Imperialism and Colonialism, 1870-1914

N 1869, the Suez Canal opened with a grand celebration. The imperial yacht Eagle, with Empress Eugenie of France on board, entered the canal on November 17, followed by sixty-eight steamships carrying the emperor of Austria, the crown prince of Prussia, the grand duke of Russia, and scores of other dignitaries. Flowery speeches flowed freely, as did the champagne. The ceremony cost a staggering ?1.3 million (about $121 million today). Even so, the size of the celebration paled in comparison to the canal itself. The largest project of its kind, the canal sliced through a hundred miles of Egyptian desert to link the Mediterranean and Red seas, cutting the trip from London to Bombay in half. The canal dramatically showcased the abilities of Western power and technology to transform the globe, but the human cost was high: 30,000 Egyptians worked on the canal as forced laborers, and thousands died during cholera epidemics in the work camps.

The building of the canal was the result of decades of European involvement in Egypt. French troops under Napoleon led the way, but Britain’s bankers soon followed. European financial interests developed a close relationship with those who

Governed Egypt as a semi-independent state inside the Ottoman Empire. By 1875, the British controlled the canal, after purchasing 44 percent of the canal’s shares from the Egyptian khedive (viceroy) when he was threatened with bankruptcy. By the late 1870s, these economic and political relationships had produced debt and instability in Egypt. In a bid for national independence, a group of Egyptian army officers led by ‘Urabi Pasha took control of Egypt’s government in 1882.

The British government, determined to protect its investments, decided to intervene. The Royal Navy shelled Egyptian forts along the canal into rubble, and a British task force landed near ‘Urabi Pasha’s central base, overwhelming the Egyptian lines. This striking success rallied popular support at home, and the political consequences lasted for seventy years. Britain took effective control of Egypt. A British lord, Evelyn Baring, assumed the role of proconsul in a power-sharing relationship with Egyptian authorities, but real power rested with Britain. Britain demanded the repayment of loans and regulated the trade in Egyptian cotton that helped supply Britain’s textile mills. Most important, the intervention secured the route to India and the markets of the East.

The Suez Canal and the conquest of Egypt was made possible by the convergence of technology, money, politics, and a global strategy of imperial control. A similar interplay between economics and colonialism produced the stunning expansion of European empires in the late nineteenth century. The years 1870 to 1914 brought both rapid industrialization throughout the West and an intense

THE INAUGURATION OF THE SUEZ CANAL. This allegory illustrates the union of the Mediterranean and Red Seas attended by Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, Abdul Aziz, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Ferdinand de Lesseps, president of the Suez Canal Company, Empress Eugenie of France, and several mermaids. It also represents the nineteenth-century vision of imperialism as a bearer of global progress, promoting technological advance and breaking down barriers between the Orient and the West. ¦ Who was the audience for this image?

Push to expand the power and influence of Western power abroad. The “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century was distinguished by its scope, intensity, and long-range consequences. It transformed cultures and states in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Projects such as the Suez Canal changed—literally—the landscape and map of the world. They also represented an ideology: the belief in technology and Western superiority. In the minds of imperialists, the elimination of geographic barriers had opened the entire world, its lands and its peoples, to the administrative power of the West.

The new imperialism, however, was not a one-way street. Europeans could not simply conquer vast territories and dictate their terms to the rest of the world. The new political and economic relationships between colonies and dependent states, on the one hand, and the “metropole” (the colonizing power), on the other, ran both ways, bringing changes to both parties. Fierce competition among nations upset the balance of power. The new imperialism was an expression of European strength, but it was also profoundly destabilizing.

IMPERIALISM

Imperialism is the process of extending one state’s control over another—a process that takes many forms. Sometimes this control was exercised by direct rule, by which the colonizing nation annexed territories outright and subjugated the peoples who lived there. At times, colonialism worked through indirect rule, by which conquering European nations reached agreements with local leaders and governed through them. Finally, informal imperialism could be a less visible exercise of state power, where stronger states allowed weaker states to maintain their independence while reducing their sovereignty. Informal imperialism took the form of carving out zones of European sovereignty and privilege, such as treaty ports, within other states. There was no single technique of colonial control; as we will see, resistance forced colonial powers to shift strategies frequently.

