Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [21]
The Seven Years War of 1756–63 has often been considered the first ‘world war’. It certainly shares its European origins with the First and Second World Wars. But it might also be considered the point at which the British recognized the extent to which their destiny lay not in Europe but elsewhere. There was, anyway, little or no land to be had in Europe, and seizing it would incur lasting menace from some other continental power. But abroad was another matter. In the treaty which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, fifty years earlier, Britain had acquired Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and the Hudson’s Bay territory in North America, along with Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean and St Kitts at the entrance to the Caribbean. Now the British had their eyes on other pieces of abroad. The talks to end the Seven Years War dragged on through the winter of 1762–3, with endless haggling over tiny islands and quick slashes of the pen disposing of chunks of a continent or two. The British negotiator in Paris was the stubby, self-important, gout-stricken Duke of Bedford, whom public opinion at home judged to be in danger of being altogether too soft on the French. Nonetheless, in the peace agreement signed on 10 February 1763 he pushed the boundaries of British rule further than most campaigns of conquest, and in so doing profoundly changed the character of the growing empire.
The British had had colonies before the Treaty of Paris. But the empire which followed was a very different enterprise. The colonies in North America had been planted with British men and women who grew crops for export to Britain and bought home-manufactured goods in return. In language, law and customs they were Anglo-Saxon. In the Caribbean white men owned and ran estates and made the wealth to pass themselves off as toffs back home. In Asia, the British presence had been largely confined to trading, as the East India Company ran cotton, silk and tea from ports at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Canton. Now, the British became masters of much of North America: under the terms of the treaty the French surrendered to them all their North American mainland territories east of the Mississippi. Spain in turn gave up Florida. The limits of Britain’s dominion on that continent were very hard to determine, ‘for to the northward it would seem that we might extend our claims quite to the pole itself’, ran a popular account. ‘To the westward our boundaries reach to nations unknown even to the native Indians of Canada. If we might hazard a conjecture, it is nearly equal to the extent of all Europe.’ And, better than Europe, it was unpopulated by pesky Europeans with armies and gunpowder.
It was now undeniable that Britain was the pre-eminent world power. But it was the acquisition of territories elsewhere that would enable the British to build what the world came to recognize as their empire. Outside North America, the French ceded Senegal in Africa and a further smattering of islands in the Caribbean. What really changed things, however, was a battle which had occurred 7,000 miles from Quebec. At Plassey in Bengal, in June 1757, Robert Clive had led East India Company troops to a remarkable victory, and through clever tactical planning, dishonesty and low cunning, had taken control of an area bigger than Britain itself. In the Treaty of Paris the French essentially abandoned their ambitions in India. The British now had an entirely different sort of cornucopia lying before them, so that when in due course the American colonies seized the independence which had grown out of the Utopian ambitions of so many of their founders, India and the rest