THE APOGEE OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

There was not a single British state, there were two and at some point three British states.
Until 1603 there was no such thing as Britain politically. None of the medieval kingdoms covered all
of the island. There was a single monarch for two countries, with two parliaments, two judicial
systems, and two state churches (that continued for 104 years).
In 1707, those two countries became one country, although they continued to have distinct legal
systems and different state churches. What happened is called the ​Union of England & Scotland​.
Forging means faking and making.
The British historian Linda Colley argued that what glued these countries together was “the glue of
empire” because empire gave Scotland access to markets and also gave ambitious young Scotts a
place to go and become rich and famous (ex: Alexander Hamilton).
Ireland was a far more complicated case because the majority of the population was catholic, so you
could not take young Irish catholics and put them into the officer class of the British army or make
them imperial administrative officials.
For the English elites, Union was all about not having to worry about bad things happening in
Scotland and bad things coming from Scotland, like a rebellion or a dynastic war.
Historians and political theorists believe that they never truly were nation-states, they became
nation-states with the rise of empire, and as the empire collapsed they headed towards European
integration (until Brexit).
Every European nation-state had its own models and the British model had some peculiarities.
1. The British Empire: the formal and the informal colonies; kinds of rule. Imperial
expansion.
The British Empire wasn’t planned and it wasn’t a single project.
Towards the end of the 16th century, there was a practice of royal policy in Britain to get charges to
join stock companies (companies in which a group assumes the risks that a particular adventure
entails and rips the benefits). Many of these companies were set up in order to exploit a monopoly on
trade with a particular part of the world or to develop industries in a particular part of the world. Some
of the first ones were set up for trade with the Baltic and Russia (never became imperial).
The most famous of these companies is the East India Company, which was founded in 1600, and
soon established factories or trading posts in Madras.
It’s important to remember that when English went to India they went to a place that was wealthier
than England and that they thought of it as a place that was more magnificent than where they were
coming from. India had a sophisticated scientific culture and a sophisticated material culture. For the
150 years of the British presence in India, they had no territorial control outside of their own
compounds and they were in competition with other European powers. It’s only because of the 7 years
war in the middle of the 18th century that the company became an imperial power and remained like
that for almost 100 years.
Australia was the exception here because it was established as a penal colony and then became a
crown colony. It was under the administration of the British state and the other territories.
In India, the British armies were company armies until the Great Mutiny in Australia. The intention
from the beginning was to export prisoners from Britain and have them work essentially as
endangered laborers for a charm of years until they were released into the general population.
For about 200 years (1670-1868) the Sovereign European power and about a third part of what is
today Canada was a company, it was called the Hudson’s Bay Company and it claimed all the land
that drained into Hudson’s Bay. It was there to trade-in furs, that were used to make hats.
The Virginia Company of London was given a royal charge to establish colonies. The company failed,
but the colony prospered.
SETTLEMENT OR SETTLER COLONIES
- The empire sent the population and rewarded people with land and freedom. Mostly a
migration and social upscaling option (i.e.: North American colonies): also a growing captive
market.
- Penitentiary (or penal) colonies were established to get rid of the British penitentiary
population (Australia)
- Direct rule of those territories; early self-government
Adam Smith in his chapter on colonies and the world of nations discusses two centuries of colonial
development and analyzes them economically.
IMPORTANT! ← The colonies are established not just because of geopolitical competition with other
powers, they were established as a way of developing economy because they developed a cap of
market and because they represented a way of motivating people to go out and better themselves
(option for social upscaling). People who were lower class became middle class; people who were
middle class became upper middle class because in colonial environment it was easier to climb the
ladder than it was at home.
1690 ← Virginia was still a company colony. These colonies got forms of self-government. In the
case of Virginia, it was a bicameral assembly, they did that because it was an efficient way to govern.
If you govern with intelligence you are gonna govern more efficiently..
There was religious freedom, but the Mayflower pilgrims (with a land patent from the Plymouth
Company) also brought debt.
