Colonization
It was explained in the chapter about The Beginning that the interest of the Western World in the rest of the globe was limited at that time. There were a number of reasons for the limitation:
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The population of Europe was still low and there was no demographic pressure for expansion. The population of the Americas, the main target for later emigration, was still in the low millions, huddled around the eastern seaboard of North America and spread thinly in South America.
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Europe's needs for tropical products were easily supplied by plantations in the Caribbean and by the American colonies, and by trading stations in India and in Indonesia.
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There was a specific African product, slaves for the plantation of the Caribbean and the Americas, which were traded in ports of West Africa., and transported from there. There were other ports for the same purpose, in the eastern coast of Africa, but their trade was directed to the Muslim World.
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With the advance of the European demographic explosion that caused among others the replacement of the old elite by the new Middle Class and the Industrial Revolution, the need for additional territory, food supplies, raw materials and markets for industrial products, became apparent. The pressure went in two separate directions:
Emigration to existing colonies with temperate climate
Creating new protectorates and colonies in the tropics and subtropics
The emigration to colonies with temperate climate was probable the greatest population movement in history to date, and it did change the face of the world with growing rapidity. A big percentage of the population increase of the European countries was emigrating and settling overseas. Still, even with large numbers of those emigrating overseas, the population of the European countries continued to rise, albeit not with an equal rate.
France was traditionally the largest European country in terms of people, although Russia overtook her in the 18th century and Austro-Hungary in 1814-5. In 1800 France had 28.3m people, by 1870 this has risen to 37.7m. The Germans, less than 20m in 1800, had passed France by 1870 to reach 41.1m. The Italians had jumped from 17.2m in 1800 to over 26m and the Spanish from 10.5m to 16.2m. The British population had risen fastest, from 10.5m in 1800 to 26m in 1870, a nearly threefold increase. It is not surprising, as the rate of lowering child mortality and the general improving of the health standards came earlier to Britain than to the continent, hence the higher rate of demographic increase.
In addition to the growth of people in the home countries, there was a constant outflow of emigrants from Europe to the colonies in the temperate zones of the globe. It was not exactly colonization according the present use of the world, but it meant that vast number of land-hungry Europeans were moving overseas to possess those lands. At the same time, the already existing colonies were breaking out of their coastal enclaves in North and South America, South Africa and Australia, and reinforced by the new immigrants started to move inland.
All over the world, the last wilderness in the pampas and the steppes, in the Mississippi Valley and in Canada, in the Himalayas and the Andes, in the deserts of Australia, were being penetrated or settled by advanced societies, and the previous population was being subdued, in some cases annihilated. Never before or since had so much cheap land became available and settled.
Russia was also expanding fast, south and east. It had contiguous territories next to their homeland, there was no need for emigration. It was all overland travel. However, because of the nature of the original population, especially to the south, in the direction of the Caucasus, the expansion was much more violent than expansions to other parts of the world. The memories of those days are still haunting Russia.
There were two large countries with temperate climate that were untouched by the European expansion, at least at the early phase. The two countries were China and Japan. They were left alone because of a number of reasons. Both were organized states, with a large population and warlike culture. So, the interest of the western World remained commercial as far as these two countries were concerned. It is doubtful that in the conditions of the early nineteenth century they would have the power to succeed. They probably would have the power to defeat them but not enough to compel them to accept white settlers.
It is not the aim of this book to find justification to whatever has happened in history; the aim is to show and explain. To put the record straight, European central power always attempted to mitigate the behavior of the settler communities toward the original population. This was the rule from the very beginning when the Spanish crown tried to save the Caribs, the Aztecs and the Incas from the hands of the conquistadors. The English government did the same toward the Indians in North America, the Negroes in South Africa and the aborigines in Australia and Tasmania. Their problem was that the central powers were in Europe and the settlers were in the colonies, next to the original population. Probably the only colony, where the treatment of the original population did not degrade to massacres and annihilation, was in New Zealand, where there was a large community of missionaries, with local influence, and in addition there was a large Maori community, with a good organization and weapons.
One gets the impression that the European settlers were cruel to the indigenous people, with whom they came into conflict when extending their use of the land. It was indeed so, but it was not a specific European trait. It probably looks that way because of the simple reason that wherever the Europeans came into conflict with indigenous people, the Europeans were always the stronger party in most of the violent encounter. They had the weapons, the organization and the experience. Nevertheless, cruelty toward the weaker side is not a specific European behavior, it seems to be a normal human biological imperative. One could find plenty of archaeological remains to support the thesis, but one can find plenty of examples from modern times too.
