- Anthony Muhammad Transforming School Culture
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- Anthony Muhammad
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I. Political AspectsRupert Emerson
Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York, 1998. Soros, George. The Open Society: Reforming of Global Capitalism. New York, 2000. Warnings of impending collapse from a giant of global finance capital. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Chicago, 1999.
- By Anthony Muhammad Muhammad, A. Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division. Job of changing school culture more difficult.
- By Anthony Muhammad _____ Study Guide This study guide is a companion to the book Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division by Anthony Muhammad. Transforming School Culture provides a framework for understanding how school leaders can overcome staff division to improve relationships and transform toxic cultures into healthy ones.
II. Economic AspectsD. K. Fieldhouse
I POLITICAL ASPECTS
Colonialism is the establishment and maintenance, for an extended time, of rule over an alien people that is separate from and subordinate to the ruling power. It is no longer closely associated with the term “colonization,” which involves the settlement abroad of people from a mother country, as in the case of the ancient Greek colonies or the Americas. Colonialism has now come to be identified with rule over peoples of different race inhabiting lands separated by salt water from the imperial center; more particularly, it signifies direct political control by European states or states settled by Europeans, as the United States or Australia, over peoples of other races, notably over Asians and Africans. To this category should be added Japan’s rule over her dependent territories, lost after World War ii.
Some further features of the “colonial situation” are: domination of an alien minority, asserting racial and cultural superiority, over a materially inferior native majority; contact between a machine-oriented civilization with Christian origins, a powerful economy, and a rapid rhythm of life and a non-Christian civilization that lacks machines and is marked by a backward economy and a slow rhythm of life; and the imposition of the first civilization upon the second (Balandier 1951, p. 75).
The Belgians attempted in the earlier years of the United Nations to broaden the concept of colonialism to include all ethnically distinct minorities discriminated against in their home countries. Contending that such minorities were often in greater need of UN attention than the people in overseas dependencies, the Belgian thesis proposed their acceptance as nonself-governing peoples under Chapter xi of the Charter. This interpretation was generally rejected in the UN and by the colonial and former colonial peoples themselves. The most serious shortcomings of the narrower interpretation are that it excludes the Asian and other non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union, alleged to be dominated by the Great Russians, and the Africans and Asians of South Africa, barred from the main stream of the country’s life by the apartheid doctrine. South Africa lacks the geographic separation of colonies from the imperial center but can be at least partially brought within the colonial rubric because the dominant group is white European whereas the ruled are of different race and color. The Asian peoples of the Soviet Union are usually placed outside the traditional colonial category even though Western observers often accuse the U.S.S.R. of being the colonial power par excellence.
Definitions of colonialism couched in terms of value and emotion take quite a different form. This is most true of those left-wing analysts who can find nothing but evil in colonialism. Thus the “Great Soviet Encyclopaedia” of 1953 speaks of colonization as the military or economic enslavement of any dependent country and sees it as accompanied by bestial exploitation and extermination of the indigenous population. The more leftward-inclined Asian and African leaders frequently denounce colonialism in similar terms.
Historical evolution of modern colonialism
Modern colonialism started with the fifteenth-century voyages of the Portuguese along the west coast of Africa, which in 1498 brought Vasco da Gama to India. The Portuguese and Spaniards were the first to establish their dominions overseas and clung to them long after their imperialist drive had lost its forward thrust. The Americas were wholly taken over as European domains, the Dutch and British began to stake out their claims in India and the Indies, and France had won and lost more than one empire by 1815. The first blows for anticolonialism were struck by the American Revolution and the subsequent liberation of most of Latin America.
Although Europe’s imperial expansion and growth in power continued during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the circumstances of the times tended to discourage the extension of colonial holdings. Britain’s command of the seas and its industrial head start gave it a virtual monopoly of access to the world overseas, making unnecessary the kind of exclusive control that colonialism offered. The abandonment of mercantilism and the swing to laissez-faire and free trade made colonies less attractive than they had been before. Bentham had pleaded that Britain and France should rid themselves of their dependencies; Turgot saw colonies falling from the tree like ripe fruit; and Disraeli, assuming the colonies would soon be independent, regarded them in 1852 as “millstones around our neck.”
China was opened to the penetration of the West but was not subjected to colonial rule. Only in India did the British more or less consistently expand their colonial sway, and France took over Algeria and made its first encroachments in Indochina. In Britain it was even seriously proposed, not long before the start of the scramble for Africa, that there should be a withdrawal from African holdings.
A very different climate of opinion and range of action prevailed in the last quarter of the century. The restraints on colonialism were swept away in the new imperialist flood that speedily completed the partition of the world between the imperial powers. Africa was almost totally divided into European dependencies. In other areas as well, new colonies were carved out or old ones consolidated and extended, as in southeast Asia, where the Dutch, French, and British greatly expanded the scope and intensity of their rule in the Indies, Indochina, Malaya, and Burma. Changing power relationships brought a redivision of territories in the Spanish–American War, in the Boer War, and after World War i with the transfer of German and Turkish holdings.
