Academic literature on the topic 'Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the lists of relevant articles, books, theses, conference reports, and other scholarly sources on the topic 'Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Journal articles on the topic "Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British"
1
Darity, William. "British Industry and the West Indies Plantations." Social Science History 14, no. 1 (1990): 117–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014555320002068x.
Full textAbstract:
Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British Colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce? And the greater the Number of Negroes imported into our Colonies, from Africa, will not the Exportation of British Manufactures among the Africans be in Proportion, they being paid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise our Plantations abound in Negroes, will not more Land become cultivated, and both better and greater Variety of Plantation Commodities be produced? As those Trades are subservient to the Well Being and Prosperity of each other; so the more either flourishes or declines, the other must be necessarily affected; and the general Trade and Navigation of their Mother Country, will be proportionably benefited or injured. May we not therefore say, with equal Truth, as the French do in their before cited Memorial, that the general Navigation of Great Britain owes all its Encrease and Splendor to the Commerce of its American and African Colonies; and that it cannot be maintained and enlarged otherwise than from the constant Prosperity of both those branches, whose Interests are mutual and inseparable?[Postlethwayt 1968c: 6]The atlantic slave trade remains oddly invisible in the commentaries of historians who have specialized in the sources and causes of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiosity contrasts sharply with the perspective of eighteenth-century strategists who, on the eve of the industrial revolution, placed great stock in both the trade and the colonial plantations as vital instruments for British economic progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, once described by the imperial historian Charles Ryle Fay (1934: 2–3) as Britain’s major “spokesmen” for the eighteenth century, both placed the importation of African slaves into the Americas at the core of their visions of the requirements for national expansion. Fay (ibid.: 3) also described both of them as “mercantilists hardening into a manufacturers’ imperialism.” For such a “manufacturers’ imperialism” to be a success, both Gee and Postlethwayt saw the need for extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies.
2
Leigh, Devin. "A Disagreeable Text." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 94, no. 1-2 (June 3, 2020): 39–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134360-bja10001.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract Bryan Edwards’s The History of the British West Indies is a text well known to historians of the Caribbean and the early modern Atlantic World. First published in 1793, the work is widely considered to be a classic of British Caribbean literature. This article introduces an unpublished first draft of Edwards’s preface to that work. Housed in the archives of the West India Committee in Westminster, England, this preface has never been published or fully analyzed by scholars in print. It offers valuable insight into the production of West Indian history at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it shows how colonial planters confronted the challenges of their day by attempting to wrest the practice of writing West Indian history from their critics in Great Britain. Unlike these metropolitan writers, Edwards had lived in the West Indian colonies for many years. He positioned his personal experience as being a primary source of his historical legitimacy.
3
Stilling, Robert. "WARRAMOU’S CURSE: EPIC, DECADENCE, AND THE COLONIAL WEST INDIES." Victorian Literature and Culture 43, no. 3 (May 29, 2015): 445–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150315000029.
Full textAbstract:
Despite the recent revival of interest in the Victorian epic, poems from the colonial periphery have played only a small role in the revised narrative of the epic's persistence across the nineteenth century. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the centralized imperial geography of the archives that inspired both nineteenth-century scholars and epoists. As Adelene Buckland and Anna Vaninskaya remark, “Britain was certainly the place to be for a nineteenth-century aficionado of epic poetry” (163). While scholars flocked to Oxford, Cambridge, the British Museum, and the Bodleian Library to pour over the texts of Gilgamesh or old Icelandic sagas, a number of nineteenth-century poets began to see the epic itself as a tool for excavating a more geographically and archeologically localized national story. As Simon Dentith notes, “the nationalism of the nineteenth century seized upon epics – especially the old vernacular primary epics . . . and made them an expression of the national spirit (Epic 67). William Morris's Sigurd the Volsung, for example, revives the mythology of the Old North to make a “Great Story” for the race of northern Europeans what the “Tale of Troy was to the Greeks” (Dentith, “Morris” 239).
