Civilization: The West and the Rest (21 page)

The crux of the matter is the relative importance in the historical process of, on the one hand, initial resource endowments in the colonized territories of the New World and, on the other hand, the institutional blueprints the colonizers brought with them from Europe. If initial conditions were determining, then it did not much matter if Englishmen or Spaniards turned up in Peru; the result would have been much the same, because Englishmen would have been just as tempted to plunder the Incas and just as likely to succumb to the ‘resource curse’ of cheap gold and silver.
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Presumably, too, Spanish settlers might have been more innovative had they found themselves goldless in the Chesapeake Bay. But if you believe that the key variable was the institutions the settlers brought with them, then quite different alternatives suggest themselves.

British colonization generally produced better economic results than Spanish or Portuguese, wherever it was tried. There is no perfect test for this proposition, since no two colonies were exactly alike, but Arizona is richer than Mexico and Hong Kong is richer than Manila. So perhaps British colonization of Mexico and Peru would have had better long-run results than Spanish, ultimately producing some kind of United States of Central and South America. And perhaps Spanish colonization of North America would have left that region both relatively impoverished and divided into quarrelsome republics: multiple nation-states like Colombia rather than a single District of Columbia as the seat of a federal government, and undying enmity between Wisconsin and Minnesota, rather than between Colombia and Venezuela.

England was already different from Spain in 1670, long before the advent of industrialization. Violence as measured by the homicide rate had been declining steadily since the 1300s. With the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an era of intermittent civil war had come to an end, though hard battles remained to be fought to impose order on the Celtic periphery, especially Northern Scotland and Southern Ireland. Beginning in around 1640, the English birth rate rose steadily from around twenty-six per 1,000 to a peak of forty per 1,000 in the
early 1800s. Yet the Malthusian trap did not close, as it had in the past and continued to do elsewhere. Real wages moved upwards. Rents trended downwards. And literacy rose markedly.
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A crucial change was the availability of an exit option for those willing to risk a transatlantic voyage. As early as the 1640s net emigration exceeded 100,000, and it ranged between 30,000 and 70,000 in every decade until the 1790s.
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Those who feared that these adventurous types were being lost to the land of their birth failed to see the reciprocal benefits of transatlantic migration as trade between the American colonies and Europe flourished. The exported labour was simply more productive in land-rich, labour-poor America. The emigrants’ departure also indirectly benefited their more risk-averse kinsmen who stayed behind by raising slightly the price of their work.

Those, like Millicent How and Abraham Smith, who left England for America after around 1670 took little with them. Even the price of their passage was paid by, in effect, a mortgage on their future labour. But they carried in their minds a number of ideas that had profound implications for the American future. The first was the idea of property rights
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as they had evolved in the common law courts (and the Court of Chancery) since the twelfth century.
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The second idea was that of militant Protestantism (though it is important not to forget that Quakers, Catholics and Jews also played their part in settling the eastern seaboard).
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The third idea was that taxation depended for its legitimacy on parliamentary approval; the Crown was granted ‘supply’ in return for consenting to the redress of grievances through legislation. These had been the core issues of Britain’s Civil War.

Antagonism to the uniformity of Anglican worship to which Archbishop William Laud had aspired, combined with hostility to Charles I’s fiscal innovations, had given the mid-seventeenth-century crisis a distinctive character in the British Isles. As early as 1628, in the Petition of Right, the King’s parliamentary critics had demanded that ‘No man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax
or such like charge without common consent by act of parliament.’ When a botched attempt to impose Laud’s Book of Common Prayer on Presbyterian Scotland ended in war, Charles was forced back to parliament, cap in hand. But rather than accept what became the Long Parliament’s violations of his royal prerogative, Charles raised the royal standard in August 1642, plunging the country into war. He lost and paid the price with his head on 30 January 1649. Regicide was followed by Republic (the Commonwealth), which in turn was followed – much as foreseen in classic political theory – by Tyranny, in the form of Oliver Cromwell as lord protector. With Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored, but the old issues soon resurfaced. Charles II and his brother were both suspected, with good reason, of Roman Catholic leanings, and of yearning to reduce the power of parliament. The deposition of James II in 1688 was a Dutch coup by parliamentary invitation; the Declaration of Rights emphatically ended the argument about fiscal power: ‘Levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.’ By ending the threat of arbitrary taxation and by putting the government’s revenue, expenditure and borrowing under the supervision of a body in which property-owners were disproportionately represented, the Glorious Revolution laid a solid foundation for the subsequent development of what might be called the British ‘maritime–fiscal complex’.
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Even if the Stuarts had been restored to power in 1714 or 1745 it is doubtful that they would have undone this.

Yet the more profound change that happened in seventeenth-century England had to do with the very nature of politics itself. The argument was between two Oxford men – one educated at Magdalen Hall, the other at Christ Church – both of whom were beneficiaries of aristocratic patronage – the Earl of Devonshire in the former case, the Earl of Shaftesbury in the latter – and both of whom derived inspiration from time spent abroad – in, respectively, France and the Netherlands. For Thomas Hobbes, writing in his
Leviathan
(1651), the lesson of the first half of the seventeenth century was clear: ‘During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in … a war … of every man against every man.’
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Men are held to perform their duties only by ‘fear’, Hobbes argued, and
therefore power must be delegated to a strong sovereign with responsibility for defence, education, legislation and justice. The crucial point was Hobbes’s belief that the sovereign must be secure against any challenge from below. He could not be bound by any ‘covenant’ (constitution), could not be ‘divisible’ and could not ‘justly be put to death’.
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This was not (as is sometimes thought) a justification of royal absolutism; on the contrary, with its dark view of man’s imperfectibility and its pragmatic arguments for a strong sovereign,
Leviathan
severed Hobbes’s ties to the then exiled Stuarts. For Hobbes made it clear that his sovereign could be either a monarch or a parliament (‘one man, or an assembly of men’).
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His conception was thus very far removed from the divine-right absolutism of a Stuart loyalist like Sir Robert Filmer, the author of
Patriarcha
.

