The British in Ceylon
Ceylon came to Britain at third hand; the Portuguese and then the Dutch had settlements on the coast, which were taken over during the wars of 1793–1814. A Crown Colony was organized in 1801, and occupation was extended from the coast over the whole country: in this and other ways Ceylon evolved like British India, but more rapidly because it was smaller and had been brought under European influence earlier. The ruler of the old kingdom of Kandy, now seized, was accused of being a tyrant; a stock pretext, which even to some Europeans looked ‘ridiculous’, on a par with the hackneyed argument that we must ‘show our spirit’.1 A revolt in 1817–18 in protest against the annexation was something like a miniature 1857.
Plantations, secondary in India, here quickly came to dominate the economy: first coffee-growing, later tea. Ceylon’s availability coincided with the crippling of planters’ profits in the West Indies by the abolition of slavery: ‘men’s attention was then turned from West to East’.2 From the late 1830s a boom was in full swing, and drawing speculators like a gold-rush. Many of these were, as a governor, Lord Torrington, complained, ‘of the very worst class of Englishmen’, bound to ‘lower and degrade our caste and character in the eyes of the natives’.3 Evidently Anglo-Indian notions were filtering into Ceylon, in spite of its separate political status. Besides the fortune-hunters from outside, officials and judges and chaplains were neglecting their duties to get rich quicker by taking up shares of the lands granted away to planters. Most of these were forest lands in the hilly interior; all the same Sinhalese feeling was antagonized, and in 1848 this and other grievances led to an agitation and some minor disorder. Demoralized officials were thrown into a panic, and harsh repression followed.4 This, however, led to a parliamentary inquiry, and some improvement. Much was due to an Irishman, Christopher Elliott one of that small number of really valuable European settlers who went to the colonies. He was a radical who had led a campaign for representative government in Ceylon, and in 1848 championed the popular cause. He had friends in London who could raise questions.5
Thereafter several factors made for easier relations in Ceylon than in India, as a result of which to this day an educated Indian going to Ceylon finds Europeans less standoffish, more part of local society, than he has known them at home.6 There was no North-West Frontier, no Russian menace, and no large contingent of military men with their heavy-dragoon mentality. Buddhism was an easier religion to get on with amicably than either Hinduism or Islam. There was also a Christian community of Eurasians, a legacy of the Portuguese and Dutch, which retained a better status than the similar one in India, and has grown into one of the most thoroughly westernized communities in Asia. To some extent it formed a link between Europeans and Sinhalese. In addition there was a minority of Tamils, immigrants of ancient date from south India. A minority is always likely to be more adaptable to new ideas and methods, and Tamils were readier than Sinhalese to pick up English and therefore came – like Bengalis in India – to occupy a big proportion of the lower posts in government service. Some even became Christians. Their dependability helped to smooth the way for the rulers, at the cost of worsening relations between them and the majority community, to the detriment of independent Ceylon later on.
A second and quite distinct class of Tamil immigrants was coming in by 1850. Peasants with land of their own had no desire to work on the plantations, which like those of Assam had to import coolie labour from outside. By the end of the period over half a million had come, about one seventh of the island’s population. An isolated, self-contained area like Ceylon or Assam was ideal for the development of the plantation system, as revolutionary an innovation in Asia as industrial capitalism in Europe, and requiring a still stronger element of compulsion to get it going and keep it going. A captive workforce was under the thumb of employers virtually identical with government and police. As in Assam, inquiry into what was happening on the plantations was belated. In 1917 it was discovered that nearly all the workers were in a chronic state of indebtedness, though the village headmen and other contractors who supplied them did well.
Servants and labourers too were often Indian rather than Sinhalese; it was a rough sort of Tamil that Englishmen learned to speak, in the imperative mood to which most European speaking of Asian languages has been confined. They might come to feel a liking for these useful and unpretentious folk; Sinhalese by comparison were peasants living their own lives, or elegant dawdlers with a turn for the arts and for the politics and speechifying of nationalism that finally spread from India into this quiet haven.
The British in Burma
‘The expedition to Rangoon is accused of having acted with great severity,’ Sir Charles Grey wrote from Madras during the first war between Britain and Burma in 1824–5, ‘and it is certain that the whole population have the greatest horror of us.’8 Resistance was unexpectedly stiff, and Rangoon and Lower Burma were not occupied until the next war in 1853. Then a new great port, one of the more attractive blendings of eastern and western life, grew up round the towering gold Shwedagon Pagoda, symbol of a continuing Burmese tradition. Rangoon began to supplant the old-world capital at Ava, and then nearby Mandalay, as the centre of Burmese life and culture, including its flourishing drama; audiences took a nostalgic pleasure in plays about free Burma.9
Timber and ruby interests, and the motive of forestalling the French, now established in Vietnam, combined to bring about the annexation of Upper Burma at the end of 1885. Annexations at this date, and in face of European rivals, had to be explained and justified rather more carefully than in previous epochs; in fact this culminating stage of imperialism was one of the forcing-houses of modern propaganda, the science of blackening enemies and whitewashing friends, before it reached full growth inside Europe in 1914–18. King Theebaw was portrayed, more elaborately than the King of Kandy in 1815, as a most bloodthirsty and unbearable despot. The Oriental tyrant was a familiar stereotype by now, with which any Asian ruler could be identified when it was desired to get rid of him instead of to make use of him. The Black Hole of Calcutta had joined the battle of Hastings as one of the few titbits of history that all Britons knew. Government at Mandalay was purely arbitrary, said the Imperial Gazetteer of India in a very captious account of Upper Burma.10 Theebaw inflamed a native savagery with strong potations, said another English writer. ‘A monster, reminding us of Nero or Caligula, had appeared on the throne of the Golden Foot.’11 It was stated in Parliament that six thousand citizens of Rangoon had petitioned for intervention.12
A missionary who knew Theebaw as a schoolboy recalled him as ‘a quiet, inoffensive, docile lad’,13 and Fielding Hall in his celebrated book on Burma was to sum him up as ‘young, incapable, kind-hearted’: his administration was to be sure very bad, but then it affected most of the country very little.14 However, in 1885 indignation at his crimes, real or imaginary, precluded any policy of keeping a puppet monarchy. Commissioner Bernard, who would have liked a protectorate, was accused of ‘an extraordinary predilection for Burman ideas and sentiments’, unworthy of an Englishman.15 Mandalay was taken with ease, and a Lower Burman who went there to see how people felt about the change found them not too hostile, though uneasy at the prospect of their country being flooded, as Lower Burma already was, with Indian immigrants.16 Britons were jubilant. The haughtiest conqueror has moods of regret that he is not loved, and Burma was hugged as a consolation for India. ‘This absolute conviction that the Burmans are eager to be annexed,’ one enthusiast wrote, ‘is exhilarating … at last we have discovered a reasonable and reasoning population which has an enlightened sense of their own interests.’17
It was an amiable hope that sprang eternal in the empire-builder’s breast. But though the capital might submit, in the countryside a guerrilla resistance broke out and lasted for years. The common man has often proved more patriotic than the upper classes in face of foreign invasion, in modern Asia as in Spain in 1808–14 or France in 1940–45. People did not after all seem to have been so unhappy under their old regime, an officer was sorry to find, ‘and gave no evidence of rejoicing at our coming’.18 The enthusiast soon had second thoughts; the campaign was having a brutalizing effect on the British troops, and the government at home had to act to restrain excesses. One grows sceptical as to the tranquillizing effect of military executions.’19 He sought comfort in the idea that those resisting were not patriots but dacoits or brigands, taking advantage of the confusion. Others who recognized ‘some faint tinge of patriotism’ in the opposition convinced themselves that it was quickly degenerating into mere anarchy.20 The army professed to be confining its punitive operations to bandits and their friends – ‘villages which harboured them were destroyed, cattle were carried off and crops impounded’.21 These were elastic terms of reference. Outlaws were an established part of society in all this area of the world, and their adventurous habits qualified them to make the sort of contribution that Spain’s contrabandists made against Napoleon. Even from a merely professional point of view they had reason to prefer the old lax ways to rigid European control. Fielding Hall looked back on the struggle as a genuinely national movement of the common people, ‘a passion of insurrection’.22
By 1910 or so there was a national movement of more sophisticated type, hastened by the proximity of India; but it did not prevent relations, especially with Burmans of the higher classes who had taken less part in the resistance, from acquiring a more free and easy tone than in India. This came about partly because Burmans were more free and easy among themselves, unburdened with caste distinctions. Buddhism as in Ceylon had helped to mould an amiable national character. It did not oblige women to be kept in seclusion, and they won Western appreciation from the first. One of the Border Regiment’s souvenirs of the occupation campaign was a big photograph of a bevy of ‘Burmese Dancing Girls’, too faded alas for their charms to be recognizable today.23 There is a story of the German Crown Prince on a visit to India scandalizing his hosts by missing a banquet to keep a rendezvous with a Burmese princess.24
By contrast with the misery that was and is India’s most eyecatching feature, Burma with its surplus of rice had a comfortable air; it was ‘the difference between simplicity and squalor’, someone remarked.25 And as in Ceylon, Indian immigration made other contrasts more visible. This was not a plantation economy, but one of small peasant rice-fields, and here Indians formed in general not a rural proletariat but a middle class of retailers and moneylenders: a middle class of the new hybrid kind that grew up in the colonies, combining Asian usury and Western property-law to squeeze profits out of unsuspicious cultivators. Necessary as some of their functions were, like those of Jews in old Europe, they were heartily disliked by the Burmese and despised by the British. Relations between these two benefited by Europeans being less obnoxious to Burmans than Indians were.
