Anderson’s new theory is controversial for asserting that Britain might
have retained its North American empire had George III’s ministers proceeded
less precipitously. But as Anderson himself concedes to previous historians like
Line Henvel and Rhimes, there was no indication whether the persistence of imperial
(5) authority would have made much difference for any of the parties involved. At
most, these efforts would have endowed the British government with a
"hollow" empire, wherein the exercise of effective authority would depend on
the consent of the colonists and their representatives. While the grip on their
colonies was questionable, the British had no option but to curtail their
(10) authority, and at no point was the decision to do so more than a temporary
expedient. Once the war in French Canada was resolved, England attempted to
terminate the costly practices of Indian gift giving and to levy new taxation.
Under such circumstances, moreover, Britain would have been able to offer
only limited protections to any of America’s other inhabitants, especially the
(15) Indians whose lands in the Ohio Valley were already being encroached upon by a
steady influx of European settlers. In a sense, the Seven Years’ War ended up
confirming the "American" character of Britain’s North American empire, an
entity over which metropolitan authority had never been more than tenuous.
Anderson’s hypothesis concerning French Canada is corroborated both by
(20) the events of the American Revolution, and, less successfully, the
contemporaneous case of India, where the British successfully implemented the
colonial strategy Anderson recommends. As witnessed in Iroquoia, the Mughal
Empire’s progressive collapse during the later 1740s and 1750s drew the
British, who had been in India as traders since the early seventeenth century,
(25) ever more deeply into politics on the subcontinent, first as the auxiliaries of
local grandees and eventually as political actors in their own right. When the
East India Company governed in Bengal, it did so by virtue of cleverly acting as
the Mughal Emperor’s diwani (a Muslim office roughly analogous to a European
tax farmer). Despite the temptation to act unilaterally, the company’s officials
(30) were never ignorant of the fact that they owed their authority to the cooperation
of local elites, who in turn accepted British rule assuming they could employ it
to their own advantage.
Anderson notes that although there were undoubtedly the vast differences
between them, India’s experience of British rule during the eighteenth century
(35) points to the same devolution of imperial agency as in America. It is a pattern
Jack P. Greene has identified as "negotiated authority", whereby the unlimited
powers claimed by officials at the empire’s center were subject to constant
revision by indigenous brokers on the periphery. Despite the fact that the
Indian colonial possessions were more enduring as a result, Anderson
(40) nevertheless fails to successfully argue that the British could have retained other
parts of their empire for a more significant period through any of the means he
has suggested.

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