Empires of the Mind Page 4

  Algeria was also originally populated by paupers and convicts. Assisted passages were offered after 1838 to struggling artisans and labourers needed to build roads, rather than to farmers.20 Unemployed workers were detailed to building projects in ‘national workshops’ under the Second Republic in 1848. When these were closed as a security risk a popular uprising known as the June Days broke out. This was brutally put down and 4,000 prisoners were sent to Algeria along with 12,000 other former inmates of the national workshops. To these were added the thousands of opponents of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 1851 who were deported. The defeat of Abd al-Qadir enabled the French government in Algeria to establish 200 villages for settlers, whose number multiplied from 131,000 to 189,000 between 1851 and 1857. Progress was slow and the threats to French power from the British Empire and Prussia, which defeated Austria in 1866, were great. In 1868 France’s answer to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the liberal journalist Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol, wrote that ‘Algeria should not be a comptoir, like India, or a training ground for our army […] It is a French land which should be populated as soon as possible by French people […] eighty or a hundred million French people, strongly rooted on both sides of the Mediterranean, will preserve the name, the language and the legitimate reputation of France’.21 Ninety years later the French would pay dearly for this ambition.

  In Australia and Algeria, the colonising British and French were confronted by indigenous peoples. In Cape colony, which was essentially a British naval base, a small British settlement had to contend with a powerful community of Dutch settlers and their African and Asian slaves as well as indigenous African peoples. In 1834 the British antagonised the Dutch settlers by abolishing slavery, and 12–14,000 Dutch set off into the African interior on what became known as the Great Trek (Figure 1.2). This brought them into conflict with African chiefdoms, driving the Ndebele north and defeating the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 before they settled in Natal. Meanwhile the British organised their own razzias east from the Cape, forcibly removing the Xhosa and killing their cattle, so that 40,000 died of starvation and 30,000 became labourers in Cape colony.22

  Figure 1.2 The myth of white settlement: the Great Trek of the Boers into the African interior. ‘The bullock-waggons wound slowly over the billowy plains’ (c.1908) from H. E. Marshall, Our Empire Story (1920).

  Getty Images / Hulton Fine Art Collection / 533389780

  In Canada, British forces had used an American Indian confederacy under Shawneechief Tecumseh against the Americans in the War of 1812, but the Amerindians did not benefit. Between 1824 and 1844 their population in Upper (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) fell from 18,000 to 12,000. Meanwhile unemployed British migrants, those cleared as surplus tenants by Scottish and Irish landlords, or fleeing the Irish famine, came in greater numbers. They generally moved into Upper Canada, which was industrial as well as agricultural, and whose population multiplied by twenty between 1806 and 1861. A gold strike on the Fraser River in British Columbia in 1857 led to an invasion of 25,000 gold seekers, land grabs and wars with local Amerindian tribes.23 The British were keen for Canada to flourish economically and to maintain its security against the United States. They negotiated a free trade treaty between Canada and the United States in 1854 and British banks promoted a railway between Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Meanwhile in 1860 they abandoned responsibility for protecting the Amerindians to the Canadian authorities, effectively giving them carte blanche to eliminate the tribespeople.24

  Questions of trade and settlement ultimately involved questions of power. Empires were developed to build the strategic might of the metropolitan power and they needed to be secure. This posed questions of governance. Were colonies to be governed from the metropolis, more or less despotically, or afforded a certain degree of self-government? In this respect, Canada was at one end of the spectrum. The size of British investments and the importance of security persuaded the British government to bring the Canadian provinces into a confederation, and for this to enjoy a broad degree of self-government under the Crown, in return for funding its own defence. This was accorded by dominion status in 1867.25

