released 12 apr 06 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The rise of the British Empire was, to an extent, something of an accident. There was never any megalomaniac behind it all with a scheme for world domination, and early on things didn't seem to go well. However, given an imperialist mindset and plodding persistence, eventually Britain would acquire a global empire, and even the loss of Britain's colonies in America did little to slow the steamroller down.
* In the year 1600, the idea that England (Great Britain would not be born until 1707) would eventually acquire the greatest empire in history would have appeared a bit implausible. During the previous century, Spain had created a global empire in North and South America and the Phillipines, rivalled only by the Portugese empire, with its vast possessions in Brazil and global network of trading posts. The New World colonies of Spain and Portugal sent glittering mountains of gold and silver back across the Atlantic, so much that they ended up inflating their coinage to a third of its value.
Even the Dutch trading empire overshadowed English overseas efforts during the 17th century, which were limited to a handful of coastal colonies in North America and a few probes into African states. Not one of these efforts returned much in the way of precious metals. Well, if the English couldn't find gold themselves, they could steal it from those who had found it, and so they turned to piracy.
Sir Walter Raleigh, who had founded the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony off Virginia in 1585, was one of the pioneers in looting the Spaniards, but Raleigh was a person whose reach greatly exceeded his grasp, and his attempts at piracy were disastrous. His final voyage of plunder, in 1617, won him nothing but loud protests from the Spanish to the Crown. Since England and Spain weren't formally at war at the time and Raleigh was already on bad graces with the government, having spent several years in the Tower of London on treason charges, the complaints led to his beheading in 1618.
Other English pirates and privateers were having more luck, and English maritime skills, which had been inferior to those of the competition, gradually caught up. English piracy reached a peak of sorts in the 1660s, with the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan scoring spectacularly in raids on Spanish towns around the Caribbean rim. By this time, the English had acquired a winner of a colony in the form of Jamaica, which had been captured from the Spanish in 1655 and formally transferred by treaty from Spain to England in 1670. Morgan had the touch that Raleigh lacked. He invested his loot in Jamaican land and even became the royal governor of the island for a time, though he was eventually dismissed for taking an excessive interest in the bottle. However, when he died in 1688, he was honored with salutes of cannon.
* Jamaica did not have much in the way of gold and silver, but it did have something almost as good: sugar. Although modern societies take sweets for granted, in pre-colonial days sweetenings were expensive and scarce, and mostly limited to honey. When sugar became available in quantity, it fueled an import boom in England. In fact, through the last half of the 18th century and for some time after, it would be Britain's biggest single import.
Along with sugar, the English public acquired a taste for other vital imports, including tobacco, coffee, tea, and textiles. Tobacco was one of the few things that Raleigh had touched that actually worked out, though by the time that it became a wildly profitable mass market item in the 1620s and 1630s, Raleigh was a head shorter and unable to benefit. King James I had his doubts about tobacco, describing it as generally noxious and "dangerous to the lungs", but his was a minority opinion at the time, and no doubt the importers insisted that there was no evidence of any health hazard.
Tea of course seems entirely English, but it was a novelty in the middle of the 17th century. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys recorded on 25 September 1660 that he had his first "cup of tee (a China drink)". Silks and calicoes from India were a particularly big import winner. There was only so much sugar, tobacco, coffee, and tea that any one person could consume, but the beautiful textiles from the East were in almost limitless demand all up and down the spectrum of English society. Historical dramas make much of 18th-century fashion and foppery; it was Indian looms that made it all possible.
* Textiles made India a valuable territory to the English, but though the British role in the history of India, the "Jewel In The Crown", is deeply embedded in modern views, at first the English hardly seemed like they would dominate India.
The Dutch were the leaders at first. The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602, after the foundation of the English East India Company, but the Dutch were better organized, better managed, and more professional, and quickly came to control the trade with India and the Spice Islands farther to the east. As with the Spanish in the New World, the English decided that the best way to overcome this obstacle was to resort to force, and conducted three wars with the Dutch between 1652 and 1674.
The English lost. The Dutch even sailed a fleet up the Thames in June 1667, raising hell and inflicting extensive damage. England was a much bigger country than the Netherlands in almost every respect, but the Dutch held a key advantage: modern systems of banking and finance. The English war effort, in contrast, was hobbled by antique improvisational financial measures.
Then matters took an abrupt U-turn. King Charles II of England died in 1665, and the throne passed to his brother, James II. James was a Catholic, which did not endear him to his proper Anglican subjects, and in 1688 a group of British aristocrats, fearing that James would sell their country out to the Papacy, arranged a coup, with the Dutch Prince William of Orange invading England and driving James out with hardly a shot being fired. James would try for a comeback in 1690, raising an army in Ireland that was thoroughly crushed at the Battle of the Boyne.
