CROSS-SECTORAL LINKS

Functional specialization, autonomy, distinctive motivations for reaching out be­yond Europe—these factors gave a metropole’s sectoral institutions the option of acting overseas on their own.

Of several patterns available one involved a coalition between government and the officially approved church. The most notable example was Spain in phase 1. At least one Catholic priest accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the New World. There followed a steady stream of clerics to minister to settlers and con­vert Amerindians. The Spanish state endeavored to protect Church property in the colonies and prevent Jews and Protestants from entering overseas possessions.

called on the Indians to acknowledge the pope as ruler of the world and, in his stead, the king of Castile by virtue of donation. It then informed them that if they accepted the summons they would be received as loyal vassals, but if they did not they would be deprived of their liberty and property and further stated, “We protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who came with us.”¹²

Because the statement was written and read in Spanish, indigenous people could not possibly have understood what their options were, much less the reasoning behind the requirimiento’s grandiose claims to worldly authority. Still, the fact that it was routinely proclaimed in the early years of the Conquest shows the significance to Spanish imperialists of having a religious rationale for aggression.

The Church further served Spanish administrators by instructing young Amer­indians in Spanish and Latin and compiling dictionaries of indigenous languages. It thus satisfied a necessary condition for effective colonial administration: a means of communication between riders and ruled.

Church and state cooperated closely to assert Spain’s claims to Alta (upper) California when, in the mid-i/oos, the Russians and English showed signs of interest in the area. A chain of missions and forts was established, beginning at San Diego in 1769 and rapidly extending northward.

The state was dominant partner in its alliance with the Church by virtue of patronage rights conceded Spanish monarchs by Rome. Yet the Church was no pliant agent of the state. Catholic prelates played important roles as royal advisers. Co­lumbus might not have been granted the audience with Queen Isabella in 1491, to present his case one last time, had it not been for the influence at court of Father Juan Perez. Consolidation of royal power by Isabella and Ferdinand was itself due in large measure to Cardinal Gonzalo Ximenes de Cisneros, the queen’s confessor and subse­quently de facto regent of Castile.¹³ In the colonies, missionaries carried out then- work with minimal government supervision or intervention. Their reports on settler exploitation of Amerindians were sent directly to officials in the colonies and in Spain. The tireless lobbying of Father Bartolome de Las Casas on behalf of indige­nous peoples pressed the royal court to limit the worst abuses. Franciscans and Jesuits set up stations far beyond the effective bounds of Spanish administrative au­thority. Especially noteworthy were the initiatives of Father Eusebio Kino in north­ern New Spain and the virtually independent polity run by the Jesuits in Paraguay.

The standardized layout of a Spanish colonial city symbolically expressed the ability of state and church to cooperate and complement one another while retaining separate institutional identities. On one side of the large square in the city center— and typically the tallest structure—was the principal church.

A second pattern was a coalition between a metropolitan government and elements of its private profit sector. For the Portuguese during the first two centuries of phase i, individual investors and merchants were keys to expansion of interconti­nental commerce. Entrepreneurs needed the state because it controlled fortified trading enclaves in Africa and Asia, and the king claimed monopoly rights to pro­ceeds from trade. The king needed entrepreneurs because they had the strongest incentive to go out and engage in trade. The two interests were satisfied when the royal court delegated monopoly rights to traders in exchange for a share of gains from their ventures. Once access to the Indian Ocean was assured the court devised a special office, the Casa da India, to delegate these rights. Licensed merchants were given permission to sail on the king’s ships and to place goods in royal storehouses.¹⁵

The situation changed as the volume and variety of trade goods increased and as economies of scale from corporate transactions undercut operations by individual traders. In Dutch and English hands the chartered company became the classic mech­anism for forging mutually beneficial ties between public and private profit sectors.

