British Empire

A

2

Australia

Though English expeditions had landed in Australia in the late 1600s, original assessments of the usefulness of the continent were not enough to motivate a large-scale interest in colonization. It was the more thorough explorations of Captain James Cook in the 1770s, coupled with the loss of the American colonies around the same time, that changed this. Though remote, Australia became important to the British, both as a strategic port near East Asia, and as a destination for British convicts after the loss of the American colonies. As a result, a British fleet composed mainly of convicts was dispatched to Botany Bay in the Australian region of New South Wales, resulting in the foundation of Sydney in 1788.

A

3

Consolidation

In the years following the American Revolution, the British government attempted to consolidate and tighten control over its territory in India and Canada. The India Act of 1785 subjected the East India Company’s administration to the scrutiny of a board of control. Under the governor-generalship (1786-1793) of Lord Cornwallis, Britain put administration in India into the hands of a professional civil service within the East India Company, though the company itself remained a trading concern. The Canada Act of 1791 attempted to ease tensions between French and British inhabitants in Canada somewhat by separating the region into Upper Canada, primarily English speaking, and Lower Canada, primarily French speaking.

B

19th Century

B

1

The Napoleonic Wars

Britain’s involvement in wars with France after 1793 gave a fresh spur to the growth of its empire. In 1794 Britain again captured the French sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. This resulted in a glut of sugar on the British market and contributed indirectly to British legislation in 1807 abolishing the slave trade, by virtue of the fact that production was so high that few new slaves were needed.

Britain’s Mediterranean position and its route to the east were secured during the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), primarily due to the naval triumphs of British Admiral Horatio Nelson. First, Nelson stopped Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the Battle of the Nile, which gave control of the entire Mediterranean to the British. Then, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson destroyed a French fleet on its way to land troops in Italy. By decimating the French navy, Nelson ended any possible threat to the British islands from Napoleon and ensured British naval superiority for much of the 19th century.

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America was not a theater of operations until friction over neutral trading rights and boundaries led to the War of 1812, during which the Americans seized York (now Toronto) in Upper Canada, and the British sacked Washington, D.C. The inability of American forces to make significant advances into Canada confirmed the survival of British North America.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the Netherlands sided with France, and Britain seized several Dutch possessions, including the Cape Colony, in South Africa; Ceylon (later Sri Lanka), off the Indian coast; Java, in Indonesia; and parts of Guiana, in South America. Though Java was returned to the Dutch, most of these possessions were retained by the British under the agreement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

B

2

South Africa

The acquisition of the Cape Colony from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars allowed the British to establish a strong presence in southern Africa. Thousands of British colonists began to arrive after 1820, and English became the official language in 1822. Slavery, which had been heavily relied upon by the Dutch, was abolished in 1833. In 1843 the British established the coastal colony of Natal.

The Boers, who were descendants of the original Dutch and German settlers, resented British rule, and thousands of the Boers migrated north, eventually founding the interior African republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

B

3

India

In India, Lord Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, made a series of conquests, so that by 1805 Britain in effect controlled Delhi and had made the native Mughal emperor into a puppet. In 1828 English replaced Persian as the official language of government in India, and Christian missionary activity increased. British superiority was finally completed with the conquest of the Punjab and Sind regions in the 1840s.

However, the Indian population gradually began to resent British rule, feeling that the British had no respect for native cultures and traditions. These feelings came to a head in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, in which Indian soldiers (called sepoys) under the command of the East India Company staged an armed uprising. The rebellion was put down by the British, but not before extensive loss of life on both sides. As a result, the British gave up trying to anglicize India and focused on governing efficiently while working in tandem with traditional elements of Indian society. After 1858 India ceased to be administered through the East India Company and was brought directly under British government, with a viceroy and a separate secretary of state in London who served in the Cabinet.

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