Hi, welcome back. Make yourself comfortable.

I want to talk in this presentation

about
some of the different forms this modern imperialism took. Well, to start with,
there are simply
national variations on an old theme. Empires aren't new. Through time immemorial,
rulers
thought of a way to get more riches. It's just to get more land or
get more stuff. And the way to get more land or more stuff
was to go raid the people who had it. So in the age of national industrial
empires, there's plenty of that. What does add a different wrinkle to
it is it's being done in the name of the superiority of a nation. Or the
superiority of a race,
these racial hierarchies. In the traditional world,
different races fought each other, and one might be stronger than another. But they
didn't have the comforts
of pseudoscience to tell them that one was better than another. But still,
the traditional themes are there. The search among some for pure plunder. Here's an
example of a market in east
Africa, in Zanzibar, for elephant ivory. You can see, gathered at the market,
some of the different traders. The European trader, some Arab traders. And some of
the local inhabitants
involved in the trade. In other parts of Africa,
the situation was much worse than that. In an earlier presentation, we talked about
what King Leopold
did in his Congo Free State. The Germans and their colonies extorted everything
they could from the local inhabitants. There were, predictably,
uprisings from local tribes. The Germans put down those
rebellions with wholesale massacres. Here's an example of just
one photograph taken during the Herero Revolt in
German South West Africa. As the Europeans and their native allies
are standing by the bodies of some of the slaughtered tribesmen. Another
traditional feature of these
new empires is settler colonialism. This is not the notion that I'm coming to
these places in order to get some stuff. This is, I'm coming to these places
in order to bring my people and settle down and create new domains. After all,
that's what happened in British
North America and Spanish North America. Indeed, by the year 1800, the Europeans
and the descendents of Europeans probably make up at least 80 to 90% of
the population of all of North America. A similar phenomenon is
happening in Australia, in South Africa, in New Zealand, and the steppess of
Central Asia as
the Russian Empire expands, and so on. Another different variety of imperialism,
though, that's new to the 1800s is what one pair of historians have
called the Imperialism of Free Trade. This concept is always
associated with the historians Robinson, And Gallagher. What are some of the ideas
here? One is there is no overall
master design for empire. Their work mainly focuses
on the British Empire. No necessary push, For formal control. Instead, their
argument is that
the government is just looking to secure conditions of free trade. It runs into
different situations,
encounters different problems. Its responses are opportunistic, episodic, man-on-
the-spot. And then the governments make up their
minds how to cope with the new situations. But cumulatively, over time,
the result is the British find themselves extending their
domains to this base there, that trade concession there,
that colony here, that war there. And over time the result is the British
find themselves ruling a large empire, stumbled into, as one other author put it,
in a fit of absence of mind. Yet another strain,
really important in the late 1800s and into the 20th century,
is liberal imperialism. What is meant by liberal imperialism? Doesn't that seem
like
a contradiction in terms? It wasn't to the people at the time. And to understand
them,
you have to understand this concept. It's especially important in Britain. And to a
lesser degree, in France. And it becomes important
in the United States, too, when the Americans find themselves
drawn into the imperial fever. The true rush for
empire is already on in the 1880s. The Americans don't get fully involved
in this until they stumble into it in the course of a war with Spain in 1898.
