UNDERLYING CHANGES: EMPOWERMENT OF THE COLONIZED

Accompanying these changes on the European side was an increased capacity and will on the part of colonized people to assert their own interests and move toward political autonomy.

Several complementary, converging processes were at work. As the years went by, the colonial situation became less a distant abstraction and more a lived expe­rience for hundreds of millions of people. As the coercive, extractive, culturally disruptive presence of foreign rulers became increasingly obvious to ever-larger numbers, the grounds for widespread disaffection grew. Most unpopular were gov­ernment initiatives spurred by global crises: recruitment of young men for military service, forced labor in war-related road maintenance, cotton, and rubber produc­tion schemes, price cutbacks for colonial exports as the depression took hold, higher head and hut taxes to cover development projects metropoles were unable or unwill­ing to finance. Growing awareness of government’s impact meant that people were more likely to attribute problems they faced to the malevolent intentions and actions of their rulers. The idea that a colony’s residents had common grievances and inter­ests became more plausible and more attractive. The basis was laid for the spread of corollary ideas: that these shared features entitled colonized subjects to be considered a nation, and that the nation deserved one day to become an independent state.

Changes in the way the colonized perceived themselves and defined their situation were due in part to new experiences affecting individuals: enrollment in Western-style schools, migration to urban centers, and recruitment to jobs involving sustained contact with Europeans.

Physical and psychological proximity to colonizers produced a range of re­sponses. One was resentment. Seen up close, Europeans were not the superior and invulnerable creatures they took such pains to represent themselves as being. It became obvious that they persistently failed to behave according to their own so- called civilized standards. Colonized peoples closest to them were the most likely to be on the receiving end of racially offensive words and actions. The more culturally assimilated to European ways a colonized person became, the more galling were expressions of white racial superiority, since racism was more manifest when it lacked the supportive shield of cultural difference to protect it. The irrational, hurtful nature of racism was further reinforced when non-Europeans who had obtained the educational qualifications to move up sectoral institutional hierarchies found their advance blocked.

Mobilization into foreign-dominated sectoral activity made it easier than be­fore to channel resentments through organizations the colonized controlled. A shared Western language, physical proximity in growing urban centers, common occupational outlooks—these factors converged to produce a veritable organiza­tional explosion in phase 4. In the public sector were junior civil servants, soldiers, and ex-servicemen. In the private profit sector were workers in mines, plantations, and trading firms as well as peasants growing export crops. In the religious sector were preachers and mission teachers. Not readily identifiable by sector were groups organized around gender, kinship, linguistic, and local or regional territorial affilia­tions. The success of efforts to organize such groups varied greatly, depending for example on whether a colonial government was willing to recognize organizations and negotiate with their leaders. Many were illegal or operated uneasily on the margins of legal status. Still, the sheer scope and variety of their activities evidenced new forms of empowerment.

Involvement in European-directed sectors permitted socially mobilized colo­nial subjects to choose among a wide range of tactics to express their interests. One option was to withdraw from participation in the colonial economy by going on strike, not supplying primary products for export, or boycotting imported consumer goods. Examples were copper miners’ strikes in Northern Rhodesia, holdups of cocoa sales by Gold Coast farmers, and the boycott of British cloth organized by inc activists. These tactics could succeed only in arenas in which colonized people had become essential to the smooth functioning of the economy, to the point that even a temporary withdrawal interrupted the flow of income their rulers had come to expect and caused metropolitan officials great anxiety.

Another option was infiltration: upward movement of individuals within in­stitutions, whether by promotion from below or by securing educational qualifica­tions to enter hierarchies at more responsible middle levels. In general, infiltration was least rapid in the large-scale private profit sector, somewhat more so in the public sector, and most successful in the religious sector. Upward mobility in the civil service varied by metropole, being more pronounced in British and French colonies of occupation than in Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese possessions. Especially note­worthy were developments in India. In 1919 Indians constituted 12.4 percent of the Indian Civil Service (ics), the elite corps of about twelve hundred men described by Prime Minister David Lloyd George as “the steel frame of the whole structure” of imperial rule. The figure rose to 15 percent in 1922, helped by that year’s decision to hold ics entrance examinations for the first time in India instead of only in Great Britain. Two years later an official commission recommended that Indians attain parity with British citizens by the late 1930s. This ambitious goal was achieved, the indigenous proportion reaching 49.5 percent in 1939. By the end of phase 4 the ics had not only taken root as a foreign import in Indian soil. It also increasingly resembled the vast land it governed.³⁷

As for the religious sector, many Christian churches indigenized rapidly, even in territories where the subject population enjoyed virtually no opportunities for political expression or bureaucratic advancement. In the Belgian Congo the number of Catholic priests who were African rose from 0 to 43 between 1912 and 1935, with over 18,000 catechists by 1935. Five Congolese served as ordained Protestant pastors in 1923,336 by 1936. In French Indochina by the mid-i93os there were four times as many indigenous Catholic priests and fourteen times as many indigenous sisters as foreign missionaries. In the Dutch East Indies the (Reformed) Church of Eastern Java was founded in 1931 with Europeans constituting only 10 percent of the gov­erning synod.

Infiltration of sectoral institutions from below raises an intriguing question: who was using whom in this situation? On the one hand, the penetration of colonial society by sectoral institutions, described earlier as the basis for consolidation of European rule, depended on recruiting colonized people as employees. On the other hand, as recruits moved up in government, business, and religious agencies, they were able to use their positions to further their own goals as well as gain administra­tive experience that could be called upon later when the transfer of power took place. In effect two penetrative processes were simultaneously at work: downward by im­ported institutions into indigenous society, upward within these same institutions by selected indigenous individuals. Were these individuals collaborators or infiltrators, agents or subverters of colonial consolidation? The answer depended on the motiva­tions of the individuals concerned, the level of administrative responsibility they attained, and the leeway for autonomous action in the territory where they worked. In general, the upward penetrative process may have had the effect of moderating and blurring, if not halting, the power-enhancing effects of the downward penetra­tion described earlier in this chapter.

Another option was to set up or expand organizations that were separate from ones Europeans controlled yet in a position to challenge assertions of European authority. Such organizations both expressed the interests of colonized peoples and gave practical expression to the ideal of self-government. In the public sector were nationalist movements calling colonial rule into question. Operating in some cases as legally recognized political parties and in others as clandestine operations, these movements increasingly functioned as alternatives to the colonial regime. Prominent examples were the inc, Wafd Party in Egypt, Neo-Destour Party in Tunisia, Indone­sian National Party, the Thakins of Burma, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, and in Jamaica the People’s National Party.

In the private profit sector were unions, whose demands to redistribute gains from European capitalist enterprise were at times backed up by strikes. Examples were the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in South Africa, les Employees de Commerce de 1’Industrie et des Banques (Senegal), and the British Empire Work­ers’ and Citizens’ Home Rule Party led by “Buzz” Butler (Trinidad).⁴⁰

India was unique in having an indigenous business class that played a large role in financing, managing, and owning industrial enterprises. Indians were prominent in the manufacture of cotton yarn and cloth for the domestic market and in iron and steel production. They were aided by import-substitution policies the raj adopted in World War I, when access to the metropole was virtually cut off, and retained after the war ended. The Tata Iron and Steel Company, founded by sons of the great Parsi entrepreneur J. N. Tata (1839-1904), began production in 1911 and benefited from wartime sales to government agencies. The House of Tata was instrumental in de­veloping hydroelectric power for Bombay from monsoon-fed lakes in mountains east of the city. It also supported technical education by founding the Institute of Science at Bangalore. Members of commercially oriented groups like the Parsis, Bhatias, and Marwaris became successful bankers by tapping savings of middle­income people as well as rulers of princely states. The existence of indigenous bank­ing institutions made it possible to transfer local funds to industrial purposes in the 1930s, when a slump in agricultural production made it more profitable to invest in factory-based enterprises than in land. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, formed in 1927, coordinated indigenous business interests throughout India.⁴¹ In these respects India gained greater control of its private profit sector than did other colonies in phase 4.

In the religious sector were organizations that broke with European-controlled agencies over a variety of issues: theology, liturgy and ritual, the acceptability of indigenous social practices, and the unwillingness of missionaries to share control. In French Indochina the Caodai movement, a compound of Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, and Taoism, was founded in the 1920s. In Borneo the Dayak Church was established. Many Kikuyu in Kenya formed their own churches and schools in reac­tion to missionary attacks on female circumcision. A movement led by Simon Kim- bangu spread in the Belgian Congo, as did the millennial Kitawala movement in the Rhodesias and hundreds of independent churches in South Africa.

Organized expressions of autonomy in the private profit and religious sectors were not necessarily intended as challenges to European control of the public sector. But colonial officials were prone to interpret activities of unions and independent religious movements as political threats. Efforts to suppress these activities often backfired, broadening the scope of popular protest to include the political arena. As Karl Deutsch notes, social mobilization makes people readily available for political participation. Proliferation of all types of organizations among the colonized in phase 4 increased opportunities for political leaders to use them as building blocks for anticolonial movements.

Mobilization of non-Europeans for political purposes was made easier by the transport and communications networks devised by colonial rulers for their own ends. The railroads Britain built in India to permit rapid troop movements should another Great Mutiny break out were the same ones Gandhi, Nehru, and Val- labhbhai Patel used to travel about the country seeking mass support for the inc. Over time the primary mode of transport shifted from expensive locomotives owned by European public or private agencies to far less costly automobiles, trucks, and buses that at least a few non-Europeans could afford. The result was greatly expanded possibilities for autonomous movement to places distant from existing rail lines. Telephones and telegraphs could be used not only by rulers to assert authority but also by some of their subjects, some of the time, to convey messages challenging it.

The technological edge Europeans enjoyed over the rest of the world in phase 3 was diminished in phase 4 by the diffusion of technology to other areas. Colonial rulers made every effort, of course, to monopolize access to the most advanced means of waging war. But they were not always successful. In 1921 a rebellion broke out in the Rif mountains of Spanish Morocco. Using smuggled French rifles and Mausers illegally acquired from Moroccan troops employed by Spain, about four thousand fighters under the skilled leadership of Abd el Krim attacked a number of Spanish outposts. Carefully coordinated surprise attacks netted the rebels an esti­mated 20,000 rifles, 400 machine guns, and 129 cannon.⁴² By 1925 Abd el Krim had expanded the rebellion and begun to attack outposts on the French Moroccan side of the Rif. His forces excelled at guerrilla tactics in the harsh mountain setting they knew so well. But they also had at their disposal rockets and other modern weapons captured from their enemies. The French and Spanish countered with even more modern military technology: aerial bombing of mountain villages and generous ap­plications of poison gas. By 1926 the combined efforts of the two metropoles brought the rebellion to an end. Nonetheless, the ability of Abd el Krim’s forces to acquire and use modern weapons in a sustained guerrilla struggle was a portent of events in phase 5, most notably in French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and Algeria.