France, as an absolute monarchy, governed her colonies without
constitutional rights or representative institutions. The French
Empire straddled the Caribbean and continental North America.
New France (Canada) was strategically important, but the most
highly valued French colonies were the "sugar islands"
in the Caribbean and Louisiana. The territory which was to become
Canada had fish, beaver fur, poor farms, and not much else. The
French government believed from the start that the function of
French colonies was to increase the power of the state. But it
was thought necessary to enlist private money and energy to exploit
the colonies, and for this purpose the device used, as in England,
was the chartered company. Such companies had a formal grant from
the crown to operate as a commercial enterprise. In the seventeenth
century especially, French-chartered companies were very active
in colonial areas, although by the 1660's most of them were defunct.
(The British East India Company was a notable exception.)
After the period of company rule, the French treated their colonies
as provinces of metropolitan France. Depending on the importance
of the colony, it had at its head a governor-general, a governor,
or a lieutenant-governor. This man was usually a noble or a prominent
soldier, but every colonial governor had an intendant. Intendants
were originally lawyers appointed to instill middle-class efficiency
into provincial government "at home." By mid-seventeenth
century, the intendants had become the provincial administrators
of France. In the colonies, however, the intendants still cooperated
with the governors; the system had the disadvantage of dividing
responsibility for colonial affairs, and it was dropped in 1816.
There were no elected assemblies in the french Empire; after all,
the Estates General of France had not met since 1614. In 1672
when Frontenac was governor of Canada, he wanted to summon an
elected assembly, but he was reminded by Colbert that the Estates
General had not been convened in France; why should the same principle
not prevail in the colonies? Although the French government was
autocratic, it was not whimsical; it operated according to a well-established
body of law. This was particularly evident in the realm of taxation,
the field in which France came nearest to accepting the notion
that colonists had rights.
The crown decided to establish the Roman Catholic Church in the
colonies as it existed in France. Jews and Huguenots lost their
official tolerance after 1685, and religious freedom did not return
until 1763. Most of the clergy in the colonies belonged to religious
orders, the Jesuits being particularly prominent in the colonization
of New France.
French mercantilist policy was begun in the seventeenth century,
when Colbert used the West Indian Company to exclude foreign ships.
The system as a whole, however, was much less rigorous and restrictive
than that of Spain. By and large, the system worked well for France;
French merchants and shippers could not have competed with the
British on a free-trade basis. In the eighteenth century the West
Indies were a major source of French income.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the colonies became technically
part of the mother country, but in actual fact the colonies followed
only those French laws which pleased them. The Republican colonial
policy was replaced by that of the Consulate and Napoleonic Empire.
Slavery and the slave trade became legal again. But San Domingo
revolted against the return to slavery in 1802 and became independent
in 1803; Louisiana was returned to France in 1800 (having been
ceded to Spain in 1763), but was sold to the United States in
1803 when Napoleon abandoned his dream of an American Empire.
In 1660 France had been in a good position to build an empire,
yet by 1789 she had lost all her North American possessions except
two tiny islands off Newfoundland. The Caribbean Islands were
retained and West African colonies regained, but France had been
humbled by the British in India and kept only some small enclaves
there. The loss of Canada and the inability to rival Britain in
India was due essentially to an inability to match British seapower.
There is a real contrast between the relatively small and homogeneous
British Empire in America before 1783, and the huge far-flung
Victorian Empire of the nineteenth century. At first there were
three types of British colonies in America. The first were plantation
colonies in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic seaboard. These
included Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia,
which produced sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo. A second group,
"the middle colonies," comprised Maryland, Delaware,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, which produced wheat and
timber. The third group consisted of the New England colonies
of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and
Maine. The New England economy rested on trade in rum and slaves
and shipbuilding.
The characteristic that made the British colonies in America most
different before 1763 (with the exception of French Canada) was
that they were genuine colonies of settlement. Englishmen migrated
to them. In the Caribbean and southern colonies, the planters
established an aristocratic English society. The middle colonies
saw large individual farms with a merchant aristocracy in the
great ports. New England was a commercial section, but with small
farms clustered around villages.
From 1754 until 1763, the English and the French contested for
the fur trade in the Ohio Valley. After a faltering start, when
General Braddock was routed by a force of French and Indians before
Fort Duquesne (the present city of Pittsburgh), the English gained
the military initiative under the political leadership of the
elder Pitt. Geoffrey Amherst captured Louisburg; then in 1759
General James Wolfe defeated the Marquis Montclam on the Plains
of Abraham under the walls of the fortress of Quebec, and the
war was all but won.
At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British
were confronted with the problem of making the American colonists
share the cost of their own defense. The British tried to accomplish
this by enforcing the old Navigation Acts which had been, to a
great extent, honored more in the breach than in the observance.
Coercion produced revolution. The American colonies declared their
independence on July 4, 1776, in a document which reflected the
natural rights philosophy of the Continent and the political ideas
of the British philosopher, John Locke.
The American Revolution occurred because the colonists resented
the attempts of London to enforce existing commercial and other
imperial regulations. The colonists' claim that they could not
be taxed without their consent was only valid if colonial legislatures
were equivalent in taxation power to Parliament. The colonists
were wrong on this issue, for Parliament did have the right to
legislate for the colonies. In their second claim, that they were
not represented, the colonists had a better argument, for representation
in the colonies and in England were two different matters.
