In May 2010 Hors-la-loi (Outside the Law), a high-budget film about three Algerian brothers caught up in their country’s violent struggle for colonial independence from France, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Rachid Bouchareb, the film’s director, was soon embroiled in a peculiarly French storm of media controversy, one that, while overtly intellectual, quickly became politicized and highly emotive. At issue was his depiction of a 1945 Algerian uprising which was used to justify the massacre of thousands of civilians by colonial security forces and French settler vigilantes.1 French-born and of Algerian descent, Bouchareb in his previous film, Indigènes (Days of Glory), had tackled the vital contribution made by North African soldiers to the French Army’s campaigning in Europe during the final years of the Second World War. This was something that the authorities in Paris proved reluctant to acknowledge either at the time or since. But Hors-la-loi went further. Bouchareb turned post-war France from a country shaped by its wartime resistance to Nazi occupation into a colonialist regime whose viciousness provoked desperate—and legitimate—resistance by persecuted Algerians. So stark was this juxtaposition that the director was accused by the French Defence Ministry, by Gaullist parliamentarians, and by elements within the French press of playing fast and loose with history.2 Others disagreed. Hors-la-loi figured among the nominees for ‘Best foreign language film’ at America’s Academy Awards later in 2010.
Arguments over the depiction of an especially violent episode in France’s recent colonial past offer an entry-point to the issues discussed in this book. For, if Hors-la-loi was anything, it was a study of why those living under colonialism took up arms against an imperial regime that refused to give ground. It was a cinematic depiction of the choices inherent in ‘fight or flight’. What, then, does this seemingly simple phrase actually imply?
The search for answers might take us back to the early nineteenth century. Reflecting on the features of violence between states, Prussia’s foremost strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz identified certain variables whose interaction determined the probability, intensity, and outcome of armed conflicts. One of these was the extent of popular support for war and the degree to which different sections of the public were personally engaged by it. Another was the clarity with which politicians defined what was being fought for. Clearly defined goals and commensurately higher levels of public support assisted the achievement of strategic objectives.3 These objectives might be military victory or, telescoping forward to the cases examined in this book, the continuation or termination of colonial rule.
Clausewitz was writing well over a century before what is loosely identified as the era of decolonization between 1945 and 1975—during which Britain and France, along with fellow European imperialists the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal, lost or surrendered sovereign control over the bulk of their once-dependent territories. Nor was he discussing colonial conflict, although memories of Napoleonic colonization in German-speaking Europe were surely fresh in his memory.4 Yet Clausewitz’s insights provide a fitting starting point for discussion for two reasons. One is that wars of decolonization were generally characterized by massive mobilization of colonial populations against their European rulers (the ‘stronger levels of support’ that Clausewitz identified as critical) alongside only limited engagement—public or military—by the colonial power.5 The other is that British and French colonial authorities professed the need, not just to defeat their armed opponents, but to address the grievances of their civilian backers. Although not always expressed with Clausewitz-like precision, the ‘defined goals’ of colonial officialdom in situations of armed revolt connected the achievement of military objectives to the subsequent implementation of socio-political reforms. This is where the challenge lay.
The more we unpick these two apparently basic points, the more the policies of colonial government reveal fundamental dichotomies. As we shall see, the form and extent of popular engagement in contested decolonization—whether for it or against it—was something to which politicians in Britain and France responded very differently in the two decades following the Second World War’s end. Equally, while responses to violent colonial disorder supposedly combined the firm hand of military intervention with soothing promises of political concessions, only belatedly, if at all, did colonial authorities treat their opponents as credible negotiating partners, still less as legitimate ones.6 More often than not, this reluctance proved to be a dreadful mistake.
This book, then, begins from the proposition that wars of decolonization were not somehow unavoidable. Most were deliberately chosen. What follows is a history of these paths to violence, of armed conflict, its incidence and its avoidance, in the end of the British and French Empires during the mid to late twentieth century. The story is told in three ways. First, in comparing French and British approaches to the challenges of anti-colonial opposition, I try to explain why conflict was prevented or promoted in particular times and places. If Britain is perceived to have escaped from empire without ‘serious shock’, France did not.7 Are these presumptions correct? Second, the book compares experiences of decolonization region by region, albeit predominantly in Asia and Africa. The third comparison is between those whose opposition to colonial rule drove them to violence and those for whom it did not. Those individuals who decided to take up arms against colonial domination were typically resisting something they found intolerable. But relatively few burned the bridge to eventual dialogue. Their decisions about resistance or accommodation were also inter-connected. The outbreak of fighting or decisions to negotiate in one territory influenced other colonized peoples contemplating their own paths to freedom. Putting these comparisons together, the fundamental question that faces us is why violent politics predominated in some places and not in others. My suggestion is that, in most situations, this issue turned on the choices made by the imperial powers and their opponents about resisting the end of empire or negotiating it, about fight or flight.
