The obligation of each Briton to fulfill the political duties, receive a vast accession of strength when he calls to mind of what a noble and well balanced constitution of government he has the honour to belong; a constitution of free and equal laws, secured against arbitrary will and popular licence, a constitution in fine the nurse of heroes, the parent of liberty, the patron of learning and arts, and the dominion of laws.
George III
Here numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue, and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty.
Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway, London, 25 February 1775
The American colonies are great to this country in general and indeed very justly, as being the principal sources of our balance in trade, and consequently of our riches and strength, by the great quantity of shipping employed, of manufactures vended and of the useful returns of their growth.
Horace Walpole, 1754
On 26 October 1760, King George II died at stool in his closet.1 His grandson, enemy and heir, also named George, was twenty-two years old. His reign was to be the second longest in English history, and one of the most eventful; he himself was to play a more important part in politics than any of his successors, although his role in American history was by no means so crucial as legend maintains. A word about his character is in order.
George III was no tyrant, whatever his enemies said. He was devoted to the British Constitution, and his political virtues leap to the eye if we compare him with those other royal failures, Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II, and explain why he kept his life and throne while they lost theirs. He was above all things open, honest and loyal. Ministers who were true to their royal master’s person and policies could depend on his support. He was extremely hard-working, and gradually acquired an immense political expertise matching that of those other master-managers of eighteenth-century English politics, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) and the Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768). His private life was blameless (that is, single-mindedly uxorious); and since he had the sense to stipulate that the woman chosen for his wife should be uninterested in politics, this trait helped his popularity. Finally, he was a stout English patriot. ‘I glory in the name of Britain,’ he remarked. Not for him the longings of his grandfather and great-grandfather for their dear native Hanover. To him, Hanover was ‘that horrid electorate which has always lived upon the very vitals of this poor country’. His passion for agriculture and a country life earned him the nickname of ‘Farmer George’. These attitudes could only endear him further to most of his subjects. He was an intelligent patron of the arts and learning, and gave a pension to Samuel Johnson.
The King had the defects of his virtues. As a backward, secluded boy he was racked by self-distrust and clung for reassurance to the Earl of Bute (1713–92). Poor Bute was as weak as the King seemed, and at length failed his friend completely. But by then George had matured, and his self-confidence became such that he could for years prop up an appallingly weak Prime Minister: Lord North. Unhappily self-confidence all too often shaded into obstinacy and wilfulness. Furthermore, George thought that change of any kind was incompatible with the survival of his country and her greatness. The convictions he defended with passionate stubbornness were those of a narrow, second-rate intellect. Again and again he employed his political cunning, his powers as King and the respect won by his character (later, the timidity inspired by his madness) to prevent essential reforms.
In 1760 his inheritance was as magnificent as that of any monarch in history. No wonder that George and his bold Britons were full of self-glorification. But the spendour was transient. The next five chapters will explain how the English-speaking world came to split into two great but utterly distinct polities – how Farmer George’s biggest farm was lost.2
He could not have expected to lose it, coming to the throne, as he did, during an enormously successful war of expansion; and even before that war started in 1756, the British Empire was something to marvel at. The wildest visions of Ralegh, Hakluyt and Captain Smith had long been surpassed. At the mid-point of the eighteenth century Great Britain was strong enough to crush her last rival and become the leader and arbiter of the world.
Hers was, above all, an Atlantic empire. British ships ventured to China; the East India Company fostered a lucrative trade in South Asia and would soon win the rule of Bengal; but India was to be the heart of the second, not the first, British Empire. George III’s principal overseas possessions stretched in a gigantic bow round the grey ocean from Newfoundland, down the east coast of North America, across the Caribbean and the precious sugar islands to the west coast of Africa: a curve of some eight thousand miles. It was an empire built on, by and for trade; and in 1750 that trade was worth more than £20,000,000 annually. The imperial merchant marine was the largest in the world; King George’s subjects enjoyed the highest standard of living. There were fifteen million of them: fewer than the inhabitants of the kingdom of France, but, if various calculations proved sound (as they did), the empire was destined rapidly to overhaul the ancient rival in population as in everything else. Unlike its nineteenth-century successor, and in spite of the presence within its borders of Irish, Africans, American Indians and East Indians, it was strikingly homogeneous, the bulk of its people being white, Protestant and English-speaking. The wide seas acted, not as a barrier, but as a link – for water transport was, in the pre-railway age, far easier, and far cheaper, than land.
