The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  From the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule . As Africa changed, so did European interest. The Atlantic slave trade gradually diminished in the nineteenth century. Europeans began to think about Africa in terms of “legitimate commerce,” missionary activity, exploration of the continent’s vast interior, and, in a few places, investment and settlement opportunities. Humanitarian and religious groups sought to end slavery and the slave trade after some four centuries of deep European involvement in it and to bring the alleged “blessings of Christianity and civilization” to what they saw as a dark and barbarous continent. But few European governments sought territory on the continent until the final quarter of the nineteenth century when they quite suddenly descended on Africa and divided it up among themselves.

  As in India, African societies were incorporated into formal colonies, but conquest was extraordinarily violent and rapid, most of it occurring in the 1880s and 1890s, compared to a much more prolonged process in India. It was a final spasm of imperialist annexations, often called the “scramble for Africa,” and pursued quite deliberately, even desperately, with little of the “absentmindedness” that shaped the takeover of India. Unlike the Dutch conquest of Indonesia or the British in India, the European conquest of Africa was highly competitive. British, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Belgian participants negotiated colonial boundaries among themselves and then bloodily subdued the African societies in their respective territories. The speed and ferocity of the scramble for Africa reflected the growing intensity of national rivalries in late nineteenth-century Europe and the high point of Western military superiority over the rest of the world. These factors also brought much of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) into the French Empire and Pacific Island societies under the control of various European powers and the United States.

  Resistance and Cooperation . While Western conquest was relatively quick, it was not easy. Most African states and societies were not initially hostile to Europeans and often tried to work out some accommodation with them. But as they became aware of the unlimited aims of the intruders and their demand for political submission, resistance mounted. Any number of African states, both large and small, fought fiercely in defense of their sovereignty. Machembe, leader of the Yao people of modern Tanzania, defiantly told the Germans in 1890, “I have listened to your words but can find no reasons why I should obey you—I would rather die first. . . . If it should be war you desire, then I am ready . . . but to be your subject, that I cannot be.”7 In West Africa, Samori Toure, founder of a new empire based among the Mandinka people, sought initially to use the French as allies against his local rivals. But the persistent aggressiveness of the French provoked Samori into a 10-year military struggle against them. On the other hand, the Kingdom of Buganda in East Africa chose to ally itself with the British and in so doing greatly expanded its territory at the expense of its local rivals and vastly enriched a small class of chiefs who gained access to much of the best land in the kingdom.

  By the early twentieth century, the initial resistance had been crushed, and all of Africa, except for Ethiopia and Liberia, had come under the control of Europeans. The overwhelming military advantage of the invaders was surely the most important factor, for by 1900 the technological gap between Europeans and the rest of the world was at its widest. Also important were sharp divisions among African societies, as the absence of any common identity as “Africans” made lasting alliances difficult to achieve. And finally, the colonial invasion of Africa coincided with a 40-year period (1880s-1920s) of diminished rainfall, famine, and disease that greatly weakened African societies. Combined with the violence of conquest, this led to devastating loss of life in many parts of the continent. More than 20 years of on-and-off warfare between Italians and Libyans killed perhaps a third of the population. A similar mortality rate afflicted the peoples of German East Africa (modern Tanzania) in the repression and famine that followed a major rebellion in 1904-1905.8

  Russian and American Expansion

  Yet another pattern of Western expansion after 1750 involved Russia and the United States, both of which continued processes begun in the 1600s. These were overland rather than overseas empires, with Russian acquisitions in the nineteenth century focused largely in more densely populated Muslim areas of central Asia and the Caucasus and those of the United States in the vast sparsely populated regions of the American West. In these land-based empires, there was no sharp distinction between “mother country” and colony so characteristic of European empires in Asia and Africa. And in both cases, the “colonial power” had some experience with various forms of Western imperialism. The United States, of course, had originated as a set of British settler colonies, while Russia continued in the nineteenth century to suffer repeated military defeats and much foreign investment by stronger European countries. Both countries introduced substantial numbers of settlers into the newly conquered regions, though in the Russian territories indigenous peoples survived and their cultures endured rather more than was the case in the American West.

