Empires and Indigenes

Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World

Wayne E. Lee

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814753095
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The early modern period (c. 1500–1800) of world history is characterized by the establishment and aggressive expansion of European empires, and warfare between imperial powers and indigenous peoples was a central component of the quest for global dominance. From the Portuguese in Africa to the Russians and Ottomans in Central Asia, empire builders could not avoid military interactions with native populations, and many discovered that imperial expansion was impossible without the cooperation, and, in some cases, alliances with the natives they encountered in the new worlds they sought to rule.

Empires and Indigenes is a sweeping examination of how intercultural interactions between Europeans and indigenous people influenced military choices and strategic action. Ranging from the Muscovites on the western steppe to the French and English in North America, it analyzes how diplomatic and military systems were designed to accommodate the demands and expectations of local peoples, who aided the imperial powers even as they often became subordinated to them. Contributors take on the analytical problem from a variety of levels, from the detailed case studies of the different ways indigenous peoples could be employed, to more comprehensive syntheses and theoretical examinations of diplomatic processes, ethnic soldier mobilization, and the interaction of culture and military technology.

Warfare and Culture series

Contributors: Virginia Aksan, David R. Jones, Marjoleine Kars, Wayne E. Lee, Mark Meuwese, Douglas M. Peers, Geoffrey Plank, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, and John K. Thornton

1
Projecting Power in the Early Modern World

The Spanish Model?

WAYNE E. LEE

Despite the near constant historical attention, the success of European expansion around the world continues to inspire debate over its meaning, consequences, and, of interest here, its causes and methods. The popular acclaim and subsequent academic criticism of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies have highlighted the extent to which the subject continues simultaneously to fascinate and trouble. Western European states in the early modern era successfully hacked out trading and limited territorial empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, often at one another’s expense, but primarily at the expense of the local peoples they encountered. The basic outlines of that story are well known, as are the arguments for the roles of disease, technology, military technique, and even a basic willingness to employ horrific violence. Imperial expansion, however, was not a Western prerogative in this period. The Russians, Ottomans, Mughals, Chinese, and others also were busily pushing the boundaries of their control, and they, too, confronted similar problems in managing the problems of conquest warfare in intercultural contexts. Local peoples proved to be essential determinants of imperial success or failure. Far from being mere victims, these peoples found ways to profit from imperial maneuverings: they could find employment and profit as allies, or they might direct the interests and energies of imperial powers against their traditional enemies. Indeed, imperial “expansion” was very often illusory, and Europeans’ ability to project power actually depended entirely on local cooperation. In turn, that cooperative process shaped and reshaped the warfare and diplomatic practices designed to define and establish sovereignty and control, whether local or European. New cultures of power and cultures of war were born in the many crucibles of encounter around the globe, and this book, Empires and Indigenes, explores these themes and more.

The chapters in this book examine the problems of understanding imperial expansion in an early modern world still ruled primarily by organic energy.¹ Oceangoing sailing ships had harnessed the winds, and mills in Europe and elsewhere were using the power of wind or falling water to turn. Aside from these exceptions, though, wielding power meant harnessing organic energy derived from agriculture, timber, and pastoral products. Power required moving goods, feeding troops and animals, and extracting the wealth necessary to pay for and equip them. Accordingly, the problem of converting energy into military force and, in turn, converting force into a claim of sovereignty unifies these chapters.² The Ottomans and the Portuguese, the Muscovites and the English, all sought in some way to tap the labor of men and animals and to convert that labor into wealth. The process required asserting control over the space in which that labor was employed, and asserting control meant successfully projecting power. This indeed is a logical loop: projecting power required harnessing territorial space with its wealth and labor, and harnessing territorial space allowed for projecting power. One might imagine that “projecting power” meant dispatching a fleet or an army from the home country, but in fact, especially given the energy costs of early modern forces, it often was far easier to rely on local indigenous agents to act on the imperial behalf. It therefore was not always, or even mostly, a story of direct “conquest” but, rather, a story of convincing, cajoling, and coercing indigenous agents to harness their own resources and to project power, either at the imperial behest or at least in the imperial interest. The chapters in this book tell that story, as well as the story of some of the consequences of that process.