Yet revolution was to break out – first in the British Empire, then in the kingdom of France: in other words, in the two most modern, richest, best-governed polities in the world; and it broke out in the more advanced of them first. This was not a coincidence, but historians are still groping for, and quarrelling over, the explanation. It is a large and difficult question. No answer can be final.
Still, the point must firmly be made that it was growth, not decay, victory, not defeat, that touched off the American and French Revolutions. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago pointed out that
It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.3
With modern historical knowledge, we would have to modify these remarks before ourselves applying them to the French old order; and they would have to be still more sharply qualified before they could be applied to the first British Empire; but there is still much relevant truth in them, worth pondering. For Tocqueville points to the phenomenon now known as ‘the revolution of rising expectations’. It was such a revolution that undermined the old order throughout the West.
No social system can ever be perfect, and the failings of the old order early became manifest. But it was destroyed by its success. It had been given its final shape by the English and French of the seventeenth century and their greatest statesmen. Their work had been far from fruitless. They had not merely solved, in rough and ready fashion, the problems of religious and civil strife which had plagued their countries; they had not merely made those countries the mightiest and most progressive states in the world. They had created the modern French, British and American nations, whose overriding characteristic turned out to be a restless creativity. This creativity could not long be confined within the political, economic, intellectual and social structure which generated it. The men of the eighteenth century came to expect, and inexorably to demand, more than the seventeenth-century ordering of their world could possibly provide. A home and refuge thus became a prison. Only in the British Isles did it prove possible to break out fairly peaceably, and even there the Irish had a ghastly history. Overseas, the mighty edifice which George III inherited collapsed in tumult and war, and the fate of the French kingdom needs no retelling here.
To be sure, periods of self-criticism were frequent even while the old order was at its height. Montesquieu was only the greatest name among the critics who rose up against the French monarchy between the death of Louis XIV and the Seven Years War. In Britain, the long ascendancy of Robert Walpole drove opposition politicians of all stripes into frenzied denunciations of ‘Robinocracy’ and the decline of British liberty. The classic phrase ‘bribery and corruption’ began to be heard – in North America, among other places. The cry went up that an oppressive Parliament had succeeded the oppressive Stuarts. ‘Power’ (we would say ‘the state’ or ‘bureaucracy’) must be brought under control again by such devices as manhood suffrage, parliamentary reform and freedom of the press. Opposition writers spread abroad an oppressive anxiety, a mood reinforced by the long, undistinguished years of the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1750 fear and worry were growing as another great struggle with France drew near, for many doubted the capacity of the ruling clique to achieve victory, or even to avert defeat. Henry Pelham (1695–1754), the chief minister, was better fitted for reducing the national debt and the size of the navy than for conducting a war.
In spite of all, the underlying mood of mid-century Britain – the right little, tight little island – was one of unlovely and almost bottomless complacency, bred by sixty years’ success in all fields of life. The realm of Great Britain4 was the heart and chief beneficiary of the lucrative Empire. The gross national product was worth some £48,000,000 annually, £15,000,000 being exported. The countrymen and heirs of Newton, Marlborough, Pope, Hogarth, Chippendale, Kent and Locke, contemplating themselves and such monuments as Parliament and the Bank of England, saw little to criticize. On the contrary, they brooded on their innumerable virtues and on the compliments they incessantly paid themselves. The national mood was well symbolized by the toilsome lawyer Blackstone, whose Commentaries attempted to demonstrate the wisdom, consistency and rationality of the Common Law of England, that extraordinary hodge-podge from the deep past. The lower orders congratulated themselves on being freeborn, and on not wearing wooden shoes like backward foreigners. The anthem of the age proclaimed:
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine;
All thine shall be the subject main
And every shore it circles thine.
Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!
Britons never never never shall be slaves!
You may, therefore, boldly defy the best-read historian to assign a single reign in all our annals when these great ends of government were more religiously intended or more generally obtained than under his present Majesty’s auspicious, mild, and steady administration: nay, you may boldly challenge the most discontented and querulous of all his subjects to point out that nation under Heaven where he will venture to assert, that he could live so happily, in all respects, as he does in England.
