Unit 4: Imperialism and Nationalism in the 19th Century
2020-2021
Riverdale Country School
Assignment 1: Nations, Race, and Empire
a. Robert Tignor, et al. “Consolidating Nations and Constructing Empires” and
“Industry, Science, and Technology” in ​Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: From
1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018) 630; 642 - 644. Ebook.
b. Selections from Herbert Spencer, “Social Statics,” (1851) 5.
c. Selections from Francis Galton, ​Hereditary Genius​ (1869) 6 - 7.
d. Selections from Arthur de Gobineau, ​Inequality of the Human Races (​ 1854) 8 - 9.
e. Selections from Karl Pearson, “National Life from the Standpoint of Science,”
(1900) 10 - 11.
f.
Cecil Rhodes & The British Empire, (1895) 12.
g. John P. McKay, “Building a World Economy,” in ​A History of Western Society
(​3rd ed.) 13 - 16.
h. John P. McKay et.al., “Causes of the New Imperialism” in ​A History of Western
Society (3
​ rd ed.) 17 - 19.
i.
Jules Ferry, “On French Colonial Expansion,” (1884) 20 - 21.
j.
Poems of Rudyard Kipling, “Gunga Din,” (1890) “Recessional,”(1897) and “White
Man’s Burden” (1899) 22 - 26.
Assignment 2: British Imperialism and Indian Nationalism
a. Thomas Macauley, “Minute on Education” and “On Empire and Education”
(1835) 28 - 30.
b. Richard Bulliet et al., “India Under British Rule,” ​The Earth and Its Peoples
(2005) 31 - 35.
c. Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper, ​Empires in World History ​(2010) 36 - 37.
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d. Dadabhai Naoroji, “The Benefits of British Rule,” (1871) 38 - 39.
e. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “Address to the Indian National Congress,” (1907) 40.
f.
Mahatma Gandhi, “To Every English Man in India,” in ​Young India (​ 1920) 41 42.
Assignment 3: Imperialism and Nationalism in Sub-Saharan Africa
a. Robert Tignor, et al. “Colonizing Africa,” in ​Worlds Together, Worlds Apart:
From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018) 648 - 656. Ebook.
b. Factsheet on the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, 45 - 46.
c. Robert Tignor, et al. “The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,” in ​Worlds
Together, Worlds Apart: From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018)
647. Ebook.
d. Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “The Expansion of the Gold Coast Colony,”
in ​Africa in World History (​ 2012) 47 - 52.
e. Trevor Getz, “Laborers and the Bourgeoisie on the Gold Coast,”in ​African Voices
of the Global Past (​ 2014) 53 - 55.
f.
Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, ​Abina and the Important Men ​(2015) [Graphic
Novel]
g. Peter Adebayo, “First Phase: The Gradual Development of the Liberation
Struggle,” in ​African Voices of the Global Past ​(2014) 56 - 58.
h. Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “Colonialism and African Elites,” in ​Africa
in World History ​(2012) 59 - 60.
i.
Jomo Kenyatta, “Gentlemen of the Jungle,” from ​Facing Mount Kenya,​ (1938) 61
- 63.
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Assignment 1: Nations, Race, and Empire
a. Robert Tignor, et al. “Consolidating Nations and Constructing Empires” and
“Industry, Science, and Technology” in ​Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: From
1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018) 630; 642 - 644. Ebook.
b. Selections from Herbert Spencer, “Social Statics,” (1851), 5.
c. Selections from Francis Galton, ​Hereditary Genius​ (1869) 6 - 7.
d. Selections from Arthur de Gobineau, ​Inequality of the Human Races (​ 1854) 8 - 9.
e. Selections from Karl Pearson, “National Life from the Standpoint of Science,”
(1900) 10 - 11.
f.
Cecil Rhodes & The British Empire, (1895) 12.
g. John P. McKay, “Building a World Economy,” in ​A History of Western Society
(​3rd ed.) 13 - 16.
h. John P. McKay et.al., “Causes of the New Imperialism” in ​A History of Western
Society (3
​ rd ed.) 17 - 19.
i.
Jules Ferry, “On French Colonial Expansion,” (1884) 20 - 21.
j.
Poems of Rudyard Kipling, “Gunga Din,” (1890) “Recessional,”(1897) and “White
Man’s Burden” (1899) 22 - 26.
Guiding Questions:
1. What connections does the textbook draw between nationalism and imperialism
in the 19th century? What contradictions does 19th-century European
imperialism raise about the idea of a nation and popular sovereignty?
2. What were key changes of the second industrial revolution? In what ways did this
second industrial revolution further the transformations of the global economy?
3. Be able to describe Charles Darwin’s ideas.
4. How did people try to apply Darwin’s ideas to society?
5. Why is Herbert Spencer’s argument “Social Darwinist?”
6. What, do you suppose, was Spencer’s explanation for economic inequalities?
What do you suppose, was his view of government initiatives to reduce such
inequalities?
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7. How and why, do you think, did Social Darwinism contributed to the creation of
‘eugenics’ as articulated by Francis Galton?
8. What are the differences between Spencer’s ideas and Galton’s?
9. One turn-of-the-century geneticist, Herbert Jennings, argued that, “national and
racial prejudices have entered largely into eugenic propaganda.” In what ways
might the application of Galton’s ideas become rooted in “national and racial
prejudices”?
10. How did Europeans use Social Darwinism and eugenics to justify and legitimate
imperialism and racism? Why was the allegedly scientific basis of Social
Darwinism so useful in such justifications?
11. How does Karl Pearson use Darwin?
12. Why does Karl Pearson believe “national homogeneity” so important? What role
does “struggle” play?
13. What is meant by “imperialism,” and what are the differences between
imperialism before 1800 and imperialism after 1800?
14. What were the (a) economic, (b) political-military, and (c) ideological-cultural
motives for the “New Imperialism?”
15. If Kipling believes that “Sloth and heathen Folly” will bring all the white man’s
“hope to nought,” why must the white man nevertheless “take up” the onerous
“burden?”
16. In what ways do Kipling’s poems reflect the motivations for European
imperialism in the 19th century?
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Assignment 1: Nations, Race, and Empire
(a) Robert Tignor, et al. “Consolidating Nations and Constructing
Empires” and “Industry, Science, and Technology” in ​Worlds
Together, Worlds Apart: From 1750 to the Present​, 5th
edition, vol. C (2018) 630; 642 - 644. Ebook.
(b)
Selections from Herbert Spencer, “Social Statics,” (1851).
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline which is a little cruel
that it may be very kind. . . . It seems hard that an unskillfulness which with all his efforts
he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a labourer
incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear
the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle
for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately but in connection with the
interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of
beneficence--the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased
parents, and singles out the intemperate and the debilitated as the victims of an
epidemic.
There are many very amiable people who have not the nerve to look this matter
fairly in the face. Disabled as they are by their sympathies with present suffering . . . they
pursue a course which is injudicious, and in the end even cruel. . . . Blind to the fact that
under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile
slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning men
advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases
the vitiation--absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent
by offering them an unfailing provision, and ​discourages t​ he multiplication of the
competent and provident by heightening the difficulty of maintaining a family. And thus
in their eagerness to prevent the salutary sufferings that surround us these sigh-wise and
groan-foolish people bequeath to posterity a continually increasing curse. . . .
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(c) Selections from Francis Galton, ​Hereditary Genius​ (1869)
H2 Intro: ​Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a British explorer, psychologist and
anthropologist, best known for his studies of human intelligence and his establishment
of eugenics, the science of improving the traits of a given population through setting
parameters on breeding. A cousin of the famed evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin,
Galton devoted his life to the study of behavioral genetics, coining both the term
“eugenics” and the phrase “nature versus nurture.” In his 1869 book ​Hereditary Genius,​
Galton proposed the inheritance of ability: according to Galton’s theory, both mental
abilities and physical traits are inherited.
-
Adapted from ​Encyclopedia Britannica &
​ University of St. Andrews
‘Biographies’)
The direct result of this inquiry is to make manifest the great and measurable
differences between the mental and bodily faculties of individuals, and to prove that the
laws of heredity are as applicable to the former as to the latter. Its indirect result is to
show that a vast but unused power is vested in each generation over the very natures of
their successors, that is, over their inborn faculties and dispositions. The brute power of
doing this by means of appropriate marriages or abstention from marriage undoubtedly
exists, however much the circumstances of social life may hamper its employment. . . .
The striking results of an evil inheritance have already forced themselves so far on the
popular mind, that indignation is freely expressed, without any marks of disapproval
from others, at the yearly output by unfit parents of weakly children who are
constitutionally incapable of growing up into serviceable citizens and who are a serious
encumbrence to the nation. . . .
I propose to show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by
inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of
the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy . . . to obtain by careful selection a
permanent breed of dogs or horses . . . so it would be quite practicable to produce a
highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.
I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little
suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature, and
that others are working towards its improvement. . . .
We may reckon upon the advent of a time when civilisation, which is now sparse
and feeble and far more superficial than it is vaunted to be, shall overspread the globe.
Ultimately it is sure to do so, because civilisation is the necessary fruit of high intelligence when found in a social animal, and there is no plainer lesson to be read off the
face of Nature than that the result of the operation of her laws is to evoke intelligence in
connexion with sociability. Intelligence is as much an advantage to an animal as physical
strength or any other natural gift, and therefore, out of two varieties of any race of
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animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most intelligent variety is sure to
prevail in the battle of life. Similarly, among intelligent animals, the most social race is
sure to prevail, other qualities being equal. . . .
I must beg the reader to bring distinctly before his mind how reasonable it is that
such influences should be expected to exist. How consonant it is to all analogy and
experience to expect that the control of the nature of future generations should be as
much within the power of the living, as the health and well- being of the individual is in
the power of the guardians of his youth. . . . Our world appears hitherto to have
developed itself, mainly under the influence of unreasoning affinities; but of late, Man,
slowly growing to be intelligent, humane, and capable, has appeared on the scene of life
and profoundly modified its conditions. He . . . is already able to act on the experiences
of the past, to combine closely with distant allies, and to prepare for future wants, known
only through the intelligence, long before their pressure has become felt. He has
introduced a vast deal of civilisation and hygiene which influence, in an immense degree,
his own well-being and that of his children; it remains for him to bring other policies into
action, that shall tell on the natural gifts of his race. . . .
Certain influences retard the average age of marriage, while others hasten it; and
the general character of my argument will be to prove, that an enormous effect upon the
average natural ability of a race may be produced by means of those influences. I shall
argue that the wisest policy is that which results in retarding the average age of marriage
among the weak, and in hastening it among the vigorous classes; whereas, most
unhappily for us, the influence of numerous social agencies has been strongly and
banefully exerted in the precisely opposite direction. . . . It may seem monstrous that the
weak should be crowded out by the strong, but it is still more monstrous that the races
best fitted to play their part on the stage of life, should out by the incompetent, the ailing,
and the desponding.
The time may hereafter arrive, in far distant years, when the population of the
earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of number and suitability of race, as the
sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in an orchard-house; in the meantime, let us
do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best fitted to invent and
conform to a high and generous civilisation, and not, out of a mistaken instinct of giving
support to the weak, prevent the incoming of strong and hearty individuals. . . .
The entire human race, or anyone of its varieties, may indef- initely increase its
numbers by a system of early marriages, or it may wholly annihilate itself by the
observance of celibacy; it may also introduce new human forms by means of the
intermarriage of varieties and of a change in the conditions of life. It follows that the
human race has a large control over its future forms of activity,--far more than any
individual has over his own, since the freedom of individuals is narrowly restricted by the
cost, in energy, of exercising their wills.
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(d) Selections from Arthur de Gobineau, ​Inequality of the Human Races
(1854).
Intro from George L. Mosse (1998): ​Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur
l’inegalite des races humaines (1853-1855) provided the classic synthesis which so
largely determined the nature of modern racist thought. Gobineau drew on
anthropology, linguistics and history in order to construct a fully furnished intellectual
edifice in which race explained everything in the past, present, and future. Racism was
the answer to the ills of his own times; at one and the same time an explanation of the
past and a guide to the present. Aryan superiority is explained through the so-called
history of the white, black and yellow races, the rise and fall of civilizations, all due to
the traits and spirit of the dominant race. Gobineau’s ideas of purity​ ​of race and its
inevitable corruption by race-mixing remained influential as a world view.
How and why is a nation’s vigour lost? How does it degen- erate? These are the
questions which we must try to answer. . . . . . . The word degenerate, when applied to a
people, means (as it ought to mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic
value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual
adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood. . . . The heterogeneous
elements that henceforth prevail in him give him quite a different nationality- a very
original one, no doubt, but such originality is not to be envied. . . . .
I think I am right in concluding . . . that the human race in all its branches has a
secret repulsion from the crossing of blood, a repulsion which in many of the branches is
invincible, and in others is only conquered to a slight extent. . . .
The purer a race keeps its blood, the less will its social foundations be liable to
attack; for the general way of thought will remain the same. Yet the desire for stability
cannot be entirely satisfied for long. The admixture of blood will be followed by some
modifications in the fundamental ideas of the people, and these again-by an itch for
change in the building itself. Such change will sometimes mean real progress, especially
in the dawn of a civilization, when the governing principle is usually rigid and absolute,
owing to the exclusive predominance of some single race. Later, the tinkering will
become incessant, as the mass is more heterogeneous and loses its singleness of aim; and
the community will not always be able to congratulate itself on the result. . . .
Civilization is incommunicable, not only to savages, but also to more enlightened
nations. This is shown by the efforts of French goodwill and conciliation in the ancient
kingdom of Algiers at the present day, as well as by the experience of the English in
India, and the Dutch in Java. There are no more striking and conclusive proofs of the
unlikeness and inequality of races. . . .
As soon as two nations are fused together, a revolution takes place in their
respective languages; this is sometimes slow sometimes sudden, but always inevitable.
