SECTORAL INSTITUTIONS: ROLES AND INTERRELATIONSHIPS

Europeans impacted other regions in phase 3 through a wide range of specialized institutions. Soldiers and administrators accountable to metropolitan governments were essential to empire building.

Both expansionist phases saw extensive immigration to distant colonies. Each settler fragment—to use Louis Hartz’s word—struck off from European society car­ried features of the society it left at the time of departure. In this respect emi­grants from nineteenth-century Britain to Australia differed from, say, those who left seventeenth-century Spain for Peru.³⁶ But the contrast should not be overdrawn. Settlers in both phases wanted to acquire land and profit by transforming available natural resources into marketable commodities. Whether in Australia or Peru they looked down on indigenous people for having failed to develop land for commercial purposes. They were prepared to use force to seize land from such people. In both phases settlers constituted elements of a private profit sector, which quickly took root after being transplanted from the homeland. The private search for economic gain took noninstitutional form in the family homesteads established as frontiers were pushed back from the coast. But settlers also set up local institutions to stimulate economic development directly benefiting themselves.

Given the nature of the Industrial Revolution and the prosperity it generated in Europe, phase 3 settlers were more focused on producing for metropolitan mar­kets than many of their phase 1 predecessors.

European traders, manufacturers, and financiers did not have identical eco­nomic interests or political preferences. But in the latter half of phase 3 many promi­nent capitalists agreed that having an empire was good for business. French enter­prises were active in lobby groups like the Union Coloniale Fran^aise, the Comity de 1’Afrique Fran^aise, the Comity de 1’Asie Fran^aise, and the Comity du Maroc.³⁷ Merchants like Adolf Luderitz from Bremen and Adolf Woerman from Hamburg urged Germany to enter the imperial sweepstakes. Luderitz bought long stretches of the southwest African coast, then asked his government to intervene to protect what he had just purchased. In 1885 the London Chamber of Commerce urged the British government to annex Upper Burma to secure the area’s forest and mineral resources for British rather than French companies and to gain overland access to the China market.³⁸ The British turned to the chartered company mechanism to sponsor ven­tures into the African interior. Best known was the British South Africa Company, Cecil Rhodes’s ingenious instrument for enlarging the empire while simultaneously amassing a personal fortune.

A comparable proliferation of institutions can be seen in the religious sectors of major metropoles. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church virtually monopolized mission work in phase 1, by phase 3 Catholics shared the field with numerous Protestant agencies. Between the late 1840s and World War I six Catholic orders, nine Protestant denominational agencies, and two Protestant interdenominational agen­cies began work in East Africa.³⁹ Prominent there and in the rest of Africa were the Holy Ghost Fathers and White Fathers for the Catholics, the Church Missionary Society (Anglican), London Missionary Society (primarily Congregational), Church of Scotland Mission, United Methodist Mission, and Lutherans and Moravians from Germany. Missionaries often set up their first churches, schools, and medical dinics outside zones of European control. But they generally welcomed inclusion of their stations within an expanding colonial frontier. Some religious leaders preached the gospel of imperialism. Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers, was among the most fervent lobbyists for French expansion in North Africa. Friedrich Fabri, supervisor of the Rhenish Missionary Society, published an influential pro­imperial pamphlet in 1879, “Does Germany Need Colonies?” The widely read Narra­tive of an Expedition to the Zambesi (1866), by the Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone concluded with a plea that British officials extend to eastern and central Africa the authority they exercised on the West African coast.⁴⁰

Phase 3 thus saw the rise to prominence of nongovernmental actors—notably industrialists and Protestant missionaries—who were absent or minimally present in phase 1. The goals, interests, and concerns of these new actors set them apart from their sectoral predecessors.

These differences should not, however, deflect attention from underlying sim­ilarities between the two expansionist phases. Settlers transplanted to the colonies important aspects of their metropole’s private profit sector. Institutions specializing in profit and proselytization dispatched agents from Europe to distant lands. In following their agendas, these institutions showed they could operate outside the formal jurisdiction of European administrators. But they were amenable to the extension of colonial rule and in many instances actively campaigned for it, both in the metropole and overseas.