The Transformation of the World (97 page)

The Netherlands did not have a colonial empire either, but it did have a vigorously governed colony. Between roughly 1590 and 1740 it had been the strongest single force in world trade, possessing a “seaborne empire” with bases from the Caribbean to Japan. By the nineteenth century, however, not much remained apart from the Dutch East Indies. In the 1880s the Netherlands was the only Western European country that did not participate in the division of Africa; it had even sold its last possessions on the Gold Coast (Ghana) to the British in 1872. The Dutch came to enjoy their position as a shrinking colonial power, with a self-image in which they appeared as a small neutral nation serving the cause of progress through a gentle colonialism quite different from that of the aggressive and rapacious Great Powers;
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any expansion involved no more than a tightening of their control over the Indonesian islands, where they had first established themselves in the early seventeenth century (founding of Batavia in 1619) but had taken a long time to gain a firm hold. This centuries-long process concluded only with the Atjeh (or Aceh) war, which between 1873 and 1903 overcame fierce resistance to bring the northern tip of Sumatra under their rule. The military operations, which cost at least 100,000 people their lives, sparked considerable controversy in the Netherlands. The main factors were in fact international, since there were successive fears of an American or British, and then German or Japanese intervention.
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As so often in the history of expansion, it was a case of aggressive defense, not of last-minute panic at the thought of being excluded from the spoils. If it gave the impression that the Netherlands was joining a fresh round of the imperialist game, this was not because any new impetus was driving it forward.
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The large and wealthy Indonesian colony—in every respect second only to British India among European possessions in Asia and Africa—remained of interest to the Dutch for the same reasons as before 1870. The Netherlands was “a colonial giant but a political dwarf.”
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Around 1900 there was a change in the methods of colonialism, not only on the part of the Dutch. The conquest of Africa was nearly complete, and in the new, more peaceful conditions the major colonial powers pursued a more systematic and less violent policy. The goal everywhere was what French colonial theory used to call “valorization” (
mise en valeur
). In Germany's African empire, especially in East Africa, the years after 1905 became known as the “Dernburg era,” after the colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg.
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In British Malaya similar policies were observable at this time. But the most thorough
mise en valeur
, and the one most closely studied by other colonial powers, took place in Indonesia. Between 1891 and 1904, as many as twenty-five French delegations alone went out to study the Dutch East Indies, hoping to learn the secrets of how to use native labor most profitably.
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Between the two wars, when colonialism entered its mature stage more or less worldwide, the Dutch East Indies
could serve as a kind of model for good and for bad. India, though in many respects atypical, had played this role in the nineteenth century, but its liberation movement had raced ahead of most other colonies and was already on the road to a new future. The Dutch East Indies stood rather for continuity in colonial governance and ideology.

In the period from 1830 to 1870, the newly devised extractive institution of the so-called Cultivation System (
cultuurstelsel
), a kind of “planned economy”
avant la lettre
, allowed the Dutch to exploit Indonesia to a degree rarely paralleled in colonial history. One-fifth of the net revenue of the Netherlands treasury came directly from the colony. However, the system ushered in diminishing productivity and failed to provide the basis for sustainable economic growth.
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In the three decades after 1870 there was a retreat from extreme forms of plunder and coercion, and in 1901, toward the end of the costly Atjeh war, the colonial power actually proclaimed a switch to an “ethical policy.” This meant, above all, that the colonial state would invest in Indonesia for the first time, especially in infrastructure such as railroads, electricity generation, and irrigation (traditionally well developed, particularly in Java). The first moves were also made toward a colonial welfare state, such as never happened in India and only reemerged in post-1945 (western) Africa.
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Scarcely any other colonial power in the long nineteenth century invested so much money in what would nowadays be called “development.” Nor was it without successes: if the Indonesian economy had later grown as much as it did between 1900 and 1920, Indonesia would today be one of the richest countries in Asia.
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This spurt, however, was mainly due not to the policies of the colonial state but to the hard work and entrepreneurship of the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago. Not enough was done in the post-1901 reform period to educate and train the local population of the colonies (to develop their “human capital”). This was perhaps the greatest sin of omission on the part of European colonialism.

