Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:32:29.556Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Burke and the Ends of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

David Dwan
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
Christopher Insole
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Get access

Summary

The politics of empire and conquest were among Burke’s most intense and abiding preoccupations throughout his life as a writer and legislator. He took up these themes in some of his earliest published writing, his contributions to An Account of the European Settlements in America, written with his friend William Burke and first published in 1757, and he continued to dwell on Indian and especially Irish affairs until his death. Burke’s career spanned a period widely seen at the time, as well as by later historians, as one of imperial crisis. Before entering parliament, Burke returned to his native Dublin in the early 1760s as an aide to William Hamilton, chief secretary in Ireland, during the early phase of the Whiteboy disturbances, when Protestant landlords and the Irish government were savagely suppressing Catholic peasant unrest with reprisals, mass arrests, and judicial murders. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain had acquired substantial new territories, with diverse and seemingly alien populations, including Quebec, with its large population of French Catholics, and in India, after Robert Clive’s decisive defeat of French ambitions there. British efforts under the Grenville ministry to recoup the costs of the war in America, most infamously through the 1765 Stamp Act, opened the breach with the American colonies that Burke struggled in vain to repair with his policy of conciliation. The crisis in the American colonies dominated Burke’s early years as a member of parliament, especially after he began in 1774 to represent Bristol, the ‘second city in the British dominions’, and a trading city whose prosperity was bound up perhaps more than any other in Britain with colonial commerce. Soon after the break with America, Burke began his fourteen-year campaign to stem the corruption and despotism of the British East India Company, the work for which he claimed near the end of his life to value himself the most (WS, IX: 159).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Fredrick likewise characterise empires as above all both ‘incorporative and differentiated’: Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010)
Lock, F. P., Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998–2006)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×