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May 31, 2014 - July 10, 2018
New World Order
So he said yes, and John Cabot – the English couldn’t cope with his real name – sailed west until he hit ‘New-found-land’. He didn’t know it, but he was also founding the British Empire.
Imperial Spain was the world superpower, thanks in part to her South American gold and silver mines. The Spanish forced the locals to mine it and then shipped it off to Spain. The English simply ambushed the ships.
Colonies in the New World
By the end of the century, the English had enough colonies in the New World to rival the French and the Spanish.
Hey, sugar sugar
Sugar made all the travails of colonisation worthwhile. You could eat it, shape it, use it to sweeten anything from cakes to drinks, and sugar tasted good! But harvesting sugar took a lot of hard work – which is why this British Empire in the New World was based so heavily upon slavery.
British seriously considered giving Canada back to the French in return for just one sugar island in the Caribbean.
India Taken Away
Then King Charles II married a Portuguese princess called Catherine de Braganza, and she gave him the Indian port of Bombay (Mumbai) as a wedding present!
Black Hole in Calcutta
As so often in history, what actually happened isn’t what matters so much as what people thought had happened. The British were convinced that the Nawab killed the men deliberately, and they set out for revenge.
Clive had 3,000 men, British and Indian; the Nawab had 68,000 Bengali and French troops. Think of that ratio as 3 against 68. Yet Clive won. How? Easy. He cheated (mind you, with odds like that, who can blame him?). Clive made a secret deal with the Nawab’s relative, Mir Jaffir. If Mir Jaffir would keep his troops out of the battle, the British would put him on the throne of Bengal. Which they did, though much good being on the throne did him. After Plassey, the Mughal Emperor handed Bengal over to the British, so Mir Jaffir was no more than a puppet controlled by a British governor.
The Battle of Warren Hastings
The government decided leaving India to be governed by a private company was no good, and it started gradually taking over India itself.
Great game, great game!
Instead of trying to fit into the Indian way of doing things, they would make the Indians do things the British way: British laws and British education.
Afghanistan, 1839–42:
Sind, 1843:
Punjab:
Burma:
This is mutiny, Mr Hindu!
In 1857 India rose in revolt, for three main reasons:
The ‘Lapse’ rule:
Greased cartridges:
An old prophecy:
The British government took over completely from the old East India Company and tried – very reluctantly – to give Indians more of a say in governing the country. The Indian Mutiny, as the British insisted on calling this event, was a terrible warning of what could happen if they got governing India wrong.
Cook’s Tour: Australia and New Zealand
The people who actually lived at Botany Bay had tried to stop Cook and his men from landing. And they weren’t the only Pacific islanders who smelt trouble when the British arrived – Cook was killed by islanders in Hawaii – but the British weren’t going to let his murder stop them.
‘How about Botany Bay?’ asked some bright spark. ‘It’s on the other side of the world, so if they do survive, there’s a good chance they won’t come back.’ The first shipload arrived in 1788.
Tasmania’s a small island with lots of poisonous snakes, so the British thought it was the ideal place to dump their hardest criminals. These bushrangers, as they were called, hunted the Aborigines for sport – with official encouragement. Within seventy years the Aborigines were dead. All of them. If you want an example of genocide, British Tasmania is a good place to start.
New Zealand didn’t escape.
Instead, they flooded New Zealand with European settlers and simply drove the Maoris off their land.
Opium? Just Say Yes: China
A Franklin’s tale
In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a naval commander, Trafalgar veteran, and former governor of Tasmania, set off with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to find that wretched North West Passage. And he probably did find the passage, but he never came back to tell the tale.
They’d died from lead poisoning from the tins.
Wider Still and Wider: Scrambling for Africa
a long time, the Victorians didn’t really ‘do’ Africa. They thought of Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’, full of jungle and disease and – well, no one really knew. The man who changed the popular opinion of Africa was David Livingstone, the Scottish physician and missionary who first went out there in 1841. Everyone loved reading his reports. And they began to dream. Maybe there was more to Africa than they thought? Like gold? Or diamonds? Or power . . . ?
Zulu!
Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
Unlike the people who came after him, Livingstone respected the Africans and didn’t seek to disrupt their way of life.
The wild Boers
One for you and two for me – cutting up Africa
Egypt was important to Britain because of the Suez Canal – easily the best way to Britain’s colonies in India and the Far East, and the canal was run by the French and British governments. So, in effect, was Egypt, which is why an Egypt-for-the-Egyptians movement got going.
Khartoum capers
The other countries in Europe didn’t see why the British should have all the fun in Africa. So the French started taking over North and West Africa, the Italians moved into Tripoli (Libya) and Ethiopia (though they moved out again pretty sharpish when the Ethiopians whipped them), and the Germans moved into East Africa. King Leopold of the Belgians took over the entire Congo basin as a sort of private estate and ran it as a massive slave labour camp. The period was a mad scramble – the Scramble for Africa.
Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere
The British, heading North to South:
The French, heading West to East:
