Britannia's Auxiliaries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Financial Investments ◽  
British Case ◽  
British State ◽  
Extensive Involvement

This book provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many different European inputs—financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from without—through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases. Britannia’s Auxiliaries explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity, at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation both by private interests in the British Empire and by the British state. Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain control of their empires. In the British case, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests.

scholarly journals Merchants and States: Private Trade and the Fall of Madras, 1746

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Søren Mentz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The State ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Economic Surplus ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
British State

Michael Pearson has argued that “rights for revenue” was an important element in the European way of organizing long-distance trade in the early modern period. The state provided indigenous merchant groups with commercial privileges and allowed them to influence political affairs. In return, the state received a part of the economic surplus. The East India Company and the British state shared such a relationship. However, as this article demonstrates, the East India Company was not an impersonal entity. It consisted of many layers of private entrepreneurs, who pursued their own private interests sheltered by the Company’s privileged position. One such group was the Company servants in Asia. The French conquest of Madras in 1746 and the following period of British sub-imperialism in India demonstrate that the state had traded off too many rights. Through the business papers of Willian Monson, a senior Company servant in Madras, the historian can describe the fall of Madras as a consequence of deteriorating relationships between private interests within the Company structure. Directors, shareholders, Company servants and private merchants in India fell out with each other. In this situation, the British state found it difficult to intervene.

THE CARING FISCAL-MILITARY STATE DURING THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756–1763

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 921-941 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERICA CHARTERS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
German States ◽  
British State ◽  
Military Victory ◽  
Practical Level

ABSTRACTThis article re-examines the concept of the fiscal-military state in the context of the British armed forces during the Seven Years War (1756–63). This war, characteristic of British warfare during the eighteenth century, demonstrates that British victory depended on the state caring about the wellbeing of its troops, as well as being perceived to care. At the practical level, disease among troops led to manpower shortages and hence likely defeat, especially during sieges and colonial campaigns. During the 1762–3 Portuguese campaign, disease was regarded as a sign of ill-discipline, and jeopardized military and political alliances. At Havana in 1762, the fear, reports, and actual outbreaks of disease threatened American colonial support and recruitment for British campaigns. Throughout the controversial campaigns in the German states, disease was interpreted as a symptom of bad governance, and used in partisan criticisms concerning the conduct of the war. Military victory was not only about strategy, command, and technology, but nor was it solely a question of money. Manpower could not simply be bought, but needed to be nurtured in the long term through a demonstration that the British state cared about the welfare of its armies.

scholarly journals ALIEN SEAMEN IN THE BRITISH NAVY, BRITISH LAW, AND THE BRITISH STATE, c. 1793 – c. 1815

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-707 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA CAPUTO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State

AbstractDuring the ‘long eighteenth century’, several thousands of sailors born outside British territories served in the Royal Navy. This phenomenon, and the peculiarities of their employment compared to that of British seamen, remain largely unstudied. This paper aims to show that, as far as disabilities or privileges were concerned, official legislation only played a very small part in making alien seamen's experiences in the navy distinct from those of their British colleagues. More broadly, this article argues that, whilst transnationalism can be overemphasized, there are specific contexts and groups of people for which the power of the state falters when it comes to obstructing movement, and indeed it is forced, for its very survival, to act strategically against the barrier to circulation that frontiers normally constitute. In similar circumstances, the origins of the individuals concerned, intended as official labels that states normally use to classify them, control them, and claim or disclaim ownership over them, can become all but meaningless. Thus, naval sailors, as useful state servants, can be an excellent case-study to understand the category of legal ‘foreignness’ as it developed in modern nation-states, and the tensions inherent to it.

scholarly journals THE STATE AND THE ASSASSINATION THREAT IN BRITAIN, 1971–1984

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON BALL
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
Major Site ◽  
The Past ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
British State

AbstractThe emergence of London as a major site of political murder caught the British state by surprise in the early 1970s. Assumptions about assassination – as an event linked to the British empire – built up over seven decades – had to be abandoned in under a decade. The change in Britain's understanding of its vulnerability within the international system was traumatic. This change took place in three stages, beginning in 1971, 1978, and 1984. There were strong elements of continuity between the Callaghan government and the first Thatcher government. It was the second Thatcher government that made a more radical break with the past. A new understanding of assassination conspiracies altered fundamentally the state's approach to security.

