The Limits of Empire
The Effects of the American Revolution on the British Empire
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The American Revolution (or the American War), from 1775 to 1783, was only a part of a long string of Britain's Empire's Wars, during which squabbling ruling factions attempted to control what can be collectively known as Englishmen. After generations of bloodletting, marching, pillaging and building, the British Empire reached the limits of the administrative and communications systems then available by 1774. The 1774-83 conflict was the first failure of the Imperial system that had run Britain since the Glorious Revolution in 1688. However, its end changed the Imperial system in time for the conflicts triggered by the French Revolution. The American Revolution, thus, helped Britain to fight Napoleon by challenging its very fabric and requiring reform and change.
A Legal Empire: From Magna Charta to the US Constitution
England has had its share of kings and queens, but a common thread throughout its history has been a certain exceptionalism; it defies tyranny consistently, sometimes at substantial cost in blood and treasure. Not even the Romans could make Britons simply roll over and take orders. Resistance to arbitrary rule or privilege is even a part of its mythology. Well known to most are the traditions of Arthur of Camelot, a quasi-mystical king who may have had some substance. After the last shipload of Romans departed, they left behind a Pendragon—war duke. From there the record is hazy, but the legend is strong: a small body of men kept the peace in one part of Britain, a peace based on equality and fairness. The spirit of equality in Arthurian legends has persisted in British history since then, though scholars debate and dismiss the relevance of how Christian these "knights" were.
One successor to Arthur was Alfred, the only English king with “the Great” attached to his name. While there was an Aethelred (or Ethelred, depending on sources) of Wessex in the 9th Century who traditionally called himself the first King of the Anglo-Saxons, historians agree on little else about his life and the extent of his authority. Historians say his legal and military system formed the traditional foundations of the Anglo-Saxon-American system. Ethnographers and historians agree that Alfred’s name is attached to one foundation of the Anglo-Saxon legal system: under ideal conditions, the King's courts treat all persons equally, even if privileges that exempted many often confused the process. His military system was a defense in depth by locally living settlers, not unlike the late Western Roman Empire, but instead of central control, Alfred spread out the responsibility for local defense to nobles. This was the basis of the Anglo-American militia system, still seen as a remnant today.
Combined, the possibly real Arthur and the known-but-mysterious Alfred formed a considerable tradition of self-reliance, local justice, and a locally derived peerage that depended not on a faraway king but on local resources. While kings, queens, and lord protectors would come and go over the centuries, not one of them would easily rule the British Isles without their consent.
When William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he radically changed the Alfredian codes but kept much of the military system, transforming it into his own admirable creature. The House of Anjou eventually joined the Norman/Anglo-Saxon union, merging the thrones of half of France and England by the mid-12th Century. The resulting House of Angevin/Plantagenet was ruling England and a third of modern Europe in 1215. In that year, John I's barons presented him with a statement outlining his limitations, a document we now call the Magna Charta, or Great Charter.
Based on the 10th Century Charter of Liberties, the 13th Century Great Charter limited how the British Isles raised taxes, deployed and raised troops, and approved or disapproved archbishop elections and the creation of laws. When John denounced it before the ink was dry, the result was civil war. The Charter was reissued in 1216, recast in 1225, and periodically hauled out for every monarch who ever claimed to rule in England. It remained in force intact in Britain and Wales until 1829, and has had only minor surgery since.
The Magna Charta’s lasting legacy is habeas corpus, which legally requires proving that anyone committed a crime at all, or that a legal person committed it. Under it, judicial abuse is nearly impossible when observed, and it has been one of the least abused legal traditions in the American-British system. But beyond that, the Charter’s limits on supreme authority—indeed, it denies that any temporal “authority” can be “supreme”—seem to have encoded themselves into the English language.
After the Great Charter there were centuries when no one expected anything worse could happen. Laws were observed by tradition; courts were perverted by “interest;” untimely deaths and civil wars put monarchs on the English throne, sometimes for only a few days. Only habit upheld the need of the people to have a uniform law and by grudging force. As Plantagenet, Lancaster, and York gave way to Tudor and Stuart, there were revolts, riots, and civil conflicts that assured whoever tried to rule England that they needed to be fair or they simply wouldn’t be around.
