NEW-STATE ELITES: MAKING UP THE DEFICIT

Colonial rule was most effectively challenged when a group of colonial residents had (1) the capacity to administer one or more of the colony’s public sector institutions, (2) a strong will to control the public sector, and (3) the will to terminate dependent status and form an independent state.

This conclusion applies equally to settlers who led independence movements in phase 2 and to non-Europeans who led them in phase 5? But each group had to call upon a distinctive experience to reach the necessary-condition threshold. To state this in another way, each had to satisfy different conditions to converge with the other in satisfying all three. Settlers were least likely to meet the third condition, non­Europeans the first To the extent that colonized peoples identified with subnational groups more than with the colonial nation as a whole, their interest in organizing these groups detracted from an interest in controlling public sector institutions and hurt prospects for meeting the second condition. The critical factor permitting settlers to satisfy their missing will for independence condition was the passage of time, which gradually shifted identities and loyalties away from the metropole and toward the territory where settlers resided. The critical factor permitting non­Europeans to satisfy their missing capacity to control the public sector condition was diffusion of secondary- and university-level Western education to a few individuals. The experience of attending schools, combined with the content of curriculum taught there, gave the best-educated elements the capacity and will to focus on public sector institutions with the intent of capturing them.

The passage of time was, of course, something over which neither phase 1 settlers nor European states had any control. During their first decades overseas settlers had strong reasons to identify with the mother country and more broadly with Europe as the “mother continent.” By doing so they could emphasize their distinctness from and superiority over indigenous peoples. One alleged difference was that Europeans had a meaningful past while indigenous peoples did not. Newly settled areas “were perceived by the settlers as having had no history prior to their arrival; the history of the mother country remained the salient history to them.”⁹ But as decades passed a growing number came to identify the colony as a homeland with its own past, defined as the heroic efforts of settlers to develop the land and tame or exterminate uncivilized peoples. The metropole continued to play a familiar role as civilizational reference point. But this did not mean that its political and economic interests should take precedence over the colonial homeland’s when interests di­verged. Over time, settlers became increasingly sensitive to policies that appeared to benefit the metropole at their expense. Assertions of imperial authority accepted grudgingly in an earlier period risked a far more hostile reception later on.

By the mid-eighteenth century New World settler colonies were long estab­lished; in the Iberian empires they had been in place for more than two centuries. But several generations of residence should be seen as the precondition not of indepen­dence but of settler interest in it, and the latter depended on metropolitan policies as well as the passage of time. The impetus shifting opinion toward separation was a metropolitan initiative to assert new forms of control or challenge settlers’ economic or security interests. In chapter 15 I show how such initiatives, in the context of the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic wars, raised settler discontent and pushed it in a separa­tist direction.

In Old World colonies of occupation,¹⁰ resentment at being subjugated was hardly a scarce commodity. And desire for freedom from European rule was intense at the outset. In this sense the third condition was readily met.

The will to control public sector institutions depended on a degree of identi­fication with an externally defined territory and diverse population that initially made no sense. In chapter 13 I showed that before the twentieth century most indigenous leaders working for freedom did not think of the colony as the unit that should be free. Early struggles for self-determination were typically waged for and by a subset of the population. Whether the response to subjugation was exit (as with maroon communities) or rebellion (as with Tupac Amaru II or the north Indian mutineers of 1857-58), the operation was designed to bypass colonial-level structures, not confront them.

The failure of rebellions and the steadily growing impact of sectoral institutions on the lives of ordinary people led many non-Europeans to view the colony as the unit over which struggles for power and autonomy should be waged. This meant that it was crucial to interact with the public sector as Europeans defined it. Relevant institu­tions might be the civilian bureaucracy, police, or courts. They might be the fledgling legislatures established in British colonies or tightly disciplined underground move­ments aiming forcibly to overthrow the government. Forms of engagement ranged from infiltration of the civil service to speeches by party leaders in legislative budget sessions to setting bombs in public buildings to organizing underground nationalist networks. What these forms shared was the goal of eventually controlling the public sector. When opinion leaders began to think in these terms—and a growing number did by phase 4—the second condition for independence was met.

The passage of time, which helped settlers meet the third condition, helped non-Europeans meet the second. Settlers took the colony for granted as an appropri­ate political unit but needed time to decide that it should be free (under their leadership, of course). Many non-Europeans took it for granted that they should be free but needed time to decide that freedom should come about by capturing the colonial government. Paradoxically, the more actively European-run sectors im­pacted society, enabling subjects to see that the “colonial nation” was a meaningfill category, the less time was needed for this change to occur.