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I. British Assessments of the Dutch in Asia in the Age of Raffles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

P. J. Marshall
P. J. Marshall
Affiliation:
(Kings' College London)
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Extract

The demarcation of phases of empire has a perennial fascination for historians of European expansion. One of the most elusive processes of change both to date and to define is what most scholars would recognise to be the shift from the colonial systems of ancien regime Europe to the empires of the nineteenth century. In outline, it seems that systems based on the close regulation of commercial capitalism through privileges devolved on more or less autonomous colonies and trading companies gave way to national empires under direct state authority and increasingly geared to the needs of industrial metropolitan economies. In the mid-eighteenth century the old order was generally intact; by the mid-nineteenth century it had largely been replaced. Greater precision about the timing and speed of change remains very difficult to attain, but within this wide parameter it seems reasonable to suppose that different empires moved at different speeds: the economically and politically sophisticated British are likely to have remodelled their system ahead of their competitors, probably forcing them towards modernity in the process.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 12 , Special Issue 1: The Ancien Regime in India and Indonesia , March 1988 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1988

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References

Notes

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