The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (2 page)

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What matters most today is that the British empire transformed the world. What it has now become is in considerable part the consequence of three hundred years of British overseas expansion. The present day demography, economy and political life of North America and much of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific owes much to former British rule and influence. English is the most widely spoken global language, and the governance, everyday lives and habits of mind of hundreds of millions of men and women have been shaped by prolonged contact with Britain and its values. For better or worse, the modern, post-imperial world is the product of that age of empires which extended from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Britain got most, in every sense, from this surge of European expansion.

I have tried to explain how, why and with what result, and I hope that I have done so with a certain degree of dispassion. I have written in the knowledge that the complex legacy of the British empire remains. Its physical and psychological impact was enormous everywhere, including in Britain. That this country is now a multi-racial nation is a direct consequence of its having once been an imperial one. For this reason alone, it is worth looking closely at the making and nature of the empire, the more so since its history and that of its creators is being excised from school syllabuses. What I have written will, I hope, make its past more understandable to all those who are its inheritors.

PART ONE

E
XCELLENT
O
PPORTUNITIES
1600–89

1

My New-Found-Land: North America

During the summer of 1605 London’s theatregoers were diverted by a new play,
Eastwood Ho,
performed in Blackfriars by a troop of boy actors calling themselves the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels. It had been written in some haste by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston and was a satire rich in topical allusions, some of which were directed against the Scots and earned Jonson the displeasure of the new king, James I. The speed of the play’s creation owed much, if not everything, to the authors’ desire to exploit the current public excitement generated by the Virginia venture. This project to found a North American colony was a source of intense speculation, both intellectual and financial.

Three of the central characters, Sir Petronel Flash, an impoverished and witless gentleman, Quicksilver, an idle apprentice, and Security, a devious moneylender, have conspired to collect funds for an expedition to Virginia where they expect to find gold. Security, on hearing from Quicksilver that the money has been secreted aboard Flash’s ship, is beside himself with excitement:

Now a frank gale of wind go with him, Master Frank, we have too few such knight adventurers. Who would not sell away competent certainties, to purchase, with any danger, excellent uncertainties? Your true knight venturer ever does it.

Later, when the would-be adventurers gather for a pre-embarkation drinking bout, they are entranced by Captain Seagull’s description of the wealth of the Virginian Indians:

Why, man, all their dripping pans and their chamber pots are pure gold: and all the chains, with which they chain up their streets, are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds, they go forth on holidays and gather ’em by the seashore, to hang on their children’s coats …

This was a parody of the extravagant claims made less than ten years earlier by Sir Walter Raleigh, who had promised England riches and power far in excess of those enjoyed by Spain in return for investment in an expedition to uncover El Dorado, a treasure house of precious metals somewhere deep in the Guianan jungle. Seagull’s hyperbole echoed Raleigh’s and no doubt amused the audience. There may have been laughter too at Security’s praise of ‘knight adventurers’, bold spirits who were prepared to take high risks. Crossing the seas in search of fortune was a fitting activity for a gentleman and equal in virtue to the pursuit of honour on the battlefield. The point was made by Thomas Drayton in his ‘To the Virginian Voyage’, written in celebration of the colonists’ first voyage in 1607:

You brave Heroique Minds,

Worthy your Countries Name,

That Honour still pursue,

Goe, and subdue.

Whilst loyt’ring Hinds

Lurke here at home, with shame.

Such sentiments, in various forms, had been the staple of a handful of colonial propagandists for the past thirty years. The most persuasive had been Richard Hakluyt, an Oxford graduate, whose purpose had been to awaken his countrymen to what he considered their divinely ordained national duty as colonisers. His
Principal Navigations,
first published in 1598, was an extensive recital of all the voyages undertaken by Englishmen and was intended to demonstrate the existence of a long and noble tradition of overseas enterprise. By revealing what had been achieved in the past, Hakluyt hoped to enkindle in his contemporaries a sense of destiny which would impel them to found colonies and penetrate distant oceans in search of trade.

