COLONIZED VERSUS COLONIZERS

Expressions of popular discontent were not evenly distributed across time and space. Much depended on the policies of individual metropoles—in particular, their atti­tudes toward dissidence and their willingness to set up legislative bodies in which indigenous interests were represented.

The parallel between localized discontent and global crisis was not coinciden­tal. Just as World War I and the Great Depression led Europeans to reconsider whether they were as superior to others as they had assumed, so these same crises led many colonial subjects who had internalized the idea of European superiority to call it into question. The colonized observed an international system that could not maintain the peace, a war that in pitting Europeans against each other destroyed the myth of white racial solidarity, and a capitalist system that could not prevent pre­cipitous worldwide declines in employment and production. In justifying colonial­ism, Europeans argued that they dominated the world because they were morally, intellectually, and culturally as well as materially and technologically more advanced than others. They interpreted political dominance as both the symbol and the practi­cal outcome of civilizational superiority. The more their performance contradicted their claims, the less credible and the more hypocritical and narrowly self-serving appeals to civilizational superiority became. It was but a short step for many in the colonies to challenge European rule as resting on premises that were morally flawed and empirically invalid.

The growing tendency to question the status quo was not simply a response to global crises. It was also a reaction to the nature and timing of Europe’s actions as metropoles tried to respond to crises they too could not control. As noted earlier, the strains of fighting the war of 1914-18 led Britain to make political concessions to non­Europeans in hopes of mobilizing all available imperial resources. Among the nota­ble instances were Sir Henry McMahon’s private commitment to Sharif Husayn regarding the Arabs and Sir Edwin Montagu’s public commitment to the people of India.

Britain was not alone in this respect. In late 1916 the Dutch government voted to break with authoritarian tradition by establishing a Netherlands Indies Volksrad, an advisory body that would include indigenous members as well as Dutch settlers. The Volksrad held its first meeting in May 1918, when war was still raging. In Novem­ber the Dutch governor-general spoke of giving it progressively greater powers. France recruited nearly three hundred thousand Algerian Muslims to fight in the trenches and work in its factories. Many joined the war effort with the under­standing-encouraged by Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s comments in 1914, 1917, and again in 1919—that the Muslim majority would participate more actively in Algerian and French electoral politics after the war. France’s earlier insistence that Muslims choose between political status as naturalized French citizens and personal status as Muslims had effectively disenfranchised the vast majority of Algerians, who were unwilling to win the right to vote for representatives in Paris if it meant abandoning application of Islamic sharia law to their lives. Clemenceau strongly implied that French citizenship would soon be granted without altering the Mus­lims’ personal status. In Vietnam, Governor-General Sarraut justified the forcible roundup of some one hundred thousand peasants and artisans to be shipped off to France to serve in labor battalions “by painting a vision of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, complete with references to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

After the war ended, however, metropolitan politicians played down or ig­nored altogether promises made months earlier when victory was by no means assured. Britain and France took over Middle East territories that they had solemnly declared deserved independence. In India, the Armistice of November 1918 was followed by disappointingly modest constitutional reforms, the Rowlatt Acts, and the Amritsar massacre. In the Dutch East Indies the Volksrad quickly became little more than a government mouthpiece. Any illusions that it might set policy were dashed by the Dutch constitution of 1922, which declared that the East Indies were not a colony but integral parts of the Dutch Kingdom. Relatively liberal wartime governors there and in French Indochina were replaced in the 1920s by more conservative, repressive officials. Sarraut’s vision of eventual self-rule disappeared from view. A French re­form plan for Algeria in 1919, while making naturalization somewhat easier, insisted upon abandonment of Muslim personal status as a condition for the franchise.

A similar pattern of raising and then lowering expectations can be seen in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Proclaimed in January 1918 as the rationale for American participation in the war, they included a call for national self- determination against the supranational claims of the Austro-Hungarian and Otto­man empires. Wilson’s appeal to the moral value of self-determination encouraged some colonial subjects to believe that this principle would some day be applied to them, not simply to inhabitants of polities against which America’s allies were fighting. M. M. Malaviya in India and Saad Zaghlul in Egypt referred to the Four­teen Points when pressing their nationalist demands. But this hopeful prospect was dashed at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919-20.

The roller-coaster pattern of raised and dashed expectations held in the eco­nomic arena. The heavy exactions and enforced austerities of 1914-18 gave rise to hope that economic conditions in the colonies would improve at war’s end. But inflationary pressures that built up during the war years could not be promptly relieved. If anything, prices rose after the Armistice as formerly repressed demands were at last openly expressed. And the faltering performance of European economies in 1919-22 failed to stimulate new investment and production overseas. Then came years of economic growth, inducing millions of colonial subjects to enter production for export. Following this came the disastrous downturn of 1929-34. The depression hurt most the very people who had abandoned older localized, self-reliant economic patterns for the international market. Writing in 1934, a French scholar described the plight of Tunisian grape growers: “The native, bewildered at having first been en­couraged to get the most out of his land and then discouraged by a refusal to receive his crop, is at once discontented and... reduced to poverty.”⁴⁵ Similar comments could be made about rice-growing peasants in Lower Burma and Vietnam, palm oil collectors in the Niger delta, rubber plantation workers in West Africa and Southeast Asia, sugar harvesters in Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean islands, and copper miners in Northern Rhodesia.

Such seesawing experiences caused many colonized peoples to lose whatever confidence they may have placed in their rulers’ ability or desire to improve their lives.

Anticolonial activity between 1929 and 1932 included Gandhi’s second inten­sive satyagraha campaign in India; the rebellion in Lower Burma led by Saya San; the Aba Women’s War in southeastern Nigeria; the Gold Coast cocoa holdup of 1930-31; a series of uprisings by peasants, indigenous troops, and intellectuals in Vietnam, brutally repressed by the French; formation in Algeria of the Association des Ulema by the nationalist cleric Sheikh Abdul-hamid Ben Badis; and in the Dutch East Indies a call for independence from Dutch rule by Mohammad Hatta and Sukarno, result­ing in the highly publicized trial and imprisonment of these prominent nationalists.

A third round of concentrated protest activity occurred in 1936-38. Its timing calls into question the roller-coaster hypothesis. Yet one factor in the numerous strikes in Africa and the Caribbean during this period was anger and disillusionment over the League of Nations’ pitiful response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.

India in phase 4 was in a class by itself in terms of the range and depth of autonomous activity. In the public sector was the inc, which by the late 1930s was the governing party in a majority of the territory’s provincial legislatures. The ics was quietly being captured from within. Gandhi’s innovative experiments in peaceful mass political mobilization, which challenged and embarrassed the raj while de­manding a high level of self-discipline among satyagraha’s adherents, had some positive results. His highly publicized Salt March in 1930 was carefully noted in colonies elsewhere—a sign that political developments in India were having observa­tion effects. In other sectors, indigenous entrepreneurs held important positions in industrial and financial life. Indians removed the word “missionary” from the work of Christian churches, and of course the religious sector remained overwhelmingly in the hands of Hindus and Muslims. The sectoral basis for self-government was in place. I elaborate on this point in part 5 in drawing a parallel with the thirteen bna colonies at the end of phase 1.