Making the British empire, 1660–1800

Jason Peacey

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526106100
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire du monde

This collection offers a timely reappraisal of the origins and nature of the first British empire, in response to the 'cultural turn' in historical scholarship and the 'new imperial history'. It addresses topics that have been neglected in recent literature, providing a series of political and institutional perspective; at the same time it recognises the importance of developments across the empire, not least in terms of how they affected imperial 'policy' and its implementation. It analyses a range of contemporary debates and ideas – political and intellectual as well as religious and administrative – relating to political economy, legal geography and sovereignty, as well as the messy realities of the imperial project, including the costs and losses of empire, collectively and individually.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Jason Peacey

Historians who have reflected on the historiography relating to the British empire have often noted that this particular sub-discipline is not just prone to ‘heart-searching’, but is also ‘quarrelsome’, and it is common to find references to the tendency to engage in ‘posturing’ and ‘ill-tempered disputes’. In commenting on what he tellingly described as the ‘imperial history wars’, Dane Kennedy referred to the risk that some strands within the profession might adopt a ‘smugly self-righteous attitude’.¹ It is certainly true that imperial history has witnessed – probably in an exaggerated form – fairly profound shifts in intellectual fashion, in ways that are perhaps more striking than in other areas of the historical profession. In certain ways, of course, the field has witnessed changes in the fortunes of political, economic, social and cultural history that are entirely familiar across all aspects of the discipline, and that involve fairly predictable anxieties – both methodological and conceptual – as well as prejudices, some of which may indeed be politically and culturally inspired. At the same time, imperial history might be said to have become rather more acrimonious than most other sub-disciplines for two reasons. The first reflects the particular ways in which some historians have engaged with non-history disciplines in recent decades, notably post-structuralist and post-colonial thought, as well as area studies, literary studies and feminist studies, all of which are sometimes said to involve work that lacks awareness of historical methodology and of historical contexts, and that can also be somewhat impenetrable and jargon-laden. The second reason is that imperial history has been more than usually politicised, for very obvious reasons, given that the profound legacies and repercussions of our imperial past continue to be felt and debated to this day. To some, therefore, historical writing was intimately bound up with modern politics and with national identity, and there can be little doubt that this has had some kind of effect on how the British empire has been studied. However, while these divisions and disagreements can be readily understood, it might also be argued that there has at times been a risk of debates becoming over-heated, and of fault lines becoming widened unnecessarily, and it is possible to argue that there is scope to provide fresh perspectives on at least the history of what is sometimes called the ‘first’ British empire without the acrimony that has sometimes been present.

The aim of this volume is to provide examples of new directions in British imperial history, and of work that offers ways of bridging some of the methodological and conceptual divisions that have dogged the field in recent decades. As such, the aim of this introduction is to provide readers with an outline of the scholarly context in which the various authors are operating. This will not, and could not, involve an extremely thorough survey of the historiography, given the overwhelming volume of literature that now exists in this particularly well-populated area of scholarship. Rather, the aim here is to highlight some of the key ideas and concepts that have been developed and debated within the field, and some of the issues that have assumed greater importance within recent work, and that help to provide the context for the chapters in this volume, and are central to how the history of the British empire is currently being reconfigured.²

One vital issue, of course, involves inevitable questions about how much weight scholars of empire have placed, and ought to place, upon issues like ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, particularly within England or Britain, and how these issues should be handled. From Sir John Seeley and John Hobson onwards, of course, the impact of both geopolitical considerations and business interests within the metropole loomed large within what might be thought to represent the ‘traditional’ historiography relating to what drove imperialism, as did the perspective of policymakers and what was sometimes called the ‘official mind’. Indeed, to the extent that it is reasonable to identify ‘traditional’ approaches to empire, including Marxist accounts, there is certainly scope to argue that historians tended to focus upon how the empire came into being, which forces were at work and what patterns can be detected across time. This often meant tracing the ways in which control was gained over people and places, the importance of trade monopolies and the impact of rivalries between European states, either in terms of identifying the impact of mercantile interests within domestic politics, as in the work of Robert Brenner, for example, or in terms of tracing the transition from an ‘adventuring’ phase – based on trade, plunder and puritanism, piecemeal development and a lack of official coordination – to a later phase that more obviously involved state control and direct rule, from the takeover of the Virginia Company through the Protestant foreign policy of Oliver Cromwell and on to the Dominion of New England, via the evolution of the East India Company, the creation of the Royal African Company and the emergence of various boards and Councils of Trade.³ The obvious danger with such analyses, arguments and narratives, of course, was that they were focused heavily on rather simplistic accounts of the ‘interests’ and visions of fairly discrete groups within the political and mercantile elite. Of course, it certainly needs to be recognised that, from John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson onwards, attention has also been paid to ‘informal’ as well as to ‘formal’ empire, and to the colonial or imperial peripheries as well as to the metropole, even if only in order to help conceptualise the shift from informal towards formal empire, and to take account of crises within colonial settings, rather than simply issues that arose at the imperial centre.⁴