Hakluyt’s vision of an expansionist England accorded with the aggressive policies of an influential group of courtiers and councillors, including the Earl of Leicester, Sir Francis Walsingham and Raleigh, all Hispanophobes and passionate anti-Catholics. They were willing to support colonisation projects as a means of damaging Spain and, in the case of a 1580 scheme for a settlement of Newfoundland, as a way of removing potentially subversive Catholics from England. None of these plans came to anything; the minute and under-funded settlements placed on Roanoke Island and Newfoundland during the 1580s soon withered.

One reason for the collapse of these enterprises was the concentration of national energies and resources on the conflict with Spain. Moreover, the largely private-enterprise seaborne war against Spain satisfied those with a taste for glory and quick profits. It attracted sharks like Sir Francis Drake and plenty of minnows who also fared well. Consider George White, a Dorset mariner and owner of the thirty-five-ton
Catherine of Weymouth
that was valued at £89 and armed with two falcons (three-pounder cannon) and two falconets (two pounders). In 1590–1, the
Catherine
captured three Portuguese Brazilmen which with their cargoes were worth £3,600. Encouraged by his success, White sold the
Catherine
and invested in a larger vessel with which he took another Brazilman valued at £4,200 and an East Indiaman crammed with Chinese silk, gems and cochineal.
1

White and the other Elizabethan sea dogs had turned a public emergency to private advantage. They belonged to a well-established English tradition that stretched back to the Hundred Years War against France during which aristocratic commanders had fought for royal wages and profits from ransoms and plunder. Soldiers and sailors who went overseas to fight did so in the expectation that they might return richer. A popular life of Drake, published in 1628, urged the youth of ‘this Dull or Effeminate Age to follow his noble steps for Gold and Silver’. Many did for the next two hundred or so years; a strong cord whose fibres were greed and fearlessness linked the Elizabethan sea rover, the eighteenth-century naval captain hungry for prize money and the early Victorian soldier, for whom the storming of an Indian city offered the chance of loot.

Men of this temper, and there were plenty of them kicking their heels in England after the end of the Spanish War in 1604, would have been easily seduced by Captain Seagull’s image of Virginia as a land of precious minerals. It was not, and those who dreamed of instant fortune were quickly disappointed, like the ‘divers gentlemen of fashion’ who returned home from the new colony of Bermuda in 1613 in disgust after having been asked to cut down trees and build a wooden fort.
2
Opportunities for such creatures came forty years later with the onset of the intermittent wars against the Netherlands, Spain and France for the control of colonies and oceans.

*   *   *

In
Eastwood Ho
Security had described the proposed plantations in North America as ‘excellent uncertainties’. It was an ambiguous expression that may have made investors in the Virginia Company uneasy, bearing in mind the history of previous ventures. There was, however, some comfort to be drawn from the fact that the new enterprise, licensed by James I in 1607, was enthusiastically backed by parliament. More substantial reassurance as to its prospects came from the knowledge that its finances were carefully managed and that its future profitability could be calculated on the basis of sound economic arguments.

A prospectus issued in 1620 promised that the expanding settlements on the Chesapeake Bay would, in time, give Britain a self-sufficiency in materials which had hitherto been imported at a great cost to the country. The North American plantations would replace Scandinavia as a source of tar and timber for ship-building. The colony would also provide the mother country with ‘The Wines, Fruit and Salt of France and Spain’ and ‘the silks of Persia and Italy’. Persuaded by such arguments investors, who included noblemen, courtiers, civil servants, country squires (details of the company’s activities were broadcast in the shires by London newssheets) and merchants, subscribed £200,000 in thirteen years.

