American schoolchildren for long recited the mnemonic celebrating the ‘discovery’ of the New World by chanting: ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ Their British counterparts celebrated Empire Day, and French pupils reeled off the poetic names – Chandernagor, Mahé, Karikal, Pondichéry, Yanaon – of the French enclaves in India. Spaniards retained memories of the heroic conquistadors, and nurtured relations with the South American republics considered part of a large Hispanic family of nations. Camoens’ saga of the Portuguese ‘discoverers’, The Lusiads, was as famous to Lusophones as Kipling’s or Conrad’s novels to Anglophones. Stanley and Livingstone, Brazza and Lyautey stood tall in the colonial gallery of great men of history. The heritage of trade in the East Indies suffused Dutch culture, from ‘Delft’ ware modelled on Chinese porcelain to the searing novel of colonialism in Java, Multatuli. The Germans and Italians were less familiar with their short-lived overseas empires (though some Italians yearned for the grandeur of ancient Rome), while Americans and Russians often claimed, contrary to the evidence, that the United States and the Soviet Union were not imperialistic states. The disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires obscured some of the imperial dimensions of those deceased states.
Nevertheless, the colonial world, receding further into the past with each decade, has returned to the consciousness of both the former colonizers and the formerly colonized: in recent years, partly thanks to perspectives introduced by the new cultural history, and the approaches of post-modernism, gender studies, cultural studies, subaltern studies and post-colonialism. A spate of films – ranging from cinematic versions of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India to Marguerite Duras’ Indochine – brought colonialism to the big screen and a wider audience, while television series such as Queen Victoria’s Empire presented colonialism in prime time. Anniversaries – the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, then the anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s expedition – in the 1990s provided the occasion for celebrations, contestations and scholarly reassessments of Spanish and Portuguese expansion, followed by commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the setting up of the Dutch East India Company in 2002. The bicentenary of British settlement in Australia in 1988, the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of Indonesia in the 1990s, fifty years since the end of the Franco-Indochinese War in 2004: all these dates gave opportunities for revisiting the colonial period, a backward glance sometimes tinged with fond remembrances of colonies past, at other times with recriminations at the sometimes still officially unacknowledged exactions of colonialism.
‘Empire’, ‘emperor’ or ‘imperial’ in a word association game would conjure up a variety of images. Some might think of the Roman empire with its roads and aqueducts, the Forum and the Colosseum, toga-clad legionnaires and gladiators. To others, the words would evoke figures from European continental empires, Napoleon crowning himself in Paris, a bemedalled Austrian archduke or a Russian tsarina. Still others might picture an exotic potentate – the glamorously infamous Dowager Empress Cixi of China, the long-lived Emperor Hirohito of Japan or the ill-fated Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Asked about ‘empire’, however, many would immediately think of the colonial empires: Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, planters in the West Indies and spice-traders in the East Indies, pith-helmeted adventurers hacking their way through equatorial forests in Africa or grand memsahibs presiding over tiffin in India. Interrogated about what ‘empire’ means, respondents – especially those not of European heritage – might also speak of slavery, indentured labour, transported prisoners, conquest and war, and genocide.
‘Empire’ is not an easy word to define, though it may be seen at its most basic as the rule by a particular group in a political centre over a diverse and different set of other, often distant countries and peoples, generally as a result of military conquest. But if ‘empire’ is not a precise word or an easily identifiable political regime, neither is it a colourless word. Promoters of empire, in whatever time and place, championed its merits and the benefits that it brought to both the colonizing and the colonized. Anti-colonialists, by contrast, saw in imperial rule humiliating battlefield defeat, unwarranted political domination, economic exploitation, social disenfranchisement and cultural alienation. Present-day observers are apt to take a more anti-colonial than pro-colonial perspective on empire, though a nostalgia for imperial days can be discerned in some quarters, and there have been attempts to rehabilitate imperial actions. If few would raise three cheers for imperialism, a generation after most European colonies gained independence, whether colonial expansion might be given one (or even two) cheers is a matter of historical debate and public disagreement. A comparative study of empires, across continents and historical periods, sheds light on colonial ambitions and accomplishments, and on imperial achievements and failures.1
Empire is one of the key topics in human history, and tracing its origins involves returning to the earliest historical epochs. The ancient Egyptian pyramids were constructed for empire-builders, pharaohs who conquered Nubia and used coerced labour to raise their mausolea. The biblical Nebuchadnezzar ruled an empire in Babylon. The Greeks established colonies of settlers around the Mediterranean, and the Hellenistic Alexander the Great pushed his empire towards the Himalayas and the Ganges. The Roman empire stretched from the borders of Scotland to Syria, from Spain to the Black Sea. So profound was the Caesars’ imperial imprint on the world that later colonizers would study their writings and try to emulate their deeds. Roman administration, many subsequent colonial theorists argued, provided a template for the rule of distant provinces and different peoples, while the highways and trading networks of Rome’s empire survived as models for economic development. The spread of Latin formed an integral part of the classical civilizing mission, and the granting of prized Roman citizenship showed how worthy men from barbarous lands might be assimilated into the ruling body politic.2
The ‘rise and fall’ of the Roman empire, especially in Edward Gibbon’s eighteenth-century rendition, became a mainstay of historical study. However, the ancient imperial idea did not die with the decline of Rome, but lived on for a thousand years in Byzantium. In western Europe, Charlemagne in 800 meanwhile took on an imperial mantle, and though his empire was later fragmented among his sons, the vacuous title of Holy Roman Emperor that he invented endured until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Clashes of civilization in the long Middle Ages created new empires. Muslims expanding from Arabia created an empire in North Africa that crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to southern Spain, stopped only by the Christian Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732. The Crusaders, departing on what they believed to be a God-blessed mission to liberate their Holy Land from the Infidels, surged into the Middle East, setting up puppet kingdoms in Cyprus and the Levant. In different types of expansion, Venice created a trading empire around the Adriatic, and Norsemen sailed to Britain, Normandy, Russia and Sicily, leaving Viking settlements wherever they landed.
