|
Chapter 24 Growth of Colonial Nationalism, 1880-1939 |
|
Section 1 The Imperial World Order |
|
At
the beginning of the 20th century, European civilization
dominated the rest of the globe politically and economically. This
global dominance was the culmination of the process of European
expansion that had begun in the 1400s. Between 1500 and the mid-1900s
Europeans had established overseas colonies
of settlement in areas that were suitable or adaptable to their
style of farming and ranching - notably in the Americas, the Antipodes
(Australia and New Zealand) and in temperate parts of Africa. During the 1700s and 1800s, Europeans had
also come to dominate the rest of the world in so-called dependent colonies,
over which European states claimed sovereignty and where European
administrators generally ruled over non-European inhabitants, or through
the establishment of protectorates and spheres of
influence, in which European states used their economic and
military power to dominate local societies informally through
“special” relationships. By 1900, Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium and Germany had divided most of Africa into dependent colonies. Britain controlled most of South Asia and outposts even further east as part of her Indian Empire. In Southeast Asia, the Dutch maintained plantation colonies in Indonesia, which produced spices, sugar, coffee, and many other tropical commodities, while the Portuguese held on to some outposts of their old trading empire in places like Goa, on the Indian coast, and Macao on the Chinese coast. France controlled Indochina. Japan and China had also been forced open to European (particularly British) and American trade. China, whose leaders continued to disdain and resist western technology and influence, was soon divided by the major expansionist powers, known as the Great Powers, into spheres of influence and concessions, or areas that were administered by foreign powers even though they were still nominally under Chinese sovereignty.
Only in Japan did a different
response emerge to the challenge of the West. After being forced open to
the rest of the world after centuries of relative isolation, many
Japanese leaders concluded that their only hope was not to continue
their resistance but instead to learn and adopt the obviously more
powerful technology of the West as the best means of maintaining their
independence. With the blessings and support of the new young Meiji
emperor, they effected a virtual revolution that put an end to the old
Tokugawa Shogunate once and for all. Under this Meiji Restoration, as it
became known, Japan embraced western science and technology, and
implemented economic and political reforms on western models. As a
result, the Japanese made a rapid and self-controlled transition
to an industrial economy. During the 1890s, this self-transformation
allowed Japan to join the “imperial
club” as a Great Power in her own right – the only non-Western power
to do so. And like the Western industrial powers, the Japanese too staked their
claim to colonial territories – in Taiwan, Korea and China, as well as
in the Pacific Ocean, where all
the Great Powers claimed islands, mostly as coaling
stations for their ships.
Meanwhile, in North America and
northern Asia two great land powers had also sprung
from Europe to spread across the two continents. While the United States
expanded westwards from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of North
America, the Russian empire moved eastward, from its heartland west of
the Ural Mountains, to the Pacific coast of Asia. Both countries
expanded through wars of conquest and agricultural settlement. With them
they carried their own cultural, economic, and political systems. Both
united their vast territories with the new industrial technology, great
railway and telegraph systems. Both developed a sense of Manifest
Destiny, as the Americans put it, to justify their expansion. The Pax
Britannica. Dominating
this world order was a single global superpower -- the British Empire.
Britain had begun to achieve this status in the 18th century. After
years of war with France, British leaders decided the only way to
guarantee Britain's independence and security was to become a global
power. By the mid-19th century, British power centered on control of the
Indian sub-continent, halfway around the world. "As long as we rule
India," observed one British imperial statesman, Lord Curzon,
"we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall
drop straight away to a third-rate power."[1]
The defense of India drove Britain's global strategy and shaped
the modern scramble for empire. As other industrializing countries
sought colonies, Britain could allow none to threaten her access to
India. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal had cut the sailing time
to India in half. The British viewed the Suez Canal as Americans would
later see the Panama Canal. It was vital to their national interests. It
also drove them to further imperial expansion. Between 1869 and 1900,
the British had taken control of Cyprus, Egypt, East and Central Africa,
and Sudan, all to control and defend access to India through Suez. Beginnings of
British Decline.
