Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (9 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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They say that on any given morning the French Minister of Education knows exactly what is being taught in every school under his control. Every French pupil is taught the same syllabus: the same maths, the same literature, the same history, the same philosophy. It is a truly imperial approach to education. And it applies as much to the French
lycée
at Pondicherry as to its counterparts in Paris. Had things gone differently in the 1750s, schools all across India might have been the same – and French, not English, might have become the world’s
lingua franca
.
The counterfactual is far from fanciful. To be sure, the Anglo-Dutch merger had greatly strengthened England. And, with the union of the Parliaments in 1707, a second merger had produced a redoubtable new entity: the United Kingdom of Great Britain, a term originally propagated by James I to reconcile Scotland to being annexed by England – and the English to being ruled by a Scot. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1713), this new state was now unquestionably Europe’s dominant naval power. Having acquired Gibraltar and Port Mahon (Minorca), Britain was in a position to control access to and from the Mediterranean. Yet France remained the predominant power on the continent of Europe itself. In 1700 France had an economy twice the size of Britain’s and a population almost three times as large. And, like Britain, France had reached out across the seas to the world beyond Europe. There were French colonies in America in Lousiana and Quebec – ‘New France’. The French sugar islands like Martinique and Guadaloupe were among the richest in the Caribbean. And in 1664 the French had set up their own East India Company, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, with its base at Pondicherry, not far south of the British settlement at Madras. The danger that France would win a struggle for global mastery against Britain was a real one, and remained real for the better part of a century. In the words of the
Critical Review
in 1756:
Every Briton ought to be acquainted with the ambitious views of France, her eternal thirst after universal dominion, and her continual encroachments on the properties of her neighbours ... [O]ur trade, our liberties, our country, nay all the rest of Europe, [are] in a continual danger of falling prey to the common Enemy, the universal Cormorant, that would, if possible, swallow up the whole globe itself.
 
Commercially, it is true, the Compagnie des Indes posed a relatively modest threat to the East India Company. Its first incarnation lost substantial amounts of money despite government subsidies, and it had to be refounded in 1719. Unlike its English counterpart, the French company was under firm government control. It was run by aristocrats, who cared little for trade but a lot for power politics. The form the French threat took was thus quite unlike that of the Dutch. The Dutch had wanted market share. The French wanted territory.
In 1746 the French Governor at Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix, resolved to strike a blow against the English presence in India. The diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, his Indian
dubash
, gives a flavour of the mood in the French fort on the eve of Dupleix’s coup. According to Pillai, ‘public opinion now says that the tide of victory will henceforth turn in favour of the French ... The people ... assert that the Goddess of Fortune has departed from Madras to take up her residence at Pondichery’. Dupleix assured him that ‘the English Company is bound to die out. It has long been in an impecunious condition, and what it had to its credit has been lent to the King, whose overthrow is certain. The loss of the capital is therefore inevitable, and this must lead to collapse. Mark my words. The truth of them will be brought home to you when you, ere long, find that my prophecy has been realised’. On 26 February 1747, as Pillai recorded, the French
hurled themselves against Madras ... as a lion rushes into a herd of elephants ... surrounded the fort, and in one day astonished and bewildered the Governor ... and all the people who were there ... They captured the fort, planted their flag on the ramparts, took possession of the whole city, and shone in Madras like the sun, which spreads its beams over the whole world.
 
Dismayed, the East India Company feared that it would be ‘utterly destroyed’ by its French rival. According to one report received by the directors in London, the French aimed ‘at nothing less than to exclude us from the trade of this coast [Madras area], and by degrees from that of India’.
In fact, Dupleix had mistimed his move. The ending of the War of Austrian Succession in Europe with the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 forced him to relinquish Madras. But then, in 1757, hostilities between Britain and France resumed – this time on an unprecedented scale.
The Seven Years War was the nearest thing the eighteenth century had to a world war. Like the global conflicts of the twentieth century, it was at root a European war. Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Saxony, Hanover, Russia and Sweden were all combatants. But the fighting raged from Coromandel to Canada, from Guinea to Guadeloupe, from Madras to Manila. Indians, native Americans, African slaves and American colonists all became involved. At stake was the future of empire itself. The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?
The man who came to dominate British policy in this Hanoverian Armageddon was William Pitt. Not surprisingly, a man whose family’s fortune rested on Anglo-Indian trade had no intention of yielding Britain’s global position to her oldest European rival. As Thomas Pitt’s grandson, Pitt instinctively thought of the war in global terms. His strategy was to rely on the one superior force the British possessed: their fleet and behind it their shipyards. While Britain’s Prussian ally contained the French and their allies in Europe, the Royal Navy would carve up their empire on the high seas, leaving the scattered British armies to finish the job off in the colonies. The key, then, was to establish a clear maritime advantage. As Pitt put it to the House of Commons in December 1755, before war had formally been declared, but well after the fighting had begun in the colonies:
We ought to have our Navy as fully and as well manned as possible before we declare war ... Is it not then now necessary for us, as we are upon the very brink of a war, to take every method that can be thought of for encouraging able and expert seamen into His Majesty’s service? ... An open war is already begun: the French have attacked His Majesty’s troops in America, and in return His Majesty’s ships have attacked the French king’s ships in that part of the world. Is this not an open war? ... If we do not deliver the territories of all our Indian allies, as well as our own in America, from every French fort, and every French garrison, we may give up our plantations.
 
