In France, history textbooks, such as the ‘manuel Brossolette’ (1907), dealt with the French conquest of Tunisia thus: ‘In 1881 Jules Ferry decided to punish the Khoumirs [a Berber tribe], a turbulent people who constantly crossed into Algeria. In pursuit, it happened that our soldiers occupied Tunisia.’64 The occupation of the Congo and Sudan, says another textbook, put an end to horrors such as the slave trade.65
A feeling of achievement was particularly felt by those members of the middle classes who went to the colonies. It gave them the possibility of enjoying an aristocratic lifestyle, taking pride in their ‘origins’, and ‘doing good’; at home, of course, they had little to be proud of. They could do what they could never dream of doing in the ‘mother country’: have a large estate with ample provisions for hunting and shooting, indulge in conspicuous consumption, have servants, and adopt ‘cultivated’ modes of paternalistic behaviour.’66 Why be against colonies when they provided jobs as administrators and officers for the middle classes and as soldiers for the unemployed; subsidies for colonially based enterprises and markets for exporters; as well as a pleasing feeling of superiority? The true imperialists, according to Bernard Porter, were a relatively small band of marginal misfits: Irish aristocrats, middle-class men with social pretensions, sexually frustrated men and women, rogues, ruffians, Scots, and so on.67 There were a significant enough number of déclassé aristocrats to lead John Bright (the anti-imperialist Liberal MP) to regard the empire as ‘a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’.68
Hobson, writing in 1902, thundered against colonizers:
As the despotic portion of our Empire has grown in area, a larger and larger number of men, trained in the temper and methods of autocracy … whose lives have been those of a superior caste living an artificial life removed from all the healthy restraints of ordinary European society … have returned to this country, bringing back the characters, sentiments, and ideas imposed by this foreign environment … everywhere they stand for coercion and for resistance to reform.69
In France it had been not much different. Hubert Jules Deschamps, a French colonial administrator in Madagascar, wrote in 1931, ‘We leave [France] to become kings … And not do-nothing kings either, but artists at our job, enlightened despots organizing our kingdoms according to maturely reflected plans.’70 Otherwise in France too there was much public indifference towards the empire, at least before 1914. Workers did not seem to connect their own interests to the acquisition of colonies. At the various trade union congresses in the two decades before the war the colonial issue was barely mentioned.71 The pro-colonialist French geographer Maurice Zimmermann lamented that his countrymen seemed unwilling to settle in the colonies.72
Some of these mixed feelings (mission civilisatrice co-existing with indifference) appear to be the consequence of the lack of a ‘colonial project’ in both major imperial powers: there was no conscious, widely accepted establishment strategy to build an empire. John Seeley’s famous ‘absence of mind’ remark could have been applied equally well to France.
However, once the empire had been built, it would take courage to call for its end. Colonies may not have been wildly popular, but they were not wildly unpopular either and so no campaign to relinquish even just some of them was ever mounted even by the staunchest anti-colonialists. Anti-colonialism was always a rearguard action, a demand not to extend the empire, never a demand to retrench it. Just as nationalism is constructed among the masses after the nation state comes into being, so imperialists are the consequences of empire-building, not the builders of empires.
An empire was the ultimate status symbol. It meant that one’s country was one of the great powers. Status symbols have a long life that extends well past their sell-by-date. Take the present-day role of nuclear weapons: Great Britain, after the collapse of communism, had no conceivable nuclear foe. Yet, for years, no party in power, regardless of economic considerations, ever dared to suggest that it might be a good idea to stop wasting money on such weapons. The empire was certainly a far better investment than nuclear weapons for Britain, since, besides providing pride and prestige, it was, at the very least, ‘an adjunct to British wealth’.73
The fruits of empire increasingly surrounded the average British household, especially in the twentieth century. The British might not have been very interested in the empire but they were ‘comfortable with the idea of being imperial’.74 By 1913, 45 per cent of their meat and dairy produce came from foreign, including colonial, sources. They drank Assam and Ceylon tea, Kenyan coffee – all sweetened with West Indian sugar – ate New Zealand butter, wrote on ‘empire’ typewriters, smoked Rhodesian tobacco, and wore clothes made of Australian wool or Egyptian cotton.75 Of course, other Europeans did the same, but it was not ‘their’ tea, ‘their’ coffee, ‘their’ wool, ‘their’ tobacco. In practice it made little difference, except, perhaps, psychologically. The coffee could come from Brazil as well as Africa, the tobacco from Virginia or Kentucky, the chocolate from the Americas, the cotton from the United States, and the tea from China. The point was that all this had to cross the seas.76 And Britain still ‘ruled the waves’.
