The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The choice had been dictated by Banks’s description of local conditions; the need to have even a small settlement in Australia as a token of British ownership; and the possible strategic value of a base which might serve as a launching pad for a seaborne invasion of the undefended western coast of Spanish America. This was not as far-fetched as it seemed. At the time, conflicting Anglo-Spanish claims in the Pacific were unresolved, and there was a chance that the two powers might fight a naval war in the region. The scheme was revived in 1806–7, when an influential circle of strategists and businessmen laid plans for a naval descent on Mexico and Chile, Spain then being an ally of France. Among the suggestions was one which proposed shipping Indian troops to New South Wales on the first leg of their journey to Chile.

  A further consideration was the convicts. They were to provide the sinews of a new colony that, in time, would profit Britain, which was preferable to having them idling in prison cells or the hulks (dismasted battleships anchored in the Thames) at considerable cost to the government. Transportation was a utilitarian and, according to its supporters, humane form of punishment which offered the criminal the chance of redemption and a return to society. Although today transportation may appear harsh, and conditions on board ship and in New South Wales were harsh, the men who ruled Britain in the late eighteenth century sincerely believed it was both an effective check on crime and a device by which criminals could be reformed. Everyone in society was expected to perform some useful function, which was beneficial to himself and contributed to the general good. The law-breaker sought to live by other means and had to be shown his error. This was the view of Governor Lachlan Macquarie who, in 1817, described New South Wales as a ‘Penetentiary Asylum on a Grand Scale’ in which the ‘Children of Misfortune’ learned through submission and hard work to become honest and industrious subjects of George III.

  The first flotilla of ships with their cargoes of male and female convicts, soldiers, free settlers and officials sailed from England in May 1787 and cast anchor off Botany Bay in January 1788. Its commander and the first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, found the harbour unsatisfactory and shifted his ships to a better one nearby, which was named Sydney in honour of the Colonial Secretary. Landfall appears to have been marked by a night-long bout of drinking and sexual excess by the convicts and those sent to guard them. Later, a clergymen regretted that the long ocean voyage encouraged torpor and a taste for wine and spirits which immigrants found hard to lose once they were in Australia.9

  The making of early Australia was an extremely complex process. It had been officially assumed that convict muscle would carve out an agrarian colony which would be self-supporting and possibly profitable. Australian society would be pyramidal and paternalist. Executive and judicial power would be in the hands of former officers, whose service experience had presumably prepared them for exercising authority over men from the lower classes who were easily led astray. From the beginning there were three kinds of Australians: officials and guards, free settlers and convicts. The last made up the bulk of the population and were there unwillingly. Analyses of the backgrounds of the criminals who found themselves in Australia after 1788 indicate that the typical convict was an urban recidivist, aged under twenty-five, who had existed on the margins of society, and lived by theft of one kind or another. In their new environment, such creatures had to sink or swim; or, as Phillip put it, ‘Men able to support themselves, if able and industrious, I think cannot fail,’ while those without the ‘spur to industry’ will starve.10

  Phillip and his successors hoped that one spur to hard work might be the presence of female convicts. In 1794, the arrival of sixty women, all under forty, was welcomed by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose who told the Colonial Secretary that ‘there can be no doubt, but that they will be the means by intermarriage of rendering the men more diligent and laborious.’11 This may have been over-optimistic; one passenger on a convict ship was horrified by the ‘shamefully indecent’ behaviour and ‘abundantly gross’ language of the women convicts which drove the respectable to shun the decks whenever they took their daily exercise.12

  After disembarkation, the convicts were allotted to various duties. The canny never revealed any particular skill when asked their trade, for this might mean detachment to onerous labour up-country.13 For this reason, perhaps, rather than truthfulness, many gave their occupation as ‘thief’, which was rendered as ‘labourer’ in the official register. Labour, skilled or unskilled, was undertaken for the government or the handful of free settlers. Discipline was rigorously enforced; flogging was the common corrective for most offences, and on Norfolk Island in 1790 three runaways were warned that they would be shot as outlaws if they did not surrender.14

