See p. [715].
CHAPTER XLIV.
INDIA AND THE COLONIES.
1815-1902.
Down to the end of the great struggle with Revolutionary and Imperial France, the history of the rise and development of the British empire beyond seas is intimately connected with the history of Britain's wars in Europe. The contest for colonial and commercial supremacy is at the root alike of the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years' War, the war of American Independence, and the war with Bonaparte.
But after 1815 this close interpenetration of the European and colonial affairs of England comes to an abrupt end. For the last eighty years they have touched each other at very rare intervals; the only occasions of importance when European complications have reacted on our dominions over-sea have been when our strained relations with Russia have led to troubles on the north-western frontier of India.
For the most part, the development of the colonial and Indian empire of Britain has gone on unvexed by any interference from without. We have therefore relegated our treatment of it to a separate chapter, set apart from our domestic annals.
The British Empire in 1815.
In 1815 the British territories in India were already by far the most important of our possessions, but they comprised not one-fourth of the dominions which now acknowledge Edward VII. as their direct sovereign. In Africa we owned only a few fever-smitten ports on the Gulf of Guinea, and the newly annexed Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope, inhabited by a scanty and disaffected population of Boers and a multitude of wild Kaffirs. In Australia, the small convict settlements of New South Wales and Tasmania gave little signs of development, blighted as they were by the unsatisfactory character of the unwilling emigrants. Our group of colonies in North America was the most promising possession of the crown; granted a liberal constitution by Pitt's wise Canada Act, they were growing rapidly in wealth and population. They had shown a most commendable loyalty during the American war of 1812-14, and the divergence in race and religion between the old French habitans of the province of Quebec and the new English settlers in Upper Canada had not as yet brought any trouble. But the greatest part of British North America was still a wilderness. The limit of settled land was only just approaching Lake Huron; even in the more eastern provinces, such as Quebec and Nova Scotia, there were still vast unexplored tracts of waste and forest. Into the far West, the basins of the Columbia and Mackenzie rivers, only a few adventurers—fur-traders of the Hudson's Bay Company and French half-breed trappers—had as yet penetrated.