For our purposes it is useful to distinguish between New World or Atlantic imperialism, originally dominated by Castile or Spain, and Old World or Indian Ocean imperialism, dominated by Portugal.

Old World imperialism was originally simply an effort by the Portuguese to monopolize the Spice Trade.   Portuguese ship-mounted cannons made possible piracy on a vast scale.  From their bases at Goa on the west coast of India and Malacca on the west coast of modern Malaya, the Portuguese were able to control the sea routes, taking them away from the Muslim sailors who had previously used them. The Portuguese fleets and bases also made it possible to dominate what was
called the "country trade" -- maritime commerce between different parts of the Indian Ocean and between the Indian Ocean and China.  There was a lot of country trade, and the profits were considerable.

The Portuguese never tried for more than the maritime monopoly I have just described.  Asian states were too strong to be pushed around on the land.  Their best efforts, in fact, were not enough to maintain their domination of the sea.  Slowly other forces were able to push themselves into the Indian Ocean trade.  It was impossible to keep Chinese pirates -- in other
words, competitors -- out of Indonesia, and the Spanish, once they founded Manila, were able to use their Mexican silver to take a share of the Chinese trade.  But up to the 1590s, the Portuguese did quite all right anyway.

The New World empire of Spain was quite a different story.  A Spanish ruling class had been established over a native and slave-African population that worked New World resources for their rulers and their rulers' rulers in far-off Castile.  Silver of course was the most important single export, and mining the crucial industry.  But cheap, coerced labor enabled Spanish
entrepreneurs to produce both staple and luxury crops for export: tobacco, sugar, and leather (an important industrial material). The agricultural sector was increasingly important in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The Portuguese, who owned plantations in Brazil, also profited in a more indirect way from the growth of colonial agriculture.
They controlled the west coast of Africa and thus the slave trade, which was essential for the colonial system.  Old World diseases and conquest had sent American populations into a steep and long lasting decline, and the remaining natives were not always easy to keep at work.  Slaves provided the controllable cheap labor that made Iberian enterprises in the New World
possible.

Both Spain and Portugal wished to enforce a political and commercial monopoly over the resources of a large part of the
non-European world.  For instance, all of Spain's trade with its empire was routed through a single port, orginally Seville, later Cadiz, so that it could be supervised and the government's share easily collected. Similarly, Portugal's trade went through Lisbon.  It is important to note that early on, Netherlanders became part of the system.  Before the Dutch revolt, Spanish-ruled Antwerp was an indispensible link between the imperial powers and other Europeans who produced both the crops and the
industrial items that Spain and Portugal bought with their profits.

Other western European were not happy to see their Iberian counterparts raking in these huge profits, but for a long time there was not much that could be done about it.

The earliest efforts to break the monopoly were small scale pirate voyages to the New World which simply defied the trade monopoly: for example, John Hawkins attempt in the 1560s to sell slaves illegally in the Carribean, with the collusion of Spanish colonial buyers, with not much success.

Politics in Europe reinforced Spanish hostility to English participation in the colonial trade.  The English forced their way in
anyway.  They had plenty of willing customers for their slaves and for English cloth.  Also war between England and Spain, cold or hot, was taken to justify any kind of piracy or looting.  Frnacis Drake took the lead here.   In 1571 he raided Panama and seized a consignment of silver from Peru that was crossing the Isthmus.  In 1577, Drake sailed around the world, still a rare accomplishment, attacking Peru and its silver ships and acquiring a cargo of cloves in the Molucca Islands in Indonesia before
returning home.

 Elizabeth of England was a silent partner in these enterprises, which were an expression of English determination to
benefit from the lucrative overseas trade.  The reluctance of James and Charles I, so friendly to Spain, to back such enterprises was one factor that alienated them from an important and vigorous segment of their own subjects.

The biggest threat to the Iberian monopoly were the Dutch.  Until the 1560s, they had been among the greatest beneficiaries of the overseas trade, even though they were not allowed to sail to either America or Asia themselves.  The long war of independence with Spain cut them off from that commerce, and challenged the Dutch, especially the Hollanders, to reestablish their connection with overseas wealth.  In the 1590s, they accepted that challenge.  Dutch seamen, who already owned the Baltic trade, began a concerted campaign to muscle into the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.

 In 1580, Philip II of Spain had inherited the Portuguese throne.  The ruling class of Portugal had agreed  to his succession on condition that they would remain free to exploit their own sea empire.  Since it was ultimately Philip's empire, the Dutch felt perfectly entitled to attack it; Philip, however, benefited so indirectly from the Portuguese possessions that he devoted few resources to defending them.  The Dutch had a rather easy time taking the spice trade from the Portuguese and by the 1620s both it and the country trade were falling under their control.

