Transforming the Politics of Difference

The rejection of slavery underscored the legitimacy of other transformations of so­cial relations on an imperial scale. Taking land from indigenous populations was masked by multiple fictions—the land was unoccupied, the populations were “no­madic” and therefore had no genuine rights in it, only people who “improved” land could claim it—and was not free from controversy.^[956] But land seizures created facts on the ground, and the law of property in land could enforce social distinction even when the law of property in human beings was repudiated.

In South Africa, the combination of settler land grabbing with the development of a capitalist mining sector in the late nineteenth century produced a racialized prole­tarianization that came closer to the Marxist model of capitalist development than anything else in colonial Africa. The aspiration to control land and labor brought the British state into direct conflict with the Afrikaner element of settler society in the so-called Boer War of 1898-1902. After the war, the state consolidated its con­trol over the movement of African peoples, many of them obliged to shuttle back and forth between wage labor and rural “reserves.” The enmities of the Boer War gave way to the “alliance of gold and maize,” of international capitalists in the gold and diamond industries and large-scale Afrikaner landowners, sharing an interest in coordinating the exploitation of black labor in farms, mines, and industries.^[958]

Elsewhere in Africa, there were too few whites to superintend such processes, re­sources were too scattered to make the systematization of labor control worthwhile, and social relations among African communities were strong enough to make the costs of strict control unbearable.

Colonial regimes in much of Africa also profited from the export of products grown by Africans with little imperial oversight or control. In a few regions, mod­erately prosperous communities of African producers emerged in the imperial con­text, some of them diversifying their interests into commerce and transportation, sending their children to mission or government schools.

These various strategies for exploiting populations and resources gave rise to new patterns of social differentiation within and across empires. All of them produced pressures on colonial regimes: educated Africans challenged racial discrimination in terms of European democratic ideals; peasants and middle-scale farmers fought restrictions on produce marketing; workers in mines, railways, and ports organized and struck; and many Africans, by moving back and forth between different places and different activities, made it impossible for colonial governments to impose the social order they desired.

Ideas of order themselves were not fixed or alike. London and Paris became places where intellectuals and activists from different parts of the British and French empires could engage in public debate.^[961] People involved in colonizing projects were heterogeneous enough that some of them exposed abuses.

As in the past, the space of empire was neither homogeneous nor neatly divided into separable spheres. In the twentieth century, European powers were developing variants of what we now call welfare states. Could these new social arrangements be limited to the European spaces of empire? At first, the Europeans' politics of difference offered an answer: Africans and Asians themselves were “different.” Their patterns of natality, family formation, life course, education, old age appeared distinctive, both in indigenous contexts and in the exploitative conditions of colonial economies. The claim that Africans neither needed nor merited state social services proved difficult to sustain. International institutions became sites where the differential treatment of social problems in the colonies was both justified and questioned. In the 1920s and 1930s, the International Labour Office became the venue for a critique of forced labor in overseas colonies along with reflection on the dangers of migratory and contract labor. In the late 1930s and especially after World War II, the “social question” be­came a problem for colonial powers to rethink, overseas as well as at home. Strikes and demonstrations in the colonies—particularly in the British West Indies between 1935 and 1938—confronted the British Colonial Office with the hard fact that dis­location and poverty could not be attributed to the “primitive” nature of colonized peoples; these problems were rampant in regions that had been part of the empire for centuries, as well as in the most dynamic cities and mine towns of Africa.⁵⁹

Britain, France, and other colonial powers thus faced, at last, the fact that the tensions of industrial society that they had been confronting at home existed in a much larger spatial field, with its own social, cultural, and political complexities.

These new perspectives implied a shift in the politics of difference: removing or attenuating the barriers of racial discrimination that educated Africans faced, accepting that African workers, like those of Europe, could join trade unions, and in some places reforming land tenure regimes to give Africans a stake in pro­perty ownership. In settler societies, these policies ran into the deeply entrenched prejudices and institutionalized powers of elite whites. In Portuguese Africa, exten­sive migration of whites from their relatively poor European homeland to Angola and Mozambique meant that niches that might otherwise have been filled by skilled Africans were occupied by Europeans.^[962] Where social change was pushed forward, increased class differentiation among Africans gave rise to its own tensions.

59

Cooper 1996.

Connections Across Empires

The formation of collectivities—classes, networks, ethnicities—did not just take place within empires, but across them. “Trading diasporas” are a case in point. These drew together people who developed a high degree of collective self-consciousness through their projects of moving commodities across long distances, making use of their cultural and religious affinities, and crystallizing these ties into relations of trust and common action.

