COMPETITION AMONG WEST EUROPEAN STATES

One cannot understand western Europe’s expansionist drives without seeing the region as a system of separate political units interacting intensively and competitively with each other (see chapter 2).

Phase 1 was the great era of European state building. Because polities constructing empires overseas were simultaneously becoming more cohesive and centralized at home, it is reasonable to assume that the two processes were intertwined. Mutual reinforcement was most evident in the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella and the early monarchs of centralizing dynasties: Aviz in Portugal, Tudor in England, Bourbon in France. The fact that not one but several empires were constructed during phase 1 strongly suggests that competition among west European states encouraged many of them to reduce their insecurity within the region by advancing ambitious claims outside it.

Five states embarked upon serious empire building during phase 1, shifts in their relative power occurring over time. The Portuguese attained prominence in the century following victory at Ceuta, the Spanish made their greatest advances in the sixteenth century, while the Netherlands reached its height as a mercantile power in the seventeenth. The English, resolutely challenged by the Spanish and then by the Dutch and French, gradually rose to become the world’s most powerful and economically dynamic state by the mid-eighteenth century.⁴ England’s dominance was reinforced by the successful outcome of its worldwide struggle with France during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63).

Portugal’s principal possessions were widely dispersed across three continents, from Brazil to enclaves along the southern African coast to Goa in India and Macao in China. The empire of Spain (or more accurately of the Castilian monarchy) was concentrated in the Caribbean and Central and South America, with a distant complement in the Philippine Islands.

Each Iberian power concentrated on the hemisphere allotted to it by Pope Alexander VI following news of Columbus’s first voyage. This conveniently dual division of earthly spoils was confirmed in revised form by the Spanish-Portuguese Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). Neither the papal bull nor the treaty was considered binding by other contestants for overseas territory. The Dutch controlled small settlements in North America, South America, and South Africa. But their principal interest was the islands off southeast Asia’s mainland that became known as the Dutch East Indies. The English and French concentrated on North America and the Indian subcontinent.

People living in the metropoles were generally uninformed about and uninterested in overseas expansion during this phase. Important decisions were made by leaders of sectoral institutions: monarchs, officials in the royal court, directors of government-chartered companies, heads of Roman Catholic missionary orders. Decisions were also made by agents of sectoral institutions in far-off regions, men who had to rely on their own resources and judgment as to what was appropriate under a given set of circumstances. Monarchs, merchants, and missionaries were not pressed by metropolitan public opinion to act in certain ways abroad. Neither, in a prepopulist era, did sectoral leaders attempt systematically to mobilize and shape public opinion to support imperial ventures.

Rivalry among metropoles frequently took a violent turn. Some of the wars that took place during phase 1 involved coalitions of states. Thus, England and Holland were allied against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). Many wars pitted two metropoles against each other. Examples include Portugal against Spain (1581-89; 1641-44); the protracted Dutch struggle for independence from Spain (1568-1648); Spain against France (1547-49; 1648-59); England against Spain (1587-1604; 1655-59; 1739-42); Holland against England (intermittently between 1652 and 1678); and England against France (1488-92; intermittently between 1542 and 1560; 1627-28; 1756-63).⁵ Conflict was particularly intense when nationality differences were reinforced by differences of official religious preference.

Thus, Protestant England and Holland were often locked in bitter struggle with Catholic Spain or France or both.

In some cases, such as the War of Spanish Succession, violent struggles commencing in the European theater set off conflict in colonial peripheries. In other cases conflict in the periphery triggered warfare in Europe. The skirmish between English and French colonial troops and their respective Amerindian allies over Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh) in 1754-55 helped precipitate the Seven Years’ War. This conflict eventually became globalized as battles between the two metropoles and their allies were waged on the European mainland, in Canada, the Caribbean, Senegambia (West Africa), and India’s Carnatic (southeastern) coast. In other instances violent competition was largely confined to non-European regions. Examples include Portuguese-Spanish conflicts over Ternate in the Moluccas (1550-88); the murder of English and Portuguese traders in 1623 by Dutch East India Company officials on the East Indian island of Amboina; Portuguese versus Dutch in West Africa (1620-55), Brazil (1624-29; 1640-54), and Malacca (1640-41); and England versus France in India (Carnatic Wars of 1744-48 and 1749-54) and North America (King George’s War, 1744-48).® In the Caribbean basin, where the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch all held territories, raids by privateers loosely aligned with one metropole against a rival’s ships or major towns were so frequent as to become virtually a way of life.

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Source: Abernethy David B.. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980. Yale University Press,2002. — 524 p.. 2002

COMPETITION AMONG WEST EUROPEAN STATES

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