Empires and Colonies E-Book

Jonathan Hart

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Themes in History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 950

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Empires and Colonies provides a thoroughgoing and lively exploration of the expansion of the seaborne empires of western Europe from the fifteenth century and how that process of expansion affected the world,
including its successor, the United States.

Whilst providing special attention to Europe, the book is careful to highlight the ambivalence and contradiction of that expansion. The book also illuminates connections between empires and colonies as a theme in history, concentrating on culture while also discussing the rich social, economic and political dimensions of the story.

Furthermore, Empires and Colonies recognizes that whilst a study of the expansion of Europe is an important part of world history, it is not a history of the world per se. The focus on culture is used to assert that areas and peoples
that lack great economic power at any given time also deserve attention. These alternative voices of slaves, indigenous peoples and critics of empire and colonization are an important and compelling element of the book.

Empires and Colonies will be essential reading not only for students of imperial history, but also for anyone interested in the makings of our modern world.

Leseprobe

EMPIRES AND COLONIES

EMPIRES AND COLONIES

Jonathan Hart

polity

Copyright © Jonathan Locke Hart 2008

The right of Jonathan Locke Hart to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5518-5

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

1

First Expansion: 1415–1517

2

From the Reformation to English and French Settlements in the New World: 1517–1608

3

The Relative Decline of Portugal and Spain: 1608–1713

4

The Rise of Britain and France: 1713–1830

5

High Imperialism: 1830–1914

6

European Civil War and World Conflict: 1914–1945

7

Decolonization or Neo-imperialism: 1945 to the Present

8

Conclusion

Notes and References

Index

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

In memory of my mother, Jean Jackman Hart (1922–2005), and to my father, George Edward Hart

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is relatively brief for the vastness of the topic. It cannot discuss all it should. Its main focus is on the expansion of western Europe and thus examines mainly the seaborne empires and their successor, the United States. Whether the United States is an empire is an open question, but some of its citizens and presidents, such as Thomas Jefferson, have thought so. It has governed, and governs, territories that are not full states in its union, and has an informal power, as the British empire did, over territories beyond its direct political control. The words ‘empire’ and ‘colony’ are sometimes loosely used, or at least rhetorically, and change over time, but they are important terms that I have tried to define. There have been empires in many parts of the globe, but I have concentrated most on the West, mainly from the Portuguese expansion into Africa to the present. In the story of empire, I have touched on Russia and its successor the Soviet Union, China, Japan and other key empires and states. The point of view of the book is as it is because of the unfolding of empires in what has come to be known as the West, even though an equally interesting story could be told about Russia, India, China and Japan, or the Aztec and Inca empires, from their vantage. This is not the story of triumph or superiority, but of how things turned out. Although I focus on western European empires, I also try to decentre that narrative with alternative points of view, like those of Natives, slaves and others who were not in power in those empires.

Another aspect of the book is that it assumes that economic, political and military history are key to an understanding of the expansion of empires but it brings to bear on them a cultural turn, in which culture and individual voices qualify the drive to patterns, systems and statistics. The focus on alternative voices, religion and human rights is meant to juxtapose the personal and cultural with the impersonal and larger economic forces that underpin military and political power. I have wished to tell some of the story from those marginalized, traumatized and, at the time, almost left out. I have also wanted to stress the ambivalence and contradiction of empire within people as well as within their cultures and political institutions and practices. Tensions also occurred within and between empires and their colonies. A book can only tell so much, and so while too much will be left out by definition, it is my hope that what remains within this relatively short book opens up for the reader some vistas about empires and colonies. This is a subject not without controversy, which means it has a built-in tension.

In the writing of a book, many people and institutions deserve credit. Over the years, in my books, I have thanked many specifically and expressed gratitude to all those who have helped and supported my work in friendship and intellectually. There are too many names to list here. My particular thanks to my editors at Polity, Lynn Dunlop, Sally-Ann Spencer and Andrea Drugan, who invited the book, believed in it, and helped it to change shape over a period more extended than any of us would have anticipated. I am fortunate indeed to be blessed with such fine editors. We all thought of what the readers might most need in a book on empires and colonies as part of the new series, Themes in History, and this changed over time. In the last iteration, Andrea Drugan showed great understanding and wisdom in guiding the book into publication. The anonymous readers (assessors) deserve thanks for their perceptive comments and suggestions. My editors and the assessors greatly improved the final version. Thanks to the dedicated group at Polity who saw this book through production and into publication. At Polity, I also wish to thank Jonathan Skerrett, Helen Gray and Annette Abel for their work on editing and production.

For a long time, the University of Alberta has been generous and enlightened in supporting my leaves for fellowships and visiting appointments. Kirkland House and Harvard University kindly welcomed me when I was beginning my concerted work on empire. The President, Fellows and students of Clare Hall and the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge have also been good to me over the years. Thanks also to the Director, Fellows, Staff and Board of the Camargo Foundation for a fellowship in France and the opportunity to consult the archives of the French overseas empire. At Princeton, Canadian Studies, History, Comparative Literature, and the Master, Fellows and students of Wilson College gave me a warm welcome and support. The librarians and staff at these universities and their libraries have been helpful and kind, as have those at the British Library, Bodleian, Bibliothèque Nationale, L’Archive d’Outre-Mer, the National Library of Canada, and other libraries and museums.

