War, revolution and the crisis of the British empire.

When Britain went to war with revolutionary France in February 1793 it was with expectations of imperial success rather than imperial catastrophe. The evident disorganisation of France and its empire seemed to present a golden opportunity to terminate decisively a century of imperial rivalry. For over two years before the war, Pitt's government had been bombarded with appeals for aid from disaffected French West Indian planters, and with suggestions from eager British officials that now was the time to take revenge for France's part in the loss of Britain's American colonies by seizing its rich Caribbean empire. Ministers resisted, putting their faith in a peace policy to see them through domestic and international dangers, but when that policy no longer seemed viable at the turn of 1792–3 and war seemed inevitable to defend Britain's interests in Holland and the Austrian Netherlands, Pitt privately admitted that the acquisition of the French islands would be an advantage of the coming conflict. What Pitt said privately was so loudly broadcast by pro-war supporters that opposition pamphleteers specifically condemned ‘those who recommend war for speculation’ and tried to belittle ‘the golden harvest’ being held out ‘chiefly in the West Indies’. These arguments failed to convince against the case that France could easily be driven from its small trading-stations in India and that Britain could snap up the dynamic core of the French empire of the Caribbean, where an immense capital investment was tied up in a rapidly expanding economy of sugar, cotton and coffee plantations worked by over 600,000 slaves and generating some two-fifths of France's foreign trade and two-thirds of its ocean-going shipping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]