Pavlac B.A. A Concise Survey of Western Civilization: Supremacies and Diversities throughout History

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CHAPTER

The Westerner’s Burden

Imperialism and Nationalism, 1810 to 1918

y building on the superiority in industrialization and technology achieved

during the nineteenth century, Western civilization gained authority over

the world as never before. Western advances created a new global domina-

tion driven by a revival of colonial imperialism and a new sense of self-identity

called nationalism. The West’s incursions into diverse world cultures both vindi-

cated and challenged its own cultural assumptions. The British poet Rudyard Kip-

ling’s acceptance of ‘‘The White Man’s Burden’’ illustrates the culture’s dialogue

with itself. Race, sex roles, and nationalism became still more closely connected

with political control over those perceived to be inferiors. Fateful decisions would

lead the West on the path toward the most destructive war the world had ever

suffered.

‘‘NEW AND IMPROVED’’ IMPERIALISM

Western nations had begun having success with colonial imperialism outside

Europe in the late 1400s and early 1500s. The ‘‘voyages of discovery’’ led to foreign

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conquests for Portugal and Spain, followed soon by the Netherlands, France, and

England. At that time, disease had given the Europeans a decisive advantage in their

conquest of the New World since the natives lacked immunities and were killed

more often by germs than by guns. Meanwhile, many peoples in the Old World of

Africa and Asia offered enough resistance both to disease and to military arms that

westerners were conﬁned to mere footholds on the edges of their principalities.

Many of these peoples lived in their own civilizations, which for many centuries

had been more advanced technologically, politically, and culturally than the West.

Asians and Africans mostly governed themselves, as they had since the dawn of

human history. By 1830, the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch controlled

only scattered remnants of their once-vast overseas empires in Asia, Africa, or the

Americas. Western colonialism’s ruling over distant territories seemed destined to

decline.

Instead, a revived and more powerful wave of imperialism, or neo-imperial-

ism (1830–1914), rolled across the oceans. Some Western nations reemphasized

imperialism out of jealousy of Great Britain and its empire. The British Empire

reigned supreme during the nineteenth century, waving its imperial glory in all the

corners of the world, despite the loss of the Americans. Many British saw their

imperial rule as benevolent, promoting peace and prosperity at home and around

the world (see ﬁgure 12.1). Britain’s old rival France or new rival Germany (see

below) became resentful of this empire on which the sun never set.

Additionally, most westerners were overly conﬁdent in their own progress.

Because technology had given them increasing dominion over nature, most Euro-

peans thought that their own cultures surpassed those of ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘ignorant,’’

IMAGE INTENTIONALLY REMOVED

Figure 12.1. The Europeans claimed to bring education and civilization,

as in this German school in the colony of Southwest Africa. At the same

time as African children were being educated, German troops were waging

a war of extermination against whole tribes.

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and ‘‘superstitious’’ peoples. In their view, Christianity needed to replace native

beliefs for the natives’ own good. While many Western leaders were personally not

very religious, they could appeal to Christian voters by supporting missionary work

to convert ‘‘heathens.’’ These missionaries naturally needed protection from head-

hunters, cannibals, or just fearful natives who held their own religious beliefs. So

European governments sent in troops. The West’s nationalistic pride, cultural supe-

riority, and international security demanded global empires.

The Scientiﬁc and Industrial Revolutions empowered this new burst of Western

imperialism. Before 1800, tropical diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness

had easily crippled and killed Europeans who ventured into Africa and Asia. First,

scientiﬁc medicine enabled westerners to better survive foreign climates. Knowl-

edge about germs and infection, inoculation and vaccination, and the discovery

that taking quinine (usually in tonic water with gin) prevented malaria all increased

westerners’ resistance to previously lethal diseases. Second, modern Western mili-

tary force and technology outmatched native Africans and Asian armies. In the eigh-

teenth century, many Asians and Africans were armed with bow, spear, and sword;

they could not compete with Western soldiers shooting muskets. By 1850, a few

thousand well-trained modern troops equipped with quick-loading riﬂes and artil-

lery could prevail over countless tribal peoples. Third, the new industrial economy

compelled westerners to acquire new resources to feed the machines of industry.

The round-the-clock factories required raw materials to process, while ﬁnished

products demanded new markets. Businessmen and the politicians backing them

thought that empires would provide both. Additionally, the vast tracts of underused

farmland in distant colonies could provide another outlet for the excess population

of Europe, easing social tensions at home.

