wealth to form a colonial administration have already been considered. When Cromwell became Protector in 1653 his own Council took over the business, and managed it by means of sub-committees for specific purposes. Then, when the "Western Design" had increased the importance of the subject, he appointed a Council of Trade and Navigation which included a fair number of merchants. This body first met in December 1655, but came to an end in less than eighteen months. Thenceforward, for general purposes, the Protector reverted to the system of ad hoc committees of the Council of State. Meanwhile, in July 1656, he had appointed a standing committee for Jamaica and the West Indies, consisting of merchants and officers with a knowledge of the conditions. This body, having an urgent problem to grapple with, acted in a virile manner and gradually became the effective colonial office of the period. Its chairman from 1657 was Thomas Povey, a West India merchant of large interests and statesmanlike views. From the beginning of the Protectorate, Povey and Martin Noell and other merchants had been urging the formation of a strong select committee, accountable only to the head of the State and unhampered by other political connections. The Jamaica committee partially fulfilled these conditions, but the Protector, from lack of time and from a disinclination to attend to details, was somewhat inert in forwarding its policy of strict control of the colonies. This mercantile party is chiefly important for the fruits which its representations bore after the Restoration. Cromwell was rather in the habit of listening to its proposals without taking any action upon them. So far the colonies have been considered in relation to politics and trade, but they present also another aspect of the utmost importance in its bearing on the destiny of the old colonial Empire. This concerns the peopling of the overseas possessions and the emigration policy, in so far as one can be descried, of the English Government. Before dealing with the facts of the Interregnum it will be useful to review the theories of population entertained from the opening of the oceanic period. About the middle of the sixteenth century, social and economic changes began to produce an increase, greater than had before been noticed, in the population of England, and at the same time an amount of pauperism beyond the power of existing remedies. Thus an impression became established that the country was over-populated and that the best means of relief would be the provision of more employment at home and of an outlet for some of the surplus people in colonies overseas. This provided the text for the Elizabethan advocates of colonisation, whose doctrines began to bear fruit in the reign of James I. But the cost of the Atlantic passage was prohibitive to persons in economic distress at home; such people could no more afford to transport themselves to America than they could afford to travel first-class to New Zealand to-day. Thus there sprang up the system of indentured service, by which the wealthier settlers paid the cost of transit and recouped themselves by commanding the services of the poor emigrant for the term of years covered by the indenture. At first, when the realities of colonial servitude were unknown and when there was a prospect of land grants for those who had served their term, the indenture system attracted a fair number of men of respectable character and status. The pioneers of New England and Maryland certainly included such servants, and the founders of the settlements in Virginia, the Caribbees and Guiana found it worth while to advertise for them in their prospectuses. But as the conditions became better understood and the eligible lands near navigable water were all taken up, indentured service got an ill name, as of certain slavery without hope of ultimate reward. Consequently, by the end of the Civil War the emigrants were coming to consist predominantly of a class which had been present to some extent from the outset of vagrants, criminals, parish paupers and unfortunates abducted by crimps, all in one way or another transported against their will, and of a low average of character. The practice of the country was thus diverging from the Elizabethan principle of voluntary emigration for the benefit of the emigrant. Meanwhile that principle itself was undergoing a silent modification. Until the end of the reign of James I the cry of publicists had been all for mass emigration to relieve the alleged over-pressure of the home population. Under Charles I this doctrine received less emphasis, and by 1649 was heard no more. The resettlement of agriculture and industry undertaken by Elizabeth's ministers was bearing its fruit in the period of peace which followed her death, and the England of the early Stuarts was proving itself capable of maintaining a moderately growing population. Mercantilists, studying more closely the interactions of trade and industry, grew more confident, and even began to regard a numerous home population not as a detrimental factor but as one favourable to the increase of wealth. Consequently, by the mid-seventeenth century the emigration of useful citizens had ceased to be a policy attractive to statesmen. For the fulfilment of the mercantile programme, however, a growing colonial trade was essential, and it could not be had without a growing colonial population. Colonists must somehow be obtained. Further, mercantile considerations required rather a growth of the plantation colonies than of the settlement colonies in New England; for the former sent rich cargoes to the mother country and received her foodstuffs in return, whilst the latter sent home virtually nothing and competed with the mother country's exports by supplying their own foodstuffs to the Plantations. Agriculture, it must be remembered, was still the premier occupation of England, and to maintain it in a healthy state an outlet for its surplus products was necessary. So the mercantilist theory demanded at all costs an increase of the Plantation population, and would have viewed with indifference a decrease of that of New England. These considerations led to a practice in emigration which first stands forth in unmistakable fashion during the Interregnum. In that period it may be questionable to call it a policy—perhaps it was rather an unconscious reaction to circumstances—but in the later stages of the old Empire it certainly was a deliberate policy. It was that of filling the colonies with undesirables from the British Isles, with foreigners from any European country which would supply them, and above all with negroes from Africa. All ideals of a decent colonial society, of a better and greater England overseas, were swamped in the pursuit of an immediate gain, and it was only by an accident that in exiling English Quakers, Irish Presbyterians and Catholics, and Scottish Jacobites, the rulers of the old Empire mingled some good British strains with the heterogeneous mob they planted with complete indifference under their flag. The origins of this disastrous error are to be seen, as has been said, in the proceedings of Cromwell and the Puritans. Those proceedings may be illustrated by the colonisation of Jamaica. The expeditionary force of 1655 consisted chiefly of English undesirables, soldiers rejected by their regiments and vagrants swept