Images on thanksgiving represent the three initial colonial experiences of the British in the United
States. It’s the third one that’s been chosen iconographically, is the third one from which the
Americans as civic societies or political societies choose their ancestors.
The first colony (The Lost Colony of Roanoke Virginia) couldn’t be a foundational moment because
it was a failure. The second colony was a British Crown colony (Company Colony of Virginia). The
people looking for religious freedom held debt, which they didn’t repay. There were investors behind
them who thought that they were going to get the debt repaid so, it was a business dimension. The
colonists were supposed to trade with the original population to get fur. It was all about commodity
(something that you trade, typically rice, corn…)
INFORMAL COLONIES AND OUTPOSTS:
- Territories that are gained progressively, not based on rule through settlement.
- Includes big territories such as India (via the East India Company), but mostly a network of
colonial outposts (i.e.: Singapore)
- Rule was progressive and informal: it mostly originated from trading along the British
Merchant Marine routes.
· Distinction between a settler colony (a colony where the European population comes to outnumber
the autochthonous population) and an invaded colony (where the Europeans are always outnumbered
by the autochthonous population).
· Distinction between formal colonies and informal colonies.
Informal colonies are places that, whether through a company or through an individual are ceased not
by the British state but by an individual or a group and they’re gradually incorporated into the
political structures at the Empire (ex: country named Zimbabwe, which was essentially bought and
stolen by one man and named after him, then it was controlled by a company that he helped to found
and it was not until 1923 that it became a self-governing British colony).
THE EXAMPLE OF THOMAS STAMFORD RAFFLES (1781-1826)
 - History of Java (1817): ethnographic history as a prospection for future colonization (Java
had been a Dutch colony).
- Foundation of Singapore in 1819 (a trading post of the British East India Company).
THOMAS← one minor British colonial official. He was working for the East India Company at a
trading post at what’s now Indonesia and he had the idea of establishing a free port elsewhere in that
part of the world. In 1819 he sailed with a small party towards what is now Singapore and negotiated
a permission to establish a British trading post, that later developed into the Colony of Singapore.
James Brooke used inherited money, charm, political skill, and some fighting to become the Sultan of
Brunei’s governor in Sarawak, Borneo. Later, he became the first “white rajah”. He became the ruler
of a small country in the east-indies, part of the island of Borneo. He did so by becoming a local
governor and then breaking away from the local Sultan. His family remained in power for about 100
years.
2. The Crises of the British Empire
India, China and the balance of trade: the Opium wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860).
Contradiction: by the time the Empire reaches its peak the ideology at home is liberalism. After the
1832 reform bill which changed the nature of House of Commons and extended the frenchize so that
more people could vote. The public ideology in Britain was one of liberalism (whiggism). It didn’t
make a good feel with imperialism.
The most famous examples of this were the two Opium wars fought in the 19th century (wars fought
over trade deficit). The industrial revolution entailed the consumption of massive amounts of tea,
mixed with sugar. Tea kept you awake and sugar gave you a shot of energy so you were able to work
the machines (textile). But tea was a Chinese product and the Chinese Empire’s market was closed in
the 18th and 19th centuries. So, the British were paying the Chinese for a lot of tea and the Chinese
were not buying very much of the British hand until the British started to produce opium in India and
sent it to China. It was initially an illicit import and the wars were fought over the opening of the
Chinese market not just dealing Opium under the British flag but to other British products.
It was British imperial policy, for a period of 60-70 years, to promote drug addiction on the other side
of the world in order to help finance their own imperial ventures in India and in order to help finance
the importing of tea into the United Kingdom itself.
Among other things, this led to a Civil War in China that started in the mid-1850s and lasted in the
1860s and in the same period and roughly at the same time there was a second Opium war in which
France was also involved and which involved Indian troops (soldiers from India but serving the
British went to China and helped to fight the King empire).