A popular imperial consciousness in France and Great Britain came into being only in the 1920s and 1930s, just as their empires began their gradual descent into extinction. Even then the central theme of patriotic history was freedom (Great Britain as the freest country in the world, etc.) rather than empire: ‘Liberty not imperialism lay at the core of British history.’77 The image foreigners often had of Great Britain was that of a powerful, arrogant imperial country (Perfidious Albion, etc.), but the British saw themselves as a ‘free, moderate and peaceful nation’.78 The idea was to lord it everywhere, but in a rather understated way. As Queen Victoria wrote, summarizing Lord Curzon’s attitude to India (on his appointment as Viceroy of India), the Indians should be made to ‘feel that we are the masters, but it should be done kindly and not offensively, which alas! is so often not the case’.79 This is not unlike the contrast between the image of the USA abroad in the late twentieth century (ruthless and ignorant imperialists) and that held by Americans of themselves (as well-meaning, honest, bent on saving the world from its follies).
Even Lord Salisbury, whose imperial credentials were unimpeachable (most of Britain’s African empire had been acquired under his premiership), was far from being enamoured of the jingoistic aspects of imperialism. As early as 1859 he held onto an unemotional view of foreign policy, declaring that ‘The only safe and dignified foreign policy for England, is to watch carefully over her own interests … to complain when they are wronged, to fight if that complaint is disregarded, and to concern herself with nothing else.’80 Forty years later he still sounded more like a pragmatic shopkeeper than an imperialist – the empire was good for Britain, but one should not forget the profit and loss: ‘The more our Empire extends the more our imperial spirit grows, the more we must urge on all who have to judge that those things are matters of business and must be considered upon business principles.’81
In defending an agreement with Germany in 1890, Salisbury thought it ‘a very curious idea’ that anyone would want to be able to control a territory ‘extending all the way from Cape Town to the sources of the Nile’, since ‘this stretch of territory North of Lake Tanganyika could only have been a very narrow one’, with no advantage to Britain and one that would have needlessly antagonized the Germans.82 But this would have been seen by his detractors as a prestigious gain, shown on the map of Africa as an uninterrupted and pleasant stretch of pink from Alexandria to Cape Town – pink being the colour used by cartographers to represent British possessions. This is exactly what the map did look like after the First World War when the British acquired Tanganyika from Germany. Generations of schoolchildren were taught to look at the pink stretch with pride in their hearts.
Disraeli understood perfectly well the ideological value of empires and explained in his famous speech on ‘Conservative and Li
beral Principles’ at Crystal Palace in London on 24 June 1872 that upholding ‘the Empire of England’ was one of the central purposes of the Conservatives because ‘the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness …’, adding that though there may be a subversive element lurking among some British workers:
the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire.83
The question of costs Disraeli grandly tossed aside.84 He knew that the recently acquired colonies in tropical Africa had limited economic significance.85 The British explorer Daniel Rankin, for example, in his book on the Zambezi basin and Nyasaland, alternates between estimating ‘the commercial and financial prospects of huge regions lately opened to the civilised world’ and estimating ‘to what a degree [our representatives] … have succeeded in carrying out the philanthropic and civilising policy they were deputed to represent’.86
Everyone flaunted their superiority: the liberal left, the conservative right, the holier-than-thou, and the cynics. Those who are convinced that they possess a superior culture have often been inclined to impose it on others (peacefully if possible, forcefully if necessary). Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages (and now) were convinced of the nobility of their cause. In 1833, discussing the fate of India, the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, not yet famous but already an MP (he was only thirty-three at the time), intoned in the House of Commons:
I see that we have established order where we found confusion … I see that the predatory tribes, which … passed annually over the harvests of India with the destructive rapidity of a hurricane, have quailed before the valour of a braver and sterner race, have been vanquished, scattered, hunted to their strongholds, and either extirpated by the English sword, or compelled to exchange the pursuits of rapine for those of industry.
