Commercial benefits were probably the most enduring consequence of empire. However, the benefit was not exclusively from Britain’s direct empire and we need to temper this optimism of the benefits of empire with the realisation that a significant proportion of this was from a more ‘informal’ empire. The empire was beyond its formal authority an empire of goods. As The Spectator noted “The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of an hundred Climates… Trade, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire.” North America remained within this after they were independent and it was further advanced with trade with Portuguese colonies of Brazil – a third of Brazilian gold ended up in Britain – and Spain through Cadiz. China was also the key exporter of tea, porcelain, lacquer ware and furniture and Javanese coffee was a popular commodity. Moreover, Britain’s mechanisation and industrialisation was not based exclusively on the benefit of empire but improvements in agriculture and an early industrial workforce. Empire was an essential benefit to the commercial economy, but was not exclusively the driver of economic growth and productivity in the eighteenth century.
On a less tangible measure, an advantage of empire’s commerce was that it developed a sense of national identity and British consciousness. Britain as a concept itself cannot be taken for granted in this period and an empire needed to be formalised and strengthened at home. Wars and maritime prowess combined with a hatred of the French and Spanish fostered a sense of national identity in patriotism and xenophobia. However, the key driver in uniting England and Wales with Scotland and Ireland was common commercial benefit. Politically, union with Ireland and Scotland was fraught within the eighteenth century: the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the bloody rebellion of 1798 in Ireland, during the course of which more people were killed than in the Terror of France, are a case in hand. However, a shared commercial benefit was essential to the softening of the political tensions. Scotland was first to benefit from trade with the empire and gained full rights to participate commercially much earlier than Ireland. The Empire created many opportunities for the Scots and they grasped them both eagerly and successfully. Indeed, Scotland played a large part in the extension of the empire through Glasgow. Scots from a range of backgrounds were heavily represented in the East India Company and Scottish landowners participated widely in the slave trade and plantations. Ireland had more limited access to empire for the most part of the century. There may have been a large export market of salted beef, pork and fish in particular, but the English and Scottish made sure that Irish benefit did not jeopardise their own. From the 1780s this balance began to change as Ireland manipulated English weakness after the defeat at Yorktown to extend their commercial rights in 1782. Moreover, the Union of 1801 fully extended these rights, which probably was one of the only benefits Union bought to Ireland. The commercial bond of empire was much stronger than the bonds of union and without it, it much harder to see how tension could be soother for a British identity. The Repeal and Home Rule campaigns In Ireland, for instance, were always careful to disavow any intention of disrupting empire showing the extent to which the bond was valued. The commercial link was fragile as it was just as easily broken down as it developed. This was to lead to a break down with Ireland over renewed religious conflicts and perhaps even today with Scotland bid for own independence in the face of apparent lack in commercial gain from England.
The empire had fortunately more than commercial and financial benefits, which are more easily neglected in the face of commercial and financial success. First and foremost, the empire developed a new and more broad-ranging culture and the gift of knowledge came from the periphery as well as tobacco and calicoes. Empire permeated British cultural life at many levels: literature, theatre, philanthropy, fashion, gardening and politics where all touched. Oriental motifs were adopted in literature and decorative arts and the effect of the empire left its heritage in British culture. At a higher intellectual level, empire provided also context for discovery and the pursuit of knowledge, spearheaded by the Royal Society and individuals, such as Boyle. Motives to improve navigation for commerce led to developed astronomy and cartography, such as the astronomical surveys at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay and the Trigonometrical Survey that was organised. It added scope and breadth for the development of other areas of study. Many disciplines of science would not have made sense without new opportunities for observation, survey and collection. Botany, zoology, geology and anthropology, for example, would have been ‘imponderable’ outside the context of the British Empire. These were not confined to England, but spread to Britain as a whole with the Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufactures and useful Arts (1731) which sought to put science at the disposal of Irish agriculture and industry. These developments were only to be fostered by coming into a new exchange of culture and ideas.
The empires effect on religion is more contentious. Unintentionally, it seems that empire ideals translated to expound freedom of religious ideas and practices: it led to “free trade in commerce and faith was the new world order.” The Anglican hegemony was faltering already at home, and it had little chance in new areas of the empire. Iterant religious leaders, such as Whitfield, could spread religion outside the old systems and in a commercial society. Religion too almost became a commodity with many churches competing for souls in various forms of Protestantism and if this was acceptable in the colonies it could only grow in Britain as well. It also seems undeniable that the empire also forced a greater toleration of Catholics. The 1774 retention of Quebec and its huge Catholic population meant that Parliament had no choice but to give toleration and land rights to the Catholic Church and civil liberties to its followers. This reluctant acceptance of Catholic rights extended to Britain and the first Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1778. Subject to an oath renouncing Stuart claims to the throne and the civil jurisdiction of the Pope, it allowed Roman Catholics to own property, inherit land, and join the army. This was not greeted wholeheartedly and the Gordon Riots of 1780 were partly precipitated by fears of the increasing toleration aboard and at home and that the same would be granted to Catholics in Ireland and Catholics in England. However, the empire set the ball rolling for greater toleration, albeit with difficulties still to surmount.
