The Penguin History of the World

6 World History’s New Shape

In 1776 there began in America the first of a series of colonial revolts, which were to take several decades to work themselves out. Besides marking an epoch in the history of the American continents, these upheavals also provide a convenient vantage-ground from which to consider the first phase of European hegemony as a whole. In other parts of the world, too, something of a change of rhythm was marked by such facts as the elimination of serious French competition to the British in India, and the opening of Australasia, the last discovered and habitable continent, to settlement. At the end of the eighteenth century there is a sense of completing one era and opening another; it is a good point for an assessment of the difference made by the previous three centuries to the history of the globe.

During them, outright conquest and occupation were the main form of European hegemony. They provided wealth Europe could use to increase still further its relative superiority over other civilizations and they set up political structures which diffused other forms of European influence. They were the work of a handful of European states, which were the first world powers in the geographical range of their interests, even if not in their strength: the Atlantic nations, to which the age of discoveries had given opportunities and historical destinies distinct from those of other European states.

The first to seize these opportunities had been Spain and Portugal, the only great colonial powers of the sixteenth century. They had long passed their zenith by 1763, when the Peace of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War, was signed. This treaty is a convenient marker of a new world order which had already replaced that dominated by Spain and Portugal. It registered the ascendancy of Great Britain in her rivalry with France overseas, which had preoccupied her for nearly three-quarters of a century. The duel was not over, and Frenchmen could still be hopeful that they would recover lost ground. Great Britain, none the less, was the great imperial power of the future. These two nations had eclipsed the Dutch, whose empire had been built, like theirs, in the seventeenth century, in the era of declining Portuguese and Spanish power. But Spain, Portugal and the United Provinces all still held important colonial territories and had left enduring marks on the world map.

These five nations had by the eighteenth century been differentiated by their oceanic history both from the landlocked states of central Europe and from those of the Mediterranean, so important in earlier centuries. Their special colonial and overseas trade interests had given their diplomats new causes and places over which to compete. Most other states had been slower to recognize how important issues outside Europe might be, and so, indeed, had even some of these five at times. Spain had fought grimly enough (first for the Habsburgs in Italy, then against the Ottomans, and finally for European supremacy in the Thirty Years War) to waste the treasure of the Indies in the process. And in their long duel with the British, the French were always more liable than their rivals to distraction and the diversion of their resources to continental ends.

At the outset, the discernment that extra-European issues might be intrinsically tangled with European interests in diplomacy had, after all, barely existed. Once the Spanish and Portuguese had demarcated their interests to their own satisfaction there was little to concern other European nations. The fate of a French Huguenot settlement in Florida, or the flouting of the vague Spanish claims which was implicit in the Roanoke voyages, hardly troubled the minds of European diplomats, let alone shaped their negotiations. This situation began to change when English pirates and adventurers countenanced by Elizabeth I began to inflict real damage on the Spanish fleets and colonies. They were soon joined by the Dutch and from this time one of the great themes of the diplomacy of the next century was apparent; as a French minister wrote under Louis XIV, ‘Trade is the cause of a perpetual combat in war and in peace between the nations of Europe.’ So much had things changed in 200 years.

Rulers had, of course, always been concerned with wealth and the opportunity of increasing it. Venice had long defended her commerce by diplomatic means and the English had often safeguarded their cloth exports to Flanders by treaty. It was widely accepted that there was only so much profit to go around and that one country could therefore only gain at the expense of others. But it was a long time before diplomacy had to take account of the pursuit of wealth outside Europe. There was even an attempt to segregate such matters; in 1559 the French and Spanish agreed that what their captains did to one another ‘beyond the line’ (which meant at that time west of the Azores, and south of the Tropic of Cancer) should not be taken as a reason for hostility between the two states in Europe.

The change to a new set of diplomatic assumptions, if that is the way to put it, began in conflicts over trade with the Spanish empire. Contemporary thinking took it for granted that in the colonial relationship the interests of the metropolitan power were always paramount. In so far as those interests were economic, settlement colonies were intended to produce, either by exploiting their mineral and natural resources or by their balance of trade with the mother country, a net advantage to the latter and, if possible, self-sufficiency, while her trading bases gave the mother country domination of certain areas of international traffic. By 1600 it was clear that claims would be settled by sea-power, and since the defeat of the Armada Spanish sea-power no longer commanded the respect it had done.

