British Empire

I

Introduction

British Empire, group of territories throughout the world, historically united by allegiance to the British Crown, which at the peak of its expansion in the early 20th century covered over 20 per cent of the Earth’s land area and held over 400 million people. Essentially, it consisted of those territories that came under the formal jurisdiction of England (after 1707, Britain) from the late 1500s through to the 20th century, although the forms of central control were to vary widely. No such thing as a British Empire existed at the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. It was by nurturing the English marine (Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577-1580), inaugurating a commercial offensive overseas (through the British East India Company, founded 1600), and challenging the Spanish Empire, that Elizabethan Britain laid the foundations of an empire of its own. English colonization as such remained almost unknown outside the plantation of Ulster—the first real venture was the attempted settlement of Roanoke Island on the American coast in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh. Only after peace was made with Spain in 1604 was it possible to experiment further.

II

Early Development

Expansion first took the form of the proliferation of tobacco plantations on Virginian lines. The focus of this colonial growth was in the eastern Caribbean Sea, well away from the Spanish Main: St Christopher (later St Kitts), acquired in 1624, was the first English foothold in the West Indies. The labour force consisted of white indentured workers from England. A second form of colonization was that of religious establishments in America. The first and most famous of these was made by the “Pilgrim Fathers”, the Pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower and landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1620. The motive was to escape Romanist tendencies in the Church of England, and the colonists set up an uncompromising Puritan community, forming the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628. Such religious phenomena are habitually prone to fragmentation, and thereafter American settlements emerged under diverse ecclesiastical auspices. Rhode Island (1636) was based on the principle of religious toleration, Connecticut (1639) on Congregationalist beliefs, while Baltimore (1634) was a haven for Roman Catholics. These colonies continued to cleave to the coastline, never penetrating far inland. Each was linked more closely to the mother country than to each other. In the circumstances, they could not be made subject to close surveillance, so that colonial governors were authorized to form assemblies elected from among the colonists to act as a legislative body and advise the executive. In this manner, the classic style of English colonial government emerged.

Perhaps surprisingly, the English Civil War in the 1640s and the subsequent English Commonwealth and Protectorate, far from reversing this process, encouraged it further. Parliament benefited from the support of the navy, which it enlarged and improved. Oliver Cromwell pursued an anti-Spanish diplomacy and in 1655 Jamaica was conquered, the first English colony taken by force. The West Indian tobacco boom petered out, and was replaced by sugar production, requiring a larger labour force, which was provided by slaves from Africa. This began the transformation of the islands into a plantation economy based on slavery. The English Republic also passed the Navigation Act of 1651, which stipulated that imports into home harbours and colonies could only be carried in English ships or those of the producing country. This provided the framework for what later became known as the Old Colonial System. The nascent English “empire” was thus more closely regulated and coherent at the Stuart Restoration of 1660 than it had been eleven years earlier.

III

The First British Empire

Colonial policy after 1660 followed essentially along the same lines. After further depredations in the Caribbean, in which semi-legitimate English privateers and buccaneers raided Spanish trade and settlements, the Treaty of Madrid (1670) finally accorded Spain’s acknowledgement of the English possessions. Ironically, one result was that the privateers relapsed into outright lawlessness, so that the next 50 years were the golden age for pirates in the English West Indies. The sugar economy expanded, and the Royal Africa Company (formed 1672) organized the so-called “middle passage”, bringing Africans to the Caribbean as chattels. Thus the plantation owners obtained labour, but at the cost of anxiety about their own security (by the 1670s slaves had become the largest community in the English islands). In North America the English presence extended further down the coastline. In 1664 New Amsterdam was seized from the Netherlands, and renamed New York. The Dutch inhabitants were the first large established community overseas to be brought forcefully under English rule. William Penn, under a royal grant, formed the colony of Pennsylvania (1681) to be run on Quaker lines. Under James II the original proprietorships and charters of the American colonies were brought under closer royal control, though whether this was, as critics alleged, part of a wider plan for a new Stuart autocracy is disputable.

There was as yet no comparable English “rule” in India. The East India Company operated its “factories” or trading posts at Surat and Madras under the Mughal Empire. In 1690, however, it set up a new factory further up the River Hugli, on a site that became Kolkata. By 1700 the Company was extending its commercial activities in Bengal, and was established as a leading if still subordinate player in Indian politics.