Early empires were not restricted to Europe. The Han Chinese created an empire in East Asia, only to be conquered in turn by the Mongols and then Manchurians, and Chinese imperial influence ultimately covered a vast expanse of eastern Asia, from Tibet to Vietnam to Mongolia. The Srivijaya empire spread through insular southeast Asia, while the rulers of the Champa, Pagan and Khmer empires battled over mainland southeast Asia. The Mughal emperor gained control of much of south Asia. The Japanese emperor – the only sovereign who still uses the title of emperor today – ruled the huge Japanese archipelago and, at times, extended his domains much further. The Ottomans came from the East to conquer a tri-continental empire in Asia, Africa and Europe that proved one of the most persistent in the modern world. In South America, the Aztecs and Incas ruled domains that might well be called empires, as did various chieftains in sub-Saharan Africa. Manifestations of imperialism, thus, have appeared throughout the world.
In the modern period of Western history, from the Renaissance until the present, empires in one form or another have been a constant feature of the political landscape. Early European experiences, not limited to the Roman empire, provided examples for empire-builders to follow in conquering new domains, settling expatriate populations, channeling trade and setting up structures of government. Colonizers claimed a natural or divine right to take over unoccupied lands or those inhabited by people whom they considered their cultural or biological inferiors. They raised flags, read proclamations and brandished symbols of their new suzerainty over what they branded primitive societies in Africa or Oceania or over the ‘decadent’ cultures in the Middle East or Asia. They arrogated to themselves the right to spread their version of civilization, whether Christian or secular, monarchical or republican, mercantilist or capitalist or socialist. They saw foreign places as sites for the settlement of transported prisoners, free migrants or servile labourers that they recruited around the world – including, for many centuries, those in Africa whom they reduced to slavery in order to ship them to distant domains as the cheapest possible sort of labour. They restructured ‘native’ societies, exporting their systems of administration, frequently replacing local rulers and laws with ones brought from home, or reducing sultans, rajahs and chiefs to vassal status within their orbit. If land despoliation, and social and economic marginalization were often the lot of indigenous populations, the colonizers promised good governance, law and order, modernization, and the advantages of European technology, medicine and education. The colonizers also hoped their newly acquired possessions would yield treasure troves of foodstuffs, coveted precious metals and other useful raw materials. They thought that decades, perhaps centuries or more in the case of the most ‘backward’ populations, would be necessary before political power might be devolved back to non-white people. Seldom if ever did they imagine that their rule would come to an end, though it did so almost everywhere, often in only two or three generations, in some cases with alacrity, through war, revolution and the sea change of decolonization.
The expansion of imperial powers from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth century is one of the ‘big issues’ in history, and much ink has been expended debating empire. Indeed, there was little consensus even at the height of the imperial age. Though most Europeans (and others in colonizing countries) probably supported their nations’ overseas endeavours, at least in a vague sort of way, numerous voices were raised in dissent. Critics often felt that expansion wasted the ‘blood and gold’ of Europe for dubious benefits, and that concern with faraway places diverted attention from pressing issues at home. Particular anti-colonial campaigns were waged against some of the worst excesses of imperialism, notably in the anti-slavery movement from the late eighteenth century until the abolition of slavery, and then in opposition at the turn of the twentieth century to the horrific exactions visited on labourers (especially in the Congo Free State). Regular exposés of colonial conditions were published, and when a giant Exposition Coloniale was held in Paris in 1931, opponents of imperialism, including Surrealists and Communists, organized an anti-colonial exhibition. Anti-colonial nationalist movements led by figures ranging from Gandhi to Ho Chi Minh gained much support in Europe, and prolonged attempts to retain colonial control, for example, by the French in Algeria or in a later military action that some deemed imperialistic, the Americans in Vietnam, provoked widespread opposition at home and abroad.
