The Routledge History of Western Empires

Robert Aldrich, Kirsten McKenzie, Robert Aldrich, Kirsten McKenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415639873
• eBook ISBN: 9781317999867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Routledge History of Western Empires is an all new volume focusing on the history of Western Empires in a comparative and thematic perspective. Comprising of thirty-three original chapters arranged in eight thematic sections, the book explores European overseas expansion from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Decolonisation.

Studies by both well-known historians and new scholars offer fresh, accessible perspectives on a multitude of themes ranging from colonialism in the Arctic to the scramble for the coral sea, from attitudes to the environment in the East Indies to plans for colonial settlement in Australasia. Chapters examine colonial attitudes towards poisonous animals and the history of colonial medicine, evangelisaton in Africa and Oceania, colonial recreation in the tropics and the tragedy of the slave trade.

The Routledge History of Western Empires ranges over five centuries and crosses continents and oceans highlighting transnational and cross-cultural links in the imperial world and underscoring connections between colonial history and world history. Through lively and engaging case studies, contributors not only weigh in on historiographical debates on themes such as human rights, religion and empire, and the 'taproots' of imperialism, but also illustrate the various approaches to the writing of colonial history. A vital contribution to the field.

Part I

Mapping the Imperial Turn

Introduction

The sixteenth-century expansion of European powers launched a new phase in world history. In this section we track the expansion from Europe towards both the east and west. That European domination would later spread such an iron grip over so much of the world can be misleading. Felix Hinz’s spirited account of the Spanish conquest of South America from the late 1490s reminds us of both the perilous and precarious nature of these enterprises. Luck played a significant role, and many of the reasons for conquistador victory were entirely outside their control. The spectacular successes that saw the fall of the Inca and Aztec Empires also need to be read against Spanish failures that descended into torture, starvation and cannibalism. Much of the initiative came from private adventurers. It was only subsequently that the Spanish Crown intervened and sent civil servants to build up a more secure and stable administration.

In his account of the Portuguese sea-borne expansion into Asia, Jorge Flores points out that in entering the Indian Ocean, Europeans were one more set of newcomers in an extremely complex region with a long history of previous incursions by foreigners. Flores turns the usual scholarly focus on an exotic ‘other’ on its head by taking as his subject the question of how Asians viewed the Portuguese. The ‘Franks’ and their culture inspired both disgust and desire. Asians found them simultaneously strange and familiar, and sought to fit them into existing cosmologies that were themselves undergoing transformation.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are widely recognised as a turning point in European expansion. The ‘Revolutionary Age’ was also a time of profound political upheaval within the Atlantic world colonies and Europe itself. Three of our chapters investigate particular aspects of this paradoxical moment in which struggles for liberty coincided with almost a third of the world’s population being brought under imperial rule.

Trevor Burnard asks why the planter classes of the Atlantic world rebelled against their metropolitan centres when the relationship between imperial centres and their planter-class colonists appears to have been so symbiotic. The Age of Revolutions, he argues, was not a reaction against empire—rather, it was a response to empire. It did not in fact contribute much to the end of slavery in the British, French or Iberian colonies of the region. With the rise of the abolition movement in Britain itself, however, that nation’s imperial turn towards Asia and the South Pacific conformed to a radical new idea: that empire and slavery were incompatible.

Michael A. McDonnell and Kate Fullagar connect the two axes of this imperial turn by taking the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean worlds as their starting point. The view from the other side of the frontier offers the possibility to shift our conception of what drove imperial history. Indigenous resistance forced Europeans to continually reassess and debate the foundations of imperial policy and practice. Central as it was to imperial expansion, violence was not the only outcome of the encounters between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’, and the complications of this process matter in our understandings of both the past and the present.

Pernille Røge’s account of British, Danish and French imperialism shows us a ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1780s and 1790s, long before the more usual late nineteenth-century use of this term. Once more, debates over slavery and the slave trade were crucial. Abolition was a key driving force in the paradoxical extension of empire in the name of liberty. Such projects laid the foundation for Europeans’ nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonisation of new parts of the globe.

