After Tamerlane (17 page)

The sugar colonies of the Caribbean were the bizarre offspring of European expansion. Everything needed to make them profitable – except the soil itself – was brought in from outside: capital, ‘management' (the European planters and overseers), labour (African slaves) and also the sugar plant itself, brought to the Caribbean from the Canary Islands. For masters and slaves alike, fear was ever-present: fear of attack by rival Europeans; fear of a slave uprising; fear of the punishment inflicted by vengeful or ill-tempered whites; fear of disease; fear of the climate, with its storms and hurricanes. In the British colonies, like Barbados, the Leewards and Jamaica, the planters pretended to be living in England. They wore wigs and woollens, ate much bread and meat (mostly salted and brought from America), and drank deeply for thirst and perhaps for oblivion. Well into the eighteenth century, the British West Indies were a true Wild West. One governor cut off the hair of a woman who resisted his advances. Another denounced the ‘unnatural and monstrous lusts' of the planters, and patrolled the streets nightly to restrain their habits. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was eventually besieged in his palace, and, after a battle that included the use of cannon, was murdered by the infuriated citizenry. His successor was jailed for stealing the church silver. It was little wonder that when the capital of Jamaica, Port Royal, was destroyed by an earthquake and flood in 1692, the disaster was widely attributed to divine displeasure.

Silver, gold (from Brazil), sugar and tobacco – commodities whose value was high enough to stand the costs of long-distance transport – were the lifeblood of transatlantic commerce. But their contribution
towards improving the efficiency and productiveness of the European economy could only be limited and indirect. Sugar and tobacco were consumer goods for which demand in Europe grew quite rapidly (in sugar's case, much more rapidly after 1750).
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Silver and gold extended the monetization of the European economies. Much silver, however, was re-exported eastward to pay for Asian textiles, porcelain, silks, tea and spices: Dutch and British exports to India in this period were overwhelmingly composed of ‘treasure' – silver and gold.
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American products did not supply the basis for new manufactures or new technologies: they stimulated the demand for Asian imports. Nor could the American economies in this mercantilist era of commercial regulation offer an export market dynamic enough to catalyse European commerce and manufacture, except in a few favoured localities and trades. American communities prospering on bullion, sugar and tobacco were a valuable market towards which British exports swung noticeably in the eighteenth century.
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But Caribbean planters had to spend much of their income on slaves,
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and a huge proportion of the American population was made up of slave or semi-servile labour living at or below subsistence level. Much of the indigenous Amerindian population was marginal or marginalized. In the Caribbean, the charges of shippers, commission agents and creditors, and the remittances home to absentee proprietors, ate into plantation profits and reduced local demand. The costly superstructure of mercantilist bureaucracy, with its horde of aristocratic placemen and pensioners and its privileged merchant oligarchies, may have been the chief beneficiary of this part of the American windfall. Colonial products were a useful supplement to trade within Europe: being in general demand, they helped smooth regional imbalances.
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Until 1750 at least, it might be wiser to see the Atlantic trading world as the vital prop of a commercial
ancien régime
rather than as a dynamic element in the industrial transformation of even the most advanced European economies.

In reality, the pattern of Europe's overseas trade with Asia and the Americas reflected the unevenness of Europe's own economic performance in the ‘Age of Crisis'. The underlying problem throughout the period was population: stagnation, worsened by the effects of war, in the seventeenth century; slow expansion after 1700. Deprived
of the extra demand generated by a rising population, trade languished. The market for Eastern Europe's grain in the west and south of the continent fell away, and was further reduced by the adoption of maize and rice as home-grown substitutes. There was little evidence of any general rise in agricultural productivity, and famine remained a periodic menace into the nineteenth century. Inland communications away from river routes and artificial waterways remained uncertain, slow and expensive. Nor was there much sign before
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. 1750 of productivity gains in manufacturing through the systematic use of technological innovations – certainly not on a scale that could reduce significantly the cost of such goods to consumers at home or outside Europe. A large, perhaps growing, number of Europeans were trapped in rural immobility by the institution of serfdom, widespread in Eastern Europe as well as in Russia.

In this long phase of slow economic growth, it was the maritime states of Northern Europe that were best placed to enhance their prosperity. Cheap sea communications favoured specialization and the efficiency gains it made possible.
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Access to the widest range of traded commodities, including colonial goods, allowed these states to maximize the benefit of a dense commercial network – the easy and frequent exchange of goods and paper credits with the largest number of destinations. As a result, a notable feature of the period was the rise of large port cities where these advantages were concentrated – London, Hamburg and Amsterdam. The English merchant fleet doubled in size between 1660 and 1690.
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In general, urbanization increased as large cities – capitals as well as great ports – expanded at the expense of smaller centres. It was here, where new wealth and new styles of life grew up, that patterns of consumption were quickest to change and the vogue for imported foodstuffs, drugs, beverages, textiles and household goods was keenest.
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It was also here that the commercialization of social life, labour and leisure was most visible.
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Partly for these reasons, it is tempting to see the most important change in this period as the rise of a group of commercial, maritime states to form an advanced ‘core' surrounded by a European and colonial ‘periphery' whose economic development was increasingly shaped by disparities in power, wealth and technical expertise. Among the ‘core' states, meanwhile, a further struggle was being waged for
outright hegemony in commerce and empire.
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But though the ‘sea states' coped most successfully with the economic conditions of the period, their strength and importance should not be exaggerated by hindsight. Much of their overseas commercial activity was risky and unprofitable,
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as the misfortunes of the Royal Africa Company, the South Seas Company and the Dutch West India and East India companies revealed.
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Commercial competition outside Europe, with its accompanying infrastructure of fortresses, convoys and mercantilist regulation, imposed huge, sometimes ruinous, transaction costs on them.
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Commercial and military operations at long range were hazardous and often ineffective: despite naval and financial superiority, neither the British nor the Dutch were able to blast open completely the Spanish commercial system in the Americas. The financial apparatus of the maritime powers was also highly vulnerable to the effects of war and political uncertainty: as late as 1745–6 the invasion of the Stuart claimant to the British throne, Bonnie Prince Charlie, created a financial panic in London. Nor, despite their relative sophistication, did the maritime economies of North West Europe enjoy a clear predominance over the inland economies of the continental interior, with their manufactures, commercial networks and ‘cameralist' ideas of state intervention and regulation. It would be better to stress the successful resistance of Europe's inland states to domination by the ‘sea powers'. On the larger stage of Eurasian or global economic competition, the maritime sector of the European economy, for all its success in developing the commodity trades across the Atlantic, and in finding customers among the expatriate Europeans in the Americas, was simply too small, too restricted in economic and demographic capacity, to aspire to global economic hegemony in the pre-industrial age.

