The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (57 page)

British “trader” who had tortured two alleged cattle thieves to death.

Even Meinertzhagen admitted that a grasping protectorate offi cial

provoked the Nandi by using punitive expeditions as an excuse to

confi scate their cattle, which they kept primarily for themselves.

292 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Yet Meinertzhagen was equally representative of the marginal

men who sought wealth and status through empire in the highlands.

While he disdained the company employees who were driven by simple greed, he and his fellow military offi cers sought fame and rapid

promotion by winning glory on African battlefi elds. Likening the

Nandi people to “a troublesome schoolboy” that had to be whipped,

he had no reservations about using brutal and morally questionable

tactics to achieve his goals. He admitted frankly in his memoirs: “I

have no belief in the sanctity of human life or in the dignity of the

human race. Human life has never been sacred; nor has man, except

for a few occasional cases, been dignifi ed.”2

Meinertzhagen put this ruthless pragmatism into practice when

he met Koitalel on October 19, 1905, to discuss a truce. The Nandi

orkoiyot
did not make Atawallpa’s mistake in underestimating an

invading foreigner, but he still made the fatal error of assuming that

Meinertzhagen would behave honorably. Claiming that Koitalel was

plotting an ambush, the British offi cer brazenly shot the
orkoiyot
to

death when the two leaders met to shake hands. Meinertzhagen’s men

then opened fi re and killed twenty-three more members of Koitalel’s

entourage. Accounts differ, but it appears that Koitalel was holding

nothing more than a bundle of grass, which was the Nandi symbol

for peace. In retelling the ambush story in his memoirs, Meinertzhagen professed to like the Nandi and claimed that he saved them from

further destruction by removing a tyrant.3

Pizarro would have approved, but this tested the British liberal

sympathies of the time. Although Meinertzhagen faced three separate army review boards to answer for his actions, there was no

denying that the death of the
orkoiyot
broke the back of the Nandi

resistance. The Nandi Field Force killed six hundred warriors and

seized ten thousand of their cattle, which largely went into the herds

of the rival Maasai. A follow-up punitive expedition killed fi fty more

people, seized more livestock, and burned almost 150 acres of crops.

Faced with starvation, the Nandi capitulated. Under the terms of the

peace settlement, they surrendered large sections of territory to the

railway and European settlement.

Eventually, Meinertzhagen’s superiors covered up the incident

by recommending him for the Victoria Cross. He went on to distinguish himself in the First World War as the chief intelligence offi cer

in Palestine and a friend of T. E. Lawrence, an aid at the Paris Peace

British

Kenya 293

Conference, and the military advisor to the postwar Colonial Offi ce.

Upon retirement he achieved an additional measure of fame as an

ornithologist with an enormous collection of stuffed birds (“study

skins”) and as a chronicler of Lawrence. It was only decades after his

death that it came to light that he had stolen many of these specimens

from other collections, plagiarized a book on Arabian birds, and written his supposedly contemporaneous diary entries about Lawrence

in the 1950s.4 Meinertzhagen’s success and wealth never reached the

levels of the conquistadors or nabobs, but he was reasonably typical

of the “civilized” men who conquered Kenya for the British Empire.

The conquest of the highlands and Britain’s rapid imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century were surprising given that Europeans appeared to have sworn off conventional imperial projects after

the quick demise of Napoleon’s continental empire. In Europe and to

some extent North America, conquest and prolonged occupation now

provoked violent resistance as westerners defi antly rejected imperial subjecthood as a violation of their natural rights as citizens of

a nation. Many Britons accepted the loss of their North American

colonies because they were confi dent in their global economic and

strategic dominance in the postwar era. Many concluded that formal

empire was an expensive tyrannical relic, particularly after the Indian

Mutiny and the steady transition of the Canadian and Australian colonies to self-governing dominions by midcentury. Mindful of Adam

Smith’s attack on empire as a source of war, corruption, and fi nancial

drain, John Bright, Richard Cobden, and other free traders openly

questioned the value of the remaining overseas territories.

These anti-imperial sentiments were at the root of Sir Charles

Adderley’s call to withdraw from West Africa in the 1860s. Arguing

that disease made British naval bases and enclaves in the Gold Coast,

Lagos, Freetown, and the Gambia “notoriously unfi t for occupation

by the Anglo-Saxon race,” the member of Parliament charged that

they were expensive luxuries that drew Britain into costly wars. Even

more problematic, their inhabitants paid no taxes and thus contributed nothing to the one-million-pound annual maintenance costs of

the naval bases. The proposal to withdraw from West Africa appeared

radical, but only missionaries and palm oil merchants made the case

for keeping a presence in West Africa. Adderley acknowledged the

importance of tropical products, but in 1865 his Select Committee on

Africa (Western Coast) concluded that while it was not yet possible

294 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

to give up the coastal settlements, the British government should

still “encourage in the natives the exercise of those qualities which

may render it possible for us more and more to transfer to them the

administration of all the Governments, with a view to our ultimate

withdrawal from all, except, probably, Sierra Leone.”5

These “natives” were mostly westernized Sierra Leonean Krios,

who were descended from rescued slaves, black North American loyalists, and poor Britons of African descent. Adderley’s committee

wanted to make the West African enclaves more effi cient by partnering with these Afro-Victorians to advance British interests. The

Krios and other western-educated Africans warmly embraced this

recommendation because they assumed that they would become the

privileged imperial class in the West African territories. Their newspapers in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast therefore openly advocated expansion into the interior, but they had no idea that in just a

few short years they would be disenfranchised by the new imperialism’s inherent racism.

