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The Expansion Of Europe

R >> Ramsay Muir >> The Expansion Of Europe



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THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE

THE CULMINATION OF MODERN HISTORY

BY RAMSAY MUIR

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

SECOND EDITION

TO MY MOTHER





PREFACE


The purpose of this book is twofold.

We realise to-day, as never before, that the fortunes of the
world, and of every individual in it, are deeply affected by the
problems of world-politics and by the imperial expansion and the
imperial rivalries of the greater states of Western civilisation.
But when men who have given no special attention to the history of
these questions try to form a sound judgment on them, they find
themselves handicapped by the lack of any brief and clear resume
of the subject. I have tried, in this book, to provide such a
summary, in the form of a broad survey, unencumbered with detail,
but becoming fuller as it comes nearer to our own time. That is my
first purpose. In fulfilling it I have had to cover much well-
trodden ground. But I hope I have avoided the aridity of a mere
compendium of facts.

My second purpose is rather more ambitious. In the course of my
narrative I have tried to deal with ideas rather than with mere
facts. I have tried to bring out the political ideas which are
implicit in, or which result from, the conquest of the world by
Western civilisation; and to show how the ideas of the West have
affected the outer world, how far they have been modified to meet
its needs, and how they have developed in the process. In
particular I have endeavoured to direct attention to the
significant new political form which we have seen coming into
existence, and of which the British Empire is the oldest and the
most highly developed example--the world-state, embracing peoples
of many different types, with a Western nation-state as its
nucleus. The study of this new form seems to me to be a neglected
branch of political science, and one of vital importance. Whether
or not it is to be a lasting form, time alone will show. Finally I
have tried to display, in this long imperialist conflict, the
strife of two rival conceptions of empire: the old, sterile, and
ugly conception which thinks of empire as mere domination,
ruthlessly pursued for the sole advantage of the master, and which
seems to me to be most fully exemplified by Germany; and the
nobler conception which regards empire as a trusteeship, and which
is to be seen gradually emerging and struggling towards victory
over the more brutal view, more clearly and in more varied forms
in the story of the British Empire than in perhaps any other part
of human history. That is why I have given a perhaps
disproportionate attention to the British Empire. The war is
determining, among other great issues, which of these conceptions
is to dominate the future.

In its first form this book was completed in the autumn of 1916;
and it contained, as I am bound to confess, some rather acidulated
sentences in the passages which deal with the attitude of America
towards European problems. These sentences were due to the deep
disappointment which most Englishmen and most Frenchmen felt with
the attitude of aloofness which America seemed to have adopted
towards the greatest struggle for freedom and justice ever waged
in history. It was an indescribable satisfaction to be forced by
events to recognise that I was wrong, and that these passages of
my book ought not to have been written as I wrote them. There is a
sort of solemn joy in feeling that America, France, and Britain,
the three nations which have contributed more than all the rest of
the world put together to the establishment of liberty and justice
on the earth, are now comrades in arms, fighting a supreme battle
for these great causes. May this comradeship never be broken. May
it bring about such a decision of the present conflict as will
open a new era in the history of the world--a world now unified,
as never before, by the final victory of Western civilisation
which it is the purpose of this book to describe.

Besides rewriting and expanding the passages on America, I have
seized the opportunity of this new issue to alter and enlarge
certain other sections of the book, notably the chapter on the
vital period 1878-1900, which was too slightly dealt with in the
original edition. In this work, which has considerably increased
the size of the book, I have been much assisted by the criticisms
and suggestions of some of my reviewers, whom I wish to thank.

Perhaps I ought to add that though this book is complete in
itself, it is also a sort of sequel to a little book entitled
Nationalism and Internationalism, and was originally designed to
be printed along with it: that is the explanation of sundry
footnote references. The two volumes are to be followed by a
third, on National Self-government, and it is my hope that the
complete series may form a useful general survey of the
development of the main political factors in modern history.

