Empires and Colonies

Jonathan Hart

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745655185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Empires and Colonies provides a thoroughgoing and lively exploration of the expansion of the seaborne empires of western Europe from the fifteenth century and how that process of expansion affected the world,
including its successor, the United States.

Whilst providing special attention to Europe, the book is careful to highlight the ambivalence and contradiction of that expansion. The book also illuminates connections between empires and colonies as a theme in history, concentrating on culture while also discussing the rich social, economic and political dimensions of the story.

Furthermore, Empires and Colonies recognizes that whilst a study of the expansion of Europe is an important part of world history, it is not a history of the world per se. The focus on culture is used to assert that areas and peoples
that lack great economic power at any given time also deserve attention. These alternative voices of slaves, indigenous peoples and critics of empire and colonization are an important and compelling element of the book.

Empires and Colonies will be essential reading not only for students of imperial history, but also for anyone interested in the makings of our modern world.

I

First Expansion: 1415–1517

In the early fifteenth century it was not certain that the Iberian or any other western European countries would expand in any significant way or that they would become important contributors to global culture, economics and politics. The first expansion was tentative, halting and unexpected. Matters of expansion moved in different and sometimes opposing directions, so that this spreading out was full of problems, questions and failures. Empires and colonies were not certain, and there was no march to triumph. Within and between the Iberian states, Portugal and Spain, there were tensions, and Europe itself was so often in conflict that to speak of Iberia or Europe as a whole with a single purpose towards imperialism and colonization would deny the ambivalence and contradiction of these states and this continent. There were times when a nation seemed to work together or when Europeans cooperated, but there were more often moments when rivalries meant that Europeans were busy conducting violent campaigns against their own people and against other European states. By the Reformation in 1517, religious tensions and conflicts meant that Europe acted even less in concert.

In 1415, these Europeans began coming into contact with peoples who had less or more technical knowledge. Some peoples considered the Europeans to be barbaric, poor, weak and few. It is also important to remember that while this study is about the expansion of Europe, the continent was also contracting in places. Elsewhere, changes affected religious, political and economic patterns that in turn affected the Europeans. The powerful Tartar dynasty, which had welcomed Europeans and their missionaries and had governed the Chinese empire, also included Mongolia, part of Russia, as well as Turkestan. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Ming dynasty had defeated the Tartar khans. The states in central Asia, either Muslim or Buddhist, did not allow European Christians and the Chinese to continue their trade as they had under the Tartars. In the fifteenth century the Hindu kingdoms in Indo-China and the islands of east Asia were becoming Muslim. In India itself, Muslim states were pressuring Hindu polities. The Ottoman Turks came to dominate other Muslim states in the Near East and took Constantinople, the last remnant of the Roman empire and the capital of the Byzantine empire, in 1453. During the sixteenth century, the Ottomans would take Egypt, Syria, the Balkans and lands along the Danube in the heart of central Europe. Islam was expanding while Christianity was contracting.¹ The expansion of the Iberian powers was a modest counterbalance to this growth of Islamic powers. This is a framework that is worth remembering for the ensuing discussion of European expansion.²

This chapter will begin with Portuguese expansion and move through Columbus and Spain to the Reformation, when religious divisions complicated political and economic rivalries between European states. The power of Portugal and Spain will be the main concerns here, but the role of Italians, who were leaders in Europe until the rise of the Iberian states, and the growth of their northern rivals, England and France, will also be important topics. The rise of Europe and its expansion will be preoccupations in the context of some adjacent empires. Moreover, the role of Europe will be discussed, not with one answer in mind, but as a way of opening up the question for readers as they move through the book. In this period the role of the Catholic Church, even beyond the Reformation (from 1517), is significant and haunts the period and beyond. The Italian states, Portugal and Spain, which dominated the expansion of empire and the establishment of colonies in this period, were all Catholic powers after the Reformation.

Backgrounds: Cultures, Trade and Commerce

The strands of Portuguese expansion in this period were manifold and, as we shall see, their effects long-lasting. Portugal led the way in the expansion into Africa, India and the East Indies. The technology of ships and naval guns was something the Portuguese developed over the course of the fifteenth century. The capture of Ceuta opened up knowledge of Africa to Portugal. Prince Henry established a court at Sagres on Cape St Vincent in the Algarve in southwest Portugal that concentrated on nautical knowledge. The desire to find the Christian empire of Prester John in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and to contain Muslim power was a motivation of Portugal. Henry derived from his brother, the king, a monopoly on the trade on the Guinea coast and also received papal support for it as a means of converting the Africans. Prince Henry, who died in 1460, also financed expeditions by those who were not Portuguese, for instance Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian.

