World History: Colonialism and Imperialism

One of the most influential aspect of history which shaped the present day was the rise of European, and later American and Japanese, empires in Africa and Asia. We briefly looked at colonialism when we discussed Britain in India and the rise of modern capitalism, but today, we will look at this in greater detail - especially the European empires in Africa. One of my specialities is colonialism in Africa, which I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on, so this post will primarily look at the impact of colonialism and imperialism on Africa. However, we shall still look at other regions as a means of cross-comparison - such as India and southeast Asia. Colonialism would greatly shape the history of the world, and its impact is definitely felt today; especially as in many areas colonialism continues.

Origins

The EIC logo

We saw the origins of nineteenth century imperialism taking root centuries prior when we looked at earlier colonialism. Europeans, initially Spanish and Portuguese, formed trading alliances in Asia and Africa in order to benefit from new resources. In 1510 Portugal captured the city of Goa in India, and formed a 'factory' - an armed fortification where trade could take place. They were later joined by the English, later British, East Indian Company (EIC), French East Indian Company, and the Dutch Vereenigte Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). These trading companies formed alliances with local rulers in order to better monopolise trade in regions - when the British edged France out of India during the Seven Years' War in 1765 the Mughal Emperor granted the EIC the legal claim to collect tax in Bengal. These alliances were not limited to India - the VOC made alliances with Indonesian rulers to monopolise spice, and the Portuguese made alliances with the Kongo Kingdom to gain access to gold, slaves, and rubber. The Atlantic Slave Trade emerged due to this formation of trade-based alliances - the kingdoms of Dahomey and Asante traded slaves, ivory, and gold in vast quantities in return for firearms and textiles. In turn, they would use the slave trade to give them the edge over states further from the coast. Walter Rodney argued that this would begin the underdevelopment of Africa - the African economy would be devoted to supplying slaves for the benefit of Europeans limiting their ability to develop their own economy. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth mercantilism gave way to industrial capitalism and modern capitalism. Industrial production required large quantities of raw materials which slavery and empire offered. As described by Shashi Tharoor: Britain's Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India's thriving manufacturing industries. The Bengal textile exports were estimated to be worth over 6.5 million rupees until 1753 amounting to a quarter of global trade in textiles; a sizeable rival to Britain's growing industrial economy. Imposing duties and tariffs of up to 80% (according to Tharoor) was designed to wipe out the competing industry. 

Empire in Africa developed for similar reasons. After the decline of the slave trade in the early-1800s European powers tried to develop 'legitimate commerce' in order to replace the now illegal profits from slavery. As in India and southeast Asia, imperial rule in Africa began not from formal agents of power (like colonial bureaucrats and the military), but by informal agents of power like traders, scientists, and especially missionaries. We shall discuss some of this later, but traders and missionaries were vital in the development of colonialism. A concept of Africa being a 'land of darkness' requiring salvation mixed with growing secularism in Europe and America, so Christian missions ventured inland to 'save' Africa. Often Christian missions claimed to be doing more than just spreading the gospel - aiding trade, spreading medicine, or even fighting slavery. The topic of my dissertation, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was formed in 1857 with the purpose to 'fight slavery' and 'spread the Light of Christ'. Antislavery, often mixed with anti-Arab racism, was a prominent feature of UMCA reports. Industrial steamships allowed better transport by the 1850s, and better medicines allowed some form of protection against diseases like malaria. This would pave the way for the 'Scramble for Africa'. The 'Scramble' was sparked thanks to the Berlin Conference of 1884/5. Wanting to enrich his small nation, and himself, King Leopold II of Belgium founded the International African Association, and hired explorer-missionary Henry Stanley to traverse the Congo in 1876. Along the river, Stanley would form treaties with local leaders and form trade depots so Leopold could claim sovereignty over the region and the lucrative production of ivory and rubber. However, France found out so began their own project by sending out Pierre de Brazza in 1881. Often these treaties left out that African leaders had to cede their land - when Tio chief Makobo signed one with Brazza in 1880 he thought it was a defence pact against the Belgians. Fearing being left out German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called a conference in Berlin inviting the major European powers, and the US, who would then carve up Africa.

