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THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE
THE CULMINATION OF MODERN HISTORY
BY RAMSAY MUIR
PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
SECOND EDITION
TO MY MOTHER
PREFACE
The purpose of this book is twofold.
We realise to-day, as never before, that the fortunes of the world, and
of every individual in it, are deeply affected by the problems of
world-politics and by the imperial expansion and the imperial rivalries
of the greater states of Western civilisation. But when men who have
given no special attention to the history of these questions try to
form a sound judgment on them, they find themselves handicapped by the
lack of any brief and clear resume of the subject. I have tried, in
this book, to provide such a summary, in the form of a broad survey,
unencumbered with detail, but becoming fuller as it comes nearer to our
own time. That is my first purpose. In fulfilling it I have had to
cover much well-trodden ground. But I hope I have avoided the aridity
of a mere compendium of facts.
My second purpose is rather more ambitious. In the course of my
narrative I have tried to deal with ideas rather than with mere facts.
I have tried to bring out the political ideas which are implicit in, or
which result from, the conquest of the world by Western civilisation;
and to show how the ideas of the West have affected the outer world,
how far they have been modified to meet its needs, and how they have
developed in the process. In particular I have endeavoured to direct
attention to the significant new political form which we have seen
coming into existence, and of which the British Empire is the oldest
and the most highly developed example--the world-state, embracing
peoples of many different types, with a Western nation-state as its
nucleus. The study of this new form seems to me to be a neglected
branch of political science, and one of vital importance. Whether or
not it is to be a lasting form, time alone will show. Finally I have
tried to display, in this long imperialist conflict, the strife of two
rival conceptions of empire: the old, sterile, and ugly conception
which thinks of empire as mere domination, ruthlessly pursued for the
sole advantage of the master, and which seems to me to be most fully
exemplified by Germany; and the nobler conception which regards empire
as a trusteeship, and which is to be seen gradually emerging and
struggling towards victory over the more brutal view, more clearly and
in more varied forms in the story of the British Empire than in perhaps
any other part of human history. That is why I have given a perhaps
disproportionate attention to the British Empire. The war is
determining, among other great issues, which of these conceptions is to
dominate the future.
In its first form this book was completed in the autumn of 1916; and it
contained, as I am bound to confess, some rather acidulated sentences
in the passages which deal with the attitude of America towards
European problems. These sentences were due to the deep disappointment
which most Englishmen and most Frenchmen felt with the attitude of
aloofness which America seemed to have adopted towards the greatest
struggle for freedom and justice ever waged in history. It was an
indescribable satisfaction to be forced by events to recognise that I
was wrong, and that these passages of my book ought not to have been
written as I wrote them. There is a sort of solemn joy in feeling that
America, France, and Britain, the three nations which have contributed
more than all the rest of the world put together to the establishment
of liberty and justice on the earth, are now comrades in arms, fighting
a supreme battle for these great causes. May this comradeship never be
broken. May it bring about such a decision of the present conflict as
will open a new era in the history of the world--a world now unified,
as never before, by the final victory of Western civilisation which it
is the purpose of this book to describe.
Besides rewriting and expanding the passages on America, I have seized
the opportunity of this new issue to alter and enlarge certain other
sections of the book, notably the chapter on the vital period
1878-1900, which was too slightly dealt with in the original edition.
In this work, which has considerably increased the size of the book, I
have been much assisted by the criticisms and suggestions of some of my
reviewers, whom I wish to thank.
Perhaps I ought to add that though this book is complete in itself, it
is also a sort of sequel to a little book entitled Nationalism and
Internationalism, and was originally designed to be printed along with
it: that is the explanation of sundry footnote references. The two
volumes are to be followed by a third, on National Self-government, and
it is my hope that the complete series may form a useful general survey
of the development of the main political factors in modern history.
In its first form the book had the advantage of being read by my friend
Major W. L. Grant, Professor of Colonial History at Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario. The pressure of the military duties in which he is
engaged has made it impossible for me to ask his aid in the revision of
the book.
