Although Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 is a landmark in the history of the human race, he went to his grave convinced that what he had found were islands off the landmass of Asia. His four voyages (1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502) did nothing to dissuade him.1 Not until 1513 when Vasco Nunez de Balboa (1475-1519) set eyes on the Pacific (the whole of which he claimed for the king of Spain) did the Europeans realize their error. By then, the southern half of the continent had been named not after Columbus, but after another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), who had sailed as far as present-day Argentina. A hundred years later the focus of European attention was still on Asia. It took a long time before Europe conceded the existence of a continent that would radically change its own history and that of the world.
In 1493, one year after Columbus' landfall, Pope Alexander VI, in a papal bull of demarcation, divided the world between Spain and Portugal. In 1494 the division was formalized in the Treaty of Tordesillas under which the Spaniards obtained most of the southern half of the American continent (Map I). Later they would claim sovereignty over land north from Mexico to Oregon and east to the Carolinas. The Portuguese, who under Henry the Navigator had done the pioneering work in the exploration of the Atlantic, were granted Asia and by the 1550s Brazil.
Beginning with the settlement of Hispaniola in 1493, the Spaniards went on to establish a base at Panama in 1519. From Panama they continued to seek a route to Cathay (China), which they thought was nearby. In the same year (1519), Hernando Cortes, with 600 men and 17 horses, arrived in Aztec Mexico. (The horse was unknown in the New World.) The end of the Aztec Empire came three years later. In 1531 Francisco Pizarro (1470-1541), with 180 men and 27 horses, reached Inca Peru (which included modern
Peru, Ecuador, northern Chile, western Bolivia and northern Argentina). Five years later - European diseases having preceded him - the once great Inca Empire was overthrown. Because Mexico and Peru were the chief centres of Amerindian population,2 and also because they were the areas in which immensely productive silver mines were discovered - Potosi in upper Peru (now Bolivia) and Zacatecas in Mexico - they became the focus of Spanish conquest. While the conquest of the Mayan Yucatan Peninsula dragged on through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fate of Guatemala was settled between 1523 and 1542. Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela (1536-9) and central Chile (1540-58) also fell to Spanish arms. By 1659 the Spaniards had taken possession of an area reaching roughly from northern Mexico to south of the Rio de la Plata in Argentina.
Although the Mayas had long since passed their peak by the 1520s, when Pedro de Alvarado (c.1485-1541) reached Guatemala and Francisco de Montejo (1473-1553) reached Yucatan, they had the most advanced pre-Columbian society of all. The Maya calculation of the solar year (in use before AD 1000) was a remarkably accurate system of reckoning time. In mathematics, they had developed the idea of place value and the concept of zero. Their hieroglyphic system of writing was the most complex in the New World; their art styles were brilliant; their architecture unparalleled. Although they did not possess precious metals on the scale of Mexico or Peru, they had enough agricultural resources to guarantee their independence. Religion pervaded their culture. In a state of continuous warfare, their rulers possessed nearabsolute powers in government, religion, war and commerce. Partly for reasons of climate, disease and warfare, the Mayas (about half a million at the time of western intrusion) had been in decline from the ninth century onwards. Why their empire collapsed, and the jungle reclaimed its ruins, is still unknown.
In contrast to the Mayas, the Aztecs were probably at their peak in 1519 when Cortes arrived in Mexico. Estimates of their number range from 10 to 20 million. The Aztecs had migrated to the central valley of Mexico in the fourteenth century. Their capital Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), with a population equal to any European capital of the time, was the wonder of the Spaniards. While Europe's use of iron and steel, the plough, draft animals, the rotary quern and the wheel were unknown to them, they had all that was necessary to live well and extend their conquests.
Everything they did was motivated by religion. It was to obtain victims to sacrifice to their principal god of the sun that caused them to wage war constantly. Without sacrifice, the sun would not rise and the world would perish. As war was the guarantor of the survival of the universe, a long peace was a disaster. Solidarity with the universe was more important than human life.
The richest, most integrated and dynamic pre-Columbian state in the 1500s was that of the Incas. From north to south it stretched 2,600 miles and had a population of about 8-10 million. A successful totalitarian state, it used its resources productively and with concern for the common good. When Pizarro appeared in 1531, the Incas' military skills, transportation (though they did not make use of the wheel) and communication, engineering, stone and metal-working, architecture, medicine and surgery, textiles and ceramics were all highly developed. So also were their economics, politics and art. Nor did their lack of a system of writing prevent them from having an efficient imperial administration. In the quipu (long ropes made of knotted cords) they possessed an effective system of calculation. Governing through an absolute theocracy, the Incas imposed their rule upon all whom they conquered. From their capital Cuzco in Peru they united the different peoples of their far-flung realm by the use of a common tongue. They recognized one language, one nobility, one emperor.