Orientalism

The Snake Charmer (1880), an Orientalist painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904

In this post I want to look at a socio-cultural history of colonialism, but in order to do so we have to look at an important idea - Orientalism. In 1978, Palestinian theorist Edward Said published his groundbreaking work Orientalism. He argued that Occidental perceptions of the Middle East were subjected to power relations - 'The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” …but because it could be…made Oriental'. Colonialists came to the Middle East with preconceived notions, and a belief that their own culture was superior. Misunderstanding of colonised culture made it appear decadent and barbaric. Said's theory has been highly influential - my own writing has been inspired by his. However, it does have its flaws. For one, Said wrote about the Middle East only - it does not map neatly onto other areas of the world. Gayatri Spivak has also identified an important critique in her landmark work, Can the Subaltern Speak?. Post-colonial theorists had focused on indigenous sources to break out of imperial narratives, but these sources were written by indigenous elites so sidelined the voices of 'subalterns' - those excluded from hegemonic power. Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amal further critiqued Said by arguing that there is little class analysis of Orientalism; Said largely discusses high culture sources, and pays little account to how class came into colonialism. Nevertheless, Orientalist theory is important, and as we shall see, Orientalist views influenced how colonised regions are seen to this day.

Forging Identities

Ganesh became widely worshipped thanks to British rule in India

As argued by Jean and John Comaroff, 'Colonialism was simultaneously, equally, and inseparable a process in political economy and culture'. Ideas of culture, faith, and even ethnic identity were subjected to change under colonial rule. Informal agents of power, especially missionaries and anthropologists, were integral to the formation of these ideas. Moreover, local elites were deeply involved in this - elites had to manage both local ideas and the wants of colonial officials. For example, Nicholas Dirks has discussed how modern caste developed under British rule. Pre-colonial caste was subject to change, and although Brahmans were supposed to supersede Kshatriyas, in reality Kshatriyas held greater power. Kshatriyas worked with the British, according to Dirks, to place themselves in power. This is further prevalent in Africa. In East Africa identity was subject to change - in what would become Kenya the only difference between a Kikuyu and Maasai in certain areas was due to how you were circumcised, it was possibly for a parent to have one Maasai child and one Kikuyu child. Missionaries and anthropologists were important in reifying and categorising identity. Helen Tilly has discussed how Africa became a 'living laboratory' for anthropologists where they could debate the lives of local peoples. Links between ideas which they knew were forced onto indigenous culture, and ideas of one group could be forced onto a different group. An example can show this well. Leading UMCA bishop Edward Steere in 1869 when in Magila, northern Tanzania tried to convert the local peoples to Christianity. Steere argued that they had no concept of a soul, despite belief in spirits, but disliked a local idea of 'kizuli' which was seen as an immortal breath. He found it 'a puzzle...how the breath could be immortal' and that kizuli was 'thoroughly and hopelessly heathenism'. He instead used an idea from Mbweni, Zanzibar for the soul writing that 'the people understood "Roho" to mean 'the heart'. I did not know it before. However, I suppose that the heart is a very fair analogue for the soul. It is a very great deal better than "Kizuli"'. Despite 'Roho' being from an entirely different culture, it was applied to mean the 'soul' and today local languages, and Swahili, uses 'roho' to mean this.

Anthropologists built upon what earlier informal agents of power had started, especially after the First World War in Africa, and used local peoples to formulate their ideas. At times colonial officials acted as amateur anthropologists as it would directly benefit themselves. How better to govern people than to 'study' them. Of course, this was heavily dehumanising and intrusive to the peoples being subjected to these anthropological studies. C.W. Hobley was an administrator in Kenya and wrote about the Kikuyu in Bantu Beliefs and Magic (1922), while Charles Dundas around Kilimanjaro wrote about the Chagga in Kilimanjaro and Its People (1924). We see these Orientalist depictions of African culture in these works. Dundas wrote that Chagga creation stories resembling Christian creation stories had to be due to an 'ancient Semitic connection' as Christian missionaries had only been in the region for a few decades; a perception that Africans were rooted in tradition meant that they surely could not have belief subjected to change from recent influences. Not only does Dundas ignore the presence of Islam along the coast and centuries of trade with the Middle East possibly introducing these ideas, but he contradicts himself by stating that white Europeans are ruling in the Chagga afterlife. Similarly, Hobley exhibits these views. He lists over sixty 'curses' called thahu, which he compares to sin, which the Kikuyu rigidly live by - one of the things which can implement a thahu is a dog knocking over a pot - with the worst being a man seeing a girl undergoing circumcision during irua, the ceremonial rite of passage. However, African-American anthropologist Ralph J. Bunche was allowed to see it in 1941, and local chief, Koinange, even threatened to take his daughters from the ceremony if Bunche was barred from seeing it. 

