Hi
I was reading “Europe The Struggle for Supremacy 1453 to the Present” by the Irish historian Brendan Simms.
On page 131 is the following sentence “The Treaty of Paris which brought the American War to an end in 1783 marked a revolution in the international state system. Britain was partitioned between France, Spain and the colonies. She was forced to recognize the thirteen colonies as independent states. Britain kept Gibraltar, but Florida and Minorca were surrendered to Spain, and France recovered Louisiana”.
The author’s use of Britain in “Britain was partitioned between France, Spain and the colonies” startled me. To me Britain is the island or at most the British Isles, not the empire itself. (Britain - definition of Britain by The Free Dictionary). Can the term “Britain” be used to denote “empire” as the author seems to do?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
So “Britain was partitioned between France, Spain and the colonies” can be read as Britain’s attention being divided between France, Spain and the colonies. I didn’t think you could use the term “partition” to imply division of one’s attention.
I’m more surprised by the use of “partitioned,” which conjures up an image of latter-day Hadrian-type walls being constructed across the island, thereby inflating the cost of bricks and mortar everywhere in the land as France, Spain and the newly minted independent Americans divide the spoils and argue about them among themselves.
“Between France, Spain and the colonies?” “Between” means between two entities, not three or more, no matter what the descriptivist cultists rant on about.
That guy self-published in his mother’s basement or he should sue the publisher’s copy editor. Just add “Britain” to the list.
I have never, ever, seen it used that way. It is certainly not a normal usage.
I don’t recall ever having seen “partitioned” used in the sense of divided attention, and that really makes little sense.
I think this is just an idiosyncratic, and not very well-chosen, word use by the author.
It would make sense if he had said “Britain’s North American possessions” or “British North America” was partitioned, but not Britain.
“Britain” normally just refers to the island of Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or before the Republic of Ireland separated to the British Isles. Using it to refer to colonial possessions would be unusual.
Britain technically refers to all British territories, and that seems to be the sense being used here. Gibraltar is always considered part of the nation of Britain, and in those days so were the North American colonies. Hence the reference to Britain retaining Gibraltar but losing her other overseas territories.
I have never met anybody who considered Gibraltar to be part of Britain, still less the (former) North American colonies. “Britain” is used officially and popularly in the UK as a synonym for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the term “British Islands” includes the Uk and also Man, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark - but not Gibraltar.
Gibraltar is a crown colony/dependent territory/overseas territory (they keep changing the name) and these have never been included in “Britain” in any usage that I know of.
The only on-line source I’ve found with that definition is Wiktionary.
Merriam Webster includes the Commonwealth of Nations in its definition of Britain.
All other on-line dictionaries I checked, including Dictionary.com, the Oxford Dictionaries, the Free Dictionary, and the Cambridge Dictionary, include only the sense of the island of Great Britain, or the United Kingdom.
Even the most ardent proponent of empire would never include overseas holdings as part of “Britain.” The United Kingdom, maybe, but even that is questionable. Queen Victoria styled herself as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and separately as Empress of India.
That’s just bizarre. By the time it became the Commonwealth of Nations none of those countries were British possessions anymore.
And all the sloppier because the time he is writing about is so close to what everyone would understand by a partition - the partitions of Poland. Trading of colonial territories, even accepting the loss of the American colonies, wasn’t the same thing at all.