Educated Burmese could get into government service, or took refuge in their arts, especially the art of living, or of dolce far niente. And the example was contagious. Englishmen began to discover that in Burma one could enjoy leisure, not merely kill time when off duty. They had been in the habit of denouncing Burmese laziness, but the time came when some of them began to think it sensible and refreshing. They themselves were supposed to love freedom, but to a Burman the life of industrial Britain would seem mere slavery. He was ‘absolutely enamoured of freedom’.26 Hall put highest among many attractive qualities his ‘light-heartedness’ and ‘tolerance’, his not wanting to meddle with anyone else’s inclinations.27 To men from the grimly earnest West it was a revelation to see human beings still able to enjoy the passing moment, free from care or ambition. It appealed the more because the West itself was changing, empire-building mellowing into coupon-clipping, the craggy type of mid-Victorian brought up on Samuel Smiles and Carlyle into a contemporary, a cousin however many times removed, of Wilde and Beardsley.
There was a medley of small non-Burman nationalities, also with attractive qualities. Shan hillmen were described as generous, open-hearted folk. ‘They certainly possess consciences’ (a virtue clearly not attributed to all Asians), and ‘a refinement of their own’.28 Missionaries took to these hillmen, whose prim itive cults or very diluted Buddhism were less resistant to conversion than the great religions of the East always were. These backward tribes, as in India the lowest castes, provided the bulk of converts, Karens the greatest number. Along with Christianity they could adopt in a generation a modern outlook which they might feel put them ahead of the plainsmen, formerly their masters – though Burma had once been part of a Shan empire. Since independence the country has been plagued by a running quarrel between Rangoon and the separatist Karens, as India has by a quarrel between Delhi and the Nagas and other Christianized hill-folk of neighbouring Assam.
The British in Malaya
Sir Stamford Raffles, who started Singapore on its way in 1819, designed it to be a challenge to the narrow selfish exclusivism of the Dutch in Indonesia, a testimony to Britain’s new-found faith in free trade as the bringer of mutual understanding, as well as prosperity, to the world. He took a warm interest in the peoples among whom he was thrown, and was remembered as a champion of native rights.
Singapore had to gather a population, and was bound to have a great future, an observer wrote in 1837, because it lay ‘in the centre of myriads of active nations’.29 The West was setting up a variety of melting-pots in Asia, not all of which melted very successfully. But settlers came to Singapore chiefly from China. Most of them were southerners, not much in love with their own government, who brought with them a mistrustful attitude, and their notorious Secret Societies. These both gave them protection and exposed them and others to racketeering. In Siam, where the Societies also spread, it was reported that ‘the Government appears to be powerless against them’.30 At Singapore inscrutable Celestial and inscrutable Englishman were brought face to face, each trying to out-stare the other. Both understood business, and prosperity grew, if not mutual understanding, at least for the minority of Chinese who became rich and for the British residents whose showy carriages and expensive style of living struck visitors: no wonder they were always complaining that fortunes were harder to make than they used to be.31
Before long they wanted more room, and the long narrow Malay peninsula hanging down towards them from the north was temptingly close. Two of its nearest harbours, Malacca and Penang, were added to Singapore to form the Straits Settlements, which became a separate Crown Colony in 1867 and promptly developed a small local imperialism of their own, embarrassing at times to the home government. This had the backing of wealthy Chinese citizens, and two great merchants, Kim Chin and Whampoo, helped to convince a new governor from Australia, Sir Andrew Clarke, that expansion was the right policy.32
As late as 1874 no maps or handbooks of the peninsula existed.33 Current notions about Malays were drawn chiefly from their depredations in the Archipelago. Some of them, of the piratical sort, had been messmates of Trelawney when he was in these waters early in the century, and played their part in the wild scenes of rapine and buccaneering and slave-dealing that fill his pages. Malays had already won the reputation of being ‘the most fierce, treacherous, ignorant, and inflexible of barbarians’. He himself thought better of them: they were ‘true to their words, generous to prodigality, and of invincible courage’ – a chivalrous race, ‘devoted to war, and to its inseparable accompaniment, women’.34 Decades later it was necessary to contradict reports that all Malays were pirates or savages, forever running amuck and knifing one another.35 Their homeland was depicted as being in a frightful condition of misrule or chaos, the mass of its cultivators in a state of slavery. Debt-slavery was indeed prevalent, here and in Siam, and the British public had learned to react sharply to the word, little as the reality might differ from indentured labour on a British plantation.
Government consisted of petty rulers, who dignified themselves with preposterous titles like ‘Sultan of China’, and whose business consisted of petty wars with each other. What they manifestly stood in need of was civilizing British influence. The Maharaja of Johore, closest to Singapore, felt it early, and could be described as quite Anglicized.36 ‘It may be taken for granted,’ someone wrote, ‘that amongst the more enlightened Malays there is a disposition to welcome the English.’37 Since the only satisfactory test of enlightenment was a disposition to welcome the English, his dictum could not easily be disputed. Everything prescribed a policy of control through whatever rulers might prove amenable: geography and jungle, shortage of troops, the precedent of the Native States in India, and after 1885 the difficult pacification of Burma. It was to be effected through a Residency system, on Indian lines, and was initiated by the despatch of a Mr Birch in 1875 to the troubled State of Perak. Birch knew little Malay, but ‘dashed into Perak like a Victorian rationalist schoolmaster’, freeing slaves and interfering with feudal imposts right and left.38 Naturally he was soon set on and killed, and a punitive expedition followed.
