How did Britain get control of its colonies?We’ve seen that industrialisation, using factories to make things, gave Britain a sudden and unexpected advantage over other countries. But how did it actually use this advantage to get control of the colonies in its Empire?

It used lots of different methods, depending on the place they were trying to get control of. We’re going to look at some of these methods through a handful of case studies.

India

Even having the advantage of industrialisation, India was far too big and powerful for Britain to march into and conquer in battle. In fact, India was far more powerful than Britain at this time. The Mughal Empire still ruled India when Britain started to want to take control of it, and it was one of the most powerful empires in the world.

So instead, Britain took control of India bit by bit. Britain started out asking for, and buying, small ports on the coast. They used these to trade with people in India and to ship expensive Indian goods back to Britain. From here, Britain began to expand its territory through battle. The Mughal Empire was weakening, and so Britain started adding small chunks to the area it controlled in India. Once they had a bit more power and land in India, Britain started making deals with princes who ruled small areas of India. Britain tried to offer them a better deal than they were getting from the declining Mughal Empire, as well as killing anyone who tried to stand up to them. Over time, this led to them controlling most of India.

Benin

When some wealthy people in Britain decided that they wanted to get their hands of the wealth and cultural riches of the thriving West African kingdom of Benin in the 1890s, Britain tried to get the king to agree to become part of the Empire. But when he didn’t do what the British wanted, Britain sent an army to destroy Benin City, one of the greatest cities in Africa. They got rid of the King of Benin, Oba, stole much of Benin’s remarkable artwork (much of which is still in the British Museum), and stole all of the expensive goods that the King of Benin owned, to pay for the cost of having sent the army there in the first place.

Australia

A British captain in the Navy, James Cook, was the first European to find Australia in 1770 and in 1778 Britain founded its first colony there, in what is now Sydney. This was to be a ‘penal colony’, essentially a huge prison to which convicted criminals could be sent from Britain to do hard labour, growing food and making things to be sold. But Australia was home to a thriving and unique group of people, known today as Aboriginal Australians or Aborigines. They lived nomadically, moving across the whole of Australia, hunting for food. These Aborigines’ ideas about their people owning the land in common got in the way of Britain’s plans to expand their penal colony and make money by farming in the rich soil in Australia. So Britain started a program of mass extermination of Aborigines. Some people argue that this should be considered a genocide, where one group of people tries to wipe out another group of people. Thousands and thousands of Aborigines were murdered by the British settlers. Some were hunted for sport like animals. Today there are not many Aborigines left in Australia, and those who survive are generally poor, having had their lands taken away from them by British settlers.

South Africa

In 1795 Britain took control of a colony in the west of present-day South Africa, centred around Cape Town, that was known as Cape Colony. It had been founded by a rival empire, the Dutch Empire, in 1652. The Dutch had settled the area, driven the native people off the land and began farming it for themselves. It had formed part of their own enormous and hugely wealthy empire that had dominated the world throughout the 17th century. But in 1795 the Netherlands was conquered by France, and Britain took the chance to expand its own empire. It made it easier for Britain to control India and other areas in Asia if it controlled the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa around which they had to sail to get to India and beyond. The Dutch farmers who had settled in the Cape disliked living under the British, and they began to move North and West in search of new land to farm, pushing more native Africans off their lands.