The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  From 1905 to 1907 in German East Africa (Tanganyika, today’s Tanzania), the Maji Maji fought against German colonial rule and attempts to compel the local population to grow cotton for export.93 In 1898, Emilio Aguinaldo led Filipino forces against the Spaniards, defeating them. Originally he had been supported by the United States but was soon forced to fight the Americans themselves in a vain effort to obtain independence from what he had regarded as the ‘land of liberty’.94 American troops destroyed villages, tortured captives, and forced Filipinos into concentration camps.95 Little of this colonial oppression and the resistance to it have found their way into American or European history school textbooks – even today, even when the facts are known and undisputable.96 The same can be said of the extermination by conquest and disease of so many native Americans in both the northern and southern hemisphere; of the massacre of Tasmanians by British colonists from 1828 to 1832 (the so-called Black War); of the horrors of Belgian colonialism in the Congo; the punitive expedition of the British in Benin in 1897 that resulted in British troops killing thousands of people, setting the city of Benin on fire and stealing the famous Benin bronzes (many are now in the British Museum); and, last but not least, the German extermination of the Herero tribe in 1907 in South-West Africa (today’s Namibia) – the first modern genocide.97 The Herero were a semi-nomadic people who had resisted white settlers’ attempts to fence off common land to raise cattle.98 They were good fighters, so good that in 1904 a particularly determined military commander, Lothar von Trotha, a veteran of the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China, was chosen over the objections of the civilian authorities. Von Trotha decided that the whole of the Herero people should be annihilated. As he told a journalist, ‘Against Unmenschen (non-human), one cannot conduct war humanely.’99 Later that year he declared that the Herero people had to disappear from the German colony, either by fleeing to British territory or by being killed. The official goal was now genocide (though the term had not been coined), and genocide it was. Some 66–75 per cent of the 60,000 to 80,000 members of the tribe were killed.100 The German government apologized in 2004, one hundred years after the event.101

  Even more horrific than German colonization was that of Belgium in the Congo. King Leopold II had claimed that the conquest of the Congo and the creation of the État Indépendant du Congo (the Congo Free State, his private property, not Belgium’s colony) was an improvement on what had happened under the rule of Muslim slave traders who controlled the territory. In fact, the system he presided over was the most monstrous example of modern colonization and ‘more horrendous’ than slave trading.102 As a consequence of Leopold’s paradigmatic ‘predatory economy’:

  the fields lay fallow. Agriculture dwindled … Native commerce came to a standstill. Crafts in the process of refinement for centuries, such as iron smithing or woodcarving, were lost. The native population became listless, enfeebled, and malnourished … It is impossible to say how many people died as a direct or indirect result of Leopold’s rubber policies.103

  Many died, were killed, raped, and tortured; villages were torched; and killing squads were sent out to force the natives to produce more rubber. A Swedish missionary reported seeing dead bodies floating on the lake ‘with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me … they had been killed … for the rubber’.104 Thousands of people fled their villages out of fear of Leopold’s soldiers. Their crops were burnt; their animals killed; starvation ensued.105 The much-weakened population was thus far more susceptible to diseases such as smallpox and sleeping sickness. Men were sent into the forests in search of rubber for long periods of time while their wives and children were held hostages, half-starved. The outcry was such that, in 1908, the Belgian Parliament decided to terminate Leopold II’s mission civilisatrice. During his twenty-three-year nefarious rule the king had become rich thanks to the rubber extracted and the ivory poached, but the Congo had lost half its inhabitants and 10 million people had died.106

  The anti-colonialists shared common ground with the colonialists. They had imbibed the same culture, often the same language (French in Algeria and Vietnam; English in India), the same commitment to modernity, the same sense of class belonging. The Belgian socialist leader Émile Vandervelde wrote at length about the horrors of Belgian colonization in Congo, but he was an advocate of a ‘rational’ system of colonization that would allow the natives to own their own land and the Europeans to trade with them.107 Similarly, Edmund D. Morel, an Anglo-French journalist who founded the Congo Reform Association (1904) and who denounced mercilessly the nefarious activities of the Belgians in the Congo, was not against colonization but against excessive exploitation.108 The leading voice against colonialism in the Belgian Socialist Party (POB), that of Louis de Brouckère, editor of the party paper Le Peuple in 1907, amid his party’s general indifference, veiled indignation with solid pragmatism: ‘One must build railways, roads, a postal system, fortresses, guns, in a word the necessary tools to keep a country in a state of subjugation. But how much will all this cost? The Congo will not benefit us; it might benefit the bourgeoisie but not us.’109

  Insofar as most ordinary ‘native’ people were concerned, colonialism often simply meant swapping one ruling class for another. Since they had always been ruled, they went on being ruled and being sub-servient to the new rulers as they had been to the old. There was no reason to rebel, plot, or conspire. Since there was no national consciousness, there was no wounded national pride. As long as the new rulers did not interfere with established norms, existing tradition, and local religions, or cause a deterioration in one’s conditions of existence, there was no reason to object. The problem was not with the natives at the bottom but with those at the top. They faced a constant dilemma: should they cooperate with the colonialists, agreeing to share power albeit in a subordinate way; or should they resist in order to acquire power later?