The Virginia Company’s promoters and the early settlers had imagined that the entire coastline of North America from Newfoundland south to the Carolinas lay in a temperate zone that enjoyed ‘a moderate equality of heat and cold’.
3
At the same time, since the Chesapeake Bay colony shared a common latitude with Spain it was assumed that it would provide an abundance of Mediterranean crops. Vine dressers were among the first ashore and even as late as 1620 plans were in hand for planting olive groves. By then everyone involved should have known better. It was soon discovered that the region lay within a malarial belt and that new arrivals required ‘seasoning’ during the hot summer months when, like timber, they sweated profusely. Winters were bitterly cold and during that of 1609–10 the disheartened wished themselves ‘in England without their limbs’ and begging on the streets rather than in Virginia. Within a dozen years the company was near to bankruptcy and in 1624 its settlements were taken over by the crown.

Tobacco rescued Virginia and made it thrive in a manner that astonished the colonists and the government. The first tentative planting of imported South American tobacco plants had been undertaken in 1617. It was a success and began a revolution that transformed the infant colony and the British economy. At the time, tobacco was still a luxury and smoking the indulgence of the rich, some of whom would pay as much as £2 a pound for the prized Guianan leaf. Mass imports from the Virginian plantations changed this and by mid-century the retail price had plummeted to one shilling (5p) a pound. Smoking became a universal habit embraced by every class in Europe. The opening up of what proved to be an unlimited market for a drug which both calmed and stimulated was the chance result of overproduction in the 1630s. By 1700, Britain imported 13 million pounds of Virginian tobacco for domestic consumption and a further 25 million for re-export to Europe, figures that rose steadily throughout the next century.

The Virginian tobacco boom had a profound impact on Britain and its economy. Viewing the colony’s prosperity during the 1620s, one commentator perceptively observed that ‘Spain is more damaged by the King’s peace than by the Queen’s war’.
4
His logic was simple and would be repeated by later advocates of colonial expansion. The wealth which flowed from Virginia contributed to that of Britain and its power grew accordingly. In terms of government revenue the imposts on tobacco raised £421,000 between 1699 and 1701, 20 per cent of all customs duties. By this time, Virginia and its tobacco-producing neighbour Maryland had a population of 92,000 and was a major market for British manufactured goods.

In terms of the generation of wealth, Virginia overshadowed the smaller colonies of Newfoundland, established in 1610, and those under the control of the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in 1620. In all there was a gap between expectation and reality. A 1611 report of one early settler in Newfoundland, written to drum up further investment, described the tiny colony as ‘very honest, peaceful and hopeful, and very likely to be profitable’. A visitor the previous year wrote home that ‘this savage country of Newfoundland gives men little content but only cruel hard labour hoping to make the best content they can have with small profit.’ The attraction of this bleak land lay in the cod fishing banks offshore which had drawn English fishing fleets since the 1520s. The cod were caught (at first with hook and line) then salted, dried and smoked and, with barrels of their oil, were shipped to the ports of the Iberian Peninsula to be traded for local products. By 1620, 300 ships visited the region annually and, according to a petition for naval protection, employed 10,000 sailors ‘thereby relieving 20,000 more people of the western parts of England, who are wholly dependent on them for their existence’.
5

Further south, the Puritan settlers of the fledgling New England colonies faced an equally unkind land. They had crossed the Atlantic ignorant of the local climate which they imagined to be the same as England’s. They were soon disabused and in 1629 one wrote mournfully that ‘from the middest of October to the middest of May there is a sad face of winter upon all this land’ and noted that many were dying from the ‘intolerable cold’.

The death rate was high, but the Puritans were psychologically prepared for it, and for the grinding work of clearing woodlands, ploughing and sowing crops. They were men and women with a profound sense of the working of God’s will who had voluntarily withdrawn from England where their Calvinist creed attracted official mistrust and, during the 1620s and 1630s, systematic persecution by the state-sponsored Church of England. Their exodus in the next decade was an escape from a spiritually uncongenial world and a manifestation of that Divine Providence which they believed was actively engaged in the affairs of men, promoting some and hindering others. Their settlements were a mark of God’s favour on His chosen people, a view held by the Massachusetts Bay Company’s governor, John Winthrop. In 1634, having heard reports of an epidemic among the local Indians, he wrote in his diary that ‘they are all dead of the small pox so as the Lord cleareth our title to what we possess’.

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