When the Zulu impis (bataillons) moved south into the area of the eastern seaboard of South Africa, they encountered many tribes in their way. They were the Swazis, or the Xosas or any of the Bantu agricultural tribes. Exterminated villages and whole tribes marked the advance of the Zulus. The roots of the present enmity between the Inkatha of the Zulus and the Xosa-led ANC in post-apartheid South Africa reach back to this period.
The Maoris, whose existence was probably saved by the intervention of the missionaries, were not much better than the Zulus. When the original Maoris reached New Zealand a few centuries before the arrival of the English, some of their canoes were lost on sea and eventually reached Chatham Island, a bleak island east of New Zealand. There they formed a community, existing on fish and seabirds. They called themselves the Moriori.
When the New Zealand Maoris in the 19th century heard about that community they organized a raiding party, attacked the Moriori and exterminated them to the last person. It was done without any possible economic gain. After that they returned to New Zealand, content with the thought that they behaved in a traditional way. It seems that after all, Bougainville's opinion that the Polynesian were cruel savages, was correct. It seems that despite everything, neither the Zulus nor the Maoris, and the others did anything else but executed one the earliest biological imperative of mankind.
There is no doubt that the direction of the emigration from Europe to territories with temperate climate was more important to the Western World than the eventual connection of Europe with the non-temperate lands of the world. At the beginning of the 19th century, there was already an English presence in India and a Dutch presence in the Spice Islands. However, local European considerations soon demanded to deepen the connections with the tropical lands of the world.
European migration was directed to countries with temperate climates, North America, Australia, New Zealand, the southern part of South America and South Africa. They did not settle in tropical areas; they were unsuitable for Europeans. Even when the European countries have occupied practically the whole of sub-Sahara Africa, the European soldiers and administrators who were needed to keep the power of the colonizatory state, served in the colonies only for a limited period, two to three years at a stretch. Those occupations that were generally considered as a preserve of the middle class, like clerks, shopkeepers and professionals, were filled by Arabs in West Africa, mainly Lebanese and Syrians, and by Indians in East Africa.
There were two exceptions to this rule. The first exception was a ridge of highland stretching from South Africa to Kenya. Both Rhodesias, today Zambia and Zimbabwe, and Tanganyika belonged to that category. Those territories were highlands, with temperate climate, and were preferred places of European settlers. Incidentally, those countries were where the European withdrawal, also known as decolonization, was accompanied by violent guerilla warfare, like the Mau-Mau in Kenya and the war of liberation of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The bone of contention was assumed to be the ownership of the land in those places, but the roots of the conflicts went back much deeper than the ownership of lands.
The Europeans had a princely life on their estates. It is sufficient to read the stories of the Danish Baroness Isak Dinesen about the life of the white community in Kenya, or view the remains of million acre estates in Zambia, with villages built for their workers, private road system and aircraft landing strips, to appreciate the extent of the European presence. Lately, in the year 2000, the world's newspapers were full of stories of Zimbabwe veterans expropriating white-owned land. The same process happened before in Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya.
It is true that the Europeans on the highlands of south-eastern Africa led a princely life, but it is also true that they developed an efficient agriculture and employed a large number of African workers, who enjoyed a higher standard of living than they could have reached on their own. However, as it is well known from other parts of the world, also from other periods, questions of efficiency and economy are always secondary to those of tribal sentiments and culture. If one wishes to see the tragedy of sub-Saharan Africa, one can visit Zambia, Zimbabwe or any other country in that part of the world, and find dozens of estates of hundreds of thousands of acres each, that were taken over after the decolonization, stripped of everything movable and abandoned. The same is happening in Zimbabwe and Kenya now, and will happen in South Africa in the near future.
It is a real tragedy, as those abandoned farms could feed half of Africa, including those starved children who daily appear on TV screens. The real tragedy is not that the farms were taken away from the European farmers, it was inevitable. It is not even the fact that those huge farms, agro-businesses really, were not continued to be worked as they were before. It is a question of culture and not of ability. It cannot be expected that people who never had those traditions could continue to manage huge agro-businesses that were developed on the lines of the best of European traditions. The problem of large-scale farming is identical to the survival of western political institutions, like nation-state, representative democracy and independent judicial system. The real tragedy is that nobody found a way, or even searched for, to develop an efficient way of large-scale agriculture that is suitable to African traditions.
