England's Empire in the 18th Century: Expansion and Critique

England in the Eighteenth Century

Two parables exist about the making and meanings of the British Empire. The first involves a man shipwrecked on a desert island. Despair gives way to resolution, Protestant faith, and ingenuity, allowing him to subdue his environment. He encounters a black man, names him, and makes him a servant. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) portrays empire-making as seizing land, planting it, and changing it, employing guns, technology, trade, and the Bible to impose rule and subordinate those of different skin pigmentation or religion.

Critique of Empire: Gulliver's Perspective

Gulliver observed that locals were deemed "harmless people" due to their perceived weakness. Consequently, their lands were seized and renamed. The locals were subdued by force, some killed, and others taken to the motherland as exhibits. Despite this cruelty, colonizers were often forgiven, their actions considered a duty.

From the outset, Gulliver, representing Swift, dissented from the Empire's ethical values. He refused participation, skeptical of colonial justice, comparing colonizers to pirates invading new lands.

Gulliver rejected colonial expansion because distributive justice was immoral, equating the colonial project with piracy: chance landings, sacking, and robbery, lacking genuine planning.

Changes for the British Empire

Consider the circumstances prompting the British Empire's gradual creation. Before the late sixteenth century, the English showed little global interest. In 1630, there were approximately 12,000 settlers from the British Isles in North America, Guiana, the Caribbean, and coastal India. By the early 1700s, the British state claimed authority over more than half a million white settlers.

By the 1820s, British dominion encompassed a fifth of the global population. The world map places Britain near the center, encouraging focus on its worldwide expanse, not its tiny islands. The disparity between Britain’s imperial pretensions and its domestic size was remarkable.

By the early twentieth century:

• The Dutch empire was fifty times bigger than the Netherlands.
• The French colonies were some eighteen times the size of France.
• Britain’s authority was stretched over a global empire 125 times larger.

This imperial overstretch was sharpened by Britain’s small demography.

Population Growth Between 1550 and 1820

• France’s population expanded by an estimated 79%.
• Spain’s population rose by just 56%.
• Britain’s population trebled over this period, an increase of 300%.

Yet, by 1820, when the British Empire contained one in every five people on the globe, there were still fewer than 12 million men and women in England, in contrast with Spain or France, with some 20 million inhabitants.

In 1715, Britain already claimed authority over some half a million people in North America, large parts of the West Indies, coastal settlements in India, and outposts in the Mediterranean.

However, its army was estimated to be no bigger than the King of Sardinia’s.

Advantages of Being Small

Emigrants, entrepreneurs, and adventurers left in large numbers because the home islands didn’t provide the land opportunities, manpower, and markets that were wanted.

Means of escape: nowhere in Britain is more than seventy miles from the sea. As Daniel Defoe said: ''We want not the dominion of more countries than we have'' (1707).