UNDERLYING CHANGES: CONSOLIDATION OF EUROPEAN RULE

A survey of formal responsibilities Europeans exercised overseas during phase 4 thus shows modest gains as well as modest losses, with little overall change in the number or size of holdings.

Among the most persuasive arguments for empire is that colonies’ human and material resources can be called upon when a metropole is in trouble. All the Euro­pean metropoles save Spain and Portugal were deeply engaged in World War I. They found themselves in unexpectedly serious trouble as the conflict dragged on, year after year, inflicting staggering losses of life and property on both sides. World War I gave metropoles urgent reason to extract more from their dependencies and showed how valuable dependencies could be in time of crisis. This was especially true of the Entente alliance. Indeed, Britain’s and France’s colonies were major players contrib­uting to Entente victory. Supplementing 5.7 million men recruited from the British Isles for the war effort were 1.4 million from India, 1.3 million from the white dominions, and 134,000 from other British colonies. From France’s colonies came 600,000 soldiers and 200,000 workers employed in the metropole’s factories.¹² The government of India contributed £100 million in 1917 to pay off the British govern­ment’s war debt and spent £20-30 million annually on war-related expenses.¹³ Stra­tegically valuable materials sent from the colonies included cotton, rubber, tin, leather, and jute, this last being used to make the ubiquitous sandbags of trench warfare.

These wartime contributions influenced metropolitan policy makers’ postwar thinking about empire. Colonies could become even more valuable in the future, so the thinking went, if their economic potential were further realized. This should be brought about by increasing public expenditure on economic infrastructure and by encouraging greater investment in the directly productive activities of private profit sectors. The new emphasis on economic development could be seen in two influen­tial books published in the early 1920s by leading practitioner-theorists of empire: France’s Albert Sarraut and Britain’s Sir (later Lord) Frederick Lugard. In La Mise en Valeur des Colonies Franfaises, Sarraut wrote, “It is not by wearing out its colonies that a nation acquires power, wealth, and influence; the past has already shown that development, prosperity, consistent growth and vitality in the colonies are the prime conditions for the economic power and external influence of a colonial metropolis.” In The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa Lugard argued that colonialism should be judged—and in the British case judged favorably—by the ability to satisfy two obliga­tions: providing tangible benefits to rulers and to the colonized population.¹⁴

New ideas about development were accompanied by new levels of activity. Government-financed railways probed deeply into continental interiors. Examples were the Benguela-Katanga and Dakar-Bamako routes. The advent of automobiles and trucks stimulated a tremendous increase in road construction. The colonial state became directly involved in large-scale agricultural enterprises in the valleys of the Nile (Gezira Scheme) and Niger (Office du Niger). Agricultural research stations generated information about yield-increasing techniques that was then passed on to farmers by a growing cadre of extension agents.

During this same period European business enterprises substantially expanded trading, agricultural, and mining activities in the colonies. Examples were Lever Brothers (renamed Unilever), which operated throughout the British Empire and in the Dutch and Belgian possessions; S.C.O.A. in French West Africa; Societe General and Union Minière in the Congo; Tanganyika Concessions; Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands Indies; powerful banks like the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij and the Banque de 1’Indochine; and numerous shipping firms.¹⁵ With large trading companies acting as wholesalers, European consumer goods reached previously in­accessible hinterland markets. Advertisements touting the high status, convenience, and reliability of these goods helped shift colonial consumer tastes from local to imported products. The plantation model of production for export was widely diffused throughout Asia, Africa, and Oceania. For the most part plantations were owned and managed by settlers or large Europe-based enterprises. Among com­modities grown for export were cane sugar, sisal, and a wide array of tree crops: rubber, tea, coffee, cocoa, cloves, coconuts, cinchona bark, kapok, and palm oil.¹⁶

These public and private profit sector initiatives were designed to link colonial economies more tightly than ever to metropoles. Vertical economic ties were further strengthened during the Great Depression, when metropolitan governments con­cerned by declining trade with other developed countries adopted protectionist (in the British case, “imperial preference”) policies directing colonial trade toward themselves.