The European settlement in southern Africa, apart of South Africa proper started at the beginning of the 20th century. Even after the 2nd World War there were a number of settlement projects for British war veterans. Officers were settled in Kenya and non-commissioned officers in Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe today. This about 15 years before Britain has decided to cut its losses and leave Africa to manage on its own.
The second territory that was an exception to the rule of European settlement only in temperate zone, was North Africa. The relations of Europe and North Africa go back to a very long time. During the last three millennia, North Africa was either independent and in direct enmity to Europe, or it was occupied by Europeans who settled there to become the ruling elite, while the local people served as workers and second-class citizens.
It should be mentioned here that the expression North Africa includes the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula too. The territories on both sides of the Gibraltar channel have similar climate and farming conditions. Since prehistoric times, the populations and the cultures were similar. The southern part of the peninsula is below the line beyond which there was no olive tree. In the east of the peninsula it reaches the Pyreneans, it even continued to the Provence. In the west the dividing line was more to the south.
There is an importance to the line of the olive trees, as without that tree no eastern rule could have existed anywhere in Europe for any length of time. It was not only in Spain, but also in the Provence, southern Italy, Greece and the Balkans, where the olive tree was cultivated, and those where the territories where the Islamic conquest had more than ephemeral duration.
Fat is essential part of the food needed by humans. In the north, pigs supplied the fat. In the south, there were cultural rules against eating of pork much before Judaism and Islam. They could not eat fat from pork, so they needed vegetable fat from the olive trees. There were places where rancid butter or the sesame oil replaced the olive oil, but by and large the main staple of North Africa and the Middle East was oil from the olive tree. In a world that was still restricted, oil was the sole alternative. Later sources of edible oils, like the palmnut or the corn, were still in the tropics or in the Americas. The olive tree allowed the Carthaginian empire to be extended to the line of the Ebro in Spain, and the Islamic conquest too.
During the last three millennia, Europeans twice occupied North Africa. The first time it was Rome who defeated the Carthaginians and took over the Carthaginian Empire between Egypt and northern Spain. The second time it was occupied by the French and the Italians, starting in 1830 for the French and in 1912 for the Italians. The first western occupation ended with the defeat of the Byzantinians by the Islam, the second occupation ended shortly after the 2nd World War. So, the first European occupation lasted about 800 years, the second about 120 years.Whenever North Africa was independent of Europe, which was most of the time, it acted as an enemy, mainly by preying on European shipping in the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians preyed in their turn on Greek and later on Roman shipping, and the Muslim pirates on the ships of the Christians and raided the European shores for catching slaves.
There were three centers of piracy on the North African coast. The centers were Tripoli in Libya, Tunis and Algiers. They all belonged nominally to the Ottoman Empire but in practice they were independent. The central Ottoman power attempted to create a naval contact with the pirate fleets, which might have changed the balance of naval power in the western Mediterranean, but Malta was stronger and their plan has failed. The failure of the Ottoman power to establish more than nominal suzerainty over North Africa decided the future type of naval warfare there. The pirates of North Africa used a typical pirate tactics. They attacked ships that were careless enough to sail alone, and raided villages and towns on the seashore. They carried off people for ransom, if they had rich relations, or for selling to slavery those who were not ransomed. The scope of their operation was not restricted to the Mediterranean. They were active in the Atlantic too. In the 17th century they reached Iceland and among others, they carried away a pastor and his housekeeper. The pastor wrote a book about his experiences.
The attitude of western countries to the pirate states of North Africa was similar to their practice of today. Business as usual on one hand and retribution for acts of piracy or terrorism on the other. In 1797, the ruler of Algiers ordered warships from an American shipyard to be used for piracy. Thomas Jefferson, the President at that time, saw the danger but Congress decided otherwise; the order was approved, the ships were built and delivered. In 1805 American marines were marching to Libya from Egypt to release American slaves who were captured by the pirates. Again in 1815 the Americans were compelled to attack Tunis and Algiers, to free again American slaves, demand indemnity and a promise that no more slaves will be taken. None of the promises were kept.