Consequently, economists revised the old economic theory of mercantilism for

the new circumstances. While the mercantilism of the seventeenth century had

asked for government intervention to foster a favorable balance of trade, the eco-

nomic theory of neo-mercantilism from the nineteenth century restricted itself

to asking for government intervention in order to help build empires and open

foreign markets. At home, the government was to continue its laissez-faire policy

and allow free use of private property. But as merchants wandered into deepest,

darkest outlands, they needed the muscle of Western military forces to protect both

their persons and their newly ‘‘acquired’’ possessions from the natives. It may seem

a bit inconsistent for business leaders to call for government to stay out of economic

decisions in one circumstance (domestic) and call for government support in

another (international), but they have done so consistently since the nineteenth

century.

Supported by technologically advanced armies and navies, the West strode with

new determination into the world. Non-Western peoples lost control of their lives.

Sometimes, enterprising businessmen simply stole what they wanted. British agents

stole tea from China, rubber from Brazil, and cinchona from Peru (to make quinine

for ﬁghting malaria). They then grew these plants on plantations in British-con-

trolled South and Southeast Asia. Other times, entrepreneurs used fraud, bribery,

or threats to convince native chiefs to sign a treaty surrendering land rights to the

Europeans. As a last resort, armies would simply mow down native resistance. As a

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justiﬁcation, the imperialists mouthed altruistic intentions of stopping violence and

warfare among the natives. They might even protest that they were drawn into

empire against their will, forced to make hard, violent, self-interested choices. Fur-

ther, Europeans often exploited native ethnic differences, exaggerating them to set

the ethnic groups against one another. Such tactics revived the classic method of

divide-and-rule practice. The westerners almost always proﬁted and prevailed.

The intensity of domination, however, differed in three degrees. First, in

spheres of inﬂuence, the natives were still ultimately in charge. In these areas,

one Western state would form an alliance and a close working relationship with the

native regime to keep other Europeans out and arrange the best deals for itself.

Second, in protectorates the native leaders still held a great deal of authority, at

least when it came to running their own society. The Western power became deci-

sive only in foreign affairs and in many economic decisions. Third, in complete

colonization, native structures and societies were substantially eliminated and West-

ern people moved in and took over.

This had been the case during the colonization of the Latin American states, the

United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Europeans shoved aside the

comparatively few natives onto the worst lands. The Dutch colony of South Africa,

located on the Cape of Good Hope, also saw Europeans drive out the natives from

the best farmland. The descendants of the Dutch colonialists named themselves

Afrikaaners. They saw themselves as Africans, just as the descendants of English

colonialists in America viewed themselves as Americans. Meanwhile, the native Afri-

cans remained a near-powerless majority of the population.

In most new colonies formed under neo-imperialism after 1830, the natives

retained little power and little hope that matters would improve. In most of Africa,

the Paciﬁc Islands, and parts of Asia, the minority population of Europeans who

possessed the majority of the land and authority restricted the natives to a subservi-

ent role—foreigners in their own country. Recent historians, however, see native

peoples acting as subalterns, ofﬁcially subservient to the westerners, yet subversive

beneath the surface. Westerners at the time merely interpreted natives’ lack of

enthusiasm for empire as laziness and stupidity.

Nineteenth-century science supported Western supremacy. Early scientists

divided up the human species into several races. The Europeans came to be consid-

ered part of the Caucasian race, named both because some scientists considered

the people of the Caucasus to be the ‘‘prettiest’’ and because many believed

humans ﬁrst appeared there. Social Darwinism increasingly emphasized racial dif-

ferences. The dominance of Europeans allegedly proved their racial superiority. To

be Western was to be of ‘‘white’’ complexion. Even hard-working and bright colo-

nized peoples could never change their skin color.

The transformation of South Africa opened the door for neo-imperialism. The

British seized the colony from the Dutch in 1815. British settlers moved in, creating

a mixed society where the Europeans dominated the large numbers of native Afri-

cans who still lived there. But the Dutch and English did not get along very well. In

1835, two years after the British outlawed slavery in the South African colony, thou-

sands of Dutch Afrikaaners left the colony on the Great Trek. They journeyed hun-

dreds of miles inland to escape what they saw as British oppression. The Afrikaaners

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seized new fertile land and enslaved the native black Africans who had survived

recent wars among one another. The Dutch Afrikaaners set up the Transvaal and

the Orange Free State as two sovereign Western countries in southern Africa. The

Western technology and methodology of these farmers (called Boers) made the

land prosper as never before.

