Empire of the Seas 

Article by Thom Absalom. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Michelle Brien. 

Dan Snow’s recent BBC programme, Empire of the Seas, traced the pivotal role of the Royal Navy in British history. He examined how the navy turned Britain from a small nation on the fringes of Europe to the most powerful nation in the world by the nineteenth century. Snow contended that the Royal Navy and its control of the world’s oceans were crucial to how the British understood their empire. For the British, the empire meant trade, commerce, naval power, and, to repeat an oft-used phrase, the ‘white man’s burden.’ This got me thinking; did the British always understand their empire, or even the idea of empire, in such a way? How did this ideology of empire develop and change over the centuries from the settlement of Britain’s earliest colonies in North America down to the zenith of British power in the late nineteenth century? 

Justifications of Empire 

The notion of British supremacy and power was not always a feature of the British imperial ideology. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, British writers attempted to find a justification for Britain’s territorial acquisitions around the world. For many thinkers and writers, the justification came from the Roman law of res nullius, or ‘empty things’, which maintained that all unoccupied lands remained the property of all mankind until they were given over to agriculture or some other use. The Jacobean poet John Donne said to the Virginia Company in 1622 that ‘a land never inhabited by any, or utterly derelicted and immemorially abandoned by the former inhabitants, becomes theirs that will possess it.’ John Locke further developed this argument in his Second Treatise of Government (1689-90), arguing that the Native Americans had no legal rights to the produce of the land beyond that which was needed for their survival. So long as enough land was left for their needs, the British could claim and settle the rest of the continent. The need for a legitimating idea for empire shows a vastly different conception of empire and Britain’s place in the world than in the nineteenth century. 

By this time the British had come to see their empire as one of trade, liberty and as having complete mastery of the seas. This idea first arose in the late seventeenth century. David Hume, writing in 1741, noted that ‘Trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century.’ The expeditions of British adventurers in the sixteenth century had been fuelled by the thought of finding lands of vast mineral wealth, much as the Spanish had done in South America. This necessitated a justification for claiming land, which has been discussed above, but eventually it became clear that no new ‘El Dorado’ was to be found. The acquisition of an empire for settlement and exploitation became associated with corruption; James Harrington noted of the Spanish Empire ‘Columbus offered gold unto one of your Kings through whose happy incredulity another prince hath drunk the poison, even unto the consumption of his people.’ This helped to transform the idea of empire into one based on commerce and trade, linked with the liberty of the British. George Savile, the Marquis of Halifax, argued that ‘Our Scituation hath made Greatnesse abroad by land conquests unnaturall… wee are a very little spot in the Map… made a great figure onely by trade, which is the Creature of Liberty.’ This link between liberty and trade was made by Britain’s growing mastery of the seas, and revolved around a different understanding of empire. 

Maritime Dominion 

Although the British Empire as a thing of commerce and trade took time to develop, the idea of British maritime dominion had long tap-roots; John Dee wrote in 1577 of the ‘Brytish Empire’ which included ‘the Royalty and Soverainty of the seas adjacent, or environing this Monarchy of England.’ The Case of John Hampden in 1637 affirmed Britain’s domination of the seas. Hampden had refused to pay Ship Money, the rate levied on coastal areas to help maintain the navy. The judges eventually found in favour of the Crown, asserting Charles I’s rights of dominion over the seas surrounding the British Isles. This idea of British maritime supremacy as a means of defending the nation and Empire carried through to the nineteenth century. The Pall Mall Gazzette exclaimed in 1884 that ‘we now find every ocean highway furrowed by European ironclads, while over many a colonial frontier frowns the cannon of continental rivals.’ This fear of losing maritime supremacy reveals how deeply entrenched this idea had become in British imperial ideology by the late nineteenth century. 

The British imperial ideology evolved over several centuries, changing as Britain’s place in the world changed. From the beginning, the idea of dominion of the seas was a central pillar of imperial thought, evolving from domination of the sea around the British Isles to domination of the world’s oceans. The need to legitimise Britain’s acquisitions was dropped by the late seventeenth century, as the idea of an empire based upon free trade and commerce developed in contrast with the (supposedly) Spanish system of settlement and exploitation. The ideology of the British Empire thus evolved over several centuries as Britain’s empire grew and she affirmed her global dominance.

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