Empire How Britain Made the Modern World

‘The most brilliant British historian of his generation … Ferguson examines the roles of “pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts” in the creation of history’s largest empire … he writes with splendid panache … and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit’
Andrew Roberts Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson’s acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history – and set the world on the road to modernity. ‘A brilliant book … full of energy, imagination and curiosity’
Evening Standard ‘A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story – triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all’
Jan Morris ‘Dazzling … wonderfully readable’
New York Review of Books ‘Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence’
Sunday Times ‘An enormous saga … crammed with the kind of anecdotes that leave the reader wanting more’
Sunday Herald
In December 1663 a Welshman called Henry Morgan sailed five hundred miles across the Caribbean to mount a spectacular raid on a Spanish outpost called Gran Grenada, to the north of Lago de Nicaragua. The aim of the expedition was simple: to find and steal Spanish gold - or any other movable property. When Morgan and his men got to Gran Grenada, as the Governor of Jamaica reported in a despatch to London, '[They] fired a volley, over-turned eighteen great guns . . . took the serjeant-major's house wherein were all their arms and ammunition, secured in the great Church 300 of the best men prisoners . . . plundered for 16 hours, discharged the prisonars, sunk all the boats and so came away.' It was the beginning of one of the seventeenth century's most extraordinary smash-and-grab sprees. It should never be forgotten that this was how the British Empire began: in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft. It was not conceived by self-conscious imperialists, aiming to establish English rule over foreign lands, or colonists hoping to build a new life overseas. Morgan and his fellow 'buccaneers'- were thieves, trying to steal the proceeds of someone else's Empire. The buccaneers called themselves the 'Brethren of the Coast' and had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury. Essentially, however, they were engaged in organized crime. When Morgan led another raid against the Spanish town of Portobelo in Panama, in 1668, he came back with so much plunder - in all, a quarter of a million pieces of eight - that the coins became legal tender in Jamaica. That amounted to £60,000 from just one raid. The English government not only winked at Morgan's activity; it positively encouraged him. Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way of waging war against England's principal European foe, Spain. In effect, the Crown licensed the pirates as 'privateers', legalizing their operations in return for a share of the proceeds. Morgan's career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces. Pirates It used to be thought that the British Empire was acquired 'in a fit of absence of mind'. In reality the expansion of England was far from inadvertent: it was a conscious act of imitation. Economic historians often think of England as the 'first industrial nation'. But in the European race for empire, the English were late beginners. It was only in 1655, for example, that England acquired Jamaica. At that time, the British Empire amounted to little more than a handful of Caribbean islands, five North American 'plantations' and a couple of Indian ports. But Christopher Columbus had laid the foundations of Spain's American empire more than a century and a half before. That empire was the envy of the world, stretching as it did from Madrid to Manila and encompassing Peru and Mexico, the wealthiest and most populous territories on the American continent. Even more extensive and no less profitable was Portugal's empire, which spread outwards from the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé to include the vast territory of Brazil and numerous trading outposts in West Africa, Indonesia, India and even China. In 1493 the Pope had issued a bull allocating trade in the Americas to Spain and trade in Asia to Portugal. In this division of the world, the Portuguese had got the sugar, spices and slaves. But what the English envied most was what the Spanish discovered in America: gold and silver. Since the time of Henry VII, Englishmen had dreamt of finding an 'El Dorado' of their own, in the hope that England too could become rich on American metals. Time and again they had drawn a blank. The best they could ever manage was to exploit their skills as sailors to steal gold from Spanish ships and settlements. As early as March 1496, in a move clearly inspired by Columbus's discovery of America on behalf of the Spanish crown three years before, Henry VII granted letters patent to the Venetian navigator John Cabot, giving him and his sons full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea [not the southern sea, to avoid conflict with Spanish discoveries], under our banners, flags and ensigns ... to find discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens or infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians . . . [and to] conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered that they may be able to conquer, occupy and possess, as our vassals and governors lieutenants and deputies therein, acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same towns, castles, cities, islands and main-lands so discovered . . . The English sense of empire envy only grew more acute after the Reformation, when proponents of war against Catholic Spain began to argue that England had a religious duty to build a Protestant empire to match the 'Popish' empires of the Spanish and Portuguese. The Elizabethan scholar Richard Hakluyt argued that if the Pope could give Ferdinand and