THE eighteenth century and onwards to 1815 was wholly different from the preceding age. It was in the main a century and more of foreign war with France and the nations that followed the lead of France, supplemented by civil war with English colonists,* whose severance from the British Empire was also determined by their mother country’s war with France. It was an age which began with Marlborough* and ended with Wellington,* and the first half of which, ending with the Peace of Paris in 1763,* was marked at its close by the victories of Wolfe and Clive.*
It was an age when gain and loss were almost entirely the result of fighting; and when the empire acquired a new and great province by peaceful means, the acquisition was still the direct outcome of action by the State. This was the acquisition of Australia.* It was a fighting time, when notwithstanding trade went on apace. It was a time when there was more continuity than in the preceding century, but the development of systematic administration was hindered by perpetual war.
See The American Revolutionary War, which began with the The Boston Tea Party in 1773 and ended with the Peace of Versailles on September 3rd, 1783.
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, secured two famous victories during the The War of the Spanish Succession, at Blenheim on August 13th, 1704, and at Ramillies on May 23rd, 1706.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was the British commander at The Battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 1815, which ended once and for all the European ambitions of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the The Seven Years’ War between Britain and Louis XV’s Kingdom of France.
James Wolfe (1727-1759) was a leading general in the Canadian theatre of Britain’s The Seven Years’ War with France, and died fighting at Quebec. Meanwhile Robert Clive (1725-1774), an officer in the militia of the East India Company, played a decisive role in the Indian theatre of the same war, frustrating Louis XV’s France and securing Britain’s place as the preferred trading partner of the Mughal Emperors.
Sir Charles, a former head of the Dominion Department of the Colonial Office, rather overplays the Government’s role. The colony founded at modern-day Sydney had to be moved because the Government chose an uninhabitable location; it was forcibly peopled with convicts, and then left to fend for itself. It succeeded because of the courage of its first governor, of the convicts and later of emigrants from Britain and the Empire (and refugees from the governments of Europe). See The First Fleet.
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