Peaces of the World: Colonial Peace and Peacemaking

The Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy recently made the provoca­tive statement that debating the pros and cons of imperialism is like “debating the pros and cons of rape.”¹ Certainly, it is impossible to explain away centuries of atrocities committed by colonizers to the peoples they colonized or violence their victims have used to overcome exploitative oppression - and it is the opposite of our purpose to do so here.

The early history of European colonialism is dominated by Spain and Portugal, each of which used scientific knowledge gained from the Islamic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the crusading zeal summoned to expel them to further their aims. Aside from spreading Christ’s kingdom, by which they gained Popes’ backing, their primary motive was the profit of trade in goods from spices and silk to grains and gold originating from east of Constantinople, controlled by Italian city-states, and south of the Sahara, controlled by Muslims. By 1450, Portuguese explorers estab­lished a network of garrisoned trading posts down the west coast of Africa.

Portugal’s King John II used the Alcazovas arrangements to claim Columbus’ finds, made in the name of the Spain. In response, Isabella and Ferdinand convinced the Spanish-born Pope to issue papal bulls that first divided the colonial world between Spain and Portugal, favouring the former, then divested Portugal of all its colonial possessions by trans­fer to its rival. John strategically ignored these diplomatic shenanigans and continued colonial business as usual, forcing Spain to renegoti­ate. The result was the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), providing for a line of demarcation 370 leagues west of Cape Verde: all lands east would be Portuguese and all lands west Spanish, with guarantees of safe passage for each. By splitting the world in this way, “peace was maintained between Portugal and Spain,”so that they directed their efforts “toward exploration and development of the discoveries rather than war;” to be precise, war between themselves, for both continued to wage wars on the colonized.² Limited geographical knowledge left large loopholes, such as whether the demarcating line ran from pole to pole or circled the globe, which worked to Spain’s advantage in claims to the Philippines and Portugal to Brazil, making ambiguity an ally of peace.

The first tract of land to be settled in the “New World” of the western hemisphere was an Antillean island called Hispaniola by the Spanish, now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In his diary of the 1492 voyages, Columbus noted on the first day he met natives that they “neither carry nor know anything of arms,” and on the third that “with fifty [European] men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”³ Less than a year later, the Pope ruled that these peoples “being in peace, and, as reported, going unclothed, and not eating flesh,” were human and so capable of being Christianized by colonizers.⁴ By 1502, a young man from the “Old World” named Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) arrived in Hispaniola seeking fortune, which like his conquistador compatriots he secured by acquiring farmlands, mines and native slaves, collectively called encomiendas. Annoyed by a priest whose sermons denounced how Spaniards treated natives as unchristian, las Casas obliquely replied by obtaining more lands and slaves in what is Cuba today. But three years later, for unknown reasons, he sold his lands, freed his slaves, became a priest himself and dedicated the rest of his life to peacemaking between the Old and New Worlds. Upon his return to Spain in 1516, he pleaded with Catholic authorities, who named him “Protector of the Indians.” He then presented a plan directly to King Charles V, who demanded practical and profitable alternatives to encomiendas: the establishment of communal associations of free Old World peasants and New World natives under the direction of priests on monastic models.

His seclusion ended as his treaties urging conversion by persuasion rather than violence, The Only Method of Attracting Men to the True Faith, began circulating. In 1537, he issued a challenge to the Spanish authorities to allow him to implement his peace plans in Guatemala, dubbed the “Land of War” by the fierce native resistance to colonization, which was surprisingly accepted. Las Casas’ experimental pacification methods, including preaching in native tongues, were so successful that the region was redubbed the “Land of True Peace.” Years later, in his last testament, he described his newfound mission of peace in these words:

To act here at home on behalf of all those people out in what we call the Indies,the true possessors of those kingdoms... To act against the unimag­inable, unspeakable violence and evil and harm they have suffered from our people, contrary to all reason, all justice,so as to restore them to the origi­nal liberty they were lawlessly deprived of, and get them free of death by violence, death they still suffer.⁵

Unrelenting conquistadors soured the fruits of peace before they had a chance to ripen, but news of las Casas’ non-violent victories had already crossed the ocean. Popes admonished deprivations of natives’ liberty and property as unchristian and threatened to excommunicate enslavers, and Charles’ New Laws prohibited native enslavement and abolished encomiendas, under politico-economic pressure retracted by 1545. Las Casas’ last push for peace took place upon his return to Spain during the Valladolid Debates with Juan Gines de Sepulveda, who argued natives were divinely preordained slaves and lacked souls to convert.