Pitt secured a commitment from Parliament to recruit 55,000 seamen. He increased the fleet so that it numbered 105 ships of the line, compared with just 70 on the French side. In the process, the Royal Dockyards became the largest industrial enterprise in the world, building and repairing ships and employing thousands of men.
Pitt’s was a policy that partly depended on Britain’s nascent economic preeminence: in shipbuilding, metallurgy and gun founding she now enjoyed a discernible lead. The British were using not only technology but also science to rule the waves. When George Anson circumnavigated the globe with his six vessels in the 1740s, the cure for scurvy was unknown and John Harrison was still working on the third version of his chronometer for determining longitude at sea. The seamen died in droves; the ships frequently got lost. By the time Captain James Cook’s
Endeavour
sailed for the South Pacific in 1768, Harrison had won the Board of Longitude’s prize and Cook’s crew were being fed sauerkraut as an anti-scorbutic. It epitomized the new alliance between science and strategy that on board the
Endeavour
there was a group of naturalists, notably the botanist Joseph Banks; and that Cook’s voyage had a dual mission: to ‘maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of BRITAIN’ by laying claim to Australasia for the Admiralty and to record the transit of Venus for the Royal Society.
Only naval discipline remained unchangingly harsh. Famously, Admiral John Byng was shot early in the war for failing to destroy a French force off Minorca, in breach of the 12th Article of War, which stated:
Every person in the fleet, who through cowardice, negligence or disaffection ... shall not do his utmost to take or destroy every ship which it shall be his duty to engage; every such person so offending, and being convicted thereof by the sentence of a court-martial, shall suffer death.
6
 
Harder men, like Byng’s cousin Sir George Pocock, beat the French fleet off India. Harder men, like James Cook, carried General Wolfe and his troops along the St Lawrence River to attack Quebec. And harder men, like George Anson – now First Lord of the Admiralty – masterminded the blockade of France, perhaps the clearest demonstration the war afforded of British naval superiority.
In November 1759 the French fleet finally emerged in a desperate bid to mount an invasion of England. Sir Edward Hawke was waiting for them. In a rising storm, they pursued the French fleet deep into Quiberon Bay on the south coast of Brittany, where it was shattered – two-thirds of it wrecked, burned or captured. The invasion was abandoned. British naval supremacy was now complete, making victory in the French colonies all but certain, for by cutting communications between France and her empire the Navy gave British ground forces a decisive advantage. The capture of Quebec and Montreal ended French rule in Canada. The rich Caribbean sugar islands – Guadeloupe, Marie Galante and Dominica – fell too. And in 1762 France’s Spanish allies were bundled out of Cuba and the Philippines. That same year the French garrison vacated the fort at Gingee. By then all their bases in India – including Pondicherry itself – had been captured.
It was a victory based on naval superiority. But this in turn was possible only because Britain had one crucial advantage over France: the ability to borrow money. More than a third of all Britain’s war expenditure was financed by loans. The institutions copied from the Dutch in the time of William III had now come into their own, allowing Pitt’s government to spread the cost of war by selling low-interest bonds to the investing public. The French, by contrast, were reduced to begging or stealing. As Bishop Berkeley put it, credit was ‘the principal advantage which England hath over France’. The French economist Isaac de Pinto agreed: ‘It was the failure of credit in time of need that did the mischief, and probably was the chief cause of the late disasters’. Behind every British naval victory stood the National Debt; its growth – from £74 million to £133 million during the Seven Years War – was the measure of Britain’s financial might.
In the 1680s a distinction had still existed between England and ‘the English Empire in America’. By 1743 it had been possible to speak of ‘the British Empire, taking together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, the Plantations and Fishery in America, besides its Possessions in the East Indies and Africa’. But now Sir George Macartney could write of ‘this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained’. Pitt’s only regret (peace was not concluded until after he had left office) was that the French were allowed to retain any of their overseas possessions, particularly the islands that had been returned to her in the Caribbean. The new government, he complained in the Commons in December 1762, had
lost sight of the great fundamental principle, that France is chiefly, if not solely, to be dreaded by us in the light of a commercial and maritime power ... and by restoring to her all the valuable West-India islands ... we have given her the means of recovering her prodigious losses ... The trade with these conquests is of the most lucrative nature ... [and] all that we gain ... is made fourfold to us by the loss which ensues to France.
 
As Pitt correctly divined, the ‘seeds of war’ were already germinating in the peace terms. The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France would rage on with only brief respites until 1815. But the Seven Years War decided one thing irrevocably. India would be British, not French. And that gave Britain what for nearly two hundred years would be both a huge market for British trade and an inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. India was much more than the ‘jewel in the crown’. Literally and metaphorically, it was a whole diamond mine.

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