Europe And the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism And Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (International Comparative Social Studies)

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Europe and the Americas

International Comparative Social Studies Series Editor

Wil Arts Editorial Board Duane Alwin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Wil Arts, Tilburg University, The Netherlands Mattei Dogan, Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque, Paris, France S.N. Eisenstadt, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel Johan Galtung, Professor of Peace Studies, France Linda Hantrais, Loughborough University, UK Jim Kluegel, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Chan Kwok-bun, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China Frank Lechner, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Ron Lesthaeghe, Free University Brussels, Belgium Ola Listhaug, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Rubin Patterson, University of Toledo, USA Eugene Roosens, University Leuven/Louvain, Belgium Masamichi Sasaki, University of Tokyo, Japan Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, New York, USA John Rundell, University of Melbourne, Australia Livy Visano, York University, Toronto, Canada Bernd Wegener, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany Jock Young, London, UK

VOLUME XII

Europe and the Americas State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity

by

Jeremy Smith With an Introduction by

S. N. Eisenstadt

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Jeremy. Europe and the Americas : state formation, capitalism and civilizations in Atlantic modernity / by Jeremy Smith. p. cm.—(International comparative social studies, ISSN 1568-4474 ; vol. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15229-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 90-04-15229-6 (alk. paper) 1. Europe—History. 2. Europe—Civilization. 3. Europe—Colonies—America. 4. State, The—History. I. Title. II. Series. D208.S57 2006 940—dc22 2006044002

ISSN 1568-4474 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15229 8 ISBN-10: 90 04 15229 6 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Bronwyn

CONTENTS Introduction by S. N. Eisenstadt ............................................

xi

Chapter One

Atlantic Modernity and Its Dimensions ......

1

Chapter Two

Civilizational Sociology and the Atlantic ....

23

Chapter Three Absolutism and Post-absolutism in Europe’s Empires ..........................................

37

Chapter Four

Civilization and Pre-colonial Traditions ......

74

Chapter Five

‘Discovery’ in the West ................................

105

Chapter Six

Mercantilism, Slavery and the Part Played by the Transatlantic Empires in the Formation of Capitalism .................................................. 140

Chapter Seven Communities of the Colonial Order .......... Chapter Eight

193

War and Imperial Re-Division between Utrecht and the Seven Years War ............

233

‘Raising the Decibels’: Republican Revolutions of the Colonial Order ............

251

The Atlantic’s Distinct Modernity ..............

292

Bibliography ..............................................................................

315

Index ..........................................................................................

333

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

These voyages have not only confuted many things which had been aﬃrmed by writers about terrestrial matters, but besides this, they have given some cause for alarm to interpreters of the Holy Scriptures, who are accustomed to interpret those verses of the Psalms in which it is declared that the sound of their songs had gone over all the earth and their words spread to the edges of the world, as meaning that faith in Christ had spread over the entire Earth through the mouths of the Apostles: an interpretation contrary to the truth, because since no knowledge of these lands had hitherto been brought to light, nor have any signs or relics of our faith been found there, it is unworthy to be believed, either that faith in Christ had existed there before these times, or that so vast a part of the world have never before been discovered or found by men of our hemisphere.1 (Francesco Guicciardini, 1538) It is surprising that for so long a time so little should have been known of the new world, even after it was discovered. Barbarous soldiers and rapacious merchants were not proper persons to give us just and clear notions of this half of the universe. It was the province of philosophy alone to avail itself of the information featured in the accounts of voyagers and millionaires, in order to see America such as nature hath made it, and to investigate its aﬃnity with the rest of the globe.2 (abbe Raynal) The great distance of our colonies is not an inconvenience that aﬀects their safety; for if the mother country, on whom they depend for their defence, is remote, no less remote are those nations who rival the mother country, and by whom they may be afraid of being conquered.3 (Charles de Montesquieu, 1748) Nosotros ni aun conservamos los vestigios de lo que due en otro tiempo; no somos europeos, no somos indios, sino una especie media entre las aborigines y los espanoles. Americanos por nacimento y europeos por derechos, no hallamos en el conﬂicto de disputar a los naturales los titulos de posesion y de los mantenernos en el pais que nos vio nacer, contra la oposicion y de los invasores; asi nuestro caso es el mas extraordinario y complicado.4 (Simon Bolivar, 1819)

1 Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy, ed. and trans. Sidney Alexander (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 1504. 2 abbe Raynal (Guillaume-Thomas-Francois), A Philosophical and Political History of the British Settlements and Trade in North America (Glasgow: Angus & Son, Aberdeen; & E. Wilson, Dumfries, 1782), pp. 11–12. 3 Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1958), vol. 38, p. 171. 4 Simon Bolivar, “Discurso pronunciado por el Libertador ante el Congreso de Angostura el 15 de febrero de 1819, dia de su instalacion,” in German Carerra Damas, Escritos Fundamentales (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1982).

INTRODUCTION S. N. Eisenstadt J. Smith’s book on Europe and the Americas: The Atlantic Modernity of State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations constitutes a distinct contribution to comparative historical and sociological analysis. This contribution is a triple one, to three distinct arenas or dimensions of comparative historical analysis and perhaps above all in the combination thereof. The ﬁrst such dimension is the emphasis on the importance of the Atlantic experience in the formation of early European state, economic and culture formations, i.e. of early European modernity. Several works have already pointed out that the crystallization of early modern states and economic formations was inﬂuenced by the colonial expansion and by the European colonization in the Americas— as for instance the inﬂuence of the extraction of gold from the colonies on early modern Spanish economy—and on its ultimate decline, or as C. H. R. James has pointed out earlier on that slave trade and slavery were the basis of the French Revolution. Other researchers have pointed out that the colonial experience—as for instance the experience of the British raj in India has been of crucial importance to the formations of the British modern state and society. But Smith’s analysis goes beyond such important indications. He shows that it is not enough to point out that the political, economic and cultural formations of early modern states was inﬂuenced by the colonial experience—but that basically the colonial formations were part and partial of crystallization of political, economic and cultural formations in Europe, that the two processes constitute part of the one common broader process. Or in other words he shows that the European and the Atlantic formations were constitutive of one another, or perhaps more precisely that they constitute components of one process—that of constitution of Atlantic modernity or modernities. This type of analysis is also in principle highly attuned to these works which attempt to put diﬀerent “local” “state” or “national” developments in the wider context of “world historical” developments— such as for instance the analysis of the formations of the Qing dynasty

xii

introduction

in China in the framework of Eurasian global developments1—a mode of analysis which points to possible reformulation of the relations between “national” and world historical processes. The second distinct innovative dimension of Smith’s work is the analysis of the patterns of early modernity as they crystallized in the diﬀerent Atlantic countries—both in Europe and in the Americas. As against the relatively wide-spread view to be found, even if mostly implicitly, especially in the many theories of modernization that the European modernity is the natural model thereof – according to which others have to be judged, Smith shows that not only even in Europe—or to be more exact—in the framework of Atlantic modernities—there developed in diﬀerent historical contexts not one, but several patterns of multiple modernities, i.e. the Atlantic modernity or modernities is only one of several patterns of multiple modernities which develop in diﬀerent historical contexts. The third contribution of Smith’s analysis is, following recent developments in social and historical analysis2—i.e. the emphasis on the importance of civilizational institutional and cultural frameworks, encompassing diﬀerent political and economic formations in shaping the self-understanding and collective identities of Atlantic countries. But perhaps above all the distinctive contribution of Smith’s analysis is the combination of all these dimensions—as they converge in the formations of multiple modernities in their historical and civilizational contexts. It is this combination which provided important indications for new directions in a comparative historical research.

1 See for instance Struve, L. A. (ed.) 2004, The Qing Formation in WorldHistorical Time. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2 See for instance Arjomand, S. A. and Tiryakian, E. A. (eds.), 2004, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis. Sage Publications.

CHAPTER ONE

ATLANTIC MODERNITY AND ITS DIMENSIONS Renaissance Europe’s encounter with the American New World inspired doubt. Reports of Columbus’ voyage in 1492 had little immediate impact. But they were the ﬁrst moments in an ongoing crossAtlantic relationship between continents that both shaped and troubled Western Europe for the next three centuries. The relationship brought a growth of European state and economic power. This was a vital juncture in which an Atlantic prospect came into view. It was as much metaphor as reality. Initially unsure of what might be found there, Europeans had no immediate new paradigm of what to expect and depended on old ones. Certainty that the new landmass was a protrusion of the Asian continent prevailed until even the 1570s. Monstrous races listed in ancient accounts were said to exist there. Where romantic optimism shadowed interpretation, the natives were cast as child-like innocents inhabiting a lost Garden of Eden that had once also been the condition of Christians. Early metaphorical ﬂourishes did not fade as the forces of colonialism further penetrated the continent, but were complimented by further bewilderment. The Atlantic vista was disconcerting. It unsettled, and then became the locus of coalescing forces of economic and imperial state power. It also disturbed reputable assumptions about the mundane world and the larger cosmos. In a way, doubt came readily. Humanism had gestated in Western monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its principal thrust was that an autonomous conscience existed and was capable of moral agency and therefore doubt. More far-reaching contact with Islamic cultures in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries returned unavailable classics of Ancient thought. A new nexus with the declining Byzantine Empire also prompted meditation on the Greeks.1 Knowledge of another landmass sent scholars scurrying for references amongst the Greeks and the Romans to an antipodean land. In a short sixteenth

1

Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 144–45.

2

chapter one

century, the existence of a further land became apparent and consequently the size of the globe known to Europeans grew dramatically. Uncertainty about how diﬀerent lands were peopled appeared. The existence of stateless societies and stratiﬁed empires hitherto unaccounted for in the annals of European thought confounded scripture and the Church’s interpretation of it. Where had the other peoples come from? Could they be really considered human? Or were they pre-social or pre-civil? Should they be enslaved? Such perplexities circumscribed the Junta de Burgos (1512) and the famous Dispute of Valladolid (1550) between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda. The theological debate raged around the humanity of the indigenous of the Caribbean. It was not settled at that time. These turned out to be the early hesitant steps of an encyclopaedic imagination which pre-dated anthropology and that aimed to catalogue and describe other non-European peoples comprehensively. Where America’s indigenes should ﬁt in the annals of Western knowledge remained unclear. There is ample evidence of uncertainty continuing to linger in the eighteenth century. The inhabitants of the New World acquired a romantic prominence. By this time, the continent as a whole was again a source of quixotic fascination, much as it had been in the sixteenth century. Most contemplation of this New World marked its supposed extremes, rather than its actual diversity. America was rugged, undomesticated and alien. Yet it could be considered untainted by the vices of the old world: it was untouched, free and a place where Utopia could be contemplated. It was wild, but it also awoke older myths of humanity’s Golden Age. The utopian imagination had been stirred in the sixteenth century by reports of the New World and its echoes could still be heard loudly in the eighteenth. Here was a perceived antithesis of Europe that called upon utopians to examine existing forms of social organization and devise new ones.2 The Americas served as a contrast in the mind to the Mediterranean world. It was a kind of mental category to aid moral and political judgment of familiar European societies and hence was easily given

2 J. C. Davis, “Utopia and the New World 1500–1700,” in Roland Schaer et al., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). On utopian experiments in the Americas, see Silvio Zavala, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), chap. 10.

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

3

to representational excesses that instructed Europeans about the diﬀerence of their civilization. In the ﬁrst century of reconnaissance and intrusion, the new lands seemed an enigma. Relations with Islamic and Asian societies had brought Spanish, English and French into conﬂict with established powers. The encounters inaugurated by transoceanic imperial rule would be greatly diﬀerent.3 Mesoamerica confronted the coercive face of European power. Conquistador intrigue and force established the rudimentary extensions of the Spanish presence through the outright extermination or subordination, marginalization and reconstructive study of indigenous civilizations. The establishment of immigrant settler societies accompanied the armed intrusion. Western states may have attempted to replicate and extend European institutions in the state forms that were exported to the non-European world. But these were then conditioned by regional political, economic and cultural circumstances in ways so profound that it is feasible to speak of distinct civilizations.4

3

Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space,” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 2, and “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and its Overseas Peripheries c. 1550–1780,” in Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas 1500–1820 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 4 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “The Civilizations of the Americas: The Crystallization of Distinct Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 1, no. 1 (2002): 43–61; Luis Roniger and C. H. Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives (East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2002). In my view, this point is not drawn out to the fullest possible conclusion in Eisenstadt’s main writing on the civilizations of the Atlantic. His dominant argument is that the religious divide in Western culture between Latin and Protestant states spills over into the cultural premises of colonial formations in the Americas. Surprisingly, he has only a little to say of the interaction of religions within the Americas, particularly within Hispanic America and the Caribbean. His tempered analysis can be easily explained. For Mesoamerican cultures there was no cultural breakthrough leading to a monotheistic consolidation of world orientation. An adaptation of Catholicism to Meso and Andoamerican cultures occurred. Otherwise, bodies of spiritual belief were forced into segregated coexistence. The absence of world religions prior to European colonialism prompts Eisenstadt to overlook one side of the intercivilizational dimension of the Americas. The European invasion brought powers that related to cultural cataclysms that occurred in Greece and were re-founded in the thirteenth century coalescence of humanism. They were proselytizing forces, but did not encounter known world religions. Eisenstadt treats civilization in the plural, but plainly his notion of Axial transformation, which privileges religions connected to empires, obstructs the conception of Amerindian cultures as a signiﬁcant part of that plurality. What is more, any prospect of theorizing the Euro-American empires as truly groundbreaking oﬀshoots of the West fades.

4

chapter one

The invasion and colonization of the Western hemisphere established two civilizational complexes. One was with Amerindian peoples. The other was with nascent colonial communities that were of European extraction, but which, from their inception, had their own character. With regard to European encounters with Amerindian societies, some distinction of the three powers can be made. The near-genocidal conquest of indigenous civilizations in the Caribbean and the destruction of the Mesoamerican and Andean empires launched a new sort of domination unexperienced by the Spanish before, even though it was based on previous patterns of warfare and occupation of territory. The French or English that followed conquered the northern continent by expanding limited colonies. North American aboriginal societies were pushed steadily westwards of Lake Ontario and the Alleghony Mountains by their advancement. Their advance was slowed by Indian nations that preserved their strategic power through resistance, diplomacy and trade. For good reasons, the historical intrusion of the British, French and Spanish is remembered today as an era of destruction and loss. However, there was also continuity in some regions and even renewal in the indigenous civilizations overcome by European expansion and not only in the sheer fact of physical survival of aboriginal cultures. During the era of imperial rivalry, some North American nations showed themselves to be eﬀective strategists in the episodes of open warfare between the French and British. Their control of the interior made them participants who could trade their allegiance with one side or the other. For the time being, the conﬁnement of French and British colonies to the geographically limited eastern estuaries helped the tribes to keep alive their form of warrior organization, their confederal alliances and the cultural premises of their spirituality. In the Spanish Indies, the fortunes of indigenous peoples varied more wildly. Closer to mining, trading and ranching centers, they found themselves trapped in the quasi-enslavement of encomienda and repartimiento modes of social relations. Paternalistic domination constrained their ability to revolt, escape or, indeed, to conserve the fabric, identity and leadership of their ethnic groups. Miscegenation— a widespread practice of colonists—broke down their previous social associations further. Elsewhere, a comparative isolation from Spanish colonial centres permitted the perpetuation and reconstruction of cultural and social forms. Endurance was more exceptional in these areas, suggesting a greater level of civilizational survival.

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

5

The other civilizational relationship lay in the creation of CreoleAmerican communities. Neither the American colonies nor the European homelands were passive parts of the empire in terms of polity, economy or culture.5 The foundation of colonial societies and new forms of government did not simply produce submissive and dependent territories. Instead there was a tension-ridden nexus between metropolitan centres and colonial realms. In this context, the selfimage held by Europeans diﬀered palpably from the identities that sat in contrast. American views of the wider imperial dominion of Spain, France and England started to appear in the late seventeenth century. Divergence, but also profound dependence, was a recurring condition for peripheral communities that could trace their foundations to a formative colonial period. Many historians have re-examined the application of notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in Atlantic history.6 The American colonies had been cast as dependent peripheries of metropolitan centres, especially in the histories generated out of the dependency and world systems theory traditions. Atlantic scholarship has re-worked these categories to accentuate the manner in which some peripheral zones functioned as lively centres in their own right. The current reconstructed historical sociology of empire state formation presumes a developmental logic that is autonomous in important respects. As an expression of the relations of the American colonies to their respective governing imperial powers, I like the phrase ‘mutual dependence’ to describe the transatlantic empires. It captures well the manner in which the home countries, indeed the whole of Europe, relied on the Americas, as indeed the colonies depended on imperial support and protection. ‘Mutual dependence’ encapsulates precisely the extent to which colonial centres constituted themselves as self-governing entities. This feeling

5 See, for example, Silvio Zavala, The Political Philosophy of the Conquest of America, trans. Teener Hall (Mexico: Editorial Cultura, 1953). 6 Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires; Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Centers: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States 1607–1788 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottsville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Donna S. Guy and Thomas Sheridan, Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). For a sociological perspective that examines these comparative issues in light of the Japanese expenerience, see the introduction to Johann Arnason, The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization (Melbourne: TransPaciﬁc Press, 2002).

6

chapter one

of shared dependence echoes through the written record of colonists’ views from the time of conquest through to the republican revolts and is present in the philosophy of empire variously espoused by the proponents of imperial rule. It underpins the basic relationship between the European homes of imperial formations and their colonial settlements. What were the contours of mutual dependence? Spain, France, England and others furnished the colonies with governors, councils, soldiers, markets, and more immigrants and, of course, slaves. The beneﬁts were tangible. The colonies developed harbours for imperial navies to compete for greater inﬂuence in the Atlantic or in regional ﬁsheries or the Caribbean trade. They were fresh commercial outlets for European manufactures. Religious and criminal outcasts could ﬁnd a haven in the North American colonies. America gave Europe an unprecedented volume of common goods, such as specie and the products of its immense ﬁsheries. It also produced new commodities that revolutionized consumption: tobacco, chocolate, sugar and coﬀee. The exchange between continents was not limited to resources. The ﬂow and counter-ﬂow of ideas evinced original American perspectives as well as ongoing deep connections with established philosophical and scientiﬁc traditions. Dependence was unbroken for all colonies, until the 1776 Revolution and the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. The lasting settlements reﬂected Spanish, French and English cities, towns and villages in their organization, if not their architectural design. The steady growth of the colonies was possible because of military and naval protection, especially in the rapidly developing Spanish Indies. French forts in North America, naval patrols in the Caribbean and the force represented by conquistador armies secured the safety of colonial towns, ports and cities from rivals and real or perceived local threats. The elite classes of the colonial communities were ever concerned about unrest from within. Spain’s peninsulares (the Spanish born) and English and Frenchborn administrators and traders were quite a distinct and visible class onto themselves. Colonial communities shared their language and customs. But other divisions between local Creole societies and imported administrators served to highlight the latter’s dependence, and feelings of dependence, on imperial protection. At the same time, the isolation of settlements right across the continent compelled colonists to rely on their own resourcefulness, a condition that fostered autonomy as well as a sense of vulnerability. Circumstances forced self-reliance. The body of trade regulations and

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

7

ordinances along with ﬁrm imperial direction in government implied tight control. However, all could be relaxed in response to rebellion or the threat of it or indeed simply for short term expediency. It was habit for the administrations of colonial and imperial government to interpret directives from the centre pragmatically. The economic value of American resources, trade and markets gave colonists some power to inﬂuence the application of imperial law as imperial bodies were reliant on colonial cooperation. Mutual dependence colored the regard that Europeans and Americans had for each other. Creole views of the local representatives of European representatives ﬂuctuated. In some periods they were ambivalent, at others spiteful and resentful. They also varied according to position in colonial society. The ambivalence of colonial aﬃnity was the most pronounced in the British Empire. Divisions between loyalists and early republicans in the home countries were replicated in England’s North American colonies. In fact, there was a direct connection, as colonists absorbed the leading philosophical and scientiﬁc works in circulation. English Americans took European thinkers as their own. The long century of revolution in England generated political traditions that they read and understood. The language of virtue and corruption appealed to their understanding of British public life, although it could be appropriated and turned into a critique of imperial domination and indeed eventually was. Americans too contributed substantial works of philosophy to Europe’s political cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bolivar, Miranda, Viscardo, Jeﬀerson, Paine, Adams were interlocutors of sorts in an intercontinental traﬃc in ideas. Mutual dependence also meant the expansion of Western political and moral discourse. That growth was unprecedented in the era of colonial revolt, as some colonists re-wrote philosophy in light of their common understanding and in light of collusion with one another. It then peaked as revolutionary thinkers came to the fore in the new republican governments. Sentiments of loyalty and deﬁance were therefore transformed over time, as the colonies built up more robust economic and other relationships with each other. A ﬁrmer nexus between British North America and the Caribbean and increased trade between the viceroyalties of the Spanish Indies are two instances of this. Although dependence on imperial administration continued, additional developments were creolizing American societies.

8

chapter one Three Dimensions of Atlantic Modernity

This book elaborates the above themes in connection with an examination of the process of imperial state formation, an emerging conception of Western Europe as a discrete civilization and the coalescence of capitalism. An early Western modernity of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries can be re-conceptualized in two ways.7 Firstly, the trajectory of Western civilization is one among a number. In fact, the civilizational unity so often presumed of the West, if found anywhere, is found mainly in the twentieth century. Europe itself contained three civilizations at the beginning of the era under discussion: Occidental, Byzantine-Slavic and Ottoman.8 These inhabited and fought over the European continent, although it should be noted that diﬀerent struggles had diﬀerent chronologies and there was no time in which all three were contemporaneously engaged in conﬂict. Secondly, the West’s longue duree should be re-evaluated against a growing body of analysis of multiple modernities.9 Two conclusions can be taken from this perspective. Firstly, states do not preside over closed and self-contained societies or even neat imperial centers and peripheral territories. They oversee cultural, economic and political syntheses that result from inter-societal and inter-civilizational contact

7 I do not propose to explore political modernity here, except in the ﬁnal two chapters. In contrast to the general arenas of social life that can be characterized as modern, political modernity can be understood as a modern culture of selfreﬂexivity, agency and historicity (that is, a historical sensibility). See Peter Wagner, Theorizing Modernity (London: Sage, 2001). 8 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Macmillan, 1995). 9 Johann P. Arnason, “Multiple Modernities and Civilizational Contexts: Reﬂections on the Japanese Experience,” in The Peripheral Centre; Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, eds., Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus Homogeneity, Essays in Homage to Shmuel N Eisenstadt (Leiden: Brill, 2005); S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schlucter, “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities: A Comparative View,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998); Francois-Xaviar Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias: Ensayos sobre las Revoluciones (Madrid: Fundacion Mapre, 1992); Dominic Sachsenmaier, Jens Riedel, and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Reﬂections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Luis Roniger and Mario Sznajder, Constructing Collective Identities and Shaping Public Spheres: Latin American Paths (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 1998); Sanjay Subramanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards Reconﬁguration of Civilization of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997); and Goran Thernborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 3 (2003). Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000) is a special issue on multiple modernities. See also Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities.

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

9

and ﬂow. The forces at play are not entirely under their control, however; indeed, they transcend the empires that took possession of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Next, the notion of the universal spread of the generic elements of a single model of modernity should be abandoned in favour of a more discerning picture of interactive formations. When applying this to the relationship of Europe and the Americas, there is a manifest complexity. However, ﬁrm conclusions are still not hard to deduce. There can be little dispute that the Americas came to share in the Western heritage. The point, however, is that the idea of multiple modernities can undercut completely the proposition that America was simply subject to the long colonial project of reproducing Western societies in a diﬀerent climate.10 It can do so by problematizing the widely held sociological presumption that Western Europe instigated a universal logic of modernization and more-or-less reproduced its key societal features in a New World environment. Instead, it becomes possible to bring to light the ways in which north-western European societies and states interacted with embryonic social formations in the Americas—which they, of course, encompassed, but did not exhaustively determine—and those that Europeans conquered. The societies that emerged were quite distinct and were shaped by a variety of Amerindian, immigrant-settler and Creole traditions. Critically, they drew on ﬂows and inﬂuences from three continents and did not merely extend the reproduction of societies from Atlantic Europe to the American mainland. In this context, it then makes better sense to talk about an Atlantic modernity of three continents, many societies and many states engaged in dynamics that modiﬁed all involved, rather than an outgrowth of the Western impulse to modernity. This early modernity that encompassed the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is better thought of as Atlantic in its geographical and social-historical scope and character. The view that I am following has implications for the conception of Western modernity that has dominated the social sciences. Instead of searching for endogenous factors that may explain Western European exceptionalism—a common strategy in the social sciences—I propose to look at how internal dynamics were inseparable from the expansionary thrust of

10 See, for example, Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1964).

10

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north-western states into the Atlantic zone during this period. In following this line of argument, I refer to the growth in European and American historical scholarship of a current of trans and circumAtlantic study. Historians initiated a turn to Atlanticism in the 1980s and 1990s. This approach has crystallized as a species of comparative history. Its appeal lies in the transnational activities and relationships that it gives visibility to. It incorporates large-scale geographical or environmental histories of the kind prized by Braudel and FernandezArmesto without being bound to their assumptions. Truly, it deserves the attention of scholars from other disciplines working in interdisciplinary ﬁelds also.11 The original insights of Atlantic History emerge from making connections between diﬀerent points of the Atlantic nexus, by exploring transatlantic activity as an area in its own right, by regarding national histories as, in some part, regional 11 Its major works include the following titles. Note also that a journal, Atlantic Studies, commenced publication in 2004. See Ida Altman and James Horn, ‘To Make America’: European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave, 2002); Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996) was a formative essay; Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History, or Reconﬁguring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the English Atlantic Community 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel W. Howe, American History in an Atlantic Context: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 3 June 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson, eds., introduction to New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002); John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan, eds., The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) (an Atlantic history that avoids Transatlantic scope in order to accentuate disaporic patterns of performance); David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Ian Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) is an early work in Atlantic history that started out as a study in transatlantic communications; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400 –1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). John H. Elliot admonishes the current trends in Atlantic history for its overwhelming focus on the British world. He calls in a positive way for more work on the Hispanic and French Atlantic in “Afterword: Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World. However, see Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999) for some sketches of possible lines of inquiry into the Francophone and Iberian empires. This issue is dedicated to the concept of Atlantic history, as is no. 20 of the same journal. American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999) is also a thematic issue, dealing speciﬁcally in this case with the British Atlantic.

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

11

histories and by restoring Africa and African contributions to a more proper place after decades of historiographic suppression. So, British history is reconstituted as a history of the British Isles.12 Ireland, Bristol and Liverpool are seen as more integral to life in the Caribbean and New England. Migration patterns in Central Europe and France are connected with the movement of peoples across to the New World. The cultural and economic impact of slavery is accentuated by circum-Atlantic study that brings movements in Africa and America into the frame simultaneously. The signiﬁcance of the formation of the Canadian nation is re-cast in a framework of imperial and interimperial histories. These are some of the patterns revealed by the broader scope of scholarship. It is less of a comparative history of empires that runs along a north-south axis and more of a zonal history that ventures into an examination of east-west interactions. Where historians have regarded the Atlantic as a zone of historical scholarship, and variously reached the above conclusions, I propose to explore it as a form of multidimensional modernity. This strives for a degree of abstraction or overview in comparative analysis that is not necessarily the goal of historical scholarship. Capitalism, civilization and empires are the three dimensions. They are interrelated, but mutually irreducible. They exhibit separate though overlapping patterns that can be analysed in isolation from others. Moreover, each encompassed the specialized disciplines of distinctthough-intersecting institutions. I can illustrate this point tangibly. The public banks and chartered companies formed by states are involved in capitalist expansion in ways that vice-regal administration is not. Scientiﬁc associations in the colonies are vehicles, perhaps unwittingly, of civilizational thinking but are not direct partners in trade. Aside from their incarnation in institutions, imperial states and early capitalist enterprises elicit cultural presuppositions in the guise of formalized patterns of behaviour, established values and philosophies of government and political economy. These too are independent, but share considerable aﬃnity with one another.

12 J. G. A. Pocock, “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999); and “The Atlantic Archipelago and the War of the Three Kingdoms,” in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (London: MacMillan, 1996).

12

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The approach in Europe and the Americas is to examine each of these dimensions separately, whilst being attentive to the nexus between them. Instead of new empirical, historical and archival research, in the manner of Atlantic Studies, a re-theorization of this path of modernity highlights and addresses lingering conceptual issues in the social sciences to do with capitalism, civilization and state formation. This can be seen in even a brief synopsis of the course of European intrusion into the Americas. The nature of the westerly opening of Europe is itself important. Western powers were drawn beyond the Mediterranean in a slow incremental movement towards western Atlantic islands that soon became familiar, and then beyond them.13 The launch into the Atlantic Ocean favoured deep-sea maritime trade and opened up inter-oceanic connections for commerce. It linked the heavily populated European landmass to a hemisphere not occupied by recognized powers. Taking one step beyond this view, it becomes clear that this was not merely a geo-political expansion of borders or an incorporation of hemispheric conditions into the life of the major civilizations. It was the opening action of an early modernity that was transatlantic in its dynamic. A rapid qualitative advance took place in the creation of a western Atlantic zone that opened up the longer-term possibility of an alteration of the existing global conﬁguration of powers. The momentous historical potential is self-evident in the case of the Iberian powers; it is true in other ways of France and England’s empires also. Each of these three—civilization, imperial state formation and capitalism—constitutes a dimension of Atlantic modernity. A short discussion of states and capitalism commences in the passages below. Before proceeding to this ﬁrst point, I want to draw attention to a potential pitfall in dealing with the notion of ‘civilization.’ A clariﬁcation of terminology and some remarks on the politics of the word ‘civilization’ itself is called for. There is a risk as the word is not innocent, given its historical connotations. It is associated with colonialism and not only European versions of it.14 The standing claim that civilizations analysis has not fully assimilated the consequences of colonialism needs to be repeatedly answered. My response is a critical

13

See Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations (London: Macmillan, 2000), chap. 15. For Japanese genealogies of the term, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Rewriting History: Civilization Theory in Contemporary Japan,” Positions 1, no. 2 (1993). 14

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

13

hermeneutical one, or one of interpretation if you will.15 It involves the danger of uncritically taking on the language of civilization, which brings with it a legacy of self-belief in Western superiority. This is a heritage internal to the very notion of civilization and is evident from an etymological study of the word.16 A hermeneutical strategy foregrounds the concerns of the present when it comes to evaluating the legacy of the notion of civilization. That legacy includes the modern construction of the concept in the context of colonialism. It also incorporates the classical writings of civilizations analysis that endeavored, through synthesized world histories, to connect reﬂections on civilization with the human sciences. While the broad body of

15

Contemporary critical hermeneutics is a pursuit of meaning through a combination of interpretation and ideological disclosure of the major societal inﬂuences on ideas. Its aim is simultaneous reﬂection on the sources of socio-cultural understanding and the speciﬁc intended contents of texts and practices. Put simply, hermeneutical thinkers are explicit about their own purposes. Concepts and actions can be critically evaluated on this basis, not in the manner of a deconstructionist strategy of positing absences and excesses of discourse, but by bridging the historical distance between symbolic meanings inherited from the past and values thrown up by the modern condition. Hans Georg Gadamer’s notion of the “fusion of horizons” captures this intention well. He argues that the most we can hope for in terms of “objective” grasp of meaning is to maximize the reconciliation of (a) often seemingly foreign interpretations either authored in the past, or whose original meaning is blurred, that come to us as objectiﬁed artifacts or texts and (b) current perspectives of our more familiar present. A hermeneutical method of this sort has some suitability in the application of civilizational sociology. However, it needs to be absorbed critically and be aware of a hermeneutics of suspicion that can also establish an analytical distance, a healthy suspicion if you will. To examine the problematic notion of civilization, we need to not only get close to its past meanings, but also—at the same time—keep a certain kind of detachment. To put this another way, distance from the concrete social structures and forces that have produced the ethnocentricity of accepted civilizational beliefs is required if that ethnocentricity is to be correctly identiﬁed. Bringing the principles and positions of the present to bear on sociologies of non-Western societies, on analyses of intercultural interaction and on time-honored perspectives in the human sciences can simplify what is valuable and what needs revision or rejection in civilizational thinking. This calls for keen critical sensibilities that are alert to ideological inﬂuences on concept formation. The concepts of ‘civilization’ and, as we see in chapter ﬁve, ‘discovery’ are suitable candidates to undergo such critical sociological scrutiny that emerge in civilizational sociology. See Zymunt Bauman, Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding (London: Hutchinson, 1978); Josef Bleicher, The Hermeneutical Imagination: Outline of a Positive Critique of Scientism and Sociology (Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1982), chap. 8; and Hans Georg Gadamer, Theory and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975). 16 John Rundell, “From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities,” in Said Arjomand and Edward Tiryakian, eds., Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (London: Sage, 2004).

14

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writing in World History is open to the charge of Eurocentrism,17 careful scrutiny of the contemporary social science turns up critical currents and a general attempt to problematize the very Europeancentredness that is the object of post-colonial critique. There is ample countervailing critique of Western modernity in the mainstream of social theory.18 Marx, Freud, Simmel, Weber, Mauss, Durkheim and earlier even Montaigne and Rousseau were all alternative and inquiring voices that brought the idea of civilization into question. The hermeneutical approach calls for the kind of reﬂection on civilizational thinking that enlists current standards of critique along with detached insights of classical social theory in order to produce a reconstruction of formative ideas. In other words, the notion of ‘civilization’ cannot be taken at face value, as it often has been within civilizational histories in the Western human sciences. Rather than abandoning it, the better alternative is to subject it to contemporary critical criteria and methodical analysis. This is risky and the risk must be explicitly stated if the pitfalls so amply highlighted in post-colonial criticism are to be avoided. But the prevailing opinion here is that, on the whole, it is worth it as the hazards can be circumvented through a critical sociological reconstruction of the best of civilizational sociology that, in a way, ‘rescue’ the concept from aspects of its own heritage. The second dimension under discussion is state formation. There is a vast literature in historical sociology on states and empires. No risk is taken in suggesting that modern European state formation is the single greatest preoccupation of this ﬁeld. Some of this body of research informs my approach. However, there are three premises of the manner in which the problematic of state formation is handled in Europe and the Americas. The ﬁrst is that the scope of analysis is expanded to cover the full reach of actual modern north-western European states. A good number of substantive histories of European state formation paid insuﬃcient attention to the imperial character of Western states, at least prior to the rise of Atlantic history. This partial occlusion of

17 See for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); and Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). 18 J. P. Arnason, “Social Theory and the Concept of Civilization,” Thesis Eleven 20 (1988); and Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, chap. 5.

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the inter-continental expanse of states emerges in the self-limitation of history and historical sociology to either the European or American theatres of imperial formations. The assumption suggested by an exclusive focus on one continent or the other is that the development of the Atlantic empires involved two isolated processes of state formation. However, the events and developments in both arenas were often related and were superintended by overarching imperial states. Casting state formation in the inter-continental frame, rather than an exclusively European one, opens up its internal tensions as they are played out on both sides of the Atlantic. The similarities and stark distinctions between European and American spheres of imperial states invite comparison and suggest an enlargement of the ﬁeld of study under examination. In the Atlantic zone, grander forms of statecraft were induced. The creation and consolidation of the modern centralist institutions of state rule was an empire-building process in this era.19 Furthermore, the empires that were constructed were oceanic, rather than mainly land-based. A zone of imperial rivalry developed in which states opposed one another on the seas, jealously guarding strategic and territorial interests. Previous experiences of colonizing furnished Europeans with models or exemplars to bring to America. In turn the colonization of the American world fed a paradigm for the consolidation of territories in Europe and elsewhere. Regal authorities had, in the amalgamation of Spanish territories, a conquistador experience, which was very much contemporary, to reﬂect on in their encroachments on the Caribbean and South America. Similarly, the English had mutually transforming experiences in the conquests in Ireland and the incursion onto the northeast coast of America. State formation in both the Spanish and British empires was a process of diﬀerent theatres. However, it produced supra-provincial and imperial bodies that governed at an Atlantic level and addressed trans-territorial problems. The thrust of the analysis of processes of institutional formation undertaken here is to work on this inter-continental and imperial plane. The second feature is comparison of absolutist states that were also empires with Britain after its historical experience of Stuart absolutism. ‘Absolutism’ itself deserves more penetrating deﬁnition. Can France

19 Anthony Pagden, introduction to The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

16

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and Spain be fruitfully characterized as, in some sense, ‘empires of absolutism’? In a sense they can and not because absolute monarchs administered them, arguably a myth created by nineteenth century historians.20 Nor is posthumous characterization of these regimes as absolutist grounds for more far-reaching study. As empires of absolutism, France and Spain can be distinguished from Europe’s empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were built on nation states.21 More importantly, for comparative purposes, the principal feature of their existence was an internal conﬂict of elites over the terms and limits of power.22 In this regard, there clearly is something in common between the two empires of absolutism and Britain. This was a conﬂict in the European territories of all three states between provincial and municipal elites. A comparable, though not simply analogous, tension embroiled imperial and colonial elites. Colonialism involved a sort of compact between colonial and imperial elites during an era of early modern state building when the resources and legitimacy of state power were insuﬃcient to eﬀect an outright domination of distant and remote colonies. Indeed, outright domination was not a pattern that Western Europe’s rulers were accustomed to in dealing with provincial privileges

20

Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Longman, 1992); and K. A. Stanbridge, “England, France and their North American Colonies: An Analysis of Absolutist State Power in Europe and in the New World,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 10 (1997). 21 For a helpful typology of European empires see David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), chap. 3. 22 I analytically diﬀerentiate the dynamic of this conﬂict from early modern class struggles. Historically, to varying degrees in diﬀerent cases, the two over-lapped. The European-based conﬂict that most clearly combined the internal clash of elites and separate classes was the long English revolution. This involved class-based revolts and the contests of elite interests, which eﬀected a decisive transformation of the country. It wasn’t only a collision of class forces, however; it was also a matter of acting out the rivalries of elites within the more powerful contending classes. The multi-faceted nature of the long revolution is well captured in Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (Berkshire: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980). For class analyses of absolutist state formation, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974); Rodney Hilton, Class Conﬂict and the Crisis of Feudalism (London: Verso, 1985); and Colin Mooers, The Making of the Bourgeoisie: Absolutism, Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France, and Germany (London: Verso, 1991). Mooers’ analysis is most interesting as it considers the separate dynamics of class and elite in play on pp. 50–52 (in regard to the Fronde) and in chap. 4 (with regard to the Civil War).

atlantic modernity and its dimensions

17

and municipal corporations. All three powers generated national and imperial institutions in response to internal and inter-continental tensions and struggles. Imperial government embodied and eﬀected the routinization of tension between central monarchical and imperial authority, on one side, and regional and colonial bodies, on the other. The third feature of the way that state formation is handled here is a metatheoretical view about processes of state formation in themselves. In Max Weber and Norbert Elias’ sociologies of the state, power is captured in the monopolies of violence, law and legitimacy held by the ruling apparatus.23 This image of state formation as a steady process of the monopolization and rationalization of power has been easily interpreted in a functionalist frame. Against this view, I see state institutions as creations out of the internal tension between rival spheres. The metatheoretical stress falls on the creative innovation of new institutions that governed on a supra-provincial and transatlantic plane and, in the case of the non-contiguous clusters of domains, a trans-European plane. The new monarchies’ corps of state did draw upon existing monopolies of authority in the bodies of jurisprudence, city administrations and in mercantile-regulatory organisations. But they also invented new positions of command and a layer of institutions that confronted the basic problems of ruling larger and more diverse territories. These were the vehicles of the abstraction of governmental power and they embodied the qualitative advance of the principles of monarchical sovereignty. Surviving bases of power were not simply absorbed. In fact, these state powers continued to ﬁght against provincial and urban elites that contested its authority at various junctures. They forged another supra-provincial level of rule that predominated. The distinguishing feature of absolutism was the complex relationship of tension with other institutional constellations, most notably the church and provincial and urban powers. It pulled these together in managing social order, but it also conﬂicted with them. Its conﬂictual orientation was directed towards clerical, urban and provincial elites as well as the subordinated classes. Out of intra-class and elite conﬂict, new governmental bodies were forged.

23 Norbert Elias, State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); and Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 223–31, 904–10. For one critique of Weber’s approach, see Michael Braddick, “The Early Modern English State and the Question of Diﬀerentiation from 1500– 1700,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 1 (1996).

18

chapter one

Concentrations of military and administrative resources were necessarily accompanied by a re-expansion of the horizon of power itself. Power was organized into national and imperial matrices. The forms and images of power were evident in the ensemble of symbols and identities associated with the institutional apparatus of the monarchies and post monarchical states. These enabled not only the exercise of power, but also its active extension, especially in the form of colonization and conquest that is its symbolic objectiﬁcation. Institutional forms contained more than the coercive resources available to ruling elites. The institutions and counter-institutions of rule symbolized power and generated the identities of those who executed it. The establishment of the monarchical apparatus was a series of inventions of new authority. Their eﬃcacy had to go beyond the exercise of sheer force or of ideological device. The symbolization of authority became part of the reach of governmental sovereignty. Indeed, it was the representation, or rather re-enactment, of the rituals, customs, semiotics and objects that signiﬁed and expressed the condensation of state authority and the abstraction of its power. The third dimension is capitalism. A glance through the historiography of capitalism gives the impression that this should be a familiar story. But, it is still the subject of signiﬁcant disputes. What are the origins of capitalism? Do they lie in the feudal pre-history? What signiﬁcance can be accorded to Protestantism? The English agrarian revolution of the seventeenth century? Proto-industrial development? Industrialization in the nineteenth century? The political revolutions? The growth of trade? A more recent dispute revolves around doubts about European exceptionalism.24 These questions are not addressed directly, but this book is also not silent on the matter either. The historical connection of the economic worlds of Western Europe and their cultural focus with Caribbean trade and production, pre-existing networks of trade in Africa, the northeast of America and the hinterlands of Central and South America has not received its due in twentieth century political economy, despite the observations of contemporaries that attested to the dynamism of early

24

See Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Jaroslav Krejcí, Before the European Challenge: The Great Civilizations of Asia and the Middle East (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990).

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19

capitalism. One contribution of this book is to revive and test earlier insights in a framework that is alert to political and civilizational inﬂuences on the formation of capitalism. Mercantilism should be regarded as a crucial component in this analysis. The historical debate about mercantilism—whether it was ‘real’ in some sense or an invention of economic historians—is unsolved. The mainstream view in economic history is that the sum of local and national institutions of economic regulation makes up mercantilism. While that is accepted here, a more broad-sweeping analysis redeﬁnes it as the economic infrastructure of transatlantic imperialism. The transformative eﬀects of the imperial superstructures reached further than the territories held by any of Western Europe’s powers. Bernard Bailyn’s observation that the British Empire’s “economic involvement in the Atlantic world radiated through the entire inter-hemispheric system”,25 applies equally to Spain’s and France’s empires. The reach of all three empires extended beyond recognized jurisdictions. The economic matrices of production, supply and distribution of goods and services overlapped with one another. Imperial economic coordination reached levels that were not possible for the feudal polities of the Middle Ages. It patterned early modern trade and so-called primitive accumulation as suggested by Marx. It also reveals a consolidation of the cultural premises of economic action and economic relationships characteristic of early modern capitalism. The increased velocity of trade movements prompted mercantilist policies throughout the European continent. In turn, they bound the Atlantic world together as an economic zone through the various laws and instruments applied by metropolitan elites to the regulation of colonial production and trade. These demarcated the patterns of trade and accumulation that were the dynamism of capitalist development in the Atlantic zone. Slavery was a vital component of this formative phase of capitalism and orthodox economic history has failed to appreciate this in the past. It established a wide-ranging set of social relations across three continents involving merchants, insurers, commodity producers and slaves. Its impact reached deep into many spheres of the European economy, but was also cultural inasmuch as it sharpened

25

Bernard Bailyn, preface to Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic, p. xv.

20

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the kinds of modern rationality associated with capitalist production and trade.26 Culture also shaped the conditions in which colonies were integrated into Atlantic trade. Widening the appreciation of historical capitalism to the larger Atlantic zone brings the overarching role of states and unfree labor into the frame. This returns the vital pre-history of industrial capitalism to its proper place and not only as a consideration of the transition from feudalism in Europe, but as the creation of an international system with global possibilities. Conclusion The book is structured in two ways. Firstly, the narrative unfolds more-or-less chronologically. The historical sociology of state formation, capitalism and civilization spans the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This choice of era is easy. It is marked out discretely by the main lives of the Atlantic empires from the beginning through to their fragmentation. In the main, however, the argument tracks the three dimensions of Atlantic modernity. Of course, the three dimensions all exceed the lifespan of each empire and cannot be reduced to the cumulative activity of each. This is true also of imperial state formation with its pre-history of continental conquests. Nonetheless, for heuristic purposes, the formal Euro-American empires provide a frame for exploring the three dimensions. There is no exclusive nomothetic approach presumed here, but nor is this a pure ideography either. The actual ﬂows and interactions of each dimension and between each empire can be examined without being forced to choose decisively between the dilemma of nomothetic and ideographic explanation. Examining capitalism, state formation and civilizational comprehension within the frameworks of empire does bring to attention institutional patterns. Each is elaborated separately in diﬀerent chapters with intersecting themes receiving simultaneous treatment at times. Chapters three and seven through to nine concentrate on imperial state formation. They pick up in explicit terms the problems of mutual dependence and distance as they are expressed above. Additionally,

26

This is the core argument of Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery, from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). See also the prologue and epilogue to Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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21

state formation is historicized through the categories of absolutism, provincial power, empire and colonial ediﬁce. Chapter three presents an overview of all four categories. Sociological images of absolutism and monopolies of power are problematized. In their place, the aristocratism of provincial government and the command of cities over their own jurisdiction are oﬀered to counterbalance the onesidedness of assumptions made in some currents of historical sociology. Early modern states were intrinsically tension-ridden polities in their domestic and overseas realms. This ﬁguration is dealt with in detail and alludes to a like-though-unalike relationship between imperial authorities and colonial organs, an analysis that commences in the third chapter and is rejoined in the seventh. It was similar in all three empires inasmuch as the struggle between contending forces was mostly subdued, though it was occasionally vivid, taking the form of negotiation over jurisdiction and the implementation of metropolitan commands. The overseas domains were distinguished by the eﬃcacy of the colonial order, the intervention of distance and the fragility of royal clientage. Chapters seven to nine describe the development of the colonies’ political ediﬁce. They explore how colonists came to put into question—through reinterpretation of their own political and cultural traditions—the imperial structures that ruled over them to which they had remained largely loyal. The last substantive chapter argues that the ﬁnal revolt of Creole and AngloAmerican republicans can only be understood in terms of the breadth of possibility given by prevailing social structures, inherited traditions and by the limited capture of the sphere of politics by institutionalized power. Capitalism is discussed in chapter six only. The chief aim is to re-problematize the early era of capitalist social relations by drawing attention to the multifaceted involvement of states in its formation. It is impossible to fully appreciate this without taking the Atlantic perspective and without exploring Western Europe’s premier powers as empires and not just nation-states in the making. Mercantilism was a sine qua non of the dynamism of early capitalist relations, as it provided the infrastructure and coordination that could not be achieved by private interests alone. Equally, slavery was a vital form of labor that spurred the outgrowth of capitalism. It was the centerpiece of tri-continental trade and the object of experiments in rationalized production. Its products, apart from their extraordinary proﬁtability, helped to transform consumption. These aspects of early capitalism

22

chapter one

have been the lacunae of the historical sociology of its development. They have a place here as they relate directly to state formation and the Atlantic zone as a crucible of civilizational interaction. Civilization is an especial problem. It deﬁnes Atlantic modernity in one respect; namely that the opening of the Atlantic world to Europeans and their continent and to Africa made it a zone of civilizational exchange where there was no precedent of the external inﬂuence of another major empire. The impact of Spanish, British and French colonialism on the Americas that occurred as part of this long historical process is well documented. However, interest in the civilizational consequences of continual interaction on Europe has been, on the whole, secondary. Chapters four and ﬁve deal with this problem of how the expansion of Atlantic states into the American world altered the terms in which the world was known, interpreted and pictured by Europeans. One of the most profound shocks was ethnographic: it lay in the knowledge of cultures and societies that were not accounted for in the canons of wisdom. Europeans’ basic sense of Self and Other was thrown into ﬂux in the confrontation with human diversity in a way that it wasn’t elsewhere. How persistent cultural transaction with the Americas sharpened modern civilizational self-consciousness is the principal problem pursued in those two chapters. The institution of centralist imperial states and the formation of capitalism were allied processes that connected with the broadening of northwest Europe’s civilizational horizon. The comparative framework developed here makes one assumption. The presupposition of this framework is that a civilizational awareness emerged without being fully and clearly uttered until the late eighteenth century. To best understand how the pre-text of identity of modern Europe formed, the conceptual tools of recent civilizational sociology need to be reviewed and some further theoretical work done. The next chapter sets in motion a realignment of the sociology of civilizations in order to establish the theoretical ground on which Europe’s historical consciousness can be substantively explored.

CHAPTER TWO

CIVILIZATIONAL SOCIOLOGY AND THE ATLANTIC Civilizational sociology is a branch of the social sciences that has come together at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries. It has a strong sense of its own historicity in two respects. Firstly, it self-reﬂects on the conditions of its development, that is, on the postCold War context. The conditions are political, cultural and global. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the rivalry of super-power blocs and removed an axis of inter-state conﬂict that the world was preoccupied with. Large-scale migration and the rise of multiculturalism have challenged monocultural conceptions of ethnicity. The comparative success of developmental states in East Asia and Latin America—although that success was fragile and uncertain and remains so at this time—along with the formation of the European Union suggests that the world is still comprised of regional blocs and is therefore multipolar. A new attention to the idea of civilization makes some sense in light of these developments. Above all, the opening for this kind of thinking exists because of the widely held opinion that the new context is post-national. To be sure, neo-liberal theses of the end of History and the clash of civilizations feed on this context also. However, the civilizational sociologies identiﬁed here have joined the sharp, critical response to the chief advocates of those theses, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington’s views.1 In my view, these are the most far-reaching as they challenge the histories of the West that Fukuyama and Huntington depend on. Secondly, civilizational sociology is a body of critical revision of earlier traditions of civilizations analysis and classical social theory.2 Reﬂecting on the theoretical heritage of Weber, Durkheim and Mauss 1 This facet of civilizational sociology cannot be developed in these pages but see Gregory Melluish, “The Clash of Civilizations: A Model of Historical Development?” in Arjoman and Tiryakian, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis. 2 Sources on the sea change in thinking in comparative sociology include Arjomand and Tiryakian, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis; Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute; and Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. See also Thesis Eleven 62 (2000), which is a reference point for the current work.

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is a hermeneutical exercise, as indicated in the opening chapter. It emphasizes their scholarship of the many diverse cultural, religious and political orders that went against the grain of those who deﬁned civilization in the singular as the attainment of a standard of economic, political and moral development.3 Earlier Western sociology produced valuable observations on diversity and plurality when it developed in an open-ended ethnological mode, although insights were sometimes forestalled and underdeveloped. Regrettably, their twentieth century heirs have not followed their richest insights through and the idea of civilization all but disappeared from the Western social sciences.4 Civilizational sociology is a revival of that idea, but one that is keenly aware of the limitations of earlier schools of thought. The paths of civilizations analysis and to some degree social theory were constrained by the ethnocentricity that was co-present in their own frameworks and existed uneasily with other theoretical and empirical ﬁndings. The hermeneutical method evident in much current civilizational sociology combines contemporary perspectives with reinterpretation of classical social theory and civilizations analysis. Civilizational Sociology in Short Summary Some of the most well known latter day comparative and macrosociologists are contributors to the reconstruction of civilizational theory: Shmuel Eisenstadt, Johann Arnason, Benjamin Nelson, Marcel Gauchet, William McNeill and Louis Dumount to name only a few.5 There is 3 Johann P. Arnason, “Civilizational Patterns and Civilizing Processes,” in Arjomand and Tiryakian, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis; and Praesenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Decolonisation,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004). 4 There are some exceptions in thinkers that emerged after the First World War who worked at the margins with notions of civilization. Pitiram Sorokin, Norbert Elias, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, Alfred Weber and the Chicago School of sociology are notable. Antonio Gramsci could also be added on the grounds of his reﬂections on Americanism. Well-known historians Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler and Lewis Mumford waxed a conservative agenda during the interwar years that, nonetheless, conceptualized multiple civilizations. Later ﬁgures who were solitary though prominent sociologists and anthropologists who contributed during the reign of American functionalism include Eric Voegelin, William McNeill and Pierre Clastres. See Bjorn Wittrock’s essay, “Cultural Crystallization and Civilization Change: Axiality and Modernity,” in Ben-Rafael and Sternberg, Comparing Modernities, for a realignment of cultural and historical perspectives. 5 Louis Dumount, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), European

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neither the space nor the need to rehearse their perspectives in full. For my purposes, a review of this synthesising body of comparative analysis can be taken in two stages. Firstly, some general comments about the presumptions of the ﬁeld draw out generic insights that can be applied to a study of the civilizational dimension of Atlantic modernity, with particular attention paid to the inter-relationships developed between more-or-less cohered cultural regions. Then, a closer and more detailed inspection of particular perspectives will ﬂow into an elaboration of my own approach. The sociology of civilizations oﬀers includes important pointers for this study of transatlantic colonialism, even though its general handling of colonialism is insuﬃcient. It overturns any proposition that traditional societies were isolated and unconnected. The agenda is, by necessity, reorganized around encounters between societies. Flows of goods, ideas, people, capital, armies and beliefs become the privileged material of investigation. The intensity and types of contact between societies comes into focus, even where diﬀerent societies regard each other with great hostility. Civilizations rarely clashed pure and simple, but were and continue to be deeply embedded in a variety of external relationships that sometimes involve warfare. They can be characterized by inter-societal and inter-civilizational contacts that are ongoing and that compel internal change. Postfunctionalist historical sociologies formulated in this vein presuppose that human societies of the past were interactive and porous, more than they were closed, defensive or remote. The formation of states and the modern system of capitalism are social processes that are revisited here with this civilizational interactivity in mind. The general lessons of civilizational perspectives have a good deal to oﬀer an examination of Atlantic modernity and yet civilizational thinkers have been surprisingly subdued on the Americas. The conclusion most salient to the current work that can be drawn from the recent scholarship is that the level of inter-cultural contact from the High Middle Ages to the early modern era between the major Civilization in a Comparative Perspective: A Study in the Relations between Culture and Social Structure (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987), introduction to vol. 1 of Patterns of Modernity (London: Francis Pinter, 1987), and “The Civilizational Dimension in Sociological Analysis,” Thesis Eleven 62 (2000); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Toby E. Huﬀ, ed., On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilizations: Selected Writings of Benjamin Nelson (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1981); and William McNeill, “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” Journal of World History 9, no. 2 (1998).

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civilizational centers of Islam, Western Europe, Eurasia, China and India is still underestimated. I would add that this is the case also with the intercontinental traﬃc passing through the Atlantic empires. Indeed, in the context of the progress made in this genre of comparative social science towards an understanding of the intercourse of civilizations, the conspicuous absence of the Atlantic zone and the modern Euro-American empires suggests that there is a space to be ﬁlled. To this point, civilizational sociologists have not really addressed, much less assimilated, the work of historians of the region. This general review of the ﬁeld now narrows to examine those conclusions that are germane to the current project’s purpose. I want to brieﬂy canvass the ideas of Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Johann Arnason in order to establish the argument that civilizations are zones of interaction and exchange. This will also set the scene for an eﬀective conception of civilization for suitable for study of the old worlds of Europe and America. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss can be put together as they experienced a conﬂuence of ideas that produced an original synthesis.6 Durkheim’s early sociology stressed the functional division of labor in self-contained national societies. His later turn to anthropology was a move to a plane of cultural comparison. The border-bounded society became a problematic unit of analysis, as did a notion of civilization that privileged the unity of societies in symbolic representations.7 This met Mauss’ own anthropological insights which concentrated on the cultural fabric that exceeded societies but also linked them in a civilizational constellation. Consequently, it can be seen that they generated two salient notions of civilization. Firstly, civilization is a cultural form subject to ‘rationalization’, that is to national appropriation, modiﬁcation and abuse by states. It cannot, however, be completely conﬁned to any particular state. Indeed, state-less societies can also be attributed a cultural unity-of-sorts, a move supported to some degree by ethnographies of their day.8 This implies that civilization can only be understood in the plural, as delineable cultural unities. 6

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “In Between Sociology and Anthropology: Note on the Notion of Civilization,” Social Research 38, no. 4 (1971). 7 John F. Rundell and Stephen Mennell, eds., introduction to Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 20–21. 8 On the uses of power in stateless societies and anthropology’s mistaken estimation of archaic societies as pre-political, see Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power among the Indians of the Americas (New York: Zone Books, 1987).

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It also indicates that they recognized the complexity of the cognitive systems that anthropology was studying. Secondly, their neglected writings established the ﬁrst principles of critical civilizational sociology through their focus on symbolism. The attention paid to the symbolic dimension paved the way for a notion of civilization that did not bind itself to the project of nationalism of any one state. To Durkheim, this was a conscience collective, or a fabric of taboos, representations and symbols that sacralized meaning across pre-industrial societies. Mauss too accepts the conscience collective as the deﬁnitive feature of civilization. It surpasses existing nations and is widely recognized as a broader and, in most respects, de-territorialized form (notwithstanding the nationalist mobilization of the term by Mauss’ contemporaries). In more general terms, the conscience implied that the proper domain for the study of civilization is not the range of emblems of progress, but rather the symbolic realm in which social intercourse is made meaningful. To re-phrase this in a manner more in keeping with the tone of this work, the symbolic realm is the set of inherited and emergent premises that can be activated in a zone of intercultural and dialogical exchange. This approach is not conﬁned to neglected insights of classical sociology. Johann Arnason’s post-Weberian perspective infuses the best insights of Durkheim and Mauss with those of Castoriadis, Elias, Marx, Luhmann and Said.9 The outcome is a re-conception of the inter-linkage of ‘culture’ and ‘power’ in which neither is seen as inert and both are mutually modifying. The institutions of power that emerge in the process of state formation are inseparable from complexes of meaning that, in turn, are interpreted through the objectiﬁcation and wielding of power. However, the richest of historical studies which inform civilizational sociology suggest that complexes of meaning and interpretation—often taken in Weberian sociologies as the world religions—mainly thrive in the crucible of civilizational encounter with each other. Instead of ‘power’ and ‘culture’ appearing as juxtaposed ‘things’, both can be seen as varying

9

Johann P. Arnason, introduction to Social Theory and Japanese Experience: The Dual Civilization (London: Kegan Paul International, 1998). For a comparison between Arnason and Eisenstadt, see also Jeremy C. A. Smith, “Theories of State Formation and Civilisation in Johann P. Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt’s Comparative Sociologies of Japan,” Critical Horizons 3, no. 2 (2002).

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across history and across diﬀerent civilizational bases, according to the post-Weberian view. If this is so, then there seems to be little reason to view civilizations as sealed formations that were more-orless remote from each other until the modern age, rather than dynamic and self-transforming over a much longer period. Arnason’s theory and his actual historical sociologies submit that it is through cultural, religious, political and economic exchange, contact, derivation and connection often encompassed by expansive empires that cultural self-transformation occurs. His conceptual reworking of Weberian schools of thought clears the ground for a comparative sociology that stresses civilizational interaction over the longue duree, instead of isolation prior to the modern epoch of globality. The process by which Arnason clariﬁes and synthesizes Weberian sources sharply focuses the conception of civilization on meaning.10 This alludes to the shared background, or substratum, that provides the assumptions behind competing ideologies within a discrete, normally multi-societal, region.11 Similarly, in economic and political spheres where power is exercised, that very exercise of power is framed by a common store of meaning. His three categories of multidimensional analysis are wealth, meaning and power. The interconnections and dissonances between them single out civilizations from each other. They can be used in comparative analysis to highlight civilizational patterns and identify the terms on which civilizations engage and interact. On the face of it, the three categories suggest aﬃnity with the three dimensions of Atlantic modernity discussed here. To be sure, there is much in common. However, the points of connection and interpenetration between wealth, power and meaning are not the same as the articulation of state power, capitalist formation and civilization that is theorized here and in chapters to follow. There is not the space to set out Arnason’s argument and hold it up for comparison, nor would this be really necessary. However, one feature will serve to illustrate a major point of departure. How cultural principles frame the parameters within which states negotiate confrontation with one another, conduct their foreign exploits and how they deﬁne the terms of recognition, non-recognition, misrecognition and appropriation of 10 11

Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, chap. 4. Ibid., pp. 205–207.

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other societies is treated diﬀerently in these pages. To put this another way, civilizational confrontations of the kind that occurred in the Americas have be theorized in a framework that is more sensitized to the extreme diﬀerences that Europeans could perceive in the interfacing social formations of the Western hemisphere. Arnason’s own classiﬁcation of civilizations privileges only those clearly connected to imperial and national states. The status of non-stratiﬁed, stateless civilizations is not considered in enough depth. In fact, outright dismissal of non-imperial cultures is implicit in post-Weberianism and, in this regard, Arnason’s civilizational theory falls short of fully concluding the direction of Durkheim and Mauss’ incomplete, but deeply insightful, formulations. This has a pressing importance for consideration of the Atlantic as a crucible of civilizational exchange that was contextualized by colonialism, given the prominence of non-imperial pre-Colombian civilizations that coexisted with the Mesoamerican and Andean empires on the American continent and in the Caribbean. Their part was not inconsiderable and while the European impact was devastating, their counter-reaction on the civilizational order and sense of identity of Europeans inﬂuenced the reconstruction of theological, ethnological and scientiﬁc assumptions, as argued in chapter ﬁve. In addition, the colonized survivors were able to variously mark out a civilizational space (in both a sociological and geographical sense) for preservation and for modern forms of ongoing engagement. Notwithstanding these critical comments, there can be little doubt that Arnason has gone further than any other social theorist in revitalizing the cultural insights of civilizational analysis and the classical heritage of sociology and anthropology. This class of theorists oﬀers the most salient historical understanding of the formation and ﬂows of civilizations. Two notions of civilization are at work here. While they are compatible, they are not used in equal measure. Comparative sociologists draw a potent image of civilizations as geo-cultural clusters that embody unity-in-tension for constellations of discrete societies. Together, these make up a useful heuristic guide for the current approach. They spell out how civilizations have been harmonized by an overarching cultural imagery, but have also been demographically, ethnically and economically diverse. Global history has demonstrated that such clusters are frequently found to encompass a rich diversity of peoples, migratory movements, ideas

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and styles.12 Historical civilizations were open to internal alterations prompted by contact, exchange and war with other societies and geocultures; such inter-connections are arguably more inﬂuential today than ever before.13 There is a second notion. If understood as uniﬁed by shared presumptions—though still containing conﬂicting ideological, institutional and structural patterns—then it can be admitted that civilizations do not simply generate functional requisites of ethnic, economic, political or linguistic homogeneity. In this sense, they are not just units of analysis for historians and comparativists. They are also the symbolic and, sometimes, material means through which intercultural encounters become meaningful, especially those of the kind involved in the colonization of the Americas. They establish the terms of identity and diﬀerence between peoples, societies and places. Thus, in the second notion of civilization, the distinctive trait for comparative purposes is the assemblage of cultural suppositions that provide the background to trajectories of development. Rethinking Civilizational Sociology in the Atlantic Context This is a careful and purposeful selection of civilizational sociology. Bearing its main precepts in mind, I propose the following working schema. It is designed to raise the best theoretical platform for the following discussion, which privileges the second over the ﬁrst notion. The civilizational sociology constructed here examines: 1) The forms of engagement in intercultural encounters amongst Europeans and between Europeans and Amerindians.14 Engagement should be taken here in the broadest sense: dialogue, 12 See, for example, Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13 This is a perspective distinct from Samuel Huntington’s understanding of civilizational clash and indeed is at odds with it. In that version, civilizations seem to be great historical entities that are immunized against external inﬂuences and endure long periods with their essential cultural traits preserved. Here they are re-conceptualized as symbolically thickly bordered rather than automatically equated with either alliances of discrete state powers or seemingly stable supra-state forces. In this regard, they also encompass stateless cultures or indeed may be constituted by them. Compare with Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). See, for contrast, Subramanyam, “Connected Histories.” 14 Some space is devoted to the experiences of enslaved and freed Africans, though admittedly this is an under-explored aspect of this exposition of Atlantic modernity.

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study, representation, diplomacy, treaties, alliances, trade, as well as the modes of conquest, violence and warfare. 2) The emergence of a self-consciousness of ‘civilization’ amongst Europeans. Civilizational diﬀerence was posited by Europeans in the Atlantic zone in ways that it was not elsewhere. The confrontation with the American world and its ethnic plurality— which colonialism added European and African identities to— fuelled a conception of radical otherness that coincided with an awareness of diverse civilizations. It can be gauged in the growing comprehension of cultural juxtaposition of the societies of Western Europe and the social imaginary of the Amerindian world. This consciousness is evident well in advance of the appearance of civilizational discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 3) The signs of civilizational interpretation. Europeans made sense of the American world through a variety of modes: maps and topography, travel literature, art and scientiﬁc works, the use and translation of language and urban and village architecture that reﬂected known traditions and New World conditions. These produced a materiality, or material expression, of particular civilization identities that were mostly European, but could also be mestizo, Creole and African-American. Some of these circulated widely adding to the common fund of Atlantic meaning, for example maps and books. They enhanced a feeling of civilizational particularity that developed in Europe in the eighteenth century. This civilizational theory that is part of my overall conception of Atlantic modernity is developed in detail in chapters four and ﬁve. It centres on a sharpening European awareness of diﬀerent civilizational forms or, in other words, a capacity to ‘map’ the world as a place of civilizations. Inter-civilizational interaction in the Americas involved the collision of universes of meaning. The transformation of cultural understanding that took place across three centuries of transatlantic exchange involved a complex combination of the mobilization of traditions and incorporation of innovations. One way to understand this as a civilizational process is to conceptualize it in the terms of Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of the social imaginary.15 Civilizational 15 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 1987).

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thinking was not central to Castoriadis’ concerns. However, it is possible to view the major thrust of his work as a parallel and pertinent development.16 Instead of searching out intercultural applications, his philosophy revolves more explicitly around the root meaning that human societies construct to explain existence in both ontological and societal terms. Another way of expressing this is to pose it as forms of image making through which the universe, the world and society are interpreted. As a body of work, his theory is distinctive and subject to substantial reception.17 The principal interest for the current argument lies in the speciﬁc notion of the ‘instituted’ and ‘instituting’ imaginary. The distinction is between: . . . on one hand, given structures, ‘materialized’ institutions and works, whether these be material or not; and, on the other hand, that which structures, institutes, materializes. In short, it is the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and of history in the making.18

Symbols, language, ideas, rules, conﬂicts and structures are created by humans and order the social world. However, they are both “made” in the sense that they are received from the past and in ﬂux or they are in the process of “making” in the sense that they institute what is new and thereby bring about change. To render this key principle of the theory of the imaginaire suitable for the civilizational sociology I am proposing I will highlight a minor thread of Arnason’s reception of Castoriadis, one in which he deals with this precise question. The formation of meaning can be re-worked and re-presented as, in his words, a process of “creative transformation of earlier cultural orientations.”19 All social formations variously develop dynamics of transformation based on inherited

16 See Arnason’s reading of Castoriadis as a contributor to the metatheory of civilizational forms in Civilizations in Dispute, pp. 226–32. 17 See, for example, Fabio Ciaramelli, “The Self-presupposition of the Origin: Homage to Cornelius Castoriadis,” Thesis Eleven 49 (1997); Hans Joas, “Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of Castoriadis’ Political Philosophy,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 5 ( Jan–May 1989); Kanakis Leledakis, “An Appreciation of Cornelius Castoriadis: Theorist of Autonomy and Openness,” European Journal of Social Theory 2, no. 1 (February 1999): 95–98. 18 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution, p. 108. 19 Johann P. Arnason, “The Imaginary Institution of Modernity,” Revue Europeenes de Sciences Sociales 27, no. 86 (1989), p. 22. Arnason develops this line of argument about the place of traditions in deeper and more general terms in “Culture and Imaginary Signiﬁcations,” Thesis Eleven 22 (1989). Later publications build on these

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beliefs, ideologies and visions. The emphasis in Arnason’s evaluation is quite diﬀerent: there is not, for all comparative intents and purposes, overriding creation of institutions ex nihilo, that is, a distinguishable side of utter creation. Where Castoriadis places the accent on the novelty of world-historical cultural breakthroughs—such as the Greek invention of democracy—Arnason acknowledges the weight of tradition that falls heavily on the makers of history (who are at the same time interpreters of the past). The implication of this view is that the inventiveness of imaginary creations is exaggerated by Castoriadis and that the development of symbols, language, ideas and rules always depend upon given traditions in acts of reinterpretation. However, Castoriadis’ point is that the instituted imaginary should not be conceived of as an unshakeable burden. Historical agents are engaged in processes of creative change of ideal conditions (and, for that matter, material ones). There is never a complete moment of absolute determination of anything social by the past; there is always an element of indeterminacy or ﬂux through which other possibilities can be exploited. This is a helpful reformulation in which social and cultural change is conceptualized in terms of accessible traditions derived from the past that can be mustered to make particular events, developments, structures and symbols meaningful. To put this another way the forms of intercultural engagement make sense in the context of frames of tradition. At the same time, it accounts for creative agency mobilized in the present in the invention of modes of interpretation that incorporate the novelty of what is discovered in inter-societal settings. The central image becomes one of collective arrangement and reorganization based on an inherited order and a creative horizon. Implicit in this conclusion is the supposition that societies are anything but closed entities and civilizations as ‘families of societies’ (to borrow Mauss’ phrase) are likewise porous. If societies have ‘boundaries’ set by traditions, they are also ‘movable’; that is, they are subject to creative transformation. Civilizations have symbolical borders too that are arguably even more mobile, especially if we accept the second notion of civilizational detailed above. The broader cultural context is more visible in this kind of understanding of societal and civilizational processes. insights through application to substantive cases, although the phrase ‘creative transformations’ does not ﬁgure prominently in them. See Social Theory and Japanese Experience, and The Future that Failed.

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However, there are still outstanding questions about the relationship between speciﬁc inherited traditions and general civilizational transformation—particularly as it occurred in the Americas—that are not solved in Mauss’ sketch of theoretical principles or Arnason’s elaboration. If we accept Mauss’ deﬁnition of civilization, we are still left with traces of particularistic traditions that often take ‘society’ or ‘nation’ as their referent. Intercultural transmission can be comprised of the opposition of distinct constellations of societies. However, speciﬁc traditions are also carried into such encounters. More to the point, speciﬁc traditions or national traits can be captured and transnationalized in the civilizational exchange. I can illustrate this point by abridging an important argument that is elaborated in chapter ﬁve. Spanish, English and French approached Amerindian cultures in a variety of ways that mirrored their own national preconceptions of ethnic diﬀerence and ‘savagery’. However, there was also a common basis for speciﬁc ethnological beliefs that derived from Christianity, the writings of the Ancients and, indeed, from medieval myths and legends. With a common background, Europeans could agree on the juxtaposition of ‘civilized’ and ‘barbaric’ nations and on cultured society against the State of Nature. Particular interpretations developed against that common background did circulate, however, in the form of travel writings, philosophical, theological and scientiﬁc works, and graphic representations of indigenous American cultures. Circulation trans-nationalized approaches to Amerindian cultures that had a Europe-wide appearance. What I characterize in chapter ﬁve as inter-civilizational encounters, therefore, involves modiﬁcation on all sides, so to speak, and not just the confrontation of two clusters of societies that are assumed, mistakenly, to be harmonized. More ﬂexible and open-ended comparison of particular cases of civilizational exchange can advance conﬁdently on this basis. The outline of general approaches carried out in this chapter clears the ground for a historical sociology of Atlantic encounters involving European and native powers, Caribbean-based stateless societies and North American indigenous proto-federations. There were a number of societies engaged in this many-sided upheaval of the Americas and the kind of mutual modiﬁcation involved in creative transformation is readily evident. At the outset, we can identify two overarching patterns. One involves the conﬂict of European and indigenous civilizations. The other is a juxtaposition of particularistic European

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and American traditions that accumulated in cross-Atlantic encounters within a universalizing Western civilization. A substantive discussion of these two diﬀerent patterns of Euro-Atlantic civilization takes place in chapters four and ﬁve. The emphasis there falls on the alwayscurrent mobilization of traditions and creation of original institutions that occurred in the creative transformation of the Atlantic. For analytical purposes, chapter four outlines the traditions, or inherited imaginary to use Castoriadis’ terminology, while chapter ﬁve focuses more on expressions of new civilizational perceptions (the emergent or ‘instituting’ imaginary). Further Questions Several questions are untreated to this point about the relationship of Atlantic modernity and civilization. One should be sharply put at this point. In the opening chapter, a multidimensional notion of modernity was elaborated that encompassed state formation, the development of capitalism and ideals—or ‘myths’—of civilization. The expansion of new and self-transforming kinds of administrative and economic power need no general theoretical preamble in advance of more detailed discussion that will occur in the chapters that follow. The same cannot be said of the problematic of civilization. This chapter’s goal has been to set out a procedure for rethinking views within civilizational sociology to generate a framework that is applicable to the Atlantic scenario. Progress in setting out the case for the speciﬁcity of the historical-civilizational experiences of the Americas awaits the detail of chapters four and ﬁve. Some further questions about Atlantic modernity have to be highlighted ahead of that however. The concluding chapter will advance a summary judgment following the detailed examination of the three-century history of the Americas. If Atlantic modernity was the historical breakthrough that produced the Euro-American world and realigned the place of Western Europe’s premier powers, then what can we deﬁne as ‘civilization’ in relation to it? This book is largely, although not completely, silent on the indigenous survival and self-renewal after Conquest and focuses on civilizational currents that originated in the European incursion into Amerindian worlds. This is to facilitate the examination of complex questions. Is civilization Atlantic? Spanish, British, French? Or is it Western? On the schema I’ve established here, civilization is the

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variety of intercultural engagements, the means of making American worlds meaningful (to Europeans) and the broad consciousness that Euro-Americans developed out of immigrant-settler colonialism. In short, it is a sort of European consciousness actualized in a variety of social practices that set broad multi-societal formations apart from one another in the Atlantic. It should be regarded as Spanish, British, French and ultimately Creole, Anglo-American and French Canadian; that is, as speciﬁc. However, it translates into Western and European or, properly speaking, Euro-American realms at the same time; that is, it should be thought of as universalizing in its thrust. How particular traditions that later informed nationalisms should be analysed with respect to the common core of the Western tradition is a challenging question. But civilization reconceived as a general consciousness is certainly too open-ended to be restricted to speciﬁc empires. In other words, it is obviously too simplistic and reductive to posit the Spanish, British and French empires as the self-contained vehicles of their own integral civilizations (and, by extension, the logical unit of analysis for sociology). The volatility of civilizational encounters in the historic Atlantic zone is too great to go down that path. That much can be concluded on the basis of this chapter. However, this draws us only a little closer to a more satisfactory explanation of the question of the relationship between the general context of European universalism and particular carriers of Europe’s civilizational preconceptions and transformed beliefs about the Atlantic. The main body of this book sheds more light on this matter. The Conclusion then returns to the general problem to summarize. The next chapter begins the substantive discussion of the three dimensions of Atlantic modernity. It begins with imperial state formation, which had ‘absolutist’ and post-‘absolutist’ logics. Then, it establishes the tension of state formation and explains how its domestic iteration can be compared to a colonial or imperial form and where the two varied. This is a launching pad for the elaboration of civilizational themes in chapters four and ﬁve.

