Late 17th century and the 18th century Europe was dominated by French culture, wealth, and military exploits. In the first of two epiosdes on the period between 1660 and 1715 (ish), we consider emerging themes in religion, colonialisation, trade – and the Age of reason
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Transcript
And hello again! If you are listening in real time, we have not spoken like this for a few months, because we are back, baby, back to the History of England. If you are not in real time – then ignore me for a minute you won’t have noticed anything, but for the rest of you thanks for waiting! I had a lovely break.
So we are due to start off with the Restoration in England, and of course across the Three Kingdoms, but it has becomes traditional here when 3 or more of us are gathered together, to first relate the Parrot Sketch, now not that, to offer you a framework in which to put all this parochial, insular English and British stuff – and so to give you a burst of European History, a short sharp shock. And so to kick off our restart, I offer you two episodes on European history.
Now, writing history obviously includes quite a bit of reading and research, as you’d expect, and in coming to this episode part of that research involved going back to the dusty rooms where my old scripts are kept, down in the deepest levels of the shed, presided over by the Archangel of the Books, a wizened, crabbed old archivist. Where we found the leather bound edition of last episode on European history. Together we performed the parrot sketch, and then blew the dust from its leather cover, and discoloured and crinkled parchment, and found it to be written almost exactly 4 years ago in August 2021. And so I discovered where we left off last time. Which wandered about the 1648 to 1660 period, at the end of the 30 years’ war but we went a bit further in the odd place.
So in this episode I am going to be reasonably unambitious, and take us through some of the themes during the reign of the figure who dominates European history over his long reign, from 1643 to 1715 – particularly Western European history anyway. Forgive me, there’ll inevitably be some overlap with the previous Europe episode.
It’s a tricky thing limiting myself to 1715, because there are some big, biiiig themes from the 18th century that we can’t really cover in full; in a way it’s much easier to do as a lot of general books do on European history, and cover the long 18th century, that sort of thing, which allows a lot of hand waving and generalisations. And everyone loves a generalisation – indeed, it’s impossible to get through a day without one. Try it if you don’t believe me.
But nevertheless, we do see all those themes emerging during 1660 to 1715, so why don’t I mention them here first of all – the big picture stuff? And then we can get on with politics, war, monarchs, formal and casual violence that sort of thing. OK? Are you sitting comfortably? In which case I shall begin.
When I think of the 18th century, which I do reasonably frequently but not every day as I do Ancient Rome, I think of Absolutism; the Sun King, Friedrick der Grosse and all that. I think of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason, I think of the agricultural and Industrial revolution and I think of the Enlightenment. I think of a change in public manners – the rise of politeness if you like. I do also think of war, a lot of armies marching about in pretty uniforms, I think of growing colonialisation, I think of an ever growing trade in enslaved people and an increasingly connected world.
All of these themes are present in our chosen period of today, 1660-1715 give or take. Some of them are no more than green shoots – such as the agricultural and industrial revolution for example. One of the things which forms part and parcel of those is population growth – but during our early period today, there’s very little sign of that yet. The population surge of 1550 to 1650 has largely come to an end, with the caveat of regional differences, and population is pretty stable; in England, it may even fall a little.
One thing I generally don’t think about very much, with respect to the 18th century, is religion. And there is a general theme of weariness with the wars of religion because there will be a new God, the God of Reason. But it’s a mistake to ignore religion really, because politically speaking it’s every bit as important as it ever was, as will become super clear as we concentrate on English and then British History and of course, as concerns Absolutist France. So, d’you know what? That’s where I am going to start. The Enlightenment and age of Reason can just jolly take its place in the line a bit longer.
