THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUALS

A final twist of the zoom lens allows one to focus on prominent individuals born in Europe who played leading roles in asserting influence and power overseas (table 10.1). Many agents of a metropole’s public sector took advantage of autonomy in the field to take aggressive action not called for—or even expressly forbidden—in their instructions.

When risky initiatives by men on the spot proved successful, imperial inertia quickly set in. Home governments resisted giving up territory acquired in their name, even if without their prior knowledge and consent. Raymond Betts’s assess­ment of French expansion in phase 3 applies to other situations as well: “Most of French imperialism was belated governmental response to activities undertaken far away from Paris by individuals who frequently altered, defied, or simply ignored official policy. That irregular band of self-seekers and noble spirits, who were sol­diers, merchants, explorers and missionaries, marched on to encounter problems that the home government then felt politically compelled to resolve.... The reality of imperialism was in the singular person of the Frenchman who happened to be there.”⁵¹

Some of these individuals sought public acclaim and some tried to avoid it; there were extroverts and intensely private persons; wealth seekers and ascetics; sadists, altruists, and would-be martyrs; men with strong heterosexual drives, mis­ogynists, and latent or active homosexuals. For some an overseas career permitted

TABLE 10.1.

INDIVIDUALS ASSERTING EUROPEAN INFLUENCE AND POWER IN AREAS THAT BECAME COLONIES

NOTES: Individuals are listed in roughly chronological order for phases i and 2 and in alphabetical order for phase 3.

The selection criterion for leaders and agents in the public sector is whether they took initiatives to add to the overall extent of European empires. Not listed are people who engi­neered transfers of existing holdings from one metropole to another. To avoid confusion, the country a monarch ruled is listed after the monarch’s name.

Phases 1 and 2

Public sector

Rulers/leaders/bureaucrats in the metropole:

Prince Henry; John II (Portugal); Isabella (Castile); Charles V (Hapsburg domains/ Spain); Elizabeth I (England); Philip II (Spain); Johan von Oldenbarnevelt; Louis XIV (France); Jean-Baptiste Colbert; Napoleon Bonaparte.

Overseas agents (includes officially sponsored explorers, soldiers, early colonial administrators):

Gil Eannes; Bartolomeu Dias; Christopher Columbus; Vasco da Gama; Amerigo Ves­pucci; Nicolas de Ovando; Afonso d’Albuquerque; Vasco Nufies de Balboa; Hernan Cortis; Ferdinand Magellan; Juan Sebastian de Elcano; Hernando de Soto; Francisco Pizarro; Fran­cisco de Toledo; Jacques Cartier; Samuel de Champlain; Francis Drake; Marquis de Dupleix; James Cook; George Vancouver; Arthur Phillip; Charles Cornwallis; Arthur Wellesley; Mount- stuart Elphinstone.

Agents of scientific organizations:

Joseph Banks; Mungo Park.

Private profit sector

Entrepreneurs (including privateers):

Nuno Tristao; Pierre Radisson; Henry Morgan; John Hawkins; Piet Heyns.

Sponsors or agents of officially chartered companies (includes leaders of company- sponsored settlement communities):

Jan Pieterzoon Coen; Walter Raleigh; Henry Hudson; Prince Rupert; George Carteret; John Smith; John Winthrop; Jan van Riebeeck; Robert Clive; Warren Hastings; Thomas Stam­ford Raffles.

TABLE 10.1.

CONTINUED

Religious sector

High ecclesiastical office; founders or agents of missionary bodies:

Gonzalo Ximenez de Cisneros; Pope Alexander VI; Ignacio Loyola; Francis Xavier; Jean-Jacques Olier; Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency; Eusebio Kino; Junipero Serra; Alexandre de Rhodes; Christian Friedrich Schwartz; William Carey.

Phase 3

Public sector

Rulers/leaders/bureaucrats in the metropole:

Otto von Bismarck; Joseph Chamberlain; Charles X (France); Benjamin Disraeli; Anto­nio Enes; Eugene Etienne; Jules Ferry; Lion Gambetta; Leopold II (Belgium); Lord Salisbury.

