The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750-1783

Abstract

ON occasion—fortunately for reviewers, rare ones—books come along to which it is impossible to do justice in a journal review. Because this is such a book, it must be made clear at the outset that it is a superb work of scholarship, elegant in conception, vast in scope and erudition, and of great significance to eighteenth-century British, Indian, American, and imperial history. Every serious student of those subjects needs to come to terms with it; anyone who has even a passing interest in the period can profit from reading it. Professor Marshall encompasses within a single narrative ‘what it is conventional to keep apart, … the loss of a British territorial empire in much of North America and the creation of a new territorial empire in eastern India’ (p. 1). He dismisses the distinction between a ‘first’ and a ‘second’ British empire as illusory. From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth, English commercial, cultural, and territorial dominion had grown simultaneously in North America and India as aspects of a haphazard worldwide expansionism. Parliament and the Crown began trying to rationalise relations between the metropolis and its dependencies in the late 1740s, largely in response to the perceived threats posed by France. The Seven Years’ War interrupted these attempts to make sovereign power the basis of an effective empire; the decisive, expensive victories of 1758–62 radically intensified both British patriotism and pressures for imperial reform.