Why did the British Empire used ethnic cleansing that much in its Empire building?

Great Debates
1

Ok, while reading an interesting thread in GDs ( Which is the most evil episode in British history? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board ) a question I have often wondered about resurfaced. And I’d be interested in hearing dopers’ advice or cues on this.

Two of the biggest colonial empires were Britain and France (I’m talking about the period of the discovery and settling of America but also the rushes on Africa and Asia later in the 19th century). And how they colonized seem to have been fairly different.
I’m going to take the example of the New World here. Both countries colonized and took control of North America (well, the east and middle at that point) fairly early. But one kingdom focused on fur trading and cooperation with the natives, while the other seemed to focus on steady immigration, lots of seizing of land used by the natives, and the constant ethnic cleansing of those newly acquired lands. As you may have guessed the former is France, the latter is Britain.
Ironically, when Britain beat France in the French and Indian war, the American-French pop, usually designed by the name Acadians, were themselves victims of ethnic cleansing. The British took away many of the Acadians children and placed them in Anglo families, so that they would never remember they were Acadians, and before that French. Definitely killing any traces of a different rule other than the British one on those territories.

This taking of children and placing them into Anglo families was the very same tactic used in Australia with Aborigenes. And Australia and New Zealand are two perfect examples of ethnic cleansing again, where the local pop was constantly chased of its natural lands to make way for the settlers and their appetites.

It is particularily evident of the two different approaches come decolonization time, when two of the most important members of the former British colonial Empire, the Commonwealth, are ruled by whites and are made mostly of whites (I’m thinking Australia and New Zealand here). I cant find an example of French decolonization where the power, when France left, was kept into white hands, instead of hands the color of what the population was in the first place.

I am not trying to start a new British bash thread, or even a Britain Vs France match to know who’s the real Alpha Male. In my opinion Great Britain decolonized far better and fare more intelligently than France. But, precisely, that is tied to my interrogation.

Namely, why did G-B used ethnic cleansing so massively in its Empire building while France seemed to do quite the contrary (France tended to favor working with the natives, certainly exploiting them but no slaughtering them)?
I would like some rounded up answers if you please, not some answers-everything talking point. I dont think only one factor can be singled out.

In the possible bag of answers, one that would crop up first was the difference between British emmigration and French emigration. Seems like the British emigrated way more to the new lands than the French did (explaining for example the important numbers disadvantage New France faced during the French and Indian Wars). But that’s precisely what I’d like us to expand upon in this topic.
Why was it so? Was it a disadvantage to have so many leave (Spain suffered greatly of that phenomenon). Then why did Frenches leave in so few numbers? Was the emigration numbers the result of a specific and carefully thought policy by each of the kingdoms?..

And then… we could get on to why the ethnic cleansing was deemed as the proper way to operate by G-B? Did it need way more land than New France did, in the case of the take over of America? Why? Was it because of a difference in the nature of what was exploited on those lands by each kingdom ?(fur trading vs agriculture?) Was the diff in pop between New France and New England so huge that while the French could live and cooperate with the Indians, the Brits had to slaughter them out?

And then, same questions, as to why the pattern repeated itself on other lands, on other continents…

As you see it leads to a lot more questions, and while it may seem a little chaotic in the way I have framed the topic, I am sure more intelligent dopers, through their contributions, will help structure it better.

PS: This is the very first thread I start on StraightDope, I hope I put it in the appropriate slot.

2

You know, I seem to remember that the British were at pains to be peaceable with the Natives but those pesky Americans went and declared independence and that was that for the NAs south of the Canadian border. Let’s have some cites for your thesis.

And if you’re thinking of the introduction of disease, well, diseases weren’t that well understood in that time frame

3

Say what? The British of the time were known for their unwillingness to coexist with “natives”; the French traded and co-opted, the Spanish enslaved, but the British either ignored or exterminated. I’d tell you to ask the Tasmanians about how the British treated them, but they’re all dead. Americans being English in culture inherited the same cultural attitudes.

They knew enough to spread some of them via contamination.

4

Meh, colonial powers were all pretty much as bad as each other in those days. The OP claims to not be singling out the British, but I don’t believe him/her.

5

Well, the OP is asking about a specific tactic-- ie, ethnic cleansing. He/she already said they were all shitty.

I’m not really familiar with the French, but if you look at the former Spanish colonies, it’s pretty clear that the indigenous peoples* largely integrated into the population instead of being driven off onto unproductive lands. It seemed as though Spain was more interested in extracting mineral wealth and returning it to Spain than in setting up productive colonies like the British did. That, and the desire to convert the natives (and exploit them for labor) generally led to contemporary societies made up largely of mixed race peoples.

*those left after diseases decimated the populations

6

Well, “full blooded” Tasmanians, at least. There are still a bunch of people of Tasmanian ancestry.

