The Transformation of the World (30 page)

3 The Legacy of Early Modern Migrations: Creoles and Slaves

We like to think of a population, even a society, as something rooted to the soil, something stationary, clearly demarcated, capable of being shown on a map. At first sight this seems to apply particularly well to the nineteenth century, in which governance became territorialized and people rooted themselves in the soil by means of technological infrastructure. They lay railroad tracks and drove mine shafts to unheard-of depths. At the same time, however, it was an age of increased mobility. One characteristic form of this was
long-distance migration
: a definitive or long-term shift in the location of one's existence across great distances to a different social environment. It should be distinguished from frontier migration, in which pioneers were the spearhead of a march into wild, uncharted territory.
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In the nineteenth century, long-distance migration gripped most parts of Europe and a number of countries in Asia; it was everywhere a factor marking the life of society. The engine driving it was the labor requirements of an expanding capitalist world economy. Migration affected many professions, many social layers, both men and women. It combined material and nonmaterial motives. No country of embarkation and no destination country remained unchanged.

In the nineteenth century, historians, especially in Europe, became fascinated by the role of migration in the origin of nations. A frequent inspiration was the story of Aeneas, the Trojan hero who finally settled down after a long odyssey in Italy. Germanic tribes in the era of the great migrations, Dorians in ancient
Greece, Normans in England after 1066: all found a place of honor in newly written national histories. Asian peoples, too, developed ideas about their past and imagined the arrival of their forebears, mostly from the North. The settled societies of the nineteenth century assured themselves of their mobile origins, and new societies, such as Australia, arose out of mobility then and there. The “immigration society” so often talked about today was in fact one of the great innovations of the nineteenth century, with mobility as its cornerstone. Migration has three closely related aspects: exodus and creation of the new community (the Mayflower motif), survival by means of further intakes of immigrants, and expansive occupation of new spaces. The nineteenth-century migrations represented three different time layers. They might be the sequel to
completed
processes of the early modern period; or they might rest upon movements stretching back into a previous period, such as the forced transfer of slaves; or they might involve a flow of forces that had newly appeared in the nineteenth century itself with the transportation revolution and the capitalist creation of employment opportunities. These flows do not always follow the political chronology: 1914 was for many of them a key turning point, but even more decisive was the Great Depression that began in 1929.

Early Modern Roots of European Emigration

Overseas emigration was already a distinctive feature of early modern Europe. At a time when the rulers of China and Japan made it virtually impossible for their subjects to leave the country, Europeans were spreading themselves around the world. England and the Netherlands were the two European countries that sent the largest proportion of their population overseas—the former overwhelmingly to the New World, the latter to Asia. Spain lagged behind in third place, while emigration from France, the most populous country west of the Tsarist Empire, scarcely featured at all. Many emigrants later returned, and their experiences enriched social and cultural life in the mother country. Of the 973,000 people (half of them German or Scandinavian) who went to Asia between 1602 and 1795 in the service of the Dutch East India Company, more than a third were repatriated to Europe.
⁴⁷
Not everyone who stayed away lived to start a family.

Actually there were no self-reproducing European core settlements in the tropics. The 750,000 Spanish who remained in the New World mostly settled in nontropical highland regions, where they were not exposed to major health threats. They formed a Spanish society that successfully established itself through natural growth, achieved by
métissage
with indigenous women plus a certain influx from the home country that increased over time. The Portuguese experience was quite different. Portugal was a much smaller country, with a population that never rose above three million before 1800. Yet its emigration between 1500 and 1760 has been estimated at a maximum of 1.5 million—twice as large as the Spanish. In its golden sixteenth century, Portugal had numerous bases in Asia, Africa, and coastal Brazil, but all of them offered a worse environment than that
of the Mexican or Peruvian highlands. Portugal—and in this it resembled the Netherlands—was much more likely than Spain to export unskilled labor; it was not a basis on which Creole societies could be constituted. The Netherlands also pursued a strategy of sending foreigners into the unhealthiest parts of the tropics. Generally in colonial history we often find “third” population groups in addition to the colonized and the members of the colonizing nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, more Spanish than French lived in certain
départements
of Algeria.
⁴⁸

English emigration in the eighteenth century was equally selective. The unwholesome tropical islands attracted only a small number of plantation managers. The work was done there by African slaves, as it was in the southern colonies of North America, and it was mainly Scots and Irish who opened up the American frontier lands. The typical English settlers in America between 1660 and 1800 were quite highly skilled and gravitated toward the core settlements and cities. In India before 1800 the British need for personnel was much lower than that of the Dutch in Indonesia. Whereas the Dutch recruited their colonial soldiery in northern Germany and Saxony, the British soon began to enlist Indian troops (
sepoys
) on the spot. All in all, only the Spanish emigration was a great success from the outset—and was seen as such throughout Europe. For the other migration-inclined Western Europeans—English, Irish, Scottish, German—North America became an attractive destination only around the middle of the eighteenth century.
⁴⁹
The prerequisite was finding ways to pass on the most unpleasant work to non-Europeans. But there were some special cases that deviated from the pattern of
ongoing
migration from Europe: the Boers of South Africa, for example, after their initial emigration from the Netherlands in the mid-seventeenth century, were replenished only by local propagation. The French Canadians, too, numbering 1.36 million in 1881, received few new intakes and were mainly descended from the immigrants who arrived toward the end of French rule in 1763.

