Cooperation and Empire: Local Realities of Global Processes 9781785336102

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Cooperation and Empire

Cooperation and Empire Local Realities of Global Processes

} Edited by Tanja Bührer, Flavio Eichmann, Stig Förster and Benedikt Stuchtey

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 Tanja Bührer, Flavio Eichmann, Stig Förster and Benedikt Stuchtey All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-609-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-610-2 (ebook)

Contents

} List of Figures and Tables

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Introduction: Cooperation and Empire. Local Realities of Global Processes Tanja Bührer, Flavio Eichmann, Stig Förster and Benedikt Stuchtey

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Part I: Case Studies Chapter 1 Caciques: Indigenous Rulers and the Colonial Regime in Yucatán in the Sixteenth Century Ute Schüren Chapter 2 Connecting Worlds: Women as Intermediaries in the Portuguese Overseas Empire, 1500–1600 Amélia Polónia and Rosa Capelão Chapter 3 Cooperation and Cultural Adaption: British Diplomats at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, c. 1779–1815 Tanja Bührer Chapter 4 Local Cooperation in a Subversive Colony: Martinique 1802–1809 Flavio Eichmann Chapter 5 Uncle Toms and Kupapas: ‘Collaboration’ versus Alliance in a Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Context Vincent O’Malley v

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Chapter 6 ‘Collaboration’ or Sabotage? The Settlers in German Southwest Africa between Colonial State and Indigenous Polities Matthias Häußler Chapter 7 Chieftaincy as a Political Resource in the German Colony of Cameroon, 1884–1916 Ulrike Schaper Chapter 8 Cooperation at its Limits: Re-Reading the British Constitution in South Africa Charles V. Reed Chapter 9 Key Alliance? ‘Native Guards’ and European Administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa from a Comparative Perspective (1918–1959) Alexander Keese Chapter 10 The Cooperation between the British and Faisal I of Iraq (1921–1932): Evolution of a Romance Myriam Yakoubi Chapter 11 Collaborating on Unequal Terms: Cross-Cultural Cooperation and Educational Work in Colonial Sudan, 1934–1956 Iris Seri-Hersch

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Part II: Concluding Essays Chapter 12 Indigenous Agents of Colonial Rule in Africa and India: Defining the Colonial State through its Secondary Bureaucracy Ralph A. Austen Chapter 13 Indigenous Cooperation: Foundation of Colonial Empires or New Historical Myth? Wolfgang Reinhard

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Index 377

Figures and Tables

} Illustrations 11.1–11.4: Drawings from: Ministry of Education, Sudan, Handbook to Elementary Education for Boys’ Schools and Boys' Clubs in the Sudan (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1951), p. 39–42. 302–305 Table 12.1: Comparative Annual Earnings

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Introduction Cooperation and Empire: Local Realities of Global Processes Tanja Bührer, Flavio Eichmann, Stig Förster and Benedikt Stuchtey

} During the First World War the young British officer Thomas E. Lawrence played a leading role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire that helped the allies win the war in the Middle East. Lawrence’s adventures and his open sympathy for the Arab cause earned him not only promotions but also the admiration of many Arab warriors. He became famous as Lawrence of Arabia. At the Peace Conference in Paris Lawrence served as an advisor to Prince Faisal’s delegation and often sided with the Arab cause against the aspirations of the imperialistic powers who intended to carve up the defunct Ottoman Empire and distribute the spoils of victory among themselves. Some British countrymen therefore accused Lawrence of having ‘gone native’.1 Had he really abandoned loyalty to his country or did he just regard the allied policy of broken promises vis-à-vis the Arabs as shameful? Was Lawrence primarily an agent of British imperial interests, a friend of the Arab cause or something in between? In the mid-1880s the British civil servant Wilfrid Scawen Blunt visited India. He reported on a growing conflict among the ‘natives’. On the one hand ‘Westernizers’, though well-meaning, were all too Anglophile, almost justifying British imperial rule. On the other hand, ‘traditionalists’ opposed Western education as it symbolized an essentially non-religious life. Blunt, who was one of the most prolific critics of European expansionism in his time, blamed the Westernizers for accommodating too easily to Western power.2 But were they collaborators in the sense of being traitors to their

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own country or nation, who aided the British in their imperial designs in South Asia, when both concepts did not even exist at the time? Or should we rather see them as personally and intellectually flexible people who could project themselves in new contexts? Could their position even have been that of translators who helped bridge Western ‘rationalism’ with nonEuropean cultures? And what about the thousands of indigenous clerks and soldiers in the service of the East India Company? These and many similar cases raise questions of loyalty and dissent, of collaboration and resistance and of the crossing of boundaries against the background of imperial expansion and rule. Why did indigenous actors engage in negotiations with imperial interlopers at all? To what extent did their interests overlap? Was a faithful and mutually beneficial relationship possible or could empires only produce contingent arrangements? How far did these cross-cultural interactions create imperial situations on the ground, and to what extent did pre-colonial cultures, socio-political and economic realities determine cooperative structures? In any case, these encounters merit further investigation.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK First, however, we should discuss the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of this issue. In the 1970s and 1980s, the British historian Ronald Robinson challenged the hitherto predominant Eurocentric theories of imperialism. He formulated a peripheral approach, arguing that indigenous3 collaboration represented both a formative and continuous factor of imperialism. Robinson’s theory particularly emphasized that by collaborating with the colonial state, indigenous actors contributed to the creation of empires, to their preservation and eventually to their dissolution.4 To some extent, Robinson’s thesis may have been a truism. Yet, most historians before him had largely ignored the role of indigenous collaboration. Unlike his seminal essay ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, co-authored with John Gallagher in 1953,5 Robinson’s theory of collaboration did not provoke intense debate. Nevertheless, his peripheral turn contributed to the emergence of area studies that became the predominant paradigm in extra-European history in the 1980s, focusing on local initiatives, forces and actors. However, area studies soon became so empirically specialized and detached both from imperial centres and each other that they could no longer be combined with other case studies or incorporated into a broader context.6 New ‘grand theories’ about the process of imperialism became rare and had disappeared altogether by the 1990s.7 In addition, many

Introduction 3

scholars shifted their focus to national narratives of postcolonial successor states.8 Imperial history thus came to be associated with colonial rule and bureaucratic authoritarianism, narratives of Western superiority and, in some cases, even covert racism.9 Considering the personal background of this generation of scholars – Robinson, Gallagher and many of their colleagues served in the British colonies during the Second World War – such a view on the colonial state appears to be hardly surprising.10 Confronted with the cultural turn in the 1980s, some of them consequently even predicted the demise of their own field of research.11 The very end of imperial history seemed to be marked by the rise of postcolonial studies in the 1990s, which can essentially be seen as an application of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’12 thesis from the field of literary studies to history. Scholars henceforth predominantly dealt with representations of imperialism, analysing images, symbols and colonial discourses in order to understand both how ‘the other’ was depreciated through the gaze of the colonizers and how the colonizers thereby constructed their ‘superior’ identity. This scepticism towards Western structures of knowledge, as well as the authentic perceptions of the other, runs contrary to Robinson’s theory of collaboration, which presumes a mutual understanding of colonizers and colonized and at least some correct empirical knowledge of the others’ socio-political situation and interests. He had already implicitly challenged this cultural essentialism by posing the question in his work of 1972 of ‘how a handful of European pro-consuls managed to manipulate the polymorphic societies of Africa and Asia, and how … comparatively small, nationalist elites persuaded them to leave’.13 Leading practitioners of the currently dominant fields of global studies and world history have built on exactly these insights. As Jürgen Osterhammel has pointed out, considering the generally very low material input and deployment of personnel during European expansion, it is completely implausible that such a process could have taken place in a context of socio-cultural ignorance and implemented in a one-sided manner.14 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have also emphasized that ‘rulers of empires could never send out enough governors, generals and tax collectors to take charge of territories incorporated’ and consequently depended on ‘the skills, knowledge and authority of people from a conquered society’.15 It is not surprising then that current approaches within global and transnational history broadly agree that one of the salient issues must be the study of concrete interactions between the ‘colonized’ and the ‘colonizers’ and that particular attention should be given to the crucial figures of brokers and intermediaries, who acted as a go-between by translating and negotiating political as well as cultural compromises.16 These figures provided access to local knowledge

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about politics, economies, revenue systems, cultures, and eventually about the exploitation of these resources.17 Intermediaries were also central to the process of decolonization. One of the main causes of decolonization, for instance, was the replacement of ‘traditional’ indigenous collaborators such as chiefs with a bureaucratized colonial state in the late nineteenth century, which led the colonial state to lose touch with its subjects.18 On closer examination, both global and transnational history, and even postcolonial studies after Said, are thus essentially dealing with similar issues as Robinson, merely conceptualizing them on a different level, from a different angle and enunciated in a different jargon. Robinson’s figure of the ‘Europeanized collaborator’19 can be seen as related to Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘Mimic Men’,20 who served similar functions as the currently prevalent figure of the ‘intermediary’. In addition, the postcolonial notion of ‘hybridity’ and its claim to exceed binary categories resonate strongly with Robinson’s idea of collaborative systems as fields of interaction between European and extraEuropean components.21 This is demonstrated by Robinson’s definition of imperialism as ‘an inter-continental process, [in which] its true metropolis appears neither at the centre nor on the periphery, but in their changing relativities’.22 Similarly, approaches of global and transnational history point out the reciprocal complexities of the various transcultural encounters23 and propose the idea of non-centred global connectedness as an alternative to the national and imperialistic narrative. Finally, Robinson’s emphasis on indigenous actors opened the way for non-Eurocentric perspectives24 and theories of indigenous agency.25 These are central issues to the New Social History,26 which argues that colonial subjects were not helpless victims of superior forces and institutions, but historical actors who were active agents and who acquired information, tools and resources.27 Given these common research agendas, combined with current pleas to recognize that the different approaches of imperial, postcolonial and global history can supplement each other rather than being incompatible,28 it is time to revisit Robinson’s notion of collaboration and thus try to overcome existing methodological shortcomings. While imperial history tends to provide a one-sided perspective of the implementation of imperial rule, the postcolonial approaches of Said and Bhabha have failed to analyse how colonialism actually worked on the ground.29 By creatively blending the concept of imperial history with new perspectives of postcolonial and global history, Cooperation and Empire aims to break new ground and provide a better understanding of how empires worked in practice and how collaboration functioned as a product of complex interaction. While discourse theory should not be rejected completely, postcolonial claims and concepts need to be supported by empirical evidence. Postcolonial sensibilities for

Introduction 5

ambiguity can help us overcome Robinson’s rather binary conception of collaboration as an interaction between colonizers and colonized. This opens up new views on in-between spaces, sites of cross-cultural negotiation, where innovative socio-political, economic as well as legal realities and novel identities emerged. Similarly, Robinson’s focus on high politics and collaboration between elites, his model of elite co-optation, will in this volume be complemented by analyses of subaltern transactions, non-state centred co-operative connections within ‘colonial’ societies and perspectives from the margins of empire. Opening up Robinson’s theory of collaboration methodologically also brings into view a considerably broader range of agents. This book thus differs from recent studies on intermediaries in the colonial context insofar as it is not only focussed on specific groups of intermediaries in specific areas.30 Instead it takes into consideration different regions on all continents as well as a wide variety of agents such as chiefs and kings, diplomats, clerks, soldiers, native guards, interpreters, teachers, scientists, women, ‘white’ settlers and socially marginalized people with only limited access to the colonial state or other centres of power. In addition, this book not only revolves around individual actors or groups, but analyses these agents in the larger framework of the institutions, socio-political, economic and cultural realities in which they were embedded. Furthermore, special attention will be given to the imperial structures, networks and practices that emerged or were created by these cross-cultural interactions. Robinson’s focus on political and economic fields of cooperation will be extended to include current topics of research such as education, warfare and intercultural diplomacy, and precolonial structures persisting within the colonial state that have so far often been ignored in analyses of empires. At the same time, studies of imperial administrative structures, high politics and military expansion, which have been neglected by the recently predominant cultural, global and transnational historiography, will return to centre stage – not of course as one-sided accounts of imperial impact but in the context of reciprocal encounters. The aim of this book is to examine these forms of cooperation from both sides, to uncover indigenous motives, interests and strategies in their engagement, while remaining aware that because of the prevalence of European sources, there is a danger that imperial norms and prejudices will be reproduced. Our modifications regarding methodological approaches and perspectives also involve a reconsideration of Robinson’s terminology. For native English speakers and for Robinson himself the term ‘collaboration’ might have had a neutral character. But for German and French readers, for instance, it is impossible to dismiss the term’s pejorative connotation, given

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its historic reference to the collaboration with the Nazi occupying forces in Europe. This is similar for audiences in postcolonial states, as the term, with its negative connotations, has also been applied to studies of anticolonial, revolutionary and nationalist independence struggles, more or less explicitly accusing indigenous groups of siding with imperial powers as traitors to the national cause. By considering collaboration as the very antithesis of resistance, such labelling is not only based on an anachronistic perspective of the postcolonial nation state.31 This pejorative terminology also opens up a dichotomy, which this volume aims to replace with a more balanced view of the relationship between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’.32 Given these reservations, the term ‘collaboration’ does not seem a very viable heuristic tool at first sight. Scholars of global, world and transnational history thus tend to refer instead to the concept of the indigenous intermediary,33 but as outlined above this exclusive figure would not cover all agents and topics addressed in this volume. Colin Newbury has suggested replacing Robinson’s concept of ‘collaboration’ with a patron-client relationship.34 This model might be appropriate to describe early encounters, for instance when European minorities entered as clients into a social space that was not regulated according to their norms, yet it is limited to asymmetrical and pre-modern relationships. Similarly, Richard White’s famous concept of the ‘Middle Ground’ is only adequate for cases in which the actors involved could not expect large-scale material support from their respective bases of power.35 The term ‘cooperation’ seems to be a more promising alternative. It covers a wide range of imperial-indigenous relationships and it suggests an interaction between two equals or two parties of different standings in which even the minor partner had a certain level of bargaining power. Yet in contrast to ‘collaboration’ – and similar to concepts of global history such as ‘non-centred connectedness’ and ‘mutual encounters’ – it connotes a rather positive interaction (talking frequently as it does of joint efforts, alliances, exchange of services, projects, partnership) and can thus, if used in an unreflective way, obscure or euphemize unequal and exploitative relationships.36 However, imperial coercion and forms of cooperation were often two sides of the same coin: when cooperation failed, the colonial state usually made a violent effort to enforce it. Exploitation, brute force and forms of cooperation often occurred simultaneously, yet frequently materialized on different levels and thus affected the various social classes differently. Despite such violent enforcement, the colonial state remained relatively weak, which even in asymmetrical power relationships provided room for manoeuvre for local agents. Only in extreme situations were the latter reduced to mere stooges.37

Introduction 7

Nonetheless, we should bear in mind the inherently coercive nature of the colonial context and there are therefore certain limits to the concept of cooperation. In highly exploitative relationships such as slavery even the term ‘forced cooperation’ fails to convey the full extent of dependence, no matter how qualified the definition. In addition, we must be particularly careful with official representations of the form and language of consent, as they might hide imposed authorities. Since European imperial agents aspired to legitimize expansion and colonial rule – not only towards native peoples and rival imperial powers, but also towards the metropolitan government – they were keen to obtain testimonials of consent from representatives of indigenous societies, which were frequently gained by coercion.38 To sum up, we have to differentiate between a wide range of cooperative relationships and structures, in which both the motives of the actors involved and the degree of imperial coercion varied greatly. There is also another group of indigenous actors who voluntarily served the imperial project but who cannot be captured by the concept of ‘cooperation’. Their behaviour is best described by the term ‘collaboration’, which needs to be reintroduced in our analysis here in order to adequately label their activities. It is not our intention to hereby resurrect anachronistic concepts such as the nation state or to condemn certain behaviour, such as switching allegiance from an indigenous to an imperial patron and deferring to a regionally common strategy in order to enhance one’s professional position. But voluntary decisions to serve the imperial project acquire a treacherous character when indigenous actors are aware that the imperial interlopers will profoundly change or even destroy local or interregional socio-political power structures, unlike earlier conquerors who merely coopted local structures. Many of these collaborators were perfectly aware that their actions would radically change the common people’s way of life for the worse. One such example might be Ghulam Husain Khan, who like his forefathers had served in the Mughal and Bengal nawabi governments, but in the 1770s offered his services to the British. Khan described the drain of wealth of Bengal caused by the misgovernment and corruption of the East India Company officials, to the disadvantage of the local nobility, service gentry and the mass of the people. He was also convinced that the British would remain ignorant of indigenous customs and principles of government and thus would not establish a mutually beneficial cooperation with the Indian societies.39 Christopher A. Bayly has accurately described such Indian career diplomats and experts, who switched to British imperial service at the expense of the declining centre of the Mughal Empire, as ‘uneasy collaborators’.40

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Considering cooperation as an essential structural phenomenon and an indispensable prerequisite to the creation, preservation and dissolution of empires enables us to cover and compare a wide variety of cases throughout different time periods. In this volume, we look at various histories of European-indigenous encounters in different European empires (Portuguese, Spanish, French, British and German) from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Middle East. Considering all the patterns of cooperation and collaboration outlined above, the specific contexts in which the various case studies of this volume are situated will be outlined by the authors of each chapter. This study of agents, fields and patterns of cooperation engages with current debates about the impact of precolonial histories and structures on imperial projects, colonial knowledge and categorization, the invention of tradition, the overcoming of binary positions and transcultural in-between spaces, local agency, intermediaries, ambiguous and multiple identities, citizenship, cooperation and resistance, corruption and scandals, intercultural diplomacy and negotiations, regional and transnational dynamics as well as perspectives from the fringes of empires.

PRECOLONIAL STRUCTURES AND COLONIAL CATEGORIZATION The impact of precolonial realities on patterns of cooperation has been neglected by both postcolonial studies and imperial history. While postcolonial scholars have identified colonial perceptions of the other and categorizations of their social institutions as fantasies with no relation to realities, imperial history has had a predominantly one-sided perspective of the imposition of imperial rule. The disregard for precolonial structures has also been, and still is, related to the fact that most scholars engage with the modern era of imperial and global history, when precolonial heritage had already been obscured and transformed by colonial categorization. The formative influence of local socio-political systems and cultures on structures of cooperation was usually most apparent in the early phase of encounters between indigenous societies and European interlopers, when European representatives were tiny minorities; and the more useful local structures were for colonial interests, particularly in terms of exploiting resources such as revenue, tax and labour, the stronger this influence was. It therefore comes as no surprise that studies on the beginning of British territorial expansion in South Asia in the second half of the eighteenth century strongly emphasize the importance of co-optation of and adaption

Introduction 9

to existing realities of sovereignty and government. The Cambridge School has argued that the British Raj originally drew on South Asian imperial structures.41 At some point, however, precolonial realities were transformed and often simplified along colonial categorizations in order to centralize and shape them according to imperial interest, or because imperial interlocutors simply did not understand the complex structures of the societies they encountered. The contributions of Tanja Bührer and Ralph A. Austen reflect the Cambridge School line of thought. However, in contrast to the scholarly preoccupation with British direct rule in North India, in her chapter ‘Cooperation and Cultural Adaption: British Diplomats at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, c. 1779–1815’, Bührer explores the British relationship with a formally independent Indian state in South India. The first British representatives in Hyderabad were perceived as potential clients or, at best, auxiliaries, and in order to negotiate they had to comply with Indo-Persian forms of diplomacy and adapt to local concepts of sovereignty. The Nizam’s condition for cooperation was that the British would provide him with troops that he might need to fight against his Indian adversaries. Examining the British-Hyderabad cooperation from its beginning, it thus becomes evident that the British ‘subsidiary troops’ permanently stationed at Hyderabad, considered a key characteristic of Governor-General Richard Wellesely’s imperialistic system of ‘Subsidiary Alliances’ with Indian rulers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was not borne out of an imperial vision of the ‘architect of British paramountcy’ over India. Rather, this institution originally emerged out of a local demand for auxiliary troops related to Mughal and post-Mughal rivalries. The British met this demand in order to participate in regional politics. As soon as the Nizam became dependent on military assistance, the British took advantage of the situation to turn this service into a tool of indirect rule. In his broad comparative approach in ‘Indigenous Agents of Colonial Rule in Africa and India: Defining the Colonial State through its Secondary Bureaucracy’, Austen shows that imperial approaches to precolonial heritage varied considerably across these areas. While the British in India initially endeavoured by and large to incorporate Mughal and post-Mughal revenue systems and its agents, in Sub-Saharan Africa, which had almost no pre-existing state bureaucracy, cooperative practices of rural tax collection usually had to be ‘imposed upon African polities as a colonial innovation’. One argument put forward in the chapters by Ute Schüren and Ulrike Schaper is that colonial ambitions which sought to rely on existing polities tended to create colonial categorizations that seriously challenged the ‘traditional’ role and legitimacy of cooperating authorities towards their own

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people. As Schüren writes in ‘Caciques: Indigenous Rulers and the Colonial Regime in Yucatán in the Sixteenth Century’, Spaniards perceived indigenous leadership as legitimate and incorporated it into their feudal order. Yet, contrary to the indigenous leaderships’ actual positions, the Spanish conceptualized all local authorities as ‘caciques’ – a Hispanicized term for chiefs, transferred from the colonial context in the West Indies to the American mainland. They thus tended to impose centralized government on the various political systems they encountered which particularly undermined local authorities’ role as war leaders and their ideological as well as religious legitimacy. Similarly, in ‘Chieftaincy as a Political Resource in the German Colony of Cameroon, 1884–1916’ Schaper argues that the Germans tried to employ precolonial structures while at the same time heavily intervening in them. In order to create a cooperative elite, they conferred the simplistic category of ‘chief’ (Häuptling) on African authorities – who in the precolonial order had held very different positions with diverse competencies – thereby incorrectly suggesting that they were heads of politically centralized societies that also held jurisdiction over their people. Due to a lack of local knowledge, German officials even struggled to identify suitable authorities. They thus sometimes had to acquiesce in the claims of communities that ‘their chief’, who was empowered by the colonial government, had no sufficient precolonial legitimacy whatsoever to fulfil this position. Therefore, the establishment of cooperation on the basis of precolonial structures was not only a strategy adopted due to limited material and human resources, but was also a necessity, the only way to avoid social disruption and resistance. In addition, when the transition from precolonial socio-political structures to more colonial conceptualized polities was by and large a smooth process, as Schüren argues in her case study of Yucatán, memories of precolonial times could soon fade away, especially in everyday interaction. Against this background, the modern scholar’s perception of a breach between the precolonial and colonial period appears ahistorical. Yet, in some cases, where precolonial structures proved insufficient for imperial interests or where a break with former rule could not be avoided altogether, governance had to be built up. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger developed the concept of ‘invented tradition’ to describe a set of ritual practices intended to create social cohesion, establish and legitimize ‘modern’ institutions and new relations of authority within rapidly transforming European societies and empires. These procedures were thus responses to novel situations, suggesting continuity with the past in order to legitimize new governance.42 The concept of invented tradition has been most prominently used by Bernhard Cohn to describe the representation

Introduction 11

of new authority after the transfer of British rule in India from the East India Company to the Crown, made particularly manifest in the Imperial Assemblage of 1877. The proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, accompanied with a public display of European and Indian style rituals, established a reference to the ancient throne of the Mughal Empire. The Indian Princes were declared her Indian Feudatories and thus ranked in a linear hierarchical order according to their size, their former standing in relation to the Mughal Emperor, and their acts of loyalty towards the British central authority.43 After the First World War, Britain was in an even more difficult situation with regard to her mandated territories in the Middle East. Myriam Yakoubi, in ‘The Cooperation between the British and Faisal I of Iraq (1921–1932): Evolution of a Romance’, explores the struggle of the British to establish and legitimize the creation of a monarchy in Iraq from scratch as well as to relate this institution to their new authority as a mandatory power. Their decision to install the Hashemite Faisal from Mecca as the first King of Iraq was influenced by the successful military cooperation between British and Hashemite forces during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War. In addition, due to his descent from the Prophet, Faisal was perceived by the British as the natural leader of the Arab national movement and the embodiment of religious authority. But Faisal had never set foot in the country before and the historical rupture with centuries of Ottoman rule was impossible to cover up. Thus, the founding event of the coronation ceremony in 1921 had to resort to British rituals and symbols, with a military band even playing ‘God save the King’ as Iraq did not yet have a national anthem.

