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COLONIALISM

COLONIALISM. European powers and persons representing them undertook a vast program of overseas colonization extending throughout the early modern period, which had the effects of energizing a world economy by encompassing the New World within it and of stimulating a massive emigration of Europeans.

THE ATLANTIC ISLANDS

In the course of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese and the Spaniards discovered, conquered, colonized, and administered a series of island possessions that became early experiments in imperialism. In the 1480s and 1490s, the Spanish crown conquered Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Palma, the richest of the seven Canary Islands. The administrative apparatus set up to govern the colony anticipated aspects of the administration of the future empire. First there was a survey and apportionment of land in a repartimiento; there was no dividing up of natives—the form that repartimiento later took in the New World. Each island was considered a municipality, administered by a cabildo, or 'city council'. The islands were settled by soldiers and by immigrants from Castile and Andalusia, many of them single men who married indigenous women. The economy of the Canaries in the sixteenth century was based on sugar, a monoculture.

The Portuguese had a papal grant to settle Madeira, an uninhabited island, in 1425. Its prosperity after the middle years of the fifteenth century was based on the production of sugar, wheat, and wine good enough to be exported. Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) was authorized to settle the Azores in 1439, by which time the Portuguese had already placed sheep on several islands to provide food for passing ships. By the end of the 1440s, the island of Santa Maria was already exporting wheat to Portugal. The colonization of the central and western isles took longer. Foreigners, particularly Flemings, were recruited to settle there in the 1460s and 1470s. Pico, one of the westernmost islands, became a leading wine producer and was important in the three-cornered trade with North America and the West Indies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the key products of which were New England barrel staves, Caribbean molasses, and Atlantic Island wine.

Italians in the service of the Portuguese crown sailing off West Africa discovered the arid Cape Verde islands. The Portuguese established a plantation and pastoral economy run by slaves from Africa and a small group of white colonists as landlords, merchants, and civil and church officials. After the discovery of the New World, the Portuguese islands served as nodal points in the great web of interoceanic shipping routes that soon developed.

SPANISH COLONIZATION

The Spaniards' strategy of colonization in the New World was to found cities: They founded 190 towns and cities by 1620. These were built uniformly on a Roman grid plan. They were self-governing entities governed by cabildos, had scant commercial functions, were populated by plantation owners and an Indian underclass, and had no industry to speak of. The most important cities were viceregal capitals such as Mexico and Lima. In 1630, 58 percent of the Spanish population of the Audiencia of New Spain lived in Mexico City, and 55 percent of the population of the Audiencia of Lima lived in Lima City. Exploration and settlement of the interior regions were organized from viceregal capitals such as Mexico, Lima, and Bogotá. The Spanish New World colonies were hypercentralized because the crown ruled the territories directly and created appropriate institutions of control, issuing some 400,000 decrees pertaining to American colonial affairs between 1492 and 1635, or around 2,500 annually. In an administrative sense, they were not colonies but kingdoms; hence they were governed by viceroys.

This urban colonial network required large numbers of settlers. A total of at least 150,000 persons moved from Spain to America before 1550. Throughout the sixteenth century, between 250,000 and 300,000 Spaniards emigrated. The Amerindians were forced, through the repartimiento system, to work in enterprises (either farming or mining) called encomiendas, feudal estates that were inheritable. Africans came as slaves, first from Europe, then, by the mid-1550s, imported directly from Africa for service on sugar plantations or in the mines.

Spanish colonization efforts in Asia centered upon Manila, the center both of trade with China and Japan and of the effort to Christianize the Filipinos. Evangelization was made easier by the political decentralization of Philippine society, which made armed resistance to Spain all but impossible. The Spanish colonists, a few thousand people in the seventeenth century, lived off the Manila galleon trade and left the direction of the country mainly to missionaries and a few bureaucrats.