Faith Deployed for a New Shiʿi Polity in India: The Theology of Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAJJAD RIZVI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
North India ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Textual Practices

AbstractWhile Shiʿi Islam and its imperial expressions were known in the Deccan sultanates from the sixteenth century and expressed in court-sponsored production of theology, it was only in the eighteenth century that Shiʿi political theology emerged in North India in the new state of Awadh. In this paper, I argue that one can discern in the theology of Sayyid Dildar ʿAli Nasirabadi (d. 1820) a clear attempt at forging a new Shiʿi theological dispensation to bolster the state, based upon a tripartite attack on three rival approaches to faith and politics: Akhbarism, Sufism, and the Sunni rationalism of Farangi Mahall. A careful examination of these textual practices within the Awadhi context demonstrates one example of how Indian thinkers responded to the decline of Mughal power and articulated alternative epistemologies in vernacular contexts before the advent of the British Empire.

Art in a Cool Climate: The Cultural Policy of the British State in European Context, c. 1780 to c. 1850*

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mandler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
The State ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
National Integration ◽  
European Context ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
British State ◽  
Cool Climate

Is it possible to speak of a ‘cultural policy’ of the ‘State’ in this period without falling into anachronism? Patronage of the fine arts had been a traditional (self-selected) responsibility of individual nobles and princes. Although sovereign nobles and princes were taking on in this period more explicit responsibilities for police and for more of their people, it is often difficult to distinguish between their activities as individual patrons, their activities as courtly patrons, and their activities as States. This chapters examines what was distinctive about the British State and its cultural policies in the period during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It argues that both the British State and its posture towards culture carried certain features that put them in the Western European mainstream towards the end of the eighteenth century. It also assesses the extent to which Britain was also affected by events in Europe, by which the fine arts were yoked bureaucratically to education and religion in programmes of national integration.

Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State

AbstractThis article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

scholarly journals Irish Convict Transportation and the Reach of the State in Late Hanoverian Britain

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Simon Devereaux
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
The State ◽  
Leeward Islands ◽  
Cape Breton ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Convict Transportation ◽  
British State

Abstract The difficulties encountered by English authorities in resuming the regular and effective transportation of convicts overseas between the loss of the original American destination in 1775 and the opening of a penal settlement in New South Wales in 1787 are well known to historians of criminal justice. Far less so is the contemporaneous convict crisis in Ireland. This article considers the practice of convict transportation from Ireland throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, it examines a series of three dramatic incidents of the late 1780s in which Irish convicts were unscrupulously (though not illegally) abandoned in Cape Breton, Newfoundland and the Leeward Islands. It argues, first, that such practices were not entirely surprising given the great difficulties that had often been experienced in transporting convicts from Ireland even before 1775. It goes on to suggest that the subsequent decision of authorities in London to assume a directive role in the transportation of Irish convicts was informed by changing perceptions of the British state in both its national and imperial dimensions.

British Private Traders between India and China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Hanser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
Personal Gain ◽  
Commercial System ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
British State ◽  
India And China

During the eighteenth century, China was by no means part of the emerging British empire, formal or informal, but it was on the borderlands of that empire. Within a rapidly changing commercial and political context, British private traders, investors in India and their agents in China created new connections between the subcontinent and the southeast coast of China. In this new commercial system, British private traders reigned supreme. But this revolution was not merely commercial. Rather, a new, predominantly British financial system linking India and China was forged, which ran parallel to other existing networks of Indian-based commission merchants such as those of the Portuguese, Muslims, Armenians, and later, Parsees. However, with these new financial connections came political entanglements. Investors in India and their British agents in China used the coercive power of the British state (without its permission or knowledge) and their own private Indian militia to enforce their contracts with Chinese merchants. Before the rise of aggressive agency houses such as Jardine, Matheson & Company, and the expansion of the nineteenth-century opium trade, eighteenth-century British private traders in search of personal gain drew China into the financial and political orbit of Britain’s burgeoning Asian empire.

scholarly journals Pirates vs. Press Gangs: The Battle for the Atlantic

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denver Brunsman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
State Actors ◽  
British State ◽  
High Seas

Abstract Pirates in the Atlantic Ocean have excited imaginations ever since they stole from merchant ships and battled naval vessels in the Age of Sail. But pirates also illustrate an underappreciated process in the development of modern states and empires: the struggle between state and non-state actors to establish a monopoly of violence on the high seas. This essay traces this contest over violence in three stages: (1) the challenge posed by English pirates to Europe’s dominant imperial power, Spain, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (2) the threat made by these same pirates to the emerging British Empire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and (3) the successful efforts of the British state to exert control over the Atlantic through state-sponsored forms of piracy, privateers and press gangs, in the eighteenth century. The British established naval supremacy and consolidated imperial control over the Atlantic by monopolizing the same violent methods once used by pirates.

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