In the 1860s, however, they had an important role in Adderley’s

vision of an informal empire. Arguing that Britain did not need permanent control to advance trade and investment, this pragmatic coalition of cost-cutters and free-traders assumed that the era of formal

empire was over. They believed that this was true not only in subSaharan Africa and other remote places but also in Latin America,

where British merchants and industrialists found profi table outlets

for trade and investment without having to reimpose imperial rule

on the former Spanish colonies. With most of continental Europe still

struggling to recover from the Napoleonic wars, the British had no

serious rivals at midcentury. In Africa, apart from the French conquest of Algeria and steady expansion up the Senegal River valley,

British merchants largely had the continent to themselves until the

1870s.

This is not to say, however, that the British ever intended to give

up their empire. In fact, the formal British Empire continued to grow

by approximately one hundred square miles per year during this

period, but most of the new acquisitions were strategically important

naval bases or bits of territory claimed by the increasingly autonomous “white” settlement colonies in Australia, Canada, and South

Africa. When the British public looked with pride on the pink-hued

territories on the globe, they were gazing at these territories and not

British

Kenya 295

the tropical regions that became the hunting grounds of men such as

Meinertzhagen.

British politicians lost faith in their network of informal infl uence and free trade only after European rivals, and to a lesser extent

the United States and Japan, reentered the global arena as industrial

and commercial powers. While British manufacturers still turned

out simple products such as textiles and hardware, their continental

rivals leapfrogged ahead in the production of steel, chemicals, and

electrical goods. Consequently, Britain’s share of global manufacturing output shrank from 33 percent to just 14 percent between 1870

and 1914. To make matters worse, the nation went from agricultural

self-suffi ciency to importing half its annual food needs as its farm

output dropped steadily during the same period.6

These troubling developments provided the backdrop for the great

depression of 1873, which was probably the single most important

factor in sparking renewed interest in empire. Although crises of

overproduction had beset the developing European industrial economies every seven to ten years in the preceding decades, the crash of

1873 was unprecedented in its scope and severity. Faced with dismal

investment prospects, plummeting prices, and widespread unemployment, the industrial powers worried that their economies could grow

no further. In Britain, panicked factory owners, fi nanciers, and traders blamed the depression on the high tariff barriers of rival nations

rather than admitting their inability to keep pace. Rejecting Adderley’s warnings about the limited value of formal empire, they called

for an expanded British imperial presence in tropical regions that

were not yet open to western commerce and investment. Britain’s

continental rivals came to similar conclusions and rushed to reserve

new African and Asian markets and sources of raw materials.

The subjugation of the East African highlands was part of this

larger European conquest and partition of the African continent in

the late nineteenth century. Historians lump this frenzy of empire

building, along with the western powers’ occupation of South Pacifi c

islands, dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, seizure of spheres of

infl uence in China, and economic dominance of Latin America, under

the heading of the “new imperialism.” This global wave of imperial

expansion was possible because the unifying power of nationalism

and the industrial revolution gave westerners a relatively brief measure of military and commercial superiority over Africans and Asians.

296 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Rather than being backward primitives, these new imperial victims

were states and peoples whose sophistication, numbers, inhospitable

climates, and/or geographical remoteness had spared them from early

modern European empire building. In the late nineteenth century,

ambitious European, American, and Japanese opportunists exploited

these advantages to claim new empires and spheres of infl uence. For

a brief window, permanent imperial rule once again appeared feasible

and cost-effective in regions where the nation-state model had not

yet taken hold.

Today, the new imperialism rivals Rome as the most popularly

imagined model of empire, but the terms
new
and
imperialism
both

require careful examination and explanation. The “old” imperialism

referred to the American conquistador states and settlement colonies

and the Asian chartered company empires of the early modern era.

What was “new” about the conquest of the East African highlands

was that it entailed the subjugation of the Nandi and other peoples

who had escaped the fi rst round of European imperial expansion but

now lacked the means to deal with the growing power of the west. The

discovery that quinine provided prophylactic protection from malaria

allowed westerners to operate in tropical regions for extended periods, and repeating rifl es, light fi eld artillery, and the Maxim gun gave

them the means to win inexpensive victories over much larger musket-equipped African armies. These advances made the new imperialism feasible by reducing the cost of conquest.

The new generation of late nineteenth-century imperial speculators fi rst had to rehabilitate empire before they could exploit

this imbalance. Imperial projects had a bad reputation in the mid nineteenth-century western world after the devastation of the Napoleonic wars. Americans proudly imagined themselves as anti-imperial

rebels, and in Europe Adderley and other liberals and free-traders

dismissed empire as anachronistic and authoritarian. Indeed, the

word
imperialism
fi rst emerged as a pejorative synonym for
empire

building
when British critics coined it to attack Napoleon III’s Second French Empire. In 1858, an anonymous article in the
Westmin-

ster Review
charged that in proclaiming himself emperor Napoleon’s

nephew aspired to “permanent military despotism,” and the author

quite correctly noted that “the permanent continuance of Imperialism resolves itself plainly into the establishment of undisguised military rule and the triumph of brute force.”7
Imperialism
never lost