Britain's Empire

Resistance, Repression and Revolt

Richard Gott

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781839764226
• eBook ISBN: 9781781683897
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

As the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain's Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative of the resisters, revolutionaries and revolters who stood up to the might of the Empire. Richard Gott recounts the Britain's misdeeds from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the globe from Ireland to Australia, telling a story of almost continuous colonialist violence. Recounting events from the perspective of the colonized, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream British histories.

Part I

THE CHALLENGE TO IMPERIAL POWER: NATIVE AMERICANS, CARIBBEAN SLAVES, INDIAN PRINCES AND IRISH PEASANTS, 1755–1772

The middle of the eighteenth century marks a significant watershed in the history of the British Empire. It was a time when the indigenous inhabitants of the United States fought their last battles against the British, and when the princes of India began the unequal struggle that would eventually lead to their subjugation. The resistance to Empire ignited in this period took place against the background of a global struggle between Britain and France, the first ‘world war’ of modern times, spreading out from the battlefields of Europe to embrace the colonial territories of India, North America and the Caribbean.

The conflict in the years between 1756 and 1763 is familiar to European historians as ‘The Seven Years War’, a European war in which the Prussian army and the British navy triumphed over France and Austria (the Holy Roman Empire). Spain, the ruler of much of Latin America and the Caribbean, joined the war in support of France and Austria in 1761, provoking the British to seize Spain's Cuban colony in 1762, while Russia and Sweden were also to be found fighting on the French side.

A yet wider war, known to American historians as ‘The French and Indian War’, overlapped with the European conflict and took place over a slightly longer period, the nine years from 1754 to 1763. fighting between Britain and France began on the Ohio River in 1754, the result of long and unresolved disputes about the interior territories of North America, and Britain formally declared war on France in May 1756. Three years later, in September 1759, a British army advanced into New France, or French Canada, and captured Quebec. France held on briefly in Louisiana, but was no longer to play an important role in the north of North America. Both Quebec and Louisiana were lost by France at the Paris peace conference of 1763.

This inter-imperial conflict led to the largest and longest Native American resistance war in American history. The Ohio valley became the epicentre of a Native American battleground that spread north to the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River on the Canadian border, and south to the Carolinas and Georgia. This cataclysmic conflict has often been overshadowed in conventional American accounts by the settler war of independence in the 1770s, and it is almost entirely forgotten in the standard histories of Britain and its overseas possessions.

Another arena of the great British war with France was India, where rival trading stations—the British at Calcutta, the French at Chandernagore—had long been established on the Hughli River, and where British and French armies had already clashed in the 1740s. A successful British attack on the French fort at Chandernagore in 1757 was followed by the defeat of France's uncertain ally, Siraj-ud-Daula, the rebellious Muslim ruler of Bengal, at the battle of Plassey. The marginalisation of French influence and the British conquest of India had begun.

The global struggle of the 1750s and the eventual British defeat of the French, formalised by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, led to the creation of what is often called the ‘Second British Empire’. With British armies deployed in different parts of the world, the struggle enabled this embryonic ‘Second Empire’ to increase in size by leaps and bounds. It also provided the Empire's subject peoples with the opportunity to participate in acts of resistance that might have been difficult to sustain in years of general peace. Many opponents of colonial rule perceived that this was a good moment to rebel. In North America and India, and in the slave islands of the Caribbean, a fleeting chance was offered to peasants and princes, as well as to slaves and indigenous peoples, to challenge British power.

Four distinct groupings sought to stem the imperial tide at the start of this era: first were the Native Americans in the North American hinterland to the west of the thirteen coastal colonies, peoples already caught up in the tide of white settlement; second were the inhabitants of the coastal states of India, threatened for the first time by Britain's military advance; third were the slaves in Britain's West Indian islands, notably Jamaica, who sought to escape from their enforced servitude; and fourth were the peasants in Ireland, mobilised against their settler landlords by the rural insurgents known as the Whiteboys.

Rebels everywhere did as best they could with the weapons they had to hand, and two successful uprisings occurred at the start of this period. One took place in the Americas in 1755, when Shingas roused the other Delaware chiefs to join the French in defeating the British on the Ohio River, killing the British commander-in-chief as he advanced into the Ohio valley. Another uprising was the one staged in Bengal the following year, in 1756, when Siraj-ud-Daula expelled the British from their military base at Calcutta, after holding prisoners in the famous Black Hole prison.

Other acts of colonial insubordination followed. In America, the Abenaki went on to slaughter British soldiers on Lake George in 1757, and, with the Micmacs, maintained a hostile posture along the Canadian frontier. A few years later, the Delaware ordered the British to leave Pittsburgh, and, inspired by Neolin and led by Pontiac, their nation rose up along the banks of the Ohio in 1763. finally, the Cherokee engaged in fresh hostilities in the Carolinas in the 1760s.

