British Empire

I

INTRODUCTION

British Empire, name given to United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the former dominions, colonies, and other territories throughout the world that owed allegiance to the British Crown from the late 1500s to the middle of the 20th century. At its height in the early 1900s, the British Empire included over 20 percent of the world’s land area and more than 400 million people.

The foundations of the British Empire were laid during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Under Elizabeth, English support for naval exploration increased dramatically, and in 1580 Sir Francis Drake became the first Englishman to sail around the world. Overseas commercial and trade interests were also established in the form of the English East India Company in 1600. However, because England was at war with Spain, which had a large colonial empire in the Americas, English colonization in the Americas remained almost unknown in the 16th century. The first real venture was the attempted settlement of Roanoke Island off the North American coast in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh. This settlement did not survive, and the English did not attempt further exploration and colonization in the Americas until 1604, after peace had been made with Spain.

II

THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain established its first empire, which was centered in the Caribbean and in North America. It began with the establishment of tobacco plantations in the West Indies and religious colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. England established a presence in India during the 17th century with the activities of the East India Company. Although this presence became larger and more entrenched during the 17th and 18th centuries, India did not come under direct British rule until 1858.

An important factor in the first empire was mercantilism, an economic policy based on protected trade monopolies and governmental control of manufacturing. Under this system, colonies were established mainly to increase the wealth of the home country. They were either used as sources of raw materials or as markets for products of the home country. The intention was to keep the amount of the home country’s exports higher than the amount of its imports; since the home country would be selling more than it was buying, its capital reserves would grow. Because this system required strict governmental control, the English began to regulate the affairs of its colonies closely. In 1651 the English parliament passed the Navigation Act, which stipulated that imports into English harbors and colonies could only be carried in English ships or those of the producing country.

A

17th Century

A1

North America

The first permanent English settlement in North America was established in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. In 1620 the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts Bay and founded Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English settlement in New England. The colonists set up a Puritan community, forming the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628. Other religious colonies were established in Rhode Island (1636), where the colony was based on the principle of religious toleration; Connecticut (1639), based on Congregationalist religious beliefs; and Maryland (1634), a haven for Roman Catholics.

These colonies stayed close to the coastline, never penetrating far inland, and in fact each was linked more closely to England than to the other colonies. However, because of the distances involved, effective government from England was impossible, so colonial governors were authorized to form assemblies elected from among the colonists to act as a legislative body and advise the executive.

English presence was gradually extended further down the eastern 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. In 1681 William Penn, under a royal grant, formed the colony of Pennsylvania.

After 1688 wars with France led to further English expansion. Colonies in New England grew steadily, and the Hudson’s Bay Company was established near Hudson Bay to participate in the fur trade. This growing English presence intensified friction in the 1690s with New France, based in the nearby St. Lawrence Valley. As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), in which England (by now Great Britain) and its allies fought against France and Spain, British forces captured the French American possessions of Acadia and Newfoundland. The Spanish islands of Gibraltar and Minorca were seized in the same conflict, giving Britain for the first time a territorial presence in the Mediterranean Sea. The Peace of Utrecht (1713) resolved the war, and officially ceded the conquered lands to the British. It also extended British rights to supply slaves and other trade goods to the Spanish Americas, and as a result, established Britain’s status as an overseas power approximately equal to its main European competitors.

A2

The West Indies

The first British foothold in the West Indies was Saint Christopher (later Saint Kitts), acquired in 1623. The English plantations established in the West Indies were worked initially by white indentured servants from England. The West Indian tobacco boom gradually petered out and was replaced by sugar production, which required a larger labor force that was provided by slaves from Africa. This began the transformation of the islands into a plantation economy based on slavery.

In 1655 the English conquered the Spanish colony of Jamaica—the first English colony taken by force. During the 1660s, semilegitimate English privateers (private vessels commissioned by a government to attack possessions or trade of a rival country) raided Spanish trade and settlements. In 1670 England and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid, in which Spain finally acknowledged English possessions in the Caribbean. The sugar economy expanded, and the Royal Africa Company was formed in 1672 to bring large numbers of African slaves to the Caribbean. The plantation owners obtained labor, but at the cost of anxiety about their own security; by the 1670s slaves had become the largest proportion of the population in the English islands.

B

18th Century

During the early 1700s, public interest in overseas affairs faded. During his long premiership (1721-1742), Sir Robert Walpole adopted a policy of laissez-faire, in which the government did not interfere in economic affairs. Nevertheless, significant developments occurred. The Transportation Act of 1718 subsidized the transportation of convicted criminals from Britain to North America. Georgia, originally a refuge for debtors, became the 13th 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, fueling the West Indian plantation economy, and with it the flow of 70,000 slaves annually across the Atlantic.