And he then concluded with words that today sound unbearably smug (though the sentiment is not far off from that of contemporary liberal interventionists):
What is power worth if it is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery; if we can hold it only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed, and which … we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.87
A few decades later, in 1865, the notorious Eyre case further divided educated opinion about the proper relations between colonizers and colonized. Edward Eyre, the Governor of Jamaica, was accused of brutally killing 439 black people in the course of suppressing a riot, and subsequently flogging 600.88
A campaign under the name of the ‘Jamaica Committee’, led by John Stuart Mill and supported, among others, by John Bright, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, called for Eyre’s prosecution. Charles Dickens, committed to the superiority of the white races (and supportive of the South in the American Civil War), denounced that platform of ‘sympathy with the black – or the Native, or the Devil’, holding that one should not deal with the ‘Hottentots, as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell’.89 He joined the rival Eyre Defence and Aid Fund, led by Thomas Carlyle (author of Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, 1849) and John Ruskin, and supported, among others, by the poet Alfred Tennyson and by the Anglican priest, academic, and author of The Water Babies, Charles Kingsley.
The 1880s and its accompanying ‘colonial scramble’ were the height of what came to be known as the ‘new imperialism’. Joseph Chamberlain, formerly a progressive liberal Mayor of Birmingham, declared in the House of Commons, ‘it is our duty to take our share in the work of civilisation in Africa’.90 As Secretary of State for the Colonies in a Conservative-led coalition, Chamberlain, addressing the Imperial Institute on 11 November 1895, declared: ‘I believe in the British Empire and, in the second place, I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen.’91 Two years later, speaking at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, he added: ‘In carrying out this work of civilization we are fulfilling what I believe to be our national mission’, concluding, ‘Great is the task, great is the responsibility, but great is the honour.’92
Lord Cromer, the all-powerful representative of the British Crown in Egypt for nearly thirty years (during which time he succeeded in not learning any Arabic), wrote in 1908 that ‘I have lived too long in the East not to be aware that it is difficult for any European to arrive at a true estimate of Oriental wishes, aspirations and opinions.’93 Yet he had no doubt that the English had been welcomed in Egypt not only ‘by the lawful rulers’ but also by the Egyptian people. After all, the English had come as ‘the saviour of society’.94 The Egyptians could not ‘save’ themselves on their own; the Englishman had to do it.95 An entire chapter of his Modern Egypt is replete with disparaging comments of the ‘typical’ Egyptian, almost always compared unfavourably with the ‘typical’ Englishman. Egyptians lack logical thought and easily become the dupes of astrologers and magicians. They will accept as true the most absurd rumours. However, once the Egyptian is told what to do he will assimilate it rapidly, for he is a ‘good imitator’ in spite of his ‘lethargic’ mind.96 These views were by no means unusual at the time, though that they should have been maintained after thirty years living in the country is astonishing.
