Colonialism

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COLONIALISM

politics and morality in the space of empire
a new imperialism?
colonial power and its limitations
bibliography

Now that colonial empires are gone, historians may be tempted to put colonies at the margins of French, British, German, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese history as excisable aberrations that can be set aside when writing histories from a national perspective. But the opposite approach can be dangerous too: Studies that portray colonialism as the "dark side of modernity," weave it so deeply into the fabric of European life that the tensions and debates over colonization also disappear. The peculiar quality of much colonial history stems from the questionable notion that old empires turned into nation-states and then set out to take colonies in the name of the nation. A more supple conception of state, empire, nation-state, and colony might give a more dynamic view of the place of colonization in European history.

politics and morality in the space of empire

The extension of European rule over distant people was fiercely debated in the late eighteenth century. Some theorists of the rights of the "people"—in Britain as well as France—posited a cultural minimum that had to be met for full participation in a polity, an idea which justified the subordination of people considered uncivilized, not to mention women. Others, like l'Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831), were sharply critical of colonial oppression and enslavement and had a universalistic vision of humanity, holding up a Christian, European social model to everyone. Still others, notably Denis Diderot (1713–1784), not only asserted European states' unworthiness to rule others but also saw cultural difference as part of humanity and opposed a European model masquerading as universality.

The question was more than theoretical. During the French Revolution, plantation owners, property owners of mixed origins, and finally slaves from the crucial colony of Saint-Domingue each claimed that the ideals of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen applied to them, and in 1793 the revolutionary government freed slaves, hoping that black citizens would join in the defense of the Republic against royalists and rival empires. The Saint-Domingue revolution (1791–1804), Napoleon I's (r. 1804–1814/15) reinstatement of slavery in the French Empire (1802), and his failure to regain control over Saint-Domingue set precedents that would echo for the ensuing century and a half: A struggle for liberty within an empire, whose failure resulted on the one hand in secession (giving rise to Haiti) and on the other in reinforcement of distinction and discrimination in the remaining colonies.

Britain's loss of the thirteen North American colonies led its leaders to make a sharper distinction than before between a core that was truly British and colonies that were less so. Yet even in the 1780s ethical questions crossed lines of distinction within the empire. Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) parliamentary attack on the exploitative mistreatment of the Indian population by the East India Company—a private entity under royal charter—suggested that as a British company had been drawn into governing, the British government should acknowledge that its name and sense of itself were implicated in the way the empire's people were treated. By century's end, the antislavery movement was raising even deeper questions about the moral and political meaning of what went on in colonies under the British flag.

Mobilization over colonization and slavery did not end exploitation, discrimination, or political exclusion in old or new colonies, but it did make such issues subject to debate until the very end of colonial rule. The taking of colonies in the nineteenth century was part of the broader strategies of European states to exercise power at a distance in the economic interest of the empire, what Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher famously called the "imperialism of free trade." Especially after the fall of Napoleon, Britain was in a good position to use pressure and the occasional gunboat to grease the wheels of commerce in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Formal colonization could occur when informal mechanisms broke down, when rivalries heated up, or when ambitious military officers took strong initiatives. The extension of British rule in South Asia—notably in Burma in the 1820s—and France's conquest of Algeria in 1830 were part of the process.

In India during the early and middle nineteenth century company rule was becoming more colonial. An orientalist conception of India as a once-glorious empire now quaintly backward but retaining its own cultural integrity was giving way among British elites to a harsher view of Indian society as crying out to be remade. France began in Algeria a bloody process of subduing Berber and Arab populations in the countryside more thoroughly than the Ottomans had attempted and encouraging settlers—mostly from non-French areas around the Mediterranean—to build a new sort of colony, divided between an immigrant minority moving toward French citizenship and an indigenous, Muslim majority defined as subjects distinct from citizens. Spain, meanwhile, lost most of its colonial possessions in the Americas as part of a crisis of empire precipitated by Napoleon's conquest of European Spain and disputes between American and European Spaniards over how to run the empire. Some scholars argue that the rise of national sentiments among American Spaniards was more consequence than cause of the crisis of empire. At the same time colonial rule deepened in the Spanish island of Cuba as planters enjoyed a sugar boom, retaining slavery until 1886 even as Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834 and France in 1848. Portugal retained an empire of enclaves along the African and Indian Ocean coasts—at risk of incursions from other empires—with the very large exception of Brazil, where offshoots of the royal family constituted the Brazilian Empire, whose vast internal expansion and lively trade with Africa seemed to overshadow its European ancestor.

a new imperialism?

