One must also be aware that shouts of ‘absolutism’ were frequently raised in a misleading way. When the English gentry complained about the absolutism of the Stuarts, they were less perturbed by the actual balance of power between King and Parliament than by fears of the imposition of French or Spanish practices. When the Polish nobles took to screaming about the ‘absolutism’ of their Saxon kings, whose position in Poland-Lithuania was more limited than that of any limited monarch, they were simply objecting to change.
The absolutism of France served as the main point of reference. Under Louis XTV (r. 1643–1715), whose reign was the longest in European history, France was far and away Europe’s greatest power; and her example excited numerous admirers. Yet the greatest of absolutists died disillusioned, convinced that the ideal lay out of reach.
In the end, therefore, absolutism proved a dismal failure. The Ancien Régime created by Louis XIV was to end in the disaster of a Revolution which, whilst turning France into the apostle of republicanism, brought French supremacy to a close. The ultimate triumph was to be enjoyed by Absolutism’s most doughty opponents. British constitutionalism inspired not only the leading power of the nineteenth century but also, via the constitution of Britain’s rebel colonies, the world’s leading superpower of the twentieth.
Europe’s colonies and overseas possessions continued to multiply after 1650, and in some cases reached independent viability. Spain and Portugal had their hands full exploiting their existing possessions. In North America, the Spaniards pressed inland from New Spain (Mexico) to California, Arizona, Colorado. In South America, aided by systematic Jesuit settlements, they concentrated their efforts on Venezuela, on New Granada (Bogotá), on Peru, Paraguay, and La Plata (Córdoba). They attempted to keep all trade to their own ships, until forced by the Asiento Treaty of 1713 to admit foreigners. The Portuguese survived a long campaign by the Dutch to take over the Brazilian coast. After the treaty of 1662, they moved south from São Paulo to the River Plate (1680) and westwards into the gold-rich interior at Minas Gerais (1693) and the Matto Grosso. Apart from the East Indies, the Dutch were left with colonies in Guyana and Curaçao. The Russians, who had discovered what was later to be named the Bering Strait in 1648, occupied Kamchatka (1679) and signed a border treaty with China on the Amur (1689). A century later, after the explorations of the Dane Vitus Bering (1680–1741), they established a fort on Kodiak Island (1783) and claimed Alaska (1791), whence they sent out an offshoot to Fort Ross in northern California (1812).
Most new colonial enterprises, however, were started by the French and the British. France launched the Compagnie des Indes in 1664, establishing stations on the east coast of India at Pondicherry and Karaikal, with staging-posts on the islands of Madagascar and Reunion. In 1682 Louisiana was founded on the Mississippi in honour of Louis XIV, with its capital at New Orleans (1718). England consolidated its American colonies with the foundation of Delaware (1682), of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania (1683), and of Georgia (1733). In India the East India Company, which now held Bombay and Calcutta as well as Madras, was hard-pressed by French competition. Commercial interests went hand in hand with maritime discovery. In 1766–8 the French admiral Bougainville circumnavigated the globe, as did the three expeditions of Captain James Cook RN between 1768 and 1780. In the circumstances, Franco-British colonial conflicts became almost inevitable. They were settled by superior British naval power. Great Britain took Newfoundland in 1713, French India in 1757, and French Canada in 1759–60, thereby confirming its status as the prime colonial power.
Colonialism was very much confined to those maritime states which first began it. The German states, Austria, and the Italian states did not take part. In this they
lagged behind the Polish fief of Courland, whose Duke bought Tobago in 1645 and briefly maintained a trading-post in the Gambia; or Denmark, whose West India Company obtained both St Thomas and St John (1671) and St Croix (1733).
The impact of Europe’s growing contacts with distant continents and cultures cannot be exaggerated. Europe had long been shut in on itself. Knowledge of civilizations beyond Europe was meagre. Fantastic tales, like that of ‘El Dorado’, abounded. But now a steady stream of detailed accounts of India, China, or the American Frontier began to stimulate more serious reflection.