Historians, too, have debated empire; imperial and colonial studies have been a prominent branch of history that have seen a renascence in the last three decades. Scholars have suggested many interpretations of empire. Probably the single most contested topic, prompted by the writings of John Hobson in 1902, was whether economics formed the ‘taproots’ of imperial expansion and whether imperialism was a product of modern industrial and finance capitalism.3 More recently – triggered by Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978 – attention has turned to the cultural bases of imperialism, the way in which certain ethnocentric assumptions underpinned expansion and the way in which imperial culture did or did not suffuse Europe itself.4 Historical theories abound on every issue of relevance to colonialism, for instance, about ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’ empire – areas of political sovereignty compared to those of hegemonic influence. Some historians make a difference between ‘colonialism’, seen as the foundation of settler societies, and ‘imperialism’, political, economic and cultural expansion into areas where Europeans did not achieve a large-scale demographic presence. The ‘imperialism of free trade’, commercial primacy without political control, is sometimes contrasted with an imperialism that mandated formal political overlordship. ‘Sub-imperialism’ has been suggested as the autonomous expansion of one colony elsewhere in its region, and ‘internal colonization’ has been used to describe the way that heartlands of a country exploitatively treat peripheral regions of the same state. ‘Neo-colonialism’ has been propounded as the type of influence that imperial countries continued to exercise over possessions once they gained formal independence.5 In the present volume, still other variations on the imperial nomenclature appear. The welter of names and theories underlines above all the importance of the phenomenon of expansion (and its seemingly inevitable corollary, contraction), and emphasizes the interest that it provokes in scholars.
New developments in historical research lead students to raise new questions about the colonial past. One of the biggest areas of interest nowadays is gender and empire, though a generation ago few studied issues relating to the gendered nature of expansion, the differing roles of women and men in empire, and such areas as sexuality and private life.6 Ecology has been another fertile growth area in colonial studies, with scholars looking at how colonials remoulded the physical landscape of places they ruled by depredations on the natural environment leading to the extinction of such animals as the dodo, the import and acclimatization of new species, land clearance, the building of dams and roadways.7 How European artists saw the landscapes of faraway places and people has provided an immense subject for historians and curators.8 Studies of culture contact between East and West, and between North and South, various types of imperial encounters and how they appeared in painting, literature, music, film, fashion and food, have broadened the range of perspectives on empire. Imperial health and hygiene provide yet another major area of contemporary research, focusing on disease and prophylaxis, provisions for health care and the biological revolutions that took place in many colonized regions.9 A particular area of interest has been how imperial ambitions, experiences and culture helped to form national identities both in the colonial and the post-colonial periods.10 All sorts of specific topics – the great hedgerows set up by the British in India, or the development of the spice trade between Europe and Asia – have been the subjects of popular books.11
Victims of colonialism have increasingly put forward their views, demanding redress of grievances inherited from colonial rule or symbolic recognitions of wrongs done to their ancestors. Aboriginals demanded land rights in Australia, claims given a judicial imprimatur with the Mabo decision by the High Court in Canberra in 1992. Groups of African-Americans and other descendants of enslaved Africans claimed reparations for the evils of the slave trade, and cultural leaders of many formerly colonized people have asked for the restitution of sacred items (and human remains) enshrined in Western museums. The reception of such demands has proved ambivalent, and leaders have been reluctant to say ‘sorry’ for colonial misdeeds or to offer anything other than symbolic compensation for injustices. Nevertheless, the Dutch erected a monument in memory of the enslaved peoples in Amsterdam, the French parliament declared that slavery and slave-trading constituted a ‘crime against humanity’, and the Germans officially recognized a ‘genocide’ of the Herero people in 1904 in what is now Namibia: steps towards coming to terms with the colonial past and perhaps also to effecting a reconciliation between the former colonizers and colonized.