From the late Middle Ages, there has been discussion of the “English constitution,” which meant an inherited understanding of the basis of all laws. Although never written, this small “c” constitution has served as the basis of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, according to legal minds and philosophers. Parliament issued the "English Bill of Rights" to William of Nassau before his enthronement; this was the closest Britain ever came to a written constitution. That document let the new Dutch king know that there was a limit to his power. Since he assumed control of a country that had functionally ejected his predecessor, it had to have had an impact equal to that of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The American Articles of Confederation made little impression on Britain since they echoed those of the Swiss cantons in many respects, yet they preserved a semblance of unity, but the Constitution of 1787 made a slightly distinct impression, reflecting the two houses of governance that had been in European practice for generations. The independence of the judiciary, however, was intriguing to the Empire because it presented a means by which courts far away from Britain could effectively administer British interests by slamming gavels without reference from the home country. By that simple mechanism, governors from Ireland to Australia to India and Bermuda could act independently within a well-defined guideline: British law. The “checks and balances” found in the Construction was an important instrument of control if there was no large ground force, which Britain rarely had. When no single branch of government—Parliament, ministry or courts—could effectively trump the other, simply pointing to the bureaucrats and the process could avert civil conflicts, dynastic disputes and even contested elections. It made the crown autonomous and increasingly irrelevant. The British thought it odd that in America the head of state and government were the same (the President), where for most of the rest of the world they were separate (crown and prime minister). The incapacity of George III and the regency of his son Clarence (George IV) resulted from a strengthened balance between the Imperial government and civil authority. Britain never established its own constitution, but it has adapted the American Constitution's mechanisms since its publication.
Technical Realities: Limits of Imperial Governance in the 18th Century
Great Britain did not control the largest empire in the world in 1775, but it had to control much of a continent across a large ocean, an attribute that it shared with Spain. But Spain had been trying with often limited success to control its New World holdings for the better part of two centuries, fighting off England, the Netherlands, the Pope, North African corsairs and France, not to mention the occasional civil war and an ongoing conflict with Portugal and a few million aboriginals that resisted being enslaved. Since the Armada of 1588, Spain had slipped into an advanced state of decay, and by 1770 was still on the downhill to chaos. Holding all her overseas colonies for another century was unlikely, and it appears as if many Spaniards were aware of it. Spanish alcaldes in Latin America needing instructions from Madrid could wait for years or decades for an answer, sometimes until the principals were dead and the original bureaucrat had long before returned to Spain or moved elsewhere.
But the English still held onto everything east of the Mississippi and a rather vague line between Georgia and Florida. Russia held trading stations along the Pacific coast, in Alaska and in the Sandwich Islands (modern Hawaii). France moved many Acadians from Quebec to Louisiana, moderately under Spanish protection but really forming their own colony. Yet, the English colonies seem to have been the healthiest and most robust, even among the islands of the Caribbean. How?
English administrative methods and attitudes towards the government played key roles in the success of the English colonies, even with the “German” Kings that followed William and Mary. The colonial government, still controlled by bureaucrats, had limited reach and even less influence over business practices and daily life. Since the coronation of William of Orange in 1688, the dominant Williamite/Whig political economy posited that labor was the root of all wealth and allowed almost anyone access to the tools for self-reliance. A colony that could hold a piece of land, farm it for long enough to raise capital for improvements, could become self-administrating and could be self-supporting within a few years. Cash crops such as tobacco and hemp raised tremendous revenues with investors, as did sugar and maize (corn), both easily distilled into alcohol. New World cotton lacked profitability until the invention of the gin in the early 19th Century.
This emphasis on the power of labor was a Dutch philosophy, one that had made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest nations in Europe that had developed despite Spain’s theoretical control of the country. It also flew in the face of Renaissance political economy, which valued only the control of land. This outlook concentrated wealth in the hands of a few who owned the land, who, by extension, were the only ones who could decide what happened to it and how others living on it should be governed. This was the Continental viewpoint and that of the Jacobite/Tory English who supported James II Stuart in the 1688-89 crisis. It was this political and economic view that dominated Hanover thinking and the Southern colonies in North America. New England was decidedly Williamite; the Middle Colonies were about evenly split. This made New England the center of the American economic universe for manufactures, and because of its independent nature, the hotbed of revolution.
Believing that a ruling class that owned land should be in charge of everything made the American Tories very loyal to those in England who believed likewise, and when New England burst into open rebellion the South and the Middle Colonies remained quiescent for a time, most of the leadership believing that the whole thing would blow over. When the idea that Americans could create a new country with its own manufactures, based on an agrarian/commercial trading economy, caught on, the Tories remained loyal to the Crown, but increasing numbers of others found themselves drawn to the ideas and the apparent inevitability of independence. English administration methods were light-handed until the war went badly in New England, but then a “march of folly” began in Britain. The folly was that the English believed they could beat, shove, and cow the Americans back into obedience to English law and the Crown, and that they also had to beat, shove, and cow all those who did not agree. Tories pointed to Scotland and the eventual submission obtained there; Whigs pointed to Ireland and the grumbling submission that never lasted more than a generation there. Few knew of a way out of the ideological mess that originated with how money was to be made, and how much there could be of it.
As the war ended in New England and wound down in the Middle Colonies, Britain believed it could hold on to the South if it couldn’t hold everything. It could protect their Caribbean investments and provide a base against Spain in the future...and perhaps the Americans if needed. But the Americans fought just well enough to be rid of the British in the South, and while they defeated their former masters at Yorktown, they also defeated the former British Indian allies in the Ohio country with an ease that surprised even the Americans. As France and Spain, the Netherlands and even Russia piled into the war effort, Britain found itself not only overextended but overtaxed. The country was going broke, and only the manufacturing segment was making enough capital to keep the system going.