In any case, William and his wife Mary became rulers of Britain, which had a significant effect on calming tensions between England and the Netherlands. The English picked up modern financial systems from the Dutch, founding the Bank of England in 1694. England and the Netherlands also came to terms on their trade rivalries in the Far East, with the English focusing on textiles and the Dutch focusing on spices.
The English got the better part of the deal. As mentioned, the market for textiles was insatiable, while the market for spices was much more limited, and the English East India Company began to outstrip its Dutch rival. The English company established three bases in India, which would grow and merge in time with surrounding towns to become the modern cities of Mumbai (Bombay), Madras, and Calcutta.
* India was a great place for an ambitious young man to make his fortune, all the more so because it was so remote from supervision. It took six months to sail from England to India or the reverse, and it was hard to keep control over employees. One ambitious young man was Thomas Pitt, the son of a Dorset clergyman, who arrived in India in 1673 as a Company employee and promptly went into business for himself. The Company had its own court and irritably ordered him to return to England, but Pitt merely ignored the summons and went on with his business.
When the Company finally hit him with a lawsuit, he paid a fine of 400 pounds, which he could well afford. He was becoming fabulously wealthy, so rich that he became known as "Diamond Pitt", with his fortune establishing an English political dynasty. As for Company officials, they might have ground their teeth over the likes of Pitt, but in reality he and other such slippery folk were helping increase the India trade all around, and the Company benefited as well. Indeed, grudgingly accepting Pitt's skills, the Company sent him back to India as a company representative, paying a modest salary but allowing him (as if they could stop him!) to continue to cut his own deals on the side.
It should not be imagined that the Company had, at this time, established itself as the dominant power in India. It was not a case, at the time, of a modern advanced nation, England, dealing with some underdeveloped backwater, India, that could be pushed around. The industrial revolution hadn't really begun in England in the 17th century and England was by no means far ahead of India technically. In fact, at the time, under the Mughal emperors, India's share of the "gross world product" was, as modern estimates have it, about a quarter, while England's was about an eighth of India's. The English were traders in a country that was more powerful than England in most regards and then firmly under local control. To do business, the English had to bow to the Mughal emperor, negotiate treaties, and bribe greedy and unscrupulous local officials. In 1700, the idea that the English would ever be in any different position in India was very difficult to imagine.
It wasn't until 1739 that Mughal stability began to totter. In that year, the Persians sacked Delhi, and in the next decade northern India began to suffer repeated invasions by Afghans. Provincial governors began to stake out their own territories, raising armies and becoming warlords. In such unsettled times, of course the Company had to look out after its own security, and gradually built up companies of soldiers, recruiting local talent, fitting them out with European weaponry, and placing them under the command of English officers. Foreign traders were one thing; foreign traders with a substantial and effective army of their own were definitely another.
* In 1707, Scotland and England signed a treaty of unification to become the "United Kingdom of Great Britain", with a new flag, the "Union Jack", combining the diagonal cross of Scotland with the vertical cross of England.
Scots were not slow to notice that the English cross of Saint George was on top of the Scots cross of Saint Andrew, and in fact the push towards unification had arisen out of a disastrous attempt by the Scots to colonize Darien in Panama, with the country betting the farm on the venture. It foundered on ignorance, encouraged by shady operators who described Panama as a tropical paradise, of what a disease-ridden horror show the place really was. The English stood by and watched the collapse of the colonial venture with stone-faced indifference, but after it was all over, they came forward with a proposal of union to bail the Scots out of their financial difficulties. It was something of a bitter pill to swallow, and there would always be a lingering nasty aftertaste, but a class of Scots society stood to benefit greatly and they managed to sell the deal.
In any case, Great Britain was clearly an up-and-coming power, and anybody who didn't notice it in 1707 did so in 1713, at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in an overwhelming British victory. Britannia now ruled the waves and would continue to do so for almost two and half centuries.
* British naval dominance meant, inevitably, clashes with the French, who were the predominant European land power. The French economy and population towered over that of Britain, and the French had their own far-flung network of trading outposts, including Quebec; the sugar islands of Guadalupe and Martinique in the West Indies; and trading posts of their own East India Company, which had been chartered in 1664. There were also significant differences in mindset between the two nations, the English making much of their rights and parliament, the French retaining an absolutist monarchy.
The difference in mindsets was reflected in India. The French East India Company was not as good at trading as its British counterpart, but it was operating as an arm of French government policy, which was focused on blunt imperialism and not trade, making the French a threat to British operations there. In 1746 Joseph Francois Dupleix, the French governor at Pondicherry, the French Company's main base in India, moved against nearby Madras and grabbed it. The British Company feared that the French would now go on to drive the British out of India.