Isabella the right to occupy 'such island and lands ... as you may have discovered or are about to discover' outside Christendom, the English crown had a duty to 'enlarge and advance ... the faith of Christ' on behalf of Protestantism. The English conception of empire was thus formed in reaction to that of her Spanish rival. England's empire was to be based on Protestantism; Spain's rested on Popery. There was a political distinction too. The Spanish empire was an autocracy, governed from the centre. With his treasury overflowing with American silver, the King of Spain could credibly aspire to world domination. What else was all that money for, but to enhance his glory? In England, by comparison, the power of the monarch never became absolute; it was always limited, first by the country's wealthy aristocracy and later by the two houses of Parliament. In 1649 an English king was even executed for daring to resist the political claims of Parliament. Financially dependent on Parliament, the English monarchs often had little option but to rely on freelances to fight their wars. Yet the weakness of the English crown concealed a future strength. Precisely because political power was spread more widely, so was wealth. Taxation could only be levied with the approval of Parliament. People with money could therefore be reasonably confident that it would not simply be appropriated by an absolute ruler. That was to prove an important incentive for entrepreneurs. The crucial question was, where should England build her anti-Spanish imperium? Hakluyt had been given a glimpse of infinite possibilities by his cousin and namesake in 1589: ... I found lying upon [my cousin's] board ... an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewat curious in the view thereof began to instruct my ignorance, by shewing me the division of the earth into three parts after the olde account, and then according to the later & better distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs, Bays, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Territories of ech part, with declaration also of their special commodities, & particular wants, which by the benefit of traffike and entercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107[th] Psalm, directed mee to the 23[rd] & 24[th] verses, where I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deepe, &c. But what his cousin could not show him was where else in the world there might be unclaimed supplies of silver and gold. The first recorded voyage from England to this end was in 1480, when a shipload of optimists set sail from Bristol to look for 'the island of Brasylle in the west part of Ireland'. The success of the undertaking is not recorded but it seems doubtful. The Venetian navigator John Cabot (Zuan Caboto) made a successful crossing of the Atlantic from Bristol in 1497, but he was lost at sea the following year and few in England seem to have been persuaded by his Columbus-like belief that he had discovered a new route to Asia (the intended destination of his fatal second expedition was Japan, known then as 'Cipango'). It is possible that earlier Bristol ships had reached America. Certainly, as early as 1501 the Spanish government was fretting that English conquistadors might beat them to any riches in the Gulf of Mexico - they even commissioned an expedition to 'stop the exploration of the English in that direction'. But if Bristol sailors like Hugh Elyot did indeed cross the Atlantic so early, it was Newfoundland they reached, and what they found was not gold. In 1503 Henry VII's Household Book records payments for 'hawks from Newfoundland Island'. Of more interest to the Bristol merchant community were the immense cod fisheries off the Newfoundland coast. It was gold that drew Sir Richard Grenville to the southernmost tip of South America - or, as he put it in his 1574 petition, 'the likelihood of bringing in great treasure of gold, silver and pearl into this realm from those countries, as other princes have out of like regions.' Three years later, it was the same 'great hope of gold [and] silver' - not to mention 'spices, drugs, cochineal' - that inspired Sir Francis Drake's expedition to South America. ('There is no doubt', Hakluyt declared enthusiastically, 'that we shall make subject to England all the golden mines of Peru . . .') The expeditions of Martin Frobisher in 1576, 1577 and 1578 were likewise all in pursuit of precious metals. The discovery and exploitation of 'Mynes of Goulde, Silver and Copper' were also among the objects of the colonization of Virginia, according to the letters patent granted to Sir Thomas Gates and others in 1606. (As late as 1607 there was still a glimmer of hope that Virginia was 'verie Riche in gold and Copper'.) It was the ideé fixe of the age. The greatness of Spain, declared Sir Walter Ralegh in The Discoverie of the large, rich, and beautifull Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) (1596), had nothing to do with 'the trade of sacks of Seville oranges ... It is his Indian Gold that. . . endangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe'. Ralegh duly sailed to Trinidad where in 1595 he raided the Spanish base at San José de Oruña and captured Antonio de Berrio, the man he believed knew the whereabouts of El Dorado. Sitting in a stinking ship in the Orinoco delta, Ralegh lamented: 'I will undertake that there was never any prison in England, that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome - especially to my selfe, who had for many yeeres before bene dieted and cared for in a sort farre more difering.' It would all have been worth it if someone had found the yellow metal. No one did. All Frobisher came home with was one Eskimo; and Ralegh's dream of discovering the 'Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana' was never fulfilled. The most pleasing thing he encountered up the Orinoco was not gold but a native woman ('In all my life I have never seene a better favoured woman: she was of good stature, with blacke eyes, fat of body, of an excellent countenance ... I have seene a Lady in England so like to her, as but for the difference of colour, I would have sworne might have been the same'). Near the mouth of the River Carom they picked up some ore, but it was not gold. As his wife reported, he returned to Plymouth 'with as gret honnor as ever man can, but with littell riches'. The Queen was unimpressed. Meanwhile, analysis of the ore found in Virginia by an excited Christopher Newport dashed his hopes. As Sir Walter Cope reported to Lord Salisbury on 13 August 1607: ‘Thys other daye we sent you newes of golde/And thys daye, we cannot returne yow so much as Copper/Oure newe dyscovery is more Lyke to prove the Lande of Canaan then the Lande of ophir ... In the ende all turned to vapore.’ In the same way, three voyages to Gambia between 1618 and 1621 in search of gold yielded nothing; indeed, they lost around £5,600. The Spaniards had found vast quantities of silver when they had conquered Peru and Mexico. The English had tried Canada, Guiana, Virginia and the Gambia, and found nothing. There was only one thing for it: the luckless English would simply have to rob the Spaniards. That was how Drake had made money in the Caribbean and Panama in the 1570s. It was also Hawkins's rationale for attacking the Azores in 1581. And it was the primary purpose of Drake's attack on Cartagena and Santo Domingo four years later. Generally, when an expedition went wrong - as when Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition to the West Indies foundered off Ireland in 1578 - the survivors resorted to piracy to cover their expenses. That was also the way Ralegh sought to finance his expedition in search of El Dorado - by sending his captain Amyas to sack Caracas, Río de la Hacha and Santa Marta. It was a similar story when Ralegh tried again in 1617, having persuaded James I to release him from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for high treason since 1603. With difficulty Ralegh raised £30,000 and with it assembled a fleet. But by that time Spanish control of the region was far more advanced and the expedition ended in disaster when his son Wat attacked the Spanish controlled town of Santo Tomé, at the cost of his own life and in defiance of his pledge to James I not to create any friction with the Spaniards. The only fruits of this ill-starred voyage took the form of two gold ingots (from the Governor of Santo Tomé's strongbox), as well as some silver plate, some emeralds and a quantity of tobacco - not to mention a captive Indian, who Ralegh hoped would know the location of the elusive gold mines. He and his men having been denounced (quite justly) as 'Pirates, pirates, pirates!' by the Spanish ambassador, Ralegh was duly executed on his return. He died still believing firmly that there was 'a Mine of Gold . . . within three miles of St Tomé'. As he declared on the scaffold: 'It was my full intent to go for Gold, for the benefit of his Majesty and those that went with me, with the rest of my Country men.' Even when English ships went in search of goods less precious than gold, collisions with other powers seemed unavoidable. When John Hawkins sought to break into the West African slave trade in the 1560s he very quickly found himself in conflict with Spanish interests. From such shamelessly piratical origins arose the system of 'privateering' or privatized naval warfare. Faced with a direct threat from Spain - culminating in but not ending with the Armada - Elizabeth I took the eminently sensible decision to license what was happening anyway. Robbing the Spaniard thus became a matter of strategy. In the period of recurrent war with Spain from 1585 to 1604, between 100 and 200 ships a year set off to harass Spanish vessels in the Caribbean and the value of prize money brought back amounted to at least £200,000 a year. This was a complete naval free-for-all, with English 'ships of reprisal' also attacking any and every vessel entering or leaving Iberian ports. 'The sea is the only empire which can naturally belong to us,' Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had written at the end of the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, James Thomson wrote of Britain's 'well earned empire of the deep'. The key to the rise of the British Empire is the fact that, in the space of around a century after the Armada, this maritime empire went from aspiration to reality. Why were the British such good pirates? They had to overcome some real disadvantages. For one thing, the clockwise pattern of Atlantic winds and currents meant that Portuguese and Spanish vessels enjoyed relatively easy passage between the Iberian Peninsula and Central America. By comparison, the winds in the North-East Atlantic tend to be south-westerly (that is, they come from the south-west) for most of the year, blowing against English ships heading for North America. It was much easier to head for the Caribbean, following the prevailing north-easterly winds in the South Atlantic. Traditionally coast-hugging English seamen took time to learn the arts of oceanic navigation, which the Portuguese had done much to refine. Even Drake's West Indian expedition in 1586 set off from Cartagena to Cuba only to return to Cartagena sixteen days later as a result of errors in navigation and the cumulative effect of compass variation. In naval technology too the English were laggards. The Portuguese were the initial leaders when it came to speed. