A History of the World (71 page)

The Mystery of Imperialism

That the age of modern imperialism should start in Europe is no surprise. Europeans had been in deadly competition with one another for centuries. Their domestic sea, the Mediterranean, had fostered seamanship, piracy and trading rivalries, so that as soon as their craft were able, they were bound to go further afield, round Africa and across the Atlantic. When they first took, or bought, a piece of land, then built a fort and stayed, it was generally to protect their new trade against other European enemies: the Portuguese fortified against the Dutch, the Dutch built forts to keep out the British; the British and French built settlements against each another. Though the obvious and primary story of empire is that of Europe’s colonizing nations imposing themselves on less powerful non-European peoples, it began because of internal European competition.

This explains the speed, rapacity and aggression of the continent’s imperial expansion. Local enmities and rivalries, simmering for centuries, were exploding afresh in new lands. In thinking of empire we must remember mutual Dutch and Spanish loathing, born of Habsburg Spain’s brutal attempt to hold on to and suppress the young Protestant republic; the very longstanding Spanish–Portuguese rivalry; the mutual contempt of English and Dutch sailors, nurtured in sea battles up and down the Channel and the Thames. Often, these were religious feuds as well as national ones. We have to recall how envious the British court had been of the dominance of Catholic Bourbon France; and how furious French merchants, Jesuit missionaries and aristocrats were when the British seemed to be stealing a march on them in the forests of America. Had the boot been on the other foot, it would have been as if Africans had not only colonized Europe, but had been playing out an ancient and bitter competition among themselves at the same time – Kongo against Mali, Zimbabwean against Bantu, as they hacked and surged their way through the valleys of the Thames, the Rhine and the Rhône.

Had this been all, it would have been a simple, if unpleasant, tale. We would have been able to define Europe’s age of empire as the predictable result of one part of the world developing better technologies and organization than most of the rest of it, and then for a short period taking what they could. There is nothing specifically European about this – no original sin. Muslim Arabs, Mongol herders, Chinese border-people and Maori seafarers all behaved just as murderously when they had the chance. Whenever you get all-male warrior bands unleashed on normal settled family-based people, there is a high risk that they will behave abominably. Untethered from the bonds of mutual need, nurtured empathy and the possibility of shame inside their own society, they are likely to kill randomly and even rape and torture. Whether the men concerned are British, American, Spanish, German – or Hindu, Aztec or Zulu – makes little difference.

Yet European imperialism did not simply let loose bands of greedy, lonely men, itchy with national rivalries, on other parts of the world. It also thrust upon them European national and religious cultures, which were well developed and had a strong sense of their own special history and cultural value. So the story of the British in America could not be just the story of military conquest, traders and trappers, but
also had to be about law, Christian dissenters, moral arguments and political rebellion. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico and Peru, they brought microbes and mayhem, but they also brought monasteries and the mass. Nineteenth-century French colonies struggled to reconcile republican citizenship with ownership of the new lands and people. The Dutch settlement in South Africa (not strictly an imperial moment) was a republican-Christian exodus from the homeland, deeply rooted in a Calvinist sense of mission, the Dutch as a people chosen during the Reformation in Europe. German imperialism in Africa was an extension of that court’s belief in Germany’s destiny as the new European superpower, more disciplined and less raggedly democratic than its decadent liberal rivals.

All this came with a huge dollop of humbug and self-seeking propaganda. It had to. How could Catholic Portuguese explain themselves in Brazil or the Congo, without insisting they were bringing eternal Christian light to the darkness – as well as slave-trading? When the British in India blew mutineers from the barrels of cannon, or gunned down protest movements, they had to tell themselves they were bringing the rule of law, education and proper administration which would, in the long run, benefit their Muslim and Hindu subjects. When the ‘scramble for Africa’ began, French, Belgian and British newspapers inveighed against the evil of the Arab slave-traders: for it was to free the African that their soldiers were shackling their tribal lands.

