When Europeans visited other lands they simultaneously encountered other peo­ples.1

Claims to possess distant places were inseparable from claims to rule their inhabitants. The scope and effectiveness of European claims were greatly affected by what indigenous peoples did.

Unfortunately, most theories of European imperialism focus primarily if not exclusively on the colonizers. Hence they provide little assistance in answering this question. And writers who do show how non-Europeans shaped their own history tend to emphasize certain activities while neglecting others. A substantial literature in what might be termed resistance studies has emerged in recent years.² Works in this genre show that European expansion was contested in a wide range of societies by people who were not about to concede accustomed liberties and ways of life to arrogant, disruptive invaders.

But chronicles of resistance, far from accounting for European imperialism, only deepen the mystery as to why invaders could have been so successful when confronted by determined local opposition. Resistance studies imply that imperial­ists were more powerful than their apologists imagined or more cleverly diabolic than their most fervent detractors asserted or both. But a theory of imperialism that treats Europeans as giants or moral monsters fails for lack of credibility. Europeans can be restored to a status at once merely and fully human by acknowledging that people in other continents responded to their initiatives in many ways, some of which had the effect of facilitating empire. Resistance was clearly an important part of this story, being at times decisive in delaying or halting conquest. But the willing­ness of indigenous people to collaborate was also frequently decisive in providing the territorial footholds and social leverage Europeans needed to start carrying out expansionist designs.³ Non-Europeans contributed in important measure to their eventual colonization, even if they did not foresee or intend it.

In the hindsight of a postcolonial world with strongly held anticolonial norms, collaboration is difficult to understand and easy to condemn as the work of sellouts and traitors. But in the context of its time and place it may have made sense on moral as well as tactical grounds. Europeans’ propensity to intervene in others’ affairs was often supplemented by requests for intervention from local people, who hoped this would help them achieve their own goals. In many cases imperialism was the result not only of European push but also of indigenous pull.