RELATIONS AMONG INDIGENOUS SOCIETIES22
Chapter 9 showed how rivalries among west European states stimulated and accelerated formation of parallel empires. Ironically, expansion was given an added boost by rivalries among non-European societies.
Learning what these rivalries were, what was at stake, and who was on what side often constituted the most important information Europeans learned when reaching a distant destination. Gaining power depended in large measure on the newcomers’ ability to take advantage of local cleavages. Once a conflict had been identified, the critical question was whether European interests would be served by allying with one of the parties to it. If an alliance was negotiated it was considered purely tactical, to be adjusted or abandoned once the newcomers achieved their goals.European intervention abroad is often described as divide and rule. The phrase implies that Europeans created divisions among others which were then used to take power. Although accurately describing what happened in some cases, divide and rule is implausible as a description of the typical state of affairs. It implies that indigenous peoples were extraordinarily naive and malleable, with so weak a sense of who they were that they were easily persuaded to accept identities invented on the spot with outsiders’ interests primarily in mind. A more accurate description is manipulate and rule. In general, people Europeans encountered had well-formed and only marginally adjustable identities and interests. It was the newcomers’ skill at using what they found that mattered, not their ability to sell unsuspecting customers a bill of identity goods never heard of before.
Even more significant, imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull. We can see how the latter factor operated by imagining a simple scenario: rivalry between non-European polities A and B.
Their relationship takes a new turn when Europeans enter the scene. If A and B are commercial competitors each could gain by fostering stable trade relations with the outsiders, whose ships bring an attractive array of consumer goods and offer potentially lucrative outlets for local commodities. If A and B are at war each could gain at the expense of the other if it got access to European guns. It is easy to understand why emissaries from A (or B or both) would make their way to the European encampment, offering to form an alliance on terms the outsiders would find attractive.Suppose that A offers the most favorable terms and succeeds in negotiating an alliance. One may assume that A regards the alliance as purely tactical, to be adjusted or abandoned once its objectives have been attained. Both parties to the negotiations thus have something in common: each wants to use the other for its own short-term advantage. Mutual manipulation is the name of this diplomatic game. That Europeans will usually get the best of the arrangement can be known only at a later point. At the time negotiations take place A’s decision makers convince themselves it is they who stand to gain, certainly relative to B and probably relative to the Europeans as well. A’s top priority, after all, is to outdo known rival B. The capabilities and intentions of Europeans are not yet well known. If anything, the newcomers’ willingness to form an alliance is taken as a portent of future friendship, not enmity. How can A know at the outset that the outsiders will eventually take A as well as B under their custody?
The point is borne out by examples from both expansionist phases. G. V. Scammell writes that on India’s western coast “the governor of Diu... abandoned (1508) the ‘league of all Muslims’ which was to have overthrown the Portuguese and hastened to secure the best commercial terms he could from them, while the King of Cochin was happy to welcome strangers rejected by his fellow Hindu, but age-old rival, the Samorin of Calicut.
Thereafter Portuguese penetration of Asia owed much, and in some cases everything, to indigenous disunity and consequent indigenous approval or support.”23 In the 1660s the Dutch inserted themselves into western India by reversing the pattern and allying with Calicut against Cochin.Bitter enmity between the people of Tlaxcala and their Aztec rulers in Tenoch- titlan was a critical factor in Hernan Cortes’s subjugation of the Aztec capital. After an initially hostile response to the Spanish soldiers Tlaxcalan leaders negotiated an alliance with Cortes that remained intact throughout the conquest’s tumultuous events. About 6,000 Tlaxcalan warriors joined a Spanish force of fewer than 350 on the march to Tenochtitlan. It was to Tlaxcala that the Spaniards retreated after the noche triste (sad night) when half their army was annihilated. Without Tlaxcalan cooperation it is virtually inconceivable that Cortes could have completed the audacious mission that changed world history.
On the island of Java the kingdom of Mataram appealed in 1675 for Dutch assistance against its enemy, Banten. In return, Mataram “was obliged to give the Dutch a monopoly over the cloth and opium trades. Dutch help was purchased again and again by tributes and concessions of land until, in 1755, with the partition of Mataram into two kingdoms, Surakarta and Jogyakarta, the Dutch became suzerains of both.”24 Clive Day concludes that the Dutch in Java “were never carrying on a war of conquest against the natives; they were always fighting for the natives, and their territorial gains came to them from the interested party as compensation for services rendered. It was the ceaseless quarreling among the native states that enabled the Dutch always to find a party or a person to champion... their candidate was generally successful, and he was not allowed to forget to whom his success was due.”25
Rivalries among local people permitted early European settlers of North America to entrench themselves on the coast and push inland.