CHAPTER THREE

ABSOLUTISM AND POST-ABSOLUTISM IN EUROPE’S EMPIRES This chapter proﬁles the intricate composition of the British, French and Spanish empires. The structures and world views of embryonic absolutist centres, as well as those that had superseded absolutism, spread across the Atlantic. Modern state building on both sides of the Atlantic occurred in synchrony, but did not necessarily entail identical processes. While the Spanish, the French and the English were establishing colonial settlements in the Americas and setting up governmental bodies to administer imperial aﬀairs, they were also consolidating the core institutions of state power. The paths to centralized and institutionalized power diﬀered vastly, although they also shared common features that invite comparison. Examination of this pattern of historical variation throws into relief the underlying capacity of each state for institutional self-innovation. The ability of state leaders to work up the institutions of government was forged in both metropolitan and imperial settings. Most explanations of absolutist state formation lend little insight into this transatlantic nexus of early modern European states. A comparative analysis that draws out the transatlantic character of early modern states, in fact, hinges on a re-examination of the idea of absolutism. There has been considerable dispute over the precise nature of absolutist states.1 Much of it dwells on the terminology. How did early modern states acquire this label? It was not because 1 Deﬁnitions vary amongst the following sources: Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State; William Doyle, The Old European Order 1660–1800 (New York: Open University Press, 1978); Elias, State Formation and Civilization, and The Court Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); John H. Elliot, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” in Past and Present 137 (November 1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714; Henry Kamen, European Society 1500–1700 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1984); Victor G. Kiernan, State and Society in Europe 1550–1650 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Helmut G. Koenigsberger, “Dominium regale or dominium et regale? Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe,” in Johan Goudsblom, Human Figurations: Essays for Norbert Elias

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they were administered by centralized and autocratic monarchies, arguably a myth created by nineteenth century historians.2 Yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe’s absolutist states were seen as despotic, and not only in Europe. Those states had also established outposts in the Americas and could be viewed from there as oppressive inasmuch as they sought to structure colonial life around the needs of the metropolitan centres. Of course, for some time historians have understood this view as an oversimpliﬁcation of the institutional make-up of early modern states. It also underestimated the gap between the formal structure of imperial institutions and the actual capacities to govern eﬀectively. To view absolute monarchies, or their immediate successors in the case of the United Provinces and Britain, as proto-bureaucratic states in which royal dynasties exercise masterly control over aristocratic and urban elites is to eﬀace their complexity. The reach of the empires’ transatlantic bodies was never so complete. Back in Western Europe, autocracy was not possible and was rarely desired. (Amsterdam: Amsterdams Sociologish Tijdschrift, 1977); Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Mooers, The Making of the Bourgeoisie; Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde 1643–1652 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); David Ogg, Europe of the Ancien Regime 1715–1783 (Glasgow: Collins, 1965); Donald H. Pennington, Europe in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Longman, 1989); and Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (London: Hutchinson, 1978). 2 Nicholas Henshall argues that ‘absolutism’ is a modern myth. His case rests on two versions of earlier historical views. Firstly, the literature overestimates the strength of monarchical rule. Monarchs incorporated local powers and elites extensively. Rather than aggressively subsuming them, monarchical authorities pursued co-optation. Rulership was therefore more a strategic than conﬂictual matter. It was on the strength and presence of pre-existing apparatus and not new institutions that this type of state was built: Some commentators refer to a royal power which was absolute and limited at the same time. Royal power was absolute and limited in the entirely logical sense of relating to diﬀerent areas of a king’s activities. His people were ‘subjects’ in relation to his prerogative: he commanded and they obeyed. As members of Estates and corporations they were ‘citizens’, upholding their rights and participating in aﬀairs. The two elements were held in balance—and sometimes in tension. (The Myth of Absolutism, p. 144) Secondly, and less importantly, ‘absolutism’ is not a ﬁguration to be studied, but a nineteenth century prism of historiographical interpretation. It was ideologicallyweighted notion in the charged atmosphere of Europe’s and America’s republican revolts. Henshall’s genealogy of the term seems sound, but I take issue with the ﬁrst claim, or at least its emphasis on the continuities with the feudal ﬁguration. It overlooks the qualitative development of the states as conglomerations of national institutions, that is as distinct and novel formations. Furthermore, he understates the ﬁssures in relations between municipal and patriciate elites. Variance of interests

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An image of internal provincial tension accords better with the historical shape and internal shifts and self-alterations in the composition of the early imperial states. Domestically, the absolute states were European-based court societies, in Norbert Elias’ terms,3 and a ﬁguration of institutional capacities, symbolic intrigue and ritual. At court, patronage—the lifeblood of absolute monarchical rule— was the means by which strategies were enacted to manage the tension with provincial and urban independence. There is a remarkable similarity in the pattern of integration that it generated in states on the continent and indeed in Britain.4 Aristocratic status was determined through court society and the cultural centres in Madrid, Lisbon and Versailles drew all in. Even the most peripheral elites ﬁgured in the world of the court and had to in order to achieve essential legal and

and perceptions were more pervasive and did not always manifest themselves openly in revolt. See Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism. See also Mark Greengrass, Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1991). 3 Elias, The Court Society. In institutional terms, the growth in the administrative and military bodies of the state is worth detailing, even if only brieﬂy. Fernand Braudel’s reading of the historical literature on bureaucracy gives two examples of the modest dimensions of the French and Spanish bureaucracies. In 1500, he estimates that France had around 12,000 in public oﬃces. By comparison Spain had a bureaucracy numbered at 70,000 by 1624. It had a smaller population than France, but, of course, a larger empire to govern. Many of the Western monarchies had the shell of a bureaucracy in place at this time, but few had the vast resources of the modern nation-state. See Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 549–50; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (San Diego: Academic Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 136–37, especially fn 16; and Kamen, European Society, p. 301. Nevertheless, states’ apparatuses did grow. The spread of oﬃces in France was symptomatic of the expanse of the French apparatus. It is alleged that Louis XIII alone created 50,000 new oﬃces during his reign. However, it was under Louis XIV that the French bureaucracy was substantially expanded, with very little resistance from the nobility. These are simple illustrations of the extent of the state in France. The English did not lag either, although their pattern of bureaucratization reﬂected constant reﬁnement. Henry VII ensured that the English state was a powerful and penetrating apparatus: by the time of his death, receipts for revenue had trebled. As Wallerstein notes (see The Modern World System, vol. 1, pp. 232–33) the Henrician Reformation brought in its wake an administrative reorganization and strengthening of this apparatus during the course of the sixteenth century. The English also expanded their bureaucratic apparatus during this period; however, this was an expansion primarily of its inﬂuence rather than its quantitative size. See Pennington, Europe in the Seventeenth Century, p. 241; Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, pp. 102–103; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute State, pp. 100–101, 119; and Ogg, Europe of the Ancien Regime, pp. 28, 34. 4 Samuel Clark, State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).

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public recognition in the cosmos of aristocratism. The web of clientele relations was an indispensable medium of control for monarchical heads and an obligatory commitment for nobles. Aristocratic motives for involvement often reﬂected clan, friendship and factional interests and this had an impact on the form of their agency. Court society embraced such counter-strategies as well as the monarch’s program of centralizing inﬂuence. Provincial leaders were bound by a grave dilemma in enacting such strategies. They were so often torn between the interests of their own power bases and obligations to higher authorities. They depended on patronage from above, just as they did on support from below. Clientage was the mode of life in what can be characterized as the baroque state,5 which gave the appearance of strength and solidity, but masked the ﬂux of monarchical and provincialized elites. The courts of Spain, Portugal and France encompassed institutional constellations that I’ve described above: these might be called a provincial and municipal order. Similar networks connecting elites are evident in the British and Dutch cases, where absolutism had been overthrown. Local and urban bodies did not simply transmit the rule of peak governmental bodies, but they did share identiﬁcation with the greater state power. There are now ample historical studies of the absolute regimes that illustrate how the court society of regional aristocratic potentates curbed monarchical rule while, through patronage, the royal cadre were able to contain provincial and corporate factions. What they show up is the state’s internal fragility, particularly in France and Spain. In French historiography, revisionism has opened up new lines of enquiry into absolutism. A number are relevant to the current study. In midseventeenth century France, Bourbon prerogative was precarious.6 A strategy of compromise and cooptation adopted in the face of the fronde undoubtedly strengthened it.7 Nonetheless, provincial and urban bodies sustained a remarkable and sometimes conﬂictual resilience

5 Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996). 6 Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France. 7 William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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within a more general pattern of regular cooperation.8 The intendancy was introduced by the Bourbon monarchy to curtail this independence. However, it was also compromised by the nexus of patronage, which could be the only basis for the King’s men having any authority. In the study of baroque Spain, there are some discerning histories that drew into relief the provincial character of monarchical rule. The Spanish Habsburgs inherited a territory uniﬁed through dynastic marriage. While the monarchy was unquestionably absolute, its centralist control over Castile was not assured, much less that of the other regions. It was thus guided to seek cooperation with provincial nobility. Even so, Castilian dissatisfaction with the Union erupted in 1520 in the comunero rebellion.9 The revolts in Catalonia and Portuguese more than a century later revealed the limits of monarchical integration in Spain’s peripheries.10 In its old world territories, Spanish royal authority was greatly constrained. Apart from its long campaign to hold on to the Netherlands, it was limited, to varying degrees, to observe long-standing local laws in its Italian territories. In Sicily, in particular, royal authority had to compromise the monarch’s will consistently.11 This was, arguably, the zone of the Habsburg Empire in which Spanish authorities were compelled to the most extreme type of adaptation. A more nuanced depiction is evident in these revised views of absolutism. It is echoed in the current argument and it is possible, at this point, to take stock of it. Early modern states encompassed the monarchy and those around it, and other relatively independent spheres of provincial and colonial government and administration. The latter restrained the former often through resistance or, alternatively, collaboration or indeed outright allegiance with monarchical authorities. In all cases, a relationship of tension prevailed. Overarching and superintending institutions of government issued from it and monarchies sustained limited rule through them. Provincial limitations did not militate against the main power centres in those 8 Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9 L. F. Martin, El Movimiento Comunero en Los Tierra de Campos (Leon: Centro de Estudios e Investigacion San Isidoro, 1979). 10 John H. Elliot, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain 1598–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 11 Helmut G. Koenigsberger, The Government of Sicily under Philip II of Spain: A Study in the Practice of Empire (New York: Staples Press, 1951).

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states that can be characterized as ‘absolutist’; they were, in fact, its central characteristic. Through their opposition to various court measures at certain historical junctures, the Church, provincial nobilities and urban associations were also able to generate new institutions or re-vitalize old ones that checked the growth of monarchical power. Their actions sustained the conﬂict over which decision making organs could legitimately govern in various spheres of power. Signs of this tension in north-western Europe included a low-level war of attrition and open conﬂict as well as the routinized engagement of monarchical and local or municipal elites. Social struggles for power that began later in the mid-sixteenth century and peaked in the mid-seventeenth century emerged from this tension. A number of these are watersheds in Western European national histories, as both dramatic class struggles and conﬂicts amongst the elites of Europe’s ruling classes. The elites of state produced a capacity to create and mobilize an institutional ediﬁce—albeit unevenly—and could exercise an ability to expand spheres of control and regulation under many circumstances. In their eﬀorts to establish the regulatory and infrastructural apparatus of central government, they encountered the recurrent resistance of city-based associations, the Church and provincial forces. Monarchical cadres were able to ‘autonomize’ their own positions even within a web of networks of patronage that brought all aristocrats. The noteworthy conﬂicts of the early modern period were clashes of diﬀerent forces within the dominant classes and a form of interclass war. They include following: the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish monarchy, the English Civil War, the comunero rebellion and Catalan revolt, and the fronde. Each manifested the tension between monarchies and the provinces and the cities and assumed the spirit of provincial insurrection.12 In the Dutch and English cases, the rebel12 Perez Zagorin sees provincial rebellion during this period as resistance to external rule. Provincialism and localism presented themselves in all rebellions. However, provincial rebellion has a particular character. It was comprehensively provincial and encompassed all classes. A number of revolts can be classed in this manner. Zagorin discusses three of the four revolts I’m concerned with as ‘revolutionary civil wars,’ to distinguish them from ‘provincial rebellions.’ The process of state formation, if seen as a tension of absolutism, brought out provincialism in all four conﬂicts, but not only as a local identity proﬀered to strengthen local autonomy, but also as a means of identifying centers vital to the provincial and municipal order. Parliament, the comunidades, the parlement courts and the states-general became the recognized centers for the provincial and municipal order. Similarly, through a provincial

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lions successfully instigated new states that advanced political principles of representation.13 They were realizations of a wider re-composition of social relations. The other two revolts also prompted a re-dispersal of power with the result that the monarchical state was shored up as a self-limited form. The surviving absolute monarchies could only be eﬀective where relatively independent spheres of the state were compelled to orient to the central court apparatus. Spain and France came out of rebellious episodes retaining a monarchical form that was reconﬁgured in two ways. Firstly, both monarchies were compelled to accommodate the routine expressions of corporate and provincial interests. Secondly, both developed additional resources for government through separate royal institutions. The tumultuous early modern history of England warrants some brief notes because the manner of its revolutionary settlement shaped its early modern imperial path. England assumed a constitutional monarchy after the Cromwellian interlude and brief Stuart recovery. The state that was embroiled in the seventeenth century conﬂicts had a composite character. The wider British dimension of England’s long civil war oriented the regimes that replaced the Stuart monarchy to the problem of multiple kingdoms.14 The long revolution was fought on the frontiers of the state and in diﬀerent theatres of war on the island. After 1689 this tension within Britain continued—in some ways, resembling the tension of state formation that delimited the exercise of absolute rule—and encompassed the American territories in a particular way. The principle of dominium politicum et regale confronted the central government in Scotland. It also confronted the

outlook it was possible to distinguish the regency in Brussels, the Stuart Dynasty and the new Catholic monarchy in Madrid as other centers associated with the court state. For Zagorin’s deﬁnition of provincial rebellion and his analysis of the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War and the Fronde, see Rebels and Rulers 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2. 13 Christopher Hill’s analysis in The Century of Revolution best frames the English Civil War in a context of religious, political and economics movements across a longer period than the one often carried out in histories of England. See also Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, “Modernity and Later-Seventeenth Century England,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the United Provinces, see Helmut G. Koenigsberger, Monarchs, States-General and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Geoﬀrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Penguin, 1977). 14 Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford 1987–1988 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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monarchy when it came to governance of the American territories. This embodied a compact between England’s rulers and local potentates in their dominions comparable to many composite absolute monarchies.15 The beneﬁts of a wider association with the empire were available to the elites of England’s kingdoms and colonies, while local self-government remained in place. The extension of dominium politicum et regale to the colonies in America and to Scotland was an outcome of the overthrow of Stuart rule. Meanwhile, the status of Ireland remained a vexed problem. There was therefore a vital analogy between the tension-ridden ﬁguration of local and central authority in England and the imperial-colonial divide that straddled the British Atlantic. In wake of this modiﬁed view of the absolute and post absolute monarchies, it becomes possible to vary the scope of analysis in a way that is more alert to the discordant character of imperial state formation. The Americas can then be brought into view and the trans-continental dimension of the ﬁguration of tension can be underlined. A dynamic of non-contiguous colonial extension was initiated with the founding of American colonies. Western states were breaking new ground in the way in which they consolidated national institutions, when they turned to transcontinental state building. Indeed, domestic and imperial developments are best understood in relation to each other, where they exhibited a similar dynamic and, more importantly, where they diverged. In many instances, supra-provincial organs of authority had to govern both single territories in which they were domiciled and imperial provinces abroad. Relations with remote colonial elites were complex and ampliﬁed by distance. Many governors and high administrators based in the colonies were removed from the immediate presence of the court and the representative and juridical bodies of the imperial state. Provincial and urban elites back in France, England and Spain had a nearer presence and inﬂuence and

15 Michael Braddick presents an image of early modern English state formation that also casts it as a battle of local and central authorities fought over the terms of civility as much as anything else. See his State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550– 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also John H. Elliot “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992); and Helmut G. Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62 (1989): 135–53, on the character of the composite state.

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were bound by the strong links of patronage, while settler communities and colonial governors of one sort or another were often more remote and had little access to the privileges and inﬂuence of metropolitan location. This is not to say that metropolitan-based imperial elites would pay no heed to colonial interests. Oﬃcials mindful of the internal discordance of early modern states drew up imperial directives carefully. Not only would they have to consider the weighty inﬂuence of military commanders, leading manufacturers and parliamentary or judicial factions; they had to take account of the views of colonial authorities and leading merchant groups. However, for oﬃcials stationed in America, who were responsible for colonial administration, it was the communities of colonists that were even more potent constituencies. The colonies were far removed from the baroque state of court society (or parliamentary government in the British case) and depended on separate networks of inﬂuence and sponsorship. Distinct sets of American interests coalesced early and were, in turn, reﬂected in colonial administration. Where the staﬀ of organs of colonial government objected to imperial cadre or simply deﬁed them, or even where they merely performed the formalities of passing gubernatorial or vice regal ordinances, they distinguished themselves as leaders of structures that were separate from the metropolitan apparatus. Sheer distance conditioned these terms of imperial rule, and I turn to this aspect of colonialism now. Ruling Over Continents As European states advanced into the Americas another dynamic of imperial extension was set into play. Many of the diﬃculties faced by imperial and colonial administrations stemmed from the tyranny of distance. To a great degree, distance dictated the terms on which the supra-colonial authorities of Spain, France and Britain could capably superintend their domains. The problem of government from afar consistently confronted imperial bodies responsible for settlement, trade and regal representation. Furthermore, consolidation of a single locus of command that arched over dissimilar social and ecological environments furthered the strain on government. The result was a dissonance of de jure authority and de facto power. Donald Meinig’s geographical typology of transoceanic empires is useful as a point of departure when it comes to the relationship of

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distance and control.16 His work on the North Atlantic has a special salience here. Its relevance lies in his premises more than his conclusions. He starts from the premise that commonly used categories of core and periphery or metropolis and frontier do not adequately capture the strategic range of points in the transatlantic transect; a premise now shared by other historians.17 Colonization did not establish cores and peripheries so much as a zone of interaction. Interaction is deﬁned by the character of the dominant colonizing activities: exploration and gathering lead to casual contacts, while establishing outposts and imperial colonies leads to articulation of diﬀerent areas and stratiﬁcation of new nuclei settlements. Casual links between diﬀerent points in the Atlantic transect develop more formal attachments: “the axis between port and court.” The number of transoceanic connections multiplies and “thickens” until numerous sites on both sides of the Atlantic, and on the islands in it, are involved. The sites are characterized by Meinig as types: hinterland, Indian core area, outpost, frontier entrepot, colony, port and Atlantic port. These sites were political, economic and migratory sites in a dozen or so geographical transects and cannot be reduced to categories of metropolis/frontier or core/periphery. Apart from a concern about Spanish mercantile monopoly, Meinig mostly conﬁnes his analysis to the British Empire. I will set this typology against the Spanish experience to illustrate the problems that confronted the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchies in establishing an absolutist empire, in a way that deepens Meinig’s point about the governmental problem of distance. The consequences of distance were well deﬁned for the Spanish Indies.18 Spain’s centre seems to be obviously Madrid. Arguably, however, Seville and Cadiz were also centres due to their privileged near-monopoly status as the conduits of trade, as well as ports. Seville housed the Casa de Contratacion and was subsequently subject to imperial regulation, although this was often breached.19 The hinterland was less important compared to English regional production, as Dutch

16 Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 years of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 258–67. 17 Greene, Negotiated Authorities. 18 Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World: 1492–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), chap. 11. 19 Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 152–53.

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merchants freely brought goods into Spanish ports, albeit through agents. In addition, the existence of diﬀerent layers of trade brought many locations of supply into the trade networks. Slavery and contraband diversiﬁed economic activity. Administratively, this could undermine the Crown’s regulatory regime and it frequently did. The Canary Island trade was itself another layer. Without doubt, it was an outpost, as Meinig would have it. But it also traded directly with the Caribbean and was governed by a separate body of regulations. Colonial ports were many and more widely spread. Havana and Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, Veracruz in New Spain, Cartagena on the north coast below the Central American isthmus, Panama to its northwest and, later, Buenos Aires in the La Plata region were major economic centres in their own right. Many were also seats of colonial administration. The colonial outposts were mostly mining zones, although these too were another kind of centre.20 Potosi and Zacatecas were the main ones. They utilized a variety of forms of labor. Indians were either freely engaged or paid a debt in the repartimiento system of communal labor. Slavery was widespread from the seventeenth century onwards. The outposts fed Mexico City and Lima as frontier entrepots. The production hinterland was comprised of communal economies working according to subsistence values, but delivering surpluses to Spanish or Creole agents. The Colombian Choco was also this type of mining zone, although its combination of African and indigenous slave labor was quite unique.21 Unlike the North American hinterland, it was not incorporated into Atlantic trade. Instead, it was part of interregional exchanges. This gives some insight into the limitations of Meinig’s typology. Applying it to the geography of Spain’s Atlantic system begs a diﬀerent, and more diﬀerentiated, classiﬁcation. I am not proposing to generate one here. But a few comments on the problem of distance are called for. Links across space in the Spanish Indies were tenuous, more so than even for the English colonies to the north. A greater proportion of trade had to go through Caribbean ports, which were subject to extensive piracy. The great landmass of the

20 Lyman L. Johnson and Susan Migden Socolow, “Colonial Centers, Colonial Peripheries, and the Economic Agency of the Spanish State,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. 21 William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Choco 1680–1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976).

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southern continent was under Spanish and Portuguese jurisdiction. But much of it was not as thoroughly exploited as the St Lawrence delta or the hinterlands east of the Appalachians. Indeed, it could not be before the nineteenth century. Also, European settlement was sparse compared to the Caribbean, the British North Americas or the St Lawrence Valley. Put simply, Spain’s colonies were further removed. Traﬃc to and from them had to negotiate the Caribbean much of the time. Moreover, the major production zones on the southern continent were remote and their hinterlands produced far less for world markets. The connections between miners and local merchants in the outposts to regional agents and oﬃcials in the frontier entrepots and to transatlantic commerce conducted from Havana or Vera Cruz were more threadlike.22 On this basis, it is argued here that the bearing that geography had was more deeply felt in the process of Spanish imperial state formation than in the north. The argument to this point has momentarily stressed divergences between Spanish possessions and those of the French and British. Nevertheless, the similarities are also startling. The distance of the New World from Europe routinely undermined imperial rule, as the apex of power was separated from the realms of its exercise in two ways. Firstly, the sheer stretch of space between the continents proved to be a barrier to the limited existing capabilities in transportation, military manoeuvre and communication. Space and time in combination governed the conditions under which the Spanish, French and British could govern their own dominions. Absolutism in the states of Western Europe was a ﬁguration that juxtaposed the European monarchical court and the provincial and municipal order. In the imperial context, this tension reached a third institutional cluster: that group of institutions that settlers maintained hegemony over. This was a tension between the high ministerial apparatus concerned with imperial aﬀairs and the colonial order. In all cases, it was ampliﬁed by distance. Ideals and legislative enactments that were based on a remote continent often conﬂicted with the real and perceived institutional needs in the colonies. The conditions of European life, polity and economy could not therefore be simply reproduced in the colonial setting. In many areas, the institutional ambitions of empires often ran ahead of their organizational capacities or even

22

Ibid., pp. 326–37.

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their real control over their colonies.23 To a large extent, it can be aﬃrmed that imperial perceptions that guided decisions were for the consumption of Europeans in the metropolitan centres, far removed from the harsh New World. Distance not only problematized the governability of the Americas, it also skewed imperial perceptions of it. Distance across the Atlantic also ampliﬁed diﬀerence separating Western Europe and the Americas. British, French and Spanish colonists confronted a physically distant and thoroughly unfamiliar environment. They endeavoured, in the context of civilizing goals, to forge American social structures, administrative and economic forms and patterns of consumption and fashion that approximated the European world. To the extent that this was held as a goal, it was a naïve one. A complex relationship existed between the aspirations of French, British and Peninsula settlers and their experiences of migration. The complexity involved the distance from the homeland cultures that immigrants came from and the colonial towns and frontiers of the lands that they occupied. Many of these emigrated with settler communities and underwent a process of substantial alteration to suit the new climate. Of course, the presence of anything that seemed European represented a reduction of the social distance and diﬀerence between the two continents, a kind of comforting association with their place of origin. Identiﬁcation with the cultures of empire—whether it took the form of French aristocratism in Montreal, Hispanicism in cities of the south or reclaimed ancient English liberties—hedged against the impositions of America’s diverse environments. However, in the New World, such familiar traits were regularly complemented, if not supplanted altogether, by new ones that had instituted themselves as the fabric of American life. The exploration and then colonization of far oﬀ American places entailed an invasion of a world of Amerindian civilisations that were completely unfamiliar. This ‘unknown’ could only be understood, mapped and conquered by the cultural and institutional means that Europeans were acquainted with, and that were accessible to them. These means were derived from a ‘known’ set of practices. Intercivilizational contact in the removed American environment set some fundamental conditions in which colonial societies and an imperial 23

Jack P. Greene, “Transatlantic Colonialism and the Redeﬁnition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires.

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state ediﬁce could develop. Features common to the three enterprises of colonialism can therefore be distilled from the speciﬁc ﬁgurations. The ‘known’ institutional practices were applied to three problems of colonizing, if we identiﬁed by David Fieldhouse.24 Firstly, Atlantic expansion was colonization “in its true sense.”25 The early waves of conquest and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants dissolved these social formations and implanted settler-colonial institutions. Furthermore, they had to be populated on a signiﬁcant scale. This lent them the character of immigrant societies that can be distinguished from later occupied states of Asia, the sub-continent and Africa that were more common in an era of so-called High Imperialism. Secondly, the Atlantic empires encompassed vast territories that they could never fully administer. The means through which the problems of distance could be tackled did not develop easily in the Americas, or at least could not be developed under the auspices of vice-regal and gubernatorial authorities. Some imperial bodies were extended and modiﬁed to suit the new demands of cross-Atlantic government; for example, the Council of the Indies was a body akin to other consejos responsible for other Spanish domains. Others were invented afresh to tackle the transoceanic character of the burgeoning Atlantic empires. However, these were not always successful. Local institutions with a Creole or settler inﬂuence were more operative in the organization and regulation of colonial life. The urban cabildo in the Spanish provinces, the town-based meetings of British North America and the Chambers of Commerce and Agriculture in the French Caribbean all represented organized colonial interests. To the extent that they exercised autonomy from vice-regal representatives, it was partly due to the distance from the centres of monarchical authority. Consequently, through to the nineteenth century, crossAtlantic distances would always trouble the European administrations of the ﬁve empires. A third feature can be delineated from the ﬁrst two and relates to the early development of modern capitalism. The transatlantic empires created spheres of mercantilist regulation intended to augment the beneﬁts that accrued to states from accumulation and trade. All ﬁve

24

David Kenneth Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (London, Macmillan, 1982), chap. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 372.

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imperial contenders in the Atlantic zone jealously guarded diﬀerent types of monopolies in shipping, trade and ﬁnance, especially as they found themselves in the unusual situation whereby the only powers operating in this vast region were European. The economic forms particular to each empire gave rise to diﬀerent administrative problems and, consequently, diﬀerent regimes of mercantile governance. The extractive economies of the Spanish Indies promoted an annual traﬃc of gold and silver carried by large ﬂotillas. They were organized out of Seville by the Casa de Contratacion as a monopoly and required signiﬁcant naval protection. Slavery was a major feature of mining and African slaves were acquired and used more and more under the instrument of the asiento (that is, the legally sanctioned contracts to trade slaves). The great imperial trades coexisted with an intra- and inter-colonial commerce. Contraband was an abiding feature of this other economy and could not be tackled eﬀectively by either imperial or municipal authorities. Without question, distance hampered eﬀorts to halt trade with other colonies or, indeed, other European powers. The two coeval economic forms made piracy, smuggling and the asiento signiﬁcant issues in treaty negotiations with other powers. There is a further feature. Europe’s American empires were intercontinental and oceanic. Mastery of the Atlantic and its trade routes was the prize sought by the Euro-American empires. The control of sea-lanes was a great challenge and this stimulated the development of maritime imperial expansion. The American territories, on the other side of the ocean, were remote and non-contiguous. The Spanish, British and French attempted to structure their colonies as imperial territories domains. As inter-state relations became the subject of more complex negotiation—after Westphalia—the international dimension ﬁgured more in domestic politics. Political life in the colonies, especially in Anglo-America, acquired an acute awareness of domestic developments on the other side of the Atlantic as a result. The imperial capture of the Americas by European states can be summarized as follows. Through conquest and expansion, European states transformed themselves into conﬂict-driven empires marked by a more pronounced structural tension between European bases and the colonies. In the metropolitan perspective, institutional primacy lay mainly with imperial bodies. However, the license to govern was diﬀused by the distance between diﬀerent regions of rule and by the colonial autonomies that emerged in New World settings and from

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the structure and shared understanding of power. Mediating institutions that were either created or captured by the colonial order were recurrently at odds with the rule of imperial bodies. The next section turns to the formation of colonial societies and the impact that foundational patterns had on the trajectories of institutional development. To this point of the chapter, I have generalized the traits of the Dutch, Portuguese, French, Spanish and British empires. The focus here is on France, Britain and Spain. Crucial comparisons between them highlight not only the diﬀerences in their respective ﬁgurations of power, but also the similarities in the ways in which each reproduced the central tension of European state formation. The beginning of each represents critical divergence. Foundations and Trajectories Although English-American colonies were established during the reign of the Stuarts, they were private corporate ventures with little direct involvement of the court state apparatus. The Stuarts were, however, continuing a pattern set by Elizabeth that was continued after the Civil War. Companies and colonies chartered by the Crown did not involve the state in their founding, but were instruments of foreign policy.26 Hispanic claims to hegemony over the Atlantic were not openly contested until the mid-seventeenth century. Until then, missions of reconnaissance and exploration under the auspices of chartered companies and the consolidation of existing claims to settlements on the northeast coast of the continent constituted a more subtle challenge. The early colonies were therefore a part of a greater strategic set of interests that were very much the domain of the court state apparatus. Parliament did endeavour to oversee their development, but was blocked by Charles I and later by Charles II.27 The colonies were legiti-

26 Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, pp. 188–89. 27 From the 1620s to well after the Seven Years War, control over crown lands in America was a battle between the monarchy and Parliament, then the monarchy and the Privy Council and then the Privy Council, the Board and Trade and settlers. On the status of Crown lands, see Elizabeth Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its Overseas Peripheries c. 1550–1780,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires, pp. 255–57.

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mated by monarchical grants of charters. Crown land in America was considered part of a royal largesse. The last granted was Pennsylvania, to William Penn in 1681. After the 1688 Revolution, the Privy Council and Parliament took over the supervision of Crown lands. Until that time, many colonies were established as acts of direct patronage. The trajectory of colonization was set early. The private and fully corporatist character of the ﬁrst colonies—exempliﬁed in the failed Virginia Company—instituted a principle of colonial autonomy that would remain an enduring feature of Anglo-American colonization from inception until the American Revolution. These origins set the manner in which colonial settlers established and shaped New England. The seventeenth century inaugurated a condition of exile that underpinned the historical experiences of migration to colonial North America. Moreover, private and corporate origins continued to inform the radical independence of the colonial order’s strategic location. In this regard, the nascent colonies were remote from the structure of the island empire governed by the Stuarts.28 The non-state origins of English colonialism were matched culturally by ﬁercely independent versions of Protestantism. The settlements of farmers bound by the Covenant struggled to survive in the early decades. But colonies did last and would receive far greater attention later from the post-revolutionary British state. Values of possession and an ethos of industry emerged as the cultural settings of the colonies. They were shaped according to existing models of social organization that stressed integration of families into a wider colonial unit. With these values, colonists began to transform the land by posting fences and tending gardens and agricultural plots. English law was unique in that it did not mandate a procedure for acquiring land that involved written title of any sort. Instead, the act of enclosure symbolized ownership and was suﬃcient to claim property.29 The values that inhered in the land that was now worked—where it had previously lain ‘idle’—were the sign of possession. Private colonies sub-divided into private farms that ﬁtted 28 Compare with the argument developed by Nicholas Canny in The Elizabethan Conquest: A Pattern Established 1565–76 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976). Canny draws strong parallels between patterns of colonialism in the UK and the Americas. 29 Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), chap. 1.

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into an integrated colonial matrix. When corporate colonies gave way to royal sovereignty, this blueprint of private possession remained. The small farmer appeared the archetypal character of English colonial society who embodied colonial and personal autonomy. A notion of private property unique to the English underpinned the archetype. It survived the transfer of colonial authority to the Crown. The Empire that developed after the Stuarts and the constitutional settlement of 1689 inherited the North American colonies that were on this trajectory.30 Culturally, imperial agents and agencies drew on similar imagery as the settlers, one that animated agrarian industriousness and notions of discrete ownership. John Locke’s intervention at the end of the seventeenth century consolidated conceptions of property.31 He counselled colonists to utilize methods of enclosing land. Arguing against government concepts of aboriginal sovereignty and against the opponents of colonial plantations, he claimed that natural right to the land inhered in its ‘improvement’ through tilling, laboring and planting and in subsequent settlement. This championed a notion of private ownership through agricultural cultivation and the use of money. In turn, this is bound up with the lack of recognition of the proto-federative character of northern aboriginal political societies. In Locke’s interpretation, the two go hand in hand: English property is made possible by the eclipse of ‘idle’ aboriginal forms. Native Americans represented a lost past, in Locke’s eyes, one that England shared as its autochthonous origins.32 However, colonists could take comfort from the knowledge that they were bearers of an inevitable progress revealed to them as Providence. The cultural character of the empire that claimed sovereignty in Atlantic America was, by necessity, tolerant of competing variants

30 H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire 1688–1775 (London, MacMillan, 1996), chap. 2. 31 Barbera Arneil, “‘The Wild Indian’s Venison’: Locke’s Theory of Property and English Colonialism in America,” Political Studies 44 (1996): 60–74; Anthony Pagden, “The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire, vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and James Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Compare with Herman Lebovics, “The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 567–79. 32 Seed, American Pentimento, pp. 40–42.

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of Protestantism and with it, a broad and diverse spectrum of views. The agencies of the Great British state had to be especially lenient towards those remote colonies whose foundation and trajectory during the seventeenth century were based on ﬂight from England. This is not to say that all American colonies were founded on religious pluralism. The original Puritan colonies were as remarkably intolerant as any in the Americas.33 But, by the beginning the eighteenth century a diﬀerent pattern had emerged: a patchwork of alternative Christian creeds made up the British North Americas. The imperial apparatus showed a laissez-faire attitude to this unmovable diversity. It asserted an overarching institutional authority to the extent that it realistically could. Meanwhile, the colonies were left alone to enjoy the general principle of religious liberalism, even though it was not wholly realized. Where British America incarnated a degree of autonomy, Spain’s colonies had diﬀerent origins and directions. The Columbian ventures and other explorations were ﬁnanced and completely supported by the Crown. Colonialism built on extensive participation in the reconquista uniﬁcation of the state. Although Spanish unity was mainly dynastic in its early years, it did embody monarchical ambition that reached beyond the range of possibilities for ﬁfteenth century Spain.34 The ideal of the ‘Universal Monarchy’ provided legitimacy to the Crown’s eﬀorts and to its legal pronouncements. Its laws revolved around its economic goals to control labor and generate mineral wealth. Where the British were preoccupied with land and property, the Spanish looked to mobilize communal labor during the early years of colonization.35 As a result, Spanish conquerors had the closest interface with Amerindian civilizations of the three Western states. The theological, strategic and legal debates that this interface produced pitted the Crown and the clergy against the encomienderos. In the Spanish territories, indigenes were an issue of division between the Royal Government and settler forces. Consequently, Spanish powers were well versed in the practices of cultural confrontation.

33 See Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas: The History of a Hemisphere (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson), 2003, p. 52. 34 M. A. L. Quesada, Los reyes catolicos: La coruna y la unidad de espana (Valencia: Association Francisco Lopez de Gomara, 1989). 35 Seed, introduction to American Pentimento.

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The form was centralist, but the Spanish were accustomed to independent self-administration also. In the Americas, Spanish colonization imperfectly copied the Castilian ﬁguration of the court centre and its opposing provincial and municipal order. The colonial order was a self-appointed encomiendero elite that, despite its Hispanicism, was embroiled in low level conﬂicts with the vice-regal governor. Compromise and mutual recognition of an arena of joint rule was less evident in the Spanish state’s American reinos, then it was in its domestic realms. In this manner, the institutions of imperial and colonial rule echoed the tension of the Spanish state, while centralism marked attitudes to those outside the Castilian world, whether Muslim, Jewish or American. This divergence between private English and royal Spanish colonization prevailed until the mid-seventeenth century. The French-American Empire issued from intense competition with England.36 French reconnaissance in the 1580s led to the early development of the fur trade and consequently a strong interest in the northern continent. Both English and French vessels were ﬁshing oﬀ the northeast coast and up the St Lawrence River at this time.37 French colonialism suﬀered a series of ‘false starts’ in this region, many of which were Huguenot initiatives.38 An experiment with an agricultural colony at Acadia in 1604 failed. In 1608 Quebec was established and although its early years were diﬃcult, miserable and precarious, it did survive. For the French, as for the English, this was a period of tentative steps. Huguenot persecution, civil conﬂict and then the Thirty Years War preoccupied France’s rulers. As the expanses of American continent became apparent, a scramble for colonial possession began. The impact on the French was profound and has, perhaps, been underestimated.39 The French empire at the core of imperial competition was a Colbertian regime and remained one after Colbert’s demise. There was certainly French interest in the Americas, particularly in the vielles colonies of the Caribbean, in the sixteenth century as well 36 Jonathan Hart, Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 86–87. 37 A. N. Ryan, “France and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century,” in John B. Hattendorf, ed., Maritime History (Florida: Kriegar Publishing Co, 1996), vol. 1. 38 William J. Eccles, France in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), chap. 1; Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 25–27. 39 Robert Aldrich and John Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 14–15.

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as Huguenot interest in Spanish Florida and Portuguese Brazil.40 However, it was Colbert who began the development of French imperial institutions. This regime confronted American possessions with its own particular dynamic. Private settlements in Canada and most of the Antilles predated Louis XIV’s reign. Henri IV had shown interest in colonization by chartering a company at the end of the sixteenth century. Cardinal Richelieu went further by establishing a charter colony in 1627. However, royal resolve superseded private eﬀorts. Colbert ended charter colonialism beginning with the chartered Company of One Hundred Associates that had barely sustained the settlements in New France. It became a royal colony and he brought other colonies under the auspices of the Crown with his compact colony policy.41 Cardinal Richelieu’s earlier eﬀorts had great ambition, produced modest achievements and were, in a way, “reﬁned . . . and ampliﬁed” by Colbert.42 The stated goal was not only the glory of the monarchy, but the proﬁtable exploitation of the new colonies. Consequently, the mercantile regulation of shipping associated with the pacte colonial began. In all, the state apparatus from the mid-seventeenth century directed its energies, fairly aggressively, towards the consolidation of a transatlantic imperial nexus. Its success in doing so was greatly tempered by the institutional autonomies of its colonies. It was, I have argued elsewhere,43 a deliberate imperialism. The results of the foundation of the colonies can now be brieﬂy summed up. The minimal administration of non-economic colonial aﬀairs by the English state sanctioned by default an autonomy that

40 See comments by La Popeliniere and Richard Hakluyt on the possible beneﬁts of colonization for France in John H. Elliot, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge, Canto, 1970), pp. 83–84, 91. See also Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Alberta, University of Alberta Press, 1984), pp. 125–27. Compare with Brian Slattery’s “French Claims in North America 1500–1559,” Canadian Historical Review 59, no. 2 (1978). 41 Pierre H. Boulle, “French Mercantilism, Commercial Companies and Colonial Proﬁtability,” in L. Blusse and F. Gaastra, Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Regime (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981); William J. Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV 1663–1701 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). 42 Mathé, French Colonial Policy in America and the Establishment of the Louisiana Colony, PhD diss., University of South-West Louisiana, 1984, p. 36. 43 Jeremy C. A. Smith, “A Deliberate Imperialism: France in the Americas in the Eighteenth Century,” in Michael Adcock, Emily Chester and Jeremy Whiteman, eds., Revolution, Society and the Politics of Memory: Proceedings of the Tenth George Rude Seminar on French History and Civilization (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1996).

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was similar to its existing provincial and municipal order. However, colonial institutions in the Thirteen Colonies were based on principles of representation rather than those of urban association. In all, this contrasts with the situation in the Hispanic and Franco-American empires.44 In the Spanish Indies, the early municipal cabildos were often corporatist societies. Likewise in the French Antilles, the Chambers of Commerce and Agriculture represented corporate interests. British North American institutions exercised some legislative powers that gave settler communities some control of the executive of the imperial state. Although this eﬀect was unintended, it amounted to limited regional authority. This was a spectacular instance of the tension between colonial autonomy and imperial jurisdiction that can be found as a generic feature of all three states. British, French and Spanish States in the New World In an alien New World, the Spanish, English and French attempted to develop states and societies by using the cultural, economic and institutional means that they were familiar with. Each empire, drawing on a general set of socio-cultural conceptions, made and re-made its own particular structures and forms of the tension of state formation, although they did not do so without constraint. English, Spanish or French states themselves bore the particular marks of their own pasts. Each empire grappled with its own particular structures inherited from these foundational experiences. Formal arrangements posited peak bodies as the decisive nodes of economic and administrative exchange. It was the needs and demands of imperial authorities that were, to varying degrees considered to be the chief imperative. More generally, the tension of European state formation, the character of the colonies’ origins and trajectories and the types of social relations that prevailed in Europe, set the circumstances in which the Spanish, English and the French projected their extant structures into empires and ensured that colonial realities did not resemble imperial ideals. It was the structures of the Spanish Empire that most faithfully mirrored this general ﬁguration. Spain constructed an imperial apparatus that endeavoured to replicate the society and culture of 44 John H. Parry, “The English in the New World,” in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair, eds., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480–1650 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978).

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Castile. Spain’s colonies were its patrimonies during the Habsburg era, and remained its realms after the Bourbon reforms. The centralist impulse of Hispanic absolutism was imported with conquest; it was a product of Castilian statecraft and administrative precision.45 The Habsburg Empire that colonized America was a sixteenth century amalgam of Spanish, Austrian and other European kingdoms united under six vice-regal councils.46 The Council of the Indies was exceptional amongst these inasmuch as it commanded its own administration. In theory, it represented and assisted the monarchy in management of the colonies, whilst more practically it was granted more authority than other councils. A distinctly Spanish executive coalesced around the Council. At its head was an aristocracy-dominated chancellorship supported by a large bureaucracy of letrados, attorneys who had extensive powers and a crucial social role. Clerks, secretarial staﬀ, geographers and treasurers ﬁlled out the ranks below. In collaboration with the monarchy, the Council legislated in all major spheres of imperial-colonial life. It was meant to subsume a number of responsibilities under its auspices: legal enactment, jurisdiction, taxation, ecclesiastic appointments, papal responsibility, trade duties and government of indigenous peoples. This ideal structure was destined to be modiﬁed in its practices. The priorities of the large composite monarchy would see to that. The wealth extracted from South American mines in the sixteenth century underwrote the Habsburgs’ domestic strategies.47 Wars in Central Europe and against France, the Ottomans and the Dutch were possible because of the ﬂow of precious metals. The monarchy endeavoured to spread the stability of rule that it enjoyed in Castile to its Iberian kingdoms and to the remainder of its European territories and it used the wealth hauled out of its American inheritance to do it. Spanish mercantilism was designed to render the economic sphere of the Americas an instrument in this ﬁght, especially the mining sector.48 It was institutionalized in the Casa de Contratacion. With these two 45 This is Claudio Veliz’s main thesis in The Centralist Tradition of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 46 See H. G. Koenigsberger, The Habsburgs and Europe 1516–1660 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). 47 Richard Herr, Spain (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). 48 R. D. Gonzalez, “El monopolio estatal del murcurio en Nueva Espana durante el siglo XVIII,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 4, pp. 685–718.

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bodies, the council and the Casa, the Spanish absolutist monarchy could, ideally, rule the Americas through the media of a hierarchy of oﬃces: viceroyalty, general captaincy, provincial governorships, district judges (oidores), audiencias (viceregal courts), town councils (cabildos) and town mayors (corregidores). The last three institutions were the only ones in the structure in which regional representative autonomy was invested. Only they could acquire a relative independence from the central court state. The rigidity and size of the viceroyal bureaucracy generated its own dynamic of centralization. Habsburg rule in Spain collapsed at the end of the seventeenth century. The succeeding Bourbon dynasty was determined to restore Spain to its former position. The institutional ediﬁce bestowed the Bourbon regime was remodelled over a period of seventy years. New oﬃces decreed with greater powers replaced some older ones. But the logic of a centralist regime confronting a corporatized urban order in the Americas remained. In fact, the Bourbon regime vigorously pursued centralism. In doing so Madrid’s letrados and functionaries broke with Habsburg methods, especially in the philosophy of government. However, in the purposeful quest for eﬀective direction of the empire, they were consistent with their Habsburg forebears.49 A detailed discussion of this complicated transformation follows in later chapters. The structure of the British Empire diﬀered clearly from the Spanish case. The initially non-monarchical projects of English colonialism gave way to imperial involvement, as charters were ceded and unoﬃcial colonies incorporated into constitutional ones. However, there was signiﬁcant indeterminacy and uncertainty before consolidation occurred. The Cromwellian Protectorate faced great domestic instability and was incapable of fully aiding English Americans. Colonists were divided over the Civil War to some extent. A web of interests had linked many planters in the Caribbean to the parliamentary cause, while others had allied with the King. Moral hesitancy about the foundation of enslavement plagued the interregnum, which in turn created uncertainty amongst planters in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia.50 The Restoration appeared to conﬁrm greater independence and increased security for the Thirteen Colonies. Accordingly, this 49 See Brian R. Hamnett, The Mexican Bureaucracy Before the Bourbon Reforms 1700–1770: A Study in the Limits of Absolutism (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1979). 50 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 243–49.

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event was received with cautious relief on the American continent.51 Colonists perceived that they were less impeded by subordination to direct British needs. Their observations were belied by their ongoing economic, political and cultural dependence on England.52 Dependence could favour colonial interests and it did through the codiﬁcation of slavery and the acceleration of slave trading.53 English imperial interest and involvement in the American colonies began in earnest after the Restoration. It was increasingly recognized that colonies were essential to the economic vitality of the wider commonwealth. This meant more intensive settlement, a mercantilist orientation to trade and a new engagement with existing AngloAmerican communities. An increase in the rate of emigration along with diversiﬁcation of its sources, the failure of American joint-stock companies and the abandonment of colonial charters cleared the way for greater English regulation of colonial aﬀairs. The institutional reﬁnement of the Empire was a set of tasks left mostly to the post-1689 constitutional state. A national division of powers between the executive and legislature loosely connected structures of national and imperial government. In the Restoration, Anglo-Americans had foreseen greater independence for themselves and their institutions. Aside from these concerns, the colonists had to act prudently in relation to events in England in order to be seen not to commit themselves too heavily to the monarchy’s cause. The absence of real representation of colonial interests continued, even though it was lessened by British constitutional measues that engendered stubborn colonial autonomies. Imperial governance rested on an assertive English parliament,

51 On Anglo-American conceptions of imperial and colonial rule before and immediately after the 1689 Revolution, see David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Lovejoy places the accent on local conditions in which interpretations of the imperial order were shaped. He sees in the rebellions in New England the portents of republicanism where Sosin sees an ideology shared with the gubernatorial and imperial elite. Sosin argues that the New English rebels simply sought to consolidate representative colonial assemblies. See J. M. Sosin, English America and the Revolution of 1688: Royal Administration and the Structure of Provincial Government (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Whichever explanation one accepts, there can be little doubt as to the colonists’ aspirations of autonomous self-direction. 52 This argument is elaborated at length by Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990); James Williamson, A Short History of British Expansion: The Old Colonial Empire (London: Macmillan, 1943). 53 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 250–56.

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as the Revolutionary Settlement brought a constitutional re-arrangement of relations between Scotland, Ireland and England. The vision of empire that emerged in the 1690s assumed a united kingdom. Moreover, there was a turn in this outwardly oriented imperial administration to mercantile success and not the subsumption of colonial autonomies per se.54 The institutional composition of the British Empire was more complex than that of its French and Hispano-American counterparts. The legislative corpus of this constitutional state included successive Navigation Acts, the codiﬁcation of customs and duties and the Acts of Trade, and support for institutional regulation provided by the Board of Trade and the Bank of England. In addition, the devolution of diﬀerent responsibilities to other ministries further decentralized colonial aﬀairs.55 The Treasury was notable for its role in collecting (and, if need be, withholding) duties, excise taxes and postal revenues. Secretaries of State accumulated greater authority after 1689, which they duly shared with the Board of Trade. Parliament was well known for its opposition to royal power. But in practice Parliament’s role when it came to imperial aﬀairs was minimal and limited to mercantilist legislation. Its main contributions to the colonies’ aﬃliation to Britain were additional Navigation Acts and the Acts of Trade, both of which enhanced Britain’s economic interests. Constitutionally, the Privy Council had executive jurisdiction over the empire that it dispensed through a series of committees. Mercantile interests also ﬁgured prominently in its deliberations. The most signiﬁcant committee after 1696 was the Board of Trade. In spite of the separation of governmental functions between them, both Parliament and the Privy Council endeavoured, in tandem, to engineer imperial activity to British needs. Imperial rule in the British Americas was thus conducted through a series of ministries and committees. Authority was thereby entrusted, on paper, to a range of working institutions accountable in principle to Parliament and the Crown. This arrangement was geared to an empire that was simultaneously commercial and martial in its enterprise. France’s imperial structure was marked by a paradox. Centralism reigned at the apex of the state apparatus, and in France manoeuvre 54 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 6. 55 H. V. Bowen, Elites, chap. 3.

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against the rival powers was reckoned more strategically important than colonial growth. Imperial oﬃcials felt caught between maritime ambitions and aspirations suited to a land-based empire. Either objective was bound to be expensive. The cost of the American empire to the royal purse was substantial and outweighed any real or prospective revenue returns. Even by questionable contemporary calculations, it is clear that state revenues could not have been the motivation for colonial enterprises. Fiscally, the Empire was expensive and a direct burden.56 On top of this, colonial companies were consistently able to shift some of their costs onto the state right up until the nineteenth century. Instead, it was the aristocratism and the strategic interests of the European theatre that ruled the attentions of the court. “Dynastic advantage was . . . thought to be the key to the New World.”57 However, at the furthest limits of the French sphere the state’s inﬂuence was extremely faint. The arc of French presence reaching from the mouth of the St Lawrence to the delta of the Mississippi was more a network of colonial footholds than fully ﬂedged possessions. This is evident in the pattern of sparse, though deliberate, peopling.58 Population ﬁgures for the whole course of French-American history are instructive.59 New France by the mid-seventeenth century was still thinly populated. Colbert resolved to boost emigration to the ﬂedgling colony and charged the Ministry of Marine with the task of recruitment. The population doubled within ten years of it being declared a royal possession.60 This optimistic interlude belies a more general pattern, however. Seven out of ten settlers returned to France disappointed, it seems, by the experience.61 Perhaps this 56 Catherine M. Desbarats “France in North America: The Net Burden of Empire during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” French History 11, no. 1 (1997), pp. 1–28; and Boulle, “French Mercantilism,” in Blusse and Gaastra, Companies and Trade. 57 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 298–99. 58 Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 11–12; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973), chap. 8; Leslie Choquette, “Recruitment of French Migrants to Canada 1600–1760,” in Altman and Horn, ‘To Make America,’ chap. 6. 59 Silvia Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999), pp. 72–74. 60 Frederick Quinn, The French Overseas Empire (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), p. 52. 61 On returning emigrants, see Peter N. Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada before 1760,” The William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 3 ( July 1989), pp. 463–505. Initially, they came from a number of diﬀerent sources within France. The French were accustomed to a high level of internal migration, so they

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is not surprising as state policies on population were quite directive. French mercantilism cultivated a fear of domestic depopulation and did not oﬃcially allow the colonies to become Huguenot refuges,62 nor did it encourage emigration in general. Instead a policy of further populating the settlements with military men was enacted.63 Jesuit missions were organized early and the missionaries went to great lengths to encourage emigration. After Louis and Colbert, a distinct pattern of transatlantic migration becomes clear. French emigrants to Canada more typically hailed from France’s trading cities and their immediate hinterlands and not from more sedentary rural areas.64 They were more likely the embodiment of modernity and not tradition, as has often been thought. The numbers emigrating increased, but the growth was dwarfed by the spectacular ﬂow of migrants to the British seaboard colonies. Aside from Montreal and Quebec, mainland Canada remained a series of thinly spread military and trading outposts as much as a conglomeration of colonial settlements. Furthermore, the spread of French Americans throughout the continent over a long period of time, assumed a diasporic character.65 French Guyana on the northeast coast of the southern continent suﬀered worse fortunes, due to the presence of the small colonies of other powers and impenetrability of the dense jungle. The Dutch brieﬂy overtook it. Conditions were poor. Two separate companies established colonies there in quick succession in the mid-seventeenth century failed dismally.66 A more concerted eﬀort by the duc de Choiseul after the Seven Years War brought an inﬂux of settlers. Their numbers suﬀered heavily from disease and the experiment was plagued by a lack of social organization. Such sporadic attempts to

were anything but sedentary. Deliberate recruitment set the emigration pattern but resulted in a signiﬁcant rate of return migration, especially amongst indentured servants. See Peter Moogk, “Manon’s Fellow Exiles: Emigration from France to North America Before 1763,” in Nicholas Canny, Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 62 Hart, Comparing Empires, pp. 84–85. 63 Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV, pp. 48–52. 64 Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 65 P. Anctil, “The Franco-Americans of New England,” in Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell, eds., French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience across the Continent (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. 66 F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 59–60.

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bolster the colony met with little success and only a small foundation that was heavily dependent on slavery was sustained.67 In economic terms, the French were not able to seriously control the northern half of the continent. In many ways colonial strategy sought a combination of economic forms, rather than a straight subjugation of the indigenous economy, as occurred in the slave and encomienda colonies. Colbert’s compact colony policy attempted to limit habitation to the St Lawrence delta. The regime persevered with this approach until Louis XIV claimed the interior of the northern continent in 1701. At that time, the fur trade was a forceful economic imperative. It called traders west into the hinterland and drew them deeper into the interior. This seemed a necessity, but it undermined Colbert’s developmental strategy. The centrality of the fur trade to the colony’s economy had a number of consequences. Its vitality depended on consistent trading relations with established indigenous networks. The conquest of land did not take place as it had elsewhere. Relations with the indigenes were marked by an economy of exchange and by military alliances punctuated by sporadic clashes, rather than by a brutal and genocidal subordination.68 This was a matter of necessity for the French as the Iroquois retained a powerful level of combat organization.69 Whilst outright defeat of the Indian nations was not realistic, other colonial activities weren’t neglected. The French did try to reconstruct the indigenes in their own image. Attempts at conversion by Jesuits and eﬀorts to create reservations were extremely signiﬁcant, but met with only limited success in more remote regions. The fur trade stood in place of the missions. It generated an economic alliance of traders and trappers. Three zones of participation were evident by the mideighteenth century.70 Around the banks of the St Lawrence River surviving indigenes were greatly reliant on the colonial economy. Beyond that, however, lay a region of articulation and inter-dependence

67

Aldrich and Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier, pp. 25–27. See Gilles Paquet and Jean-Pierre Wallot, “Nouvelle-France/Quebec/Canada: A World of Limited Identities,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 95–115. See also Blackburn, The Making of Modern Slavery, p. 280; and Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, pp. 34–49. 69 William J. Eccles “Sovereignty Association 1500–1783,” in David Armitage, Theories of Empire 1450–1800 (Hampshire, UK: Agate Publishing Ltd., 1998). 70 Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 208–13. 68

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where the Micmac, Abenaki and Iroquois engaged in economic relationships established in common with one another and with FrenchAmericans. Where English colonists had a political economy based on land and the use of money, the French accommodated the existing gift-giving economy in order to take advantage of the potential trade.71 Mutuality did not assure symmetry of relations, but it meant that colonists could not freely dictate terms. In a third area of European participation and reverberation, the fur trade was most lively. Around the Great Lakes and beyond, the alliance of trappers and traders was at its starkest. The boundaries between the three zones would eventually shift with calamitous consequences for the indigenous nations. During the era of greatest imperial rivalry, however, this division was quite stable. In this context, the Iroquois retained their independence and became a powerful strategic factor right through to the Seven Years War in the 1750s.72 As a result of isolation, the relationship of colonists to the land was less ﬁxed than in other parts of the continent. A great and neglected tradition of migration traveled with colonists to Canada’s “river empire.”73 Those accustomed to movement across regions were able to adapt to the mobility demanded by the fur and ﬁshing trades.74 Mobility sat in tension with a more sedentary lifestyle in the settlements along the St Lawrence River. Until the Seven Years War, it was mobility that dominated. Nomadism was less conducive to a colonial reconstruction of space in both cultural and economic terms as it was land that dominated the settlers, rather than the construction of townships and forts that could dominate the landscape. Where land in Europe was relatively scarce and highly valued, it seemed endless in Canada. It was a wilderness land that did not acquire the same social and economic meaning that it had in France.

71

Seed, American Pentimento, pp. 21–22. See William J. Eccles, “The Fur Trade and Eighteenth Century Imperialism,” in Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, Atlantic-American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition 1492–1888 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 212–45; Eccles, France in America, chap. 4; and Arthur J. Ray, “The Hudson’s Bay Company Fur Trade in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Economic Study,” in James R. Gibson, ed., European Settlement and Development in North America: Essays in Honour and Memory of Andre Hill Clark (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 116–36. 73 Eccles, France in America, p. 156; Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants. 74 See Christian Morissonneau, “The ‘Ungovernable’ People: French-Canadian Mobility and Identity,” in Louder and Waddell, French America, pp. 15–33. 72

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The traits of rural life could not be simply transferred to this environment.75 While a system of de jure seignoriality prevailed, the material and social underpinnings that sustained it in France were absent and so the unintended consequences of its introduction were quite diﬀerent.76 It was a means of clearing the land and not a reproduction of the social relations of the old world,77 although historical evidence suggests that seignorial grants did not always lead to clearing and development.78 Land was plentiful and free to till, placing potential tenants in a strong position. Seignorial dues were low and they were paid to the non-ennobled. The holders were as likely to pursue the proﬁtable trades of townships, which promised greater returns than their landed rents.79 There were no taxes levied. A uniﬁed legal system was the law of the land. Instead of producing a country of villages clustered around local churches, seignoriality, on one hand, opened up territory and, on the other, concentrated settlement on the St Lawrence River, where economic traﬃc was greatest. It also produced a sharp contrast between residential life and the mobility of the fur trade. Therefore a colonial relationship

75 R. Cole Harris, “The Extension of France in Rural Canada,” in Gibson, European Settlement and Development, French America, pp. 27–46. 76 L. R. MacDonald develops a Marxist analysis of New France that departs from the fallacious ‘seignorial mode of production’ argument in “France and New France: The Internal Contradictions,” Canadian Historical Review 52, no. 2 (1971). I am following his analysis for the purposes of this argument. However, two other views should be acknowledged. Allan Greer takes a unique position on French Canada based on a general reconsideration of post-medieval feudalism. He argues that New France from its inception combined a rural feudalism with urban commercial connection to the mercantile absolutist empire. This was feudalism, to be sure, in Greer’s mind, and it was quite compatible with a nascent capitalist world economy. See Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740 –1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). I don’t see that conceptualizing the internal social relations of colonial New France as ‘feudal’ adds much depth to the analysis of the overall mercantile ﬁguration of the French Empire. However, Greer’s connection of colonial economic life to imperial economic movements, despite its internal patterns, is laudable. There is a larger controversy about the feudal or capitalist character of New France, which I don’t want to assess in full here, although I am clearly expressing a view by endorsing MacDonald. Much of the discussion about feudalism, seigniorial patterns and the economy follows the contours of a historiographic debate over nationalist inﬂuences in history-writing. See Serge Gagnon, “The Historiography of New France 1960–1974: Jean Hamlin to Louise Dechene,” Journal of Canadian Studies 13, no. 1 (1978). 77 Allain, French Colonial Policy, pp. 61–68. 78 Miguelon, New France 1701–1744, pp. 194–98. 79 Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants, pp. 284–87.

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to the land remained undeﬁned as long as the mobile industries of fur and ﬁshing led colonial concerns. This was the situation until the nineteenth century. The extremely limited re-shaping of the North American world stood in stark contrast to the pattern of exploitation in the Caribbean. The French Antilles were more deeply colonized. Although European colonists were in a minority overall, they constituted a self-legislating colonial order. Largely, the French Caribbean corresponded more to Spanish and British American models on the mainland than it did to life in New France. In addition, the elites of French West Indian colonies were acutely aware of the nearby Spanish presence and exhibited deep anxiety about Spain’s movements.80 Of course, what was exceptional about it was the “systemic slavery” that was its predominant form of labor.81 Land and labor were everywhere ﬁrmly in the hands of French planters. Here the thrust of imperial possession was far more complete, partly because of the proﬁtable character of the slave and sugar trades of the eighteenth century.82 The French West Indies were the richest colonies in the world at this time. Indeed, they surpassed their British rivals in eﬃciency. This was largely because they were able to prosper without in any way threatening French trading interests. But, due to the unparalleled productivity of the plantation economy, the merchant-planter nexus constituted a formidable force in the French imperial structure. The actual reach of French possession in the Americas was therefore fairly limited. Sovereignty was held in the huge Canadian wilderness, but New France’s de facto reign was substantially curbed by Iroquois power. In contrast French command in the Caribbean was ﬁrm, though the possessions were small. Sovereignty was most closely guarded in those colonies of great strategic and economic value. The Franco-American empire generated transatlantic institutions that concentrated on these colonies. In the early seventeenth century, colonial undertakings were jointly sponsored by private companies and the marine de guerre.83 Over time the weight of responsibility was

80

Hart, Comparing Empires, pp. 93–100. See the introduction to Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). 82 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, chap. 10; Doyle, The Old European Order, p. 527. 83 Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, pp. 281–83 81

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assumed by the latter as the former subsided and then dissolved. The reforms to the French government of the 1690s added considerable numbers of new oﬃces to the institutional ediﬁce and stabilized it until the Revolution.84 Together, these had the authority to govern the empire. A Council of Commerce and Secretariat of the Foreign Oﬃce were instituted, bringing greater superintendence to colonial aﬀairs. The Council was a vital body of the court state.85 It brought together merchant interests, representatives of the Crown and leading administrators of the trading monopolies in a negotiating forum. The colonies were subject to its regulation of trading companies and its resolutions on tariﬀs and trade policies. It lasted only until 1716 and after a period of abeyance, its functions were taken up by the bureau du commerce. The bureau dovetailed with the interventionist tenure of Maurepas who took charge of the Ministry of Marine in 1725. Maurepas acquired extensive responsibility for the Atlantic colonies and developed a philosophy of commerce that accorded colonial activity equal status within the mercantile system. Many of his projects, launched with the support of Cardinal Fleury,86 drew heavily on this outlook that was so rare in the French polity. Other changes had implications for the colonies. A Director-General for fortiﬁcations was appointed. The admiralty was rendered an oﬃce that was independent of the King. The reforms of this period were a response to internal dynamics at court and in the bureaucracy, although fear of an Anglo-Dutch alliance compelled the restructure of the Marine.87 By the eighteenth century, overall responsibility for colonial aﬀairs had been handed to the Ministry of Marine. The Marine was in a decrepit state by this time and was substantially restructured. The new State Secretariat of the Marine was handed jurisdiction of trade and colonial matters. The Ministry was subject to ongoing reorganization during the early decades of the eighteenth century.88 The new

84 John C. Rule, “Royal Revisions of the French Central Government in the 1690s,” in Adcock et al., Revolution, Society and the Politics of Memory. 85 Thomas J. Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce 1700 –1715: A Study of Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983). 86 Peter R. Campbell, preface to Power and Politics in Old Regime France. 87 Donald G. Pilgram, “France and New France: Two Perspectives on Colonial Security,” Canadian Historical Review 55, no. 4 (1974). 88 Dale Miquelon, New France 1701–1744: ‘A Supplement to Europe’ (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), pp. 88–91.

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Minister, Jerome de Pontchartrain, created the bureau des colonies in 1710 to take speciﬁc command of colonial aﬀairs. The Marine’s authority in Canada was tenuous. Its eﬀorts to close Western forts provoked a serious response. It had to concede and cancel its decision. For much of the century, the lines of ministerial demarcation remained unclear. The level of eﬀective centralism present in the Spanish consejo was not paralleled in the French empire. Direct administration was the dual responsibility of colonial governors, some of whom held the title of intendant. Governors were military aristocrats appointed because of their proximity to the King more than anything else. Some intendants were legal functionaries, but they also acquired their positions as a reward for their loyalty. They were supported by a small number of oﬃcials, including ordonnateurs responsible for ﬁnance. At times, there was friction between the oﬃces of intendant and governor, often a reﬂection of dissonance between royal government and its colonial representatives. More typically, the governorship and the intendancy simply remained distinct oﬃces and not conﬂicting ones. In this unique arrangement, governors focussed on aﬀairs that would concern the Crown, while the intendancy regulated legal institutions. Gubernatorial powers were not open to challenge except by authorities in Paris. Some colonial assemblies were called, although none were elected until 1787. Colonial government was ﬁrmly located in the hands of French agents. However, their role was far from despotic. In matters of taxation—an area of government that was a source of great antagonism elsewhere in the Americas—the colonists were largely left alone. The most onerous of taxes in France were not levied in the colonies, nor was tithing practiced. Those taxes that were imposed on the Caribbean possessions were only feasible after a degree of indirect consultation. For the most part, the Crown was reluctant to permit the inﬂuence of colonists to expand and therefore made little eﬀort to extract more revenue than it realistically could. In Canada, royal taxes were waived to encourage emigration.89 In other governmental matters, centralism reigned. Unlike the Spanish Empire, colonial autonomy in legal matters was precluded, except at the margins of colonial jurisdiction. The sale of administrative 89

R. Cole Harris, “The Extension of France in Rural Canada,” in Gibson, European Settlement, p. 40.

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oﬃces to local inhabitants never occurred; that avenue of enfranchisement that was important to Spanish-Creoles was not available to New Frenchmen. Conclusion In the opening chapter, three premises of state formation in the era under considered in this book are set forth. A transatlantic perspective is privileged in the place of national histories of colonialism that have dominated historical scholarship, at least until the recent advent of Atlantic Studies. A reconstructed notion of ‘absolutism’ is marked as a concept that can provide some heuristic value for comparative analysis. The British conﬁguration is more correctly considered a post-absolutist state in this framework. Thirdly, a metatheory of state formation as a process of institutional creation is preferred over Weberian sociologies of the functional monopolization and rationalization of power. The analysis provided in this chapter supports four claims about the character of early modern European state formation that are derived from these premises. First of all, the argument for an Atlanticwide perspective on early modern state formation is profoundly compelling. Analysis of the transatlantic expanse of European states calls for comparison of the three main empires to seek similarities and measure diﬀerences. What this draws into relief is the distinctiveness of domestic and colonial theatres, despite the continuities between them. Provincial and urban elites were drawn closer to the centres of power through networks of patronage. Rebellions and low-level and routine forms of resistance to monarchical rule provided the impulse to internal changes in the Spanish, English and French baroque states. However, clientage also acted to integrate more secluded aristocratic forces into the regime. Colonial governments were another matter. They were more remote and had to be selfreliant. Moreover, they answered to a separate and additional set of constituencies whose voice could, at times, sound loud to elites with less inﬂuence to ply with imperial decision makers. There were, therefore, two types of tension within Western Europe’s imperial states: a domestic tension between central and provincial elites, while the other marked the imperial sphere and set imperial administrators against colonial leaders.

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The second claim is that a re-theorized notion of absolutism has some explanatory power in a comparison of the British, Spanish and French empires. Traditional conceptions of absolutism have centred on its allegedly autocratic nature. The work of historians has put that idea to rest, suggesting that the only viable understanding of absolutism must be based on its demonstrable divisions. As a category of historical-sociological analysis, it is redeﬁned as a tension-laden monarchical ﬁguration. This adequately captures the social character of the regimes that governed France and Spain from the sixteenth century. It also helps to explain the emergence of the British constitutional monarchy and some of the particular features of its ﬁrst imperial state. However, examination of domestic conﬂicts makes it diﬃcult to avoid the glaringly obvious discordance in imperial arrangements. The third contention is that the vastness of the expanding empires stimulated exceptional relations of mutual dependence between metropolitan administration and colonial societies. Distance set the terms of government and it did so in the unique zone of the Atlantic where the only oceanic powers were European. Categories of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ are of little use in studying this aspect of state formation. Thinking about how states confronted the problem of distance in terms of multiple centres is far more helpful. It brings into play the agency of local elites, economic patterns and partial autonomy of colonial institutions. Of course, distance also magniﬁed the frictions between imperial bodies and American-based authorities. Comparatively isolated colonies had to be self-reliant. At the same time, a sense of vulnerability compelled colonists to look to martial and naval forces for protection. In addition, abiding feelings of loyalty and identiﬁcation with the Empire integrated communities. This is a dimension of colonial existence that is detailed in a further chapter. The ﬁnal argument is that the colonies’ foundational patterns left an ‘imprint’ on the trajectories of imperial expansion in each case. The divergent circumstances confronting the English, Spanish and French states are foregrounded in this discussion. Private and corporate English colonies were founded on the ideals of a complete autonomy. Their self-understanding was that they were re-enacting the Exodus. Labor-centred acts of enclosure symbolized their colonization of the land. The Spanish sanctioned colonies through regal ritual, the charter of towns and the mobilization of labor for mining and ranching. The nucleus of decision-making aimed to provide standard methods of colonial development. Although this could not

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achieve its own ideals in full, it put in place an enduring logic of centralism. The French were deliberate in their colonial manoeuvres. However, Europe consumed their attention and, up until the War of Spanish Succession, they had little regard for their American territories. Control of their continental and Caribbean possessions was diﬃcult and the response of the state was a far-reaching militarization of colonial authority. Even the garrisoned and fortiﬁed colonies were prey for the British, however. It must be emphasized that the powers that faced one another in the New World did not operate solely in a Hobbesian environment of perpetual hostility. The states that vied for territory and occasionally clashed shared something of a common cultural background that circumscribed their engagement. The process of territorial and imperial state formation in Europe was informed by the growth of a consciousness of Europe as a civilization apart. This did not assuage the internal or international conﬂicts of states. It framed them in an Atlantic world where colonists had to be acutely mindful of the diﬀerence of the physical environment of the Americas and the diﬀerence of its inhabitants and their social forms. In the violent intercession into America, European traditions were sharpened in some respects and transformed in so many others. This transformation propelled the crystallization of a self-awareness of civilizational diﬀerence.

CHAPTER FOUR

CIVILIZATION AND PRE-COLONIAL TRADITIONS Imperial states were built across two continents by monarchies adapted to tradition but ever adjusting to new conditions. Each enjoyed a deﬁnite relationship to the medieval past. They were also oriented to a constantly expanding Atlantic theatre. Perceptions of empire in this historical process were therefore inherited and emergent. They drew on collective memories or legacies of Rome that represented an empire of highly condensed power. In turn, the inherited understanding of Europe’s ancient imperial past was an aid that helped make sense of the new Atlantic nexus. Each would have been inconceivable in their form without that common legacy of imperium, or the historical experiences of conquest, or the impermanent unity provided by Christendom. The forward movement of Spanish, French and English power was animated by these legacies. In encounters with Amerindian societies and purportedly antipodean environments, diﬀerent facets of the conquering states’ heritage remained meaningful to varying degrees for the conquering forces and the elite cadre of the imperial apparatus. It also set the ways in which traditions were transformed, relativized or even relinquished. The feudal and Christian past was part of a conceptual apparatus that helped Europeans to comprehend and describe the Atlantic world to Europe’s west. The New World enlarged the civilizational self-perception of the apparatus of states and forcefully inﬂuenced the decisions of rulers. This chapter is the ﬁrst of two dealing directly with the dimension of civilization. It looks at the civilizational inheritance with which Europeans approached that astounding American horizon. This is a matter of existing traditions that informed colonialism in the Americas. Another way to present this that is consistent with the outline in chapter two is to call it the instituted imaginary or the imagery of tradition that creative transformation was infused with. Three kinds of traditions inﬂuenced European entry into the Atlantic and arrival in the American world. The turns in conception that emerged in the Renaissance and that were coeval with the early voyages into the Atlantic Ocean furnished a disposition to explore westwards.

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Similarly, an early mercantilist orientation to extraction, production and trade supplied motivation to expand. The Spanish, English and French had their own traditions of conquest that contextualized the movements of each state. Some were shared and others were unique. One that was shared was the memory of the Roman Empire and this endured in the idea of the monarchia universalis. These were all pre-existing factors. The emergent signs of a civilizational consciousness—the other side of creative transformation— coalesced in the encounters with New World. Chapter ﬁve takes up three aspects of the emergent imaginary. What is taken to be the legacy of Europe’s past combined with the disposition to scientiﬁc inquiry, a new continental and geographical imagination and an expanded ethnological awareness. Some brief remarks made at this point foreshadow greater elaboration in chapter ﬁve. New science has a longer and unexamined history in the rise of medieval rationalism. The breakthroughs to modern science depend less on the development of the techniques of improved perception and observation associated with the so-called Scientiﬁc Revolution and more on a discernible metaphysical transformation.1 The twelfth century transformation of rationalistic philosophy altered the terms of intellectual thought for Europeans.2 They set loose logic and dialectics as methods of inquiry. The balance of faith and learning shifted. It was the late medieval pre-text for the development of scientiﬁc approaches that would coexist with and could contest the sacred authority of the Church. This early background of Western humanism won’t be explored at length in these pages, but it is acknowledged. The argument here is that the internal mutation of theology became more meaningful in the context of the opening up and exploration of the American continent by Europeans. This has been understood as the process of

1 See Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute, pp. 280–87; and Toby E. Huﬀ, ed., On the Roads to Modernity. 2 Benjamin Nelson’s distinctive history of civilizational developments is promising. One of the pivotal moments in the life of European civilization is the critical renaissance in the thirteenth century in which the relationship between faith and knowledge began to alter. Rationalism enjoyed a good reputation in Christian Europe during this period. This is the most decisive and comprehensive development on the road to rationalized consciousness, according to Nelson. It is a breakthrough either ignored or understated elsewhere and it serves to highlight the neglect of monasticism as an incubator of civilized subjectivity. The mutation of High Medieval scholasticism is the backdrop to Renaissance thought examined in this chapter.

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‘Discovery’—European and not universal discovery to be sure—and there are several aspects of it. While knowing and inquiring as modes of human endeavour had been problematized by medieval humanism, the transformation of the precepts of Western knowledge took place in the branches of cosmology, geography, natural philosophy and ethnological disciplines that emerged in Atlantic and American exploration. Indeed, the European breakout into the Atlantic had a profound eﬀect on the metaphysics of perception by encouraging doubt of mind and a sharpened sensitivity to the visual. In other words, the status of debate and dispute and the very contestability of authority became meaningful in the long confrontation with the Americas. A modern continental and geographical imagination formed rapidly in the sixteenth century as the actual proportions of the Earth become apparent to Europeans. The Western hemisphere pressed itself on European minds more and more. Historians have now established that it took much of the sixteenth century for the geographical properties of the American landmass to be absorbed, but after that initial period, it began to gain more attention.3 By century’s end America and Europe were increasingly thought of as continents. Western Europe had entered the Renaissance entrenched in the Christian mindset. ‘Christendom’ was a name and a racialized identity.4 It had uniﬁed Europeans against Ottoman encroachment and established the imagination of the Christian Empire. However, the late ﬁfteenth century inaugurated a shift in prospect as Europeans thought increasingly in terms of ‘Europe’ and less and less in terms of Christendom.5 The name ‘Europe’ entered the vocabulary of literate Europeans more frequently as the western prospect of their existence was disclosed. By 1500 it was possible to imagine Europe balancing between eastern and newly found western lands. It could be depicted as one of four

3 Oswalde A. Dilke and Margaret S. Dilke, “The Adjustment of Ptolemaic Atlases to Feature the New World,” in Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, The Classical Tradition and the Americas (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994). 4 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change 950 –1350 (London: Allen Lane, 1993), pp. 250–55. 5 Margaret Aston, The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968); Delanty, Inventing Europe, chap. 3; Barnet Litvinoﬀ, Fourteen Ninety Two: The Year and the Era (London: Constable, 1991); John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: HarperCollins, 1993), chap. 1. On the identity of Christendom, see Pagden, The Idea of Europe, pp. 74–76. See also Denys Hay who, in Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), chap. 5, stresses that earlier uses of the word ‘Europe’ were important, but restricted.

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continents and not one of three bequeathed to the sons of Noah.6 A concept of Europe is illustrated in artefacts that survive. Renaissance maps and their pictorial marginalia suggest such a speciﬁc conception. So also do works of art that departed from Byzantine and Gothic techniques to develop a High Renaissance style, particularly in representing America. The reinterpretation of the classics helped to induce this change of artistic representation as the immediate medieval past was rejected in favour of a more remote Antiquity, whose imagery could be used to valorise Europe’s conquest.7 Whilst the classical heritage had been clearly preserved by Islamic scholarship, it could be reﬂected upon as European in its civilizational origins. The transformation of civilizational outlook was also evident in ethnographic thought. The expanding ﬁelds of humanist and scientiﬁc inquiry were fraught with tension—the classiﬁcation of humankind and the re-conception of Nature were especially contentious areas. America’s peoples were variously subject to curiosity, to romantic interpretation as the inhabitants of paradise and to theological debate about their Noachic origins. These are hints of an early apprehension of the astounding anthropological diversity of humanity.8 Ethnological judgment and deliberation began to crystallize in the sixteenth century as the cultural universe of Europe expanded. New ethnological knowledge pressed the West’s re-evaluation of its conceptions of a multicivilizational and multi-continental order. This was the ﬂuid consciousness of otherness that vacillated between conception of other peoples as similar and constructions of those same peoples as alien. It was produced and elaborated in the ferment of interaction with foreign worlds, the Americas being the most momentous of these. Three centuries of transatlantic engagement generated a self-ordering image of civilization, even though the terms to describe it that became current much later.

6 Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997). 7 Denise Albanese, New World, New Science (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 24–39. 8 See Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492 (London: MacMillan, 1987), pp. 223–45.

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chapter four The Tributaries of Civilizational Orientation to the Atlantic

These three aspects that are detailed in chapter ﬁve are introduced here to convey the novel and dramatic changes brought about in the early Colombian era. They can be seen as an abiding contrast to established traditions that guided Spanish, English and French ventures into the Atlantic. Four sets of traditions oriented Europeans to the western Atlantic: the conceptual realignment associated with Renaissance thought; the economic or mercantilist regard for possession and motion; pre-established models of conquest and colonization that emerged out of Latin Europe’s late medieval expansion, Spain’s uniﬁcation and England’s plantations in Ireland; and the ideal of the universal kingdom, the new Rome. Exploration in the Renaissance Mind The precepts of humanism stimulated and circumscribed naval exploration and steady colonial possession of the Atlantic. They contained the potential of adaptability and improvisation. Humanism involved two movements: the division in philosophy between human-centred and canonical authority and the growth of empirical judgement.9 The ﬁrst and foremost preoccupation was with texts. The humanists demanded disciplined exegesis. Ancient works thought lost entered the body of philosophical thinking through more regularised and thorough contact with Islamic sources and systematic searching of the declining Byzantine heritage. As the volume of imported works grew, the humanists insisted on thorough and scrutinizing examination of the original sources of scripture. The new exegetes were preoccupied with what ﬁrst authors wrote, whether it was in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. Scriptural interpretation was thereby relativized and opened up to dispute. This was the ﬁrst and continuing impact of medieval humanism. It forced a division between theology and philosophy as the latter acquired a this-worldly and hence humanist orientation. A realignment of schools of thought followed.10 Thomist and Averroist coalitions

9 Jaroslav Krejcí, The Human Predicament—Its Changing Image: A Study in Comparative Religion and History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 99–110. 10 See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 487–90.