The coalition took another form in phase 3. The emergence of large European financial institutions with considerable investable capital coincided with the rise of a new type of North African ruler, committed to modernize his country through public expenditures on railroads, ports, military training and upgrading, and public buildings. Banks made large portfolio loans to rulers in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco to assist their defensive modernization programs. When export revenues proved insufficient to repay these loans, financiers pressured their home governments to manage the revenue collection efforts of increasingly insolvent regimes. From fiscal intervention to comprehensive administrative and military takeover of these three territories was but a short step.¹⁶

Another pattern involved less formalized interaction among all three metro­politan sectors, each at times operating independently, at times taking others’ ac­tivities into account when planning its own strategies.

All three sectors were likewise active in constructing the virtually new French empire of phase 3. In the public sector were politicians like Leon Gambetta, Jules Ferry, and Eugène Etienne, and soldiers whose actions in the field often went well be­yond marching orders. Among these were Thomas Bugeaud (Algeria), Louis Faid- herbe (West Africa), Louis Archinard (West Africa), Henri Rivière (Tonkin), Joseph Gallieni (Tonkin and Madagascar), and Hubert Lyautey (Morocco).¹⁸ Business inter­ests in the 1880s and 1890s were anxious to carve out overseas zones in which French merchants, industrialists, engineers, shippers, and investors could be assured a pro­tected, preferred status. They pushed for expansion through the organizations noted in chapter 5. In the religious sector Cardinal Lavigerie’s aptly named Pères Blancs (White Fathers) were active in Algeria, Tunisia, and the East African interior. The Societe des Missions Africaines de Lyon proselytized along the West African coast, the Societe des Missions Etrangères de Paris concentrated on Indochina, and the Congregation des Sacres Coeurs worked in the Marquesas.¹⁹

Links between French missionaries and government officials were close in the Marquesas. Missionaries arrived in 1838, four years before these Pacific islands were formally annexed. Greg Dening writes, “The French government saw the mission­aries as civilizing influences and precursors of the flag. They had free passage in French naval ships and from the beginning had negotiated to be fully paid and supported from public funds.”²⁰

The overseas role of all three British sectors in the nineteenth century was described in chapters 5 and 8.

As if to compensate for Germany’s belated entry into the imperial sweepstakes, German businessmen and missionaries entered many territories at virtually the same time as soldiers and administrators. This was the triple assault in its most literal form. An example from Kamerun (Cameroon) shows how sectoral activity assumed a national character. Shortly after setting up an administration there the German government asked the Basler Evangelische Missionsgesellschaft to take over the work and property of the English Baptists, whose presence was unwelcome. This move was supported by a syndicate of Hamburg traders, who foresaw the benefits of having Africans gain technical and German-language skills in mission schools. For its part the Basle mission, headquartered in Switzerland, established a branch in Stuttgart to portray itself as a more German institution.²¹

The autonomy European sectors enjoyed permitted several variations in the sequencing of overseas activities. One pattern—seen in France’s advance from Sene­gal into the West African interior—was for soldiers to assert political control over a territory. Merchants and missionaries came in once pacification efforts were well advanced.²² A more common pattern was for soldiers and administrators to enter a territory at about the same time as agents of other sectors. Normally this was done with a clear understanding of which actors would undertake which tasks. Examples were the state-Church alliance in Spain’s colonies, the state-merchant coalition of Dutch, English, and French chartered companies, and the triple sector activi­ties of the French in seventeenth-century Canada and the Germans in nineteenth­century Africa.

Another option, the reverse of the first, was for merchants or missionaries or both to ensconce themselves in an area before the arrival of soldiers and administra­tors. In many cases—notably in the New World in phase i—agents of all three sectors set up headquarters in a coastal enclave. Merchants and missionaries then moved into the interior, far beyond zones protected by colonial authorities.²³ Only at a later point did soldiers and administrators catch up with them. On the West African coast, in Madagascar, Indochina, and Oceania merchants and missionaries operated, often for decades, without access to colonial enclaves.

