She cowed her rivals and so dominated Europe’s trade with Asia, Africa and North America that by 1773, the writer George Macartney could celebrate “this vast empire on which the sun never sets.”īritain was ascendant, with its own mighty revolutions - agrarian and industrial - underway. Britain emerged from the war with the most powerful navy in history and the world’s largest mercantile fleet, some 8,000 vessels. Spoils under the Treaty of Paris were among the greatest ever won by force of arms, including Canada, a half-billion fertile acres west of the Appalachians, various sugar islands in the West Indies, Florida and parts of India. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victory,” one happy Briton reported. Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what London also called the Great War for the Empire. Several dynastic coalition wars against European adversaries had ended indecisively before Britain’s wildly successful triumph in 1763 over France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War, called the French and Indian War in America. We have become more like that Anglo imperium than perhaps we suspect, and we face some of the same head winds that caused so much grief for King George III and his nation. No sooner does an empire congeal than centrifugal forces - overreach, complacency, strategic miscalculation and enemies, foreign and domestic - threaten to tug it apart.Īs we celebrate our 243rd Independence Day, and the resultant American empire that would come to dominate the modern world, it’s worth considering the 18th-century British Empire against which we rebelled in a bleak and bloody eight-year war. Empires are hard to build and even harder to keep intact.
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