The Transformation of the World (179 page)

The typical British missionary in the late nineteenth century had much to offer: bibles and primers, soap and monogamy. A second aspect of the program for the education of humanity was the growing confidence among missionaries, at least by midcentury, that their work among particular peoples was assisting the breakthrough of civilization as such. Despite its rival claims to universalism, the French
mission civilisatrice
had a stronger patriotic foundation. The universal character of British civilization mirrored the global reach of its empire, but it also reflected a greater identification with two normative practices whose operational radius was theoretically unlimited: international law and the free market.

Law and the Standard of Civilization

Toward the middle of the century, the old
ius gentium
was refashioned into a legally binding “standard of civilization.” Law became the most important medium of cross-cultural civilizing processes, more effective than religion because its importers could adapt it to local needs even when indigenous values and norms proved immune from foreign faiths. Japan—where Christian missionaries of every denomination never really gained a foothold, even after they were allowed back in 1873—adopted major elements of European legal systems. The resistance to Christian proselytism was at least as strong in the Islamic world, with its dense interweaving of faith and law, but central pillars of European law
were introduced into noncolonial countries here too, such as the Ottoman Empire and Egypt (even before the British occupation of 1882). The prestige and effectiveness of the law have to do with its twofold nature: both a political instrument in the hands of legislative authorities and a product of autonomous or—as German Romantic theorists would have it—“anonymous” developments in the moral concepts of society. This duality of construction and evolution was apparent also in colonial contexts, where the body of law, together with its enforcement by judges and policemen, was often a sharp weapon of cultural aggression. Bans on the use of indigenous languages, for example, were among the most hated measures in the whole history of colonialism, “own goals” that never had the intended “civilizing” effect. But one of the strengths of the British Empire, in comparison with others, was the versatility of the English legal tradition, whose pragmatic application in many colonies left some latitude for compromise and coexistence with local forms. An awareness of law, unmatched elsewhere in Europe, meant that the accountability of officeholders not only to their superiors but to a morally and legally vigilant public was seen as a central pillar of civilized existence. An internationally applicable standard of civilization was therefore the counterpart of the rule of law in the internal governance of society.
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For the Victorian mind, the standard of civilization had its source less in the constructed aspect than in the evolutionary aspect of the law.
¹³
An ethnocentric precursor of today's human rights, it had come to be understood as a universally valid bedrock of norms defining what it meant to belong to the “civilized world.” Such norms existed in several areas of the law—from the prohibition of cruel forms of corporal punishment through the inviolability of property and civil contracts to the exchange of ambassadors and (at least symbolic) equality in dealings between states. The evolutionary side consisted in the idea that the standard of civilization was the outcome of a long civilizing process in Europe, and its so-called leading nations—often denoting only Britain and France until 1870—were called upon to guard this state of legal perfection.
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Europe based its claim to moral authority on the success it had had in educating itself. Had it not, in the eighteenth century, left behind the open brutality of the wars of religion, stripped criminal law of its archaic features at least with regard to white people, and developed practical rules for social interaction among its citizens?

Up to the 1870s, European legal theorists used the standard of civilization to criticize barbaric practices elsewhere in the world, but there was not yet any thought of large-scale intervention to enforce it directly. Even the opening up of China, Japan, Siam, and Korea, through war or gunboat diplomacy, was seen less in terms of a general civilizing mission than as a necessary measure to facilitate intergovernmental relations. The treaty-port system established in 1842, for example, was not so much a Western triumph as a compromise. China was forced to grant special extraterritorial rights for foreigners, but no pressure was put on it to change its
whole
legal system; the Westernization of Chinese law would be a long-drawn-out process that began only after 1900 and is still not completed
today. In the nineteenth century, the next step by the West that followed any “opening up” was to demand reforms in a few particular areas of the law: property and inheritance, but also matrimonial affairs, were brought more into line with “civilized” customs in countries such as Brazil and Morocco.

The Market and Violence

The second major vehicle of the Victorian civilizing mission was the market. In the liberal utopia of passions tamed by interests, markets made nations peaceful, warrior classes superfluous, and individuals industrious and ambitious. But in the nineteenth century a new idea emerged: namely, that the market was a natural mechanism for the generation of wealth and the distribution of life chances. All that was needed for the maximum development of human capacities in any culture was to clear away obstructive traditions and to give up interference in self-regulating systems. Classical liberalism assumed that anyone would respond enthusiastically to market incentives; steam transportation and telegraphic communication would weave markets into ever wider spheres of activity, and the Victorian trade revolution would make itself felt on a planetary scale. Not all economists in the mid-nineteenth century shared this naive optimism. Sharp-eyed observers of society soon saw that the market economy would not necessarily serve to perfect human beings or to raise the general level of morality. The market civilized some but left others untouched, and in a third group it brought out the ugliest side of human nature. As John Stuart Mill and some of his contemporaries suspected,
Homo oeconomicus
required a degree of education and maturity too. Politically this was a double-edged argument: on the one hand, it sought to prevent the consequences that would follow if premodern economic cultures suddenly had to face untrammeled competition; on the other hand, it could imply that a tutelary colonialism was needed to open up a cautious path to economic modernity for non-Europeans. In colonial reality the slogan “educating for work” often meant a great deal of work and very little education.