The overwhelming defeat of the pre-Columbian empires by the Spaniards must be ascribed to the devastating sicknesses introduced by the Europeans, to superior weaponry, as well as to the audacity and fanaticism of the invaders. Propelled by the vibrancy and energy of their Mediterranean origins, by their Christian zeal, by their desire to serve their king, by their unmatchable warlike pride, by their lust for plunder ('We want', said Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortes' soldiers in the conquest of Mexico, 'to give light to those in darkness and to get rich') and their own desperate situation, the Spaniards fought ferociously. They also took advantage of the natives' ritualistic and ceremonial way of fighting. Aiding them were dissident tribes, the low morale of the native warriors and the utter dependence of their opponents on leaders such as Montezuma and Atahualpa. These men were the pillars upon which rested the Aztec and Inca states. When they fell, the states fell.
Other weaknesses were class hatreds, tribalism and political and religious schism. Prophesy and omens also played a part.
All these societies - Mayan, Aztec and Inca - had a legend of a white god who would return. A comet appeared above Tenoch-titlan and split into three; the waters of the lake boiled; a tongue of fire burned in the sky. In the last resort, shock (gunpowder and horses terrified the Indians) coupled with treachery ensured Spanish victory. Unable to meet the European challenge, the preColumbian civilizations were conquered, evangelized and exploited.
Not until after the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, which caused a shift in world power from Spain to France, did the other European powers feel safe to dispute Spain's hold on the New World. England and the Netherlands began to challenge Spanish power by raiding its American possessions and harrying it at sea; France disputed the military primacy of Spain in Europe. Only in the sugar-rich West Indies, initially claimed by Spain, did the other powers succeed in breaking Spain's grip. Barbados, Jamaica and Bermuda became British colonies; Saint Dominique, Martinique and Guadeloupe became French. European-colonized Caribbean islands would eventually yield high profits from sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, indigo and lumber.
Despite the inroads made in its power, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spain continued to rule a great empire with outstanding administrative skill. As late as the eighteenth century, it was still expanding into Texas (1718-20) and California (1770s). The future seaports of San Diego (1769), Monterey (1770), San Francisco (1776) and Los Angeles (1781) were founded by Spain after 1763.
If England, the Netherlands and France failed to bring down Spanish power in the New World, it was because they were more concerned with the Asian trade, the Turkish threat and piracy in the Caribbean.
The policy followed by Portugal in the colonization of Brazil (which was discovered by Pedro Cabral [c.1467-c.1519], and which 150 years later the Portuguese were to defend successfully from Dutch intrusion) differed from that of Spain. Formally possessed in 1549, Portuguese colonization was directed by the Crown; there were no Portuguese conquistadors. Brazil was the world's first great plantation economy - hence its use of slaves; no country received more slaves from Africa than Brazil. By 1800 there were 150,000 slaves - many of them employed in the sugar plantations - accounting for half Brazil's population. New racial mixtures of
Europeans, Asians, Africans and indigenous Americans were the outcome. Showing more interest than the Spaniards in developing the country's agriculture than in searching for gold and silver, the Portuguese extended the frontiers of Brazil beyond the line established at Tordesillas in 1494.
The conquest by western Europeans of pre-Columbian America is a story of gain and loss.3 The loss was the destruction of indigenous cultures and the extension of war, sickness and slavery - whence sprang the tumultuous, unstable Latin America of today. The gain was the widening of the world economy and the transformation of world agriculture. Imports of maize, manioc and other crops from the New World cannot compensate for the scourge of slavery, but slavery-supported plantation industries provided Africans, Europeans and Asians with more to eat. The western conquest also provided a bonanza of precious metals, which gave a stimulus to the North Atlantic region at a critical moment in its economic development.4 The history of capitalism, which led to the world economy of today, began at this time. In material terms, the ultimate outcome was to enrich and unify the world.
At the end of the seventeenth century Latin America was divided into the empires of Spain and Portugal. At the end of the eighteenth century there were four major divisions in Spanish America: the vice-royalties of New Spain (founded at Mexico City in 1535), Peru (Lima, 1542), New Granada (Bogota, 1739) and Rio de la Plata (Buenos Aires, 1776). Portuguese Brazil remained a tightly controlled colony.
In the early nineteenth century, encouraged by the American and French revolutions, as well as by Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808, the Iberian colonists of the New World won their independence. Whereas revolution by the English colonists of North America had been an affirmation of existing middle-class rights, the Spanish American revolutions, led by priests, landed gentry and the military, possessed the abruptness of the French Revolution. In 1804 a revolt against French control had made Haiti the first independent state in Latin America. By 1838 the Spanish empire in South and Central America had broken up into 15 new states. In the Western Hemisphere only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained tied to Spain, and even these would be lost later. After 1850, with the exception of Cuba and Panama (both made independent by the US), the map of Latin America remained virtually unchanged.
While the history of Brazil during the early nineteenth century is not free of armed insurrection, the independence movement there followed a much less violent course than in Spanish America. As a result of Napoleon's invasion of Portugal (Britain's ally in the Napoleonic wars) the Portuguese Prince-Regent Dom Joao had taken refuge in Brazil (with the help of the British fleet). Having become the centre of Portuguese government, Brazil developed a will of its own. After Portugal's revolution of 1820 had caused the return of Dom Joao to Lisbon as King Joao VI of Portugal, Brazil declared its independence in 1822 under Dom Pedro, eldest son of King Joao VI. It was then that President Monroe of the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine, which was a clear warning to Latin Europe not to try to recover their American empires. Behind Monroe's warning was the British fleet. Dom Pedro, having resigned as emperor in 1831, was succeeded by his son Pedro II in 1840. Brazil became a republic in 1889.
