Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (19 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Today the Yorktown battlefield looks about as menacing as a golf course. But in October 1781 it was pockmarked by trenches full of armed men, and artillery. On 11 October Washington began pounding the British positions with over a hundred mortars and howitzers. Retaining the two defensive positions known as Redoubts 9 and 10 – small forts made of wooden ramparts and sandbags – became crucial if Cornwallis were to hold out until reinforcements arrived. The fiercest hand-to-hand action took place on the night of 14 October when a Patriot force led by the future American Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, stormed the redoubt to the right with fixed bayonets. It was a heroic and professionally executed assault, proof that the colonists had come a long way as soldiers since the rout at Lexington. But had it not been for the French attacking the other redoubt at the same time, the assault might not have succeeded. Once again, the French contribution was crucial to Patriot success and British defeat. And it was the French navy to his rear that doomed Cornwallis, ruling out the evacuation of his force. On the morning of 17 October he sent a drummer boy to sound the parley. It was, one American soldier noted in his diary, ‘the most delightful music to us all’.
Altogether 7,157 British soldiers and sailors surrendered at Yorktown, giving up over 240 pieces of artillery and six regimental colours. The story goes that as they marched into captivity their band played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. (Other evidence suggests that the prisoners sought consolation in alcohol when they reached Yorktown itself.) But what exactly had turned the world upside down? Aside from French intervention and incompetent British generalship, at root it was a failure of will in London. When the British army surrendered at Yorktown, Loyalists like David Fanning felt they had been left in the lurch. Joseph Galloway deplored the ‘want of wisdom in the plans, and of vigour and exertion in the execution’.
On the other hand, the Loyalists were not sufficiently disillusioned with British rule to abandon it altogether. Quite the contrary: many of them responded to defeat by emigrating northwards to the British colonies in Canada, which had all remained loyal. Fanning himself eventually ended up in New Brunswick. In all, around 100,000 Loyalists left the new United States bound for Canada, England or the West Indies. It has sometimes been argued that in gaining Canada in the Seven Years War, Britain had undermined her position in America. Without the French threat, why should the thirteen colonies stay loyal? Yet the loss of America had the unforeseen effect of securing Canada for the Empire, thanks to the flood of English-speaking Loyalist immigrants who would soon reduce the French Quebecois to a beleaguered minority. The amazing thing is that so many people should have voted with their feet against American independence, choosing loyalty to King and Empire over ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
It was, as we have seen, Thomas Jefferson who coined that famous phrase. But there was a difficulty which the American revolutionaries found rather embarrassing. Did their Declaration that all men were ‘created equal’ also apply to the 400,000 black slaves they collectively owned – roughly a fifth of the total population of the ex-colonies, and nearly half that of his native Virginia? In his autobiography, quoted inside his pristine marble memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC, Jefferson was quite explicit: ‘Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [meaning the slaves] are to be free’. But the autobiography goes on to say – and the sculptors of the memorial unaccountably left this out – that ‘the two races’ were divided by ‘indelible lines of distinction between them’. After all, Jefferson himself was a Virginian landowner with around 200 slaves, only seven of whom he ever freed.
The irony is that having won their independence in the name of liberty, the American colonists went on to perpetuate slavery in the southern states. As Samuel Johnson acidly asked in his anti-American pamphlet
Taxation No Tyranny
: ‘How is it that the loudest YELPS for liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?’ By contrast, within a few decades of having lost the American colonies, the British abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout their Empire. Indeed, as early as 1775 the British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had offered emancipation to slaves who rallied to the British cause. This was not entirely opportunistic: Lord Mansfield’s famous judgement in Somersett’s case had pronounced slavery illegal in England three years before. From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation. Although slavery was gradually abolished in northern states like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, it remained firmly entrenched in the South, where most slaves lived.
Nor was independence good news for the native Americans. During the Seven Years War the British government had shown itself anxious to conciliate the Indian tribes, if only to try to lure them away from their alliance with the French. Treaties had been signed which established the Appalachian mountains as the limit of British settlement, leaving the land west of it, including the Ohio Valley, to the Indians. Admittedly, these treaties were not strictly adhered to when peace came, sparking the war known as Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763. But the fact remains that the distant imperial authority in London was more inclined to recognize the rights of the native Americans than the land-hungry colonists on the spot.