The South African conﬂicts focused the attention of Britain’s rivals upon the

continent. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, only a few European imperial

possessions clung to Africa’s fringes. Portugal in particular retained its colonial

bases gained during the ﬁrst wave of European colonial imperialism. The French

led the new wave. Their neo-imperialism began in 1830 with ‘‘the ﬂyswatter inci-

dent.’’ When a French diplomat arrogantly refused to discuss repaying a debt owed

to Algerians, the Ottoman governor slapped him in the face with a ﬂyswatter. Out-

raged about an insult to French honneur, France conquered the provinces and

made them part of France. Thousands of French immigrants then began buying

land and settling in.

It took a few more years for European interest to penetrate the rest of Africa,

especially the interior south of the Sahara. Europeans called Africa the ‘‘Dark Conti-

nent’’ partly because they knew so little about it. By midcentury, missionaries and

explorers were bringing back fascinating accounts. Most famous were dispatches

from the journalist Henry Stanley as he searched for the humanitarian Dr. David

Livingstone, allegedly lost in the Congo in 1871. His dry remark, ‘‘Dr. Livingstone,

I presume,’’ is a statement of the obvious (ﬁnding the only white man amid so many

Africans). More important, he published exotic tales of African riches, from gold to

ivory. Stanley laid the foundation for the takeover of the Congo River basin by King

Leopold of Belgium. Livingstone had wanted to minister to the spiritual and physi-

cal needs of the natives; Leopold desired to exploit the region as his own pet col-

ony, plundering it of rubber and ivory. Over the next few decades, the Belgians’

brutal treatment of natives reduced the population from more than thirty million

to less than ten million.

Western neo-imperialism soon overwhelmed the rest of Africa as other leaders

began to follow Leopold’s example. The fate of one hundred million Africans

changed with the stroke of a pen in 1884. The leaders of Europe convened a meet-

ing in Berlin to discuss the recent Belgian takeover of the Congo. At this Congress

of Berlin they deﬁned the ground rules for their Partition of Africa (1884–1914).

Each interested power was permitted to move in from a speciﬁc area of coastline

and stake claims to whatever territories it could. During these seizures, the invading

nation was to notify other European governments so that they did not stumble into

war with one another. The conquest of more than ten million square miles of Afri-

can lands quickly followed.

Even the traditional rivals France and Britain managed to forget many of their

ancient grievances with each other. The French were crossing the continent from

east to west, while the British linked a chain of territories from north to south. This

competition between Britain and France intersected in the Sudan. The French and

British competition there almost sparked a larger war. The French began the Suez

Canal to build an artiﬁcial waterway to link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

After the French investors ran into difﬁculties, the British rushed into Egypt in 1882

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(see ﬁgure 12.2). They wanted to ﬁnish the Suez Canal since it offered a much

shorter route to British India than sailing all the way around Africa. Then, in 1885, a

Muslim revolt led by the ‘‘Mad Mahdi’’ drove the British out of Egyptian-dominated

Sudan. The British General Gordon and his troops died defending Khartoum,

Sudan’s capital. After the French showed some interest in claiming the Sudan, the

British invaded again in 1898. They avenged Gordon by killing thousands of Mus-

lims with machine guns and retook the country. But when a small French force

confronted the British at Fashoda, the two commanders eventually toasted each

other and parted on friendly terms.

While the British ended up with the best share of Africa, they faced an unantici-

pated challenge to their new supremacy in South Africa again. When the British

started to build a railroad from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo (South Africa to

Egypt), the Dutch Boers of the Orange Free State refused to allow the British pas-

sage through their territory. So the British tried to conquer the Afrikaaners in the

IMAGE INTENTIONALLY REMOVED

Figure 12.2. This cartoon shows a British soldier, with a Turk at his feet,

claiming to be the protector of Egypt. No Egyptians are seen, only the

Sphinx and pyramids in the distance.

