1
COLONIZATION OR IMPERIALISM
Gold or Christ
Colonization is associated with the occupation of a foreign land, with its being brought under cultivation, with the settlement of colonists. If this definition of the term âcolonyâ is used, the phenomenon dates from the Greek period. Likewise we speak of Athenian, then Roman âimperialismâ. Has there been any change in the meaning of this term?
Western historical tradition, however, places the date of the colonial phenomenon at the time of the Great Discoveries. For example, according to the Histoire de la France coloniale, published in 1991, the âreal colonial adventureâ began with the explorers of the fifteenth century, when Jean de BĂŠthencourt received from Henry IV, King of Castile, the Canary Islands as fief. It goes on to say that the exploration and discoveries in America took place later: the Bay of Rio de Janeiro and the Florida coast were occupied towards the middle of the sixteenth century, prior to any interest being directed towards Canada, during the reign of Henri IV and thanks to Champlain. This way of looking at colonization is equally valid for Portugal, Spain and England. That is, historical tradition links the expansion of these countries to the discovery of distant lands in the West Indies, followed by the installation of trading-posts along the routes of Africa, India and Asia.
Thus terms such as âcolonistâ and âcolonizationâ disappear from the vocabulary of the history covering the period from the Roman era to the fifteenth century. The exceptions, during these twelve centuries, are the colonies or trading-posts which Venice or Genoa established on the other side of the Mediterranean or on the Black Sea, but still a good way from home.
However the case of Russia needs to be thought about. âColonization is the essential element in our historyâ, wrote the historian M.Kluchevski in 1911. âIts development explains the growth as well as the changes experienced by the state and the society since the time of Rus, the Russia of the Dnieper.â Beginning in the twelfth century, the incursions of Novgorod, then those of Suzdal in the direction of the Urals and beyond, ended in the submission of the Mordvins and other peoples. Interrupted by the Tartar invasion (1220), the incursions, following the expulsion of the Tartars after the victory of Kulikovo, were resumed in 1390.
But were these, in a strict sense, âcolonialâ expeditions? In any case, since the beginning of the eleventh century, Novgorod had been sending men up as far as the Pechora. This region, called the Zovoloche, to the east of the Dvina, was the habitat of foxes and sables for which a tribute had to be paid. The colonists lived in Matygory, Ukhto-Ostrov, and received their instructions from the officials and civil servants of the great city, the posadniki.
Up to the twelfth century the expansion proceeded without any noteworthy impediment. But the situation changed as soon as the principality of Suzdal-Rostov freed itself from its dependence on Kiev and intercepted the traffic between Novgorod and its colonies. In 1169 this principality provoked their secession and its colonists joined Suzdal. At the same time Suzdal-Rostov attacked the Bulgarians who were then grouped in the region of present-day Perm, in the Urals. The latter were themselves engaged in a struggle with the ânativesâ, the âYuraâ or âYugiaâ of the chronicles of the period. Within a short time, the Russians completed the conquest of the territory of the Mordvin.
At this point the Tartars rose up. They reached Nijni-Novgorod, established in 1221, the former Mordvin territories and the countries of the Dvina. Novgorod in the west was the only city to resist them (1232).
Consequently the case of Russia would indicate that, between the territorial expansion in the direction of Siberia and the conquest of the Tartar and Turkish territories, there is certainly a gap, but there is also a similarity, except in the difficulty of conquest. Thus, territorial expansion and colonization are more or less synonymous. But, in the West, the distinction is carefully emphasized: sea space is supposed to constitute the difference between the former, which is part of the national question, and the colonial question as such.
The spice route: how much is this explanation worth ?
How good a criterion is sea space? Here we are confronted with the problem of Spain and Portugal. In these countries the Americas are viewed as a land of conquest, of colonization. But can one not say the same about the furthest advances of the Reconquista?âbeyond Granada, into the Riff and on to the Atlantic coast; from the Portuguese Algarve, that is the Al Gharb, as far as Tangiers and Mazagan, the conquered territories which were retaken by Don Sebastian, leading in 1578 to the disastrous defeat of Alcazarquivir, the battle of the Three Kings. This foray, like the Russian expansion beyond the Volga, is an example of continuity with former enterprises; there is no evidence of discontinuity.
It is now evident that the history of colonization cannot be made to start with the Great Discoveries overseas, that is, with the search for a route to India. The discoveries may have altered the dimensions of the phenomenon of colonization and perhaps its nature, but expansionism preceded it. The need to bypass the Turkish Empire, with all its consequences, does not by itself fully account for the different dimensions of the expansionist colonial phenomenon.
This is precisely what the Arab tradition holds. The Arabs believe that European expansion began with the Crusades, the first expression of âimperialismâ. The Western tradition, by contrast, views the Crusades as an attempt to reconquer the Holy Land from Islam which had seized a Christian country. In any event, a European history of colonization must of necessity take the perimeter of Christendom as its starting point.
