The Empire Project

Hi, I'm Mike Braddock, and I teach history at the University of Sheffield,

including the early history of the British Empire.

And what I'm going to talk about today is the origins of the

empire and paying particular attention to

turning points in its early development.

Um,

I'm going to cover the whole period as far as I can

between 1517 100 but I'm going to pick out some key themes.

And in this first segment, I just wanted to talk about some general

analytic issues that might come up as we think about what

were the key moments in the development of the empire over these

critical 200 years.

And the first thing to ask, really, is

what was the Empire.

It's important to understand what it was like if we're going to understand

its origins and key moments in its development, and I'm following here.

Important book by John Darwin, who wrote about the English, the British Empire,

after 18 30

as a project rather than as a real thing and ambition to

assert control over a heterogeneous collection

of different kinds of overseas activity.

So he says four things about this empire that

emerged in what we think of its high point.

Firstly, it's a very mixed bag of overseas activities.

There are treaty ports like Hong Kong.

There are colonies.

There are Dominions that were originally colonies of white.

Settlement has become essentially self governing.

There are mandates awarded by the League of Nations,

and there are all sorts of informal engagements by the British overseas.

So the first thing to remember about the British Empire

is that it was a very varied phenomenon

at its high point.

Secondly, though, all these things were connected,

you can't understand the history of any one of these component parts without

understanding its connections with the rest of

what Darwin calls the British system.

So his third point is that it is a system,

although its individual parts are very mixed and

different, one from another.

They are all reliant on each other for their own particular histories,

and that constitutes a system.

But it's not a system, and this is his fourth point.

It's not a system dictated by a central government vision.

It's a system that grows out of all kinds of cultural social economic connections,

among them a government visions and government forms of authority.

But the empire is really held together by much

greater variety of connections in a much greater variety of activities.

So this is a very complex thing that we're talking about, a complex thing,

is likely to have had very complex origins,

and turning points in such a complex story are probably going to relate

to one part of a complex phenomenon rather than the whole thing.

So when I'm talking about turning points in the 1st 200 years,

I'm talking about key moments

in a continuous development of a very

varied set of relationships which ultimately produced

this very complex phenomenon that John Darwin talks

about for the period after 18 30.

So between 1517 100 I'm going to talk about

the origins of the empire.

So the outcome of a similar combination of

forms of influence and control and activity,

some of them sponsored by the government, some of them private enterprises,

some of them motivated by a desire for profit, some for governmental power,

some for religious liberation and so forth.

It's a very complex and varied set of

activities which only really have in common that

they took place overseas,

and ultimately, in one way or another,

they become the foundations for what we later recognised to be

the British empire.

So I might talk then about four main impulses in the development of this system.

The first one is a kind of extension of dynastic overseas expansion,

which has been going on throughout British history.

From the time when kingdoms developed in the

7th, 8th and 9th centuries, kings had always pursued

their dynastic interests through marriage and conquest,

and in the Middle Ages, the English had extensive holdings.

English kings had extensive holdings overseas, and then

in the 16th centuries,

or C turned more towards trying to extend their dynastic power within Britain.

But that dynastic element of political power was

important in the origins of the Empire.

And just to pick two immediate examples,

Bombay

and Tangier came to the British through royal

marriage or an extension of dynastic interests,

the second key way in which English

overseas expansion was driven in this period through

private enterprises, pursuit of profit,

a desire to escape religious prosecution, persecution,

an attempt to establish a new society of one kind or another,

a desire for adventure and discovery

and It is a great period of discoveries,

and I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail in a minute as well.

The third key interest was trade,

particularly fisheries in the first instance and then a pursuit of

goods in the Baltic Sea, for example,

a longer background of the attempt to establish a trading network in the Atlantic.

And then, fourthly, the fourth element of all this is where the money came from.

For these various enterprises who put up the capital for these exercises,

and Fifthly and only fifth e. Really.

There's attempts to establish new English societies on foreign territories.

Settlement

is a later element of all these developments between 1517 100

not the primary purpose.

So when we think about the origins of the empire,

it's not primarily of desire to colonise.

It's a desire to pursue all these other

interests which eventually give rise to colonising efforts

so we can see that between 1517 100.

There's this very varied set of enterprises and in some

ways that resembles the high empire that John Darwin describes.

The second Darwin's questions then,

is very varied set of activities what makes it a system.

And here I think again, there are parallels with the later period.

There are economic networks that tie all this together

the role of capital,

the role of trade, uh,

the role of diplomatic connection following economic interests.

They're also geographical connections.

The winds of the Atlantic took British ships to some places more easily than others,

and once they were there,

they the English activities tended to spread out from those points.

So there are geographical reasons why the British Empire

took the shape it did.

And thirdly, there are governmental

interests at work here which make it a system

the dynastic interests I've been talking about,

but eventually a more coherent attempt by government to

take advantage of all these activities and tie them together

in some kind of diplomatic,

coherent diplomatic hole

and to the benefit of the English crown.

So, in one way, as with John Darwin's book,

this series of lectures is really a

discussion about the relationship between political authority

and a wider set of overseas activities,

and how far political authority was able to

direct and impose shape on these activities.

How an empire emerges from that relationship

and it follows from this and this is my final preliminary

comment that if we're looking for turning points in all this,

it's unlikely that a single

moment is going to affect all this complex set of relations at once

rather than turning points in the origins of empire.

There are key moments in the developments of

relationships which are really continuously developing over centuries,

in fact.

But I'm going to talk about four different kinds of turning points,

and I'll come back to this in the final lecture.

But firstly,

turning points in the way that political

authority interacted with this set of relationships.

Secondly,

changing purposes of government in trying to

shape and take control of these relationships.

Thirdly, changing economic interests at work in these networks

and fourthly

the presence in regions that were subsequently very

important to the empire as it developed so

turning points in the settlement of particular regions

which subsequently became critical to the British Empire.

So it's a complex picture, but it's not one without patterns,

but I think we have to get away from the thought

that there is an empire which is being built by design

coherently from a centre and instead think of

a multitude of different kinds of overseas activities,

which the government is sometimes helping, sometimes shaping

and overall trying to take advantage of.