Overseas agents (includes officially sponsored explorers, treaty collectors, soldiers, early colonial administrators):

Louis Archinard; Evelyn Baring (Earl Cromer); Heinrich Barth; Pierre Savorgan de­Brazza; Thomas Bugeaud; Louis Faidherbe; Joseph Gallieni; Francois Garnier; Pierre de la Grandiere; Charles Gordon; Harry Johnston; H. H. Kitchener; Henry Lawrence; Frederick Lugard; Louis Hubert Lyautey; Jean-Baptiste Marchand; Gustav Nachtigal; Carl Peters; Freder­ick Sleigh Roberts; Albert Sarraut; Henry Morton Stanley; Lothar von Trotha; Garnet Wolseley.

Agents of scientific organizations:

Richard Burton; John Hanning Speke; Joseph Thomson.

Private profit sector

Entrepreneurs:

Macgregor Laird; Adolf Luderitz; Adolf Woermann.

Sponsors or agents of officially chartered companies:

George Taubman Goldie; Ferdinand deLesseps; William Mackinnon; Cecil Rhodes.

Founder of settler communities:

Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

Religious sector

High ecclesiastical office; founders or agents of missionary bodies:

Francois Coillard; Friedrich Fabri; C. D. Helm; Charles Lavigerie; Robert Laws; David Livingstone; Samuel Marsden; Robert Moffat; Ludwig Nommenson; John Philip; Joseph Shanahan; Mary Slessor; Alfred Tucker; Henry Venn; Henry Williams. escape from the conventions and constraints of their own society or opportunity to start over following a failed early career.

Some nonpsychological generalizations about individuals can be advanced. First, constructing empires was a gendered operation, reserved for men. The only exceptions were women monarchs in phase i—Isabella of Castile and Elizabeth I of England played, in fact, decisive roles—and women sent out by Protestant mission agencies in phase 3—Mary Slessor, for example. The virtual male monopoly in this field is not, however, a feature distinctive of Europe. The same could be said of aggressive behavior throughout human history, whether across political boundaries or within them.

Second, aspects of west European culture and social structure were supportive of individual achievement. The Renaissance and Reformation, albeit in different ways, stressed the value and autonomy of individuals and encouraged each person to realize unmet potential by acting in the here and now. The Judeo-Christian image of a God intervening actively and redemptively in human affairs expressed a model of behavior that disparaged fatalism and passivity. In general, social stratification was sufficiently marked that persons born on the lower end of the scale were acutely aware of the rewards of living at a higher level. Yet relations among classes did not ossify into a caste system, and all three sectors offered opportunities for upward mobility. Unusual personal accomplishments were acknowledged and praised, for example, by statues in public places, commissioned works of art, folktales, biogra­phies, and autobiographies.

Third, overseas achievements of individuals, far from undermining metro­politan sectoral institutions, strengthened them and extended their territorial reach. To be sure, some Europeans went abroad as loners, unconnected to or only nomi­nally supported by a sponsoring agency. Examples include coureurs de bois in the French Canadian interior; privateers like Henry Morgan and Piet Heyns in the Caribbean; explorer/adventurers like Rene Caillie, Richard Burton, Gerhard Rohlfs, and Mary Kingsley; beachcombers on South Sea islands, and James Brooke, founder of a family dynasty in Sarawak. In his final years Livingstone cut himself off from all previous sponsors, ecclesiastical, scientific, and governmental. Archetypal loners immortalized in fiction are Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Dravot in Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. Still, it is striking how frequently able, am­bitious individuals advanced the interests of an institutional sponsor in the course of advancing their personal careers. As noted earlier, Cortes and Pizarro could have seized power in their own names following conquests attributable in large part to their decisive, tactically brilliant leadership. Yet they insisted on portraying them­selves as agents of Emperor Charles V. What at one level was a personal triumph was transmuted into a conquest for the ruler of Spain and the ruler’s domains.

Focusing on individuals thus takes one back to sectors. Europe’s sectoral in­stitutions offered sufficient recognition and reward to individual accomplishments that high achievers were attracted to their ranks. At the same time, ambitious indi­viduals found ways to define personal career goals in ways compatible with advance­ment of larger institutional objectives. It was on the frontiers of empire that the organization man and the rugged individualist turned out to be the same person. Perhaps it was the daunting challenge of creating new organizations in unfamiliar settings that permitted the fusion of these apparently opposite personality types. In any event, the willingness of dynamic individuals to work for organized causes transcending self-interest meant that their labors outlasted their lives. If bold per­sonal initiatives often proved decisive in the formation of overseas empires, the persistent channeling of personal initiatives into European-based institutions goes far to explain the durability of these improbable arrangements.