A replica of the ‘Nonsuch’ (1650), the vessel that on June 5th, 1668, left Deptford for Hudson Bay in what is now northeast Canada; here the replica ‘Nonsuch’ (1968) is seen at Belleville, Ontario. On May 2nd, 1670, ‘The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay’ was formed to trade in furs. It was one of several other companies with Royal Charters behind it, including the London (or Virginia) Company in 1606 and the most famous of them, the East India Company in 1600. The London Company ceased in 1624, but the Hudson’s Bay Company is a major diversified retailer with a turnover of more than CA$9bn in 2018, and the East India Company trades in tea and fine foods.
Part 1 of 3
THE seventeenth century for England was a time of great unrest at home. There was civil war, a king was beheaded, the monarchy was abolished, a republic was established which became a despotism, the Stuart kings were brought back, and finally they were turned out again.* It was a century of perpetually changing authority.
Over the seas it was a busy time for British trade and settlement, settlement taking place almost entirely in America and the West Indies, trade being much in evidence also on the West Coast of Africa, and the East Indies. British colonisation was in its origin almost entirely the outcome of trade and private initiative. The State gave charters, and so far licensed or favoured trade and settlement.* But the colonists, unless they were transported as criminals or political prisoners, were not sent out by the Government, and in large measure they went out to be rid of the Government.* The Government meanwhile, was constantly changing; there was therefore no continuity or system in colonial administration, and self-government for the colonies grew up in fact if not in name.
The British Civil Wars (1639-1660) included an Interregnum from the execution of King Charles I in 1649, when Parliament governed without a recognised monarch. Charles II was restored in 1660, but his brother James II was driven out in 1688, to be replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III. See Home Page.
The most famous of the chartered companies is surely the East India Company, formed on December 31st, 1600, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The London (or Virginia) Company followed under James VI and I in 1606, with the Hudson’s Bay Company on May 2nd, 1670, under Charles II. More ‘joint stock’ companies were added in later years, including the ill-fated Darien Scheme and the infamous South Sea Company. The first, however, was the Russia Company that emerged in 1555 out of the voyage of Richard Chancellor. See Merchants of Muscovy.
See The Empire of Enterprise, where Adam Smith agrees that Government contributed very little to the enterprise of the early colonists, except to drive them out of hearth and home and to seek new lands.
Part Two
British regulars in an American Revolutionary Wars reenactment. The revolutionaries made common cause with the Kingdom of France, at a time when France and Britain were vying for supremacy in India and North America in the Seven Years’ War. However, after Louis XVI was sensationally executed in the French Revolution, George Washington nudged the newly formed USA back towards Britain. See The ‘Jay Treaty’. The two countries were at war again ten years later: see Home Page.
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.
Part Three
A fusillade from troops assembled outside the old Parliament building (destroyed by fire in 1916) in Ottawa, Canada, for the Queen’s Birthday Review on May 24th, 1868. The previous year, the British North America Act (1867) had established Canada as a self-governing Dominion, by a federal union of four provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec. Manitoba joined in in 1870, British Columbia in 1871, Prince Edward Island in 1873 and in 1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan completed the federation.
THE nineteenth century and after, from the battle of Waterloo down to the present day, has to some extent combined the characteristics of the two preceding centuries, and yet has been widely different from either, the difference being largely due to scientific invention.*
War has been much in evidence, but it has not been, with the exception of the Crimean War,* which had little or no bearing on overseas enterprise, war with any European nation.* One notable war has been the semi-civil war in South Africa.*
It has been an era when the State has been far more in evidence than in the seventeenth century, and private enterprise far more in evidence than in the eighteenth century. On the other hand, the State has been in evidence as much in relaxing authority as in asserting itself. It has taken over India from a chartered company,* but has conceded self-government in fullest measure to British North America, Australasia, and South Africa.* Starting from the British North America Act of 1867,* the self-governing dominions have been taking final shape as nations.
See Lucas’s arguments in Timely Progress.
See posts tagged Crimean War (5). It was the outcome of hysterical Russophobia and a groundless fear that the Tsars had designs on the Balkans and on India.
This volume was published in 1914, and the essay thus written before the outbreak of the Great War that year. See The Outbreak of the Great War.
See The Boer Wars, a conflict between English settlers and settlers of Dutch descent in the self-governing colonial states of southern Africa. Victory for the British led to the formation of the self-governing Union of South Africa in 1910.
During The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), India saw continual a struggle between the Mughal Emperors and rival Indian princes, in league in one way or another with the militias attached to the British East India Company and to rival trading companies from France, Portugal and the Netherlands. Thanks mainly to Clive of India, the British won and gained complete control of the Mughal Emperors. Following The Indian Mutiny, their Empire was dissolved in 1857, and its role was adopted by the British Crown.
Lucas could not be expected to predict it, but of all these former colonies the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910 out of a mixture of British and Dutch territories, would prove to be the least successful. The others made sometimes slow but always steady progress toward racial equality, but in South Africa no progress was made at all; eventually, the Commonwealth became such a standing rebuke that in 1961 the Government seceded from it, threw off the British Crown and declared itself a Republic, all in order to pursue the infamous apartheid system that lasted until 1994.
The British North America Act of 1867 gave Canada self-government and organised the province into a federation of four provinces (five more joined between 1870 and 1905), in part to make the country defensible against any further aggression from the United States of America. To a large degree it followed the recommendations made by Lord Durham in 1839. See Defective Democracy.
.jpg){kind=link}