In the study of history and empires, I thank Anthony Pagden in parti cular. In this field, I am also grateful to Jeremy Adelman, Peter Burke, Nicholas Canny, Olive Dickason, Robert Duplessis, Anthony Grafton, Roland Le Huenen, Anthony Low, Kenneth Mills, François Moreau, Peter Sinclair and John Herd Thompson for their advice and example. Others have been supportive of my work generally in history and literature: Anne Barton, Sandra Bermann, Louise Clarke, Margaret Ferguson, Stephen Ferguson, Philip Ford, Marjorie Garber, Thomas Healy, Barbara Johnson, Michèle Lamont, Dale Miller, J. Hillis Miller, Don Skemer, Gordon Teskey, Godfrey Waller, Michael Worton and Jan Ziolkowski. Thanks, too, to my hosts for inviting me to speak about empire at conferences and universities in various locales. At Alberta, many have been encouraging of my research in recent years, including Kris Calhoun, Kerri Calvert, Patricia Demers, Julian Martin, Juliet McMaster, Douglas Owram and Irene Sywenky. I owe a debt to my students in courses on empires, colonialism and post-colonialism, especially those at Alberta and Princeton. For those who suggested, gave or lent me books that made a difference, my thanks: Alan Hart, George and Jean Hart, Shelagh Heffernan, John Hickie, Daniel Johnson, Mary Marshall, Stephen Mobbs, Peter Sinclair and Pauline Thomas. To many friends, thanks, including Alfred and Sally Alcorn, Judith Hanson, Allan and Laura Hoyano, Lenore Muskett, and Donald and Cathleen Pfister. In the past year or two, I have lost friends and colleagues, including Milan Dimic´, G. Blakemore Evans and Elena Levin, whose kindness and wisdom were exemplary. Many thanks to my brothers and sisters, Charles, Gwendolyn, Deborah, Alan and Jennifer. To my wife, Mary Marshall, and our twins, Julia and James, my deepest gratitude. This book has grown up while our children have. Finally, this book, which was begun some time ago, is dedicated to my mother, Jean, who died on 26 August 2005, and to my father, George. While she painted, he wrote. They both instilled in me a fascination with history and literature.

Introduction: Empires and Colonies

The interest in empires and imperial history in the past decade or so has been keen. Why are authors and readers and people generally interested in the rise and fall of western empires from the Portuguese to the present? Various reasons have arisen in the period during which I have worked on this topic. For instance, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the western Atlantic, the First Gulf War, the attack on New York and Washington, and the invasions of Afghanistan (with the sanction of the United Nations) and Iraq (without the approval of the UN) are all events that have generated contemporary interest in the colonial and imperial past. Other defining moments in a changing world developed this interest. The signing of the Helsinki Accord in 1975 guaranteed respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms among member states in eastern and western Europe. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened up eastern Europe and weaned it from Soviet dominance. Moreover, in 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred; this took the world’s second industrial power and third most populous state and largely broke it up into Russian and non-Russian states. President Ronald Reagan and some members of his administration in the United States during the last phase of the Cold War called it the Soviet empire, or even the ‘evil empire’. Was the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR) some kind of end of the last European empire? Alternatively, is the United States, which expanded into lands as a successor to the British, French and Spanish empires in northern America, an empire? Is this much-expanded Russia, which grew from Muscovy over the centuries into the lands of other peoples, yet an empire? Are these two great states in some form, even after the end of the Cold War and the loss of federated republics by the Russians, empires still? Given the Cold War from about 1945 to 1991, these two rival states, the United States mainly capitalist and the other mainly Communist or socialist, still generate a great deal of interest in the case of empires and colonies and what constitutes imperialism. In the chill of propaganda wars, there were those on both sides who spoke in derogatory terms of the other state as an agent of imperialism. This move is telling because it means that in some sense being an empire and embodying imperialism was not considered good in this period. From the early part of the twentieth century to its end, V. I. Lenin and Ronald Reagan both used ‘imperialism’ and ‘empire’ as negative terms. So there was and is a lot at stake over terms like ‘empire’, ‘colony’ and ‘imperialism’. That makes the debate an exciting one and not something moot. In the conflicts, verbal, political and military, in whose midst we have been since the Second World War and where, unfortunately, we still find ourselves, these terms are still used as weapons. They do not have fixed definitions, so that makes it necessary to give some of the contours of the debate. In such a context, it is also important to provide a historical view of these persistent and vital themes. For instance, if the United States is not considered an empire, then, of the empires in Europe that began their expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Russian (Soviet) empire was the last to dissolve. It is also possible to think of Russia as being, like the United States, a continental empire that involved expansion overland. One difference, however, is that the English had to sail to the New World to expand, whereas the Russians just spread out from Moscow in all directions.

However that might be, the United States became the dominant superpower with the decline of the Soviet Union, although the USA and Russia, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, were great continental powers that were destined to become the great world powers. In the middle of the story at hand, during the 1820s de Toqueville looked beyond the past glory of Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands, the memory of the French Revolution and the recent rise and defeat of Napoleon, and declared the future to be American and Russian – something that came to be especially the case after 1945:

There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.

Both have grown in obscurity, and while the world’s attention was occupied elsewhere, they have suddenly taken their place among the leading nations, making the world take note of their birth and of their greatness at almost the same instant.

All other peoples seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and need nothing but to preserve them; but these two are growing. . . .

To attain their aims, the former relies on personal interest and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of individuals.

The latter in a sense concentrates the whole power of society in one man.

One has freedom as the principal means of action; the other has servitude.

Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.1

This prophecy shows that amid the shape of the world as it was and is, the configurations of what will be fascinate people, whether in de Toqueville’s time or now. A typology or double vision on power and expansion takes effect between the time not now and the present. While the British empire was the greatest state, de Toqueville was looking to future empires or powers.

