Empire, the Sea and Global History.
Britain’s Maritime World, c.1760-1840
David Cannadine, ed.

Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2007
£19.99 – 159 pages, ISBN – 13:978-0-230-00899-1 (hardback)
10:0-230-00899-2 (paperback).

Reviewed by Trevor Harris

 

Bringing together imperial history, maritime history and world history is a challenge of considerable proportions and this collection of eight essays—originally given at the University of London as a series of “Empire Lectures,” in October 2006—does not attempt to be more than a drop in the ocean. It is none the less a very suggestive three-way intersection for that. Beyond the title and the period covered (roughly from the Seven Years War to the abolition of slavery), it can sometimes be difficult—as is often the case with a collection of this kind—to see what holds these very different essays together. True, each contribution deals, as David Cannadine indicates in his introduction, “with different aspects of the maritime component of the British empire” [4]. Yet the book shows, if anything, that Britain’s “maritime world” was not coextensive with, and did not always share the same objectives as, the British Empire: something which has the advantage of inviting readers to plot their own course through the book and the undoubtedly interesting questions which it raises.

The reader is bound to ask, first of all, where “British history” is in all of this. The concept, indeed, is discussed in the very first lines of Cannadine’s introduction: as a subject, he implies, British history is apparently ebbing away, revealing a sometimes featureless beach of “global” history: but a vastness, one could add, which is now studded with countless, minutely crafted micro-histories—as well as occasional, more substantial rock pools scooped out by the retreating tide of national history. In a world of real-time planetary communication, on the one hand, and of rogue or imploding states, on the other, academic disciplines seem to mirror the faltering nation-state and have, for some time now, had the boundaries, the legitimacy and even the usefulness of their own traditional territories called into question. The responses have been many and varied, but often polarised, as historians either pull back and try to take in the significance of phenomena spiralling out beyond the limits of the usual frames of reference, or zoom right in to seek solace among the minutiae of human development. The contributors to this volume gravitate rather towards the first pole, opting, as it were, for some large-scale naval-gazing: a triangulation of imperial, maritime and global perspectives.

Where imperial history is concerned, it is difficult to talk of anything other than an embarrassment of riches to draw upon: the vigour of this branch of the discipline shows no sign at all of abating. And Cannadine points out that empire is proving to be among the longest-lived forms of political organisation, with the British Empire being simply one of the most recent manifestations of a trend endlessly confirmed throughout history.  As for maritime history, it may appear to be less in the limelight, but for British readers—perched on their island home, never further than 70 miles from the sea—who necessarily draw on a vibrant ocean-going tradition, maritime history is scarcely a less grand branch of historiography: at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies¹ very logically brings the imperial and the maritime together. And both, given their geographical scope, can be seen as key constituents of world or “global” history: the third intersecting circle of the book’s title. At one level, it is possible to conceive a global history of most phenomena—a global history of architecture, for example, of the city, of technology, ethnology, and so on²: or (apposite in the present context) John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: A Global History of Empire (Allen Lane, 2007), which uses global history to upset traditional Eurocentric approaches, but also to contribute to the current, rather vexed, debate about the pros and cons of empires and their legacy.

But in addition to global approaches to any given theme, global history also operates as a discipline in its own right, with its own methods and objectives.³ The fundamental link with geography is clear, and global history works in terms of spatial influences—some might say of geographical determinism—rather than with the chronological constraints on causality: it is continents which become the basic units of historical currency. This is interesting in respect of Empire, the Sea and Global History, since the origins of the latter can be traced back to British competition with Russia during the “Great Game”: a land-based struggle which seems, on the face of it, to be at odds with the kind of seaborne dominance under analysis here. Halford J. Mackinder’s “heartland theory”—in many ways his theoretical response to the Anglo-Russian tussle—which he set out in his 1904 paper to the Royal Geographical Society on the “geographical pivot of history,” seemed to inaugurate a paradigm shift away from the kind of maritime thinking earlier championed, for example, by Alfred Thayer Mahan.

This poses some challenging questions for the contributors to this and other volumes taking a global approach, since there is a latent tension between the synthetic objective, on the one hand, and the desire—clear in most of the essays in this book—to point up difference and diversity, on the other. The proximity of global history, that is, to geopolitics, international relations and to all aspects of the international “system,” inevitably means that global history focuses on migration, interdependence, overarching questions of human rights, cultural diversity and interaction, patterns of belief, comparative economics and politics, or the role played by multinational corporations. Global history, in short, seems to shade back towards an unavoidably “grand narrative.” It resists fragmentation and goes in search, implicitly or explicitly, of high-level connections and “traditional long-term explanations” [15]: something which Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, for example, in the first essay—“Britain, the Sea, the Empire, the World”—instinctively recoils from but is none the less drawn into. His essay, for example, dismisses “northernist” or “Europeanist” explanations for imperial phenomena, preferring to see them as a function of a “projection from Atlantic-side Europe” [18]: which could be interpreted as making him a “westernist.” “All explanation is a function of perspective,” he writes [16]: and his own is clearly posited here. But can we really say, for example, that “the British empire was a nineteenth-century phenomenon” [15]? In the end, this essay underlines the considerable difficulty of installing a truly plural perspective, rather than substituting one grand narrative for another, however softly proffered it may be.

