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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
8. The Colonial State:
Sovereignty Expanded
As we discussed in Chapter 3, the idea of sovereign political space depended on a new way of envisioning the world as a whole, as an infinite, empty space. The globe consisted of an infinite landscape given to men, and secondarily to women, to use to satisfy their needs and realize their purposes and wants. Over about four centuries European states carved this space into empires, jurisdictions, and spheres of influence over which each claimed absolute, sovereign authority. The legitimacy to rule within a territory was bound up with the recognition of that right by other states, who claimed the same sovereign rights over different territories, as well as the right to participate in practices of diplomacy. The existence of territorial states was deeply implicated in the construction of a world order that was economic and cultural as well as political and military. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the development of modern states without taking into account the way European states constructed an interconnected global order by means of conquest, trade, religious conversion, and diplomacy. In this chapter we look at the modern state as it was implicated in the construction of a global grid of imperial possessions. In the next two chapters we turn to the emergence of states within this grid.
European Imperialism
Imperialism refers to the process of “expanding a state’s power and authority by territorial acquisition or by extending political and economic domination and control over other peoples.” 1 European imperialism differs from other historical empires such as the Roman, Chinese, Inca, and Zulu. These empires were not global and their internal dynamics did not construct their world as infinitely expandable. Despite being more decentralized, unplanned, and episodic than these empires, European states claiming sovereignty beyond their borders, individuals greedy for profits, and missionaries seeking souls for the universal Christian commonwealth produced the first global system of contiguous and interconnected empires extending across oceans and continents. The planet was thus enclosed in a grid of European colonial possessions. Very few portions of the non-European areas of the globe escaped European imperialism. Huge swaths of territory, all of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, most of Africa and the Middle East, and portions of Asia were incorporated within the European imperial system. Those areas that escaped direct European hegemony—China, Persia (Iran), Japan, Korea, Siam (Thailand), and Abyssinia (Ethiopia)—were eventually reconstructed by indigenous elites using the state as it had emerged in Europe as the basic model and incorporated into the globalizing system of nation-states largely on European terms.
Typically, discussion of European imperialism begins with the voyages of discovery (1400–1600) by Europeans along the coast of North Africa, out into the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. Actually, European expansion began much earlier. It is important to recognize that expansion overseas was essentially a continuation of internal expansion, which began with Charlemagne’s conquests.
The feudal politico-military practice of governing, which was discussed in Part 1, was spread by conquest and dynastic marriage from the Frankish core of Europe to the peripheries of the continent and to the British Isles. The Normans conquered and colonized England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and southern Italy as well as the island of Sicily. Burgundian knights were a major force in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Teutonic Knights colonized Prussia after which they conquered and converted the Livonians. These conquests resulted in the political homogenization of Europe around feudal institutions and were not the creation of patterns of regional subordination and dependence associated with modern imperialism. In other words, Frankish culture and politico-military governing practices were spread by individual knights who replicated feudal institutions as they conquered new parts of Europe. Thus, internal European expansion took place by a process of individualized “cellular multiplication” rather than according to an overall imperial plan organized and carried out by a centralized state. 2
The primary reason for the internal expansion of Frankish politico- military practices was land. The knights who conquered the peripheries of Europe were usually second and third sons who were forced to find their own land in distant regions because the eldest son had, according to the law of primogeniture, inherited the family fief. A general scarcity of fiefs and an overpopulation of warrior-knights developed in the core of Europe during the eleventh century and sparked a scramble for new hereditary fiefs in areas of Europe not yet touched by feudalism. Thus, the rise of a class of fiefless knights created expansionary pressures in the original Frankish core, which resulted in the spread of feudal institutions to the peripheries of Europe. 3
Such expansionary pressures, combined with religious fanaticism and the desire for booty and trade, resulted in Europe’s first attempt at external expansion, the Crusades. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries European armies, at the instigation of various popes, attacked the Muslim peoples of the “Holy Land” in order to establish a Christian kingdom in Palestine. A Crusader state, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was divided into four feudal principalities (Jerusalem, Edessa, Tripoli, and Antioch), was established and existed for about 200 years (1099–1291). It was protected by the crusading military order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem ( Hospitallers ), which was created in 1099 after the First Crusade; the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon ( Templars ), which was organized in 1118 to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem; and the Knights of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Teutons in Jerusalem ( Teutonic Knights ), which, after the failure of the Crusades, was transferred to the eastern frontier of Prussia. Palestine was eventually reconquered by Muslim armies led by Saladin (1138–1193), the great Muslim ruler who had unified Egypt and Syria in 1187.