By 1900, however, Britain's position as a superpower was being
challenged. Both Germany and the United States had surpassed Britain as
industrial manufacturers. Between 1860 and 1913, Britain's share of
world industrial production had dropped from 25% to less than 10%.[2]
London remained the heart of the world's financial structure, but New
York was fast gaining ground. In the 1890s, Germany also began to build
a fleet that could challenge the Royal Navy. Inside the empire, Indian
nationalists demanded more participation in their own government. In
South Africa, the Boers, descendants of the original Dutch farmers that
had settled at the Cape of Good Hope in the early 1600s, challenged
British supremacy in the bloody Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. Even Canada
and Australia wanted more autonomy from Britain.
As the new industrial nations emerged, they challenged the
economic world order established by the British. For most of the 19th
century, Britain had imposed a policy of Free Trade on as much of the
world as they were able. This meant that no country would establish
tariffs to restrict other nations' access to materials or markets. As
the first and largest of the industrial powers, Britain's need for
resources and markets was greater than that of other countries. Free
Trade therefore worked to her advantage. To counter this advantage the
newly-industrializing nations adopted protectionism. The United States
led the way. They had long protected their industries, and in 1875 had
raised the import tariff on steel to 40%. In 1890 and again in 1897,
they raised tariffs even further. In 1879, Germany too abandoned Free
Trade and raised tariffs on both industrial and agricultural imports.
France gave in to protectionism in 1892, and the rest of Europe soon
followed. By 1900, only Britain and Holland continued to advocate Free
Trade.[3] Colonial
Administration Once
they had taken direct control of new territories, the imperialists had
to govern them. Before World War I, their aims were fairly simple. Their
most important rule was that colonies must be self-supporting. At first,
they tried only to establish "law and order," and to collect
taxes. Different empires had different ideas about how to do this,
especially in Africa. Two main theories emerged: direct
rule, in which Europeans established completely new European
administration, and indirect rule,
in which the Europeans ruled through traditional leaders. Both theories
assumed that Europeans knew what was best for the colonial peoples, a
policy called paternalism.
Direct and indirect rule reflected the different objectives of
the various imperial powers. France, Belgium, Portugal, and the United
States, for example, practiced direct rule as part of their plan to
"civilize" their colonial subjects. For the French, Belgians,
and Portuguese, this meant primarily cultural assimilation. The United States also promoted the English language
in its territories. But its primary interest was in teaching people how
to run a constitutional, democratic government system, as well as the
benefits of a free market capitalist economic system.
British policy was more racially and culturally exclusive.
Britain had tried both direct and indirect methods of administration,
particularly in India. In India they had also initially adopted a kind
of assimilation policy through western education. However, the
experiment had been judged a disaster in the wake of the great 1857
Sepoy Rebellion. The Indian rebellion fostered an undercurrent of racism
in British colonial administration. After 1857, they decided against
trying to create "Black Englishmen," as they put it.
Instead, British colonial administrators argued that their
subjects should be allowed to keep most aspects of their own cultures
intact. They only stopped those practices that the British themselves
considered immoral and degenerative to the human spirit. For example,
they had suppressed slavery and human sacrifice in Africa. In India they
had stopped ritual murder and sati,
or widow-burning. They maintained that colonial peoples should be helped
along their own natural "evolutionary" path from
"savagery" to "civilization," just as Europeans had
traveled it. Despite the appeal of this argument, many Asians and
Africans came to resent its paternalistic assumptions of British
superiority. Consequences of
World War I. World
War I marked a watershed in the imperial world order. In Europe, it
shook the confidence of Europeans in their sense of moral superiority,
and their conviction that human history was a constant progression
upwards towards a better life, both materially and morally. "The
storm has died away," observed Paul Valéry, a French intellectual
speaking in 1922, "and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the
storm is about to break....We hope vaguely, we dread precisely....the
charm of life is behind us, abundance is behind us, but doubt and
disorder are in us and with us."[4]
Colonial subjects were also disillusioned. Africans and Asians
had not only watched Europeans killing one another but had participated in the
process. Thereafter they found it less easy to accept the myth of
European "superiority," whether racial or moral. Even European
technology seemed only to have raised the capacity for human
destructiveness and violence to new heights.