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anchored a new spectrum of opinion and debate to which competing versions of nominalism oriented. The institutional bases of competing factions were also distinctive; papal appointments went one way, university teachers another, while monarchical administrators and courtiers were more typically of a humanist persuasion.11 They were rooted in diﬀerent centers also and enjoyed the patronage and protection of diﬀerent rulers. The fracturing of knowledge was forced by the attention paid to scriptural reading that facilitated a climate of disputation and disagreement. The interaction of new sources that came from outside of Western Europe with the problematization of the Church’s monopoly on knowledge which had already occurred in the monasteries and universities encouraged the will to inquiry. While the intricacy of late medieval and early Renaissance intellectual milieux cannot be explored here, it is clear that transformation of the terrain of orthodoxy provided a humanist impulse to an outwardlooking curiosity. The second result of humanism is also relevant. The preoccupation with textual interpretation induced an adjustment to the phenomenal world. An enlargement of the scope of empirical sensibility relativized more rigid conceptions of geography and anthropography. The change in attitudes to sight was vital.12 Medieval Christianity had denigrated vision and the visual senses. But vision as a sense found a diﬀerentiated place in Western aesthetics. The thirteenth century recovery of Aristotlean works that were sympathetic to the privilege of the senses helped to create the cultural pre-conditions for perspectivism. It also generated a tension between the theological Canon and the new authority accorded to the senses that endured the early modern transformation of European culture. The reputation of perception and the empirical was itself up for grabs and was problematized in philosophical discourse. Europeans entered the sixteenth century and the American hemisphere, trusting the witness of those who could give ﬁrst or second hand accounts. At the risk of over-simpliﬁcation, the epistemological tension of the Renaissance can be summarized as follows. Two kinds of interpretation coexisted in Renaissance thought and was the basis of judgement. The world could be ‘read’ through the texts of Holy

11

Ibid., pp. 497–501. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 1. 12

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Scripture or comprehended through the lens of sensual experience, direct interpretation, discovery and requestioning.13 In the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries both forms of comprehension were accommodated in quite diﬀerent combinations, often synthesized in the new natural philosophy.14 Proto-scientiﬁc thinking was not easily distinguishable from the humanist endeavours of the day. Indeed, specialized scientiﬁc inquiry disposed to an empirical epistemology did not originate in the Renaissance; that is, it did not exist as a separate activity. Scientia was closely allied with the arts, with trade and with philosophy.15 It was cultivated in the milieux of major cities and courts across Europe.16 Its appeal was tactile and aesthetic, where the existing corpus of natural philosophy associated with monastic knowledge was textual. In the cities and at court, secretaries, engineers, physicians and philosophers lived in close proximity to the practitioners of the constructive arts, that is, the painters, sculptors, instrument makers, alchemists and architects. They mingled in inner-urban environments that stimulated a cross-fertilization of ideas. Such networks were the intersections of artisanal skill and technique, academy-based instruction, natural history and naturalistic philosophy. They fomented a mode of cognition characteristic of the world of artisans and traders, one in which the senses were privileged. This generated a “vernacular epistemology” easily given to naturalistic pursuits.17 Artists, seafarers and merchants were observers and interpreters of the physical world. Nonetheless, whilst theirs was an experience-based knowledge, it was

13 Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 14 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Tradition of Scholarship in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), introduction and chap. 1. 15 Owesi Temkin, “Science and Society in the Age of Copernicus”; in Owen Gingerich, ed., The Nature of Scientiﬁc Discovery: A Symposium Commemorating the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ISA, 1975); Collins, A Sociology of Philosophy, chap. 10. 16 Pamela O. Long, “Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and Investigation of Nature,” and Deborah E Harkness, “‘Strange’ Ideas and ‘English’ Knowledge: Natural Science Exchange in Elizabethan London,” in Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2001); Paula Findlen, “Courting Nature,” in Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Margaret C. Jacob, “The New Science and Its Audience,” in Scientiﬁc Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 17 Larry Silver and Pamela Smith, “The Powers of Nature and Art in the Age of Durer,” in Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels, pp. 46–47.

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not closed oﬀ from the inﬂuences of humanism.18 Indeed, in the age of exploring and colonizing, the boundaries of clerical scholarship and nautical practice were porous. Moreover, these spheres of knowledge were not uniﬁed in themselves and they contained ambiguities and contradictions. At ﬁrst sight, one appears scholarly and the other experiential. However, both drew on ancient references, as well as practical application in a manner that should defy over-simpliﬁcation. Canonical authority was tested by the epistemological weight accruing to perception that resulted from the voyages of reconnaissance. The disposition to set out from Mediterranean shores emerged from the merchant culture that was not bookish, but which was inﬂuenced by scholarship. It was also shaped by a number of nautical elements. Merchant life involved calculation of proﬁt and loss, the arithmetic of a commercial mind. It also embodied debate between religious and material concerns. The colloquial knowledge of merchants was the knowledge of places. Their textual diet involved an adaptable capacity to read maps as well as the Latin classics. Merchant lives, like those of scholars, were pregnant with ideas received from Antiquity. Those ideas were fed by the stories of travelers, which seemed to conﬁrm ancient myths. However, sailors and traders also drew from a pool of experience that included what they saw. That acted as a diﬀerent mode of understanding. Voyaging was followed by settler-colonialism, although this was unintended in the ﬁfteenth century and there was no necessary connection between exploration and colonization. Nonetheless, the Renaissance exuded a predisposition to voyaging. The technological and economic means for deep-sea exploration had been developed and available for some time.19 In the ﬁfteenth century, however, the practical experience of European mariners had been limited to the Mediterranean basin and the trade routes of the Black Sea. Minor incremental breakthroughs facilitated the expansion of navigation. There were a number of important developments in cartographic techniques, most of them Portuguese: the emergence of latitudinal

18 On English colonialism’s relationship to humanism and the infusion of its seafaring milieux with humanist ideas, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 9–19. 19 John H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement 1450 –1650 (London: Sphere Books Ltd, 1973), pp. 16–18.

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calculation, navigational innovations acquired from Arab sailors, the production of new charts and improvements in compass technology.20 Advances in cartography steadily overtook Ptolemaic cosmography without immediately displacing its authority. Indeed, the Ptolemaic conception proved durable as it could easily accommodate the discovery of new lands simply adding to existing maps.21 The establishment of trading footholds on East Atlantic islands and on the North African coast set the boundary of trade further to the West and began this long process of testing European’s mental picture of the world. Technological capacities and new maritime experiences merely established potential. More was needed to propel oceanic exploration. Some stories of distant places remained in the domain of the monasteries and academies. Others, however, emerged from the realm of travelers’ tales to hasten nautical adventure. Stories told by Marco Polo and Mandeville stimulated curiosity about distant realms that were foreign to European experience, and perhaps inhabited by marvels and monsters.22 Nearby eastern lands were enshrined in the social memory of Christendom and in the journals recorded for the literate by travelers. However, the western vista was more mysterious. Reconnaissance in the eastern Atlantic prior to 1492 excited the imagination of a western Antipodes in humanist circles.23 The metaphor of the Antipodes—a place at the foot of the world or on the other side of it—hung over European perception of all unchartered regions. Some of Columbus’ contemporaries took it literally.24 It had a general inﬂuence on Renaissance perceptions of the Americas: freedom from the tyranny of impassability that was associated in Ancient myth with

20 Patricia Seed, “‘A New Sky and New Stars’: Arabic and Hebrew Science, Portuguese Seamanship, and the Discovery of America,” in Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 21 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 22 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (New York: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 2; and Seymour Phillips, “The Outer World of the European Middle Ages,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reﬂecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 23 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 245–51; and Gabriella Moretti, “The Other World and the ‘Antipodes’: The Myth of the Unknown Countries between Antiquity and the Renaissance,” in Haase and Reinhold, The Classical Tradition. 24 Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas, p. 4.

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the so-called torrid zones of the world turned European eyes to other lands that could be navigated. Italian humanists were thus able to entertain ideas of an unchartered western land.25 Ancient maps by Crates and Macrobius circulated in Renaissance Europe supporting the idea of a western hemisphere.26 Peter Martyr thought Columbus had stumbled across it: A certain Colonus has sailed to the western Antipodes, even to the Indian Coast, as he believes. He has discovered many islands which are thought to be those of which mention is made by cosmographers, beyond the eastern ocean and adjacent to India.27

Martyr was not alone in this conclusion. With the possession of the Americas, Europeans had conﬁrmation of the existence of the unknown. At this time, the Antipodes could signify either southern regions or people. References to the Americas as the Antipodes were frequent, especially with regard to the southern part of the hemisphere.28 The mythical heritage was another necessary, though insuﬃcient, precondition of exploration. Incremental gains in technological capacity and pre-existing expectations of what lay beyond the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ extended the borders of the ‘known’ European world, encouraged further exploration. Well-known lands lay elsewhere, while beyond the Mediterranean and the closer islands of the Atlantic the unknown was only just within grasp. For the Arab heirs of the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, the Atlantic Ocean had represented a feared ‘green sea of darkness.’ However, for Europeans a predisposition to set out for other centres had amassed out of centuries of foreign exploits. Their fear of the Atlantic was not so great; at the very least it did not restrain Renaissance explorers. Up until the mid-ﬁfteenth century, Latin Europe had looked east for territorial and ecclesiastical expansion. Portuguese naval advances disrupted this eastern gaze and then the Colombian breakthrough 25 Germán Arciniegas, “The Foreshadowed Continent,” and “Imago Mundi,” in America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse, trans. Gabriela Arciniegas and R. Victoria Arana (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986). 26 See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration and Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Thomas Suarez, Shedding the Veil: Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World (London: World Scientiﬁc Publishing, 1992), pp. 29–60. 27 Peter Martyr, cited in John H. Parry, The Discovery of America (London: Paul Elek, 1979), p. 77. 28 Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990), chap. 5.

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dislodged it.29 Christendom’s Eastern borders continued to front onto Islamic states, but these were known civilizations. Its Persian and Eurasian expanses were familiar. Entry into the Atlantic and the Caribbean opened up a new domain for Christian and imperial expansion creating a Western aspect for it. Iberian experiences in conquering combined with the commercial seafaring talents of Venetians, Genoese and Jews from the ports of the Mediterranean.30 Maritime Hispanic culture welcomed newcomers, especially Italians and Basques. It stoked enthusiasm for exploration and it was suggested that this was a Christian, regal and economic enterprise all at once. The reorientation of Christianity’s sacred imagination to a new centre other than Jerusalem or Byzantium hastened Iberian ambition. The new centre was America and it was considered a place for material, strategic and spiritual gain. A search for souls and wealth was the explicit motivation for a deeper probe into the unfolding Atlantic world. Economic and evangelical pursuits were one and the same in the sixteenth century mercantilist projection of the world to Europe’s west. Possession and Motion Strands of the medieval Judeo-Christian heritage blended with early mercantilist values. There are two sides to mercantilism that matter in this discussion. Firstly, it set the pre-conditions of capitalist development as Europeans began to trade extensively. Mercantilism involved a set of values that were commercial, though they were often couched in the language of virtue. Secondly, it was the creation of state mechanisms to coordinate economic activity and the construction of national infrastructure. At the same time as Western Europe’s empires began to develop such early forms of supra-provincial economic regulation they were also being propelled into exploration. This second deﬁnition will be dealt with extensively in the sixth chapter, while the ﬁrst is drawn out here. Europe’s business with the rest of the world was conducted quite diﬀerently. Trading alliances and joint stock or state-sponsored companies of international trade were its main vehicles. European explorations and colonial ventures were driven largely by commercial

29 30

Aston, The Fifteenth Century, pp. 41–47. Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 43–46.

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imperatives geared to mercantilist values.31 Colonization of the world to Europe’s east, however, was not feasible. The sheer disparity of power between the exploring states and other civilizations ruled out attempts at occupation at this time.32 Many were also the nodes of already existing networks of trade and had a good deal to oﬀer European merchants. Long-distance trade joined European networks to established matrices of commerce and production, in particular those dominated by China and Mogul India. The technologies, resources and logic of colonial expansion beyond Europe could not be mobilized for some time outside of the Atlantic domains of the ﬁve empires. Elsewhere, commercial networks based on trading posts and forts were developed by European states as the conduits of trade and contact with the rest of the world. Annexation of lands to the east was therefore unrealistic and possibly undesired. In contrast, a mentality of conquest characterized the Spanish entry into the New World. It was based partly on mercantile values. The exploratory ambitions of Iberian navigators and merchants revolved around gold, spices, mobility, proselytizing and land. Gold was a spiritual pursuit and conversion was an economic matter. A close relationship between these can be found in the express motives of explorers. Spiritual and economic goods were ideologically connected, even though each was the sphere of quite diﬀerent institutions. These objects of early conquest ﬁgured prominently and in Spanish and Portuguese perceptions were associated with one another. The lure of gold and the call to evangelize were well adapted to trading and crusading. Gold was especially important. In one sense its charm was illusory. It fuelled the dreams of the non-landed Spanish nobility seeking wealth and prestige. Their ambition for gold was sustained by a long-standing awareness of trade around the West African goldﬁelds.33 Moreover, the routes to that region were clearly navigable. Paradoxically, there was a shortage of gold in the ﬁfteenth century due to

31

John H. Parry, The Establishment of the European Hegemony 1415–1715: Trade and Exploration in the Age of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) and The Age of Reconnaissance; Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money: 1450–1920 (London: Verso, 1991), chap. 7. 32 Abernethy, Global Dominance, pp. 184–85. 33 Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, pp. 26–27.

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a fall in production.34 Hoarding ceased and states exported portions of their gold reserves to realize high prices. In a century in which the price of general commodities fell, it must have seemed that gold was the most cherished of all goods, even though its actual ﬁnancial beneﬁt often proved elusive.35 Notwithstanding the immediate eﬀects of the inﬂux of specie on speciﬁc economic movements, gold had a wider symbolic or imaginary value in Europe’s trade economy. It represented mobility and ownership. Its portability and its seemingly universal identity lent it enormous importance as a symbolic good and as a sign of possession.36 Its allure lay in its capacity to represent and enable motion and exchange. This is supplemented by another signal that it imparted. The pursuit of gold embodied movement in itself. Gold was a potent mercantile symbol. It struck at the insular borders of the mindset of Renaissance Europe by valorizing new sources of production and new routes of trade. It enticed Europe’s adventurers to the Western Atlantic and then further. The growing urge to set out in motion is well captured by Columbus. Columbus’ diary is replete with passages on gold.37 They express more than his idiosyncrasy. Indeed they were carefully crafted for a larger audience: the Catholic monarchy and its court. Portuguese colonization of West Africa and Columbus’ ventures to the Caribbean opened up the Atlantic nexus of trade in gold. Conversion and the search for wealth went hand-in-hand in the extension of the western perimeter. Proselytizing, like gold, could be transported. It was a forceful universalizing practice. The newly found landmass—so it

34 Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), pp. 109–11. 35 Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, chaps. 8–9. 36 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 26–27. 37 Columbus constantly makes reference in his journal to the search for gold or spices. In the ﬁrst two voyages it is mentioned sixty-ﬁve times. What his diary indicates is an ever-present awareness of the need to make his ventures return some small fortune, or at least the prospect of one, to his regal benefactors. Bartolome de Las Casas also makes biographical notes of the Admiral’s pursuit of both metals and other tradable substances in his Historia de Las Indias. S. Lyman Tyler draws extracts from both and prefaces them with his own commentary, reading and contextualization of these artifacts of exploration and conquest. See Two Worlds: The Indian Encounter with the European 1492–1509 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988). Peter Hulme also pursues this line of thought in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (New York: Metheun, 1986).

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must have seemed—brought new opportunities for precious metals, spices and souls. All of these contextual elements of early mercantilism were the metaphorical cargo of Columbus’ voyages and the ships of conquest that followed. The lure of gold and new subjects was complemented by other important pressures. Traditional land-based trade routes had been disrupted at the end of the Middle Ages, especially for traders connecting the Iberian peninsula to France and northern Europe. The One Hundred Years War cut oﬀ routes to the northeast.38 Commercial openings from other regions were also constricted. By the end of the ﬁfteenth century a large part of the spice trade had been captured by Islamic forces in India, along East Africa and through the Southeast Asian archipelago.39 More importantly, the Ottoman hold over Eastern Europe was growing. Trade with the Ottomans and beyond was the speciality of Italian merchants who consequently solidiﬁed monopolies in the Mediterranean trade for competing city-states.40 The city-states beneﬁted considerably from their pivotal location and their economic self-organization. The situation facing Spain, Portugal and most of Europe at the end of the ﬁfteenth century was not so propitious. It was one of relative isolation from the hub of the world economy. Great incentives therefore existed to ﬁnd either new routes by sea or new sources of spice. For the Spanish and the Portuguese, spice assumed an immediate importance second only to gold. Both formed the economic basis for imperial rivalry. In focussing on Africa, Portugal was able to win a share of the Asian spice trade. Spain reconnoitred America instead with a view to ﬁnding a westward passage to China and India and reconnecting directly with the Asian centre. In fact, this goal was kept alive well into the sixteenth century.41 The Spanish and the Portuguese therefore were drawn to establish the transatlantic economy by the squeeze on trade to their east. In doing so they built on a Portuguese, state-centred model of exploration supplanting the Italian approach to long distance trade that brought

38 Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 6–8. 39 John H. Parry, Europe and the Wider World 1415–1715 (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 32–35. 40 Parry, Age of Reconnaissance, pp. 36–37. 41 Parry, The Discovery of America, pp. 111–36.

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together consortia of interests.42 However, a fresh understanding of the realities of world economic links pressed on the expansionists. The mercantile propensity to explore and trade was also stimulated by a growing awareness in Europe that Asia was a major, if not the major, centre of economic gravity in the world economy.43 The goals of exploration gained impetus from the constriction of trade to the immediate east and interaction with the high tempo of the central zone of the world economy in Asia. The switch in orientation from east to west that emerged paradoxically from vigilance about Asian centres acted as a further stimulus to exploration and an expansion of the Renaissance perception of the world. Closed trade routes and a honed mercantilist orientation were not the only factors. Money itself facilitated greater European participation in trade as it was utilized more extensively. After Columbus’ initial passages to the Americas and the settlement of the ﬁrst colonies, the use of hard currency grew. The further development of monetary exchange in the sixteenth century was bolstered by the inﬂux of bullion from West Africa and then the Americas. Minting and coinage became industries in the Spanish Indies quite early.44 Money’s role as an imaginary bearer of value was augmented by the increased rate of circulation of specie and currency throughout Europe and Asia. Gold and silver acted as a mercantile guarantee of debts. Over time precious specie became the media of trade between Western European states, Asian countries and the Ottoman Empire.45 These developments enhanced the general circulation of economic interests, which could be embodied in currency or in notes of credit. In later centuries, the connection between money and the circulation of interests would be even closer and a higher level of social interdependence stretched over greater real world spaces.46 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the circulation of money intensiﬁed 42

Helen Nader, “The End of the Old World,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992). See J. M. Blaut, “On the Signiﬁcance of 1492,” Political Geography 11, no. 4 ( July 1992); and Frank, Reorient. For a more generalized version of this kind of argument, see also Jack A. Goldstein, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41 (1998). 44 McAlister, Spain and Portugal, pp. 240–41. 45 Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 199–204. 46 This is an important theme, which Marx provided a thumbnail sketch for in the chapter on money in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973). From this standpoint, money mediates the spheres of production and consumption. However, it acquires a force of its own through 43

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institutional mercantilism, which both mediated and coordinated the connections between economically signiﬁcant communities in the Atlantic sphere and beyond. This newfound mobility in exchange hastened economic development. It was not only goods and services that were being exchanged. It was a transfer of values also or rather an outgrowth of mercantile values. In the sixteenth century those values motivated further conquest of the American continent. In a way they were ‘forward-looking’, a culture of capitalism that was still forming. The movement of Spanish imperial power into the Atlantic world also drew on a past that was two-sided. On one side, a received imagery of a civilizational past conferred general purpose on Spain’s historical move beyond the Mediterranean. In addition, speciﬁc Iberian and Christian historical experiences also shaped European intrusion into America. The next section delves into this second side. Traditions of Expansion: Rome and Conquest Colonization had historical precedents that served as paradigms for the forward movement of states. There were three models: medieval Christian colonization, the reconquista and England’s incursions into Ireland. The expansion of Christendom in the High Middle Ages brought Europe’s warrior cavalries together in common ventures. This was more than a just a forward movement; territory that was notionally under control was properly consolidated. Medieval conquest involved the decree of new lordships and towns, the organization of further bishoprics and the advance of knightly forces. There is ample evidence of an “expansionary mentality” that emerged from the system of colonization.47 The orders of crusaders that participated in the campaigns in the Baltic, East Mediterranean, Jerusalem and the southern peninsula the symbolic act of exchange and its impact on acting subjects. It plays a part in the creation of interdependence not only by connecting diﬀerently functioning individuals but through the simulation of social intercourse that emerges through exchange. This isn’t solely functional interdependence. It symbolizes the social relations of a complex system of capitalist production and trading and it captures them in a meaningful way every time actors reproduce them through the act of exchange. On Marx’ articulation of functional and symbolic acts of exchange and how each is theorized in what are, for Marx, competing economic sociologies, see John F. Rundell, The Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory From Kant to Hegel to Marx (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 178–82. 47 Bartlett, The Making of Europe, pp. 90–96.

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came together in what was seen as civilizing missions.48 This received widespread support from all corners of Western Europe and combined diverse Christian constituencies. The orders themselves were a fusion of monastic and warrior forces in which each modiﬁed the other. They embodied uniformity in social organization that endowed their members with the experience of seizing territory. They created a powerful memory of the advancement of Christendom as well as spreading the institutional nexus of monasteries. Other institutions complemented the extended reach of the monastic orders. Chartered towns with urban liberties completed the colonial movement. A mother city, at the centre of a cluster of towns, would base settlement on common legal privileges.49 Urban growth buttressed the internal and external growth of Christendom. Like the military orders, cities nurtured and extended uniformity in social organization. Latin Europe therefore had methods of colonialism on the continent and some of its components could be emulated in the Americas. As land was seized, ecclesiastical missions were started and new townships and administration were chartered. Consequently, when the Spanish conquered, colonized and converted they were exercising already acquired collective habits. Safe traditions were vital in the advance into the Western Atlantic. Thus, the 1493 Papal Bulls that divided the New World between the Spanish and the Portuguese lent legitimacy, in a recognizable form, to the seizure of the newly found islands in the Caribbean basin. It was a valuable gesture for the Spanish because it demarcated new international lines of control, even though they did not last. It provided continuity with the established and respected approach to colonization. This was essential as the daunting new situation brought about by Columbus’ voyage called for oceanic and not only territorial expansion. The wider late medieval growth of Christendom provided a necessary backdrop to the conquista. The Spanish ediﬁce has been described as an empire founded and continued on conquest.50 Spanish colonization was an inter-continental re-run of the conquista. The original invasion of the Islamic south of the peninsular was not a sudden movement, but occurred over centuries. The method of conquest jelled during the long campaigns 48

Ibid., pp. 260–68. Ibid., pp. 172–77. 50 James Lang, Conquest and Commerce: Spain and England in the Americas (New York: Academic, 1975); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 49

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in the Iberian south. Successful expulsion or conversion of Jews and Muslims established a religious despoblado. Hispanic Christians then colonized the southern frontier.51 Many Islamic forms and rituals of warfare and conquest were appropriated by the conquerors and combined with Castilian traits. The result was a hybrid method of conquest that had no real equivalent in Christian traditions of warfare. It was deployed in the Americas involving features that were Islamic in origin. At its heart was the Requerimiento, the most ritualised and elaborate protocol of conquest.52 It was a ‘summons’ to accept submission to a superior religion. Like the Arabic jihad, it did not require belief, only obedience. Exposure to the Moors’ conduct of war over a period of time led to direct assimilation of its key elements in the Hispanic approach to subjugating peoples. This constituted a Hispanic tradition that was taken quite seriously in the imperial polity, even though it caused initial apprehension amongst theologians. This was also a source of debate for Spanish clerics when it placed strain on those theological interpretations of warfare belonging to the other crusading tradition. When it was found not to conﬂict with biblical script—as it was interpreted in non-Iberian theology—it was conﬁrmed that this tradition was compatible with other components of the Spanish vision of war. The Spanish conquest of the Americas was distinct in its reach and ferocity. The French, Spanish and English all shared the mercantilist impulse that led beyond the bounds of the old world. However, Spain’s uninhibited drive spread the sphere of its possession from the Antilles on to the continent, through the hinterland and to the south and, they had hoped, beyond to Asia. The long historical experience of conquest imbued the conquerors with a speciﬁc outlook on wealth, land and subjugated peoples.53 The singular tenacity of the conquest did distinguish its project from English and French advances, which were geographically conﬁned to the north-eastern seaboard and the Laurentine region. It was the enthusiasm for conquest that stands out from 1492 through to the end of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding important clerical reactions against its excesses. The zealotry that propelled the Spanish reconquista over hundreds of years was ﬁnally triumphant at the point of union of the Castilian 51

McAlister, Spain and Portugal, chap. 2. Seed, “The Requirement: A Protocol for Conquest,” in Ceremonies of Possession. 53 John H. Elliot, “The Seizure of Overseas Territories by the European Powers,” in Armitage, Theories of Empire. 52

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monarchy. Granada had been the hub of civilizational exchange. Castile over-ran it, repopulated it and then cut short its previous pluralism. Spain purged of ‘heresy’ bred a martial mood. It established the monarchy as a serious power within and outside of Spain. It brought the long period of continuous civil war to an end and set about wresting control of the judiciary from local lords. It also endeavoured to curb the independent power of the Church. However, it was always challenged externally and from within and can be regarded as a ‘weak’ state, despite its leadership on the European continent,54 with coercive capacities that depended ultimately on voluntary coalitions of elites.55 The comunero and Catalan uprisings were the main Iberian insurgencies and they were evidence of the constrained nature of Castilian integration. They emerged from provincial institutions: the cortes with its fueros (liberties). Habsburg rule was defeated externally in the arduous and exacting Dutch revolt. Its other European consejos could hardly rule their respective territories with impunity and were forced to adjust to prevailing legal and administrative conditions. In the Americas, there were also limitations. A self-ennobled class formed in America, part of Spain and yet also separate from it. This was an eventual outcome that was not anticipated. On one hand, in the strange Americas an ‘internal motivational order’ united the conquistadores as the advance party of the Castilian crown.56 On the other hand, the conquistadores were not only a part of colonialism’s march, but also a force branching oﬀ independently from it. Spain’s invasion was a distinctly mercantilist action combining Christian goals, the subjugation of peoples and their subsequent transformation into a labor force.57 While royal sponsorship was essential it was on these grounds that the conquerors claimed the land for themselves as the spoils of a ‘just war’: They possessed this land not because they had bought it, or because it was ‘unoccupied’. They possessed it because their blood, in that hallowed metaphor, had literally ﬂowed into the ground, and made them and their descendants its true owners and its true rulers.58 54

Herr, Spain. Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States 1500–1660 (London: Routledge, 2002), chap. 3. 56 Lang, Conquest and Commerce, p. 11. 57 Ibid., chap. 1; Pagden, Lords of all the World, pp. 64–66, 92–93. 58 Pagden, Lords of all the World, p. 93. On the Aquinan roots of the notion of a ‘just war’ and debates about the legitimacy of conquest, see Zavala, New Viewpoints, chap. 4. 55

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Undoubtedly, they were boosting Spain’s world empire. But they were also forging a Spanish-American identity in the blood spilt on American soil. This produced a collective identity separate from Castile. In this sense, the conquerors were both a power with origins in the uniﬁcation of the monarchy and a portent of future colonial resistance. The third paradigm of conquest is the English colonization of Ireland. This is controversial and no overall consensus exists amongst historians. The dispute is worth rehearsing brieﬂy and some short remarks are called for. Was Ireland really a colony? If so, was there continuity between the process of colonization in Ireland and northeast America? The ﬁrst question can be dealt with quickly. The ﬁrst point to note is that this was an issue of debate amongst Anglo-Irish settlers in the sixteenth century.59 The English saw it as a civilizing process on a shifting frontier. The spread of manners to a coalescing AngloIrish and Scottish elite propped up English authority.60 However, while Ireland may have been a frontier for civilizing experiments, its status as either a kingdom or a colony is quite unclear. Undeniably, it was a province of a widening composite monarchy. Indeed it was declared a kingdom in 1541. But it assumed some of these characteristics in name only; eﬀorts to remake it to resemble other dominions reduced it to a colony in many respects.61 Numerous waves of socalled New English immigration regularly set the country into turmoil until they stopped in the later part of the seventeenth century. At this time, English hegemony was more complete, but the continuation of religious conﬂict and the reinforcement of English administrative policy attest to the instability of Britain’s Irish territory. If judgment of Ireland as a kingdom or a colony is not conclusive, then a question mark also hangs over parallels drawn with early 59 Nicholas Canny, “Ireland as Terra Florida,” in Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 60 Michael J. Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World. Canny suggests that there were limits to the civilizing process prior to Cromwell. Authoritarian models of plantation cultivated a shared mentality amongst serving soldiers, a pre-disposition to the ‘savagery’ of locals. But there is little evidence that the immigrating poor were imbued with the same outlook. See “The Permissive Frontier: Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia 1550–1650,” in Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise. 61 Karl S. Bottigheimer, “Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise 1536–1660,” in Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise.

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English colonies. While comparison of contemporaneous processes of colonization may be valuable, much of the recent historical literature seems paradoxically preoccupied with identifying limitations to comparison. The strong proponents of this perspective are David Quinn and those who have followed his scholarly path.62 On this view, the parallel is a direct correlation. Some of English America’s most important adventurers were also Ireland’s (or at least had experience of life there to draw upon): Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, Ralph Lane, William Penn, Viscount Faulkner and Thomas White.63 Their experiences may not have traveled with them as enduring models, but there can be little doubt that their past exploits inﬂuenced their direction in settling America. For example, images of Barbary projected onto America’s indigenes by these colonial founders had origins in Ireland. A less direct relationship is suggested elsewhere.64 The Atlantic zone involved England in diﬀerent colonial relationships that each shaped an imperial mindset in distinct but comparable ways. Ireland was a 62 David Beers Quinn, The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1940), Raleigh and the British Empire (London: Hodder and Stoughton for English Universities Press, 1947), The Roanoke Voyages 1584–1590, Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America under the Patent Granted to Walter Raleigh in 1584 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), “Ireland and Sixteenth Century European Expansion,” in T. D. Williams, ed., Historical Studies: Papers Read Before the Second Irish Conference of Historians (Cork: Cork University, 1987); Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest: A Pattern Established 1565–1576 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976); “The Irish Background to Penn’s Experiment,” in Richard S. Dunn and M. M. Dunn, eds., The World of William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986). Quinn presents a historical survey of the Irish population of the Americas in Ireland and America: Their Early Associations 1500–1640 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991). See also A. L. R. Rowse, The Elizabethans and America (London: Macmillan, 1959). 63 Nicholas Canny, conclusion to Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 64 Jane E. Ohlmeyer, “Seventeenth Century Ireland and the New British and Atlantic Histories,” American Historical Review 104 (1999). Steven Ellis reverses the thesis to argue that American settlements were a model for colonies in Ireland. In his view, Spanish conquest of America served as a prototype for the Elizabethan conquest. It seemed to England’s colonizers that some features of Gaelic Ireland were comparable to the equivalents in indigenous America and that this incited their take-over. Where Ireland had been a borderland to be administered and patrolled, it now appeared ripe for a fuller assault. Even the attempts at plantation settlement were open to comparison with other European enterprises in the New World, although for Ellis colonization of a land perceived to be populated was anachronistic in sixteenth century Ireland. Irish conquest had been unintended, according to this account. Elizabeth’s reign brought about a change in Tudor disposition towards borderland territories that precipitated English forward movement.

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“near periphery,” while America constituted an “outer periphery.”65 The Atlantic zone provided examples of diverse eﬀorts to transform strange environments and those that inhabited them. Near and outer peripheries were zones of learning for English colonizers whose own doctrines were tested and altered as a result. Moreover, Ireland became a conduit in the British Atlantic. From the late seventeenth century there was a sharp increase in the rate of transoceanic migration.66 At the same time, Irish ports began to service growing demand in British trade, although often Irish traders did the carrying. Ireland’s strategic location in the commerce with the West Indies, Virginia and the Amazonian coast, in combination with the greater ﬂow of people into America, induced an Atlantic orientation. There are further criticisms that bear on the question of models of colonizing.67 The absence of intention to colonize Ireland raises questions about the idea of a ‘model’ of colonialism implicit in the Quinn-Canny approach. While plantation settlements were experimented with in Ulster and Munster, they were not ﬁnished forms in any sense and were not readily transferable to an uncharted environment. Moreover, they encountered a very diﬀerent reaction. The military strategy of Gaelic warlords in response to English encroachments transformed the Irish situation in fundamental respects: so much so that comparison with the American colonies becomes untenable. Attitudes to the rebellious Irish may have resembled, and indeed informed, subsequent dispositions to America’s indigenes. However, both had more potent precedents to draw upon in the Romanesque juxtaposition of Barbary and the ordered organization of urban life and in Anglo-Norman traditions of conquest. Evaluating these criticisms leads me to one conclusion: the relationship to Ireland did constitute a minor and fresh tradition in the English expansion into the Atlantic. However, balanced comparison To my mind, this suggests a comparison with the disinterest shown by the Stuarts and the Cromwellian Protectorate towards the American colonies. However, Ellis’ position is open to dispute. Nicholas Canny is one who disagrees; see Kingdom and Colony, pp. 9–11. See Steven Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule (London: Longman, 1998). 65 This observation is credited by Ohlmeyer to Jack Greene in “Seventeenth Century Ireland.” 66 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 126–206. 67 See Hilary Morgan, “Mid-Atlantic Blues,” Irish Review 11 (1991/2); and Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 38–39.

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of the two theatres of colonial enterprise brings out the distinctions more than urging the similarities. Ireland resembled a realm of a composite monarchy far more closely than English America could.68 England’s promotional materials cast an optimistic view about the opportunities in the American colonies, while views of Ireland were shadowed by anxieties about civility’s movable frontiers. Its proximity set it apart from America, even though it was also part of the greater English Atlantic. That proximity was not only geographic; Ireland and England showed a history of partial and failed conquests. Each time England had left an invader-elite to struggle against its insecurity. That struggle took place in more densely settled territories in which close contact with the Irish was unavoidable; so much so that a process of ethnic homogenization was possible for a short time.69 Of course, long term implantation did not generate a conquering, colonizing tradition. However, planting in north-eastern America was carried out in a land in which there were no European precedents. Coexisting plantations in Ireland (the ‘island in the Virginian Sea’) were points of comparison, but North America was, at the time, a barely reconnoitred proposition, while the Irish frontier was more familiar. The ideal of civility that had emerged by the end of the seventeenth century was more distinct and varied in the North American settlements; it was “a form of local Englishness.”70 The civilizing enterprise in Ireland produced a sort of reﬁnement for America’s colonies that more closely resembled that of the English ruling class. The conquest of Ireland was a minor exemplar for America’s colonies. The results of the colonial experience for Anglo-Americans seem to conﬁrm this in the distinctiveness and variation of American societies in all dimensions. Most certainly, Ireland ﬁgured in the background of the English advance into the Atlantic. But it was a secondary inspiration and even then it was shadowed by the more distant, but in some ways more potent, Roman past.

68

Karl S. Bottigheimer, “Ireland in the Westward Enterprise,” in Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise, pp. 55–57, 60–61. 69 A point granted by Canny as a diﬀerence between Ireland and America. See Kingdom and Colony, pp. 66–67. 70 Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, p. 107.

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The universal monarchy: memories of Rome Colonial expansion into the Americas reinvigorated a notion of universal monarchy. The latter was a cultural vessel for the memorialization of Rome. The concept had survived the Middle Ages and gained a new lease of life in the Renaissance. All three states under consideration here embraced its legacy and were still claiming it in the seventeenth century. At the beginning of this period, its association with the Kingdom of Christendom receded. Nonetheless, Rome was a memory that was frequently invoked in empire building. This memory had an institutional ediﬁce in the form of the Church. Beyond wider perceptions of a community of Christendom, however, what Rome signiﬁed varied from one state to another.71 The Portuguese believed that they succeeded the Roman heritage due to the size of their empire and the excellence of their sciences. The French incorporated Roman art into sixteenth century ceremony and legal codes into juristic theory. In turn Roman legal principles supported the claims of lawyers that the monarch was imperator in regno suo. This was not a rival bid for the emperorship or papacy, but a claim designed to assert authority over aristocratic, provincial and urban contenders for power. The English monarchy exercised a diﬀerent and more wide-ranging relationship to the legacy of imperium left by Rome. English understanding of Roman colonial settlement furnished leading adventurers with a paradigm of civilizing to follow and experiment with.72 The establishment of white colonies abroad draw in indirect and sometimes tenuous ways on a history of Irish plantation that more powerfully echoed Roman precedents. For example, Cromwell’s proposal to form a new Commonwealth based on the seizure of Hispaniola was cast as the foundation of a new Western Roman Empire.73 Rome’s legacy was not limited to the territorial outgrowth of England’s imperium. It girded a whole world view. English possession in the North Americas was legitimated by reference to the literary classics. Milton’s works built on these by projecting

71 Patricia Seed, “The Habits of History,” Ceremonies of Possession; Armitage, The Ideological Origins, pp. 29–36. 72 Canny, introduction to The Origins of Empire. 73 David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Language of Empire,” The Historical Journal 35 (1992).

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an English vision of empire that was reminiscent of Rome, whilst at the same time slighting the Spanish ‘Black Legend.’74 All built empires in the image of Rome as that image was variously projected. All laid claim to the universality of their sovereignty over land and sea on the basis of Roman ancestry. Yet it was Spain that rigorously pursued this antiquity. Spain came to be identiﬁed as an actual monarchia universalis by some in the Spanish court. It claimed to inherit the entire legacy of Rome, viz. the custodianship of Christendom. This particular outlook melded easily with the ‘philosophical matrix’ of Spanish imperialism and was the general perspective of the Habsburg dynasty.75 It represented an early attempt to manage the tension between the Church, on one hand, and the Spanish experience of conquest, on the other. Spain diﬀered from English and French ventures in its form of conquest, in the extraction economy it developed and in the interpretation of the American world. These distinctive features continued to inform the parameters of Spain’s self-understood mission in the New World. Graeco-Roman tradition was potent inspiration for the baroque generally. In the case of Spain it led to a ﬁrmer embrace of the project of a universal monarchy. Hispano-American colonies bore the mark of universalism. For this and other reasons, its logic of colonial formation was distinctly centralist. Culturally the Spanish Indies were enveloped by an orientation to the authority accorded to the past. The early phase of debate around the project of universal monarchy can be explained as an episode in which universalism combined with an appeal to the prestige of the Ancients to rationalize Spain’s imperium. Under Charles V, the Habsburg historians labored a debate over the legitimate reach of Spain’s jurisdiction. The 1493 Papal Bulls that conferred the right of the Spanish and Portuguese to occupy the new hemisphere

74 John Evans argues in Milton’s Imperial Epic that there are themes in Paradise Lost that are reminiscent of America’s conquest. The epic form is conducive to imperial comparison. It is an anti-colonial text that speaks to the ‘Black Legend’ perceptions of Spanish colonialism and a pro-colonial text that speaks for English attempts at settlement in Virginia and New England. Against other critiques of Paradise Lost, Evans argues that this is no indictment of English colonialism. See John Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 75 Colin M. McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), chaps. 1–2. For Timothy Anna, the main forms of Christian consociation emerged from

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were taken immediately as license to extend the Western Empire. Interpretation of the grant fed on the assumption of universal legitimacy throughout the sixteenth century.76 Yet this remained an issue of contention in Spain and later in the Italian territories. The notion of universal monarchy formed the conceptual battleground for pamphleteers from both the camps of supporters and opponents of Habsburg rule.77 The height of Spain’s bid for universal sovereignty coincided with sustained eﬀorts to consolidate the monarchical hold over its immediate dominion. Universal monarchy was the bedrock on which the legitimation of the Spanish state rested. However, the actions of government authorities could be tested on this basis also. Prior to the end of Spain’s comunero rebellion in the 1520s, the state’s claim to possession of the Americas provoked the beginning of debate at court and mild resistance in Castile’s towns and provinces. The debate outlived the revolt and took on renewed concern with the legitimacy of Spain’s rule over the Americas and its peoples.78 But both the comunero rebellion and the debate over legitimacy were understood by authorities to be responses to the rule of the Catholic monarchs to which they had to pay careful attention. The Crown maintained a self-formulated obligation towards its subjects that was continuously negotiated between cultural and political elites in the nascent public sphere of the Habsburg court.79 The bid for legitimacy was treated with suspicion by most of Spain’s theocratic intelligentsia.80 This was a long-lasting and lively period of political theorizing involving previously accepted beliefs. The limits of rule and the moral duties of the Christian monarchy were the main point of discussion in theocratic publics.

the potent, but more general, self-understanding of Spanish imperialism. See also Timothy Anna, “Spain and the Breakdown of the Imperial Ethos,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 2 (1989). 76 Pagden, Lords of all the World. 77 Franz Bobach, “The European Debate on Universal Monarchy,” in Armitage, Theories of Empire. 78 Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 79 Victor Perez-Diaz, “State and Public Sphere in Spain during the Ancient Regime,” Daedulus 127, no. 3 (Summer 1998). See also Guerra, Modernidad e Indepencias, chap. 7. 80 Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, pp. 5–6.

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More generally, the idea of the universal monarchy fuelled Spain’s moral doubts at court and in the colleges. However, it also represented a resolution of the tension between the legitimation of rule and existing jurisdiction in the Americas that was preferred by the high apparatus—as opposed to Cortes’ images of a dominion of New Spain.81 Of course French and English commercial activity suggested that the aim of Charles V to establish a monarchia universalis would be contested. Besides this, pamphleteers had captured the previously medieval notion of universal monarchy and were using it for the purposes of propaganda in international aﬀairs.82 Other states opposed Spain’s bid to universal legitimacy. Nonetheless, Spain’s command of the Americas continued to preoccupy theological, legal and historiographic debate at court long after any possibility of complete colonization of the northern and southern continents had passed. Two points of reference that informed Thomist and humanist perspectives sat in tension in the Habsburg court. The command of the Ancients remained, but the fact and the principle of discovery interrupted their prerogative. The power of tradition was unsettled, albeit only slightly at ﬁrst. The world of Rome’s civitas engendered a universalism that did not sit so easily with the competition of powers. The relative immobility of the ancient city republic had formed a diﬀerent context for the ius perigrinandi, the archaic right to free passage. In contrast the world of the nautical Renaissance was transoceanic, one in which the right of ‘access to nations’ of the high seas was a point of debate.83 Humanism became more attuned to the mobile exploration as it was open to a large body of texts and did not hold to a conservative view of inquiry. This left the humanists more receptive to the signiﬁcance of the New World.84 The writings of Domingo de Soto, Diego Covarrubias y Leyva and Fernando Vasquez de

81 See Victor Frankl, “Imperio Particular e Imperio Universal en las Cartas de Relacion de Hernan Cortes,” in Armitage, Theories of Empire. Cortes articulated universal and limited images of empire. The latter found grounds for justiﬁcation in the system of vassalage that he was mindful of. In addition, he formulated a third vision based on appropriated Aztec myth (which in turn became a Hispano-Mexican myth). The Aztec pre-history was a foundation for a dominion of New Spain, independent of the monarchy, but which would set Charles V as an Emperor who inherited the Aztec legacy. 82 Bosbach, “European Debate on Universal Monarchy.” 83 Ibid., p. 61. 84 Grafton, New Worlds, pp. 28–35.

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Menchaca shifted the frame of interpretation from a notion of empire grounded in the eschatological vision of Ptolemy of Lucca, Augustine and Aquinas to the universal empire of human creation that should be a limited dominion.85 The inﬂuence of ancient texts was relativized by the stubborn fact of new discoveries, but it was sustained in the imagination of the universal monarchy. Little of all this debate mattered outside of Habsburg Spain, as Pagden points out,86 but Spain was the foremost power in the sixteenth century. Over time, the project of universal monarchy slowly faded from juristic and historical memory. The industrious thinking it prompted did continue until the eighteenth century. The Habsburg pretension to the rule of Christendom was ﬁnally supplanted in Spain by the Bourbon vision of an empire made up of distinct and particular possessions. The universal monarchy was a vital component of baroque culture. The other was the manner in which the clash of the paradigm of discovery and scholastic orthodoxy was managed. Conclusion Instances of creative transformation are described in this chapter as traditions brought to the inter-civilizational experience of colonialism. That historical experience for the Spanish, British and to a degree the French was one of brutal subordination, but also one of newfound cultural interaction with diﬀerent physical and social worlds. Colonialism, in this sense, should be regarded as both a form of violence and an inter-civilizational mode of encounter. Four sets of traditions equipped Euro-Americans with the cultural apparatus of both conquest and more general cross-Atlantic connections. In summary, these include a growing elasticity of Western knowledge that more readily allowed the assimilation of new phenomena; the mercantile esteem of gold that stimulated Iberian exploration; long experiences of colonialism accumulated in the crusades and in regional conquest

85

Pagden, Lords of all the World, pp. 53–59. Ibid., p. 40. Cecil Clough argues that the exploration of the New World ‘truncated’ the Italian Renaissance as the center of humanist gravity shifted to Spain. See “The New World and the Italian Renaissance,” in Cecil H. Clough and P. E. H. Hair, eds., The European Outthrust and Encounter: The First Phase c. 1400–1700: Essays in Tribute to David Beers Quinn on His Eighty-Fifth Birthday (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994). 86

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and encroachment; and the enduring legacy of the Roman example received as the ideal of the universal monarchy and reconstructed in a modern Atlantic context. In toto, this background contextualized the respective projects of colonialism. I point out that it combines traditions that are held in common, some that have national inﬂections and others that are wholly Hispanic, French or English. I indicate this in order to connect this chapter with the theses presented in chapter two. As argued there, civilization has two axes. One runs from a general Western heritage to outlooks conﬁned to particular states. In other words, where traditions are collective or circulate freely in Europe, they can be depicted as Western and where they infer national or at least bounded patterns, they exhibit speciﬁc civilizational features. The other axis diﬀerentiates the instituted and emergent dimensions of civilizational consciousness. At the risk of over-simplifying the more detailed analysis in this chapter, I will try to relate each of its main sections to way of thinking about civilization. The transformation of modes of acquiring and constructing knowledge associated with humanism is as well judged in terms of centres and networks as much as countries. The movement of knowledge across Western, Southern and Central Europe fostered a public sphere of philosophical, theological and scientiﬁc debate and common opinions. The networks that made up this public sphere participated in activities of ﬂow and exploration. They privileged the physical, mundane and empirical world and thereby incubated motives that encouraged voyaging and exploration. Europe’s powers were ﬁnding that their access to countries to their east was increasingly crowded out by the growth of the Ottoman Empire. Only the gateway to the Atlantic and to the West African coastline remained easily accessible and even then it seemed open primarily to Atlantic coast states. This ﬁgured in the instituted civilizational background that ordered the forms of engagement with the Western hemisphere. Western knowledge was suﬃciently elastic to permit multi-faceted encounters with American environments, people and social forms. The openness to learning was robust enough to encourage a searching curiosity to coexist with other ways of knowing the New World. Moreover, it endowed Europeans with a structure of comprehension of dissimilar modes of life—that is, with otherness—although it must be acknowledged that that structure often involved outright perplexity, mis-recognition and miscomprehension.

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The second section of this chapter deals with mercantile values that seemed to compel exploration and colonizing. The prized status of gold was foremost amongst these. While it circulated throughout the European economy and was widely valued, it held an especial worth in Spain. The worldview of the monarchy was a speciﬁc trait. Early adventures in the Caribbean and the north-eastern coast of South America privileged the pursuit of gold. It guided the Spanish drive into the interior and dictated some of the terms in which the conquistadores met Mesoamerican and Andoamerican powers and sought to defeat them. While the conception of gold’s materiality was changed by the experience of Conquest, it remained an instituted cultural attribute that cohered Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic. Habits of conquest during the crusades were the general property of Christian Europe. They distinguish Western civilization from Islam. Without them, Europeans would not have had the intricate and developed armature of subjugation and colonial settlement that they deployed in the Americas. Particular forms of conquering were equally important, however: the Spanish blend of Christian and Islamic symbols of defeating and founding that were learnt in the long reconquista was a signiﬁcant inﬂuence, as was the English record in Ireland. In the latter case, one might add the pre-programmed attitude to enclosure of land. The example of Rome’s Ancient greatness paralleled all other tributaries of Iberian, French and English imperial self-understanding. It inspired the ideal of universal statehood and just claims to empire, that is, those that were widely recognized by competing sovereign states. A dialectic of universality and particularity is most evident in the way that this concept ﬁgured in Spain’s political imagination. It helped to set the conditions of entry into the American hemisphere and subjugation of its lands, cultures and societies, especially for the Spanish. The traditions and established patterns of subordination that Europe’s modern empires brought to America can be contrasted with their colonial capture of possessions elsewhere around the globe prior to the nineteenth century. Instead of simply engaging and trading with contrasting societies, diﬀerent economic networks and other state powers (such as those civilizational centers in Asia), European states inaugurated settler-colonialism as a form of empire building. Atlantic encounters were therefore more focussed on expansion in lands that seemed to promise a tabula rasa condition but in reality enlivened European ideas about unknown worlds. America seemed to contain

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so many cultural opposites, interpretations of which invigorated Europeans’ sense of civilizational diﬀerence. Modern colonial constructions of otherness were not conﬁned to confronting the staggering diversity of the human community. They encompassed a number of areas of cultural experience. The next chapter canvasses these within a framework of a critical hermeneutical reconstruction of the notion of ‘Discovery’. In other words, the next chapter will turn the mirror of European civilizational consciousness on itself by looking at how the breakthrough to the Western hemisphere further stimulated natural, philosophical and ethnological thought.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘DISCOVERY’ IN THE WEST This chapter picks up the thread of discussion of the emergent imaginary begun in the opening pages of chapter four. It continues the application of a civilizational sociological perspective to Atlantic modernity. The cultural impact of the opening of the Americas to European expansion has been extensively researched.1 It is re-examined in these pages as a process of emergence of a European perception of civilizational particularity and an ampliﬁed awareness of the range of human, environmental, cultural and societal forms. The impact of intercultural experience is evident in diﬀerent endeavours: the eﬀorts to ‘assimilate’ new phenomena; the rapid development of more exact modes of science; debates about proto-evolutionist thought in the eighteenth century; the development of the cartographical and continental imagination; the greater incorporation of the experiences of travel into the realms of knowledge; and the changing conception of the spectrum of America’s indigenous inhabitants. These are explored in this chapter through the prism of a reconstructed notion of ‘discovery’. In the opening chapter I indicated that writing historical sociology from the vantage point of a civilizational perspective risks misunderstanding. This is due to the inherited understanding of the notion in the human sciences that reﬂects the circumstances of imperial domination in which it was formed. The term ‘discovery’ is similarly hazardous, perhaps even more so. I am acutely aware of this danger, especially given that this study simultaneously ranges across problems of growing cognition of civilizational diﬀerence and of colonialism as a power and range of practices of conquest and expansion. Some comments on discussions within American historiography on the language of discovery are therefore in order.

1 The literature drawn on in this chapter relies on the results of this research. Two works that, although quite diﬀerent, are widely recognized are Arciniegas, America in Europe; and Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonisation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

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The notion that Columbus discovered an uninhabited continent in 1492 has been laid to rest.2 Forty years before the hemispherewide Quincentenary protests of 1992, Edmundo O’Gorman critiqued the fallacy that America was discovered.3 ‘Discovery’ suggests that the intention to ﬁnd unknown continents enveloped Columbus and Vespucci’s missions. Columbus’ writings themselves indicate his belief that he had discovered unknown lands on the eastern perimeter of Asia and entitled them the Indies. This was a suitably vague name that reﬂected Columbus’ cautious uncertainty about what he had found.4 It is clear, however, that it was some years before it was conceived as a continent apart from Asia. Then indeed it was not until the late sixteenth century that the continent became widely known as ‘America’. At that time it acquired a new signiﬁcance. If the ‘being’ of America is attributed and not innate, then it was invented, not discovered, declares O’Gorman. Today the signiﬁcance of 1492 has been put into perspective as a formative period of European colonization of an already inhabited world. Postcolonial views on this matter are beyond serious challenge now, as is O’Gorman’s main point. The proposition that Columbus discovered America now ﬁnds no place in social scientiﬁc thinking. Yet this can still be pictured as a time of discovery, if the term’s connotation is modiﬁed and broadened.5 What was ‘discovered’ is a subject that should be probed in greater depth. Vast regions of the world that sat on the outskirts of European consciousness were charted

2 The literature on this subject is voluminous. A limited selection might include Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Mario B. Mignone, Columbus: Meeting of Cultures: Proceedings of the Symposium held at The State University of New York, October 16–17, 1992 (Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1992); Nader, “The End of the Old World”; and John Yewell, Chris Dodge and Jan Desines, eds., Confronting Columbus: An Anthology ( Jeﬀerson, MO: McFarland and Co., 1992). 3 Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 4 Wilcomb E. Washburn presents a sustained critique of the signiﬁcance of Columbus’ own beliefs in “The Meaning of ‘Discovery’ in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (October 1962), 1–21. This essay is a sharp critique of the histories of O’Gorman and Germán Arciniegas. 5 Peter Mason conducts an interesting discussion of the ways that examination of the New World repeated classical motifs and problems. Ethno-anthropological novelty emerged much later, on his account. See “Classical Ethnology and Its Inﬂuence on European Perception of the Peopels of the New World,” in Haase and Reinhold, The Classical Tradition.

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for them. This set in train a series of internal discoveries Europeans made about European worlds, which were not really discoveries about wondrous America.6 ‘Discovery’ was, in a sense, primarily paradigmatic in this era and involved a confrontation with the radical otherness of a fourth continent. The realization of the existence of another hemisphere and more divergent formations forced a change of ways of thinking and opened a prominent vein of internal reﬂexivity in scientiﬁc cultures in Europe. This was a process of cultural realignment, that is, the questions that were being asked about nature, humanity and society were paradigmatically altered. Little of this had anything to do with the ‘real’ continent. In the ﬁrst instance, the study of America did not aspire to realist vigour, as it would be seen in today’s terms. There was an extraordinary paucity of knowledge of the Americas in the sixteenth century.7 Few books discussed it.8 The initial impact did not stimulate empirical inquiry. Interest was not lacking entirely, however. Curiosity drove Europeans to more far-reaching exploration of the real fourth continent. During the ﬁrst two centuries of transatlantic history, the Americas could still be classiﬁed and understood within Ptolemaic and Aristotlean systems of thought, even though these were under challenge.9 The oscillation of Renaissance thinking proved painstaking in the confrontation with the New World, as it did in physics and astronomy. Prevailing views were modiﬁed by actual discourses and through learned debates and discussion, but this was an uneven process. American phenomena did not shatter long-established frameworks of thinking for some time, as America made better sense when viewed

6

Arciniegas, America in Europe, preface and chap. 1. On the English reception, see Canny, “England’s New World and the Old 1480s–1630s,” in The Origins of Empire. See also John H. Elliot, “The Process of Assimilation,” in The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Canto, 1970); Sabine McCormack, “Limits of Understanding: Perceptions of Graeco-Roman and Amerindian Paganism in Early Modern Europe,” in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness. 8 On one count, there was little literary acknowledgement of the Americas. Between 1480 and 1609, books circulating in France on Islamic countries outnumbered those on America twofold, whilst pamphlets on Islam outnumbered those on America tenfold. According to Honour, Jean Bodin’s 1566 bibliography of history mentions only three works on the New World. See Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America: A Special Exhibition to Honor the Bicentennial of the United States (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975), pp. 83–85. 9 Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 7

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through the classical and humanist heritage. The impact of the new on the old world was tempered by the fact that Europeans sought out what was common to both, although they did so by following diﬀerent national traditions.10 The matchless singularity of the Americas was ignored or rendered in familiar form. Europeans were not looking for reality, but “commonality (so) that they could secure the full incorporation of the peoples of America into the human community.”11

10 There is a case for the view that the English had already developed a diﬀerent aﬃnity with humanism. Andrew Fitzmaurice diverges from Pagden, Elliot, Stephen Greenblatt and others on the epistemological reasons why Europeans converted impressions of the New World into forms that were familiar. He highlights the case of English colonization as distinctive. Classical and humanist rhetoric was employed in promotional materials to build support for American settlements through a “psychology of persuasion.” Those materials carried great weight in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, while the categories of humanist understanding were situated in diﬀerent media in Spain and France. Extensive eﬀorts to promote the colonies struck a chord by appealing not to familiar renderings of the Other, but through accommodation of the unfamiliar to audiences accustomed to rhetorical style. It is accepted that Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were aware of America’s diﬀerence and the accent is placed on what is valued greatly in the Old World that can be demonstrated to-be-present in the New. Persuasion to ‘adventure’ to the colonies was truly an art form that pre-dated the deep intrusion onto the American continent and was a more potent factor in English assimilation than the epistemic shock of ‘discovery,’ according to Fitzmaurice. Promotional literature was historically far more inﬂuential in England, that much is certain. Loren Pennington’s survey of English promotional literature builds up an impression of a more intricate intellectual engagement relationship with humanism. The images that informed it were less isolated than Fitzmaurice seems to suggest and more the result of contact with Spanish and French sources. Prior to 1590, Spanish translations of Martyr, Francisco de Lopez and Gonzolo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes left their mark on early English adventurers, including Richard Hakluyt, and the literature that they produced. After 1590, a more sanguine picture of the indigenes emerges. It is only at this point that English sources become visible as experiments with settlements began. Karen Kupperman takes this point one step further. English writings in general stressed a similarity of civil form between the appearance of the natives and the colonials. The Indians could be admired in their physique, style of hair, attire and visible social hierarchy. The more time that writers spent in America, the closer the form, claims Kupperman. This was not only exemplary, but could be seen as containing salutary lessons in the maintenance of order in England. Her account places the accent on proximity to the subject and implies a resemblance to Spanish and French writings highlighted by Pagden and Elliot. See Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New World,” Journal of History of Ideas 58, no. 2 (1997), and the introduction to Humanism and America; Loren E. Pennington, “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature 1575–1625,” in Andrews et al., The Westward Enterprise; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997). 11 John H. Elliot, “Final Reﬂections: The Old World and the New Revisited,” in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness, p. 398.

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The originality of the New World was absorbed selectively into prevailing categories of natural and enthnological thought. Internal accommodation and adjustments led to the eventual problematization of the classical and humanist heritage. Many developments of science were informed by what has been characterized as the ‘assimilation’ of the New World into the sum of knowledge of the Old,12 which is an interesting though still unresolved subject of debate. Instead of delving into it, I will draw a limit at two observations. Firstly, there was a dynamic tension between medieval perspective and the empirical persuasion encouraged by new experiences of travel. This tension underscored the ordering of America’s peoples, ﬂora and fauna. Secondly, little was really ‘discovered’ in the strictly empiricist sense about America in the ﬁrst two hundred years of colonialism, except perhaps by anonymous subjects in the new colonies. There was no overall transparent inventory of things from the Americas. However, the idea of novelty had to be grasped and this had great ramiﬁcations for the conduct of cosmography, ethnology, biology and botany. After the early sixteenth century ﬂourishes of universalism, general astonishment at the unfolding diversity of the New World cultivated a deep feeling of particularity. A focus on particulars emerged in the human sciences, in botanic studies of the microscopic, in the preference for more exact cartographic representations of land forms (rather than sensual and familiar depictions of important features) and in the growing application of mathematics. Europeans’ civilizational self-deﬁnition was also stimulated by the accumulated focus on particulars. The process through which a civilizational consciousness amassed began with protracted eﬀorts to account for the fundamental distinctiveness of America. It then took shape as Europeans searched the lands of the western Atlantic further. The next part of this chapter takes up the forceful tensions within Renaissance humanism. A ﬁnal passage examines the symbolic universe that Europeans fashioned to understand the Atlantic New World.

12 A few scholars can be listed here, although the discussion amongst historians extends further. John H. Elliot, “The Uncertain Impact,” in The Old World and the New, sparked an ongoing reconsideration of the history of Europe’s awareness of America. See also Michael Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981). John Mandalios reconsiders these issues in the context of the breakdown of monogenesis and the emergence of a European sense of “Otherness” in “Being and Cultural Diﬀerence: (Mis)understanding Otherness in Early Modernity,” Thesis Eleven (62) 2000.

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From familiarity to diﬀerence: the New World as a mirror for Europe Humanism began with a complex and multifaceted interest in a classical age whilst rejecting the immediate medieval past. Translation of ancient texts precipitated the challenge to faith, producing a kind of scrutiny of existing patterns of belief. It posited other sources of interpretation and popularized, to a degree, the thoughts of the Greeks and the Romans. The widening spectrum of available ancient philosophy was easily adapted to a variety of competing humanist and scholastic perspectives. The texts were the basis of the ﬁssures of dispute within and between diﬀerent schools of thought. With respect to reﬂection on the New World, Spain was the ﬁrst center of dispute. Ancient texts and Holy Scripture had forceful and enduring inﬂuence in the context of the Spanish Empire. Nonetheless, Spain formed a focus for disputation over the signiﬁcance of the unfolding Atlantic world. Sixteenth century Spain has been pictured as a Catholic fortress against the perils of heresy, but actually was a crucible of doctrinal conﬂict and revision. The entry of lay thinkers into universities and the diﬀusion of debate through a growing public of courts, academies and printers steadily dislodged the clergy’s purchase. The epistemological status of the canonized textual authority of the Ancients had brought comfort and familiarity as props of the existing order.13 ‘Discovery’ itself epistemologically unsettled this order and over time led to a diﬃcult condition of ongoing reinterpretation. Grappling with what was found in the Americas set a new balance of the phenomenal and unsettled scriptural interpretation. Retrospectively, it is obvious that the New World contradicted the ancient texts. To many contemporaries it seemed to conﬁrm them. The transformation of the prevailing modes of cognition was disjointed. Deeper exploration of the New World animated scientiﬁc reﬂection, but ‘animated’ is the operative word. The ferment of interaction with the Americas relativized pre-existing epistemological self-conﬁdence. Hence Europe’s assimilation of the western Atlantic world was full of alternating and, on the face of it, contradictory beliefs. Approaches to Nature exemplify how fresh inquiry was stimulated. Nature had been a prominent theme in Ancient Greece. It returned

13 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped Our World View (London: Random House, 1991), chap. 4.

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as an object of dispute in the Renaissance controversies about the attributes of the American kingdoms and their environs: The discovery of America unquestionably acted as a powerful stimulus to naturalistic and anthropological enquiries. The eﬀect on European philosophical thought was felt more slowly, beginning only toward the end of the sixteenth century, with Montaigne and Bruno. The philosophy of humanism was in fact already perfectly capable of accommodating the new geographical discoveries, which, in their inmost essence, belonged to the same spiritual current: the enlargement of the physical world beyond the Ocean was immediately paralleled with the expansion of the historical horizon resulting from the rediscovery of classical antiquity.14

There was uncertainty about what to make of America. This was, as German Arciniegas states, a “change of horizon” for Europeans or a westwards orientation.15 This could also be called a new continental imagination. The sheer size of the recognized world grew and along with it the minds of Europeans.16 Between Columbus’ ﬁrst voyage and the turn of the sixteenth century, the sum landmass that Europeans were aware of doubled. By 1525 it had tripled. A growing realization that the world was widely inhabited, temperate and navigable cut through previous assumptions about lands that Europeans might have intuited, but not really ‘known’.17 Explorers and cartographers began to portray the landmass as a single, uniﬁed New World that could be named ‘America’ in the singular.18 With the new hemisphere appearing as another horizon, it became possible to think in planetary terms and the elites of Europe’s imperial states began to do just that. This involved a diﬀerent visualization of the continents. From the sixteenth century portraits of the world began to allegorically depict the four continents in ways that accentuated the distinctions between them.19 14 Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 8–9. See also Zavela, “America and the Wider World,” and De Lamar Jensen, The Expansion of Europe: Motives, Methods and Meanings (Lexington: MA, D. C. Heath and Company, 1967). 15 Arciniegas, America in Europe, p. 24. 16 Bernstein, The Power of Gold, p. 112. 17 On changing perceptions of the habitability of the world, see John Headley, “The Sixteenth Century Celebration of the Earth’s Total Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe,” Journal of World History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1997). 18 Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas, pp. 2–3. 19 Honour, Hugh, The European Vision of America, pp. 112–22.

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The only landmass that counted was continental and its chief features were taken to be civilizational. America appears the strangest of all these. It was often pictured in classical pose as a woman with an iguana or an armadillo or in Aztec headdress. This was one style of projection of the new western hemisphere. It was another place unaccounted for in the bequest of Ancient geographies. Other distant places were starting to matter more. A horizon of change also loomed large. Europeans deferred to ancient texts but were also struggling to comprehend the ‘change of horizon’. They were put between two poles of authority and, in this sense, when confronted with a horizon of change responded by searching for similarities. Early classicist iconography of America pictured only common humanity, an image eﬀected by positing Romanesque gestures and appearance as trans-cultural. Artists and cartographers portrayed America in classical similes. This was the only way that the New World could be meaningfully depicted without disclosing a broad dissimilarity. Ancient heritage felt more familiar and thus the interruption of the Americas could be accommodated in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The search for the origins of civilized humanity brought scientists, artists and philosophers to the New World. They could express their preoccupations with the classical heritage and the problems of the present in accounts and images of that place. A paradox emerged between European images of the Americas and new narratives based on on-the-ground experience. Colonizers and travelers had to attempt to reconcile an established philosophical outlook and inexplicable experience. During the era in which the Spanish dominated the Atlantic nexus, this perplexity was common. In the sixteenth century, Spanish clerics tried to develop histories of Mesoamerica. They based their attempts on the existing understanding of the progress of civilizations. Yet other ‘texts’ also mattered and were grappled with in an unprecedented attempt to understand the historical self-image of others. This opened up an emergent, though contested, vein of hermeneutical thinking in European civilization that was subsequently present, even in the minority currents of natural philosophy and the human sciences.20 Unfamiliar quipus and codices of Incan and Aztec history and other types of indigenous script were treated as credible.21 20 See Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 34–35. 21 Esguerra-Canizares, How to Write the History of the New World, chap. 2.

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To be sure, they believed the sources to be biased and primitive, but they regarded local information as suﬃciently authoritative in the context of an unknown past. Even within these parameters, explanations of inexplicable experience remained pliable, especially when pressed into the polemical argument of a disputatio, that is, a formal clerical and scholarly debate.22 Disputation occurred in Europe far removed from the American environment in which variance between wellaccepted views and lived experience must have seemed sharper. At this time, the authority of eyewitnesses was high, but under challenge. In Spain and Italy the authority of tradition was often invoked in a highly expedient manner. Where experience would seem to refute the book, the refutation would remain incomplete. Observations and events that deﬁed written wisdom could be neglected because the canonical trinity of the Bible, clerical opinion and ancient wisdom provided the paradigmatic design in which certain questions could be accommodated and only certain answers attended to. Those discoveries which acquired signiﬁcance for much of the sixteenth century seemed to be those that conﬁrmed a tract of prevailing opinion, or at least those for which credibility could be found in ancient explanation. Nonetheless, the reports of witnesses were treated as serious materials and, in this sense, the empirical endured as a problematic. Both eyewitness accounts and tracts of debates on the continent entered into growing ﬁelds of knowledge. They circulated freely around Europe, creating an impression of continent-wide dialogues amongst and between distinct networks of science and philosophy.23 There were also signiﬁcant national and denominational variations. Protestant and Catholic interpretations were at odds. Within each, there were further diﬀerences, for example between Lutheran and Calvinist, and between Franciscan and Dominican. As well, these varied in diﬀerent waves of colonization.24 On the whole, however, a level of general communication meant that philosophy and science became shared ﬁelds. A “mobile technology of power”—the reproducible printed word—united otherwise diverse representations in shared civilization-wide observations.25 A common ﬁeld of discourse

22

Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 52–54. See Collins’ macrosociology of ‘rapid-discovery science.’ The seventeenth century juncture built up and intensiﬁed contacts and density of networks, according to his account. See Randall Collins, Sociology of Philosophies, pp. 533–62. 24 Greenblatt, introduction to Marvelous Possessions. 25 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 23

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and literature threw up a synthesis of world-views beyond the immediate control of Europe’s ruling temporal and ecclesiastic powers. The monarchies of Spain, France and England and their apparatus, to varying degrees and in quite particular ways, endeavoured to cast their American possessions in the mould of the European homelands. But perspectives coming from the colonies disturbed this aim. The New World inducted travelers and immigrants into societies where enduring certainties were susceptible to revision. All explanations returning back to European circuits were informed by sensual as well as traditional authority, at least to some degree. During the seventeenth century, the kind of scientiﬁc thinking that might be more recognizable today was elevated, led by the coalescence of the Newtonian paradigm in physics. Its natural philosophers and ethnologists tended to dismiss earlier Spanish accounts of the Central and South American continent. The general impact of science during this phase was more notable beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Also, in the Italian territories, the authority of the Canon was interrupted increasingly by the expansion of science. Contemporary readings of this movement identiﬁed Columbus’ voyage as its starting point.26 This laid the groundwork for Enlightenment philosophies that were deeply sceptical of American accounts. In the eighteenth century they increasingly clashed with growing American knowledge of the continent. Evolutionary thinking associated with Cornelius de Pauw, abbe Raynal, Buﬀon, Voltaire and William Robertson distrusted human perception and thoroughly doubted the reliability of earlier eyewitnesses.27 Their ascendant philosophy of history contained contradictory perceptions of the New World’s natural and ethnic make-up. Amerindians were ostensibly strong, war-like and digniﬁed, and yet weak and in need of benevolent paternity. It was a young, virgin continent and yet also inhospitable and unforgiving. It was a world of depravity, inhabited by the depraved. De Pauw’s method of philosophical criticism became tremendously inﬂuential in a new eighteenth century species of writing

26

Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 90–96. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, chap. 1. See also Stuart Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), chap. 12. On the ambiguities of European images of America and American self-imagery, see Thomas K. Murphy, A Land Without Castles: The Changing Image of America in Europe 1780–1830 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), chap. 2. 27

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on America.28 The reliability of written histories and scientiﬁc treatises was judged by standards of internal consistency. The framework of evolutionary history was the paradigm of judgement which would over-ride more empirical attempts to describe diﬀerence. De Pauw and his followers inspired relatively closed systems of thought that derided American culture, where previous Spanish accounts of Amerindian world culture drew stereotyping though nevertheless more ﬂattering analogies with classical Europe. Those living in and traveling extensively through the American continent were also attuned to diﬀerence. But they lived through it as direct observers and their experience was not limited to remote criticism. A kind of Spanish-American patriotic epistemology built up a critique of the scientistic contempt for the American world and the eyewitnesses who gave account of it.29 The social standing of Creole interpreters was privileged in the defence of American historiography, where it was resolutely maligned in European versions. Americans thought that only they could understand the complex compendium of local sources that were the raw materials of history. In defending their histories they were also upholding a partisan position in continent-wide dialogues in Europe that countered socialevolutionary philosophy. This was an epistemological battle over the civilizational eminence of the Americas. It marked out two diﬀerent basic perceptions of the value of the peoples, societies and ecosystems that inhabited the Western hemisphere. In other words, by the eighteenth century there were two diﬀerent orientations that indicated a more sharply deﬁned conception of civilizational speciﬁcity. Spaniards sensed alterity, while Creole Americans diﬀerentiated themselves from both Spaniards and northern Europeans and from subaltern mestizos. This battle for cultural possession of the past informed the accumulation of civilizational distinction in the present. European disdain for the American world had grown in the eighteenth century in competition with the countervailing position. At times, it reached the pitch of outright hostility to Creole-Americans and enduring Amerindian cultures. The new evolutionist philosophy of history demarcated a strong and more insular identiﬁcation with European civilization that was now more loudly declared superior. 28 29

Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, pp. 29–49. Zavala, The Political Philosophy of the Conquest, pp. 107–14.

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However, it must be recognized that eighteenth century evolutionism did not proliferate. When it did spread, it was opposed by romantic and primitivist reﬂections on the New World. The latter enlarged on prevailing utopian trends. To explain how, it is necessary ﬁrst to return to the sixteenth century to examine the ﬁrst impulses to utopian imagining. Wonder and utopian perception related directly to the process of internal discovery that Europeans were embroiled in. Those American experiences that seemed irreconcilable with the given conceptual apparatus assured the status of the wondrous. Contemporaries took ‘wonderful’ to mean awe-striking marvels,30 which assaulted the senses with their alterity. Travelers, explorers, scholars and writers wrestled to ﬁt new marvels from American lands into familiar moulds.31 The uncanny and the marvellous sat in the interstices of familiar and inexplicable ﬁndings. This was a confrontation with the unknown for Europeans. Columbus’ intrusion into the Caribbean initiated “a century of intense wonder” in which explorers, conquerors and settlers grappled with what they encountered and perceived in contrasts.32 In this struggle with contrasts, received wisdom did sustain its forcefulness. However, sensedependent understanding expanded as the traﬃc of ideas, people and goods across the Atlantic world grew. An awareness of horizons of ‘here’ and ‘there’ increased; that is, an awareness of Atlantic seaboard states and their new distant colonies on the other continent. This literal horizon added more dramatically to the body of experiences in the colonies that were at some variance with metropolitan perceptions. On both the European and American sides of the Atlantic, experience blended with canonical preconceptions, sometimes with harmony and sometimes with friction. Later, the divergence of the two would be enlarged. This was a crucial discovery: that the representation of experiences might not be consolidated within pre-existing schemas. It brought unease and was accommodated by attempts to render the incommensurable familiar. It also stimulated utopian imagination. From Peter Martyr and Columbus’ letters and from More’s Utopia onwards, a current of ‘Golden Age’ thinking pictured the Americas as an 30 See Rachel Roggett, ed., New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas 1492–1700 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992). 31 Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 10–12. 32 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 14.

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original utopia.33 Reports of the condition of Amerindian peoples were coached in the language of a ‘liberty’, ‘natural virtue’, ‘a state of nature’ or a true Eden. The Golden Age current drew on impressions of the old and new worlds using metaphors to enable uniﬁed comprehension of the contrasting conditions of each. The contrast could serve as a means of critiquing the existing state of European civilization. The New World was used in utopian writings as a mirror reﬂected onto European societies to defamiliarize them. The enthusiasm for the discovered metaphorical Eden sustained the Creation story as an allegory as well as a story taken literally as truth. For much of the seventeenth century enthusiasts bustled about ﬁlling in the gaps in the Bible and in their own imagination, debating whether America was a separate Creation or not.34 It seemed that in America, Europe’s own prehistoric origins—now freshly discovered—had been preserved. The utopian impulse drew succour from the assumption that Europe could be redeemed from its present state, if it had enjoyed a more ideal past, even if that past was remote. By the end of the century such wonder and romantic retrospectivity had begun to fade as speculation about the New World’s contained and distinct history over-shadowed the belief in common anthropological origins. Europeans had discovered what they did not know: an expanding horizon of another vast land. Utopian metaphor was not the only means by which the contrasting environment could be grasped. The wondrous was the rhetorical process that ﬁlled the gaps of New World imagery and complemented the catalogue of the exotic to 33 Beatriz Bodmer delineates a speciﬁc mode of thinking that is utopian at this time. Its ‘locus utopica’ is America, but it brings together the dark recesses of the European invasion as well as the hopeful desire for perfection. More and Columbus’ views contributed along with others. See El Jardin y el Peregrine: Ensayos Sobre el Pensamiento Utopico Latinoamericano 1492–1695 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi), 1996. See also William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and their Eﬀect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe 1500–1800 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986) and Stelio Cro “Classical Antiquity, America and the Myth of the Noble Savage,” in Haase and Reinhold, The Classical Tradition. In this period, Mario Gongora also sees utopian thought, as a particular current, breaking oﬀ from eschatological vision, which was the established basis of Christian ‘hope.’ Utopianism came to dominate writings of the sixteenth century and spiritual hopes were invested in them. Their distinctive traits lay in rationalism, which was an element absent from the eschatological imagination. See Gongora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) pp. 230–38. 34 Philip C. Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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produce a remarkable unity of comprehension. The exotica of monsters, ‘savages’, plants and animals that did not accord with anything in the ancient inventories were rendered in forms digestible for Europeans. A gift economy involving the exchange of actual transported novelties from the Americas, Africa and the sub-continent also emerged amongst Europe’s rulers. Mostly, it was representations from the catalogue of exotica that circulated. Apprehension of diﬀerence became a growing challenge. But it was not a challenge without any precedent. Myths of the Wild man and of monsters facilitated the consumption of the strange and unfamiliar were ﬁrmly established in traces of Ancient writings and the dark and fearful side of the medieval imagination.35 They were mobilized in a wide and ongoing exercise of comprehension. Yet the surprise of the American continent’s existence and the particularity of its features lent the description of its natural and human landscape a unique place in the compendium of European representation. The tracts, diaries, tales, paintings, carvings, specimens, captive natives on display and pageants celebrating New World paraphernalia that brought impressions of America to Europe had to render alien features comprehensible. This was a more diﬃcult process, as many Europeans did not appreciate America’s antiquity. Myth provided a prism of recognition for perplexed Europeans, one that endured. But this was insuﬃcient. Forms of visual, graphic and other textual representation dedicated to the imitation of Nature developed at the intersection of art, science and natural philosophy.36 Museums, gardens and libraries induced transition in this regard as they assembled and housed a selection of artefacts that could be taken as representative. Artefacts on exhibit gave the appearance that the phenomenal diversity of the New World could be grasped, managed and indeed even possessed.37 35 Susi Colin, “The Wild Man and the Indian in Early Sixteenth Century Book Illustration,” in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Jeﬀrey Janome Cohen, “The Order of Monsters: Monster Lore and Medieval Narrative Traditions,” in Francesca Canadé Sautman, et al., eds., Telling Tales: Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Jacques Le Goﬀ, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Lorraine Datson and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 36 P. Smith and Findlen, “Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science,” in Merchants and Marvels. 37 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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Botany is an area where the assimilation of New World ﬂora was, arguably, more rapid and complete. Natural philosophy as its epistemological underpinning was a catalyst. Sixteenth century science’s preoccupation with the similarity of plants was a struggle with comparability. Early botanists strove to match unusual plants with those classiﬁed by Pliny, Aristotle and Dioscorides. In fact, few specimens were considered until the mid-sixteenth century and even fewer were transported. Often enough the natural history of the day relied on human sources and neglected eyewitness accounts.38 Original discoveries provided the impetus to reﬁne the standards of illustration and classiﬁcation of new species. Of course, species unknown to Europeans were being found in many places. But the growing volume coming from the Americas made it a special source of scientiﬁc renewal.39 Furthermore, it compelled naturalists to focus more on the genus of plant life than on references to them in erudite texts. Many felt additional compulsion to represent them with greater accuracy to accentuate their wonder. Curiosity about the New World’s natural phenomena increased noticeably from the mid-seventeenth century onwards,40 paradoxically during the period where investigative inquisitiveness into the universe of its aboriginal inhabitants declined. Scientiﬁc institutions, such as the Royal Society and the Paris Academy of Sciences, gathered collections in a quasi-public space. A physical interface with New World materials fostered an early scientiﬁc public sphere. Criticism of hitherto respected ancient texts emerged. In summary, botany was an area of endeavour where representation in realistic proportion and perspective prevailed earlier. Many mediated the initial botanical and ethnographic observations of travelers and receptive audiences across the Atlantic. Anthony Pagden alludes to these in discussing the relational positions of conquerors, travelers, missionaries and settlers.41 Attachment to the New World is the principle on which commensurability pivoted for all those diﬀerent types of colonizers. Their perception was dictated to partly by their relationship to the environment. Travel, in particular, was a compelling stimulus to enquiry, one that had begun to 38

Henry Leywood, “The New World and the European Catalog of Nature,” in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness. 39 Honour, The European Vision of America, pp. 57–58. 40 Katie Whitaker, “The Culture of Curiosity,” in Jardine et al., Cultures of Natural History. 41 Pagden, European Encounters, chap. 1.