  Escape was perilous and rarely attempted, although the geographically ignorant imagined that by plunging inland into the bush they would, eventually, reach China. In 1791, the government made it plain that every hurdle was to be placed in the way of those convicts who wished to return home after the end of their sentences. Instead, they were to be offered grants of land in the hope that they might become self-supporting farmers, and in 1794 men still serving their sentences were allowed to earn 10d (5p) an hour for work done in their spare time. On Norfolk Island, convicts and their marine guards were each given twenty-four acres and some pigs, with the intention that the settlement would become a self-supporting community.15

  Among the Australian labour force were a small group of men who had been sentenced for subversion. Among the first of this category of political prisoners were the three so-called Scottish Martyrs who had been found guilty of disseminating French Revolutionary doctrines. The lieutenant-governor was ordered to keep a ‘watchful eye over their conduct’ in case they began to preach Jacobinism. One, Thomas Palmer, a Unitarian minister, had been allowed a servant during his passage out, who, once his master’s sentence began, was given the privileges of a free settler.16 The late 1790s and early 1800s saw an influx of a new type of political offender, Irish nationalists. They had been sentenced for joining underground societies, participating in the 1798 rebellion or mutiny and were considered extremely dangerous by the New South Wales authorities. Crossing the seas did not purge the Irish of their rebelliousness; in 1804 some planned an insurrection which was swiftly crushed.

  In the same year, a book was published which reviewed the development of New South Wales. Its anonymous author listed many encouraging signs of future prosperity: the settlement’s growth rate seemed to surpass that of the former American colonies and one recent innovation, a local newspaper (the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser), was seen as a milestone on the road to maturity. The Australians, he noted approvingly, were trying to find a ‘national character’ though nothing was said about its ingredients.17 This silence is understandable, for there appeared to be little cohesion among the 8,000 or so colonists, many, perhaps the majority of whom had no wish to be there. They represented what their descendants would call the ‘us’ who were watched over, controlled and judged by the ‘them’, that smaller body of administrators, soldiers and free landowners. Unlike America, where common bonds of religion or an urge for self-advancement had given a sense of purpose to the first colonists, early Australia was a divided society. In any case, it would have been hard for religion to have had much impact on men and women with a proven immunity to sermons. Moreover, the fact that during the early days colonial chaplains were Anglicans, who preached obedience to the secular authorities, which they often served as magistrates, made it well nigh impossible for them to have any moral influence over the convicts. There were, as elsewhere in the empire, public displays of loyalty to Britain, celebrated by the rituals of toasts to the king and balls on royal anniversaries. But this attachment to a country which oppressed their homeland and sent them into exile meant nothing to the growing body of Irish convicts, who would bequeath their ancestral grudges to their children and grandchildren.

  The ‘them’ of early Australian society
was an open élite into which former convicts who had taken advantage of land grants (there were forty-four in 1791) were allowed once they had made their fortunes. Its most powerful members, outside the senior government officials, were the officers of the New South Wales Corps, which had been formed in 1791 as part garrison and part police force. It was manned by rogues of various sorts, including deserters from the regular army under sentence of transportation, and was commanded by scoundrels.18

  The Corps’s officers were a flock of raptors who used their privileges to fill their pockets through the accumulation of land grants and liquor licences. Captain Bligh, who became governor in 1806, attempted to challenge the vested interests of the Corps and its greediest officer, John Macarthur, by authorising the distribution of government stores to poor settlers, many former convicts. ‘Them were the days, sir, for the poor settler,’ one, an ex-smuggler, recalled, ‘he had only to go tell the Governor what he wanted, and he was sure to get from the stores.’19 This enlightened system of state investment was overthrown by private enterprise when Macarthur, fearing the loss of profits, engineered a Corps mutiny against Bligh. Bligh, whose unhappy fate it was to have his authority affronted by malcontents (he had also been on the receiving end of the 1797 Nore Mutiny ), was unseated by the plotters and recalled in 1810.

