EUROPE’S COLONIAL EMPIRES: DISTINCTIVE FEATURES

In the half millennium following Ceuta’s capture, the rulers of eight countries that together account for a mere 1.6 percent of the land surface of the earth—Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy- claimed vast territories and asserted sovereign rights over hundreds of millions of human beings.

What occurred in the course of Europe’s expansion had a profound impact on the modern history of all continents. Since the fifteenth century west Europeans have sent forth their inhabitants, their several versions of the Christian faith, their atti­tudes toward nature, their languages, intellectual and political controversies, con­sumer goods, diseases, death-dealing and life-enhancing technologies, commercial institutions, government bureaucracies, and values. Entire regions were directly in­corporated, in a kind of global enclosure movement, into overseas empires.⁸

Europeans were not, of course, the only expansionist actors in the centuries following Ceuta’s capture. Western Europe itself, invaded from North Africa in the eighth century and briefly threatened by Mongol forces in the thirteenth, confronted a new round of external challenges in the fifteenth. These came from the Ottoman Turks, who in 1453 captured Constantinople, the Byzantine capital and center of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Ottoman rulers transformed the city into a center of Islamic arts and letters, went on to conquer large portions of the Balkans, and advanced as far as the outskirts of Vienna in 1529. The greatest Ottoman ruler, Suleiman I (r. 1520-66), was influential in the turbulent affairs of early-Reformation Europe.

Along the eastern edge of continental Europe, Muscovy expanded in several directions after breaking free of the Mongols in 1480. By the seventeenth century Russian czars had extended their claims thousands of miles eastward to the Pacific. During the next two centuries their immense empire was further enlarged along its southern flanks by incorporation of a number of Islamic polities. Russian trading settlements were established along the northwestern coast of North America in the late eighteenth century, providing the basis for claims to Alaska.

Elsewhere in Eurasia the Mughal dynasty, initially under the leadership of Babur (1483-1530), extended its sway over northern and central India. This empire reached its height around 1700. In China, the Ming imperial court sponsored a series of trading and diplomatic expeditions by sea at the same time as the Portuguese were commencing exploration along the African coast. Fleets of huge, heavily laden ships under the direction of Adm. Cheng Ho sailed as far west as the Red Sea and the East African coast before this ambitious initiative to reach out to other societies was halted in the 1430s. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Chinese state under the Qing (Manchu) dynasty greatly enlarged its boundaries with campaigns of conquest in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a rapidly industrializing Japan under Meiji Restoration leadership took control of portions of the Asian mainland—most notably Korea—as well as Taiwan and numerous smaller islands in the Pacific.

In Africa the Songhai Empire, centered in the Niger River valley, reached its height by the early sixteenth century. The powerful Zulu empire created by Shaka rose during the early nineteenth and had an enormous impact on neighboring southern African societies. In what Europeans termed the New World, the Aztec and Inca empires grew greatly in power and size in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The formation of large-scale, relatively centralized polities, commanding obe­dience and extracting resources from physically and culturally disparate populations, is a recurring theme in human history. West Europeans were not the only peoples with expansionist agendas in the centuries following Portugal’s capture of Ceuta, to say nothing of the years preceding it.

Nonetheless, the overseas empires west Europeans constructed in the past five centuries have certain distinctive and in many respects unique features. Their forma­tion was closely associated with the most systematic, extensive exploration of the globe ever undertaken. European explorers obviously did not discover lands already inhabited by other human beings. But they did discover the seas, in that their voyages familiarized them with the huge portion of the earth’s surface—some 70 percent—covered by water. Their findings enabled European cartographers to pro­duce the first reasonably accurate images of the size, shape, and interconnectedness of the world’s oceans.⁹ Whether maritime explorers had imperialist designs or not, the knowledge they accumulated was essential for founding “saltwater” empires.

Because territories Europeans claimed were linked to the governing country, or metropole, by ships designed for lengthy sea voyages, colonies could be geograph­ically dispersed in a way quite different from the empires just noted. Except for Russia (in Alaska) and Japan, the others advanced along land frontiers. The results were contiguous units, not multiple territorial fragments.¹⁰ The first modern Euro­pean empire, constructed by Portugal, is a classic illustration of dispersed power. In the century following their Ceuta expedition the Portuguese set up trading and settler enclaves along the coasts of Brazil, West Africa, East Africa, southwestern India (Malabar), China, and in the Spice Islands. They controlled two strategic ports: Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and Malacca, overseeing Indian Ocean- China Sea traffic in the narrow strait between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula.