Thus an anonymous admirer of the constitution in 1748. His views are representative. Yet the Hanoverian – perhaps one ought to say the Walpolean – political system was, as has been said, the solution to the problems of Stuart England. To deal with the problems of Georgian Britain it would have had to be flexible and adaptable. Unhappily it was dangerously rigid.
For one thing, it was deeply aristocratic and oligarchical. On the eve of the great changes that collectively are known as the Industrial Revolution, landed wealth was still the supreme source of power and prestige. The gentlemen of England were wiser than the French noblesse: less insolent, spendthrift, exclusive, military, Court-oriented, selfish and crass. But (or perhaps therefore) they had an even firmer grip on their country. The great families of the Whig aristocracy had palpably gained most from the Glorious Revolution. Since 1689 the British political system had reflected their influence, their acres, their rent-rolls; but the lesser gentry, the squirearchy, secure in their manor-houses and their justiceships of the peace, were quite as deeply committed to the system as the grandees. Their lesser status only made them less intelligent, for it kept them mostly in the countryside with none but dogs, horses and huntsmen for company. In everything, individually and collectively, they showed the effect of narrow horizons. Shooting, hare-coursing, fox-hunting and port were their pleasures; church-going was their religion; farming and gamekeeping their only business. Snobbish by vocation, for they were compelled to cherish the values of blood, land and cash which kept them at the top of the heap, they were also as besottedly insular as any of their most ignorant inferiors. In politics, whether in Parliament or out of it, they were deeply conservative; reluctant to pay, or to vote, taxes, though conscientiously doing so when obliged by law; contemptuous of merchants and of fortunes won in trade (unless lucky marriages brought such fortunes their way); loyal to the King, the Protestant religion and old customs; more reluctant than any duke or businessman to contemplate radical change, except perhaps for the enclosure of the common fields.
As to the Whig grandees, they had wealth, worldliness and intelligence enough to be rakes or reformers if they chose without much risk. Their basic conservatism did not become conspicuous until they were frightened by the French Revolution. They were as reluctant as the squires to contemplate the loss of power, or any alteration in the scheme of things which had given them ascendancy. But their position was complicated by this very instinct for power. According to the Whig tradition, they had wrested authority from the Stuart kings to exercise it themselves, in the name of Protestantism and the landed gentry; this left them with a residual suspicion of the Crown, no matter who wore it. All went fairly well while George I and George II let themselves be guided by the oligarchs; but the emergence of the active, opinionated George III soon revived the divisions and tensions within the oligarchy itself that had marked the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. A vigorous king made a vigorous opposition likely: it only needed an issue, which the times swiftly provided. Then, as long before, the role of the monarchical executive again became a leading question of British politics.
The tradition of such a full-bloodedly aristocratic society was bound to be that office was primarily a form of property, a source of income. No higher end could be imagined for the public service than that of providing for the dependants of the gentlemen and peers of Britain, men whose position entitled them to insist on decent provision, out of the national purse, for their younger brothers and other poor friends and relations. Hence the power wielded by the King, or his trusted Minister (a Walpole, a Pelham), through the medium of deaneries, bishoprics, clerkships, commissions in the army, colonial governorships, etc. – the whole vast machine of patronage. Even this was only part of the social system that it symbolized; for example, the municipal government of England had been falling into the hands of little local oligarchies since before the Civil War. But it was the part that mattered, for politics largely consisted of squabblings over the allocation of the patronage plums, and it was the part through which the Empire was governed. Inevitably we must ask, how efficient was it?
No simple answer can be given. Clearly, a system which could bring the British, in war and peace, to the pinnacle they had attained by the end of the Seven Years War was both vigorous and efficient, if only by the skin of its teeth. But it had conspicuous failings, for all that.
In the first place, the patronage machine, skilfully used, gave whoever commanded it an almost unbreakable hold on the politicians. The House of Commons could and did rebel from time to time, bringing down such long-dominant Ministers as Walpole and Lord North; but it did not do so often, and seldom or never succeeded in forcing an unwanted Prime Minister on the King, at any rate for very long. Throughout the Georgian age no ministry ever lost a general election. So it was dangerously possible for a government to persist in ruinous policies long after public opinion would have sanctioned their abandonment, and still longer after their unwisdom should have been clear to Ministers – or to the King.
