The New Penguin History of the World (126 page)

As its products became more easily available, China also provoked in Europe an eighteenth-century craze for oriental styles in furniture, porcelain and dress. As an artistic and intellectual influence this has remained more obvious than the deeper perspective given to the observation of European life by an awareness of different civilizations with different standards elsewhere. But while such comparisons may have had some disquieting aspects, revealing that Europe had, perhaps, less to be proud of in its attitude to other religions than China, there were still others suggested by exploits such as those of the
conquistadores
which fed Europeans’ notions of their superiority.

The impact of Europe on the world is no easier to encapsulate in a few simple formulae than that of the world upon Europe, but it is, in some of its manifestations at least, at times more dramatically obvious. It is an appalling fact that almost nowhere in the world can most of those in non-European countries be shown to have benefited materially from the first phase of Europe’s expansion; far from it, many of them suffered terribly. Yet this was not always something for which blame attaches to the Europeans – unless they should be blamed for being there at all. In an age with no knowledge of infectious disease beyond the most elementary, the devastating impact of smallpox or other diseases brought from Europe to the Americas could not have been anticipated. But it was disastrous. It has been calculated that the population of Mexico fell by three-quarters in the sixteenth century; that of some Caribbean islands was wiped out altogether.

Such facts as the ruthless exploitation of those who survived, on the other hand, whose labour was so much more valuable after this demographic collapse, are a different matter. Here is expressed that
leitmotiv
of subjection and domination which runs through well-nigh every instance of Europe’s early impact on the rest of the world. Different colonial environments and different European traditions present little but gradations of oppression and exploitation. Not all colonial societies were based on the same extremes of brutality and horror. But all were tainted. The wealth of the United Provinces and its magnificent seventeenth-century civilization were fed by roots which, at least in the spice islands and Indonesia, lay in bloody ground. Long before expansion in North America
went west of the Alleghenies, the brief good relations of the first English settlers of Virginia with the ‘Red Indian’ had soured and extermination and eviction had begun. Though the populations of Spanish America had been in some measure protected by the state from the worst abuses of the
encomienda
system, they had for the most part been reduced to peonage, while determined efforts were made (from the highest motives) to destroy their culture. In South Africa the fate of the Hottentot, and in Australia that of the Aborigine, would repeat the lesson that European culture could devastate those whom it touched, unless they had the protection of old and advanced civilizations such as those of India or China. Even in those great countries, much damage would be done, nor would they be able to resist the European once he decided to bring sufficient force to bear. But it was the settled colonies that showed most clearly the pattern of domination.

The prosperity of many of them long depended on the African slave trade, whose economic importance has already been touched upon. Since the eighteenth century it has obsessed critics who have seen in it the most brutal example of the inhumanity of man to man, whether that of white to black, of European to non-European, or of capitalist to labourer. It has properly dominated much of the historiography of Europe’s expansion and American civilization, for it was a major fact in both. Less usefully, it has, because of its importance in shaping so much of the New World, diverted attention from other forms of slavery at other times – or even alternative fates to slavery, such as the extermination, intentional or unintentional, which overtook other peoples.

Outlets in the New World settler colonies dominated the direction of the slave trade until its abolition in the nineteenth century. First in the Caribbean islands and then on the American mainland, north and south, the slavers found their most reliable customers. The Portuguese who had first dominated the trade were soon elbowed out of the Caribbean by the Dutch and then by Elizabeth I’s ‘sea-dogs’, but Portuguese captains turned to importing slaves to Brazil instead as the sixteenth century went on. Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch founded their West Indies company to ensure a regular supply of slaves to the West Indies, but by 1700 their lead had been overtaken by French and English slavers who had established posts on the ‘slave coast’ of Africa. Altogether, their efforts sent between nine and ten millions of black slaves to the western hemisphere, 80 per cent of them after 1700. The eighteenth century saw the greatest prosperity of the trade; some six million slaves were shipped then. European ports like Bristol and Nantes built a new age of commercial wealth on slavery. New lands were opened as black slave labour made it
possible to work them. Larger-scale production of new crops brought, in turn, great changes in European demand, manufacturing and trading patterns. Racially, too, we still live with the results.

What has disappeared and can now never be measured is the human misery involved, not merely in physical hardship (a black might live only a few years on a West Indian plantation even if he survived the horrible conditions of the voyage) but in the psychological and emotional tragedies of this huge migration. Historians still debate whether slavery ‘civilized’ blacks in the Americas by bringing them into contact, willy-nilly, with higher civilizations, or whether it retarded them in quasi-infantile dependence. The question seems as insoluble as the degree of cruelty involved is incalculable; on the one hand is the evidence of the fetters and the whipping-block, on the other the reflection that these were commonplaces of European life too, and that,
a priori
, self-interest should have prompted the planters to care for their investment. That it did not always do so, slave rebellions showed. Revolt, though, was infrequent except in Brazil, a fact which also bears consideration. It is unlikely that the debate will end.

Estimates of the almost unrecorded damage done in Africa are even harder to arrive at, for the evidence is even more subject to conjecture. The obvious demographic loss may (some have hazarded) be balanced against the introduction to Africa of new foodstuffs from America. Conceivably, such by-products of a European contact determined by the hunt for slaves actually led to population growth, but the hypothesis can hardly be weighed against the equally immeasurable effects of imported disease.

It is notable that the African slave trade for a long time awoke no misgivings such as those which had been shown by Spanish churchmen in defence of the American Indians, and the arguments with which some Christians actually resisted any restriction of this traffic still retain a certain gruesome fascination. Feelings of responsibility and guilt began to be shared widely only in the eighteenth century and mainly in France and England. One expression of it was the British use of a dependency acquired in 1787, Sierra Leone; it was adopted by philanthropists as a refuge for African slaves freed in England. Given a favourable political and economic conjuncture, the current of public feeling educated by humanitarian thought would in the next century destroy the slave trade and, in the European world, slavery. But that is part of a different story. In the unfolding of European world power, slavery was a huge social and economic fact. It was to become a great mythical one, too, symbolizing at its harshest the triumph of force and cupidity over humanity. Sadly, it was also only the outstanding expression of a general dominance by force of advanced societies over weaker ones.

