The early and mid-Victorian period covered in this chapter is one of frequent wars and revolutions in Europe, but of even more frequent wars in the British Empire and its neighbours around the Indian Ocean. These imperial wars also involved countries around the whole Pacific region. Histories of the period tend to highlight the American Civil War, and the German wars in Europe, perhaps the Italian unification wars, none of which involved Britain other than diplomatically. In the east, however, the British in India fought China (twice), in New Zealand (twice), Burma (again), in Borneo, South Africa, Madagascar, Sind and the Sikh kingdom, Russia, Afghanistan, Japan, Persia, Arabs in the Gulf, Ethiopia – and its own Indian subjects in the Indian Mutiny. These decades were therefore the most violent of the century, and every quarrel in the region involved or affected Britain and British India. The period before then had seen fighting, as did that which followed, but the thirty years of this chapter were the most violent of all, even more so than the preceding French wars.

It is possible to interpret the period as one of British India on the defensive, but in most cases it is difficult to see that a serious challenge could be mounted to its imperial position: there was, for example, no coordination between its many enemies. Those wars which could be clearly described as defensive were confined to India and its borders – the Afghan war, the Mutiny, and the Sikh wars, which did not really involve the Royal Navy or the Indian Navy in any large degree – though naval people were involved in the Mutiny, and the Sikh wars saw the invention of the Naval Brigade. But any other war, from the Russian Pacific to Madagascar and South Africa, needed the Navy, or was conducted by the Navy, and in many cases it was a matter of British aggression; the British Empire was substantially larger in 1871 than it had been in 1839 as a result of these wars. It is therefore astonishing that the Royal Navy deployment in the Indian Ocean and the Indian Navy were little larger at the end of the period than at the beginning.

From 1935 the Admiralty in London was contemplating with some unease the prospect of having to fight three enemy navies simultaneously in the fairly near future. In Europe the fiasco of the ‘Abyssinian’ policy, with the politicians’ dithering and eventually succumbing to Italian pressure, had left Ethiopia conquered and subject to fascist rule, and Italy angry and hostile. One Italian response was to set about a naval building programme, designed to dominate the Mediterranean, which the Italian fascist regime now called ‘our sea’, in reminiscence of the Roman term mare nostrum, as an attempt to imply that other powers had no ‘right’ to put their warships there – meaning in particular Britain. Germany, under Nazi rule, was keen to find allies, and a disgruntled Mussolini was a prime target. The two dictators eventually made their ‘Pact of Steel’ in 1939.

More directly important, and a policy the Admiralty approved, was a diplomatic agreement with Germany, whereby the new German navy would be allowed to build up to one third (35 per cent) of the Royal Navy's tonnage. Being a man who liked symbols of power above all else, Hitler urged the building of battleships and powerful cruisers, which were described as ‘pocket battleships’. An aircraft carrier was begun, but few submarines – nasty, shapeless, and above all invisible things – as yet. But here were two likely enemies, who had made themselves friends, and later allies, building up their navies in direct competition with the Royal Navy; it was pre-1914 all over again. By 1939 Italy had eight battleships, all in the Mediterranean, and Germany one, in the North Sea; neither had any aircraft carriers, though both had one a-building.

But the most worrying development was the expansion of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Japan had been the most aggressive power since 1918, at least until Italy's Ethiopian adventure. It had seized Manchuria from China in 1931, and moved to control China's capital, Peking (Beijing) in 1936. It was building a navy at a greater rate than either Germany or Italy, concentrating on air power and aircraft carriers, but not neglecting battleships, cruisers, and submarines.

The Company may have won the victory at Hormuz, but that did not end the struggle with the Portuguese, though to have alliances with the Shah of Persia and the Mughal Emperor was helpful. These rulers regarded the Company as a subordinate rather than an ally, of course, and the alliance with Shah Abbas was terminated with his overthrow late in the year of the Hormuz victory. In 1630, a Portuguese fleet once again aimed to prevent the Company from using Surat, but was again defeated. This pleased the Mughal government, which had already engaged the Company to transport its envoy to Persia. The emperor also gave permission for the Company to capture any Portuguese ships it met; it is unlikely that such permission was really needed, but it was good to have an imperial licence for its normal practices.

