Colonial Empires and Some Comparisons

There are really fundamental differences between the European colonial empires of the sixteenth century and afterward and what we might call the “traditional” land empires of Eurasia or pre-Columbian America, even if many of the points made earlier also apply to them.

The early mercantilist empires depended upon slave- manned plantations and often oppressive commercial regulations—that were not necessarily very effective in the longer term—to obtain a trade surplus. By the early nineteenth century “free trade imperialism,” supported by liberal political economic theory, meant a qualitative transformation of imperial political economy as a capitalist “world-system” was created. Such differences quickly amounted also to a qualitative transformation of political relationships within the colonising societies as well as between them, and differences between contrasting modes of exploitation of colonial possessions played a key role: whether managed directly by imposed ruling elites (who may or may not eradicate existing elites and indigenous populations, as in North America, for example, or Australasia), indirectly through the co-option of established elites (or indigenous replacements of such elites), or by a combination of imposed administrative apparatuses with preexisting elite co-option, as with the British in India, these arrangements directly affected both economic and political structures and relationships between colonies and metropolis.^[388] By the same token, the form taken by the economic relationship between the imperial core and its colonies directly affected the social and economic structures of the core territory or country. In the initial stages of imperial development it reflected the production of specific market-orientated products—tobacco, sugar, cotton, slaves, etc.—or control over goods whose value can be massively increased through export from the colony to “home” markets where demand is high, in particular spices, which were at the heart of the initial Portuguese push around the coast of Africa into the Indian Ocean.

The resulting super-profits were then reflected in investments at both the imperial core as well as in the infrastructures of control of the colonial possessions, benefiting those who controlled one or more of the home market, the means of transport, or the centers of production. The expansion of the English East India Company in competition with its Dutch counterpart from the first half of the seventeenth century illustrates some of these features very clearly.^[389]

Of course, such imperial and colonial expansion is not sui generis—the preexisting political situation, in particular competition over limited resources between rival polities, plays a structuring role. Thus rivalry between France, England, Holland, and Spain—the “classic” European imperial powers from the sixteenth century—in different combinations at different times, and complicated by ideological differences (Catholic Spain and France vs. Protestant England and Holland, for example), were major stimuli to the quest for expanded resources. But as imperial competition evolved, so strategic competition also came to play a role.^[390] Once in motion, such competition generated further friction and further economic growth as both trade and commerce expanded to meet demand, while at the same time competition around the military control over or protection of distant markets and colonies led to direct conflict. Additionally, the impact of substantial new revenues derived from the exploitation of colonial economies impacted directly on the economy of the home or core region. This could have both positive and negative outcomes: the clearest example of the latter is in the case of Spain, where the import of vast quantities of bullion inhibited investment in manufacturing, supported expensive military undertakings, especially in Europe, and contributed to the ossification of Spanish socioeconomic structures, with the result that the kingdom of Spain was transformed into little more than a clearing house for the exchange of South American bullion and other forms of wealth for northern European manufactured goods via Spanish markets.^[391] In the case of Britain, in contrast, and somewhat later in the process of global European imperialism, the wealth extracted in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the colonies, especially from India (raw materials for the English cotton industry) fueled the agrarian and industrial revolutions, a transformative process that also brought with it, ultimately, direct state control of India after the abolition of the outmoded East India Company.^[392]

Such competition in the early modern period, as well as more recently, has also promoted the quest for knowledge and understanding of the worlds now brought into the purview of the core cultures.

But this was not an even playing field, from a structural perspective: the relative degree of success or failure in this arena reflected also the sociopolitical structure of the core, so that the open, pluralistic competitive political culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England turned out to be far more conducive to private enterprise in the generation of new knowledge—natural scientific as well as in terms of practical application—than the centralized “compromised autocracies” of France, Austria-Hungary, or Spain.^[393]

Early modern colonial empires depended, therefore, on a qualitatively different type of political economy from traditional land empires. Inter-colony commerce, asymmetrical trading and exchange mechanisms, and settler or plantation economies played a key and complexly interwoven role, and they evolved in a world-market context with a potential for resource-redistribution and projection of power vastly greater—both potentially and, in most cases, actually—than anything possible in a traditional imperial system. They also evolved in the context of a rapidly changing technology of transport and weaponry from the sixteenth century on. One result of this was awareness of the central importance of controlling commerce and keeping routes of access open—something to which earlier states had also paid attention (one thinks of Sasanian Persian interests in the Gulf and along the northern Silk Route, for example, among many),^[394] but which in the context of trans-oceanic colonial competition became far more nuanced and had a much more dramatic impact on state as well as private finance. As Adam Smith, and indeed many other commentators on trade and economics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries observed, controlling commerce was key, and the state that controlled commerce controlled not only its own destiny but that of others as well.^[395]

In contrast, traditional land-based imperial systems generally derived their wealth from agriculture, even until comparatively recent times, with the addition of a degree of commercial enterprise. Tsarist Russia is a classic example—trade and international commerce there certainly were, and awareness of the need to invest in manufacturing and commerce likewise (the example of Peter the Great is a case in point) but they tended to focus on adjacent lands and societies, and thus had a more regionalized cross-border character than the trans-oceanic commerce of the western European colonizing powers.