1

Spanish–Indian Encounters

The conquest and creation of new empires

Felix Hinz

The Caribbean—an imperial prelude

Columbus sensed disappointment at what he found, or rather at what he did not find, when he landed in the Caribbean in 1492.¹ There were no obvious resources, no highly developed trading nations, no connections to China nor to the Indian spice merchants as he had hoped. Neither was there a connection to the holy city of Jerusalem.² Instead he found fever, mosquitoes and slightly built, half-naked humans living in thatched cottages—men and women who had never before heard of Jesus Christ. It was hard for Columbus to accept these facts. He did not tire of asking the Indian fishermen about ‘Cipangu’ (Japan). He stubbornly named the areas he explored ‘Las Indias’ (India) and its inhabitants ‘Indios’ (Indians). In his reports, he turned what seemed a green tropical hell into a flourishing paradise and described the Indians as peaceful and innocent.³ But this land offered nothing of material worth for the Catholic Monarchs who had already expressed doubt about the embellished calculations of Columbus’ plan to reach India by sailing westwards.

Because Columbus, under no circumstances, wanted to return to Spain with empty hands, he amassed what he could. He tried to collect gold by any possible means, as presents from local people, by trade, by robbery, or through blackmail. He also captured Indians whom he intended to sell as slaves back in Spain. King Ferdinand II of Aragon accepted the gold with thanks, but his wife Queen Isabella was concerned by the treatment of the Indians, who had been described to her as so well behaved and innocent, and the proposal to augment the sparse booty through selling Indian slaves was rejected by the monarchs.⁴ Columbus, by this time already appointed ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’ and viceroy of all of the lands he discovered, followed instructions not to transport any further Indians to Spain as potential slaves. However, this did not keep Columbus from enslaving Indians in the Caribbean on his own initiative, using as an excuse the argument that the indigenous islanders were cannibals.⁵ (The term indeed derives from the Carib people, caníbales in Spanish, and the name was given to the Caribbean Sea at the time of the slaving raids carried out by Columbus.)

Along with his nearest male relatives, Columbus gradually built an island kingdom in the Caribbean to which he attracted more and more Spaniards through baseless exaggerations of its potential. The Spaniards did not go to America to become hard-working farmers but rather with the expectation of becoming rich in no time and without great effort. Each Spaniard crossing the ocean felt, no matter who he had been before, that he was now an hidalgo, a nobleman. To keep his settlers content, Columbus assigned to them Indians required to work and produce supplies for the Spaniards, and to deliver gold tribute to them. The encomienda system in practice was not very unlike slavery.⁶

The first settlements nevertheless failed because Columbus chose inappropriate places for his colonies. Many Spaniards and even more Indians died, especially because the Spaniards brought germs from the Old World to which the inhabitants of the New World were not immune; and within a few decades the Indian population of the Caribbean was largely exterminated. The brutal and rapid conquest and exploitation of the islands caused protests by some Dominican friars,⁷ but in 1504 Queen Isabella died, and her husband, King Ferdinand II, had a particular interest in gold that he could now pursue without hindrance.

The last act of the Caribbean drama was the conquest of Cuba in 1510.⁸ Led by Diego Velázquez, the Indians were driven from east to west over the 1,250 kilometre-long island by fighting dogs and firearms, and systematically conquered or killed if they resisted. The name and fate of one indigenous Taino chieftain named Hatuey are known. He had already suffered painful experiences under the Spaniards on the island of Hispaniola, escaping to Cuba, where he organised opposition against the conquistadors. But there he was caught and burned alive. Already on the stake, Hatuey was asked by a Franciscan if he wished to convert to Christianity so that he would go to heaven instead of hell. Before giving his answer, Hatuey wished to know whether the Spaniards would go to heaven as well. When the priest replied that they would, Hatuey answered that he would not convert because he did not want to go anywhere that the Spaniards went.⁹

Mexico—the foundation of a ‘New Spain’