Dispersal of holdings across latitude and longitude lines gave rise to the idea that each colony should specialize in certain commodities based on its comparative economic advantage. A territory might be valued because it possessed minerals or tropical agricultural products unavailable in Europe. The tendency for metropole and colony to specialize in disparate yet complementary activities, and pressures on colonized peoples to produce designated commodities for export, were much greater when imperial possessions were distant and overseas than when polities expanded along land frontiers.

Geographic dispersal made for enormous diversity in the peoples assembled under one political authority. The differences, not only between colonizers and colonized but also among the colonized, were striking. Each European empire was the arena for an extraordinarily high level of interaction across territorial, racial, linguistic, and religious lines.

The physical space separating a metropole from its colonies meant that rulers and ruled grew up in distinct disease environments. Initial encounters between the two groups could therefore have profound demographic consequences. In the New World and parts of Oceania, where indigenous peoples had little or no contact with humans from other continents prior to the arrival of Europeans, exposure to the invaders’ diseases produced precipitous population declines. This was not the case with the non-European empires mentioned, in which newly subject populations were genetically primed, so to speak, to fight off the diseases of conquerors who were also neighbors.

The expansion of Europe is distinctive in that not one but several empires were constructed at about the same time and administered in parallel. In many respects it makes sense to consider western Europe a single category, analyzing the cumulative impact on other peoples of what is appropriately termed European imperialism.

European imperialism was marked by its capacity to undermine the power and legitimacy of other expanding political systems. To take several of the post-1415 examples cited earlier, the Ottoman Turks were unable to sustain their claims to North African territory in the face of European military, diplomatic, and economic offensives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final collapse of Ottoman authority in the aftermath of World War I enabled the victorious British and French to become League of Nations mandatory powers, governing Arab popu­lations in portions of the Near East formerly under Ottoman rule. In India, the century from the Battle of Plassey (1757) to the Great Mutiny (1857-58) saw gradual but steady erosion in Mughal power and a corresponding increase in British eco­nomic penetration and political influence.

By the time European soldiers entered the savanna interior of West Africa the Songhai Empire had fallen. Songhai’s smaller successor states, despite putting up often fierce resistance, were subdued by technically superior weaponry within two decades of the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, which set guidelines for Europe’s scramble for Africa. Further south, Zulu warriors were decisively defeated by white Afrikaner (Boer) forces in the Battle of Blood River (1838). Although inflicting heavy losses on British forces at the Battle of Isandhlwana in 1879, the Zulus subsequently lost at Ulundi and could not stave off invasion of their territory by both the Af­rikaners and the British. Military resistance collapsed after a brief uprising in 1906 was crushed. In the New World, the powerful Aztec and Inca empires were defeated by the cunning, tenacity, ruthlessness—and infectious diseases—of the Spanish con­quistadors within a matter of months following the invaders’ arrival.

The arrogant attitude Europeans displayed toward other people was due in large measure to their success at directly challenging the power and prerogatives of non-European rulers. The principal exceptions to this pattern—Japan, Thailand, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia)—are interesting because the ability of these polities to remain independent in the face of external challenge was so exceptional.

