SECTORAL INSTITUTIONS

Are there features of west European society that permit one to think of the region as a single, coherent unit? If so, do they help explain why the region had such an impact elsewhere? We do speak, after all, of European civilization, culture, and empires; when traveling abroad, Europeans persistently referred to their continent of origin as a source of identity and loyalty.

Here I stretch the concept of sector to refer to functionally specific activities within western Europe as a whole. When one examines recurring patterns of govern­ment, economic activity, and religious belief and ritual, one sees underlying themes conducive to global dominance: each sector displays a high level of institutionaliza­tion, autonomy, and will to extend itself overseas.

Public Sector: The Bureaucratic State

Europeans were long accustomed to living within territorially bounded polities and under rulers with substantial power and moral authority. The sequence was from one unit to a multitude to a few: from an immense empire centered in Rome to hun­dreds of small feudal principalities to a much smaller number of states. At all times, however, could be found specialists in rule visibly presiding over a public realm.

Given this experience, Europeans defined living in a polity as a defining feature of civilized life. It is not accidental that the Latin root for civilization is cives, “cit­izen.” Europeans looked down upon societies that lacked recognizable, specialized political structures as uncivilized—Rudyard Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law.” The Spanish, for example, called stateless New World peoples savages (indios sal­vages), as distinct from indios policias who lived under identifiable governance struc­tures. By conceptualizing differences in the way societies performed political func­tions as inequalities between superior and inferior ways of life, Europeans handed themselves a powerful moral justification for imperialism.

The line separating a feudal principality from a modern state is blurred, con­ceptually as well as in actual historical circumstances. Generally speaking, however, early in phase t western Europe began to accelerate the transition across that line. Modern state formation involved a shift in power and status from physically dis­persed, rural-based aristocrats to court officials in a capital city; codification and territory-wide application of legal norms and procedures; the growth of standing armies to defend rulers against domestic and external challengers; and a function­ally specialized bureaucracy largely recruited, trained, compensated, and directed through the central government.³⁶ Modern state building involved the elimination of many small units by incorporation into larger ones. By Charles Tilly’s estimate, western Europe had some five hundred political units at the start of the sixteenth century and about twenty-five early in the twentieth.³⁷

Modern states were far better positioned than their feudal predecessors to construct overseas empires. Their greater size and population, their rulers’ capacity to amass taxes and borrowed capital in central treasuries, and their control of stand­ing armies gave them more human and financial resources to deploy, abroad as well as at home. Had Europe remained as politically fractured after the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as it was in the feudal era the region could not have had the global impact it did. The external projection of power was facilitated by the internal con­solidation of power by centralizing dynasties: the House of Aviz in Portugal, the Aragon-Castile merger followed in 1516 by Habsburg rule in Spain, the Bourbons in France, the Tudors in England, and subsequently the Prussian Hohenzollerns in Germany.

The prospect that colonies might enrich a metropolitan government’s coffers was, of course, a strong incentive to look abroad. State building in Europe was an extremely expensive proposition. Funds had to be raised to induce or coerce other­wise unwilling subjects to obey the government as well as to wage war against neighboring enemies. Resources from abroad could help resolve the state’s perennial fiscal crisis.³⁸

European colonies may be considered protostates. Territorial boundaries, cap­ital cities, defense forces, functionally specialized bureaucracies—these features were transferred deliberately from metropolitan core to imperial periphery. Construction of protostates abroad could not occur until the modern state was in place as a model for export?⁹

The sequence of European political evolution from one unit to hundreds to a few affected relations among sectors. Private profit and religious institutions that emerged prior to modern state building had opportunities to take root in society, gain legitimacy on their own terms, and enjoy autonomy from political control. From the feudal era came a tradition of largely unfettered entrepreneurial activity in urban areas. Among the Roman Empire’s legacies was the Catholic Church. The autonomy of urban capitalist institutions was clearly a factor in Europe’s sustained economic development. The autonomy of its religious institutions—Roman Cath­olic and eventually Protestant—limited the arbitrary and authoritarian exercise of power by state officials. Sectoral autonomy also influenced the way Europeans acted overseas. Capitalist and Christian institutions had the leeway to set their own foreign policy agendas and the financial and personnel resources to carry them out. This meant that the number of actors and the range of motivations and incentives operat­ing overseas at any given time was far greater than a survey of government actions alone would suggest. It also meant that Europeans could exert influence even when the states from which they came were unable or unwilling to govern specific overseas territories (see chapter 10).