I distinctly remember writing a long, long time ago, about Pope Boniface VIII, who may have been the last Pope to try to impose the Medieval concept of the universal temporal authority of the church, who crashed and burned at the hands of Philip IV of France, and died in 1303. Papal temporal authority now was largely confined to the states it controlled in Italy, but spiritually and culturally it remained vibrant throughout the Counter Reformation, and from 1620 at White Mountain, Europe had seen the tide of Protestantism first stopped, and reversed to some degree. In 1667, the Pope was Alexander VII, he was a contemporary of Bernini and his creative and cultural triumphs, and as a through-going child of the Counter Reformation the Pope would have agreed with Bernini’s quip, ‘better a bad Catholic than a good heretic’. Alongside him in Rome, he had a rival as an artistic patron, the ex-Queen Christina of Sweden, a celebrated catholic convert, who ran a salon at the Palazzo Riario which doubled up as a hot bed of political intrigue. Rome looked to have be a centre of the western cultural world still.
But appearances are deceptive, and the world Alexander surveyed would not have been a happy one from a papal point of view. We are at the start of a great transfer of economic and cultural power and leadership from southern Europe to North Western Europe, Rome’s greatest days were behind her, and the Papal states, like most of Italy, were undergoing a great economic downturn, which belied the extravagance of Bernini’s works.
The struggle against Protestantism had reached a stalemate by 1660. Politically, all sorts of conflicts took place with no reference whatsoever to the Pope, and indeed the major wars in Europe were no longer tied up with religion, even as an excuse, warfare is about dynastic supremacy now, with a dash of the clash of nations thrown in. There were no hopes however vague of Latin and orthodox religion re-embracing each other, and in the Balkans and Mediterranean the Ottoman Turks were in the ascendant. Long in decline, Venice was a shadow of the old powerhouse of the European economic world, holding onto its last stronghold in Crete. And in less than 20 years after Alexander’s death, in 1683, a massive Ottoman army would appear in front of the walls of Vienna once more.
The leading Catholic powers were all in disarray. The Emperor, who would meet that Ottoman army, Leopold I, ruled over a ravaged and dislocated realm. Not only would Germany take decades to recover from the 30 Years war, it was politically part of a Holy Roman Empire in name only. Its Electors increasingly pursued their own dynastic policies. From 1697 the Electors of Saxony ruled the state called Poland Lithuania. The Electors of Brandenburgh, the Hohenzollerns, ruled also as Kings of Prussia and we are at the time their Great Elector, who would start Prussia’s rise into the ranks of the Great Powers. From 1714, the Electors of Hanover will also rule an increasingly less peripheral Great Britain, and the Electors of Bavaria spent most of their time in alliance with France. Leopold and the Hapsburgs, therefore, now focus more on their Austrian lands, and looked East to the Ottomans and Russians, although their traditional tussle with the French remains also important – Hapsburg vs Bourbon now.
The Pope’s erstwhile right hand man, Spain, is also in the process of serious economic decline, certainly no longer capable of furthering any international catholic reconquest; it will soon be at the centre of a super violent, international succession crisis with the war of Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714, and under its subsequent Bourbon rulers will lose any right, despite some lingering pretensions, to being a great power. All of this means that the policy of the Catholic church is no longer to recover its lost lands; the focus now will be missionary work in the colonial world.
Though we haven’t mentioned France, which on the one hand will become more universally Catholic, and as per the title of this episode it’s Catholic king will lead the state whose cultural, economic and military power will dominate Europe. So Da Daa! Happy Papal days are here again.
But are they? Nope, no they are not. Louis XIV will base his whole reign around embedding the central and absolute power of the French crown, and he saw the Pope as little more than an Italian Prince – afterall, the Popes were universally Italian all the way from the mid 16th century to 1978. So the long standing policy of Gallicism will reach its peak under his hand. Gallicism meant that the French church was essentially under the control of the French king, not just in temporal matters but spiritual matters too. The French Bishops in Council declared themselves superior in authority to the Pope.
