Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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Chapter Eight

Europe’s World: Power, Empire,

and Colonialism

Woodruff D. Smith

Historians of European imperialism do not usually regard the years covered in the

ﬁrst chronological section of the present volume as a discrete period for study.

Typically, they subsume those years within a larger span stretching between the late

1870s and World War I. Nevertheless, changes did occur in the political engagement

of Europeans with the world overseas in the years immediately around the turn of

the century – nuances, alterations in public attitudes and ofﬁcial behavior, rather than

major reversals of direction – that make the decade and a half before the outbreak

of the Great War signiﬁcant in imperial history. This is especially true if one is con-

cerned with the links between pre-1914 imperialism and what happened in the rest

of the twentieth century. Unexpectedly difﬁcult and expensive resistance by targets

of great-power expansion, such as the Boer War of 1899–1902, the American war in

the Philippines during the same years, and the rebellions against German rule in what

are today Namibia and Tanzania between 1904 and 1907, brought home to the citi-

zens and leaders of imperializing countries the costs of what they were doing and

the need, if not to disencumber themselves of their empires, then at least to formulate

policies to make sure that they would not have to face such resistance again. After

about 1895 the leaders of European states that had carved up almost all of Africa

found themselves having to address seriously the problem of what to do with their

acquisitions, especially once they realized that most of the new colonial territories

could not be quickly turned into proﬁtable adjuncts to the home economies in the

ways that colonial propagandists had earlier claimed. One result of this was the for-

mulation of colonial economic expansion programs that were the direct forerunners

of the elaborate “Third World” development policies of the second half of the twen-

tieth century. Colonial reform movements, or at least reformist tendencies, appeared

that profoundly inﬂuenced the ways in which European powers envisioned and ruled

their overseas dependencies after 1918.

This essay focuses on recent research and issues of interpretation in the historiog-

raphy of European imperialism between the turn of the century and World War I,

with attention also to continuities between that period and succeeding ones. Much

of the most innovative research in the ﬁeld has concerned imperialism in the context

120 woodruff d. smith

of colonized societies. However, because of the scope of the present volume, the

emphasis here will fall on Europe, and on four major themes: relationships among

imperialism, modernization, and globalization; the politics of imperialism; colonial

reform; and the role of imperialism in constructing identities.

Modernization and Globalization

From the 1950s to the late 1970s the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries was interpreted by most historians within a framework in which

the process of modernization played the dominant role and in which industrialization

was the key element of modernization. A classic example of this approach is

Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s explanation of Germany’s sudden grasp for a colonial empire

as a policy of “social imperialism.”

According to Wehler, Chancellor Otto von

Bismarck seized colonies for Germany in the mid-1880s in order to exploit class

antagonisms created by industrialization and to build a solid basis of support for the

new Reich, which primarily represented traditional Prussian landed and bureaucratic

elites threatened by modernization. The middle classes were to be wooed away from

anti-colonial liberalism by the promise that an overseas empire would offer them a

ﬁeld of opportunity that would offset a movement toward organized corporate capi-

talism at home. The working class would be diverted from revolution and the Social

Democrats by the prospect of jobs protected against economic slumps by “reserve

markets” in the colonies. The strategy did not work, not because it was based on an

inaccurate assessment of the social effects of modernization but because Bismarck

and most of his successors were unwilling to pursue an imperial course vigorously

enough. Although they varied in speciﬁcs, most other prominent interpretations of

pre-1914 imperialism from the same period shared a strong tendency to employ the

standard narrative of modernization as a framing structure.

Modernization is still a signiﬁcant organizing concept for contemporary studies

of imperialism, although the notion of a uniform or standard modernization process,

a norm from which “developing” societies depart at their peril, has largely been dis-

carded. The fact that the continuing modernization of industrial economies was often

accompanied by various kinds of “demodernization” elsewhere in the world has been

taken to indicate that modernization is at least a more heterogeneous phenomenon

than we used to think. Nevertheless, the idea of turn-of-the-century Europe employ-

ing the political mechanisms of colonialism as a means of encouraging modernization

at home and overseas forms the background for a substantial amount of historical

research. Several developments since the early 1980s have, however, displaced the

modernization paradigm from center stage. Of these, the most important has been

the rapid rise of “globalization” and the “global economy” as interpretive structures

within which to situate the history of European imperialism.

It is possible to view globalization and modernization as entirely compatible pro-

cesses – the former being simply the expansion of the latter beyond the conﬁnes of

the European world. Most historians of globalization, however, see it as a long-term

historical phenomenon within which the central elements of modernization, includ-

ing European industrialization, are embedded. This is particularly noticeable in the

recent renaissance of British imperial history. Not long ago it was customary to

describe the “second” (post-American revolution) British empire as a product of the

europe’s world 121

imperatives of industrialization and the power that the industrial revolution gave to

its country of origin, and to explain the decline of British imperial hegemony in the

twentieth century as a result of Britain’s loss of industrial supremacy.

Recent histo-

rians have tended instead to emphasize Britain’s ﬁnancial and commercial primacy as

the core of Britain’s world power and to ascribe that primacy in large part to the

political and military success of the British Empire. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins

have argued in great detail that British imperialism in the nineteenth and early twen-

tieth centuries was a product of “gentlemanly capitalism” – an amalgam of the

ﬁnancial elite of London and the aristocracy broadly deﬁned, manifested in a distinc-

tive political and economic culture and a set of interests that heavily inﬂuenced British

policy abroad. The success of gentlemanly capitalism was made possible by, among

other things, the success of the British state and its military forces in shouldering

Britain into a dominant role in the operation of the global economy in the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. The achievements of British industry are not disparaged,

but Cain and Hopkins and a growing group of historians who think along similar

lines see the manufacturing sector as having less inﬂuence on policy and far less effect

on the long-term operations of the global economy than the banking and commercial

sectors, in close alliance with the state and the political elites to which the state – even

after the electoral reforms of the nineteenth century – primarily responded.

This

approach probably exaggerates the autonomous power of elites and underestimates

the importance of the public context of politics and the extent to which policy makers

in Britain and elsewhere adjusted their external actions to that context. Nevertheless,

by emphasizing the importance of the ﬁnancial sector for deﬁning British imperialism

it has performed the major service of placing imperialism in the framework of a global

economy in which international ﬁnance was the central feature.

Differences have emerged among historians who think along these lines. Niall

Ferguson sees the British Empire as the political and military underpinning of

nineteenth-century British ﬁnancial hegemony, which permitted the global economy

to develop for the beneﬁt (to greater or lesser degrees) of most countries in Europe

and much of the rest of the world. To Ferguson, the sudden appearance of signiﬁcant

imperial rivals to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, together with a general

movement toward protectionism and other forms of government involvement in

the economies of the major states, led to a partial breakdown of the global economy

as a functioning unit before and during World War I – a breakdown that, despite

attempts at reconstruction in the 1920s, became more complete with the Depression

of the 1930s. Only after 1945, under an American hegemony that was similar to the

earlier imperialism of Britain, could the process of economic globalization be truly

resumed.

This suggests that a successful global economy requires some form of

imperial hegemony by a single state that accepts its role and performs it conscien-

tiously. Others, such as Jürgen Osterhammel, see the explosion of imperial rivalries

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not as a breakdown of globaliza-

tion, but rather as a sign of its growing complexity, of a necessary movement toward

a polycentric global economy and an attempt by governments to develop an appro-

priate role for their nations in such an economy.

Unfortunately, neither the interna-

tional political system based on nation-states nor the existing body of political

and economic theory was able to accommodate such a state of affairs prior to, and

for many years after, World War I. Nevertheless, it may be possible to construct a

122 woodruff d. smith

successful global economy on a foundation of cooperation among states and recogni-

tion of the transnational character of global enterprise rather than the imperial hege-

mony of one power suggested by Ferguson.

The ﬁrst couple of decades of the twentieth century saw serious attempts to articu-

late economic development programs for most of the European colonial empires.

These programs arose in large part from a political need to justify previous –

or sometimes ongoing – colonial conquests that were not readily defensible on the

basis of current economic realities, but they were framed in terms of broad visions

of the economic changes that had occurred during the nineteenth century and that

could be anticipated in the twentieth. The most important models for the details of

such programs were British India and the Netherlands East Indies, but what is most

interesting about them is the general conceptions that lay behind them – conceptions

that constituted important sources for later constructions of the idea of moderniza-

tion itself.