The capacity of Europeans to assemble combinations of sectoral actors and to devise a variety of sequencing patterns for sectoral overseas activities goes far toward explaining their global dominance. Europeans had at their disposal a wider reper­toire of options for organizationally outflanking other societies than anyone else. Their repertoire enabled them to be highly flexible, adapting penetrative strategies to the specific circumstances they encountered. When military conquest at the time of initial contact was possible and deemed desirable, empire could be established by the classic method of aggressive soldiering. Here the metropole’s coercive and adminis­trative resources facilitated the work of traders and missionaries. When conquest at the time of contact was not possible or advisable Europeans did not abandon over­seas initiatives as not worth the effort. Instead they employed a backup strategy substituting influence for power. If a metropole’s soldiers could not prevail, at least its consumer goods could be purchased and its preachers’ Salvationist message heard.

Informal influence by nongovernmental sectors functioned in practice as a Trojan horse. Indeed, it was instrumental in preparing many non-European societies for eventual subordination. Some takeovers were the result of mercantile and mis­sionary activity consciously designed for that end. But to an even greater extent takeovers were the unintended and unforeseen product of activities that, while os­tensibly nonpolitical, nonetheless subverted the political status quo. Examples from both expansionist phases show how different sequencing arrangements worked.

The “conquest first” option was most likely when an indigenous population’s capacity to resist takeover was limited by low population density, vulnerability to imported diseases, the absence of powerful state structures, and the presence of numerous small-scale societies riven by intergroup conflicts or internal cleavages. Many of these conditions obtained along the coasts and rivers of the New World in phase i. Another circumstance tempting would-be conquerors was the concentra­tion of vast quantities of transportable wealth in the hands of indigenous elites. This situation—quickly redefined as the opportunity of a lifetime—faced Cortes and Pizarro.

Had European countries sent forth only soldiers it is unlikely they would have come to dominate the world. Administrators were needed to translate battlefield victories into ongoing control. But not even the ablest bureaucrats backed by the best-equipped soldiers would have sufficed. The key to dominance was the spatial stretch of all three—not just one—of several metropoles’ sectors and the ability of sectoral agents to devise complementary mechanisms of control. The colonial gov­ernment did what governments everywhere do, obtaining compliance by heavy reliance on the use and threat of force. Agents of the private profit sector emphasized material inducements, rewarding with imported consumer goods those who pro­duced and sold commodities Europeans wanted. Missionaries specialized in what Emile Durkheim terms “normative pacification.” They offered a sense of moral superiority now and eternal salvation later to hearers who abandoned inherited worldviews, values, and behaviors for new, civilized ones. What Amitai Etzioni terms the three forms of power-coercive, remunerative, normative—were all in play and were all backed up by home-based institutions.²⁴

A colonial regime installed by conquest needed revenues to cover pacification, personnel, and infrastructure expenses. It needed non-Europeans to collaborate in such tasks as collecting taxes, implementing new laws and regulations, recruiting police forces and forced labor gangs, and keeping an eye on potential rebels. If revenues and collaborators were not found quickly, initial military victories would not translate into durable rule. Here is where agents from a metropole’s private profit and religious sectors were so valuable. Traders, plantation and mine owners, and settlers set rapidly to work producing whatever might net them a profit. Because capitalists specialized in economic transformation and had personal incentives to bring it about, they were often highly efficient at generating output which could then be taxed. Many of their activities were export-oriented, which cut revenue collection costs by concentrating tax collection in a few sites—notably port cities—where com­modities were shipped.

Fully as important was the missionaries’ contribution: training and socializing collaborators. To be effective agents of religious conversion missionaries had to be­come linguistic intermediaries, learning indigenous languages, translating the Bible into them, and teaching the metropole’s official tongue. Missionaries in turn trained students in catechism classes and schools as linguistic intermediaries. School gradu­ates were in great demand by governments whose top officials all too often could not speak directly and intelligibly to the subject population. Mission schools taught literacy and numeracy, skills required for many bureaucratic positions.

Missionaries dispensed a cultural as well as religious doctrine. To the extent that they converted indigenous people to the colonizer’s lifestyle and values, making European civilization the normative reference point, they increased the likelihood that some of their converts would actively wish to collaborate. Products of mission­ary schools often possessed the school-based knowledge and compliant demeanor administrators considered ideal for effective grassroots work.

