European conquests of the Age of Exploration
The origins of the capitalist world-economy
I continue today with my discussion of conquest in human history and its role in providing foundation for the emergence of human civilizations that are advanced with respect to economic productivity, commerce, education, culture, and morality. Today I focus on the Western European conquests from 1492 to 1650 and their role in the emergence of the modern capitalist world-economy, drawing upon the Encyclopedia of Invasions and Conquests, hereafter referred to as Encyclopedia,1 as well as the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.2
The Encyclopedia sees the European conquests as pertaining to two distinct periods: the age of exploration, from 1450 to roughly 1650; and the age of empire, from 1750 to 1914. This is consistent with Wallerstein’s analysis, which defines four stages in the development of the capitalist world-economy.
The European conquests of the Age of Exploration
From the early 1440s to the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese set up trading centers on the African coast—at Sao Tome, the Cape Verde Islands, the mouth of the Senegal River, Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique—for the purpose of facilitating trade with the Spice Islands (East Indies) as well as with the interior of Africa. The Portuguese settlements on the western coast of Africa initially sought access to gold and ivory, but they soon became exclusively interested in slaves. The Portuguese traders dealt with local slavers, who provided an almost unlimited supply. Slavery was a lucrative business controlled by the Portuguese colonial administration, who accepted slaves as payment of taxes and used slaves for local agriculture or mining or sold them abroad. Virtually every element of Portuguese colonial society was involved in the lucrative slave business, including the clergy. In the Portuguese colonies, Catholic missionaries established European-style schools, with the intention of creating an African educated elite that would assist the Portuguese exploitation.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he became the first European to see the various islands of that sea. Bahamas was probably the first of the islands that Columbus sighted. He claimed the lands for Spain.
In the Treaty of Tordesillas on 1494, mediated by the Pope, Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the world. In the agreement, Portugal was granted Brazil, where the Portuguese generated an agricultural surplus by introducing sugar cane from the Caribbean and slaves from Africa. This wealth was subsequently supplemented by the discovery of various precious metals.
The Portuguese colonists in Brazil dominated political and economic life, but they were socially open-minded. Whites, natives, and blacks mingled freely in society and culture. Mixed-race marriages were common, and the children of the unions were accepted without social prejudice.
The first Spanish colonists arrived in Jamaica in 1509, which led to the extermination of the indigenous Arawak population and the importation of African slaves. The island was captured by British forces in 1655. It remained firmly in British hands, solidified by the Treaty of Madrid in 1670, in which the British agreed to stop piracy in exchange for Spanish recognition of British control of the island. Jamaica produced cacao, sugar, and timber, and it became one of the world’s largest slave trading markets.
The island of Puerto Rico was captured by the Spanish in 1509. The indigenous population was exterminated by disease and abuse, leading to the importation of African slaves for labor in the plantations and sugar mills. Although attacked by British pirates in 1595, by the Dutch in 1625, and the British in 1702, Puerto Rico remained firmly in Spanish hands.
The Spanish colonization of Cuba was initiated in 1511, with the first settlements in Baracoa, Santiago, and Havana. Following the extermination of the indigenous population through disease and abusive labor in the river washing of gold, the island was dedicated to agricultural production, primarily sugar, through the use of African slaves.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Portuguese arrived in Ceylon in 1505. At the time, Portugal was the sole European trading power in Asia, and it took military steps to preserve its monopoly, constructing a fort at the harbor town of Colombo. Dom Laurenco de Almeido secured an agreement with King Parakrama Bahu VIII, whose kingdom consisted of the lowland Sinhalese population, with the capital city in Kotte. Bahu, in seeing the military force of the Portuguese, sought their protection from the Tamil peoples in the highland Kingdom of Kandy as well as from the Moors. He received such protection from the Portuguese in exchange for an annual tribute to be paid in cinnamon. The Portuguese built forts along the western coast of Ceylon, enabling them to control the export market from Ceylon and to dictate policy to the Sinhalese leaders.
However, Portuguese power was not unchecked in Ceylon. King Rajasinha I of the Kingdom of Sitawaka had built an army furnished with modern weapons. Rajasinha attacked and defeated Portuguese troops, and he waged war against and defeated other kings on the island. At the height of his reign, from 1554 to 1593, Rajasinha controlled all of Ceylon except Colombo.
The decline of Portuguese mercantile power in the 1600s provided an opening for the Dutch in Ceylon. The Dutch allied themselves with the mountain Kingdom of Kandy to fight the Portuguese, and in 1656, established themselves as the dominant foreign power in Ceylon. Through the Dutch East India Company, a civil administration was established, directed by a military governor.
