IMPACTS ON WESTERN EUROPE

—State formation was accelerated.

Empire building abroad had to await formation of centralized states at home. But the two processes became mutually reinforcing once some measure of control was gained in overseas lands.

Charles Tilly’s assertion that in western Europe “war made the state, and the state made war”¹⁸ should be complemented by the observation that the European state made the overseas empire, and the empire helped make the European state.

—Domestic political stability was enhanced.

Overseas possessions and issues relating to empire enabled rulers to deflect, divert, and undercut domestic opposition. This reduced the likelihood of unrest and revolt from below and made it easier for those in power to retain it.

Absorption of settlers by selected colonies probably increased metropolitan stability by lowering population pressures in overcrowded areas and removing trou­blesome minorities, notably Puritans, Baptists, and Quakers to bna and French Huguenots to Dutch South Africa.

Following the massive workers’ uprising in Paris in 1848, “the Second Republic felt itself called upon to solve the underlying social problem,” writes Charles-Robert Ageron, “and the Assembly voted 50 million francs to clear the capital of subversive elements. Unemployed artisans and labourers made over 100,000 applications for free grants of land in Algeria; in the end there were 20,000 such emigrants, 15,000 of them from Paris, who settled in Algeria in forty-two new villages.”²⁰ Ex-revolutionaries quickly became reactionaries, ardently supporting French rule in Algeria. In one stroke the government turned enemies at home into agents of expansion abroad.

A long-term effect of Britain’s industrial development was a surge in popula­tion. Having to absorb all entrants to the labor force would have been difficult, particularly when the business cycle turned downward in the 1870s. More than twelve million people left Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Most emigrated to the United States, where the predominance of English-speakers was an enduring colo­nial legacy; others went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In the absence of these vents for surplus population, Britain might have experienced urban unrest and a more radical working-class movement.

When politics took a populist turn in phase 3 the quest for overseas territory was used to generate mass support or to mute or deflect criticism of a government’s performance at home. Among the earliest examples of an overseas “circus” de­signed primarily for domestic consumption was the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.²¹ Politicians seizing on imperial issues for electoral purposes included Ben­jamin Disraeli, Jules Ferry, Otto von Bismarck, and Joseph Chamberlain.²² It is unclear whether their actions had the desired effect. Ferry’s Vietnam policy, in fact, backfired on him. But major expansionist initiatives were taken in phase 3 in the expectation that they would increase popular support for the government of the day.

If expansion helped stabilize metropolitan regimes, the impending loss of empire could destabilize them, as occurred twice in phase 5, with the fall of France’s Fourth Republic in 1958 over Algeria and the coup in 1974 against the Caetano government over the Portuguese armed forces’ inability to defeat African nationalist movements. Both instances involved a change of regime as well as of national leader­ship and hence represented a major break with politics as usual.

—How metropoles fared overseas influenced membership and status in the Euro­pean interstate system and affected procedures for handling relations among states in war and peace.

Having overseas possessions may have influenced whether a polity survived or disappeared. Profits generated by the Dutch East India Company doubtless helped Holland win the long struggle for independence from Habsburg rule. Holland’s status as a player in Southeast Asian trade and politics must have counted for something when independence was internationally acknowledged in 1648.

Metropoles with access to colonies during wartime enjoyed a strategic edge. In this respect the distribution of imperial power influenced the outcome of hegemonic wars. England’s victories over France in the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic Wars owe a great deal to its ability to trade with far-flung colonies while using seapower to curtail France’s ability to do likewise. Writing after World War I, the French colonial admin­istrator Albert Sarraut stressed how important France’s possessions had been:

When after the attack of 1914 the first batallions of black troops arrived, imme­diately followed by those disembarking from Asia, Antilles, and Madagascar, when our industries became full of hardworking and silent Indochinese workers, when our harbors and storehouses were stocked with abundant products from our overseas possessions, when successive war borrowing recorded hundreds of millions of subscriptions by French and indigenous peoples from our colonies, everyone noticed suddenly that the efforts of our soldiers and administrators and colonizers, ignored until then, were not worthless.²⁴

Germany and its allies could not extract comparable resources from outside the war theater.