To assess the causes of the change in the last decades of the nineteenth century would involve the whole range of theories of imperialism, but certain elements particularly related to colonialism may be singled out. Such men as Jules Ferry, Joseph Chamberlain, and Cecil Rhodes justified the revival of colonialism in terms of the needs of the new industrial system and by the demands of a Darwinian struggle between nations and races. The entry of France, Germany, and Italy, followed by Japan and the United States, into the imperial rivalry, not to mention Russia’s expansive mood, seemed to substantiate Lenin’s dictum that only colonial possession gave a complete guarantee against the risks of competitive struggle. The new wave of protectionism and governmental intervention at home restored validity to the assertion of direct political control overseas. Such control seemed particularly justified in tropical Africa, where it was arguable that only the assumption of full responsibility by a Western government could establish the conditions under which modern enterprise could function. This position found powerful support in the prevalent theories holding that certain races, notably the Teutonic or Anglo–Saxon, had a peculiar genius for government.
The transition away from colonialism
Western imperialism reached its highest point before World War i, although several decades went by before World War ii brought a full rejection of colonialism. The Spanish–American War marked the beginning and the end of any large-scale American involvement with colonialism, and the Boer War crystallized the hostility of many, in Britain and elsewhere, to imperialism. The years preceding World War i were the last in which a complacent colonialism could flourish as a part of what seemed the natural order of things. Liberal and socialist attacks on colonialism were growing, although the belief in white supremacy lingered on. The adoption of the mandates system in the Versailles peace settlement was one significant expression of the doubts that were beginning to undermine colonialism. The only significant additions to the colonial domains between the two world wars were short-lived: Mussolini’s anachronistic seizure of Ethiopia and Japan’s drive on China and, later, southeast Asia.
All the forces opposed to colonialism and sap-ping its vitality grew in strength in the interwar years. The success of the Russian Revolution brought into being a world-wide network of agitation against imperialism, and nationalist activities and organizations were multiplying in the dependent territories themselves. In the imperial centers the will to maintain empire steadily declined with the spread of ideas hostile to racialism and colonial domination. World War ii greatly hastened the process through the Japanese displacement of the colonial powers in southeast Asia, the further weakening of those powers at home, the intensification of anti-imperialist opinion throughout the world, and the atmosphere of change that permeated many of the colonies.
Anthony Muhammad Transforming School Culture
After 1945 the flood tide of anticolonialism swept away the colonial system with a speed and thoroughness that matched colonialism’s advance at the close of the nineteenth century. The possession of colonies, so long a matter of pride and prestige, now became a sin to be expiated only, if at all, by the granting of immediate independence. The League of Nations’ indifference to the problem was replaced by the profound involvement of the United Nations in the process of decolonization.
Attitudes toward colonialism
Attitudes toward colonialism have varied greatly from time to time and from place to place. Most frequently, colonialism has been accepted as merely one manifestation of the ever-present truth that the strong dominate the weak. Although the missionary element has rarely been wholly absent, the usual presumption has been that every colony does or ought to exist for the benefit of the mother country.
The justifications of colonial rule cover a wide range, often resting upon the right of the conqueror, perhaps bolstered by a claim of racial superiority. Where the interests of the dependent peoples are taken into account, it is held that an extended period of guardianship is necessary to enable them to “stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Here the mission civilisatrice and the “white man’s burden” come into play. Some French spokesmen for colonialism acclaim it as the universal instrument for the spread of civilization, pointing to themselves and many of their neighbors as products of Roman colonization.
The defense of colonialism is likely to adopt some variant of the criterion laid down by John Stuart Mill, who, in the case of peoples not yet ready for representative government, defended alien rule on the ground that the colonial mode of government was as legitimate as any other if it was the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people most facilitated their transition to a higher stage of improvement. Lord Lugard (1922) introduced another element in proposing that the colonial powers were under a dual mandate obligating them to secure the advancement of their dependent territories and to develop them in the interest of the world at large.
The assumptions on which such defenses of colonialism rest have been increasingly subject to challenge in recent decades. The more moderate present-day approach tentatively accepts colonial rule if the authorities devote themselves to preparing their wards for independence, but growing skepticism as to the trustworthiness of the colonial powers has led to the insistence that they accept international supervision in so doing. The UN Charter looked to independence or self-government for all dependent peoples, tightened control over the trust territories surviving from the mandates system, and brought all nonself-governing territories into the international public domain.
The more radical approach denounces the imposition of alien rule as always evil under all circumstances. This starting point eliminates all controversy as to whether one colonial system or policy is better than another by blanket condemnation of all, leaving immediate independence as the only way out. Building on the anticolonial resolution of the 1955 Bandung Conference, the UN General Assembly in its 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence gave this position international recognition. This declaration denounced the alien subjugation of peoples as a denial of human rights and an impediment to peace, proclaimed the right of all peoples to self-determination without conditions or reservations, and repudiated the doctrine of tutelage by asserting that inadequacy of political, economic, social, or educational preparedness shall never serve as a pretext for delaying independence. Asian and African opinion has constantly been moving toward this radical position, pillorying colonialism as the source of most of the world’s troubles and proclaiming that the higher law of anticolonialism renders all remnants of the era of European colonialism illegitimate and open to attack.
The anticolonialists project such doctrines into the future through the use of the concept of neocolonialism, which accuses the imperialists, among whom the Americans figure prominently, of regarding the independence that the colonial peoples have wrung from them as only the occasion to adopt more subtle tactics of domination and exploitation. Overt colonial rule is thus replaced by economic and other forms of control, including the provision of aid, and the nominally free countries are Balkanized and manipulated in the imperial interest.
