Peace (29 page)

religious, racial, national and political bias: all these prejudices strike at the very root of human life; one and all they beget bloodshed, and the ruination of the world. So long as these prejudices survive, there will be continuous and fearsome wars.
⁶⁷

Having thus sowed the seeds of what he called “World Faith” aimed at world peace, he returned to his home in Haifa, where he died. Today, Baha'i has over five million adherents globally, sharing with Kant, the organized peace movement, Transcendentalists and Tolstoy unwavering beliefs in and commitments to a transformative non-violence powerful enough to counteract the warmongering tendencies of nation-states. Concurrently, other peace traditions emerged to counteract proliferations of these tendencies within and between the worldwide empires some nation-states came to control, and to which we now turn.

7

Colonial and Imperial Peace and Peacemaking

Peaces of the World: Colonial Peace and Peacemaking

The Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy recently made the provocative statement that debating the pros and cons of imperialism is like “debating the pros and cons of rape.”
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Certainly, it is impossible to explain away centuries of atrocities committed by colonizers to the peoples they colonized or violence their victims have used to overcome exploitative oppression – and it is the opposite of our purpose to do so here. But to ignore the innovative forms of peace and peacemaking put forth and practiced by colonizers and colonized at and shortly after first contact, then by imperial powers and their subjects as consolidations and resistances took place, is to discount the vital roles they have played in shaping those of today in both productive and counterproductive ways. In fact, contemporary means of and motives for making, maintaining and breaking international peace would not have evolved as they have without colonialism and imperialism. Parallel to and in conjunction with nation-states, colonial peace and peacemaking were proposed and implemented on three linked levels: among the colonizers, between the colonizers and the colonized, and among the colonized, best explored, analyzed and assessed in tandem as a second major vehicle towards modernity.

The early history of European colonialism is dominated by Spain and Portugal, each of which used scientific knowledge gained from the Islamic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the crusading zeal summoned to expel them to further their aims. Aside from spreading Christ's kingdom, by which they gained Popes' backing, their primary motive was the profit of trade in goods from spices and silk to grains and gold originating from east of Constantinople, controlled by Italian city-states, and south of the
Sahara, controlled by Muslims. By 1450, Portuguese explorers established a network of garrisoned trading posts down the west coast of Africa. Settlers from Castile, united with Aragon in 1481 as Spain, founded crop colonies on the Canary Islands, which Portugal actively competed for with native help. In the next decade, piratical warfare between the colonizers reached critical levels and fed into the Iberian War of Succession (1474–79) over the Castilian throne. The conflict was halted by the Treaty of Alcazovas (1479), the first modern European peace treaty regarding overseas possessions. Spain's Isabelle and Ferdinand's legitimacy was affirmed and all Canary Islands claims granted to them; Portuguese possession of all lands south thereof and their monopoly on all African trade were recognized. Natives were neither consulted nor taken into account in the peace other than as property, a precedent that later colonial peacemakers would replicate all too perfectly. Further “discoveries” like that of the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa (1487), which promised a direct sea route to India, and Columbus' misidentified landing there, actually the Caribbean Islands, posed serious geo-political challenges to the Treaty's premises.

Portugal's King John II used the Alcazovas arrangements to claim Columbus' finds, made in the name of the Spain. In response, Isabella and Ferdinand convinced the Spanish-born Pope to issue papal bulls that first divided the colonial world between Spain and Portugal, favouring the former, then divested Portugal of all its colonial possessions by transfer to its rival. John strategically ignored these diplomatic shenanigans and continued colonial business as usual, forcing Spain to renegotiate. The result was the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), providing for a line of demarcation 370 leagues west of Cape Verde: all lands east would be Portuguese and all lands west Spanish, with guarantees of safe passage for each. By splitting the world in this way, “peace was maintained between Portugal and Spain,”so that they directed their efforts “toward exploration and development of the discoveries rather than war;” to be precise, war between themselves, for both continued to wage wars on the colonized.
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Limited geographical knowledge left large loopholes, such as whether the demarcating line ran from pole to pole or circled the globe, which worked to Spain's advantage in claims to the Philippines and Portugal to Brazil, making ambiguity an ally of peace. The expeditions of Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand Magellan compounded these geographical issues, so a second form of colonial peacemaking was put in place by the Treaty of Saragossa in 1529, by which Spain's King Charles V released his claims to the Moluccas Islands for a large sum from the Portuguese. Other European powers, by this time aware of Spain's South America mines and Portugal's lucrative trade in luxuries, found it more expedient to disregard their colonial peace treaties than
to dispute them, though in different ways they influenced nearly all those that followed.

The first tract of land to be settled in the “New World” of the western hemisphere was an Antillean island called Hispaniola by the Spanish, now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In his diary of the 1492 voyages, Columbus noted on the first day he met natives that they “neither carry nor know anything of arms,” and on the third that “with fifty [European] men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”
³
Less than a year later, the Pope ruled that these peoples “being in peace, and, as reported, going unclothed, and not eating flesh,” were human and so capable of being Christianized by colonizers.
⁴
By 1502, a young man from the “Old World” named Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) arrived in Hispaniola seeking fortune, which like his conquistador compatriots he secured by acquiring farmlands, mines and native slaves, collectively called
encomiendas
. Annoyed by a priest whose sermons denounced how Spaniards treated natives as unchristian, las Casas obliquely replied by obtaining more lands and slaves in what is Cuba today. But three years later, for unknown reasons, he sold his lands, freed his slaves, became a priest himself and dedicated the rest of his life to peacemaking between the Old and New Worlds. Upon his return to Spain in 1516, he pleaded with Catholic authorities, who named him “Protector of the Indians.” He then presented a plan directly to King Charles V, who demanded practical and profitable alternatives to encomiendas: the establishment of communal associations of free Old World peasants and New World natives under the direction of priests on monastic models. This peace plan was shown to Erasmus, a member of the Royal Council, who lent it to More, after which he wrote
Utopia
. Charles found the plan appealing, but Spanish landlords killed it in fear of losing labourers. Disheartened, las Casas retreated to a Dominican monastery, where he wrote a
History of the Indies
over the next ten years.