Market economy, law, and religion were the three pillars supporting the British civilizing mission, the most effective of its kind. In the French case—though not so emphatically anywhere else—assimilation to the high culture of the colonial power added a further dimension.
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Particular civilizing initiatives differed not only from country to country but also according to their time frame, principal agencies, local conditions, and the degree of the perceived cultural gap. If this gap was deemed unbridgeable, candidates for civilization appeared incapable of meeting the demands of the “superior” culture, and therefore soon came to count as useless and dispensable. Repression, marginalization, and even physical annihilation were possible consequences, but they were exceptional even in the age of high imperialism. No colonial power had a rational interest in systematic genocide in peacetime. However, King Leopold II of Belgium allowed large-scale atrocities to be perpetrated in his euphemistically named Congo Free State from the 1880s on, and German troops deliberately committed them in 1904–5
against the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa. Some colonial wars of the epoch—for example, the US war of conquest in the Philippines—were waged with such single-minded brutality that historians have used the term “genocide” to describe them.
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Care and Self-Consciousness

The civilizing mission as a project to reshape whole ways of life lay midway between two extremes of nonintervention. At one end, coexisting with the humanitarianism of a morally solicitous Europe, was a calm and arrogant acceptance that “primitive peoples” were doomed to extinction. Hard-boiled economists had already interpreted the Irish famine of 1846–50 as a necessary adjustment crisis.
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Around the turn of the century, there was much talk of “dying races” on the periphery of empires—that is, of peoples whose demise should not be halted. At the other end, all European colonial powers opted in special circumstances for a policy of indirect rule, avoiding any deep intrusion into indigenous social structures. Local people were left to their own devices so long as they kept the peace, paid their taxes, listened to the “advice” of colonial agents, and could be relied on to deliver goods for export. Indigenous law, including “barbaric” forms of punishment, then often remained untouched. The colonial authorities reined in overzealous missionaries and sometimes cultivated relations of mutual respect with the local upper classes, reluctant to allow the uniformity of Westernization to dampen their colorful exoticism. Such was the relationship of the British to Indian princes or Malayan sultans, or of the French to the elite in their post-1912 Moroccan protectorate.
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Under such circumstances, the social and lifestyle engineering involved in a civilizing mission would only have disturbed longstanding balances of power and cultural compromise. Civilizing missions, taken seriously, aimed at a wholesale refashioning of any society on which its guns came to be trained. They usually were the program and the work of activist minorities. Even in European societies, high-minded bourgeois reformers found themselves in the midst of “uncivilized” majorities of peasants, urban plebeians, and mobile vagrants. The growing metropolises were a magnet for large migratory movements, which called forth an ambivalent mix of rejection and philanthropic eagerness to change the newcomers. Observers such as Friedrich Engels and Henry Mayhew saw only slight differences between English slum dwellers and the impoverished masses in the colonies. Mayhew, indeed, thought of the destitute “urban nomads” at home as closely analogous to the true nomads far away in the desert. For reform-minded middle-class minorities, the “internal barbarians” were scarcely less alien and frightening than exotic savages. Nor was this a European peculiarity. In Mexico the liberal
científicos
, a bureaucratic elite that modeled itself on Europe's municipal oligarchies and efficient state administrators, waged a lengthy campaign against rural
indios
and their supposedly backward ideal of common landownership. Racist representatives of this elite, however, considered them to be
biologically inferior and therefore impervious to improvement and education.
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In Tokyo, Istanbul, and Cairo, urban intellectuals and bureaucrats similarly regarded their country regions as remote, primitive, and menacing worlds.

The most spectacular outbreak of “savagery” in a society proud of its civilized refinement took place during the Paris Commune rebellion of 1871. After its suppression—no less violent than British operations against the Indian Rebellion of 1857/58—four thousand surviving Communards were deported to New Caledonia, a recently colonized archipelago in the South Pacific, where they were subjected to a harsh “civilizing” program not unlike that inflicted on the native Kanak people.
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From the point of view of nineteenth-century civilized elites, barbarism was lurking everywhere in the most diverse guises and called for vigorous countermeasures in every corner of the world. Only where the demographic preponderance of the white population was unmistakable could the work of civilization proceed from a position of unchallenged superiority—above all, in North America after the end of the Indian Wars and in the Philippines (where the United States introduced systematic reform programs even before the First World War).

The language of civilization and civilizing was the dominant idiom of the nineteenth century. In the decades around the turn of the century, it was briefly undermined or called into question by extreme forms of racism that doubted whether certain peoples were capable of being educated. After the First World War, when racist rhetoric generally became more muted (though not in Germany or east-central Europe), the idea of civilizing others underwent a revival. But in the 1930s Italians, Japanese, and Germans began to argue that they were superior human beings who, by virtue of the law of the strongest, were justified in ruling colonial peoples without the minimum of fellow feeling essential to the transformative relationship of the civilizing mission. Three different paths therefore led out of the Victorian civilizing mission: one ended in violent collapse, when the civilizer's denial of the humanity of others exposed the fictitiousness of his own civilized character; one led via embryonic “colonial development” in the period of late colonialism to the national and international development aid of the second half of the twentieth century; and one ended in indifference after major material and moral investment had borne no fruit.

The optimistic civilizer is constantly at risk of seeing his efforts fail. The British lived through such a moment in 1857, when “India” (perceived as a uniform whole) shocked them after decades of reforms by giving dramatic evidence of its ingratitude and “unteachability.” Missionaries repeatedly had similar experiences: their implanted Christianity failed to take root, or else proved so successful that the new converts went their own way. All kinds of movements for political autonomy were often seen as unintended side effects of the spread of Western thought. Using the law they had learned from Europeans, Asians and Africans turned the universalism of its lofty principles against the culpability of colonial practice. European languages taught with great zeal became instruments of anti-imperialist rhetoric.