Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (30 page)

It was not that the French had colour prejudice. Paris always welcomed
évolués.
In 1919 the old-established ‘Four Communes’ of West Africa sent to the Chambre a black deputy, Blaise Diagne. Two years later René Maran’s
Batouala
, giving the black man’s view of colonialism, won the Prix Goncourt. But the book was banned in all France’s African territories. Clever blacks learned to write superb French; but once they got to Paris they tended to stay there. In the 1930s, Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, felt so at home in right-wing Catholic circles he became a monarchist.
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There seemed no future for him in Africa. By 1936 only 2,000 blacks had French citizenship. Apart from war veterans and government clerks, the great majority of black Africans were under the
indigénat –
summary justice, collective fines, above all forced labour. Houphouët-Boigny, later President of the Ivory Coast, described the work-gangs as ‘skeletons covered with sores’. The Governor of French Equatorial Africa, Antonelli, admitted that the building of the Congo—Ocean railway in 1926 would ‘require 10,000 deaths’; in fact more died during its construction.
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Black Africans voted with their feet, running into nearby British colonies to escape the round-ups.

Some Frenchmen with long experience of colonial affairs saw portents. Lyautey warned in 1920: ‘The time has come to make a radical change of course in native policy and Muslim participation in public affairs.’
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Sarraut himself argued that the European ‘civil war’ of 1914–18 had weakened the position of the whites. ‘In the minds of other races,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘the war has dealt a terrible blow to the standing of a civilization which Europeans claimed with pride to be superior, yet in whose name Europeans spent more than four
years savagely killing each other.’ With Japan in mind he added: it has long been a commonplace to contrast European greatness with Asian decadence. The contrast now seems to be reversed.’
⁴⁵
Yet nothing effective was done to broaden the base of French rule. When Léon Blum’s Popular Front government introduced its reform plan to give 25,000 Algerians citizenship, the leader of the Algerian moderates, Ferhat Abbas, exulted
‘La France, c’est moi!’
Maurice Viollette, a liberal Governor-General of Algeria and later, as a Deputy, one of the sponsors of the reform, warned the Chambre: ‘When the Muslims protest, you are indignant. When they approve, you are suspicious. When they keep quiet, you are fearful. Messieurs, these men have no political nation. They do not even demand their religious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If you refuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.’
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But the reform was killed.

The truth is colonialism contained far too many unresolved contradictions to be a source of strength. Sometimes it was seen, as indeed it partly was, as the expression of European rule. Thus in the Thirties, Sarraut, who was terrified of increasing Communist subversion in Africa, proposed a united European front, to include the Italians and even the Germans, who would get their colonies back. But as war approached the French again saw their empire as a means to fight their European enemies, resurrecting the slogan ‘110 million strong, France can stand up to Germany!’ In September 1939, Clemenceau’s former secretary, Georges Mandel, once an anti-colonialist but now Minister for the Colonies, boasted he would raise 2 million black and Arab troops. The two lines of thought were in the long run mutually exclusive. If Europe used non-whites to fight its civil wars, it could not combine to uphold continental race-superiority.

But this was only one example of the confusions which, from first to last – and persisting to this day – surrounded the whole subject of imperialism and the colonial empires. What purpose did they serve?
Cui bono?
Who benefited, who suffered? To use Lenin’s phrase, who was doing what to whom? There was never any agreement. Lord Shelburne, the eighteenth-century statesman who deliberated most deeply on the question, laid down the policy that ‘England prefers trade without domination where possible, but accepts trade with domination when necessary.’
⁴⁷
Classical economists like Adam Smith, Bentham and Ricardo saw colonies as a vicious excuse to exercise monopoly, and therefore as contrary to the general economic interest.
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Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in his
View of the Art of Colonization
(1849), thought the object was to provide living-space for overcrowded European populations. This was likewise the
view of the greatest colonizer of all, Cecil Rhodes – without it, the unemployed would destroy social order: ‘The Empire … is a bread and butter question: if you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.’
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On the other hand, protectionists like Joe Chamberlain argued that colonies existed to provide safe markets for exports, a return to pre-industrialist mercantilism.