The same story was with Europeans. In 1804 Spain provided carpenters to Libya to build gunboats knowing well that the gunboats will be used primarily against Christian shipping. Finally in 1816, the Europeans decided to finish the piracy once for all. A combined English-Dutch fleet attacked Algiers, the main port of piracy. In a few hours of bombardment practically the whole Algerian fleet was destroyed and the town was in flames. Despite that, piracy has continued; nothing else but direct control of the seashore could stop piracy, as the Romans found out 2000 years before.
In 1830 the French occupied Algiers, followed in due course by Tunis and Morocco. They had a dual purpose. One of them was the final elimination of the piracy, the second was settlement of excess population there. It was the continuation of the policy of the Romans. They settled over a million European in Algiers alone and created flourishing agricultural settlement. Just like the British in East Africa. Again, like the British in East Africa, nothing has remained from the French presence in North Africa, neither the settlers nor the agriculture. It seems that like in East Africa, it is a question of culture and not of economy.
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There were three major elements that controlled western expansion into the tropical areas of the world. They are listed below in diminishing importance:
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Securing food and raw materials for the European industry, and provide a market for industrial products. The British called it 'imperial preference'.
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The western nations became the sovereigns of most of the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world. They became responsible for the interests of their newly-acquires subjects, which caused further expansions.
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There was an element of rivalry between the European powers for more colonies, the famous 'scramble for Africa'. Even when the politicians knew that colonies never were a source of profit, still they could not prevent the jingoism of the public to push for further expansion.
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The supply of food, raw materials and protected markets for industrial goods was probably the single most important factor in the colonial expansion of Europe. The scramble for colonies eventually affected the non-European parts of Western Civilization but when they joined the scramble they only have taken colonies from other European countries. So, the United States of America inherited the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and in the Far East, and South Africa and Australia took over former German dependencies after the First World War.
What is called 'classic colonization' or the 'scramble for Africa' started in the second half of the 19th century. At the end of that century, most of Africa, with a few negligible exceptions, was in European possession, and so was India too. There were different names to describe the same reality; colonies, protectorates, princely states with British advisers, etc., but they were all the same. The trigger to that colonization was the question of food and raw material. It is difficult to separate between the two, so they should be treated as one subject.
Statistics has shown that the population of the United Kingdom has increased threefold within seventy years, between 1800 and 1870. Other European countries had impressive increases, although none had as much as the United Kingdom. The actual increase was even bigger, because the people who emigrated during the seventy years, and their descendants, were not included in the statistics. If they had been included the increase of the United Kingdom would have been much higher. Probably more than fourfold.
The additional people had to work, eat and live. They needed houses, clothes and everything else. Land was limited, so most of the new population has streamed into the towns to join the urban proletariat. There was a continuous pressure from the proletariat and it happened first in the countries with the populations of the highest numbers.
In the years before the French Revolution, there were a number of years in France with acute food shortage and high bread prices. The same process was in England, although there it took a different turn. In France, the suppliers of wheat were the peasant proprietors or renters of farms, so the blame for the shortage and the high prices was put on the speculators, the bakers and ultimately on the ineptitude of the government. Supply of food and its price became one of the triggers of the French Revolution.
In England the main suppliers of wheat were large estates, controlled by politically influential people. They demanded protection for their products; and the protection was forthcoming. Anyone who is familiar with the present policies of Europe in giving subsidies to farmers, can see that the English policy at the time of the Corn Laws, was similar to present policies. There was plenty of corn to buy in other parts of Europe, especially east of the Elbe. Overseas transport was still expensive at that time, at the turn of the century, so import of grain from overseas was still out of the picture. The great landowners in England demanded, and received, a government assurance that a protective tariff will be put on the import of grain. The tariff was to be activated when the price of the imported grain was less than a level, which was set together by the landowners and the government.
The result was that the landowners had an assured profit and the government could collect duty on the import. The losers were the countries that traditionally supplied England with wheat, chiefly Prussia, Poland and Russia. The year after the enactment of the Corn Laws in England, about 150 landowners in East Prussia filed for bankruptcy. The main losers were the poor in the cities, London and elsewhere. There were ugly demonstrations demanding eliminating taxation of their daily bread.
