Britain battles on multiple fronts

Britain should have beaten the nankeen britches off the upstart American rebels in the

1770s and 1780s. What were nankeen britches? Also called breeches, they were the

khakis of their time — trousers made out of sturdy, buff-colored cotton cloth that the

British East India Company bought from Chinese traders — and that’s not as beside the

point as it seems.

At the time of the American Revolution, the British were the greatest sea power of the

world and one of the biggest trading powers. They were on their way to amassing an

empire that, at its height, would have made Alexander the Great’s eyes pop out of his

handsome Macedonian head.

The American setback (although the American Revolution wasn’t a setback to the

colonists) could be blamed on just how far-flung and thinly spread the British had

become. They were busy in other corners of the globe in the late eighteenth century.

British soldiers fought French forces in West Africa and the West Indies and faced

Dutch opposition in India. Spain got into the fight and blockaded the British colony at

Gibraltar. Meanwhile, East India Company troops plunged into the second of four

closely spaced Mysore Wars against the Muslims who ruled southwest India.

British manpower was so overstretched and its wealth so great that Britain resorted to

fighting the American war with hired German mercenaries, the Hessians. (Hesse is a

state in Germany.) Well-trained but hardly united behind the British cause, many

German soldiers became Americans after the war.

In the larger scheme of world domination, Britain’s setback in America — even Britain’s

inability to bring the Americans to their knees in the War of 1812 — amounted to not

all that much. Not compared to all the victories and conquests the British made in the

nineteenth century.