Along with the outward orientation of colonial economies went a tendency for each colony to specialize in a few commodities for export. This resulted not simply from comparative advantage in a particular commodity but also from policies set by imperial officials with the empire’s interests primarily in mind. A metropole might have a greater volume and variety of resources at its disposal if each possession concentrated on certain items. The assumption was that the sum total of multiple specializations was a more diversified and viable resource base for the empire as a whole. Government decisions on trade, infrastructure, and research priorities pushed colonies—above all, smaller ones—toward specialization.

Because of such policies, the typical colony’s economic prospects were un­usually dependent on forces operating outside its boundaries and beyond its control. These included investment decisions of foreign companies and banks, export strat­egies of other primary-producing areas, international demand for commodities in which a colony specialized, and terms of trade between colonial exports and man­ufactured imports. In a time of global economic growth, as in the 1920s, these vulnerabilities benefited some segments of the colonized population. But in the global economic crisis of the 1930s the same vulnerabilities produced tremendous hardships, widely shared. Between 1925-29 and 1930-34 the value of traded goods fell 28 percent in the Netherlands Indies, 46 percent in Malaya, and over 50 percent in India, Ceylon, and Nigeria.¹⁸ These declines hit the export-oriented labor force hard. In the Netherlands Indies, for example, plantation employment fell from 1.2 million to half that figure between 1929 and 1933.

Expansion of European economic activity in the public and private profit sectors was more marked in the 1920s than in the 1930s, as the Great Depression curtailed funds to finance development projects officials and private employers had in mind. Still, taking the interwar period as a whole, the assessment of the colonial historian Raymond Betts seems valid: “Most of the physical changes and develop­ment in the colonial territories were initiated and, in large measure, executed during the interwar period. In these days the structure of modern empire was established, what was good and bad about it was institutionally fixed.”²⁰

Accompanying increased metropolitan economic influence was a consolida­tion of administrative control. In much of rural Asia and Africa the impact of European rule had scarcely been felt when World War I broke out, if only because rule existed primarily in the colonizer’s imagination. The situation changed after war’s end. In many territories European soldiers and bureaucrats assigned high priority to pacifying outlying areas and subordinating them to directives from the colonial capital city.²¹ Administrative staffs expanded, particularly in such technical fields as botany, agricultural extension, forestry, public health, civil engineering, and vocational education. Even when local administration was handled by indigenous rulers acceptable to colonial authorities, European officials spent a great deal of time traveling “in the bush” to settle disputes and enforce their version of law and order. The interwar period was the era par excellence of the British district officer, French commandant de cercle, Belgian administrateur de territoire, and Portuguese chefe do posto. Acting largely on their own, these men often became undisputed “rois de la brousse” (monarchs of the bush).²²

Norms prohibiting interracial sexual relations and severely restricting inter­racial social relations became more explicit and were more rigidly enforced.

Perhaps because informal links across racial lines declined in the interwar years, administrators tried to compensate for lack of knowledge of what the colo­nized were thinking by designing systematic methods of learning about their sub­jects. Findings from fieldwork by anthropologists helped them understand better why local revolts and work stoppages had occurred. Fieldwork studies helped offi­cials avoid egregious mistakes when selecting the “traditional” authorities of indirect rule systems.²³ Anthropologists tended to see themselves as students of small-scale, autonomous non-European societies minimally affected by the outside world. Yet their own activities belied these assumptions. Fieldworkers in colonies operated under the protective shield of an externally imposed government. The societies they studied were no longer autonomous: the ultimate sanction of capital punishment, for example, had been removed from indigenous institutions and placed in foreign hands. The anthropologist’s presence in an out-of-the-way village was itself testi­mony to the penetrative capacity of outside forces.²⁴

As in earlier phases, settlers emigrating from Europe threatened indigenous peoples’ claims to land. Ex-servicemen from Great Britain were officially encouraged to settle in Kenya. Their numbers made it more possible and more necessary to dispossess Africans from what became known as the White Highlands. An extraor­dinarily complex and controversial case of settlement involved Jews in Palestine, as Britain attempted to work out the mutually incompatible implications of its Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations mandate. From the outset the mandatory power found itself not only presiding over but also actively encouraging a head-on collision over land and legal rights between the immigrant population and resident Palestinians. Conflict was intensified because these immigrants, unlike others noted in this book, did not consider themselves settlers in a foreign territory, but rather returnees to land from which their ancestors had been forcibly driven centuries earlier. Even more important to Zionists, this was the land promised the Jewish people by God.

