Hello everyone and welcome to lecture four for history 18 history 2013 U.S. history to 1865. Lecture four today is going to be titled Rule Britannia the English Empire and generally we're going to be covering the years 1660 to 1763. So in the previous lectures we took a look at the other European countries what they're going what they're doing getting done here. in the New World. So that was France, the Netherlands, and Spain.
Today we're going to take a more deeper look at Britain and what's going on with the English Empire, because that primarily is where our focus is going to be for the remainder of the semester, is on the British colonies. You know, in American history, it can be difficult because so much of what is the early United States is not our history. Right. Meaning us here in Louisiana are more connected to the French and the Spanish history because we were their colony for much longer before we became a state in the United States. So it does present this kind of interesting challenge.
Right. When we examine these and we have to look at these other states histories so in depth in order to understand how the country that we currently live in came. to be.
So let's go ahead and look at our sections for today. We're gonna have three. We're gonna talk about the Glorious Revolution, we're gonna talk about slavery, and we're gonna talk about the French and Indian War.
I'm not gonna go into a whole lot of detail about the Glorious Revolution because that's gonna be covered a lot in the textbook reading for this week. I will be talking a little bit about the French and Indian War. And so just to give you a heads up. It's going to be a little bit of talks of war and revolution here today.
So let's go ahead and get started with the Glorious Revolution, which is going to be this huge revolution that occurs in England after we start settling colonies, but before we really get into full mode of colonization and expansion. So the Glorious Revolution is going to happen when James II, I don't have a picture of him here, James II will become the king of... England.
James II is a Catholic monarch at the time when England is a Protestant country. England has its own church, the Church of England, of which the monarch is the head. So for then some other terms, with the Catholic religion, the Pope is in charge of that religion, right?
He makes all the decisions. In the Church of England, the king or the queen is the person who makes those decisions. And so we have James II who comes and he's Catholic, but now he's the head of a Protestant church. And so basically what he does is try to make England Catholic again, which nobody in England wants or likes.
They like their independence from the Pope. They like that change, that difference in themselves compared to the other European countries at the time. So James II has become the King of England. And he's going to attempt to overhaul the government and put, start putting his Catholic people into government positions, including government positions in the colonies.
His idea is he wants to make England more like France. He sees France and he sees that on the outside, they're doing really well. They've got a lot of wealth.
Their colonies are doing really good and are really wealthy. And so he kind of wants England to have that. that. And so he goes about it in the same way that the French do.
So he's trying to make England into France a little bit. And eventually the people in England and in the colonies, the English colonies, are not going to be happy with this and they're going to be fed up with it. And so eventually they're going to rise up against him, against James II.
In England, Parliament is going to take control of the government. Remember, Parliament is sort of like a Congress. But at this time, it didn't have a lot of power, right?
It was more of an advisory council to the king. It didn't really have enough power to make decisions or anything. And this is where that's going to change in this glorious revolution here. Parliament's going to take control of the government from James II.
They're going to say, you are making terrible decisions. You cannot be king. We're taking it back from you.
And then they're going to install a new king and queen, and that's going to be William and Mary here, King William, Queen Mary, who are Protestants who were hand-selected and hand-picked by the members of Parliament here. They also, with that, before they put William and Mary, are going to take powers away from the monarchy and give it to themselves, to Parliament. So they're going to take certain things that the king used to always be in charge of and be able to do without really checking with anyone. They're going to take that away from him and give it to the people, give it to the nobles and to Parliament.
And then they'll install William and Mary as their monarchs. Now, as that's happening in the colonies, there'll be a small rebellion, and particularly in Boston, against the leaders that James II put in place, because those leaders are making changes in the colonies based on the changes that James is making in England. And so the colonists have enough of it as well, and eventually get rid of it.
So what we see here, the reason we look at it is because we see Parliament become... more in charge of the colonies and of the government for the first time, where previously the colonies were pretty much just managed by the king and anybody that he appointed to be in charge of it. And in the colonies, we start to see this precursor of rebellion, right? We see that they are okay with rebelling against their governors, that they are okay with making those changes for themselves in the colonies.
And so we see these things both happen at the same time at the Glorious Revolution, but Parliament and colonies are on the same side. So it's all kind of swept up together as this big, joyful moment for them. After the Glorious Revolution, we have some changes that happen alongside that, particularly with slavery.
So Charles II is going to be in charge right before James II. So we're going a little bit back. before James II, before the Glorious Revolution for a second. Britain is involved in the slave trade in Africa, right?
And they had been for years. Under Charles II, he creates the Royal African Company to trade in African goods. This includes enslaved people. Now, up to this point, any merchant could set up a deal. in African goods, right?
You could be a slave trader from Africa. You could deal in exotic animals, exotic food, handmade items from Africa. You could just do that as a merchant.
Charles II comes in and says, we're going to make it a government thing. So the government's going to regulate what you can bring in, how much you can charge for it, but more importantly, how much the English government is going to get for you bringing in those goods and selling those goods in. England. And he's going to appoint his brother, James II, who will eventually become King James II to lead the company.
Now, under both of these kings, under Charles II and James II, the Royal African Company is going to have a monopoly on the slave trade to the English colonies. So the only people bringing slaves into the English colonies are slave traders from the Royal African Company in England. So the government is going to have a very heavy-handed, very integral part of introducing slavery into the English colonies here.
Between the years 1672 and 1713, the Royal African Company is going to bring about 125,000 captive Africans from the African coast. They're going to lose 20% of them to death in the Middle Passage. We're going to look at the Middle Passage in a second.
