Wars in India customarily reflected, and at points anticipated, those in Europe. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the consequent wars with Louis XIV’s France and the end of the Napoleonic Wars over a century later in 1815, Britain and France were at war almost every other decade, and these wars provided both the motivation and the opportunity for imperial expansion in India and elsewhere.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rapid expansion of Britain's territorial holdings in India. The decline of the Mogul Empire, traditionally a British ally, led the British to assume many of the functions of government and of territorial sovereignty, once performed by that empire. At the same time as the East India Company's power was expanding in India, the company and its growing wealth became the subject of controversy in England. The India Bill of 1784 imposed a London-based Board of Control on the Company, and successive bills further regulated its conduct, restricting its role to that of administering, rather than trading in, India. By the nineteenth century, a widespread view had developed that rule by a chartered company was anachronistic. An 1857 rebellion by sepoys - native Indians in the Company's army-was put down only with great bloodshed. It led to the end of company rule in 1858 and the creation of an Indian government responsible to a Secretary of State in London. Since the time of Clive, British rule in India had expanded to encompass the entire subcontinent.
The Royal Titles Act of 1876 created Queen Victoria Empress of India, marking the new and larger place that India, and the empire as a whole, occupied in the British imagination. The viceroyalty of George Curzon, Lord Curzon, and the imperial Durbar at the accession of Edward VII in 1901, marked the height of British prestige in India. The Seven Years' War (1756-1763) took place in Europe, in India, and at sea; but its most notable result was in North America, where the French colony at Québec was conquered by a British expeditionary force, giving Britain an exclusive claim to North America north of Florida. The first English attempt to colonize the mainland of North America was Sir Walter Raleigh's failed settlement at Roanoke, Virginia, in the 1580s. Two further colonies were founded in 1607, one that survived at Jamestown, Virginia, and another failed colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Numerous other small colonies, usually of a single ship's company of settlers, were established in this period throughout the Americas; there was no sense that those in the future United States were in any way special. The famous arrival of the Mayflower in New England in 1620 opened the way to more extensive settlement by English Puritans. By the end of the century, there were substantial cities at Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, the latter taken from the Dutch in 1664. Britain also acquired significant holdings in the Caribbean and small toeholds in South and Central America. Jamaica was taken from the Spanish in 1660, and became a rich sugar colony worked by slave labor. By the end of the eighteenth century, Jamaica and related Caribbean sugar islands were among the richest imperial holdings, and the influence of the planter class in London was considerable.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the British-American colonies had 10 times the population of New France, but they were still hemmed in behind the substantial barrier of the Alleghenies. The British conquest of New France removed the threat from the French and their native allies, but it also removed the apparent need for British forces. The British demand that Americans pay taxes to help pay the costs of their own defense led to the American rebellion and subsequent declaration of independence in 1776. In the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), Britain lost most of its American empire, but retained its colonies in Canada. Historians of the eighteenth century have been inclined to speak of a first British Empire lasting until 1783, and a second British Empire rising afterward.
This makes sense in the American context, but not in India, where British power, or rather the power of the East India Company and its traders and soldiers, continued to grow steadily despite its setback in the Americas. Ten years after the conclusion of the War of American Independence, war with France broke out again, and the war would last, with the slight interruption of the 1802-1803 Peace of Amiens, until 1815. During the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, the foundations of the so-called second British Empire were laid. That empire consisted of dependent territories throughout the littorals of Asia and Africa, and settler colonies-the future Dominions -in Australia,New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.