So if the attempt to re-create the religious unity of Europe was dead, in either Protestant or catholic mode, does that mean that toleration had ridden into town? Not really, sad to say. There are very few examples of states with any real degree of religious toleration – the rule was that the religion of the ruler defined the religion of their people. In many kingdoms, that meant the church would effectively become an agent of the state, whether Protestant or Catholic, and an arm of its policy and governance. This applied to places like the German states, Sweden, Spain and the Hapsburg Empire as well as France. While there are fewer violent programs of persecution, members of the relevant minority religious group suffer disabilities of varying severity; in England, Sweden and Denmark members of the Catholic religion were barred from public office, and the same occurred in reverse in Catholic countries – Poland Lithuania, once heterodox and a beacon of religious plurality, banned all non Catholics from the Diet in 1718.
And there are some example of mass state violence. The most well-known is the extraordinary programme of persecution against French protestants which culminated in the forced conversion or expulsion of all Huguenots in 1685; in 1731 20,000 protestants were forced to leave Salzburg; in the 1650s the Patriarch Nikon introduced reforms in the Russian Orthodox church, which were rejected by many in Russia – who would become known as the Old Believers. That policy led to waves of religious persecution including torture, death and forced relocations in the 1660s, and lead to a rift that would still be troubling the Romanovs in the 19th century. So there’s that. Equally there are some few examples of more genuine formal toleration – in some German cities, and primarily in the Netherlands – though even there the Reformed Church was the official state church.
But it’s also true to say that a spirit of rationalism begins to come to the fore, particularly in England, the idea that Reason should be the main guide to social rules. And so while practising the wrong religion could still be a serious disadvantage, the old days of violent persecution mostly recedes. England again is a good example; the Clarendon Code rigorously tries to re-impose uniformity in 1662 but is not prepared to physically persecute dissenters; the Toleration Acts that finally appear in 1689 still only formally apply to protestant dissenters and still disbar them from public office, but its clear no one will stop dissenters and Catholics from practising their religion. And as long as you turn up at an Anglican church every now and then, the world’s your lobster anyway. None of that means religion is less important in the daily lives and minds of the people of Europe in our period. This is a period of great strides forward in the Scientific revolution – but most of those involved assumed that their work would illuminate the work of God, not disprove her existence. Though it’s also true that there is a growing strand of atheism and secularism that would appear, though a little later; the natural Philosopher Denis Diderot later in the 18th century would famously say that
Man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest
But look, he was having a bad day when he wrote that, locked himself out of his house or some such.
The historian Norman Davis asserts that the growth of rationalism was focussed on those countries where both Catholic, Protestant and Non Conformist communities existed, whose ideas and world views set up a clash of ideas; but where those states at the same time possessed a measure of religious toleration, so that a rational dialogue was possible. He pointed at past times in Poland Lithuania, where, until things changed in our period, Jesuits mixed with orthodox, jews and radical sects; he pointed at the Cantons of Switzerland, at Scotland and England where a broad Anglican tradition of Latitudinarianism, or a broad church you might say, finally takes over once the spleen of the Clarendon Code was exhausted. But above all, he pointed at the Netherlands. The Netherlands continued its tradition as being the destination site for fleeing radical thinkers, for being the obvious place to go and print and publish that unpopular thesis that would get you in trouble back home, where ever home might be. John Locke would be an example.
But changing in social manners and mores increasingly meant that the ferocity of the religious dogma of the revolutionary period became anathema – embarrassing almost. The idea of violent ‘enthusiasms’ as the phrase went, such enthusiasms were now derided and shunned; so on a personal level, it is simply considered rude in polite society to start spitting feathers about peoples’ personal religious beliefs, it’s so awfully passe, darling did you hear that dreadful man?! Of course such rules don’t apply to everything; John Bunyan will write Pilgrims Progress for example, but most of ‘polite society’ as it became known, rejected the norms of taste and conduct religion had tried to impose during the Commonwealth; the story of Restoration theatre and the behaviour of Charles II and his court reflected a Europe wide sharp decline in moral restraints, while increased artistic sensitivity has also caused the period to be called the Age of Elegance. That same freedom in morality and art gave rise to greater intellectual tolerance too, especially in north Western Europe, which brings us, as night follows day, to the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason.