4
Rönnbäck, Klas. "Power, Plenty and Pressure Groups: A Comparative Study of British and Danish Colonialism in the West Indies and the Role of the State, 1768–1772." Journal of Early American History 1, no. 3 (2011): 215–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187707011x592282.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractWhy was the British crown unable to generate direct net revenue from its West Indian possessions during the early modern era, while a country such as Denmark was able to do just that? is paper undertakes a comparison between Great Britain and Denmark, which might yield important insights into what yielded revenue and drove the costs of colonialism. The British West Indian lobby, this paper proposes, was comparatively successful in shifting the burden of taxation to other areas, for example import tariffs, thus keeping direct taxation on colonial subjects low. In the Danish West Indies, direct taxation was on the other hand comparatively high. Danish neutrality during the period also contributed to reducing military costs for the state. The findings emphasize the importance of political power for the profitability of colonialism.
5
Połosak, Andrzej. "Borneo – trudna przeszłość, poplątane tożsamości. Indonezyjsko-malajska konfrontacja 1963–1966." Studia Polityczne 48, no. 2 (September 25, 2020): 285–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.35757/stp.2020.48.2.11.
Full textAbstract:
Borneo, the largest of the Sunda Islands, was already divided during the colonial period. Its southern part belonged to the Dutch East Indies. To the north, there were the territories of North Kalimantan, part of the British Federation of Malaya. The President of the Republic of Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno, supported anti-colonial movements around the world. Moreover, in 1962, Indonesia launched a military operation that attached West Irian, a Dutch overseas territory in the eastern tip of New Guinea. This operation gained international support.When Great Britain revised its Far East policy in the late 1950s, London gave independence to the Federation of Malaya, known as Malaysia since that time. From then on, the country was part of the Commonwealth of Nations. President Sukarno, remembering the success of the 1962 operation, considered newly established Malaysia to be only a new incarnation of English colonial politics. In April 1963, Jakarta began invading northern Borneo to annex these lands to Indonesia. The invasion met with strong resistance from the Commonwealth of Nations. After three years of struggle, the territorial status quo from before the conflict was re-established. The invasion and its high costs shook President Sukarno’s position. As a result, he was overthrown by General Suharto and the previously pursued policy of supporting anti-colonialism ended, although Indonesia remained a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, one of whose spiritual fathers was Ahmed Sukarno.
6
Marshall, P. J. "Empire and Opportunity in Britain, 1763–75 The Prothero Lecture." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5 (December 1995): 111–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3679330.
Full textAbstract:
At the Peace of Paris in 1763 Britain reaped the rewards of a successful war overseas. Great gains were made in North America, die West Indies and West Africa. Two years later Robert Clive signed the treaty of Allahabad by which the Mughal emperor transferred the diwani and widi it effective possession of die huge province of Bengal to the East India Company. No one could doubt the scale of what had been acquired in so short a time in terms of land, people or resources. How these vast gains could be turned to account, by whom and with what consequences, aroused eager anticipation, a well as serious misgivings, as die British state and many private individuals tried to exploit the opportunities opened up by British military prowess. In so doing they revealed much about the strengdis and weaknesses of British overseas expansion in the eighteenth century.
7
Blouet, Olwyn M. "Bryan Edwards, F.R.S., 1743-1800." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 54, no. 2 (May 22, 2000): 215–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2000.0108.
Full textAbstract:
Bryan Edwards was a Jamaican planter and politician who published a well–respected History of the West Indies in 1793. He articulated the planter view concerning the value of the West Indian colonies to Great Britain, and opposed the abolition of the slave trade. Edwards disputed European scientific speculation that the ‘New World’ environment retarded nature, although his scientific interests have largely gone unnoticed. Elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1794, he became a Member of Parliament in 1796, and wrote a History of Haiti in the following year. As Secretary of the African Association, Edwards edited the African travel journals of Mungo Park.
8
Green, Cecilia A. "“A Civil Inconvenience”? The Vexed Question of Slave Marriage in the British West Indies." Law and History Review 25, no. 1 (2007): 1–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s073824800000105x.