Just as wars against Spain had engendered the early growths of English empire, so successive wars with France after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to further expansion. The steady outreach of New England, as well as a new commercial presence based on fur trading in Hudson Bay, embodied in the Hudson’s Bay Company, meant that friction with New France, based on the St Lawrence Valley, intensified from the 1690s in King William’s War, fought as part of the Nine Years’ War against France. English forces captured the French American possession of Acadia and Newfoundland in Queen Anne’s War, part of the War of the Spanish Succession, fought to contain the ambitions of Louis XIV. Gibraltar (1704) and Minorca (1708) were seized in the same conflict, giving England (now Britain) for the first time a territorial presence in the Mediterranean Sea. By confirming these acquisitions, and also extending English rights to supply slaves and other trade goods to the Spanish Americas, the Peace of Utrecht at last established Britain’s status as an overseas power approximately equal to her main European competitors.

After the brief excitement of the South Sea Bubble—as the speculation surrounding new trading privileges with Spanish America was known—which collapsed in 1720, public interest in overseas affairs faded for a while. During his long premiership (1721-1742), Sir Robert Walpole adopted a policy of laissez-faire abroad as well as at home. Significant developments nevertheless occurred. The Transportation Act of 1718 subsidized the transportation of convicted felons to North America. Georgia, intended as a refuge for debtors, became the thirteenth American colony in 1732, while the New England seaboard began to fill out and extend further into the interior, where it threatened to bump up against French settlement. Sugar emerged as the chief import into Britain, fuelling the West Indian plantation economy, and with it the flow of 70,000 slaves annually across the Atlantic. The English Caribbean became the lynchpin of the colonial system, more intimately linked by trade, investment, and social connections with the metropolitan centre than was the case with the American colonies.

Meanwhile, after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal Empire in India entered a period of instability in which the East India Company—while above all a commercial organization—had to manoeuvre more adroitly to preserve its position, so entering more directly the world of politics.

When a period of European conflict resumed in 1740 with the War of the Austrian Succession, followed soon after by the Seven Years’ War, England was well placed, especially under the leadership of William Pitt the Elder, to make imperial gains at French expense, launching first King George’s War and then the French and Indian War against France in America. In 1758 General Jeffrey Amherst captured the French fortress of Louisbourg, so gaining access to the St Lawrence Valley, and in the following year General James Wolfe captured Quebec in a battle which claimed both his own life and that of his French counterpart, Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm. The fate of New France was sealed. In the Caribbean, British forces captured many of the French sugar islands.

These years also witnessed the making of the British Empire in India. The East India Company sent a young clerk, Robert Clive, inland from Madras to combat French attacks in the Carnatic Wars, and after his successful defence of Arcot (1751), a series of engagements culminated in the Battle of Plassey (June 1757) in which Clive defeated his Indian and French rivals and established the Company as the dominant power in Bengal. At the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the British handed back to France the large sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but the retention of Canada was especially important in guaranteeing the security of the New England colonies. The Seven Years’ War was characterized by the first real flourish of popular imperial enthusiasm in Britain, and set the precedent by which large indigenous populations were brought under British domination.

A triumphant and expanded empire meant new responsibilities and new costs, as a major Indian uprising underlined. The British government and Parliament wanted to tap American revenues to pay for American necessities, leading to fresh local taxation in a Stamp Act (1765), which appeared perfectly fair in London but which to many American colonists grossly infringed their constitutional rights. After riots, the Stamp Act was repealed, but other taxes soon replaced it, so stoking a controversy in which the colonies were united against Britain in a Continental Congress. A skirmish at Concord in April 1775 deteriorated into general fighting, and a Declaration of Independence by the Congress (July 1776) followed. During the following American War of Independence Congress controlled most of the land area, but the British were secure in their stronghold in New York until their position was weakened by a defeat at Saratoga (1777), which encouraged France to intervene on behalf of the rebellious colonists. British resistance ended when General Charles Cornwallis surrendered with his army at Yorktown in October 1781. This not only ended the American war, but in retrospect has been seen as marking the liquidation of the American-centred “First British Empire”. Yet because France had not been able to challenge British supremacy at sea, Britain’s losses did not extend beyond the American colonies themselves, while the departure northwards of over 30,000 “United Empire Loyalists” led to the establishment of the new colony of New Brunswick and reinforced the British presence in Canada.