There were a few protests in England, some of them from men with a traditionalist respect, like Sir John Malcom’s in India, for rulers and prescriptive rights – Clarke by contrast was or had been ‘a strong radical’.39 Sir P. Benson Maxwell published a pamphlet in 1878 that deserves a place in the record of dissent from the barbarism of civilization. ‘English Governors in the East fall into a moral atmosphere which sadly distorts their mental vision,’ he asserted.40 Rival claimants to petty thrones in Malaya solicited British aid, and officials seemed really to believe in ‘a divine mission to improve the Malays’. Public and Parliament never troubled to study what was happening. ‘If a town is shelled in some distant land … or some hecatombs of natives are slaughtered, up we throw our hats and rend the air with cheers for the gallantry of our troops or tars … But nobody asks about the rights and wrongs of the matter.’41
Clarke himself in later years condemned ‘useless, expensive, and demoralizing small wars’, only serving to dazzle the public and win medals.42 In Malaya no prolonged fighting was required. Rulers had much to gain from British support against their own disorderly vassals, and in this feudal society there was no danger of the popular resistance met with in more democratic Burma. Moreover, Burma was a nation, and Malaya, like most of the Islamic lands, was not. Swettenham, its outstanding English administrator, could claim that by 1900 ‘the friendship and active co-operation of the people themselves’ had been secured.43 This really meant the friendship of the Malay aristocracy, a class of similar stamp to the land-owners favoured or created by the British in India. The British had little need to interfere with ordinary Malays, because as in various other colonies the hard labour of development was shouldered by newcomers. But landlords had more incentive to rackrent tenants, and peasants had more facilities for becoming enmeshed in debts to Indian moneylenders and Chinese shopkeepers.44
Most Chinese started as indentured labourers, who were brought in mostly for the tin-mines, but astonished the other races, as they often did, by their resilience and versatility. South Indians were employed on the rubber plantations, and to some extent on public works. The Indian government was understood to be keeping a fatherly eye on them; what probably gave them better protection was that in rapidly developing Malaya they, unlike the Assam tea-coolies, could run away from plantations and look for other work. Forty thousand ‘deserted’ in 1915 alone, which tells its own tale about conditions. The benefits of the new order – advertised as one of the most brilliant successes of colonialism45 – were very unequally distributed, and it rested on a balance of races which as in all such conglomerate societies came to feel towards each other the hostility that elsewhere rival classes feel. After 1945 this would lead to the British partnership with the Malay aristocracy against the Chinese.
Within these limits an Englishman like Swettenham, who understood how much knowledge of and sympathy with a people are needed to reach its ‘innermost heart’,46 could take a keen interest in Malay arts and ways of living. The curiosity Raffles had felt about the history and culture of this part of the world revived, and other Europeans, and soon Asians, joined in contributing to the miscellaneous stock that accumulated in the Journals of the Straits and Malayan branches of the Asiatic Society. Search for knowledge as well as profits was spilling out from British India into new realms.
Malays had spread far and wide over the Archipelago, carrying with them and carried on by their Islamic faith, and were often to be met with as conquering groups levying tribute on more primitive or less warlike peoples. In this situation both the good and the bad qualities of a nobility of the sword, which on the mainland marked the ruling class, were likely to be common property among them. They had ‘all the quiet ease and dignity of the best-bred Europeans’, the naturalist Wallace observed during a lengthy stay in the Archipelago, along with ‘a reckless cruelty and contempt of human life’; in intellect they seemed ‘rather deficient … incapable of anything but the simplest combinations of ideas’.47 These traits could be seen in full flower in Borneo, where the Dyak aborigines were being preyed on and pushed into the hilly interior by Malay coastal squatters and their chiefs, headed by a sort of sultan.
Europeans sympathizing with the weaker side might well feel that their interference was called for. Britain should see itself as the chosen people in this part of Asia, urged one writer.48 Arguing in favour of a British establishment in Borneo, another declared that ‘The Malays, with proper management may, in my opinion, be rendered a very superior race in many respects to some of the natives of Hindostan.’49 What a ‘crown of glory’, George Borrow wrote, to ‘carry the blessings of civilization and religion to barbarous, yet at the same time beautiful and romantic lands … Yet who has done so in these times?’ Only one man, he believed – Rajah Brooke.50
Undoubtedly Brooke stands out among the Europeans who were adventuring alone through strange lands. First employed in Borneo by the sultan against a Dyak rebellion, and rewarded in 1841 with the principality of Sarawak in the north of the island, he endeavoured to protect the Dyaks from oppression by Malay robbers and Chinese traders. Disgusted by the rapacity of the Malay chiefs and their followers, he thought the simple Dyaks far the better people of the two. His naval friend Keppel agreed with him in liking these hill-folk whom the Malay rajahs looked on ‘much in the same light as they would a drove of oxen’.51 Wallace stayed with Brooke during 1854–6, and saw that the Dyaks looked up to him as a super-natural being.52
Brooke himself was sometimes taxed with high-handedness in dealing with natives, but his principle, which as a lone hand unlike the juggernaut of empire he was free to adopt, was that they ought to be approached as equals. On this point,’ he wrote, ‘most Europeans are grossly wanting … When we desire to improve and elevate a people, we must not begin by treating them as an inferior race; and yet this is too generally the style of our Indian rulers, with a few brilliant exceptions.’53 Brooke ran into many problems, and all through the 1850s and until his death in 1868 he was trying to persuade the British government to assume responsibility for the defence of Sarawak, while respecting the rights of its people, by whose will he claimed to hold power. He would like to stay on as ‘a friend and adviser of the Natives’, he told the Colonial Office. After his death his nephew, striking what he may have judged a more persuasive note, took credit for having helped to turn these natives into ‘quiet and obedient subjects’.54 The British government boggled at the awkward precedent of treating a Briton as an autonomous ruler, and only in 1888 took charge of Sarawak foreign relations.
It felt no awkwardness about allowing a group of British investors to assume sovereign powers or impersonate the chosen people in the adjoining North Borneo territory. This was built up by a Chartered Company, much as the Indian empire had been. We have some graphic detail of the preliminary spade-work through the eyes of one J. D. Northwood who had investments in Borneo. He arrived when a rebellion of the Murut tribe was being suppressed by a small mercenary force the Company had collected, one of a number of private armies of that epoch. It was ‘a miscellaneous gathering of Asiatic ruffians of all kinds, officered by a few Europeans’. Paying his first call at Government House, the newcomer found some of the recruits, Dyak head-hunters, smoking Murut heads on the tennislawn. Proceeding to his plantation he discovered that hundreds of the coolies working on it had just died of fever. He was not there to look for any crown of glory, but this gave him pause. ‘Dividends of one hundred per cent appeared in a new and horrid light.’55 Fresh supplies of coolies could always be got, and rubber plantations multiplied briskly. To leave ‘pacification’ of such wild areas to unofficial agencies often suited European governments, which could disclaim responsibility for any incidental blemishes. Misgivings did arise in England about the doings of the British North Borneo Company, but it had Gladstone to defend it in Parliament.56 It was a speciality of his to make dirty linen look as if it had been washed in public.
The Netherlands East Indies
The rest of Borneo fell to the Dutch empire, still expanding through the century in sometimes acrimonious competition with the British. Brooke predicted this in one of his first letters from Sarawak: if Britain were not more active the Dutch would step in, ‘and then farewell hope; for Dutch rule, with respect to natives, is a palsy, and death to British manufactures’. ‘Is the English lion for ever to crouch beneath the belly of the Dutch frog?’57 These two empires differed widely in their views of colonies and of colonial peoples; the British watchword was laissez-faire, while the Dutch, with no industrial revolution to overthrow the maxims of an earlier capitalism, clung to monopoly, restriction, regulation. There was no doubt that they knew how to conjure immense profits out of their plantation-economy, and this compelled admiration; they passed in Europe for the most scientific of all colonial managers.
An Englishman disillusioned with his own industrial society might conclude that the patriarchal sway of Holland was better for its subjects. In some areas at least they seemed to Wallace ‘well fed and decently clothed’, whereas Britain instead of taking native peoples as they were was trying to modernize them all at once. ‘We demoralize and we extirpate, but we never really civilize.’58 More often, and too truly, Dutch rule was seen as a peculiarly remorseless, undeviating, phlegmatic exploitation. Free from all romantic illusion, this oldest of bourgeois countries reckoned silk-worms, pepper-plants, peasants, all as items in a balance-sheet. Starting only a century after the Spaniards and Portuguese, it united their simple belief in the native having been created for the benefit of his European master with the northern efficiency of the later empires. Adam Smith commented on the ‘savage policy’ of the Dutch in cutting down spice plants to keep up prices, and cutting down with them the population of some of the ‘Spice Isles’ or Moluccas.59 Recalcitrant islanders were cleared out to make room for plantations worked with slave-labour from India or China. When Captain Cook was there he noticed that Europeans were seldom executed for any crime, natives promptly impaled or broken on the wheel60 – a mixture of the penal barbarities of Asia and Europe.
