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Imperialism

Imperialism, the extension of a nation's power and dominion, whether by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining indirect control of a region, has the capacity to create a sense of global community for a sequence of nations, though in complex and conflicting ways. The Spanish and Portuguese, followed later by the Dutch, French, British, and Americans, each identified themselves as representing a worldwide mission, religious, royal (or republican), and commercial. Though these imperial communities were fiercely competitive, they shared some common characteristics. By the late nineteenth century, technological, scientific, and medical developments served to internationalize some aspects of imperialism and offered a profounder sense of a “civilizing” mission crossing national boundaries. Nevertheless, competition remained intense and ultimately broke down into the major wars of the twentieth century.

Imperialism also produced a sense of community among the so-called native or indigenous peoples of empire. If the dominant imperial community was constituted by feelings of racial superiority, as well as military, naval, commercial, and industrial strength, the subjugated community was ultimately united by a common awareness of oppression, dispossession, and racial antagonism. The experience of slavery, the new national forms that emerged in South America beginning in the late eighteenth century, the efforts of non-Christian religions to respond to the Christian missionary challenge, and the international black movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century all contributed to subjugated peoples' sense of community, as did the major political responses to imperialism that occurred in the twentieth century. As anti-imperial movements gathered force, often led by educated elites who received their education in the imperial metropolitan countries themselves, new forms of nationalism—often themselves competitive—led to a real sense of global community. This sense of “the Third World” or “developing nations” or “the South” as a community remains a potent force to this day.

Catholic Imperialism: Spain and Portugal

The spread of imperial rule throughout the world from the sixteenth century onward dispersed peoples in such a way that they remained aware of the characteristics that united them. The Spaniards and the Portuguese were united by their Roman Catholicism and the crusading mission that it embodied, symbolized by the Pope's division of the world between them in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. They were also united by their common antagonism toward Islam, the cultural, political, and religious power of which had only recently been pushed back within the Iberian Peninsula. The Portuguese in particular were activated by what they perceived as a need to outflank the power of Islam in order to reach out to ancient Christian communities in northeastern Africa and South Asia.

The Spanish and the Portuguese were also united both by commercial ambitions under royal patronage and by a common hatred of the Protestant Reformation and the new states defined by reformed Christian communities that were consequently created, particularly in the Netherlands and in England. Thus, in the course of the sixteenth century, the expansive power of Spain and Portugal became bound up with the forces of the Counter-Reformation. Spain's possessions in North Africa, the Atlantic, and Central and South America, as well as the Philippines, were communities united by language, religion, and a sense of loyalty to the Spanish royal house. At times, however, this unity was tempered by the need for individual survival strategies and often by ambitions to create wealth on a personal rather than national basis. The same was invariably true of the Portuguese. Their communities were established in Brazil; in forts in West Africa; in outposts in southwestern, southeastern, and eastern Africa; in the Arabian Gulf, as well as in locations on the Indian coast; in Southeast Asia; and in the Far East. Like their Spanish counterparts, these communities were seaborne, united in commercial, cultural, religious, and political ways by the coming and going of vessels that represented a significant technical advance in ship design and construction as well as in firearms.

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