Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (31 page)

If investors had no agreed and concerted, let alone conspiratorial aim, the colonial administrators were not much clearer. In the nineteenth century, in the spirit of Macaulay’s educational reforms in India, the object of colonial rule was commonly thought to be to produce imitation Europeans. Between the wars this vision faded rapidly, leaving only confusion. The so-called ‘Dual Mandate’ policy put forward by Lord Lugard in the 1920s, not so different to Lyautey’s aims in Morocco, sought to preserve native patterns of
administration, and to give paramountcy to their interests. The British task, Lugard wrote, was ‘to promote the commercial and industrial progress of Africa without too careful a scrutiny of the material gains to ourselves’.
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This element of altruism gradually became stronger but it coexisted with other aims: military strategy, emigration, defending settler interests, national prestige, national economic policy (including tariffs), which varied according to the nature of the colony, and the colonial system, and were often inconsistent with native interests and indeed with each other. There was no typical colony. Many colonial territories were not, in legal terms, colonies at all, but protectorates, mandates, Trust territories, federations of kingdoms and principalities, or quasi-sovereignties like Egypt and the states of the Persian Gulf (including Persia itself). There were about a score of different prototypes. Some colonies, especially in West Africa, contained two or more quite different legal entities, representing successive archaeological layers of Western penetration. In these circumstances pursuing a consistent colonial policy, with clear long-term aims, was impossible. No empire did so.

Hence there can be no such thing as a balance-sheet of colonialism between the wars, or at any other stage. Broadly speaking, the policy was to provide the basic infrastructure of external defence, internal security, basic roads and public health, and leave the rest to private initiative. Government’s aim was to be efficient, impartial, uncorrupt and non-interventionist. Sometimes the government found itself obliged to run the economy, as Italy did in Somalia and Libya, with conspicuous lack of success.
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It usually had to maintain a broader public sector than at home. Thus Britain, for instance, promoted the modernization and expansion of agriculture and ran public health services in all her crown colonies, and operated state railways in every African territory south of the Sahara (except Rhodesia and Nyasaland). But all this points to a scarcity, not a surplus, of capital. Government did these things from a sense of duty, not desire; they added to the debit side of the ledger.

Colonial governments did little to promote industry but they did not deliberately restrict it either. Usually there was little incentive to invest, shortage of skilled labour and lack of good local markets being the main obstacles. Where conditions were suitable, as in the Belgian Congo, industry appeared between the wars, though the money came chiefly not from Belgium but from foreign sources and foreign-owned subsidiaries – another blow to the conspiracy theory. Dakar in French West Africa was a growth point for exactly the same reason. The notion that colonialism, as such, prevented local industry from developing, breaks down on the simple fact that the free-trading British, Belgians and Dutch, on the one hand, pursued
diametrically opposed policies to the protectionist French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Americans on the other.

From 1923 onwards, and especially after 1932, the British broke their own rules about free trade in order to promote Indian industry. It was the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who persuaded J.N.Tata, the Parsee cotton magnate, to set up an Indian iron and steel industry, for which Britain provided protective tariffs. By 1945 India produced 1.15 million tons annually and Indian producers virtually monopolized the market. Again, in cotton and jute, where conditions for the industry were attractive, the Indians could and did produce the capital themselves, and Britain provided protection. By the time of independence, India had a large industrial sector, with Indian firms handling 83 per cent of banking, 60 per cent of exports-imports and supplying 60 per cent of consumer goods.
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But it is very doubtful that creating local industries behind a tariff barrier worked to the advantage of the general population of a colony. By and large, the inhabitants of the free-trading empires enjoyed higher living standards than the others, as one would expect. India and Pakistan maintained ultra-protectionist policies after independence, with protection levels of 313 and 271 per cent respectively, and that is one reason why their living standards have risen so much more slowly than in the market economies of Eastern Asia.
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On the whole, colonial powers served the interests of local inhabitants best when they allowed market forces to prevail over restrictive policies, however well intentioned. It usually meant moving from subsistence agriculture to large-scale production of cash-crops for export. This so-called ‘distortion’ of colonial economies to serve the purposes of the mother country or world markets is the basis of the charge that these territories were simply ‘exploited’. It is argued that colonies became poorer than before, that their ‘natural’ economies were destroyed, and that they entered into a diseased phase termed ‘underdevelopment’.
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Unfortunately the statistical evidence to prove or refute this theory simply does not exist. Mungo Park’s
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
(1799) does not give the impression of a rural Arcadia where the pursuit of wealth was eschewed: quite the contrary. The independent chiefs were not only imperialists, in their own small way, but exceptionally acquisitive. They moved into cash-crop agriculture wherever they could contrive to find a market. Indeed there was no alternative, once population increases made subsistence farming a dead-end.