John Locke’s first
Treatise of Government
(1690) was a rebuttal of Filmer, but his second
Treatise
offered a more searching and original challenge to Hobbes. Far from a strong sovereign’s being the solution to a natural state of war, Locke argued, the true state of nature is harmonious; it is the would-be absolutist, in seeking to ‘take away
Freedom
’, who is at war with society.
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People do not choose to be governed purely out of fear. As ‘a Society of Rational Creatures’, they enter into ‘a Community for their mutual good’. In a commonwealth constituted on this basis, Locke suggested, power is merely delegated by ‘Civil Society’ to a ‘Legislative’, whose majority decisions are based on the implicit consent of all citizens. In contradistinction to Hobbes’s belief that the sovereign must be unitary and indivisible, Locke explicitly favoured separating the ‘Executive’ and what he called the ‘Federative’ branches from the Legislative, though he saw the Legislative as the dominant institution, with the responsibility for appointing judges as well as for making laws. Even more striking is the difference between Hobbes’s theory of liberty and Locke’s. According to the former, ‘the liberty of a subject, lieth … only in those things, which … the sovereign hath praetermitted [that is, explicitly conceded]’ – in cases of ‘the silence of the law’, the presumption must be in favour of the sovereign. Locke saw the matter quite differently:

Where there is no Law, there is no Freedom
… The
Legislative
… is
bound to dispense Justice … by promulgated standing Laws, and
known Authoris’d Judges
… designed
for
no other end ultimately but
the good of the People
.
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Freedom in Locke’s view was something quite distinctive. It was a man’s ‘Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another …’
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Here was the heart of the matter: ‘The great and
chief end
therefore, of Men’s uniting into Commonwealths … is
the preservation of their Property
.’
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And the Legislative may not ‘take from any Man any part of his
Property
without his own consent’, meaning a consent of the majority of representatives to taxation. This had truly revolutionary implications, as Locke well knew, writing as he was so soon after the events of 1688:

the Legislative being only a Fiduciary Power to act for certain ends, there remains still
in the People a Supream Power
to remove or
alter the Legislative
, when they find the
Legislative
act contrary to the trust reposed in them.
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Though only one American edition of the
Two Treatises
appeared before 1776 – and an imperfect edition at that – Locke’s ideas would have a seminal influence on the development of both society and politics in North America. By contrast, Latin America’s politics after independence would end up oscillating between Hobbes’s anarchic state of nature and a crude caricature of his authoritarian sovereign.

The New World represented a vast addition of territory to the West European monarchies. The key question that faced the new settlers in the Americas – Spaniards in the south, Britons in the north – was how to allocate all this new land. Their answers to this question would ultimately determine the future leadership of Western civilization. They could scarcely have been more different.

When the captain of the first ship to arrive in the Carolinas stepped on to the beach he brought with him an institutional template for the New World – one that had the issue of land at its heart. ‘The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’ were drawn up in March 1669 by none other than Locke, in his capacity as secretary to one of Carolina’s
eight ‘Lords Proprietor’, the Earl of Shaftesbury. The document is remarkable as much for the things the colonists did not adopt as for what they did adopt. Obedient to his aristocratic patron, who was anxious to ‘avoid erecting a numerous democracy’, Locke outlined a scheme that would have established a hereditary aristocracy and a hierarchical society in the Americas, complete with a supreme lord palatine, landgraves, baronies and all kinds of oddities like caziques and leet-men, as well as strict limits on the alienation and subdivision of land from their large estates. He also sought to ban professional lawyers, arguing that ‘it shall be a base and vile thing to plead for money or reward’. And, to his considerable discomfiture, he was forced by his noble patron to include an article (number 96) naming the Church of England as the established Church of Carolina.
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The colonists wisely ignored most of this, but they did retain one of Locke’s key assumptions – that there should be a link between political representation and property-ownership. Article 4 specified that three-fifths of the land was to be divided ‘amongst the people’. Articles 71 and 72 declared that there would be a parliament, meeting biennially, and that:

No man shall be chosen a member of parliament who has less than five hundred acres of freehold within the precinct for which he is chosen; nor shall any have a vote in choosing the said member that hath less than fifty acres of freehold within the said precinct.

Much therefore hinged on how the land in Carolina would be divided up.

For a time it was feared that the first fleet of settlers sent to Carolina had been lost at sea. When it was discovered that they had in fact arrived safely, what became known as the Barbados Proclamation was drawn up to regulate the distribution of land. The important thing was that there was a guaranteed minimum: ‘To every freeman that shall arrive there to plant and inhabit before the 25 March 1672 one hundred akers of land to him and his heires for ever …’. But what if there were insufficient freemen to take advantage of this offer? The obvious answer was that when the indentured servants had served out their time – usually five or six years – they too should be given land.