[G.V. Scammell, Ships, Oceans and Empire, London,
Variorum Reprints, 1995, pp. 502-521]
No
part of the world, proclaimed that arch-conservative Samuel Johnson, ‘
yet had reason to rejoice that [Co1urnbus] found at last reception and
employment’. Nor was this merely the dyspeptic rhetoric of an irascible sage.
Great and glorious consequences have, with varying degrees of plausibility,
been claimed for the voyages of Columbus and his contemporaries. But there was
another side to the coin. Experience of empire, in which the Americas loomed so
large, intensified or exacerbated a number of ominous traits long present in
European civilization, most notably absolutism, racism, and intolerance.
Absolutism can be roughly defined, without becoming entangled in the snares of
philosophy and semantics, as the
inclination and ability of those in authority to do unimpeded what they have a
mind to, with the strong probability
that there will be many to encourage them in such courses. Racism is the
assumption that groups of humans differ in their values and social
accomplishments solely as the result of biological heredity. It sustains the
sinister corollary that members of such groups whose beliefs, behaviour and
physical appearance do not approximate to those of some external authority or
observer are undesirable, or inferior, or commonly both. Intolerance, of which
racism is an integral ingredient, can be taken to mean the unwillingness,
particularly of those in control of any state or society, to countenance
opinions or conduct not to their liking, and their determination, as a rule, to
eradicate them.
A comparison of the
Europe of c.1500 with that of 1600 or even 1550 shows what was
happening. In the lifetime of Columbus (c. 1451— 1506), antipathies
based on colour — which underlie the most virulent racism were relatively
insignificant. Africans, duly westernized, are depicted. and far from pejoratively, in Renaissance art. In late
medieval Iberia, they could lead lives no different from their European
counterparts. Those enslaved in Spain and Portugal enjoyed, if that is the
right word, conditions far better than their compatriots were soon to endure in
the Americas. In France, African girls could even be the mistresses of royalty.
The Catholic church was reasonably tolerant. Attitudes to death were less
fearsome than in the late medieval centuries. The ability, if not the will, of
most European states to control and tax their subjects was limited. Imperial
rule, where it existed — in, for example, the possessions of the Venetian
Republic — was not oppressive. Slavery, though certainly not unknown in the
continent, was a mere shadow of what was shortly to come and had few vociferous
advocates. Indeed, a distinguished humanist announced in 1521: We are now
nearly all brothers in Christ and citizens of the kingdom of God. While we have
servants in our houses they are not to be called slaves.’ And,
ironically enough, just as the Italian peninsula was to he engulfed in decades
of war between France and Spain, from Venice came the urbane utterance that it
was shameful and dishonourable for men to keep weapons in their dwellings.
By the opening decades of the
seventeenth century, it was a different story. European states or monarchs were
claiming authority over huge tracts of the oceans of the world and had embarked
on strategies which embraced most of the globe. The Iberian kings had the
churches of their new colonial possessions under their thumbs while the Papacy,
struggling to recover lost ground, was endeavouring to bring the Catholic
overseas missions under its direct control. Slavery flourished in Europe and
was the vital pillar of most of the new oceanic economies. The authority, not
to say the tyranny, of the Bible, was firmly entrenched in much of the
continent whose peoples, whatever they might think of one another, were at
least united in the conviction of their superiority to non-Europeans.
Not all these
developments are to be attributed to the opening of the wider world.
Nevertheless, the finding of America, the Spanish overthrow of powerful native
empires, and the western penetration of the ancient maritime economies of Asia
not unnaturally gave Europeans an immense pride in their achievements. So at
last could modern man stand comparison with the heroes of ancient Greece and
Rome. “Thanks to the sublime merits”,
wrote a panegyrist of the Portuguese
royal house in 1490, “the times in which we live may be freely compared
with the greatest days of Antiquity.” ‘Speak no more’, sang Camões in his Lusiads
(1572), ‘of the Greeks and Romans, and the voyages that they made,’
all quite eclipsed by those of his compatriots. Moreover, it was now clear that
much of the geographical lore of the ancients was wrong. ‘Had Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny or Solinus here ... I
would put them to shame and confusion,’ wrote a learned Portuguese in 1531,
whilst an erudite contemporary was scathing on their ‘muitas
ignorâncias’. And what Iberia had achieved by the mid-1500s was indeed
staggering: ‘the greatest event since the making of the world apart from the
incarnation and death of him who created it’, in the familiar words of the
significantly entitled Hispania Victrix of Francisco López de Gómara.
Such confidence and ebullience slid easily into arrogance or
worse. Already in 1515 Erasmus was alarmed that Europe was preparing to
annihilate all Asia and Africa with the sword’. There was wild talk in Portugal
of the conquest of Mecca, the subjugation of Africa and Asia, and of a divinely
inspired Lusitanian mission to bring the whole world to Christ. Equally wild
views were aired in Spain, with the conquest of China allegedly a matter of no
great difficulty — mooted in the time of Philip II. Iberian self-esteem and
pretensions became insufferable, particularly to less successful would-be
imperialists. The English fulminated against the demands of Portuguese
emissaries for precedence — ‘the chefest place with the Embassadores of the
greatest kings of Christendome’. Nor
was this idle gossip. When in 1608 an
officer of the English East India Company expressed some grievance to his
Portuguese equivalent in Asia, he was sent packing with the message that
Portugal ‘gave not a fart’ for his commission, that James I was but a ‘King of
Fishermen, and his realms ‘of no import’.
