DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF EUROPEAN EXPANSION
The devastating impact on indigenous peoples of the Europeans’ arrival in the New World continued to be felt long after phase 1. As descendants of the early settlers, reinforced by millions of new immigrants from Europe, pushed back frontiers they interacted for the first time with new groups of Amerindians.
To death from imported diseases was added expulsion from ancestral lands by settlers intent on occupying the allegedly open spaces of temperate-zone North and South America. When settlers did not need indigenous labor, the maxim “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was put into practice. Araucanian speakers in southern Argentina and Chile and horse-riding tribes on the U.S. plains felt the full force of this maxim. The typical nineteenth-century settler on the great plains of the Americas doubtless viewed Amerindians much as the first governor of Massachusetts did. “For the natives,” John Winthrop wrote triumphantly in 1634, “they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.”17 Severe demographic and territorial losses lowered the capacity and often the will of Amerindians to resist further rounds of physical, cultural, and spiritual dislocation.These patterns were replicated in many parts of Oceania in phase 3. Measles, smallpox, dysentery, diphtheria, and tuberculosis ravaged Melanesian and Polynesian islands, whose isolation had prevented their inhabitants from building up the necessary immunities. Land-hungry settlers in Tasmania and the Australian outback organized officially sanctioned hunting parties in the 1830s and 1840s to exterminate the original inhabitants. Visiting Tasmania in 1836, when genocide was proceeding full tilt, Charles Darwin lamented, “Wherever the European has trod death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, and we find the same result.”18
Yet Oceania was peripheral, not central, to the phase 3 imperial enterprise.
Mainland Asia and Africa were central. Here the striking fact is that, with few exceptions, indigenous populations did not decline following initial contact with outsiders. If anything, Asians and Africans held an edge over Europeans, who initially could not cope with such unfamiliar tropical maladies as malaria and yellow fever. Nineteenth-century European medical advances, however, undercut that advantage. Whereas thirty-nine of forty-eight Europeans died of malaria on Macgregor Laird’s expedition up the Niger River in 1832, not a single fatality occurred among the dozen Europeans who spent three months with Laird on the same river in 1854: on the second trip each crew member took six to eight grains of quinine daily. In the 1850s seedlings of the cinchona tree, from whose bark quinine is derived, were taken surreptitiously from the tree’s Andean habitat and transferred to botanical gardens in India, Ceylon, and the Dutch East Indies. Mass production via cinchona plantations was the next step. A readily available antimalarial medication in Asia was crucial to the penetration of tropical Africa. Europe’s head start in technology and organization eventually overcame the disease advantage held by Asians and Africans.19European settlers and their descendants played key roles in the major New World colonies of phase 1, most obviously in pure settlement colonies, but also in mixed settlement and plantation colonies, whose economies and social structures were shaped by settler control of land and labor. The typical phase 3 territory, by contrast, was the colony of occupation. There, few if any Europeans were present other than administrators, soldiers, traders, and missionaries—people, that is, for whom the metropole rather than the colony was the psychological reference point and legal domicile. In the great majority of Asian and African colonies more than 98 percent of the population was indigenous. Public health advances that permitted Europeans to survive in Old World colonies were insufficiently effective or comprehensive to encourage large-scale settlement there.
Additional barriers to settlement included a hot, damp climate, poor soil quality, and the ever-present possibility of indigenous uprisings.To be sure, Europeans did migrate in phase 3 to Old World zones where latitude or altitude produced congenial climatic conditions. The most prominent examples were Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, the highlands of central Kenya, Eritrea, and the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. But the numbers involved were small compared to the simultaneous flood of emigrants to the Americas. Of the estimated 22.7 million people migrating from Britain between 1815 and 1915, only 10 percent went to Australia and New Zealand, 4 percent to South Africa, and 1 percent to India. Nineteen percent migrated to Canada, 62 percent to the United States.20
Of those who did leave Europe for Old World colonies, the vast majority settled in lands ruled by Great Britain. There, as in Canada and Britain’s Caribbean possessions, settlers pressed for an increasing share of political power, at least over internal matters. Canada set the crucial precedent with publication in 1839 of the Report on the Affairs of British North America by Gov.-Gen. John George Lambton, Earl of Durham. The Durham Report proposed a system known as “responsible government” under which the monarch’s representative was expected to endorse domestic policies approved by the majority party in a locally elected, territorially based legislature. The reports recommendations led to the Union Act of 1840, then to the British North America Act of 1867 authorizing complete self-government in Canada’s internal affairs. Australia and New Zealand followed Canada in obtaining responsible government in incremental steps from the 1840s onward. Starting in 1902 parliamentary leaders from the white dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand could express advisory opinions on imperial defense, tariffs, and other foreign affairs through Colonial (renamed Imperial) Conferences held periodically in London.21
At the other end of the spectrum of local political participation were colonies of occupation. There, European energies were directed toward gaining control of formerly independent societies.