Of all the powers, Britain and the US stood to gain most commercially and financially from Latin American independence. It was Britain, with the connivance of the US, which interfered most in Spanish and Portuguese imperial affairs. Although willing to restore royalty in Europe after the Napoleonic wars, Britain resolutely opposed the restoration of the Iberian monarchs in the New World. In the early 1800s, they financed the radical Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) to make trouble in Spanish America. They also openly supported the republican Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), who fought for independence in Venezuela, and the monarchist Jose de San Martin (1778-1850), who liberated Argentina, Chile and Peru. By the 1820s Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia had all freed themselves of Iberian rule. The strong naval force sent by Spain in 1815 to restore Spanish rule was unable to match the revolutionary privateers and the crucial military support provided by Britain and the US.
The unity which Bolivar and San Martin sought among the newly freed colonies of Latin America was never realized. With no tradition of self-government, such as the North American colonists had had, and weary of the centralization which Portugal and Spain had imposed, the semi-feudal aristocracies of Latin America chose political freedom rather than unified control. Even where union was a possibility, disputes over boundaries and poor transport and communications impeded common action. 'Those who have made the revolution with me', said Bolivar, 'have ploughed the sea.' His Greater Colombia, comprising Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, was formed, only to break up again. A similar fate befell the move to join Mexico (which had revolted in 1810) with Central America.
The struggle for power among the people of Latin America continued long after they had gained their independence from Spain and Portugal. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, Latin America was plagued by political, economic and social disorder bordering on anarchy. With the military, the rural aristocracy, the Church and the bureaucratic elite retaining control, the necessary social and political changes were evaded. If anything, property, especially land with all the power that it entailed, became concentrated in fewer hands after the wars of independence than before. The poverty of the masses remained unchanged.
Spawned by the turbulent conditions of the time, by the contradictions of an economic organization that ranged all the way from slavery through feudalism to an emerging industrial capitalism, the caudillos - the military dictators or warlords - became the final arbiters. Some of them, having freed Latin America from Iberian oppression, became the oppressors themselves. Usually they added nothing new before being swept aside by a more powerful opponent.
Of all the republics, only Chile was able to avoid the worst excesses of despotic caudillism. Elsewhere, especially in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Uruguay, caudillism ruled. In Mexico the caudillo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ruled from 1829 to 1855. In Argentina the more popular caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas ruled from 1829 to 1852. In Guatemala the caudillo Rafael Carrera ruled from 1839 to 1865. Between 1835 and 1845 the unity of Brazil was almost lost in the struggle for power by such lawless adventurers.
While most contests in Latin America concerned internal interests, many countries were threatened from outside. Mexico, having elected Agustin de Iturbide as emperor in 1821, had to meet the challenge of the Spaniards in 1829, the Texans in 1836, and US troops in 1848. Thirty years later the Indian leader Benito
Pablo Juarez (1806-72) had to defend Mexican territory again, this time from the French. Other Latin American countries affected by outside pressure were Argentina, which fought a British blockade of the Rio de la Plata (1845-7), and whose government was eventually overthrown by a coalition of Brazilian, Uruguayan and Argentinean insurgents. Between 1865 and 1870 Paraguay's population was halved in a devastating war over the territorial claims made on it by Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. In the Pacific War of 1879-84 Chile took from Bolivia territory bordering on the Pacific. In the 1890s there was a dispute over Venezuelan boundary rights between Britain and the US.
In war and peace, the countries of Latin America remained subservient to the economic hegemony exercised by Europeans and North Americans, who in exchange for manufactured goods took the bulk of Latin American raw materials and foods - chiefly grain, tobacco, fibres, coffee, sugar and hides. By 1900 Spanish and Portuguese commercial interests had been supplanted by those of Britain, the US and France. In trade and investment Britain led. In immigration the Latins of Europe remained supreme. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century millions of immigrants arrived - chiefly Portuguese to Brazil, and Italians and Spaniards to Argentina.
With southern sea routes to Asia controlled by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the exploration of the northern half of the continent by the English, French and Dutch had begun with the search for a north-west passage to the riches of the Orient. In 1497 the British sent John Cabot on a voyage in which he sighted the shore of Newfoundland. Cabot's second voyage to North America in 1498 was used to support England's claim to Canada, as well as to the territory of the 13 colonies. In 1523 the French sent Giovanni da Verrazzano (c.1485-c.1528) on a voyage in which he sailed as far as Newfoundland. Like Cabot he failed to find a passage to the East. In 1576 the Elizabethan sea dog Martin Frobisher (c.1539-94) entered Arctic waters. Earlier, in 1534 the French navigator Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) had entered the Gulf of St Lawrence hoping that it would lead him to China. He claimed the St Lawrence area as New France. Arriving there in 1603, Samuel de Champlain (c.1567-1635) founded the first French colony at Quebec in 1608. Montreal was founded in 1642. In 1663 New France became a royal colony in the French Empire. In 1673 Louis Jolliet (1645-1700) and Pere
Jacques Marquette (1637-75) followed the Mississippi as far as Arkansas. In 1682 Rene de La Salle (1643-87) explored the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. The territory from Quebec to the Gulf he called Louisiana in honour of Louis XIV. After La Salle the search for a new passage to Asia was abandoned, the development and settlement of New France was earnestly begun. By then New France (with a much smaller population than the English colonies) stretched crescent-like from the mouth of the St Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi.