With a retrospective lens we can see how the empire developed all areas of life, and in strengthening the economy, defence, discovery and education and sense of identity of Britain it did strengthen the state and we can therefore loosely term it ‘benefiting’ Britain. However, the outcome was by no means certain and the empire and its war bought to Britain to its knees with political instability and a huge financial burden. Most unavoidable is, the American Revolution, which severely damaged imperial structure and undermines its ‘benefit’ as a whole in the eighteenth century. It exposed the glaring defects of methods of governing empire and trying to enforce sweeping claims to authority over the colonies. With war came a huge escalation of financial and human cost and empire was a huge burden on the British taxpayer. National debt soared to 140 million with the cost of war in defending the empire, and even in peace Quebec, for example, cost treasury £100,000 a year. These put huge political pressure put on the ministries to come up with ways of paying interest and dealing with the threat. Consequently, empire saw the destabilisation of government ministries and brought huge political instability for the period. The loss of Minorca in 1756, for example, bought down the ministry of Newcastle. Even Pitt did not see the end of the Seven Years War and resigned in 1761 as for failing to achieve a strike against Spain. Empire could destroy its advocates and left political instability for much of the century.
Contemporaries recognised these concerns. Whilst there was some praise for Britains new power in subordination and some pride in imperial expansion and commercial liberty, there were also broad ranging concerns about the financial and other costs of empire. Parallels were drawn with the Roman Empire and there were concerns, spurred on by the Gibbon’s Rise and Fall in 1776, that as empire over expanded it became unwieldy and corrupted by the wealth and luxury of the east. The corruption of the empire was attacked in the press and satire, such as vicious literature against the leaders in the East India Company. Samuel Foote’s play the The Nabob was a scathing indictment of the moral corrosiveness of empire in India. The deepest concern was about liberty. It made the country re-think the cornerstone of its identity and how the paradox of how that translated to empire. Whilst Britain was forming its identity based on its constitutional liberty it was hard for many to reconcile this with the autocratic and unrepresentative rule of the colonies. The violence of empire in the War of Independence caused horror shown in in the 1780 “The Allies” cartoon, where King George III and the Anglican church are criticized for colluding with, if not orchestrating, Native American violence that was so horrible, including the slaughter of women and children, it could be equated to cannibalism. India was just as contentious. Gillray’s Blood on Thunder fording the Red Sea (1788) represents Lord Thurlow carrying Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, through a sea of gore of the effects of empire in India. Hastings looks very contented, and is carrying two large bags of money. These cartoons show that the uncomfort we feel when discussing the benefits of the empire given its exploitation was as much an eighteenth century phenomenon as it is today.
At its height the British Empire stretched over a quarter of the earth’s surface, and so this essay has barely scratches the key elements of impact it wrought. Whilst commercially the empire supplemented the fiscal-military state and sustained Britain against war against France, boosted economic dynamism in the markets led to an increased concept of Britain and provided a context for new cultures and knowledge, it seems erroneous to ascribe the term ‘benefit’ to the empire. It certainly provoked change and development, but seeing it in terms of ‘benefit’ seems false in the scope of instability and unrest it caused, and indeed wrong given the human cost that any advantage was built upon. This paradox affected the contemporaries as much as the historian today. Thus, rather than looking at it in terms of benefit, it is more helpful to analyse the empire from other angles and lenses. It is undeniable that the empire developed all spheres of life and left little untouched by its influence, but was it essential to British growth and development? Could Britain, for example, have industrialised without an Empire? Counter-factual history is always dangerous and its help limited, but I think it is clear that empire was a bedrock in all areas of development in the eighteenth century and that despite its cost, Britain would not be the same in identity, culture, economically or politically without it. It remains left to the individual as to whether this was beneficial or not.
Linda Colley Britons: Forging the Nation (1992)
P. Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (1998)
K. Wilson ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660-1840 (2004)
D. Armitage, Greater Britain. Essays in Atlantic History 1516-1776 (2004)
J R Seeley quoted p.3 of K. Wilson A New Imperial History
P. Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (1998) p.582
P. Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire p.251