In its first form the book had the advantage of being read by my
friend Major W. L. Grant, Professor of Colonial History at Queen's
University Kingston, Ontario. The pressure of the military duties
in which he is engaged has made it impossible for me to ask his
aid in the revision of the book.

R. M. July 1917





CONTENTS


Preface
I. The Meaning and the Motives of Imperialism
II. The Era of Iberian Monopoly
III. The Rivalry of the Dutch, the French, and
the English, 1588-1763
(a) The Period of Settlement, 1588-1660
(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713
(c) The Conflict of French and English, 1713-1763
IV. The Era of Revolution, 1763-1825
V. Europe and the Non-European World, 1815-1878
VI. The Transformation of the British Empire, 1815-1878
VII. The Era of the World States, 1878-1900
VIII. The British Empire amid the World-Powers, 1878-1914
IX. The Great Challenge, 1900-1914
X. What of the Night?





I

THE MEANING AND THE MOTIVES OF IMPERIALISM


One of the most remarkable features of the modern age has been the
extension of the influence of European civilisation over the whole
world. This process has formed a very important element in the
history of the last four centuries, and it has been strangely
undervalued by most historians, whose attention has been too
exclusively centred upon the domestic politics, diplomacies, and
wars of Europe. It has been brought about by the creation of a
succession of 'Empires' by the European nations, some of which
have broken up, while others survive, but all of which have
contributed their share to the general result; and for that reason
the term 'Imperialism' is commonly employed to describe the spirit
which has led to this astonishing and world-embracing movement of
the modern age.

The terms 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' are in some respects
unfortunate, because of the suggestion of purely military dominion
which they convey; and their habitual employment has led to some
unhappy results. It has led men of one school of thought to
condemn and repudiate the whole movement, as an immoral product of
brute force, regardless of the rights of conquered peoples. They
have refused to study it, and have made no endeavour to understand
it; not realising that the movement they were condemning was as
inevitable and as irresistible as the movement of the tides--and
as capable of being turned to beneficent ends. On the other hand,
the implications of these terms have perhaps helped to foster in
men of another type of mind an unhealthy spirit of pride in mere
domination, as if that were an end in itself, and have led them to
exult in the extension of national power, without closely enough
considering the purposes for which it was to be used. Both
attitudes are deplorable, and in so far as the words 'Empire,'
'Imperial,' and 'Imperialism' tend to encourage them, they are
unfortunate words. They certainly do not adequately express the
full significance of the process whereby the civilisation of
Europe has been made into the civilisation of the world.

Nevertheless the words have to be used, because there are no
others which at all cover the facts. And, after all, they are in
some ways entirely appropriate. A great part of the world's area
is inhabited by peoples who are still in a condition of barbarism,
and seem to have rested in that condition for untold centuries.
For such peoples the only chance of improvement was that they
should pass under the dominion of more highly developed peoples;
and to them a European 'Empire' brought, for the first time, not
merely law and justice, but even the rudiments of the only kind of
liberty which is worth having, the liberty which rests upon law.
Another vast section of the world's population consists of peoples
who have in some respects reached a high stage of civilisation,
but who have failed to achieve for themselves a mode of
organisation which could give them secure order and equal laws.
For such peoples also the 'Empire' of Western civilisation, even
when it is imposed and maintained by force, may bring advantages
which will far outweigh its defects. In these cases the word
'Empire' can be used without violence to its original
significance, and yet without apology; and these cases cover by
far the greater part of the world.