Forms of Colonial Rule

Colonial rule took many different forms across even the same empires. Rule by companies often predated formal rule - the EIC in India until 1857, the VOC in Indonesia until 1799, and the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) until 1906 in the Congo. As we have already looked at, capitalism and imperialism marched hand-in-hand so they positioned themselves as a way to extract resources from colonised regions. Formal rule which replaced company rule built upon these institutions - these companies attempted to 'reform' indigenous cultures at the same time trying to make a profit. Company rule could end due to loss of profit (with the VOC), mismanagement (the VOC and the EIC's inability to deal with the 1857 Indian Rising), or brutality (with the ABIR). The Belgian Congo became synonymous with colonial brutality. To maximise rubber production (from 100 tons in 1890 to 6,000 in 1901) Leopold oversaw long work hours in poor conditions enforced through violence. Individuals, including pregnant women and children, were forced to work over 80 hours a week with the viboko (hippo-hide whip) hanging over them. In 1904 Roger Casement issued a report called King Leopold's Rule in Africa detailing the atrocities, such as the depopulation of the Bolobo mission station which saw its community decimated from 40,000 to 1,000, and the brutal mutilations as punishment for fleeing forced labour. Casement's book featured the infamous photo by Alice Seeley Harris of a man called Nsala in Wala district mournfully looking at a severed hand and foot, the only remains of his five-year-old daughter. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) depicts an ivory collector, Marlow, working for ABIR going insane with greed and power.

Nsala looking at his daughter's foot and hand

'Indirect rule' was a common form of colonial rule. This was coined by Frederick Lugard in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa to describe a form of rule where the British, and other colonial powers, would rule through local elites. Lugard would govern in Nigeria operating through local leaders, like the former Sokoto rulers. This was not limited to Africa - France ruled through Vietnamese and Cambodian kings and the Dutch ruled through Indonesian sultans as well. This was a cost effective way to rule large areas cheaply - Britain barely had a few dozen individuals operating in Nigeria. Settler colonialism saw large communities of white settlers displace indigenous peoples from their land in order to establish their own communities. We saw this in South Africa, Rhodesia, Algeria, Australia, the American West, Taiwan, and Hokkaido to name a few notable examples. Today, white families still hold the majority of land in Zimbabwe and South Africa. African settler colonies saw indigenous Africans being reduced to tenant farmers who had to find work on white farms. Indirect rule could be mixed with settler colonialism - Kenya is a good example of this. The colonial government seized over 7 million acres of land to form the White Highlands while, simultaneously, implementing indirect rule for larger ethnic groups - like the Kikuyu. A further form of colonialism, which still exists today, is informal empire; foreign powers could exert varying economic and political power over weaker states. At times this paved the way for formal colonial rule - Britain and France used Egypt's debts to build the Suez Canal to exert control, the US used American plantations in Hawaii to overthrow the monarchy, and Japan used railways and political influence to informally control Korea and north China before formally annexing them. China is the perfect example of informal empire. British opium imports were used to justify a war in 1839 resulting in Britain taking 'treaty ports', like Hong Kong, where Britain could exert free control. Other powers including France, Russia, Germany, and Japan similarly carved up China forming their own treaties granting them political and economic influence.