R. M. July 1917
CONTENTS
Preface
I. The Meaning and the Motives of Imperialism
II. The Era of Iberian Monopoly
III. The Rivalry of the Dutch, the French, and
the English, 1588-1763
(a) The Period of Settlement, 1588-1660
(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713
(c) The Conflict of French and English, 1713-1763
IV. The Era of Revolution, 1763-1825
V. Europe and the Non-European World, 1815-1878
VI. The Transformation of the British Empire, 1815-1878
VII. The Era of the World States, 1878-1900
VIII. The British Empire amid the World-Powers, 1878-1914
IX. The Great Challenge, 1900-1914
X. What of the Night?
I
THE MEANING AND THE MOTIVES OF IMPERIALISM
One of the most remarkable features of the modern age has been the
extension of the influence of European civilisation over the whole
world. This process has formed a very important element in the history
of the last four centuries, and it has been strangely undervalued by
most historians, whose attention has been too exclusively centred upon
the domestic politics, diplomacies, and wars of Europe. It has been
brought about by the creation of a succession of 'Empires' by the
European nations, some of which have broken up, while others survive,
but all of which have contributed their share to the general result;
and for that reason the term 'Imperialism' is commonly employed to
describe the spirit which has led to this astonishing and
world-embracing movement of the modern age.
The terms 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' are in some respects unfortunate,
because of the suggestion of purely military dominion which they
convey; and their habitual employment has led to some unhappy results.
It has led men of one school of thought to condemn and repudiate the
whole movement, as an immoral product of brute force, regardless of the
rights of conquered peoples. They have refused to study it, and have
made no endeavour to understand it; not realising that the movement
they were condemning was as inevitable and as irresistible as the
movement of the tides--and as capable of being turned to beneficent
ends. On the other hand, the implications of these terms have perhaps
helped to foster in men of another type of mind an unhealthy spirit of
pride in mere domination, as if that were an end in itself, and have
led them to exult in the extension of national power, without closely
enough considering the purposes for which it was to be used. Both
attitudes are deplorable, and in so far as the words 'Empire,'
'Imperial,' and 'Imperialism' tend to encourage them, they are
unfortunate words. They certainly do not adequately express the full
significance of the process whereby the civilisation of Europe has been
made into the civilisation of the world.
Nevertheless the words have to be used, because there are no others
which at all cover the facts. And, after all, they are in some ways
entirely appropriate. A great part of the world's area is inhabited by
peoples who are still in a condition of barbarism, and seem to have
rested in that condition for untold centuries. For such peoples the
only chance of improvement was that they should pass under the dominion
of more highly developed peoples; and to them a European 'Empire'
brought, for the first time, not merely law and justice, but even the
rudiments of the only kind of liberty which is worth having, the
liberty which rests upon law. Another vast section of the world's
population consists of peoples who have in some respects reached a high
stage of civilisation, but who have failed to achieve for themselves a
mode of organisation which could give them secure order and equal laws.
For such peoples also the 'Empire' of Western civilisation, even when
it is imposed and maintained by force, may bring advantages which will
far outweigh its defects. In these cases the word 'Empire' can be used
without violence to its original significance, and yet without apology;
and these cases cover by far the greater part of the world.
The words 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' come to us from ancient Rome; and
the analogy between the conquering and organising work of Rome and the
empire-building work of the modern nation-states is a suggestive and
stimulating analogy. The imperialism of Rome extended the modes of a
single civilisation, and the Reign of Law which was its essence, over
all the Mediterranean lands. The imperialism of the nations to which
the torch of Rome has been handed on, has made the Reign of Law, and
the modes of a single civilisation, the common possession of the whole
world. Rome made the common life of Europe possible. The imperial
expansion of the European nations has alone made possible the
vision--nay, the certainty--of a future world-order. For these reasons
we may rightly and without hesitation continue to employ these terms,
provided that we remember always that the justification of any dominion
imposed by a more advanced upon a backward or disorganised people is to
be found, not in the extension of mere brute power, but in the
enlargement and diffusion, under the shelter of power, of those vital
elements in the life of Western civilisation which have been the
secrets of its strength, and the greatest of its gifts to the world:
the sovereignty of a just and rational system of law, liberty of
person, of thought, and of speech, and, finally, where the conditions
are favourable, the practice of self-government and the growth of that
sentiment of common interest which we call the national spirit. These
are the features of Western civilisation which have justified its
conquest of the world[1]; and it must be for its success or failure in
attaining these ends that we shall commend or condemn the imperial work
of each of the nations which have shared in this vast achievement.
[1] See the first essay in Nationalism and Internationalism, in which
an attempt is made to work out this idea.
Four main motives can be perceived at work in all the imperial
activities of the European peoples during the last four centuries. The
first, and perhaps the most potent, has been the spirit of national
pride, seeking to express itself in the establishment of its dominion
over less highly organised peoples. In the exultation which follows the
achievement of national unity each of the nation-states in turn, if the
circumstances were at all favourable, has been tempted to impose its
power upon its neighbours,[2] or even to seek the mastery of the world.