Debates continue to rage on such topics as the extent of systematic torture practised by French troops in colonial Algeria, the level of cruelty of Belgians in the Congo, and the role of colonialism in creating an inequitable and iniquitous disparity in wealth between the North and the South. Arguments about the benefits and demerits of contemporary globalization perpetuate claims of development and underdevelopment. Commentators have found in colonial conditions the origins of bloody post-colonial conflagrations in recent years from Northern Ireland to Palestine, from Rwanda to Aceh, from the Sudan to East Timor. Meanwhile, European countries have faced difficult and pressing issues, particularly linked to migration, the emergence of societies of multiple cultures, and the economic and political gaps between various ethnic groups in their midst, especially when many of the disadvantaged are descendants of those who came from former colonies. Urban riots in Britain and France, ethnic tensions in the Netherlands and Germany, and conflicts between Italy and Spain and their neighbours across the Mediterranean, resonate with issues tied to colonial conquest and the uneasy situations they produced. Civil war in the Balkans in the 1990s was ascribed both to the inheritance of Austro-Hungarian imperialism and to a new Serbian imperialism. Nationalists in Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh have accused Moscow of unreconstructed Russian imperialism; critics of the Iraq War (2003–11) alleged that the United States, the world’s remaining superpower, was reinventing a new imperialistic dominion. The colonial legacy, the volatile accusations of ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’, public interest in empire and scholarly debates about overseas expansion are manifestly issues of the present, not just the past.
Involved in this interest, for both scholars and the general public, is a host of questions. Did colonial administration create the economic underdevelopment that became such a handicap to much of sub-Saharan Africa or, at least in some parts of Asia, did it, by contrast, lay the groundwork for the extraordinary economic growth that marked the 1980s and afterwards, despite several notable downturns in that continent? Did foreign overlordship, by combining diverse cultural groups into one polity and for long limiting the exercise of self-determination and representative government, underlie political dictatorship and corruption, or did it rather plant the seeds of pluralism, democracy and parliamentarianism? Did European cultural expansion have a ‘fatal impact’ on local societies and their cultures and traditions, or introduce a potential conduit for emancipation from gendered, hierarchical and inegalitarian ‘feudalism’? Was the Western impulse behind expansion primordially one of greed justified by racism, or were there higher ideals and less deleterious results to the enterprise of expansion? Were imperialists heroes or villains, or something in between? Were the colonized always victims, sometimes collaborators or even beneficiaries in the colonial project?
Colonial history, thus, is not limited to maps of explorations, chronologies of conquests, pantheons of explorers, settlers and administrators, and balance sheets of commercial activities. It touches on the fundamentals of Western culture itself: ideas of governance and the ways that political rights and powers were (or were not) extended throughout populations; notions of race, ethnicity, culture and ideology; types of economic relationships and models for development; moral codes and standards of personal conduct; the roles of religion, education, science and technology in the modern world. The study of colonialism is an investigation of the effect of Europeans (and other colonizers) on distant lands and peoples, but also of the impact of the Americas, Asia, Africa and the South Seas on Europe itself. It is, too, a study of the ideas and ideologies that motivated Europeans to leave their native lands and take over much of the rest of the world.
The extent of modern imperialism since the 1500s truly encompasses the globe, and indeed imperialism has been the most important contributor to contemporary globalization. One need only recall that in the mid-eighteenth century, the islands of the Caribbean and the North and South American continents were coming under the control of European powers, which had also established numerous trading outposts around the coast of Africa and the Indian subcontinent and onwards to East Asia. Although almost all of the American countries gained independence by the early decades of the nineteenth century, imperialists soon expanded into the hinterlands of their Asian and African beachheads, and they had already found other domains for expansion, stretching from Australasia to North Africa. In the early twentieth century, the British monarch reigned over between a quarter and a fifth of humanity and the planet; France claimed an empire of 11 million sq km (4.25 million sq miles) and 100 million citizens and subjects; the Belgian Congo was seventy-three times the size of Belgium. By the mid-1930s, the zenith of the ‘new’ imperialism, all southern and southeast Asia was ruled by Europeans, except for such largely inaccessible Himalayan regions as Bhutan, as well as Thailand, maintained as a buffer between the French and British colonies. Most of China and Japan had escaped European takeover, though from the mid-nineteenth-century Opium Wars onwards, Westerners had demanded concessionary trade and political privileges from China, where imperial and then republican authorities struggled to maintain their centralized control over the world’s most populous conglomeration of peoples. Japan, forcibly opened to the West by ‘gunboat diplomacy’, had then learned from European government and economics, and also imitated European imperialism by taking over Korea, Taiwan and islands in Micronesia; leaders in Tokyo by the 1930s were formulating plans for further expansion. The new Communist rulers of the Soviet Union after 1917 had essentially recreated the old Tsarist empire along new Marxist lines, all the way from the Baltic to Central Asia and the Pacific Ocean. The United States, after fulfilling its ‘manifest destiny’ to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, replaced Spain as imperial overlord in the Philippines. Further south, every single island in the Pacific Ocean, from relatively large Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia to myriads of tiny coral atolls, fell under the sway of colonial governments; Australia and New Zealand, proud of their continued ‘late-colonial’ affiliation to Britain, had joined the imperial powers ruling in Melanesia and Polynesia. In Africa, the story of colonial rule was the same. With Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s, the entire continent – barring Liberia, though it, too, came under the influence of the Americans when they established it as a colony for emancipated slaves – was effectively ruled by colonial powers. In the Middle East, the victorious Allies divided up the Ottoman domains after 1918; though technically territories administered under League of Nations auspices, they were treated as colonies. The colonizers had even scrambled for uninhabited places in the world, from minuscule rocky outcrops in the North Atlantic to immense ranges of Antarctica.
