CONTRADICTIONS OF COLONIALISM

Consolidation of colonial rule had the unintended effect of magnifying and high­lighting problems inherent in systems of overseas governance. These problems made it more difficult for administrators to know what to do and became sources of conflict with colonial residents.

As the colonial government extended its sway throughout a territory, extract­ing resources, regulating behavior, adjudicating disputes, and providing services through bureaucratic agencies, the public sector came to look increasingly like the metropole’s. But the more closely the public sectors resembled each other in function and structure, the more obvious to all was the essential dissimilarity between them: the metropole’s monopoly of sovereignty. The colony was supposed to be a proto­state, not a complete state. In order to create a protostate the metropole’s agents set themselves an ambitious agenda for change (see chapter 13). Once the apparatus of control was in place rulers favored not change but the status quo. They thus shifted from a radical to a conservative stance toward the role of government in colonial society.

But as government tried to slow down political change, growing numbers of colonial residents asked why their protostate should not move more rapidly toward state sovereignty. Critics complained, in effect, “The metropole has taken us 80 percent of the way. Why not finish the task? If our rulers won’t do it we will.” As a political movement, nationalism represented a challenge to colonial rulers. As an ideology, however, it was a pledge not to abandon the metropole’s agenda but to complete it. The European state was the normative reference point, the standard to which nationalists appealed when critiquing the way their territory was governed.

If colonial rulers acquiesced to nationalist demands they sped up the transfer of power and their own eventual departure.

In one instance a metropole’s struggle for freedom was cited to support the claim that its colony should likewise be free. In 1913 officials and settlers in the Dutch East Indies proposed to celebrate the centenary of the Netherlands’ independence from French rule. I. R. M. Soewardi Soerjeaningrat, secretary of the newly formed Indische Party, wrote an essay—tongue firmly in cheek—warning against this plan: “If I were a Netherlander I would not celebrate the commemoration of indepen­dence in a country where we refuse to give the people their freedom.... Especially in these times when the people of the Indies are engaged in finding their feet, although they are only half awakened, it would be a tactical mistake to show this people how it should eventually celebrate its independence.”²

Disagreement over the locus of ultimate political authority was reinforced by conflict over the basis of political legitimacy, conflict not only between metropolitan authorities and nationalists but also between norms and practices applied by metro­poles at home and those applied abroad. In theory and practice colonialism was authoritarian. The matter was straightforward: the strong took possession of a dis­tant land, and decisions affecting it were made at the imperial center, from the top down. Yet the theory and practice of domestic politics in many metropoles were antiauthoritarian. From the seventeenth century onward a powerfill theme in Euro­pean political thought was the idea that legitimacy inhered not in monarchs by divine right but in the people, expressed through legislatures representing the popu­lar will. Such ideas were institutionalized in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 when Parliament successfully limited royal prerogatives, and in France in 1789 with the onset of a social revolution that abolished the monarchy, appealed to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, and vested ultimate power in a people’s assembly.

Through education, travel, and word of mouth politically conscious individ­uals in colonies became aware of these trends in Europe. They demanded that the colonial nation be represented in an elected legislature, either its own or the metro­pole’s. The principle of consent from below applied whether the nation was defined restrictively (as by settlers in phase 2) or inclusively (as by non-Europeans in phase 5). Again Europe was the normative reference point. Colonial elites wanted their territories to replicate not only the sovereignty but also the populism of Euro­pean states.

Political developments in England pushed bna opinion leaders toward form­ing the first new state. In a stream of pamphlets that became a torrent following the Seven Years’ War, writers asserted the principle, reaffirmed by Parliament in 1688-89, that only a body representing the people had the right to impose taxes. Parliament’s failure to apply this principle when imposing new taxes on North American colonies after the war set off the first serious organized opposition to metropolitan policies. The American Declaration of Independence eloquently affirmed the principle of consent of the governed and notions of social contract articulated around the time of the Glorious Revolution. Samuel Eliot Morison observed that “the principles and language of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) were so much a part of [Thomas Jefferson’s] mind that unconsciously [Jefferson] thought and wrote like Locke.”³ Independence was seen by its architects as a way to fulfill values the metro­pole rhetorically affirmed but refused, in practice, to respect.

In what became the second new state, Haiti, the timing of the slave revolt in 1791 was strongly influenced by the opening rounds of revolution in France.