Full textAbstract:
This article revisits the debates on the question of slave marriage that were carried on for roughly two centuries, both back and forth across the Atlantic and on the local terrain of the British West Indian plantation colonies. These debates came into critical focus during the fifty-year showdown over “amelioration,” which ended—though only in a manner of speaking—with the British Abolition Act of 1833. For a long time the lines were starkly drawn, but, in the context of laissez-faire political imperium or “indirect rule,” seldom tested. The metropolitan authorities felt some obligation to uphold the grand moral and civilizational integrity of the as-yet imperfectly imagined British Empire, as well as of Western Christendom. They, therefore, were inclined to see the slave as a species of imperial subject, still vaguely conceived within the emerging terms of reference of their global trusteeship and presumptive legal jurisdiction. They felt that, to honor the dignity of the latter, and sustain and nurture its moral legitimacy, the slaves—their subjects, ultimately—should be encouraged to marry, and their marriages should be formally marked, if only symbolically or by summary Christian rite. The planters, for their part, were unshaken in their certitude that the slaves were a species of property,theirproperty no less, and that the idea of any kind of formal marriage among them was preposterous, a great impertinence, an attack on their authority and rights of property, a threat to public safety, and a dangerous intrusion upon the sacrosanctity of European racial exclusivity and superiority.
9
Østergård, Uffe. "Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture." Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (January 1992): 3–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500017412.
Full textAbstract:
From a cultural and historical-sociological perspective, the Danish nationstate of today represents a rare situation of virtual identity between state, nation, and society, which is a more recent phenomenon than normally assumed in Denmark and abroad. Though one of the oldest European monarchies, whose flag came ‘tumbling down from heaven in 1219’—ironically enough an event that happened in present-day Estonia—Denmark's present national identity is of recent vintage. Until 1814 the word, Denmark, denominated a typical European, plurinational or multinational, absolutist state, second only to such powers as France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and perhaps Prussia. The state had succeeded in reforming itself in a revolution from above in the late eighteenth century and ended as one of the few really “enlightened absolutisms” of the day (Horstbøll and østergård 1990; østergård 1990). It consisted of four main parts and several subsidiaries in the North Atlantic Ocean, plus some colonies in Western Africa, India, and the West Indies. The main parts were the kingdoms of Denmark proper and Norway, plus the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. How this particular state came about need not bother us here.
10
Khakhalkina, Elena. "Windrush Generation in the Context of the Modern Development of Multiracial Great Britain." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 6 (2022): 180. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s013038640018792-9.
Full textAbstract:
The author focuses on events related to the understanding of the role and place of immigrants from the West-India in modern multiracial society in Britain that have been largely unexplored in Russian historical scholarship. The first part of the article provides a brief historical outline relating to the arrival in the United Kingdom in 1948 of the ship “Empire Windrush”, which symbolised the beginning of mass immigration into the country. The second part of the article analyses the parliamentary discussions on the commemorative events of the 70th anniversary and the social and political scandal that arose on the eve of the celebration. The author pays particular attention to clarifying the controversial question in the political discourse in the United Kingdom as to what the true reason was for the surge of immigration from colonies and countries that gained their sovereign status after the Second World War. The third part provides an overview of the settlement of the scandal and the problem of monetary compensation to the affected citizens. Sources include debates in both Houses of Parliament, Cabinet documents, and statistical data. Historical-genetic, comparative and structural-functional analysis became the research methods. The author concludes that the wide public and political resonance of the anniversary celebrations and all related events reflects the complexity and multifaceted nature of the problem of migrant integration and the reconfiguration of the existing model of national identity of Great Britain, the “outlier” element of which is the attitude towards the colonial and post-colonial past of the country. Against the backdrop of debates in Parliament, there was a demand from various ethnic groups, including those represented in the political establishment, for recognition of their real contribution to the development of the United Kingdom, an inclusive environment, and multiracial diversity. The outlined topics clarify the features of the migration picture in Great Britain and bring about an understanding of fundamental questions about the essence of British identity.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British"
1
Alford, Brandon Wade. "Robert Searle and the Rise of the English in the Caribbean." UNF Digital Commons, 2019. https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/885.
Full textAbstract:
This research examines the career of Robert Searle, an English privateer, that conducted state-sponsored attacks against the Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean from 1655 to 1671. Set within the Buccaneering Period of the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1680), Robert Searle’s personal actions contributed to the rise of the English in the Caribbean to a position of dominance over Spain, which dominated the region from 1492 until the 1670s. Searle serves as a window into the contributions of thousands of nameless men who journeyed to the Caribbean as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design Fleet. These men failed in their endeavor to take Hispaniola from the Spanish, successfully invaded Jamaica, and spent the next fifteen years securing England’s largest possession in the region, transitioning Jamaica from a military outpost to a successful plantation colony. These men, including Searle himself, have been overshadowed in the history of English Jamaica by more well-known figures such as Sir Henry Morgan, the famed “Admiral of the Buccaneers.”