Les Six Voyages
(1676) of J. B. Tavernier (1605–89), who made great wealth in Persia, started a genre written in the same vein as the celebrated
New Voyage round the World
(1697) of the buccaneer William Dampier (1652–1715), the
History of Japan
(1727) by the German surgeon Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), or the later
Travels in Arabia
of the Swiss J. L. Burckhardt (1784–1817), the first European to visit Mecca.
The Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719), the world’s first popular novel, was written by the English satirist, Daniel Defoe (1659–1731), on the basis of the real experiences of a Scots sailor marooned on Juan Fernández Island off Valparaíso by Dampier. These works often gave European readers a comparative perspective on the religions, folklore, and culture of the world; and they handed the philosophers of the Enlightenment one of their most effective devices for questioning European or Christian assumptions. It hit Europeans hard to learn that the Siamese might be happier, the Brahmin more sagacious, or the Iroquois less bloodthirsty than they were themselves. It is a curious fact that Jesuit authors, who excelled in travelogues of the ethnological type, provided the very ammunition with which their own intellectual world was most effectively bombarded. Here one would mention the description of Amerindian life in Canada by Fr. J.-F. Lafitau (1670–1740) or the much-translated memoir of Persia by Fr. T. Krusiński SJ (1675–1756), published in 1733.
International relations were clearly affected by the colonial factor. Almost all the wars of the period had naval or colonial theatres which were fought over in parallel to the main military conflict on the Continent. The great land powers— France, Spain, Austria, and increasingly Prussia and Russia—had to take account of the wealthy maritime powers, especially the British and the Dutch, who, whilst possessing few troops of their own, could play a vital role as paymasters, quartermasters, and weavers of diplomatic coalitions.
Diplomacy was increasingly governed by the Balance of Power—a doctrine which viewed any change in one part of Europe as a potential threat to the whole. This was a sure sign that a ‘European system’ was coming into being. And colonial assets were an integral part of the equation. The system was of particular interest to the British, who instinctively opposed any preponderant Continental power and who made a fine art of maintaining the Balance at minimum cost to themselves. International relations of this sort entirely lacked the moral and religious fervour of previous times. They were often reduced almost to a form of ritual, where the current state of the Balance was tested in set-piece battles fought by small professional armies; where elegant officers of both sides belonged to the
same international confraternity of arms; and where the result was nicely calculated in territory ceded or gained. Territorial possessions were viewed rather like casino chips that rulers lost or amassed according to the fortunes of war, with no thought for the interests of the inhabitants. Like Westphalia, all the great congresses of the subsequent era—Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1738), Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), and Paris (1763)—were conducted in the same spirit of cheerful cynicism.
Economic life, too, was greatly affected by the colonies. Europe was increasingly divided into countries which could benefit from colonial commerce and those which could not. Britain benefited most, especially after Utrecht, gaining a predominant hold on the Atlantic trade in sugar, tobacco, and slaves, from which Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol grew rich. Britain’s policy of enforcing a blockade on enemy ports in time of war led to constant trouble not only with France and Spain but also with the neutrals—Dutch, Danes, and Swedes—who had specialized in smuggling, raiding, and blockade-running. In Britain, in emulation of the Dutch, this period saw the growth of all the permanent institutions of public credit—the Bank of England (1694), the Royal Exchange, and the National Debt. The first steps of the Industrial Revolution were taken in the 1760s.
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Britain produced John Law (1671–1729), a racy Scots financier, who invented the first experiment for harnessing colonial trade to popular capitalism. His grand ‘Scheme’ and
Banque royale
(1716–20) in Paris, which was patronized by the Regent, and which coincided with the similarly disastrous South Sea Company in London, created a veritable fever of speculation by selling paper shares in the future of Louisiana. The Bubble burst; thousands, if not millions, of investors were ruined, Law fled, and France was permanently inoculated against credit operations. Meanwhile, the commercial operations of Law’s company thrived; and the value of French overseas commerce quadrupled between 1716 and 1743.
In Central and Eastern Europe, few such developments occurred. Land remained the major source of wealth; serfdom reigned supreme; inland trade could not compare to its maritime counterpart. Germany’s recovery was slow, Bohemia’s somewhat faster; Poland-Lithuania after 1648 experienced an absolute economic regression from which it never recovered. Baltic trade passed increasingly to Russia, where the foundation of St Petersburg (1701) opened its ‘window to the West’.