  His successor, Macquarie, a strong-willed army officer, presided over the disbandment of the Corps and, up to a point, continued Bligh’s policy of assistance to the small settlers. Free immigrants continued to be scarce and Macquarie realised that many of the yeoman farmers, whom he saw as the future backbone of Australia, would have to be ex-convicts. He left his office in 1821 by when it was clear that the colony was flourishing; its population had risen to 38,000 and its economy was sound. Burgeoning prosperity owed much to Macarthur’s entrepreneurial shrewdness for he had been among the first to recognise that sheep would thrive in New South Wales. He also had a measure of good luck for, in 1807, when the first Australian wool was unloaded in Britain, the increasingly mechanised Yorkshire cloth industry had just been deprived of Saxon and Spanish imports. New South Wales merino was judged finer than its former rivals and the demand soared. By 1821 there were 290,000 sheep in Australia and within twenty years raw wool exports topped 10 million pounds annually. Sheep had been to the colony what tobacco had been to Virginia and sugar to the West Indies.

  8

  Wealth and Victory: The Struggle against France, 1793–1815

  Until 1914 the war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was sometimes called the Great War. It began in February 1793 and lasted until June 1815 with a thirteen-month break, which was little more than an armed truce, between April 1802 and May 1803. Historically, this war appeared to be an extension of the Franco-British conflict which had started in 1689, but it was markedly different from its predecessors, not least in the scale of the fighting and the aims of the contestants.

  First, it was seen by both antagonists as a struggle for survival, a Roman-Carthaginian duel that could only end with one side stripped of its overseas empire, commerce and independence. The French had learned from previous struggles that Britain’s greatest strength was its system of government credit which rested on public confidence. This confidence could be eroded to the point of collapse if, as both Revolutionary governments and Napoleon believed, Britain lost her Continental trade, which was the chief source of her wealth. With nothing to sell, the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ would have no surplus money to advance their government.

  From 1795 to 1805 Britain was threatened by invasion, and with it the prospect of occupation by a power bent on remodelling every nation it conquered according to Revolutionary principles. The monarchy would have been removed, the constitution dissolved, and a republic established. The pattern changed somewhat after 1803, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. States under his control were transformed into military dictatorships governed by puppet princes, whose main task was to supply men and cash for the French war machine. Individual freedom would have vanished had Britain become a Napoleonic satrapy, a point based on the experience of other countries in Europe, and repeatedly made by government propagandists. One, the author of The Dangers to the Country (1807), warned the Englishman that he would have to endure the bullying of the ‘ruffian familiars of the police’ on the streets, and have his domestic peace disturbed by ‘some insolent young officers, who have stepped in unasked to relieve their tedium while on guard, by the conversation of our wives and daughters.’

  This, unlike previous Franco-British wars, was a contest of ideologies. The French, at least during the 1790s, were animated by an urge to emancipate the people of Europe, and share with them the blessings of the new Revolutionary order based on equal rights for all men and government by the general will. The ideals of the Revolution appealed to many in Britain, particularly those excluded from power, who saw them as the blueprint for a new political order in their own country. Jacobin theories of equality also won converts, but they and more moderate apostles of the Revolution were soon driven underground. In 1794–5, the government, desperate to secure national unity and fearing the existence of what later would be called a fifth column, began the legal persecution of anyone suspected of Revolutionary sympathies. Their numbers and powers of persuasion were exaggerated, but nevertheless they became, like their French counterparts, bogey men intoxicated by wild fancies:

  I am a hearty Jacobin,

  Who owns no God, and dreads no Sin,

  Ready to dash through thick and thin for Freedom:

  Our boasted Laws I hate and curse,

  Bad from the first, by age grown worse,

  I pant and sigh for Universeal Suffrage.1

  And yet, in the political climate of the late 1790s, such a figure had a potential for mischief-making. War-weariness, food and anti-militia riots, the naval mutinies of 1797 and their successors, and the 1798 insurrection in Ireland were reminders that, at times, British political unity was brittle.

