Britannia's Auxiliaries: Continental Europeans and the British Empire, 1740-1800
- ISBN-10
- 0192536141
- ISBN-13
- 9780192536143
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-10-20
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Stephen Conway
Description
Britannia's Auxiliaries provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many European inputs - financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from outside - through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases. The book explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation by both private interests in the British Empire and by the British state. Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. Many of them became at least partly Anglicized by the experience, and even those who retained their national character usually came under British direction and control. This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain exclusionary empires. In the British case, at least, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests. In this sense, those foreign Europeans who involved themselves in or with the British Empire, whatever their own perspective, acted as Britannia's auxiliaries.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2017-10-26
- 288 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
The British Army, 1714–1783: An Institutional History
By Stephen Conwaycontemporaneous developments elsewhere, see Duffy, Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 67–8. 29. BL, Letter-book of John Ramsay, Additional MS 63,819, fols. 4-5. 30. Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Neville Aldworth Papers, ...
-
British Celtic Warrior vs Roman Soldier: Britannia AD 43–105
By William HorstedFeaturing full-colour maps and specially commissioned battlescene and figure artwork plates, this book examines how both the British warriors and the Roman auxiliaries experienced the decades of conflict that followed the invasion.
-
Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail
By John McAleer, Douglas HamiltonThis volume examines the various ways in which islands (and groups of islands) contributed to the establishment, extension, and maintenance of the British Empire in the age of sail.
-
Women, Families and the British Army 1700–1880
By Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Lynn MacKay... this Class of poor Women, which, until I became conversant with the Army, I hardly thought had existence in nature. ... His two Children had caught the Small-Pox on board the Ship: and soon after landing, his Wife was seized with a ...
-
Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War
By Friederike BaerThe book offers a ground-breaking reimagining of this watershed event in world history.
-
History of the British Army, 1714-1783: An Institutional History
By Stephen ConwayThroughout the book a key theme is order and control. How did a small number of officers exercise authority over large numbers of common soldiers?
-
Britannia's Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and Late-Victorian Imperial Defence
By Craig Stockings... British regular force but also of the auxiliaries: the traditional county-based militia, the mounted yeomanry and the rapidly growing and predominantly city-based volunteer movement. In 1859 a royal commission on the fortifications of ...
-
The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750–1820
By John McAleerThis book foregrounds the role of the Royal Navy in creating the British Atlantic in the eighteenth century.
-
Britannia's Dragon: A Naval History of Wales
By J.D. DaviesIn springtime, this sometimes led to the surgeon coming across 'sick' workers who were actually moonlighting in the fields to harvest one of Pembrokeshire's most famous assets, its early potato crop.46 From 1832, the head of the ...
-
Friedrich Rosen: Orientalist Scholarship and International Politics
By Amir TheilhaberThis is pursued through analyses of Germans in British imperialist contexts, cultures of lowly diplomatic encounters in Middle Eastern cities, Persian poetry in translation, prestigious Orientalist congresses in northern climes, leveraging ...