POSTWAR CRISES: THE COLONIAL MOBILIZATION OF ANGER

Postwar realities were quite another matter, as metropoles took a harder line than expected once the emergency was over. Within two years of England’s victory in the Seven Years’ War a series of unprecedented restrictions on bna colonies was an­nounced.

In 1801-02 Napoleon marked a truce in the fighting in Europe by dispatching a large force to invade Saint Domingue and reimpose slavery. Ferdinand VII, restored to the throne in 1814, promptly sent an army to crush rebellions in his Ameri­can possessions. Spanish soldiers became known for the atrocities they committed against suspected as well as real enemies in the creole population.

India a year after World War I ended was politically in an altogether different space than in 1918, to say nothing of prewar years. Constitutional reforms proposed by British officials were more modest and slow-paced than many Indians expected. The Rowlatt Acts, retaining martial law after the wartime need for it ended, were harshly enforced. Above all the Amritsar Massacre shocked the Indian public by the extent of its brutality and the arrogance toward Indians displayed by General Dyer and his vocal supporters.

In Algeria, Vietnam, and the Dutch East Indies, wartime assurances that colo­nial subjects would be more actively involved in policy making were abandoned by the early 1920s. The Versailles Conference of 1919 made it dear that Wilsonian principles of national self-determination applied to residents of the former Austro- Hungarian empire but not to non-Europeans.

The Middle East following World War I witnessed abrupt policy reversals. Britain and France soon revealed' that they had their own territorial ambitions, which took precedence over notions of Arab self-determination they had invoked earlier. Added to the forced imposition of mandates on large chunks of former Ottoman territory was British equivocation about the rights of Palestinian Arabs, since Zionists had been promised a national home for Jews in Palestine.

Political developments in France at the end of World War II and shortly afterward raised and then lowered expectations in the overseas possessions.⁷ Algerian Muslims who used Victory in Europe Day as the symbolically powerful occasion to march for freedom in their own country were massacred at Setif. Independence was not an option in Algeria or elsewhere; what politicians termed Greater France and the Fourth Republic’s constitution termed the French Union was considered indivis­ible. At issue, rather, was whether colonial subjects would be accorded French cit­izenship, whether that status entailed equal rights with French citizens, and what functions were to be exercised by officials in Paris and the overseas territories. The assembly that convened in 1945 to write a constitution for the Fourth Republic issued a draft containing several relatively liberal provisions on these matters. The draft said the French Union was “freely consented to,” implying that its constituent parts would at some point be asked to express their views on it.

The draft was rejected, however, by an electorate heavily weighted toward voters in France. The second version, written by another constituent assembly and approved by the same electorate in October 1946, was much more conservative in tone and content than the first. It “made the cornerstone of the French Union not free consent but domination by France.”⁸ In response to concerted pressure from French settlers and business interests, it reduced the size of the African elector­ate, allocated fewer colonial seats to the French National Assembly, concentrated decision-making power in Paris, limited prospects for changed political status, and set up an electoral system giving hugely disproportionate weight to Europeans resi­dent overseas.

Colonial reactions to postwar metropolitan initiatives came swiftly and were overwhelmingly negative. Shock, anger, disillusionment, and a sense of betrayal are recurring themes in speeches and writings of prominent individuals. In bna the principal target was the Stamp Act, though anger was probably intensified by other policy moves announced at about the same time. This was hardly the thanks settlers expected for work well done. “Perhaps more than any other single factor,” writes Jack Greene, “the sense of betrayal, the deep bitterness arising out of the profound disjunction between how, on the basis of their performance during the Seven Years’ War, they thought they deserved to be dealt with by the metropolis and the treatment actually accorded them, supplied the energy behind their intense reactions to the Grenville program in 1765-66.”¹⁰

The Stamp Act crisis raised larger constitutional issues and led to new ways of organizing across colonial boundaries. The Stamp Act Congress, convened in late 1765 by representatives of eleven colonies, was markedly more effective at directing colonial energies toward shared objectives than the most serious previous attempt at Albany, New York, in 1754. Committees of Correspondence were formed to commu­nicate information and proposals for action among town, county, and colonial assemblies. Parliamentary repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 was due in large measure to the settlers’ capacity to mobilize public opinion and direct it toward policy makers in London. Richard Merritt concluded from a content analysis of leading bna news­papers that the Stamp Act crisis had a strong and lasting impact in shifting settlers toward American identities and loyalties.¹¹

The significance of organizational and attitudinal changes in the mid-i76os should not be overstated. Opposition to specific actions of Parliament did not imply assertion of a right to autonomy.