The Crusades, and the religious differences they reinforced, helped to give rise to an increasingly European cultural identity that understood the world as divided between Christian and non-Christian civilizations, cultures, and religions. This imaginary was reinforced by the rise of the Ottoman Turks, Muslims who overthrew the Byzantine Empire in 1453. As one historian says:
From the Renaissance onwards, indeed, European political thinkers in the age of Absolutism repeatedly sought to define the character of their own world by opposition with that of the Turkish order, so close and yet so remote from it; none of them reduced the distance simply or mainly to one of religion. 4
The voyages of discovery, then, can be seen as Europe’s second external expansion. It was motivated by the same goal as was the internal expansion two centuries earlier, more land. By the fifteenth century, European agricultural production had reached its maximum output, given the level of technology and arable land available. At the same time, the advent of large standing armies, brought about by the military revolution discussed in Chapter 3, sharply increased the revenue requirements of medieval monarchs. More land, which was at the time the primary source of wealth, was needed to expand agricultural production in order to increase revenue. 5
The emergent modern states, each with its own economic base and centralized political institutions, were the chief vehicles for Europe’s second external expansion. Unlike China, where a single politico-military authority prevailed over the entire empire, limiting Chinese expansionism, no such authority existed in Europe. But this did not lessen the impact or culturally specific character of European imperialism. European states, although sovereign entities, were linked through an interlocking set of economic, political, and cultural relations. This situation was historically unique and engendered a vast global quest among rival European protostates for political, economic, and military power. This quest, which had been confined to the European continent, began to spill over into the oceanic sphere in the early fifteenth century. The result was the European hegemonization of the globe and the replication of the state through colonization. 6
Before European Hegemony
Before discussing Europe’s second expansion in more detail, we need to discuss briefly the global economic situation before European hegemony.
Europe, after a period of isolation following the disappearance of the Roman Empire, had gradually become integrated into an economic system of exchange that stretched across Eurasia from northeastern Europe to China. This economic system involved merchants, traders, and producers operating from key cities who exchanged agricultural goods (mainly spices) and manufactures (mainly silk cloth and other textiles). During the Middle Ages, Europe was the least developed of the regions of the Eurasian world economy and China the most advanced. Neither Europe nor China was hegemonic over the other. Although linked together by sea lanes and overland caravan routes, Europe and China were distinct from each other in terms of language, religion, and culture. This trading system was composed of three major commercial regions: Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. The Americas, the Pacific Islands, Japan, and the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand) existed independently of this system. 7
Western Europe formed a region bound together by three trading networks, each with its own center. The first was the Champagne fairs, which were held in the east-central French cities of Lagny, Provins, Troyes, and Bar-sur-Aube. These cities had year-round commodities markets established by local counts who wanted to make profits and become independent of their overlords. They rented halls, stalls, and stables to traders for whom they provided protection and safe conduct. Fair guards appointed by the counts policed the fairs, heard complaints, enforced contracts, collected fines, and punished cheating. Six fairs were held annually. They started in one city and moved to another, in a predictable circuit, according to religious feast days.
The second network was in Flanders, where favorable soils and terrain for sheep-raising, and an ancient tradition of weaving, resulted in Europe’s first major industry: woven woolen textiles. Ghent and Bruges were the two key commercial and financial centers of this network. The third was northern Italy, which linked the western European region to the rest of the world trading system through the port cities of Genoa, commanding the western Mediterranean, and Venice, commanding the eastern Mediterranean. These port cities were linked to the Champagne fairs by overland routes and to the Middle East through the Kingdom of Jerusalem in Palestine. Shipping and shipbuilding had become major industries in these cities, especially Venice, which built ships to carry Crusaders and their equipment to the Holy Land. Long-distance trade between Flanders and the Italian port cities was dominated by Italians, who introduced banking, credit, and bookkeeping into Europe. The major items of trade were spices and silks from the Far East. 8
The Middle East was the core of the Eurasian economy in the thirteenth century. It connected the western European region to China by way of three routes. A northern route, called the Silk Road, went eastward from the Kingdom of Jerusalem via Constantinople across the Asian landmass to China. A central route connected the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean via Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. A southern route linked Alexandria and Cairo to the Red Sea, which was linked to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. 9
The Indian Ocean formed a region between Western Europe and the Far East that was divided into two sailing circuits. In the western portion, Muslim shipowners sailed from the Arabian Peninsula to the Malabar Coast (the southwest coast of India). The eastern portion was dominated by Hindu shipowners who sailed from the Malabar Coast to the Straits of Malacca. These two circuits were produced by the natural forces of the monsoons, which created two sailing seasons, west to east in the spring and summer, east to west in the autumn and winter. Arab traders were the intermediaries between the western Mediterranean and India, and Indian traders were the intermediaries between India and the Straits of Malacca. Trade beyond the Straits of Malacca was dominated by Chinese shipowners. The Malabar Coast was the central exchange point where the western European region via the Middle East and the Far Eastern region via the Straits of Malacca converged. 10 When the three routes through the Middle East fell under the control of the Ottoman Turks, Europeans began to seek a new route to India.