In practical terms, the war weakened the European powers
enormously. At the end of the war, Germany fell into revolution, and
seemed on the verge of disintegration. The Austrian Empire did
disintegrate, as the forces of nationalism in its eastern European
provinces finally dismembered the imperial corpse. In Russia the cost of
the war was too much for a people just entering the modern industrial
world. The revolutionaries of the new Soviet state condemned imperialism
along with capitalism—then created a new empire of Soviet Socialist
Republics. Even the main victors, except the United States, were
virtually bankrupt. Recovery increased European dependence on the United
States for capital, and on the colonies for raw materials.
As they struggled to restore their own sense of purpose and moral
soundness, many people in Europe required a better justification for
colonialism. The point was especially important as the victorious powers
decided what to do with the colonies of the defeated German and Ottoman
empires.
Trusteeship.
Under pressure from Woodrow Wilson and the United States, in 1919 the
victorious imperial powers had accepted new goals for colonial rule in
the mandate system. Under the mandates, the well-being and development
of peoples "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous
conditions of the modern world," were to "form a sacred trust
of civilization."[5]
The mandate system allowed the victorious imperial powers to consolidate
and expand their territories, but it also required them to develop the
colonies and, theoretically, to prepare them for eventual
self-government. Under the principal of "trusteeship," colonial
governments had to do more than just establish law and order and collect
taxes. After World War I, they expanded economic development and began
to provide education, medical, agricultural, and other services needed
to modernize the new states.
The trusteeship principle also made it mandatory on the
colonialists to bring their subjects into full membership in the world
political community, represented by the League of Nations itself, and
especially into the world economy. But the League and the world economy
were essentially European creations. Participation in both meant
following a western model. Justifying such policies, Lord Lugard, the
British governor of northern Nigeria who first defined the policy of
indirect rule, spoke of the Dual
Mandate. He meant that while the colonial powers had an obligation
to help their colonial subjects, the colonial peoples also had an
obligation to contribute to the larger world by allowing the development
of their natural resources.
The French Colonial Minister, Albert Sarraut, made similar
arguments. "The
old...imperialist concept...is being purified, is swelling and soaring
into the idea of human solidarity. Colonial France will organise, to her
own advantage no doubt, but also
for the general advantage of the world, the exploitation of
territories and resources which the native races of these backward
territories have been unable to develop by themselves, with the result
that the profit has been lost, not only to them but to the whole
world."[6] With
European political and economic organization, however, came European
cultural values. Western Education.
One of the most important affects of trusteeship appeared in colonial
education policies. By World War I most colonial governments had
realized that local clerks and technicians were cheaper than Europeans.
Education for such helpers, however, had remained elementary, and
confined to a few. Under the mandate system, education became a
priority, at least in theory, as colonial subjects were trained to run
their own states. Still, only a few obtained secondary and higher
education. By providing western education even to the few, however, the
colonial powers unwittingly were sowing the seeds of their own
destruction.
With western education came the western world view -- a world
view that emphasized individual responsibility, achievement, and above
all individual liberty. While French colonial subjects read of "our
ancestors the Gauls," in their textbooks, they also read about the
French Revolution and the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality.
In British schools Asian and African students read about the English
Common Law, with its emphasis on individual human rights, and the
constitutional struggle for representative parliamentary democracy. In
some American missionary schools they even learned about the American
Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Colonial peoples soon began to demand their own rights under the same
principles. |