From these attempts have sprung the greatest of the European wars. From
them also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states.
It is no mere coincidence that all the great colonising powers have
been unified nation-states, and that their imperial activities have
been most vigorous when the national sentiment was at its strongest
among them. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia: these
are the great imperial powers, and they are also the great
nation-states. Denmark and Sweden have played a more modest part, in
extra-European as in European affairs. Germany and Italy only began to
conceive imperial ambitions after their tardy unification in the
nineteenth century. Austria, which has never been a nation-state, never
became a colonising power. Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for
dominion, may be regarded as the chief source of imperialism; and if
its effects are unhappy when it tries to express itself at the expense
of peoples in whom the potentiality of nationhood exists, they are not
necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of the
settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and development of
primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration and strengthening of
old and decadent societies, it may prove itself a beneficent force. But
it is beneficent only in so far as it leads to an enlargement of law
and liberty.
[2] Nationalism and Imperialism, pp. 60, 64, 104.
The second of the blended motives of imperial expansion has been the
desire for commercial profits; and this motive has played so prominent
a part, especially in our own time, that we are apt to exaggerate its
force, and to think of it as the sole motive. No doubt it has always
been present in some degree in all imperial adventures. But until the
nineteenth century it probably formed the predominant motive only in
regard to the acquisition of tropical lands. So long as Europe
continued to be able to produce as much as she needed of the food and
the raw materials for industry that her soil and climate were capable
of yielding, the commercial motive for acquiring territories in the
temperate zone, which could produce only commodities of the same type,
was comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas,
which we have come to regard as the most important products of the
imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be
mainly attributed to other than commercial motives. But Europe has
always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics: gold and
ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a very
early age found their way into Europe from India and the East, coming
by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of the Black Sea and
the Mediterranean. Until the end of the fifteenth century the European
trader had no direct contact with the sources of these precious
commodities; the supply of them was scanty and the price high. The
desire to gain a more direct access to the sources of this traffic, and
to obtain control of the supply, formed the principal motive for the
great explorations. But these, in their turn, disclosed fresh tropical
areas worth exploiting, and introduced new luxuries, such as tobacco
and tea, which soon took rank as necessities. They also brought a
colossal increment of wealth to the countries which had undertaken
them. Hence the acquisition of a share in, or a monopoly of, these
lucrative lines of trade became a primary object of ambition to all the
great states. In the nineteenth century Europe began to be unable to
supply her own needs in regard to the products of the temperate zone,
and therefore to desire control over other areas of this type; but
until then it was mainly in regard to the tropical or sub-tropical
areas that the commercial motive formed the predominant element in the
imperial rivalries of the nation-states. And even to-day it is over
these areas that their conflicts are most acute.
A third motive for imperial expansion, which must not be overlooked, is
the zeal for propaganda: the eagerness of virile peoples to propagate
the religious and political ideas which they have adopted. But this is
only another way of saying that nations are impelled upon the imperial
career by the desire to extend the influence of their conception of
civilisation, their Kultur. In one form or another this motive has
always been present. At first it took the form of religious zeal. The
spirit of the Crusaders was inherited by the Portuguese and the
Spaniards, whose whole history had been one long crusade against the
Moors. When the Portuguese started upon the exploration of the African
coast, they could scarcely have sustained to the end that long and
arduous task if they had been allured by no other prospect than the
distant hope of finding a new route to the East. They were buoyed up
also by the desire to strike a blow for Christianity. They expected to
find the mythical Christian empire of Prester John, and to join hands
with him in overthrowing the infidel. When Columbus persuaded Queen
Isabella of Castile to supply the means for his madcap adventure, it
was by a double inducement that he won her assent: she was to gain
access to the wealth of the Indies, but she was also to be the means of
converting the heathen to a knowledge of Christianity; and this double
motive continually recurs in the early history of the Spanish Empire.
France could scarcely, perhaps, have persisted in maintaining her far
from profitable settlements on the barren shores of the St. Lawrence if
the missionary motive had not existed alongside of the motives of
national pride and the desire for profits: her great work of
exploration in the region of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley
was due quite as much to the zeal of the heroic missionaries of the
Jesuit and other orders as to the enterprise of trappers and traders.
