NONGOVERNMENT SECTORAL INSTITUTIONS

Virtually all colonies could point to evidence—from trading firms to mining com­panies and plantations to banks—of some sort of private profit sectoral stretch. Europe-based enterprises often extended operations inland as transport networks grew.

When an enterprise headquartered outside a colony played an important role within it for an extended time, many people came to regard it as an integral part of the colony’s economy. In this respect foreign enterprises were gradually domesti­cated, the process paralleling that of public sector institutions. Indeed, to the extent that public and private profit sector institutions imported from Europe were the only ones whose reach extended throughout a colony, to that extent their presence shaped and even defined the contours of a territory’s domestic life. Europeans enjoyed a power edge over colonized peoples when their sectoral institutions had a spatial range that no institution controlled by the colonized could match.

The European-directed portion of a colony’s private profit sector had several effects on economic and social life. Given a commitment to rearrange natural and human resources in the search for profit, entrepreneurs had few compunctions about disrupting past ways of doing things if disruption was expected to produce future gain. Just as capitalism continuously remade modern European economies, so it had ongoing impacts on colonies. Over the five-century span of this book, dra­matic change took place in ocean and land transport, communications, mining tech­nology, transfers of plants and animals to new areas, and applications of scientific research to agricultural production. These kinds of changes accelerated from phase 3 onward, but events and trends in phase 1 mattered also.

Land and labor requirements of colonial capitalists substantially impacted non-European ways of life. Many people were driven from their lands and had to devise new ways to survive, including working for European employers on the latter’s terms. Many were kidnapped and shipped over the high seas as slaves. Many were enticed from homelands by the prospect of cash and consumer goods if they worked in large-scale enterprises. Where migrant labor arose to meet the heavy demand of mines and plantations for unskilled labor, economic life in areas the migrants left was profoundly altered by their absence. The shock waves of capitalist development thus spread far beyond the sites where Europeans supervised extraction and produc­tion for the market.

Employers used varying mixes of coercion and inducement to get the amount of non-European labor they needed. For activities dependent on slavery and forced labor, government’s police units and courts were invaluable supplements to methods employers were prepared to use. But the persuasive power of material reward was great. Europeans monopolized the supply of many products desired by their sub­jects. In numerous instances the only way to earn cash to buy these products was to be employed in European-owned operations. As a metropole’s output of consumer goods increased so did the extent to which colonial employers could rely on induce­ment to attract, train, and even discipline their work force. Colonial development was not simply pushed along by the restless striving of employers after profit: it was also pulled along by employees’ strong preferences for imported goods and a diffu­sion throughout society of consumerist values.

Christian missionary bodies greatly extended their reach during the colonial era. The typical pattern was for an organization based in the metropole (or at the Vatican) to set up branches overseas. These were led by Europeans the organization recruited, trained, funded, and instructed to follow policy guidelines. The Roman Catholic Church and its missionary orders are the clearest illustrations of the re­ligious sector’s institutional stretch. The situation was more ambiguous among Prot­estant denominations, particularly those with strong traditions of congregational autonomy. But when Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist missionaries in the field received funds from sponsoring home agencies, used agency-provided Bibles and tracts, returned home for leave and retirement, and were reassigned from one place or task to another, they demonstrated the consider­able hold European institutions had on agents operating far afield.

A missionary’s ultimate mission was not, however, to set up branch headquar­ters but to reach people not converted to the true faith. An already stretched institu­tion was called upon to stretch further, this time into the periphery of colonial society. If conversion was successful the emphasis shifted to sustaining and deepen­ing the faith of believing communities clustered around mission stations. As the geographic scope and range of activities increased, non-European converts were recruited to preach, teach, and assist in translating the Bible into local languages. Some began to look to mission agencies as sources of employment and upward mobility, just as others sought employment opportunities in the public and private profit sectors.

Missionaries concentrated on people most likely to convert. In practice, this meant those not already committed to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or other faiths based on sacred texts. Missionaries relied heavily on persuasion, advancing argu­ments favoring their own Salvationist creed and attacking what they called heathen beliefs.

A parallel pattern thus emerges for each of the three sectors. Specialized in­stitutions stretched from metropole to colony, then outward from nodes of concen­trated activity toward a colony’s peripheral areas. Each sector had distinctive reasons for wanting to reach ever-larger numbers of colonial residents. But all reasons had something to do with changing how residents acted and thought. The cumulative impact of institutional dynamism expressed simultaneously on several fronts en­abled colonizers to consolidate an already dominant position.