Europe’s Second Overseas Expansion
Europe’s second overseas expansion succeeded because of political and technological developments as well as the religious zeal, economic greed, and adventurism with which it was pursued. Advances in maritime technology, especially the magnetic compass, the astrolabe (an instrument for observing the position of celestial bodies), and portolans (navigation charts), enabled sea captains to find their positions in open ocean and encouraged voyages out of the sight of land. The oared galleys of Roman design, which had evolved in the relatively placid waters of the Mediterranean, were replaced by the more maneuverable lateen-rigged caravels, which had greater cargo capacity and could sail efficiently across expanses of rough, open ocean, with or against the wind. 11
These new maritime technologies shifted the geographical locus of power and economic accumulation from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and to the general exploitation of the wealth of Asia and the Americas. They opened vast new opportunities for the accumulation of wealth and expansion of the European state’s power in both its domestic and international spaces. Increasingly, European religious, political, and cultural practices and institutions, such as Christianity, private property, and the territorial state, appeared as hallmarks of a universal human development, the markers of advanced civilization. By spreading their institutions and practices throughout the world, Europeans constituted and maintained a sense of their own superiority over peoples outside Europe, whom they considered “primitive” and “savage.”
The first thrusts outward from Europe were made by the Genoese, who sailed out of the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic Ocean in order to establish a sea route from Genoa to Flanders. The Genoese were eventually successful in diverting the overland trade between northern Italy and Flanders onto their own ships and thus ruined the economic viability of the Champagne fairs, which went into economic decline and closed.
In the fifteenth century, the Genoese were replaced by the Portuguese and Castilians. Of the two, the Portuguese led the way owing to their geostrategic location on the southern edge of the European landmass, their experience in long-distance maritime trade, and their strong and centralized protostate. 12 The first Portuguese discoveries were the Madeira Islands in 1419 by Gonçalves Zarco, and the Azores Archipelago in 1427 by Diogo de Silves. Both island groups, uninhabited when they were discovered, were quickly colonized. Madeira, initially a source of timber, later became one of Europe’s chief sources of refined sugar. These discoveries and the profitable trade in sugar that they created encouraged additional voyages into the Atlantic and along the western coast of Africa. After 1460 the pace of exploration slowed, resuming only after the pope settled a conflict between the Portuguese and the Castilian crowns over which monarchy had the right to explore Africa and the Atlantic. The Treaty of Alcoçaves (1479), which settled the dispute, gave the Portuguese a monopoly of fishing, trade, and exploration along the coast of Africa and allowed the Castilians to keep the Canary Islands.
The Portuguese, therefore, devised a plan for opening a sea route to India, with the crown taking 20 percent (the Royal Fifth) of the profits of these explorations, which it conducted in secret in order to safeguard Portugal’s lead in maritime technology and geographical knowledge. In 1483 Diogo Cão discovered the Congo River and sailed south as far as 22 degrees south latitude. In 1487 Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In 1497 Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) left Lisbon with a large fleet and sailed up the east coast of Africa to Mombassa, where he secured the services of an Arab pilot who guided him across the Indian Ocean to the Malabar coast of India in 1498, thereby circumventing the Ottoman Turks.
Following da Gama’s voyage, the Portuguese sent large fleets to Asia on a regular basis. One of these, led by Pedro Álvares Cabral (1468–1520), accidentally discovered Brazil in 1500. Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), who was made viceroy of India in 1509, extended Portuguese hegemony by defeating the Turks, Malays, and Moghuls. He captured the port cities of Ormuz and Muscat from the Arabs and built forts in Sumatra, Timor, the Malaccas, and Ceylon. His captains sailed to the mouth of the Mekong River in Vietnam and arrived on the coast of China at Canton, and then Japan, in 1542. Portugal had established its hegemony in Asia and control of the entire spice trade to Europe.
When Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), sailing for Spain, landed in Lisbon in 1493, the Portuguese king laid claim to his discoveries in the Americas, arguing that they were his under the terms of the Treaty of Alcoçaves. The Spanish appealed to the pope, who drew an imaginary line on the globe 100 leagues (about 1,000 miles) west of the Azores and granted to Spain all discoveries west of that line and to Portugal all discoveries east of it. The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494 and allowed Portugal to maintain control of the sea route around Africa to India and to keep Brazil.
Columbus made several additional voyages to the “New World,” during which he found no gold or spices. Other Europeans followed, such as the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), who explored the southern coast of South America to Patagonia; the Castilian Vasco Nuñez Balbo a (1475–1519), who crossed the isthmus at Panama and sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513; and the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521), who in 1519 found the strait at the southern tip of South America that now bears his name and sailed up the west coast and into the Pacific and to the Philippine Islands. Magellan’s voyage, completed by one of his captains, was the first to circumnavigate the globe and, in the process, found the westward sea route to India sought by Columbus. However, Magellan’s strait was never used as a regular channel of trade with the East.