Other perspectives on the plural experience of empire are explored elsewhere in the collection. Neither Africans nor women, it would seem, were condemned to a uniformly subordinate role in Britain’s maritime world. Catherine Hall (“Gender and Empire”) shows that white women held prejudices against blacks, and were often capable of making a case in defence of slavery. In addition, if all empires are gendered, then gendering is shown to be part of the life of the colonised, as well as the colonisers. “Black experiences in Britain’s Maritime World,” were also of many different types. Philip D. Morgan—in the longest contribution to the volume—underlines the terrible British legacy where slavery is concerned, Britain having shipped 3.2 million of the 12.3 million slaves taken across the Atlantic. Britain was, whichever way one looks at it, in the vanguard of a “racially defined world” [127]. But Morgan is keen to address his difficult subject without romanticism or exaggeration, and discusses in detail a number of aspects of the maritime dimension of black life in the colonies and at sea. Paradoxically, the slaves who were members of the crew of a British ship were far freer than had they remained on land. Many Africans were involved extensively in maritime activities, including trade: notably in the extensive trade between colonies. In some cases, Africans held down jobs involving considerable responsibility. In the Caribbean—which Professor Morgan describes at some length—it was not uncommon for ships to have all-black crews. And Morgan adds that, often, the desertion rates were lower than in the navy (though this may perhaps only be another way of saying that, if conditions were awful on board ship, they were less awful for black crew than on land—rather as many working-class recruits to the British army thought, up to the time of the First World War). Still, Morgan shows clearly that many black seamen were subsequently able to acquire their freedom: a point also made by Peter Marshall (“Empire and British Identity: the Maritime Dimension”), who shows how British freedom was indeed available to some people of non-British origin. This is a meagre riposte to the monumental horrors of slavery, perhaps, but worth pointing out none the less. In short, the British maritime world was, Morgan says, a “permeable” frontier in an otherwise hermetically sealed system of class and privilege at the heart of the British state wherever it took up residence.

Simon Schaffer (“Instruments, Surveys and Maritime Empire”), however, reveals some of the complexities attaching to the outreach of that state through the agency of the Royal Navy. He shows, indeed, that the relationship between British naval activity and the empire was complex and, in many ways, counter-intuitive. Above all, the international dimension of the navy’s work cannot be reduced to, or easily explained by, the imperial dimension. For what becomes increasingly clear as one reads is the importance of the national role played by the British navy, whatever the distance at which it may have been operating (a point also brought out by Peter Marshall). Stephen Conway (“Empire, Europe and British Naval Power”) takes the idea further, arguing that the “common association of naval power and the expansion and defence of empire” [23], does not really stand up to scrutiny. Conway, indeed, arrives at a conclusion which, in effect, turns the assumed hierarchy of navy and empire on its head: “empire served the navy,” he argues, “more than vice versa” [33]: not least because the demands of seaborne trade from British colonies meant that large numbers of seamen were, in effect, ready trained for the senior service.

Maxine Berg (“Cargoes: the Trade in Luxury from Asia to Europe”), writing specifically on the theme of trade, provides what is perhaps one of the most interesting insights in the book. Professor Berg examines in detail the movement of luxury goods between Asia and Europe and shows how these goods globalised the concept of luxury, became “central to European material culture” [67], and how, in effect, they stimulated consumer markets and accelerated the growth of consumer culture in Europe. In terms of the synergies between Britain’s maritime, imperial and national history, it is difficult to avoid the observation that the acceleration of trade in such markets coincided, in Britain, with the Industrial Revolution which provided the capital for much of this consumption—a fact which, curiously, is never acknowledged in the book.   

Those Asian luxuries, arriving, as they did, in increasing quantities from the east, remind us that the empire, for the best part of a century, became “oriental” following the loss of the American colonies and the development of the Monroe doctrine: before becoming frenetically African at the end of the nineteenth century. As Peter Marshall shows in the lucid pages he devotes to India towards the end of his essay, the empire in India was in many ways the antithesis of the earlier transatlantic empire. The latter had been built on four main values: Protestantism, maritime power, commerce and freedom. In the east, and particularly in India, the empire took on a far more authoritarian, even reactionary character. The values forged in the west did not transfer unscathed to the east, where the empire, to a non-negligible degree, mutated from maritime to military. By entering this more resolutely continental phase, had the empire not, as it were, simply run aground? Certainly the militant, Beaconsfieldian, full-on imperialism of Dilke, of Joseph Chamberlain, or Milner, Rhodes and others, operated with a decidedly conservative concept of freedom. If Britain was, as Disraeli said, an Asian power, was she still British? Did Britain, in fact, in the course of the period covered by these essays—while retaining an important “maritime component”—lose a maritime world and not really find an empire?
 
This is certainly a book well worth reading, for both advanced students and for eighteenth and nineteenth-century specialists of “civilisation,” the history of ideas or intellectual history. Above all, what emerges from this collection is a sense of the enormous energy and sheer dynamism at the heart of the British imperial enterprise, whether or not the energetic and the dynamic were always conscious of themselves as cogs within the vast imperial machine; a sense of the empire “out there,” the empire on the move, constantly discovering, often plundering, sometimes constructing, then marking time, or changing course and setting off again on a whim, on a wind fair or ill.

 

 

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