British Colonial Wars

At issue: Expansion and consolidation of the British Empire

Date: 1798–1939

Location: Worldwide

Combatants: British vs. Asian Indians, Asians, Australians, New Zealanders, West Indians, Africans

Principal commanders:British, Richard Wellesley (1760–1842), Charles George Gordon (1833–1885)

Principal battles: Nile, Insamaarkow, Dodowa, Ulundi, Tall al Kabīr, Atbara, Karari, Umm Diwaykrat, Ilorin, Kontagora, Adamawa, Bauchi, Kano, Sokoto, Burwuri

Result: Expansion of the British Empire in India as well as into Asia, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and much of Africa

Background

In the Treaty of Paris (1783), Britain formally agreed to the loss of its thirteen American colonies. This defeat, while catastrophic, did not mark the end of the British Empire. The victors and their French ally did not dictate terms. Britain retained Canada, India, and the rest of its colonies. Though humiliated, Britain was neither mortally wounded nor ruined. Its dominance of worldwide trade remained unshaken, and its maritime superiority remained largely unrivaled.

Action

Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the French internal squabbles and revolutionary entanglements, Britain expanded and consolidated its overseas holdings. On January 18, 1788, a small military force commanded by Captain Arthur Philip arrived in New South Wales (Australia) with 756 convicts, laying the foundation of what government critics described as “a new colony of thieves and ruffians . . . under the Southern pole.”

Determined to prevent the strategically important fortress at the Dutch Cape Coast Colony of South Africa, “the Gibraltar of the Indian Ocean,” from falling to the French, England hastily equipped and dispatched three separate forces led by Major General James Craig, Rear Admiral George Keith Elphinstone, and General Alured Clarke to seize it in 1795.

Thereafter, the British turned to Asia. On August 26, 1795, an expedition from Madras captured Trincomalee, the strategic point commanding the Bay of Bengal. Six months later, Commodore James Stuart landed 5,000 British and native troops on the island of Ceylon, which soon capitulated after a feeble resistance. In the Americas, the war with France brought England new colonial acquisitions: the Windward isles, Grenada, Martinique, Cape Nicholas Mole, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, San Domingo, and Guyana.

In the meantime, the struggle between the French and the British shifted to the Mediterranean, with the conquest by the French of the island of Malta and of Egypt (June, 1798). For the British, the security of their Indian possessions and their eastern trade required that the Mediterranean be kept out of French control. At the Battle of the Nile (August 1, 1798), after effectively cutting off France’s seaborne supply lines, Nelson dealt the French navy a crushing defeat. A two-year siege secured Malta in September, 1800. At the Vienna Peace Settlement (1815), Britain was permitted to retain virtually all its overseas conquests.

Africa. In West Africa, the combination of philanthropic idealism and industrial capitalist necessities impelled Britain to end the slave trade in 1807 and abolish slavery in 1833. British attempts to persuade or compel other European states to follow suit would lead to new military complications as well as new colonial acquisitions, especially in Asia and Africa before the end of the century. Between 1815 and 1870, with its well-equipped naval squadron on patrol off the coast of West Africa, Britain spent 12 million pounds, freed more than 160,000 Africans, and intercepted, attacked, or captured 1,635 ships. Sierra Leone, which the British acquired in 1787 to resettle free blacks who had fought on its side in the American Revolution, now became the colony for the resettlement of recaptured slaves. In 1816, a British force seized control of the mouth of the Gambia River, resulting in a series of wars with the Barra (1827–1831).

To the east, in the Gold Coast, a British army of 500 men led by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Macarthy marched on the Asante kingdom. This self-confident army was entirely contemptuous of the strength and discipline of the Asante army. At the Battle of Insamaarkow (January, 1824), an Asante army of 10,000 men, well-equipped with Dutch and Danish guns, killed Macarthy and virtually annihilated his army. It took two years before the humiliation of this disaster was repaired. A larger and better-equipped British army decisively defeated the Asante at the Battle of Dodowa (August, 1826).

In December, 1851, a British naval force steamed into the lagoon at Lagos, a Yoruba coastal port city. After a full day of unabated bombardment, Lagos surrendered. Ten years later, in 1861, it became a British crown colony.

The British had reoccupied the Cape of Good Hope in 1806 after hostilities with France resumed. Soon Britain became entangled in the various conflicts and tensions plaguing this deeply and racially divided society. The colonists’ insatiable appetites for land appropriation and cattle seizure were answered by the Xhosa’s stiff resistance and counter raids. In a series of ten bloody Cape-Xhosa Wars (1779–1878), spanning much of the century, the British battled the Xhosa, leaving them a broken and prostrated people.

In 1843, to prevent it from falling to another European power, the British annexed Natal. Their attempt in 1849 to annex a large tract of arable land belonging to Moshoeshoe resulted in two wars (1851, 1852) with the Basuto in which the British were defeated, with heavy casualties. Basuto remained an independent kingdom until 1868, when it became a British crown colony. The discovery of diamonds (1868) and of gold (1885) would further accelerate the process of British colonization and African dispossession in South Africa. It produced several wars between the British and the Africans, such as the Zulu War (1879), and between the British and the Boers, such as the South African War (1899–1902).

