SPECIFIC METROPOLES

Refocusing the zoom lens on units smaller than an entire region, namely, countries that became metropoles, one sees that each had a distinctive profile. This was a composite of its location, size, population, ethnic and religious mix, natural re­sources, level and rate of economic development, social structure, political institu­tions, key historical events, and so forth.

Portugal

Portugal’s most distinctive feature was its role as precedent setter. Indeed, in the three-quarters of a century between the conquest of Ceuta and the Spanish mon­archs’ sponsorship of Columbus’s voyage, Portugal was the only European country whose rulers were serious about long-distance maritime initiatives. Its location­close to Africa and the Mediterranean basin, yet with a coastline facing westward— gave it a head start. Its explorers showed how Europeans could reach the fabled lands of Asia and profit from direct access to its spices, precious stones, and textiles. Portugal pioneered in demonstrating the military potential of highly mobile sailing ships armed with guns.

Within a century of the conquest of Ceuta, Portugal had enclaves in the New World as well as in Africa and Asia. A European country became, with surprising ease and speed, literally a world power. That a small, relatively weak polity was able to accomplish so much virtually invited more powerful European states to emulate it, in the reasonable expectation that deploying more resources would produce even more spectacular results. Had a major state set the imperial precedent, smaller states might not have joined in. Because a small state took the lead, the system in which it was embedded ensured that larger states would follow suit.

Portugal offers the first instance of compensatory imperialism. Overseas ex­pansion bolstered its otherwise marginal position within Europe, enhanced national identity and pride, and imbued a tiny country with a spirit of global mission. But the impressively wide range of Portugal’s holdings could not hide the reality of military and economic weakness, dramatized by its inability to avoid being incorporated into Spain from 1580 to 1640. That period aside, Portuguese rulers tried to protect a vulnerable independence by forming an alliance with England. As the phase 3 scram­ble for Africa accelerated, the British were willing to support Portuguese claims to the interior of Angola and Mozambique provided their own Cape-to-Cairo ambi­tions were not thwarted. Portugal remained an imperial actor longer than might have been expected by playing the game of European balance-of-power politics. Indeed, in some respects it became a client of the regional system’s most powerful member.

Spain

Spain’s first great contribution to the European imperial project was, of course, sponsorship of the epic voyage that made the Old World aware of the New. Spain enjoyed the advantage over Portugal of direct access to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Having extensive political responsibilities in Italy, Spain’s rulers were ideally placed to facilitate transfers of Mediterranean knowledge and technology to the wider world of the Atlantic. Columbus’s life dramatically illustrates this lateral transfer. The Spanish capitalized on the Genoese explorer’s findings by concentrat­ing on the Americas. Their pioneering work led other metropoles to focus attention on the New World during phase 1.

A second accomplishment was to demonstrate that a small number of highly disciplined European soldiers mounted on horses and armed with guns could defeat vastly larger Amerindian forces. Conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires by troops led by Cortes and Pizarro ranks among the decisive events in world history. Yet these triumphs were also among history’s more improbable events. Had the first Spanish invaders been defeated it is by no means clear that Europeans of any nationality could have dominated New World hinterlands as rapidly and decisively as they did. To understand the conquistadors’ success one must turn to Spain’s history. Owing in part to the prolonged struggle against the Moors that culminated in the defeat of Granada in 1492, many men were trained in the arts of combat. They expected material gain and enhanced social status from daring military accomplishments. The Americas were a vast arena in which to distinguish themselves for those ends.

Spain showed that colonies could enrich a metropole in the versatile, fungible form of gold and silver. Abundant early evidence from the mines of New Spain and Peru that colonies can pay stimulated other countries to seek new possessions.

Spain was the first European power to dispatch large numbers of people to live in its colonies. The settlers’ ability to adjust to new environments and in some cases to prosper probably encouraged other phase 1 metropoles to deploy settlers as an integral part of their own New World strategies. The settlers’ insistent demand for land and inexpensive non-European labor proved enormously disruptive to indige­nous societies. Through the settlers’ example, the Spanish empire was the first to demonstrate the will and capacity to transform the economic, social, and demo­graphic environment of other continents.

