Paper borders, Maxim bullets

For centuries, Europe’s involvement in Africa and Asia hinged on the Portuguese golden age of discovery and expansion, and the subsequent establishment of trading posts along the coasts.

In retrospect, one can study individually or as a series the events changing European and then global diplomatic, military and political relations in this period. The impacts of imperial expansionism developed so rapidly and so extensively as to be explained after the fact, rather than in advance or contemporaneously.

A necessary precondition was the military and naval superiority of the west European powers and their competitors, Japan, Russia and the United States. The inexpensive, high-quality steel produced by the Bessemer process, first developed in Britain, allowed for the proliferation of precision small arms and artillery pieces.

The possibilities of projecting European power were first tapped in 1876 by an unlikely world leader, Leopold II, the second king of Belgium. Although Belgium had once encompassed one of the wealthiest regions of Europe, its status as a neutral country, cre­ated in 1830—1839 and guaranteed by international treaty, made its imperial breakthrough a perceived affront to the Great Powers. Leopold created a public corporation, under his private control, with the ruse of international access and the reality of ruthless economic exploitation. Working as an entrepreneur for Leopold’s corporation, the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley secured treaties from local chieftains, capturing on paper the domination of nearly the entire Congo basin. Though not a colony with a temperate climate and the possibility of large-scale settlement, like South Africa or North America, the Congo and its ivory and rubber offered rich profits.

Newer countries than Belgium were also drawn into the imperial dynamic, powered by the unprecedented rise of nationalism and the emergence of new nation-states. The unified Kingdom of Italy, formed in stages between 1859 and 1871, committed itself in principle to the return of ancient Roman greatness in the Mediterranean Sea. Germany, united between 1860 and 1871, fomented European colonialism from an opposite perspective: others might waste their energies in Africa, but Germany should concentrate upon central Europe.

The expanded list of Great Powers in Europe now included Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy, with Belgium a great colonial power if still a diminutive European one, the Netherlands still an imposing state because of its overlord­ship of the East Indies, and Portugal an imperial power of consequence, because of its holdings in Africa and vestigial outposts in Asia. With so much power and so many competitive players concentrated in a small geographic area, intercontinental conflict may have been inevitable. Japan and the United States—both countries modernising and industrialising rapidly in the late 1800s—added to the international competition. The waste of money, lives and energy in modern colonialism pursued by such a range of modern states remains a monument to hubris and political ambition.

The rush to Africa was launched under a disguise: the Berlin Conference of 1878. Bismarck hosted the meeting to discuss peaceably the tensions between Russia, Austria- Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. On the side, however, diplomats made secret arrangements concerning other spheres. The starting point for the race to Africa was Tunisia, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

Italy harboured informal plans for Tunisia, only 210 kilometres away from Sicily, and Italian migration to Tunisia had created a large and influential community or ‘colony’ there. But Italy’s prime minister in the late 1870s, Benedetto Cairoli, followed a far­sighted ‘clean hands’ policy, and refused to stake claims on African territories. Italian regions had only recently been liberated from the rule of the Austrian emperor; would Italy now in turn impose imperial domination upon others? Cairoli believed that each nation in Europe, and across the world, had the right to self-determination; other governments did not hold such scruples.

In March of 1881 the French army marched into Tunis. Italians were shocked at the news, Cairoli fell from power, and his successors scrambled to catch up with France. The new prime minister, Agostino Depretis, appointed the lawyer Pasquale Stanislao Mancini as foreign minister. Despite his earlier legal pronouncements in support of national independence movements, Mancini launched Italian imperialism in December 1881 by assuming control of a coaling station in East Africa at Assab, a port claimed by the Ottoman Empire. Fascinated by the Suez Canal, Mancini claimed that Italy could ‘find the key’ to the Mediterranean in the Red Sea.¹ He made exceptions to his ideas of self­determination in the case of Africa, following Machiavelli in not allowing morals to influence policies: clean hands are empty hands, argued Mancini.

When Britain soon decided to intervene in Egyptian affairs, however, both France and Italy declined the offer to participate in a multi-national counter-insurgency operation— aimed at defending British commercial interests in Egypt and preserving open access to the Suez Canal—as the incursion seemed too risky and open-ended. A British military expe­dition in 1882 proved remarkably successful in the short term, giving Britain effective control of the government of Egypt, and the Suez Canal, the vital link between the Med­iterranean and the Indian Ocean—and thus to British India, Australasia and British trading outposts in East Asia. France and Italy now regretted their reticence. Having avoided the risk, they had lost all rewards, and they rushed to catch up.

Territories near the Suez Canal route in North and East Africa, which came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire (the ‘sick man of Europe’) and regional sultanates, became targets for expansion.

An Islamic revolt in the Sudan—an immense territory south of Egypt—in the 1880s framed Britain’s reactions to future colonial uprisings. From their Egyptian base, Britain had aspired to secure the entire basin of the Nile, the longest river in the world. But upriver in the Sudan, Britain faced a Sufi Dervish religious revolt led by Muhammed Ahmad, who declared himself the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam at the end of time. Britain sent General Charles Gordon, ‘Chinese Gordon’, famed for action in Shanghai in 1862—1864 during the Taiping Rebellion, to advise the evacuation or defence of Khartoum, situated at the con­fluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile tributaries. On 26 January 1885, Khartoum fell, and Gordon was beheaded, two days before the arrival of British reinforcements.