TRANSCULTURAL IN-BETWEEN SPACES AND CONTESTED LOYALTIES Cooperative transcultural encounters and the merging of precolonial and imperial structures and cultures opened up in-between spaces which transcended binary opposition and created innovative sites of cross-cultural negotiation, be it dialogical or antagonistic; this led to the emergence of new socio-political structures and often ambiguous or contested loyalties.44 Several chapters in this volume engage with these questions. In her study of sixteenth-century Yucatán, Schüren claims that not only Eurocentric but also Indian-centric perspectives have prevented scholars from understanding that Indians and Spaniards were, from the very beginning of their encounters, interacting in flexible networks of kinship and clientship that

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blurred the presumed dichotomy between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Indian agents often did not act vis-à-vis ‘colonial’ institutions, but as part of them. They even internalized colonial normative discourses, which contributed to the fact that memories of the precolonial area soon faded away. Yet with the example of Don Pablo Paxbolon, she illustrates the in-between situation of a border crosser on the frontier of the Spanish empire, who was acting both inside and outside colonial institutions. On the one hand, he held a colonial office, was a devotee of the Catholic faith, intermarried with the Spanish and cooperated with the colonial institutions by capturing fugitive Indians beyond the colonial frontier. On the other hand, he established flourishing subversive trade relations with people beyond colonial control and was even engaged in contraband with unpacified groups. According to Schaper, African chiefs who cooperated with German authorities in Cameroon also found themselves predominantly in a structural as well as personal in-between situation. The coinage of their position as ‘administrative chieftaincy’ reflected not only a fusion of presumed African polities and German bureaucracy, but also their ambiguous situation of being colonial agents within a colonial hierarchy without actually being formal, salaried employees. This in-between position also provided them with a ‘double power basis’ (Schaper), enabling them to act as intermediaries. At the same time, their loyalty was often doubted both by ‘their people’ and the German authorities. Yakoubi argues that the British installed Faisal as King of Iraq because he was presumed to have high religious prestige within the Arab community, but was considered to depend on British advice and assistance due to his lack of a real power basis among the people of the new created monarchy. When it turned out that he knew how to use his intermediary position and his room for manoeuvre to negotiate and enhance his power, the smooth cooperation that was expected turned into a power struggle. Cultural adaption and adoption in cross-cultural negotiations could of course also run the other way, with European interlopers complying with local regulations of diplomacy and norms of social interaction. As Bührer shows with the example of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British resident at the court of Hyderabad adopted Hyderabadi ways of living, intermarried into the local aristocracy and converted to Islam. Despite this, or perhaps precisely for this reason, he managed to persuade the Hyderabad government into a subordinate cooperative arrangement with the treaties of 1798 and 1800. Not only was the Resident’s position queried by antiBritish factions at the Hyderabad court, but Kirkpatrick also had to face an investigation of his political loyalty, conducted by the Governor-General Richard Wellesley, which almost cost him his career.45

Introduction 13

Acting as intermediaries at the interface of different power structures could thus considerably enhance imperial actors’ agency. Yet it was also a very risky undertaking, even more so as these key figures often found themselves in the midst of dynamic processes of empire building with changing balances of power, and not only had to deal with two parties, but also had to juggle countless mixed interest and factions within them. The contributions of Charles V. Reed and Iris Seri-Hersch show that Western-educated intellectuals in later periods of colonial encounter also found themselves in disputed in-between situations and positions of contested loyalties. As Reed argues in ‘Cooperation at its Limits: Re-Reading the British Constitution in South Africa’, South African colonial subjects of colour who were fighting the exclusive South African constitution founded by the Act of Union 1910 found themselves in a political, cultural and social space between empire and nationalistic movement. They were Europeaneducated imperial liberals but they never rejected their Africanness and claimed to represent the African communities. They used the language of loyalty and Britishness, yet were far from being collaborators, as their offer of cooperation was stipulated by the demand for citizenship, which they also pursued through their publishing activities: they took their legal claims to London and participated in global movements for civil and human rights. They not only employed British legal principles as a strategy of resistance, but also claimed to interpret the British constitution in a more authentically British way than the white settler communities of South Africa did. In ‘Collaborating on Unequal Terms: Cross-Cultural Cooperation and Educational Work in Colonial Sudan’, Seri-Hersch explores cross-cultural cooperation in the field of education – in particular in teacher training, schoolbook production and school reforms – on the margins of empire and in a frontier area in-between different religions and cultures. According to Seri-Hersch, the colonial education reform was a British endeavour to prepare Sudanese society for what they considered the modern world, while Sudanese officials were supposed to convey local codes and give the project an ‘“indigenous” type of legitimacy’. On the one hand, the gap between the socio-cultural norms was not easily bridged and caused tensions in the British-Sudanese relationship. On the other hand, the fact that Sudanese officials integrated into the colonial state apparatus and appropriated elements of British culture and political discourse was seen as a threat to the colonial regime, which became manifest in the mockery of them as ‘thirdclass Europeans’ or ‘detribalized intellectuals’. In fact, their tacitly shared belief in ultimate independence was for many patriotic Sudanese a reason to cooperate in the project of imperial education reform. However, examining the long-term development from the 1920s to the 1950s, Seri-Hersch

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notices a shift in modes of cooperation from a discriminatory hierarchic relationship to a more equal interaction in the twilight of the British Empire. Within the complex context of collaboration, cooperation and resistance, one important group of people is commonly neglected: women. There are of course a few famous exceptions, such as Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who was one of the leaders of the Indian uprising in 1857–1858 and who became a hero in Indian memory.46 Others like Gertrude Bell proved to be more cooperative in the quest for empire, as Yakoubi’s chapter in this volume illustrates.47 But there was more to the story than just the activities of a few female individuals. As Amélia Polónia and Rosa Capelão demonstrate in their chapter on the emerging Portuguese empire, indigenous as well as Portuguese women played crucial roles as intermediaries in all kind of ways. Many women married interculturally, some worked in diplomatic missions, while others were successfully engaged in trade and business. And of course, there were always the female members of royal courts. Most of these women were very influential in processes of cultural exchange concerning language, climate, day-to-day life, social behaviour, hygiene, medicine and politics. Religion was also an important factor. The Catholic authorities expected indigenous women who married Portuguese men to convert to Christianity. They also did their best to fight heathen practises, although they often failed. The more remote the outposts of imperial expansion, the less the authorities were able to exert control on them. Hence, on the margins of empire there was much scope for all forms of intercultural exchange. However, the full extent of the influence of women in this process remains largely unknown and much more research will have to be done in the future.

COLONIAL SCANDALS AND CORRUPTION BY COOPERATION Corruption of power and money is one of the central topics in the history of empires. The plundering by Spanish conquistadores in the Americas set a defining example for all would-be colonial conquerors to come. It was not only colonial conquests that offered Europeans plenty of opportunities to enrich themselves, but also their employment in the colonial administration, as the endless cases of colonial scandals and corruption show. While plunder during military operations could be legitimized as the ‘just spoils of war’, everyday corruption and misuse of power within the colonial bureaucracy was less easy to justify in the metropolis. The trial against Thomas Picton, the first British Governor of Trinidad, in 1806, who was charged with having brutally tortured a fourteen-year old free coloured girl

Introduction 15

named Louisa Calderon, is an instructive example of the uneasiness of the metropolitan government and the public at home when confronted with the realities of colonial rule on the spot.48 In the plantation and settler colonies of European empires, metropolitan governments had another reason to prevent the corruption of their men on the spot: the subversion of metropolitan authority. Colonial officials who owned plantations and participated in trade were naturally more prone to defend the interests of the colonists in defiance of metropolitan policies, which they were supposed to implement. Consider, for instance, French Governors in the West Indies during the Age of Revolutions, for whom it was normal to gain a fortune by buying plantations and participating in the flourishing contraband trade. To some extent, metropolitan authorities saw these practices as a necessary evil and tried to minimize the damage by regularly exchanging their representatives in the colonies, thus preventing too close cooperation between their agents and the colonists.49 However, in wartime situations, the French metropolis hardly had the means to prevent such fraternization and the subsequent subversion of its authority in the colonies, as Flavio Eichmann emphasizes in his contribution on the cooperation between colonial officials and local planter elites in the French Caribbean sugar island of Martinique during the Napoleonic Wars. In their quest for more economic freedom and political autonomy the planters found a willing supporter in the colony’s Governor, who ignored all orders from Paris in exchange for material rewards from the planters. His subversive cooperation with the colonial elites went so far that it even undermined the French war effort against the British Empire, with whom the planters’ true loyalties lay. Probably the most prominent scandal in the British Empire was the impeachment of the first Governor-General of British India, Warren Hastings, who was prosecuted between 1788 and 1795 by Edmund Burke, Member of Parliament for the Whig Party. Hastings became a symbol of the corrupt, scrupulous nabob, conspicuously wealthy men who had made their fortunes by abusing agreements and treaties and exchanging presents with ‘oriental’ rulers. Yet many European officials – and indigenous intermediaries – of the early colonial period considered additional profit to be a fair reward for their performance. In addition, even Burke recognized that the East India Company acted under two sorts of powers: the British Crown, authorized by Parliament, and the Mughal Emperor. In such circumstances, it was in the very nature of cooperation to adopt the others’ norms and become ‘corrupt’. This reveals another – moral – sense of corruption. Burke’s main concern was not so much bribery, but that the public responsibility of British officials and political ethics would be corrupted by the others’ differing norms and regulations.50

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The reformist agenda of Burke was reflected in Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which at its core was an effort to regulate cooperation between Company officials and Indian rulers according to British norms. It was possible to implement these governmental regulations by degree in British territories such as Bengal, which were more or less directly ruled with a considerable imperial presence. However, as Bührer demonstrates in her chapter on British residents in Hyderabad, it was far more difficult to implement them in the case of British officials who were acting as minorities on the margins of empire, where moral and material corruption presumably continued to exist until the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, after the trial against Hastings, corruption became increasingly identified with India itself, particularly with its customs and culture. Indigenous corruption became the main justification for imperial intervention in Asia as well as later in Africa.51 Austen thus shows that already the ‘Cornwallis reforms’ of the 1790s sought to reform the presumably corrupt revenue system in Bengal. In particular, the zamindars, tax-collecting landholders who were perceived as both defrauding the British authorities and oppressing the peasants beneath them, were transformed into landlords along the model of the English landed gentry. Corruption and colonial scandals remained a central issue throughout the nineteenth century up to the era of decolonization and beyond.52 According to Schaper, the double power basis of colonial authorization and local networks, a pre-condition for chiefs in German Cameroon to serve as intermediaries, was at the same time perceived by colonial officials as a dangerous source of misuse. They in particular were accused to use their new jurisdictional power to demand inappropriate court fees or defraud money. An often neglected group of African intermediaries are the subject of Alexander Keese’s chapter ‘Key Alliance? “Native Guard” and European Administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa from a Comparative Perspective (1918–1959)’. Keese contributes a comprehensive comparison of British, French and Portuguese native guards in colonial Africa, whose duties ranged from policing to organizing forced labour. They were often employed far from their areas of origin, they were poorly paid and their European superiors seldom backed their actions on the ground, sometimes even treating them with contempt. Thus, Keese concludes, it was not their double empowerment but rather their lack of both local networks and colonial patronage that made them prone to corruption and prompted them to resort to violence in order fulfil their colonial duties. Regular extortion scandals and killings characterized the institution of native guards; this persisted in all European colonies in Africa up to the era of decolonization. As opposed to the native guards, Austen examines indigenous agents with high salaries who were on the secondary level of colonial bureaucracy.

Introduction 17

Allegations of large-scale corruption were brought against indigenous government agents both in India and Africa from the colonial to the postcolonial era. Yet Austen suggests that these intermediary groups were not as prone to corruption during the colonial era, when the risk of losing a privileged position was not worth the expected illegal profits from only limited resources. However, the ubiquitous discourse on practices of abuse essentially helped to define the colonial state. Inherited colonial regimes, with their defects, were much more receptive to the high material temptations and social expectations of postcolonial development and mass politics. Austen thus concludes that there was no direct continuity of corruption from colonial to postcolonial states.

COOPERATION AND VIOLENCE More often than not imperial expansion was accompanied by violence and war. This is almost a truism, as wars on the imperial periphery, wars of conquest, brutal violence of all kind, as well as uprisings against colonial suppression are common features of imperial history.53 This violence has been part of transcultural warfare for the whole of its very long history.54 However, wars on the periphery in faraway places posed specific problems for imperial powers. Metropolitan authorities were barely able to keep close control of those territories. Their representatives, soldiers, administrators, merchants and settlers therefore enjoyed a great deal of freedom to act on their own account and to pursue their own interests that often conflicted with the intentions and aims of governments at home. The conquest of India for example was orchestrated mainly by military men on the spot contrary to orders from London and against the will of the directors of the East India Company, who wanted to avoid the enormous costs of wars on the subcontinent that were to ruin the company.55 Eichmann’s contribution in this volume shows that rich planters and their political partners in French Martinique ignored orders from Paris and would rather have handed over the colony to the British than allow their personal interests to be hampered. It is therefore doubtful whether Ronald Robinson’s assumption that planters and settlers were ‘pre-fabricated collaborators’ of imperial rule is correct.56 Matthias Häußler emphasizes this point in his chapter on German Southwest Africa. He demonstrates how settlers contravened the colonial authorities’ attempts to spread peace. Instead they displayed aggressive attitudes towards the indigenous population and did not shy away from brutal violence, extortion and even murder. The prosecution of such crimes

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was rare, as German settlers enjoyed a special status. The colonial state was weak, with little control over the settlers and little ability to protect the ‘natives’. Having suffered constant violence and been driven into poverty, the Herero and later the Nama rebelled against German rule. The German government in Berlin sent troops to the colony to suppress the uprising. This resulted in a terrible war that culminated in genocide. However, the presence of the regular army that enforced colonial rule and led to the mass killing of the potential work force, also displeased the settlers. The relationship between settlers and authorities remained tense. If imperial powers could not even rely on their men on the spot, whom else could they trust? This issue of trust posed a major problem throughout the history of imperial expansion. For financial, economic and even political reasons imperial powers were rarely able to send large numbers of regular troops to the periphery. As a result, they usually lacked manpower and firepower on the ground. The support of indigenous forces was therefore of the utmost importance for the imperial enterprise.57 Victory in warfare on the periphery as well as the enforcement and maintenance of imperial rule was simply impossible without help from some parts of the local population. Indigenous fighters, mercenaries, irregular troops, carriers, workers as well as allies in the region played an indispensable role in enabling the outsiders to establish themselves in parts of the world that were alien to them. In addition, the intruders required supplies, orientation by local guides, medical assistance and many other things that could only be provided by inhabitants of the land. In the context of violence and war friendly interaction ranged from mutually beneficent cooperation to lopsided collaboration. But indigenous cooperation is all too often overlooked in heroic tales of imperial conquerors such as Cortez and Pizarro. This is not only unfair but also completely wrong. Tiny forces of heavily armed Spanish men would never have been able to defeat the huge armies of the Aztecs or the Inca. But they found allies among the local rivals of the enemy. As time progressed and empires grew, indigenous forces remained important. Above all they were comparatively cheap, adapted to the local climate and more resistant to disease. They also could be employed for special tasks such as counter guerrilla and dirty work such as violence against civilians. The recruitment of indigenous fighters was normally easy, as military traditions existed in many parts of the world and there were enough men ready to be employed by the highest bidder in local power contests. The cooperation of actors of violence went beyond mere fighting. By focusing on the indigenous soldiers’ role in everyday colonialism, their often pivotal contribution to colonial state-building becomes evident.58 With the increasing establishment of a colonial state, colonial powers usually started

Introduction 19

to differentiate between military violence and policing for which they built up special forces. Such a force were, for instance, the native guards in Africa, founded well after the establishment of empire. They performed some form of policing, especially in remote areas where the colonial powers exerted little control. It was exactly this lack of control that gave these men a certain amount of freedom to pursue their own interests. As Keese demonstrates, low pay and the neglect of their superiors induced many of the native guards to extort goods and services from the local population. They often committed brutal acts of violence and all kinds of atrocities, which gave them a rather bad reputation. But the authorities of the colonial powers involved needed them. Matters improved only slowly over time and even then, the guards were never fully under the control of the colonial powers. In modern Maori language, the word kupapa stands for traitors to their own people. They are ‘Uncle Toms’, archetypical collaborators with the alien rulers. But as Vincent O’Malley shows, this word originally had a different meaning. It referred to people who during the New Zealand Wars of the nineteenth century preferred to remain on the sidelines, as the very notion of a united Maori nation did not exist. Cooperation with the Crown, where it existed, was selective and purposeful. Kupapas refused to be mere tools of the colonial authorities but pursued their own interests and sometimes switched sides if support for the resistance appeared to serve their ends better. Cooperation, collaboration and resistance therefore were just changing ways of interaction within the imperial context. O’Malley’s findings can be generalized. History is rarely black or white; it should be painted in grey colours instead. Important as indigenous support was for imperial policy, it could also serve the interests of those who were prepared to cooperate. They pursued their own agendas and thus did not always necessarily remain loyal to the imperial power. Whether cooperation with the imperial power turned into collaboration or was just a short-lived affair, beneficial to both sides, depended on circumstances and opportunities. But it was also possible for cooperation to end in hostilities, when mutual understanding collapsed. It was a telling case when the Sepoys in Northern India, who for decades had loyally served the British Raj, turned against their superiors and in 1857–1858 staged a massive revolt. Dependence on the cooperation of indigenous groups was the weak point of empire and this proved to be fatal to imperial rule in the face of rising anti-colonial nationalism. The various case studies in this volume, largely based on primary sources, are arranged chronologically. Two chapters by Austen and Wolfgang Reinhard conclude this book. While Austen compares the colonial state’s

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secondary bureaucracy in India and Africa, Reinhard summarizes this volume’s central themes and discusses further fields for research. Dr Tanja Bührer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her Ph.D. thesis to ‘Colonial Security Policy in German East Africa 1885–1918’ was awarded first prize of the Werner Hahlweg Prize of Military History and Sciences 2009/10. Afterwards she was awarded a Fellowship for advanced researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to work on her Habilitation (post-doctoral qualification) in the United Kingdom, France and India. From 2015 to 2016 she was Visiting Professor for European and Modern History at the University of Rostock. Dr des. Flavio Eichmann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has published several articles on war, revolution and abolition in the Caribbean during the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. His dissertation on war and revolution in the Lesser Antilles, 1789–1815 is being prepared for publication. Professor Stig Förster is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institutes in London and Washington, D.C. and Professor of Modern History at the University of Augsburg, Germany. At Düsseldorf University he received his Ph.D. and his second Ph.D. He has published widely on international, political, military and imperial history. Together with Roger Chickering and others he edited a five volume series on the history of total war that was published at Cambridge University Press. He is chairman of the Military History Association in Germany. Professor Benedikt Stuchtey is a full professor of modern history at the University of Marburg, Germany, since 2013. Until then he was deputy director of the German Historical Institute, London, since 2004, and he has taught as Visiting Professor at the universities of Basel, Switzerland and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He concentrates his research on the history of colonialism and imperialism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

NOTES   1. See the fascinating but also openly self-indulgent work by T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Oxford, 1922).

