For three and a half centuries Europeans extended the bounds of their overseas possessions. In the half century that commenced in the 1770s the scope of imperial holdings shrank dramatically.

Twenty countries recognized today as sovereign states gained independence as a direct or indirect result of political upheavals in phase 2.¹ Decolonization was confined to the Americas.

Phase 2 began in British North America (bna) with the outbreak in 1775 of armed conflict between colonists and troops loyal to the British monarchy and to the monarch’s local agents. In the background was a decade of tension between the metropole and residents of several colonies, notably Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Disputes initially arose from parliamentary decisions following suc­cessful prosecution of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) to impose new taxes on the colonists and station troops among them. The American Duties (“Sugar”) Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act the following year came as a shock to colonists, many of whom had fought on Britain’s side and expected to be treated more rather than less favorably now that France’s loss of North American mainland possessions ended the most serious threat to bna security. A hastily gathered assembly of prominent figures from several colonies, the Stamp Act Congress, objected in principle to taxation by a distant legislature in which colonists were not represented. The scope of disagree­ment widened from political theory to political activism with the Boston Massacre (1770) and Tea Party (1773), British closure of the port, and formation of local militias to defend colonists against British troops.

The first major armed confrontation, the Battle of Bunker Hill, took place in June 1775 on a peninsula opposite Boston harbor.² In a dramatic escalation from skirmishes with local residents at Lexington and Concord two months earlier, the battle involved volunteer units drawn widely from the New England colonies, en-

gaged thousands of troops on both sides, led to extensive property damage (much of Charlestown was leveled by fire from naval bombardment), and ended with substan­tial casualties: 268 dead on the British side, 115 on the colonists’.

The concluding event of phase 2 was another major battle, fought in 1824 on the outskirts of Ayacucho in the Peruvian highlands. The town, known earlier as Huamanga, had been founded in 1539 by Francisco Pizarro. The battle pitted the conquistador’s successors—the Spanish viceroy of Peru and royalist forces—against Colombian and Peruvian troops seeking independence. The royalist side was de­feated and the viceroy captured in the decisive, and final, effort by Spain to retain a hold on the New World mainland. By 1825, when the independence of Charcas (Bolivia) was proclaimed, the imperial edifice constructed by Spain on the mainland had collapsed.

In the years between the battles of Bunker Hill and Ayacucho, every European state with significant New World colonies lost its most economically and strategically valuable New World territory. The British were the first to undergo major loss. Thirteen North American colonies fought from 1775 to 1781, achieving a decisive military victory at Yorktown, then engaged in intense diplomacy to form one polity out of many. The independent status of the “first new nation” was formally acknowl­edged by Britain in 1783? The French came next. A massive slave revolt broke out in 1791 in their most lucrative colony, Saint Domingue. This led to de facto control of the entire island of Hispaniola a decade later by forces commanded by the ex-slave general Francois Toussaint L’Ouverture. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte sent twenty thousand soldiers across the Atlantic to restore French control and reimpose slavery. Toussaint was captured and exiled to France, where he died in captivity. But his associates waged a successful guerrilla campaign against French troops and in 1804 proclaimed the independence of Saint Domingue, renamed Hayti or Haiti.

The initial challenges to Spanish rule came not from its most important New World colonies, as in the British and French cases, but from its peripheral ones. The ideological foundations of independence from Spain were distinctly more conserva­tive than those in the bna colonies and Haiti. The financial and administrative nerve centers of Spain’s mainland empire were New Spain and Peru. But it was from Venezuela and New Granada (Colombia) that Simon Bolivar led his protracted armed struggle against the metropole, beginning in 1810. In Argentina that same year selection by settlers (criollos) of a provisional junta marked a de facto break with Spain that was formalized six years later. It was from Argentina that Gen. Jos£ de San Martin and his troops set out in 1817 on their epic march over the Andes to fight royalist forces in Chile and later in Peru.

The transition from colonial New Spain to independent Mexico came rela­tively late, in 1821. Moreover, Mexican independence was a conservative reaction against the unsuccessful grassroots revolts led earlier by the populist priests Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (in 1810-11) and Jos6 Maria Morelos (1810-15). Peru’s criollo elites were likewise cautious about breaking with Spain. They feared that independence might trigger Amerindian revolts in the interior and slave revolts along the coast that could undercut their privileged position. If change was to occur it required outside intervention. This took the form of San Martin’s forces from the south and Bolivar’s and Antonio Josi de Sucre’s forces from the north converging on Lima. These maneuvers culminated in defeat of royalist forces at Ayacucho. The two bastions of Spanish authority were thus reluctant to assert independence. But once it was de­clared, Mexico and Peru experienced no serious domestic pressures to return to colonial status.