B1

The Seven Years’ War

During the Seven Years’ War in Europe (1756-1763), Britain made large imperial gains at the expense of France. The North American segment of the Seven Years’ War was known as the French and Indian War. It was launched by the British against French possessions in North America in 1754, and in 1758 the British captured the French fortress of Louisbourg, which gave them access to French territory in the St. Lawrence Valley. In the following year Québec was captured, marking the end of the French presence in Canada. In the Caribbean, British forces captured many of the French possessions, including the large sugar-producing islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

At the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended both the Seven Years’ War and the French and Indian War, the British handed Guadeloupe and Martinique back to France, but retained control of Canada. This was especially important to the British in guaranteeing the security of the New England colonies.

B2

The American Revolution

For the British, an expanded empire meant new responsibilities and new costs. The British government wanted to tap American revenues to pay for American necessities, and consequently increased taxation with the Stamp Act (1765). Although the British considered the act to be perfectly fair, many American colonists saw it as a violation of their rights. After riots in the colonies, the Stamp Act was repealed, but other taxes soon replaced it, setting off a controversy in which the colonies united against Britain in the Continental Congress. A skirmish at Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1775 deteriorated into general fighting, and in July 1776 the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence. During the American Revolution that followed, the 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, Virginia, in October 1781.

This defeat marked not only the end of the American war, but also the end of the 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. At the same time, the British presence in Canada was reinforced by the establishment of the colony of New Brunswick, resulting from the migration northwards of over 30,000 citizens of the American colonies who were still loyal to Britain.

III

THE SECOND BRITISH EMPIRE

After the loss of the American colonies, British commerce turned from the Americas to the east in its search both for spices for re-export and, increasingly, for markets to sell ever-growing amounts of British manufactured goods. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the British economy from a primarily agricultural one to one based much more on mechanized manufacturing, and as a result had drastically increased the amount of British products available for export. The quest for new markets for international trade was the economic incentive behind the Second British Empire. Free trade, the belief that international trade should not be restricted by any one nation, replaced the old colonial system, which had relied on mercantilist ideas of protected commerce.

The Second British Empire, focused more on Asia and Africa, continued to expand in the 1800s and early 1900s and reached its apex at the end of World War I. However, a growing nationalism among the British colonies gradually weakened the power of the empire, and Britain was eventually forced to grant independence to many of its former colonies.

A

18th Century

A1

India

Although the first empire was centered in the Americas, the English were also active in India in the 17th century. The English East India Company founded trading posts known as factories at Surat (1612) and Madras, now Chennai, (1639) under the auspices of the native Mughal Empire. Rapid expansion followed, and in 1690 the company set up a new factory further up the River Hugli, on a site that became Calcutta (now Kolkata). By 1700 the company was extending its commercial activities in Bengal and had established itself as a leading player in Indian politics.

After the death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal Empire in India entered a period of instability. During this time the East India Company—while remaining above all a commercial organization—entered more directly into politics in order to preserve its position. Then, during the 1740s and 1750s, the East India Company fought the French Compagnie des Indes for primacy in India during the Carnatic Wars. A series of engagements culminated in the Battle of Plassey in June 1757, in which the British defeated their Indian and French rivals and established the East India Company as the dominant power in the important region of Bengal.

A2

Australia

Though English expeditions had landed in Australia in the late 1600s, original assessments of the usefulness of the continent were not enough to motivate a large-scale interest in colonization. It was the more thorough explorations of Captain James Cook in the 1770s, coupled with the loss of the American colonies around the same time, that changed this. Though remote, Australia became important to the British, both as a strategic port near East Asia, and as a destination for British convicts after the loss of the American colonies. As a result, a British fleet composed mainly of convicts was dispatched to Botany Bay in the Australian region of New South Wales, resulting in the foundation of Sydney in 1788.

A3

Consolidation

In the years following the American Revolution, the British government attempted to consolidate and tighten control over its territory in India and Canada. The India Act of 1785 subjected the East India Company’s administration to the scrutiny of a board of control. Under the governor-generalship (1786-1793) of Lord Cornwallis, Britain put administration in India into the hands of a professional civil service within the East India Company, though the company itself remained a trading concern. The Canada Act of 1791 attempted to ease tensions between French and British inhabitants in Canada somewhat by separating the region into Upper Canada, primarily English speaking, and Lower Canada, primarily French speaking.

B

19th Century

B1

The Napoleonic Wars

Britain’s involvement in wars with France after 1793 gave a fresh spur to the growth of its empire. In 1794 Britain again captured the French sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. This resulted in a glut of sugar on the British market and contributed indirectly to British legislation in 1807 abolishing the slave trade, by virtue of the fact that production was so high that few new slaves were needed.