In fact, a peace treaty signed the next year, 1748, forced the French to return Madras to the British. The peace was short-lived, since Britain and France were on a collision course over global empire. War broke out in 1757 on a grand scale and would go on for seven years. The Seven Years' War would actually be a "First World War", with most of the major European powers involved and the fighting ranging all over the globe.
The British prime minister at the time, William Pitt the Elder, grandson of Thomas "Diamond" Pitt, was a man of vision, and he saw that such a global conflict demanded a strong Royal Navy. He presented that demand to Parliament in 1755, and quickly built up a force with 55,000 seamen and 105 ships of the line. The French only had 70. The English had suffered in their clashes with the Dutch in the previous century because of the superiority of Dutch financial mechanisms; now the English used those same financial mechanisms, selling low-interest government bonds on the financial market, to build a fleet that the French, still stuck with improvised finances, couldn't possibly match.
The British were also extending their technical lead in maritime matters, learning to pack sauerkraut on long ocean voyages to fight scurvy and adopting the "chronometer", a highly accurate clock to help determine longitude, developed by the inventor John Harrison after an epic intellectual struggle.
The French tried to challenge British naval superiority in November 1759, but Admiral Sir Edward Hawke chased the French fleet into Quiberon Bay on the south coast of Brittany and all but annihilated it, with only a third of the French warships escaping. The French colonial empire was now at the mercy of the British. By the time the fighting fizzled out in 1763, Britain had captured Canada and the French sugar islands in the Caribbean, reduced the French presence in India to a few isolated trading outposts, and seized Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards, allies of the French.
* Britain was forced to give back much of what had been seized, most importantly the Caribbean sugar islands. William Pitt, who was out of office by the end of the war, felt this was a grave mistake, since it granted the French a major source of income and bases that the French could use to undermine Britain in the New World. Pitt saw that the peace that had followed the Seven Years' War was just an intermission in further war with France. He would be proven correct in all these particulars, with Britain and France remaining at each others' throats, off and on, for over another half century.
On the positive side, Canada was now British, and the French were no longer in any position to challenge the British in India. Canada was nothing much at the time, mostly a mildly profitable source of furs, but India was a prize. That prize had been largely won for Great Britain by a hothead named Robert Clive.
Clive would seem to be the stuff of pre-WW II British potboiler movies, with characters in red coats and three-cornered hats playing out scripts on a theme of "Rule Britannia", but the reality was more complicated and interesting. Robert Clive had gone to India in 1743 in Company service, as a low-ranking clerk. He passed his time in India whoring, smoking opium, and wanting to get ahead at any cost. Indian instability and war with the French gave him all the opportunities he needed.
In 1747 Clive became an officer in the British Army, rising quickly by being shrewd, and more importantly bold to the point of reckless. In 1751, he captured the French stronghold at Arcot, near Madras, and held out against an 11-week siege. It was a major step towards breaking the French hold on India, and in 1753 Clive went back to Britain as a national hero. He went back to India again in 1756, when the Seven Years' War broke out. The Nawab (Prince) of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawlah, sided with the French and seized Calcutta from the British, cramming dozens of British prisoners into a tiny cell in the height of summer. Most of them died, and the atrocity of the "Black Hole of Calcutta" became a rallying cry for the British.
With local backing and mostly local troops, Clive retook Calcutta in early 1757. The Nawab tried to settle with Clive, but after capturing the French settlement of Chandernagore, Clive turned on Siraj and defeated him at Plassey on 23 June 1757. It was on paper an incredible upset victory, with Clive's 2,900 mostly-local troops defeating Siraj's 50,000. In fact, Clive had guaranteed the victory ahead of time by cutting a deal with one of Siraj's generals. However it was done, Britain had now obtained a strong handhold on India, and it would only continue to get stronger.
As Clive's underhanded deals at Plassey demonstrated, rising British predominance in India was by no means entirely a matter of simple brute force. A near-contemporary Indian historian, Gholam Hossein Khan, wrote in 1789 that the British took advantage of Indian factionalism, creating an alliance with one group to overcome another, all the time growing deeper roots of influence: "The English who seem quite passive, as if suffering themselves to be led, are in fact giving motion to the machine." He concluded that they had simply "availed themselves of the imbecility of some Hindostany Sovereigns, equally proud and ignorant."
* With the rise of British power in India, the question of what to do with it was unavoidable. A clever, energetic, and somewhat unbalanced thug like Clive had his uses, but his concepts of governance were based mainly on the importance of personal gain. In 1773, Warren Hastings was appointed as the first governor-general of British India.