In English colonisation, indeed, the missionary motive was never, until
the nineteenth century, so strongly marked. But its place was taken by
a parallel political motive. The belief that they were diffusing the
free institutions in which they took so much pride certainly formed an
element in the colonial activities of the English. It is both foolish
and unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda in the
imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by the
colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial expansion,
as of other human activities, are mixed, and the loftier elements in
them are not often predominant. But the loftier elements are always
present. It is hypocrisy to pretend that they are alone or even chiefly
operative. But it is cynicism wholly to deny their influence. And of
the two sins cynicism is the worse, because by over-emphasising it
strengthens and cultivates the lower among the mixed motives by which
men are ruled.
The fourth of the governing motives of imperial expansion is the need
of finding new homes for the surplus population of the colonising
people. This was not in any country a very powerful motive until the
nineteenth century, for over-population did not exist in any serious
degree in any of the European states until that age. Many of the
political writers in seventeenth-century England, indeed, regarded the
whole movement of colonisation with alarm, because it seemed to be
drawing off men who could not be spared. But if the population was
nowhere excessive, there were in all countries certain classes for
which emigration to new lands offered a desired opportunity. There were
the men bitten with the spirit of adventure, to whom the work of the
pioneer presented an irresistible attraction. Such men are always
numerous in virile communities, and when in any society their numbers
begin to diminish, its decay is at hand. The imperial activities of the
modern age have more than anything else kept the breed alive in all
European countries, and above all in Britain. To this type belonged the
conquistadores of Spain, the Elizabethan seamen, the French explorers
of North America, the daring Dutch navigators. Again, there were the
younger sons of good family for whom the homeland presented small
opportunities, but who found in colonial settlements the chance of
creating estates like those of their fathers at home, and carried out
with them bands of followers drawn from among the sons of their
fathers' tenantry. To this class belonged most of the planter-settlers
of Virginia, the seigneurs of French Canada, the lords of the great
Portuguese feudal holdings in Brazil, and the dominant class in all the
Spanish colonies. Again, there were the 'undesirables' of whom the home
government wanted to be rid--convicts, paupers, political prisoners;
they were drafted out in great numbers to the new lands, often as
indentured servants, to endure servitude for a period of years and then
to be merged in the colonial population. When the loss of the American
colonies deprived Britain of her dumping-ground for convicts, she had
to find a new region in which to dispose of them; and this led to the
first settlement of Australia, six years after the establishment of
American independence. Finally, in the age of bitter religious
controversy there was a constant stream of religious exiles seeking new
homes in which they could freely follow their own forms of worship. The
Puritan settlers of New England are the outstanding example of this
type. But they were only one group among many. Huguenots from France,
Moravians from Austria, persecuted 'Palatines' and Salzburgers from
Germany, poured forth in an almost unbroken stream. It was natural that
they should take refuge in the only lands where full religious freedom
was offered to them; and these were especially some of the British
settlements in America, and the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope.
It is often said that the overflow of Europe over the world has been a
sort of renewal of the folk-wandering of primitive ages. That is a
misleading view: the movement has been far more deliberate and
organised, and far less due to the pressure of external circumstances,
than the early movements of peoples in the Old World. Not until the
nineteenth century, when the industrial transformation of Europe
brought about a really acute pressure of population, can it be said
that the mere pressure of need, and the shortage of sustenance in their
older homes, has sent large bodies of settlers into the new lands.
Until that period the imperial movement has been due to voluntary and
purposive action in a far higher degree than any of the blind early
wanderings of peoples. The will-to-dominion of virile nations exulting
in their nationhood; the desire to obtain a more abundant supply of
luxuries than had earlier been available, and to make profits
therefrom; the zeal of peoples to impose their mode of civilisation
upon as large a part of the world as possible; the existence in the
Western world of many elements of restlessness and dissatisfaction,
adventurers, portionless younger sons, or religious enthusiasts: these
have been the main operative causes of this huge movement during the
greater part of the four centuries over which it has extended. And as
it has sprung from such diverse and conflicting causes, it has assumed
an infinite variety of forms; and both deserves and demands a more
respectful study as a whole than has generally been given to it.
II
THE ERA OF IBERIAN MONOPOLY
During the Middle Ages the contact of Europe with the rest of the world
was but slight. It was shut off by the great barrier of the Islamic
Empire, upon which the Crusades made no permanent impression; and
although the goods of the East came by caravan to the Black Sea ports,
to Constantinople, to the ports of Syria, and to Egypt, where they were
picked up by the Italian traders, these traders had no direct knowledge
of the countries which were the sources of their wealth. The threat of
the Empire of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century aroused the
interest of Europe, and the bold friars, Carpini and Rubruquis, made
their way to the centres of that barbaric sovereign's power in the
remote East, and brought back stories of what they had seen; later the
Poli, especially the great Marco, undertook still more daring and
long-continued journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to
Europeans, and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later
mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro (1459),[3] which
incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly imaginative than their
predecessors, and show a vague notion of the general configuration of
the main land-masses in the Old World. But beyond the fringes of the
Mediterranean the world was still in the main unknown to, and
unaffected by, European civilisation down to the middle of the
fifteenth century.