  At the other end of the spectrum was India. Pressures on the East India Company and its army steadily increased as external threats through Afghanistan from Persia and Russia intensified. Burma was annexed after a war in 1824–6 and Sind and the Punjab were annexed after the Afghan War of 1839–42. In 1857 the Bengal army mutinied against what it considered tyrannical and immoral British rule and has been seen as a first jihad against their hegemony.26 The following year Britain decided finally to depose the Mughal emperor and impose direct rule from London, through a Secretary of State for India. The governor-general became viceroy, the army was henceforth recruited not in unreliable Bengal but mostly in the Punjab, which had remained loyal in 1857, and an Indian civil service was created, drawn from the best British public schools. The princes who continued to rule outside the Raj were integrated as feudal lords, bedecked with new honours. To convey the majesty of the new British Raj, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, the capital was moved from the busy port of Calcutta to the old imperial city of Delhi, and the princes rallied to the viceroy in a highly staged ceremony there of 84,000 people on 1 January 1877. The décor and uniforms were designed by Lockwood Kipling, director of the art school at Bombay; his 12-year-old son Rudyard was at boarding school in England. The mercantile republic was now eclipsed by imperial hubris.27

  Algeria was like a hybrid between India and Canada. The indigenous population was subject to military despotism while the European settler population increasingly called the shots. Napoleon III visited Algeria in 1860 and declared that ‘our African possession is not an ordinary colony but an Arab kingdom’. Rumours spread that he wanted to make Abd el Kader its viceroy. This was not to be. The Algerian population in the countryside were governed after 1844 by the army’s ‘Arab bureaux’. A French law of 1863 permitted vast tracts of land to be confiscated from the indigenous populations, who were corralled into smaller and smaller regions and suffered a terrible famine in 1867–8. Another law of 1865 deemed Algerian Muslims to be French subjects, but not citizens, on the grounds that their religious practices, such as polygamy, made it impossible for them to acknowledge the French Civil Code. In 1870 the Empire was defeated by Prussia and a massive Algerian rebellion broke out. It was brutally put down, its leaders were executed or sent to New Caledonia, and even wider tracts of land were confiscated as punishment. French citizens from Alsace-Lorraine, now annexed by united Germany, were encouraged to settle in Algeria, although only 1,200 families arrived. Meanwhile the Algerian Jewish community of 34,000, which had been petitioning for naturalisation since 1860, was collectively granted citizenship by the Republic in October 1870. This brought the European population to 245,000 in 1872, but divided them even more sharply from the millions of Algerian Muslims.28

  Scrambles, White Supremacy and the Civilising Mission

  The colonial expansion experienced before 1880 has often been described as ‘informal empire’. Trade and settlement took place for the most part without direct administration of large tracts of territory. Clearly this changed in India after 1857 and in Algeria after 1870. Usually, until then, the European powers supported imperial regimes such as the Mughal, Ottoman or the Chinese Empires or nominally vassal regimes such as that of the khedive of Egypt or emperor of Annam while extracting the maximum economic benefit. After 1880 this precarious equilibrium came under threat as a result of two factors. First, non-European governments broke down under a crisis of debt owed to the European powers and faced internal opposition which may loosely be described as nationalist to that humiliating dependency. Second, the domination of Britain and to a lesser extent France on the international scene was challenged by new imperial powers, notably Germany, Russia and Japan, eager for a place in the sun. This led to what Jules Ferry, the architect of French colonialism in the 1880s, called ‘a mass
ive steeplechase on the road to the unknown’.29 The outcome were ‘scrambles’ for vast tracts of Africa and China and colonial powers increasingly assuming the direct responsibility of ‘formal empire’ in their new territories. More elaborate administrative structures were developed which were dominated by European official and settler elites, legitimated by consciously developed myths of white supremacy and the civilising mission.

  Egypt was virtually owned by Britain and France, in terms of both government bonds and shares in the Suez Canal, and in 1876 they established dual control over Egyptian finances. In 1879 they deposed one khedive, who would not pay up, and replaced him by another, who was putty in their hands. Nationalist army officers under Colonel Ahmed Urabi revolted against this humiliation in 1881 and demanded a national parliament and government. This threatened Anglo-French investments and influence and indeed the route to India. Intervention to establish full control was unavoidable. At this point, however, the French dropped out. They were consolidating their hold on Tunisia, where they had substantial investments and dictated terms to the bey. They used the excuse of a raid into Algeria by Tunisian Krumir tribesmen to intervene militarily and force a protectorate on the bey. The French parliament had stumped up for this but one adventure was enough. Thus when riots broke out in Alexandria in June 1882 and sixty Europeans were killed, the British fleet bombarded the port, British forces defeated the Egyptians at the Battle of Tel El Kebir on 13 September and entered Cairo alone.30 It felt like revenge for Napoleon’s coup of 1798.