  Political propaganda which emphasised national solidarity was vital in what quickly became a total war in a modern sense. Sustained and effective resistance to France required the greatest ever mobilisation of Britain’s manpower and financial resources. Just over a tenth of Britain’s adult males were drafted into the armed services during the war, and even then there were continual complaints from commanders of shortages of men. By 1810 there were 145,000 sailors and 31,000 marines, 300,000 regular soldiers and militiamen and 189,000 volunteers, an early version of the Home Guard.

  The total cost of the war was just over £1000 million of which £830 million was consumed by the army and navy. Part of this sum came from increased customs and excise duties, which was why it was so important to maintain the flow of British trade, and from new imposts, including income tax which was first introduced in 1798 and had yielded £142 million by the end of the war.2 Government borrowing spiralled, and by 1815 the national debt stood at £834 million. It was not surprising that the rich were willing to invest so much of their money in government stock for it was, in a way, an insurance against imported, levelling Jacobinism.

  Britain clearly possessed the capacity to wage total war and at every stage outmatched her antagonist when it came to raising cash. This meant that when the going got bad, as it did in 1797 and again after 1806, Britain could continue fighting, even without allies. This ability to hang on counted for a lot, since the Franco-British conflict was essentially a war of attrition. Wearing down France, through weakening its economy, had been central to British strategy since the outbreak of the war. Remembering the triumphs of 1759–63, the government in 1793 looked to the sea as the means of bringing about the breakdown of France and, incidentally, the strengthening of Britain. The process was explained to the Commons in March 1801 by Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State for War, who had been one of its stoutest advocates:

  … the primary object of our attention ought to be, by what means we can most effectively increase those resources upon which depend our
naval superiority, and at the same time diminish or appropriate to ourselves those which might otherwise enable the enemy to contend with us in this respect.

  It was, he continued, therefore imperative to ‘cut off the commercial resources of our enemy, as by doing so we infallibly weaken and destroy their naval resources.’3

  Dundas’s war was an imperial contest, waged in the manner of the elder Pitt, in which Britain picked off her opponent’s colonies and swept her merchantmen from the seas at the same time as preserving, even enlarging, her own commerce. Some of the loot would be kept and the rest bartered for a European settlement designed to restrain France. As in 1763, Britain would emerge richer and stronger than ever, or, in the words of a pro-government versifier of 1798:

  Matchless Heroes still we own;

  Crown’d with honourable spoils

  From the leagued Nations won

  On their high prows they proudly stand

  The God-like Guardians of their native Land

  Lords of the mighty Deep triumphant ride,

  Wealth and Victory at their side.4

  The results of the naval war were up to expectations. In 1793 the French fleet was bottled up in its harbours, and a blockade imposed on its Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards. There followed a series of seaborne offensives against the French West Indian colonies and, after 1795, when Holland surrendered, the Dutch. As supporters of these operations predicted, they were highly profitable; the prize money from Demerara and Essequibo (now part of Guyana) was £200,000 and the invasion forces were followed by British planters keen to buy up sugar estates at knockdown prices.5 The cost in lives was enormous with a death rate of 70 per cent among sailors and soldiers, nearly all of them victims of malaria and yellow fever exacerbated by alcoholism.6 As the wastage rate among fighting men rose, local commanders decided to recruit free negroes, despite the protests of planters horrified by the idea of any black men trained in arms. In 1798 a new expedient was tried to increase the numbers of the West India Regiment and the army began buying slaves to fill its ranks; within nine years just over 6,800 had been purchased at a cost to the Treasury of £484,000.7