Britain’s Mediterranean position and its route to the east were secured during the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), primarily due to the naval triumphs of British Admiral Horatio Nelson. First, Nelson stopped Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the Battle of the Nile, which gave control of the entire Mediterranean to the British. Then, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson destroyed a French fleet on its way to land troops in Italy. By decimating the French navy, Nelson ended any possible threat to the British islands from Napoleon and ensured British naval superiority for much of the 19th century.

America was not a theater of operations until friction over neutral trading rights and boundaries led to the War of 1812, during which the Americans seized York (now Toronto) in Upper Canada, and the British sacked Washington, D.C. The inability of American forces to make significant advances into Canada confirmed the survival of British North America.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the Netherlands sided with France, and Britain seized several Dutch possessions, including the Cape Colony, in South Africa; Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), off the Indian coast; Java, in Indonesia; and parts of Guiana, in South America. Though Java was returned to the Dutch, most of these possessions were retained by the British under the agreement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

B2

South Africa

The acquisition of the Cape Colony from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars allowed the British to establish a strong presence in southern Africa. Thousands of British colonists began to arrive after 1820, and English became the official language in 1822. Slavery, which had been heavily relied upon by the Dutch, was abolished in 1833. In 1843 the British established the coastal colony of Natal.

The Boers, who were descendants of the original Dutch and German settlers, resented British rule, and thousands of the Boers migrated north, eventually founding the interior African republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

B3

India

In India, Lord Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, made a series of conquests, so that by 1805 Britain in effect controlled Delhi and had made the native Mughal emperor into a puppet. In 1828 English replaced Persian as the official language of government in India, and Christian missionary activity increased. British superiority was finally completed with the conquest of the Punjab and Sind regions in the 1840s.

However, the Indian population gradually began to resent British rule, feeling that the British had no respect for native cultures and traditions. These feelings came to a head in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which Indian soldiers (called sepoys) under the command of the East India Company staged an armed uprising. The rebellion was put down by the British, but not before extensive loss of life on both sides. As a result, the British gave up trying to anglicize India and focused on governing efficiently while working in tandem with traditional elements of Indian 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.

B4

Burma

During the 19th century, Britain was using its strong armies in India to expand into Southeast Asia. The Burmese Konbaung dynasty had expanded the borders of Burma (now Myanmar) greatly, until they began to bump up against British India. Attempted Burmese incursions into India resulted in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826), in which the Burmese were overpowered by the British and were forced to cede several coastal areas to them. Over the course of the Second and Third Anglo-Burmese Wars (1852 and 1885) Britain established its dominance in the region, conquering all of Burma. In 1886 Burma was officially made a province of India.

B5

The Beginning of Responsible Government

An empire based on free trade required less regulation than one based on mercantilist principles. As a result, the concept of responsible government, or government by the citizens of a colony, emerged. It was applied in the British North American colonies during the 1840s, and in 1867 Canada was confederated. Confederation allowed Britain to withdraw its military presence while retaining control of foreign affairs and external defense. In the 1850s the new Australian colonies of South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria, and Queensland that had been established in the 1830s and 1840s were accorded responsible government, along with the existing colony of New South Wales. However, their fragmented character delayed federation until 1901. Britain did not grant responsible government to its colonies in southern Africa because of tensions between the settlers and the native Africans. However, in the 1850s Britain withdrew from overseeing the interior republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

The mid-1800s was an era of relative stability in imperial affairs, without unbridled expansion overseas. However, Britain did continue its aggressive trading policy, which often led to conflict. The primary examples of this were the conflicts with China over the British importation of opium into China, which led to the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century and the British acquisition of Hong Kong in 1841.

B6

New Imperialism

The government of Benjamin Disraeli (1874-1880) adopted a more active British policy overseas. This so-called New Imperialism was characterized by much more aggressive imperial expansion and defense of British interests overseas. Though it was sometimes the result of local instability, as in 1882 when British troops occupied Egypt in order to preserve control of the Suez Canal, it was more often fueled by the British government’s desire to extend its empire.

After the occupation of Egypt, a race to establish colonies in Africa ensued. Britain, which competed principally against France and Germany, made a series of claims in West Africa in the 1880s, mainly in the Niger River Valley. Additional colonies were established in southern Africa, where the activities of Cecil Rhodes led to the annexation of Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1885 and the founding of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1890. The most resolute opponents of British expansion were the Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in southern Africa, until the British finally defeated them in the Boer War (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 Albert; the acquisition of Uganda in 1894 eventually secured Britain’s political dominance in the region. About the same time, British settlement in Kenya began.

