period was its dependence upon the support and direction of the home
government, which was the natural result of the highly centralised
regime established in France during the modern era. Only in one
direction was French activity successfully maintained by private
enterprise, and this was in the not very reputable field of West Indian
buccaneering, in which the French were even more active than their
principal rivals and comrades, the English. The word 'buccaneer' itself
comes from the French: boucan means the wood-fire at which the pirates
dried and smoked their meat, and these fires, blazing on deserted
islands, must often have warned merchant vessels to avoid an
ever-present danger. The island of Tortuga, which commands the passage
between Cuba and Hispaniola through which the bulk of the Spanish
traffic passed on its way from Mexico to Europe, was the most important
of the buccaneering bases, and although it was at first used by the
buccaneers of all nations, it soon became a purely French possession,
as did, later, the adjoining portion of the island of Hispaniola (San
Domingo). The French did, indeed, like the English, plant sugar
colonies in some of the lesser Antilles; but during the first half of
the seventeenth century they attained no great prosperity.
For the greater enterprises of trade in the East and colonisation in
the West, the French relied almost wholly upon government assistance,
and although both Henry IV. in the first years of the century, and
Richelieu in its second quarter, were anxious to give what help they
could, internal dissensions were of such frequent occurrence in France
during this period that no systematic or continuous governmental aid
was available. Hence the French enterprises both in the East and in the
West were on a small scale, and achieved little success. The French
East India Company was all but extinct when Colbert took it in hand in
1664; it was never able to compete with its Dutch or even its English
rival.
But the period saw the establishment of two French colonies in North
America: Acadia (Nova Scotia) on the coast, and Canada, with Quebec as
its centre, in the St. Lawrence valley, separated from one another on
land by an almost impassable barrier of forest and mountain. These two
colonies were founded, the first in 1605 and the second in 1608, almost
at the same moment as the first English settlement on the American
continent. They had a hard struggle during the first fifty years of
their existence; for the number of settlers was very small, the soil
was barren, the climate severe, and the Red Indians, especially the
ferocious Iroquois towards the south, were far more formidable enemies
than those who bordered on the English colonies.
There is no part of the history of European colonisation more full of
romance and of heroism than the early history of French Canada; an
incomparable atmosphere of gallantry and devotion seems to overhang it.
From the first, despite their small numbers and their difficulties,
these settlers showed a daring in exploration which was only equalled
by the Spaniards, and to which there is no parallel in the records of
the English colonies. At the very outset the great explorer Champlain
mapped out the greater part of the Great Lakes, and thus reached
farther into the continent than any Englishman before the end of the
eighteenth century; and although this is partly explained by the fact
that the St. Lawrence and the lakes afforded an easy approach to the
interior, while farther south the forest-clad ranges of the Alleghanies
constituted a very serious barrier, this does not diminish the French
pre-eminence in exploration. Nor can anything in the history of
European colonisation surpass the heroism of the French missionaries
among the Indians, who faced and endured incredible tortures in order
to bring Christianity to the barbarians. No serious missionary
enterprise was ever undertaken by the English colonists; this
difference was in part due to the fact that the missionary aim was
definitely encouraged by the home government in France. From the
outset, then, poverty, paucity of numbers, gallantry, and missionary
zeal formed marked features of the French North American colonies.
In other respects they very clearly reproduced some of the features of
the motherland. Their organisation was strictly feudal in character.
The real unit of settlement and government was the seigneurie, an
estate owned by a Frenchman of birth, and cultivated by his vassals,
who found refuge from an Indian raid, or other danger, in the stockaded
house which took the place of a chateau, much as their remote ancestors
had taken refuge from the raids of the Northmen in the castles of their
seigneur's ancestors. And over this feudal society was set, as in
France, a highly centralised government wielding despotic power, and in
its turn absolutely subject to the mandate of the Crown at home. This
despotic government had the right to require the services of all its
subjects in case of need; and it was only the centralised government of
the colony, and the warlike and adventurous character of its small
feudalised society, which enabled it to hold its own for so long
against the superior numbers but laxer organisation of its English
neighbours. A despotic central power, a feudal organisation, and an
entire dependence upon the will of the King of France and upon his
support, form, therefore, the second group of characteristics which
marked the French colonies. They were colonies in the strictest sense,
all the more because they reproduced the main features of the home
system.
