The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

150 Chapter Fire

of North America. As a result, American manpower and local sup­

plies permitted more and more significant local defense.

In this process of overseas expansion, market behavior played the

organizing role. Profits from trade supported European overseas

activity and increased its scale decade by decade. At the same time,

profits were guaranteed by ready resort to armed force. No other part

of the earth supported an armed establishment as efficient as those

which European states routinely maintained; and nowhere outside of

Europe was the management of armed force in the hands of persons

sympathetic to or much concerned about traders’ profits. European

rulers, by contrast, had been accustomed since the fourteenth century

to finding themselves enmeshed in a commercial-financial system for

organizing human effort. Even when reluctant and uncomprehending,

kings and ministers depended on market-regulated behavior for the

supply and maintenance of their armed forces and of their govern­

mental command structure in general. In England after the 1640s and

in France after the 1660s rulers ceased to struggle against the con­

straints of the market in the fashion Philip II of Spain and most of his

contemporary rulers had done. Instead a conscious collaboration be­

tween rulers and their officials on the one hand and capitalist entre­

preneurs on the other became normal.

The rise of French and British overseas enterprise registered and

reflected the relatively smooth cooperation between business

mentality and political management that came to prevail in those

countries. Instead of looking upon private capital as a tempting and

obvious target for confiscatory taxation, as rulers in other parts of the

world regularly did, the political masters of western Europe came to

believe, and acted on the belief, that by setting precise limits to taxa­

tion and collecting designated sums equably, private wealth and total

tax receipts could both be made to grow. Wealthy merchants and

money-lenders could afford to live in London, Bristol, Bordeaux, or

Nantes under the jurisdiction of the British or French governments,

instead of seeking refuge, as in earlier centuries, in independent cities

governed by men of their own ilk.

For men of commerce the advantage of living under a militarily

formidable government was obvious: they could rely on a more effica­

cious and far-ranging military protection for their enterprise than

F. Cook and Woodrow W. Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean,
2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, 1974). As subsequently among Polynesians
and other island dwellers of the Pacific, the drastic population die-off that followed
initial contacts with white men was due mainly to exposure to imported infections.