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 IndependAnd 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 element in the commercial and manufacturing cycle on which the whole structure of power reposed. Viewed economically, that colony was the most serviceable whose commodities supplemented rather than competed with raw materials of the home market. Fur, for example, was a more interesting commodity to a European home market than were wheat and fish. The latter competed more or less directly with the wheat and fish of Europe, whereas the former created a new and immediate value to be taken out in products of home manufacture. Similarly islands like the West Indies, devoted almost wholly to the production of sugar, indigo, or tobacco, were encouraged to a one-sided industrial life in which the production of staples alone necessitated the purchase in the mother country of almost every other article of utility. A sugar island was, in fact, the supreme illustration of mercantilism as an ideal economic system. The interests of empire and of colony dovetailed in a perfect harmony. It was only in sterner climates, in regions of temperate-zone products where the interest of the colonist was more identical with that of his fellow subject in the homeland, that the demand arose for local production of the very products which the mother country monopolized, and the colonial surplus for export interfered with the profits of the merchants in the mother country. Under circumstances such as these, the seed was sown for rivalries and controversies in which the home market was almost inevitably favored, while the colony became increasingly aware of its separatist interests. PIONEERS OF EMPIRE As beneficiaries of the early voyagers, Spain and Portugal led in the race for empire. The former from the viewpoint of mercantilism was singularly fortunate in acquiring colonies which yielded gold and silver directly without the complications ordinarily incident to procuring a balance of trade. For the rest of the world, the colonial problem consisted during at least the first century of Spanish imperialism of attempts to dislodge the Spanish monopoly by intrusion |