GENERAL
NEWS
The Future o f the Past
An Agenda for the H istory o f European Expansion The following lecture was read at the seminar ‘Expansion and Reaction’: a reappraisal held on 30 September 1995, to mark the occasion o f the retirement o f Professor H.L. Wesseling as director o f the Institute for the History o f European Expansion (IGEER). Professor Wesseling is now the director o f the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Wassenaar. Professor P.C. Emmer has succeeded Professor Wesseling as Director o f IGEER. By P . C . E m m e r
have come a M l I j l longw ay.lt Ill'll seems only a fill I few years ago that the histo ry of the expansion of Europe was used mainly in order to either defend or attack. During the 1940s and 1950s, historians were recruited to defend the thesis that decolonization was wrong and that the expansion of Europe had bestowed many bene fits on the colonial world. In fact, in Portugal the demand for such par tisan overseas history still existed as recently as the middle of the 1970s. On the other hand, there was an increasing number of historians, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, who had joined ranks with anti-colonial groups and who used the history of Euro pean expansion in order to con struct a colonial past full of m ur der, rape, exploitation, and nega tive development, ‘coined’ under development.
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In many ways, the Leiden Centre and later Institute - for the History of European Expansion has escaped this ideological divide by concen trating on comparative themes such as colonial administrations, over seas trading companies, colonialism
and racism, and the like. Neverthe less, the term ‘European expansion’ has sometimes been held against us as if it were a triumphalist term rather than a descriptive one. The printed result of the efforts of the Institute for the History of European Expansion can be divided into three categories: i) a series of 9 volumes on Comparative Themes in Overseas History; ii) a journal Itinerario, with a comparative approach to overseas history; and iii) a series cal led Intercontmenta which has mainly been the vehicle for edited source publications with a special focus on the participation of the Dutch in the process of the expansion of Eu rope. Although our Institute may have been unique in Europe in that it did not concentrate on the overseas experience of a single European country, in the USA a similar com parative approach has been devel oped under the name o f‘World His tory’. There are two reasons under lying this development. First of all it could be argued that ‘Europe’ as such is an American concept, becau se only in the US was it possible and sometimes necessary to view Europe as a whole, an equation which was transferred to Europe’s overseas experience. Another stimulus to the developing of a comparative appro ach to Europe's expansion overseas
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was the fact that the population of US has grown increasingly aware of the fact that not all their roots are European. The teaching of Europe an history has now been incorporat ed into surveys of many ‘world civi lizations’, lending the expansion of Europe importance as a tool to link the history of various continents. This approach has already become part and parcel of publication pro grammes of several history textbook publishers, in addition to which a Journal of World History has been established, which already has won a prize. Does all this indicate that our Institute has outlived itself? Has the concept ‘the expansion of Euro pe and the reactions to it’ lost its scientific basis? Should we accept the fact that ‘World History’ is the new name of the game or is it a name for a new game and does ‘the expansion of Europe still constitute a field study in its own right? The answer must be yes - the con cept - ‘expansion and reaction is limited in time, it covers only devel opments in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the New World, which are linked to the expansion of Europe. In other words: large periods of the history of these continents are not of inter est to the historian o f‘expansion and reaction’, while they are indeed part o f‘World History’. A second difference between Expansion History and World His tory is situated in thematic appro ach. The history of China and Amer indian America might encompass a wealth of interesting topics, such as state formation or agricultural sys tems, which a World Historian would be delighted to use for a comparison with Western agricul ture. The expansion historian, however, is mainly interested in Chinese or Amerindian formation and agri culture - or state formation and agriculture in Europe for that mat ter - in as far as these institutions were affected by the expansion of Europe. So, if World History and History of Expansion and Reaction are to re main separate entities, which new developments can we indicate as promising avenues for future re search? As far as the Atlantic region is concerned, I would propose three topics: a demographic, a cultural, and an economic one. Let me start with the recent developments in demography. In the past we wrongly assumed that all men (and women) were born equal and would react similarly to
disease, malnutrition, droughts and relocation. The study of European expansion has refuted this concept. Europeans reacted differently to certain diseases than did Amerindi ans or Africans. The best way of testing this issue is by studying two ethnic groups, who moved or were relocated to the same new environ ment overseas. We have discovered that Europeans died much more rapidly in the tropical parts of the New World than they did at home, but that Europeans died even at a greater rate in the tropical parts of Africa. By the same token we have discovered that Africans and Euro peans died less frequently in the non-tropical parts of the New World as well as in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Plants and Seed Imperialism There is still a lot to be done in this domain as we now have come to terms with the idea that the expansion of Europe was not made possible only by technological superiority, by economic develop ment or by social causes, but the fact that the Europeans were bio logically speaking better endowed to relocate than were other ethnici ties and the same can even be said about plants and animals from Eu rope also played a role in this. The documents of the colonial adminis tration, in particular after 1800, contain a wealth of material which will give us new insights into the demography of those who moved because of the expansion of Europe, but also about the resident popula tions, i.e. via military records. I would like to add that some of the most important work of the eco nomic historian Robert Fogel deals with the timing of the ‘adolescent spurt’ in several population groups around the globe and that this hel ped him to win the Nobel Prize. In addition to disease, immunity, and death I would argue that the history of the expansion of Europe is an excellent testing ground for detecting cultural differences be tween the various ethnicities. As in the case of the ‘plants and seed im perialism’, it would be best if and when we were able to study two dif ferent ethnic groups, who travelled under the same conditions to the same overseas destination and who developed in different ways, once these two groups had arrived. This type of research, again, goes against the post-WW II assumption that everybody is equal, the US and Israel have been confronted by the effects of the cultural differences between their immigrants, and Europe seems to be standing on the thresh
old of becoming interested in this problem. In view of that, the experi ence of the various migrant groups within the expansion of Europe can be used to study these differences and their effects. In fact, next year our Institute hopes to submit a re search proposal in order to explain the demographic and cultural dif ferences between migrant labourers from China and Java. The last topic, which I would like to address is that of unequal eco nomic growth. Again a topic that seems to attract considerable atten tion today in view of the important differences in economic prospects between the various regions in Eu rope and in Asia and Africa. During the first phase of the expansion of Europe we can provide a perfect example of such differing results between regions by discussing the disparities between the first and the second Atlantic system. The first Iberian system had almost the same dimensions as that of northwestern Europe: it had trade settlements, plantation colonies, and settlement colonies. Domestically, on the eve of the period of expansion, Spain and Portugal did not deviate signifi cantly from the countries in north west Europe; in fact, around 1500 Spain and Portugal may have been ahead of their northern neighbours in economic development. As we all know the economic, technological, cultural, and demo graphic development within the two expansion systems unfolded very differently. On both sides of the Atlantic the Iberian system showed much slower growth than did the second system. Why was that? My feeling is that we have a good answers for the unique growth of the second system, but that the ins and outs of the Iberian system still remain to be uncovered. If we assume for a moment that southern Europe today faces similar challeng es by becoming part of the Europe an Union as they did when expand ing around the globe, we need to know fast why they failed the first time around. ^
I n s t i t u t e fo r t h e H i s t o r y of E u r o p e a n E x p an s io n (IGEER)
University of Leiden P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands E-mail: Emmer@Rullet.LeidenUniv.NL
Summer 1996
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