New territories were incorporated into the Empire in the early years of the nineteenth century as a byproduct of Britain’s counter-revolutionary war against France, resumed in 1803 after a breathing space registered by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. The Treaty, signed by the British, the French, the Spanish and the Dutch, declared that ‘peace, friendship, and good understanding’ would henceforward exist between the signatories. Prisoners and hostages were exchanged,1 and the British were obliged to abandon all their Caribbean conquests, with the exception of Trinidad and Tobago. They also returned Cape Colony in southern Africa to the Dutch, and withdrew their troops from Egypt; they were allowed to keep the new colony established at Ceylon.
The Amiens Treaty broke down in 1803, and a new war between Britain and France continued for a further twelve years, until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon, ruler of France since 1799, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1804, and France sought again to challenge the British in the Caribbean, as it had done with such success in the 1790s, with the support of its freed slaves. This time the French project was thwarted by the slave forces of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Haiti and by the sea battle in October 1805 at Trafalgar, from which the British emerged victorious. Having lost Tipu, his ally in India, and having failed to build on his occupation of Egypt, Napoleon was obliged thereafter to concentrate his attention on Europe.
With the French engaged in military campaigns in Europe, the British continued the expansion of their empire elsewhere. White settlers first arrived in Tasmania in 1803; Cape Colony was again seized from the Dutch in 1806; Buenos Aires was briefly captured from Spain in the same year, and lost a few months later; Ra’s al-Khaymah (today one of the United Arab Emirates) was seized in 1809; and Mauritius and the Seychelles were taken over in 1810. Indonesia was incorporated into the Empire in 1811 (though lost in 1816), Kandy (in central Ceylon) was taken in 1815, and Nepal in 1816.
In most of these territories, seized from the French or the Dutch, the change of imperial overlord was greeted with resistance from the local inhabitants, often more widespread than expected. Revolts and mutinies were frequent, notably in India in 1806 and 1809, while continuing rebellions in the Caribbean came from slaves and slave-soldiers, as well as from Maroons.
The resistance of princes continued in India in the early years of the nineteenth century, with a number of notable, though impermanent, military victories by the Maratha rulers, Daulat Rao Sindhia and Jeswant Rao Holkar. In Kandy, Wickrama Sinha outmanoeuvred a British army in 1803, and secured a postponement of the conquest of his kingdom until 1815. Resistance to the occupation of Indonesia in 1811 was also a protracted affair - the attempt to add this Asian jewel to the British crown being thwarted both by indigenous resistance and by the requirements of politics in Europe.
The local inhabitants also defeated the British when they attempted to move into Egypt and Latin America. The Egyptians destroyed a British army in 1807, leaving the great Mohamed Ali in supreme charge, while the Mayan Indians of British Honduras refused to accept incursions into their territory by loggers. Local resistance to British expeditions sent to seize Spanish-held territories along the River Plate in 1806 and 1807 was also successful. This period saw a revival of the tradition of white settler rebellion begun in North America in the 1770s. In Australia in 1808, and in South Africa in 1815, white settlers quarrelled among themselves, with some of them seeking to escape from the imperial embrace.
Meanwhile the native populations of conquered territories were treated according to the pattern of Britain’s earlier experience in the Americas, establishing guidelines for the future conduct of Empire. The slaughter of the Aboriginal inhabitants on the island of Tasmania started almost on the first day of settlement, in 1803, while the fierce repression of convicts held in the colony of New South Wales, mostly prisoners from the Irish revolt of 1798, provoked rebellion in 1802 and 1804. The attacks on ‘pirates’ in the Persian Gulf in 1809, and off the coast of Java in 1812 and 1813, were a pointer to the future, as was the campaign to seize land from the Xhosa on the frontiers of Cape Colony in 1811 - the first of many wars of extermination.
The scale of the repression in the colonies of the Caribbean did not go unnoticed in London, and several overly violent governors were brought back prematurely to London, notably Colonel Cochrane and Colonel Ainslie in Dominica, and Colonel Picton in Trinidad. As a result of the growing campaign against the slave trade, the British authorities had become better informed about conditions in the colonies.
None of Britain’s new imperial acquisitions were immune to the global desire to remove the shackles of slavery, and all were made more alert by the British parliamentary vote in 1807 to end the slave trade, believed by many to presage an end to slavery itself. The British had abolished slavery in Britain itself in 1772, but had continued to support the slave system within the Empire - an established institution that provided a welcome supply of cheap labour.
In March 1807, after long debate, the British parliament finally voted to end the slave trade.2 The trade had been a central feature of Britain’s foreign commerce for more than two centuries - endorsed, supported and profitably enjoyed by the royal family, as well as by the families of sundry courtiers, financiers, landowners and merchants. The personal and public wealth of Britain created by slave labour was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made possible both the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the Empire.
The trade was brought to an end partly by the useful political work of Quakers and other Christian dissidents, and partly through the efforts of parliamentary radicals. Yet it was also the work of slaves in the Caribbean who engaged in propaganda of the deed. Driving the anti-slave trade agitation was the accelerating rate of slave rebellion in the late eighteenth century, notably Tacky’s Jamaican rebellion in 1760, and Chatoyer’s resistance in St Vincent. Then came the slave revolutionaries of Haiti, who rebelled in August 1791. They had seized power, abolished slavery, and established the first black Republic in the Americas. Other islands saw serious uprisings by slaves and Maroons, who, with French help, seized control of large parts of Dominica, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St Vincent, Jamaica, St Lucia and Trinidad.
These rebellions (with assistance from the French and from the twin weapons of malaria and yellow fever) had defeated the two British armadas sent to destroy them, and killed thousands of seamen and soldiers. They also deprived the British of income from their sugar plantations. Since those in the forefront of the struggle were slaves recently arrived from Africa, the stark danger to British commercial interests of the continuing trade could not have been more graphically revealed.3
The vote of 1807 did not put an end to the international trade by other nations, nor did it terminate slavery. Several countries continued the trade, with half a million slaves arriving in the Americas in the 1820s - more than 60,000 a year. Each year 3,000 slaves were still being landed in Brazil in the 1850s. Slavery itself was not abolished in the British Empire until 1838, in the French Empire until 1848, and in the United States until 1863. Slavery persisted in Spanish Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888. The vote of 1807 was not always respected. The British in Asia continued to take advantage of the continuing trade. The governor in Mauritius, which had been conquered from the French in 1810, sought to befriend the existing French settlers by allowing them to continue importing slaves - some 30,000 of them between 1811 and 1821.
One tragic and unforeseen result of the decision to end the trade was its arousal of the false expectation among slaves that their servitude might soon be abolished. Slave rebellions occurred in Trinidad (1805), in Jamaica (1808 and 1809) and in Dominica (1813). Even the slave state of Cape Colony witnessed a revolt in 1808. More than thirty years passed after 1807 before the British finally abandoned slavery in their Empire - years that saw major slave rebellions in Jamaica, Dominica, Barbados, Honduras and Guyana. All were savagely repressed. Some among their participants claimed that the trumpeted news of an end to the trade had led them to believe that slavery itself was over.
World History