The colonial and former colonial powers see what has been happening in recent decades in a very different light. They reject the charge of being oppressors and exploiters and point to their accomplishments in advancing their dependent peoples in every sphere, including the granting of independence to hundreds of millions since 1945. However, they differ greatly in the way in which they have envisaged their colonial mission. The position of four of them—Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal—may be briefly sketched to indicate the wide range of variation.
Varying colonial policies
Great Britain
With the exception of the United States, whose colonial holdings were far smaller, Great Britain could adapt itself more easily to the new dispensation than any of the other colonial powers. The entire British policy of regarding colonies not as integral parts of the mother country but as countries with their own distinctive ways of life facilitated autonomous development. The colonial peoples were given an increasing share in the governing councils, public service, and judiciary and thus were started on what came to be a standard cycle culminating in self-government and then independence. This was a cycle through which the older dominions had passed and which was tested again in India, Ceylon, and elsewhere in the interwar decades. World War ii brought both a heightening of the belief that colonial rule imposed responsibility for the well-being of dependent peoples and an acceptance of the need to move speedily to end colonialism. India’s independence, in 1947, started a process of decolonization that dismantled the British empire in Asia and most of Africa and the West Indies; and although difficulties have cropped up where there is a substantial amount of white settlement or race mixture, as in the Rhodesias, Kenya, and British Guiana, the British have been able to transform most colonies into independent states within the framework of long-established policies that were already in operation.
France
France, on the other hand, was forced to undertake a basic reversal in direction. In contrast to the British, the French inclined always to a policy of cultural, economic, and political assimilation. It was characteristic of French policy that the 1944 Brazzaville conference of leading colonial officials decreed that France’s work of civilization in her colonies excluded any idea of autonomy or of evolution outside the French empire, “even in the distant future.” French aid for the colonies was greatly increased after World War ii, and many reforms were introduced, but the bonds linking the colonies to France were not relaxed until the eve of independence. The Indochinese and Algerian wars demonstrated French reluctance to accept colonialism’s end. Even in 1958, when Guinea opted for independence by voting “no” in the referendum on de Gaulle’s constitution, Guinea was treated as an outlaw. Yet in the succeeding months de Gaulle reconciled himself and the French people to African independence on terms of intimate collaboration between France and the newly freed countries—terms often so intimate as to lead to charges that a French neocolonialism had been instituted, rendering independence nominal.
Belgium
Belgian rule over the Congo, which came to an abrupt end on July 1, 1960, was an unusual combination of elements. The Belgians concentrated power in Brussels, as did the French in Paris, but they did not follow France in associating Africans with them in the imperial center nor Britain in drawing the Congolese into the local administration and governing councils. The great triumvirate—the Belgian government, the giant corporations, and the church—made tremendous strides in economic development, and to a lesser extent in welfare and education, laying the foundation for what would have been a solid structure if uninterrupted decades of colonial rule had stretched ahead. The Belgian philosophy of colonialism explicitly excluded the creation of an elite on the French or British model until mass education would have spread widely and a middle class come into being. The haste with which Belgium moved to sever its formal ties with the Congo following the riots in Leopoldville in January 1959 gave no opportunity to bridge the immense gap between its patronizing paternalism and the responsibilities suddenly assumed by the Congolese, who were left with a government lacking trained African leaders and officials and an army lacking African officers.
Portugal
The Portuguese offer a fourth variant of colonialism, ruling over an empire shorn of Goa but still reaching from Macao to Mozambique and Angola. Oldest of the Western colonial powers, Portugal continues to protest vigorously that she has no nonself-governing peoples but only equal provinces of a single indivisible realm. The Portuguese boast that they are free of racial prejudice, but their African colonies are marked by the cleavage between the few thousands of “civilized” or “assimilated” Africans and the millions of “uncivilized.” The 1961 rising in Angola led the Portuguese government to announce a number of reforms, including the abolition of the regime do indigenato and the establishment of a single status for all within the Portuguese domain, but the overwhelming majority of the Africans remain illiterate and touched by little more of modernity than pressure to work as laborers for the Europeans. Furthermore, embittered competition has inevitably broken out between the advancing African elements and the thousands of Portuguese peasants and workers officially encouraged to emigrate to Portuguese Africa with the double purpose of relieving home poverty and establishing the Portuguese presence so firmly as to make it unchallengeable. The heart of the problem is that Portugal is itself only a partially developed country, having lived for many years under a dictatorship and being unable to overcome its own poverty and mass illiteracy. Its ability to secure the advancement of millions of people overseas is obviously questionable.
The literature of colonialism
The literature dealing with colonialism is wide-ranging and diverse and reflects the changing nature of the colonial problem. For the most part it consists of studies of particular dependencies or groups of dependencies, but a substantial body of literature dealing with general aspects of colonialism has also been built up. Several studies have undertaken to compare the colonial policies of the powers in terms of the goals that have been set, the success with which these goals have been reached, and the administrative and other machineries that have been employed. At both ends of the spectrum the motives lying behind the acquisition of dependencies and the evaluation of the forces leading to the present surge of decolonization open challenging vistas to inquiry. Among the themes that have recurred regularly in the examination of colonialism are the relative values of direct and indirect rule, centralization and decentralization, varying types of economic policy, the acceptability and effects of white settlement, pressures of different kinds to aid in recruiting a labor force, and the scope and nature of the educational system.