Granting these points, disputes that erupted shortly after the Seven Years’ War ended marked decisive first steps on the road to independence. The British historian P. D. G. Thomas describes the events of 1763-67 as “the first phase of the American Revolution.”¹² The American scholars Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson assert that “all the essential elements that led to the fall of the First British Empire— the conflicts of interest, the rival ambitions, the profoundly disparate estimates of power—were present in the crisis over the Stamp Act.”¹³

Evidence of reaction to the French army’s invasion of Haiti is clear-cut. Former slaves, their status as free persons at stake, fought intensely, launching guerrilla attacks from mobile mountain bases on a force initially numbering more than twenty thousand. Attacks continued after Toussaint was seized and deported to Europe. Unable to prevail militarily and decimated by yellow fever, French forces withdrew, leaving Haitian patriots to declare independence.

Spain’s American colonies began moving toward independence when Ferdi­nand VII’s removal from power gave creoles political space and a constitutional pretext for action. But the king’s unwillingness to consider creole proposals when he returned to the throne in 1814, coupled with his dispatch of ten thousand soldiers to impose royal authority over rebellious New Granada and Venezuela, were last straws. The army commander’s tendency to treat all creoles as enemies turned many with royalist sympathies into patriots. Spanish forces initially won the day, forcing Bolivar to take refuge in Jamaica.

More than a century later, in India, a metropole’s regressive postwar policies once again generated widespread popular protest. Many Indians assumed from the Montagu Declaration that Indians would soon be controlling legislative business at the central government level, where ultimate power lay. But the Government of India Act (1919) proposed power sharing in the provinces, not at the center. At this rate of progress, people asked, would not dominion status be decades rather than years away? Even conservatively inclined Indians were shocked that the raj’s first order of business in 1919 was to replace wartime internal security arrangements with the Rowlatt Acts. Indian powerlessness was put on display as these bills were passed by the British official majority in the central legislature despite unanimous opposition by the body’s Indian members.

The repressive content of this legislation and the process by which it was passed transformed Gandhi’s political attitudes. Gandhi had been in many respects a loyal subject of the British Empire. While in South Africa he was awarded medals for supporting the British in the Boer War and the Zulu uprising of 1906. As late as the summer of 1918 he courted unpopularity among Indian radicals by campaigning for unconditional support of the British war effort, including more volunteers for the army.

General Dyer’s order to fire on a crowd assembled in Amritsar to protest British policy reflected a resolute will to assert control. But mass killings that in other contexts might have cowed the colonized population had exactly the opposite effect in a politicized postwar atmosphere. Changes in Indian public opinion were chan­neled into organized action. The ambitious satyagraha campaigns Gandhi launched in 1920-22 broadened the territorial and class base of the inc, transforming it into a mass-based national movement. A new constitution adopted in 1920 expanded the party’s ability to make day-to-day policy decisions at the top and enroll new mem­bers at the district level. The noncooperation campaign was called off in 1922 when it turned violent, and the inc lost much of its momentum until the next anticolo­nial surge in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the opening round in the struggle for a democratic, self-governing India had been fought. Indian politics would never again be the same.

Parallels with the Stamp Act crisis come to mind. As in bna a century and a half earlier, so in British India the reaction of colonial subjects to metropolitan assertions of authority showed a new will and capacity to set the political agenda. It quickly became the colonizer who reacted to colonial initiatives rather than the reverse. People increasingly thought of themselves as part of a larger national com­munity, called American and Indian. Important advances in institutional capacity were made with the convening of the Stamp Act Congress and the organizational reforms and outreach campaigns of the inc. Colonial capacity was enhanced in both instances by networks of mutual support between politicians and elements of the private profit sector. Mobilization against the Stamp Act and the satyagraha cam­paigns of 1920-22 were basically protest movements; in neither was independence called for. In both cases political mobilization peaked and declined, with a lull of several years before picking up again. Nonetheless, movements launched in the immediate aftermath of war marked a decisive break with the past. They revealed popular forces at work that would, after a series of subsequent crises, be crucial to the independence drive.

Egypt is another example of the radicalizing effect of wartime expectations dashed. Afaf Marsot summarizes the situation in 1918-19:

The various declarations made by the Allies during the war aroused hopes that independence might be in the offing, especially when President Wilson made public his Fourteen Points. Self-determination became the keyword in every­body’s mouth, and a group of politicians met to plan the future of Egypt as an imminently independent country, or at least one that would have a modicum of home-rule. That group of men constituted themselves into a delegation, in Arabic a wafd, and in November 1918 met with Sir Reginald Wingate, the British High Commissioner, to request that they be allowed to proceed to the Paris Peace Conference and present Egypt’s case. The British government in London refused the request of the wafd in no uncertain terms and agitation broke out in the country, encouraged by the nationalists and the government of the day and the sultan.... Throughout 1919 Egypt was rife with agitation. [ Wafd leader Saad] Zaghlul was arrested and deported to Malta, which signalled an explosion of violence in all regions in support of the national leader.¹⁸

Before the war Zaghlul had been a somewhat conservative lawyer and a personal friend of Lord Cromer, de facto proconsul of Egypt. His political metamorphosis paralleled Gandhi’s in timing, rapidity, and direction. The upsurge of anticolonial activity Zaghlul orchestrated and the outbreaks following his deportation had an unprecedentedly broad popular base. Supporters emerged in cities and rural areas and included large landowners, peasants, Bedouin nomads, students, the urban poor, and the intelligentsia. The breadth and depth of discontent indicated a capacity for asserting Egyptian interests that surprised the British and placed them on the defensive. The high commissioner relented, released political prisoners, and allowed Wafd leaders to proceed to Paris. Nothing came of their appeals. In 1922, following further unrest which could not be controlled, Britain announced Egypt’s indepen­dence. A postwar crisis that increased colonial will and capacity to reject the status quo ended the shortest instance of formal European rule on record.