Some Europeans recognized this but none the less believed that any evil was outweighed by what they offered to the rest of the world, above all, by the bringing of Christianity. It was a bull of Paul III, the pope who summoned the Council of Trent, which proclaimed that ‘the Indians are truly men and… are not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith but according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it’. Such optimism was not merely an expression of the Counter-Reformation spirit, for the missionary impulse had been there from the start in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions. Jesuit missionary work began in Goa in 1542 and radiated from there all over the Indian Ocean and south-east Asia and even reached Japan. Like the other Catholic powers, the French, too, emphasized missionary work, even in areas where France was not herself economically or politically involved. A new vigour was none the less given to missionary enterprise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and may be acknowledged as one invigorating effect of the Counter-Reformation. Formally at least, Roman Christianity took in more converts and greater tracts of territory in the sixteenth century than in any earlier. What this really meant is harder to assess, but what little protection the native American had was provided by the Roman Catholic Church, whose theologians kept alive, however dimly at times, the only notion of trusteeship towards subject peoples which existed in early imperial theory.

Protestantism lagged far behind in concern about the natives of settlement colonies, as it did in missionary work. The Dutch hardly did anything and the English American colonists not only failed to convert, but actually enslaved some of their native American neighbours (the Quakers of Pennsylvania were laudable exceptions). The origins of the great Anglo-Saxon overseas missionary movements are not to be detected until the end of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, even in the gift of the Gospel to the world when it came there lay a tragic ambiguity. It, too, was a European export of enormously corrosive potential, challenging and undermining traditional structures and ideas, threatening social authority, legal and moral institutions, family and marriage patterns. The missionaries, often in spite of themselves, became instruments of the process of domination and subjugation which runs through the story of Europe’s intercourse with the rest of the globe.

Perhaps there was nothing Europeans brought with them which would not in the end turn out to be a threat, or at least double-edged. The food plants which the Portuguese carried from America to Africa in the sixteenth century – cassava, sweet potatoes, maize – may have improved African diet, but (it has been argued) may also have provoked population growth which led to social disruption and upheaval. Plants taken to the Americas,
on the other hand, founded new industries which then created a demand for slaves; coffee and sugar were commodities of this sort. Further north, wheat-growing by British settlers did not require slaves, but intensified the demand for land and added to the pressures driving the colonists into the ancestral hunting-grounds of the Indians, whom they ruthlessly pushed out of the way.

The lives of generations unborn – when such transplants were first made – were to be shaped by them, and a longer perspective than one confined by 1800 is helpful here. Wheat was, after all, ultimately to make the western hemisphere the granary of European cities; in the twentieth century even Russia and Asian countries drew on it. A still-flourishing wine industry was implanted by the Spanish in the Madeiras and America as early as the sixteenth century. When bananas were established in Jamaica, coffee in Java and tea in Ceylon, the groundwork was laid of much future politics. All such changes, moreover, were in the nineteenth century complicated by variations in demand, as industrialization increased the demand for old staples such as cotton (in 1760 England imported two and a half million pounds of raw cotton – in 1837 the figure was 360 million) and sometimes created new ones; it was a consequence of this that rubber was to be successfully transplanted from South America to Malaya and Indo-China, a change fraught with great strategic significance for the future.

The scope of such implications for the future in the early centuries of European hegemony will appear sufficiently in what follows. Here it is only important to note one more, often-repeated, characteristic of this pattern, its unplanned, casual nature. It was the amalgam of many individual decisions by comparatively few men. Even their most innocent innovations could have explosive consequences. It is worth recalling that it was the importation of a couple of dozen rabbits in 1859 which led to the devastation of much of rural Australia by millions of them within a few decades. Similarly, but on a smaller scale, Bermuda was to be plagued with English toads.

Conscious animal importations, though, were even more important (the first response to the Australian rabbit scourge was to send for English stoats and weasels; a better answer had to wait for myxomatosis). Almost the entire menagerie of European domesticated animals was settled in the Americas by 1800. The most important were cattle and horses. Between them they would revolutionize the life of the Plains Indians; later, after the coming of refrigerated ships, they were to make South America a great meat exporter just as Australasia was to be made one by the introduction of sheep the English had themselves imported originally from Spain. And, of course, the Europeans brought human blood-stock, too. Like the British
in America, the Dutch for a long time did not encourage the mixing of races. Yet in Latin America, Goa and Portuguese Africa the effects were profound. So, in an entirely different and negative way, were they in British North America, where racial intermarriage was not significant and the near-exact coincidence of colour and legally servile status bequeathed an enormous legacy of political, economic, social and cultural problems to the future.

The creation of large colonial populations shaped the future map, but also presented problems of government. The British colonies nearly always had some form of representative institution which reflected parliamentary tradition and practice, while France, Portugal and Spain all followed a straightforward authoritarian and monarchical institutional system. None of them envisaged any sort of independence for their colonies, nor any need to safeguard their interests against those of the mother country, whether these were conceived as paramount or complementary. This would in the end cause trouble and by 1763 there were signs at least in the British North American colonies that it might be on lines reminiscent of seventeenth-century England’s struggles between Crown and Parliament. And in their struggles with other nations, even when their governments were not formally at war with them, the colonists always showed a lively sense of their own interests. Even when Dutch and English were formally allied against France their sailors and traders would fight one another ‘beyond the line’.