By the end of the 19th century, the European colonial order was made up of two, quite different, kinds of colonies. The greater portion of the European empires consisted of "true" colonies in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific in which small numbers of Europeans ruled large numbers of non-Western peoples. The true colonies represented a vast extension of the pattern of dominance the British, Dutch, and French had worked out earlier in India, Java, and African enclaves such as Senegal. Most of these had been brought, often quite suddenly, under European rule in the last decades of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th century. The following sections devoted to this form of colonization focus on the new forms of colonial rule and changing patterns of social interaction between colonizer and colonized that emerged in the decades of imperialist expansion before World War I.
Settlement colonies made up the second major type of European overseas possession, but within this type there were two different patterns of European settlement and indigenous response. The first pattern was exhibited by colonies such as Canada and Australia, which the British labeled the "White Dominions." The White Dominions accounted for a good portion of the land area but only a tiny minority of the population of Britain's global empire. The descendants of European settlers made up the overwhelming majority of the population in these colonies, in which small numbers of native inhabitants had been decimated by diseases and wars of conquest. These patterns of substantial European settlement and the precipitous decline of the indigenous population were also found in those portions of North America that came to form the United States. Though Canada and Australia remained within the British Empire, each moved steadily toward self-government and parliamentary rule in the late 19th century.
In some areas where large numbers of Europeans had migrated, a second major variation on the settlement type of colony developed. Both in regions that had been colonized as early as North America, such as South Africa, and in those the Europeans and Americans had begun to occupy only in the mid- or late 19th century, such as Algeria, Kenya, New Zealand, and Hawaii, the key demographic characteristics of both the settler and the "true" colonies were combined. Temperate climates and relatively mild disease environments in these areas made it possible for tens or hundreds of thousands of Europeans to settle on a permanent basis. Despite the Europeans' arrival, large indigenous populations survived and then began to increase rapidly. As a result, in these areas for which the label contested settler colonies seems most apt, Europeans and indigenous peoples increasingly clashed over land rights, resource control, social status, and cultural differences. From the 19th century onward, the history of contested settler societies has been dominated by the interaction between European settlers and indigenous peoples. The last sections of this chapter are devoted to case studies of three of the most important and representative examples of the contested settler variation on the settlement colony pattern: South Africa, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Because the pattern of colonization involved in the White Dominions has been considered in some depth in Chapter 23, developments in Canada and Australia are covered largely through comparisons to patterns in South Africa and other contested settlement areas.
Colonial Regimes And African And Asian Peoples
As the Europeans imposed their rule over tens of millions of additional Africans and Asians in the late 19th century, they drew heavily on precedents set in older colonies, particularly India, in establishing administrative, legal, and educational systems. As in India (or in Java and Senegal), the Europeans exploited long-standing ethnic and cultural divisions between the peoples of their new African or Asian colonies to put down resistance and maintain control. In West and East Africa in particular, they used the peoples who followed animistic religions (those that focused on the propitiation of nature or ancestral spirits) or those who had converted to Christianity against the Muslim communities that existed in most colonies. In official reports and censuses, colonial administrators rigidified and enhanced existing ethnic differences by dividing the peoples in each colony into "tribes." The label itself, with its connotations of primitiveness and backwardness, says a great deal about general European attitudes toward the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. In Southeast Asia, the colonizers sought to use hill dwelling "tribal" minorities against the majority populations that lived in the lowlands. In each colonial area, favored minorities, often Christians, were recruited into the civil service and police. Their collaboration not only resulted in a sense of loyalty to the colonizers, it antagonized less-favored ethnic and religious groups, thus bolstering the divide and rule strategy of the Europeans.
As had been the case in India, Java, and Senegal small numbers of Europeans, who lived mainly in the capital city and major provincial towns, oversaw the administration of the African and Asian colonies, which was actually carried out at the local level mainly by hundreds or thousands of African and Asian subordinates. Some of these - normally those in positions of the greatest authority - were Western educated, but the majority were recruited from indigenous elite groups, including village headmen, local notables, and regional lords. In Burma, Malaya, and East Africa, numerous Indian administrators and soldiers assisted the British in ruling new additions to their empire. The Europeans also recruited promising male youths in the newly colonized areas for Western schooling that would make them fit for jobs as government clerks or railway mechanics.
In contrast to Java and India, where schools were heavily state-supported, Western-language education in Africa was left largely to Protestant and Catholic missionaries. As a result of deep-seated racial prejudices held by virtually all the colonizers, higher education was not promoted in Africa, and in Africa college graduates were rare compared to India, the Dutch East Indies, or even smaller Asian colonies such as Burma and Vietnam. Of course, this policy stunted the growth of a middle class in black Africa, a consequence that European colonial officials increasingly intended. As nationalist agitation spread among the Western-educated classes in India and other Asian colonies, colonial policymakers warned against the dangers posed by college graduates. Those with advanced educations among the colonized, according to this argument, aspired to jobs that were beyond their capacity and were understandably disgruntled when they could not find employment.