The relations with the Mughals were sufficiently close that the Company was granted the privilege of constructing its own warships (in 1633); from London came permission to fortify the main factories, though since Surat was part of the Mughal Empire and under a Mughal governor, this was confined to a stout building in which to store the Company's goods.

Conflict with the Dutch alternated with occasional co-operation. Fighting between the Dutch and the Portuguese continued – they were again at war in Europe from 1621. This state of affairs brought the Company's President at Surat, William Methwold, to negotiate with the Portuguese at Goa, aiming to bring an end to their conflict; he could point to their mutual hostility to the Dutch as an inducement for a truce. This led to a convention by which the Portuguese in Asia in effect accepted English Company protection (the Convention of 1635, sometimes called the Anglo-Portuguese Truce). After the conclusion of this agreement President Methwold seriously, but unsuccessfully, suggested that the Company limit its trading to four ships per year, which would call at Portuguese Goa for much of the goods it collected, so making the Estado da India a junior trading partner.

Surat was not fortified by the Company. Mughal disapproval was decisive here.

Sir Edward Hughes’ seizure of control of Trincomalee in January 1782 followed his earlier seizure of Negapatam. There were now no French or Dutch ports left under their control in India. Rear-Admiral Suffren came into the Bay of Bengal with his squadron (which had been enlarged by the capture of the British Hannibal (50) on the way) and a set of transports carrying over 3000 French soldiers, their equipment, supplies, and war material. In South Indian terms this was a major force, given the greater military effectiveness of European troops. Suffren's aim, therefore, was first to land this force, whose presence would actively preoccupy the British land forces; they could join with Haidar Ali in a campaign, while encouraging others to take up an anti-British stance, if not active measures. He had first to make contact with Haidar Ali, preferably before he landed the troops.

Suffren had gone on to Mauritius from the Cape, having left some of his soldiers there to defend the Dutch colony. At Port Louis his senior officer was d’Orves, who conveniently died, putting Suffren in the naval command. In the Bay of Bengal he and his augmented force – ten line-of-battle ships, two 50s, four frigates –fought a series of battles with Hughes for the next year. These are very interesting from a technical point of view. It is theorised that Suffren had developed a new tactical theory, rather like that of Nelson at the Nile, or Rodney in the West Indies, whereby his ships could envelop the enemy by attacking from both sides, instead of lining up parallel to it as was the normal method. Hughes, with eight line-of-battle ships, one 50, and a frigate, was considerably outnumbered, and fought in the usual way, broadside to broadside. Suffren, however, rather like Rodney at first in the contemporary campaigns in the West Indies, suffered from idle, disobedient, or uncomprehending or incompetent subordinate captains, some of whom exhibited signs of cowardice, so that enforcing his ideas proved extremely difficult. (Rodney succeeded by taking his fleet on a month's series of exercises and instilled discipline into his captains; Suffren did not do this.)

Peace being established in Europe in 1748 did not mean that peace existed outside Europe. In both North America and India, and in the West Indies and the Pacific, contests for local control, domination, and influence went on with scarcely a break – as it did in Europe. The indecisive end of the wars of 1739–1748 meant that, both in the distant lands and in Europe, war by another means went on. In Europe continual rearming, rebuilding of naval forces, and the search for allies produced much activity. In North America the contest between France and Britain culminated in the British attacks on the French fort at Fort Duquesne in 1754, in the West Indies the clandestine infiltration and unofficial colonisation of the Neutral Islands by the French began as soon as the war ended; the Pacific had to wait some time to see evidence of the contest, but Anson's voyage had stimulated academic work on the ocean, and at least two compendiums detailing past explorations and discoveries came out in the period between the wars (1748–1756); these emphasised the gaps in knowledge and, by implication, the possibilities of discoveries and so the extension of national trades, influence, and conquests.

There were two separate wars being waged by the Company in India in this period, as before: one was on the west coast, from Gujarat to Malabar, where the enemies were the small communities of predators – ‘pirates’ – from the small coastal states, with the Maratha state in the background; the other was on the Coromandel coast where the enemy was the French East India Company, a contest which involved a variety of Indian powers, notably, as before, the Nawab of Arcot and the Nizam of Hyderabad, again with the Marathas in the background, and the Sultan of Mysore as well. Until 1755–1756 there was virtually no connection between these wars on opposite coasts, other than the largely disengaged and partly disunited Marathas, but then a brief connection came into existence, though it was only personal.

