James Bond Was Created Amid Decline of the British Empire

Few movie icons, besides Godzilla, have graced the screen as frequently as super spy James Bond. More than 50 years after Sean Connery first took on the role, fans continue to obsess over the franchise.

Many of the Bond films are based on the original books by Ian Fleming, who created the character in 14 books he wrote between 1952 and his death in 1964 (two of them were published posthumously). When Fleming set out to write his famous books, he sought not just to create a cunning action hero, but also pay homage to the crumbling British Empire.

“James Bond is really an imperial throwback,” says Matthew Parker, author of Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born. “He projects British power in all corners of the globe.”

In 1946, Fleming built his house, which he called “Goldeneye,” in the then-British Colony of Jamaica. It was a place he loved specifically because it reminded him of the empire’s old days, says Parker. There, colonial race and class structures held firm. But by the time Fleming began writing his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, he could see the changes happening in Jamaica as British power crumbled.

“He didn’t like the fact that Black people were getting the vote and that they were forming political parties and demanding much more respect,” Parker explains. “So he created James Bond as this sort of consoling fantasy for himself and his readers.”

Britain’s descent as a global power was a constant motif in the novels. Fleming used the books to bemoan that the British, in his opinion, had become broke and lazy; complain that Americans were money-obsessed; and take shots at any group he felt threatened Britain’s power.

Yet as the empire continued to decline, so too did Bond. Parker notes that by the later novels, Agent 007 is falling apart, constantly drunk, and aware that the empire is essentially over.

In one later scene, “Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, taunts him, ‘You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands,’” Parker recounts in The Huffington Post. “Bond has not the energy to disagree.”

Beginning in 1962, the James Bond action films picked up Fleming’s obsession with the British Empire. The first movie, Dr. No, was filmed in Jamaica just a few months before the country won independence. Yet Parker says that the movie still portrayed it as a place where the empire’s control was firm.

Similarly, Parker says that nostalgia for the British Empire still plays a role in U.K. politics. “Some of the people who voted to leave the European Union were really motivated by that same fantasy that is James Bond,” he notes. “The fantasy that Britain can still go out with its buccaneering spirit into the world and punch above its weight.”