This slow-growing European economy was required to support an elaborate socio-political superstructure of courts, bureaucracies, churches and aristocracies. After the great wars and internal upheavals of the early to mid seventeenth century, the later part of the period saw a gradual consolidation of social and political authority over much of Europe. The incidence of peasant revolt and regional rebellion declined. As the political order dug deeper, and exerted more effective control, there was a steady rise in state expenditure and the burden
of taxation
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– especially indirect taxation, which fell disproportionately on the poor. But this trend towards more professional and systematic government was achieved only at the price of a radical compromise with the entrenched power of aristocracies. In France this meant careful cooperation with networks of aristocratic clientage in the provinces.
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In England the aristocratic embrace of parliamentary government was built on a foundation of places, pensions and electoral corruption at public expense. In the Habsburg monarchy, the price of aristocratic loyalty to the Crown was dominance by a tiny oligarchy of great families and the state's underwriting of rural serfdom as the centrepiece of the social order.
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The gradual emergence of a more orderly
ancien régime
over a large part of Europe did not imply a neat division into unified nation states. ‘Germany' remained a vast patchwork quilt of over three hundred states, most of trivial size. The Habsburg monarchy, combining territories in modern Belgium (after 1713), northern Italy, Hungary (after 1683), Central Europe and the northern Balkans, was hardly more than a loose-knit alliance of different kingdoms, precariously unified in the person of the emperor. Even in France, integrating the provinces acquired by marriage, diplomacy and conquest was an uphill struggle: as late as 1720 Paris had to crush a separatist conspiracy by Breton nobles enraged by economic hardship and the fiscal burden.
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The unification of the British islands, insecurely based on a common monarchy, was tentatively begun in 1707 with the union of England and Scotland, severely tested by two Scottish rebellions, and constantly threatened by Irish disaffection. For the maritime states of the European Far West, as well as for the ‘inland empires' of Eastern Europe, external policy still turned in large part on the loyalty of their peripheral provinces.

Two important consequences flowed from the limited degree of political integration that the main
ancien régime
states had achieved. Firstly, they usually lacked the means to exert real control over the activities of their subjects and citizens in the extra-European world. Their colonial policies were a battleground where mercantile lobbies, aristocratic networks and the court wrestled inconclusively: the result was often to leave settler or merchant outposts to their own devices in a form of ‘salutary neglect'.
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Secondly, to most Europeans the lack
of any compelling sense of nationality meant that dynastic loyalty was the only practicable basis of political life. In reality, dynastic prerogatives were diluted by consultative or representative bodies that defended established liberties and privileges. But there was no
ancien régime
ideology, or political model, which could be exported elsewhere or easily transferred to exotic settings overseas. The balance of rights and prerogatives in every state (and every unit) depended upon local custom and precedent, inherited and defended by local interests. This way of thinking had been taken by Spanish and English settlers to the American colonies, and helped to explain the difficulties that faced every attempt to assert the authority of the imperial centre.
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As a result, it was hard to see how any European state could drastically enlarge its territories overseas without jeopardizing the delicate political mechanisms on which its stability depended at home. Not surprisingly, it was a commonplace of political commentators to stress the importance of preserving territorial compactness so that the balancing of royal prerogative with aristocratic, mercantile, religious, municipal and regional privilege did not become completely unmanageable.
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Indeed, for all that it represented an astonishing extension of the European sphere, America also offered proof of the limits to the expansionism of the
ancien régime
states. In both English and Spanish America the price of imperial expansion had been de facto colonial autonomy.
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When Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy Virginia planter, led a rebellion against the governor in 1676 (accusing him of being soft on the Pamunkey people) and burned down the colony's capital at Jamestown, there was little or nothing that London could do. Luckily, perhaps, Bacon died of the ‘bloody flux' before he could entrench his rebel regime.
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For their part, imperial governments at home displayed a general reluctance to divert scarce military and naval resources to protect or expand colonial possessions, whose leaders had to compete (with all the disadvantages of distance) with the multitude of domestic lobbies, cliques and interests clamouring for the attention of monarchs and ministers. Of course governments in London, Paris and Madrid
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deeply concerned to safeguard the revenues derived from their overseas trade, and willing to use force to prevent its disruption by rival states: tensions of this kind led to the War of Jenkins's Ear in 1739, when a long-standing dispute over the mistreatment of a British
sea captain by Spanish coastguards in the Caribbean boiled over into war. But they usually showed little inclination to place territorial expansion at the centre of their grand strategy,
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and were likely to regard their colonies more as a convenient extension of their patronage systems than as an addition to national strength.
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