The British Empire

Sunrise to Sunset

Philippa Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351259668
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset is a broad survey of the history of the British Empire from its beginnings to its demise that offers a comprehensive analysis of what life was like under colonial rule, weaving the everyday stories of people living through the experience of colonialism into the bigger picture of empire.

The experience of the British Empire was not limited to what happened behind closed doors or on the floor of Parliament. It affected men, women and children across the globe, making a difference to what they ate and what kind of work they did, what languages and lessons they learned in school, and how they were able to live their lives. This new edition expands its coverage and discusses the relationship between Brexit and empire as well as the recent controversies connected to empire that have engulfed Britain: the Windrush scandal, the fight over the Chagos Islands and the Mau Mau lawsuits, bringing it up to date and engaging with key debates that govern the study of empire.

Painting a picture of life for all those affected by empire and supported by maps and illustrations, this is the perfect text for all students of imperial history.

1Uniting the kingdom

Before the eighteenth century the colonial world was dominated by Spain and Portugal, and Britain’s overseas activities in the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century were often focused on what could be wrested or gained from these powerful Iberian empires. The British Empire before the mid-seventeenth century was a highly local affair, and overseas activity was concentrated mostly on trading and exploration. The domination of Wales, Scotland and Ireland by England, which by the nineteenth century saw all these regions directly ruled from the Westminster parliament, is often dubbed ‘internal colonialism’. Three Acts of Union – from the sixteenth to the very start of the nineteenth century – cemented the legal, political and economic relationships between dominant England and this so-called Celtic fringe. Bringing Wales, Scotland and Ireland within a broader British realm represents some of England’s earliest forays into colonial rule, for though the formal statutes linking these countries take us through to the nineteenth century, English interest in, and often coercion of, these neighbouring regions has a much longer history.

The first of these lands to come directly under English control was Wales, brought formally into the English fold by a 1536 Act of Union that created 27 Welsh parliamentary constituencies. For at least a hundred years prior to this, conflicts between the Welsh and the English were common and, in the borderlands between the two especially, the English imposed discriminatory regulations and practices on the Welsh. The Welsh lacked many of the rights taken for granted by the English, a pattern of inequality and prejudice that would only grow after formal annexation.

Scotland’s associations with England were more complicated, and its annexation more drawn out. It was under Stuart rule in 1603 that the union of the Scottish and English crowns was formalised, with the seat of government firmly located in England. The new king, James I (who was also James VI of Scotland), styled himself King of Great Britain, in which he included Wales, Scotland and England. Little more than a hundred years later, in 1707, an Act of Union robbed Scotland of its own parliament: 45 seats in the House of Commons and 16 in the House of Lords represented the new Scottish constituencies. Unlike Wales, however, and largely because it had been an identifiable sovereign state before unification, Scotland maintained even after union with England its own judicial system, its own national church (Presbyterian, unlike England’s Episcopal Church of England) and a separate education system. And unlike the 1536 Act which had yoked Wales to England, the 1707 Act was a product of negotiation and not brute force. Scotland was in a position to sever its ties with England and the precise purpose of the 1707 legislation was to prevent that. The Act thus gave the Scots considerably more latitude than the 1536 Act had allowed the Welsh. Indeed, outside the wealthier segments of society, it probably made little difference to most Scottish men and women. Colin Kidd argues that, though always controversial, the Anglicisation of Scotland was welcomed by many Scots.¹ On the whole, the Union was reasonably harmonious and by no means wholly disruptive for Scotland.

The same could not be said for the 1800 Act of Union, which took effect on the first day of the new century, 1 January 1801. A number of critical political factors prompted this union with Ireland, largely related to Britain’s vulnerability, perceived or real, to foreign invasion. Ireland’s incorporation came at a time when Britain was almost constantly at war with the Catholic power of France, and sometimes with Catholic Spain, and shortly after a popular uprising in Ireland had been subdued. Ireland was, of course, a dominantly Catholic land. Wolfe Tone’s 1798 Irish rebellion was a violent one, with almost 30,000 fatalities. The fact that the rebellion had been aided by the French (despite the fact that Tone was himself a Protestant) fuelled English fears, especially during the threatening years of Napoleon’s rule when Britain’s political and military strengths were severely tested.