Some might see antecedents to this story, whether in the classical period or in other, more recent historical times. In the late eighteenth century France and Britain had each surrendered the North American domains of their first empires after fighting ineffectually to keep them. French losses in Canada during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 and the American Revolution of the 1770s were portents of later decolonization. The first was bound up with the greater strategic resources of an imperial rival—Britain. The second was the consequence of a settler rebellion against imperious rule from London. And following each defeat, the geopolitical focus of empire shifted elsewhere—in Britain’s case, initially to South Asia; rather later in the French case, to the African continent. This is where the sheer magnitude of modern colonialism begins to distinguish it. Over 450 million people in Asia and Africa fell under European colonial rule between the 1830s and the treaty settlements that carved up the Ottoman Middle East following the First World War.8 After the end of the Second, the figure climbed to almost a billion. This massive growth in numbers, as much the consequence of population increases and improving life expectancy as of geographical extensions to imperial power, was thrown into sharp reverse in the twenty years after 1945. By the end of the 1960s fewer than fifty million souls remained European colonial subjects and only Portugal clung on to the bulk of its overseas territories. The process involved is usually described as decolonization.9 Although historians can agree on the terminology, they differ sharply about the principal causal factors as work.
Imperial historians, as their name implies, have tended to focus on empires’ collapsing institutional structures, changes in administrative practice, shifting European public and political attitudes, and the consequent adoption of colonial reforms. Reinvigorated in recent years by closer attention to empire cultures and the networks of communication and migration that spread them, imperial history remains primarily European in focus, its foremost concern being to explain modern European empire as a historical phenomenon. Historians of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean pursue different approaches, although these, too, are grounded in the primacy of their regional interests. For them, studying the end of empire must begin with the people most affected by it—not so much European publics as populations in the developing world for whom decolonization was imminent, proximate, and visceral. This focus on the global ‘south’ as the source of revolutionary transformation echoes the ‘Third Worldism’ that dominated new left thinking in the 1960s and 1970s. But, as a historical methodology, it implies something else: not an ideological stance, but rather, as Mark Philip Bradley puts it, a pre-eminent concern with the experiences of the colonized, not the colonizers. ‘In this view, independence was not so much given as taken, and anticolonial actors and their construction of post-colonial states and society become central elements of the story.’10
The distinction between these two approaches should not be overdrawn. Since the mid 1990s scholars of empire and area studies specialists have converged, for the most part accepting that imperialism cannot be reduced to one-way traffic, whether European or otherwise. Empire is now studied in more imaginative ways that reject the old binaries of European ‘metropole’ and colonial ‘periphery’ in favour of more complex interlocking relationships built on cultural transmission, economic inter-dependence, and shared—albeit opposing—histories of colonialism. One of the achievements of this more integrated new imperial history has been to explain how politicians and publics came to adopt ‘imperialist’ outlooks. The apparent oddity of an avowedly liberal parliamentary democracy in Britain and a relatively egalitarian, liberal republic in France each possessing vast colonial empires was always more apparent than real. In Britain, certain strands of liberalism and imperialism walked hand in hand. In France, the republican commitment to liberty and the revolutionary values of 1789 was used to reframe colonial domination as culturally educative and socially beneficial, a civilizing process that would bring genuine emancipation to other, less fortunate societies.11 Meanwhile, France’s status as the ‘eldest daughter’ of the Catholic Church suggested that France was duty-bound to its self-proclaimed task ‘of freeing the indigenous colonized peoples from savagery and ignorance’.12
For most of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the one constant in British and French international politics was the exploitation of non-European ethnic groups through authoritarian systems of political control that denied equivalent civil rights, economic entitlements, and citizenship status to whites and non-whites. Reduced to their absolute essence, varieties of imperial rule invariably replicated these and other forms of discrimination.13 Colonial dominion, whatever the official policy monikers applied to it—among them, indirect rule, diarchy (in India), and ‘preparation for self-government’ in the British case; assimilationism, associationism, or integrationism in the French case—was followed, eventually, by the struggle against decolonization.14 The expansion and ultimate contraction of empire, as well as the strategic networks, economic relationships, and cultural affiliations that underpinned it framed the canvas on which the global presence of Britain and France was drawn. The colonial dimension of this picture may, at times, have been less vivid than other aspects of international affairs, from inter-state conflict to the construction of alliance systems, even the internal consolidation of the French Republic itself. But empire was always there.
It might appear self-evident that the history of empire cannot be either European or non-European—it has to be both. But the real point is this: interpretations of colonialism now concentrate on these conjunctures, on the intersections between European imperial ideas and practices and non-European responses to them. And in the generation after 1945 the practices and the responses changed more dramatically than ever before, bringing European colonial rule to its knees.