Both formal and informal imperialism expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century. The “scramble for Africa” was the most startling case of formal imperialism: from 1875 to 1902, Europeans seized up to 90 percent of the continent. The overall picture is no less remarkable: between 1870 and 1900, a small group of states (France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States) colonized about one quarter of the world’s land surface. In addition, these same states extended informal empire in China and Turkey, across South and East Asia, and into Central and South America. So striking was this expansion of European power that contemporaries spoke of the “new imperialism.” Nevertheless, imperialism was not new. It is more helpful to think of these nineteenth-century developments as a new stage of European empire building, after the collapse of Europe’s early modern empires in North and South America at the end of the eighteenth century.

The nineteenth-century empires rose against the backdrop of industrialization, liberal revolution, and the rise of nation-states. Industrialization produced greater demand for raw materials from distant locations. At the same time, many Europeans became convinced in the nineteenth century that their economic development, science, and technology would inevitably bring progress to the rest of the world. Finally, especially in Britain and France, nineteenth-century imperial powers were in principle democratic nations, where government authority relied on consent and on notions of civic equality. This made conquest difficult to justify and raised thorny questions about the status of colonized peoples. Earlier European conquerors had claimed a missionary zeal to convert people to Christianity as a justification for their actions. Nineteenth-century imperialists justified their projects by saying that their investment in infrastructure—railroads, harbors, and roads—and their social reforms would fulfill Europe’s secular mission to bring civilization to the rest of the world. This vision of the “white man’s burden”—the phrase is Rudyard Kipling’s— became a powerful argument in favor of imperial expansion throughout Europe (see Competing Viewpoints on pages 756-57).

In spite of these ambitious goals, the resistance of colonized peoples did as much to shape the history of colonialism as did the ambitious plans of the colonizers. The Haitian revolution of 1804 compelled the British and the French to end the slave trade and slavery in their colonies in the 1830s and the 1840s, though new systems of forced labor cropped up to take their places. The American Revolution encouraged the British to grant self-government to white settler states in Canada (1867), Australia (1901), and New Zealand (1912). Rebellion in India in 1857 caused the British to place the colony under the direct control of the crown, rather than the East India Company. In general, nineteenth-century imperialism involved less independent entrepreneurial activity by merchants and traders and more “settlement and discipline.” This required legal distinctions made on racial or religious grounds in order to organize relationships between Europeans and different indigenous groups and an administration to enforce such distinctions. (Apartheid in South Africa is but one example.) Defending such empires thus became a vast project, involving legions of government officials, schoolteachers, and engineers. Nineteenth-century imperialism produced new forms of government and management in the colonies, and as it did so, it forged new interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples.

The New Imperialism and Its Causes

As early as 1902, British author J. A. Hobson charged that the interests of a small group of wealthy financiers had driven the “scramble for Africa.” British taxpayers subsidized armies of conquest and occupation, and journalists whipped up the public’s enthusiasm for imperialism. Hobson, a reformer and a social critic, argued that international finance and business had distorted conceptions of England’s real national interests. He hoped that a genuine democracy would curb the country’s imperial policies.

Hobson’s analysis inspired an influential Marxist critique of imperialism made by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Like Hobson, Lenin believed that imperialism was best understood on economic grounds. Unlike Hobson, however, Lenin believed that imperialism was an integral part of late-nineteenth-century capitalism. With domestic markets saturated and growth limited by competition at home, capitalists were forced to invest and search for new markets overseas, producing an ever more intensive pressure for the expansion of European imperialism. Lenin published Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) at the height of the First World War, and he used this argument to assert that hopes for a democratic reform of capitalism were misplaced and that the only solution was the replacement of capitalism with a revolutionary new economic order.

Historians now agree that economic pressures were only one of the causes of imperialism. Only half of Britain’s ?4 billion in foreign investments was at work within its empire, and in France the proportion was even smaller: one fifth of French capital was invested overseas. The French had more capital invested in their ally Russia than in all their colonial possessions. Nevertheless, Europeans expected the colonies to produce profits. French newspapers, for instance, reported that the Congo was “rich, vigorous, and fertile virgin territory” with “fabulous quantities” of gold, copper, ivory, and rubber. Such hopes contributed to expansionism, even if the profits did not meet expectations.