Paternalistic European condescension was even embraced by women who were themselves fighting against dominant forms of patriarchy. Thus Millicent Fawcett, a leading Victorian feminist, defending herself from accusations that enfranchised women would set India ‘on fire’, wrote in The Times (4 January 1889) of the sterling work done by British women in India, which elicited ‘the touching affection and reverence’ of ‘native women of India to the English women’, and how valuable the work of these women would be ‘if periods of storm and stress should arise for our Indian Empire’.97 The Victoria League, a women’s imperial propaganda society founded in 1901, organized war charities, provided ‘imperial education’ for the working classes, and aimed to strengthen the bond with the white dominions (i.e. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to ensure the preservation of the ‘imperial race’.98
By not resisting, the natives confirmed their desire to submit to a greater and more civilized power. By resisting, they simply showed how barbaric they were. Thus, as the Indian ‘Mutiny’ gathered steam, The Times thundered (31 August 1857):
The barbarities of the mutineers in India are so shocking, so atrocious … we are taken aback, as human nature must always be when it is outraged, when it meets with what is insufferable and inexpressible, and religion, we may say, may have something to do with this treatment. We are heretics in India, and therefore out of the pale of humanity. Religion is the pride of the Brahmin, and enters into his blood; the Mahomedan is a ferocious animal, and made so by his creed … These soldiers know that they have crossed the Rubicon, that they can never be friends with us … that it is a death struggle between us and them.
While The Times’ correspondent in India, the famed Irish journalist William Howard Russell, denounced bravely the use of torture, summary punishment, and indiscriminate executions by the British, a cartoon in Punch (22 August 1857) depicted the ‘Bengali tiger’ (i.e. the mutineers) ravaging the body of a white woman saved by the intervention of the British lion. Another, also in Punch (12 September 1857) represented a vengeful Britannia engaged in violent but ‘just’ retribution against rebellious sepoys, protecting not just British women but also Indian women and children, thus justifying Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’.99 It was the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 that led to t
he transformation of India into a colony and, in 1876, the crowning of Queen Victoria as ‘Empress of India’. But the imperial mentality had existed well before.
Here too Charles Dickens, often regarded as a progressive writer (and so he was, but at home not overseas), was, once again, on the wrong side of history. In a letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts, a philanthropic baroness and one of the wealthiest women in England, he declared that if he were ‘Commander in Chief of India’, he would do his ‘utmost’ to exterminate the Indian race, ‘to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth’.100
*
By 1885, as colonial expansion was in full swing, France was still deeply divided ideologically, not just between left and right or liberals and conservatives but over the kind of constitutional regime it should have: a liberal republic or a conservative monarchy. This is why the French debate on colonization in the decades following the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 is particularly interesting.
Born out of the defeat of Napoleon III by Prussia, the Third Republic had limited support. Catholic, monarchist, and rural France remained hostile to it. The expansion of the French colonial empire could provide a rallying point for most republicans and (some) monarchists. At first the pro-colonialists seemed to be winning the debate, but in February 1885 the French were defeated at the Battle of Lang Son in North Vietnam. It proved to be only a temporary embarrassment, but there is nothing like military humiliation to dampen interventionist ardours. Parliament refused to grant the Prime Minister, Jules Ferry, further funds for the Indochina campaign. Ferry had to resign. Ranged against him was a coalition of anti-colonialist republicans, led by Georges Clemenceau, and a Catholic-monarchist bloc of deputies reluctant to offer succour to the Third Republic that they despised so heartily. Business too was split. Bankers such as Henri Germain, founder of Crédit Lyonnais (1863), were strongly opposed to colonies.101 Colonies, however, were not central to French politics and colonial politics was never consistent or coherent.102 During the Second Empire virtually all republicans had been against Napoleon III’s colonial policies. But when the Third Republic was established and they found themselves in power, many changed their mind. Jules Ferry (Prime Minister 1880–81 and 1883–5), the once-radical Léon Gambetta (Prime Minister 1881–2), and his follower Charles de Freycinet (four times Prime Minister) became born-again colonialists. Colonial policy seemed to provide an excellent platform for strengthening and uniting the young republic whose fate was still so uncertain. The Catholics too were on the move. The more intelligent among them, prompted by Pope Leo XIII, realized that an intransigent opposition to the republic was leading nowhere and it was in their interest to find some common ground with moderate republicans, who also wanted to make new friends to counterbalance the rising power of the socialists. The Abbé Pierre de Raboisson, virtually the spokesman for the Catholic Church in France, decreed that it was necessary to assure ‘la grandeur de la France par la grandeur de ses colonies’.103
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