Northern European efforts to open up the New World did not meet with such quick success.  The early 17th century of course was when the colonies of New England, New France, Nova Scotia, New Netherland, New Sweden, Virginia and Acadia were established in North America.  Some luxuries could be found or produced here, most notably furs, and staples such as fish and
lumber were of some importance, but the lack of concerted Spanish opposition to these colonizing efforts reflected an important fact:  there was little opportunity for big short-term profits to be made in the north. Furs apart, profit would only follow a long period of settlement and capital investment.  The religious refugees in New England were the only people with much interest in that kind of hard work.

T he big money, the easy money, was in the tropics, where sugar and tobacco could be grown by slaves.

There were really only two ways to break into the tropics.
 

• Settle the smaller Carribean islands and turn them into sugar islands.  Every European country with any pretensions to maritime capability succeeded in doing this during the 17th century.  The biggest prize was Jamaica, taken by England from Spain during Cromwell's colonial war.

• Use such islands as entryways into the slave trade with the Spanish colonies.As Spanish power declined in the 17th century, this became increasingly easy, and the great rivalry was not between Spain and other countries, but between rivals for the Spanish trade.

The Dutch as an example:

In Europe they could undercut all competitors in a free competition, and so they insisted on their right to trade freely in
all waters.  Elsewhere, they were determined to keep all competitors out of the crucial areas.  An English diplomat named Downing remarked on this two-faced Dutch policy in 1663, just before England and the Dutch went to war over trade:  "It is  mare liberum  [open seas] in the British seas but  mare clausum  [closed seas] on the coast of Africa and in the East Indies."  [Boxer 92]

It was Indonesia that they were most intent to control.  In 1623, for instance, officials of the Dutch East Indies Company, usually called the VOC, intent on keeping others out of Ambona, one of the centers of clove production, arrested some English
merchants, accused them of treason (in other words plotting against Dutch supremacy), tortured them to get confessions (legal in Dutch law but not English), and executed them.  The English called this "the Amboina Massacre," and it was resentment against such tactics that contributed to the later wars between Dutch and English.

If English merchants might be tortured and killed, the Indonesians themselves suffered even more.  The Dutch stopped at nothing to ensure their domination of key regions.  A most notorious instance is the Banda Islands massacre.  The Banda islands, like Ambona, were rich in cloves, and early leaders of the VOC enforced a monopoly on the growers.  When in
1621 the people of Banda violated the agreement, the Dutch governor-general, Jan Pieterzoon Coen, sailed in with a fleet and killed or enslaved the entire population, resettling the archipelago with slaves.  The desire for monopoly led to the entire Molucca islands being turned into spice plantations, the Dutch domination of Sri Lanka, where nutmeg was grown, and
the eventual conquest of most of Indonesia, political control being the ultimate stage of commercial monopoly.

Such monopoly, such ruthlessness, paid quite well, too.  This one company, the VOC, controlled by a few of the richest Dutch traders, amounted to 9 or 10% of the total trade of the Republic [Price 54] when the United Provinces dominated the trade of Europe.

 With commerce so important, it is no accident that politicians thought quite a bit about the economy in the 17th century, that it was the age of mercantilism.  It had always been obvious that one needed money, bullion, gold and silver metal, to run a government and especially to pay for wars. But bullion did not create wealth.  Wealth was created through action, if
the Dutch were any guide, by agricultural and industrial production and the control of commerce.  We have already seen how men like Louis XIV's minister Colbert were concerned to build up domestic industry to emulate one element of Dutch success.

He and all other men in his position were equally concerned with the overseas arena.  With the waning of Spanish power, controlling a share of the non-European world was obviously a key factor in maintaining or building up one's power in Europe.  Just as this was the era of the great monopolistic trading company, which might, like the VOC or the Hudson's Bay Company or the English East India Company, become an empire, it was the era too of the Navigation Acts that obliged all colonies to  trade only with their so-called mother countries.  All these expedients were attempts to get a hammerlock on the movable wealth of the globe.

When the importance of colonial exploitation became a key matter of state policy in England and France, the Dutch were in trouble.    In the later 17th century, the Dutch were forced to fight three wars with England and several with Louis XIV.
Although, as we will see, they resisted conquest, and even stymied the Sun King's ambitions, the effort was too much for them.  The Dutch could not fight bigger rivals forever without undermining their commercial prosperity.  By 1700, it was obvious that the two large maritime powers, England and France were the main contestants for the domination of the oceanic world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800
Maland, David  Europe in the Seventeenth Century
Parry, J.H. The Establishment of the European Hegemony:  1415-1715
Price, J.L. Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth  Century
Wallerstein, Immanuel  The Modern World-System

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.