After Tamerlane (48 page)

Both these latter points need examining further. Why was it so cheap to occupy the African interior? Why did African rulers not sell their independence more dearly? It is reckless to generalize, and we still knowlittle about most of pre-colonial Africa. But historians broadly agree about one vital fact. Almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa people were in short supply, leaving vast tracts of land uninhabited or unused. This may have been due to an unusually harsh environment, the impact of the slave trades and the effects of disease. The result was critical. Building states in pre-colonial Africa was exceptionally arduous. Imposing taxes or duties on reluctant subjects was hard enough anywhere. But, where rebelling meant no more than walking away to found a splinter community, the odds were heavily stacked on the negative side. Except in certain favoured locations (as in parts of West Africa), where rulers could tighten their grip over
trade, states in Africa remained small and weak by Eurasian standards. They were poorly placed to exploit the growth of international commerce. Hardly any had the means to buy modern weapons or raise a strong enough force to repel a determined European attack. Worst of all, perhaps, the typical lack of broader political or cultural unity exposed African rulers to an insidious weakness. In almost every struggle, it was all too easy for the European invaders to find local allies. In what became French West Africa, the
officiers soudanais
carved out their warrior state with an army of black soldiers who were paid in slaves. That was why it cost so little. In British East Africa it was Maasai fighters who helped coerce Kikuyu and Embu in return for a share of the captured cattle.
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For African rulers, the most hopeful prospect was to keep some local autonomy. Their chances of this were greatly improved if they could keep the loyalty of their subjects and followers and strike a reasonable bargain with their newEuropean ‘sovereigns'. In the north and west of Nigeria, and in Buganda (part of modern Uganda), pre-colonial rulers did this with conspicuous success.

But why were the European powers so unwilling to fight each other for their African empires? The partition of Africa was (for the Europeans at least) a peaceful partition. There was bad-tempered diplomacy, furious argument in the press, and much jostling and fist-shaking by the men-on-the-spot. But the Europeans did not fight each other. Governments at home played a double game. They were nervous of offending the powerful colonialist lobbies or of being accused of weakness in the face of rival claims. There were always politicians who hoped to advance their careers by waving the imperial flag. There were some who believed that decline was certain without an adequate share of the coming global partition. But, for all the European governments, a far higher priority than any colonial adventure was the continental balance of power. Their view of Europe was profoundly conservative. They refused to believe that, if it came to a crisis, any African empire would be worth the risk of a European explosion, from which none of them thought they were likely to gain. They were willing to contemplate a colonial sphere in Africa, but on the strict understanding that it posed no threat to their safety in Europe. They were also determined that so far as possible the
territorial squabbles of the men-on-the-spot should be settled peacefully in Europe and not by force on the ground. They succeeded because of the diplomats' consensus that, apart from Suez and the Cape (where only the British were prepared to fight), the African stakes were invariably low. It was chiefly a matter of squaring the lobbies. So, while the Europeans had fought wars to divide the Americas, and periodically threatened to do so over the Middle East, they shared out Africa with surprising bonhomie. This had two crucial results. It reduced the scope for African leaders to exploit European differences and so prolong their freedom. And it meant that, once they were demarcated, colonial borders could be left undefended (until the First World War) against any European foe.

The scramble for Africa was the most obvious case of Europe's growing appetite for global supremacy, and the irresistible strength it could bring to the task. But it was also a paradox. Firstly, European governments showed little enthusiasm for extending their control over the African interior. They responded grudgingly to the clamour of lobbies. Secondly, once their sphere was marked out, they were content with little more than a nominal control over the peoples and places on their treaty maps. They sawno immediate need to win African loyalty or build a colonial patriotism. The colonial state remained a shallowstate: lightly governed by a handful of foreigners; heavily reliant upon local ‘collaborators', whose abuses of power, if discovered at all, could rarely be checked. Thirdly, the ‘civilizing mission' (the ideological banner waved over the scramble) had a strange double life. Its spirit (in Europe) may have been strong; its flesh in Africa was invariably weak. It was this careless indifference to the obligations of rule that explains in part why the African experience of global colonialism was exceptionally brutal. The case of the Congo may have been an extreme one, but there is plenty of evidence that Europeans were willing to use physical violence as a matter of course, and to treat African property as a contradiction in terms. Racial and cultural contempt was one of the causes. But so was the willingness of European governments to leave their African subjects to the mercy of commercial or settler interests, the offspring of the lobbies who had engineered the partition. In a hard environment, where people were scarce, no enterprise could survive without capturing
and keeping the Africans' labour, by fair means or foul. There was thus a terrible symmetry in the reasons that had made Africa so vulnerable first to conquest and then to some of the harshest regimes that Europeans devised anywhere in the world.