  As John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson explained in a now famous text, the extension of colonial empires could not have occurred in the way it did without some form of cooperation, collaboration, or instrumental engagement by local societies.110 Europeans may have played the game of divide and rule, but indigenous forces also tried to exploit colonial rivalries to settle scores internally against rivals. The British, in particular, tailored imperial intervention to fit local divisions in order to confuse resistance and obtain compliance.111 In India too, before the 1857 takeover, British rule consisted not in direct control but in having subordinate local allies and dependants and arbitrating between Indian states. In a sense the British inherited the system of controls of their predecessors, the Mughal rulers.112

  On the eve of the First World War, in 1913, the British Empire took in a population of some 440 million, on a level with China, a number hugely boosted up by India, whose population was just over 300 million.113 This amounted to a quarter of mankind, probably the largest empire ever. But Britain had had this empire for quite a while and its economy was the most globalized among the main industrial states. Why bother to take over more colonies whose value was far from obvious? One answer, the most traditional, was that it was not very costly to take them over and that in so doing one kept others out. The British dominated in three ways: one was by having more colonies than any-body else, then by trading with them more than anyone else, and finally by having, in addition to its formal empire, an informal one. Keeping the world open to British goods was central to British imperialism. As Joseph Chamberlain put it in his speech at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce (1896): ‘the greater part of Africa would have been occupied by our commercial rivals, who would have proceeded, as the first act of their policy, to close this great commercial market to the British Empire’.114

  The reach of this empire was quite formidable. Of the 200-plus countries that exist today, sixty-three were once ruled by Britain, twenty more were occupied for shorter periods, and a further seven (such as Argentina and Chile) could be counted as part of its informal empire.115 This ‘empire’, however
, had no consistency and no unity: Canada was not ruled in the same way as India and India not in the same way as Egypt, which was not a real colony.116

  Britain’s colonial supremacy was partly due to the circumstances of potential rivals. Portugal and Spain, once possessors of great empires, were too poor to expand; and Spain did not even succeed in keeping what it had, losing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. Germany and Italy appeared too late on the scene to be major players in the colonial scramble. Some of their leading politicians, Bismarck in Germany and Giolitti in Italy, were reluctant to enter the colonial race.

  Russia could expand eastwards, annexing Asian territories without transforming them into formal colonies. It established formal rule over Transcaucasia, thus completing its control over the vast Eurasian plain and moved into the Far East.117 As for the United States, it expanded westward, fighting Indians and Mexicans. Russia and the USA were not ‘classic’ empires, though they could be said to constitute instances of ‘internal’ or ‘contiguous’ colonialism.

  Other countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden, were industrializing in earnest without any need of an empire. Neither of the two states called empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian, expanded in the slightest during the nineteenth century. They did not produce settlers. Few Turks settled in the European or Arabic parts of the Ottoman Empire. Few Austrians settled in Galicia or Hungary. In the years leading up to the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was losing territories and was well on the road to disintegration, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was desperately trying to hold on to the recalcitrant nations within its borders. No one, whether in Vienna or in Constantinople, seriously advocated creating settlements in far-flung areas overseas.

  So Britain’s only possible rival was France. But while Britain had been remarkably stable throughout the nineteenth century, France had been astonishingly unstable since 1789, even losing a major war against Prussia in 1870.118 All this contributed to Britain’s success in the imperial stakes. In spite of such luck, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s trading advantages were constantly decreasing as other countries were catching up.

  Was any of this of material significance to the development of capitalism? Those who advocated colonies seemed certain of it. Jules Ferry, Prime Minister of France, stated it plainly in 1885 in a much-used quote: ‘La politique coloniale est la fille de la politique industrielle.’119 Perhaps that was true of France, though many disagreed, but it was manifestly untrue of Germany, since German industrial success involved no colonies before 1884, and nothing of significance afterwards. Those Germans who were in favour of colonies argued that German industrial development required not just a united Germany but also a large empire. Leo von Caprivi, Bismarck’s successor as Chancellor, justified the aspiration to become a sea power and building the navy by stressing that commerce and industry were of great political and cultural importance.120

  A popular argument, expressed by the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke as well as by many others was that Germany, having ‘lost’ decades reconstructing her national identity, had now to enter a colonial race that others, above all the so detested ‘arrogant’ England, had started long ago.121 There was also the hope that colonies would provide jobs and land for German settlers.122 Treitschke too, who wanted a German empire for the greater glory of Germany, deployed practical arguments: ‘For a nation that suffers from continued over-production, and sends nearly 200,000 of her children abroad, the question of colonisation is vital.’123 Among the most vociferous colonialists were Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, architect of German naval rearmament, and Carl Peters, Reichskommissar (Imperial High Commissioner) for East Africa (1891), responsible for atrocities (posthumously rehabilitated by Hitler, and celebrated in films and books during the Nazi period).124 The central idea of German foreign policy in this post-Bismarck period was that of Weltpolitik (‘global policy’), though, in reality, without much of a navy Germany could, at best, dream only of a Europapolitik and not a proper Platz an der Sonne (Place in the Sun).125

  The pre-industrial Romantic idea of Germans returning to till the soil and finding their soul – this time in foreign lands – was absurd even in the nineteenth century, though not absurd enough not to be revived, far more disastrously, under Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nazi Hunger-plan for eastern Europe, however, was not aimed at anything outside Europe. It envisaged the starving to death or into submission of the Soviet Union and Poland, and the consequent implementation of the Generalplan Ost: the settling by pure-bred German farmers of the eastern territories thus freed.

