A fresh and lasting phenomenon in the history of imperial resistance emerged between 1770 and 1785: revolts by white settlers. While most rebellions came from indigenous peoples and slaves, a stronger and often more successful strand arose within the ranks of migrants who had made the Empire their home. The first of these settler rebellions occurred in the colonies of British North America. The Declaration of Independence, devised by the American settler leadership in 1776, was to become a model, admired and repeated at different moments in different parts of the world. Yet while this American rebellion appeared to be inspired by idealistic and revolutionary rhetoric, it arose from a far from selfless motive: the desire to seize other people’s land.
The white settlers in North America were a minority, sharing what they thought of as their continent with millions of Native Americans and hundreds of thousands of black slaves. The settlers wanted independence not for the high-minded reasons with which they are often credited, but because the British colonial power was thwarting their ambition to occupy native territory. The pattern of all future white settler rebellions, driven by the thirst for land, was etched in the 1770s, and recurred constantly until the end of the twentieth century. To achieve their goal, the settlers organised rebellions, resistance and revolutionary war. They were often successful.
The American rebellion of 1776 involved the outbreak of another world war, a repeat of the French and Indian War of the 1750s. France and Spain came out in support of the settlers and against Britain, their historic enemy. Rebellion and war created opportunities for others, and both in India and the Caribbean various groups sought to break loose from the imperial embrace.
The crisis in relations between Britain and its American colonies arose largely as a result of the expense involved in crushing Pontiac’s great Native American rebellion in 1763. The colonial expenditure of the London government had more than doubled during the hostilities of the 1750s, and Pontiac’s rebellion was the final straw, creating political trouble in England. Heavily taxed to pay for colonial wars, British landowners and legislators now sought, understandably, to extend taxation to the colonies. It was a burden the settlers were unwilling to shoulder.
Worse was to come, for the extension of taxation was accompanied by a more serious threat to the settlers’ future. The British effectively dashed their hopes of territorial expansion. The October 1763 Royal Proclamation on the
Native Americans had outlined the future of the newly enlarged territory of British America, but the details were not well received in the Thirteen Colonies. The great hinterland of the continent, west of a line from Quebec to New Orleans, had once been notionally in the sphere of the French, but it had also long been in the sights of ambitious and expansionist settlers from Britain. To their surprise and irritation, the Proclamation decreed that the land rights in these territories of the Native Americans, many of whom had already been pushed westwards by the settlers on the Atlantic seaboard, were to be recognised and respected. White settlement was to be expressly forbidden in these Native American lands, and all existing settlers were ordered to withdraw.
To control this new territory, and to police it against settler incursions, was the task of the British army - but now, the British government argued, the funds for these military operations were to be met by the white settlers. In order to raise revenues in the colonies for this purpose, in March 1765 George Grenville, the British first lord of the treasury, secured a parliamentary measure. The Stamp Act decreed that newspapers and pamphlets in the American colonies, as well as commercial and legal publications, were to be taxed. Grenville hoped this tax would meet the added cost of military defence, including the control of the new Native American territory in the west.
Grenville gave due warning of his scheme, but the white settlers were enraged. ‘No taxation without representation’ was their cry - although they had no intention of allowing ‘representation’ to their black slaves or to the Native American population. They soon embarked on a campaign of resistance to the proposed measure, encouraged by their about-to-be-taxed newspapers. Though relatively peaceful at first, their passive resistance soon exploded into full-scale war.
The settlers in the early stages had allies in the British parliament, which voted in 1766 to repeal the Stamp Act, albeit reiterating its right to tax the colonies. Yet money to pay for military operations in America had still to be found. One bright idea was to persuade the settlers to pay in kind for the British soldiers policing the settlers’ frontiers. An amendment to the Mutiny Act in 1766 allowed military commanders to secure lodging and food for their troops in the homes of the local inhabitants. This measure aroused almost as much resistance from the settlers as the stamp duty, notably in the town of Boston, Massachusetts.
An additional cause of settler unrest was Britain’s developing relationship with Canada. The Royal Proclamation gave fresh rights to Canada’s Native Americans, and had also made concessions to the large population of French settlers. Most of the white settlers in the former French province of Quebec were French-speaking Catholics - 100,000 lived there, and only 400 Protestants, according to General Guy Carleton, British governor of Canada. (Figures for the Native American population were not recorded.) If the French Canadians were not to prove rebellious like the British settlers further south, their wishes would have to be taken into account. General Carleton made a tactical alliance with the French landowners and the Catholic church, who became the power-brokers of the new colony, and his proposals were given legislative form in the Quebec Act of May 1774.
One effect of this Act, which repealed the Royal Proclamation of 1763, was to extend the frontiers of British Canada into the Native American territory to the south, as far as the junction between the Ohio and the Mississippi. The present-day American states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were effectively included within Canada. At the same time, the Act removed the guarantee of the Native Americans’ land rights that had been awarded to them in the Royal Proclamation ten years earlier. Although the Native Americans were still seen as valuable military allies, and the British wanted them to remain content and loyal, their land claims were extinguished in exchange for ‘presents’. In most of Canada, as elsewhere in the Empire, military rule became the norm. Native Americans in the frontier regions were placed under martial law, and remained so until 1830.
This solution to Canada’s constitutional problems was to compound the anger and distrust of the white settlers in the American colonies. The largely Protestant settlers were shocked by the details of the Quebec Act: not only were Canada’s frontiers being extended into the uncharted territory that they believed they had a right to occupy, but Quebec itself was handed over to the Catholic Church. The fact that the British now planned to depend on the formerly French settlers of Canada as their only reliable ally on the continent raised fears among settlers in the Thirteen Colonies that the British would soon have adequate military force at hand to limit their ambition to move west into Native American territory.
While the writing had been on the wall for the settlers ever since the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act appeared to extinguish for all time the settlers’ long-imagined right both to seize land beyond their existing frontiers and to exterminate the Native Americans when necessary. When the settlers’ rebellion finally broke out, in 1776, the slaughter of the Native Americans, many of whom sided in desperation with the British, was high on their agenda. American patriots might call their rebellion a war for liberty, but the indigenous people understood it as a struggle for land.1
While the British government and the American settlers squared up for battle on the mainland, the native peoples of the Caribbean also faced new threats to their lands, and embarked on their final acts of resistance. The Caribs and the Maroons, sometimes in tandem with the slaves and sometimes against them, fought their last battles against the Empire before being slaughtered or expelled. Black Caribs in St Vincent in 1772, and Maroons in Dominica in 1785, were drawn into revolt. Slaves too, notably in Jamaica, again seized the chance to try to break free.
The British also met with steady resistance in India in these years, in spite of the peace agreement achieved in 1769 with Haidar Ali and the kingdom of Mysore. Trouble now came from the Marathas, first in 1779 and again the following year - this time from Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, with renewed French backing. The Marathas of Nana Farnavis were successful in inflicting a humiliating defeat on the British at Wargaon in 1779, paving the way for further Maratha resistance in the early years of the nineteenth century, while Tipu Sultan’s memorable victory over Colonel William Baillie in 1780 was to remain in the annals of Empire as a signal defeat for the imperial forces.
World History
