Balance and counterbalance

Until the 1760s British statesmen had two empires to manage. One exercised the public imagination and awoke patriotic dreams: the colonies in America and the West Indies. The public frequently wished the other away — the Holy Roman Empire. Britain had been dragged into the morass of European politics from 1714 with the accession of George I, who was ruler of Hanover and one of the Electors of the Empire. Britannia ruled the waves, the people were told; surely it was better to leave the Continent to its own concerns, follow a ‘blue water policy’ and build up a maritime empire. In this bold and convincing account Brendan Simms shows that Britain reached the height of her glory when she was actively engaged as a European player.

Indeed, he argues that the two empires were interconnected. The elder William Pitt, when in opposition, famously said that thanks to the Hanoverian monarchs Britain had become ‘a province of a despicable Electorate’. In power he found that the Hanoverian bond could be a geopolitical asset. It connected Britain to the heart of the Continent, allowing her to build up alliances against France and Spain, her colonial rivals. In Simms’s words Pitt refined a tradition of British diplomacy, creating ‘the perfect strategic virtuous circle, in which Germany was defended in America, and America was won in Germany’.

Simms’s argument forces us to reconsider the structure of politics in the 18th century and Britain’s position in the world more generally. The origin of the strategic considerations Simms highlights lay deep in history. As far back as the 16th century William Cecil called the area comprising modern Belgium ‘the very counterscarp of England’ against Spain. In military fortifications, the counterscarp is the first line of defence.