Russia remains a power still, while Japan remains the world’s second economic power. The rise of China and India, or their resurgence, is also causing great interest: these states are products of non-European imperial expansion, but they have also traded with Europe. Furthermore, for between one and two hundred years, China was subject to Europe informally and India formally. Both asserted their independent paths during the late 1940s in the wake of the cataclysm in Europe and Asia. These are ancient places with a plethora of languages and cultures and have taken on various political shapes over the past few thousand years. Alexander the Great made it to India and died there: Robert Clive helped the British stay there. Both China and India have long played central roles in the world economy and they appear poised to resume leadership in that sphere. When Britain gave back Hong Kong to China in 1997 and Portugal returned Macao to China in 1999, a circle had been closed or the tag ends of European expansion had been gathered. Both religious and secular books tell about the coming and going of empires and about the hubris of those who think they will never end.

The Irony of Empire: Limitation, Ambivalence and Contradiction

The story is more complicated than that because most administrators of empire and their peoples know that empires do not last. Guessing when states crest and when they ebb is something for prophets and soothsayers. In a world of models, projections and computers, people try to be precise about these matters. A typology or a double image of past and present haunts great powers in trying to guess their fate. The translation of empire is a myth of continuity between empires as a means of making an empire without end, but there is also a fear of chaos from the fall of an empire. The end of Rome provides such an image.

Empires can make people, even those at their centre, uncomfortable and ambivalent about them. If empires do not endure and are part of a fleeting earthly power, then why work for an empire or why suffer under the anxiety of trying to keep one going as long as possible? Are empires and colonies all about profit? Do those who live in the colonies suffer most to enlarge the imperial or metropolitan centre and its profits? For Christians, Rome was the empire that both helped crucify Jesus and persecute Christians and then became the empire that latterly made Christianity its official religion. The image of the Roman empire was ambivalent and contradictory. Ironically, empires are limited in time because they rise and fall or have a beginning, middle and end, even if they project power and endurance. Some of those who administer or write about empire are keenly aware of this contradiction. In the typology of time among past, present and future, in the theme of history concerning empires and colonies, historian and reader are also aware that change will make Rome, or any empire claiming that the sun will never set on it, less than eternal.

Power is also powerless in time. The very Christian religion which was at the heart of the expansion of Europe from the fifteenth century, despite the echoes of the classical and pagan world of Greece, Rome and the Europe beyond the pale of those empires, showed in its scriptures, especially in the New Testament, the chastening of power. The city of God and the earthly city coexisted symbolically and in the daily view, but earthly power would give way, like the empires, before the truth of religion, on the way to the end of things, as predicted in Revelations at the end of the Bible. While the powerful often prevail on earth, the meek shall inherit the earth. Secular and religious worlds came to collide in individuals, societies and states. The missionary urge was often enough in tension or in tandem with the quest for economic and political power.

The Argument and Emphasis

Nor is power the only matter at hand, whether it is trying to speak about the expansion of western Europe or the United States or setting out world history in terms of the power and might of China or India in historic and future terms. Empires and Colonies will provide an exploration of the expansion of the seaborne empires of western Europe from the fifteenth century and how that process of expansion affected the world, including their successor, the United States. While paying particular attention to Europe, this study will be careful to highlight the ambivalence and contradiction of that expansion. The book will also illuminate connections between empires and colonies as a theme in history, concentrating on culture while also discussing the significant social, economic and political dimensions of the story.

Empires and Colonies will recognize that while a study of the expansion of Europe is an important part of world history, it is not a history of the world per se. Its focus on culture will be a means of asserting that areas and peoples that lack great economic power at any given time also deserve attention. The alternative voices of slaves, indigenous peoples and critics of empire and colonization will be a vital aspect of the book, which is meant to appeal not only to students of imperial history, but also to anyone interested in the makings of the modern world.

Terms and Background: Empires, Colonies and Imperialism

Before we look in detail at the period and themes in question, it is worth taking some time to understand what we mean when we talk of empires and colonies. The background to the beginning of western European expansion in the fifteenth century shows that the story of empires and colonies is not new. This tale of empire and colony is an important one that still lives with us, however repugnant empire is to many in what has been called, in hope, the postcolonial world. In classical antiquity the Greeks and Romans discussed the nature of politics and history, which included discussions of empire and colonies. For instance, the Greeks explored other cultures. Herodotus wrote about the Persian empire and its clash with the Greeks. Thucydides represented internal strife in Greece and the fall of the Athenian empire and its democracy. Plato, through his teacher and the protagonist of his dialogues, Socrates, set out a cycle that included aristocracy and democracy and the nature of tyranny. Aristotle, who was Plato’s student, studied politics systematically and was, for a brief time, the tutor of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian, who extended the imperial sway of greater Greece from northern India to Egypt and beyond. Alexander became a model for future emperors in Europe: he was observed even as his successors in the mythology or translation of empire departed from his example.

The Romans had the Greek imperial past to reckon with, and as they emulated Greece, they also displaced it as the imperium. Rome swept away rivals such as the Etruscans and Carthaginians (descendants of the Phoenicians) as well as the Greeks, but in doing so they absorbed what each of these cultures had to offer, for instance Carthaginian ship-design and Greek philosophy. Livy and Tacitus recorded the changes in the Roman polity from republic to empire, and Cicero was sceptical of the withering of the republic. These writers came to influence writers, advisers and rulers of the Middles Ages and Renaissance in western Europe, where the focus of this study begins.

