Heirs of Empire 2: Trade and Conquest
Dear Reader,
The British empire began as a hungry search for wealth, for trade and lands, and where traders pioneered, conquest and colonists followed sooner or later. At the beginning of the imperial era in 1600 the population of England stood at approximately 4.1 million people with an [adjusted] per capita income of £1143 per annum. Within a century, despite civil war and revolution, the figures had increased to 5.2 million and £1812. The eighteenth century saw the population triple to 15.5 million and income increase to £2331 by 1800. Another century and with the empire at its height in 1900 the population had more than doubled again to 35 million and income to £4870. To put that in context, even today with the same level of per capita income as Great Britain had in 1900, there are more than 100 poorer countries in the world. The British empire was a great wealth generating machine for the peoples of these islands, it was a huge success.
In the early imperial years the English Crown played an important part, granting monopoly trading rights and the authority to set up colonies to Chartered Companies – in return for payments and taxes of course. Within two generations the shape of the empire was already forming as the Crown licensed English merchants to exploit the resources of the new world that was opening up. By far the most important of these trading companies was the East India Company, established by Royal warrant by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 to trade in India, China and the Indian Ocean regions. From small beginnings with trading posts it expanded its reach and power as the Indian Mughal empire declined. In 1757 the company fought and won a major battle at Plassey against the Muslim Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, becoming the leading power in north east India. At its height in the mid-nineteenth century the Company controlled, either directly or through puppet princes, most of India and Pakistan, Burma, Hong Kong, numerous south-east Asian lands and even waged war against the Chinese empire in defence of the lucrative Opium trade. It was a state within a state with its own bureaucracy, troops and tax raising powers – a privatised empire. It was only its mis-rule in India, provoking the 1857 rebellion, that caused the British government to close it down and take over direct rule itself.
The East India Company was only one of a number of such Chartered Companies which pioneered the British expansion. Inevitably some were more successful than others, some failed completely. North America was the focus for most of these companies with the Virginia and Plymouth companies receiving charters in 1606, the Newfoundland Company in 1610, the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 and the Hudson Bay Company in 1670. Of these the Hudson Bay Company was the most successful, trading on the huge demand for furs and pushing ever further west into new territory. For two hundred years it was the de facto government for vast swathes of north American lands. All of these companies and colonies, tied by law to trade only with Britain, drew ever greater numbers of colonists from the homeland seeking a better life of religious freedom, land or work. Conflict with native peoples or European rivals, chiefly French, Dutch and Spanish, did little to deter them. It was internal tensions that put paid to the British empire in north America, ‘No taxation without representation,’ was the rallying cry of the American rebels which culminated in the loss of thirteen colonies in the years 1776-78. Britain retained control of the Canadian territories as a mass movement of loyalists migrated north to escape the newly independent lands.
Cook’s discovery of Australia in 1770 opened up a whole new continent for the empire and they were not slow to seize on its potential – as a penal colony. There had been a long established practice of sending prisoners to the American colonies as prison labourers, a sentence that both punished the prisoner, strengthened the colony and gave the prisoner the possibility of a future once the sentence was served. With the loss of the American colonies in 1778 Australia became the replacement territory with the first fleet of ships arriving in 1788. Within five years ships of convicts and voluntary immigrants, who were granted free land and two years support with convict labour, were arriving regularly and spreading out from the original settlement of Sydney. As well as providing new land and opportunity the settlement of Australia countered the growing influence of France in the region, a major factor in the global geo-political game that was being played as revolutionary France sought to expand its influence. Opposition from the native Aboriginal tribes was often violent and persistent, guerrilla warfare continuing well into the late 1800s, as the British spread out over the continent but it was ultimately ineffective. As well as the huge technological advantages the newcomers held they also brought with them deadly diseases, such as measles and small pox, against which the tribes had no resistance; there was only ever going to be one result. Another five per cent of the world was under British control.
Beyond north America and India the last major focus for the empire was Africa. Here Britain was late on the scene, from the early 1400s the Portugese, Spanish and Dutch were well established with trading stations along the Atlantic coast, initially to facilitate their trade to the spice islands of the east but later for the trading of slaves for their south and north American territories. The English entered the continent in an organised way with the founding of the short-lived Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa under James, Duke of York (later King James II) in 1660. Bankrupted by the Anglo-Dutch wars it re-formulated as the Royal African Company in 1672 but lost its royal monopoly in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution and deposition of James II. Though not the sole item of trade (gold for the English mint obtained from Guinea was an important commodity) slaves for the Americas were the prize trade item, as demand in the Caribbean islands, Brazil, south America and the north American colonies multiplied. Such was the rivalry among the European competitors for the lucrative trade that conflict and war would often break out. After breaking the Dutch stranglehold on the slave trade the British then had to overcome the French in Africa as they did with the French in America. Thus it was the British who came to control the hugely profitable ‘Slave Triangle‘ trade, manufactured goods from Britain, exchanged for slave is Africa, which were then traded for goods from the Americas such as sugar, tobacco and cotton before returning to Britain to sell at a substantial profit. The major limiting factor for developments within Africa at this time was the inhospitable climate and disease, venturing inland from the west African coast seriously limited the life expectancy of any European; British traders, like those of other nations were thus dependent upon the local states for the provision of slaves and other goods. It was not until the British took final possession of the Cape of Good Hope colony from the Dutch in 1814 that they established a substantial and enduring presence on the continent.