While the first successful English colony was planted at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, England's search for a northwest passage to the East was not relinquished until the 1630s. With the arrival of the Puritans at Cape Cod in 1620, an English colony took root in New England. By 1642, 20,000 Puritans - a description covering many kinds of religious dissent - had settled on the New England coast. Maryland became a refuge for English Catholics; the Carolinas a refuge for French Protestants, as well as for English, German and Swiss settlers. In addition, New Jersey (1664), Pennsylvania (1681) and Delaware (1704) were founded. Georgia (1733) was meant to be a buffer state between the southern colonies and Spanish Florida. Instead of being faced with an immediate life-and-death struggle with native civilizations5 (such as Spain had met with in the southern half of the continent), the English were able to encroach piecemeal on scattered native Indian domains. Unable to halt the incursions of the Europeans, the Indians found temporary relief by escaping to the plains.
Dutch interests in North America began in 1609 with Henry Hudson's search for a northwest passage. It ended in the seventeenth century with the founding of trading colonies on Manhattan Island (1624), in Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Of the European contestants for power in North America, the strongest became Britain and France. Compared with the French or the Dutch (who possessed a valuable gateway to the interior in the Hudson River), the claims of the small, isolated pockets of Englishmen on the Atlantic seaboard to inherit the continent appeared improbable; especially after the English had been cut off from the interior by a line of French forts which stretched from the St Lawrence via the Mississippi to New Orleans.
The clash between British and French interests was not decided in America but in Europe in the War of the Spanish Succession.
In 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht the British obtained Acadia (which was renamed Nova Scotia), Newfoundland and the Hudson's Bay territory. Under Britain's William Pitt 'the Elder' (1708-78), British power was expanded in Canada. In 1759 a decisive battle was fought between the British and the French on the Heights of Abraham above Quebec City, in which Britain's General James Wolfe (1727-59) triumphed over France's General Louis de Montcalm (1712-56). In 1762 a defeated France ceded to Spain its lands west of the Mississippi (the Louisiana Territory), including the island of New Orleans (Map V).
Under the subsequent Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the near-global Seven Years War between the two leading powers, France ceded to Britain the whole of New France, which included the lands east of the Mississippi (Map VI). France, Spain and Portugal recognized Britain as a leading world power for the first time. Through a superior maritime strategy, the century-old contest between Britain and France had ended in Britain's favour.
The Treaty of Paris illustrates the limited nature of eighteenth-century wars among the Europeans. It was not Britain's purpose to annihilate France, but to secure a balance of power among Europeans so that Britain's will would prevail. France was allowed to keep certain fishing rights on the Newfoundland banks, as well as the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon; it was also allowed to retain the valuable West Indian sugar islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia, and have restored to it the French settlements in India at Chandernagor and Pondicherry, as well as Goree on the West African coast. England's Pitt might have talked about 'finishing off the French once and for all', but by and large it was sufficient for Britain to predominate. Indeed, having won the whole of Canada, the British then played with the idea of giving it back to the French in exchange for the rich Caribbean sugar island of Guadeloupe.
Britain was similarly prepared to reconcile itself to Catholic Spain's existence. Spain, having surrendered Florida to Britain and returned the Mediterranean island of Minorca, was handed back Havana and the Philippines.
In the fight to possess and exploit the New World, unknown millions perished.6 Countless numbers of Indians in North and South America died in battle, others from the epidemic diseases introduced by the Europeans to which the natives were terrifyingly vulnerable. It has been estimated that within 130 years, 85 per cent of the native population of central Mexico had died.7 Within a century of Columbus' landfall, estimates of those killed in the Americas by the European presence range from 50 to 90 per cent of the native populations. The populations of some West Indian islands such as Haiti were decimated. The solution to the labour shortage in the European plantations of the New World was to substitute black slaves, but they died too, as did the Europeans who owned them. Without still more black slaves, the southern part of the Americas could not have been colonized at all.
The discovery and exploitation of the New World also altered Europe's relations with Asia. The enormous quantity of precious metals - constituting one of the greatest windfalls in history - which reached Europe from Peru, Mexico and Colombia could now be used to buy the luxuries of the East. As a result, the first true world economy was established. The arrival of so much gold and silver in Europe also caused great inflation - prices in Spain increased fourfold in less than a century - and a business boom which influenced the course of European economic development. In 1795 the German publicist and statesman Friedrich von Gentz wrote: 'The discovery of America and a new route to the East Indies opened the greatest market, the greatest inducement to human industry, that had ever existed since the human race emerged from barbarism.'8
In 1763 when France ceded to England all claims to New France there were about 65,000 Europeans there, most of them French and Catholic. There were many more native Indians, but these were ill-armed and powerless in the struggle to prevail. Far from obstructing the Europeans' intrusion, some Indian tribes helped the Europeans to colonize the land. By the 1750s, with Indian help, enterprising Scots and perdurable Frenchmen in search of furs had already reached the Canadian Rockies; on their heels followed the gold diggers and after them the farmers.