‘Empires’ and ‘colonies’ are terms that we understand in a general sense, but the closer we examine them, the more fractured and intricate they become. Part of the reason for this is that an empire in the ancient world of the Mediterranean served as a model to those modern empires that will be discussed here, but that the ancient empires differed from those latter-day empires. Even if each of the western European empires from the fifteenth century onwards were distinct, it shared certain key characteristics with the others. In the confines of this book, I can mention but cannot explore other empires that inhabited the reaches of the globe, continent to continent, period to period, but these different polities strain the word ‘empire’ even more. Various European languages, not to mention others with related terms, have distinct but connected uses of this key word for this study. Still, as with the term ‘colony’, with ‘empire’ there is a practical field of use. Etymology, although it has its limits, is a good place to begin.

‘Empire’ and its cognates have a certain grounding. The English word ‘empire’, which has different uses, derives from the Latin ‘imperium’, which is related to ‘imperare’ – to command – from which comes the term ‘imperator’, the origin of our word, ‘emperor’. This sense of ‘Supreme and extensive political dominion’, particularly ‘that exercised by an “emperor” . . . or by a sovereign state over its dependencies’, entered the English language about the first quarter of the fourteenth century, although related meanings seem to have occurred at the end of the thirteenth century.2

‘Colony’ also has a suggestive history as a term. The Latin ‘colonia’ came from ‘colonus’, a ‘tiller, farmer, cultivator, planter, settler in a new country’, and ancient Roman writers used it to translate the Greek word for ‘a settling away from home’.3 The word first appeared in modern languages, particularly in relation to the Roman ‘coloniæ’, in French and then in English. In the sixteenth century Latin and Italian writers, such as Peter Martyr, used the term ‘colonia’ from ancient Greek and Roman precedents to apply to settlements newly ‘discovered’ and planted in places outside Europe such as the New World, and Richard Eden translated some of these works into English, for example Martyr’s Decades (1516, translated by Eden, 1555), and so gave this new context for the word a proper place in the vernacular of England. Other writers in English took up this meaning over the following centuries: for instance, in his continuation of the work of Richard Hakluyt the Younger, Samuel Purchas in the edition of 1613 declared ‘O name Colon . . . which to the world’s end hast conducted Colonies’. In Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes spoke about colonies from England planted in Virginia. In 1775 Edmund Burke mentioned how the colonies in America complained that a Parliament in Britain taxed them without including their representatives. In 1883 Seeley, in The Expansion of England, provided the following definition, which builds on the classical and modern vernacular inheritance: ‘By a colony we understand a community which is not merely derivative, but which remains politically connected in relation of dependence with the parent community.’ In the year of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations appeared, a reminder of the political economy of empires and colonies. Smith proclaimed: ‘The colony trade has been continually increasing.’4 Recently, Robert Aldrich and John Connell admitted that while colonies are generally accepted to be distant, established by settlers and politically connected to an independent state, formal definitions of ‘colony’ do not reflect the complexity of the term: ‘Since political shifts are crucial to colonialism and decolonization, any definition of a colony is condemned to flexibility and variable interpretations.’5 Although my study is comparative, it is written in English, so that the very language I use involves the translation of empire as a theme but literally in the language.

‘Empire’ and ‘colony’ and their cognates are translations and came to have a practice in the language and lives of the English-speaking nations.6 There were empires and colonies long before the English tongue was born, and the imperial centres and the overseas settlements of these seaborne empires between 1415 and 2000 were Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch as well, to name a few. German, Swedish, Danish, Russian and other colonies were also part of the concurrent European expansion.

The story of empire – although in English it is often, owing to language and culture, a story of Anglo-American expansion – is not of one language and nation. Even these key terms in English are related to earlier uses in Greek, Latin, French and Italian. To speak English is to speak the language of the colonized and colonizer even in the heart of London, once a colony of ancient Rome. England itself was invaded or colonized so often: in the past two thousand years alone, the Romans, Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Normans, to name a few, came into conflict with the Celts and the already hybrid ancient cultures of the British Isles. The great empire ruled from London, like that governed from Washington, was born of a colony turned empire. Whereas I include the United States in this study, as an extension and a development of the English/British empire from which it broke, it is not a traditional seaborne empire. The technologies that brought the United States to the fore may have helped it to build on the empire that gave birth to it, but radical technological changes in industry, agriculture and the military also gave it distinction. It developed the very sea and air power that Britain built up for the last great conflicts – those two great civil wars in Europe that drew in the whole world which we call the world wars – only to decline precipitously. Germany had aspirations to empire and, having been denied those by Britain and France, with the help of their empires or former colonies and the United States and Russia, the German state took Europe with it into an earthly apocalypse. Germany’s ally, Japan, had similar ambitions in Asia and was defeated by all those who fought Germany as well as by China. Perhaps politically the greatest casualty of these wars was the British empire, which in 1914 was the world power. The United States, already gathering strength economically from 1870 (as was Germany), rose from those ashes – having helped the mother country – and developed over the course of the century, and certainly by the end of the Second World War in 1945 it was the foremost world power.

