Thus by 1763 the British power had achieved a dazzling double triumph.  It had destroyed the power of its chief rival both in the East and in the West.  It had established the supremacy of the British peoples and of British methods of government throughout the whole continent of North America; and it had entered, blindly and without any conception of what the future was to bring forth, upon the path which was to lead to dominion over the vast continent of India, and upon the tremendous task of grafting the ideas of the West upon the East.

Such was the outcome of the first two periods in the history of European imperialism.  It left Central and South America under the stagnant and reactionary government of Spain and Portugal; the eastern coast of North America under the control of groups of self-governing Englishmen; Canada, still inhabited by Frenchmen, under British dominance; Java and the Spice Islands, together with the small settlement of Cape Colony, in the hands of the Dutch; a medley of European settlements in the West Indian islands, and a string of European factories along the coast of West Africa; and the beginning of an anomalous British dominion established at two points on the coast of India.  But of all the European nations which had taken part in this vast process of expansion, one alone, the British, still retained its vitality and its expansive power.

IV

THE ERA OF REVOLUTION, 1763-1825

‘Colonies are like fruits,’ said Turgot, the eighteenth-century French economist and statesman:  ’they cling to the mother-tree only until they are ripe.’  This generalisation, which represented a view very widely held during that and the next age, seemed to be borne out in the most conclusive way by the events of the sixty years following the Seven Years’ War.  In 1763 the French had lost almost the whole of the empire which they had toilsomely built up during a century and a half.  Within twenty years their triumphant British rivals were forced to recognise the independence of the American colonies, and thus lost the bulk of what may be called the first British Empire.  They still retained the recently conquered province of French Canada, but it seemed unlikely that the French Canadians would long be content to live under an alien dominion:  if they had not joined in the American Revolution, it was not because they loved the British, but because they hated the Americans.  The French Revolutionary wars brought further changes.  One result of these wars was that the Dutch lost Cape Colony, Ceylon, and Java, though Java was restored to them in 1815.  A second result was that when Napoleon made himself master of Spain in 1808, the Spanish colonies in Central and South America ceased to be governed from the mother-country; and having tasted the sweets of independence, and still more, the advantages of unrestricted trade, could never again be brought into subordination.