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gain momentum before Columbus’ voyages.42 Returning travelerethnographers did not have to face the permanent condition of acclimatizing to unfamiliar environments as settlers did.43 They returned with memoirs or with artefacts of elements torn from their contexts and habitats and, in this sense, what they brought back was ephemeral. English travelers of the seventeenth century are a good example. They were instructed to tour with purpose.44 They were to take an inventory of all things that they saw, perhaps with a view to publishing when they returned. Traveling amateurs sketched or painted many landscapes and illustrations.45 Their records were additional materials for botany and geography. Far from being only personal experiences, impressions of America were passed around an eager reading and viewing public, whose appetite for representations of American ecology seemed insatiable. This was a public that incorporated the naturalistic and scientiﬁc sensibilities that Milton’s Paradise Lost appealed to.46 Collectively, they helped to build up impressions of other places. They were a major source of information about the New World environment, but could amount to little more than ﬂeeting portraits excised from the contexts in which they were formed. Consequently, the signiﬁcance of habitat and ecology could not be completely conveyed and was therefore piecemeal, in spite of the advances in botany and in spite of a growing public that was hungry for reports on the American environment. Translations disseminated impressions also, although these mattered less in the eighteenth century due to the progress of protoevolutionism. Missionaries, historians, artists and visitors were acutely aware of their inability to understand or indeed to transport the elements of the other continent. Yet it was in the attempt to convey 42

Aston, The Fifteenth Century, chap. 3. Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 36–38. 44 Peter J. Marshall and Glyn Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1982), chap. 2. 45 Honour, The European Vision, pp. 6–7, 179. 46 Karen Edwards argues that Paradise Lost reﬂects how this public measured the natural world against ‘experiential knowledge.’ It was a record of new natural science derived from exploration. Nature is depicted as a ‘book of knowledge’ open to interpretation. It captured the insurgent interest in microscopic sight eager to explore the inner universe of plants and animals. This universe was open to interpretation by experimentalists much as the world was open to new interpretation by Milton’s Adam after the Fall. See Karen L. Edward, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 43

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impressions of the environment that a common frame of cultural encounter can be found. There were weak, but nonetheless discernible, links between Americans, Europeans and the myriad of intermediaries. Their translations not only applied on the frontier, the coast or in the central hinterlands. Their words reached other audiences in Europe in both scholarly and vernacular languages. Of course their role was not solely one of benign functionaries. Strange European ideas were translated for the Arawaks of Hispaniola, for Moctezuma, in John Guy’s trading expedition in 1612 and for many after the early encounters. Although they did not always ﬁnd equivalents in the Amerindian universe of understanding, these were acts of representation of European intentions. Greenblatt singles out translators as the factor that gave the Spanish decisive edge in using the rivalries of the central Mesoamerican empires to advantage.47 To be sure, they occupied a pivotal position in the nexus of intercourse. However, the indigenes were relegated to the margins of philosophical history over time. Reconstructions of their pasts could attribute diﬀerent traits—some ‘civilized’, some ‘savage’—to distinct tribes and societies.48 In this way, evolutionary accounts of the continent’s past that appear self-contradicting to modern observers could be easily pieced together. During the ﬁrst century of confrontation, the Spanish had retrieved and relied on Amerindian sources of information. Denigration of non-alphabetical languages was not their custom. A sea change in attitudes came in the eighteenth century as Mesoamerican cultures were situated within evolutionist schemas as lower than Egyptian and Chinese civilizations. Non-stratiﬁed societies did not fare nearly as well. They were designated natives without history. For cultures with a physical record and a recognizable hierarchy, it was the image of savagery that was the nucleus of European comprehension and not a treatment of their interpretations of the past. Given all of the above, if this can be aptly described paradigmatically as a period of Discovery, what then was ‘discovered’? The discovery

47 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 11–13. Stuart B. Schwarz is implicitly critical of Greenblatt’s theorization of representation as the essential core of cultural encounters. Instead, encounters do capture and retain some of what is reported. In the case of the Americans, Schwarz sees a complicated range of encounters, only some of which are linguistic, textual, symbolic or pictographic, and not all of these are exercises of power, for that matter. See his introduction to Implicit Understandings. 48 Ter Ellington, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), chaps. 1–5.

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was that little was known. A profound feeling of new and expanding limits of European knowledge unfolded. In Pagden’s words the boundary of what was known was a “receding horizon,” stretching on forever, further out of reach as more and more was added to the store of European knowledge.49 This was a discovery in itself that resulted from an accumulation of numerous and smaller observations. Civilizational encounters in the Atlantic zone cultivated a pragmatic disposition as ethnological awareness and scientiﬁc imagery began to incorporate a greater diversity of environments. This raised the prospect that the existing fund of knowledge held by European civilization was limited and therefore the categories of scientiﬁc thinking should be relativized to admit future ﬁndings. Awareness of the span of humanity was a ‘horizon’ of knowledge that ‘receded’ most rapidly. Confrontation with other peoples whose status was uncertain led to much debate. Strictly speaking this cannot be calculated as the early rise of anthropology. However, it might be seen as its pre-history.50 The continent-wide contact with peoples to that point unknown by Europeans did spark an ethnological awareness or a curiosity that was proto-anthropological. It was steeped in an ambiguity that was not present in the founding writings of nineteenth century anthropology.51 The impulse to comparative inquiry meant that questions about others had to be open-ended to some degree. Empirical sensibilities competed with philosophically-abstract principles by demonstrating that there were now clearly exceptions

49

Pagden, European Encounters, chap. 3. Robert Wokler, “Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment,” in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 51 “(M)any . . . discern during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century a hardening of racist attitudes and a withering of what is seen as a genuine curiosity and empathy for other cultures, characteristic of Enlightenment explorers and natural philosophers.” (Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government [Oxford: Polity Press, 1994], pp. 68–69). Fuyuki Kurasawa takes this view a great deal further in his analysis of crosscultural counter-currents in the history of social theory. An intercultural sensibility can be traced back to Montaigne’s essay on cannibalism, then to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and to Rousseau’s far-reaching critique of European civilization. This ‘ethnological imagination’ forms a backdrop to the critical dimension of modern social theory. Sociology’s capacity to constantly reinterpret gives it an inter-cultural disposition, which at ﬁrst glance might seem to be missing in anthropology. However, in-depth interpretations of diﬀerent aspects of Durkheim and Levi-Strauss show that anthropology too shares the ethnological imagination with sociology. Kurasawa’s strong argument is that the counter-current has been present in Western social 50

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to the accepted universal story of the spread of humanity.52 In other words, they countered universalism with illustrations of diversity that demanded alertness to relativity. In hindsight, this inquisitiveness clearly echoed the main ethical dilemma of Spanish colonialism: how to relate to actual peoples whose genesis and character were unexplained.53 To this dilemma there was a spectrum of responses. The scholarly exchange between Juan de Sepulveda and Bartolome de Las Casas in the well-known Valladolid controversy was an early instance, although it was perhaps the most spectacular.54 The reactions continued through to the eighteenth century.55 By this time, polygenesis had supplanted monogenesis in explanations of the anthropographic spread of humanity.56 Public admission that the peoples of the New World might have a diﬀerent origin lent legitimacy to the notion that it was a separate world altogether. It remained for many a perplexing and barbaric world. Spanish and French ethnographic thought spanned a new spectrum that variously ascribed traits of ‘savagery’ in impressions of indigenous civilizations. Some of them reﬂected a romantic and primitivist mood and attributed nobility to those living in ‘lost’ natural conditions. Others endorsed the collective sense of superiority in tune with evolutionist currents. The self-assured conﬁdence of the Renaissance that attributed brotherhood to America’s people and searched for a common genesis was starting to fall away. A confounding New World was displacing it.

theory since the sixteenth century. In fact, tellingly, he consistently describes Western modernity’s sphere as ‘North Atlantic’ and ‘Euro-American.’ See “The Ethnological Counter-Current in Sociology,” International Sociology 15, no. 1 (March 2000), and The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). See also Philip Bagby, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations (London: Longmans, Green, 1958). In his introduction, Bagby re-visits the pre-anthropological writings of Montaigne and Laﬁtau and traces a relationship to romanticism in anthropology’s nineteenth century emergence. 52 See Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents, pp. 26–27. 53 Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 184–88, and The Fall of Natural Man, chaps. 2–3. 54 For a commentary about the revival of Ancient writings in the disputes involving Las Casas, Juan de Sepulveda, Jose de Acosta, Pere Laﬁtau and the American Jesuits, see Mario Gongora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 225–30. 55 Arciniegas, Europe in America, chaps. 5 and 11. 56 Joyce E. Chaplin, “Race,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World.

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However, the appearance of variety continued to provide stimulus in a range of ﬁelds of inquiry as it had since the sixteenth century. During this time, theology acquired a secular aspect kindling the urge for new pursuits.57 The ﬁrst generation of scientiﬁc, geographical and philosophical responses is indicative of a rupture in thinking precipitated by exploration and colonialism, but neglectful of American realities. Partial, yet signiﬁcant, revisions were made to the ancient texts on ﬁndings in medicine, geography, cosmology, physics and political science. Some landmarks were notable. Early in the sixteenth century, Columbus and Vespucci’s journals brought doubt on the questions of the shape of Earth’s overall landmass and its peopling. Munster’s cosmographie charted lands, seas and peoples in an encyclopaedic way. Copernicus re-charted the heavens, while Vesalius went back to Galen to check his anatomy against fresh dissections of the body. Vespucci, Munster and Vesalius were all iconoclasts in their day, but they also accommodated Aristotlean precedents and concepts in elucidating their breakthroughs. Hugo Grotius captured wider concern about the lack of sound explanation of the ancestry of American peoples in the Bible. Mercator’s refutation of Ptolemy and Galileo’s ‘abolition of heaven’ were bolder responses; in Galileo’s case, a later one. Although a common tension in conceptual apparatus united these ﬁgures, the spectrum of perspectives was also broadened. The reception of images of America was at once bound by the cognitive heritage and divided by a splintering of interpretative bases. An expressed notion of ‘civilization’, internally fragmented from inception, was also ‘discovered’ in the mid-eighteenth century. It was preceded by discernible awareness of civilizational diﬀerence. Europeans had chronicled awareness of other societies since Antiquity. Aside from familiarity with Islamic states in the Middle Ages there was some acquaintance with southern Chinese dynasties and empires in the Indian sub-continent.

57 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientiﬁc Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Funkenstein focuses on European developments in his historical survey. It was lay education and Protestantism that eroded the Church’s theological monopoly and led to a ﬂourishing of scientiﬁc pursuits. See also Blair Worden, “The Question of Secularization,” in Hornston and Pincus, A Nation Transformed. For one alternative view that science during this period was more varied than this image suggests and mirrored a great perception of variety in nature go to Lisa Roberts “A World of Wonders, A World of One,” in Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels.

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However, they were not the objects of a projected Golden Age counter-posed to an advanced, though perhaps decadent, civilization in the manner that the Americas were in the sixteenth century.58 America was a mixture of states and societies and while there was some accommodation of Andean and Mesoamerican states, it was the primitivism of non-stratiﬁed societies that dominated. This made the other ‘unknown’ continent across the Atlantic more ‘known’ and gave great impetus to a self-sustained and more sharply deﬁned sense of particularity that underpinned European notions of civilization. Curiosity lost? New signs of dominance Europe’s penetration and conquest of the world beyond its borders did not just involve the extension of its institutional and economic order. In constructing new societies, the empires came to see themselves as bearers of civilization. This was boosted by French, British and Spanish incarnations of colonialism. A glance at the adventures of the concept of civilization reveals a longer history and a vital formative period in which images of the civilized were crafted.59 Latterday etymologies of the term ‘civilization’ indicate many historical lineages. The Romans used various terms—civilis, civis, civitas, civilitas— in a quasi-anthropological classiﬁcation of those races they saw as non-civilized. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this family of terms acquired an association with ‘civilized’ reﬁnement and conduct regulated by manners. In the context of the debates over the Americas and the validity of ancient texts, the idea of civilization was endowed with the values of progress and exceptionality. It was the basis for a philosophical defence of the imperial project against the antagonists of colonialism who mobilized a notion of culture to advance their views. In the Enlightenment debates around the idea of civilization, a notion of ‘civilizing mission’ held meaning a full century before it was incarnated in the French mission civilisatrice.

58

Brandon, New Worlds for Old, pp. 151–52. Bruce Mazlish, “Civilization in a Historical and Global Perspective,” International Sociology 16, no. 3 (2001); Anthony Pagden, “The ‘Defence of Civilization’ in Eighteenth Century Social Theory,” History of the Human Sciences 1, no. 1 (1998); and Rundell and Mennell, Classical Readings, p. 6. See also Lucien Febvre, “Civilization: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (London: Routledge, 1973). 59

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It was present in the philosophical discourse of Western Europe’s public sphere. In the Americas, it had a practical application, as it was borne by missionaries and perhaps conﬁned to their communities.60 The word ‘civilization’ coined in the eighteenth century was a noun that took the action of civilizing and turned it into an image of development. The more frequent usage of the word in the eighteenth century was necessarily plural. It referred to things that were developed such as achieved standards of cultivated behaviour, a state of social order, a universal goal and, most importantly, a stage of social and economic development.61 Civilization as an idea denoted diﬀerent particular things for Europeans. But a comprehensible imagery embraced all. While possession in Africa, Asia and Ireland provided points of reference for the colonial mind-set, the Americas more forcefully dominated imperial imagery until the early nineteenth century. Indeed the breadth of European possession circumscribed the contours of civilizational thinking for supporters of colonial purpose such as Sepulveda, Hakluyt, Bodin and Acosta and its mildest and most trenchant critics such as Las Casas and Montaigne. Civilizational consciousness had not crystallized ideologically in the sixteenth century in the way that it would in pre-revolutionary France or Britain after the Seven Years War. Nonetheless the conceptual signage that buttressed European understanding of Asian, African and American societies had materialized. It did not at this time impart to Spanish, English and French subjects an unambiguous language through which they could represent themselves as the ‘civilized’. But it could guide the premises of science and provide paradigmatic coherence for Europe’s relationships with pre-Colombian societies. Expansion across continents altered the structural and economic dynamics of Iberian and north-western Europe. A diﬃcult yet crucial release of its cultural energies accompanied the rapid spread of European power. While the Spanish, French and English intrusion into the American world was theological in its thrust, science and philosophy were also travelers.62 After an initial era in which naïve and benign curiosity coexisted with colonization, sciences of classiﬁcation,

60

F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 5–6. Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), chap. 2. 62 Pagden, The Idea of Europe, pp. 10–11, 50–4. 61

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collection and cataloguing were practiced in new ways in an intercivilizational environment. They established a body of signs symbolizing the civilizational diﬀerence between Europeans and Americans and, more vividly, between Europeans and the indigeneity of the American world. With this objectiﬁcation of civilizational diﬀerence, European powers could systematize the world’s spaces and civilizations for the purposes of collective understanding, for trade and commerce, for the mercantile re-ordering of inter-state relations, for warfare and for travel. However, this particularization of European identities was marked by its own tension with universalizing patterns and ideals that shaped empires as vehicles of European civilization. The accumulated selfbelief in civilizational distinctiveness—increasingly underscored by a proto-evolutionist paradigm in the eighteenth century—was forged in a dialectic of universality and particularity. Looking at how this played out in the American colonies, it is evident that there are two areas in which this tension is well illuminated: the experiences of migration and settlement and the relationship to conquered and transformed aboriginal worlds. On the side of the colonizers, the ontological renewal of identities fostered singularity through the confrontation with America. Migration disembedded and for those who undertook it, it was a process of transformation in itself. Migrants carried diverse regional or religious identities, rather than national ones.63 Waves of new migrants repeated the importation of geographical and denominational identity. However, the accumulation of experiences of distant surroundings and peoples honed a two-sided appreciation of both European homelands and new American homes as singular entities. At the moment of joining colonies, settlers may have felt intensely aware of the diversity of their place of origin. Migration did not stop at the settlements on the east coast. Repeat migration was a common feature, as settlers moved a second time, following a period of acclimatization. Immersion

63 Altman and Horn ‘To Make America’; Patrick Griﬃn, introduction to The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689 –1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), chap. 1. Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 80–82. Meinig cites Michael Kammen’s telling remark that “colonials didn’t come from Europe. They came from East Anglia, Bristol, London, Ulster, Leyden and Nantes” (p. 80).

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in a new environment had a creolizing eﬀect. The contrasts that mattered more were those that were immediately sensed and those that were remembered in the local community cultures. Invoked in those cultures were images of the old world more in tune with conditions of the new one. Moreover, fear of indigenous populations that were colonized or just beyond the reach of established settlements forced a communal unity on colonists that were otherwise culturally diverse. Fear of the indigenous presence fostered a similarity of colonial interests and an integration of perceptions of the Spanish, French and English. In other words, migrants were turned into French and Spanish Creoles or Anglo-Americans. Growing uniformity on the side of the colonizers inﬂuenced the ways that they re-shaped the American world. After the initial and normally paciﬁc encounters,64 diﬀerent indigenous cultures were judged in terms of civilization and ‘savagery’. The juxtaposition of the two sets of standards was more pronounced in the Americas than in the trading entrepots and naval bases that comprised European imperial holdings in Asia and the Indian Ocean. In the settler colonial empires, the language of civilization and ‘savagery’ was “honed into the sharpest instrument of empire.”65 It was turned on relationships with indigenous worlds, but also on places and values. The distinction between civility and savagery in the nexus of European and Amerindian encounters was actualized in three practices: cartography, geographic nomenclature and linguistic dominance. Each is elaborated in more detail below, after some general remarks on the proliferation of European signiﬁcations. In the Colombian scenario of the ﬁrst relatively passive encounters, respective European and indigenous semiotics of territory coexisted.66 Colonization brought a universalizing logic into a general scenario of coexisting conceptions of time, space and culture. European names for American places prevailed as the oﬃcial geographical nomenclature marginalized indigenous signiﬁers. The diversity, diﬀerence and novelty of the New World were displaced by European 64 This is a well-known facet of Columbus’ early voyages. However, English settlers too had non-violent relations with Indians in the New England area before the 1620s. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing oﬀ in the Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 65 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, pp. 2–3. 66 In other places, indigenous and European knowledge were blended, at least for a time. See Gerald R. Crone, Maps and their Makers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 90–92.

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representations of it. The Americas were named, understood and described in the terms and language of the Old World. The new continent had to be illustrated in a recognizable semiotics.67 Thus confrontation with diﬀerence entailed the mobilization of an idiom that was familiar to Europeans, even while it could only partially conceal the particularity of the American world. Representations of the New World were part and parcel of the universalist subsumption of non-European civilizations and their cultural horizons. Yet such universalizing ideals sat uncomfortably with the reality and experience of diﬀerence in the colonies where they could, to say the least, become uncertain. A tension emerged between the ‘civilizing practices’ of empires and the real limits to the exercise of European culture in the colonial frontiers. Mapping was such a practice. During the long era of imperialism, the world was re-mapped within European consciousness as a place foreign to Europe, but under the auspices of its major powers. Mapping the world was an important step in cultivating this pretension and, in itself, was an impulse to imperial state formation.68 In EuroAmerican empire-building these steps were precarious and unstable. Heightened competition between imperial powers for the most accurate and contemporary maps suggests that they were highly sought after objects. Their political, economic and military importance to competing states and their apparatus made them valuable commodities in themselves. The mercantilist projection of the world mandated a scientiﬁc and rationalized representation of space. Renaissance perspectivism accorded a new privilege to visual perception.69 The ocular objects of measurement that it generated rationalized the representation of space. They were used to craft materials for the consumption of the seeing individual. The transformation of mapping is a measure of the early modernity of spatial conceptions. Renaissance maps acquired a descriptive aspect that enhanced the textualism of the age.70 Their medieval antecedents had centered mainly on stylized symbolic and mythological representation. In contrast, 67 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, pp. 34–39. See also Elliot, The Old World and the New 1492–1650. 68 Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999). 69 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 240–53. 70 Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 6–9.

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objectivist impulses were plainly inﬂuential in the rise of geographical realism. Mercantile exploration encouraged common standards of cartography within imperial states. The commensurability of spatial representations that the exploring states strove for was one impetus to uniformity in cartography. Standard representations of the semiotics of space within the institutions of the state (notably the mercantile Casa de Contratacion, the Academie Royal des Sciences and the Portuguese Padron Real ) animated European conceptions of the world as a series of imperial domains.71 In the early years, the maps of the Casa depended heavily on Columbus and Vespucci’s accounts. Portuguese innovations continued to aid navigation adding more detail to the realistic representation of proportionate spaces and geological and geographical features. The Academie produced less elaborate utilitarian maps that made best use of Mercator’s projections of the planet’s sphericity. Thus the lessons of the early voyages faded as a source of information for cartographers. The invention of printing enabled a wider distribution of maps and intensiﬁed inter-state competition for more advanced versions. The minimal Portolan charts ceded ground by the end of the sixteenth century to more elaborate and expansive Dutch maps.72 Later products were not just artistic and they went far beyond utilitarian and political purposes. They captured the globe in a European conception that crossed Dutch, English, French and Spanish experience. Imperial oﬃcials, merchants and explorers constructed and read maps not only for practical purposes, but also to estimate the extent of their national reach. Attempts to map the whole world indicated a desire to grasp the totality of humanity and bring it under the signs of European civilization. Unknown lands and continents were accepted widely by the third quarter of the sixteenth century. They appeared in outline on new maps from that time on. Maps carried more 71 The Casa dedicated a number of oﬃcers and staﬀ to the accumulation of geographical knowledge about the New World and the Atlantic. They passed their discoveries on to pilots and other state oﬃcials and manufactured new navigational instruments and maps. See Antonio Barrera, “Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge and Commodities in Spanish-America,” in Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels, p. 165. On the development of the Academie and other such institutions in France, see F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 77–78 and Daniel Rouche, “Natural History in the Academies,” in Jardine et al., Cultures of Natural History. On the institutional memory contained in surviving cartography, see Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map.” 72 Hale, The Civilization of Europe, pp. 15–27; Suarez, Shedding the Veil, chaps. 6–7.

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particular detail of places colonized, or at least claimed, by European powers. Often the imagined reach of the empires ran ahead of their real control over actual territories. They painted a continent, indeed a world, under state domination for Europeans to look at. Where territory remained unexplored, mapmakers ventured speculation about the size of the landmass and the characteristics of its possible inhabitants. Peoples depicted at the margins as uncanny, exotic or Romanesque served to demonstrate the sources of conquest. Such anthropographic annotations powerfully declared the extent of European possession and knowledge.73 Maps reassured imperial elites in Europe of their control far from the real coasts and frontiers of captured worlds. They connoted mobility and told Europeans about their capacity to move through space and time and conquer new worlds. Mapping and the signs made on maps in a way made the places themselves transportable.74 They could be unﬁxed and ‘read’ in a form that was legible. They suited the baroque culture of Counter-Reformation Europe as they were designed to impress the visual senses. They were not only tools of imperial penetration; they were the accessories of imperial identity.75 Cartography was an especial mode of representation that boasted the achievements of European state formation and that deepened civilizational self-understanding. Concurrent processes of exploration and the cartographic charting of the non-European world were the initiation of imperial imagery of the globe and Europe’s possessions in it. Modern ideas of civilization involved re-imagining the American world. Place names involved a more literal institution of signs. It has been argued that the textuality of European culture was part and parcel of colonization of the Americas.76 If this is the case, and if it can be seen as part of a cultural movement onto the American continent then New Spain was a frontline. The Aztec world was ‘textually 73

Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, pp. 269–81. Pagden, European Encounters, pp. 27–28. 75 They were also essentials of civil gentlemanly Anglo-American identity. See Margaret Beck Pritchard, “‘Useful and Elegant Furniture for Screens, Balls, Large Rooms, Stair Cases’: Maps as Symbolic Objects,” in Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002). 76 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1989); Greenblatt, Marvelous Possession; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1992). 74

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captured’ over time, in a manner of speaking. In the ﬁrst instance the romanization of Nahuatl ensured the displacement and slow demise of pictography.77 Mexica idiom utilized the combination of expressive forms for some time. Ultimately, the loss of indigenous signage was an act of assimilation that was shored up by other forms of redeﬁnition of the pre-Hispanic imaginaire. Topography too was conceptually reordered. In the Mexican scenario—and more generally throughout the Americas—the environment was grasped in new ways. The suppression of indigenous territorial signs re-classiﬁed the unfamiliar world. Re-identiﬁcation and re-naming of places left a European stamp on the land.78 Explorers and conquerors initiated the renaming of places as a means of homogenizing diﬀerence. Comparison of discovered American geographical features with the familiar European landscape was an attempt to discursively tame the land. Re-constituting places oﬃcially with European-like names was part of the process of classiﬁcation. Some Amerindian words were appropriated in the development of Creole terminology and American names. Also Inca and Aztec maps maintained a coexistence with cartography and were absorbed in some instances. However, there are strong reasons for recognizing that the invention of geographic nomenclature was a vital feature of Spanish colonial accommodation to the American world. The English and French went even further in their seaboard colonies in North America and their island possessions in the Caribbean, constructing complete topographies for the areas they ruled. That linguistic dominance minimized later indigenous challenges until the nineteenth century.79

77 Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 52–55. For studies of comparable processes of transformation in the Andean region in the sixteenth century, see Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds., Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 78 Whilst re-naming ﬁgured prominently in the era of discovery and conquest, this process was even more pronounced in empire building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, important traces of these features of empires can be found in the era of conquest, settlement and revolt. David Harvey discusses the nineteenth century at length, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 242–52, 264–65. On the Colombian moment of contact and conquest see James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Open University Press, 1992), in particular pp. 58–63 on the naming of new places. 79 On the nineteenth century critics, see T. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization, chap. 5.

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The experiences of the Americas nourished European perceptions of civilization. Peoples, environments and places so unique had to be rendered in a digestible form. The apprehension of otherness crystallized in diﬀerent interpretations of what was noble and what was savage. To the extent that we can talk about a single symbol of l’homme sauvage, it was a transﬁgured image that condensed the indigenous past and projected it as a timeless and unchanging state of being. It did not ﬁnd its way into the discourse of philosophical critique, as is often supposed with regard to Rousseau.80 It was a deeply contradictory ensemble of depictions of Amerindians that could variously bear the trappings of civilizations or denigrate their alleged savage practices or both. The lack of discursive substance in the image generated by countless representations of Amerindians left it open to a nostalgic yearning for noble races that were assumed ‘lost’. But it could just as easily be turned to contempt for a base state of existence that was being superseded by civilization. If it is feasible to talk about a noble savage image in the eighteenth century, it should be considered the accumulation of centuries of portrayals that became quite open to a wide range of interpretations by that time. It had not begun in Rousseau’s romantic essays, or Lahontan’s dialogues—as convention has had it—although they and other ﬁgures did produce important portrayals of civilized natives. It arose in more modest ways in meetings on the frontier, letters, diaries, paintings and woodcuts. It also survived in artefacts, plants and people transported and exhibited in Europe.81 Attributes of savagery or dignity acquired momentum at an earlier time in the particular versions of each of the colonial empires. 80 See Ellington’s The Myth of the Noble Savage. Ellington’s main argument is that the myth of noble savagery is itself a myth of nineteenth century anthropology. The romantic unity of l’homme sauvage ﬁnds little support in Rousseau’s own writings, nor is it prominent in other ethnographies. The absence of essentialized nobility and the preference for variously assigning distinct traits of civil custom and savage habit to diﬀerent Amerindians is what really marks eighteenth century ethnographic thinking. The phrase ‘noble savage’ itself occurs more times in Lescarbot’s accounts of the sixteenth century and Lescarbot is credited with coining the phrase. While Ellington’s reasoning and empirical proﬁle is quite convincing, it is conﬁned to the discursive and textual artifacts of the day. The uniﬁed representations that cultivated impressions of the ‘original’ New World are not treated, even though some are, paradoxically, reproduced in The Myth. My argument here is that the ‘noble savage’ image did have currency in the eighteenth century, although not in the genre of travel writing and philosophy as has been thought. 81 Katie Whitaker, “The Culture of Curiosity,” in Jardine et al., Cultures of Natural History.

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They were inﬂuenced by myth and legend, to some extent, and most certainly by pre-understanding of otherness. For the Spanish, paganism anthropologically deﬁned the conditions of Amerindian peoples as both barbaric and noble. How it did so varied from the early years of Spanish colonialism to its ﬁnal period.82 Sixteenth century theologians and jurists debated the status of aborigines as subjects— the well-known Valladolid Controversy was a landmark disputation of this sort. Ethnographic categories of barbarism were deployed in reference to new races, but this was ﬂexible enough to allow the representation of American natives as singularly good. New data on the Americas were interpreted through the prism of classical and biblical analogies as contesting views sought to work out where Amerindians ﬁtted into the anthropography of humanity. The names used in theological and historiographic disputes to describe diﬀerent things in Caribbean, Andean, Mississippi-based and Mesoamerican cultures invoked familiarity, just as the names of places did so more generally back in the Americas. Moreover, the signiﬁers allowed recognition of the internal hierarchies of highland Andean and Mesoamerican societies. They constituted a recognizable vocabulary that could partly depict social complexity. Eighteenth century works in the evolutionary philosophy of history disparaged such aids to recognition. The Spanish had earlier conceptualized savagery in un-philosophical terms, according to this view. Too much nobility was accorded to the pre-civil conditions of indigenous-imperial cultures and their place in the ranking of civilizations could not be accurately reﬂected. Of course, the level of diﬀerentiation was no longer immediately evident to eighteenth century observers, as the long process of integration of Amerindian communities had simpliﬁed previous hierarchies. The writings of ascendant evolutionary historiography reﬂected indigenes as an amorphous mass of commoners lacking the societal complexity of civilized peoples. This censure of the Amerindian world had an impact, prompting an assault on suggestions that virtue and civility could inhere in indigenous cultures that had become less diﬀerentiated due to the process of colonization. Spanish responses were tempered by the need to defend its history of colonialism against the Protestant oﬀensive

82

Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, pp. 38–44, 207.

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and by the Bourbon project of modernization. On the whole, they proved unsuccessful. Along the way, the ambivalence about indigenous civilizations waned. Seventeenth century English perceptions rested on diﬀerent values. Creation myths were unintelligible to the seventeenth century English minds and were consequently disparaged. Where spirituality was foundational for Indian civilization, landed property was at the heart of English values. Indian nations did not have the signs of industriousness that were at the core of the Protestant temperament and capitalist ideal. English colonists built an empire of fences in the North Americas with this ideal in mind.83 Agrarian and village traditions melded with diﬀerent inﬂections of Protestantism to reorganize the landscape according to the principles of enclosure. The legality and legitimacy of possession came only with delineation of possession and ‘improvement’ of land. The Indians’ mode of production, quite deliberate in its land use, could not be recognized at all as civilized in the colonial mission of agriculture. Native American hierarchies were identiﬁed, but were not respected because of the value accorded private property. This is not to say that colonial forces were indiﬀerent to what they saw as the spiritual impoverishment of the Indians. Indeed, the Puritan projection of the indigenous condition as a fallen state conﬁrms this.84 In a paradoxical way, this projection stressed a common fate of Englishmen and Indians: a fall into temptation by Satan that demanded redemption. Not only the land had to be ‘improved’ in New World America, so also did its inhabitants through so-called civilizing measures. By the mid eighteenth century, the weight of opinion had swung against this view. Savagery appeared intrinsic and irredeemable. A natural law conception of the uncivilized accentuated the distance and diﬀerence of the colonials’ fellow beings from their ways of cultured life. The demand for more land coincided with this outlook to move Anglo-Americans to thrust westwards and to sweep aside perceived obstacles to their cultivation of wilderness. Earlier connections of Indian paganism that implied common human origins were severed in favour of a goal of progress that allowed no part for Indians. 83 Patricia Seed, “Houses, Gardens, and Fences: Signs of English Possession in the New World,” in Ceremonies of Possession. 84 Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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This is, of course, a typology of Anglo-American thought over time. Notwithstanding broadly shared values, views of relations between the Indian nations and the colonizers could still vary. Harsher seventeenth century views of the means of redemption in the northern colonies contrasted with Pennsylvanian accounts written later.85 The contrast is consistent, however, with threads of French and Spanish visions. Natives appeared in uncultured frames in all three nations. In French eyes, savagery came from a condition of proximity to nature.86 The lack of polished manners, the competences of conversation and the arts was a Native American trait that set them outside of the bounds of civility. There was an incongruity, however, and much disputation over the intrinsic civility/barbarity of natives. Unlike the Spanish, some French travelers thought the indigenes capable of civilized development, but that they simply did not possess its rudiments.87 The key writers can be taken as representative of more particular currents that defended the human integrity of Canada’s indigenes.88 Laﬁtau submitted that they possessed native virtues and were convertible. Thus they should be subject to missionary work. Samuel de Champlain thought that the French should go around them in the search for economic and strategic resources. Another view—Lahontan may be its progenitor—saw semi-nobility capable of much more. The dispute reﬂected a dissonance of the French orientation to the New World environment. It certainly allowed for a great ﬂexibility of views. Moreover, the dispute was more widely exposed in an inclusive public sphere, rather than halting at the conﬁnes of the theocratic intelligentsia, as in the case of Spanish philosophical deliberations. Distinctions between Spanish and French views may be due in part to the courtly context in which the latter were presented.89

85

Marshall and Williams, The Great Map, pp. 188–91. Dickason, The Myth of Savagery, pp. 63–70. 87 Cornelius J. Jaenen considers this civilizing process to be Frenchiﬁcation. See Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). 88 Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: Europeans Travellers and North American Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 1. 89 “Courtly society, we know from Elias, was predicated on the internalization of status distinctions . . . In this light, European civilization was further distanced from the ways of the ‘savage American’” ( John Mandalios, Civilization and the Human Subject (Oxford: Roman and Littleﬁeld, 1999), p. 101). 86

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No tradition or set of traditions was isolated. Ideas about America’s pre-Columbian peoples were widely communicated. Translation accelerated the circulation of views in the eighteenth century. A climate of mounting criticism of Europe’s supposed civilizing duty did nurture a reassessment of America’s indigenes, although this may not have been as important as previously believed. Eighteenth century reaction against the excesses of Spanish colonialism led the French and the British to distance their own imperial projects from the initial conquest. Some distinctions are clearly discernible. Nonetheless, alternate currents of thought about the conquest reﬂected on it as a collective enterprise in which all shared, even though the Spanish penetration was the most complete. Conclusion Three of the most relevant premises of the intercultural sociology set out in the second chapter are addressed with respect to the emergent civilizational imaginary. They are the forms of engagement used in transatlantic encounters, the growth of civilizational consciousness and the materialization of particular European civilizational signs. This chapter addresses several aspects of long-term intercultural engagement in which the emergent side of creative transformation is evident. Brieﬂy, they include the reconstruction of ‘unknown’ new phenomena in recurring forms; manifestations of wonder, marvels and utopianism to ﬁll the gaps left by the unexplained; the development of more exact modes of science (cartography, botany and topography); the rapid expansion and diversiﬁcation of experiences of the New World on the part of both settlers and travelers; and growing contempt for all things American. These can now be reordered in summary form according to the main categories of civilizational sociology. The forms of engagement of European powers were transformed by the long exchange with the Americas. Both the settler-immigrant societies and enduring Amerindian civilizations were subject to more sharply deﬁned European identities. It is indigenous cultures that are mostly discussed. For mainstream eighteenth century metropolitan culture, America’s aboriginal peoples represented another epoch and were depicted as wholly diﬀerent. The greater appreciation for the anthropographic diﬀusion of humanity that had characterized earlier inquisitive attempts to relate to Amerindian cultures had mostly

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given way to constructions that mixed together characteristics believed to be either vice or virtue. New evolutionist philosophies of history reﬂected a belief in European exceptionality that was consistent with the denigration of American indigenous nations. The potential for a deeper understanding of anthropological diversity was compromised by the conﬂation of distinct societal and cultural forms that resulted not only through conquest, but also through processes of mis-recognition. European colonization of place naming, language and history established signs of civilization that simultaneously claimed the New World and enhanced the colonial sense of distinctive American and European identities. The exceptionalist consciousness put America at a distance from Western Europe by situating it and its societies at earlier stages of civilizational development. This was always contested, as the debates around the proto-evolutionary sciences showed. Creole and indigenous voices that were heard in Europe also bore witness to competing interpretations of progress. However, it was also evidence of increasingly forceful perspectives that boldly proclaimed the superiority of European civilization. The forms of engagement therefore showed symptoms of distance between imperial and colonial centres, and at times outright hostility. A strong contention of the current work is that, before the nineteenth century, Europeans’ sense of alterity reached a peak in relation to the Americas. For Europeans, the Atlantic zone represented the most completely unfamiliar and diﬀerent of all worlds. When challenged by the novelty of American societies in the sixteenth century, they used images that corresponded to what was familiar to them. Classical similes helped to portray the strange environment and everything that inhabited it in comprehendible forms. Nonetheless, there was a two-sided discovery that was unavoidable. They discovered how limited the realm of their own knowledge was. Moreover, with deeper exploration of the American environment, they found that the frontier of geographical, botanical and ethnological knowledge continuously retreated. On the other side, the pluralization of paradigms in European philosophy and science generated new cognitive frameworks for the assimilation of phenomena. The sciences became objectivist and classifying arts of inquiry. The great discovery was how little was known compared to what could be known. Moreover, the diﬀerence and novelty of the lands under the sovereignty of Europe’s expanding empires nourished general and national cultural awareness.

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Finally, the signs of civilizational consciousness emerged in transatlantic relations. Imperial authorities reconceptualized the globe in uniform terms with the use of maps as technologies and universalism as a set of values. Colonial authorities variously followed suit by colonizing communication, history, topography and the representation of space through the institution of oﬃcial nomenclature and language. How this occurred and the degree to which it was complete varied greatly between the three empires and indeed between diﬀerent colonies. A monopoly was achieved only rarely. Moreover, colonies were beginning to create their own cultures distinct from governing metropolitan traditions and customs. Nonetheless, it is clear that the establishment of the signs of Euro-American cultures eroded the imaginary of Amerindian civilizations and powerfully asserted the domination of the empires. Subsequently, mixed and occasionally self-negating images of Amerindian worlds were made for Europeans by Europeans. A deeper awareness amongst the empires’ rulers of Western Europe’s relative position in the world was evident. Words to articulate this, such as ‘civilization’, were only barely in use in the eighteenth century. But the widespread consciousness that circumscribed its expression was forming. The self-understanding of Europeans was forged not only in connection with the territorial consolidation of imperial states, but also in the civilizational intersection with American worlds. Another way of looking at this is to see that it developed not only in the social settings of national societies on the European continent, but also out of the transatlantic exchange of images, values and impressions of America. The modiﬁcation of European conceptions was an internal journey of discovery that was undertaken as part of the construction of the Euro-American empires. The New World captured and colonized by European power and culture was also integral to the expansion of capitalism. Europe’s leap across the Atlantic extended not only its horizons and its dominions, but also its economic sphere. More than this, it was a decisive point in the early creation of capitalist social relations.

CHAPTER SIX

MERCANTILISM, SLAVERY AND THE PART PLAYED BY THE TRANSATLANTIC EMPIRES IN THE FORMATION OF CAPITALISM The analysis of the modern transatlantic world moves, in this chapter, from a direct concern with the interactivity of civilizations to a debate history of capitalism. Quite forceful arguments for dating the development of Western capitalism from the early sixteenth century have been convincingly put by historians working in quite diﬀerent traditions. Braudel, Wallerstein and the world systems theory current pioneered a new periodization of capitalism based on a heightened tempo of trade and the intensiﬁcation of economic networks in Europe. Charles Tilly focusses on the accumulation of coercive resources to re-date capitalism.1 Accepted time-scales of European capitalism’s birth were re-problematized in a Cambridge symposium organized by Jean Baeuchler, John Hall and Michael Mann.2 Samir Amin has launched a sustained eﬀort to bring the mercantilist phase into the picture.3 Robin Blackburn draws attention to the neglected status of slavery as an element in the development of capitalism. His results have a special place in this chapter. Dependency theory, as developed by Andre Gunder Frank, Ferdinand Cardoso and Celso Furtado, is a kindred school of thought of world systems analysis but spreads theoretical revision further aﬁeld.4 Weber’s classic thesis on Protestantism as an aﬃnity of capitalism also pinpoints the sixteenth century as a watershed in the trajectory of the West. His ghost haunts this debate, as does that of Marx.

1 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States 900 –1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 2 Jean Baechler, John Hall and Michael Mann, Europe and the Rise of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 3 Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Harvester Press, 1974). 4 F. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) and Celso Furtado, “The Concept of External Dependence,” in Charles K. Wilber, ed., The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (New York: Random House, 1973).

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 141 Rather than attempting to add to this or adjudicate on it, I will pluck out one thread. I am honing in on the involvement of imperial states in the transatlantic process of so-called primitive accumulation. Discussions about the stages of capitalist expansion open up a line of enquiry about the early relationship of state and economy. This chapter draws out some conclusions of some important, albeit under-acknowledged, theorists of capitalism. Mercantilism is the lynchpin of the aﬃnities of states and capitalism in this formative phase. Mercantilist institutions acted to integrate national economies. But mercantilist strategies were simultaneously extended into the transatlantic domain. Their development in the imperial sphere was homologous to that of the national one in all three cases under discussion. The outstanding diﬀerence between the two spheres was Atlantic slavery. Slavery also serves my argument as an illustration of the partnership of states in economic expansion. Mercantilism is a controversial concept amongst economic historians. Before commenting on the long-standing debate about this concept, I want to give a short working deﬁnition. The mercantilist institutions that states were in the process of creating in Europe were enlarged and geared to transatlantic trade. Furthermore, a type of conﬂictual relationship featured in the imperial realm as well, pitting the metropolitan imperial state against a distant and distinct colonial order. Mercantilism in Europe was spawned out of the routine confrontation of national governments and provincial and city-based administration. Mercantilism in the imperial domain grew out of a tension between the colonies and a state that ruled from the other side of the world. There is no view of mercantilism in the literature that quite resembles this. Economic historians understand it largely as an unintended economic philosophy of statehood or an early modern perspective on the relationship of national economies to each other and to state institutions.5 It can, however, also be reconceptualized as a two-sided development. In the ﬁrst place, it was the crystallization of an impulse to trade and the expansion of trade networks. Secondly, it can be 5 A genealogy of the notion of mercantilism can be traced to Gustav Schmoller, Adam Smith and through to Thomas Mun. Mercantilism as doctrine, ideology or discourse is emphasized. In this chapter, the notion of mercantilism draws on Eli Heckscher’s detailed work. There is a literature of debate that emerged after Heckscher published his tome. See Mercantilism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935). See also “Mercantilism,” in Donald C. Coleman, ed., Revisions in Mercantilism (London: Metheun, 1969). In that volume a number of other pertinent essays can

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reconstructed a posteriori as a system of instrumental policies by which states tried to engineer optimum conditions for advancement in trade and commerce. This view may be contentious and is certainly not in accord with a long-standing consensus that has only more recently come into question.6 In the discussion of capitalism here, mercantilism stands for a series of policies, institutions and eﬀects enacted by states motivated by involvement in the European world economy, with a number of unforeseen outcomes. The emphasis rests on mercantilism as the creation of state institutions of economic life within the Atlantic empires, rather than as a well-deﬁned doctrine. On this question I want to sound agreement with Johann Arnason—both in spirit and in formulation— when he writes: It would consequently seem advisable to replace the conventional periodicization of capitalism in terms of a liberal and organized variant with a three-phase model. The formative phase is characterized by the symbiosis of pre-industrial capitalism and the absolutist state; the latter inﬂuences the economic sphere both via direct participation in it and by supporting monopolistic strategies. The next phase, often called competitive or liberal capitalism, can in retrospect be reduced to the regional, partial and temporary separation of state and capital, and it is followed by a phase of their renewed interpenetration.7

This formulation precisely expresses the premise that the relationship between state formation and capitalism is indeed more variable

be found. See A. V. Judges, “The Idea of a Mercantile State”; D. C. Coleman, “Eli Heckscher and the Idea of Mercantilism”; Jacob Van Klaveren, “Fiscalism, Mercantilism and Corruption”; Ingmar Bog, “Mercantilism in Germany.” See also Frank A. Haight, A History of French Commercial Policies (New York: MacMillan, 1941), chap. 1; Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution 1713–1826 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) and Lars Margusson, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (London: Routledge, 1994). 6 Epstein’s economic history stresses a sea-change in opinion that has emerged with Robert Brenner, Wallerstein and historians of proto-industrialization. Indeed, Epstein concludes that it was the incomplete nature of mercantilist regulation (rather than its development) that restrained the growth of competitive capitalism. See Stephan R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe 1300 –1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), chaps. 1–2. 7 Johann P. Arnason “Modernity as Project and as Field of Tension,” in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, eds., Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 191. Etzioni-Halervy similarly prescribes a three-stage history of intervention and withdrawal. See Eva Etzioni-Halervy, Social Change: The Advent and Maturation of Modern Society (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 70–73, 92–95, 154.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 143 than may have been thought. Mercantilism was a vital characteristic of the formative phase of the engagement of European states with capitalism. The state was closely involved in capitalist economic life as a set of institutions of unique importance. It shared the frameworks of monopoly in which economic action takes place. EuroAmerican states assumed a co-constitutive agency. Understood this way, the inter-relationship of imperial states to capitalism can be reconceptualized (as Arnason suggests), not as a two stage evolution of capitalism through its liberal and then monopoly regimes, but the constitution of capitalism and market logics in three phases: during the ﬁrst era of European colonialism absolutism, through the disengagement of state and economy and via their renewed partnership. Arnason’s view is pre-empted by others that have been neglected until recently. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is an account that brings to the fore the role of the British state in creating the monopoly conditions of free enterprise capitalism.8 Eric Hobsbawn has a similar view. The nineteenth century was an era not of lassez faire, but of government intervention of diﬀerent weight and character. Like Polanyi, Hobsbawn argues that British Free Trade presupposed a whole range of state-sponsored acts that created the conditions in which industrialization could proceed apace.9 Indeed if these otherwise disparate interventions are grouped together, then it may be possible to talk of a minor current of historical sociological thinking becoming evident. If this important modiﬁcation of mainstream historical scholarship is embraced, then a diﬀerent interpretation of the relationship between state and economy can be easily and clearly elaborated. A radical and unique symbiosis existed between the early modern imperial state form and the early development of modern capitalism. A dialectic of transformation underpinned the relationship. Speciﬁcally, the conditions of so-called primitive capitalist accumulation elaborated by Marx nourished the state’s institutional creativity.10 In turn, the state was the leading edge of the forceful process of primitive accumulation. The mercantile creation of national and imperial

8 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). 9 Eric J. Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (London: Penguin, 1990), esp. chap. 12. 10 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Middlesex: Penguin, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 915–16.

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institutions and provision of infrastructural resources was part of this other side of the process of accumulation set out in Capital. Western European states matured capitalist economic forms through the provision of guarantees of property, trade and credit; through labor laws, the licensing and regulation of slavery; through the British Acts of Enclosure; and ultimately through their own output. They were both encouraged and constrained by the autonomy of capital and of the market economy itself. States, therefore, were not mere appendages of capitalist economic life. They aided its joint-creation and extension, with the British state being a leading exemplar (rather than a leading liberalizer). They connected with it as regulators and as political, military and economic agents sui generis. Mercantilism set here as the augmentation of territory-wide conditions of accumulation, trade and exchange was developed in three spheres. It established national—or rather supra-provincial—structures and instruments that quickened the impulse to national uniﬁcation. Bodies that governed the administration and trade of the American colonies worked within a second sphere of intra-imperial government. Competition and warfare between European states became more intense both in the transatlantic theater and within Europe itself, especially after the Westphalia Treaty. In this context mercantilism was a strategy of inter-imperial competition. The remainder of this chapter is an analysis of these three spheres. National structures and the struggle over economic sovereignty Mercantilism was fashioned out of the conﬂict between central and provincial and municipal authorities within European states. The methods and instruments of monopolies of provincial and city-based bodies were appropriated and adapted by the Crown in France, Spain and England. Ministers and their oﬃcials were the chiefs of many bodies that regulated trade, industry and labor. They were found in a variety of authorities: in Royal Mints that acquired a monopoly of currency production, in state-sponsored industries, in ﬁnancial institutions and in judicial bodies.11 Bodies ﬁlled with such

11 See Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France (London: Fontana Press, 1991); Peter Seaby, The Story of British Coinage (London: Seaby, 1985); Vilar, A History of Gold and Money.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 145 oﬃcials forged the domestic institutional framework of capitalism. There were three broad arenas open to their intervention. Firstly, the passages of laws that created a level of commercial security necessary to normatively anchor economic action. Secondly, only centralized states with eﬀective territorial sovereignty could guarantee the legitimacy of the form of currency, its weights, metals and its divisibility. Finally, Western states legislated to regulate and control labor, limiting some forms of labor—notably coercive ones—whilst encouraging others. On the continent, involvement in cottage industries and the verleger mode of production gave them further means of labor regulation. Above all, they limited the mobility of labor. A layer of legislation decreed the existence of national mechanisms of coordination. It was laid over an assemblage of provincial regulation. To varying degrees, it was supported by the provision of administrative force to implement it. Many of the edicts, laws, labor regulations, cottage industrial enterprises and regulatory bodies established by the state were directed at the erosion of provincial and urban barriers. At times, however, they also imitated aspects of urban government. Portions of city government from the Middle Ages remained prominent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Urban guilds and city governments instituted tolls and tariﬀs and governed the determination of measurements and weights. They regulated production, consumption and population and modiﬁed distributional patterns. The fundamental characteristic of city-based corporatist structures was particularism. Heckscher groups the facets of municipal ‘mercantilism’ or corporatism into ﬁve diﬀerent classes.12 Towns endeavored to do the following: obtain an abundance of goods, particularly produce; establish production monopolies; regulate migration; limit merchant control of the internal movement of goods and labor and regulate a more diﬀerentiated community. The means through which this was achieved is a signiﬁcant measure of the capacities of the provincial and municipal order within their localized dominions. This was a provincial or corporatist ‘mercantilism’. The logic of these institutions set them in opposition to the mercantile regimes of the state. Provincialism and corporatism continued to characterize city economies in the early modern epoch.

12

Heckscher, Mercantilism, pp. 128–30.

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Rallied against this was the logic of mercantilism. However, in order to fashion mercantile techniques, states had to engage in a process of short-term replication. To a considerable extent, their policies were drawn from pre-existing conditions and methods of regulation that were the creation and monopoly of the cities and the provinces. The provincial and municipal order originated in these structures. Its spheres of relative independence from central institutions emerged from the immunities enjoyed by its localities and districts. The principle of territorial consistency in regulation was the innovation brought to the municipal and regional techniques of protection. It began as little more than a tendency to universalize provincial structures. In this way, it represented an assault on the exclusivity of the city where the internal apparatus of incorporation was subsumed as a pre-condition of the nationalization of economic life. And so, whilst the policies of city corporate entities were a major barrier to the state of uniformity, the strategies of mercantilism were designed to institute large monopolies as the foremost step in the establishment of national economies. Map-making and the production of currency illustrates well how this process of nationalization proceeded. Map-making at the beginning of the seventeenth century was largely the monopoly of the provincial and municipal order, especially in France. One of Colbert’s many endeavors was to put together a national map of France.13 The lack of such knowledge constrained infrastructural development. A tyranny of local knowledge hampered eﬀorts to co-ordinate national planning within the realm. Provincial maps contained what geographical knowledge there was of the country, its organization and resources. An instruction sent to all provincial oﬃcers by Colbert in 1663 directed them to submit all amended maps to Paris for collation. It was largely ignored, unsurprising perhaps, given the atmosphere of France after the Fronde. Even if Colbert had cobbled together all of France’s provincial maps, a practical representation of France would have proved impossible. Cartography remained underdeveloped at that time in two respects. A technique to render existing maps commensurate did not exist. Furthermore, provincial administrators had

13 David Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France 1660–1848: Science, Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), introduction and chap. 1.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 147 to be convinced of the need to hand over what maps they had. In response to these diﬃculties, the Academie royale des sciences developed a proposal to map France independently through a new method of charting networks of triangles on a grid. The project was not ﬁnally completed until 1789 and it produced the ﬁrst national map of France. Under France’s ancien regime, these works continued producing limited but helpful results for the court state. Advances in the centralization of strongly related topographic and mercantile forms of knowledge were novel institutions in Europe. The French court state led the way in topography, but it was not alone in the pursuit of accurate territorial maps. Consciousness of cartography in England sharpened as the sixteenth century progressed.14 Its relationship to mercantilism followed a distinctively English logic of economic development. Prior to 1550, the Tudor state was directly implicated in the production of maps. Its need for cartographic knowledge increased continuously, as did awareness of this need. Furthermore, a considerable number of administrators were engaged in the production of maps. After 1550, a shift in the demand for maps occurred. As private capital increasingly entered trade and commercial ventures, merchants and the landed gentry formed a private market for maps. Production of charts and maps was led by the search for markets in trade and ﬁnance and by an invigorated aristocratic fervour to protect the property rights of rural holdings. Involvement of the merchant and noble classes in military matters rendered the production of maps a responsibility shared by court oﬃcials and patriotic Englishmen. In this climate there were a number of eﬀorts made to construct a national map of England. These produced some successful representations of parts of the British Isles. Typically, they began with an assembly of alreadyexisting templates that had been drawn up by provincial and municipal administrations. No struggle seems to have occurred over control of cartographic knowledge, as it had in France. In both cases it was an aid to the mercantilization of economy. The institution of the powers to mint coin and legitimize credit, control circulation and regulate monetary values also occurred over a long period. Competing oligopolies forced governments over time to strengthen their own mints, or at least gain greater control over the creation and use of money through granting franchises. In the

14

Buisseret, Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, pp. 57–98.

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Middle Ages, the right to mint currency always remained the prerogative of the monarch or the emperor in common law. It was part of the colonizing pattern of Christendom.15 The authority that silver coins carried depended on particular warrior lords and whether the ecclesiastic see could survive on the expanding peripheries of Latin Europe. However, multiple coining establishments continued to persist long after the impulses of feudal decentralization had subsided. Throughout Europe many foreign and regional currencies and minting manufactures competed with each other for legitimacy and for scarce bullion. Rivalry between diﬀerent foundries and mints declined in the sixteenth century due to the inﬂux of bullion from the New World, a development that favored the monarchies that controlled the trade in precious metals. The gradual and very uneven ascendancy of royal mints, royal money and royal franchises coupled with the mercantile institutional regulation of colonial trade allowed the state to gain greater control over the ﬂow and valuation of money. In both France and England, for example, the state invented new currencies. In 1613, James I experienced some success in halting the illegal production of pewter coins. He then advanced a royal franchise to Lord Harrington to mint the King’s money in return for half the proﬁts. Baronial mints were suppressed during the sixteenth century in France in a move that asserted the monarchical prerogative to mint coin.16 In the 1640s, Richelieu began to re-weigh the currency with a value and denomination similar to foreign competitors. In eﬀect he created a completely new currency in France. The English did the same thing between the Restoration and the eighteenth century, again with considerable success. Innovations such as these in the mercantile institutions of economic activity further sapped the autonomies of provincial and urban powers. Moreover, they created the conditions for the institution of national capitalist structures such as the London Stock Exchange, the Bourse and the Bank of England. The pre-eminence of domestic institutions eclipsed local sources in these and other areas. The purview of the apparatus engaged in forming and shaping such institutions was not only national, however. It was also oriented to the crystallization of imperial power. This is the area of greatest interest. 15 16

Bartlett, The Making of Europe, pp. 280–88. Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, pp. 170–71.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 149 Within empires: mercantile monopolies and Atlantic trade A comparable tension developed within the imperial structures of the transatlantic states, although many overt aspects of the intra-state struggle were not present. In advance of the discussion in this section, it can be plainly put that alternative economic networks of production, trade and regulation coexisted with mercantilism in the imperial sphere. In the American colonies, the fundamental measures of exchange and the organization of property that mercantile-imperial bodies generated were not as ﬁercely contested. More speciﬁc opposition to trade monopolies and laws regulating labor characterized the intraimperial sphere. The forms of colonial resistance were broad and some were speciﬁc to particular empires. Corruption in local administrative oﬃces, widespread smuggling of contraband, the ﬂouting of shipping laws, imperial edicts modiﬁed through local legislation and simple deﬁance were all made possible by the distance from imperial legislators. These were not the steadfast economic autonomies enjoyed by the provincial and municipal order back in Europe. They derived from the fact that imperial bureaucracies either left the colonies alone or were ineﬀective in enforcing mercantile rules. This tension set mercantilist institutions against colonial networks that shared the landscape of economic life in the Americas. Mercantilism parented imperial bodies of economic coordination, whilst commanding colonial economic relations. The mercantile governance of economic activity in the British, French and Spanish empires was almost entirely the province of imperial administrations. These were based in the Board of Trade, the administration of the pacte colonial and the Casa de Contratacion. Mercantilism developed in the Atlantic trade and in Europe’s national economies simultaneously. In the imperial context, the methods of mercantile regulation used were certainly drawn from those techniques that European rulers were becoming familiar with, and that were mostly available to them. However, imperial bureaucracies also fashioned new guiding principles that were speciﬁc to the ﬂow of trade. Aspects of America’s economies were mostly cast by metropolitan institutions and merchant interests in the image of European mercantilism: mining in the Spanish Indies, port trade in key staples and the traﬃc in slavery are salient examples. Overall, Spanish, British and French states directed colonial economic activity according to the mercantilist preconception of the European capitalist world economy.

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American economies had a limited dynamic of their own on which independent institutions of economic development could be formed. Private capital and non-imperial networks of exchange spread beyond the imperial economy of French and British North America and the Spanish Indies. As the seventeenth century expired, and the colonies developed economically, networks became increasingly important. But the intensity of their activity revolved mostly around inter-colonial trade, which was regulated by imperial bodies. Hence the nodes of the American economies did not have the independence or dynamism of the cities in northwest Europe until the mid-eighteenth century; the only exception was the British North Americas. In the Spanish Indies, mercantilism conferred a centralist form on economic development. Hispano-America’s extraction economy channelled resources into industries governed by imperial dictates. Indeed, in the eighteenth century the viceroyalties were expected to produce ﬁscal surpluses, a requirement not put forth by the French or the British. Spanish imperial economic structures encouraged the rapid exploitation of resources. Industrial growth was limited and the best outlook for expansion seems to have lain with Catalan region. Other European reinos that were governed by imperial councils were limited in their economic development. Potentially more independent economies were supplanted by mercantile institutions through which all produce of the colonies had to pass. In the Indies, the two main bodies of control were the Casa de Contratacion and the ultimate executive authority, the Council of the Indies. The Casa’s control of shipping, the traﬃcking of bullion and merchant taxation was forceful in the sixteenth century. The English victory over the Armada in 1588 signalled the de facto demise of the Casa’s monopoly.17 For the Spanish, however, imperial trade remained a peninsular monopoly restricted to New Spain and the La Plata region until Bourbon reform took hold in the late eighteenth century.18 Until the colonies absorbed the Bourbon commercio libre, Seville and Cadiz were the mandatory gateway to European markets for Spanish merchants trading in the Americas. Within Spain, the colonies were reckoned an exploitable resource. Where the English regarded land labored on by them to be their

17 18

Lang, Conquest and Commerce, chap. 3. Ibid., pp. 76–83.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 151 right, for the Spanish it was the riches underground that they discovered which were justly theirs. The Americas were perceived to be a land of resources, a quarry economy, with which Spain could negotiate its fortunes in the European world economy. However, the monarchy was unable to alter its relative economic and political position in Europe.19 It monopolized American trade for quite a long period through its coordinating institutions of economy. But Spain became nothing more than a commercial conduit in Europe. Much of the trade that entered Europe in the seventeenth century through Seville and Cadiz appears to have served a strategy of balancing national debts. Its imports of bullion ran readily through to other centres. The cross-Atlantic ﬂows of produce and manufacture steadily fell to non-Spanish merchants from the late sixteenth century onwards. The Spanish court state was unable to cultivate a robust merchant class that could prosper independently of the American trade. Nor was such a class able to diﬀerentiate itself from the centre of monarchical power. This is a result of its construction of an imperialmercantile economy so carefully channelled through a couple of tight avenues. The long-term relationship between Spain and the Americas produced a constantly present axis of tension that ultimately prompted the reform of Spanish mercantile institutions. It set in opposition the oﬃcial public mercantile economy and the much weaker quasi-private forms that bore the stamp of local conditions. Spanish political economy revolved around the general pursuit of mineral wealth. The private enclosure of communal lands—a preoccupation of the English— did not ﬁgure at all in Spanish calculations. The Crown’s goals of public exploitation of America’s riches were not easily reconciled with the private enrichment sought by conqueror elites. The outcome was a range of institutions intended to mobilize labor in mining. They included the encomienda to the hacienda vessel of production and the repartimiento de mercancias parallel economy of forced distribution of goods. Each was a compromise in the tug-of-war between the monarchy that asserted its imperial authority and colonists who controlled resources. In this chapter, I concentrate on the repartimiento in order to illustrate the manner in which this tension was played out. 19

See Antonio Garcia-Baquero Gonzalez, Cadiz y el Atlantico 1717–1778: El Comercio Colonial Espnaol Baja el Monopolio (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-americanos, 1976).

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For the most part, the diﬃculties in production, supply and trade that imperial regulation created were alleviated at the regional level through the ﬂexible mechanisms of colonial administration.20 In its sixteenth century origins, the repartimiento referred to the ‘apportionment’ of natives to each conqueror. The King Ferdinand himself recognized this practice: “(G)overnor or peace-maker, with whom this authority may lie, shall divide the Indians amongst the settlers.”21 In the eighteenth century it became the predominant form.22 Oﬃcials in municipal administration, especially the corregidores, used their positions to monopolize the supply of goods and then force Indian communities and communities of isolated provinces to purchase them. Smuggling of contraband goods and regional hoarding of currency specie were the two most visible and yet pervasive examples of the suppressed repartimiento.23 Its legalization in 1751 was an acknowledgement of the frailty of viceregal control. The repartimiento fed oﬀ the deﬁcit of local oﬃcials in imperial administration. In fact, it meant that they were entrenched in local interests and became “a political technique of the ‘opposition’”24 or the colonial order, if you will. Royal patronage could not strike roots in these conditions. In the Indies, oﬃcial trade was undercut by these illegal distributive networks that revolved around colonial government positions. The repartimiento market compensated oﬃcials for paltry salaries or for the complete lack of salaries in some cases. Relatively independent of imperial administration, they drew most of their income from the distribution of goods in the unoﬃcial economy. Invariably, they identiﬁed with the interests that were represented in the local economic ediﬁce.

20 Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp. 401–403. 21 Cited in Seed, American Pentimento, p. 226 (my translation). 22 McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World. On the Spanish state’s attachment to general economic development in South America, and the repartimiento in particular, see Johnson and Susan Migden Socolow, “Colonial Centers, Colonial Peripheries, and the Economic Agency of the Spanish State,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. Stanley J. Stein has written an excellent analysis of corruption and patterns of administration in the Indies. See “Bureaucracy and Business in the Spanish Empire, 1759–1804: Failure of a Bourbon Reform in Mexico and Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 1 (1981), on the repartimiento in particular, see pp. 8–9, 15, and 27. 23 On smuggling in the Spanish Indies, see Braudel, The Perspective of the World, pp. 413–20. 24 Hamnett, The Mexican Bureaucracy, p. 11.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 153 Contradiction in mercantilist policy marked the intervention of the Bourbon regime in the eighteenth century. Two dilemmas lay at the foundation of so-called liberalization, which set the pattern for institutional and economic development in the last century of the Spanish Indies’ existence. The ﬁrst has to do with attempts to reconcile the structure of imperial trade with provincial economic expansion. Individuals enriched outside of local government protested the monopoly of the infrastructure of trade held by corregidores and sub-delegates. The full extension of the principles of commercio libre championed by prominent individuals in Madrid may well have loosened the oﬃcials’ networks of control. However, the merchant class in a number of port cities allied their interests with the colonial order. The second dilemma emerged from the failure to integrate a layer of provincial oﬃcials who related to peninsular interests. When the repartimiento spread, Spain tried to suppress it through legislation and policing. The oﬃcial mercantilist order provided the primary model of economic organization. However, it did not tackle the source of the contradiction: the Crown’s reluctance (or inability) to institute a colonial bureaucracy furnished with suﬃcient means to undermine the participation of oﬃcials from the colonial order in the repartimiento. In other words, it was unwilling or unable to cultivate the links of patronage that were its whole modus operandi on the Iberian Peninsula. It was a paradox that this aspect of the Hispanic governmental complex was not reproduced in the New World. Those charged with unshackling economic constrictions were not furnished with the means to do so and were predictably reluctant to comply with Madrid’s decrees. Madrid oﬃcially gave up trying to eradicate the repartimiento in the early nineteenth century. Liberalization brought some alteration to both layers of economy, although its impact varied from Peru to New Spain to La Plata. In 1765 the colonies were permitted limited trade with each other. The 1778 reglamento sponsored new merchant guilds, which had a modernizing eﬀect on agricultural production. Moreover, formerly smuggling cities were economically renewed (Buenos Aires, Santiago, Vera Cruz, Havana), diﬀerentiating them from noted colonial-administrative centres (Lima, Mexico City). Nonetheless, in 1797 when the monopoly on shipping was dropped at the insistence of Madrid there was widespread objection from local merchant classes: The reason is not hard to discover; the merchant class, made up both of Spanish born and creole traders, had prospered precisely by adapting

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Thus, there were two dimensions of economy. Although the mercantile economy dominated, the legal imperial trade coexisted in tension with the economic networks born in a colonial order that formed with the encomienda and prospered in the colonial economy. This tension exacerbated ethnic divisions. Cautious generalization is possible here. Peninsular communities, in the main, controlled oﬃcial trade whilst Creoles, in the main, engaged in the repartimiento. The shift into economic activity of Creole-dominated urban communities during the seventeenth century altered the relationship between Spain and the Indies. Coupled with the gradual exhaustion of mineral wealth in the Americas, the diversiﬁcation of production strengthened Creole networks of distribution and forms of economic interaction. During the era of Bourbon restructuring, the socio-cultural distinction between Creoles and peninsulares paralleled the structural separation of the two forms of economy. The repartimiento belonged to the American-born; it was the economic orbit of positions of relative independence of the colonial hierarchy. Typically, the underpaid administrator had to seek remuneration by means other than the imperial salary. It was in the colonial institutional nexus of governance that Creoles dominated. During the eighteenth century the low level struggle between the imperial apparatus and the colonial order took on an ethnic appearance. The conﬂict between the Spanishborn minority and the American-born majority was also a clash of diﬀerent levels of the colonial hierarchy with varying relationships of dependence on and degrees of loyalty to the Spanish Empire. Notwithstanding these comments, the issue of composition of oﬃces is a complicated one and will be taken up in more detail in chapter eight. A provisional generalization can be made that ethnicity was an axis of tension exacerbated by Spanish mercantilism. It indicates a conﬂict with the weak, but not unimportant, American colonial order. The tensions that emerged from within directed the methods of imperial economic regulation. The incorporation of England’s American colonies into the imperial economy was a more complex case of imperial monopoly. The

25

Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, p. 128.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 155 nature of seventeenth century corporate colonization set a pattern of distant autonomy. Puritan colonies were densely settled and existed in close proximity to each other. As the colonies were integrated into the English Empire, the tempo of migration increased dramatically.26 The rapid and ongoing population of the Chesapeake and Massachusetts Bay colonies, the Caribbean Islands and then the Carolinas led to the quick development of robust colonial networks of internal trade and production from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The British Empire was a transoceanic commercial empire and some of its colonists were vibrant traders. As in the Spanish empire, English mercantilism revolved around the needs of the centre. However, the manner in which the centre dominated diﬀered markedly. It incarnated a Protestant regard for commerce and industriousness. This ideological variant of the capitalist imaginary did not simply privilege private enrichment. Trade and the accumulation of national wealth were mercantilist activities that served the strategic interests of the empire. Trade was the centrepiece of national thinking, that is, the rhetoric of public interests. It sat privileged in the national market, alongside of the debate around ﬁxed property, mobile property, land, credit and corruption. In addition, population and migration were viewed diﬀerently. Population of the North American colonies was encouraged as a boost to trade.27 Colonization was interpreted quite literally in English political economy after the 1690s. It was taken to mean ‘peopling’ other lands for the beneﬁts of trade. England’s orientation to commerce was diﬀerent from Spain’s. It structured mercantile regulation in a less centralized manner. English mercantilism revolved around the legislative products of Parliament, Cabinet Council, the Privy Council and the instructions of the Board of Trade. It was the latter—a quintessentially mercantilist body— that was foremost in controlling trade. It drew up instructions for provincial government in the colonies. Its brief also covered ﬁnding new sources of raw materials and produce and ﬁnding new colonial markets for English manufactures. It was to superintend colonial ﬁnances and legislation and advise the Privy Council accordingly. Its

26 On migratory movements and their momentous impact, see Alan MacFarlene, The British in the Americas 1480–1815 (Essex: Longman, 1992), chaps. 2–3. 27 Armitage, The Ideological Origins, pp. 166–67.

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overall task was a judicial one: the supervision of the imperial monopoly of the commercial proﬁts of colonial trade. It was inaugurated at the beginning of a period of economic prosperity for the British Empire,28 which immunized it from far-reaching challenges either in parliament or in the ﬂedging colonial assemblies. Despite being charged with important responsibilities, the Board of Trade itself did not have the full powers to execute its brief.29 The ministerial apparatus abrogated many of its oﬃcial responsibilities during the period of Whig government. Its sway therefore depended on personal connections with Ministers. Parliament took far greater interest in the business of the Board, but the government focussed mostly on Britain’s overall commercial position in Europe and neglected the Board’s advice on the state of colonial trade. Even at its height in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, associations representing Anglo-American merchant interests could more easily capture its proceedings than those of other government departments.30 Presbyterian, Quaker and Congressional groups vied with French lobbies for inﬂuence over decision. Generally they were successful. The preoccupation with trade paradoxically disadvantaged the Board as a superintending body. Success in commercial ventures throughout the Empire gave the Board little ground for more extensive powers of intervention or greater authority in commercial matters. The Board, therefore, did not act with the sweeping prerogative of the Council of the Indies, nor did it attempt to direct non-economic aspects of colonial society. Likewise parliament found itself in a position of considerable control over oceanic trade, sustaining the monopoly of trade and ensuring that exports to the Americas went via British ports.31 But it was impotent in matters of internal colonial life, or indeed inter-colonial trade.

28 Richard J. Johnson, “Growth and Mastery: British North America 1690–1748,” in Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 29 Lang, Conquest and Commerce, pp. 188–92. 30 Alison G. Olsen, “The Board of Trade and London American Interest Groups in the Eighteenth Century,” in Peter J. Marshall and Glyn Williams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., 1980). 31 John M. Murin, “The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three Great British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 157 Thus, the relationship between the colonial economies, the metropolitan state and early British capitalism seems to be more intricate involving more sources of authority in a devolved ﬁguration.32 Management of the framework of trade in the British imperial economy was made more complex by the wide-ranging array of private capitalist interests. From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, oﬃcially sanctioned competition in imperial trade between commercial ﬁrms began to emerge. The Navigation Acts were regulated by the Board of Trade, which eﬀectively permitted a more ﬂourishing inter-colonial trade. Oﬃcially, the governor of each British colony was entrusted with the enforcement of the Navigation Acts that involved an array of supervisory duties.33 In the eighteenth century, these duties were expanded to include the monitoring of colonial legislation to ensure that no colonial acts interfered with English merchant trade. This move emerged from incidents pitting merchant interests in a nascent colonial order against Parliament and the Privy Council. The Navigation Acts did not impoverish colonial trade, although they did formally exclude Irish and American merchants from the immediate beneﬁts of colonial commerce. Indeed, exceptions were made to the regulations when it seemed the economic vibrancy of the empire was in jeopardy.34 Beyond this the only major transgressions were the contraventions of the Navigation Acts—and this did not invite sanctions—or when the regulations of Spain, Portugal or France were violated. Nevertheless, decisions crucial to the fortunes of the colonies were made in London by an apparatus whose attention was ﬁxed on Britain’s position and not the consequences for the Americas. What made British mercantilist institutions a complex web was the triangle of interests linking the British merchant class, colonial administrations and economic actors in settler markets. Well-organized merchant inﬂuence emerged out of the revolutionary settlement of

32 See Jack P. Greene, “Metropolis and Colonies: Changing Patterns of Constitutional Conﬂict in the Early Modern British Empire 1607–1763,” in Negotiated Authorities. For a recent work that reiterates the vitality of the metropolitan center in the development of the colonial empires and a “gentlemanly capitalism,” see Peter. J. Cain and Anthony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993). 33 On these tasks see L. W. Labaree, Royal Government in America: A Study of the British Colonial System Before 1783 (New York: Ungar, 1958), pp. 120–21. 34 Lang, Conquest and Commerce, pp. 152–60.

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the long seventeenth century.35 The inﬂuence of private English merchants in the restriction of the economic outﬂow of the colonies proved considerable. The coincidence of private merchant interests and municipal oﬃcials closer to the English Crown suggests that British hegemony in the capitalist economy in Europe in the eighteenth century was contingent on the oﬃcial British monopoly in shipping. The entwinement of mercantile interests in the empire and capitalism in Europe produced the merchant-driven eﬀorts of the Crown to maintain the imperial monopoly in the eighteenth century. Arching over this complex ﬁguration of economic actors was the opposition of the constitutional state and the colonial order. The instructions of the British government to the colonies, which were inﬂuenced by mercantile interests, addressed protectionist legislation enacted by colonial assemblies. Close relations between Britain’s commercial classes and the Board of Trade proved to be a source of settler antagonism to the Board.36 It became an arena of the competing claims of well-organised British commercial interests and contestatory counter-claims of colonists.37 In many ways, the instructions of the Board provoked more opposition from some settler communities than did the Navigation Acts. Colonists could contravene the latter by a form of subterfuge. However, legislation of the assemblies designed to circumvent direct instructions had to pass through the governorship and the Board of Trade, it “could not be smuggled as could a pipe of French wine.”38 Mercantilism became an issue of autonomy and dominance for the colonial order. It entered the public domain in which American interests competed with the claims of British commerce. The imperial system of trade rarely accounted explicitly for the interests of settlers. However, the illicit trade proved extremely proﬁtable for all involved, especially colonial merchants. Thus, in British North America, the tensions engendered by the mercantile grip on economic interaction often became political issues and a source of antagonism

35 On the emergence of merchant capitalist interests in the seventeenth century institutional structure of the imperial state, see Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 191–93 and Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conﬂict, and London’s Overseas Traders 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 36 Labaree, Royal Government in America, pp. 60–61. 37 Ibid., pp. 62–63. 38 Ibid., p. 247.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 159 between London and the colonial order. The complexion of English imperial rule was thus coloured by the involvement of English merchants, some American interests and the Crown, at one pole, and colonial producers and other commercial interests, at the other. These were the actors that stood in opposition to one another in an ongoing legislative conﬂict between colonial and imperial institutions. This was certainly centralism. But the extent of its penetration was not so great as in the Spanish Empire or in the French Caribbean. Furthermore, no single body was empowered to oversee and enforce the legislation and regulation of the British government. Thus, centralized rule was always more nuanced than in the Indies and French America and the economic restrictions on settler communities were less stringent. As in the Spanish case, restructuring emerged from the tension within the British Empire. By mid-century, the level of smuggling had gone beyond its earlier proportions. Indeed, it seemed as though the private merchant empires that existed were beginning to swallow up greater volumes of the overall trade; empires within the empire, one might say.39 In the 1750s, the British government responded to the general situation by revitalizing a stagnating Board of Trade. It introduced a reform program that encapsulated two strategies. First of all colonial government was re-designed around greater monarchical prerogative. In particular, legislation passed by colonial assemblies had to include a clause empowering the Board with the right to suspend it.40 Secondly, the provision of mercantile incentives to diversify production, particularly of goods in which England did not have an advantage or simply did not produce expanded the range of opportunities for American merchants. Naturally, this also reasserted imperial imperatives, albeit indirectly. However, it also permitted the colonies to conduct greater trade within the continent. Moderating the mercantile system catered for colonial realities and compensated for economic underdevelopment. Alongside of this, the restructuring was a product of more decisive and practical shifts in British political economy towards the ideals of free trade. When Parliament enacted the Free Ports Act in 1766, it opened up channels of inter-imperial trade for colonial merchants. 39 T. H. Bowen, “British Conceptions of Global Empire 1756–83,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 3 (September 1998). 40 Lang, Conquest and Commerce, pp. 208–209.

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This produced an attempt at resurgence in imperial authority via a liberalization of British North American trade. The desired results were an increase in imperial prestige in the colonies, greater economic purchase in the home economy and boosted inter-imperial competition in Europe. The reforms did not dissolve the tensions of the British mercantile system, nor did they placate opposing colonial interests. They put in place a regime of economic policies that were more adaptable to changing circumstances. Yet, the tension of imperial state formation reconstituted itself, and found explicit voice in the growing dissent of settler communities after the Seven Years War. French historians have judged mercantilism as a force of domination in the Americas. This perception has its roots in nineteenth century Canadian historiography and yet it has come under scrutiny more recently.41 The complexity of intra-imperial relations is evident in the origins of French intrusion into the American world. Reconnaissance came early enough, although settlement came comparatively late. The French had begun trading in fur and farming ﬁsh stocks in the North Americas in the 1550s and 1560s, whilst in the south French slavers were active in Brazil and the Spanish Indies and pirates patrolled the Caribbean. They faced stiﬀ competition and not only from the Spanish: the English presence on the seas became increasingly weighty in the second half of the seventeenth century.42 French Huguenot colonies were contemplated for Florida, but early experimental settlements had failed.43 It was only when the ﬁrst settlement at Quebec was established that early French trade was supplemented by colonialism. It was really Colbert’s tenure that heralded a systematic French approach to colonialism and with it a mercantilist regime. Many of the institutional innovations of this period were national applications for France speciﬁcally: regulation of the guild structure, eﬀorts to draw up a national map, the introduction of accounting procedures in state budgets, a systematic reorganization of the monarchy’s body of taxes, monetary reform and the development of state industries. Much of this set in train a substantial transformation of the machinery of state, rendering it more eﬀective as a national structure in early capitalist Europe. 41 Leslie Choquette, “Center and Periphery in French North America,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. 42 F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 13–18. 43 Ibid., pp. 24–29.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 161 But Colbertism was also an empire-building project. Navigation and trading associations were established. More generally, the French monarchy aimed at a favourable balance of trade in accordance with mercantilist principles. Growing French trade in the seventeenth century was, to some degree, due to the state-led expansion of its empire.44 The direct economic beneﬁts to the French state were indisputable. Its diverse range of colonial holdings carried great expense, but also brought visible gains. Canadian trade in leather, ﬁsh and fur ﬁtted neatly into the logic of Colbertism and provisioned the homelands with a variety of essential goods that would be procured at greater expense otherwise.45 In return, the American colonies were an outlet for French manufactures. The economic fortunes of France were paralleled in the colonies. More generally, for the duration of imperial rule, colonial production served three purposes. It fed French markets, a beneﬁt directed towards defraying the costs of an expensive empire. The French market for fur became saturated in the 1680s. Canada’s value as a colony did not lessen though. Quite the opposite: the ascendancy of the Bourbon regime heralded an improvement in Canada’s strategic standing.46 Secondly, it supported the wider growth of French colonial trade. A proﬁle of Franco-American trade after the treaty is quite instructive and indicates that the American colonies were anything but marginal.47 The Caribbean sugar trade proved extremely proﬁtable. The French Empire entered a long North Atlantic cycle of rapid growth.48 While overall French foreign trade between 1716 and 1720 and the revolution only increased seven-fold, the value of trade with the colonies jumped eighteen-fold. Trade with all colonies (excluding Africa) in the 1770s constituted a third of all French exports and imports. Much of this passed through the transatlantic

44

See Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, p. 246: “Above all, it accounts for the fervour with which some of Louis XIV’s advisers pressed on him the idea of accepting the Spanish succession for his grandson. Many of them imagined that this would result in joint Franco-Spanish rule of America.” 45 Raymond Birn, Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648–1789/91 (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1977), pp. 102–103. 46 William, J. Eccles, “The Social, Economic and Political Signiﬁcance of the Military Establishment in New France,” Canadian Historical Review 52, no. 1 (1971); Allain, French Colonial Policy, chaps. 5–6. 47 Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic”, pp. 75–79. 48 Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chap. 7.