The Roman Empire was far enough removed in time to pose no challenge to Europeans constructing states out of the huge territory Rome once controlled, yet sufficiently recent to be on state builders’ minds. Its legal and architectural legacies affected the way European polities operated at home. Rome also served as a role model for external relations. Modern empire builders, familiar with classical history through their formal education, often described their actions as replicating Rome’s accomplishments. Patricia Seed observes that every imperial power in the New World between 1492 and 1640 invoked Rome. Doing so “served to foster the sense that Europe was indeed engaged upon a single legitimate project—domination of the peoples/lands/commerce of the New World in the name of recreating the imagined ideal of the Middle Ages—the medieval dream of a single unified Rome.”⁴⁰ The ancient empire cast a shadow even in phase 3, though the medieval ideal had by then been discarded.

Luis Vaz de Camoens’s sixteenth-century poem The Lusiads, written in praise of early Portuguese explorers, is filled with references to classic mythology and history. The poet writes that Venus “was attracted to the Portuguese, seeing in them many of the qualities of the ancient Rome she had loved so much.” Jupiter promises Venus, “You shall see Greeks and Romans cast into oblivion by the great deeds this people will perform in the East.”⁴¹

The British in phases 3 and 4 were especially fond of comparing their accom­plishments to those of Rome, as seen in the phrase pax britannica. Classical studies (litterae humaniores) were popular among students at Oxford and Cambridge, and colonial officials from these elite institutions frequently referred to Greek and Ro­man themes. Cecil Rhodes liked to be told that his bust resembled that of a Roman emperor. Richard Symonds writes that Rhodes, “brooding often on the lessons of Rome for Britain,... had the books Gibbon used as sources for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire translated into English for his personal use.”⁴² In The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1914), Lord Bryce com­pared Rome’s impressive road network with the British feat of crisscrossing India by railway.

In both expansionist phases the Roman Empire was an exemplar for several states whose territories had been incorporated within it centuries earlier. Rome’s lesson was not so much that Europe could again be unified as that its people could again perform great deeds on other continents.

Private Profit Sector: Urban Capitalist Institutions

Western Europe developed a regionwide private profit sector through the institutions and values of capitalism. As the word “bourgeoisie” indicates, the key to this outcome was the rise of urban areas specializing in production of marketable goods and services. Cities have been to the region’s economy what states have been to its politics. As Tilly puts it, “Europe’s system of cities represented the changing relations among concentrations of capital, its system of states the changing relations among concen­trations of coercion.”⁴³ Before the Industrial Revolution rural areas accounted for a sizable proportion of handmade goods. But even then, “wherever physical produc­tion might take place, the intangible processes of information flow, decision making, and exchange concentrated firmly in cities.”⁴⁴ The onset of factory-based industry in phases 2 and 3 led to a dramatic urbanization of nonagricultural production.

In the late Middle Ages European towns and cities enjoyed considerable politi­cal autonomy from neighboring barons—a legacy that insulated them to some extent from the centralizing activities of state builders in phase 1.⁴⁵ Another feature of late medieval life was the dense network of trade and credit linking cities throughout the region. These two features were interdependent. Autonomy within a polity was en­hanced by flows of valuable resources across political boundaries. Partial insulation from external political control enabled cities to concentrate on economically pro­ductive activities and to maintain direct trade ties with other regional urban centers.

Although much of this trade took place overland, western Europe’s extensive coastline encouraged reliance on ships to transport bulk as well as luxury goods.

Europe’s urban population was driven primarily by the imperative of eco­nomic survival, considering that the time-honored means of subsistence—land—was inaccessible to the great majority. For a growing number of city dwellers, however, accumulation of wealth over and above subsistence became an attainable goal. Such a goal was hardly unique to European society. What was distinctive was the high priority placed on acquiring wealth and the innovative techniques used to do so.

European capitalism was marked, first, by societal acceptance of private owner­ship of property (including land) and by effective enforcement of claims to property rights. As the legal system developed, public sector officials came to acknowledge pri­vate claims even when these were directed against the government itself. Second, the search for profit was linked to an interest in technological innovation that might lower production costs or generate new products. Third, wealth was valued not only for the goods and services it could purchase but also as a means to generate even more wealth in the future. The idea that capital derived from putting resources to use should itself be put to use was consistent with the explore-control-utilize syndrome. Rapid, effi­cient recycling of capital into subsequent rounds of production was an enormously potent stimulant of economic life and technological change over the long run.

Fourth, urban political autonomy enabled entrepreneurs to avoid being crushed by taxes and regulations imposed by central governments. The will of urban capitalists to generate profits was complemented by their capacity to retain substan­tial portions of what they accumulated.