Spreading the Roman Catholic faith was an integral part of Spain’s imperial project and a primary justification for it. Spain’s monarchs worked to link state structures with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at home and abroad. The resulting cross-sector coalition was one reason for their success at undermining indigenous resistance in many areas. Not until the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Britain during phases 2 and 3 did commitment to religious activism figure so prominently in a metropole’s overseas agenda.¹⁹

France

France, by virtue of its location in the heart of western Europe, centralized public sector, and sizable standing army, was the most powerful state on the mainland from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.

In phase i the French concentrated on thinly populated North American areas largely neglected by other metropoles. To some extent this resulted from the private actions of fishermen and trappers rather than deliberate state policy. Still, focusing on what became eastern Canada might be termed an instance of emulation by avoidance. Likewise, France acquired enormous chunks of Saharan and Sahelian West Africa during the phase 3 scramble, knowing that much of this desolate land was not desired by its major rivals, Britain and Germany. The tendency to claim large, underpopulated areas not highly valued by other metropoles reflected a certain ambivalence about overseas empire. On the one hand, France wanted possessions whose cumulative size signaled its great-power status. There was also a certain appeal in expanding holdings abroad to compensate for military defeat at home. This factor influenced policy making after Alsace and Lorraine were lost to Germany in 1871. On the other hand, the security problems France faced on its borders prevented it from committing substantial resources to acquire distant holdings.²⁰ The effect of this ambivalence was that many parts of the world that from a European perspective appeared economically or strategically marginal were acquired by a decidedly non­marginal state.

Following the French Revolution the country’s leaders pioneered the appeal to and manipulation of public opinion for expansionist purposes. An early instance was Napoleon Bonaparte’s effort to advance his political ambitions by leading the ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798. In 1830 the restored Bourbon monarch, Charles X, facing growing popular opposition, ordered the occupation of Algiers that commenced French rule in North Africa. This initiative, notes Raphael Danziger, “was largely the product of domestic political considerations, primarily the calculation that a spec­tacular expedition would give the declining Bourbon monarchy enough prestige to defeat the opposition and win the coming election.”²¹ In the 1880s Premier Ferry tried to rally popular as well as parliamentary support for expansion in Indochina.

Efforts to link popular nationalism with specific imperial goals were not all that successful. At most they produced a temporary surge of interest and pride in the nation’s overseas accomplishments. But France demonstrated that democratization was quite compatible with imperialism, a lesson not lost on politicians in other countries like Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, and Joseph Chamberlain. The populist dimension in phase 3 imperialism made leaders of Europe’s metropoles more unwilling than ever to risk the public humiliation of backing down once they were committed to an aggressive foreign policy.

Holland

Holland’s population was traditionally oriented to waterborne trade. Several rivers flow into the North Sea in Holland, and it is close to the British Isles and the passage to the Baltic Sea. During the first half of the seventeenth century the Netherlands, having large numbers of technically advanced, skillfully manned ships at its disposal, played a critically important role as integrator of the world economy. “The Dutch maritime zone,” writes Jonathan Israel, “moved to the top of the global hierarchy of exchanges, emerging as the hub of what was now definitely a ‘mono-nuclear’ system, the first and, for most of early modem times, the only true world entrepot.”²² This achievement was all the more impressive considering the territory’s small size and population and the fact that for much of the period its people were fighting for independence from Habsburg Spain. The unusually efficient institutions the Dutch developed in the private profit sector enabled them to mobilize and gainfully invest resources from other parts of Europe as well as from their own society. The Dutch state, controlled by urban interests specializing in production and international exchange of a wide array of consumer goods, was far less inhibited by the agrarian feudal structures of medieval Europe than Portugal, Spain, and France. The Re­formed Protestant faith of Holland’s elites sanctioned unabashedly acquisitive be­havior. Dutch actions and motivations in phase i prefigured those of leading partici­pants in phase 3, when capitalist-led economic growth became a dominant motif in European life.²³