The same sentiments were more elegantly enunciated by Camões in the famous lines ‘that had there been more to find’ in
the world, his compatriots would have found it. Pride of this order is barely
removed from lunatic messianism — the belief common to Iberians in the early
modern centuries that they were in some special way charged with the defence
and propagation of the Catholic Faith, that they were God’s chosen people for whom all things would be made
possible and for whom the deity would
provide. The good cause, the Cortes of Castile was told by one delegate in
1592. was not to be abandoned for lack of resources: God would look
after his own and new riches would be forthcoming.
Unhappily, the very
triumphs that swelled the pride of Europeans and made plain to them
their merits made equally plain to them the alleged shortcomings of
their victims or opponents. Hence there was launched on its long and
destructive career the conviction, forcibly expressed for example by Samuel
Purchas, that only Europe had
accomplished anything worthwhile and
that the rest of mankind were a pretty sorry lot. That some peoples were
better than others, that some had inherent defects, and that those with dark
skins were inferior were tenets of lengthy ancestry in Europe. But with the discovery of the Americas and as the
result of the ensuing developments there and in other parts of the world —
conquest. colonization, exploitation — they acquired a new and ominous
prominence. The ancient Greeks had been contemptuous of those neighbours they
dismissed as ‘barbarians’. The many shortcomings of their assorted Germanic
assailants were catalogued by the Romans. In a Europe highly conscious of local
and regional differences, banal insults were bandied about as to the defects, moral
and physical, of its various
inhabitants — stories, plausible enough, that the Dutch, Germans, and
English were always drunk, and, less plausible, that the latter had tails.
Anti-Semitism was endemic in the continent, evidenced alike in massacres of Jews
from at least the twelfth century or in the praises heaped by early Castilian
authors on those of Gothic, as opposed to Jewish, ancestry. But by the
mid-1500s, anti-Semitism had reached an unprecedented and hysterical intensity,
not least as a result of the fulminations of Catholic and Protestant zealots.
Martin Luther urged the destruction of Jewish schools, houses, and places of
worship. Still greater excesses were advocated or perpetrated in Iberia where
there emerged, in the course of the sixteenth century as bigotry and
intolerance burgeoned, a fanatical concern with purity of blood and the belief,
expressed for example in the writings of Diego de Simancas (1575), that the
defects of Jews were biological, ‘hereditary in them’, and transmissible. Thus, a child of pure blood, suckled by a
Jewess, would be irrevocably tainted.
Such prejudices were intensified by the belief that Jews, or Jewish
converts to Christianity, were dangerously ubiquitous and powerful in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas where, like their fellows at
home, they were aiding and abetting the enemies of Iberia. Suspicions of this
order were inevitably self-fulfilling. Already
in the 1560s, according to the Spanish ambassador at the court of
Elizabeth I of England, Jews were encouraging her subjects to attack ‘a very rich part of the Portuguese Indies’,
just as later in the century those in England were said to he conspiring
against Spain.
Other equally unpleasant convictions
proliferated. Medieval Europe, influenced by the legacies of Antiquity and
Islam, was conscious of colour and of
the inferiority of those whose skins were darkest. In the vast and lucrative slave trade (chiefly
in young women ) conducted for centuries by Genoa and Venice in the
Mediterranean, pigmentation was carefully recorded — black, brown, olive, white
— for the benefit of potential purchasers, with the best prices commanded by
the blond and strikingly beautiful Circassians. Nevertheless, such
prejudices were for long muted, if only because peoples of unfamiliar
colour were comparatively rare. But all
was changed when Europe encountered the wider world. True, there were Europeans
who for safety, necessity, love, and similarly pressing reasons fled to live among
Africans or Amerindians, or who sought the rich rewards of service with the
Moguls or other oriental rulers. So, too, protagonists of ventures like the
colonization of North America might urge the merits of the native peoples to
further their schemes, just as their compatriots, obliged to seek indigenous
assistance, might tacitly admit alien virtues, and such associations could
develop into pragmatic tolerance and even genuine friendship and affection. And
it is, of course, true that a handful of Europeans, by no means exclusively men
of learning, endeavoured to reach some
understanding of the diversity and diverse capabilities of human kind.’
However, the great majority of Europeans who penetrated to
the wider world, or who knew anything of it, rapidly came to the view,
expressed in a rich vocabulary of abuse and manifested in gratuitous insult and
hostility, that to rest of the globe’s inhabitants were of little merit. By and
large they traded deceitfully, fought treacherously, were cruel, cowardly, and
sexually depraved. They commonly neither looked nor smelt like Europeans. They
might be naked, pagan, or infidel, polygamous
or cannibal, and their political organization could rarely he reconciled
with those precepts of Antiquity which defined a civilized existence. Their
modes of behaviour were not those of Europe and of a Europe, moreover, which,
beset by daunting social and economic problems, was much concerned with the
reformation of manners and the dissemination of civility. Native testimony,
thought an officer of the English East India Company in the late seventeenth
century, would never do in England’s courts.
Black Africans were to bear the worst brunt of this hostility.