Globalizing European International Society
The expansion of European protostates spread European society throughout the world. The processes through which European political, economic, and cultural norms and practices became the norms for all states and peoples made those states into what they became, about which we will say more in Chapter 10.
By the hegemony of European society, we mean not only the dominance of specific actors or institutions, but the routinization of specific sets of social relations through which peoples inside and outside Europe were integrated into the European imperial system. The principles of these social relations were economic (private property and capitalism), political (rule associated with the modern state, especially pressures of militarization), and cultural (Christianity and humanism). The specific processes of European expansion and the encounters with non-European peoples were multilayered and multifaceted experiences that fundamentally changed both conqueror and conquered alike.
Economic gain, military and diplomatic competition, and religious mission all provided important motives for the expansion of early European protostates. It is important to remember that developments inside and outside Europe were closely connected. English and Dutch advances in weaving produced cloth not only for home markets but for foreign trade; the development of credit instruments in Venice and other Italian port cities was motivated by foreign trade, as were numerous important technologies. Sovereignty inside became dependent upon conquests outside; that is, the ability to realize the sovereign identity European states claimed for themselves came to depend upon the colonial possessions over which they exercised control.
Sovereignty inside European states, then, became dependent upon denying sovereignty to other peoples. Imaginaries of non-European peoples were constructed (through travel literature, for example), which justified treating non-Europeans as not worthy of sovereignty. It is important to recognize that these imaginaries constructed what was meant to be “European” as well, marginalizing groups such as Gypsies, Jews, and Muslims living in Europe. Europeans considered non-European peoples either as inferior by nature or as primitive and unable to take on the responsibilities of sovereignty. What Europeans did not question was the universality of state sovereignty and their right to spread it throughout the world. They generally failed to recognize, however, that this portended violence toward peoples within as well as outside Europe. European lawyers and statesmen came to understand the international society being created as a global civitas, a global city or “republic of all mankind.” 13
The dualistic political and moral structure generated by the way European statesmen, lawyers, and clergy came to imagine non-European “others” can be seen in slavery. Long after slavery was outlawed in Europe, European states continued to promote it in their colonies and supported it in world trade. Even after the slave trade was outlawed, colonial states continued to use strategies not unlike slavery (such as forced labor), which, too, were unacceptable in their home states. 14 Europeans used coercive labor discipline in their colonies long after such practices had generally disappeared in Europe, having been replaced by wage labor.
In large part, the reasons for continuing forced labor were economic. Slavery and other directly coercive labor regimes produced extremely large profits. These practices also persisted and were legitimated, even when they were not so economically profitable, in part, for geopolitical reasons, especially the military-political competition among European states. Colonies came to be regarded by European states as pawns in strategic and economic competition with other European states. Therefore, keeping order and creating allies among colonized peoples led to treatment of those peoples that would be unacceptable toward Europeans.
By the nineteenth century, colonialism also took on a certain psychology in which the colonies were portrayed and treated according to paternalistic attitudes and practices. Regularly, native peoples were associated simultaneously with paternalistic possession and with the feminine in European culture. Colonized peoples were often seen as children in need of the domination of the colonial master. One scholar has shown how, in India, the experience of colonialism masculinized the subcontinent’s traditional culture by accentuating the character traits, attitudes, and practices associated with male dominance over women that had been secondary within traditional India. 15 In this paternalistic psychology, race and gender overlaid each other.
The dualistic structure created by the hegemony of European society can also be seen in diplomacy. As we discussed in earlier chapters, the institutions of modern diplomacy first emerged primarily in the struggles over Italy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when institutions of diplomacy developed as a strategy to gain information and influence about the motives and movements of rival city-states and potential allies. The papacy was the initial object of such strategies, given its central position in the network of Italian city-states, over which Spain, France, and the Habsburg Empire (later the Austro-Hungarian Empire) struggled during this period. As a result of this struggle, European states created the institutions of resident embassies, extraterritoriality, and congresses of states to produce treaties. These became the central institutions of modern diplomacy among states.