Secondly, a system so riddled with jobbery, so studded with sinecures – a government service which had as so prominent an object the protection of politicians’ clients, or of retired politicians themselves,5 was not very capable of putting the right man in the right place. This affected offices high and low. An exceptional man at the head of affairs, like the elder Pitt (1708–78), might know how to find the right person (say, General Wolfe) for the right job (the conquest of Canada); nevertheless there was all too much likelihood that an emergency would find a man of only passable competence in the place of urgency. More important, the everyday level of knowledge and capability in the middle and lower ranks of the public service was adversely affected. We need not take too seriously the case of the member of the Board of Trade who thought that Virginia was an island; but his like proliferated, and made it difficult to conceive and carry out wise policies. Surveying the Age of Walpole and the Age of Chatham,6 we may think that the wonder was that the imperial and domestic administration was so well conducted; but its deficiencies were real, and were soon to emerge as fatally important.
Third, and last, we must note the most insidious, and perhaps the worst, evil of the system, which was that everyone – King’s friends, civil servants and Whig reformers alike – had a stake in it. Boards, committees and incompetents might proliferate to the general confusion. Everyone was conditioned, almost unconsciously, to avoid the thought of fundamental alteration. Some politicians’ actions might carry them and their countrymen long leagues towards radical change: thus the younger Pitt greatly enlarged the scope and effectiveness of Edmund Burke’s ‘economical reform’, transmuting what had started as a mere attempt to curb royal patronage into a true modernization of English government. But the politicians’ vision remained bounded by horizons beyond which not even the Pitts, Burke or Charles Fox could look. This made them curiously helpless when a crisis arose which posed fundamental challenges to the old order. There is no sure evidence that even Chatham, in office and in health, could have settled the American question peaceably, to the enduring satisfaction of both sides. His assumptions were too much those of George III.
In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that the attitude of the British to the Empire which they had acquired was not very enlightened. Distinctions must be made. Some Britons still regarded the New World as potentially a most lucrative investment; others still hoped to find a better life by going there; others, especially in the political class, saw the Empire, east and west, as both a burden and a glory. But it seems safe to say that on the whole a profound indifference to, almost an unawareness of, the colonies’ existence was the commonest stance, even during the excitements of the Seven Years War. The colonists could thus count among their blessings a complete security against interference from British public opinion. The ending of this security was to make a great difference for the worse. The waking of the American Revolution in the Stamp Act crisis awoke the slumbering English too, impelling them to ask themselves what they thought of the colonies. They replied, as men always do in such cases, with a torrent of cliché, on this occasion about the Mother Country. They took great pride and pleasure, they decided, in owning an empire (provided it cost them nothing), and their tone (caught from their betters, the politicians) became highly patronizing. They could make nothing of the American view that the colonists owed allegiance, not to their British fellow-subjects, but to George III as their common King. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Every man in England seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the throne with the King, and talks of our subjects in the Colonies.’ It was shallow, foolish and harmless – until the explosion of 1774, when the North ministry was able to fan this feeling into a flame of support for its severe American measures, and thus sweep aside all opposition in its drive to disaster.
But the great emergency was far below the horizon in 1750. In that year the Empire was still very much what it had always been, with nothing worse to perplex it than the perennial problems of the French, the Spanish and the Indians, and organized according to the set of economic and political principles commonly known as mercantilism.
The term is convenient, but treacherous. It was never a coherent, universally practised creed, and to present it as an obsolete economic theory, or, contrariwise, as a forerunner of the economic policies of modern nation-states, is to over-simplify. The word itself is nineteenth-century; Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), was the first commentator to identify the thing – he called it ‘the mercantile system’. Different countries adopted different varieties of it at different times. Generalizations about mercantilism are therefore certain to be unsound, and in what follows I confine myself to the British variant. Still, there was nothing unique about the English system, except the size of its success. Identifiably mercantilist doctrines were widely popular for many centuries, and at some time or other were adopted as government policy by every important state in Western Europe. In fact mercantilism was one of the most universal expressions of the old order of the West. Its rise and decline corresponded closely to the rise and decline of that order. It was scarcely coincidental that 1776 saw the emergence not only of Adam Smith, the critic of mercantilism, but also of Jeremy Bentham, the critic of Blackstone, and Thomas Jefferson, the critic of the old politics. A moment of general crisis had arrived.