Did competition for colonies raise the propensity of European states to go to war? This was quite likely the case in phases 1 and 2 but not in phase 3, so the evidence is mixed. The answer appears to depend on whether mechanisms were in place for resolving a wide range of interstate conflicts.

A colony could stabilize international relations by being used as a pawn in diplomatic negotiations. Exchanges of non-European territory in the last decade of phase 3 reduced the level of tension among great powers and postponed the day of reckoning. After the French declared a protectorate over Morocco very little addi­tional real estate was available, either to reward the winner of a peaceful great-power confrontation or to compensate the loser. The competition for colonies did not cause World War I, as Lenin argued; more likely the termination of the scramble for colonies depleted available buffers against the resort to violence and made war more likely.

Europeans gained valuable diplomatic experience as they negotiated overseas claims. They attended conferences and signed treaties—as at Tordesillas (1494), Brus­sels (1876), Berlin (1885), and Algeciras (1906)—that addressed disputes over foreign lands. Formal settlements of major European wars in 1714, 1763, 1815, and 1914 contained protocols redistributing governance rights over colonies. Imperial issues enabled diplomats to hone their skills, develop widely accepted procedures for con­flict management in their own region, and learn about the capacity and will of other governments to implement agreements.

Possession of territories outside the European system had symbolic value, enhancing the status of countries so obviously able to make their presence known in the larger world. Not all metropoles were great powers. But all European countries aspiring to become great powers acquired colonies. The tendency to associate great­ness with empire can be traced to the major metropoles of phase i: Spain, France, and England.

—The private profit sector was strengthened.

Capitalism and imperialism were mutually reinforcing enterprises. Private profit sector institutions played leading roles in founding and consolidating em­pire. Empire in turn strengthened the sector and set west European countries even more firmly along the path of capitalist development. Not all, but a great many metropolitan-owned colonial ventures turned a profit. These included firms han­dling shipping, insurance, wholesale and retail trade, corporations owning mines and plantations, banks lending large sums to governments for infrastructure proj­ects, and exporters of capital goods like railroad equipment and structural steel. A portion of gains from overseas activities was presumably invested in profitable ven­tures in Europe, thereby fortifying the sector in its home base.

Colonial governments helped capitalist institutions by providing physical se­curity, protecting property claims, financing construction of port facilities and trans­port networks, and ensuring access to desired amounts of low-cost labor (see chapter 12). In these ways governments lowered the risks and costs of private ventures and raised profit margins. In many cases overseas private investment would not have occurred had the government not been run by Europeans. When the bulk of a colony’s public revenue was generated by non-Europeans, a subject population living close to subsistence involuntarily subsidized wealthy foreign enterprises.

A legacy of colonial rule was ex-colonies whose elites eagerly sought European private investment. Phase 3 offers an instructive contrast between former colonies in the New World and colonies-to-be in the Old. European investors in the Americas gained handsome profits from assets like mines and utilities and returns on port­folio loans to new governments. They saw no need to recolonize New World states because, with elites of European descent running government, the political condi­tions were in place for outsiders to make secure, profitable transactions. At the same time many European investors pressured their governments to claim territory in Africa and Asia. There the desired political conditions were absent because rulers of indigenous polities were ambivalent toward foreign investment or hostile to it. The different attitude of European private sectors toward ex-colonies and what might be called prospective colonies partly explains why phase 3 metropoles did not try to reconquer independent countries in the Americas while simultaneously sponsoring conquest in Africa and Asia. An apparently inconsistent foreign policy was in fact quite consistent. It followed the maxim that profit seekers could do far better in areas that were colonies or had been so than in places never brought under metro­politan rule.

Some of the gains capitalists made from the colonies were spent for political ends at home. Money financed electoral campaigns and, whether placed on top of the table or under it, swayed politicians in their decision making. Lobbying efforts helped ensure that restrictive regulations and high tax rates were not imposed or, if on the books, not assiduously enforced.²⁵ In these ways business interests maintained the high level of influence over—and autonomy from—the public sector that has long marked west European societies.

—European economic development was stimulated.