The demonstration in France and England were the first signs of the effect of the demographic explosion on the social equilibrium. It affected the staple of the proletariat, bread, because of taxation in England and because of mismanagement in France. The cause was not really important. Most of the urban proletariat was working in factories, or had livelihood that depended on the factories. Whether the staple was taxed, or was expensive because of expensive sea transport, or they had no wages because the factory closed lacking raw materials or because the factory had a backlog of unsold products, it was unimportant. That was the reason why the expansion to the colonies was directed by the supply of food or raw materials, or by securing markets to the finished products. In countries with three or fourfold of population increase in 70 years, provision of food, or work, which is the same, was of primary importance.
France and England were the first, but other countries in Europe followed them. The problems of food and raw materials increased everywhere. It was a long process whose effects were cumulative rather than immediate. In the first half of the 19th century there were food riots all over Europe, which were fuel to the revolutions, but eventually an equilibrium was found in large-scale emigration. It was the safety valve that regulated the pressure.
There are a number of curiosities remaining from those times. One of the nicknames, American Negroes gave to whites, is 'honky'. It means Hungarian and it came into existence when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian farmers emigrated to America and became factory hands in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The reason for that emigration was that the excess farming population emigrated first to Hungarian towns, and finding no solutions there, continued to America. The same happened in most of the European countries.
What importance had the food prices on the world, one can see in the examples of Argentine and Brazil. It is difficult to comprehend it today, but in 1900 Argentine was the fifth richest country with Brazil not much farther down the list. Rich Argentinean ranchers spent the winters in Paris and the Brazilians built an opera house at Manaus, deep in the Amazonian jungle. In 2000 Argentine was no. 55 in the list of the world's countries, organized by wealth. Brazil was somewhere lower. A century ago, the cost of sea transport was already low, so South America was the preferred supplier of agricultural products to Europe, as the European agriculture still did not catch up to the growth of population. That South America paid lower wages than Europe, was also one of the factors in the import.
A century later, the demographic pressure has abated and the local production has caught up with the demands in all categories, except probably in the production of the basic staples. The result is that the people in the western countries eat well and at affordable cost. However, the change did not help the economies of South America.
The second half of the 19th century was the time of the highest prices and that was also the time of the 'scramble for Africa'. Africa seemed to be an untouched cornucopia of tropical products and protected markets. Still, it has to be admitted that at least the announced intentions were honorable. Viewing from western eyes, the tropics was a wilderness, full of savage tribes, cannibalism, intertribal wars, massacres and slavery. It is difficult to assess the real intentions from a distance of a century and half, but judging from internal documents, among others they wanted to bring civilization to the benighted savages, improve health and education, and join them to the economy of the world. Through the economy of their country, of course. They also had intentions to raise their standard of living in order that they could become consumers of goods that were produced from their raw materials.
It was a form of social engineering on a continental scale and as all attempt of social engineering, it failed. The initiators ought to have known that it will happen. The Spaniards tried to turn the Caribs and the American Indians into hard-working and god-fearing citizens. It did not succeed. The same happened when the Greeks and the Romans tried to convince the people in the Middle East that their way of life, with gymnasiums, public baths, etc. is better. Social engineering is a chimaera, a daydream, which is always successful in theory and never in practice. Russians learned it to their sorrow in seventy years of a social engineering experiment. Advocates of multiculturalism, another social engineering experiment, will learn the same in due course.
Probably the only part of the attempt that has succeeded was the reduction of the rate of the mortality of children. Young babies had no cultural objection to the process of inoculation, so the rate of children mortality went down and the spiral of demographic explosion went up. This was not exactly the result the initiators of the social engineering experiment have hoped for. All the other parts of the original hopes were abject failures.
Even the hoped for yield in tropical products was less than a success. Adam Hochschild describes in his book :King Leopold's Ghost, how the most extreme and brutal methods could not generate but a scanty reward. The Belgian private company, that was organized by the King of Belgium, tried to compete with the rubber that the patrons of the Manaus' opera house supplied to western factories. Joseph Conrad described the methods of the company in his book: The Heart of Darkness.
Thus, the exploitation of the tropical colonies, that at least in theory, was based upon normal, free-market pattern, in which people produce agriculture products, sell them to the highest bidder and become consumers for manufactured goods, was a failure. The only way to succeed was by organizing large plantations, like the agro-businesses that were described early in this chapter. This approach was more successful and soon tropical Africa and South Asia was full of plantations, growing all kinds of tropical products, coffee, tea, cocoa, sisal, cotton and others. The huge white-owned farms in the highlands of southeast Africa were parts of the same pattern.It went on for a very long time. It was tried probably for the last time after the 2nd World War, when Britain planned a huge plantation in Tanganyika to grow groundnuts. It was supposed to supply the needs of the United Kingdom for vegetable oil. That was at the very end of the colonization period. It failed like most government led projects.
