The European Overseas Expansion

What were the crucial variables governing the ability of Europeans to establish themselves, even to dominate, overseas? The answers are complex, and no single interaction was exactly like another; and as we have seen in this course, “domestic” factors—elements of the equation that lay inside, not outside Europe—were often decisive. At the risk of oversimplification, these factors can be reduced to five:

1) The first involves culture, specifically the assumptions on which Europeans and indigenous peoples interacted: if, for example, indigenous people believed that Europeans sought tribute or slaves rather than to control trade routes or to reorient local economies around production for the global market, the result often catastrophic.

2) Equally important were biological factors, such as the vulnerability of native peoples to the Europeans’ diseases, and vice versa. Prior to the nineteenth century, there was very little European penetration of African interior; the European presence there remained confined to isolated strong-points, usually within a few miles of the coast. There were many reasons for this, but one of the principal ones was European vulnerability to tropical diseases prevalent in Africa, such as malaria.

• The statistical base for estimates is often very slender; data from Dutch trading posts in West Africa indicate that 25% died of diseases; it has been estimated that during the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic sent about 1,000,000 people into the world—almost all of them young males—of whom 600,000 never returned. As a result of this vulnerability, the mortality among Europeans in Africa, especially, was astonishingly high. The big advantage of the “Little Europes” of North and South America was that their microbes were familiar!

3) Another variable was technology—especially military technology, and the resilience it gave indigenous peoples. Related to this was the adaptability of native cultures: there was no mystery about the advantages of using European technologies to fend off Europeans sailing ships and European-style fortifications, and indigenous peoples were typically quick to adapt them. The crucial question was whether indigenous peoples could absorb and deploy the Europeans’ technologies against them—assuming, of course, they did not possess those technologies already before the Europeans arrived.

• Sultan Iskandar knew perfectly well that only European cannons would enable him to take the Portuguese fortress, and he amassed an artillery force of 2,000 pieces to reduce the Portuguese fortress at Melaka in 1629.
• In North America, native peoples quickly began acquiring European guns (beginning in the 1640s) from the Dutch (until 1664), the French, and the English.
• Sometimes the natives prevailed: in the 1660s, for example, the Portuguese tried to invade the kingdom of Kongo in southwestern Africa, but were repulsed by indigenous soldiers armed with Western muskets and grenades.

4) A fourth variable was sociological and refers to “depth of organization”—whether the societies that Europeans encountered were able to mobilize resources, including military resources, quickly and efficiently. Related to this was the ability of indigenous societies to coordinate resistance in a manner as well-regimented as the Europeans.

• Until the mid-eighteenth century, Europeans were simply no match for the sheer size of the Mughal army in central and northern India; only after the Mughal state had begun to crumble from within were the French and British able to score their famous defeats against the far larger forces arrayed against them.
• In Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate, established in 1600, proved exceptionally efficient, first at expelling Europeans the Empire and then, after the Exclusion Decree of 1635, of regulating European access to Japanese markets. Dutch traders were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan, and that only in Nagasaki, where Dutchmen were effectively imprisoned on a small artificial island called Deshima.

5) A fifth and final variable was political and involved the complicity of indigenous peoples in the Europeans’ success: time and again, European powers established a foothold only with the aid of indigenous allies.

• Sometimes they accomplished this by indigenous groups against on another; in Java, for example, the Dutch were able to hold their position, in part by playing one side against the other in a series of dynastic wars that tore up the island between 1704 and 1757 (the First, Second, and Third Wars of Javanese Succession, in 1704-1708, 1719-1723, and 1746-1757, respectively).
• Likewise, Hernan Cortes could not have prevailed over the Aztec Empire without massive support from peoples who saw in him an opportunity to rid themselves of Aztec rule—most notably the Tlaxcalans.
• By the same token, Europeans that did not acquire native allies often failed: in 1678-1681, for example, the Dutch tried to conquer the interior of Sri Lanka, but failed because they lacked reliable native allies.