Introduction 21

  2. On Blunt see B. Stuchtey, Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2010), 211–15.   3. The use of the term ‘indigenous’ in this volume does not necessarily denote autochthonous people, but generally societies that have, in contrast to the agents of the invading empire, ‘generations of experience with the local climate, terrain, and subsistence system’ and ‘operated according to different cultural systems’. See W.E. Lee, ‘Projecting Power in the Early Modern World: The Spanish Model?’, in idem (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 9.   4. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–42; idem, ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire’, in W.J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 267–89.   5. J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 6(1) (1953), 1–15.   6. A.G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future? From National History to Imperial History’, Past & Present 164 (1999), 198; P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 27–30.   7. On the ‘grand theories’ of imperialism, see W.J. Mommsen, Imperialismustheorien: Ein Überblick über die neueren Imperialisinterpretationen, 3rd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). On the reasons for their demise, see B. Barth, ‘Whatever Happened to Imperialism? Wolfgang J. Mommsen und die Imperialismustheorien’, in C. Cornellisen (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 168–69.   8. S. Howe, ‘The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 29(2) (2001), 133.   9. D.M. Peers, ‘Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again? The Revival of Imperial History and the “Oxford History of the British Empire”’, Journal of World History 13(2) (2002), 452. Referring to the works of Gallagher and Robinson, P. Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review 102(2) (1997), 402, wrote that their ‘purview remained resolutely Eurocentric, a quality reflected in their fondness for colonial boys’-club rhetoric’. 10. D. Ghosh, ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’, American Historical Review 117(3) (2012), 774–75; G. Shepperson, ‘Ronald Robinson: Scholar and Good Companion’, in A. Porter and R. Holland (eds), Theory and Practice in the History of European Expansion Overseas: Essays in Honour of Ronald Robinson (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 2.

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11. D.K. Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 12(2) (1984), 9–23. 12. E. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 13. Robinson, ‘Foundations’, 118. 14. J. Osterhammel, ‘Wissen als Macht: Deutungen interkulturellen NichtsVerstehens bei Tzvetan Todorov und Edward Said’, in E.-M. Auch and S. Förster (eds), ‘Barbaren’ und ‘Weiße Teufel’: Kulturkonflikte und Imperialismus in Asien vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997), 145–49, 163–64. 15. J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). See also Lee, ‘Projecting Power’, 1; T. von Trotha, ‘Was war Kolonialismus? Einige zusammenfassende Befunde zur Soziologie und Geschichte des Kolonialismus und der Kolonialherrschaft’, Saeculum 55 (2004), 64–66. 16. S. Conrad and J. Osterhammel, ‘Einleitung’, in idem (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 7–27; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 13–14; Howe, ‘Slow Death’, 138. 17. On the importance of information gathering, see C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. Of course, information from indigenous sources needed to be true in order to be of any value to colonial administrators. See E.L. Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 29–50. 18. W. Knöbl, ‘Imperiale Herrschaft und Gewalt’, Mittelweg 36 21(3) (2012), 33–34, 43–44. 19. Robinson, ‘Foundations’, 130, 139. 20. H.K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 21. P.J. Cain, ‘Foreword’, in B. Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), x. 22. Robinson, ‘Excentric Idea of Imperialism’, 271. 23. Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism’, 415. 24. Ironically, in their focus on imperialistic discourses as Western monologues detached from reality and the authentic other, postcolonial studies are reifying Euro-centrism in a very extreme form. See Peers, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, 456; S. Conrad and A. Eckert, ‘Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, multiple Modernen: Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt’, in idem and U. Freitag (eds), Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2007), 22–23. 25. J.A. Clancy-Smith, ‘Collaboration and Empire in the Middle East and North Africa: Introduction and Response’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24(1) (2004), 126.

Introduction 23

26. W. Johnson, ‘On Agency’, Journal of Social History 37(1) (2003), 113. 27. W. Reinhard, ‘Kolonialgeschichtliche Probleme und kolonialhistorische Konzepte’, in C. Kraft, A. Lüdtke and J. Martschuka (eds), Kolonialgeschichten: Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2010), 77; Peers, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, 463. 28. D. Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 24(3) (1996), 345–63; Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism, 60–61; Clancy-Smith, ‘Collaboration’, 126; Howe, ‘Slow Death’, 134–35; Peers, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, 457–58. 29. S. Dubow, ‘Introduction’, in P. Levine (ed), The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, 4 vols (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), vol. 2, xi–xxxi. 30. B. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); M. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). 31. See for example A.A. Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 41; and B. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts, ‘Introduction. African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration’, in idem (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 6. Osborn, ‘Circle of Iron’, 32, points out that the term ‘collaborator’ is ‘premised on a pan-African identity that flattens out the complexities of Africa’s histories’. Yet, it should be noted that Robinson, ‘Foundations’, 131, never used the term ‘collaboration’ in a pejorative sense. 32. Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, ‘Introduction’, 6. Some scholars emphasize the fact that many of the future nationalists would in fact be drawn from the descendants of the ‘collaborators’. Other local elites, like the creole elites in Latin America and Cuba, simply exchanged one empire for another. See A.W. McCoy, ‘Fatal Florescence: Europe’s Decolonization and America’s Decline’, in idem, J.M. Fradera and S. Jacobson (eds), Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 12–15. 33. Lawrance, Osborn and Roberts, ‘Introduction’; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 14. 34. C. Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, Journal of World History 11(2) (2000), 227–63. 35. See R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 36. Yet as Iris Seri-Hersch notes in this volume, the term ‘cooperation’ can be understood as equally anachronistic because of its use by Western ‘development’ agencies since the postcolonial era. 37. Von Trotha, ‘Kolonialismus’, 60–63.

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38. S. Belmessous, ‘The Paradox of an Empire by Treaty’, in idem (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11–14. 39. G.H.K. Tabatabai, The Seir Mutaqhrein, or View of Modern Times: Being a History of India, 3 vols (Calcutta, 1789), vol. 2, 547–612. 40. C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4. 41. See the pioneering studies of P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Bayly, Indian Society. 42. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, ‘Introduction’ in idem (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–14. 43. B.S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 165–210. 44. This line of thought refers to the introduction in Bhabha, Location, 1–2; however, the editors avoided the problematic analytical categories of ‘identity’ or ‘subjectivity’, which figure as key concepts of postcolonial studies and also of the new imperial history. See K. Wilson, ‘Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities’, in idem (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–26. These currently prevalent approaches suggest, as Brubaker and Cooper argue, a ‘constructivist stance on identity … to acquit it of the charge of “essentialism” by stipulating that identities are constructed, fluid, and multiple’. Yet by this proliferation the ‘term loses its analytical purchase’. See R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29(1) (2000), 1. In addition, most contributions in this book deal with subjects and communities that did not produce the necessary ego documents such as autobiographies, memoirs or diaries to track down such a thing as identity. Thus, the editors opted instead for the quest for loyalties outlined above and extended the personal with a structural approach. On the problematic use of identity see also A. Stucki, ‘Empire Light? Kooperation als Herrschaftsstrategie in den späten iberischen Imperien’, in F. Eichmann, M. Pöhlmann and D. Walter (eds), Globale Kriege und Machtkonflikte: Festschrift für Stig Förster zum 65. Geburtstag (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2016), 328–29. 45. On James Achilles Kirkpatrick see also W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Penguin Books, 2002). 46. S. David, The Indian Mutiny, 1857 (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 351–52. 47. See L. Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London: Tauris, 2006). 48. On Picton see J. Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); K. Candlin, The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 118–37. After a lengthy trial, Picton was acquitted of all charges. The former Governor of Trinidad is certainly more famous for his deeds during the Peninsular Campaign under Wellington. He was the

Introduction 25

highest-ranking officer on the British side to die at the Battle of Waterloo. A statue in St Paul’s Cathedral in London commemorates him. 49. See O. Gliech, Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution: Das Ende der weißen Herrschaft in einer karibischen Plantagenökonomie (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 87–92. 50. E. Burke, ‘Speech on Opening of Impeachment on 15 February 1788’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), vol. 6, 270–82. See also N.B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–5. 51. Ibid. 52. See for example F. Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien, 1880–1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009), 225–328. 53. See for example T. Klein and F. Schumacher (eds), Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006); T. Bührer, C. Stachelbeck and D. Walter (eds), Imperialkriege von 1500 bis heute: Strukturen – Akteure – Lernprozesse (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2011); D. Killingray and D. Omissi (eds), Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); O. Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et l’état colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005). 54. H.-H. Kortüm (ed.), Transcultural Wars from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006). 55. S. Förster, Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992). 56. Robinson, ‘Foundations’, 124–26. 57. For a general analysis of imperial warfare see D. Walter, Organisierte Gewalt in der europäischen Expansion: Gestalt und Logik des Imperialkrieges (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014). 58. See Moyd, Intermediaries; M. Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barth, B. ‘Whatever Happened to Imperialism? Wolfgang J. Mommsen und die Imperialismustheorien’, in C. Cornellisen (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010, 159–74. Bayly, C.A. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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 . Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Belmessous, S. ‘The Paradox of an Empire by Treaty’, in idem (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 1–18. Bhabha, H.K. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boahen, A.A. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Bösch, F. Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien, 1880–1914. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009. Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper. ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29(1) (2000), 1–47. Bührer, T., C. Stachelbeck and D. Walter (eds). Imperialkriege von 1500 bis heute: Strukturen – Akteure – Lernprozesse. Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2011. Burbank, J. and F. Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Cain, P.J. ‘Foreword’, in B. Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006, viii-x. Cain, P.J. and A.G. Hopkins. British Imperialism 1688–2000. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000. Candlin, K. The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Clancy-Smith, J.A. ‘Collaboration and Empire in the Middle East and North Africa: Introduction and Response’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24(1) (2004), 123–27. Cohn, B.S. ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 165–210. Conrad, S. and A. Eckert. ‘Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, multiple Modernen: Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt’, in idem and U. Freitag (eds), Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2007, 7–49. Conrad, S. and J. Osterhammel. ‘Einleitung’, in idem (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, 7–27. Dalrymple, W. White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Penguin Books, 2002. David, S. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Dirks, N.B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Dubow, S. ‘Introduction’, in P. Levine (ed), The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, 4 vols. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, vol. 2, xi–xxxi. Epstein, J. Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Introduction 27

Fieldhouse, D.K. ‘Can Humpty Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 12(2) (1984), 9–23. Förster, S. Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992. Gallagher, J. and R. Robinson. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 6(1) (1953), 1–15. Ghosh, D. ‘Another Set of Imperial Turns?’, American Historical Review 117(3) (2012), 772–93. Gliech, O. Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution: Das Ende der weißen Herrschaft in einer karibischen Plantagenökonomie. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger. ‘Introduction’ in idem (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 1–14. Hopkins, A.G. ‘Back to the Future? From National History to Imperial History’, Past & Present 164 (1999), 198–243. Howe, S. ‘The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 29(2) (2001), 131–41. Johnson, W. ‘On Agency’, Journal of Social History 37(1) (2003), 113–24. Kennedy, D. ‘Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 24(3) (1996), 345–63. Killingray, D. and D. Omissi (eds). Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, c. 1700–1964. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Klein, T. and F. Schumacher (eds). Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006. Knöbl, W. ‘Imperiale Herrschaft und Gewalt’, Mittelweg 36 21(3) (2012), 19–44. Kortüm, H.-H. (ed.). Transcultural Wars from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006. Lawrance, B., E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds). Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Lawrance, B., E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts. ‘Introduction: African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration’, in idem (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, 3–36. Lawrence, T.E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Oxford, 1922. Le Cour Grandmaison, O. Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et l’état colonial. Paris: Fayard, 2005. Lee, W.E. ‘Projecting Power in the Early Modern World: The Spanish Model?’, in idem (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World. New York: New York University Press, 2011, 1–16. Lukitz, L. A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq. London: Tauris, 2006.

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Marshall, P.J. Bengal: The British Bridgehead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. (ed.). The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. McCoy, A.W. ‘Fatal Florescence: Europe’s Decolonization and America’s Decline’, in idem, J.M. Fradera and S. Jacobson (eds), Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, 3–39. Mommsen, W.J. Imperialismustheorien: Ein Überblick über die neueren Imperialismusinterpretationen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987. Moyd, M. Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014. Newbury, C. ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, Journal of World History 11(2) (2000), 227–63. Osborn, E.L. ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 29–50. Osterhammel, J. ‘Wissen als Macht: Deutungen interkulturellen Nichts-Verstehens bei Tzvetan Todorov und Edward Said’, in E.-M. Auch and S. Förster (eds), ‘Barbaren’ und ‘Weiße Teufel’: Kulturkonflikte und Imperialismus in Asien vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997, 145–69. Peers, D.M. ‘Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again? The Revival of Imperial History and the “Oxford History of the British Empire”’, Journal of World History 13(2) (2002), 451–67. Reinhard, W. ‘Kolonialgeschichtliche Probleme und kolonialhistorische Konzepte’, in C. Kraft, A. Lüdtke and J. Martschuka (eds), Kolonialgeschichten: Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2010, 67–94. Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Longman, 1972, 117–42.  . ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire’, in W.J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986, 267–89. Said, E. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Shepperson, G. ‘Ronald Robinson: Scholar and Good Companion’, in A. Porter and R. Holland (eds), Theory and Practice in the History of European Expansion Overseas: Essays in Honour of Ronald Robinson. London: Frank Cass, 1988, 1–8. Stuchtey, B. Die europäische Expansion und ihre Feinde: Kolonialismuskritik vom 18. bis in das 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2010. Stucki, A. ‘Empire Light? Kooperation als Herrschaftsstrategie in den späten iberischen Imperien’, in F. Eichmann, M. Pöhlmann and D. Walter (eds), Globale Kriege und Machtkonflikte: Festschrift für Stig Förster zum 65. Geburtstag. Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2016, 315–29. Tabatabai, G.H.K. The Seir Mutaqhrein, or View of Modern Times: Being a History of India. Calcutta, 1789.

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Thomas, M. Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Trotha, T. von. ‘Was war Kolonialismus? Einige zusammenfassende Befunde zur Soziologie und Geschichte des Kolonialismus und der Kolonialherrschaft’, Saeculum 55 (2004), 49–95. Walter, D., Organisierte Gewalt in der europäischen Expansion: Gestalt und Logik des Imperialkrieges. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014. White, R. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wilson, K. ‘Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities’, in idem (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 1–26. Wolfe, P. ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review 102(2) (1997), 388–420.

Part I

} Case Studies

Chapter 1

Caciques Indigenous Rulers and the Colonial Regime in Yucatán in the Sixteenth Century Ute Schüren

} The conquest of and the establishment of colonial rule in Mexico and in other parts of Latin America by a relatively small number of Spaniards in the sixteenth century would not have been possible without the support of thousands of indigenous men and women, who served as commanders, interpreters, spies, soldiers, porters, servants, suppliers, guides, messengers, cooks, etc. The conquerors rarely acknowledged the crucial role of these socalled auxiliaries.1 One remarkable exception is the Spanish captain Francisco de Bracamonte, commander of a combined column of Spanish and several hundred Nahua soldiers who jointly participated in the conquest of the Yucatán Peninsula. He states in his relation of merits and services directed to the king in 1572: ‘I have fought beside these Indians and I have seen their loyalty and the great service that they have done for Your Majesty … They have fought and suffered along beside us, and many a Spanish soldier owes them his life … I can say in all honesty that without them we would never have conquered this land’.2 The cooperation of indigenous leaders was indispensable for the subjection of the native population in the socially stratified societies of Mexico and other parts of Mesoamerica. It was obtained either by force or consensually. The Spanish strategy of subduing native rulers rested to a large degree upon exploiting political antagonisms and status differences among them. Frequently, indigenous 33

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groups and leaders wanted to win the Spaniards as their allies against political rivals. In their view, they themselves were the conquerors. This principle of strategic alliance building in the context of regional and local conflict had a long history in Mesoamerica and was also of crucial importance for the expansion of pre-Columbian states such as those of the Aztec and Maya.3 However, contrary to pre-Columbian patterns of indirect rule and tribute extraction, the Spaniards aimed at subjecting, exploiting and colonizing the provinces entirely, thus profoundly changing the culture and way of life of the conquered populations. For a long time, indigenous agency in the Spanish conquest and colonization has been ignored by scholars or has received only passing mention. As Restall puts it, ‘[earlier, U. S.] published histories are so overwhelmingly Hispanocentric, so incestuous in their use of each other and of the same Spanish sources that they can be taken as primary – that is, primary sources on the European perspective’.4 However, many recent histories and interpretations of the implementation of colonial rule focus on an overly broad and unqualified understanding of agency, these interpretations assume that (everyday forms of) resistance and autonomy are self-evident for the indigenous part of the colonial population.5 They also highlight or single out indigenous sources. However, these accounts are as biased as the Spanish sources. Both perspectives attest that a Spaniard-Indian dichotomy still distorts most studies – be they Indian-centric or Euro-centric. It is precisely this dichotomy that prevents us from understanding the various forms of agency and interaction in the early colonial period. This chapter discusses the roles indigenous leaders played during different phases of Spanish colonial expansion on the Yucatán Peninsula. The lowlands of Yucatán provide an especially interesting case when illustrating how Spanish rule was established in a frontier region far away from the central Mexican highlands, where the core area of colonial New Spain was located. It will be shown, among other things, that Spaniards as well as Indians were rather heterogeneous groups and pursued different interests. Thus, the relationships between indigenous rulers and the Spanish colonial agents turned out to be varied and ranged from friendship to violence and from cooperation to resistance. First, I will present the Spanish concept of natural lord and cacique as colonial designations for indigenous leaders. Second, precolonial forms of rulership in Yucatán will be introduced briefly. We will then look at different colonial actors and discuss the impact of both the expansion of colonial rule and its increasing institutionalization at the local level, while focusing on indigenous rulers, their experiences and strategies. I will in particular examine the case of Don Pablo Paxbolon, a renowned Chontal leader who functioned as an



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important intermediary between the Spanish colonial authorities and the indigenous society, while pursuing his personal and family interests. Being economically and politically successful, he was able to move back and forth between indigenous and Spanish cultures, to which he had adapted since his early childhood.

SPANISH COLONIAL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTORS The Spaniards generally called the indigenous rulers whom they encountered señores naturales, ‘natural lords’, or caciques – a Hispanicized term for chiefs (from Arawak: kassequa) exported from the West Indies to the American mainland – and sometimes also ‘kings’. The concept of natural lord goes back to the Middle Ages. It can be found, for example, in Castilian codes, laws and decrees such as the ‘Siete Partidas’. Based on these early sources, Robert Chamberlain defines the señor (or señora) natural as a lord (or lady in cases of female rulers) who ‘by inherent nature of superior qualities, goodness, and virtue, and by birth of superior station, attains power legitimately’. His rule is just and ‘in accord with divine, natural, and human law and reason’, as well as ‘universally accepted, recognized, and obeyed by his vassals and subjects’. The position must also be recognized by other lords as rightful. The Spaniards applied the concept of the señor natural to native rulers and lords, both with respect to relations with their own subjects and with Castile. It assured the subjection of the masses through the control of their already established lords. It was also relevant as a legal basis for Spanish rule, including the assessment of tributes and services. The Spaniards acknowledged even caciques of relatively small areas or towns as natural lords of their people ‘if of established ruling families’. The Spanish king was conceived, in turn, as ‘the señor natural of the native lords and their subjects’.6 Thus, the Spaniards recognized indigenous rulership as legitimate and incorporated it into their feudal order. The native inhabitants of the new colonies were classified as indios, defined by descent. Spanish law distinguished Indians in quasi-racial terms from other groups in the colony (such as Spaniards, Blacks, people of mixed blood), while estates inside indigenous society with different rights and obligations were also recognized.7 Although the Spaniards discovered that different types of leaders existed in this context, they generally assumed a hierarchical relationship among them in their search for the sovereign ruler or king and his vassals and followers. Thus, they tended to impose a reading of centralized governance onto the varied political systems they encountered. Initially they

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used the term cacique indiscriminately to categorize indigenous leaders of varied rank. Later it became restricted to the individuals officially recognized as rulers by the Spaniards.8 The official caciques became the mainstay for the execution of colonial rule at the local level. They were accepted in this role if they had converted to Roman Catholicism and were of pure ‘race’.9 Among other things, they became important functionaries of the encomienda system.10 They had to organize the forced labour service, collect taxes and chase fugitives. In return for their services, they received privileges, such as being addressed by the title don or doña and being freed from tribute as well as many fees and taxes. The Crown granted them a status equal to that of members of the lower Spanish nobility called hidalgos. The caciques and other indigenous noblemen could obtain the right to ride on horseback or to carry Spanish weapons. Their status was heritable and usually taken over by a younger brother or the eldest son, but sometimes also transferred to an older daughter. Caciques and their wives were to be provided with a certain number of personal servants from their towns and be better treated and dressed than other Indians, having the right even to wear fashionable Spanish clothes.11 Many learned the Spanish language and became important cultural brokers.12 However, as will become clear, the caciques should not be understood as mere puppets of the colonial regime. Many utilized their position successfully to gain personal wealth and status. Others resisted colonialism or were cruelly exploited, like the indigenous commoners who were the main targets of Spanish rule. Particularly in its early phases, colonial rule must have appeared arbitrary, chaotic and inconsistent to the native subjects. The establishment of the colonial state and its institutions was a protracted process in many regions.13 Spanish attacks on villages and towns were carried out frequently in order to obtain food, goods, labourers or concubines. There was no unified Spanish actor discernible, since the various players, such as conquerors, encomenderos, missionaries and state officials all followed their own agendas. Conflicts between them were common.14 The natives quickly learned to lobby for one side or the other or to play them off against each other. Thus, the antagonisms among the Spaniards must be taken into account to fully understand the native leaders’ attitudes towards them. Some encomenderos, for example, were much more tolerant regarding local politics and cultural issues than the missionaries, as long as they received the expected goods, capital and labour. They often tried to establish a good working relationship with the caciques in the indigenous villages and towns because of the latter’s role as middlemen and as helpful witnesses in cases of litigation with the clerics or other adversaries.