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routes between Bordeaux, Nantes and the Caribbean slave islands. It was predominantly a commerce in agricultural goods and slaves that was dedicated to the development of Antillean society, on one hand, and the beneﬁts to the hinterland economies of French Atlantic ports, on the other. However, this suited the Atlantic zone well. French Canada in particular was a beneﬁciary as prices for its main export commodities increased steadily.49 Thirdly, colonial production was seen as a support to the strategic designs of the monarchy, in which long-term economic interests ﬁgured fairly prominently. This inter-continental nexus became a more conscious part of the economic structure of the French state in the eighteenth century. In the rivalry of states, it can be conﬁdently concluded that French foreign trade became “Americanised” through mercantilism whilst that of Britain was “globalised.”50 Thus, mercantilism did not give France the ﬁnal leading edge that the monarchy sought. However, as a set of guiding motives it did drive the imperial reconstruction of the French American world. During the eighteenth century, North America remained a seemingly insurmountable problem for the Crown. Remote and daunting tracts of wilderness made Canada an impenetrable place that forced compromise on the part of the colonisers. This left its stamp on the structures of mercantilism. The Crown was exceptionally assertive in the area of maritime trade, while in non-economic areas it was less forceful. When corporate holdings were ceded to the Crown, l’exclusif was invoked through Colbert’s West Indies Company. After it collapsed, the principles of regulation were generalized, beginning a history of strict French monopoly. Monopolies over trade were rapidly developed at the turn of the century. Some monopolistic methods failed. After the Seven Years War, the mercantile economy was liberalized for French Americans under a regime of l’exclusif mitige.51 Free ports were established and new restrictions on imports paid for with American products were introduced. In other respects, the advantages for France were augmented. New monopolies on

49

Ibid., chap. 9. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 2, p. 270. See also H. V. Bowen, “British Conceptions of Global Empire.” 51 Aldrich, Greater France, pp. 16–17. 50

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 163 valued colonial exports and French imports were promulgated. Ongoing employment of French mariners was guaranteed. Conﬂict between imperial authorities and the colonial order did not suddenly wane as a result of liberalization. It had been born in the structure of the British, French and Spanish empires and continued to reproduce itself from that structure. Mercantilism itself was constituted out of a conﬂict generated by the presence of an opposing colonial order. In Europe, the conﬂict between monarchies and provincial and municipal administration inﬂuenced the early stages of the long historical formation of capitalism. At the same time, another side of this process was unfolding in the Americas. Mercantilism in the intra-imperial sphere informed the transatlantic development of European capitalism. It was a realm of state intrusion into the aﬀairs of the colonial order. It was intended to augment the beneﬁts that accrued to states from accumulation and trade. Nowhere is this more evident than in the trade in enslaved humans. Why is slavery so important in explaining the role of mercantile states in early capitalist development? In many respects, slavery was truly transatlantic. It created a nexus of trade and production in a zone of inter-dependence that connected West Africa to the Caribbean, Brazil and Chesapeake Bay and then to London, Cadiz and Nantes. Oﬃcial government initiatives were crucial in sponsoring the trade and then sustaining it. Above all, it furnished America with much of the labor that was so essential to the production of colonial commodities and to the early consumer markets of capitalist Europe. Furthermore, its importance has not been lost on historians and social scientists, although much of the interest is conspicuously recent and coincides with the development of postcolonial sensibilities in the social sciences. Slavery and the breakthrough to Atlantic capitalism Modern slavery was vital to transatlantic commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The observations of Marx and Adam Smith showed due regard for the contribution of American production and trade to the takeoﬀ of capitalism. Contrary to some readings of Marx and the mainstream understanding of Smith, their views do acknowledge the contribution of the slave trade to early capitalism. There is a growing body of opinion that the place of slavery in the formation of capitalism needs to be re-assessed. Either Smith or Marx

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has been taken as a starting point.52 Marx’ scattered remarks on America draw attention to the modernity of colonial slavery: (T)he Negro labor in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was chieﬂy directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labor, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.53 Where the capitalist outlook prevails—as on the American plantations—this entire surplus value is regarded as proﬁt; where neither the capitalist mode of production itself exists, nor the corresponding outlook has been transferred from capitalist countries, it appears as rent.54 The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labor.55

These comments reﬂect on a later period than the one under scrutiny in the current work. However, the essential point is that it is the world system in the whole of the modern epoch that Marx has his eye on here, rather than the internal features of the mode of production as such (aside from the mention of slavery’s calculative rationality). Moreover, cultural aspects of slavery are accorded a place alongside of the process of extraction of value. Marx’ belief remained ﬁrm that a free labor force was an indispensable feature of capitalism. However, his anatomy of industrial capitalism’s pre-history shows signs of a transatlantic scope. It is clear now that Marx’ views on American slavery do contain ambiguities and, furthermore, he had little evidence with which he could more sharply distinguish diﬀerent Anglo-American colonies.56 Nonetheless, he is unequivocal in identifying the necessity 52 Marx certainly was for Eric Williams in his classic on capitalism and slavery and for C. L. R. James in his study of French slavery in the Lesser Antilles. Both of these are intermediaries between Marx and recent writers, such as Robin Blackburn, Barbara Solow, Jacob M. Price and David Galenson. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 53 Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 345. 54 Marx, Capital: A Critique, p. 804. 55 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 513. 56 Both of these points are elaborated on by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese in “The Janus Face of Merchant Capital,” in Fruits of Merchant Capital:

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 165 of both waged European labor and systematic slavery in the Americas to the development of capitalist social relations during this era.57 Adam Smith’s treatise on capitalism makes little mention of slavery. When it is remarked upon, the kind of contempt that Marx expresses for it is conspicuously absent.58 In both models of capitalism waged labor is pivotal and the independent producer and planter of the New World appear as the embodiment of a modern entrepreneurial ethic of self-reliance. For Marx, such self-suﬃciency rested on a patriarchal foundation of slavery (locked into the world wide capitalist mode of production); while for Smith it seems to be a choice made by settler communities conﬁdent of the especial value of their consumer commodities: The plantation of sugar and tobacco can aﬀord the expense of slavecultivation . . . In our sugar colonies, on the contrary, the whole work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies a very great part of it. The proﬁts of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America; and the proﬁts of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn . . . Both can aﬀord the expense of slave-cultivation, but sugar can aﬀord it still better than tobacco. The number of Negroes accordingly is much greater, in proportion to that of whites, in our sugar than in our tobacco colonies.59

In this passage slavery appears as a function of the imperial division of labor, the central motif of Smith’s political economy. Indeed, it was slavery and mercantile monopolies of trade that mediated colonial America’s relationship to the world. Both elements are necessary in an explanation of the prosperity of British America’s colonies. Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 57 One survey of the sixteenth century questions whether the bonded American workforces (estimated to be close to one million at the end of the sixteenth century) might not have equalled Europe’s waged labour force. See Blaut “On the Signiﬁcance of 1492,” pp. 378–79. Prior to the American Civil War, the combined slave populations of the South and Brazil came to more than 6 million, accounting for more than 30%. Prior to the Haitian revolt in the 1790s the total slave populations of the Caribbean came to 1.1 million (around 70%). See Barry Higman, “Demography,” in Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 168–174. 58 Robin Blackburn points out, however, that the “analytic gap between Marx and Smith was . . . less substantial than it appears” (Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, p. 516). 59 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 489.

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The latter does not get its due in Smith’s classic. But the wider importance to the transatlantic trade is not lost on him either. If this was a lively and industrious sphere of the world economy that he suggests it was, then imperial mercantilism and slavery were necessary and dynamic components of it. If this was the epoch of so-called primitive accumulation, then slavery was a weighty component. Recent research suggests that proﬁtability in economic activity in the Caribbean and the North Americas only came with slavery.60 If mercantilism was the establishment of the pre-conditions of accumulation, then the philosophy of state and active involvement of state oﬃcialdom warrants careful attention. The orientation of all those involved in slavery also shows up something of the character of transatlantic commerce. Its patriarchal veneer implied that it was embedded in ﬁrm traditions, and yet its practices and productive organization were, in many respects, integral to Europe’s early capitalism and even to its modernity. Colonial slavery could not be local in orientation; the self-suﬃcient oikos was not a model that could be reproduced easily in North America and had no feasible application in the Caribbean. Its orbit was necessarily transatlantic.61 Its lifeblood was a trade in goods and human beings. This trading nexus was ﬁrmed up by lines of credit that linked merchants, planters, shipowners, ﬁnanciers and parliamentarians. The chains of interdependence reached from Bordeaux and London to Barbados and Charlestown. This nexus was a means of extending English and French capital westwards in investment and loans for plantation production. It also provided for the planter class the imperative to trade with other economies. At the same time, production for distant markets logically compelled slavers and planters to participate in a mercantilist regime of accumulation. The exchange of produce for manufactures—an import/export trade over long distances—was proﬁt driven and quite competitive. The availability of credit encouraged the expansion of estates and the takeover of others. 60 Barbara L. Solow, introduction to Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). David Eltis puts the case that economic factors were marginal, although he concedes that the enslavement of Africans was highly proﬁtable. See “Europeans and the Rise and Fall of African Slavery: An Interpretation,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993). 61 Research into the history of slavery has taken the transatlantic sphere as its proper scope of analysis. Cross-national studies have received less attention since the 1970s. See Locksley Edmundson, “Trans-Atlantic Slavery and the Internationalization of Race,” Caribbean Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1976).

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 167 Across the seventeenth century, small Caribbean-based producers found themselves bankrupted by the marginal and uncertain returns on their output. Through foreclosure, their lands fell to larger producers as ownership became more concentrated. Competition and the diﬀerent lines of connection with Western Europe, African and other colonial networks compelled all within the orbit of the slave trade to re-organize. More systematic forms of cost accounting were developed. More complicated and extensive credit arrangements were devised. New types of insurance that catered for risk taking in long distance trade were drawn up. Calculation and a calculative rationality were inherent to these aspects of economic organization. Moreover, there was an impulse to expand operations indeﬁnitely up until the point of zero return. Through investment in a larger workforce, fertilizers, new crops, storage facilities and housing, sugar, tobacco and other goods could be produced at cheaper rates through higher levels of productivity. A more rapid rate of purchase of inputs and technology coupled with the growth of luxury markets in Europe accelerated the circulation of commodities. The intense development of capitalist social relations in Western Europe therefore depended on the inclusion of colonial producers and traders from America and Africa for the rapid growth of markets. It also rested on the behaviourshaping character of slave-centred economic organization to provide further impetus to the reﬁnement of mercantilist and ﬁnancial institutions. Slavery was critical in all these respects to the actual development of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early eighteenth century, the Atlantic world governed by Europe’s colonial empires resembled a new social formation. Slavery formed the sinews of transatlantic trade. Portuguese exchange with slave traders in Africa pre-dated slavery’s emergence in America. But slavery’s breakout from Africa was precipitated by the growth in economic activity in the West Atlantic and the quickening pulse of European trade along the West African coast. The extension of the range of capital investment and the connection of metropolitan and colonial markets perpetuated slavery and indeed may have been a root cause of its expansion. From the perspectives of the American colonies, slavery appears to be no less essential to the economic life of the French and British empires. Not only did it entail the traﬃc in humans across the so-called Middle Passage; the fruits of Africans’ labor in America were transported to Europe to satisfy luxury markets that delighted the tastes of the new bourgeois-aristocratic public sphere.

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At the apex of this trade was a class of businessmen who provided coordination of a number of commercial, ﬁnancial and distributive activities.62 Slavery was the basis of these, although many seemed detached from the processes associated with slave-based production. This pattern has been dubbed the three point triangular trade. This is an oversimpliﬁcation and can be misleading. More penetrating analyses suggest that trade linkages were more complex. The large joint-stock companies normally associated with the triangular networks were only part of the trade. Small-scale private traders had a considerable stake in long-distance trade and contributed considerably to the development of modern forms of credit and transaction.63 They depended on networks of ‘correspondents’, commissionaires or ‘employees’ to transact their business through Atlantic and Caribbean channels. Small time businessmen relied heavily on trust built up with contacts over time. Their reputation could be further secured if they belonged to the same religious denomination. ‘Moral credit’ guaranteed their ﬁnancial creditworthiness.64 Credit was indispensable in all these exchanges and the trade linkages that they produced were a patchwork of connections. As for the large monopolies and joint-stock companies, they too depended on the balances of relations between London-based factors, ﬁnanciers, merchants and planters.65 From the middle of the eighteenth century, West Indian planter dominance enabled triangular trade, where previously return journeys from Britain were unproﬁtable. Of course, a good portion of the trade was bilateral involving merchants that sailed from North America to the Caribbean or to Europe.66 62

Hancock’s Citizens of the World is a fascinating study of the entrepreneurial outsiders to London’s merchant circles. This group was an emblem of colonial slavery and an exemplar of transatlantic unity, and yet was two degrees removed from slave-based production. They established a transatlantic commercial network that furnished a cosmopolitan array of goods for Britons abroad (and at home). Their scope was global. They were imperial ‘improvers’ in commerce, consumption, style and manners. These agents of empire coordinated the factors of production across markets, regions and indeed continents. 63 Jacob C. Price, “Transaction Costs: A Note on Merchant Credit and the Organization of Private Trade,” in James C. Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 276–97. 64 Peter Mathias “Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise,” in McCusker and Morgan, The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. 65 R. B. Sheridan, “The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave Trade 1750–1807,” Economic History Review 11, no. 2 (1958): 249–63. 66 Stanley Engerman argues that the image of the triangular trade should be modiﬁed as it subsumes complex patterns of commerce to the neglect of bilateral trade.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 169 In addition, some general caution is warranted when examining the most basic patterns of trade in the Atlantic zone. The so-called hub-and-spoke model of imperial commerce that has enjoyed favour amongst economic historians stresses the ﬂow of agricultural goods to Europe in exchange for manufactured products, tight imperial monopolies and the decisive weight of decision-making of metropolitan merchants. Close scrutiny of particular industries suggests that this model does not capture the complexity and variation of the operation of actual markets. The hub-and-spoke image applies best to the sugar and tobacco trades.67 However, for present purposes, the important conclusion to draw is that, whatever its underlying patterns, the triangular trade was qualitatively new and cohered a new economic zone. In a way it was the raison d’etre of a whole species of French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and English merchants. Slavery was the basis of economic relations in this zone. It integrated activities of distant locations. London, Liverpool, Cadiz, Bordeaux, Rotterdam and North America, the Caribbean, the Brazilian coastline and then West Africa were linked in a transatlantic nexus. Slavery was, therefore, the centrepiece of the extension and expansion of capitalist forms. Its eﬀect on nascent capitalism was also cultural. It promoted a supervision and discipline of labor that would later suit industrialism.68 It also boosted the calculative activities of merchants, shippers, insurers and planters alike. For those involved in plantation there was a marked desire for greater predictability in production and trade; for example, planters went to great lengths to secure their interests through local legislative and judicial bodies. Calculation was a signiﬁcant feature of most stages of production and trade connected to slavery. This resembles the rationalization of economic action described by Max Weber, although he did not recognize this source of rationality.69

See “Mercantilism and Overseas Trade 1700–1800,” in Roderick Flood and Donald McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 67 See David Hancock’s discussion of Madeira wine as an instructive counterexample in “The British Atlantic World: Coordination, Complexity and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy 1651–1815,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 107–26. 68 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 588. 69 Max Weber’s relevant comments on colonial slavery can be found in General Economic History (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 300–301, and Economy and Society, p. 155.

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In this regard, David Galenson’s description of “market behaviour” to typify the trader-planter outlook is apt.70 I argue, however, that this type of behaviour is a speciﬁc cultural form constituted in variable ways in the Atlantic zone. The picture of cultural inﬂuences on slavery and reactions to it is more varied than a survey of rationalization might suggest. The tensions between traditional and modern sides of slavery diﬀered between Caribbean, Brazilian and North American plantation colonies. In the British North American tobacco and cotton plantations, the incongruence was of a particular kind.71 A localized culture of villa life fashioned itself, to a degree, on Roman republicanism. Its values were hospitality, leisure, quiet reﬂection, active exercise and a discursive inter-subjectivity (albeit a private one). It should be remembered that underpinning the South’s leisurely recreation was slavery; the adjuncts of the villa were the plantation and the slave quarters. But more than this, the aim of all activity was directed towards a private enrichment. In contrast to ancient slavery, “‘(p)roduction’—and not ‘consumption’ in the sense of public buildings, festivals and so on—was the telos of economic behaviour.”72 As well, however, it must be added that the imperative to trade and exchange was a constant intruder into the cultural domain of the southern gentry. The local style of life could not evade Atlantic trade; indeed it often depended on these external links. A disjuncture between the modern plantation economy and the selective revival of Ancient and Renaissance traits of virtue placed some limits on the expansion of so-called rationality. In the new US, it generated dilemmas in political philosophy for Southerners grappling to reconcile republican virtues with the practices of slavery. Tradition was no stable thing. The South’s villa society conformed only partially to ancient models and these were open to wider interpretation. On the other hand, the impress of modernity varied between the port

70 See David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 148–50, on West Indian maneuvers to stymie the eﬀects of Royal African Company’s de jure monopoly as an instance of ‘market behaviour’. Nuala Zakelich provides a snapshot of English merchants from port books in 1686 that supports the idea that the ‘new men’ of the Atlantic trade promoted calculative forms of action. See “Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (1999): 143–58. 71 See Peter Murphy, “Peregrini,” Thesis Eleven 46 (1996): 14–16. 72 Ibid., p. 15.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 171 cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia and the colonial towns of Savannah and Charlestown. While the modern principles of capitalist organization may have prevailed in production, inter-colonial trade may have seemed more distant and focussed on northern coastal centres. The Caribbean experience was diﬀerent. ‘Tradition’ in many of the island colonies was over-determined by the imperative of trade and the nature of the colonies’ origins. There seemed less room on the islands for detached villa life. Demographic patterns make this clear. They were far more densely populated (especially in the eighteenth century) than the mainland colonies and the number of slaves relative to the white population was far greater. However, it was the authoritarian model of agricultural production that most decisively formed island traditions. In the early years of founding plantations “everything had to be brought over from the old continent: the masters—white settlers; the labor force—black Africans . . . the plants themselves.”73 English colonists in the West Indies were quick to form a coherent master class capable of coordinating wealthy plantations a whole generation before the Southern gentry and years before the French.74 Production methods were also imported. Implantation did not end with people and production techniques. In a way, societies were being artiﬁcially created out of “total strangers” who were mostly brought to this world forcibly.75 Bewildered Africans arrived to ﬁnd themselves amongst an estranged majority; indentured Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English servants had preceded them. Their motives for transportation were immaterial (if indeed they were apparent in any way). In contrast, the motives of free settlers were crucial and drove the trajectory of development in many of the islands. Unlike early mainland English colonists who had gone through a religious exodus, island planters and their overseers were spurred on by temporal 73

Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, p. 273. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624–1713 (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), chap. 2. 75 Orlando Patterson, preface to The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: Associated University Presses, 1969). There is a substantial debate about the randomizing eﬀect of transatlantic migration on Africa’s cultural groups. It revolves around whether there was cultural continuity and, if there was, how much and how did enslaved Africans maintain it. It is beyond the scope of the current work to develop a judgment on the ﬁner ethnographic and demographic research on this. Broadly speaking, I accept 74

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interests in commerce.76 They brought what they were familiar with. Above all, English settlers insisted on their northern European style of life. Their very diet, daily social schedules, clothing, housing and urban architecture resembled English custom.77 Beyond these features of life, however, gentility was extremely thin. But they were also quick to develop a total system of production that was unique to this part of the world in the seventeenth century.78 Unlike forms of cottage industry in Europe, slave-based plantation production involved intense and direct supervision. An owner or overseer was immediately responsible for the management of all facets of production, plantation maintenance and care of the workforce. The extent of supervision reached a point of close surveillance of many aspects of the lives of slaves. Agriculture provided a disciplinary regime (in the manner described by Michel Foucault) that went beyond the labor process. Not surprisingly, its defenders were heavily armed and well organized. The disciplined and instrumentally rationalized organization of slave production was also a cultural form of slave economy. Gang labor routinized the experiences of production. The relations of oppression between master and slave that dictated in the sphere of production spilled over into many aspects of social life, especially towards the end of the seventeenth century when the growth of slave numbers became more conspicuous. Master-slave Patterson’s sociology of the historical experiences of slavery in the Caribbean. The lively and changing debate over disenclavement and recomposition of African societies should be acknowledged. Two seminal contributions are Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) and Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1977). Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 344–50. See also Philip Morgan who argues for a paradigm that appreciates the heterogeneous and porous nature of slave interaction. Noting empirical evidence that many slaves were channeled from their points of origin, he remarks that the record of the fate of many is thin after disembarkation. However, the cultural forms that have survived show extraordinary ethnic creativity and hybridity. See “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass and Company), 1997. For a summation of the issues and an analysis that seeks a middle ground between the so-called maximum diversity hypothesis and the view that there was considerable cultural continuity and sharing, see Thornton, Africa and Africans, chaps. 7–8. 76 O. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 33–34. 77 R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, chap. 8. 78 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 332–35.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 173 relations encompassed manumitted slaves who, although nominally free, were always treated with suspicion. Nonetheless, holding a majority, and living in close proximity to one another, slave communities in the British Caribbean were able to develop community ties that aﬀorded them a modicum of immunity from the tyranny of overseers.79 To the white minority, this was a source of long-term fear of violence or rebellion. Revolts and sporadic violence did occur and fuelled white prejudice. But these were more infrequent and vivid manifestations of slave deﬁance.80 Muted resistance was far more common and took many forms from malingering to marronnage. Acts of resistance added to an accumulated subculture of slave commemoration of such events. They were not the only way to claim some autonomy. Sunday worship, subsistence plots and accompanying markets for their produce and stories, music and dance all contributed to a social space for slaves partly generated by the white elite, partly forged by black communities themselves. This contributed to Creole traditions in the region through cultural osmosis. In the dominant white communities, habits of constant vigilance spread. They complemented the extraordinary attention paid to prices, the course of trade and wider imperial aﬀairs. The state seemed more prominent to the colonial order based in the British Caribbean or French Antilles than it did to mainland communities in North America. And, in the matter of slavery, the British and French apparatus were quite involved. Slaving as an industry that encompassed the capture, transport, purchase and laboring of Africans exempliﬁes the character of mercantilism. To understand how this is the case, mercantilism must be conceived as a series of strategies of colonial pioneering, rather than simply the operation of monopolies. Only then can the involvement of governments be more clearly understood. Mercantilism and slavery came together in the early development of cross-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic trade. States invested heavily in slavery, and not just in a ﬁnancial sense. In the seventeenth century, the British, French and Spanish furnished their empires with the essential infrastructure of the slavery business, founding a mercantile

79 T. H. Breen, “Creative Adaptations: Peoples and Cultures,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 210–12. 80 Thornton, Africa and Africans, chap. 10.

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unity in the Atlantic world. Fortiﬁed African ports protected shipping. Supplies of slaves were guaranteed by chartered companies that matured with state support. Governments also drew up legislative frameworks for the regulation of bonded labor. While they sought to govern slavery in this way, governments also reaped the ﬁscal beneﬁts of slave production. The commodities most directly associated with slave production were the most proﬁtable and were subject to the heaviest taxes and customs duties.81 In this way, slavery enriched the public purse in Britain as it did the private fortunes of the large merchant traders. The British public sphere also incorporated planters from the Caribbean and the east coast. Parliamentary government in England opened up a signiﬁcant space for colonial planters to exercise political inﬂuence over imperial aﬀairs. The public dimension and some private interests were mutually bolstered by the outgrowth of slavery in imperial Britain. Infrastructure, regulation, the acceleration of revenue-raising and involvement in a substantial portion of the trade gave the French and British states especial purpose in the process of accumulation generated by slavery. Europe’s empires were connected with slavery in other respects also. Beyond the structural and economic complex of nascent capitalism, slavery was factored into inter-state relations. States pursued the development of slaving in a larger diplomatic framework. A climate of multilateral negotiation over free access to sea-lanes emerged in the treaties drawn up between the major contending powers after Westphalia.82 Diplomacy was used more often to restrain piracy and other sorts of private violence and settle disputes over land and maritime boundaries. The Westphalian framework of inter-state relations, along with the recession of Spain’s claim to sovereignty over the Atlantic, brought a relative security and conﬁdence to slaving enterprises after early decades of free piracy during the seventeenth century. The involvement of states in slavery should be put in the context of wider patterns of colonial population. One dimension of mercantilism was the concept of ‘plantation’. One of its connotations was ‘people-ing’. The initial foundation of American colonies reﬂects this outlook.83 Emigration was exile for early colonists, most certainly.

81 Christopher L. Brown, “The Politics of Slavery,” in Armtiage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, p. 217. 82 Mancke, “Empire and State,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, pp. 184–86. 83 E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 15–17.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 175 However, it was supported by the mercantilist conception of a trade in people to the outer reaches of a stillborn empire. Thus early English experiments with the transportation of indentured servants indicated an enthusiasm for populating. The subordinated status of these subalterns made traﬃcking easy. But it produced little success. By the late seventeenth century, the preference for slaves as a source of population had gained momentum. For the English state, the height of governmental involvement came just prior to the 1688 Revolution.84 Populating was a matter of great concern to imperial authorities and the main institutional vehicle for slaving was the Royal African Company. Oﬃcial support for the plantation of people in the American colonies underscored French eﬀorts in this period.85 The scale of emigration was less impressive than that of England. Prior to the 1660 Restoration, the French navy and the Company of the Isles of America supported the movement of more than 20,000 French colonists. Like English initiatives, there were few slaves and many servants. However, the character of the French advance diﬀered in important ways. Huguenots were potential exiles and colonizers, but were prohibited from joining the colonies. The dearth of numbers in Canada encouraged routine co-operation with the Indians. Jesuit missions also sat alongside forts on the frontier, which was the perimeter west of the St Lawrence River. Population of the settlements may have been oﬃcial policy, but its eﬀectiveness was slight. In the French Caribbean, settling people on Martinique, Guadaloupe and St Christopher was formative work and proceeded more swiftly. But formative work it was and, like the English colonies, slavery was not so signiﬁcant until the 1680s. Then the demographic transformation would alter tropical perceptions of population, as race became the basis for oppression and resistance. Royal government supervised the establishment of many other aspects of slavery. In Anglo-America, slavery was driven by the independent initiative of planters more than in the French or Hispanic American colonies. Nonetheless, even in the British Caribbean and

84 Imports of slaves into the English colonies grew substantially around the 1680s. Between 1651 and 75, 368,000 slaves were imported into the North Americas and 69,200 into the West Indies. This increased considerably between 1676 and the turn of the century. By then 602,500 slaves transported to the North Americas and 173,800 taken to the West Indies. See Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves, p. 15. 85 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 279–86.

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the Chesapeake colonies, the role of metropolitan authorities was considerable. Indeed, in the formative phase of plantation, it was an essential prop for small producers.86 British authorities were more than a collective superintendent. The state was altogether a beneﬁciary of slavery. Customs duties and the heavy taxes levied on tobacco and sugar contributed signiﬁcantly to the greater fund of public wealth.87 Its ﬁscal capacity to sustain a large military and naval force to police its colonial possessions and its trade routes were greatly enhanced by the revenue that slave-based production brought. In turn, it assigned itself a role in providing the infrastructure of the slave trade. The Royal African Company fashioned the architecture of the English slave trade. Its factories held contacts in Africa; its forts guarded English interests and its ships accounted for much of the trade in the 1670s and 1680s. Furthermore, its charter of monopoly constituted a legal framework in which government in London could attempt to minimize competition from private traders. Financially, it was a vehicle through which capital could be aggregated. Slavery required a high level of capitalization and joint stock incorporation.88 Above all, royal surety was essential for success at this time. The Company represented direct imperial support for the trade that lasted until the mid-eighteenth century, even though its fortunes declined signiﬁcantly after the 1688 Revolution. Its monopoly was enshrined in the charter. The Navigation Acts provided a mercantile framework that favoured its operations. However, there was competition; from the Madagascar trade, from other European traders, from private sales made by the Company’s own captains and from ‘interlopers’.89 The Company was unable to control prices and quantities because of the local domination of colonial institutions. In the Caribbean, colonial legislatures and courts heavily favoured the planters and often acted against the claims of the Company’s agents.90 Furthermore, the English plantocracy was able to constantly place pressure on parliament and the Crown to revise the terms of the charter of monopoly. The Company was therefore not an eﬀective monopolist. Instead, it might be better understood as a vehicle of 86

Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 2, pp. 167–69. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (New York: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 98. 88 R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 231–32. 89 Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves, pp. 14–17. 90 Ibid., pp. 18–20. 87

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 177 state involvement and a guarantor of the ﬂow of slaves from West Africa. Similar eﬀorts by Richelieu and Colbert to establish chartered companies with a French monopoly failed.91 The Crown succeeded in establishing state control of this slave trade through l’exclusif. Sugar cultivation as a dynamic industry emerged within this system of regulation. The tight monopoly was strictly enforced, much to the chagrin of planters in St Domingue, Martinique and Guadaloupe.92 Still, as in Anglo-America, there were other sources available. Dutch and English traders were happy to breach l’exclusif. Furthermore, settler complaints accumulated and exploded into revolt against metropolitan authority on a frequent basis. But the most striking diﬀerences between French and English regulation of slavery lie in two factors. Firstly, the French were unable to secure their trade routes around the West African coast at this time. The lone fort of the Senegal Company could not service a large number of ships. The Company could not come close to matching the Royal African Company’s volume of shipping. Secondly, Louis XIV promulgated the Code Noir in 1685, “the most comprehensive attempt by a European power to regulate the judicial, moral and material conditions of slavery in its colonies.”93 The Code was couched in a language of paternalistic guardianship of all aspects of the slaves’ lives. It was a royal decree that regulated the moral conduct of masters, in contrast to its Barbados equivalent of 1660 which was a Common Law derivative based on local experiences aimed at exerting greater control of its slave force.94 The Code’s speciﬁcations were far-reaching, including the prescription of the terms of religious observance for all colonists. It was a systematic attempt to recreate the moral order of absolutist France in all spheres of routine. Naturally, institutional autonomy accompanied the program of regulation. The legislation of islander counseils was a mark of “unwonted respect” for the amassing colonial order.95 Planter loyalty was vital at this time

91 Between the 1620s and 1670s twelve companies were chartered, re-chartered or reconﬁgured with a new charter, according to Allain, French Colonial Policy, pp. 46–48. 92 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 283–85. 93 Dale Tomich and Carolyn Fick, “French Caribbean,” in Drescher and Engerman, A Historical Guide to World Slavery, p. 134. 94 Meinig, The Shaping of America, p. 171. 95 Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, p. 292.

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as Colbert’s plans for an expanded marine ﬂeet that could match the English were not complete. In all, although French mercantilism was quite comprehensive in its body of regulations, its reach into (and inﬂuence over) the Africa-America trade was limited in the seventeenth century. British and the French intervention seemed less active in the eighteenth century. However, this withdrawal was not straightforward; the forms of mercantilist intervention changed signiﬁcantly, rather than simply receding. The Royal African Company steadily lost ground to private traders in the trade to America’s English colonies. After gaining legal status in 1698, they delivered far more slaves on far more ships than the monopoly ﬁrm.96 Later attempts by the Company to lawfully regain its hegemony failed. As the Company began to fail in the early eighteenth century, slaving was opened up to a greater number of agents.97 Moreover, the concentration of plantation production in the West Indies turned many successful planters into large producers. A stark division between small and large planters had prevailed in Barbados, Jamaica and Bermuda from the Restoration to the turn of the century. Moreover, the application of English law was more forceful in the smaller islands that had not been formally conquered.98 Both factors—internal division and legislative autonomy in Jamaica—strengthened the independent liberties claimed by planters as their heritage. As land ownership became more concentrated and production more dependent on slaves in the early eighteenth century, the large plantocracy pushed its autonomy even more vigorously. A web of patronage and connection gave them considerable, sometimes decisive, political weight in parliamentary government.99 Their contacts in Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow and London were inﬂuential lobbies. Some, who were more fortunate, relocated to London, as they were rich enough to aﬀord a local supervisor to manage their plantations. In London, they became a strong constituency, which could ply its inﬂuence in metropolitan politics.100 96 Jacob M. Price, “Credit in the Slave Plantation Economies,” in Solow, Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, p. 305. 97 Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves, pp. 20–21. 98 Michael Craton, “Property and Propriety: Land Tenure and Slave Property in the Creation of a West Indies Plantocracy 1612–1740,” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (New York: Routledge, 1995). 99 Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Pearson Education, 1989), pp. 90–91. 100 On the inﬂuence of the planters as a common interest, see Christopher Brown, “The Politics of Slavery,” in Armtiage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 179 However, this produced a paradox. It made the British government an unrivalled center of debate about the slave trade and about colonial aﬀairs more generally. This did little to alleviate the plight of slaves, as local planters strengthened the slave code deﬁning chattel property and the conditions of life. For a time, parliamentary law found little application.101 Other avenues of regulation emerged for the English. Credit-based purchase of slaves was becoming more important as the trade expanded.102 A war between colonial and British legislatures began in the 1720s.103 Local laws designed to aid indebted planters were annulled by London, which, in turn, passed laws supporting creditors. Merchants and planters lobbied parliament and then the Board of Trade during the course of several episodes of conﬂict over colonial bills. In 1732 the government settled the issue with the Colonial Debts Act and thereby stamped its authority on the credit system. The British state had withdrawn from direct participation in the trade, but its prerogative in management of the trade remained and was, in some ways, even augmented by its consolidation of the terms of credit. The French state had been so assertive in the development of the Code Noir and l’exclusif. Yet, it did not establish a uniform legal basis for credit.104 Laws varied throughout the French Antilles. Consequently, debtors encountered diﬃculty in identifying bankers who could feel conﬁdent acting as guarantors. Instead, lines of credit were established in the islands themselves, according to local agreements. Often slaving captains remained after a voyage to broker such agreements and to directly sell their cargo. It was in other ways that the French state eased its grip on slavery. As was the case with Britain, it was a matter of changing the form of intervention, not withdrawing from it. The old regime could maintain mercantile guidance through the manipulation of taxes and some control over the movement of trade through French ports. After the Treaty of Utrecht, l’exclusif was loosened slightly due to French failure to gain the asiento. The Guinea and Senegal companies 101 Craton, “Property and Propriety,” in Brewer and Staves, Early Modern Conceptions of Property. 102 Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake 1700 –1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). H. V. Bowen, Elites, pp. 92–98. 103 Price, “Credit in the Slave Plantation Economies,” in Solow, Slavery, pp. 307–10. 104 Ibid., pp. 331–35.

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were disbanded and trade opened to all French mariners. Trading was limited to French vessels, of course, and to French ports only. Nantes, Rouchelle and Bordeaux enjoyed the prosperity that the slave-based sugar industry and the general growth of international commerce brought.105 After 1741 the trade was permitted in all French ports. This brought little beneﬁt to planters. Arguably, the main beneﬁciaries of trades between the Antilles and France were merchant interests in the port cities on France’s Atlantic coast.106 Moreover, increased taxes designed to capture for the state the fruits of expanding and prosperous trades provoked revolts in Guadaloupe and Martinique in 1715.107 Colonial governors quelled the unrest. But, it would emerge again, later. They felt the pressure of a growing colonial order in the Caribbean and were willing to make temporary concessions. But, at the height of the imperial apparatus, there was little immediate compromise. Exception was made for French merchants who during the eighteenth century increasingly enjoyed ‘free trade’—but within a framework of national monopoly. The situation mostly favoured merchants over planters and the balance did not change substantially after the Seven Years War. Rivalry with the British swelled, placing the Caribbean planter in a stronger position.108 Freedom to trade with the enemy during the war itself made the planters accustomed to some choice, which had to continue. Also, the value of the Caribbean possessions grew as a result of the loss of Canada. During the postwar period, further re-growth of the trade soothed antagonistic traders. At that point, the regime in Paris was able to relax l’exclusif. Perhaps the most signiﬁcant role remaining for the state was outright protection of trade routes. Indeed, even when direct state involvement seemed diminished, the potential deployment of a naval presence to defend colonial interests often still remained. The conﬁdence of producers, colonial administrators, merchants and investors in the 105 Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 251–55. 106 Fernand Braudel argues that raw and processed materials could be passed further through European markets by these same merchants. The multiplier eﬀect would augment their proﬁts. Meanwhile, merchants could ship goods back to the islands at far higher prices and thereby proﬁt from the return trade. See The Wheels of Commerce, pp. 275–78. 107 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 295–97. 108 Robert L. Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, WI: University of Winsconsin Press, 1979), pp. 29–34.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 181 diplomatic and naval capacities of their state was a mark of its strength, even where more direct forms of involvement were not in evidence.109 This was not the case in the early years when Spain dominated the Atlantic. Spanish treaties drawn up with the French in 1559 and the British in 1604 had placed America “beyond the line.” Only Spanish claims to territory had any legal status.110 Norms that applied to international conduct in Europe were suspended in the American zone. British and French ‘adventurers’ were free to act as they willed. But they could expect no defence from their governments and the Spanish reserved the right to expel them. The treaties slowly lost their worth after the Anglo-Spanish War, when Spain could no longer enforce them. Naval protection increased in step with the growth in armed conﬂict between the French and the British. Slave-based capitalist growth “required the combined sponsorship of the state and of economic agents, guaranteeing both good security and good commercial conditions.”111 The former rose in prominence as the century wore on. It did not involve merely the provision of naval protection. Legal security of titles (and labor) and of the authority of commercial and political institutions in the colonies rested ultimately on the state acting as guarantor. But enforcement of those things required the mobilization of naval power in the context of ﬁerce economic and political competition. This was costly and none bar slavers and sugar planters could aﬀord to pay for it. Moreover, skirmishes between French and British naval expeditions during the three Anglo-French wars of the seventeenth century did great damage to both planter property and marine forces.112 This doubled the expense of military protection for those involved in slavery. Clearly, only imperial navies had suﬃcient means to provide this. After the Peace of Utrecht, it looked like only the British and the French governments could aﬀord the costs. The Dutch, and ﬁnally the Spanish, found the price too high and they were unable to maintain their share of the slave trade. After the Treaty of Utrecht, the ﬁeld was mainly left to the French and the British. Slavery in these two transatlantic empires was a catalyst of capitalism’s development. It was highly proﬁtable. It provided the fuel 109 Mancke, “Empire and State,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, pp. 182–83. 110 R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 11–12. 111 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 507. 112 R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, pp. 22–23.

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for signiﬁcant consumer markets for Europe.113 Its impact, in terms of quickening capitalist development, was not limited to its acceleration of urban growth.114 It was highly productive and contributed substantially to many domains of capitalist accumulation, if Robin Blackburn’s case is to be believed.115 The Caribbean was perceived as an economic prize; the Brazilian gold mines and the northern continent’s plantations not far behind. For the French, maintaining them meant sustaining a heavy involvement, even if mercantilist regulation was lightened over the course of the early eighteenth century. English merchants had a much freer hand. Yet, during this phase of Anglo-French rivalry, dependence on marine forces was universal. While the French-British contest was global, the American theatre was the most important. But, it was also a test of two national models of capitalist development. In each, the state had a sizeable interest. Each empire had similar shares in slaving and in the transatlantic industries dependent on slaves such as sugar, coﬀee and cotton.116 Where capitalism grew, the visible hand of the state was never far away. Mercantilism and slavery prompted debates about trade, especially at the summit of the British state. Open debates became impassioned after the 1688 Revolution, perhaps because England was in the ascendancy in the world economy. Planters put the case for less restricted trade to the Board of Trade in 1711. Government interest had been augmented by the Board’s formation and the passage of a further Navigation Act in 1696. However, the England Company, the Merchant Adventurers of London and the Muscovy Company had already been divested of their respective monopolies. The impetus for more liberal conditions of trade existed and produced results. What makes this an era in which mercantilism constituted the whole ﬁeld of economic philosophy was the terms of debate. Contention revolved around the institutional and regulatory structuring of trade. Without doubt, the lines of dispute ran from monopolists to free traders.

113 See Carole Shammas, “The Revolutionary Impact of European Demand for Tropical Goods,” in McCusker and Morgan, The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. 114 See, for the British case, Paul E. Clemens “The Rise of Liverpool 1665–1750,” Economic History Review 29, no. 2 (1976). 115 See also an early essay in transatlantic economic history by D. A. Farnie, “The Commercial Empire of the Atlantic 1607–1783,” The Economic History Review 15, no. 2 (1962). 116 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 4–7

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 183 However, mercantilism deﬁned the ﬁeld of disputation as one about the regulation of trade and the nuances of opinion were geared to this question. Institutional support from the state was not in dispute, simply the form that it should take. The ideological ﬁeld was steadily reorganized as the Abolitionist position grew in prominence. Slaving was then fought over as a moral as well as economic problem. But, by this time, Britain’s supremacy in the world economy was clear and its creed of political economy was unhindered free trade. For France there were two reasons for introducing slave labor.117 Firstly, the colony in Louisiana was failing in the early part of the eighteenth century. It was established as an oceanic outlet for Canada and not a colony with a separate raison d’etre.118 It also fronted on to St Domingue with which it had social and cultural links. Yet its place in French America was not secured. It was far removed from any signiﬁcant French military outpost. The Middle Mississippi was Louisiana’s frontier society. Only when it was incorporated as a regal colony did it gain a governing centre. Its population was quite Francophonic in its cultural and even agricultural practices.119 All the while, however, it resorted to shifting alliances with local Indian nations and with other European powers. It had its own internal coalitions of villages and communities that oscillated.120 Up to 1717 its population was not sustainable. The initiative to place the colonies under the tutelage of Say’s Compagnie des Indies led to an experiment in the importation of engages. It was obvious by the early 1720s that indentured labor also had failed. The Code Noir was made law in 1724 with the intention of resolving the demographic hiatus through the introduction of slavery. This distinguished it from France’s other continental colonies. Imperial authorities remained absolutely decisive in all major decisions (including the decision to persist in colonization) prior to and after the Compagnie took control. The presence of all Europeans settled around the Mississippi Delta was an artefact of French aspirations to a continental empire that were embodied in the Louisiana colony. As a regal enterprise, it must have seemed

117

Eccles, France in America, chap. 6. Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 192–202. 119 See Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times, Urbana and Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 120 F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 72–76. 118

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always a failure and the introduction of slavery was designed to bolster its ﬂagging fortunes. The second reason relates to the Caribbean and it was commercial. The development of sugar planting necessitated the use of largescale slave labor. Sugar was expensive, but extraordinarily proﬁtable. The greatest singular threat to this trade was war. During the eighteenth century wars with Spain and Britain, French commerce in the Atlantic sea-lanes suﬀered terribly. Conversely, its prosperity during years of peace was remarkable. The Ministry of Marine and the French navy were essential vehicles of protection; they guaranteed the course of trade in both directions. In addition, the provision of militia and scientiﬁc corps to pursue the development of improved crop varieties registered as other forms of imperial involvement.121 This vital support came at a price for the planters, the continuation of l’exclusif, which delivered conditions that were visibly less favourable than those oﬀered by Dutch or North American merchants.122 It angered planters in Martinique and Guadaloupe. But it helped ﬁnance the monarchy’s ventures. The application of the French mercantilist system was selective and quite deliberate. Exemptions, privileges and bounties beneﬁted merchants from Nantes and Bordeaux who traded both in shares and the goods produced by their labor. This policy was strategic. It was also open to alteration. As Law’s system receded, the metropolis withdrew from its constant assault on colonial interests. This was an admission of planter autonomy and it emboldened the colonial order. Colonial economies were essential for the French state and could not be gambled with. The value of the islands was staggering and put the slaver-based colonial order in a strong position. The sugar trade constituted more than half of France’s overall exports. St Domingue by itself provided the world with two-ﬁfths of the world’s sugar and more than half its coﬀee.123 This was well in excess of production in the British West Indies. While production and trade in the British West Indies was well integrated into the empire’s structure of urban manufacturing and commercialized agriculture,

121 James A. McLellan, Colonialism and Science: St Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1993). 122 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 431. 123 These calculations are made from ﬁgures presented by Frederick Quinn in The French Overseas Empire, p. 83.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 185 the same process in the French Antilles depended on an economy of ostentatious consumption in France’s public sphere which in turn depended on Caribbean production for its continued existence: The splendour of the French Court helped to advertise and promote such luxury products, setting a standard for the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie throughout the continent. At Versailles Louis XIV, without intending it, had built a showcase for the exotic produce of the plantations: chocolate served from gleaming silver pots, snuﬀ taken from elegant little boxes, banqueting tables spread with elaborate sugar confections. The plantations were to add mercantile zest to an Ancien Regime that might otherwise have sunk into lethargy.124

The life of the French court state was directly dependent on maintaining its hold on imperial aﬀairs. When France lost all else in North America, it clung to its Caribbean possessions. The state was heavy-handed in the transatlantic business. But, like its British rival, it was able to bring about a retreat from policies implemented in its slave-based economy, when self-interest dictated. Between empires: capital and the rivalry of states after Westphalia Slavery helped to breed struggle amongst states. Piracy was concentrated on this area early on. It gave way to a general contraband trade in slaves. Although illegal, it was widespread and it generally beneﬁted planters looking for a cheaper source of labor. The slave trade was a signiﬁcant cause of war in the Caribbean. It was a patch in the mosaic of Western Europe’s rivalries. The competition of states aﬄicted the whole Atlantic world. Europe at this time was embroiled in alliance building and armed conﬂict on land and at sea. How states strategically engaged imperial competition depended also on domestic conditions. Relationships with the capitalist classes were vital.125 Mercantile regimes brought the court state and private capital closer together in a partnership of sorts. Yet, it too was fraught with tension. Western European states encountered two strategic dilemmas in their aﬃnities with capital that haunted them until the

124

Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 301. This passage takes Immanuel Wallerstein’s work as a source. See Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983). 125

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nineteenth century. Firstly, they had their own interests generalized over and abstracted from those of particular capitalists. Secondly, they had to adjudicate between diﬀerent and sometimes competing fractions of private capital, which petitioned in favor of either protectionist or free trade policies, or a combination of the two. In the relationship between capital and the state, the latter had its own concerns. Its own military and imperial projects and the sustenance of the body etat gave it a form of universalist social organization all of its own. Mercantilism was a strategic stance that addressed contradictory and complex situations confronting governments. At times, it kindled internal tensions between the state apparatus and conglomerations of capital, especially amongst those capitalist interests that were particularly keen on reducing the costs of production and increasing productivity. At the commanding heights of mercantile institutions, the struggle over markets and geography seldom fell from sight. Hence, its strategies were generally informed by mercantile and international ﬁnancial and military movements, rather than by the especial interests of speciﬁc industries. From here, the struggle between states in economy, diplomacy, war and politics was of paramount importance and shaped the responses of states to intra-state, intraimperial and international events. However, at the same time, the reactions of Western states were also modiﬁed by their relationships with competing aggregates of capital. Interests and perceptions of interests conﬂicted and alternated. Leading merchant interests tended to favor the liberalization of trade, which would give them access to more markets. Against them were arrayed less productive producers who cherished monopolies of trade and labor. The strategies of mercantilism were also informed by this conﬂict between merchant classes to the extent that the beneﬁts of national and, more importantly, imperial monopolies had to be balanced against the particular concerns of leading, active economic potentates. The resolution of this second dilemma was not set hard and fast at any particular point, but was variable and open to re-negotiation, depending on changing circumstances or a reﬁguration of the interests of private capital, or both. The eﬀectiveness of regulatory instruments was also jeopardized by circumstances in the Americas. The propensity of colonial oﬃcials to circumvent imperial ordinances and the ability of competing states to break them were signiﬁcant inﬂuences. Thus, the imperial state

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 187 was caught in a double bind: it had to ensure mercantile economic cohesion, maintain the growth of internal markets, seal the increase in wages (especially during periods of recession of trade) and compete with major rivals. In order to do this, it had to, on one hand, weigh broad imperial and colonial needs against speciﬁc private inﬂuences and, on the other, balance conﬂicting private interests themselves. How diﬀerent states responded to these sometimes-contradictory impulses framed their strategies within the international system of states. The economic infrastructure of empires therefore developed in a context of rivalry between the main powers inﬂuenced internally by relations with capital. The competition of states in the early modern period over trade, colonial expansion and supply had economic and military dimensions that are diﬃcult to separate. While the Dutch and Spanish ﬁgured in the core activities of sixteenth century trade, the prime economic and military contest in Europe after that was between Britain and France. Considerations of international and intra-imperial trade inﬂuenced the mercantile regimes that each state respectively adopted. Furthermore, military concerns abetted the aims and designs of mercantile policies, at least in the inter-imperial arena. Through fashioning and renovating mercantile institutions and through imperial expansion, France and Britain located themselves in positions of strategic confrontation in trade, military contests and conquest of land. This was the time when the stakes of economic and strategic preeminence were raised in the Atlantic world. England’s competitive resources developed earlier. A number of internal peculiarities placed England in a fortuitous strategic position. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, certain features of English economic life were well developed. Transport systems had been transformed. ‘Exotic’ luxury goods held widespread appeal. Mass economic demand underwrote the market economy. English banking aggregated capital in ways that Dutch ﬁnancial institutions never did in the previous century. The universal spread of commodities throughout the British Isles had brought a more consummate uniformity to the English national economy. The compact and dense character of British economic life permitted the constitutional state to play a greater role in regulating trade between England and its early colonial possessions, and within the world economy as a whole. Domestically, a relatively high state integration of economic life supported a strategy of developing capitalist institutions.

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This situation was slower to emerge in eighteenth century France for three reasons. The lethargic pace of the development of capitalism and land enclosure can be attributed to the relative lack of structural integration of the provincial and municipal order, elements of France’s geographic tyranny and the higher level of resistance amongst French rural communities for whom the land of the laboureur was crucial. It was through Colbertism that the French monarchy had hoped to compete. Colbertism as a type of mercantilism was characterized by its ability to reorganize the French state around the imperatives of war. Colbert’s internal restructuring of its ﬁscal machinery had furnished the state as a whole with far greater resources. However, it did more than this. The reconstruction of the apparatus also transformed the techniques that it employed to raise funds. Reform involved a redistribution of income and resources from the tax-farming oﬃces of the fermiers and the traitants—a signiﬁcant section of the ﬁscal machine which sat in a provincial relationship to the monarchy—to more productive enterprises that fulﬁlled mercantile objectives, even if only indirectly. Industrial, agricultural and trade enterprises beneﬁted enormously from monarchical patronage during Louis XIV’s reign. In return, they provided a base for the French monarchy’s military ventures. Royal industries in France helped the state generate its own sources of revenue and capital whilst expanding and deﬁning the structures of mercantile economy. In the late 1680s, an additional program of reform was instituted in response to the growing threat of war and religious strife that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.126 The monarchy’s ambitions and projects were only possible due to the reservoir of resources. France’s mercantile achievements were limited in one further respect during this era: they did not complete the uniﬁcation of France’s economic interior. Diﬀerent regulations, or at least diﬀerent eﬀects of existing legislation on diverse regions, lessened the impulses towards a national economy. However, by the mid-eighteenth century an appreciation of France’s economy as a national market did exist: It seems to be at this point, in the 1760s, the French elites—the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the agronomists, the industrialists, and the politicians—began to express the feeling that they were somehow ‘behind’ Great Britain and began to thrash about for ways to ‘catch up’. 126 John C. Rule, “Royal Revisions of the French Central Government in the 1690s,” in Adcock et al., Revolution.

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 189 In light of our current knowledge, such an impression was probably exaggerated, but that does not eﬀace its impact on the social and political behaviour of the time.127

With the support of private capital, the ruling classes of the West’s imperial states were able to carve out territorial cores bound by institutional restrictions and regulations of production, trade and exchange. In these historical circumstances, the competition between states became increasingly more intensive in the theatres of war and the markets of trade. Mercantilism acted as a philosophy in this interimperial sphere. In this game, there were certain accepted wisdoms about how to gain ascendancy over a rival. To be a leading power, the productivity and availability of economic resources had to be such that few other competing powers could match it. The next imperative for the foremost power—mainly Britain from the early eighteenth century—was the relative freedom of markets for the movement of resources, goods and services. This could be ensured through counter-balancing internal barriers to commerce and labor with programs of liberalization in imperial trade. Hence, mercantilist uniformity within borders became the mandatory, even if diﬃcult, program of the major states. Externally, these strategies were adopted to tackle market movements, growth and contraction. For the French court state, gaining uniformity remained the central economic labor. British mercantilism was also driven on by the intensiﬁed interconnectedness of European states. Its advantage lay in its own internal order. By the late seventeenth century, when Colbert was beginning to grapple with the problem of coherence in regulations, England was starting to look like a major economic entity composed of the nexus of London ﬁnanciers and merchants, rural industrialists and agriculturalists and a solid, but slender, apparatus. By establishing mercantile conditions of production and exchange, the British were securing the general relationship between London and the rest of the world and delineating its central location within the Empire. It was orienting the mercantile alliance of capital and the state to the overall processes of creating capitalism in a country with expanding colonial concerns. Hence, it converted its mercantile policies to new areas: joint stock companies, credit provisions, a system of insurance, protection of agriculture and cultivation of its stock markets. All of

127

Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, p. 73.

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these were institutions of imperial economic expansion fashioned by the British state that brought it directly into a certain mutually beneﬁcial partnership with private capital. This relationship was never fully achieved in France. For the English it meant that the costs and general responsibility for colonial possessions did not lie with the state alone. London’s ﬁnancial interests shared that responsibility. Unhindered by the imperatives of infrastructural uniﬁcation the British could devote their energies to pursuing their inter-continental trading interests. Its outward perspective and its management of mercantilism distinguished Britain from France, where mercantilism had subsequently consolidated the court state’s authority, but could not go immediately further. Oﬃcials drew up imperial directives mindful of this rivalry. Not only did they have to respond to the manoeuvres of other powers; they had to balance the perspectives of their own wealthy and powerful elites. Not only did they have to consider the weighty inﬂuence of military commanders, leading industrialists and parliamentary and judicial factions; they had to incorporate the views of colonial authorities, especially leading slavers. There is little doubt that the highest representatives of the empire in the colonies, especially at the gubernatorial level, had a transatlantic orientation that rose above local concerns. However, for British oﬃcials stationed in America, the communities of colonists were potent constituencies, just as they were for oﬃcials back in London. Not all the interests of these sometimesintricate societies were represented in the institutionalized colonial order. Where the elites of colonial institutions objected to the empires’ cadre or simply deﬁed them, or even where they merely passed gubernatorial or viceregal ordinances, they distinguished themselves as leaders of structures that were separate from the metropolitan apparatus. They were caught between the ministers responsible for the colonies and their inhabitants. Conclusion Capitalism as a dimension of Atlantic modernity is treated in this long chapter. Three arguments speciﬁed in the opening chapter are elucidated in detail. First of all, there is a contribution to debates in the social sciences about where to place capitalism in world history. A fuller understanding of its development obliges a longer view of

transatlantic empires in the formation of capitalism 191 history, a conclusion reached some time ago by macrosociologists. But the move to extend its chronology is insuﬃcient. The analysis of the spatial scope of its formation also must be ampliﬁed. It never originated as an entirely European world system. It was instead an Atlantic one, before it went global. This thesis is stated in the introduction and is implicit at every stage of this chapter. The evidence to support this thesis lies in several developments that are summarized in the pages above: the extraordinary growth of Atlantic trade and capital, the close strategic attention paid by imperial administrators to the colonies during key periods, the intensity and reach of networks and linkages created in transatlantic economic activity and the invention of colonial slavery, a vast form of highly productive labor connected directly with the Americas. Next, the notion of mercantilism is revived to help re-think the historical relationship of Western European states to the institution of capitalist social relations. Mercantilism is taken to refer to domestic and imperial infrastructures that promoted economic expansion. Governments and the permanent apparatus of states constituted themselves as co-founders of capitalism by guaranteeing the essential components of intercontinental economic expansion: the provision of legal, military and ﬁnancial security of trade; the establishment of pioneering enterprises; the centralization of banking and ﬁnance; the regulation of waged, indentured and coerced modes of labor and programs of standardized laws and regulations that governed trade. The infrastructure provided and watched over by imperial states had a unifying eﬀect on the Atlantic. It connected northern and central to western Africa, and then to South and North American ports and the Caribbean, and ﬁnally to Atlantic cities in north-western Europe. This unifying tendency was always qualiﬁed by the tension of imperial state formation. The struggle for autonomy was simultaneously an economic as well as strategic and political one for the colonial order in Anglo-America, the Spanish Indies and the French Empire. Many mercantilist strategies drafted by royal and governmental administrators had to respond to colonial demands, as well as to private capitalist interests and the imperatives of inter-imperial rivalry. Finally, a minor problematic in this chapter is the cultural side of early Atlantic capitalism. It fostered calculative rationality in economic action—rationality in the sense intended by Weber. Exact accounting practices, more sophisticated long-range credit and insurance arrangements, precise estimation of inputs and outputs of production,

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close and disciplining supervision of labor and an imperative to predict sometimes far-oﬀ future economic movements are the components of this calculative culture. Slavery had a special place in this consolidation of the premises of rationalized economy action. The merchant-bourgeois orientation that emerged in the slaving economy resembled supposed market behaviour celebrated in neo-liberal economics and rational choice theory. It is more soberly viewed as a cultural type that coexists with other conceptions of economic agency. Culture, therefore, is relative to place and circumstance. The rationalities evident in slave-related industries were embedded in modes of living that varied from one colonial region to another. The villa ethos found in the Carolinas’ plantations did not exist in the severe and authoritarian culture of the colonial order in the French and British Caribbean. A climate of racial fear plagued the settler-planter colonial order there. Slave-owners reacted with regular repression. Despite this, a space existed for hybrid and Creolized sub-cultures that arose from slave and freed Africans communities. This had a cultural impact on capitalist development as surely as the expressions of rational conduct by merchants, producers and ﬁnanciers did. In this sense, cultures contextualized the development of capitalism as well as being forms of engagement with it. All this goes to suggest that colonial societies turned out full-bodied communities. Their engagement with the early international capitalist economy was a sphere of life strongly interrelated with their integration into Empire. In this way, colonial communities were more intricate than they might appear to be. Indeed, the colonial order was caught up in a knot of competing interests, crammed between European authorities (and the civilization they represented) and the character of their American domains. The next chapter delves into this complexity in the French, British and Spanish empires and returns the line of argument in this book to the problematic of imperial state formation.

CHAPTER SEVEN

COMMUNITIES OF THE COLONIAL ORDER The American possessions extended the administrative and economic resources of the masters of the British, French and Spanish empires. Distance between the chief European authorities and the lands that lay under their auspices undermined the capacity of their local representatives to eﬀectively implement imperial law. The problem of government from afar was created for the imperial bodies responsible for trade, intendancy and regal representation. Furthermore, consolidation of distinct loci of command that addressed problems that appeared in dissimilar social and ecological environments furthered the strain on government. Legislative and executive initiatives were often ineﬀective. However, distance also drove colonists into a relationship of relative dependence on existing structures. This made it possible for imperial authorities to enact laws, ordinances and decrees of royal government. The result was tension-laden government whose sovereign rule was limited by a permanent gap between the de jure authority and de facto power. At the same time, it provided opportunities for colonists to variously seek to create or capture institutional autonomies at the lower and local end of the structures of empires. This tension marked each of the Atlantic empires and was present from their inception through to their overthrow. Institutions A comparative notion of the colonial order can convey how this tension set conditions for colonists in Hispanic French and British America. The colonial order can be deﬁned negatively and positively. In negative and residual terms it can be conceptualized as local or conﬁned communities that are subject to distant government by bodies headquartered in Europe. Positively, it can be discerned in the capacity of communities to actively forge their own institutions, outlooks and connections with each other. The manner in which this occurred varied widely. It diﬀered considerably from French Canada to the British North Americas and between the

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Caribbean and the southern viceroyalties. However, the relationships of diﬀerent colonial communities to imperial apparatus were suﬃciently similar to warrant comparison. In this section, the chief similarity that I focus on is the structures of colonial power. The general character of the colonial order can now be spelt out and the distinctiveness of its existence re-iterated. In the North American colonies and the Indies, the colonial order formed in circumstances quite unlike those of Europe. It fashioned its own institutions outside of the sphere of mercantilism and gubernatorial superintendence. The colonial societies it was embedded in variously diverged from the dominant national characteristics of Spain, England and France, either as an initial rejection of the home culture or in an attempt to preserve the culture as it was remembered. Puritan New England is an instance of the ﬁrst trend, while Peru exempliﬁes the second. Whether marked by degrees of cultural rejection or preservation, the colonial order in its diﬀerent guises tended towards the formation of its own identities. This brought communities up against the structures and ethos of empire. This contestatory stance was closed oﬀ for the provincial and municipal order back in Europe, due to its regional and corporatist character. In contrast, the colonial order could develop through generating new institutions which were less easily subsumed by the monarchical apparatus or submerged within the latter’s own institutions. Thus colonial communities were able to confront the imperial state in ways the provincial and municipal order of European absolutism was not. In the Indies, the colonial order was formed in the most tensionridden location of the Spanish empire. It spread Hispanic civilization in the Americas, even as it was quite ambivalent in its relationship to Spain. Its ambivalence appeared at the inception of the colonies and lasted through to independence. In adapting to the American world, settlers developed a Creole association with the land and with a style of life. They fashioned a localized outlook and a sense of their own history that echoed through the administrative colonial order.1 There were three institutional areas in which contestatory colonial orders formed in the Spanish Empire and gave political expression

1 On sixteenth century Creole consciousness, see Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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to this ambivalence: the encomienda, Spanish-America’s cities and local administrative institutions that were the sources of conﬂict between viceregal representatives and colonists. The colonial order was initially constituted by the early development of the encomienda system of labor and production which was intended to limit the independence of Spain’s conqueror-warriors: Left to themselves, (the conquistadores) would have probably settled in loose communities, employing the feudal terms which already were anachronisms in Spain, exploiting the Indians as the needs of the moment dictated, and according verbal homage but little else to the Crown. The rulers of Spain never for a moment thought of allowing such a state of aﬀairs to persist. In the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Crown, with considerable bloodshed and expense, had cut the claws of the great feudal houses, of the knightly orders and of the privileged local corporations. A growing royal absolutism could not tolerate the emergence of a new feudal aristocracy overseas.2

The re-dispersal of authority through grants of labor (encomienda) made by the conquerors to their followers entrenched colonial autonomy. The encomienda was a post-feudal arrangement of power and labor that echoed Spain’s medieval past.3 Hispanic legal tradition of the day ordered territorial jurisdiction by the fact of occupation.4 Where communities established a pattern of occupation, they could exercise authority. In the Colonial Americas, this meant that settled areas were not fully recognized as the jurisdiction of local bodies by dint

2

Parry, The Age of Reconnaisance, pp. 222–23. On the encomienda see Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, pp. 22–24; James Lockhart, Spanish Peru 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968; McAlister, Spain and Portugal, chap. 8; Seed, American Pentimetnto, chap. 4. On its social origins in the Americas and the ongoing conﬂict with the Crown, see Claudio Esteva Fabregat, La Corona Espanola y el Indio Americano (Valencia: Association Francisco Lopez de Gomara, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 231–32, and vol. 2, pp. 10–25. Fabregat casts this as an extractive, but strictly post-feudal relational form: “Territorial property, the encomienda, and on it the Indian settlements, were shaping the seigniorial ideal and he (the encomiendero—JS) was converted into a privileged vassal of the King. Although less than the coalescence of a feudal ideal, and although its productive organization was based on the personal service of the Indians, the encomienda could not escape the ﬂuctuations of a society that was moving in the direction of gold, of precious metals, of pearls and of money and material gain and that, therefore, with its demands and its material attractions continuously extracts from the Indians their obligations to the encomienderos” (p. 232). 4 See Tamar Herzog, “The Meaning of Territory: Colonial Standards and Modern Questions in Ecuador,” in Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities. 3

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of those bodies presence. Sovereignty by legal right did not exist in law. Consequently, the grant of labor associated the Indians with a community that was headed by the patriarchal ﬁgure of the encomiendero. This implied authority, but also left the issue ambiguous as other bodies such as audiencias and cabildos could also claim jurisdiction. Thus, this reﬂection of feudalism brought the encomiendero little satisfaction. The encomienda entailed a grant of indigenous laborers to the conquering class who were entrusted with their general welfare. Later, the right to tribute was added.5 It also charged the church with a responsibility for their spiritual and material wellbeing of the Indians. However, the Church had no direct economic interest in their exploitation and could focus on their spiritual conversion. Thus, one set of identiﬁable interests was established for secular settlers and another for the missions. In the early sixteenth century, the protestations of theologians about the mistreatment of indigenous communities brought action from the court in Madrid. The encomienda drew a sharp reaction from Dominican missionaries in particular, prompting the Crown to enact the Laws of Burgos in 1512. They failed to halt the assignment of ‘trusteeships’ in New Spain, New Granada and Peru. The Crown renewed its eﬀorts to ban the institution with the 1542 New Laws. This too failed to meet its intentions and resulted only in the codiﬁcation of social relationships that already existed in order to bring regulation to the use of indigenous labor. Over time, the Indians would acquire the status of vassals of the Crown. Even though a revolt in Peru against the New Laws failed, they remained ineﬀective vis-à-vis their stated intention. For the rulers of the empire, there was a grave dilemma.6 Subjugation of the interior required the support of encomienderos on the frontier. Yet, the encomiendero domination of the aboriginal inhabitants countered the Catholic doctrine of benevolence and the proselytizing inclinations of the clergy, though all of them shared in the same Catholic faith. But their ideological understanding of the rights and

5 Robert Himmerich y Valencia argues that this was its main purpose in New Spain, The Encomienderos of New Spain 1521–1555 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). 6 In the discussion of the encomienda that follows, a debt must be acknowledged to the treatment of these problems in three works. Claudio Veliz’s argument about the legislative contradiction in the constitution and development of the Spanish Indies and about its decline can be found in The Centralist Tradition, pp. 51–69. Shorter, but valuable, contributions are Parry, The Establishment of the European Hegemony, pp. 57–64; and Kiernan, State and Society in Europe 1550–1650, pp. 45–46.

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duties of the Hispanic social order was at variance with clerical opinion. Their representations to the Crown indicate a belief that Indian tribute was their natural right. The laws did not succeed as intended at this time. An institutional compromise of sorts emerged between an imperial apparatus trying to contain a new colonial elite within the bounds of its objective of expansion and an unrestrained conqueror elite. Spain’s court state tolerated forced labor in a limited form because it satisﬁed the conquerors and opened up the interior of Mexico and the Andes. The legal traits reﬂected the tension of imperial state formation. Jurism was a central principle of Spain’s philosophy of empire and so the dispute over the encomienda was bound to ﬁnd legal expression. The Crown could endure it to a certain point only, and then attempted to abolish it. Part of its motivation was to curtail colonist tendencies to relative independence. But more was involved. The encomienda presented the legal apparatus with a paradox. Indians were declared a free people in law. Nevertheless, they were assigned in a kind of bondage to encomiendero functionaries who had no jurisdictional authority over them, but who represented the empire that did. Furthermore, in law, the encomienderos were subjects without seigneurial authority, but with responsibility for the tasks of education, ‘employment’ and protection of indentured Indians. They were thereby furnished with the autonomy to improvise, which they had to and which they did. The encomienda generated a tension between the legal constitution of the empire and the pressing reality of frontier social formation.7 It was a means through which Indian liberty could be recognized de jure, whilst centralized control over the grant of encomienda could be pursued. Hostilities between the encomienderos and their opponents were the target of imperial legislation. The former interpreted the laws as a guarantee of the continuity of labor. For the latter, they seemed to promise regulation. By the early seventeenth century, a voluminous body of legislation had been compiled and catalogued by Spanish jurists. It was published in 1681 as the Recopilacion de leyes de los reinos de las indias. In the compilation appeared

7 The application of the encomienda itself varied signiﬁcantly in diﬀerent social and ecological conditions. For a long-standing study of the distinctive case of Paraguay, see Elman R. Service, “The Encomienda in Paraguay,” in David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1994).

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a new law ﬁnalising the relationship with South America’s indigenes by prohibiting all war against them.8 Culturally, the conquerors developed independently of Spanish jurism. The frontier mind, cultivated by the experiences of conquest and colonization, turned itself to issues of property and seigniorage. There was a cultural dimension to the conquistador class that was projected through the outlook of the Creole colonial order.9 Creole life survived the demise of the encomienda system. It lived oﬀ myths of an American antiquity that developed in the wake of the defeat of Mesoamerican cultures. One of the crucial elements of the constitution of the Spanish Empire was the suppression of indigenous cultures. In this, the church, which had variously contested the encomienderos’ treatment of Indian labor, played a crucial part. A bi-product was the generation of a Creole Catholicism. The church furnished the rationale for the suppression of indigenous oral traditions (and thereby ethnic memory), the criminalization of their script and the abolition of their calendars. Its mission was to monopolize the sacred, or at least to try to. As a result, heritage and memory of the Indian past was eroded, while in the conquered present indigenous cultures were transformed by enactment of these measures. They were not exterminated, nor were they suppressed in an even pattern. They proved resilient.10 Their survival was quite unmistakable in the Andean region. In post-Mesoamerican New Spain cultural exchange occurred between peninsular and Creole power and abiding conquered Indian cultures.11 The latter survived there by absorbing features of the former thereby redeﬁning itself. To be sure, this form of acculturation was two-fold. It was based on an interaction of two changing cultural worlds, although this was far from symmetrical. Indeed, the loss of the Aztec Empire had been catastrophic for Indian society in the sixteenth century. The conquerors eﬀectively froze the symbols of the Mesoamerican world in the distant past. Set at a distance, Aztec icons and rituals

8 Zavala, New Viewpoints, p. 46. On the history of the Recopilacion, see McAlister, Spain and Portugal, pp. 435–38. 9 See Jose G. Merquior, “El Otro Occidente: Un Poco de Filosoﬁa de la Historia desde Latinoamerica,” Cuadernos Americanos 13 (1989). 10 Stuart B. Schwartz, Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views on the Conquest of Mexico (Boston MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). 11 See Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico; and Antonio Annino, “The Long Seventeenth Century in Latin America,” Itinerario 21, no. 2 (1997).

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integrated easily into the nativized culture of Mexican-Americans.12 Creole mythologization of Christianity blended Indian folklore with a Mexican version of Catholicism that had to coexist with indigenous practices. The creation of a redemptive culture yielded a provincial religion that grafted myths about the pre-Conquest state onto ancient Latin ceremonies. The sacred fatherland proved to be a powerful component of the created Catholicism, which would ensure its long-term growth. It lent Creole communities a dimension of identity that was self-edifying; namely, a cultural horizon that could clearly separate them from both the native and Peninsular communities. Genealogy fulﬁlled this need. After the early waves of Conquest, the encomienderos and their heirs sought legitimacy in their ancestral heritage.13 Long tenure on the land gave them a blood tie that they believed others could not emulate. Their inheritance ought to include title and nobility. Once disappointed by the Crown, they eﬀectively invented a Creole pedigree. It was based on their self-declaration of service to the new territories that they lorded over and on an appropriation of the heroic myth of the Aztec and Incan pasts. Amerindian warrior cultures were readily spliced with the conquistador imagining of Creole ancestry. In both the realms of religious and political meaning, Creoles would adorn the symbols of Inca and the Texcocans whom their true ancestors had vanquished. By pressing this version of the past into the service of the present, they could ﬁll their horizon with the elements of an ancient heritage of virtue and a New World historicity that displaced their Spanish background.14 The encomienda was the institution that had given the Spanish a basis to monopolize the land and South America’s riches. Creole myth was based on this collective act of conquest, although it did not directly acknowledge this act. It was based on the premise that the

12 J. C. Phelan, “Neo-Aztecism in the Eighteenth Century and the Genesis of Mexican Nationalism,” in Stanley Diamond, ed., Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin (New York: Octagon Books, 1981); Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico, chap. 4. 13 Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 77–83. 14 David Brading, “Patriotism and the Nation in Colonial Spanish America,” in Roniger and Sznajder, Constructing Collective Identities; Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, pp. 128–30.

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new nobility were no longer conquerors, but servants of the patria. Through this cultural dimension, the colonial order could coalesce, even with the decline of a structural underpinning such as the encomienda system. Colonial life acquired a universalism that arose especially in New Spain. Thus the colonial order had a history of itself and a religious, philosophical and political basis for a separate identity. Much later, in the nineteenth century, republican government would feed oﬀ it and oﬀ Creole traditions of redemption. Jose Merquior sheds light on the geometry of the post-imperial Mexican imaginary: (T)he ideological phenomenon of ‘mestizo patriotism’ had a broad continental diameter . . . a catholic republicanism formed and developed, which lent a radical face to traditional political culture, gaining at times the authority of a truly Christian Jacobinism.15

The forms of labor relation that accompanied the coalescence of the Creole position still echoed the ongoing tension between Crown and colonists. The encomienda was in decline anyway due to the depopulation of indigenous peoples that its regime of toil brought about. Where the Crown had failed to abolish it, depopulation succeeded. Its legal existence was expunged over time, except in Chile where it survived until 1789. Then it was replaced by labor systems that had coexisted with the encomienda and shared a legal link.16 These were the repartimiento and hacienda and represented ongoing attempts to systematically subsume Indian labor. The repartimiento was based on a quota system of community labor. Viceregal eﬀorts to rid the colonies of it ran up against local resistance. Waged labor under the hacienda appropriation of lands proved more eﬃcient and did not have the same deleterious eﬀects as the other two systems. It proceeded without Crown opposition. While the colonial order did not command the institutional powers that the encomienderos had considered their right, they did acquire the basis for personal enrichment. Oﬃcials of the Crown confronted an elite enriched by its agricultural and mining enterprises. With this capital, privileged Creoles

15

Merquior, “El Otro Occidente,” p. 17, my translation and emphasis. James Lockhart, “Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies,” and Robert S. Keith, “Encomienda, Hacienda and Corregimiento in Spanish-America: A Structural Analysis,” in Joyce Lorimer, ed., Settlement Patterns in Early Modern Colonization, 16th–18th centuries (Aldershot: Variorum, 1998). 16

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could procure inﬂuence and position in the lower end of the colonial structures. The speciﬁcity of the Spanish ﬁguration is evident also in the second institutional area listed above. American cities were initially founded to house indigenous labor. They were a means of conquest and were established wherever the Spanish presence went. In the continental hinterland they imposed structured symbols of the Spanish advance.17 When it came to the legal ‘no-man’s land’, they were a de facto authority. They were the visible, material signs of Hispanic presence and of the permanence of European civilization. Creoles had labored in culture for a separate self-image. In architecture, however, they were loyal Spaniards and declared Europeans. Settlers built with familiar Castilian designs in mind and so cities resembled the layout and the replicated jurisdictional reach of their Iberian equivalents. From 1573, urban planning accorded with fresh and speciﬁc imperial directives.18 Either way the results were similar. Cities had vital set features: a main square, jail, church, courts, arcades and a municipal hall. The founding of a bishopric gave the city some importance. Arches and arcades accentuated Hispanic style in contrast to pre-Colombian shapes and outlines. Such baroque design mirrored the relationship between the European court state (with its representatives stationed in the colonies) and the settler-based colonial order. The preconceived design of the city expressed the political and ecclesiastic might of the crown, and could set the peninsular and Creole communities apart from the Indians and, in some ways, apart from each other: The conquerors were advised that the shape and size of houses must be such that would be regarded with awe and admiration by the Indians and would convince them that the Spaniards intended to remain forever in these places and would move them ‘to fear and respect [them], to seek their friendship and avoid giving them oﬀence.’19

Cities came to be much more, however. They were administrative centres with territorial responsibilities that became politicized. It was

17

Carla Rahn Phillips, “The Iberian Atlantic,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 91–92 I am closely following Marianne Picon-Salas’ argument in chap. 4 of A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, trans. Irving A. Leonard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). See also Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas, pp. 46–47. 19 Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, p. 231. 18

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not only large cities, such as Mexico City and Lima, which constituted themselves as centres. Others were nodes of trade and production.20 With the decline of the encomienda, Hispano-American cities increasingly became a political battleground for peninsular, indio and Creole communities. These functioned as housing for the administrative autonomy of the settler communities, even though they were preordained the incarnation of Spanish power. Through the mechanisms of urban government, settler interests could gain a foothold in the ediﬁce of sanctioned imperial authority in institutions beyond the immediate control of the court state. The audiencias (viceregal courts), the ﬁgures of the corregidor (district mayor) and the alcalde mayor (town magistrate) and the cabildo (urban/municipal administration) made up the legal and administrative infrastructure of cities. The colonial order coalesced in these oﬃcial nodes of administrative power. Positions below these proliferated with the spread of the sale of oﬃces. Control of municipalities was of considerable consequence as their geographic jurisdiction was extraordinarily large. The stakes were often quite high. Spanish-American cities were geographically larger than their continental counterparts. As well as institutional make-up they epitomized Castilian ideals of life. Ceremonial occasions were perennial in many cities but their signiﬁcance for participants varied according to the degree of friction within the viceregal territory. On one hand, they regularly reminded witnesses of their Hispanic origins and allegiance. However, in circumstances of disaﬀection from the monarch’s representatives their purpose altered. They remained indispensable acts of loyalty, but they also signalled that the colonists considered resistance to laws and decrees compatible with ﬁdelity to Spain. Ceremonies performed in full panoply publicly communicated the Hispanic-ness of Creole Americans. The splendour set against early baroque architecture also conjured up the ambiance of a near-Castilian style of life. In this way, they were often complex and multifaceted occurrences. City structures duplicated some aspects of the social constitution and corporatism of their Spanish equivalents. Royal oﬃcials intended the charter of cities to be an especial foundational act that would

20 Ida Altman, “Reconsidering the Center: Puebla and Mexico City 1550–1660,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires.