Yet European societies had become more open and more self-critical at just the same time as they were acquiring empires. They had advanced beyond the point where they could live on a diet of humbug without feeling ill. The missionaries included many men who enjoyed lording it in steaming backwaters, ordering servants around and taking their sexual pleasure from the conquered, thousands of miles from their families and fellow citizens. But they also included genuine Christians aghast at the moral consequences of imperialism – men like Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican friar who campaigned against the worst excesses of ‘New Spain’ and insisted on the full humanity of the native people; or, in Africa, Scotland’s David Livingstone.

At home, almost from the beginning, European societies were divided on the subject of imperialism. The nonconformist, Baptist and free-trade strain in British political life fought vigorously against the
slavers and other empire enthusiasts. A large, vocal group of pro-Americans existed in London well before the Boston Tea Party. In France, there was a long tradition of writing that mocked European pretensions of being more advanced than the people they were enslaving and conquering. The victory of the anti-slave-trade lobby in early-nineteenth-century Britain was a battle won, not the end of a war, but it was nonetheless hugely significant.

Every European society that acquired an empire was affected, often for the worse. We have seen the effect of American gold and silver on Spain. Though Portuguese wealth was based for centuries on its African and Brazilian conquests, by the mid-twentieth century the country had become a backwater, snoring under dictatorship. Britain became socially and politically divided between the free-traders and liberal nonconformists on the one hand, and on the other the empire-lovers clustered around the court, the military and London. Had the imperialists lost much earlier, then perhaps Britain today would not be a post-manufacturing, post-industrial nation overdependent on the financial services that are the last vestige of imperial stretch. She would certainly have experienced far less mass immigration and would have a shorter record of involvement in overseas wars.

So it is important to remember that imperialism was never simply about one country invading or occupying others. It was two-way. It always involved internal choices and the victory of one lobby or economic interest over others. Outside the Dutch Republic, where capital was raised from the growing middle class, this generally meant the victory of the court, and the military associated with the court.

Societies that were divided into many little courts, such as Germany or Italy, could only join in the imperial game when they had come together and formed a single military and financial hub. And as soon as they did, almost their first act was to try to acquire overseas territories. They seemed among the most brutal of the imperialists, but this was because they were late. Britain had fought her way to dominance in India, and massacred Tasmanians, and helped wipe out native American peoples, before the full glare of modern communications made it all too embarrassing. The Dutch had behaved savagely to the Javanese before anyone in Europe knew or cared. The Germans with their machine-guns in East Africa, and Mussolini with his aircraft and gas in Ethiopia, were easier targets for outrage.

The only European countries that were virtually non-participant in empire-building at this point were the ones that already had empires inside Europe, such as the Austro-Hungarians (and to a lesser extent the Russians), or that were too small or landlocked to hope to compete, such as the Swedes, Norwegians, Swiss and Poles. These have often built the more equal, more successful societies today, which may not be a coincidence. There is, however, one glaring example of a small country that did acquire a vast empire. Though an odd story, it is one that tells us a lot about how imperialism actually worked.

Leopold the Nasty

The personal empire carved out of the guts of the African continent by the Belgian King Leopold II was the most extreme, almost ridiculous, example of European imperialism. Belgium was a small also-ran in nineteenth-century Europe, a nation of two languages, which had only become independent in 1830 (and is now again barely a nation). The Belgians had gone shopping for a king in the monarchical bazaar of Germany. They had opted for Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who had been a swashbuckling officer with the Russian army fighting Napoleon. He had married the second-in-line to the British throne, who had died before she could become queen; and he was Queen Victoria’s uncle. Indeed, he had helped arrange her famously happy marriage to his nephew, Prince Albert. After accepting Belgium’s invitation – he had earlier turned down the chance of becoming King of Greece – Leopold proved in many ways a good king, supporting social reforms and behaving with the circumspection of a constitutional monarch.

He was, significantly, King of the Belgians, not King of Belgium – the head of a people, not the owner of a fiefdom. As the age of empire matured, this chafed on Leopold. His relatives, notably his niece Victoria, possessed fine empires. Belgium had nothing. It was a crammed and relatively poor country, where emigration was discussed as a way to avoid social revolution. Leopold asked the Turks if they would sell him Crete. He tried for Cuba, and even Texas, before it joined the USA. He wondered about the Faroe Islands. He covetously eyed parts of South America too. Nothing was available. Leopold died disappointed;
but he passed this colony mania on to his son, the sly, gangling, large-nosed Leopold II. This son was more of a mess than his father. He was struggling in an unhappy marriage, and roamed the world. An unappealing figure and a world-class hypocrite, he disliked the minor role offered by constitutional monarchy in Europe and was unimpressed by Belgium in general. ‘
Petit pays, petits gens
,’ he moaned.

