Guy Chet__colonial failures, imperial triumphs, and the loss of the American colonies

Colonial failures, imperial triumphs and the loss of the American colonies: warfare and bureaucratic expansion in British America

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the American mainland colonies were not the center of Great Britain’s empire. At the economic center were the sugar islands of the West Indies that provided the financial basis for naval conquests of new Caribbean territories and more trading posts. They also financed the establishment and expansion of American mainland colonies, such as the Carolinas, and boosted the economies of all the mainland colonies, from Georgia to Massachusetts. That the American colonies were on the periphery of England’s empire and on the periphery of its attention is evident from England’s allocation of limited military and naval resources to North America in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. By the Revolutionary era, however, the government in London had become increasingly interested in American affairs. After the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, Great Britain left ten regiments permanently stationed in these colonies, maintained permanent naval bases on the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic coast (including Halifax and Louisburg, two of the most strongly fortified naval bases in the New World) and established a permanent military presence in the American West, complete with roads, bridges and modern forts. Moreover, for the first time since the administrations of Charles II and James II, imperial administrators attempted to use those naval, military and financial resources to centralize the administration of these colonies, to regulate and govern them more effectively, and to integrate them more fully into the British state. By the end of the French and Indian War, then, these colonies were no longer peripheral to the Empire. This transformation explains provincial efforts in the 1760s and 70s to reestablish salutary neglect as an imperial policy.
This shift was certainly a reflection of the mainland colonies’ growing economic and demographic weight, but it was also occasioned and aided by a lack of military success on the part of colonial governments. Imperial forces, as well as imperial investment in military infrastructure, were drawn into North America because provincial governments and imperial administrators became more and more frustrated with the military incompetence displayed by colonial military establishments. Provincial failures in in the 1670s and during King William’s War (1689-97) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13) led to a creeping enhancement of Britain’s direct military involvement in North America by the mid-eighteenth century.