Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10 Colonial Encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania (1750-1950)

• An elaborate assembly in India called a durbar was mounted to mark the coronation of British monarch Edward VII as emperor of India
• The durbar showcased the splendor of the British Empire, and its pageantry included sporting events, a state ball, a display of Indian arts, crafts, jewels and an enormous parade of British officials and Indian princes passing by on bejeweled elephants

Industry and Empire

• The Industrial Revolution generated new economic needs that were solved abroad
• New affluence lead to the need for raw materials and agricultural products like, wheat, meat, bananas, rubber, cocoa and palm oil
• It created a need to sell products abroad
• Wealthy Europeans saw social benefits to foreign markets because they kept the factories humming
• English imperialist Cecil Rhodes stated the importance of imperialism to avoid civil war by creating new markets
• Thus, imperialism solved class conflicts of the industrializing society by avoiding revolution

Colonial Rivalries

• By 1871, the unification of Italy and Germany intensified Europe's international competitive relations, and much of this rivalry spilled over into the struggle for economic concessions/colonies
• Overseas expansion was made possible with steam-driven ships, the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, and the underwater telegraph
• The discovery of quinine to prevent malaria greatly reduced European death rates in the tropics
• Breech-loading rifles and machine guns vastly widened the military gap between Europeans and everyone else

Changing Perceptions

• Europe defined others in religious terms as heathen until the industrial age
• Europe unlocked the secrets of nature, created unprecedented wealth, and used it to produce unsurpassed military power which became the criteria to judge themselves
• The opinions of other cultures dropped and the Chinese were reduced to "John Chinaman" while African societies were demoted to tribes and leaders being chiefs
• People of Pacific Oceania were regarded as big children who lived closer to nature
• Increasingly, Europeans viewed Asian and African peoples through scientific racism
• Race determined human intelligence, moral development, and destiny

Social Darwinism

• Adherents applied Charles Darwin's evolutionary concept of "the survival of the fittest" to human society
• Suggesting European dominance inevitably led to the displacement or destruction of backward peoples
• Imperialism, war, and aggression seemed natural and progressive and weeding out weaker people
• Ideas Industrializing and powerful Europeans had when confronting the peoples of Asia and Africa

A Second Wave of European Conquests

• From 1750 to 1900, the Americas represented the end of the first phase of European Conquests and the expansion moved to Asia, Africa, and Oceania
• Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United States, and Japan were new to the second phase, while Spain and Portugal started having minor roles
• Europeans preferred informal control, which occurred through occasional military intervention and economic penetration by avoiding colonies
• They took advantage of moments of local weakness such as drought
• The European empires in Afro-Asia, involved military force or the threat of it
• Increasingly, Europeans possessed overwhelming firepower, which came from repeating rifles and machine guns
• African, Asian, and Oceanic peoples of Incorporating and gathering in Australia, agricultural villages, societies, or chiefdoms on Pacific islands lost political freedom

Colonial Status

• India and Indonesia, the colonial conquest grew out of interaction with European trading firms, authorized to conduct military operations and exercise political and administrative control
• The British East India Company, played the leading role in the colonial takeover of South Asia
• The fragmentation of the Mughal Empire and the absence of cultural or political unity invited European penetration
• Britain and the Dutch did not have a clear conquest plan

Africa and the Pacific

• Most of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands, conquest came in the second half of the nineteenth century
• The "scramble for Africa," involved half a dozen European powers partitioning the continent among themselves from 1875–1900
• They were surprised by the speed with which they acquired huge territories, which they knew nothing about

Conquest

• It included negotiations among the Great Powers and military action
• The French took sixteen years to conquer the West African empire led by Samori Toure.
• The most difficult to subdue were decentralized societies so Europeans confronted no central authority with which to negotiate or that they might defeat
• The colonial conquest of Africa was resisted

Under European Rule

• Incorporation into European colonial empires caused small-scale societies to loss of life, homes, cattle, crops, and land
• For the Vietnamese elite, conquest meant harmonies of life were disrupted and water flowed uphill
• Confucian thinking, conquest meant natural harmonies of life were disrupted and conquered

Cooperation and Rebellion

• Although violence was prominent, groups cooperated with colonial authorities for their own advantage through employment, status, and security
• Indian princes, Muslim emirs, and African rulers, from elite families found possible advantages in retaining earlier influence
• The colonial state consisted of hundreds of French administrators and thousands of African "chiefs"

European Education

• Governments and missionary organizations promoted European education and from the process arose a Western-educated class
• They served the colonial state, European businesses, and Christian missions as teachers, clerks, translators, and administrators
• Colonial governments and business enterprises depended on the Western-educated class who were preferred over traditional elites
• Rebellions erupted periodically and the Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858 was famous
• Because Hindus venerated cows and Muslims regarded pigs as unclean, both groups saw the innovation as a plot to render them defiled
• Led to a series of grievances, including the loss of power, peasants and weavers, landlords overtaxed by moneylenders

Colonial Empires

• European colonial empires were were unique because of scientific racism in Europe coinciding with Asian and African colonies
• In East Africa, white men were addressed as bwana (Swahili for "master"), whereas Europeans regularly called African men "boy.”
• Indian judges hearing cases involving whites provoked outrage

Racial Segregation

• In colonies with a large European settler population, racial segregation was more pronounced
• South Africa had extreme the use of African labor which led to an apartheid
• The colonial states were able to penetrate the governed societies through centralized tax bureaucracies, new communication and transportation, changes in landholding patterns, integration of economies to a global network, public health and sanitation
• The British found and idealized the caste system in India that made it possible to bring order
• Europeans identified and invented tribes in colonies in Africa, each with its own defined territory, language, customs, and chief
• Gender entered into the efforts of Europeans to define themselves, with European colonizers taking pride in their active masculinity while defining others as soft, passive, and feminine
• Colonizers contradicted their own beliefs like democracy.