Nearly 20 years after all of the other
great powers have already been scrambling all over the world to grab domains for
themselves. Some Americans had felt that they
were falling too far behind. But most other Americans didn't have
an appetite for imperial conquest. They did, however,
have an appetite to do good. This notion of the civilizing
mission is powerful. Is it hypocritical to some degree in which
people mask their selfish motives behind professions of good intentions? Sure. Are
some of the good intentions genuine
and buttressed by some genuine good deeds? Also true. Here is an early 20th century
example of
how one cartoonist was actually trying to justify what America had done for the
foreign peoples who had
fallen under its control. So for example, the artist is contrasting
the Philippines under Spanish oppression, the great weight, with the Philippines
that now have a Filipino assembly, education, businessman. Or Hawaii that had been
labouring under
industrial slavery of rich planters, and now Hawaii has become
a more prosperous place. Puerto Rico and
Cuba under the Spanish yoke. Well, you can see Puerto Rico, prosperity,
the Cubans now have self-government. The Isthmus of Panama broken down,
tin pot military dictators, replaced by the healthy, robust, and need
I say it, prosperous Panama Canal Zone. When the Americans were having their
great debate about whether to acquire any imperial possessions. Debate that reaches
it height in 1898 and
1899. The great poet laureate of empire,
Rudyard Kipling, contributed this poem to the American
debate about The White Man's Burden. It's interesting to notice
Kipling's argument. Take up the White Man's burden. Send forth the best ye breed,
go, bind your sons to exile,
to serve your captives' need. To wait in heavy harness
on fluttered folk and wild. Your new-caught sullen peoples,
half devil and half child. Yes, of course, racially patronizing. But he's calling
on the Americans to
accept the burden, the white man's burden. Take up the savage wars of peace, fill
full the mouth of famine,
and bid the sickness cease. And when your goal is nearest,
the end for others sought) unselfishly, watch sloth and heathen folly
bring all your hope to nought. Comes now, he said, you should search your
manhood through all the thankless years. Cold, edged, with dear-bought wisdom,
you earn the judgment of your peers. By which, of course, he means the judgment
of people like him in England. Of course, there's also a commercial side
to The White Man's Burden as we can see illustrated by, again,
this advertisement for Pears' Soap. A potent factor brightening
the dark corners of the earth. It's hard to read or look at some of this. But it's
absolutely necessary if you want
to understand the mental climate of that age, in which even the progressive-minded
people sincerely believed that they were doing good. Although a lot of other
progressive people
were attacking the hypocrisy of all of this. But in fact, in the United States, one
of the biggest sources of
anti-imperialism was racism. A lot of Americans didn't want America
to get involved in the affairs of racially different places. Didn't want Americans
to take
responsibility for dark peoples. So what's been picked up here
in this civilizing mission? Well, one idea is that the ruler
should bring law, legal codes, courts, the administration of justice. And this
turns out to be really
important in many of these places. Tthe legal systems in
places like India and much of Africa today are descendants
of the imperial systems. They're also bringing order
between warring tribes. The outsider becomes
the umpire of disputes. They also bring protection to people who
are suffering from the predatory attacks of rival tribes. For instance, if you were
to watch an old
American movie called The Real Glory, made at the end of the 1930s,
stars Gary Cooper and David Niven. The Hollywood film stars are playing
American soldiers in the Philippines, guarding the Filipino settlers
from the predatory raids of Moro tribesmen in the Southern Philippines. One of
those thankless jobs
bearing the white man's burden, as Kipling would have put it. Well, what about
those anti-imperialists? Back in Europe, the most powerful
voice against imperialism was coming from the socialists. The socialists thought
that imperialism
was just a mask for greedy capitalism. But the socialists themselves,
of course, had a hierarchy too. If you were a young Filipino, or
young Cuban, or young Asian, and you wanted to join
the International Socialist Movement, you'd be part of what was called
the Second International. Drawn from the number of an international
congress of socialists in the late 1800s. But, as part of the of
the Second International, again, there would be a hierarchy. And again, that
hierarchy of the socialist
movement had Europeans at the top. And as we're talking about these varieties
of imperialism, maybe the most important variety that I want to talk to you
about in this presentation is this one. Imperial partnerships. Let's take a little
bit of
time to understand this. You have this image of
the traditional world, perhaps, in which, You have a ruling elite. Let's think of
them as lords,
warrior chiefs, priests. Then, over here, you have subjects. Common people, mainly
subsistence farmers. Maybe over time, there's some
intermediary group that grows up. In Europe, this might have
been an aristocracy of nobles. In China, we might think of
the Confusian scholar-gentry. In the Islamic world, we might think of the Imams.
The learned religious elite who were
separating themselves from the formal government apparatus in the way
I talked about earlier. So what happens when the foreign
empire rearranges this landscape? Let's take, for example,
the British situation. You might think that what happens is,
British rulers with all the local people being subjects. But that would be wrong.