Hastings was entirely unlike Clive, an intellectual of obvious talents and accomplishments. He had signed up with the Company at age 17, and acquired an extensive knowledge of Indian language, religion, and culture, which he greatly admired. He sponsored translations of classic Hindu and Islamic texts, founded an Islamic law school, and encouraged the study of the subcontinent's nature and geography. With such an example, many Company employees took Indian wives and were assimilated to a degree into Indian culture.
Although Scots were only about a tenth of the population of Great Britain, about half the Company employees were Scotsmen. Sensing better opportunities abroad than at home, they were much more willing than the English to go overseas to seek their fortunes. Coming from an austere culture, they found the pleasures offered by Indian society very attractive. Some took multiple wives.
At the same time, Gholam Hussein Khan complained that there was a large element of the Company population that walled themselves off from the locals and regarded them as inferiors. Segregation, not assimilation, would over the long run be the way of the future for the British in India. Furthermore, the Company never wavered on its essential goal in the subcontinent: to make money. Men like Pitt and Clive, and not incidentally Warren Hastings, collected huge fortunes and carried them back to England, where they bought huge manors and conducted themselves in the style of the lords they had become. Those who came back from India with satchels of gold and diamonds became known as "nabobs", a corruption of Indian term nawab.
Not everyone got rich, of course, and Indian wasn't a particularly healthy climate for Britons. About half who went to India in the employ of the Company died there. Still, the opportunities were very attractive for a man on the make.
* Modern corporations are out to make a profit, of course, or even a killing if they can, but the British East India Company went well beyond the methods allowed any modern corporation by employing an army of 100,000 men, the majority of them locals. These troops were used to extend Company (and of course British) dominion over India, applying force when deals and financial persuasion weren't enough to do the job. In less than a century, the Company had gone from taking cap in hand to the Mughal emperor to beg permission to trade in India, to becoming the increasingly predominant power in the land.
Supporting imperial British ambitions in India meant collecting money in the form of taxes. Taxes in Britain at the time were bad enough, but they were a severe burden in British India, where the population was suffering under a sequence of disastrous famines that killed off hundreds of thousands. Even such harsh taxation still did not ensure profits, since the Company suffered serious military reverses in 1779 and 1780. The army still had to be paid, but it wasn't bringing in its keep. Company share prices plummeted and company debt skyrocketed. The Company turned to the government for what would now be called a "bailout".
Hastings resigned as governor-general in 1785 and returned to England. He arrived to face impeachment in 1788 by Parliament for mismanagement and corruption. Clive had been put through a similar mill over a decade earlier, a humiliation that coupled with his opium addiction and poor health had led to his suicide in 1774. Hastings proved to be made of sterner stuff, stringing out the trial for seven years, the exercise finally collapsing of exhaustion before he did.
Although that was a vindication for Hastings himself, in part his impeachment put the entire Company on trial as well, and Parliament decided that the Company needed to be put on a leash. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger passed through an India Act to reform the Company, implementing measures that no doubt made his great-grandfather Diamond Pitt spin rapidly in his grave. To that time, Company salaries had been fairly modest, with Company officials expected to make up the difference on their own. This was fine for a smash-and-grab sort of operation, but it wouldn't do for long-term governance. The Earl of Cornwallis, returning from being famously defeated in the American War of Independence, became governor-general of India and implemented the reforms, raising salaries, imposing strict limits on perks, and rationalizing taxation. His efforts gave rise to an Indian Civil Service that was legendary for its incorruptibility, and to a new caste system in India, with the British colonial elite at the top of the pyramid.
Some things didn't change, however: British domination over India continued to increase, mostly by force of arms. In 1803, the rump Mughal emperor bowed to the inevitable and agreed to British "protection". Richard, Earl of Wellesley, the successor of Cornwallis as governor-general of India, built a grand palace in Calcutta where he and his successors would take up residence and conduct their business. The governor-general was now the true emperor of India, and had to play the part appropriately.
Although it has been said that Britain acquired an empire "in a fit of absence of mind", that was only true in the sense that it hadn't been done as part of an overall long-term plan of conquest. It would have taken a remarkable amount of vision and foresight to have even contemplated such a plan, to be executed over a span of generations. However, policies were implemented that were specifically designed to extend British power overseas, and these policies had proven successful.
The use of the term "success" the new British imperial regime in India had a deep ambiguity. Over centuries past, the English had worked very hard to build a tradition of civil rights and liberties that would continue to grow, at least at home. It took a certain thickness to take pride in such liberties and not wonder why they weren't being exported elsewhere. From this point of view, the empire that the British were building was the wrong empire.
* The British domination of India was far-reaching, but in some ways it was superficial, consisting of a ruling elite over a mass of people whose ways of life were more or less unchanged. British went to India to hopefully make their fortunes and then return home eventually, wealthy or not as the case might be. Most were not planning on staying.