But diplomatic practices with regard to non-European peoples emerged in a somewhat different way and created similar tensions with the system of diplomacy as had developed in Europe. First, Europeans did not initially understand the languages of the peoples they encountered. Also, because non-European peoples did not organize their societies around the principles of private property, especially with respect to land, misunderstandings and miscommunication frequently occurred. Usually in such cases, either Europeans assumed that indigenous peoples understood what the Europeans meant by treaties and agreements (assuming that certain behaviors by the natives constituted agreement with the Europeans on their terms), or they simply imposed their “agreements” on them. This can be seen in the way Europeans went about giving their discoveries European names as a way of taking possession of them. 16
The dualism in European-created global order is exemplified in an early weapon of mass killing, the machine gun. 17 Invented during the nineteenth century, the machine gun seemed to European militaries to violate all the norms of war (as the crossbow had been considered during the Middle Ages), which they still considered a noble enterprise in which soldiers were to conduct themselves honorably and to demonstrate their valor on the battlefield. The machine gun was simply a weapon for mass slaughter, and many types of machine guns were invented. In 1862, the American Richard Jordan Gatling (1818–1903) patented a machine gun that could reliably fire 200 rounds per minute. Although not used in the American Civil War, the Gatling Gun was used extensively against Native Americans during the conquest and colonization of the West by the American state. During the 1860s and 1870s various European states and the Ottoman Empire bought Gatling Guns and used them, together with various types of machine guns invented by others, in their colonies, especially in Africa. Here racism intersected with the other motifs of colonialism. It is helpful to quote from one history of the machine gun in Africa:
Whatever the general causes, or the personal motives of the individual colonizers, the whole ethos of the imperialist drive was predicated upon racialism. Attitudes to the Africans varied from patronizing paternalism to contempt and outright hatred, but all assumed that the white man was inherently superior to the black. . . . Clearly, working from such a theory of human development, it was easy, even natural, to go on to regard superior military technology as a God-given gift for the suppression of these inferior races. 18
Emergence of European Colonial Empires
In this section we review cases of expansion by specific European states into the non-European world, linking hitherto isolated peoples and areas within a grid of political, economic, and cultural relations. We then conclude the chapter with a discussion of the institutions of these colonial states as extensions of European territorial sovereigns.
In the Americas, the Spanish organized a series of conquests of native peoples and empires into an imperial administrative system. Balboa, the first conquistador (conqueror), achieved hegemony over the indigenous Americans of the isthmus by military force, terror, and diplomacy. Hernando Cortéz (1485–1547) conquered the Aztecs of Mexico by military force and diplomacy (1519–1521), establishing his capital at Mexico City, the former Aztec capital. Francisco Pizarro (1475–1541) defeated the Incas in 1532 and established his capital in Lima, not Cuzco, the Inca capital, which was too high in the Andes for Europeans to live comfortably. Hernando de Soto (1500–1542) explored and conquered the American Southeast (Florida), and Juan V´squez de Coronado (1525?–1565) explored and conquered the American Southwest. Conquests were aided by the spread of epidemic diseases carried by the European conquerors. Small pox, measles, influenza, and typhus wiped out 95 percent of many Native American populations because they had no natural immunities to such diseases. 19
In addition to having established themselves on land, the Spanish were able to create a monopoly of seaborne trade between the Americas and Europe, much as the Portuguese had done between Portugal and India. These trade monopolies were eventually challenged by other European protostates during the latter part of the sixteenth century. England, under Elizabeth I, tried to break the Spanish monopoly but was unsuccessful. In 1604 the English signed a peace treaty with Spain (the Treaty of London ) that recognized Spain’s right to dominate the Caribbean trade in exchange for England’s right to colonize coastal areas of North America. Although the eastern seaboard of North America had been originally explored in 1534 by a Genoese, Giovanni de Verrazzano (1485?–1528), and a Breton, Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), in 1536, both of whom were sailing for the king of France, the area was colonized by the Dutch and the English in the 1600s. Settlement was encouraged by the English because it was the only way to prevent the Spanish from challenging their claims. The English were able to dislodge the Dutch from the city of New Amsterdam (renamed New York) and to establish a string of settlements along the coast. 20
In the Far East, the seaborne empire established by the Portuguese was challenged by the Dutch, who sought to create an alternative trade in spices by controlling both the supply and the shipping. The Dutch began to acquire territory in the East Indies (especially on the island of Java) and founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, which functioned as a way station for Dutch ships involved in the spice trade. The Dutch established a direct trade, controlling the source and carrying the spices to Europe by sailing a southerly route around the Cape of Good Hope. Gradually, the Dutch replaced the Portuguese and the spice trade shifted from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the area around the Straits of Malacca. A Dutch captain, Abel Tasman (1603?–1659), charted New Zealand and Australia in 1642–1643. By the early seventeenth century the Dutch had become, arguably, the dominant colonial power on the globe in part by using their advanced capitalist financial institutions. 21
In Brazil the Dutch challenged the Portuguese-controlled market for Brazilwood (which was used for dying cloth) and sugar, which had been brought by the Portuguese from Madeira. In 1623, the Dutch invaded Brazil and captured Bahia; in 1643 they occupied Pernambuco. However, in 1645, Portuguese settlers rebelled against the Dutch and had expelled them by 1654. 22
Despite having had its coast explored very early by Europeans, Africa remained relatively isolated from the emerging global trading system until the 1800s. Large indigenous African empires, small states, and smaller stateless societies existed side by side and interacted with one another. Like the indigenous systems in the Americas, these societies had their own histories of war, conquest, and peaceful coexistence. For several hundred years after the beginning of Europe’s second external expansion, Europeans and Africans had contact with each other only along the coasts. The Portuguese established trading forts at various places, where they traded for gold and slaves. Africa was first integrated into the global order when the demand for labor increased dramatically in the Americas, where labor-intensive crops such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco were being grown on ever-expanding plantations. In the 1780s, the decade when the greatest number of slaves were taken from Africa, 88,000 Africans per year were carried across the Atlantic. One-half of these went to the Caribbean, one-third to Brazil, and the remainder to the English colonies in North America. 23 Many thousands perished en route because of the horrible conditions under which slaves were transported.