But I think the big difference is that a lot of the early English and British colonization was actually settlement. The colonists wanted to come and set up farms and all that. The problem with that, of course, is if you’re trying to settle on land other people live on, you have to kill them, enslave them, or drive them out. Most of the early French colonies were trading colonies. You didn’t have large scale immigration. You had people who wanted to trade with the Indians for furs and such and get rich. That’s why the non-Native population of New France (Quebec) in 1754 was 55,000 people, and the non-Native population of the British North American colonies was about 1.2 million.

In places where the French settled to actually settle, like Martinique, Haiti, and Louisiana, they did wipe out the natives (although the Taino of Haiti were almost extinct when the French claimed it).

The French wiped out the Caribs of Martinique and in Louisiana, massacred and then enslaved the Chitimacha, and the Acolapissa fled to Lake Pontchartrain to escape slave hunters.

Meanwhile, when the British did want to set up colonies to just exploit the economy and not settle, like in Africa and India, they didn’t really exterminate or dispossess the population.

7

On the other hand, neither of those places were decimated by disease, nor were they small populations on an island like Tasmania; killing everyone would have been a lot harder. And both of those imperialist ventures mostly happened later too, the British like everyone else changed over time.

8

The British were looking to establish farming colonies. They tended to see the land as the valuable resource they were acquiring. They wanted to remove the natives from the land and replace them with English settlers.

The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French were looking to establish economic colonies. They wanted to harvest gold, silver, spices, furs, etc. They saw the natives as cheap labor that could be used to acquire the valuable resources they wanted.

9

They didn’t. The Acadians were allied with the French against the British. The French had their Indian allies and the British had their Indian allies.

After kicking the French out the British tried to come to a settlement with the native Indians in the Royal Proclamation

Royal Proclamation of 1763 - Wikipedia

10

That’s a good point. But the settling of New France wasnt supposed to be a hit and run thing. At least to the settlers, it was a permanent move to go to America. Though they were no farming settlements (mostly fur trade), they were not supposed to be temporary trade posts . The following questions thus come:
-why didnt the French emigrate in the same numbers as the Brits?

  • why did the Brits go for farming settlements when every other colonial power was apparently going for other sources of revenue?

Most of all, was the British emigration then something controlled in the sense that if you got to more than one million Britishs in 1754, it was because that was something the British Crown actually wanted (or planned)? Or was it contrary to the efforts of the Brit government?
And a difference has been made there between countries that the British desired to settle and those that it did not. The question would be why did the British want to settle that much more than the other colonial empires (and how it was able to do so, considering settling is a drain on your population and I highly doubt that Great Britain’s pop was larger than France’s during the 18th century).

Maybe it could be summed up to this: most have been saying there’s a settlement-ethnic cleansing formula over a trade post-cooperating/exploiting formula.
Why and how did the British Empire favor the former when the latter seems to have been the strategy of the other colonial powers?

11

The British changed because conditions changed, though. When Britain colonized North America, Britain was under immense political and religious unrest, moreso than, for instance, France. So you had, at various times, English Puritans, non-conformists, Catholics, Royalists, and Parliamentarians going to America to flee political or religious persecution, or set up their ideal state free of government interference. Australia was set up as a giant penal colony because there was a large number of poor, landless, petty criminals who the British wanted to get rid of.

12

in 18th century population of England increased by 77% that is by a total of 3 million people, plus the emigrants to the colonies Demography of England - Wikipedia . During the same period population of France increased by 39%, by a total of 8 million Demographics of France - Wikipedia

Subsequently in 19th century France became the first country in history to experience “demographic transition” and grew by just 10 million or around 30%. At the same time England and Germany grew substantially faster and their emigrants populated United States, Canada, Australia plus smaller communities in South America.

I don’t have economic statistics handy, but I suspect that people in England were also simply on average richer and more business-like than people in France. English working class gave rise to trade unions (i.e. efforts to get workers to become middle class) whereas the French one gave rise to the Communist revolution of 1848 in Paris. Pretty big difference, I would say. Richer, more business-like people are more likely to emigrate in order to find more fertile ground for their efforts whereas the more Communism-inclined people are more likely to hang around cafes and read Karl Marx’s manifestos.

Incidentally, one of the big French settlement in America, the Louisiana area, seems to have been a pretty unhealthy place where they couldn’t have much population growth. The same applies to Caribbean locations like Haiti. By contrast, the Massachusetts Bay colony had some of the longest average life expectancies of 18th century, and sure enough they grew and spread out.

As far as ethnic cleansings go, you can probably find some local cleansings during French take-over of Algeria, when they were expelling and taking away land of rebellious tribes.

13

Also a lot of criminals got sent to America from England (about 50 000). You have to consider the conditions going on in England at the time. Aside from the religious persecution mentioned by CA there were lots of English farmers who got pushed off their land due to enclosure acts, overpopulation of the countryside, increased livestock rearing.

