The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (58 page)

British

Kenya 297

this negative meaning, particularly among twentieth-century critics

of empire, but the imperial special-interest groups rehabilitated it in

the 1880s by depicting empire as a profi table national enterprise.

Yet there were no more Bengals waiting to be conquered and

exploited in the modern era. Partially commercialized African economies were poor outlets for western trade and investment, and J. A.

Hobson, an imperial critic who covered the Anglo–South African

War for the
Manchester Guardian
, was wrong in arguing that capitalist special interests sponsored the new wave of imperial expansion

in Africa. In reality, British fi nanciers put the bulk of their capital

to work building railways and factories in the United States, Latin

America, and Russia. The new imperialism stemmed primarily from

fear and speculation, and only a small range of special-interest groups

profi ted directly from the new empires. In addition to the merchants,

missionaries, soldiers, and other men on the spot, these included

the “gentlemanly capitalists” who controlled metropolitan banking,

insurance, and shipping concerns.8 Together, these latter-day nabobs

exploited the temporary western advantage in technology, industry,

and fi nance resulting from the uneven advance of globalization.

It is an open question as to how many people actually profi ted from

the new imperialism. The overall value of the new empire to metropolitan Britain was certainly debatable. Britons at the turn of the twentieth

century put 75 percent of their capital in nonimperial territories, and on

average these investments brought approximately 1.58 percent higher

returns than imperial ones.9 For those willing to risk their money in the

empire, India and the dominions remained the most lucrative outlets for

trade and capital. The Raj was still unquestionably Britain’s most valuable imperial possession. It offset Britain’s trade imbalance with Europe,

and the heavily subsidized Indian railways paid rich dividends to investors. The self-governing dominions were also important trading partners,

but their value to Britain waned as they gained more control over their

economies. By comparison, British Africa was nowhere near as valuable. The entire continent south of the Sahara took less than 5 percent

of British exports in 1890, and when British capitalists did invest in the

African empire they focused on the mines of southern Africa.10 Lacking

easily exploitable resources, suffi cient infrastructure, and reliable labor

supplies, the new protectorates were spectacularly poor investments, and

the British government had to pay generous subsidies to draw capital to

Africa.

298 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Far from being a great engine of liberal free trade, this “new”

British Empire was profoundly protectionist. Born of a deep sense

of insecurity, it was Britain’s desperate attempt to defend its global

network of commerce and investment through non-economic means.

Most British taxpayers probably would have preferred the cheaper

option of informal empire, but the growing economic and military

power of the United States, France, Germany, and to a lesser extent

Russia and Japan scared the British government into indulging the

imperial lobby’s demands for more African and Asian territory. As a

result, the British added almost fi ve million square miles and ninety

million more people to their formal empire in the last three decades

of the nineteenth century. Although metropolitan Britain was a relatively small nation with a population of only forty-one and a half

million, the new British Empire covered twelve million square miles

(roughly one-quarter of the habitable world) and boasted more than

four hundred million subjects at the turn of the twentieth century.11

As in the early modern era, bands of private explorers and chartered companies played the lead role in staking out claims to promising regions. In 1884, the European powers formalized this process at a

conference in Berlin that the German chancellor Bismarck convened

to ensure that squabbles over territory in Africa did not lead to war

in Europe. In what amounted to the ground rules for the new imperialism, the delegates agreed that a nation wishing to claim a specifi c

territory had to demonstrate that it occupied it “effectively.” In practical terms, this meant direct administration and treaties in which

the “natives” agreed to accept foreign protection. In many cases, the

prominent local individuals who signed off on these protectorates

did not realize that they were surrendering their sovereignty under

European law. Instead, African leaders expected to be treated as equals

and often hoped to use the foreigners against local rivals.

The British government was relatively restrained in this renewed

rush for empire. In West Africa, it chartered Sir George Goldie’s

Royal Niger Company to claim Nigeria, but it only expanded territories surrounding the naval bases that Adderley wanted to give

up. This is how the French came to claim most of West Africa. The

central importance of India to the wider empire dictated the occupation of Egypt to safeguard the Suez Canal. Similarly, the Indian

route around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa drew Britain

into a war with the Transvaal and Orange Free State to ensure that

British

Kenya 299

these mineral-rich Afrikaner republics did not swallow up the strategically important Cape Colony. Britain had no signifi cant military

or economic interests in central and eastern Africa, so the metropolitan government left the region to state-sanctioned private speculators. Thus, Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company claimed and

conquered northern and southern Rhodesia, and Sir William McKinnon’s British East Africa Company did the same in Uganda and the

East African highlands.

Imperial enthusiasts swelled with pride in seeing these territories

colored British pink, but metropolitan reactions to the new imperialism were decidedly mixed. Many Britons assumed that imperialism

meant building closer ties with the white settlement colonies and not

the conquest of alien and inassimilable Africans and Asians. While

Rhodes, Meinertzhagen, and other adventurers made fortunes and

careers in the new territories, more often than not the British taxpayer paid for their empires. The Treasury was particularly suspicious

of the new imperialism and criticized the expense of unnecessary

imperial wars. The imperial special interests countered by appealing

to the public’s patriotic and humanitarian sentiments. Popular newspapers depicted the new empire as a heroic national enterprise, and

music hall shows carried the message to the working classes. Rudyard

Kipling, Rider Haggard, John Buchan, and other widely read authors

spun romantic tales of adventure and national glory in the empire.