Elsewhere in that decade, with Caribbean islands changing hands during the war, and with a consequent loosening in imperial systems of control, African slaves seized their chance to rebel. A plantation revolt in Jamaica in 1760 was to smoulder on for several years.

Fresh leaders in India—Mir Jafar and Haidar Ali—took up the anti-imperial cause in Bengal and Mysore. These varied resistance struggles in different parts of the world paved the way to a sustained period of imperial rejection throughout the newly expanded empire. Though ultimately unsuccessful, they nourished a tradition of resistance that was to be incubated by succeeding generations.

CHAPTER 1

Native American Resistance during the French and Indian War

On 9 July 1755, in a ravine of the Monongahela River, a few miles from Pittsburgh, a troop of 600 Native American guerrilla fighters ambushed a British army advancing into their territory along the Ohio valley. A thousand British soldiers were casualties of the ensuing battle, and the commander-inchief of British forces in America, the sixty-year-old General Edward Braddock, was killed. The Native Americans, chiefly Delaware and Shawnee, together with 250 French soldiers with whom they were allied, could savour for a moment a significant victory against an imperial army, and rejoice as its defeated remnants retreated to the Atlantic coast.

The indigenous inhabitants of North America were always aware of the different colonial strategies of the British and the French, and they thought they were better off under the French. An Iroquois at a French mission outpost run by the Jesuits in Canada described their rival merits:

Go see the forts our [French] Father has erected, and you will see that the land beneath his walls is still hunting ground, having fixed himself in those places we frequent only to supply our wants; whilst the British, on the contrary, no sooner get possession of a country than the game is forced to leave it; the trees fall down before them, the earth becomes bare, and we find among them hardly the wherewithal to shelter us when the night falls.¹

Several Native American nations accepted the implicit advice in the Iroquois letter, and when war broke out between the European rivals in 1754 they made temporary alliances with the French, whose rule appeared less threatening to their interests than the impositions of the British settlers.

In the Ohio valley, the Delaware took time to decide which way to jump. They had only recently moved into the upper reaches of the valley, driven there by British settlers from Pennsylvania and other coastal colonies, and were soon made aware that this too was territory into which settlers were planning to expand. Fur traders were to be found travelling along the rivers, as well as groups of armed settlers from Virginia. Two of these pioneering expeditions in the early 1750s were led by Major George Washington, a young, slave-owning Virginian landowner with a part-time military position who was to take a speculative interest in these western territories for the rest of his life. The Virginian pioneers were soon followed by settlers from the rival colony of Pennsylvania.

These Virginian probes into the Ohio valley coincided with a revival of French interest in the future of these lands situated between their existing colonies: Canadian ‘New France’ to the north, and Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico to the south. France's strategic aim was to establish French ‘protectorates’ in the vast Native American territory stretching from the Gulf to the St Lawrence River, to be controlled from a string of military outposts. The first to be constructed was Fort Duquesne, later to become Pittsburgh.

In the early stages of this war, the British had hopes of recruiting the Native American nations to their side, but the French experience of making tactical alliances with local people had proved more effective. The Delaware supported the French move against the British in 1755, and the British commander was their first victim.

Braddock had been sent out to North America in January 1755. Sailing with two Irish regiments from Cork to Virginia, he advanced westward from Maryland. His soldiers built a rough road across the Allegheny mountains and into the territory of the Delaware. Their task was to seize Fort Duquesne from the French.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the white settler leaders in Pennsylvania, warned the British general of the uncertain loyalties of the Delaware, but Braddock took no notice. ‘These savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the King's regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible that they should make an impression.’²

Shingas, one of the Delaware resistance leaders in the Ohio valley, had long been known as ‘a terror’ to the British frontier settlements.³ Yet in recent years he had seemed more friendly. He was invited with other chiefs to a meeting with Braddock, and came under pressure to join the British against the French. He sought to bargain, and a settler recalled what he had requested:

Shingas asked General Braddock whether the Indians that were friends to the British might not be permitted to live and trade among the British, and have hunting grounds sufficient to support themselves and their families, as they had nowhere to flee to but into the hands of the French and their Indians, who were their enemies.⁴

This was a straightforward request, but Braddock had no experience in dealing with Native Americans and no mandate to give Shingas what he asked for. The hunting grounds of the Delaware were already destined to be handed over to the settlers of Virginia, represented in Braddock's army by Major Washington.

Shingas received a one-sentence reply from Braddock that echoes through the chronicles of Empire: ‘No savage should inherit the land.’⁵ Tactical alliances might be made with indigenous peoples, for short-term opportunistic reasons, but such people could never be granted rights in exchange for their cooperation, least of all rights to land scheduled for white settlement.

