Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (14 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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This, then, was the combination that made New England flourish: Puritanism plus the profit motive. It was a combination institutionalized by the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in 1629, whose Governor John Winthrop cheerfully united in his person Congregationalism and capitalism. By 1640 Massachusetts was booming, thanks not just to fish but also to fur and farming. Already some 20,000 people had settled there, far more than were living by that time around the Chesapeake Bay. The population of Boston trebled in just thirty years.
There was one other crucial ingredient, however: procreation. Unlike European colonists further south, the New Englanders very quickly began to reproduce themselves, quadrupling their numbers between 1650 and 1700. Indeed, theirs was probably the highest birth rate in the world. In Britain, only around three-quarters of people actually married; in the American colonies it was nine out of ten and the age of colonial women at marriage was also significantly lower – hence their fertility was higher. Here was one of the key differences between British America and Latin America. Spanish settlers tended to be solo male
encomanderos
. Only around a quarter of the total of 1.5 million Spanish and Portuguese migrants to pre-independence Latin America were female; the majority of male Iberian migrants therefore took their sexual partners from the (dwindling) indigenous or the (rapidly growing) slave population. The result within a few generations was a substantial mixed-race population of
mestizos
and
mulattos
(Hispanic and African).
11
British settlers in North America were not only much more numerous; they were encouraged to bring their wives and children with them, thus preserving their culture more or less intact. In North America as in Northern Ireland, therefore, British colonization was a family affair. As a consequence, New England really was a new England, far more than New Spain would ever be a new Spain.
As in Ulster, so in the New World plantations meant planting – not just people but crops. And planting crops meant tilling the land. The question was, whose land was it?
The colonists could hardly pretend nobody had been living here before their arrival. In Virginia alone there were between 10,000 and 20,000 Algonquian Indians: Jamestown was in the heart of Powhatan territory. At first, it is true, there seemed to be a chance of peaceful coexistence based on trade and even intermarriage. The Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock was prevailed upon to kneel and be crowned by John Smith ‘as vassal to his majesty’, King James. The chief’s daughter Pocahontas was the first native American to marry an Englishman: John Rolfe, who had pioneered the cultivation of tobacco. But it was an example few were to follow. When Sir Thomas Dale sought to marry Wahunsonacock’s youngest daughter ‘because being now one people and he desirous for ever to dwell in his [Wahunsonacock’s] country he conceived there could not be a truer assistance of peace and friendship than in such a natural bond of united union’, his advances were rebuffed. Wahunsonacock by now suspected that here was a design ‘to invade my people, and possesse my Country’. He was right.
In his pamphlet ‘A Good Speed to Virginia’, the Chaplain to the Virginia Company Robert Gray asked: ‘By what right or warrant can we enter into the land of these Savages, take away their rightful inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their place, being unwronged or unprovoked by them?’ Richard Hakluyt’s answer was that the native Americans were a people ‘crying out to us ... to come and help’ them. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629) even had an Indian waving a banner which read ‘Come over and Help Us’. But the reality was that the British intended to help themselves. As Sir Francis Wyatt, Governor of Virginia, put it: ‘Our first worke is expulsion of the Savages to gaine the free range of the countrey for encrease of Cattle, swine &c which will more than restore us, for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us’. In order to justify the expropriation of indigenous populations, the British colonists came up with a distinctive rationalization, the convenient idea of ‘
terra nullius
’, nobody’s land. In the words of the great political philosopher John Locke (who was also Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina), a man only owned land when he had ‘mixed his
Labour
with [it] and joyned it to something that is his own’. Put simply, if land was not already being fenced and farmed then it was up for grabs. According to John Winthrop:
... the Natives in New England they enclose noe land neither have any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by & soe have noe other but a naturall right to those countries Soe as if wee leave them sufficient for their use wee may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them & us.
 
The native Americans were tolerated when they were able to fit in to the emerging British economic order. The Hudson Bay Company in Canada was happy to rely on Huron and Montagnais Indian hunters to supply its fur traders with beaver pelts and deer skins. The Narragansetts were also treated with respect because they produced the wampum beads – made from purple and white whelk shells on the shores of Long Island Sound – which functioned as the earliest North American currency. But where the Indians claimed the ownership of agriculturally valuable land, coexistence was simply ruled out. If the Indians resisted expropriation, then they could and should (in Locke’s words) ‘be destroyed as a
Lyon
or a
Tyger
, one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society or Security’.
As early as 1642 Miantonomo, a chief of the Narragansett tribe of Rhode Island, could see the writing on the wall for his people:
[Y]ou know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and foul. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.
 