Searle and his compatriots pursued the objectives of the core in London throughout the contested periphery of the Caribbean region. These goals were first framed as the complete destruction of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and later as achieving trade between Jamaica and Spain’s American colonies. The examination of Robert Searle through the core-periphery relationship between the metropole and the Caribbean illustrates how the totality of his actions contributed to the rising English position in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Searle and his fellow privateers proved vital to Spain conceding to England the rights of trade and formal recognition of their colonies in the region with a series of succeeding Treaties of Madrid.
2
Gobin, Anuradha. "Leaving a bittersweet taste : classifying, cultivating and consuming sugar in seventeenth and eighteenth century British West Indian visual culture." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=112338.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores visual representations of British West Indian sugar in relation to the African slave trade practiced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, sugar played a vital role to the lives of both European and non-Europeans as it was a source of great wealth for many and became transformed into one of the most demanded and widely consumed commodity. From the earliest days of British colonization, the cultivation and production of sugar in the Caribbean has been inextricably linked with the trade in African slaves to provide free labor for plantation owners and planters. This thesis considers how European artists visually represented sugar in its various forms---as an object for botanical study, as landscape and as consumable commodity---and in so doing, constructed specific ideas about the African slave body and the use of African slave labor that reflected personal and imperial agendas and ideologies.
3
Newton, Joshua David. "The Royal Navy and the British West African settlements, 1748-1783." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648224.
Full text
4
Moran, Arik. "Permutations of Rajput identity in the West Himalayas, c. 1790-1840." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a5436935-3a87-4702-8b0a-471643633c46.
Full textAbstract:
The sustained interaction of local elites and British administrators in the West Himalayas over the decades that surrounded the early colonial encounter (c. 1790-1840) saw the emergence of a distinctly new understanding of communal identity among the leaders of the region. This eventful period saw the mountain ('Pahari') kingdoms transform from fragmented, autonomous polities on the fringes of the Indian subcontinent to subjects of indigenous (Nepali, Sikh) and, ultimately, foreign (British) empires, and dramatically altered the ways Pahari leaders chose to remember and represent themselves. Using a wide array of sources from different locales in the hills (e.g., oral epics, archival records and local histories), this thesis traces the Pahari elite's transition from a nebulous group of lineage-based leaders to a cohesive unitary milieu modelled after contemporary interpretations of Hindu kingship. This nascent ideal of kingship is shown to have fed into concurrent understandings of Rajput society in the West Himalayas and ultimately to have sustained the alliance between indigenous rulers and British administrators.
5
HOONHOUT, Bram Michael. "The West Indian web : improvising colonial survival in Essequibo and Demerara, 1750-1800." Doctoral thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/45449.
Full textAbstract:
Defence date: 22 February 2017Examining Board: Professor Jorge Flores, European University Institute; Professor Regina Grafe European University Institute; Professor Cátia Antunes European University Institute; Professor Gert Oostindie, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
When, in 1796, the British invasion fleet approached the Demerara River, its commanders were in for an unpleasant surprise. The expedition, arriving from Barbados with some 1,300 men, aimed to take possession of the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara on the Guiana coast of South America. Theoretically the British came to offer “protection” to the colonies in the name of the Dutch Stadtholder, in practice they were also keen on taking these lucrative colonies for themselves. The Dutch colonies of Essequibo and especially Demerara already had a high percentage of British planters, and their fertile soils carried the promise of great riches. The coffee, sugar and cotton planters could fuel the unfolding Industrial Revolution in Britain with the raw material for its machines and the consumer goods for its workforce.