The Dutch copioneered with the English the classic institutional link between public and private profit sectors: the officially chartered company. The United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or voc), established by the Estates General in r6o2, was intended to function as a trading enterprise and, if necessary or convenient, as a government. In dealings with Japan the voc was strictly confined by the Tokugawa rulers to trade. But in the East Indies economic transac­tions went hand in hand with political control backed by force. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, considered the founder of the East Indies empire, wrote in 1614 to the board of directors that trade “must be conducted and maintained under protection and favor of your own weapons and... the weapons must be supplied from the profits enjoyed by the trade, so that trade cannot be maintained without war or war without trade.”²⁴ Appointed governor-general three years later, Coen put his philosophy into practice. Inhabitants of the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands were almost wiped out and the islands resettled by others willing to sell their crops solely to voc agents. A company monopoly in cloves was obtained by launching violent attacks on producers in the Moluccas and against all ships serving rival dove traders.²⁵ The Dutch consolidated political power slowly on Java. But by the end of phase i they were recognized as direct or indirect rulers of much of the island.

As these examples illustrate, an important advantage of the chartered company was its tactical flexibility. When faced with effective resistance to its political ambi­tions, the voc defined itself as a trading firm and was content to exert informal influence. Externally imposed constraints did not humiliate the Dutch state, for the state was only indirectly involved, its presence buffered by the corporate front it had set up. If indigenous resistance was ineffective, however, the company could proceed to assert control. Areas it governed were transferred to the Dutch state after the voc was abolished in the war years of phase 2. In large part because of the flexibility it offered, the chartered company model was adopted by other European states. Char­tered companies were especially active during the middle years of phase 1 and the latter half of phase 3.²⁶

The voc was widely regarded in its heyday as a cost-conscious, efficient, care­fully managed company. But even this paragon of a profit-driven institution was un­willing to rely solely upon market forces. Its founding charter officially designated the voc a monopoly, the goal being to eliminate competition among Dutch traders in Asia. The idea of negotiating prices with willing sellers was anathema. The belief that market share could be increased and assured by forcibly asserting political con­trol over the market made eminent sense to voc entrepreneurs. It made sense to the Dutch in phase 3 as well. By ensuring order at the cost of crushing local uprisings, the colonial state helped an efficient plantation system run by Dutch private interests to prosper. The Schumpeterian notion that capitalists are inherently peaceable did not apply to the Dutch in distant lands, where the perils and uncertainties of operating in what seemed like a Hobbesian “war of each against all” were self-evident. If western Europe’s most efficient private profit sector relied so heavily upon soldiers and administrators to ensure overseas profits, it is all the more understandable why pri­vate entrepreneurs in other European metropoles pressed their governments to take up the imperial cause. The Dutch experience illustrates more clearly than any other the symbiotic relationship between private profit and public sectors in European expansion. Capitalist institutions were driven not by free market ideology but by a persistent tendency to act politically and to call upon state institutions for assistance.

Britain

Britain was inescapably oriented to the sea and hence exceptionally well positioned to enlarge its colonial holdings once the Tudor monarchs had consolidated polit­ical control at home. Whereas the military strategies of mainland countries re­quired heavy spending on armies, Britain’s best means of defense was to expand and modernize its navy. Once in place a strong navy was far better suited than a large European-based army to claim and defend overseas colonies and to expand trade ties with them.²⁷ Given the importance of ships for commercial as well as military ends, the British had strong incentives to increase the speed, maneuverability, carrying capacity, safety, and firing range of their vessels. A striking consequence of their numerous technological breakthroughs in the hundred years following the Indus­trial Revolution’s takeoff was a capacity, unrivaled until the 1890s, to rule the waves. A head start in producing ships powered by steam and constructed of iron and steel helped Britain become the preeminent metropole in phase 3. Its mainland neighbors readily adopted Britain’s advances in maritime (and overland) transport, giving western Europe as a whole the dramatic technological edge over other regions noted in chapter 5.

