War and Empire

The Expansion of Britain, 1790-1830

Bruce Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317870760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The years 1790 to 1830 saw Britain engage in an extensive period of war-waging and empire-building which transformed its position as an imperial state, established its reputation as a distinctive military power and secured naval preeminence.

Despite this apparent success, Britain did not become a world super power in the conventional sense. Instead, as Professor Collins demonstrates, it operated as an enclave power, influencing or dominating many regions of the world without ever asserting global hegemony. Even in the 1820s, Britain still had to fight to maintain influence, and sometimes struggled to assert dominance on the borderlands of the empire.

By locating naval and military power at the heart of Britain's relationship with the wider world, Bruce Collins offers an insightful reinterpretation of the interaction between military and naval war-making, the expansion of the empire, and the nature of the British regime. Using examples of conflicts ranging from continental Europe and Ireland to North America, Africa and India, he argues that the state's effectiveness in war was crucial to its imperial expansion and gives new significance to British military conduct in an age of revolution and war.

PART ONE

War, empire and British identity

CHAPTER 1

War and empire: the contested connection

During the period 1790–1830, Britain vastly expanded its existing empire. At the same time, it was heavily engaged in warfare across much of the globe. Whether and how far these two developments were linked and interdependent will be the core concern of this book. With hindsight the British have typically disavowed such a connection. 1926 the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, denied that any relationship existed: ‘The empires of old [were] … created by military conquest and sustained by military dominion. They were of subject races governed by military power. Our empire is so different from those.’¹ Such a reassuring gloss on the imperial experience exemplifies an enduring view that commerce and investment drove imperial policy, and that there was an endemic tension between a nation so focused on commercial progress and an interest in or commitment to militarism. Critics of British imperial policies conceded the existence of a contradiction, but insisted that Britain pursued her self-interest while embodying that contradiction. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, one of George Washington’s leading wartime aides, wrote of Britain: ‘Commerce has been for ages the predominant pursuit of that country. Few nations, nevertheless, have been more frequently engaged in war.’² Others, however, insisted that war sat uneasily with the maintenance of British economic interests. Lord Stormont, a prominent former ambassador, warned the House of Lords in 1791 during a debate on India that ‘The expense of a war … was a great disadvantage to a commercial country’, adding that ‘great caution ought to be taken how a nation, like Great Britain, … whose chief object it was, to promote its commerce, and consequently its prosperity’ became involved in war.³

Given such objections to the notion that Britain’s overseas expansion depended upon the effective use of military and naval power, any exploration of the dynamic relationship between war and empire should start by considering the principal arguments against militarism as a driver of imperial expansion. Those arguments arose from the political attachment in London to limited government and restricted expenditure, the confused management of Britain’s overseas interests, and a range of ideological objections to expanded overseas commitments and to empire itself. A further set of reservations has been raised concerning the nature and strength of national political and popular support for war and expansion. Contentions that foreign wars galvanized national sentiment have been rebutted with counter proposals that national mobilization reflected instead the strength of people’s attachments to their localities, and that much patriotic and nationalistic sentiment focused on liberties and rights, not on might. A further obstacle to the interdependence of imperial expansionism and the successful conduct of war has long been the reputation the British had for military inadequacy. This chapter will therefore conclude with a review of claims that Britain’s military record was far too weak to sustain a world-conquering role.

Dilemmas of imperialism

The apparent contradiction between Britain’s commercial preoccupations and the use of war to advance the country’s interests was widely debated in the eighteenth century. Many in the governing elite and Enlightenment intellectuals in Britain doubted whether war even qualified as a necessary evil. Economic development and diversification indicated that the growth of commercial interests and the middle classes would reduce both the predilection and ability of governments to resort to war. War was described instead as the province of monarchs and aristocracies, with their quest for territorial possessions and the prestige, privileges, perquisites, and profits to be secured through rulership rather than commerce. Thus when France went to war with Britain in February 1793, Charles James Fox, the leading Whig politician of his age and persistent critic of royal influence, insisted that the hostilities stemmed from the efforts of George III and his submissive prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, to increase monarchical power.⁴