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had developed a three-masted ship, which generally set square sails on the fore and main masts and a triangular lateen sail on the mizzen mast, allowing the ship to tack more easily. They were also pioneers of the carvel, which was constructed around a strong internal frame rather than clinker-built. This was not only cheaper; it was also able to accommodate watertight gunports. The difficulty was that there was a clear trade-off between manoeuvrability and firepower. The Iberian carvel was no match for a Venetian galley when it came to a shooting match, because the latter could carry far heavier artillery, as Henry VIII discovered off Brittany in 1513, when Mediterranean galleys sank one of his ships outright, damaged another and killed his Lord Admiral. By the 1530s Venetian galleys could fire cannonballs weighing up to 60 pounds. It was not until the 1540s that both the English and Scottish navies were able to launch carvel-style ships with load-bearing decks capable of carrying anything like as much firepower. But the English were catching up. By the time of Elizabeth I, the hybrid 'sailing-galley' or galleon, capable of mounting four forward-firing guns, had emerged as the key British vessel. It still lacked the punch of a galley, but made up for that in speed and manoeuvrability. At the same time as ship design was evolving, English artillery was improving thanks to advances in iron founding. Henry VIII had needed to import bronze cannons from the continent. But home-made iron cannons, though harder to cast, were far cheaper (almost one-fifth the price). This meant significantly more bangs per buck - a technical advantage that was to endure for centuries. English sailors were also becoming better navigators thanks to the reorganization of Trinity House at Deptford, the adoption of Euclidian geometry, better understanding of the variation of the compass and its dip, the translation of Dutch charts and tables in books like The Mariners Mirrour (1588) and the publication of improved maps like the 'new map with the augmentation of the Indies' mentioned in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The English were also pioneers in improving the health of crews at sea. Sickness and disease had in many ways proved the most persistent of all the obstacles to European expansion. In 1635 Luke Fox described the seaman's lot as 'but to endure and suffer; as a hard Cabbin, cold and salt Meate, broken sleepes, mould[y] bread, dead beere, wet Cloathes, want of fire'. Scurvy was a major problem on long voyages because the traditional naval diet lacked vitamin C; crews were also vulnerable to wet beriberi and food poisoning, plague, typhus, malaria, yellow fever and dysentery (the dreaded 'bloody flux'). George Wateson's The Cures of the Diseased in Remote Regions (1598) was the first textbook on the subject, though it did not help much (since treatment revolved around bleeding and changes of diet). It was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that real headway began to be made in this area. Still, the British Isles seemed to have an endless supply of men tough enough to withstand the hardships of life at sea - men like Christopher Newport of Limehouse, who rose from being a common seaman to become a wealthy shipowner. Newport made his fortune as a privateer in the West Indies, losing an arm in a fight with Spaniards and ransacking the town of Tabasco in Mexico in 1599. Henry Morgan was far from unique. Morgan's raid on Gran Grenada was one of many such incursions into the Spanish Empire. In 1668 he attacked El Puerto del Principe in Cuba, Portobelo in present-day Panama, Curacao (Caracas) and Maracaibo in what is now Venezuela. In 1670 he captured the island of Old Providence, crossed to the mainland coast and traversed the isthmus to capture Panama itself. The scale of such operations should not be exaggerated. Often the vessels involved were little more than rowing boats; the biggest ship Morgan had at his disposal in 1668 was no more than fifty feet long and had just eight guns. At most, they were disruptive to Spanish commerce. Yet they made him a rich man. The striking point, however, is what Morgan did with his plundered pieces of eight. He might have opted for a comfortable retirement back in Monmouthshire, like the 'gentleman's son of good quality' he claimed to be. Instead he invested in Jamaican real estate, acquiring 836 acres of land in the Rio Minho valley (Morgan's Valley today). Later, he added 4,000 acres in the parish of St Elizabeth. The point about this land was that it was ideal for growing sugar cane. And this provides the key to a more general change in the nature of British overseas expansion. The Empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar. In the 1670s the British crown spent thousands of pounds constructing fortifications to protect the harbour at Port Royal in Jamaica. The walls still stand (though much further from the sea because an earthquake shifted the coastline). This investment was deemed necessary because Jamaica was fast becoming something much more than a buccaneer base. Already, the crown was earning substantial sums from the duties on imports of Jamaican sugar. The island had become a prime economic asset, to be defended at all costs. Significantly, the construction work at Port Royal was supervised by none other than Henry Morgan - now Sir Henry. Just a few years after his pirate raid on Gran Grenada, Morgan was now not merely a substantial planter, but also Vice-Admiral, Commandant of the Port Royal Regiment, Judge of the Admiralty Court, Justice of the Peace and even Acting Governor of Jamaica. Once a licensed pirate, the freelance was now being employed to govern a colony. Admittedly, Morgan lost all his official posts in 1681 after making 'repeated divers extravagant expressions ... in his wine'. But his was an honourable retirement. When he died in August 1688 the ships in Port Royal harbour took turns to fire twenty-two gun salutes. Morgan's career perfectly illustrates the way empire-building process worked. It was a transition from piracy to political power that would change the world forever. But it was possible only because something quite revolutionary was happening back home.
