Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (13 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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The so-called ‘Printed Book’, published in April 1610, spelt out in detail how plantation would work. The land would be reallocated in neat parcels ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 acres. The biggest plots would go to the ominously named ‘undertakers’, whose job it was to build Protestant churches and fortifications. Symbolically, the walls of Derry (or ‘Londonderry’ as it was renamed in 1610) were shaped like a shield, protecting the new Protestant community planted there by the City of London. Catholics had to live outside the walls, down in the Bogside. Nothing illustrates better the ethnic and religious segregation implicit in the policy of plantation.
It is hard to believe anyone thought this would ‘settle’ Ireland. It did nothing of the kind. On 22 October 1641 the Ulster Catholics rose up against the newcomers. In what one contemporary called a ‘fearful tempest of blood’, around 2,000 Protestants were killed. Not for the last time, colonization turned out to mean conflict, not coexistence. Yet by this time the plantation had taken hold. Even before the 1641 rising, there were more than 13,000 Englishmen and women established in the six counties of the Jacobean plantation, and more than 40,000 Scots throughout Northern Ireland. Munster too had revived: by 1641 the ‘New English’ population was 22,000. And this was just the beginning. By 1673 an anonymous pamphleteer could confidently describe Ireland as ‘one of the chiefest members of the British Empire’.
So Ireland was the experimental laboratory of British colonization and Ulster was the prototype plantation. What it seemed to show was that empire could be built not only by commerce and conquest but by migration and settlement. Now the challenge was to export the model further afield – not just across the Irish Sea, but across the Atlantic.
Like the idea of Irish plantation, the idea of an American plantation was an Elizabethan one. As usual, it was a desire to emulate Spain – and a fear of being pre-empted by France
9
– that persuaded the crown to give its backing. In 1578 a Devon gentleman named Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Ralegh, secured a patent from the Queen to colonize the unoccupied lands north of Spanish Florida. Nine years later an expedition established the first British settlement in North America on Roanoke Island, south of the Chesapeake Bay at what is now Kitty Hawk. By this time, Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Central and South America had been going on for almost a century.
One of the most important questions of modern history is why the North European settlement of North America had such different results from the South European settlement of South America. It is worth first recalling how much the two processes had in common. What began as a hunt for gold and silver quickly acquired an agricultural dimension. Crops from the New World could be exported, including maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pineapples, cocoa and tobacco; while crops from elsewhere – wheat, rice, sugar cane, bananas and coffee – could be transferred to the Americas. Even more importantly, the introduction there of hitherto unknown domesticated animals (cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats and horses) greatly enhanced agricultural productivity. Yet the wiping out of – in the Latin American case – around three-quarters of the indigenous population by European diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza and typhus) and then by diseases brought from Africa (particularly yellow fever) created not just a convenient power vacuum but also a chronic shortage of labour. This made large-scale immigration not only possible but desirable. It also meant that even after a hundred years of Iberian imperialism most of the American continent was still unsettled by Europeans. It was not just as a compliment to his celibate Queen that Ralegh named the country around Chesapeake Bay ‘Virginia’.
Expectations of Virginia were high, with predictions that it would yield ‘all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia’. According to one enthusiast, ‘The earth [there] bringeth foorth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour’. The poet Michael Drayton called it ‘Earth’s only paradise’. Once again, there were assurances that the land would flow with milk and honey. Virginia would prove to be, according to another booster,
Tyrus for colours, Basan for woods, Persia for oils, Arabia for spices, Spain for silks, Narcis for shiping, Netherlands for fish, Pomona for fruit, and by tillage, Babylon for corn, besides the abundance of mulberries, minerals, rubies, pearls, gems, grapes, deer, fowls, drugs for physic, herbs for food, roots for colours, ashes for soap, timber for building, pastures for feeding, rivers for fishing, and whatsoever commodity England wanteth.
 
The trouble was that America was thousands of miles further away than Ireland, and agriculture there would have to be started from scratch. In the interval between arrival and the first successful harvest, there would be daunting supply problems. There were also, as it turned out, graver threats to prospective settlers than even the dreaded Papist ‘woodkerryes’ of Ulster.
As had been true of the development of Britain’s trade with India, colonization was a form of ‘public-private partnership’: the crown set out the rules with royal charters, but it was up to private individuals to take the risk – and put up the money. Those risks turned out to be considerable. The first settlement at Roanoke survived barely a year; by June 1586 it had been abandoned after trouble with the local ‘Indians’.
10
The second expedition to Roanoke in 1587 was led by John White, who left his wife and children there when he returned to England for supplies. When he returned in 1590 they and all the other settlers had vanished. The Virginia Company established in April 1606 was therefore not a concern for the risk-averse.