England's hope that the French Canadians would eventually succumb to English culture was never realized. French Canadians continued to resist Anglicization. With the Quebec Act of 1774, French Canadians were guaranteed the right to language, religion and civil law. By 1852, when the Canadian population stood at 2.5 million, British immigrants in Upper Canada, centred on Toronto, exceeded the much longer established French population centred on Quebec.
The destruction of French power in New France also ensured the end of British power in the 13 American colonies. The French threat removed, British power could now be discarded. The enforcing of half-forgotten mercantile regulations that threatened the profits of American commerce, as well as the introduction of new measures (including restrictions on western settlement, interference with the profitable American West Indian sugar trade and the obnoxious Stamp Act of 1765), only served to make the need for a break by the colonists with the mother country all the more urgent. American grievances against Britain were first aired at the First Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia in 1774.
With the battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on 19 April 1775, the hope of compromise with the British died. On 15 June 1775 George Washington (1732-99) was appointed commander of the Continental Forces. On 4 July 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, the colonists declared their intention to substitute home rule for foreign rule. They challenged the authority of the English parliament to legislate for them 'in all cases whatsoever'. Liberty was at stake.
Those who led the revolt were not revolutionaries, but a group of aristocrats steeped in European eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas. Their aim was to enlarge individual freedom: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. It is the voice of John Locke, as well as that of Thomas Paine (1737-1809), with his call for freedom of speech, that resounds in the American Declaration of Independence.
Thenceforth, with the indispensable help of the French (whose navy and army played a crucial role in the defeat of the British at Yorktown) the 13 colonies fought for self-rule. The war itself, except for terrain and distance, was not a large-scale affair. Washington never commanded a force greater than 15,000-20,000 in any single battle. While he may have been one of the least spectacular of the great generals in history, he nevertheless held together a rag-tag army for six almost impossible years without once committing any serious tactical error. Victory was achieved at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. 'Humanity has won its battle,' said the French Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). 'Liberty now has a country.' The only major war Britain fought without an ally, it lost. 'United Empire Loyalists', or 'Tories', fled to Nova
Scotia, the St Lawrence area, and to territory north of the Great Lakes. For the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch and even the Russians, who had formed a League of Armed Neutrality, the outcome at Yorktown meant the settling of long-standing grievances against the British in Europe and the world.
The concern of those who met to draft a new constitution at Philadelphia in 1787 was not so much how to extend freedom, but how to limit the power of the majority. The result was a compromise between the equalizing conditions of a frontier society and the aristocratic traditions of the Europeans. The word 'democracy' was not used. A Bill of Rights was added in 1789.
Whatever credence is given to the American Revolution as a revolution - the Americans were just as middle-class, Protestant and capitalistic at the end of the revolution as they had been at the beginning - its influence would become world-wide. It inspired those who led the French Revolution, as it did those who drafted the constitutions of Switzerland, Norway, Belgium and Canada. It was used as a precept by the Boers of South Africa on their historic trek into the interior in the 1830s, as it was by the Chinese nationalists in 1911. The American Revolution stimulated nationalist revolutions in the West, as Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 had stimulated them in the East. From the point of view of world politics, it meant that a great new Anglo-Saxon power had appeared on the American continent, and that the Europeans would be forced to turn to Asia and Africa for further expansion.
Under the peace settlement of 1783 between the United States and Great Britain, all the land between Canada and Florida east of the Mississippi was assigned to the Americans. Florida was ceded to Spain. The Louisiana Territory was returned from Spain to France. American territory doubled overnight from 400,000 to 895,415 square miles. At that time only about 25,000 white settlers were strung out in the new area from the Appalachians to the Mississippi.
The next great acquisition of territory by the Americans was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which President Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743, president 1801-9, d. 1826) obtained from the French for $11.3 million (raised chiefly in London). The territory comprised 909,380 square miles stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains (Map XII). The price paid by the Americans was under 3 cents per acre. Any rights which native Indians had were ignored. Without bloodshed, the United States had doubled its territory.
In 1804 Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) to find out what he had bought. They were also charged with the search for a water route from the Missouri to the Pacific coast.
Called by the promise of free land, by trade, by a sense of adventure, by the expanding mining, farming, cattle and (later) railway frontiers, the white Americans began their westward march. Unlike the Spaniards, who at the outset had had little interest in founding a new homeland in America, the North American colonists were intent on creating a 'New Jerusalem, the abode of the redeemed' for themselves and those who would follow. Theirs was a manifest destiny assigned by God; nothing should be allowed to impede its unfolding. When friction between the growing number of American settlers and Mexican authorities came to a head in Texas in 1845, Congress responded by annexing 390,000 square miles of Mexican territory (the size of France and Germany combined). At little cost to itself, the United States had added to its territory the equivalent of the original 13 colonies.