IV

The Second British Empire

Consolidation and a tightening of imperial control was the hallmark of policy in the following years. The vast personal fortunes made in India by Clive and Warren Hastings (governor-general in Bengal, 1772-1784), which attracted the opprobrious term of “nabobs”, led to a determination in London to regulate the East India Company’s affairs more closely. The India Act of 1785 subjected Company administration to the scrutiny of a board of control. Under the governor-generalship (1786-1793) of Lord Cornwallis, British administration in India was put on the basis of a professional civil service, though the Company itself remained a trading institution. The Canada Act of 1791 sought to rationalize American affairs north of the 49th parallel by separating Upper Canada and Lower Canada, recognizing the special position of the French inhabitants in the latter. Following the Pacific explorations of Captain James Cook in the 1770s, the First Fleet was dispatched to Botany Bay in Australia under Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788, resulting in a settlement at Sydney Cove. Although in the first instance the motive in this was to find a new outlet for transported convicts after the loss of New England, some historians have seen this as part of a wider “Swing to the East” in imperial policy, in which English commerce turned from the Americas to the Eastern seas in its search both for spices for re-export and, increasingly, for markets to sell British manufactured goods. Industrial revolution and imperial expansion thus overlapped, providing the motor for the “Second British Empire”.

Britain’s involvement in wars against Republican France and then in the Napoleonic Wars after 1793 gave a fresh spur to the growth of empire. Her soldiers and sailors did not always meet with dramatic successes outside Europe. The attempts to intervene in Hispaniola (1796), and to seize Buenos Aires from Spain (1807), failed. French sugar islands, however, were again captured, and the consequent glut of the sugar market contributed to legislation in 1807 abolishing the slave trade; although this latter action also had something to do with a growing moral earnestness in Britain which was reflected in the establishment of such missionary societies as the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804). The fiasco of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, curtailed by the Battle of the Nile, and the naval triumphs of Horatio Nelson, especially at the Battle of Trafalgar, secured Britain’s Mediterranean position and the route to the east. In India the governor-generalship of Lord Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, was preoccupied with a series of further conquests, so that by 1805 Britain in effect controlled Delhi and made the Mughal emperor into a puppet. America was not a theatre of operations until friction over neutral trading rights and boundaries led to the short, sharp Anglo-American War of 1812, during which the Americans burned York in Upper Canada, and the British sacked Washington. The failure of American arms confirmed the survival of British North America. The participation of the Netherlands on the side of France allowed Britain to seize such possessions as the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), and parts of Guiana. Most, though not all, of these possessions were retained by agreement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, though Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles used his brief tenure in Java as a springboard to the foundation of Singapore in 1819. More important than the balance of acquisitions by Britain was the emergence of a distinct imperial identity and vocation, in which the British ruling elite perceived itself to be more accomplished and beneficent imperial rulers than other European powers.

As after all wars, the new peace was at first a time for consolidation. The exception was in India, where a succession of campaigns rounded out British preponderance (though this was not finally completed until the conquest of the Punjab and Sindh in the 1840s). Subsequently, British influence worked more directly on Indian society. English replaced Persian as the official language of government (1828), and Christian mission activity increased. After the Indian Mutiny (1857), however, any ambition to transform India—other than through such means as the introduction of railways—gave way to the lesser aim of sustaining efficient government in tandem with traditional elements in society. After 1858 India ceased to be administered through the East India Company and was brought directly under British government, with a Viceroy and a separate Secretary of State in London who served in the Cabinet.

The campaign against West Indian slavery languished after 1815, but the revival of Reform politics in Britain after 1830, and a slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, led to legislation abolishing the institution in 1834 (emancipation took place in 1838). Thereafter the West Indies gradually diminished into an imperial backwater. The ending of slavery was followed before long by the passing of the Old Colonial System, overwhelmed by the rise of Free Trade; the Navigation Act was repealed in 1849.

