The motivations for Italian colonies were so weak that most of the country’s establishment opposed their acquisition, calling their colonialism un colonialismo da straccioni (‘a beggars’ colonialism’). In any case Italy, without colonies, had almost levelled with Spain in terms of industrial development. In November 1886, Giovanni Giolitti, not yet in charge of the country’s politics, explained patiently and wisely to his electors that an imperial policy was expensive; that it required armies and a navy; and it would confer more privileges to the aristocracy – not something he would recommend.136 Other enlightened conservatives were equally scathing of Italy’s attempts to build an empire, notably Count Stefano Jacini, author of the celebrated Agrarian Inquiry, who, in his Pensieri sulla politica italiana (1889), accused the government of ‘megalomania’ – the first modern use of the term – a disease he attributed to the eccitabilità della nostra immaginazione meridionale (the ‘excitability of our southern imagination’).137
Italy succeeded in acquiring Eritrea (1882), Somalia (1889), and Libya (1911–12). These, however, offered neither commercial advantages nor primary products worthy of note (oil was discovered in Libya only in the 1950s). Some politicians, in particular southerners such as Francesco Crispi (Prime Minister 1887–91, 1893–6), were strong supporters of colonial expansion.138 The idea that colonial settlements would relieve overpopulation in Italy had become a prominent justification for acquiring an empire. Italians, it was mistakenly believed, would prefer to settle as conquerors in Eritrea and Somalia than to be received in the United States as ‘huddled masses’ and ‘wretched refuse’.
Crispi’s dream of colonial conquest as a means of resolving the inability of the growing Italian industry to absorb Italian labour turned out to be a chimera. Antonio Gramsci was scathing. In his Prison Notebooks he wrote that southern Italian peasants wanted land, and since Crispi could not give it to them, he hoped to give them colonial lands. Crispi’s imperialism, he explained, had no economic basis in reality. Italy had no capital to export, like the advanced countries, so he hoped to export labour and calm down the land hunger of the southern peasantry.139
As in many other matters, the young Italian state turned out to be quite inadequate to the tasks it had set itself. Much of the (not large) budget devoted to colonization was earmarked for the armed forces and little was left for the necessary infrastructure that might have attracted private enterprise and personnel. The first ‘model’ settlers did not have the skills required, and the climate was quite different from that of southern Italy.140 Italians continued to emigrate to the United States and Canada, to other European countries, and above all to Argentina, in ever larger numbers (an annual average of 679,000 in the years immediately preceding the First World War).141 Few went to Africa. In the first decades after unification, Italy’s main exports were to France and Germany and its imports came mainly from Austria, France, and the United Kingdom. By 1913 its extra-European trade had increased considerably, a further sign of the globalization of commerce even for countries not yet in the first ranks of the industrial race and without empires.142 Opposition to Italy’s forays in Africa had been manifest as early as 1888 when Andrea Costa, the first socialist member of parliament at a time when the Socialist Party had not yet been created, declared that the huge sums to be spent on African conquest could be better spent on the draining of swamps in Italy, thus encouraging ‘our poor peasants’ not to emigrate but to find work at home. When finally a socialist party emerged in 1892, such anti-colonialism encountered some internal dissent. In 1911 leading socialists, such as Leonida Bissolati and Ivanoe Bonomi, supported the Italian conquest of Libya precisely on the grounds that Libya would provide Italian peasants with land.143 They were both expelled from the party in 1912.
Italy had begun to industrialize but Portugal failed even to start. It did have an old empire acquired well before the nineteenth century but it was the poorest country in western Europe. It exported primary products, such as cork and port wine – the latter trade dominated by the British, as the enduring names testify: Cockburn, Osborne, Sandeman, and Taylor. Portugal’s population was tiny: 5 million in 1890, the same as London. Its bourgeoisie was involved in commerce rather than manufacturing. Its African possessions were tangential to its economy.144
Portugal’s African empire looked big on paper, but, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it consisted of little more than the occupation of coastal areas and only a nominal control of the hinterland. The country’s rulers dreamt of using their empire in a modern way. Plantations and mines would be developed and Portuguese emigration would be diverted from Brazil to Africa. The colonies would cease to be a financial burden. The whole grandiose project, the attempt to create a vast central African empire, foundered almost immediately.145 In 1886, Portugal sought to claim the territory between Mozambique and Angola so as to have a stretch of African territory from ocean to ocean, suitably coloured in pink (Mapa cor-de-rosa). This clashed with the British project of an uninterrupted rose-tinted map (also the colour designating British possessions) stretching from Cairo to Cape Town. In January 1890, Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister, sent Lisbon an ultimatum requesting unconditional Portuguese withdrawal from territories that are now Zimbabwe and Malawi, territories which had long been regarded as Portuguese. Lisbon, unable to face Britain militarily or diplomatically, gave way.146 It had been an expensive disaster. Humiliated by its oldest and only ally, Britain, Portugal entered a period of national recrimination. Britain was depicted, not unreasonably, as Perfidious Albion. There was popular disenchantment with the Portuguese royal family, widely regarded as pusillanimous and corrupt.147 Money lost value, some banks failed, public debt increased, investments declined.148 In 1908, King Carlos I and his son and heir Luís Felipe were assassinated by a secret republican organization, the Carbonária, which claimed 40,000 members.149 In 1910, Portugal became a republic.
