A HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS C CHAPTER I THE COLONIAL PERIOD OLONIES are not self-determining political units. It is only within the last few years that the great self-governing dominions of the British Empire have achieved independent diplomatic representation abroad so that now a Canadian minister is accredited to Washington side by side with the British ambassador. Speaking historically, colonies are dependencies, and little more. As such their diplomatic importance is that of pawns rather than of kings on the chess board of diplomacy. The colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and Great Britain have constituted vast empires. But from the age of discovery down practically to the present day, the agglomeration and the disintegration of colonies and overseas dominions have been the concern of European chancelleries, and the relations of one colony with another colony in the same imperial system, of one colony with the mother country, or of one colony with another holding country or its dependencies, have been the almost exclusive concern of the imperial government rather than of the colony's own leadership. Thus in a technical sense the diplomatic history of the United States dates only from the war for Independence. And indeed our foreign relations do acquire a vastly heightened interest from the moment that the surrender of Burgoyne in 1777 insured French participation in and the eventual success of the American Revolution. Nevertheless American influence upon British foreign policy during the Colonial Period is in a very real sense a portion of our diplo matic history and should not be dismissed without at least a passing mention. MERCANTILISM The key to the foreign policy of the rival kingdoms and colonial empires which entered the race for power in the half century following the voyages of Columbus is the economic and political system known as mercantilism. The decay of feudalism in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries necessitated an entirely new basis for military power, now that the overlord was no longer able to muster troops and levies on the principle of land tenure and personal homage. Moreover the attendant rise of national states with the creation of a real Spain in the union of Castile and Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, with the emergence of a powerful and united France following the distractions of the Hundred Years' War, and with the erection in England of the strong Tudor monarchy on the ruins of an aristocracy destroyed by the Wars of the Roses, created an intense economic, political, and diplomatic rivalry. With the three leading states of Western Europe achieving self-realization at almost the same moment, each jealous of the others' power and alert to every opportunity for selfaggrandizement, the problem of power became acute indeed. It was solved in two ways, each of which has a thoroughly modern ring, for each lies at the foundation of modern imperialism, which is, after all, but another name for the earlier mercantilism. The first solution lay in a maximum extension of home manufactures to the end that there might be a constant surplus of exports over imports and a corresponding favorable balance of trade, with inflow and not outflow of gold, the precious metals being viewed as the true measure of national wealth and the indispensable support for armies and navies. The second means to power lay in the accumulation as swiftly as possible of a colonial empire which should serve the two-fold purpose of a source of raw materials and a market for finished products, in either case as a necessary |