A year later, in 1846, on the pretext of a Mexican invasion, the United States declared war on Mexico. (The war was clearly provoked to secure even more land.) Understandably, the much weaker Mexico was defeated. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, of 2 February 1848, on payment by the US of $15 million, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and ceded New Mexico and California to the US. Mexico lost one-third of its territory, half its best land. Including earlier annexations of Mexican territory, a further million square miles was added to the United States' national domain, which now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The other groups to be dispossessed as a result of westward expansion were the aboriginal Indians of North America, who had fought a continuing battle since shortly after the white man arrived. Sometimes the Indians won temporary relief, as chief Crazy Horse (c.1844-1877) did for the Sioux and the Cheyenne at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876, or when he and chief Sitting Bull (c.1834-1890) annihilated Colonel George Custer (1839-1876) and his cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the same year; but eventually the white tide returned to engulf them.
Propelled by overwhelming numbers, by a most extraordinary aggressiveness, by superior arms, by a righteous belief in their race, their cause and their destiny, nothing could hold the white settlers back. In contrast to the profound respect that the Indian had for nature, the white man was determined to subdue it and anyone who stood in his way.9 The attitude that man must master nature and exploit it was alien to Indian thought.
For the red man there was no escape, no compromise he could make, no terms he could accept other than death or exile. 'Hear me, my chiefs,' said chief Joseph (c.1840-1904), a great Indian warrior and leader of the Nez Perce Indians in 1877, 'I am tired... my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.' By the 1890s Indian resistance had ended. Most Indian chiefs were dead, the people decimated, torn apart, scattered to the winds. Judged by deeds and not by words, the ultimate arbiter in the disposition of North America was naked force.
Meanwhile America's territory had been rounded out by a compromise with the British in 1846 over the Oregon territory, which added a further 286,541 square miles to the United States. In 1853, under the Gadsden Purchase, the US bought what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico (29,670 square miles) from a bankrupt Mexican government at a cost of $10 million. In 1867 it also purchased Alaska's 570,374 square miles from Russia - 'a waste of snow and ice' some US senators called it - for the sum of $7,200,000 (about 2 cents an acre). Russia needed the money, and Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria and Korea offered better spoils.
By 1868, 85 years after the peace treaty with Britain in 1783, US territory had grown from 393,152 square miles to 3,608,787; a more than ninefold increase. Never was so much territory obtained so quickly and at so low a price. By the 1890s the continental expansion of the US was complete. The US now occupied an area equivalent to the whole of Europe (including European Russia). States such as Texas and California were larger than the largest European countries. Increasingly, Americans felt that their manifest destiny called them not only across the continent but across the seas.
The more one ponders the expansion of the white man's empire across North America, the more one is struck by how relatively easy it was - especially when compared with Russian expansion across Asia. Except for the colonization of Australia, there is no other example in world history of any group coming into possession of such a vast, rich area so swiftly and at so little human cost. While each death represents a tragedy which cannot be expressed with statistical detachment, American casualties in the period of its most rapid expansion were minimal. At Yorktown the Continental Army and its French allies lost 262 men. The War of 1812 with Canada, the Mexican War of the 1840s and the Spanish American War of the 1890s were all minor clashes. The Battle of the Alamo (187 dead) and the battle of the Little Bighorn (246 dead) are chiefly of symbolic importance. America was also fortunate in having only two neighbours, Canada (unified in 1867) and Mexico, both of whom were weak and (if left alone) peaceful. The relative ease with which the white American obtained what he considered to be his true inheritance must surely help to explain the Americans' sense of confidence and optimism, especially the belief in a happy ending.
Not only were America's wars low on casualties, they also conferred considerable benefits. The war of 1776-83 had brought independence; the War of 1812 had extended that independence to the high seas as well as to the Mississippi Valley; the wars against Mexico10 in the 1840s had brought great territorial gains; the civil war of the 1860s, scourge as it was - in the loss of blood and treasure it was the worst the Americans have ever fought - had safeguarded the unity of the nation, abolished slavery,11 and stimulated development; the Spanish American War of the 1890s had made the US a world power.
In contrast to the settling of Russia (or of Europe generally), which is a story of fortified villages and towns, the settling of America in the nineteenth century entailed the clearing of the forests and the dividing of the plains. The speed with which territory was won has no better example than in the whirlwind occupation of Oklahoma in 1889:
At the sound of a gun... a flood of 50,000 white settlers poured like an avalanche into the last great Indian reservation. By nightfall, under conditions of utter pandemonium, almost 2,000,000 acres of land had been claimed, most of it to be sold again. Within half a day, Guthrie and Oklahoma City, each with an instant population of 10,000, had come into being.12
The conquest of North America had repercussions across the entire world. Politically, it resulted in the appearance of a new, great, industrialized power. The US not only became a great political and industrial power; through the crucible of civil war, which more than any other historical event defined the American character,13 it became a unified power. Had President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809, president 1861-5) not insisted on unity, the history of the western world would have been very different. A dis-United States could not have intervened as decisively as it did in the two world wars.