Empires and Indigenes is divided into three parts, proceeding from, roughly, the general to the more specific. Part I explores the interactive nature of imperial expansion from a wide perspective, presenting many of the broader themes that recur in the more detailed case studies. Essentially, how did intercultural contact, the meeting of empire and local, change diplomatic and military practices and cultures? In her chapter, Jenny Hale Pulsipher examines the blending of European and Amerindian diplomatic practices as both sides sought to find advantage in the other, and she finds that for most of this period, the Europeans adapted to Amerindian conventions rather than vice versa. Wayne E. Lee asks a similar set of questions about Amerindian military adaptation to European techniques and technologies, and Douglas M. Peers looks at the extent to which South Asian military practices determined and shaped British military capabilities there. In combination, these three chapters provide a broad synthetic analysis of how imperial “conquest” was complicated by the process of mutual diplomatic and military adaptation.

Part II also works from a broad perspective, but here Virginia H. Aksan and David R. Jones provide a comparative perspective on two non-Western European continental empires, those of the Ottomans and the Russians. As part of their imperial expansion, these two empires also came to recognize the necessity of diplomatic adjustment and compromise in order to foster intercultural alliances. Although historians specializing in the relatively new subfield of “Atlantic history” often compare the European oceanic empires with one another, they rarely compare them with continental empires, even those from the same era and resting on similar technological foundations.

Part III returns to the Portuguese, Dutch, and English Atlantic, but here John K. Thornton, Mark Meuwese, Geoffrey Plank, and Marjoleine Kars use a much more detailed approach, focusing on the problems and potentials of employing “indigenous” peoples in the cause of imperial expansion. Indigenous “allies” could play many different roles in solving the problem of projecting power in an organic economy, and these chapters explore that variability.

The Spanish Model?

In many ways the Spanish empire set the model to which other European powers aspired, and it also supplied the popular historical imagination with dramatic narratives of small numbers of Europeans seemingly “conquering” vast Amerindian empires.³ Spain’s (and Portugal’s) apparent brilliant and enriching success motivated other European powers to try their hand at creating trading and territorial empires across the oceans. The Spanish story for a long time dominated the historical portrayal of the process of European expansion. Indeed, for many students and for most of the modern age, the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru defined the extent of European superiority. More modern scholarship, however, has battered that reputation and, furthermore, has begun to integrate fully into the story the (semi-)cooperative relations between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the New World.⁴ In essence, we now see more and more clearly the extent to which Spanish imperial expansion both depended on extensive intercultural alliances and generated an adaptive exchange of warfare styles, which are the central themes of Empires and Indigenes. At the same time, however, Spain’s experience turns out not to have been paradigmatic. Crucial aspects of their early successes could not later be duplicated, and so this book focuses on those empires that came afterward or that struggled for control elsewhere, outside the New World. Before we turn to those other empires, we will briefly examine the Spanish experience in the New World to review what was paradigmatic and what was not and, above all, to begin to discover the nature and limits of early modern European power.

In Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763, Henry Kamen argues that early modern Spanish, really Castilian, power derived from the efforts and contributions of many ethnicities, states, and peoples. More to the point, he notes that even using the word power too often conjures up images of troops, ships, and guns, when in fact power is more than “just the capacity to apply force.” Power, he contends, derives from

the underlying structures that made empire possible, factors such as the ability to supply finance and services. In other words, who gave the men, who supplied the credit, who arranged the transactions, who built the ships, who made the guns? … “Conquest” and power turned out frequently to be of less importance than … the ability to marshal resources.⁵

Kamen’s thesis of the diffuse sources for Spanish power applies with even greater force to their activities in the New World. In 1519, when Hernando Cortés marched down out of the mountains into the valley of Mexico and approached Tenochtitlan, he brought with him several crucial advantages, all of which proved necessary in the ensuing contest. Those same advantages accrued to Francisco Pizarro in Peru in 1534 and to the other early conquistadors. First, the Spanish brought diseases, which, however unknowingly, proved potent allies in devastating populations and disrupting the normal processes of social mobilization and intergenerational cultural continuity.⁶ Although the extent of the devastation by disease remains difficult to measure, it no doubt was worst in those centralized and urbanized states first encountered on the mainland in the valley of Mexico and in Peru. Second, the Spanish brought horses, steel swords, and a tactical system that proved to be remarkably resistant to indigenous methods, especially in the first part of the sixteenth century. After the initial shock response to their strangeness, firearms lost much of their importance, and unarmored horses in small numbers quickly proved vulnerable. But armored Spanish infantry, fighting in the close-order style associated with the European warfare of that era and armed with steel swords, functioned as a kind of impenetrable mobile core from which they could launch cavalry charges, or, more importantly, around which they could form their third advantage: large numbers of indigenous allies.⁷

