The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, Volume I

Social Organization

Owen White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032402659
• eBook ISBN: 9781351882767
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection brings together twenty-one articles that explore the diverse impact of modern empires on societies around the world since 1800. Colonial expansion changed the lives of colonised peoples in multiple ways relating to work, the environment, law, health and religion. Yet empire-builders were never working with a blank slate: colonial rule involved not just coercion but also forms of cooperation with elements of local society, while the schemes of the colonisers often led to unexpected outcomes. Covering not only western European nations but also the Ottomans, Russians and Japanese, whose empires are less frequently addressed in collections, this volume provides insight into a crucial aspect of modern world history.

[1]
HEGEMONY ON A SHOESTRING: INDIRECT RULE AND
ACCESS TO AGRICULTURAL LAND

By Sara Berry

Struggles over access to and control of land have a long history in sub–Saharan Africa. For a long time, cultivable land was regarded by students of African economic and agrarian history as abundant and therefore immune from both market competition and political conflict. Recent scholarship suggests that this view is oversimplified. Since precolonial times, Africans have attached both material and symbolic significance to land, and rights in land have been exchanged, negotiated and fought over in the course of political and religious as well as demographic and economic change. This article will examine changing patterns of struggle over access to and the meaning of land rights during the early decades of colonial rule, when Africans’ relations to land and to each other were being reshaped both by the process of colonial domination and by the accelerating pace of agricultural commercialisation.

Commercialisation, together with colonial regimes’ exactions of taxes, labour, and provisions, increased Africans’ demand for land and labour, and intensified their efforts to appropriate a share of the increased flow of income from cash crops and wage employment. Competition over land, labour, and income gave rise, in turn, to struggles over the terms on which people gained access to productive resources and/or controlled both income and processes of production and exchange. Patterns of agricultural commercialisation and conditions of access to land were both, in turn, affected by colonial policies aimed directly at regulating rural economic activity, and by colonial regimes’ overall strategies of surplus appropriation and social control. Administrators’ efforts to collect taxes, keep order, and mediate disputes shaped the legal and institutional conditions under which farmers sought access to land and labour, whether or not they were explicitly designed for that purpose. The effects of land legislation or of agricultural officers’ efforts to introduce new methods of cultivation and animal husbandry must be understood in the context of colonial processes of governance in general.

Recent literature on the colonial state in Africa has attempted to move beyond the dominant liberal and Marxist paradigms of the 1960s and ’70s. These paradigms, articulated in part as reactions against the laudatory or apologetic historiography of the colonial era, depicted colonial states as external agents, seeking to govern or exploit African societies according to the interests and political philosophies of European powers. The liberal or neoclassical paradigm portrayed the state as an arbiter of conflicting interest groups, existing outside the social and economic system, and capable of impartial intervention to advance the ‘public interest’, while Marxist writers played a series of variations on the theme of the state as an executive committee of the metropolitan (or local settler) bourgeoisie. (For reviews of some of this literature see Lonsdale, 1981; Kitching, 1985; Jessop, 1977.)

More recently, several authors have tried to unpack these arguments: to look at the state as a complex institution, made up of individuals and interest groups with diverse links to the societies they seek to govern (see, for example, Bates, 1983; Jessop, 1977; Chazan et al., 1988). Lonsdale and Berman (1979) and Berman and Lonsdale (1980) argued, for example, that the colonial state in Kenya was drawn into increasingly coercive patterns of labour control through officials’ efforts to cope with the contradictions of capitalist accumulation in a colonial context. Others have suggested that the state plays several roles, serving as an agent of capitalist or other class interests; as an arbiter of social conflict; and as an arena within which social groups struggle to advance their interests through alliances with elements in the state apparatus (Joseph, 1984; Beinart et al., 1986; Chazan et al., 1988).

