DIVISION AND WEAKNESS WITHIN INDIGENOUS SOCIETIES

Cleavages within indigenous social/political units offered additional opportunities for Europeans to establish and extend a power base. To revert to hypothetical mode, imagine that polity E has recently conquered its neighbor, F.

Such an opportunity arose when Pizarro and his band of adventurers took on the mighty Inca Empire. The Huanca Indians had been recently defeated by an army from Quito and incorporated into the empire. John Hemming writes that when the Quitan army engaged Pizarro’s men in 1534 at the Battle of Jauja, the Huancas “made no move against the Spaniards.... They even provided two thousand auxiliaries for [the Spanish commander’s] army. Their action was partly revenge for the Quitan occupation during the past year, but it was also a more fundamental revolt... against the rule of the Incas from Cuzco. The hostile attitude of powerful tribes such as the Huanca was a decisive factor in the overthrow of Inca rule in Peru.”³³

A large indigenous polity lacking strong bonds of common loyalty was in a vulnerable position, for parts of it could be taken without necessarily precipitating a hostile response from other parts. The decentralized structure of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century made it problematic to devise a common strategy against advances by the British East India Company into outlying Mughal provinces. In West Africa, the Sokoto Caliphate was unable to coordinate resistance to British forces led by Frederick Lugard (1900-03). Each major city within the caliphate fought its own defense with minimal assistance from others.

Another kind of internal cleavage open to outside manipulation was a struggle for political leadership. A contestant might seek or be offered European assistance to come out on top. The British acquired Singapore by such means. Though the island belonged to the sultan of Johore, succession to the sultan’s throne was disputed when Stamford Raffles, an agent of the English East India Company, arrived on the scene in 1819. Raffles sided with one of the two claimants, installing his man as sultan in an elaborate ceremony and offering him a handsome yearly stipend. The condition was that the new ruler formally request British protection. In western Senegal after the 1860s “succession conflicts were increasingly taken to the French.... Every time there was a succession conflict in Siin, [French headquarters in] Goree received letters, often promising things like new posts that the French had not even requested.”³⁵ These vignettes suggest that societies lacking widely accepted rules for handling political succession were vulnerable to outside intervention whenever contenders for office looked around for powerful supporters.

A different sort of leadership struggle gave the British the pretext they wanted to occupy Egypt in 1881. Popular opposition to the corrupt, bankrupt government of Khedive Tawfiq coalesced around Col. Ahmad Urabi. When riots broke out to protest the government’s supine acquiescence to stiff British and French financial demands, the khedive feared he would be overthrown by nationalists led by Urabi. Tawfiq secretly suggested that the Anglo-French fleet, anchored offshore from Alexandria, bombard the city and land marines to save his throne. The French declined, but the British acted on the request. In the short run Tawfiq triumphed over his challenger: Colonel Urabi surrendered to British officers and was dispatched to exile in the Seychelles.

When ethnically distinct groups with origins outside a territory specialized in trade and finance, they sometimes found it convenient to collaborate with agents of European firms and governments. This was the case with long-established Chinese communities scattered throughout the Southeast Asian mainland and East Indian and Philippine archipelagos. As the Malaccan episode indicated, overseas Chinese lacked ties to their home government. The government in turn was indifferent to what happened to them.³⁷ Hence they were vulnerable to extortion and persecution in areas where they lived. Many Chinese merchants were amenable to a European takeover provided they could be assured a profitable, protected niche in the local economy. Instead of serving as advance agents of China’s power, as European settlers did for their metropoles, overseas Chinese communities helped Europeans consoli­date power by serving as intermediaries between rulers and local people in the colonial division of labor.

Christian missionaries often directed conversion campaigns toward low-status groups in the understandable hope that these people would welcome a gospel of liber­ation from oppression, slavery, and neglect. Target groups included untouchable and low-caste Hindus in India and slaves and repatriated former slaves in Africa.³⁸ Con­verts were able to raise their position in society—or even declare independence from the old stratification system in which they had been trapped—by attending mission schools and moving up the mission agencies’ alternative hierarchy. These people’s linguistic and cross-cultural skills made them especially desirable employees in Euro­pean firms and government offices. They knew they owed their position in life to the new order brought by outsiders. It is not surprising that the collaborators so essential for consolidating European rule were drawn disproportionately from their ranks.³⁹