Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800

by Anthony Pagden

The rise and fall of modern colonial empires have had a lasting impact on the development of European political theory and notions of national identity. This book is the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers Spain, Britain, and France.

Anthony Pagden describes how the rulers of the three countries adopted the claim of the Roman Emperor Antoninus to be "Lord of all the World." Examining the arguments used to legitimate the seizure of aboriginal lands and subjugation of aboriginal peoples, he shows that each country came to develop identities―and the political languages in which to express them―that were sometimes radically different. Until the early eighteenth century, Spanish theories of empire stressed the importance of evangelization and military glory. These arguments were challenged by the French and British, however, who increasingly justified empire building by invoking the profit to be gained from trade and agriculture. By the late eighteenth century, the major thinkers in all three countries, and increasingly in the colonies themselves, came to think of their empires as disastrous experiments in human expansion, costly, over-extended, and based on demoralizing forms of brutality and servitude. Pagden concludes by looking at the ways in which this hostility to empire was transformed into a cosmopolitan ideal that sought to replace all world empires by federations of equal and independent states.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Spain, Academic

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good examination of how ideologies of empire shape empires. For example, the Spanish empire was shaped by the idea of conquest stemming from the Reconquista. “What the conquistadores and their heirs, concerned as they were to perpetuate an archaic society based upon martial valour, had failed to grasp was that true political power lay in wealth, and that wealth depends upon a political order directed towards development, not rapine.” Their dependence on gold and silver led to an underdevelopment of trade and inflation.

“Talleyrand was right in claiming that the Spanish had not gone to America, as had both the French and the English, in order to cultivate the land. They had gone to occupy and to benefit, as all good noblemen did, from the labour of others.” The Spanish claimed dominion over people and the French and English over land.

But, as Pagden points out, ideologies shape empires which shape people. The people who had benefited from Spain’s ideology of conquest were unlikely to want a change in structure that would destroy their way of life—even though it was being destroyed inevitably by the empire’s over-extension and lack of economic development.


Quotes:

“What in their different ways Smith, Montesquieu and Mirabeau were claiming was that the over-dependence of the metropolis upon an single staple [gold] produced by the colonies had resulted in the suppression of political independence, of the kind enjoyed by the British colonists, and that this combination had had the effect of forcing the metropolitan economy into decline, while preventing growth, either human or economic, within the colonies themselves.” 70

“[T]he commercial success of the English, the French and the Dutch could be attributed to their not having had ready supplies of bullion.” 72

“In the absence of sustained argument to right of occupation grounded on the supposed nature of the indigenous inhabitants, the British, and to a somewhat lesser degree the French, were driven to legitimize their settlements in terms of one or another variant on the Roman Law argument known as res nullius. This maintained that all ‘empty things’, which included unoccupied lands, remained the common property of all mankind until they were put to some, generally agricultural, use.” 76

“The Spanish, by contrast, had founded colonies based not upon ‘planting’, but upon conquest.” 79

“Spanish notions of empire had since the eleventh century been inextricably found in with the language and cultural traditions—as well as the mythology—of the Reconquista.” 92

“As [Francisco] Suarez observed, it was not man’s task to vindicate God. If God wishes to take revenge upon the pagans for their sins, he remarked acidly, ‘he is capable of doing so for himself.’” 97

“The prolonged and bitter debates over legitimacy had another dimension. They were not—as they have so often been described—merely struggles, of little long-term consequence in the world of realpolitik, over the rights of native peoples. They were also, and more pressingly for the European invaders, discussions about the historical origins, and hence the political and cultural identity, of the settlements themselves…They determined the way in which the theorists of empire considered what kind of future the settler societies were likely to have.” 102

“They [Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans] knew, from Rome’s example, that as empires expanded they reached an optimum point, beyond which they began to over-reach their capacity both for effective administration and for effective military control. At this point, too, they began progressively to lose their ability to impart a satisfactory legal and cultural definition to ever more extended dominions.” 107

“The true imperial state—the ‘Universal Monarch’ of Pufendorf’s formulation—would, in the end, as Spain had done, be driven to ruin its domestic base in pursuit of the maintenance of its overseas dominions.” 107

“All empires had been created, as Benjamin Constant was later to observe, on the basis of a simple vision of military virtue. And because of the nature of their origins, all European empires had generated, or helped sustain, political cultures with a marked tendency towards tyranny and repression.” 109

“The ‘despotic rule’ of all the early-modern European monarchies…had been established in this way precisely so as to create the conditions necessary for extended empire. They could not be expected to evolve effectively into polities concerned with preservation without also becoming some other kind of society.” 110

“[F]ew of those who had given their support to their rulers because they possessed the qualities needed to create great and extensive empires were likely to transfer their allegiance willingly to those who knew when to stop and how to preserve.” 110

“…[I]t had already become clear [in the mid seventeenth century] that the future of empires lay not in territorial acquisition but in trade, and trade reliant not upon the acquisition of territory, but upon control of the seas.” 115