The achievements of empire, at least in a technical sense, were no less remarkable than the extent of imperial control. Transport is a prime example. The French built the Suez Canal in the hopes of increasing international trade, though Britain proved the primary beneficiary of this new maritime route to India and further east. Throughout the colonial world, a vast infrastructure was put into place: the Canadian-Pacific and the Indian-Pacific railways across North America and across Australia, the great system of trunk roads in India, the parallel French and Belgian rail links from the African interior to the coast of the Congo. Shipping companies, such as the Messageries Maritimes and P&O, joined together colonial ports, and telegraph cables created an international communications network. Along the transport routes, European manufactured goods, capital and migrants poured into the empire. The colonies sent to Europe foodstuffs and other consumer goods – France even imported wine from Algeria. New industrial demands increased markets for primary resources. Phosphate from Morocco, Christmas Island and Nauru was useful for fertilizer, nickel from New Caledonia and Canada supplied an important alloy in steel. Rubber became essential for tyres and insulation – the British developed rubber plantations in Malaya, as did the Dutch in the East Indies and the French in Indochina, while the Belgians harvested rubber from the Congo. Coconut oil from tropical islands was the key ingredient in industrially produced soap. The busy ports of Rotterdam, Marseille and Liverpool handled the ‘colonial wares’ as the geographical interfaces between Europe and the wider world, and large numbers of shippers, merchants and financiers depended on the colonies for their wealth.
Like goods, men and women too moved around the empire. By the early twentieth century, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were such successful white settler societies that they had been granted self-government under the Crown. Substantial British settler communities lived in Rhodesia, in the highlands of Kenya and in the trading ports of Asia. The French had made Algeria a settler society, though Italians, Spaniards and Maltese for long outnumbered French migrants, and on a smaller scale New Caledonia saw itself as an austral France. German colonial authorities hoped (in vain, it turned out) that the African colonies would attract some of the millions of Germans who would migrate overseas, while the Italians conceived of colonial Libya as a ‘fourth shore’ for settlement of poor peasants from the Mezzogiorno.12 Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, boasted a thriving European population until the Second World War. Thousands of mixed-race Eurasians moved to the Netherlands from Indonesia in the 1940s; when Algeria became independent in 1962, a million French citizens were ‘repatriated’ to France; and when Portugal withdrew from Angola and Mozambique in 1975, some 500,000 settlers and their descendants moved back to Portugal. In the midst of ‘permanent’ settlers in the colonies lived business people on short-term contracts, government officials, soldiers and the large number of Protestant and Catholic missionaries who counted among the key groups in colonialism. Europeans were proud of turning such cities as Hanoi, Léopoldville (Kinshasa), New Delhi and Addis Ababa into European-style capitals; the government houses, cathedrals and warehouses were architectural symbols of European colonialism at its most triumphant.
Ideas, too, circulated through colonial networks. Europeans hoped to spread their notions of ‘commerce and Christianity’, among other pillars of ‘civilization’. However, ideas of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, the notion of the ‘nation’ as an independent state, the merits of representative democracy, and the call to class struggle also echoed around the empire: European concepts that could be used against the colonial overlords. Christian theology, a prime European export, became an essential part of the cultures of the American countries, the Philippines and many islands in the South Pacific and Caribbean. Most ex-colonies have institutions – parliaments, law courts and universities – modelled on European prototypes. At the same time, ideas from the wider world were taken to Europe. Whole scientific disciplines, such as ethnology and anthropology, owed their origins to fieldwork carried out in distant places. Esoteric religions, from nineteenth-century Theosophy to contemporary ‘new age’ beliefs, borrowed eclectically from non-European cosmologies. The artistic styles of ‘primitive’ cultures worked an enormous influence on Picasso and others of the early twentieth-century avant-garde who saw African masks and Oceanic sculptures in European galleries. The political ideas of Gandhi influenced Martin Luther King in the United States, and the independence struggles in colonial Vietnam and Algeria inspired many later ‘liberation fronts’.