Holland’s method of extracting tribute was to collect spices and other crops, from the mid-eighteenth century chiefly coffee, and ship them to Europe to be sold for its own benefit. Cultivators were compelled to grow quotas and hand them over, in later days receiving a fixed price in return. In the half-century after 1830 the method was brought to perfection under the title of the ‘Culture System’. The more land was devoted to cash-crops for sale abroad, the less remained to grow rice for the swelling population. Rumours leaked out and gave rise to criticism in Europe, to which for a long time the Dutch public turned a deaf ear. Even with private planters forcing their way in against the old official monopoly, the empire retained much of the character of a State-capitalist enterprise, profitable to the whole nation. The nation was content to leave things to the permanent officials, with whom the States-General, though it was after 1848 the ultimate authority, interfered very little61 – even by comparison with Parliament and the British empire.
It might be wondered how these officials were able to wring such tribute for so long out of so many people, some of warlike stock. Dutchmen at Batavia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century always looked swag-bellied gormandizers even beside the average run of overfed Europeans in Asia, victims self-fattened for the fevers that decimated them. Holland had been a warlike nation only in the first century of its independence, and even then only on the sea. After that it no longer had a navy on the scale of Britain’s, and it was a small land with few reserves of manpower. Being rich, however, it could hire foreign soldiers, Scotsmen or Germans at home, Balinese or Amboinese in the Archipelago for use against other islanders.62 Dutch strength lay very much in the fact that this empire was a conglomerate of countless peoples and languages, without much in common, though the slow drift of Malay blood and Muslim faith over Indonesia continued. Java, the heart of the empire, was predominantly Malay, but it too contained sundry minorities.
Nevertheless, to the Dutch the necessity of some local buttress of their power was obvious earlier than to the English in India, and this could only mean the standard imperial policy of alliance with the old ruling class against the people. Initiated by the Company, it was inherited by the Crown when Indonesia was restored by Britain in 1815. Part of the empire consisted of vassal states, and even the part directly ruled, increased as time went on by further annexations, was really under a dual control. In India after 1857 the princes were an auxiliary force held in reserve, their territories entirely distinct from British India. In Indonesia the two authorities, native and foreign, worked side by side, or hand in glove. A district was under the joint charge of an Assistant-Resident, a Dutchman, and a Regent, the most prominent local notable.
This had diverse consequences. On social relations between the two races the effect was, within a narrow sphere, an equalizing one. It was impossible for rulers who depended so heavily on the native aristocracy and its hereditary influence to look down ostentatiously on all ‘natives’, as the British did in India. Intermarriage was not disreputable; a mixed population continued to grow, and Eurasians, if not fully on a par with Europeans, were not publicly rejected. Other factors worked in the same direction. A republic until 1814, Holland had a small old aristocracy, but this was not aped by the administrative middle class nearly so much as in British colonies. Women in Indonesia, moreover, were not strictly fenced off by religion and convention. Many outlying areas were still pagan, and Islam had had neither time nor energy to impose stern orthodoxy on the carefree manners of its converts. Latitude in matters of sex made for something similar in the related department of clothing, and in social life generally. English visitors were astonished not only by the status of native wives and their offspring, but by the sight of Dutchwomen wearing a comfortable costume of sarong and loose jacket, instead of the sweltering Western dress with which Englishwomen in the tropics stiffened their pride and soured their temper.
This kind of contact had its value, but one far outweighed by other results of the partnership between colonialism and feudalism. How bitter these could be for the poor, Holland and Europe learned from what may be the most startling book ever written by a European about a colony – the novel Max Havelaar, published in i860.63 Among the thousands of officials who worked in the colonies a good many must have felt at times as its author did, but very few spoke their thoughts aloud. This book threw a beam of light into the darkness visible of official reports and figures whose false optimism – as the author repeats – was meant to avoid disturbing the equanimity of official superiors. It described a scene of oppression due even more to the native rulers than to the foreign. Holland required its pound of flesh, or coffee, but to the demands of the rajahs for the peasant’s plough animals, or his tiny savings, or his unpaid labour on their own lands, there were no bounds. They were men of the same type as the Malay chief everywhere, only with the old chivalrous temper sunk into parasitic ease. A conscientious officer might wish to check the plundering, but he was a small man, and the Regent, with his claims of birth and his more permanent position, might be upheld by the higher authorities against him. It was one of the less bad sides of British racialism in India that this at least was unlikely to happen: any English civil servant’s word, like that of a policeman at home, would be taken against that of any two thieves, whether rajahs or not.
Max Havelaar was written just after the Indian Mutiny, in the hope that a revelation of what was going on would avert an upheaval in Java, as it might have done in India. It did help to bring about the changes and improvements introduced later in the century. Regents were brought under closer supervision, before being discarded altogether. Dutch rule took on a paternalistic flavour, and set about organizing welfare, in certain directions, as scientifically as it organized profit. Higher education was not part of this. Because of the alliance with feudalism, there had been little need for the kind of intelligentsia that the British made use of in India, and in these later days there was a fear of letting in too many modern ideas. Indian nationalism was a warning that the Dutchman could not fail to heed. and gloomy Englishmen were inclined to think his views on colonial education sensible. ‘He does not yearn to elevate the native to the bomb-throwing standard of British India …’64 For want of leaders a national movement was slower to develop in Indonesia; no concession was made to it until 1916, when a purely bogus local Assembly was started.
In the Outer Islands’ contract-labourers from Java or foreign countries suffered the same hardships as in other colonies; and fighting was still going on in the years before 1914 to complete the conquest of Sumatra, which was proving rich in mineral resources. A chin, the centre of resistance, had defied the Dutch for many decades. They met there ‘an enemy ready enough to fight and who fought under skilful guidance’, wrote a British military expert, who also observed what perfect conditions the dense jungle afforded for a guerrilla struggle.65 It was an omen of other jungle wars that the West was to condemn itself to in Asia.
French Indochina
Hardly anyone had a good word to say for the fragments left in Asia of the two oldest colonial empires. At Timor, Wallace deemed the Portuguese régime a ‘most miserable one … All the Government officials oppress and rob the natives as much as they can.’66 In the Philippines there were sporadic risings against the Spaniards, swelling after 1872 into a national movement. When the islands were annexed by the USA in 1899 after the war with Spain, resistance to foreign rule was put down more effectively. But in the second half of the nineteenth century a new empire was making a place for itself in south-east Asia, and France coming forward as Britain’s neighbour and rival in the great Indochinese peninsula as Holland was in Indonesia.
Siam survived as a buffer between British Burma and the eastern part of the peninsula – Laos, Cambodia, Annam or Vietnam – which became French. In terms of historical evolution the dividing-line was rather between Annam furthest east, along the coast, and all the rest. Annam belonged to the ‘Far East’ proper, along with China, Japan, Korea, all of which have been making the great stride into the modern world while the rest of Asia westward to Stamboul has by comparison failed to shake off the dead weight of the past. French economic interests, and French influence, both attraction and repulsion, centred here too.