Inter-empire networks did more than exchange goods. The diverse people who traveled or settled in the rival Venetian and Ottoman Empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped a dialogue about difference and connections across political, religious, and ethnic frontiers. The Mediterranean was for centuries a web of connection as much as of conquest and rivalry, where different powers tried to extend their networks and people in interlocking cities tried to play one authority off against another.^[966]

Connections across the Indian Ocean fostered networks controlled by Hadrami Arabs or Gujeratis, who persisted in making commercial connections even as polities came and went in different parts of the region. By the time Great Britain began to rule Zanzibar and coastal Kenya (and Tanganyika after 1919), South Asians were already a well-established commercial diaspora. Their networks linking different parts of the British Empire facilitated empire-wide economic development at low cost to the colonizing power even as officials worried about networks they did not control, with their unpredictable economic and political consequences.^[967] Muslim Indians and Arabs living in India fostered networks con­necting Bombay, Surat, and Karachi with Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul, spread ideas coming out of the revolts of the mid-nineteenth century, and shaped a Muslim ecumene.

Ideas moved not only within empire space, but across imperial boundaries. Competitive as they were, officials of European colonial empires sometimes exchanged information and strategies, and some internationalists sought to shape—through the League of Nations and the International Colonial Institute— what one might call “best practices” for colonial rule. As Britain and France led efforts to reform their empires after World War II, they sometimes cooperated in fields like health and industrial relations in an effort to turn political tensions into technical or managerial problems.^[969]

Opposition to empire also crossed imperial boundaries. African, Caribbean, and Afro-American activists established pan-African circuits, as did anti-colonial leaders from South Asia and the Middle East. London, Paris, Moscow, and at times Hamburg or Berlin became nodes in anti-imperialist networks.^[970] Oppositional associations were both mobilizing and fractured by ideological and tactical disagreements—including fears that the Soviet Union was using anti-imperial networks for its own purposes and the underlying question of whether people were engaged in a common struggle against imperialism or particular struggles for national liberation. Some saw anti-imperialism and independence as necessarily intertwined—forging a world order that could accommodate both recognition of cultural particularity and aspirations for equality among peoples. This aspiration would prove difficult to attain even after the formal end of colonial empire.^[971]

Racism, Colonialism, and Distinction

At the heart of colonialism, Partha Chatterjee has argued, is the “rule of differ­ence.”^[972] We emphasize instead the politics of difference, for the meanings of differ­ence were multiple, contested, and rarely stable. Many scholars have argued that race was the category that counted most, particularly for the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonized people felt the brunt of racism at many levels, from daily humiliations to the elaboration—by writers like Carlyle or de Gobineau—of theories of human society that put blacks at the bottom. Questions of race have persisted throughout and beyond the history of colonial empires.

As scholars examine the history of racism in the nineteenth- and twentieth­century colonial empires, it becomes a no less vicious practice but a less coherent ideology. The proposition that a “scientific racism” was the product of classificatory thinking characteristic of the Enlightenment runs into the problem that at no point did scientists agree on the significance of race. If some scientists concluded that the world's population was clustered into unequal groups—white, black, and yellow— others reasoned that human beings were intermixed in a variety of ways and that skin color, intelligence, or other capabilities did not correlate. These arguments among scientists and officials trying to define and legitimize a colonial order never produced a consensus, even when the rule of European powers over much of the world was at its height.^[973]

Imperial practices provoked some to criticize racial domination and others to justify it in new ways. The British anti-slavery movement's deployment of the image of a black man in chains, pleading, “Am I not a man and a brother?” invoked the universality of humanity. But British lawmakers in the early 1830s were of two minds about whether people of African descent, if freed from the shackles of slavery, would become “rational” actors who could participate in market economies as wage laborers, and—at least some of them—in political institutions. When ex­slaves did not follow the script written for them by abolitionists—often preferring a variety of economic activities to the constraints of full-time wage labor on the plantations where they had worked as slaves—British administrators and some missionaries concluded that blacks were a racial exception to an economic rule and could contribute to the empire only if kept in a subordinate position. That position too provoked controversy, as well as efforts on the part of ex-slaves to claim the rights which formal emancipation had seemed to dangle before them.^[974]

The consolidation of colonial states—and the fact that colonizers came to live in them for short or long periods—raised the question of whether boundaries be­tween colonized and colonizer needed to be defined and policed. The European who “went native” and the child of a European father and indigenous mother con­founded the notion of a society neatly divided into superiors and inferiors and raised the possibility of subversion from inside or at the margins of a colonial so­ciety. Metropolitan and settler elites did not see eye to eye on how far to go in treating indigenous people as a category that could be exploited at will.^[975] Entrenched settler communities with their self-identification as “whites” sharply distinct from indige­nous people—as in Kenya, Rhodesia, or Algeria—could complicate matters for im­perial administrators who took a more pragmatic view of the costs and benefits of colonial rule.^[976]