The languages are changed and, after a certain time, die out as separate entities. The new
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tongue is a compromise between them, the dominant element being furnished by the
speech of the race that has con- tributed most members to the new people. . . .
The linguistic results of the fusion of two peoples are as individual as the new
racial character itself. One may say generally that no language remains pure after it has
come into close contact with a different language. . . . Thus language is one of the most
fragile and delicate forms of property; and we may often see a noble and refined speech
being affected by barbarous idioms and passing itself into a kind of relative barbarism.
By degrees it will lose its beauty; its vocabulary will be impoverished, and many of its
forms obsolete, while it will show an irresistible tendency to become assimilated to its
inferior neighbour. . . .
The world of art and great literature that comes from the mixture of blood, the
improvement and ennoblement of inferior races-all these are wonders for which we must
needs be thankful. The small have been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been
lowered by the same process; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair. . . .
The good as well as the bad qualities are seen to diminish in intensity with
repeated intermixture of blood; but they also scatter and separate off from each other,
and are often mutually opposed. The white race originally possessed the monopoly of
beauty, intelligence and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created,
which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both
weak and ugly.
If the facts are as I say, then we have an irrefragable proof of the nobility of our
own species.
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(e) Selections from Karl Pearson, “National Life from the Standpoint of
Science,” (1900)
H2 Intro:​ ​Karl Pearson was a British mathematician, follower of Francis Galton, and
the first Professor of Eugenics. His theories of eugenics were based on a “theory of
inheritance through continuous blending and variation.” Pearson was particularly
interested in using anthro- pometry, the measuring of parts of the human body, to
determine and police national and racial identity. With the rise of modern genetics, his
theories were discredited and abandoned by scientists.
-
Adapted from Lucy Bland and Lesley A. Hall “Eugenics in Britain: The View
from the Metropole,” in T
​ he Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization
has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the
physically and mentally fitter race. . . .
You will see that my view--and I think it may be called the scientific view of a
nation--is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by
insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up
to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races,
and with equal races by the struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material
and food supply. This is the natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can
in its main features subvert it. . . .
Struggle of race against race, and of man against man-- if this be the scientific
view of life, the basis of human progress--how have human love and sympathy come to
play such a great part in the world? Here, again, I think science has something to say,
although the earlier interpreters of evolution rather obscured it. They painted evolution
as the survival of the fittest individual, and spoke of his struggle against his fellows.
But this is not the only form of selection at work; it is often quite the least
effective phase of the contest. Consciously or unconsciously, one type of life is fighting
against a second type, and all life is struggling with its physical environment. The safety
of a gregarious animal--and man is essentially such--depends upon the intensity with
which the social instinct has been developed. The stability of a race depends entirely on
the extent to which the social feelings have got a real hold on it. . . . The nation organized
for the struggle must be a ​homogeneous w
​ hole, not a mixture of superior and inferior
races. . . .
This need for homogeneity in a nation may be pursued further. We must not have
class differences and wealth differences and education differences so great within the
community that we lose the sense of common interest, and feel only the pressure of the
struggle of man against man. No tribe of men can work together unless the tribal interest
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dominates the personal and individual interest at all points where they come into
conflict. . . .
The true statesman has to limit the internal struggle of the community in order to
make it stronger for the external struggle. We must reward ability, we must pay for
brains, we must give larger advantage to physique; but we must not do this at a rate
which renders the lot of the mediocre a wholly unhappy one. We must foster exceptional
brains and physique for national purposes; but, however useful prize-cattle may be, they
are not bred for their own sake, but as a step towards the improvement of the whole
herd.
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(f) Cecil Rhodes & The British Empire, (1895)
I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the
unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread’, ‘bread’,
‘bread,’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and became more than ever
convinced of the impor- tance of imperialism. . . .
My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40
million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial
statesman must acquire new lands and settle the surplus population, to provide new
markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always
said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become
imperialists.
“​The Rhodes Colossus​” -- This ​Punch ​cartoon from 1892 captures Cecil Rhodes’ imperial
ambitions. A key player in Europe’s “Scramble for Africa,” Rhodes aimed to build a railway from
Cairo to Cape Town.
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(g) ​John P. McKay, “Building a World Economy,” in ​A History of
Western Society (3
​ rd ed.)
While both nationalism and urban life were transform- ing Western society,
Western society itself was reshaping the world. At the peak of its power and pride, the
West entered the third and most dynamic phase of the aggressive expansion that began
with the Crusades and continued with the great discoveries and the rise of seaborne
colonial empires. An ever-growing stream of products, people, and ideas flowed out of
Europe in the nineteenth century. Hardly any comer of the globe was left untouched. The
most spectacular manifestations of Western expansion came in the late nineteenth
century, when the leading European nations established or enlarged their far flung
political empires. The political annexation of territory in the 1880s--the “new
imperialism,” as it is often called by historians--was the capstone of a profound
underlying economic and technological process. How and why did this many-sided,
epoch-making expansion occur and what were some of its con- sequences for the West
and the rest of the world? This chapter will focus on these questions.
Building a World Economy
The Industrial Revolution created, first in Great Britain and then in continental
Europe and North America, a growing and tremendously dynamic economic system. In
the course of the nineteenth century, that system was extended across the face of the
earth. Much of this extension into non-Western areas was peaceful and beneficial for all
concerned, for the West had many products and techniques the rest of the world desired.
If peaceful methods failed, however. Europeans did not stand on ceremony. They used
their superior military power to force non- Western nations to open their doors to trade
and investment.
Trade and Commerce
Commerce between nations has always been a powerful stimulus to economic
development. Never was this more true than in the nineteenth century, when world trade
grew prodigiously. World trade grew modestly until about 1840, and then it took off.
After a slowdown in the last years of the century, another surge lasted until World War
One. The value of world trade in 1913 was roughly twenty-five times what it had been in
1800. This figure actually understates growth, since average prices of both manufactured
goods and raw materials were substantially lower in 1913 than in 1800. In a general way,
the enormous increase in international commerce summed up the growth of an
interlocking world economy, centered in and directed by Europe.
Great Britain played a key role in using trade to tie all corners of the world
together economically. In 1815 Britain already had a colonial empire, for India, Canada,
Australia, and other scattered areas remained British possessions after American
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independence. The technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution allowed
Britain to manufacture cotton textiles, iron, and other goods more cheaply and to far
outstrip domestic demand for such products. By 1820 Britain was exporting half of its
cotton textiles, for example. As European nations and the United States erected
protective tariff barriers and began to industrialize, British cotton-textile manufacturers
aggressively sought and found other foreign markets. In 1820 Europe bought half of
Britain’s cotton-textile exports and India bought only 6 percent. By 1850 India bought 25
percent and Europe only 16 percent of a much larger total.
Moreover, after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Britain’s commitment to free
trade was unswerving. The decisive argument in the battle against tariffs on imported
grain had been, “We must give. if we mean honestly to receive, and buy as well as sell.”
Until 1914 Britain thus remained the world’s emporium where not only agricultural
products and raw materials but also manufactured goods entered freely. Free access to
the enormous market of Britain and its empire stimulated business activities around the
world.
The growth of trade was facilitated by the conquest of distance. The earliest
railroad construction occurred in Europe (including Russia) and in America north of the
Rio Grande: other parts of the globe saw the building of rail lines after 1860. By 1920
more than one-quarter of the world’s railroads were in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and
Australia. Wherever railroads were built, they drastically reduced transportation costs,
opened new economic opportunities, and called forth new skills and attitudes. Moreover
in the areas of massive European settlement--North America and Australia--they were
built in advance of the population and provided a means of settling the land.
The power of steam revolutionized transportation by sea as well as by land. In
1807 inhabitants of the Hudson Valley in New York saw the “Devil on the Way to Albany
in a saw- mill,” as Robert Fulton‘s steamship ​Clermont t​ raveled 150 miles upstream in
thirty-two hours. Steam power, long used to drive paddle-wheelers on rivers, particularly
in Russia and North America, finally began to supplant sails on the oceans of the world
in the late 1860s. Lighter, stronger, cheap steel replaced iron, which had replaced wood.
Screw propellers superseded paddle wheels, while mighty compound steam engines cut
fuel consumption by half. Passenger and freight rates tumbled, and the intercontinental
shipment of low priced raw materials became feasible. In addition to the large passenger
liners and freighters of the great shipping companies, there were innumerable
independent tramp steamers searching endlessly for cargo around the world.
An account of an actual voyage by a typical tramp freighter will highlight
nineteenth-century developments in global trade. The ship left England in 1910, carrying
rails and general freight to western Australia. From there, it carried lumber to
Melbourne in southeastern Australia, where it took on harvester combines for Argentina.
In Buenos Aires it loaded wheat for Calcutta, and in Calcutta it took on jute for New
York. From New York it carried a variety of industrial products to Australia before
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returning to England with lead, wool, and wheat after a voyage of approximately 72.000
miles to six continents in seventeen months.
The revolution in land and sea transportation helped European pioneers to open
up vast new territories and to produce agricultural products and raw materials there for
sale in Europe. Moreover, the development of refrigerated railway cars and, from the
1880s, refrigerator ships enabled first Argentina and then the United States, Australia,
and New Zealand to ship mountains of chilled or frozen beef and mutton to European
(mainly British) consumers. From Asia, Africa, and Latin America came not only the
traditional tropical products--spices, tea, sugar, coffee--but new raw materials for
industry, such as jute, rubber, cotton, and coconut oil.
Intercontinental trade was enormously facilitated by the Suez and Panama
canals. Of great importance, too, was large and continuous investment in modern port
facilities, which made loading and unloading cheaper, faster, and more depend- able.
Finally, transoceanic telegraph cables inaugurated rapid communications among the
financial centers of the world. While a British tramp freighter steamed from Calcutta to
New York, a broker in London was arranging, by telegram, for it to carry an American
cargo to Australia. World commodity prices were also instantaneously conveyed by the
same network of communications.
In surveying these dramatic and impressive developments, one must remember
that, in terms of value, most ​trade ​(as opposed to most ​shipping)​ was among European
nations, the United States, and Canada. It was not between Europe and the
colonial-tropical lands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For example, Britain and
Germany, both great world traders, carried on a very large and profitable trade with each
other before World War One. Between 1900 and 1913, Britain’s second-best customer in
the entire world (after India) was Germany, and Britain was Germany’s largest single
customer. Germany sold twice as much to Britain alone as to all of Africa and Asia
combined. Before 1914 world trade was centered in the prosperous, tightly integrated
European economy.
Foreign Investment
The growth of trade and the conquest of distance encour- aged the expanding
European economy to make massive foreign investments. Beginning about 1840,
European capitalists started to invest large sums in foreign lands. They did not stop until
the outbreak of World War One in 1914. By that year, Europeans had invested more than
$40 billion abroad. Great Britain, France, and Germany were the principal investing
countries, although by 1913 the United States was emerging as a substantial foreign
investor. The sums involved were enormous.
In the decade before 1914, Great Britain was investing 7 percent of its annual
national income abroad, or slightly more than it was investing in its entire domestic
economy. The great gap between rich and poor meant that the wealthy and moderately
well-to-do could and did send great sums abroad in search of interest and dividends.
15
Contrary to what many people assume, most of the capital exported did not go to
European colonies or protectorates in Asia and Africa. About three quarters of total
European investment went to other European countries, the United States and Canada,
Australia and New Zealand, and Latin America. The reason was simple: Europe found its
most profitable opportunities for investment in construction of the railroads, ports, and
utilities that were necessary to settle and develop those almost-vacant lands. By loaning
money for a railroad in Argentina or in Canada’s prairie provinces, for example,
Europeans not only collected interest but also enabled white settlers to buy European
rails and locomotives, developed sources of cheap wheat, and opened still more territory
for European settlement. Much of this investment--such as in American railroads, fully a
third of whose capital in 1890 was European, or in Russian railroads, which drew heavily
on loans from France--was peaceful and mutually beneficial. The victims were native
American Indians and Australian aborigines, who were decimated by the diseases,
liquor, and guns of an aggressively expanding Western society.
16
(h) John P. McKay et.al., “Causes of the New Imperialism” in ​A
History of Western Society (​3rd ed.)
Many factors contributed to the late nineteenth-century rush for territory and
empire, which was in turn one aspect of Western society’s generalized expansion in the
age of industry and nationalism. Little wonder that controversies have raged over
interpretation of the new imperialism, especially since authors of every persuasion have
often exaggerated particular aspects in an attempt to prove their own theories. Yet
despite complexity and controversy, basic causes are clearly identifiable.
Economic motives played an important role in the extension of political empires,
especially the British Empire. By the late 1870s, France, Germany, and the United States
were industrializing rapidly behind rising tariff barriers. Great Britain was losing its early
lead and facing increasingly tough competition in foreign markets. In this new economic
situation, Britain came to value old possessions, such as India and Canada, more highly.
The days when a leading free-trader like Richard Cobden could denounce the
“bloodstained fetish of Empire” and statesman Benjamin Disraeli could call colonies a
“millstone round our necks” came to an abrupt end. When continental powers began to
grab any and all unclaimed territory in the 1880s, the British followed suit immediately.
They feared that France and Germany would seal off their empires with high tariffs and
restrictions and that future economic opportunities would be lost forever.
Actually, the overall economic gains of the new imperialism proved quite limited
before 1914. The new colonies were simply too poor to buy much, and they offered few
immediately profitable investments. Nonetheless, even the poorest, most barren desert
was jealously prized, and no territory was ever abandoned. Colonies became important
for political and diplomatic reasons. Each leading country saw colonies as crucial to
national security, military power, and international prestige. For instance, safeguarding
the Suez Canal played a key role in the British occupation of Egypt, and protecting Egypt
in turn led to the bloody reconquest of the Sudan. National security was a major factor in
the United States’ decision to establish firm control over the Panama Canal Zone in 1903.
Far-flung possessions guaranteed ever-growing navies the safe havens and the
dependable coaling stations they needed in time of crisis or war.
Many people were convinced that colonies were essential to great nations. “There
has never been a great power without great colonies,” wrote one French publicist in 1877.