In the colonies representatives were elected by the taxpayers
on a district basis for local councils, but every English subject
was considered to be "virtually" represented in the
English Parliament. "Virtual representation" meant that
even though a member of parliament was elected from a specific
geographic district, he theoretically represented the interests
of the citizens of the empire at large. Actually, the interests
of the colonists were unknown and of small concern to the tenth
of the English population which voted for parliament. The members
of Parliament were not, therefore, directly responsible to the
voters in colonial America. Many of the problems that arose as
a consequence of the questions raised by the Americans and the
American Revolution were subsequently ameliorated by British colonial
policy after 1783.
The attraction of trade, as opposed to the desire to conquer
territory, had brought the British to India. By the seventeenth
century a three-cornered rivalry among the Portuguese, the Dutch,
and the English and developed on the subcontinent. The Portuguese
established themselves at Goa, but fell behind in the commercial
competition largely because of their diffident trading methods.
The Dutch were edged off the field by the English, while the British
in turn were forced to abandon the Spice Islands to the Dutch.
By 1700 British "factories" (armed trading posts) were
established at Bombay in the west, and Madras and Calcutta on
the east coast, and were engaged in a thriving trade in cotton
goods, silk, and spices.
By the eighteenth century the French became the chief rivals of
the English, although the struggle between the two competitors
was destined to be brief. Starved and neglected by Paris, the
French East India Company experienced great difficulty, while
at the same time the British East India Company put down the roots
of an empire. The leader of the French enterprise, Joseph Francois
Dupleix (1697-1764), a man of extraordinary talent, was convinced
that any European company dependent on the unstable Indian courts
was in a precarious position. He therefore attempted to construct
a system of Indian alliances under the French, but he had the
bad fortune to be opposed by Robert Clive (1725-1774), a formidable
adversary.
When the Seven Years' War broke out in Europe in 1756, with the
French and the English on opposite sides, the nawab, or native
ruler of Bengal, unsuccessfully tried to ally himself with the
French. Clive then moved against the nawab. Events were decided
by the Battle of Plassey on June 23, 1757. As a result of his
victory, Clive was able to eliminate French influence, and the
British no longer had European commercial rivals in India. It
was fundamentally British sea power that helped to perpetuate
British dominance in India during the mid-eighteenth century.
Clive became the first governor of Bengal for the British East
India Company. He estimated that the company and private persons
gained perhaps three million pounds sterling by the conquest.
The thirst for loot manifested by the company's servants is comparable
only to that of the conquistadores in Mexico. Clive went home
to England, but he returned for a second administration in 1765
with the intention of ending the extortionate practices he had
inaugurated. He made peace with the titular Mughal ruler, who
was glad to grant the British the fiscal administration of Bengal
in return for a fixed annual payment. Indian officers were to
do the actual tax collection. This was Clive's famous dual system:
the English received the revenue and maintained a military force,
but the collection was left in the hands of Indians. Clive had
established British rule, but in the process serious damage was
done to contemporary Indian society in Bengal.
Warren Hastings (1732-1818), essentially a constructive statesman,
was an entirely different type. Had he not sailed for India while
still a boy, he might very well have become a bishop. Hastings
strongly objected to giving "tax farmers" (intermediaries)
the status of landlords by recognizing the revenue they collected
as a fixed rent. There followed a continuing struggle over this
question. Lord Cornwallis later established a "permanent
settlement" in 1793, but that solution was only accepted
because there was no suitable alternative.
Hastings began the sort of district administration which became
characteristic of British rule in dependent colonies. He revised
the court system and appointed European revenue collectors. In
addition, he did much to consolidate British territory in India.
Yet by 1772 the British East India Company was in bad financial
straits. Parliament came to the rescue with two acts passed in
1773. The first granted the company a state loan, while limiting
its dividends; the second, the Regulating Act, revised the Indian
government. Warren Hastings became governor-general with a council
of four members. Unfortunately, the council and the governor-general
were soon at odds.
Upon his return to England in 1783, Hastings was vigorously attacked
in parliament for alleged corrupt practices in India. He might
have escaped without impeachment had not the younger Pitt added
his powerful voice to the chorus of accusation. (By 1784 Pitt
had a working majority in Parliament.) Finally in 1795 Hastings
was acquitted on all counts, and he passed his old age in dignified
retirement. He survives as a mighty figure in British history,
for he laid the foundation for the British administration in India.
The end of the American Revolution in 1783 allowed Parliament
to turn its full attention momentarily to Indian affairs. The
Regulating Act of 1773 would obviously not serve. The governor-general
was responsible for all that occurred, yet his council could reverse
his orders and resist his policy. In 1783 the younger Pitt had
been able to pass a bill which set up a parliamentary board of
control for Indian affairs. This device had its limitations, but
it worked well enough to endure until the Mutiny of 1857, when
the crown began to rule India directly.
Lord Mornington, the Marquess Wellesley (administration, 1798-1805),
brought the spirit of expansion to the Indian shore. At that moment
General Bonaparte was preparing an invasion of Egypt, an invasion
which seemed to threaten India. Wellesley's policy was designed
to frustrate any possible French invasion. He did this by establishing
British dominance over the princely states of south and central
India. A British Resident was placed behind the princely throne
with a force of the company's troops under his control. This was
the process by which semi-independent states became encapsulated
within British India.
British India was to become the most important nonwhite colony
(as opposed to the colonies of settlement) in the nineteenth-century
British Empire; in fact, many think it was the keystone of Victorian
foreign policy.