French governments were reluctant to inscribe racial distinction in law. They insisted that the major distinction in the overseas territories was juridical status: colonized peoples were subjects, not citizens; their legal affairs did not come under the French civil code. However much “race”—immutable and heritable— seemed distinct from “culture”—a category that also made invidious distinctions, but admitted the possibility of change—the two were imbricated in one another. British anthropologists in the early twentieth century preferred to analyze the par­ticular ways in which different societies solved universal problems rather than to emphasize fixed hierarchy among people. As usual, practice and ideology did not line up neatly. Portuguese governments claimed to have transcended race con­sciousness, but practiced distinction-making to a high degree.

Most important, people of African and Asian descent pushed back against the different forms of racism they encountered. Even before colonialism in much of Africa was consolidated, organizations like the Pan-African Conference of 1900 were attacking the racist assumptions of imperial rule. When W. E. B. DuBois is­sued his famous statement of 1903 that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” he was signaling a struggle that would challenge the foundations of multiple empires and the political forms that succeeded them.^[977]

Some colonizers—secular as well as religious—invoked the idea of a “civilizing mission” that might eventually create equality among imperial subjects.^[978] The con­cept combined Roman humanitas with Christian proselytism. But if the goal was to uplift, could Africans or Asians be lifted very far? As earlier, the civilizing mis­sion was undercut by humiliations directed at the very people who had absorbed mission thinking. British Protestant missionaries, like the secular civilizers of the French Third Republic who were the agents of “cultural imperialism” or the “colo­nization of consciousness,” did not necessarily think that their subjects would ever attain the levels of their mentors. But subjects in the colonies often refused to ac­cept this message. Studies of converts show that the lessons of Christian and other missions could be reinterpreted and lived out in disparate ways. People insisted that they could become Christian while remaining “African.” Culture was a realm of contestation, more complicated than an imperialist imposition or a defense of African authenticity.^[979]

The civilizing missions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism sup­posed a dynamic element: colonizers were staking their legitimacy on the colonized becoming more like them. Yet while convergence could be deferred to an indefinite future—and perhaps be imagined as only partial even then—the concept of “civili­zation” could be used in a static sense to inscribe a global, hierarchical division of people that transcended the competition among colonial powers. The profession of international law offered a venue for imperial definitions of difference on a grand scale. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as jurists and statesmen in Europe set out procedures for adjudicating conflicts among themselves and limiting actions in time of war, they elaborated a distinction between civilized powers that interacted with each other on the basis of mutually recognized sovereignty and polities that did not deserve such respect. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 and the Brussels Conference of 1890-1891, rival powers agreed on the rules for their competitions over Africa—notably “effective occupation” as a basis for claiming territory—and committed themselves to practices, such as stamping out the slave trade, that were supposed to mark their advanced civilization.^[980] In this way, they enforced, for them­selves at least, the cultural superiority of “Europe,” even as they competed with each other to incorporate supposedly less civilized people into rival imperial blocs.

In the actual exercise of power, imperial rulers could not operate as if the world were divided into the civilized and the uncivilized.^[981] Such a division of the world was complicated by the existence of non-European empires that, however much they were condescended to, still had to be reckoned with—the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire, and—of increasing importance at the turn of the century—Japan. The fraught relationships among these empires, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and the growing overseas empires of some western European powers has often been covered up by thinking of all but the latter as anachronisms. Yet Asian, Eurasian, and empires on Europe's edges were all part of the game of power that ruling elites played—with devastating consequences in 1914. These empires were all aware of and influenced by each other's politics of difference.^[982]

The cataclysm of World War I seemed to explode the commonalities of Europeans, and even before then, mobilizations within the colonies confronted rulers with multiple challenges, some turning “civilizing” ideologies against colo­nial authority, others positing alternative visions. As colonial governments tried to co-opt some elements of society while repressing others, they encountered in real terms the incoherence behind their claim to legitimate authority over people they had tried to define as “others.”

At the end of World War II, both French and British governments formally repudiated race as a legitimate category of state practice with remarkable alacrity. Assertions of non-racialism did not, however, mean equality and respect. White settlers did their best to preserve racial privileges; habits of denigration among co­lonial officials, businessmen, and tourists died hard if at all. And the nature of dis­tinction could be subtly transformed. In the twentieth century, as colonial regimes became more serious about economic and social reform in order to preserve em­pire, administrators put a new emphasis on distinctions in behavior. If Africans were now considered capable of becoming rational economic actors, participants in Western-style political institutions, and students of science and literature, the African who refused to conform to the “modern” ways made available to him could be considered to be acting in a willfully negative manner, well deserving the designation of “savage” This kind of thinking was prominent in the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya and the war in Algeria; people labeled as backward could be forcibly resettled in closely supervised villages, interned, tortured, or killed—all at a time when in other parts of Africa, colonial regimes were negotiating with African political parties about the transfer of power.