“Every virile people has established colonial power,” echoed the famous nationalist
historian of Germany, Heinrich von Treitschke. “All great nations in the fullness of their
strength have desired to set their mark upon barbarian lands and those who fail to participate in this great rivalry will play a pitiable role in time to come.”
Treitschke’s harsh statement reflects not only the increasing aggressiveness of
European nationalism after Bismarck’s wars of German unification but also social
Darwinian theories of brutal competition between races. As one prominent English
economist argued, the “strongest nation has always been conquering the weaker ... and
17
the strongest tend to be best.” Thus European nations, which were seen as racially
distinct parts of the dominant white race, had to seize colonies to show they were strong
and virile. Moreover, since racial struggle was nature’s inescapable law, the conquest of
inferior peoples was just. “The path of progress is strewn with the wreck . . . of inferior
races,” wrote one professor in 1900. “Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the
stepping stones on which mankind has risen to the higher intellectual and deeper
emotional life of today.”” Social Darwinism and racial doctrines fostered imperial
expansion.
Finally, certain special-interest groups in each country were powerful agents of
expansion. Shipping companies wanted lucrative subsidies. White settlers on dangerous,
turbulent frontiers constantly demanded more land and greater protection. Missionaries
and humanitarians wanted to spread religion and stop the slave trade. Explorers and
adventurers sought knowledge and excitement. Military men and colonial officials,
whose role has often been overlooked by writers on imperialism, foresaw rapid
advancement and high-paid positions in growing empires. The actions of such groups
and the determined individuals who led them thrust the course of empire forward.
Western society did not rest the case for empire solely on naked conquest and a
Darwinian racial struggle, or on power politics and the need for naval bases on every
ocean. In order to satisfy their consciences and answer their critics, imperialists
developed additional arguments.
A favorite idea was that Europeans could and should “civilize” more primitive
nonwhites. According to this view, nonwhites would eventually receive the benefits of
modern economies, cities, advanced medicine, and higher standards of living. In time,
they might be ready for self-government and Western democracy. Thus the French spoke
of their sacred “civilizing mission.” Rudyard Kipling ( 1865-1936), who wrote masterfully
of Anglo-Indian life and was perhaps the most influential writer of the 1890s, exhorted
Europeans to unselfish service in distant land.
Many Americans accepted the ideology of the white man’s burden. It was an
important factor in the decision to rule rather than liberate the Philippines after the
Spanish-American War. Like their European counterparts, these Americans sincerely
believed that their civilization had reached unprecedented height and that they had
unique benefits to bestow on all “less- advanced” peoples. Another argument was that
imperial government protected natives from tribal warfare as well as cruder forms of
exploitation by white settlers and businessmen.
Peace and stability under European control also permitted the spread of
Christianity--the “true” religion. In Africa, Catholic and Protestant missionaries
competed with Islam south of the Sahara, seeking converts and building schools to
spread the Gospel. Many Africans’ first real contact with whites was in mission schools.
As late as 1942, for example, 97 percent of Nigeria’s student population was in mission
schools. Some peoples, like the Ibos in Nigeria, became highly christianized.
18
Such occasional successes in black Africa contrasted with the general failure of
missionary efforts in India, China, and the Islamic world. There, Christians often
preached in vain to peoples with ancient, complex religious beliefs. Yet the number of
Christian believers around the world did increase substantially in the nineteenth century,
and missionary groups kept trying. Unfortunately, “many missionaries had drunk at the
well of European racism,” and this probably prevented them from doing better.”
19
(i) Jules Ferry, “On French Colonial Expansion,” (1884)
H2 Intro:​ Ferry was twice prime minister of France, from [1880-1881, 1883-1885]. He
is especially remembered for championing laws that removed Catholic influence from
most education in France and for promoting a vast extension of the French colonial
empire.
-
Internet History Sourcebook, “Modern History Sourcebook”
The policy of colonial expansion is a political and economic system . . . that can be
connected to three sets of ideas: economic ideas; the most far-reaching ideas of
civilization; and ideas of a political and patriotic sort.
In the area of economics, I am placing before you, with the support of some
statistics, the considerations that justify the policy of colonial expansion, as seen from
the perspective of a need, felt more and more urgently by the industrialized population of
Europe and especially the people of our rich and hardworking country of France: the
need for outlets [for exports]. Is this a fantasy? Is this a concern [that can wait] for the
future? Or is this not a pressing need, one may say a crying need, of our industrial
population? I merely express in a general way what each one of you can see for himself in
the various parts of France. Yes, what our major industries [textiles, etc.], irrevocably
steered by the treaties of 18601 into exports, lack more and more are outlets. Why?
Because next door Germany is setting up trade barriers; because across the ocean the
United States of America have become protectionists, and extreme protectionists at that;
because not only are these great markets . . . shrinking, becoming more and more
difficult of access, but these great states are beginning to pour into our own markets
products not seen there before. This is true not only for our agriculture, which has been
so sorely tried . . . and for which competition is no longer limited to the circle of large
European states. . . . Today, as you know, competition, the law of supply and demand,
freedom of trade, the effects of speculation, all radiate in a circle that reaches to the ends
of the earth. . . . That is a great complication, a great economic difficulty; . . . an
extremely serious problem. It is so serious, gentlemen, so acute, that the least informed
persons must already glimpse, foresee, and take precautions against the time when the
great South American market that has, in a manner of speaking, belonged to us forever
will be disputed and perhaps taken away from us by North American products. Nothing
is more serious; there can be no graver social problem; and these matters are linked
intimately to colonial policy.
Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly
that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races. . . .
20
I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have
the duty to civilize the inferior races. . . . In the history of earlier centuries these duties,
gentlemen, have often been misunderstood; and certainly when the Spanish soldiers and
explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfill their duty as men
of a higher race. . . . But, in our time, I maintain that European nations acquit themselves
with generosity, with grandeur, and with sincerity of this superior civilizing duty.
I say that French colonial policy, the policy of colonial expansion, the policy that
has taken us under the Empire [the Second Empire, of Napoleon 1111, to Saigon, to
Indochina [Vietnam], that has led us to Tunisia, to Madagascar-I say that this policy of
colonial expansion was inspired by . . . the fact that a navy such as ours cannot do
without safe harbors, defenses, supply centers on the high seas. . . . Are you unaware of
this? Look at a map of the world.
Gentlemen, these are considerations that merit the full attention of patriots. The
conditions of naval warfare have greatly changed. . . . At present, as you know, a warship,
however perfect its design, cannot carry more than two weeks' supply of coal; and a
vessel without coal is a wreck on the high seas, abandoned to the first occupier. Hence
the need to have places of supply, shelters, ports for defense and provisioning. . . . And
that is why we needed Tunisia; that is why we needed Saigon and Indochina; that is why
we need Madagascar . . . and why we shall never leave them! . . . Gentlemen, in Europe
such as it is today, in this competition of the many rivals we see rising up around us,
some by military or naval improvements, others by the prodigious development of a
constantly growing population; in a Europe, or rather in a universe thus constituted, a
policy of withdrawal or abstention is simply the high road to decadence! In our time
nations are great only through the activity they deploy; it is not by spreading the
peaceable light of their institutions . . . that they are great, in the present day.
Spreading light without acting, without taking part in the affairs of the world,
keeping out of all European alliances and seeing as a trap, an adventure, all expansion
into Africa or the Orient--for a great nation to live this way, believe me, is to abdicate
and, in less time than you may think, to sink from the first rank to the third and fourth.
21
(j) Poems of Rudyard Kipling, “Gunga Din,” (1890) “Recessional,”(1897)
and “White Man’s Burden” (1899).
H2 Intro:​ ​Kipling was born in Bombay, India. His parents were English; his father was
long-time curator of the Lahore Museum. In addition to many volumes of poetry, Kipling wrote
The Jungle Books (1894- 95), Captains Courageous (1897), Just So Stories (1902), and Kim
(1901). “The White Man’s Burden” was composed on the occasion of the United States’ victory
over Spain in 1898 and its conquest of Cuba and the Philippines. Kipling sent the first copy of the
poem to Teddy Roosevelt, just elected governor of New York and a fellow imperialist.
“Recessional” was composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which was
celebrated lavishly throughout the British Empire in 1897.
“Gunga Din” (1890)
You may talk o’ gin an’ beer
When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ‘im that’s got it.
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ‘Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them black-faced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental ​bhisti,​ Gunga Din.
It was “Din! Din! Din!
You limping lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!
Hi! slippy hitherao!
Water, get it! Panee lao!
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din!”
The uniform ‘e wore
Was nothin’ much before,
An’ rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind,
For a twisty piece o’ rag
An’ a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment ‘e could find.
When the sweatin’ troop-train lay
22
In a sidin’ through the day,
Where the ‘eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl,
We shouted “Harry By!”
Till our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped ‘im ‘cause ‘e couldn’t serve us all.
It was “Din! Din! Din!
You ‘eathen, where the mischief ‘ave you been?
You put some juldee in it,
Or I’ll marrow you this minute,
If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!”
‘E would dot an’ carry one
Till the longest day was done,
An’ ‘e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin’ nut,
‘E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.
With ‘is mussick on ‘is back,
‘E would skip with our attack,
An’ watch us till the bugles made “Retire.”
An’ for all ‘is dirty ‘ide,
‘E was white, clear white, inside
When ‘e went to tend the wounded under fire!
It was “Din! Din! Din!”
With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green.
When the cartridges ran out,
You could ‘ear the front-files shout:
“Hi! ammunition-mules an’ Gunga Din!”
I sha’n’t forgit the night
When I dropped be’ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should ‘a’ been.
I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.
‘E lifted up my ‘ead,
An’ ‘e plugged me where I bled,
An’ ‘e guv me ‘arf-a-pint o’ water—green;
23
It was crawlin’ an’ it stunk,
But of all the drinks I’ve drunk,
I’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
It was “Din! Din! Din!
‘Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ‘is spleen;
‘E’s chawin’ up the ground an’ ‘e’s kickin’ all around:
For Gawd’s sake, git the water, Gunga Din!”
‘E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
‘E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ‘e died:
“I ‘ope you liked your drink,” sez Gunga Din.
So I’ll meet ‘im later on
In the place where ‘e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen;
‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to pore damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din!
Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
24
“Recessional” (1897)
God of our fathers, known of old-Lord of our far-flung battle line
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine-Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe-Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law-Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard-All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard-For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!
25
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899)
Take up the White Man’s burden--
The ports ye shall not enter,
Send forth the best ye breed--
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go bind your sons to exile
Go mark them with your living,
To serve your captives’ need;
And mark them with your dead.
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Take up the White Man’s burden--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
And reap his old reward:
Half-devil and half-child.
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
Take up the White Man’s burden--
The cry of hosts ye humour
In patience to abide,
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
To veil the threat of terror
“Why brought he us from bondage,
And check the show of pride;
Our loved Egyptian night?”
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
Take up the White Man’s burden--
To seek another’s profit,
Ye dare not stoop to less--
And work another’s gain.
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
Take up the White Man’s burden--
By all ye cry or whisper,
The savage wars of peace--
By all ye leave or do,
Fill full the mouth of Famine
The silent, sullen peoples
And bid the sickness cease;
Shall weigh your gods and you.
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Take up the White Man’s burden--
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Have done with childish days--
Bring all your hopes to nought.
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Take up the White Man’s burden--
Comes now, to search your manhood
No tawdry rule of kings,
Through all the thankless years
But toil of serf and sweeper--
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The tale of common things.
The judgment of your peers!
26
Assignment 2: British Imperialism and Indian Nationalism
a. Thomas Macauley, “Minute on Education” and “On Empire and Education”
(1835) 28 - 30.
b. Richard Bulliet et al., “India Under British Rule,” ​The Earth and Its Peoples
(2005) 31 - 35.
c. Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper, ​Empires in World History ​(2010) 36 - 37.
d. Dadabhai Naoroji, “The Benefits of British Rule,” (1871) 38 - 39.
e. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “Address to the Indian National Congress,” (1907) 40.
f.
Mahatma Gandhi, “To Every English Man in India,” in ​Young India (​ 1920) 41 42.
Guiding Questions:
1. In what ways does Macaulay’s guidance on education in India reflect the
motivations for British empire in the 19th century?
2. How and why does Britain’s role in India change over the course of the 19th
century?
3. In what ways did Britain’s changing role in the global economy shape British
goals and their rule in India? What do British policies and methods of rule
suggest about their goals?
4. What were the political and industrial effects of British Rule on India?
5. How did the goals, methods, and rhetoric of Indian Nationalism change over
time?
6. Who was Dadabhai Naoroji? Who do you think the audience for 2(d) would have
been? How might that have affected the rhetoric and arguments he employed?
7. What tools do Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi believe that Indians
should use to gain independence? In what ways are they similar? In what ways
are they different?
8. What elements unify the Indian nation according to Naoroji, Tilak, and Gandhi?
In what ways do these connect to the elements of nationalism that we discussed
in Unit 1?
27
(a) Thomas Macauley, “Minute on Education” and “On Empire and Education”
(1835).
H2 Intro:​ ​Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English politi- cian and
historian best known for his 1835 speech, “Minute Upon Indian Education.” After
joining Parliament in 1830, Macaulay rose to prominence and was named a member of
the Supreme Council of India in 1834. From this position, Macaulay had the ability to
create a new national system of education. Before leaving India in 1838, Macaulay
worked to create a new Penal Code, leaving his mark on the country in the form of
Western education and criminal law.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as
Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country.
The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken
among the natives of this part of India, contain neither literary nor scientific
information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from
some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems
to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the
people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by
means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it
should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The
whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to
form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated
Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men
distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the
Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one
among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western
literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the
Oriental plan of education. . . .
How, then, stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present
be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign
language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands
pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. . . . Nor is this all. In India, English is
the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the
seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the
seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising,
the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year
28
becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether
we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this
country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the
English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.