Adaptation to Empire

The Masasi Church

Empire greatly shaped the demographics and cultures of the colonised peoples. Indentured servitude created a significant Indian diaspora across the world. Regular famines under British rule put incredible strain on communities, so Indians - especially Bengalis, Tamils, and Gujaratis - engaged in indentured servitude to escape famine despite the brutality of the labour system. As a result, South Africa, east Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania developed significant Indian populations. The Uganda Railway, constructed in 1895, was primarily built with Indian labourers. Eventually, thriving and successful Indian communities, over 84,000 in Uganda by 1940, emerged. White farmers in Kenya, after 1929, became angered that Indians, like Mohamed Ahmed, were gaining enough wealth to own land, so campaigned the colonial office to prevent their land ownership. Those from wealthier families, or in the right circumstances, could use imperial structures to become deeply involved in the colonial project. The UMCA heavily relied on Leonard Pesa and Cecil Majaliwa to convert Africans, and they too infused racism to Africa in their rhetoric; Pesa said that 'evils would tend to disappear' under European rule. Meanwhile, Mohandas Gandhi became a lawyer and travelled to both South Africa and Britain; future president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, was educated at Makerere College; and Senegalese president Leopold Senghor managed to attend university in Paris. Work and demographics shifted thanks to imperialism. Increased urbanisation meant that primarily rural cultures became involved in urban economies, or economies geared towards industrial consumption. For example, industrial peanut production became important to Senegal, so much so that women began singing folk songs about how peanuts were more dependable than men. Koreans moved to cities like Tokyo and Osaka to work in industry forming vibrant Korean communities. While in the metropole there were discussions of reforming work this was not the case in colonial states. Corporal punishment and forced labour remained common - the Congo Free State was only targeted as it went beyond 'acceptability'. 

As we saw when we looked at India, reforms were subject to being contested. Ostensibly benevolent reforms - like medicine and education - were often used to increase colonial power. Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism would explain how colonial medicine was distrusted as it was linked to colonial powers, and the fact that colonial doctors ignored the needs of colonial patients. Censuses in India to prevent female infanticide were used to keep tract of peoples, bringing women into education were used to reinforce female domesticity, and medical programmes, while healing patients physically, could cause major mental damage. Janice Boddy has discussed how the Wolff sisters in 1930s Sudan tried to reform female circumcision and midwifery. Part of their reforms placed more emphasis on the midwife to make birth safer; by doing so they inadvertently took agency away from the mother. Colonised peoples did adapt colonial changes, everything from faith to language. In Singapore 'Singlish' emerged combining English, Malay, Tamil, Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese is a notable example. As France placed emphasis on making Africans citoyens noirs formally educated Africans could use French courts to improve their own rights. 

Race and Sex

An infamous Pears' Soap ad depicting The White Man's Burden

Our next post will be about racism so we'll discuss it more there, but it is vital to understand empire. Race thinking was integral to how empire was structured. Certain ethnicities, called 'races' or 'tribes', were deemed superior so colonial powers chose to rule through them - in Rwanda and Burundi Germany, and later Belgium, declared the Tutsi to be 'natural rulers' so had to rule over the Hutu. In India, the Public Service Commission in 1886 declared that the British Raj was made up of 'passive' Hindus, 'lawless' Muslims, 'manly' Punjabis, and 'effeminate' Bengalis. As early as the 1810s a woman called Saartjie Baartman was kidnapped from South Africa and forced to perform in a freak show, shaking her hips to accentuate her large buttocks. When she died she was even put on display in a museum. Racial scientists would use Saartjie Baartman to formulate their eugenics and social Darwinist theories. Human zoos emerged across the worlds including at the 1878, 1889, and 1900 Parisian World's Fair which featured a 'Negro Village', and a Japanese exhibition depicted 'savage' Ryukyuans, Taiwanese, Koreans, and Ainu. Anne McClintock has emphasised the intersection between commodity capitalism and colonial racism. Soap, in particular, was used with it being linked to 'white civilisation' against 'unwashed black savagery'. Pears' Soap regularly featured Africans becoming white thanks to soap, proudly proclaiming that it was doing its part in 'The White Man's Burden'. Ann Stoler has linked racism to the fragility of white identity, especially with the idea of interracial relations. Originally, concubinage had been allowed in Dutch Indonesia, however, this changed by the early-twentieth century for fears of 'racial impurity' and mixed race children, the 'fruits of a regrettable weakness'. White women were seen as tempting non-white men, due to white male fears of racial mixing. In 1926 in Dutch New Guinea rape or attempted rape of a white woman by a non-white man would result in the death penalty. The rape of a non-white woman by a white man would not result in death, however, indicating a fear of white prestige being challenged.