Private Empires

Such forms of empire formation, though ultimately under the control of an autonomous metropolis and involving the projection of power from core to periphery, rarely had a grand strategy behind them. In this sense the historian Sir John Robert Seeley was not altogether wrong when he famously remarked in 1883, shortly after the highly planned occupation of Egypt, that the British Empire seemed to have been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” It was an observation that also applied to other European empires.

But there were many deviations from the model: empires were not always propelled by military dynamics. In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the territory of the United States at a stroke, opening wide new spaces for settlement and the founding of new federal states. In 1867 the United States acquired Alaska from the Tsarist Empire. In 1878 Sweden sold its Caribbean island colony Saint Barthelemy to France, after the United States and Italy had
both turned down the offer.
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Such transactions were the modern counterpart of peaceful transfers of territory through dynastic marriages (Bombay, for example, was part of the dowry of the Portuguese princess Catherine when her marriage treaty with Charles II of England was agreed in 1661).

Another peaceful mode was for a land to place itself under higher protection, as the ruler of Bechuanaland (today's Botswana) did when he opted for British annexation over being ruled by Cecil Rhodes's private British South Africa Company.
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“Voluntary” subjugation, whether in such a triangle or in direct recognition of vassal status, is one of the oldest and commonest mechanisms of imperial expansion. The system of US hegemony after the Second World War—which the contemporary Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad calls “empire by invitation”—bears traces of this variant.

Private empires also arose in the slipstream of Great Powers, Leopold II's in the Congo being only one such case. In Brunei and Sarawak (North Borneo) the Brooke family established itself as the ruling dynasty in an area of some 120,000 square kilometers. In 1839 the English adventurer James Brooke arrived on the island, in 1841 the sultanate (which had remained outside Dutch control) conferred on him the title of Rajah of Sarawak, and in the years until his death in 1868 he brought a large swathe of territory under his control. The second rajah, his nephew Charles Brooke, who ruled until 1917, expanded this still further. In 1941 the third rajah surrendered to the Japanese. The Brookes were not simply a band of robbers, but they did organize the extraction of considerable wealth, investing part of it in Britain and doing little for the long-term economic development of Sarawak. They regarded social change as detrimental to its indigenous people, yet allowed foreign corporations access to exploit the natural riches. Unlike King Leopold's Congo, however, Sarawak had at least the minimal trappings of statehood.
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Elsewhere, attempts were made to construct domains almost free of a state. Cecil Rhodes, who amassed a fortune from the South African diamond business, was relatively successful in building a private economic empire in southern Africa. For the British government, it was a cheap and easy option to cede the territory between Bechuanaland and the Zambezi river (Southern Rhodesia, today's Zimbabwe) to the British South African Company, which was endowed with a royal charter in 1889 and was largely funded by Rhodes and other South African mining magnates. The company undertook to “develop” the territory, and above all to meet all the necessary costs. In 1891 it was permitted to extend its operations north of the Zambezi, into what would become Northern Rhodesia (today's Zambia). For Rhodes and his company, the point was not to acquire and rule territory for its own sake but to exercise a monopoly over known and suspected mineral deposits, and to incorporate the mining areas into the South African economic space. For that, effective control was a necessity. “If we do not occupy, someone else will,” he wrote in 1889, expressing as pithily as possible the logic of the scramble for Africa.
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Rhodes made his plans even more palatable to
Whitehall by opening up the “Rhodesian territories” (the name came into use in 1895) for British settlers. “Company rule”—a method that had previously failed in German South West Africa—was vigorously criticized by missionaries, who in this instance complained of a colonial paternalism that was too indulgent toward the natives. But, in the eyes of other local whites, the semiprivate protectorate involved a successful symbiosis of big capital with the settler way of life.
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Large plantations and concessions, too, were often stateless zones in which the law of the land prevailed only indirectly, as on a Junker estate east of the Elbe.
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Missionaries sometimes came to exert such influence that they built veritable protectorates of their own. Even with the end of the chartered companies in Asia, and finally of the East India Company in India (1858), new semiofficial colonization agencies came into being there. The most important of these was the South Manchurian Railroad Company (SMR), which after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 took possession of the southern tip of Manchuria and the southern sections of the local Russian railroads. The SMR became a colonial power supported by the Japanese state, building the most lucrative railroad colony in history and a center of gravity for the whole economy of northeastern China. At the same time, Manchuria became the location of the largest heavy-industrial plants on the East Asian mainland.
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Secondary Empire Building