In the interwar decades there appeared in the literature of colonialism the relatively new theme of international control over the colonial powers, but since 1945 this has been superseded by the processes and problems of decolonization and the means of securing economic and political development. The transition through the last stages of colonial rule to independence has been studied in a number of instances but still offers an unusually rich field of inquiry. Africa, achieving independence almost overnight, has come in for unprecedented attention. Now that colonialism is virtually at an end, it becomes possible to explore in depth and in detail what type of colonial system has produced the best results, but before this question can be meaningfully explored it is necessary to determine the scale of values by which colonialism in its various guises is to be measured.
The era of colonialism is far too close to us for any definitive and objective assessment of it to be possible. A few salient points may, however, be tentatively put forward.
(1) Colonialism imposed alien and authoritarian regimes on subordinate societies. These regimes tended to train a few of their subjects in bureaucratic management and required passive acquiescence from the remainder.
(2) Although for long periods passive acquiescence was indeed largely attained, as colonialism advanced it also stimulated nationalist agitation and organization and came to be more and more passionately detested, particularly by those among the colonial people who came into closest contact with the European superiors.
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(3) The anticolonial forces have derived their inspiration and ideas primarily from the teachings of the colonial powers themselves, have for the most part adopted Western forms of organization and action, and have been led by men intimately acquainted with the West.
(4) For good or ill, colonialism has been the primary channel through which the ideas and techniques, the spiritual and material forces of the West, have impinged upon the rest of mankind.
Rupert Emerson
[See alsoImperialism; Modernization; Nation; Nationalism.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balandier, Georges 1951 La situation coloniale: Approche théorique. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11, no. 51:44–79.
Burns, Alan 1957 In Defence of Colonies: British Colonial Territories in International Affairs. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan.
Easton, Stewart C. 1964 The Rise and Fall of Western Colonialism: A Historical Survey From the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present.New York and London: Praeger.
Furnivall, John S. 1948 Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Issued in cooperation with the International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations. New York: Macmillan; Cambridge Univ. Press.
Girault, Arthur (1895) 1938 Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale. 7th ed. Revised by Louis Milliot. Paris: Sirey.
Hailey, Malcolm (1938) 1957 An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara. Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Rev. ed. New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press.
Kat Angelino, A. D. de (1929–1930) 1931 Colonial Policy. 2 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff; Univ. of Chicago Press. → Abbreviated translation from the Dutch. Volume 1: General Principles. Volume 2: The Dutch East Indies. First published as Staatkundig beleid en bestuurszorg in Nederlandsch-Indië.
Lugard, Frederick J. D. (1922) 1929 The Dual Man-date in British Tropical Africa. 4th ed. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood.
Mannoni, Dominique O. (1950) 1956 Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. New York: Praeger; London: Methuen. → First published in French as Psychologie de la colonisation.
Maunier, RenÉ (1932–1946) 1949 The Sociology of Colonies. 2 vols. Edited and translated by E. O. Lorimer. London: Routledge. → Volume 1: An Introduction to the Study of Race Contact: Psychology of Expansion. Volume 2: The Progress of Law. First published in French in three volumes.
Nkrumah, Kwame 1965 Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Nelson.
Panikkar, Kavalam Madhava (1953) 1959 Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945. New ed. London: Allen & Unwin.
Perham, Margery F. 1962 The Colonial Reckoning: The End of Imperial Rule in Africa in the Light of British Experience. New York: Knopf.
Plamenatz, John P. 1960 On Alien Rule and Self-government. London: Longmans.
Royal Institute of International Affairs 1937 The Colonial Problem. Oxford Univ. Press.
II ECONOMIC ASPECTS
This article will deal with the economic theories propounded and the practices adopted at different times during the four and a half centuries of European colonization and with the effects these had on the colonies. It will examine what difference the end of formal empires in the mid-twentieth century made to the economic relations between metropolitan powers and former colonies.
The primary fact about colonialism as a historical phenomenon is that precast theories seldom dictated or even strongly influenced practice. At every stage the economic relationships between colonies and metropolis were determined pragmatically, according to current European practices and needs and conditions in the colonies. Theories were secondary, designed to justify or attack existing practice. Even in the case of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), when a new approach seems to have had demonstrable effects, it is clear that changed colonial policies resulted more from altered circumstances than from an intellectual acceptance of his arguments.
Economic theories of colonialism
Theories of colonialism may be placed into four periods of time: prior to 1660; from 1660 to 1776; from 1776 to 1870; and from 1870 onward. Such divisions are arbitrary, but they provide a primitive frame-work for analysis.