Having fought the Civil War - the first modern war - the Americans, according to the London Spectator on 17 February 1866, had become 'a power of the first class, a nation which is very dangerous to offend, and almost impossible to attack'. With the victory of the Union the US emerged as the largest naval and military force the world had ever seen. Henceforth, America's viewpoint was taken seriously. It says a great deal for the growth in the actual and the potential power of the US that the Americans were able to bundle Napoleon Ill's imperialistic-minded French troops out of Mexico (French intervention lasted from 1862 to 1867) once the Civil War was over.
The economic consequences stemming from the colonization of the North American continent were as significant as the political. Not least, it released a torrent of cheap food and supplies upon the world. By the late 1860s the US was producing a bushel of wheat for about half the cost of a European bushel. From 1852 to roughly the end of the century, the average American exports of wheat and wheat flour grew from 19 to 197 million bushels; in the same 50 years exports of corn and corn meal rose from 7 to over 200 million bushels. The export of chilled and refrigerated meat of all kinds to Europe became a veritable flood. By 1900 American farm produce made up three-quarters of the country's total exports. By 1914 the US (although still a net debtor-nation) had vast trade surpluses with Europe. Cheaper food meant falling European death rates and a growth in numbers. to America's riches, famine in the western world became a thing of the past. But the flood of food from the New World proved disastrous for some sectors of European agriculture (Western Europe experienced a fall in agricultural prices, land rents and land values).
Accompanying the avalanche of food to Europe were immense quantities of minerals, metals and raw materials, which provided a powerful stimulus to the growth of western industrialism. The US production of crude petroleum rose from 3 million barrels in 1865 to more than 55 million in 1898. The availability of large quan-titles of Californian gold enabled the western world to abandon a bi-metallic standard of silver and gold in favour of a common gold standard,14 which further facilitated the economic integration of the Old World and the New. The final outcome was a reallocation of the world's resources and white hegemony around the globe.
By 1914, almost comet-like, the US had become the agrarian, industrial and financial colossus of the world. Blessed by its resources, by its abundant supplies of capital and labour, by its political stability, by its work ethic, by its mystique of the American Dream, as well as by its aggressive entrepreneurial spirit, its per capita income of $377 in 1914 soared above all the rest.15 No other country had set aside the basic law of political economy - the law of diminishing returns - as America did. No other country had such economic potential. By moving labour and capital from Europe (where they were relatively plentiful) to the United States (where they were relatively scarce) the world - especially the white world - was economically better off.
Long before 1914, America's manifest destiny had carried it far beyond its shores. The US had no intention of standing aside while the Europeans conquered the world. In 1867 it annexed Midway Island; in 1878 it established a semi-protectorate over Tutuila in Samoa; in the 1890s it annexed Hawaii (which foreshadowed its clash with Japan at Pearl Harbor in 1941), Wake Island and Guam, and, led by President William McKinley (b. 1843, president 1897-1901), conquered Spanish Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Philippines were regarded by the US as a suitable jumping-off point for China, and a possible redoubt against future Japanese aggression. Filipino insurgents bitterly contested the US presence in a brutal six-year war.
At the turn of the century, unsuccessful efforts were made to lease Samsah Bay, opposite Formosa, from China. Americans began to talk about Manchuria becoming America's 'new West' (which is partly why, in 1907 and 1910, Russia and Japan divided it between them). The US Secretary of State, John Hay, proclaimed his Open Door Policy whereby economic opportunities in China should be available to the Americans on equal terms with the Europeans. In 1902 Cuba became a protectorate. There followed in 1903 the seizing of Colombian territory by American-backed Panamanians and the eventual construction of the Panama Canal which was completed in 1914.
As a 'corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine (1823), President Theodore Roosevelt16 (b. 1858, president 1901-9, d. 1919) announced the right of the US to intervene in Latin America to prevent 'chronic wrongdoing' and European interference. Thus the door was opened to the subsequent military intervention in Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Mexico and Grenada. In 1907, to demonstrate how powerful the US had become, Roosevelt sent his Great White Fleet (the third most powerful) around the world.
Encouraging the Americans' expansive urge was the belief in their role as God's chosen people. The American way was the right way, the normal way, the only way to save the world.17 Americans took it for granted that it was all part of God's plan. That is why America was called 'God's country'. 'Almighty God', said Senator Beveridge in 1900, 'has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.' In his book Our Country (1885), Josiah Strong wrote:
This race. . . having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. . . this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.
The expansion of America and American commercial and financial interests, so it was thought, would usher in a golden age of justice, democracy and economic well-being. All of which was contrary to the outlook of the Founding Fathers, who had been concerned to safeguard the nation's interests at home. 'The United States', warned President John Quincy Adams (b. 1767, president 1825-9, d. 1848) 'should never go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. [Did she do so] she might become the dictatress of the world; [but] she would no longer be ruler of her own spirit.'