By 1782 it was clear that the British way of fighting and paying for wars wouldn’t work on the Americans. British aristocratic dominance depended on a subordinate relationship between the levels of nobles who provided the wealth and the direction for society, hopefully in concert with their worship at church. American/Whig free-market philosophy let citizens make whatever they could, whenever they could, and however they could. Whig rulers worked to protect wealth, not control it, and had no truck with churches. With the end of the war, many in Britain understood that the basis of wealth had to shift if they wanted to survive the next war.
Thus was born the economical basis for the continuing Industrial Revolution, where laborers became servants of the factories, not the lords. They earned wages, not an allowance, and they could turn their skills to their own use, even go into business themselves if they were so inclined. This kind of business innovation took hold in English manufacturing centers and spread throughout the British Isles wherever there was coal for fuel and water for transportation.
The Jewels in the Crown: The Colonies
Losing the American War wasn’t the end of the British Empire, merely the end of the first phase of growth. At the beginning of the, Britain was chronically short on everything but demands for more money, men and materials. By its end, though heavily in debt, Britain had replaced its shortages with innovation, forward thinking, and newer ideas that were only made possible by superior industrial and financial organization. The “wizard war” of 1939-45 had nothing on the “inventor’s war” of 1775-1783.
Critical among the campaigns of the war was the late naval campaign in the West Indies, where British forces held the Bahamas, Antigua, and Jamaica. Small in themselves, they formed a naval barrier between the parts of the Spanish New World colonies in the event of another war, and that was only a generation away. The West Indies bases were critical to the naval war that France secured supplies from the Americas, and once Spain became France’s ally, to destabilize Spanish specie shipments. The British hold on a few islands in the Caribbean was enough to affect Continental finance.
Far away from the Americas, British naval forces outfought the French in 1782. British traders were quick to export cotton goods, tea, and other high-value goods. Britain’s relationship with India, once the American War was over, gradually shifted from trader to competitor to ruler as they outfought and outmaneuvered the Mughals, who usually refused to cooperate with each other. Britain, fighting a handful of pitched battles against forces far larger than themselves, secured trade agreements with the largest and most powerful states in India. The result, by 1805, was British dominance of the second most populous country on Earth. Though it was expensive to maintain for a generation, that Britain had secure bases and access to markets and manpower that France could never match was enough to keep the engine of British finance running at top speed.
Discovered just before the Revolution and colonized just after, Australia was a faraway desert that could absorb whatever excess energies (and people) Britain could not afford to keep. Vagrants, petty and serious criminals, seditionists, and adventurers moved to the new land on the other side of the world, and there they eventually prospered and grew. But more importantly, the Empire kept growing throughout the wars with France, so that there was always hope for a future that investors could back and shipbuilders could get credit for.
Just across the St. Lawrence River from America, Canada was a cornerstone of the British Empire for the next century. Though not as populous as the US, it was a toehold on vast resources that was fought over one more time from 1812 to 1815. Fighting on a vast battle front that stretched from the Atlantic to Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Mississippi, one of Britain’s goals was to gain access to the Gulf of Mexico and the interior of North America. Holding onto the Great Lakes was critical to controlling a route to the Mississippi. The British defeat on Lake Erie in 1813 made Canada’s chance of being a trade competitor to the US fade; Andrew Jackson’s decisive victory in the swamps around New Orleans in 1815 ended them. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Britain rushed to her aid, and in return had leverage to get the Romanovs to reduce their Pacific power, allowing western Canada access to the Pacific. Two military losses and a diplomatic coup in the space of three years allowed Canada to become a treasure house.
Despite the apparent embarrassment of the loss of her most important colony, and because of it, the British Empire thrived and prospered after 1783. The demands of the global conflict strengthened it, reforming their economic and legal methods to compensate for the loss and make new profits. Britain had found the limits of the Empire in 1776, and improved its methods continually until World War I.
The American War stretched Perfidious Albion enormously, but she grew strong to take up the strain.
Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries
Although Battalion takes place generations after the Revolution, a curious thing about the impact of the American War on Anglo-American relations was that, by the end of the 19th Century, the relations between British and American troops (though not their leadership) was as if nothing untoward had happened.
And Finally...
On 27 June:
1743: The Battle of Dettingen takes place near Karlstein am Main in Bavaria. It was the last time an English sovereign (George II) commanded and troops (English, Hanoverian, and Austrian) in battle, barely defeating/escaping the French during the War of the Austrian Succession.
1898: Joshua Slocum lands his 36-foot gaff-rigged oyster sloop Spray at Newport, Rhode Island, completing the world’s first solo circumnavigation by boat. Slocum left Boston on 24 April 1895 and sailed roughly 46,000 miles over three years.
And today is INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD DAY, observing the creation of the IWW in Chicago, Illinois on this day in 1905. The Wobblies employ revolutionary industrial unionism as their philosophy and tactics, connecting with socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements, and they’re still around.