Before 1660. During the two centuries before 1660 colonial economic theories were of minimal importance. The expansion of colonial territories proceeded experimentally, reflecting a wide diversity of aims: crusading zeal against Islam, the missionary impulse, geographical curiosity, the desire for bullion and for luxury trades in the East, and land hunger. None of these objectives required theoretical justification—though men like Bartolomé de Las Casas might denounce particular aspects of Spanish native policy in America—and the economic systems imposed on American settlements and Eastern trading bases were derived from the simple premise that each colonizing country was entitled to any advantages its new possessions offered. The northern European countries that came to colonization later—England, France, and Holland—had more time to theorize before acting; but no one produced a general theory of colonialism, and contemporary attitudes must be deduced from passing references. Most French and English commentators, such as Bodin, Antoine de Montchretien, Marc Lescarbot, Bacon, and Richard Hakluyt, mixed economic with other rewards of colonization indiscriminately: the need for a route to the East via a northwest passage, the utility of American bases in the war with Spain, the interests of transatlantic fishermen, the possibility of finding gold and silver, the support a maritime empire would give the navy, the value of outlets for unemployed people, the possibility of new markets and sources of raw materials, and the Christian mission to convert the heathen. Most of these were commonplaces of Iberian writers: there was no attempt to select or to provide a rationale of colonialism.
The mercantilist era. During the period after about 1660, however, colonial theories became more sophisticated. This was the classical age of mercantilist thought, though it must be remembered that the multiplicity of arguments and practices it embraced were first dubbed a “system” by Adam Smith in 1776 [seeEconomic thought]. The essence of mercantilism was that it projected current metropolitan preoccupations into the colonies and assumed that dependencies existed solely to serve these particular interests. There was still some diffusion of aims, but the primary considerations were now economic advantage and the value of colonial trade for supporting an artificially large merchant marine. The economic possibilities of colonies were categorized. As producers of raw materials they served their owners by freeing them from dependence on European supplies, which might be cut off during war and for which monopoly prices were often charged. Colonial products could, moreover, be paid for in exported manufactures, saving foreign exchange, and could be re-exported to Europe to help the balance of trade. Conversely, colonies provided uniquely favorable markets for European exports, since they were monopolies, and thus helped to maintain employment in metropolitan industries. Since they were subordinate, they could be prevented from building competing industries, and their economies could be made entirely complementary. These arguments, based on observation of established practices, were the staple of pamphleteers and statesmen from the second quarter of the seventeenth into the early nineteenth century: of Richelieu, Colbert, and Vauban in France; of Child, Petty, Davenant, Defoe, Arthur Young, and many others in Britain. Though never brought together into a coherent academic “system,” they formed a well understood and only occasionally criticized corpus of concepts, conveniently summarized as the pacte colonial.
Adam Smith: free trade. Attacks on these principles became significant only in the mid-eighteenth century, led by the French physiocrats and Encyclopedists; the first because they disapproved of overemphasis on industrial production for the colonies, the second because they disliked all monopoly [seeEconomic thought]. But it was Adam Smith (1776), normally taken to be the first academic economist, who first attacked mercantilism root and branch and provided an alternative theory of colonial economics. He did this by applying his theory of the division of labor to colonial production and trade. The value to Europe of colonies in America (he largely ignored possessions elsewhere) was merely that they provided new articles for international trade and extended the market for European manufactures. Such advantages were in-dependent of any colonial system and were diminished to the extent that any state tried to monopolize its colonial trade. Monopoly raised the cost to consumers both in America and Europe; discouraged foreign capital from colonial investment; raised the profits of metropolitan capital and so reduced each country’s competitiveness; and made the metropolis dangerously dependent on colonies of uncertain loyalty. In addition, the higher profits allegedly made by European merchants on the monopoly trade of the colonies had to be set against the costs of imperial government and defense, which were paid by the general taxpayer. Hence a better colonial system would be one in which there was no monopoly and in which common costs were shared between colonies and metropolis. Better still, all colonies should be liberated, for once their trade was open to the world, the principle of the division of labor could be fully applied, and Europe would no longer bear the unrewarding cost of imperial organization.
Smith was rightly pessimistic about Europe’s willingness to admit the truth of these facts. For half a century his arguments convinced only the minority, and no colony was liberated voluntarily, for there were always enough traditionalists to argue that the benefits of colonialism were real and to run against colonial monopoly and therefore purely economic rewards. But the trend of economic theory, as expounded in England by men like David Ricardo and the Benthamites, continued to run against colonial monopoly and therefore against colonies, for the two were still assumed to be inseparable. In any case the question had become almost academic by the 1830s, for once the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil were independent the British alone retained a substantial empire, compensating by gains in India for what they had lost in America. But in the 1820s, the British, as they moved toward international free trade, were also losing interest in their colonies, which were increasingly criticized as fields of government expenditure unrequited by economic advantages. India and trading bases in the East were generally accepted, because they were economically self-supporting and were an increasingly valuable market for British manufactures; but settlement colonies were falling into disrepute.
Modern period: capital outlet. In the century after 1830 two distinct theories were developed to justify or rationalize colonies as economic phenomena under the new conditions. The first theory applied only to colonies of white settlement in North America, South Africa, and Australasia and concerned only the British. Against those who denounced such possessions, E. G. Wakefield, in a series of publications starting with his Letter From Sydney in 1829 and culminating in his Art of Colonization in 1849 argued that suitable colonies were valuable to the parent state, even under free trade conditions, provided they were correctly organized. Denying the precepts of Ricardo, he argued that an industrialized state could generate surplus capital which it was unprofitable to invest at home either in agriculture (because of the declining profitability of marginal lands) or in industry (because foreign markets did not expand fast enough to absorb its products). Adopting Smith’s theory of “new equivalents,” he held that this capital would be more profitably employed if it were exported to places where fertile land was in good supply. Provided ample labor was made available by emigration, capital would be more productive in these new lands and at the same time would expand the market for British manufactures and increase the supply of cheap foodstuffs and industrial raw materials. Colonies would provide these advantages better than independent states because colonies could be forced to be free-trading, and the new settlements would remain primary producers for the indefinite future.