Nothing could have differed more profoundly from this system than the
methods which the English were contemporaneously applying, without plan
or clearly defined aim, and guided only by immediate practical needs,
and by the rooted traditions of a self-governing people. Their
enterprises received from the home government little direct assistance,
but they throve better without it; and if there was little assistance,
there was also little interference. In the East the English East India
Company had to yield to the Dutch the monopoly of the Malayan trade,
and bitterly complained of the lack of government support; but it
succeeded in establishing several modest factories on the coast of
India, and was on the whole prosperous. But it was in the West that the
distinctive work of the English was achieved during this period, by the
establishment of a series of colonies unlike any other European
settlements which had yet been instituted. Their distinctive feature
was self-government, to which they owed their steadily increasing
prosperity. No other European colonies were thus managed on the
principle of autonomy. Indeed, these English settlements were in 1650
the only self-governing lands in the world, apart from England herself,
the United Provinces, and Switzerland.
The first English colony, Virginia, was planted in 1608 by a trading
company organised for the purpose, whose subscribers included nearly
all the London City Companies, and about seven hundred private
individuals of all ranks. Their motives were partly political ('to put
a bit in the ancient enemy's (Spain's) mouth'), and partly commercial,
for they hoped to find gold, and to render England independent of the
marine supplies which came from the Baltic. But profit was not their
sole aim; they were moved also by the desire to plant a new England
beyond the seas. They made, in fact, no profits; but they did create a
branch of the English stock, and the young squires' and yeomen's sons
who formed the backbone of the colony showed themselves to be
Englishmen by their unwillingness to submit to an uncontrolled
direction of their affairs. In 1619, acting on instructions received
from England, the company's governor summoned an assembly of
representatives, one from each township, to consult on the needs of the
colony. This was the first representative body that had ever existed
outside Europe, and it indicated what was to be the character of
English colonisation. Henceforth the normal English method of governing
a colony was through a governor and an executive council appointed by
the Crown or its delegate, and a representative assembly, which wielded
full control over local legislation and taxation. 'Our present
happiness,' said the Virginian Assembly in 1640, 'is exemplified by the
freedom of annual assemblies and by legal trials by juries in all civil
and criminal causes.'
The second group of English colonies, those of New England, far to the
north of Virginia, reproduced in an intensified form this note of
self-government. Founded in the years following 1620, these settlements
were the outcome of Puritan discontents in England. The commercial
motive was altogether subsidiary in their establishment; they existed
in order that the doctrine and discipline of Puritanism might find a
home where its ascendancy would be secure. It was indeed under the
guise of a commercial company that the chief of these settlements was
made, but the company was organised as a means of safe-guarding the
colonists from Crown interference, and at an early date its
headquarters were transferred to New England itself. Far from desiring
to restrict this freedom, the Crown up to a point encouraged it.
Winthrop, one of the leading colonists, tells us that he had learnt
from members of the Privy Council 'that his Majesty did not intend to
impose the ceremonies of the Church of England upon us; for that it was
considered that it was the freedom from such things that made people
come over to us.' The contrast between this licence and the rigid
orthodoxy enforced upon French Canada or Spanish America is very
instructive. It meant that the New World, so far as it was controlled
by England, was to be open as a place of refuge for those who disliked
the restrictions thought necessary at home. The same note is to be
found in the colony of Maryland, planted by the Roman Catholic Lord
Baltimore in 1632, largely as a place of refuge for his
co-religionists. He was encouraged by the government of Charles I. in
this idea, and the second Lord Baltimore reports that his father 'had
absolute liberty to carry over any from his Majesty's Dominions willing
to go. But he found very few but such as ... could not conform to the
laws of England relating to religion. These declared themselves willing
to plant in this province, if they might have a general toleration
settled by law.' Maryland, therefore, became the first place in the
world of Western civilisation in which full religious toleration was
allowed; for the aim of the New Englanders was not religious freedom,
but a free field for the rigid enforcement of their own shade of
orthodoxy.
Thus, in these first English settlements, the deliberate encouragement
of varieties of type was from the outset a distinguishing note, and the
home authorities neither desired nor attempted to impose a strict
uniformity with the rules and methods existing in England. There was as
great a variety in social and economic organisation as in religious
beliefs between the aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the
democratic agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only
was there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing
institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None,
indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New
Englanders. They came out organised as religious congregations, in
which every member possessed equal rights, and they took the
congregational system as the basis of their local government, and
church membership as the test of citizenship; nor did any other
colonies attain the right, long exercised by the New Englanders, of
electing their own governors. But there was no English settlement, not
even the little slave-worked plantations in the West Indian islands,
like Barbados, which did not set up, as a matter of course, a
representative body to deal with problems of legislation and taxation,
and the home government never dreamt of interfering with this practice.