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While the encomenderos and the soldiers pursued mainly short-term economic interests and tended to ruthlessly exploit the indigenous population, the Catholic friars wanted to spread the mission, save indigenous souls and foster cultural change. They feared that the Spanish colonists and soldiers set a bad example to the neophytes through their misconduct and immoral lifestyle; they also threatened the friars’ work by frightening, dispossessing or even murdering the Indians. Being often the sole Spanish representatives at the local level, the friars (and later the secular clergy) were of crucial importance to the integration of the indigenous population into the colonial order. The ability to speak indigenous languages and an understanding of the respective cultures was an important prerequisite for this role. The friars relied heavily on local informants, such as caciques, cantors, teachers and children in the missionary schools to acquire this knowledge.15 Over time, the Spanish colonial state was consolidated and new laws and institutions, such as the defensor de indios,16 were introduced by the Crown to protect the indigenous population against excessive exploitation, which endangered tribute payments in the long term. Indigenous officials, entire villages and individuals – nobles and commoners alike – became increasingly involved in investigations and lawsuits. They complained about abuses or testified to incidents and wrote letters to different representatives of the colonial state (governor, bishop, king, audiencia [court of justice], etc.). The indigenous elite in particular used the colonial administration to protect their privileges, status and property. The resulting documentation, often written in indigenous languages, thus adds much information to the Spanish military or missionary reports and to official investigations. The so-called probanzas de méritos (proofs of merit and nobility) are especially illuminating for the discussion of caciques as indigenous middlemen in the colonial context. They include the self-representations of indigenous elites and are evidence of their strategies vis-à-vis the colonial institutions. The documents report the authors’ services provided to the Crown in order to confirm noble descent, obtain privileges or gain access to certain rewards.17

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE YUCATÁN MAYA AT THE TIME OF CONQUEST The Yucatán Peninsula extends over a large area in south-eastern Mexico, northern Guatemala and Belize.18 Many parts are still widely covered with dense scrub and tropical forest. Here the Spaniards could find neither gold nor silver. The wealth of Yucatán in colonial times was based on agrarian

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and forest products (such as corn, beans, squash, honey, wax and lumber), cotton cloth (mantas) woven by indigenous women, salt and cattle. At the time of the conquest, the region was inhabited by a large indigenous population speaking different Maya languages (such as Yucatec Maya, Itzá, Chontal, Ch’ol and Cholti).19 The Maya population was stratified into nobles20 and commoners,21 and power was mainly controlled by the heads of influential lineages who claimed descent from foreign conquerors and divine ancestors. Slavery was common and slaves (mostly orphans and war captives) were bound to many households on a temporal or permanent basis.22 They also constituted a major part of the labour force in the indigenous elite’s plantations and trade enterprises. The area was divided into several provinces whose internal political organization varied.23 In some of them (such as Maní, the province of the Xiu) a paramount leader called halach uinic (real man) or batab (Plural: batabob; ‘governor’) ruled over chiefs of important towns who were also called batabob. Others were controlled by federations of batabob of almost equal power. Thus, the title batab referred to offices of different rank and spheres of influence. It was even applied to leaders of town sections or wards. In some parts of the peninsula, for example, in the Chontal-speaking region of Acalan, local leaders and paramount rulers seemingly carried the title of ahau (ruler) instead of batab. Furthermore, local and regional councils existed in each province. Members of the councils were called ah cuchcabob (Singular: ah cuchcab). Mostly they represented town wards or provincial districts. The batabob or halach uinicob consulted them before taking important decisions. The council members were also responsible for collecting tribute. The batabob were assisted by several office holders of lower status. A head chief always had to consult other principal men.24 At the time of the conquest, the legitimacy of the native rulers was based on several factors. It relied on their success in the endemic wars among indigenous polities and on their high status as members of ruling lineages. Their descent from prominent ancestors also made them preferential intermediaries between the human and the divine. Due to this religious role, they could recruit workers or warriors and demand tribute from their subjects. Much of it was spent on lavish feasts to attract followers and impress rivals. Rituals such as bloodletting were important to maintain and display the relationship with their divine ancestors and gods. The conquest of the Yucatán Peninsula took place in 1527, six years after the Spaniards vanquished the Aztec state, the most powerful indigenous polity in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Although the Spanish soldiers lead by Francisco de Montejo, his son and his nephew were joined by hundreds of indigenous allies from central Mexico and other regions, the conquest of



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Yucatán was an arduous enterprise lasting twenty years (1527–1547). In contrast to the situation in the central Mexican highlands, where Tenochtitlan was the capital of the Aztec empire, no single hegemonic political centre existed that could be taken over in a single stroke. A number of independent polities had to be conquered. Initially, many Maya leaders accepted the Spanish intrusion without much resistance. However, after encomiendas had been distributed to the Spanish conquerors many former native allies joined a rebellion that succeeded in driving the Spaniards out of the province for some time. Winning allies was one thing, keeping the alliances alive was quite another. Many Maya leaders became strong opponents to the Spanish attempts to deepen colonial domination and several rebellions had to be quelled. Due to the extremely violent campaigns and the imported epidemic diseases, the death toll among the indigenous population was very high. According to reliable estimates, between 1511 and 1550 the population decline ranged from 50 to 90 percent. It was especially high in the hot and humid coastal areas such as the western Chontal region and lower in the dry north-western region of Yucatán.25 The Spaniards eventually succeeded because they managed to sustain strategic alliances with leading Maya families, such as the Pech and Xiu ruling lineages, by granting certain privileges and giving them status symbols and other gifts. Documents written in Yucatec Maya provide an insight into the interpretation of the conquest by members of the Maya elite, who had allied themselves to the Spaniards. In the Titles of Yaxkukul and Chicxulub, Macan Pech, a member of the Pech family, states: ‘From them we had been given clothes – coats and cloaks; we were made very content by these captains’.26 Additionally, a certain east-west antagonism, as well as a pre-existing feud between the Xiu and Cocom (the strongest opponents to Spanish rule) and their respective allies, might explain why Maya elites responded differently to the Spanish endeavour to settle in Yucatán.27 The Spaniards were perceived as another group of foreigners establishing an overlordship. This was in line with pre-Columbian tradition, at least to a certain extent, since many native lords claimed descent from earlier groups of conquerors who had gained their position through warfare. These ancestral ties were more or less remote and, according to Farriss, it was among the ‘comparative newcomers, such as the Chontal Maya on the gulf and east coasts, the Pech, Chel, and Canul dynasties, and most notably the Xiu rulers of Mani province, that the Spanish found the friendliest reaction’. Historical traditions of rulership by conquest were shared all over the peninsula and, against this background, their actions were determined by ‘questions of political power, not cultural survival’.28

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COOPERATION AND GAINS OF INDIGENOUS CACIQUES IN THE COLONY AND BEYOND THE COLONIAL FRONTIER After the conquest was completed in the northern part of Yucatán the Maya commoners were soon exploited through labour drafts, tribute, forced sales and labour contracts (repartimientos). In addition, there were many instances of Spanish encomenderos forcing their encomienda Indians into service as auxiliaries for further conquests or as porters.29 Mayan resistance declined as a result of military control, political and economic crises (such as the breakdown of trade relations, colonial exploitation, famines), as well as the ongoing depletion of the indigenous population. Most indigenous rulers were recognized and formally put into office by the Spaniards. They became caciques (batabob) of the provinces and towns that their families had controlled before the arrival of the Europeans. However, the traditional basis of their legitimacy was seriously challenged. One important consequence of Spanish colonialism was the pacification of large parts of the Yucatán Peninsula, which deprived the native rulers of their role as war leaders. In addition, the indigenous provinces or petty states (cuchcabalob) were disintegrated. Native political power was restricted to individual towns (cahob) and the small settlements in their vicinity. Additionally, proselytization attacked not only the ideological and religious legitimacy but also the economic base of the indigenous elites. The Franciscan missionaries, of course, condemned supposed heathen rituals, such as ancestor worship and blood sacrifice, as well as the widespread polygamy among the native rulers. They also aimed at intervening in the friendly relationship between some caciques and encomenderos. This policy is documented in the ordinances (ordenazas) of the inspector and judge (visitador and oidor) Thomas López Medel, who for a short period (1552–1553) became the administrator of Yucatán. The ordinances were formulated according to the needs of the Franciscan missionaries. Among other things, the number of nobles were to be reduced and the religious veneration of the caciques prohibited. They were not allowed to celebrate public rituals, feasts and meetings. Caciques were to be forced to choose only one out of their several wives to live with. Beyond this, Indian slavery was banned. These orders must have been especially painful for the caciques since slaves as well as women represented an important workforce in the private ventures of the native elite. López Medel also authorized the devastating concentration and congregation of the indigenous population in selected or new towns under missionary control. Many Indians were forced to settle in unfamiliar and unfavourable regions and lost their homes and economic bases.30



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By the mid-1560s, 190 pueblos (municipalities or repúblicas de indios) had been formed.31 Each of these pueblos had to organize its own government, including a governor and a town council, judges, scribes and other officials, following the Spanish model of cabildos.32 The caciques were increasingly excluded from political decisions and representative functions. The new parallel position of the gobernador / batab in the town council, which combined precolonial and colonial elements, was no longer a life-long appointment. It was to be filled with persons who were not the officially recognized caciques. Consequently, new political elites could arise.33 The caciques kept some of their privileges, such as the right to receive goods and services in their towns, and could often maintain much influence on an informal basis. However, the Franciscan attacks on their religious, political and economic power undermined their willingness to behave according to Spanish norms. Particularly in places rarely visited by priests, caciques were prone to backsliding into religious and social practices banned by the missionaries. But even in the centre of the province where the Catholic Church appeared to be well established, the friars’ success was often limited. This reflects the fact that many caciques and other indigenous authorities had adapted to Spanish standards only superficially while trying to maintain their authority by traditional means. At the same time, some European forms of representation were adopted to foster the caciques’ prominent position at the local level. Some chiefs disregarded the friars’ monopoly and administered Christian marriages, divorces and baptisms themselves. They even founded their own Christian churches.34 Cases of ‘idolatry’ were discovered that involved local leaders, elders as well as other principal men, teachers and cantors. In the inquisitional trial records of 1562, for example, the Franciscans documented worshipping of ‘idols’, animal sacrifices, auto-sacrifices and human sacrifices, as well as other rituals performed in Christian churches, other sacred places and the houses of caciques.35 The idolaters were severely punished for their ‘treachery’, particularly because most of them had been educated by the friars in the convents in order to become compliant, loyal and obedient authorities who were meant to return to their towns and foster Christianity. Many of them were tortured and killed.36 Subsequently, the provisorato de indios, a legal institution of the Diocese of Yucatán, continued with the persecution of forbidden indigenous religious practises.37 It was no wonder then that many caciques and their followers preferred to escape colonial control. After the conquest of Yucatán, the Spaniards had settled only in the northern part of the Yucatán Peninsula where the cities of Campeche, Mérida and Valladolid began to prosper, while most indigenous pueblos had been distributed to encomenderos or the Crown. The

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regions to the east and south, which were covered by dense tropical forests, remained outside Spanish control. In the montaña, fugitives from the colonized districts found asylum mostly in small, scattered hamlets (rancherías), but a few larger settlements also existed. The most important was Tayasal, the capital of the Itzá polity at Lake Petén Itzá in the southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula. Tayasal defended its independence up to the late seventeenth century.38 Emigration to the regions beyond the colonial frontier was not only provoked by the restrictive regime of the Catholic friars but was also in consequence of famines, epidemics and the rise of Spanish violence and exploitation. The forced production and sale of goods, often carried out by colonial administrators and supported by indigenous local leaders for their mutual enrichment, for example, drove many Indians into the forests.39 There, Indians could lead an autonomous life away from the villages and towns controlled by the missionaries and encomenderos. Traditional religious practices could be carried out publicly. The heavy burden of compulsory labour and tribute for the Spanish colonists could be avoided. Living in the forests permitted them to obtain edible plants, game and wild honey in case of crop failure and locust plagues. Milpa (swidden) agriculture provided the families with corn. The unconquered zones were an escape hatch for some of the colonized Maya; they were a cultural and political as well as an economic factor in the lives of all of them. Contact between separated kinsmen was not entirely broken, for news travelled rapidly with the trade goods. Even for the great majority of Maya who did not flee there, the zones of refuge were an ever-present and familiar (if only by hearsay) option rather than a frightening unknown.40

However, life beyond Spanish control was far from idyllic. The autonomy of the fugitives in the montaña was threatened by attacks from hostile independent groups searching the scattered villages for slaves, women and children or goods. Every now and then, military expeditions (entradas) were carried out into the forests to extend Spanish control. They also looked for Indians in order to replenish the encomiendas. Many of these entradas were led or supported by ‘loyal’ caciques. Indigenous leaders and their followers also accompanied small groups of missionaries who entered the region either to persuade the apostates and ‘heathens’ to surrender peacefully before a military campaign was launched or because they were anxious to spread Christianity among them. However, these campaigns often culminated in plunder and the abduction of the population.41 The so-called ‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’ Indians, for their part, also assaulted villages and towns



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along the colonial frontier of Chiapas, Guatemala and southern Yucatán and jeopardized the missionaries’ success.42 As can be seen in the following example of Don Pablo Paxbolon, loyal indigenous leaders who participated in the subjection of Indians in the uncontrolled regions could profit, and not only economically. Because of their qualities, they became indispensable to the missionaries, encomenderos and the colonial administration. Operating in a region remote from the colonial centre, these indigenous conquistadors were allowed to carry out their campaigns almost independently. According to the so-called Paxbolon-Maldonado papers, including his probanza and other important documents, Don Pablo Paxbolon could count on a long family tradition of helping the Spaniards in establishing colonial rule.43 His grandfather, the Acalan ruler Paxbolonacha, had supported Hernán Cortés’s forces with food, logistic aid and several porters and guides on their way to Honduras in 1525. Don Pablo was born around 1543 and baptized in 1550. He was educated in the convent of the Franciscan order at Campeche, where he was familiarized with the Spanish language and culture and started to practice the Catholic faith. In the 1560s Don Pablo took office in Tixchel, a coastal town in Campeche. Only a few years before, the Chontal Maya population and other groups had been congregated in this place by force to be better accessible to the Franciscan missionaries.44 Within Chontal society, he was able to legitimate his political power and build up economic enterprises as the son of a former ruler, a descendant of the most important noble lineage of Acalan and because of his familiarity with the Chontal language and culture. He was also able to secure his influence in the province because of his good relations with the Spaniards. Due to his knowledge, faith and social networks he was highly esteemed in Spanish colonial society. He also had an excellent reputation as a military expert as well as a reliable and effective ruler. Pablo Paxbolon participated in military campaigns to forcibly remove Indians to the Spanish-controlled regions. He captured fugitive Indians from beyond the colonial frontier, thus returning tributaries to the encomiendas as well as apostates and heathen Indians to the missionary settlements. He also visited several settlements of runaways of Tixchel and tried to persuade them to return. Due to his frontier activities, he was even named military captain of his district (cacicazgo) and authorized to ‘organize detachments of native warriors and to lead them into the interior to affect the reduction of unsubdued Indians’.45 Paxbolon later went to Mérida and even obtained a capitulación, a contract recognizing him as the leader of an expedition of conquest and discovery, signed by the governor of Yucatán (dated 2 June 1583) and the oidor of

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Mexico and visitador, Dr Diego García de Palacio. This contract guaranteed to Paxbolon: (1) that all the Indians pacified and resettled by his efforts should recognize and obey him and his descendants as their caciques and give them the services and aid customarily paid by other Indians of Yucatán to their hereditary caciques and lords; (2) that he should hold office for life as governor of all new settlements founded by virtue of the agreement and that no corregidor or other Spanish official should exercise local jurisdiction over them; and (3) that he and his heir should receive an annual gratuity of 20 peso for each Indian brought to obedience, this sum to be paid from the tributes levied on such Indians.46

Furthermore, Don Pablo aimed at broadening his trade relations with unpacified groups in the areas beyond Spanish control, because the coastal trade, once an important economic venture of the Acalan caciques, was increasingly controlled by Spanish merchants.47 Trade relations expanded due to the increase in fugitive settlements and were very lucrative. The fugitives and unconverted Indians needed salt, cloth, knives, machetes, axes and other goods. In exchange, they provided beeswax, honey, copal and other products that could be traded in northern Yucatán, Tabasco and other parts of New Spain. From Oxkutzcab and other towns of the Xiu province, from Hecelchakan in the Canul area, and from Campeche and Champoton Indian traders followed the trails southward and eastward to the interior to barter with the fugitives and the Cehache, and in some of the documents we read of occasional trips as far south as the Itza country. For the commercially minded Tixchel chieftains this inland commerce offered special opportunities in view of the strategic location of the pueblo of Tixchel.48

Thus, being an intermediary and border crosser, the cacique was extremely helpful to the missionaries and colonial administrators. He could employ networks in many directions – with the Spanish as well as with the unsubdued and pacified Indians – for his own political and economic interests. Paxbolon became successful and wealthy. He was even in a position to pay a considerable dowry and marry his eldest daughter to a Spanish immigrant, Francisco Maldonado. Furthermore, after the death of his first wife, Don Pablo Paxbolon married the daughter of a Spanish merchant, which gave him better access to the highly prized Spanish commodities. Both marriages gained him prestige and strengthened his relations with Spanish society. Thus, he was able to obtain privileges and a status not granted



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to other caciques.49 In a comment to his probanza the Council of the Indies concluded: That the said Don Pablo is one of the most serious Indians of that province, [he is] of great authority and great respect, principal and descendant of the natural lords of the province he is cacique, [he is] a good Christian and zealous in his service to God and his Majesty and a person who has been and still is of much benefit to the other Indians, without appearing in their behaviour and customs.50

CONCLUSION The indigenous probanzas (or titles) clearly demonstrate that the distinction between Spanish conquerors and conquered Indians was already blurred in the early phases of colonization. Indians not only acted vis-à-vis colonial institutions, they were part of them and followed the colonial discourse boasting about their personal deeds and achievements with respect to Spanish colonial norms (e.g., fighting idolatry, pacifying a certain region, being loyal, a true Christian, of pure blood). This is not surprising, since the authors aimed at gaining prestige and obtaining certain privileges or recognition and had often hired Spanish administrators and notaries for their instruction. But were they, then, merely corrupt? It is seriously misleading to consider indigenous conquerors, colonial agents and middlemen as traitors of their ‘Indian race’, as it is often stated, because they never imagined this type of ‘community’ as their own. This misinterpretation results from a projection of modern nationalities or ethnic consciousness on the precolonial and colonial actors. Thus, some authors assume, for example, that a strong Maya ethnic identity existed in early colonial times despite the political fragmentation in Yucatán.51 However, we must remember that we are dealing here with feudal systems that had a long tradition both in Mesoamerica and Spain. These systems implied that social identities and status were bound to an estate, defined by descent and nobility (while interplaying with other forms of social differentiation).52 This explains, for example, why indigenous elites often felt much closer to the Spaniards than to other indigenous elites or indigenous commoners even in their own communities. Caciques primarily aimed at maintaining and expanding the political power of their lineages and did not pursue the interests of a larger ethnic community.53 This also clarifies why many were so anxious to obtain Spanish status symbols, such as clothes and weapons. Thus, it is better to think of these

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Indian noblemen as interacting with Spaniards in ‘indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship’.54 These nets of kinship and clientship even became enmeshed, as shown by the case of Don Pablo Paxbolon, who married a Spanish wife and had a Spanish son-in-law. Neither the Indians nor the Spaniards were unified, as the conflicts between missionaries and encomenderos mentioned above show.55 Conflicts among the indigenous rulers impeded collective action against the European invaders during the conquest. Colonialism and the demographic catastrophe experienced by the native population profoundly altered the social and political structures, even when the Indians lived outside Spanish control in the forests.56 The memory of the pre-Columbian era soon faded away. Indigenous people were raised and educated in the context of Spanish rule and their perceptions were oriented according to their contemporary environment. It is therefore misleading to assume that the modern perception of a breach between the precolonial and colonial epoch was relevant to everyday interaction in colonial times. Also, the pre-Columbian era has been frequently idealized in the face of the atrocities of the conquest period. However, there were more continuities between these periods than many present interpretations would allow: think of the role of the indigenous nobility. As the example of Yucatán shows, the effects of the colonial order were far from uniform and indigenous rulers faced diverse restraints as well as new opportunities. The sources also point to the fact that indigenous loyalties and identities were not static, as proved by the Spanish conquistadors’ difficulty in retaining their Maya allies after the introduction of encomiendas in Yucatán. The relations between Spaniards, native leaders, and their subjects changed over time. Many caciques, for example, first consolidated their power by affiliating with the Spanish and collaborating with the encomenderos in the exploitation of the indigenous commoners. The more colonial rule and colonial institutions spread in the northern part of Yucatán, the more indigenous leaders had to adapt themselves to Spanish cultural norms, and the narrower was their political leeway. Quite a few caciques experienced a painful change in their way of life and curtailment of their power and status including the erosion of their economic bases and political autonomy. However, restricting the power and influence of the indigenous leaders could jeopardize their capacity to fulfil their role as middlemen. As Ronald Robinson put it: ‘When mediators were not given enough cards to play, their authority with their own people waned’.57 Thus, commoners often voted with their feet and left the sphere of influence of their caciques. In addition, local factions opposed the caciques’ decisions and pursued their own interests.58 This might explain why many caciques tried



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to revive traditional means of legitimizing their authority, such as drinking bouts and non-Christian rituals, as has been documented in, for instance, the ordinances of López Medel and in the idolatry trials of the Franciscans in Yucatán. Some even performed Catholic services to uphold or re-establish their traditional duty as middlemen between the human and the divine. Therefore, the missionaries regarded many of them as unreliable and reinforced their disempowerment as regional and religious leaders. Thus, agency clearly existed on all sides. However, most indigenous actors had only limited options. The loyalty and conformity of trustworthy and compliant caciques such as Don Pablo Paxbolon were fostered to a large extent by the economic profits and the status they obtained by their integration into the upper echelons of colonial society. However, even Paxbolon did not always stick to the colonial rules, as is evidenced by his contraband trade with the unsubdued Indians. Nevertheless, caciques like him were of utmost importance in extending Spanish influence beyond the colonial frontier. This provided him with considerable room for manoeuvre so that he could move back and forth between the Spanish and indigenous societies within and beyond the colonialized territory. Being a successful plantation owner and merchant and relying on his personal networks, he had access to resources from several sides. While many caciques adjusted to the colonial system, trying to extract from it as much as possible, others fled with their followers to regions outside Spanish control. Thus, given the proximity of the colonial frontier, open rebellions and resistance to colonial rule were less pronounced in Yucatán than in other parts of the colony. Dr Ute Schüren is cultural anthropologist and specialist in Amerindian Studies (Altamerikanistin). Her main research interests are the archaeology, history, economic and social anthropology of Mexico and Central America. She has taught at the Universities of Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Berne and Hannover. Her current research project at the Department of History, University of Münster, Germany investigates the impact of colonial rule on the social and political relations within the indigenous Maya population of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Her recent publications include: Amerika vor der europäischen Eroberung with co-author Antje Gunsenheimer (S. Fischer Verlag, 2016) and Globalized Antiquity: Uses and Perceptions of the Past in India, Mesoamerica, and Europe. (Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2015, edited with Daniel Segesser and Thomas Späth).