The resulting wave of popular enthusiasm generated by this celebration of empire meant that there was very little real political debate

over the nature and merits of the new imperialism. Liberal and Tory

politicians argued over its particulars, but both parties recognized

the power of popular imperial sentiment. Benjamin Disraeli argued

that the empire made Britain great, and Lord Randolph Churchill and

Joseph Chamberlain courted working-class voters by promising that

the new conquests provided markets and new lands for settlement.

Alternatively, William Gladstone, H. H. Asquith, and other Liberals

appealed to the publics’ better nature by depicting the new empire as

benevolent.

While this imperial expansion might appear inevitable in hindsight, it caught nonwestern peoples almost entirely by surprise. For

nearly four centuries, coastal Africans interacted with Europeans as

trading partners and allies in struggles with rival neighbors. Slave

traders were certainly a threat, but on balance most African societies

300 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

could deal with Europeans on relatively equal terms before the industrial era. Even more troubling, the new imperialism stripped them of

their humanity.

Seeking to lend credence to their promise to civilize the “primitive races” of Africa, imperial speculators and their mission allies

portrayed subject peoples as implicitly and often irredeemably backward. Most missionaries genuinely believed that the imperial wars

of conquest were liberating, but the popular theories of social Darwinism and pseudoscientifi c racism, which depicted nonwesterners as

biologically inferior, gave this seemingly benevolent imperial project

an inherently sinister reality. While late nineteenth-century western intellectuals and politicians cited the unique characteristics of the

British, French, and German “races” in making national distinctions,

they placed all Europeans on a scale of cultural evolution far above

the supposedly backward overseas peoples. Ethnographers and scientists confi dently found evidence of this primitiveness by using comparative anatomy and craniology to prove that nonwestern peoples

had smaller brains and diminished cognitive ability. E. S. Grogan, one

of the most grasping new Kenyan imperialists, blithely declared that

it was “patent to all who have observed the African native, that he is

fundamentally inferior in mental development and ethical possibilities (call it a soul if you will) to the white man.”12

Consequently, by the late nineteenth century it was no longer

possible to be African and civilized within the British Empire. Africans became people without history, people who lived in timeless and

unchanging backward tribal societies. This meant that westernized

communities such as the Sierra Leonean Krios, who ran Britain’s

West African coastal enclaves, became “trousered natives” who, like

the Indian baboos, aped a modern culture they did not understand.

It did not matter that many were graduates of British universities,

or that Samuel Adjai Crowther was an Anglican bishop and James

Africanus Horton was a British army doctor. The new pseudoscientifi c racism created a liberal excuse for empire by turning all darkcomplected peoples into primitives.

This was the grim scenario that played out in East Africa. Highland peoples, who traded with coastal Swahili city states through

middlemen, became more directly integrated into global trade networks in the early nineteenth century when western middle-class

demand for combs, piano keys, and billiard balls drove up the price

British

Kenya 301

of ivory. Additionally, the British abolitionists’ success in outlawing

the Atlantic slave trade had the unexpected consequence of pushing

human traffi cking into Central and East Africa. This was the result

of a loophole that the British government inserted into the antislaving treaties to allow their Portuguese allies to buy and capture slaves

south of the equator. Led by Afro-Arab adventurers and bankrolled

by Indian investors, armed caravans hunted elephants and people in

the highlands. Captured slaves carried the tusks to the coast, where

these speculators doubled their profi ts by selling both commodities.

Most of the ivory was destined for western markets, and the slaves

went to Zanzibari plantations, the Middle East, and Brazil, where

slavery remained legal until the 1880s.

These caravans integrated the highlands into the wider networks

of trade and investment. Less advantageous, they spread fi rearms and

contagious diseases. Merchant adventurers such as Tippu Tib carved

out minor empires in the interior, and young highlanders who acquired

guns to hunt elephants joined caravan deserters and runaway slaves

in preying on local communities. This explains why Richard Burton,

David Livingstone, and other explorers and missionaries encountered

anarchy and violence when they mapped these regions at midcentury.

Assuming that slave raiding, warfare, famine, and widespread misery

were endemic, they had little clue that western demands for ivory

and the misguided efforts of the humanitarian lobby were at the root

of many of these problems.

This ignorance allowed the missionaries and fortune seekers who

followed the explorers to portray Africans as primitive and in need

of rescue and salvation. The metropolitan government initially paid

little attention to these special interests. It saw no value in East Africa

during the era of informal empire, and it took the threat of German

expansion into the great lakes region to spur Prime Minister Lord

Salisbury into action in the 1880s. Motivated by an unrealistic fear

that a foreign presence on Lake Victoria/Nyanza and the headwaters of the Nile would threaten British control of Egypt and the Suez

Canal, Salisbury’s government chartered Sir William MacKinnon’s

IBEAC to stake a formal claim to the highlands. From the British

government’s standpoint, MacKinnon’s enterprise was a cost effective way to establish “effective administration” of the northern end

of the highlands under the terms of the Berlin Conference. Germany

claimed what became modern Tanzania, and Britain acquired control

302 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

over Zanzibar and, by extension, the Kenyan coastline by forcing the

sultan to accept British “protection.”

MacKinnon had vague but ambitious plans to develop the region