The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach
this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no
books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can
teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever
they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can
patronise sound Philosophy and true History, we shall countenance, at the public
expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,—Astronomy, which
would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,—History, abounding with
kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,—and Geography, made up
of seas of treacle [molasses] and seas of butter. . . .
And what are the arguments against that course which seems to be alike
recommended by theory and by experience? . . . It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are
the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and
that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the
duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all
religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small
intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the
most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or
even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. . . .
It is taken for granted by the advocates of Oriental learning, that no native of this
country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt
to prove this; but they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their
opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it as undeniable,
that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and
science on the one side, and a superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the
other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and
experience. . . . Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as
Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of
years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit college, becomes able to read, to
enjoy, and even to imitate, not unhappily, the compositions of the best Greek Authors.
Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and
Sophocles, ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.
In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am
opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt
to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who
may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
29
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich
those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to
render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the
population.
On Empire
I feel that, for the good of India itself, the admission of natives to high office must
be affected by slow degrees. But that, when the fullness of time is come, when the
interest of India requires the change, we ought to refuse to make that change lest we
should endanger our own power, this is a doctrine of which I cannot think without
indignation. Governments, like men, may buy existence too dear. “Propter vitam vivendi
perdere causas,” [“To lose the reason for living, for the sake of staying alive”] is a
despicable policy both in individuals and in states. In the present case, such a policy
would be not only despicable, but absurd. The mere extent of empire is not necessarily
an advantage. To many governments it has been cumbersome; to some it has been fatal.
It will be allowed by every statesman of our time that the prosperity of a community is
made up of the prosperity of those who compose the community, and that it is the most
childish ambition to covet dominion which adds to no man’s comfort or security. To the
great trading nation, to the great manufacturing nation, no progress which any portion of
the human race can make in knowledge, in taste for the conveniences of life, or in the
wealth by which those conveniences are produced, can be a matter of indifference. It is
scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of
European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most
selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and
independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own
kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were
performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too
ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men
is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting
wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless
and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our
customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them
submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening
ambition? Or do we mean to awaken ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent?
Who will answer any of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be
answered in the affirmative, by every person who maintains that we ought permanently
to exclude the natives from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plain before
us: and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honor.
30
(b)Richard Bulliet et al., “India Under British Rule,” ​The Earth and Its
Peoples ​(2005)
Political Reform and Industrial Impact
Whatever it is called, the rebellion of 1857-1858 was a turning point in the history
of modern India. Some say it marks the beginning of modern India. In its wake Indians
gained a new centralized government, entered a period of rapid economic growth, and
began to develop a new national consciousness.
The changes in government were immediate. In 1858 Britain eliminated the last
traces of Mughal and Company rule. In their place, a new Secretary of State for India in
London oversaw Indian policy, and a new government-general in Delhi acted as the
British monarch’s viceroy on the spot. A proclamation by Queen Victoria in November
1858 guaranteed all Indians equal protection of the law and the freedom to practice their
religions and social customs; it also assured Indian princes that so long as they were
loyal to the queen British India would respect their control of territories and “their
rights, dignity and honour.”
British rule continued to emphasize both tradition and reform after 1857. At the
top, the British viceroys lived in enormous palaces amid hundreds of servants and gaudy
displays of luxury meant to convince Indians that the British viceroys were legitimate
successors to the Mughal emperors. They treated the quasi-independent Indian princes
with elaborate ceremonial courtesy and maintained them in splendor. When Queen
Victoria was proclaimed “Empress of India” in 1877 and periodically thereafter, the
viceroy’s put on great pageants known as durbars. The most elaborate was the durbar at
Delhi in 1902-1903 to celebrate the coronation of King Edward VII, at which Viceroy
Lord Curzon honored himself with a 101-gun salute and a parade of 34,000 troops in
front of 50 princes and 173,000 visitors).
Behind the pomp and glitter, a powerful and efficient bureau- cracy controlled
the Indian masses. Members of the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS), mostly graduates of
Oxford and Cambridge Universities, held the senior administrative and judicial posts.
Numbering only a thousand at the end of the nineteenth century, these men visited the
villages in their districts, heard lawsuits and complaints, and passed judgments. Beneath
them were a far greater number of Indian officials and employees. Recruitment into the
ICS was by open examinations. In theory any British subject could take these exams. But
they were given in England, so in practice the system worked to exclude Indians. In 1870
only one Indian was a member of the ICS. Subsequent reforms by Viceroy Lord Lytton
led to fifty-seven Indian appointments by 1887, but there the process stalled.
The key reason qualified Indians were denied entry into the upper administration
of their country was the racist contempt most British officials felt for the people they
31
ruled. When he became commander-in-chief of the Indian army in 1892, Lord Kitchener
declared:
It is this consciousness of the inherent Superiority of the European which
had won for us India. However well educated and clever a native may be,
and however brave he may have proved himself, I believe that no rank We
can bestow on him would cause him to be considered an equal of the
British officer.
A second transformation of India after 1857 resulted from involvement with
industrial Britain. The government invested millions of pounds Sterling in harbors,
cities, irrigation canals, and other public Works. British interests felled forests to make
way for tea plantations, persuaded Indian farmers to grow cotton and jute for export,
and created great irrigation systems to alleviate the famines that periodically decimated
whole provinces. As a result, India’s trade expanded rapidly.
Most of the exports were agricultural commodities for processing elsewhere:
cotton fiber, opium, tea, silk, and sugar. In return India imported manufactured goods
from Britain, including the flood of machine-made cotton textiles that severely undercut
Indian hand-loom weavers. The effects on individual Indians varied enormously. Some
women found new jobs, though at very low pay, on plantations or in the growing cities,
where prostitution flourished. Others struggled to hold families together or ran away
from abusive husbands. Everywhere in India poverty remained the norm.
The Indian government also promoted the introduction of new technologies into
India not long after their appearance in Britain. Earlier in the century there were
steamboats on the rivers and a massive program of canal building for irrigation.
Beginning in the 1840s a railroad boom (paid for out of government revenues) gave India
its first national transportation network, followed shortly by telegraph lines. Indeed, in
1870 India had the greatest rail network in Asia and the fifth largest in the world.
Originally designed to serve British commerce, the railroads were owned by British
companies, constructed with British rails and equipment, and paid dividends to British
investors. Ninety-nine percent of the railroad employees were Indians, but Europeans
occupied all the top positions—”like a thin film of oil on top of a glass of water, resting
upon but hardly mixing with those below,” as one official report put it.
Although some Indians opposed the railroads at first because the trains mixed
people of different castes, faiths, and sexes, the Indian people took to rail travel with
great enthusiasm. Indians rode trains on business, on pilgrimage, and in search of work.
In 1870 Over 18 million passengers traveled along the network’s 4,775 miles (7,685
kilometers) of track, and more than a half-million messages were sent up and down the
14,000 miles (22,500 kilometers) of telegraph wire. By 1900 India’s trains were carrying
188 million passengers a year.
But the freer movement of Indian pilgrims and the flood of poor Indians into the
cities also promoted the spread of cholera, a disease transmitted through water
32
contaminated by human feces. Cholera deaths rose rapidly during the nineteenth
century, and eventually the disease spread to Europe. In many Indian minds kala mari
(“the black death”) was a divine pun- ishment for failing to prevent the British takeover.
This chastisement also fell heavily on British residents, who died in large numbers. In
1867 officials demonstrated the close connection between cholera and pilgrims who
bathed in and drank from sacred pools and rivers. The installation of a new sewerage
system (1865) and a filtered water supply (1869) in Calcutta dramatically reduced
cholera deaths there. Similar measures in Bombay and Madras also led to great
reductions, but most Indians lived in small villages where famine and lack of sanitation
kept cholera deaths high. In 1900 an extraordinary four out of every thousand residents
of British India died of cholera. Sanitary improvements lowered the rate later in the
twentieth century.
Rising Indian Nationalism
Ironically, both the successes and the failures of British India stimulated the
development of Indian nationalism. Stung by the inability of the rebellion of 1857 to
overthrow British rule, some thoughtful Indians began to argue that the only way for
Indians to regain control of their destiny was to reduce their country’s social and ethnic
divisions and promote Pan-Indian nationalism.
Individuals such as Ranmohun Roy (1772-1833) had promoted development
along these lines a generation earlier, A Western-educated Bengali from a Brahmin
family, Roy was a successful administrator for the East India Company and a thoughtful
Student of Comparative religion. His Brahmo Samaj (Divine Society), founded in 1828,
attracted Indians who sought to reconcile the values they found in the West with the
ancient religious traditions of India. They supported efforts to reform some Hindu
customs, including the restrictions on widows and the practice of child marriage. They
advocated reforming the caste system, encouraged a monotheistic form of Hinduism,
and urged a return to the founding principles of the Upanishads, ancient sacred writings
of Hinduism.
Roy and his supporters had backed earlier British efforts to reform or ban some
practices they found repugnant. Widow burning (sati) was outlawed in 1829 and slavery
in 1843. Reformers sought to correct other abuses of women: prohibi- tions against
widows remarrying were revoked in 1856, and female infanticide was made a crime in
1870.
Although Brahmo Samaj remained an influential movement after the rebellion of
1857, many Indian intellectuals turned to Western secular values and nationalism as the
way to reclaim India for its people. In this process the spread of Western education
played an important role. Roy had studied both Indian and Western Subjects, mastering
ten languages in the process, and helped found the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1816.
Other Western-curriculum schools quickly followed, including Bethune College in
Calcutta, the first secular school for Indian Women, in 1849. European and American
missionaries played a prominent role in the spread of Western education. In 1870 there
33
were 790,000 Indians in over 24,000 elementary and secondary schools, and India’s
three universities (established in 1857) awarded 345 degrees. Graduates of these schools
articulated a new Pan-Indian nationalism that transcended regional and religious
differences.
British Rule and Indian Nationalism
Colonial India was ruled by a Viceroy appointed by the British government and
administered by a few thousand members of the Indian Civil Service. These then, imbued
with a sense of duty toward their subjects, formed one of the more honest (if not
efficient) bureaucracies of all time. Drawn mostly from the English gentry, they liked to
think of India as a land of lords and peasants. They believed it was their duty to protect
the Indian people from the dangers of industrialization, while defending their own
positions from Indian nationalists.
As Europeans they admired modern technology but tried to control its
introduction into India so as to maximize the benefits to Britain and to themselves. For
example, they encouraged railroads, harbors, telegraphs, and other communications
technologies, as well as irrigation and plantations, because they increased India’s foreign
trade and strengthened British control. At the same time, they discouraged the cotton
and steel industries and limited the training of Indian engineers, ostensibly to spare
India the social upheavals that had accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Europe,
while protecting British industry from Indian competition.
At the turn of the century the majority of Indians--especially the peasants,
landowners, and princes--accepted British rule. But the Europeans racist attitude toward
dark-skinned people increasingly offended Indians who had learned English and
absorbed English ideas of freedom and representative government, only to discover that
thinly disguised racial quotas excluded them from the Indian Civil Service, the officer
corps, and prestigious country clubs.
In 1885 a small group of English-speaking Hindu professionals founded a
political organization called the Indian National Congress. For twenty years its members
respectfully petitioned the government for access to the higher administrative positions
and for a voice in official decisions, but they had little influence outside intellectual
circles. Then, in 1905, Viceroy Lord Curzon divided the province of Bengal in two to
improve the efficiency of its administration. This decision, made without consulting
anyone, angered not only educated Indians, who saw it as a way to lessen their influence,
but also millions of uneducated Hindu Bengalis, who suddenly found themselves
outnumbered by Muslims in East Bengal. Soon Bengal was the scene of demonstrations,
boycotts of British goods, and even incidents of violence against the British.
In 1906, while the Hindus of Bengal were protesting the partition of their
province, Muslims, fearful of Hindu dominance elsewhere in India, founded the
All-India Muslim League. Caught in an awkward situation, the government responded by
granting Indians a limited franchise based on wealth. Muslims, however, were on
34
average poorer than Hindus, for many poor and low-caste Hindus had converted to
Islam to escape caste discrimination. Taking advantage of these religious divisions, the
British instituted separate representation and different voting qualifications for Hindus
and Muslims. Then, in 1911, the British transferred the capital of India from Calcutta to
Delhi, the former capital of the Mughal emperors. These changes disturbed Indians of all
classes and religions and raised their political consciousness. Politics, once primarily the
concern of westernized intellectuals, turned into two mass movements: one by Hindus
and one by Muslims.
To maintain their commercial position and prevent social upheavals, the British
resisted the idea that India could, or should, industrialize. Their geologists looked for
minerals, such as coal or manganese, that British industry required. However, when the
only Indian member of the Indian Geological Service, Pramatha Nath Bose, wanted to
prospect for iron ore, he had to resign because the government wanted no part of an
Indian steel industry that could compete with that of Britain. Bose joined forces with
Jamsetji Tata, a Bombay textile magnate who decided to produce steel in spite of British
opposition. With the help of German and American engineers and equipment, Tata’s son
Dorabji opened the first steel mill in India in 1911, in a town called Jamshedpur in honor
of his father. Although it produced only a fraction of the steel that India required,
Janishedpur became a powerful symbol of Indian national pride. It prompted Indian
nationalists to ask why a country that could produce its own steel needed foreigners to
run its government.
35
(c) Jane Burbank & Frederick Cooper, ​Empires in World History ​(2010).
During the decades after the Mutiny, historian Manu Goswami argues,
government actions shaped India into a coherent entity and Indian political activists
began to claim that very space. A British-built railroad network tied India together as
never before, with middle-class Indians from all regions experiencing both the
possibilities of traveling rapidly over long distances and the humiliations of segregation
in the railway cars. The India Civil Service was a unified body, recruiting senior officers
in England and more junior ones among British, Eurasian, and Indian candidates in
India. Indians played important but not equal parts within it, circulating as tax collectors
and census takers across India.
The unification of territory went along with the internal differentiation of its
people. The British thought of India as divided, along lines of caste and religious affinity,
into communities as if Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, and Muslims were neatly bounded from
each other.