Thesis chapter 4 'The commercial web : mercantilism, cash crops and captives as contraband' was previously published as and article in Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis (2013) and as a chapter in the book 'Beyond empires : global, self-organizing, cross-imperial networks, 1500-1800' (2016)
6
Malcomson, Thomas. "Creating order and 'disorder' in the British Navy : the North American and West Indies Station 1812-1815 /." 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR39034.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in History.Typescript. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR39034
7
Theron, Bridget, and Bridget Mary Theron-Bushell. "Puppet on an imperial string? Owen Lanyon in South Africa, 1875-1881." Thesis, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/741.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is a study of British colonial policy in southern Afiica in the 1 gill centwy. More
specifically it looks at how British imperial policy, in the period 1875 to 1881, played itself out
in two British colonies in southern Africa, Wlder the direction of a British imperial agent,
William Owen Lanyon. It sets Lanyon in the context of the frontiers and attempts to link the
histories of the people who lived there, the Africans, Boers and British settlers on the one han~
and the histories of colonial policy on the other. In doing so it also unravels the relationship
between Lanyon and his superiors in London and those in southern Africa.
In 1875 Owen Lanyon arrived in Griqualand West, where his brief was to help promote a
confederation policy in southern Africa. Because of the discovery of diamonds some years
earlier, Lanyon's administration had to take account of the rising mining industry and the
aggressive new capitalist economy. He also had to deal with Griqua and Tlhaping resistance to
colonialism. Lanyon was transferred to the Transvaal in 1879, where he was confronted by
another community that was dissatisfied with British rule: the Transvaal Boers. Indeed, in
Pretoria he was faced with an extremely difficult situation, which he handled very poorly. Boer
resistance to imperial rule eventually came to a head when war broke out and Lanyon and his
officials were among those besieged in Pretoria. In February 1881 imperial troops suffered defeat
at the hands of Boer commandos at Majuba and Lanyon was recalled to Britain.
In both colonies Lanyon was caught up in the struggle between the imperial power and the local
people and, seen in a larger context, in the conflict for white control over the land and labour of
Africans and that between the old pre-mineral South Africa and the new capitalist order. He
made a crucial contribution to developments in the sub-continent and it is remarkable that his
role in southern Africa has thus far been neglected.History
D.Litt. et Phil. (History)
8
Theron, Bridget. "Puppet on an imperial string? :." Thesis, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/16188.
Full textBooks on the topic "Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British"
1
Only West Indians: Creole nationalism in the British West Indies. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press, 2010.
Find full text
2
Ledgister, F. S. J. Only West Indians: Creole nationalism in the British West Indies. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010.
Find full text
3
The British in the Americas, 1480-1815. London: Longman, 1994.
Find full text
4
cartographer, Hermann Michael, ed. British Atlantic, American frontier: Spaces of power in early modern British America. Hanover [N.H.]: University Press of New England, 2005.
Find full text
5
Revisiting the transatlantic triangle: The constitutional decolonization of the eastern Caribbean. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
Find full text
6
1965-, Armitage David, and Braddick M. J. 1962-, eds. The British Atlantic world, 1500-1800. 2nd ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Find full text
7
1965-, Armitage David, and Braddick M. J. 1962-, eds. The British Atlantic world, 1500-1800. 2nd ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Find full text
8
1965-, Armitage David, and Braddick M. J. 1962-, eds. The British Atlantic world, 1500-1800. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Find full text
9
The empty sleeve: The story of the West India regiments of the British Army. St. John's, Antigua, WI: Hansib Caribbean, 1997.
Find full text
10
Sugar barons: Family, corruption, empire and war. London: Hutchinson, 2011.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Great Britain – Colonies – West Indies, British"
1
Bidnall, Amanda. "Introduction." In West Indian Generation. Liverpool University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781786940032.003.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The history of West Indian (or Caribbean) migration to Great Britain and its impact on British national identity have been the subjects of growing scholarly interest, but they are often viewed in terms of racial tension and conflict—as a series of crisis moments marked by violence and growing anti-immigration sentiment. This Introduction states the author’s thesis that in the years after the Second World War, when the British Empire was reinventing itself as a “New” Commonwealth, and decolonization was on the horizon, a coterie of artists fused a catholic array of concerns in their work and found an echo in the British cultural establishment. They worked within British cultural institutions and trends and expressed a positive vision of national belonging that was multi-racial, anti-racist, and focused on Britain’s historic connection to its West Indian colonies. In doing so, these men and women were less symbols of a racial divide or national angst than they were a driving force behind a postwar cultural revolution. The chapter also reviews some of the essential primary and secondary literature in British cultural studies, the history of Black Britain, and contemporary sociological studies of English “race relations.”
