Empire by Default

This paper explores the intersection between credit relationships and imperial expansion in the British empire between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In various settlements, outposts, and bridgeheads, private credit relationships between cross-cultural trading partners often turned violent. Incidents of financial exploitation between British and Asian merchants in Qing China and Southern India led to conflict that encouraged new kinds of legal and military interventionism, ending with the confiscation of land and annexation of territory in Madras and Hong Kong. But this was not simply an Asian phenomenon. British Colonists in North America used similar financial strategies and tactics to ensnare indigenous people in pernicious credit relationships, ultimately justifying (at least to themselves and the British state) the confiscation of indigenous land. “Empire by Default” examines this phenomenon in a global and comparative context throughout Britain’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires. It identifies a global imperial pattern by which merchants and settlers confiscated land, sometimes enticing and entangling the British state in the process. By turning our attention to the machinations of lenders and wielders of credit throughout Britain’s empire, East and West, we can observe an important process by which British merchants and settlers facilitated and justified imperial expansion all over the globe.