  However, leaving aside this grandiose scheme and its ideological justifications, the most immediate spur to German colonial acquisition in the 1880s was the so-called Long Depression of the 1870s. This crisis was generally seen as a crisis of overproduction, to overcome which a major export drive was proposed. Since Great Britain had a considerable advantage in overseas market, it was felt that colonial acquisitions would provide the desirable outlets, though this case for colonialism would hardly justify the German conquest of places of little trading value, such as Cameroon, Togoland, Ruanda-Burundi, and Tanganyika.

  Politicians also argued that colonies would keep the state in the driving seat of economic policy; colonies might unite agrarian and industrial interests; might enable many to make money out of state procurement; might contain socialism; and might encourage a broad ideological consensus around the press, the Reichstag, and the civil service.126 Public opinion, until whipped up by the press, cared little for colonies, but colonial enthusiasts and industrial interests, particularly shipbuilders, converged in pressure groups such as the Deutscher Kolonialverein (1882, German Colonial League) and later the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (1887, German Colonial Society), the Naval League (Deutscher Flottenverein, 1898, with its 330,000 members), and the ultra-nationalist anti-Polish Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband, 1891), of which Max Weber was a member. Among the objectives of such pressure groups was that of turning workers into patriots, or, in the words of a supporter, of ‘winning back the masses’ by an extensive shipbuilding programme that would provide jobs as well as patriotic pride.127 Friedrich Engels too, though from an entirely different political position, thought there was a connection between economic power and proletarian ardour. In a letter (30 August 1883) to the German socialist leader August Bebel, lamenting the lack of socialism among the English working class and their contentment at being just ‘an appendage of the “Great Liberal Party”’, Engels declared that ‘participation in the world market was and is the economic basis of the English workers’ political nullity’.128

  All this may explain why Germany pursued colonial expansion, but it does not follow that such expansion was profitable. In fact, enthusiasm soon cooled down, for the new territories were a drain on government finances; industry did not benefit; and hardly any Germans wanted to become settlers.129 The social composition of the organized colonial movement in Germany was largely made up of middle-class professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists, imbued with nationalism, who had no intention of becoming settlers but who thought that colonies were where dangerous proletarians and dispossessed peasants should go.130 Although this was the age of mass migration, not many proletarians and peasants were willing to leave their homes to endure the heat, the insects, and the diseases of sub-Saharan Africa. They much preferred to go to the United States, to Latin America, to Australia and New Zealand, and to South Africa (which had good land, diamonds, and fewer mosquitoes). Some colonies would have been useful to send convicts to, as Napoleon III knew: in 1854 he closed expensive French prisons and sent the convicts to New Caledonia and French Guiana, thus shortening their lives and saving public funds. The Tsar sent his convicts to Siberia and the British sent theirs to Australia (where they thrived). But although colonialism provided an outlet for ‘undesirables’ by absorbing some of the unemployed from the upper and middle classes, a country does not co
nquer a vast empire just to solve one’s prison problems.

  An empire did not profit the Netherlands either. The country was engaged in a long, bitter, unpopular, and totally useless war in the Sultanate of Aceh (1873–1903) in order to conquer Sumatra, part of Indonesia – a war that caused the deaths of 37,000 troops on the Dutch side (the majority Indonesian recruits) and over 60,000 natives.131 There was no reason for this financially costly thirty-year war apart from prestige and pride as well as the fear that if the Dutch were to with-draw, the Americans, or the British, or the Germans, or the Japanese would intervene.132 Control over the whole of Indonesia did nothing for the Dutch economy, which never regained the glorious days of the eighteenth century and lagged behind that of Belgium, whose empire was much smaller and whose industrialization had preceded the acquisition of Congo. The Netherlands did expand commercially throughout the nineteenth century, but its success was due more to the development of intra-European trade than to its colonies.133

  Italy, like Germany, did not have an empire and could only hope to acquire what the British and French had left over – stuff of no great economic consequence. The Italians even failed to conquer Ethiopia, where they were defeated militarily by local armies, first at the Battle of Dogali in 1887 and then, even more decisively, by armies led by Menelik II at Adwa in 1896. Being defeated by ‘natives’ was a rare event in the history of modern European colonialism. (The British had been defeated too, as we have seen, but they eventually won the Afghan wars.) The Italians had chronically underestimated the Ethiopians, assuming that a ‘primitive’ kingdom could be no match for a modern European state.134 Menelik was turned into a celebrity in the West with his own tableau in wax at the Musée Grévin in Paris and a colour lithograph in the magazine Vanity Fair.135