ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with an analysis of social and political changes in Asia and north Africa in the period which immediately preceded the great expansion of British power during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It presents a brief discussion of the 'plantation colonies' of the British empire; in particular it considers the Caribbean and those parts of North America which remained British after American independence in 1783. New Englanders, men from the Carolinas and Jamaicans traded with French and Spanish colonies even during times of war. The eighteenth-century British empire was a ragged and conflict-ridden community of separate interests: English-speaking Creoles people born in the colonies but retaining English culture; virtually self-governing colonies of settlement; antique trading corporations, colonial land speculators and peasant farmers. The empire's position in the Atlantic colonies after 1780 was secured by its governors' judicious use of patronage in Crown lands.
