This is a masterful work of synthesis and interpretation that will take its place among the essential texts of eighteenth-century imperial history. Adding to arguments developed in a series of highly influential articles over the past two decades or more, Marshall's new study offers a richly documented view of the ‘official mind’ of the British empire in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Writing from the vantage point of metropolitan politicians, and high officials and soldiers overseas, Marshall knits together two major arenas of British imperialism, North America and India, which have usually been treated by entirely distinct tribes of historians.
This approach yields striking results. The core of Marshall's argument is that both the unmaking of empire in North America, and the concurrent making of empire in India were closely related to changes in the attitudes of the British empire's high officials. From the late 1740s, and more strongly during and after the Seven Years War (1756–63), Marshall detects the rise of a newly authoritarian approach to imperial problems, which insisted on the indivisible and comprehensive sovereignty of the king-in-parliament over colonies. This imperial whiggism was in large measure provoked by war and the threat of war with other European empires, and the perceived need to tighten the bonds of empire in the interests of economic and military security. Even as ministers insisted on expanding the powers of centre over periphery, they also maintained that the British empire would remain an empire of liberty. Indeed, Marshall emphasizes that the very idea of the sovereignty of parliament, the tribunal which had come to embody whig ideals of liberty, appeared to many high officials to absolve and justify the new authoritarianism.
In Marshall's argument, these unyielding claims to ultimate authority had a rapidly corrosive effect on empire in North America. The dramatic demographic and economic expansion of the thirteen colonies did not itself unmake the empire, though it created new strains within the old system of regulated trade, and fears in the metropolis about a drain of population and resources. Rather, what unmade the empire was the metropolitan insistence on imperial integration and parliamentary authority in the face of entrenched ideas among colonial elites of their right to self-government through local assemblies. In the eyes of most metropolitan politicians, American resistance to parliamentary statutes and taxes smacked of a dangerous spirit of lawlessness and licence, fostered by disorderly and overly democratic habits of colonial government. American invocations of classic whig doctrines like popular sovereignty and the right of resistance were now regarded as tending to the dissolution of empire. British politicians felt emboldened by a wider public which, when it considered distant colonists at all, often saw them as ungrateful recipients of metropolitan protection.
Ministers and governors longed to tinker with the constitutions of unruly colonies like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to restore what they regarded as a proper balance between executive and legislature. Fearing the uproar such measures would provoke, ministers instead tried to press through new taxes and regulations within the old patchwork of colonial governance, without first strengthening the hands of local executives. In the ensuing slide into alienation and conflict, only a few powerful but ineffectual British voices realized the folly of insisting on the sovereign prerogatives of parliament. Edmund Burke's pleas for acknowledging the distinctively democratic and libertarian culture of the American colonies fell on largely deaf ears in parliament. Meanwhile, imperial policy-makers dramatically misjudged their capacity either to rally moderates loyalists in the colonies, or to enforce their will without colonial co-operation. The thirteen colonies had grown big enough and strong enough to contemplate separation from Britain. And the relatively thin institutional basis of metropolitan control could not bear the weight that imperial whigs placed on it.
The argument becomes less clear-cut on the Indian side, especially because the making of empire in India was largely the work of East India Company officials, rather than crown ministers or their appointees. Marshall argues that during the Seven Years War, Company directors successfully persuaded British ministers that their distant conflicts with French traders and Indian rulers were a vital component of the national struggle for empire and security. Ministers thus backed the Company with naval and military reinforcements to protect the valuable Indian trades. After the dust of war had settled, the Company faced the consequences of its own rhetoric of national interest, when ministers insisted on reaping the rewards of their investment in terms of tribute drawn from the Company's territorial conquests, as well as greater controls over the Company's operations. In the short term, the Company was quite successful in defending its chartered rights to independence, but Lord North's assertion of ultimate parliamentary sovereignty over the Indian conquests in 1773 signalled the future pattern of more elaborate state controls. Meanwhile, Company officials themselves often articulated a rhetoric of singular state sovereignty that was reminiscent of imperial whigs at home, especially in their ambitious plans for building a new state in Bengal.
A useful section discusses how British ideas of their empire adjusted to accommodate more diverse populations and forms of rule. Many Britons came to see the recognition of French Canadian or Indian forms of law, and tolerance of different religions, as one of the empire's greatest strengths, despite British radical and American claims that this vaunted magnanimity was little more than a fig leaf covering more authoritarian systems of rule by force rather than consent.
Marshall himself rejects a stark comparison between an empire based on political negotiation and consent in North America, and a despotic rule of force in India. Drawing on recent trends in the writing of Indian history, Marshall emphasizes how the East India Company was apparently able to secure the co-operation of some elite groups in key provinces like Bengal. British power was built on ‘negotiation and implied compacts with elites’ (p. 377), some of whom stood to profit from new opportunities for trade, military or administrative service, or investing in new forms of landed property generated by British reforms of agrarian taxation.
A by-product of this approach is to expose the enduring imbalance in our historical knowledge between America and India in this period. Whereas Marshall is able to track in exhaustive detail the political opinions and intellectual orientations of Americans, the evidence for the opinions of Indians about the rise of British rule is presently much scantier. What we do know from Persian language treatises suggests that some old administrative elites based in the Mughal and post-Mughal cities of north India felt rapidly alienated from the new regime. The argument for negotiated authority thus relies on finding groups within Indian society who entered into the service of the Company or profited from its expansion; yet opting to deal with the British was not the same thing as consenting to empire. Marshall is generally careful not to push his evidence too far; his broad claim that British authority was in some sense ‘negotiated’ is relatively uncontroversial, though the precise dynamics and balance of these negotiations will continue to be debated. Others may want to emphasize more the distinctive economies of coercion operating in a political system that was more layered or segmented than in the thirteen colonies; this both enabled different levels of power to survive the British conquest of the political high ground, but also meant that a co-ordinated resistance to the heavily armed new rulers was unlikely to emerge. As Marshall himself notes, ‘in no way could British authority be said to be accountable to an Indian public’ (p. 270), and the British moved quite rapidly to exclude Indians from the deliberative heights of state power.
Among other things, Marshall has provided a bridge between early eighteenth-century ideas of maritime, settler imperialism, and the ‘new imperial age’ of heightened imperial nationalism and hardening taxonomies of civilization and race after 1780, as described in C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989). Like Marshall's other books, this work will stand as a valued resource for other historians, not only for its subtle interpretations, but for its astonishing wealth of carefully mined nuggets of information. It is, moreover, despite its impeccable scholarly style, a timely story about the hubris of imperial policy-makers in a time of war, about the ways that lines of communication with distant provinces can become silted up by ignorance and incomprehension, and, perhaps most resonantly today, about how historical claims to virtue and liberty can themselves become the best justifications of authoritarian practices of rule.
