Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (12 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Though not all the charges were approved, the list was enough to get Hastings arrested and charged with ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. On 13 February 1788 the most celebrated – and certainly the most protracted – trial in the history of the British Empire began in an atmosphere like that of a West End opening night. Before a glittering audience, Burke and the playwright Richard Sheridan opened the prosecution with virtuoso hyperbole:
BURKE: I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all.
 
 
SHERIDAN: In his mind all is shuffling, ambiguous, dark insidious, and little; all affected plainness, and actual dissimulation; – a heterogeneous mass of contradictory qualities; with nothing great but his crimes, and even those contrasted by the littleness of his motives, which at once denote both his baseness and his meanness, and mark him for a traitor and a trickster.
Hastings could not match this; he fluffed his lines. On the other hand, the hallmark of a successful play, a long run, is not the hallmark of a successful trial. In the end, Hastings was acquitted by an exhausted and substantially altered House of Lords.
Still, British India would never be the same again. Even before the trial began, a new India Act had been steered through Parliament by another William Pitt, son of the hero of the Seven Years War and great-grandson of ‘Diamond’ Pitt. The aim of the Act was to clean up the East India Company and to bring to an end the day of the freebooting nabob. From now on the Governor-Generals in India would not be company officers but grandees, appointed directly by the crown. When the first of them, the Earl of Cornwallis, arrived in India (fresh from defeat in America), he took immediate steps to change the ethos of company administration, increasing salaries and reducing perquisites in a deliberate inversion of ‘the old principles of Leadenhall Street economy’. This marked the beginning of what would become an institution celebrated for its sea-green incorruptibility – the Indian Civil Service. In place of the arbitrary taxation of the Hastings era, Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement of 1793 introduced English-style private property rights in land and fixed landowners’ tax obligations in perpetuity; the effect of this was to reduce peasants to mere tenants and strengthen the position of a rising Bengali gentry.
The Governor-General’s new palace built in Calcutta by Cornwallis’s successor, Richard, the Earl of Mornington (later Marquess Wellesley) – brother of the future Duke of Wellington – was a telling symbol of what the British in India aspired to in the years after Warren Hastings. Oriental corruption was out; classical virtue was in, though despotism remained the preferred political order. As Horace Walpole somewhat disingenuously put it, a ‘peaceable, quiet set of tradesfolks’ had become the ‘heir-apparent to the Romans’.
One thing did not change, however. Under Cornwallis and Wellesley, British power in India continued to be based on the sword. War after war extended British rule ever further beyond Bengal – against the Marathas, against Mysore, against the Sikhs in the Punjab. In 1799 Tipu Sultan was killed when his capital Seringapatam fell. In 1803, following the defeat of the Marathas at Delhi, the Mughal Emperor himself finally accepted British ‘protection’. By 1815, around 40 million Indians were under British rule. Nominally, it was still a company that was in charge. But the East India Company was now much more than its name implied. It was the heir to the Mughals, and the Governor-General was the
de facto
Emperor of a subcontinent.
In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents. The title of Patrick Colquhoun’s
Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire in Every Quarter of the Globe
(1814) said it all. They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten the French and plundered the Indians. Now they ruled supreme.
Was all this done ‘in a fit of absence of mind’? Plainly not. From the reign of Elizabeth I onwards, there had been a sustained campaign to take over the empires of others.
Yet commerce and conquest by themselves would not have sufficed to achieve this, no matter what the strength of British financial and naval power. There had also to be colonization.
2
 
WHITE PLAGUE
 
What should we do but sing his praise
That led us through the wat’ry maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storm’s and prelates’ rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything ...
Andrew Marvell,
‘Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda’ (1653)
 
We [saw] a Set of Men . . . under the Auspices of the English Government; & protected by it ... for a long Series of Years ... rising, by easy
Gradations, to such a State of Prosperity & Happiness as was almost
enviable, but we [saw] them also run mad with too much Happiness, &
burst into an open Rebellion against that Parent, who protected them
against the Ravages of their Enemies.
Peter Oliver,
The Origin and Progress of the American Revolution
(1781)
 
 
 
 
 