The schemes articulated by British ofﬁcials for Nigeria and the Gold Coast, by

French ofﬁcials for the interior of West Africa, by German theorists for colonies such

as Togo and German East Africa, focused on shaping the economies of those regions

as coherent adjuncts to a metropolitan economy that was envisioned as comprising

mainly a modern manufacturing and a consumption sector.

Colonial subjects were

to ﬁgure in development schemes mainly as producers of raw materials used by home

industry, which would create consumer goods to be sold in Europe and overseas –

including the colonies that supplied the raw materials. The basis of economic security

for employers and workers in European countries and for the material advancement

of colonial subjects was presented in terms of grand modernization projects inte-

grated, under state direction, with the industrial enterprises of the metropolitan

economies.

In the early years of the twentieth century, raw cotton was a major focus of most

development plans in African colonies. This circumstance reﬂected an already out-

dated belief that the textile industry was the foundation of an industrial economy

and that the European textile industries were particularly vulnerable to interference

with the supplies or prices of their principal raw materials. The British pushed a major

cotton scheme in Nigeria, which was followed after World War I by an even larger

project in the Sudan. The French had their own cotton project in the Niger basin,

while the Germans attempted brieﬂy to create large-scale cotton production in Togo

and East Africa. In one way or another, all the cotton schemes failed, in large part

because of inconsistencies between the assumptions of the planners and the realities

of the global cotton market. Interestingly, what succeeded in many colonies were

primary agricultural industries that came about, not as a result of the grand economic

strategies of the leaders of empire, but because of small investments by non-European

farmers taking advantage of opportunities provided by access to global markets. This

was what happened in the cases of the cocoa and coffee industries of Nigeria and the

Gold Coast (Ghana). After initially ignoring these sectors of the economy, the colo-

nial authorities moved in the 1920s to control and tax them, in part so as to pay for

larger schemes of planned “modernization” that had failed or were in the process of

doing so.

Interpreting early twentieth-century imperialism in terms of modernization is

therefore a complicated business, in part because one is actually dealing with the

europe’s world 123

history of the interpretive concept itself. That the formulators of the colonial devel-

opment schemes were conscious modernizers, that they saw the economic core of

the process they were encouraging as the construction of coherent systems of

economic exchange around industrial production at home, and that they expected

and planned for a wide range of apparently desirable sociocultural changes in the

colonies as a result of economic change, all this is very clear. Modernization as an

explanatory framework thus provides a useful guide to the intentions of the policy

makers, and in terms of those intentions, the ultimate results of the policies can be

seen as “failed” (or occasionally successful) modernization in the latter part of the

twentieth century. On the other hand, it is also possible to place the early develop-

ment schemes and their successors in other interpretive contexts, especially that of

globalization. It can be argued, for example, that the most important consequence

of British imperial development activities in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century was

the creation of the “sterling area” – a secondary aspect of policy, but one that pro-

vided a considerable degree of ﬁnancial stability for colonial economies and a relative

lowering of the transaction costs associated with investment and trade within the

British Empire and Commonwealth.

The sterling area had obvious defects. Its

boundaries were deﬁned not by the dynamics of a changing global economy but by

the political structure of Britain’s empire. It could not be maintained by a British

economy weakened during World War II. But until a broader dollar-based system

was erected in the late 1940s, it permitted a substantial expansion of commerce

among Britain, its colonies, and self-governing dominions and an increasing level of

articulation between colonial economies and a signiﬁcant part of the global economy.

Looking back from the twenty-ﬁrst century, these developments often seem more

important than well-publicized programs of large-scale development and socioeco-

nomic modernization.