The pattern of British colonization of the New World and Australia was different. For the most part, those who came were to stay, establishing families and cities and societies. In general, colonists went to the New World to seek freedom and opportunity, while colonists went to Australia somewhat less voluntarily. In either case, however, they took British culture and ideals across the oceans with them, helping to create a Greater Britannia across the globe.
The goal to colonize had actually started closer to home. In the middle of the 16th century, English penetration of Ireland had been generally restricted to the settlement of Dublin. Queen Mary established a few more outposts in the Emerald Isle, but it was under Queen Elizabeth I that the idea of colonizing Ireland began to catch on in earnest. There was, first, the issue that Papist Ireland represented a threat to English security: the Spanish could use the island as a safe haven, a springboard for attacks on England. In addition, there was a prospect of wealth and advancement, and also a goal of bringing civilization to the wild Irish.
Settlements were established at Ulster and Munster. To no surprise in hindsight (if there was actually much surprise at the time), the wild Irish showed little enthusiasm for English civilization, and by the beginning of the 17th century battle and massacre had pressed the English intrusions severely. They were not, however, wiped out by any means, and under King James I the push to colonize Ireland was renewed, with settlers forming "plantations" run by settlers and into which the Irish were allowed only on sufferance. The Irish resisted; on 22 October 1641, they rose up against the Ulster Protestants and killed over 2,000 of them. The English were not deterred. They had put roots down in Irish soil and were not going to be driven out in any short time, any more than the Irish were going to become resigned to having them there.
* Settlement of the New World had similar origins in Elizabethan times, but though the underlying ideology was similar, the circumstances were different. There was the obvious fact that the New World was farther away. There was also the fact that the country was largely empty, at least by European standards.
However, such circumstances meant that the supply of labor in the English colonies in the New World left much to be desired. The answer was large-scale immigration, both voluntary and forcible. The mostly vacant spaces of "Virginia", as the site of the first English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard was named in honor of celibate Good Queen Bess, seemed like a promised land that begged for settlers. The grass really was greener on the far side of the pond, or so it seemed.
The English crown chartered private companies to make the settlements happen. As is typical when shiny dreams encounter reality, things didn't work out as easily as expected. The first settlement established by Raleigh's Virginia Company was raised on Roanoke Island off Virginia in 1585, but it lasted only a year, with the survivors leaving in the face of hostile locals.
Another group came to Roanoke in 1587, under the leadership of John White. He returned to England to obtain more materials for the colony, leaving his family behind in the New World, only to find when he returned that everyone in the settlement had mysteriously vanished, leaving behind as an enigmatic clue the word CROATOAN carved on a tree. It was the name of a local tribe, but what actually happened to the settlers remains an unsolved mystery that still comes up occasionally in gothic horror stories.
The third attempt, the settlement at Jamestown, was a success, but it certainly didn't seem like it for the first decade. It wouldn't have survived at all except for the leadership of John Smith, a shrewd and decisive leader who did what he needed to do to get things done. The discovery in 1612 that tobacco could be grown there did much to bring the shaky settlement onto a more solid foundation. However, within decades production of tobacco had risen to the level where the price dropped significantly, undermining the economic rationale for the difficult voyage across the Atlantic and the even more difficult labor of putting down roots in "virgin country".
There was another reason to make the journey, however: religion, or maybe better religious extremism. Queen Elizabeth I had done much to ensure that England would not return to Popery any time soon, but there were those among the faithful who thought the official Anglicanism too weak, possibly not any better than Catholicism at all. The "Puritans" of course thought themselves an elite, looking down on those around them, and some of them wished to be free of polluting influences. Such a group of "Pilgrims" from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire left England to go to Holland, but to no surprise found the Dutch wanting as well. They decided to go to the New World and settle a place where they could be more or less by themselves.
The "more or less" has to be emphasized. There was the matter of the present native tribes, as well as the fact when the MAYFLOWER reached shore at Cape Cod on 9 November 1620, eight weeks out of Southampton, only a third on board were actually Pilgrims. The others were seeking their fortunes, mostly in the form of cod. The name "Cape Cod" was not arbitrary, since the seas around the place seemed so full of fish that some even claimed the possibility of walking over their backs on the top of the water. One of the fishing settlements, Marblehead, was established in 1628, but didn't have a church until 1684.
John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in 1629, was shrewd enough to understand the importance of both religion and commerce, and under his direction the colony thrived. The population grew rapidly, both from immigration and from settlers raising large families. These were families of proper English blood, not incidentally. In Latin America, few of the Spanish or Portugese who came across the Atlantic to seek their own fortunes were women, and so there was considerable intermarriage and interbreeding with locals. The result was that the Latin American settlements would always have a mixed complexion, both racially and culturally. In contrast, New England would become much more of a "new England" than New Spain could be a "new Spain".