Indian intellectuals had as early as the 1810s been aware of constitutional
developments around the world--such as the liberal Spanish constitution of 1812. In
speech and writing Indians began to claim a role in legislative bodies, an end to the
restrictive economic policies of the EIC, and more local administrative authority. Some
promoted a progressive variant of Hinduism. Later in the century, as the public activism
of Indians intensified, British ideas of the Raj--as the regime was called--ran up against
an equally coherent but distinct vision of “Bharat Mata,” “Mother India.” For Hindu
intellectuals, the notion of Bharat Mata embraced all of Índia, but with a Hindu slant to
what constituted its core values and shared history. The large presence of Muslims,
including their connection to the empire Mughals, was downplayed in favor of a direct
link between an ancient, Sanskritic civilization and the Hindu culture of the present.
Indian activists also criticized British policy on its own terms for failure to live up
to the liberal values they had been told about in school. Some activists were sensitive to
the irony that British rulers were posing as Asian overlords paying lip service to the
authority of Indian princes and Rajas while Indians were demanding the rights of
Englishmen.
The political critique of colonialism went along with an economic one, for which
Indian intellectuals used the term “the drain.” They referred to the various means by
which the fruits of Indian labor were funneled to Great Britain. “Home charges” meant
that Indians paid the cost of their own repression: the salaries and pensions of officials,
plus the India Office bureaucracy in London and interest on funds used for railroads and
other projects. World trade, Indian critics of the economy claimed, was manipulated to
serve British rather than. Indian interests, leaving India overexposed to fluctuations in
world markets and compelled to produce export crops even when drought conditions
36
threatened people’s livelihoods. The result was deadly famines in the late nineteenth
century. Economic historians today agree with the critics that British policy in India
produced little economic growth. One estimate is that per capita GDP did not grow at all
between 1820 and 1870, then grew at only 0.5 percent per year until 1913, and stood
below its 1913 level at the time of independence.
Indian critics of empire seized upon the small spaces that colonial policy allowed,
such as councils, which since 1861 had functioned with a mix of elected and appointed
members. The British reserved seats for “minorities,” and that term came to embrace
Muslims--a sad twist for people whose religion was associated with the former empire.
Indians were thus developing a “national” conception one that saw certain people at the
core, others outside, others on the margins of their polity. This notion took on
institutional form with the founding in 1885 of the Indian National Congress. Congress
developed further the critiques of inadequate political representation, discrimination the
civil service, drain of wealth, and inequities of the land revenue system. Congress’s sense
of nation grew out of empire from the empire’s structures of rule, from Indians’ service
as soldiers and laborers elsewhere in the empire, from Indian merchants and financiers
who contributed to and profited from imperial connections.
37
(d) Dadabhai Naoroji, “The Benefits of British Rule,” (1871)​.
H2 Intro:​ ​Dadabhai Naoroji was the first Asian Member of the British House of
Commons and a founding member of the Indian National Congress.
The Benefits of British Rule
In the Cause of Humanity: Abolition of suttee [sati] and infanticide. Destruction
of Dacoits, Thugs, Pindarees, and other such pests of Indian society. Allowing remarriage
of Hindu widows, and charitable aid in time of famine. Glorious work all this, of which
any nation may well be proud, and such as has not fallen to the lot of any people in the
history of mankind.
In the Cause of Civilization: Education, both male and female. Though yet only
partial, an inestimable blessing as far as it has gone, and leading gradually to the
destruction of superstition, and many moral and social evils. Resuscitation of India’s
own noble literature, modified and refined by the enlightenment of the West.
Politically: Peace and order. Freedom of speech and liberty of the press. Higher
political knowledge and aspirations. Improvement of government in the native states.
Security of life and property. Freedom from oppression caused by the caprice or greed of
despotic rulers, and from devastation by war. Equal justice between man and man
(sometimes vitiated by partiality to Europeans). Services of highly educated
administrators, who have achieved the above-mentioned results.
Materially: Loans for railways and irrigation. Development of a few valuable
products, such as indigo, tea, coffee, silk, etc. Increase of exports. Telegraphs.
Generally: A slowly growing desire of late to treat India equitably, and as a
country held in trust. Good intentions. No nation on the face of the earth has ever had
the opportunity of achieving such a glorious work as this. I hope in the credit side of the
account I have done no injustice, and if I have omitted any item which anyone may think
of importance, I shall have the greatest pleasure in inserting it. I appreciate, and so do
my countrymen, what England has done for India, and I know that it is only in British
hands that her regeneration can be accomplished. Now for the debit side.
The Detriments of British Rule
In the Cause of Humanity: Nothing. Everything, therefore, is in your favor under
this heading.
38
In the Cause of Civilization: As I have said already, there has been a failure to do
as much as might have been done, but I put nothing to the debit. Much has been done,
though.
Politically: Repeated breach of pledges to give the natives a fair and reasonable
share in the higher administration of their own country, which has much shaken
confidence in the good faith of the British word. Political aspirations and the legitimate
claim to have a reasonable voice in the legislation and the imposition and disbursement
of taxes, met to a very slight degree, thus treating the natives of India not as British
subjects, in whom representation is a birthright. Consequent on the above, an utter
disregard of the feelings and views of the natives. The great moral evil of the drain of
wisdom and practical administration, leaving none to guide the rising generation.
Financially: All attention is engrossed in devising new modes of taxation, without
any adequate effort to increase the means of the people to pay; and the consequent
vexation and oppressiveness of the taxes imposed, imperial and local. Inequitable
financial relations between England and India, i.e., the political debt of, 100,000,000
clapped on India’s shoulders, and all home charges also, though the British Exchequer
contributes nearly, 3,000,000 to the expense of the colonies.
Materially: The political drain, up to this time, from India to England, of above
500,000,000, at the lowest computation, in principal alone, which with interest would
be some thousands of millions. The further continuation of this drain at the rate, at
present, of above ,12,000,000 per annum, with a tendency to increase. The consequent
continuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country, except so far as it has been
very partially relieved and replenished by the railway and irrigation loans, and the
windfall of the consequences of the American war, since 1850. Even with this relief, the
material condition of India is such that the great mass of the poor have hardly tuppence a
day and a few rags, or a scanty subsistence. The famines that were in their power to
prevent, if they had done their duty, as a good and intelligent government. The policy
adopted during the last fifteen years of building railways, irrigation works, etc., is
hopeful, has already resulted in much good to your credit, and if persevered in, gratitude
and contentment will follow. An increase of exports without adequate compensation; loss
of manufacturing industry and skill. Here I end the debit side.
Summary
To sum up the whole, the British rule has been: morally, a great blessing;
politically, peace and order on one hand, blunders on the other; materially,
impoverishment, relieved as far as the railway and other loans go. The natives call the
British system “Sakar ki Churi,” the knife of sugar. That is to say, there is no oppression,
it is all smooth and sweet, but it is the knife, notwithstanding. I mention this that you
should know these feelings. Our great misfortune is that you do not know our wants.
When you will know our real wishes, I have not the least doubt that you would do justice.
The genius and spirit of the British people is fair play and justice.
39
(e) Bal Gangadhar Tilak, “Address to the Indian National Congress,”
(1907).
H2 Intro: ​A scholar and nationalist, Bal Gangadhar Tilak founded the India Home
Rule League and worked to achieve Hindu-Muslim Unity in the independence
movement.
One thing is granted, namely, that this government does not suit us. As has been
said by an eminent statesman - the government of one country by another can never be a
successful, and therefore, a permanent government. There is no difference of opinion
about this fundamental proposition between the old and new schools. One fact is that
this alien government has ruined the country. In the beginning, all of us were taken by
surprise. We were almost dazed. We thought that everything that the rulers did was for
our good and that this English government has descended from the clouds to save us
from the invasions of Tamerlane and Chingis Khan, and, as they say, not only from
foreign invasions but from internecine warfare, or the internal or external invasions, as
they call it. . . . We are not armed, and there is no necessity for arms either. We have a
stronger weapon, a political weapon, in boycott. We have perceived one fact, that the
whole of this administration, which is carried on by a handful of Englishmen, is carried
on with our assistance. We are all in subordinate service. This whole government is
carried on with our assistance and they try to keep us in ignorance of our power of
cooperation between ourselves by which that which is in our own hands at present can be
claimed by us and administered by us. The point is to have the entire control in our
hands. I want to have the key of my house, and not merely one stranger turned out of it.
Self-government is our goal; we want a control over our administrative machinery. We
don’t want to become clerks and remain [clerks]. At present, we are clerks and willing
instruments of our own oppression in the hands of an alien government, and that
government is ruling over us not by its innate strength but by keeping us in ignorance
and blindness to the perception of this fact. Professor Seeley shares this view. Every
Englishman knows that they are a mere handful in this country and it is the business of
every one of them to befool you in believing that you are weak and they are strong. This
is politics. We have been deceived by such policy too long. What the new party wants you
to do is to realize the fact that your future rests entirely in your own hands. If you mean
to be free, you can be free; if you do not mean to be free, you will fall and be forever
fallen. So many of you need not like arms; but if you have not the power of active
resistance, have you not the power of self-denial and self-abstinence in such a way as not
to assist this foreign government to rule over you? This is boycott and this is what is
meant when we say, boycott is a political weapon. We shall not give them assistance to
collect revenue and keep peace. We shall not assist them in fighting beyond the frontiers
or outside India with Indian blood and money. We shall not assist them in carrying on
the administration of justice. We shall have our own courts, and when time comes we
shall not pay taxes. Can you do that by your united efforts? If you can, you are free from
tomorrow.
40
(f) Mahatma Gandhi, “To Every English Man in India,” in ​Young India
(1920)
Dear Friend,—I wish that every Englishman will see this appeal and give
thoughtful attention to it.
Let me introduce myself to you. In my humble opinion no Indian has co-operated
with the British Government more than I have for an unbroken period of twenty-nine
years of public life in the face of circumstances that might well have turned any other
man into a rebel. I ask you to believe me when I tell you that my co-operation was not
based on the fear of the punishments provided by your laws or any other selfish motives.
It is free and voluntary co-operation based on the belief that the sum-total of the British
government was for the benefit of India. I put my life in peril four times for the sake of
the Empire—at the time of the Boer War when I was in charge of the Ambulance corps
whose work was mentioned in General Buller’s dispatches, at the time of the Zulu revolt
in Natal when I was in charge of a similar corps, at the time of the commencement of the
late War when I raised an Ambulance Corps and as a result of the strenuous training had
a severe attack of pleurisy and, lastly, in fulfillment of my promise to Lord Chelmsford at
the War Conference in Delhi, I threw myself in such an active recruiting campaign in
Kaira District involving long and trying marches that I had an attack of dysentery which
proved almost fatal. I did all this in the full belief that acts such as mine must gain my
country an equal status in the Empire. So last December I pleaded hard for the trustful
co-operation. I fully believed that Mr. Lloyd George would redeem his promise to the
[Muslims] and that the revelations of the official atrocities in the Punjab would secure
full reparation for the Punjabis. But the treachery of Mr. Lloyd George and its
appreciation by you, and the condonation of the Punjab atrocities, have completely
shattered my faith in the good intentions of the Government and the nation which is
supporting it.
But though my faith in your good intentions is gone, I recognise your bravery and
I know that what you will not yield to justice and reason, you will gladly yield to bravery.
See what this Empire means to India:
●
Exploitations of India’s resources for the benefit of Great Britain.
●
An ever-increasing military expenditure and a civil service the most expensive in
the world.
●
Extravagant working of every department in utter disregard of India’s poverty.
41
●
Disarmament and consequent emasculation of a whole nation, lest an armed
nation might imperil the lives of a handful of you in our midst.
●
Traffic in intoxicating liquors and drugs for the purpose of sustaining a top heavy
administration.
●
Progressively representative legislation in order to suppress an ever-growing
agitation, seeking to give expression to a nation’s agony.
●
Degrading treatment of Indians residing in your dominions, and,
●
You have shown total disregard of our feelings by glorifying the Punjab
administration and flouting the Mussulman sentiment.
I know you would not mind if we could fight and wrest the scepter from your
hands. You know that we are powerless to do that, for you have ensured our incapacity to
fight in open and honourable battle. Bravery on the battlefield is thus impossible for us.
Bravery of the soul still remains open to us. I know you will respond to that also. I am
engaged in evoking that bravery. Non-co-operation means nothing less than training in
self-sacrifice. Why should we co-operate with you when we know that, by your
administration of this great country, we are being daily enslaved in an increasing degree.
This response of the people to my appeal is not due to my personality. I would like you to
dismiss me, and for that matter the Ali Brothers too, from your consideration. My
personality will fail to evoke any response to anti-Muslim cry if I were foolish enough to
raise it, as the magic name of the Ali Brothers would fail to inspire the [Muslims] with
enthusiasm if they were madly to raise an anti-Hindu cry. People flock in their thousands
to listen to us, because we to-day represent the voice of a nation groaning under iron
heels. The Ali Brothers were your friends as I was, and still am. My religion forbids me to
bear any ill-will towards you. I would not raise my hand against you even if I had the
power. I expect to conquer you only by my suffering. The Ali Brothers will certainly draw
the sword if they could, in defence of their religion and their country. But they and I have
made common cause with the people of India in their attempt to voice their feelings and
to find a remedy for their distress.
You are in search of a remedy to suppress this rising ebul- lition of national
feeling. I venture to suggest to you that the only way to suppress it is to remove the
causes. You have yet the power. You can repent of the wrongs done to Indians.... But this
you cannot do unless you consider every Indian to be in reality your equal and brother....
I invite you respectfully to choose the better way and make common cause with the
people of India whose salt you are eating. To seek to thwart their aspirations is disloyalty
to the country.
I am,
Your faithful friend, M.K. Gandhi.