There was one part of Africa in the age of partition where the rules were broken. In the South African War of 1899–1902, white men fought white men. Tens of thousands of whites, including women and children, died from violence or disease or the effects of imprisonment. White men destroyed other white men's property, burning their farms or stealing their animals. Black people too were caught up in this white man's war, and suffered in similar ways.
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What had brought it about?

Southern Africa was (as it long remained) a strange mutation in sub-Saharan Africa's history. It was the one place where Europeans had established a permanent settlement long before the late nineteenth century. Since around 1700, Dutch-speaking farmers (Boers) had moved up from the Cape, slowly imposing their power on the African peoples they met. In the late 1830s they surged forward in a series of ‘treks' to occupy the northern half of modern South Africa, the plains of the ‘highveld'. After 1870 this localized brand of European colonialism was suddenly energized by new mineral wealth – first diamonds, then gold. To the British government, overlords of the Cape since 1815, it was the perfect chance to steer a backward region away from its cycle of costly frontier wars. They wanted South Africa to be like Canada: a federal dominion, economically progressive, ‘British' in outlook, and loyal to the empire. British trade would flourish, and the Cape would be safe for Britain's Indian traffic. This was also the goal towards which Rhodes was manoeuvring, and the main reason why London was willing to back his claim to modern Zimbabwe and Zambia. ‘He has laid the foundations of a splendid empire,' said an admiring Lord Salisbury.
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But the breakaway Boers of the northern interior had other ideas. Since the 1850s, they had enjoyed almost complete independence. In the early 1880s the Transvaalers had defeated a clumsy British attempt to turn their ramshackle ‘republic' into a colony proper. By the 1890s, with its soaring revenue from the goldfields of the Rand, the once-bankrupt Transvaal was becoming
the dominant state in the whole of South Africa. Its doughty president, the old frontier fighter Paul Kruger, thwarted Rhodes's grand design and smashed his attempt at a
coup
d'état – the infamous Jameson Raid (1895). He showed considerable skill in dividing the immigrant (largely British) community that had flocked on to the Rand and in stalling London's demands that they be given full political rights. But when (in September 1899) he seemed to press openly for full independence (i.e. the right to have direct relations with foreign powers) he touched a rawnerve. Britain sawa threat to unravel its regional primacy, with disastrous consequences for its diplomatic prestige and strategic security. War followed within weeks. When it ground to a halt nearly three years later, the Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had been forced to acknowledge that they were British subjects. But whites still ruled blacks across the whole of South Africa.

The partition of Africa was the most dramatic evidence that the world beyond Europe and the United States faced a colonial (or semi-colonial) future: occupation and rule or forms of economic dependence. There were other partitions in South East Asia and the South Pacific, extending French, British, Dutch, German and (after 1898) American rule across Eurasia's maritime rim. After 1900, the larger part of the globe had become politically and legally an extension of Europe. It seemed reasonable to expect that the rest of the world – especially continental East Asia and the Middle East – would follow sooner or later. Indeed, there were many warning signs that such a division was imminent – if only the great powers could agree on their shares.

