by Kevin Reilly
Forced Labor . Even after the end of the slave trade, European imperialists of the late nineteenth century subjected Africans to very crude and direct forms of exploitation. In one form or another, forced labor was practiced in almost all the colonies and was used for building roads, railroads, and government buildings as well as providing workers for private enterprises. The worst abuses occurred in the Congo Free State, personally controlled by Leopold II, king of Belgium. Here, private companies were granted huge concessions of forestland rich in rubber, which was much in demand for bicycle and automobile tires in the early twentieth century. With political and administrative authority over their concessions, these companies compelled local Africans to collect the rubber and enforced their demands through hostage taking, torture, and murder. A reign of mass terror lasted a decade until the Belgian government, acting under the pressure of massive public protest, took direct control of the colony in 1908.
Cash Crops . In many places, particularly West Africa, colonial governments came to rely on African farmers to produce the export products that would generate a taxable trade. Somewhat to their surprise, they found many African peoples both willing and able to respond to new market opportunities. Peanuts in Senegal and Gambia, cocoa in the Gold Coast, cotton in Uganda, and coffee in Tanganyika were among the cash crops African farmers began to produce for the world market and in considerable quantities. Many African farmers gained substantial cash incomes with which they could pay their taxes and school fees and buy a variety of imported goods. But in linking their economic lives so heavily to a world market over which they had little control, Africans also came to experience the fluctuations of the capitalist world economy, as many discovered painfully during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The uncertain rhythms of the international marketplace were now added to those of the seasons and weather.
In addition, most colonies came to specialize very heavily in a very limited range of products and had the bulk of their trade with the country governing them. This very narrow base for economic development proved a serious obstacle to balanced growth after independence. Furthermore, some African colonies devoted so much land and labor to producing luxury crops for export that they had to rely on imported food to feed their own people. This happened first in Senegal and Gambia, where peanut production was so intensive that rice had to be imported from Asia. By the 1970s, such deficiencies had become common throughout the continent, caused in part by an overemphasis on export agriculture and a corresponding neglect of domestic food production. Here was one source of the terrible vulnerability to famine that afflicted so much of Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Loss of Land . Elsewhere, in colonies with a large and permanent European population, production for export was undertaken primarily by resident white settlers. Colonial governments intervened decisively on behalf of European settlers, took large areas of African land, and reserved it for exclusive white ownership. In Kenya’s “white highlands,” some 4,000 European farmers owned 7.3 million acres of the colony’s richest land. Even more extreme was the situation in South Africa, where the Land Act of 1913 legally reserved 88 percent of the land for whites, who constituted less than 20 percent of the population.
Settler colonies created vastly overcrowded and impoverished “native reserves,” as areas limited to Africans were known in British territories. Especially in South Africa, these “reserves,” or “homelands,” of the country’s African population often became “rural slums,” undeveloped, overgrazed, and seriously eroded. Nor was this accidental, for limiting the size of African reserves was one means of forcing Africans to work on European-owned farms and plantations. The experience of rural wage labor for white settlers became a familiar one for hundreds of thousands of Africans who lived in or near settler territories. By the early 1950s, about 30 percent of the African male population of South Africa worked and usually lived on European-owned farms.
Mining and Migration . Many others came to work in the copper-, gold-, and diamond-mining industries of central and southern Africa. Such enterprises created a vast pattern of labor migration all over southern Africa, as men by the hundreds of thousands left their homes in the rural areas for work in the mines. To prevent the growth of a stable and permanent black urban population, the South African government enforced a pattern of circulating labor migration. Without their wives and children, men would come to the mines on contract for a fixed term and then be required to return to the overcrowded reserves, only to repeat the whole process sometime later. Such a pattern, involving by the early 1950s more than 2 million men, undermined rural society, for it meant the absence of large numbers of men and prevented the development of a normal urban society because settled family life was forbidden. African laborers were caught in the middle.
Global Migration
The new world economy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries put people into motion not only in Africa but around the world as well. Between 1800 and 1914, some 50 million Europeans, many from impoverished regions of southern and eastern Europe, migrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in search of land and jobs. In doing so, they created “neo-Europes,” or Western-style societies, in these temperate regions. Another migratory stream brought indentured laborers from India to the plantations of the West Indies, South and East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, generating sizable Indian minorities in these areas. The so-called coolie trade pulled large numbers of impoverished Chinese workers to Malaya, Peru, California, and elsewhere, while other Chinese settlers followed earlier migrants to colonial Southeast Asia, where they often became a prosperous mercantile minority. A recent estimate suggests that some 38 million Asians (19 million from India and 19 million from China) migrated to Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1940, a vast movement of people comparable to the better-known European migrations to the Americas.15
Global Imperial
Society and Culture
Nineteenth-century European imperialism also created global societies and cultures. Sometimes these new social and cultural developments were intentional creations of the Europeans, sometimes they were the indirect product of European economic dominance, and sometimes they were the product of Asian and African initiatives.
