The Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire

The accession of William and Mary to the British throne in 1689 eased the friction between Britain and the Netherlands as the two countries entered into an alliance aimed at curbing the ambitions of Louis XIV.

Scotland’s success in becoming part of the metropolis in 1707 left Irish Protestants politically isolated. They, whose immediate ancestors had conquered and settled Ireland at the behest of the British government, were outraged that they were being denied the same trading and constitutional rights as their kin and co-religionists who had chosen to remain in England and Scotland. The counterargument to their remonstrations held that the preservation of Protestant society in Ireland remained a costly responsibility for the British government, and to clarify its position the Westminster Parliament in 1719 passed the Declaratory Act reaffirming its right to legislate for Ireland, notwithstanding Ireland having its own parliament.^[2154] This constitutional ruling on how the British government might manage the kingdom of Ireland had clear implications for the governance of the colonies in Britain's Atlantic Empire.

The Declaratory Act might well have reduced the Irish parliament to a supine body with but limited local powers, but the growing financial needs of a British state that, after 1692, was almost constantly at war, gave members of the Irish parliament the opportunity to place demands upon government as the price of their agreeing to extra revenue over and above what was normally due from crown rents and cus­toms duties.^[2155] Negotiation as well as legislation thus contributed to the evolving constitutional relationship between the government at Westminster and the kingdom of Ireland. Negotiation similarly guided the interactions between the metropol­itan government in London and the elites in Britain's several Atlantic colonies be­cause, as we know from Jack Greene, the leaders of some mainland colonies came to regard their Houses of Assembly as mini-parliaments dedicated to upholding the interests of the colony against executive interference.^[2156] Thus it was conceded that London was principally responsible for the protection of all the crown's dominions, and that it had power also to regulate commerce through the Navigation Acts and a Board of Trade.

While the constitutional powers that remained with subordinate jurisdictions within Britain's expanding Atlantic Empire were theoretically limited, most co­lonial elites actually enjoyed considerable latitude in managing their affairs other than in wartime. The representative of the metropolitan government in the colo­nies was the governor, who was the counterpart of the viceroy in Ireland and, like the viceroy, was chosen by the crown regardless of local preference. However, governors, like viceroys, found that they could be effective only when they enjoyed support from those factions that exerted influence in the colonies. Governors were also nominally in charge of any crown forces stationed in a colony, and they had some discretion in the appointment of lesser crown officials even if, as with Ireland, the plum jobs went to people nominated by court grandees.^[2157]

Governance practices were reasonably consistent throughout Britain's expanding empire, as were metropolitan assumptions concerning what rights and prerogatives belonged to crown and parliament in dealing with subordinate jurisdictions. Disputes did arise, but accommodations were usually worked out because, pre­vious to the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, central government and its colonial representatives recognized that it was in both their interests to nego­tiate communal sanction for the raising of supplemental taxes over and above what was considered normal. The assemblies in the Caribbean colonies proved most amenable because they depended on naval support from Britain, as was proven during the War of Jenkins's Ear (1739-1748). While the colonies of mainland North America were not so reliant on metropolitan support, they usually agreed to approve extra taxes, especially when these went toward securing their western frontiers from incursions by Native Americans and their French allies.

It was within this constitutional and trading context that Britain's Atlantic Empire proved of increasing interest to various peoples within the British mon­archy. During the seventeenth century, Ireland rather than America had been the destination of choice for most skilled English emigrants and also emigrants of higher social standing. Of Britain's colonies in America, only New England also attracted a socially diverse, albeit a religiously exclusive, migration flow, and then but for a few decades. Britain's colonies in the Caribbean and in the Chesapeake proved the most popular trans-Atlantic destinations for poor English migrants who went to both places as indentured servants, but the islands and the Chesapeake also proved of interest to some lesser merchants from England and to some artisans skilled in particular manufacturing and packing processes. Scots and Irish migrants increasingly took the place of English indentured servants in the later seven­teenth century, and planters then also began to make more use than previously of African slaves. English planters, estate managers, slave traders, merchants, and those with skills in particular manufacturing processes continued to make careers in the Caribbean. However, most English migrants to America in the eighteenth century went as merchants and artisans to the developing cities in the mainland colonies; as planters and farmers to the interior; and as artisans skilled in mining, manufacturing, and in the production and processing of agricultural crops (partic­ularly grain) for export to Europe.^[2158] Those English (and also those Scots and those Irish) who became resident colonial merchants had perforce to work under the Navigation Acts, which proved not as onerous as might seem because evasion was possible given that the government could never enforce its regulations comprehen­sively.

Scots also looked to America rather than to Ulster as the emigration destiny of choice during the eighteenth century, and many people from all levels of society made their way to various Atlantic destinations. Those who succeeded most con­spicuously and returned to live stylishly on newly purchased estates or in urban residences, in Scotland or England, had usually made fortunes from slave trading or from plantations in the West Indies; especially in Jamaica, where Scots became both numerous and successful. Scottish farmers, frequently accompanied by families, emigrated in large numbers to the middle colonies of British North America and into the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains where Presbyterianism became a conspicuous, and sometimes the dominant, religion. Graduates of Scotland’s universities made an early impact on the intellectual and educational life of British North America, with Scottish lawyers and doctors featured in every colony. Scottish itinerant traders were active in all mainland colonies, including on the frontiers, where they interacted with Native Americans. This ubiquity of Scots meant that the empire was becoming British in reality as well as in theory, even if the cultural norms remained those of England.^[2160] However, even these were compromised by the presence of sizable German-speaking communities, particularly in Pennsylvania.