Sir Harry Johnston, whose late nineteenth-century exploits in southern Africa certify him as an archetypal soldier-administrator, was not alone in recognizing the contributions agents of Euro-Christianity made to empire. Writing in 1890, he waxed almost rhapsodic: “The missionary is really gaining your experience for you without any cost to yourself.... They strengthen our hold over the country, they spread the use of the English language, they induct the natives into the best kind of civilisation, and, in fact, each Mission Station is an essay in colonisation.”²⁵

But sometimes administrators found the missionary presence inconvenient, if not downright subversive. An obvious example was a colony in which another highly institutionalized, cosmopolitan religion, with its own sacred texts, was widely prac­ticed. Active proselytizing for Christianity might trigger a revolt by adherents of the other religion that would be difficult to repress. The autonomy of sectors within European society permitted adaptability in this situation. Lack of fusion between state and church in the metropole made it possible for colonial administrators to restrict missionary activity if there were persuasive political reasons to do so.

Thus British officials in India adopted a distinctly more critical stance toward Christian missionaries after the Great Mutiny than they had in the quarter century before it. Behind the uprising was growing suspicion among Hindu and Muslim sepoys that the British were trying to convert them to Christianity by forcing them to violate religious practices. To help counter this impression among Muslims the raj went so far as to subsidize an eiite secondary school in Aligarh to teach Islamic principles alongside the standard English curriculum.²⁶ In Nigeria and the Sudan the British devised a dual policy, permitting missionary activity in the predominantly animist southern regions while virtually prohibiting it in the overwhelmingly Is­lamic northern areas. For the same pragmatic reason the French were tolerant of missionaries in Dahomey and Gabon yet wary of them in the Soudan and Niger.²⁷ Where missionaries were not wanted, administrators met the need for educated indigenous personnel by founding government schools.

More frequent than conquest first was a pattern in which soldiers bearing the flag followed traders bearing manufactures and missionaries bearing redemption messages. This was the typical sequence during phase i in the Old World as well as in the New World interior. During phase 3 the same sequence played out in the African interior and Oceania. This pattern took advantage of the autonomy of nongovern­mental sectors, which could send out their agents even if the home government was unable or unwilling to do likewise.

When merchants or missionaries were the first Europeans to reach other societies, they helped in several ways to facilitate subsequent imposition of European rule. Posing a less immediate and obvious threat to indigenous authorities than foreign soldiers or administrators, they could gain entree in ways not possible for a metropolitan government’s agents. Once installed within a foreign society merchants and missionaries reported their observations and activities to sponsoring agencies. Many reports were read by others as well. C. R. Boxer notes that the Jesuits “enor­mously enlarged the scope and depth of Europe’s knowledge of Asia by the letters and reports which they sent from their mission-fields, and which were widely circu­lated through the medium of the principal European presses.”²⁸ Information that such reports conveyed about local political conditions, natural resources, social customs, and languages proved invaluable to empire builders at a later point.

In some cases missionaries provided intelligence directly to government offi­cials. In 1815 directors of the London Missionary Society wrote Lord Somerset, governor of South Africa’s Cape Colony, requesting assistance in sending a mission to the Tswana people, who lived north of the colony’s boundaries. The directors observed, “We hope that the information which [this mission] may obtain respect­ing remote nations will be gratifying to your Excellency.”²⁹ David Livingstone’s well- publicized writings and speeches on the depredations of Arab and Swahili slave raiders increased popular pressure on the British government to intervene in cen­tral Africa.