What had already happened in Central America now repeated itself along the North Atlantic seaboard. In 1500, in what was to become British North America, there had been roughly 560,000 American Indians. By 1700 the number had more than halved. This was just the beginning of a drastic decline that was to affect the entire North American continent as the area of white settlement spread westwards. There were probably around 2 million indigenous people in the territory of the modern United States in 1500. By 1700 the number was 750,000. By 1820 there were just 325,000.
Short but bloody wars with the better-armed settlers took their toll. After the Powhatan attacked Jamestown in 1622, the colonists’ views hardened. As Sir Edward Coke saw it, the Indians could only be
perpetui enimici
, ‘perpetual enemies ... for between them, as with devils, whose subjects they be, and the Christians there is perpetual hostility, and can be no peace’. Massacres were the order of the day: of the Powhatan in 1623 and 1644, of the Pequots in 1637, of the Doegs and Susquehannocks in 1675, of the Wampanoag in 1676 – 7. But what really did it for the native Americans were the infectious diseases the white settlers brought with them from across the sea: smallpox, influenza, diphtheria. Like the rats of the medieval Black Death, the white men were the carriers of the fatal germs.
For the settlers, on the other hand, the devastating impact of smallpox was simply proof that God was on the colonists’ side, conveniently killing off the previous tenants of this new world. One of the things the Pilgrims gave thanks for at Plymouth at the end of 1621 was the fact that 90 per cent of the indigenous peoples of New England had died of disease in the decade before their arrival, having first – very considerately – tilled the land and buried stores of corn for the winter. In the words of John Archdale, Governor of Carolina in the 1690s, ‘the Hand of God [has been] eminently seen in thinning the
Indians
, to make room for the
English
’.
The near-disappearance of the original proprietors did not mean that land in colonial America belonged to nobody, however. It belonged to the King, and he could then grant these newly acquired parts of the royal demesne to meritorious subjects. As the viability of the American colonies became apparent, this quickly became a new source of patronage for the Stuart monarchs: colonization and cronyism went hand in hand. This had important implications for the social structure of the nascent British America. In 1632, for example, Charles I granted Maryland to the heirs of Lord Baltimore, modelling the charter on the palatine charters granted to the Bishops of Durham in the fourteenth century, and entitling the ‘Lords Proprietors’ to create titles and grant land on an essentially feudal basis. In giving Carolina to eight of his close associates, Charles II devised an even more explicitly hierarchical social order, with ‘landgraves’ and ‘cassiques’ owning estates of, respectively, 48,000 and 24,000 acres, and governing the colony through a purely aristocratic Grand Council. New York acquired its name when, following its capture from the Dutch in 1664, Charles gave it to his brother James, Duke of York.
In much the same way, it was to settle a debt of £16,000 to one of his supporters – William Penn, the admiral who had captured Jamaica – that Charles II granted Penn’s son ownership of what became Pennsylvania. Overnight, this made William Penn junior the largest individual landowner in British history, with an estate well over the size of Ireland. It also gave him the opportunity to show what the combination of religious fervour and the profit motive could achieve. Like the Pilgrim Fathers, Penn was a member of a radical religious sect: since 1667 he had been a Quaker, and had even been imprisoned in the Tower of London on account of his faith. But unlike the Plymouth colonists, Penn’s ‘Holy Experiment’ was to create a ‘tolerance settlement’ not just for Quakers but for any religious sect (provided it was monotheistic). In October 1682 his ship, the
Welcome
, sailed up the Delaware River and, clutching his royal charter, he stepped ashore to found the city of Philadelphia, the Ancient Greek word for ‘brotherly love’.
Penn understood that if his colony was to succeed it would have to be profitable. As he put it candidly: ‘Though I desire to extend religious freedom yet I want some recompense for my trouble’. To that end, he became a real estate salesman on a grand scale, selling off huge tracts of land at knockdown prices: £100 bought 5,000 acres. Penn was also a visionary town planner, who wanted his capital to be the antithesis of overcrowded, fire-prone London; hence the now familiar American grid system of streets. Above all, he was a marketing man who knew that even the American dream had to be sold. Not content with encouraging English, Welsh and Irish settlers, he promoted emigration from continental Europe by having his prospectuses translated into German and other languages. It worked: between 1689 and 1815 well over a million continental Europeans moved to mainland North America and the British West Indies, mainly Germans and Swiss. The combination of religious tolerance and cheap land was a powerful lure for settler families. This was real freedom: freedom of conscience – and almost free real estate.
12
But there was a catch. Not everyone in this new white Empire could be a landowner. There had to be some workers too, particularly where labourintensive crops like sugar, tobacco and rice were being grown. The question was how to get them across the Atlantic? And here the British Empire discovered the limits of liberty.
Black and White
 
The scale of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century migration from the British Isles was astonishing and unmatched by any other European country. From England alone, total net emigration between 1601 and 1701 exceeded 700,000. At its peak in the 1640s and 1650s – not coincidentally the period of the English Civil War – the annual emigration rate was above 0.2 per thousand (around the same rate currently experienced by Venezuela).

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