  The dramatic shift from informal to formal empire triggered the ‘scramble for Africa’. The French realised too late that they had been humiliated as a great power and sought to recoup by pressing their advantage in West Africa. Major Joseph Galliéni returned to France to great acclaim in 1881 after five years as governor-general of Senegal, having concluded a treaty with Sultan Ahmadou, the son of El Hadj Omar, which conceded France a protectorate from the source of the Niger to Timbuktu.31 Meanwhile Captain Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza returned with a treaty he had concluded with the Congolese king Makoko, giving France a protectorate over vast areas of the Congo. The ambition was that this would open the way to Lake Chad and the Nile. The treaty was enthusiastically ratified by the French parliament on 22 November 1882, to make up for the Egyptian débâcle. King Leopold II of Belgium was provoked to assert his interests in the Congo through a company called the International Association of the Congo.32

  The British responded with a trio of chartered companies, updated versions of the East India Company headed by latter-day buccaneers, to drive forward into Africa. They enjoyed powers to deal with local rulers and with international competitors. Former soldier George Goldie headed the Royal Niger Company, chartered in 1886, which consolidated British control in Lower Nigeria, subdued the Asante in the Gold Coast, and took hold of Upper Nigeria in 1895 to cut off the French threat. William Mackinnon, a Scot who had developed steam lines through the Suez Canal to Aden, Zanzibar and India, chartered an Imperial British East India Company in 1888 to drive from Zanzibar to Lake Victoria, securing what became Kenya and Uganda. Finally, Cecil Rhodes, a vicar’s son from Hertfordshire who had built up a diamond mining empire in Kimberley, just north of the Cape, formed a British South Africa Company in 1889 with the financier Alfred Beit. Their aim was to develop gold mining interests in the Transvaal, where gold had been found in 1886, and other mining interests in Mashonaland, later part of Southern Rhodesia. A wilder ambition was to drive a route bearing British trade, settlers and power from the Cape to Cairo.33

  These ambitions led to a direct clash with the French. In 1896 the French sent Galliéni to annex Madagascar, where Queen Ranavalona II and her Merina aristocracy had headed a rebellion against them. The queen was exiled, her chief ministers executed, and Galliéni set about pacifying the island.34 The same year a mission led by Captain Marchand left Marseille to drive west from Senegal to the Upper Nile in order to stake out a Central African French empire. A mere eight French officers and a hundred Tirailleurs Sénégalais made contact with the Mahdists of the Sudan who were challenging the British. Marchand arrived at Fashoda on 29 August 1898 and declared himself acting high commissioner on the Upper Nile and Bahr el-Ghazal. Unfortunately, Kitchener had an army of 20,000; he defeated the Mahdists at Omdurman on 2 September and arrived at Fashoda on 19 September to oust Marchand. The British government ordered the Mediterranean and Channel fleets to sail and the French government climbed down, recalling Marchand on 3 November 1898.35 Meanwhile two more French captains, Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine, set out from Dakar with another unit of Tirailleurs Sénégalais in order to take control of a borderland between the Niger River and Lake Chad which was drawn by an Anglo-French agreement of June 1898. This resulted not in humiliation but atrocity. Heirs of Bugeaud and Faidherbe, they took the view that their domination of African kingdoms could be established only by force, and they left a trail of burned villages, pillage, enslavement and massacres. On 14 July 1899 a colonel sent out from France to arrest them was shot by Voulet, who with Chanoine set up their own short-lived African kingdom in the heart of darkness.36 In the same region, at the same time, the fantasies and anguish of empire were being enacted (Figure 1.3).

  Figure 1.3 A romanticised image of colonialism in Africa: the French attack on Kana, Dahomey, Africa, 1892. Artist Henri Meyer, Le Petit Journal, 19 November 1892.

  Getty Images / Art Media / Hulton Archive / 463929521

  The ‘scramble for Africa’ was echoed by a ‘scramble for China’, where the Qing emperor’s position was becoming increasingly fragile. The French tried to consolidate their influence over his vassal, the emperor of Annam, with a view to extending their influence in Tonkin, which controlled the Red River route into Southern China. Jules Ferry dangled before parliament the bone that China was a market of ‘400 million consumers’.37 In 1883 a war party gained control in Peking, but the French fleet used torpedoes to sink the Chinese fleet further up the coast at Fuzhou in August 1884. Under the Treaty of Tientsin in 1885 the emperor conceded a French protectorate in Tonkin. After 1889 they modelled their rule on that of the British in India, working with the mandarinate and setting up a French Indochinese civil service.38

  In the end, the hammer blow to the Chinese Empire came from another source: Japan. Confronted by Western attempts to open it up after the Opium Wars, Japan restored the Meiji emperor in 1867 and urgently built a modern army, bureaucracy and education system. It undertook a breakneck programme of industrialisation and looked to build an empire on the Chinese mainland, starting with Korea. In 1895 Japan comprehensively defeated China on land and sea, secured Korea as a protectorate and extracted an indemnity of 200 million taels, almost an entire year of income, from the Qing government.39 The Chinese were obliged to go cap in hand to the banks of the European powers for credit. The British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank combined with the Deutsche Asiatische Bank to provide three loans between 1895 and 1898, while French and Russian banks provided other loans. This shattered the remaining ability of China to keep the European powers and Japan out of the country. In return for loans it was obliged to grant spheres of interest to those powers, enabling them to build railways and sink mines far into the interior, using the revenues to ensure that their loans were repaid.40 These incursions provoked economic dislocation and national humiliation, and triggered a peasant-led rebellion of the Boxers United in Righteousness behind the motto, ‘Support the Qing, expel the foreigner!’ The empress dowager declared war on the European powers, who duly brought in a joint army of 20,000 to restore order. They imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels, payable in gold, completely opened up China to foreign trade and reduced the Qing dynasty to a puppet of Western interests.41

  The scrambles for Africa and China progressed with little opposition that could not be overcome by warships and the Maxim gun. There was one exception: South Africa. The issue there was that the British at the Cape had steadily lost control of the Boers, who built up an interior st
ronghold in the Transvaal. The British tried to annex the Transvaal in 1877 and to bring it into a South African Confederation on the Canadian model. They defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in January 1877 but the Boers fought for their independence and defeated the British at the Battle of Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881.42 The Transvaal regained its autonomy as the South African Republic under the presidency of former Great Trekker Paul Kruger. It consolidated its political power by an electoral reform in 1894 that disfranchised the poor whites of British origin, denigrated as Uitlanders or foreigners. A petition was signed by 35,000 of them, demanding their rights, and Cecil Rhodes organised a raid by one of his company administrators, Sir Leander Starr Jameson, to make common cause with them and take power in Pretoria. The raid by a mere 500 men was easily dealt with by the Boers and Kruger received a telegram of congratulation from the German Kaiser.43

  The Germans had established themselves in Southwest Africa in 1884, giving the Boer threat an additional twist. Lord Alfred Milner was sent as High Commissioner to South Africa in 1897 but failed to make Kruger stand down over the franchise. War broke out in 1899. The British brought in the Indian Army and drafted Africans into their ranks. They corralled thousands of Afrikaners into concentration camps in which 28,000 – mainly women and children – died. In the end, the conflict between British and Boer turned out not to be the most important thing. ‘The war between the white races will run its course and pass away’, wrote Boer commander Jan Smuts in January 1902, ‘and the day will come when the evils and horrors of this war will appear as nothing in comparison with its after effects produced on the native mind.’44 The Boers lost the war but won the peace, forming in 1910 a Union of South Africa of Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape, which – like Canada – was accorded the status of a British dominion. The Afrikaners now drew in the ethnic British to construct a racially homongeneous state. An all-white franchise was imposed, overruling the Cape where 10 per cent of the voters were coloured (mixed race) and 5 per cent African. A Native Land Act was passed in 1913, confining African populations to 7 per cent of the country’s land. African workers who migrated to work in the mines were subjected to the legal bondage of indentured labour, barrack-like male-only compounds, a pass system and a ban from pavements. Slowly an African fight-back began. A South African Native National Congress was founded in 1913, becoming the African National Congress in 1923.45