Fifth, although a driving force in Europe as elsewhere was the self-interest of individuals and families, a large and growing role was played by institutions whose organizing principle transcended individualism and kin loyalties. Examples were artisans’ guilds, joint-stock trading companies, and banking houses. Once estab­lished they could grow, taking advantage of economies of scale in ways not open to individual or family enterprises. They could also extend their territorial scope, com­peting effectively with enterprises elsewhere whose outreach and personnel recruit­ment policies were limited by dependence upon kinship.

Sixth, people engaged in making a profit—from artisans and tinkers to traders, industrialists, and bankers—were not relegated to inferior status. Skilled manual labor and the drive for material possessions were respectable. The stratification system was sufficiently flexible that ambitious persons from lower-class backgrounds could move upward, spending wealth to acquire higher status.⁴⁷

Western Europe’s merchants favored overseas exploration as opening up addi­tional sources of profit. Lands distant from Europe were especially attractive if they produced commodities unavailable at home. The will to reach beyond Europe was coupled with capacity to do so, especially through joint-stock companies whose capital assets were pooled from many private investors. The autonomy capitalist institutions enjoyed gave them latitude to act overseas on their own and with their own interests uppermost in mind rather than as agents of a metropolitan govern­ment.⁴⁸ The trade frontiers along which they operated might coincide with the political boundaries of empire. But they need not. During phase i they extended well beyond de facto political frontiers in such diverse places as Canada, Brazil, India, the West African coast, and the Dutch East Indies.

Religious Sector: Euro-Christian Missionary Agencies

Christianity was an enormously important cultural unifier in western Europe,⁴⁹ even after the Protestant Reformation ended the Roman Catholic Church’s virtual mo­nopoly of religious life. For one thing, Catholicism retained widespread support. Three of the five phase i imperial powers were officially Catholic, and a substantial Catholic population lived in England and Holland long after rulers there broke with the papacy. For another, Protestant reformers, whether they retained much of the Catholic liturgy (as in the Church of England) or rejected the old tenets and rituals (as in the more radical dissenting sects), could never fully disentangle themselves from Rome. The Protestant/Catholic divide added an element of competition to overseas initiatives—but it should not obscure beliefs and practices that made west­ern Europe, on balance, remarkably homogenous in religious terms.

Christianity is an institutionalized religion whose governance structures are separate from those of secular political authority. Even when European governments formally adhered to a branch of the faith and had a say in promotion to top eccle­siastical posts within their borders, religious structures maintained autonomy from the state. The Roman church’s autonomy was aided by several factors: its universalis- tic (catholic) claims; a historical pedigree far more ancient than any European gov­ernment; a centralized, transnational bureaucracy; recognition by late medieval and early modem national legislatures of the clergy as a separate corporate estate; and location of the Papal See in Rome, far from the emerging centers of European power and an autonomous polity in its own right. Most Protestant sects enjoyed indepen­dence from government control for a quite different reason: a high degree of self- government at the local congregational level. Whether autonomy was derived from suprastate centralization or substate decentralization, the freedom Europe’s Chris­tian institutions enjoyed gave them leeway to set their foreign agenda and act on it.

The agenda always had an outward-oriented dimension, for Jesus directed his followers to “go out to all the world” and convey the Good News. His command took institutional form in denominational agencies specializing in conversion: for exam­ple, Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, and White Fathers for Catholics, the Church Missionary Society for Anglicans, the English Baptist Mission, and so forth. Mission agencies were headquartered in Europe and found recruits there to send forth with instructions to report on what they accomplished. European soldiers, administra­tors, merchants, and settlers did convert the occasional individual to Christianity. But the vast bulk of the work was done by missionaries because their reason for being where they were was to persuade others to replace false beliefs with true ones. This motive being separate from political control—though not necessarily incompatible with it—mission agencies had strong reasons to set up distant outposts regardless of whether a colonial regime was in place there. What Alistair Hennessy calls “the mission frontier” extended well beyond de facto political frontiers in Canada, Brazil, and Paraguay in phase i and in many parts of Africa in phase 3.⁵⁰ The parallel with the overseas ventures of European capitalists is obvious.

It is one thing for European Christians to want to convert people to their faith. It is quite another to think of the faith as distinctly European, a factor setting the region apart from and above other parts of the world. Yet several developments converged to produce just this way of thinking, with the result that missionaries consciously spread the gospel of European civilization as well as of personal salva­tion. In this respect they served, deliberately or unconsciously, as advance agents of regional aggression.