42
Assignment 3: Imperialism and Nationalism in Sub-Saharan Africa
a. Robert Tignor, et al. “Colonizing Africa,” in ​Worlds Together, Worlds Apart:
From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018) 648 - 656. Ebook.
b. Factsheet on the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 45 - 46.
c. Robert Tignor, et al. “The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,” in ​Worlds
Together, Worlds Apart: From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018)
647. Ebook.
d. Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “The Expansion of the Gold Coast Colony,”
in ​Africa in World History ​(2012) 47 - 52.
e. Trevor Getz, “Laborers and the Bourgeoisie on the Gold Coast,”in ​African Voices
of the Global Past (​ 2014) 53 - 55.
f.
Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, ​Abina and the Important Men (​ 2015) [Graphic
Novel]
g. Peter Adebayo, “First Phase: The Gradual Development of the Liberation
Struggle,” in ​African Voices of the Global Past (​ 2014) 56 - 58.
h. Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “Colonialism and African Elites,” in ​Africa
in World History (​ 2012) 59 - 60.
i.
Jomo Kenyatta, “Gentlemen of the Jungle,” from ​Facing Mount Kenya​, (1938) 61
- 63.
Guiding Questions:
1. What is the Berlin Conference and what does it tell us about European attitudes
and assumptions about the world?
2. How did colonial partition, presence, and occupation affect African states and
societies?
3. Who was Menilik II?
4. What were the original methods used by colonial governments? How did
resistance from Africans force change?
5. How did European motivations and goals shape their rule in African colonies?
43
6. How and why does power change hands over the course of the 19th century on
the Gold Coast?
7. In what ways was cocoa a success story for farmers in the Gold Coast/Ghana?
How does it allow Ghanaian farmers to hold economic power?
8. In what ways were women affected by the spread of cocoa farming? In what ways
were they affected by loopholes in the British legal system?
9. Who benefitted from the expansion of the palm oil trade in the Gold Coast? In
what ways did it affect social organization?
10. What were the two main objectives of anticolonial resistance in the period
1870s-1910s?
11. What strategies of resistance did people use?
12. What typically ignited rebellions?
13. What roles did African elites play in colonial societies? Were African elites
collaborators (with colonial power)? or nationalists?
44
3(a) Robert Tignor, et al. “Colonizing Africa,” in ​Worlds Together,
Worlds Apart: From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition, vol. C (2018)
648 - 656. Ebook.
3(b) Factsheet on the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.
In 1884 at the request of Portugal, German chancellor Otto von Bismark called
together the major western powers of the world to negotiate questions and end confusion
over the control of Africa. Bismark appreciated the opportunity to expand Germany’s
sphere of influence over Africa and desired to force Germany’s rivals to struggle with one
another for territory.
At the time of the conference, 80% of Africa remained under traditional and local
control. What ultimately resulted was a hodgepodge of geometric boundaries that
divided Africa into fifty irregular countries. This new map of the continent was
superimposed over the one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa. . . .
Fourteen countries were represented by a plethora of ambassadors when the
conference opened in Berlin on November 15, 1884. The countries represented at the
time included Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain,
Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway (unified from
1814-1905), Turkey, and the United States of America. . . .
The initial task of the conference was to agree that the Congo River and Niger
River mouths and basins would be considered neutral and open to trade. Despite its
neutrality, part of the Congo Basin became a personal kingdom for Belgium’s King
Leopold II and under his rule, over half of the region’s population died.
At the time of the conference, only the coastal areas of Africa were colonized by
the European powers. At the Berlin Conference the European colonial powers scrambled
to gain control over the interior of the continent. The conference lasted until February
26, 1885 - a three month period where colonial powers haggled over geometric
boundaries in the interior of the continent, disregarding the cultural and linguistic
boundaries.
Following the conference, the give and take continued. By 1914, the conference
participants had fully divided Africa among themselves into fifty countries.
Major colonial claims included:
45
●
Great Britain desired a Cape-to-Cairo collection of colonies and almost succeeded
through their control of Egypt, Sudan (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), Uganda, Kenya
(British East Africa), South Africa, and Zambia, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), and
Botswana. The British also controlled Nigeria and Ghana (Gold Coast).
●
France took much of western Africa, from Mauritania to Chad (French West
Africa) and Gabon and the Republic of Congo (French Equatorial Africa).
●
Belgium and King Leopold II controlled the Democratic Republic of Congo
(Belgian Congo).
●
Portugal took Mozambique in the east and Angola in the west.
●
Italy’s holdings were Somalia (Italian Somaliland) and a portion of Ethiopia.
●
Germany took Namibia (German Southwest Africa) and Tanzania (German East
Africa).
46
3(c) Robert Tignor, et al. “The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,” in
Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: From 1750 to the Present​, 5th edition,
vol. C (2018) 647. Ebook.
3(d) Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “The Expansion of the Gold
Coast Colony,” in ​Africa in World History ​(2012).
The Expansion of the Gold Coast Colony
The coastal regions of Gold Coast (now the modern country of Ghana) had been
deeply involved with Europeans for centuries before the area was colonized. The
Portuguese had built the first European fortress south of the Sahara at El Mina [in the
late-15th century]. There they had bought gold and slaves. Later they were driven from El
Mina by the Dutch, who were joined on the coast by the British and the Danes. The
British built a trade fort at Cape Coast, and the Danes used the nearby Christianbourg
Castle. By the early nineteenth century, all three groups of Europeans were still present,
but the power of the British was waxing steadily, while the Dutch and Danes found their
power to be waning. Still, their presence is an important part of the story because it
meant that African states could always seek another European trading nation if one tried
to cut them out of the trade.
On the African side of this trade system were the Asante empire and a loose
confederation of Fante states. The Asante, as discussed in Chapter 9, had carved out an
empire in the eighteenth century from a collection of Akan-speaking states. Initially a
sort of confederation, it had gradually come to be dominated by the city of Kumasi,
whose rulers called themselves the Asantehene. Asante had been deeply involved in the
slave and gold trades, selling both into the Saharan and Atlantic trades. The Asante state
was directly involved in trade and drew much of its revenue from trade, Kumasi, the
Asante capital, was inland, over 100 miles from the coast. Between Asante and the trade
forts was the Fante confederation. The Fante states lacked Asante’s political
centralization, but usually unified when threatened by the Asante. Because the major
trade forts were in Fante territory, the Fante were a chronic thorn in Asante’s
side.Thus,aconsistentcomponentofAsantepolicywastotrytogetdirect access tothe
tradeforts, either by conquering Fante, overawing the Fanteso that they would not hinder
trade, or by seeking alliances with the European powers.
In the Fante-dominated towns around the trade forts—El Mina and Cape
Coast—a class of mixed-race (mulatto in the parlance of the time) merchants and
professionals had grown up. Many of these mulattos were the descendants of European
merchants who had settled on the coast long before. They had names like Bannerman
and Brewandservedas cross-cultural intermediaries between the Europeans and the
Fante and Asante. Many of them were educated in Europe or in Sierra Leone and so had
a foot in both the worlds of Europe and West Africa. Later they would play a role in the
47
administration of the Gold Coast Colony (James Bannerman was the first attorney
general of the Gold Coast) until forced out in the second half of the nineteenth century as
Africans were replaced in colonial administrations by whites. Mulattos also played a
prominent role in opposing the expansion of British power in the Gold Coast and in the
creation of a pan-African consciousness.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the balance of power in the Gold Coast
was fairly even. The Asante were often at odds with the Fante, but could not defeat them
decisively. The Fante sought British support in their wars with the Asante, and for their
part the Asante usually got some support from the Dutch, The British were not in a
position to seize any territory they wanted. Instead they were a powerful but not
dominant element in the politics of the Gold Coast. In fact, when the Asante invaded
Fante in 1824, the British suffered a major defeat (the governor of Cape Coast was killed
in the battle) before the Asante withdrew.
What happened in the subsequent 74 years or so was that the British slowly
acquired control over more and more territory. Growth was incremental until 1850, but
afterward the pace picked up. Before 1850, the main change was the signing of “bonds”
in 1844 that created what the British came to call a protectorate over the Fante states.
What resulted was a sort of proto-colony in the southern Gold Coast. The British slowly
took more and more administrative power and created courts in the protectorate. But
their power was limited by the absence of a real source of revenue. They could not levy
customs duties because if they did, local merchants would simply sell their goods to the
Danes or the Dutch. In 1850 the Danes departed, but it was not until 1872 that the Dutch
pulled out.
In 1863, the Asante invaded the Fante protectorate and were repelled, but with
difficulty. At the same time, the Fante were growing less and less willing to cooperate
with the British. Fante intellectuals and political leaders began to demand greater local
control, and Africanus Horton, a Sierra Leonean physician who was working in the Gold
Coast, wrote a book that called for the creation of a republic with its capital at Accra.
In 1872, the departure of the Dutch opened up a new possibility for the British.
They could now charge customs duties, and so had a newsource of revenue. They
promptly put their new money to work by invading Asante. The Asante had spent much
of 1872 invading the southern regions of GoldCoast and trying to reclaim the territory
taken from them in 1824, They were remarkably successful. However, the British decided
to take decisive action and brought in Sir Garnet Wolsey, a veteran of colonial wars in
western Canada. Wolsey brought in troops from Britain, but also used soldiers from
other parts of the empire. There was a large group of West Indians and some Nigerians
in his force—an example of empire begetting more empire.
Wolsey’s troops, armed with Enfield rifles and modern artillery, marched to
Kumasi in 1874. After two battles, in which the Asante suffered many casualties and the
British suffered few, Kumasi was taken. The British looted the palace and burnedit
(much of the loot is still on display in art museums in Europe). They then withdrew,
48
demanding that the Asante pay an indemnity and relinquish their claims to their
southern territories.
The events following the British withdrawal were, if anything, more damaging to
the Asante than the invasion itself had been. Impoverished by the looting of the palace
and the indemnity, the Asantehene was forced to take grave goods from the tombs of his
ancestors, an offense for which he was dethroned. Emboldened by clear evidence of
Asante weakness, most of their subject states revolted. Soon there was little left of the
Asante empire except the area immediately around Kumasi. In 1896, the British offered
their “protection” to the rump of the Asante empire. When it was refused, they sent an
expedition that took the city and took Prempeh, the Asantehene, into exile. He was not
allowed to return until 1924. The final indignity occurred in 1900 when the British
governor of Gold Coast demanded that the Golden Stool—the throne of the
Asantehenes—be turned over to him. From the Asante perspective, this was rubbing salt
in their wounds, and it was too much to bear. Although the odds were clearly against
them, they revolted. It took nine months and much bloodshed before the revolt was put
down. Even after all these defeats, the Asante never totally abandoned their cause. When
Prempeh was allowed to return in 1924, the British required that he live as a “private
citizen,” not a political one. Soon they relented and allowed him to take the title
“Kumasahene”(i.e., the ruler of Kumasi but not Asante). Former parts of the Asante
empire began to send him tribute. Eventually, in 1934, the British were forced to allow
the creation of an Asante Confederation.
It is worth looking at the timing of these events. In the first half of the century,
the Asante and the British were on more or less even terms. Had conquering Asante been
a majorBritish foreign policy objective, they almost certainly could have found the
resources to defeat the Asante. But it never was that important to the British, and so they
held their portion of the coastal areas and fought a series of indecisive wars. In the
second half of the century, conquering Asante was still not critical to the British, but it
was a much cheaper and easier proposition. With modern firearms, quinine, and
steamships, which brought supplies and troops from other parts of the empire, they
could take Kumasi despite the vigorous resistance of the Asante.
At the same time, we should note that the Asante did not crumble in the face of
all this modern weaponry. The British did not try to hold Kumasi after their expedition of
1874. And even once the British occupied Kumasi, the Asante did not give up. They
revolted in 1900 and remained a threat into the 1930s. So changing technology set the
terms of the encounter between these two empires but was not the sole determinant of
the outcome.
Cocoa Farming in Ghana
The move from subsistence farming to cash cropping took place many times in
different parts of the continent, and the nature of that transition was highly variable, so
there is no way to look exhaustively at all the permutations. The rise of cocoa farming in
Ghana makes an instructive case study. Cocoa farming was a tremendous success in
49
Ghana, and many of the reasons it succeeded help to explain the failure of imposed cash
cropping schemes in other parts of the continent. The success of cocoa farming also
brought great social strains, as farmers sought to get access to the labor and capital
needed to grow the new crop. Foremost among these social strains were struggles to
define the extent to which married women were obligated to provide labor to their
husbands’ cocoa farming ventures.
Cocoa,the plant from which chocolate is made, is not native to the African
continent. Rather, it is one of the American crops that only became available in the
Eastern Hemisphere as a result of the Columbian Exchange. However, unlike many New
World crops, cocoa was only slowly adopted outside its homeland. It is a tree crop that
thrives in tropical forest environments. Because it is a tree crop, it takes several years to
reach maturity. The earliest a cocoa farmer can hope to see his, or often her, first harvest
is three to four years after planting. Even then the trees are not at full productivity for
several more years. The beans also require processing once they are harvested, so cocoa
farming is a capital-intensive form of farming. One must have the capital to clear land,
buy seedlings, plant them, keep the field weeded for three or four years until the trees
shade out all the weeds, and finally harvest and process the beans. A cocoa farmer needs
lots of cash to start up the business and then does not get any income for at least three or
four years. An aspiring cocoa farmer also needs some means of recruiting the labor
needed to perform all of these tasks. Thus, cocoa farming requires a complex set of social
and financial institutions for it to succeed in a new place.
In the nineteenth century, the Spanish introduced cocoa to the island of
Fernando Po (now renamed Bioko), which lies just off the coast of Cameroun. How cocoa
arrived in Ghana is uncertain, and it looks as though three separate groups may have
introduced cocoa almost simultaneously in the 1890s. One was the British colonial
governor, another was a group of missionaries, and the third was an African blacksmith.