Yet the British mercantile system, if judged by its own tenets, was one of the old order’s most solid successes. In the mid-eighteenth century its achievements were clear for all to see. The Empire was the chief of them, for it encompassed, explained and made possible all the others.
Such a monumental structure could never have been erected by a purely economic theory. Mercantilism was a political as well as an economic doctrine. As one of its supporters asked, ‘Can a nation be safe without strength and is power to be compassed and secured but by riches? And can a country become rich anyway but by the help of a well-managed and extended traffic?’ Mercantilism reflected the realities of a world in which inter-state competition in all fields was deadly and incessant. It also intensified that competition: a large part of a mercantilist ruler’s purpose was to deny to his rivals, and secure to himself, as big a piece as possible of what was thought to be a largely static quantity: the wealth of the world. It was in part a system of defensive commercial regulation; but was also the continuing, institutionalized expression of the ambitious, aggressive, outward-looking spirit which had inspired the first American settlements, the first quest for the world’s trade. Other considerations had played a part in colonization, but commercial greed had never been lacking, and as greed was rewarded by success, the ever-wealthier merchants of an ever-wealthier England rose in influence. Their views began to colour those of statesmen and theorists. The great Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) urged the need for a strong navy, as encouraged by the Navigation Acts, to check the ‘immoderate desire’ of other states ‘to engross the whole traffic of the universe’. When the Second Dutch War broke out in 1664, General Monck commented on its origins, ‘What matters this or that reason. What we want is more of the trade the Dutch now have.’ Fifty years later John Withers, author of The Dutch Better Friends Than the French, remarked, ‘If those Froglands were once crushed the trade of the world would be our own.’ Such men demanded wars, plantations and Acts of Parliament to help on the quest for riches; the rulers of England, looking to the military strength, prosperity and quiet of the realm, were happy to co-operate; and so mercantilism was born, to put its stamp indelibly on the Atlantic Empire, both in its creation and government.
The earliest theorists were not especially interested, for the most part, in colonies: they hoped to extinguish Dutch competition (for a time their chief problem) by other means. But by the late seventeenth century the English overseas possessions had come to play an essential part in mercantilist thought. Economic self-sufficiency was, as always, the aim, but now it was conceived on an imperial, not merely national scale. All members of the Empire – colonies and mother country – would contribute to the prosperity of all; outside supply, of skills or produce, would not be needed. From this basis the trade of the world would be captured, and thus the wealth and glory of England would be splendidly augmented. The colonies were merely an expedient. Not for a moment were they supposed to have any purposes of their own. They existed for the sake of the mother country which had founded and nourished and now protected them. There was no room for sentiment or imagination in the great maritime and commercial struggle. The colonists’ interests could never be allowed to take precedence over England’s. According to a commentator in 1696, ‘The same respect is due from them as from a tenant to his landlord.’ Their role was simply to provide, cheaply, those things – chiefly crops such as sugar, rice and tobacco – which the English could not or would not grow at home. They would thus emancipate England from dependence on foreigners. They would furnish the English merchant with a market which he could profitably monopolize, once effective laws had been passed excluding foreign competitors; and such laws, the celebrated Navigation Acts, were passed between 1651 and 1696.
