Jean Baptiste Colbert Quotes
Canada is encompassed by many powerful Colonies of English who labor incessantly to ruin it by exciting all our Indians, and drawing them away with their peltries for which said English give them a great deal more merchandise than the French.
Jean Baptiste Colbert, 1619-1683, Chief Minister to French King Louis XIV, Memorandum Regarding the Dangers that Threaten Canada and the Means to Remedy Them, January 1687
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The extravagance of Louis XIV caused the conservative Colbert to raise taxes, always an unpopular move. His response: Marquis de Seignelay
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was akmost uninhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
At the time, the traders were mostly French who traded all kinds of goods and especially alcohol—usually rum—for fur animal pelts. Many of the Indians were partial to the French and French oriented traders who did not covet their land and would provide the Indians with alcohol and guns, lead and powder while English traders sometimes tried to restrict these items. Many tribes of American Indians are genetically very susceptible to alcohol—both in terms of immediate impairment—getting drunk and in developing a dependency on having alcohol—addiction or alcoholism.
The Indian allies of the French scalped some American colonists which for some whites was akin to the modern reaction to terrorist atrocities. The British and Americans then justified the scalping of their Indian allies as simple retaliation. While Indians had scalped before the whites ever came, the whites accelerated the practice. There was an economic element to scalping. The French “paid” their Indian allies in arms, blankets, trinkets and alcohol by the scalp as it was a crude way of “performance measurement.” Not to be outdone, the English adopted the same custom with the French allied Indians as targets. In North Carolina, for example, the “volunteer” rangers were paid the enormous rate of 10 pounds a scalp.
See {633119} for the basic provision of the Dawes Act.
Ironically America bought the Louisiana Territory from the French, and the French traded Canada to England for Guadalupe. These are probably the two worst real estate deals ever made by a nation—and it was the same nation in both cases.
Coping with the French and their Indian allies was a problem for all the American colonies and Franklin was the strongest voice for some kind of union or federation for not only mutual defense, but to facilitate commerce by having some uniform currency and basic laws of trade to promote the mutual economy. The 6 Iroquois tribes had years ago formed the Iroquois nation complete with a formal constitution that maintained tribal identity but also enabled unified action if any were attacked and provided mutual assistance on a number of economic areas. They became the strongest, wealthiest, healthiest and most sophisticated nation of North America before European colonization and unlike many other Indians with a few exceptions–see {21747} for an example–got along very well with the English colonists. Franklin was a great admirer and wanted to use some of their Constitutional provisions in the American Constitution 36 years later, but at the time tried to embarrass many American's into forming a union with language like this quote. Actually, he did not think of them as savages at all, but most Americans who knew little about them did, and Franklin was never above using people's prejudices to get them to buy into one of his political ideas.
Even at this early time, it was clear that whites had brought numerous diseases that decimated the Indians. Alcohol and disease killed many more native Americans than all the wars—intertribal and with the whites—ever did. Neolin warned but did not have more than regional influence.
In 1832 the President sent Edmund Roberts, a New Hampshire sea captain, to arrange commercial treaties with Asian countries such as Burma, Indo-China, Siam and Japan:
- Born: August 29, 1619
- Died: September 6, 1683
- Nationality: French
- Profession:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French statesman who served as First Minister of State from 1661 until his death in 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His lasting impact on the organisation of the country's politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a doctrine often characterised as a variant of mercantilism, earned him the nickname le Grand Colbert ([lə ɡʁɑ̃ kɔl.bɛʁ]; "the Great Colbert").