The international movement of ideas, people and trade goods along the new lines of transport and communication made of imperialism a complex international system of multilateral connections. By the 1920s and 1930s, when the exchanges were quicker, information was more rapidly disseminated, and perhaps European countries were more open to foreign influences – fascination with African and African-American cultures, or ‘Negrophilia’, is an example13 – the imperial system had reached its most ‘perfect’ expression, though the seeds of discontent and crisis were rapidly germinating. The sweep of imperialism in the interwar years of the twentieth century is breathtaking, and the cast of imperialistic powers is equally remarkable. By the 1930s, only the Germans and Ottomans had been eliminated as imperial overloads (as had Austria-Hungary, if one considers the colonial aspects of Habsburg rule in the Balkans), and countries such as Denmark and Spain had just residues and memories of their former imperial holdings.
Throughout the course of colonial history since the 1500s, all of the great powers of Europe, and some of the smaller ones, have been players in the imperial game. Many were involved for centuries, and some would cling to their far-flung domains even after the liberation or secession of most formal colonies. The flags have long been lowered over the British Raj and French Indochina, the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies, but some fifty territories today remain in a state of constitutional dependency on distant powers, incorporated through a baffling variety of statutes. America’s former colonies of Alaska and Hawaii are states, Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands are ‘commonwealths’, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are ‘associated states’, Guam and American Samoa are ‘unincorporated’ territories. French overseas territories encompass Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon in the North Atlantic and French Guyana in South America, Mayotte and Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna in the Pacific. The Netherlands administers six small islands in the Antilles; the geographically enormous Greenland is still linked to Denmark. Spain claims Ceuta and Melilla, two enclaves within Morocco. Britain’s overseas outposts include Bermuda – formally ruled by London since 1684 – and other Atlantic islands, including the Falklands, which Margaret Thatcher’s government successfully fought to recapture from Argentina in 1982, and folkloric St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, as well as a host of West Indian islands. Gibraltar in Europe, the British Indian Ocean Territory (rented to the United States as a navy base) and minuscule Pitcairn in the southeastern Pacific still form part of Her Majesty’s ‘realms and territories’.14 Meanwhile, various subject peoples still campaign for independence from the successor states to the old colonial empires.
Despite the survival of these ‘confetti of empire’,15 decolonization, which occurred in different colonies at various stages, was in sum quick and thorough. The United States, Haiti and the Spanish and Portuguese South American colonies gained independence from the 1780s through the 1820s. Most of the latter-day Asian colonies won independence within a decade after the Second World War – India, Pakistan and Burma in 1947, Sri Lanka the following year, Indonesia and the Philippines by the end of the 1940s as well, the countries of French Indochina, after a bloody war, in 1954. By the end of the 1950s, most of the larger countries of the Middle East and North Africa were independent, with France holding out in Algeria for several more years. The 1960s saw the independence of the majority of African colonies, though in this arena Portugal held out, and the case of Rhodesia remained intractable. Even the smallest countries were on the road to independence, and by the 1970s sovereign microstates were proliferating in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The subject countries of the Baltic, eastern Europe and Central Asia had to await the falling apart of the Soviet Union to get their independence.
Changed international conditions partly explain the final round of decolonization of the empires of western European states. Japan and Italy lost their colonies after the Second World War, and the war had distended ties between European colonial masters and their Asian possessions. Gandhi’s non-violent struggle played the major role in forcing the British to quit India. The Dutch were simply unable to re-establish colonial control over the East Indies after the Japanese occupation in the face of Sukarno’s nationalism, and Ho Chi Minh’s Marxist-inspired nationalists dealt a humiliating defeat to the French at Dien Bien Phu. Nationalism in Africa – liberal constitutionalism, more radical brands of socialism, blatant or disguised authoritarianism – pushed forward the separation between the Europeans and their African subjects. During the decade after 1945, post-war recovery and rebuilding focused European energies on home countries, and the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s provided ample opportunities for growth in domestic economies. Though Europeans were then pouring ever-larger amounts of money into their dwindling colonies, policy-makers were concerned about the costs of administration, ‘pacification’ of nationalist movements, and infrastructural investment, and were not always willing to shoulder such onerous financial responsibilities. The racialist assumptions on which imperialism had been based were less tenable after the defeat of Fascism and Nazism. Extension of democratic rights, education and political enfranchisement in the colonial world undermined monopolies of European rule. Such institutions as the United Nations and, ostensibly, the USA and the USSR opposed the maintenance of colonial rule. Anti-colonial forces in overseas possessions gained strength almost everywhere, using the media, elected assemblies, direct action and, sometimes, violence to pursue their ends. Authorities in European capitals ultimately faced the inevitable. Winston Churchill