Population Patterns
Among the most significant consequences was the quickening of population growth in several places as modern public health measures and improved food supplies took hold. Rates of growth were most rapid in the Americas, where a massive influx of European immigrants contributed to the process. Japan and India also grew rapidly and China’s already huge population somewhat less so. On a global level, the 1800s witnessed an 80 percent increase in human numbers, compared to 30 percent in the 1700s and no more than 10 percent for previous centuries. More isolated peoples, however, suffered greatly, and their populations declined sharply as they came into contact with the diseases and the firepower of European intruders. These included the native peoples of the American West, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, the Arctic, central Africa, and the Amazon River basin. The original population of Tasmania, an island south of Australia, disappeared entirely as the last native person died in 1876. Her name, for the record, was Trucanini.16
Slavery and Race
An End to Slavery . A further social change induced by the impact of an industrializing Europe involved slavery, for centuries an integral part of colonial economies in the Americas. In some places, such as the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil, the initial impact of Europe’s industrial revolution was to intensify the use of slaves as the demand for slave-produced products such as coffee, cotton, and sugar increased. African producers of palm oil in West Africa and Arab producers of cloves in East Africa also made extensive use of slave labor in the nineteenth century.
In the long run, however, slavery came to be considered incompatible with both Christian morality and a capitalist economic system dependent on free labor. Furt
hermore, periodic slave revolts raised the cost of slavery. Abolitionist reformers in both Europe and the Americas put pressure on their governments to take legal action against it throughout the nineteenth century. The British outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833; other countries followed suit. With the ending of Brazilian slavery in 1888, four centuries of Atlantic slavery came to an end. A parallel process brought the abolition of serfdom in central and eastern Europe, most notably in Russia in 1861. While pockets of slavery remained until recently, capitalism and Christianity made the practice both inefficient and immoral for most people in the nineteenth century. For many people, however, legal slavery or serfdom was replaced by new forms of oppression and exploitation, including forced and indentured labor and permanent indebtedness. Typically, former slaves became landless laborers or tenant farmers, while immigrants were imported to replace them. Cuban sugar planters imported Chinese contract laborers to work with and replace African slaves, and Brazilian coffee growers near São Paulo recruited migrants from Italy rather than take newly freed Africans from its own northeast.
The Growth of “Scientific Racism.” While slavery gradually declined, the racial distinctions so often associated with it assumed even greater significance. Earlier, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europeans living in Asia and Africa had attempted to adapt to local cultures. Dutch gentlemen in Java often wore the long skirtlike garb of Javanese aristocrats and lived with and frequently married local women. Until the 1850s, the British governed India ostensibly as agents of the Mughal emperor, making use of Indian political rituals and ceremonies, patronizing Hindu temples, and sharply restricting Christian missionary activity for a time. Eighteenth-century European intellectuals praised China for its long political unity and its remarkable system of civil service examinations. It was, declared the French writer Voltaire, “a model, even for Christians.”
But increasingly in the nineteenth century, this more fluid and tolerant pattern of race relations sharply declined as Europeans living in the colonies withdrew into their own restricted communities. Steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal after 1869 brought wives and families to the little Englands in the hill stations of British India and Malaya. There, British magistrates and family men began to worry about sexual relations across racial lines and to deal with “natives” only as servants or subjugated people. One English missionary in early twentieth-century East Africa objected to teaching English to “natives” on the grounds that it would endanger white women if African men could speak their language.
The new intensity of colonial racism reflected an emerging ideology of race in Europe and the United States. With their marvelous technological inventions and their immense economic and political power, many westerners came to believe in their innate biological superiority. To many people, “social Darwinism,” based on the “survival of the fittest,” seemed a sufficient explanation for Western dominance in the world. Invoking the prestige and apparatus of science, “phrenologists” used allegedly scientific methods to classify the size and shape of human skulls and concluded, not surprisingly, that those of whites were larger and therefore more advanced. “Race is everything,” declared British anatomist Robert Knox in 1850; “civilization depends on it.”17
Race and Colonial Life . Race thus became the central division of all colonial societies, affecting job opportunities, political participation, educational provisions, wages, and daily social interactions. The earliest colonial settler societies in the Americas experienced this new postslavery racism earliest. The Civil War in the United States brought an end to slavery but not racism. In fact, after 1875, the United States initiated racial segregation of public facilities; pioneered pseudoscientific racist studies meant to prove the inferiority of blacks, Jews, immigrants, and poor rural Americans; and tolerated racial violence against blacks by white mobs, police, and government officials.