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lead to a Hispanic civilizing of the American terrain.21 In the original consent granted to found cities there was a marked investment of autonomy. This was realized in proto-democratic forms with the election of municipal representatives. While the Crown always recognized the political role of the cabildos—and had to as they were the vanguard of its civilizing mission—it labored to reclaim administrative duties for higher functionaries. Mexico City, Puebla and Lima all held the valued responsibility for the execution of justice for a time, although only Lima could retain it permanently.22 The decline of municipal control over time did not diminish the belief amongst city-dwellers that they held a separate set of interests. Up until the late eighteenth century, the reception of viceregal ﬁgures was always accompanied by their pledge to honour the liberties enshrined in the original consent. Pageants and public displays therefore aﬃrmed the reciprocity of relations between non-indigenous Americans and peninsulares. There was general recognition of monarchical sovereignty. But the place of the council in the structure of state was also symbolically ratiﬁed. The cabildos system of elected council government operated throughout the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries. At the height of cabildo authority in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the cities were crucibles of political conﬂict. Indeed, the institutional autonomies of the colonial order appear to be concentrated in the urban structures. As the most assertive cabildos subsided and imperial authority gained ground, the lively intrigue of Spanish-American cities faded, with the exception of crucial mining centres.23 Afterwards, it was supplanted by viceregal patronage. The expansion of the towns and the peninsular assertion of monarchical authority led to the sale of positions in local government, which then became hereditary during the seventeenth century.24 Eventually, all oﬃces were sold or 21 G. Baudot, La Coruna y la fundacion de los reinos americanus (Valencia: Association Francisco Lopez de Gomara, 1992); and J. G. Doering and G. L. Villena, Lima (Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992). 22 McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, pp. 224–25. 23 See Oscar Cornblit, Power and Violence in the Colonial City: Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru 1740–1782, trans. Elizabeth Ladd Glick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 24 For an example of the changing composition of cabildo government, see Peter Marzahl, “Creoles and Government: The Cabildo of Popayan,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974). In Mexico, the sale of oﬃces seems to have favoured

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ﬁlled by appointment. They still remained in the domain of the colonial order. Also their holders identiﬁed with the numerous local interests: landed aristocrats, merchants, small traders and landholders and some professional groups. Calls for enfranchisement at the level of regional government were responses to the muted war of attrition between court state and the colonial order. The municipalities remained the major repositories of settler politics and constituted a position of relative independence from the state’s representatives. Thus, the encomienda system and urban development in the Americas were both arenas of contending interests in which colonial autonomies appeared suppressed, albeit incompletely. This leads us to a third area of institutional tension: the contest for positions in the institutions of administrative order. The relationship of the peninsular court state and a largely Creole colonial order was one of antagonism, even though Creoles shared a common cultural background and were not excluded from positions of administrative power to the extent assumed by nineteenth century nationalist historians. Within Latin American historiography, this has been a matter of contention between liberal and revisionist interpretations of nineteenth century independence.25 Speciﬁcally, the debate revolves around the ratio of Creoles/peninsulars in the imperial apparatus. There is little dispute over the fact that peninsulares dominated the high administration of the empire, while Creoles were found in greater numbers in colonial posts. There is less agreement over overall levels of enfranchisement and the mechanisms through Creole advancement according to Brading. Although peninsulars maintained their domination of judicial institutions such as the oidores and the alcaldias mayores, the infusion of Creole judges represented a marked shift in the composition of legal personnel. See David A. Brading, “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire’, in Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vols. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 401–402, 409–11. Peru was also a case of enhanced autonomies accompanying the advancement of Creole administrators. See Kenneth J. Andrien, “The Sale of Fiscal Oﬃces and the Decline of Royal Authority in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1633–1700,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 1 (1982). 25 The publications that perhaps best exemplify the opposing poles of the debate about exclusion are Sergio R. Villalobos, Tradicion y Reforma en 1810 (Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, 1961); and Jaime Eyzaguirre, Ideario y Ruta de la Emancipacion Chilena (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1971). Villalobos argues that Creoles were systematically excluded and the subsequent collective grievance powered the revolutions. In contrast, Eyzaguirre presents the case that they grew in number at most levels of administration. Following Habsburg tradition, they presumed that their prevalence should translate into a political monopoly. Thus, they revolted to claim their rightful position.

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which Creoles were excluded. Benedict Anderson points to the monopolization of high oﬃces by peninsular bureaucracies;26 however, his evidence is selective. Other sources suggest that this may have been the limit of exclusion.27 The extensive inﬂuence of Creole oﬃcials in the church, the army and the legal structure appears to have been considerable, prior to the Caroline reforms.28 With the decline of the electoral cabildo system of urban government, town burghers, who were mostly Creole, began to purchase oﬃces in local courts giving them positions of substantial authority.29 The complexity of less formal powers, which lay in the hands of middle to lower level Creole

26

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 58. Such is the argument of Leon Campbell in “A Colonial Establishment: Creole Domination of the Audiencia of Lima during the Late Eighteenth Century,” HispanicAmerican Historical Review 52 (1972). Campbell’s case for Lima and Mexico is comprehensive, yet caution is warranted in generalizing his evidence beyond those municipalities. Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler’s study is more extensive. Indeed it could be tentatively described as the deﬁnitive study into Creole inclusion/exclusion from administrative oﬃce. The depth of their historical research permits them to reconstruct a more complete and substantiated picture of the ethnic patterns of colonial oﬃcialdom. Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler “Creole Appointments and the Sale of Audiencia Positions,” Journal of Latin American Studies 4, no. 2 (1972). 28 The Peruvian example is covered by Leon Campbell, “A Colonial Establishment,” pp. 2, 3, 10, 14, 15 and 20. On Chile, which manifested a similar institutional demography, see Jacques A. Barbier’s “Elites and Cadre in Bourbon Chile,” HispanicAmerican Historical Review 52 (1972). John Lynch’s evidence supports this view. Between 1687 and 1750, 44% of audiencia appointments went to Creoles. A majority of audiencia judges were Creole even in the 1760s, at least in the key cities. After that time the ranks of administration were recomposed. Between 1751 and 1808, the lion’s share of senior posts of the audiencias went to Spaniards. See John Lynch “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, pp. 26–27. 29 The widespread jurisdiction of judges is a reﬂection of the residues of power which lay in this municipal structure: Judges served as auditor of war, assessor of the tribunal of accounts . . . and as administrators of the properties of the expelled Company of Jesus, of hospitals, colosseums, water districts, pension funds, royal monopolies, and public works of all kinds. In addition, they were delegated to inspect troops or Indian communities, conduct censuses, residencias, or investigations, to study subjects such as the mails, taxation, the slave trade, and to execute a variety of property divisions. Through these commissions, the creole magistracy constituted a virtual interlocking directorate which inﬂuenced and controlled the operation of the city of Lima, and indeed of the entire viceroyalty. Virtually no aspect of colonial economic life escaped their authority. (Leon Campbell, “A Colonial Establishment,” pp. 14–15) Some caution is necessary here. Lima was one of the foremost cities of Creole inﬂuence. However, the outline of the pattern and reach of the colonial order in Peru serves as a powerful corrective to the impression of complete peninsular domination. 27

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nobility, corresponded to the maze of Creole routes to oﬃce. The links of “patronage, marriage, god parentage, property ownership and friendship bound the creole bureaucrats to the creole nobility . . . of which they were indeed members from birth.”30 If clientelism was eﬀective anywhere, then its eﬃcacy lay in the colonial order and not the royal hierarchy. Settlers did have a kind of counter hegemony in this respect. The complex intertwinement of the contending communities produced ethnically heterogeneous settlements. Informal links created through ‘corruption’ brought peninsulars and locals into greater proximity as much as the penetration of Creole nobles into the colonial state outﬁt.31 Whilst historians suggest that this was the case in Chile, Mexico and Peru, regional variations in the implementation of the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century meant that Creole advancement also varied.32 The Bourbon reform era brought the ownership of state posts to a head as one of the major contentious issues. Following Burkholder and Chandler, this can be explained by reference to the pre-reform period. Creole penetration of the institutions of the colonial order in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century was made possible by the cycles of sale of oﬃce that were forced on Madrid. In particular, municipal tribunals were institutional sites in which Creoles gained some control over the administration of power. The Bourbon program of imperial restructuring in its later phase revived the institutions of the audiencia and the cabildo that had been dormant during the course of the eighteenth century.33 However, the presence of Creole elites in colonial administration complicated the process of rejuvenation. The Caroline reforms—notably the institution of the intendancy system replicated from the France court state— heightened the tension between a resurgent peninsular court state and a Creole colonial order that grew in conﬁdence as the century drew to a close. This tension surfaced as a conﬂict over the revitalized institutions of the colonial order. Contrary claims over who would

30

Ibid., p. 19. See also Hamnett, The Mexican Bureaucracy, pp. 21–25. Barbier, “Elites and Cadre in Bourbon Chile,” p. 416. 32 Lang discusses the contrary impact of Bourbon centralization on diﬀerent urban centers, Conquest and Commerce, p. 83. See also Herr, Spain, chaps. 3 and 4. 33 See John Fisher, “The Intendant System and the Cabildos of Peru, 1784–1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40 (1960); and John Lynch, “Intendants and Cabildos in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, 1782–1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 35 (1955). 31

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control them fuelled early nineteenth century sentiments for either greater autonomy or even for independence. Spanish colonialism, at this point of its fullest growth did incorporate leading settler administrators into the lower-to-middle echelons of the viceregal states. At the same time it strengthened the higher posts of the apparatus. It was strong in its orientation to its own methods of government and in its grip over its own court state personnel. But, on the whole, the empire was fragile insomuch as its resources were diluted and spread across vast areas and sparse populations. Furthermore, it was weakened by the resuscitation of the institutions of the colonial order. The intention of the Bourbon reforms was a resurgent centralization. But the unintended outcome was initial division in the early years and then a grant of greater authority to more senior posts. The Franco-American colonial order was embedded in two contrasting types of society. The thinly spread settlements of Canada and Louisiana were frontier defences, dependent in Canada’s case on the fur trade. Military organization held a privileged place due to threats from other imperial powers and indigenous nations allied against the French. Montreal and Quebec were substantial and thriving towns connected to the Atlantic economy. They manifested the visible signs of Euro-American civilization—the trappings of aristocracy, maritime enterprise, seignorial grants, colonial government and the heavy military presence. They were closer to France and linked to Europe. At a distance from the St Lawrence River, the material presence of New French society was constituted by the network of forts around the Lakes and by the commercial relationships and values established in the interior. The presence was light and represented a compromise with the wilderness and the Indian nations which sustained their social and political force. The vieilles colonies of the Caribbean zone were quite diﬀerent. The visible signs of Frenchiﬁed society were unmistakeable and heavy on the ground. The indigenes were gone; they had been all but exterminated by the Spanish in early colonial years. In the eyes of colonists, the threat of slave revolt was unmistakable. Consequently, the military presence loomed large in social life. War in the Caribbean zone was frequent. Combined with the harsh system of slavery, the condition of war bred a colonial order that was exacting in its demands of imperial authorities and largely merciless when it came to the perceived menace within. A long history of planter resistance to imperial edicts

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begins with Colbert’s attempts to enforce shipping monopolies and ordinances that speciﬁed that sugar could be reﬁned in France only.34 It continued after the Treaty of Utrecht when conditions improved for those in sugar related industries and reached a peak in the late eighteenth century when threats to French possessions were at their greatest. This set the general conditions of the Antillian colonial order and cultivated a high degree of internal solidarity. White settlers had divisions of their own, but were capable of stout defence from threats, whether local or from outside. The social composition of French-American communities speaks volumes about the level of social closure in the colonial order. There was a marked social ranking set by colour and class.35 Plantation owners were at the top. They were large landowners in many cases. They married their daughters into aristocracy, maintained close connections with France and produced manors that displayed their wealth. Bekes were a Creole class below them, whites born in the Caribbean. Their cultural bearings were local and distinguished them from the plantation owners. Petit blancs were at the bottom of the white hierarchy. They had few resources and farmed or worked as tradesmen. Ex-slaves and free blacks were challengers for this layer. Consequently, the petit blancs proved the most fervent opponents of moves to end slavery. Although the island societies were sharply stratiﬁed, the colonial order proved durable. It survived France’s global losses in the Seven Years War, perhaps due to the economic value of the islands. It survived the French Revolution and the revolts of those who took up its call with the spectacular exception of the Haitian Revolution. It recoiled from the pressure of metropolitan abolitionists and from the rebellious anger of slave and mulattoes issuing from below it. It remained the chief French presence in the Americas, long after the strategic global defeat of the Empire in the Seven Years War. Society in the Canadian expanse was quite diﬀerent. Everyday life there was diverse and divided.36 Yet, paradoxically, aspects of its ruling structure underwent a process of de-diﬀerentiation. Royal inter-

34

F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, p. 57. Aldrich and Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier, pp. 22–23. 36 For a social history of New France that ‘slights’ the common focus on politics and power, see Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 35

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vention secured the future of the beachhead settlements down the St Lawrence River and the fort defences to their south and west. Fortiﬁcation demanded the continuous dispatch of companies of French troops to North America. By the mid-1660s soldiers made up thirty-ﬁve percent of the population.37 The militarization of the New France colony turned out to be a formative pattern. The relatively high income paid to French troops meant that they carried considerable economic weight. The military corps was an attractive career for enriched colonists. In the absence of the full range of aristocratic titles available in France, military commissions were sought for the sons of prosperous traders.38 Early generations of French Canadians did service in the army. The authority that accompanied oﬃcer positions aﬀorded them some inﬂuence and imparted to them a set of conservative values. Those with a family background in the fur trade during its peak years (up to the 1690s) could bring together the interests of merchants and militia. In the eighteenth century those interests were directly fused.39 In the early 1700s the Compagnie de la Colonie went bust and the government assumed the monopoly of trade directly. In 1729 the Governor began to lease posts to army oﬃcers in the hope that they would put imperial interests before private enrichment. Contemporary reports suggest that some of them didn’t. Their possession of trading leases made them agents of war and trade simultaneously and enhanced their pre-eminence within the colonial order. It also lent Canada’s leading oﬃcers a vested interest in inter-continental trade and a link to mercantile authorities. This was not the only connection with metropolitan authorities. Acquisition of oﬃcer commissions required the recommendations of the governor and the intendant to the Ministry of the Marine.40 Regal approval was also needed. Leading families looked to French authorities and identiﬁed with the court state in their pursuit of these most prestigious titles. Consequently, there was relative cohesion in the upper echelons of colonial society. Local imperial agents had inﬂuential milieux to draw upon for support. Directly below the military and administrative elite was a mass of provincial habitants. There was a more tangible divide between a 37 38 39 40

Eccles, “Social, Economic and Political.” Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV 1663–1701, chap. 4. Eccles, “Social, Economic and Political,” pp. 12–15. Ibid., pp. 17–18.

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partially de-diﬀerentiated gubernatorial apparatus and a diverse colonial order marked by a wider societal diﬀerentiation. For the colonial order there were two axes of diﬀerentiation. Firstly, life in urban New France stood in manifest contrast with the world of the frontier. The frontier world forced coexistence on its inhabitants. During the life of the French Empire, this world could not be remade in the manner than the Laurentine settlements were.41 Many colonial frontiersmen accommodated themselves wholly to their immediate environment. Some adapted aspects of the indigenous style of life, a cause of considerable moral anxiety amongst ecclesiastics in Montreal.42 Canada was the inverse of New England’s colonies as there was no sustained attempt to take possession of the land and fence it oﬀ. Instead, Canadian frontiersmen simply passed through the wilderness in pursuit of the trade, adapting themselves to their environs as they went.43 Their course was directed by the ﬂow of rivers and the system of lakes in the interior. Life in the eastern settlements was marked by an attempt to adopt the trappings of French civilization to Quebecois life. It was a world away from the wilderness. Yet, in the eyes of its inhabitants, it was frightfully close to the Indian nations that issued from it. This world was socially complex and constitutes a second axis of diﬀerentiation. The distribution of wealth ensured that it was so. Cutting across that pattern of social inequality were forms of status ranking that intensiﬁed the social hierarchy.44 Marriage alliances, family background, the possession of governmental posts and conspicuous consumption intersected with class relations to stratify the colonial order. Under the judicial, administrative and military elite, an artisan class splintered into numerous occupations: architects, hatmakers, metalworkers, stonemasons, tailors and many others. Professions such as medicine and land surveying sat to one side of them. Religion 41

Richard White treats the Great Lakes region as a middle ground in which diﬀerent peoples sought accommodation in the context of conﬂict and imperial warfare. This was a region of interchange of Iroquois, Huron and their respective oﬀshoots with English and French Americans. See The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 42 Allain, French Colonial Policy, pp. 172–95. 43 William J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier 1534–1760 (Montreal: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1969), chap. 1. 44 Peter N. Moogk, “Rank in New France: Reconstructing a Society from Notarial Documents,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 8, no. 15 (1975).

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divided the bulk of merchants oﬀ from a small Huguenot group that emerged in the eighteenth century.45 The clergy and the army had their own hierarchies. Servants and a small number of enslaved Indians occupied the lowest stations. The hardy institutions of relatively autonomous administration were not as developed as that they were in Anglo or Hispanic America. The colonial order may have been fragmented, but this was not due so much to structural factors in the imperial polity as it was to the degree of cultural integration of military elites in the Laurentine region with the Parisian nobility and the level of incorporation of the fur and ﬁshing trades into imperial commerce. Furthermore, it would be erroneous to perceive a complete absence of governmental conﬂict. Royal intervention in Canada did stimulate an institutional apparatus that was not fully controlled by imperial administrators and was more open to capture by provincial factions. Seventeen assemblies were convened in the last three decades of the seventeenth century; one was notable—the etats generaux called by Frontenac in 1672.46 They were formally convened in Quebec and a number were called in country parishes. A degree of popular participation was permitted. However, they were in no way lively bodies and had no legislative powers. They were a response to a perceived strain in relations between imperial administrators and merchant groups and between the governor and the intendant. Nonetheless, the ill feeling that existed reached a height in the last few decades of the seventeenth century. The conﬂict between Colbert and Frontenac exempliﬁes this.47 Colbert endeavoured to boost the intendancy and the counseil soverain to check Frontenac’s capricious governorship. The intendant presided over the counseil ’s deliberations and dominated in early years. Over time, it became preoccupied with litigation and steadily withdrew from its legislative role. Indeed, it came to hold de facto supreme judicial authority in the late 1670s and had jurisdiction over minor courts below it. Later, more councillors were appointed and its powers were augmented. In response to Frontenac’s unruly governorship, the Council and its members were given greater sanctions by Colbert. Accordingly, it 45

J. F. Bosher, The Canada Merchants 1713–1763 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Allana G. Reid, “Representative Assemblies in New France,” Canadian Historical Review 27 (1946). 47 Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV, chap. 6. 46

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began to exercise more independence and enjoyed powers formally separate from the governor and the intendant. For some years, it became a crucible of conﬂict between Colbert, Frontenac, the intendant and the councillors. It could fail to register royal edicts and regulations, if they were deemed inappropriate. In the island colonies, the counseils did just that. In New France, it was less audacious due to divisions within its membership. Colbert’s vision of accelerated development of villages in the main colony was actively impressed on the governor. In 1673 Frontenac deﬁed the Minister by establishing new forts around Lake Ontario to promote the fur trade and capture it for himself and his allies. This measure encouraged some colonists to drift westward. More importantly, it brought Frontenac’s party into conﬂict not just with Colbert, but also with Montreal’s traders. Factional battle-lines were drawn in the Counseil between the two sets of Canadian traders. In this way, it became a body of ongoing intrigue for the remainder of the century. Eventually, it was tamed and the factionalism defeated. Its name was changed to Supreme Council in 1703 to conform with its new loyalty to the court state. One ﬁnal institution of this fragile cluster of colonial bodies deserves mention. The capitaine de malice was a parish and town-based oﬃcial who acted as a moderator. The oﬃce was avenue for townspeople to air grievances. Whilst in no way a democratic institution, it allowed the King’s administration to act responsively in its rulings. Oﬃcials at this layer were intermediaries who had to face neighbourhoods of numerous constituencies. Their exposure to local communities made them bearers of popular measures. This was an important role, even though it bore no formal judicial or decision-making powers. New France did not nurture a concentrated colonial order with ongoing institutional autonomy. Episodes of non-cooperation did little to decisively augment its powers. Up until and even beyond the Seven Years War the sentiment for autonomy appears quite absent. In retrospect, it can be conﬁdently claimed that the movement for independence in the New French region coalesced in opposition to the British at a later time. There was no such movement against the French court state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The heightened tension of imperial state formation that was striking in relations between the Antillais colonies and metropolitan France was less conspicuous in the Canadian trajectory. The situation was quite diﬀerent in Anglo-America. British colonialism had separate origins and generated more nuanced social rela-

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tions. It was distinct in ﬁve respects.48 Economic life and attitudes to the land and its inhabitants were singularly English and reﬂected models of colonization discussed in previous chapters. Whereas the Spanish and the French proselytized, Protestant colonists were largely indiﬀerent to the question of the indigenes’ salvation. Spain’s legalistic zeal and the French preoccupation with the body of mercantile ordinances were not emulated in the English colonies. The ﬂow of immigrants to the northern continent was far more intense and rapid. Finally, in later years, slavery and the plantation economy were pivotal for British interests. This contrast is greatest in the founding conditions of American settlements. The British had three types of colony: corporate or charter, ‘proprietary’ and Crown colonies. Colonial autonomy originated in the ﬁrst American charters and the joint stock companies that supervised initial settlement. Royal grants of corporate charters presupposed collective rights for the colonial grantees. Whilst this form of colonial corporation did not last beyond the second half of the seventeenth century, the logic of chartered government was embodied in the legislative institutions and claims to jurisdiction of colonial administrations. The decline of the charter did not bring a loss of autonomy to the colonies. On the contrary, the imperial state structure that was consolidated after 1688 enshrined greater independence for colonial government. Administrative jurisdiction was drawn from a separation of legislative and executive responsibilities. Competing legislative sovereignties shaped colonial development and recast the relationship between the metropolitan state and colonial government as one that could be contested and transformed. Comparison of the English and Spanish trajectories can serve to throw into relief the distinctive features of English colonial society. A ﬁrst distinction lay in the entrenched image of a colony. The Spanish conquerors founded a ciudad on an accepted blueprint, which, by force of its presence on the American landscape, shaped the nearby countryside. Their priority was the organization and display of religious, administrative and military supremacy. English colonization drew on coalescing agrarian and commercial capitalist values. Protestantism informed ideas about the British Empire, although it is

48 This comparison draws notes from Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 3, chap. 7.

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questionable as to whether it furnished the English with a grand ideology of empire in the manner that Catholicism did for the Spanish.49 It did carry images of colonial organization. Early sketches of colonial life by Raleigh, Hakluyt, Purchas and others had previously stressed a regimented and disciplined organization of the colonies. Actual colonies should replicate country life. Survival in the hostile environment required a high level of social regulation. There is a recurring analogy in writings of the time of the beehive that expressed the intention of English investors.50 As charter colonies were superseded the beehive analogy faded. Towns and cities spread down the eastern coasts and through riverine settlements. They were the visible, material signs of English expansion though they did not resemble sixteenth century dreams of regimented urban life. What English colonials did bring with them were the essential elements of modern Protestant agrarianism.51 Notions of possession and property found a material expression in the enclosure of land in new village communities scattered along the eastern seaboard. The idea of enclosed and ‘improved’ land ordered the immediate physical landscape and also the relations of colonists to the American environment. The New World was seen as a ‘waste’ land because of the lack of clear markers of its productive use.52 It was thought grossly under-populated. ‘Improvement’ signiﬁed clearance of ﬂora and fauna (and indigenes) and containment of the wild. Property in this period did not have to be codiﬁed in written law as it was proclaimed by the act of fencing and improving land. Thus, it comes as no surprise that speculation on land was present in colonial towns from the moment of their foundation.53 There is evidence that the Spanish had a similar notion of industrious improvement, but expressions of such a notion were marginal.54 Anyway, their mindset was ﬁxed on 49

Armitage, The Ideological Origins, chap. 3. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Beehive as a Model for Colonial Design,” in Kupperman, America in European Consciousness. 51 See Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, chap 1. Compare with Mark Peterson who argues that Anglo-America in its Puritan origins was primarily commercial in its orientation. See The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 52 Seed, American Pentimento, chap. 2. 53 John Frederick Martin, Proﬁts in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 54 J. H. Elliot, “The Seizure of Overseas Territories by the European Powers,” in Armitage, Theories of Empire, pp. 148–50. 50

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extractive production, which compelled them to explore South America’s hinterlands and coerce communities of labor. Advancement into the interior did not seem as urgent for the English as it was for the Spanish. Within the British North American colonies the social metaphor of the fenced-oﬀ garden better describes the village life of the English colonial order. Spanish colonialism placed American land and peoples under a uniﬁed regal sovereignty. It was driven by a singular enthusiasm for subjugation and conversion. English colonization did not have the same uniformity. Each colony had its own charters that established a separation of powers. The innovations of the English state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not succeed in capturing all aspects of governmental responsibility for imperial authorities. Metropolitan bodies were based on jurisdictions that conﬂicted with those of colonial legislatures. It was not clear in either law or in the constitutional theories of sovereignty where authority lay. Multiple institutions combined in a patchwork of authority. Some were contemporary; others were legacies of colonial origins. In theory, Parliament had the ultimate authority. In practice, its legislative activity did not touch the colonies terribly often, apart from the Navigation Acts. It was more likely that the colonies would deal with the regal apparatus. Each colony structured a diﬀerent relationship of autonomy to the Crown.55 In New England’s corporate colonies, however, the King’s representative was elected by the executive council; the Crown had little power here. All colonies had a legislature of a representative assembly and an upper house. The Crown nominated the latter, although in some instances it was elected. It also acted as an executive council. The legislative power of the assemblies was only really restricted in cases where it conﬂicted with imperial ordinances. By 1730 Crown colonies had become the norm. Nevertheless, settler communities ﬁercely guarded the basis of their relative independence. Issues of revenue raising and expenditure on civil administration were particularly contentious and often turned into political ﬂashpoints. A ﬁercely loyal senior gubernatorial apparatus was not so easily nurtured, as governors found themselves unable to enforce London’s instructions and permanently in a position where they sensed political pressure from local elites.

55

Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, pp. 61–62; Lang, Conquest and Commerce, chap. 8.

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English law in eﬀect supported the colonial order’s assimilation of crown powers throughout the eighteenth century. It guarded the legal rights of colonists. Trial by jury and habeas corpus were legally constituted norms. Justices of the Peace oversaw their administration.56 Furthermore, the Vice-Admiralty Court for All America was also under colonial control, often by nature of the fact that local judges staﬀed them.57 In many ways, the imperial state imported the institutions that British subjects in England enjoyed. In the context of the North Americas, however, these were transformed into semiautonomous and self-legislating bodies. Colonial liberties were grounded in legislative control over the executive arm of the Crown. This understanding of the relationship of representative assemblies and the monarchy had its origins in the opposition to Stuart rule.58 In a way, Parliament was a model institution as far as the colonies were concerned. It provided what they thought was an example of a balanced constitution of government and a civilized form of political behaviour. It always remained a standard in America, one that imparted to colonists a heightened appreciation of the liberties they believed to be their heritage. The initial impression held by oﬃcials of the constitutional state was diﬀerent. Ideally, the colonial assemblies were to be limited to those powers that the parliament had under the Stuarts: the power to legislate, vote taxes and petition the Crown. The real exercise of power in colonial British America went well beyond this. The power to tax was enlarged in the colonial context into a type of control over colonial ﬁnance. The salaries of the governor and his staﬀ were paid by London, but this brought them little respect when conﬂicts arose. An ongoing skirmish between many legislatures and governors marked the history of the British Americas from 1689 on. As a result, the institutions and apparatus of the imperial state had limited and imprecise constitutional powers in the Thirteen 56 D. Sayer, “A Notable Administration: English State Formation and the Rise of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 5 (1992), pp. 1405–407. 57 Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 130–31. On the tensions of the vice-admiralty and colonists in cases involving smugglers, see Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1973), pp. 30–31. 58 See Jack P. Greene, “Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behaviour in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” in Negotiated Authorities.

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Colonies. The uncertainty surrounding legislative and executive aﬀairs in the colonies issued from the fragmentation of responsibility within various imperial bodies. Unlike in the Spanish Empire, there was no single institution of superintendence to manage imperial aﬀairs. The Board of Trade and the Privy Council had supervisory roles but few actual powers. Privy councillors tended to rely on the Board of Trade for administrative advice, a body that had few executive powers. Other ministries carried out their work in the colonies by adhering to their respective functions. Customs, the Post Oﬃce, the Admiralty, the War Oﬃce and the Treasury did not correspond with each other often, nor did each consult regularly with the Board of Trade. Imperial interests within the constitutional state were “nobody’s business and everybody’s business,” inasmuch as no institution within the apparatus was responsible for colonial aﬀairs, but all dabbled in it.59 Considerable nominal powers were invested in colonial governors. But the assemblies uncovered their limitations. Governor Belcher of New Jersey faced the dilemma that plagued most governors: I have to steer between Scylla and Charybdis . . . to please a King’s ministers at home and touchy people here; to luﬀ with one and bear away with another.60

Britain’s colonies in the Americas were, in eﬀect, not supervised clearly and completely by any part of the imperial apparatus. This intricate institutional arrangement permitted the space in which the empire could be brought into question, on both sides of the Atlantic. Colliding notions of sovereignty set the imperial-constitutional state and the colonial order apart. Two conceptions of sovereignty were permissible.61 One located authority ﬁrmly in the hands of the monarchy or the Privy Council. The other asserted the prerogatives of parliament in governing the colonies. Imperial rule itself was rarely in question within Britain. However, there were nuanced versions of it, an indication of some level of debate and discussion about the character of the British Empire. In the colonies, competing theories of political power amounted to alternative perspectives. The empire was variously considered as 59

Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, p. 64. Cited in Finer, The History of Government, p. 1403. 61 See Max Savelle, Empires to Nations: Expansion in America 1713–1824 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), pp. 43–44; and Tucker and Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire, pp. 148–49. 60

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a federation of sovereign or quasi-sovereign entities. Colonial institutions should have authority within each set of jurisdictional boundaries and this was seen as legally correct. At the peak of the federated structure, the British Parliament carried responsibility for overall welfare, the export economy, intra-imperial matters and foreign policy. In the colonial theory of a quasi-federated state, Americans were not articulating fundamental opposition to the imperial-colonial relationship as much as interpreting it within the context of their accumulated experiences of partial self-government. Their understanding of empire led to the perception that their own colonial government was in partnership with Britain. The resurgence in imperial institutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, after the Seven Years War, upset this conception and, when married to other crucial contingencies, problematized British rule. In the eighteenth century, a colonial order emerged that was capable of social self-legislation and governance. This was clearly the case in the British North Americas, less so in the Spanish Indies and the French Caribbean. Imperial rule from the outset had engendered a colonial opposition. In all three empires, however, there was a colonial order capable of exercising autonomy and embedded in the life of settler-immigrant culture. Each had an ambivalent stance in relation to bodies of imperial rule. Varying degrees of independence of action were possible, but were nonetheless circumscribed by loyalty to imperial arrangements. Those loyalties were made uncertain by the demands of colonial society and its principal elites. During the course of two hundred years of state and social formation, the build up of colonial communities had aggregated historical experience of mutual dependence, but also a degree of self-reliance. Colonial communities had social ballast of their own and the cultures they generated acted as another pole of loyalty for the most pre-eminent political and economic classes. Diﬀerent allegiances tugged at the political sentiments of colonial leaders and the communities that they led. The character of those allegiances and the local inﬂections that they exhibited is the next topic. Communities In the colonies, unique populations were composed of surviving indigenes, slaves and ex-slaves, immigrants and settlers, clergy and local and imperial merchants. A social and class hierarchy of a new kind

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underpinned colonial communities. Ownership of property (or lack of it) and control of the apparatus of government (or exclusion from it) were pivotal factors shaping the hierarchies of rule. Within those communities coexistence between diﬀerent sections of the populace was punctuated by episodes of massacre or revolt. Identities that were ethnic and aboriginal informed the tension between the empires and the colonial order. These ampliﬁed the dramas of eighteenth century America and would later come to fruition in the revolutionary acts of 1775 and the Napoleonic era. Miscegenation was a sort of policy in the Spanish Indies. During the sixteenth century, just less than one quarter of a million Spaniards emigrated to South America and the Caribbean following the conquistadors.62 The rate scarcely increased in the years up to independence, so the immigrant peninsular population was never too weighty. Until the 1590s Spain’s imports of slaves ran well below the rate of peninsular migration. But between 1595 and 1640 there was a spectacular reversal of this trend as Spain experimented with the slave trade.63 The ethnic variations that this process produced led to a proliferation of organizational interests. The oﬀspring of inter-mixing were classed as mulatto, metis, albino, morisco, lobo or by other regional designations. The aim was a so-called pigmentocracy.64 Spaniards could rule through a fragmentation of the Indian and African slave populace. It was ineﬀective inasmuch as other social categories of inequality overtook the fundamental conﬂict between Indians and conquerors. Class divisions assumed greater importance rendering deliberate miscegenation a superﬂuous strategy of divide-and-rule.65 Also, the barriers to joining colonial communities faced by foreigners were substantial.66 They reﬂected a tendency towards ius soli principle of integration and exclusion, which privileged the criterion of birthplace in determining membership of a community. As a result of these two types of division, the strategy of miscegenation produced

62 Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz “The First Transatlantic Transfer: Spanish Migration to the New World 1493–1810,” in Canny, Europeans on the Move. 63 Robin Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, pp. 140–44. 64 Magnus Morner, Race Mixing in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967). 65 Ferro, Colonization, pp. 105–14. 66 See Tamar Herzog, “ ‘A Stranger in a Strange Land’: The Conversion of Foreigners into Members in Colonial Latin America,” in Roniger and Sznajder, Constructing Collective Identities.

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the unforeseen consequence of diversity in the range of ethnic groupings where the boundaries between them were relatively fuzzy. Canada’s sparse settlements isolated white pioneer communities from daily encounters with the Huron. Despite purposeful emigration guided by the court state, the overall intake was low. New France still had only 3,000 settlers in 1660, most from north-western France.67 They did not emigrate as families and there was no ﬁnancial incentive or religious compulsion for them to do so. When the British took Canada, the total population had only grown to around 70,000 or about 5% of that of the English colonies. The thin distribution of colonists contrasted with the situation in the Caribbean where immigration was directed. In all, around 200,000 whites emigrated to the French Antilles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Migration may have been more concentrated after the losses in North America incurred in the post war settlement of 1763. But this represents a small part of the region’s population. Imports of indentured servants primed demographic growth.68 After the supply slowed, slaves ﬁlled the gaps and then exceeded them. Between 1687 and 1737, the slave population grew tenfold.69 Slavery was a ‘solution’ in the French Caribbean to the low level of settlement. The consequence was a group of island societies in which a highly stratiﬁed white minority had to govern itself and then had to govern an enslaved African majority. Confrontation was inevitable and features prominently in the history of the islands. But daily interracial interaction did not always involve conﬂict or acts of repression—far from it. Racial mixing was unavoidable. Also, French colonial strategy deliberately focussed on fostering a freed African community.70 The lower level of white settlement prompted this development as a safeguard against social unrest. The overwhelming presence of free and enslaved blacks heightened awareness amongst colonists of their cultural separateness which was accentuated by their social proximity. Additionally, it opened a separate possibility. Original

67 MacFarlene, The British in the Americas, p. 153; Ted Morgan, Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 195–96. 68 Christian Huetz de Lemps, “Indentured Servants Bound for the French Antilles in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Altman and Horn, ‘To Make America.’ 69 Eccles, France in America, p. 160. 70 Aldrich and Connell, France’s Overseas Frontier, pp. 97–98; Robin Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, pp. 439–41.

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cultural features were forged out of Creole hybrids of French and African arts. The intense fusion of imported cultures produced local customs, language, dance and music that survived decolonization. In British America’s demographic history, the outstanding features are the relatively high level of migration, urbanization on the coast and around eastern estuaries and the ethnic mixture of the migrants.71 Two periods can be distinguished.72 Between 1580 and the middle of the seventeenth century, migrants came principally from England, Wales and lower Scotland. A high rate of population growth in the British Isles produced the numbers for emigration and political instability produced the motives. Between 1610 and 1660 English migration to the Caribbean and the north-eastern seaboard far outstripped that of the French and Spanish, more than doubling the Spanish at one point.73 Prosperity in English agriculture combined with the impoverishment of a class of laborers to create the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors of a higher rate of migration. In the second period—from the mid-seventeenth to the 1776 Revolution—Irish, Africans and continental Europeans composed the majority. After the Treaty of Utrecht in particular, the pace of migration increased rapidly.74 The genocidal depopulation of indigenous societies was completed in the Caribbean and set a fast pace on the east coast of North America after 1660. Those that survived were marginalized and pushed westwards or moved around. The import of slaves to the islands was higher than for the northern colonies until the late eighteenth century. Still, growth in the black population on the continent nearly doubled that of the whites in the seventeenth century.75 Settler communities gelled around port towns and then on the frontier, rarely more than one hundred miles from river estuaries or from populated bays. The towns, cities and regional jurisdictions they

71 For a survey of the literature and a discussion of some of the historiographic issues in the demographic history, see Nicholas Canny, “English Migration into and Across the Atlantic during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Europeans on the Move. 72 Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. 73 Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, pp. 228–29. 74 Lester Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution 1750–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 18–19. 75 Between 1630 and 1680 the growth in slave numbers was signiﬁcantly greater. By the end of the century Africans made up 11% of the colonial population. See Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure,” in Greene and Pole, Colonial British America.

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chartered were based on familiar English standards.76 The terms to describe these could be connected them to equivalents in England: manor, hundred, parish, borough, precinct. What they signiﬁed in the homeland was highly variable. Their application to the landscape of the North American east coast similarly varied. Some had no discernible precedent in England that could be readily drawn upon. So the municipalities that American settlers forged were original, in a way, even though they had models to try and emulate. The formation of colonial communities was more haphazard in English North America and no two colonies and their townships were replicas. The preeminence of town and city resulted, not through a strategy of baroque design, as in the Spanish Indies, but through demographic concentration and a pragmatic application of known settlement methods. These housed signiﬁcant numbers of new arrivals. Between 1700 and 1770 the northern colonies grew eight-fold, while the population of the West Indies trebled.77 By this time, the ethnic composition of the Chesapeake and New English population had been transformed. New migrants hailed from European sources connected with Atlantic routes.78 Eastern Europe, the Baltic region and the Mediterranean furnished few emigrants due to their relative isolation from ports of embarkation. Africans and their enslaved heirs constituted almost one-ﬁfth of the populace by 1770.79 As their numbers rose, so did segregation; racial boundaries became thicker.80 The subordinated Indians and bonded Africans were grouped by compulsion. Settlers, Indian nations and slavery all remained more distinctly dissociated than in Spanish and French America. Against this forming and inconstant demographic background, it is possible to view the formation of identities in the colonial order as a dynamic process in itself. A number of facets of civility symbolized for Europeans the distance between immigrants and indigenes and diﬀerent segments of settler communities: language, style; dress and a monopoly of communications, manners and position.

76

Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 236–44. MacFarlene, The British in the Americas, p. 229. Bernard Bailyn details a quantitative analysis of the extraordinarily diverse sources of emigration in Voyagers to the West, pt. 2. 78 Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 213–14. 79 MacFarlene, The British in the Americas, p. 231. A percentage calculation based on Robin Blackburn’s ﬁgures suggests that 17.6% of the total North American population were slaves. See the table in The Making of Colonial Slavery, p. 460. 80 Greene and Pole, Colonial British America, pp. 210–11. 77

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In Europe, the cultures of nations in their formative stages were deﬁned by the use of a dominant language by political or cultural elites.81 Likewise in the colonized world, language could act as a basis for senior imperial elites. Being able to speak the dominant language of imperial business incorporated many settlers into the mercantile economy of the empire, whether they had transoceanic connections or not. Later, it opened up the possibility of reception to various currents of Enlightenment thinking via their access to philosophical, historical, political and, importantly, literary works. For those outside of European or Creole communities, the inability to speak imperial languages meant disenfranchisement. Degrees of incorporation or the extent of exclusion on the basis of language decided the thickness of the boundaries of the colonial communities. This sharply deﬁned linguistic boundary did not exist within Anglo-American communities. Indeed, the process of formation of New World societies eﬀected a homogenisation of language that acted to solidify communities, while broadening the number of settlers who could have access to transatlantic ﬂows of information and commerce.82 English, of course, remained a solid symbolic boundary that distinguished Anglo-European civilization from the Native American nations. Style also distinguished communities of European origin from preConquest inhabitants and from slaves. This distinction went beyond ethnicity. The outward appearance of European civilization insinuated deeper cultural diﬀerence, even greater spiritual worth. For the Spanish, conversion of indigenous populations to Catholicism was deemed to be a major imperial mission. This appeared to be the limit of what was possible or necessary at the time. On the other hand, greater incorporation of Creole Americans was an imperative and it was made possible by common written language and traditions. Those of American birth could quite freely take up features of subordinated cultures. Diet, a consumptive lifestyle and relaxed eating routine were habits of a “short present” that distinguished Hispanic Creoles from Spanish born administrators and their families who served in high oﬃce.83 Preserving etiquette and daily customs made them Spanish. The civil habits of life could not be readily or completely abandoned without social consequences. 81

Eric J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Canto, 1991), pp. 60–61. 82 H. V. Bowen, Elites, pp. 113–18. 83 Ferro, Colonization, pp. 114–15.

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British and French colonists had a similar relationship to their metropolitan principals governing in the colonies. Indeed style conﬁrmed the exclusion of even Creole/settler communities from European-dominated high administration. However, style and manner varied more across England’s North American colonies than anywhere else in European America.84 Social distinction was built on standards that were current in Scotland and England. But it sat in tension with American localism. Inevitably, this resulted in a provincialization of gentility, “a local form of Englishness.”85 Economically, they were agrarian and commercial colonies and not dominated by extraction or ranching. Close inspection shows up diversity in style, in the social hierarchy and in the immediate relationship with the gubernatorial apparatus.86 Puritan New England steadily expanded its boundaries beyond Massachusetts. Life amongst the settlers was relatively egalitarian in the North compared to the sharply deﬁned hierarchies of East Anglia that migrants might have remembered. The experience of migration was itself a process of acculturation.87 Those destined to become Anglo-Americans—and they came from miscellaneous backgrounds—entered this process from the point of embarkation. Weeks-long voyages across the Atlantic threw migrants together and forced cultural exchanges. Subsequent entry into the northern English colonies immersed new migrants with such experiences in a society where common tasks of domestication of the land confronted all. In contrast to this northern pattern, it was villa life that was cultivated in the Carolinas and Virginia over a long period of time. In these colonies, social rank tended to mirror England more closely. Large plantation owners were at one pole with tenant farmers and indentured servants at the other in great numbers. In Virginia, the southern gentry pursued aristocratic habits and were loyal to the Church of England, consistently rejecting radical Protestant experiments in theology. Further south, in the Carolinas, the merchant and planter class were modestly gentriﬁed and detached, although they did not parody English-ness to the degree that colonists in the Caribbean 84 Braddick, “Civility and Authority,” in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World. 85 Ibid., p. 107. 86 MacFarlene, The British in the Americas, chap. 6; Ian Steele, “The Anointed, the Appointed, and the Elected: Governance of the British Empire 1689–1784,” in Marshall, The Eighteenth Century, p. 113; H. V. Bowen, Elites, pp. 18–60. 87 Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 131–44, 218–19.

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did.88 Slaves were appendages in this world; few could ever be sovereign participants in it. The Middle Atlantic colonies developed a polyglot population drawn from a greater number of sources. Dutch origins and Quaker inﬂuence shaped a more insular and egalitarian community orientation. Frontier America produced pioneers. Fresh settlers made up the numbers of those pushing the boundary westwards. Forceful, strong-willed individuals, better suited to the environment, did not entertain strong notions of community. Nor did they automatically defer to the rule of imperial law. This contrast left its imprint on the social boundaries between imperial oﬃcials (and those around them) and the large settler communities. Northern and middle-eastern settlements were communitarian and juxtaposed their social worlds with those of their remote governors. Where social inequality was greater and found expression in style, manners and custom (as in the South), imperial rule might seem more ‘natural’. But the South and the frontier could also be most antagonistic to imperial authorities. Central authority might have seemed the bane of slave-owning southerners and law resistant frontiersmen. This does not signify that there was no porosity between imperial administration and the colonial order in British North America. Both had independent access to the means of production and they shared elemental features of a common culture, especially language. The compulsion to incorporate settlers into the community of empire was also generally felt by colonial administrations. The French Empire was split between Canadian and Caribbean colonies. In New France, a homestead style of life developed along the river system, in spite of Colbert’s best eﬀorts to establish villages modelled on agrarian France.89 In contrast, elites housed in Quebec and Montreal aspired to the ethos of the French nobility.90 This was a second Canada, wedded to the original colonial implantation. Montreal and Quebec were the most densely populated ports and represented “the highest level of urbanization in any North American colony.”91 They were inhabited by a would-be noblesse whose military commissions, connections in trade and membership of Parisian milieux led

88 See Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: the Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina 1670–1770 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1989). 89 Eccles, France in America, p. 37. 90 Ibid., pp. 119–21. 91 Meinig, The Shaping of America, p. 113.

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them to simulate an aristocratic lifestyle. The personal wealth required for such a life was not available in the North American colonies. As compensation, many obstacles to ennoblement were removed. The stigma attached to commerce in the old world was also absent. Consequently, nobility was quite an alluring goal. For a small and distinct minority, it was a means of becoming conspicuous in an urban world set apart from the frontier of the coureurs de bois and habitants. In Canada, the two worlds did not collide too often. In the West Indies, however, social extremes coexisted in close proximity. This sharpened the distinction between grand blancs, other whites, freed blacks and slaves.92 They inter-married and monopolized positions in local administration and justice/law. Positions in the colonial order brought little oﬃcial remuneration and oﬃcials became quite susceptible to inﬂuence. Gubernatorial salaries were low from the formative era in the seventeenth century through to later years.93 Such positions held attraction for the already enriched, furthering the distance between governors and those below them. They became enthusiasts for science and their sons and daughters assimilated the works of the philosophes.94 Paris was their centre and they became political actors in the French court. The structure of oppression that they resided over left little by way of status symbols to other colonists. A pale skin and the social and economic advantages that went with it was the exception. In the late eighteenth century, the petit blancs of St Domingue agitated successfully for the exclusion of blacks from public employment and campaigned against inter-racial marriage. They were able to re-capture some privileges to maintain a higher status. That this was a bitterly fought issue serves as a reminder of how important distinctions of status were. An advantageous economic position was vital for the small and large planters as it was for the military-merchant elite of Canada. But the markings of what was seen as French civilization were an obligatory expression of privilege. In all three empires, a sense of belonging to the American land vied with imperial loyalty. In the case of the Spanish Indies and the French West Indies, ethnic and indigenous distinctions were more acutely felt and those who held Hispanic or French identity held it 92

Eccles, France in America, pp. 164–66. Philip P. Boucher, “The ‘Frontier Era’ of the French Caribbean 1620s–1690s,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires, p. 221. 94 McLellan, Colonialism and Science. 93

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strongly. Canadians developed a strong sense of connected-ness, at least outside of the aristocratic hobereaux. Creole identity came easily for them. However, in British North America the level of identiﬁcation with Britain was also strong and, in some respects, could have been strengthened by geographic isolation from Europe. For colonial settlers in British North America the imperial and colonial experience: . . . viviﬁed inheritance. Transatlantic and intercolonial communication—complex networks of commerce, migration and remigration, oﬃcial and private correspondence—sustained common understanding in multifarious ways . . . Economic and social developments in most colonies maintained, perhaps even strengthened individuals’ sense of Englishness; ‘anglicization’ is not a uniquely eighteenth century phenomenon. Some historical episodes were particularly important both to shaping the empire and to maintaining its Englishness; here England’s revolutions enjoyed pride of place alongside the Restoration of 1660. Such seismic shifts forced colonists to react and made English politics acutely relevant to the colonial situation. However, such events had another signiﬁcance, and this lay not so much in the drama of their immediate impact as in how they changed (and marked changes in) the ways in which Englishmen thought about government and sought to organize or beneﬁt from the relationship between state and society.95

English North American settlers forged common identities through shared experiences of colonial life. Detachment from the European base of empire nurtured this sense of distinct collectivity. But until the consequences of the Seven Years War rolled out, it was always ambivalent. Colonists considered themselves English and viewed events in Britain as critical to the development of the colonies. Traﬃc in news across the Atlantic bound the English together fostering a transatlantic aﬃnity. The 1688 revolution exempliﬁed this relationship and indeed cemented it for nearly one hundred years.96 Divisions between the Whig opposition and Stuart rule found some symmetry in the colonies in the confrontation of the proponents of ‘English liberties’ and the governors. Local inﬂections also drove the dispute. In turn, the reaction in colonial America rebounded onto the parliamentary opposition in England. The establishment of the foundations of Westminster administration boosted the sense of English community. English-ness was buttressed by the seventeenth century

95 96

Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 4–5. Lang, Conquest and Commerce, pp. 165–71.

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inter-state rivalries of Spain and England, which found expression in English entry into the Americas.97 Inter-imperial war and economic competition modiﬁed the long-term designs of the British Empire. At the same time, imperial fortunes in the international competition of states were seen as a great concern of the colonies. In the Spanish Indies, imperial identity was fed by ethnic and cultural encounters which were, arguably, more intensive and came earlier. The sense of distinctiveness that peninsular communities cultivated was fuelled by their experiences of a foreign America. Journeying through ethnically-stratiﬁed cities furnished imperial oﬃcials with the experience of encounters with geographic and cultural contrasts. Familiarity with all sectors of government gave peninsular elites privileged familiarity with Spain’s dominions. The passage of oﬃcials through diverse social, cultural and administrative settings fuelled the self-identiﬁcation of the personnel of the imperial state with each other. Benedict Anderson’s idea that the community of absolutist functionaries was grounded in the interchangeability and experiences of journey has some relevance here. The salient point is that: (T)he most important ( journeys) were the diﬀering passages created by the rise of absolutizing monarchies, and, eventually, Europe-centred world-imperial apparatus of power, controlled directly by, and loyal to, the ruler over against a decentralized, particularistic feudal nobility. Uniﬁcation meant internal interchangeability of men and documents. Human interchangeability was fostered by the recruitment—naturally to varying extents—of homines novi, who just for that reason, had no independent power of their own, and thus could serve as emanations of their master’s wills . . . (the functionary) encounters as eager fellowpilgrims his functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard of and surely hopes never to have to see. But in experiencing them as travelling-companions, a consciousness of connectedness (Why are we. . . . here . . . together?) emerges, above all when all share a single language-of-state. Then, if oﬃcial A from province B administers province C, while oﬃcial D from province C administers province B—a situation that absolutism begins to make likely—that experience of interchangeability requires its own explanation: the ideology of absolutism, which the new men themselves, as much as the sovereign, elaborate.98

This insight can be applied with equal salience to the colonial settings of the Americas. The interchanges of bureaucratic functionaries had 97 98

Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 8–10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 56–57.

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greater resonance as they were less densely concentrated. The paucity of imperial administration relative to the size of the Americas quickened the communication of skills and interchangeability of peninsular functionaries. The experience of journeying in the Americas, albeit in limited regions and encounters with associates encouraged an aﬃnity with the community of peninsular bureaucrats. Engagement within the bureaucratic state furnished the imperial oligarchy with its own self-understanding of Hispanic cultures. Likewise, journeys for Creoles cultivated identity. Travel through the continent inculcated a sense of American-ness. Touring imperial Spain enhanced American loyalties. Seventeenth and eighteenth century Spain appeared poor and foreign to Americans. Its cities lacked the grandeur of the baroque New World, reﬂecting instead more of the medieval Islamic past than the contemporary aesthetics of court society. The colonies may have even seemed like the region of the empire in which Spanish culture and social structure were directly preserved.99 Journeying can be contrasted with the metaphoric homecoming. In the long term, Spanish elites in the Indies thrived not only on the military or economic functions of imperial pride or trade, but also on the needs of imperial institutions. This included the development of the administrative American city, planned in the baroque tradition with open plazas and carefully located government centres. The public spaces of the baroque city were reminiscent of the alternative home that the agora represented in Ancient Greece.100 Indeed this trace of Antiquity had been carefully crafted into the baroque style. Beyond this, the American city could be a place of homecoming. The growing familiarity of the American environment and the trade of functions within imperial bureaucracies that multiplied those experiences required a cultural and symbolic foundation to sustain itself. Authority invested by the monarchy in the imperial apparatus supplied that foundation. The involvement of court state oﬃcials trained in Europe in provincial governments encouraged an elite solidarity which manifested itself in beliefs, values, fashions and habits and was conﬁrmed in the correct use of Castilian Spanish. Such shared features of identity were housed in the colonial city. Although 99 This is J. H. Parry’s suggestion in The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 340–41. 100 Murphy, “Peregrini,” p. 21.

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the rule of the peninsular court elite was often ﬁercely contested in the cities, the administrative setting was more conducive than the frontier to their magisterial mores and lifestyles. Conclusion One of the methodological starting points for this book’s overall argument is that there are compelling similarities between the Atlantic empires to justify comparison of diﬀerent colonial experiences. In this chapter, I have tried to chart roughly corresponding features of diﬀerent Euro-American colonies through a notion of the colonial order. The colonial order is a concept with heuristic advantages. It helps to reiterate the constantly present imperial dimension of the historical experiences of colonies. This chapter revolves around it and is drafted with one of the main aims of the book in mind: to examine transcontinental empires within Atlantic modernity. A preliminary conclusion is that Spanish, French and British colonies are comparable across the northern and southern American continents. However, further comparison is required to illustrate the tension of imperial state formation. American colonies can also be evaluated against the provincial and municipal order of Western Europe discussed in chapter one. A quick assessment would highlight the unique position of the colonial order in its conﬁgured opposition to the viceregal apparatus. Distance between centres on the two continents constrained the governmental capacities of the empires’ peak bodies. Due to this condition, the colonial order can be described in negative and positive terms; negatively due to the lack of eﬀective imperial government, positively due to the institutional autonomies that it created or captured on its own. The institutions that it coalesced in were in part the objectiﬁed and material expression of their autonomous condition. Colonial cities might echo English, French or Hispanic origins, but they also bore the mark of Americanized colonial communities with Creole traditions. The institutions of local self-government could be the bane of imperial oﬃcials. Unlike the provincial and municipal order, they were not prey to the cohesion of dense networks of patronage. Their circumstances often made autonomous action a necessity. The form of economic relations also endowed settler communities with societal separation. Exploitation of the land and its resources—be it in plots, ranches, mines or plantations—enriched some settlers enormously. New World wealth made

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some of them formidable ﬁgures in metropolitan Europe. The unique and speciﬁc position of the colonial order in American colonial societies enabled Creoles/settlers to develop an ambiguous relationship with the imperial ediﬁce. In summary, the colonial order was analogous to the provincial and municipal order in Europe, but enjoyed a distinguishing capacity for self-reliance. A great awareness of belonging to the American world variously buttressed the feeling of independence; but such sentiments competed with entrenched imperial allegiance. The life of colonies is not taken here in isolation from the empires that formed and possessed them. Comparison is therefore possible and, in fact, is highly rewarding. The comparative analysis of this chapter has turned up the above similarities in colonial history. The variation is equally illuminating. The cultural horizons of American communities contrasted Hispanic forms of Creole identity such as the neo-Aztecism of New Spain with the strong loyalism of New French settlers in Canada’s main city centres. Low levels of immigration over decades made for small and separate white communities in some places. French Canada and the Caribbean stand out in this respect and consequently exhibit high commitments to empire. Concentrated mixed migration to the British east coast enabled diverse provincialisms. Imperial allegiance was always moderated by local conditions there. Voluntary immigration did not have nearly the same impact in the Spanish Indies due to the long-term blending of communities. The spectrum of ethnicity formed around the interchanges of Spanish Americans and indio communities and through the spread of slavery. Creole/settler cultures were also informed by the intensity of social inequalities. Again, this ﬂuctuated from one set of colonies to the next; it was often most severe in places where it was compounded by organized slavery. The ﬁnal variation lies with the diﬀerent civilizational signs of foundation of colonies. Enclosure and possession of land symbolized settlement for the English. The ritual foundation of cities authorized the landmarks of Hispanic civilization. The establishment of forts and spread of trade signiﬁed the advance of French civilization in North America, while in its Caribbean possessions the oppressive apparatus of plantations incarnated its presence. These were, in a way, the possessions of the colonial order as much as they were the institutions of the empires. Local conditions were important as they inﬂuenced the degree of compact and conﬂict between imperial and colonial leaders. The

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institutional struggle over authority combined with intensiﬁed rivalry between Europe’s empires to open up a new conjuncture. In the Atlantic world, new states could be created by a colonial order that set itself against the British Spanish and French empires. The next step in my overall argument is a reconstruction of the British and Spanish American revolutions that took place in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. This reconstruction throws into relief the imperial ﬁguration of tension that produced those processes and mark how divergent histories shaped distinctive paths of modernity for America’s emergent republics.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WAR AND IMPERIAL RE-DIVISION BETWEEN UTRECHT AND THE SEVEN YEARS WAR By the mid-eighteenth century vibrant settler-colonial societies had grown in the Spanish, French and British Atlantic empires. In places where the tension of state formation engendered conﬂicts in the American environment, those conﬂicts exposed the limited capacity of imperial rule and the tenuous links of colonial patronage. On one hand, the conﬂicts stoked the hesitancy of existing loyalties and magniﬁed American subjectivities. On the other hand, it shored up the sense of rightful authority on the part of the personnel of state who understood themselves to be the embodiment of empire. For settler elites, the experiences of the remote character of the institutions of the imperial state sat uncomfortably with their steadfast loyalties to old world traditions. Their familiarity with colonial life and partial self-administration re-conﬁrmed their location at the perceived ‘margins’ of the Spanish, French and British empires. Yet, many colonists also saw their own worlds as centers of sorts or at least saw themselves as compatriots of a common cultural heritage in which they had entitlements as Hispanic subjects, Frenchmen or Britons. In the changed international climate of the late eighteenth century, when states militarized the world-wide competition of empires, this polarization of perceptions boosted conditions of potential rebellion. The Atlantic empires, to varying degrees, had generated self-regulating institutions which colonists used as vehicles of partial government. Through these, Americans developed distinctive colonial visions of empire. More than this, they experienced colonization as peripheral subjects, even though they felt that they were members of an empire who should stand on a truly equal footing with their European counterparts. The sense of marginality was heightened by the colonial autonomies that they held and jealously guarded. American republican sentiments emerged as responses to experiences shared in the colonial order of government. They aggregated Creole perspectives on questions of sovereignty, legal jurisdiction, economic interest and the constitutional character of empire as a whole. In the

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British and Spanish empires, which are the main focus of this chapter, the possibility of republican political horizons ﬂowed out of the institutional autonomy created by the colonial order. Conﬂict within empires—competition between states I will assume license to re-date the eighteenth century such that analysis can commence with the 1689 constitutional reformation of the English state and ﬁnish with the American War. With this time frame the eighteenth century can be classed as a short century of war.1 The transformation of governmental institutions and the development of the philosophies of political economy were responses to the martial climate of inter-state rivalry. Reform of the administrative and mercantile structures of British, French and Spanish empires heightened the level of conﬂict in the mid-late eighteenth century. The economic relationship between the mercantile organization of imperial economic life and the endogenous formation of colonial economies bred opposition. Administratively, the societal distinctiveness of the New World was also evident in the structures of colonial government. Moreover, the stakes were raised across the board after the Treaty of Utrecht as the competition of states intensiﬁed. Manoeuvre, intrigue and war in the interstate system had a profound impact on the course of trade. Programs of ‘liberalization’ were responsive to crises that led to war. In a short eighteenth century, wars and their resolution prompted the internal restructuring of the protagonist states. The terms of settlement of the War of Spanish Succession began this short century and the Seven Years War established new conditions for trade at its end. Indeed, during this time commercial advantages became part of the spoils of war. Spain suﬀered a great deal in both conﬂicts. The Treaty of Utrecht was a watershed that was Atlantic in its scope.2 In law, it established the sovereignty of realms, ﬁnally terminating Spain’s claim to universal monarchy after the 1493 Papal Bull. It limited France’s territorial claims. The results were directed by British interests, which were

1 See “The Economics of War and the Politics of Peace,” in Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 2 Liss, Atlantic Empires, chap. 1.

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clearly perceived to be commercial and not territorial. France and Spain’s most visible losses, however, were territorial. The resources of the Habsburg dynasty and its energies had been extended across six diﬀerent territories. The European territories were lost to the Austrian Habsburgs. Moreover, the strategic locations of Gibraltar and Minorca fell to Britain. On top of this the beneﬁts of Spanish mercantile monopolies were curtailed by the further inroads into Spanish trade made by the British and the loss of the asiento—the slave monopoly in the Caribbean. The asiento was a coveted prize that states fought ﬁercely for, although its monopoly properties could not be strictly enforced. For the British, it opened up Spanish trade in the Americas. Three decades of peace with France enabled the British to exploit the new opportunity. In turn, France surrendered Newfoundland, Port Royal, Hudson Bay and Nova Scotia to Britain; more gains for the country coming out of its century of revolution. The Bourbons claimed the Spanish throne in an important dynastic coup that re-shaped the institutional arrangement of the Spanish empire, yet they saw ﬁt not to annex Spain outright. Although territorial boundaries had shrunk in the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession, the problems of governing a vast empire remained with its Bourbon heirs. The legacy of Habsburg rule—an exhausted treasury and a battered court state—continued to limit what Madrid could do. The parlous state of Spain’s reduced empire presented the Bourbon regime with a challenge. The century-long response was a strategy of modernization that gained momentum in the 1750s. Elements of physiocratism, liberalism in trade arrangements and mercantilist aggression in the exploitation of resources were combined in the renewal of the state apparatus. The Spanish Enlightenment (ilustracion) was the creed of the new centralism. Within this ideology, reform itself was legitimized. The authority of the state could no longer rest on appeals to virtue. It had to justify itself on the grounds of interests served rather than honour. This introduced a new tension between the legitimation of dynastic continuity and the encouragement of individual subjects to pursue material gain. In policy, the regime shared its sincere commitment to the goal of private prosperity, while at the same time overseeing debates about the national interest between the ilustrados and the functionaries of state.3 Modernity came after a fashion with Spain’s 3

Perez-Diaz, “State and Public Sphere,” pp. 253–55.

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new dynasty. But it was restricted to a rationality of outlook amongst new oﬃcials and the rationalizing measures that they introduced. Spain’s cities were not greatly eﬀected, even less so the rural worlds of the majority of Spaniards. Spain’s state was its most modern sector. Thus the main result between 1715 and the Seven Years War was economic and administrative stabilization. For Britain, aside from strategic gains, the terms of Utrecht brought the conditions of further institutional innovation. The potential was realized. A new institutional hegemony emerged under Walpole. Where colonial interests did not conﬂict openly with British ones, the colonies were left to govern unrestrained. However, in the 1740s the existing instruments of imperial supervision were applied more and more.4 Governors in a number of colonies were under siege from local assemblies.5 At the conclusion of King George’s War in 1748, the Board of Trade adopted a renewed zeal for reforming supervision arrangements. Oﬃcials on the Board and in related bodies were increasingly inﬂuenced by the growth of political economy in the 1750s.6 It was an applied social science, done by specialized practitioners, rather than as an adjunct to business or public service. Careful attention to the interests of Britain’s empire and its colonies was a central tenet of the new kind of thinking. British political economy was becoming the paradigm of imperial policy and its grip on British statesmen would grow during the war with France. The Seven Years War was a watershed in re-shaping the balance of Western European states. It was the ﬁrst modern intercontinental war.7 Moreover, it had a cold war phase during which the French and the British regarded each other with mutual suspicion.8 The results were telling. The Spanish gained and lost; mostly, they lost.

4

Greene, Peripheries and Centers, pp. 49–51. Greene, Negotiated Authorities, pp. 71–75. 6 Koehn, The Power of Commerce, pp. 19–22. 7 The ﬁnest skills in mapmaking at this time were deployed in the manoeuvres leading up to the war and in the subsequent conﬂagration. See Margaret Beck Pritchard, “Claiming the Land,” in Pritchard and Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude. 8 Each government felt that the other harbored territorial ambitions in both North America and north-western Europe. In Europe, the settlement of the War of Austrian Succession satisﬁed neither party to the Treaty of the Aix-La-Chapelle. In America, past conﬂicts and skirmishes in which alliances with Indian nations were mobilized to defend strategic posts had left issues of colonial possession unresolved. New France’s borders in 1755 were still in dispute. Frank W. Brecher, Losing a Continent: France’s North American Policy 1753–1763 (London: Greenwood Press, 1998). 5

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They gained Louisiana and Havana thereby enlarging their sphere of slave-based production. However, with the loss of Florida, Spain was in a weaker position on both continents on either side of the Atlantic. Britain was unambiguously the victor in the war and in the peace. Immediately, the Grenville Government was able to withdraw from the European theatre and concentrate its energies on the transcontinental empire. Its administration turned to four problems of governing that crystallized in the post-war settlement:9 a) Ensuring that the alliances made with the Indian nations could be managed without provoking conﬂict with the ambitions of colonists; b) Restructuring the imperial apparatus to bring greater uniformity in government. Coordination of diﬀerent jurisdictions in the empire could replace overlapping spheres of responsibility, or so it was hoped; c) Maintenance and even extension of defence forces capable of resisting France and Spain’s counterparts; d) Transfer of the costs of empire onto the colonies. This reﬂected a shift in the disposition towards the English colonists. Imperial administration in France and Spain adopted fresh postures too. But, the unease between imperial administrators and colonial society went deeper in British North America than it did in the Spanish Indies or in the French Caribbean. It was most evident in three areas: the application of the Navigation Acts, the collision of expectations held by imperial and colonial authorities and in constitutional theory. Each is dealt with below. It was at the administrative summits of the Thirteen Colonies that the unease was most conspicuous. Ownership and wealth had become more concentrated in North American colonial society at this time.10 The enrichment of a settler-colonial capitalist class brought greater competition between American and British merchants. However, rivalry was conﬁned to American markets.11 The only avenues for export were through the imperial system of mercantilist regulations, narrowing the options available to many American merchants. The

9

Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 245–307. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, p. 196. On the enrichment of the British North Americas after the Seven Years War, see also Blackburn, The Making of Colonial Slavery, pp. 376–79 and Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 406. 11 Braudel, The Perspective of the World, pp. 409–11. 10

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Navigation Acts regulated colonial shipping. They were made and maintained by Parliament, a body whose authority was controversial in the eyes of colonists right from the beginning of the eighteenth century.12 The monopoly on credit was maintained by London. Trade was centralized through the Board of Trade which since the settlement at Utrecht had sought even closer supervision of colonial aﬀairs.13 Such measures found their counterparts in Spain and France’s American empires. But the British confronted more robust and densely populated communities. British America’s prosperity ﬂowed out of the ongoing conquest of territory. The Board of Trade, with government support, sought to apply the Navigation Acts with even greater vigour after 1763. The eﬀects of mercantile regulation varied from one American city to another and within cities too. The many competing merchant interests can be distinguished by their relationship to the mercantile regime. For some, the link with Britain oﬀered prosperity and stability, or at least seemed to, even after the War of Independence.14 London’s Navigation Acts eﬀected various sectors of the colonial economy in diﬀerent ways. The southern colonies in North America, in particular, seem to have suﬀered lost export opportunities under the mercantilist regime, which may partly explain southern support for the revolution.15 Consequently, the application of the Navigation Acts provoked mixed reactions from northern merchant classes and the plantationbased south. During the eighteenth century, many market districts had been linked into the network of the imperial economy. New York’s merchant class is a major example. However, the growth of colonial capital magniﬁed the degree of British regulation of the American economy. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, economic competition between wealthy colonial and British merchants could only occur within certain limits, due to the inﬂuence of the latter in the legislation of mercantilism. More energetic competition precipitated an even greater number of legal regulations in the instructions sent from London. Britain’s response in this period

12

Marshall, The Eighteenth Century. See Greene, Peripheries and Centers, p. 46. 14 Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, pp. 197–99. 15 “Curiously, it was in the state with most slaves—Virginia—that the aristocracy was most favourable to the Whigs, that is to the revolution, whose success it probably ensured.” (Braudel, The Perspective of the World, pp. 408–409) 13

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of crisis was intended to sustain its beneﬁcial commerce with the colonies. However, it was not just the increased volume of regulations that made the Board of Trade’s regulatory regime an issue. A qualitative shift in the awareness of regulation accompanied the upsurge in the amount of trade itself. Greater competition made the imperial export economy more visible for British and colonial merchants alike. The historical conditions of colonial economic activity illustrate the tension in the imperial constitution of the American economy and its growing colonial markets. It was also the case that mercantile regulation helped in the formation of the colonies’ internal market economies. There were market communities clustered around the bottlenecks of American exports that were part of the oﬃcial export sector and which looked favourably upon imperial connections. Merchants in Plymouth and Boston may have contested mercantile controls silently by evading them, but their New York counter-parts, and others besides, championed them. Overall, the mercantile reaction after 1763 was, in part, a measure of increased competition and of the greater leverage that colonists had within the imperial economy. Yet, its impact varied signiﬁcantly. The changing systems of taxation and regulation fuelled the separation within the colonies between those who proﬁted, or at least thought that they did, from the connection with London, and those who felt otherwise.16 Moreover, it deepened the standoﬀ between colonial assemblies and governors who supported mercantilism. Britain’s mid-century wars set the expectations of colonists at a distance from metropolitan goals.17 Perceptions and expectations diverged even more emphatically in the British colonies in the wake of the Treaty of Paris and the Stamp Act. The British gained Canada as its spoils. This brought relief to English settlers keen to gain more land and it raised their expectations of enrichment. Already imbued with the culture of frontier economy, they thought that they could reasonably expect a further aperture of the colonies’ western

16 Partiality towards the sugar and tobacco-producing islands of the Caribbean had been evident since Walpole’s ascendancy. According to Greene, where there was a clash between corporate interests in Britain and colonial interests, the former would invariably hold sway over Parliament. This intensiﬁed after the Seven Years War. See Negotiated Authorities, pp. 62–67. 17 John Shy, “The American Colonies in War and Revolution 1748–1783,” in Marshall, The Eighteenth Century.

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boundaries.18 The end of the Seven Years War might bring new wealth and a concomitant relaxation of the economic constraints inherent in mercantilism, or at least a return to the 1756 status quo ante. Behind this was a colonial impression of what the Empire was, or should be.19 The societies and institutions that colonists had developed were the political right, almost the property, of the colonial order. Taxation was the privilege of their assemblies only. In the eyes of British Americans, defence of the colonies was their responsibility up until that stage and there were few compelling reasons for that arrangement to change. In London, the view of the 1763 Treaty reﬂected a very diﬀerent impression. The chief considerations were strategic and extended over all of Britain’s imperial concerns.20 The Treaty presented an opportunity to prune the ﬁnancially stressed empire and its military forces. Metropolitan intervention in colonial aﬀairs could be reasserted. There was, moreover, a growing perception that diﬀerent parts of the empire should be ﬁrmly connected.21 An overarching imperial body could forge links between eastern and western possessions. A new and broad imperial agenda was set to serve the overall needs of Britain’s far-ﬂung territories, or at least that was the way that the new situation was understood in London. Developments after 1763 favoured London’s ambitions. Expectations had diﬀered substantially in the Thirteen Colonies on three burning issues. Going unfulﬁlled, they remained a source of antagonism for frontier settlers. Firstly, the potential of the territories in the northwest was denied to the colonists in the re-division of Ohio. The Royal Proclamation saved the Ohio Valley for its original inhabitants, an area envied by fur trappers, land speculators and other settlers.22 The decision to set the region aside was guided by a view that this was a kind of ‘no-man’s land’ due to the absence of a legal claim to it. In this instance, imperial administrators thought it their duty

18

H. V. Bowen, Elites, pp. 185–93. Eliza H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 4. 20 Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. 21 H. V. Bowen, Elites, pp. 174–78. 22 Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), chaps. 54 and 59. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, pp. 14–16. 19

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to act with benevolence towards the indigenous nations rather than in protection of the colonists’ interests.23 Secondly, the beneﬁts of Canadian markets were largely reserved for British merchants. The reconstructed empire had closed oﬀ the areas to the north and northeast desired by ambitious settlers. Finally, and most famously, London instituted the imperial prerogative to tax the colonies for their share of imperial administration and introduced a series of new taxes and further regulatory laws. Divergence of opinion was not conﬁned to the Treaty. Constitutional arguments grew.24 The parliamentary majority interpreted the relationship with the colonies through the prism of the domestic constitution. However, the lack of constitutional direction on the place of the colonies left great latitude for interpretation on the part of the imperial and parliamentary elite. The central dispute in parliamentary debates concerned whether the colonies were acquired by conquest or settled outright. Since the turn of the eighteenth century, the metropolitan view had declared that the colonies were dependent on the Empire and should remain that way.25 The question was still unresolved for the British government in the 1760s and confusion reigned amongst competing imperial authorities. Parliament, the King’s ministers and the Privy Council each entertained diﬀerent interpretations.26 In addition, it was clear to some that Britain sustained separate set of interests for its American territories and another set for its enterprises in Africa and Asia. Others added their voices to the debate by arguing for an out-and-out integration of the Empire.27 When it came to North America, Grenville as government leader was himself unambiguous about the prerogative of the monarchy, as he was also about his directions to the governors. As far as he and the Cabinet were concerned, there was no middle ground when it came to the constitutional sovereignty of the empire: imperial sovereignty reigned over that claimed by the colonial assemblies. This meant that the status of the colonies could be constitutionally remodelled to keep the powers of the assemblies in check.

23 24 25 26 27

Gould, The Persistence of Empire, pp. 59–61. Liss, Atlantic Empires, pp. 23–24. Greene, Negotiated Authorities, pp. 56–60. Greene, Peripheries and Center, chap. 2. T. H. Bowen, “British Conceptions,” pp. 16–19.

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Debate was not conﬁned to parliament and the ministerial oﬃces of the government. A groundswell of public concern informed factional alignments within the government. Ambivalence about victory in the war and generalized anxiety about imperial rule underpinned public divisions that were, in turn, reﬂected in government circles.28 On the whole, Britons had expected enhanced prosperity and territorial gains from the war. Disappointment with the Peace of Paris fuelled pressure for the cost of the war to be shared with the American colonies. The war gave Britain a sense of global supremacy and, to be sure, its imperial reach was unprecedented. The extension of its rule was new and did not stack up against prevailing conceptions of a limited and moral dominion. Many worried that the empire was over-stretched and good deal of public insecurity was channelled into disputes about the national budget. Constitutional and institutional reform set a new direction, although it did not quell the debate either in government or amongst the public. On balance, the weight of active public constituencies fell behind those who wanted a heavy handed and interventionist approach to the empire, even though this may not have amounted to full endorsement. In contrast, American views on constitutional arrangements were based on what was perceived as the enduring rights of Britons under the ancient constitution. Any perceived encroachment on them was ranked metropolitan despotism. Such complaints were reminiscent of seventeenth-century expressions of disquiet, which had also concerned ﬁscal matters and liberties. Around the time of the 1660 Restoration and the 1688 Revolution, Anglo-Americans had deliberated on their status as provincials. They considered themselves English and viewed events in Britain as critical to the development of the colonies. AngloAmericans accustomed to the constitutional notions of natural right and Common Law precedent saw in their own institutions, customs and historical practices a part of an undeclared imperial constitution in which the relationship was cast diﬀerently. Throughout the eighteenth century, colonists had sought a ‘regular’ constitution from London.29 They were steadfast in the point of departure with metro-

28 Koehn, The Power of Commerce, chap. 5. Comparisons with the fate of Rome were symptomatic of imperial ambivalence. Gibbon was prompted to start his famous magnum opus on the rise and decline of the Roman Empire only a year after the Peace of Paris. 29 Greene, Peripheries and Center, chap. 3.