PORTUGUESE COLONIZATION

The most striking aspect of the Portuguese seaborne empire was its extreme dispersion in chains of forts along various continental coastlines and islands. By the time of Prince Henry's death in 1460, the Portuguese had reached Sierra Leone, which was 1,500 miles down the west African coast. There they established fortified trading posts, feitorias, close to the sea, guarded by caravels bearing canons. This style of settlement, which the Portuguese later introduced into Asia, required few settlers and was designed to facilitate trade.

Brazil was settled in the sixteenth century (after 1530) by a mixed feudal-commercial system wherein coastal lands were placed under the control of hereditary proprietors. Settlers were taken there and introduced cattle raising and sugar cultivation. Sugar was the ideal crop for coastal Brazil, which had quick access to Europe and the capacity to outprice the Atlantic islands. Thousands of Portuguese arrived as settlers, attracted by quick money in the sugar industry. When the Amerindians of the coast, who had been conscripted to work on sugar plantations, perished, they were replaced by African slaves who were already resistant to most Old World diseases.

The Portuguese crown began to take back governance of Brazil from the hereditary landholders as early as 1549, when it reacquired the Bahia captaincy and named a governor general. Settlements were widely dispersed, with a Portuguese population of only 30,000 in 1600, scattered among fourteen captaincies along 4,000 miles of coastline.

The Portuguese empire in Asia was established between 1509 and 1515 by capturing the sea passages leading to and from the Indian Ocean. Goa, on the Malabar coast of India, was the main naval base, followed in importance by Macão, off the Chinese mainland near Canton. The Portuguese empire in Asia was tiny in extent, consisting of only a few strategic islands and coastal trading posts that controlled most Asian trade routes. The territory of a trading post was negotiated with local authorities to achieve a form of colonization, but one of a purely commercial nature. The Portuguese settled near the centers of production and markets and at the intersection of trade routes, taking advantage of trading networks already established before their arrival. This system could run efficiently with few settlers, who did not require an infrastructure of public services, and it left local trade in the hands of the indigenous communities. The majority of Portuguese settlers in Asia were soldiers, while the Spanish empire, after the conquests of Mexico and Peru, was by and large a civilian empire.

COLONIES IN THE CARIBBEAN

Europeans of different origins established colonies of different styles. Spanish settlements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo were based on ranching, mining, and, in the seventeenth century, sugar. The English and French established plantations on their islands to produce labor-intensive crops like sugarcane, worked by indentured servants and, later, African slaves. The Dutch established trading posts, such as Curaçao. In 1600, all New World settlements were still Spanish. The English and French begin to colonize in the first quarter of the seventeenth century in part because the Dutch Navy in the Caribbean protected them from the Spanish. At the same time, the British began to colonize the outer islands, starting with St. Kitts and Barbados, which served as bases for further expansion. The French then established a Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique and settled Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635. It was easy (both for French and English settlers) to obtain grants because the islands were thought fairly worthless before sugar was introduced. In the first phase of settlement, tobacco and cotton were the main crops.

BRITISH COLONIZATION

British colonial development in the New World was focused both on the Caribbean and the North American mainland. The disinterest of the English government in direct management of the colonies was matched by the penchant of settlers in the thirteen colonies for self-government, inasmuch as distaste for central authority had played an important role in their decision to emigrate. The economic life of the colonies was differentiated early on, with plantations in the south, which grew cereals, cotton, and, later, tobacco, and a more varied economy in the north, characterized in New England by commercial shipping, fishing, and timber. In the eighteenth century, large numbers of immigrants, first from Germany and later from Ireland, were attracted by the prosperity of the British colonies, only to submit to the lure of the frontier once they had arrived.

The British had a colonial stake in Asia since the formation in 1600 of the East India Company, a trading organization whose business grew steadily at the expense of the Portuguese. In the eighteenth century the company had its own army; its rapacious rule in Bengal stimulated Parliament to appoint a governor general in 1773. Over the next half century the British steadily occupied the whole of India, but the company continued in an administrative capacity until it was finally dissolved in 1858.