[3] Simplified reproductions of this and the other early maps alluded
to are printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of Modern History, which
also contains a long series of maps illustrating the extra-Europeans
activities of the European states.
Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were made
possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during the
fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly transformed
the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of this revelation
can perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of two maps, that of
Behaim, published in 1492, and that of Schoener, published in 1523.
Apart from its adoption of the theory that the earth was globular, not
round and flat, Behaim's map shows little advance upon Fra Mauro,
except that it gives a clearer idea of the shape of Africa, due to the
earlier explorations of the Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that
the broad outlines of the distribution of the land-masses of both
hemispheres were already in 1523 pretty clearly understood. This
astonishing advance was due to the daring and enterprise of the
Portuguese explorers, Diaz, Da Gama, Cabral, and of the adventurers in
the service of Spain, Columbus, Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of them
all--Magellan.
These astonishing discoveries placed for a time the destinies of the
outer world in the hands of Spain and Portugal, and the first period of
European imperialism is the period of Iberian monopoly, extending to
1588. A Papal award in 1493 confirmed the division of the non-European
world between the two powers, by a judgment which the orthodox were
bound to accept, and did accept for two generations. All the oceans,
except the North Atlantic, were closed to the navigators of other
nations; and these two peoples were given, for a century, the
opportunity of showing in what guise they would introduce the
civilisation of Europe to the rest of the globe. Pioneers as they were
in the work of imperial development, it is not surprising that they
should have made great blunders; and in the end their foreign dominions
weakened rather than strengthened the home countries, and contributed
to drag them down from the high place which they had taken among the
nations.
The Portuguese power in the East was never more than a commercial
dominion. Except in Goa, on the west coast of India, no considerable
number of settlers established themselves at any point; and the Goanese
settlement is the only instance of the formation of a mixed race, half
Indian and half European. Wherever the Portuguese power was
established, it proved itself hard and intolerant; for the spirit of
the Crusader was ill-adapted to the establishment of good relations
with the non-Christian peoples. The rivalry of Arab traders in the
Indian Ocean was mercilessly destroyed, and there was as little mercy
for the Italian merchants, who found the stream of goods that the Arabs
had sent them by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf almost wholly
intercepted. No doubt any other people, finding itself in the position
which the Portuguese occupied in the early sixteenth century, would
have been tempted to use their power in the same way to establish a
complete monopoly; but the success with which the Portuguese attained
their aim was in the end disastrous to them. It was followed by, if it
did not cause, a rapid deterioration of the ability with which their
affairs were directed; and when other European traders began to appear
in the field, they were readily welcomed by the princes of India and
the chieftains of the Spice Islands. In the West the Portuguese
settlement in Brazil was a genuine colony, or branch of the Portuguese
nation, because here there existed no earlier civilised people to be
dominated. But both in East and West the activities of the Portuguese
were from the first subjected to an over-rigid control by the home
government. Eager to make the most of a great opportunity for the
national advantage, the rulers of Portugal allowed no freedom to the
enterprise of individuals. The result was that in Portugal itself, in
the East, and in Brazil, initiative was destroyed, and the brilliant
energy which this gallant little nation had displayed evaporated within
a century. It was finally destroyed when, in 1580, Portugal and her
empire fell under the dominion of Spain, and under all the reactionary
influences of the government of Philip II. By the time this heavy yoke
was shaken off, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the
Portuguese dominion had fallen into decay. To-day nothing of it remains
save 'spheres of influence' on the western and eastern coasts of
Africa, two or three ports on the coast of India, the Azores, and the
island of Magao off the coast of China.