Let me just give a very brief survey of what I mean by The Enlightenment, capital T capital E and so on, so we know what we are talking about here. And also so that you can correct me! So, the roots of the enlightenment are usually sought in the Rennaissance, and the key concept of the word itself tracked to a phrase, the ‘natural light of reason’ to one of Melancthon’s works in 1559, de lege naturale. Together with the rational method of Descartes, who died in 1650, it formed the key philosophy behind it. If I had the knowledge and talent I’d go into all these reams of philosophers and what they said. Sadly, that’s beyond me, and luckily for me beyond scope of this episode, but as far as I understand it, the concept is that the scientific method of observation and deduction, such as Francis Bacon had talked about, should be applied to human affairs too. At the heart of the Enlightenment therefore was the theory of knowledge – how we know what we know, and here I can quote Bacon, in 1597, “ipsa scientia potestas est” – “knowledge itself is power”. I always wondered where that one came from, and now I know. Isn’t doing podcasts great?!
Worshipping a new God, the God of Reason, did not normally mean rejecting the Christian God, but it might suggest that God was not the proper subject of such methods of enquiry; unlike the logic of the old scholasticism, that the nature of God was not susceptible to reason. And instead we might turn to Alexander Pope, who lived 1688 to 1744, and his declaration
Know then thyself, presume not God to Scan
The proper study of mankind is man
The belief was that humankind, as well as science and the natural world, was susceptible to Reason, which could uncover the rules that underlaid the apparent chaos, order underlying it all, and that produced a new set of approaches in the arts as well. A notion became adopted that applying clear rules, and symmetrical, structured patterns would produce order, and that order was beautiful – and this was the real spirit of Classicism. And in a way I can see what they mean; I tend to find neo classical architecture a bit derivative and often pompous, but there’s something deeply satisfying about the symmetry of the Georgian townhouse for example.
It might be thought that I am being a little previous by introducing the Enlightenment this early in the chronology; isn’t this about all French Philosophers, later in the 18th century? And originally historians very much focussed on those French origins, centred around opposition to church and championing of science, possibly including the Scot David Hume from the 1740s. And of course those great names of French political philosophy – Montesqieu writing from the 1730s, Voltaire and Rousseau writing in the second half of the 18th century.
But that focus on the impact on political thought, and particularly on the later 18th century revolutions, in Haiti, America and France, actually lead further backwards to the ideas of Natural Rights, and to John Locke who lived from 1632 to 1704, and who will certainly appear soon in these pages. Though of course, you and I know that it should really reach further back even than that – to the revolutionaries and republicans who developed the Agreement of the People with its concepts of Natural Rights, to Overton, Walwyn and the Levellers. Probably proper historians know a lot of stuff I don’t and why that’s a false trail, so I am happy to be enlightened – pun intended.
More recently, I am told there are considered to be broadly two different streams of thought through the Enlightenment thinkers; the radicals, like Diderot and Spinoza, who championed individual freedoms, equal rights and the eradication of traditional religious structures. And the other theme, led by moderates such as Locke, Voltaire and Hume who would recommend evolution, working through existing social structures. Historians also stress what seems obvious; that the development of thought was not just a French affair, it was deeply international and formed through constant interaction with thinkers across national boundaries, even if centred in Western Europe.
That same interaction and belief in reason was at the heart of the Scientific Revolution which is such a feature of our period too, and of course beyond. Building on the work in the protectorate of Boyle, Hooke and others, this is the time of Newton’s work, immediately recognised for its world changing genius. It’s the time also of Leibnitz, who developed calculus at the very same time, and whose endless optimism Voltaire mocked in Candide, with Pangloss’ ironic cry, the ’best of all possible worlds’. The optimism of Rationalism, that everything in the world could be understood, improved, remade, transformed is one of the most remarkable thing about our period and the whole 18th century. There’s a thoroughly invigorating, growing feeling that anything was possible.