The Americas demanded them as slaves by the thousand from the mid- 1500s to sustain plantation economies producing eminently saleable
crops — sugar and tobacco — for the cultivation of which other labour was
either unsuitable or unavailable. So America sealed the African’s fate. True,
slavery had been endemic in their continent for centuries, but Blacks
were now shipped East anti West alike in what rapidly became the biggest
oceanic migration known before the nineteenth century. That Africans acquiesced
in their fate and that their fellow countrymen were so prominent in the trade
only proved to Europeans their inferiority and depravity, just as their
frequent rebellions demonstrated their treachery. Worse still, as they greatly outnumbered their
masters in many places, it was accepted that, like animals, they were best kept
in order by a violence and brutality
which so blunted European sensibilities that no incongruity was seen in
transporting slaves in vessels named Delight, Mercy, or Happy Return.
Africans were thus speedily cast in the enduring
stereotype of the natural slave and the embodiment of every form of sexual licence and indulgence. They were, wrote a
Muslim convert to Christianity, ‘brutes without reason, without intelligence or
knowledge. They have no notion of anything.’ From classical sources, luminaries
like Bodin and Thevet knew that hot climates begat hot passions and so went on
to identify Africans with lust and bestiality. Familiarity only intensified
contempt. Pierre Bergeron, whose influential account of his travels went
through three editions by 1658, considered them ‘peoples ... so savage that
they hardly know how to speak; so dirty
that they eat the intestines of animals full of ordure ... so brutal that they
resemble hungry dogs rather than men who use reason’. From Iberia came the same
message — the inhabitants of Mozambique were, for example, ‘like animals to be
used for any kind of work’. English literature in its golden years presents a
formidable gallery of unwholesome Blacks. The
villain of Peele’s The Battle of A1cazar (?1588) is ‘an
unbelieving Moore’ who amongst other abominable practices, feeds his wife on
raw lion’s meat. Dekker’s Lust´s Dominion has sex-crazed and satanic
Africans imperilling order and decency. Not even his military skills can make
Shakespeare’s Othello fully human, and from the age of elegance there comes Chesterfield’s
bleak assertion that Africans were ‘the most ignorant and unpolished peoples in
the world, little better than lions, tigers, leopards and other wild beasts’.
But the final and
fatal nail in the African’s coffin was colour. Europeans might admire the
dancing, athletic prowess, fighting ability, or resonant voices of their men.
Some enthused over the beauty of their women and more enjoyed their charms. But
the stumbling block of blackness remained. As that seasoned connoisseur of such
things, Francesco Carletti, observed, African females were gorgeous and had
many admirable qualities ‘except for their colour’. Antiquity taught that black
meant depravity and in early Christian tradition it stood for all that was ugly
and revolting. It represented evil and corruption in medieval popular culture,
and by the sixteenth century it was understood that Africans were black because
of the enormity of the sins of their ancestors. In French literature of the age
of Racine, the devil was ‘the great Negro’ and black the symbol and cause of
depravity. Such was its stigma that Louis XIV refused to receive letters from
Caribbean planters with mulatta wives and stripped several noblemen of their
titles for marrying coloured women. And fatally for Africans, all
those peoples who most successfully resisted, and often defeated Europeans —
the Ottoman Turks, the Moguls, the Japanese — were white.
It thus became the divinely ordained destiny of Africans to
labour as slaves for Europeans. Their servitude raised no qualms as this was
already their lot — and that of Muslim Moors — in Iberia. It was justified on
the grounds that they were supposedly of the race that carried the burden of
Noah’s curse on the offspring of Ham, and were hence physically differentiated
from the rest of humankind for eternity. Alternatively, they might stem from
the equally unfortunate Cain, or from some separate pre-Adamic ancestor — but
with no amelioration in their status. A few, moreover, were captured in wars
designated as ‘just’ by some medieval thinkers because directed against peoples
of evil behaviour who resisted the Christian message. That they could be used
as slaves established their inferiority and their consequent need, as the
followers of Aristotle knew, to be subjected to their natural superiors. Their
well-found reluctance to work whole-heartedly in servitude was taken as further
proof of their inadequacy, while their enslavement offered the added benefit of
accustoming them to the virtues of regular toil, thereby preparing them to receive
the True Faith. By the seventeenth century, even a converted African living in
Holland could draw a simple distinction between his fellows, descended from Ham and doomed to servitude, and the
Dutch, God’s ‘chosen people’, entitled to enslave them. The same logic carried
the same message for the rest of non-European humankind. Amerindians were
widely held to be, as an English sage phrased it, ‘the dregs and refuse of Adam’s lost posterity’. They were,
thought Columbus on his first encounter with the Tainos, ideally suited for
enslavement, and it was the initial intention of most Iberians to reduce to
servitude those who, as the bishop of
Darien proclaimed in 1519, were ‘hardly men’, and for whom such
treatment was ‘the most effective and indeed the only means that can be used
with them’. So, too, a common Portuguese view of the native inhabitants of
Brazil was that they were ‘merely fit for labour and service’. There were, of
course, those Europeans, particularly in France and Spain, who, under the
influence of classical ideas of some past Golden Age, identified Amerindians as
survivors from this era of pristine bliss who were to be cherished and brought
by divine grace to their full potential. And the remarkable political
organization of the Aztec and Inca states inspired in a handful of Europeans
who accepted the essential rationality of all humankind the dream that ‘by reason ... love and industriousness’ their
inhabitants would be led to live a well-ordered, Christian, and Europeanized
existence. Such schemes were, however, largely abortive. There was no adequate
machinery to implement them. Amerindians were in general subjected to ruthless
exploitation and exposed to the lethal ravages of unfamiliar diseases. And
almost everywhere it proved difficult to undermine tenacious indigenous
adherence to traditional cultures. Already
by the mid— 1500s, Sepúlveda,
drawing on the lore of Antiquity, was arguing that Amerindians were irrational,
notwithstanding the papal declaration of 1537 that they were true humans. Worse
was to come. Military defeat revealed them to be ‘weak and imbecile’, overthrown, according to an early
English visitor to Mexico, by their own ‘great and beastly cowardlinesse’. At best they were spineless and infantile,
eventually identified as miserables who, as the Old Testament and Roman
lawyers alike recognized, deserved compassion and succour, and who were so
inadequate that their affairs needed to be supervised by ‘protectors’. Their
enslavement was forbidden in the Spanish Caribbean in 1500, on the mainland in
1542, and in Brazil in 1570. But this was not the end of the matter. Cannibals,
or those who rebelled or resisted,
could be reduced to servitude, and large-scale slaving continued unabated on
the frontiers of Spain’s empire and in Brazil.