Although historians have debated whether the last part of the nineteenth century witnessed a "new imperialism," some writers at the time were convinced that "modern colonialism"—the work of engineers, merchants, teachers, and doctors, and not of conquistadors—would produce a rational system of economic complementarities that would serve the imperial center while helping to civilize colonized populations. In Great Britain missionaries and other humanitarians increasingly moved from criticism of British colonizers to calls to save indigenous societies from slave traders and tyrannical kings in Africa, to end the mistreatment of women in India, and to remove the impediments posed by backwardness to the extension of Christianity, orderly commerce, and civilization. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 fostered efforts to make rule more thorough and transformative, but pointed up the need to be careful about upsetting Indian social structure; its most concrete effect was to eliminate the East India Company and put India under crown rule. In France after 1871 political leaders began to advocate an explicitly republican form of colonialism, serving the national interest while extending French civilization to Africa and Southeast Asia, holding out to some unspecified future the possibility that colonial subjects could become citizens. It is not clear how much of the public in either Britain or France was fully convinced of the colonial project, and colonization proceeded in ad hoc ways, keeping costs down, relying on recruitment of indigenous troops or local allies to do much of the conquering. Colonial rule would be rule on the cheap.

Creeping colonization became a scramble in the 1870s and 1880s, especially in Africa, as each Great Power feared that others might preempt current trading interests and future possibilities. German and Belgian entrance into the imperial game added to uncertainty in a European world with a small number of actors, each with supranational resources of unknown potential. Europe's industrialization not only gave the powers more cost-effective means to intervene overseas—the machine gun, the steamship, and the telegraph—but also more need for predictable supplies of minerals, vegetable oils, cotton, and other tropical products, and hence the temptation to secure such supplies from European rivals and unpredictable indigenous producers.

For a time, European leaders sought to avoid violent conflict with each other over colonial territory and to define rules of the game. Conferences at Berlin in 1884–1885 and Brussels in 1890–1891 produced agreements that power should be claimed by effective occupation of territory, meanwhile committing colonizers to abolish trade in slaves, arms, and liquor. The agreements posited a Europe of civilization and tutelage and an Africa of backwardness and subordination. That differences among people were by the late nineteenth century increasingly seen in racial terms is sometimes attributed to the influence of scientific racism in European thought, but colonial racism must also be understood on the ground. That Africans or their descendants—in the West Indies as well as Africa itself—did not always play by the rules of wage-labor production and property relations led to an increasing tendency of European administrators and traders to portray their interlocutors as racial exceptions to the universal laws of economy. Conquest had contradictory effects: Colonizers relied on the authority of indigenous intermediaries in order to govern but often excluded

Africans educated through an older mission presence from any role in government and colonial society. In colonies with large and well-established white settlements—South Africa and Algeria to an extreme, as well as Kenya, the Rhodesias, Côte d'Ivoire, Vietnam, and others—racial lines were the sharpest.

colonial power and its limitations

Much literature contrasts—with reason—the moralizing claims European conquerors made with a sordid history of bloody conquest, oppressive rule, and meager spending on education and health. Recent scholars add an emphasis on both the limits and the unintended consequences of colonial rule. Ruling colonies was much more difficult than conquering them. Conquest proceeded rapidly thanks to differences in military technology and communications, the concentration of force, the terrorizing of villages, and the ability to reward allies among already colonized populations. Setting up routine administration—capable of maintaining order, collecting taxes, encouraging peasant production, and recruiting labor—was another matter. Having worked to define African kings, chiefs, and elders as backward tyrants, colonial administrators had to redefine them as representatives of traditional authority in order to have the intermediaries that empires, as in the past, needed to make good the chain of command. In Asia as well as Africa, indigenous elites sometimes gained recognition of their authority reified as "customary" law, enhanced patriarchal power, and further access to wealth and status.