Now it’s very much emphasised that the Scientific Revolution which made such a leap forward from the 1650s lay on very deep foundations, on the shoulders of those giants Newton spoke about who stretched back to the Arabic world and Asia, as well as those of blokes like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Bacon. And that the courage to challenge the old certainties of Aristotle and Ptolemy, lain the emergence of a vibrant, active shared community of debate, the Republic of Letters as it has been caused. Natural philosophers corresponded constantly, shared their findings, pushed each other to develop and defend their ideas and observations.
That spirit of enquiry ran through the expanding and increasingly wealthy ranks of elite society, from which emerges Jurgen Habermas’ much debated, pruned and amended idea of the Public Sphere, a place where debate, rational debate, could be held without an immediate fear of destruction – though there are without doubts limits to what you could say, depending on where you were. At the heart of the achievements of the age was enquiry, information, knowledge and the ability to share it through a mass of publications and shared spaces. Journals appear like the Tatler in 1709 and the Spectator in 1712; the first printed newspaper had appeared in Germany in 1605 – and so on.
And I should mention the encyclopaedia, which appears in our period, once such an important part of every family bookshelf. There had been compendia of knowledge in the middle ages but they’d fallen out of fashion. The father of the modern version is thought to be a French Huguenot called Pierre Bayle, one of those who fled religious persecution to the Netherlands in 1681, and created his dictionnaire historique et critique published in Rotterdam in 1697. In England there was a Lexicon by John Harris in 1704, and the Cyclopedia by Ephraim Chambers. But there are examples in various countries – knowing stuff was now both cool and clever. In France Diderot did the monster of 17 volumes between 1751 and 1765; the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. Almanacs of facts and knowledge and useful stuff weren’t new, but were all the rage in the later 17th century; I remember Rebecca Rideal, the author of a book on the Great Fire of London, bringing one in to our course way back, and rather amazing it was too.
The term ‘Republic of Letters’ was invented in Italy and referred to all those sharing knowledge through written and oral means. This is the time when Coffeehouse culture goes bananas – we’ve already heard of its expansion under the Protectorate in England under the Commonwealth; there were 600 in Paris by 1750.
It’s a time when the Virtuosi collect what they call Cabinets of Curiosity – which would be called national History museums now, probably, but people collected madly at home, and showed their wonders and oddities off to visitors. Learned societies and academies were all the rage; the Academie Francaise had been founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the Royal Society in London in 1660, and similar academies were founded in Paris, Rome and Florence. The aforesaid Leibnitz founded The Academy of Science in Berlin in 1700 with the Patronage of the Electress Sophie Charlotte; the Royal Dublin Society would be founded in 1731, to apply learning to practical problems. Just like our Samuel Hartlib and his network under the Protectorate. The academy of Freemasons was probably possibly perhaps founded in London, to discuss politics, science and learning.
The names around a lot of this are all very male, a function of lack of education provided for women, access, and the general misogyny of the time. The first woman to be elected to the Academie Francaise occurred in – any guesses? No? 1978. So there’s that. But many women were very much involved in this new Rationalism and search for Improvement, capital I, and Progress, capital P; and it did give elite women at least a role, through the development of the Salon from the 17th century. The salonniere, the hostess, was the general of the whole event, which was a serious affair; she would assemble the most glittering of guests, prepare the program of singing, poetry readings, dramatic productions, set the tone as serious or light. She needed to be convincing, authoritative, preparing herself before by reading and practicing letter-writing and conversational skills.