“Most such analysts agreed that Spain’s mistake had consisted in conceiving of greatness in terms of—as no less a person than the Count-Duke of Olivares had expressed it—‘religion and reputation’. Both concerns had seriously hampered the ruler’s capacity for effective political action, since as both were static both necessarily limited the possibilities of change over time…” 117

“[I]t was not the capacity either to sustain international prestige through arms, or to enforce religious conformity of one’s subjects, which constituted power in the modern world. It was prosperity. Spain had for long recognized the need in every state for a strong financial base. But successive Spanish monarchs had only ever seen wealth, not as a source of greatness in itself, but as something that could be translated directly into military power.” 117

“The most widely accepted account of the decline of the Spanish economy in the late sixteenth century had been based upon the altogether plausible assumption that an over-dependence upon bullion had led to a decline in manufacturing industries, and consequently to an over-dependence upon foreign goods, foreign supplies and, because of spiralling inflation, foreign bankers.” 123

“If the European overseas empires had begun in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as different kinds of society with different structures, objectives and ideological matrixes, by the end of the eighteenth century they had converged upon a common set of theoretical concerns. These were overwhelmingly concerned with undoing the deleterious consequences of the ‘spirit of conquest’ and the military ethos of glory, Machiavellian grandezza and, its ecclesiastical counterpart, evangelization and doctrinal orthodoxy.” 125

“True sociability, it was claimed, could only be maintained within communities of moderate size and homologous beliefs. Empires are, of necessity, societies divided between masters and slaves and, as Diderot who in Russia had witnessed this process at first hand recognized, communities which are so divided are bound one day to erupt into unparalleled violence.” 163

“In the historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such trajectories, from the pursuit of mineral wealth, military glory and evangelization, to the quest for wealth through commerce and cultivation, became constitutive of a view of human social development in which warfare, and land-based empires, dependent as they had been upon military virtue for their creation, were regarded as but one phase in the historical development of mankind. ‘War then comes before commerce,’ wrote Benjamin Constant in 1813. ‘The former is all savage impulse, the latter civilized calculation.’” 179


“Such optimism about the potentially beneficial consequences of commercial relations was not shared by all. The more sceptical observers could see that trade itself, or what Hume had identified as ‘the Jealousy of Trade’, could easily become, not a substitute for but a further cause of war.” 182

“In the end, the models which had driven the ideologies of empire in all three European monarchies had always been too self-consciously ancient ones, increasingly incapable of explaining the shape of a modern and complex world.” 186

[Benemint · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a very impressive (amount of) work. I learned a lot from the book about how imperialists of early times regarded their divine roles in conquering America. I think the causal impact of the ideologies is a bit overstated, and we are left curious of the context within which these ideologies had to emerge.

[sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for class

sure the author is super smart but i just don't particularly care for analyses of ideology without analyzing the practice of the ideology, y'know. like sure we can conceptualize, and theorize, and rework our ideas of empire across the span of time and space but that doesn't actually reveal anything about its PRACTICE ;aks;fksjdflkj i just was very frustrated, esp by the fact my professor seemed to eat up everything this man put down and it was all very ehhhh to me. intellectual history is not my vibe

idk why its really common in scholarship like this to not analyze the ideology of race as something inherent to empire, especially the three empires analyzed above (like race is mentioned and discussed like mirabeau's idea of a savage idk, but it didn't feel sufficient to me because race goes hand in hand with empire aaaaaa)

pagden also uses lots of Big Fancy Words to Prove his Intellect. not very accessible to the average joe

[Daniel Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more-or-less an organized, annotated anthology of all the European intellectuals who considered imperial ideologies in Britain, France, and Spain between 1500 and 1800. This is ALL the intellectuals (not necessarily those who actually crafted policy or had the power to enforce their ideology) and it is confined to Europe (creoles, much less natives, have no voice in this book). The author integrates context, paraphrase, and quote rather seamlessly together, which I appreciated. The book is organized into 7 chapters, each of which considers a particular theme - the legacy of Rome, universal monarchy, conquest and settlement, expansion and preservation, colony and metropole, calculation of benefits, and from empire to federation.

[Chiara · Rating 4 out of 5]

è un po’ datato per certe cose, va considerato che non è un libro recentissimo (potrebbe essere anche la traduzione, non so). comunque interessante

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compact thesis on the origins and manifestation of empire prior to 1773. A clear distinction between Spain, Britain and France is made, anchored by their respective histories and traditions. Most noteworthy is the author's treatment of Antiquity, establishing both clear continuities and distinctions between Greece & Rome and the Modern Age.

[Cameron Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this book twice, once for an honours thesis as part of background research, and again for a graduate level course. Both times it was a sturdy introduction and synthesis of the justifications European colonists used for their overseas expansions. Pagden is a reliable historian, although his recent book 'Worlds at War' is a definite disappointment.