A distinctive feature of the empires I will discuss was the persistent effort of Europeans to undermine and reshape the modes of production, social institutions, cultural patterns, and value systems of indigenous peoples. This transformation agenda, which in many instances proved remarkably successfill, was the outward projection of tumultuous changes in the way Europeans themselves lived during the half millennium of their global dominance. At issue here is not whether Europeans were particularly cruel to other peoples in the course of subduing them. The grim truth is that all expanding polities cause loss of life and societal disruption when incorporating others into their domains. Acts of pillage, rape, and mass murder have been committed by advancing armies in diverse times and places throughout his­tory.¹² The crucial difference lay rather in the rulers’ actions following conquest. The mechanisms non-European empires devised to extract surplus from newly con­quered groups typically did little to alter what these groups already produced. Nei­ther was there substantial change in how commodities sought by new rulers were mined, grown, or fashioned by human labor.¹³ In contrast, Europeans often revolu­tionized production in their colonies. New methods permitted extraction of min­erals and metals not accessible to local people. In numerous instances animals and plants were introduced. Horses and pigs, for instance, accompanied early Spanish settlers to the New World. Settlers were responsible for “population explosions of burros in... the Canaries, rats in Virginia... and rabbits in Australia.”¹⁴ Some plants, like citrus fruits and sugarcane, were grown in the Mediterranean region and were familiar to those who transplanted them. But many others—like cassava, cocoa, coffee, groundnuts, maize, quinine, rubber, and tobacco—were not accessible until Europeans reached other world regions. These crops were transferred from one non­European continent to another, frequently through officially sponsored botanical gardens expressly established for this purpose.¹⁵

Having transferred commercially valuable crops, Europeans employed novel methods of mass producing them for export to the metropole. Colonial plantations may be seen as outdoor factories applying principles of industrial organization and production to tropical and semitropical agriculture well before they were applied to the indoor factories of Europe. In this respect the Industrial Revolution was given a colonial trial run. Both types of factories required large amounts of rigidly controlled human labor. In plantation colonies this typically entailed importing of slaves or indentured servants, whose presence altered a territory’s racial composition and social structure as well as economic activities. Novel technologies were deployed to transport mass-produced commodities long distances over land and sea. The structure of precolonial economic life, including the largely self-reliant character of local communities, was changed after contact with a persistently intrusive western Europe.¹⁶

Non-European empires did not reserve large tracts of land for conquerors who had come to settle. And the number of such settlers was not substantial compared to the subjugated population. In sharp contrast, land alienation on behalf of European settlers and their descendants—with its accompanying dislocation of indigenous ways of life—was a recurring feature in many overseas possessions.¹⁷ Colonies in the New World and the temperate zones of Africa and Oceania offered opportunities for millions of Europeans to migrate. These lands served as vents for expanding home­country populations in a way without parallel in the history of other empires.¹⁸

The ruling elites of non-European empires did not invariably consider them­selves culturally superior to their subjects. In instances in which a group with a pastoral and nomadic tradition imposed itself upon an agricultural and urbanized population, rulers were more likely to assimilate to the culture of the ruled than the reverse. Such was the case when the Mongol Yuan dynasty ruled China (1268-1379); when the Mughals descended to the Indian plains from the mountains of Afghani­stan; when the Turks progressed from Central Asia to Anatolia; and when the Aztecs migrated south to the Valley of Mexico in the twelfth century.¹⁹ Quite different were European empire builders, nomads traveling by sea, who with few exceptions showed little or no interest in adjusting to the cultures of their subjects.²⁰ Their challenge was rather to persuade or coerce indigenous leaders, if not the populace as a whole, to adopt what Europeans believed to be their own clearly superior religion, moral code, language, literature, artistic tradition, legal system, and technology. Adaptation was essentially a one-way process. Upon the shoulders of the colonized was placed the burden of making necessary adjustments.

Europeans were by no means the only rulers with a superiority complex vis- à-vis their subjects. But they displayed this complex in an exceptionally systematic, self-conscious way and in an unusually wide range of symbolic settings. They were ingenious in devising methods to humiliate non-Europeans and unusually skilled at encouraging those they ruled to internalize an inferiority complex. The results were often devastating for the individual and collective self-confidence of subordinate populations.²¹

A major theme of this book is that Europeans were distinctive in mounting a triple assault on other societies: on indigenous institutions of governance, on long­standing patterns of generating and distributing economic assets, and on ideas and values that gave meaning to life. When all these aspects of the old order came under direct and at times simultaneous attack, non-European societies found their ways of life imperiled as never before.

Within the genus of imperialism in human history, the west European version from the fifteenth century onward thus qualifies as a distinctive species, one deserv­ing of study in its own right. It should be neither equated with the larger genus nor too readily broken down into the specific empires—Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch, and so forth—comprising its several subspecies. The history of each metro­pole’s empire has been exhaustively recounted. This book examines broader patterns of the rise, fall, character, and impact of the empires considered collectively.