In Coromandel the governor of Pondicherry, Joseph Dupleix, seized the moment when Admiral Boscawen took the Royal Naval ships away to continue his work of expanding French influence throughout southern India (following, as it happened, a similar move by the British to gain influence in Tanjore).

A significant step in the creation of a sometimes formal, but more often informal naval alliance between Russia and Great Britain, was Tsar Peter I’s desire to construct a significant naval force. To achieve this, he sought out and gained the help of King William III (r.1689–1702), who permitted him to recruit from within the British Isles engineers who could build naval facilities, artisans skilled in shipbuilding trades, together with professional seagoing officers. William and his advisors looked to gain from Russia a favoured trading relationship, one that, in particular, would provide the raw materials needed by Britain’s government and privately owned dockyards for the construction of merchant and naval ships. In pursuing their joint aims, neither Peter nor William was pushing in directions new. Tsar Ivan IV (r.1547–84), the first Tsar of Russia, in showing an interest in developing a navy had welcomed English traders and, for a short period, following a successful military campaign and the acquisition of Dorpat and Narva, gained an entry point into the Baltic. Furthermore, it had been Ivan IV who had brought Russia to the shores of one further sea, the Caspian, this following a successful campaign against the Kharnate Khazan that gave Russia control of the Volga from its source to the delta. Peter’s father, Alexis I (r.1645–76), who brought Dutch shipwrights into the country to build ships for both trade and war, had also made an attempt to secure entry into the Baltic. The ambitions of both Ivan IV and Alexis I may have been later paralleled by Peter, but Peter, considerably aided by the arrangements forged with William III, was able to go much further. Not only did Peter gain a permanent entry point into the Baltic, but he also created a navy of considerable size and longevity, something which neither Ivan nor Alexis was able to bring about.

Archangel – Russia’s Only Oceanic Sea Port

Peter’s first experience of waterborne craft had been the cumbersome boats used in Russia to transport goods along rivers, together with small craft used only for pleasure boating.

Britain’s attempt at maintaining within the Baltic Sea a balance of power that ensured the unimpeded transit of naval stores into British ports was blown apart by Tsar Peter’s acquisition of considerable tranches of the Baltic littoral and his determination to build a large and credible seagoing navy. While not a reliable indicator as to how the future might develop, Peter did not, at any time during the Great Northern War, attempt to close Russian ports to British shipping. It was, nevertheless, a precarious situation, the conditions of trade unregulated, with Peter only prepared to agree to something more definite if Britain would reciprocate through entering into an explicitly stated defensive alliance. That trade, and the money it was bringing into Russia, was of an importance equal to that of the naval stores trade to Britain, the underpinning factor to his non-interruption of trade. For this reason Peter had his resident in London announce in June 1719 and again in April 1720, a time when Great Britain and Russia were most at odds, that Russia would remain open to British merchants, claiming it to result from his benevolence to the English people and tradesmen. In May 1720, Peter, in an instruction issued through the College of Commerce sitting in St Petersburg, further enforced this arrangement, stating that ‘liberty of commerce’ was allowed to British merchants, and that all should be done to facilitate this requirement. In noting that ‘his Britannic Majesty has taken the part of Sweden and sent his fleet into the Baltic’, Peter attributed this action to Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, and not George I, king of Great Britain. In coming to terms with the new situation, one made permanent by the Treaty of Nystad (1721) that saw Swedish Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, Kexholm and the bulk of Karelia ceded to Russia, the British government now gave urgent consideration to the future direction of the naval stores trade and the level of dependency that could be safely placed on Russia.

Trade

The death of Elizabeth Petrovna in January 1762 saw her successor, Peter III (r. February–July 1762), end Russia’s participation in the war against Prussia, with a treaty of peace signed in May. Strangely, this made little difference to the trading relationship between Great Britain and the Russian Empire, for as already shown, despite being in opposing alliances, the terms of trade, and the nature of that trade, had been unaffected. However, as Russia continued to expand her territories, with her stature in Europe growing, the unequal nature of Russia’s trading relationship with Britain became ever more irksome. Under the terms of the 1734 treaty, Russia’s export trade was more or less totally dependent on the British trading community in St Petersburg and their associates in London. All business transactions and the onward sale of Russian goods were in their hands, with Russia having given numerous rights to British merchants to exploit the Russian Empire.

