China and Afghanistan both came under attack from British forces in the course of 1839 in ambitious undertakings that would change the face of empire. The Afghan city of Kabul was captured in August by the British Army of the Indus, while the Chinese island of Hong Kong was seized in the same month. In November a fleet of Chinese junks was sunk by the British navy off Canton - an event that marked the opening of the flrst ‘opium war’, designed to open Chinese ports to British trade. In January of the same year, the port of Aden was captured by a British naval force. The imperial strategy of seizing useful harbours while avoiding an occupation of the hinterland would become a hallmark of empire.
The Chinese war was a relative success for the British, the Afghan invasion a huge disaster. The two events ran in parallel. In 1840, a British force of 4,000 men, half British soldiers and half sepoys, commanded by General Sir Hugh Gough, occupied Chusan at the entrance to Hangchow Bay, blockading both Canton and Hong Kong. Canton itself was occupied in May 1841, and Gough’s fleet then moved slowly up the coast, to capture Shanghai in 1842. Nanking came under threat, but hostilities were formally concluded there with the Treaty of Nanking. Five ‘treaty ports’ were established on shore, giving the British unparalleled trading opportunities, while Hong Kong was formally incorporated into the Empire, to be retained by Britain until the end of the twentieth century.1
The attempt to include Muslim Afghanistan in the imperial fold was less successful. Dreamed up in London but executed by the authorities in India, the policy envisaged the establishment of temporary, and then permanent, control over the intervening independent states of Sind and Baluchistan, and the eventual occupation of the Punjab. Sind, in the lower Indus valley, was seized by British armies in 1843, and the Sikh rulers of the Punjab were forced into subjection after battles in 1846 and 1849. But the British capture of Kabul and other southern Afghan cities in 1839 soon proved to be a catastrophe.
For a brief moment, Britain’s triumphant occupation of Kabul appeared to be a striking and signiflcant geopolitical achievement, yet the project unravelled almost immediately. Afghan resistance to the British presence was sustained throughout 1840, and in November 1841 crowds of angry Afghans surrounded the British garrison, and several officers were killed. News of the subsequent disastrous British retreat to Jalalabad, through the snowy mountain passes of the frontier region, echoed around the Empire, putting fresh heart into resistance movements everywhere. The British defeat showed that imperial forces were enfeebled, vulnerable and overstretched - and might now be challenged.
The impact of this British humiliation was felt initially in India itself, whose population bore the cost of this unsuccessful conquest. As with the war against China, sepoys from India played a leading role in the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent debacle had a particular impact on these imperial legions. Hundreds of frost-bitten sepoys from the defeated army survived to tell the story of the demoralisation of British officers and soldiers they had witnessed during the retreat. Some believed that this humiliation was the fatal seed from which the Mutiny was to spring fifteen years later.2
In spite of the Afghan setback, the British continued to expand their empire in India throughout the 1840s. Yet the retreat from Kabul had shown that the Empire was not as powerful as it imagined itself to be, and the populations of the freshly invaded regions of Sind and the Punjab took heart from the Afghan resistance. Baluchi soldiers sought to repel the British invasion of Sind in 1843, as did the Sikh soldiers of the Punjab - heirs to the armies of Ranjit Singh - in 1845. Both Sind and the Punjab eventually succumbed to British firepower, but the battles were fierce and not without cost to the British. The Sikh victory at Chilianwala in 1849 sent a further tremor through the Empire, in another premonition of the events of 1857.
In other sections of the colonial portfolio, the period inaugurated by the Kabul disaster saw the creation of fresh zones of white settlement and the renewed growth of the indigenous opposition. In New Zealand, the Maoris showed immediate hostility in 1840 to new British settlement schemes, provoking the first of a series of resistance wars in 1843 that continued sporadically throughout the 1840s and beyond. Elsewhere, local peoples raised vigorous objections to the expansion of existing areas open to British pioneers in Australia, South Africa and Canada. The flow of migrants leaving Britain grew to tidal proportions in these years, though short of the huge scale it would achieve later in the century.3
These newcomers were met by the growing hostility of the Aborigines in Australia, while in Cape Colony the Xhosa maintained their long-term commitment to drive white settlers into the sea. The Xhosa were no longer the sole enemy of the British, for the heirs to the former Dutch settlers of South Africa, now established in independent Boer territories beyond Cape Colony, were embarked on the first of many wars against the Empire.
The white populations of Europe were not the only peoples forced onto the move by the expansion of the Empire. The formal abolition of slavery within the Empire in 1834 had obliged settlers everywhere to search for new sources of cheap labour, and the end of the apprenticeship system in 1838, in practice a brief extension of slavery, accelerated the process. Workers had to be brought from elsewhere, since freed slaves and most indigenous peoples refused to work for the imperial settlers. They came chiefly from the seemingly inexhaustible pools of labour in India, and later from China, many of them travelling through the new port facilities at Hong Kong. Just as the British used sepoys in India and Khoi-Khoi in South Africa to man their imperial armies, so the imperial outposts in the Caribbean and elsewhere were able to use this cheap Indian and Chinese labour to replace their slaves from Africa, and to provide a fresh economic resource for the Empire.