From the seventh century on, Arab Islam had unified the greater part of that Mediterranean world which had been fragmented since the division of the Roman Empire and amputated by the penetration of the âBarbariansâ. In the east and west, Byzantium and the Carolingian Empire constituted, in the face of Islam and the Arabs, the two poles of Christian resistance. But, for the Muslims, the barbarian kingdoms of the West scarcely counted.1 Only the Roman Empire stood as a real obstacle to the total reunification of the Mediterranean space. For the Muslims, Byzantium represented the survival of a state that was dominated by an outmoded religion, Christianity. The break-up of the Arab Empire began in the following centuries, under the pressure of internal, theological or dynastic conflicts between the Shiites and the Sunnis, but also as a result of the fragmentation of economic areas and of the difficulty of controlling such a vast territory, stretching from India to the far West.
As a result the Christian marches gradually succeeded in liberating themselves: in the West, beginning with the Asturias; in the East, thanks to the action of the Bagration dynasty which, for a while, âfreedâ Armenia and later Georgia. Was this a liberation? Was it a decolonization? Then, according to the Christian tradition, came the era of the Crusades, âfor the reconquest of the tomb of Christâ. This is how Ibn al-Athir, an Arab historian who lived in those times, refers to the earliest expeditions: âThe first appearance of the Empire of the Franks (my italics), their invasion of the land of Islam occurred in 478 (A.D. 1086) when they captured Toledo ⌠Then they attacked Sicily, Africa and finally, in 490, Syria.â Even in the twentieth century the establishment of the Frankish States of Syria is thought of as a harbinger of the future âinvasionsâ, that of Israel being the latest. Moreover if the last crusade was indeed that of Saint Louis at Tunis, in 1270, it became possible subsequently to speak of a âthirteenth crusadeâ when, under the aegis of the Papacy and of Philip II of Spain, three centuries later, the Christian fleets defeated Islam at the battle of Lepanto (1571). In the meantime the Turks had taken over from the Arabs, destroyed their empire and forced them into subjection. That was a dramatic upset which the Arabo-Islamic tradition conceals even today, as if the destroyers of the past greatness of the Arabs had been, not the Turks, but the Westerners who, during the period of imperialism, had renewed the attack.
When, after their victory over the Arabs, the Ottoman Turks replaced them, they did actually launch a new jihad which culminated with the fall, in 1453, of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, followed by the march upon Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburgs. Never had the Muslim Turkish Empire been as powerful as it was during the time of Soliman. The wars of Philip II and the battle of Lepanto constituted a halt to the second expansion of Islam. In the light of these events, should one speak of a conquest, or of a colonization?
The four routes
Christianityâs counter-attack took place elsewhere and in a different manner. On one hand, in order to be able to trade with India and China, well known since the travels of Marco Polo, it was necessary to search for new routes to bypass the Ottoman Empire. However the expedition of Vasco da Gama had a religious connotation as well. When, after going round Africa, he arrived at Calicut the navigator declared âthat he had come in search of Christians and spicesâ. And, like the Portuguese, the Ottomans assimilated the trade associated with the Great Discoveries to one of the forms of holy war. âLet us dig a canal at Suezâ, they said at the time, âso that we may go to India and Sind, drive away the Infidels and bring back precious commodities.â
Thus one ought not to overlook the context of the holy war in a search for the origins of the âdiscoveriesâ and of the history of colonization. As Fernand Braudel has shown, the main activities in trade and politics did indeed shift, around 1580, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The legacy of the preceding conflicts was none the less still vivid in the memory of those who had not broken away from this past by transferring their attention to other worlds. Bernard Lewis has shown that, in the Islamic world, the remembrance of past greatness is the better preserved because Islam has a single dominant language, Arabic, which ensures the omnipresence of the Quran, while the âmemory and the learning of the Infidels are dispersed in more than twenty-five languagesâ. One comes across this manner of judging the other again, several centuries later, among the English colonizers in India, the French in black Africa, or the Russians in the Caucasus. As a result when the Christian reappears, in 1798 at Alexandria, and subsequently at Algiers in 1830, for the Muslim he remains the Infidelâstill scorned and ignored. But if he establishes himself, takes command, colonizes, he very soon generates a trauma which is expressed with singular violence:
We have humiliated emirs more powerful than you. They have knelt down before our spears, their women have been our mats.
The gallop of our horses made the mountains of Jemanah quake.
We have pitched our tents in Voutoulou and in Damascus.
We have chased from this land all the enemies who, like hyenas, were harassing us.
I have seen what happened yesterday, I know all that will happen tomorrow.
Songs of war and of love of Islam
This resentment provides a clue to understanding the violence of the events which were soon to follow.