From the early or mid-eighteenth century and certainly from the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Britain was the dominant country in the world, so that for about two hundred years or more, the English-speaking power of either Britain or the United States was first among nations, even if these were contending nations. Being first does not mean having its own way or that other states within Europe or in other parts of the world did not have their own influence. It would have been difficult for Britain to survive these terrible wars, which also had horrific effects on Germany, Japan, Russia and other countries, without its colonies such as India and its former dominions (but still dependent for foreign policy on the empire and then the Commonwealth) such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Its first great former colony – the United States – was also a key support that helped Britain to victory in both world wars, even if Britain became weaker and weaker and would in time become, even with lessening power, a help to the United States in the Cold War and later conflicts. In other words, to leave the United States out of this narrative of empires and colonies, especially as this relation between the centre and its settlements is an aspect of this imperial theme, would be to tell only part of the story.

Empires have come and gone in different ways and shapes, making colonies or other dependencies, whether these were envisioned as part of expansion or not. As this is a study of empire in a specific sense and not a meditation on empire in the sense of a history of the world from antiquity to our time, it will not cover the imperial yearnings of Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar or chronicle the diverse empires of the Chinese, Mongols or Mughals. The body of this book will take as its beginning the rough date of 1415, when Portugal began its expansion into Africa and not long before the Portuguese rounding of the Cape of Good Hope to India and the Spanish landfall in the western Atlantic. This date will be observed as much in the breach as in the rule, but most of what follows will derive from the fifteenth century onwards and will concentrate on the seaborne empires of western Europe – Portugal, Spain, England (Britain), France and the Netherlands – and their chief successor the United States.7

This last ‘empire’ breaks the rule of this book, and while the United States, like the Russian (later Soviet) empire, was and is largely continental, its presence here is in large part as a translation of western European empires, especially that of the British empire, whose principal ‘colony’ it was and whose tongue and institutions it has propagated, modified and repudiated. As these western empires, built on sea power, from which the United States developed late but in earnest, came into contact with other empires and peoples, they will be discussed, but within the scope of a book it would be difficult to examine all these matters and even begin to do them justice. Many of these powers came to see themselves – as the Byzantine emperors, the popes, Charlemagne and his successors had done – as those chosen to inherit from, or embody, the Roman emperors and empire in a kind of translatio imperii or translation of empire. The architecture of Washington shows that this translation was and is alive long after the fact.

This study will avoid conflating different kinds of phenomena under the rubric of ‘imperialism’. Norman Etherington warned against a loose application of classic theories of imperialism in the historical study of the European colonial empires. Like Eric Stokes, Etherington thought that these theorists had not intended their theories to account for the growth of those empires. Etherington saw in H. Gaylord Wilshire, J. A. Hobson, V. I. Lenin and other important figures a study of capitalist sources for their theories of imperialism – how the imperial urge functioned as an outlet for surplus capital. Moreover, Etherington argued that imperialism, colonialism and the expansion of capitalism were not the same.8 The colonial fits and starts from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, especially among the French and British, for instance in the Americas, were nothing like the so-called high imperialism of the scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century and before the First World War began in 1914. Even then Etherington observed that there was a confusion of terms. He argued that the first capitalist proponents of imperialism saw it as justification for action, a policy that would allow an outlet to surplus capital, a civilizing mission or a struggle for survival among states. By imperialism, Marxists meant applying beliefs about causation in history to an analysis of international aggression, that is, they connected and confused (in Etherington’s view) aggressive capitalist states and their financial press that justified imperialism. Later, historians who were not Marxists used the term ‘imperialism’ to include explanations of the expansion of colonial empires and split the term into specialities such as economic imperialism and capitalist imperialism. Etherington provided a reminder that capital exports alone cannot explain colonialism. The theory of imperialism, then, should not confuse these three factors: imperialism, colonialism and the expansion of capitalism. Etherington also called attention to Charles A. Conant’s theory of capitalism which justified a policy, V. I. Lenin’s application of a theory of history to a given phenomenon, and D. K. Fieldhouse’s explanation of the scramble for Africa according to national rivalries. For Etherington, it is important to place these theories in their own historical contexts before testing them, and he noted that theories of imperialism are still useful. More specifically, it is vital to distinguish what these theories say about the different phenomena of the building of empires, the expansion of capitalism and the military rivalries that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.9

By choosing the terms ‘empires’ and ‘colonies’, I am emphasizing the different kinds of empires and colonies even over time in the expansion of western Europe. As this region expanded overseas and its economic power increased, imperialism was part of the story but not all of it. Part of the expansion from about 1415 to 1750 was based on an agrarian, commercial and pre-industrial society that involved capital but was founded primarily on crafts and manufactures supplied by energy from the biological world of wild and cultivated plants and trees. The expansion from 1750 was derived from coal and other sources, such as oil, that drove an industrial revolution begun in England. In the twentieth century a technological revolution built on the agrarian and industrial bases of the economy.

Expansion involved the use of capital from the beginning of this period, but banking and investment intensified over time and, through the industrial and technological revolutions, displaced land more and more as a source of wealth and power for individuals and states. The European economy began to expand before intense colonization and capitalism were developed. Colonization and industrialization occurred in England before the high and centralized imperialism of late Victorian times. Capitalism and technological invocation continue in Britain despite the formal decolonization of its empire in the decades after the Second World War.

Decolonization occurred to some degree with the loss of the American colonies by Britain, but the British empire subsequently amassed more colonies. This empire was also a patchwork of various kinds of polities. Beginning with Canada in 1867, at about the peak of power but not of size of the empire, the settler dominions began to gain self-governance in domestic matters and gained that right over foreign affairs between the two world wars. Even between the imperial centre and settler colonies, where there was much in common, frictions occurred. The tension between empire and colony in this expansion is a reminder against the urge to flatten out everything in a flattened-out ‘imperialism’, which has its own confusions, fissures and intricacies. There were many empires among the western Europeans and they sought origins in their classical past.