The Spanish dominion in Central and South America was of a different
character. When once they had realised that it was not a new route to
Asia, but a new world, that Columbus had discovered for them, the
Spaniards sought no longer mainly for the riches to be derived from
traffic, but for the precious metals, which they unhappily discovered
in slight quantities in Hispaniola, but in immense abundance in Mexico
and Peru. It is impossible to exaggerate the heroic valour and daring
of Cortez, Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Orellana, and the rest of the
conquistadores who carved out in a single generation the vast Spanish
empire in Central and South America; but it is equally impossible to
exaggerate their cruelty, which was born in part of the fact that they
were a handful among myriads, in part of the fierce traditions of
crusading warfare against the infidel. Yet without undervaluing their
daring, it must be recognised that they had a comparatively easy task
in conquering the peoples of these tropical lands. In the greater
islands of the West Indies they found a gentle and yielding people, who
rapidly died out under the forced labour of the mines and plantations,
and had to be replaced by negro slave-labour imported from Africa. In
Mexico and Peru they found civilisations which on the material side
were developed to a comparatively high point, and which collapsed
suddenly when their governments and capitals had been overthrown; while
their peoples, habituated to slavery, readily submitted to a new
servitude. It must be recognised, to the honour of the government of
Charles V. and his successors, that they honestly attempted to
safeguard the usages and possessions of the conquered peoples, and to
protect them in some degree against the exploitation of their
conquerors. But it was the protection of a subject race doomed to the
condition of Helotage; they were protected, as the Jews were protected
by the kings of mediaeval England, because they were a valuable asset
of the crown. The policy of the Spanish government did not avail to
prevent an intermixture of the races, because the Spaniards themselves
came from a sub-tropical country, and the Mexicans and Peruvians
especially were separated from them by no impassable gulf such as
separates the negro or the Australian bushman from the white man.
Central and Southern America thus came to be peopled by a hybrid race,
speaking Spanish, large elements of which were conscious of their own
inferiority. This in itself would perhaps have been a barrier to
progress. But the concentration of attention upon the precious metals,
and the neglect of industry due to this cause and to the employment of
slave-labour, formed a further obstacle. And in addition to all, the
Spanish government, partly with a view to the execution of its native
policy, partly because it regarded the precious metals as the chief
product of these lands and wished to maintain close control over them,
and partly because centralised autocracy was carried to its highest
pitch in Spain, allowed little freedom of action to the local
governments, and almost none to the settlers. It treated the trade of
these lands as a monopoly of the home country, to be carried on under
the most rigid control. It did little or nothing to develop the natural
resources of the empire, but rather discouraged them lest they should
compete with the labours of the mine; and in what concerned the
intellectual welfare of its subjects, it limited itself, as in Spain,
to ensuring that no infection of heresy or freethought should reach any
part of its dominions. All this had a deadening effect; and the
surprising thing is, not that the Spanish Empire should have fallen
into an early decrepitude, but that it should have shown such
comparative vigour, tenacity, and power of expansion as it actually
exhibited. Not until the nineteenth century did the vast natural
resources of these regions begin to undergo any rapid development; that
is to say, not until most of the settlements had discarded the
connection with Spain; and even then, the defects bred into the people
by three centuries of reactionary and unenlightened government produced
in them an incapacity to use their newly won freedom, and condemned
these lands to a long period of anarchy. It would be too strong to say
that it would have been better had the Spaniards never come to America;
for, when all is said, they have done more than any other people, save
the British, to plant European modes of life in the non-European world.
But it is undeniable that their dominion afforded a far from happy
illustration of the working of Western civilisation in a new field, and
exercised a very unfortunate reaction upon the life of the
mother-country.
The conquest of Portugal and her empire by Philip II., in 1580, turned
Spain into a Colossus bestriding the world, and it was inevitable that
this world-dominion should be challenged by the other European states
which faced upon the Atlantic. The challenge was taken up by three
nations, the English, the French, and the Dutch, all the more readily
because the very existence of all three and the religion of two of them
were threatened by the apparently overwhelming strength of Spain in
Europe. As in so many later instances, the European conflict was
inevitably extended to the non-European world. From the middle of the
sixteenth century onwards these three peoples attempted, with
increasing daring, to circumvent or to undermine the Spanish power, and
to invade the sources of the wealth which made it dangerous to them;
but the attempt, so far as it was made on the seas and beyond them, was
in the main, and for a long time, due to the spontaneous energies of
volunteers, not to the action of governments. Francis I. of France sent
out the Venetian Verazzano to explore the American shores of the North
Atlantic, as Henry VII. of England had earlier sent the Genoese Cabots.