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surprisingly nasty Boer War (1899–1902). The Boers fought an effective guerrilla

campaign until the British defeated them with a new radical measure, the concen-

tration camp. The British rounded up large numbers of civilians whose only crime

was being the wrong kind of person (in this case, an Afrikaaner) and conﬁned these

men, women, and children in barracks under guard and surrounded by barbed

wire. The British thus perfected the concentration camp as a technique of social

conquest and resorted to its use increasingly thereafter. Tens of thousands of camp

residents, young and old, white and black, died from disease and hunger. The Brit-

ish also burned farms and armed native Africans (at least until victory had been

achieved). The British won the Boer War, but at the cost of many lives and sharp

international criticism. Thus, the Boer War marked the dangerous precedent of

westerners ﬁghting other westerners over foreign plots of land.

Despite this crushing defeat, the large population of Afrikaaners still resisted

British domination. So the British and the Afrikaaners compromised a few years

later with the creation of the Union of South Africa. South Africa developed into

a Western industrialized nation, although its British and Afrikaaner populations

remained a minority. The 80 percent majority of the population, a few immigrants

from India, some ‘‘coloreds’’ of mixed heritage, and the large numbers of black

Africans slowly tried to organize their own political participation by founding the

(South) African National Congress. Joint British and Afrikaaner rule, however, effec-

tively excluded these people of non-European heritage.

In the scramble for Africa, other Western powers managed to grab different

slices to appease their appetites for the moment. While Western civilization had

ended the international slave trade, many millions of Africans lived under slavelike

conditions in their own countries under these European masters. France appeared

to hold the next-largest share after England; yet much was the wasteland of forbid-

ding desert or impassable jungle. The Germans won a couple of key colonies, but

they grumbled that theirs did not compare well enough with those of the French

and English. They nearly exterminated the native Herero and Nama peoples in their

colony of Southwest Africa (today Namibia). The success of other states inspired

the Spanish and Portuguese to move deeper inland from their own coastal colonies.

Even the Italians got a few pieces of Somalia on the eastern Horn of Africa. Regretta-

bly for Italian pride, the poor Italians who tried to invade Abyssinia (also called

Ethiopia) had their army decisively trounced by natives armed with arrows and

spears at the Battle of Adowa (1896). They were the only westerners to be defeated

by Africans during this wave of imperialism. Thus, by 1914, native Africans governed

only in Abyssinia and to some extent in Liberia, which was an American protectorate

run by Africans whose ancestors had, for a time, been slaves in the United States.

Westerners ruled all the rest of Africa.

While Africans succumbed relatively quickly under Western supremacy, the

Asians experienced more varied levels of resistance. The ﬁrst major Asian region to

fall was the Indian Subcontinent. Since Britain’s victories in the eighteenth century,

it had been the supreme foreign power in the land, either directly or indirectly

through the East India Trading Company. Still, many princes and rajahs remained

independent of the growing British inﬂuence. An odd incident in 1857, however,

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provided the means and opportunity for British imperialists to take over much of

South Asia.

A rebellion broke out when the British military introduced the latest Enﬁeld

riﬂe and its cartridges to their native troops, called sepoys. This ammunition was

more efﬁcient than the ball and powder of muzzle-loaded muskets. The bullet and

explosive charge were wrapped together in greased paper, and a soldier needed

only to bite off the paper and load the cartridge in the riﬂe. Suddenly, the rumor

spread among the natives that the grease on the paper was either beef fat or pig fat.

The former was abhorrent to Hindus, who believed that cows were sacred, and the

latter was repulsive to Muslims, who held that swine were unclean. Thus began

the so-called Sepoy Mutiny (1857), or as some Indians call it, the ‘‘First War for

Independence.’’ Sadly for an independent India, the British quickly rallied and used

their superior organization and technology to crush the rebels. The British

destroyed dozens of temples and mosques and killed and injured thousands of

innocent civilians in revenge. One favorite death penalty was to tie a rebel across

the mouth of a cannon and blow him to bits. From then on, the British reigned

over most of India as an outright colony, while only a few rajahs managed to pre-

serve their states as protectorates. The British also aggravated the traditional differ-

ences among religious groups. They set Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and others against

one another. It was the classic divide-and-conquer routine used by imperialists in

all ages.

Most of the inhabited islands in the Paciﬁc became colonies in the second half

of the nineteenth century. Europeans wanted them as safe harbors to store and

provide food, water, and coal for their steamships. Also, many islands were moun-

tains of guano, or bird poop, that was useful as fertilizer. Most islanders could

defend themselves with only Stone Age technology and thus quickly lost.

In East Asia, powerful states had much better technology but soon found them-

selves outmatched by the West. The most powerful Asian state, the Chinese Empire,

had endured many invasions and rebellions since its foundation two millennia

before in 221

B.C.