Essentially, Philip was caught in a dilemma: the dispersal of his effort and interest between Europe – where the struggle with the Valois and Elizabeth, the Dutch Revolt and the Counter-Reformation all claimed his resources – and the Indies, where safety could have lain only in sea-power and the organization of effective Spanish supply of the colonists’ needs. His choice was to try to keep the empire, but to use it to pay for European policies. This was to underrate the difficulties of controlling so huge an empire through sixteenth-century bureaucracy and communications. Nevertheless, a huge and complicated system of regular sailings in convoy, the concentration of colonial trade in a few authorized ports, and policing by coastguard squadrons were ways in which the Spanish tried to keep the wealth of the Indies to themselves.

It was the Dutch who first made it clear that they were prepared to fight for a share of such prizes and therefore first forced diplomats to turn their attention and skills to regulating matters outside Europe. For the Dutch, predominance in trade overrode other considerations. What they would do for it was made clear from the start of the seventeenth century, in the East Indies, the Caribbean and Brazil, where they engaged great fleets against the Spanish-Portuguese defence of the world’s chief producer of sugar. The last provided their only serious failure, for in 1654 the Portuguese were able to evict the Dutch garrisons and resume control without subsequent challenge.

This quest for commercial wealth cut across the wishes of the most Protestant of English seventeenth-century governments; England had been an ally of the Dutch rebels in the previous century, and Cromwell would have liked nothing better than the leadership of a Protestant alliance against Catholic Spain. Instead he found himself fighting the first of three Anglo-Dutch wars. The first (1652–4) was essentially a trade war. What was at issue was the English decision to restrict imports to England to goods travelling in English ships or those of the country producing the goods. This was a deliberate attempt to encourage English shipping and put it in a position to catch up with the Dutch. It struck at the heart of Dutch prosperity: its European carrying trade and, in particular, that in Baltic goods. The Commonwealth had a good navy and won. The second round came in 1665, after the Dutch had been further provoked by the English seizure of New Amsterdam. In this war the Dutch had the French and Danes as allies and also had the best of it at sea. At the peace they were therefore able to win an easing of the English restrictions on imports, although they left New Amsterdam to the English in exchange for an offshoot of Barbados at Surinam. This was decided by the Treaty of Breda (1667), the first multilateral European peace settlement to say as much about the regulation of extra-European affairs as European. By it France surrendered West Indian islands to England and received in return recognition of her possession of the uninhabited and uninviting but strategically important territory of Acadia in New France. The English had done well; the new Caribbean acquisitions followed in a tradition established under the Commonwealth, when Jamaica had been taken from Spain. It was England’s first transoceanic acquisition of territory by conquest.

Cromwell’s policies have been seen as a decisive turn towards conscious imperial policy. This may be attributing too much to his vision. The returned Stuarts indeed kept intact most of the ‘Navigation’ system for the protection of shipping and colonial trade, as well as hanging on to Jamaica and continuing to recognize the new importance of the West Indies. Charles II gave a charter to a new company, named after Hudson Bay, to contest with the French the fur trade of the north and west. He and his in other ways inadequate successor, James II, at least maintained (even if with some setbacks) English naval strength so that it was available to William of Orange in his wars with Louis XIV.

It would be tedious to trace the detailed changes of the next century, during which the new imperial emphasis, first of English and then of British diplomacy, came to maturity. A brief third Anglo-Dutch war (it had virtually no important consequences) does not really belong to this epoch, which is dominated by the long rivalry of England and France. The War of the League of Augsburg (or King William’s War, as it was called in America) brought much colonial fighting but no great changes. The War of the Spanish Succession was very different. It was a world war, the first of the modern era, about the fate of the Spanish empire as well as about French power. At its close, the British not only won Acadia (henceforth Nova Scotia) and other acquisitions in the western hemisphere from the French, but also the right to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies and to send one ship a year with merchandise to trade with them.

Overseas matters loomed larger and larger in British foreign policy after this. European considerations mattered less, in spite of the change of dynasty in 1714, when the elector of Hanover became the first king of Great Britain. Though there were some embarrassing moments, British policy remained remarkably consistent, always swinging back to the goals of promoting, sustaining and extending British commerce. Often this was best done by seeking to maintain a general peace, sometimes by diplomatic pressure (as when the Habsburgs were persuaded to withdraw a scheme for an Ostend company to trade with Asia), sometimes by fighting to maintain privileges or strategic advantage.