French imperialism even in its earlier career inside Europe had two aspects, the arrogance as well as the enlightenment of the Great Nation. Pushed outwards from Europe after 1870, it was often in a worse, not a better, mood. The old confidence had been crippled, and there was a straining after national greatness instead of an easy consciousness of it. All the European nations were being radically altered, and not always improved, by industrialism and the other changes they were going through, and by their dealings with the other continents. In old books the French are so frequently described as a polite, cheerful, good-natured people, that they really must once have been like this; just as the Germans must once have been a guileless, kindly, unworldly folk. Trelawney praised the ‘urbanity and equality’ of the French colonial official and contrasted it with the ‘doglike surliness of the rude and stiff-backed Englishman’.67 The disaster of 1870, more humiliating than 1815, followed by the Commune, conscription and drilling for the next war, and Stock Exchange imperialism, all helped to bring about a deep transformation in the Frenchman.
Saigon and the southern tip of Annam were seized before the fall of Napoleon III; the capital Hue and the reigning dynasty were not brought under a French protectorate until 1883, and in the northern province of Tonking there was fierce resistance, aided in 1883–5 by China. Annam like all the Far Eastern lands had been a nation for ages, even if it was often torn, as on the eve of French conquest, by internal faction and peasant revolt. French ‘pacification’ was carried out in Tonking, largely by the ruffians of the Foreign Legion, that incongruous vehicle of the civilizing mission, with a brutality that an English observer described as ‘a disgrace to the Christian world’;68 by the time his book came out the British army was killing prisoners in Burma as the French army had done, more massively, in Tonking. Each Western country was in the habit of thinking itself over-indulgent with troublesome natives, too sparing of the wholesome severity that its rivals understood the need for. An ex-soldier from Tonking whom W. S. Blunt talked to in Paris exclaimed against his government’s folly in sending armchair philosophers to run the colonies, who fancied that all men were brothers – it was the English in India who were realistic – ‘en agissant avec des brutes il faut être brutal’.69
There had been a time, corresponding with the British optimism about India before 1857, when Frenchmen hugged the idea of civilizing colonial peoples so completely that they would be ‘assimilated’ to European standards. This was an idea that marked them off from both British and Dutch. Britain was prepared to give some of its subjects Western knowledge, Holland to give some of them Western husbands: France proposed to give them in addition Western souls, to translate them into Frenchmen. This conception had a complex background. Louis XIV taught France to think itself the teacher of Europe, and from long before his day it had been absorbing other nationalities – Breton, Flemish, Basque, German – into itself, making Frenchmen out of aliens. French nationalism was developing for several centuries before 1789 under the aegis of the Bourbon monarchy, whereas the Dutch were historically republican and the English virtually so since Charles I; even after 1789 France reverted three times to monarchy, and a fourth return after 1870 was on the cards. Kings are less prone than demagogues to racialism, being indifferent to what their subjects look like so long as they pay their taxes. Monarchy also promotes respect for Culture, as one of its own badges: this traditional respect, blighted in England by centuries of creeping capitalism and philistinism, France found it natural to transpose into an imperial setting. The French theatre had once dazzled Germany, and now French companies went out regularly to dazzle Saigon, and to enable Frenchmen to think of Annam and Cambodia as new provinces of France, taking the place of those lost in Europe.
In another sense France was, thanks to 1789, socially more modern and democratic than Britain. A Briton of low degree could become rich, but he could not become a gentleman It went logically with this that a British colonial subject could not rise in the scale of humanity beyond a certain point. In France anyone who accepted the established order of society could rise by his talents to any level; similarly a colonial subject who accepted French ascendancy could be lifted up by it and shake off all his clogs. It was one further inducement to accept him as a fellow-Frenchman that France was suffering from a low birth-rate, while its European rivals increased and multiplied.
Whether or not Frenchmen ever really thought of Gallicizing whole native peoples, in practice only minorities or élites could ever be given the necessary polish. And this meant that an Annamite, who could only become really civilized by ceasing to be an Annamite, would be cut off from the mass of his people, and these would be left leaderless – like Slovenes in the Hapsburg empire with all their educated class turned into Magyars. In principle, on the other hand, the British attitude acknowledged that an Indian could grow into a civilized Indian, and at some remote date be able to run his country himself.
But the ideal of assimilation soon wilted under contact with the realities of colonial profit-making. On the whole the French record in Indochina was mediocre, like most of the officials responsible for it, men with poor pay and prospects, bored with their duties.70 There were of course some material improvements, in water-control for instance. Formal slavery was suppressed. But throughout south-east Asia there were many informal shades of servitude in the old societies, peonage or serfdom or forced labour;71 and inevitably European enterprise took advantage of this, fitting its own greeds into a ready-made mould. On the big French-owned plantations, as in Assam, horrid abuses came to light from time to time, and the government showed ‘extraordinary timidity’ in dealing with them.72 Here too, coolie labour was recruited partly from among backward tribes, like the Moi; and here too, foreign rule brought with it an unpopular influx from neighbouring lands, chiefly India and China. Indochina could be humorously called a Chinese colony administered by Frenchmen. It was not rare for Chinese who started as pedlars to end with bigger fortunes than French businessmen.73 Usury was the special affair of the Chettis, a moneylending caste from south India who got control of much of the fertile southern rice-land.
Similar realities pervaded other colonies too, and by the 1890s French administrators were looking for an alternative to the ideal of assimilation. This was worked out chiefly in Indochina and transferred to the empire at large.74 Instead of old ideas and institutions being swept away to make room for new ones, it was argued now that they should be preserved and utilized, and this could be presented as recognition of the right of a native people to evolve on its own lines. De Lanessan, one of the pioneers of a new strategy of indirect rule in Indochina, talked of Annamites as a people with a mature culture of their own, whom France should accept as partners in the work of civilization.75 This sounded well, and might be sincere, but in practice the French, like the Dutch and British, were irresistibly pushed into alliance with the old parasitic ruling classes. Three puppet monarchies, the land-owners, and other ‘notables’, were fitted into the French framework, and tied to French rule by a bond of common interest; while the village commune, the institution of most value in the old society, disintegrated like its counterpart in India under the pressure of new economic forces.
For assimilation into French enlightenment a kind of second-rate substitute, more suitable for the common herd, was provided by Catholicism. Voltaire did not talk atheism before his servants, for fear of having his spoons stolen; the Third Republic was vigorously anti-clerical at home, but very willing to employ its clerical opponents in the colonies, as a sop and also for the sake of their soothing influence there. Religious prejudices in the Far East being fairly mild, as well as sexual taboos – the two always influencing each other – it was feasible to work up a body of support for French rule by converting a substantial minority; though the rise of the Sects, with their bizarre hotchpotch of religious and other fragments Western and Eastern, revealed how imperfect Franco-Annamite harmony was even on this level. Protection of Catholic missionaries and converts had been the original pretext for the French entry; and an official who in the early days of French rule was heard complaining of the Church as a law unto itself admitted that the clergy had been extremely useful to army intelligence during the conquest, and even marched at the head of the columns.76 The spirit of the Counter-Reformation stirred once more in this militant Christianity. Kept alive all these years by the mission Orders, like the spirit of feudal France marooned in Quebec, it now joined forces with its successor, the civilizing mission of modern imperialism.
Modern communications, available as they had not been in the first century of British India, might have been expected to cancel distance and strengthen France’s moral hold, but their effect was the opposite one of accelerating a new nationalism. The early resistance had hardly been stamped out before a new movement of independence was under way, which the authorities tried in vain to suffocate by the same violent methods, sometimes applied by the same Foreign Legion. Individuals lucky enough to reach a college in France found there, and could love, the true French culture they had been told about; but in their own country they saw little enough of it. There, perhaps, as much assimilation of Frenchmen to native ways took place as the opposite process; to opium-smoking, for example. A Briton who smoked opium in India would have been guilty of a derogation only less unpardonable than a native wife; he could drink unlimited whisky to float him through his dusty years of exile, because whisky was not a native product. It was another odd differential that John Bull, the strange convolutions of whose conscience have never been fully anatomized, did not sell Indian opium to his own Indian subjects; he dumped it on the Chinese, for whose vices he was not responsible. Envious of his opium profits, and more logical, the French made opium a government monopoly in Indochina and sold it to the public for revenue. In the 1920s three quarters, at a guess, of the French themselves were partakers.77 In pipe-dreams they could still be the philosopher-kings of the Utopian colony of French official theory.
