Echoes of Empire

Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies

Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sebe, Gabrielle Maas, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sebe, Gabrielle Maas

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781784530501
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

How does our colonial past echo through today's global politics? How have former empire-builders sought vindication or atonement, and formerly colonized states reversal or retribution? This groundbreaking book presents a panoramic view of attitudes to empires past and present, seen not only through the hard politics of international power structures but also through the nuances of memory, historiography and national and minority cultural identities. Bringing together leading historians, poitical scientists and international relations scholars from across the globe, Echoes of Empire emphasizes Europe's colonial legacy whilst also highlighting the importance of non-European power centres- Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Japanese- in shaping world politics, then and now. Echoes of Empire bridges the divide between disciplines to trace the global routes travelled by objects, ideas and people and forms a radically different notion of the term 'empire' itself. This will be an essential companion to courses on international relations and imperial history as well as a fascinating read for anyone interested in Western hegemony, North-South relations, global power shifts and the longue duree.

Part I

Colonialism and Modernity:
Views from the Receiving End

Imperial Parasitism:
British Explorers and African Empires¹

Dane Kennedy

The exploration of Africa in the nineteenth century is usually seen as setting the stage for European imperial expansion across the continent. British explorers in particular are presented as men who helped make empire, blazing the trails that would be followed by conquering armies and mapping the terrain that would be claimed as colonial territories. But whose empire did they advance? The answer to this question seems so self-evident that it is rarely asked. After all, most British explorers saw themselves as the agents of British interests. Moreover, the British Empire did in fact become the primary beneficiary of the ‘scramble’ for African territory by the end of the century. But a close examination of the contexts in which explorers undertook their expeditions shows that their contributions to British imperialism were not as direct and determinative as we have been led to believe.² The most effective means of accessing much of the African interior came by way of routes controlled by several gateway states, and these states only permitted explorers to access these routes when it furthered their own political and economic interests in the region. Although these gateway states’ ambitions and achievements have since been submerged under the meta-narrative of the European Scramble for Africa, they made bids for empires in Africa that would be echoed by Britain and other European imperial powers. The benefits that British exploration brought to the British Empire need to be reconceived as a consequence of its parasitic dependence on the ambitions of these gateway states.

British explorers confronted a complex and highly contested political terrain in Africa. Indigenous and other non-Western polities did much to shape the terms under which expeditions were conducted, as well as to determine their outcomes. Most viable routes to the interior were controlled by Arab or black African states, whose cooperation was essential to any expedition that sought to set out from their shores. These states supplied much of the geographical expertise, political leverage, and logistical support that explorers relied on for their success and indeed their very survival. As they ventured into the African interior, explorers encountered a complex mosaic of polities whose allegiances and rivalries, shaped to varying degrees by ethnic, economic, and religious factors, made safe passage difficult. Their ability to move through this fractious and ever shifting political landscape had far less to do with their affiliations to Britain and its empire than with the assistance they received from the gateway states and their agents, who sought to exert their own imperial influence on the interior. To ask ‘whose empire?’, then, is to acknowledge that British exploration of Africa occurred against the backdrop of the intertwined ambitions of various empires, which both colluded and collided with one another.

The argument I will advance here diverges in an important respect from Ronald Robinson’s well-known thesis about the role of indigenous collaborators in European imperial expansion.³ That thesis, which characterized certain members of colonized communities as active agents and beneficiaries of colonial rule, was premised on the understanding that the European colonizers held the balance of power in the relationship with these indigenous collaborators, however tentative or fragile that power may have seemed at the time. What distinguishes the circumstances examined in this chapter is that the balance of power rested with the indigenous gateway states, not the explorers or the European governments they represented. Insofar as there was a collaborative relationship between the explorers and gateway states, the explorers were more often the collaborators, acting as agents of these indigenous states’ interests.

The inspiration for this analysis derives in large part from a new wave of comparative studies of empires. This research is eroding the exceptionalist claims that have long been made on behalf of the British and other Western empires. At the heart of these claims is the conviction that such empires were uniquely modern.⁴ Recent work has shown instead that they often built on the institutional foundations of the older empires they replaced, and that contemporaneous non-Western empires often adopted similar strategies of rule.⁵ Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, among others, have pointed to ‘the portability of practices and ideas […] across imperial systems’.⁶ As a result of this comparative research on empires, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain the long-standing distinction between ‘modern’ Western empires and ‘pre-modern’ non-Western ones. Furthermore, modernity itself has been exposed as such an elusive and problematic term that its value as an analytic category is open to question.⁷ Its significance for our understanding of Western empires may have less to do with any innovative practices they introduced than it does with the ideological poses they adopted. What is required, then, is a reconsideration of the associations that historians have conventionally drawn between European expeditions into Africa, European empires, and their exceptionalist claims to modernity.

Most of the literature on African exploration, both in its popular and academic guises, has minimized the role that non-European actors, institutions, and interests may have played in the character and outcome of expeditions. Until recently, the few historians who did devote attention to the role of non-Europeans in the European exploration of Africa regarded them as subordinates to and agents of European-driven enterprises, a view consistent with the collaborative model advanced by Ronald Robinson.⁸ To be sure, historians of Africa have been tracing for some time the trading interests and political influence that various African, Arab, and other non-European parties established across parts of the continent.⁹ Surprisingly little notice, however, has been given to the ways they interacted with and imposed their own will on European efforts to explore these same regions.

