European Overseas Empire, 1879 - 1999

A Short History

Matthew G. Stanard

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119130116, 9781119130109
• eBook ISBN: 9781119130130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A Timely Look Back at the Era That Shaped Our World

Thousands of years of recorded history show that the main way in which human societies have been organized is as empires. Today, the evidence of recent European overseas empire's lasting effects is all around us: from international frontiers and fusion cuisine to multiplying apologies for colonial misdeeds. European Overseas Empire, 1879-1999: A Short History explores the major events in this critical period that continue to inform and affect our world today.

New access to archives and a renewed interest in the most recent era of European overseas empire building and the decolonization that followed have produced a wealth of fascinating information that has recharged perennial debates and shed new light on topics previously considered settled . At the same time, current events are once again beginning to echo the past, bringing historical perspective into the spotlight to guide our actions going forward. This book examines our collective past, providing new insight and fresh perspectives as it:

• Traces current events to their roots in the European overseas imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries
• Challenges the notion of political, cultural, social, and economic exchanges of the era as being primarily "Europe-outward"
• Examines the complexity and contingency of colonial rule, and the range of outcomes for the various territories involved
• Explores the power dynamics of overseas empires, and their legacies that continue to shape the world today

1
The Nineteenth-Century Context

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

Makana Nxele began to speak of visions in the spring of 1819. Nxele was Xhosa, a people living around the Great Fish River in southern Africa who were suffering from intrusions from neighboring peoples. Invaders included white settlers, including “Boers” of Dutch origin and Britons, who for years had encroached on Xhosa lands, seized their cattle, and disrupted their lives in myriad other ways. Nxele was a convert to Christianity who claimed to be a prophet and a younger son of Jesus Christ. He said that the Xhosa had to rise up, fight, and drive the whites out. People listened, and many joined up. In April, Nxele led an attack on a British outpost in Grahamstown. The British put down the uprising, captured Nxele, and imprisoned him on Robben Island, the same island on which South Africa’s apartheid regime would imprison Nelson Mandela in the 1960s. (Although Mandela survived Robben Island, Nxele did not: he drowned during an escape attempt in December 1819.)

In 1856 another Xhosa, a girl named Nongqawuse, preached a series of prophetic visions. Nongqawuse foretold that the morning sun would set and that the ancestors would arise and drive the whites into the sea, thus saving the Xhosa. First, though, the Xhosa had to prove their faith by destroying their crops and slaughtering all livestock; only if they did so would the prophecy come true, on the eighth day. Nongqawuse’s uncle Mhlakaza was among those who embraced her vision, and he won over the Xhosa ruler, Sarhili. Like Mhlakaza before him, Sarhili destroyed his cattle and crops, and then persuaded a number of his advisers and subordinates to do the same. Others bought into Nongqawuse’s vision, so desperate were they to rid themselves of the whites.

Whites were not the only problem: the Xhosa also felt pressure from the Zulu, a successful and expansionistic people to their east. Zulu success dated back to Dingiswayo, a king among the Nguni people who had transformed his society, doing away with traditional “bush schools” that required cohorts of boys of the same age – “age grades” – to sequester themselves from society, undergo education, and be circumcised. Instead of removing productive young men from society for an extended period, Dingiswayo organized age grades into military units, and these young men became full members of society through military service. This transformed the Nguni into a fighting force. Dingiswayo’s successor, Shaka, made his Zulu clan dominant among the Nguni. Shaka Zulu put the Zulu on a permanent war footing, instituted more combat training and years-long segregation of men in military groups, and introduced the assegai, a short stabbing spear used as a sword at close quarters. Shaka also introduced new tactics, including the “cow horn” formation, combining a central group with swift-moving wings to attack an opponent’s flanks and rear. Innovation translated into Zulu dominance over large areas of southeastern Africa and, when others adapted or adopted Zulu tactics, warfare became more destructive. The result was the Mfecane or “time of troubles,” during which Shaka himself was assassinated, in 1828.

By the time of Shaka’s successor, Dingane (r. 1828–1840), the Mfecane had spread widely, reaching the Xhosa people. Heeding Nongqawuse’s visions, Xhosa slaughtered thousands of head of cattle and destroyed crops. Then came the eighth day. “Nothing happened. The sun did not set, no dead person came back to life, and not one of the things that had been predicted came to pass.” Instead there was starvation, devastation, and death. By 1857 the Xhosa were no longer capable of putting up any resistance to expanding European colonization.

How could anyone have such faith, to the point of destroying all their crops and cattle? One can analyze such apocalyptic visions and those who believed them from anthropological, psychological, religious, gender, or other perspectives. The historical explanation is straightforward: the Xhosa were under intense pressure as a result of Zulu and European expansionism. The same was true of other indigenous peoples, from Khoi, San, Nama, and Herero in southwestern Africa, to Bantu-speaking peoples such as the Sotho, Ndebele, and Shona. A series of droughts coupled with population growth compounded such problems. The Xhosa were unable to compete, in particular in the face of European technological superiority.

As the experience of the Xhosa suggests, many actors and factors shaped global history in the nineteenth century, including local conflicts, movements of people, competition for resources, climate, the environment, religious beliefs, and military tactics. As this chapter will emphasize, it was local concerns and actions that drove much change for much of the world and for most of the century. Europe remained for most people a distant peninsula on the western end of Eurasia. That Europe was not dominant is revealed in how its overseas efforts were motivated by the need to procure things that Europeans needed more of, such as land or goods that they could not make like fine silks; this meant that Europe was dependent on much of the rest of the world.