A corollary of Britain’s position as the world’s leading sea power was the tendency of its rulers to feel threatened by—and to want to challenge—the leading land-based power of the day. France held the title during the eighteenth century and Napoleon’s reign. Its successor was Russia, which rapidly extended its hold over central and eastern Asia in phase 3. The assertion of British power in the Indian subcontinent can be interpreted in geostrategic terms as a sustained effort to counter advances by these adversaries: the French in phase 1, the Russians in phase 3. Britain’s comparative advantage on the high seas was insufficient in and of itself. Land claims in many parts of the world were needed both to ensure naval supremacy and to compensate for its limits.

Millions more people left the British Isles to take permanent residence in a more dispersed set of territories, over a longer period of time, than residents of any other metropole. English-speaking settlers brought with them the institutions and values of representative government that they enjoyed at home. Strongly disposed to political and religious self-rule, they constituted fragments of the metropole with a high potential to break away from it.²⁸ Over the long run, settlers’ insistence on transferring key features of Britain’s political system to the colonies undermined metropolitan control. In the short run, however, the restless, almost insatiable de­mand by settlers for new land was a powerful expansionist force in its own right. Settlers extended imperial frontiers in bna during phase 1 and in Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Rhodesia during phase 3.

Britain relied on the chartered company mechanism more widely and over a longer time than did Holland. The Virginia Company of London was short-lived (1606-24). But this joint venture of merchant capital and royal authority succeeded in founding, at Jamestown, the New World’s first permanent English-speaking set­tlement. The English East India Company operated as a quasi government over ever-larger areas of India from the 1750s until 1858, when the British government assumed direct control in the aftermath of the Great Mutiny. The Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1670, controlled vast tracts of land in Canada until 1867. Late phase 3 expansion in the Niger Valley, along the East African coast, and in what became Southern and Northern Rhodesia was directed by royally chartered com­panies. Britain is the prime example of sustained collaboration between public and private profit sectors, with the benefits of tactical flexibility and synergistic energy this arrangement yielded. Generous representation of propertied interests in the two houses of Parliament lent itself to the creation and sustenance of a cross-sector coalition.

Britain pioneered mass production of inexpensive, machine-made consumer goods. Its leadership in the first Industrial Revolution had mixed effects, varying over time, on the will of influential economic actors to enlarge the empire. From the early nineteenth century onward British prosperity depended not only on assured access to imported primary products but also on exported manufactures. Hence factory owners joined mercantile and shipping interests in paying close attention to overseas markets. During the early decades of phase 3 British manufactures enjoyed such a competitive edge everywhere that it did not seem necessary for government to provide backup support through territorial claims. Indeed, many in the private profit sector opposed using public funds to acquire new colonies because this would entail higher taxes. But by the 1870s diffusion of industrial technologies to the European mainland and the United States undercut Britain’s competitive edge. And the cumulative capacity of all the industrial powers to generate consumer and capital goods began to exceed world demand. Under these more threatening conditions Britain’s private profit sector looked more favorably on imperialism. Colonies were valued as ensuring the dual access to raw materials and markets required by an industrial economy.²⁹

The British case suggests that while industrialization per se need not generate imperial expansion, rivalry among several simultaneously industrializing countries can easily take the form of a colonial scramble. The world’s first overproduction crisis, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gave powerfill economic impetus to interstate rivalries for new possessions.

Britishers have had unusually diverse religious affiliations. An official Church of England was established in the 1530s in a dramatic break with Rome, yet substan­tial numbers remained Catholic. A variety of dissenting Protestant sects flourished. The small Jewish population was not persecuted. Religious pluralism significantly influenced British imperial expansion, albeit in varying ways depending on the time period. In phase 1 the government permitted non-Anglicans to found colonies over­seas and practice their faith there, provided they acknowledge the authority of Crown and Parliament. This policy encouraged religious minorities to seek a better life for themselves abroad, in the course of which they extended the frontiers of British power. The role of Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, and Catholics in the forma­tion of Britain’s North American colonies is well known.

