ABSTRACT
If the civil wars over the potential inherent in the different regional complexes built up under the real or nominal sovereignty of the English and later the British monarchy were as inevitable as the French and Spanish governments thought they were by the 1760s, the experience of conflict was in every region painful, with significant elements of the disreputable or the savagely brutal, or of both. Successor regimes which emerged from the implosion of the British world of 1775 were therefore at pains to rewrite the record to imply a consistent note of nobility and inevitability to their parturition. The Westminster-based British government, which had pulled a house down on itself by a mixture of protracted appeasement of colonial defiance of metropolitan authority and an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty over regional empires never likely to bow to its will on the scale necessary to make that sovereignty meaningful, was one of those successor regimes. It did not fail to emerge from the general reshuffling of the territories and assets associated with the British Crown with a strong acquiescent core territory in the shape of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. To that had to be added the still extensive colonial dependencies of Britain; and by 1800 the continuing vitality of the regime had been expressed in the acquisition of effective control of the territories of the British East India Company, and the incorporation of the kingdom of Ireland, whose aristocratic elite had at one point gone a fair distance along the road travelled by the gentry of Virginia in defying Westminster, into the new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