FRENCH COLONIZATON

In 1534, Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) established a fort on the site of what is now Quebec City. The French settled Acadia in 1604 and Quebec in 1608. The entire early French enterprise in Canada was based on a single product: fur. Beaver pelts, the best material for hat felt, could not be found in France, were light in weight, had a high value relative to bulk, and were easily transported. Quebec was organized along feudal lines, divided into huge rural estates, or seigneuries, many of which persisted after the British absorbed the colony in 1763. Further south the French established plantations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, a colony that prospered from the late seventeenth century (with an interval of Spanish rule) until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. A number of French efforts to establish trading colonies in Brazil (Fort Coligny/Rio de Janeiro in 1555–1560, Ibiapaba in 1590–1604, and São Luis do Maranão in 1612–1615) were all squelched by Portugal.

DUTCH COLONIZATION

Dutch expansion was slow, steady, and on the whole peaceful. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, acted like a state within a state and imposed sole control over Holland's Asian interests. The first solid Dutch base was obtained in 1605 with the capture of the Portuguese fortress at Amboyna in the Moluccas. In 1619, the Dutch founded the city of Batavia (now Jakarta, on Java), which became the center of Dutch power in Asia. The Dutch also acquired a series of factories on the Indian coast and in 1638 a foothold in Ceylon, which they called the "Cinnamon Isle." By 1661 the Dutch were effectively in control of the entire island. The Dutch empire, like the Portuguese one it largely replaced, was protected by its very size and the way it was scattered all over the map.

Between 1624 and 1664 the Dutch established a colony in the Hudson Valley, called Nieuw Netherlands, with its capital at Nieuw Amsterdam, on Manhattan island; it was a shipping and farming colony whose total population reached 10,000 persons. In 1657, the Dutch established Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa, to protect its seas lanes to Asia. It was a tiny colony, reaching a population of 15,000 only in the eighteenth century. Less successful was the colony of New Sweden along the South River in Delaware, which had been established by a joint stock company in 1632 and was overrun by the Dutch in the early 1650s. In 1624, the Dutch Company temporarily acquired a huge empire in the Brazilian "bulge" when they captured Bahia, which they held for thirty years.

A COMPARATIVE OVERVIEW

In comparative perspective, British and Dutch empires were decentralized and heavily privatized. Companies were the preferred form of colonization. The Spanish empire, whose colonial administration was highly centralized, was just the opposite. The Portuguese liked the centralization model but lacked the administrative infrastructure to overcome the problems created by distance (Asia) and scale (Brazil). The French were unsuccessful for political reasons and because of the weakness of their navy compared to those of the English and Dutch. Where possible, they established plantations (Louisiana, the Caribbean) or feudal-like domains (the Quebec seigneuries). They were out-maneuvered in North America and lost the richest of their Caribbean islands, Saint Domingue (now Haiti), to a revolution. In economic terms the Spanish colonies constituted a kind of experiment in mercantilism whereby colonies were to become productive entities that trade with the motherland. The Portuguese and Dutch colonies were purely economic outposts, with only a few exceptions like Brazil or the Cape Colony. The southern colonies of the future United States were, in their inception, plantation economies organized by companies; the northern colonies were increasingly drawn into commercial shipping networks of the New World economy.

See also British Colonies; Columbus, Christopher; DutchColonies; Europe and the World; French Colonies; Magellan, Ferdinand; Missions and Missionaries; Portuguese Colonies; Spanish Colonies; Sugar; Tobacco; Trading Companies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. London, 1990.

——. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire. New York, 1969.

Gibson, Charles. Spain in America. New York, 1966.

Parry, J. H. The Spanish Seaborne Empire. London, 1966.

Véliz, Claudio. The Centralist Tradition of Latin America. Princeton, 1980.

THOMAS F. GLICK