An introduction to Colonial Office 5

Neil York (Brigham Young University)

Henry VIII talked of his wearing an “imperial crown” long before England had any sustained interest in founding colonies across the Atlantic. But as England transformed itself into Great Britain it did so, in large part, through building an overseas empire, joining other nations that turned ocean barriers into transoceanic highways. That Britain would resist any attempt by its American colonies to sever the imperial tie is understandable; that it failed to prevent those who sought independence from achieving it may have been inevitable.

The evolution of imperial administration

“England’s commercial policy was slow in the making; it never reached the stage of exact definition, even in the days of its greatest influence; and it can be understood only by a study of its principles in actual operation over a period of one hundred and fifty years. In its relation to the colonies in America, it was never an exact system, except in a few fundamental particulars. Rather it was a modus operandi for the purpose of meeting the needs of a growing and expanding state. It followed rather than directed commercial enterprise, and as the nation grew in stature it adapted itself to that nation’s changing needs.”

Historian Charles Andrews’s characterization of the administrative structure that accompanied Britain’s imperial rise, offered above, holds as true now as it did when Andrews made it in the 1930s. Advocates of overseas empire took it as a given that colonies should be subordinate to the mother country, that trade should be restricted to keep wealth within their own empire and out of the hands of potential rivals, and that there should a favorable balance of trade: meaning, more bullion flowing into the mother country than out, and more trade goods circulating within the empire than carried out of it. But those mercantilistic notions did not, in and of themselves, dictate any particular set of policies. Britain would build an ad hoc empire, its administrative shape determined by political and social circumstances, not formal theory.