The most persuasive analyses of racism treat it not as an intrinsic characteristic of European society—any more than “tribalism” should be considered an inherent char­acteristic of African culture—but as a mode of thinking that evolved in conjunction with the exercise of power and exploitation.⁸¹ The contents and deployment of ra­cial thought thus shifted with the trajectories of colonial empires—and not least in relation to the fact that Africans and Asians argued back. If empires configured the context for both racism and anti-racism, they did so in relation to myriad struggles in particular imperial situations, at the level of an entire empire, and across empires.

Political movements in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries insisted that the inhabitants of the Raj were “imperial citizens” who could claim the rights of an Englishman anywhere in the empire. An Indian who managed to get to England might make good on such a claim, although not so in British India itself. In the early twentieth century, controversy erupted when Indians wanted to exercise the right they had to enter the British Isles or any other part of the Empire, including self­governing dominions like Canada and Australia. Those governments refused that right on racial grounds, a refusal that was a significant factor in alienating Indian elites from carrying on their struggle within British institutions. They were running into another empire-wide vision—of a “Greater Britain” extended across the globe, an imperial space in which only white people mattered.⁸²

What of race outside European empire? That non-European societies were ca­pable of making invidious distinctions should hardly come as a surprise, but once again the relationship between power and difference was not uniform. Some African

⁸¹ Bethencourt 2013; Schaub 2019.

⁸² Banerjee 2010; Bell 2007; Sinha 2006; Lake and Reynolds 2008. empires had been content to extract tribute and obedience from conquered people without treating them as a distinct category or trying to change their way of life. The great empires of the Sahelian region from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries (Ghana, Mali, Songhay) ruled over diverse peoples and fostered linkages over large spaces without insisting on assimilation. But particularly when external slave markets created powerful incentives, outsiders could be defined as the “enslavable other.” Bruce Hall has documented the denigration of “black” Africans by light­skinned inhabitants of the edge of the Sahara desert in the context of political consolidation and the slave trade, but he is careful to point out that blackness was considered as much a matter of patrilineal descent as of physical appearance. Two people who looked the same might be considered to be of different races. In a later context, tensions between “Arabs” and “Africans”—neither of which constituted a homogeneous category —crystallized in these more generalized terms during contests for power in Zanzibar as it became clear that British power was fading and control of a successor state was at stake.⁸³

In imperial Russia, the politics of unproblematized everyday difference strained under the pressures of nationalist movements⁸⁴ and the vogue for racial theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Russia's scholars participated in research projects and international debates on “race science.” While their differences in political aims, academic ambitions, and theoretical arguments were legion, overall Russia's scholars considered physical anthropology more “scientific” (more objective) than cultural ethnography with its “colonial” biases.⁸⁵ Professional fascination with physical type and worry over civilizational categories accorded with dilemmas faced by the empire. Not only did Russia's administrators have to manage and learn something about enormous numbers of distinctive peoples, they had also to cope with the disdain of European competitor empires who played the civilizational card against Russia itself. One ideological move on the part of rulers was to claim that the Russian Empire was bringing “Western” civilization to its “Asiatic” regions.⁸⁶ Russia's loss to Japan in the war of 1904-1905 was a hard blow.

Whether the empire constructed by Japan in Asia from the 1870s through the 1940s was similar to or distinct from European empires was the subject of fierce argument at the time. Japanese ideologues sought at times to emphasize their dis­tinction from the people of Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (or for that matter, Hokkaido and Okinawa) and their equivalence to European powers, at others to portray themselves as “big brothers” to Asian relatives. They developed an anti- imperialist—that is anti-European—imperialism. Even as Japanese authorities exercised harsh interventions and relegated incorporated peoples to second-tier status, they went further than European empires in fostering industrialization in their newly acquired territories. Some Koreans found opportunities for profit in their Japanese-run homeland or in Japanese-conquered Manchuria. Nonetheless,

⁸³ Hall 2011; Glassman 2011. See also Gomez 2018.

⁸⁴ See Lieven, Chapter 35, in Volume 2 of this work.

⁸⁵ Mogilner 2013.

⁸⁶ Sunderland 2004.

in the 1930s Japanese conquerors in China proved themselves every bit as brutal as their European rivals.^[983] In recent years, demands from Korea and China that Japan acknowledge its colonizing past are acknowledged by some Japanese intellectuals, but are resisted in official quarters.