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
three things
guns – lots of guns
germs – lots of germs
steel – for ships and other things
a blatant disregard for other people – we are better than everyone else
technology
Largely, it’s building power through local rulers. The key word here is protectorate, where basically a ruler agrees to allow a foreign power a degree of domestic influence in exchange for military protection.
The image of colonialism as a group of European soldiers just conquering territory through nothing but military might is misleading. Diplomacy and evonomic influence played an arguably larger part.
The British Army and it’s guns. Basically they marched into capital cities and said “You are now under British Rule, your king is loyal to the King of England, or else we’ll find someone who is”.
Done. “Overrule” and “Colonize” can be replaced by the word “Conquered”.
As others have said they used the carrot and stick approach, they were not the first or only empires to do this, it was a favoured tactic of the Romans.
You play nicely with us, we’ll look after you, you’ll have benefits that you would never get alone.
Don’t play nicely with us we’ll go play with your rivals, give them the benefits, or we’ll send our troops to dissuade you from being uncooperative – or both. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Step one was always to disrupt the local economy by introducing a monoculture cash crop from elsewhere or to pay the locals to hunt a single species to the point of economic colapse or extinction.
They showed up in boats with cannons and an army with guns and trade goods that locals had never seen before.
It’s almost on the order of imagine aliens landing picking a fight and then vaporizing a whole carrier battle group or the 101st airborne, with super advanced weapons and offering to trade a access to unlimited clean energy if they can rule earth. After that if they wish to rule, what practical method do you have of challenging them?
Ally with someone who wants to be in charge – a younger brother of the king, a trusted advisor, etc. Let them know you want to work with them as long as they work with you, but they just need to get the king out of the way.
Sometimes the ruler had only been in charge a little while and there was someone else he toppled – that person was always happy to get put back in charge.
Also, they had better guns and better trained soldiers. So they might face a bigger army, but they secretly cut a deal with one of the key generals; on the day of battle, that general doesn’t send his troops in, and suddenly it’s a more evenly matched fight; then British superior artillery and more disciplined troops and training take the day (as the other side is also demoralized when the bought-off general doesn’t join in with all his men)
Keep in mind there was not “nationalism” like you have today. To most of the people – the peasants and merchants – the rulers were just people who squeezed them and were often changed through warfare or imperial appointment (in the case of the Mughals). There was not a lot of loyalty to the person in change; one was as good as another.
Ironically, the presence of the British and their growing control often awakened nationalist ideas (see Sepoy Mutiny)
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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.
Usually protection from the other colonial powers. Other colonial powers were – according to the colonised – scary enough to warrant protection from a relatively benign (as far as colonised peoples were concerned) empire. This was the case in New Zealand where the British empire promised to protect Māori subjects from French colonists.
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