The importance of war became clearer and clearer. The first time that two European powers ever went to war on a purely non-European issue came in 1739, when the British government began hostilities with Spain over, in essence, the Spanish right of search in the Caribbean – or, as the Spanish might have put it, over the steps they properly took to secure their empire against abuse of the trading privileges granted in 1713. This was to be remembered as the ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ – the organ produced in pickle by its owner in the House of Commons, whose sensitive patriotism was inflamed and outraged to hear of the alleged mutilation by a Spanish coastguard. The conflict soon became caught up with the War of the Austrian Succession, and therefore became an Anglo-French struggle. The peace of 1748 did not much change the respective territorial position of the two rivals, nor did it end fighting in North America, where the French appeared to be about to cut off the British settlements for ever from the American west by a chain of forts. The British government sent regular contingents to America for the first time in order to meet this danger, but they were unsuccessful; only in the Seven Years War did a British minister grasp that the chance of a final decision in the long duel existed because of France’s commitment to her ally Austria in Europe. Once British resources were allocated accordingly, sweeping victories in North America and India were followed by others in the Caribbean, some at the expense of Spain. A British force even seized the Philippines. It was global war.

The peace of 1763 did not in fact go so far in crippling France and Spain as many Englishmen had wanted. But it virtually eliminated French competition in North America and India. When it was a question of retaining Canada or Guadeloupe, a sugar-producing island, one consideration in favour of keeping Canada was that competition from increased sugar production within the empire was feared by Caribbean planters already under the British flag. The result was a huge new British empire. By 1763, the whole of eastern North America and the Gulf of Mexico coast as far west as the mouth of the Mississippi was British. The elimination of French Canada had blown away the hope – or, from the English point of view, the threat – of a French empire of the Mississippi valley, stretching from the St Lawrence to New Orleans, which had been created by the great French explorers of the seventeenth century. Off the continental coast, the Bahamas were the northern link of an island chain that ran down through the Lesser Antilles to Tobago, and all but enclosed the Caribbean. Within it, Jamaica, Honduras and the Belize coast were British. In the peace of 1713, the British had exacted a limited legal right to trade in slaves with the Spanish empire, which they quickly pressed far beyond its intended limits. In Africa there were only a few British posts on the Gold Coast, but these were the bases of the huge African slave trade. In Asia the direct government of Bengal was about to provide a start to the territorial phase of British expansion in India.

British imperial supremacy was based on sea-power. Its ultimate origins could be sought in the ships built by Henry VIII, among the greatest warships of the age (the Harry Grâce á Dieu carried 186 guns), but this early start was not followed up until the reign of Elizabeth I. Her captains, with little financing available either from Crown or commercial investors, built both a fighting tradition and better ships from the profits of operations against the Spanish. Again, there was an ebbing of interest and effort under the early Stuart kings. The royal administration could not afford ships (and paying for new ones was, indeed, one of the causes of the royal taxes Parliament had raged over). It was only under the Commonwealth, ironically, that the serious and continuing interest in naval power which sustained the Royal Navy of the future began. By that time, the connection between Dutch superiority in merchant shipping and their naval strength had been taken to heart and the upshot was the Navigation Act which provoked the first Anglo-Dutch war. A strong merchant marine provided a nursery of seamen for fighting vessels and the flow of trade whose taxation by customs dues would finance the upkeep of specialized warships. A strong merchant marine could only be built upon carrying the goods of other nations: hence the importance of competing, if necessary by gunfire, and of breaking into such reserved areas as the Spanish American trade.

The machines which were evolved to do the fighting in this competition underwent steady improvement and specialization, but no revolutionary change, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once square-rigging and broadside firing had been adopted, the essential shape of vessels was determined, though individual design could still do much to give sailing superiority and the French usually built better ships than Great Britain during the eighteenth-century duel between the two countries. In the sixteenth century, under English influence, ships grew longer in proportion to their beam. The relative height of the forecastle and poop above the deck gradually came down, too, over the whole period. Bronze guns reached a high level of development even in the early seventeenth century; thereafter gunnery changed by improvement in design, accuracy and weight of shot. There were two significant eighteenth-century innovations: the short-range but large-calibre and heavy-shotted iron carronade, which greatly increased the power of even small vessels, and a firing mechanism incorporating a flintlock, which made possible more precise control of the guns.

