The American Revolutionary War (1775-83) resulted in defeat for the British; however, its impact was very different in other parts of the world. Here Bilal Junejo explains how defeat in the war led to Britain strengthening its presence in India.
King George III of England, 1799/1800.
Of all the upheavals that dot the annals of the turbulent eighteenth century, it is improbable that many could readily vie in either import or impact with the seminal War of American Independence, a landmark which, whilst it tolled the death knell of imperial aggrandizement at one end of the globe, simultaneously, if inadvertently, also served to herald its retrospectively ineluctable flourish at the other by dint of the virtual liquidation that it secured of all non-Indian obstacles in the path of British expansion in India. Indeed, had it not been for this colossal western loss that preceded the eventually colossal eastern gain, General Charles Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India from 1786-93, might never have been afforded the means of expiating his ignominious capitulation to General George Washington at Yorktown in 1781.1 What might have happened in the case of the colonists’ defeat at British hands must necessarily remain the sport of conjecture, but what is certain is that with their victory, the eventual one of their erstwhile masters in London also became well-nigh certain in that illustrious subcontinent of Asia entitled India, the lure of the ages. The way Great Britain’s own fortunes were affected by the American fiasco directly determined the manner in which she would go on to determine those of India. Principally, the impact of the Revolution had two facets: one domestic and one foreign. But because the latter could scarcely have made any difference in the absence of the former, it is to the domestic aspect that we must first turn our attention, before proceeding to contemplate how it operated in conjunction with the other one to render the cumulative result of incorporating India as the brightest jewel in the British crown.
The immediate domestic consequence lay in the dissolution of that effete administration whose memory has become intertwined with the loss of the American colonies, and the hallmark of which had lain in the anachronistic fantasies of a monarch and the correspondingly complaisant follies of his premier. The government of Lord Frederick North (1770-82) had distinguished itself not only by the acute myopia which had informed its dealings with the colonists since, at least, the Boston Tea Party (1773)2, but also by the slow, yet steady, erosion of those gains which had been consolidated in the practice of parliamentary government since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. King George III, the unfortunate disciple in his early years of the royalist tutelage that pervaded the philosophy of the ironically hapless Earl of Bute3, and in stark contrast to the relatively democratic predilections of the first two Hanoverians, ascended the throne with a vigorous resolve to effect the full exercise of royal powers, but in his personal capacity, a regression that would entail a gradual erosion of the need to govern through ministers responsible to parliament. The Settlement of 1689 had provided that thenceforth the government should be a constitutional monarchy, but the immediate consequence of that compromise, as Trevelyan explained, was to limit any further expansion of the royal prerogative, rather than effect its transfer from the sovereign to their ministers, which only transpired gradually over the decades— a classic example of what the Fabian Sidney Webb called the ‘inevitability of gradualness’. Of this inexorable transformation’s culmination, the essence was succinctly delineated by one Lord Esher, in a memorandum that His Lordship prepared for King George V in 1913, during the constitutional troubles over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland:
“Has the King then no prerogatives? Yes, he has many, but when translated into action, they must be exercised on the advice of a Minister responsible to Parliament. In no case can the Sovereign take political action unless he is screened by a Minister who has to answer to Parliament. This proposition is fundamental, and differentiates a Constitutional Monarchy based upon the principles of 1688 from all other forms of government.”4
The impact in Britain
It is not for us to delve into the constitutional implications of George III’s untoward proclivities, for all that need concern us here are the political ramifications, in the light of that era’s constitutional status quo, that would likely have ensued following a British victory in America. In any given society, it is axiomatic to say that an overseas victory achieved by the incumbent regime will redound to its credit and increase its popularity amongst the electorate, whereas any loss would only serve to undermine its popular appeal and support. Because the defeat in America was so categorical, the pretensions of the George-North administration were dealt a mortal blow, and the peril of a return to the polity of James II was practically expunged. Englishmen of the seventeenth century had waged a formidable Civil War for the blessings of political liberty and accountable government, restored Charles II when it seemed expedient to do so to restore stability after the less than favorable developments following Cromwell’s demise, but then again overthrown James II a mere five and twenty years later when it appeared that his deleterious inclinations promised a return to the autocracy of his father’s days. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that had autocratic power begun to increase in the wake of a victory in America, the people (especially the Whigs) of Britain would have so submissively acquiesced in a renewed emulation of the traditions that still inspired the dilapidated ancien régime in neighboring France. Indeed, the famous writer and politician, Edmund Burke (1729-97), had begun to sound the alarm as early as 1770, even before the Revolution, when he published his pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, arguing that King George III was upsetting the balance between crown and parliament in the British constitution by seeking to rule without due acknowledgement of the party political system.5 And in 1780, whilst the war was still going on, Dunning’s resolution— which lamented that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished”— was passed by a distrustful House of Commons.6 Thus, it is not fanciful to suppose that victory in America would have given a fresh lease of life to the George-North administration, any continuance of which could have only served to deepen the fissures in British society. If the King could block Catholic Emancipation, despite his American failure, for as long as he lived, then one can only wonder at what he might have done had he won that redoubtable contest of wills on transatlantic shores. As it happened, though, a contretemps in America averted the much greater danger of domestic unrest and civil war at home, which would scarcely have conduced to the acquisition of empire in the world. The last Jacobite uprising of 1745-6, with all its turbulence, was still a living memory, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender, was destined to live until 1788, which means that it was not impossible for him, or his nominee, to become the figurehead of a popular resistance to a jubilant George-North oligarchy. An unstable metropolis cannot exude the aura of that infallibility and serenity which is indispensable for cowing a foreign people into deferential submission, even against their will.