Of course, England was a settled place, with proper towns and farms, and the dream of a New England envisioned much the same. Wild woods had to be cut down, stumps removed, the land cultivated. The fact that the local tribes used these forests for hunting and other activities was beside the point. If a tribespeople didn't occupy tillable land, they might well survive, but if they were in the way of progress they would have to be removed. The results were intermittent little wars and massacres of locals. To be sure, there were those among the settlers who sought justice and peaceful coexistence, but the tide was against them, and even if their view had prevailed the diseases the settlers had imported would have swept through the native population anyway.
Some settlers saw the "hand of God" in the way He had used pestilence to clear out the residents to make way for the English. It certainly was convenient. The empty spaces were attractive to English settlers, particularly in the time of the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, when violence and destruction at home, not to mention a stridently prudish but blessedly temporary Puritan regime, gave many the idea that they might lead better lives elsewhere. It seems unlikely that anyone saw the hand of God in that.
* The colonies belonged to the Crown, and the Stuart kings saw the American colonies as an excellent resource to buy political support. Charles I granted Maryland to Lord Baltimore in 1632. Charles I lost his head in the Civil War, but after the rise and fall of the Puritan regime Charles II restored the monarchy, and granted New York to his brother James, Duke of York, in 1664, after its capture from the Dutch. Charles II also owed a debt of 16,000 pounds to Admiral William Penn, who had seized Jamaica for England, and paid it off by granting the admiral's son, also William Penn, the land of Pennsylvania. This was a territory the size of Ireland and made the younger Penn the biggest single landowner in British history.
The younger Penn was a member of another unorthodox religious group, the Quakers, and he had even been thrown behind bars for his beliefs. The Quakers, however, might have been well off the religious mainstream, but when Penn set foot on shore from the good ship WELCOME in October 1682 to found the city of Philadelphia, Greek for "Brotherly Love", he was determined to set up a society based on ideals that were far from narrow minded. Pennsylvania law established religious toleration for all, at least within the limit that they be monotheistic faiths, and Penn recruited settlers from Continental Europe and not just the British Isles. Philadelphia would be a neatly laid out, clean city to welcome newcomers.
This was not just pure altruism at work. Penn might have been devout, but he sensibly saw no conflict between that and getting rich, and was able to sell off tracts of his huge property grant at bargain prices and still become very wealthy in the bargain. He was a shrewd promoter. The fact that he was bringing in skilled craftsmen and artisans to help build a new society in America was another bonus.
* But what about work that didn't require such skill? That is, the sort of jobs that didn't pay well and few wanted to do if they had a choice. Who would go through the bother of making the risky Atlantic crossing to the New World for such a small reward? The answer was: those who didn't have a choice.
There were two such classes of people. The first were indentured servants, people who were down on their luck and were forced into a rough bargain, signing a contract to deliver services for a number of years, maybe four or five, in return for the necessities of life and some small compensation. At least half, probably much more, of the settlers to the American colonies came over as indentured servants. In the 18th century, they were generally Scots or Irish fleeing grasping landlords and years of bad harvests. Convicts were also "transported" to the colonies, in effect as completely involuntary indentured servants. Transportation of convicts had been performed almost from the beginning of the American colonies, though it didn't become an official part of the British penal code until 1717, when minor offenders could be given seven years of transportation instead of being flogged or branded.
Indentured servants were not too much different from slaves, even being bought and sold, and flogged or thrown into chains when they broke the rules. The major difference was that they could look forward to freedom at the end of their terms, if they lived through it -- the mortality rate of the first few years in the American colonies was something like 40%.
The other class of people were actual slaves. The foremost driver for this was Jamaica and the other British sugar islands in the Caribbean. They were so unhealthy that nobody in their right mind would sign on to an indenture to such places, since the likelihood of surviving such an indenture was so low that it wasn't much of an alternative to hanging oneself in desperation. Even those who ran the sugar plantations, standing to make fantastic fortunes, did so at a great risk that all they'd get was a pine box instead.
Slavery was the answer to the West Indies labor problem. Africans stolen from their homes were dragged across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships to work the plantations. The Africans could tolerate the unhealthy climate better than whites, but the mortality rate was still about 40%, not counting the one in seven who died in the crossing. The high mortality meant that slaves fetched a good price in the sugar islands, making the whole exercise very profitable.
There was little objection to the slave trade at the time. One mid-18th-century slave-trader, John Newton, is remembered today for writing the classic hymn "Amazing Grace", a standard of modern folk musicians, when he became a clergyman later in his life. He had actually seen the light of the Lord before he became a slave-trader, but his letters show he felt perfectly at peace over his unpleasant line of business, calling it a "genteel occupation". A Jamaican planter summed up the mindset, which was basically a shrug: "Africk's sons were always slaves."
