Great Mother of Men
The spread of Western civilisation must not be credited to European policy, but to a culture of curiosity, enterprise and defiance.
1776
King George III 1760-1820
The spread of Western civilisation must not be credited to European policy, but to a culture of curiosity, enterprise and defiance.
1776
King George III 1760-1820
Adam Smith, writing in 1776, the year that her American colonies declared independence from Great Britain, reminded his readers that the Americans had no obligations towards London. The thirteen colonies had been founded by Englishmen, but not by England. No European colony abroad had come into being through Government policy.
abridged
The policy of Europe has very little to boast of, either in the original establishment or, so far as concerns their internal government, in the subsequent prosperity of the colonies of America.
Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines,* and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.
The English puritans, restrained at home, fled for freedom to America, and established there the four governments of New England.* The English catholics, treated with much greater injustice, established that of Maryland;* the quakers, that of Pennsylvania.* The Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the Inquisition,* stripped of their fortunes, and banished to Brazil, introduced, by their example, some sort of order and industry among the transported felons and strumpets by whom that colony was originally peopled.
Adam Smith was one of the first people in history to appreciate that a nation’s wealth is not to be measured by how much gold and silver its Exchequer has amassed. That error is the basis of Mercantilism, the chief object of Smith’s criticism, a policy whereby the Government works hand-in-glove with favoured companies to seize and stockpile money or resources, tax foreign imports, put sanctions on competing nations, and carefully manipulate international trade to their own unfair advantage.
They were: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Massachusetts grew out of Plymouth Colony, founded at Cape Cod by the so-called Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, under the auspices of the Colony of Virginia established in 1606. See The Voyage of the ‘Mayflower’.
Maryland was founded in 1632 by convert Sir George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore. Although created for persecuted Roman Catholics, it was never restricted to them. He named it after Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henry IV of France, and consort of King Charles I of England.
Founded by Englishman William Penn (1644-1718) on the basis of a Royal Charter granted to him in 1681 by Charles II, in acknowledgment of a debt of honour to Penn’s father. The Quakers, founded by George Fox in 1650, were originally hardline Protestants in the Calvinist and Puritan tradition; gradually they moderated their severity. Many leading figures in the abolition of slavery and prison reform were Quakers.
A programme similar to the Spanish Inquisition was established by King John III of Portugal in 1532. It was feared that converts to Christianity from other religions, chiefly Judaism but in colonies such as Goa in India also Hinduism, did not hold to strict official Roman Catholic teaching; so trials were convened, and some 40,000 people were transported or bound over to comply with Government’s official morality and religion. The Inquisition continued, both in Portugal and in the country’s colonies, until 1821.