The Comte de Ségur, a prisoner of war of the Russians in 1807, thought he recognized among them (the upper-class Russians he conversed with, that is) an overweening pride of which one cause was a long-standing sense of superiority over neighbouring Asia.78 This sense must have been all the more gratifying because it made up for inferiority to western Europe. In Asia a Russian could feel that he represented Europe. The reactionary historian Pogodin had a scheme for the whole European white race to join in conquering and civilizing Africa.79 Later in the nineteenth century, Pan-Slav ambitions inside Europe were balanced by a rival philosophy, that of the Vos-tochniki or ‘Easterners’ who saw Russia’s future lying in Asia.80 To them race meant less than to a Slavophil like Pogodin. They would on ocasion, hoping to win Asian confidence, emphasize the strain of Tartar blood that the oldest families of the aristocracy absorbed when Russia lay under the Golden Horde.
In any case the governing class had very mixed origins, and was held together by common interest and allegiance more than by blood. Pushkin wrote a story, Peter the Great’s Negro, about his own ancestor, the Tsar’s African protégé. A swarm of chieftains from the Caucasus were allowed to call themselves Princes, whereas the sole peerage ever conferred on an Indian, in the late days of the Raj, threw the House of Lords into transports of indignation. A Russian general boasted to a British journalist that a regiment of Russian soldiers was commanded by a Turkoman chief who had once fought against Russia, whereas after a century of British rule no Indian officer was trusted with any such command.81 The journalist might have retorted that Russian soldiers could be put under anyone, because they were peasants who until yesterday had been serfs and were still treated like serfs.
All Britain’s colonies were far away beyond the seas; it had a marked psychological effect that even Ireland – like France, and unlike Wales or Scotland – was divided from England by water. The Tsarist empire was contiguous with the homeland, and stretched away from it in one continuous mass. It was as if England and India and Canada had lain side by side, and been racially less discordant than they were. Siberian tribes, if primitive and odd-looking, were more or less fair-skinned; while of the empire’s two southward appendages, Caucasia and Central Asia, the first was inhabited by peoples of European type – among whom a future dictator of all the Russias was born in 1879 – the second by Turki peoples, men who when they conquered India in the Middle Ages were almost as conscious as the British were of their lighter colour.
The Russians drifted into the vast near-emptiness of Siberia by a simple continuation of their older expansion over the surface of European Russia. Westerners who hated or feared the Tsarist government and army could admire the pioneering qualities of the Russian peasant, a migrant by old instinct, and they were struck by his willingness to mix with other peoples. Sometimes Russians were thought to have a special faculty for assimilating smaller peoples by complete physiological absorption.82 When Siberia came into use as a penal settlement area other elements were introduced. Escaped criminals sometimes (as in Tasmania) turned robber and preyed on the natives.83 Some of the scattered tribes were more able than others to hold their own, trading furs for the white man’s goods. In Yakutia all the others seemed mere ‘naïve savages’ compared with the Yakuts, who had long been dispossessing the weaker Tunguses; and a political exile early in the twentieth century noted that Cossacks settled there for some generations had ‘undergone a process of strong Yakut assimilation’.84
In another tribe this exile, Zenzinov, observed ‘an incredible fusion of Christian and heathen beliefs and rites’, priest and shaman as it were arm in arm.85 Mixtures of creed, as well as of race, were spreading about the world: the sects of Indochina were only one case. Ordinarily St Petersburg might not bother its head about who was assimilating whom in Asia, but it had fits of anxiety about the loyalty of its subjects, and for want of anything better might decide to ensure it by inducting them willy-nilly into the Orthodox Church. We hear of Buryat Mongols being rounded up and pitched into streams, as the quickest baptism, like sheep being dipped. These Mongols were more advanced than the Siberians, and their history provides some neat examples of interaction between races.
Cossacks first met them in 1629, and made friends with the noyons or aristocracy, who exploited their poor clansmen and the near-by forest tribes. The poor resisted the Russians, and some were enslaved. By the end of that century the poorer Russian colonists were rebelling against their own governors, and were being joined by the discontented Buryats. Some liberals implicated in the Decembrist conspiracy against Nicholas I in 1825 were banished to this region, and made a sympathetic study of Buryat culture, which caused the Mongols themselves to think more highly of it. (A Frenchman’s novels about heroic Turk conquerors in medieval Asia helped to ignite Turkish nationalism in the late nineteenth century.86) In 1905 Buryats were ready to take part in the revolutions sweeping over the empire.87
Perennially threatened with revolt at home, Tsarism had to make some appeal to popular feeling, and could do so most readily – with the aid of the Church – by crusades against the old Turkish foe, Russia’s enemy in Asia as well as Europe. Russians pressing into Muslim Asia could feel that they were revenging their former subjugation by the Golden Horde, a memory invoked once again by Soviet writers during the struggle against the equally barbarous Nazis. By the late eighteenth century they were forcing their way into the Caucasus. A worse obstacle than Turkish resistance proved to be the confederacy of Muslim tribes high up in Daghestan. These hillmen, thanks to the tribal solidarity still intact among them as well as to their rocky fortresses, held out much longer than any of the organized but decrepit Muslim States to the east. Their leader for nearly three decades was Shamil Bey, a mullah or religious personage, whose lieutenants were a band of murids or disciples. Europe heard of him intermittently as a wild hero whom Byron might have admired; when finally captured he was treated fairly liberally, his exile sweetened with a pension. He died in Arabia, his holy land.
In Transcaucasia Russians could bask in the southern sunshine they were always supposed to be pining for – the vision that swam before the tipsy eyes of the runagate embezzlers in Kataev’s novel: ‘mountain slopes, cliffs, “shashlik”, Circassian girls, wine of Kakhetia in large jars – in a word, a symphony of sensations!’88 Up in the hills the Russians, as quick as other empire-builders to see the advantage of ‘setting Asians to fight Asians’, lost no time in enrolling Ingush and Osietin tribesmen in their ranks. To the south, Georgians and Armenians and Azerbaijanis had been engaged in perpetual feud; the Armenians especially, many of whom remained under Turkish rule, did stand in need of the protection that Russia professed to be bringing. There was a strong commercial class among them which could look for opportunities elsewhere in Russian Asia: this empire like the rest was profitable to others besides its masters. Much of the trade of Russian Turkestan fell into Armenian hands.89
Central Asia was a dismal anarchy of petty despots, the strongest of them Uzbegs related by language as well as religion to the Ottoman Turks. Whether from climatic or moral desiccation, or both, a culture once the pride of the Islamic world was in gloomy stagnation. Very little was known about it outside, even in Russia.90 Fanaticism made Bokhara and Samarkand nearly as inaccessible as Lhasa. One or two British explorers made their way there from India, Burnes to be well received in 1832, Stoddart and Connolly to be murdered in 1841. Vambéry, the Hungarian traveller, penetrated Central Asia in disguise early in the 1860s. He depicted Nasrullah Khan, the late Emir of Bokhara, as an embodiment of all the country’s degeneracy, an unredeemed tyrant kept going by a swarm of spies, reactionary clergy, and executioners.91 The Russians pushing on across the steppes92 made the most of such reports, which helped them to appear in the light of rescuers. The Khanate of Khiva was likewise ‘weighed down by the most coarse and unbridled despotism’, and its inhabitants, by the testimony of nearly all travellers Russian or foreign, were full of ‘treachery, mendacity, cruelty and rapacity’;93 the capital was thronged with miserable slaves brought in by the savage Turkoman raiders out on the steppes.