Little now remains of Jamestown, Virginia, the Company’s first American outpost. Although it can legitimately be called the first successful British colony in America, it too nearly suffered the fate of its ill-starred predecessor at Roanoke. Malaria, yellow fever and plague meant that by the end of their first year there, only thirty-eight men were left of the original force of more than a hundred. For almost ten years Jamestown teetered on the brink of extinction. What saved the colony was the tenacious leadership of a now rather overlooked pioneer.
John Smith’s greatest misfortune was to be called John Smith: given a less forgettable name, we might all have heard of him. An irascible soldier and intrepid navigator who had once been enslaved by the Turks, Smith was convinced that the future of the British Empire lay in American colonization. Although he had arrived in Virginia as a prisoner – having been accused of mutiny in mid-Atlantic – it was he who imposed order and averted a second Roanoke by conciliating the local Indians. Even so, the odds of surviving a year in Jamestown were roughly 50 : 50, and the winter of 1609, which Smith had to spend fetching supplies from England, was remembered as ‘the starving time’. Only fairly desperate men would gamble their lives with odds like these. What Jamestown needed was skilled craftsmen, farmers, artisans. But what it had, as Smith complained, was the dregs of Jacobean society. Something more was needed if the British plantation in America was really to take root.
One important inducement was the Virginia Company’s offer to prospective settlers of fifty-acre plots of land at negligible rents in perpetuity. Under the ‘headright’ system of land allocation, a settler received fifty acres for every dependant he brought with him. But the prospect of free land alone did not suffice to attract the kind of people John Smith was after. Of equal importance was the discovery in 1612 that tobacco could be grown with ease. By 1621 exports of the weed from Virginia had soared to 350,000 lbs a year. Six years later the King himself was driven to lament to the Governor and Council of Virginia ‘that this province is wholly built upon smoke’.
Superficially, tobacco was the answer. It needed little investment: just a few tools, a press and a drying shed. Though time-consuming, it called for only simple skills, like the knack of ‘topping’ a plant between the thumb and forefinger, and was not physically taxing. The fact that tobacco exhausted the soil after seven years’ cultivation merely encouraged the westward spread of settlement. Yet precisely the ease of cultivation very nearly proved Virginia’s undoing. Between 1619 and 1639, as supply grew exponentially to 1.5 million lbs a year, the price of tobacco collapsed from three shillings to threepence a pound. The monopoly trading companies of Asia would never have tolerated such a slump. But in America, where attracting settlers was the objective, there could be no such monopolies.
In short, the economics of British America were precarious; and by economics alone British America could not have been built. Something more was needed – an additional inducement to cross the Atlantic over and above the profit motive. That something turned out to be religious fundamentalism.
After breaking with Rome under her father, wholeheartedly embracing the Reformation under her half-brother, then repudiating it under her half-sister, England finally settled on a moderately Protestant ‘middle way’ at the accession of Queen Elizabeth I. For the people who came to be known as Puritans, however, the Anglican Establishment was a fudge. When it became clear that James I intended to uphold the Elizabethan order, despite his Scottish Calvinist upbringing, a group of self-styled ‘Pilgrims’ from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire decided it was time to leave. They tried Holland, but after ten years they gave it up as too worldly. Then they heard about America, and precisely what put other people off – the fact that it was a wilderness – struck them as ideal. Where better to found a truly godly society than amid ‘a vast and empty chaos’?
On 9 November 1620, nearly eight weeks after leaving Southampton, the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod. As if to give themselves the cleanest possible slate, they missed Virginia by around 200 miles, ending up instead on the chillier northern shores that John Smith had christened ‘New England’. It is interesting to speculate what New England might have been like if the Pilgrims had been the only people on the
Mayflower
. After all, they were not just fundamentalists; they were also in a literal sense communists, who intended to own their property and distribute their produce equally. In fact, only around a third of the 149 people aboard were Pilgrims: the majority had responded to the Virginia Company’s advertisements, and their motives for crossing the Atlantic were more material than spiritual. Some were in fact fleeing a depression at home in the East Anglian textile industry. Their aim was to make good rather than be godly, and what attracted them to New England was not so much the absence of bishops and other relics of Popery, but the presence, in large quantities, of fish.
The Newfoundland fisheries had long attracted British fishermen far out into the Atlantic. But it was of course much easier to reach them from America. The coastal waters of New England were also full of fish: they were so abundant off Marblehead that ‘it seemed one might goe over their backs drishod’. The indefatigable John Smith had grasped the importance of this when he first explored the coastline. ‘Let not the meanness of the word Fish distaste you’, he later wrote, ‘for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or Tumbatu, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility’. This was a very different reason for crossing the Atlantic: not God but cod. The weather-beaten gravestones at Marblehead on the Massachusetts coast testify to the existence of a British settlement there from as early as 1628. But the town had no church and no preacher until 1684, over sixty years after the Pilgrims founded Plymouth. By this time the fishing industry was well established, exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of cod every year. The Pilgrims might have come to the New World to escape from Popery. But the ‘main end’ of the men of Marblehead ‘was to catch fish’.

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