Comparing Colonial Economies

• Colonial rule affected the lives of its subject people most prominently in their work
• The state, with its to tax, to seize land for European enterprises, to compel labor, and to build railroads, ports, and roads – played an important role
• Even more powerful was the growing integration of colonized societies into a world economy that demanded their gold, diamonds, copper, tin, rubber, coffee, cotton, sugar, cocoa
• Old ways of working were eroded and subsistence farming decreased

Economies of Coercion

• Forced and unpaid labor was on public state projects, in French Africa, for ten days a year through 1946
• The infamous cruelties of forced labor occurred during the early twentieth century in the Congo Free State, by King Leopold II of privately governed Belgium
• Private companies in the Congo forced villagers to collect rubber which was in demand of bicycle which lead to terror
• Outrages were publicized in Europe, the government took control in 1908
• Peasants cultivated 20 percent of land for cash crops such as sugar in return for obligations

Cash Crop Agriculture

• Many Asian and African peoples produced for an international market
• British Burma acted to increase rise production and under these conditions the Irrawaddy Delta boomed, and migrants poured and rice exports soared
• Led to destruction of mangrove forests in Mekong Delta of French Vietnam
• African farmers took the initiative to develop export agriculture and plant cacao in Ghana to become the world's leading supplier
• Labor fostered former slaves, some men married women for labor power.
• Colonies came to specialize in one or two cash crops, creating an unhealthy dependence when world market prices dropped as international market increased.

Wage Labor Migration

• Colonial societies involved wage labor in some European enterprise and millions sought employment in plantations, mines, construction, and homes across Africa
• Colonized migrants were joined million Chinese and Japanese, created vast steams parallel to Europeans
• Africans stayed as "squatters." With the Giykuyu and Kamba people , highlands were taken over by 4,000 white farmers
• They worked in mines with work reserved for white miners

Continued Migrations

• Asians were in motion with 29 million Indians and 19 million Chinese migrated across Asia to work in plantations
• Impoverished workers were subject to strict control, often housed in barracks, and paid poorly
• British colonial authorities in India facilitated the migration of millions of Indians to sites elsewhere
• Chinese migrated to Manchuria urged by the government.
• Dennis Kearney led a anti-immigrant labor organization with the slogan and the "Chinese must go.

Colonial Cities

• Cities had migrants in Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Calcutta, Batavia and was opportunity
• The spectrum had elites, absentee landlords, and Western-educated specialists
• Laborers were those who worked in factories that processed agricultural goods or manufactured basic products
• the urban poor consisted of const workers, rickshaw drivers, food sellers, domestic servants, and prostitutes.

Women in the Colonial Economy

• In Africa, women were active farmers, with harvest, and food preparation
• Men cleared, herded, and assisted with men who went more for export
• Women's work week increased

Colonial Development

• Colonial rule served to further the integration of Asian and African economies into a global network while also facilitating colonial control through infrastructure and schools
• Modernization was appearing yet it only impacted things inadequately
• Nowhere in the world did major breakthrough to occur in industrial society as India was one of the poorest countries
• Colonial nationalism surged across Asia and Africa under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah.

Identity and Culture

• Colonial rule generated new patterns of identity through western education
• The knowledge of reading and writing often suggested magical powers
• These people embraced European custom to make the society more westernized, many were inspired at the start to cooperate
• Western-educated people had contempt for pagan who could not read and saw themselves modernizing culture and thought colonial was best future.
• In India men reformed societies like Hinduism, though disappointment quickly set in for colonials did not value native cultures.

Religion

• Religion provided the opportunity to transform identities during the colonial era, especially where conversion to Christianity was abundant like Africa
• Missionaries found success were they provided education on how to resist the older gods.
• There were gender issues like woman and female circumcision, which led to many breaking away and forming own separate practices
• The Africanization of Christianity became common

Swami Vivekananda

• Leading intellectuals began to define a religion called Hinduism, in efforts to provide a culture to go against colonial rule.

Race

• Racial identity was forged to confront upheaval to colonial life
• African thinkers started becoming more familiar with cultures
• An effort to revived colonial self-confidence by articulating larger views were expressed by Blyden; he believed they both world races are diverse each with distinct contributions Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans needed tribes to fit in.

Tribe

• Migrants catagorized themselves in larger ethnic terms that united
• Colonial cities shared more diverse group in where tribes made them a whole
• Igbo who previously had no identity created one under the colonial setting
• Europeans believed Africans belonged to tribes; Africans then believed tribes to belong.

Understanding History

• Often made from from unequal groups but no intended outcome
• Colonial rule had limits and did not get what they wanted
• People were made in the image of god and not of an lesser creation, so people should stretch forward their wings and fly