A free trading empire did not require detailed and often expensive regulation of mature settler societies, so that the principle of “responsible government” was applied in the British North American colonies during the 1840s. As a logical extension of this, Canada was confederated in 1867, allowing Britain to withdraw her garrisons while retaining control of foreign affairs and external defence. The Australian colonies were accorded responsible government in the 1850s (though their fragmented character delayed federation until 1901). Circumstances in South Africa, especially in the realm of settler-African relations, remained too volatile for such a dilution of imperial control, although in the 1850s Britain withdrew from oversight of the Boer republics in the interior created by the Great Trek of the 1830s. Although it is true that underlying British penetration outside Europe continued in the form of an “empire of manufactures”, one expression of which was the Opium Wars with China following the frustration of trade, leading to the acquisition of Hong Kong, the first half of the reign of Queen Victoria was an era of relative stability in imperial affairs, averse to unbridled expansion overseas.

The imperial flourishes of the Conservative government (1874-1880) of Benjamin Disraeli have been seen as the harbinger of more active British policy overseas. The more aggressive New Imperialism thereafter was also brought about by local instability, as in 1882 when the Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone occupied Egypt in order to preserve control over the Suez Canal (opened 1869). There ensued the Scramble for Africa, in which Britain, competing mainly against France and Germany, substantiated a series of claims in West Africa, mainly along the Niger Valley, during the 1880s and in the south of that continent, where the activities of Cecil Rhodes led to the annexation of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1888 and the establishment of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1894. The most resolute opponents of British expansion were the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State, until they were finally defeated in the Boer War of 1899-1902. In East Africa, British explorers were active from the 1850s in the search for the source of the Nile, and in 1864 Sir Samuel Baker discovered Lake Malawi; the acquisition of Uganda (1894) eventually secured Britain’s political dominance in the region. British settlement in Kenya simultaneously got under way, but remained tentative prior to 1914. In India Queen Victoria’s assumption of the title of Empress of India in 1876 reflected the heyday of British India. The British rulers worried more about the threat from Russian expansion than from internal challenges, although brittle race relations and the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 suggested to some astute commentators that there was trouble ahead. Although Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was a celebration of the British Empire, it was accompanied by a feeling of pessimism about the future echoed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Recessional”:

The Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who took office in 1905, sought to return to a less spectacular imperial style. In a “magnanimous gesture”, it gave self-government to the Transvaal and Orange Free State, so opening the way to a Union of South Africa in 1910 by the agreement of the white communities (though not the black). The 1907 Colonial Conference was the first of its kind, the forebear of later Commonwealth institutions. The British Empire remained essentially united in World War I. In the self-governing Dominions (as they were now called) heady imperial enthusiasms at first predominated, apart from a minor and easily repressed Boer revolt in 1914; but the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, a country so long united with Great Britain as to be hardly considered an imperial possession at all, set a different tone for the future.

Dominion troops were prominent in World War I, both the Canadians in France (particularly at Vimy Ridge in April 1917) and the Anzacs (Australians and New Zealanders) in the Gallipoli Campaign during 1915. In India no mass dissatisfaction expressed itself; and Indian troops fought extensively in France, East Africa, and the Middle East. But as the sacrifices of war increased after 1916, imperial loyalty waned. Conscription was rejected in Australia (1917), and was strongly opposed in French Quebec. The nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi made a significant impact on Indian opinion after his return from South Africa in 1915, and for a while even united Hindus and Muslims within Congress. The war brought the British Empire to its territorial peak—the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 gave Britain most of the German empire in Africa, while a new imperium opened up in the Arab world with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Yet it also accelerated widespread feelings of alienation and nationalism.

In fact, after 1919 not only was Britain exhausted internally, but her empire was overextended strategically. The 1920s and 1930s were characterized by the search for policies to make the empire function cheaply and with least risk of falling apart. Egypt (1922) and Iraq (1930) gained independence. Dominion demands for full recognition of their constitutional autonomy were met in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, although the Crown still remained the focus of unity. After the Irish Revolution, southern Ireland was granted Dominion Status as the Irish Free State (1922), though under the External Relations Act of 1937 she retreated from it and became a republic. The shadow of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British Army fired indiscriminately at demonstrators, killing over 400, hung over Indian affairs throughout this period. Afterwards, the British Raj passed constitutional reforms (1919, 1935) designed to make Indian progress compatible with imperial needs, but its contest with the Congress Party remained unresolved. In its African colonies, Britain did not as yet have to cope with nationalism, and concentrated on administering the populations indirectly and very cheaply through local institutions based on rural chiefs. Nevertheless, there were occasional indicators of African reaction to colonial control, especially where it levied new taxes or interfered with customary practices.