Clamor persisted in Ireland (and especially in Protestant Ireland) concerning the Navigation Acts and the associated constitutional downgrading of the kingdom, but the population at large quickly recognized that Britain’s colonial expansion into the Atlantic presented them with unique opportunities.

As Britain’s Atlantic Empire flourished, so also did enthusiasm for it increase among the ever more diverse populations settled in various locations. Those least impressed were the Irish Catholic, the Native American, and the African slave populations, and for good reason. Some Irish Catholics, as was noted, participated as colonists in Britain's colonial ventures, and a far greater number were recruited as, or were forced to become, indentured servants in the tobacco and sugar colonies. As the eighteenth century proceeded, migration to Britain's expanding “middle col­onies” in North American became increasingly more attractive to Ireland's poor than service in the Caribbean or soldiering on the European Continent. However, regardless of which British colony they settled in, or of how successful they became, Irish Catholic emigrants were precluded, by virtue of their religion (as they had been emphatically in Ireland), from full participation in the social and political life of that colony. Moreover, the few who achieved considerable wealth were unable to emulate their English, Scottish, and Irish Protestant counterparts by investing their fortunes in the purchase of estates and the education of their children at home, be­cause, in Ireland, Catholics were forbidden by law from purchasing land, retaining Catholic schools, or entering the professions. Successful Irish Catholic planters or traders opted instead to send their sons (and occasionally their daughters) to be ed­ucated in Catholic institutions in France or Belgium. They also invested their profits in developing their American properties and in fostering trading connections and opportunities, frequently in conjunction with members of other exiled Irish merchant families, in London, the Canary Islands, and throughout the Atlantic world. The links thus fostered and consolidated relationships between those Irish Catholics in exile who had prospered in several British colonies with those who had succeeded in French and Spanish port towns, or on French or Spanish Caribbean islands, or in London. Such connections, frequently strengthened by marriage, facilitated the creation of an Irish Catholic trading international on the Atlantic.^[2163] The members of this group frequently became wealthy by circumventing the regulations of the various metropolitan governments. The settler populations in some imperial locations (and particularly within the Caribbean) frequently valued such illicit activities, even when they were decried as smuggling by metropolitan governments. The readiness with which this Irish Catholic international promoted shady dealing suggests that they were prepared to give their allegiance to the British Empire provided it did not impede their enrichment.

Native American populations had less reason than Irish Catholics to show loy­alty to the British crown and empire since most of the land that Europeans occu­pied in the Americas had once been theirs. However, as those of the indigenous populations in North America who had survived the demographic collapse associ­ated with the initial European encounter reconstituted themselves into coherent “na­tions” and became better acquainted with the politics of European involvement with North America, many came to appreciate, especially during the course of the Seven Years' War, 1756-1763, that it was British colonial settlers rather than European governments who most threatened them. As that war proceeded, many who had been traditional allies of the French saw that they would benefit from switching their alignment to the British government. The deciding factor was that the remote impe­rial government in London, and its armed garrisons in North America, provided the best assurance that the lands of those who allied themselves with Britain in wartime would be protected from trespass by white settlers who coveted the territories that were being assured to Native Americans by the treaties they were negotiating with the imperial power.^[2164]

The populations of African descent in British America had no such opportunity to better their position through negotiation given that most of them had been brought there in shackles. Moreover, the British authorities had permitted slavery in their Atlantic colonies when it was illegal to retain slaves in Britain; they were aware of the various slave codes that enabled white elites to treat their slaves tyrannically; and they negotiated persistently to acquire and retain the monopoly to supply slaves to Spanish America.

It appears therefore that each significant population within Britain's Atlantic Empire had reason to rethink its relationship with the imperial authority during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the underlying characteristics of that empire were undergoing change. Essentially, once the British government was satis­fied that an appropriate relationship had been defined to link Britain with the con­stituent parts of its Atlantic Empire, it sought, where possible, to leave the colonial elites to fend largely for themselves. The government was forced by circumstances to defend its island colonies from foreign attack, but otherwise it could not be in­terventionist, had it so wanted, because it lacked the administrative apparatus to enforce strictly the trading regulations that parliament had decreed. This laissez- faire approach for dealing with its Atlantic Empire persisted also because Britain's commitment to the wars against Louis XIV was followed by a fresh round of di­plomacy and conflict, this time to preserve what Brendan Simms has termed the “new European empire” acquired by Britain in 1714 when King George I had succeeded Queen Anne on the British throne. That monarch, and his successor George II, continued to rule as electors of Hanover while also being kings of Great Britain.^[2165] This meant that the British government could devote little attention to its North American interests besides providing a navy to defend its Caribbean colo­nies and its commercial shipping. It was to its navy also that Britain owed the cap­ture from the French of Louisburg on Cape Breton in 1745. This quickened Britain's interest in the American mainland because it proved that territorial acquisitions in America could be used to negotiate better terms from France in Europe as the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) proceeded. This condescending atti­tude of the British authorities toward that section of its Atlantic Empire that lay on the North American mainland prevailed throughout most of the Seven Years'

War (1756-1763). Indeed, as Fred Anderson has demonstrated, it was only when the British achieved victory over the French navy at Quiberon Bay in 1759, and with it control of the Atlantic shipping lanes, that they recognized the possibility of countering the military successes of the French in Europe by supplying their own colonists in mainland North America with the military and financial assistance that enabled them jointly to take control of French Canada, which was formally ceded to Britain in 1763.^[2166] Nobody then realized how this massive accession would chal­lenge how Britain's Atlantic Empire had previously functioned.