Amerindians were equally or even more politically fragmented than the Europeans. The Spanish, though, had the advantage of arriving from the outside (literally) as a fresh variable into a tense system of competing indigenous powers. Even if we set aside the supposed material advantages of steel or horses, the Spaniards’ strangeness allowed them to maneuver into the dual role of catalyst and tipping point. As numerically limited as Spanish military power was, it proved capable of mobilizing extant political struggles, and in doing so, the Spanish gained thousands of Amerindian allies. Certainly, the most famous example is the tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans who joined Cortés in overthrowing the Aztec state. But such aid persisted throughout the next two centuries and across the continent, even to the Spanish administrator in northern Mexico in 1693 who complained that “the soldiers absolutely cannot take the field without a number of Indian friends” and who asked that the salaries of eight Spanish soldiers instead be used to pay forty Amerindian fighters.⁸ This lesson was particularly clear as a “model” for other European powers: seek out the divisions between indigenous peoples and use them to mobilize allies. The indigenous peoples’ provision of numbers and intelligence could prove decisive. Later imperial powers in the New World, although also able to use local political divisions to their advantage, lacked the Spanish advantage of shock and surprise, so they were less successful at generating the kind of dramatic tipping point effect seen at Tenochtitlan.

There was another “side effect” of the Spaniards’ outsider status. As Matthew Restall points out, Amerindians had the option of surrendering: a choice that would protect their families and their homes. To be sure, that same motive gave them extraordinary courage in fighting the Spanish, and thousands died resisting, but eventually they could choose submission and survival.⁹ But the early conquistadors did not have that choice: if they failed, they died. These were men imbued with a crusading ideology, an energizing greed for hidden mineral wealth, and a profound, ends-of-the-earth, succeed-or-die desperation. Moreover, their consciences were fortified by an intricate and sustained religious-legalistic framework. As a result, the Spanish were pleased to accept native submission, but when resisted, they wielded violence swiftly, unhesitatingly, and with extraordinary cruelty. Like the “tipping point,” the power generated by this sense of desperation also did not fully carry over to the later oceanic empires, whose explorers and soldiers could more reliably fall back to their ships (or coastal forts) and return home if necessary. And for the Old World continental empires discussed here, this power of desperation did not really apply at all.

Beyond the power of desperation and the potential power conferred by their outsider status, Restall suggests that the conquistadors’ process followed a seven-part “method” that held true for most of the century and persisted in part because of deep precedent dating to the reconquista on the Iberian peninsula. This process also persisted because it succeeded. The Spanish began their campaigns (or entradas) in a quest for precious metals, which they framed with legalistic devices and appeals to distant, usually royal, authority that, as suggested earlier, fortified their consciences for the rest of their program of action.¹⁰ Aware of their own vulnerability and local ignorance, the Spanish deliberately sought out interpreters and intermediaries, whom they then used to parlay Amerindian political divisions into active allies. Finally, at crucial moments of conflict, they sought to publicly seize and control the chief ruler and combined that act with the use of “display” violence designed to terrorize the population into submission (whom they wanted to tap for labor, after all, not eliminate).¹¹ To Restall’s framework, I would add that appeals to the king’s authority notwithstanding, throughout the seventeenth century virtually all these actions were conducted as private-enterprise ventures, although they were increasingly subject to rules set down in Spain—at least in theory.¹² What is crucial to note here is that this was a methodology applied consciously. Even if Spanish accounts later glorified their own role, the conquistadors’ patterns of behavior clearly indicate their awareness of the necessity for interpreters and allies, as well as the efficacy of display violence and decapitation of the leadership.¹³

Although this “method” was repeated all around the hemisphere and was essential to Spanish success, the (in)famous conquests of Mexico and Peru were nevertheless not paradigmatic, even for Spain. Although often cited and also seen as the most in need of explanation, the victims of both “conquests” were complex, hierarchical, even imperial, states. These hierarchical states, especially in the shock of their first contact with an alien culture, proved to be more brittle and susceptible to overthrow by leadership decapitation than were the more diffuse tribal societies that Spain confronted in the rest of the Americas.¹⁴ Much of the remaining Spanish expansion in the New World did not contend with state-based societies. It is true that there were other large contemporaneous Amerindian states, but many were eviscerated by disease or internecine warfare before full or continuing contact with the Spanish.¹⁵ Furthe...