The notion that industrialization, as opposed to primary production, is the sole road to high living standards is belied by the experience of former colonies like Australia, New Zealand, much of Canada and the US Midwest, where exports of meat, wool, wheat,
dairy products and minerals have produced the most prosperous countries in the world. It is significant, perhaps, that during the post-colonial period none of the newly independent states with well-established plantation economies has attempted to replace them by other forms of farming. Quite the reverse in fact: all have sought to improve their export-earning potential, usually in order to finance industrial development – which was exactly what most colonial governments were seeking to do in the later phases of the era. There were rarely big and never easy profits to be made out of large-scale tropical agriculture. An analysis of export prices of coffee, cocoa, ground-nuts, cotton, palm oil, rice, gum arabic, kernels and kapok in the French West African territories during the last phase of colonial rule (1953) shows that profits were small and determined largely by the transport system.
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The argument that the advanced economies organized a progressive deterioration in the terms of trade to depress primary prices does not square with the statistical evidence and is simply another aspect of conspiracy theory.

The worst aspects of inter-war colonialism were forced labour and land apportionment on a racial basis. Their origin was as follows. African land could be made productive, and a take-off from subsistence agriculture achieved, only if adequate labour, working European-style regular hours, was made available. In pre-colonial Africa the answer had been slavery. The more progressive colonial powers, Britain and to a lesser extent France, were determined to abolish it. The British preferred to push Africans into the labour market by taxation. Or they imported labour under contract. This was the easy way out. Running a world-wide empire where labour as well as goods could travel freely, they induced Indians to work in Burma, Malaya, the Pacific, Ceylon and in South, Central and East Africa, even in Central and South America; and Chinese to work in South-East Asia, the Pacific, South Africa and Australia. They also brought about big internal movements in Africa, just as the Dutch, in Indonesia, induced Javanese to work in the other islands.
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The effect was to create a large number of intractable race and communal problems (or, in the case of Indonesia, Javanese imperialism) which are still with us. The Dutch also adopted the so-called ‘culture system’ which forced the inhabitants to produce by demanding payment in kind, the state being the chief plantation owner and agent.
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The culture system was adopted by Leopold II, the creator of the Belgian Congo, and became the basis of the economy there, and the Belgians also put pressure on the chiefs to provide ‘volunteers’ who signed long indentures. The French and Portuguese went the whole hog with unpaid
corvées
(forced labour) as a substitute for taxation. The worst cases of oppression occurred in Portuguese
Africa and the Congo. They had largely been ended by 1914, following exposure by British journalists and consular officials. But forced labour in some forms continued right up to the late 1940s.
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Its scale was small, however. Indeed, until comparatively recently the vast majority of Africans remained quite outside the wage economy. As late as the 1950s, out of 170 million Africans south of the Sahara, only 8 million worked for wages at any one time in the year.
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Where wages were high the Africans worked willingly: the Rand goldfield never had any trouble getting labour, from its origin up to this day. Elsewhere it was mostly the same old story: low returns, low investments, low productivity, low wages. No one who actually worked in Africa, white or black, ever subscribed to fantasies about surplus capital. That existed only in Hampstead and Left Bank cafés.