Already in 1650, the English empire was sharply differentiated from the
Spanish, the Dutch, and the French empires by the fact that it
consisted of a scattered group of self-governing communities, varying
widely in type, but united especially by the common possession of free
institutions, and thriving very largely because these institutions
enabled local needs to be duly considered and attracted settlers of
many types.
(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713
The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of systematic
imperial policy on the part of both England and France; for both
countries now realised that in the profitable field of commerce, at any
rate, the Dutch had won a great advantage over them.
France, after many internal troubles and many foreign wars, had at last
achieved, under the government of Louis XIV., the boon of firmly
established order. She was now beyond all rivalry the greatest of the
European states, and her king and his great finance minister, Colbert,
resolved to win for her also supremacy in trade and colonisation. But
this was to be done absolutely under the control and direction of the
central government. Until the establishment of the German Empire, there
has never been so marked an instance of the centralised organisation of
the whole national activity as France presented in this period. The
French East India Company was revived under government direction, and
began for the first time to be a serious competitor for Indian trade.
An attempt was made to conquer Madagascar as a useful base for Eastern
enterprises. The sugar industry in the French West Indian islands was
scientifically encouraged and developed, though the full results of
this work were not apparent until the next century. France began to
take an active share in the West African trade in slaves and other
commodities. In Canada a new era of prosperity began; the population
was rapidly increased by the dispatch of carefully selected parties of
emigrants, and the French activity in missionary work and in
exploration became bolder than ever. Pere Marquette and the Sieur de la
Salle traced out the courses of the Ohio and the Mississippi; French
trading-stations began to arise among the scattered Indian tribes who
alone occupied the vast central plain; and a strong French claim was
established to the possession of this vital area, which was not only
the most valuable part of the American continent, but would have shut
off the English coastal settlements from any possibility of westward
expansion. These remarkable explorations led, in 1717, to the
foundation of New Orleans at the mouth of the great river, and the
organisation of the colony of Louisiana. But the whole of the intense
and systematic imperial activity of the French during this period
depended upon the support and direction of government; and when Colbert
died in 1683, and soon afterwards all the resources of France were
strained by the pressure of two great European wars, the rapid
development which Colbert's zeal had brought about was checked for a
generation. Centralised administration may produce remarkable immediate
results, but it does not encourage natural and steady growth. Meanwhile
the English had awakened to the fact that England had, almost by a
series of accidents, become the centre of an empire, and to the
necessity of giving to this empire some sort of systematic
organisation. It was the statesmen of the Commonwealth who first began
to grope after an imperial system. The aspect of the situation which
most impressed them was that the enterprising Dutch were reaping most
of the trading profits which arose from the creation of the English
colonies: it was said that ten Dutch ships called at Barbados for every
English ship. To deal with this they passed the Navigation Act of 1651,
which provided that the trade of England and the colonies should be
carried only in English or colonial ships. They thus gave a logical
expression to the policy of imperial trade monopoly which had been in
the minds of those who were interested in colonial questions from the
outset; and they also opened a period of acute trade rivalry and war
with the Dutch. The first of the Dutch wars, which was waged by the
Commonwealth, was a very even struggle, but it secured the success of
the Navigation Act. Cromwell, though he hastened to make peace with the
Dutch, was a still stronger imperialist than his parliamentary
predecessors; he may justly be described as the first of the Jingoes.
He demanded compensation from the Dutch for the half-forgotten outrage
of Amboyna in 1623. He made a quite unprovoked attack upon the Spanish
island of Hispaniola, and though he failed to conquer it, gained a
compensation in the seizure of Jamaica (1655). And he insisted upon the
obedience of the colonies to the home government with a severity never
earlier shown. With him imperial aims may be said to have become, for
the first time, one of the ruling ends of the English government.
But it was the reign of Charles II. which saw the definite organisation
of a clearly conceived imperial policy; in the history of English
imperialism there are few periods more important. The chief statesmen
and courtiers of the reign, Prince Rupert, Clarendon, Shaftesbury,
Albemarle, were all enthusiasts for the imperial idea. They had a
special committee of the Privy Council for Trade and Plantations,[4]
and appointed John Locke, the ablest political thinker of the age, to
be its secretary. They pushed home the struggle against the maritime
ascendancy of the Dutch, and fought two Dutch wars; and though the
history-books, influenced by the Whig prejudice against Charles II.,
always treat these wars as humiliating and disgraceful, while they
treat the Dutch war of the Commonwealth as just and glorious, the plain
fact is that the first Dutch war of Charles II. led to the conquest of
the Dutch North American colony of the New Netherlands (1667), and so
bridged the gap between the New England and the southern colonies. They
engaged in systematic colonisation, founding the new colony of Carolina
to the south of Virginia, while out of their Dutch conquests they
organised the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware; and the
end of the reign saw the establishment of the interesting and admirably
managed Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. They started the Hudson Bay
Company, which engaged in the trade in furs to the north of the French
colonies. They systematically encouraged the East India Company, which
now began to be more prosperous than at any earlier period, and
obtained in Bombay its first territorial possession in India.