The colonial trajectories of the Netherlands and England differed sig­nificantly from those of Portugal and Spain, especially as paths to peace and profit. The Dutch, ruled by Spain until the mid sixteenth century, gained their navigational knowledge and used it against them. An Anglo- Dutch fleet defeated the legendary Spanish Armada which now had a strong Portuguese component in 1588, marking the start of the eclipse of the first two major European empires. Within a decade, Dutch merchant and military ships were circumnavigating the globe, trading and settling in the West Indies (Atlantic Islands) and East Indies (Pacific Islands). The Dutch sought the shortest routes to riches in that they attempted to displace the Spanish and Portuguese from their profit centers, making conflicts with them more likely than peace. For example, by 1543 Portuguese missionaries and merchants had established relatively peace­ful and productive relations with China and Japan, acting as intermedi­aries between them when Chinese Emperors forbade trade after rampant Japanese piracy. Unlike with Africans or South Americans, the Portuguese dealt with Asians as equals or even superiors, probably because subjuga­tion was not an option due to their large and advanced armies. The Japanese called them nanban (“barbarians”), after which a century of economic and cultural exchange until 1643 is sometimes named. Japanese diplomats with Portuguese escorts were welcomed at courts of South American and European rulers as curiosities but also as potential trading and military partners throughout this period.

Dutch colonialism was nowhere near as rosy elsewhere in the world. As they annexed Spanish and Portuguese possessions elsewhere in Asia and in Africa, they also took up the slave trade. Following this pattern, they moved into North America only after English and French explorers had made headway. In establishing New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1614 (renamed New York after becoming an English possession in 1674) and several other fur-trading colonies, the Dutch gained com­petitive advantages over other Europeans by adopting native diplomatic and negotiation styles. The Iroquois, for instance, used ritualized gift exchanges to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with other tribes, to which Dutch traders were invited and in which they eagerly partici­pated. But piggybacking colonial policies ultimately proved lethal for the Dutch by triggering a series of wars with England after which they lost many of their colonies. The series of peace treaties that ended each of these wars’ instalments (Treaties of Westminster in 1654 and 1674, of Breda in 1667) codified pretextual principles of uti possidetis (“as you possessed”) or status quo ante bellum (“existing conditions before the war”) in colonial peace terms. Vesting each party with the properties under its previous control unless otherwise stipulated, events subsequent to these treaties showed how capricious such status quo peaces can be.

As the Dutch star rose, England already had a centuries-old colonial plantation system in nearby Ireland: dispossessed native Catholics were forced to work for Protestant newcomers. The British had found that this method could improve domestic peace prospects by satisfying disgruntled nobles, exporting overzealous proselytizers, expelling prisoners and rec­ompensing soldiers. Doing so without interfering in the affairs of other European powers became the boon of early British colonial strategy, mit­igating conflicts in two ways. First was by new routes to old destinations, such as John Cabot’s failed 1494 attempt to find a northwest passage to Asia, during which he landed on a western coastal island of what is now Canada. Claiming territories there not already claimed by the French exemplifies the second: establishing presences in places other colonial powers had not, such as Jamestown in 1607, England’s first overseas set­tlement. Within two generations, many more settler colonies and trading posts were established on the North American mainland, in the Indies and India, some explicitly for peace, others exclusively for profit.

Tying our discussion of reformed Christian peace practices with colo­nial trends, the Quaker William Penn inherited Irish estates from his father, to whom the newly restored King Charles II owed a large debt. In exchange for its cancellation, Penn asked for and received one of the largest tracts of land ever owned by a private person, now the US state of Pennsylvania, inaugurating one of the grandest experiments in the history of peace. Fleeing persecution in England and finding it again in the colonies, Quakers and other peace church members now had a place to carry out what has since been referred to as the “Holy Experiment,” or the only known state officially founded on pacifist principles, set out by Penn. Natives were to be treated as equals, for as Penn proclaimed to them:

I and my friends have a hearty desire to live in peace and friendship with you, and to serve you to the utmost of our power. It is not our custom to use hostile weapons against our fellow creatures, for which reason we have come unarmed... We are met on the broad pathway of good faith and goodwill, so that no advantage is to be taken on either side, but all is to be openness, brotherhood, and love.⁶

The Code of Handsome Lake, named after the Seneca tribe’s leader (c. 1733-1815), combined Quaker pacifism with traditional tribal emphases on kinship and land in a legal and spiritual code focusing on interpersonal behaviour, still practiced today as the Longhouse Religion. Penn made two two-year trips to the colonies, during which he founded Philadelphia, the “city of brotherly love.” At first the Experiment was quite successful: Pennsylvania was among the first colonies to outlaw slavery, abolish capital punishments and use arbitration to resolve disputes. However, the Experiment sputtered within a few generations as settlers with monetary and military rather than missionary motives took over Pennsylvania’s administration, as England now had to contend with another power both on the European continent and in the colonies.