The governor oversaw the opening of the Aburi Botanical Gardens, which in addition to
being a scientific research station was also a cocoa nursery. But Teten Quashie, the
blacksmith, also opened a nursery and it is he who seems to have done the most to sell
the cocoa seedlings to local farmers.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about cocoa farming in Ghana is that the local
farmers always seem to have been a step ahead of the British. Whereas in other parts of
Africa, colonial governments tried to push Africans into cash cropping, in Ghana the
British mostly found themselves supporting and encouraging initiatives already begun
locally. Governor Sir William Griffith’s nursery at Aburi, for example, probably provided
fewer than 10 percent of the seedlings planted in the 1920s, the decade when cocoa
farming went through its most dramatic expansion; the other 90 percent were provided
by Ghanaian entrepreneurs. Likewise, the expansion of cocoa farming preceded the
creation of a railway system in Ghana. In most cases colonial states built railways hoping
that their existence would stimulate the transition to cash cropping; in Ghana the
opposite happened. Ghanaian farmers started growing cocoa, so the British decided to
build a rail system that linked the cocoa farming regions to the ports.
50
The enthusiastic adoption of cocoa by Ghanaian farmers was most likely the result of a
prior history of cash cropping in the region. Ever since the abolition of the slave trade,
West Africans had been producing more and more palm oil as a way of staying involved
in Atlantic trade. Thus, farmers in southern Ghana had a tradition of growing oil palm as
a cash crop. By the early twentieth century the price of palm oil was declining, and
farmers were looking for other crops. Cocoa came along at just the right time to fill this
need. Cocoa farming also benefited from a prior history of kola nut farming in the region.
Many of the skills and tools used in kola nut farming could be applied to cocoa farming,
so although the cocoa tree was alien to Africa, it was a near-perfect fit for Ghanaian
farmers.
Cocoa farming spread like wildfire in Ghana. By 1911, Ghana was the world’s
leading producer of cocoa. By the 1920s there was a full-scale boom in effect. Cocoa
prices were high, new land was still being brought into production, and labor was
becoming scarce. Though slavery was outlawed in Ghana in 1874, the British had at the
same time they outlawed slavery, passed a law called the Masters and Servants
Ordinance. This was a fairly common way for colonial governments to formally end
slavery without totally upsetting the social and economic conditions that had prevailed
when slavery was legal. Masters and Servants Ordinances usually required former slaves
to accept labor contracts with their former owners or someone else.
These contracts placed great power in the hands of employers, and the courts
usually leaned toward the employers when enforcing these contracts. Thus, in the early
years of cocoa growing, even though slavery had ceased to exist as a legal institution,
many of the workers involved in the cocoa industry were either former slaves or wage
laborers whose contracts made them easily controlled by the growers. Family labor was
also used. There was, however, much crossover between former slaves and family
members. When slaverywas legal, it was common for men in southern Ghana to take
slave wives. After slavery was abolished, it was still acceptable to have pawns as wives.
(Pawns were people given as collateral and interest on a loan.) Not surprisingly, wives
who were former slaves had many fewer rights than free wives. Free wives could, for
instance, keep any property they brought to a marriage separate from their husbands’
property. Any income they earned from their property was likewise theirs to keep. They
were expected to provide their husbands with farm labor, in exchange for which they
expected to be provided with “subsistence” by their husbands. Note the use of the
word“expect” in the last sentence, As demands for labor grew in the 1920s, a period of
what historian Jean Allmanhas called “social chaos” ensued. Both men and women
began to try to redefine the expectations of marriage.
By the 1920s male cocoa farmers seem to have been trying to use marriage as a
means of obtaining labor. They would marry women, insist that they work on their
farms, and often not provide the subsistence that had previously been part of the deal.
Women resisted this by either using the failure of their husbands to feed them as a
reason to avoid working on their husbands’ farms and putting more effort into their own
farms, getting into cocoa farming themselves, or avoiding marriage altogether. This latter
51
strategy became so common that local courts, dominated, as you might expect, by men
with an interest in cocoa farming, in some places ordered all unmarried women to be
rounded up and placed in custody until someone could be found who was willing to
marry them. When a potential husband arrived, he paid a fee to the court that was
comparable to normal bridewealth and took home his bride. If the woman refused to
marry the man, she had to pay him the amount he had paid the court.
In effect, these courts were trying to force women into providing labor through
the institution of coerced marriage. Women used many strategies to circumvent these
roundups, such as getting a male friend to come and claim them as a wife or paying their
own bridewealth. Such was the social upheaval of the 1920s that bedrock social
institutions like marriage were being challenged and manipulated during this time.
Although the Akan farmers of southern Ghana adopted cocoa of their own accord and
profited more from it than most other cash croppers in colonial Africa, the new crop
brought great social strain.
52
3(e) Trevor Getz, “Laborers and the Bourgeoisie on the Gold
Coast,”in ​African Voices of the Global Past ​(2014)
The region known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Gold Coast
comprises most of the coast of what is today Ghana and the forested area toward the
interior. This area has been involved in trans-regional trade since at least the sixteenth
century, including the sale of gold and kola nuts across the Sahel and Savanna into North
Africa and the Islamic world.“ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Gold Coast
supplied gold to Portuguese and Dutch merchants in exchange for enslaved Africans
brought by the Europeans from other regions of the continent. These slaves were then
used locally in the gold mining industry. Only in the 1670s did the Gold Coast become a
net exporter of enslaved Africans.
Trade in the region was dominated for varying periods by networks of merchants
such as the “Akani,” but by the late eighteenth century merchants associated with the
state government of the growing Asante Confederation regulated much of the commerce
between the coast and the interior….In the commercial crisis [following the abolition of
the slave trade] Europeans as well as Africans scrambled to find a way to replace the
slave trade. In 1778, a Danish entrepreneur named Dr.Paul Isert had tried to grow coffee
near the town of Accra using enslaved laborers, and in the early nineteenth century other
Europeans tried sugar, cotton, and tobacco. However, the crop that actually took off in
the area was palm oil, which had become important as an industrial lubricant.
In contrast to southern Africa, very few Europeans settled in the Gold Coast, or
indeed anywhere else in West Africa, during the nineteenth century. Thusthere was no
system of settler capitalism here. Rather, most palm oil in the region was probably grown
on small farms worked by extended families. There is evidence, however, of other types
of landowning and labor arrangements. The most dramatic of these may have been the
“huza” system of the Krobo people. The Krobo lived in mountainous territory, and the
huzas were a style of farm uniquely suited to their environment, as they consisted of long
parallel rectangular strips reaching away from a road or stream up the low slopes of the
mountains.
The Krobo in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries probably had a
relatively decentralized political structure in which priests were important leaders. In the
late eighteenth century, the Krobo were fortunate in that many of their neighbors had
weakened each other in a series of wars,
allowing them to occupy rich agricultural
land just as palm oil was becoming a profitable crop. As a result, the Krobo came to
dominate its production. The palm oil farmers quickly rose in importance within Krobo
society; many could afford to send their children to the tuition-charging mission schools
and, with the assistance of their formally educated children, were able to make
commercial alliances with merchants in the big towns of the coast and trade routes.
53
As the Krobo expanded by occupying or purchasing land in neighboring areas,
they tended to subdivide these newly acquired regions in the same way as they had in
their mountainous home territory. Palm oil grown on these farms was then carried to
large cosmopolitan towns, where traders spoke all of the languages of the region—Ewe,
various Twi dialects, the Adangme language of the Krobo themselves, the Ga language of
their close cousins in nearby Accra, and even languages from far away such as Hausa.
Some towns even had large European populations.” The oil was carried to the big ports
of the coast, such as Accra, and then shipped to factories in Britain.
As they spread into new areas, individual Krobo farmers tended to acquire
multiple farms, sometimes located quite far apart. By the 1880s, many important
farmers were extremely wealthy. Of course, they did not have enough family to work all
of the farms, and it seems that at least some of their laborers were enslaved individuals.
For example, the Konor (king) of the Yilo Krobo state in 1851 produced palm oil on
dozens of huzas worked by his“slaves and children” and processed it at a central farm
under the control of his wives. Evidence of the Konor’s farming empire shows that
women played a key role on the farms. In general, as wealthy men became involved in
traveling among their farms and arranging export arrangements, their wives and other
key women of their households took over such roles as growing food, making goods for
local markets, and processing palm kernels to get at the oil.
However, not all women (or men) found positive opportunities in the new
economy. Because the tropical rainforests harbored diseases that killed domesticated
animals, almost all of the palm oil was carried to the coast by humans, who,in return,
brought industrial goods such as cloth and firearms as well as locally produced fish and
salt. Many of these carriers were full members of local communities and were paid wages
for their work, but a heightened demand for carriers drove a renewed bout of
enslavement that did not diminish during the nineteenth century. Despite the
criminalization of slavery in the British-controlled regions of the coast in 1874, there is
evidence that throughout the late nineteenth century large numbers of young men and
women and even children were serving as enslaved ‘carriers’ who transported palm oil
into the international market and returned with salt and finished products to the interior
of West Africa…
What was life like for these unfree workers? Unfortunately, they left little written
evidence behind, but some of what we have learned about their lives comes from sources
like oral traditions and proverbs. However, there are a few records from this place and
time in which enslaved workers can tell us about their lives. For example, after defeating
Asante in an 1873-1874 war, the British began to impose antislavery ordinances in some
places along the coast. The ordinances allowed a few enslaved workers, especially those
in domestic settings working for farming families or the new bourgeoisie, to seek their
freedom. As Inspector R. E. Firminger's report notes, many were children. Here is how
some of them described their lives as unfree domestic workers.
SCT 17/5/6, Queen v. Aceday Ancrah, 5 October 1887, Accra District Court
54
Amina(girl of 10 or 12):"I... went with accused to her house. [She] sent me
to get water and wood. ... If I did not get some she beat [me]. I was always
hungry.”
SCT 17/5/9 Queenv. Afelu 25 March 1890, Accra District Court
Ramato: “Sometime ago I came from Salagah [north of Asante] with my
master. We stopped in Accra about two months and returned to Salagah.
My master always told me my mother stayed with her master. I must be
patient and stop with him! When we came here I heard my mother was
sick at Salagah. I asked my master to let me go and see but he refused. If
1am not a slave why can't my master allow me to go and see my mother
now she is sick? When we went down to Kwitta my master used to flog
[beat] me always.”
SCT 5/4/19 Queen v. Quamina Eddoo 10 Nov 1876, Cape Coast Judicial Assessor's Court
Abina:“[T]he defendant gave me two cloths and told me that he had given
me in marriage to one of his house people, and I remonstrated with
defendant. I asked him how it was ([since] I had been left by Yowawhah to
live with him, and that he would return), that he had given me in marriage
to one of his people. On this I thought that I had been sold and I ran away.
At the time the defendant said he had given me in marriage to Tandoe.
And the defendant said that if I did not consent to be married to ‘Tandoe
he would tie me up and flog me. I heard I had country people living at
Cape Coast, and for what the defendant said I ran away and came to Cape
Coast. I swept the house, I go for water and firewood and I cooked and
when I cooked I ate some. I went to market to buy vegetables.”
While the court records largely reflect questions asked by the judges to determine
whether or not these young witnesses could be described as having the status of ‘slaves,’
many of them nevertheless managed to tell us about what it was like to lack control over
their own daily lives.
3(f) Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, ​Abina and the Important Men
(2015)
[Graphic Novel]
55
3(g) Peter Adebayo, “First Phase: The Gradual Development of the
Liberation Struggle,” in ​African Voices of the Global Past (​ 2014)
With the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia, the entirety of the African continent was
colonized between the 1870s and 1910s. During this period, Africans engaged in rural
armed uprisings and other types of struggles against colonialism. They found it difficult
to tolerate the restrictive and often inexplicable ways in which their lives were being
reordered. The main objective of the anticolonial movement during this period was to
either regain lost sovereignty by expelling the colonial administration or to press for
reforms of the colonial system. Strategies included passive resistance as well as
campaigns by secret associations, unions, political parties, and the new
African-controlled Ethiopian and Pentecostal churches that had begun to emerge.
Numerous rebellions also broke out, usually originating in rural areas rather than
urban centers and often under the leadership of traditional rulers and priests. These
rebellions were usually precipitated by measures introduced by the new colonial order
such as taxation, alienation of land, compulsory cultivation of crops, colonial officials’
tyrannical behavior, introduction of European culture in the form of Western education
and Christianity and condemnation of African culture and traditional ways of life. One
rebellion in West Africa that focused on defending the old order was the Yaa Asantewaa
war in 1900, which involved the Asante of Ghana. Other rebellions—such as the Egba
revolt of 1903, the Gurunsi rebellion in 1915 in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and the
Hut Tax war in Sierra Leone in 1898—were largely uprisings against taxation and forced
labor. In the same period more than twenty-five organized rebellions occurred in the five
central African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern
Rhodesia (Zambia), and the Congo as well as in southern Africa. An interesting aspect of
these rebellions in the southern and central African regions was the involvement of cult
priests and spirit mediums. The rebellion in Nyasaland in 1908, for example, was led by
the Tonga priest Maluma, who urged “black people to rise and drive all the white people
out of the country.” Similarly, Mbona cult priests spearheaded the Massinga rebellion of
1884, and the priestess Maria Nkoie played a leading role in the rebellion in the Congo
that lasted from 1916 to 1921.
In East Africa, the largest uprising of this period was the Maji-Maji rebellion, which
broke out in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) with the sole aim of driving out the Germans.
Led by the traditional prophet Kinjikitlele, it covered an area of more than ten thousand
square miles and involved more than twenty ethnic groups. The revolt started when the
Germans levied new taxes in 1898 and forced locals to build roads and accomplish
various other tasks for the government. Four years later, in 1902, the governor of
Tanganyika ordered all of the villages of the colony to grow cotton as a cash crop; each
was charged with producing a common plot of cotton. The African headmen of these
villages were left in charge of overseeing production—a position that left them vulnerable
to angry criticism from the population. This decision to force cotton growing on rural
peasants, who had their own livings to make, was extremely unpopular across Tanzania
56
and took a toll on their lives. Indeed, the social fabric of society was undergoing rapid
change. The roles of men and women were altered to face the needs of the communities.