The faiths most early settlers brought to the New World fostered a sense of separation from—and superiority over—indigenous peoples. Only tangentially were Anglicans, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians interested in converting Amerindians to Christianity. If anything there were persuasive reasons not to do so because converts might have to be treated with the respect due fellow believers. The early settlers wanted a frontier of exclusion, not of inclusion. Uncon­verted Indians fit the stereotype of the savage and, as such, were candidates for extermination and expulsion from land the settlers coveted. John Winthrop ex­pressed a widely held view when he rejoiced that “God hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left voide of inhabitants.”³⁰

In this respect early English Protestantism differed from the strong conver- sionist ethic of the Roman Catholic Church, whose missionary orders were active from the outset in Portuguese, Spanish, and French colonies.³¹

By phase 3, however, British Protestants had become at least as interested in missionary work as western Europe’s Catholics. The new orientation was a product of the evangelical movement that began in the late eighteenth century and crested in the late nineteenth. The movement’s ambitious initial aims included abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, then slavery throughout the British empire.³² After Parlia­ment approved these measures, reformers set an even more far-reaching goal: to transform non-European societies. Of particular interest were sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and Oceania, deemed malleable because many of their inhabitants ad­hered to animist religions, were nonliterate, and employed simple technologies. Their societies were to be transfigured by a civilizing package: conversion to Chris­tianity, formal instruction in European learning, abolition of domestic slavery, en­couragement of cash-crop production, and adoption of a Victorian-era lifestyle.³³ British Catholics likewise offered the world’s benighted souls not just a religion but a religion encased in a way of life. The task was daunting, not least because many of the societies to which missionaries were attracted lay outside the pale of colonial authority.

The work of conversion can proceed on its own. The work of civilizing others, at least as phase 3 British missionaries defined the task, is another matter. Close links between Christianity and commerce—or, in a widely used phrase, between “the Bible and the Plough”³⁴—meant that European trading companies were needed to ex­change peasant-grown cash crops for imported manufactured goods. Abolishing domestic slavery required the use of force against recalcitrant slaveholders and intro­duction of a new legal code. This typically meant replacing indigenous rulers with European ones. The sheer scope of the missionaries’ transformative agenda led them, in short, to press other sectors to help launch a triple assault

British Protestants in phase 3 were extraordinarily effective lobbyists for em­pire. Their most famous missionary, David Livingstone, played a key role in this respect.³⁵ Livingstone’s well-publicized travels greatly increased popular interest in previously unknown parts of the African interior, and his views took antislavery sentiment in a new direction. Whereas abolitionists had earlier attacked Britain and other European powers for complicity in an iniquitous trade, now they began to support Britain’s advance into the heart of Africa to end non-European complicity in the same trade. Livingstone did more than advocate an active diplomatic presence in central Africa. He acted on these beliefs, accepting appointment as British consul in Quelimane, Mozambique, in 1858. Protestant missionaries in Nyasaland, Nigeria, Uganda, and Bechuanaland—and the home-based mission societies sponsoring them—pressed vigorously for government intervention to facilitate the civilizing mission.³⁶

Britain in the latter half of phase 3 provides the clearest instance of a coordi­nated triple assault on non-European peoples. That all three sectors were so actively involved may help explain why Britain emerged from the late nineteenth-century scramble as the premier imperial power. With officials facing insistent appeals from mercantile, financial, and missionary groups to act aggressively overseas, the empire continued to grow even when the home government lacked expansionist plans of its own. The Cambridge University historian J. R. Seeley overstated matters when claim­ing in 1883 that the British Empire grew “in a fit of absence of mind.” If politicians and bureaucrats were looking elsewhere, their absentmindedness was more than compensated for by the close attention nongovernmental actors paid to their coun­try’s imperial role.