It was Robert Torrens in
The Colonization of South Australia
(1835), who first put forward the view that colonies should be seen primarily as a place to invest capital. The notion of surplus capital was taken up by John Stuart Mill: ‘Colonization in the present state of the world is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage.’
⁵⁰
This was also the view of practical French colonizers, like Jules Ferry, and their theorists, like Paul Leroy-Beaulieu; though the latter’s book,
De la Colonization
(1874), provided categories:
colonie de peuplement
(emigration and capital combined),
colonie d’exploitation
(capital export only) and
colonies mixtes.
The German theorist, Gustav Schmoller, argued that large-scale emigration from Europe was inevitable and that colonization, as opposed to transatlantic settlement, was far preferable as it did not involve capital flying from outside the control of the mother-country. All these writers and practitioners saw the process as deliberate and systematic, and above all rational. Most of them saw it as benevolent and benefiting all concerned, including the native peoples. Indeed Lord Lugard, the creator of British West Africa, felt Europe had not merely an interest but a moral mandate to make its financial resources available to the whole world.

In 1902 however the capital-export argument was turned into a conspiracy theory by J.A.Hobson, a Hampstead intellectual, classical schoolmaster and
Manchester Guardian
journalist. Hobson’s ideas were to have an important twentieth-century reverberance. In 1889 he had developed a theory of under-consumption: industry produced too much, the rich could not consume it all, the poor could not afford it, and therefore capital had to be exported. Keynes later acknowledged that Hobson’s theory had a decisive influence on his
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(1936), and Hobson’s solutions – steeply progressive taxation, vast welfare services and nationalization – became the conventional wisdom of West European social democrats. But Hobson was also an anti-Semite, and in the 1890s he was so angered by the ‘scramble’ for Africa, the forcible extraction of concessions from China and, above all, by the events leading up to the Boer War, that he produced a wild book,
Imperialism
(1902), in which the process was presented as a concerted and deliberate act of wickedness by ‘finance-capital’, often Jewish. Imperialism was the direct consequence of under-consumption
and the need to export capital to secure higher returns. In two crucial chapters, ‘The Parasites’ and ‘The Economic Taproot of Imperialism’, he presented this conspiracy theory in highly moralistic and emotional terms, arguing that the only people to gain anything from empires were the ‘finance-capitalists’: the natives suffered, the colonizing nations as a whole suffered and, just as the Boer War was a plot to seize control of the Rand gold mines, so the practice of imperialism and particularly competitive imperialism would tend to produce war.
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The actual idea of imperialism had only entered the socio-economic vocabulary about 1900. Hobson’s book, which defined it as ‘the use of the machinery of government by private interests, mainly capitalists, to secure for them economic gains outside the country’,
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instantly made the evil conspiracy aspect immensely attractive to Marxists and other determinists.
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The Austrian economists, Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding, argued in 1910 that imperialism made war absolutely inevitable. In 1916 Lenin put the capstone on this shaky edifice by producing his
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism
, which fitted the concept neatly into the basic structure of Marxist theory. Hitherto, colonial empires had been approached in an empirical spirit. Colonies were judged on their merits. Colonial powers were benevolent or exploitative
or
a mixture of both. The process was seen as having advantages and drawbacks for all the parties concerned and, above all, as complicated and changing. Now it was all reduced to slogans, made simple, in both economic and moral terms, and certified, everywhere and always, as intrinsically evil. The process whereby this crude and implausible theory became the conventional wisdom of most of the world, over the half-century which followed the Versailles Treaty, is one of the central developments of modern times, second only in importance to the spread of political violence.

