Jaja of Opobo

They reinforced one another.

Uh, so at times, for instance, the projects of the monarchy, which were about gaining subjects, gaining stature, fighting wars with rivals in Europe, coincided and reinforced the projects of businessmen and businesswomen, but mainly businessmen in the t- period we're talking about.

Joint stock company investors and the monarchy sometimes converged in their colonizing projects.

But there were other projects that were often contradictory, uh, and the relationships could wax and wane through time.

You know, the, the role of the Puritans is generally the kind of stereotypical first settlers on the Atlantic seaboard of the USA, but they were actually outnumbered, uh, almost from the very beginning by, um, settlers who were not Puritan, who were just in search of, of better opportunities, a bit of land, uh, in a, you know, a very hierarchical British society where, where access to land was becoming ever more concentrated.

So you have settlement on the eastern seaboard, and the other part of the Atlantic complex that's being built, um, during the eighteenth century is, as you mentioned, the plantation complex of the, the Caribbean, uh, which is fueled by enslaved, uh, captive labor.

So again, we're talking about different parts of the world being put into connection with one another, mainly through the agency, again, of these joint stock companies, of these capitalist enterprises.

This is why historians so often link the rise of modern European colonialism with the rise of capitalism.

Prices fluctuated and local producers had less leverage.

The economic independence that Java had cultivated was slowly eroded, replaced by a system designed to benefit British industries.

It's a slow, insidious form of colonization that often went unnoticed compared to wars and treaties.

So the economic war was just as important.