Rationalism would very much be applied to the economy too, where the word ‘Improvement’ would become a mantra; and not always in a good way. Development in industry and agriculture would certainly make Europe richer; but many people would be hurt on the way, and as normal it’s the poor and their traditional ways of life that suffer. Reading Tom Devine’s work when doing my shedcast the History of Scotland made me aware that it was the spirit of improvement among leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment that justified the changes made by Scottish Landlords that would result in the Highland clearances and the end of the Cottar in the lowlands. But then economic change was very uneven, across Europe. Agricultural production won’t really improve dramatically everywhere until mechanisation begins to be common, much later in the 18th century; though Jethro Tull famously of course, invented the horse drawn seed drill in 1701 which is seen as the father of agricultural machinery; but it was complicated and expensive and not widely used. However, in our period, in the Netherlands and England, changes such as crop rotation, selective breeding and new crops, meant that agricultural labourers produced between 50% and 175% more per head than farmers elsewhere.
People like Turnip Townshend often get the headlines in improved agriculture, but part of the reasons for Dutch and English success was the innovation by entrepreneurial tenant farmers. The model was not commonly replicated elsewhere. In Eastern Europe, Serfdom became progressively more onerous, especially in Russia; Aristocratic Russians held vast estates, and measured their resource on the number of serfs they controlled, who were tied entirely to the land. Because of the vast size of their estates they were little bothered by improving productivity, because scale still gave them a big surplus to sell and fund their lifestyle. Spanish landlords were also not very interested in innovation, and even less interested in trade, which for an aristocrat there was a 4 letter word. And in both Spain and France, the exclusion of church and nobility from taxation meant a crushing burden on the peasantry, who spent most of their time concentrating on not dying, rather than innovating.
Another aspect of the English and Dutch rural economies was cottage industry. Rural industry was a part of many regions of Europe, but in England and The Netherlands the growth and concentration was exceptional. Normally, rural crafts such as weaving were ‘by-employment’, employment to supplement income in quiet periods like winter, but in some areas it became full time, and highly integrated, with merchants organising and collecting work from complete villages and regions, and taking them to be worked up and marketed. The spread of this proto industrialisation as it has been termed, had the additional effect of encouraging the proletarianization of sections of society. There were more and more landless labourers, entirely dependant on industry – which for employers meant a flexible labour market. It also generated a concentration of capital, for re-investment in manufactories – the ancestors of factory production gathering workers and processes together under one roof. Production would start to move to towns and cities, which I guess is what we are used to, but in the earlier 18th century rural production is much more important; in Silesia in 1740, 80% of linen production was rural.
Into this came the increasing impact of colonial trade. An example is the increasing imports from the area around Kerala in India, of light cotton garments, which were easy to print with bright colours, and of course cotton was a triumph in hotter countries. It often had a serious impact on local woollen trade; so much so that printed calico imports were banned into England in 1700, and there were riots in 1719. Most of the Asian trade, especially the traditional spice trade, was now dominated by the Dutch East India company the VOC. They had been given the right to wage war, and they did, capturing Jakata in 1619, and carrying on warfare in small East Indian states; by 1680 the Dutch controlled most of the Islands around Jakata, or Batavia as it was called at the time, and they also dominated the carrying trade between China, India and Japan. Dutch colonies contained a mix of populations, among whom the Dutch made up a fairly small proportion, and relied heavily on slavery; enslaved people made up between one-third and two-thirds of the population in Dutch East Indian colonies. Chinese merchants also imported indentured labourers on harsh terms; this is where the term, Coolie appeared, now of course considered derogatory. The industry they worked in was sugar production; a trade that would collapse as Brazilian sugar flooded the market from the 1740s.
Dutch domination of the Spice islands forced the English East Indian Company to concentrate on India and the calico trade; the Dutch would later regret their over concentration on spices, as prices began to fall, and the textile trade took off. The EIC in our period was very much an also ran in the minds of the fabulously rich Mughal Emperors, and had been continuously hamstrung by trading something no one really wanted in India – nice warm woolly pullies and things. The EIC spent most of their time trying to get hold of a privileged trading licence; but were mainly restricted to Bombay; so they tried to force the issue militarily. And were given a kicking in 1686. But after some grovelling – well quite a lot of grovelling actually – the EIC managed to start up again, mainly from East India, from Madras and Calcutta, and making good money from the calico trade. One of the reasons for that, alongside the obvious, of enthusiastic consumer demand, was that the EIC followed a very private enterprise model. Local agents were allowed to develop their own businesses and lines, and make their own little trading empires. The Dutch did not allow that, in favour of central direction; and French colonisation was largely state funded and driven, and therefore could be slower and more cumbersome.
