Chapter 18 - Colonial Encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania

Industry and Empire

• The huge reality of Europe's Industrial Revolution, a process that gave birth to new economic requirements, many of which sought solutions overseas, was at the heart of most of the continent's nineteenth-century growth. Industrial technology's great productivity, along with Europe's expanding wealth, has produced a need for a wide range of raw materials and agricultural products: wheat from the Midwest of the United States and southern Russia
• The United Kingdom was investing almost half of its savings abroad. It had 3.7 billion pounds sterling invested overseas in 1914, about evenly split between Europe, North America, and Australia on the one side, and Asia, Africa, and Latin America on the other.
• The rise of mass nationalism, however, was what made imperialism so popular in Europe, particularly in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. The unification of Italy and Germany in 1871 intensified Europe's already aggressive foreign relations, and much of this competition spilled over into the fight for colonies and economic concessions in Asia, Africa, and Pacific Oceania.
• The industrial age not only made international development more desired, but it also gave new ways to achieve those aims. Steam-powered ships traveling via the new Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, enabling Europeans to reach remote Asian, African, and Pacific ports more swiftly and consistently, as well as penetrate inner rivers.

The Second Wave of European Conquests

• If the conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the first phase, the century and a half between 1750 and 1914 was a second and very separate round of that broader process. Rather than the Western Hemisphere, it was now centered on Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

• Like all empires, the development of these new European empires in the Afro-Asian continent included military force or the threat of military power. The European military superiority was first based on organization, drill and practice, and command structures.

• Colonial conquest occurred later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more suddenly and intentionally than in India or Indonesia, for much of Africa, mainland Southeast Asia, and the Pacific islands. For example, the “scramble for Africa” pitched a half-dozen European countries against one another as they partitioned the whole continent in only twenty-five years.

• During the eighteenth century, Europeans and Americans were driven to the Pacific Oceania region by exploration and scientific curiosity, missionary zeal for conversion, and commercial interests in sperm whale oil, coconut oil, guano, mineral nitrates and phosphates, sandalwood, and other goods.

  

  

Under European Rule

• Incorporation into European colonial empires was a terrible event in many locations and for many individuals. The loss of lives, houses, animals, crops, and land was especially catastrophic for small-scale civilizations.
• Conquest meant that the natural harmonies of life had been drastically disrupted for the Vietnamese elite, who had been trained for generations in Chinese-style Confucian thought; it was a time when “water flowed uphill.” Nguyen Khuyen (1835–1909) was a Vietnamese writer who lived from 1835 to 1909.

Cooperation and Rebellion

• Even though violence was a common part of colonial life both during and after the conquest, many groups and people actively worked with colonial authority for their benefit. In European-led armed forces, many men found work, prestige, and security.
• Both colonial administrations and private missionary groups wished to promote some form of European education. As a result of this process, a tiny Western-educated class emerged, whose members worked as teachers, clerks, interpreters, and lower-level administrators for the colonial state, European businesses, and Christian missions.
• While colonial control drew the eager collaboration of some, it also drew the wrath of many others. As a result, colonial administrations across the world saw recurrent rebellions, both major and minor.

Economies of Coercion: Forced Labor and the Power of the State

• Many of the new modes of functioning that arose during the colonial period were directly influenced by the needs of the colonial government. The most visible was obligatory and unpaid work on public projects including railroad construction, government building construction, and commodities transportation. In French-speaking Africa.
• Meanwhile, the enormous use of forced labor in both the Congo and the adjacent German colony of Cameroon enabled the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rubber and ivory trade, laying the groundwork for the contemporary AIDS pandemic.
• During the nineteenth century, the so-called cultivation system of the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) evolved into a variant on the subject of forced labor. To satisfy their tax obligations to the state, peasants were obliged to grow 20 percent or more of their land in cash crops like sugar or coffee.
• The forced planting of cash crops has been successfully resisted on a few occasions. In late-nineteenth-century German East Africa, for example, colonial officials mandated cotton planting, which severely hampered the production of native food crops.

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