Scholars’ interest in disaggregating the state, conceptually speaking, has intersected with a growing interest, among students of political economy and social history, in the role of culture in shaping social and economic processes. Colonial rule and capitalist accumulation generated conflicts of interest, among Europeans and Africans as well as between them. The outcome of those conflicts was shaped not only by the material and political resources which different groups could marshal in support of their interests, but also by the terms in which people understood their interests and expressed them (Peters, 1988; Carney, 1988; Carney and Watts, n.d.). Historians such as Beinart (1984), Anderson (1984), and Vaughan (1987) have shown how major events, such as famine or soil erosion, become focuses of multiple explanations which, in turn, shape people’s responses to the events themselves. Similarly, Peters (1984), Comaroff (1980), and other anthropologists have explored the role of struggles over meaning in shaping governments’ policies and interactions between colonised peoples and colonial regimes. In particular, a growing body of literature has shown that ‘customary’ laws were not static perpetuations of precolonial norms, but new systems of law and adjudication based on colonial administrators’ interpretation of African tradition (Colson, 1971; Moore, 1975, 1986; Ranger, 1983; Chanock, 1985; Snyder, 1981).

The present discussion is intended as a contribution to ongoing efforts to draw these strands of argument together. I will look at the early decades of British colonial rule in Africa, when administrators struggled to establish effective control with extremely limited resources. Scarcity of money and manpower not only obliged administrators to practise ‘indirect rule’ but also limited their ability to direct the course of political and social change. In effect, I will argue, colonial regimes were unable to impose either English laws and institutions or their own version of ‘traditional’ African ones on to indigenous societies. Colonial ‘inventions’ of African tradition (Ranger, 1983) served not so much to define the shape of the colonial social order as to provoke a series of debates over the meaning and application of tradition which in turn shaped struggles over authority and access to resources.

The article is organised in four sections. The first presents my general argument about the impact of colonial rule on conditions of access to agricultural resources. The second describes the kinds of debate which arose under indirect rule over the meaning and uses of ‘custom’, while the third and fourth illustrate their implications for the organisation of native administration, and for changing conditions of access to land. Examples are drawn from rural areas in four British colonies, selected to reflect different histories of colonial domination and agricultural commercialisation.¹ Because of the time period covered, African countries are referred to by their colonial names.

Hegemony On A Shoestring: The Argument

As they moved to assert military and political control over most of sub–Saharan Africa, colonial administrators faced from the outset a continual struggle to make ends meet. As self-declared rulers of the African continent, Europeans assumed responsibility for governing extensive territories inhabited by scattered and diverse peoples—a vast and potentially expensive project. The British exchequer was, however, reluctant to subsidise either the recurrent costs or the capital costs of colonial administration (Frankel, 1938; Pim, 1940, 1948; Hailey, 1957: 1307 ff.; Hopkins, 1973: 190–1). Partly because of financial stringency, the number of European personnel posted to colonial administrations was limited, and officials were expected to raise enough revenue from their colonies to cover the costs of administering them. However confidently administrators might share Earl Grey’s conviction that ‘the surest test for the soundness of measures for the improvement of an uncivilized people is that they should be self-sufficient’ (quoted in Pim, 1948: 226) the daily struggle to wrest revenue, labour and provisions from reluctant, hostile or scattered subjects was not an easy one (Asiegbu, 1984; Munro, 1975; cf. Weiskel, 1975).

To live within their means, officials worked both to raise revenue and to keep down the costs of maintaining order and running the day-to-day business of administration. One obvious way to cut costs was to use Africans, both as employees and as local agents of colonial rule. African clerks and chiefs were cheaper than European personnel; also, by integrating existing local authorities and social systems into the structure of colonial government, officials hoped to minimise the disruptive effects of colonial rule (Hailey, 1957). In other words, for reasons of financial and administrative expediency, most colonial regimes in Africa practised indirect rule, whether or not they had articulated it as their philosophy of imperial governance.

Although, over time, colonial administrators did evolve an elaborate set of principles and institutions for formalising the conception and practice of indirect rule, in fact they not only failed to preserve (or restore) stable systems of traditional social order, but actually promoted instability in local structures of authority and conditions of access to productive resources. My argument differs from those of authors who have suggested that European ‘inventions’ of African tradition served to rigidify jural norms and practices, and hence social structures, in Africa (Chanock, 1985; Ranger, 1983; Snyder, 1981; MacGaffey, 1970).² Colonial officials certainly tried to govern according to fixed rules and procedures which were based on what they imagined to be the stable political and jural systems of the African past. But they rarely exercised enough effective control to accomplish exactly what they set out to do.