Specialization of function and design between warships and merchant vessels was accepted by the middle of the seventeenth century, though the line was still somewhat blurred by the existence of older vessels and the practice of privateering. This was a way of obtaining naval power on the cheap. In time of war, governments authorized individual private captains or their employers to prey upon enemy shipping, taking profits from the prizes they made. It was a form of regularized piracy and English, Dutch and French privateers all operated at various times with great success against one another’s traders. The first great privateering war was that fought unsuccessfully against the English and Dutch under King William by the French.

Other seventeenth-century innovations were tactical and administrative. Signalling became formalized, and the first Fighting Instructions were issued to the Royal Navy. Recruitment became more important; the press-gang appeared in England (the French used naval conscription in the maritime provinces). In this way large fleets were manned and it became clear that, given equality of skill and the limited damage which could be done even by heavy guns, numbers were always likely to be decisive in the end.

From the seminal period of development in the seventeenth century there emerged a naval supremacy which was to last over two centuries and underpin a worldwide Pax Britannica. Dutch competition dropped away as the Republic bent under the strain of defending its independence on land against the French. The important maritime rival of the English was France and here it is possible to see that a decisive point had been passed by the end of King William’s reign. By then, the dilemma of being great on land or sea had been decided by the French in favour of the land. From that time, the promise of a French naval supremacy was never to be revived, though French shipbuilders and captains would still win victories by their skill and courage. The English were not so distracted from oceanic power; they had only to keep their continental allies in the field, not to keep up great armies themselves.

But there was a little more to it than a simple concentration of resources. British maritime strategy also evolved in a way very different from that of other sea-powers. Here, the French loss of interest in the navy of Louis XIV is relevant, for it came after the English had inflicted a resounding defeat in a fleet action in 1692, which discredited the French admirals. It was the first of many such victories which demonstrated an appreciation of the strategic reality that sea-power was in the end a matter of commanding the surface of the sea so that friendly ships could move on it in safety while those of the enemy could not. The key to this desirable end was the neutralization of the enemy’s fleet. So long as it was there, a danger existed. The early defeat of the enemy’s fleet in battle therefore became the supreme aim of British naval commanders for a century during which it gave the Royal Navy almost uninterrupted command of the seas and a formidable offensive tradition.

Naval strategy fed imperial enterprise indirectly as well as directly, because it made more and more necessary the acquisition of bases from which squadrons could operate. This was particularly important in building the British empire. In the late eighteenth century, too, that empire was about to undergo the loss of much of its settled territory and this would bring further into relief the way in which European hegemony was, outside the New World, still in 1800 a matter of trading stations, island plantations and bases, and the control of carrying trade, rather than of occupation of large areas.

Less than three centuries of even this limited form of imperialism revolutionized the world economy. Before 1500, there had been hundreds of more or less self-supporting and self-contained economies, some of them linked by trade. The Americas and Africa were almost, and Australasia was entirely, unknown to Europe, communication within them was tiny in proportion to their huge extent, and there was a thin flow of luxury trade from Asia to Europe. By 1800, a worldwide network of exchange had appeared. Even Japan was a part of it, and central Africa, though still outside the main lines of communication, was linked to it through slavery and the Arabs. Its first two striking adumbrations had been the diversion of Asian trade with Europe to the sea-routes dominated by the Portuguese and the flow of bullion from America to Europe. Without that stream, above all of silver, there could hardly have been a trade with Asia, for there was almost nothing produced in Europe that Asia wanted. This may have been the main importance of the bullion from the Americas, whose flow reached its peak at the end of the sixteenth century and in the early decades of the next.

Although a new abundance of precious metals was the first and most dramatically obvious economic effect of Europe’s new interplay with Asia and America, it was less important than the general growth of trade, of which slaves from Africa for the Caribbean and Brazil formed a part. The slave-ships usually made their voyage back to Europe from the Americas loaded with the colonial produce which more and more became a necessity to Europe. In Europe, first Amsterdam and then London surpassed Antwerp as international ports, in large measure because of the huge growth of the re-export trade in colonial goods which were carried by Dutch and English ships. Around these central flows of trade there proliferated branches and sub-branches, which led to further specializations and ramifications. Shipbuilding, textiles and, later, financial services such as insurance all prospered together, sharing in the consequences of a huge expansion in sheer trade volume. Eastern trade in the second half of the eighteenth century made up a quarter of the whole of Dutch external commerce and during that century the number of ships sent out by the East India Company from London went up three-fold. These ships, moreover, improved in design, carried more and were worked by fewer men than those of earlier times.

