From Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times”:
“There were as many (5,000) French officials in Indo-China as in the whole of British India, with fifteen times the population, and they were closely with the French colon planters.”
Alternatively, this could reflect the docility of Indians relative to Indo-Chinese or the supervisory requirements of different forms of resource extraction. But shortly afterward he notes that there were 15,000 French officials in Morocco.
I’ve neglected giving samples earlier, but on reading there seem to be a lot worth blogging in a short space.
Another quote: “Two years [after the ‘Four Communes’ of West Africa sent a black deputy to the Chambre in 1919] Rene Maran’s Batoula, giving the black man’s view of colonialism, won the Prix Goncourt. But the book was banned in all France’s African territories. Clever blacks learned to write superb French; but once they got to Paris they tended to stay there. In the 1930s, Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, felt so at home in right-wing Catholic circles he became a monarchist.”
“As a matter of fact, the rise of the Japanese Empire […] came closest to the model of a deliberately willed development by an all-powerful ruling establishment. But the Japanese model was scarcely ever considered by the European theorists. And in any case Japanese expansion was often dictated by assertive military commanders on the spot, who exceeded or even disobeyed the orders of the ruling group. That was the French pattern too. Algeria was acquired as a result of army insubordination; Indo-China had been entered by overweening naval commanders; it was the marines who got France involved in West Africa. In one sense the French Empire could be looked upon as a gigantic system of outdoor relief for army officers.”
When reading the above, keep in mind the problem of “rogue” traders.
Johnson almost seems to contradict himself with the following: “But forced labour in some forms continued right up to the late 1940s. It’s scale was small, however. Indeed, until comparatively recently the vast majority of Africans remained quite outside the wage economy.” The French/Portugese unpaid corvee as opposed to the British taxation system is precisely what we’d expect from a pre-cash economy.
This bit sounds like James Scott: “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.”
Earlier he had contrasted the fates of the relatively free trading British, Dutch and Belgian colonies with the protectionist ones of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and America as evidence for the merits of each policy. But later he says “Britain could be just to her colonial subjects so long as she was a comparatively wealthy nation. A rich power could run a prosperous and well-conducted empire. Poor nations, like Spain and Portugal, could not afford justice or forgo exploitation.” So there seems an obvious problem in determining causation.
More on old rich countries vs poor ones: “Losses from the United Kingdom [in the Great War] were not so enormous: 702,410 dead. They were comparable with Italy’s, which bounded with vitality in the 1920s. But of course Italy’s population was still rising fast.” Johnson blames the “numerous” and “high quality” war poets for an obsession “with death, futility and waste” and their “unheroic” if not defeatist literature for giving rise to a “myth of the ‘lost generation'”. Instead many of the casualties are suggested to be “misfits or failures”.
October 18, 2011 at 12:34 pm
The French “gigantic system of outdoor relief for army officers” of course parallels the course of the Roman empire’s expansion, in which military commanders sought to conquer new territories that they might obtain proconsular status and the accompanying advancement in Rome’s domestic politics. Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul is prototypical of the later Gallic conquests.
The British empire, on the other hand, was a commercial enterprise from the start. Its earliest colonial ventures were organized as joint stock companies: the East India Company, royally chartered in 1600; the Virginia Company of London, chartered in 1606; the Massachusetts Bay Company, chartered in 1629; and the Hudson Bay Company, chartered in 1670, illustrate the commercial origins of British colonialism. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century, there was a strong preference amongst British colonial administrators (e.g., Lord Salisbury) for a modest and commercial empire, seeking colonies for trade rather than for the sake of having them, or in pursuit of a French-style mission civilisatrice or Christian missionary aims. There was open scorn amongst parts of the English ruling class for the latter; the little rhyme
“If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo,
I’d surely eat a missionary,
Cassock, bands, and hymn book too.”
is all the more pungent when we learn that its author was “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, Lord Bishop of Winchester.
October 18, 2011 at 9:23 pm
I’ve heard the theory of officers on the ground causing imperial expansion from a number of other sources, with the only one I can specifically recall being Robert Kaplan’s “Imperial Grunts”. They didn’t always explicitly specify the British empire, but there’s also a saying about that empire being acquired “in a fit of absent-mindedness”.