This was so for several reasons. First, colonial administrators’ own economic and political interests often had contradictory implications for their strategies of exploitation and control. Second, contrary to British expectations, African societies were not divided into neatly bounded, mutually exclusive, stable cultural and political systems, but were dynamic, changing communities, whose boundaries were fluid and ambiguous and whose members were often engaged in multiple contests for power and resources. And, finally, officials’ efforts to learn about indigenous societies in order to build on them frequently elicited conflicting testimony about the nature of ‘native law and custom’. I shall elaborate each of these points in turn.

The contradictions of colonial interests in African agriculture

The financial viability of a colonial regime was likely to be both threatened and enhanced by successful African participation in cash cropping and wage employment. Whether or not a particular episode of conquest was motivated by the desire to promote European capitalist interests in Africa, once colonial rule was established, officials counted on European enterprise to generate taxable income and wealth. Trading firms, concessionaires, mining companies, and European settlers were all expected to increase the volume of commercial activity and hence the flow of taxable income generated by the colonial economy. European profits depended, in turn, on ready access to cheap African labour—as farm and mine workers, as porters and dock hands, and as producers of commodities for export or for the direct provisioning of Europeans in Africa. Africans were, in turn, more likely to offer their labour cheaply if they were hard pressed to meet their own needs independently of trade with or employment by Europeans. In short, African prosperity threatened the profits of European enterprise on African soil.

However, Africans also paid taxes and bought European goods, and their ability to do so increased with their income. Thus colonial regimes walked a tightrope between encouraging Africans to become involved in labour and commodity markets and attempting to prevent them from becoming economically independent enough to ignore the opportunities afforded by European-controlled markets and jobs. Officials did not want to stifle the flow of African labour, produce, and tax revenue on which the fiscal and economic health of the colony depended, but they were equally anxious to minimise the cost of African labour and produce, and to limit Africans’ ability to influence the terms of exchange.

Colonial administrators’ ambivalence towards African agricultural growth and commercialisation was expressed differently in different colonies, depending on the particular local configuration of economic activities and interests. In settler economies, such as Kenya, officials faced conflicting pressures to encourage increased African production for sale, in order to generate taxable income, supply the home market, and keep down wage costs, and to suppress it, in order to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires
• Series Preface
• 1 [1] Hegemony On A Shoestring: Indirect Rule And Access To Agricultural Land
• 2 Sugar Factory Workers and the Emergence of ‘Free Labour’ in Nineteenth-Century Java
• 3 [3] Peasants at Work: Forced Cotton Cultivation in Northern Mozambique 1938-1961*
• 4 [4] reinterpreting a colonial REBELLION:FORESTRY AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA, 1874-1915
• 5 [5] Geography, Race and Nation: Remapping “Tropical” Australia, 1890-1930
• 6 Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism
• 7 [7] The Control of “Sacred” Space: Conflicts Over the Chinese Burial Grounds in Colonial Singapore, 1880–1930
• 8 Bringing the State Back: The Limits of Ottoman Rule in Jordan, 1840–19101
• 9 State, enterprise and the alcohol monopoly in colonial Vietnam
• 10 ‘Martial Races’: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India 1858-1939
• 11 11 ‘Circle Of Iron’: African Colonial Employees And The Interpretation Of Colonial Rule In French West Africa*
• 12 [12] Negotiated Spaces and Contested Terrain: Men, Women, and the Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1939
• 13 [13] The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–1902)
• 14 [14] Sleeping sickness epidemics and public health in the Belgian Congo
• 15 Sanitation and Security The Imperial Powers and the Nineteenth Century Bajj
• 16 16 The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology
• 17 making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th-century colonial cultures
• 18 [18] Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists In India, 1865–1945
• 19 Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia
• 20 [20] Kings of the Mountains Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina1
• 21 [21] A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea
• Name Index