The period just preceding World War I also saw the beginning of what was perhaps

the most spectacular connection between imperialism and globalization: the discovery

of oil in southern Persia (present-day Iran) by a British company in 1908, followed

by similar ﬁnds elsewhere in the Middle East during the next few years. This brought

signiﬁcant new strategic considerations to bear on the political futures of Persia and

the Ottoman Empire. It also created an international politics of oil, as extremely

powerful ﬁnancial consortia, formed to exploit the petroleum resources of the region,

placed great pressure on the governments of the major powers to establish imperial

control. The fact that the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers during World

War I and was therefore available for deconstruction at its end led to a massive grab

for colonies (some of them disguised as protectorates and others as League of Nations

mandates) by Britain and France and to a chaos of imperialist initiative, nationalist

response, and eventual Cold War competition in a vital node of the global economy,

with consequences that continue into the present.

Imperialism and Politics

In recent years there has been a growing tendency for historians to portray modern

imperialism as primarily a political phenomenon rather than an economic or social

one. This tendency is by no means universal, but it is quite widespread. It goes against

basic assumptions about the engines of change in modern history that are built into

124 woodruff d. smith

standard Marxist and modernization-based approaches. So strong were those assump-

tions as late as the early 1980s that Paul Kennedy, in his excellent study of the origins

of the antagonism between Britain and Germany before World War I, after having

made what many readers believed to be a good case for understanding that antago-

nism in largely political and ideological terms, concluded by ascribing it on much

weaker grounds to economic competition.

Since then, historians have been more

willing to challenge both the notion that the orgy of competitive imperial expansion

in which the European powers indulged at the turn of the century was a direct

product of economic change and the idea that it was caused mainly by class conﬂict

at home (the concept of “social imperialism” mentioned above.)

“Political” can mean many things, of course. It can include the kind of struc-

tural–diplomatic interpretation that ascribes pre-1914 imperialism to the collapse of

the system created at the Congress of Vienna and to the decline of British global

hegemony in the late nineteenth century – both in large part due to the sudden

rise of the uniﬁed German Reich as a great power.

In recent years, historians of

imperialism who emphasize diplomacy have tended to focus less on such structural

factors and more on the mindsets of those who discussed and made policy in the

major imperialist states. In some cases, this takes the form of analyzing the ways

politicians and bureaucrats understood (and misunderstood) what they were doing.

In others, the focus of attention is broader, encompassing the array of conceptions

present in the public discourse in the major European countries regarding trends in

the wider world.

A particularly useful way to look at the aggressive imperialism of the turn of the

century from a political angle is to connect it to the changes in the political structure,

behavior, and culture of European states that are collectively called “democratization”

– changes that occurred even in places like imperial Germany that were not, in an

institutional sense, democracies. The term refers not just to a broadening of the

franchise but also to a vast expansion of participation in the public sphere, a prolifera-

tion of interest groups vying to inﬂuence public opinion, the appearance of mass

political parties, and a host of other alterations in the political scene. The relationship

between democratization and imperialism was actually a subject of considerable dis-

cussion at the time among politicians and commentators. It was never wholly ignored

by historians after 1918. Only fairly recently, however, has it become a central focus

of attention among scholars interested in the ways participants in modern political

systems seek to establish broad bases of support by creating ideological, discursive,

and iconic linkages between their particular agendas and broad social and cultural

patterns. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperialism served as

a device with which politicians, state ofﬁcials, leaders of interest groups, journalists –

indeed, people of all sorts who took an active part in politics – attempted to operate

within democratizing political systems that seemed newly complex and bewildering.

Very often, the economic reasoning that plays so large a role in standard interpreta-

tions of imperialism reﬂected not so much the realities faced by businesses functioning

in global markets, or even policy problems handled by governments, as it did the

expectations of the various audiences that made up the public spheres of the imperial-

ist countries. This helps to explain why so many of the new colonies acquired by

European states around the turn of the century had so little economic relevance to

their occupiers and why the occupiers turned to development schemes that were

europe’s world 125

intended to create such relevance within the cognitive frameworks that prevailed in

imperialist thinking.

