RESISTANCE AND ITS EFFECTS

At some point west Europeans ruled most of the world, but they never ruled all of it. Japan, China, Tibet, Thailand, Persia, Afghanistan, and most of the Arabian Penin­sula were not incorporated into overseas empires.

In some instances geography played an important role. The deserts and moun­tains of Arabia, Afghanistan, and Tibet inhibited outside penetration. On occasion these features were skillfully put to defensive use, as when Afghans humiliated the British army in 1839-42 and 1878-80. As noted earlier, diseases in the Old World trop­ics decimated European ranks until prophylactics were devised and mass produced.

The military, political, and administrative capabilities of non-European states were a factor. The Japanese never confronted a European invading force, primarily because their reputation for ferocity against enemies, both fellow Japanese and foreigners, was a powerful deterrent. A Spanish royal decree of 1609 directed com­manders in the Pacific “not to risk the reputation of our arms and state” against Japanese soldiers.⁴ Wrote the missionary pioneer Francis Xavier, “Never in my life have I met people who rely so much on their arms.... They are very warlike and always involved in wars.”⁵ When in the early seventeenth century Tokugawa rulers restricted trade with the West and persecuted European priests and local Christian converts, no European power dared launch a retaliatory strike, much less an invasion bent on conquest. Instead, the English quietly left in 1623, while the Spanish were deported in 1624 and the Portuguese fifteen years later. Only the Dutch remained, confined to a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. In 1640 the Portuguese-ruled enclave of Macao sent emissaries to press for a resumption of trade.

Japan’s resistance to phase i European penetration was a function of its rulers’ capacity and will to take decisive, timely action. Political consolidation in the early seventeenth century under the Tokugawa dynasty ended more than a century of warfare among the islands’ regional lords. A centralizing regime was able to carry out a coherent foreign policy at the very point when Europeans were making their presence felt in East Asian waters. Had Japan’s state-building era occurred a century later and had the civil wars continued, Europeans might have had a greater impact on Japan’s domestic affairs than they did.

Moreover, the early Tokugawa rulers had the foresight to envisage that foreign merchants and missionaries would be followed by soldiers. The official rescript on the Macao mission alleged that “the worm-like Barbarians of Macao, who had long believed in the doctrine of the Lord of Heaven, wished to propagate their evil religion in our country; and for many years they sent people called ‘Bateren’ [Padre] on board their own ships, or in hired Chinese ships. They did this with the intention of seducing our ignorant people, thus paving the way for the eventual occupation of our country.”⁷ By expelling agents of the two sectors that had infiltrated Japanese society, the shoguns ensured that the triple assault they feared would not take place.

More than two centuries later the leading European countries, reinforced by the United States, announced their governments’ intentions to intervene.

China escaped takeover not because of its rulers, who in sharp contrast to the Japanese approached outsiders with indifference heavily laden with disdain, even after Opium War defeats and the sack of the imperial summer palace in Beijing in i860 by a British-French expeditionary force.⁸ The main factor was a durable bu­reaucracy linking the imperial court with the rest of the vast country. An institution using meritocratic recruitment principles supported by domestic sources of revenue and socialized to respect the emperor and his edicts was a formidable obstacle to foreign conquerors. The only comparably populous society, India, proved easier for Europeans to penetrate because Mughal rulers never imposed a unified, centrally controlled administrative apparatus on the subcontinent. The English East India Company had room to maneuver within a public sector far more decentralized and loosely structured than that in China.

The vital role of rulers resurfaces when one examines Thailand and Abyssinia. The Thai rulers Mongkut and Chulalongkorn and the Abyssinian emperor Mene- lik II skillfully engaged in international diplomacy, taking advantage of rivalries among European powers pressing against their borders. Though neither Thailand nor Abyssinia industrialized as did Japan, both adopted aspects of defensive modern­ization. Thai rulers redesigned administrative and educational systems along Euro­pean lines.

The ability of non-European warriors to intimidate or defeat European in­vaders helps explain why some areas that were eventually colonized retained inde­pendence as long as they did. Moroccan defeat of a large Portuguese army in 1578 at El Ksar-el-Kabir abruptly ended Iberian dreams of conquering the African territory closest at hand. In the New World fierce resistance by the Carib inhabitants of Trinidad, Martinique, Antigua, St. Vincent, and St. Kitts delayed permanent Euro­pean settlement for well over a century. Araucanians in the southern extremities of South America and so-called Chichimecs in northern New Spain fended off Spanish claims for decades by launching guerrilla raids on settlers and colonial troops. Other examples come from Angola (Queen Nzinga Mbande), the Philippines (Muslim Moros of Mindanao), the West African interior (Samory and Rabeh), Sumatra (the Acheh emirate), and India’s Northwest Frontier District.