British and European expansion into the African interior was finally triggered by a series of different factors; national rivalry, the hunt for resources, medical advances and the suppression of slavery. Britain came into conflict with several African and Arab states in its active suppression of the slave trade from 1808 onwards but these were largely coastal raids to close slaving ports, until the early 1900s when control was wrested from local rulers by force. In 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea – vastly shortening the time it took for a ship to sail to India and the Far East – had made control of Egypt a strategic necessity for Britain. Taking control of Egypt, Sudan and other lands to the south was the British response. It was in the 1870s that the British began their determined expansion northward from their Cape Colony, gold and diamonds discovered in the Boer and Zulu controlled lands to the north luring them in. With the starting gun having been fired other European nations, notably France, Germany and Italy raced to take possession of lands in Africa and the period a known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ began. British imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes had visions of a railway line from Cape Town to Cairo, other nations had their own competing strategic aims. It has been calculated that in 1870 ten per cent of Africa was controlled by European powers, by 1914 only ten per cent was not under European control, with Britain and France having the greatest shares.
The cultures which the British encountered during their expansion varied greatly. In north America, as in Australia, the land seemed scarcely settled, the tribes mainly living as nomadic hunter gatherers. Without the wheel, the horse, literacy or metal working, often engaged in warfare with each other, indulging in human sacrifice and cannibalism, they were separated from the European settlers by some 4000 years of technological and civil development. There was never going to be question as to the outcome of the contact or the idea that this was a meeting of equals, this was ripe new land ready for settlement and development. The situation in Africa was more complex, north and east of the Sahara the continent was part of the Mediterranean and near Eastern civilisations, as well as being the home of ancient cultures such as Egypt and Ethiopia. South of the Sahara the situation was much more fluid with largely un-urbanised kingdoms and empires swiftly rising and falling. In southern Africa the rise of the Zulu kingdom under the warlord Shaka in the early 1800s had disrupted older societies and caused considerable de-population. Into these lands the Boers (Dutch settlers escaping British rule in the Cape Colony) had moved, to be followed shortly after by the British expansion.
India and the East was a different situation, it was the wealth of these societies that had drawn the hungry Europeans; India accounted for 22% of global production and China for 29% in the seventeenth century - but that did not make these societies powerful. The size of their economies was down to the size of their populations, on a per capita basis they were poorer than the British by a considerable margin. European advances in technology were also beginning to tell and although the Indian economy continued to grow rapidly though the seventeenth century it fell ever further behind as the industrial revolution transformed Europe. The states in these two major countries were also weak, the Mughal empire, which dominated regions of central Asia as well as northern India was both new and weak. Consolidating its power in India only in 1600, the same year that the East India company was formed, it relied for its wealth on agricultural production which it taxed at rates of 50% and more. Though splendid and cultured, liberally patronising the arts, it fell into decline after little more than a century – a century in which the East India Company and other European forces had consolidated their footholds in the country by trading for Indian products. As the empire declined so the East India Company was able to exploit internal divisions to expand their trade, impose their own terms, become tax collectors for the Princes and after 1757 conquer and rule. Although never so weak as the Mughals, the Qing dynasty of China was also in decline with frequent rebellions disrupting the nation. Trading settlements were established in coastal ports for trade in tea, silk, porcelain and other luxury goods, with cotton from India being exported there. A darker side of trade also flourished, opium, supplied from India by the East India Company. Levels of opium addiction within China grew to such an extent that successive emperors sought to ban the trade – only to have to make humiliating concessions as the British sent both naval and expeditionary forces to enforce their right to trade. The superiority in European military technology was underlined when a joint Anglo-French force occupied the Emperor’s ‘Forbidden City’ in Peking in 1860.
Technology and civil and political structure were what brought the advantage to Britain, wherever she went in pursuit of trade and the resources to support that trade. By the time of the imperial expansion England already had a 700 year history as a centralised nation state, in war, crisis or opportunity she was able to focus her resources to the task in hand. Yet unlike other European power sshe was not hampered by an over-centralised and absolutist monarchical government. As the empire grew so the resources available multiplied, whether that be wealth, people, science, technology or military might. The world into which the British ventured was very disparate, the empire prospered because those the British met were undeveloped technologically, societally or both. Having emerged victorious from the fires of internecine European warfare, with a tempered faith in both her religion and her form of government, she was all but unstoppable.
To be continued…