But nothing came of these official enterprises. More effective were the
pirate adventurers who preyed upon the commerce between Spain and her
possessions in the Netherlands as it passed through the Narrow Seas,
running the gauntlet of English, French, and Dutch. More effective
still were the attempts to find new routes to the East, not barred by
the Spanish dominions, by a north-east or a north-west passage; for
some of the earlier of these adventures led to fruitful unintended
consequences, as when the Englishman Chancellor, seeking for a
north-east passage, found the route to Archangel and opened up a trade
with Russia, or as when the Frenchman Cartier, seeking for a north-west
passage, hit upon the great estuary of the St. Lawrence, and marked out
a claim for France to the possession of the area which it drained. Most
effective of all were the smuggling and piratical raids into the
reserved waters of West Africa and the West Indies, and later into the
innermost penetralia of the Pacific Ocean, which were undertaken with
rapidly increasing boldness by the navigators of all three nations, but
above all by the English. Drake is the supreme exponent of these
methods; and his career illustrates in the clearest fashion the steady
diminution of Spanish prestige under these attacks, and the growing
boldness and maritime skill of its attackers.
From the time of Drake's voyage round the world (1577) and its
insulting defiance of the Spanish power on the west coast of South
America, it became plain that the maintenance of Spanish monopoly could
not last much longer. It came to its end, finally and unmistakably, in
the defeat of the Grand Armada. That supreme victory threw the ocean
roads of trade open, not to the English only, but to the sailors of all
nations. In its first great triumph the English navy had established
the Freedom of the Seas, of which it has ever since been the chief
defender. Since 1588 no power has dreamt of claiming the exclusive
right of traversing any of the open seas of the world, as until that
date Spain and Portugal had claimed the exclusive right of using the
South Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans.
So ends the first period in the imperial expansion of the Western
peoples, the period of Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. Meanwhile,
unnoticed in the West, a remarkable eastward expansion was being
effected by the Russian people. By insensible stages they had passed
the unreal barrier between Europe and Asia, and spread themselves
thinly over the vast spaces of Siberia, subduing and assimilating the
few and scattered tribes whom they met; by the end of the seventeenth
century they had already reached the Pacific Ocean. It was a conquest
marked by no great struggles or victories, an insensible permeation of
half a continent. This process was made the easier for the Russians,
because in their own stock were blended elements of the Mongol race
which they found scattered over Siberia: they were only reversing the
process which Genghis Khan had so easily accomplished in the thirteenth
century. And as the Russians had scarcely yet begun to be affected by
Western civilisation, there was no great cleavage or contrast between
them and their new subjects, and the process of assimilation took place
easily. But the settlement of Siberia was very gradual. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century the total population of this vast
area amounted to not more than 300,000 souls, and it was not until the
nineteenth century that there was any rapid increase.
III
THE RIVALRY OF THE DUTCH, THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH, 1588-1763
The second period of European imperialism was filled with the rivalries
of the three nations which had in different degrees contributed to the
breakdown of the Spanish monopoly, the Dutch, the French, and the
English; and we have next to inquire how far, and why, these peoples
were more successful than the Spaniards in planting in the non-European
world the essentials of European civilisation. The long era of their
rivalry extended from 1588 to 1763, and it can be most conveniently
divided into three sections. The first of these extended from 1588 to
about 1660, and may be called the period of experiment and settlement;
during its course the leadership fell to the Dutch. The second extended
from 1660 to 1713, and may be called the period of systematic colonial
policy, and of growing rivalry between France and England. The third,
from 1713 to 1763, was dominated by the intense rivalry of these two
countries, decadent Spain joining in the conflict on the side of
France, while the declining power of the Dutch was on the whole ranged
on the side of Britain; and it ended with the complete ascendancy of
Britain, supreme at once in the West and in the East.
(a) The Period of Settlement, 1588-1660
The special interest of the first half of the seventeenth century is
that in the trading and colonial experiments of this period the
character of the work which was to be done by the three new candidates
for extra-European empire was already very clearly and instructively
displayed. They met as rivals in every field: in the archipelago of the
West Indies, and the closely connected slaving establishments of West
Africa, in the almost empty lands of North America, and in the trading
enterprises of the far East; and everywhere a difference of spirit and
method appeared.
The Dutch, who made a far more systematic and more immediately
profitable use of the opportunity than either of their rivals, regarded
the whole enterprise as a great national commercial venture. It was
conducted by two powerful trading corporations, the Company of the East
Indies and the Company of the West Indies; but though directed by the
merchants of Amsterdam, these were genuinely national enterprises;
their shareholders were drawn from every province and every class; and
they were backed by all the influence which the States-General of the
United Provinces--controlled during this period mainly by the
commercial interest--was able to wield.
