The Founding of the Second British Empire

Abstract

n many respects a masterpiece',2 wrote Richard Pares of the first volume of The Founding of the Second British Empire. It was certainly a work which profoundly influenced all scholars working in the field of British colonial policy. Professor Harlow was first concerned to explode the common view which saw the American Revolution as a great watershed in British colonial history. This was a view which sliced colonial developments into neat compartments. After the mercantilist 'Old Colonial System', the peace of I783 was held to have ushered in an era of disillusion, summed up in Lansdowne's phrase: 'It appeared a madness to think of colonies after what had passed in North America.'3 There followed a period of convalescence, when Britain concentrated on building up administrative and financial strength at home; then from I793 to i8I5 all was subordinated to the struggle with France; and at last, as the first prospects of the pax Victoriana dawned, the views of Huskisson and Wakefield stirred the Colonial Office, and the colonies emerged from neglect to blossom into the second British Empire. That Pitt's ministry fostered consciously the rebuilding of the Empire seemed doubtful to historians such as Benians, who asked: 'Who would have proposed to found a new empire with the exiles from the old colonies, the escaped negroes, the convicts excluded from the new world? Yet in providing for them the new beginning was made.'4 Such a view was not much in advance of Seeley's famous aphorism about the Empire's origins 'in a fit of absence of mind.'5 Professor Harlow's contribution was to show that this 'second British Empire' was not brought into being half-accidentally through reaction from the American experience, but followed a pattern of development built up gradually by successive British administrations since the Seven Years War. 'Trade, not dominion' was the dominant objective. Since the first half of the eighteenth century the colonies had supplanted Europe as Britain's main trading partners; and the colonies were envisaged as a chain of bases exploiting hinterlands which might not (and, for reasons of economy, perhaps preferably should not) lie directly under British governance, but which were safely linked to the