His seclusion ended as his treaties urging conversion by persuasion rather than violence,
The Only Method of Attracting Men to the True Faith
, began circulating. In 1537, he issued a challenge to the Spanish authorities to allow him to implement his peace plans in Guatemala, dubbed the “Land of War” by the fierce native resistance to colonization, which was surprisingly accepted. Las Casas' experimental pacification methods, including preaching in native tongues, were so successful that the region was redubbed the “Land of True Peace.” Years later, in his last testament, he described his newfound mission of peace in these words:

To act here at home on behalf of all those people out in what we call the Indies, the true possessors of those kingdoms. . . To act against the unimaginable, unspeakable violence and evil and harm they have suffered from our people, contrary to all reason, all justice, so as to restore them to the original liberty they were lawlessly deprived of, and get them free of death by violence, death they still suffer.
⁵

Unrelenting conquistadors soured the fruits of peace before they had a chance to ripen, but news of las Casas' non-violent victories had already crossed the ocean. Popes admonished deprivations of natives' liberty and property as unchristian and threatened to excommunicate enslavers, and Charles' New Laws prohibited native enslavement and abolished encomiendas, under politico-economic pressure retracted by 1545. Las Casas' last push for peace took place upon his return to Spain during the Valladolid Debates with Juan Gines de Sepulveda, who argued natives were divinely preordained slaves and lacked souls to convert. In line with his lifework, the gist of las Casas' response was that this view is not only unchristian, but inhuman. To expose the results of such views, Las Casas wrote the widely translated
Very Brief Recital of the Destruction of the Indies
(1552), staining Spain's international reputation and prompting other emerging colonial powers to at least try and keep the appearance of peaceful colonial strategies.

The colonial trajectories of the Netherlands and England differed significantly from those of Portugal and Spain, especially as paths to peace and profit. The Dutch, ruled by Spain until the mid sixteenth century, gained their navigational knowledge and used it against them. An Anglo-Dutch fleet defeated the legendary Spanish Armada which now had a strong Portuguese component in 1588, marking the start of the eclipse of the first two major European empires. Within a decade, Dutch merchant and military ships were circumnavigating the globe, trading and settling in the West Indies (Atlantic Islands) and East Indies (Pacific Islands). The Dutch sought the shortest routes to riches in that they attempted to displace the Spanish and Portuguese from their profit centers, making conflicts with them more likely than peace. For example, by 1543 Portuguese missionaries and merchants had established relatively peaceful and productive relations with China and Japan, acting as intermediaries between them when Chinese Emperors forbade trade after rampant Japanese piracy. Unlike with Africans or South Americans, the Portuguese dealt with Asians as equals or even superiors, probably because subjugation was not an option due to their large and advanced armies. The Japanese called them
nanban
(“barbarians”), after which a century of economic and cultural exchange until 1643 is sometimes named. Japanese diplomats with Portuguese escorts were welcomed at courts of South American and European rulers as curiosities but also as potential trading and military partners throughout this period. However, after the Dutch arrived in Asia, they systematically routed out key Portuguese trading
posts and settlements in the region, eventually being granted exclusive trading rights in Japan on account of their less obtrusive ways. Wars against other colonizers for peaceful and profitable relations with natives, colonized or not, soon became commonplace.

Dutch colonialism was nowhere near as rosy elsewhere in the world. As they annexed Spanish and Portuguese possessions elsewhere in Asia and in Africa, they also took up the slave trade. Following this pattern, they moved into North America only after English and French explorers had made headway. In establishing New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1614 (renamed New York after becoming an English possession in 1674) and several other fur-trading colonies, the Dutch gained competitive advantages over other Europeans by adopting native diplomatic and negotiation styles. The Iroquois, for instance, used ritualized gift exchanges to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with other tribes, to which Dutch traders were invited and in which they eagerly participated. But piggybacking colonial policies ultimately proved lethal for the Dutch by triggering a series of wars with England after which they lost many of their colonies. The series of peace treaties that ended each of these wars' instalments (Treaties of Westminster in 1654 and 1674, of Breda in 1667) codified pretextual principles of
uti possidetis
(“as you possessed”) or
status quo ante bellum
(“existing conditions before the war”) in colonial peace terms. Vesting each party with the properties under its previous control unless otherwise stipulated, events subsequent to these treaties showed how capricious such status quo peaces can be.

As the Dutch star rose, England already had a centuries-old colonial plantation system in nearby Ireland: dispossessed native Catholics were forced to work for Protestant newcomers. The British had found that this method could improve domestic peace prospects by satisfying disgruntled nobles, exporting overzealous proselytizers, expelling prisoners and recompensing soldiers. Doing so without interfering in the affairs of other European powers became the boon of early British colonial strategy, mitigating conflicts in two ways. First was by new routes to old destinations, such as John Cabot's failed 1494 attempt to find a northwest passage to Asia, during which he landed on a western coastal island of what is now Canada. Claiming territories there not already claimed by the French exemplifies the second: establishing presences in places other colonial powers had not, such as Jamestown in 1607, England's first overseas settlement. Within two generations, many more settler colonies and trading posts were established on the North American mainland, in the Indies and India, some explicitly for peace, others exclusively for profit.