Anyway, the EIC’s trade flourished, until internal weaknesses in the Mughal states allowed them to win their farman in 1719 – their trading licence. From which state they will go from strength to strength. Or to considerably too much strength, with hindsight.
The other most important colonial areas in the late 17th and early 18th century were of course the Caribbean, and the enslavement that went along with it. As you will all know, it’s a hideous history. Enslavement has been a part of history since Human history began and is still with us, much has also been written about the centuries of North African enslavement. But in this period, enslavement is industrialised, to unimaginable proportions. And the English, and later British, will come to play a central part in it.
By the middle of the 17th century, the Spanish had basically given up the attempt to keep everyone else out of the Caribbean, and a number of states set up colonies on islands or the North coast of South America; England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and even the tiny Baltic duchy of Courland, in Latvia. The sovereignty of many colonies changed frequently; the tiny island of St. Martin, for example, changed hands at least sixteen times before it was finally divided between the Dutch and the French. For a while the Dutch even managed to capture much of Brazil from the Portuguese, until thrown out by a local revolt.
From the middle of the 17th century, many of the Caribbean islands and Brazil went through a similar transformation; from tobacco and other crops using indentured labour from Europe, to the wholesale importation of enslaved Africans producing sugar, coffee and tobacco on large plantations. Sugar could only be profitably produced by large scale production, which meant plantations increasingly consolidated; the original indentured labour often either sold up and returned home, or eked out a living on the margins, fishing and small scale farming, and usually dirt poor; Redlegs they became known, for obvious reasons. Similar reason to the American Redneck I assume.
By the 18th century, enslaved populations often vastly outnumbered western people, and the numbers grew and grew. It’s estimated that about 75,000 slaves left Africa for the Americas before 1580, and during the same period, around 225,000 people left Europe, mostly from Spain and Portugal. From 1580 to 1700, the proportions had all changed; something a million people left Europe for the Americas, while a million and a half to two million people were taken from Africa. Taken together across the whole 18th century, around 40 percent of the slaves went to Brazil, another 40 percent to the Caribbean, and the remaining 20 percent to the rest of the Americas, of which about 4 percent went to North America. This is the start of the infamous triangular trade, of manufactured goods in Europe to West Africa, to buy the enslaved from African kingdoms, to transport to the Caribbean, where goods where loaded for Europe. It’s been pointed out though that it’s too simple a model really, however useful and easy to understand, with multiple lines of trade, routes and carriers. For example, as the Caribbean islands focussed more and more ruthlessly on sugar, much of the food for those enslaved by the English, and indeed British, was imported from the American colonies. The enslaved were transported by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and by English, French, Dutch and even Danish in the 18th. Obviously we’ll talk more about English role as we get to it in the main series, but with the foundation of the Royal Africa Company by Charles II, English involvement grew, and by 1690 the English were the largest single carrier and trader.
The laws governing the enslaved varied, but Spanish, French and Dutch colonies tended to be based on the Roman Law they used back home, which referenced slavery of course, and in theory mean slaves could not be killed and could buy their freedom – and slaves in the Spanish Americas were allowed to buy their freedom from their masters as long as they paid a fair price, if fair be the right word. In the British colonies, Common Law applied, and common law didn’t recognise slavery. So British colonies made up their own law.
