Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

than his theory requires (pages 452, 455-457)-that the "period of statification" need not be a period of depression, but merely a period of liquidation and readjustment, that the wave-like movement of prosperity need not be a true wave, but merely an upward movement, then a straight line, and then another upward movement. Hence the point that the rate of interest when evolution is checked often does not do more than cover risk and the banker's expenses (page 396), would, in so far as true, cover not the theoretical period of statification, but only the extreme depressions which are unwesentlich.

The reviewer hopes that Professor Schumpeter-whose command of English style is faultless-will give us an English edition of this interesting and important book. He knows no book that would be more stimulating to a class in economic theory, and he feels that the constructive doctrine of the book contains much that is destined to become a permanent part of economic theory. The economist has too long been content with static theory, and work like that of Schumpeter and Veblen is full of significance for the better understanding of economic life.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

B. M. ANDERSON, JR.

FOUNDATIONS OF WEST INDIA POLICY1

ENTION the West Indies of the sixteen hundreds and the mind leaps to a free field of fancy; in the languorous noon

ME

of a tropic sea, by the curving strand of some nameless isle, one sees, perhaps, a gaunt and dingy flagless ship waiting whilst its crew, long-haired and bleared and greasy, divide the plunder of a brassbound treasure chest-a lawless time and place, with bold adventures metely chronicled by the pen of Smollet or Defoe or R. L. S. The gentle reader may remember vaguely that the Caribbean was not filled entirely with galleons and corsairs, that some men actually did build homes and spin out an existence, sometimes profitable enough, in their tobacco fields or sugar mills; but to ask him soberly to think of the Antilles as the residence of honest men in the century when the buccaneers haunted Hispaniola, and Mansfield and Morgan harried up and down the Spanish Main, is quite too much to ask of human nature. Very likely he marks no division between buccaneers and pirates; all that happened "beyond the line" takes on a romantic glow, and it never occurs to him to relate it to the grand duel of Spain and England for sea power, the amazing intelligence and energy that made the Dutch the conquerors of markets, the assiduous labor of Colbert and of Sir George Downing to build up perfect schemes for mercantilist empire, the evolution of joint stock companies, or, least of all, to the serious enterprise of the English Puritans to found an ideal commonwealth.

Fortunately the buccaneers have recently been borrowed from the story-writers by more faithful and responsible historians. Five years ago in London there appeared a work by C. H. Haring, who, after retelling what was trustworthy of Esquemeling's Bucaniers, supported by considerable evidence, established clearly that these private men-of-war were protected and urged on by the authorities of France and England, and had whatever official standing might proceed from letters of marque issued against Spain. Secretaries of state corresponded gravely with the governors regarding the energy and efficiency of this arm of

'The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans. By Arthur Percival Newton. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1914.-xi, 344 PP.

Colbert's West India Policy. By Stewart L. Mims. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1912.-xiv, 385 pp.

the service, somewhat irregular though it was, and as many facilities were given it as might be in times of formal peace. M. de Vaissiere's Saint Domingue, published the year before, had called attention to the interacting influence of the marauding bands of Tortuga and the planters of the principal French colony. Violet Barbour, in an article in the American Historical Review in 1911 summing up results of extensive inquiry in the State Papers, ably showed the difficulties which the connection between sea-robbing and the administration of West India colonies entailed. Though no important work of recent scholarship had appeared that dealt with the administration itself, interest, at first reflected from romance, was gathering, and it was thought not unlikely that such works must be under way and that their publication would not long be deferred.

Especially was this true in the light of the attention lately focusing in America and England upon the colonial systems as they operated in this hemisphere. The history of European settlements on this side of the Atlantic had been chronicled with perhaps wearying minuteness, but nearly always, in the nineteenth century, from the colonial point of view. The story of the thirteen colonies planted (it always seemed) as steps in the conquering march of human liberty, was followed with respectful interest in view of its tremendous issue. Searching for seeds was the grateful task of the patriotic scholar-the seeds of republican institutions and union and all the glorious ideals adverted to in the first ten amendments. When any measure of control was observed as proceeding from the offices of London it was treated merely as an attempt at impediment which the heroic colonists overcame. The imperial or mercantilist view was described almost as an aberration from which some near-sighted and ungenerous counsellors of the king seemed to suffer. Hildreth wrote his severely impartial" account of New England without visiting the old. Palfrey found a summer's notes in London sufficient to balance his five volumes. Bancroft while minister to the court of St. James did hire copyists to transcribe the manuscripts of Dartmouth, Grafton, Lord North and others, but he had published his three volumes on the United States of America as Colonies before he turned seriously to research in English sources. Fiske gained his notion of "the English side" from reading Gardiner.