up from the streets. It was early realised that these men would not be sufficient to make a strong colony, and in the year of the conquest the Protector sent an agent to New England to preach the advantages of the West Indies and to induce the New Englanders to transfer themselves thither in mass. They, however, in spite of tempting immunities and land offers, refused to move. They were attached to their rugged climate and could not enter into the feelings of English statesmen, to whom colonists producing foodstuffs in America were valueless, although as growers of sugar in Jamaica they would be doing good work for the Empire. Meanwhile, the Government had been ordering its officers in Scotland and Ireland to use pressure in recruiting emigrants from those countries. To the English mercantilist the populations of the sister kingdoms were not only politically dangerous but economically competitive, and so there could be no objection to weakening them by emigration. Few persons seem actually to have gone to Jamaica from Scotland, and none from Ireland, whilst from England itself the only reinforcement from civilian ranks was a consignment of prostitutes collected by the Governor of the Tower. Only then, after the peopling of Jamaica by New England farmers and British undesirables had come to a standstill, did the Government turn to the established colonies of the Caribbees, moving 1400 persons from Nevis and afterwards some of the surplus inhabitants of Barbados. But for the fact that this transference involved no net increase of the West Indian population it would have been a more obvious step to take first rather than last. The evil wrought by the policy of exiling undesirables was twofold. It introduced a bad element into THE SLAVE TRADE 237 the colonies, already sufficiently unruly, and it accustomed English administrators to regard all colonists as inferiors, a stigma which rankled until the War of Independence. Before the end of the Protectorate it was apparent that the attempt to emigrate large numbers of white men to the West Indies had broken down. Jamaica remained short of men for a generation to come. Antigua was another island whose exploitation was desirable for strategical reasons, for it contained the best harbours in the Lesser Antilles for careening warships. Here again English settlers did not come forward freely, and the Government encouraged any foreigners to go there provided they were Protestants. Actually a few Norwegians took advantage of the offer.1 To some extent the deficiency was made good by the fact that Barbados and Bermuda were becoming overcrowded and that their unwanted inhabitants were ready to go pioneering in newer colonies. But the real mercantilist remedy lay in the negro slave. Slaves crossed the ocean in increasing numbers in the decade before 1660. After that date the movement grew into a flood, swamping first the West Indies and then the American Plantations, and providing the greatest material gain and the worst moral deterioration in the record of the old colonial Empire. The organisation of the slave trade, like certain other branches of oceanic administration, was, during the Interregnum, the subject of experiments which led to no successful results, but which nevertheless yielded experience whereon the Restoration was to found a definitive policy. A basis existed in the Guinea Company incorporated in 1630.2 At that date the number of negroes purchased by the English colonies had been unimportant, and the Company's trade had been chiefly in gold, ivory and vegetable products. During the Civil War, the Company's monopoly had been extensively infringed by English interlopers, whilst the Dutch had grasped the principal share in the nascent business of supplying negroes to the English Plantations. Commonwealth policy demanded that the Dutch should be ousted, and as a first step the Council of State interfered in the dispute between the Guinea Company and the interlopers. As has been explained, the latter were powerful in the Puritan ranks, and special monopolies, particularly those of royal foundation, were unpopular. The Commonwealth therefore sought in 1651 to impose a compromise, by which the Company was to enjoy a monopoly of the trade from Sierra Leone to Cormantin on the Gold Coast, and all the remainder was to be thrown open. Years of misfortune followed, and by 1657 the Guinea Company had lost all its stations and most of its shipping to attacks by Prince Rupert, the Dutch and the Danes. At this juncture Cromwell, who was then reviewing the affairs of the East India Company, decided to place the Guinea interests under its control for five years. In this way the Guinea Company of 1630 came to an end, and the temporary nature of the new expedient left it open for a later Government to make a more solid contribution to the problem of management. From a review of the imperial statesmanship of the Interregnum certain permanent results may be traced. The intrusion of the Dutch into the economy of the Empire was checked but not completely ended. The means for their exclusion was provided, but it was left for the Restoration to put it into full operation. Here Cromwell's strongly Protestant policy conflicted with the desires of the mercantile interest, but Charles II was to be restrained by no such considerations. Towards Spain the Protectorate maintained an attitude in continuity with England's policy in the past, although a new departure, of alliance rather than enmity, might well have been instituted. The Dutch, with greater insight into the ambitions of France, were preparing to make this departure; but Cromwell was drawn into the alliance with Mazarin which produced the Peace of the Pyrenees and the beginning of the great age of French ascendancy. Cromwell's French alliance, however, was always tinged with suspicion. Had he lived ten years longer he would very probably have reversed it, and it is unjust to condemn him for the way in which others continued the work which he laid aside at the age of fifty-nine. The treaty of 1654 with Portugal produced a permanent effect, the modern English alliance with that country, which proved a great asset in the naval wars and mercantile competition of the eighteenth century. It also definitely closed a period of estrangement which had endured since the reign of Henry VIII. In the internal affairs of the Empire the Navigation Acts, disputable as their effect may have been, marked a new and permanent departure, clearly distinguishable from the colonial regulations of the early Stuarts. The latter had been directed chiefly to the increase of English revenue; but the Commonwealth Acts were primarily designed for the advancement of sea power, from which the newer mercantilist doctrine taught that an increase of wealth would follow. Out of Cromwell's West Indian transactions sprang the emigration policy which did so much to shape the destiny of the old Empire; and out of the series of administrative experiments of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate emerged the permanent commercial element in the conduct of imperial affairs. And from the two West India expeditions of the Interregnum dates the continuous employment of the Navy as a link of empire. In general it may be said that, for good and ill, the policy of the Interregnum confirmed the foundation of imperial unity upon an economic basis. |