In its early years Christianity could not possibly have been identified as a west European cultural artifact. It originated, after all, in Western Asia, spread north to Armenia, south to Abyssinia, and southeast to Mesopotamia and India as well as to the Mediterranean basin. Conversion of Europe’s northern areas to Roman Catholi­cism was not completed until the fourteenth century. But ways of thinking began to change with the rise of Islam, which severed or severely frayed links between Catho­lics and non-European Christians. The initial wave of Arab conquests led many Western Asian and North African Christians to convert to the new faith. It isolated Christian communities in Asia and Africa (Nestorians and Monophysites, for exam­ple) from those living north of the Mediterranean. Subsequent advances of Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks into Asia Minor challenged the Eastern Roman (Greek Orthodox) Church, official faith of the Byzantine Empire. This branch of Chris­tianity was dealt a tremendous blow in 1453 with the capture of the imperial capital, Constantinople.

Largely because of Islam’s rise, inhabitants of western Eurasia began to think of themselves as having a shared European identity. The first use of the term “Euro­pean” has been traced to the Battle of Tours in a.d. 732, when Romano-Gallic and so- called barbarian armies came together to defeat Muslim forces invading France.⁵¹ Because the challenge was religious as well as political and military, Europeans came to regard their regional identity as intimately connected to their faith. The origins of this subjective change long preceded phase i, being traceable to the Arab conquest of the Holy Land and invasion of Iberia. What was new about the early years of phase 1 was the Islamic challenge’s next round under Turkish leadership. Ottoman advances through the Balkans and into central Europe led people living close to the Atlantic to perceive western Europe as the cultural heartland of the entire continent. With the fall of Constantinople Roman Catholics saw themselves as the only Christians left to combat the infidel. Pope Pius II, who took office five years after Constantinople’s fall, was a leading proponent of the idea that Europe was a single entity unified by its Roman Catholic faith.⁵² Increasingly the broad, pre-Ottoman category of Christian Europe was displaced by a narrower Roman Catholic western Europe.

The Ottoman Turks’ role in spreading Islam made that faith more cosmopoli­tan because no longer could it be seen as the ethnic property, so to speak, of Arabs who originated and initially spread it. Paradoxically, the Ottomans made Chris­tianity less cosmopolitan by further reducing the already limited contact among Christians on different sides of Muslim-controlled lands. Roman Catholics in early phase 1 had a vague sense that Christian communities existed south and east of the line, an awareness expressed in the myth of Prester John. But the myth’s appeal lay precisely in the absence of hard evidence to support it. Even if Prester John existed, Catholics could not assume the priest-king would reach out to find them. It was they who had to take the initiative to locate him and form a grand anti-Islamic alliance. An idea one may term Euro-Christianity gradually took shape: if the faith was to flourish, Europeans had to shoulder the responsibility for going out to all the world.

The reality of Ottoman military power, coupled with knowledge of a wider world conveyed by explorers, persuaded fifteenth-century Europeans that it was time to change strategy and tactics from crusading days. The earlier goal had been to conquer the Holy Land. Conversion was an incidental aim because Crusaders were realistic: even if defeated on the battlefield, Muslims were not going to become Christians. The new goal was to bypass the Holy Land and place top priority on converting pagans in areas far from it. The task was assigned not to warriors but to missionaries. If Christians could not control sites central to their faith, they could compensate (and retaliate) by mounting conversion campaigns elsewhere.⁵³ The prospect of finding non-Muslims in other regions was appealing, as they would be less inclined than Muslims to reject the Good News out of hand. This proselytizing impulse, seen in the despatch of friars to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, became pronounced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Changing attitudes took institutional form with creation of the Jesuit order (in 1540) and redirection of the Franciscan and Dominican orders toward overseas work.

Adding impetus to this new approach was the conquest of Granada. Religious zeal generated in the final round of the long crusade to retake Iberia was there to be tapped and redirected at the very moment Spain’s rulers decided to sponsor a major overseas venture. One can see this clearly in the selection from Columbus’s log cited earlier.

To summarize, several features of western Europe made it a distinct, relatively homogeneous, integrated regional system. Its political life was organized around ter­ritorially bounded states, its economic life around urban-based private actors seek­ing and recycling profit, its religious life around versions of Christianity grounded in Roman Catholicism. Regionwide sectoral activity was institutionalized in the Middle Ages but became even more so from phase 1 onward with the centralization and bureaucratization of state structures, increased use of joint-stock corporations to amass and invest capital, and formation of specialized mission agencies. All three sectors had the organizational capacity to project themselves overseas while retaining control of operations from region-based headquarters.