In French and English America, where
Europeans were unable to emulate the military successes of the Spaniards in
Mexico and Peru, views of the indigenous population were on the whole even more
uncompromising. They were headstrong
and ‘inconstant’ savages, brutish and irrational and in general ‘lazy, liars,
thieves, and beggars’. With some honourable but insignificant exceptions, the
English carne to see the Amerindians of the lands they penetrated as, at the
most charitable, ‘our younger brethren’, who were to be Christianized and
Anglicized, if need be by the well-tried recipe of force. For the rest they were ‘wild men’ whose
ungentlemanly methods of fighting justified the use of dogs against such
‘thieves and murderers’. As in the Iberian Americas, they could and should be
enslaved, which was the fate of the survivors of the Pequot war in
Massachusetts and of the tribes who rose against New England in 1675, whilst in
English Carolina and Belize, just as in French Louisiana, slaving was soon a
boom industry.
Underlying this treatment of fellow
humans were attitudes long- established in Europe, even though they never had
been, or ever were to be, obstacles to alliances, physical or political, with
them when necessity dictated. But in the early modern centuries, and primarily from the sheer scale of the
encounter with the unfamiliar, these antipathies intensified and spread. Colour was all too often synonymous with
poverty, the acknowledged root of disorder and worse. European defeat and
exploitation of non-Europeans showed them to be of little con sequence. Where
victory was not forthcoming, or where
Europeans were unable to direct native peoples into such ways as seemed
right and proper to them, they felt themselves to be confronted by creatures
who were stubborn, irrational, or both. Where they lived as minorities among
large, imperfectly subjugated indigenous populations, fear for their own
safety, or disgust at the frustration of their ambitions — usually the
acquisition of land — encouraged distaste for, or hatred of, their neighbours.
And where they found themselves among numerically overwhelming concentrations
of African slaves, fear again dictated
that these must be overawed by force and brutality.
Such sentiments had other unhappy consequences. To some
English colonists, as to some men of taste in Europe, it seemed that the presence of
indigenous populations in America was the continent’s most serious
shortcoming, and consequently the best strategy was ‘to root them out’. Hence,
too, advocates of the colonization of the otherwise unpromising Newfoundland
could urge that it was at least free
from tiresome Indians. But where such policies were impracticable, or where the
labour of indigenous inhabitants might be
necessary, not to say indispensable, then Europeans were to avoid
the contaminator that would inescapably arise from association with them. In a
continent much exercised to improve manners and disseminate civility, the privileged minority was clear that
nobility of character was conferred by birth — the converse speaks for itself.
In the mid-1500s, it was argued that the superiority of the French aristocracy
stemmed from its descent from the original Germanic conquerors of Gaul. Others,
who knew their Juvenal, urged that the essence of nobility was virtue, not
blood. But in vain. The virtue of a well-born person’, Richelieu subsequently
observed, ‘has something nobler in it
than that found in a man of lesser extraction.’ To early modern
Iberia, and particularly in Castile, there was an even more frenetic obsession
with the extent to which blood was tainted by, or free of infection from Jewish
or Moorish ancestry. That pure stock was debased by the evil influence of lesser breeds had long been understood. In
medieval Castile, those of Gothic origins were supposedly endowed with martial
virtues, not found in compatriots of
Jewish antecedents. The English were alarmed that their fellow countrymen
settled in Ireland since the early Middle Ages were losing their pristine
qualities through association with the natives. Legislation was introduced as early as the fourteenth
century to ensure these ‘degenerate English’, as they were known, would
henceforth eschew the dress, behaviour, and language of the barbarous locals.