It was primarily the success with which nationalism had been used during the

course of the nineteenth century as a means of aggregating support – by governments

and their opponents, by liberals and eventually radicals and conservatives, by political

parties and leaders trying to free themselves from control by parties, and ultimately

by the founders of new nation-states such as Germany – that suggested that a nation-

alism expanded on a global scale could be used for the same purpose under the

increasingly complicated circumstances of politics at the century’s end. Imperialism

appeared to have even more potential than “standard” nationalism for appealing

across lines of class, organized economic interest, region, and ideology. It displaced

the arena of proposed political action to the world overseas – to a world, in other

words, that was more easily ﬁctionalized than the domestic scene. There were plenty

of occasions for invoking imperialist thinking. Events arising from the commercial

activities of Europeans overseas and from their demands for intervention by govern-

ments on their behalf could be interpreted as having vital signiﬁcance for the nation

as a whole. Politicians could attract public attention by connecting such events to an

ideology that portrayed the nation’s future as bound up with its success in staking

its claim to a share of global resources. Business enterprises with overseas interests

were often willing to employ such ideologies to obtain enhanced state support for

their enterprises. On the basis of perceptions of such possibilities, a new politics of

imperialism was constructed.

Attempts by political organizations – often including governments in ofﬁce – to

use overseas expansion (or vigorous defense of overseas possessions already acquired)

as a means of appealing for public support occurred between the 1880s and 1914 in

Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Russia, as well as Japan and the

United States. In Germany, Bismarck’s effort in the 1880s to parlay limited colonial

occupation into political support was followed after 1890 by a succession of similar

moves by Emperor Wilhelm II and several of the chancellors who served under him.

In Germany there also developed a nationalist opposition movement, centered on

organizations such as the Pan-German League, which criticized the government for

not being imperialist enough. In Italy, the acquisition of an overseas empire was

represented by politicians in several parties as a matter of vital importance to the

country’s economic future as well as an essential sign of great power status. The ill-

fated attempt of the Crispi government in 1895–6 to occupy Ethiopia resulted mainly

from domestic political aims, while the more successful effort of a liberal government

in 1911–12 to seize Libya from Turkey was largely a response to pressure from a

newly active nationalist right. In Britain, imperialist wings of both the Liberal and

the Conservative-Unionist parties competed with each other for the support of a

public that was thought to respond to the need to defend Britain’s empire and

(weakening) global hegemony as a chief national priority. Colonialism as a factor in

French politics went through cycles. In the 1880s, expansion in southeast Asia and

in Africa was a major part of the foreign policy and the popular appeal of a number

of governments, especially those in which Jules Ferry was a leading ﬁgure. Contrary

to expectations, however, it proved incapable of serving as a consistent rallying point

for any party or coalition. Well-publicized instances of international conﬂict

over colonies, such as the Fashoda incident of 1898 which pitted a French attempt

126 woodruff d. smith

to establish an empire that stretched across northern Africa from west to east

against a British effort to do the same thing from north to south, could generate

widespread interest, but the interest did not translate into stable popular support for

parties supporting colonialism. The same thing was true of the furor that surrounded

the Moroccan crises of 1905–6 and 1911. In Russia, the government made a con-

certed effort in the 1890s and up to 1905 to use colonial thrusts into Manchuria

and Korea as (among other things) ways of building public support, primarily among

the expanding middle classes. As was so often the case with imperialist politics, the

project backﬁred when Russia’s aims were decisively thwarted by Japan in the Russo-

Japanese War of 1904–5. Variations on these themes occurred in the other countries

noted above.

The politics of imperialism was seldom successful for very long. In a few cases,

such as that of Italy, whose attempts to colonize Ethiopia met with disastrous defeat

on the battleﬁeld of Adowa in 1896, imperialism backﬁred and drove the government

that employed it out of ofﬁce. In other cases, such as Britain at the turn of the century,

setbacks such as the Boer War lowered the effectiveness of imperialism as a political

tool. In Germany, the growth of the nationalist-imperialist opposition put the gov-

ernment into an increasingly difﬁcult position, in which its leaders believed that they

could not safely deemphasize imperialism because of public opinion, but at the same

time also could not meet the demands of the radical nationalists without taking

unconscionable risks in foreign affairs. This was one of the factors leading Germany

to become increasingly intransigent in its foreign policy between 1900 and 1914 and

encouraging a belief among senior state ofﬁcials that major war was inevitable. It also

led, in Germany as in most other countries possessing newly acquired colonies, to

