Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [29]
The possession of an empire was, though, never a uniquely British activity. Portugual and Spain had already taken territory in the Americas and Africa, and the Dutch had done so in southern Africa, South America and the Indies. The Ottoman Empire ran across north Africa, up through the Middle East and back across the Balkans, and at one point had laid siege to Vienna. The French still ruled land in the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean. At one time or another the Danes held colonies in the north Atlantic, Africa, the Caribbean and India. Sweden had possessions in Africa and the Caribbean and for a while ran a slave trade. The Russians held land in North America into the last third of the nineteenth century and still rule over resentful people scattered across nine time zones. ‘Owning’ colonies was considered a mark of significance, as the miserable Belgian presence in Africa testified: Belgium was created only in 1830, and yet by the turn of the twentieth century its king had his own slave state in the Congo. The newly unified nation of Italy also demanded its own ‘empire’, an ambition which reached its strutting apotheosis when the king had himself declared emperor of Abyssinia in 1936. Germany, another late entrant to the competition to enhance yourself by abasing others, established itself in Africa and the south Pacific.
The motives for seizing land were complex – sometimes commercial, sometimes military, to satisfy greed or scientific curiosity, to spread religion, to free and to oppress, to procure labour and to dump it, for strategic security and because governments had been bounced into it. But, as we have noted, the single most powerful incentive to travel and colonize was money.
In the middle years of the sixteenth century it had been commonly believed in Venice that if an Englishman could not get enough currants to eat at Christmas-time he would kill himself. This supposedly uncontrollable appetite for dried-up grape skins and other Italian delicacies offered a tidy living to anyone with the means to carry them from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. In 1583, a group of London merchants negotiated a formal arrangement to exclude competition and give themselves a monopoly in the business. The Venice Company became one of the first of the chartered companies that did so much to create the British Empire and to set a model for modern capitalism. In so doing, they disproved the subsequent Victorian claim that ‘trade follows the flag’ – the suggestion that, once red-coated British soldiers had subdued some foreign land, British merchants created a market. In fact, it was very often the other way around. Many of the architects of imperial progress sat not in parliament, the Admiralty or the War Office but in the nation’s counting houses, and governments lived with the consequences of their decisions. The empire followed no organizing template: when the flag was planted it was often simply because some sharp-elbowed businessman had got there before anyone else. Untroubled by much political interference from home, those who were willing to take risks became not merely wealthy but immensely powerful. The illegitimate Highlander George Simpson, for example – the mid-nineteenth-century head of the Hudson’s Bay Company who came to be known as ‘the birchbark emperor’ – was certainly the most powerful man in Canada and even travelled to St Petersburg to try to persuade the Russians to lease him Alaska.
Chartered companies were not unique to Britain – there were French, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Portuguese, German and Swedish equivalents – and nor was England the first country to develop them (that distinction is claimed by a Swedish mining company). But they indisputably laid many of the foundations of the British Empire, and in some places did much more. The first phase of Britain’s foreign empire was driven by capitalism,