The material consequences of Europe’s new involvement with the world are much easier to measure than is the interplay of new knowledge of the world with European mentality. Minds were changing, as the great increase in the numbers of books about discoveries and voyages had showed as early as the sixteenth century. Oriental studies may be said to have been founded as a field of enquiry in the seventeenth century, although Europeans only began to show the impact of knowledge of the anthropologies of other people towards its close. Such developments were intensified in the unrolling of their effects by the fact that they took place in an age of printing, too, and this makes the novelty of interest in the world outside Europe hard to evaluate. By the early eighteenth century, though, there were signs of an important intellectual impact at a deep level. Idyllic descriptions of savages who lived moral lives without the help of Christianity provoked reflection; an English philosopher, John Locke, used the evidence of other continents to show that humans did not share any God-given innate ideas. In particular, an idealized and sentimentalized picture of China furnished examples for speculation on the relativity of social institutions, while the penetration of Chinese literature (much aided by the studies of the Jesuits) revealed a chronology whose length made nonsense of traditional calculations of the date of the Flood described in the Bible as the second beginning of all men.

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

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

Such facts as the ruthless exploitation of those who survived, on the other hand, whose labour was so much more valuable after this demographic collapse, are a different matter. Here is expressed that leitmotif of subjection and domination which runs through well-nigh every instance of Europe’s early impact on the rest of the world. Different colonial environments and different European traditions present little but gradations of oppression and exploitation. Not all colonial societies were based on the same extremes of brutality and horror, but all were tainted. The wealth of the United Provinces and its magnificent seventeenth-century civilization were fed by roots which, at least in the spice islands and Indonesia, lay in bloody ground. Long before expansion in North America went west of the Alleghenies, the brief good relations of the first English settlers of Virginia with native Americans had soured and extermination and eviction had begun.

Though the populations of Spanish America had been in some measure protected by the state from the worst abuses of the encomienda system, they had for the most part been reduced to peonage, while determined efforts were made (from the highest motives) to destroy their culture. In South Africa the fate of the Khoi people (whom the Europeans called Hottentots), and in Australia that of the Aborigine, would repeat the lesson that European culture could devastate those whom it touched, unless they had the protection of old and advanced civilizations such as those of India or China. Even in those great countries, much damage would be done, nor would they be able to resist the European once he decided to bring sufficient force to bear. But it was the settled colonies that showed most clearly the pattern of domination.

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

Outlets in the New World settler colonies dominated the direction of the slave trade until its abolition in the nineteenth century. First in the Caribbean islands and then on the American mainland, north and south, the slavers found their most reliable customers. The Portuguese who had first dominated the trade were soon elbowed out of the Caribbean by the Dutch and then by Elizabeth I’s ‘sea-dogs’, but Portuguese captains turned to importing slaves to Brazil instead as the sixteenth century went on. Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch founded their West Indies trading company to ensure a regular supply of slaves to the Caribbean, but by 1700 their lead had been overtaken by French and English slavers who had established posts on the ‘slave coast’ of Africa. Altogether, their efforts sent between 9 and 10 million African slaves to the western hemisphere, 80 per cent of them after 1700. The eighteenth century saw the greatest prosperity of the trade; some 6 million slaves were shipped then. European ports like Bristol and Nantes built a new age of commercial wealth on slavery. New lands were opened as African slave labour made it possible to work them. Larger-scale production of new crops brought, in turn, great changes in European demand, manufacturing and trading patterns. In terms of race, too, we still live with the results.

What has disappeared and can now never be measured is the human misery involved, not merely in physical hardship (an African might live only a few years on a West Indian plantation even if he survived the horrible conditions of the voyage) but in the psychological and emotional tragedies of this huge migration. The degree of cruelty involved is incalculable; on the one hand is the evidence of the fetters and the whipping-block, on the other the reflection that these were commonplaces of European life too, and that, a priori, self-interest should have prompted the planters to care for their investment. That it did not always do so, slave rebellions showed. Revolt, though, was infrequent except in Brazil, a fact which also bears consideration. Chattel slavery reached a new and qualitatively different stage from earlier history with the plantations that were set up in America, a stage of human exploitation that ensured that both perpetrators and victims conformed to their roles. In this sense, the New World was born in bondage.