However, the alliance between the Dutch and the Kingdom of Kandy was full of conflict. The Kandyan monarchy was strongly independent; it conducted raids on Dutch forts, provoking retribution by the Dutch. Unable to dislodge the Kandyan King from his mountain home, the Dutch ultimately confined themselves to the coastal areas, leaving the government of the interior to the Kingdom of Kandy. On these terms, Ceylon was a profitable possession for the Dutch.
The Dutch in the late 1500s had emerged as an important commercial force in the East Indies, acting as a middleman bringing spices from Asia to customers in Europe, with Portugal handling the importation, and Holland the distribution, a mutually profitable arrangement. However, when King Philip II of Spain closed the Port of Lisbon to Dutch shipping, Holland had no choice but to bypass Portugal and establish its own contacts in Asia. The Dutch were able to sign agreements with local Muslim sultans in the Spice Islands, which included religious freedom, thus forcing the Portuguese from the trade. When the Dutch captured the Portuguese trading center at Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, with the assistance of the sultan of Jahore on Sumatra, the Portuguese ceased being a threat in the area.
Holland was able to establish a monopoly on the spices headed for Europe, building settlements and forts to protect its interests and carry on trade. In 1618, the Dutch governor-general established the town of Batavia on the island of Java as the Dutch area headquarters, from which it controlled the Sunda Straits, the most popular trading route through the islands. With their monopoly on trade, the Dutch set prices, enabling them to grow very rich. Dutch ships patrolled the water of the East Indies to keep out foreign ships. Occasionally, the Dutch forced sultans to cooperate at gunpoint. Generally, the Dutch did not interfere in the politics of the region unless it directly affected their income.
In Africa, the Dutch in 1595 initiated trading expeditions on the Guinea coast near the mouth of the Niger River, exchanging salt, wine, cloth, copper, flax, timber, and wood products from all over Europe for the gold and ivory for which the area was famous. They established a trading post in 1617, concluding a treaty with a local chieftain on the island of Goree, in the Portuguese-held Cape Verde Islands. Twenty years later, the Dutch attacked Portuguese settlements, and by the early 1640s, the Dutch were masters of the “Gold Coast.”
The French joined the Spanish, English, Dutch, and Danes in colonizing the Caribbean Islands in the seventeenth century, settling colonies on a number of islands, including Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Grenada, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Martin, and St. Eustatius. They became extremely valuable as sugar producers in the eighteenth century. The Encyclopedia writes: “the middle 1600s was an active time in the Caribbean, with Spanish, English, and Dutch forces attacking one another’s possessions, and many islands gaining and losing temporary masters.” Most of the French colonies in the Caribbean were ceded to Great Britain in the eighteenth century, as France lost several conflicts in the Caribbean.
Hispaniola was originally “discovered” and settled by the Spanish, and the Spanish maintained control until 1697, when the Peace of Ryswick transferred the western third of the island to the French, who established the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). The Spanish section of the island was Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). French invested in Saint-Domingue, making it by far the most productive of its possessions in the French West Indies.
The English began to settle Bermuda in 1612. The population grew in the late seventeenth, as a result of the introduction of African slaves and the importation of Portuguese laborers from the Azores. The English began settling two of the islands of the Bahamas a century and half after Columbus. In spite of Spanish attacks, they remained under British control, and they served as a base of operations for buccaneers who struck at Spanish ships.
The Virgin Islands, the group of islands lying to the east of Puerto Rico, were sighted by Columbus, who named them after St. Ursula and other virgin martyrs. They were first settled by the Dutch in 1648, and they were acquired by Great Britain in 1666. Sugar was produced for export, using African slave labor. They were a pirate haven throughout the 1600s.
The southern extreme of Africa became the most important venture of the Dutch on the continent. At first, the Dutch established a shipping resupply point for trade with India and the Spice Islands. Beginning in 1652, a fort was constructed, around which the town of Cape Town grew. The Dutch East India Company began to grant land to retiring employees, for the purpose of exploiting the rich agricultural land near Cape Town. The colony grew slowly during the 1700s, with the immigration of political exiles from the Netherlands and as a result of inbreeding with the local population.
A pivotal conquest of the Age of Exploration was Spanish occupation of the Western Hemisphere. The Encyclopedia writes: “Christopher Columbus’s discovery of a “new world” in 1492 led to one of the largest invasions ever undertaken. In this case, it was not merely a neighboring country or region that fell, but an entire hemisphere. Reports of gold led many adventurers across the Atlantic, but they were merely the forerunners of a huge influx of settlers who occupied vast territories at the expense of the native inhabitants.”
