Pagden, Lords of All the World

Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500-1800 (Anthony Pagden, 1995).

Lords of all the World is an intellectual history of European thinking (discourse) about empire. Pagden examines how Europeans thought about the empires they created and how their thinking changed over the years 1500 to 1800. He focuses on the empires of Spain, England, and France in the Americas. A key theme of the book is the divergence between Spanish and English conceptions of empire, and the eventual triumph of the English ideology that developed by the end of the time period in consideration. Scholarship has traditionally divided the European imperial project into two distinct phases - the first stage of largely American colonization starting in the late fifteenth century and ending by the eighteenth century, as many American colonies gained political independence (the stage Pagden covers), and the second stage occurring in the nineteenth century and focusing on Africa and Asia. These two phases are usually distinguished by their differing imperial ideologies. Pagden's argument is that these differing ideologies actually have more continuity than is usually claimed because changing thought in the first stage set the ideological framework for the second. Pagden's book examines how and why this transition occurred.

Initial colonization of the Americas drew heavily on Roman imperial models. He argues that empires in the Americas were “created in the shadow of an ancient and medieval legacy of universalism, of a presumed right of lordship over the entire world” (p. 8). Romans saw their empire as constituting the entire world, with those outside the empire as outside civil society and effectively “outside the world.” This way of thinking was easily transferred to the universalist claims of Christianity, so that being part of the Christian world came to be seen as a prerequisite for being part of civil society and by extension the human race. The Spanish American empire in particular was conceived of as a joint church-state venture of quasi-divine significance. In addition to concepts of universalism and Christianity, first-stage imperialism was also founded on a military ethos of honor and glory. The Spanish, French, and English empires in America all “had been based upon conquest and had been conceived and legitimized using the language of warfare” and “a code of aristocratic values” (p. 63). It was the Spanish who best embodied this ethic.

However, as the Spanish empire started to decline dramatically at the end of the seventeenth century, European theorists began to criticize this Spanish strategy. They concluded that the Spanish had mistakenly based their fortunes on precious metals and military  might, not agriculture and trade, which created true wealth. Additionally, they thought that “the Spaniards had been destroyed by a tyrannical monarchy determined to place the cause of religious orthodoxy over the welfare of their subjects” (p. 177). The Spanish political system which conceived of their colonies as an extension of the monarchy was also faulted in favor of the English imperial conception of semi-autonomous political units organized into a commercial system. By the end of the eighteenth century, theoreticians of empire became concerned with undoing the military ethos and Christian evangelism which underlay the beginning of the American empires and replacing it with a new enlightenment ethos of mutually beneficial economic ties for both the colonizer and the colonized. This search for a new ideology of empire was “driven in part by the new language of moral philosophy and political economy” developing in the eighteenth century” (p. 125). These ideas of commercialism and mutual benefit which developed in the first stage of European imperialism lay the ideological ground for the second phase.