Since men were forced away from their homes to work, women had to assume some of
the traditional male roles; as a result, the resources of the village were strained and
people were less able to remain self-sufficient. These outcomes created a great deal of
animosity against the government. In 1905, a drought threatened the region. This,
combined with opposition to the government’s agricultural and labor policies, led to an
open rebellion against the Germans that lasted from 1905 to 1907.
In places where colonial policies were particularly oppressive, such as the Belgian
Congo, country-wide revolts frequently broke out. The biggest of these were the uprisings
among the Azande (1892-1912), the Bakaya (1825-1906), the Kasango Nyembo
(1907-1917), the Bashi (1900-1916), and the Babua and Budja (1903-1905). Similar
revolts occurred in many other parts of Africa. Some of these revolts were carried out
jointly by neighboring peoples who had little or nothing to do with each other before the
advent of colonial rule. In eastern and central Africa, for instance, the Ndbele and Shona
of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), who had once been antagonistic toward each other, revolted
together against the British in 1896-1897. And the Maji-Maji revolt against German rule
in 1907 was the result of cooperation among many groups in southeastern Tanzania.
Essentially rural movements, such revolts occurred at a time when the colonial powers
were firmly establishing their control. In most cases they were easily suppressed by the
colonial powers.
Religious insurrections were also common during the early years of colonial rule. In
parts of Africa where Christianity had made a considerable impact, people sought
liberation through such insurrections. In 1911 Charles Domingo founded an independent
church in Malawi and used his pulpit to criticize colonialism. With rousing sermons he
attacked Christian missions and Europeans, pointing out the contrast between their
theories and their practices. One of his leaflets, published in 1911, employed the
semi-pidgin English common during this period to express his disdain for European
hypocrisy. Although such language may seem comical to us today, the sentiment was
deadly serious:
There is too much failure among all Europeans in Nyasaland. The combined
bodies—missionaries, Government and Companies organizers of money—do
form the same rule to look down upon the native with mockery eyes. It is
sometimes startles us to see that the three combined are from Europe and along
with them there is little Christiandom. . . . If we had power enough to
communicate ourselves to Europe we would advise them not to call themselves
Christiandom but Europeandom. Therefore the life of the combined bodies is
altogether too cheaty, too thefty, too mockery. Instead of “give,” they say take
away. There is too much breakage of God’s pure law as seen in James’s Epistle,
Chapter Five, verse four.
In many African communities, separatist Christian churches arose under the
leadership of native “messiahs” who declared that they had been sent to liberate the
people. Their preachings sparked revolts against the colonial regime. Among many such
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uprisings, the two best-known ones were led in 1915 by John Chilembewe in Malawi
(then Nyasaland) and in 1921 by Simon Kimbangu in the Belgian Congo. In some
instances (e.g., Kimbanguism in the Congo), the political influences of these messianic
movements persisted for many decades.
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3(h) Erik Gilbert and Johnathan Reynolds, “Colonialism and
African Elites,” in ​Africa in World History (​ 2012).
Despite the reality of European domination, African populations were neither
meek nor powerless in the face of colonial administrations. Although violent resistance
to colonialism proved unsuccessful in the early twentieth century, changing economic
and social conditions provided manyAfricans with the tools they needed to demand
political influence in the face of colonial rule. Thanks to economic, educational, and
cultural accomplishments, a growing class of Africans was able to exert pressure for
change on colonial administrations from within the new colonial system. These groups
are often referred to by scholars as the “African Elite.” Some have seen these individuals
and the organizations that they founded as “collaborators,” in that they often pressed for
greater inclusion for Africans within European administrations and greater inclusion by
Africans in European society and culture. Other observers, however, see these
individuals as the first African “Nationalists” and as the first to truly challenge the
European hold on power in Africa in the twentieth century,
It is important to note that these elites were an important force in African history
even before the advent of colonial rule. African traders who had done well in the era of
the slave trade and legitimate trade often sought European education and adopted
aspects of European culture as a means of enhancing their position vis-a-vis European
traders. Many were of Euro-African heritage, which helped them serve as cultural
mediators—a familiar theme in the history of long-distance trade. Long present in
coastal trading centers such as St. Louis, Freetown, Accra, Lagos, Luanda, and Cape
Town, these Africans were quick to push for recognition and incorporation in new
colonial governments. As already discussed, within the British system of indirect rule,
preexisting African authorities often found continued influence. The new environments
created by colonial rule also provided opportunities for new elites to be created. The
expanding cash economy and rapid development of transportation infrastructures
allowed some farmers and traders to amass considerable fortunes. The fact that the
imposition of colonialism was designed to benefit the colonial powers did not mean that
some Africans were not able to exploit the new setting to their advantage.
The new class of elites was quick to take steps to improve their position within
the colonial administration and society. In 1897 a group calling itself the Aboriginal
Rights Protection Society (ARPS) was formed in the Gold Coast. Made up of both local
chiefs and Western-educated elites, the ARPS organized to protest a move to declare
large tracts of land in the region as “uninhabited.” If the proposal had gone through,the
lands would have become the property of the colonial government. The ARPS, however,
sent a delegation of representatives to London to protest the proposed action and
succeeded in having it stopped. During the early twentieth century, other colonies in
Africa saw similar groups being organized. The Gremio Africano (African Union) was
formed in Angola in 1908. In 1912 the African Native National Congress (later renamed
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the African National Congress) was formed in South Africa to protest the ongoing
marginalization of African rights as the state moved toward a formal policy of white
supremacy. In 1914 the ANNG, too, sent a delegation to London to protest the 1913 Land
Act. In no small part due to the influence of South Africa’s white population, the act went
through despite the delegation’s efforts. A number of individuals came to prominence as
political activists in the early twentieth century. In 1914, Blaise Diagne was elected to the
French Parliament as a representative from the Communes of Senegal. In Nigeria,
Herbert Macaulay founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party. Harry Thuku, of
Kenya, founded the Young Kikuyu Association in 1921. Such activists were instrumental
in acquiring limited representation for elite Africans in colonial administrations, often
through the organization of consultative bodies. Although these assemblies had neither
the power to make nor veto legislation, they did establish the critical precedent of
making Africans a formal part of colonial governments.
As mentioned previously, some have dismissed these early African political
activists as conservatives and collaborators in that they sought to work within colonial
structures and to utilize European ideologies rather than seek an immediate end to
colonialism or rely on African values and norms. It is important to note that these
individuals and groups were very often disliked and feared by the colonial
administrators. The Nigerian Herbert Macaulay may have used British legal and political
principles in his demands for greater incorporation of Africans into British colonial
administration, but he also sought restitution for traditional African leaders such as the
Eleko of Lagos, who had been denied a pension by the British. Macaulay was himself
repeatedly jailed by the British for his activities. Elites such as Macaulay may well have
been “Westernized,” but they had not lost their concern for their fellow Africans.
Further, their familiarity with Western legal and moral systems meant that they could
utilize the very rhetoric of “civilization” against the colonial powers themselves. As any
good debater or politician knows, there is no argument more powerful against your
opponent than your opponent's own argument.
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3(i) Jomo Kenyatta, “Gentlemen of the Jungle,” from ​Facing Mount
Kenya,​ (1938).
H2 Intro: ​Jomo Kenyatta, a member of the Kikuyu people (Kenya’s largest ethnic
group), was educated in London. This story, which he called ‘a Kikuyu folk tale,’
became part of Kenyatta’s master’s thesis. Upon his return to East Africa he led various
anti-colonial and reformist movements. After the bloody struggle for independence,
Kenyatta became Kenya’s first president.
Once upon a time an elephant made a friendship with a man. One day a heavy
thunderstorm broke out; the elephant went to his friend, who had a little hut at the edge
of the forest, and said to him: “My dear good man, will you please let me put my trunk
inside your hut to keep it out of this torrential rain?” The man, seeing what situation his
friend was in, replied: “My dear good elephant, my hut is very small, but there is room
for your trunk and myself. Please put your trunk in gently.” The elephant thanked his
friend, saying: “You have done me a good deed and one day I shall return your kindness.”
But what followed? As soon as the elephant put his trunk inside the hut, slowly he
pushed his head inside, and finally flung the man out in the rain, and then lay down
comfortably inside the friend’s hut, saying: “My dear good friend, your skin is harder
than mine, and as there is not enough room for both of us, you can afford to remain in
the rain while I am protecting my delicate skin from the hailstorm.”
The man, seeing what his friend had done to him, started to grumble; the animals
in the nearby forest heard the noise and came to see what was the matter. All stood
around listening to the heated argument between the man and his friend the elephant. In
this turmoil the lion came along roaring, and said in a loud voice: “Don’t you all know
that I am the King of the Jungle! How dare anyone disturb the peace of my kingdom?”
On hearing this the elephant, who was one of the high ministers in the jungle kingdom,
replied in a soothing voice, and said: “My lord, there is no disturbance of the peace in
your kingdom. I have only been having a little discussion with my friend here as to the
possession of this little hut which your lordship sees me occupying.”
The lion, who wanted to have ‘peace and tranquillity’ in his kingdom, replied in a
noble voice, saying: “I command my ministers to appoint a Commission of Enquiry to go
thoroughly into this matter and report accordingly.” He then turned to the man and said:
“You have done well by establishing friendship with my people, especially with the
elephant, who is one of my honorable ministers of state. Do not grumble any more; your
hut is not lost to you. Wait until the sitting of my Imperial Commission, and there you
will be given plenty of opportunity to state your case. I am sure that you will be pleased
with the findings of the Commission.” The man was very pleased by these sweet words
from the King of the Jungle, and innocently waited for his opportunity, in the belief that
naturally the hut would be returned to him.
The elephant, obeying the command of his master, got busy with other ministers
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to appoint the Commission of Enquiry. The following elders of the jungle were appointed
to sit in the Commission: (1) Mr. Rhinoceros; (2) Mr. Buffalo; (3) Mr. Alligator; (4) The
Rt. Hon. Mr. Fox to act as chairman; and (5) Mr. Leopard to act as Secretary to the
Commission. On seeing the personnel, the man protested and asked if it was not
necessary to include in this Commission a member from his side. But he was told that it
was impossible, since no one from his side was well enough educated to understand the
intricacy of jungle law. Further, that there was nothing to fear, for the members of the
Commission were all men of repute for their impartiality in justice, and as they were
gentlemen chosen by God to look after the interests of races less adequately endowed
with teeth and claws, he might rest assured that they would investigate the matter with
the greatest care and report impartially.
The Commission sat to take the evidence. The Rt. Hon. Mr. Elephant was first
called. He came along with a superior air, brushing his tusks with a sapling which Mrs.
Elephant had provided, and in an authoritative voice said: “Gentlemen of the Jungle,
there is no need for me to waste your valuable time in relating a story which I am sure
you all know. I have always regarded it as my duty to protect the interests of my friends,
and this appears to have caused the misunderstanding between myself and my friend
here. He invited me to save his hut from being blown away by a hurricane. As the
hurricane had gained access owing to the unoccupied space in the hut, I considered it
necessary, in my friend’s own interests, to turn the undeveloped space to a more
economic use by sitting in it myself, a duty which any of you would undoubtedly have
performed with equal readiness in similar circumstances.”
After hearing the Rt. Hon. Mr. Elephant’s conclusive evidence, the Commission
called Mr. Hyena and other elders of the jungle, who all supported what Mr. Elephant
had said. They then called the man, who began to give his own account of the dispute.
But the Commission cut him short, saying: “My good man, please confine yourself to
relevant issues. We have already heard the circumstances from various unbiased sources;
all we wish you to tell us is whether the undeveloped space in your hut was occupied by
anyone else before Mr. Elephant assumed his position.” The man began to say: “No, but .” But at this point the Commission declared that they had heard sufficient evidence from
both sides and retired to consider their decision.
After enjoying a delicious meal at the expense of the Rt. Hon. Mr. Elephant, they
reached their verdict, called the man, and declared as follows: “In our opinion this
dispute has arisen through a regrettable misunderstanding due to the backwardness of
your ideas. We consider that Mr. Elephant has fulfilled his sacred duty of protecting your
interests. As it is clearly for your own good that the space should be put to its most
economic use, and as you yourself have not yet reached the stage of expansion which
would enable you to fill it, we consider it necessary to arrange a compromise to suit both
parties. Mr. Elephant shall continue his occupation of your hut, but we give you
permission to look for a site where you can build another hut more suited to your needs,
and we will see that you are well protected.”
The man, having no alternative, and fearing that his refusal might expose him to
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the teeth and claws of members of the Commission, did as they suggested. But no sooner
had he built another hut than Mr. Rhinoceros charged in with his horn lowered and
ordered the man to quit [in British English, ‘quit’ can mean ‘leave’]. A Royal Commission
was again appointed to look into the matter, and the same finding was given. This
procedure was repeated until Mr. Buffalo, Mr. Leopard, Mr. Hyena and the rest were all
accommodated with new huts. Then the man decided that he must adopt an effective
method of protection, since Commissions of Enquiry did not seem to be of any use to
him. He sat down and said: “​Ng’enda thi ndagaga motegi​,” which literally means “there
is nothing that treads on the earth that cannot be trapped,” or in other words, you can
fool people for a time, but not forever.
Early one morning, when the huts already occupied by the jungle lords were all
beginning to decay and fall to pieces, he went out and built a bigger and better hut a little
distance away. No sooner had Mr. Rhinoceros seen it than he came rushing in, only to
find that Mr. Elephant was already inside, sound asleep. Mr. Leopard next came in at the
window, Mr. Lion, Mr. Fox and Mr. Buffalo entered the doors, while Mr. Hyena howled
for a place in the shade and Mr. Alligator basked on the roof. Presently they all began
disputing about their rights of penetration, and from disputing they came to fighting,
and while they were all embroiled together the man set the hut on fire and burnt it to the
ground, jungle lords and all. Then he went home saying: ‘Peace is costly, but it’s worth
the expense,’ and lived happily ever after.
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