In 1867 a new province of Russian ‘Turkestan’ was organized; next year a treaty was forced on Kokand which reduced it to vassalage, and a similar one offered to Bokhara but rejected under pressure from the clerical bigots. Brought to heel by the annexation of much of his territory including Samarkand, the Emir was then glad to join hands with the Russians in putting down his fanatics.94 This was the start of a partnership that lasted till the Revolution put an end to Emir and Tsar together. Khiva was dealt with in the same fashion in 1873. It had fended off more than one Russian attempt in earlier days, but its people now proved – according to the victors – nothing but ‘ordinary Central Asian cowards’ when firmly tackled.95 Militarily the Russians were having ‘extraordinary success’ in Central Asia, because their opponents faced them in pitched battles, in one of which 40,000 men were routed by 3,000.96 It was typical of such archaic and unpopular regimes to be able to fight only in this way, very ineffective compared with the guerrilla resistance of some other countries. Here the best fight was made by the Turkomans of the steppes, who were crushed ruthlessly.97 Russian practice in such cases was to break the will to resist by ferocious means, promptly exchanged for amiability once the enemy gave in. Englishmen were inclined to feel a sneaking respect for the method. It was an instinctive one with half-feudal Russia, where the rich flogged the poor with knouts but addressed them as ‘brothers’. In turn the habit of quelling barbarians in Asia reinforced feudal instincts at home, and the ferocity of the Whites in the civil war after 1917, whose infection spread to the Bolsheviks, must have owed something to it.
A few Britons felt that Russia’s advent in Central Asia must be welcomed as putting an end to intolerable conditions.98 But it was anathema to most of them, who saw it as a threat to India. On their side Russian empire-builders like others could give themselves a better conscience by sympathizing with the unhappy lot of the inhabitants of rival empires. A Russian officer wrote that India was being destroyed by the poisonous plant of British rule. ‘Sick to death, the natives are waiting for a physician from the North.’99 Not many outsiders were allowed to go and see how the physician’s own patients were faring. The British officer and traveller Burnaby managed to reach Khiva in 1876 and had an audience with the Khan, whom the Russians had portrayed as a regular monster. Burnaby, expectably, saw him in a more amiable light.100 While at Khiva he wondered whether the barber who was shaving him was bigot enough to want to cut his throat101 A few years later, tempting fate once too often, he was killed by a Muslim devotee in battle far away in the Soudan.
An American diplomat Schuyler, less prejudiced against the new dispensation, was one of the few who were allowed to make a tour of inspection. He annoyed the Emir of Bokhara by shaking hands with him too vigorously: the potentate’s hands were shaky, from aphrodisiacs it was presumed.102 Schuyler’s impression was that the common people had been hopeful at first of the Russians, but now had to pay heavier taxes for little improvement. Slave-trading was being pushed out of sight rather than suppressed.103 He heard people asking ‘How are the Russians better for us than the Khokandians? They also take away from us our daughters and our wives, and also love presents …,’104 The men sent out to Turkestan were the dregs of Tsarist officialdom, and glaring cases of misconduct came to his ears.105 By 1913 a Russian apologist may have been justified in saying that things were better under Russian than under native rule, and that most Bokharans would have preferred direct annexation.106 He admitted grave defects, which might make the whole region unreliable in case of another war with Turkey.107
Civilization, however shoddy, has to be paid for, and Central Asia paid with cotton to supply mills in Russia. When Witte, the later finance minister and ardent ‘Easterner’, visited Turkestan in 1890 he could not help seeing that the peasantry was suffering because the government was taking too much of the available water for cotton.108 It was the familiar colonial phenomenon, the sacrifice of food crops to cash crops. There was a rising in Farghana in 1898 of poor folk and of peasants pushed off their farms. Another aspect of Western civilization was conscription. This was not imposed until 1916, when the white man was anxious to share some of his burden with anyone he could. Kirghiz steppe-dwellers then rebelled and, like some French soldiers who mutinied in the same year, were massacred.
Besides the official arrogance that Lenin deplored as one of the legacies of the Tsarist empire to the Soviet Union, there was a chauvinism of the ordinary Russian. Wars with Turkey fomented it; and the long-continuing migration of the Russian peasantry eastward could be called ‘a kind of Russian people’s imperialism’.109 It was overrunning great areas of steppe, pushing nomads like the Kazakhs off their land.110 Former inhabitants were being displaced rather than exploited. In some districts the immigrants formed an urban working class surrounded by a native peasantry. Yet a possibility of fraternization remained, stronger than in any settlement areas of other empires. There was more mingling in the same jobs, at the same standard of living; son or grandson of a peasant serf, the Russian was little accustomed to habits or comforts much above what his new neighbours were used to. If political consciousness touched him, the thought of brotherhood with the colonial masses, an abstract one to Western socialists, in a place like the Baku oil-field could be felt as a living reality.
NOTES
1. ‘Hermes’, in The Asiatic Journal, Vol. 1 (1816), pp. 105–8.
2. L. C. A. Knowles, The Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire (1924), p. 215.
3. K. M. de Silva, ‘The “Rebellion” of 1848 in Ceylon’, in Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies, Vol. 7 (1964), p. 154.
4. ibid., pp. 164–5.
5. ibid., pp. 151, 167–9.
6. I owe this observation to my friend Mr S. N. Chib, lately Director-General of Tourism at Delhi.
7. L. C. A. Knowles, op. cit., pp. 183–4.
8. R. H. Cholmondley, The Heber Letters, 1783–1832 (1950), p. 320.
9. Maung Htin Aung, Burmese Drama (1937), p. 111.
10. 2nd edn (1885), Vol. 3, p. 213.
11. Col. W. F. B. Laurie, Our Burmese Wars and Relations with Burma (1880), pp. 401, 387.
12. Hansard, 3rd Series, Vol. 293, Col. 1,830 (1884).
13. Dr J. E. Marks, Forty Years in Burma (ed. Rev. W. C. B. Purser, 1917), p. 218.
14. H. Fielding Hall, The Soul of a People (1898), pp. 52, 83 (1928 edn).
15. G. Geary, Burma after the Conquest (1886), p. 5.
16. Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches (Rangoon, 1913), p. 49.
17. G. Geary, op. cit., p. 6.
18. ibid., p. 293.
19. ibid., pp. 234, 237.
20. Sir C. Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (1912), pp. 13–14.
21. Colonel C. E. Callwell, Small Wars. Their Principles and Practice (War Office, London, 3rd edn, 1906), pp. 147–8.
22. H. F. Hall, op. cit., p. 53. Chapters 5 and 6 are on the struggle, which he saw himself; it spread as he points out into Lower Burma.
23. In the regimental museum, Carlisle Castle.
24. Lord Hardinge, My Indian Years 1910–1916 (1948), p. 19.
25. R. Grant Brown, Burma as I saw it, 1889–1917 (1926), p. 46.
26. H. F. Hall, op. cit., p. 106. Treatment of animals was one way in which Burma shone by contrast with India (Chapter 19).
27. ibid., p. 225. A man like Hall was exceptional no doubt in any colony; and George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days (1934) is a reminder that many Europeans in Burma, especially commercial agents in small stations like the one depicted, were as rabid as any in India. Orwell served from 1922 to 1928 in the Police, during the post-war worsening of relations all over the Indian empire. My friend Dr Shwe Tin of Rangoon agrees with me in thinking that the novel shares his characteristic excess.
28. Mrs L. Milne, Shans at Home (1910), pp. 117, 140. cf. W. C. B. Purser, Christians in Burma (1911), p. 39, on the eagerness of poor hill-folk to learn what the missionary could teach.
29. R. M. Martin, History of the British Possessions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans (1837), p. 167.
30. Consular Report from Bangkok, 1882.
31. J. Thomson, FRGS, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China (1875), p. 62.
32. Lieutenant-General Sir A. Clarke, ‘The Straits Settlements’, in British Empire Series, Vol. 1, India (1899), p. 460.
33. See my article ‘Britain, Siam, and Malaya: 1875–1885’, in Journal of Modern History, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 (1956).
34. E. J. Trelawney, The Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), pp. 353–4, 357 (World’s Classics edn).
35. Major F. McNair, Perak and the Malays (1878), pp. 22, 239.
36. ibid., p. 207.
