The British Empire’s Early Colonial Expansion

The British Empire was not built by design. It was assembled, between roughly 1600 and 1815, by a chaotic mix of joint-stock companies, royal charters, religious dissenters, and ambitious governors who exceeded their instructions, financed by a capital market that was, by 1700, the most sophisticated in Europe. The result was, by 1815, the largest empire the world had seen. The more interesting question, which C.A. Bayly’s The New Cambridge History of India (1988) and Empire and Information (1996) have done the most to clarify, is not how the British built it, but why it lasted when its rivals collapsed.

The short answer is that the British had three durable advantages. They controlled the world’s strongest navy, they had a Parliament and a fiscal system that could borrow against future tax revenues, and they inherited the Atlantic slave trade and the Atlantic commercial system from which they built the world’s first industrial economy. The first of these advantages they won in three Anglo-Dutch wars between 1652 and 1674. The second they developed during the long eighteenth century, especially under William III and Robert Walpole. The third, the slave trade and the sugar economy, was the original foundation of English overseas wealth, and it remained the single most important source of metropolitan capital accumulation until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

The Atlantic Beginnings: Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth

The first English overseas settlements were mostly failures. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke colony, planted in 1585 and resettled in 1587, vanished between 1587 and 1590, leaving only the word “Croatoan” carved into a post. The Jamestown settlement, established by the Virginia Company of London in 1607, came close to extinction. Of the 500 settlers who arrived in 1607, fewer than 100 were alive in 1610; the colony was saved by the discipline of the Virginia Company charter, by the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop, and by John Rolfe’s marriage to Pocahontas, which secured a fragile peace with the Powhatan Confederacy. The Plymouth colony, established by the English Separatist Pilgrims in 1620, lost nearly half of its Mayflower passengers in its first winter and survived only with the help of the Wampanoag, who taught the settlers how to cultivate maize. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, and the other New England settlements that followed were the work of English Puritans building godly communities, a fundamentally different project from the profit-seeking of the Virginia Company.

The pattern that emerged in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic was therefore not the result of a unified imperial plan. It was a chaotic jumble of joint-stock companies (Virginia Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, Providence Island Company), royal charters, religious dissidents (Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers), and proprietary colonies (Maryland under the Calverts, Pennsylvania under Penn). The Crown did not directly control most of these settlements, and the early colonies were, in their politics, a series of constitutional experiments. The Virginia House of Burgesses (1619) and the Mayflower Compact (1620) are the two most-cited examples; the longer-term significance is that the colonists developed traditions of self-government, common-law procedure, and Protestant dissent that would, by the 1770s, make the Thirteen Colonies difficult to govern from London.

The mainland English colonies, in their demographic relation to the indigenous populations, are sometimes contrasted with the Spanish American pattern, but the contrast is more one of degree than of kind. The English, like the Spanish, were the beneficiaries of a catastrophic indigenous depopulation driven by Old World diseases — the 1616–1619 epidemic that swept the New England coast may have killed 90 percent of the native population in some areas, as John Willoughby’s Calamity in the Colony and other recent work has documented. What the English lacked, on the mainland, was large settled populations of the kind the Spanish encountered in Mexico and Peru. The result was a slower, more piecemeal process of displacement, dependent on treaty, warfare, and the same disease-driven depopulation that the Spanish benefited from further south. This is the central insight of Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country (2001) and James Merrell’s Into the American Woods (1999), both of which take indigenous agency seriously in a way the older settler histories did not.

The Caribbean: The Sugar Revolution

The Caribbean was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more important to the British Empire than the mainland colonies. The first permanent English settlement, on Saint Kitts in 1624, was followed by Barbados in 1627, and within a few decades the English had developed one of the most lucrative and brutal plantation systems in history. The Barbadian model — a small island, a thin white planter class, a large enslaved African workforce, a single export crop — was exported across the Lesser Antilles and, after the capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 and Trinidad from Spain in 1797, to the Greater Antilles.

The transformation that followed is what historians call the “sugar revolution.” Sugar, a luxury in sixteenth-century Europe, became a common commodity in the eighteenth century, partly through the development of efficient refining techniques and partly through the relentless exploitation of enslaved African labor. The British Caribbean colonies were the wealthiest territories in the empire, and they absorbed a substantial fraction of the entire British slave trade. The mortality of enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations was so high — average life expectancy on a sugar estate was, in some calculations, under ten years from arrival in the West Indies — that the slave trade to the region was a continuous process of replacement rather than a one-time event. This is the grim arithmetic at the heart of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which, whatever its later qualifications, has not been displaced on the central point.

The Royal African Company and the Slave Trade

The English became the largest single national carrier of enslaved Africans in the eighteenth century. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1660, was given a monopoly on English trade with West Africa, and it built a network of forts and trading posts along the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin that became the principal points of departure for the Middle Passage. The Company was dissolved in 1698, and English slave trading was opened to all British subjects. The volume of trade increased sharply: Bristol, Liverpool, and London became the principal British slaving ports, and by the end of the eighteenth century British ships were carrying more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than those of any other nation. Eltis’s Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (2007) puts the British share at about 3.2 million of the approximately 12.5 million total transported over the history of the trade.

