A Settled Question? Charles, Lord Cornwallis, the Loss of America and the Mind of Empire

Abstract

The loss of the prized American colonies of settlement was the first crisis of British settler colonialism. To explore the reverberations of this loss and its impact on imperial thinking and strategies, this chapter examines the letters of the first Marquis of Cornwallis, who surrendered at Yorktown but who also, after spending seven years in India as Governor-General, rode the storm of Ireland’s 1798 Rebellion and steered the Act of Union through the doomed Irish Parliament in 1800. Disillusioned with both of America’s divided settler factions (loyalists and patriots alike), Cornwallis also held a generally poor view of European groups in British India and, later, of Irish Protestants for what he saw as their misguided treatment of Ireland’s Catholic population. Using Cornwallis’s career and views as lenses, this chapter seeks to address the following questions: What lessons did those at the heart of empire draw from the American context, and did these lessons help shape the response by the British state to the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland? Did the loss of the American settler colonies thus in some sense affect directions taken by the Irish (both settler and ‘native’) and their rulers into the nineteenth century? Did these late eighteenth-century crises affect the ways in which the very identity of the British empire was imagined in the century that followed?