Colonialism

WHILE COLONIALISM can date from the ancient world, and Rome's final vanquishing of its old rival Carthage in the Punic Wars, modern colonialism could be measured from the first voyage of Christopher Columbus for Spain in 1492. Columbus's voyage was intended to find a less expensive route to find the riches of the Orient after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had made the cost of overland commerce prohibitive. In 1493, the 15th pope, Alexander VI, arbitrarily drew a line at the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the world between Spain and Portugal. Immediately, the other European countries denounced this compact and began a heated competition for the riches of the world.

From this time on, there would be no European wars that would not have repercussions throughout the world. Asia was opened to European trade when the Portuguese Vasco da Gama reached India at the port of Calicut in 1494. Between 1519 and 1540, Spain had explored and conquered Central and South America, with the exception of Brazil, which became a colony of Portugal. In 1565, Pedro de Menendez had established Saint Augustine in today's Florida as the first permanent European settlement in the future United States. Within 60 years, driven both by the desire for exploration and economic success, the European nations had virtually spanned the globe with their commercial settlements, or “factories.” The first British settlement in North America, on Roanoke Island, Virginia, failed in 1587; the second one at Jamestown succeeded in 1607. While sociologist Max Weber wrote that Protestantism as a new religion impelled the drive for commercial expansion, the aggressive colonialist policies pursued by traditionally Catholic nations like Portugal, France, and Spain disproves the thesis.

Gradually, a political philosophy arose that has been used to interpret the explosion of European interests across the world from the 15th to the 17th centuries: mercantilism. Mercantilism held that the European countries should acquire overseas “factories”—and colonies—to provide them with raw materials for the growing manufacturing industries at home. From the beginning, with the acquisition of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, colonies were also seen as a way of using the indigenous inhabitants as slave labor, working at no wages for their colonial masters.

By the end of the 17th century, England and France had become embroiled in fierce commercial rivalry, which spread from the plains of Germany to the rich colonies that they coveted in India. Earlier, the Netherlands, after it had won freedom from Spain, had fought a series of spirited naval actions against England. In 1678, however, the old animosity was resolved in a joint treaty directed against the French of King Louis XIV, the Sun King. In 1688, allied thus with the Netherlands, William III of England, who had ruled the Netherlands as William of Orange, entered into a series of wars with France which that continue with brief interludes of uneasy peace until 1763. In that year, at the Treaty of Paris, the final conflict, the Seven Years War, came to a triumphant conclusion for the British. France was effectively removed as a colonial rival in the Americas and India as well. As an example of how mercantilism dominated French political thought, the French decided to keep their sugar-rich islands in the West Indies and relinquish their vast Canadian colony, New France, to British rule.

...