Estimates of the almost unrecorded damage done in Africa are even harder to arrive at, for the evidence is even more subject to conjecture. The most recent research shows that it is likely that the slave trade had a direct and lasting economic and social impact on those parts of Africa where most of it was carried out. The sudden reduction in population, the unpredictability of life and living conditions and the perpetual fear of contact with outside groups led to social disasters. The chronic sense of insecurity, some economists argue, led to low levels of production that lasted in parts of Africa up to the last century. Africa’s problems today may have more to do with slavery than most realize, even if it is by no means the only explanation for the continent’s relative under-development.

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

Some Europeans recognized this but none the less believed that any evil was outweighed by what they offered to the rest of the world, above all, by the bringing of Christianity. It was a decree of Paul III, the pope who summoned the Council of Trent, which proclaimed that ‘the Indians are truly men and … are not only capable of understanding the Catholic faith but according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it’. Such optimism was not merely an expression of the Counter-Reformation spirit, for the missionary impulse had been there from the start in the Spanish and Portuguese possessions. Jesuit missionary work began in Goa in 1542 and radiated from there all over the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia and even reached Japan. Like the other Catholic powers, the French, too, emphasized missionary work, even in areas where France was not herself economically or politically involved.

A new vigour was none the less given to missionary enterprise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and may be acknowledged as one invigorating effect of the Counter-Reformation. Formally at least, Roman Christianity took in more converts and greater tracts of territory in the sixteenth century than in any earlier. What this really meant is harder to assess, but what little protection the native American had was provided by the Roman Catholic Church, whose theologians kept alive, however dimly at times, the only notion of trusteeship towards subject peoples which existed in early imperial theory.

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

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

The lives of generations unborn – when such transplants were first made – were to be shaped by them, and a longer perspective than one confined by 1800 is helpful here. Wheat was, after all, ultimately to make the western hemisphere the granary of European cities; in the twentieth century even Russia and Asian countries drew on it. A still-flourishing wine industry was implanted by the Spanish in the Madeiras and America as early as the sixteenth century. When bananas were established in Jamaica, coffee in Java and tea in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the groundwork was laid of much future politics. All such changes, moreover, were in the nineteenth century complicated by variations in demand, as industrialization increased the demand for old staples such as cotton (in 1760 England imported 2½ million pounds of raw cotton – in 1837 the figure was 360 million) and sometimes created new ones; it was a consequence of this that rubber was to be successfully transplanted from South America to Malaya and Indochina, a change fraught with great strategic significance for the future.

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

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

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

Problems of imperial government in the eighteenth century were, though, largely a matter of the western hemisphere. That was where the settlers had gone. Elsewhere in the world in 1800, even in India, trade still mattered more than possession and many important areas had still to feel the full impact of Europe. As late as 1789 the British East India Company was sending only twenty-one ships in the year to Guangzhou; the Dutch were allowed two a year to Japan. Central Asia was at that date still only approachable by the long land routes used in the days of Chinghis Khan and the Russians were still far from exercising effective influence over the hinterland. Africa was protected by climate and disease. Discovery and exploration still had to complete that continent’s map before European hegemony could become a reality.

In the Pacific and ‘South Seas’, things were moving faster. The voyage of William Dampier, a Somerset man, in 1699, had begun the integration of Australasia, an unknown continent, within established geography, though it took another century to complete. In the north, the existence of the Bering Strait had been demonstrated by 1730. The voyages of Bougainville and Cook, in the 1760s and 1770s, added Tahiti, Samoa, eastern Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand to the last New World to be opened. Cook even penetrated the Antarctic Circle. In 1788 the first cargo of convicts, 717 of them, was landed in New South Wales. British judges were calling into existence a new penal world to redress the balance of the old, since the American colonies were now unavailable for dumping English undesirables, and were incidentally founding another new nation. More important still, a few years later the first sheep arrived and so was founded the industry to ensure that nation’s future. Along with animals, adventurers and ne’er-do-wells there came to the South Pacific, also, the Gospel. In 1797 the first missionaries arrived in Tahiti. With them, the civilization of the Europeans may be reckoned at last to have appeared, at least in embryonic form, in every part of the habitable world.