Themes

The British empire was founded on commerce, the terms and direction of which was underpinned by the political economy of what was known as mercantilism. As an economic philosophy, mercantilism was ill-defined, but suffice it to say that it preached increased wealth of a nation depended upon maximizing exports and minimizing imports. With this is mind chartered trading companies, privately owned and managed, drove the search for new markets almost always with the active support of the state. The most important of these companies was the East India Company, and it is hardly surprising to learn that many of the important theorists of mercantilism in the early decades, including Thomas Mun, Josiah Child and Charles Davenant, were employed by the company.

At the heart of the company’s operations, however, were unresolved tensions which attracted adverse criticism. First, the company was able to survive only because it was empowered by monopoly trading rights in the East Indies, and second, over time this private, joint stock trading company began to resemble an colonial power as it seized land, administered justice, minted coins and ran its own army. The fiercest and most influential critic was Adam Smith who in Wealth of Nations referred to the company as a strange absurdity, one in which artificial advantages have fostered old corruption of the landed elite, inefficiency, waste and extravagance, a company ill-fitted to meet the challenges of the new industrial age.

Smith’s critique coincided with an acute financial crisis suffered by the company, as a result of which control was gradually ceded to the state, culminating in the complete take over after the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. This period witnessed also the emergence of a new political economy of free-trade imperialism. The transition was complex but its main features were evident. While never abandoning mercantilist traits, free-trade imperialism was built on changes occurring within Britain during the nineteenth century, most notably, the abolition of old corruption, the rise of an industrial middle class determined to spread their influence into the wider world, an end to protectionism, and the ascendancy of a dynamic new finance sector willing to invest in imperial ventures abroad. Together, these promoted a great wave of expansion abroad, reaching its zenith in the late years of the nineteenth century. The hope was not only the creation of vast new fortunes but also that as workshop of the world Britain would forge a place at the centre of the world’s economy and preside over a beneficent Pax Britannica.

Changes in the nature of governance over this period were inevitable and in ways were the outcome of responses to the same challenges. In the early period individual colonies – even regions – were ruled ultimately by metropolitan authorities but routinely on the ground by agents and administrators who recruited native elites as intermediaries. It was a system which worked through patronage; few of the British agents had the appropriate training, and so the mechanics of rule responded pragmatically to conditions found in the regions. Toward the end of the century, this system was superseded by a rule of trained professionals with expert knowledges of the peoples and customs over which they were intended to rule, and with sophisticated approaches to the challenges of disputes over land, collection of revenue, provision of rudimentary public health, dispensation of justice and other tasks which were the lot of colonial administrators. Above these stood the Whitehall bureaucracy of the Colonial Office.

This important but rather neglected area is well served by the programme for there are a number of studies on various colonial theatres, including Sui Wai Cheung, Colonial Administration and Land Reform in East Asia, Raymond Durnett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism, M.N. Das, India Under Morley and Minto, and Annie Tindley, Lord Dufferin, Ireland and the British Empire, c1820 – 1900. Jon Wilson’s, ‘Governance’, in Philippa Levine and John Marriott (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories, provides a brief overview.