Pacification campaigns and creation of colonywide administrative structures required a government apparatus firmly in the hands of metropolitan officials. Institutions representing indigenous interests were either rudimentary and ineffective—as in British India and the four French communes of Senegal—or nonexistent. The idea that colonies of occupation might follow the model of the white dominions toward responsible government was not seriously contemplated by officials in London, to say nothing of policy makers in other metropolitan capitals who ruled out devolution of responsibility even to settlers.South Africa, which in phase 1 combined features of a mixed settlement colony, a plantation colony, and a colony of occupation, experienced developments in phase 3 that underlined its uniqueness. The population of European origin became more complex as the initial settler wave from Holland and France was supplemented by a nineteenth-century influx from Great Britain. English-speaking immigrants were initially drawn to South Africa’s coastal areas as farmers and merchants. Others came later in response to the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) in the interior.
Descendants of phase 1 settlers increasingly identified themselves not as Europeans but as indigenous people (Afrikaners), paralleling the tendency of descendants of Europeans in the New World to redefine themselves in phase 2 as indigenous to America. In contrast, phase 3 emigrants from the British Isles saw themselves as settlers and retained economic and cultural ties to the metropole. Ethnic differences were reinforced politically by formation of two independent Boer (Afrikaner) republics, whose domestic and foreign policies were at odds with British imperial interests and values. The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 pitted the British government and its settler allies against the Boer republics. Britain’s victory incorporated them into a new Union of South Africa. A constitutional settlement devised by leaders of the two white ethnic groups permitted the country to become a self- governing dominion in 1910.
Underlying the willingness of the recently warring white parties to resolve their antagonism through constitutional compromise was recognition that their shared interest lay in excluding the country’s nonwhite population from political power and economic privilege. The basis for domestic self-government in South Africa was a pact explicitly rejecting all political rights for nonwhites in the two former Boer republics and offering severely limited participation rights for nonwhites in the two British-ruled provinces. For South Africa’s English-speaking whites the reference group was the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where indigenous people were also effectively excluded from the political system. The difference was that whites formed the majority in these other countries, whereas Africans constituted the overwhelming majority in South Africa. In the United States and the white dominions electoral democracy was consistent with racially exclusionary public policies. In South Africa the racist ideological foundations of a minority-ruled polity precluded evolution toward democracy.
Plantation colonies in the Caribbean experienced social and economic changes in phase 3 when the Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery built upon it were abolished. Meanwhile, a variant of the plantation colony model emerged in several Indian and Pacific Ocean islands and in South Africa’s Natal Province. This time it was indentured servants from India who constituted the labor force for plantations producing sugar (in Mauritius, Reunion, the Fiji Islands, Natal), copra (Fiji), and tea (Ceylon). Many Old World islands acquired characteristics found earlier in the Caribbean: racially plural societies, rigid race-based caste systems, and economies extraordinarily dependent on export of a limited range of commodities grown by the most advanced mass-production methods.22
The social structure of colonies of occupation acquired in phase 3 was dichotomized along racial lines.
On one side were the few rulers, who were white; on the other the vast majority classified as native, nonwhite, or in subcategories based on shade of skin, religion, language, and social custom. In many instances colonial societies were trichotomized, so to speak, by the officially sanctioned entry of a nonEuropean group to perform intermediate economic functions. Examples were Indians in East Africa, Burma, and Malaya; Chinese in Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and Malaya; and Lebanese in French West Africa. Such third parties were separate in continental origin and culture from both the colonizers and the indigenous populace.Whether a society was divided into two or three racial castes, opportunities for informal interaction across caste lines were severely reduced in phase 3 as compared to phase 1. This was consistent with a growing European preoccupation with race, seen not simply as the principal means of identifying and classifying people but also as a way of placing them in a hierarchy of more or less civilized societies. Sexual intercourse across racial lines was increasingly frowned upon, interracial marriage even more so. The more rigid sexual code was part of an increasingly dominant ideology asserting white (Caucasian) superiority and insisting that “pure” white descent lines be maintained.23
The use of race to differentiate, stigmatize, and physically isolate groups of people meant that phase 3 colonies of occupation had sharply polarized social structures. People of mixed racial ancestry composed a small fraction of the population, at least compared to New World countries that in phase 1 had been mixed or plantation colonies. A more prominent role for mixed-blood groups might have reduced racial polarization by raising the number of socially recognized racial categories, complicating the process of classifying human beings along color lines and dramatizing how arbitrary the process was.24