The slave trade had a transformative effect on Britain’s economy. Liverpool grew from a fishing village of about 6,000 in 1700 to a major port of 80,000 by 1800, much of the growth driven by the slave trade and the sugar imports it generated. The capital accumulated in the slave trade financed early industrial investment in Birmingham and Manchester, and the commodities it produced — sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum — provided both the demand and the raw material for the early Industrial Revolution. Williams’s argument, refined by Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002), is that the slave trade and the plantation economy were not the only causes of British industrialization, but they were an essential precondition.

The moral and political campaign to abolish the slave trade began in the 1780s, organized by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and by figures like Thomas Clarkson, Olaudah Equiano, and William Wilberforce. The British slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, established in 1808, intercepted slave ships throughout the nineteenth century, and Britain’s diplomatic and naval pressure was central to the suppression of the transatlantic trade in the first half of the century.

The East India Company and the Conquest of India

The British East India Company, founded by royal charter from Elizabeth I in 1600, was the most important English overseas institution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Company was conceived as a joint-stock trading enterprise with a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, and it was given, by a series of charters and parliamentary acts, the right to wage war, conclude treaties, maintain a private army, and administer civil and criminal law in the territories it controlled. It was, in Lauren Benton’s phrase, a “corporate sovereign” — a private company that exercised functions normally reserved for a state.

The Company began as a commercial enterprise, competing with the Portuguese and the Dutch for a share of the spice trade. The Dutch elimination of the English from the East Indies after the 1623 Amboyna massacre — long treated in English propaganda as an atrocity, more recently reassessed as a smaller event blown up for political purposes — pushed the English to concentrate on India. The Company’s first factory on the Indian subcontinent was established at Surat in 1619; Madras was founded in 1639; Bombay was acquired from Portugal as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza in 1661. By the 1690s, the Company had a “factory” at Calcutta, in the Ganges delta, which would become the second city of the British Empire by the twentieth century.

The transformation of the Company from a trading firm to a territorial power was the central political development of the eighteenth century in India. The Mughal Empire, which had dominated the subcontinent since the sixteenth century, entered a long period of decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, producing a political vacuum that the Company exploited with increasing effectiveness. The decisive moment was the Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which Robert Clive’s small force, supplemented by the defection of Mir Jafar, defeated the Nawab of Bengal and established Company rule over one of the wealthiest provinces in the world. The subsequent acquisition of Madras, Bombay, and Bengal, and the long wars against Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Sikh Empire, made the Company the effective ruler of most of the subcontinent by the early nineteenth century.

Bayly’s Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988) makes the case that the Company’s territorial expansion was not the inevitable result of British military superiority; it was contingent on Indian political fragmentation, on the Company’s ability to mobilize Indian soldiers (the sepoys) and Indian revenue systems, and on the slow development of a British administrative apparatus that could actually govern the territories it conquered. The Company’s rule was expensive, militarily demanding, and politically controversial. The Indian Rebellion of 1857, triggered by the greased-cartridge controversy and a long list of grievances, was the proximate cause of the British Crown’s decision to dissolve the Company and assume direct rule through the new Indian Raj, governed by a viceroy and the India Office in London.

The Wars of Empire

The British Empire was a warring empire. The three Anglo-Dutch Wars of 1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674 were fought over commercial and colonial rivalry, and the fourth, in 1780–1784, was a renewed commercial struggle. The wars established British naval supremacy in the North Sea and the English Channel — the Naval Acts of the 1650s and the Navigation Acts of 1660–1696 were the legislative backbone of British commercial power — and they pushed the Dutch Republic into a strategic partnership with Britain that, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of William III, became something like an Anglo-Dutch condominium in the early eighteenth century.

The Anglo-French wars of the eighteenth century — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon (1793–1815) — determined the global balance of power. The Seven Years’ War was, in Churchill’s phrase, the “first world war.” Fought on five continents and three oceans, it produced a decisive British victory in North America, the Caribbean, India, and West Africa. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 stripped France of Canada, all French territory east of the Mississippi, several Caribbean islands, and most of its Indian possessions. The result was a British empire in North America that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and a British primacy in India that would last until 1947.

The loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, was a serious blow but not a fatal one. The British turned their attention increasingly to India, to the Pacific (where Cook’s voyages between 1768 and 1779 had opened up Australia and New Zealand for future settlement), and to the West African coast. The second British Empire, built between 1783 and the 1870s, was, in Cain and Hopkins’s argument in British Imperialism, 1688–2015 (2016), a different kind of empire from the first: more global, more dependent on naval power and free trade, and less dependent on white settler populations. It was the second empire, not the first, that became the largest empire in history.

The Legacy of the Early British Empire

The early British Empire laid the institutional and economic foundations of the 19th-century British world system. The constitutional models of self-government developed in the American colonies influenced the later evolution of the British Dominions. The administrative practices of the East India Company in India — the cadastral surveys, the district-level administration, the codified law — provided templates for British colonial rule in Africa and the Pacific. The slave trade and the plantation system continued to shape the demographics, economies, and political cultures of the Caribbean and the American South long after the formal abolition of slavery. And the navy, the central institution of British power, was the product of the long seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rivalry with the Dutch and the French.

The British Empire was, by the early twentieth century, the foremost example of what historians call “informal empire”: a system in which British naval power, British capital, and British trade penetrated and dominated regions that were never formally annexed. The combination of formal colonies, informal economic dominance, and the English language gave the British Empire an unprecedented global reach, the consequences of which are still being worked out. The early empire — the trading companies, the sugar islands, the Indian conquests, the long wars with the French — was the foundation on which the 19th-century system was built.