Resistance to Empire

A colonial depiction of the death of Major-General Gordon during the Mahdist War

Empire was never simply accepted by colonised peoples. Many of those who resisted colonialism have since become icons of national history since independence. For example, the queen mother of the Asante Kingdom, Yee Asantewaa, in 1900 led a rebellion against British rule in what would become Ghana laying siege to Kumasi. When we looked at India we discussed the 1857 Indian Uprising - growing anger over over-reach by British rule and mismanagement sparked a rebellion. However, British divide-and-rule policy, divisions among the rebels, and British armaments meant it was crushed. Violent resistance to colonial rule could vary in different ways. Some, like the Anglo-Zulu War, was a clear-cut case of trying to prevent colonial rule. Some was due to political misrule. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi in Sudan calling for a restoration of Islam and the purging of the corrupt Ottoman and Egyptian rulers. In 1884 the Mahdi defeated the British, and it took until 1899 for British rule to be re-established. Putting down rebellion was incredibly destructive. In German South-West Africa, modern Namibia, the German settlers and soldiers dispossessed and abused the Herero and Nama communities. In January 1904, a hundred Herero horsemen arrived at Okahandja to solve an inheritance dispute, but the local commander, Lieutenant Ralph Zurn, declared an uprising was underway. What followed was the German colonial army under General Lothar von Trotha issuing an extermination order resulting in the massacre of the Herero and Nama peoples. In January 1904 the Herero population was around 80,000 - by December 1905 it was about 15,000. It was to be the first genocide of the twentieth century, and sadly it would not be the last. Non-violent resistance could also take place. Gandhi and other Indians began non-violent protest against South African segregationist policies, something which would pave the way for his satyagraha protests against British rule in India. Japan tried to replace Korean with Japanese, so Koreans formed Korean language societies in the cities. The destructive schooling system for Native Americans and First Nations in the US and Canada aimed to destroy indigenous culture by taking them from their families, and raising them in abusive boarding schools. They were taught Christianity, and were beaten if they spoke their own languages. Children managed to resist by fleeing back home, and the Ghost Dance movement emerged in the 1880s to revitalise Lakota culture. It took a massacre by the US army to crush this movement. All these aspects of resistance would pave the way for future anti-colonial resistance and decolonisation.

Legacies and Conclusion

The legacies of colonialism is intrinsically felt today. Racism and Orientalist views of the former colonised world still persists today - from movies like Aladdin to how the news presents events in Africa and the Middle East. The political boundaries formed by colonial rule, and what happened in them, touches every country to this day. Divide-and-rule policies has caused deep ethnic and religious divides in Nigeria, India, and Pakistan to name a few. The legacies of German and Belgian rule in Rwanda regularly led to massacres after independence resulting in genocide in 1994. With colonies geared towards supplying the metropole with raw materials this ensured that after independence this is still the case. Zambia's economy was geared towards the export of copper, but when copper prices plummeted in the 1970s it devastated the Zambian economy. For this reason, former colonies, or informal colonies, remain tethered to their old colonial overlords, or new powers. Even now, former French African colonies have to pay a tax to France as 'gratitude' for bringing them 'civilisation'. One of the reasons why liberal democracy has largely failed to take root in most of Africa, as well as other colonies, is that there was no history of democracy before independence, and they simply have not been allowed to. We shouldn't really discuss the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, instead we should discuss how it evolved thanks to decolonisation.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavour, (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015)

-Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, (London: Hurst & Company, 2017)

-Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 1978)

-Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995)

-Richard Reid, A History of Modern Africa, 1800 to the Present, Second Edition, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

-Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

-A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The History of the UMCA, 1859-1896, (London: Office of the UMCA, 1897)

-Charles Dundas, Kilimanjaro and Its People, (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1924)

-C.W. Hobley, Bantu Beliefs and Magic, (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1922)

-Ralph J. Bunche, 'The Irua Ceremnony among the Kikuyu of Kiamba District, Kenya', The Journal of Negro History, 26:1, (1941), 46-65

-Thomas Spear, 'Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa', The Journal of African History, 44:1, (2003), 3-27

-Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

-Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late-Nineteenth Century, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995)

-Ann Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures', American Ethnologist, 16:4, (1989), 634-660

-Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World, (London: Bloomsbury, 2011)

-Nicholas Dirks, Castes of the Mind, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

-Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, Trans. by Haakon Chevalier, (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1959/1980)

-Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, (London: Penguin, 1902/1956)

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. The next World History post will look at the origins of modern racism. For other World History posts please see our list. For other blog posts please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.