Japanese empire building was the only non-European instance after 1895 to be crowned with spectacular success—until 1945, that is—but we should not overlook a few others that for a while had a major regional impact. These cases of
secondary
empire building may be defined as military aggression plus territorial expansion, with the help of European military technology but not under the control of European governments. Africa of all places, which later became the main victim of European empire building, was an especially eventful arena in the first half of the century. At a time when Europeans were beginning to expand in three ways in Africa—fresh conquest beyond the South African frontier, military intervention in Algeria, and conversion of a trading frontier into a military frontier in Senegal
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—the sub-Saharan savannah belt was witnessing several large and mutually independent processes of expansionist state building, with centralized and highly militarized structures, which correspond in many respects to our definition of empire. These formations, impelled by jihadi themes, derived their cohesion from two communicative elements that were lacking farther south: a script and cavalry animals.
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Other embryonic empires developed without Islam or cavalry: the Ganda (in Buganda), for example, built a fleet of war canoes in the 1840s and beyond, gaining a kind of imperial supremacy on and around Lake Victoria that exploited the labor of weaker peoples.
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Often such operations used a far from modern, almost antiquated, technology. The military strength of the Boers in the early nineteenth century was based on horse-riding infantry equipped with muskets.
The Sokoto caliphate, built up roughly from 1804 to 1845, also supported itself on horses and muskets.
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In all these cases there was no direct link with the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The technological gap was already smaller in the 1850s and 1860s, however, when the Muslim empire of Sheikh Umar Tal was taking shape in Upper Senegal.

The expansion of Egypt is a particularly good example of secondary empire building. It is one of the most remarkable facts of nineteenth-century imperial history that independent Egypt possessed an empire between 1813 and 1882—that is, an area under its military control that was more than just a sphere of influence. If we consider that the Japanese empire lasted a mere fifty years, then the Egyptian experience merits some consideration.
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Pasha Muhammad Ali, a man of obscure Albanian origin and Egypt's de facto ruler from 1805 on, was never content with a realm along the Nile. It cannot be proved that he planned to supplant the sultan as universal caliph of Islam, but he set about building an empire that stood in a contradictory relationship with the Ottoman Empire (whose suzerainty over Egypt he never actually questioned). On the one hand, he openly defied the sultan as a rebellious satrap; on the other hand, the sultanate felt more threatened by the puritanical, fundamentalist, and antimodernist Wahhabi movement, founded in the Arabian Peninsula by Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Wahhabis, who sought to return to the pure faith and ideal practices of the Prophet and the four rightful caliphs of the seventh century, branded all opponents as heretics and conducted a holy war against all other Muslims, including the Ottoman sultan. Indeed, until his death in 1792, the Wahhabi founder regarded the sultan as the greatest evil, calling upon Muslims to rise up and overthrow him. The movement displayed religious fervor and military skill in expelling the Ottomans from large parts of the peninsula. Its followers even occupied Mecca and Medina, in 1803 and 1805 respectively, and in 1807 denied Ottoman pilgrim caravans access to the holy sites. The sultan therefore welcomed Muhammad Ali's help in fighting the Wahhabis, while the pasha for his part cherished grand plans for the modernization of Egypt and had little time for a fundamentalist version of Islam. When the sultan assigned Muhammad Ali to put together an armed expedition against the Wahhabis, it was the starting signal for Egyptian empire building. In 1813 the Egyptian army recaptured the holy sites and the port of Jeddah, and a year later Wahhabi power crumbled, though not yet the movement and all resistance.