RETAINING METROPOLITAN CONTROL

Ultimate authority to set imperial policy usually lay with a metropole’s ruler, whether a monarch or an elected politician. Ultimate responsibility to execute policy lay with political leaders and bureaucrats in a metropole’s capital city who were assigned this task.

Metropolitan officials faced a dilemma in deciding how to control distant possessions. They wanted the administrators they sent out to perform the basic tasks of governments everywhere: defining and defending borders, maintaining order, interpreting and enforcing laws, collecting taxes, regulating individual and group activities, providing basic services. The easiest way to create an effective public sector overseas was to transfer institutions and practices metropolitan officials were most familiar with: those in their own country. This meant turning a colony into some­thing like its metropole, with a boundary, a capital city, an official language and currency, and functionally specialized, bureaucratically structured agencies trans­planted from the imperial center. Because transplants might not take unless adapted to new and unfamiliar local environments, top administrators in the colonies re­quired authority to make adjustments on the spot.

But replicating the metropole overseas and delegating authority to colonial governors posed obvious problems. The more closely a colony resembled the metro­politan state the greater the risk that its inhabitants—perhaps even its administra­tors—would demand the one attribute of statehood the metropole insisted on reser­ving for itself: sovereignty.

The only way to resolve this dilemma was to make colonies protostates. They should look like states—but without the crowning attribute of sovereignty. Their governors should govern, but only in accord with policy guidelines set by faraway superiors. A colonial edifice was to be constructed. But the carpenters would be ordered to lay down their tools if they came too close to completing the task.

How assure that a colonial governor follows instructions when one instruction is to live thousands of miles away? The classic principal-agent problem was magni­fied in the imperial setting by the distance separating principals from agents. Several policies and mechanisms were devised to retain control. Imperial officials insisted on the right to appoint, transfer, and dismiss governors. Seldom did a governor remain in the same post for more than four or five years. With few exceptions governors were recruited from the metropole, it being understood that they would return home when their tours of duty were over.² The same applied to officials in charge of internal security, finance, the judicial system, and communications. Teams were dispatched to monitor the performance of top administrators and report on their findings. Spain’s Council of the Indies, for example, arranged occasional general inspections by visitadores, who had authority to examine the files of any official, including a viceroy. The council arranged residendas, judicial reviews at the end of officials’ terms of office. These could result in punishment for serious misuse of power. British authorities from phase 3 onward sent out commissions of enquiry after uprisings, massacres, and riots.

In order to assert authority as well as clarify policy, metropolitan rulers issued edicts and legislatures passed laws governing a wide range of activity throughout an empire. The history of mercantilist policy cannot be written without reference to these edicts. Even when trade restrictions were disregarded or openly disobeyed in the colonies, everyone was aware of them because there was always a chance that officials would identify an infraction and press charges based on the regulations. Metropoles took care to enforce prohibitions on exporting advanced technology to the colonies, fearing this could undermine the desired imperial division of labor.

Considering the interest colonial residents had in retaining economic surplus for themselves, some metropoles did an impressive job of transferring wealth back to Europe. Spain’s rulers extracted massive amounts of bullion from the Americas in phase 1 despite losses on sea and land. Dutch officials took a great deal from the East Indies, indirectly through the East India Company in phase 1 and directly in phase 3. Under the so-called culture system in place from 1830 to the 1870s, peasants were forced to grow export crops and sell them to government buyers for a fraction of market value. By 1877, writes Robert McMahon, this system “had paid off all of the East India Company’s debts and was bringing a sizable amount of additional revenue into The Hague’s home treasury. The East Indies, between 1831 and 1877, earned on the average 18 million guilders a year in profit; in view of a national budget that did not exceed 60 million guilders a year during the same period, the considerable contribution of the colony to the health of the home economy is unmistakable.” One minister for the colonies declared that “Java pours riches upon the homeland as if by a magician’s wand.”³

As these examples show, one way a metropole acquired wealth from its colo­nies was to orient them toward exports. A wide range of commodities was then available to the home market as consumer goods or industrial inputs. High levels of intra-imperial trade offered a fiscal advantage as well. Taxes on a colony’s exports and imports could be more easily and cheaply collected than head or hut taxes directly levied on colonial residents. Concentration of tax revenues in a few port cities made it relatively easy for a metropole’s agents to collect their share and send it home.