DECOLONIZATION AND VIOLENCE
Decolonization took place in a context of protracted and often intensely violent conflict. Violence was of three sorts:
1. Wars among European states, which affected both the European theater and colonies of contending metropoles;
2.
Warfare in which a metropole attempted to prevent a colony from gaining independence;3. Conflict within a colony pitting some of its residents against others. Contentious issues included the advisability of seeking independence, what kind of postindependence regime should be established, and who should lead the new state.
Warfare among west European powers was if anything more intense and protracted in this period than in phase i. In particular, the English-French rivalry that erupted into war on several occasions earlier in the eighteenth century took new forms in phase 2. The British found themselves engaged ideologically against French revolutionary populist doctrines and militarily against Napoleon’s armies. Between 1775 and 1824 the two countries and their respective European allies were at war more often than at peace.7 Although the principal staging areas were Europe’s mainland and its coastal waters, the struggle affected many other parts of the world as well. The Caribbean islands (especially between 1793 and 1796), the Nile Delta (1798-1801), and the Indian subcontinent all experienced the outward projection of European fratricide.8 Only historical myopia permits us to call the terrible events of 1914-18 the First World War. Phase 2 struggles for hegemony on four continents, in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and in the Mediterranean had global dimensions.
A second type of conflict pitted metropoles against independence movements. No European state was prepared to concede that its possessions had the right to rebel, much less unilaterally to proclaim sovereignty.
The British, French, and Spanish sent sizable contingents of troops across the Atlantic to reinforce loyalist forces on the ground in crushing insurrection. Napoleon sent thirty thousand troops to Saint Domingue in 1802; Ferdinand VII deployed ten thousand to Venezuela and New Granada in 1815 shortly after being restored to the Spanish throne. Wars for independence normally lasted several years, included guerrilla attacks as well as conventional battles, and generated serious casualties among opposing forces and civilian populations. Of twenty countries tracing independence to phase 2, nine experienced violent outbreaks between proindependence and prometropolitan forces. In a tenth, New Spain, protoindependence movements led by Hidalgo and Morelos were brutally suppressed by royalist troops.9Often the first and second types of conflict were linked, one European state supporting the breakup of a rival’s empire. France assisted the American colonists by providing the critical support on land (Lafayette) and sea (de Grasse) to force Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. In fact, over twice as many French soldiers as American were killed and wounded in the Yorktown campaign. For their part the British, having failed to conquer Toussaint’s Saint Domingue in the 1790s, gave naval support to Jean Jacques Dessalines against the French when he became Haiti’s first head of state in 1804. In 1823, the prospect that Bourbon France might invade Spain and then try to reconquer Spain’s former colonies led British Foreign Secretary George Canning to issue his famous declaration recognizing the sovereignty of these New World countries and placing British naval power on the side of their continued independence.10
A third type of violence, that among a territory’s residents, figured in about a third of the independence struggles of phase 2. Most dramatic was Haiti, where, beginning in 1791, a struggle among black ex-slaves, mulattoes, and white plantation owners had devastating effects on lives and property.
In 1804 virtually all whites were expelled or massacred. The American Revolution, too, had a civil war dimension. About a fifth of the thirteen colonies’ residents remained loyal to the British Crown, and some fought on the British side. Most of the eighty thousand Loyalists forced into permanent exile after the war had property confiscated by revolutionary forces. Indeed, on a per capita basis the American Revolution produced as much property confiscation as the French. Far more political emigres left America than France.11 In New Spain, suppression of the Hidalgo and Morelos uprisings was undertaken primarily by locally born criollos or mestizos. The decade of violence that wracked Venezuela and New Granada (Colombia) after 1810 was in large measure a civil war, as many of the soldiers and civilians loyal to the Spanish Crown were born and raised in those territories. The briefer but still contentious drive for independence in Peru and Upper Peru (Bolivia) likewise involved locally born partisans on both sides.Brazil’s political transition was remarkably peaceful. Portugal did not seriously contest Dom Pedro’s Cry of Ypiranga asserting independence. And his declaration did not trigger the conflicts among regions, racial groups, and classes that might have been expected given the country’s size, ecological and social diversity, and pronounced economic inequalities. The contrast with phase 5 is striking. For after World War II it was the Portuguese who fought most stubbornly of all the metropoles to retain their empire. And it was in Portugal’s principal colony, Angola, that one of the most devastating and prolonged postindependence civil wars of phase 5 took place. On the other hand, the British, Belgians, and, after 1958, the French generally avoided resorting to force when dealing with nationalist movements. It was as if Portugal’s leaders had forgotten or repressed a chapter from their country’s history, leaving it to other metropoles to follow its own earlier precedent.
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