Focus, Context and Method

By necessity, this book has Europe as its primary focus, because it explores the expansion of western Europe, its influence and its overseas colonies from the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, but that does not mean that the argument need be celebratory, teleological or triumphant. In other words, a volume about the development of Europe in the modern world need not be ‘Eurocentric’ in what has come to be a derogatory sense. Instead, the story that this book will tell is of ambivalence and contradiction in terms of the themes of history as they apply to imperialism, colonialism and decolonization, or what might be considered by some as neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism.

There are many different ways in which one could approach the writing of a book on such a broad subject matter as empires and colonies. Choosing to emphasize different themes or criteria would delimit the chronological and geographical scope of such a book in varied ways. For instance, if economics were the sole criterion for writing about the expansion of western Europe and its power, then the book might constrain itself to the period of about 1800 to 1945. Another way of shaping a history of western expansion would begin in the classical or medieval periods. The westering of empire is an old theme that scholars have traced, and one theme is that this movement from the east would lead to doom in the west, where learning and knowledge (science) would have its end. This idea occurred in Christian writings, from Severian of Gabala (in the fourth century CE) to Hugh of Saint Victor and Otto of Freising (twelfth century CE).10 The expansion of Europe could also begin much earlier, for instance with the Norse expansion to Iceland and Greenland, which ended in the fifteenth century. That way there would be a continuity between the Vikings and the Portuguese and Spanish voyages to Africa, India and the New World.11 It would also be possible to view the expansion of Europe in terms of ecological and epidemiological damage or imperialism, beginning with the plagues. Some of them, like the Black Death, originated from China when Mongols, who controlled a vast empire in Eurasia (which fell about 1350), spread the bubonic plague (carried by the fleas on rats) from China into Europe, devastating populations from the east to the west, from 1331 to 1350 and beyond. By the end of the fourteenth century, the population of China and Europe, both connected through the Mongol empire, fell by about a third. The effects of weather and disease on food production, labour and the economy altered political, social and cultural practices in Eurasia and elsewhere. It is possible to see that this death count created a labour shortage in places like Europe that drove up wages and made these states look for gold and silver and for slaves to replace the dead. That seems to have caused an exploration of the New World, where Native populations died in vast numbers from diseases to which Asians and Europeans had been exposed over a long time, and this shortage of labour for exploitation led to the seeking of African slaves.12 Such a narrative would see that a division between Asia and Europe is really artificial and would suggest that a global society and economy included Africa, America and elsewhere in a biological and cultural regime.

Whatever the focus chosen may be, in a comparative study of cultures and empires and colonies such as this one, it is vital to provide other contexts that serve as a reminder of the obvious, that other peoples besides Europeans had strong texts, images and actions that related to expansion, empire and relations with other cultures, some colonized or tributary. The tensions among Europeans and those they encountered during their expansion were multifold and had a context: that is, past as precedent as a future that soon becomes the past. The narrative or thesis this book sets out is one among many possible worlds, as Leibnitz might have framed it.13 Even if from one point of view, nothing was or is inevitable, what has happened has happened. Thus, if the inexorability of the expansion of the western European empires is possibly a tool of triumphalism or mythology as much as something related to historiography, to get too deeply into the what-ifs of history might well, if taken too far, serve to deflect attention from what occurred during the expansion of these empires into the world beyond Europe. Alternative histories are a form of speculation, a philosophical view of human time not too different from fiction, more particularly historical fictions in the novel, drama and poetry. Aristotle had considered history to be that which represents what happened and poetry what might have happened, so that while the historian could not rearrange events for effect, the poet could.14

Although I have chosen the title Empires and Colonies, which emphasizes the relation, and sometimes tension, between the centres of the colonizing powers and their colonies, it could have been called The Expansion of Western Europe. This title, while perhaps more descriptive, might have suggested more of a focus on western Europe than the expanding role of Europe in the world in the period under discussion. Expansion includes empires, colonies, imperialism and related matters, but it allows for a distinction among them as well as within terms. For instance, these key terms are contested, and to assume that all empires are alike or that all their constituent parts are the same is something that this book argues against. One of the ways that empires are different, even from themselves, is over time. It is appropriate, especially in a volume that is part of a series on the themes of history, for this book to be structured in a way that explores the theme of empires and colonies chronologically. England grows into the English and then the British empire, and even the British empire is different in 1707, 1807 and 1907, and, by 2007, has long since ceased to exist except as a memory, trace and remnant. The same could be said for the Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch empires. As this history has many points of view within Europe, it needs focus, for the sake of coherence and detail, given the scope of the topic at hand. While China, India, Africa and other parts of the world were and are of great import ance, it would be unwieldy to concentrate on the place of Europe in the modern world mainly from the point of view of the many colonies and states that came under pressure from Europe, especially from the middle of the eighteenth century or beginning of the nineteenth. Instead, while focusing on western Europe and showing the tension between these seaborne states and their colonies and with other parts of the world, this study cannot, within this scope, do justice to many of the aspects of the world beyond Europe or these empires.

