How Did the British Empire Begin?

The British Empire did not begin with a grand design. It began with a series of small, mostly failing ventures — Roanoke, the early Jamestown years, the Bermuda settlements — that were rescued, in the 1610s and 1620s, by the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop, by the importation of indentured and enslaved labor, and by a willingness on the part of English merchants and aristocrats to risk capital on transatlantic ventures. The pattern, which has been worked out in detail by Bernard Bailyn, Nicholas Canny, and others, is one of state-licensed private enterprise. The Crown granted charters to companies and individuals; the companies and individuals raised the capital; the Crown reserved the right to regulate trade and to revoke charters. This is the system that produced the first British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was a system that was, in its early decades, much less centralized than its Spanish or French counterparts.

This page focuses on the specific institutions and people that made the early British Empire: the Virginia Company, the Bermuda Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Royal African Company, the British East India Company, and the joint-stock and proprietary structures that gave English colonization its distinctive shape.

The Virginia Company and the Tobacco Economy

The Jamestown colony, founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London under a royal charter from James I, was the first permanent English settlement in North America. The early years were catastrophic: disease, starvation, conflict with the Powhatan Confederacy, and the near-total absence of any profitable export brought the colony to the brink of extinction. Of the 500 settlers who arrived in 1607, fewer than 100 were alive in 1610, and the colony was saved only by the disciplined governance of successive royal governors (notably Sir Thomas Dale and Sir Thomas Gates), by the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop in 1612 by John Rolfe, and by the headright system that granted 50 acres of land to each new settler (and 50 more for each person he brought with him).

The introduction of tobacco transformed the economics of the colony. By the 1620s, Virginia was producing more than a million pounds of tobacco a year, and by the 1660s more than ten million pounds. The crop was labor-intensive, and the demand for labor was met first by indentured servants (most of them young English men and women bound by contract to four to seven years of labor) and then, increasingly, by enslaved Africans, the first of whom arrived in 1619. The transition to a slave-labor economy was gradual — it was not complete in Virginia until the late seventeenth century — but it was driven by the same logic that produced the Caribbean sugar economy: high mortality, high labor demand, and a willingness on the part of English merchants to trade in human beings.

The Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624, and Virginia became a royal colony. The transition marked a shift in imperial governance from chartered company to Crown rule, but the underlying economic structure — tobacco, indentured and enslaved labor, the headright land grants — persisted. The same pattern repeated in Maryland, founded in 1634 as a proprietary colony under the Calvert family, and in the Carolinas, founded in the 1660s under the Earl of Shaftesbury and other Lords Proprietors.

The New England Colonies and the Protestant Diaspora

The New England colonies were a different kind of project. Plymouth, founded by the English Separatist Pilgrims in 1620, was small, religiously motivated, and politically inconsequential on its own. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 under a royal charter from Charles I, was much larger and more ambitious. It was established by English Puritans, many of them well-educated and well-capitalized, who wanted to build a godly community in the New World. The migration of 20,000 to 30,000 Puritans to New England between 1630 and 1642, the so-called Great Migration, was the largest single English migration to the Americas in the seventeenth century.

The New England colonies developed distinct institutions: town meetings, elected governors, and a Congregationalist church establishment that was, in practice, theocratic. The economic base was mixed — fishing, shipbuilding, fur trade, mixed agriculture, and, increasingly, the provisioning of the West Indian sugar colonies with food, timber, and horses — but the colonies were never as profitable as Virginia or Barbados. Their importance, as Bailyn and others have shown, was cultural and political. The New England colonies produced a distinctive political culture — republican, suspicious of centralized authority, deeply literate — that would, by the 1770s, make the American Revolution possible.

The colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were founded by religious and political dissidents from Massachusetts Bay. New York, taken from the Dutch in 1664, and New Jersey, founded in the 1660s, were proprietary colonies. Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 under William Penn, was a Quaker experiment in religious toleration. The pattern that emerged in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic was therefore not the result of a unified imperial plan; it was a series of overlapping, often competing projects, each with its own charter, its own religious and political character, and its own economic base.

The Caribbean: Sugar, Slavery, and the “Sugar Revolution”

The English Caribbean colonies were, by the early eighteenth century, the most important overseas territories of the British Empire. 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 1655, to Jamaica.

The “sugar revolution” that transformed the Caribbean in the seventeenth century was driven by two linked changes: the development of efficient sugar-refining techniques (especially the use of the three-roller mill), and the massive importation of enslaved Africans. The mortality of enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations was so high that the slave trade to the region was a continuous process of replacement rather than a one-time event. The economic logic was brutal and self-reinforcing. Sugar was enormously profitable; sugar required enslaved labor; enslaved labor had high mortality; high mortality required continuous new imports. The result, as Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), was the foundation of the Atlantic slave economy.

The English slave trade, organized through the Royal African Company (chartered in 1660) and, after 1698, through private British traders, was the largest component of the British Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century. The slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool grew from small fishing towns into major commercial centers on the basis of slave-trade profits and the import of colonial sugar, tobacco, and cotton. The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1833 was the result of a long campaign, organized in the 1780s and 1790s by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by figures like Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Equiano, and by a much larger popular movement. The abolition of the slave trade, as Brown, Drescher, and others have shown, was not driven primarily by economic self-interest; it was driven by a genuine moral and political movement, in a Britain that was more politically free than any other slave society of the era.

The British East India Company

The British East India Company, founded by royal charter from Elizabeth I in 1600, was the single 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. The Company’s first factories in India were at Surat (1619), Madras (1639), and Bombay (acquired from Portugal in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza). The establishment of a factory at Calcutta in the 1690s extended the Company’s reach to the Ganges delta, which would become the heart of its territorial empire.

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 Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which Robert Clive’s small force, supplemented by the defection of Mir Jafar, defeated the Nawab of Bengal, was the decisive moment. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Company controlled Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, and it was on the verge of further expansion into Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy, and the Punjab. The Company was dissolved in 1858, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the British Crown assumed direct control of India through the new Indian Raj.

The Wars of Empire

The British Empire was, from the beginning, 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, and they pushed the Dutch Republic into a strategic partnership with Britain that, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, 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: the capture of Quebec (1759) and Montreal (1760), the Treaty of Paris (1763) in which France ceded Canada and all French territory east of the Mississippi, and the establishment of British primacy in India. The British victory in the Seven Years’ War made the British Empire the leading European colonial power, and it set the stage for the second British Empire that would, by the early twentieth century, become the largest empire in history.