A second interpretation of imperialism emphasized strategic and nationalist motives. International rivalries made European powers more determined to control less-developed nations and territories. French politicians hoped that imperialism would restore the honor France had lost in their defeat by the Prussians in 1870. The British looked with alarm at Germany’s industrialization and feared losing their share of world markets. The Germans, recently unified into a modern nation-state, saw overseas empire as the only way to become a great power.

This interpretation suggests a link between imperialism and nineteenth-century state and nation building. Colonies demonstrated military power; they showed the vigor of a nation’s economy; the strength of its citizens, the force of its law, the power of its culture. A strong national community could assimilate others, bringing progress to new lands and new peoples. One German proponent of expansion called colonialism the “national continuation of the German desire for unity.” Lobby groups such as the German Colonial Society, the French Colonial Party, and the Royal Colonial Institute in Britain argued for empire in similar terms, as did newspapers, which recognized the profits to be made in selling sensational stories of overseas conquest.

Finally, imperialism had important cultural dimensions. A French diplomat once described the British imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes as a “force cast in an idea”; the same might be said of imperialism itself. Scottish missionary David Livingston believed that the British conquest of Africa would end the East African slave trade and “introduce the Negro family into the body of corporate nations.” Taking arms against the slave trade, famine, disorder, and illiteracy seemed to many Europeans not only a reason to invade Africa but also a duty and proof of a somehow superior civilization. These convictions did not cause imperialism, but they illustrate how central empire building became to the West’s self-image.

In short, it is difficult to disentangle the economic, political, and strategic causes of imperialism. It is more important to understand how the motives overlapped. Economic interests often helped convince policy makers that strategic interests were at stake. Different constituencies— the military, international financiers, missionaries, colonial lobby groups at home—held different and often clashing visions of the purpose and benefits of imperialism. Imperial policy, therefore, was less a matter of long-range planning than a series of quick responses, often improvised, to particular situations. And of course, Europeans were not the only players on the stage. Their goals and intentions were shaped by social changes in the countries in which they became involved; by the independent interests of local peoples; and by resistance, which, as often as not, Europeans found themselves unable to understand and powerless to stop.

EUROPEAN EMPIRES IN 1900. ¦ Where were Britain's major imperial interests, and what trade routes did they have most incentive to protect? ¦ Where were France's most important imperial holdings and who was their major competitor? ¦ Flow substantial were German, Dutch, Portuguese, or U. S. colonies in comparison to British and French holdings?

IMAGES OF WOMEN IN THE COLONIES. Photographs and engravings of women in Africa and Asia circulated widely in Europe during the nineteenth century, and these images shaped attitudes toward colonization. Many images-some openly pornographic-portrayed African or Asian women as attractive, exotic, and in postures that invited European fantasies of domination. "Reclining Jewess" (left) is a typical example of such imagery, from French Algeria. Other images portrayed colonial women as victims of barbaric customs, such as sati, a social funeral practice in which a new widow would burn herself during the cremation of her deceased husband (right). This image, which first appeared in a work by a missionary who had been to Calcutta, was widely reproduced later as an illustration of the need for the British to bring "civilization" to India. ¦ Could these images have the same impact without the emphasis on the gender of the subject?

IMPERIALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

India was the center of the British Empire, the jewel of the British crown, secured well before the period of the new imperialism. The conquest of most of the subcontinent began in the E750s and quickened during the age of revolution. Conquering India helped compensate for “losing” North America. General Cornwallis, defeated at Yorktown, went on to a brilliant career in India. By the mid-nineteenth century, India was the focal point of Britain’s newly expanded global power, which reached from southern Africa across South Asia and to Australia. Keeping this region involved changing tactics and forms of rule.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, British territories in India were under the control of the British East India Company. The company had its own military, divided into European and (far larger) Indian divisions. The company held the right to collect taxes on land from Indian peasants. Until the early nineteenth century, the company had legal monopolies over trade in all goods, including indigo, textiles, salt, minerals, and—most lucrative of all—opium. The British government had granted trade monopolies in its northern American colonies. Unlike North America, however, India never became a settler state. In the 1830s, Europeans were a tiny minority, numbering 45,000 in an Indian population of 150 million. The company’s rule was repressive and enforced by the military. Soldiers collected taxes; civil servants wore military uniforms; British troops brashly commandeered peasants’ oxen and carts for their own purposes. Typically, though, the company could not enforce its rule uniformly. It governed some areas directly, others through making alliances with local leaders, and others still by simply controlling goods and money. Indirect rule, here as in other empires, meant finding indigenous collaborators and maintaining their goodwill. Thus, the British cultivated groups that had provided administrators in earlier regimes: the Rajputs and Bhumihars of North India, whom they considered especially effective soldiers, and merchants of big cities such as Calcutta. They offered economic privileges, state offices, or military posts to either groups or entire nations that agreed to ally with the British against others.

