Britain in the Wider World: 1603-1800

301 Pages·2020·6.651 MB·English

by  Trevor Burnard

Britain in the Wider World

Britain in the Wider World traces the remarkable transformation of Britain
between 1603 and 1800 as it developed into a world power.
At the accession of James VI and I to the throne of England in 1603,
the kingdoms of England/Wales, Scotland and Ireland were united only by
having a monarch in common. They had little presence in the world and were
fraught with violence. Two centuries later, the consolidated state of the United
Kingdom, established in 1801, was an economic powerhouse and increasingly
geopolitically important, with an empire that stretched from the Americas to
Asia and to the Pacific. This book offers a fresh approach to assessing Britain’s
evolution, situating Britain within both imperial and Atlantic history and
examining how Britain came together politically and socially throughout the
eighteenth century. In particular, it offers a detailed exploration of Britain
as a fiscal-military state, able to fight major wars without bankrupting itself.
Through studying patterns of political authority and gender relationships, it
also stresses the constancy of fundamental features of British society, economy,
and politics despite considerable internal changes.
Detailed, accessibly written, and enhanced by illustrations, B ritain in the
Wider World is ideal for students of early modern Britain.
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the
University of Hull. He is editor in chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online
in Atlantic History and the author of J amaica in the Age of Revolution (2020) and
The Atlantic in World History, 1492–1830 (2020).
Countries in the Early Modern World
Available titles:
Early Modern Ireland
New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives
Edited by Sarah Covington, Vincent P. Carey, and Valerie McGowan-Doyle
Britain in the Wider World
1603–1800
Trevor Burnard
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Countries-in-the-Early-Modern-World/book-series/CEMW
Britain in the Wider World