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NOTES   1. For this reason, John Chuchiak has described the auxiliaries and Indian conquistadors on the Yucatán Peninsula as ‘forgotten allies’. See J.F. Chuchiak IV, ‘Forgotten Allies: The Origins and Roles of Native Mesoamerican Auxiliaries and Indios Conquistadores in the Conquest of Yucatan, 1526–1550’, in L.E. Matthew and M.R. Oudijk (eds), Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 175–225. See also the other contributions in this volume that highlight the active and diverse roles of indigenous people in the European conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica. Another important revisionist study focusing on the Yucatán Peninsula is M. Restall, Maya Conquistador (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998).   2. Cited in Chuchiak, ‘Forgotten Allies’, 175.  3. See, e.g., A. Gunsenheimer and U. Schüren, Amerika vor der europäischen Eroberung (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 2016); W. Gabbert, ‘Kultureller Determinismus und die Eroberung Mexikos: Zur Kritik eines dichotomischen Geschichtsverständnisses’, Saeculum 46(2) (1995), 282–84.  4. Restall, Maya Conquistador, 16.   5. For a recent discussion of the debate on indigenous agency, see the review of R.D. Cope, ‘Indigenous Agency in Colonial Spanish America’, Latin American Research Review 45(1) (2010), 203–14. For a critical discussion of the supposedly omnipresent resistance among the indigenous population, see, e.g., R. Adorno, ‘Reconsidering the Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America’, Latin American Research Review 28(3) (1993), 135–45.   6. R.S. Chamberlain, ‘The Concept of the Señor Natural as Revealed by Castilian Law and Administrative Documents’, Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939), 130–32, emphasis in original; see also F.V. Scholes and R.L. Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians of Acalan-Tixchel: A Contribution to the History and Ethnography of the Yucatan Peninsula, 2nd edn (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 176–77. Juan de Solórzano Pereira, a Spanish jurist and author of the Política Indiana, an important work on colonial law (published in 1648), describes the origins of the Spanish recognition of Indian nobility: ‘Although the dominion, government and general protection of all the extensive provinces of the New World belong to our Catholic Kings of Spain, by the just titles and principles which I have stated … nevertheless it was always their royal will that in the towns of Indians there, which were found to have some form of organized government, or in which such was later set up in the manner stated in the preceding chapters, there should be maintained to rule and govern them particularly those petty kings or captains who did this in the time of their paganism, or those who may prove themselves to be their descendants’. See Solórzano, cited in R.L. Roys, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 131.



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  7. See, e.g., K. Spalding, ‘Social Climbers: Changing Patterns of Mobility among the Indians of Colonial Peru’, Hispanic American Historical Review 50(4) (1970), 645–46.   8. Other leaders were often called principales (principals) and ancianos (elders) to distinguish them from the officially recognized caciques.   9. Succession to the cacique position was to follow customary law. See Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (Madrid, 1680), libro VI, título 7, ley primera, ley iii, ley vi. 10. The encomienda was a reward given by the Crown to people (often conquerors or their descendants) for a certain time period in recognition of their merits and services. It included the right to exact tribute and services from a certain number of Indian commoners. In return encomenderos (the holders of an encomienda) were obliged to take care of the entrusted population and foster their Christianization, and, if needed, be ready for military service to the Crown. During the colonial period, encomiendas increasingly reverted to the Crown and tribute was paid directly to Crown officials. See, e.g., for the encomienda system in New Spain the classic study of L.B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico, 3rd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). 11. Roys, The Indian Background, 131–37, 148–60; S. Quezada, Pueblos y caciques yucatecos, 1550-1580 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1993), 128–38; see also U. Schüren, ‘Kazike’, in F. Jäger (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, 16 vols (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2005–2012), vol. 6, 530–32. 12. On the roles of political and cultural brokers in Mesoamerica, see especially Y. Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); see also R. Adorno, ‘Images of Indios Ladinos in Early Colonial Peru’, in K.J. Andrien and R. Adorno (eds), Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 232–70. 13. See, e.g., H. Pietschmann, Die staatliche Organisation des kolonialen Iberoamerika (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), for an overview and a periodization of the most important Spanish colonial institutions. 14. See, e.g., the interesting reports by encomenderos and other informants, dated between 1579 and 1581, in the Relaciones histórico-geográficas, the Spanish Crown’s geographic and historical survey, including among other things much criticism of the clerics’ activities: M. de la Garza, Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la gobernación de Yucatán (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983). 15. J.F. Chuchiak IV, The Indian Inquisition and the Extirpation of Idolatry: The Process of Punishment in the Provisorato de Indios of the Diocese of Yucatán, 1563–1812 (dissertation, The Graduate School of Tulane University, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 51–73; W.F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 23–84; Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 72–81;

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C. Cunill, ‘La alfabetización de los mayas yucatecos y sus consecuencias sociales, 1545–1580’, Estudios de Cultura Maya 31 (2008), 163–92. The missionaries’ educational programme focused particularly on the sons of the indigenous nobility. 16. On the institution of the defensor de indios (defender of Indians) see especially W. Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983) and C. Cunill, Los defensores de indios de Yucatán y el acceso de los mayas a la justicia colonial 1540–1600 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012). 17. The documents generally adapt to Spanish norms and highlight the long family tradition and noble descent of the author, his faithful performance of duties for the Spaniards, a Christian way of life, peacefulness, loyalty to the Spanish conquerors, missionaries, encomenderos and to the colonial administration, etc. 18. The administration of the south-east frontier changed at various times. Yucatán was subordinate to the Real Audiencia de Mexico in Mexico City during most of the colonial era. However, it became a part of the Real Audiencia de Guatemala or Audiencia de los Confines in 1549 and again in 1552. For the history of the political administration of the Yucatán Peninsula see, e.g., P. Gerhard, The Southeast Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1979), 12–20. 19. For important studies on the history of Yucatán in colonial times see, especially, J.F. Molina Solís, Historia de Yucatán durante la dominación española, 3 vols (Mérida: La lotería del estado, 1904–1913); Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians; R.L. Roys, The Political Geography of the Yucatan Maya (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1957); Roys, The Indian Background; M.C. García Bernal, La sociedad maya de Yucatán, 1700–1750 (Seville: Escuela de Estudios HispanoAmericanos, 1972); M. Espejo-Ponce Hunt, Colonial Yucatan: Town and Region in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms, 1974); N. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); I. Fernández Tejedo, La comunidad indígena maya de Yucatán, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1990); Quezada, Pueblos y caciques; R.W. Patch, Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648– 1812 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); M.H. Ruz, Un rostro encubierto: Los indios del Tabasco colonial, Historia de los pueblos indígenas de México (Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1994); S. Quezada, Los pies de la república: Los mayas peninsulares, 1550– 1750 (Mexico: Patronato Indigena, 1997); P. Bracamonte y Sosa and G. Solís Robleda, Espacios mayas de autonomía: El pacto colonial en Yucatán (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1996); M. Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); W. Gabbert, Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatán since 1500 (Tucson, AR: University of Arizona Press, 2004); S. Quezada, Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society, 1350–1600 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).



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In Yucatec Maya: almehenob, Singular: almehen. In Yucatec Maya: macehualob, Singular: macehual. See, e.g., Farriss, Maya Society, 237–38; Roys, The Indian Background, 31–35. According to Sergio Quezada, the provinces can be understood as the spheres of influence of prominent noble lineages with their followers and dependent populations, instead of as entities with fixed political or territorial borders. See Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 19–58. 24. Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians, 55. 25. Gerhard, The Southeastern Frontier, 23–30. See also Farriss, Maya Society, 57–67. 26. See Restall, Maya Conquistador, 112. Restall (ibid., 104–28) translated and edited the document and discusses its dating. On the conquest of Yucatan see also R.S. Chamberlain, The Conquest and Colonization of Yucatan, 1517–1550 (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1948); P.A. Means, History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzas (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1917); I. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987); G.D. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Farriss, Maya Society, 14–25. 27. See Restall, Maya Conquistador, 47–49; Farriss, Maya Society, 20–21. 28. Farriss, Maya Society, 22–23. 29. Chuchiak, ‘Forgotten Allies’, 193. 30. See ‘Ordenanzas de Tomás López (1552–1553)’ in Fray D. de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Mérida: Ediciones Dante, 1983), 218–34. 31. P.C. Thompson, Tekanto: A Maya Town in Colonial Yucatán (New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 1999), 39–40; Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 81–101. 32. On the colonial cabildo in Yucatán see especially Thompson, Tekanto. See also Roys, The Indian Background, 11–12, 31, 57–70, 129, 167–68; Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 103–26; Farriss, Maya Society, 227–28. 33. See, e.g., Roys, The Indian Background, 136; Fernández Tejedo, La comunidad indígena, 85–87. There was also much fluctuation in the succession to offices because many of the heirs of the ruling elites had died in consequence of the demographic catastrophe after the Spanish conquest and the spread of European diseases. Thus, in some cases even commoners were reported to hold the office of gobernador. 34. See ‘Ordenanzas’ in de Landa, Relación, 218–34; see also Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 58. 35. See the documentation of the records in F.V. Scholes and E.B. Adams (eds), Don Diego Quijada, Alcalde Mayor de Yucatán, 1561–1565, 2 vols (Mexico: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1938) de J. Porrúa e hijos, also partly reproduced in the Appendix in Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 193–207; see also de Landa, Relación [ca. 1566], 38–39. 36. See, e.g., Chamberlain, The Conquest and Colonization, 315, 319–20; J.F. Chuchiak IV, ‘In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Return of the Extirpation of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatán, 15731579’, The Americas 61 (2005), 611–646; A.C. Collins, ‘The Maestros Cantores in Yucatan’, in G.D. Jones (ed.), Anthropology and History in Yucatan (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1977), 236, 243; Farriss, Maya Society, 97, 335–36; I. Clendinnen, ‘“Disciplining the Indians”: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan’, Past and Present 94 (1982), 27–48; see also Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 45–46, 76–77. 37. See especially Chuchiak, ‘The Indian Inquisition’, who documents many of these practices. 38. See, e.g., Farriss, Maya Society, 29–30, 67–79; Patch, Maya and Spaniard, 41–66; Jones, Maya Resistance, 100–109, 125–26. 39. On the different forms of forced labour see especially G. Solís Robleda, Bajo el signo de la compulsión: El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540–1730 (Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología social / Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2003). 40. See Farriss, Maya Society, 18. 41. The missionary reports are especially interesting because they illuminate the social and political organization among the unsubdued groups and the roles of their leaders. In addition, they provide us with a glimpse of the missionaries’ strategies to convince the ‘savage’ caciques of the benefits of colonial rule. See, e.g., Fray A. de Avendaño y Loyola, Relation of Two Trips to Peten, Made for the Conversion of the Heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1987 [1688]); G. Solís Robleda and P. Peniche (eds), Idolatría y sublevación: Documentos para la historia de Yucatán (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1997). On the history of the uncontrolled regions and the so-called montaña missions, see, e.g., Jones, Maya Resistance; J. de Vos, La paz de Dios y del Rey: La conquista de la Selva Lacandona, 1525–1821 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980); idem, No queremos ser cristianos: Historia de la resistencia de los Lacandones 1530– 1695, a través de testimonios españoles e indígenas (Mexico: Dirección General de Publicaciones del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990); Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians; Means, History of the Spanish Conquest. 42. As Cunill has shown, the discursive construction of barbarous Indians who lived in regions beyond Spanish control was part of a strategy of encomenderos and indigenous leaders, such as Don Pablo Paxbolon, to justify their operations and obtain official permission to access these regions. See C. Cunill, ‘La frontera en el discurso de los caciques Chontales, siglo XVI’, in S. Bernabéu Albert (ed.), Poblar la inmensidad: Sociedades, conflictividad y representación en los márgenes del Imperio Hispánico, siglos XV–XIX (Seville: Ediciones Rubeo, 2010), 220. 43. The so-called Paxbolon-Maldonado papers (1612–1615) are the most important source referring to this cacique. They include a scribal copy of a text in the Chontal Maya language and form part of the Audiencia de México legajo (bundle) 138 in the Archivo General de las Indias, Seville, entitled Cartas y expedientes de personas seculares dated to 1620. Parts of the Paxbolon-Maldonado



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papers have been published (including introduction, facsimile, transcription, Spanish version and English translation) in Appendix A of Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians, 359–405. 44. On Don Pablo Paxbolon and the Chontal region, see especially Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians; see also Restall, Maya Conquistador, 53–76; Cunill, ‘La frontera’. Ruz, Un rostro encubierto. On the political geography of the Chontal region, see also A.L. Izquierdo, Acalán y su provincia en el siglo XVI: Geografía política (Mexico: Centro de Estudios Mayas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997). 45. Scholes and Roys, The Maya Chontal Indians, 221. 46. Ibid., 230–31. 47. Ibid., 180, 183, 185–220, 249. 48. Ibid., 245. 49. There were of course other important Yucatecan caciques who in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century led military campaigns into the forests, such as Don Juan Chan Pat, cacique of Chancenote. He employed more than one hundred Indian soldiers (indios soldados). His sons followed his career. Don Juan Chan was able to extend his political power to a large area and thus became governor of governors, which was, according to Quezada, a colonial version of the halach uinic status. As a colonial functionary, he also received a share of the tribute of the respective towns he governed, such as corn and cotton cloth. See S. Quezada, ‘Don Juan Chan: Un cacique yucateco anti-idólatra’, Mayab 5 (1989), 42, 44. On Don Fernando Uz and others, see Farriss, Maya Society, 96–103. Compared to other regions in New Spain even the economically successful caciques of Yucatán, such as Don Pablo Paxbolon and Don Juan Chan, disposed of relatively moderate assets and received lower compensations for their activities. See Roys, The Indian Background, 144–45; Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 138–42. 50. ‘Extracto del Consejo de los servicios prestados por don Pablo Paxbolon, cacique de Tixchel, en diversas entradas a reducir indios mataraces huidos y gentiles’, 1565–1612, AGI, México 138, in Solís Robleda and Peniche, Idolatría y sublevación, 7 (my translation). 51. See, e.g., Bracamonte y Sosa and Solís Robleda, Espacios mayas de autonomía, 131. 52. See Gabbert, Becoming Maya, 33–35; idem, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Class in Middle America: Conceptual Issues’, paper presented at the 54 International Congress of Americanists (ICA), Vienna, 15–20 July 2012. 53. See also Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-Between, 3. 54. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 55. See also F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler, ‘Introduction: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule’, American Ethnologist 16(4) (1984), 613–14. 56. See also Yannakakis, The Art of Being In-between, 9–10: ‘The complexity of forces with which native intermediaries had to contend constrained them; they were not free agents. Their social context in combination with their communicative skills situated them as brokers and negotiators, and as such, their positions

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entailed considerable power and risk. Their position in multiple networks and coalitions [kin groups, political factions, communities, or other formal or informal coalitions] meant that they were both varyingly situated and not situated at all’. 57. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 121. 58. See Quezada, Pueblos y caciques, 143–55.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, R. ‘Images of Indios Ladinos in Early Colonial Peru’, in K.J. Andrien and R. Adorno (eds), Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, 232–70.  . ‘Reconsidering the Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America’, Latin American Research Review 28(3) (1993), 135–45. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991. Avendaño y Loyola, Fray A. de. Relation of Two Trips to Peten, Made for the Conversion of the Heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches. Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1987 [1688]. Borah, W. Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Bracamonte y Sosa, P. and G. Solís Robleda. Espacios mayas de autonomía: El pacto colonial en Yucatán. Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1996. Chamberlain, R.S. ‘The Concept of the Señor Natural as Revealed by Castilian Law and Administrative Documents’, Hispanic American Historical Review 19 (1939), 130–37.  . The Conquest and Colonization of Yucatan, 1517–1550. Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1948. Chuchiak IV, J.F. The Indian Inquisition and the Extirpation of Idolatry: The Process of Punishment in the Provisorato de Indios of the Diocese of Yucatán, 1563–1812, dissertation. Ann Arbor, MI: The Graduate School of Tulane University, 2000.  . ‘In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego de Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of the Extirpation of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatán, 1573–1579’, The Americas 61 (2005), 611–46.  . ‘Forgotten Allies: The Origins and Roles of Native Mesoamerican Auxiliaries and Indios Conquistadores in the Conquest of Yucatan, 1526–1550’, in L.E. Matthew and M.R. Oudijk (eds), Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007, 175–225. Clendinnen, I. ‘“Disciplining the Indians”: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatan’, Past and Present 94 (1982), 27–48.  . Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987.



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Collins, A.C. ‘The Maestros Cantores in Yucatan’, in G.D. Jones (ed.), Anthropology and History in Yucatan. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1977, 233–47. Cooper, F. and A.L. Stoler. ‘Introduction: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule’, American Ethnologist 16(4) (1984), 609–21. Cope, R.D. ‘Indigenous Agency in Colonial Spanish America’, Latin American Research Review 45(1) (2010), 203–14. Cunill, C. ‘La alfabetización de los mayas yucatecos y sus consecuencias sociales, 1545–1580’, Estudios de Cultura Maya 31 (2008), 163–92.  . ‘La frontera en el discurso de los caciques Chontales, siglo XVI’, in S. Bernabéu Albert (ed.), Poblar la inmensidad: Sociedades, conflictividad y representación en los márgenes del Imperio Hispánico, siglos XV–XIX. Seville: Ediciones Rubeo, 2010, 209–30.  . Los defensores de indios de Yucatán y el acceso de los mayas a la justicia colonial 1540– 1600. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012. Espejo-Ponce Hunt, M. Colonial Yucatan: Town and Region in the Seventeenth Century. Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms, 1974. Farriss, N. Maya Society under Colonial Rule. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Fernández Tejedo, I. La comunidad indígena maya de Yucatán, siglos XVI y XVII. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1990. Gabbert, W. ‘Kultureller Determinismus und die Eroberung Mexikos: Zur Kritik eines dichotomischen Geschichtsverständnisses’, Saeculum 46(2) (1995), 274–92.  . Becoming Maya: Ethnicity and Social Inequality in Yucatán since 1500. Tucson, AR: University of Arizona Press, 2004.  . ‘Race, Ethnicity and Class in Middle America: Conceptual Issues’, Paper Presented at the 54 ICA (Vienna, 15–20 July 2012). García Bernal, M.C. La sociedad maya de Yucatán, 1700–1750. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1972. de la Garza, M. Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la gobernación de Yucatán. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983. Gerhard, P. The Southeast Frontier of New Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Gunsenheimer, A. and U. Schüren. Amerika vor der europäischen Eroberung, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 2016. Hanks, W.F. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010. Izquierdo, A.L. Acalán y su provincia en el siglo XVI: Geografía política. Mexico: Centro de Estudios Mayas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997. Jones, G.D. Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Landa, Fray D. de Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Mérida: Ediciones Dante, 1983. Means, P.A. History of the Spanish Conquest of Yucatan and of the Itzas. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1917.

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Molina Solís, J.F. Historia de Yucatán durante la dominación española. Mérida: La lotería del estado, 1904–1913. Patch, R.W. Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pietschmann, H. Die staatliche Organisation des kolonialen Iberoamerika. Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1980. Quezada, S. ‘Don Juan Chan: un cacique yucateco anti-idólatra’, Mayab 5 (1989), 41–44.  . Pueblos y caciques yucatecos, 1550–1580. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1993.  . Los pies de la república: Los mayas peninsulares, 1550–1750. Mexico: Patronato Indígena, 1997.  . Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society, 1350–1600. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias. Madrid, 1680. Restall, M. The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.  . Maya Conquistador. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998. Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Longman, 1972, 118–40. Roys, R.L. The Political Geography of the Yucatan Maya. Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1957.  . The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Ruz, M.H. Un rostro encubierto: Los indios del Tabasco colonial, Historia de los pueblos indígenas de México. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1994. Scholes, F.V. and E.B. Adams (eds). Don Diego Quijada, Alcalde Mayor de Yucatán, 1561-1565. Mexico: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1938. Scholes, F.V. and R.L. Roys. The Maya Chontal Indians of Acalan-Tixchel: A Contribution to the History and Ethnography of the Yucatan Peninsula. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. Schüren U. ‘Kazike’, in F. Jäger (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, 16 vols. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2005–2012, vol. 6, 530–32. Simpson, L.B. The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. Solís Robleda, G. Bajo el signo de la compulsión: El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540–1730. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología social / Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2003. Solís Robleda, G. and P. Peniche (eds). Idolatría y sublevación: Documentos para la historia de Yucatán. Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 1997. Spalding, K. ‘Social Climbers: Changing Patterns of Mobility among the Indians of Colonial Peru’, Hispanic American Historical Review 50(4) (1970), 645–64.