[4] It was not till 1696, however, that this Board became permanent.
More important, they worked out a new colonial policy, which was to
remain, in its main features, the accepted British policy down to the
loss of the American colonies in 1782. The theory at the base of this
policy was that while the mother-country must be responsible for the
defence of all the scattered settlements, which in their weakness were
exposed to attack from many sides, in she might reasonably expect to be
put in possession of definite trade advantages. Hence the Navigation
Act of 1660 provided not only that inter-imperial trade should be
carried in English or colonial vessels, but that certain 'enumerated
articles,' including some of the most important colonial products,
should be sent only to England, so that English merchants should have
the profits of selling them to other countries, and the English
government the proceeds of duties upon them; and another Act provided
that imports to the colonies should only come from, or through,
England. In other words, England was to be the commercial entrepot of
the whole empire; and the regulation of imperial trade as a whole was
to belong to the English government and parliament. To the English
government also must necessarily fall the conduct of the relations of
the empire as a whole with other powers. This commercial system was
not, however, purely one-sided. If the colonies were to send their
chief products only to England, they were at the same time to have a
monopoly, or a marked advantage, in English markets. Tobacco-growing
had been for a time a promising industry in England; it was prohibited
in order that it might not compete with the colonial product; and
differential duties were levied on the competing products of other
countries and their colonies. In short, the new policy was one of
Imperial Preference; it aimed at turning the empire into an economic
unit, of which England should be the administrative and distributing
centre. So far the English policy did not differ in kind from the
contemporary colonial policy of other countries, though it left to the
colonies a greater freedom of trade (for example, in the
'non-enumerated articles') than was ever allowed by Spain or France, or
by the two great trading companies which controlled the foreign
possessions of Holland.
But there is one respect in which the authors of this system differed
very widely from the colonial statesmen of other countries. Though they
were anxious to organise and consolidate the empire on the basis of a
trade system, they had no desire or intention of altering its
self-governing character, or of discouraging the growth of a healthy
diversity of type and method. Every one of the new colonies of this
period was provided with the accustomed machinery of representative
government: in the case of Carolina, the philosopher, John Locke, was
invited to draw up a model constitution, and although his scheme was
quite unworkable, the fact that he was asked to make it affords a
striking proof of the seriousness with which the problems of colonial
government were regarded. In several of the West Indian settlements
self-governing institutions were organised during these years. In the
Frame of Government which Penn set forth on the foundation of
Pennsylvania, in 1682, he laid it down that 'any government is free
where the laws rule, and where the people are a party to these rules,'
and on this basis proceeded to organise his system. According to this
definition all the English colonies were free, and they were almost the
only free communities in the world. And though it is true that there
was an almost unceasing conflict between the government and the New
England colonies, no one who studies the story of these quarrels can
fail to see that the demands of the New Englanders were often
unreasonable and inconsistent with the maintenance of imperial unity,
while the home government was extremely patient and moderate. Above
all, almost the most marked feature of the colonial policy of Charles
II. was the uniform insistence upon complete religious toleration in
the colonies. Every new charter contained a clause securing this vital
condition.
It has long been our habit to condemn the old colonial system as it was
defined in this period, and to attribute to it the disruption of the
empire in the eighteenth century. But the judgment is not a fair one;
it is due to those Whig prejudices by which so much of the modern
history of England has been distorted. The colonial policy of
Shaftesbury and his colleagues was incomparably more enlightened than
that of any contemporary government. It was an interesting
experiment--the first, perhaps, in modern history--in the
reconciliation of unity and freedom. And it was undeniably successful:
under it the English colonies grew and throve in a very striking way.
Everything, indeed, goes to show that this system was well designed for
the needs of a group of colonies which were still in a state of
weakness, still gravely under-peopled and undeveloped. Evil results
only began to show themselves in the next age, when the colonies were
growing stronger and more independent, and when the self-complacent
Whigs, instead of revising the system to meet new conditions, actually
enlarged and emphasised its most objectionable features.
(c) The Conflict of French and English, 1713-1763