Chapter 3. The Transatlantic Age
3.7 Summary
Spain was clearly the force with which to contend when it came to the European race across the Atlantic, although perspective is important in making this statement. Western Europe and especially northwestern Europe constituted the outermost fringe of what its people regarded as the “civilized world.” The Holy Lands, the Italian States, Constantinople, India, and even China were far more advanced technologically and economically. While the Europeans were keen to access the spice and silk stores of Asia, Asia was in no special hurry to build trade links with England, the Netherlands, or Portugal. Put simply, there was not much that western Europe had that Asia or even the eastern Mediterranean wanted. Relatively poor, often pummelled by wars, and riven by religious differences, western Europe was both highly motivated by the prospect of potential riches in the Americas and, at the same time, accustomed to competing bitterly with rivals from other polities.
The earliest expeditions from Spain inched their way out of the lower Gulf of Mexico into the Mississippi basin and across Florida before refocusing on the western flank of South America and the building of New Spain. Portugal’s focus remained on South America and the west coast of Africa. The lands north of Florida were largely open for probes sent out from England, the Low Countries, France, and even Scandinavia.
The model of imperialism that the Iberians introduced took advantage of existing populations and grafted onto it the absolutist, heavily militarized, and severely Catholic features of the European homelands. Many of the Indigenous societies they encountered were hierarchical and some were strongly influenced by priesthoods of their own. These coincidences played to Iberian strengths and the early colonies did not require large numbers of emigrants from Europe to create working societies anew. In this respect, in most of Iberian America the Spanish and Portuguese were not “colonists” in the biological sense so much as they were managers and rulers.
This model influenced the northwestern Europeans but it was one that they could not follow utterly. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the English relied on emigration to (re)populate the territories they claimed. France was reluctant to do the same and it lacked the resources and the will to build much more than a replacement society along the St. Lawrence and a few outposts in Acadia and Louisiana. Certainly there are echoes of the Iberian experience in the alliance between the French and the Wendat, but there were no singular Indigenous civilizations of the stature of Mexico which the French might dominate, let alone enslave. In short, “colonization” played out differently across the Western Hemisphere: it had different qualities and moved at varying speeds toward distinctive goals.
Set side by side, the French and the English colonies present substantial contrasts. They were, of course, he