The words 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' come to us from ancient Rome;
and the analogy between the conquering and organising work of Rome
and the empire-building work of the modern nation-states is a
suggestive and stimulating analogy. The imperialism of Rome
extended the modes of a single civilisation, and the Reign of Law
which was its essence, over all the Mediterranean lands. The
imperialism of the nations to which the torch of Rome has been
handed on, has made the Reign of Law, and the modes of a single
civilisation, the common possession of the whole world. Rome made
the common life of Europe possible. The imperial expansion of the
European nations has alone made possible the vision--nay, the
certainty--of a future world-order. For these reasons we may
rightly and without hesitation continue to employ these terms,
provided that we remember always that the justification of any
dominion imposed by a more advanced upon a backward or
disorganised people is to be found, not in the extension of mere
brute power, but in the enlargement and diffusion, under the
shelter of power, of those vital elements in the life of Western
civilisation which have been the secrets of its strength, and the
greatest of its gifts to the world: the sovereignty of a just and
rational system of law, liberty of person, of thought, and of
speech, and, finally, where the conditions are favourable, the
practice of self-government and the growth of that sentiment of
common interest which we call the national spirit. These are the
features of Western civilisation which have justified its conquest
of the world [Footnote: See the first essay in Nationalism and
Internationalism, in which an attempt is made to work out this
idea]; and it must be for its success or failure in attaining
these ends that we shall commend or condemn the imperial work of
each of the nations which have shared in this vast achievement.

Four main motives can be perceived at work in all the imperial
activities of the European peoples during the last four centuries.
The first, and perhaps the most potent, has been the spirit of
national pride, seeking to express itself in the establishment of
its dominion over less highly organised peoples. In the exultation
which follows the achievement of national unity each of the
nation-states in turn, if the circumstances were at all
favourable, has been tempted to impose its power upon its
neighbours,[Footnote: Nationalism and Imperialism, pp. 60, 64,
104.] or even to seek the mastery of the world. From these
attempts have sprung the greatest of the European wars. From them
also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states.
It is no mere coincidence that all the great colonising powers
have been unified nation-states, and that their imperial
activities have been most vigorous when the national sentiment was
at its strongest among them. Spain, Portugal, England, France,
Holland, Russia: these are the great imperial powers, and they are
also the great nation-states. Denmark and Sweden have played a
more modest part, in extra-European as in European affairs.
Germany and Italy only began to conceive imperial ambitions after
their tardy unification in the nineteenth century. Austria, which
has never been a nation-state, never became a colonising power.
Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for dominion, may be
regarded as the chief source of imperialism; and if its effects
are unhappy when it tries to express itself at the expense of
peoples in whom the potentiality of nationhood exists, they are
not necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of
the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and
development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration
and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may prove
itself a beneficent force. But it is beneficent only in so far as
it leads to an enlargement of law and liberty.

The second of the blended motives of imperial expansion has been
the desire for commercial profits; and this motive has played so
prominent a part, especially in our own time, that we are apt to
exaggerate its force, and to think of it as the sole motive. No
doubt it has always been present in some degree in all imperial
adventures. But until the nineteenth century it probably formed
the predominant motive only in regard to the acquisition of
tropical lands. So long as Europe continued to be able to produce
as much as she needed of the food and the raw materials for
industry that her soil and climate were capable of yielding, the
commercial motive for acquiring territories in the temperate zone,
which could produce only commodities of the same type, was
comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas,
which we have come to regard as the most important products of the
imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be
mainly attributed to other than commercial motives. But Europe has
always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics: gold
and ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a
very early age found their way into Europe from India and the
East, coming by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of
the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Until the end of the
fifteenth century the European trader had no direct contact with
the sources of these precious commodities; the supply of them was
scanty and the price high. The desire to gain a more direct access
to the sources of this traffic, and to obtain control of the
supply, formed the principal motive for the great explorations.
But these, in their turn, disclosed fresh tropical areas worth
exploiting, and introduced new luxuries, such as tobacco and tea,
which soon took rank as necessities. They also brought a colossal
increment of wealth to the countries which had undertaken them.
Hence the acquisition of a share in, or a monopoly of, these
lucrative lines of trade became a primary object of ambition to
all the great states. In the nineteenth century Europe began to be
unable to supply her own needs in regard to the products of the
temperate zone, and therefore to desire control over other areas
of this type; but until then it was mainly in regard to the
tropical or sub-tropical areas that the commercial motive formed
the predominant element in the imperial rivalries of the nation-
states. And even to-day it is over these areas that their
conflicts are most acute.