But partition was not the only change in the political face of the late-century world. The generation after 1880 also sawthe consolidation of four or five ‘world states' that were expected to share global mastery between them. Two were newcomers to the imperial stage. The most remarkable was the United States (the other was Germany). Its symbiotic relations with the Old European world were growing
closer and closer. An ever-increasing flowof European migrants poured across the Atlantic. Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews and many other nationalities built a transatlantic connection with almost every part of Europe, redoubling and diversifying the European influence in American society and culture. By 1900 the United States had the largest population of European origin (82 million out of a total, including African Americans, of 92 million) of any country except Russia. It had also become the largest industrial economy in the world, producing by 1910 more pig iron and steel than Britain, France and Germany combined. Thomas Jefferson's republic of independent yeoman farmers had become the scene of huge industrial plants: digging iron and coal; making textiles and steel; building locomotives, ships and even cars; processing food and drink. It had a large working class, some of it housed in slum conditions that bore close resemblance to Europe's, as the social investigator Jacob Riis revealed to a scandalized public.
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Although living standards were higher, class relations less rigid, and mobility far greater than was usual in Europe, by the end of the century an upper social class had become clearly visible. It attended elite schools, aped the upper-class life style seen across the Atlantic, and bemoaned the populism and crudity of American politics. It also displayed an intriguing tendency to marry across the ‘pond', creating family alliances with the British aristocracy, one of which was to produce the infant Winston Churchill.

America was still set apart by its democratic populism and by its open avowal of race segregation. But in other respects it now seemed to resemble more and more closely a ‘normal' European state. By 1890 it was ceasing to be a frontier society with vast tracts of unclaimed or unoccupied land. A newsense of the limits on America's natural resources encouraged a more protective approach to a much-abused environment. The other side of the coin was the stronger sense of an imperial destiny. It was a source of irritation that the valuable lands on America's Caribbean doorstep should suffer the careless management of their Hispanic guardians, European Spanish in Cuba, or local Creoles elsewhere in Central America. On the Pacific coast (where there was an old connection with China and Japan) there were others who saw California as America's base in the struggle for East Asia, and San Francisco Bay as the springboard of empire.
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The alacrity
with which the United States used a supposed grievance against Spain to dispossess it of Cuba and the Philippine Islands in the ‘splendid little war' of 1898 showed that this widening conception of American national interests had become politically viable. Under Theodore Roosevelt's presidency (1901–9) it was carried further. America's pre-eminence in the Caribbean Sea was bluntly announced in the ‘Roosevelt Corollary'. This declared that, in the event of misdemeanour or default by the independent states in and around the Caribbean, the United States would act for the aggrieved foreign power, whose direct interference would be very unwelcome. And, at Roosevelt's urging, America was at last to act like a major naval power (the great prophet of sea power, Alfred T. Mahan, was an American admiral). In 1907 the United States Navy's ‘Great White Fleet' (a reference to its paintwork) made a much publicized cruise all round the Pacific.
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In these various ways, America was asserting its status as a major world power, on terms of equality with the largest European states. As a colonial power (after 1898) with extraterritorial privileges in China, its interests and outlook seemed remarkably similar to Europe's. America, declared the influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was ‘an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates… a new world power'.
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The Mexican revolution that broke out in 1910 pushed Washington further towards an imperial mentality. To force the removal of the dictator General Huerta, Mexico's chief port was occupied for eight months in 1914.
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But the similarities and parallels should not be exaggerated. American attitudes towards Europe's global colonialism remained semi-detached. America had played no part in the partition of Africa, although an American representative had attended the Berlin African conference. Before the 1890s it had no possessions in Asia. The imperial role assumed in 1898 provoked a political controversy that was far more bitter than the colonial debates that sometimes erupted in Europe. Roosevelt's naval programme was stinted and stymied by the sceptics in Congress.
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Roosevelt himself envisaged his newmodel navy as the junior partner in an informal alliance of ‘Anglo-Saxon' sea powers. Britain's naval supremacy, he remarked, ‘was the great guaranty of the peace of the world'.
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On the economic front, there were still significant differences. There was almost no American capital invested abroad,
with most of what there was across the border in Mexico. American industry catered mainly for the huge home demand and a vast farmer economy. Only 5 per cent of American output was actually sent abroad (the British figure was 25 per cent). The economic colonies of American business lay in the west and south of the United States, not overseas. There was no consensus for adopting the aggressive style or military preparedness of the other world states. But what turned out to be critical in shaping American views was the astonishing growth of the US industrial economy, setting off fears of exclusion from other world markets. With so small a share of imperial real estate, little prospect of increasing it, and (by 1913) much the largest manufacturing capacity in the world, it was hardly surprising that American leaders should come to regard any global partition as more and more harmful to American interests.