The idea of a manifest destiny to the world was not peculiarly American. Most nineteenth-century Europeans felt the same. The British spoke of a 'white man's burden' to Christianize and raise up the rest of the world; the French stressed their 'mission civilisatrice'; the Germans and the Belgians also thought that they possessed a superior civilization and that they had a right and a duty to tell the world what to do.
On the eve of war, in 1914, most Americans would have agreed with the sentiments expressed by Senator Beveridge and Josiah Strong. No mention was made at the time that America's gains had been won at a high cost to the Mexicans, the American Indians and the African blacks. That would, of course, have smacked of imperialism - which was not what American history was about. The truth is that while Americans have been more idealistic and moralistic in their outlook on the world, they have essentially been involved with the struggle for power that has affected all other expansionist nations. If imperialism means taking other people's land by force, if it means imposing one's will on others, if it means plundering other people's wealth without moral scruples, if it means considering oneself superior, then Americans - the moralistic rhetoric of presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (b. 1857, president 1909-13, d. 1930) and Thomas Woodrow Wilson (b. 1856, president 1913-21, d. 1924) aside - were imperialistic. Where they differed from the so-called imperialist nations of Europe is that they ascribed to themselves a purity of motive that no expansionist nation can possibly possess.
Meanwhile the seeds of a new nation - Canada - were being sown north of America's border. After the American War of Independence between 40,000 and 60,000 British loyalists had settled on the northern shores of the Great Lakes and the upper St Lawrence, causing friction with the French in Lower Canada. By 1791 the British in Upper Canada, Ontario, outnumbered the French of Lower Canada, Quebec.
The American attempt in 1812 to seize eastern Canada compelled the British and the French Canadians to close their ranks. But disunity was not banished for long. In 1837-8, following rebellions for self-government in Upper and Lower Canada, the British government appointed Lord Durham (1792-1840) to carry out an inquiry. The famous Durham Report appeared in 1839 finding 'two nations warring in the bosom of a single state'. Durham recommended that English-speaking Upper Canada (Ontario) and French-speaking Lower Canada (Quebec) should be united under one legislature. French and English differences, however, were not so easily settled. In 1864 the Quebec Conference was still discussing self-government for English - and French-speaking areas.
Pressure from the US - in 1846 Canada lost more than a quarter of a million square miles to the US under the Oregon Treaty - fostered Canadian unity. A compromise about the boundary was reached between Britain and the US, whereby President James K. Polk's (b. 1795, president 1845-9) demand for 'Forty-four forty or fight' was met at the 49th parallel. After much bickering, Vancouver remained Canadian. In 1848 Canada won limited selfgovernment from Britain.
New threats to Canadian territory came in the 1860s at the time of the American Civil War. Fearful of American intrusion (the Canadians were accused of having harboured Confederate guerrillas) and expansion (America purchased Alaska), in 1867 the British North America Act established the Dominion of Canada, which included Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. (The population was about 3.5 million, most of them living east of the Great Lakes.) Canada's new constitution called for 'peace, order and good government'. In 1870, following an Indian rebellion, Manitoba was created. British Columbia joined the confederation in 1871. In the same year, in the Treaty of Washington, a northwest boundary dispute was settled in favour of the US.
While the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 (the unifying factor of Canadian history) and a growing prairie population (1 million in 1881) strengthened Canada's hold on the western provinces, the Canadians still feared that the US might try to wrest territory from them. In 1911 the US House Speaker Champ Clark declared that he hoped to see the day 'when the American flag will float over every square foot clear to the North Pole'. It was also in 1911, by which time Canada had become the second largest country in the world next to Russia, that President Taft caused a storm by talking about annexation. Canada's population at that time was 7 million compared with 92 million for the US.
Successful in maintaining its political independence, Canada was unable to stem the commercial infiltration by the US. By 1914 American interests controlled much of Canada's transport, banking, agriculture and manufacture. Canada had become America's greatest field of foreign investment. Nor was it able to prevent the departure to the US of many of its nationals; throughout the second half of the nineteenth century more Canadians were migrating to the US than there were Europeans entering Canada. In the period 1870-90 Canada received 1.5 million immigrants from Europe, but lost 2.0 million emigrants to the US, most of them Canadian-born. Only in the first two decades of the twentieth century was the process reversed. It was not until 21 May 1913 that the first Asian migrants appeared off Canada's western shores; a Japanese ship having entered Vancouver harbour with 300 Hindu would-be migrants was turned away. In little more than a year, the Canadians would be fighting alongside the Indians in defence of the British Empire.
The First Great War was a major turning point in Canadian history. Although Canada had sent troops to fight alongside the British in the Boer War (1899-1902), the French Canadians protested and the Canadian soldiers had to be brought back home again. In 1914, with the fate of France as well as Britain at stake, Canada's response was unequivocal; within weeks 30,000 of Canada's best sons had voluntarily embarked for the western front. While formal independence from Britain would have to wait until 1931, actual independence for Canada, which by 1914 included nine provinces, was won by the valour shown by its troops in France and elsewhere. In consequence, in 1919 Canada was accorded a separate place at Versailles.
World History