What about the other side of the social experiment? It was supposed to raise the standard of living of the indigenous people that will draw them into the economy of the world and eventually would be consumers of manufactured products. Something similar to the declared aims of the present Global Economy. However, the indigenous people who were supposed to benefit from the social engineering, refused to participate. Some became agricultural workers in the plantations, some not even that. There were colonies where the indigenous people were pressed into work using the cruelest methods, flogging, starvation and even mutilation, but without result. The indigenous people had no tradition of organized work and the punishments were not the best ways to bridge a cultural gap of thousands of years.
The refusal of the indigenous people to take part in the plan caused another wave of human migration. This time the migration was not of Europeans to territories with temperate climate but a migration of Indians and Chinese to work in the plantations which could not recruit indigenous people to work there. That is the source of the Indian diaspora in South Africa, Trinidad and Surinam, Fiji and others. So, eventually, the tropical plantations supplied the needs of the western world, but the price in money and in social conflicts, then and later, were exorbitant.
The blame, if it can be called such, was solely on the side of the colonial powers. They attempted to change the habits of a people and turn them into docile proletariat. It did not work; it could not ever work. No one can change traditions in a short time that have been ingrained in thousands and tens of thousands of years. If there is something that the history of the last two centuries should teach humanity is, that there are no shortcuts and social engineering must always fail. It is true for colonialism, socialism, fascism, communism, liberalism, multiculturalism and all other –isms, past, present and future. Apart of this lesson, there is one more heritage from the colonial era, and it is presented on Chart No. 3.
The rate of demographic increase of the Third World was 55% between the years 1950 and 2000, 179% between 1950 and 2000. That was the period when colonialism came to an end, in Africa and everywhere else. Still, the effects of the lowered rates of child mortality were felt, and the estimate for the years between 2000 and 2050 is still 53%.
The figures do not lie. Demographic increase testifies at least to an improved health system, lack of famines and improved personal safety. The comparison of the figures between 1900 and 2000 to the figures before and after, show that the colonial period was better than the times before and after the colonies.
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Colonization had a number of additional aspects that have to be explained. Up to now only direct colonization was touched, its causes, conditions and results. Once, a European power became sovereign in another country, that power has inherited everything connected to the colony, its past, problems, friends and enemies. It was less important in Africa as there were no nations yet, only tribal societies. The relations between the tribes did not affect the new sovereigns. If they had been interested in them then the present borders of Africa would probably be different, and many catastrophes and genocide would have been avoided.
South and Southeast Asia were different. The nations there were on a higher level of political development than the African tribes and they had bigger entanglements too. The British in India, Burma, Ceylon and Malaya, the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indo-China inherited the problems and the responsibilities of the sovereign powers. The British had the biggest share of colonial property in Asia, they had the bigger problems too. First, there were the delicate internal relations, between Muslim and Hindi, between Sinhalese and Tamil, and between the innumerable statelets, princely fiefdoms and religious retreats, that they had to deal with them without affronting too many sensibilities.
The responsibility for India's security embroiled Britain in a number of costly Afghan adventure. The favorite invasion route to India was from the Northeast through the Khyber pass. That was the route of the original Aryan invaders sometimes in the second millennium BC; Alexander the Great came there too and so did the Moghuls. Britain felt responsible to keep the invasion route securely locked. At the same time Russia from the north has constantly advanced toward India. It occupied the Central Asian oasis states, one after another. Bukhara, Ferghana, Samarkand, Siva, etc became Russian possession. The Britain knew that Russia has an imperial aim to gain a warm water port, that would terminate its isolation from the world six months every years. Whether that port would be in the Persian Gulf or on the Indian Ocean, it would not matter much.
The Russian acts and the British countermeasures formed what Rudyard Kipling in his book 'Kim' called the 'Great Game'. Kipling has shown a much later phase of the competition but it started much before that. At the time of the Napoleonic wars there was a paradoxical situation; Britain and Russia were allies against France, and competitors in the Great Game.