More recently, of course, fresh impetus was given to an ‘economic’ interpretation of the British empire through the work of Peter Cain and Antony Hopkins, the importance of which lay in emphasising developments within the metropole rather than merely events on the periphery, and in stressing that economic considerations were a prime driver of imperial expansion, not least as a result of influence that was exerted on the state by financiers and financial interest groups. This intervention represented more than merely a revival of Hobson’s ideas and arguments, and whatever the merits of the central claim about the role of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ – either for the nineteenth century or for the earlier period from the late seventeenth century onwards – there can be no doubting its significance. This involved focusing attention upon the causes, rather than the consequences of imperial expansion; upon the relationship between metropole and periphery; and upon the complex relationship between economic interests and the state – what they referred to as ‘varying influence and shifting alliances’ – not least in relation to political upheaval and constitutional change in the era, as well as the aftermath, of the Glorious Revolution. What Cain and Hopkins offered, in other words, were ways of thinking about imperial expansion that focused on ‘political economy’, and that recognised the potential for concentrating upon the metropole without necessarily having to accept the existence of an official imperial ‘mind’. For Cain and Hopkins, therefore, the ‘various phases’ of the empire were ‘closely connected with the development of the domestic economy, the shifting balance of social and political forces … and the varying intensity of Britain’s economic and political rivalry with other powers’.⁵ Indeed, these connections between economic development, imperial expansion and the rise of the fiscal state have remained central to the economic history of the early modern period.⁶

Imperial history really became controversial, of course, when challenges were laid down to the focus not just upon the metropole but also upon politics, economics and political economy. Thus, as historians took the ‘cultural turn’ in all sorts of different ways, and in all sorts of sub-disciplinary areas, there emerged powerful reactions against what was perceived to be the methodological conservatism of the prevailing scholarship, in terms of conceptual narrowness, disciplinary insularity and what Kennedy referred to as ‘adamant empiricism’.⁷ At the same time, however, such concerns and claims were clearly given piquancy by a sense that ‘traditional’ imperial history was also profoundly conservative in a political sense, not least in failing to probe the attitudes that underpinned imperial projects, and the impact of imperial experiments. The result, therefore, was a turn away from imperial ‘policy’ and towards the insights that could be offered by ‘interlopers’ from other disciplines, and an attempt to refocus attention on the cultural origins and consequences of empire, Orientalist attitudes towards colonised peoples and cultures, and non-western perspectives on overseas expansion, as well as the history of those from outside the elite (sometimes called ‘subaltern studies’). As such, what became known as the New Imperial History focused on issues like gender, race and identity, on Foucauldian themes relating to power, knowledge and information, and on those who were on the receiving end of empire, as well as on interactions between cultures, and on perceptions and assertions of power. As Kennedy explained, the aim was to move ‘from politics to cultures, from institutions to identities and from the intentions of European elites … to the experience of colonial subjects’.⁸ Ultimately, of course, the need to ‘provincialise’ Europe, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, has also been linked to the rise to prominence of new strands within the discipline, such as transnational, global and world history.⁹

It was at this point, of course, that imperial history ran the risk of fragmenting into different and more or less incompatible sub-disciplinary strands and approaches, between which there was little common ground. It was certainly the case that cultural historians were highly critical of multi-volume projects like the Oxford History of the British Empire, and to the approach taken by historians such as Peter Marshall, which were seen as being too conventional and too dependent upon the ideas of Gallagher and Robinson, and which were also regarded as being insufficiently willing to address a range of cultural issues, not least gender and race. Marshall, of course, was more or less unapologetic about the value of analysing the ‘official mind’, and the impact of metropolitan perspectives and European competition upon developments across the British empire, not least in order to explore and explain the transition from the ‘first’ to the ‘second’ British empire. For Marshall, this was a story of a more or less decisive shift in the nature of the empire, from one that involved the projected power of a sovereign state, as a result of competition with France and Spain, and through things like plantations, to the control of both territories and people.¹⁰ To its critics, however, such scholarship – and the Oxford History more generally – was very obviously ‘reactionary’, not least in its tendency to ‘snipe’ at cultural approaches of the kind adopted by the New Imperial History.¹¹

Nevertheless, it would perhaps be too easy to overdraw the differences between different kinds of imperial history, and there is certainly scope to recognise that cultural approaches to empire are not necessarily incompatible with other methods and other ideas, and to acknowledge that at least some of its arguments and insights have had an impact on scholars who do not straightforwardly identify themselves as practitioners of New Imperial History. Indeed, it is possible to argue that recent years have witnessed a willingness to incorporate cultural dimensions into political and economic histories of the empire, just as cultural history has had an impact on social, economic and political history more broadly. It is also important to reflect on the likelihood that by looking beyond the metropole it is possible to consider the ways in which the colonies exerted influence upon Britain, and whether such influences were political rather than merely cultural. Indeed, while scholars like Marshall might be thought to be wary of such arguments, it seems clear that recent years have witnessed increasingly sophisticated and complex understandings of both the first and second British empires, which involve at least some kind of rapprochement between cultural historians of empire and those who insist on the need to a...