In some cases indigenous forces killed or expelled Europeans who had estab­lished themselves in an area. Amerindians likely annihilated the party Columbus left at La Navidad, Hispaniola, in 1492-93 and turned Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke settlement (1587-91) into a lost colony. Omani Arabs dislodged the Portuguese from Muscat in 1650 and from Mombasa in 1698. Instead of a European replacement for the declining Iberian state, “in general it was Arab sea-power that dominated East African waters north of Cape Delgado throughout the eighteenth century.”⁹ In 1661 a large fleet and twenty-five thousand soldiers led by Cheng Ch’eng-kung (Coxinga) invaded Taiwan and expelled the Dutch from a lucrative trade enclave. Europeans never retook the island, which was later annexed to China by a Ch’ing expeditionary force. In northern New Spain Pueblos under Pope drove Spanish settlers and mis­sionaries out of their territory in 1680 and kept repacification forces at bay for more than a decade.

Numerous revolts set back European plans to settle and administer newly claimed territories. Examples come from New Spain (Mixton War, 1540-42; Yucatan Mayas, 1546), Brazil (Potiguar attacks on Itamaraca Island settlers, 1540S-90S); Vir­ginia (tribes confederated by Powhatan, 1622), the New England colonies (Pequot War, 1636-37; Wampanoags under Metacom, 1675-76), Algeria (guerrillas led by Abd-al-Qadir, 1839-47), north-central India (the Great Mutiny of 1857-58), New Zealand (Maori Wars, 1865-72), German East Africa (Mkwawa, 1891-94; Maji-Maji Rebellion, 1905-06), Southern Rhodesia (Matabele [1893] and Mashona [1896] re­volts), Madagascar (Red Shawl uprising, 1895), Sierra Leone (Bai Bureh’s Hut Tax Rebellion, 1898), Somalia (dervishes led by Sayyid Muhammad Abdille Hassan, 1900-20), German Southwest Africa (Nama and Herero resistance, 1904-07), and Libya (Sanusi sheikhs, 1912-18).

Indigenous responses to Christian missionaries influenced the geography and timing of colonial expansion. Muslim rulers generally opposed the presence and activities of missionaries, seeing them as religious rivals and precursors of infidel rule. This limited the number of Christian converts Europeans could call upon as political collaborators. As noted, emphasis in phase 1 on exploration and settlement of the New World was initially driven by a desire to bypass powerful Islamic polities ensconced in the Mediterranean basin. Religious considerations affected European plans well into phase 3. Otherwise it is hard to explain why Arabian holy sites, the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia, and Persia were not formally taken over, and why for three decades, until strategic necessities intervened in 1914, Britain maintained the fiction that Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire.

In colonies in which Muslims composed a high proportion of the population, administrators were alert to the possibility that insurrections would become jihads (holy wars) and escalate out of control.

These examples show that there was nothing easy, automatic, or inevitable about the overseas extension of European power. Resistance delayed and in some instances prevented outsiders’ claims from being realized. The battle of El Ksar-el- Kabir was not a fluke: European-led forces would in all likelihood have been routed had they tried to conquer Old World continental interiors in phase 1. There was little choice but to adopt the more subtle strategy of sending in merchants and mission­aries. Formal control being out of the question, a backup strategy of informal influence would have to suffice.

Violent resistance shaped the way Europeans governed their colonies. In gen­eral, after uprisings were crushed in territories with a settler presence, settler leaders pressed for harsh restrictions on indigenous peoples’ physical mobility and access to land as a deterrent to future outbreaks. Such was the case in bna, Southern Rhodesia, Algeria, and New Zealand. On the other hand, uprisings in colonies of occupation often led European rulers to accommodate indigenous leaders and social forces. Examples are the search for collaborators in India following the mutiny of 1857-58 and in northern Nigeria following the Satiru revolt in 1906. Accommodation sensi­bly acknowledged the weakness of the strong. With few fellow Europeans on site to enforce compliance, rulers were acutely aware of the need for local help if the fledgling colonial enterprise was to succeed. Offering carrots seemed a more promis­ing deterrent to future rebellion than brandishing sticks. But whatever the mix of coercion and accommodation, initiatives by the newly colonized were the driving force. Colonial policy was a response.