As heir, he travelled around observing British imperialism in Egypt, studying in Seville the financial inflows of the Spanish empire, and reading about the treasure that had streamed into Holland from the Dutch colony of Java. As an importuning would-by buyer outdoing his father, young Leopold asked if he could buy part of Borneo. He fantasized about purchasing something in Abyssinia, or maybe on the Nile. Perhaps the Argentines could find him something? Or maybe he could snaffle a morsel of China? Fiji? Vietnam? The Philippines? An island off Uruguay? Or in the Pacific? Like his father, he was on the verge of becoming a comic-opera figure: ‘Trainee emperor in need of empire. Will consider all offers.’ Yet he had already received a grim warning about the dangers of Europeans parachuting themselves onto foreign thrones. His sister had married the ill-fated Austrian Archduke Maximilian, whom the French had packed off to Mexico as their puppet-emperor. Unimpressed, the Mexicans had executed him, providing the inspiration for a very fine painting by Manet. The bereaved wife, Leopold’s sister, went mad, and he kept her hidden away in a palace for the rest of her life.

What transformed all of this from byway in European dynastic history into world-class tragedy was the penetration of central Africa by European explorers. From the late 1840s, Britons such as the flamboyant multilinguist Richard Burton and his comrade (later enemy) John Speke began to chart the African interior, starting with their search for the origins of the Nile. The heroes of London’s Royal Geographical Society were not motivated by a desire to extend the British Empire – though fame, and the wealth accruing from successful book-publishing certainly were lures. Nor was the British government much interested. When Verney Lovett Cameron tried to rescue the great David Livingstone, the Scottish Congregationalist missionary and explorer, he failed, but he returned to London having crossed the continent and brimming with tales of its rivers, lakes and rich soil. Ministers could not have cared less.

Livingstone had crossed the continent himself, in the opposite direction, travelling light and managing not to offend most of the African chieftains he met. He believed strongly in Western, Christian civilization, and he wanted to save souls as well as to chart rivers and lakes, but he came from a religious tradition that was suspicious of earthly, militaristic power. Like Cameron, he was a genuinely outraged critic of African slavery. The same could not be said of Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh boy who had suffered a horrible upbringing in a poor-house before getting to America, where he managed to fight on both sides during the Civil War until he emerged as a brilliantly self-publicizing and unreliable journalist.

Employed by a New York press tycoon, he was sent to find Livingstone. Cruelly misusing his native bearers and driven by a reckless hunger for fame, he was able to ask, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ and make himself a global celebrity. Stanley too returned to London and, though now an American, wanted the British to claim the huge new land. But like Cameron, Stanley found no enthusiasm in London for annexing the Congo. Leopold II, reading the explorers’ reports in his daily copy of
The Times
, delivered freshly ironed to his breakfast table at his palace outside Brussels, thought differently.

Leopold wanted, as he said, a slice of ‘this magnificent African cake’, and he began a cunning campaign to help himself. He decided to pose as a philanthropist. As we have seen, Muslim slavers had long preyed on African kingdoms, and after the anti-slavery movement had ended British involvement in the Atlantic trade, African slavery had become a fashionable moral cause. So Leopold set himself up as a Crusader, telling Queen Victoria he wanted ‘to bring civilization to Africa’ and in 1876 convening a lavish conference in Belgium, where explorers, politicians and do-gooders from all over Europe and Russia were honoured, given medals, listened to and served superb banquets. Free drink and flattery go a long way, as Brussels knows well. Leopold told everyone he merely wanted to shine the light of civilization on the natives, and suggested a network of European stations in the Congo, staffed by doctors, scientists and others, to help abolish slavery, establish ‘harmony among the chiefs’ and ‘pacify’ the region. Impressed, the grandees of the Brussels conference agreed to form the International Association of Africa with King Leopold as president. His cake knife was poised.