With a far larger population than either Scotland or Wales, the 1800 Act granted Ireland 100 seats in the House of Commons and 32 in the House of Lords to represent its 5 million inhabitants. As with Scotland, this representation was premised on the dissolution of a separate Irish parliament, and though that all-Protestant body had long been under the English thumb, the symbolism of its abandonment was nonetheless potent in shaping the future of Irish politics.

Ireland’s entanglements with England pre-date even those of Wales, and the Irish had experienced considerable erosion of their liberties over the years. English intrusions into Ireland date back to the thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth century England was actively engaged in a political, economic and religious subjugation of this neighbouring island. The dates are anything but coincidental, for the bloodshed over religion so characteristic of the Tudor years in England had deep and dangerous consequences for Catholic Ireland. By the late sixteenth century, there was some urgency to the policy of de-Catholicising Ireland through migration and plantation, as England became definitively Anglican. A greater and greater Protestant presence was imposed from the 1560s and for the next hundred years, with a corresponding dispossession and pauperisation of the Catholic Irish. When the Act of Union was passed in 1800 one promise upon which the old Irish parliament insisted before they would dissolve was that Catholics be allowed to vote and to hold public office. It was a promise that would remain unfulfilled for a further three decades. In March 1801, inability to keep that controversial promise prompted the prime minister, William Pitt, to resign his office.

After 1801, the kingdom – now consisting of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England, together known as the United Kingdom – was governed as one polity from London. The state was more deeply centralised than ever before; the term Great Britain, already in use, now became the official designation of the nation. Some historians have argued that such centralisation was effective by 1640.² While this might be so in an informal sense, we can certainly point to 1801, the dawn of the nineteenth century, the moment when such centralising tendencies were fully and formally in place and when internal colonialism was complete. While Scotland retained a number of important local institutions, Britain had one parliament and a state religion secured by a Protestant succession to the monarchy.

It was fear of destabilising this Protestant sovereignty that prompted much of Britain’s internal colonialism. Ireland as a predominantly Catholic region was the principal flashpoint for these religious debates within imperial policy, but religion was politically significant in Wales and Scotland too. In Scotland, Catholicism had largely given way by 1690 to a Calvinist-inspired Presbyterianism, under the influence of John Knox. It was distinctively different in character from English Episcopalian Christianity. The influence of Presbyterians among Protestant Irish groups, mostly centred in northern Ireland, was of considerable concern to English authorities in the eighteenth century. Presbyterianism in Scotland was acceptable, but its presence in Ireland added a complicating additional layer of religious discontent and dissent that could only add to England’s problems there; the Protestant Irish strand was the origin of the Orange Movement, which quickly became deeply involved in political protests in Ireland. Meanwhile, in Wales the much-resented insistence by the Anglican Church that services be conducted solely in English secured a sturdy support for non-Anglican forms of Protestantism. The successful spread especially of Methodism and of Baptism owed much to the fact that these new Protestant movements conducted services in the local language. Likewise the translation of the Bible into Welsh, effected during the reign of Elizabeth I, ensured that virtually every household in Wales would continue to be exposed to Welsh even at a time when that language was under attack. The Welsh language remained alive in large part because of the actions of a monarch determined to impose Anglican conformity.

Non-Anglican Protestants and Catholics throughout the kingdom were barred from public office – local or national – by the Corporation Act of 1661 and the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678. These laws were part of the legal and political mechanism designed to protect a Protestant succession to the throne and to resist reinstatement of the Catholic Stuart dynasty. They also reflected a popular and growing sentiment that parliament – although hardly a representative institution at this time – was a specifically Protestant expression of liberty, what historian Linda Colley has called the ‘Protestant inheritance’.³ This celebration of Protestantism gave voice to a profound and long-standing anti-Catholicism in England, bolstered throughout the eighteenth century by the animosity between England and its most significant imperial and commercial rival, France. Ironically, after the defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain’s new colonial acquisitions made the Empire a far less identifiably Protestant one than it had formerly been. Catholics and non-Christians figured largely among those now subject to British imperial rule.

