LIMITATIONS ON EFFECTIVE RESISTANCE

Several factors made it difficult for non-Europeans to mount sustained, united, effective opposition to the empire builders. These factors help explain why resistance seldom prevented eventual takeover.

Geographical Factors

The starting point for overseas empire was the arrival of armed ships along coasts or island chains of other continents. Ship commanders held the psychological and military advantage of surprise over indigenous people.¹⁰ The initial report to the Aztec court of the Spaniards’ arrival on the gulf coast registered astonishment as well as surprise when it told of “towers or small mountains floating on the waves of the sea.”¹¹ Inhabitants of the lower St. Lawrence River valley were amazed when they first saw a French ship, thinking it was “a moving island.”¹² Europeans capitalized on the surprise/shock factor by constructing stockades or forts as soon as they could upon landing.¹³ Almost before local people knew what had happened a strong, easily defended enclave had been erected on the shoreline. This became the base for subse­quent movement inland.

Many non-European societies lacked ships that might have given advance notice of an invading flotilla. Those whb did usually had too few to halt the invaders before they landed.

In the centuries following that first encounter other ships arrived with fresh surprises. On board might be immigrants eager to farm the land, preachers from a newly formed missionary body, soldiers and administrators with new policies to carry out. In the hold might be crates of the most advanced repeating rifles, equip­ment to lay the colony’s first railroad track, the first consignments of iron bars, quinine pills, kerosene lamps, bicycles, and the like. Indigenous peoples lacked intel­ligence networks that could report what was about to hit them next. When they did find out it was usually too late.

In many cases, notably in the Indian Ocean basin, the early explorers landed in established port cities. Indigenous rulers might have better withstood onerous de­mands or seaborne assaults had they been aligned to a large inland state whose army could come to their rescue. But the most powerful non-European armies usually belonged to states figuratively as well as literally grounded in continental interiors, with little or no access to the coast. Examples of hinterland polities are the Aztec and Inca empires; Mali, Songhai, Bornu, and the Sokoto caliphate in western Africa; the Shona and interlacustrine Bantu kingdoms, Mahdist state, and Abyssinia in eastern Africa; and the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, centered in the northern Indian heartland.¹⁴ Rulers of inland states were minimally concerned about developments in maritime trade or naval warfare. They were in no position to appreciate the changed relationship between land and sea power effected by Europe’s takeover of the oceans because, from their vantage point, the maritime takeover was invisible.

Thus the armies most capable of defeating Europeans in their coastal enclaves were too far away, and their commanders too ill-informed or unconcerned, to be effective. Almost by accident, Europeans in phase i possessed the optimal level of coercive power.

Most of western Europe’s Atlantic ports, by contrast, were embedded in larger states. In some instances ports were created or developed by monarchs as part of the state-building project.¹⁶ The seaward orientation of major ports was complemented by the landward orientation of the polity as a whole. The west European state was Janus-faced, its rulers looking to sea and soil for sources of revenue and power. European ports derived cash, raw materials, and recruits for overseas voyages from the hinterland. In return, ports sold what they imported to a large inland market The port-state nexus thus stimulated overseas trade and empire building. Imperial­ism may have been further aided by the absence of similarly close links elsewhere.

Where people were vulnerable to European diseases because their homelands were distant from the Eurasian-African land mass, their capacity to resist was dras­tically undercut by epidemic outbreaks. Warrior ranks were decimated. Anomie and social disarray came to the fore just when a well-organized collective response was needed. By felling leaders at key moments an imported disease may have been decisive in the fall of the two most powerful New World empires. Cuitlahuac, an Aztec warrior who warned against allowing Cortes to enter Tenochtitlan and di­rected a charge against the Spaniards, was chosen ruler after his brother Moctezuma died under “protective custody” of the Spaniards. Cuitlahuac had the personal quali­ties to mobilize the city’s defenses and mount a major counterattack. But he died of smallpox less than three months after assuming the throne. It is likely that the last great ruling Inca, Huayna Capac, was also a victim of smallpox, which spread inland before Pizarro and his men arrived. Huayna Capac’s death triggered a succession struggle between his sons Huascar and Atahualpa, a political crisis the astute Pizarro was quick to manipulate.¹⁷ Epidemics also lowered the will of indigenous peoples to fight back.