Instead, a better image is to
think of a very small number of British civilian rulers,
really, a handful. A district of 50,000 people in India
might have one British district official. And sometimes the proportions
are even more outlandish than that. So just a very tiny number
of British civilians and some military people relative
to the size of the population. Who are working in
partnership with a colonial elite, Made up of local people. Who are those local
people? Well, sometimes you might just make
your partners the old ruling elite. Take India, for example. A large part of India
is actually
being ruled by feudal princes. These princes are partners
of the British government. They're subsidized for
the British government. There might be a British resident that's
advising the Maharaja about how to run his principality. But think of this as a
partnership
of a British ruling elite and a local ruling elite. Sometimes, the British disturb
the original ruling elite. They might pick out people from the
aristocracy or the gentry, or they might overthrow the old hierarchy and elevate
other people who used to be subordinated. For instance, in the old Mughal Empire,
the Muslim ruling elite was in charge. The British in Bengal, for example,
are elevating some people who might not have had important
positions under the old regime. But the point is that most of
the jobs of governance, and most of the jobs in business, and
even to a large degree in finance, are held by local people who had become
partners in running the country. There are still a large
number of subjects. So in the colonial era,
mostly they're downtrodden, except that now the ruling elite has
a thin layer of foreigners at the top, plus a lot of local rulers and
junior partners. When those local partners were white, The British end up turning
over
the government of the colony to them. They create systems of
self-government called dominions, the so-called white dominions. Good examples
would be Canada and
Australia. They're autonomous by 1900. It's in places like India, where the
British are unwilling to share the power at the very top with the local elites,
in part, frankly because of racial prejudice and a color line, that the local
elite retain a certain junior status. But it's still really important
to see these relationships at the top as partnerships. Because the British
are constantly negotiating and renegotiating the terms of their
partnerships with the local people who are actually doing most of
the work in running the place. If you understand this point, a lot of things in the
20th
century will make more sense too. A lot of the process of ending
colonialization just meant renegotiating the terms of these partnerships. All this
discussion of partnerships
may seem pretty dry to you. Let me try to make this real. Let's look at India, the
year is 1877. First image. The British colonial regime
holds an enormous ceremony, overseen by the viceroy of India. See, British used to
have
a governor general, now the queen, Queen Victoria, is the queen empress. Her ruler
in India is the viceroy,
in this particular case, Earl Lytton. But at the very highest level surrounding
the viceroy at this ceremony, take a look at the people in the audience. You don't
have to notice
the figures in particular. Just notice what you see is
a number of Europeans mixed in with many Indian nobles of various kinds. Maharajas
and
other kinds of Indian notables. That audience is a good symbol
of the imperial partnership. But at almost the same time that that
beautiful ceremony was taking place, horrors were occurring in
the southern part of India. The horrors are caused
by a couple of things. First, bad crops. Second, an awful lot of Indian produce is
now being devoted to the global market. Indian foodstuffs are being
sold to a worldwide market, where they'll command a good price. But that means that
foodstuffs
are not available in the poor, drought-stricken areas of southern India. The result
is an utter calamity,
a famine on a staggering scale. Millions of people
are threatened with starvation. The British are in charge of
distributing famine relief. But the government, animated by a rather doctrinaire
version of liberal economic philosophy, believes the government shouldn't
do too much to help these people. And of course, the government is
in partnership with private firms, both Indian and British, that
are involved in the commerce of selling India's food supplies to the world market.
The result, then,
is an image like this one. This was published, actually,
in a London illustrated magazine in 1877. It shows the picture of the British
officials coming to the Indian village full of starving people to distribute
meager bits of famine rations. This effort will fail catastrophically,
by the way. Millions of Indians starved to death
in the Great Famine of 1877, 1878. It's right to look to
the British government for a share of the responsibility for
this catastrophe. But it's also right to
understand India is being run by a British-Indian partnership in
which the elites on both sides preferred to keep things
the way they were. Well all this imperial fever
is about to come to a head. It's about to come to a head as
all the vultures are gathering around the greatest world prize of all,
China. My next presentation is going to talk
about what happened to China in the 1890s. See you then