25 The age of empire

The voyages of discovery of the 15th and 16th centuries unveiled whole new worlds to the European eye, worlds full of new animals, new plants, new peoples. “It ought not to go for nothing,” wrote Francis Bacon in 1607, “that through the long voyages and travels which are the mark of our age, many things in nature have been revealed which might throw light on natural philosophy.”

But for many, the discovery of new worlds was not so much an intellectual opportunity as a commercial one. These new lands were rich in raw materials, which could be traded for European manufactured goods. They also offered possibilities of settlement, and a number of European countries began to plant their flags and their people in distant parts of the globe, often fighting each other for the right to do so.

War and trade Colonial rivalries were apparent from the very beginning. As Spain looted its newly conquered possessions in Mexico and Peru of gold and silver, English privateers such as Francis Drake preyed on the fleets of galleons taking plunder back across the Atlantic. The Americas and the Indies (south and southeastern Asia) held other riches that made them worth fighting for: furs, timber, tobacco and fish from North America; coffee, sugar and tobacco from Central and South America and the West Indies; spices, silk, cotton, tea and coffee from the Indies. The 17th and 18th centuries were punctuated by frequent wars between the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese over trading rights and colonial possessions. The Dutch largely ousted the Portuguese from their scattered empire in the East Indies in the 17th century, and by the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain emerged as the dominant power in North America and India. The Portuguese held on to Brazil and the Spanish retained their colonies in Mexico and Central and South America, while the West Indies ended up as a mosaic of colonial settlement.

“To the natives … all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations,1776, referring to “the discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope”

The cultivation of sugar, tobacco and other crops on the plantations of the Americas depended on slave labor. At first the Spanish tried to enslave the indigenous inhabitants of the West Indies, but within a matter of decades these peoples were wiped out by a combination of brutal treatment and European diseases to which they had no resistance. Thus began the great demand for African slaves, kick-starting the so-called triangular or Atlantic trade, by which slaves were taken from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas, American raw materials were transported to Europe, and European manufactured goods were sent both to the American colonies and to West Africa to purchase more slaves.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, most of the colonizing was carried out by government-chartered trading companies such as the British East India Company, founded in 1600, and its Dutch and French equivalents. A patent “for the inhabiting and planting of our people in America” was granted by Queen Elizabeth I of England to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584, and various attempts were made to colonize the eastern seaboard until the first permanent settlement was established by the Virginia Company in 1607.

European governments at this period saw the creation of such settlements as a means of benefiting the mother country. This theory, known as “mercantilism,” was outlined by the great French Encyclopédie of 1751–68, which stated that colonies were established “solely for the use of the metropolis [i.e. the mother country],” that they therefore “should be immediately dependent upon it and consequently protected by it,” and that the colonies “should trade exclusively with the founders.” What the mercantilists did not recognize was the cost of defending by armed force the mother country’s monopoly on trade to and from its colonies. It took Adam Smith, in his groundbreaking economic work The Wealth of Nations (1776), to recognize the truth: “Under the present system of management … Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.”

A new use for the colonies

The first European settlers of Australia—claimed for Great Britain by Captain James Cook in 1770—were convicted criminals. Since the early 18th century, in the absence of a prison system, Britain had sent the convicts it did not hang to its American colonies to work on the plantations. But with American independence, Britain had to look elsewhere, and in 1788 the “First Fleet,” carrying hundreds of felons, arrived in New South Wales to establish a penal colony. Transportation continued for several more decades, and freed convicts were to play an important role in building the foundations of Australia’s economy.

The imperial mission In the 19th century, a new attitude began to emerge. Colonization was not to be undertaken merely for commercial reasons, but for the high moral purpose of spreading the benefits of Western civilization to peoples regarded as godless savages or as children in need of discipline and guidance. In Britain, the new attitude emerged out of the evangelical revival of the later 18th century, and in the 19th century became intertwined with pseudo-scientific racial theories as to the superiority of the white races over those of different colors. In the 18th century the “nabobs” of the British East India Company, in it only for the money and a life of luxury and ease, had been content to adopt native ways and marry native wives—and even, in some cases, convert to native faiths. In contrast, the colonial administrators and missionaries of the Victorian era observed a strict apartheid between rulers and ruled, while at the same time making strenuous efforts to build churches, schools, courthouses, railways and other pillars of Western civilization. For the colonized, it was something of a mixed blessing, and beneath the veneer of pious intent, the colonizers were still in it for power and profit, and any dissent was dealt with by armed force.

“It is a noble work to plant the foot of England and extend her sceptre by the banks of streams unnamed, and over regions yet unknown …”

The Edinburgh Review, vol. 41, 1850

Armed force was still the means by which empires were extended. In the scramble to carve up Africa in the later 19th century, the Europeans used their massive technological advantage to crush all resistance from the indigenous peoples, as did the white Americans as they spread westward across the North American continent. A new fervor of competition arose among the Western powers: more colonies meant more raw materials, and more markets for manufactured goods. Many talked in quasi-Darwinian terms of “the survival of the fittest.” This drive for imperial domination was to contribute to the mutual mistrust and hostility that culminated in the outbreak of the First World War.

the condensed idea

From the 16th century the European powers began to take over the rest of the world