Attitudes, Values, Worldviews

Many non-Europeans were proud of their custom of offering hospitality to passing strangers. To cite three among numerous examples, generous provisions of food and drink may have saved the lives of Magellan’s crew in the Philippines and permitted the Jamestown settlers and Massachusetts Bay Pilgrims to survive their first months ashore. All too often Europeans took this hospitality for granted and did little to requite it.¹⁸ What indigenous peoples did not realize is that these strangers were not just passing through but in many instances intended to stay. Had the newcomers’ goal of occupying and permanently settling land been known at the outset, the first indigenous response would likely have been hostility. And more would-be settle­ments would have joined Raleigh’s ill-fated ventures at Roanoke on the lost colony roster. When indigenous people realized their mistake it was often too late. New­comers were settled in for the duration.

In a show of generosity with enormous historical ramifications, the Aztec ruler Moctezuma sent an extravagant array of gifts to Cortes shortly after the Spanish expedition reached Vera Cruz and was still encamped along the shore. Intricately wrought gold objects, emeralds, and tropical feathers were presented by royal mes­sengers to propitiate Cortes should he turn out to be the returning god Quetzalcoatl, as was widely rumored.

went out to meet the Spaniards... there in the Eagle Pass. They gave the “gods” ensigns of gold, and ensigns of quetzal feathers, and golden necklaces. And when they were given these presents, the Spaniards burst into smiles; their eyes shone with pleasure; they were delighted by them. They picked up the gold and fin­gered it like monkeys; they seemed to be transported by joy, as if their hearts were illumined and made new.

The truth is that they longed and lusted for gold. Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous; they hungered like pigs for the gold. They snatched at the golden ensigns, waved them from side to side and examined every inch of them.¹⁹

The more obvious it became that Cortes was not satisfied by the finest offer­ings and would not go away, the more disheartened Moctezuma grew. The king’s will to resist collapsed just when he might have put a highly militarized regime on full alert. The account continues, “When he learned that the ‘gods’ wished to see him face to face, [Moctezuma’s] heart shrank within him and he was filled with anguish.... He had lost his strength and his spirit, and could do nothing.... Now he was weak and listless and too uncertain to make a decision. Therefore he did nothing but wait. He did nothing but resign himself and wait for them to come. He mastered his heart at last, and waited for whatever was to happen.”²⁰

Indigenous conceptions of the proper relationship between human beings and land had the unintended effect of empowering European settlers. It was widely believed that land was available for collective use and that its allocation to families or lineages should be set on a need-specific, revocable basis by group leaders.

Given their conception of property rights, settlers thought it proper to delin­eate the precise boundaries of land to which they had title, to place fences or other markers along bouridary lines, and then to prevent other people from entering without permission. The Lord’s Prayer notwithstanding, trespassing was a sin these Christians were not inclined to forgive. With monotonous regularity in all conti­nents and expansion phases, land was taken before indigenous people realized what had happened. Guns protected the boundaries of settler property against local peo­ple who had no idea the land was not also theirs to occupy. The armed defense of land that had just been declared off-limits gave Europeans an advantage of surprise equivalent to the advantage of arriving suddenly by sea. Little wonder that colonial land transfers were so consistently one-sided. An African saying puts it well: “Before the white man came we had the land and they had the Bible. Now the white man has the land and we have the Bible.” The clear implication is that the exchange was not based on free-market principles—and that whites gained far more than blacks.²¹

The explore-control-utilize syndrome that marked modern European thought and action was less prevalent in other societies. There was no such thing as a single, commonly held non-European worldview. Still, values embedded in many indige­nous cultures questioned or directly countered the syndrome’s empirical and nor­mative assumptions. Emphasis was frequently placed on adapting to a group’s physi­cal surroundings rather than struggling against them; being an integral part of the natural world rather than observing nature from an analytically distant vantage point; enjoying what the environment provided rather than trying continually to develop its presumed potential to produce something more; experiencing the pres­ent in the context of the past rather than reaching out toward an imagined future. For many people the way to influence an uncertain, potentially hostile environment was to propitiate powerful unseen spiritual forces that were believed to affect what happened in the observable world. This belief was at odds with the increasingly prevalent European view of nature as a despiritualized realm governed by imper­sonal universal laws. From one perspective, ritual appeals to spiritual forces could harness the capricious character of the universe for desired ends. From the other, it was precisely the «„capricious, lawlike character of the universe that permitted people to manipulate nature for their own ends. There was no need to resort to superstitions that at best were useless, at worst dangerous.

Other things being equal, when a society that is comfortable with its natural environment encounters a society that is uncomfortable unless actively attempting to control and improve its environment, the former is likely to lose out to the latter. One reason is that scientific and technological advance is more likely in the second situation, with technologies to put Nature to use being readily adaptable to dominate other people. To the extent that non-European cultures fit the first situation while modern European cultures fit the second, one has a plausible cultural explanation for Europe’s rise to power.