But basically on transferring them from Africa to England, 20% of that 125,000 are going to die. Now, that comes with the caveat that we only know the numbers that they report. It could be much more, right? It could have been many more people that they brought and many more people that were lost, lost their lives during that transfer.
So that is a huge caveat there. The Royal African Company's monopoly is going to end as a result of the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary will not outlaw slavery, but they will stop the government participation or regulation of it. So it's going to go back to anybody could try to make a buck by selling a human. And it's going to greatly increase the number of captives being transported from Africa to the New World.
And any Africans who survived the Middle Passage are usually going to arrive in the West Indies first. This is after the Royal African Company. And then from there, they're going to be transported up into the English colonies, into various slave markets in the various colonies here.
And I think I have, no, go back for a second. So I thought I had a caption for that coin. Went too far. I didn't have a caption for this coin, but I'll tell you what the caption is.
This is a coin here from the Royal African Company. This is a picture of Charles II here. along with the African company's coat of arms. This is in your book if you need a bigger picture of it. We can tell that it's an African coin because the symbols on the back of the coin here include an elephant and other African symbols here.
This was the money that was used by the Royal African Company in Africa and with the merchants who are trading in African goods. And so it's just a little piece of history that it's neat to see that we have. All these different kinds of coins here as well.
All right, moving on to looking at what happens to slavery when we get those people here. There's a sketch here of a slave market in one of the colonies. And slave Africans are going to try to adapt to the new environment that they're brought into. They don't speak the language majority of the time. They have no idea what's being said to them.
They can't communicate back. They're being treated like animals and not in a good way, right? They're being held in captive and bondage, being brutally punished, right? For doing things that they don't understand that they can or cannot do, right?
Now, what will happen is as they start being bought and sold and moved out, they're going to retain a lot of African customs and healing techniques. Um, And the bond of families and communities is going to be very strong among these people. Now, this does not mean strictly blood relative family bonds, but family bonds created out of unity, right, of needing that unity on your plantations or wherever you might be sold to. Other Africans will deal with their trauma by actively trying to resist their condition.
And so you can resist in subtle and not so subtle ways, right? A not so subtle way would be leading an armed revolt or violently reacting against your slave owner. A subtle way would be feigned ignorance. So making the captors who already think that you're dumb and can't comprehend anything playing into that actively, right? So, for instance, maybe hitting your tool too hard and it breaks and you know that's going to take a week to fix.
And you may or may not be punished for it, but you know that it's going to mean you don't work, but it's also going to hurt your slave master, right? It's going to hurt his profits. It's going to hurt those things that he actually cares about, right?
Escape. Escape. slaves will also create maroon colonies. So they will be groups that evade, recapture, and settle up on the outskirts of territories or escape into Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean islands, even back to Europe sometimes.
And they also will be integrated into some Native American tribes and communities as well. But basically everywhere. Almost every enslaved person, whether actively or not, is going to resist their exploitation as just a natural reaction to this inhumane way of treating a person, right?
And we'll have several active rebellions that we'll look at through the semester as well. All right, finishing off this lecture here with the French and Indian War. Remember when we looked at our colony map, the French and British were right on top of each other, right?
And they already had arguments pre-existing before the colonies were even set up. What happens is that there is a war that starts in Europe between England and France that then opens up a side in the New World between the colonies here. Now, Britain here... is painted in this purple color. Pink is France here.
And this yellow territory is going to be disputed territory, disputed ownership between the two of them. The French and Indian War is going to be kind of a unique war. It's a war that all of the colonists, for the most part, participate in.
It is a war that ends up directly benefiting the colonists, but that the colonists want this degree of separation from. So what do I mean by that? I mean that you colonists are going to sign up to join the British army specifically to fight in the French and Indian war.
The British, I'm sorry, the colonists are going to include people like George Washington, who will go on to fight in the Revolutionary War. They're signing up as part of the British army to fight with the British as a British citizen going to war with a French citizen here. And so we'll have this huge set of series of battles here that ultimately comes down to grabbing territory.
And what eventually happens is that we, when the war ends, America, the British colonies, we're not America just yet, but the British colonies end up taking territory that was disputed from France as part of that. We grab Maine here, this yellow area, and we grab, we grab, um, parts of the territory here, right? We go all the way out to Ohio here.
This, for Louisiana history, includes the time period of when we get the influx of Acadians here, and the Acadians come down from Canada down to populate the rest of the French colony in Louisiana. and so we uh this is the time period that all happens for england it's a great success right but they refer to it as a different way i'm sorry my camera is going crazy again i feel like every lecture this happens and i'm not entirely sure why let me switch to a different camera real quick all right let me fix that okay um we'll deal with that for now you getting back to it. In England, we're going to treat this as kind of a victory, mostly a stalemate.
In the colonies, this will be treated as a good thing, but something that was an English problem. We immediately create that degree of separation. We immediately label it the French and Indian War, whereas in Europe, they refer to it as the Seven Years'War.
There's that ownership there. that is not present in the British colonies at that time. And this will become a problem next week when we look at the debt that is caused by this war and how the colonists react to that. It's not very good.
They react pretty poorly. But the French and Indian War is a very important part of American history. It's not always talked about, overlooked.
Let me turn my camera off. I don't know what's happening with it right now. it's overlooked, it's not addressed as fully as it should be, and it is 100% a huge contributing factor to the actual movement of war, meaning to the revolution. It is something that sets us on that path and really keeps us on that path is the French and Indian War.
So it's a very important part, very important thing to have discussed here. With that, that's going to be the end of lecture four. We... We'll pick up next week with the revolutions. If you have any questions or want to see any of the images or maps that I used, as always, just post something in the question form or send me an email.
Otherwise, that'll be the end of Lecture 4, and I'll see you back here next week for Lecture 5.