Tensions between Jews and Palestinians intensified in the 1930s as Nazism’s spread in central Europe swelled the number of Jews who saw a Palestinian home­land as their only means of personal and collective survival. On the other side, many Arab residents of Palestine felt their community’s future was in danger unless Britain respected its mandate to protect the territory’s overwhelming majority. As Palestin­ian leaders saw it, encouraging Jewish immigration was yet another instance of what European powers had unjustly done in so many parts of the world: sponsor settle­ment by fellow Europeans with scant regard for the rights of non-Europeans already living there.

Phase 4 witnessed an unprecedented degree of cultural penetration by Euro­pean and North American religious sectors. Catholic and Protestant missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 12,500 in 1924 to 17,900 twelve years later; Catholic missionary orders had 20 percent more foreigners in India in 1933 than in 1912. As of the late 1930s England and Scotland were headquarters for 140 Protestant mission agencies, many formed since the start of World War I. Thirty-two agencies based in the Netherlands worked overseas, mostly in East Indies outer islands. Efforts to coordinate the work of major Protestant denominations resulted in formation of the International Missionary Council in 1921. Christian adherents in India rose from 2.7 million in 1911 to 6 million in 1936, in sub-Saharan Africa from 1.3 million in 1911 to 6.7 million in 1936, in French Indochina from fewer than 1 million in 1912 to 1.4 million in 1935.²⁵ Mission schools and health clinics in remote rural areas as well as cities exposed an ever-growing number of colonial subjects to West­ern ideas, values, and lifestyles.²⁶

Marking the apex of European power and self-confidence was the International Colonial Exposition held in Vincennes, outside Paris, in 1931. Its commissioner­general and guiding spirit was Marshall Louis Hubert Lyautey, the legendary soldier and administrator who had brought Morocco under French control. The exposition was enormously popular, attracting 3.5 million visitors in its first month. An Interna­tional City of Information dispensed handouts on the possessions of France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Italy, Denmark (Greenland), and the United States. Many colonies had their own pavilions, designed to portray distinctive cul­tural features. Inside were elaborate dioramas of village scenes, replete with indige­nous inhabitants brought to France for the occasion. Other pavilions focused on the French army, European private enterprises, and Christian missionaries. The exposi­tion conveyed an image of peaceful, economically progressing societies whose diverse peoples were grateful to be living under benevolent tutelage.²⁷

Carrying such images in their heads, Europeans could comfort themselves, at least until the outbreak of World War II, that the colonial enterprise was firmly in their hands. They and doubtless many of their subjects as well took the status quo as a reliable predictor of the future.

UNDERLYING CHANGES: THE EROSION OF EUROPEAN POWER Counteracting these trends and events were changes eroding European capacity and will to control far-flung empires. Capacity was lowered in several respects. Perhaps most important, World War I had a devastating impact upon lives, property, and the fabric of society in western Europe. From 1914 to 1918 contending armies inflicted on one another the destructive power of repeating-rifle technologies used with such lethal effectiveness against non-Europeans in phase 3. European powers consumed, for unproductive military purposes, financial and material resources accumulated from productive activities elsewhere. By one estimate Britain’s prewar foreign invest­ments were diminished by a quarter, France’s by over half, and Germany’s by over 90 percent as a result of war and the forced sale of securities.²⁸ American corporations and banks purchased many of these assets, especially investments in Canada and South and Central America, thereby replacing European private profit sectors with their own as an influential force in New World economic and political affairs.

With reduced public and private capital, and with France and Belgium facing a major task of postwar reconstruction at home, imperial powers had limited amounts to invest abroad in the 1920s. Ironically, the war that convinced Europeans that accelerated colonial development would benefit all parties also severely constrained capacity to carry out projects consistent with that goal. And, of course, after 1929 the global depression made it hard for financially strapped metropolitan governments to implement even their most modest overseas development schemes.

The crises of phase 4 dramatized the limited ability of Europeans to control world events. In phase 3 imperial powers prided themselves on their “civilized” avoidance of fratricidal war. Yet in 1914 they embarked upon a round of fratricide costing the lives of at least eight million combatants. On the Middle East front in 1915-16 British, French, Australian, and New Zealand forces failed in the Gallipoli offensive against Ottoman forces, while Anglo-Indian troops marching into Meso­potamia were forced to surrender at Kut in 1916. Following the war, Britain proved unable to channel the course of events in Egypt and Iraq, as witnessed by unantici­pated grants of independence. Britain’s contradictory policies in Palestine created a situation which by the late 1930s threatened to explode. For decades Europeans boasted of industrial capitalism’s power to generate economic and technological progress. Yet they were obviously unable to insulate themselves from an economic depression their finest forecasters had failed to predict. As crises engulfed Europe, the image of its omnipotence lost all credibility.

World War I undercut Europe’s global dominance by accelerating the rise to great-power status of a few countries outside the region. Far from being weakened by participation in the war, the United States and Japan emerged from it economically and militarily strengthened. Their industrial base benefited from the spread of pro­ductive technologies initially concentrated in Europe. Between 1913 and 1920 man­ufacturing production rose 22 percent in the United States, 76 percent in Japan.²⁹ The two countries gained geostrategically as global attention shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, where both powers maintained a strong naval and commercial presence. The end of British preeminence at sea was signaled by the Washington Naval Disar­mament Conference of 1921-22, which set ratios of 5:5:3 for battleships of the British, American, and Japanese navies, respectively.

The rise of the United States and Japan did not initially challenge the European empires. The United States focused on consolidating informal influence within its own hemisphere, occasionally intervening militarily in the affairs of recalcitrant New World states. In 1934 Congress set a target date of July 4,1946, for Philippine inde­pendence, reflecting the anticolonial tradition that antedated America’s brief fling with overseas empire. But the United States did not press other imperial powers to follow suit. The Japanese tried to enhance the economic performance of their exist­ing empire. By the early 1930s they had begun to expand into northeast Asian mainland areas never claimed by Europeans. European powers could hardly ignore the growing challenge posed by the United States and Japan as centers of trade and investment. Neither could the possibility be foreclosed that Japan would one day look to Southeast Asia to satisfy a growing appetite for raw materials.

Another candidate for great-power status was the world’s largest polity, which entered World War I as tsarist Russia and emerged at war’s end as the Soviet Union under Bolshevik leadership. From the start official Soviet ideology posed a more direct and fundamental threat to European colonialism than the official stance of the United States or Japan. But the Soviet Union’s anticolonial role was quite limited in phase 4. Placed on the defensive, its military forces were in no position to mount offensives elsewhere. First things came first: protecting the new regime against invad­ing foreign armies and domestic anticommunist forces while trying to hold together the vast, restive, multiethnic overland empire bequeathed by the Romanov tsars. Moreover, the Stalinist option for “socialism in one country” entailed economic modernization through economic autarchy. Only after the Soviet leadership had consolidated and centralized domestic power during phase 4 and managed to pull the country through the devastating experience of World War II was the regime in a position to conduct an aggressive foreign policy in line with its anticolonial ideology.

Accompanying the erosion of Europe’s capacity to dominate the world in phase 4 were signs of a less resolute and more ambivalent will to do so. The war led European intellectuals to examine their own civilization far more critically than before. The two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s influential work The Decline of the West were published in 1918 and 1922. The French literary critic and poet Paul Valery wrote in 1919, “As for us and our civilization, we now know that we are mortal.... And we now see that the abyss of history is large enough for everyone.... Will Europe keep its preeminence in all things? Will Europe become what in fact it is, that is to say a small corner of the Asian continent?”³⁰ Probing questions were raised about such nineteenth-century shibboleths as material progress, rationality, nation­alism, and biologically determined inequalities among the races. In this new intel­lectual setting it was hardly surprising that questions would also be posed about the rationale for colonialism as well as its actual accomplishments. In the 1930s the widely held belief that capitalism would generate sustained growth was shaken by the everyday experiences of millions in Europe and elsewhere. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe’s cultural heartland highlighted disturbing aspects of Western culture that could no longer be ignored. The specter of yet another frightful con­flagration among great powers was raised. These were decades when Europeans began to lose confidence that their race and culture were manifestly the best on earth.

Self-confidence was further eroded as anthropologists and colonial officials uncovered disquieting evidence of the effects of culture contact in the colonial situation. Metropoles varied in how they defined “civilization” and in the role for­mally accorded the “civilizing mission.” But they all relied on some version of this mission to justify colonial rule. By phase 4 it was becoming clear that their impact on other peoples undermined indigenous patterns of thought and action without neces­sarily turning the colonized into clones of their rulers. Indeed, colonialism’s ob­served effects often diverged from and even contradicted its intended effects. The British colonial administrator J. S. Furnivall wrote of trends in Southeast Asia, “The desire for gain tends to subordinate all social relations to individual economic inter­est, and unless kept under control, leads... to general impoverishment.” He added, “It seems... to be generally true in tropical dependencies that western law encour­ages litigation, crime, and corruption.”³¹

Administrators were worried about non-Europeans whose education, travel experience, or occupation allegedly set them emotionally and psychologically adrift, identifying neither with their own indigenous culture nor with existing structures of power.³² Officials feared that development policies might increase the number of rootless, atomized individuals. Feared even more was the political and ideological challenge such people—especially the well educated—could pose. The most educated elements among the colonized, far from expressing gratitude for benefits bestowed on them, were the status quo’s severest and most outspoken critics.

In searching for ways to respond to these unexpected and unwelcome prob­lems, many colonial officials came to believe that maintenance of their authority depended on reconstructing aspects of the precolonial order. Europeans and their indigenous collaborators, in other words, should deliberately reestablish some of the very features of the old order the colonial enterprise had earlier set out to destroy. The task was none other than the invention of tradition, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger aptly put it.³³ Adding to the irony, outsiders took the lead in restoring cultural patterns the indigenous population allegedly possessed before outsiders arrived. Whether so-called traditions had in fact any historical precedent was imma­terial so long as Europeans thought they did. Reviewing developments in colonial Africa, Ranger observes that

administrators who had begun by proclaiming their support for exploited com­moners against rapacious chiefs ended by backing “traditional” chiefly authority in the interests of social control. Missionaries who had begun by taking converts out of their societies so as to transform their consciousness in “Christian vil­lages” ended by proclaiming the virtues of “traditional” small-scale commu­nity.... People were to be “returned” to their tribal identities; ethnicity was to be “restored” as the basis of association and organization.... The most far-reaching inventions of tradition in colonial Africa took place when Europeans believed themselves to be respecting age-old African custom. What were called customary law, customary land-rights, customary political structure and so on, were in fact all invented by colonial codification.³⁴

But restoring an imagined past created at least as many dilemmas as it resolved. In 1937 a study group of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs quoted with approval a French Jesuit priest on the precolonial customs of peoples brought under European rule:

Custom belongs to the community itself, but to remove from the community the right of interpretation and of transformation is an act of violence more serious, though less visible, than the confiscation of arable land or of forest. Now, as soon as custom is written down, formulated in legislation, and invested by the Euro­pean Power with its omniscient authority, it is applied, no doubt, to the native community as a caning may be applied, but it no longer belongs to the commu­nity. It has passed into other hands, where it is not easy to seek. Custom thence­forth becomes the business of lawyers and white administrators, and of those who can read and interpret texts.³⁵

For imperial enthusiasts in phase 3 the colonial task was a radical one, in the literal sense that they wanted to uproot what other cultures had planted. In sharp contrast, the task in phase 4 task was reactionary. The aim was to return to a real or imagined past in order to undue the harm Europeans believed their presence had done to their subjects’ psyches and social relationships. Inevitably, belief in the revised colonial mission entailed a searching critique of the intended purposes as well as actual results of the earlier mission. Self-criticism was in order even though its announced aim was to enhance empire’s long-term prospects.