The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (68 page)

hypocrisy, which required empire builders to denigrate their Africans

and Asians so they could save them, was also an innovative feature

of the new imperialism. Early generations of empire builders were

equally certain of their cultural superiority, but they never really

pretended that their conquests were for the good of their subjects. No

one in early modern Spain really took the rhetoric of the conquistadors’
requerimiento
seriously. Even more troubling, the rigidity of

national thinking meant that there was little possibility of romanization or
amalgame
in the new imperialism.

The Kenyan imperial state was one of most oppressive manifestations of the new imperialism. It grafted its deceitful legitimizing ideologies onto a highly exploitive model of the kind of old-style settler

colonialism that destroyed the Amerindian and Aboriginal civilizations

of North America and Australia. Dressing the East Africa Protectorate’s pacifi cation campaigns in the garb of liberal humanitarianism was

bad enough, but the settlers’ argument that they were civilizing the

peoples of the highlands by exploiting their labor was simply disgusting. As one dubious offi cial in the Colonial Offi ce acidly noted: “Does

anyone really believe in the educative value of labour on a European

farm?”60 The reality of the settlers’ self-avowed goal of making Kenya

into a “white man’s” country turned Africans into a permanent underclass. To be sure, ancient Britons, medieval Iberians, and early modern

Andeans and Bengalis faced a similar fate, but at least their imperial

rulers made no attempt to disguise their extractive agenda.

In the end, the African territories paid some of the worst returns

in the history of empire. Although the native reserve system ultimately proved effective in forcing Africans to accept extremely low

wages, inexpensive unskilled labor was not worth very much in the

modern industrial era. At best, coerced African labor helped the settlers compensate for their lack of capital, high transportation costs, and

basic agricultural incompetence, but it was not a basis for sustainable

British

Kenya 349

development or even old fashioned imperial extraction. These economic realities were fairly typical of most new imperial territories.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the new empires of the late

nineteenth century proved so ephemeral. Lasting less than a century,

they were almost as short-lived as the aborted Napoleonic empire. The

new British Empire in Africa that Frederick Lugard assumed would

last for centuries fell apart once Africans acquired the means to mount

an effective resistance by developing larger collective, if not protonational, identities based on the common experience of abuse and a

mutual hatred of the imperial regime. In explaining the ultimate collapse of the Kenyan imperial state, Michael Blundell candidly admitted: “It boiled down to whether the British Government could or would

shoot Africans to maintain the status quo for Europeans.”61 Earlier

generations of empire builders would have unfl inchingly obliged the

settlers by killing people, but the Kenyan imperial regime had to at

least make a show of living up to its humanitarian obligations.

Even more fundamentally, the metropolitan British government

was bound by the new imperialism’s legitimizing ideologies. Seeking

to defuse African and Indian nationalism in the post–World War II

era, the Labour government assured subject peoples that they were

full and equal citizens of the empire. Its 1948 Nationality Act put

this promise into law and opened the way for fi rst tens and then

hundreds of thousands of West Indians and South Asians to take the

low-paying menial jobs that were vital to Britain’s postwar reconstruction. Many stayed on to enjoy the higher standards of living in

the imperial metropole. Never imagining that empire building would

have such a profound impact on their own politics and culture, xenophobic Britons responded with race riots in the 1950s and a series of

discriminatory immigration laws that gradually closed the door to

non-European members of the Commonwealth a decade later.

There is no such thing as a liberal empire. The “new” British Empire

in Africa fell quickly once Africans acquired the means to expose its

inherent weaknesses. Like all empire builders, the architects of British Africa grossly underestimated their subjects. In Europe, however,

another band of conquerors once again plunged the continent into

tragedy and chaos by making the same mistake. Few historians see

Adolf Hitler as product of the new imperial era, but his genocidal

attempt to create a continental empire took the logic of the new imperialism to its bloody but inevitable conclusion.

Dunkirk

Luxembourg

(annexed to the

Reich in 1942)

Coastal military

N

zone

Military

administration

Annexed to

of Belgium and

the Reich

Northern France

Paris

Strasbourg

Zone of

Zone of

Zone of

Germany military occupation

German

settlement

From November 1942: Northern Zone

Demilitarized

zone

Vichy

arcation

Italian occupation

zone

em

From November 1942:

Fr

F om November

Southern Zone

1942:

rom November 1942: Southern Zone

Southern Zone

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Italian

occupation

(Nov.

(Nov 1942

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1942

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to

1943)

Sept.

to Sept. 1943)

1943)

Nice

Marseille

Corsica

Italian occupation

0

50

100 mi

(Nov. 1942 to

Sept. 1943)

0

50 100 150 km

France during the Nazi Occupation

7

Imperial Endpoint

In the summer of 1940, the French received a surprisingly unpleasant

reminder of what it meant to become an imperial subject. After overrunning Poland and the Low Countries, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi legions

dealt them a crushing defeat that recalled the sudden and apocalyptic victories of earlier generations of empire builders. Although

France was a global imperial power in its own right, it was vulnerable because a decade of economic decline and fratricidal infi ghting

between left-and right-wing political factions left the nation unready

for war. Moreover, many Frenchmen were determined to avoid being

dragged into another continental confl ict after the carnage of the First

World War had demonstrated the devastating consequences of total

war between “civilized” industrial nation-states.