66

But this neglect seems greater than it was, and is explained not so much as flowing from a lack of a right desire to know the truth as to the lack of opportunity to find it. So long as the English records on America and the West Indies, for example, were left extended through their seven hundred volumes, research was not invited; it was not until

after the middle of the century that the Master of the Rolls began to analyze and publish in synopsis the papers confided to his care, and not until 1870 that the Commission on Historical Manuscripts brought forth its first report. Slowly, following the lead of Doyle of Oxford, American scholars began to avail themselves of the material thus exhumed, and a new point of view became observable in the writing of our colonial history. A half-century after Roscher published his Kolonien there seemed emerging an appreciation of what colonies really were. Finally the trustees of the Carnegie Institution authorized the production of systematic guides to the materials for our history contained in foreign archives. At the same time appeared the first volume of Mr. Beer's study of the British colonial system in the preface of which it was stated: "The focus of interest is, however, the British Empire, and not the rise of the American Nation." Distinctions of useful and useless colonies were newly apprehended and the mind recalled with fresh understanding that in 1763 so astute a statesman as Lord Hardwicke had solemnly counselled the trading of Canada for Martinique and Guadaloupe. It was now realized by students of colonial history that in the Caribbean might best be traced the application of those principles which formed the working basis for the old empires of early modern Europe.

From the point of view of the institutional historian the West Indies are as homogeneous a group as New England. If the one approximated to the Greek type of colony so did the other to the Roman. And of a group so similar in quality we may desire and perhaps some time get a consecutive and systematic history, especially of administration, like 'those now under way of the thirteen colonies. Much has been written about the West Indies: the New York Public Library in its bulletins for 1912 listed three hundred and forty-seven titles, but chiefly in Spanish and leaving many arid spaces. Before any important summary account can be composed there must be a broad and firm basis of monographic study conceived and developed in the light of scholarly ideals, with modern method and with access to the full body of material. Those who watch the progress of historical frontiers observe with some such further hope the emergence of two substantial works in English, in a measure pioneers in this conquest of a new domain.

On opening Mr. Arthur Percival Newton's recent book on The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans one may expect to be regaled again with the oft-repeated saga of John Winthrop and the godly men of Massachusetts Bay; but the sub-title, The Last Phase of

the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain, stirs the curiosity, for though the saints of the great migration were prepared to struggle furiously enough against the papists as they met them in the forests of New England, these were of another nation. Where did the English Puritan play the epilogue of the drama begun by Master William Hawkins and his "tall and goodly shippe" a century before? The reader turns to follow the story of a long-forgotten attempt to colonize three tiny islands in the heart of the Spanish seas. The project of the Providence Island Company is important, the author tells us, not alone because it carried forward the tradition of hostility to Spain, but in that it included "almost every important member of the inner circle of leaders in opposition to the arbitrary rule of Charles I" (page 3) and whose councils were, therefore, the brooding place of plans that revealed new destinies for England. Its minute books serve to fill in the biographies of Pym and Warwick and others during the eight years when the Puritans were eclipsed by the king's unhampered rule, and its instructions to outline systematically the Puritan notion of what an ideal commonwealth ought to be.

The connection between privateering and the planting of new colonies is interesting. The long negotiations for the Spanish marriage enforced a simulated friendship with the subjects of Philip III which made the preying on his commerce no longer permissible. Thus was released much capital which must seek new channels of investment, a condition resulting in the formation of the London and Plymouth Companies of 1606. When in 1623, however, the alliance came to an expected end, a new era of colonization was begun, this time in the enemy's preserve, the Caribbean. St. Christopher, Nevis, Barbadoes, Montserrat, all were founded in a year or two, not solely for the ends of peaceful commerce; and when the possibilities of Santa Catalina, lying not far off the Moskito coast, were disclosed to Warwick, a company for its colonization was soon organized among his Puritan friends, evidencing in personnel a result of the commercial revolution large with consequences:

The intimate business alliance of such members of the Upper House as Warwick, Saye, and Brooke with great London merchants is prominent throughout our pages and we must recognize that these commercial bonds are of great importance in the history of the time, as rendering it easier for great nobles and wealthy country gentlemen to unite with the city merchants and to work side by side with them in the constitutional struggle against the crown. Such a union would have been impossible at an earlier period [page 39].

« ForrigeFortsett »