Themes

Such was the size, power and proclaimed triumph of the British empire that we might be tempted to argue that those who held the reins were well ordered, confident and integrated, with a shared vision of what was desirable and achievable. Nothing was further from the truth. From the outset, those in control lacked a coherent strategy largely because of internal divisions, domestic disputes erupted over policy, and on the ground colonial administrators were reminded daily of the limits of their power when faced with resistance from peoples who were either colonized or looked with horror on the prospects of colonization. This resulted in a patchwork of inchoate connections among different regions of the empire, forged by a pragmatism – at times an ad hocery – which grew out of the circumstances of the time and place.

Taking India as a the most significant example, it is evident that although a unified vision was outlined in the original charter of 1600, the practical realities discovered in India continually recast precisely how that vision was to be realized. While the East India Company saw itself principally as a trading company, it soon recognized that success was predicated on gaining a permanent station which could be defended against attacks from rival imperial powers, both European and Indian. And despite the powers were endowed in the charter, company agents, when faced with Mughal resistance, found it impossible to acquire land until 1661 when Bombay was ceded by the Portuguese as part of the dowry of the Infanta on her marriage to Charles II. This created tension and occasionally hostility between the company court in London and factors in India who had a rather better grasp of the practical realities, made much worse by the impossibilities of prompt communication.

After a series of crises in the late eighteenth century, the British state entered the fray by establishing the Board of Control for India. Now with hands firmly on the levers of power, disputes between parliament and the company over the nature of colonial rule as well as vital policies such as the Permanent Settlement and missionary activity. The catastrophe of the ‘mutiny’ of 1857 sealed the fate of the company as the governance of India was assumed by the India Office assisted on the ground by an army of colonial administrators. With the rise of free traded imperialism and the establishment of a Whitehall bureaucracy with power over not only India but for many colonies in the region of the India Ocean including Zanzibar, Iraq, Iran, Malaya, China and Tibet, Britain forged a certain coherence in its colonial affairs.

Throughout this period, resistance to British rule was ever present. Despite the power that it wielded and the seeming commitment to progress, at the edges of the empire were dangers which unchecked threatened to topple the whole edifice. Nor should it be forgotten that even if native recruits made up a large majority of the armies of occupation, imperial agents were a tiny minority of the population. From the very beginnings of British rule, resistance took many forms. Petitions, strikes, boycotts and sabotage were common features of indigenous resistance in Ireland and India of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Americans using the language of  the right to self determination overthrew British rule in 1776 so heralding the United States, and providing in part the inspiration for the great and only successful slave revolt in Haiti some fourteen years later. It is no exaggeration to say that in the course of the nineteenth century, Britain was in a constant state of war against insurgents in virtually every corner of its empire. The Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 may have been the best known of these, but important too were, for example, the Falklands (1833), Opium War (1839-42), First Sikh War (1845-46), Jamaican Rebellion (1865) and the Ashanti War (1900), all of which remind us of the problematic nature of the supposed Pax Britannica.

Several primary collections investigate critically the role and legacy of empire. Diana Brydon’s Postcolonialism, Peter Cain and Mark Harrison’s Imperialism, and Peter Cain’s Empire and its Critics all look in detail at the ways in which British imperialism provoked resistance domestically and from indigenous peoples. And Martin Thomas covers the period of decolonization when colonized societies threw off foreign rule in his European Decolonization. Finally, it is worth mentioning C.A. Bayly’s, Imperial Meridian, a fine study which rethinks the trajectory of the British empire over 1780 – 1830.