Asking this for my 5-year-old niece. I, myself am 21 years old, don’t know how exactly they did it and am exceptionally bad at Humanities.
I don’t quite understand how the Britishers convinced/bewitched/overruled the rulers of a nation. From what I understand, they struck deals and what-not. Can you please explain a **bird’s eye view** of the entire situation so that I can explain it to my niece?
In: 203
Depends on where, when and which colony.
Relatively recently, historians have taken more to separate the history of the British Empire into three distinct phases. The First Empire, starting with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia and Boston in Massachusetts, the Second Empire after the American Revolution, where the British held a lot of trading posts all across the world (not too dissimilar to the Dutch and Portugese) along with Canada and various islands in the Caribbean and the Third Empire, with India, Australia and Africa, starting around the 1820s.
The first Empire was fairly obvious: There was a lot of land and not a whole lot of people who could challenge the British claims over these lands. The English and Scottish settlers that arrived far outnumbered the scattered Native tribes rather quickly (i think you can figure out the rest for yourself). It bears mentioning that the control of the British Crown over the Thirteen Colonies was tenous even at the best of times – since they were filled to the brim with people who were either exiles, sold into servitude or held a great disregard for the authority of the Crown, the British had to frequently negotiate with the settlers about a lot of things. The vastness of the land made it nearly impossible to enforce central rule from England in the colonies to the same degree the Spanish managed in Mexico and South America, who built the administration of New Spain on the foundations of the defeated mesoamerican civilizations. This is why “Taxation without representation” was such a big deal for the Founding Fathers; the Crown was effectively walking on a decades old arrangement that the colonists only had to pay taxes to themselves and not to Britain. The American Revolution soon followed.
The second Empire was left in the wake of the American Revolution, after the War of 1812 had failed to reestablish British supremacy over the United States (or at least reign them in so that they stopped supporting Napoleon and establish a clear pecking order), with the British turning their gaze elsewhere. During the Wars of the Coalition, the British had taken over a bunch of Factories (trading stations for exotic goods) from the French, who couldn’t defend them and the Dutch, who fell under Napoleons rule, particularly in India, China and South Africa. These weren’t governed by the British Crown, but the British East India Company, a private company that handled the trade in India, China and Indonesia. The relations between the Company and local powers were often fickle, so the EIC started recruiting mercenaries to protect their outposts and train these men after european military standards. When the EIC’s financial situation got untenable, the British Crown simply assumed direct control over the Company and annexed its holdings in Bengal. From there, they started conquering the fractured Indian and Mogul states piece by piece, forming a complex network of vassal rulers sworn to the King of England. These vassal rulers were simply local nobles and warlords who saw opportunity and pledged their loyalty to the side with the biggest guns.
The Third Empire is the Empire of the Age of Imperialism, starting in the 1850s. Here, the British became much more overt in their colonization, as the invention of preserved foods and advancements in medicine combined with their headstart in industrialization made it possible to get into the heart of Africa, which was for the most part desolate wilderness. Further advancements in naval and communications technology made it far easier to hold big territories together.
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