THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH COLONIAL EMPIRES
I. The French in America
France, as an absolute monarchy, governed her colonies without constitutional rights or representative institutions. The French Empire straddled the Caribbean and continental North America. New France (Canada) was strategically important, but the most highly valued French colonies were the "sugar islands" in the Caribbean and Louisiana. The territory which was to become Canada had fish, beaver fur, poor farms, and not much else. The French government believed from the start that the function of French colonies was to increase the power of the state. But it was thought necessary to enlist private money and energy to exploit the colonies, and for this purpose the device used, as in England, was the chartered company. Such companies had a formal grant from the crown to operate as a commercial enterprise. In the seventeenth century especially, French-chartered companies were very active in colonial areas, although by the 1660's most of them were defunct. (The British East India Company was a notable exception.)
After the period of company rule, the French treated their colonies as provinces of metropolitan France. Depending on the importance of the colony, it had at its head a governor-general, a governor, or a lieutenant-governor. This man was usually a noble or a prominent soldier, but every colonial governor had an intendant. Intendants were originally lawyers appointed to instill middle-class efficiency into provincial government "at home." By mid-seventeenth century, the intendants had become the provincial administrators of France. In the colonies, however, the intendants still cooperated with the governors; the system had the disadvantage of dividing responsibility for colonial affairs, and it was dropped in 1816.
There were no elected assemblies in the french Empire; after all, the Estates General of France had not met since 1614. In 1672 when Frontenac was governor of Canada, he wanted to summon an elected assembly, but he was reminded by Colbert that the Estates General had not been convened in France; why should the same principle not prevail in the colonies? Although the French government was autocratic, it was not whimsical; it operated according to a well-established body of law. This was particularly evident in the realm of taxation, the field in which France came nearest to accepting the notion that colonists had rights.
The crown decided to establish the Roman Catholic Church in the colonies as it existed in France. Jews and Huguenots lost their official tolerance after 1685, and religious freedom did not return until 1763. Most of the clergy in the colonies belonged to religious orders, the Jesuits being particularly prominent in the colonization of New France.
French mercantilist policy was begun in the seventeenth century, when Colbert used the West Indian Company to exclude foreign ships. The system as a whole, however, was much less rigorous and restrictive than that of Spain. By and large, the system worked well for France; French merchants and shippers could not have competed with the British on a free-trade basis. In the eighteenth century the West Indies were a major source of French income.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the colonies became technically part of the mother country, but in actual fact the colonies followed only those French laws which pleased them. The Republican colonial policy was replaced by that of the Consulate and Napoleonic Empire. Slavery and the slave trade became legal again. But San Domingo revolted against the return to slavery in 1802 and became independent in 1803; Louisiana was returned to France in 1800 (having been ceded to Spain in 1763), but was sold to the United States in 1803 when Napoleon abandoned his dream of an American Empire.
In 1660 France had been in a good position to build an empire, yet by 1789 she had lost all her North American possessions except two tiny islands off Newfoundland. The Caribbean Islands were retained and West African colonies regained, but France had been humbled by the British in India and kept only some small enclaves there. The loss of Canada and the inability to rival Britain in India was due essentially to an inability to match British seapower.
II. The British in America
There is a real contrast between the relatively small and homogeneous British Empire in America before 1783, and the huge far-flung Victorian Empire of the nineteenth century. At first there were three types of British colonies in America. The first were plantation colonies in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic seaboard. These included Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, which produced sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo. A second group, "the middle colonies," comprised Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, which produced wheat and timber. The third group consisted of the New England colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The New England economy rested on trade in rum and slaves and shipbuilding.
The characteristic that made the British colonies in America most different before 1763 (with the exception of French Canada) was that they were genuine colonies of settlement. Englishmen migrated to them. In the Caribbean and southern colonies, the planters established an aristocratic English society. The middle colonies saw large individual farms with a merchant aristocracy in the great ports. New England was a commercial section, but with small farms clustered around villages.
From 1754 until 1763, the English and the French contested for the fur trade in the Ohio Valley. After a faltering start, when General Braddock was routed by a force of French and Indians before Fort Duquesne (the present city of Pittsburgh), the English gained the military initiative under the political leadership of the elder Pitt. Geoffrey Amherst captured Louisburg; then in 1759 General James Wolfe defeated the Marquis Montclam on the Plains of Abraham under the walls of the fortress of Quebec, and the war was all but won.
At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British were confronted with the problem of making the American colonists share the cost of their own defense. The British tried to accomplish this by enforcing the old Navigation Acts which had been, to a great extent, honored more in the breach than in the observance. Coercion produced revolution. The American colonies declared their independence on July 4, 1776, in a document which reflected the natural rights philosophy of the Continent and the political ideas of the British philosopher, John Locke.
The American Revolution occurred because the colonists resented the attempts of London to enforce existing commercial and other imperial regulations. The colonists' claim that they could not be taxed without their consent was only valid if colonial legislatures were equivalent in taxation power to Parliament. The colonists were wrong on this issue, for Parliament did have the right to legislate for the colonies. In their second claim, that they were not represented, the colonists had a better argument, for representation in the colonies and in England were two different matters.
In the colonies representatives were elected by the taxpayers on a district basis for local councils, but every English subject was considered to be "virtually" represented in the English Parliament. "Virtual representation" meant that even though a member of parliament was elected from a specific geographic district, he theoretically represented the interests of the citizens of the empire at large. Actually, the interests of the colonists were unknown and of small concern to the tenth of the English population which voted for parliament. The members of Parliament were not, therefore, directly responsible to the voters in colonial America. Many of the problems that arose as a consequence of the questions raised by the Americans and the American Revolution were subsequently ameliorated by British colonial policy after 1783.