Europeans did not deploy everywhere the full battery of institutions and techniques noted in chapter 12.

Their goals varied according to the funds and technologies at their disposal and their estimates of how much economic and social change was needed to consolidate political power.

Even when goals were adjusted downward to take realities on the ground into account, a large gap often separated what colonizers attempted to do from what they achieved. This was due in part to the serendipitous nature of cross-cultural inter­actions under colonialism. Unexpected results were, in fact, to be expected when unequally powerful actors tried to communicate across dividing lines of worldview, language, religion, and social custom. British soldiers employed by the East India Company, for example, had no idea that the new Enfield rifle they introduced to Indian infantrymen (sepoys) in 1857 might be culturally problematic. The rifle’s cartridges were coated with grease and had to be bitten open for powder to be released. How could company officers have anticipated reactions to a rumor that animal tallow in the grease came partly from pigs, abominable to Muslims, and partly from cows, sacred to Hindus? Suspicion that the British were trying by this subtle tactic to force sepoys to violate religious norms, and hence become vulnerable to Christian missionaries’ appeals, triggered the Great Mutiny.

Sometimes a policy had counterproductive results. An example is the public torture and death of Tupac Amaru II, noted in chapter 12. The goal was to terrify the rebel leader’s followers into submission. “The effect of these cruelties was cata­strophic,” writes John Crow,

and was the exact opposite of what the Spaniards had anticipated.

No matter how powerless a colony’s residents might appear to be, they never fully lost opportunities to assert their interests and affirm their values. What they did affected their rulers and helped shape the colonial experience for rulers and ruled alike. Part 5 shows how residents’ initiatives undermined the imperial status quo and led to the formation of independent states. This chapter takes the opposite tack, pointing out ways in which residents reinforced the system controlling them. Such an outcome seems obvious in the case of collaborators but counterintuitive for armed resistance, at the other end of the spectrum of available options. Here too the serendipitous character of colonialism is highlighted. Just as rulers’ efforts to consol­idate power underscored contradictions in the system which their subjects were able to exploit (see chapter 14), so efforts of subject peoples to advance their individual and collective interests sometimes proved self-defeating. The law of unintended consequences could—and did—work in both directions. The very range of behav­ioral options noted in this chapter could itself be disempowering, by preventing people from reaching consensus on the principal problems they faced and the most appropriate tactics for resolving problems.

A colony’s residents could be settlers as well as non-Europeans. I focus here on the latter, with comments on settler communities in a concluding section.