The Encyclopedia reports on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico in 1520; and the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in what is today Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile in 1533. It notes that these were autonomous empires that possessed mastery over their subject peoples, extracting tributes from them. The Aztec and Inca empires possessed sophisticated buildings, an abundance of material goods in vast markets, and a refined culture. The Spanish conquerors immediately undertook systematic destruction of religious temples and the seizing of property, and they committed acts of violence, theft, and vandalism.
The Encyclopedia notes that the rapid spreading of disease was an important factor in the Spanish victory over the American empires, which was a consequence of the fact that the American populations were geographically isolated from the European and Asian diseases that had been evolving since pre-historic times, and the American populations had not developed the natural antibodies to combat the diseases. In addition, the Spanish possessed tactical advantages that were rooted in different concepts of warfare. Other scholars have pointed to other explanatory factors, such as the Spanish possession of horses, which had become extinct in America; and steel swords and steel armor, impossible to fabricate in America at that time, because iron had not yet been discovered. Moreover, the Aztec and Inca empires were in a process of disintegration at the time of the contact, in accordance with normal tendencies with respect to the rise and fall of empires.
The analytical limitations of the Encyclopedia
The Encyclopedia states that the gold and silver from the New World were converted by the Spanish kings into military power. But this is not the whole story. To be sure, the Spanish kings used the gold and silver to increase military expenditures as well as other state expenditures, including the salaries of state bureaucrats. However, rather than supplying these needs through investment in the productive capacity of Spain, the Crown purchased manufactured goods from northwestern Europe, thus contributing to the economic development of northwestern Europe, especially Britain. In particular, the Spanish demand led to the expansion of textile and other forms of craft manufacturing in the towns, which created a higher demand for craft labor, wool, and food. This demand was met in part through the commercialization and centralization of northwestern European agriculture, and through the conversion of agricultural lands to the pasturing of sheep and cattle. In addition to increasing the efficiency of production and redirecting the focus of production, these two dynamics displaced peasants and serfs from the land, forcing their migration to the towns. Said transformations of the countryside of northwestern Europe were tied to the importation of grains from Eastern Europe, attained through the imposition on the peasantry by the landholding class of a new form of forced labor, which Wallerstein calls "coerced cash crop labor" and other scholars have called the “second serfdom.”
Thus, the Encyclopedia does not see that the Spanish conquest of America stimulated the emergence of a world-system of a type different from an empire, namely, a world-economy. According to Wallerstein, world-economies goes beyond the extraction of tribute to a structural transformation and integration of the economies of the conquered empires, kingdoms, and societies. World-economies had appeared only in a transitory form previously in human history. The modern world-economy is characterized by a geographical division of labor between core and peripheral regions, in which the periphery utilizes new forms of forced labor to provide raw materials for the core, which is now capacitated to function as the manufacturing center of the world-system. This concept of a geographical division of labor between core and periphery that extends beyond geographical regions is the fundamental concept of the world-systems perspective, put forth by Wallerstein in four volumes in the 1970s and 1980s.
The world-systems perspective explains how, beginning in the sixteenth century, the expansion of world commerce generated the economic development of some regions and the underdevelopment of others. And it explains the amoral lust of actors from the core economies for gold, silver, and sugar. Moreover, it explains that the resistance of the conquered, to the extent that it grasps the essence of the holocaust being visited upon them, would focus above all on the need for the transformation of worldwide economic structures. Political independence, in and of itself, could not ensure autonomous economic development.
As Wallerstein suggests in the Preface to the first volume of The Modern World System, in formulating the world-systems perspective Wallerstein appropriated and transformed a methodological insight of Marx, for whom scientific understanding required taking the point of view of the working class, which was in the vanguard of the worldwide revolutionary struggle in Marx’s time. But in the twentieth century, taking seriously the insistence of African nationalist militants that theirs was a “colonial situation,” Wallerstein grasped the scientific mandate of his time, which was to make the world-system, and not particular societies, the unit of analysis. Like Marx, Wallerstein saw the need to take the vantage point of the subjugated actors in struggle; at the same time, Wallerstein discerned that the leading revolutionary actors of his time were the colonized peoples. Something, incidentally, Lenin had anticipated, when he observed that the Western European proletarian revolutions were not going to triumph.
I continue in my next commentary with the unfolding human story of conquest, focusing on the European conquests in what the Encyclopedia calls the “Age of Empire,” that is, the period 1750 to 1914, which Wallerstein considers to be the third stage in the development of the modern world-economy, following a period of stagnation from 1650 to 1750.
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Paul K. Davis, Ed. Encyclopedia of Invasions and Conquests, 4th edition (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2023).
Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World System, Vol. I (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); The Modern World System, Vol. II (New York: Academic Press. 1980); The Modern World System, Vol. III (New York: Academic Press, 1989).