British India

In India, Robert Clive had defeated pro-French forces at Arcot in 1751 thus helping his East India Company to monopolize appointments, finances, land and power. The British victory led to the withdrawal of the French East India Company. Then, six years later, faced with native opposition, opportunist Clive defeated the local Nabob at Plassey to become virtual ruler of Bengal and opened up much of the country to further exploitation and control by the East India Company. When Clive was recalled to England, Warren Hastings took over to strengthen British interests in India and to establish a basic pattern of government that remained virtually unchanged for 100 years. Hastings was impeached by Parliament for enriching himself unduly in India. His trial, in which he refused to admit his mistakes, was closely studied in January 1999 by members of the US Senate in their own impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

India was regarded as the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire; over two thirds of the vast sub-continent was ruled by the East India Company. Its finances and its troops were used to protect British interests, even overthrowing native Indian princes. Much of the country, however, was chafed under English practices, there were simply too many differences in social and religious customs between the two countries. In 1857, simmering discontent flared into a great mutiny, when sections of the army of Bengal attacked British settlers.

After atrocities on both sides, the revolt was finally crushed by November 1858, the majority of Indians, having remained loyal. The British government then took over the administration of India from the East India Company and the British Governor General became the Viceroy of India to represent the Crown. A proclamation from the Queen then ensured the Indian people that their religious practices and customs would not be interfered with, that the titles of their Indian princes would be recognized and that in the future they would be able to participate in the government of their country.

At the same time, a network of roads, railroads and telegraphs (in addition to the ubiquitous civil servant) helped unite the sprawling subcontinent, and an educated, English speaking elite emerged to further westernize its peoples. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877 by Prime Minister Disraeli. India did not gain its independence until after the Second World War when it fought alongside other countries of the British Empire.

South Africa

South Africa came to the attention of Europeans when a Dutch ship, Haarlem, broke up at Table Bay in 1648 and the survivors, back in Holland, urged authorities to establish a settlement for provisioning their East India fleets. In 1652, a small group of Dutch settlers founded Cape Town. In 1815, Britain gained its long-desired "half-way house" on the sea route to India when the Dutch ceded the Cape of Good Hope. The British arrived in 1820 when the Albany settlers founded Grahamstown in the eastern coastal region. By 1826, Britain's Cape Colony had extended its borders to the Orange River. In 1834, Xhosa tribesmen revolted against Dutch encroachments on their lands but were defeated. The seeds of later conflict, however, involving British, Dutch and native Africans were sown.

Soon after Britain abolished slavery in its Empire in 1834, Dutch cattlemen in South Africa began their great Trek north and east of the Orange Rivers. In the next two years, some 10,000 Boers (Dutch colonists) moved to new lands beyond the Vaal River. They were to found Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1838, they were forced to defeat the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River in Natal. Britain then repulsed the Boers and made Natal a British colony in the pretense of protecting the natives. In 1854, the British withdrew from lands north of the Orange River and the Boers seized the Orange Free State. In 1856, Britain made Natal a Crown colony; and the Boers established the South African Republic (Transvaal) with Pretoria as its capital.

Events came to a head between Boers and Brits when diamonds were discovered in the Orange Free State. The British disregarded Boer claims to the territory, annexing the district to Cape Colony in 1871. Six years later, Britain annexed the South African Republic in violation of the Sand River Convention of 1852 that recognized the independence of the Transvaal. The Boers demanded a restoration of their independence and fully expected it from British Prime Minister Gladstone, always concerned with doing what was right and moral. His slowness, however, in getting a reluctant Parliament to act led to the Boers taking up arms. In December 1880 a Boer Republic independent of Britain's Cape Colony was proclaimed by Paul Kruger. After a British defeat at Majuba Hill a year later, the Treaty of Pretoria gave independence to the Boer Republic but under British suzerainty.

When gold was discovered in the Transvaal in 1886, the drive to annex the Boer republics began in earnest. Cecil Rhodes (who had founded the De Beers Mining Corporation in 1880) was determined that the riches being discovered in South Africa were not going to the Boer farmers. Rhodes dreamed of extending British rule in Africa, building a railroad from the Cape to Cairo but the Boers were in the way, controlling the key areas of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Using his great wealth, amassed in the diamond and gold fields, Rhodes with other imperialists established British colonies to the north of the Boer territories. Both Northern and Southern Rhodesia (settled by English workers for Rhodes's British South Africa Company who founded Salisbury in 1890) were granted charters by London.