The ‘alliance’ to which the title of this book refers was a sometimes formal, but more often an informal arrangement; it began during the reign of Peter the Great (r.1682–1725) and continued until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. Admittedly, during the final decades of this alliance it was in a somewhat weakened state, the potential for conflict between the two an ever-present prospect. Some might even question the use of the term ‘alliance’, given that over the period to which I refer, there were times of open hostility, but such breaches were quickly repaired. As such, the term is being used in a very loose sense, a union or association formed for mutual benefit. It was a partnership that secured for Great Britain unlimited supplies of raw materials, especially naval stores, the essential commodities for the upkeep of Britain’s naval and mercantile fleets. Russia, in turn, gained a considerable income from an exceedingly favourable balance of trade, alongside access to Britain’s advanced naval technology, skilled personnel and at times the use of British naval facilities. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, the quantity and value of trade transmitted between Russia and Great Britain was so immense that it totally eclipsed all trade and commerce conducted with any competitor, with Britain, during the 1730s, gaining from Russia the status of ‘most favoured nation’.

Naval stores, primarily fir, flax, tar, hemp and bar iron, as mainly imported from the Russian Empire, represented the life-blood upon which Britain’s ascendancy into world domination was founded. Without those basic commodities, Britain would have had a much-diminished maritime global presence, resulting in a limited ability to trade overseas, her powerful fleet of warships equally constrained. It was upon the navy and Britain’s merchant marine, that the prosperity of the nation hinged. The Royal Navy, through an ability to extend Britain’s reach across the oceans of the world, was responsible for creating a fabulous empire with a wealth that could only be fully exploited through trade.

Here, Britain’s merchant fleet, under the protection of the Royal Navy, came into its own, bringing into British ports from these colonies raw materials to be turned into manufactured products that were then profitably exported abroad, carried into foreign ports on board British registered vessels.

Distrust of Russia intensified in 1792 when a new war broke out, the Polish-Russian War; the resulting capitulation of Polish forces leading to a second partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a large tranche of Poland’s eastern provinces now occupied by the Russian army. A complete liquidation of the Commonwealth, following an uprising against the occupiers, took place in 1795, known as the third partition, the remainder of Poland divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia. While these actions simply confirmed Tory politicians in their suspicions that Russia was seeking a continuous and unrestricted programme of expansion, the liquidation of Poland, at a time when there was a new and more egalitarian constitution with an effective constitutional monarchy, also angered the Whigs. Radical Whig MP Samuel Whitbread, for one, denounced the occupation as one that would return Poland to ‘feudal degradation and servility’ through Russia plundering an already ‘mutilated and oppressed country’. Yet, no action on this occasion was considered by the British government, for while Pitt might now have the support of the opposition, a war with Revolutionary France was stretching Britain’s naval resources to dangerous levels, making it even more imperative that Russia be maintained as an ally. In the war against Revolutionary France, which for Britain broke out in February 1793, the resources demanded from Russia in the form of naval stores were to reach unprecedented levels. It was a situation that the British government was forced to accept, having established no large-scale alternative supply source. In one other area Britain was to be helped by Russia; warships of the Imperial Navy worked alongside those of the Royal Navy in the home waters around the British Isles, and in so doing allowed British warships long at sea to be relieved and dry docked for critical repairs. In the Mediterranean, from 1798, warships of the British and Russian navies worked alongside each other, ensuring a joint supremacy in waters that might otherwise have been dominated by the French.