Wakefield’s theory and the detailed prescriptions he laid down for new settlements were never fully tested; but his basic argument carried conviction and constituted the main justification for settlement colonies under free trade conditions. But since only Great Britain possessed important settlement colonies in the nineteenth century, Wakefield’s theory had limited applicability. The vast majority of new European colonies in the period after 1830 were tropical territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific that did not fit his formula. By the last quarter of the century new theories were necessary to justify these acquisitions to the mass electorates of Europe.
Modern period: market outlet. Thus the second main theory of colonialism in the modern period was specially adapted to the facts of tropical dependencies. Significantly, no leading economist dared challenge Adam Smith by formulating a comprehensive doctrine; the new “neomercantilist” theories were evolved by politicians and businessmen rather than academic economists. Theory followed the fact of new colonies and had to justify them. As propounded and widely disseminated by such statesmen as Jules Ferry of France and Joseph Chamberlain of Britain, the new argument was that tropical colonies were essential as markets (débouchées) for the surplus products of European industry as it expanded under the influence of renewed domestic protectionism—necessary safety valves for industrial capitalism—without which Europe faced social chaos and perhaps revolution. As a secondary point it was held that industrial states needed guaranteed sources of cheap industrial raw materials and food and that colonies ensured that any one country could not be made to pay monopoly prices for them. In addition, some argued that Europe had surplus capital that was best invested in tropical plantations, mines, and communications. Thus, in general, such colonies provided the solution to most of the economic and social problems of industrial Europe under conditions of protectionism.
Twentieth-century criticism. By the early twentieth century these arguments were widely accepted, even to the extent that many believed tropical colonies actually did provide these projected advantages and that they had been deliberately acquired for these functions. Seldom were any of these assumptions true: the irony was that critics of the new colonization accepted them and founded their new anticolonialist arguments on these alleged facts. Critics had been vocal throughout the later nineteenth century, mostly on financial or humanitarian grounds. After about 1900 they divided into two groups: those who believed the profits of tropical empire to be real but deplored them; and those who believed the rewards to be illusory. The first school was led by European Marxists who regarded the export of capital to the tropics as evidence that Europe was entering a new phase of “monopoly capitalism” when it was no longer profitable to invest in protected domestic markets because they were dominated by a few great trusts. Europe had to export surplus capital or allow capitalism itself to stagnate. Ultimately the nations would compete for the limited supply of colonies, and the resulting wars for imperial redivision would inaugurate the socialist revolution and the end of capitalism. This was the basic argument propounded by V. I. Lenin in his influential pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Others, like Rosa Luxemburg, produced variants on the same theme.
The rival school of critics was led by J. A. Hobson, whose Imperialism: A Study (1902) stated the case against the profitability of tropical colonization. Hobson accepted the propagandists’ argument that colonies were the product of surplus capital seeking fields for investment but held that this surplus existed only because the social and economic systems of Europe denied the masses sufficient consumer capacity to justify increased investment in home industry. Hobson was wrong in thinking that the bulk of the exported capital had gone to the new dependencies: in fact most was going to the old settlement colonies, India and the independent American countries. But he rightly pointed out that most of the new colonies were too poor to provide valuable markets for manufactured exports and held that the cost of defense and administration, coupled with the moral degradation resulting from most of Europe’s activities in Africa and Asia, outweighed any advantages such colonies might provide. His conclusion was that Europe’s best interest was to invest at home; to stick to free trade; and to place undeveloped tropical territories, whose raw materials were needed by the West, under international supervision. He thus brought the debate over colonization back to the position taken by Adam Smith. During the remaining half century of European colonialism no one satisfactorily demonstrated that tropical empire was either necessary or profitable to the Western powers.
The “practice” of colonialism
The practice of colonialism (taking this to mean the devices actually employed to provide economic advantages to the owners of colonial dependencies) can be described as having evolved through three stages of unequal length: from the foundation of the first colonies to the 1830s; from that time to near the end of the century; and from about 1890 to the period of decolonization after 1945. In each period imperial arrangements closely followed contemporary practices in the parent states and owed very little to theory.
Before 1830: the mercantilist period. During the first period—the era of mercantilism—the pattern was set by Spain and Portugal as the pioneers of overseas colonization. They in turn instinctively applied the protectionist and monopolistic practices current in sixteenth-century Europe to their new possessions. Later-starting imperial states adopted most, though not all, of these techniques, so that by the later seventeenth century there was a “system” largely common to all empires, varying mainly according to whether colonies were in America or the East. There were practices common to all: foreign ships were entirely excluded from colonial ports; virtually all colonial exports and imports were routed through the ports of the metropolis; and specified manufactures or processing of raw materials were banned in the dependencies. Spain and Portugal went further than others by insisting, until late in the eighteenth century, that American trade should be carried only in annual convoys and be restricted to a single metropolitan port. Spain also banned most intercolonial trade in America and restricted the Pacific trade from Mexico to the Philippines. By these means it was hoped that each metropolis would have a monopoly of colonial bullion and raw materials and a guaranteed colonial market for manufactures; that metropolitan merchants would be ensured a middleman profit on trade passing through the parent state; and that the colonies would be preserved as primary producers, ideal markets for industrial Europe. In addition, production of the most wanted colonial products was encouraged by complex systems of bounties and preferential tariffs in the home markets. Trade with Africa and the East was dealt with rather differently. Until after 1640 Portugal excluded even her own nationals from dealing in the more valuable Eastern commodities, leaving a monopoly to the crown. England, France, and Holland also imposed monopolies on their Eastern trade but granted them to privileged chartered companies with full administrative powers.