Slaves thought the slavers were devils who were going to devour them; the wine the crew drank was the blood of slaves, the cheese the crew ate was the brains of slaves. They were only in error to a degree. Since the slaves well outnumbered the planters on the sugar islands, they were kept in line by chains and the lash. They were not merely used for labor. Attractive female slaves could be used for sex, which could produce more offspring for the work force, combining business with pleasure.
Not all the slaves took this sort of treatment without protest. Even when Britain obtained Jamaica in 1655, there was a society of runaways living in the hills of the island. The Spanish had called them "Cimarron (Wild)" and this was corrupted by the British to "Maroons". The Maroons liked to raid plantations to free slaves to build their ranks, showing a particular interest in female slaves. Under the leadership of Captain Cudjoe and the matriarch Queen Nanny, they became an intolerable nuisance and even a threat. The British called in troops and managed to capture Nanny Town, the holdout of the Maroons, in 1732, but the Maroons faded into the trees and kept on being a damned nuisance while most of the troops died of disease.
The British Empire was pragmatic, and one of the pragmatic rules that kept it going was: If you can't beat them, make a deal. In 1739, the Crown signed a treaty with Captain Cudjoe, granting the Maroons their own little autonomous region on the island. The treaty required that the Maroons return escaped slaves, with a reward established to give the requirement some weight. Both sides kept the agreement. In fact, the Maroons found the new status quo agreeable and kept slaves themselves. John Newton had no corner on the notion of inconsistent morality.
The system of slavery arose in the American colonies as well, though it was more strongly entrenched in the southern colonies, where labor-intensive crops like tobacco were raised. Slavery would generally remain a marginal sort of thing in northern colonies.
* As the American colonies grew more populous and prosperous, tensions began to rise across the Atlantic. It wasn't really a question of exploitation by the mother country. Englishmen suffered under oppressive taxes, the colonists in America hardly paid taxes at all. When attempts were made to get them to do so in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the Americans protested loudly.
From the point of view of the English, the Americans seemed like spoiled brats, complaining when they were hardly inconvenienced. What most English didn't understand was that it was precisely that attitude that was creating the controversy. The Americans resented the fact that they were regarded as backwoods yokels, even if there might have been some justifications for it, and were much more resentful of the fact that decisions were being made without their least say or consultation in the matter. The rallying cry was: "No taxation without representation!" By this, nobody really meant representation in the British Parliament. The colonies had their own governance, which should properly be beholden only to the King himself, not Parliament. Far-sighted Americans could see a time when their nation would be more populous and prosperous than England itself; why should the tail wag the dog?
It was a classic example of the sort of dispute that would have probably been resolved without too much pain if there had been any serious effort to talk things out. If proper Englishmen thought the colonists were backwards in many ways, the Americans tended to confirm this by looking to England for inspiration in culture and fashion (and, to a much smaller extent, still do). Americans in general wanted to be loyal English subjects, to honor King and Country, but as they increasingly felt they were talking to a brick wall, the attitude began to change: Maybe we ought to just go our own way.
On the night of 16 December 1773, in protest over a negligible tax on tea, a gang of rowdies dressed as tribesmen broke into the freighter DARTMOUTH in Boston harbor and threw its cargo of tea overboard. This was not entirely a matter of popular indignation at work; some of the rowdies were smugglers who didn't like official competition. In response to the "Boston Tea Party", the government of Lord North closed the harbor and sent British troops to occupy the city.
The action just poured fuel on the fire. The first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. The initial urge was simply to make grievances known to the Crown and seek official redress, but that went nowhere and matters continued to escalate. On 19 April 1775, British troops in red coats marched from Boston to confiscate an arsenal built up by local American militias, and when one of the militias stood up to the intruders, the redcoats shot them down. The redcoats then suffered through a murderous ordeal to get back to Boston, being fired on at every bend in the road, losing a good portion of their number.
Now things had come to serious violence, and the violence continued on the path of escalation. The American "Patriots" raised an army, an indifferent sort of army but still an army, under George Washington and took on the redcoats, with surprising success at first. Now things were almost completely out of control. In this overheated environment, an English immigrant to America, Thomas Paine, a classic hotheaded radical but an extremely articulate writer, wrote a massively influential pamphlet named COMMON SENSE that suggested "common sense" lie in simply disposing of monarchy and all that rot altogether. Taking their cue from this, on 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress signed a Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The rebellion was official.