Given the widespread European acceptance by the mid— 1500s of
the inherent shortcomings of most of the inhabitants of the rest of the
world, it was all too plain that any infusion
of their blood and especially that of Africans and Amerindians — spelt
disaster. Hence in 1681 a French official wrote with more force than elegance,
and in terms long to be familiar: ‘It is true that the debauchery of the
Spaniards and Portuguese has brought them to alliances with such au impure
stock; but I can also say that their colonies are abodes of abomination, vice,
and filth, and that from these unions there has sprung a people so wretched and
so weak that a hundred of our buccaneers can put to flight a thousand of that
rabble. Alternatively, and foreshadowing even more fearsome racial theories, it
could be proposed that from an admixture of the best there would spring a race
of super mortals, as would happen, thought an Iberian Jesuit, if Castilian males were mated with Chinese
women.
But to most Europeans
it was clear, and became clearer as
time went by, that the offspring of Whites by non-Whites were natural
inferiors. Miscegenation was of course widespread for self-evident reasons in
colonial societies which, outside North America, were predominantly male:
necessity, as the old adage pithily has it, been~ the mother of invention and
the father of Eurasians. But it had few defenders, and where it was regularized
in formal matrimony it was generally understood that the whiter the bride the
better the match, and even then it was almost invariably urged that such unions
were entered into for some especial reason — with the obvious implication that
the breached normality. In the early 1500s, the Portuguese lower orders in Asia
were married off to indigenous converts to Christianity. The empire, it was argued, had to be populated
and the brides were in any case more or less white. In the late seventeenth
century, the English East India Company
grudgingly conceded that some of its soldiers and servants might marry local women, ‘for the
preventing’, as was said, ‘of sin
and God’s judgement thereon’. But the general view was that sexual relations — let alone matrimony — with
indigenous women, especially Amerindians and Africans, were undesirable and unacceptable. Those
between white women and Amerindian or
African males, though rarer, were similarly condemned by the English as ‘a Disgrace to our Nation’. Colonists who fled
from English settlements to live among the Indians were, if recaptured, brutally
punished — ‘some ... hanged, some burned, some broken upon wheels, others
staked and some ... shott to death’.
Protestant extremists could justify keeping the natives at a
distance from the Old Testament injunction to the faithful to live separate from
the people of the land and from strange wives’. Elsewhere, there was little
point in taking a wife when mistresses were freely available in societies in
which there were commonly no sanctions against concubinage. Outside the tiny
English settlements in America, the machinery
to enforce matrimony was feeble
or non-existent. And in any case indigenous women and those of mixed blood were
considered unworthy of any such relationship except with members of the very
lowest strata of European colonial society. In British Asia, for example, the
discarded mistresses of men of standing
in the service of the East India Company commonly became the spouses of its
troops. Hence miscegenation brought the added stigma of illegitimacy, and
throughout much of the new imperial world — particularly in the Iberian Americas — there came into
being a class condemned to remain at
best near the bottom of the social pyramid and whose poverty further emphasized
the inferiority of its members. The
alleged degree of non-European blood in their veins was codified in a bizarre
and complex vocabulary of prejudice. In Spanish America Africans, or those of some degree of African
ancestry, legally free though they might be, were excluded from the clergy, the
universities, and the professions. Those with
Indian blood were barred from
the religious orders and public office and long banned from the priesthood. In
English North America, white fathers
commonly abandoned their offspring
by Amerindian women ‘to be provided for
at random by their mothers’, making them amongst the colonists’ most determined
opponents and strengthening European prejudices as to the unreliability or
worse of the natives.
Nor did Europeans see their compatriots settled in the
wider world in a much better light. They might be social
outcasts living among indigenous peoples in that lush immorality which both
fascinated and repelled fellow Whites. They might wel1 be tainted with native
blood. Moreover, since many colonies were in tropical or semi-tropical regions,
this meant, as the protagonists of classical wisdom knew, that the characters
of those who emigrated there were subject to adverse climatic influences. Worse
still, it was widely assumed in Europe that colonies attracted undesirables —
whether devotees of easy affluence or refugees from creditors or spouses. And
there was also an influential school of thought, especially in Portugal and
England, that considered colonies particularly suitable receptacles for the
unemployed and unemployable of the mother country. Such settlements would, in
particular, absorb the ‘dangerous’ poor who, it was widely believed in the
sixteenth century, spread illness,
disorder, and moral corruption, infected as they were with new, or newly
virulent diseases like syphilis. Such
‘filth and vermin’ must therefore be purged or amputated, in a favourite
contemporary figure of speech, from the body politic. And where better to deposit them than in distant lands, well away
from ‘the better sort’?
European prejudice
hardened as colonial populations were reinforced with those recruited
through various forms of impressment — convicts and vagabonds dispatched to
Portuguese Brazil, lepers to the Cape Verde — and, as in the English Caribbean,
by those unfortunates freely condemned to deportation as thieves, rebels, and
the like. Virginians were thus dismissed as the ‘very scum of the land’. English Barbados was described
in 1654 as a
dunghill ‘whereon [the country] doth cast forth its rubbish’ and where
‘a whore, if handsome,
makes a wife for some rich planter’. The great
and powerful of Jamaica were thought to be all ‘formerly rude and
of mean birth’. The short-lived Dutch colony in Brazil
was dismissed with similar demotic vigour as a
‘dose stool for voiding the dregs of society’, and
those in the service of the East and West India
companies as ‘the scum of the United
Provinces.