The Outsiders (Uitlanders, who flocked to the gold fields soon began to outnumber the Boers (sometimes called Afrikaners), who took retaliatory measures which included excessive laws against the newcomers that led to Rhodes intervening in the abortive "Jameson Raid," late in 1895. When Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain tried to get Kruger to accept British supremacy, the attempt ended in yet another humiliation for his government. War began in 1899 as a result of British diplomatic pressure and a military build up on the borders of the Transvaal.

The highly mobile guerrilla units of the Boers were immediately successful in defeating much larger units of the British Army. Their big error, and one that may have cost them the war, was not to invade Natal, but to lay siege to a large British force penned up in Ladysmith, an error they repeated in the sieges of Kimberley and Mafeking (of Baden-Powell fame). Yet overwhelming Boer victories occurred when British commander Redvers Buller split up his forces.

Victory for Britain only came when Buller's replacement, Lord Roberts took the war into the enemy heartland, putting the Boers on the defensive. The capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria effectively ended the gallant efforts of the Transvaal Field Army of the Boers, so successful in small engagements but heavily outgunned an out numbered in larger battles. Kruger went into exile and the two Boer republics were annexed to the British crown in 1900.

Yet the war dragged on. Under skilful leaders such as de Wet, Botha and Smuts, the Boers utilized commandos to strike at British lines of communication in determined efforts to fight to the last for their independence. The British resorted to a scorched earth policy to deny the Afrikaners food and supplies, burning their farms and crops and removing masses of farming families to concentration camps. Losses to attrition and demands from Liberals in the government at Westminster to stop the barbarism led to negotiations and the Peace of Vereenigning in May 1902. The Boers accepted British sovereignty with a promise of future self-government.

The war was costly for both sides, but especially the British. Deaths from disease greatly outnumbered those from bullets, and a series of defeats showed only too clearly the deficiencies in leadership, operational planning, training, equipping and supplying of troops that had been so evident in the Crimean War. The red jackets of English soldiers had made them easy targets for Boer marksmen on the high Veldt, and their lack of knowledge of how to survive on the land was to lead Baden-Powell to found the Boy Scout movement primarily as a form of early outdoor military training for youths born and bred in the unhealthy cities spawned by the industrial revolution.

Further Expansion of Empire

Britain's rise to a world power meant that she found interests everywhere. Not only was she now head of the self-governing colonies, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand (mostly settled by British newcomers in addition to the relatively tiny native populations); but also the vast Empire of India and a veritable host of dependent territories all over the world's oceans. Most of these had been acquired somehow to protect the merchants and traders of England, or areas in which their missionaries and explorers (mostly Scots such as self-promoting David Livingstone or English brave hearts such as Richard Burton and John Speke) had established their outposts.

Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1874 with the idea of expanding the Empire and taking up the "White Man's Burden" (as Rudyard Kipling described it) to not only create trade and bring profit, but also to spread British ideas of democracy and law, as well as the Christian (and Protestant) religion. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, offered a 5,000 mile shortcut from Britain to India and the east, to Australia and New Zealand and Disraeli persuaded his government to buy the khedive of Egypt's majority shares with a loan from the Rothschild banking house.

Because of Britain's control of Egypt it got involved in the war against the Mahdi, preaching a holy war in the Sudan (a dependency of Egypt), and the defeat of General Gordon at Khartoum. It was also Disraeli who backed British military intervention in the Transvaal in 1877, in the Zulu War two years later and in the ill-fated attempt to support the ruler of Afghanistan against Russia in 1878.

Britain had become involved in Afghanistan, that graveyard of so many foreign troops, when the expansion of Russian power in the Near and Middle East in the 1820's and 30's alarmed the East India Company. An attempt by the British government to control the mountainous land in 1839 by placing a pretender on the Afghan throne proved a complete disaster. A whole British army was destroyed, the puppet ruler assassinated and the British envoys murdered. Not much was learned from the experience.

In a further attempt to control the northwest approaches to India, another British invasion against the legitimate ruler (considered too friendly to Russia) took place in 1880 under Gladstone's government. The murder of the British Resident in Kabul brought another British force to remedy the situation under General Roberts. It managed to extricate itself after dealing with rival claimants to the throne. The Northwest frontier between the Punjab and Afghanistan was finally drawn up in 1901 under the British viceroy in India, Lord Curzon.