A third motive for imperial expansion, which must not be
overlooked, is the zeal for propaganda: the eagerness of virile
peoples to propagate the religious and political ideas which they
have adopted. But this is only another way of saying that nations
are impelled upon the imperial career by the desire to extend the
influence of their conception of civilisation, their Kultur. In
one form or another this motive has always been present. At first
it took the form of religious zeal. The spirit of the Crusaders
was inherited by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, whose whole
history had been one long crusade against the Moors. When the
Portuguese started upon the exploration of the African coast, they
could scarcely have sustained to the end that long and arduous
task if they had been allured by no other prospect than the
distant hope of finding a new route to the East. They were buoyed
up also by the desire to strike a blow for Christianity. They
expected to find the mythical Christian empire of Prester John,
and to join hands with him in overthrowing the infidel. When
Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile to supply the means
for his madcap adventure, it was by a double inducement that he
won her assent: she was to gain access to the wealth of the
Indies, but she was also to be the means of converting the heathen
to a knowledge of Christianity; and this double motive continually
recurs in the early history of the Spanish Empire. France could
scarcely, perhaps, have persisted in maintaining her far from
profitable settlements on the barren shores of the St. Lawrence if
the missionary motive had not existed alongside of the motives of
national pride and the desire for profits: her great work of
exploration in the region of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi
Valley was due quite as much to the zeal of the heroic
missionaries of the Jesuit and other orders as to the enterprise
of trappers and traders. In English colonisation, indeed, the
missionary motive was never, until the nineteenth century, so
strongly marked. But its place was taken by a parallel political
motive. The belief that they were diffusing the free institutions
in which they took so much pride certainly formed an element in
the colonial activities of the English. It is both foolish and
unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda in the
imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by
the colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial
expansion, as of other human activities, are mixed, and the
loftier elements in them are not often predominant. But the
loftier elements are always present. It is hypocrisy to pretend
that they are alone or even chiefly operative. But it is cynicism
wholly to deny their influence. And of the two sins cynicism is
the worse, because by over-emphasising it strengthens and
cultivates the lower among the mixed motives by which men are
ruled.

The fourth of the governing motives of imperial expansion is the
need of finding new homes for the surplus population of the
colonising people. This was not in any country a very powerful
motive until the nineteenth century, for over-population did not
exist in any serious degree in any of the European states until
that age. Many of the political writers in seventeenth-century
England, indeed, regarded the whole movement of colonisation with
alarm, because it seemed to be drawing off men who could not be
spared. But if the population was nowhere excessive, there were in
all countries certain classes for which emigration to new lands
offered a desired opportunity. There were the men bitten with the
spirit of adventure, to whom the work of the pioneer presented an
irresistible attraction. Such men are always numerous in virile
communities, and when in any society their numbers begin to
diminish, its decay is at hand. The imperial activities of the
modern age have more than anything else kept the breed alive in
all European countries, and above all in Britain. To this type
belonged the conquistadores of Spain, the Elizabethan seamen, the
French explorers of North America, the daring Dutch navigators.
Again, there were the younger sons of good family for whom the
homeland presented small opportunities, but who found in colonial
settlements the chance of creating estates like those of their
fathers at home, and carried out with them bands of followers
drawn from among the sons of their fathers' tenantry. To this
class belonged most of the planter-settlers of Virginia, the
seigneurs of French Canada, the lords of the great Portuguese
feudal holdings in Brazil, and the dominant class in all the
Spanish colonies. Again, there were the 'undesirables' of whom the
home government wanted to be rid--convicts, paupers, political
prisoners; they were drafted out in great numbers to the new
lands, often as indentured servants, to endure servitude for a
period of years and then to be merged in the colonial population.
When the loss of the American colonies deprived Britain of her
dumping-ground for convicts, she had to find a new region in which
to dispose of them; and this led to the first settlement of
Australia, six years after the establishment of American
independence. Finally, in the age of bitter religious controversy
there was a constant stream of religious exiles seeking new homes
in which they could freely follow their own forms of worship. The
Puritan settlers of New England are the outstanding example of
this type. But they were only one group among many. Huguenots from
France, Moravians from Austria, persecuted 'Palatines' and
Salzburgers from Germany, poured forth in an almost unbroken
stream. It was natural that they should take refuge in the only
lands where full religious freedom was offered to them; and these
were especially some of the British settlements in America, and
the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope.

