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xv Introduction The story of the rise of the British Empire is one of the most fascinating stories of mod- ern history. How did one small island nation, poor in natu­ral resources, lacking a large standing army, and prone to religious and po­liti­cal turmoil, come, in the 17th and 18th centuries, to amass the largest empire the world had ever seen? The 19th-­century historian J. R. Seeley, riding high on a tide of late-­Victorian self-­congratulation, famously declared, “We seem, as it ­ were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind” (Seeley 1883, 8). Seeley was being sardonic, chiding his fel- low En­glishmen for their apparent lack of interest in their empire and exaggerating its size by half (although ruling a quarter of the earth’s surface and a fifth of its ­ people, which Britain was on its way to ­doing, was itself an unpre­ce­dented feat), but he hit upon an essential truth nonetheless. Although ­ there was nothing absentminded about the claiming and conquest of each individual piece of the British Empire, ­there was also never any ­grand plan guiding the ­whole ­thing: no absolute monarch saying “go forth and conquer,” no musty room of cigar-­chomping conspirators pulling all the strings, no detailed blueprint for ­ future expansion. In fact, in several instances, Brit- ish governments and chartered companies found themselves reluctantly claiming and occupying territories that their overzealous subordinates had seized without asking permission first. It was, to say the least, a rather haphazard sort of empire. Haphazard, improvised, cobbled together—­perhaps all empires arise in this way, the unplanned by-­products of a thousand small decisions made when imperial desire happens to coincide with means and opportunity. But the British Empire seemed more haphazard than most, perhaps ­because Britain lacked a strong tradition of autocratic government, or ­because the lines between private enterprise and public policy ­were unusually blurry ­ there, or ­ because the British Empire’s life span happened to straddle two distinct eras in Western Eu­ro­pean history: the early-­modern era of commercial expansion, divine-­right monarchies, and religious warfare and the modern era of industry, nation-­states, and scientific-­rational “pro­gress.” As the world changed, so changed the empire, and we should hardly be surprised if the British Empire of, say, 1750 looked profoundly dif­f er­ent from the British Empire of 1950 we might even come to doubt, as some scholars have done, ­whether they ­were even the same empire. In many ways, the history of the British Empire is the history of the world over the last five centuries, as capacious and contradictory as any historical phenomenon that has