Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Uses and Abuses of Nationalism and Imperialism

In 1648, more than 150 years after the discovery of the Indies, and of America, the Treaty of Westphalia was finally concluded. This brought to an end the Thirty Years War, when Protestant and Catholic nations had fought themselves to a standstill over how to interpret God’s intentions. They agreed that, from now on, each state would be left free to pursue its own inclination. So much blood had been shed, for ideas that could never be settled one way or the other, that a ‘toleration of exhaustion’ seemed the only way forward.¹

However, it was impossible to avoid the fact that there were several uncomfortable consequences which followed from this new state of affairs. For one, the papacy was sidelined; Spain and Portugal lost power, and the centre of gravity of Europe moved north, to France, England and the newly independent United Netherlands.² But by now it had become clear that the globe was bigger, more varied and more recalcitrant than the first explorers had anticipated and this brought about a change in sensitivity in the northern nations, whose very existence had been confirmed by the outcome of the Thirty Years War. Instead of the outright conquest of other peoples, which had brought Spain such vilification for its treatment of the American ‘Indians’, the northern nations were more interested in trade and commerce. (Only around a quarter of the Spanish and Portuguese migrants to pre-independence Latin America were women, whereas British settlers in North America were encouraged to bring their wives and children. As a result, far fewer British migrants took sexual partners from the indigenous population.) This change in feeling, between the early ‘Catholic’ attitude and the later ‘Protestant’ one, had a great deal to do with the fact that new mercantile classes were replacing the traditional military and landowning aristocracies as the main political force. There was thus an intellectual and moral basis in this development: commerce was believed to be a civilising and humanising force, for both parties. ‘Commerce was not simply the exchange of goods, it involved contact and tolerance.’

³

Crucial here were the Protestant countries, Britain and Holland. Each had a strong tradition of trading and, as countries which had achieved religious tolerance at some cost, they had no wish to inflict the same sin on the populations they found in distant lands. If they could, they would rescue these ‘primitives’ from paganism, as a subsidiary aim of trading, but they would not use force.⁴

If anything, Britain was now more important in this regard than Holland. Britain had her American colonies and, after the Seven Years War with France, she had emerged as the most powerful of the maritime nations. But the seven-year campaign had driven her into massive debt and it was her attempt to make good her financial losses, through taxation of the American colonies, combined with the government’s flat refusal to allow these colonies any direct representation in Parliament, that finally brought on the War of Independence (though the levels of taxation in the American colonies were quite low compared with those in Britain).⁵ This was not a foregone conclusion but, at the same time, for many people, in Britain and elsewhere, it was only too clear that colonisation could never work in the long run. Experience was to show that either the colonies became dependent, and then a drain, on the metropolitan countries or, once they showed signs of becoming economically self-sufficient, they wanted to go their own way. One of Adam Smith’s most pertinent predictions was that free Americans would prove better trading partners than as colonised subjects. Niall Ferguson says that there is good reason to believe that by 1770 New Englanders were ‘about the wealthiest people in the world’.