B
etween the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants. In leaving Britain, the early emigrants risked not merely their life savings but their very lives. Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets – some purchased voluntarily, some not – there could have been no British Empire. For the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white.
For most of the emigrants, the New World spelt liberty – religious freedom in some cases, but above all economic freedom. Indeed, the British liked to think of this freedom as the thing that made their empire different from – and of course better than – the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Dutch. ‘Without freedom’, Edmund Burke declared in 1766, it ‘would not be the British Empire’. But could an empire, implying as it did British rule over foreign lands, be based on liberty? Was that not a contradiction in terms? Certainly, not all those who crossed the oceans did so of their own free will. Moreover, all were still subjects of the British monarch; and just how politically free did that make them? It was precisely this question that sparked the first great war of independence against the Empire.
Since the 1950s flows of migration have of course reversed themselves. More than a million people from all over Britain’s former Empire have come as immigrants to Britain. So controversial has this ‘reverse colonization’ been that successive governments have severely restricted it. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the British themselves who were the unwanted immigrants, at least in the eyes of those who already inhabited the New World. To those on the receiving end of Britain’s empire of liberty, these millions of migrants seemed little better than a white plague.
Plantation
 
In the early 1600s, a group of intrepid pioneers sailed across the sea to settle and, they hoped, civilize a primitive country inhabited by – as they saw it – a ‘barbarous people’: Ireland.
It was the Tudor queens, Mary and Elizabeth, who authorized the systematic colonization of Ireland, first in Munster in the south and then, most ambitiously, in Ulster in the north. Nowadays we tend to think of this as the start of Ireland’s troubles. But colonization was intended as the answer to the country’s chronic instability.
Since Henry VIII’s proclamation of himself as King of Ireland in 1541, English power had been limited to the so-called ‘Pale’ of earlier English settlement around Dublin and the beleaguered Scottish fort of Carrickfergus. In language, religion, land tenure and social structure, the rest of Ireland was another world. There was, however, a danger: Roman Catholic Ireland might be used by Spain as a back door into Protestant England. Systematic colonization was adopted as the remedy. In 1556 Mary allocated confiscated estates in Leix and Offaly in Leinster to settlers who established Philipstown and Maryborough there, but these were little more than military outposts. It was under her half-sister Elizabeth that the idea of English settlements took shape. In 1569 Sir Warham St Leger proposed a colony in south-west Munster; two years later Sir Henry Sydney and the Earl of Leicester persuaded the Queen to undertake a similar scheme in Ulster following the confiscation of the estates of Shane O’Neill.
The idea was that ‘haven townes’ would be established through merchants ‘intrenchying themselves’ and the settlement of ‘good husband men, plow wryghtes, kart wryghtes and smythes ... eyther to take habitation yf they be hable, or else to staye and serve there under sotche gentlemen as shall inhabyte there’. Land that was now ‘waste’, ‘desolate’ and ‘uninhabited’ would flow with ‘milk and honey’, according to Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, who mortgaged his estates in England and Wales to finance the ‘enterprise of Ulster’.
But the would-be colonists did not fare well; many returned home, ‘not having forgotten the delicacies of England, and wanting the resolute minds to endure the travail of a year or two in this waste country’. In 1575 an English expedition took Carrickfergus from the Scots, but Essex soon found himself pitted against the Gaelic Lords, under the leadership of the O’Neill (Turlough Luineach). A year later Essex died of dysentery in Dublin, still believing that the future lay in ‘the introduction of collonys of English’. By 1595 power in Ulster was in the hands of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who proclaimed himself Prince of Ulster after securing backing from Spain. In August 1598 O’Neill defeated an English army at Yellow Ford. It was a similar story in Munster. Following the suppression of Catholic revolts a scheme was launched for a settlement there. Lands were to be divided into estates of 12,000 acres to Englishmen who would undertake to populate them with English tenants. Among those who acquired estates in Munster were Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser, who wrote
The Faerie Queene
in his house at Kilcolman, County Cork. But in October 1598 the settlers were massacred; Spenser’s house was razed to the ground.
Only the failure of Spain to send an adequate force to Kinsale and the defeat of O’Neill’s army when he attempted to relieve the siege there prevented the complete abandonment of the Elizabethan colonization strategy. After O’Neill’s submission and flight to the continent in 1607, the strategy was nevertheless revived by Elizabeth’s successor, James VI of Scotland, now James I of England.
As any reader of the poetry of John Donne knows, the Jacobeans were inordinately fond of metaphors. Their term for colonization was ‘plantation’; in the words of Sir John Davies, the settlers were ‘good corn’; the natives were ‘weeds’. But this was more than mere social gardening. In theory, plantation was just another word for colonization, the ancient Greek practice of establishing settlements of loyal subjects out on the political margins. In reality plantation meant what today is known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. The lands of the rebel Earl and his associates – in practice, most of the six counties of Armagh, Coleraine, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Cavan and Donegal – would be confiscated. The most strategically and agriculturally valuable land would be given to what the Lord Deputy Chichester called ‘colonies of civil people of England and Scotland’. Plant enough good English and Scottish corn, James’s advisers argued, ‘and the country will ever after be happily settled’. Where possible, as the King himself made clear, the natives would be ‘removed’.

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