Negotiations of Empire

Bureaucratic stuff  Ghana  Books / discussion  Brown Bag series  H-Atlantic H-Atlantic

 “in observing America, Europe was in the first instance observing itself.”  Sir John Elliott  Columbus was involved in “the production of wonder.”  Stephen Greenblatt

What did conquest mean?  Conquest equals the mastery of American space  Sir John Elliott: Empires of the Atlantic World  1) symbolic possession  2) physical occupation of the land  3) peopling of the land

Order and Hierarchy  Tension about proper type of society that should be established in the New World  A) recreation of European societies in the New World  B) these societies to be put under the control of European empires  C) societies that actually developed in the New World diverged from European practice

 John Winthrop: “in all times, some must be rich, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection”  A Modell of Christian Charity (1629)

Authority and the Periphery  Authority flowed not from the centre out towards the periphery but was constructed out of an ongoing series of negotiations, of reciprocal bargaining, between the centre and colonies  Result: conformity to traditional values of order, hierarchy but a willingness to break out of old values and subvert them

Wallerstein  Origin of "modern world-system" in 16 th C Western Europe and the Americas  By 19 th C virtually every area on earth was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy.

 Not homogeneous in cultural, political, and economic terms  Characterized by fundamental differences in  Civilizational development  Accumulation of political power and capital.

 Not mere residues or irregularities that can and will be overcome  A lasting division of the world in core, semi- periphery and periphery an inherent feature of the world-system  Core high level of technological development and manufactures complex products  Periphery raw materials, agricultural products and cheap labor for the expanding agents of the core.

 core and periphery are not mutually exclusive and fixed  relative to each other and shifting  zone called 'semi- periphery’ acts as a periphery to the core, and a core to the periphery core Semi periphery periphery

 Continuing co modification of things, including human labor  Natural resources  land  Labor  human relationships  being stripped of their "intrinsic" value and turned into commodities in a market which dictates their exchange value.

Spanish Conquests  Caribbean: model for later developments  Crucial features: importance of gold and mining  Urban concentration of Spanish  Development of encomienda system – wealth in people rather than in land  Conquest through conversion

Spanish expansion  Conquest spread from Hispaniola in two great arcs: one to Panama and one to Cuba and then Mexico  Conquest of Mexico  Conquest of Peru

Portuguese Encounters and Conquest  Beginnings of expansion 1415 Ceuta, in present day Morocco  Over fifteenth century, moved to Madeira islands, Cape Verde archipelago, Sao Tome and the Principe islands with forts in Morocco, Senegambia and gulf of Guinea  1487 Bartolomeu Dias crossed into Indian ocean

Portuguese expansion  Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India  1500 Portuguese move into Brazil  Reasons for going to Brazil  -counter French colonization  -find gold/silver as the Spanish had done in Potosi  -new sources of income to compensate for declining returns from India

Portugal: slaves and sugar  : shipped 156,000 Africans to Brazil, Atlantic islands and Spanish empire  Growth of sugar in late 16 th  -1570: 60 engenhos (sugar mills) in Brazil  -1585: 120 engenhos  -1612: 192 engenhos  “Without Angola, no slaves; without slaves; no sugar, without sugar, no Brazil.”

British Conquest  Jamestown  Pirates  Gold  Tobacco  New England  Religious persecution

France Geographic Diversity  Major areas of French Atlantic:  Marseille, Nantes, Bordeaux and Paris  French slaving posts from Senegambia to Benin, especially Fort Saint Louis and Gorée  New France plus Acadia and Terre-Neuve (Newfoundland)  Loisiana  Caribbean-Saint Domingue, Martinique, Guadaloupe and Cayenne

Population  French comparatively small in comparison to British in Americas  -70,000 went to Quebec; 7,000 to other parts of Canada  -300,000 to French Caribbean  African: 1,118,000 to French Caribbean including 800,000 to Saint Domingue

Why did so few French go to the Americas?  High chance of death  Limited numbers fleeing religious persecution  Expanding economy in France  Movement of peoples governed by the policies of the French crown and highly centralised French colonial bureaucracy – the Marine

How much control did the French have over their empire? Strengths  Theoretically great  tied into a largely mercantilist set of policies and governed by a connected set of legal codes  including the Code Noir “policing the conduct of slaves,”  Network of admiralty courts and a set of legal traditions called the Coutume de Paris Weaknesses  French interior only nominally under its control  North America less control than an “intercultural alliance” and “situation of interdependence”  “intercultural alliances” carried out by Jesuits missionaries and fur traders  not bureaucrats or soldiers

Differences between empires  Spain – neither a consolidated or a very well integrated state  Portugal – long a unified kingdom with centralising monarchs, John II and Manuel I  England – diverse set of ethnicities and a model of understatization  France – built upon the principle of incorporation. Large standing officialdom with a large standing army

Maintaining Rule – Spanish America  Spain was the European nation with the most effective control over their colonies  Discovery of silver and gold  Spanish empire in America a medieval construct – Edmundo O’Gorman: “Spanish colonisation is animated by a medieval spirit; whatever it contains that is modern is a blemish in it”

Maintaining Rule – British empire  More control in the peripheries  Colonists’ insistence on enjoyment of all English laws as English subjects  Importance of negotiation and government by consent  Aim of government: emulation of French and especially Spanish modes of colonial government