It was like a balloon waiting to be burst. No wonder they called it their burden. This post will be concerned with the later days of the British Empire, under its formal jurisdiction, followed by the simultaneous economic decline and loss of colonies, followed by the ascension of London as the global financial center, and the reemergence of the UK as a world power with profound global influence and many things to offer the rest of the world. As a result, the UK became an empire, albeit not nearly as significant as the American one. Right now both powers are in tough straits economically, and their situation might be greatly exacerbated, meanwhile their global leverage is being challenged by some sleeping giants - the BRICS - in addition to smaller developing countries that are rising from obscurity. What should we expect? Well, I'm not a social scientist yet, but if I were then I wouldn't try to predict the future.
The mainstay of their intra-empire economy, the slave trade, was outlawed in Parliament by a majority of 283-16 in the House of Commons in 1807, the same year the US Congress banned the importation of slaves. In the following decades the British engaged in something virtually unheard of at the time, a humanitarian intervention, in which they policed the Atlantic and their West African colonies, to apprehend anyone who seemed to involved in selling slaves that weren't claimed by another strong European power. Meanwhile, other countries would follow suit and end their own slave trades. And the obsolescence of slavery interfered with the exchange of other commodities. As it says in the movie: molasses, rum and slaves. Without continual imports of cheap slaves, plantation owners (primarily in the Caribbean) could no longer overwork and malnourish their slaves with the expectation that they can be To easily replaced when they die. Caribbean sugar therefore became more expensive, so other tropical regions could sell sugar at competitive prices, and so could European countries that had learned to make it from beets. Meanwhile, the center of rum production was in some former colonies that had become states. So the British had to anchor their economy elsewhere, and to find other commodities
The Napoleonic Wars were, perhaps, what set the British ahead of their southern neighbors in terms of global conquest. One major reason is the the shear damage that these Continental European countries did to each other via the fighting itself. Until the Napoleonic Wars, I would say France was Europe's dominant global imperial power. That changed because France was overwhelmed during these wars, and because the British were blockading the French, first by the military's own initiative and then from 1806 onward by parliamentary statute. Their North American territory would be purchased by Thomas Jefferson at a bangin' price, nearly doubling his territory. Also at this time their handy colony Saint-Domingue gained independence through its own efforts under Jean Jacque Dessalines, who named his new country "Haiti," a cross-breed of two separate words from Hispaniola's native language and a West African language. During the Treaty of Amiens, the Second Treaty of Paris and the Congress of Vienna, French lost small but critical colonies across the globe (some more Caribbean colonies, Malta, Mauritius, Seychelles), all of them ceded to Britain. France would, of course, bounce back in the course of the 19th century, but the British victory would give them a head start. Also during these wars, and their treaties, the British took some highly valuable colonies from the Dutch, most of which would soon be ceded back, but they could hold onto two of them securely: Guyana and Cape Colony, South Africa. During the wars the British also took Sri Lanka (re-naming it Ceylon) from its nominal Dutch control, and against the resistance put up by the country's indigenous military. Additionally, in coming decades the British would acquire such Dutch colonies as Singapore, some add-ons comprising most of what's now Malaysia, and the Dutch Gold Coast of Africa (namely Ghana).
To be continued ...
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