2
Marshall, P. J. "The West Indies and the American Crisis." In Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies, 125–54. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841203.003.0008.
Full textAbstract:
The conflict between Britain and the North American colonies, which led to a worldwide war involving Britain’s European enemies, caused dire problems for the British West Indies. North America was an essential source of foodstuffs and other supplies to the islands. To bring pressure on Britain the American colonies cut off supplies to the British islands, much to their detriment. When war broke out in 1778, the French had the ascendancy in the Caribbean, capturing a number of British islands. Edmund Burke and his associates in the Rockingham party were highly critical of both the government policies that led to war with America and of the way in which the war was conducted. They sought to enlist West Indian interests in Britain in their opposition to Lord North. Although most West Indians saw little alternative to putting their trust in the government, Burke played a part in shaping the London Merchants and Planters’ pleas for moderating policy towards America in 1775. In 1781, in two powerful speeches, he took up the cause of those in Britain and the West Indies who were trying to limit the damage the war was inflicting on them by trading through neutral channels. Admiral Rodney’s seizure of the Dutch island of St Eustatius was a very serious blow to British merchants, which Burke denounced as amounting to robbery.
3
Marshall, P. J. "Richard Burke and Grenada." In Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies, 47–65. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841203.003.0004.
Full textAbstract:
Grenada was the most important of the new colonies in the Caribbean acquired by Britain in 1763. In 1764 Richard Burke was appointed Collector of Customs and Receiver of the Crown’s Revenue in the island, although he rarely resided there. These were contentious posts. The Collector of Customs had to curb trade outside the terms of the British Navigation Acts, while the Receiver was required to levy, without the consent of the elected assembly, old French taxes and a new British one, which was soon to be declared illegal by the British courts. Richard’s insistence that he handle all monies voted by the Assembly brought him into further conflicts with it. These conflicts between the prerogatives of the crown and claims to privileges by the assembly were similar to those being waged in North American colonies. While generally sympathetic to North American claims, Edmund staunchly supported his brother’s upholding the royal prerogatives. Richard also became mired in disputes with the customs authorities in Britain, who charged him with misappropriating public money. These issues were never fully resolved. Any gains that may have accrued from his offices are likely to have gone to his deputies; they certainly did not go to him. He ended his life in financial embarrassment.
4
Livesay, Daniel. "Lineage and Litigation, 1783–1788." In Children of Uncertain Fortune. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469634432.003.0004.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter chronicles the personal and public disputes rankling the British Empire after the American Revolution. It includes a case study of a mixed-race Jamaican family who travelled to England, then to India, and back to England. When they finally settled in Britain, a white cousin sued them for their Jamaican inheritance and used their West and East Indian ties (including connections to Bengal’s discredited governor Warren Hastings) as a way of castigating them as both corrupt and racially impure. This lawsuit demonstrates the ways that family negotiation in Britain grew increasingly racialized in the wake of the imperial storm of the American Revolution and the beginning of popular protests against colonial slavery. At the same time, however, the chapter shows great divergences in mixed-race experiences in Britain as well as the continuation of interracial relationships in Jamaica despite increasing calls against the practice.
5
Marshall, P. J. "The Making of the Free Ports Act." In Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies, 105–24. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841203.003.0007.
Full textAbstract:
Burke became involved with West Indian issues at the very beginning of his political career. The brief Rockingham administration of 1765–6 was committed to measures to improve flows of trade around the British Atlantic, of which the West Indies was a crucial component. As the prime minister’s secretary, Burke was deeply involved in these measures. The main problem which they sought to remedy was the inability of the British West Indies to produce commodities needed in other parts of the Atlantic in sufficient quantities. These commodities were principally sugar and raw cotton for Britain and molasses for British North America. The remedy chosen was to allow foreign supplies of these commodities to enter the British system through what were called free ports in two British islands—Dominica and Jamaica. Burke was particularly influential in the provisions of the act relating to Dominica, whose ports were intended to draw in produce, especially raw cotton, from French islands that the British had occupied during the war. In return, they would export British manufactures and slaves to foreign colonies. Getting the act through Parliament required the careful balancing of interests, notably those of the North American colonies and of the West Indies. Burke was in the thick of these negotiations, forming many contacts with merchants. The act, by letting in foreign produce to British islands, marked a significant breach in the hitherto sacrosanct doctrine of imperial self-sufficiency.