Economic projects of colonizers ranged from attempts at systematic, imposed change—efforts at turning slaves and peasants into wage laborers on mines, plantations, and transportation networks—to ad hoc efforts to pillage resources and live off African commercial networks. Charter companies in the Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa relied on coercion and terror to make people collect wild rubber and other natural resources, while in other parts of Africa and Asia indigenous producers used family, tenant, or hired labor for exportable crops, sometimes leading to modest peasant prosperity, occasionally to wealthy propertied classes. The worst abuses—particularly those of second-tier European powers like King Leopold II (r. 1865–1905) of Belgium or the Portuguese—gave rise to international movements at the beginning of the twentieth century that turned antislavery ideology against European practitioners of coerced labor. Great Britain and France had their forced-labor scandals too.

Missionaries did not necessarily colonize the minds of those they educated or converted, but unintentionally or otherwise provided them with material they could use selectively to get around the constraints of patriarchal authority within their own communities, to find alternatives to the cash-crop production or wage labor colonial officials wanted to see, and to challenge the white missionaries themselves. The publications and petitions of African activist organizations such as the African National Congress in South Africa (1912) evoked Europe's rationalizing, civilizing assertions against the daily brutality and denigration that so many experienced.

On the eve of World War I the unevenness of the colonial presence stands out. British India was tied together by a civil service, railway network, and census system, but the vital need for imperial intermediaries reinforced the power of Indian elites, led to increasingly reified notions of "caste" and other cultural institutions, and meant compromises on the extent to which agrarian relations could be remade in a British image. It was also in India that the opposition to imperial rule went furthest both in turning British idioms against the government—developing a liberal critique of imperial repression and stagnation—and in developing alternative conceptions of political order based on idioms asserted to be Indian. With the organization of the Indian National Congress in 1885 a crucial step was taken toward articulating a national alternative to colonial domination. But the importance of acting within imperial structures and on the basis of imperial ideology remained, as Mohandas Gandhi's (1869–1948) encouragement of Indians to join the war effort against Germany in 1914 made clear. Britain's perceived failure to keep its side of the imperial bargain and expand internal self-rule marked a breaking point in the politics of imperialism and nationalism.

In Africa divisions were enhanced by colonial strategies of rule and by economic fragmentation. Africans often "straddled" rural farms and urban jobs, jobs and small-scale marketing—in many cases both entering and holding at arm's length the colonial order. Opposition took many forms—movements to enhance or restore chiefly power, revolts against colonial intrusions within culturally specific milieus, efforts by Africans to take over churches from white missionaries or invent their own versions of Christian or Islamic community, and insurrectionary movements that crossed ethnic lines or followed networks established by religious figures and trade routes. As early as 1900 Caribbean and African American activists pioneered pan-African conferences and connections, attempting to bring together people of African descent across the world to challenge the racial ideologies and the structures of power on imperialism's global scale. While colonial policies had long been subject to critique in Europe, the violence of conquest, the brutalities of coerced labor at the turn of the century, and tensions over the Anglo-Boer war of 1898–1902 led to movements in Europe—linking up unevenly with Africa-based mobilizations—that attached the "ism" to colonial and made the overall project an object of questioning and mobilization.

By 1914 the civilizing and missionizing impulse that was part of the colonial story had become more conservative as European powers realized the limits of their own power; their reluctance to invest in economic, political, or social infrastructure; and the danger—following from their own naturalization of indigenous cultures—of people pulled out of "their" milieu. The use France and Britain made of African and Indian troops and porters during the world war led first to claims by colonial subjects that paying the "blood tax" should give them the rights of citizens, then to efforts by officials in the postwar decade to insist that it was tradition, not imperial citizenship, to which colonial subjects should aspire. France and Britain both considered "development" plans to make the exploitation of colonial resources more systematic, but both decided that they neither wanted to spend metropolitan funds on such an effort nor upset "traditional" authority too much. By the early twentieth century, European states had extended rule over nearly half of the world's surface but had yet to satisfy themselves that they had found ways to exploit those regions in systematic fashion, let alone mold that world in their own image. The assertions and counterassertions that followed a war that was never simply European echoed possibilities raised 125 years earlier in the Franco-Haitian revolution: That colonies were part of a supra-European, supranational polity whose people would demand their due, inside or outside the bounds of colonial empire.