Among later settler colonies, South Africa was the most extreme case. There, a long history of racial conflict culminated in twentieth-century apartheid, which established race as a legal, not just a customary, feature of South African society and provided for separate “homelands,” educational systems, residential areas, public facilities, and much more. South African whites sought to maintain an advanced industrial country by incorporating Africans into the economy as cheap labor while attempting to limit their social and political integration into South African society in every conceivable fashion.
Similar efforts to maintain racial barriers, though less formal and rigid than in South Africa, occurred all across the colonial world. Where these barriers were threatened, European reaction was vociferous. Outraged British residents of India in 1883 protested massively and bitterly against a proposal to allow Indian judges and magistrates to hear cases involving Europeans, “the conquering race.” A debate about domestic servants in colonial Southern Rhodesia illustrates the complex sexual politics of race. There white men favored using African females as household servants, fearing that African men had uncontrollable designs on their women. But European women preferred African male servants, fearing the temptations that female help presented to their husbands.
Western-Educated Elites . Those most directly affected by colonial racism were members of the “educated elite,” Asians and Africans trained in mission or government schools and employed in the modern sector of the economy or the colonial bureaucracy. Their familiarity with Western ways set them apart from others and introduced a new cultural division into their societies. Many among them enthusiastically embraced Western culture. The first generation of Western-educated Bengalis in northeastern India of the early nineteenth century came to believe that much of old Indian culture was obsolete and needed an infusion of European civilization. They demonstrated their modern “enlightenment” by speaking and writing in English, wearing European clothing, and eating European foods, often to the distress of their elders. Subsequent generations of educated Indians sought to reform certain features of Indian society, such as child marriages or harsh caste restrictions, while vigorously defending Indian culture and especially its unique spirituality in the face of racially based and highly negative European views of India.
Colonial racism impelled some among the educated elite to political action as well. Among the earliest was the Indian National Congress, established in 1885 by a group of educators, lawyers, and journalists. Inspired by Western political ideals, this organization later led the drive for India’s independence and became a model for anticolonial movements in Asia and Africa. More than military conquest or economic exploitation, racial discrimination was responsible for the bitterness of educated Asians and Africans, who otherwise saw much to admire in modern Western culture. What they found so offensive was Western hypocrisy—the contradiction between the “civilizing” and “modernizing” rhetoric and the reality of racial exclusiveness—together with a frequent disparagement of their cultures for being backward, primitive, or savage. Thus, in a strange irony of colonial history, those most deeply involved in Western culture became the chief critics of Western domination and in the twentieth century the leaders of mass movements that brought colonial rule to an end. In this explosive combination of Western education and colonial racism lay yet another process of change generated by the global extension of European power.
New Identities
Beyond Western education, other patterns of change in the colonial world also generated new ways of thinking and new conceptions of community. Millions of Asians and Africans found their way to cities, mines, plantations, and mission stations far from home where they mixed and mingled with people quite culturally different from themselves while competing for jobs, school places, and living space. In the process, new identities took shape as earlier fluid and flexible cultural loyalties became more rigid and sharply defined. Some Africans began to see themselves as “black” in response to “white” racism and even to forge connections with black people in the Americas in the beginnings
of a pan-African identity. Others identified with various “tribes,” many of which had been invented by European colonial officials to administer complex African societies more easily. In the Belgian Congo, colonial authorities applied the “tribal” label of “Bangala” to men from a number of small and quite separate communities along the Congo River who worked in colonial enterprises. The Belgians adopted one of the river dialects as their means of communicating with these Africa workers, and thus it became Lingala, or the language of the Bangala. Prior to the coming of the Belgians, the notion of a Bangala identity had simply not existed; it was the creation of the colonial state, appropriated by various Africans as its usefulness in the colonial situation became apparent. Then, typically, colonial authorities like the British in East Africa would informally sponsor the publication of “tribal” histories in order to blunt the force of more inclusive African nationalisms.
“India” likewise took on a new national meaning for some elite South Asians confronting British rule. At the same time, the old distinction between Muslim and Hindu communities in India became sharper and more competitive as the British defined separate law codes for the two groups and organized political representation along religious lines. Growing numbers of African and Indian peoples found these new racial, national, ethnic, or religious identities useful as they sought a measure of security and solidarity in a rapidly changing colonial environment.
Colonized Women
European Reforms . Colonized women were also put to the European global standard. Horrified European officials, aided by some Indian reformers, attempted to abolish sati, the practice in which a devoted Indian widow, usually from an upper caste, followed her husband in death by burning herself alive on his funeral pyre. In Africa, missionaries and some colonial officials attacked polygamy and female circumcision, or the cutting of the clitoris, while in Polynesia, nudity and sexual permissiveness deeply offended European sensibilities. While none of these efforts were wholly successful, they introduced new ideas about the roles of women and stimulated local reformers. In 1819, for example, the king of Hawaii declared an end to the traditional taboo on men and women eating together.