The Navigation Acts were many, and the system they established was never wholly symmetrical or thoroughly efficient. But their principal provisions, as set out in the Acts of 1660 and 1696, were clear and practical enough. Their purpose was to restrict the colonies to the functions listed in the last paragraph and to monopolize the profits of the carrying trade, indeed of all forms of economic activity, so far as was possible: no foreigner should grow rich as a result of activities carried on within the English realm or colonies. Under penalty of forfeiture of ships and goods it was laid down that all vessels importing or exporting goods to or from any English ‘lands, islands, plantations or territories’ in Asia, Africa or America, or carrying goods from such possessions to the English realm, or carrying exports out of the realm, must be ‘truly and without fraud’ English, with English masters, and crews three-quarters English. Foreign goods might come to the realm in such vessels only, or in vessels of their countries of origin (a blow against Dutch middlemen, this). Any ling, stock-fish, pilchard, cod-fish, herring, whale-oil, whale-fin, whale-bone, whale-blubber, etc., imported in foreign bottoms ‘shall pay double aliens custom’. The American colonies might export certain specified, or ‘enumerated’, products (sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and other dyes, specklewood)7 only to each other or to England; customs officers in the plantations were to have the same powers as those in the realm, and plantation laws which clashed with the Navigation Acts were declared to be ‘illegal, null and void, to all intents and purposes whatever’. The system was rounded off by some lesser provisions, and in 1696 the Board of Trade was set up to administer it.8
It is impossible to decide exactly how successful the system was. According to British merchants, times were always bad, foreign competition was always dangerous, even under the Navigation Acts (and since those acts were defied by vast numbers of smugglers, the merchants may not have been entirely wrong). However, some observations may be ventured.
The mercantile system was selfish and nationalistic – arising from a condition of conflict, no doubt, but making that condition worse. According to C. M. Andrews, the greatest historian of colonial America, ‘It fomented war in provoking an economic struggle among the commercial and industrial nations for place, power, and wealth.’9 It sacrificed the Empire’s periphery to its centre, and all loftier considerations to those of commerce and power. Against this it can only be urged that rulers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with the world as they found it, and mercantilism was at least a rational and in many ways a beneficial response to trying circumstances.
More particularly, the British system turned, as we have seen, on tropical and sub-tropical staple products. They were raised by plantation owners in the mainland colonies south of Pennsylvania and in the British West Indies, whose prosperity was made possible by the importation of vast numbers of African slaves, in itself a lucrative staple trade.10 There were some crucial differences between the mainland and island planters. The mainland planters, whose crops were less profitable, bought fewer slaves, a much higher proportion of them women, and treated them better (since replacements for the dead or incapacitated were expensive). The proportion of black slaves to free whites was far, far greater on the island plantations, and so was discontent. The planters were to a great extent absentees. Consequently imperial protection, against rebellion as well as invasion, was much more important to the islands than to the mainland. Secondly, sugar was so incomparably the most valuable colonial crop that the absentee planters were able to buy themselves into Parliament and the ruling class of landed gentlemen, to form, in alliance with the sugar merchants, a powerful lobby known as the West India interest. By contrast, tobacco planters were content to be colonists. They regularly exceeded their incomes in the attempt to live magnificently at home. Their credit was good, but they over-strained it: by the outbreak of the Revolution, it is estimated, they owed more than £4 million sterling to London.
Britain throve on the system as she was meant to. She had become the staple for her colonies: all colonial produce passed through her ports in its quest for European customers, and she reaped the middleman’s reward. She enjoyed a monopoly of the colonial market for manufactures, which stimulated her industries, and was independent of potentially hostile sources for supplies of such essential commodities as naval stores: tar, pitch, rosin, turpentine, hemp, masts, yards, bowsprits. The slave-trade was a risky and often unprofitable business to individuals, but it helped to make the fortune of Bristol and Liverpool. The merchant marine benefited from the Navigation Acts, as planned, and thus furnished a reserve of trained seamen and seaworthy vessels, most useful to the Royal Navy in time of war. The various customs duties brought in handsome revenue returns for the government, and places in the customs service were useful additions to patronage. The trade and tax structure meant that there was a constant drain of bullion from the colonies to the realm, which appeased the constant mercantilist anxiety about a shortage of precious metals. Finally, the fences which Britain erected round her Empire denied its products to her rivals. Decidedly the mother country seemed to have little reason to complain of mercantilism.11