The main imperial “profit” from these mercantilist practices arose from commercial monopoly. This is practically impossible to estimate quantitatively but almost certainly existed, at least to the extent that colonists had to pay a higher price for their imports and received lower returns for their exports than under a free trading system. This metropolitan profit varied inversely with the economic capacity of the parent state, favoring economically uncompetitive countries like Spain, who would otherwise have had little share in the trade of their own colonies, more than a country like Britain, which, by the eighteenth century, possessed the greater economic potential. For Britain it has been estimated that in 1773 the gross “profit” of mercantile controls in North America lay between $2.5 and $7 million, ignoring the ancillary costs involved in empire. But in addition to such commercial profits, Spain and Portugal made substantial fiscal profits from their American colonies by transferring surplus revenue to the metropolitan exchequer. Portugal was receiving thereby some £900,000 annually in the mid-eighteenth century. No other colonial power used this device. The French subsidized their colonies. The British conceded the principle of fiscal autonomy until after 1763 and then attempted to impose taxes on the colonies, not to make a profit but to offset the cost of colonial defense and administration. This attempt failed, although it had considerable importance in the course of events leading to American independence.
Nineteenth-century trend to free trade. The first and longest era of colonialism ended effectively during the first half of the nineteenth century— more because the colonies that had made it meaningful were now independent than because colonial theory had changed. The British, who possessed the only large empire, gradually adopted free-trade practices at home and extended them to the colonies. British colonies were virtually open to the world by 1830 and by 1860 the last vestiges of shipping controls and preferences on colonial products had gone. Other colonial powers slowly followed suit. The Dutch threw open their colonial trade after 1815 but created a special monopoly of the carriage and sale of certain commodities that the Batavian government collected as part of the “culture system” from 1830 to the 1870s. France preserved the colonial shipping monopoly together with preferences and certain exclusive regulations until the 1860s but had abolished them by 1870. Spain and Portugal never completely removed mercantile controls but largely liberalized them for their few dependencies. By 1870 the era of mercantilism seemed over, in that no imperial power then obtained economic advantages from its dependencies that were not available to the world.
Resurgence of limited protectionism. The period of colonial free trade was very short-lived. The revival of protectionism in most parts of Europe in the last quarter of the century led naturally to its extension to the new tropical empires. France adopted a strongly protectionist domestic tariff in 1892 and extended it to all her colonies except West Africa, the Congo, and the Pacific, which had to have separate tariff systems because of international treaties or local economic conditions. Even so all colonies gave and received preferences. The Russians enclosed their new possessions in central Asia and the Far East within their metropolitan tariffs and gave bounties and preferences on selected colonial products. The United States incorporated most new dependencies in the Caribbean and Pacific within the metropolitan tariff, leaving only the Panama canal zone and Samoa open to international trade on the open-door principle. Portugal, Spain, and Italy either assimilated their colonies to the metropolis or imposed preferences. But not all states reverted to mercantile concepts. The Dutch abolished their semimonopoly of Indonesia in the 1870s and maintained an open door, although using quotas on imports in the 1930s. Germany before 1914 and Belgium also preserved the open door with moderate tariffs in their colonies. Britain resisted demands from pressure groups at home and from some settlement colonies and did not drop free trade until 1932, though the self-governing colonies indulged in protection and, after 1899, gave Britain limited preferences. Some preferences were given to colonial products in the British market during and after World War i. Britain reverted to protection in 1932, and the Ottawa agreements of that year led to a preferential system throughout the empire, coupled with quotas on some products and financial control by means of the sterling area.
During the last phase of European colonialism, therefore, most colonial powers adopted some form of preferential system: hence the term “neomercantilist” to describe the new pattern. Yet it never approximated in its severity the mercantilism of the first period. No power excluded foreign ships or goods from its colonies, forced colonial trade to pass through metropolitan ports, forbade colonial manufactures that might compete with its own or, with the sole exception of Holland between 1830 and 1877, transferred colonial revenues to the metropolitan treasury.