From the cultivated Chinese point of view, all foreigners were

barbarians who lacked the sophistication of Chinese culture. Chinese merchants

wanted very little from the outside world, although they were willing to sell their

tea, silks, and porcelain for cold, hard Western silver and gold.

The British and the Americans, meanwhile, tried to ﬁnd a product that the

Chinese would be willing to buy. They worried that the neo-mercantilistic balance

of trade tilted too much to the Chinese advantage. Ultimately, they found a product

that would break open the Chinese markets: illegal drugs, in particular, opium.

These narcotics damaged the Chinese economy, health, and morality. Nevertheless,

Western merchants smuggled opium into China from the ﬁelds of western and

central Asia where it was grown. Proﬁts meant more than Chinese law. When the

Chinese authorities justiﬁably conﬁscated and destroyed these illegal substances,

British merchants complained to their own regime about property rights. The Brit-

ish Empire declared war on China to protect the British right to sell illegal narcotics.

In the short Opium Wars (1839–1842), the Chinese suffered humiliating and deci-

sive defeats by modern British military technology.

The triumphant British imposed treaties that opened up China to Western

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exploitation. Under the concept of extraterritoriality, British people and posses-

sions were exempted from native laws and authority (much as foreign diplomats

and embassies still are today). Therefore, British merchants and missionaries could

do what they wanted. The treaties also forced the Chinese to hand over parts of

several key ports, while British warships and troops could move at will throughout

China to defend British citizens and interests. In the next few years, the other West-

ern great powers bullied the Chinese into handing over these same privileges, one

by one. Westerners out to make a proﬁt attacked and undermined Chinese society.

By 1900, the United States feared that other Western states might start to carve

up the weakened Chinese Empire into distinct economic and political zones. To

keep access to markets as free as possible, the United States advocated an ‘‘open

door’’ policy throughout China: promising mutual cooperation and no trade barri-

ers between Western imperialists. The open door policy merely meant that China

was open to being bought and sold in little bits by westerners rather than all at

once. The Chinese imperial government lacked the ability to resist.

Instead, a nativist movement sparked what the westerners called the Boxer

Rebellion (1900). The name ‘‘Boxer’’ came from an anti-Western society whose

symbol was the raised ﬁst. The insurgents attacked foreigners all over China and

laid siege to hundreds of diplomats, soldiers, missionaries, and merchants in the

foreigners’ quarter of the capital city of Peking (today called Beijing). After only

ﬁfty-ﬁve days, Western armies smashed the revolt and imposed more humiliating

treaties on China. Shortly after, in 1903, the incompetent empress who had man-

aged Chinese affairs for decades died, leaving only a child to inherit the crumbling

mechanisms of power. Without leadership, the empire fell to a republican revolt

in 1911. Western imperialists stayed and provoked terrible consequences in the

developing twentieth century, as explained in later chapters.

In Southeast Asi a between India and China, Siam (modern-day Thailand)

managed to negot iate for itself a spher e of in ﬂuence ra ther than a more seriou s

takeover. The Br itish had conquer ed Burma to the west, as t he French sei zed

Indochina (what would become Viet nam, Laos, and Cambodia ) to the east. Yet

neither side was sure how to dominate the pow erfu l little state of S iam, which

was likely t o put up a ﬁght. Inste ad, Siam became a b uffe r betwee n French a nd

British col onie s. It learned f rom both , althoug h the weste rn izin g inﬂuence of the

governess Anna Leono wens on ki ngs Mong kut (r. 1851–1 868) and Chulalongkor n

(r. 1868–19 10) has been exaggerat ed by modern musicals and ﬁlms. Siam’s for-

ward-looki ng kings slowl y brough t Western ways into the co untry.

Meanwhile, Europeans conﬁdently predicted that their humanitarian burden of

looking after the less-advanced peoples of the world would last far into the future.

This ‘‘caretaking,’’ however, was two-sided. On the one hand, Europeans could

point with pride to the construction of railroads, roads, harbors, large colonial

administration buildings, schools, hospitals, and military bases. Their laws and eco-

nomics brought a Western vision of order and growth to places once considered by

Europeans to be violent, barbaric, and stagnant. Christian missionaries were win-

ning converts. And to its everlasting credit, the West ended the international trade

in African slaves and did much to stop most other slavery. All humans became more

connected, for good or ill, than they ever had been before in history. The Europeans

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