The biggest mistake made by the colonial powers – and it had political and moral as well as economic consequences – was to refuse to allow the market system to operate in land. Here they followed the procedures first worked out in the British colonies in America in the seventeenth century, elaborated to develop the American Midwest and West (to the destruction of the indigenous Indians) and refined, on a purely racial basis, in South Africa. It involved human engineering, and was therefore destructive of the individualistic principle which lies at the heart of the Judaeo–Christian ethic. In South Africa, by 1931, some 1.8 million Europeans had ‘reserves’ of 440,000 square miles, while 6 million Africans were allotted only 34,000 square miles. In Southern Rhodesia, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 gave Europeans, already in possession of 30 million acres, the right to buy a further 34 million acres of crown lands, while Africans, with reserves of 21 million acres, had access only to 7 million more. In Northern Rhodesia the whites already had exclusive possession of 9 million acres. In Kenya this deliberate distortion of the free land market was particularly disgraceful since in 1923 the Duke of Devonshire, as Colonial Secretary, had laid down the ‘Devonshire Declaration’: ‘Primarily Kenya is an African territory … the interests of the African natives must be paramount.’ Despite this, in a deliberate exercise in social engineering, the White Highlands was cleared of its Kikuyu inhabitants to make way for white farmers. In the 1930s, there were in Kenya 53,000 square miles of African reserves, 16,700 reserved for Europeans and 99,000 of crown lands, which the government could apportion according to arbitrary political criteria. The system was indefensible. Indeed it was only defended on the grounds that drawing racial lines was essential to good farming. The argument was false in itself (as subsequent events in
Kenya have demonstrated) and it contradicted the general free-market principles on which the British Empire had been created.

Of course in pressing for the social engineering inherent in the race-determined apportionment of land, the settlers were making a crude response to what to them was an overwhelming fact: the unequal development of human societies. It is a problem fundamental to the species, which already existed in marked form at the time of the Iron Age. The archetype European capitalist empires, which were effectively confined to the years 1870–1945, constituted an uncoordinated and spasmodic, often contradictory, series of attempts to solve the problem presented by the existence of advanced and backward societies in a shrinking world, where contacts between them were inevitable, not least because populations were rising almost everywhere – and expectations too.

The system, if it can be called that, was slow to get itself organized: even the French did not have a Colonial Ministry until 1894, Germany till 1906, Italy 1907, Belgium 1910, Portugal 1911.
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Its ‘classical age’ between the wars was already a kind of twilight. Its existence was too brief to achieve results on its own terms. Developing human and natural resources is a slow, laborious and often bloody business, as the whole of history teaches. Men like Rhodes, Ferry, Lugard, Lyautey and Sarraut shared an unjustified optimism that the process could be speeded up and made relatively painless. Exactly the same illusions were shared by their successors as independent rulers: Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru and scores of others, as we shall see. But most of the poor countries remained in the same position relative to the rich in the 1980s as they were in the 1870s, when the great age of colonialism started.

This leads us to a very important point. Colonialism was a highly visual phenomenon. It abounded in flags, exotic uniforms, splendid ceremonies, Durbars, sunset-guns, trade exhibitions at Olympia and the Grand Palais, postage stamps and, above all, coloured maps. It was, in essence, a cartographic entity, to be perceived most clearly and powerfully from the pages of an atlas. Seen from maps, colonialism appeared to have changed the world. Seen on the ground, it appeared a more meretricious phenomenon, which could and did change little. It came easily; it went easily. Few died either to make it or break it. It both accelerated and retarded, though marginally in both cases, the emergence of a world economic system, which would have come into existence at approximately the same speed if the Europeans had never annexed a single hectare of Asia or Africa. ‘Colonialism’ covered such a varied multiplicity of human arrangements that it is doubtful whether it describes anything specific at all.