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politan authorities: they were English and therefore governed their own aﬀairs by right. Their perceptions sharpened after the Seven Years War. The growth of the colonies conferred a sense that their status was also growing. This seemed to them to be historically conﬁrmed in their internal tax regime, which had never been challenged by parliament or the Crown. In the wake of the expensive war with France, it was under threat from taxes imposed from without that might over-run the ﬁscal capacities of colonial society. This appeared to Americans as fundamental and constitutional as the question of whether they could be taxed without parliamentary representation seemed to go to the foundation of their societies.30 The conﬂict of interests in the British Empire became more apparent in what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a decade “of acceleration of conﬂict, or raising of the decibels.”31 This did not merely raise the stakes in political debate within the colonies; it also led to more intense actions on the part of colonists against the empire. The agents of the British Empire, and indeed the colonists themselves, were driven to opposing poles. Politics developed a gruﬀ, high-pitched rhetoric that set republicans and loyalists at an even greater distance from one another. Millennialism added to the shrill pitch of debate.32 The 1763 Treaty exempliﬁed the tensions that were intrinsic to the imperial state. The Treaty moved British statesmen to pursue in full an oceanic empire.33 However, colonists imagined that they would acquire more land. Their vision was one of a territorial empire, their own lands that were separate from the British imperium, which was 30

Ibid., chap. 5. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, p. 203. 32 Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty, Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Liss, Atlantic Empires, pp. 43–45. But see also Melvin B. Endy, “Just War, Holy War,” William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1 January 1985): 3–25. Endy argues that clerical support for the Revolution was couched in the worldly terms of a ‘just war’ rather than a strictly millennial language of a holy crusade. On the place of the so-called enthusiasts as a current in the revolutionary movement that was separate from Whig inﬂuence, see David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 11. 33 Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire, in Daniels Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. But compare with T. H. Bowen, “British Conceptions,” who argues that the logic of imperial expansion led to a territorial empire spanning diverse regions of the world. In his view, the orientation of British statesmen from Pitt onwards was to a global territorial empire. 31

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oceanic and stopped at the shores of North America. This collision of plans and hopes had longer-term roots in the structure and direction of the British imperial state. Indeed there were portents of imperial restructuring in pre-1756 initiatives.34 The 1750 Iron Act, 1752 Currency Act and the ordinance that royal governors in the colonies were responsible to the Board of Trade were intended to check the inﬂuence of colonial legislatures. However, with the Treaty of Paris those tensions became tangible in London’s re-conception of the Empire. Of course, Britain’s American empire was still at the peak of its prosperity. Growth in British American trade, in British manufacturing and in British exports of capital was a sign of its economic ascendancy.35 But this success did little to diminish colonial divisions; in fact it may have exacerbated them. It was becoming more apparent to the government in London that colonial privileges and indemnities did not serve its interests. International competition of a military and economic nature, and opposition in the Thirteen Colonies acted on the process by which decisions were made. The 1760s decade of accelerated conﬂict found its crucible in the North Americas. Bourbon determination to restore Spain to its former position crystallized at this time, in this context. Early proposals only addressed matters of reorganizing the top administrative apparatus, the navy and imperial commerce.36 They aimed to reduce the breadth of Spanish imperial responsibility, relieving it of ﬁnancial and military burdens.37 It was an attempt to increase metropolitan control over the spheres of regulation of colonial administration, communications, transportation, production and distribution. In the Americas, the imperial project of re-centralization was applied to already-consolidated viceregal jurisdictions in which municipal and judicial autonomies had some lingering vitality and constituted a sphere of Creole admin34

Liss, Atlantic Empires, pp. 15–16. Engerman, “Mercantilism and Overseas Trade 1700–1800,” in Flood and McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain. 36 Liss, Atlantic Empires, p. 48. 37 Jacques Barbier poses administrative expansion and commercial liberalization at the end of the eighteenth century as a continuation of patterns of state formation in the Indies. They represented continuity insomuch as they maintained American dependence on Spanish if not European markets. In this sense they were not radical innovations. See “The Culmination of the Bourbon Reforms” Hispanic American Historical Review 57, no. 1 (1977). On the content of the reforms, see Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, pp. 79–83. 35

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istration. The formation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1739 and then the Viceroyalty of La Plata in 1776 streamlined those jurisdictions and were recognition of new economic and political realities. It was also a move to diminish the inﬂuence of the Creole-dominated audiencia in Lima. Inadvertently, this stoked merchant and administrative elites in Buenos Aires. Thus, the assertive regulationist principles of the absolutist Spanish empire were slightly oﬀset by informal colonial rule, the mercantile economy and colonial black markets. Madrid’s institutional overhaul addressed colonial autonomy in the Americas. The centrepiece of reform in Spain was a system of intendancy.38 Salaried bureaucrats answered to Secretariats of State, Treasury Justice, the military and Navy and the Indies. The reforms took hold in Spain, but were delayed in the Americas. Division within government in Madrid stymied the introduction of intendants into the American viceroyalties until the 1780s. In the 1760s a crucial step was taken. Bourbon minister and ideologue Jose de Campillo had conceived a program of reform that included the visita general (inspection) and the appointment of regional intendants with sweeping powers. A number of visitations occurred in the 1760s. The vistadores seized the authority to implement immediate changes, swinging the balance of decision-making towards the Crown’s agents. But the problem of controlling the viceregal apparatus and exerting authority over the institutions of the colonial order remained. Until the 1760s, there were too many senior peninsular oﬃcials who lived oﬀ the repartimiento de comercio. Unable to scrap the corruption, Spain’s government demanded that traded goods be priced and that tariﬀs on those goods be collected by paid oﬃcials, of course, even though this met with only limited success.

38 These comments draw on Brading’s “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, pp. 394–409; Liss, Atlantic Empires, pp. 55–58; John Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America; and McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, pp. 90–91. In the case of colonial Mexico, eighteenth century Bourbon reform brought a reversal of the bureaucratization of colonial oﬃces. The empire abandoned the principle of salaried payment of district magistrates—the alcaldes mayores and the corregidores—and converted their oﬃce into an unpaid one. Previously, the pay had been poor. Now, the magistrates were dependent on trade in the repartimiento economy or on “the meagre fruits of justice.” As a result oﬃce holders began to perceive their oﬃces as personal prebends. See David A. Brading, “Government and Elite in Late Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 53 (1973).

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One fruitful outcome of the Bourbon strategy was the salaried appointment of oﬃcials to lower levels of administration. The payment of a salary to the alcabalas (who administered treasury collection and transportation) spread between the 1750s and 1770s throughout Mexico and Peru. Squads of armed guards were a sign of their growing prestige; ﬁgures who were also on the viceregal payroll. The reorganization produced a marked improvement in imperial ﬁnances. Reform therefore demarcated peninsular elites who identiﬁed themselves more directly with the court state and whose fortunes were less dependent on the networks of exchange in the large cities and their surrounding catchment areas. Increasingly, military men accustomed to a chain of command were appointed.39 Where the repartimiento had encouraged oﬃcials to entrench themselves in a local economy, salaried income combined with ﬁscal measures tied to exports linked them with trade activity. Ideology also separated the Bourbon-cultivated elites from the colonial order. A perception of rationality derived from the Spanish ilustracion guided innovation. Meanwhile, those same innovations were viewed more and more by Creole leaders as incursions on local autonomy. The judicial language of the empire’s constitution spoken by Bourbon ministers betrayed a diﬀerent attitude to the Americas. Creole-Americans had grown accustomed to thinking of themselves as part of a transatlantic empire, the ‘Universal Monarchy’. Spanish oﬃcials spoke increasingly and incessantly of an empire now divested of its European territories, as divided between the ‘metropolis’ and the ‘colonies’. The ideological and linguistic shift was important, especially given the purposeful and programmatic character of the Bourbon interlude in Spain’s imperial state building. The program of reforms was a response to two coextensive developments. Firstly, the increase in the seemingly ubiquitous contraband trade in the Americas and the more vociferous presence of Creole interests in colonial institutions formed the context in which the reforms appeared necessary. The ﬁnal return on intra-imperial trade was consistently and severely cut by the repartimiento and smuggling. Forging a layer of supra-provincial oﬃcials attacked the repartimiento head on. It also introduced an additional stratum of overseers into colonial society.

39

McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, pp. 96–97.

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Secondly, increased inter-imperial competition weakened Spain, opening the Atlantic seaboard to British and French monopolies. Bourbon Spain could have responded by shoring up its mercantilist trade. But, the growth of contraband trading had undermined its mercantile regulations for much of the century. Caught between the strain placed on the mercantile economy by smuggling and pressure from the British to unshackle inter-imperial trade, Madrid elected to loosen its relationship to its possessions. Colonial commerce was opened up in 1765 as part of a program to remove the incentives of the black market.40 The liberalization of trade and the opening of ports to intra-colonial commerce were generally opposed by merchants in the Americas who had beneﬁted from the pre-Caroline monopoly on trade and proﬁted from smuggling. Cadiz and Seville lost their monopoly status in 1765 and Spanish ports were permitted open communication with each other and the American colonies. Subsequently the pace of trade accelerated for the colonies; between 1778 and 1788 one estimate suggests that the sum of Spanish American exports increased by seven hundred percent.41 So why did the breakdown in monopolized trade lead to opposition? Monopoly had united the diﬀerent provinces of the empire with Madrid and it provided economic security and even a spur to development. The renewal of commercial restrictions reﬂected a new perception amongst court state oﬃcials. The colonies were now vibrant economic entities in and of themselves. Nonetheless, their purpose had not changed. In 1778 Gaspar de Jovellanos expressed this view well: “Colonies are useful in so far as they oﬀer a secure market for the surplus production of the metropolis.”42 A further innovation—the creation of joint-stock companies—was a source of greater antagonism between peninsular and Creole communities in the Americas.43 Joint-stock companies replaced the mercantile ﬁrms that had dominated monopoly trade in Seville and Cadiz. They were not new monopolies, but privileged ﬁrms. Tax concessions gave them an exercisable advantage in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. Some monopoly companies continued to exist,

40

Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, pp. 129–35; and Herr, Spain, p. 61. McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, p. 93. 42 Cited in Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, p. 15. 43 Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, pp. 338–40. 41

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but their operations faltered. Joint stock companies adapted to changing regulations more readily. Of course, both the regulations and the companies were intended to be vehicles of supervision for the court state. They played a far greater role in colonial life than the Habsburg monopolies and their personnel gradually gained a substantial place in colonial administration, even in institutions that were relatively independent. Their weight in the economic hinterlands was a mark of peninsular inﬂuence and a source of growing Creole resentment, even while trade with other colonies was bringing material beneﬁts. The chosen strategy of the Bourbons for the reconsolidation of the Atlantic empire was a particular form of centralism designed around the expansion of monarchical bureaucracy. Apart from the restructuring of the imperial court apparatus, Madrid attempted to signiﬁcantly alter the composition of colonial government personnel. The appointment of Creole and even indigenous servants to magisterial oﬃce was fairly common. This trend continued during the early Bourbon years, until Charles III instituted the program of recentralization in the 1760s. Filling colonial oﬃces with peninsular personnel displaced some Creole and native civil servants and barred other aspirants to higher oﬃce. Their traditional paths to government were increasingly blocked; the purchase of oﬃces became a less common practice and their appointment to the positions of intendencia and oidor rare.44 Redirection of the empire in the second half of the eighteenth century brought to light the partial exclusion of Creoles. Increased centralization of administrative decisions and the displacement of Creole administrators were designed to tighten a ﬂagging imperial economy. Within a given set of parameters, these measures could be regarded as successful. Re-centralization, the lynchpin of liberal reform, provoked the opposition of Creole oﬃcials whose political position was weakened by the formation of an intendant apparatus staﬀed chieﬂy by Europeans. Re-centralization provoked greater ethnic rivalry between Creoles and peninsulares that impacted on all: merchants, traders, ecclesiastics, lawyers, judges, rulers. Comparison of imperial re-division in the British and Spanish Americas at this point can throw light on critical diﬀerences. The imperial resurgence in the British Empire was, in important ways,

44

Leon Campbell, “A Colonial Establishment,” pp. 18–19.

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characterized by diﬀerent results. In British North America, the post1763 reforms galvanized pre-existing tensions, but in a new context. The strategic and economic importance of the Thirteen Colonies increased after the Seven Years War. This was recognized, after the fall of Pitt, in the Grenville reforms.45 The opposition in the Thirteen Colonies to more active imperial intervention was unmistakably more diﬀerentiated than in the Indies. Consequently, colonial institutions of legislative authority struggled to maintain their purchase on their powerful and autonomous institutions, while London attempted to shape a program of recentralization. By contrast, the corresponding process in the Spanish Indies marginalized Creole-dominated colonial inﬂuence and opposition and strengthened the peninsular-dominated court state apparatus in the viceroyalties themselves. It advanced the court state’s authority through direct institutional reform and innovation. What prompted Madrid to pursue this path of recentralization was its inability to control colonial production and trade and its declining position in the interstate system. Reform was therefore a product of relative demise, rather than ascendancy. Britain’s position in the global competition of European empires after the Seven Years War was one of unprecedented strength. With Britain soaring and Spain in decline, the respective economic fortunes of the two empires followed suit.46 Britain continued to beneﬁt greatly from its mercantile institutions. Conversely, Spanish America was beginning to prove costly for Madrid. The American possessions drove an expansion of an expensive administration at a time when the proﬁts of mercantile privileges were falling, even though the level of trade clearly wasn’t.47 The fate of transatlantic empires in the midlate eighteenth century period rested with the success each had in trying to forge new institutions that could maintain the pattern of power in changing circumstances.

45

Tucker and Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire, pp. 109–14. John Lynch, “British Policy and Spanish America 1783–1808,” Journal of Latin American Studies 1, no. 1 (1969). 47 Jacques Barbier outlines the eﬀects of the decline of Spanish mercantilism in “Peninsular Finance and Colonial Trade: The Dilemma of Charles IV’s Spain,” Journal of Latin American Studies 12, no. 1 (1980). 46

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An emphasis falls in this short chapter on international pressures on the Euro-American empires and how the rivalry of states impacted upon the tension of imperial state formation. The principal purpose in these pages is to set out how the tensions of empire were made tangible through the clash of post-war aspirations in British and Spanish America. In the re-aligned international context, the lack of harmony between metropolitan intentions and colonial demands and actions echoed in opposing perspectives on how Empire should be conﬁgured. Republican decampment did not appear inevitable to anyone embroiled in the political turmoil of the late eighteenth century.48 But the shape of a colonial order that the imperial apparatus confronted was more deﬁned. It held vital instruments of administration in Anglo-American and was resurgent in the Spanish-American viceroyalties. Meanwhile, the institutional contours of London and Madrid’s overarching structures were re-structured as part of revisioned programs of state-building. The growth of the colonial order drew responses from reform minded imperial statesmen and the programs of reform were intended to tackle its institutional powers head on. But the latter were more alert than ever to the interests of competitors. This became a recipe for collision. The next chapter steps aside from the international focus. I proceed on to examine the American Revolution and the rise of Latin American republics The next stage in this comparative analysis has a separate purpose: to explore their contexts and historical signiﬁcance.

48 In contrast, Marc Egnal argues that in the British North American colonies a faction of the upper class committed to expansionist development crystallized well before 1763. Its patriotic determination was a critical force in the logic of revolutionary transformation in the North. See A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER NINE

‘RAISING THE DECIBELS’: REPUBLICAN REVOLUTIONS OF THE COLONIAL ORDER How republican states emerged and how they varied with one another is the topic of this chapter. From the War of Spanish Succession through to the end of the Napoleonic adventure, Western states were engaged in ﬁerce world-wide rivalry. International relations in the Atlantic zone between extended polities conditioned the extent to which colonial communities could govern themselves. The discussion now focuses on the contexts of politics in the British and Spanish Americas and the transformation of the social and economic structures that sustained modern republican traditions. This breaks down into two problematics. Firstly, subjectivities cultivated in the New World underscored competing imperial and republican loyalties. All political coalitions depended on shared experiences of life in the Americas. But ultimately, diﬀerent commitments were made voluntarily and it is diﬃcult to explain the development of a rich spectrum of opinion solely by reference to colonial subjectivity. The pattern of pro-empire and pro-republican allegiance is dealt with under the headings of proto-nationalism and the colonial condition. Secondly, I consider the relationship of social and economic conditions to civic and political traditions that were in the process of forming in the late eighteenth century. Two sub-themes organize this part of the chapter. Colonial public spheres emerged and were the sites of republican traditions. None were a tabula rasa and existing political alignments weighed on Anglo and Spanish American minds. However, in the Spanish case, ethnic stratiﬁcation of colonial communities intersected with other social, economic and political divisions to limit the horizon of political possibility. A ﬁnal discussion of the character and content of the revolutions of the Anglo and Hispanic American colonial order arises from this. Little is said about French America. Nor is the Caribbean area a large part of the picture. This book stops at the 1820s. Canada’s independence still had some time to wait, although the regroupment

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of the British American Empire around possessions in the Caribbean and the acquisition of Canada deserves a pause for reﬂection. Also, colonies of the British and the French Antilles were held long after the rest of America left the imperial fold. Any far-reaching explanations of republican departures from the Atlantic empires must acknowledge the fact that Canada was reformed as a British colony and that the Caribbean colonies were not overthrown. The spectacular exception is Haiti and there is a section on that revolt. Its roots in local conditions and in Jacobin republicanism are discussed against a backdrop of the shifting philosophy of empire before and after the French Revolution. Otherwise, the French case is not as prominent in these passages. Proto-nationalism and the tension of state formation The crystallization of opposing loyalties in the colonies has been interpreted as the portents of nationalist causes waiting to emerge. Conventional historiographic wisdom on the wars of Latin American independence and the 1776 Revolution has been inﬂuenced by nineteenth century national histories.1 They explain imperial disintegration by reference primarily to the rise of nationalism as a driving-force of independence. The presumption that the movements for independence were nationalist has rested at the core of long-standing historiographic explanation. This section examines the implications of nationalist historiography and proposes a more theoretically nuanced view. Following Eric Hobsbawn’s notion of proto-nationalism, the current argument aims to set colonial political divisions in historical perspective in order to highlight the limited eﬀect nationalist sentiments had. This prepares the ground for a later analysis of the character of the revolutions of independence can begin. On the face of it, there seems to be good reasons why explanation of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutions should 1 Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 22–23, 277–80. On Latin American historiography, see Joseph A. Barager, “The Historiography of the Rio de La Plata area since 1830,” Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 1 (1959). See also vol. 40 of the same journal for a series of surveys of regional historiography. For a bibliographical review of literature on the early nineteenth century revolutions, see Robert Humphreys, “The Historiography of the Spanish American Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 36, no. 1 (1956).

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hinge on nationalism. The articulation of nationalist ideas expressed the consolidation of notions of independence in the revolutionary period. However, the assumption that independence in the Americas was ﬁred by nationalism is too imprecise and one-sided.2 The social, economic and cultural conditions that characterized the spread of nationalist sentiment in the old world in the second half of the nineteenth century did not have exact American equivalents at this time. Governed as they were by distant metropolitan elites, Americans projected distinct and indeed competing loyalties not easily subsumed under the heading of nationalism. Many historians have re-evaluated old world nationalism. It is now described as a mass phenomenon of the last two centuries to distinguish it from the identiﬁcation of the elites of state with the central monarchy.3 Nationalism is seen as the form of mass identity of national communities in order to delineate it with any theoretical clarity from antecedent complexes of understanding and identity.

2 American historians began to utilize a new language to describe the events and politics of the eighteenth century in the 1970s. In her historiography, Linda Kerber charts this shift by linking it with the context of contemporary events that indirectly inform the language of recent historical scholarship in the US: A new label has been devised in the last decade; the modest phrase ‘early republic’ is not much more descriptive, but it is richer in nuance. Aggressive nationalism has come to seem somewhat less important to an understanding of the early American political system than does then widely shared sense that Americans were engaged in a republican experiment. Substitution of ‘republican’ for ‘national’ in the historians’ lexicon may have had some relationship to a growing distaste, among people writing in the midst of the Vietnam conﬂict, for nationalism as a non-perjorative explanatory device. But it also owes much to an enlarged sensitivity to and respect for words as carriers of culture, and to a respect for ideology as an authentic expression of political situation and cultural condition. (“The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 [1985]: 474) 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966); Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism. Francois-Xaviar Guerra charts a course between Anthony Smith’s thesis of the primordial impulse of nationalism and Anderson’s hyper-modernity of nationalism with a notion of the nation as imaginary. See Modernidad e Independencias. This argument has some aﬃnity with Shmuel Eisenstadt’s sociological assessment of the debate on nationalism. Eisenstadt marks out a third perspective between primordialist and modernist positions and emphasizes factors of trust, solidarity and the social construction of boundaries between groups. In the era of nation state, these aﬃnities are articulated into nationalist versions of collectivitism. See “The Construction of Collective Identities in Latin America: Beyond the European Nation-State Model,” in Roniger and Sznajder, Constructing Collective Identities.

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In the American context, the politics of independence addressed a terrain of imperial and colonial loyalties and identities. Contestatory national identities were, in a sense, present. Indeed, they can be characterized as the ‘proto-national bonds’ of consociation, the basis of ‘popular proto-nationalism’. This is the working notion of Eric Hobsbawn’s theory of nationalism. His departure from the conventional historiography of nationalism rests on the proposition that ethnicity does not form the sole basis of nationalist sentiment. Nationalist movements mobilize and transform pre-existing ethnic loyalties as well as other traditions (such as language and religion).4 Ethnicity was one of “certain variants of feelings of collective belonging which already existed and which could operate . . . on the macro-political scale.”5 However, conﬂating proto-national bonds with macro-political mass nationalisms of nineteenth century Europe is conceptually misleading. In Hispanic America, nationalism was not clearly formed and articulated in the early nineteenth century. It was only well after the revolutions of independence had occurred that mass nationalism found fertile ground in the new Latin American republics.6 In the British north, national identity was more signiﬁcant. Yet, in the postrevolutionary period, the important questions issue from the conﬂict between a range of republican and federalist visions of government. Strictly speaking, it was debates over the constitution and diﬀerent plans for a federal polity that deﬁned politics after the revolution. While a national form did take shape, the ubiquitous nationalism of socio-culturally coherent national communities did not take root in the Americas until well into the nineteenth century. Another reason to be cautious about past claims that ﬂourishing nationalism caused the republican revolts is the stubborn fact that the British and French empires survived and re-divided. A pause for reﬂection on why the colonies in Canada and the Caribbean remained

4 Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism, chap. 2. See also Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), pp. 48–50 for a clarifying discussion of the literature. 5 Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism, p. 46. 6 For a critique of Anderson’s theory of nationalism that draws on the Latin American experience, see Claudio Lomnitz, “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America,” in Miguel Angel Centano and Fernando Lopez-Alves, eds., The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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which serves to qualify the analysis of the Empire prior to 1763 and shed further light of the speciﬁcity of the North American revolution.7 Elizabeth Mancke summarizes recent critical research on Canadian and United States history and introduces some vital correctives to received views on the nationalist break-up of the British Empire. I will brieﬂy review her argument here.8 She contrasts the responses of American settlers and Canadian colonists to circumstances after the Seven Years War. While republican-minded Americans chafed under assertive Crown intervention, Canadians largely acquiesced to their new rulers. After loyalist resettlement following the War of Independence, political debate in Canada did not revolve around independence or autonomy, but on the distribution of power within a strong apparatus that remained unchallenged.9 There are two sides to Mancke’s explanation as to why this was the case. The ﬁrst is the character of imperial governance before and after the American Revolution. Canada during the revolutionary era fell to a British imperial regime that was able to hold it together and was more attuned to close superintendence of its colonies. English involvement in the seventeenth century had taken the form of settlement and medium range expansion of existing colonies. The eighteenth century necessitated imperial strategies of commercial occupation of apparently ‘empty’ lands and diplomatic agreements with other powers to govern over larger and more sparsely populated territories. This state of aﬀairs seemed to call for greater stability in the existing colonies. Newly acquired possessions that followed the Treaty of Utrecht (Acadia, Nova Scotia) were familiar with imperial government, but could not be closely supervised. They were thinly populated, as 7 Andrew O’Shaughnessy mounts a systematically-developed case that settlers in the British Caribbean were, at root, loyal to the Empire, despite the appearance of low-level agitation in their legislatures. See An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 8 Elizabeth Mancke, “Early Modern Imperial Governance and the Origins of Canadian Political Culture,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 3–20; “Another British America: A Canadian Model for the Early Modern British Empire,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 1 ( January 1997): 1–36. On the more speciﬁc involvement of British Canadian colonies in the War of Independence, see Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 311–15. Meinig stresses the sincerity of motives of Canadians at this time, a factor that he believes has been taken too lightly. 9 On this point, see also David Milobar, “Conservative Ideology, Metropolitan Government, and the Reform of Quebec, 1782–1791,” International Historical Review 12, no. 1 (February 1990).

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were all Canadian regions and the Floridas acquired after the Seven Years War. Therefore, sustaining political power was the priority and cultural and religious diﬀerences were tolerated to a greater extent.10 This amounted to a diﬀerent imperial strategy for British Canada before and after the American Revolution. The other side of the explanation has to do with the varying traditions of colonial government, the structure of the colonial order in a manner of speaking. This is discussed in detail in this and previous chapters. Some brief comments from Mancke will add to my analysis. The colonies in Canada were accustomed to centralist French rule, even where a de facto autonomy had existed west of the Laurentine settlements of Quebec and Montreal. By contrast, the English colonies of the north-eastern coastline held in common autonomous self-government on which they had been founded. To put this more simply, there was less privatism in the establishment of the Canadian settlements. Consequently, there was less inclination to launch a more sustained and far-reaching challenge to the imperial order in the manner that the Americans of the eastern seaboard had. Indeed, there was a ready acceptance of imperial rule, aside from some agitation amongst newly settled Anglo-Americans in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec for a share of assembly representation. This combination of post-1763 imperial arrangements with the colonial heritage produced a diﬀerent political landscape in Canada. The proposition in the traditional historiography of the American Revolution—which was unquestioned until recently—that the decisive factor was forceful British administration can now be set aside for a more nuanced explanation that captures the variability of institutional and economic arrangements and pre-existing political culture. Mancke’s work summarizes the critical research amassed around this view. It calls for a comparative methodology and the conclusion that is most salient to the current argument is that the speciﬁc conditions of the Thirteen Colonies were vital. If the revolutionary episodes of North and Hispanic America are compared, this becomes even clearer. Any thorough assessment of the conjuncture of America’s revolutions should single out the republican political culture of the British North Americas and its institutional context as a highly distinctive factor. Diﬀerent political postures struck by settlers in the 10

See also Bayly, Imperial Meridian, pp. 93–95.

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Thirteen Colonies had a unique bearing on the development of an independent state in North America. Hence, in Anglo-America, republicanism ﬁgured prominently in the process of revolution itself. Republican ideas featured in the revolts in the Spanish Indies, but the political culture generated in the crucible of conﬂict was not itself republicanized. The degree of social consociation of the tight knit communities of the Thirteen Colonies and the public sphere that they constructed had only fragile equivalents in the Spanish Indies. The ground for bourgeois democratic republicanism was not as fertile. This discussion of republicanism and the end of the British and Spanish empires can now be broken down into three themes that structure much of the rest of this chapter preceding the analysis of America’s revolutions. One was common to both empires. The other two were points of comparative departure. First of all, settler communities lived in the Creole condition of being caught between European and indigenous civilizations. In the Spanish Indies this cultivated a fear of indigenous revolt amongst Spanish-Americans. In British North America it forced a cleavage between loyalist and republican camps. The economic and social institutional settings of political debate and discussion that constituted the public sphere in the north are a second crucial theme, one where there is a clear divergence between Hispanic and Anglo-America. Finally, ethnic divisions amongst non-indigenous Spanish Americans acted as an impulse to the formation of republican states in the Spanish Indies. The troubled Creole condition: caught between diﬀerent worlds Spanish Americans held the perception that both the Scylla of indigenous revolt and the Charybdis of overbearing metropolitan rule threatened them. In the Spanish Indies, the tumults of the late eighteenth century provoked fear in the three million strong Creole population. Slave and Indian rebellions spoke a language of loyalty to Madrid that issued from past imperial interventions that had partly attempted to improve their conditions of life. Creole fears of indigenous revolt strengthened sentiments for independence. Reaction against Madrid’s liberal legislation on slaves and Indians fanned this fear. Exasperation at imperial reforms that provided some protection for the indigenous classes motivated many to consider greater independence. On the other side of the Atlantic, Madrid had its own motives

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for administrative and legislative reform, which included maintaining stability in the colonies. However, its rationale for maintaining control over the vast apparatus of the imperial state brought it into conﬂict with self-assertive colonial institutions. The ambivalence of Creole communities in relation to the empire was heightened by the policies of the Spanish ilustracion on nonCreole communities. The political conﬂicts played out in imperial administration and legislation in the eighteenth century had reinforced metropolitan control and aggravated Creole grievances. Settler resentment towards the Caroline resurgence was tempered by the fear of indigenous insurgency, especially after the rebellion of Tupac Amaru and the fall of Haiti.11 Both sets of sentiments—fear of insurgency and colonial disaﬀection—became motives for independence in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain that precipitated the decline of the empire. Apprehension and agitation then transformed Creole constituencies into a movement for separation. Such fears certainly did exist on the English-American frontier, but they had little eﬀect on the disposition of colonial settlements towards London. Most urbanized British Americans saw themselves as distant from any indigenous ‘threat’. Attempts to systematically evangelize in native communities were abandoned from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, around the time that Protestant Reformer settlers in Ireland gave up their zeal for conversion.12 They had successfully decimated many native tribes to the east of the Appalachians. Others fell prey to forced resettlement. Moreover, the conquest of northern indigenes was a longer, later and more drawn out process predominantly carried by the republican state. The impact of fear of indigenous nations was less during the colonial era. Colonial North America exhibited another level of ambivalence. An overarching belief held by Americans that, as Britons, they possessed full liberties guaranteed by the ancient Saxon constitution did nothing to problematize imperial rule prior to 1763. However, this sort of identity could accommodate considerable ambivalence in

11

Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” pp. 31–40. Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini explain the profound impact of Tupac Amaru’s movement by reference to the power of the myth of Inkarra in Peruvian society. See “The Construction of a Colonial Imaginary: Columbus’ Signature,” Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, pp. 70–76. 12 Canny, Kingdom and Colony, p. 113.

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changed circumstances. Anglo-American understanding of colonial self-government splintered into diﬀerent camps of loyalty, conservatism and radicalism after imperial reform began. In the colonial order, settlers maintained divergent opinions on the relationship with London while at the same time protecting their perceived loss of common liberties. Prior to the Seven Years War, colonists were often unconcerned about imperial economic regulation, or were alternatively more interested in appropriating trading monopolies. Further to this, even in the political machinations of colonial and imperial government, they were often dependent on imperial administration for sanction to act, or even to call representative institutions to session.13 At times, some settler communities quite resoundingly echoed the imperial interpretation of the colonial constitution, even after London reforms. After 1764, the mercantilist resurgence created divisions that revolved around the axis of the politics of independence. Grievances accumulated in the wake of the Seven Years War exacerbated by greater regulation, extra-colonial taxes and British disdain for the provincials.14 They served to exacerbate growing rifts of opinion in the Thirteen Colonies. Perceived hardship fertilized the ground on which feeling for and against independence could grow. Independence was a question that divided colonial society. This divide itself splintered into a series of discernible perspectives. Some were conservative, others were more nuanced. There were moderate views and there were those with more radical objectives. Two general types of conservative response were provoked: outright loyalty to the empire and loyalty to a moderate agenda of independence. The main feature of the moderate program was the tempering of non-aristocratic popular ambitions. Loyalty to the empire for many wealthy colonists was steered by fear of popular mobilization of the independence movement and its possible long-term consequences. On the other hand, there were also those who thought that cutting the umbilical cord with Britain would not beneﬁt them and might place them on a spiral of downward mobility.

13

The unstable history of the Virginia assembly is illustrative of this more general problem. See Bliss, Revolution and Empire, pp. 29–31; and Jack P. Greene, “The Attempt to Separate the Oﬃces of Speaker and Treasurer in Virginia 1758–66,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities. 14 On the contempt of British oﬃcers for Anglo-American provincials as a factor in rising discontent, see F. Anderson, The Crucible of War, chap. 15.

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This “Toryism of the Left” was the other type of allegiance which the independence movement gave rise to.15 In the late 1760s, some leaders entertained a confederalist solution. Jeﬀerson was among them, although he described it as the existing constitutional arrangement that Parliament was in deﬁance of.16 Republican currents were surfacing by this time, although they utilized a language of British identity. The movement to independence was buttressed by a heritage that was Gothicist and Saxonite.17 Interpreted in American conditions this gave one strain of colonial political culture an image of primordial English nationhood that was lost in the Empire. In this line of thinking, Anglo-Saxon liberty could only be preserved in America and only through independence. In these ways, the intricate political conﬂict over American identity, sovereignty, autonomy and independence was prompted by debates amongst colonists engaged in colonial government. The conﬂict between shades of loyalism and republicanism took place in a public sphere that was itself republicanized by the overall process of revolution. The northern public sphere—the Atlantic economy of commerce A robust public sphere formed in Anglo-America in the eighteenth century.18 Its settings were urban. The vitality of economic life in colonial America buttressed this development. Behind America’s vibrant economy was a privileged relationship with British commerce.19 London, Bristol and Liverpool constituted a hub of trade by the late seventeenth century. The coalescence of capitalist social relations in English agriculture and commerce compelled revolutionary merchant interests to embroil themselves in American markets. The settler centres of the Atlantic seaboard and Caribbean colonies were, to varying degrees, integrated early into the dynamics

15

Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, p. 238. Gould, The Persistence of Empire, pp. 134–36. 17 Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600 –1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 261–76. 18 See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgois Society (London: Polity Press, 1989); and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 19 See James F. Shepard, “British American and the Atlantic Economy,” in Ronald Hoﬀman, ed., The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period 1763–1790 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1988). 16

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of expanding Atlantic capitalism.20 Within the British North American colonies, demographic density and the proximity of city-based markets to each other enabled a more far-reaching integration of economic networks than elsewhere on the continent. Boston, New York, Salem and Philadelphia and their economic catchments produced a substantial nexus of market economic life,21 in spite of their diﬀerent relationships to London’s export mercantilism. Commercial milieux connected to imperial trade existed in the four cities.22 The weight of merchant interests was heavy in all of them, although this in no way would govern where the loyalties of each city would fall in the crisis of the 1770s. Their incorporation into major trading routes in the Atlantic network guaranteed vibrant economic and social expansion. Growth in exports and imports extended the links with European states, although the impact of expanding trade was uneven.23 British North America generated rival communities that competed not just for intra-colonial markets, but also within diﬀerent levels of economy. New York was home to the colonial export market, while Boston and Philadelphia mainly accommodated local markets. Market formation also cultivated the bonds of colonial identity through the creation of diﬀerentiated communities. These could distinguish themselves from each other and their interests from others. Above all, it was easy to perceive that their particular city contained a distinct set of markets. Commerce gave them something in common with each other, and set them up in social relationships of inter-dependence and reciprocity. This could only but succour colonial consciousness. In the Thirteen Colonies, political contention, discussion and conﬂict were carried out in the colonial public sphere. The emergence of

20 Jacob Price, “The Transatlantic Economy,” in Greene and Pole, Colonial British History. 21 Donald Meinig portrays a Greater New England that was culturally Puritan and economically centered on Boston. The latter competed with ports at Salem, New Haven, New London, Providence and Portsmouth. Boston remained the main gateway servicing Massachusetts. See The Shaping of America, pp. 100–109. See also Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity: Massachusetts Merchants 1670–1780 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America 1743–1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955). Richard Sheridan drew early attention to the vitality of North American colonial economies with “The Domestic Economy,” in Greene and Pole, Colonial British History. 22 Meinig, The Shaping of America, pp. 317–19. 23 Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, pp. 16–18.

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the printed word and its constitution of diﬀerent public spheres were distinctive.24 The close relationship between communications networks and printing houses produced a privileged position for the newspaper and for the ‘printer-journalists’. Journalists could command many aspects of the production process and were in a crucial location in the ﬂow of public information. Furthermore, their importance was augmented in the years prior to the Revolution as pamphleteering and broadside production provided more forums for public formation.25 Newspapers and smaller productions carried political commentaries, histories, testimonials, legal tracts, local controversies, letters and polemics. Anglo-Americans, who were well schooled in a classical education,26 eagerly read those publications and conversed in a wider political discourse about morals. A vibrant middle-class discussion took place in a rich transatlantic circuit of periodicals. Some titles had emerged in England and France as early as the mid-seventeenth century and were found in the libraries of many Anglo-Americans of diverse opinion.27 These fora of the public sphere were not monopolized by any one perspective or political interest. The prevalence of loyalist and republican articles and publications, in all their respective shades of opinion, is testament to the relatively open character of the eighteenth century public. 24 Benedict Anderson cites ﬁgures from Lucien Febvre which demonstrate phenomenal growth in American print: “Between 1691 and 1820, no less than 2,120 ‘newspapers’ were published, of which 461 lasted more than ten years.” This ﬁgure would appear to include pamphlets and ‘broadsides’ also. By the mid-eighteenth century the media seems to have begun consolidating itself. Between 1763 and 1775 the number of colonial newspapers in constant circulation more than doubled from 23 to 58. The number of places that they were published nearly doubled from 15 to 26. Between 1764 and 1783, Bailyn notes that 335 printers operated in 77 diﬀerent places in the colonies. On the unique character of American print capitalism, see Imagined Communities, pp. 61–62 and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London: New Left Books, 1976). On pamphlets and the media, see Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 7–10. For statistics on the growth of publishing, publishers and print see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Some Statistics on American Printing,” in Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1980), pp. 315–365. 25 For statistics and analysis on the spread of pamphleteering see Bailyn and Hench, The Press and the American Revolution, pp. 349–57. 26 Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1984), chap. 2. 27 Norman S. Fiering, “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned Periodicals to Early Eighteenth Century America”, William Mary Quarterly 33, no. 4 (October 1976): 642–60.

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The growth of public discourse had two important eﬀects. Firstly, it inculcated a sense of colonial selfhood that had a levelling eﬀect, though the public sphere was hardly classless in any sense. The provision of news of international, inter-colonial and British aﬀairs helped in this.28 American colonial interests could be articulated. Then these would be the objects of controversy in relation to national and international developments. Diﬀerent and competing points of view emerged from a heightened sense of what was going on in the world and the place of the colonies in it. Highly informed colonists considered colonial and international events from within the structure of a newspaper-based public sphere and in the framework of publicized debate, learned critique and opinion. For colonial merchants, print media relayed economic information about movements in prices, new ventures and exports and imports. Furthermore, these were public fora in which philosophical discussion could be carried out in serial exchanges that always had a bearing on politics. In this way, the plethora of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides and other publications combined to form a support of colonial identity formation. Secondly, the public sphere also integrated relatively autonomous colonial assemblies that had accumulated increased powers during the eighteenth century.29 Representative assemblies as institutional foci of public debate formed centres of colonial attention that deepened the republican convictions of those in the colonial order. They fostered a civic space in which republican notions of representation, legislative prerogative and self-limited spheres of government could gestate. Above all, the language and bonds that colonists created within these structures animated both imperial and colonial loyalties. Print media and representative government assemblies acted as structural props of a pre-national public sphere. They acted as spheres in which the competing perspectives of the Empire’s own internal make-up tussled with one another for wider popular endorsement. After 1763 they developed a self-governing dynamic of their own, giving life to the politics of independence in circumstances where it might otherwise have struggled to ﬁnd institutional nourishment from elsewhere. Publicity and the public sphere opened up the realm of politics and the possibility of forging a new state and a new state form. 28

On the growth of Atlantic communications, see Steele, English Atlantic, pp. 1–92. See “The Role of the Lower Houses of Assembly in Eighteenth Century Politics,” in Jack P. Greene, The Re-Interpretation of the American Revolution 1763–1789 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). 29

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Compared to the British north, the development of print and interrelated public spheres in the Spanish Indies was not as complete. Cities were less closely connected with each other relying, on one hand, on the surrounding region and, on the other, links to imperial trade. Although the cities were densely populated, the kind of proto-industrial development normally associated with print capitalism was absent. However, economic developments alone do not explain the limitations on the public sphere in the Spanish Indies. Indeed, during the period under discussion colonial economic development sped up and the pace and extent of economic exchanges in the catchment areas of the viceregal capitals increased substantially.30 The reasons are more strictly political, or at least relate to the structures of state power. The tight grip of the Catholic Church and the state over governmental institutions and sources of information limited the possible growth of a pluralist public sphere in almost all the viceroyalties. This is not to say that there wasn’t a ﬂow of communication or intellectual critique. The private circulation of correspondence fostered a community of public ideas, one that was underestimated by historians in the past.31 Furthermore, there was a substantial readership for books and essays, indeed throughout the Habsburg and Bourbon eras.32 Ideas circulated through bourgeois merchant circles in trading cities in the sixteenth century. They spread with the growth of universities, private libraries and missionary orders. Universities and academies were features of port and administrative cities; indeed, they had a privileged place in urbanizing the Spanish American landscape. However, the existence of a reading audience for European philosophy, art and criticism does little to counter the suggestion that politics, philosophy and criticism were constrained. The purpose of places of learning was cultural

30 Brading, “Bourbon Spain and its American Empire,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, pp. 426–33. 31 James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, eds. and trans, Letters and People of the Spanish Indies, Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 32 Jacques Lafaye, “Literature and Intellectual Life in Colonial Spanish America,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, pp. 663–704. For Teodoro Harpe-Martinez, Colonial Peru had a vibrant public sphere based on the exchange of letters and books that were imported fragments of the Enlightenment. Of course, this was limited to the wealthier Creoles and Peninsulars. Harpe-Martinez notes that Peru was quite exceptional in this regard. See “The Diﬀusion of Books and Ideas in Colonial Peru: a Study of Private Libraries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1956).

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transmission of Spanish mores and habits of life. The content of the curricula was not the monopoly of the Inquisition, but it did follow Hispanic scholastic trends.33 Medieval debates typical of the Habsburg era gave way to curricula reform that propagated ideas of the Bourbon ilustracion. In the second half of the eighteenth century, new institutions were built and new chairs founded in Rio de La Plata, Mexico and Guatemala. The Inquisition retreated and the circulation of texts increased. Newspapers came late: the Diario Erudito was founded in Lima in 1790 and Diario de Mexico in 1805. But their publication was concurrent with more political pamphlets and gazettes and together papers and other forms of publication proliferated during the early years of the nineteenth century.34 However, until that time, the social structures of the public sphere were conﬁned to city centres and a signiﬁcant proportion of Spanish and Spanish-Americans lived beyond the reach of urban culture. Above all else, they were publics dedicated to reading and receiving mainly European ideas, rather than spaces in which a full Creole republican politics could freely gestate. Only Lima and Mexico sponsored publishing houses. These were busy in the second half of the eighteenth century, but the price and distribution of their products suggests that they did not serve popular markets.35 As a result, Spanish American readers were comparatively few in number. The revolutionary works of the French and then the North Americans were read by Creole revolutionaries, but not by many others (at least prior to independence).36 Thus, there were ‘publics’. However, the structures 33

Gongora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, pp. 187–93. Anibal Gonzalez ﬁnds in Spanish American journalism and literature an equivalent to the French and American public sphere. Journalism was “imbued with the critical spirit of modernity, though it could not help but reﬂect the strident and uneven nature of Spanish America’s particular approach to modernity as a whole” (p. 16). Interestingly, Gonzalez is critical of Benedict Anderson’s overemphasis on print capitalism in the rise of Latin American nationalism. However, Gonzalez does not solve this problem, as publication is privileged as an element of “Spanish America’s particular approach to modernity.” Then its comparative importance is inﬂated to put it on a par with the pre-revolutionary situation in the British North. This thesis might be more convincing if other aspects of the public sphere were brought in to ﬁll out the picture. However, Gonzalez does not pursue this. See Anibal Gonzalez, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 1. 35 Lafaye, “Literature and Intellectual Life,” in Bethell, Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, p. 698. 36 John Lynch, The Spanish Americans Revolutions 1808–1826 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1973), pp. 27–30; Liss, Atlantic Empires. 34

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themselves were not demotic in character. The dynamic of town meetings and regional assemblies that provided an impetus for the republicanization of North American politics was largely absent. American identity and community consociation encouraged by the Anglo-American press proved powerful. In contrast, the peculiarly local character of Spanish-American journals and newspapers prevented the generalization of Creole experiences in the empire as a whole. Spanish-American sensibilities were not generalized to all sectors of the populace across the vast southern continent. In all, the weakness and sparsity of the Hispanic Creole public spheres curbed the formation of a wider variety of republican responses. Ethnicity and the conﬂicts within empires In British North America ethnicity did not divide the republican and loyalist camps, as it did to a signiﬁcant extent in the Spanish Indies. The patterns of ethnic identity varied signiﬁcantly between the two empires. The clear borders of racial composition facilitated community cohesion for Anglo-American settlers. Divisions between blacks, whites and natives were comparatively clear, enhancing the historical myth of colonization as the subjugation of a lesser race. Ethnic diﬀerences within settler communities were minor, and reinforced a prenational and colonial sense of identity. In this situation, political conﬂicts within the enfranchised white population revolved less around ethnicity and more around social class and empire. The War of Independence was not caused by a perceived ethnic inequality between loyalist Europeans and colonial order Creoles, but by issues of republican politics, the instituted organs of government and the gap between rich and poor. Ethnic divisions were discrete, permitting a degree of cohesion amongst settler communities. The ethnic unity of the settler-colonists removed the ambiguity of who was American, or perhaps who should be a citizen. As slaves and natives were automatically shut out, new republican horizons only incorporated European settler communities. The question then became one of who would govern what type of state and how. The situation in Spanish-American colonies was typically diﬀerent. Towards the end of the colonial period, the categories of ethnicity proliferated. In the Caribbean and South America Indian and Creole populations splintered into caste-like status groups with a variety of

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designations.37 A spectrum of demographic divisions had grown out of the social structures of colonialism. More complex social relations emerged during the Bourbon years, clouding the boundaries between diﬀerent subaltern groups. Enlightenment reforms instituted an economic strategy to control the Indians surrendering the overt coercive measures associated with the Habsburg era.38 Divisions remained sharper among the dominant classes. Creoles, for the most part, remained distinct from the peninsulares. They were diﬀerent in their status, clothes, style and habits. The turbulent mix of status positions in the Spanish Indies fuelled the resentment felt by Creole communities during the period of the Caroline reforms, when the composition of the court state and the colonial order was being transformed. However, ethnicity itself did not consistently demarcate the boundaries of the colonial order. Anti-imperial sentiments were often articulated in the language of ethnicity. But the conﬂicts involved other issues of position within the structure of the state. Furthermore, experiences of ethnicity had a local inﬂection for members of Creole and peninsular communities. Yet, the fact that the politics of independence in the south formed as a juxtaposition of Creole and peninsular interests suggests that American identities were robust enough to reﬂect some level of proto-national consociation. The antagonism was evident to contemporaries: “too speciﬁc to deny and too widespread to ignore.”39 The bonds that tied Creoles together were ethnic. But they also involved status distinctions, collective experiences of episodes of insurrection and regionalized versions of Catholicism. The position of Creole elites in the rebellions of the eighteenth century was symptomatic of the entire historical situation. They were caught between indigenous mobilizations and the forces of the monarchy seeking stability through repression. Simon Bolivar’s retrospective remarks express the ambivalence of this intermediary condition: We are not Europeans nor are we Indians, but a species halfway between aborigines and Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans by law, we ﬁnd ourselves engaged in conﬂict, on one hand, disputing the natives over titles of ownership, and at the same time struggling 37

Gongora, Studies in the Colonial History, pp. 160–64. David Weber, “Bourbons and Barbaros: Centre and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish-Indian Policy,” in Daniels and Kennedy, Negotiated Empires. 39 Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, p. 28. 38

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These comments, which arise long after the event, say something about the position of Creoles in the revolts of the eighteenth century. Earlier rebellions (the Paraguayan comuneros 1721–35 and the rebellion in Venezuela 1744–52) were regional and did not foreshadow future developments. In contrast, the 1765 Quito rebellion centred on taxation, which was an imperial issue. Later rebellions involved competing interests and agendas. However, revolts in Peru and New Granada suggest that Creole communities acted in cohesion.41 In both uprisings, mestizo and Creole elements maintained separate agenda to that of indigenous participants. The claims of the latter implied a logic of social revolution, even though it spoke a language of loyalty. In Peru, they allied soon enough with the Spaniards. In New Granada, Creoles participated in the formation and then fracture of an alliance with the Indians. They participated in that rebellion for longer, though it was obvious that there were two disconnected insurrections taking place. The mestizo and Creole revolts were a response to higher and new taxes, whilst Indian participation was manifestly prompted by government corruption, further seizures of communal lands and despair at the region-wide economic downturn. Compromises between peninsulares in the court state apparatus, which unambiguously represented Madrid’s interests, and the mestizo insurgents left the Indian armies out in the cold in both cases. In fact, it allowed the Spanish to crush them. These episodes suggest that the respective loyalties of the Creole and peninsular layers of the state and agricultural landowning class were suﬃcient to prevent the haemorrhage of communal cohesion. Moreover, these links were comprehensible to Creoles. Spanish Americans, in these instances, allied their interests with those of the state at the point when matters threatened to get out of hand. In the very least they perceived their interests as distinct from the Indian revolutionaries. Their position of relative independence rendered them distrustful of peninsular leaderships, but also fearful of indigenous insurgency. The experience of insurrection reinforced a self-under40 Simon Bolivar, “Discurso pronunciado,” in Damas, Escritos Fundamentales, p. 116 (my translation). 41 Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3, pp. 219–223.

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standing of both the social structure of Spanish America and their place within it, which ﬂowed from the coalescence of pre-national colonial links. These experiences united many mestizo colonists in the early nineteenth century. In the context of the Napoleonic Wars, events in Europe were elevated in their importance to the South Americas. These circumstances would galvanize Creole movements and present the opportunities for independence. In this enterprise, they were following Anglo-Americans who earlier broke with the British Empire. While the norteamericanos provided one source of inspiration, the republicanism and the republics of Simon Bolivar, Jose San Martin and Santiago Marino diverged fundamentally from the polity of the United States. The posture assumed by new republican movements confronting their imperial legacies was a condition in the developing trajectories of new Atlantic states. The revolutionary institution of America’s republics The revolution that led to the constitution of the United States brought about a radically new formation and instituted a republican political culture that was singularly innovative. In this ﬁnal section of the chapter, I want to bring into relief important features of two general types of republicanism that realized “a ‘new world’ of politics.”42 The intention underlying this approach is to suggest that the two processes of revolutionary transformation were not of equal signiﬁcance. The Anglo-American revolution generated a paradigmatic state form. The long revolution in the Spanish Indies dismantled Spain’s Atlantic empire. However, revolutionary processes there instituted states that retained more of the institutional patterns of the previous state form than the United States did. In this sense, the two processes had signiﬁcantly diﬀerent consequences. In the remainder of this chapter I examine the institutional and political-cultural divergence in the forms of republicanism developed by Americans constructing modern relationships to their imperial legacies. My comparison contrasts the British North American trajectory and the centralist recomposition of power and politics in the

42

Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas, chap. 4.

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republics that emerged out of Spanish colonies. A sketch of the argument below is followed by single discussions of British, French and Spanish America. The passage on French America invokes the Caribbean as a yardstick of comparison and an inﬂuential realm in its own right. It also includes a brief discussion of the inﬂuence of French republican universalism. Fundamental diﬀerences separated the pre-histories of the United States and the republics of the former Spanish Indies. The struggles for independence that instituted a constitutional state in the north marked an institutional departure from the imperial past. In the Hispanic American republics, centralism endured in the form of the foundation of ‘praetorian’ states.43 They were based on the colonization of already-existing institutions of power by the professional apparatus (especially the military) in alliance with private oligarchic interests. Often the oligarchy and the military were indistinguishable in this relatively undiﬀerentiated ﬁguration of power. The singular outstanding feature that separates the constitutional and praetorian states of the early to mid nineteenth century was the relative autonomy of the institutions of rule. A distinctive version of republican political culture prevailed in the Thirteen Colonies, but gained little ground in Hispanic America due to the character of those states and the legacy of centralism that they inherited.44 The novel and radical nature of the American Revolution against the British cannot be over-emphasized. It marked a sharp break with the imperial past, generating a process of state formation that was inherently self-innovating. Even the word ‘independence’ acquired a

43 On the notion of praetorian statehood, see also Enrique Peruzzotti, “The Weimarization of Argentine Politics and State Autonomy,” Thesis Eleven 34 (1993). 44 Fernando Lopez-Alves critiques this ‘traditional’ view of the Spanish legacy and persisting centralism as culturalist. Aligning Claudio Veliz and Mark Burkholder with Seymour Lipset, Richard Morse and Alexis de Tocqueville, he writes that the claims of this group about Spanish centralism have been ‘seriously challenged’ by recent literature that highlights the weakness of republican states (he looks to Peru in particular). The question begged is “how long legacies can last, how to measure their inﬂuence, and how to deﬁne them” (p. 154). It might well also be asked, should centralism be mechanically conﬂated with strong statehood. The history of centralist Spanish rule in the Americas is replete with examples of regions in which state power was ‘weak’. Also, it might well be asked whether Veliz’s analysis can be regarded as properly speaking culturalist. For a critique of the categories of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states, see Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism. Lopez-Alves’ essay is “The Transatlantic Bridge: Mirrors, Charles Tilly, and State Formation in the River Plate,” in Centano and Lopez-Alves, The Other Mirror.

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diﬀerent political connotation as a result of the war with the British.45 The New World generated its own version of political modernity in the national-democratic republic. In British North America, the republican horizon was institutionalized in a civic public sphere structured on the principles of limited plurality. The situation was diﬀerent in the Spanish Empire. Peninsular traditions of governance had smothered much of the public dynamics of the cabildos and audiencias, especially in their Bourbon iterations. The possibility of a republican political culture emerging was thereby always compromised by the centralism of imperial institutions and the subsequent praetorianization of new revolutionary states. There were, therefore, two inter-related dimensions of the modern logics of New World republicanism: state forms and a broad political horizon. To this point, the latter has not received full attention. In what follows only secondary consideration is given to republican political ideas per se. I am deliberately limiting the analysis to the extensive framework of revolutionary developments in which Americans could constitute new states in the context of republicanised politics. In making this choice, speciﬁc republican traditions are not dealt with comprehensively. What I am drawing into relief are two diﬀerent types of state that have emerged from diﬀerent imperial legacies. Each has a diﬀerent relationship to those legacies that include administrative, civic and political traditions as well as institutional arrangements and varying sets of social relations. Yet, it should be noted that the praetorian form retained more from the past than did the radically innovative northern American republicanism. Anglo-American Republicanism The philosophical contents of republicanism set in a colonial public sphere where social structures did not deliver a monopoly of information to the imperial masters. The British had not established the full, visible and daunting architecture of power in North America. The strict hierarchies of social relations did not bear down on EnglishAmericans in quite the manner that they did in the British Isles. Exilic New England set colonists apart from the strongholds of state

45 See Germán Arciniegas’ interesting genealogy of the word ‘independence’ in America in Europe, pp. 115–18.

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power. At the same time, Americans believed liberty was their inheritance as Englishmen. The wealthy communities that they built supported that belief. Just as the contingencies of state formation in Latin and North America diﬀered, so too did their respective historicities, that is their relationship to their traditions: The multiple settlements in the English colonies led to an inadvertent pluralism, which made it easy to imagine alternatives to any particular institutional arrangement. In America . . . neither the coercion of economic dependence nor the persuasion of majestically ritualised power was ready at hand to reinforce the dictates of society’s arbiters. Nor were there in the colonies the cathedrals, royal palaces or country estates to remind the many of the superior position of the few . . . In colonial society far more than in England words were called upon to do the work of artefacts. The proper civil order was described in sermons, parental lectures and judicial pronouncements at quarter sessions. But words were not so easily monopolised as churches and mansions. Despite the evident intentions of most colonists to replicate the institutions left behind, the means of securing them from attack was rarely strong.46

The power of words in the absence of the architecture of long-established authority introduced a capacity to question the permanency of traditional institutions. Anglo-Americans were heavily dependent on the classical and modern works of the Western world. All these works ﬁgured in the debates in political philosophy in this revolutionary juncture, but they were read in contexts far removed from their original settings.47 Common Law theory, romantic and rationalist works of the Enlightenment and the orations of Cato and Cicero were meaningfully reinterpreted. They animated dramas that Americans believed could be compared to their own. In the exercise of philosophical discourse, ‘tradition’ was invoked in arguments against traditional social structures. This is further highlighted by a comparison with Hispanic America where the institutions of Hispanic power had a very visible presence. The power of words could be as easily summoned to support the

46

Margaret and James Jacobs, The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 11. On the power of sermons in shaping religion and politics in pre-revolutionary North America, see Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 47 Reinhold, Classica Americana, chaps. 3 and 4; Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 23–31.

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status quo as it could be to question it. Political philosophy was read and discussed in the Spanish Indies, but amongst a much more conﬁned and smaller reading public. Moreover, Spanish America’s cities gave pride of place to the church and its countryside haciendas helped to “remind the many of the superior position of the few.” In this regard, rigid social rank existed as much in Spanish Indian societies as it did in Spain. In British North America, by contrast, the given form of imperial state was under scrutiny in this public sphere, which was enlivened by debate in political philosophy. Deliberation over what constituted a modern polity was a daily occurrence. However, it assumed grand proportions in meetings that portended the separation of the colonies: the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and the ﬁrst and second Continental Congresses. This conjuncture was ground breaking and not only because it threw up new social relations and new ideas. This was a revolution in which politics as a sphere of social action was itself republicanized. The signiﬁcance of republicanism is a topic of diverse debates in North American historiography.48 What was revolutionary about this political culture? Was the radical edge taken oﬀ it by the federalist solution? Was the predominant inﬂuence Lockean or did republicanism reach back to other Renaissance traditions for inspiration, as maintained by Pocock and those who adhere to the civic republican thesis? I do not wish to re-visit these lengthy and much-debated issues. They are extremely important, but there is a convincing argument

48 Some of the principal contributions to this literature include Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1986), and Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Robert East and Jacob Judd, eds., The Loyalist Americans: A Focus on Greater New York (New York: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1975), Jack P. Greene, The Re-Interpretation of the American Revolution 1763–1789; Linda Kerber, “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1985): 474–96; Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, “Towards a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1985); J. G. A Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays in Political Thought and History, Chieﬂy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and History Chieﬂy in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).

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that various positions developed have been at times one-sided and exaggerated.49 Moreover, the acute juxtaposition of internally contained liberal and relatively eclectic republican traditions acts to conceal the interchange between them.50 Instead, the main point to make is that the outstanding feature is the unparalleled pluralism of the eighteenth century public sphere. If the republic was a political creation of the Revolution, then it was due to the public sphere as much as it was to the spirit of civic commitment championed by Pocock. What is important is the sense of historical originality that the process of revolution aroused: uncertainty about what would or could follow resounded throughout the British Empire, not just in the newly declared republic.51 Republican perspectives remained ﬂuid on this question, at least prior to the consolidation of the federal state. In my view, this indeterminacy reveals that this modern citizenry was grappling with innovative models of state, economy and society. The mood of Atlantic republicanism may have subsided after the later debates over Federalism. However, the horizon of political inventiveness—that is, the sense that social and political institutions were contingent and could be made and re-made—remained. This was the lasting impact of revolutionary republicanism; however it may

49 See Lance Banning, “Jeﬀersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 ( January 1986): 3–20, for an analysis of this trend to imbalance in the historiographic debates around Jeﬀersonianism. “As things now stand, the literature appears to force a choice between mutually-exclusive interpretations of Jeﬀersonian ideology—a choice that we really do not have to make, and one that would impede a better understanding” (p. 4). 50 See Steve Pincus, “Neither Machivellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Republic,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 ( June 1998). 51 The republican revolt dislodged existing conceptions of empire as libertarian and consensual in its foundations. This is widely understood with regards to the Americas. Some recent studies reﬂect on the profound impact in Britain. Deep and impassioned divisions emerged where a loose consensus over imperial rule had held together. English sympathy for British Americans ranged from general opposition to the war to outright support for the republican cause. Parliamentary loyalists felt provoked and retaliated with accusations of treason, especially when petitioners protested or rioted in the streets. The high pitch that marked American debates in the 1770s appeared in this public discourse in Britain in the 1780s. See Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 5 and, for a survey of Georgian age radicalism, John Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in J. G. A. Pocock, Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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have been inﬂuenced by Locke, Aristotle, Harrington or Luther and Calvin. The presence of republican horizons meant that diﬀerent solutions to contemporary problems competed in the battle to prevail in the determination of the direction of state formation. Behind this historical process lay a revolutionary turn in the self-understanding of the human construction of social forms.52 Those who executed the revolution understood themselves to be taking conscious direction in settling social questions. The institution of a new state was carried out with the issue of what kind of society combined public and private virtue in mind. The concepts of power and law were transformed by the process of revolution in a new world where social relations more closely approximated the image of a ‘tabula rasa’ assumed to be the American condition by Europeans, than social relations, in fact, did in Europe. In other words, the process of revolution really was more possible in the New World, as AngloAmericans understood it to be. That recognition of limited social change guided by a belief in the future itself was conceivable in a society where the spoken word of a sermon and the appeal of the book (be it the Bible or the philosophy of Locke, Harrington or Montesquieu) held political sway alongside of the physical manifestations of institutional power. How to reconcile received wisdoms of public and personal virtue with the society of lively capitalist commerce and growing industrial property was the question that literate Americans deliberated on. It split Jeﬀersonians and their Federalist opponents in the 1790s as surely as the issue of the precise constitution of the polity did.53 Many historians concur with the view that republican sentiments (as summarized by Pocock) were disappointed, or perhaps displaced, by the Federalist advance in the 1790s. They have good reason to hold this view. Nonetheless, a republican public sphere, in which the competition of ideas was essential, had emerged and a diﬀerent form of state accompanied it. In the 1770s and 1780s this New World terrain was new and its signiﬁcance derived from its radically reﬂexive character. Its coexistence with slavery was ultimately unsustainable. Its coexistence with a dynamic logic of capitalist development

52 Dick Howard, The Birth of American Political Thought 1763–87, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 53 Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order.

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was relatively harmonious in the nineteenth century, but not without its tensions. This trajectory stands as a contrast when compared with French and Spanish American ﬁgurations of culture, economy and state. Republicanism and the French empire French support in the War of Independence was indispensable to the survival of the revolution. Strategic interests overshadowed any concern about America’s anti-monarchical trajectory. After the AngloAmerican war, the French American Empire was reduced in the Caribbean. Moreover, it was destabilized by frequent and growing outbursts of violence, rebellion and warfare. Two kinds of conﬂicts in the Greater Caribbean plagued French rule.54 Firstly, global rivalry with Britain and France was fought out in intensive microcosm in the region. Battles with the British navy became commonplace in the Antilles. France’s military and naval forces were asked for greater vigilance than ever. Secondly, sharp social divisions were magniﬁed by the upsurge in violence and by the example of the French Revolution. In this context, the position of the colonial order in the face of intrusion into colonial aﬀairs and threats of slave revolts (both real and imagined) was surprisingly good, in spite of the turmoil in the region. After the war with America, the British presence was multiplied and the energies of its imperial personnel increased. Britain’s naval and military power had built up during the war with the Thirteen Colonies. The British West Indies were heavily guarded during that period.55 The remaining British possessions in this hotly contested zone were more isolated from the English-speaking Empire, which its colonists had previously experienced as a much larger entity.56 The feeling must have been uncanny, as there can be little doubt that the islands continued to enjoy good economic fortunes both before the American War and afterwards.57 The value of the 54 David Geggus, “Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean,” in David Barry Gasper and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 55 O’Shaughnessey, An Empire Divided. 56 See Edward Braithwaite’s study of the changing relationship between Britain and Jamaica after the American War and how it ‘Creolized’ the island’s internal social relations and culture, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 57 See John J. McCusker, “Growth, Stagnation or Decline? The Economy of the British West Indies 1763–1790,” in Hoﬀman, The Economy of Early America.

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British West Indies trade was not lost on the government in London either. Britain’s islands were more fully fortiﬁed in the increasingly hostile climate that emerged after American War. French colonists, wary of their minority position in the new context, grew restless. Agitation within the Chambers of Commerce and through envoys in Paris attracted the attention of the French court. There were other reasons for the renewed focus on the Caribbean. The importance of the Antilles became magniﬁed in the eyes of all European statesmen in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as slave-based trade and production grew. The British cast jealous eyes over French possessions and imperial vigilance increased as a result. The last decade featured ongoing open warfare between the British and the French in a ﬁght over possession in the region and over the labor regime of slavery. The conﬂict of the two states remained highly visible. The 1789 Revolution opened opportunities to the British to grab the lot.58 However, it closed oﬀ these opportunities just as quickly with one devastating measure: the temporary emancipation and arming of French slaves. Colonial elites were able to play a pivotal role during this period. It played this role in the context of ambiguous, but growing, colonial inclinations to self-government. The chief issue in contention was slavery and it remained unresolved, both within the declared libertarian ideals of the French Revolution (which were rapidly lost) and within the legal and political ediﬁce of the Empire. The French court had ignored slavery. The Revolution did not resolve this conﬂict and instead introduced further complications. In France, abolitionism had found a voice in the Amis de Noirs and in widely read tracts by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Raynal.59 Despite the patronage of prominent ﬁgures, the movement was ineﬀective and faced formidable opposition.60 The Revolution reversed this situation indirectly by legitimizing emancipation, even while public anti-slavery societies were in decline. The island colonists held varying perceptions of the revolutionary government. The split between colonists with stronger ties to France (absentee planters, military and civilian administrators) and the Creole populace deepened and multiplied. Also, the emancipatory message of the French and American Revolutions, underscored 58 Michael Duﬀy, “The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies,” in Gasper and Geggus, A Turbulent Time. 59 Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, chap. 5. 60 F. Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, pp. 93–95.

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by a commitment to universalism, brought into doubt the legitimacy of the Empire. Initially, the radical revolutionary clubs favoured a strong version of political liberty for all French, a position of some attraction for wealthy planters and the petit blanc whites in the Caribbean alike. Reaﬃrmation of slavery by the Paris Assembly brought relief to colonial deputies. But the gap between the Jacobin clubs in Paris and the colonies grew, as did settler anxieties. The rebellion in St Domingue was seen as a radical realization of the republican agenda, an outcome feared by whites.61 What it challenged, and what seemed in question, was an imperial nexus that had suﬀered an enormous blow in the Seven Years War. Now the Caribbean possessions were insecure as the metropolitan polity debated the virtues and vices of slavery, an issue long resolved for the colonial elite. The French colonial order by the time of the Haitian rebellion had become a dense formation ﬁlled with instability. Robin Blackburn’s appraisal of its ﬁguration illustrates well its pivotal position: (C)lamped on top of the slave economy, there was a complex of interests, formed by the intersecting ﬁelds of force of a colonial and mercantile system, an aristocratic political order, a racial caste hierarchy, and a highly unequal distribution of private property within both the white and free coloured population. In the French Antilles . . . exploitation and oppression (was) overlaid by conﬂicts stemming from this interlocking structure of control. The revolution weakened the grip of the metropolis and stimulated ﬁerce factional strife, but this was a protracted and complex process.62

Strong and independent elites had become apparent in this later part of the century, as they had in the Thirteen Colonies, the River Plate, Peru, and New Granada. The Haitian revolt in 1791 issued a serious challenge to this compact hierarchy. Ministerial authority and public opinion in France saw it initially as an invitation to the British to invade. Indeed, a constituency of Creole opinion in St Domingue favoured such a change of direction. Elsewhere in the Antilles, royalist support was expunged with news of the Convention’s consolidation

61 Frank Moya Pons, “Haiti and Santo Domingo 1790–1870,” in Bethell, Cambridge History of Latin America III. 62 Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 169. James McLellan proﬁles the demographic and sociological characteristics of St. Domingue in Colonialism and Science, chap. 3.

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in late 1792. But newfound support for the government in Paris was short-lived. As the conﬂict between settlers, mulattoes and slaves continued to simmer in Haiti, St Vincent, Guadaloupe and Martinique, it had become obvious that the range of possible future directions was wider.63 Outside of St Domingue, the colonial order seemed able to stave oﬀ the threat of slave revolt against its rule. It also played oﬀ the Spanish, the British and the Royalists against the Republicans and small slave-owning mulattoes against slave battalions. In early 1793, slavery itself was not questioned fundamentally by any of the contending parties. But British blockades and a circling Spanish presence ensured that the situation remained precarious for the French. Threats from outside and divisions within ensured that rebel armies held the key to continuity of Republican rule in St Domingue and perhaps the rest of the French Antilles. The growth of the revolutionary forces coupled with the decree scrapping slavery in 1794 tipped the balance in favour of republican universality in St Domingue and then the British Caribbean. The remainder of the decade featured ongoing warfare. St Domingue fell to Toussaint; indeed the British withdrew deciding that there was little gain from occupation. The costs were counted in both troop numbers and pounds. The government in Britain was scandalized by the losses. Napoleon then moved, with the connivance of Britain, in 1802 to crush the black republic. Slavery was re-established in Guadaloupe. But the birth of the Republic of Haiti terminated any hope of return for the grand and petit blancs and they had to settle into a condition of exile for which they were well-prepared.64 Slavery intensiﬁed in Cuba and Brazil as a result. Indeed, the proﬁts of slavebased industries enjoyed a real surge with the spread of chaos in St Domingue. The Spanish clearly saw developments as fortuitous. The 63 Michael Crafton, “The Black Caribs of St Vincent: A Reevaluation”, AnnePerotin-Durnon, “Free Coloureds and Slaves in Revolutionary Guadaloupe: Politics and Political Consciousness”, and David Geggus, “The Slaves and Free Coloureds of Martinique during the Age of the French and Haitian Revolution: Three Moments of Resistance,” in Robert Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1996). 64 See R. Meadows, “Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community 1789–1809,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 1 (2000). Perspectives on the legacy of the Haitian Revolution can be found in David Patrick Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).

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British, however, were deterred from a larger scale re-development of slave numbers in the Caribbean by their losses. In the rest of the region the French colonial order waxed and waned in ongoing skirmishes with the British. But it did survive Napoleon’s defeat. Fluctuating strategic fortunes were one side of the French constellation. Another side to the polity that reﬂected this pattern of state formation was the philosophy of empire. The Americas loomed large in the minds of French statesmen after the Seven Years War. Imperial rivalry was magniﬁed in the agenda of concerns of the state’s elites. Furthermore, this occurred in a new socio-structural framework. The rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the last third of the eighteenth century broadened the space in which the empire could be considered as a topic for discussion.65 Many literary, critical, and political ﬁgures inhabited the salons of French nobility prior to 1789. To the philosophes, the physiocrats and republicans embroiled in this discussion, America appeared as a beacon of hope more than a horizon of depravity.66 Benjamin Franklin and his closest friends were widely celebrated on their visits to France in the late 1760s. Correspondence, exchanges and American letters to the French press were the components of a lively traﬃc across the Atlantic from 1767 onwards. America was ﬁrmly implanted in the political imagination of pre-revolutionary France and its horizon informed the debates around the philosophy of the French empire. Physiocratic administrators who straddled the worlds of the state and the nascent public were also fascinated by the American image. Physiocratic doctrine enjoyed its heyday at this speciﬁc juncture of developments. The loss of Canada, the rise of the public sphere and the growing concern over imperial fortunes all coincided with the life of Physiocratism. A long-term dilemma came to the fore at this point: whether to open-up France and its empire economically or whether to strengthen the state in Europe. Britain and Spain liberalized trade after 1763. France, under Calonne, opened American ports in 1784, mostly in response to growing trade. The Eden Treaty

65

See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 136–69 and Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 67–70. 66 On the mutual engagement of Anglo-Americans and the French after the Seven Years War see Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of America to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), chap. 1.

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(1786) furthered this process.67 In part, this was prompted by France’s strategic weakness. However, the laissez-faire outlook of the physiocrats also guided this tack. It represented a shift of sorts in the philosophy of empire from the dominance of a residual Colbertism to a more liberal economics. It was truly a transitional philosophy that lauded the ideals of free trade, whilst calling on the sovereign power to ensure the operations of the market system.68 As Marx rightly pointed out a century later, the physiocrats were unwitting free traders.69 In this period, liberalization was a strategy to strengthen the state as a whole. This was clearly true of the British; it can also be said of Spain and France. Indeed, liberalization represented a response of the agronomist elite of the French state to a changing context. Their deliberations expressed a shift in the philosophy of a deliberate imperialism. Physiocratism’s brief life gave way to republican universalism. The governance of the empire developed new tensions between universal ideals and local realities. Assimilationism, based on the principle of an indivisible polity, underscored a new philosophy of colonialism. This became a peculiar feature of French empire building in the nineteenth century: the rationality and uniformity of imperial governance over a colonial empire that was, in all respects, extremely diverse.70 But the promise that all French were to be integrated into the republique had been well received earlier. The reception turned cold in 1794 when the end of slavery was decreed. The Directory found itself having to meet white settlers’ conditions in 1798 when their protests grew too loud. Of course, the republican philosophy of empire achieved few of its aims. In a way, its boasts were mostly a ﬁction belied by the retention of many features of the old empire. The civic egalitarianism of the Revolution sat in an awkward relationship with actually existing colonialism. What emerged was a hybrid of diﬀerent administrative practices and diﬀerent patterns of institutional formation. Assimilationism would prove impractical for

67

Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, pp. 86–97. Albert O. Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Argument for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 93–100. 69 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), vol. 1, chap. 2 For a more detailed exploration of speciﬁc policies see A. I. Bloomﬁeld, “The Foreign Trade Doctrines of the Physiocrats,” in Mark Blaug, ed., Francois Quesney 1694–1774 (Brookﬁeld, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1991), pp. 22–47. 70 Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, pp. 47–48. 68

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France’s rulers after the Restoration and the colonies were returned to a position of subordination. But that is a new stage of French imperial history that is not a concern of the current work. The long revolution in Hispanic America In the framework of European crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the deepening tensions of empire, the nuclei of movements of independence in the Spanish Indies began to coalesce. Three events precipitated Spanish-American secession: the American and French Revolutions, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the breakup of the Napoleonic Empire at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. These did not foretell independence. They did, however, frame the international context in which the move to separate statehood occurred across the Spanish Empire. The Anglo-American and French revolutions altered the international context substantially. The new United States sought more extensive trade with the Spanish colonies in South America, especially after 1793. The revolutions also provided models of republican state building, although they were not equally well received.71 Those Spanish-Americans who did read French political philosophy were well versed in it. Mostly, they were concentrated in the key nodes of information networks: the ports, capital cities and coastal towns.72 Moreover, it was mainly members of the cultural elites who were exposed to French thought: professors, pseudo-aristocrats and high public administrators. The inquisition in Mexico rigorously sought to root out French-inspired radicalism and any prospect of conspiracy just prior to and immediately after the Revolution. In New Granada, it echoed in an urgent criollismo. To escape the reach of the Holy Oﬃce, many dissidents made London a base for exiles. Some British oﬃcials courted potential revolutionaries with a view to supporting any move to independence. After Spain and Britain assumed hostilities in 1796, some received pensions. Britain’s constitutional monarchy had appeal for the insurgents, perhaps due to their long-standing connections with the minority liberal constitutionalist currents in Spain. But the US provided a living example and indeed was another refuge for ﬂeeing Creole revolutionaries. 71 On French and North American inﬂuences on Spanish America, see Liss, Atlantic Empires, chap. 7. 72 Guerra, Modernidad e Independencias, pp. 42–43.

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Its revolution and the French Revolution established two vital republican principles: political involvement is a civic duty and that the state is secondary to the nation and can therefore be rightly overthrown in the conditions of injustice. The revolt of the Thirteen Colonies achieved a continuous republic—so it seemed to Creole leaders in the 1790s—while the promises of the French Revolution faltered during the Terror and then were lost in Napoleon’s ascendancy. Miranda spoke for others when he said: Two great examples lie before our eyes: the American and the French revolutions. Let us discreetly imitate the ﬁrst: let us carefully avoid the disastrous eﬀect of the second.73

The constitutions of Venezuela and Mexico echoed that of the United States, at least in form. Up until the 1820s, Miranda, Bolivar, Moreno and others reserved their public admiration for America ﬁrst and foremost, at least until the US publicised its initial refusal to recognize the new republics.74 The Jacobin turn in France and its repercussions in the Caribbean had driven anxious Creoles away from its example. They continued to read the works of the philosophes and warmly welcomed their inﬂuence. Indeed, Latin American intellectuals frequently sojourned in Paris and took France as their cultural parent.75 But for the new republican state-makers, it was the US Federal leaders that embodied the vital example. The second event, the Napoleonic conquest of Spain, although brief, threw the imperial court apparatus into confusion. Fear of Madrid’s incapacity to lend support to the empire in a moment of crisis pervaded the court state and the colonial order. Self-rule became a reality for the colonial order during this period and the experience of government was incorporated into the political outlook of Creole leaders. After this brief interlude in which the viceroyalties had time to contemplate non-dependence on the centre, Ferdinand VII was restored. Although the monarchy’s policy was directed at a re-establishment of the imperial order, Spain’s relationship with Britain and the United States was now altered. War with Britain ravaged Spain’s resources and cuts its trade routes. The US and Britain could both

73

Cited in Liss, Atlantic Empires, p. 166. Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American Independence,” in Bethell, The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1 pp. 45–46. 75 Luis Roniger, “Global Immersion: Latin America and its Multiple Modernities,” in Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities, pp. 94–99. 74

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covertly support independence movements without fear of them, or of Spanish retribution.76 The related event was the resolution of the 1812 war between the United States and Great Britain. The United States was now a competitor in the Atlantic economy. It had arrived as a power in the international state system and in the American hemisphere. This further permitted clandestine involvement in South American politics. Finally, in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, the victorious European states were in a position to persuade Spain to extend liberal reform in Latin America. Imperial reforms had continued from the 1780s under Charles II. Actually, this had been a period of ﬂexible responses to changing circumstances in the Americas. Moreover, Spanish liberals had actively agitated for more far-reaching reform for some decades. Therefore, further remodelling of the imperial polity did not meet entrenched opposition at this time. British commerce gained a ﬁrmer hold in the Spanish-American economy as a result. Further, inter-imperial trade undermined an oﬃcial Spanish mercantile policy regime, which had become largely an empty shell of regulations by this stage. These three international shifts created the optimal conditions for independence movements to succeed. Yet, there was no guarantee that they would, a fact demonstrated by two features of the struggle for independence. Firstly, Spanish Americans rarely accepted independence unequivocally. In each separate case of independence the level of mestizo support seemed to vary according to the perceived threat to the established institutions of the colonial order. Bolivar’s commitment to the end of slavery in 1815 and his decision to mobilize the lower orders of colonial society added decisive weight to his northern campaigns. This harmonized with the vision of a republic of ‘good citizens’ that he derived from diﬀerent sources: Rousseau, the European liberals, the examples of revolutionary France and the US and Ancient models of Sparta, Athens and Rome.77 His rendition of republicanism was a modern one, to be sure, that encapsulated emancipation of slaves. But this would be another experiment in liberty.

76

Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, pp. 251–52. Luis Roniger, “Global Immersion,” in Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities, pp. 84–85. 77

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It would run up against the next problem that confronted LatinAmerican republicans (and the second feature), which was the diﬃculty of creating viable states to replace the Spanish empire while balancing the powerful and entrenched interests of newly empowered Creole elites. Two models were available.78 On one hand, the example of a civilian legislature existed in the Cortes of Cadiz. Its operation was constitutionally-guided and it could have even formed a centre for a re-launched quasi-federal imperial polity. The other was an American-based republican tradition that emphasized executive power. It better reﬂected long-standing Hispanic centralism. The question of which might prevail was still open after 1812. The fragility of the newly amalgamated movements for independence meant that there was a range of possible outcomes. A major event that revealed the weakness of the insurgent Creole order was Bolivar’s attempt to forge an ‘American Union’ at the Congress of Panama in 1826. This failed. However, its very occurrence suggests the existence of a form of solidarity that was at this time regional rather than national in scale. Bolivar attempted to base a state power on a centralized military force.79 Its failure was a product of the vast area that the union would have encapsulated and the weakness of military institutions in the early nineteenth century.80 However, this was not only an issue of organized military might. Bolivar confronted similar diﬃculties in uniting provincial forces that San Martin did in Rio de la Plata. San Martin’s campaign struggled to gain inﬂuence in the Argentine interior, due to the authority of rural leaders who perceived their interests diﬀerently.81 Of course, the strength of provincial government in that region was the legacy of the colonial order. Yet fear of the shape that the new Argentina might take went beyond the interior. Paraguay and Uruguay were both forged in deﬁance of a new centralism emanating from Buenos Aires.82 The legacy of 78 Jaime E. Rodriguez, The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 79 David Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” pp. 140–50. 80 Wallerstein’s comment rings true here: Bolivar’s dream of replicating the formula of unity achieved by the Thirteen Colonies failed. The area involved was, of course, far more dispersed, and hence there was no possibility of unifying the military struggle, an important factor in the creation of the United States. Bolivar’s Congress of Panama in June 1826 failed completely. (The Modern World System, vol. 3, p. 254) 81 Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, pp. 200–203. 82 Fernandez-Armesto, The Americas, p. 101.

