Introduction

In this section we consider the agents that both made and unmade empire. While missionaries might seem at first glance to fall squarely into the first category, in fact their criticisms of the treatment of indigenous peoples by both settlers and the imperial state made them harbingers of arguments that increasingly came into play during the period of decolonisation.

From the first phase of European expansion in the sixteenth century, religion and empire have been inextricably linked. Yet missionaries were never unequivocal agents of empire. As Felix Hinz points out earlier in this volume, competition between the Jesuits and the Crown led to the order’s expulsion from Spain and Spanish America in 1767. The chapters by Jason Bruner and John Gascoigne highlight how the ambivalent relationship between missionaries and the imperial state unfolded in the nineteenth-century British Empire. In Bruner’s example, the case studies are Nigeria, India and China. For Gascoigne, the context is the Pacific. European ideas were mediated through missionaries in encounters with indigenous people. As Gascoigne argues, missionaries, whatever their criticism of imperial policy and the treatment of indigenous people, inevitably projected European influence around the globe, in part through insistence that spiritual conversion be reflected outwardly by material culture and behaviour.

Taking up the theme of colonial violence and the humanitarian protests it inspired, Matthew G. Stanard considers one of the most notorious imperial settings, Belgium in the Congo Free State in the late nineteenth century. How and why did Belgian colonial expansion become the focus for such particular concern by critics both at the time and subsequently in imperial historiography? Stanard asks us to consider in what ways the focus on colonial violence as an explanatory framework might potentially lead us into problems in understanding the processes and outcomes of colonial expansion.

Roland Burke’s chapter places the collapse of Western empires and the rise of human rights in the same analytical frame. As he points out, the roots of the idea lie within the imperial period itself. Missionaries and humanitarians, while aligned with empire, invoked the concept and sometimes even the actual term ‘human rights’. In the peak era of decolonisation from the late 1940s to the 1960s, empire was formally denounced as a human rights violation, and human rights discourse was most closely and visibly aligned with anti-imperialism. Yet in the post-imperial period, profound disillusionment set in, with

new national regimes proving as disappointing as had European empires in matching rhetoric about rights with real action.

In examining the process of decolonisation, Martin C. Thomas takes a different tack, placing the political, economic and strategic workings of French imperialism within the changing international system of the twentieth century. He considers the paradoxical example of the Fourth Republic (1946—1958), an overtly democratic and liberal regime at home that proved itself harsh and reactionary in its relations with anti-colonial forces overseas. Why was it, he asks, that a France that seemed to have turned so sharply to the left after the Second World War would launch two of the bloodiest colonial wars of the twentieth century in North Africa and Indo-China?