  While Russian imperialism was limited largely to adjacent territories and peoples, its U.S. counterpart grew more expansive. By the late nineteenth century, American industrialization had made it an exporting nation. Now the products of America’s farms and factories began to descend on Europe, Latin America, and even Asia. Foreign markets and the need to sustain them played an increased role in the thinking of American business leaders as the factories poured out more goods than their countrymen could afford to buy. By the 1890s, Americans were looking west toward Asia and south to Latin America for potential markets. Some argued for an expanded navy with which to protect American commerce abroad. This was accompanied by a revival of expansionist thinking reminiscent of the Manifest Destiny era. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana thrilled listeners with his oration “The March of the Flag,” an updated version of Manifest Destiny, with more than a tinge of racism:

  God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vague and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. . . . We are the trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.9

  Beveridge later added, “The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.”10

  The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the most visible result of this new interest in expansion. The United States wound up in possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. In separate actions, Hawaii was annexed in 1898 and the Panama Canal Zone in 1903. The United States entered the twentieth century as the newest of the overseas imperial powers. But it also practiced a form of noncolonial imperialism, or informal empire, in which nations nominally independent, largely in the Caribbean and Latin America, nonetheless were actually controlled by U.S. mining, agricultural, and commercial corporations, occasionally with the help of the Marine Corps.

  Australia and New Zealand

  A final pattern of European expansion, more closely resembling the earlier experience in the Americas, unfolded in Australia and New Zealand, both claimed by Great Britain. While no demographic catastrophe of American proportions had afflicted mainland Africa and Asia, a combination of imported firearms and disease decimated the previously isolated hunting and gathering Aboriginal people of Australia and the agricultural Maoris of New Zealand. While both peoples subsequently recovered demographically and have maintained a unique cultural identity into the present, their territories were overrun in the nineteenth century by European settlers who established fully Western societies in the South Pacific. In New Zealand, for example, some 700,000 whites dominated the colony in 1896, while Maori numbers had been reduced to about 40,000, many of whom had converted to
Christianity. This contrasts sharply with most Asian and African territories, which received few permanent European settlers and maintained demographic dominance in their own lands even as their cultures and economies changed considerably.

  Global Imperial Economies

  A Second Wave of Globalization

  If Europe’s expansion in the Atlantic basin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries initiated modern “globalization,” its nineteenth-century empires deepened that process and extended its reach in Asia and Africa. Conquest and foreign rule, of course, were nothing new in world history. Earlier empires, whether dominated by Romans, Arabs, Mongols, or Turks, had also brought suffering to subject peoples. The uniqueness of Europe’s global reach in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay in the extent of change that it induced in the ordinary working lives of millions of people around the world. An industrializing Europe acted like a magnet, pulling raw materials and agricultural products from its formal colonies and informal empires alike in ever-growing quantities. Rice from Southeast Asia; indigo, tea, and opium from India; meat from Australia; rubber from Brazil and the Congo; palm oil and cocoa from West Africa; cloves from Zanzibar; sugar and coffee from Indonesia; cotton from Egypt; tin from the Malay Peninsula; and gold and diamonds from South Africa—all of this and much more was financed by Western capitalist enterprises and produced by the low-wage labor of local people, which together generated an expanding stream of world trade moving generally to the west. In return Asian, African, and Latin American societies received a growing volume of Europe’s manufactured products.

  What made this economically integrated world possible was a host of communication and transportation innovations that emerged during the nineteenth century. The telegraph, underwater cables, steamships, railroads, and canals tightened the links among distant human communities. Messages that previously took months or years to arrive now could be transmitted in minutes. Falling transportation costs made it possible to carry bulk goods such as cotton, coal, grain, tea, tobacco, and opium over long distances. More and more people became dependent on these man-made linkages for their economic and sometimes their physical survival.

  A Divided World

  If the world was growing more connected, it was also increasingly unequal, as an international division of labor that had begun earlier in the Atlantic basin now took shape in the rest of the world. As late as 1750, India accounted for almost 25 percent of world manufacturing and China for another 33 percent, but by 1913, they produced only 1.4 and 3.6 percent, respectively.11 To the massive inequalities between social classes, evident since the beginning of urban civilizations, was now added a new inequality among the nations or regions of the planet. Here were the roots of that “global rift,”12 sometimes called the North-South divide, between the rich and poor regions of the earth that continues to bedevil the world in the twenty-first century. It was a novel division of global labor, casting the Western world of Europe and North America as the center of manufacturing while the rest of humankind provided the raw materials and consumed the products of the industrialized West. Born of Europe’s industrial revolution and its global empires, this emerging world economy departed sharply from the more regionally balanced world of earlier centuries.