Johnson doesn’t portray the French as being concerned with bringing civilization (that is portrayed as a distinctly minority view) or unconcerned with commercial benefit (the French actually passed a law around the turn of the century requiring all colonies to pay their own way, but the facts on the ground were not obliging). The major difference he argues is that the British were competent and could run an empire well.
The leftward shift in the Anglican clergy is noted by Johnson, but he seems to think it was a distinctly post-WW1 phenomenon, and recounts a number of contemporaries being surprised by the turn some clergy made.
October 18, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Two other factors to consider are the dependence of Continental powers on Roman rather than common law, and the Continental tradition – derived from Rome – of military interference in civilian government as restorers of order (like Octavian) when the civilian politicians have mucked things up and can’t make them right.
When Hernando de Soto (the economist, needless to say – not the conquistador) spoke at the Philadelphia Society shortly after his book “The Other Path” was published, I asked him if the bureaucratic difficulties that hindered economic development in so much of Latin America might not have their origin in the top-down character of Roman law, its manifestation in the centralizing policies of the Bourbons (both Spanish and French – descending in common from Louis XIV), and the continuation of such policies by Buonaparte. He responded that he thought this was the case.
Buonaparte’s style was of course imitated in Latin America not only as to bureaucratic centralization and adoption of codified Roman law after the fashion of the code Napoléon, but in his example as a latter-day Octavian, intervening to restore order at the end of the revolutionary period. Caudillos like Bolivar, O’Higgins, and San Martin were all bush-league Buonapartes. France, not England, was the clear cultural leader to which countries like Mexico and Argentina looked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is evident in the very architecture of Mexico City and Buenos Aires.
And of course what characterized the old Spanish empire of the Bourbons as continued by its home-bred caudillos, characterized, à fortiori, both France and its empire. The historical instability and lack of perceived legitimacy of most Latin American regimes parallels the history of France itself, which has since 1789 been ruled by a hotch-potch of various royal and imperial claimants, interspersed with periods of supposedly republican, but really caudillist, government, under the aegis of the latter-day Octavian du jour – be he MacMahon, Boulanger, Petain, or de Gaulle. France’s own economic backwardness compared (say) to England, Wilhelmine Germany (or even today’s Germany), and the United States, was necessarily reflected in the French colonies.
October 20, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Yeah, I’ve heard the theory about the effects of Roman/civil vs common or German law before, but it’s hard to disentangle causality. I support Quebec is an interesting case for comparing different colonialists because it’s a French colony in the midst of English Canada. I don’t know how it’s legal system compares though (I’ve heard Louisiana still uses civil law).
October 20, 2011 at 10:34 pm
Quebec is governed under English common law, a byproduct of its conquest by Wolfe. It is, however, one of the poorer provinces, and its Francophone policies have limited the economic mobility of its peoples. Louisiana is, indeed, the only state of the union to have a legal system based on Roman law. It has also been historically one of the most corruptly governed states, its relaxed acceptance of corruption being truly more like that of Latin America than of any other American state. In comparing its recovery from Hurricane Katrina with that of its neighbor, Mississippi, even the latter – poor as it is – has done a better job. The cultural influence of France is evident in both Quebec and Louisiana, and has not been to the good in either.
October 20, 2011 at 10:22 pm
India was uniquely profitable for imperialists: a subcontinent filled with relatively docile workers used to being systematically exploited by overlords from abroad.
The North Vietnamese, in contrast, were a nation, formed to resist China. The South Vietnamese were less nationalistic, more familistic. Thus, Henry Kissinger’s conclusion when he started visiting Hanoi for secret negotiations: damn, we backed the wrong horse in this race.
October 22, 2011 at 10:53 pm
Farmers/peasants are used to being dominated. It would be the horseman/herder Aryans and Mughals who were used to being warrior elites.
I’d be interested in an account from pre-communist North Vietnam to see whether that agrees with Kissinger’s assessment.
October 23, 2011 at 9:54 pm
Here’s part of Kissinger’s memoir’s on his first visit to North Vietnam. It’s pretty funny:
http://tinyurl.com/42kh9k7
October 28, 2011 at 6:54 pm
“Instead many of the casualties are suggested to be “misfits or failures”.
Someone should take Paul Johnson out and spank him.
October 30, 2011 at 6:09 pm
You know, he has a Presidential Medal of Freedom.