National stability and success depended on more, of course, than merely a continued adherence to Protestant Christianity. The needs of merchants and of bankers were vital, and the mercantilist economic principles of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that the state took a close interest in trade and commerce, actively regulating economic life as a way to pay government’s expenses. In the early eighteenth century, for example, rarely a year passed in which a new law designed to regulate colonial trade in some fashion, or to control customs revenue (and its enemy, piracy) did not come before parliament. England kept a tight rein on colonial trade. Colonial goods were governed by strict regulations which gave a strong advantage to the English economy. Scots merchants and traders gained access to these lucrative colonial markets as a condition of the 1707 Act of Union. This meant that they were no longer required to route goods through England and pay duties on them, but could trade directly with other colonies within the British Empire. For Ireland, the wait was longer. An Act of 1696 had ruled that goods from the American plantations could not be landed in Ireland, a law that hindered the logical trade that might otherwise have flourished between America and Ireland, given their geographical proximity. Though this restriction was eliminated in 1731, Irish trade continued throughout the eighteenth century to be primarily with England, a situation that gave England as the dominant trading partner a considerable advantage.

Wales, like the often neglected Celtic region of Cornwall on England’s south-west tip, was the site of active smuggling, both across the English–Welsh border and at the ports. The loss of government revenue that efficient smuggling represented made the control of contraband and of piracy a major component in England’s desire to fold these ‘peripheral’ areas into the polity. The prospect of economic order in border areas – meaning a crackdown on smuggling and an organised customs agency pulling in significant revenue – was a key motive for internal colonialism.

This interest in potential revenues from the Celtic lands was seldom balanced by a corresponding commitment to investment in those regions. The Irish plantation schemes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were more concerned with peopling the country with loyal Protestants than in giving economic aid to, or partnering with, the Irish. Centralisation, as it would do at a later stage of empire and in more distant lands, often worked to the advantage of the dominant and not the peripheral power. In the arena of banking, for example, London became more and more powerful at the expense of provincial centres, and the establishment of the Bank of England in London in the 1690s was some indication of the power lines in the fiscal world. While Scottish banks remained robust until the banking reorganisation of the 1840s, those in Wales and Ireland simply could not compete with their English rivals.

Economic competitiveness was crucial to political survival in this era, and here again it was English practices and activities which came to dominate, particularly from the eighteenth century. The landholding practices common in Celtic cultures were often incompatible with English ideas about inheritance, wealth creation and economic efficiency. The dominance of gavelkind, in which land was shared by all male heirs, contrasted with the typical practice of primogeniture in England, which concentrated wealth in eldest sons. In an era when the English economy was focusing increasingly on consolidating large tracts of land for more profitable and efficient cash-crop farming, the tendency in gavelkind for land plots to shrink to accommodate every son was regarded as a backward-looking and inefficient system. The clan system common in the Scottish Highlands was similarly regarded as hindering economic reform, with its sub-letting practices based on small farms and plots. English unwillingness to accommodate alternative practices and lifestyles led easily to a view of other cultures as barbarous, uncivilised and unproductive, an attitude that would re-emerge in relation to more distant cultures as imperialism grew, and which frequently became a justification for colonial rule or intervention.