  India and Imperial Globalization

  The consequences of this “imperial globalization” became especially and tragically apparent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a worldwide wave of climate change and weather disruption, associated with what meteorologists now call the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, brought recurrent and widespread drought, famine, and death to many parts of the world, especially in the tropics. Mortality estimates for India, China, and Brazil range from a low of 32 million to a high of 61 million between 1876 and 1902. Many others perished in Africa. Much of this massive human suffering was caused not by the weather alone but by the policies and practices of governments, both colonial and semi-independent, operating within the emerging world of imperial globalization.

  Famine and Free Markets . British-ruled India provides a case in point. When drought and famine struck India in 1876, the colonial state was unable—or unwilling—to respond effectively. Household and village grain reserves, intended to provide a local safety net, had been transferred largely to central warehouses using recently built railroads. Wheat exports to Great Britain almost doubled in 1877 despite widespread famine within the country. Food prices soared as private speculators took advantage of shortages to make a profit. Meanwhile, the colonial viceroy, Lord Lytton, acting on the basis of laissez-faire free market economic principles, gave orders that “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food.” Nor did the government make much effort to provide relief for those perishing from famine, believing that it was nature’s correction to India’s tendency to “overbreed.” A Famine Commission argued the case against relief: “The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief . . . would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.” At the same time, extravagant expenditures on military campaigns in Afghanistan and on an elaborate ceremony proclaiming Queen Victoria as empress of India continued without pause, and the government refused to defer the collection of heavy land taxes. British racism, no doubt, played a role in these decisions, as many senior officials were convinced that it was “a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows.”13

  The outcome of these policies was disaster. In the 1876-1879 famine, hunger and disease claimed some 6 million to 10 million Indian lives. In some districts, this amounted to 25 percent or more of the population. Mothers sold their children for a meal, husbands drowned their wives to prevent them from dying of hunger, people sought imprisonment for the food it provided, and violence flared among groups and individuals struggling for survival. Between 1872 and 1921, the overall life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by an amazing 20 percent.14

  The Economics of Empire . Beyond the catastrophes of the late nineteenth century, how did India fare economically under British rule? Some Indians clearly benefited—merchants, producers of high-end textiles, upper-caste Indians closely associated with the British, larger landowners producing for export, and a few industrialists. But Indian entrepreneurs were slowly squeezed out of the ship-owning and shipbuilding business, prevented from entering the new railroad industries, and restricted in the profitable export trade—primarily because they lacked access to credit, insurance, technology, and information about the world market. These were monopolized largely by European interests in the British port cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras.

  But perhaps more important than what happened was what did not. In almost two centuries of British rule (1757-1947), while the “mother country” industrialized and raised its people’s living standards sharply, India experienced no overall growth in its per capita income and only a very modest beginning of modern industrial production. This meant that India’s handloom weavers, long the source of much of the world’s textiles, had few alternatives when their traditional livelihood was destroyed by the massive importation of cheap mass-produced textiles from England. British weavers, similarly unemployed, could at least seek work in the burgeoning factories of industrial England.

  Scholars have argued about the sources of India’s modern poverty. Many have focused on internal factors, such as a weak internal market, the continuation of rural mentalities among workers, and inadequate Indian entrepreneurs. Critics of British imperialism have pointed to the almost religious belief in free trade and the political influence of English manufacturing interests, which produced a virtual refusal to provide tariff protection for India’s infant industries. Certainly, the unwillingness of the British government of India to actively foster industrial growth (as the governments of Germany, Japan, and Russi
a were doing in the late nineteenth century) played an important role in its retarded industrialization.

  Yet another inhibition of British colonial rule on India’s economic growth lay in the substantial wealth the British carried home from India, draining the country of investment capital needed for development. Some of this drain came in the form of profits made by British banks and corporations, some as pensions sent to retired soldiers and officials, and some as various expenses that the British government charged off to the Indian treasury. Indian taxpayers had to foot the bill, for example, for the Indian army, which was used in places as far away as China and Ethiopia to further British imperial interests. While the size of this drain is in dispute, its existence is not. In short, 200 years of colonial rule by the world’s first industrial power did not make a substantial dent in India’s traditional poverty and in fact created new forms of modern poverty.

  Africa and Imperial Globalization

  Colonial rule likewise brought African societies more fully into a new world economy as growing numbers of people were drawn into producing goods for distant markets. Their experience illustrates the various ways in which this process took shape and the kinds of changes it brought to this most recently colonized continent.