From the start, France pursued the same dual paths-of-least- resistance colonial policies as England, leading colonists of both countries to some of the same places, notably North America, making friction between them inevitable and forcing natives to take sides. Early French explorers arrived in Canada in the 1530s with scant supplies and could not have survived winters without native help, which they received in exchange for trinkets and muskets. Thus, in stark contrast to colonies where slave systems already prevailed, of necessity French colonies in North America began on a cooperative footing with natives, who acted as translators and guides in exchange for trading privileges. Marriages between French fur-traders and native North Americans were more common than with English or Dutch. Children of such unions, called metis, had counterparts in Spanish and Portuguese South America called mestizos; where Africans were brought, as in the Indies, they were called creoles. They often spoke native and newcomer languages which later turned into distinctive blends and so could act as intermediaries between colonial cultures when they were not subjected to the ever- elaborated structural violence based on skin color and class, or precisely because they were. In other cases, they were the result of unions of ruling natives and powerful newcomers, and so could act as intermediaries between the cultures of each continent, when they were not rejected outright by both.

Deaf to language and blind to color and class was disease, an early form of biological warfare when intentionally inflicted and the single most deadly weapon in both European (in North and South America) and native (in Africa and Asia) arsenals. No peace yet devised could deal with diseases that wiped out populations, except living bodies of mixed or immunized blood whose survival is a testament to the power of passive resistance, if it can be so called. In times of active resistance like during King Philip’s War (1675-76) between New Englanders and natives, alliances between natives were broken and new ones created with colo­nial rivals like the French as with former native rivals. This pattern was repeated on ever-larger scales in a series of inter-colonial wars tied to inter­national wars in Europe, as shown in the table on the following page. The debt and devastation caused by the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris prompted England to levy heavy taxes and tariffs on the North American colonies without seeking their consent, setting gears in motion that would revolutionize war, peace and peace­making the world over by creating the United States.

Often recognized by colonists but rarely used by them other than for survival and gain, native North Americans had their own longstanding peace and peacemaking traditions. Three prominent examples are the calumet, the League of Peace and Power and Condolence Councils. The calumet or peace pipe may have originated with the Pawnee of Nebraska, but by the time Europeans arrived it was in use across the continent, through which they were introduced to tobacco. In 1672, French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet were given and carried a calumet as they mapped the Mississippi river basin, with which they formed “peaceful relations with all the tribes along the way.”⁷ In Pawnee culture, peace pipes were centerpieces of elaborate ceremonies through which inter-tribal trading and political relationships were made and maintained. Hosts were called “children” by their visitor “fathers,” and brought with them a wide range of food and goods for exchange. Negotiations were initiated and closed by smoking the calumet in common “as a sign of peaceful intention and thus a safe-conduct pass through alien territory,” extended to Europeans deemed worthy.⁸ Many tribes recognized peace chiefs and war chiefs, and non-violent codes of intra-tribal conduct were widespread, such as the Cherokee Harmony Ethic by which tribesmen were required to walk away from a conflict and

resolve it through generosity rather than bellicosity. But the League of Peace and Power was one of the first and few inter-tribal bodies Europeans encountered whose sole aim was to promote cooperative peace among its otherwise autonomous communities.

The League was and is a matrilineal alliance of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Seneca of north-eastern North America, endur­ing “to this day as one of the oldest forms of participatory democracy on earth.”⁹ According to oral history, it was founded by Deganawidah (c. 1100-50), The Great Peacemaker. A stutterer, he enlisted the orator Hiawatha to his cause of bringing peace to the region’s warring tribes by spreading a Great Law of Peace, both spiritual and legal. His first axiom was to balance stable minds and healthy bodies so that harmony within and between individuals and groups could flourish. Second was that humane thought, speech and action were the basis of equity and justice, so individual acts of violence were prohibited. Lastly was an extended series of ceremonial and civil procedures for inter-tribal relations, which as an oral tradition could take days to recite in full and by using wampum or rope-writings, accessed article-by-article. Each tribe had its own council. Male leaders were selected by women holding hereditary titles to the offices. The Grand Council of these tribal councils convened as nec­essary to debate, resolve and pronounce on pressing or ongoing issues and popular proposals, which could then be ratified or amended. Rites and rituals sometimes referred to as “Forest Diplomacy” served to widen bases of Great Council deliberations.¹⁰ Among them were Covenant Chains, in which weapons were linked in symbolic circles of friendship, and Condolence Council rites, in which the dead were mourned, new chiefs named and inter-tribal ties and histories celebrated by storytelling, song and dance. Although for the most part lost to Europeans, many of these native North American peace traditions survived their colonialism and imperialism.