The second route The nature of the efforts of exploration in the direction of the Americas is not without a connection with the preceding ones. Actually the writings of Columbus himself bear this out. He testifies that during his first voyage gold, or rather the search for gold, was omnipresent. On 15 October 1492 he wrote in his diary: âI do not want to stop, but to proceed further to visit many islands and to discover gold.â
But Christopher Columbus was not out simply to enrich himself personally and his sailors. He also aimed to enrich his patrons, the Kings of Spain, âso that they should understand the importance of the enterpriseâ. For him wealth was important first and foremost because it meant the recognition of his role as a discoverer. Furthermore, this thirst for money is justified by a religious vocation which is nothing less than the expansion of Christianity. On 26 December 1492 he wrote in his diary that he âhopes to find gold in such quantities that the kings will be able, within three years, to prepare for and undertake the conquest of the Holy Landâ.
The third route Christopher Columbus was obsessed by the idea of a crusade: the reconquest of Jerusalem was one of his aims. We may observe that the same applied to the third route which was supposed to lead to India by way of the interior of Africa, and whose very existence was questionable. As the work of Geneviève Bouchon has shown, the purpose of reaching India through the Kingdom of Prester John was an alliance with Ethiopia to take the Empire of the Moors in the rear. For her part Queen Eleni felt the need to loosen the grip of Islam which controlled all the accesses of her kingdom to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The political worries of the queen converged with the religious preoccupations of the Coptic Metropolitan, whose nomination was in the control of the Egyptians. He wanted to have a closer relationship with Rome. So the decision was taken to send Mateus, the Metropolitan of the Ethiopian Church, on his famous mission from Ethiopia to Lisbon, via India.
Mateus met Albuquerque in India. The latter grasped the full import of the enterprise. At the same time he saw the illusory character of any relationships which the Negus might establish with the King of Portugal. The story of Mateusâ secret departure from Ethiopia illustrates the ubiquity of the Egyptian agents and the fear which the Ethiopians had of the Arabs. According to the account related by Damiao de Gois, Queen Eleni gave Mateus and his young companion Yaâkob letters of recommendation for the barnagas (cf. Geneviève Bouchon), the viceroy of the maritime province, âin order that he might help them as secretly as possible in everything that would be necessary, by pretending that they were merchants who had come to him to do business solely on her behalfâ. âFor a while (aliquamdiu) Mateus acted in full freedom, never confiding his schemes to anyone and revealing neither what he had to do nor where he had to go. He passed himself off as a pelt trader, the more safely to fulfil the task that had been entrusted to him. However, from time to time, he would buy pieces of Indian jewelery which he would send in secret to Queen Eleni. Under this pretext he travelled through various regions of various countries, doing all this in order that, protected from the ambushes of his enemies while crossing the kingdoms and states of the many adversaries to the Lusitanian name, he might reach the Portuguese and fulfil the duties of the mission he had undertaken. There was no other way of carrying out the task.â
The fourth route The opening of a fourth route, the northern one, coincided with the beginning of the fifteenth century. Russians living under the Mongol yoke, who were sent to Peking as hunting guides or guards, discovered the riches of China, then those of India on returning from China by way of Samarkand. The information reached Tver where Afanasi Nikitin organized, as early as 1466, the first expedition to India. At that time, Astrakhan, together with Bukhara and Khiva, constituted the still tenuous point of contact between, on one hand, the products of China and India, and, on the other, the products of Russia or the Baltic countries. Subsequently Zotov would write to the Court of Russia that âthese cities would be of great use to us, for there lie the riches of China and Indiaâ.
This route is the only one which, at that time had no connection with a crusade. But later the situation changed. In the age of imperialism it was in the name of orthodoxy that the Tsar wanted to colonize the Far East.
A social cause: the decline of the nobility
The list of things which account for the discoveries and colonization is well known: religious zeal, love for adventure, thirst for wealth, revenge by conquest. Does this set of reasons account fully for the surging vigour that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?
Undoubtedly, yes, as regards the conscious or unconscious behaviour of individuals. But there are at the same time weightier causes which predetermined the ability of some to act, while others did not.
The conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesâthe Hundred Years War among othersâresulted in the displacement of the great trading routes. In part they had to abandon the land, particularly between Flanders and Italy, in favour of the sea, between Genoa, Barcelona, Lisbon, Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam. So it was that Ceuta became, at that time, a strategic point. This displacement resulted in the considerable enrichment of the ports of the Atlantic seaboard. This was particularly true of Lisbon, whose ânationâ was established in Bruges as early as the fifteenth century. Thus it was that in Lisbon one could come across Italian merchants, especially from Genoa, who had an eye on the trade with the Orient, but they had no means of organizing expeditions on a large scale. Besides they ran the risk of being shut out by the Venitians, or even of being stopped, as we know, by the Ottomans.
Capital was available in the Iberian Peninsula. But the route to the far North lay through forests. To the south, however, the links with Islam remained active in spite of the wars. Besides sea traffic was easy as far as southern Morocco. Moreover, at that time, the States of Castile and Portugal were in the process of being strengthened, while France, Burgundy, and the Empire were tearing themselves apart. That is why the younger members of the Castilian and Portuguese nobility became interested in these wealth-promoting commercial en...