Such intemperate language was a stock-in-trade of the age, but Europeans needed
little encouragement to see the world
called into being by Columbus and his successors as one whose white
inhabitants. debased by contact with indigenous populations and succumbing, as it was put, to ‘clirnate and constellations’, were
degenerate and degenerating. In Portuguese Asia, primacy was accorded to those out from the mother country married to Europeans. To
many Spaniards, it was incredible that the descendants of the conquistadores, offspring
of Amerindian women, could he the true heirs of Cortes, whilst in 1703 an English
admiral dismissed the Jamaican élite as ‘brutes’, unfit to be entrusted with office. And there was much else to fuel these crude
racial antipathies. As colonies developed, they commonly aspired to pursue policies opposed to those of the parent society. Hence, in the late seventeenth century, much
English effort was expended on endeavouring to stifle, or at least control, the maritime economy which sprang in New England, while the spectacular
upsurge of piracy on the North
American seaboard
was clear evidence of the chronic addiction of the
colonists to disorder, if not
anarchy. Metropolitan states doubted the political loyalty of
colonies much addicted to trading with the enemies of the mother country.
European men of taste professed themselves
amazed at the antique modes of transatlantic
speech and behaviour, and clashed with
their colonial-born fellows in over secular and ecclesiastical
preferment overseas. Already in
the sixteenth century, Spanish officials were
alarmed at the attitude and behaviour of those creoles who, they reported, neither
knew their
king nor wished to know him. The American colonies, it was thought in Stuart England, ‘took more
power than was ever given or intended them’ and needed reducing to ‘a more certaine civill and uniforme way of government’,
as James II attempted to do.
Such
opinions and behaviour reflected an intolerance which sprang in part from
experience of empire. True, toleration was hardly the hallmark of the furor
theologicus of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe. But from the mid-I500s, intolerance grew apace
in the continent’s two leading imperial powers — Spain and Portugal — and did
not diminish with the passage of time — as was to happen in at least some other
parts of Europe. Spain and Portugal
were globally embattled with pagans, infidels, and those European heretics who
poached on their supposed preserves, threatened Iberian safety, and obstructed Iberian ambitions. Such conflict aggravated
that bigotry, messianic religiosity, and introspective intolerance which
characterized the peninsula from the
late 1500s. So, too, that chronic xenophobia, which stemmed from the survival
of large and unassimilated Moorish and Jewish minorities, was intensified. And
paradoxically there was a similar narrowing of intellectual horizons in those
European states either excluded from or unsuccessful in exploiting the new
imperial opportunities. Seventeenth-century publicists urged the folly of such
ambitions — witness bankrupt Spain staggering under all the burdens whilst
others drew all the profits — and revealed how much better off were those kings
who had no colonies, but possessed within their own realms the ‘true mines of
the Indies’. Venetians carne to see oceanic endeavour as futile and their own
city as the sole seat of virtue, the real ‘New World’, and a very paradise on
earth. The North American colonies were no more than nests of heretics set in
lands whose natural features violated all true criteria of good taste and whose
native inhabitants were idle and undesirable. Far from being the heralds of a
new age, Columbus and his crews were merely the ‘argonauts of syphilis’.
Other old prejudices were meanwhile reinforced and new ones encouraged.
Since the 1530s, English seamen had been carrying on a vigorous war against
the maritime commerce of Iberia and the
Habsburg Netherlands in European waters. The campaign intensified and spread to
more distant seas as ardent Protestant spirits became convinced that the silver
of the Indies underlay the power and ambitions of Spain. One of the objectives of the founders of the Dutch West
India Company was ‘to take away from the Spaniard the American treasures ...
with which he has so long battered the whole of Christianity’. The mutual
loathing of Protestants and Catholics was exacerbated and in Holland, and above
all in Huguenot Atlantic France and in Elizabethan England, anti-Catholicism
fused with aggressive nationalism into that psalm-singing, image-breaking
buccaneering so notably espoused by Francis Drake.
Yet even as European mariners accomplished
some of the greatest voyages ever made under sail, their reputation at home,
admittedly never very high, plummeted. Oceanic crossing meant ships were now at
sea for longer periods than ever before. The likelihood of mutiny, or at least
friction, amongst their complements was accordingly greater, especially since
the authority of commanders was radically strengthened, allowing them almost
limitless opportunity for imperious behaviour. More ships, often sailing to
dangerous waters and hostile climates, meant an insatiable demand for manpower
and hence a less critical selection of crews. And to these there now opened up
pleasing vistas of world-wide piracy and the prospect of riches beyond measure.
Hence denunciations of sailors proliferated in early modern Europe: they were,
in a favourite witticism of humanists — who knew from the classics the
importance of discipline in military undertakings — ‘the ordure of the sea.’
Throughout the continent, men of letters, publicists, and that growing band of
disgruntled or unsuccessful commanders vied with one another iii vituperative
condemnation. The unruly conduct of seamen terrified honest persons ashore and
invited disaster afloat. They were ‘so unruly ... that ... no merchantman dare
enterprise to take upon him the ordering and governing of ships’. They were ‘as
well voyde of reason as of obedyence’, no better than ‘baptized beasts’ who
stank of fish and spoke an incomprehensible ‘thick, imperfect language’.