The rivalry with France
The second aspect that merits consideration here is the impact that the Americans’ victory had on France, Britain’s historic— and, in India, the principal— rival and the chief abettor of seditious endeavors across the Atlantic. How the war affected France was aptly summed up by the historian, Herbert Fisher, when he observed that “for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, no policy could have been more improvident, for not only did the American war give the final push to the tottering edifice of French finance, but the spectacle of republicanism triumphant and monarchy overthrown across the Atlantic kindled in every forward-reaching mind in France the vision of a Europe remade after the new American pattern of republican liberty.”7 Again, we can only speculate about what might have happened in the case of French neutrality or the Americans’ defeat, but what is certain is that after Washington’s triumph at Yorktown, and the ironic, not to mention portentous, fact that the treaty of peace and recognition between Great Britain and the new American democracy was signed at despotic Versailles, revolution in France became only a matter of time. The cost of the war was unlikely to have been inflamed to the degree that it was on the eve of the Bastille’s fall had it not been for the legitimate pride that the likes of Lafayette could take in the succor they had rendered the armies of Washington. France might have collapsed even earlier in the case of defeat in America, but it is also possible that she might have launched a fresh war of revenge in Europe for the distraction of domestic opinion from real domestic issues to manufactured foreign perils. And if France had lost, then England would have won, and thereby consolidated the insidious gains in royal power made by King George III up to then, resulting in British foreign policy coming to reflect royal predilections more and more, as opposed to those of Parliament. One must not forget that the English monarch back then, a Hanoverian, was also the Elector of Hanover at the same time, and if France had decided to avenge an ignominious failure in America by attacking Hanover to her east (thereby precluding the need to try to reach a conclusion with the Royal Navy), George III might have decided to focus his entire attention on saving his Electorate without worrying about Britain’s overseas possessions, and given the latent insanity with which we know, thanks to the benefit of hindsight, that he was afflicted, all sorts of untoward eventualities might have arisen.
The impact on India
How exactly did these two consequences cumulatively affect India? This is the question that constitutes the end of our discussion. In 1623, the massacre of Amboina had forced the English to withdraw from the East Indies. Now, Yorktown had also necessitated a kindred evacuation from the American colonies, so India was perforce the main attraction left for imperial gratification. But such gratification, quite naturally, presupposes uninterrupted stability in the metropolis, and this was achieved by the Revolution when it shattered the autocratic ambitions of King George III, any realization of which might have imperiled the island state’s security by precipitating a fresh civil war. And we must not forget that towards the end of the eighteenth, as well as the beginning of the nineteenth, century, some of the most crucial battles that would determine the fate of the East India Company in India were fought (e.g. with Tipu Sahib of Mysore and the Marathas). Even though France was wracked with internal unrest, the contagion of which soon pervaded the rest of Europe and did not abate until 1815, she was nevertheless able to create great problems for the British. Indeed, one of the main reasons for remembering Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General of India from 1798-1805, is his frustration of Napoleon’s plans, which encompassed burgeoning contacts with Tipu, to subvert the Indians.8 And when Admiral Nelson decimated the overweening French fleet at Aboukir Bay in August 1798, thereby annihilating any hopes of Napoleon’s advance eastwards to India, it was the East India Company that, out of profuse gratitude, rewarded him with a munificent ten thousand pounds sterling, a stupendous sum in those days.9 To judge from the magnitude of this largesse, such were the fears aroused by the grandiose ambitions of a feverish and unstable France that one can only wonder what might have happened had the Bastille not been stormed in 1789— a cogently distinct possibility, but for that eruption which commenced at Lexington and was carried to triumph under the auspices of French arms.
Thus, the inevitable conclusion we draw is that the American Revolution, by domestically strengthening Britain at the same time as it domestically weakened France, made it assured that no serious challenge from without could henceforth arise to check the British rise within India. It was so because, to recollect the memorable verdict of Fisher, after the Peace of Versailles, “the continent merely saw that an empire had been lost. It did not perceive that a constitution had been saved. Yet such was the case. The failure of the king’s American policy involved the breakdown of the last effectual experiment in personal rule which has been tried in Britain.”10 And it was from the ashes of this humbled royal pride that there arose the Pax Britannica. God bless Peace, and God bless Britain.
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1 John Kenyon, The Wordsworth Dictionary of British History (first published 1981, Wordsworth 1994) 93
2 Ibidem, 44
3 Ibidem, 55
4 G. M. Trevelyan, The English Revolution 1688-1689 (first published 1938, Thornton Butterworth Ltd 1938) 193
5 John Kenyon, The Wordsworth Dictionary of British History (first published 1981, Wordsworth 1994) 54
6 Ibidem, 118
7 H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (first published 1935, The Fontana Library 1972) 861
8 Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-speaking peoples (Cassell and Company Ltd 1957) Volume 3, pages 188-9
9 James Brown, The Life & Times Of Lord Nelson (Parragon Book Service Ltd 1996) 41
10 H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (first published 1935, The Fontana Library 1972) 862