Trying to bring the methods of imperial history together with those of other historical fields, the following chapters look both beyond the purely political, ‘high policy’ decisions of British and French governments and their colonial administrations, and beyond the nationalist parties, insurgent groups, and social movements that opposed them. Decolonization, as we shall see, was sometimes driven by other pressures. Economic change in post-war Europe and the wider world altered patterns of trade. Levels of industrialization increased. Colonial towns and cities mushroomed, often chaotically. And customary forms of agriculture struggled to survive. Each of these transformations bore directly on the relevance and viability of continuing imperial rule. Social changes were equally significant. To take only two examples, the emancipation of French women in 1944 and the increasing secularization of British and French society altered the terms in which the defence of empire was articulated and the constituencies to which imperialists and anti-imperialists appealed.
Finally, cultural change, too, impacted on decolonization. Between the book’s starting point in the era of the First World War and its endpoint in the 1970s French and British families, communities, and civil society groups became less hierarchical and less deferential. The ‘banal imperialism’ characteristic of French and, even more so, of British society in the early twentieth century, an acceptance of empire so ingrained in everything from early-years education to media reportage, leisure, sport, and family connections that it passed almost unnoticed, became less reliable as a political indicator as the post-war decades rolled forward.15 The end of deference—to political authority at least—was also implicit in the mounting pressure for decolonization within colonial societies. Meanwhile, in the imperial mother countries and their dependencies, improving living standards and the development of mass consumerism transformed basic ideas about wants and needs, duty, and sacrifice. An amalgam of these and other economic, social, and cultural factors refashioned political cultures in Britain, France, and their empires, shaping fight or flight choices and the ways they were understood by politicians and publics.
It is worth recalling that these choices, often amounting to the pursuit of war, were rarely articulated or understood in moral terms. Perhaps one reason why is that long-standing colonial problems, unlike particular episodes, especially those with a scandalous flavour, did not always register highly in the wider political cultures of Britain or France. A danger for anyone enthralled by the history of empire and processes of decolonization is that we assume the political actors and public audiences of the day shared the same fascination. How misguided this can be. One has only to recall Winston Churchill’s disdainful, if disarming, comment as France’s war in Indochina entered its final stages in 1953: ‘I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia.’16 Tragically, all too often such ‘bloody places’ appeared fleetingly on the radar of western commentators, and normally only in response to social crises that were read as affirmation of their benighted status beyond the pale of the normative standards of western civilization. If the history of empire has one justification above all, it is surely to remind us that those normative standards dripping with disapproval of colonial backwardness produced some of the most savage violence, gross iniquity, and chronic upheavals of our recent past.
The historian, trying to be true to source material and historical context, needs to bear these factors in mind. There is plenty in the chapters to come that one might be tempted to condemn. That is a judgement best left to the reader on the basis of the evidence presented. As David Anderson, a historian of Kenya, has suggested, there is little analytic purpose and no real scholarly value in trying to measure which colonial power was cruellest by counting the dead from colonial wars, repression, and other forms of violence. Wherever possible, we need to know who such victims were, and how many there were. But a comparative history of decolonization should not be some polemical ‘league table’ of barbarity.17 It should, rather, try to explain why recourse to extreme violence seemed not only logical, but defensible, even ethically imperative, to those who authorized or performed it.18 Colonial fights, as we will see, were never reducible to the crass simplicities of struggles for ‘hearts and minds’ in which imperial powers strove to win some sort of popularity contest against their anti-colonial opponents. For one thing, wars of decolonization, while never described in these terms at the time, were characterized by ruthless methods of population control, not by the kid-gloves treatment supposedly integral to ‘hearts and minds’ counter-insurgency.19 For another thing, the fact that security forces’ resort to violence was often meant to be exemplary did not imply that it was kept within narrow limits. At one extreme such ‘exemplary’ actions involved deliberate counter-terror designed to intimidate local populations; at another, the material affirmation of western technological supremacy through bombardment of recalcitrant ‘rebel zones’, often from the air.20 Recourse to violence against civilian populations whose material improvement and cultural elevation was, in theory at least, a first principle of empire exposed the hollowness of colonial promises and affirmed the underlying weakness of imperial authority.21