They were welcomed in America as long as they agreed to work as indentured servants for about 5 years

14

While I had read that France’s pop was around 27 millions at the time of the Revolution, I have serious trouble believing Britain’s pop at the same time was a measly 8 millions . Even more so, how could a country facing such a populous and hostile neighbour (remember that was the strength of France, the largest pop in Europe at the time with Russia, and why it was able to field such large armies during the Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic ones) afford to lose more than one million of its subjects to emigration? If those were really the numbers then encouraging emigration to the New World was suicide. I had always thought it lingered more around the 15 millions, but I’ll go for some research on this.

After that you seem to do some serious back and forth in history that dont amount to any serious explanations. You cite the 1848 Revolution’s spirit for being the cause New France had a pop numbering in the few ten thousands whereas New England had a pop over the million in 1754?
I also have trouble taking seriously that Britain had a high production of busy hard working people while France could only produce Commie slackers… It is quite an essentialist’s vision of history, but it also doesnt explain anything in the massive difference in running (to) the colonies. I’m also not certain at all there was such a big difference in capita possessed by the richest classes in both countries, especially in the 18th century. And even if it was, nothing forces you to settle into profitable territories to exploit them. You could do that from London. Now, if you moved from London to settle in New England, that means something entirely different.

As for the area of New France, you seem to not realize it comprised a lot more land to the north of Louisiana, I’m not even sure Louisiana was that much developed by the French, compared to their more northern possessions, before the Lousiana arrangements betwen Spain and France. In all, New France was comprised mostly of lands probably as favourable of development as most of New England (though one enormous drawback, as they had very little sea access, the link to the Old World was hard to maintain and hold upon). Haiti would also be a poor example of lack of prospective development. It probably was one of the biggest recipient of French emigration, and by itself produced more wealth than any other colony held by the French, worldwide.
If population grew in New England it wasnt because it was fertile or had a healthy atmosphere (especially when you look at all the early failed attempts at colonization) there, it was because there was a large and steady immigration flow feeding it.

“As far as ethnic cleansings go, you can probably find some local cleansings during French take-over of Algeria, when they were expelling and taking away land of rebellious tribes”. Well, that’s the question, maybe it happened but by and large they did not proceed in any massive ethnic cleansing in Algeria (I’m talking about the colonization process here. Even during most of the colonial rule. The decolonization is different, there are plenty of recorded French massacres in that period). Nor in the rest of Africa. Maybe in Asia, i am not very familiar with French Indochina, maybe someone could fill in the blanks for me.
Someone mentioned earlier some French ethnic cleansing on some of their island possessions.
Maybe that’s also part of the answer, that to have genetic cleansing, you necessarily have to have a population at least partly decimated by new diseases. And that happened to be more of a thing occuring in British possessions than in the French ones (through no plans of their own I mean. I dont believe the British nor the French knew they could eliminate a population with diseases and then take over. But it is certainly something that happened more in British Colonial history than in the French one).

15

You seem to be trying to find a single unifying theme over a historical movement that occurred over several centuries. The motives that prompted the settling of Virginia in 1607 were not the same as the ones that prompted the settling of the Transvaal in 1902 (and you can substitute Acadia and Chad if you wish).

Generally speaking, Britain encouraged settlers to go to its American colonies. People were offered deals like land ownership, the right to set their own religion, and an opportunity to not get hung for stealing somebody’s pig.

France did have farming communities in the Americas but they were not promoted by the same incentives. France essentially tried to recreate old world France in the new world. Settlers would be tenants of some landholder’s estate not owners of their own farm. And France tried to settle its colonies with the “right elements” - ie no religious dissenters and petty criminals. Most farmers didn’t see any advantage in sailing across the Atlantic and ending up in the same situation they already had in France.

16

The other thing was that, first, not only the British went to British colonies in North America. Second, there was more land in North America, so people could spread out, grow a lot of food, and generally be healthier. At the time of the American Revolution, the average American male was about 2 inches taller than the average Londoner. More food and better health means higher fertility.

17

Britain = heavily populated (if not overpopulated) island.
France = not so heavily populated part of continent.

I think a lot of it stems from this.

But note where Britain wasn’t as interested in exporting population, they got on a lot better with the natives (see South Africa: frontier wars, yes, but those were wars of subjugation not extermination & replacement). Which is why the Xhosa and Zulus are still around in their millions and run the country. I think you’ll find that the case in most of ex-British Africa. I don’t know what’s different about America and Australasia, but there clearly was a difference.

18

Those damn Swedes…

19

Actually, I’m prtty sure that France *was *the most heavily populated part of Europe at the time. It certainly was the most fertile.

20

The UK’s a third of the size of France, though.