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This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.
Writing the British Imperial and Colonial History: A Global Perspective
Asian Review of World Histories, 2014
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From the founding of the colonies in North America and the West Indies in the seventeenth century to the reversion of Hong Kong to China at the end of the twentieth, British imperialism was a catalyst for far-reaching change. British domination of indigenous peoples in North America, Asia, and Africa can now be seen more clearly as part of the larger and dynamic interaction of European and non-western societies. Though the subject remains ideologically charged, the passions aroused by British imperialism have so lessened that we are now better placed than ever to see the course of the Empire steadily and to see it whole. At this distance in time the Empire's legacy from earlier centuries can be assessed, in ethics and economics as well as politics, with greater discrimination. At the close of the twentieth century, the interpretation of the dissolution of the Empire can benefit from evolving perspectives on, for example, the end of the cold war. In still larger sweep, the Oxford History of the British Empire as a comprehensive study helps us to understand the end of the Empire in relation to its beginning, the meaning of British imperialism for the ruled as well as the rulers, and the significance of the British Empire as a theme in world history.
Colonial Governance in the Atlantic World - revised in 26-06-2019
Oxford Bibliographies - Atlantic History, 2019
From the beginning of the European overseas expansion into the Atlantic in the 15th-century onward, Europeans had to figure how to govern the newly conquered lands and peoples across Africa and the Americas. Western European polities transplanted to their Atlantic territories forms of governance already tested within the European context, but institutions of colonial governance were built in fits and starts and constantly adapted to local demands and characteristics. American elites sought and sometimes achieved a relationship with the imperial center that could be similar to the one experienced by European local elites. However, Old World models of government were deeply transformed by distance, by environmental conditions, and, above all, by the variety of peoples that were under European rule. Atlantic governance involved the (often violent) seizure of substantial portions of the American and (in a much lesser scale) African lands, along with the transfer of people of European descent to settle the conquered lands. Local populations were often forced to labor for their new overlords and were gradually dispossessed of their lands and institutions, while sub-Saharan Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to work as slaves. As a result of racial prejudice and power relations, they were assigned a subaltern status that deprived them from many civic and political rights, becoming a subaltern majority. This posed new problems that transformed templates brought by European colonizers, such as the patterns of government developed in the Iberian Reconquista and in the English domination of Ireland. All empires dealt with similar problems in the Atlantic: the need to establish its own authority, to defend the settlements, and to produce enough revenue to pay for it all. A high level of flexibility was needed at first because European authorities had little knowledge of Atlantic realities. Afterward, the slowness of communication and the need to obtain local cooperation to achieve any goal, from the conquest itself to defense and taxing local production, required collaboration, not only from colonists of European descent but also from Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and the multiethnic populations that grew throughout the Early Modern era. Colonial governance should not be understood, therefore, as a top-down imposition from Europe to Africa and the Americas, but as a contested struggle between many opposing groups and factions. Recent historiography has been increasingly cognizant of temporal and spatial differences, but there is still need for a deeper engagement between different linguistic traditions. Atlantic expansion was a multinational endeavor, and so should be its study.