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Thompson, P.C. Tekanto: A Maya Town in Colonial Yucatán. New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 1999. Vos, J. de La paz de Dios y del Rey: La conquista de la Selva Lacandona, 1525–1821. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980.  . No queremos ser cristianos: Historia de la resistencia de los Lacandones 1530–1695, a través de testimonios españoles e indígenas. Mexico: Dirección General de Publicaciones del Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990. Yannakakis, Y. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Chapter 2

Connecting Worlds Women as Intermediaries in the Portuguese Overseas Empire, 1500–1600 Amélia Polónia and Rosa Capelão

} The study of early modern empires usually centres around imperial rivalries, monopolies, warfare strategies and political disputes between European colonizers. The focus on such central power strategies obscures how individuals and groups of individuals contributed to those historical dynamics, at times to an even greater extent than the central power itself. In addition, it also neglects the active influence of African, Asian and American agents, societies and civilizations, ignoring local inputs into colonial dynamics. In the case of the Portuguese empire, a number of studies have already gone beyond this perception with regard to Asia and particularly the Indian Ocean.1 New historiographical approaches, both European and non-European, have questioned traditional perspectives, giving rise to the concept of ‘informal empires’, that highlights all the unofficial ways in which the European overseas dominion was built in the First Global Age, the period from 1400 to 1800. This chapter follows this perspective, as well as recent historiographical approaches deriving from theories of cooperation.2 Cooperation is understood as a social process where individuals, groups and institutions act in a concerted way to reach common goals.3 According to this theory, cooperating individuals incur individual costs to gain benefits for themselves and unrelated group members.4 This behaviour is driven by expectations and motivations that involve dyadic or collective interaction between individuals. When applied to colonial empires, this approach demands that we 58



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focus on the relationships between colonists and colonized, as well as on the informal connections between individuals, as much as on the regulating mechanisms formally imposed by the state. Furthermore, one must bear in mind that there are different kinds of cooperation. In some situations, cooperation is enforced; in others, cooperation is promoted and encouraged in order to achieve state-oriented goals; there are situations where cooperation results from self-organized mechanisms that go beyond the intentions and the aims of the formal empire builders; and finally, there are cases where cross-cultural and cross-imperial cooperation among individuals, who appear to be part of different worlds, goes against the very purposes of the ‘national’ entities they are supposed to belong to and serve.5 This understanding is the basis for our analysis of women who acted as intermediaries between different worlds in the Portuguese colonial set-up. The focus on women as brokers fills a significant gap in colonial studies. Our social history approach sheds new light on the crucial, but so far ignored, role of women as intermediaries. Literature addressing the role of women in colonial worlds has so far mostly centred upon Atlantic societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Yet, regarding the East and Far East, indigenous women as social actors and their role in the emerging social and cultural patterns in colonial territories have remained neglected topics. This is even more obvious for the sixteenth century, the first and most decisive moment for the establishment of inter-cultural relations.7 This chapter aims to fill this gap by analysing the roles of both indigenous and Portuguese women who acted as intermediaries between worlds in a context where assimilation and confrontation seemed almost inevitable. In the absence of new data, this chapter approaches old sources with new questions, aware of the fact that we are looking at all those realities through colonial eyes. The sources used are European, mostly Portuguese official records, such as chronicles, administrative correspondence and letters from missionaries. These narratives are presented by men, but even when ascribing a subordinate and peripheral position to women, they acknowledged their important roles. The colonial world examined here is the Portuguese Estado da India.8 In this vast territory, unified by a web of maritime connections and characterized by diverse models of settlement, the heterogeneity of the roles, profiles and the actions of women varied greatly, as they were determined both by the strategy of the Portuguese settlers and by their status in the local economies, societies and cultures. This chapter argues that during the process of settlement, women provided more than a merely reproductive function in colonial society, whether in the East, Africa or Brazil, but also served as production agents and economic

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partners, essential to the build-up and maintenance of colonial empires. Their role as intermediaries between worlds was essential, be it as key elements in marriage strategies, as assets in sexual markets, or as political, economic and cultural go-betweens. This chapter takes a two-step approach to analysing this heterogeneous role. On the one hand, it focuses on the ways in which women were social agents in the East and Far East, within or on the margins of official policies of the Portuguese State of India that required their participation. On the other hand, it addresses the ways in which women connected these worlds by focusing on their social, political, economic and cultural performances.

WOMEN AS EMPIRE BUILDERS – THE ESTADO DA INDIA CASE STUDY In the literature, autochthonous and indigenous9 women within the Portuguese empire are primarily represented as filling the gap created by the lack of white, European women in those territories.10 In the Portuguese case, however, state-driven policies sometimes intentionally promoted inter-marriage with local women as an alternative to the emigration of Portuguese women. The number and status of Portuguese women in overseas settlements varied by territory. The distance to the homeland, political and economic aims, the model of colonization, climate and health conditions all played a crucial role in the strategies followed and the trends established. In the East, even though registers – or the lack of them – suggest that a smaller number of families migrated to India, the crown encouraged marriages with women sent out from the kingdom. Portuguese women were therefore widely present, especially in Goa and other Eastern urban centres. Forced family migrations, such as, for example, the New Christians, also contributed to the flow of women to the East, who became forced settlers in the new territories, as evidenced by Inquisition records from Goa.11 At the same time, particularly in the East, single women were also important agents of the Portuguese crown’s colonization strategies. This was, for example, the case with the so-called ‘orphans of the king’, young women who were placed in various institutions throughout the kingdom, notably the Lisbon Recolhimento do Castelo (Castle Refuge), and intended by the crown to be sent to overseas settlements for marriage. However, as Timothy Coates has shown, the number of female orphans who actually ended up going to India was negligible.12 The Portuguese government’s colonization strategies embraced not only orphans (some of whom were the daughters of members of the lower



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nobility who had served as colonial agents and died while in the service of the crown), but also those convicted of prostitution in the kingdom, or those housed in the various Refuges of Santa Maria Magdalena scattered around the country. Former prostitutes or marginalized women could thus be transformed into reluctant but crucial instruments of settlement strategies.13 However, not only were their numbers insignificant, but from the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, local reports from Goa also strongly advised against sending over more Portuguese women, as the marriage market was saturated with local orphans, both white and mestizas of Portuguese descent.14 In fact, from the beginning of the formal Portuguese settlement in the East, other ‘mating’ strategies were also pursued by the government. Afonso de Albuquerque, the second governor of India (1509– 1515), aimed to increase the number of Portuguese casados15 by marrying them with local women. The significance of this policy can be measured by the opposition it met within the State of India and the fierce divisions between its supporters and opponents. It essentially involved the conversion of local Hindu or Muslim women to Christianity and their subsequent marriage to Portuguese officers, both civil and military.16 The ideological meaning of this policy as an expression of the Portuguese propensity to intermingle with autochthonous local populations is still debated today.17 The intention to maintain Goa as the centre of such a marriage market seemed a clear indication that this business was, and was intended to remain, a crown-driven settlement strategy. But could this market be controlled by official authorities alone? This seems unlikely, mostly because – as much as he was a champion of this colonial strategy – Albuquerque’s administration did not continue beyond 1515, and the chronicles do not provide any explicit information about his successors’ policy on this matter. Furthermore, not all the women were seen as equally suitable to marry Portuguese men. Albuquerque clearly hierarchizes them, separating those suitable for marriage from those who were captives and sold as slaves, even though the difference between them was not always clear: I never meant to marry men with these Malabar women, because they are black, corrupt in their way of living and their behaviour; the women who have been Moorish are lily and chaste and withdrawn into their homes and their way of living, as the Moors of this land have by practice, and women of Brahmins and their daughters also are chaste women and good living and are white and with a good presence. So, my Lord, anywhere where we took white women they were never sold or ransomed: they were all given to good men who wanted to marry them.18

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The reasons why Portuguese men were attracted to local women seem clear: they appreciated their ‘beauty and grace’, as well as the dowries that they brought with them. As for the brides’ preferences, several explanations are put forward by the sources, varying according to the women’s religious affiliation and social status. It is certain that some of them were captives and were taken from their families as a conquest ransom. Those women were usually Muslims and subsequently converted to Christianity. But they could also be Hindus, who were either forcefully converted or won over voluntarily to marry Portuguese soldiers and officers. While Brahmans saw this policy as an imposition that disgraced their status and family since it involved marrying outside their caste, Malabar women of lower castes, as well as their families, were – if we are to believe the Portuguese sources – often attracted by the opportunity to rise to a higher social status through marriage to a Portuguese.19 The sources also reveal a policy of forced marriages, weddings being celebrated against the brides’ will.20 This was one of the arguments used against Afonso de Albuquerque by his opponents. In fact, although Albuquerque’s marriage policy was officially approved, there were several issues that remained questionable and in fact were questioned by his counterparts. One of the issues had to do with the nature of empire. One should not forget that in its juridical conception, the Portuguese State of India was a matter for the king, the nobility and the church. No official place or role was allocated to merchants, businessmen, adventurers or common people, as pointed out by the traditional perspective of Boxer21 or the more recent one of Boyajian.22 But there they were: soldiers, seafarers, craftsmen, merchants and adventurers – all acting as empire builders. The crown needed their commitment and their presence. The privileges they were given – making them men of the king with a mission and a starting fortune – were essential to the sustainability of the empire. The attribution of this status of casados was a means of recognizing the importance of their services, despite their recognized lack of loyalty or nobility. The profile of the grooms is one of the reasons why a significant number of Portuguese aristocrats mocked this policy and blamed it for the poor reputation of the imperial project.23 Portuguese women were equally important to the establishment of the Portuguese empire in the East. Attempts at religious conversion, especially by Jesuit missionaries, were frequently aimed at local rulers in the hope of spreading Christianity among all their subjects in a topdown conversion strategy. In some cases, princes were brought to be educated in Goa or other Portuguese settlements in India. In other cases, the marriage of local rulers with Portuguese women became a simultaneous or alternative way to ensure not only conversion to Christianity, but



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also an effective acculturation. This is the case with the Maldivas ruler, Sultan Hassan IX Svasi Sri Dhirukusalokya Maha Radun. His Christian name was D. Manuel and he married a Portuguese woman, D. Leonor de Ataíde, daughter of Heitor de Sousa de Ataíde. One of his sons died in 1581 during a fight in Lisbon, where he had gone to try to appeal on behalf of his father, who had fallen into disgrace. In India, a second son, João, married another Portuguese woman, Francisca de Vasconcelos.24 In this context, Portuguese women were used as alliance builders as much as autochthone and mixed breed women, representing strategic pieces in political games. As for the casados policy, aside from the moral, social and religious issues, the role of Albuquerque himself in the process was also questioned. He was accused of monopolizing the overall process for his personal benefit. There are allegations about the sexual use of his female slaves for political purposes. He admitted himself that he owned female slaves whom he had taken as part of his soldada, the wages for his services and whom he gave to Portuguese men to marry.25 This statement implies that captive women were probably traded as a regular part of the remuneration earned by the king’s officers. This also means that besides the official marriage market, there was a significant number of captive and slave women who were essential to settlement strategies in the East. These were sold as personal servants, as slaves, but also used as prostitutes, enticing men, mostly soldiers, to settle in Eastern territories.26 One place where such a practice was documented is Kannur on the Malabar Coast. In a letter dated 1513, Albuquerque declared that he was sending eight women for service to Christian men, not to Moors. The letter explained that they should be provided with a wage, given ‘good care’ and replaced by others every three or four months.27 In addition to official spouses or unofficial or illegitimate partners, there was thus an impressive number of prostitutes operating within the system, comprising Portuguese women, descendants of Portuguese and autochthone or indigenous women. We do not know many details about how they operated in the different colonial set-ups. Besides those who followed the Portuguese troops in military campaigns or were used to entice them to settle in newly incorporated territories, there were also large numbers of prostitutes in Goa – so many in fact that representatives of both the Portuguese crown and the church felt it necessary to try to control their number and allocate them to specific neighbourhoods, thus separating them from the ‘married and honoured and respected women’.28 That this was not a phenomenon exclusive to Goa is illustrated by an account of Rumecan’s attack on Diu where there was ‘a street they call the pit that was

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the old Moorish camp, where all the useless people gathered, and the single women’.29 Among them were many Portuguese women who had come directly from the metropolis. For the Jesuits, controlling these women by placing them within the official wedding market seems to have been a priority, alongside the fight against concubinage, as pointed out in successive letters from the early 1550s.30 The growing frequency of such records from the 1560s onward gives both testimony to the increasing scale of the phenomenon and the higher level of moral control following the stricter postTrent spirit.31 An example is a 1593 law by Filipe II32 or the First Provincial Council of Goa determinations from 1563.33 The expansion and heterogeneity of the Portuguese presence in the East and the Far East was such that one cannot simply extend the conclusions drawn from the case studies of Goa or the Malabar Coast to all Portuguese settlements in the region. In general terms, the concept of the State of India encompasses only those interests that were officially governed by the crown and does not coincide with or exhaust the much broader notion of the ‘Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean’, which covered also non-official modes of settlement. These developed regardless of the State and, in some cases, even against its interests.34 These colonies proliferated throughout the Indian Ocean, in places like Pattani (Southern Siam), Nagapattinan, Saint Thomas of Millipore (Coromandel Coast), and most importantly, Macao. The role and function of women in these colonial setups also varied. Regarding practices in Pegu (Myanmar), one account for example states: Most Portuguese going to this land take women every monsoon, which they pay very well. Besides being beautiful, sweet & caressing, the biggest disgrace there is between them is to make themselves available for free. Some pay them for when they return; their children cannot be taken from that land without the license of the King, which costs a lot, and not everyone can have them.35

Another important example is the story of Filipe de Brito Nicote, an adventurer who seems to have equalled Fernão Mendes Pinto in his ventures, becoming king in Pegu between 1600 and 1613: he used his own daughter in strategic marriage policies to strengthen his positioning in the region.36 The set-up in Japan was quite different. There, an official Portuguese presence was not allowed, with the exception of the Jesuits, who were only there from 1540 to 1614.37 Nevertheless, some Portuguese traders in fact lived in Japan, married daughters of prominent Japanese traders and seemingly even defended Japanese rather than Portuguese trade interests.38 The 1639 edict expelling the Portuguese from Japan stated that their women



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and children were not allowed to leave the country with them. In China, especially in Canton (Guangzhou), relations with local women were officially restricted, as opposed to Macao, where Portuguese and other Europeans appeared to have limitless opportunities to intermingle with Chinese women, marry them and start a family.39 When discussing the role of women as intermediaries between different worlds, it is impossible to avoid one question: to what extent did the exchange between individual women and between men and women from such different cultural and socio-religious backgrounds transmit values on a broader scale and transform respective family and social patterns? To what extent did autochthone societies change, and how did they contribute to transforming the ethical, family and even religious codes of the colonizers? Distance from home, a lack of social control and additional opportunities to intermingle with different societies were factors that seem to have favoured the establishment of stable and long-term relationships outside marriage. The different cultural set-up allowed forms of transgression that were impossible in Europe.40 Above all, more open local attitudes towards the dissolution of marriages tended to undermine crown and church aims.41 Certain practices seem to have provoked real shock among Christian women. The most obvious case was Sati/Suttee, a common funeral practice. The prospect of dying by immolation, by fire, or of being buried alive, provoked horror and total incomprehension among European women. A Portuguese woman, asked by an Islamic widow to help her collect wood for her immolation, was so distressed that she ran away, asking for help among Christian missionaries.42 Other ritual practices among Hindu widows, such as shaving their heads, signalling they would be unavailable to marry again, were also forbidden by church authorities. Such prohibitions were intended to remove obstacles to their conversion to Christianity and make sure that these women, and their assets, remained on the marriage market.43 Crown and church had the same aims: to convert those women to Christianity, guaranteeing they would keep their dowries and personal belongings. Keeping these widows in the marriage market while simultaneously alienating them from their native culture would further strengthen the Portuguese colonial position in India. The concrete nature of the encounters between European and autochthonous or indigenous women remains obscure. However, beyond their roles as master and servants or master and slaves, they could also encounter each other as equals, both performing in intermingled multiracial societies. Some accounts make clear, however, that colonial authorities, especially the church, resented any kind of acquaintance between women of such different worlds. João dos Santos recounts two episodes that are revealing

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about this kind of familiarity among strangers. In 1592, he explains that in Quirimba island, where Christians, Moors and Gentiles co-inhabited, he prohibited certain practices and ceremonies that the Moors performed among Christians: as he explained, there had been cases of Christian men and women participating in and even sponsoring Moorish celebrations of circumcision.44 The same author mentioned the – allegedly detrimental – practice of Moorish women coming to visit their Christian friends on Sundays and holidays, all singing, dancing, eating and drinking together.45 What continues to be debated is the long-term permeability of family patterns and norms concerning the role of women in these different colonial societies. Was it possible to transfer certain female roles and statuses between cultures? Could women’s different status, for example, influence the status of European women, or the other way around? Did European women go ‘native’? How far did these cross-cultural interactions involving women feed imperial set-ups, and to what extent did precolonial cultures, socio-political and economic realities lead to diversity in cooperative behaviours? We do not have answers to these questions. Church representatives appeared to try and resist the introduction of different family models and standards of marriage as far as possible. But as we have seen, women from Portugal tended to leave and divorce their husbands much more easily, as the latter often had more than one partner in the same or different places, without the same degree of control and punishment they would experience in Europe. In return, would the men overcome traditional anthropological, ethical and social norms established in European, Christian societies concerning what they expected from a woman and a wife? If so, would that apply only to local women or also to Europeans? And would they have different attitudes toward legitimate spouses and illegitimate partners? Answering these questions would require one to study family and private spheres for which sources are scarce.

WOMEN AS INTERMEDIARIES IN POLITICS, DIPLOMACY AND THE ECONOMY Women became indispensable partners in politics and war in the Portuguese empire. Women can be found assuming the roles of local interpreters and messengers in different conflicts; they performed as political leaders with whom the Portuguese had to negotiate or fight, as happened with the queens of Coulão (Kollam) and Camorim (Kanyakumari),46 confronting them at the beginning of their settlement on the Malabar Coast; they also acted as war ambassadors, appointed by the local power holders during wartime.47



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Local women appear frequently in the sources as intermediaries and negotiators. In the following episode, narrated as happening in Banta after Fernão Mendes Pinto and his companions passed by Melaka, the author of Peregrinação comments on women’s natural suitability to act as diplomats. Recounting the events that led to the initial negotiations performed by Nhay Pombaya, a widow of nearly sixty years, Pinto explains: And so that you know why this message came from a woman and not from a man, there is to know that it was always a very ancient custom of the Kings of these realms since the very beginnings, to treat the very important things, & requiring peace & harmony by women; & this not only in private messages that were sent to vassals, as it is the case now, but also in public & general business that Kings deal with each other by their embassies, & give to this by reason that the female gender, by the mildness of their nature, gave God more kindness, & authority & other parts so they would have more respect than men, because they are dry, & for that reason the less pleasant in the parts they are to be sent.48

Numerous accounts also show how local women (molheres solteiras christãs) helped the Portuguese in Kannur (1507),49 in Calicut (1525)50 or in the second siege of Diu (1546).51 Furthermore, in Moluccas in 1529, it was the intervention of an autochthone Christian and single woman, a slave freed by her Portuguese owner who she had a child with, that helped captain D. Jorge de Meneses uncover a plot to kill both Portuguese and Spanish.52 Local women are furthermore praised for their heroic warlike deeds as detached members of the local armies. Castanheda reports how, after fighting the king of Cambaya, the king of the Mughals left the battlefield with his armies, among which were ‘many single women all on horseback with bows and arrows that they shot’.53 One can also add an episode, in 1584, when a woman of great reputation came to Goa. She was one of the people who had been banished from the Kingdoms of Idalcan; she was sixty-five years old, dressed as a man, she rode on a horse and carried a quiver and bow. She followed the armies as an amazon, and was held in high esteem by everyone. She was there to talk to the Vice-Roy about unspecified subjects. Her name was Abehi and she was imprisoned by the Portuguese Inquisition and then banished to Hormuz, from where she went to the Mughals.54 At the same time, one should not forget about the role of Portuguese women. D. Juliana Dias da Costa (1658–1733) was a prominent character at the court of the Mughals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The daughter of the physician Agostinho Dias da Costa and an Armenian slave, she held an important position with the Great Mughal for over forty years. She spoke fluent Arabic and Portuguese and lived as a

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Christian in Muslim lands. She was reported in Portuguese sources to have founded several Jesuit missions in the region.55 Her role at the court of the Great Mughal was not even exceptional, given the culture, education and economic activities of elite women in the Mughal Empire, particularly in the seventeenth century.56 Other accounts present women as operating politically against the Portuguese. A recent essay by Wendy L. Belcher highlights the importance that both Portuguese Jesuit chronicles and Ethiopian hagiographers attached to several seventeenth-century court women of Habesha (Ethiopia) as opponents of the Jesuits.57 Being educated and powerful women, they came to be opinion makers and political leaders. They managed to mobilize masses of subjects, preventing the success of the Jesuit mission and the implementation of the Roman Catholic model of Christianity in Ethiopia. Their culture and education, their economic, political and social power, as well as their freedom, even within the framework of marriage, are emphasized in the sources. Black African women are not absent from the narratives either, performing important roles be it as slaves, spouses or community leaders, as is illustrated by the following example. Referring to Monomotapa (kingdom of Mutapa), Fr. João dos Santos explained: ‘The Monomotapa has many women, & the principal, whom he much loves, called Mazarìra, is his full sister, & a good friend of the Portuguese, & she defends, & speaks for them to the king & for that reason when they give the Curve to the king, they also give it to her’.58 As much as political agents, these women acted as economic intermediaries and were essential elements of trade networks. Even though in the East their economic power was widely acknowledged at the time, their activities as intermediaries are not particularly well-documented. As for Portuguese women in the East, their role was primarily that of administrative post holders and recipients of privileges. Under the Ancien Regime and during the crown-driven process of colonization, as it happened in the State of India, the king had a pivotal role as distributor of favours and privileges. A significant number of them were given to women, mostly to widows of colonial military, naval or administrative post holders, or their orphans, either under the guardianship of their mothers and families or as órfãs d’el Rei (orphans of the king) as previously mentioned. These women became transmitters of power and privileges in a man’s world, acting on behalf of their sons, brothers, or future husbands.59 As widows, spouses or orphans, through dowries or resulting from royal nominations and privileges, they would hold political, administrative, logistic, financial and fiscal jobs related to colonial administration. As a result, men’s access to those positions depended to a great extent on their relations with women



