THE SETTLER POPULATION

Settler communities were in a stronger position than non-Europeans to become autonomous if they chose to do so. Settlers usually outnumbered metropolitans and hence constituted a majority of a territory’s colonizers.

When settlers began to think in nationalist terms they regarded themselves as the nation deserving of self-determination. Except for colonies in which there were two distinct European communities, as in Canada and South Africa, the settler nation was strikingly homogeneous in terms of race, language, and cultural patterns. In Iberian colonies the settler nation was homogeneous in religion as well. Mobiliz­ing settlers to act was thus not nearly as great a challenge as mobilizing a far more diverse colonized population.

Settlers were far better positioned than non-Europeans to gain access to and influence over critical sectoral institutions. There were important cross-national differences in this respect, Spanish American settlers in phases i and 2 possessing less leverage than English-speaking settlers in phases 1 through 4. Nonetheless, if one focuses on the two groups’ common denominators, in the public sector they controlled local government structures and were members of local militia, with the important right, denied ordinary non-Europeans, to carry weapons. Limits to upward mobility within the bureaucracy were set much higher than for non­Europeans. In some colonies settlers became influential insiders in the policy pro­cess.

Settlers were if anything even more active players in the other sectors than in government. They owned productive assets: land for commercial agriculture and ranching as well as slaves when this practice was permitted. They had access to credit from European banks, when comparable lines of credit were unavailable to non­European entrepreneurs. They were sometimes involved in international commerce. Many small and medium enterprises were directly under their control. In colonies where Protestants were dominant, settlers controlled local denominational struc­tures and church-managed educational systems.

The institutional leverage settlers held meant that they did not need to struggle as hard as non-Europeans to infiltrate key colonial structures—to say nothing of having to develop elaborate underground institutions to sabotage these structures. This factor helps explain why settlers led the initial round of independence move­ments while non-European nationalists did not enjoy comparable success until much later.

The puzzle is why settlers remained formally dependent on metropoles for as long as they did. That dependence lasted for roughly 250-300 years in the New World colonies of Spain and Portugal, for more than 150 years for English-speakers in Canada (if we take the Statute of Westminster as the marker of independence for white dominions), for more than 140 years in Massachusetts and Virginia, and for longer than a century in Australia. Why did settlers accept the authority of a distant power for so long when it appears they could have captured the levers of state power and gained independence with relatively little difficulty whenever they wanted?

The principal obstacle to autonomy was not capacity but will.

Such reluctance can be seen with special vividness in Britain’s white dominions during phases 3 and 4. As long as settlers²⁸ in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had authority to manage domestic affairs through imported parliamen­tary institutions, their leaders were unwilling to push for the formal separation from Great Britain that the term “independence” denoted. The Statute of Westminster granted the reality of sovereignty desired by dominion leaders. But these leaders were anxious to play down the significance of the statute. They studiously avoided refer­ences to independence, emphasizing common interests with Great Britain rather than the freedom to go their own way. During the 1920s and 1930s they worked closely with officials in London to design a Commonwealth giving new institutional form to long-standing ties. The unwillingness of Britain’s diaspora communities to announce a formal break with the mother country in 1931 contrasts strikingly with the way independence was celebrated in phase 5.

In both Spanish and British empires the monarchy played a large role in retaining settler loyalties (see chapter 12). Spanish American creoles remained loyal even when the ruling dynasty shifted in the early eighteenth century from one non­Spanish line (Habsburg) to another (Bourbon). On occasion creoles rebelled against policies they did not like, as in Paraguay in 1732—33, New Granada (Venezuela) in 1749, and New Granada (Colombia) in 1781.

British monarchs lacked constitutional authority overseas equivalent to that of Spain’s rulers. And George Ill’s unstable personality did not help him as disputes with the thirteen North American colonies escalated in the 1760s and 1770s. The contrast with phase 3 is striking. During the years when English-speakers in Canada and Australasia might have pressed for autonomy, Queen Victoria became a revered figure at home and abroad. During the final quarter century of her long reign (1837- 1901) the queen saw herself as the living symbol of a vast, unified empire.³⁰ She was perceived that way by millions of her far-flung subjects, of all racial backgrounds.

In phase 4 Parliament’s leaders skillfully transformed the monarchy into the embodiment of British Commonwealth unity. The very institution that in phase 3 represented the metropole’s dominance was redefined to soften the blow of the decline from dominance. At Imperial Conferences held in London during the 1920s dominions were assured that affirmations of loyalty to the Crown would not prevent them from exercising the full panoply of sovereign rights. In a feat of verbal legerde­main, the Balfour Report to the conference in 1926 described the United Kingdom and overseas dominions as “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”³¹ The Crown thus came to symbolize a new relationship among political equals.

Settler dependence on the metropole had practical as well as symbolic advan­tages. Its troops could be called on to suppress internal rebellion and ward off invasion by land or sea. The nature of the threat varied depending on the colony. In Iberian phase 1 New World possessions and Caribbean slave-based plantation colo­nies, where hierarchically arranged racial groups lived in close proximity, rebellion was the principal threat. In bna cross-frontier raids by Indians and the French were the main danger. Strategic concerns were less important for the white dominions. Still, Canadians fearful that an expanding United States would look north as well as west had reason to retain close ties with the world’s greatest naval power.