It is often said that the overflow of Europe over the world has
been a sort of renewal of the folk-wandering of primitive ages.
That is a misleading view: the movement has been far more
deliberate and organised, and far less due to the pressure of
external circumstances, than the early movements of peoples in the
Old World. Not until the nineteenth century, when the industrial
transformation of Europe brought about a really acute pressure of
population, can it be said that the mere pressure of need, and the
shortage of sustenance in their older homes, has sent large bodies
of settlers into the new lands. Until that period the imperial
movement has been due to voluntary and purposive action in a far
higher degree than any of the blind early wanderings of peoples.
The will-to-dominion of virile nations exulting in their
nationhood; the desire to obtain a more abundant supply of
luxuries than had earlier been available, and to make profits
therefrom; the zeal of peoples to impose their mode of
civilisation upon as large a part of the world as possible; the
existence in the Western world of many elements of restlessness
and dissatisfaction, adventurers, portionless younger sons, or
religious enthusiasts: these have been the main operative causes
of this huge movement during the greater part of the four
centuries over which it has extended. And as it has sprung from
such diverse and conflicting causes, it has assumed an infinite
variety of forms; and both deserves and demands a more respectful
study as a whole than has generally been given to it.





II

THE ERA OF IBERIAN MONOPOLY


During the Middle Ages the contact of Europe with the rest of the
world was but slight. It was shut off by the great barrier of the
Islamic Empire, upon which the Crusades made no permanent
impression; and although the goods of the East came by caravan to
the Black Sea ports, to Constantinople, to the ports of Syria, and
to Egypt, where they were picked up by the Italian traders, these
traders had no direct knowledge of the countries which were the
sources of their wealth. The threat of the Empire of Genghis Khan
in the thirteenth century aroused the interest of Europe, and the
bold friars, Carpini and Rubruquis, made their way to the centres
of that barbaric sovereign's power in the remote East, and brought
back stories of what they had seen; later the Poli, especially the
great Marco, undertook still more daring and long-continued
journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to Europeans,
and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later
mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro
(1459),[Footnote: Simplified reproductions of this and the other
early maps alluded to are printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of
Modern History, which also contains a long series of maps
illustrating the extra-Europeans activities of the European
states.] which incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly
imaginative than their predecessors, and show a vague notion of
the general configuration of the main land-masses in the Old
World. But beyond the fringes of the Mediterranean the world was
still in the main unknown to, and unaffected by, European
civilisation down to the middle of the fifteenth century.

Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were
made possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during
the fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly
transformed the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of
this revelation can perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of
two maps, that of Behaim, published in 1492, and that of Schoener,
published in 1523. Apart from its adoption of the theory that the
earth was globular, not round and flat, Behaim's map shows little
advance upon Fra Mauro, except that it gives a clearer idea of the
shape of Africa, due to the earlier explorations of the
Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that the broad outlines of
the distribution of the land-masses of both hemispheres were
already in 1523 pretty clearly understood. This astonishing
advance was due to the daring and enterprise of the Portuguese
explorers, Diaz, Da Gama, Cabral, and of the adventurers in the
service of Spain, Columbus, Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of
them all--Magellan.

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