During the 1800s European adventurers, Christian missionaries, and explorers began to penetrate the interior of Africa. Africa’s isolation was finally ended in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when global rivalries among the major European states led to the penetration, pacification, and occupation of the African hinterland. A dispute between Portugal and the king of Belgium over ownership of the mouth of the Congo River led to a conference in Berlin in 1884–1885, known as the Berlin Conference, at which France, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Italy presented colonial claims. They negotiated among themselves and, without regard to the wishes of Africans or knowledge about boundaries among African peoples, partitioned Africa among the attending states. The boundaries they mapped at the Berlin Conference became the boundaries of their colonial possessions in Africa. The doctrine of effective occupation, advanced at the conference, impelled what has come to be called the “scramble for Africa.” Europeans, with the aid of military force, began to penetrate the interior in order to conquer and pacify African peoples; thus they could effectively occupy their colonial claims. Conquest was quickly followed by occupation and the establishment of colonial administration. Within a couple of decades, all of Africa was enclosed within a colonial grid.
In addition to Africa and the Western Hemisphere, other parts of the globe were enclosed within the grid of European imperial domination. As the Portuguese were displaced from the Straits of Malacca and Sundra by the Dutch, the East Indies became a Dutch colony. The instrument of colonization was the Dutch East India Company, which built forts at various places. The company used military means to take and hold several of the archipelago’s islands and to dominate the Straits of Malacca. The company’s rule was consolidated over Java. In the 1800s the Dutch government began to penetrate the interior of the islands, then known as the Netherlands Indies. The process of enclosure was complete by 1909. Plantations were laid out and planted with coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco, indigo, cinnamon, and cotton. 24
British and French rivalries in Asia and southeast Asia brought about the enclosure of other areas. The British East India Company occupied India in 1700 and controlled it until 1857, the year of the Sepoy Rebellion, when the British government took it over from the company. Threats from the French encouraged the British to invent a pretext to start a war with the king of Burma in order to occupy his kingdom; the occupation was completed in 1852. The Dutch, who had replaced the Portuguese in Malaya, were themselves replaced by the British; the most important place occupied was Singapore, an island at the tip of the Malayan Peninsula that was easy to defend and gives easy access to the Straits of Malacca. Malaya was initially administered by the East India Company, and later by the British India Office. The French conquest of Vietnam began in 1857, with Saigon becoming the site of the new colonial government after its capture in 1859. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were ruled as French Indochina. The Philippines, long a colony of Spain, became a colony of the United States after Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898–1899). 25
China and Japan were never directly colonized by the European states. Japan was able to isolate itself from direct foreign control, about which we will have more to say in Chapter 10. China, on the other hand, although not occupied, was forced to conclude a number of treaties, known as the Unequal Treaties, which effectively denied Chinese sovereignty by allowing the major European states to establish spheres of influence over large sections of Chinese territory along the southern coast.
The United States, itself the creation of British imperialism, expanded its sovereignty westward, enclosing and destroying indigenous native peoples in the process. In 1803 it bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon and in 1819 acquired Florida from Spain. The Republic of Texas, which had broken away from Mexico, was admitted to the Union in 1845. During the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the United States seized what is now the American Southwest and California. After the Civil War, the United States bought Alaska from Russia, and after the Spanish-American War in 1898 it acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The United States also seized Hawaii, Guam, and other Pacific islands.
The Middle East was incorporated into the global order after World War I, when it was the empire of the Ottoman Turks. At its height in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire included the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa, and parts of southern Russia and Ukraine. After World War I, the empire, which had fought on the German side, was replaced by the Turkish Republic in 1923, and its Middle Eastern provinces were given to France and Britain to administer under League of Nations mandates.
Colonial Rule
The Portuguese empire took shape before ideas about colonial rule were well developed. European protostates did not have well-developed plans for ruling and managing colonial possessions. They expanded their sovereignty by extending their principles and practices of administration, which were based on their conceptions of colonies as their private property, and on their imaginary of the non-European peoples they took it upon themselves to rule.
Portuguese sovereignty penetrated inland only in Brazil, where Portugal established 15 captaincies ; these were ruled by individuals who received hereditary delegation of royal jurisdiction and a percentage of the royal tithes and rents in return for securing and settling horizontal strips extending indefinitely inland from the coast. In the rest of their empire, the Portuguese were content to occupy outposts on the coasts. They established a viceroyalty at Goa from which they extended a network of outposts throughout the Indian Ocean and Straits of Malacca. It was from such coastal settlements that Portugal was able to dominate the sailing routes of the Indian Ocean until challenged by the Dutch.