C

20th Century

The British government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who took office in 1905, followed a less active imperial style. Britain granted self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in 1907, which paved the way for the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

C1

World War I and the Empire at its Height

During World War I (1914-1918) the British Empire remained essentially united. The Dominions, as those colonies granted responsible government were now called, were loyal to Britain at first, apart from a minor and easily repressed Boer revolt in 1914. However, the Easter Rebellion in Ireland in 1916 marked the beginning of an increasing desire for independence in many of the colonies.

Troops from the Dominion countries were prominent in World War I, but as the sacrifices of war increased after 1916, loyalty to Britain waned. Conscription, a system by which private citizens were forced to join the armed services, was rejected in Australia in 1917 and was strongly opposed in French Québec.

The war expanded the British Empire to its greatest extent. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 gave Britain most of the German Empire in Africa, while the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East led to the British acquisition of Palestine and Iraq in 1918.

However, the war also accelerated support for nationalist movements in the colonies, and the British government found that it could do little to stop this trend. After World War I Britain was exhausted, and the empire was overextended. As a result, during the 1920s and 1930s Britain searched for policies that would both reduce the cost of the empire and the risk of its falling apart. It granted independence to Egypt in 1922 and to Iraq in 1932. The demands of the Dominions for full constitutional autonomy were granted in the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which eliminated all control by the British Parliament over dominion government. The statute also established the British Commonwealth of Nations as an association of equal and independent states united by common allegiance to the British Crown. After the Irish Revolution (1912-1922), southern Ireland had been granted dominion status as the Irish Free State, though in 1937 it withdrew from the empire and became the Ireland.

In India discontent with British rule increased throughout this period, culminating in the Amritsar Massacre, in which the British army fired indiscriminately at demonstrators, killing nearly 400. Though the British colonial government passed constitutional reforms in 1919 and 1935, tensions remained high. In its African colonies, Britain did not as yet have to cope with nationalism and concentrated on administering the populations indirectly and inexpensively through existing local institutions. Nevertheless, there was occasional African resistance to colonial control, especially where the British levied new taxes or interfered with traditional practices.

C2

Decolonization

If the British Empire still clung to a fragile equilibrium in 1939, World War II (1939-1945) upset it. Some British possessions, including Hong Kong and Burma, were conquered by Japan. There was a revolt in India in August 1942, and some dissidence in the Indian Army. Although India nevertheless contributed extensively to the Allied war effort, by 1945 the British colonial government in India was a spent force. The Dominions entered the war alongside Britain in 1939, but afterwards showed their determination to judge the nature and limits of their participation. In the colonies still directly under British authority, especially those in Africa and the Caribbean, the British government sought to develop a more progressive image in keeping with a war supposedly being fought on behalf of freedom. Colonial Development and Welfare Acts were passed in 1940 and 1945, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined with United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in issuing the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which declared the right of self-determination for all countries. While Britain was quite successful overall at mobilizing its empire for the war, the promises it issued and the actions it took to elicit this mobilization ultimately hastened its end.

The results of these actions were seen quickly in Asia, where India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947, and Ceylon and Burma in 1948. Only Burma did not remain a member of the Commonwealth. Of Britain’s Asian possessions, only Hong Kong was still under British control after 1950, and it was returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. In 1948 Britain also gave up its control over Palestine. In Africa, Britain assumed that self-government would be much longer in coming. Riots in Accra in February 1948, however, forced a relatively rapid transition in the Gold Coast, which in 1957 became the independent nation of Ghana. In the 1950s the British government recognized the winds of change in Africa, and many African nations gained independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Sudan (1956), Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), Tanganyika (1961, later Tanzania), Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), Zambia (1964), Malawi (1964), The Gambia (1965), Botswana (1966), and Swaziland (1968). These and other transfers of power were for the most part very smooth, with the exception of Rhodesia, where a revolt by white settlers led to years of guerrilla warfare before Zimbabwe was legally established in 1980.

There were no such troubles in the West Indies, although the various islands gained their independence as separate, and not always viable, units. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, and the other islands followed thereafter.

Throughout this process, British governments did not resist decolonization, provided that it was possible to transfer power to friendly regimes and the circumstances were not humiliating to national pride. Where British prestige was hurt, as in the war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) in 1982, the response was militant. With the end of the empire, a multiracial, coequal Commonwealth of Nations evolved, which had modest utility but generally cooperative feelings. Today there are 54 Commonwealth nations, and even most of those states that left the Commonwealth for one reason or another (such as South Africa and Pakistan) have found cause to return.