British policy shifted between two poles: one group wanted to “Westernize” India; another believed it safer, and more practical, to defer to local culture. Christian missionaries, whose numbers rose as occupation expanded, were determined to replace “blind superstition” with the “genial influence of Christian light and truth.” Indignant at such practices as child marriage and sati (in which a widow immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre), missionaries sought support in England for a wide-ranging assault on Hindu culture. Secular reformers, many of them liberal, considered “Hindoos” and “Mahommedans” susceptible to forms of despotism—both in the family and in the state. They turned their reforming zeal to legal and political change. But other British administrators warned their countrymen not to meddle with Indian institutions. “Englishmen are as great fanatics in politics as Mahommedans in religion. They suppose that no country can be saved without English institutions,” said one British administrator. Indirect rule, they argued, would work only with the cooperation of local powers. Conflicts such as these meant that the British never agreed on any single cultural policy.

From Mutiny to Rebellion

The East India Company’s rule often met resistance and protest. In 1857-58, it was badly shaken by a revolt of Indian soldiers in the British army, now known in India as the Great Mutiny of 1857. The uprising began near Delhi, when the military disciplined a regiment of sepoys (the traditional term for Indian soldiers employed by the British) for refusing to use rifle cartridges greased with pork fat— unacceptable to either Hindus or Muslims. Yet, as the British prime minister Disraeli later observed, “The decline and fall of empires are not affairs of greased cartridges.” The causes of the mutiny were deeper and involved social, economic, and political grievances. Indian peasants attacked law courts and burned tax rolls, protesting debt and corruption. In areas that had recently been annexed, rebels defended their traditional leaders, who had been ousted by the British. Army officers from privileged castes resented arbitrary treatment at the hands of the British; they were first promoted as loyal allies and then forced to serve without what they considered titles and honors. The mutiny spread through large areas of northwest India. European troops, which counted for fewer than one-fifth of those in arms, found themselves losing control. Religious leaders, both Hindu and Muslim, seized the occasion to denounce Christian missionaries sent in by the British and their assault on local traditions.

At first, the British were faced with a desperate situation, with areas under British control cut off from one another and pro-British cities under siege. Loyal Indian troops were brought south from the frontiers, and British troops, fresh from the Crimean War, were shipped directly from Britain to suppress the rebellion. The fighting lasted more than a year, and the British matched the rebels’ early massacres with a systematic campaign of repression. Whole rebel units were killed rather than being allowed to surrender or tried on the spot and executed. Towns and villages that supported the rebels were burned, just as the rebels had burned European homes and outposts. Yet the defeat of the rebellion caught the British public’s imagination. After the bloody, inconclusive mess of Crimea, the terrifying threat to British India and the heroic rescue of European

THE EXECUTION OF INDIANS WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE REBELLION OF 1857. The British were determined to make an example of rebel Indian soldiers after the Great Mutiny. The engraving on the left shows executions in which the condemned were blown apart by cannons. The cartoon on the right, "The Execution of 'John Company,'" shows the same cannons destroying the British East India Company, which was abolished by the British government as a result of the rebellion. ¦ What do these images tell us about public awareness of the rebellion's violence and its suppression?

BRITISH INDIA BEFORE AND AFTER 1857. Note the dates of British territorial annexations on the left, and the complexity of colonial India's political boundaries (on the right) even after direct rule by the British crown had been established. ¦ According to the first map, what were the three ways the British gained control over various kingdoms and states in India before 1857? ¦ What is the most important change in British rule before and after 1857? ¦ How did the British hope to successfully rule over such a large and diverse group of people after 1857?