The actual historical and economic reality did not fit any of the theories, the Hobson-Lenin one perhaps least of all. If empires were created because of over-saving and under-consumption, if they represented the final stage of capitalism, how did one explain the empires of antiquity? Joseph Schumpeter, whose
Zur Soziologie des Imperialismus (On the Sociology of Imperialism)
appeared in Germany in 1919, was closer to the truth when he argued that modern imperialism was ‘atavistic’. Capitalism, he pointed out, usually flourished on peace and free-trade, rather than war and protectionism. Colonies often represented ‘an objectless disposition … to unlimited frontier expansion’. They seemed to be acquired at a certain critical stage of national and social development, reflecting the real or imagined interests of the ruling class.
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But that was too glib also. As a matter of fact, the rise of the Japanese Empire (as we shall see) came closest to the
model of a deliberately willed development by an all-powerful ruling establishment. But the Japanese model was scarcely ever considered by the European theorists. And in any case Japanese expansion was often dictated by assertive military commanders on the spot, who exceeded or even disobeyed the orders of the ruling group. That was the French pattern too. Algeria was acquired as a result of army insubordination; Indo-China had been entered by overweening naval commanders; it was the marines who got France involved in West Africa.
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In one sense the French Empire could be looked upon as a gigantic system of outdoor relief for army officers. It was designed to give them something to do. What they actually did bore little relation to what most of the ruling establishment wanted or decided. The French cabinet was never consulted about Fashoda, the protectorate over Morocco, or the 1911 crisis. Parliament never really controlled the empire at any stage of its existence. Jules Ferry probably came close to the real truth when he described the imperial scramble as ‘an immense steeplechase towards the unknown’.
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It was said that Bismarck encouraged France to lead the steeplechase in order to forget his annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. If so, he was much mistaken. Outside the army, few Frenchmen cared about black Africa. As Déroulede put it: ‘I have lost two sisters – you offer me twenty chambermaids.’
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There were a great many other anomalies which did not fit into Hobson—Lenin. Why, in Latin America, did the phase of capitalist investment follow, rather than precede or accompany, Spanish colonialism? Why, in this vast area, were the capitalists in league with the political liberators? Then again, some of the ‘exploited’ or colonized countries were themselves residual empires. China was the creation of a whole series of imperial dynasties, without benefit of ‘finance-capital’. India was a product of Mughal imperialism. Turkey had been expanded from Ottoman Anatolia. Egypt was an old imperial power which, after its breakaway from Turkey, sought to be one again in the Sudan. There were half a dozen native empires south of the Sahara run by groups and movements such as the Ashanti, Fulani, Bornu, Al-Haji Umar, Futa Toro. Ethiopia was an empire competing with the European empires in the Horn of Africa, before succumbing to one of them in 1935. Burma was a kind of empire. Persia, like China, was an imperial survivor from antiquity. Colonialism itself created empires of this anomalous type. The Congo (later Zaïre) was put together by the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, and survived decolonization without benefit of any of the factors which theory said created empires. So did Indonesia, a product of Dutch tidy-mindedness, assembled from scores of quite different territories. Conspiracy theory shed no light on any of these cases.
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What is decisive, however, is that the theory broke down at its very core – the need for colonies to provide high-return settlement areas for capital. Indeed, the closer the actual facts are studied, the clearer it becomes that any notion of ‘finance-capital’ desperately looking for colonies as places to invest its huge surpluses of capital is preposterous. There was never any such thing as ‘surplus’ capital. Investment capital was always hard to come by, but especially in the colonies. The tropics did not yield big returns until the very end of the colonial era. There were a few big success stories. In West Africa, Lever Brothers made huge investments in communications, social services and plantations which by the 1950s employed 40,000 Africans: the company owned 350,000 hectares and actively worked 60,000.
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There was also heavy investment and occasional high profits (but also some large-scale failures) in Malaya, whose rubber and tin made it probably the richest colony between the wars. Capital did not follow the flag. The British were at least as likely to put their money in independent Latin-American states as in crown colonies. They often lost it too. Argentina, which attracted more British money than any other ‘developing’ territory, taught all investors a fearful lesson during its 1890–1 financial crisis. Taking the nineteenth century as a whole, British investors in Argentina showed a net loss.
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The Germans and Italians were keener than anyone to possess colonies but were most reluctant to sink any money in them. The French preferred Russia – or the Dutch East Indies – to their ‘twenty chambermaids’. The British, too, favoured Java and Sumatra over their innumerable African territories.
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Conspiracy theory demands the existence of a small number of very clever people making a highly rational appreciation and coordinating their efforts. In fact the number of investors, in France and Britain alone, was very large and their behaviour emotional, inconsistent, ill-informed and prejudiced. The City of London was incapable of planning anything, let alone a world-wide conspiracy; it simply followed what it imagined (often wrongly) to be its short-term interests, on a day-to-day basis.
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The most consistent single characteristic of European investors throughout the colonial period was ignorance, based on laziness.