It is beyond the scope of this book to estimate how much the colonies contrib­uted to European economic growth. Some scholars conclude that the impact was significant, others that on balance it was negligible.²⁶ The more modest goal here is to trace how resources extracted from colonies stimulated metropolitan growth and structural change. At issue is the nature if not the magnitude of the contribution.

Two caveats are in order. Colonies varied enormously in the capacity to assist development outside their borders. Clearly, much depended on factor endowments, population, location, and the role (if any) of settlers. Moreover, the most a colony could contribute were potentially productive resources. There was no guarantee that potential would be realized. For evidence of missed opportunities one has only to observe the Habsburgs, who squandered vast supplies of New World bullion on wars and anti-Reformation propaganda campaigns. Whether a metropole made good use of its empire’s resources depended on how its society, polity, and economy were structured.

An obvious rationale for colonies was that they supplied valued commodities unobtainable at home. Cinnamon, pepper, tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, and cane sugar were consumed by growing numbers of Europeans. Other commodities were inputs in manufacturing operations. Cotton and tropical dyes were essential compo­nents in Britain’s early textile-based industrialization. Tin, rubber, chrome, copper, bauxite, and petroleum were likewise crucial at later stages of European industrial development. Gum arabic was used in the manufacture of textiles, paper, medicines, confections, and cosmetics. Palm oil literally lubricated the wheels of industry and, as an ingredient in soap, kept the industrial work force clean. Colonies were impor­tant sources of all these commodities, in some instances the only areas where they could be obtained. Political control over the source increased assurance of future access and made it easier for metropolitan manufacturers to invest large sums in factories dependent on imported inputs.

Slave labor in phase 1 plantation colonies kept production costs of sugar, indigo, tobacco, and cotton artificially low, enabling the emerging European middle class to consume more of these commodities. In Capitalism and Slavery Eric Wil­liams shows how profits amassed by slave traders and owners of West Indian sugar plantations were invested in new technologies. Capital from the West Indian trade financed Boulton and Watt, the first firm to manufacture the steam engine.²⁷

Government policies regulating trade between Britain and India gave early industrialization a boost. Lightweight, brightly colored cotton cloths imported from India, known as calicoes, became popular in the early eighteenth century and threat­ened English wool interests. Responding to pressure, Parliament in 1721 passed the Calico Act prohibiting display or consumption of printed cotton goods. This con­structed a barrier behind which the infant industry of cotton textile manufacturing, using imported raw cotton, got its start.²⁸ Given the critical importance of cotton textiles to the first Industrial Revolution, what might have happened had free-trade principles been applied and Indian competition not been restricted? A century later the East India Company took the opposite approach and removed duties on British textiles entering India. This assured Lancashire’s mills a valuable overseas market and further undercut competition from Indian handloom weavers. Had Indians set tar­iffs on goods entering their country they would presumably have acted to protect endangered domestic interests in the way that Parliament did. But the British were in charge at home and in India. Tariff policies in both settings had the effect of indus­trializing one country and pushing the other toward rural stagnation.

In both the colonial and independence eras, settler communities were closely tied to the European economy as exporters of primary products and avid importers of the latest consumer goods. To the extent that settlers and their descendants be­came wealthier overseas than if they had not emigrated, they stimulated Europe’s development by spending additional income on its exports.

—Empire helped create and reinforce a superiority complex.

In many situations Europeans quickly and easily subdued indigenous peoples. Those early encounters took place not simply across lines of racial and cultural difference but also across the gap of power inequality. Europeans found it difficult to separate observations about difference from those about inequality—and many ob­servers had an active interest in blurring that very distinction. It was but a short mental leap for people superior in power to infer that they were superior in intellect, morality, and civilization as well. The superiority complex served as a rationalization for colonial rule and, by reducing qualms over the rightness of dominating other people, was empowering in its own right.