The Spanish, on the other hand, expanded their sovereignty by constructing a territorial rather than maritime empire. Unlike the Portuguese, who were content to confine themselves to the coasts, the Spanish sought to impose themselves on land and people. Once the exploration and conquest of the Americas were completed, Spain set up a centralized administrative structure. Spain’s absolutist governing practices were then transferred to Spanish possessions in the Americas. The empire in the Americas was initially divided into two viceroyalties, New Spain (Mexico) and New Castile (Peru); each was headed by a viceroy, who ruled in the king’s name. Viceroys, who were without exception born in Spain, were instructed to enforce colonial law, maintain order, and collect revenue. They were assisted by advisory and judicial bodies known as audiencias. Audiencias were established at Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Panama, Lima, Guatemala, New Galicia, and Bogotá. They were further subdivided into territorial units administered by an alcalde, who handled legal matters, and a corregidor, who executed colonial law and collected taxes. 26
The Spanish system was highly centralized, and little colonial self-government was allowed. All important decisions were made in Madrid. The wealth produced by the colonies in the Americas encouraged Spanish absolutism at home because it gave the crown an independent source of income that allowed the king to ignore his own estates ( cortes ) when money was needed to pay for his armies and wars.
The expansion of English sovereignty took a different form. English possessions along the eastern seaboard of North America were of three types: crown colonies, which were owned by the king and governed by an appointed governor; property colonies owned by individuals such as Lord Baltimore and William Penn, who appointed their own governors and high officials; and charter colonies owned by joint-stock companies, which elected their own governors and officials. Eventually, the crown made all the English colonies in North America into crown colonies; their governors and high officials were appointed by the king. These colonies were then grouped together under a governor-general. The English colonies were the only colonies in the Americas where locally elected assemblies played a significant part in the governance of the colony. This was a result of Parliament’s new power as a governing institution in England. 27
The joint-stock company was a common method of English and Dutch imperial conquest and administration. Privately owned mercantile companies, such as the British East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, the Royal Africa Company, and the Dutch East India Company, were granted full sovereign powers. In addition to the monopoly on trade in a given region or commodity, these companies were allowed to raise armies, build forts, make treaties, wage war, govern, and coin money. They fought wars against non-European native peoples in the name of trade. The Dutch East India Company, from its birth in 1602, had as its objective the capture of the spice trade in nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and cinnamon. It later fought a five-year war in the Malaccas in order to suppress a revolt of local people that had broken out in 1649 over the Dutch policy of uprooting trees to control the production of cloves. Eventually, the Dutch East India Company, from its stronghold in Djakarta, acquired territorial control throughout the entire East Indies archipelago. In effect the company became a colonial state. The British East India Company took Bengal by military force in 1764. It fought four wars with the rulers of Mysore in 1769, 1780, 1790, and 1799, who after their defeat became dependent on the company. After three wars between 1775 and 1817, the company established its rule over Maranthas. Nepal was conquered between 1814 and 1816. The company took the Punjab and Burma in the Anglo-Sikh wars (1848–1852) and the Anglo-Burmese wars (1824–1826), respectively. By the 1830s practically all of India was under the direct control of the British East India Company. 28
Although Portugal, Spain, and France used mercantile companies to further their imperial ambitions, the companies chartered by these states were for all intents and purposes state-run enterprises, not joint-stock companies organized by private commercial interests. The French crown forced its merchants, bankers, and financiers to invest in its various East India companies. Eventually, all such companies were taken over by the state and their colonial holdings were integrated into the administrative structure of the imperial European state. 29
In Africa colonial rule reached its apogee. By the time of the scramble for Africa, the doctrines of colonial administration of non-European peoples had been developing for 500 years. At the end of the nineteenth century, the European state had acquired the administrative capacity to extract resources and coerce its subjects well beyond that of the early modern protostates, which had carried out the initial phases of European expansion. Thus, the subjugation of Africans was more systematic and exploitive than the subjugation of other peoples had been.
By the end of the nineteenth century there existed basic premises about how colonial states should be organized and administered; these were ruthlessly applied to Africa. The first was effective occupation. This premise, which originated in the sixteenth century (when the English and French were challenging Spanish and Portuguese imperial claims in the West Indies based solely on the doctrine of “discovery,” and reaffirmed at the Berlin Conference), required that a colonial claim be occupied physically in order for the claim to be valid. Effective occupation extended the principle of sovereign territoriality to the colonies. The second was economic self-sufficiency. This premise required the colony to generate enough revenue to pay the costs of its administration and development. The third premise was metropolitan advantage ; colonies always had to be of some use to the European imperial state, be it economic or political. The fourth was beneficence. It was assumed that the colonial state was beneficial for the subjugated African peoples within it. This assumption was based on the universal belief that colonialism, no matter how oppressive, was better than the “savagery” and “barbarism” of African peoples. The fifth premise was permanence ; that is, it was assumed that the colonial state would last forever. 30
The Partition of Africa
Reprinted by permission of Waveland Press, Inc.