British officials in India were convinced that the Russian plans in Central Asia will eventually include India too. The best invasion route from Russian Siberia led through Chinese Turkestan. They feared that the Russians will annex Chinese Turkestan and advance from it to India, through the traditional invasion gateway, Afghanistan and Kashmir. They used the familiar argument that the Chinese rule in Turkestan was vulnerable because the Uigur Moslems of the hills hated the Chinese rule so much that they would rise to welcome anyone, including the Russians, who came to end Chinese rule. It would have been a valid observation, provided that the Muslims of Chinese Turkestan were ignorant of the intense hatred of the Muslims of the Caucasus against the Russians because the atrocities committed by the Russians in their wars against the Chechens and in the Caucasus in general.
The Russians were perfectly aware of their reputation by the Uigurs and did not attempt to invade India through Chinese Turkestan or anywhere else. The officials of the British East India Company, however, did not know it, so they constantly advocated to create a protectorate in Afghanistan and Ladakh, and annex Kashmir. This led the British into the disastrous Afghan wars, which they could easily avoid. The Russians waited another century when they repeated the British wisdom of invading Afghanistan, but by then the British were already out of India.
If anyone comes to the conclusion that it is a familiar scenario from the second half of the 20th century, he is right. The geography is the same, so are the elements in the balance of power. Some of the players have changed but the play remained the same. Now the Indian government wants to close the gateway and the Muslims to the north and the east want to pry it open. The Great Game had an importance in British Imperial calculations, but in retrospect, one can see that there never was a real danger that the Russians reach a warm sea port, at least not in the direction of Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass. The mountains and the wild Muslim tribes were sufficient protectors.
There was a second British embroilment in the Far East, and that also was because of the British rule in India. At the beginning of the 19th century, Britain imported yearly about 30,000 pounds of opium, mainly from Turkey. The opium was used for medicinal purposes. There were some, mainly artists, who became addicted to opium, but it certainly was not a general habit. It was too expensive to become a common addiction. Opium was grown not only in territories controlled by the Ottoman government; it was cultivated in India too. Indeed, there was plenty of opium in India and it was much cheaper than opium from Turkey.
India could produce a practically unlimited quantity of opium but it had not much to do with it, except to sell it to the West to be used for medicinal purposes. For some reason, the Indians never became addicted to opium, but neither did the Europeans, except a small minority. However, the British became addicted to tea and they remained so to this very day. By 1820 they already imported millions of tons of tea, mainly from China.
Commercial relationship with China was a problem. It did not recognize that trade must be a two-way street. They were willing to sell tea to the British but were unwilling to buy British products to even out the balance of the trade. They were willing to buy a small quantity of Indian cotton, a few mechanical toys and scientific instruments, but the rest of the balance had to be paid in silver. In the first decade of the 19th century the Chinese had a trade surplus of 26 million Pound Sterling, an enormous sum for the times. At such a rate, the whole world's silver output would be insufficient to pay for the import of tea to the western world.
There were two developments that evened out the commercial balance, embroiled Britain in two wars with the Chinese, the Opium Wars, and gained the lease of Hong Kong for a period of 99 years. The first development was that the Chinese became addicted to opium. Why did the Chinese became addicted and not the Indians who grew it, nobody can answer. It changed the commercial balance, as Chinese demand for opium more than offset the export of tea to Britain. It was not an official Chinese import, in fact the Chinese government was deadly against it, but nobody could stop the intense Chinese craving for the substance. The Chinese government was powerless to stop the import of opium, smuggling indeed, and the outflow of the silver.
In addition, tea plantations were established in India and Ceylon, and very soon the import of Indian tea to Britain surpassed the import of Chinese tea. It was an example of commercial considerations of a colony that compelled the colonial power to intervene, even to wage wars and extend the empire, as it happened to Britain with Hong Kong and as it happened to most of the European powers in the 19th century, when China was weakest.
The western colonial empires started out as a necessity, to provide food for the burgeoning populations in western cities, and raw materials and markets for the factories in the home countries. The second impetus to the process of colonization was given by the responsibilities the colonial powers took on themselves as sovereigns of the colonies, There was a third element too: it was the competition between the colonial powers themselves.
The expression 'Scramble for Africa' represents a fact that there was a competition for African colonies. There was indeed a scramble but it was difficult to see whether the motivation to participate in the scramble was real national interests or its was something that was built up by commercial interests and by the yellow press that served their interests.