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– privileged targets of the crown’s favours and inheritors of their father’s positions. Among those privileges were highly desirable licenses to transport spices and other goods normally exclusive to crown trade on the ships of the Cape Route. In 1563, a royal permit allowed Dona Francisca Henriques, Countess of Feira, to bring goods up to a value of four thousand crusados from India, a trade originally reserved for the Crown. This privilege was intended as a contribution to the marriage dowry of her daughter, Dona Inês de Castro.60 It was a way of circumventing crown monopolies, and allowing private parties to be included in the Indian trade. In the East, the records repeatedly refer to the high number of Portuguese widows acting on behalf of their deceased husbands as active economic agents. The classic example is Dona Luisa da Silveira, widow of the former governor of Hormuz, who was in 1622 authorized to act as a shipping manager.61 Considering the roles of autochthone women in the Eastern contexts, these performances of Portuguese women should not be seen as uncommon. Elite women in local Eastern courts seem to have frequently exercised both political and economic power. Their ability to do so, however, depended on the particular role of women in local societies, heterogeneous as they could be. E.B. Findly provides additional evidence for this with her narrative of the capture of a ship owned by Maryam-uzZamānī, the mother of the Mughal emperor who had been imprisoned by the Portuguese. The dominant position of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean depended on the Cartaz system, which allowed only ships licensed by the Portuguese to navigate, with all others being subjected to privateering attacks. In 1613, the Portuguese attack on the Rahïmï, which occurred despite the fact that she carried the necessary safe travel pass, was a provocation for the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), mostly because the owner and patron of the ship was his mother, Maryam-uz-Zamänï. Most Mughal noblewomen of the period were wealthy and many of them were active in highly risky business, investing in foreign trade. The capture of the Rahïmï reveals the substantial involvement of women in Indian trade during that period.62 Regarding the role of Asian women in the world predating the mass arrival of Europeans, Anthony Reid has stressed the relatively high autonomy and economic relevance of women in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Southeast Asia, although of course one could not speak of them as being equal to men. There were very few areas in which they competed directly with each other and women had very different functions from men.63 Their roles included planting and harvesting rice, weaving and trade. As he stresses, the prominent economic role of women explains why the value

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of daughters was never questioned in Southeast Asia, as it was in China, India and the Middle East: on the contrary, he points to António Galvão’s statement from 1544, declaring that in Southeast Asia, ‘the more daughters a man has, the richer he is’.64 As for the performances of common women, Reid’s essay quotes expressive testimonies from several early Europeans merchants and settlers, beginning with the Portuguese. Tomé Pires noticed in 1515 that Melaka benefited a lot from the women street sellers, since they operated in every street and even held a market at night.65 António de Galvão in 1544 described how women in Birman country managed the more important mercantile businesses of their husbands and how, surprisingly, Moluccas women were the ones who negotiated, did business, bought and sold goods.66 The contributions of Barbara Watson Andaya on the role of women in the pepper trade must also be acknowledged.67 Her study points out the important role of women as rulers in Southeast Asia. As women were active participants in trade and shipping it was inevitable that the Portuguese had to deal with them as intermediaries in Indian and interAsiatic trade. Explicit evidence for this is, however, surprisingly scarce not to say almost non-existent in the reports of crown officers, in contrast to sources on the West Coast of Africa. Even so, for Macao, the activities of Isabel Reigota have been documented. She was a widow of Japanese origin, known for her attempts to reintroduce Jesuits in Japan after their expulsion. In addition, she played an important role in the sandalwood war, this time acting against the Jesuits’ interests. As one of the main sandalwood traders in Macao, Isabel Reigota was a principal player in this conflict.68 Even where we are able to locate in Portuguese official sources and archives which provide evidence of Portuguese, African and Asian females performing as economic agents in the East, the material remains meagre, especially when compared to the evidence available for the Atlantic world. If that is the case in a formal set-up, one would expect to identify more evidence of women as economic brokers within informal trade settings. This is the reason why we (re)oriented our research towards the ultimate testament of informal agency: the Peregrinação by Fernão Mendes Pinto.69 Interestingly, despite the multiple references to women in his work, their presence as economic agents is not paramount. Nevertheless, the role of women as local agents of trade is evident. One noteworthy account involves a woman performing as the saviour of the Portuguese – as happens frequently in Peregrinação. After being shipwrecked following a Moor attack in the bay of Lugor, in the kingdom of Siam, and losing several of their comrades, the remaining sailors threw themselves in the water and tried to escape. After seven days, they were found and cared



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for by this local woman, who lived off transferring salt from a big junk, which she owned, to smaller barges that could enter the bar of the river.70 Her story provides a vivid example of how women maintained businesses even in times of adversity, when their spouses and sons were not able to support or protect them. This woman’s husband, sons and other relatives had all been killed by the king of Siam.71 Pinto’s stories involving women always stress their strength, humanity, intelligence and their usefulness as information providers or as intermediaries between the Portuguese and the local powers and societies. Other European traders, British, French or Dutch, were also surprised to find themselves dealing with women. According to Hamilton, the women of Siam were the only ones engaged in trade, and some of them did so on a pretty large scale.72 Sampier notices that money exchanges in Tongking were also managed by women and that they were considered experts in this field.73 White explains that in nineteenth-century Cochin-China every man was a soldier, which is why commercial operations were performed by women.74 In fact, in their reports the Dutch and the English acknowledge dealing with several female traders. In Cochin-China, some Dutch negotiated pepper prices with ‘a great woman merchant of Sinoa’ who had made the journey to the capital to examine the market. She represented a company involving her two sisters and a brother that could deliver considerable amounts of pepper. The author notices that despite travelling with a male companion ‘the women did the talking and the man listened and agreed’.75 In a similar way, one of the Patani orangkaya (aristocrat merchants) who had debts with the English was a woman, Datu Newanan, while the Dutch in Aceh bought up tin for export from another Acehnese woman.76 Examples of powerful and influential women are abundant in the sources. One of them refers to the wife of a Portuguese who became a victim of the difficult multi-racial and cultural relations and ended up being murdered by her husband, who was then killed by her slaves: ‘In the year of our Lord 1595, in Mozambique occurred the following case. On this island lived a Portuguese, named Francisco Leitão, married with a mestiza, who had already been married before, & was rich & had farms & palms, on the other side, on the mainland, where she had her slaves, who administered her farms for her’.77 One cannot avoid noticing the importance of the bride’s wealth and economic power. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese access to the Monomotapa gold area depended on such female intermediaries. Similarly, women property owners in the Zambezi region have already been the subject of several studies.78 The Zambezi region came under Portuguese influence and was ruled by the Mozambique island captain

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whose intention was to bring the huge properties granted by the Bantu chiefs under Portuguese rule, administration and agrarian exploitation. Those were latifundia transformed into royal Portuguese properties, granted by the Crown for three successive generations in return for an annual fee paid in gold dust by the holders of the rental contract. This territory became important after the 1607 and 1629 treaties with the Monomotapa, which acknowledged the Portuguese Crown’s ownership of vast areas in exchange for military support. These grants not only involved the transfer of the land, but also the jurisdiction over the African people living there. The apparent singularity of these contracts derives from the fact that during the seventeenth century, the representatives of the Crown granted them exclusively to women, daughters of the Portuguese, who only obtained and retained them on the condition of marrying white Portuguese men. The sons from these marriages were excluded from the succession, since the properties were only transmitted along the female line. This was not totally exceptional, as Portuguese law allowed inheritance through daughters and followed the local prevalence of matrilineal lines of succession. This had previously also been a practice in the Indian ‘villages in the North’, from Chaul to Daman, a region administered from Bassein.79 In the Eastern colonial context, the meaning of this intentional transmission of land through the female line, with the attached condition to marry a Portuguese man, is twofold. First, it recognized the role of women, including mixed women, in empire building processes; secondly, it represented an attempt to ‘whiten’ the colonial set-up of the region, since those daughters of Portuguese men were not necessarily white, but rather the offspring of mixed marriages.

CULTURAL TRANSFERS In addition to their political and economic roles, women were also agents of linguistic, cultural and knowledge transfer. As partners and spouses, it was inevitable that they would transmit languages, new hygiene practices, diets and food preparation rules, as well as a different house building and aesthetic sense. As mothers, they were educators and thus had a great capacity to transfer codes of conduct, ethical behaviour and values to new generations. It is therefore not surprising that women frequently appear in the sources as translators, as línguas, elements of communication between the different worlds, mastering several languages. Fernão Mendes Pinto acknowledges that this crucial role of women as interpreters predated the arrival of the Portuguese. Arriving for the first time in Japan, he describes how



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the Nautoquimaa prince of this island of Tanixumaa (Tanegashima) came to our junk accompanied by many merchants, & noblemen … And then, calling one Lequia woman, who was the interpreter, through whom he talked with the China captain, owner of the junk, he asked the Nacodà (Captain) where he met these men and under which condition he brought them with him to our land of Japan.80

Such a pattern is also acknowledged in relation to the Dutch colonial presence in the East. The first Dutch mission to Cochin-China was accompanied by a Vietnamese woman who spoke excellent Portuguese and Malay and had long resided in Macao. She, along with another elderly woman who had had two Portuguese husbands as well as one Vietnamese one, had been the principal translator for the Cochin-China court for thirty years.81 Since European expansion and control depended on the knowledge of climate, geography, production and consumption markets, maritime circuits, languages, cultures, trade products and trade hubs, information was the most valuable asset. Women were part of that chain of information and were crucial elements of networks in which acquaintance and kinship consolidated patterns of cooperation. These exchanges of information were not unilateral, and the same women could be equally valuable to their own societies, communities and families by utilizing the money, power and influence of the newcomers. They even performed as contacts between European settlers. In Macao, many Chinese women were the partners of, first, Portuguese, and later other European, especially Scandinavian, supercargoes in Canton, spending a great deal of time in Macao. One could also mention the roles performed by the Portuguese settlers and their wives within the British settlement of Madras, on the Coromandel Coast. As Radhika Seshan has pointed out, they developed into invaluable elements of support to the British presence.82 They became natural brokers, connecting not only European and non-European worlds, but also establishing contacts between the various European nations in the region. Portuguese remained the lingua franca in the East, even after the emergence of the British and the Dutch political, economic and maritime dominion. One hypothesis is that such transfers and dominance were to a great extent due to the slaves, including women slaves,83 who had been raised on Portuguese settlements and who had previously co-habited with Portuguese men. The Dutch and English Companies’ practice of transferring slaves from one part of their influence zones to another facilitated this language transmission. In fact, the linguistic abilities of slaves as a result of forced relocations were a concern for the British East India Company. The Company was

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aware of the dangers of slaves possessing private means of communication. Accounts of planned uprisings on St Helena refer to conversations between slaves conducted in either Portuguese or shared country languages. In the aftermath of this attempt, and to avoid future uprisings, the Company directives expressed orders suggesting a preference for slaves who came directly from Africa: ‘as you can buy them from the Portuguese you may add six or eight, but we would have them bought as they come raw from Mosambeek or Mumbas before they can speak the Portuguese language and the more Native languages they are off, we think it may be the better’.84 This recommendation was, however, apparently not applied when Governor Collet planned a school for slaves in Bencoulen in the early eighteenth century, since by that time he assumed the language of instruction would be Portuguese. Other ways of cooperation involved the transfer of knowledge. This seems particularly noticeable as far as medical knowledge is concerned. As some diseases (like malaria) were new to the Europeans, they depended on local knowledge and cures. Some European accounts acknowledge women’s medical expertise. Afflicted by one of those diseases, Father Manuel dos Santos refers to ‘an old Moorish woman, called Manâsùa, a great master, who had healed me from the air, very cautiously, of which I was very thankful’.85 Equally striking was the centrality of Antonia, the slave of Garcia da Orta, the Portuguese New Christian doctor practicing in Goa. During a dialogue between Doctor Orta and Doctor Ruano, she was called on to assert, correct and confirm local knowledge. Authority thus lay with a woman and a slave.86 In a world of doctors and wise men, she was considered the ultimate guardian of knowledge and wisdom. One medical practice deserves particular attention, given its significance to most women: childbirth. The Diocesan Councils of Goa in 1567 banned local infidel midwives from attending the childbirth of Christian women – including converted ones, unless they had explicit permission from the Bishop.87 The fifth ecclesiastical council stated that a heathen daya was allowed to help, but only if there was no Christian available and on the condition that two other honest Christian women were present in order to perform baptism and to prevent any superstitious practice.88 For different reasons, the same ecclesiastical council forbade any Christian to be treated by infidel physicians or even to be shaved by an unfaithful. Yet in reality intense transfers of knowledge from Eastern to Western society persisted.89 Medical and healing practices, a central ground for knowledge transfer between different cultures, deserve further analysis from historians.



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Meanwhile, diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones, were commonly attributed to women from Europe and elsewhere, as the following account illustrates: There is another disease in this whole coast of Sofala, rivers Cuama, & Mozambique, very sticky to any kind of man, which is caused by the black women of these lands, because many of them, particularly the slaves of the Portuguese, if they get pregnant, and do not want to come to light, take a concoction of juice of a certain herb, which exists in these parts there, & just move with it; but when removed it becomes so poisonous that if they do not take that evil to any man, they will be drying, consumed little by little, until they die. Because of that, soon after they remove [the foetus] they soon look for a man, to whom to give this infirmity, so they stay healthy: & the man gets so sick that he rarely escapes death because at the very same moment they are taken by great pain in the groin, from which they die in a few days – unless they have an antidote, provided by the same women, to be taken in the same day of the sexual contact.90

The power of these women, even as slaves, and the degree of the Portuguese’s dependence on them for their own survival is plainly established in this quotation.

CONCLUSION Although the chronicles, official reports, correspondence and missionary letters examined here do not present Portuguese women, and even less autochthonous women, as protagonists in the process of empire building, they show them as essential elements in the construction and maintenance of empires. A large number of mestizas, resulting from a variety of mixed contacts, both licit and illicit, formal and informal, constituted an even more impressive driving force. Cooperation between the Portuguese and autochthone societies, economies and cultures depended on the agency of women, performing as brokers and go-betweens across all territories settled by the Portuguese. A great deal of this cooperation was imposed on the women who were crucial elements in the dynamics of European colonization. This affected both Portuguese and autochthone women, even if on different scales and levels. In any case, against a background of resistance, conflict, cheating, defection, intermingling and assimilation, those women, Portuguese and autochthone alike, acted as intermediaries between the different worlds. Their presence and agency was vital to economic relations and the survival

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of newcomers. They also played an important role in negotiations and accessing local knowledge. They were active agents of complex processes of identity construction in colonial set-ups, as well as influential in processes of social organization, through their role in families (and on the fringes of institutionalized families) and in the reconfiguration of colonial social environments. Beside their central roles in families, material culture and everyday life, their economic role was also impressive, as were their actions as political intermediaries. Equally important was their impact on religious practice and syncretism, on the emergence of new linguistic patterns and on knowledge transmission. Those practices emerged as a result of cross-cultural interaction, featuring women within colonial societies, whether they were colonizers, colonized, placed in the centre or on the margins of the system. By providing empirical evidence for the centrality of these women, this chapter follows an analytical framework that goes beyond the concepts of collaboration, as proposed by Robinson,91 or the ‘Middle Ground’, as established by White.92 It demonstrates that cooperation between individuals as well as between individuals and the formal powers is often a central means of empire building. In doing so, it brings to the fore the role of women as intermediaries between different worlds and highlights the centrality of trans-cultural relations to empire building processes in Early Modern Asia. Furthermore, it points to different kinds and levels of cooperation. This social mechanism was not always spontaneous and even less often linear: collaboration, communication, imposition, resistance, as much as fraud and defection are behaviours that can occur among the same agents in different circumstances. In this complex framework, negotiation and intermediation become crucial. The cross-cultural relations between individuals belonging to different worlds, which form the basis of this chapter, therefore make an argument against a national approach to empire building. This analysis does not focus on the outcomes of cooperative relations in terms of cost versus benefit, and even less does it evaluate them. Instead, it mostly centres on the social attributes, the aims and needs of the partners involved as go-betweens in this complex world. Dyadic interactions between individuals proved as important to the building of the Portuguese empire in the East as formal political strategies. This insight has provided the basis for our analysis of women who acted as intermediaries between worlds in the Portuguese colonial set-up.93 Professor Amélia Polónia is Associate Professor at University of Porto and a researcher of CITCEM (Transdisciplinary Research Centre Culture,



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Space, Memory). As the Vice-President of IMHA (International Maritime History Association), her scientific interests include colonial history, transfers and flows between oceans, informal mechanisms  of empire building, women participation in colonial dynamics and the environmental impact of the historical uses of the seas. She co-edited Beyond Empires: Self Organizing Cross Imperial Networks vs Institutional Empires, 1500–1800 (Leiden, 2016), Seaports in the First Global Age: Portuguese Agents, Networks and Interactions (1500– 1800) (Porto, 2016), Mechanisms of Global Empire Building in the First Global Age (1500–1800) (Porto, 2017), with Cátia Antunes, and the Forum ‘Connected Oceans: New Pathways in Maritime History’, IJMH, 2017, vol. 29 (1): 90–174. Dr Rosa Capelão is a Fellow at CITCEM (Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar ‘Cultura, Espaço e Memória’), University of Porto, Portugal, author of El culto de reliquias en Portugal en los siglos XVI-XVII: contexto, norma, funciones y simbolismo (U. Porto, 2011 ) and co-author of Mulheres que curam no Portugal Moderno. Do centro às margens: o exemplo das práticas médicas (Braga, 2015). She currently studies the role of women in Portuguese Overseas Expansion and the production and circulation of medical knowledge in Iberian empires. Her current interests include the study of women as healers in Early Modern Portugal and the understanding of the presence of beliefs and (ir)rationality in healing processes.

NOTES   1. See, above all, S. Subrahmanyam (ed.), Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); idem, Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Variorum Books, 1996); idem, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); idem, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993); M.N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: the Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); idem, Port Cities and Intruders: the Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); J.C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).   2. On this, see the rationale of the international and interdisciplinary research project DynCoopNet, part of the European Science Foundation’s TECT (The Evolution of Cooperation and Trade) programme. For further information, see http://www.dyncoopnet-pt.org/   3. P. de Jesús and L. Tiriba, ‘Cooperação’, in J.-L. Cattani, L.I. Gaiger and P. Hespanha (eds), Dicionário Internacional da Outra Economia (Coimbra: Almedina, 2009), 80.

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  4. P. Hammerstein (ed.), Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Dahlem University Press, 2003); E. Fehr and U. Fischbacher, ‘Social Norms and Human Cooperation’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004), 185–90; E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); R. Boyd et al., ‘The Evolution of Altruistic Punishment’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100(6) (2003), 3531–35.   5. A. Polónia, ‘Informal Self-Organised Networks in the First Global Age: The Jesuits in Japan’, The Bulletin of the Institute for World Affairs Kyoto Sangyo University 28 (2013), 133–58.  6. D. Catterall and J. Campbell (eds), Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); S.E. Owens and J.E. Mangan (eds), Women of the Iberian Atlantic (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).   7. The Portuguese overseas world is a case in point. The study of the role of women in the Portuguese Overseas Expansion is mostly centred on women in Portuguese maritime communities: A. Polónia, ‘Ocupações femininas em sociedades marítimas (Portugal, Século XVI)’, Mare Liberum 18/19 (2000), 153–78; idem, ‘De Portugal a espaços ultramarinos: Inclusão e exclusão de agentes femininas no processo de expansão ultramarina (século XVI)’, in D.D. Mendoza (ed.), Historia, Género y Familia en Iberoamérica: Siglos XVI–XX (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello/Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2004); idem, ‘Women’s Contribution to Family, Economy and Social Range of Maritime Communities in Sixteenth-Century Portugal’, Portuguese Studies Review 13(1/2) (2007), 269–86; idem, Expansão Ultramarina numa perspectiva local: O porto de Vila do Conde no século XVI (Lisbon: INCM, 2007); idem, ‘Women’s Participation in Labour and Business in the European Maritime Societies in the Early Modern Period’, II ruolo economico della famiglia: Secs. XIII–XVIII (Prato: Instituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’, 2009). On the building of a creole society in the Atlantic Archipelagos, namely in S. Tomé, see A.M. Caldeira, Mulheres, sexualidade e casamento em São Tomé e Príncipe, séculos XVI–XVII (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1999); idem, ‘Mestiçagem, estrategias de casamento e propriedade no arquipélago de São Tomé e Príncipe nos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII’, Arquipélago 2(11-12) (2007–2008), 49–72; for Atlantic encounters: P.J. Havik, ‘Women and Trade in the Guinea Bissau Region: The Role of African and Luso-African Women in Trade Networks from the Early 16th to the mid-19th Centuries’, Studia 52 (1994), 83–120; idem, ‘Comerciantes e Concubinas: sócios estratégicos no comércio Atlântico na costa da Guiné’, II Reunião Internacional de História da África (1997), 161–79; idem, Silences and Soundbytes: The Gendered Dynamics of Trade and Brokerage in the Pre-Colonial Guinea Bissau Region (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004); or in their role in Brazil, but here again, centred on elite women and on the period from the eighteenth century onwards: M.B. N. da Silva, Donas e Plebeias na Sociedade Colonial (Lisbon: Estampa, 2002).



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  8. ‘In the 16th century, the State of India did not designate a well-defined geographic space, but rather a conglomeration of territories, establishments, assets, individuals and interests that were administered, managed or governed by the Portuguese Crown in the Indian Ocean and neighbouring seas and in the coastal territories, from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan’. T. Thomaz and L.F. Reis, De Ceuta a Timor (Lisbon: Difel, 1994), 207; translation by the authors.   9. By ‘autochthone women’ we refer to women from local societies with whom the Europeans interacted. It is easiest to identify them as such during the first encounter. From then on, as a more or less intense process of miscegenation occurs, it becomes difficult to ascertain if the women mentioned in the source are still autochthone or already a product of miscegenation and thus representatives of a second and ulterior generation of settlers. 10. C.R. Boxer, Relações raciais no império colonial português 1415–1815 (Porto: Afrontamento, 1988), 115. 11. A. Baião, A Inquisição de Goa: Correspondência dos inquisidores da Índia (1569–1630), 2 vols (Coimbra: Academia das Ciências, 1930). 12. According to T.J. Coates, from 1550 to 1755 only between 615 and 1025 female orphans were actually sent to India. T.J. Coates, Degredados e órfãs: colonização dirigida pela coroa no império português: 1550–1755 (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1998). However, in the twenty-five years between 1561 and 1585, at least 205 Portuguese women (mostly ‘new Christians’) are registered in the Goa Inquisition records. Cf. Baião, A Inquisição de Goa. 13. Coates, Degredados e órfãs. 14. J.J. de A. Silva, Collecção Chronologica da Legislação Portugueza 1657–1674 (Lisbon: Imprensa de J.J.A. Silva, 1856), 273; Letter of the City Council of Goa, 31 October 1524, in A.S. Rêgo (ed.), Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente. Índia, 12 vols (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1947–1958), vol. 2, 36. 15. The term casados denotes those Portuguese who were – through marriages with local women – encouraged to settle in the Eastern territories. They became residents where they married, as they were given land to settle. They were not obliged to do military service, but were forced to defend some places in times of conflict. They were also granted certain privileges in relation to trade. In some cases, they turned into a local elite, becoming municipal officers and assuming responsibilities in social institutions such as Casas da Misericordias (charitable institutions founded in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century by laymen and established all over the Portuguese overseas territories). The first promoter of this policy in the Estado da Índia was Afonso de Albuquerque, Portugal’s Governor and Vice-Roy of India between 1509 and 1515. As for its effective impact, Albuquerque explains it in a letter to D. Manuel, 1 April 1512, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 1, 145–52.