6
Sarson, Steven, and Jack P. Greene. "Some Observations on the Right of the Crown of Great Britain to the North West Continent of America." In The American Colonies and the British Empire, 1607–1783, 99–107. Routledge, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003074113-10.
Full text
7
Fagan, Brian. "To Desert and Steppe." In From Stonehenge to Samarkand. Oxford University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195160918.003.0014.
Full textAbstract:
The vast reaches of central Asia are redolent with history, with stirring tales of Marco Polo’s epic journeys and all the romance of the Silk Road, an arduous caravan route that connected Asia and the West for hundreds of years. The archaeology of both central Asia and the Silk Road has yet to reveal all their secrets, for the area presents formidable obstacles for even the most experienced researchers and travelers. A century ago, the obstacles were even more severe—no rail lines, no roads beyond caravan tracks and horse trails, and endemic political instability, to say nothing of harsh deserts and high mountain passes. Despite these obstacles, Afghanistan, Tibet, and other countries along the Silk Road were the arena for what became known in the nineteenth century as the “great game,” the hide-and-seek struggle between Russia and Britain for control of a strategically vital area north of British India. Here, archaeological travel was in the hands of explorers and truly dedicated scientists, and certainly was not the domain of tourists. The logistics and enormous distances ensured that anyone traveling in central Asia vanished from civilization for months, and more often for years. During the nineteenth century, the occasional British army officer and political agent, and also French and German travelers, ventured widely through the region, although their concerns were predominantly military and strategic rather than scientific. The great game culminated in Colonel Francis Younghusband’s military and diplomatic expedition for Britain into Tibet in 1904, prompted by rumors that Russia had its eye on the country. After Younghusband’s return to India and because of his account of the fascinating, mountainous regions to the north, the rugged terrain that formed India’s northern frontier became a place where solitary young officers went exploring, hunting, or climbing mountains for sport. During this period, only a handful of travelers penetrated central Asia with scientific objectives, among them the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who traveled via Russia and the Pamirs to China in 1893–1897. He nearly died crossing the western Taklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin to reach the Khotan River. This huge basin was a melting pot of different religions and cultures, a bridge for silk caravans between East and West.
8
Marshall, P. J. "Conclusion." In Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies, 223–34. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198841203.003.0012.
Full textAbstract:
The Conclusion restates the narrative theme of the book in briefly tracing the growth of Burke’s involvement with the West Indies through the private interests of his close connections, to making policy on an issue of great national importance, and finally to Burke’s defining of his views on slavery and the slave trade through his Negro Code and his participation in the abolition debates of the late 1780s and early 1790s. It explores his views on these issues further through a brief comparison of his attitude to abuses being perpetrated in India. For a number of reasons Burke’s crusades on India were less inhibited than was his campaign for reform of slavery and the slave trade. The chapter concludes that Burke’s concern for the value of the West Indian asset to Britain and his inability to feel the same intensity of sympathy for the plight of Africans that he did for Indians account for his willingness to make practical compromises with slavery and the slave trade, even though he regarded both as morally indefensible.
9
Manz, Stefan, and Panikos Panayi. "The Extent and Nature of the Camp System." In Enemies in the Empire, 123–58. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198850151.003.0006.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter gives a broad overview of British imperial internment, stressing its globality. It first looks at internee numbers both within Britain and in the Empire as a whole. It then develops a camp typology which includes specially built environments such as Knockaloe, military establishments and forts, old factories, and prison islands. Some of these structures were permanent, others only temporary. The chapter then tackles cultural life within camps, as well as conditions and the notorious barbed-wire disease. The chapter moves on to a detailed examination of two areas of the British Empire which have attracted limited attention from scholars of internment during the Great War in the form of Canada, where attention has tended to focus upon Ukrainians rather than Germans, and the West Indies and Bermuda.