The anglo-french army that entered Beijing considered the destruction of the forbidden city in Beijing
as one way to punish the Chinese Empire but instead, they opted to go to the Summer Palace outside
of the city, which they looted, destroyed and burned.
Can’t begin to understand Chinese historiography without understanding something of the humiliation
and the destruction that China was subject to by various European powers in the 19th century.
THE INDIAN MUTINY, 1857
There was a further crisis in India itself in 1857. At the time when the East India Company ruled
something like half of India, directly or indirectly, the Mughal Empire still existed on paper. Many
Indian principalities were functioning essentially as client states of the British. And the army, which
kept all of this in place, was staffed almost entirely by the Indian soldiers known as sepoys (another of
the peculiarities of English powers in the imperial period ← big navy, small standing army).
The colonial armies are typically armies made up of men from the colonies, not from the motherland.
In 1856-1857 the British army started to introduce a new rifle called “the Enfield”. This required
cartridges for the bullets that came pre-greased, they were in little paper packages, and in order to load
the rifle, you had to bit off the end of the cartridge and essentially get the bullet out with the teeth.
You would get some of the grease or lubricant on your lips, which was rumored to be a mixture of
beef fat (offensive to Hindus) and pork fat (offensive to Muslims) and that, according to a legend
anecdote, is how the Mutiny began.
· “​We believe that the Indian mutiny points to the fact that there is something radically and extensively
wrong in our whole governing system there”​
This lead to the end of the East India Company and the founding of what we now call “the British
Radge” or the period of British Imperial Power in India, which lasts until 1948. It meant that Queen
Victoria became empress of India and three successors British monarchs after her were also emperors
of India. It also meant that very gradually elements of British liberalism were recreated in India partly
out of pragmatism and partly as a way to justify Empire so that by 1919 the British provinces in India
had a form of self-government and had legislative assemblies.
MORANT BAY REBELLION, 1865
In the mid-1860s, liberal imperialists were also reminded that the empire had been founded on
racialization and its slave labor had been key to things such as sugar production in the west-indies
until the 1830s.
In 1807, the parliament voted to abolish the slave trade, but that didn’t abolish slavery. The abolition
of slavery came in the 1830s (1833) with a huge compensation scheme, although slaves were
technically apprentices for 4 years after the end of slavery and, because of property qualification for
political rights, were not able to participate in elections in self-governing colonies.
In Jamaica, a planter class had political rights and controlled the legislative assembly. The people who
worked the field were of African descent, but there was a small group of people of mixed descent
some of whom were also landowners. When a rebellion broke out in 1865, the governor used this as
an excuse to put one of the landowners of mixed descent, who was also politically active, on trial for
treason (he was quickly convicted and executed).
In fact, he had to be taken in that part of the island that was under martiall law in order for him to be
tried militarily and executed in quick succession.
A commission of inquiry to the rebellion and dispersion of the rebellion was created in Britain, and
political liberals such as J.Stuart Mill, pressed to have the colonial governor put on trial for his
actions, but that never took place. Universal suffrage and self-governing Jamaica didn’t happen until
the 1940s.
Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill’s dispute over the “Negro” question.
We can see the reaction to these crisis exemplified in a dispute between the historian writer Thomas
Carlyle and the philosopher & politician J.S. Mill.
Mill was a reformer, he was the second member of parliament to suggest giving suffrage to women,
and he was a defender of imperialism. In India, he worked for the East India Company for many years
and although he was not an advocate of a particularly ugly form of imperialism, he did believe that
Europeans should export their civilization.
Carlyle, on the other hand, had a sort of neo-feudal view of imperialism, by which the subject people
were inferior and their subjection gave them a kind of work that made their lives and the lives of those
overseeing it meaningful.
The Boer Wars, 1880-1881 and 1899-1902
It was in the course of building their empire that the British learned to racialize subject people in
places like India and came to racialize defeated polities such as in China.