Europe’s private profit and religious sectors were relatively autonomous from its state structures. Autonomy was aided by separate institutions and by a widely held view that each sector could perform its specialized functions best when given a large measure of freedom. The sequence of European political development was crucial in making sectoral autonomy possible. The politically fragmented feudal era that fol­lowed Rome’s collapse was conducive to the rise of capitalism; the earlier concentra­tion of power under Rome and Emperor Constantine’s conversion were conducive and perhaps necessary conditions for Christianity’s spread. Because capitalism and Christianity took root before modern states were formed, they could protect them­selves from autocratic state builders and limit the scope and arbitrariness of public sector power. Geographic factors were also important. Capitalism was based in urban centers considerably smaller than the states into which cities were eventually incorporated. The Roman Catholic Church had a hierarchy and base of believers far more extensive than any one state. Many denominations formed from the Protestant Reformation stressed local congregational self-government. Whether the key sec­toral unit was smaller or larger than the state, the fact that it did not coincide with state boundaries helped insulate it from political control.

Sectoral autonomy meant that states were not the only actors able to assert themselves abroad and that nongovernment agencies could act without waiting for home governments to approve what they proposed. The fact that many kinds of institutions operated overseas, with varying but complementary goals in mind, gave Europeans a wide range of options for penetrating and influencing other societies (see chapter 10).

A high capacity for overseas initiatives was complemented by will. Political control, commercial gain, conversion—all could be achieved by looking abroad. At the outset of phase i the image of the Great Khan attracted rulers and merchants, while the image of Prester John attracted rulers and supporters of Christianity’s global mission. These myths did not correspond to reality. But their allure helped shape the way the modern world emerged.

The features discussed here have sufficiently broad geographic range to apply to all eight metropoles. Are they sufficiently narrow temporally to distinguish be­tween western Europe before phase i and afterward? If one focuses on capitalism the answer is a qualified no. Its orientation and urban base were in place well before the fifteenth century, but its reliance on corporate structures to accumulate and recycle profit accelerated after that time. With Christianity the answer is a qualified yes. Its institutional and ideological roots were obviously premodern. But the way its ad­herents associated region with religion—what I term Euro-Christianity—was a re­sponse to Ottoman advances early in phase i. And the emergence of specialized missionary agencies is a feature of the imperial era. Emergence of the modern state coincides most clearly with the early years of phase i. Empire building depended on state building, in that small feudal principalities had insufficient resources to admin­ister colonies. The point is not that all three sectors changed radically in the fifteenth century but that when the public sector was finally ready to act the other two sectors were ready as well. The triple assault could then be launched.

The political dominance of several European states becomes more under­standable in the context of multisectoral activity based in an entire region.

A revealing indicator of regional identity is the willingness of individuals born in one part of Europe to work for “foreign” sponsors. One sees this in the Ceuta expedition. Ferdinand Magellan was born in Portugal and claimed the Philippines for Spain. Italian-born explorers found sponsors where they could, Columbus visit­ing royal courts in France and England before winning support from Ferdinand and Isabella. Amerigo Vespucci and Giovanni da Verrazzano worked for Spanish mon­archs, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) for England. So many Venetians did early ex­ploratory work for Spain off the South American coast that Venezuela (Little Venice) was named for them. The Englishman Henry Hudson came upon the river named after him while reporting to the Dutch East India Company. The Bavarian count Prince Rupert was an architect of the Hudson Bay Company. In phase 3 Italian-born Savorgnan de Brazza worked for France, Welsh-born Henry Morton Stanley for Bel­gium’s Leopold II. The German explorers Heinrich Barth and Carl Weiss helped Brit­ain and Portugal, respectively. Recruitment of Catholic missionaries shows another form of cosmopolitanism. Father Eusebio Kino, for example, a pioneer in northern New Spain, was born in the Tyrolean Alps.

Nothing confirmed identification with one’s continent so much as leaving it. People describing themselves as French, English, or German at home became Euro­peans abroad. In Camoens’s Lusiads, commonly seen as an ardent patriot’s tribute to Portugal, Vasco da Gama is asked by the ruler of Malindi where he comes from. “We hail from the proud continent of Europe,” the explorer replies. He goes on to give his African host a detailed description of European geography.⁵⁴

Over a long time lines of causation become very complex and may indeed be circular. Such was the case with imperialism. The convergence of state building, urban capitalism, and Euro-Christianity was conducive to expansion. But the reverse was also true. Resources extracted from colonies were available for state building at home; profits accumulated overseas were available for recycling in later rounds of domestic private investment; ready access to raw materials from colonial plantations and mines facilitated the Industrial Revolution; opportunities for mass conversion overseas helped revitalize Christianity in Europe, substituting forward-looking, pos­itive goals for the earlier defensive aim of halting Islam. Once circular causality came into play, powerful forces sustained patterns of dominance that were fast becoming the status quo.