French revolutionary ideals appealed to Spanish Americans who went on to lead independence movements. The Argentine nationalist Manuel Belgrano wrote, “As I was in Spain in 1789, and the French Revolution was then causing a change in ideas, and especially in the men of letters with whom I associated, the ideals of liberty, equality, security, and property took a firm hold on me, and I only saw tyrants in those who opposed man’s enjoying, wherever he might be, those rights with which God and Nature endowed him.”⁵

Phases 3 and 4 saw increased participation in European national legislatures through progressive extensions of the right to vote. This trend did not go unnoticed in the colonies. Most directly affected were Britain’s white dominions, many of whose residents had recently left the mother country and were unwilling to accept more restrictive franchise rules for themselves than for British elections. When the first substantial influx of settlers took place in Australia and New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century, democratization of British political institutions was well under way. These dominions consequently experienced more rapid transitions to re­sponsible government than did Canada, whose founding occurred in a predemo- cratic era.

In Britain’s colonies of occupation politicians pressed in phases 4 and 5 for a broadened franchise paralleling developments in the metropole and in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The argument was that granting all adult residents of a territory the right to vote regardless of race or culture was the ultimate fulfillment of a movement for participation that had already broken down restrictive barriers of education, class, and gender.

Concepts of nation and nationalism became more appealing in colonies as they became more popular in Europe. It is well known that the French Revolution ushered in an era of heightened nationalist sentiment throughout Europe. The initial impact of its appeal to fraternity was on the French people, mobilized to carry out radical change domestically and wage war against neighboring monarchical regimes. A second impact was on peoples whose lands were invaded, whether by revolution­ary forces or Napoleon’s armies. The warlike form French patriotism took stimulated patriotic anti-French fervor in countries as far afield as Russia and Spain. It is not a coincidence that independence movements flourished in the Americas between the start of the French Revolution and the end of Napoleon’s rule. Year after year, leaders of New World movements were exposed to the emotional rhetoric of European nation-states at war. Hence they found it increasingly “natural” to think in national­ist terms about their own circumstances.

The experiences of colonial subjects living in Europe during this tumultuous period had a radicalizing effect. Francisco de Miranda, a legendary figure in Spanish American revolutionary history, was a general in France’s army in the early 1790s. Jose de San Martin served as a lieutenant colonel in the Spanish army that fought desperately to repel France’s invasion of Iberia. Simon Bolivar resided in Europe in 1799-1802 and 1803-07. It was during his travels there that he swore (in Rome) to devote his life to the independence cause.

The legacy of French revolutionary nationalism was felt well into the twentieth century. Writing in Paris in 1922, Ho Chi Minh referred to “the people of France... who have won their freedom through revolution, shattering the despotic yoke of emperors and kings so that they might become rulers of their own destiny.”⁷ Already an ardent patriot before leaving Vietnam for France, the young man was further inspired by the history of the country that had conquered his own.

But metropoles whose people regarded themselves as nations were generally unwilling to grant that colonies had this same attribute or might some day acquire it. The unwillingness was understandable because nationhood was equated with shared racial and cultural features, and colonies were generally far more heterogeneous than their metropoles. But Europeans also saw nationhood as the product of shared his­torical experience. Metropolitan officials typically reacted with skepticism if not outright rejection to the argument that their own rule was a sufficiently important shared experience to create a colonial nation. From the colonial perspective it was abundantly clear that Europeans wanted nationhood for themselves but not for others.

Sovereignty, popular representation in government, national identity were ideas integral to European political development from the eighteenth century on­ward. Colonial elites were so favorably impressed by them that they wanted to apply them to their own territories. Here the contradictions of overseas empire came into play. Metropoles refused to grant these ideas an export permit, claiming their inap­plicability abroad. A break from Europe became the best way to affirm ideas Euro­peans were eloquently articulating.

That these ideas were also ideals enabled colonial nationalists to seize the offensive in the normative arena. Empires had been constructed on the premise that Europeans were morally superior to other peoples. Colonial nationalists turned the tables by accusing Europeans of being morally deficient, hypocrites who denied their own principles when these conflicted with narrow self-interest. Nationalists in phases 2 and 5 had a strong sense that their cause was just, both because it embraced universalistic values and because independence would move humanity closer to acknowledging those values. As the high ground was seized by colonial activists, supporters of empire found themselves on the moral defensive.