British explorers became entangled in the agendas of non-European parties because these parties controlled most viable points of entry to the African interior and, hence, often set the terms of their admission. Suitable sites for launching expeditions were far fewer than might be supposed. The logistics of such operations necessitated a staging ground that could be counted on to provide a secure and reliable source of supplies, trading goods, modes of transportation, knowledgeable guides, and more. These requirements tended to be found at the coastal or riverine termini of established trade routes to the interior. Suitable sites were often controlled by non-European states and traders, who had their own interests to protect and promote.

Three states that proved particularly important to British exploration in Africa were Tripoli (now Libya), Egypt, and Zanzibar, each of which was ruled for a significant portion of the nineteenth century by new, dynamic, and expansionist Muslim regimes. Tripoli was transformed by Yusuf Karamanli, who seized the throne in 1795 and temporarily revived his state’s naval presence in the Mediterranean, then projected its power across the Sahara. Muhammad Ali took control of Egypt in 1805, asserting its autonomy from Ottoman overlords, expanding its rule into Arabia and the Sudan, and establishing a dynasty that lasted until the Urabi revolution and British invasion of the early 1880s. The Omani ruler Seyyid Said moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar in the 1830s, founding a vigorous trading state that extended its sway into the East African interior and retained its independence until 1890. Taken together, these states served as the staging grounds for most of the major British expeditions into West, East, and Central Africa: only the continent’s southern triangle was explored by parties that set out from mainly British-controlled territories. The implications that these non-British points of entry carry for our understanding of British exploration and empire will be examined here.

The first region to attract the systematic attention of British explorers was the interior of West Africa. British and other European merchants had established a profitable presence along the West African coast as a result of the slave trade, but indigenous states and a deadly disease environment limited their access to the interior. By the end of the eighteenth century, economic interests, scientific curiosity, and geopolitical rivalry with France had created stronger incentives for the British to explore the region. Their coastal settlements, however, were poor staging grounds for such endeavours. Mungo Park’s miraculous journey from the mouth of the Gambia River along a slave caravan corridor to the banks of the upper Niger River in 1795–7 stirred hopes about that route’s feasibility, but Parks and his entire party of 50 men died during a second attempt in 1805. The British sent an even larger expeditionary force on much the same route at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, but the obstructionist tactics of a local ruler prevented it from penetrating more than a few hundred miles into the interior. Nor did the trade factories along the Guinea Coast provide viable points of entry. The African states and merchants that supplied slaves to European traders sought to safeguard their own political and economic interests by keeping Europeans sequestered on the coast, and their suspicions of the British were heightened when Parliament voted to end the slave trade in 1807. According to the would-be explorer Henry Nicholls, a leading African trader in Calabar warned him that ‘if I came from Wilberforce [the Parliamentary leader of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade] they would kill me’.¹⁰ Nicholls succumbed instead to fever. His fate was a common one. Malaria and yellow fever posed the other major barrier to expeditions setting out from the West African coast. Even large, well-equipped river-bound expeditions failed to overcome the problem of disease. The Royal Navy’s expedition up the Congo River in 1816–17 disintegrated when most of the crew died of yellow fever, and disease defeated several attempts to journey up the Niger River, killing 40 of the 49 European participants in Macgregor Laird’s privately financed expedition of 1832–3 and 55 of the 159 Europeans in the government-sponsored Niger Expedition of 1841–2.¹¹ Only a few especially hardy (and lucky) British explorers, such as the Lander brothers, succeeded in penetrating the interior of West Africa from its coast.

North Africa proved a far more stable launching pad for expeditions into the region. Disease presented less of a threat to outsiders and the Sahara desert, for all its challenges, had been traversed by transhumant tribes and trade caravans for centuries. One of the shortest routes to the savannah region where the kingdom of Bornu and the Hausa states held sway had its northern terminus in Tripoli on the Barbary Coast. This Muslim maritime state had been one of the main promoters and havens of the privateers that plagued the Christian west with coastal raids, the capture of vessels, and the ransom of hostages, but its predations were brought to an end by European and American navies in the early nineteenth century. As a result, Tripoli’s ambitious pasha, Yusuf Karamanli, turned to commercial and political opportunities in the interior, asserting tributary claims to the crucial network of oases in Fezzan, exerting influence over the traders who controlled the routes across that part of the Sahara, and establishing Tripoli’s presence as a political force to be reckoned with among the states further south.¹² It was therefore able to provide explorers with the escorts and assurance of safe passage that they so obviously lacked when setting out from the Gambia, the Gulf of Guinea, or elsewhere along the West African coast.

The earliest attempts by the British to launch expeditions into the African interior from Tripoli were no less star-crossed than the efforts they made from Gambia and the Guinea Coast, but their prospects improved as Tripoli began to project its own power into the Sahara. In 1788, the African Association recruited a long-time English resident of North Africa, Simon Lucas, to cross the Sahara from Tripoli, but reports of warfare along the caravan route convinced him that the undertaking was too risky. Friedr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Echoes of Empire: The Present of the Past
• Part I: Colonialism and Modernity: Views from the Receiving End
• Part II: Return to Sender? Imperial Visions, Imperial Legacies
• Part III: From Imperial to Normative Power: the EU Project in a Post-Colonial World
• Part IV: Globalism: From the Colonial to the Post-Colonial Worlds
• Afterword