The Wampanoags signed a treaty with the Pilgrims in 1621 offering protection against the Narragan- setts. The settlers later paired with the Narragansetts against the Pequots, then with the Mohegans against the Narragansetts. Settlers in Pennsylvania found the Iroquois eager to ally with them against the Delawares. In the Mississippi valley the French collaborated with Choctaws to subdue the Natchez.26In phase 3 the Fanti of the Gold Coast sought British help to ward off a growing threat from their northern neighbors the Ashanti. One of the first British representatives in the area wrote in 1853, “The necessity of a protector against the power and ambition of the Ashantees... the mutual fear and jealousy of rival chiefs [and other factors] all conspired to influence the minds of every class, to elevate us into power, and to make common cause in maintaining our authority.”27 Sikh soldiers assisted British troops in suppressing Muslim and Hindu forces in India’s Great Mutiny.28 Afrikaner and British migration into the South African interior during the 1830s and 1840s was facilitated by the unwillingness of non-ZuIu groups to join Zulu impis (warriors) in opposing white settlement. The Zulus’ neighbors could not forget the aggressiveness of Shaka’s armies and the social dislocation accompanying his statebuilding tactics. The first white settlers in what became Southern Rhodesia benefited from rivalry between the Ndebele and the Ngwato branch of the Tswana. Chief Kgama of the Ngwato provided soldiers for the Pioneer Column of 1890 and helped settlers crush a major Ndebele uprising three years later.29 In Mozambique almost half the soldiers employed in Portugal’s campaign to conquer the Zambezi Valley in 1888 were recruited from two African states, whose leaders favored cooperation with the Portuguese as an opportunity to gain advantage over neighboring enemies.30
The more strongly people identify with their group and the more physically insulated and culturally distinct that group is, the greater the challenge of forging bonds of identity and loyalty with neighbors.
This was a formidable challenge in many non-European areas, making it difficult for large numbers of people to unite, or even coordinate activities, around the common cause of resisting colonial takeover. To take an extreme form of a recurring scenario, imagine that societies C and D are located a hundred miles apart. Each is unaware of the other’s existence because of the terrain, the absence of connecting trade routes, and rudimentary methods of transport and communication. Each is economically self-reliant and has its own customs regarding marriage and inheritance. C’s and D’s people practice different religions and speak mutually unintelligible languages. The two societies have never been incorporated into a larger indigenous polity. In this scenario, had C and D interacted they would have found they had little in common. Whereas A and B in the earlier hypothetical case are rivals, C and D are strangers, distanced from one another in many more ways than physical space.C regards Europeans entering its territory as strangers. But it would think the same of D’s people if it knew of their existence. To C, Europeans and D are Others, just as for Europeans C and D are Others.31 European offers to recruit C’s young men on a campaign to conquer D would not be met with indignant refusal on grounds that C and D have too many things in common to betray each other. The comprehensive racial, continental, and national identities that evolved in the colonial era and gave birth to anticolonial solidarity movements did not exist before the onset of European rule. Whether D is subjugated is a matter of indifference to C, whose young men may feel no qualms at joining a force marching on D. Any qualms might be overridden by anticipated gains from victory, which can be foreseen since the advancing army deploys powerftd weapons unavailable to D’s defenders.
This hypothetical example helps one understand why Europeans consistently found indigenous people to fight for them.
Successfill recruitment drives enabled European soldiers to overcome the initial handicaps of small numbers and unfamiliarity with the local terrain, languages, and customs. Though the armies that built overseas empires were commanded by European officers, they were typically manned on the front lines by local foot soldiers. As long as C’s recruits were not asked to subdue their own people they were ready to march a hundred miles and wage war on D. Parochial identities and loyalties induced many non-Europeans to take a leading part in their subjugation.To take a few examples, Indian soldiers (sepoys) recruited by the English East India Company enabled the company to move inland from the coastal “presidencies” of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. Young men who joined the famed Tirailleurs Senegalais helped the French pacify areas of West Africa hundreds of miles from their homelands. Senegalese and Algerians fought for France in Morocco. The Zimbabwean historian Stanlake Samkange asserts that “European armies had to depend on Africans for foot soldiers and carriers, for intelligence and food supplies. Without other Africans supplying these services, Europeans would never have been able to mount the campaigns by which they conquered the continent.”32