Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 149
the continent of Europe had won a qualified success. Instead of re
newing full-scale combat on European soil, French energies in the
relatively peaceful forty years that followed turned towards overseas
enterprise in the islands of the Caribbean, in North America, in India,
and in the Mediterranean Levant. Merchants and planters met with
great success: French overseas trade actually increased more rapidly
than that of Great Britain, though since the British started the century
at a higher level, French trade never overtook British in absolute
volume.^4
National rivalries, however sharp, were effectually adjusted by
monopolizing trade in particular ports and regions of America, Africa,
and the Indian Ocean shorelines. Such local monopolies were sus
tained by local armed force—forts, garrisons, settlers—supplied and
knitted together by the coming and going of ships which were them
selves almost always armed with heavy cannon and could, in
emergency, be supplemented by a detachment of warships sent from
the home country to reinforce, protect, and extend imperial footholds
overseas.
The growing French and British trade empires interpenetrated
older European overseas establishments in complicated and shifting
fashion. After 1715, home governments in Holland, Spain, and Por
tugal could no longer protect their imperial possessions against the
assault of a major expeditionary force launched from Europe. Yet
these older overseas empires survived precariously and without really
major territorial loss. This was largely due to the fact that legally or by
tacit disregard for the law Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch imperial
administrators admitted French and/or British traders to do business
in the ports they controlled, thus giving the two greatest sea powers of
the century the practical benefits of trade without requiring them to
pay the costs of local administration. Towards the end of the century,
moreover, Spanish imperial resources in the Americas began to in
crease. The collapse of Amerindian populations, which had provoked
radical depopulation and labor shortages in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, bottomed out after about 1650, at least in
Mexico and Peru. Slowly, at first, and then with accelerating rapidity,
population growth began to permit fuller exploitation of local re
sources.^5 Brazil, too, started to flourish and so did the English colonies
- Cf. François Crouzet, “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyze
comparée de deux croissances économiques,” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 21
(1966): 261–63 and passim.
- On population phenomena in the New World see Nicholas Sanchez-Albornoz, The
Population of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), pp. 104–29; Shelbourne
