Abstract
From the days of Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, the British had been pressing their advantages in the eastern seas, drawn to the spice trade. They did so against great odds. Not only did indigenous rulers, pirates and states pose obstacles, but the pioneer maritime powers of Europe — Portugal, Holland and Spain — seemed always ahead of them. Yet on these distant margins of Europe’s influence, the British made significant inroads, one piece at a time. They used their armed military might to do so. It came in two forms: first, the East India Company, with its army and its navy, known as the “Bombay Marine”; and second, the Royal Navy and such units of the British Army as were required from time to time to make the point that Britain was not beholden to any other power, and that the commercial interests of the home islands and overseas places of trade and production had to have equal advantages to those of Britain’s rivals. By the time the British had opened China’s gates by the end of the first war there, in 1841–1842, they had projected their maritime and amphibious power in a way hitherto undreamed of. As the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, remarked, the British campaign was “the farthest military enterprise, of the same extent, in the history of the world, surpassing, in that respect, the expeditions of Alexander and Caesar in one hemisphere, and those of Cortes and Pizarro in the other”.1 All of that lay ahead, and the progression came in various stages, all determinants of sea power.
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Notes
Quoted, Gerald S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), viii.
Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, 1952–1964).
Maurice Collis, Raffles (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 26.
Quotations from Reginald Coupland, Raffles, 1781–1826 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 101.
George Woodcock, The British in the Far East (New York: Athenaeum, 1969), 56.
Cavanagh to Sec. to the Government of India, 31 December 1863, quoted in Nicholas Tarling, British Policy in the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, 1824–1871 (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1969), 78.
C.N. Parkinson, British Intervention in Malaya, 1867–1877 (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1960), xv;
cf. C.D. Cowan, Nineteenth Century Malaya (London: Oxford University Press, 1961);
for historiographical reviews, see E. Chew, “Reasons for British Intervention in Malaya: Review and Reconsideration”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, 6, 1 (March 1965), 81–93,
and Damodar R. SarDesai, “British Expansion in Southeast Asia: the Imperialism of Trade in the Nineteenth Century”, in Roger D. Long, ed., The Man on the Spot: Essays in British Empire History (Westport: Greenwood, 1995), 1–20.
Barry Gough, “India-based Expeditions of Trade and Discovery in the North Pacific in the late Eighteenth Century”, Geographical Journal, 155, 2 (1989), 215–223.
H.V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 28–29.
Quoted, Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 33.
J. Stephen, minute of 3 June 1843, C.O. 129/3; Welsh, History of Hong Kong, 7; Jan Morris, Hong Kong (New York: Random House, 1988), 235.
Quoted Roger Pelissier, Awakening of China, 1793–1949 (New York: Putnam, 1967), 90; see also Welsh, History of Hong Kong, 1.
Grace Fox, British Admirals and Chinese Pirates, 1832–1869 (Westport: Hyperion, 1940), 59–60, quoting Instructions to Admiral Inglefield, 3 August 1846, Article 2, Adm.13/3.
James Hope Grant, Incident in The War in China (London, 1860), 224–225.
D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia (2nd ed.; London: Macmillan, 1964), 521–532.
Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy (3rd ed. of 1847; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1968), 2: 48–64 and elsewhere.
For similar episodes of this critical period, see Tim Travers, Pirates: A History (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 257–260;
see also Harriette McDougall, Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak (London: SPCK, 1882).
Christopher Lloyd, Nation and Navy (London: Cresset Press, 1961), 229.
Ibid. Henry Keppel, A Sailor’s Life under Four Sovereigns (3 vols. London, 1899); The Times, 18 January 1904. L.G.C. Laughton (rev. Andrew Lambert), “Keppel, Sir Henry”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
See the recent study by Robert J. Antony, “Turbulent Waters: Sea Raiding in Early Modern East Asia,” Mariner’s Mirror, 91, 1 (February 2013), 23–38, especially 30–31;
for Malaya, see Nicholas Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World: A Study of British Imperialism in Nineteenth Century South-East Asia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963).
David Lyon and Rif Winfield, The Sail & Steam Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy 1815–1889 (London: Chatham, 2004), 272–273.
For a survey of these developments and imperial rivalries, see Clark Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 421–426.
Donald M. Schurman, Imperial Defence, 1868–1887, ed. John Beeler (London, Frank Cass, 2000), 111.
Ronald Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism”, in Roger Owen and R.B. Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 132.
Here I have drawn on Richard Hill, “ ‘A Difficult Person to Tackle’: Admiral of the Fleet Sir Gerard Noel”, Mariner’s Mirror, 98, 4 (November 2012), 491.
Arthur J. Marder, Old Friends, New Enemies: The Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy, Volume 1: Strategic Illusions, 1936–1941 (London: Oxford University Press, 1981).
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© 2014 Barry Gough
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Gough, B. (2014). The Indian Ocean, Singapore and the China Seas. In: Pax Britannica. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313157_7
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