This fear of the different and the alien also played heavily into another of the factors determining the course of internal colonialism, and that was Britain’s European rivalries, most especially its enmity with France. Throughout the eighteenth century, France was England’s most constant antagonist and tension between the two countries was frequently performed on the imperial stage. Between 1689 and 1815, the English and the French fought seven wars against one another. Furthermore, not only did the French aid the Americans in their quest for independence in the 1770s, but they helped the Catholic Stuart claimants in the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite uprisings in Scotland, which attempted to put a Catholic monarch back on the British throne. France and Britain fought one another in India, North America and the Caribbean. Rivalry between England and France would not die down until 1815, when the Napoleonic armies had been routed and their leader exiled. Britain also went to war with Spain and with Austria during the eighteenth century, and colonial trading rights were at the heart of these conflicts. These complex entanglements of religion, trade and expansionist rivalry directly affected the internal colonies of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. England’s intent in annexing the Celtic lands had a lot to do with securing the borders to deter foreign invasion. Such fears were, of course, confirmed when Catholic France offered aid to the Stuart cause or in Ireland. When the 1798 rebellion in Ireland (which catalysed formal annexation in 1800) broke out, government feared that the resulting instability would allow a French invasion. This constant reading of the predatory hostility of France had powerful consequences; the marginality of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish was commonly transmuted into a potential disloyalty to the English state, a sentiment not always, of course, inaccurate given the resentments that colonialism invariably fostered. As a result, English control of these three regions grew, and the history of their relationship is one of increasing domination and supervision. England’s close control of the Celtic regions was in part intended to stabilise rule at home and in part to secure the more distant outposts of empire so often under threat from rival European colonising powers.

This control made the Celtic lands more and more dependent, economically and politically, on England and, as a result, anxious to participate as much as possible in its complex, highly protected trading network. Even before formal annexation, the subjugation of Wales, Scotland and Ireland was high among English priorities. The 1720 Declaratory Act passed at Westminster was, in its own words, ‘for the better securing the dependency of Ireland upon the crown of Great Britain’. The Act made laws passed at Westminster binding on Ireland and also ensured that appeals cases originating in Ireland were heard in England, formalising judicial control from the centre. This mechanism for asserting central authority was also applied in the American colonies in 1766, proclaiming parliament’s right to legislate on behalf of the colonies in the wake of a slew of unpopular and vigorously resisted legislation. Unsurprisingly, neither the colonial assemblies in the Americans nor the Irish parliament welcomed such laws. The Irish Act of 1720 was repealed in 1782, and not insignificantly after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’ troops at Yorktown, the symbolically important colonial defeat for the English state that ended the American Revolution (see Chapter 3).

The Irish had made shrewd use of Britain’s preoccupations in America. The American Revolution had wreaked havoc with the Irish economy, cutting off many of its markets. English merchants refused to relax any of the restrictions on Irish trade to help alleviate Ireland’s crisis, and in the face of this intransigence the Irish retaliated by refusing to import British-manufactured goods. More pressingly, given how many of England’s troops were deployed in America, Irish volunteer militia – Protestant and Catholic – began to drill and train all over the country, a move much feared by the English government which hastily moved to repeal the Declaratory Act. The Irish parliament was reconvened in an attempt to calm discontent, especially among Irish Protestants.

The victory of the Irish was, of course, short-lived, for within 20 years their parliament would once again be dissolved. And while Wolf Tone’s rebellion in 1798 called for political representation for all Irish regardless of religious creed, the Irish parliament that had clawed back its existence in 1782 was an exclusively Protestant body with little interest in representing the Catholic majority. Internal tensions like these remind us that we should not classify the Celtic lands simply as victims of colonial aggression. Although they certainly experienced such aggression, the history of internal colonialism is far more complex; the Celtic regions were often also internally divided. They were also sometimes themselves anxious to colonise. In 1695, a Scottish expedition attempted to found a colony in Spanish Central America; the Darien project was a failure, but it certainly spurred the English to annex Scotland a decade later. The English were infuriated by this independent Scottish action, fearing its effects on English colonial trade and on relations with Spain. The Scots asserted their right to exercise an independent foreign policy, but the English threat to ban exports from Scotland to England subdued the Scots’ protests. Scotland was clearly the weaker power in this exchange, yet it had attempted to colonise abroad despite its own experiences with a colonising power.

Further complicating any overly simple view is the tangible split between Lowland and Highland Scots. Urban Scotland in the eighteenth ce...