You’ve never seen history like it. In Empire, bestselling author Niall Ferguson unravels the controversial and compelling history of the British Empire, and explains how a rainy island in the North Atlantic went on to become one of the biggest empires in all history. Here, Niall Ferguson talks exclusively to penguin.co.uk about the inspiration behind Empire, and his experiences whilst filming the TV series, which was broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this year. What inspired you to write Empire?
I suppose I had been thinking imperial thoughts for some years. My history of the Rothschild bank ended up having a large section on the Empire, since late nineteenth century imperialism depended so heavily on overseas investment by big City banks like Rothschilds. The Pity of War includes a fairly clear argument about the strengths and weaknesses of the British Empire during the First World War. And, The Cash Nexus, ended with what now seems a rather prescient call for the United States to play a more imperial role.

The more reading I did for those books, particularly of recent British historiography, but also of the growing economics literature on the history of globalization, the more convinced I became that the history of the Empire was being underplayed. That extraordinary achievement, the new Oxford History of the British Empire, was being read by specialists - imperial historians, as they tend to be called - but not more widely. So I was contemplating having a stab at a history of the Empire when the idea of a television series surfaced. That was the catalyst.

Looking further back, I see myself as a late child of Empire. My family, like many Scottish families, had multiple imperial connections: relatives in Canada, uncles who had worked in India, South Africa and the Gulf. Yet I grew up at a time when the Empire had largely gone and its historical reputation was going too. That generation of student radicals who were heaping abuse on imperialism are now of course in power. When you hear the British Foreign Secretary blaming half the world's present ills on the Empire you feel that the subject badly needs a more balanced public airing. This was the perfect opportunity to offer a reassessment of Empire which would make the latest scholarship accessible to the widest possible audience - not to whitewash the Empire, nor to apologize for it, but to offer a history of all its achievements, positive and negative - from enslavement and ethnic cleansing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the extraordinary export of economic liberalism and Christianity in the nineteenth. How did you tackle such an enormous subject?
With help. Reading Jan Morris's trilogy, and then the Oxford History was a wonderful start. The reading list more or less suggested itself from then on. I was also lucky to have some wonderful research assistants, who diligently responded to my increasingly frantic requests to dig up the details of the first international cricket match or the first cup of tea drunk by an Englishman. Finally there was, for me, the new experience of researching with my feet by actually going to the places I was writing about.

You travelled to many of Britain's former colonies while filming for the Channel 4 series. What was your most memorable experience, and how did the countries differ from what you expected?
The unforgettable occasion was the religious service I attended at the old Kuruman Mission Church in the north of the Cape Province in South Africa - an astonishing experience. I was quite overwhelmed by the beauty of the choirs that sang there and the intensity of the congregation's faith. But that's only one of many memories: watching the sun set over Simla with the Himalayas in the distance, dancing very ineptly in a Mukuni Village in Zambia, fearing for my life at Freetown Airport… What did you read when you were growing up?
How long have you got? Relevant authors here were Rudyard Kipling, of course, John Buchan, H. Rider Haggard. I'm afraid I really was raised on tales of imperial adventure. As a teenager, of course, I was taught to despise them all in favour of Tolstoy and Thomas Mann. Quite wrongly.

Is there a particular book or author that has had a significant influence on you as a writer?
This project owes a huge debt to a huge legion of historians of Empire - the names that spring immediately to mind are Chris Bayly, Patrick O'Brien and Wm. Roger Louis.

Did you know?
I really did go around the world in 80 days - well, 99 to be precise - to make the series.