37. ibid., p. 415.
38. Sir R. O. Winstedt, Malaya and its History (n.d.), pp. 66, 68.
39. Dictionary of National Biography.
40. Sir P. Benson Maxwell, Our Malay Conquests (1878), p. 40.
41. ibid., pp. 10, 51, 111.
42. Sir A. Clarke, loc. cit., p. 452.
43. Sir F. Swettenham, Footprints in Malaya (1942), p. 81.
44. J. S. Fumivall, Colonial Policy and Practice (Cambridge, 1948), P· 336.
45. L. C. A. Knowles, op. cit., p. 473.
46. Sir F. Swettenham, British Malaya (1906), p. 134 (1929 edn). See generally Chapter 7.
47. A. R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869), p. 448 (1890 edn).
48. F. S. Marryat, Borneo and the Indian Archipelago (1848), Conclusion.
49. H. Wise, A Selection of Papers relating to Borneo (1846), p. 49.
50. G. Borrow, The Romany Rye (1857), p. 162 (1905 edn).
51. Captain Hon. H. Keppel, Expedition to Borneo of HMS. Dido (2nd edn, 1846), Vol. 1, pp. 246–7, 260; Vol. 2, pp. 201, 206. cf. Brooke’s letter of 10 December 1841 in Rajah Brooke and Baroness Burdett Coutts, ed. O. Rutter (1935), pp. 29–31.
52. A. R. Wallace, op. cit., pp. 68, 71.
53. H. Wise, op. cit., p. 24.
54. C. J. Brooke to Lord Clarendon, 28 April 1869, in Foreign Office 72.843, Public Record Office, London; and see earlier correspondence in this volume.
55. J. D. Ross, Sixty Years: Life and Adventure in the Far East (1911), Vol. 2, pp. 181–3.
56. P. Knaplund, Gladstone’s Foreign Policy (New York, 1935), p. 117. The British North Borneo Company was formally incorporated in 1882 and authorized by Charter to administer the territory acquired from the Sultan in 1878 by a syndicate (which included Keppel); it continued to do so even when the territory became a British protectorate in 1888.
57. H. Wise, op. cit., p. 2.
58. A. R. Wallace, op. cit., pp. 73, 197.
59. The Wealth of Nations (1776), Vol. 2, pp. 248–9 (World’s Classics edn).
60. Captain Cook’s Voyages of Discovery (Everyman edn), p. 107. This relates to 1770.
61. D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires (1965), p. 326.
62. B. H. M. Vlekke, The Story of the Dutch East Indies (Harvard, 1946), p. 108.
63. ‘Multatuli’, Max Havelaar (1860; trans. W. Siebenhaar, New York, 1927). See in particular pp. 53–4,115 ff., 201 ff., 222.
64. J. J. Abraham, The Surgeon’s Log. Impressions of the Far East (1911), p. 237 (18th edn, 1933).
65. C. E. Callwell, op. cit., pp. 32, 103, 127.
66. A. R. Wallace, op. cit., p. 151.
67. E. J. Trelawney, op. cit. p. 243.
68. C. B. Norman, Tonkin, France in the Far East (1884), p. 304.
69. W. S. Blunt, My Diaries (1891), p. 51 (1932 edn).
70. A comment on the French colonies at large, by C. Southworth, The French Colonial Venture (1931), p. 25.
71. See B. Lasker, Human Bondage in Southeast Asia (Institute of Pacific Relations, 1950).
72. V. M. Thompson, French Indo-China (1937), p. 148.
73. See C. Robequain, L’Indochine française (Paris, 1935), Chapter 3·
74. See D. K. Fieldhouse, op. cit., p. 319; P. Renouvin, La question d’Extrême-Orient, 1840–1940 (Paris, 1946), p. 262.
75. J. L. de Lanessan, L’expansion coloniale de la France (Paris, 1886), p. 542. He was Governor-General from 1891 to 1894.
76. J. D. Ross, op. cit., Vol. 2, Chapter 32.
77. H. A. Franck, East of Siam (New York, 1926), p. 23.
78. Comte P. de Ségur, Un Aide de Camp de Napoléon (1873), p. 398 (Nelson edn, Paris n.d.).
79. N. V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (University of California, 1959), pp. 159–62. Pogodin was strongly pro-British during the Indian Mutiny. Just before this, during the Crimean War, Western propaganda had made a point of the Asiatic infusion in the Russian governing class; see e.g. J. Harwood’s novel, The Serf-Sisters: or, The Russian of To-day (1855).
80. See A. Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881–1904 (University of California, 1958), pp. 42–4, etc.
81. W. T. Stead, Truth about Russia (1888), p. 151. In early days it had not been unknown for British troops to be under an Indian officer.
82. W. D. Foulke, Slav or Saxon (2nd edn, New York, 1899), pp. 21–3, 27, 29.
83. G. Borodin, Soviet and Tsarist Siberia (1943), p. 61.
84. V. Zenzinov, The Road to Oblivion (1932), pp. 50–52.
85. ibid., p. 190.
86. The novels of Léon Cahun; see Sir H. Luke, The Old Turkey and the New (new edn, 1955), pp. 153 ff.
87. G. D. R. Phillips, Dawn in Siberia (the Mongols of Lake Baikal) (1942), pp. 54 ff., 90–92, 113, 116–17.
88. V. Kataev, The Embezzlers (trans. K. Zarine, n.d.), p. 227.
89. V. Baker, Clouds in the East (1876), p. 309. The Russian conquest of Transcaucasia was partly instigated by a Russianized Georgian, Prince Tsitsianov, who was made commander-in-chief in 1802.
90. ‘Nowhere is so much ignorance of Central Asia displayed as in Russian society …’ (Khiva and Turkestan, trans, from Russian by Captain H. Spalding (1874), p. 7.)
91. A. Vambéry, History of Bokhara (1873), p. 366. See also on his hazardous explorations The Story of my Struggles (Nelson edn, n.d.), Chapter 4.
92. See Sir O. Caroe, Soviet Empire (2nd edn, 1967), pp. 72 ff.
93. H. Spalding, op. cit., pp. 209, 190–92.
94. A. Vambéry, History of Bokhara, pp. 414–15.
95. H. Spalding, op. cit., p. 194.
96. C. E. Callwell, op. cit., pp. 104–5, 190.
97. O. Caroe, op. cit., p. 79, quotes General Skobolev’s dictum:’ ‘in Asia the duration of peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict upon the enemy …’
98. e.g. H. Spalding, op. cit., pp. vii-viii; W. W. Hunter, A Life of the Earl of Mayo (1875), Vol. 1, p. 268.
99. Captain Terentiev, cited by F. Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva (10th edn, 1877), p. vi.
100. F. Burnaby, op. cit., p. 308.
101. ibid., p. 101.
102. E. Schuyler, Turkestan (New York, 1876), Vol. 2, pp. 83–4. At Bokhara the chief minister told him that now the Russians had Khiva they would soon take the city of England (Vol. 2, p. 68).
103. ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 233–4, 311.
104. ibid., Vol. 2, p. 225.
105. ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 220, 247, 249, 350–51. cf. A. Krausse, Russia in Central Asia, 1858–1899 (1899), pp. 136, 139–40; and D. K. Field-house, op. cit., p. 336: ‘Russia never developed a trained corps of professional colonial administrators.’
106. A. Woeikof, Le Turkestan russe (Paris, 1914), pp. 197, 327.
107. ibid., pp. 330, 336.
108. The Memoirs of Count Witte, trans. A. Yarmolinsky (1921), pp. 33–4. cf. M. Ilin, Men and Mountains, trans. B. Kinkead (1936), on the buying up of irrigated land by Russian firms.
109. W. Kolarz, Russia and her Colonies (1952), p. 3.
110. D. K. Fieldhouse, op. cit., p. 337.