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Hispanic centralism proved persistent in both the short-lived Argentine Confederation (1810–16) and Gran Colombia (1819–30). The national borders of the new republics remained undetermined for some time. Competing republican and municipal models of sovereignty meant that the establishment of a nation-wide centralized source of legitimate authority was diﬃcult in the absence of an empire. The principles of nation state formation were often enunciated in the constitutions of the new republics. A blueprint of representation could be easily pieced together, but there was no prior conception of ‘the people’. Thus, the inﬂuence of customary corporatist organizations endured due to a deep patrician logic common to all the republics giving oﬀ the appearance of ‘family resemblance’ amongst the diﬀerent societies in from the cone of South America up to its northern coastal states.83 In establishing the jurisdiction of rule, this produced two contrary trends. On one hand, authority lay with territorial jurisdiction (although this was still being fought over); on the other hand, Hispanic Americans were accustomed to the government of communities and not territory by provincial (audiencia) and urban (cabildo) authorities.84 By 1830, some stability emerged with the dissolution of Gran Colombia that brought an end to Bolivar’s classical republican vision. At that point, it was the audiencias and cabildos which took over. In time, their unsettled borders would come to broadly resemble the patterns of viceroyalty, intendancy, province and municipality that were consolidated in Bourbon America. The inﬂuence of republicanism on the process of imperial disintegration has also been a traditional concern of Spanish-American historiography.85 The ﬁrst period of revolt (1808–1812), was brought about by the Napoleonic invasion. Republicanism, in the sense of a republican political culture, was absent. Bonaparte’s usurpation of the French throne resulted in a loyalist backlash against France in the Americas.86 The assertion of imperial allegiance to the Spanish empire lent legitimacy to the juntas, cabildos and audiencias, which assumed authority in the name of the monarchy. Although this was,

83

See Francois-Xaviar Guerra, “The Spanish American Tradition of Representation and its European Roots,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 1 (1994). 84 Herzog, “The Meaning of Territory,” in Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities, pp. 167–70. 85 Liss, Atlantic Empires, chap. 9; and Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, p. 164. 86 Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 3, pp. 249–50.

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in a way, a period of self-government or even the formation of quasirepublics, republican horizons did not underscore its legitimation. The political imagination of a nation—the requisite component identiﬁed by Benedict Anderson and others—was distinctly absent. Instead, acquired methods and habits of provincial and municipal rule provided political continuity, even in the absence of the functioning structure that had cultivated those same methods and habits. During this period, the cabildos and even the audiencias were the structural-institutional foci of power.87 They attempted to establish independent governments, even though, in some cases, professing loyalty to Ferdinand VII. Some of the rebellious cabildos, re-formed as juntas. They re-drew the boundaries of their administration, constituting a disunited Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico and Venezuela out of the viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada and the Rio de la Plata. The centrality of the institutions of the colonial order emerged from the historical occupation of these institutional locations by those who ﬁgured prominently among the insurgents. Creole leaders were habituated to administration in the governing bodies of the colonial order. In establishing new states, or even in governing temporarily in the name of the Emperor, they reached for whatever means of governance that were available to them and that they were accustomed to. Mainly, these issued from prior patterns of governance and the colonial institutions that generated them. This is attested to by the fact that in almost all cases of early rebellion against court oﬃcials in the Spanish Indies government could only gain hegemony over a limited area around the major cities.88 The boundaries of what might have been new ﬁgurations of power could only be drawn up on the foundations of the jurisdiction of either urban-based audiencias A historical narration of the ﬁrst period of revolt can be found in Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, pp. 350–55. For a historical essay speciﬁcally on the revolt in New Granada, the relationship between the viceroy and his Creole constituents, and the crisis of the empire, see Robert L. Gilmore, “The Imperial Crisis, Rebellion, and the Viceroy: Nueva Granada in 1809,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1960). 88 The cabildo of Buenos Aires was a partial exception to this rule. After defeating the British expeditionary force in 1807, it sought the title of ‘Defender of South America and Protector of the Cabildos of the Viceroyalty of La Plata’. Its actions had won it friends among other municipal cabildos, which in turn pursued stronger links with Buenos Aires. In many ways this was an attempt prior to independence to extend the sphere of the cabildo’s inﬂuence beyond Buenos Aires and to encompass much of La Plata itself. See John Lynch, “Intendants and Cabildos in the Viceroyalty of La Plata.” 87

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or cabildos. To extend eﬀective authority of the new governments beyond this area would involve a radical innovation—the establishment of a quasi-national state. The two elements of the nineteenth century move to independence in the Spanish American states—the uncertainty of mestizo opinion and the lack of deﬁnition of feasible national and territorial sovereignty reﬂected in stable boundaries—are indications that Creole nationalism was relatively fragile at this juncture. However, they also point to the undeniable weight of accumulated Creole identity, which would form the basis of later Latin American nationalisms. Furthermore, it would also form the cultural basis for territorially conﬁned national populations. After independence, political and state centralism endured in the form of praetorian national states. The movements for independence often: . . . lacked a preconceived and uniﬁed program of action and (were) therefore forced to rely on the existing administrative concepts and practices even though thereafter these were directed to diﬀerent ends.89

Perhaps this is not surprising as the proclamation of independence often came when the threat of the revolutionary process going further seemed the greatest. For Creole communities poised between the Spanish and the subaltern classes, independence may have been the more conservative option, better in their eyes than the prospect of a Haitian-style revolt.90 Still, continuity in practice sat easily with a ﬁery rhetoric of change. The language of European liberalism and republicanism adopted by independent governments masked the persistence of centralism in the techniques and habits of governance that had ancestral roots in the Caroline reforms. Because of this, the states produced by the rebellions against the Spanish-American Empire can be characterized as centralist. A glance at the reception of the diﬀerent strands of the Enlightenment amongst Spanish-American intellectuals accounts for one aspect of this legacy. The uncritical, yet only partial, appropriation of diﬀerent versions of the Enlightenment furnished Hispanic America’s revolutionaries with political horizons that were republican in limited ways only. Reason appeared to contemporaries to have 89 90

Veliz, The Centralist Tradition, p. 117. Abernethy, Global Dominance, pp. 73–75.

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migrated to the post-revolutionary Latin American states and journeyed through all the cultural and political works of the early nineteenth century. Yet, the new enlightened approach to polity and society clearly echoed the rationalist reform program of the late eighteenth century court state.91 The continuity seems remarkable today, although it was lost on nineteenth century nationalist historiography. Indeed, it was quite possible for the Crown to reassemble the Empire after Napoleon’s withdrawal.92 As late as 1821, a plan for autonomy was put to the liberal Cortes in Madrid based on the division of the empire into three regions, each with the right to trade with the others freely. Its rejection left the American revolutionaries with little choice. Compromise was widely contemplated; in fact, it was the ﬁrst and most feasible option. A universe of common interests and ideas had held Spain’s American empire together. The populace only absconded to seek independence at the very end. Whilst the reverberations of the American and French Revolutions sounded strongly in the ears of those who led revolutionary governments, the tones of nationalism began to rise only after 1820. This can be explained easily by reference to European trends which Hispanic elites were mesmerized with. Independence in the Americas only barely preceded the development of nationalism in Europe as a widespread phenomenon. In Spanish America, nationalism followed in the wake of the success of independence movements in establishing new states. This is not to suggest that a mechanical, causal relationship existed between events in Europe and developments in Latin America. Nationalism in the southern continent was not an automatic product of its European counterparts. However, the growth of nationalism on the European continent did provide a series of examples of nation-formation for ruling elites to later borrow from as they saw ﬁt. Conclusion The era in which immigrant-settler colonialism dominated Western European expansion eﬀectively ended with the revolts in the Americas. Forthcoming colonies in Australasia and South Africa could be 91 92

Arciniegas, America in Europe, chap. 8. McLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, pp. 133–35.

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compared and it might be supposed that they ﬁt a type. However, most of Europe’s future colonies were occupied by minorities that partitioned the states, which they had subjugated. They were fundamentally diﬀerent from the Euro-American empires of the Western Hemisphere. That is the conclusion that can be readily drawn from this chapter. The revolts of the colonial order terminated settler-colonialism, not so much because they cleared much of the American landmass of imperial sovereignty, more because they broke up the potential for long-term endurance of this kind of polity. This doesn’t merely ﬁnish the narrative. It bears on the second and third premises of state formation considered in the opening chapter. I’ll go over this brieﬂy. Premise two is that Western European state formation was a process of internal conﬂict of elites. Domestically, a provincial and municipal order confronted a monarchical core in routine struggle that was sometimes overt. In the imperial domain, the colonial order was a more distant other of the governing regime. The tension of state formation that underlay the creation of governmental institutions in the European heartlands also marked the ﬁrst phase and subsequent ageing of imperial bodies. But the New World changed everything. The colonial order developed diﬀerent relations with the agencies of the state. Royal patronage did not strike so deep there. Distance forced self-suﬃciency on administration in the colonies. Laws were interpreted according to colonial interests. Traditions were read in fresh ways, including political philosophy and culture. The revolutions that occurred were anti-imperial in character and direction. The analysis in the second half of this chapter demonstrates that there is dissimilarity between the analogousthough-not-identical colonial order and the provincial and municipal ﬁguration. The distinction can ultimately be measured by the horizon of possible social and state forms. This connects with the third premise. State formation is a process of institutional creation. It is not only a consolidation of existing arrangements and it is not an exhaustively pre-determined pattern. Its variability is borne out in the diverse results of the rebellions against the empires. They were terminated in the Americas by the inability of the Spanish court and British constitutional states to sustain legitimate governmental rule and a mercantile economy in much of the New World. But the upheaval in the Thirteen Colonies was groundbreaking. A republicanized public sphere containing multiple political traditions was a prime social structure. Colonial bodies were

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the institutional loci that gave rise to a new terrain of conﬂicting identities. The axis of tension of transatlantic state formation was manifest in the subsequent debates and struggles around autonomy, sovereignty and, in the end, the very form of the state itself. Settler colonialism in the Thirteen Colonies gave way to a path of reconstitution, while the British Empire in America re-grouped around Canada and the Caribbean. This new form of state power was an innovative creation that escaped more of its past and more of its history. In Hispanic South America, the centralism of the Spanish Empire continued in the praetorian-style republics that formed, despite the rhetorical radicalism of the Creole revolutionaries. The Atlantic nexus that was discussed in chapter one was broken in the sense that the empires and their hegemonies unravelled. The geography of the three large trans-continental states was fragmented for a time. With the entry of smaller American republics onto the world scene, the era of nation-states was dimly foreshadowed. Those states began to trade largely on their own terms. They developed diplomatic capacities and vigilance in guarding their own strategic interests. The United States became a prominent trader and minor economic power. But relationships between the Western European and American continents also remained. They were changed as imperial nexus receded. Capitalism proliferated in the Atlantic zone and new, smaller states still had a visible hand in economic matters. Cultural and political links in the case of Hispanic America were very strong. These factors are outside of the parameters of this work, but they are important continuities to note nonetheless. The central point is that the area between the three continents was still a set of arenas of inter-civilizational interaction. It was the world of Atlantic modernity that Western Europe still looked out over and it was, of course, an intercultural zone. These points allude, however, to unanswered questions that are either implicitly foregrounded by the sketch in the introduction or by the subsequent argument in the main body of the book or that are lingering in the background. In the ‘Conclusion’, a summary of results of the argument is presented and some further points of clariﬁcation will address those questions.

CHAPTER TEN

THE ATLANTIC’S DISTINCT MODERNITY The main body of this book leaves us better placed to address questions raised in the ﬁrst two chapters as well as highlight in summary form the characteristics of Atlantic modernity. To summarize: those questions have to do with the articulation of three dimensions of Atlantic modernity and with its deeply inter-civilizational character. Questions of ‘civilization’ are posed in two groups: • The diﬀerent aspects of civilizational conception—the modes of contact and relation across diﬀerent social formations, the standards of civility and the concentration and mobilization of the signs of European civilizational interpretation. This is one working answer to the recurring question: what is civilization? • How the Western civilizational imaginary actually was particularized by speciﬁc European states. Identifying and comparing EuroAmerican empires is straightforward enough. Exploring the shared features of traditions brought to America and transformed by transatlantic experiences is more challenging. It requires looking above and beyond the institutional entities of any one of the three states to the circuits of information and knowledge in both Europe and the Americas. Through these media, the cultural products of the Western civilizational imaginary could be put into motion. This précis of the book brings answers to these questions, answers that do not claim to be exhaustive. It reviews each chapter, but also summarizes across chapters. It is short, sums up the results of the current work and points to prospective agenda for further research. Civilization and Atlantic modernity This work presumes the paradigm breakthrough made by the multiple modernities school of thought in departing from the exhausted metanarrative of modernization. In place of a singular linear pattern of modernizing, multiple patterns and cultural programmes are

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posited.1 The patterns overlap and interweave. This is only partly because of the large-scale expansion of Western powers since the sixteenth century. It is due also to trans-national dynamics of conﬂict between states and the widespread tensions between cultures and the forces of expanding capitalism. Divergence is the hallmark of modernity not preordained tendencies of homogenisation.2 Thus, there are many articulations of the principal features of modernity informed by cultural legacy and institutional and political conditions, so much so that it is sociologically more meaningful to talk about multiple modernities, rather than an overarching logic of modernization. Atlantic modernity thus has competitors and alternatives. At the risk of over-stating its importance, I argue that Atlantic modernity overlaps with European modernities but should not be conﬂated with them. It is distinct and contains its own diversity of institutional, economic and cultural forms. To see this clearly, some rethinking of the classical image of European modernity is needed and has been presented in this book. The breakdown of the closure of traditional societies presumed to be the corollary of Westernization is discarded in favour of exploration of the multiplicity and diversity of societies created in the ferment of actual colonialism. This involves dynamic historical processes of creation and reconstitution of social and political institutions, broad cultural understandings and modes of economic life. They were at work from the beginning of Europeans’ presence in the Americas and entailed indeterminacy and uncertainty in the direction of social formations. This kind of dynamism goes unnoticed in modernization studies that presuppose a singular and inexorable erosion of traditional structures, ideologies and economies by modern forces. In its place, I emphasize the historical weight of the Atlantic world and the societies of the Americas and this weight has mattered not only since the independence of the United States and the Latin American republics, but throughout the early modern era. In other words, the diverse articulations of principles of modernity in new 1 S. N. Eisenstadt, “Modernity in Socio-Historical Perspective,” in Ben-Rafael and Sternberg, Comparing Modernities; and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jens Riedel, and Dominic Sachsenmaier, “The Context of the Multiple Modernities Paradigm,” in Sachsenmaier et al., Reﬂections on Multiple Modernities. See also Patterns of Modernity, vol. 1. 2 Eisenstadt and Schlucter, “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities.”

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Euro-American cultures were present from the beginning of colonialism. Re-orienting the focus of comparative analysis onto the Atlantic thus casts light on other neglected patterns. Accepted accounts of Western modernity have variously privileged diﬀerent endogenous factors: rationalization, the Reformation, democracy and revolution, industrialization and societal diﬀerentiation more generally, war or the cataclysmic transformation of social relations. There is much that is rich and illuminating in these explanations, but they are also limited in their range of analysis. In my ledger of Atlantic modernity, there are other dynamics that are advanced and given visibility: imperial transoceanic state formation, the shock of New World inter-civilizational interaction and the wider creation of networks of capitalism connecting three continents. This re-casts the image of modernity as manifold by pointing to at least one other original source of development of its core institutional, political and economic features. These three are the general dimensions of Atlantic modernity. There are at least eight speciﬁc areas in which the colonized Americas are set apart from European modernity. Firstly, the overall pattern of confrontation and exchange between civilizational forms is vastly diﬀerent. Early modern Europe was a continent of three diﬀerent civilizational inﬂuences. All were articulated in imperial states and were identiﬁed with particular societies and political-ecological zones. Their modes of interaction were shaped by their grounded-ness and the relatively even balance between them, whether it was in warfare, trade or cultural, educational or artistic exchange. By contrast, the historical relationships between Euro-America and the hemisphere’s indigenous civilizations began with the fact of overwhelming conquest of territory and societies and the immense, almost unimaginable, destruction of human life that was the result of colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This set in train a logic of extermination. Despite its violence, this logic still had a vital cultural dimension. The civilizational imaginary that made the encounter with the Americas meaningful for Europeans included images of the indigenous worlds that enabled comprehension, and often misjudgement, of the New World. This is the second distinct feature of Atlantic modernity and it was only possible through the long historical engagement with the Americas. The imaginary animated knowledge of this world, its peoples and its environs, such as that knowledge was. It framed the entire challenge of otherness, whether in its ‘natural’ (i.e. botanical and topological) or societal and demotic guises. The conquest

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had not resulted in ﬁnalized and decisive devastation. Its result was more than mere survival, even in the cases of those relatively untouched by the Euro-American presence until the nineteenth century. It was the beginning of regeneration and reconstitution, albeit along greatly diﬀerent and generally less autonomous lines. The persistent and recreative presence of indigenous cultures and communities viviﬁed the imaginary in important ways, as argued throughout chapters four and ﬁve. This relates to the third area—the striking freshness of the Americas in its terrain, its topos, its global location, its utopian appeal. There was no place like the New World; one that had an appearance of seemingly recent discovery and that lacked the mark of civilizations known to Europeans. In reality, the landscape and all on it were subject to colonial processes of transformation. Plots, villages, cities, ranches, forts, ports, mines and farms sprang up at a faster pace than in Europe, at least prior to the nineteenth century. Rapid growth was a mark of all colonies. The speed and scale varied signiﬁcantly, of course. The sweep of colonization was breathtaking in Spanish America, concentrated in the British colonies and marginal but, again, concentrated in New France. In retrospect, the impression that colonial societies were European fragments implanted in new soil is forgivable, even if deceptive. The swift development of Creole communities and settlements can lead to the conclusion that there was a widespread process of Europeanization going on. In fact, a far-reaching initiation of an Atlantic modernity had begun. The immigrant-settler character of the societies that emerged is the fourth area of this modernity and it self-evidently relates to the culture of novelty. A large proportion of non-indigenous populations shared primary and secondary experiences of migration, much larger than in Western and Central Europe. It was not only that many had undertaken cross-ocean voyages and then possibly relocated again later, but also that it was widely recognized as a deﬁning and founding feature of American societies. These were, in other words, immigrant cultures, especially the Anglo-American colonies. Travel and migration (including internal migration) was the centrepiece of modern experiences in a way that it was not in Europe. Not all were willing travelers. The impact of slavery is the ﬁfth area. Contemporary historians have established that there were industries of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. However, their impact bears no comparison with the Atlantic in terms of scale or

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long-lasting legacy. There is no need to labor the detail further on this, except to note two points. Colonial slavery was modern, as so capably shown by Robin Blackburn and others. Moreover, it was the scourge of the Caribbean, British America and the hinterland colonies possessed by the Spanish; elsewhere it was sparse, even nonexistent. Densely multiracial populations in Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States bear witness to this modern legacy and point to countries where it was most prominent. Notwithstanding the facts that abolitionism was a British movement and that Enlightenment philosophies were deeply preoccupied with slavery in contradistinction to freedom, it is indisputable that the problem of slavery was ingrained in Atlantic modernity while it only really ﬁgured as a philosophical and political question in Europe. Migration and slavery provided the membership of extended colonial settlements. The nature of the colonial communities they accommodated is the sixth area of distinction. Diﬀerent ontological constructions rooted in competing religious aﬃliations informed the degree of accessibility and egalitarianism of particular communities in more profound ways than in the Old World.3 Other sorts of closure and hierarchy can be delineated. Corporatism and guild-like enclaves marked urban Hispano-American communities. Membership of those communities was tightly constrained and cultural barriers deterred strangers.4 Moreover, the segmentation of communities was conspicuous reﬂecting deep divisions within the wider hierarchical social order and the split between indigenous, Creole and peninsular groups. Elsewhere in the Americas, other communities were more formally receptive. They generated cultural fusion, ‘splicing’ and hybridity. In that process, they often produced their own traditions and identities that had diﬀerent orientations vying for adherents— the seventh area of interest. This was strongest in mainland Spanish America where operative myths of origin drew links with preColombian heritage to accentuate the supposedly primordial traces of Creole cultures. It established a steadfast identiﬁcation with the land and with place that enlivened the Creolism of the revolutionary era. In other non-Hispanic colonial zones, greater ambivalence 3 See Eisenstadt’s argument about the unique multiple civilizations of the Atlantic, “The Civilizations of the Americas.” 4 See Herzog, “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” in Roniger and Sznajder, Constructing Collective Identities.

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reigned. Association with place competed with an allegiance to empire and to its styles of civility. This raised continent-wide doubt about the sense of belonging. Was it possible to be English and American, Creole and Hispanic? Which place, what culture to belong to? Atlantic modernity entailed a struggle with identiﬁcation. In the eighteenth century, communities started to look divided along lines of identity, which were related to politics, religion and location. The divisions were starkest in British North America, but were visible also in the Hispanic south. They feed existing public spheres that emerged with a horizon of other possibilities. A vibrant public sphere in the Thirteen Colonies created more than access to political discourse; it posited a principle of representation, some years before the French Revolution. This was a distinct innovation and it informed the republican state that emerged. The ﬁnal feature is therefore the self-conscious revolutionary foundation of new orders. It was expressed in two ways. A strong millennial sense of mission informed the American Revolution. Patriotic rhetoric summoned Creolist sentiments in the Spanish viceroyalties. The results were diﬀerent, but the shared sense of forging something new was strong and it brought a focus on constitution drafting—that is, on encoding the process of social change—if not always constitutional statehood. It was in the Americas that this political modernity ﬁrst made a full appearance and it set models for subsequent developments in Europe. The eight areas distinguish Atlantic and European modernities. The conquest of the American hemisphere opened up a context of inter-civilizational interaction that was itself a part of modernity and impelled cultural transformation. The civilizational self-consciousness of Europeans condensed over time in general reorientation to the Europe’s western horizons and to strikingly dissimilar formations. But if this was an outthrust of European powers, how was it a forward movement of a ‘civilization’ and an early token of a pattern of modernity more particularly Atlantic than European? The intercultural experiences that occurred in the Western hemisphere (including the social and cultural pulverization that colonialism brought) were not possible on the European continent, in the eastern interface with the Ottoman Empire, or in northern Africa. Incursion into the Atlantic and the Americas not only broke the dependence of Christian Europe on the Mediterranean and North-West African conﬁnes, it produced newborn colonial societies that were recognized as part of the Western empires. Their heritage was, at the same time, both original and

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shared. An outward freshness of the American hemisphere underscored the societies founded in the Americas under the muﬄed yet swelling de facto leadership of the colonial order. The apparent novelty of the world that Iberian and then north-western European powers claimed as theirs contributed to the self-reﬂected impression amongst many Europeans of upheaval. This echoed not only in the rising sense of civilizational otherness present in the Euro-American empires, but also in the experience of a heightening of the sphere of economic power, the range of Europe’s polities and the sense of distinctive cultural identities. Thus, the intrusive presence of Europeans in American environments ushered in the creation of modern colonizing state institutions, trans-imperial instruments of government, the large-scale aggregation of capital, a colonial slave mode of production, markets that bartered human beings and colonies at the edge of cultures and social formations that they struggled to construct ﬁrstly as similar and then as vividly diﬀerent and barbarous. Multiple centres on both sides of the ocean dominated these relationships. It is therefore misleading to speak in strict terms of a ‘centre’ with a ‘periphery’ or peripheries. Colonialism produced its own centres on the North and South American continents. Granted, they did not enjoy symmetrical relationships with the headquartered bodies of imperial government, whether those headquarters were in London, Paris or Versailles or in Madrid. But they were not simply dependent on the capitals of the imperial states either. Thus these are not outposts of Western modernity, as some social scientists have understood it. All these historical features have panoramas that are British, Spanish or French Atlantic and not exclusively European or continental, even though they have been constituted culturally by Europeans through what has been called in modern times the Western Tradition. And it is Atlantic and American vectors—whether imagined or really absorbed—as much as European ones that count in thinking about the early modern processes of state formation, capitalism and civilizational consciousness. Considering the vitality of developments in the Western hemisphere and how they inﬂuenced Western Europe at its roots has pressed the following thesis which underpins the argument of this book: that these histories are all better written as ones of Atlantic rather than Western modernity. The terms of this multidimensional pattern of modernity are introduced in chapter one. A special place is given to civilizational cognition as that is the area in greatest need of more complete development

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and some further thinking. It draws on a longer tradition of sociology and revives research programs that were concerns of early sociologists but were subsequently overlooked. The context in which civilization has come into public debates today is vastly diﬀerent from the ﬁn de siecle ambivalence of the early twentieth century. Three features of the new context stand out. The end of colonialism brought an unﬁnished search for robust post-colonial independence and cultural renovation for many states new to the United Nations. Indigenous peoples who were formally subsumed under national categories of citizenship now ﬁnd voice in all sorts of public fora. They exercise a politics of mobilization based on claims for recognition and justice. The end of the Cold War has sparked new worldwide hostilities that do not resemble traditional inter-state conﬂicts. They appear to some as clashes of civilizations, although that impression is too casual and short-sighted. This world is so starkly diﬀerent from that in which civilizations analysis initially ﬂourished. It demands new sensibilities to be exercised and a review of the underlying longer-term assumptions of Western history.5 The sociology of civilizations is well suited to this task as it is around the idea of civilization that some of those assumptions have revolved. A quick glance at the contours of the Colombian context in which the substantial connection of all the world’s continents occurred shows up the hazards that present themselves and some of the sensibilities needed. A comprehensive examination of the American picture must assume revision of the terms under which macrosociologists classify historical formations and the typologies employed. Mesoamerican and Andoamerican empires were a diﬀerent type with distinct characteristics (hinterland concentrations, pictographic communication and monumental cities, alliance-making). Alongside those, the stateless societies can be also reassessed within the frame of civilizational theory. Pre-invasion cultures and political federations established themselves in an interior world that contrasted with the Colombian era interface of diﬀerent groups of societies. The speciﬁc complexity of their technological, economic and symbolic apparatus presents a strong case for considering them to be bona ﬁde civilizations. Ethnographers and archaeologists in the twentieth century have

5 See, once again, Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallizations and Civilizational Change: Axiality and Modernity,” in Ben-Rafael and Sternberg, Comparing Modernities.

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reconstructed their productive techniques, which were unappreciated by intrusive colonizers. Many developed quasi-federal chiefdoms that attained large-scale organizations, even though these were actually state-less. Similarly, many of the sophisticated codes of myth and history are decipherable today and often defended by descendants in situations where languages have been recovered.6 Anthropology and archaeology have also turned up evidence in state-less as well as stratiﬁed agrarian societies of methods of cultural preservation that involve capacities to absorb other inﬂuences but also to self-immunize and thereby resist them.7 Moreover, it is evident today that the best remembered civilizations were preceded by other cultures that contributed substantially to them. Amerindian societies clearly had ample connections with each other and possibly with trans-Paciﬁc and Atlantic nexus of integration and migration.8 How civilizational sociology evaluates the proto-federative, indigenous, stateless societies and the pre-Colombian empires has consequences. The relative lack of geographically discrete American formations based on a kind of state power that is readily graded as ‘traditional’ increases the odds of overlooking these. Therefore, it is the very invisibility of their civilizational character that should be investigated. A historical genealogy of the social sciences would be one approach and one with great merit. Another is to develop a reﬂexive sociology of civilizations suited to the study of Atlantic modernity that renders this invisibility visible. The contribution of the present work to such sociological thinking is twofold. Firstly, it records very positive gains made in comparative social science. Secondly, it explores in some depth the coalescence of the European civilizational imaginary in Atlantic contexts. The ﬁrst point needs only brief reiteration. Two notions of civilization are present and invoke considerations of civilizational complexes as both regional and ontological contexts. The objectivistic tag of ‘civilization’ for geo-cultural entities continues. This is a clear link to older traditions of civilizational thinking.

6 For example, see Samuel M. Wilson, ed., The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). 7 Michael E. Smith and Marilyn A. Masson, The Ancient Civilizations of Mesoamerica: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 8 Muriel Porter Weaver, The Aztecs, Maya and their Predecessors: Archaeology of Mesoamerica (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1972), chap. 9; Michael N. Nassaney and Kenneth E. Sassaman, Native American Interactions: Multiscalar Analyses and Interpretations in the Eastern Woodlands (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).

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However, the emphasis has changed totally. The nexus of diﬀerent social formations have gained more attention from historians and this, in turn, has translated into an image of inter-connection. This is by no means a ﬁnished trend in the literature. It establishes the commonplace that past impressions that historical empires and civilizations were self-contained and protectionist are extremely misleading. The thesis driving globalization studies that the uniﬁcation of communication, ideas and trade is a recent development serves to replicate this impression. It draws attention away from rich scholarship that casts grave doubt over the presumption that large-scale, multifaceted connections had few historical precedents before the nineteenth century. The sociology of civilizations can be credited with integrating the fruits of historical research, which demonstrate that large-scale contact is a widespread feature of human endeavour at least since the Axial Age (to use Eisenstadt’s celebrated label for the ﬁrst millennium BCE). This puts the Western trajectory into far clearer perspective and returns a measure of proportion to impressions governing contemporary World History. So much so, in fact, that the case for a multiple modernities paradigm now seems undeniable and the claim that modernity is a singularly Western phenomenon looks like it has been largely abandoned. The second notion ﬁxes on its symbolism. Durkheim and Mauss’ original insights are taken by Arnason and others as the material of a research program that is ongoing. Arnason’s own innovation is the relativization of ‘culture’ and ‘power’ in civilizational complexes. This helps in relating civilizations as units of analysis to civilizations as ontological visions. The boundaries of possibility for a hermeneutics of civilization have not been reached, however. Deep probing of the multifaceted inter-civilizational encounters of the Atlantic zone throws into relief the profound cultural impact on Europe. These were encounters like few others that Europeans had in the Mediterranean, across Eurasia and in northern Africa. They drew on a civilizational imaginary with the following characteristics: 1) The means to make sense of intercultural experiences combined traditions of ethnological understanding with novel conceptions of Others; 2) Signs of civilization that were both vehicles of understanding (for example maps) and instances of recognition and re-closure (expressed in early attempts to grasp Mesoamerican societies compared with the inability to discern economies of land use in stateless formations).

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Chapter four and ﬁve set out the complexity of the civilizational imaginary. Over the course of three centuries a collective mood of civilizational individuality swelled amongst Europeans. The racial and cultural supremacy boasted about in the eighteenth century was strongly contested, but mostly on the grounds of particularity. The path to that point was uneven and disrupted. It was uneven as there were variations in traditions of civility and conquest amongst Europeans. It was disrupted in the sense that not all knowledge about the New World was in circulation in urban intellectual milieux. Accurate reports of the New World were raised; but more telling were the kinds of interpretation being made. The parameters of understanding that Europeans brought into the Americas set standards for encounters there. Traditions of empire were animated by actual strategies of empire building and by the greater general example of Rome. Humanism encouraged such a neo-classical sensibility that informed state formation with a universalist imagination. This existed in tension with the particularism of each national convergence of colonizing. Imperial models were not only eﬀected upon entry into the new continent. The powers were increasingly mindful of each other, especially after the settlement at Westphalia. Even before the end of the Thirty Years War, there was vigorous rivalry. Nonetheless, compacts of conduct of foreign exploits also developed. Spain brought its own version of universalism to the new sphere of oceanic rivalry that opened up in the early ﬁfteenth century. It sat at the cusp of medieval and early modern romantic conceptions of the legal conduct of maritime movement. Besides this, conquistadorial conquest and mercantilist inclinations encouraged Spanish advances. Both drew upon the experiences of previous and, at that stage, still current exploits. They were led to large land seizures. The English employed a diﬀerent strategy that was simultaneously colonial and mercantilist: it ‘planted’ people in small, civilizing settlements. During the same period, they were establishing beachhead community in Ireland with Atlantic orientations. The French drew from a common history in crusading over some centuries. Empire still meant Rome to them, however. They took jurisprudence from its legacy. Along with the Spanish, they shared notions of the universality of legitimate rule, which deferred to the heritage of that paradigmatic empire. The forces of colonialism therefore did not enter the Americas as though it were a tabula rasa. Their invasion brought more than

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guns, ships, towns and diseases. It also brought preconceptions that were subject to change also over time. This was an era of ‘discovery’ and not in the supremacist sense of other peoples and places ﬁnally ‘discovered’ by civilized man, as has been assumed. It is the discoveries internally set in motion by the transformation of knowledge that came from debates about the New World. Foremost amongst these, for the purposes of the current argument, was a widening of the categories of thinking about humanity. The ethnologization of European perception transformed established schemas and practices of subjugation as discussed in chapter ﬁve. The ethnological horizon expanded from the ﬁfteenth century onwards as Europeans encountered a host of cultures, which they previously knew nothing about and which knew nothing of them. It forced a confrontation with the foundation of knowledge of geology, environment, botany and societies. Some of the latter were recognized as civilizations due to detectable religious and political hierarchies of power, impressive cities, systematic agriculture, architecture, the arts, monuments and ordered markets. Other geo-cultural formations were less conspicuous or were observed as cultures without the public infrastructure and political superstructures associated with historical societies. These had a sort of cultural unity, which took in a geographical area and exhibited sophisticated though unacknowledged civilizational features. On the side of Europeans, we can see that civilization is an intricate matter. The upheaval instigated by the invading European powers brought to the surface civilizational features that were both particular to each imperial state and shared by all of them. America was treated over time as more distant and diﬀerent. We ﬁnd this in the ﬁelds of botany, travel writing, topography, historiography, mapping, iconography, art and literature. How colonial societies related to conquered indigenous civilizations speaks more loudly than any other component of the invading complex. The modes of recognition of pre-Colombian civilizations (and the destructiveness that this entailed) serve as an excellent illustration of the variability of the conceptual ground of colonialism. To re-cap: the British held conceptions of possession, the Spanish pre-established notions of paganism and the French a ﬂexible spectrum of understanding of savagery and civility that primed the forms of inter-civilizational engagement. The English had a civilizational approach to the signs of productive and enclosed land. Lands labored entitled the laborer to ownership under an unwritten law of property. North-eastern Indian cultures

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most certainly had economies of land use and long-standing lines of trade, but these were imperceptible to English eyes. Collective myths, land settlement and political organization were features of the Indian nations’ sense of being that similarly did not ﬁnd easy equivalents in the Protestant universe of concepts. Without doubt, this was peculiar to English civilizational sensibilities and its culture of capitalism. Ambiguous conceptions of paganism cast a long shadow over Spanish views. Impassioned debate about the ethnological character of aboriginal Americans turned on this ambiguity. Slavery was up for discussion as well and the conclusions reached put moral limits on the economic exploitation of the New World, which became quite severe anyhow. The direct enslavement of Amerindians in the mineral and agricultural economy of the colonies was contested. They were pressed into economic communities by the encomienda and repartimiento, but did not appear to have the visible physio-cultural features required for slavery that Africans seemed to. Respected Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations were invaded, then misinterpreted and documented by theologians whose own world views left them bewildered in the face of unfamiliar cultural constellations. Interpreting Mesoamerican histories led to constructions that emphasized commonality. Meanwhile non-agrarian and non-hierarchical societies of the Caribbean and the central and southern continental hinterlands were remembered in romanticized classical forms. French premises were formed in the crusades of the late medieval era and were communicated at that time to other temporal and ecclesiastic powers in Christendom. They fragmented easily in the Canadian environment where engagement with Huron, Algonquin and Micmac forces was shaped by trade, diplomacy, missionary work and alliance making as much as out-and-out confrontation. Where battles broke out around colonial forts, a harsh image of the natives ensued. Jesuit attempts at developing missions promoted a diﬀerent understanding. For the French, perceptions of civility or its absence also primed relationships with Indian networks. However, fragmentation enabled trade, rather than hindering it. Both kinds of perception—the savage and the semi-civil—roughly matched the two sides of the French imperial state, namely its militarism and its heavyhanded mercantilism, while also accommodating Jesuit visions of the Indians’ humanity. Each mode of recognition and interaction with America’s original civilizations is particular to its imperial source and, in that sense, is

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part of British, French and Spanish. However, this question is complex and a conclusive view needs to be balanced with some succinct remarks on what was generalized amongst the European empires. The cultural preconceptions that informed the continuing interface with America’s civilizations were communicated through Europe’s knowledge circuits. Maps, paintings and sketches had a common geometry and semiotics, while books, diaries and journals were drafted in widely intelligible idioms. The institutions of libraries, gardens, scientiﬁc academies, and private museums and collections preserved elements of the New World in a frozen and decontextualized state, re-contextualizing them in settings of civilizational interpretation. These were signs of civilization and they were exchanged throughout Europe, giving oﬀ the impression of civilizational diﬀerence from the American world and reinforcing propositions that there is a common Western destiny. Europe had entered the ﬁfteenth century bearing the traces of Ottoman, Western and Byzantine traditions. With the transformation of Western Europe induced by the advance into the Atlantic, a new commonality emerged in countries that extended their states into the Americas. In a sense, the premier civilizational identity of Atlantic modernity was Western—more properly EuroAmerican—more so than British, French or Hispanic. It is in the Americas that we ﬁnd ambiguity and diversity and some identities in a state of ﬂux from the mid-eighteenth century onward. They reﬂected oﬀ an instituting civilizational imaginaire. Its unﬁxed nature was the source of new feelings of belonging. For example, middling Creoles felt an ‘in–between-ness’ that did not resonate with their counterparts in French or British colonies. Their demeanour was peninsular, but their close proximity to Indian communities gave them a disposition to defensiveness about the places and style of life they felt they belonged to. French Canadians were split between fort, river and town. Many identiﬁed with cities and some in the elite looked to Francophone culture for their bearings. Others were more attuned to the rhythms of life in the wilderness. Continental Anglo-Americans retained strong loyalties to the Anglosphere and the tenor of its culture. Even when politics and philosophy started to separate them, there were many customs and practices that still transcended divisions. Conversation and hospitality—the arts of the public sphere, if you will—were sustained, even in the climate of upheaval. In the Caribbean, European settlers became a minority able only to generate ardent Anglophonic and Francophonic

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identities. African inﬂuences produced hybrid cultures that proved more lasting. In the Americas the civilizational imaginary created new people with interpretive resources to understand and articulate their own conditions in fresh and synthetic worldviews. They also operated in a governmental environment in which the political capital that they could mobilise was starting to matter more and more in the second half of the eighteenth century. They arrived at that point in an institutional context that echoed the tension of imperial state formation analysed in chapters three, seven, eight and nine. Three factors produced diﬀerent conditions for colonial governments. A colonial order embracing local instruments of administration, Creole elites that were coherent to diﬀerent degrees and public spheres of philosophy, artistic and political discourse in some places amounted to an eﬀective pole of attraction for opponents of imperial government. Secondly, the reach of royal patronage was comparatively tenuous in the colonies. There certainly were webs of clientage, but they were spun in local and regional networks as well as imperial hierarchies and they tended to hold people more ﬁrmly to American ties of obligation. Finally, distance dictated the imperatives of colonial autonomy to a degree. The means of eﬀective royal government in non-contiguous and trans-continental empires were not reﬁned in the era of colonialism. In fact, there was no major precedent for imperial endeavours on this large-scale in the history of European empire building. Even Rome, which towered as the great classical exemplar, was a land-based empire that mainly occupied and dominated colonies. The challenge of the Americas was to build oceanic empires, constituting immigrant settler colonies on the remains of struggling indigenous civilizations. This produced the modern problem of large colonial populations embedded in centres on other continents that were developing new societies against a backdrop of old environments mostly depopulated by their intrusion. The resulting tension of state formation therefore played out in analogous-though-diﬀerent ways in colonial and national spheres. It established the potential for independent societies in the Americas. Four conclusions about state formation can be drawn from chapter three. Firstly, there were two comparable tensions. One is national, the other imperial. A reconstruction of the notion of ‘absolutism’ gives eﬀect to this point by illuminating the inner conﬂicts of early modern polities and by expanding the range of analysis to encompass

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all territories that were theatres of royal government. In this sense, ‘absolutism’ is only a meaningful term when it denotes a ﬁguration of constant conﬂict. This shed light also on the third conclusion. If the complexity of intra-imperial arrangements is taken into account, then multiple centres can be identiﬁed. This is a better and more illuminating approach which can supplement hypotheses that map institutional ensembles a priori according to a ﬁxed centre and presumed peripheries. Furthermore, the instances of mutual dependence between centres become clearer, where such instances can be discerned. Finally, the foundations of colonies set the tone for the emergence and consolidation of autonomies within the Atlantic empires. Naturally this was a process of institutional creation; indeed, state formation in general should be theorized at a meta-sociological level as an act of creation. A pivotal concept is worked out through the course of chapter seven. The colonial order is a feature of the transoceanic empires of Atlantic modernity. Colonial elites are legion in complex empires of diﬀerent civilizational origins.9 However, the colonial order’s position and role in the Euro-American empires was distinct and a token of the early modernity of transatlantic colonialism. The contrast with the provincial and municipal order, made up of more conventional elites, conﬁrms this. The colonial order was in possession of the institutions of administration and could establish a conception of this kind of political ownership. The varied formulations of republican politics within colonial societies spell out this modernity for us. They vied with durable doctrines that reﬂected loyalty to existing arrangements and to the monarchical order in place. This political competition generated modern republican horizons in the Anglosphere. It was taken as a model by others and often incompletely at that. It emerged from the new-ness of the New World that pressed itself most forcefully on colonial subjects. But there were colonists who were thinking about their past, their traditions and their political-philosophical and cultural inheritance. In the case of Anglo-Americans, this produced the deepest collective reﬂection, although that collective was rife with division. For Hispanic Americans who surrounded themselves with the monuments and architecture of tradition, modernity came harder and it came from

9

S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York: Free Press, 1969).

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others to some extent: the French and, after 1776, the North Americans. This deliberative culture was heavily context-bound. Chapter eight looks at how it took place in an environment of intense rivalry between imperial powers, that were headquartered back in Europe, but advancing their interests in intercontinental diplomacy, warfare and intrigue. Modern empires were looking like large agglomerations of non-contiguous territories a full century before the world empires would move to carve up Africa. They were modern as their leaders were global in their assessment of where they had a stake. The division in the British colonies and the resurgent Creole colonial order of the South American continent led to restructuring after the Seven Years War. This magniﬁed the tension of state formation and encouraged confrontation between colonial and imperial authorities. In the international arena, the rivalry of states was not ended by the Treaty of Paris, although French interests were greatly reduced at that settlement. Instead, the ongoing antagonism intensiﬁed in the Caribbean theatre, where the colonial order was entrenched and where slave-based industries were thriving. The last quarter of the eighteenth century ﬁnished European coverage of the main continents with the reconnaissance of Australasia and the movement in to the Paciﬁc. At this time in which French and British empires were assertive on an international scale, their American colonies were either unstable or seemed in jeopardy. Only in the Americas could republican polities emerge at this stage. Within imperial states, colonial interests were a distant other with which royal clientage had to compete to gain the sway of urbanbased American administrators. Self-rule was hard to grasp in the end for new republicans. Autonomy as a sovereign rule came easily to those accustomed to various levels of self-administration. Autonomy of determination—that is, a break of the limitations on self-determination of the future—was harder. It evaded Latin American republics where the legacy of executive power continued. How opportunities to industrialise and engage capitalism were negotiated rested in a large measure on the resources of reﬂexivity that new elites could draw upon (as well as the natural endowment, level of technological and economic development etc.). Praetorian states struggled to develop these, while the US sustained a horizon of self-critical democracy. There were real constraints on this, however, and indeed on the new republics in general. Not the least of these was the survival and reformation of the British and French empires. The

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republican diversity of Atlantic modernity had to coexist with the enduring American colonies that were positioned within changing British and French empires as well as the newly conﬁgured Anglophonic formation in Canada. That these were imperial forms made them no less modern, as I’ve consistently argued throughout. The Atlantic had the appearance of a singular zone, although its diversity is its singularity. For example, the volume of trade and levels of investment in the Western hemisphere grew phenomenally in the nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that colonial and republican governments had been sworn enemies. The civilizational programs of the past instituted intercultural dynamics that permitted such a nexus. It had also by the time of republican decampment established another constraint on the new republican states: inter-continental capitalism, which simultaneously limited and enabled development of the new polities. Capitalism was the child of Atlantic modernity, notwithstanding its antecedents in European (such as urban mercantilism, the growth of money as the imaginary of exchange). Chapter six seeks to extend arguments developed by macrosociologists since the 1970s at the cusp of dependency theory’s demise and world systems theory’s ascendency. It is the area of political economy that the most work and the most comprehensive work has been done on the Atlantic zone to date. Mercantilism as a concept of heuristic value has suﬀered some blows to its standing. On one hand, its credibility has been widely questioned. On the other hand, the trends it designates have been neglected in economic history. This is a shame as there is some social scientiﬁc value in reviving and expressing this as a form of state strategising. I have tried to do this here by pointing to four features of the mercantilist state and what it actually did. Firstly, it set up the domestic and imperial infrastructures that promoted economic expansion. In doing so, it was giving eﬀect to the second feature I’m interested in: its role in co-founding capitalism. States and their particular divisions were also arbiters. They uniﬁed the transatlantic infrastructure that they also monitored, guarded and connected to diﬀerent points in the geographic transect. Still, they were overseers of a sort when it came to deep-rooted and inﬂuential interest groups. The fourth feature is those mercantilist strategies drawn up by royal and governmental administrators who often juggled colonial demands, the expressed interests of fractions of national capital

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and the constraints imposed by inter-imperial rivalry. Beyond these there was another feature of capitalism’s early development that deserves attention: a partial and always contested rationality of economic practice that emerged in the Caribbean. It could be considered an early type of rationality if one wanted to think within the metanarrative of rationalization. Its components—such as cost accounting, high-risk insurance and sophisticated credit provisions—suggest a full bloodedness or maturity that deﬁes an evolutionary or developmentalist scheme. I consider this to be a cultural type, however, and my analysis bears out the view that it was not alone and uncontested. Capitalism’s development was therefore not smooth, nor uniﬁed, although in some respects it was unifying. Atlantic modernity after colonialism Early Atlantic modernity is one path in the complex tapestry of the contemporary world. It produced independent American states that seem occidental in a number of respects, but really have developed their own interpretations of modernity, models of capitalist economy and distinct identities. Political and economic ties with Western Europe regrew and expanded after the republican revolts. The states that emerged from those wars stimulated the further cultural and economic outgrowth of the Atlantic world throughout the nineteenth century. Their own interpretations of modernity engaged the colonial foundations of their original historical experiences. Yet their condition and outlook was truly post-imperial. It is no surprise therefore that none of these states acquired and kept a colonial empire— notwithstanding the oft-repeated and correct caveats about the United States.10 In this regard, economic, cultural, political and diplomatic links with the lasting empires of Western Europe was a source of transatlantic tension. Not that this was “a confrontation with an alien culture,”11 as the encounter with the West would be for other civilizations. Rather, it was a condition of reﬂection on many discrete cultures that existed on two shores on either side of the Atlantic. Their respective worldviews on the inter-state system divided into 10 On the anti-colonial posture of the United States, see Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic (London: Weidenfeld, 1974). 11 Eisenstadt, “The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity,” in Arjomand and Tiryakian, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis p. 58.

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imperial and national. Moreover, French American, Hispanic American and Anglo-American perspectives on modernity were not merely produced domestically; they were disseminated over the Atlantic and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, globally. Outside perceptions of the Americas came to be dominated by the United States. It “radiated modernity” for Europeans, where once it had illuminated a primeval past. Unlike during the colonial era in which it had been romanticized as utopia or deplored as depravity, the consolidated federal state was seen as a vision of progress—a “pure modernity”—regenerating itself continuously in the present.12 It had achieved the aim of an unbound past, or so it was believed. Nonetheless, ambivalence prevailed because it always had a record of Western achievements from which it could selectively borrow, even though it started its history in the present. Thus, what past it did establish for itself was inscribed in revolution and self-conscious constitutional re-foundation. But its revolution combined traditions with an untarnished modernity, as the discussion of the historiography of republicanism indicates. Its history focuses on a heroic act of purging the vices of the old world and creating something new. Of course, there was always another civilizational form in the Americas, another Atlantic zone that lay south of the border in the Western hemisphere. Hispano-America’s traditions might be seen as more traditional and steadfast. Creolism and Hispanicism in Latin America create an ambience of tradition, not modernity. On this basis it is easy to dismiss the idea of a Latin American version of modernity.13 But those traditions are to a great extent the products of exposure to European modernity and to internal Creole versions of it. They are the artefacts of a modern history of intercultural transactions. There were two particular moments of “global immersion.” One arose when the empire crumbled during the Napoleonic interlude and another in the post war era, when Latin American republics were forced to confront externally-derived modernizing strategies.14 Latin American modernities involved collective deliberation and conﬂict over how to reconcile competing external models 12

Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994). As Constantin von Barloewen does in Cultural History and Modernity in Latin America: Technology and Culture in the Andes Region (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995). 14 Roniger, “Global Immersion,” in Roniger and Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities. 13

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of societal development with an internal and utopian project of a good republican society. In other words, how would imported European and Asian ideas stack up against internal understandings of ‘the social’ which were incomplete and which did not have a clearly deﬁned citizenry to focus on. This modernity of Latin America opens up moments of critical reﬂexivity that deserve more attention than they have received in the past. There is no space to develop this here. However, intercultural ﬂows should be part of any consideration of this issue and some conjectural comments on this in relation to the current project are possible. Culturally, Hispanic inﬂuences remain, even though nineteenth century liberal doctrine may have denied this. The Iberian peninsular was still an important civilizational connection. However, there are other sources of intercultural exchange. If Latin American civilization is modern in any way— that is, if it is dynamic, reﬂexive and shifting—then it is due to the ﬂow of economic, political and cultural traﬃc. The passage of people in the nineteenth century maintained the bonds with Europe. British capital, migrants and liberal philosophy blended into the La Plata region. Paris furnished philosophy for others. Its reception of Enlightenment thinking had started with the Bourbons, but many European sources were contributing to it by the nineteenth century. Relativized notions of totality and modernity accept a ﬂexible understanding of both. One general observation is possible here. Understanding how tradition and modernity are ﬁgured diﬀerently in modern Latin America can dissolve the appearance of traditional societies rooted in the past. While the process of state formation evinces continuity—as I argue in the ﬁnal chapters—the appearance of a great burden of tradition can lead us away from cultural modernisms that are part of the Latin American fabric. Some balance is therefore needed. Moreover, appearances, although powerful in themselves, can be deceptive in general. America—the whole of America—had a past that interfaced with two (perhaps three or more) civilizational types more than it may have seemed to. Of course, those civilizations are the Western and indigenous ones. Centennial celebrations of statehood have occasioned protest and reproach arising from the historical experiences of the ‘nations within’ in New World immigrant settler societies.15 Extensive protests dur-

15

See Montserrat Guibernau, Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global

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ing the 1992 Quincentenary of the Discovery of the Americas reminded the world of America’s aboriginal age and were evidence of indigenous modernities.16 In place of the jubilation of commemorative ceremonies, indigenous coalitions spoke in a vernacular of resistance and survival and, in some cases, articulated visions of diﬀerentiated citizenship and sovereignty. In the midst of commemoration of the past, movements against the Quincentenary inverted the relationship of past and present. Instead of elevating the accomplishments of the present to celebrate Columbus’ voyage, indigenous claims mobilized other records of the past to highlight issues of the present. Public acknowledgment of the stubborn endurance of Amerindian peoples and their claims to continuing sovereignty was troubled and controversial and mostly remains so. In the context of consolidated multiculturalisms, the autonomies claimed by indigenous movements throughout the Americas takes on added force. What they express is an ongoing feeling of coloniality held by distinct peoples within nations that declare that they are survivors and independent of the dominant state. To be sure, the pasts that indigenous people point to haunt the American present and do so partly because the movements that assert them are exercising modern political self-consciousness—some make claims to limited sovereignty—in doing so. The civilizational friction between the modernity of Euro-America and the modernity of aboriginal America, along with the mutually ambivalent regard that Western Europe and America have for each other with, is the political and cultural corollary of the transatlantic modernity of state formation, capitalist development and civilizational interaction. These potent legacies of the past remind that the New World in itself is an interaction of several old worlds.

Age (Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 3; and Augie Fleras and Jean Leonard, The ‘Nations Within’: Aboriginal-State Relations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand (Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1992). 16 On the notion of indigenous modernity, developed in relation to Australia’s civilizational experience, see Rundell, “From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities,” in Arjomand and Tiryakian, Rethinking Civilizational Analysis.

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INDEX

abolitionism 183, 208, 277–278, 296 absolutism 15–16, 17, 37–45, 59, 71–72, 228, 245, 306–307 academies 80, 82, 110, 119, 131, 147, 264, 305 accounting 160, 167, 191, 309 Africa 10–11, 22, 50, 51, 87, 118, 126, 161, 167, 171 n. 75, 176, 191, 241, 297, 301, 308 see also West Africa alcalde mayor 202, 203 n. 24 American Revolution 6, 219, 221, 238, 250, 252, 256, 270–271, 277–278, 282–283, 289, 297 Amerindians 3–4, 22, 30–31, 34–35, 54, 65–66, 94–95, 105, 108 n. 10, 114–115, 117, 119, 121, 128–139, 183, 195–201, 207, 210, 213, 219, 221, 223, 236 n. 7, 240–241, 257–258, 266, 268–269, 299–302, 304, 312–313 Abenaki 66 Aztec 100 n. 81, 112, 131–132, 198, 199 Huron 210 n. 41, 304 Incan 112, 132, 199 Iroquois 65–66, 68, 210 n. 41 Meztizos 115, 268–269, 284, 288 Micmac 66, 304 see also civilizations Amis des Nois 277 Anderson, Benedict 205, 228, 253 n. 3, 254 n. 6, 287 anthropology 2, 26–27, 122–123, 133 n. 80, 300 anthropography 79, 117, 123, 124, 134, 137 Antipodes 1, 74, 82–83 antiquity 77, 81, 100–101, 124, 229 Aquinas, Thomas 101 Argentina 285, 287 Argentine Confederation 286 aristocracy 39–45, 85, 188, 195, 199–200, 208, 210–211, 225–226, 229 Aristotle 119, 275 Aristotleanism 79, 106, 124

Arnason, Johann P. 24, 26–27, 142–143, 301 art 31, 77, 97, 112, 118, 120, 264–265, 303 asiento 51, 179–180, 235 Atlantic Ocean 12, 83–84, 90, 102 Atlantic studies 5, 10–12, 71 audiencia 60, 196, 202, 206, 245, 271, 286, 287 Augustine 101 Australasia 289–290, 308 Bailyn, Bernard 19 banking 60, 144, 148, 187 Barbados 60, 166, 177, 178 baroque culture 41–1, 98, 131, 201–203, 222 bishoprics 89, 201 Blackburn, Robin 140, 164 n. 52, 165 n. 58, 182, 278, 296 Board of Trade 62, 149, 155–156, 179, 182, 217, 236, 238–239, 244 Bodin, Jean 126 Bolivar, Simon ix, 7, 267, 269, 283, 284–286 Bordeaux 162, 166, 169, 180, 184 Borkeneu, Frank 24 n. 4 Boston 171, 239, 261 botany 109, 119, 120, 137, 294, 303 Bourbons 101 French 40–41 Spanish 46, 59, 60, 150, 153–154, 206–207, 235–236, 243–248 Braudel, Fernand 10, 39 n. 3, 140 Brazil 57, 160, 163, 165 n. 57, 169, 170, 182, 279 Bristol 11, 178, 260 Buenos Aires 47, 153, 245, 285 bureaucracy 39 n. 3, 17, 50, 59, 60 bureau des colonies 70 bureau de commerce 69 cabildo 50, 58, 60, 196, 202–203, 205–206, 271, 286–288 see also urban government Cadiz 46, 150, 151, 163, 169, 247

334

index

calculative rationality 164, 167, 191–192 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de 280 Canada see New France capital 25, 144, 147, 150, 166, 167, 176, 182, 185–190, 200–201, 237–238, 244, 298, 309 capitalism 18–20, 21–22, 88 n. 46, 89, 139, 140–192, 213–214, 290, 293, 294, 304, 308, 309–310 Cardinal Fleury 69 Caribbean, the 47–48, 56–57, 68–71, 90, 91, 103, 116, 134, 155, 159, 160, 161–162, 165 n. 57, 166, 168–170, 172–173, 176–182, 184–185, 191, 207–208, 219, 220–221, 237, 251–252, 254, 266, 276–280, 291, 296 see also West Indies cartography 81–82, 105, 109, 129–131, 137, 146–147, 160, 236 n. 7, 303 Casa de Contratacion 46, 51, 59–60, 130, 149, 150 see also mercantilism Castile 41, 59, 91–92, 99 Castoriadis, Cornelius 31–33 catholicism see church, Papacy Cato 272 ceremony 202–203 Chambers of Commerce (French) 50, 58, 277 Charles V (Spain) 98, 100 Charlestown 166, 171 chartered companies 57, 175–178, 182–184, 209 see also joint-stock companies Cheasapeake Bay 155, 163, 176, 222 Christendom 74, 76, 82, 89–90, 97–101, 148, 304 church 2, 42, 79, 92, 196–197, 198–199, 201, 224, 264, 272–273 Cicero 272 Civil War (English) 42–44, 60–62 civilizations 4, 12–14, 22, 35–36, 76–77, 112, 231–232, 292–313 Andoamerican 29, 103, 125, 134, 299–300, 304 Byzantine 18, 77, 78, 84, 305 European 8–9, 74–75, 76–77, 103–104, 109, 257, 293–298 indigenous, see Amerindians inter-civilizational exchange 4–5,

30–31, 50, 101, 105, 137, 291, 294–295, 301, 305–306 Islamicate 1, 84, 90–91, 103, 124 Mesoamerican 29, 103, 112, 121, 125, 134, 198–199, 299–300, 301, 304 see also sociology, civilizational civility 125, 133, 134–136, 222, 292, 297, 301, 303 civilizational imaginary 75, 77, 102, 105, 115, 124–127, 137–139, 300–301, 305–306 civilizing process 90, 93, 96, 125, 135, 136 n. 87 see also Elias, Norbert clash of civilizations thesis 23, 209 see also Huntington, Samuel class struggle 16 n. 22, 42 clergy 110, 196–197 see also theologians Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 56–57, 64, 65, 146, 177–178, 188, 189, 208, 211–212, 225 Cold War 23, 299 colonial autonomy 6–7, 70–71, 158, 193–232, 244–245 see also colonial order colonial order 48–49, 141, 149, 193–232, 233–234, 251–291, 298, 306, 307 deﬁned 44–45, 193–194, 230 British 158–160, 212–218, 239–244, 258–260, 263 French 162–163, 177–178, 207–212, 225–227, 276–280 Hispanic 151–154, 194–207, 228–230, 245–149, 257–258, 264–266, 284–289 colonialism 4, 15, 53–55, 56–57, 84, 89–97, 101–103, 105–106, 125, 299–300, 303–304 Columbus, Christopher 82–83, 86–87, 88, 90, 106, 114, 116, 117 n. 33, 120, 124, 128, 130, 313 common law 177, 148, 242, 272 Compagnie des Indies 183–184 composite monarchy 43–44, 59, 93, 96 comunero revolt 41, 42, 92, 99 Congress of Panama 285 Congress of Vienna 282, 284 conquistadores 3, 92–93, 103 consejos 50, 70, 92 contraband trade 51, 149, 152, 158–159, 185, 245–247 Convention, The 278, 279

index corregidores 60, 152–153 Cortes, Hernan 100 see also conquistadores cortes 92, 289 Cortes of Cadiz 285 corruption 7, 149, 155, 206, 245, 268 cosmology 76, 107, 124 counseil soverain 211–212 court society 39–41, 45 see also Elias, Norbert and aristocracy credit 144, 147, 155, 166, 167, 179, 189, 191, 310 Creoles 128, 154, 201, 203–207, 223, 229–230, 244–249, 264 n. 32, 264, 269, 285–289, 296 Creolism ix, 5, 93, 128, 173, 192, 194–195, 198–200, 223–230, 231, 233–234, 257–260, 267–269, 282, 288, 311 Cromwell, Oliver 92 crusades 89–92, 103 see also reconquista currency see money de de de de

Acosta, Jose 123 n. 54, 126 Campillo, Jose 245 Champlain, Samuel 136 las Casas, Bartoleme 2, 86 n. 37, 123, 126 de Montaigne, Michel 14, 122 n. 41, 126 de Pauw, Cornelius 114–115 de Pontchartrain, Jerome 70 dialectics 103, 127, 143 diﬀerence 3, 31, 108, 115, 116–118, 132, 135, 223, 296 see also otherness diplomacy 4, 31, 174, 180–181, 186, 255, 290, 304 Directory, the 281 discovery ix, 75–76, 80, 82, 104, 105–139, 295, 303 Dominicans 113, 196 Dumount, Louis 24 Durkheim, Emile 14, 23, 26–27, 122 n. 51, 301 Dutch empire 40, 42–42, 52, 69 Eden Treaty 280–281 education 197, 262 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N 3 n. 4, 253 n. 3, 24, 301 Elias, Norbert 17–18, 24 n. 4, 39

335

enclosure 53–54, 72, 103, 135, 144, 151, 188, 214–215, 231, 303 encomienda 4, 65, 151, 154, 195–201, 202, 204, 304 encomienderos 55–56, 195–201 end of history thesis 23 enlightenment philosophy 114–116, 125, 223, 288–289, 296 ethnicity 31, 154, 219–222, 223, 228–230, 231, 248, 251, 254, 257, 266–269 ethnological imagination 22, 75, 76, 77, 106 n. 5, 109, 122–123, 138, 303 evangelism 84, 85, 86–87, 90 evolutionism 105, 114–116, 121, 123, 127, 134–135, 138 exotica 112, 117–119, 187 exploration 46, 49, 52, 74, 75–76, 78–84, 102, 130–131 extermination 3, 198–199 Febvre, Lucian 24 n. 4 federalism 254, 261, 273–276 Ferdinand VII 283, 287 feudalism 67 n. 76 see also seignoriality ﬁshing 56, 160–161, 211 Fleury, Cardinal 69 Floridas, The 57, 160, 237, 256 Forts 6, 66, 70, 85, 174, 177, 209, 231, 295, 304, 305 Free Ports Act (1766) 159–160 free trade 153, 162–163, 180, 280 French and Indian War see Seven Years War French Revolution 69, 208, 252, 277–279, 282–283, 289, 297 Freud, Sigmund 14 Fronde, the 40, 42, 146 Frontenac, comte de 211–212 Fukuyama, Francis see end of history thesis fur trade 56, 65–66, 160–161, 209–210, 211, 240 Galileo, Galilei 124 gardens 53, 118, 305 Gauchet, Marcel 24 n. 4 genealogy 199 gentility 96, 170–171, 224 see also civility geography 48, 76, 79, 105, 111, 120, 124, 128–129, 132 gold 85–87, 103

336

index

‘Golden Age’ 2, 116–117, 125 see also utopianism governorship 70, 157, 180, 190, 215–216, 217, 223, 225, 227, 236, 239 Gran Colombia 285 Granada 92 Greenblatt, Stephen 121 Grenville, George 237, 241, 249 Grotius, Hugo 124 Guadaloupe 175, 180, 184, 279 Habsburg dynasty 41, 46, 59, 60, 92, 99–100, 235–236, 248 see also Charles V hacienda 151, 200, 273 Haitian Revolution 165 n. 57, 208, 252, 258, 278–280, 288 see also Toussaint Hakluyt, Richard 126 Harrington, James 275 Hartz, Louis 9 Havana 47, 48, 153, 237 Heckscher, Eli 141 n. 5, 145 hemeneutics 12–13, 78, 104, 112, 301 historicity 115, 194, 198–199, 272 historiography 18, 40, 105, 114–115, 134, 160, 204–205, 252–257, 272–276, 286, 289, 303, 311 Hobsbawn, Eric 143, 252, 254 Huguenots 56, 64, 160, 175, 211 humanism 1, 75–76, 78–81, 100–101, 102, 108 n. 10, 109, 110–111, 302 Huntington, Samuel 23, 30 n.13 ilustracion 235–236, 246, 258, 266 immigration 127–128, 231, 295 British 93, 95, 213, 221–222 French 220–221 Spanish 219–220 see also population imperialism 15–17, 44–45, 48–49, 51–52, 58, 129, 130–131, 139, 233–239, 251, 289–291 British 52–55, 60–62, 93–96, 165–158, 215–218, 236–239, 241–244 French 56–58, 62–71, 160–162, 225–226, 276–282 Spanish 55–56, 58–60, 90–93, 98–100, 149–151, 234–236, 282–284 indigenous peoples see civilization, Amerindian

indigeneity 127, 219, 312–313 indenture 171, 175, 220 industrialization 18, 143, 294, 308 inequality 208, 210–211, 218–220, 224–225, 228, 231, 237–238, 251, 266, 276, 296 Inquisition, Holy Oﬃce of the 265, 282 insurance 167, 189, 191, 310 intendants 70, 211–212, 245, 248 Italy 41, 99, 113, 114 Ireland 11, 78, 93–96, 103, 126, 258, 302 Jaspers, Karl 24 n. 4 Jacobinism 200, 252, 277–278, 283 Jamaica 60, 178 Jeﬀerson, Thomas 7, 260 Jerusalem 84, 89 Jesuits 64, 65, 123 n. 54, 175, 304 joint-stock companies 84–85, 168, 189, 247–248 judges 92, 205 n. 28, 205 n. 29, 216, 248 see also oidores jurism 97, 197–198, 211–212, 216–217, 301 just war, conceptions of 92–93, 243 n. 32 Justices of the Peace 216 La Plata 47, 150, 153, 245, 265, 285–286, 287, 312 labor 42, 55, 92, 145, 151, 163–193, 186, 195–201, 303 labor laws 144, 145 Laﬁtau, Joseph Francois 123 n. 54, 136 Lahontan, Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce 133, 136 Language 112, 121, 128–129, 131–132, 198, 223, 225, 254 Law of Burgos 196 l’exclusif 162–163, 177, 179–180, 184 l’homme sauvage see savagism liberalism 142–143, 235, 274, 282, 288–289, liberalization of trade 142–143, 153–154, 159–160, 162–163, 186–187, 234, 247, 280–281, 284 liberties 49, 90, 92, 117, 174, 197, 203, 216, 227–228, 242–243, 260, 272, 277–278 libraries 118, 264, 305 Lima 47, 153, 202, 203, 245, 265

index Liverpool 11, 169, 178, 260 Locke, John 54, 273–275 London 157, 163, 166, 168, 169, 176, 178–179, 189–190, 238, 239, 241, 244, 249, 250, 258, 259, 260, 261, 277, 282, 298 Louis XIV 64, 65, 188 Louisiana 183, 207, 237 loyalism 7, 61 n. 51, 218, 233, 251, 253–254, 257, 258–260, 266 McNeil, William 23 Madrid 39, 46, 153, 196, 206, 245, 247, 249–250, 257, 298 Mandeville, Sir John 82 manumission 173 maps 31, 77–82, 83, 129–131, 146–147, 305 Marco Polo 82 marine de guerre 68 Martin, Jose San 269, 285 Martinique 175, 180, 184, 279 Martyr, Peter 83, 116 Marx, Karl 14, 19, 27, 88 n. 46, 140, 143, 163–165, 281 Maurepas, comte de 69 Mauss, Marcel 14, 23, 26–27, 33–34, 301 Mediterranean 2, 12, 81, 84, 87, 89, 222, 297, 301 Meinig, Donald 45–46, 47 Mercator, Gerhardus 124, 130 see also cartography merchants 48, 81, 85, 145, 150–151, 153, 155, 157–158, 158–159, 168 n. 62, 169, 170 n. 70, 180, 186–187, 189–190, 191, 204, 224, 237–239, 241, 247, 248, 260, 264 mercantilism 19, 50–51, 59–60, 75, 78, 84–89, 103, 140–163, 237–239, 240, 247, 260–261, 302, 309–310 see also casa de contratacion, Board of trade, pacte colonial Mexico 206, 246, 265, 287 Mexico City 47, 153, 202, 203 migration see immigration millennialism 243, 297 Milton, John 97–98, 120 mining 4, 47, 51, 59–60, 149, 150–151, 200 minting 88, 144, 147–148 Miranda, Francisco de 203 miscegenation 4, 219–220

337

missions 65, 90, 119, 126, 196, 264, 304 Moctezuma 121 mode of production 135, 164–165 modernity 64, 232, 236 Atlantic xi–xii, 8–20, 36, 292–313 Early xii, 12, 129, 307 European xii, 293–298 Latin American 307–308, 311–312 indigenous 299, 312–313 political 269–271, 297 money 54, 66, 88–89, 145, 146–147, 309 Montesquieu, Charles 122 n. 51, 275, 277 Montreal 49, 64, 208, 210, 212, 225, 256 mullatoes 219, 279 multiple modernities xii, 8–9, 292–294, 301 Munster, Sebastian 124 see also cartography Muscovy Company 182 Museums 118, 305 mutual dependence 5–6, 72, 193, 218, 307 Nahuatl 132 see also Mexico, Aztec Nantes 161, 163, 180, 184 Napoleon, Bonaparte 279, 280, 282, 283, 289 Napoleonic Wars 6, 251, 258, 279–280, 283–284, 286 natural philosophy 77, 80–81, 110–111, 114, 118, 119 see also science nautical technology 81–82, 130 n. 71 Navigation Acts 62, 157–158, 215, 237, 238–239 navy 175, 181, 184, 244, 245, 276 Nelson, Benjamin 24 n. 4, 75 n. 2 New England 53, 194, 222, 223, 261 n. 21 New France 57, 65–68, 161–162, 193, 207, 208–209, 211–212, 220, 225–227, 239, 241, 252, 254–256, 280, 291 New Granada 196, 268, 278, 282, 287 New Laws (1542) 196 New Spain 47, 131, 154, 196–197, 203 n. 24, 287 New York 171, 238, 239, 261

338

index

newspapers 262, 265–266 see also print media Noahic origins, myth of 77 see also anthropography nobility see aristocracy Nova Scotia 235, 255, 256 oidores 60, 203 n. 24, 248 oligarchy 270 ordonnateurs 70 otherness 31, 77, 102, 107, 133–134, 294, 305 see also diﬀerence Ottoman Empire 8, 76, 87, 88, 102, 297, 305 pacte colonial 57, 149 paganism 134, 135, 303–304 Papacy 90, 92 Paradise Lost (Milton) 120 Paraguay 268, 285, 287 Paris 70, 146, 180, 226, 277, 278–279, 283, 298, 312 Parliament (British) 52, 53, 62, 155–156, 157, 215, 217, 238, 241–242, 261 patronage 39–42, 71, 79, 152, 153, 178, 188, 203–204, 206, 231, 233, 277, 290, 306 peninsulares 6, 153, 154, 199, 203 n. 24, 204–207, 219, 228–229, 245–246, 249, 264 n. 32, 267–269, 296 Penn, William 53, 94 Perspectivism 79, 119, 129–130 Peru 153, 194, 196, 203 n. 24, 206, 246, 268, 270 n. 44, 278 Philadelphia 171, 261 philosophers 80, 112, 226, 283 philosophy ix, 7, 78–79, 102, 110–111, 113, 264–265, 272–276, 282, 290, 307–308, 312 philosophy of empire 6, 280–282 Physiocratism 235–236, 280–281 pictography see languages piracy 51, 160, 174, 185 see also contraband trade Pitt, William the Elder 243 n. 33, 249 plantation 68, 95–96, 171–172, 174–175, 225, 238, 302 see also colonialism, population

planters 165, 166–173, 176, 180, 182–183, 207–208, 224, 277–278 see also slavery Pocock, J G A 273–275 political economy 151, 165, 182–183, 234–236 population 63–64, 155, 171–172, 183, 208, 219–222, 261, 266–269, 295–296, 306 portolan charts 130 Portugal 40, 81, 83, 85, 86, 90, 97, 98–99, 130 post-Weberianism 27–29 see also Arnason, Johann P postcolonial critique 14, 163, 313 power 17–18, 27–28, 71, 290–291, 300 praetorianism 270–271, 288, 308 primitive accumulation 19, 140, 143, 166 see also capital print media 106 n. 8, 113, 261–262, 264–266 see also newspapers Privy Council 53, 62, 155, 157, 217, 241 Protestantism 18, 53–55, 113, 134–135, 140, 224, 304 proto-nationalism 251, 252–7 provincial and municipal order 40, 41–45, 58, 141, 144–148, 149, 155, 163, 186, 194, 230, 231, 290, 307 Ptolemaic conception 82–83, 107 Ptolemy, Claudius 124 Ptolemy of Lucca 101 public sphere 119–120, 126, 136, 174, 251, 257, 260–266, 271, 273, 297 puritans 214 n. 51, 214 n. 55, 135, 155 Quakers 156, 225 Quebec 56, 64, 160, 206, 211, 225, 256 Quincentenary (1492–1992) 106, 312–313 Quinn, David 94–95 Racism see otherness, diﬀerence Raleigh, Walter 94 rationalism 35, 236, 272, 289 Raynal, abbe ix, 114, 277 reconnaissance 3, 52, 56, 81–82, 87, 160

index reconquista 55, 89, 103 redemptive cultures 135–136, 199–200 Reformation 131, 294 Renaissance 1–2, 74, 75 n. 2, 76–77, 78–84, 86, 87, 97, 107, 123 repartimiento 4, 47, 151–154, 200, 245–246, 304 republicanism 7, 21, 170, 200, 233–234, 243, 250, 251–291, 307–309 requerimiento 91 Richelieu, Cardinal 57, 148, 177 romanticism 1, 116–118, 123, 272 see also utopianism, ‘Golden Age’ Rome 74, 75, 78, 97–98, 100, 102, 125, 242 n. 28, 284, 302, 306 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 122 n. 51, 133, 277, 284 Royal African Company 170 n. 70, 175, 176–177 see also slavery St Domingue 184, 226, 278–279 St Lawrence Delta 48, 56, 63, 65, 67, 175, 207, 209, 256 Said, Edward 27 Santiago 153 salons 280 savagism 34, 121, 123, 125, 128, 133–137, 303 see also wild man, myth of science 75, 77, 80–81, 97, 102, 105, 114, 122, 126–127, 138, 226 scientiﬁc revolution 75 seignoriality 67–68 Seven Years War 64, 66, 126, 160, 162, 180, 208, 212, 218, 227, 234, 236, 239 n. 16, 240, 243, 249, 255–256, 259, 278, 280, 308 Seville 46, 51, 150–151, 247 Sicily 41 Simmel, Georg 14 slave rebellions 173, 208, 220, 257 slavery 19–20, 47, 65, 68, 140, 141, 144, 149, 160, 163–193, 207–208, 213, 219–222, 231, 277–280, 284, 295–296, 298, 304 Smith, Adam 141 n. 5, 163–166 social imaginary 31–33, 35, 74 see also Castoriadis sociology 36, 122 n. 51, 140, 190–191 classical 14, 23–24, 299

339

civilizational 14, 22, 24–35, 105, 137, 299–301 historical ix, 105, 143 South Africa 239–290 sovereignty 17–18, 54, 68, 98, 145, 193, 213, 215, 233, 234, 286, 288 sovereignty, theories of 215–218, 241–244 specie 86, 88 Stamp Act 239, 273 Stuart dynasty 15, 43–44, 52–54, 94, 95 n. 64, 216, 228 style of life 170–172, 192, 194, 202–203, 211, 220–228, 305 sugar trade 6, 68, 161, 165, 167, 169, 176, 180–182, 184–185, 208 taxation 59, 67, 70, 150, 160, 174, 179, 216, 239–241, 243, 247, 259, 268 theologians 78, 91, 99, 134, 196 theology 75, 78–79, 91, 102, 113, 124 Thomism 78–79, 100–101 tobacco trade 6, 165, 167, 69–70, 176 topography 31, 128–129, 131–132, 137, 147, 295, 303 Toussaint, L’Ouverture 279 Toynbee, Arnold 24 n. 4 trade See contraband trade, free trade, fur trade, liberalization of trade, sugar trade, tobacco trade, triangular trade translation 31, 110, 120–121 Treaty of Paris 220, 239–242, 243–244, 308 Treaty of Utrecht 179, 181, 208, 221, 234–236, 238, 255 triangular trade 6, 167–169 travel 105, 115, 119–121, 228–230, 295 travel writing 31, 34, 82–83, 303 travelers 81, 112, 113, 119–121, 136, 137 United Nations 299 United States 255, 269, 282, 284, 290, 310–311 Universal Monarchy 55, 75, 78, 97–101, 102 universities 110, 264–265 urban government 17, 141, 144–148, 202–204, 212 Uruguay 285 urbanization 90, 172, 194, 201–204, 210, 214, 221–222, 225–226, 229–230, 231, 260–266, 295

340

index

Utopia (More) 116 utopianism 2, 116–117, 137, 295, 311 Valladolid Controversy (1550) 2, 123, 134 see also de las Casas and de Sepulveda verleger system of production 145 Versailles 39, 185, 298 Vespucci, Amerigo 106, 124, 130 viceroyalties 7, 60, 150, 152, 190, 195, 200, 202, 245–246, 264, 283 Virginia 60, 95, 223, 238 n. 15 virtue 7, 84, 134, 136, 170, 199, 235 Viscardo, Francisco de 7

vistadores 245 visuality 79–80, 118, 129 Walpole, Robert 236, 239 n. 16 Wallerstein, Immanuel 39 n. 3, 140, 142 n. 6 Weber, Max 14, 17–18, 23, 140, 169 West Africa 85, 86, 88, 102, 163, 167, 169, 173–178 West Indies 68, 95, 168, 178, 184–185, 222, 226, 276–280 West Indies Company (French) 162 Westphalia, Treaty of 51, 144, 174, 302 wild man, myth of 118 world history 29–30, 190, 301 World Systems Theory 5, 140, 309

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