The American-Spanish war in 1898 was fueled and incited by the Hearst newspapers. In that war the United States inherited the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and in Asia. The establishment of the infamous Free Republic of Congo of Leopold II of Belgium, was the result of a newspaper campaign, led by Henry Morton Stanley, the ace reporter of the New York Herald. But these are only extreme examples. The colonization of practically the whole sub-tropical and tropical world, with a few notable exceptions, was the answer to very urgent and practical needs that were caused by the demographic explosion of Europe. There were also direct commercial interests, but the changes that were the results of agitation of commercial interests, were usually transfers from one colonial power to another..
One should not disregard the power of political slogans and that of public opinion. A slogan like the one saying that: The sun never sets on the British Empire, was powerful and important. As most of the colonial powers had similar slogans there was always a danger that public opinion will push the governments to hasty actions. It happened in 1914, when public opinion on both side of the dividing line in Europe, was enthusiastically in favor of war. In the last years of the 19th century there was a colonial conflict between France and England. That was the famous Fashoda incident. The French sent an expedition to cross the Sahara, from west to east. At the easternmost point of the journey, the French expedition reached a village in Sudan that was English possession. The village was called Fashoda. It was probably the most worthless piece of real estate on earth, but in the imagination of the public, on both sides, Fashoda became a very desirable territory. The politicians knew better; it took a long time until they succeeded to defuse the situation.
There were many other incidents too, luckily none with the intensity of the Fashoda incident. After the First World War, even politicians knew that the net value of the colonies was about nil. However, in respect of public opinion, they kept that knowledge to themselves.
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History is not an arbiter of ethical behavior. It is a rule that all historical writings should observe, but very few do so. When the question comes to the relation of western civilization to the rest of the world, then usually all the stops are pulled out and all proper politically correct historians compete with each other to condemn the West for its behavior. This book has no intention of following that beaten path. First, one cannot add much to an already swollen litany of condemnations and second, one cannot condemn natural forces. One can say that an eruption of a volcano was a bad thing because in the eruption it buried thousands of people, but one cannot claim that an eruption of a volcano is an unethical act. Eruption of a volcano is a natural phenomenon, and such it is beyond the limits of human ethics. So is a demographic explosion. One can maybe blame the scholars and doctors that they improved public health and the demographic explosion was the direct result of that, but it would be a farfetched conclusion.
Colonization was the direct outcome of the demographic explosion in Europe. It was not the only outcome, there were others, not less painful. Natural catastrophes have usually painful results and the demographic explosion of Europe was no exception.
That the western world became the whipping boy for the excesses of the colonization is understandable. Although the acts of the western colonization were less cruel than the acts of the tropical world have committed against each other, they were numerous and they were visible. It is possible that the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda was much worse than anything the Belgians did in the Congo under the infamous rule of Leopold II. However, the Belgians were judged by western public opinion, based upon western standards. It is doubtful that the same genocide is judged in Africa by the same standards. It was an internal African conflict, managed by traditional methods. There seems to be little doubt that it was not the first and not the last either, in the long history of the tropical world.
The same with conflict everywhere else, whether between Muslims and Hindi in Kashmir, between Muslims and Christians in East Timor and in the Moluccas, or between Indians and Polynesians in Fiji. It all reminds one of the saying of the Maoris, after having massacred the Morioris on Chatham Island: It was done according our traditions.
About two centuries ago, there was a demographic explosion in Europe. As a result of that demographic event, tens of millions of European emigrated to the temperate zone everywhere and conquered most of the sub-tropical and tropical territories as colonies. That was a response to a historical imperative.
Since about fifty years ago, the wheel has turned. The western demographic explosion has abated or even retrogressed. Instead of population increase, there is a population decrease. Now, there is a demographic explosion in the lesser-developed parts of the world, mainly in the countries that were formerly colonies. They react to that development exactly the same way as the Europeans reacted previously. They attempt to move to the territories of the western civilization, where there is a demographic decrease. This too is a response to a historical imperative.
The reaction of both sides to a historical imperative is identical, but the results are not. The difference between the two is the large count of people who streamed from Europe to America and other places in the temperate zones. The number of Europeans who actually settled in the tropical areas was very small, and most of them were not settlers but soldiers and officials of the colonial administration who spent a limited period in the colonies. The present reverse colonization is certainly to the favor of the tropical world. In simple words, the number of Indians and Pakistanis who settled in Britain is many times more than the number of the English who settled in India and Pakistan.This too creates an imbalance that only the future will solve.
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