Early Modern Commercial Imperialism

The quest for new markets and new sources of exchangeable goods and materials, rather than for the control or management of the circulation of relatively fixed amounts of social wealth, evolved in the West out of the transformation of traditional feudal polities into absolutist or constitutionalist systems (to adopt Mann's terms) and the competition among them.

The search for ever greater resources with which to assert national or imperial political and ideological agendas meant a transformation of the relationship of commerce to state fiscal arrangements. With the growth of capitalist relations of production, the qualitative nature of imperial political economy changed, and along with it the nature of international commercial competition as well as the forms through which colonial exploitation was facilitated. One consequence was that states were compelled to involve themselves in the protection of their investment and their commercial enterprises, an involvement entailing increasingly burdensome military investment—investment which only states could afford or support. Private investment in colonial and international commerce was increasingly framed by the interests of competing states. In the case of Britain, some of the wealth generated through colonial exploitation for home and foreign markets found its way into an industrializing production process, which meant both for government as well as entrepreneurs an exponential leap ahead of their European rivals, a leap that became particularly clear toward the end of the eighteenth century—a process mirrored in the competitive wars between the major European colonizing powers in the eighteenth century in particular.^[411] The most striking example of this integration of state with private investment interests is the foundation in 1694 of the Bank of England, established on the basis of a mutual share issue with a guaranteed 8 percent return.

Within a year it had raised over 1.5 million pounds sterling, enough to fund an impressive new program of warship construction. The demands of the navy stimulated at the same time over the following half-century a vastly increased industrial output as well as a host of new industries, promoting both technological innovation as well as improved construction and production techniques—a forerunner of the later “military-industrial complex.” And within 10 years of the original share issue, the revived and reequipped Royal Navy had confronted and defeated the French and had begun to transform the military-political balance of power in western Europe and—crucially for the next century of colonial expansion—in the Atlantic world more broadly.^[412]

One of the characteristics of the world of imperial colonial commerce is that it remained largely centered around national state/empire networks—the British traded with their own colonies and vice versa, the French struggled to impose controls on their colonies in the Caribbean trading with those outside the French sphere of influence, and all governments struggled to retain as much direct control over colonial economies as they could. But attempting to limit and control colonial commerce for the benefit of the imperial state alone meant that European rivalries were carried overseas along with European colonial and commercial ventures. Already in the later sixteenth century in Portuguese Brazil, royal garrisons and ships suffered competition from the Dutch and at the same time had to deal with increasingly autonomous settler elites who built their own autonomous trade networks, with Africa and the slave trade in particular. The picture is the same in the East Indies, where the Dutch soon became dominant. For the Spanish in the Americas, similar problems had to be dealt with. Its colonial incomes were essential to the Spanish monarchy, since without them it was not able to maintain control over its far more fractious European lands.

But again control was massively compromised by the distances entailed and the various competing interests of local governors and administrators, settlers, merchant elites, and the church. And while the protection afforded by royal ships and armaments held the empire together as much as successful conflict with competitor powers such as the English and the Dutch, it reinforced the national identities of these competing colonial worlds.^[413]

The growth of British international commerce contrasts with this model and evolved along somewhat different lines. The slow process of Anglo-Scottish colonization in North America was allowed to develop under largely private auspices with only minimal intervention from the government, except in terms of the diplomatic and political support it could offer in cases of conflicting claims from France or Spain, in negotiations with the indigenous populations, and occasional military support. In the West Indies, the development of sugar production on a grand scale supported by slave and indentured labor followed in the footsteps of the initial Spanish colonization of the islands, generating both a market for foodstuffs in New England and a market for sugar in England and elsewhere, as well as supporting the slave trade itself. The East India Company, established in the last years of the sixteenth century to profit from trade with India and the East Indies, remained an entirely private operation, albeit with the advantage of a government monopoly on the trade, and negotiated on its own behalf with local rulers and potentates for trade rights, concessions, and stations. It intervened in local politics where its interests were affected, and gradually established a territorial hegemony rivaling that of any European state; the equivalent of the East India Company for Africa and the Caribbean, established somewhat later in 1663, was the Royal Africa Company, which operated along similar lines. In all these cases the government attempted to maintain a degree of supervision and the potential for intervention on its behalf, but found that both the trading companies and the settler populations were generally resistant. In spite of the need for military and naval action to defend these territories and the sea-routes that linked them to one another and to Britain, relative autonomy remained the norm, except when, after the 1857 mutiny in India, the East India Company ceded administrative, judicial, and military authority to the crown. Yet at the same time, the revenues drawn from colonial economies, the private and public investment in colonial enterprises, the maintenance of a powerful fleet and ancillary industries, and the establishment of a common judicial system across all the imperial possessions meant that this “fiscal-military” state retained a degree of fiscal and more broadly economic flexibility that gave it a substantial advantage over all its rivals.^[414]

<< | >>

↑

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

Early Modern Commercial Imperialism

More on the topic Early Modern Commercial Imperialism: