The Pursuit of Glory, page 13
Tramping the roads of France in search of work must have been as depressing as it was demanding. How much more so was a final form of migration–to the world outside Europe. A long, arduous sea journey took the intrepid emigrant to an uncertain future in a distant land about which very little could be known. Yet large numbers crossed the Atlantic during this period. Between 1630 and 1700 about 378,000 inhabitants of the British Isles went to North America. The pace slackened during the more stable and prosperous century that followed, but, even so, another quarter of a million had left by 1800. It is believed that 40,000 Highlanders emigrated following the failure of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. They were joined by a large number of Germans, variously estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000. By 1800 it appears that a third of Pennsylvania’s population was German by origin. There were repeated waves of emigration from the Iberian Peninsula to southern and central America, although the figures are very approximate. The great Prussian scientist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt estimated in 1800 that Spanish America contained a total population of 16,900,000, of whom 3,200,000 were whites but only 150,000 were peninsulares, i.e. first generation Spaniards. In fact, according to John Lynch, the real figure was much lower, somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000. Even in Mexico, to which there had been the greatest emigration, there were only about 14,000 peninsulares in a total population of 6,000,000, of whom 1,000,000 were white. Around a quarter of a million Dutch also emigrated in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly to south-east Asia.
Only the French seem to have been reluctant to leave Europe. They had established a footing in North America as early as 1535, but a hundred years later there were only sixty-five French inhabitants of Quebec and one hundred more elsewhere in Canada. Under the energetic direction of Colbert, the pace picked up during the middle decades of the century, with the result that there were 12,000 permanent settlers in North America by the 1680s. Yet the total number of emigrants for the period 1600–1730 amounted to just 27,000. Additional population pressure from the third quarter of the eighteenth century might have led to a rapid increase, but in 1759 the French were defeated at Quebec by General Wolfe and lost Canada to the British. It was a defeat which ensured that English, not French, would become the world language and may also have helped to destabilize politics inside France. The typical emigrant was young, male and, by definition, alienated from conditions in the old country. For example, on 12 May 1785, John Dunlap, who had been responsible for the printing of the Declaration of Independence, wrote to his brother-in-law in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, extolling the advantages of the New World: ‘People with a family advanced in life find great difficulties in emigration, but the young men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick as possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America.’ So it might be speculated that the British exported their dissidents and so suffered their revolution three thousand miles away from home in the shape of the American War of Independence. The Spanish did the same in the shape of the liberation movements in Latin America in the 1820s. But the French Revolution was a revolution in France.
3
Trade and Manufacturing
TRADE
When Joseph Palmer visited Bordeaux in 1775, he was deeply impressed, recording that it
yields to very few cities in point of beauty; for it appears to have all that opulence which an extensive commerce can confer. It is finely situated on the banks of the Garonne…The quay which is extended on a straight line, for more than two miles, with a range of regular buildings, cannot fail of striking the eye with admiration; which is encreased by the noble appearance of an immense rapid river, and the multitude of ships and vessels which trade here.
Twelve years later the peripatetic agronomist Arthur Young confirmed this favourable verdict. In view of his notorious propensity for making unflattering comparisons between conditions at home in England and what he found in France, his impressions are particularly authoritative: ‘Much as I had heard and read of the commerce, wealth and magnificence of this city, they greatly surpassed my expectations. Paris did not answer at all, for it is not to be compared to London; but we must not name Liverpool in competition with Bordeaux.’ As he was ferried across the river, he added, ‘The view of the Garonne is very fine, appearing to the eye twice as broad as the Thames at London, and the number of large ships lying in it, makes it, I suppose, the richest water-view that France has to boast.’
Visual evidence of the accuracy of this description can be found by any present-day visitor, for the city’s architecture demonstrates that the eighteenth century was its heyday. For all its splendour, the Place Royale is not the most characteristic site, for it was replicated in other French cities. The same could be said for the new archiepiscopal palace facing the cathedral. It is the great opera-house–the Grand Théâtre–designed by Victor Louis and built between 1772 and 1780 which best exemplifies the Bordeaux boom. What makes it special is not its size, for although it is very large, it is not as big as, say, San Carlo in Naples or La Scala in Milan. Nor is it the fact that it was a free-standing building, for Frederick the Great’s opera-house on Unter den Linden in Berlin had anticipated this feature by more than a generation. The Bordeaux opera-house is different because in effect it is three buildings, incorporating not just a theatre but also a concert-hall and a staircase. To identify the staircase as a space of equal importance is less perverse than might appear, for the foyer and staircase were as large as the auditorium. It was there to allow members of Bordeaux high society the opportunity to parade before each other in all their finery–to see and be seen. As Victor Louis grasped, in an opera-house the audience is as important a performer as the singers on stage. In an opera-house built for a king, it is the royal box that is the chief architectural feature, but in a public opera-house built for a great commercial city such as Bordeaux, it is the foyer, staircase and other public rooms. Arthur Young certainly grasped the close connection between commerce and culture in the city:
The theatre, built about ten or twelve years ago, is by far the most magnificent in France. I have seen nothing that approaches it…The establishment of actors, actresses, singers, dancers, orchestra, etc. speaks the wealth and luxury of the place. I have been assured that from thirty to fifty louis a night have been paid to a favourite actress from Paris…Pieces are performed every night, Sundays not excepted, as everywhere in France. The mode of living that takes place here among merchants is highly luxurious. Their houses and establishments are on expensive scales. Great entertainments, and many served on [silver] plate. High play [gambling] is a much worse thing; and the scandalous chronicle speaks of merchants keeping the dancing and singing girls of the theatre at salaries which ought to import no good to their credit.
This conspicuous display derived from commerce. Between 1717 and 1789 Bordeaux’s trade increased on average by 4 per cent per annum, multiplying almost twenty times in value, from 13,000,000 livres to almost 250,000,000 livres; its share of French commerce increased from 11 to 25 per cent and its population doubled from 55,000 to 110,000. Although some of this prosperity derived from increased wine sales to the rest of Europe, the lion’s share came from the West Indian colonies –Guadeloupe, Martinique and, above all, Saint Domingue, the greatest sugar-producing region in the world. The sugar production of the last-named increased from 7,000 tons in 1714 to 80,000 tons in 1789. Moreover, it was not just the merchant-princes who grew rich on the proceeds, for Bordeaux’s whole economy was moulded by its leading sector. For example, 700–800 men were employed in the shipyards, 300–400 in the ropeworks, 300 in the sugar refineries, and so on.
As we shall see, the whole European economy expanded during the eighteenth century, but it was international trade that provided the most dramatic success story. The original impetus probably came from outside Europe. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, there was a marked upturn in the Iberian Pacific, demonstrated by the customs receipts at Manila and Acapulco, which increased by 2,600 per cent in the fifty years before 1720. Simultaneously, a demographic surge in China created a corresponding demand which attracted growing numbers of British and Dutch merchants. The Chinese gold they brought back to Europe, together with the rapidly expanding output of Brazilian mines, helped to alleviate the chronic shortage of coin and, among other things, allowed the stablization of European currencies. With European colonial expansion on the move again after a century of stagnation, in North America, the Caribbean and the Far East, the scene was set for self-sustaining expansion. Between 1740 and 1780 the value of world trade increased by between a quarter and a third; indeed, in Alan Milward’s words, ‘the mid-eighteenth century was one of the most remarkable periods of trade expansion in modern history’. In France, the volume of foreign trade doubled between the 1710s and the late 1780s, but its value increased five times. French colonial trade increased in value by a staggering ten times during the same period.
The human cost of this great surge is revealed by more chilling statistics, for example that the number of slaves in the French West Indies increased during the course of the eighteenth century from c. 40,000 to c. 500,000 in 1789, with the price of each slave quadrupling during the same period, such was the demand for their labour. All the major maritime nations were involved in the trade. The Portuguese and the Dutch imported more than they needed for their own colonies, so sold on their surplus to the voracious Spanish and French producers. The British probably constituted the most dynamic national group; as Paul Langford has written, slavery was ‘one of the central institutions of the British Empire, one of the staple trades of Englishmen’. It was certainly the foundation for the prosperity of Liverpool, from which there were nearly 2,000 slave-trade departures between 1750 and 1780, compared with 869 from London and 624 from Bristol.
If the transatlantic trade provided the most startling statistics, the core of Europe’s trade remained within Europe. As Jacob Price has observed, it is remarkable how durable was the traditional ‘map of commerce’, whose main artery ran from the Baltic via the Low Countries to the Bay of Biscay and the Iberian Peninsula, with off-shoots to Norway, the British Isles and the Mediterranean. In the course of the sixteenth century, oceanic connections had been added to reach America and the Far East, but it was the Baltic–Cadiz route that remained the great employer of shipping. In 1660 it was dominated by the Dutch. Despite–or perhaps because of–the eighty-year struggle to break free from Spanish rule (only ending in 1648), the Dutch had put together a trading system of truly amazing size, complexity and prosperity. One simple statistic illustrates their predominance in European commerce: in 1670 their merchant marine totalled 568,000 tons, more than that of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined. The basis of Dutch trade was the huge surplus of grain, chiefly rye, produced by the Baltic countries, especially Poland-Lithuania. It was almost all shipped to the Dutch Republic, 80 per cent of it in Dutch ships. Around 40 per cent was then re-exported to feed the numerous parts of Europe, notably in the south, that were unable to feed their populations from their own resources. This plentiful supply of basic food allowed Dutch farmers to specialize, to concentrate on branches of agriculture best suited to their soil and climate, namely livestock, dairy products, vegetables, barley, hops, tobacco, hemp, flax, cole-seed (for lamp-oil) and various sources of dye (madder, weld and woad). Down their matchless waterways, these cash crops, and the articles manufactured from them, went to markets all over northern and western Europe. More important still, in terms of value, were the ‘rich trades’, the commodities such as spices, sugar, silk, dyestuffs, fruit, wine and silver that the Dutch gathered in southern Europe and took back to all points north. By the 1660s this branch of commerce was generating seven times as much profit as the bulk freightage from the Baltic. It also provided much of the raw materials that formed the basis of the Republic’s flourishing manufacturing sector: fine cloth, silks, cottons, sugar-refining, tobacco-processing, leather-working, carpentry, tapestry-weaving, ceramics, copper-working and diamond-cutting.
Part of the explanation of Dutch superiority was technological. From their first introduction at the very end of the sixteenth century, the famous fluyts (known to the English as ‘fluteships’ or ‘flyboats’) provided a sharp competitive edge. Thanks to the adoption by the Amsterdam shipyards of standardized designs and labour-saving devices, the fluyt maximized carrying capacity and minimized cost. It has been estimated that an English ship of 250 tons cost 60 per cent more to construct than its Dutch rival. As a dedicated carrier of bulk freight with no pretensions to be a warship, the fluyt was also much cheaper to run, requiring far fewer sailors–as few as ten for the 200-ton version, as opposed to the thirty for an English ship of comparable tonnage. The result was that Dutch shippers were able to undercut their competitors from other nations by between a third and a half. With that kind of advantage, the Dutch achieved an extraordinary dominance of the carrying trade. By the second half of the seventeenth century, they so dominated the Baltic as to make it appear a colony. The Swedish port of Gothenburg, for example, was built by the Dutch, owned by the Dutch and run by the Dutch–Dutch was even its official language. The Bishop of Avranche wrote in 1694:
It may be said that the Dutch are in some respects masters of the commerce of the Swedish Kingdom since they are masters of the copper trade. The farmers of these mines, being always in need of money, and not finding any in Sweden, pledge this commodity to merchants of Amsterdam who advance them the necessary funds. It is the same with tar and pitch, certain merchants of Amsterdam having bought the greater part of these farms of the King, and made considerable advances besides, so that the result is that these commodities and most others are found as cheap in Amsterdam as in Sweden.
Danish sovereignty was also heavily compromised by coercion on the part of the Dutch to secure most-favoured status for their ships passing through the sound separating the North Sea from the Baltic.
A second major branch of Dutch commerce was supplied by fishing. Not for nothing was their herring industry known as ‘the Great Fishery’. Each year, between late June and early December, a specialized fleet of buizen (known to the envious English as ‘busses’) followed the herring-shoals from the Shetlands to the Straits of Dover, catching colossal quantities as they went. The fish were salted, barrelled and sent back to the Maas ports for re-export, the Catholic parts of Europe proving particularly good customers. Out of season, the buizen went south to the Bay of Biscay or to Portugal to collect the huge amounts of high-quality salt needed in the curing process. In terms of total value, the Great Fishery vied with English cloth for the title of ‘greatest single branch of European commerce’. Less important but also lucrative was the cod-fishing in the North Sea and the whaling in the Arctic. The latter reached its peak in the 1680s, when the Dutch were sending 240 ships a year, returning with up to 60,000 tons of blubber to be turned into lamp-oil and soap.
The Dutch also exploited the resources of the East. In the last year of the sixteenth century, a number of ships returned to Amsterdam from the Spice Islands laden with, among other good things, 600,000 pounds (270,000 kg) of pepper and 250,000 (113,000 kg) pounds of cloves. As this precious cargo yielded a profit of more than 100 per cent, there was a rush to follow. When, three years later, the various companies were amalgamated to form the Dutch East India Company, one of the greatest commercial undertakings in European history was underway. At its peak, in the late seventeenth century, it was the richest corporation in the world, owning 150 trading ships and 40 ships of war, and employing 20,000 sailors, 10,000 soldiers and nearly 50,000 civilians. Dutch pre-eminence in south-east Asia first had to be wrested from the Portuguese. Showing irresistible energy and aggression, they chased the incumbents from one spice island after another. By 1660 the Dutch were in possession of Cochin (on the west coast of India), Malacca (on the west coast of the Malayan Peninsula), Indonesia (including Sumatra and Java), Borneo, the Celebes, the Moluccas, western New Guinea, Formosa and Ceylon. All that was left to Portugal in the Orient was Goa in southern India and Macao in China. Later attempts by the British to muscle in on the immensely lucrative spice trade were rebuffed with vigour, not to say brutality, notably at the infamous ‘Amboina massacre’ of 1623, dramatized by John Dryden forty years later to drum up support for the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
The total population of the Dutch Republic was only about two million, yet Dutch merchants seemed to be everywhere in the world, leaving their calling cards in the form of place-names–Cape Horn, Brooklyn, New Zealand, Van Diemen and Spitsbergen, for example. From 1625 until 1667 New York was a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam. They established a permanent presence in South America, the Carribbean and South Africa, as well as in eastern waters. Commenting on the ubiquity of the Dutch fleet in 1667, Sir William Batten, Surveyor of the Royal Navy, exclaimed to Samuel Pepys: ‘By God! I think the Devil shits Dutchmen!’ His fellow countryman Charles Davenant added a little later: ‘the trade of the Hollanders is so far extended that it may be said to have no other bounds than those which the Almighty set at the Creation’. Underpinning their global trading complex were the financial institutions of Amsterdam. Founded in 1609, its eponymous bank quickly eclipsed the traditional leaders, Venice and Genoa, as the centre of Europe’s money market. It was soon joined by a Loan Bank. Together with the Stock Exchange, which moved to a palatial new building in 1609, the banks gave Dutch merchants a head-start in managing their business affairs. Nowhere else could credit be obtained so easily, quickly and cheaply. Nowhere else could goods be insured with such facility. Symbolic of the methodical approach adopted by the Amsterdam agents was their introduction of printed forms for the registration of insurance policies. So superior were the services they offered that during the Third Anglo-Dutch War of 1672–4, the British fleet was insured at Amsterdam. For all Europe’s businessmen, a bill on Amsterdam was the accepted way of financing foreign trade. With this institutional infrastructure in place by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were in a position to establish quickly what Jonathan Israel has called ‘world trade primacy’ when peace returned in 1648.
