By the late H. E. EGERTON, M.A., sometime Beit Professor of Colonial History in the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION "ENGLAND, on account of the natural fertility of the soil, of the great extent of the seacoast in proportion to that of the whole country, and of the many navigable rivers which run through it, and afford the conveniency of water carriage to some of the most inland parts of it, is perhaps as well fitted by nature as any large country in Europe to be the seat of foreign commerce, of manufactures for distant sale, and of all the improvements which these can occasion."1 This was Adam Smith's guarded estimate of the natural advantages of England for foreign trade, published in the Wealth of Nations at the time when the old British Empire was coming to an end. Through the centuries the world had known a variety of empires, but empires and colonisation had no necessary concern with each other. No element of colonisation, other than the forcible deportation of peoples, entered into the empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. Colonisation and colonies, in the ordinary sense, began, not with empires, or with nations, which were as yet unformed, but with the city states of the Mediterranean world, with the Phoenicians and Greeks who crossed the water to establish trading stations or to found new homes. By water far more than by land colonisation went forward, and unbridged distance from the original metropolis or mother city was substituted for the more or less continuous widening out from a dominating centre which characterised the land empires of the earliest times. A further stage was reached when, centrally placed on the North African coast, the Phoenician colony of Carthage subjected the neighbouring cities and countryside, established by sea distant trading stations on the coast of North-West Africa, and went far towards creating a land empire in Spain. Carthage fell before Rome, which beginning as a city, ended as a world-the Mediterranean world. Rome made an empire of more or less well-governed dependencies, and with Roman rule was coupled Roman colonisation carried out alike by land and sea. In the Mediterranean world the peninsulas led the islands. There was for a time one marked exception. The magnificent geographical position of Sicily attracted incomers, whose cities and their rulers rose one after another to wealth and temporary leadership; but that island, never unified under either Greek or Carthaginian, wholly failed to become the centre of a Mediterranean empire. Among the ancients the land dominated the sea; sea-fighting was hardly more CHBE I 1 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, bk m, chap. iv. I |