The inequality built into cross-cultural encounters affected what European observers saw, did not see, and imagined or fantasized that they saw. More impor­tant, it affected the meaning of the observers’ experience, which was then conveyed through words and pictures to a broad reading public at home. Edward Said’s influential study Orientalism emphasized how perceptions shaped by power and self- interest distorted Europeans’ views of themselves and the colonized Other. This idea is a leitmotif in the rapidly growing field of cultural and postcolonial studies.²⁹

Power asymmetry reinforced a recurring human tendency to describe real or imagined cultural dissimilarities in normatively loaded language. European travelers sometimes used complimentary terms to describe people they met. Political theorists relying on travelers’ reports sometimes emphasized positive features, as when they referred to the nobility and generosity of New World peoples. But more often what was strange to the traveler and armchair philosopher was described as repulsive, barbaric, irrational, and uncivilized. Or unfamiliar customs were deemed bizarre, implying that their practitioners were not fully human.

Colonial rule made negative stereotyping easy and relatively costless. The deepening and broadening of dominance described in part 4 increased the range of settings in which Europeans could express a superiority complex without fear of re­taliation. Their control of the means of coercion made it dangerous for colonial sub­jects to question, much less confront, the complex’s assumptions and claims. When Europeans could largely shape the form cross-cultural interaction took, they came to believe that negative stereotypes were not instances of self-serving prejudice but doc­umentable matters of fact. The ruling caste’s prejudices, in other words, were rein­forced by judgments made after observing group relations in the colonial situation.

How the superiority complex was phrased and justified varied over time and from one metropole to another. But a theme constantly emphasized from phase 1 well into the twentieth century was that Europeans were especially skilled at gover­nance. They took pride in a long tradition of founding polities, ranging in scale from Greek and Italian city-states to postfeudal national states to the vast Roman empire. A colonial administration, once installed, gave Europeans additional cause to believe they were good rulers. For not only did they know how to govern themselves; they also knew how to rule alien people in places far from the civilizational center. What is more, went the claim, Europeans knew how to govern others better than others could ever govern themselves. Colonial rule did its subjects a favor for which they should be gratefill.

Sentiments and values nurtured on imperial frontiers were conveyed to people who never left home. Colonial rule shaped Europe’s self-image by juxtaposing its civilized self to the uncivilized existence of subordinate peoples abroad.

This legacy carried over to the postcolonial era. Just as formerly colonized peoples struggled to throw off an internalized inferiority complex, so those who once ran the world found it difficult to abandon the belief that they were truly superior to everyone else.

—Empire contributed to a guilt complex.

Some Europeans appealed to core values of Western civilization in bitterly criticizing what their compatriates were doing overseas. There is a long tradition of carefully documented attacks by insiders on European greed, cruelty, exploitation, sexual misconduct, and hypocrisy. It dates to the first years of settlement in the Americas with the sermons of Father Antonio Montesino and the impassioned lobbying of Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas. It can be traced through the writings of William Wilberforce and other Abolitionist crusaders to the nineteenth-century Dutch administrator and novelist Eduard Douwes Dekker to twentieth-century crit­ics like E. D. Morel, Andri Gide, Norman Leys, Fenner Brockway, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Critics did not necessarily conclude that the colonial enterprise should be abandoned: Las Casas and Morel called for reform despite impressive evidence they themselves amassed that human rights abuses were intrinsic to foreign rule. In some cases, however, Europeans supported movements for independence against their own countries. Annie Besant and Rev. Charles Andrews were active in Indian na­tionalist circles in phase 4. Sartre and Brockway were articulate, impassioned critics of French and British colonial policies, respectively.

With the final collapse of empire in phase 5, a desire to atone for past sins has probably played a role, however sublimated, in the foreign policy of former metro­poles. It may have been a factor in the establishment of foreign aid programs. It may also account for reluctance by many European officials and intellectuals to criticize the human rights violations of new-state leaders.³⁰ One sees this, for example, in the cordial relations between France’s presidents—from de Gaulle through Mitterand— and leaders of repressive military and one-party regimes in francophone Africa.

A sense of guilt does not entail the absence of a sense of superiority. The two may coexist, as when Europeans (or westerners generally) use demanding moral standards to criticize their own countries’ domestic and foreign policies and lower standards to evaluate non-European regimes. That the superiority complex con­tinues into the present is most unmistakable in the rhetoric of some on the political right. The complex is more subtly manifested but nonetheless present in the double moral standards sometimes employed by the left.