It is worth pausing a moment to consider the nature of this weakness. The widespread assumption that colonial conflicts were highly ‘asymmetric’, or heavily lop-sided, in the military and economic resources that imperial powers and their insurgent opponents could bring to bear is deeply misleading. Britain and France, it is true, had the means to divert professional military forces and advanced technologies to fight against decolonization. But they rarely did so. Colonial counter-insurgency, when fought over long periods, typically involved large numbers of police, paramilitaries, and locally-recruited ‘loyalist’ forces all of whom used fairly traditional weaponry to do their killing. Deployment of professional troops or young national servicemen to colonial wars certainly took place, but, with the notable exception of French Indochina and, even more so, French Algeria, it usually involved thousands, not tens of thousands of European soldiers. Again these two French conflicts give the lie to an otherwise general rule that wars of decolonization did not require ‘total’ mobilization of metropolitan political, economic, or cultural resources. For the populations of post-war Britain and France, violent disorder somewhere in their empire was perennial, a part of the imperial soundtrack, not an abrupt change of tune. The result was to normalize rebellion and violence as aspects of the wider process of holding or, eventually, losing an empire. Even colonial defeats were, in John Horne’s words, ‘partial’ for British and French society insofar as they involved no fear of occupation, no surrender of domestic territory, no loss of basic rights.22
Even if the stakes were lower for Britain and France than the ‘struggles for survival’ of 1914–18 and 1939–45, empire defeats could still generate venomous politics and endless recrimination. And for the colonial populations directly involved, colonial warfare was neither remote nor ‘low intensity’. It was threatening, divisive, devastating. Civilian casualties, whether relative to military losses or in terms of overall population, could be staggeringly high. Public engagement was greater too. The Vietnamese path to victory in 1954 was traceable in sustained popular mobilization. The triumph of Algeria’s FLN was grounded in strict enforcement of popular compliance. Elsewhere the success of anti-colonial nationalists was built upon less violent forms of political action—outflanking rivals, repeating a clear message, winning over the young and taking control of the apparatus of local administration. In these non-violent cases, as in their violent counterparts, any asymmetry was reversed: it was the colonial power, not the colonial population that seemed poorly equipped to meet the challenge.
Another point to emphasize from the outset is that neither the British nor the French empires were unitary, coherent, or closed territorial polities. Rather, they were multifarious systems that included formal colonial administration and control in some places, more informal (even invisible) networks of strategic, economic, and cultural predominance in others. Even territories that were clearly run as colonies—in the British case, Nigeria, Jamaica or Burma for instance; in the French case, Senegal, Guadeloupe, or Cochin-China (southern Vietnam)—on closer inspection defy such generic classification. Nigeria was the exemplar of ‘indirect rule’, yet its northern and southern provinces were administered very differently. Jamaica, a British colony to be sure, fell within a US sphere of Caribbean influence during and after the Second World War. Burma was ruled as an off-shoot of British India by the Raj administration in Delhi until 1937. It then came under Colonial Office control for only four years until the shock of foreign invasion made Burma the strategic epicentre of British efforts to halt Japan’s advance through mainland Asia.
On the French side, Senegal, the departure point for French incursion into the Sene-Gambian Valley, retained a complex form of dual administration that reflected its past importance as the commercial centre of French slaving in West Africa. Thus, the so-called originaires, those born inside Senegal’s original ‘four communes’ of Saint Louis, Dakar, Rufisque, and Gorée island, enjoyed French citizenship and, from 1916, voting rights that were denied to their fellow Senegalese in the colony’s interior. Guadeloupe was another colony with origins in early modern slavery and the commercial attractions of sugar and rum. Like its near-neighbour Martinique, it was reinvented as an overseas département in 1946, a transition that, on paper at least, replaced the hierarchical architecture of colonial administration with the more horizontal bureaucracy of French local government. Finally, Cochin-China and its steamy capital, Saigon, was another hub for wider colonial penetration, this time north and westwards through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Cochin-China was ruled colonially as part of a larger Indochina federation in which more mixed systems of ‘royal protectorate’ survived elsewhere. And the entire composite federation was redesigned immediately after the Second World War in a bid to conceal its imperial foundations. None of these territories, nor the changes in administrative status they underwent were anomalous. The more one looks beneath the veneer of colonial rule, the more idiosyncrasies appear.
So can any generalizations be made? In broad terms, economic considerations weighed more heavily in British than French decolonization. Conversely, domestic political division features more prominently in the French case than the British. In this sense, the value attached to gradualism and compromise in British political culture was strikingly different to French traditions of protest and intolerance of low-performing coalition administrations. These traditions, although elusive and vaguely stereotypical, did surface in the contrasting official rhetoric that peppered the British and French roads from empire. If the traffic lights of British decolonization tended to oscillate between amber and green, their French equivalents sometimes stuck on red. Where British governmental statements were often placatory, understated and, it must be said, misleading, declarations of French governmental intent were usually framed in a more confrontational language of triumph or defeat.23 It seems appropriate then to begin our story by investigating the colonial dimensions to a shared Franco-British victory. This takes us to the year 1918.