It quickly promised to be short-lived as well. Once the British Army got organized, Washington's rabble seemed no match for it, and the Patriots were soundly defeated in battle after battle. When a desperate Washington finally led his raggedy troops across the Delaware River to surprise and overwhelm a garrison of hungover Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas Day 1776, some British officers were unimpressed by what amounted to a minor battle and were annoyed at the way the Patriots played it up as a major victory. They failed to understand that Washington, who had a shrewd understanding of practicalities, had struck a massive moral blow for the Patriot cause that put it back on its feet after everyone had been ready to give it up for dead. The British didn't realize that they had just lost their first and best chance to stamp out the flame of rebellion.
The British and the Americans fell into a war of attrition that favored the Patriots. Washington wasn't always the most skillful general on the battlefield, and he has been dismissed by some as a bumbling incompetent. In truth he may not have been any Napoleon, but he understood the basic logic of a colonial insurgency. It didn't matter that much if he was defeated again and again, just as long as he kept on fighting and making the occupying power pay. Sooner or later the occupying power would weary of the game and call it quits. Furthermore, the British soon found that they could win battles but not control territory. Where their army went the Patriots were usually sent packing, but if the British tried to send out detachments to hold down remote towns, those detachments were likely to be snatched up by concentrations of Patriot forces. The British only held down the territory they were actually standing on.
There was also the fact that many senior British officers were understandably uncertain on how to fight such a conflict. Despite a few burnings of towns and the like, most British officers were thankfully unwilling to conduct the sort of ruthless, scorched-earth "kill them all and let God sort them out" campaign often used to deal with insurrections, rightly understanding that it would have been counterproductive over the long run, not to mention well over the bounds of the common nastiness of war into the outright criminal. Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of Quebec, was criticised for being lenient to American prisoners, and his reply would prove very far-sighted: "Since we have tried in vain to make them acknowledge us as brothers, let us at least send them away disposed to regard us as first cousins."
It still helped the Patriot cause to win big victories. On 17 October 1777, the British General John "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne -- a fellow with a lot of style and dash but no great generalship, who had led an army of regulars into the woods of the Northeast -- found himself isolated at Saratoga in New York and was forced to surrender to General Nathanael Greene, one of Washington's lieutenants. Now the British has lost an army, a completely different matter from losing a trivial skirmish. The voices in the British parliament who had been always been sympathetic to the Patriot cause got louder. More importantly, the French, still smarting from their defeat in the Seven Years War, decided that it was time to go beyond their covert support of the Patriot insurgency, and accept the proposals of American ambassador Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues to declare a full-blown alliance with the American rebels.
The British were not yet ready to throw in the towel, however. The struggle for America was not a simple case of Patriots on one side, redcoats on the other. American society was actually divided into three portions: Patriots, Loyalists, and the indifferent who didn't really care that much who was in power. The Patriots had a numerical edge over the Loyalists, but the Loyalists had backing from British troops.
The British decided to conduct what would now be called a "pacification" campaign. They would work their way up from the southernmost colonies, crushing Patriot resistance with superior force, and then leaving Loyalists in charge behind to make sure that the Patriots couldn't move into the vacuum. It sounded tidy, but the Loyalists were generally from the lower classes, and putting them in charge led to a vicious class struggle, characterized by atrocities on both sides. Instead of suppressing insurrection, the policy tended to encourage it. In the meantime, British regulars found themselves engaged in infuriating games of hide-and-seek with Patriot forces in the hills and swamps.
Finally, British General Cornwallis was surrounded by a Franco-American army at Yorktown, Virginia, and forced to surrender on 17 October 1781. Losing one army in America was bad enough, losing two was intolerable, and the peace faction in the British government got the upper hand. America had won its freedom, after a protracted, hard-fought struggle that had involved fighting not only with foreign troops but with neighbors, even family members. Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son William stayed with the Crown, and when the Patriots threw William in prison, Benjamin did little but express satisfaction.
Freedom did not mean freedom for all Americans. There was the business of slavery. Although the northern American states would soon abandon slavery, the institution would become entrenched in the southern states, and in another century would lead to difficulties. There was also the fact that the new American nation had little interest in respecting the tribes on the frontiers. The British had made some mixed attempt to give the tribes a fair deal, but the Americans made no great effort to consider native rights.
Finally, there was the matter of the Loyalists, who had no future in the new American nation. Large numbers went to Canada, with the significant effect that Canada would remain strongly loyal to the Crown. The Loyalists felt like they had been left in the lurch by Britain, but when push came to shove they knew what side of the fence they were on. The newcomers also easily outnumbered the Canadian French speakers, and there was no longer any possibility that the French population of Canada could pose a significant threat to British domination of the land -- though the cultural split in the nation would always be a running source of aggravation for all concerned.
In fact, although the American Revolution was a major blow to the British Empire, that Empire hadn't come close to reaching its full extent.