The Portuguese accomplishments were gradual. In 1483, Diogo Cao got to the mouth of the Congo and in 1487 Bartolomeu Dias sailed on a route around the southern tip of Africa. Columbus’s voyage to the New World helped delay the Portuguese fleet in going to India until 1497 as the court assessed the impact of Columbus’s claims. When Vasco da Gama arrived at Malindi, he found Ibn Malid, a Muslim pilot of great talent, who helped him to navigate across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. There, the Hindu leader did not welcome this change from dealing with the Arabs, and the Portuguese had trouble trading for spices given the inferiority of their goods to those in India.

There is much talk about globalization today, but a global economy did exist at this time, although not with the intensity, variety and scale that have developed in the past few decades. Still, in the Middle Ages, Europeans had shortages of feed for their animals and had to slaughter a good portion, and so needed preservatives, such as salt. Spices could also be used to preserve food. Pepper, cloves, ginger and cinnamon, all from Africa, India and China, became valued in Europe. As Muslim states expanded at the expense of Christian and Hindu countries, they came to control the spice trade by about 1500. The Arabs traded with the Venetians for spices and other precious goods from the East, such as Chinese silk and Indian cotton. The Portuguese feats in sailing around Africa would challenge this trade, affecting the dominance of Venice and the Arab and Muslim control of the exchange of spices and precious goods. In 1502, Da Gama was able to destroy a larger Arab fleet in the Indian Ocean because of military tactics and the use of guns. Under Affonso Albuquerque, the Portuguese established forts off the Arabian coast and took Goa on the Malabar coast of India in 1510. They also took Hormuz, a strategic market at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and also Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Malacca, the key place for trade with east Asia, in 1511. The Portuguese were in Canton by 1513 and set up soon after in Macao. By controlling the Straits of Gibraltar in Ceuta and the straits to the Far East in Ceuta, the Portuguese were in a strategic position to dominate trade. War was the way Portugal sought to control the trade in the Indian Ocean and well beyond.³ All this was in about a hundred years, the period that this chapter discusses. In other words, in a relatively brief time and in an unexpected fashion, Portugal, a small nation on the edge of western Eurasia, altered through force a trade network that stretched from Europe to China. It would be a long time before Portugal, or any European nation, could rival the Indian states and China in wealth and strength, but in these early years the groundwork was set.

Some background will suggest that there were other factors in the context leading to Portuguese expansion into Africa and Asia. Cultural encounters complemented and supplemented the legal texts of the expansion of Portugal and other European powers later on. Columbus would show this ambivalence towards the Natives of the New World. Cultural, financial, religious and other values were intertwined with the legal framework of expansion. A proleptic aspect of these texts of early European expansion into Africa for those accounts of a similar exploration of the western Atlantic is that of the bad tribes or peoples. For instance, in Alvise Cadamosto’s account of the Portuguese in Africa in the fifteenth century, the Barbazini (Barbacenes) and Sereri (Serer) partly play this role: ‘They will not recognize any lord among them, lest he should carry off their wives and children and sell them into slavery, as is done by the kings and lords of all the other lands of the negroes. They are exceedingly idolatrous, have no laws, and are the cruellest of men.’⁴ They seemed to be without class, religion, law, restraint and civility. Even though the king of Senega tried to subdue these peoples, he suffered at their hands, their poison arrows having presumably been too much to overcome. A certain unruliness and danger, a group escaping but needing control, created a tension that would welcome later European intervention.

Countries and continents were closely linked long before Columbus set sail. Europe in the late Middle Ages was short of gold, which was available through African trade routes. The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth century involved intertwined motives of God and gold. The fate of merchants depended then, as they had before, on war, investment and resources. In the late fourteenth century the climate for business was not good. The Black Death devastated the population and contracted the economy. The Persians and the Chinese had little time for the Europeans, but the technology that drove them to expand by land and sea helped to create a more global world than ever before and to bring about modernity. The Russians spread by land while the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, French and Dutch moved by ship. People, crops, diseases and goods crossed boundaries and changed and devastated the New World or Americas. Italians were crucial in banking and navigation in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and they would continue to play crucial roles in the economic expansion of Europe, sometimes within the Italian city states and other times in the service of the monarchs of Portugal, Spain, England and France.⁵