Nor was it so oppressive to the colonies as it may seem. Great Britain wanted her plantations to be contented and prosperous, and took steps to make them so. The tobacco colonies of the south mainland – Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina – were allowed to trade only with Britain; but they were given a monopoly of the British market, heavy duties being placed on foreign leaf and British farmers being forbidden to grow any.12 Similar advantages were given to South Carolina, which grew rice and indigo; and of course to the sugar islands (which otherwise would have suffered from the competition of cheap French sugar). The colonies of the north mainland – Pennsylvania to New Hampshire – had their own profitable place in the system. The British West Indies became dependent on them for provisions. New Englanders were encouraged by the imperial government to build and sail ships, and eventually supplied nearly a third of all British bottoms, owning half of the 3,000 vessels involved in the colonial trade. Perhaps the colonies’ chief gain was in the political and military sphere. Britain, a careless mother, expected her children to be self-supporting; they were to be a source of profit, not expense; but, with some consistency, and whether the Navigation Acts were obeyed or not – they often were not, for an illicit trade with the French and Spanish colonies became a valuable source of income to the North Americans – she did not interfere with their internal government, beyond occasionally disallowing a colonial law; and she protected them against France and Spain. The colonies were well aware of political and military problems, and that islands and plantations could change hands at peace conferences. To them therefore it mattered little that no large British force was sent to America until the Seven Years War: they were protected equally, or better, by the mother country’s victories on European battlefields, or at sea. For the rest, they were sure of some assistance and support in their perennial struggle against the French- and Spanish-supported Indians. The Board of Trade could plan intelligently, and sometimes rescue a desperate situation. For example, the incompetent heirs of the founders and proprietors of South Carolina, declared under Queen Anne to be ‘the frontier colony of all Her Majesty’s plantations on the Main in America’, might have been left to ruin their province and enjoy their charter in peace for far longer, had not the Yamasee Indians in 1715, in a war arising out of the misdeeds of the Indian traders, shown vividly how a weak government in one colony could injure the whole British position in North America. The war wiped out the Indian trade of the Carolinas for a time and revived French and Spanish strength in the area. The southern flank of the British might be turned, or their traders and settlers confined to the coastal plains. The colony survived – just – but its defence had clearly become too important to be left to incapable private management, so the Board of Trade endorsed a revolt of the settlers in 1719, and in 1729 the proprietors were bought out, South Carolina being ‘taken into the King’s hand’ – that is, becoming a crown colony of the usual type, with a Crown-appointed governor.
On the whole, then, the mercantilist system must be reckoned to have fulfilled the purposes of its makers: it made the prosperity of all parts of the Empire possible. Its drawbacks were its inefficiency and incompleteness – the Board of Trade could never induce Parliament to make it watertight, and the customs officers were too few, too ill-paid, too corrupt to plug the gaps. It was, economically, increasingly obsolescent. But its destruction was to come from quite different causes.
In 1756 the war that had been threatening between France and Great Britain since their last peace (1748) burst into life; and before long the helm of British government had been seized by the man of genius, Pitt the Elder, vaingloriously but truly saying, ‘I know that I can save the country and that I alone can.’ For the war had not been going well; and Pitt incarnated the logic of mercantilism – logic which, ruthlessly pursued, would bring victory. Pitt was not afraid of the harsh international conflict, the scramble for power and profit, from which mercantilism sprang. On the contrary, he rejoiced in it. Faith in Britain’s divine mission inspired him, as it had inspired those earlier pirates, the Elizabethan sea-dogs. He had long correctly identified France as Britain’s last rival, and now he fell upon her with wild ferocity. Her capacity for sea trade and sea warfare must be destroyed. Britain must be aggrandized with France’s spoils. As to the cost of such an onslaught, of such a daring bid for pre-eminence, it could (Pitt thought) be met, ultimately, from the proceeds of war; until they were realized, his colleague, Newcastle, might usefully struggle to raise money by loans and taxes. Meanwhile the French sugar islands, Canada, India and the Floridas were seized, and the French navy was destroyed at Quiberon Bay. Overnight, it seemed, Pitt had doubled the extent of the British Empire with one hand, while sustaining with his other Frederick of Prussia’s struggle in Europe against hopeless odds. Frederick’s role was to keep the French too busy to defend their Empire. ‘I have conquered Canada in Germany,’ Pitt boasted.
Then victory showed its disappointing side. The mercantile system touched the summit of its glory, and glory proved too much for it. First, George II died, and the new King, longing for peace, like most of his people, got rid of the great war minister. In 1763 George III and Bute signed the first Treaty of Paris. Next, the government began to face the problem that Pitt had so airily dismissed. The war had run up the National Debt to £129,586,789, carrying an interest charge of £4,688,177 per annum. The land-tax stood at four shillings in the pound. Glory and power now had to be paid for. How was it to be done? And how was an empire grown suddenly so large, so heterogeneous, to be harmoniously governed?