Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson Read Free Book Online

treatment revolved around bleeding and changes of diet). It was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that real headway began to be made in this area. Still, the British Isles seemed to have an endless supply of men tough enough to withstand the hardships of life at sea – men like Christopher Newport of Limehouse, who rose from being a common seaman to become a wealthy shipowner. Newport made his fortune as a privateer in the West Indies, losing an arm in a fight with Spaniards and ransacking the town of Tabasco in Mexico in 1599. Henry Morgan was far from unique.

    Morgan’s raid on Gran Grenada was one of many such incursions into the Spanish Empire. In 1668 he attacked El Puerto del Principe in Cuba, Portobelo in present-day Panama, the island of Curaçao and Maracaibo in what is now Venezuela. In 1670 he captured the island of Old Providence, crossed to the mainland coast and traversed the isthmus to capture Panama itself. 3 The scale of such operations should not be exaggerated. Often the vessels involved were little more than rowing boats; the biggest ship Morgan had at his disposal in 1668 was no more than fifty feet long and had just eight guns. At most, they were disruptive to Spanish commerce. Yet they made him a rich man.
    The striking point, however, is what Morgan did with his plundered pieces of eight. He might have opted for a comfortable retirement back in Monmouthshire, like the ‘gentleman’s son of good quality’ he claimed to be. Instead he invested in Jamaican real estate, acquiring 836 acres of land in the Rio Minho valley (Morgan’s Valley today). Later, he added 4,000 acres in the parish of St Elizabeth. The point about this land was that it was ideal for growing sugar cane. And this provides the key to a more general change in the nature of British overseas expansion. The Empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar.
    In the 1670s the British crown spent thousands of pounds constructing fortifications to protect the harbour at Port Royal in Jamaica. The walls still stand (though much further from the sea because an earthquake shifted the coastline). This investment was deemed necessary because Jamaica was fast becoming something much more than a buccaneer base. Already, the crown was earning substantial sums from the duties on imports of Jamaican sugar. The island had become a prime economic asset, to be defended at all costs. Significantly, the construction work at Port Royal was supervised by none other than Henry Morgan – now Sir Henry. Just a few years after his pirate raid on Gran Grenada, Morgan was now not merely a substantial planter, but also Vice-Admiral, Commandant of the Port Royal Regiment, Judge of the Admiralty Court, Justice of the Peace and even Acting Governor of Jamaica. Once a licensed pirate, the freelance was now being employed to govern a colony. Admittedly, Morgan lost all his official posts in 1681 after making ‘repeated divers extravagant expressions ... in his wine’. But his was an honourable retirement. When he died in August 1688 the ships in Port Royal harbour took turns to fire twenty-two gun salutes.
    Morgan’s career perfectly illustrates the way the empire-building process worked. It was a transition from piracy to political power that would change the world forever. But it was possible only because something quite revolutionary was happening back home.

Sugar Rush
     
    The son of a London merchant and author of the best-selling novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders , Daniel Defoe was also an acute observer of contemporary British life. What he saw happening in early eighteenth-century England was the birth of a new kind of economy: the world’s first mass consumer society. As Defoe noted in The Complete English Tradesman (1725):
    England consumes within itself more goods of foreign growth, imported from the several countries where they are produced or wrought, than any other nation in the