In World War II as in its predecessor expectations were raised and then dashed, giving rise to anger and political mobilization. One can see this pattern during the war itself in the hostile reaction of Indians, Nigerians, and others to Prime Minister Churchill’s emphatic denial that the Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination applied to the British Empire. As French public opinion shifted rightward between 1945 and 1946, the reaction in France’s African colonies was one of dismay. A major­ity of indigenous voters in these territories approved the liberal first draft and op­posed the second. Voters in France followed the opposite course—and prevailed because of the unequal voting system in place. Africans expressed their frustrations in various ways. In late 1946 an interterritorial party, the Rassemblement Democra- tique Africain (rda), was formed. This party, which dominated French West African politics for a decade, worked to maximize African influence on French colonial policy through its elected representatives to the Assemblee Nationale in Paris. In Madagascar a major revolt broke out in 1947, repressed at the cost of an estimated eighty thousand lives. Whether the response was to work peacefully within Fourth Republic institutions or to revolt, France’s African subjects in 1946-47 organized for political action in ways without prewar precedent.

Trained, disciplined soldiers were decisive organizational weapons in Viet­nam’s and Indonesia’s independence struggles. Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno seized the opportune moment to declare independence: the brief period when Japanese forces were demoralized and confused following Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, yet before Allied forces arrived in sufficient numbers to take over. Had trained soldiers not been available to secure a territorial base for these fledgling governments, the new regimes would probably have succumbed—in Vietnam to French and Kuomintang Chinese armies, in Indonesia to Dutch troops. Guerrilla bands trained and brilliantly led by Vo Nguyen Giap used weapons captured from other armies and smuggled in from China. The communist-led Viet Minh controlled a base of operations in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) which it never ceded. To the discipline and opportunistic tactics of the guerrillas should be added their skill at using nationalist appeals to win peasant support. This combination kept them from being decimated at the outset of France’s reconquest drive in late 1946 and enabled them by 1954 to deal the French a humiliating defeat. In Indonesia, Japanese-trained forces constituted the nucleus of the new republic’s army as it fought two concerted Dutch reconquest campaigns. Indonesian troops held their ground long enough to permit United Nations diplo­macy to pressure the Dutch to leave.

The decisive contribution of politically conscious soldiers to independence in Vietnam and Indonesia becomes clearer when one realizes that all phase 4 efforts to organize civilian-led nationalist movements in these territories were crushed. With the path toward evolutionary advance blocked and efforts at violent revolution aborted, it is difficult to see how decolonization could have occurred unless an external factor intervened. Hegemonic war was that factor. By providing oppor­tunities to expand indigenous military capacity in Vietnam and Indonesia, war was a surrogate for the subversive role Western education played in colonies in which more peaceful political evolution was possible.

Each of the four hegemonic wars thus illustrates a pattern of crises in which postwar metropolitan efforts to reassert control generated strong opposition. The belief that colonial populations had been manipulated and betrayed intensified this opposition. People do not like being used by others. Especially intolerable are situa­tions in which they feel they have been deceived into making sacrifices for the sake of a future reward that is then denied them. Opposition had an unusually broad popu­lar base because leaders reached out to followers in innovative ways through existing or newly created institutions. What is striking about the cases cited above is the speed with which political mobilization took place. If colonies did not expect the metro­pole’s reactionary turn at war’s end, neither did metropoles expect the speed, inten­sity, magnitude, and institutionalized character of nationalist responses.

One reason bna and India were precedent-setters in their respective decolo­nization phases was their headstart in postwar crises. The Stamp Act crisis emerged from the Seven Years’ War; the Rowlatt Acts protest and Amritsar Massacre followed World War I. More tightly controlled colonies apparently needed the combined effects of two wars—first and second or third and fourth—to set up effective na­tionalist movements.

This analysis indicates why bna and India were followed by other territories, including non-British possessions. Postwar crises affected colonies of France and Spain in phase 2 and those of France and Holland in phase 5. Hegemonic wars preceding these crises served as external destabilizers of empires in which oppor­tunities to capture the public sector were far more limited than under the British. By mobilizing people to fight, wars created opportunities for rapid institutional de­velopment in the coercive arena. Where a Western-educated elite was not permitted to form or was severely circumscribed, military units filled the organizational gap.