At the end of April 1519, an army of conquistadors landed near today’s Veracruz, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, under the command of Hernán Cortés, secretary to Diego Velázquez, the governor of Cuba.¹⁰ Cortés so far had little military experience,¹¹ but he was one of the most influential settlers of Cuba. He also had seen the gold that two captains had brought from their exploration of the Mexican coast. The governor’s secretary mortgaged all his assets and, together with his supervisor, financed an armada of over 600 foot-soldiers, sixteen horsemen and a bevy of cannon. What he built up was a remarkable force for the Caribbean. Cortés’ men were desperadoes. They did not receive wages and had to supply their own arms, though they hoped for a share in any prize won in battle. The conquistadors wanted to become rich with the treasures of Mexico—immeasurably rich and as soon as possible. Indians were all the same to them: weak, barbaric pagans without rights. Moreover the Indians of the Mexican mainland were believed—or, rather, were expected to be—especially despicable because they sacrificed humans or were cannibals. Moreover, they were thought to commit unnameable sexual sins and generally to make pacts with the devil.

The chieftain of the Totonacs, living on the Gulf coast, told the Spanish that an inland ruler named Moctezuma possessed legendary amounts of gold taken from the Indians of Mexico. The Spaniards coveted Moctezuma’s wealth, and argued that he had to be a true tyrant if he was able to terrify all Mexico—their self-appointed mission would be to free the Indians from Aztec rule.

Unexpectedly, two of Moctezuma’s tribute collectors appeared at the Spanish camp, behaving arrogantly and refusing to recognise the Europeans. Although the Totonacs trembled in fear of the Aztecs, Cortés had Moctezuma’s two men captured. But on the same night as they were taken hostage, Cortés visited and freed the men, assuring them that he was friends with Moctezuma and that he wanted to visit him in his capital city, Tenochtitlán, because he had a personal message to present to him from the Spanish king. This was a bald-faced lie, as Charles I, crowned in 1516, had never heard of Moctezuma nor indeed of Cortés. But in this way Cortés set up a situation of effective confusion that allowed him to play the Indian states of central Mexico off against each other.

The political situation in Mexico at the time was complicated. The Aztec polity consisted of the three city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopán.¹² Tenochtitlán was America’s largest city, and no city in sixteenth-century Europe is likely to have had a higher population. But Texcoco, the most important ally of Tenochtitlán, had been weakened through a bloody civil war when the Spaniards arrived. Because of its exploitive character, the Aztec triple alliance faced several enemies. When Cortés proved the military clout of the Spanish conquistadors in the first battlefield encounters, many of the Aztecs’ enemies believed an alliance with the Europeans would provide a chance to free themselves from tribute to the hated Aztecs. Probably Moctezuma II (r. 1502–1520) underestimated the danger emanating from the small band of Spaniards. First he even sent Cortés rich gifts intended for the Spanish king, including several magnificent costumes made for the gods, and a large golden grommet portraying the sun as well as a small silver one, picturing the moon. These items were supposed to frighten the Spaniards, but, of course, they only stirred up their greed for gold.

The subsequent conquest of Mexico was not least a war between the Indian states that Cortés was able to master with luck and aptitude.¹³ The Aztecs knew neither horses nor firearms—but Cortés knew how to put them to successful and intimidating use. But his essential advantage came from a young Indian woman whom he received as a ‘present’ from a Mexican chieftain. Malintzin (Malinche) learned Spanish within a very short time and became his interpreter;¹⁴ without her aid, the conquest of Mexico would not have been possible.

After an exhausting trek up to the Mexican highland, bouts of bloody fighting and various pacts of assistance, especially with the Totonacs and Tlaxcaltecs, the Spaniards and their allies reached Moctezuma’s island capital of Tenochtitlán in November 1519. The Aztec ruler welcomed them and billeted them grandly. Despite the friendliness, the conquistadors rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Why colonialism?
• Part I: Mapping the imperial turn
• Part II: Planning empire
• Part III: Locations of empire
• Part IV: People of empire
• Part V: Imperial sciences
• Part VI: Imperial spaces
• Part VII: Imperial cultures
• Part VIII: Making and unmaking empire
• Epilogue: imperial frictions. Thinking through impediments in empire history
• Index