1603–1800
Trevor Burnard
First published 2020
by Routledge
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© 2020 Trevor Burnard
The right of Trevor Burnard to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.  
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-1-138-31359-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-31360-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45752-4 (ebk)
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Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Britain in 1603 1
2 England enters the world, 1600–1700 20
3 British troubles, 1638–60 43
4 Making Britain, 1660–1707 68
5 Ireland 92
6 Imperial Britain, 1688–1763 114
7 War and society, 1689–1756 144
8 Britain at the accession of George III, 1760 172
9 Global victory and imperial defeat, 1756–88 194
10 The Industrial Revolution 217
11 Gender relations 237
12 A new empire? 262
Index 282
Figures
1.1 The coronation of James I 14
2.1 Yland of Barbados, Plantations, Humphrey Moseley 1657 35
3.1 The execution of Charles I in Whitehall on 30 January 1649 56
4.1 The Landing of William of Orange, 1688, also known as the
Glorious Revolution 77
5.1 Cromwell taking Drogheda by Storm 99
6.1 Pierre Mignard, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth,
with an unidentified servant 121
6.2 The tobacco trade, Merchants relax while slaves load barrels
with tobacco bound for export, Joshua Fry and
Peter Jefferson, 1751 137
7.1 The Invasion, plate 1, William Hogarth, 8 March 1756 160
7.2 Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey,
1757 (1760) 169
8.1 John Singleton Copley, T he Three Youngest Daughters of
George III 188
9.1 Dominic Serres (1779), The Battle of Quiberon Bay , 20
November 1759 196
9.2 Craskell (1763), illustration to map of Surrey, Jamaica 213
11.1 Quarrels with her Jew protector, plate II: T he Harlot’s Progress ,
William Hogarth, 1732 241
11.2 Joshua Reynolds, Lady Worsley, 1776 258
12.1 Death of the Earl of Chatham, by John Singleton Copley, 1779 267
Acknowledgements
I am a late convert to the writing of British history, having spent my career as
a student of early American history, notably of the Chesapeake and the Carib-
bean. The usual move in scholarship is for scholars of England in the seven-
teenth century or Britain in the eighteenth century to extend themselves from
the study of the small islands that made up the British archipelago to a study
of what Britain wrought overseas. I can think of works by my friends Steven
Pincus, Kathleen Wilson and Sarah Barber as examples of outstanding British
historians applying their insights from British history into the history of the
British Empire. It is less common to move the other way, from studying British
America to look at Britain itself, although it was always impossible to study
early America without knowing a good deal about British history. And as an
Atlantic historian with an increasing orientation to studying the relationship
between the Atlantic and the rest of the world and in understanding themes
in Atlantic history that have a transatlantic dimension between Britain and
its overseas possessions, such as imperialism, gender relations, migration and
slavery, I argue that seeing Britain and its involvement in the wider world has
become an increasingly interesting imperative.
My first exposure to early modern British history came at undergradu-
ate level in a subject on Stuart Britain taught at the University of Otago by
Michael Cullen (now Sir Michael Cullen, after leaving historical scholarship
to take up a distinguished political career). An equally distinguished New Zea-
lander, John Pocock, introduced me further to British history at graduate level.
But I never really got to grips with the rich historiography and excitement that
is involved with understanding how Britain began its involvement in the wider
world alongside the making of a British nation within the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century British archipelago until I taught a course at the Univer-
sity of Canterbury in New Zealand with three brilliant historians of Britain –
Glenn Burgess, Marie Peters and John Cookson. This course, from 1992, was
a pioneering subject in what John Pocock had asked scholars to do in 1973
in a famous memorial address to John Beaglehole, the great scholar of James
Cook in the Pacific. That address was as much an expression of rage against
Britain for abandoning New Zealand when it joined the European Economic
Community as it was a call for a new historical approach to Britain. John was
viii Acknowledgements
concerned then and now at expanding what he saw as parochial visions of
what constituted being ‘British’ then and in the past. Pocock asked British, and
by implication British American, scholars to try a new subject, which was to
expand their vision beyond the shores of Britain (which for most meant just
the land of England) to examine all kinds of Britains, from North America to
the West Indies to South Africa and to Australia and New Zealand. The course
that Glenn, Marie, John and I taught was probably the first course in Atlantic
history and in the British world to be delivered in the Southern Hemisphere.
And the rage that Pocock expressed against the historical amnesia that some-
times affects the British in Britain about its role in the past in the world is just
as significant in 2019, two months before a possible exit from the European
Union, as it was when Britain left New Zealand to its own devices in 1973.
Moving from Jamaica, to New Zealand, to Britain, to Australia, and then
back again to Britain, where I am the Professor of Slavery and Emancipa-
tion and Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and
Emancipation at the University of Hull, has made me aware of the multiple
links that Britain forged in the seventeenth and eighteenth century throughout
the world. In Britain, a key moment was at the University of Sussex in 2007,
where Huw Bowen persuaded me to put on a conference on a project he was
running with Elizabeth Mancke and John Reid comparing the eighteenth-
century Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. I think Huw took advantage of my
susceptibility to flattery while out drinking at the Merchants pub in Rugby,
where we were then both living. He persuaded me to do some of his confer-
ence preparation for him by providing him with a venue for discussions. It was
a good thing that he did so. The result of this conference, held in the beautiful
weather of early-summer Sussex, produced a wonderful book that includes
among many better offerings an essay from me when I began my first exercise
in comparative oceanic history, asking what studying the Indian Oceanic world
would do to inform studies of the Atlantic world. I soon realised when I pre-
sented an embryonic version of this paper to colleagues at my new university,
the University of Warwick, that my knowledge of the Indian oceanic world
was very limited. David Arnold pointed this out with his customary tact and
helped set me straight on how to think of British overseas expansion into Asia.
Huw also helped me develop greater knowledge and interest in British history
when he invited me to a fabulous conference at Aberystwyth, two months after
our conference in Sussex. This conference, which Huw organised entirely this
time, was on Wales and the British overseas empire. It allowed me not only to
benefit from the wisdom of some great historians of Wales and Scotland but to
write my first essay that was on a British history topic. While I was at Sussex, I
discussed many of the themes of a British world and what was distinctive about
British European expansion with Saul Dubow, a great scholar of South Africa
and nineteenth- and twentieth-century African themes that have had a bearing
on this work. My thinking was also strongly influenced by what I learned at
Sussex from Richard Follett, Clive Webb, Richard Whatmore, Naomi Tadmor
and Paul Betts.
Acknowledgements ix
The month of the conference on Wales and Empire saw me move from the
University of Sussex to the University of Warwick, as professor of American
history. Warwick is a major centre for global history, and my colleagues there
in global history, notably Maxine Berg, Giorgio Riello and Anne Gerritsen,
along with colleagues in Caribbean and American history – Gad Heuman,
Tim Lockley, Rebecca Earle, Cecily Jones, John Gilmour, David Dabydeen
and Tony Macfarland – and colleagues in early modern British history –
Steve Hindle, Bernard Capp, Peter Marshall, Margot Finn and Beat Kumin –
instructed me in how to think about British, American and Caribbean history
more globally.
My thanks are due to all of them, but my most important thanks are to Mark
Knights. We arrived at Warwick together in September 2007 and became fast
friends and intellectual companions, although his historical and exposition
skills are far superior to mine. A highlight of our intellectual life together was a
series of workshops and seminars for advanced graduate students that we held
at Warwick and most memorably in a hot Chicago summer in 2011 where we
compared scholarship on Britain and British America in two weeks of incred-
ibly intensive and massively rewarding teaching. These two weeks were the
most intensive teaching either of us had ever done, with constant guests, loads
of readings and brilliant graduate students, many of whom have gone on to
very promising careers. If you want to know something, however, you must
teach it and after those two weeks I was convinced that I had something to
say about Britain and the wider world between the seventeenth and the early
nineteenth century that others might be interested in. This book is thus the
long-term result of the Mellon funded set of workshops on Britain and the
wider world held in 2010 and 2011. I thank the Mellon Foundation for
their support of this project. It is also a by-product of an Australian Research
Council Discovery Grant and the product of fellowships in Paris between 2015
and 2018, courtesy of Cécile Vidal, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Marie-Jeanne
Rossignol and Allan Potofsky.
Many other people in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and
the United States have contributed to the work that is presented here, but I
hope these friends and colleagues will not mind me making a special acknowl-
edgement of my long-time friend and collaborator, Andrew O’Shaughnessy.
Once again, this work is indebted to both Andrew’s scholarship and to his
encompassing historical vision. Andrew is the perfect embodiment personally
of some of the themes in this book – the quintessential English gentleman
who has lived in America for much of his life (albeit in that English outpost of
Charlottesville, Virginia) and who has written penetrating work on the British
West Indies, British North America and the ruling elite of Britain during the
American revolutionary war. Every page of this work bears some indebtedness
to my deep immersion in Andrew’s work.
I believe that this book shows that I have the sort of lasting appreciation of
Britain that only those of us not born in Britain can have. My ancestors left
for New Zealand between 1858 and 1905, some from Scotland and more from