Shingas and the Delaware chiefs gave a blunt response. ‘If they might not have liberty to live on the land’, they told Braddock, they would not join the British in fighting for it. They withdrew from the talks; the general told them dismissively that ‘he did not need their help’.⁶ He lived long enough to regret his decision, for their assistance would have been useful. They alone were familiar with the terrain through which his army was about to march.

Shingas and his men, ‘very much enraged’ by Braddock's remarks, went off to join the forces of France. Travelling back to Fort Duquesne, they met the French officer in charge, Captain Daniel de Beaujeu, who was more appreciative of their needs. When Captain Beaujeu ‘began the Warsong’, it was said, ‘all the Indian Nations immediately joined him’.⁷ Soon a powerful fighting force of Native Americans came out in support of the French—the army with French officers that defeated the British at Monongahela in July 1755.⁸ Washington was one of the few survivors.

The victory of the Native Americans, albeit with French help, could be chalked up as a major success in their long resistance war. For a short while, they had cause to congratulate themselves on a notable victory, and, according to settler legend, they avenged their own losses by burning several prisoners alive. Their success was widely noted, and raised the spirits of other victims of settler oppression. The huge population of black slaves in the Thirteen Colonies were much encouraged by the result of the battle.

The military governor of Virginia, where 120,000 slaves worked on the plantations, noted with alarm that the blacks had become ‘very audacious on the defeat on the Ohio … These poor creatures imagine the French will give them their freedom.’ The white settlers of Virginia, numbering 170,000, were nearly outnumbered by their slave workforce, and had good cause to be worried. The threat of black rebellion was deemed so alarming that the governor placed ‘a proper number of soldiers in each county to protect it from the combinations of the negro slaves’.⁹

Resistance by the indigenous inhabitants of the coastal colonies of North America was not new; it had occurred at intervals since the arrival of white settlers at the end of the sixteenth century. The first ‘Indian War’ took place in Virginia on the shores of Chesapeake Bay between 1609 and 1614. A second rebellion in the same area in 1622 almost destroyed the nascent colony, leaving nearly 400 settlers dead. A further rebellion in Virginia in 1644 was considered the bloodiest day for the British in the history of seventeenth-century America.¹⁰

Further north, the river towns of Connecticut were attacked by the Pequots in 1637, while the Algonquin warriors of Metacom, known to the English as ‘King Philip’, besieged half the settler towns of New England, destroying twelve of them in 1675. What became known as ‘King Philip's war’ was the deadliest conflict, in terms of the proportion of casualties to the population, in the history of the Americas. By the time it was over, hundreds had died on both sides.¹¹ To the south, in the Carolinas, the Creeks and the Yamasees were also no strangers to rebellion, joining forces early in the eighteenth century to kill several hundred settlers.

Native American resistance was met by the settler strategy of extermination. In the brutal conflict of the Chesapeake war, the English, with their banner of ‘King Jesus’, destroyed entire villages, slaughtering their inhabitants.¹² During the subsequent rebellion in Virginia in 1622, settlers murdered 200 Indians with poisoned wine.¹³ Fifty fell in an ambush the following year, and 800 were killed in July 1624.

The Pequot rebellion in Connecticut in 1637 also evoked a savage English response, culminating in the massacre of several hundred Pequots. Male survivo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: THE CHALLENGE TO IMPERIAL POWER: NATIVE AMERICANS, CARIBBEAN SLAVES, INDIAN PRINCES AND IRISH PEASANTS, 1755–72
• PART II: WHITE SETTLER REVOLT IN AMERICA, AND FRESH RESISTANCE IN CANADA, INDIA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 1770–89
• PART III: THE LOSS OF AMERICA CREATES A NEED FOR NEW PRISONS ABROAD AND A PLACE TO SETTLE BLACK ‘EMPIRE LOYALISTS’, 1786–1802
• PART IV: BRITAIN EXPANDS ITS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY EMPIRE DURING THE WAR AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE, 1793–1802
• PART V: RESISTANCE TO IMPERIAL EXPANSION DURING THE WARS AGAINST NAPOLEON, 1803–15
• PART VI: SLAVE REVOLTS, WHITE SETTLEMENT, INDIGENOUS EXTERMINATION, AND THE ADVANCE INTO BURMA AND ASSAM, 1816–30
• PART VII: AN END TO COLONIAL SLAVERY AND RESISTANCE TO FRESH SETTLEMENT, 1830–38
• PART VIII: IMPERIAL HUMILIATION AND FURTHER EXPANSION, 1839–47
• PART IX: PRELUDE TO THE MUTINY, 1848–53
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index