A flow of Indian ‘indentured’ labourers to the colony of British Guiana on the South American mainland began in 1838, and private recruiters sent thousands of Indians to Mauritius in 1839. An initial shipload of workers (described as ‘coolies’) sailed from Calcutta for the West Indies in 1845, disembarking at Trinidad and Jamaica. Earlier, in 1841, a parliamentary commission of enquiry into ‘the abuses alleged to exist in exporting Bengal Hill Coolies and Indian labourers’ had denounced a new system of slavery: ‘If West Indian voyages be permitted, the waste of human life and misery that will fall on the Coolies under the name of free labourers will approach to those inflicted on the negro in the middle passage by the slave trade.’4
Yet economic necessity drove workers along these new channels of migration, and over the next eighty years Indians became the majority population of Mauritius, outnumbered the Europeans in Natal, and grew to form one-third of the population of Trinidad. They also became a substantial minority in British Guiana and Fiji.5 Many in the early years received the harsh treatment reminiscent of the centuries of slavery. On John Gladstone’s estate in British Guiana, salt pickle was rubbed into the backs of ‘coolies’ who had been flogged. Yet Indian labour was relatively quiescent until the development of active trade unionism in the twentieth century. Chinese migrants, on the other hand - notably in Singapore, Sarawak, Australia, and Hong Kong itself - rebelled frequently, creating difficulties for the imperial authorities later in the century.
Slaves were no longer available in the 1840s, and soldiers to conquer and control the Empire were also in short supply. When a British ship arrived at New Zealand in January 1840 to establish a new colony, the captain was warned beforehand that no spare troops were available to assist his conquest. The British were hard-pressed militarily at the end of the 1830s on many fronts - notably at home, where the Chartists had embarked on campaigns of civil disobedience. In the northern counties of England, General Sir Charles Napier, a veteran of the Peninsular Wars, had been sent out with 6,000 troops to frighten the Chartists, while the Colonial Office warned that no additional troops would be available for foreign conquest, or even for police work, when ‘the most pressing demand for troops’ existed in every part of Britain itself.6
Soldiers were also needed in India and North America, where the Canadian rebellions of 1837-38 had necessitated rapid fresh redeployments. The London authorities noted with irritation that Australian governors in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were constantly complaining about ‘the inadequacy of their forces’ The governors were bluntly told that ‘not a spare regiment’ could be found anywhere. Yet in New Zealand the fierce Maori resistance to settlement throughout the 1840s was so strong that the British government was obliged to pay attention. Its reluctance to find extra troops was eventually overcome, and the Maori resistance was invariably met with the harsh conditions of martial law.
While Britain’s stretched forces were extending the Empire in New Zealand, Australia and India, they were also moving into the South China Sea, in the waters of Hong Kong, and pushing eastward from Singapore along the coast of Borneo. A renewed campaign to exterminate ‘pirates’, who had been picked off spasmodically in the 1830s, was launched in the archipelago south of the Strait of Malacca. The ‘piratical’ tax-collectors who made their living from exacting tolls on those who passed through their waters were now engaged in a long rearguard struggle. After 1842, with an end to the China war, the British sent their spare ships to attend to the suppression of ‘piracy’ further south. An added attraction for the sailors was the payment of a ?25 bounty for every ‘pirate’ head brought in.
Pangeran Makhota, a Muslim ruler on the island of Borneo, became a fierce opponent of the encroachments into Sarawak and Brunei of Lieutenant James Brooke, a freelance British naval operative who imposed himself on the region in the decade after 1841, with the official connivance of Captain Henry Keppel and HMS Dido.7 The Dayak ‘pirates’ were attacked along the northern Borneo coast in 1843, and their homes and villages were burned; but in 1844, they struck back, plundering passing British trading ships. This form of imperial warfare - attacks by British warships and retaliation by ‘pirates’ - continued throughout the 1840s.
The resistance of native peoples, and the arrival in London of information about British atrocities, often provided by missionaries, began to chip away at Britain’s self-confidence in its imperial project. William Gladstone, colonial secretary in 1846, outlined his distrust of imperial expansion:
The multiplication of colonies at the other end of the world must at all times be a matter for serious consideration; but especially at a time when we have already land almost infinite to defend that we cannot occupy, people to reduce to order whom we have not been able to keep in friendly relations, and questions in so many departments of government to manage.8
The distant resistance struggles of the 1840s helped to create serious doubts at home about the imperial mission abroad.
World History
