EUROPEAN SECTORAL INSTITUTIONS: ROLES AND INTERACTIONS

When Europeans emigrated to the New World in phase i they were typically moti­vated by a desire to generate economic gains over and above subsistence. They wanted consumer and luxury goods from Europe and were prepared to devote some or all of their labor to producing export commodities whose sale paid for imported goods.

Even in pure settlement, mixed, and plantation colonies, however, metropole­based private profit institutions played major roles. Whether operating on their own or in conjunction with the metropolitan state, European companies controlled trade between a metropole and its colonies. They were particularly well positioned to reap handsome profits if they monopolized trade with colonies exporting highly valued commodities like spices and sugar. Banking houses extended credit to overseas ven­tures. European companies handled the vast bulk of the transatlantic slave trade. Many plantation owners lived lavishly in the metropole thanks to profits from their outdoor factories.

A recurring pattern in phase i was the formalization of cooperative arrange­ments between a metropole’s public and private profit sectors. A common Iberian pattern was for a monarch to authorize a ship’s captain to trade on condition that a fifth of the proceeds was handed over to the royal exchequer. A mechanism popular in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Holland, and France was the char­tered company, a corporate body authorized by royal or legislative charter to operate overseas for profit and to carry out quasi-governmental functions in territories assigned to it.

Christian missionary activity was most evident in the New World colonies of Catholic countries. Among Catholic orders sending priests to Iberian colonies to observe, convert, and teach indigenous peoples were the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Mercedarians, and Jesuits. More than a hundred houses and mission centers belonging to various orders were at work in Spanish America by 1600. The leading religious congregations in French North America were the Jesuits, Recollects, Capuchins, and Sulpicians.³³ Missionaries often operated far outside areas effectively controlled by a colonial administration. In Japan and China they worked in lands never taken over.³⁴ In effect they created their own religious and cultural frontiers.

Cooperative links between public and religious sectors were most evident in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Papal bulls authorizing these countries’ mon­archs to claim overseas possessions made it clear that propagation of the Catholic faith was a precondition and principal purpose of the entire operation. From the start close ties were maintained between secular governing structures and the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

A different pattern obtained in England and Holland after Catholicism ceased to be the official religion. Protestant denominations, whether accorded official status or not, showed little interest in converting indigenous people to Christianity. Not until phase 3 did Protestants become seriously involved in missionary work. Rather, phase 1 Protestantism was the more or less exclusive possession of settler commu­nities. Indeed, it was precisely the “heathen” character of non-Europeans that en­abled settlers to justify exterminating them and taking their land. To the extent that a church-state alliance obtained in English and Dutch settler colonies, the decentral­ized nature of Protestant denominational governance gave settlers a degree of control over the religious sector that was not possible in officially Catholic colonies.

The kinds of cross-sector coalitions forged in the metropoles affected the ways in which overseas empires were governed. The nature of these coalitions and the degree to which decision-making authority in each sector was retained in metro­politan hands influenced the degree of leverage settler communities could exert on sectoral institutions at the point when political leaders in the colonies considered breaking with the metropole. But such observations run well ahead of the story. The point here is that during phase i Europeans experimented with a variety of ways in which public sector institutions could collaborate with institutions from other met­ropolitan sectors to advance their interests overseas.