The tension between Britain’s projection of military and naval power overseas and the celebration of commercial society was strikingly revealed during the mid- and late 1770s, when the British government confronted the rebellious American colonies by despatching the largest army ever to that date sent overseas from Britain. Three influential British writers of the late eighteenth century doubted the war-making capacity of an increasingly middle-class society. Edward Gibbon, the first volume of whose magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776, questioned in 1775 whether the forces then deployed could quash the Americans.⁵ His analysis of Rome’s empire underscored the need for a cohesive and ‘national’ army locked into the metropolis and its values if an increasingly affluent society were to sustain a mighty and wide-flung empire.⁶ While Gibbon provided an example of how an imperial state might lose its military capability, Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, also published in 1776, concluded that empires based upon military authority were financially irrational. Smith pressed the case for jettisoning the mercantilist mind-set which viewed colonies as essential to European maritime states’ resources and power. Even though he predicted that political inertia rather than economic rationality would ensure empires’ survival, Smith saw commercial societies as inherently incapable of sustaining imperial armies.⁷

The third commentary on empire and war came in Tom Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776 to advance the case for American independence. Paine asserted that monarchies were tyrannies founded ultimately upon medieval conquest, and that commercial republics ruled by the middle classes and skilled artisans would govern for ‘the public good’, thereby promoting peace.⁸ Republicanism denied claims that royal rule, whose virtues had been re-emphasised since 1689, would provide stability, a constraint upon mere factionalism and localism, and a constitutional order founded upon the central principle of parliamentary supremacy.⁹ Paine’s claims inspired radicals throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their deep hostility to standing armies and their association of war with monarchical and aristocratic power.

These claims met with various rebuttals. One was that Britain, with considerable difficulty, had developed since the Revolution of 1689 the only constitutional monarchy and the leading Protestant state among the Great Powers of Europe. As commercial activity stretched British interests across the globe, British governments responded to increasing potential challenges from imperial rivals by strengthening London’s role in naval and military defence arrangements and preparations, as well as in wider issues of colonial governance. Such measures in the 1770s and early 1780s met failure in America, success in India, and a mixed outcome in Ireland.¹⁰ War and the extension of control over colonies resulted from international rivalries arising from the rapid progress of commercialization. War and commercial interest thus became intimate bedfellows not polar opposites. A second counter-argument was that British governments prevented the army from garnering excessive power or authority from war and deliberately avoided the creation of a self-consciously ‘professional’ army separated from civil society. By fostering an officer corps which had close and deep ties with the landowning elite and those attached to it, such as the clergy of the Church of England, politicians felt confident that a ‘civilianized’ army would pose no praetorian threat to the state.¹¹ This struggle to limit the domestic role of the army and the generally non-militaristic thinking of the elite encouraged a third argument, that military power was a subsidiary factor in the making of the empire. Even the experience of the American Revolution did not diminish a British conviction that theirs was indeed an empire of liberty. After the wars of 1776–83, interest in empire focused not on any military lessons to be learned, but upon the regulation and expansion of imperial trade and the readjustment of Britain’s constitutional relationship with its colonies.¹²

Underpinning counter-arguments to the intellectual assault upon warlike monarchies was a preoccupation among the British ‘political nation’ with countervailing power. Authority in London over policy-making was extremely fragmented, the legacy of historical inertia and deliberate efforts to prevent undue concentrations of influence. British territorial possessions in India were controlled by the East India Company, not the crown. But there was also a working model of empire as a loose collection of interests and territories whose tighter control might merely, as in the American case, intensify disagreements.¹³ If much administrative attention in London was given to the army and navy, which together accounted for 60% or so of the national government’s annual expenditure in the later eighteenth century, there was little debate over the armed services’ imperial role or capabilities. Moreover, colonial issues tended to be dealt with in ad hoc ways. When problems exploded in North America during the late 1760s, a third Secretary of State was appointed to run a new American Department. So, too, when controversy flared over the East India Company’s administration in India, Pitt’s government created in 1784 a political and bureaucratic framework for supervising Indian policies, with a middle-ranking ministerial post – the President of the Board of Control – being established to work with and supervise the East India Company, which remained as the ruling authority in India until 1858. The colonies, originally overseen by the President of the Board of Trade, were handed over to the department responsible for military strategy and policy in the 1790s to form the portfolio for the newly created Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Only in 1854 was a separate Colonial Office established at Whitehall. While bureaucracies do not define the world, they help describe the ways in which politicians envisage the world. Not only did the offices in Whitehall discourage imperial visioning, the Treasury’s increasing scrutiny of departments’ spending in the late eighteenth century reinforced ministers’ habitual reluctance to maintain large defence establishments in peacetime and sustained bureaucratic pressure to cut government expenditure at the conclusion of any war.¹⁴

Even in wartime, the governing establishment regularly reaffirmed its civilian character. The tone was set, for example, in 1794, when, for a commemorative service at Portsmouth, George III indicated that ‘a proper Sermon may be preached on the late victory, wherein may with great propriety be made some remark on a nation attached to religion, good government and obedience to law, in opposition to those hurried on by anarchy, irreligion and every horrid excess’.¹⁵ When the king proclaimed a day of thanksgiving on 29 November 1798 for the battle of the Nile, the service in Anglican churches throughout the country included the prayer:

Continue, we beseech Thee, O Lord, to go forth with our fleets and armies. Inspire … the leaders with wisdom and courage and the men with loyalty and intrepidity. Support them in the hour of danger with the recollection, that the battle is for more than gain or glory – for religion and for public liberty, for the independence of their country, for the rights of civil society, for the maintenance of every ordinance, divine and human, essential to the well-being of man.¹⁶

The primacy of civil and providential concerns was unambiguous.

Equally clear was the absence of concerted political pressure for imperial expansion. For example, there was no major debate on an Indian issue in the House of Commons from 1793 to 1803.¹⁷ As Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, privately noted of opinion in Britain in 1805: ‘The real truth is that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’¹⁸ When ministers in London and the Company’s directors became alarmed at the pace of expansionism in India, they induced the ailing Lord Cornwallis to return to India in 1805 as governor-general to halt the extension of British territories. Cornwallis advanced a sternly cautious argument:

it is not the opinion only of the Ministers, or of a party, but of all reflecting men of every description that it is physically impracticable for Great Britain, in addition to all other embarrassments, to maintain so vast and so unwieldy an empire in India, which annually calls for reinforcements of men and for remittances of money, and which yields little other profit except brilliant Gazettes.¹⁹

Later in the nineteenth century the Cambridge historian, J.R. Seeley, famously dismissed expansionism in India as only loosely connected to national political purposes because it was undertaken not by the British state but by British employees of the East India Company: ‘Our acquisition of India was made blindly. Nothing great that has ever been done by Englishmen was done so unintentionally, so accidentally, as the conquest of India.’ The expansionist impulse came allegedly from those serving in the sub-continent rather than from the metropolis.

Here then was a range of arguments against the notion that a contradiction existed between Britain’s commercial expansion and her frequent recourse to war in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The empire was one of liberty and the government was constricted in its powers; it was not administered centrally; the army was constitutionally constrained; the army and navy were geared to defending Britain’s global interests; expansionism in India was unimportant in British thinking and policy-making. War and empire-building were essentially peripheral to British public consciousness and policy.

This mix of attitudes and arguments cast a long shadow. Nineteenth-century British accounts of imperial expansion from the 1740s focused on almost anything other than military might. The military and naval side of the imperial saga in the nineteenth century seemed to be consigned to books addressed mainly to schoolboys and aimed at conveying exemplary messages of courage, endurance and daring, or to campaign memoirs rushed out to exploit public interest in individual interventions. Victorians learned of Trafalgar, the Peninsular War and Waterloo as episodes in a long-endured international rivalry with France...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART ONE War, empire and British identity
• PART TWO The war against Republican France
• PART THREE Military imperialism in India
• PART FOUR The war against Napoleon
• PART FIVE Britain’s global reach
• PART SIX The impact of war
• Index