The Barbados slave code of 1661 was the first, and it established strict and complete racial separation between Black and white, and established the principle of complete chattel slavery, people who were denied any basic human right or existence in law. The code spread through the British Islands and into North American Colonies – a group of planters for example left Barbados in the 1670s and set up shop in Carolina, bringing the enslaved with them. The codes were updated and made yet harsher in 1688, the date of the Glorious Revolution, and in 1691. The codes obsessed about the need to stop slave revolts, and detailed vicious punishment for transgression. None the less, slave revolts there were, and escaped slaves living in the inaccessible margins of islands were called Maroons, who figured highly in slave revolts. Fear was everywhere, sensational stories of horror stalked the planters minds.
The French approach was centralisation and state control of colonisation, and in 1685 Louis XIV established the Code Noir, the law governing the colonies and enslaved populations. This was the year of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and in that spirit it stipulated that Catholicism was the only religion allowed; it also forbade the presence of Jews. It was no less harsh in its fear of slave revolt, and the freedom to inflict the vicious punishment, but it did allow slaves and their children to be freed; which might sometimes happen for the children of enslaved women and white planters. And so slowly a population of free black and mixed race grew; it’s thought that the population of the French Caribbean in 1789 included about 56,000 whites, perhaps as many as 700,000 enslaved, and 23,000 free blacks and persons of mixed ancestry
The Free black and mixed Race families adopted French customs and clothes. But they were not welcomed by the planters, and in the late 18th century laws would be passed restricting their economic status.
In the 1660s, a new wave of colonies were founded in North America, and since many of them were English, of course we’ll come back to them at some point, but this is when New York makes absolutely the right, freely taken and thoroughly sensible decision to stop being New Amsterdam – Welcome, welcome. New colonies are set up in South Carolina, and Georgia, and were hoped to form a buffer between Virginia and Florida – I have no idea if that continues to be an important part of their roles. At the time, Florida was still Spanish, of course, inexplicably. In 1682, the Quaker Willian Penn was given permission to sail the ocean Blue – or at least he was granted a charter for Pennsylvania.
In 1699 meanwhile, the French started a new colony in Louisiana, but Louis XIV was thoroughly fromaged off with the slow progress of colonisation in Canada and in 1663 brought all of New France under direct royal control. He may well have seen it as an opportunity to try out a few absolutist ideas – so there was a governor, but each province had its own sub governor, and Intendants – royal government agents. But things didn’t rightly flourish; most of the immigrants were unemployed young men, who did their thing and then went home. While the English colonies attracted women and families too; and so population grew. At one stage in the 1660s the French crown directly recruited young women and paid for their passage – about eight hundred of these filles du roi did emmigrate. But Colbert, Louis trusty finance minister thought this was a rubbish idea; in the 17th and 18th century world, population was thought to define a nation’s strength and vigour. “It would not be wise to depopulate the kingdom in order to populate Canada,” he said – and the programme was stopped. A policy of francisation was undertaken instead – to assimilate native American populations, and make them French.
Right, I feel we have done a sort of general survey of the main themes of the late 17th century and early 18th century Europe, and in fact we have been a little naughty at places; many of these themes, of course spread right across the 18th century and even beyond. Just to recap, then. We have spoken of religion, of how the great struggle between Protestant and Catholic had reached an impasse, and with two major exceptions in France and Russia, those mass violent persecutions have largely become passe. Genuine toleration is rare, but a reluctant looking away becoming more common; but religion though is no less important to daily life.
We have spoken about a lot of change that can be lumped under a great big banner called the Age of reason; a search for the rational which lead to new ideas in a search for Enlightenment, to a new love of order, a search for rules that govern man and nature – the Scientific Revolution, order in neo classical art. We have talked, very briefly about economic change, the start of something new in the Netherland and England which looks promising. Wee have talked of colonisation and enslavement.
So I think we ought to start talking about what you really came for – probably. You want to hear about the clash of nations, the struggle for dynastic supremacy – you want to hear about war, battle, kings and queens & stuff. And you want to get on to the title of these episodes – the age of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Or at least I hope you do, because that’s what we are going to get. But you are going to get it in the next episode, I almost said you are going to get it in the next life, force of habit, in the next episode, and in the words Oliver Newton John – let’s get political.