As a joint public-private profit venture, a chartered company was able to penetrate other societies more readily than public sector agents acting on their own. Non-European rulers might regard the company as a trading operation whose occa­sional resort to force was only a means to the end of profit. If rulers believed they themselves could profit by trading with the company they might tolerate its troops on their territory as a minor strategic risk outweighed by economic gain. The troops could even be a strategic asset if borrowed to help the ruler against local rivals. But if at some point the company reversed means and ends and used its wealth to obtain power, its troops would be ideally positioned to conquer a polity from within. According to Jawaharlal Nehru this is how the English East India Company en­trenched itself in India. The company “had originally established itself for trading purposes, and its military establishment was meant to protect this trade. Gradually, and almost unnoticed by others, it had extended the territory under its control, chiefly by taking sides in local disputes.... People looked upon [the company’s] troops as mercenaries to be hired. When it was realized that the British were playing nobody’s game but their own, and were out for the political domination of India, they had already established themselves firmly in the country.”³⁰

Agents of nongovernment institutions who had won the confidence of indige­nous elites were able to use their influence to facilitate the transfer of power. Their role as cultural intermediaries was ready-made for cross-cultural deception. Leaders of New Zealand’s Maoris were persuaded to sign the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) with British officials by Archdeacon Henry Williams, who understood the Maoris’ lan­guage after years of working among them. The archdeacon’s Maori-language version of the treaty, however, conveniently glossed over the clear delegation of sovereignty to Queen Victoria’s government contained in the English-language version. Loben- gula, ruler of the Ndebele, was induced in 1888 by the Revs. C. D. Helm and John Moffat, whom he considered trustworthy friends, to sign agreements granting the British South Africa Company concessions far more sweeping than the missionaries led Lobengula to understand.³¹ When the extent of the deception became known it was too late. Heavily armed soldiers and settlers had moved into Maori and Ndebele territory. The invaders were well positioned to suppress indigenous uprisings that took place within a few years of the signing of deliberately misleading treaties.

Consumer goods introduced by missionaries as well as merchants almost invariably proved popular. Woollen cloth, needles, mirrors, iron pots, and kerosene lanterns may at first have been considered novelties and luxuries—but they quickly became conveniences, then were seen as satisfying basic needs. A seventeenth­century traveler in North America, Nicolas Denys, observed that nearly all Amer­indians aware of European ways were affected “by the need for the things which come from us, the use of which has become to them an indispensable necessity. They have abandoned all their own utensils, whether because of the trouble they had as well to make as to use them, or because of the facility of obtaining from us, in exchange for skins which cost them almost nothing, the things which seem to them invaluable, not so much for their novelty as for the convenience they derived there­from.”³² In order to obtain imported goods people expanded traditional production patterns and grew new crops in response to external demand. They began, in other words, to look outside their society, turning to the nearest representatives of the outside world to satisfy new notions of the good life. A parallel process of external dependence occurred in the religious sphere when people converted to Christianity, since foreigners now became the arbiters of acceptable religious belief and practice.

Non-Europeans looking to Europeans to satisfy their material and spiritual needs were prime candidates for directing political loyalties outwardly as well. They were inclined to disparage indigenous rulers unable to furnish desired material benefits and to disrespect or even disavow rulers whose legitimacy rested on non­Christian foundations. Sensing the inadequacies of non-European rule, they were more likely to consider the colonial alternative with an open mind or even with eagerness. Whether by design or accident European nongovernmental sectors pro­duced collaborators-in-waiting.

At some point rising European influence within a society became a source of discord in its own right, pitting those prepared to cooperate with Europeans against others counseling caution, noncollaboration, or resistance. Cleavage lines could take highly visible form, as when Christian converts abandoned their communities to enter mission stations restricted to those who had been “saved.” Examples of cultur­ally and economically insulated Christian communities were the Jesuit congrega­tions in Paraguay, aldeias in Brazil, and Livingstonia Mission in Nyasaland. In many instances externally generated cleavages reduced a society’s capacity and will to unite against the sources of those very cleavages.