Portugal’s immense New World colony, Brazil, gained independence in 1822 under unusual circumstances. The Portuguese regent, Joao VI, and most of his court fled Portugal for Brazil in 1808, just before invading forces loyal to Napoleon reached Lisbon. During the regent’s years in Brazil (1808-21) the roles of metropole and colony were in effect reversed. With Joao’s return to Portugal as king, Portuguese interests attempted to reassert the dominant position they had once held over Bra­zilian affairs. This triggered a negative reaction from Brazil’s landholding elites. Joao’s son Dom Pedro, who had remained in Brazil as his father’s appointed agent, took up the nationalist cause. Rejecting orders to return to Lisbon in 1822, he instead proclaimed himself emperor of Brazil. Though at one level Dom Pedro clearly dis­obeyed Joao, at another the son simply followed advice offered earlier by his depart­ing father: “If the worst comes to the worst and Brazil demands independence, proclaim it yourself and put the crown on your own head.”⁴ The transition to independence in Brazil was incremental, in the sense that the monarchical principle was retained, as was the authority of Portugal’s ruling House of Braganza. Transition was also quite peaceful, in contrast with the other cases noted.

A distinctive feature of phase 2 is its short duration. The decolonization of most of the New World mainland and the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was compressed into five decades. The rapidity of imperial decline becomes even more striking if one examines independence dates within phase 2. In many cases there was a lag between the year independence was pro­claimed and when it was acknowledged by the metropole; the extreme example was Haiti at twenty-one years. If the event that counts is the declaration of independence by individuals or groups able to sustain that claim, the first two cases stand alone: the United States in 1776 and Haiti in 1804.

As noted, inhabitants of small islands and mainland enclaves held by European powers in the Old World did not break from colonial status in phase 2. Where change did occur it involved redistribution among imperial powers of previously acquired territories. These were a direct consequence of France’s drive for hegemony in Eu­rope, initially through armies mobilized in the Revolution’s early years, then (1803- 15) through armies directed by Napoleon. The more the French extended their power on the mainland, the more they ceded control of the high seas by default to their archenemies the British. Britain’s naval victory over a French-Spanish armada off Trafalgar in 1805 was in both real and symbolic terms the proclamation of its domi­nance over the world’s oceans.

France’s takeover of the Netherlands and Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, moreover, prevented other imperial powers from defending their possessions against the British. Particularly weakened were the Dutch, the only phase 1 power with more substantial economic interests in the Old World than the New. French revolutionary forces established the Batavian Republic (1795-1806) in Holland, and by 1810 the Netherlands was ruled directly from Paris. The Dutch were thus isolated for many years from their settlement colony at the Cape of Good Hope and trade centers administered by the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon, Java, Amboina, and elsewhere. This isolation offered the British an ideal opportunity to occupy the Cape, Ceylon, Java, and several Spice Islands. Following Napoleon’s de­feat and formation of a new diplomatic Concert of Europe, Holland regained control of its East Indian islands. But the Cape and Ceylon remained in British hands.

By the end of phase 2 Britain held strategic outposts at the southwestern entrance to the Indian Ocean (Cape Town) and along a major southeastern en­tryway, the Strait of Malacca.⁶ The British could have used these enclaves to expand inland had they wished to do so, but during phase 2 they regarded them essentially as components of sea power. English-speaking settlers arriving at Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1820 were not encouraged to press into the interior. Expansion into the Malayan interior from the Straits Settlements did not take place until the 1870s.

There were two exceptions to this Old World pattern. Following the explora­tory South Pacific voyages of Captain Cook, the British gained a foothold in Australia when they established a penal colony at Fort Jackson, now Sydney, in 1788. The settlement’s frontiers gradually shifted inland during the next thirty years, the Blue Mountains back of Sydney being crossed by sheep-breeding settlers in 1813. Penetra­tion of the vast Australian interior by a wave of settlers awaited the early decades of phase 3.

A far more significant exception was British activity on the Indian subconti­nent. The India Act of 1784 declared Parliament’s view that expansion there was “repugnant to the wish, the honour and the policy of this nation.” Nonetheless, a series of military campaigns under two activist governor-generals, Lords Cornwallis (1786-98) and Wellesley (1798-1805), extended British power in areas surrounding the Madras and Bombay enclaves and in the Mughal Empire’s northern heartland. Cornwallis’s career nicely summarized Britain’s diverging fortunes in New World and Old. After signing the instrument of surrender at Yorktown in 1781, he went on to extend British holdings in India. Military campaigns in Nepal in 1813 and the last Maratha War of 1817-19 augmented territory administered directly by British East India Company officials or ruled indirectly through the so-called subsidiary system. The British in India proceeded on their steady expansionist course from late phase 1 through phases 2 and 3. The timing of their takeover differed from that found in any other world region, and in this respect generalizations about phase 2 do not fit Indian history.