Much of the land in the remaining Portuguese colonies – Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau), Mozambique, and Angola – was not settled by the Portuguese, few of whom wanted to become settlers and fight the Africans, who were better adapted to the climate and the insects.150 Those few Portuguese who settled in the African colonies – 13,000 in Angola and 11,000 in Mozambique (1914) – lobbied Lisbon to extract concessions and subsidies.151 They were detested everywhere, especially on plantations such as those of São Tomé and Principe, where they exploited an enslaved workforce (formal slavery having been officially abolished in 1876) in appalling conditions.
Spain fared even worse than Portugal, having ‘lost’ most of its empire to the United States in 1898. In reality these colonies were not very important and their loss was not detrimental to growth. The main consequence of such loss was political-cultural rather than economic. Spaniards could not use imperial grandeur to rebuild national identity. Instead, the country faced a lengthy period of autarchy under authoritarian regimes of various hues occasionally interrupted by brief periods of democracy.152
Ramiro de Maeztu, one of the most influential members of what came to be called the generación del ’98 that arose following the desastre del ’98 (see Chapter 11), declared that since ‘the loss of our colonial markets makes clear how shallow and peripheral our economic evolution [was]’, the only way Spanish manufacturing, for example, textiles, could prosper was to develop the internal market.153 But, had Spain retained her empire or even been able to expand it she might, in any case, have been forced to adopt the same protectionist conclusions. The era of the first great modern globalization was dominated by such protectionist sentiments. Facing the world could be a terrifying prospect for countries whose greatness lay in the past.
For Americans, however, the future could only be glittering – in a sense, optimism was the real American ideology. Despite their anti-colonial rhetoric, they could not resist the temptation of establishing a protectorate over Cuba and the Philippines, which became de facto colonies. Americans too were becoming imperialists, as a French commentator point
ed out in 1902.154 The United States had already in 1875 established a treaty with the kingdom of Hawaii that made it a virtual colony, before annexing it formally in 1898. Hawaii acquired statehood only in 1959 (just two years before Barack Obama’s birth). In 1899 the USA partitioned the Samoan islands by agreement with Germany. In 1900 it took part in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China along with Britain, France, Japan, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary.
The United States felt it had a ‘duty’ in places such as the Philippines or Hawaii on a par with the mission civilisatrice of European colonial states. In 1899, having just defeated Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino liberation army, President McKinley declared ‘The Philippines are ours not to exploit, but to civilize, to develop, to educate, to train in the science of self-government.’155 In 1901, Woodrow Wilson, then still a professor at Princeton, echoed McKinley when he declared that since the USA had acquired the Philippines ‘almost accidentally’, it was ‘our duty’ to play a part in its future and that since:
The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it … It is our peculiar duty … to moderate the process in the interests of liberty: to impart to the peoples thus driven out upon the road of change … our own principles of self-help; teach them order and self-control … impart to them … the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of the strenuous processes of English history …’156
McKinley’s successor as President, Theodore Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address on 6 December 1904, noted that the Philippine people were at present ‘utterly incapable of existing in independence at all or of building up a civilization of their own’. Eventually, with American help, they would ‘rise higher and higher in the scale of civilization’ and would be able to govern themselves. He then added candidly:
There are points of resemblance in our work to the work which is being done by the British in India and Egypt, by the French in Algiers, by the Dutch in Java, by the Russians in Turkestan, by the Japanese in Formosa …157
The American takeover of the Philippines in 1898 was the inspiration for Kipling’s famous 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (subtitled ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands’), which begins ‘Take up the White Man’s burden – / Send forth the best ye breed’.
