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Symbiosis: Trade and the British Empire More Empire and Seapower
By Professor Kenneth Morgan
Last updated 2011-02-17
British History Timeline
Just what drove the expansion of the British Empire into one of the
Explore the British
largest in history? Kenneth Morgan weighs up whether it was the
desire for greater trade or the thirst for conquest. History Timeline from
the Neolithic to the
present day

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The long 18th century, from the Glorious Revolution until
online content
A flourishing power Waterloo, was the period in which Britain rose to a dominant
position among European trading empires, and became the first
Growth of Empire
western nation to industrialise.
Which came first?
The extent of economic change between 1688 and 1815 can be Surviving the trenches
The impact of
imperial trade
discerned through a glimpse at the state of economic and social Dan Snow asks why so
conditions at home, and the growth of trade and empire at the
Find out more
many soldiers
beginning and end of that period.
survived the trenches
In 1688 England and Wales had a population of 4.9 million, and in WW1
Print this page
the internal economy was still largely based on agricultural work
and production.

Domestic industry flourished, with many workers pursuing dual The History of the Home
occupations on a seasonal basis in industry and agriculture.
Take a journey through
English society contained a flourishing and more extensive
middling sector than any other western country, including the the history of the
Dutch Republic. This provided a strong platform for commerce home. Each room tells a
with, and settlement in, far-flung territories. different story.

Merchants sent out ships to

trade with North America and
the West Indies, where
England had established a The long 18th
network of colonies, following century was the
on from the permanent period in which
settlement of Virginia in 1607 Britain rose to a
and the acquisition of dominant position
Barbados in 1625. Some among European
350,000 people had emigrated trading empires...
from England across the
Atlantic by the end of the
17th century.

In 1686 alone these colonies shipped goods worth over £1 million

to London. Exports to the colonies consisted mainly of woollen
textiles; imports included sugar, tobacco and other tropical
groceries for which there was a growing consumer demand.

The triangular slave trade had begun to supply these Atlantic

colonies with unfree African labour, for work on tobacco, rice and
sugar plantations. It was based around the activities of the
Royal African Company, with headquarters in London.

Trade and settlement also occurred in Asian waters. This was

mainly based around the activities of the East India Company, a
large joint-stock company based in London. The ships of the
East India Company fleet traded mainly in bullion, textiles and
tea with Bengal.

Overseas commerce was conducted within the mercantilist

framework of the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that all
commodity trade should take place in British ships, manned by
British seamen, trading between British ports and those within
the empire.

Despite these developments, in 1688 Britain was still a vulnerable

competitor for stakes in overseas colonies and trade - her rivals
were the trading empires of France and the Netherlands, as well
as Spain and her client state, Portugal.

Top

Growth of Empire
By the end of the Napoleonic wars,
this scenario had been transformed.
Population growth increased rapidly
after c.1770, and by 1815 the
British population totalled 12 million.

Agricultural productivity, proto-

industrialisation, the growth of
manufacturing and new mineral A sugar cane field and
technologies, along with the arrival windmill in Barbados ©
of factories, had helped the
economy to industrialise. Dual occupations had largely been
superseded by specialised, regular working conditions.

Trade and colonisation had also proceeded apace. In 1700 most

foreign commerce, by volume and value, was still conducted with
Europe, but during the 18th century British overseas trade
became 'Americanised'. By 1797-8, North America and the West
Indies received 57 per cent of British exports, and supplied 32
per cent of imports.

After the Royal African

Company's monopoly was
rescinded in 1698, the British
became the largest and most ...the British
efficient carriers of slaves to became the largest
the New World. Private and most efficient
merchant houses provided the carriers of slaves to
capital for this business the New World...
activity, and Jamaica, the
largest British slave colony,
was also the wealthiest
colony in the British Empire.

By 1775 Britain possessed far more land and people in the

Americas than either the Dutch or the French - who were the
two main northern European rivals for international power and
prestige. The East India Company's trade also still flourished at
this time, and greater settlement by the British in Bengal
occurred after c.1765.

The loss of the thirteen mainland American colonies in the War of

Independence was a major blow to British imperial strength, but
Britain recovered swiftly from this disaster, and acquired
additional territories during the long war years with France from
1793 to 1815. The new colonies included Trinidad, Tobago, St
Lucia, Guyana, the Cape Colony, Mauritius and Ceylon. Various
Indian states were also subjugated.

By 1815, Britain possessed a global empire that was hugely

impressive in scale, and stronger in both the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans, and around their shores, than that of any other
European state. All of this had occurred within basically the
same protectionist trade network as in 1688: free trade, much
discussed by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker, had failed yet to
make much inroad into British economic policies.

Top

Which came first?