Such was the voice of an age that saw slavery
re-integrated into European culture and re-introduced to whole
areas of the economy of a continent from which — notably the North - it had long been absent. Black and other
slaves had been employed in southern Iberia and along
Europe’s Mediterranean littoral for centuries before 1492. But then, as the
direct outcome of the establishment of the oceanic
empires, they appeared, the lowest of the low, in
England, France, Holland, and elsewhere. Slavery, the
Parliament of Guienne grandly proclaimed in the mid-sixteenth century,
was forbidden in France, ‘the mother of liberty’, and even
as late as 1691 slavers entering the country’s ports were obliged
to free their Africans. But once
the importance of the slave-based West Indian colonies in the
French economy was clear, the importation of slaves into the
mother country was legalized (1716). Much the
same happened in England where, by the
beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the
status of slave — though
known to the common law — was to
all intents defunct. Soon, however, large numbers of
slaves, chiefly Africans, began to reach the country. There were some in Lord
Derby’s household in 1569 and George I subsequently
arrived to enter into his inheritance accompanied by others. In 1677, lawyers
accepted, on the starkest racist grounds, that since Blacks were bought and
sold, and since they were infidels, their enslavement was perfectly
valid. Following a period of legal uncertainty, it was eventually agreed
in 1729, under pressure from the
influential West Indies sugar lobby, that slaves were not
freed by coming to England, or by baptism which, as the bishop of London
opportunely explained, ‘made no sort of change in their political estate’.
Indeed slavery came to be seen as
something of a panacea for the ills of the early modern centuries. Humanist
admirers of the Civil Law, now restored to
its Roman purity, were familiar with its texts prescribing enslavement
for the congenitally idle. An English Act of 1547 proposed it as a suitable
punishment for vagrants, whilst there were subsequent thoughts of its more
general and beneficial employment. At much the same date, and in much the same
vein the imperial ambassador to
Constantinople, commenting on, as
was the fashion, the degeneracy
of the times, regretted that slavery was not more widespread. A learned
Spaniard argued that in a ‘just war’ even the innocent members of an enemy
population might legitimately be enslaved to punish the state, and children
similarly treated for the misdeeds of their parents.
Such views were not the direct outcome of the creation of
overseas empires but found a congenial atmosphere in the authoritarianism and
intolerance this generated. When, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the philosophical debate on
title to sovereignty over alien lands was in full swing, the king of Portugal
simply asserted the primacy of
possession and the early rulers of Spain admitted nothing more than their own
will as authority for their actions. Mexico, thought some advisers of the
Spanish crown in 1554, should be governed absolutely by direct military rule,
Turkish style. Restive Indians on the imperial frontiers were to be subdued ‘by
fire and blood’, a policy arcade tried
by the Portuguese in southern Persia.
Conversion by force was freely employed
by Catholic missions in the Americas and urged for the intended English
settlements by Richard Hakluyt, where ‘our old soldiours trained up in the Netherlands’ were t knock recalcitrant
Indians into godly ways. Iberian
theorists talked of empires founded and upheld by ‘the two swords of the civil and the ecclesiastical power’ whilst, where imperial beginnings were s1ow or unsatisfactory, it was urged that only bold state action
could retrieve the situation. ‘Trade without war or war without trade cannot be
maintained’, concluded that formidable
Dutchman Jan Coen after surveying the Asian scene.
What would do abroad would do
equally well at home. Destructive theological debate in England could he stifled, thought Hakluyt,
by shipping the tiresome disputants to
America, just as he and many others knew that the happiness, prosperity, and
security of the ‘better sort’ would be enhanced by deporting the ‘offals of our
people’ to the colonies. Castilian experience of the Americas convinced a Spaniard holding high office under Philip
II in the Habsburg possessions in Italy that his unruly charges would be best
brought to order by a whiff of true imperial government, and that ‘although
they are not Indians [they] have to be treated as such so that they will know
we are in charge’. In seventeenth-century England, Blacks were forcibly restrained from becoming
Christians and tortured if they did so.
Not only did empire foster an atmosphere conducive to the
growth of state power, but also added, sometimes momentarily, sometimes
permanently, to the authority of metropolitan governments. True, this was
already increasing in the early 1500s, but the whole process was
now significantly advanced. In Spanish America, it was remarked, the king was supreme
by virtue of conquest, and untrammelled by
these restraints to which he was
subject in the peninsula. The rulers of Portugal took to referring to their
overseas possessions, however acquired,
as ‘the Conquests’. In Spain, as in Portugal, the crown secured a
massive extension of its authority by obtaining complete control over the new
imperial church, into whose
affairs, ruled Philip II in 1574, ‘none should dare to intrude’. In both Spain
and Portugal, but more effectively in the
former, every aspect of the government and exploitation of the empire
became matters for the crown. And in both Portugal and Spain, new offices were created for the discharge of these functions, generating in turn a new bureaucracy which was itself a
further manifestation of roya1 power. Such developments were subsequently
echoed in varying degrees in Holland, England, and especially France, where
Louis XIV laid it down that colonies were to be ruled firmly and with no
nonsense ‘like a good father would his children’.