Social life, despite the recurrence of violent outbursts, remained within its established channels until the opening of the floodgates in 1789. Extremes of wealth among the aristocracy and of misery among the peasants were normal. Differences between Western and Eastern Europe were growing, but not dramatic. Even in Britain, where commercial pressures were greatest, the landed aristocracy maintained its supremacy. Indeed since the English lords were not averse to commercial activities like canal-building or coalmining, their pre-eminence was prolonged. This was the age of the grandees and the magnates—the Medina Sidonia and Osuña in Spain, the Brahes and Bondes in Sweden, the Schwarzenbergs in Austria, the Esterhazy in Hungary, the Lobkowitz in Bohemia, the Radziwitt and the Zamoyski in Poland—each with a vast latifundium protected by entail, a princely life-style, and enormous patronial power,
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volume 70 of the journal
Past and Present
(1976), an American historian advanced a hypothesis on ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe’. He was questioning the established view which attributed economic change to the pressures of rising population. Starting from contrasts between England and France, he argued that the key to England’s precocity and France’s retardation lay in their different class structures. Whereas the landlord class in England had created a flourishing system of agrarian capitalism, ‘the most complete freedom and property rights for the rural population [in France] meant poverty and a self-perpetuating cycle of backwardness’.
1
An elaborate historians’ debate raged in the journal’s next seventeen issues. Volume 78 carried a symposium on ‘Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society’, a second joint critique of the hypothesis, and an exposition of ‘Peasant Organization and Class in East and West Germany’. Volume 79 carried two still more hostile pieces, one lamenting ‘the confused view of manorial development’ and another, from the star of French rural history, which pummelled the Brenner thesis with a comprehensive eighteen-point ‘Reply’. Volume 85 extended the debate to ‘Pre-industrial Bohemia’. At last, in volume 97, Professor Brenner’s long-awaited rejoinder stretched matters still further by expounding his views on ‘the agrarian roots of European Capitalism’.
2
Debates of this sort are the chosen method for historical specialists to bridge the gaps in existing knowledge. They appear to have two weaknesses. They use tiny samples to make huge generalizations; and they are shamelessly inconclusive. If engineers were to approach their subject in the same spirit, no river would ever be bridged.
A solution of sorts, however, was to hand. In the same year that the Brenner debate was launched, another American scholar took the same subject of ‘capitalist agriculture’ and used it to explain ‘the origins of a world-economy’.
3
By applying the techniques of systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein was able to locate a ‘core’ of the European economy in the West and a dependent ‘periphery’ in the East. In his view, the core region, which consisted of England, the Netherlands, northern France, and western Germany, had possessed only a ‘slight edge’ in the fifteenth century. But they were able to exploit their advantage through favourable trading relations, and to set up the conditions which transformed the feudal nobilities of Eastern Europe into a capitalist landowning class. They also projected their growing economic power into the New World. As a result, they created the familiar framework where ‘coercive, cash-crop capitalism’ took hold both of colonial and of East European agriculture. Whilst the core countries flourished, the serfs of Prussia, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary were reduced to the status of plantation blacks. Once established, the system could only magnify its imbalances. ‘The slight edge of the fifteenth century became the great disparity of the seventeenth and the monumental difference of the nineteenth.’
4
The hypothesis soon came under fire from the specialists, not least from Brenner. Wallerstein was accused of oversimplification, of overemphasis on trade, even of ‘neo-Smithianism’.
5
It turns out that the ‘Polish model’, which was central to his argument, did not hold good even for the whole of Poland, and was largely invented. The Hungarian beef trade, it seems, was not run by nobles or capitalist middlemen, but by free, wage-earning peasants. The Russian and the Ottoman elements in European trade had been ignored. Instead of a micro-theory which could not sustain generalizations, here was a macro-theory, which could not bear the specifics.
In the end, the most interesting aspect of Wallerstein’s work was the light which it shed on the relations of Eastern and Western Europe. Though the postulate of a core and a dependent periphery had not been proved, the interdependence of all parts of Europe had been amply demonstrated.