Growing free trade, the independence of most of Spain’s and Portugal’s American colonies, and the power of non-Europeans made a renewed wave of empire building seem unlikely. Then a series of developments, beginning in the 1850s, signaled that change was taking place. Parts of Europe and the United States were industrializing, and both world areas emerged stronger following the American Civil War and the unifications of Germany and of Italy. Failed reforms in the Ottoman empire, Russia’s defeat in the 1853–1856 Crimean War, and the 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion in China signaled the profound challenges these large land-based empires faced. Still, the renewed wave of overseas imperialism that soon followed was never a simple story of a more powerful Europe expanding outward in some well-planned colonial takeover, and we should not project back into the past the dominance that western Europe, the United States, and Russia exercised over much of the world by 1900. This power was neither inevitable, nor was it in any way complete.

New and Unlikely Empires

Around the mid-nineteenth century, another wave of European overseas empire building seemed improbable, for a number of reasons. The abolitionist movement had suggested a turning away from the subjugation of foreign peoples, and Enlightenment ideals of a shared humanity had spread widely throughout the Atlantic world. Britain outlawed the slave trade, beginning in 1807, imposed this on others through its naval supremacy, and outlawed slavery itself in 1833. France followed in 1848. In other places slavery was on the way out. When in 1860 the Dutch banned slavery in Batavia – the main European settlement and trading outpost in the Dutch East Indies – it already had diminished to near insignificance. Despite its continued profitability, the United States (1865), Cuba (1886), and Brazil (1888) also finally abolished slavery, although the Indian Ocean slave trade endured.

Other signs suggested that overseas empire building had largely run its course. France lost almost all its foreign possessions at the end of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), and Britain relinquished 13 North American colonies two decades later. Independence for Haiti, across Central and South America, and in some other parts of the Caribbean followed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Large, landed empires had more staying power, including the Ottoman empire (spanning southeastern Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and the Arabian peninsula), Russia’s massive expanse, and to a much lesser extent India under the declining Mughals. Britain’s 1793 Macartney Embassy revealed Qing China’s strength. The British envoy George Macartney arrived in China hoping to open ports to trade, but the Qianlong Emperor rejected his requests, telling Macartney:

Strange and costly objects do not interest me … Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.

China had little time for what it saw as a small, backward island people halfway around the world. Macartney left empty-handed.

Developments nevertheless signaled a potential renewal of overseas expansionism. With the French Revolution and the abolitionist impulse to eliminate slavery came a more activist, outward-looking mindset, and Europeans began to see themselves as uniquely positioned to civilize benighted peoples everywhere. Although most colonies in the Americas had achieved independence by the 1830s, colonists from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand had created huge “neo-Europes” where settlers dominated natives – those who had not succumbed to disease – and where flora and fauna imported from Europe flourished, displacing indigenous animals and plants. This, and intensifying British rule in India, began to revolutionize international relations, economics, and culture, initiating a reordering of the global balance of power. Europe and North America enjoyed tremendous advantages such as natural resources like coal, whose use spurred innovations like the steam engine. Europe benefited from rising populations; new types and varieties of crops and imported foodstuffs; growing trade and transportation; legal institutions that protected property; and comparatively independent financial institutions. Europeans also were good at warfare. The uniqueness of Europe was not its strong states or patriotic identities, but rather the convergence of these “with economic dynamism, well-honed weapons of war making, and fierce rivalries between medium-sized polities.” Viewed this way, Qing, Ottoman, and Mughal success at imposing peace over large empires contributed to their decline. Even if Europeans could not match the commercial capabilities of the Indians, Ottomans, and Chinese, competition and war within Europe’s multistate system meant growing competitiveness and expansionism by the mid-nineteenth century. By that point, Europeans were more expansionistic than ever before and more so than any other people at the time, with the exception of land-hungry, western-bound US colonists. On top of it all, the growth of “civil society” in Europe lent its societies staying power. Then, in just two decades, from 1850 to 1870, world-changing events contributed to growing European advantage: war and revolt in China, a revolution in Japan, a civil war in the United States, and industrialization and national unification in Europe.

China’s Qing Dynasty

The Qing were a foreign, Manchu dynasty in power since 1644, controlling far-flung territories and peoples with their military and a large, educated bureaucracy infused with Confucian principles emphasizing civilized behavior, ritual, family, and loyalty. Like Ming emperors before them, Qing rulers believed that they were at the center of the world. China was the “Middle Kingdom,” fringed by peripheries including Korea, Japan, mainland southeast Asia, Mongolia, and other so-called barbarian lands at or beyond its borders. Success and isolationism discouraged innovation and invention. The imperial examination system, based on Confucian literature and values, fostered conservatism. Change occurred but always within a framework of tradition.

Mental inflexibility manifested itself in lackluster responses to internal and external threats. First was a massive domestic revolt, a result of growing population and rural poverty. Like Makala Nxele of the Xhosa, the failed Chinese civil servant and Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, claimed bizarre religious visions and encouraged his followers to rebel against the Qing. Hong’s Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was a massive uprising that cost millions of lives – 26 Chinese perished during the rebellion for each soldier who died in the contemporaneous American Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history.

A second threat came from abroad as industrializing Europe pressured China to open its markets to trade. The Chinese remained uninterested in Western goods like chea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Selected Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Nineteenth-Century Context
• 2 The Civilizing Mission and the Race for Empire, 1879–1902
• 3 Resistance and Consolidation, 1902–1912
• 4 Empires at War, 1912–1922
• 5 The Colonial Era, 1922–1931
• 6 World War II, 1931–1945
• 7 Unfinished and Finished Empires, 1945–1958
• 8 Decolonization’s Second Wave, 1958–1975
• 9 Empire After Imperialism
• Index
• End User License Agreement