More remarkably still, European states now claimed authority over
the oceans of the world and the right
to conduct and regulate
maritime commerce as they saw fit: The Sea was given by
God for the use of Men’, ruled an English Admiralty judge in 1718, ‘and is subject to Dominion
and Property as well as the Land’. Already in
1479 the Iberians, well aware that this was so, had carved up the eastern Atlantic between them. In their
commission for Columbus, the rulers of Spain made assertions of
suzerainty over the ocean of the same
ambitious order as those advanced by
Portugal, whose king even went as far as arrogating to himself
in 1499 the preposterous title of ‘Lord of Guinea and of the conquest of the navigation and commerce
of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India’. The Portuguese crown claimed the exclusive
right to trade with Asia and Africa, just as Spain maintained that her American
possessions must deal only with
specified ports and individuals in the mother country. This was the doctrine of mare clausum, once
enforced in limited areas in the medieval centuries — as by the Hanseatic
League in the Baltic — now spread as
far as the power of the Iberians could reach and for as long as they could
sustain it.
Similar claims, notably the
right to exclude all others,
were made and similar expedients tried by the rivals of Spain and
Portugal. The English, Dutch, and French all set up
vast monopoly corporations to handle
their respective trades with Asia — and the Far Eastern commerce of the rest of Europe
if they could manage it.
In the Atlantic, England, France, and some Netherlanders
endeavoured to establish monopoly companies
of varying degrees of grandeur
to regulate the whole, or particular, areas of colonial trade. Whatever Grotius
might have to say about
the freedom of the seas, the Dutch East India Company was satisfied
that its military annexation of Portugal’s onetime Asian empire conferred on it
lordship of the sea and that right to control indigenous shipping the
Portuguese had formerly claimed. In the French West Indies, so Colbert
declared, trade was restricted to agents of the
mother country’s monopoly company and that ‘the exclusion
of all commerce with foreigners
is to be ensured everywhere’. In
a series of Navigation Acts, the
English sought to define and
regulate the trade
of their overseas possessions, so infringing, the Dutch
somewhat inappositely alleged, ‘the ownership of the sea’. Such pretensions reflected and reinforced
state authority. The control and defence of oceanic commerce, particularly that
with the Americas, was a stimulus to the growth of naval power and hence of that monopolization
of armed force which is one of the hallmarks of
the modern state. The upsurge of piracy and buccaneering feeding
on the new ‘rich trades’ brought the eventual suppression of such an affront to
the rights of property by metropolitan authority.
Empire thus enhanced the power and encouraged the absolutist ambitions
of European states. Rule over distant lands, the revenues they provided or were
alleged to provide, the homage of their
princes, and the well-publicized stories of the conversion of their inhabitants
to Christianity added lustre to the reputation of a ruling house. Colonies,
said Louis XIV, chiefly existed to advance ‘the greatness of the mother
country’. The Iberian monarchs claimed virtually untrammelled authority over great tracts
of the lands and seas of the world, together with the
right to monopolize and control trade with, and within,
such regions, just as they could legitimately dispossess and enslave
the luckless inhabitants of huge and vaguely defined
territories. The two great Dutch chartered trading companies,
branches in effect of the Netherlands state, aimed at commercial monopoly on a
scale previously unknown, and when, on the renewal of the East
India Company’s charter, shareholders demanded some say in the running of the
organization, the Republic declared the more radical proposals
treasonable. The French monarchy eventually kept
its colonies on the tightest of reins, whilst Charles
II of England, and even more so James II, whose
dependence on the uncertain financial generosity of parliament
was lessened by increased revenues accruing from the country’s
Atlantic settlements, entertained large plans for extending
their authority over them. Imperial government entailed more offices, more
officials, and accordingly more scope for patronage. Colonies
absorbed ambitious and unruly citizens, allowing imperial
powers — so it
was argued in the sixteenth century — to
enjoy domestic peace. As a Spanish agent in Elizabethan England perceptively
observed, if the queen’s subjects were denied the opportunity of trade and
plunder in the Iberian Atlantic, they
would soon be killing one another.
And indeed the country’s
troubles were to grow apace after the peace of 1604, whereas Britain in the
heyday of imperial expansion in the eighteenth century enjoyed a far more
stable existence.
Europe’s
first encounters with the wider world did not set in train some revolution n
the continent’s culture and political organization. Ancient civilizations have
an almost infinite capacity for absorbing, adapting, or ignoring such
experiences. Nevertheless, the breath-taking achievements of explorers and
conquerors, the acquisition by an enterprising or unscrupulous minority of
riches of an astonishing order, and the emigration, willingly or unwillingly,
of thousands of Europeans to the Atlantic settlements left their mark in the
continent, intensifying existing prejudices, exposing latent beliefs. Much of
the rest of humankind was dismissed as inferior on grounds of their race,
colour, unfamiliar modes of behaviour,
or other unpalatable characteristics. Europeans felt themselves able to
accomplish anything they might envisage, whether the conquest of China (by
Spain), a sea passage over the North Pole (by the English), or the invasion of
Peru across the Andes from Brazil (by the Dutch). Almost globally there were
endeavours to enforce authority more vigorously, whether that claimed by
European states and their representatives, or that now allowed to, or assumed
by, commanders of expeditions to distant parts. As the author of a memorandum
for Walter Raleigh wrote in the eternal language of empire, ‘the general to
Commaund absolutly’.