This became problematic when the subject people were themselves of European descent, that
happened around the Cape of Good Hope at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Cape of Good Hope was a Dutch colony, but when the Netherlands fell into the French circle of
political influence in the Napoleonic period, the British decided to take it because it controlled access
to the Indian ocean (geostatistical reasons). These are the same reasons that had led them to take
Gibraltar and also Malta because it was a seaborne empire and dependent on the British Navy, where
they were key points of access to oceans and seas. The Dutch settler around the Cape of Good Hope to
escape British colonial control went into the interior and set up two independent republics. In the
1880s & 1890s, there were two wars between the British Empire and these independent republics.
These republics were polities set up by European settlers in South-Africa and had nothing to do with
the autochthonous population in the zone.
The other shock about the Boer wars for British liberals is the way the British were betrayed in the
international press because the political class was increasingly cosmopolitan and they confirmed to
hold prisoners in concentration camps. It was a photograph war (we have a lot of photos).
3. The Forging and Development of Imperialism as an Ideology
● The British Empire expanded during periods of wartime (7 years war)
● In the early empire, outside of the settler colonies of what would become the United States,
there’s a kind of Nietzschean will to power of people who are looking for ways of making a
lot of money, compete with their rivals and beat them. In the 19th century that was not
sufficient because it didn’t do well with liberalism. You had to find new ways to justify the
imperial project.
- National Pride
Benedict Anderson and his concept of imagined communities: it’s the idea that shared cultural
references glue people together into national communities and creates affinity with other people who
live far away. It’s basically the medium of print and art that made people glue together.
In the 19th century, you get a huge expansion in the amount of fiction that is set in colonial places.
Best known: Heart of Darkness
The most racialized fictions tended to be fictions produced for young readers, particularly boys. From
the 1930s to the 1960s, British and Hollywood films glorified Empire.
From the 1960s on, British and Hollywood films questioned Empire.
Big imperial celebrations: Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee (1897), Empress of India and Massive
ceremonies (imperial doubars) to celebrate the crowning of the Empress or Empressor ← examples of
public pageantry being part of all.
- The racialization of British society and the development of “English” as a racial
category.
Painting: the man smoking is representative of a kind of British colonial official, East India Company
clerk, who’s adaptation to Indian society was notorious at the time. Considers being bicultural.
Mixed race kids (lives circumscribed by skin color and wealth) ← two options:
- Kid becomes a slave (but more privileged than the others) because parents reject him.
- White+wealthy become elite individuals (they received racism anyway).
These attitudes were not universal.
In Victorian Britain, there was a range of opinions towards these questions. The tendency though is to
the racialization of the other.
Robert Knox (Races of men) ← sometimes called a zoological history of humanity, because he treated
humanity as divided into two subspecies and gives each subspecies its own characteristics. Treats the
Saxon race as a distinct subspecies.
Knox made the population of Britain out to be fundamentally Germanic and Scandinavian.
Saxon race= taller, fairly independent, bad soldiers, good sailors.
Darwin teaches that species evolve but they can devolve.
There’s also a Victorian concern with the idea of recidivism (regression to another state, more
savage).
The trope of the “Primitive”
In the most extreme examples, the racialized colonial becomes a kind of gothic master.
 - Social and moral distinction: the example of the abolition of slavery.
Abolitionism contrasts the British attitudes towards slavery with the Abolition of Slave Trade in 1807
and the Abolition of Slavery in 1833.
It is an attempt to portray British Imperialism as more humane than other countries.
The discourse of the whig interpretation of history (English liberalism) is written from poetry and
literature into abolitionist discourse.
- Social and moral distinction: the example of the public schools teaching of values
and Civil Service examinations.
Final example: there was a boy scout style inculcation of attitudes towards values in the selection and
training of young men for the colonial civic service in places like India, East-Africa, West-Africa, etc.
An Indian civil service exam in 1870 asks candidates about fortitude, courage, endurance, valor and
virtue ← qualities that are not innate, but you aspire to them.