remarked in the 1940s that he had not become the prime minister of Britain in order to preside over the dissolution of the British empire, but Harold Macmillan spoke only a few years later of the ‘wind of change’ buffeting the British colonies. A French parliamentarian just after the war argued that, without its empire, France would only be a parcel of Europe, but by the start of the 1960s Charles de Gaulle affirmed that decolonization was French policy because it was in the French interest. Neither the Dutch nor the Belgians suffered dramatically from the loss of their colonies. A combination of guerrilla warfare in Africa and regime change in Europe, the 1974 ‘revolution of the carnations’ in Portugal, provoked the end of the last major overseas empire. Somewhat ironically, European states that once proclaimed colonies necessary for their economic and political well-being have thrived in the absence of empire. Yet while the European imperial sun was setting, the United States assumed Britain’s place as the leading Western power, further trying to extend its role throughout the Caribbean, in eastern Asia and in the Middle East.16
Extreme longevity nevertheless marked some colonial establishments. Portugal ruled Macao from the 1550s to 1999, and the Dutch presence in parts of the East Indies covered three centuries. In other cases, the formal colonial period was relatively brief, though its impact ran deep. The French were in Algeria for 132 years and in southern Vietnam for under a century; they ruled Morocco as a protectorate for less than forty-five years. Britain’s official rule of the Raj ranged from 1858 to 1947, although the East India Company had established a commercial, political and cultural presence in South Asia two centuries before the ‘Mutiny’. Formal European colonial rule in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa (other than in South Africa and Western African trading posts) lasted for about seven decades. Germany ruled overseas colonies for barely thirty years, France and Britain administered their mandated territories in the Middle East for a similar span, and Italy’s Ethiopian empire lasted only a decade. However, these spans of time belie the important transformations that foreign rule effected wherever Europeans established themselves, and their imprint on the colonized countries represents the clearest legacy of the colonial epoch.
In Europe, too, the legacy of empire remains prominent. As the British sit down to a meal of curry, or the French to couscous, or the Dutch to a rijstafel, they are consuming the products of trade in commodities and cuisines that began with colonial encounters. Even more ubiquitous, coffee, tea and many spices are products of Europe’s encounter with the East, and tomatoes, maize and chocolate (as well as tobacco) were brought to Europe’s shores from the new worlds of the Americas, while sugar was the precious export of plantation colonies in the West Indies and Indian Ocean, São Tomé, Fiji, Natal and colonial Queensland. A European menu without ‘colonial’ foodstuffs would hardly be palatable, and the porcelain and china on which Europeans eat their meals are also souvenirs of the voyage to East Asia.17
European wardrobes and sitting rooms also have (or at least had) a colonial legacy. The fashion for chinoiserie was big business in the eighteenth century, as traders in China sought silks for clothing, upholstery and wall decorations.18 ‘Nankeen’ came from China, and ‘madras’ and ‘calico’ from India. Wool from Australasia and cotton from South Asia were woven into cloth in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century furnituremakers liked tropical hardwoods such as teak and mahogany, and decorators cluttered houses with rugs from Persia and Turkey, and knickknacks made from African ivory or mother-of-pearl from the South Pacific. Those who had been on safari decorated their walls with hunting trophies, and the odd elephant-foot table or lion-skin rug still appears in dusty antique shops. Women bejewelled themselves with gold and diamonds from South Africa and sapphires from Ceylon. Children collected colonial coins and stamps, and soldiers proudly pinned on their colonial medals.
Europeans today view the art and artefacts of foreign cultures in their museums – Benin bronzes at the British Museum, Khmer statues at the Musée Guimet, Indonesian textiles at the Tropenmuseum.19 ‘Colonial’ motifs appear in buildings, the symbols of age-old European fascination for faraway places, whether in the Indian pastiche of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton or the statues of a Turk and a Native American on the façade of the bakers’ guild house in Brussels’ Grand’ Place.20 Botanical gardens – Kew outside London, the Jardin des Plantes and the former Jardin Colonial in Paris, similar botanical gardens in Florence and Lisbon – testify to the collection and acclimatization of colonial flora, and zoos as well are reminders of the European desire to tame the wild and collect the exotic. Monuments, statues, memorials and other ‘sites of memory’ continue to testify to the way that colonialist promoters imprinted the empire on metropolitan landscapes and national consciousness.21
Revamped displays in old colonial museums in Amsterdam and the suburbs of Brussels illustrate the rediscovered interest in the history of imperialism. In other ways, too, the legacy of Europe’s links with the wider world and, more specifically, with their old colonial possessions, is evident. Europeans listen to the world music recorded in Paris or London: Algerian rai or Indian bhangra. They read the diasporic literature put forth by major European publishing houses, often written by authors who have elected to live in Europe, such as Salman Rushdie and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Sports teams, especially in European football, are line-ups of players of diverse backgrounds – Algerian-born Zinedine Zidane starred in France’s World Cup-winning team in 1998 and captained them to the final eight years later – and cricket and the Commonwealth Games continue to tie together Britain’s old dominions and colonies more certainly than any political instance.
