The Global Reach of Empire: Britain's Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764–1815 by Alan Frost Robert Travers The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764–1815. By Alan Frost. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2003. Around 1740 the British empire was confined mainly to the Atlantic and Mediterranean spheres, with thinly scattered outworks in Asia. By 1815, however, the British had forged an extensive network of territories and naval bases in the Indian and Pacific Oceans; British naval squadrons were permanently maintained in the Cape Colony and in India; and British ships regularly patrolled the eastern coast of South America and the eastern Pacific. In The Global Reach of Empire, Alan Frost describes the twists and turns of British maritime expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans in a lively narrative account, drawing on a wealth of printed and archival sources (especially from the India Office Records and the Public Records Office). His book has been beautifully produced by the Miegunyah Press, with colored prints and excellent maps. Frost tells us that he grew up on the edge of the Pacific Ocean outside Brisbane, and his writing displays a feel for the technical achievements and hard graft of eighteenth century sailors. For the many other historians who are navally challenged, this book will provide an admirable survey of an important subject in British, imperial and world history, leavened with a profusion of telling details and quotations. Frost’s grand narrative style is a throw back to an earlier era of imperial history, and its explanatory devices are unfashionably straightforward. Britain’s maritime expansion, in his view, was the consequence of purposive, even heroic, planning and execution by far-sighted and courageous Britons. His introduction singles out three groups for special mention: explorers and geographers gripped by the encyclopedic appetites of the enlightenment and a taste for adventure; politicians (especially the circle around Pitt the Younger and Henry Dundas from the mid 1780s) armed with new maps and awakening to a global consciousness of the possibilities of trade and empire; and finally traders, especially the Southern whalers, who ‘like the Phoenicians of old’ (12), ventured forth into new horizons of wine dark sea. The following chapters trace British maritime expansion in the context of intense commercial and military competition between European empires in the later eighteenth century. European adventurers had long been enthralled by the mirage of a new continent (Terra Australis) apparently awaiting discovery in the southern seas, and the elusive prospect of a ‘north west passage’ into the Pacific. Since the sixteenth century, British sailors had sniffed around the southern Atlantic trying to steal scraps from the Iberian empires. But Frost makes a good case that the Seven Years War (1756–63) was a crucial turning point in the history of maritime expansion, when the aggressive colonial and naval strategy pursued by Britain focused European attention more intensively on maritime power. In the aftermath of this war, British politicians forged new alliances with naval adventurers with the goal of breaking into markets in Spanish America and northern Asia, and penetrating the mysteries of the uncharted Pacific Ocean. This was the context for James Cook’s famous voyages, in which the great explorer faced off in wooden ships against Antarctic ice packs, finally dismissing the notion of Terra Australis, and probing Australia as a potential consolation prize. Yet Frost shows that British maritime ambition drew powerful responses from France and Spain. French naval rebuilding after the Seven Years War initiated a new naval arms race which lasted into the nineteenth century. The build up of French forces in Mauritius in the 1760s forced the British to strengthen their naval presence in the Indian Ocean, and sparked a search for new naval bases during and after the American war. One of the most interesting sections of Frost’s account demonstrates the sense of vulnerability experienced by British naval commanders east of the Cape of Good Hope. The British possessed no good half-way house for the Asian trade until the capture of the Cape from the Dutch in 1806. Moreover the lack of a good naval base on...