American independence might have heralded the end of the British Empire. It certainly marked the birth of a new and dynamic force in the world – arevolutionary republic which could now exploit its vast natural resources without having to defer to a distant monarchy. Yet the Empire was far from shattered by this loss, in marked contrast to Spain, which never recovered from the revolt of her South American colonies. Indeed, the loss of the thirteen colonies seemed to spur a whole new phase of British colonial expansion even further afield. True, half a continent had been lost. But on the other side of the world a whole new continent beckoned.
Mars
 
The British had been attracted to Asia by trade. They had been attracted to America by land. Distance was an obstacle, but one that with fair winds could be overcome. But there was another continent that was attractive to them for diametrically different reasons. Because it was barren. Because it was impossibly remote. Because it was a natural prison.
With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna – the eucalyptus trees and kangaroos – Australia was the eighteenth-century equivalent of Mars. This helps explain why the first official response to the discovery of New South Wales by Captain Cook in 1770 was to identify it as the ideal dumping ground for criminals.
Informally, transportation of convicts to the colonies had been going on since the early 1600s, though it did not become a formal part of the penal system until 1717. For the next century and a half, the law stated that minor offenders could be transported for seven years instead of being flogged or branded, while men on commuted capital sentences could be transported for fourteen years. By 1777 no fewer than 40,000 men and women from Britain and Ireland had been transported on this basis to the American colonies, supplementing the supply of indentured labourers (as Moll Flanders’s mother explained to her). With the American colonies now lost, somewhere new had to be found to prevent British prisons – not to mention the new prison hulks along the south-east coast – from overflowing with untransportable inmates. There were strategic considerations too. Aware of ancient Spanish claims in the South Pacific and more recent Dutch and French expeditions, some British politicians saw it as imperative that New South Wales be settled, if only to assert British ownership. But getting rid of the convicts was the prime objective.
Northern Ireland had been a day’s sailing, North America a few weeks’. But who wanted to start a colony from scratch 16,000 miles away?
20
Small wonder the early settlement of Australia required compulsion.
On 13 May 1787 a fleet of eleven ships set sail from Portsmouth, crammed with 548 male and 188 female convicts, ranging from a nine-year-old chimney sweep, John Hudson, who had stolen some clothes and a pistol, to an 82-year-old rag-dealer named Dorothy Handland, who had been found guilty of perjury. They arrived at Botany Bay, just beyond what is now Sydney harbour, on 19 January 1788, after more than eight months at sea.
In all, between 1787 and 1853, around 123,000 men and just under 25,000 women were transported on the so-called ‘hell ships’ to the Antipodes for crimes ranging from forgery to sheep stealing. With them came an unknown number of children, including a substantial number conceived
en route
. Once again, from the very outset the British were intent on reproducing themselves in their new colony. Indeed, sexual licence, fuelled by imported rum, would be one of early Sydney’s defining traits.
The settlement of Australia was designed to solve a problem at home – primarily that of crimes against property. In essence, it was an alternative to hanging thieves or building prisons to house them in Britain. But among the convicts there were also political prisoners. Luddites, food rioters, radical weavers, Swing rioters, Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, Quebecois
patriotes
– members of all these groups ended up in Australia. Around a quarter of all those transported were Irish, of whom one in five had been convicted on a political charge. Nor was it only the Irish who ended up there in numbers. Australia had more than its fair share of Scots, though judges in Scotland were more reluctant than their English counterparts to sentence convicted felons to transportation. A surprisingly large number of Fergusons were sent to Australia: ten in all. The sparse records of their crimes and punishments make it clear how harsh life in the penal colony was. Seven years’ forced labour for stealing a couple of hens was a not untypical sentence of the time, handed out to one of my namesakes. Further transgressions once convicts had arrived were corporally punished: discipline in the early penal colony was based on the lash. Those who ran away, naively hoping – as some did – to walk to China, perished in the arid passes of the Blue Mountains.
The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.
Perhaps the best explanation of the Australian paradox is this. Although the system of transportation made a mockery of the British claim that theirs was an empire of liberty, in practice the effect of the policy was liberat
ing
for many of those sent to Australia. This was partly because, at a time when private property was the holiest of holies, British criminal justice routinely convicted people for offences that we today would regard as trivial. Although between half and two-thirds of those transported were ‘repeat offenders’, nearly all of their crimes were petty thefts. Australia literally started out as a nation of shoplifters.

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