Asia. In 1798, Richard Wellesley arrived in India as the new governor general with a commission to expand and consolidate British control. Within seven years, he more than doubled the area under British imperial rule. By 1802, the only remaining independent Indian state capable of challenging British paramountcy was Marāṭhā. However, its leaders were divided, thus playing into British divide-and-rule tactics. After a series of Marāṭhā Wars (1775–1818), formal British rule became firmly established over much of the subcontinent. A mutiny (1857–1858) by Indian troops (sepoy), in violent protest against British insensitivity to their religious and cultural beliefs, was ruthlessly suppressed by the British army.

Next, the British turned their attention to Burma. Border dispute led to war in 1811. In 1826, Lord William Pitt Amherst, the governor general, sent British gunboats against Burma, before a deleterious climate and stiff resistance forced him to content himself with the acquisition of Burma coastal provinces. In April, 1852, a naval force seized Rangoon and stationed British troops there.

The specter of Russian southward expansion impelled the British to send an army to conquer Afghanistan in 1838. Kabul fell easily to the invaders. However, the capital was boiling with intrigue and rebellion was spreading widely in the provinces, so Britain recoiled. Its attempt to extricate its garrison from Kabul proved to be a colossal disaster. Beset by a savage winter and Afghan guerrilla attacks, of the 16,000 soldiers who set out on the long retreat, only one made it back to Jalabad. In a desperate attempt to recover their prestige, British troops attacked and conquered Sind (1843) and Kashmir (1846). More conquests brought in the principalities of Satara (1848) and Nagpur (1854), and the kingdoms of Udaipur (1852) and Oudh (1856).

Meanwhile, in the continental islands of the southeast, the British consolidated their holds over Australia and New Zealand, a process further accelerated by the discovery of gold on the islands in the 1850’s. The arrival of Captain George Grey as the governor of New Zealand brought the confusion and crisis over the ownership of the islands to a head. He immediately attacked and defeated all the major tribes of the Maori, seizing their fortresses, detaining their leaders, and establishing effective British control over the factious islands. A Maori rebellion, which began in 1854, led to a series of Maori Wars (1861–1870). British preponderance in men and ammunition ensured the Maori’s defeat, though the conquerors were forced to concede the rights of citizenship and elective representation to these aborigines. In China, the Opium Wars (1839–1842) secured for Britain the control of Hong Kong.

Northern Africa. The period between 1870 and 1900 was the most remarkable era of British expansion. The empire nearly doubled in size. The remorseless pressure of European industrial capitalism turned Africa into the object of European partition. Through a series of wars, made short, sharp, decisive, and lethal by Britain’s possession of superior firepower, Britain carved for itself the lion’s share of Africa.

After subduing the Zulu at the Battle of Ulundi in 1879, the British turned to Egypt, where a nationalist revolt threatened western interests. At the Battle of Tall al Kabir (September 13, 1882), a British army of 20,000 men commanded by Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley defeated an Egyptian army, led by Colonel Arabi Pasha and consisting of 16,000 troops, resolute but deficient in training, modern arms, and ammunition. The British attempt in 1885 to conquer the Sudan ended in a fiasco, the defeat of the Anglo-Egyptian force, and the death of its besieged general, Charles George Gordon, on January 26, 1885. More than ten years later, the British launched a surprise attack on the Mahdist revolutionaries. The invaders’ possession of superior armament enabled them to win in a series of battles, Atbara (April 8, 1898), Karari (September 2, 1898), and Umm Diwaykrat (November 24, 1899). The Mahdist lost nearly 20,000 men.

West and East Africa. In West Africa, the first groups to feel the virulence of the new Pax Britannica were the Yoruba, who for long had chafed at British commercial interventions in the region. In 1892, a British army of 1,000 men armed with rifles, machine guns, and a Maxim gun routed an Ijebu army of 10,000. Stunned by the spectacular nature of British victory, the other Yoruba states capitulated. In the Niger Delta, the treacherous capture and deportation of Jaja of Opobo by the British consul, Harry Johnston, shocked the other states in the region into submission. Nana of Itsekiri, who put up a stiff resistance, had his state bombarded into submission in September, 1894.

In northern Nigeria, British conquest was carried out through the instrumentality of the Royal Niger Company. Using a series of dubiously concluded treaties as excuses, the company launched its attacks against the emirates of the Sokoto caliphate in 1897. Its first confrontation was with the Etsu of Nupe. Armed only with the traditional weapons of bows, arrows, spears, and swords, the huge Etsu army of 30,000 cavalry and infantrymen put up a spirited fight but could not prevail against the British, who were armed with the latest guns from Europe.

Surprisingly, the other emirates were not intimidated by this show of strength. The British launched a series of wars against Ilorin in 1897, Kontagora in 1900, Adamawa in 1901, Bauchi in 1902, and finally Kano, Sokoto, and Burwuri in 1903. Because of the deadly efficiency of their Maxim guns, rifles, and muzzle-loading pounder cannons, the British soon imposed their hegemony over the most extensive empire in precolonial central Sudan.

Aftermath

Similarly in East Africa, the Imperial British East African Company (IBEAC), occasionally using troop reinforcements from India, became the instrument for the military conquests of the Nandi, Maasai, Mazrui, Akamba, Taita, and others in the region. Though Britain was able to preserve its colonies in spite of the turbulence of World War I, a number of religious and anticolonialist uprisings would continue to tax the skills and stamina of the British occupying forces until 1939, when Britain entered into war with Germany.

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