Belgium

Belgium represents the classic case of a determined ruler’s impact on foreign policy. King Leopold II (r.1865-1909) became obsessed with acquiring overseas territory. Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan write that the king “had a personal drive so compel­ling that it repelled Cecil Rhodes, who was not an overly squeamish man.”³⁷ Through sponsorship of an international conference on the Congo in 1876 and skillful diplo­macy at the Conference of Berlin, Leopold obtained in the bizarrely misnamed Congo Free State a land almost eighty times larger than Belgium. The Congo was considered the king’s personal property until atrocities committed in his name forced transfer of sovereignty in 1908 to Parliament.

Leopold II parlayed his country’s small size and population into sources of strength by playing upon rivalries within the interstate system. France, Germany, and Britain were more willing to cede jurisdiction over an immense, strategically located territory to the Belgian ruler than to grant one another this privilege. By reducing great-power rivalry in the Congo basin Leopold assisted the rapid Euro­pean takeover of Africa. Like Portugal and Holland before it, Belgium illustrates the role of compensatory imperialism—and the disproportionately large role small states played in projecting European power abroad.

Germany

Germany offers additional evidence that a leader’s ability to utilize competitive features of the interstate system could have major impacts outside the system. Chan­cellor Bismarck’s foreign policy focused principally on power relationships within Europe and only peripherally on the wider world. Bismarck aspired to serve as regional balancer while preventing formation of a coalition of other states to chal­lenge the Second Reich’s growing prominence. His interest in defusing and diverting French revanchiste sentiment following Germany’s acquisition of Alsace and Lor­raine led him to back French expansion abroad. His one brief foray into the imperial arena in 1884-85 was apparently influenced more by domestic and regional political considerations than by any analysis of global trends.

Whatever the motives may have been, the effect of German territorial claims in several parts of Africa in 1884 was to intensify and accelerate rivalry for control of Africa’s coastal areas. Having raised the stakes of competition, Bismarck then took steps to regulate its form by convening the Berlin Conference. States attending this conclave not only not only devised a common set of rules for occupying large por­tions of Africa and Oceania, but also pledged to resolve disputes among themselves through diplomacy. The conference’s routinization of the scramble for territory may be considered Germany’s most important and distinctive imperial contribution.

Italy

The peninsula that eventually became the Italian state played diverse roles over time. As noted in the previous chapter, the Roman Empire created and diffused institu­tions, norms, and ideas that gave cultural coherence and unity to western Europe. It was an inspiration and role model for advocates of multicontinental empire in modern times.

That Italy did not become politically unified until the nineteenth century affected early European expansion in indirect but nonetheless important ways. Ex­perienced mariners like Columbus, Vespucci, Cabot, and Verrazzano abandoned the tiny city-states of their birth and worked instead for rulers of far larger, more powerful states fronting the Atlantic. The Roman Catholic Church was able to gain sway throughout western Europe, as both an actor within countries and a com­paratively autonomous supranational institution. Had Italy been unified in phase i, people elsewhere in Europe might have eyed the Roman Church with suspicion as an agent of the Italian state. Instead, the Church’s association with catholic (that is, universal) goals and its sponsorship of missionary orders operating throughout the world enabled the proselytizing element in Christianity to be harnessed to the politi­cal ambitions of several states, not just one.

When political unification did occur in the 1860s, the new state was able to play a direct role of its own. Last entrant in the competition for colonies, Italy was also the last European power to dispatch armies in search of colonial glory when Benito Mussolini launched the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. The hostile reaction this invasion elicited from many quarters, including other metropoles, showed that actions widely supported by Europeans in phase 3 no longer had moral and emo­tional appeal by phase 4. Attempting to recreate the ethos of a bygone era, Abyssinia’s fascist conquerors played out the final act in the drama of European expansion.

Distinctive features of each metropole influenced the behavior of others through competition or emulation. To note the uniqueness of each imperial power does not undermine the argument that all the metropoles should be seen as constitu­ents of a larger system. One reason for the system’s dynamism was a high level of interaction among units differing among themselves in important respects. These very differences enabled metropoles to learn from the successes and failures of their rivals’ experiments with long-distance rule.