Nevertheless, the French were aware of the Nazi threat and were

hardly defenseless. With four and a half million men under arms and

a modern air force and tank corps that rivaled the Germans’, they

had good reason to feel secure at the outbreak of the Second World

War. The fall of France did not result from the pronounced military

disparity that made the new imperialism in Africa and Asia feasible.

The Nazis’ advantage lay in their tactics and aggression, qualities

that served earlier imperial conquerors well. While French strategists

planned for the static trench warfare of an earlier era and concentrated

on fortifying the border with Germany, the Nazi forces bypassed the

Maginot Line entirely and invaded France through Luxembourg

and Belgium. The French generals, who had assured themselves that

German tanks could not operate in the Ardennes Forest, were caught

351

352 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

fl at-footed as Nazi armored columns backed by dive-bombers broke

through their lines at Sedan and drove to the coast of the English

Channel. In doing so they cut off a British Expeditionary Force and

the bulk of the French army. After the British escaped from the

beaches of Dunkirk, the Germans easily swept aside the remaining French divisions and advanced on Paris. Shocked French offi cials

declared the French capital an open city, and the Germans rolled into

Paris on June 13, 1940.

The effectiveness of the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) threw

the entire French populace into a panic. It was inconceivable that a

modern imperial power would suffer such a rapid and overwhelming

collapse, but the equally self-confi dent Iberian Visigoths and Inkan

aristocrats would have identifi ed with their profound shock. As in

earlier eras, this astonishment gave way to fears of mass rape, looting,

and destruction. As the Nazis advanced, some Frenchmen grew so

despondent that they took their own lives. These suicides included an

entire farm family in Burgundy, the mayor of Clichy, and Comte Thierry de Martel, a prominent brain surgeon who injected himself with

strychnine. As the comfortable rhythms of modern life suddenly disintegrated, a newly subjugated people once again concluded that the

world was coming to an end.

Terrifi ed that they would suffer the fate of earlier generations of

imperial subjects, between 8 million and 10 million Frenchmen fl ed

south to escape the Nazi invasion. In a matter of days the population

of Reims shrank from 250,000 to 5,000 people, while only 700,000 of

2.8 million Parisians remained behind to face the Germans. Spurred

by rumors that internal enemies had betrayed France to the Nazis,

bureaucrats burned state papers and museum directors packed up their

collections. The capital’s privileged and wealthy classes scrambled for

cars, trains, and any other form of viable transportation. Thomas Kernan, the American editor of the French edition of
Vogue
magazine,

was one of the few who remained behind. “I had a curious feeling of

walking in a surrealist canvas by Salvador Dalí. In the streets of Paris,

without autos, without noise, with only an occasional dwarfed fi gure

on the vast esplanades, I could interpret for the fi rst time the sense

of isolation and alarm in my friend’s weird painting.”1 With approximately one-sixth of its population on the clogged roads south, France

was lucky to escape the devastating epidemics that accompanied the

new imperial conquests in Africa.

France under the Nazis 353

This mass panic contributed to the sense of desperation that

affl icted the remaining French forces. While some units stood bravely,

in other cases infantrymen shot offi cers who insisted on carrying on

the fi ght. Similarly, many mayors in the line of the German advance

refused to let the French army establish defensive positions on the

assumption that further resistance would lead only to the destruction

of their towns. All told, the fi ghting killed approximately forty thousand French civilians, while the French army suffered about one hundred thousand casualties. This fi gure included approximately forty

thousand to fi fty thousand soldiers from France’s North and West

African colonies. Additionally, the Germans took almost two million

prisoners of war. French men in general and the French soldiery in

particular found this total collapse humiliating and ultimately emasculating. By comparison, the peoples of the East African highlands

were actually far more successful in standing up to a conquering

imperial power than the French. Where the Nandi fought a war of

attrition against the new imperialists that lasted ten years, the French

forces collapsed in a matter of weeks.

The German victory demonstrated how easy it was to take over a

modern centralized state with a capitalist industrial economy. But at

least the French were fortunate that the Nazis did not view them as

racially inferior eastern European Slavs, much less subhuman Africans. Showing uncharacteristic restraint for a conquering imperial

power, the German commander in chief promised that civilian lives

and property would be safe so long as they followed orders. Simone

de Beauvoir was pleasantly surprised to fi nd this was the case in

newly occupied Paris: “There were people boating and bathing [in

the Seine], so that it had a strange holiday atmosphere. Moreover

the season, people’s nonchalance, and the low value of time—all that

gives the days a gratuitous air, rather charming but rather disturbing.”2 De Beauvoir’s only injury came from a chocolate bar thrown

from a truck by a German soldier, and she observed that her friends

never would have fl ed Paris had they known the invaders would have

been so well behaved.

The Nazis’ initially restrained behavior in France was the result

of a specifi c policy termed Operation Seduction. Seeking to keep the

population compliant while they completed the conquest of France,

Germans gave up their seats to old women and young mothers on the

Paris Métro and put up posters showing their men feeding emaciated

354 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

children with the caption “Abandoned Populations—Put Your Trust

in the German Soldier.”3 This hollow propaganda had echoes of the

humanitarian rhetoric that the western powers used to legitimize the

new imperialism, and Operation Seduction seduced few people. As a