Theodore Roosevelt, who has been described as ‘the most impulsive, compulsive, dramatic, rambunctious … character ever to live in the White House’, was, like many politicians at the time (in Europe and in the USA), a social reformist at home and an imperialist abroad. (He was also an undeserved winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his mediating efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War – hardly a momentous enterprise.)158 In his four-volume work The Winning of the West (1889–96), he drew from the history of his country’s struggle with the Indians the conclusion that a racial war to the finish was inevitable.159 The triumph of the Anglo-Saxon race (a common trope at the time) was not inevitable. In a famous lecture he gave in 1899 (‘The Strenuous Life’) he declared that one must fight for greatness and not follow the bad example of:
the timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills … shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos … we cannot sit huddled within our own borders …160
Domestic reaction against the new American imperialism was muted and largely confined to those who, consistent with their libertarian and anti-statist attitude, regarded foreign adventure as a betrayal of what America ‘stood for’. Thus, when the United States went to war with Spain over Cuba and the Philippines (1898), the arch-liberal William Graham Sumner warned that the USA risked following Spain and other European powers on the road of empire and eventual post-imperial ruin. Americans would become inflated with vanity and pride. They would assume, just like other colonialists, that the conquered inhabitants of the Philippines and Cuba would relish America’s rule: ‘this is grossly and obviously untrue. They hate our ways. They are hostile to our ideas. Our religion, our language, institutions and manners offend them.’ And Sumner added: ‘The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions.’161 The philosopher William James concurred. In a letter written in 1899 to his brother the novelist Henry James about the American acquisition of the Philippines, he declared that ‘our national infamy is I fear undeniable …’162 In 1899, William and Henry James and Sumner had joined the American Anti-Imperialism League in opposition to the occupation of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The League was founded by George S. Boutwell, former Treasury Secretary, Senator and Governor of Massachusetts, and included among its supporters the satirical writer Ambrose Bierce, the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), the former President of the USA Grover Cleveland, the philosopher John Dewey, and the trade union leader Samuel Gompers.
Many European empires originated in a partnership between private companies and the state. The East India Company originated from the granting, in 1600, of a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I, to a group of City merchants of the monopoly of trade with India and other parts of Asia. In 1602 the Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie was granted by the Dutch Parliament the monopoly of trade with Indonesia. In 1664 the Compagnie française des Indes orientales (a state company but with a private basis) was founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Minister of Finance and architect of Louis XIV’s centralized French state. These companies were not purely commercial; they also had political institutional functions since, in their territories, they could raise armies, establish an administration, exercise police powers, and collect taxes.
Throughout the seventeenth century other European states granted trade monopolies to private enterprises in the East Indies and elsewhere: Denmark in 1616, Portugal in 1628, and Sweden in 1731. By the end of the nineteenth century most of these private enterprises had been wound down and states became directly responsible for the colonies. However, Britain continued to use the private-company model when it deemed it suitable. The British South Africa Company, established in 1889 under Cecil Rhodes, had its own army, fought wars against local kingdoms, and occupied a territory corresponding to present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Manchester Guardian, in its obituary in 1902, described him as being constantly implicated in unscrupulous pursuits and, as a consequence, became ‘a wrecker instead of a constructor of South African development’.163 Rhodes’s statue still stands at Oriel College, Oxford – the beneficiary of huge sums from his will.
The historical verdict on the most famous of these imperial private enterprises, the East India Company, can only be negative, vindicating the judgement of contemporaries such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham that the Company was despotic and corrupt.164 In 1789, Bentham, mischievously, even suggested that the East India Company erect a statue of Warren Hastings, de facto Governor of India from 1772 to 1785, who was accused of corruption and eventually acquitted:
To this Governor a statue is erecting by a vote of East India Directors and Proprietors: on it should be inscribed – Let it but put money into our pockets, no tyranny too flagitious to be worshipped by us. To this statue of the Arch-malefactor should be added, for a companion, that of the long-robed accomplice: the one lodging the bribe in the hand of the other. The hundred millions of plundered and oppressed Hindoos and Mahometans pay for the one: a Westminster Hall subscription might pay for the other.165
‘The British,’ exclaimed Burke in 1783, had established ‘an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious, and peculating despotism’ that had no regard for the well-being of the Indians.166 Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations, denounced the Company for having extend
ed its ‘dominion or their depredations’ over some of ‘the richest and most fertile countries in India’, which were ‘all … wasted and destroyed’. Consequently, it was now (1784) in ‘greater distress than ever; and, in order to prevent immediate bankruptcy, it is once more reduced to supplicate the assistance of government’, and all now agree to ‘what was indeed always abundantly evident’: that the East India Company was altogether ‘unfit to govern its territorial possessions’.167 The Company survived into the nineteenth century, facing increasing financial problems. By 1813 the British government, now hostile, stripped the Company of almost all its trading privileges and monopolies, leaving it with only the unglamorous function of providing personnel as agents of the Crown in India.168 In 1833 the Charter Act (formally the Government of India Act, 1833) removed all remaining privileges, including the China monopoly, from the East India Company.169 The Company’s trading days were over. James Silk Buckingham, a former editor of the Calcutta Journal, who led the campaign to end the monopoly, declared in that year that the idea of giving a commercial undertaking ‘the political administration of an empire peopled with a hundred million of souls was so preposterous’ that if it were proposed now it would be regarded as absurd.170 Yet the Company, even after it lost its commercial business, continued to exercise British rule over much of South Asia – a kind of privatized armed force working on behalf of the Crown. It did so rather badly and was widely held responsible for the Indian Rebellion of 1857. With the Government of India Act in 1858, the Company was dissolved and the administration of India became not just de facto but also de jure the business of the British state, in other words, a colony.171
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