The potential strength of Tsar Peter’s Russia as proven to the rest of Europe by territorial conquest over Sweden, the dominant power of the Baltic, forced other nations to take Russia seriously. When Peter met William III at Utrecht in 1697, there was no expectation that Russia would soon eclipse Sweden in the Baltic. Keeping Russia as a friend for the purpose of trade was the objective, with Russia at that time not even in possession of a Baltic port. As Russia’s stature grew, helped greatly by the creation of a powerful blue-water navy capable of subduing the might of the Swedish navy, the British government had to reassess its own strategic position with regard to the nature of its relationship with Russia. Was it possible that the Russian Empire, and Tsar Peter, was less of a friend and now more of a threat? In replacing Sweden as the dominant power in the Baltic, it was Russia that was beginning to control the naval stores trade, leading to the possibility that through her navy, a force gifted with so much technical expertise by British subjects, the existing balance of power in that region might at some point be completely destroyed. If that came about, and it was clearly possible if Russia continued to grow her navy and further her territorial ambitions, a stranglehold could be placed upon Britain’s own navy through Russia using her position, should enmity arise, to deny the right of British merchants to enter the Baltic and purchase those all-important naval stores. In such a situation, the Royal Navy would be seriously hampered, leaving the British shoreline bereft of its first line of defence and British merchant ships unable to put to sea with regularity.

The Fortunes of War

Upon Peter’s return to Moscow in September 1698, the Tsar had to confront several setbacks. First an acceptance that his mission abroad had not met with full success, failing to bring into the war against the Ottoman Empire either Britain or the Netherlands.

From the death of Peter the Great in 1725 until the accession of Peter III in 1762, the three Empresses, Catherine I, Anna Ioannovna and Elizabeth Petrovna, effectively ruled the Russian Empire, the largest Empire of the age and occupying one-sixth of the world’s surface. Over that thirty-seven-year period, the much-weakened Anglo-Russian naval affinity was gradually repaired, with Great Britain coming to the gradual realisation that Russia was an obvious counterpoise to French ambitions in the Baltic. Admittedly, Catherine I did little to heal that breach, but during the reign of Anna Ioannovna commercial trade between the two countries, following the signing of the 1734 treaty, was put on a regulated footing, with a mutual defence pact agreed seven years later. This pact, which required Russia to provide a military force to aid Great Britain in the event of an attack on her European possessions, and Britain to bring into the Baltic a sizeable naval squadron to defend Russian territory if under threat, clearly indicated that the government of George II in London was now seeing Russia as a clear ally against France. The War of Polish Succession (1733–35), fought during the early part of Anna Ioannovna’s reign, demonstrated to Russia the value of the support that could be given to Russia by Great Britain; a perceived threat that Britain might send into the Baltic a squadron of warships was sufficient to prevent the French reinforcing their forces in defending Danzig (now Gdańsk) when under siege by a large Russian army. Even when Great Britain and Russia were in alliances opposed to each other, as occurred during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, the basic relationship between Britain and Russia remained more or less undisturbed; the Russian Empire continuing to supply the bulk of naval stores required by the Royal Navy and British merchant marine, and Russia using the resulting income to support her own military and naval endeavours.

Catherine I (r.1724–27)

Following his death from a bladder infection in February (NS) 1725, Peter the Great was succeeded, upon his own wishes, by his second wife, who ruled as Yekaterina I Alekseyevna, better known in the English-speaking world as Catherine I.

While the meeting between King William III and Tsar Peter at Utrecht was one that proved highly advantageous for Russia, it was to be no less important to England, providing the latter with a privileged position in Russia for its seaborne merchant traders. This, in itself, might seem of limited significance, given that British traders were already spreading their tentacles across all the world’s oceans, but for the fact that without the goods that Russia could produce and sell, those traders and the navy that supported them would have but few ships with which to carry out trade, and no navy to defend those ships when sailing the high seas. For Russia would become the key source of naval stores, the basic raw materials used for the building, supplying, maintaining and repairing of ships, with the meeting at Utrecht coming at a particularly auspicious moment. It was a point in time when Britain was undergoing a period of naval expansion that was to be maintained and continued right into the nineteenth century and on into the age of steam, iron and steel. To sustain that growth, during the age of sail, Britain’s ship builders and owners, be they merchant traders or the Admiralty, needed a steady and virtually limitless supply of basic raw materials out of which the wooden ships of that period were constructed and maintained. The Russian Empire, through the vastness of its territory, suitable climatic conditions and a ready supply of cheap labour, was in a position to fully meet that demand with materials of quality and at a cost much lower than might be found elsewhere. It was the privileged position that British merchants were given in Russia, first explored by the two monarchs at their meeting in Utrecht, that secured for Britain the future sure supply of those essential items known as naval stores, and which in turn secured British trading dominance as the world’s leading maritime power.