The social history of the nineteenth century must therefore centrally address the consequences of migration
immediately
prior to it. It was not in the ancient times of the “great migrations” but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that new foundations were laid for numerous societies. In a nineteenth-century perspective these were
young
societies, the virtual opposite of historically rooted social landscapes such as those of the Mediterranean or China. No other large region in the world witnessed the frequency of migration-driven ethnogenesis that was characteristic of Latin America and the Caribbean.
⁵⁰
The societies of Latin America developed out of three elements: indigenous habitants who survived the conquest and the ensuing microbe shock, European immigrants, and enslaved newcomers from Africa. This mix, varying in its proportions, explains why the early-modern Atlantic slave trade helped to mold the four different types of society that had emerged in the Western hemisphere by the early nineteenth century.

The Slave Trade and the Formation of New World Societies

The
first
type of society developed in Brazil. Here a Luso-Brazilian society developed out of the descendants of Portuguese conquerors or immigrants and a half-African, half-native slave population. Between these two groups there were a number of intermediate layers. A wide spectrum of skin coloration, with various shades of mestizo and mulatto, corresponded to a relatively loose division among the legally free social classes. Although the Indians of the interior were enslaved throughout the eighteenth century by brutal bands living outside the law (the
bandeirantes
), the country's plantation and mining economy remained geared to slave labor imported from Africa. The gender imbalance among the slaves, most of whom came from present-day Angola and the Zaire River basin, as well as a high mortality rate due to harsh working conditions, meant that the African slave population in Brazil was unable to reproduce itself. Between the beginning of the trade around 1600 and the closing of the Atlantic slave importation to Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century nearly 4.8 million Africans were transported to Brazil. The peak was reached only in the four decades after 1810 when roughly 37,400 were arriving each year.
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The trade continued until 1851, well after it had ceased in other parts of the Latin America. In Brazil it was easier than in other New World slave societies to buy one's way to freedom or to be granted personal emancipation.
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Free blacks and mulattoes displayed the strongest population growth among all the groups in Brazilian society. Brazil remained marked by slavery until its abolition in 1888—a consequence of earlymodern forced migration.

Slavery persisted everywhere for a while after the ending of the slave trade. In the United States it was declared illegal only in 1865, but the importation of slaves had ceased in 1808, having reached a record of 156,000 new arrivals over the preceding seven years.
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The United States was exceptional in having high rates of slave self-reproduction even
before
the end of the international trade. Thus, after 1808 it had a self-perpetuating slave population in which those born in Africa soon constituted a minority.
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Imports were no longer necessary to satisfy the demand for nonfree labor. All the more did the slave trade develop inside the United States, enabling special firms of “speculators” or “soul drivers” to make a fortune. Free blacks were captured and sold; slave families were brutally torn apart. Plantation owners from the Deep South, the realm of cotton, made trips to Virginia or Maryland to replenish their supply; it is likely that as many as a million blacks crossed interstate frontiers under compulsion between 1790 and 1860.
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This internal commerce became the most visible and scandalous side of slavery, and the one most open to attack. At almost the same time, the end of the transatlantic trade boosted the circulation of slaves within the African continent.

A third pattern of correlation between migration and society building was found in Mexico. New Spain (Mexico), the administrative center of the Spanish empire, naturally shared the experience of slavery with the rest of the New
World, but unlike in Brazil or the Southern United States slavery never became an all-pervasive institution that marked every sphere of life. This was not because of any special aversion of the Spanish to human enslavement: Spanish Cuba remained a fully fledged slave colony right into the 1870s. But for mainly ecological reasons a large-scale plantation economy could not gain a firm footing in Mexico. In 1800, in contrast to Brazil or the United States, it was not a country of immigration. It is probable that from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the prohibition of the slave trade to Mexico in 1817, no more than 20,000 Africans were exported there.
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The indigenous population slowly recovered after 1750 from various demographic setbacks. According to the 1793 census, blacks constituted at most 0.2 percent of the total population. The second smallest group, at 1.5 percent, were the 70,000 European-born Spanish (
peninsulares
). The majority of the Mexican population was made up of autochthonous
indios
(52 percent), followed by
criollos
(that is, people of Spanish origin born in Mexico).
⁵⁷
In 1800 Mexico was a society cut off from intercontinental migration flows, whose population renewal was based on its own biological resources.

A fourth pattern developed in the British and French Caribbean. On most of the West Indian islands, the indigenous population had been killed during the first wave of European invasions. In the seventeenth century, on this tabula rasa, the dynamic of early capitalist production for the world market then created new kinds of society consisting wholly of nonindigenous outsiders. These out-and-out immigrant societies, totally lacking in local traditions, could fulfill their mission of producing plantation sugar only with an uninterrupted supply of slaves from Africa; the plantation system consumed human beings at a staggering rate. Those societies never progressed to self-reproduction of the black population, which in the Southern States of the United States had overcome the need for a constant intake of new slaves from overseas. The European share of the population stagnated after a wave of English, French, and Dutch settlement in the early seventeenth century. Although it was not upper-class planters but specialist workers and plantation overseers who later moved out from Europe, whites remained a small minority throughout the eighteenth century; black slaves accounted for 70 to 90 percent of the population on sugar islands such as Saint-Domingue or the British possessions of Jamaica and Barbados.
⁵⁸

It was much harder for a slave to buy freedom or to win emancipation in the Caribbean than in Brazil, and so the intermediate class of “free persons of color” remained comparatively thin until the ending of slavery. In Brazil roughly two-thirds of the population was legally free in 1800, while in the United States free men and women
always
constituted a majority. This differentiated both countries from the Caribbean sugar islands (although, of course, most free people were black or “mixed” in Brazil but white in the United States).