The major cities of Europe have become cosmopolitan juxtapositions of populations from many horizons, including the South Asians in Britain, and the North and West Africans in France, as well as, though in fewer numbers, the Surinamese and Javanese in Holland and the Ethiopians and Libyans in Italy. Mosques and Hindu and Buddhist temples provide sites of worship and of cultural identity for many, and issues of integration, assimilation and exclusion, both socially and culturally, underscore the complexities of cultural intermingling that owes much to the channels of migration created during the colonial period. Forced and free migration has, both literally and figuratively, changed the demographic complexion of host societies, including former colonies themselves. Brazil champions its mestiço coupling of Amerindian, European and African peoples and cultures; the United States claims to be a ‘melting pot’, though it remains a country marked by self-identification among such groups as the African-American descendants of enslaved peoples and white nationalists. Many former colonies of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean are home to a spectrum of cultures and ethnic groups – in Mauritius, the descendants of French planters, African slaves, indentured Indian workers, Chinese traders and those whose family trees included many of those roots.
The societies of the colonizing peoples, however, have faced particular, and sometimes forbidding, challenges in their own itinerary from relative cultural homogeneity to the incorporation of men and women who, whatever their individual or collective memories of the colonial pasts, have often looked to the old colonizing countries as sources of new opportunities or of potential refuge. The post-colonial predicament offers a chance, perhaps a necessity, for the self-redefinition of societies once arrogantly sure about the superior verities of Greco-Roman and Christian precepts, the white race, and European technological and commercial superiority. Cultural métissage and hybridity are quintessential post-colonial conditions.
In chronological length, geographical breadth and thematic complexity, the age of empires covers much of modern history, an inexhaustible reservoir for research and debate. This volume examines a particular set of empires: those in which European states expanded around the world from the sixteenth century onwards – cases of the ‘classic’ and extensive overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the lesser-known outposts of Scandinavian countries, and those of the short-lived imperial late-comers, Germany and Italy. Alongside these, the continental empire of Austria-Hungary (and the interests of Habsburg leaders in the wider world) shows some surprising parallels with the more widely flung empires. The empires of tsarist Russia (and its successor states, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation), the Ottoman sultanate and the United States have all been both continental and inter-continental manifestations of the imperial phenomenon; they, too, offer fascinating parallels and some contrasts with the other cases of expansion. Covering hundreds of years of history and most of the globe, these empires are not the only ones in the modern world, though it is beyond the brief of this book to look at empires constructed by other powers, such as China or Japan. This book, therefore, examines a restricted group of empires in the modern world, those where promoters of continental and overseas expansion shared some basic ideas associated with Europe and its culture, the economic system of mercantilistic then industrial capitalism (though socialist in the case of the USSR), the development of certain types of technology (including the weaponry that facilitated conquest), and the ideology of big-power conflict that pitted one imperial master against another.
The aim of this volume is to provide accessible overviews of these imperial experiences. The focus is on the imperial countries themselves, looking at the modes and cycles of expansion and contraction, the ideologies that prompted them and some of the repercussions of colonial expansion that rebounded on the metropolitan states. Most authors have adopted a chronological approach, though adapted to the very significant differences among the various empires. Different chapters focus attention variously on geopolitical, economic, social or cultural issues. Several of the writers have laid emphasis on historiographical and interpretive debates, while others have preferred a more narrative framework of imperial advance and retreat. Those who have contributed chapters on the largest and longest-lived of empires – those of Portugal, Spain, Britain and France – have met the particular challenges posed by word limits to provide succinct summaries of diverse imperial experiences on which literally thousands of full-scale works have been published. Those writing on more limited empires, for instance, the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Italy, may introduce readers to less familiar cases of expansion. The chapters on American and Russian/Soviet expansion argue for the inclusion of those cases within the broad framework of colonial and imperial history, as does the essay on Austria-Hungary.
The chapters provide introductions to different issues, offer synopses of recent research and debate, indicate leads to further reading and are intended to inspire discussion about the extremely rich and fascinating issues raised by colonial history. Without either misplaced nostalgia for the colonial past or an angry and polemical castigation of imperial objectives, they seek not so much to draw authoritative conclusions as to provoke further questions. In its own fashion, each chapter also underlines the significance of the colonial past in the post-colonial present, as those in countries that were colonizers and those that were colonized struggle to make sense of a past that inextricably tied them together. The legacy of imperialism continues to contribute to the metamorphosis of social and cultural structures, to the articulation of their national identities and ideologies, and to the globalization considered a hallmark of our own world.