Significance of colonial trade. Moreover, few colonial powers obtained anything approaching a monopoly of the overseas trade of their dependencies or found their chief market or source of imports in their empires. Russia and the United States took most of the exports and supplied most of the imports of their possessions; but for both colonial trade was of marginal importance. Britain’s share in her empire’s overseas trade declined steadily from about 49 per cent in the decade after 1854 to 35 per cent in 1929–1933, rising only slightly thereafter as a result of imperial preferences. But the colonies’ share in British total overseas trade rose from about 28 per cent in the 1850s to 51 per cent between 1950 and 1954. France continued to furnish a high proportion of her colonies’ imports—always more than half (except during the world wars)—but the proportion of colonial exports to France declined fairly steadily. On the other hand the colonies’ share of France’s total overseas trade was always relatively small: about 10 per cent until 1914, then rising to 28 per cent in 1934. Belgian territories in central Africa took 51 per cent of their imports from Belgium in 1928 and 46 per cent in 1938. They sent 70.6 per cent of their exports in 1928 and 80.7 per cent in 1938 to Belgium. But the Congo played a very small part in Belgian overseas trade, supplying 2.4 per cent and 6.6 per cent of Belgian imports in 1928 and 1938 respectively and taking less than 2 per cent of Belgian exports in each year. The trade of the Netherlands Indies was not monopolized by Holland and played a minor part in Dutch overseas trade. In 1928 only 5.3 per cent of Dutch imports came from Indonesia, 7.2 per cent in 1938. In the former year 8.9 per cent of Dutch exports went to Indonesia and 9.5 per cent in 1938. Indonesian exports to Holland declined from 78.3 per cent in 1850 (during the period of the “culture system”) to 15.3 per cent in 1930; and Indonesian imports from Holland fell from 41.9 per cent to 16.8 per cent in the same period.
Although not comprehensive, these figures point to a firm conclusion about modern colonialism on its commercial side. Most colonial powers took a large proportion of the overseas trade of their colonies; but with the sole exception of Britain, whose empire was far larger and provided uniquely favorable markets and varied sources of raw materials, the colonies were of small importance to the world trade of their owners. Artificial factors, such as tariffs, preferences, and currency systems, probably affected the pattern of colonial trade to some extent, but never as much as mercantile controls had done before 1830. Since, moreover, there was never a total ban on foreign trade or shipping, and therefore no monopoly, it cannot be said that “neomercantilism” exploited dependencies; in fact, bounties, preferences, and quotas on colonial products probably favored the colonial producer more than colonial tariffs helped the metropolitan producer. The old pacte colonial was indeed revived, but it was no longer exclusive and was reasonably two-sided in its benefits.
Advantage of colonial investments. There remains the question of metropolitan advantage from capital investment in the colonies. Did political controls, especially of non-European labor, create especially favorable conditions for European capital in the dependencies, providing a “superprofit” for European “finance-capitalists”? The question is too complex to unravel briefly; but two points are reasonably certain. First, the great bulk of European investment in colonies was in government bonds or in fixed interest debentures in public utility companies. On both, the interest paid was only very slightly higher than that from comparable stocks in Europe or America, so that colonies were not forced to provide artificially high returns to metropolitan investors. Second, the return on some risk stocks—equities—was often high, and probably higher than could be obtained at most times on industrial equities in Europe or the United States. But this was due less to the fact of colonial subordination than to the intense world demand for certain products possessed by some tropical colonies, for example, metals and rubber; and the return on capital invested in such ventures was not evidently different from that invested in independent countries of similar economic type that lacked the capacity to develop their own natural endowments, notably those in the Middle East and Latin America. In short, the special profitability of capital investment attracted to the tropical colonies reflected the inherent advantages of the strong world demand at particular times for their particular types of product, the scarcity of capital there, and the strong bargaining position of Western countries when dealing with politically or economically weak societies. Colonial investments did not depend on formal imperial control to provide excess profits.
This fact is the key to understanding the economic relations between the industrialized Western powers and the new ex-colonial countries in the period after decolonization in the 1960s. The phenomenon denounced by Marxists and by nationalists in the new states as “neocolonialism” was the continued economic dependence of the ex-colonies on their previous masters or on other Western powers. This could take the form of special commercial relations, such as exist between France and several ex-dependencies in west Africa and elsewhere; between Britain and many members of the sterling area; and between the United States and the Philippines or Puerto Rico. Alternatively, “neocolonialism” might consist in the “exploitation” of these “developing” societies through their reliance on foreign capital, which tends to place segments of their economies under the control of foreign companies or governments. In either case “neocolonialism” implies that the advanced countries are continuing to interfere in the economic life of onetime colonies as if they had not been liberated. Instrumental ringtone download.
It remains debatable how much truth there is in these allegations; but in fact “neocolonialism” is as imprecise a concept as colonialism. Facts are in any case more important than accusations. Most developing countries, like most earlier colonies, are primary economies, and depend heavily on more advanced states for markets, imported manufactures, capital, technical skills, and opportunities to train their own nationals. If they prefer to avoid contacts of these kinds in order to retain their entire freedom of action, the choice is now open to them, strengthened by the possibility of obtaining the same amenities from Russia or China as “nonimperialist” states. In practice, however, the balance of advantage almost certainly lies with the receiving countries. In the 1960s they have been given much capital in the form of “aid”—i.e., grants or capital on noncommercial terms—and many have benefited substantially from preferential markets for their products in France, the Common Market, Britain, or the United States. [SeeForeign aid, article onECONOMIC ASPECTS; International integration, article onECONOMIC UNIONS; International trade controls, article onTariffs and protectionism.] If “neocolonialism” exists, it is the inevitable product of an inherent imbalance between the advanced and the developing economies, irrespective of the political factors involved. This one-sided relationship will disappear only when the new states reach the position already achieved by Japan and become as powerful economically as the ex-colonial powers on whom they continue to depend. Evidence provided by eastern Europe after 1945 does not suggest that the economic status of nominally independent countries associated with socialist Russia differs substantially from that alleged to exist between the ex-colonial territories of Africa and the East with their onetime masters.
D. K. Fieldhouse
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