British Imperial Strategies in the Pacific, 1750-1900
Jane Samson
ISBN: 0 7546 1961 3
Publication date: Feb 2003.
The
focus of this volume is Britain's trans-Pacific empire.
This began with haphazard challenges to Spanish dominion,
but by the end of the 18th century, the British had established
a colony in Australia and had gone to the brink of war
with Spain to establish trading rights in the north Pacific.
These rights led to formal colonies in Vancouver Island
and British Columbia, when Britain sought to maintain
a north Pacific presence despite American expansionism.
In the later 19th century the international 'scramble
for the Pacific' resulted in new British colonies and
protectorates in the Pacific islands. The result was
a complex imperial presence, created from a variety of
motives and circumstances. The essays selected here take
account of the wide range of economic, political and
cultural factors which prompted British expansion, creating
tension in Britain's imperial identity in the Pacific,
and leaving Pacific peoples with a complicated and challenging
legacy. Along with the important new introduction, they
provide a basis for the reassessment of British imperialism
in the Pacific region.
Seafaring,
Sailors and Trade, 1450-1750
G.V. Scammell
ISBN: 0 86078 897 0
Publication date: March 2003
This
second volume of articles by G.V. Scammell offers new
insights into the history of British and European shipping
in the centuries of Europe's penetration into the oceans
of the world, from the 15th to the 18th century. It examines
the building, ownership and operation of merchantmen
in the context of economic and social developments of
the period, combining this with the investigation of
the vital, but still comparatively neglected, subjects
of the lives, working conditions, beliefs, skills and
behaviour of seamen. This is the basis for discussion
of the means and methods by which British shipping and
merchants established themselves in oceanic trades, including
those of other powers, considered in relation to the
growth of British maritime and commercial supremacy.
The final studies then examine the causes and consequences
of European and British seaborne expansion, particularly
in Asia.
'A
Free Though Conquering People': Eighteenth-Century Britain
and its Empire
P. J. Marshall
ISBN: 0 86078 913 6
Publication date: May 2003
The present collection brings
together a series of studies by Peter Marshall on British
imperial expansion in the later 18th century. Some essays
focus on the thirteen North American colonies, the West
Indies, and British contact with China; those dealing
specifically with India have appeared in the author's
'Trade and Conquest: Studies on the rise of British domination
in India'. The majority, culminating in the four addresses
on 'Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century'
delivered as President of the Royal Historical Society,
deal with the processes and dynamics of empire-building
and aim to bring together the history of Asia and the
Atlantic. The themes investigated include the pressures
that induced Britain to pursue new imperial strategies
from the mid-18th century, Britain's contrasting fortunes
in India and North America, and the way in which the
British adjusted their conceptions of empire from one
based on freedom and the domination of the seas, to one
which involved the exercise of autocratic rule over millions
of people and great expanses of territory.
Colonial
Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750-1850
Bob Moore and Henk
van Nierop
ISBN: 0 7546 0492 6
Publication date: April 2003
During the seventeenth century,
the Dutch and English emerged as the world's leading
trading nations, building their prosperity largely upon
their maritime successes. During this period both nations
strongly contested for maritime supremacy and colonial
dominance, yet by the nineteenth century, it was Britain
who had undoubtedly come out on top of this struggle,
with a navy that dominated the seas and an empire of
unparalleled size. This volume examines the colonial
development of these two nations at a crucial period
in which the foundations for the modern nineteenth and
twentieth century imperial state were laid. The volume
consists of ten essays (five by British and five by Dutch
scholars) based on papers originally delivered to the
Fourteenth Anglo-Dutch Historical Conference, 2000. The
essays are arranged into five themes which take a strongly
comparative approach to explore the development of the
British and Dutch colonial empires in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. These themes examine
the nature of Anglo-Dutch relations, the culture of imperialism
and perceptions of the overseas world, the role of sea
power in imperial expansion, the economics of colonial
expansion and the extension of the metropolitan state
to the colonies. Taken together, these essays form an
important collection which will greatly add to the understanding
of the British and Dutch colonial empires, and their
relative successes and failures.
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