Newly introduced consumer goods could undermine the old order. Distilled alcohol contributed to loss of personal self-control and family cohesion, and guns to societal disintegration. European travelers and missionaries routinely recounted the devastating human toll of gin, rum, brandy, wine, and whiskey.³³ As for guns, Keith Sinclair reports in his History of New Zealand that by the 1820s:

the Maoris had entered not a money but a musket economy. When they had got enough guns, they set off to even old scores. Because of the ramifications of kin­ship, each new death... spread out like waves from a stone dropped in the pool of tribal society.... In the twenties and early thirties these savage civil wars led to heavy casualties and cannibal feasts unprecedented in pre-European battles fought with stone-age weapons. It is estimated that about forty thousand people were slaughtered.... The traders gave the Maoris the means of self-destruction.³⁴

When guns were more readily available to one indigenous group than to others, the newly strengthened group sometimes launched more frequent and de­structive attacks on neighbors. Examples were slave raids by West African coastal peoples on residents of the interior and Iroquois attacks on the Huron. The desire of these groups to ally against a shared threat from distant shores was thereby undercut.

Missionary preaching had a subtler but potentially more corrosive impact on indigenous life. A case in point was Tahiti. Alan Moorehead writes of missionaries who arrived there early in the nineteenth century that “they meant the Tahitians nothing but good, and when all their righteous follies have been ignored, one is still left with a sense of astonishment at their success. Nothing dismayed them. Nothing turned them away from their purpose. Resolutely and persistently they kept ham­mering away at the Tahitian way of life until it crumbled before them, and within two decades they had achieved precisely what they set out to do.”³⁵

By physical self-destruction or normative pacification, the way was cleared for empire builders to march in and impose their own version of law, order, and civilization.

On several occasions indigenous elites, accurately assessing the political dan­gers posed by Europe’s nongovernmental sectors, launched counteroffensives. In the most successful instance, Japan’s Tokugawa regime in the early seventeenth century persecuted Catholic missionaries and their local followers and severely restricted the travel of European merchants. In phase 3, as European trading houses extended operations from West Africa’s coast into the interior they encountered growing resistance from Africans who had earlier, when trade was confined to the coast, been partners in mutually beneficial transactions. Missionaries to the Yoruba, Baganda, and Vietnamese experienced hostile backlashes by local rulers.

An underlying dynamic was at work in these cases. To attain their goals agents of European private profit and religious sectors had to disrupt the societies they entered. If anything, agents tended to underestimate the extent of the transforma­tions set in motion by their presence and activities. Societal disruption in turn placed at risk the work agents were sent out to perform. As merchants and missionaries faced a growing array of obstacles, ranging from persecution to the anarchy loosed by breakdown of local authority structures, they turned to their metropole’s public sector for help. A colonial regime that earlier had appeared unnecessary or even undesirable now was attractive if not essential. European rule could restore a vanish­ing political stability and permit traders and missionaries to move freely about the territory on their business.

How a metropolitan government responded to pleas for intervention from its other sectors depended largely on conditions in a given territory—a point elaborated in chapter 11. Suffice it to say that Japan’s rulers were capable of repelling Euro­pean invaders in the early seventeenth century while this was not so for Yoruba, Baganda, and Vietnamese elites confronting far stronger European states more than two centuries later. Another factor was a government’s relations with the other two sectors. Sometimes the decision to advance imperial claims was influenced by private lobbying, as when British missionaries urged London in the 1890s to intervene in Buganda. Sometimes complaints that merchants or missionaries were being unfairly treated gave officials a pretext for action impelled by quite different motives. A case in point was the French invasion of Cochinchina’s Mekong delta in 1858-60. Ostensi­bly troops went in to help beleaguered French missionaries. More likely were geo­strategic calculations having nothing to do with the agendas or problems of Roman Catholics. Even here, however, the religious sector mattered. Lacking persecuted missionaries, French politicians would have lacked the excuse they needed to justify naked aggression.

Examples from many places and times show how the multisectoral character of European overseas activities was conducive to empire. With a repertoire of mixtures and sequences of sectoral activity at their disposal, outsiders were able to adapt flexibly to the enormous range of overseas situations they faced.

From the perspective of non-European peoples, even if agents of three sectoral institutions had acted independently the cumulative effect of their activities was often as disruptive of precolonial ways of life as if their penetrative strategies had been carefully coordinated. Whether invasion was a single three-pronged assault or three distinct single-pronged assaults, it was eventually experienced as having a triply threatening impact. Nothing in the old way of life was safe from challenge.