Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (56 page)

Treacherous or warlike Indians needed to be remote, in time and space, before they could be safely appropriated into creole patriotic mythology. In much of British America they were neither. Those of Virginia, described by Beverley in the early eighteenth century as `almost wasted',104 lacked the ancient grandeur of the civilization of the Mexica, while the Indians of New England were all too close. When writing their narratives of the Indian wars of the later seventeenth century the New England Puritans defined themselves in terms of their relationship with their adversaries, the pagan Indians and the papist French.105 This self-imagining reinforced their sense of their own Englishness, and of the Englishness of the world they had created for themselves in the wilderness. `As we went along', wrote Mary Rowlandson, in her poignant narrative of captivity among the Indians, `I saw a place where English cattle had been: that was comfort to me, such as it was: quickly after that we came to an English path which so took with me, that I thought I could have freely laid down and died. 1106

The creole inhabitants of the Spanish American heartlands, who had no need to fortify their towns against Indian attack, could afford to distance themselves somewhat from the mother country and begin fashioning a distinctive and partially `American' identity, incorporating, if necessary, an Indian dimension in ways still impossible for the colonists of New England. For these, the only safe Indian had become a dead Indian. Only during the course of the eighteenth century, as the Indian menace started to recede, would a few Indians begin to be silhouetted by the colonists on the skyline of their imagined American landscape, as exemplifications either of Roman martial virtues or of unspoilt natural man. 107

Unable to endow their communities with the respectability of time stretching away into a distant Indian antiquity, British settlers needed to find other arguments to support their cause when confronted by metropolitan disparagement and contempt. As long as it remained faithful to its origins, New England could justify itself in terms of its self-proclaimed mission as a city on a hill. This gave a strong providentialist and religious cast to an emerging local patriotism which in this respect had obvious affinities with the local patriotism of the creole communities of the Spanish Indies. For other colonies, the task of identity construction was harder, and it proved easier to look to the future than to dwell on the past. The appropriate note was struck by Robert Beverley in The History and Present State of Virginia when he wrote: `This part of Virginia, now inhabited, if we consider the Improvements in the Hands of the English, it cannot upon that Score be commended: but if we consider its natural Aptitude to be improv'd, it may with Justice be accounted one of the finest Countries in the World.'108 English settlers had the duty of improving and transforming the land with which they had been blessed.

The expression of such aspirations fitted well with the developmental ideology of the commercial society of eighteenth-century England, where it could help to reinforce the metropolitan commitment to overseas colonization and legitimize the activities of the colonists. This was all the more necessary because of the widespread assumption in the mother country that all too many of the colonists, especially in the Caribbean, were mere lay-abouts. The planters and settlers therefore seized on the language of improvement as a useful device for justifying their record, in an attempt to rebut the slanderous allegations made against their lifestyles. Richard Ligon, in his True and Exact History of the Barbadoes, neatly turned the tables: `Others there are that have heard of the pleasures of Barbadoes, but are loth to leave the pleasures of England behind them. These are of sluggish humour, and are altogether unfit for so noble an undertaking ... So much is a sluggard detested in a Countrey, where Industry and Activity is to be exercised. '10' This language of industry, activity and improvement was ubiquitous in the British transatlantic world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. No longer restricted to turning the land to good account, `improvement' now had a wide range of connotations, which ran from making a profitable investment to cultivating one's character. It implied, too, the process of acquiring gentility or civility - a process which, for members of settler communities, could be equated with the construction of their societies on a model resembling as nearly as possible that of the mother country."'

At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the challenge to replicate the norms and customs of the mother country was especially strong in the Caribbean colonies, where the social structure of the island communities, with white minorities asserting their mastery over rapidly expanding black populations, bore little relation to that of the English society that they sought to emulate. For this reason the planters found it all the more necessary to prove that they had not degenerated in tropical climes and lost their Englishness. `They being English', wrote Sir Dalby Thomas in 1690, `and having all their commerce from England, will always be imitating the Customs, and Fashions of England, both as to Apparrell, household-Furniture, Eating and Drinking &c. For it is impossible for them to forget from where they come, or even to be at rest (after they have arrived to a Plentifull Estate) untill they settle their Families in England ...'~~i

Many Caribbean planters were inclined to think of themselves as transient residents of islands from which they would return to the mother country to live as country gentlemen once their fortunes were made. This distinguished them from the mass of settlers in the mainland colonies, whose prime commitment was American. But even as these mainland settlers came to identify themselves with the land which they and their forefathers had `improved', they too remained anxious to display their English credentials and to share in the refinements of the polite and commercial society of eighteenth-century England. The scale of the black population in the southern colonies, and the menacing presence of the Indians in the forests of the north, were standing encouragements to maintain and strengthen ties with an English homeland which diminishing numbers of them had ever seen.

As Sir Dalby Thomas indicated, one way of asserting Englishness was to imitate the latest metropolitan fashions. Since the beginnings of colonization the settlers had looked to the mother country for inspiration as they constructed their transatlantic lives, and for the supply of such material objects as they could not produce themselves. As the ties of commerce were strengthened, it was natural that the colonies, as cultural provinces of Britain, should share the aspirations of growing numbers of Britons for more genteel forms of living and an increasing array of comforts.112 The process began at the top of the social scale in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as rich merchants and planters built their new brick mansions on the latest English pattern, with a parlour taking the place of the old hall, and the creation of an open stairway ascending to the second floor as the central feature of the house.113 Often, especially in the Caribbean, fashion tended to win out over practical considerations, as planters constructed houses in the most fashionable English style, with little regard for the difference between an English and a tropical climate. Sir Hans Sloane noted the difference in Jamaica between Spanish houses, with their tiled floors, shuttered windows and great double doors, and those built by the English, which `are neither cool, nor able to endure the shocks of Earthquakes'. 114