Changing Social Relations Between Colonizer And Colonized
In both long-held and newly acquired colonies, the growing tensions between the colonizers and the rising African and Asian middle classes reflected a larger shift in European social interaction with the colonized peoples. This shift had actually begun long before the scramble for colonies in the late 19th century. Its causes are complex, but the growing size and changing makeup of European communities in the colonies were critical factors. As more and more Europeans went to the colonies, they tended to keep to themselves on social occasions rather than mixing with the "natives." New medicines and increasingly segregated living quarters made it possible to bring to the colonies the wives and families of government officials and European military officers (but not of the rank-and-file until well into the 20th century). Wives and families further closed the social circle of the colonized, and European women looked disapprovingly on liaisons between European men and Asian or African women. Brothels were put off-limits for upper-class officials and officers, and mixed marriages or living arrangements met with more and more vocal disapproval both within the constricted world of the colonial communities and back home in Europe. The growing numbers of missionaries and pastors for European congregations in the colonies obviously served to strengthen these taboos.
European women were once held to be the chief culprits in the growing social gap between colonizer and colonized, but male officials may well have been mainly responsible. They established laws restricting or prohibiting miscegenation and other sorts of interracial liaisons, and they pushed for housing arrangements and police practices designed specifically to keep social contacts between European women and the colonized at a minimum. These measures locked European women in the colonies into an almost exclusively European world. They still had lots of "native" servants and "native" nannies for their children, but they rarely came into contact with men or women of their own social standing from the colonized peoples. Occasions when they did were highly public and strictly formal.
The trend toward social exclusivism on the part of Europeans in the colonies and their open disdain for the culture of colonized peoples were reinforced by notions of white racial supremacy, which peaked in acceptance in the decades before the First World War. It was widely believed that the mental and moral superiority of whites over the rest of humankind, which was usually divided into racial types according to the crude criterion of skin color, had been demonstrated by scientific experiments. Because the inferior intelligence and weak sense of morality of non-Europeans were believed to be inherent and permanent, there seemed little motivation for Europeans to socialize with the colonized and lots of good reasons for fighting the earlier tendency to adopt elements of the culture and life-style of subject peoples. As photos from the late 19th century reveal, stiff collars and ties for men, and corsets and long skirts for women became obligatory for the respectable colonial functionaries and their wives. The colonizers' houses were filled with the overstuffed furniture and bric-a-brac that the late Victorians loved so dearly. European social life in the colonies revolved around the infamous clubs, where the only "natives" allowed were the servants. In the heat of the summer months, most of the administrators and virtually all of the colonizers' families retreated to the hill stations, where the cool air and the quaint architecture made it seem almost as if they were home again - or at least in a Swiss mountain resort.
Shifts In Methods Of Economic Extraction
The relationship between the colonizers and the mass of the colonized remained much as it had been before. District officers, with the help of many "native" subordinates, continued to do their paternal duty to settle disputes between peasant villagers, punish criminals, and collect taxes. European planters and merchants still relied on African or Asian overseers and brokers to manage laborers and purchase crops and handicraft manufactures. But late 19th century colonial bureaucrats and managers sought to instruct African and Asian peasants in "scientific" farming techniques and to compel the colonized peoples more generally to work harder and more efficiently. Here was an important extension of dependent status in the Western-dominated world economy, as pressure for new work habits supported the drive for cheap raw materials (exports) and drew in a growing segment of the colonial labor force.
A wide range of incentives was devised in response to the expansion of production for export and also the abolition of prior forms of slavery. Some of these incentives benefited the colonized peoples, such as the cheap consumer goods that could be purchased with cash earned producing marketable crops or laboring on European plantations. In many instances, however, colonized peoples were simply forced to produce crops or raw materials that the Europeans desired for little or no remuneration. Head and hut taxes were imposed that could only be paid in ivory, palm nuts, or wages earned working on European estates. Villagers were forced to grow market produce on lands they normally devoted to food crops. Under the worst of these forced-labor schemes, such as those inflicted on the peoples of the Belgian Congo in the final decades of the 19th century, villagers were flogged and killed if they failed to meet production quotas, and women and children were held hostage to ensure that their menfolk would deliver the products demanded on time. Whether out of self-interest or fear, the colonial overlords were determined to draw their subjects into fuller participation in the European- dominated global market economy.
As increasing numbers of the colonized peoples were drawn into the production of crops or minerals intended for export to Europe, colonized areas in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia were reduced to dependence on the industrializing European economies. Roads and railways were built primarily to facilitate the movement of farm produce and raw materials from the interior of colonized areas to port areas where they could be shipped to Europe. Benefiting from Europe's technological advances, mining sectors grew dramatically in most of the colonies. Vast areas that were previously uncultivated or (more commonly) had been planted in food crops were converted to the production of commodities - such as cocoa, palm oil, rubber, and hemp - in great demand in the markets of Europe and, increasingly, the United States.
The profits from the precious metals and minerals extracted from Africa's mines or the rubber grown in Malaya went mainly to European merchants and industrialists. The raw materials themselves were shipped to Europe to be processed and sold or used in the manufacture of industrial products. The finished products were intended mainly for European consumers, whether these be members of middle and working class families or government contractors. The African and Asian laborers who produced these products were generally poorly paid - if indeed they were paid at all. The laborers and colonial economies as a whole were steadily reduced to dependence on the European-dominated global market. Thus, economic dependence complemented the political subjugation and social subordination of colonized African and Asian peoples in a world order loaded in favor of the expansionist nations of western Europe.