Portugal and Spain: Their Expansion and the Role of the Church

Papal donations and bulls played a key role in the expansion of European powers. What authority did the pope have in dividing the world unknown to Europe between Portugal and Spain? The monarchs and writers of England and France asked this question repeatedly for centuries.⁶ In the expansion of Portugal and Spain the Church played a role that supplemented conquest, reconquest and trade. This expansion often involved religious, political, economic and cultural motives. Documents of various kinds, whether ecclesiastical or civil, were not only promulgated but also engendered interpretations by those who seemed to benefit from them and those who complained they did not. Even before the Reformation in central and western Europe in 1517, Christian countries in those regions were engaged in disputes over the influence of the pope and the Roman church in areas that we would now call international law and trade.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Portugal and Spain were rivals in exploration. The rediscovery of the Canary Islands created a conflict between Portugal and Castile in the late thirteenth century. In 1344, Don Luis de la Cerda, admiral of France and great-grandson of Alfonso the Wise, obtained a bull from Clement VI to Christianize these islands, believed to be the Fortunatae Insulae of the ancients, and was crowned prince of this domain in Avignon. Castile and Portugal put aside their differences and supported Luis, but, after he did not take possession, they continued their struggle. Subsequent papal bulls favoured one side then the other, and the question of ownership was not settled until 1479 when, by the treaty of Alcaçovas, Portugal ceded the Canaries to Castile.⁷ The second controversy between Portugal and Castile was over Africa. After the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 with military expeditions in Morocco and with voyages to Guinea, Portugal made its claim in Africa. In the 1440s and 1450s slaves and gold made for a lucrative trade there. As they had in the case of the Canaries, the kings of Castile based their claim to conquest in Africa on its possession by their ancestors, the Visigoths. By 1454, the two countries were embroiled in this African controversy. On 8 January 1455, Nicholas V issued the bull Romanus pontifex that gave exclusive rights to King Alfonso of Portugal in this African exploration and trade. This ruling extended the bull Dum diversas (18 June 1452), in which Nicholas had given Alfonso the right to conquer pagans, enslave them and take their lands and goods. Nicholas’s predecessor, Eugenius IV, had, in the bull Rex regum (5 January 1443), taken a neutral stance between Castile and Portugal regarding Africa. The Castilians would not accept the authority of the papal letters and continued to claim Guinea until 1479. That year, after the War of Succession (in which Alfonso invaded Castile in an attempt to annex it), Portugal ceded the Canaries, and Castile acknowledged Portugal’s claim to Guinea, the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands.⁸ Conflict and rivalry, as well as the dynastic intertwining of the royal houses, complicated the relations between Portugal and Spain as well as their expansion beyond their peninsular boundaries.

The legal authority of the See of Rome was also a complex matter, and papal authority, even in places as apparently devout as Portugal and Spain, was not always secure. As these tensions and conflicts between Spain and Portugal suggest, papal bulls were not permanent laws and were not always accepted as remedies by the parties involved in the disputes. From the late fifteenth century onwards, Portugal and Spain would, however, insist that other nations, such as France and England, abide by the papal bulls dividing the ‘undiscovered’ world between the Iberian powers. After 1492, Spain dominated the discourse about the New World. The temporal power of Spain used the spiritual authority of Rome to underpin the Spanish empire.

Lost opportunities were a theme of France and England in this period. The French and the English, who had not taken up Columbus’s Enterprise of the Indies as Spain had, now had to try to catch up to the Spanish. Columbus had given Portugal the right of first refusal. In this they had to contravene the wishes and the gift of the pope, set out in the bull of 4 May 1493, which, in response to Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, divided the parts of the world yet unknown to Christians into two spheres, one for Spain and the other for Portugal. The pope, who had Iberian connections, issued a direct threat to those who might not accept his donation ‘under the penalty of excommunication’ if they contravened the gift of these new lands to the Iberian monarchs.⁹ Church and state were intricately integrated in Europe in the early phases of the age of exploration.

Papal warnings were not new. This kind of threat against other Christian princes breaking the exclusive rights of the parties named in the donations occurred in earlier bulls, such as Romanus pontifex. The Spanish and the Portuguese accepted the terms of this bull, except that they shifted the line of demarcation from 100 leagues to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Although claiming the spheres of ownership that the pope had set out, these Iberian states gave each other rights of passage across each other’s territory. Spain and Portugal confirmed these terms, including the changes to the bull Inter caetera, in the Treaty of Madrid in 1495. The bull Ea quae of 1506, issued after Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, also made this confirmation. The Reformation changed the attitude of other countries, such as England and the Netherlands, to the authority of the papal disposition. Catholic France also resisted this donation. Monarchs, when issuing commissions to their own explorers, instructed them not to seize land already claimed by another Christian prince. To claim title, the explorers supplemented the bulls by planting crosses with the royal coats of arms on the ‘new-found’ lands.¹⁰

If there was disagreement within European nations over expansion to the New World, Europe itself was divided. This division possessed its own form of opposition. The English and French opposed the papal donation to Spain and Portugal even while they imitated these leading colonial powers. That the English and French monarchs sent out their own expeditions to the New World showed a practical disregard for the papal bulls. A gap between theory and practice, church and state, widened as the rivalry among the European powers intensified. After the Reformation took hold, at various times in different countries from 1517 onwards, the primarily Protestant powers of England and the Netherlands came to oppose Portugal and Spain, with France, a Catholic country with a large Protestant population, poised between. In Germany and the Netherlands, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. First Expansion: 1415–1517
• 2. From the Reformation to English and French Settlements in the New World: 1517–1608
• 3. The Relative Decline of Portugal and Spain: 1608–1713
• 4. The Rise of Britain and France: 1713–1830
• 5. High Imperialism: 1830–1914
• 6. European Civil War and World Conflict: 1914–1945
• 7. Decolonization or Neo-imperialism: 1945 to the Present
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Index