While the Mahdi’s success was a disaster for British prestige in Africa and in the Muslim world, the upheaval benefited others in the region. Italy had been actively cultivating a relationship with Ras Menelik, the king of Shoa in the Ethiopian Empire and a rival to the Ethiopian emperor, Yohannes of Tigray.

Here the vagaries of diplomacy directly impacted upon international events. The Italo- Ethiopian Treaty of Wichale was written in both Italian and Amharic, and a controversy arose over Section 17, thanks to the linguistic and cultural gulf between the Ethiopians and the Italians.³ The Amharic text translates as follows: ‘Whenever the Ethiopian Royal King wishes to discuss anything with the Kings in Europe, he would do the necessary corre­spondence with the help of the Italian Government.’⁴ Italian prime minister Francesco Crispi claimed that with this wording Menelik had accepted Italian tutelage, and he thus declared an Italian protectorate over Ethiopia in 1889. Menelik discovered he had been tricked in 1890 when Queen Victoria refused to answer his letters, replying from London that Ethiopia was an Italian protectorate, and so must communicate with Britain through Italian channels.⁵ Britain thereby endorsed Italy’s claims to a protectorate, though France and Russia supported Ethiopia’s ancient independence with small arms sales.

To settle the diplomatic conflict, Italy sent conscript troops to Eritrea, staging an invasion of Ethiopia to topple Menelik’s regime or force his obedience. The war proved extremely controversial in Italy, with popular reactions ranging from peace demonstrations and outright sabotage in northern Italy to impassioned anti-Ethiopian marches and pro­war demonstrations in Sicily. Crispi goaded the Italian commander into a risky attack. In a single day at Adwa, on 1 March 1896, between 4,600 and 5,000 Italian soldiers, as well as 1,700 Eritrean soldiers, were killed, 500 Italians and 1,000 Eritreans were wounded, and at least 1,811 Italians were taken prisoner. The Italian force had thus lost more than half its strength, and more Italian officers had been killed in one battle than in all the wars of national unification on the Italian peninsula.⁶ Yet because of the Italian army’s dis­organisation, no one knows exactly how many died on the battlefield.⁷ Adwa was a disaster with lessons on every level. Crispi fell from power, his strong colonial policies completely discredited in Africa. Furthermore, Italian emigrants, rather than being drawn to Italian Africa, as the government had hoped, chose to settle in Argentina and North America.

Britain, meanwhile, saw its prospects rebounding in East Africa. In 1897 Britain re­established ties with Ethiopia, abandoning the pretence of an Italian protectorate and negotiating a treaty with the emperor. Like the Italians, the British tricked Menelik in negotiations to gain unequal terms of trade, but nevertheless supported and recognised Ethiopia’s expansion into neighbouring Somali and Oromo territories.⁸ The following year, British forces and their heavy weapons annihilated the Mahdist forces at the battle of Omdurman, with one of the most startlingly disproportionate outcomes of any battle: while more than ten thousand of the Mahdi’s followers were killed, only forty-seven British soldiers perished. British forces from Egypt then confronted a French force coming from West Africa at Fashoda, and a military conflict over the swamps of what is now Kodok, South Sudan, was successfully, if narrowly, avoided in 1898. The lesson was that the Great Powers decided what to do, not indigenous rulers and local armies.

In the fin de siecle, the world’s military balance had shifted markedly, with rapid-firing artillery and machine guns making resistance to imperial expansion more difficult than ever before. The wild slaughter of the unrestrained British victory at Omdurman con­trasted sharply with the British defeat at Isandlwana in South Africa, less than two decades before, when more than 1,300 British soldiers died on the battlefield. The United States’ rapid victory over Spain in 1898, sinking two Spanish fleets in the Caribbean and Pacific in the course of ten weeks, demonstrated that marginal advantages in weapons were now anachronistic: improved technology could completely dominate an enemy. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in China, like these earlier wars, also lasted only briefly, as a small but well-armed international force, determined to secure commercial interests in the Qing Empire, proved victorious in only eight weeks. Using new weapons, the Dutch con­solidated their presence in the East Indies (now Indonesia), in particular through wars in Sumatra and Bali. But Ethiopia’s victory at Adwa, with strong leadership, a massive imperial mobilisation for numerical superiority, and weapons supplied from Europe, demonstrated that Europeans could not take victory for granted.

Although each country’s colonial administration differed, a large measure of similarity in strategy and ideology prevailed over diversity. Because competition had launched the rush for colonies, each imperial power devoted minute attention to what the others were doing. International comparisons of colonial policy mattered much more, for example, than the traditional governmental administrations of taxation or education. Specialised periodicals and activist lobbies fostered a dynamic of public pressure by documenting what other empires were accomplishing, and how their state was falling short. While nationalist movements did not compare notes across borders, colonialists relied on such comparisons to spur governments into deeper commitments abroad. Reports on the theory and practice of European colonialism circulated throughout the closed circle of the Great Powers, ultimately leading to a common colonial disaster.