the demands for systematic colonial economic development that were discussed previ-

ously. Because much of the territory colonized by European states in the late nine-

teenth and early twentieth centuries did not immediately yield a signiﬁcant economic

return, it became necessary to create the prospect of such a return in order to validate

the process by which colonies had been acquired in the ﬁrst place. Ideally, validation

should have taken the form of substantially enhanced ﬁgures for colonial trade and

production, but most proponents of development realized that these would take

some time to manifest themselves. Instead, the development schemes were con-

structed so as to validate themselves in terms of the logic of imperialist ideology – that

is, to offer the possibility of contributing to a secure economic future for the home

economy in an increasingly industrialized world.

Colonial Reform

Imperial politics helped to instigate a phenomenon found in almost all countries with

colonial empires during the two decades or so before World War I: movements

toward colonial reform. Germany provides many examples. Some of the impetus to

making reform of colonial administrations and their policies a matter of public dis-

course arose from the same sources as schemes for colonial economic development.

This was true, for example, of the reforms associated with the tenure in ofﬁce of

Bernhard Dernburg as head of the German colonial administration (1906–10), which

were largely directed toward revising labor policies and regulating resource develop-

ment in such a way that the colonies would become signiﬁcant participants in the

europe’s world 127

expansion of the domestic economy. Many reformers had other political agendas,

although usually they were to some degree compatible with plans for economic

modernization. Socialist and left-liberal politicians in the Reichstag regularly directed

attention to abuses of indigenous colonial subjects by ofﬁcials as a way of criticizing

authoritarianism in Germany itself, calling for closer oversight of the bureaucracy and

an extension of the public sphere as correctives. Still others focused on “native poli-

cies,” typically with the intention of trying to prevent the proletarianization of colo-

nial inhabitants as a means of emphasizing the need to limit the social consequences

of advanced capitalism both abroad and at home. Some colonial reformers, particu-

larly women’s groups trying to establish a respectable place for themselves in the

national political establishment, also called for racial segregation and the prohibition

of miscegenation in the colonies.

In Great Britain, reformist colonial thinking between the turn of the century and

World War I tended to be directed toward India and, as in other countries, reﬂected

ideological divisions within the home country. Much attention has been paid by

historians to the formation of a fashion for “reform imperialism” that was closely

connected to a cult of “national efﬁciency” among intellectuals and members of the

leadership of all major political tendencies. A common factor that cut across party

and ideological lines, from members of the Tory Party on the right to many of the

Fabians on the left, was a desire to increase the role of intellectual elites in governing

both Britain and its empire. However, when it came to the actual formulation of

policy, fault lines appeared. The comprehensive attempt of Lord Curzon as Viceroy

of India (1899–1905) to reorganize the Indian government as an administrative

entity without including increasing native Indian representation reﬂected the views

of conservative imperialists. The Morley-Minto reforms that followed pursued a more

liberal line of imperial cooperation, with gradual movement toward increasing the

native Indian contingent in the Indian Civil Service and toward representative institu-

tions.

Reform could mean quite different things to different people, which was true

also of the movements for reform that were a characteristic feature of domestic poli-

tics in practically all western European countries (and the United States) in the early

twentieth century.

The most heavily publicized movements toward colonial reform in the period

before World War I were those that arose from colonial scandals, and of these,

none had greater resonance than the uncovering of the horrors of labor exploitation

in the Congo Free State in 1903. The Free State, under the personal sovereignty of

King Leopold II of Belgium, had been assigned control of most of the Congo

basin and its tributaries in order to achieve humanitarian purposes such as eliminating

the slave trade, and also to foster the economic exploitation of the region without

bringing the great powers into conﬂict with one another. In fact, the Free State

had established a much more closed economy than allowed by the original

agreements under which it had been created. Its downfall, however, came about

because the system of forced labor it employed to expand its rubber industry in the

upper Congo constituted a practical return to a very brutal form of slavery. A number

of observers, mostly British, reported what was going on, and an international outcry

resulted. Leopold attempted to counter with a series of inquiries and reforms,

but this proved to be insufﬁcient to satisfy a Congo reform movement that

was mostly located outside of Belgium. In the end, the Belgian state was forced