The Company of the East Indies was the richer and the more powerful of
the two, because the trade of the Far East was beyond comparison the
most lucrative in the world. Aiming straight at the source of the
greatest profits--the trade in spices--the Dutch strove to establish a
monopoly control over the Spice Islands and, in general, over the Malay
Archipelago; and they were so successful that their influence remains
to-day predominant in this region. Their first task was to overthrow
the ascendancy of the Portuguese, and in this they were willing to
co-operate with the English traders. But the bulk of the work was done
by the Dutch, for the English East India Company was poor in comparison
with the Dutch, was far less efficiently organised, and, in especial,
could not count upon the steady support of the national government. It
was mainly the Dutch who built forts and organised factories, because
they alone had sufficient capital to maintain heavy standing charges.
Not unnaturally they did not see why the English should reap any part
of the advantage of their work, and set themselves to establish a
monopoly. In the end the English were driven out with violence. After
the Massacre of Amboyna (1623) their traders disappeared from these
seas, and the Dutch supremacy remained unchallenged until the
nineteenth century.
It was a quite intolerant commercial monopoly which they had
instituted, but from the commercial point of view it was administered
with great intelligence. Commercial control brought in its train
territorial sovereignty, over Java and many of the neighbouring
islands; and this sovereignty was exercised by the directors of the
company primarily with a view to trade interests. It was a trade
despotism, but a trade despotism wisely administered, which gave
justice and order to its native subjects. On the mainland of India the
Dutch never attained a comparable degree of power, because the native
states were strong enough to hold them in check. But in this period
their factories were more numerous and more prosperous than those of
the English, their chief rivals; and over the island of Ceylon they
established an ascendancy almost as complete as that which they had
created in the archipelago.
They were intelligent enough also to see the importance of good
calling-stations on the route to the East. For this purpose they
planted a settlement in Mauritius, and another at the Cape of Good
Hope. But these settlements were never regarded as colonies. They were
stations belonging to a trading company; they remained under its
complete control, and were allowed no freedom of development, still
less any semblance of self-government. If Cape Colony grew into a
genuine colony, or offshoot of the mother-country, it was in spite of
the company, not by reason of its encouragement, and from first to last
the company's relations with the settlers were of the most unhappy
kind. For the company would do nothing at the Cape that was not
necessary for the Eastern trade, which was its supreme interest, and
the colonists naturally did not take the same view. It was this
concentration upon purely commercial aims which also prevented the
Dutch from making any use of the superb field for European settlement
opened up by the enterprise of their explorers in Australia and New
Zealand. These fair lands were left unpeopled, largely because they
promised no immediate trade profits.
In the West the enterprises of the Dutch were only less vigorous than
in the East, and they were marked by the same feature of an intense
concentration upon the purely commercial aspect. While the English and
(still more) the French adventurers made use of the lesser West Indian
islands, unoccupied by Spain, as bases for piratical attacks upon the
Spanish trade, the Dutch, with a shrewd instinct, early deserted this
purely destructive game for the more lucrative business of carrying on
a smuggling trade with the Spanish mainland; and the islands which they
acquired (such as Curayoa) were, unlike the French and English islands,
especially well placed for this purpose. They established a sugar
colony in Guiana. But their main venture in this region was the
conquest of a large part of Northern Brazil from the Portuguese (1624);
and here their exploitation was so merciless, under the direction of
the Company of the West Indies, that the inhabitants, though they had
been dissatisfied with the Portuguese government, and had at first
welcomed the Dutch conquerors, soon revolted against them, and after
twenty years drove them out.
On the mainland of North America the Dutch planted a single colony--the
New Netherlands, with its capital at New Amsterdam, later New York.
Their commercial instinct had once more guided them wisely. They had
found the natural centre for the trade of North America; for by way of
the river Hudson and its affluent, the Mohawk, New York commands the
only clear path through the mountain belt which everywhere shuts off
the Atlantic coast region from the central plain of America. Founded
and controlled by the Company of the West Indies, this settlement was
intended to be, not primarily the home of a branch of the Dutch nation
beyond the seas, but a trading-station for collecting the furs and
other products of the inland regions. At Orange (Albany), which stands
at the junction of the Mohawk and the Hudson, the Dutch traders
collected the furs brought in by Indian trappers from west and north;
New Amsterdam was the port of export; and if settlers were encouraged,
it was only that they might supply the men and the means and the food
for carrying on this traffic. The Company of the West Indies
administered the colony purely from this point of view. No powers of
self-government were allowed to the settlers; and, as in Cape Colony,
the relations between the colonists and the governing company were
never satisfactory, because the colonists felt that their interests
were wholly subordinated.