To what extent were these changes between 1688 and 1815 a
case of trade stimulating empire, or of empire stimulating trade?
The answer is that trade and empire went hand in hand, with a
symbiotic relationship to each other.

Growing overseas commerce with colonies stimulated merchants

to provide ships, as well as goods for expanding settler societies.
The slave trade also became a vehicle for establishing an empire
of slavery in the Caribbean and southern American colonies, and
emigrants sailed to the colonies in search of better material
conditions. They also, in some cases, had to emigrate to escape
religious persecution.

Rapid population growth in 18th-century North America provided

a large market for British exports. In the quarter century before
the American Revolution, British foreign trade changed its
commodity composition to provide a wider range of textiles,
notably linen and cotton fabrics.

This was in addition to a range of metalware and hardware,

fabricated to meet the demands of a burgeoning colonial
population with less advanced industrial processes than were
current in the home country, and with some restrictions on their
own manufacturing.

The slave trade stimulated

British manufacturing
production by the derived
demand for goods such as The answer is that
plantation utensils, and trade and empire
clothing needed for slaves and went hand in hand...
estates. Colonies became
linked to the metropolis by
complex bilateral and
multilateral shipping routes.

An integrated Atlantic economy came into being after the mid-

18th century, in which merchants in British, American, West
Indian and Iberian ports established firm commercial ties and a
modern, enterprising outlook with regard to making money
through imperial trade.

To what extent was British hegemony in empire, trade and

industry based on the growth of imperial commerce? Many
historians have discussed this basic question, and disputed the
level of stimulus to the domestic British economy, and hence to
industrialisation, that was provided by the growth of empire.

A negative assessment would emphasise that the profits of

slavery and the slave trade were more modest than the bonanza
that was once thought to have taken place, and that the
contribution of slavery and the slave trade to national income
was marginal at best.

Sceptics would also argue that British manufacturing production

owed more to demand from the domestic market than from
overseas customers; they would stress agricultural productivity
and other supply-side factors as the vital components of British
economic growth.

Others would suggest that the protectionist trade network led to

the Caribbean colonies becoming a burden on the mother
country, once defence and administration costs are considered,
and that trade with India, with an imbalance between imports
and exports, was a similar drain on British capital.

Those wishing to downgrade the role of overseas trade in

industrialisation also argue that gains by British financial
services, both from trade and empire, were essentially derivative
and parasitical.

Top

The impact of imperial trade

Although there is no space in this article to cite detailed data, a
more positive assessment of the impact of trade and colonies on
British development can, however, be made.

Revenue from slavery and the slave trade filtered back into the
British economy in indirect ways, with bankers, insurance
specialists and country gentlemen all participating as active
investors. Some historians think that the profits of slavery and
the slave trade, as a proportion of national income, were
impressive.

British manufacturing production, it has been argued, received

the additional stimulus of a large overseas trading bowl, that
induced producers to increase productivity and introduce new
technologies to meet this additional demand.

Modern studies have shown that the net drain to the British
economy from protecting the British Caribbean colonies, or from
participating in the East India trade, have been exaggerated.
There can be little doubt that trade and empire gave a
significant boost to the proliferation and sophistication of
financial services, and that this was of considerable benefit to
the long-term development of the British economy.

No historian would argue that

trade and empire had a
minimal impact on emerging
British industrialisation; the British hegemony in
question is, rather, exactly empire and trade by
how important was that 1815 was such that
impact? Britannia did rule
the waves......
The current consensus is that
trade and empire were
significant for British economic
growth in the Hanoverian
period, even if they were not decisively important. British
hegemony in empire and trade by 1815 was such that Britannia
did rule the waves; but this would not have been achieved
without the strong support provided by the 'military-fiscal' state
and the Royal Navy.

The expansion of British imperial endeavours was accompanied

by many years of warfare: over half of the 18th century saw the
British at war, principally against France.

The ability of the British government to raise taxes and loans to

support aggressive military policies by Hanoverian governments,
and the superiority of the Royal Navy over other European
navies, both played a large part in creating the conditions
through which trade and empire could flourish.

Top

Find out more

Books

The Illustrated Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence

James (Little, Brown, 1999)

The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth

Century edited by PJ Marshall (OUP, 1998)

Atlas of British Overseas Expansion edited by AN Porter

(Routledge, 1994)

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About the author

Kenneth Morgan is Professor of History at Brunel University. He
specialises in the social and economic history of Britain and her
colonies, primarily in the 18th century, and in music history. He is
a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has been a British
Academy Research Reader. His books include Bristol and the
Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University
Press, 1993), The Birth of Industrial Britain: Economic Change,
1750-1850 (Pearson, 1999), Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the
British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2000),
Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet (University of Illinois Press,
2005) and Slavery and the British Empire (Oxford University
Press, 2007).

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