The title of the book shows the tensions between imperial centre and colonies, but the volume tries to complicate and qualify notions of European superiority and to avoid reading history backwards by arguing for the inevitability of European power, and for that of the United States and Russia (later the Soviet Union) as societies that grew out of Europe. Despite this attempt at balance, this study is not, however, a completely decentred world history. In other words, while this book gives one way into the modern world and into globalization, it does so from the point of view of an expanding Europe and the world, no matter how ambivalent that expansion might be in the eyes of Europe, the world and posterity. It is important not to read history backwards in another sense, that is, to renovate the past or to reconstruct it for present purposes. All histories are written in the present, so there is always a dialogue between past and present, but to provide a revisionary history for the purpose of present political and scholarly trends is another form of teleology. Whereas that teleological urge might be difficult to avoid, it is worth resisting. It is possible for a historian to be too much of his or her times. While this book should contribute to the field of world history, it is doing so from a European point of view, with all the blindness and insight a vantage can provide. The same would be said about viewing world history from a Chinese or Indian view, especially up to 1750 or 1800, when both were world powers. Both states might well again be great powers in the world, but that would not detract from the story of about 1415 to the present, in which Europe expanded for much of that time. That expansion might not have meant, for about the first half of this period, that Europe was anything like as economically or technologically dynamic as Asia, but this growth in the western part of Eurasia affected the world, even when Europe was a lesser force in the world.

Culture

Economics and technology are not the whole story. It would be one-sided if we discussed Europe, India or China because they were economic powers and assumed that that was the central criterion in the study of history. One of the central concerns of this book, despite its attempt to examine social, economic and political factors, is ‘culture’. That word is another notoriously fraught term, like ‘imperialism’, but it is one that Clifford Geertz said was ‘Almost as bad as matter’.15 As people cannot enact the lives of others, as Geertz notes, they can try, instead, to understand other frames of meaning. The meeting of cultures – different peoples in different places and time – is a key to the expansion of Europe and its encounter with the world and lies at the heart of this book. Moreover, the voices of people and their cultural practices, as they occur in texts and images, represent important parts of this study.

One of the assumptions of this book is that the meeting of cultures – even under stress from invasion, disease and ecological trauma – is the exchange of intricate cultures full of ambivalence and contradiction. The irony of a sense of superiority is that empires pass and cannot be sustained and that, by definition, no culture can sustain an argument for superiority. What is most productive is to bring out some of the intricacies of some of the relations between and among cultures at the time that Europe slowly then steadily went out into the world for better and worse.

It is important to remember that in the fifteenth century Europe was a creative, violent, multilingual and multicultural peninsula, which may have declined from the power and influence of Greece and Rome. However, even in the centuries afterwards, no matter how much power and influence Europe gained, it remained fractious and bent. If taken as a whole, Europe – which is supposition, as it was and is an idea perhaps more than an actuality – was given to civil war.16 Rivalry, self-destruction, violence and social, economic and political friction characterized Europe on the verge of expansion as much as it has since. The world wars of the twentieth century (CE) show the sheer destructiveness that Europe brought on itself and on the world. So Europe was and is no Edenic or utopian world bringing civilization to the world, whatever was said, but it did and does make a contribution to the global community and changed it utterly.

The story of western European expansion, as this book will show, is ambivalent and contradictory. The western European seaborne empires and their successor, the United States, provided in economics, politics and social structures the good and bad, mixed sometimes inextricably. Those who would make this expansion into a triumph have one eye closed, and those who would make it into a disaster have the other eye closed. This book is neither an apology for European expansion nor a denunciation of it. The expansion occurred, and the task at hand is to see some contours of what that meant. This story of expansion is the focus of the book and gives it its shape.

Violence and Ecology: the Imperial, the Colonial and Expanding Capital

Imperialism, colonialism and the expansion of capitalism are key factors in the central concerns of violence and ecological change and degradation. During the period in question, violence against aboriginal peoples and others around the globe was widespread and the effects of disease and industrialization had complex interactions. The diseases the Spaniards brought to the New World and the mining for minerals such as gold and silver with slave labour were a form of violence against the land and peoples. The transportation of plants and peoples from different parts of the Atlantic basin, for instance, meant that, long before the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, trade and exploitation were present on a large scale. This occurred particularly through the institution of slavery, and through violence – physical, psychological and ecological. Colonies sometimes preceded formal empires. Feudalism characterized the Portuguese and Spanish empires, while the English (British) and the Dutch transformed their own colonies through capitalism, especially from the seventeenth century. The Industrial Revolution and the increase in capital certainly added to the strain, through technologies of warfare and ecological devastation, which we have been seeing on an ever-greater scale from about 1970.

The gap between the biological world and the industrial/technological world has been growing. Capitalism without classical imperialism seems to be doing an even greater job of ecological destruction. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became apparent that, if anything, the command or planned economies of eastern Europe had done even greater damage to the environment. The dictatorships of Stalin, Hitler and Mao showed that violence against people and the environment was more intense than in capitalist democracies and those with mixed economies. So from the colonization of Columbus, Cortés and the Pizarros through the division of China and the imposition of the Opium Wars and the scramble for Africa at the height of imperialism to the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, violence and wars against people and the land, air and seas are a central part of the story. Capitalism and socialism have at their extremes as much to answer for as the ideological wars of religion, society and politics. These are concrete examples that should serve as a reminder that to make one theme all themes, while tempting, is not possible. A mixture of ideological, physical, economic, technological and ecological violence has created a difficult situation in the time in which we live. This violence has historical roots and is a central part of this story.