In practice, most colonial houses remained, as in Maryland,"' simple frame or log constructions, but the new or remodelled mansions helped to set new standards for gracious living, as their occupants surrounded themselves with growing numbers of chairs and tables, plates and glassware, knives and forks."' What once were seen as luxuries were coming to be regarded as necessities, although there was, and remained, a counter-current in the culture of the mainland colonies which favoured plain living over luxurious new refinements. `This man', wrote a diarist of Robert Beverley in 1715, `lives well; but though rich, he has nothing in or about his house but what is necessary ...111' The kind of austerity practised by Beverley was likely to have more resonance in a society which, even while becoming acquainted with the pleasures of refinement, spoke the language of hard work and improvement, than in one where, as in the Spanish viceroyalties, there was no effective rallying cry against the values exemplified by conspicuous consumption.

While church and state in Spanish America fought a long but losing battle to maintain an ordered, hierarchical and respectable society through the regulation of codes of dress, the blurring of the lines of social and ethnic distinction produced by inter-ethnic marriage or cohabitation tended to encourage extravagance in dress and adornment. `Both men and women', wrote a disapproving Thomas Gage, `are excessive in their apparel, using more silks than stuffs and cloth ... A hat-band and rose made of diamonds in a gentleman's hat is common, and a hatband of pearls is ordinary in a tradesman. Nay, a blackamoor or tawny young maid and slave will make hard shift, but she will be in fashion with her neck-chain and bracelets of pearls, and her ear-bobs of some considerable jewels.'" As creoles, mestizos, mulattoes and blacks bedecked themselves with an extravagance that shocked and dismayed the authorities, it is clear that the population at large had come to see richness of apparel as a fairer measure of social status than the colour of one's skin.

By contrast, in the North American colonies, where black was black and white was white and there was little in between, those who chose to cultivate austerity on religious or ethical grounds were not haunted by the fear that the choice of a frugal life-style would undermine their social worth. Indeed, as Beverley's comportment suggested, frugality might send out as powerful a social message as conspicuous consumption. Yet, in British America too, the pressures to consume were growing, as the colonial societies found themselves caught up in an expanding commercial empire, an `empire of goods'. From the 1740s, as British manufacturers, in their search for profitable markets, turned their attention to the possibilities offered by a rapidly expanding American population and made available to it an increasing number and range of goods at affordable prices, the rush to consume in the mainland colonies became vertiginous. Growing supply was matched, or exceeded, by growing demand."'

The response of the North American colonists indicated that it was not only hierarchically organized societies, like those of Spanish America, that were driven by the urge for conspicuous consumption. A rough equality of status generated its own pressures to keep ahead of one's neighbours. The desire to follow the latest metropolitan fashions, however, also responded to a collective psychological need. The colonists needed to prove to themselves, as well as to their parent societies, that they had triumphed over the innate barbarism of their New World environment. Yet it would not be easy to persuade sceptical Europeans that their efforts had transformed America into an outpost of civility.

The British and Hispanic communities that bridged the Atlantic were at least as much cultural communities as political and commercial. Spanish colonization, however, was driven, far more strongly than British colonization, by the urge to raise the indigenous inhabitants of America to the levels of civility which Europeans claimed as unique to themselves. From the start, this gave Spain's colonial enterprise a strong religious and cultural dimension that did much to shape the development of its transatlantic possessions. The priority given by church and crown to policia - civility - made it natural for the creoles, from an early stage, to point with pride to their cultural achievements. In 1554, only a generation after the conquest, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, one of the first teachers in the newly founded university of Mexico, published a set of Latin dialogues in which two citizens pointed out to a newcomer some of the sights of Mexico City - its broad and regular streets, its handsome houses, its viceregal palace adorned with columns of Vitruvian proportions. The dialogues, dwelling with special pride on the university, gave the author an opportunity to blow his own trumpet. As one of the participants in his dialogues explained, Cervantes de Salazar had done his best to ensure that `young Mexicans', by the time they left the university, should be `erudite and eloquent, so that our illustrious land should not remain in obscurity for lack of writers, who until now have been in short supply'.120

By 1700, Spanish America could boast nineteen universities, as against the two colleges in British America - Harvard and William and Mary - rising to three with the founding of the future Yale University in 1701.121 Although many of them were at best mediocre, the Spanish American universities were a source of intense regional pride, and seventeenth-century creole writers lovingly listed the names of the luminaries they had produced.122 Yet, as Bishop Villarroel complained in 1651, the merits of their graduates were ignored by the Spanish authorities. It seemed to be assumed in Madrid that only in the university of Salamanca were the letters and learning requisite for service to church and state to be found.123

Such complaints reflect the uneasy relationship normally to be found between a metropolitan centre and its cultural provinces. The provinces receive, and seek to imitate, the high styles of the metropolis, only to find their efforts dismissed as `provincial' and crude. Imitation, however, is only a part, and not necessarily the most important part, of a relationship that is often too complex to be summarily reduced to questions of mimesis and influence. Distance from the sources can inspire creative transformation, as the artistic achievements of colonial Hispanic America amply testify. 121

The `Spanish' culture transmitted to the societies of the Indies by way of Seville was itself a hybrid culture. In religion, literature and the visual arts, peninsular Spain was exposed to a variety of influences, and most immediately those coming from its dominions in the Netherlands and Italy. As the centre of a world-wide empire - a centre dominated by a highly formalized court, a powerful church and a wealthy and cultivated elite - it sought to accommodate those influences to its own tastes and needs, while passing on to the outlying parts of its empire fashions and styles that arrived with the cachet of metropolitan approval.