Imperialism

WHILE THE FIRST modern age of empires could be said to have ended with the British defeat in the American Revolution in 1783, the modern age of imperialism can arbitrarily be dated from the same historic event. Having lost its main overseas market in the infant United States, Great Britain in effect retaliated with a trade war that did not really draw to a close until the “Second American War of Independence” in the War of 1812. When that conflict ended with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, the new United States and Great Britain entered a historic friendship that has never seriously been dimmed to this day.

When the French Revolution overthrew the ancient Bourbon monarchy in 1792 and later executed King Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette, conservative thought in Great Britain naturally allied itself with the monarchies of Europe against the revolutionaries in Paris. Indeed, the Briton Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is still considered one of the best early expositions of conservative political thought. When Napoleon overthrew the French Revolutionary Directory in November 1799 to become the real power in France, the French revolutionary wars rapidly took on the character of the old mercantile wars of the 18th century. Except for the transitory Peace of Amiens in 1802, France and England were locked in a mortal struggle until Napoleon was defeated by the British Duke of Wellington and his Prussian allies at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. In 1806, Napoleon established what he called his Continental System, which attempted to shut out British goods from Europe. It would be to enforce this continental embargo that Napoleon would launch his two most disastrous invasions: Spain in 1808 and Russia in 1812. England retaliated with its Orders in Council, which attempted to bar French trade from virtually the rest of the world. Although France was rendered impotent at sea by its defeat at Trafalgar in October 1805, continued British efforts at enforcement led to the War of 1812 with the United States, as the new nation felt the British were severely threatening the freedom of the seas.

Indeed, rather than bring to a close any mercantile struggle over world trade, the Napoleonic Wars can be said to have inaugurated the second modern age of empires: the age of imperialism. While the first modern age of empires, colonialism, had been almost completely an economic struggle, the nationalism brought forth by the Napoleonic Wars, as with the fervent German war of liberation from Napoleon in 1813, imbued [Page 696]the mercantile contest with a new zeal, which can conveniently be called the imperial spirit. Each country gradually felt a call that empire was its destiny. Great Britain, in fact, obtained perhaps its first major new colonial possession, the Cape Colony, in 1806 in South Africa from the Dutch. The Duke of Wellington's earlier victory at Assaye in India in 1803 sealed the British dominance as the major European power in the Indian subcontinent, thus confirming the victory of Robert Clive at Plassey in 1755.

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