8.5: Around the Globe

India

Even as the British were actively participating in the Slave Trade in the Atlantic region, they began the process of seizing control of territory in India. There, they set up self-contained merchant colonies (called factories) run by the English East India Company (EIC), which had a legal monopoly of trade just as its Dutch counterpart did in the Netherlands. The original impetus behind the EIC was profitable trade, not political power.

As of the mid-eighteenth century, British power in India was limited to its factories, which served as clearinghouses for trade with Indian merchants. In 1756, however, an Indian prince sent an army to Calcutta to drive out the British, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of English noncombatants and thousands of their Indian colleagues and allies. The next year, a small British force of 800 men with 2,000 Indian mercenary troops (called sepoys) defeated the prince at the Battle of Plassey. This event led to the process of taking over the entire province of Bengal.

The takeover of Bengal started the slow creep of British power. Tax revenue supplemented mercantile revenue, which allowed the British to hire tens of thousands of sepoys, who were armed with modern European weapons. These actions allowed the British to drive out the French from Indian territories and dominate Indian princes. In this patchwork fashion, the EIC expanded its power in India over the next century, directly controlling some territories, indirectly controlling others through Indian puppet princes, and economically dominating others. By the middle of the 19th Century, the EIC, a private corporation backed by the British state, controlled almost all of the Indian subcontinent.

Americas

Britain and France colonized areas of the eastern seaboard of North America. While initial attempts at colonization either failed or struggled to survive (e.g. almost all of the original settlers at Jamestown in Virginia were dead by the time more arrived in 1610), the survivors discovered that they could at least grow one cash crop: tobacco. Likewise, slaves were imported to work first the tobacco fields, and then later cotton fields, farther south. Simultaneously, a French explorer named Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec on the St. Lawrence river. This region became the center of New France, and its cash “crop” consisted of furs gained through barter with Native American groups or taken by French trappers.

Until the latter half of the 17th Century, the French and British had small-scale colonies compared to the vast states of Central and South America. Slowly but surely, colonists did arrive in North America, but not always for economic reasons. Britain came to boast the largest population of colonists among Europeans in North America as English religious dissenters, Puritans, fled persecution from the Anglican state and began to settle in Massachusetts by the thousands in the 1620s.

Spain still held the largest overseas empire, holding almost all of South America, all of Central America, and the American West as far north as Oregon, as well as the Pacific island chain of the Philippines. South American silver passed through both Spain and the Philippines en route to China, where it paid for luxury goods that were shipped back to Spain. The Spanish crown, especially under a branch of the Bourbon royal family, exercised direct control over colonial trade and taxation (rather than relying on a corporation as did the Dutch and English).

Figure 8.5.1: Spanish territories in the Americas in the eighteenth century, at the height of their territorial expanse.

The Spanish colonial system suffered from infighting between Spanish-born royal bureaucrats and the creole elites who dominated the Spanish New World itself. Many of these creole elites lived more like traditional nobles, dominating land-based economies, rather than overseers of more commercially-based agriculture like the plantations of the Caribbean or Brazil.

To be clear, South and Central America were important regions within the global trade network, but the Spanish state itself did not enjoy the same level of direct control over, or power derived from, its colonial possessions as did its European rivals. Instead, the vast Spanish empire was relatively fragmented, with regional elites exercising a high degree of local autonomy. Thus, even the vast wealth still generated within the Spanish empire did not translate into an equivalent degree of state or military power for the Spanish monarchy.

Meanwhile, the overseas empire of Portugal steadily shrank as its colonies and factories were seized or handed over to the Dutch and British in the 17th Century. The country was not able to compete with the better-funded and equipped forces of the Netherlands and Britain. Thus, most Portuguese colonies and trading posts were lost over time to rivals. The major exception was Brazil, which was hugely profitable. In 1888, Brazil became the last European state to outlaw slavery.

Finally, Russian explorers moved eastward across Siberia from the 15th through 18th centuries in search of furs. Indeed, furs were so critical to the Russian economy that they were often used in lieu of currency outside of the major cities. As a result, Russian fur trappers and traders arrived at the Pacific in the late seventeenth century. From there, they sailed across to Alaska and then down the west coast of North America, establishing small churches and forts but not colonizing territory (i.e. for the most part, they did not stay and establish families).

By the early eighteenth century, the various branches of European exploration and expansion converged in the Pacific Northwest. Russian fur trappers, French fur trappers, Spanish missionaries, and English explorers all arrived in what eventually became the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon.