by Kevin Reilly
Underlying all this was a growing sense among Europeans that they were a superior form of humanity, as evidenced by their amazing technological progress. For some, this meant that “lesser breeds” or ‘backward peoples” were destined to be displaced or destroyed by superior races and that the war, bloodshed, and brutality associated with imperialism were the “natural” and even “progressive” mechanism by which the “survival of the fittest” unfolded. For others, this “social Darwinism,” a harsh understanding of imperialism, was tempered with a genuine though condescending sense of responsibility to the “weaker races” that Europe was fated to dominate. Empire and trade, they felt, should bring the blessings of Western civilization to those less fortunate: Christianity, freedom, and material improvement. Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem of 1899 gave this “paternalistic idealism” its classic expression:
Take up the White Man’s Burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.4
The Tools of Empire5
The industrial era provided new means as well as new motives for European expansion. Steam-driven ships facilitated the penetration of the Asian and African interiors along their river systems, and the discovery of quinine to prevent malaria reduced the risk of an extended stay in the tropics from quasi suicidal to merely dangerous. Breech-loading rifles, which became available about 1850 and machine guns a few decades later, provided the overwhelming firepower that decided many a colonial conflict. A much-quoted rhyme expressed the essential facts of the situation:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun [machine gun], and they
have not.
Finally, the enhanced administrative capacities of an industrializing Europe as well as remarkable improvements in the technology of transportation and communication—larger and more efficient ships, the Suez and Panama canals, underwater telegraph cables, and the railroad—linked Europe and its new dependencies more tightly than ever before. All this—both motives and means—propelled Europeans’ inland intrusion into Asian and African societies after 1750, following more than two centuries of being limited largely to fortified trading centers along the coasts.
Confronting Imperialism
The global encounter of European imperialism and various Afro-Asian peoples took shape in quite different ways. Much depended on the historical circumstances of particular cultures or civilizations as well as on the intentions of various groups of European intruders. It was clearly a two-way process although a highly unequal one in terms of power.
Some people and some groups in every society found advantage in the European presence and were inclined to cooperate, at least for a time. Rulers, caught in complex internal rivalries and external threats, might very well view the Europeans as useful allies. In Southeast Asia, for example, a number of highland minority groups, long oppressed by the dominant lowland Vietnamese, viewed the French invaders as liberators and assisted in their takeover of Vietnam. And once colonial rule was established, many traditional elite groups and other aspiring individuals eagerly served the new order as princes, chiefs, administrative officials, clerks, soldiers, and translators. Without them, colonial rule would have been impossible.
On the other hand, resistance was widespread, as witnessed by the endless and bloody wars of conquest that Europeans were required to fight in order to establish their control. Here is just one very small example drawn from the British conquest of Kenya in East Africa in the early twentieth century. It comes from the diary of a British soldier in 1902:
I have performed a most unpleasant duty today. I made a night march to the village at the edge of the forest where the white settler had been so brutally murdered the day before yesterday. Though the war drums were sounding throughout the night, we reached the village without incident and surrounded it. . . . I gave orders that every living thing except children should be killed without mercy. I hated the work and was anxious to get through with it. So soon as we could see to shoot we closed in. Several of the men tried to break out but were immediately shot. I then assaulted the place before any defense could be prepared. Every soul was either shot or bayoneted, and I am happy to say that there were no children in the village. They, together with the younger women, had already been removed by the villagers to the forest. We burned all the huts and razed the banana plantations to the ground.6
Even after initial resistance had been crushed, hundreds of rebellions threatened the “colonial peace.” And soon nationalist movements, led by Western-educated elites, took shape and eventually brought the age of global empire to an end in the second half of the twentieth century.
But the various peoples of Asia and Africa confronted quite different patterns of European intrusion, and their responses to it varied widely as well.
India
Mughal Decline . India was among the first to experience this new thrust of European imperial expansion. European traders, first the Portuguese and later the British and French, had been active along the coast of India for several centuries, but their trading companies had long operated under the control and with the permission of the powerful Mughal Empire. But in the eighteenth century, that empire began to disintegrate as the more aggressively Muslim emperor Aurangzeb (1658—1707) upset the delicate balance between the empire’s Muslim rulers and its mostly Hindu subjects. As the central authority of the Mughal Empire weakened, regional rulers became more prominent, as did urban merchants and moneylenders. Many such people found an advantage in some connection with the French or British trading companies. European military technology and techniques for training troops were useful to aspiring regional authorities enmeshed in local rivalries. Some wealthy Indian traders and bankers, resenting the demands of Mughal authorities, helped finance the military forces of the British East India Company. Substantial numbers of Indian men joined European led armies, attracted by the security and opportunities for enrichment that they offered.
British Takeover . Without the authority of the Mughal Empire to provide law and order, the British East India Company, together with its French rival, found it useful and profitable to train and arm some of these Indian states and to involve themselves ever more deeply in the complex political affairs of India. Over the course of more than half a century after 1750, the British Company bested its French rivals, allied with some Indian rulers, opposed others, and found itself by the mid-nineteenth century ruling the Indian subcontinent. Although it involved the frequent use of British-led military forces, the British acquisition of India was not, precisely, a “conquest” of one state by another, and it occurred with the assistance of many Indian allies. Lest this seem unpatriotic, we need to remember that little sense of “India” as a nation had yet emerged. Local loyalties to caste, village, or region were far more important, and relationships with rulers at an all-India level fluctuated frequently on the basis of changing interests.
One witty observer quipped that Britain had acquired its Indian colony “in a fit of absence of mind.” Certainly, the British government had no declared policy of conquering India, but it generally acquiesced to the actions of East India Company officials “on the spot” who often acted quite deliberately (and without consulting authorities in London) in carving out new territories to govern. Thus, the British takeover of India was carried out by a private commercial company, though the British government assumed official control of the country in 1858. The resources that made this remarkable acquisition possible did not initially involve industrial technology or superior firepower, for much of this process occurred before the industrial revolution kicked in. Rather, it was a matter of organizational technology in the form of disciplined military training and highly regimented tactics.
A broadly similar transition from a lim
ited European commercial presence to outright political control also occurred in Indonesia as the Dutch East India Company took over that heavily populated archipelago. In both cases, the outcome was unexpected and was driven as much by events in Asia as by the intentions of European governments or commercial firms.
Rebellion . India was also the site of one of the largest rebellions in the colonial world. Known as the Indian, or Sepoy, Rebellion of 1857-1858, it began as a cultural clash in the military when Indian troops, known as sepoys, refused to use cartridges greased in animal fat. Hindus feared that the fat came from sacred cows, while Muslims feared it came from filthy and offensive pigs. The revolt attracted a variety of groups with grievances against the new British rulers: exploited peasants, landlords deprived of their estates, princes displaced by British rule, and religious leaders threatened by missionary activity. Nevertheless, divisions among the rebels and British military superiority crushed the revolt amid horrendous violence. In one display of extravagant revenge, British soldiers chained “disloyal” sepoys to the mouths of cannon and blew them apart.
Yet even failed rebels could become martyrs in later struggles for independence. One of these was the young Rani of Jhansi, a fierce fighting widow of an Indian raja who had been deprived by the British of her inheritance. The Rani led her own army of women as well as male troops against the British in 1858. Despite her death in the battle at the age of 23, her memory was honored in stories, films, monuments, and the naming of a women’s regiment in the anti-British Indian National Army during World War II.
China
China and the West . China’s confrontation with Western imperialism bore both similarities and differences to that of India. Like the Mughal Empire, China had controlled and contained European activity for some 300 years. Chinese authorities had admitted European missionaries to the court when they appeared respectful and useful and sharply restricted or prevented their activity when they became offensive. Western traders, like other “barbarians” seeking access to China’s riches, were subject to strict monitoring and after 1759 were limited to trading in a single Chinese city, Guangzhou (Canton), and were compelled to conduct business only with authorized Chinese merchants. But by the early nineteenth century, the balance of power had begun to shift. China’s Qing dynasty (16441911) weakened under the pressures of population growth, official corruption, and periodic peasant rebellion. Furthermore, the country faced a new problem, directly related to European activity—drug addiction.
Opium for Tea . British traders had long been frustrated by their inability to find Western products that the Chinese wanted to buy. By the eighteenth century, increased consumption of Chinese tea had to be paid for in silver, depleting British reserves. A solution was found in India, where opium had long been grown for medicinal purposes. Finally, a product with an unquenchable demand. The British East India Company increased production, and it and (after 1834) various American and other companies began to import huge quantities of this highly addictive drug into China, where it found a ready market. From the viewpoint of the Chinese government, here was a problem of major proportions. The opium trade, after all, was wholly illegal and contrary to Chinese law, thus creating a growing “law-and-order” issue. Furthermore, it corrupted Chinese officials who were bribed to turn their heads when boats laden with opium chests arrived. It was a terrible social problem as well, vastly increasing the number of addicts to perhaps 10 million by the mid-1830s. For the British, the trade was a huge success since it reversed the drain of silver, but now the Chinese suffered from a massive outflow of the precious metal in payment for an illegal addictive drug.
What followed was an intensive debate at the Chinese court in the mid-1830s between those who sought to control the opium trade by legalizing it and those who wanted to strictly enforce the laws against it. When the emperor finally decided on suppression, Chinese authorities acted decisively, seizing and destroying some 20,000 chests of opium in Canton and promising harsh punishment for Europeans who persisted in the trade. From the Chinese point of view, a crackdown on the sale and consumption of opium was a principled decision.
The Opium Wars . But the British claimed a principle as well—free trade and the rights of private property. As the world’s major commercial country, the British viewed free trade as an almost religious doctrine, and the seizure of British-owned opium had clearly violated the rights of private property. Emboldened by their new industrially based power, the British government in 1840 used novel steam-powered gunboats to coerce the Chinese state into more open trading relations. This was the Opium War (1839-1842), the first in a series of military conflicts in the nineteenth century in which various European powers (and later Japan) repeatedly inflicted humiliating defeats on the proud Chinese state. In one of these encounters in 1860, after the Second Opium War, the British vandalized and then burned to the ground the exquisite summer palace of the emperor.
Unlike European imperialism in India, the outcome was not a formal colonial takeover but rather a set of “unequal treaties” that sharply limited Chinese sovereignty while preserving its legal independence. Under these treaties, the Chinese were required to open up numerous ports to European merchants, to limit their tariffs on imported goods, to allow foreigners to be judged by their own courts, and to protect Christian missionaries. They also had to permit the continued trade in opium, which grew even larger. One of the treaties even forbade the Chinese to use the character for barbarian to refer to the British. It was a kind of semicolonial status that historians sometimes call “informal empire.”
The Taiping Rebellion . Compounding China’s external problems was a series of massive peasant rebellions that shook the country in the 1850s and 1860s. But unlike the Indian Rebellion, which was directed against the British, China’s largest upheaval, known as the Taiping Rebellion, took aim at the ruling Qing dynasty and the landlord class that supported it. The ideology of the Taiping rebels differed from earlier Chinese peasant movements in that it was based on a foreign set of ideas, a garbled version of Christianity picked up from missionary teachings. That ideology cast the rebellion’s leader, Hong Xiuquan (18141864), as the younger brother of Jesus Christ, returned to Earth to expel the demons and to prepare the way for the “heavenly kingdom.” Hong’s message was genuinely revolutionary as it rejected Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism; proposed the elimination of private property; urged the equality of men and women; and sought to promote modern industrialization. While the Taiping Rebellion was crushed by the mid-1860s, the civil war that it occasioned devastated China economically, cost some 20 million to 30 million lives, and further weakened the Qing dynasty, which was already under growing pressure from foreign imperialists.
The Ottoman Empire
Something similar occurred in the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire, which had long posed a threat to Europe, was suffering internal decline throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries compounded by periodic military defeats and loss of territory at the hands of French, British, and Russian aggression. As the empire shrank in size as a result of European annexations, a lengthening set of “capitulations,” similar to the “unequal treaties” later signed with China, gave foreign merchants immunity from Ottoman laws and legal procedures, exempted them from internal taxes, and limited import and export duties on their products. Foreign consuls could grant these privileges to Ottoman citizens, and hundreds of thousands of them, usually Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, received this privileged status, which effectively removed them from Ottoman control and greatly enhanced European control of the Ottoman economy. In 1838, the British and French forced Ottoman authorities to reduce their tariffs on imported goods, an action that made subsequent Ottoman efforts to industrialize even more difficult. Like China, the Ottoman Empire gradually slipped into the position of an “informal colony” of the European powers.
Africa
Patterns of Change in the Nineteenth Century . The nineteenth century in much of Africa was a period
of dynamic, even revolutionary, change. In North Africa, some regions began to throw off the control of the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, for example, regained its independence, pursued an ambitious program of modernization, and carved out a large empire in the Nile River valley in what is now the modern country of Sudan. As the Atlantic slave trade diminished, a number of societies in West Africa reoriented their economies toward the export of other products—palm oil, peanuts, gum, coffee, and ivory. The interior of West Africa witnessed a series of religious wars intended to expand and purify the practice of Islam, a process that gave rise to a number of new Islamic states. In southern Africa, an enormous and bloody upheaval grew out of the conquests by the Zulu people, setting in motion a series of vast migrations and stimulating the formation of many new states and societies. Eastern Africa experienced a growing commercial integration of the interior and the coast, expressed tragically in a mounting slave trade that sought to supply laborers for Arab plantations on the coast and on the nearby islands of Zanzibar and Pemba.