By the same token, accompanying this and depending also on period and context, there was sometimes also a degree of opportunistic tribute-raising—through attacks or threats of attack on neighboring states or societies, for example—generally justified on grounds of defense or preemption: the expansion of the Russian Empire into Siberia and the Eurasian steppe is illustrative of this process, effectively turning Russia away from qualitative growth in terms of manufacturing and commercial enterprise and toward geographical and territorial expansion.^[396]

The difference between “traditional agrarian” empires and more recent colonial systems is thus not simply a question of chronology, for traditional forms of continental empire survived into the twentieth century. The oceanic imperial colonial systems distinguished themselves through a great deal more than their relative extent, the methods through which they were acquired, or the military technologies and logistical infrastructures upon which they in part depended. Indeed, such imperial-colonial systems are qualitatively so different from other forms of imperial hegemony that they can only usefully be compared at the broadest general comparative level, the more so since they are part of a new set of economic relations entailing the commodification of labor and the investment of wealth in production processes employing alienated labor to generate surplus value: capitalism. For these reasons, therefore, this chapter will be concerned chiefly with the “traditional” imperial systems, although comparisons will be drawn between the two types of empire, and with a focus on the four classic European colonizing empires already mentioned.

For the latter, we can perceive two phases in the evolution of imperial political economy: an initial period of mercantile expansion based to a large degree on the exploitation of asymmetrical markets; followed by the qualitative transformation of trading stations and enclaves into colonial bridgeheads serving to facilitate the penetration of new lands and the establishment of monopolistic control of new resources.

This is not a simple picture, however, complicated as it was by the movement of colonists seeking new lands for political and religious reasons, chiefly in North America. While the commercial opportunities offered by tobacco, for example, to late sixteenth-century English and French colonists in the Americas were apparent, it is doubtful that the ruling elites of either kingdom fully grasped their potential until somewhat later; while in France for certain it was the luxury value of furs and other forest products acquired through the exploitation of indigenous economies in the colonies of North America that attracted attention and that determined royal policy for many decades, even if sugar production in the Caribbean soon rivaled this commerce and generated a very different type of economy. Again, we can see here very clearly the unintended consequences of two different forms of colonization—religious exiles and emigres from England seeking land and religious freedom rather than trade, on the one hand; commercial exploitation of hitherto untapped resources on the other, resulting in different settlement strategies with markedly different outcomes, even if the two patterns are by no means mutually exclusive.^[397] In contrast with the British and Dutch, however, whose governments played only a limited role in the establishment of either settler colonies or commercial bases and where private companies as well as individuals put up most of the investment in money and ships, the French crown was directly involved in exploiting colonial commerce, investing its own resources on the assumption of a solid and expanding return. There were points of contact, however. In the French Caribbean as in the British colonies of New England, conflict between the vested interests of the colonists and their local economies, on the one hand, and the metropolitan interests of merchant companies (in the French case) or the government (in the British example) led to serious difficulties between the imperial core and its colonial outliers.

While resolved in different ways, both examples point to the difficulties faced by the different interests involved in colonial exploitation.^[398]

In the case of Portugal, on the other hand, the opening phases of exploration and the establishment of commercial bases was largely the result of royally funded merchants and soldiers seeking new resources for a beleaguered peninsular kingdom, in which the crown paid for the ships and invested in the purchase and sale of the goods that were traded, generating a system of “enclave” trading centers on the West African coast and then further afield, in East Africa and the Indian Ocean. The income derived from such enterprise was substantial and acted as a massive stimulus to further extension of the system, eventually expanding into a settlement colonialism in Brazil in which gold and slaves became key factors in royal income.^[399] The other Iberian colonizing power, Spain, in contrast, pursued what may have begun as a similar approach, although it evolved somewhat differently, again reflecting the politics of the home territory and its rulers' needs for revenues with which to support military and defensive activities in their European possessions. Initial conquests in the Americas were made on the basis of private initiative rather than state sponsorship, although as soon as colonial settlements were being established, the government stepped in to make sure it received a portion of any winnings. Governance was managed at first through the so-called audiencias (later partly replaced or supplemented by vice royalties), a system of appellate courts that possessed legislative and executive functions in addition to their judicial ones. They represented the rulers in their role as makers of laws and dispenser of justice, and at the same time were deployed to regulate settlement and economy in a way that had been impossible within the original European Habsburg territories.^[400]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

Colonial Empires and Some Comparisons

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