Slavery, human rights abuses and the collision of cultures are key to the study of the expansion of Europe. As I have briefly discussed above, I will give due treatment to slavery, racism, the treatment of women and other related sub-themes so as to counter an economic history that might discuss production and power in the greatest states and neglect the violence, the ecological crisis and the legacy for aboriginal peoples and the descendants of slaves. There is a moral dimension to this history of empires and colonies. No one person or one people has the moral high ground, including the historian, and certainly not this historian. We are implicated and complicit. It is easy under the sway of models, graphs, statistics and other quantitative techniques, however useful they are, to forget about human voices and individuals and the culture of which each person is a part. Each culture has value, so that while empire, colony and imperialism can call up images of dominance and superiority, these are spectres and can lead to self-delusion on a personal, religious, social and political scale.

To these ends, in discussing the myths, theories and practices of colonization, or colonialisms, it is important to take a comparative approach to history. That way, one national tradition, or one imperial theme, does not seem so original or seminal. The appeal to wider contexts prevents the provincialism of each empire prevailing. Through a use of evidence from earlier periods and different cultures, it is possible to complicate and revise the notions of modern European imperial expansion and the apparently ‘postcolonial’ period we are said to inhabit.

Coming to Terms Once More

In what follows, taking into account the additional contexts set out since the discussion of the key terms of the study, I seek to make further suggestions concerning the intricacies of changing words, like ‘empire’ and ‘colony’, and to question the ready division between imperial centre and colonies as well as the claims that empires make for themselves. As Hans Kohn has suggested, not every imperial relation is colonial, and, in its baldest terms, colonialism, which has many intricacies, might be said to be ‘foreign rule imposed upon a people’.17 For Kohn, empire and imperialism imply power and domination, but however corrupt and greedy these systems can be, it is really a question of the abuse of power that is the root of the political problem. Domestic and foreign governments can abuse power. The words ‘colonialism’, ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ developed pejorative connotations in the twentieth century, but they had been laudatory terms until the end of the nineteenth: ‘The Roman empire had been a model for Western political thought for over a thousand years. Americans at the end of the eighteenth century spoke proudly and hopefully of their “empire.” The French revolutionaries proclaimed the “imperial” expansion of their leadership.’18 A view that corroborates this one is that, as Jean-Marie André asserts, ‘Roman imperialism has modelled our daily life and our culture’.19 Michael Twaddle’s definition is a variation on Kohn’s: ‘Imperialism, interpreted as the rule of foreigners by strangers, is as old as human history.’20 This study discusses colonies in British, Spanish and Portuguese America, for instance, that were both colonial in the sense that they colonized many settlers in new lands that were invaded or conquered and imperial in that they came to rule over subject peoples. ‘Empire’ and ‘colony’, then, are caught between colonialism and imperialism because, depending on a greater or lesser degree of European settlement, they are imperial and colonial at once, so much so that in certain cases the two aspects become blurred. Lenin saw a sea-change in 1890, from a different point of view from Kohn, when the most advanced capitalist countries became monopolist and competed one with the other for direct control for the world’s unconquered lands.21

Even if ‘empire’ and ‘colony’ are vexed terms and imperialism and colonialism have begun to be questioned in a widespread fashion over the past century or so, it would be an over-simplification, despite their drawbacks and abuses, to blame all the woes of the world or of a given people entirely on the colonial expansion of western Europe. Violence, disease and death did come with the Europeans, especially in the Americas. Moreover, they did exacerbate the already existing networks of slavery, especially in Africa, but war, violence, illness and domination were already in most cultures across the world. Empire and colony, then, have been subject to a shift in views in recent times and for good reason when considering the abuses of colonialism and imperialism, but there is also an ambivalence because many of the institutions, ideas and cultural practices that questioned or vilified empire derived from the critical nature of European culture. These empires were not above self-criticism.

Structure

The structure of the book is set out chronologically in order to provide context. Each chapter is based on major events for western European empires and their colonies, which constitute the focus of the study. The first chapter (1415–1517) focuses on the first years of Portuguese expansion into Africa until Luther began the Reformation; the second (1517–1608) goes from then to the founding of the permanent settlements of Jamestown in 1607 and Quebec in 1608; the third proceeds from then to the peace at the end of the War of Spanish Succession; the fourth (1713–1830) moves from then to the time when most of the European colonies in the Americas became independent; the fifth (1830–1914) is the era of high imperialism in which European powers expanded elsewhere, especially in Africa until the cataclysm of the First World War; the sixth (1914–1945) moves from the Great War to the end of the Second World War, which were shocks to Europe and the world, and which began stresses in and between European empires; the seventh (1945 to the present) deals with the postwar period of decolonization, which might also be viewed as an age of neo-imperialism.

Within these chronologically ordered chapters, key sub-themes of the main theme of imperialism will be explored. A significant emphasis will be on the legal, economic and technological aspects of the political culture of empire. Culture, and in particular the meeting of cultures, is a key part of the story. Culture is also one of the main lenses through which we gain insight into the friction between the religious, social, legal, political and economic histories of empires and colonies on the one hand, and alternative histories through the voices of individuals on the other. The human voice and statistics will qualify each other in a story-argument in which the private and public, the micro and macro, work together to give as broad a perspective as possible within the constraints of this book. Even in periods of economic expansion and changes in warfare, issues such as slavery and women’s rights were on the minds of those alive at the time.

Ambivalence and contradiction abide in the theme of empire and colony. The tension between the imperial centres and the colonies themselves is sometimes stressed to suggest that there is no one point of view even within an empire at any given time, let alone from without or in subsequent eras. While taking a sceptical view of the self-promotion of empires, the study will also point out how new cultures and practices are born of colonization. While the ill-effects of empire are abhorrent, the imperial theme is not a simple moral tale.

I

First Expansion: 1415–1517