From Robert W. July, A History of the African People, 5th ed.
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.,1998).
All rights reserved.
Two methods of colonial administration developed in Africa. One was indirect rule, which used existing African rulers to administer the colony, especially in places where there was a clear pattern of African hierarchical authority that acquiesced to European conquest and made no demands. Indirect rule was favored by the British, who saw it as an inexpensive way to administer their colonies, and a means to avoid the social and political disruption that would be caused if indigenous institutions were destroyed. 31
The other method of colonial administration was direct rule, which removed existing African rulers and substituted European administrators in their stead or made the African chief a part of the colonial administrative hierarchy. This method was favored by the other colonial powers, especially France, which minimized the importance of existing African institutions and attempted to incorporate local chiefs into the administrative apparatus. The incorporation of indigenous chiefs and the minimalization of existing African institutions was motivated by the more “positive” imperial mission of the colonial powers who employed direct rule. The French, Italians, Portuguese, Belgians, Spanish, and Germans maintained the fiction that their colonies were an integral part of their states. This positive imperial mission was mostly favored by the French, who sought to create Black Frenchmen out of their African colonial subjects and never contemplated giving them independence. 32
Whether ruled indirectly or directly, the most important premise of colonial rule in Africa was economic self-sufficiency. Because indigenous African economies were not monetarized, the labor of African peoples had to be converted into cash in order to meet the financial needs of the colony. This was done by forcing Africans into the money sector of the colonial economy created by the imperial power.
Africans were forced into the money sector in several ways. First, a tax, which had to be paid in cash, was levied on each hut or individual. In order to earn the money to pay hut or head taxes, Africans had to work for a period of time in the European sector of the colonial economy. Such taxes, which became routine in the 1920s throughout Africa, were the chief source of colonial revenue and increased in amounts as more and more Africans were incorporated into the money economy. Second, Africans were forced into work gangs to build colonial outposts, roads, bridges, and railroads, and into portage gangs to carry supplies. The colonial authorities justified such forced labor by arguing that work was an ennobling obligation that every able-bodied African male had to fulfill. Third, colonial officials forced Africans to grow cash crops, such as peanuts, cotton, coffee, tea, and palm oil, on their own land or by forcing them to work on European-owned plantations that grew such crops. Thus, African farmers were coerced into devoting a certain amount of their own land and labor to the raising of cash crops for export, often to the detriment of the production of food for themselves, a pattern that continues today throughout the world economy. 33
Summary
In this chapter we addressed the construction of a global grid of European colonial possessions created though conquest and colonization. European imperialism lacked a central, directing authority, as was the case for previous empires. European imperialism was driven by economic, political, and cultural forces, which were universalizing. In the next two chapters we discuss how this interlocking global grid of European domination constructed new states, and effected the reconstitution of European sovereignty itself.
Endnotes
Note 1: Steven L. Spiegel, World Politics in a New Era (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 185. Back.
Note 2: Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 46-51. Back.
Note 4: Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 397. Back.
Note 5: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), 50-51. Back.
Note 6: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 20 00 (New York: Random House, 1987), 31. Back.
Note 7: Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 33-38. Back.
Note 11: This discussion of early European expansion is based on J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963). Back.
Note 12: For details on Portugal’s expansion, see C. R. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). Back.
Note 13: For a discussion of the language in which early modern international law and political philosophy framed the “global city,” which argues for the appropriateness of the terms republic and city, see Nicholas Onuf, City of Sovereigns: Republican Themes in International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Back.
Note 14: On the British case of forced labor in Kenya, for example, see Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). On the Portuguese, see James Duffy, A Question of Slavery: Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Back.
Note 15: On this overlap of race and gender in European colonialism, see the Indian scholar Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). For an argument that a similar psychology spread to Latin America through twentieth-century mass culture, see Ariel Dorfman, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Back.
Note 16: Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). Back.
Note 17: This paragraph follows John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Back.
Note 19: See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997). Back.
Note 20: J. H. Parry, The Establishment of European Hegemony, 1514–1715, 3d ed., rev. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959). Back.
Note 21: See C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1965). Back.
Note 23: On slavery, see Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans and the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). Back.
Note 24: Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire. Back.
Note 25: This and the ensuing paragraphs follow Spiegel, World Politics in a New Era, 202-208. Back.
Note 26: Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), chap. 5. Back.
Note 27: Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance, 266-270. Back.
Note 28: Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32-41. Back.
Note 30: Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 95-99. Back.
Note 31: Richard Hodder-Williams, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 33-44. Back.
Note 33: Young, The African Colonial State, 125-128. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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