COMPLIANCE MECHANISMS

Europeans used a wider range of mechanisms in phase 3 than in phase 1 to gain compliance with their demands. In the earlier era their capacity to reward others for cooperation was limited by a small volume and variety of trade goods.

Their coercive capacity increased exponentially in phase 3. When the phase began, soldiers placed cartridges one by one into a gun’s muzzle. When it ended, multiple cartridges were automatically loaded through the breech, then fired with unprecedented speed and accuracy over far greater distances. The military virtues of the Maxim machine gun, employed on colonial battlefields from the 1890s onward, were summarized by Daniel Headrick: “The Maxim was light enough for infantry to carry, it could be set up inconspicuously, and it spat out eleven bullets per second.”³³ Any conflict pitting a Maxim against a muzzle-loader—to say nothing of spears, swords, and poisoned arrows—was not really a battle. It was a slaughter.

The classic confrontation took place in 1898 at Omdurman in the Sudan, where British and Egyptian forces met the Mahdi’s army of forty thousand. The encounter was brief, intense, and decisive: the British lost twenty soldiers, the Egyp­tians twenty, the Mahdi eleven thousand. A young correspondent named Winston Churchill was present and wrote that the Battle of Omdurman was “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modem Euro­pean Power had been destroyed and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, com­paratively small risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.”³⁴

News of unequal encounters like these traveled fast.

But the mechanized factories and workshops of nineteenth-century western Europe mass-produced what people in other continents desired as well as what they feared. Consumer goods were increasingly available abroad as networks of long­distance transport, communication, and trade expanded. To the extent that these goods outcompeted locally made products in price, quality, and convenience, Europe had what indigenous peoples valued. Hence Europeans could rely far more than in the past on rewarding compliant behavior by providing or promising manufactured articles. Peasants could be persuaded to abandon traditionally self-reliant, localized systems of production and consumption for participation in a globalized economy. Only by producing for export could they earn the cash to purchase imported kero­sene lamps, cotton piece goods, corrugated iron roofing, fishnets, cutlery, bicycles, medicines, and bottled liquor.

Europeans in phase 3 were able to deploy high levels of coercion and high levels of economic inducement to get what they wanted. The threat of a Maxim gun if a colonial subject joined a revolt was reinforced by the enticing prospect of a cement floor and tin roof if the same person paid hut taxes and diligently tended coffee trees. The coercive threat was blunt and externally imposed. The material reward was more subtle and entailed an internalization of consumption norms by the colonized.

The mix of compliance mechanisms varied by time, place, and circumstance. The ratio of coercion to inducement, for example, was generally higher in the early pacification and railroad construction phases than in a colony’s later years. Reliance on force to repress indigenous groups was more pervasive in lands with European settlers than in colonies of occupation. Whatever the combination in particular circumstances, however, the mere fact that foreign rulers could simultaneously dis­play terrorizing power on the battlefield and exert attractive power in the mar­ketplace gave them an unprecedented degree of flexibility in choosing the most cost- effective and persuasive ways to achieve their goals.