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16. Letter of 22 December 1510 in ibid., vol. 1, 118. All translations from Portuguese are by the authors. 17. Cf. for instance the debate on Gilberto Freyre’s concept of Lusotropicalism during Salazar’s regime. On further developments see C. Castelo, ‘O modo português de estar no mundo’: o luso-tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa: 1933– 1961 (Porto: Afrontamento, 1999). 18. Letter of Afonso de Albuquerque to D. Manuel, 4 November 1514, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 1, 119–21. 19. J. de Barros, Década Segunda da Asia (Lisbon: Jorge Rodriguez, 1628), 125–26. 20. Letter of Albuquerque to D. Manuel, 1 April 1512, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 1, 145–52. 21. C.R. Boxer, O Império Marítimo Português 1415-1825 (Lisbon: Companhia das Letras, 2002); idem, A Mulher na Expansão Ultramarina Ibérica 1415–1815: Alguns factos, ideias e personalidades (Lisbon: Horizonte, 1977). 22. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, 29–32. 23. ‘from people so vile as those who accepted to marry that way could not be expected results that would have the honour or the qualities required by those high hopes of Afonso de Albuquerque’. Cf. Barros, Década Segunda da Asia, 125–26. 24. Letter of the king of Maldivas to D. João III, from Kochi, 27 January 1555, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 6, 11. He was previously supposed to marry a girl aged nine, daughter of Francisco de Mariz and Maria Pinheira. See the letter of D. Afonso de Noronha to D. João III, from Kochi, 27 January 1552, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 5, 96–98; published by D. Couto, ‘Un coup d’épée dans l’eau: la Memoria da tomada da fortalleza de Catifa et l’expédition à Bassorah (1551)’, in idem and R. Loureiro (eds), Revisiting Hormuz: Portuguese Interactions in the Persian Gulf (Wiesbaden: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 82–83. 25. Letter of Albuquerque to D. Manuel from Goa, 4 January 1514, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 1, 119–21. 26. This is not a Portuguese particularity. In the case of the British East Indian Company, the use of female slaves as unofficial concubines is evident from the references to the birth of several children of factors and freemen of the Madras factory by slave women. The Company records also mention the exploitation of slave women as prostitutes. Cf. A. Winterbottom, ‘From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660– 1720’, in M. Fusaro and A. Polónia (eds), Maritime History as Global History (St John’s, Canada: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2010), 95–124. 27. Letter of Afonso de Albuquerque from Kannur, 3 December 1513, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 1, 194.



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28. J.H. da Cunha Rivara, Archivo Portuguez Oriental, 6 vols (Nova-Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1857–1876), vol. 3, 412–13 (henceforth: APO). 29. D. do Couto, Década Sexta da Asia (Lisbon: Domingos Gonsalves, 1736), vol. 2, 669. 30. Letters of 1 December 1552 and 16 December 1554 from Goa, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 5, 246, 380; Sofala regiment of 20 May 1530 in: Documentos sobre os portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central, 1497–1840, 9 vols (Lisbon: National Archives of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 19621989), vol. 6, 332. 31. The council of Trent (1545–1563) is the main landmark of the Catholic Reformation. Its decrees, published in 1564, determined, among other things, that marriage is a sacrament instituted by God. It should be insoluble and monogamous. Any other union between couples was deemed illegitimate, and thus susceptible to severe punishment. These determinations were followed by stricter surveillance and social control. The same spirit applied to overseas territories under Roman Catholic influence. This model of marriage would represent the foundation of the European and colonial social and moral structure. The Roman Church discourse on this matter often clashed with local realities both in Europe and overseas. 32. APO, vol. 3, 412–13; Alvará de D. Sebastião on prostitution in S. Tomé and the kingdom of Congo, 9 November 1559, in A.P. Brásio (ed.), Monumenta Missionaria Africana: África Ocidental, Seria I, 15 vols (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1952–1988), vol. 2, 443–45. 33. ‘Item to avoid the evils resulting from the wrong women not living in separate places and indifferently living the Christians with the infidels: it seems that they should be placed in different districts, and separate, Christians in one, and the infidels in another: what they very insistently ask the Viso Rey for’. APO, vol. 4, 51–52. 34. Thomaz, De Ceuta a Timor, 207. 35. P.F.A. Freyre, Primor e honra da vida soldadesca no Estado da India (Lisbon: Jorge Rodrigues, 1630), 98. 36. Filipe de Brito Nicote represents a great example of such individual adventure stories. He was a Portuguese captain in eastern India, in the service of the king of Arakan (title of General Captain of Syriam, Myanmar). See J. Cayetano, ‘The Portuguese in Lower Burma: Filipe de Brito de Nicote’, Luso-Brazilian Review 3(2) (1966), 3–24; Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa, 3 vols (Lisbon: Antonio Craesbeeck, 1675), vol. 3, 148. 37. The first contacts seem to date from 1540, arranged by Portuguese adventurers, one of whom potentially was Fernão Mendes Pinto. The first anti-Christian edict, signed by Toyotomi Hideysohi, dates from 1587, but it was not applied. A second edict was issued in 1614, demanding the expulsion of the Jesuits from Japan. Finally, the edict expelling the Portuguese was issued in 1639. Cf. J.E. Hall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 2003), vol 6, and J.P.O. e Costa, O Japão e o Cristianismo no Século XVI: Ensaios de História Luso-Nipónica (Lisbon: Sociedade Histórica da Independência de Portugal¸ 1999), Cf. V. Coutinho, O fim da presença portuguesa no Japão (Lisbon: Sociedade Histórica da Independência de Portugal, 1999). 38. T.T. Chang, Sino-Portuguese Trade from 1514 to 1644: A Synthesis of Portuguese and Chinese Sources (Leiden: Brill, 1934), 104. 39. On the women in Macao, see E. Penalva, Mulheres em Macau: Donas Honradas, Mulheres Livres e Escravas. Século XVI e XVII (Lisbon: CHAM, 2011); I. C. de Sousa, ‘Cativas e Bichas, Meninas e Moças: A Subalternidade social feminina e a formação do mercado matrimonial de Macao (1590–1725)’, Campus Social 3/4 (2006–2007), 173–96; Havik, ‘Comerciantes e Concubinas’. As for Canton in the eighteenth century, see P. van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Politics and Strategies in Eighteenth-Century Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). 40. ‘I have seen in Goa and knew it for sure in Kochi finishing many women with their husbands with false testimonies and I saw one who married in a year three times and all three she took away from each one of them’. Letter of Bispo Dumiense to the King from Kochi, 12 January 1522, in Documentos sobre os portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central, vol. 6, 76; as for Calicut, they state: ‘a woman has 8 to 10 husbands, a girl of eight years already knows man’. Crónica do Descobrimento e Conquista da India pelos Portugueses (Coimbra, 1974), 9, also in A.P.M. Avelar, Figurações da Alteridade na cronística da Expansão (Lisbon: Universidade Aberta, 2004), 165. 41. Documentos sobre os portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central, vol. 3, 228–44. 42. ‘Letter of Baltasar Nunes about Cap Comorin (Kanyakumari), 1551’, in Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 5, 47–49. 43. Recommendations of the bishops D. Gaspar de Leão and D. Fr. Aleixo de Meneses in the Second and Fifth Goa Council, 1575 and 1606, in APO, vol. 4, 97, 263. 44. J. dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, e Varia historia de cousas, notáveis do Oriente, E da Christandade que os Religiosos da Ordem dos Pregadores nelle fizeram, 2 vols (Évora: Manoel de Lira, 1608–1609), vol. 2, 77. 45. Ibid., 78. 46. F. L. de Castanheda, Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India pelos Portugueses (Lisbon: Typographia Rollandiana, 1833), 215–16. 47. G. Correa, Lendas da Índia, 8 vols. (Lisbon: Academia Real das Sciencias, 1858– 1866), vol. 4, 81–82. 48. F.M. Pinto, Peregrinaçam (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1614), 221–221v. Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509–1583) sailed from Portugal on 11 March 1537, bound for India. According to his testimony in Peregrinaçam, he was shipwrecked, captured and sold into slavery sixteen or seventeen times. The accuracy of his records is somewhat doubtful as his biography frequently intermixes reality with fantastic and heroic tales. ‘Pinto, Fernão Mendes’, in Dicionário da Expansão



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Portuguesa, 2 vols (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1994), vol. 2, 904–6; J.S. Alves (ed.), Fernão Mendes Pinto and the Peregrinação: Studies, Restored Portuguese Text, Notes and Indexes, 4 vols (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, INCM, 2010). 49. Correa, Lendas da Índia, vol. 1, 702. 50. Ibid., vol. 2, 865. 51. F. de Andrade, O primeiro Cerco que os turcos puserão há fortaleza de Diu nas partes da India defendida pollos portugueses (Coimbra: João de Barreira, 1589). 52. Correa, Lendas da Índia, vol. 3, 366. 53. Castanheda, Historia do Descobrimento e Conquista da India, 228. 54. Sousa, Asia Portuguesa, vol. 3, 17–18. 55. R. Coutinho, Mulheres Aventureiras Portuguesas Espalhadas Pelos Quatro Cantos do Mundo (Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2009); T.R. Zaman, ‘Visions of Juliana: A Portuguese Woman at the Court of the Mughals’, Journal of World History 23(4) (2013), 761–91. 56. E.B. Findly, ‘The Capture of Maryam-uz-Zamānī’s Ship: Mughal Women and European Traders’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 108(2) (1988), 227–38. 57. W.L. Belcher, ‘Sisters Debating the Jesuits: The Role of African Women in Defeating Portuguese Proto-Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Abyssinia’, Northeast African Studies 13(1) (2013), 121–66. 58. Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, vol. 1, 63. 59. See the registers of endowments and privileges concerning the State of the India published by Rêgo, Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, vol. 5; APO also gives many examples of this. 60. Lisbon, 23 February 1563, in APO, vol. 5, 531. 61. G. da S. Correia, História da colonização portuguesa na Índia, 6 vols (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colonias, 1948–1956), also in Boxer, A Mulher na Expansão Ultramarina Ibérica, 98. 62. Findly, ‘The Capture of Maryam-uz-Zamānī’s Ship’. 63. A. Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 22(3) (1988), 629–45. 64. A. Galvão, A Treatise on the Moluccas (c. 1544), probably the preliminary version of Antonio Galvao’s lost História das Molucas, ed. H. Jacobs S.J. (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1971), 89. 65. T. Pires, 1515, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), 274; H. Chung, ‘Hai Yũ (Words about the Sea), 1537’, in Historical Notes on Indonesia and Malaya, Compiled from Chinese Sources (Groeneveldt, 1880), 128. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 635. 66. Galvão, A Treatise on the Moluccas, 75. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in PreColonial Southeast Asia’, 634. 67. B.W. Andaya, ‘Women and Economic Change: The Pepper Trade in PreModern Southeast Asia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38(2) (1995), 165–90. 68. Penalva, Mulheres em Macao, 115–42. 69. Pinto, Peregrinaçam.

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70. Ibid., 38–39. 71. Ibid., 39. 72. A. Hamilton, 1727, A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols (Edinburgh: John Mosman, 1930), 96. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 634. 73. W. Dampier, 1699, Voyages and Discoveries (London: Argonaut Press, 1931), 47. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 634. 74. J. White, A Voyage to Cochin-China (London: Longman, 1824), 261. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 634. 75. J. Wonderaer, ‘Letter from Tachem (Tatchim, Cochin-China), 5 April 1602’, in H.A. van Foreest and A. de Booy (eds), De Vierde Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indie onder Jacob Wikens en Jacob van Neck (1599–1604), 2 vols (Gravenhage: Linchoten-Vereniging, 1981), vol. 2, 80. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in PreColonial Southeast Asia’, 635. 76. J. Browne, Letter from Patani, 30 May 1616, in F.C. Danvers and W. Foster, Letters Received from the East India Company from its Servants in the East, 6 vols (London: Sampson Low, Martson & Company, 1896–1902), vol 4, 108; J. Compostel, ‘Origineel daghregister van de voyagie, handel en resconter met tschip d´Revengie near Atchin’, 1636, in Algemene Rijksarchief, KA 1031 (1119), f. 1200. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 635. 77. Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, vol. 1, 77v. 78. J. Capela, Donas, Senhores e Escravos (Porto: Afrontamento, 1995); A. Isaacman, Mozambique: the Africanization of a European Institution. The Zambezi Prazos. 1750– 1902 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); A. Lobato, Colonização senhorial da Zambézia e outros estudos (Lisbon: J.I.U., 1962); M.D.D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi (London: Longman, 1973); E. Rodrigues, ‘Portugueses e Africanos nos Rios de Sena: Os prazos da Coroa nos séculos XVII e XVIII’ (dissertation, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 2002). 79. Boxer, A Mulher na Expansão Ultramarina Ibérica, 94–97. 80. Pinto, Peregrinaçam, 158v. 81. Wonderaer, ‘Letter from Tachem’, 22, 38. Quoted by Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, 636. 82. R. Seshan, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi: Primus Books, 2012). 83. Winterbottom, ‘From Hold to Foredeck’. 84. Court to Fort St David, 6 March 1694/5. Quoted by Winterbottom, ‘From Hold to Foreback’, 118. 85. Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, vol. 2, 77. 86. G. da Orta, Colóquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas medicinais da India… (Goa: Ioannes de Endem, 1563), 26, 41. 87. APO, Fasc. 4, 25, 133. 88. Ibid., 263–64. 89. See, among Portuguese authors, Orta, Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia… and C. Costa, Tractado de las drogas, y medecinas de las Indias



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Orientales con sus Plantas debuxadas al biuo por Christoual Acosta medico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente (Burgos: Martin de Victoria, 1578). 90. Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, vol. 1, 89v. 91. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–42; idem, ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire’, in W.J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 267–89. 92. R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 93. This approach has also been followed by recent historiography. See, among others, B. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

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Pearson, M.N. Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.  . Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Penalva, E. Mulheres em Macau: Donas Honradas, Mulheres Livres e Escravas. Século XVI e XVII. Lisbon: CHAM, 2011. Pinto, F.M. Peregrinaçam. Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1614. Pires, T. 1515, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires. London: Hakluyt Society, 1944. Polónia, A. ‘Ocupações femininas em sociedades marítimas (Portugal, Século XVI)’, Mare Liberum 18/19 (2000), 153–78.  . ‘De Portugal a espaços ultramarinos: Inclusão e exclusão de agentes femininas no processo de expansão ultramarina (século XVI)’, in D.D. Mendoza (ed.), Historia, Género y Familia en Iberoamérica. Siglos XVI–XX. Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello/Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2004, 21–66.  . Expansão Ultramarina numa perspectiva local: O porto de Vila do Conde no século XVI. Lisbon: INCM, 2007.  . ‘Women’s Contribution to Family, Economy and Social Range of Maritime Communities in Sixteenth-Century Portugal’, Portuguese Studies Review 13(1/2) (2007), 269–86.  . ‘Women’s Participation in Labour and Business in the European Maritime Societies in the Early Modern Period’, II ruolo economico della famiglia. Secs. XIII– XVIII. Prato: Instituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’, 2009, 705–20.  . ‘Informal Self-Organised Networks in the First Global Age: The Jesuits in Japan’, The Bulletin of the Institute for World Affairs Kyoto Sangyo University 28 (2013), 133–58. Rêgo, A.S. (ed.). Documentação para a História das Missões do Padroado Português do Oriente. Índia. Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1947–1958. Reid, A. ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 22(3) (1988), 629–45. Rivara, J.H.C. Archivo Portuguez Oriental. Nova-Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1857–1876. Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Longman, 1972, 117–42.  . ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire’, in W.J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986, 267–89. Rodrigues, E. ‘Portugueses e Africanos nos Rios de Sena: Os prazos da Coroa nos séculos XVII e XVIII’, dissertation. Lisbon: University of Lisbon, 2002. Santos, J. dos. Ethiopia Oriental, e Varia historia de cousas, notáveis do Oriente, E da Christandade que os Religiosos da Ordem dos Pregadores nelle fizeram. Évora: Manoel de Lira, 1608–1609. Seshan, R. Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Delhi: Primus Books, 2012.



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Silva, J.J. de A. Collecção Chronologica da Legislação Portugueza 1657–1674. Lisbon: Imprensa de J. J.A. Silva, 1856. Silva, M.B.N. da. Donas e Plebeias na Sociedade Colonial. Lisbon: Estampa, 2002. Sousa, I. C. de. ‘Cativas e Bichas, Meninas e Moças: A Subalternidade social feminina e a formação do mercado matrimonial de Macao (1590–1725)’, Campus Social 3/4 (2006–2007), 173–96. Sousa, M. de F. e., Asia Portuguesa. 3 vols, Lisbon: Antonio Craesbeeck, 1675. Subrahmanyam, S. Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.  . (ed.). Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.  . The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. London: Longman, 1993.  . Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Variorum Books, 1996. Thomaz, L.F. De Ceuta a Timor. Lisbon: Difel, 1994. White, J. A Voyage to Cochin-China. London: Longman, 1824. White, R. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Winterbottom, A. ‘From Hold to Foredeck: Slave Professions in the Maritime World of the East India Company, c. 1660–1720’, in M. Fusaro and A. Polónia (eds), Maritime History as Global History. St John’s, Canada: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2010, 95–124. Wonderaer, J. ‘Letter from Tachem (Tatchim, Cochin-China), 5 April 1602’, in H.A. van Foreest and A. de Booy (eds), De Vierde Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indie onder Jacob Wikens en Jacob van Neck (1599–1604), 2 vols. Gravenhage: Linchoten-Vereniging, 1981. Zaman, T.R. ‘Visions of Juliana: A Portuguese Woman at the Court of the Mughals’, Journal of World History 23(4) (2013), 761–91.

Chapter 3

Cooperation and Cultural Adaption British Diplomats at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, c. 1779–1815 Tanja Bührer

} On 8 May 1779, the ruler of Hyderabad, Nizam Ali Khan Asaf Jah II, received John Hollond, an envoy of the Madras Government of the British East India Company (EIC).1 The British in India needed a friend. Upon the French declaration of 1778 to fight the British in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), they had resolved to drive the French out of their remaining possessions in India. As the French were a key ally of the Ruler of Mysore, Haidar Ali, the EIC stood on the brink of a potentially fatal second Anglo-Mysore war. At the same time, the Company was already at war with the Maratha Empire (First Anglo-Maratha War, 1775–1782). Hollond’s role was to reside at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad and to ascertain the political position of the third Indian power player in the South towards the French, the Marathas and Mysore, to eventually win it over for an alliance by treaty.2 Yet, Hollond found himself in a difficult position. The Nizam was still outraged about the Company’s interference in his family’s concerns. The Madras Government had entered direct negotiations with his subordinate and rival brother Bazalut Jang, who in January 1779 agreed to lease the Guntur Circar3 to the British in return for military support.4 The British envoy thus suffered various embarrassments at the court. After the devastating British defeat against Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur in September 1780, the Nizam read out a letter he had received from a triumphant Haidar 90



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Ali, in which he described the British as ‘a set of paltry, contemptible merchants’, who should not have dared to rank themselves among the Princes of this country and solicit the honour of admittance into durbars (courts).5 To make matters worse, Hollond got caught in the crossfire of the British Governments of Bengal and Madras. Although the Regulating Act of 1773 imposed a series of reforms, entrusting the Bengal Presidency with administrative supervision as well as the power of peace and war over all of British India, diplomatic competences and governmental responsibilities were still contested. Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General, accused the Madras Government of having violated what he considered to be the Nizam’s ‘sovereignty’. The Madras Government, in turn, saw this as an unjustified interference in their negotiations and recalled their Resident. Yet, Hollond decided to comply with the directions of Bengal to continue his mission. Consequently, the Madras Government suspended Hollond from service and for months he found himself in a paralysing uncertainty as to whether the Court of Directors in London would procure his re-instalment.6 As the Hyderabad Government was well aware of these internal conflicts, the Resident lost even more bargaining power and the negotiations came to a standstill. Hollond applied for release of his position due to health issues, which he also believed were a result of his social isolation.7 He finally took his leave in July 1782. It was only in June 1784 that another British envoy, Richard Johnson, reached Hyderabad. However, the latter was compelled to wait for weeks in his tent outside the gates of the city. The Nizam had set out with court and army to settle territorial issues with the Marathas and had declined Johnson’s request to join his camp.8 After the Nizam’s return, Johnson’s reception was delayed again due to unfavourable omens.9 When the British Resident was finally admitted to court, he had to face questions, such as whether he ‘meant to stay three years as Mr Hollond had done without forwarding the Company’s Business or the Nabob’s’.10 After the Nizam had learned that the new Resident was not invested with plenipotentiary powers, Johnson was considered merely as ‘a dignified messenger of some prescribed words instead of a confident & entrusted general agent’.11 Already in March 1785, a month after his patron Warren Hastings resigned, Johnson was recalled. Hasting’s wars had left the EIC heavily in debt and the new Governor-General, Sir John Macpherson, was ordered strictly to keep out of Indian politics.12 This short overview of the first encounters between British envoys and the Hyderabad Government shows that the early Residents acted as tiny minorities on the very margins of an unfinished political organization with only roughly established bureaucratic structures. As in most other parts of India, the British encountered a diplomatic world defined by the Indo-Persianate

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protocols of the Mughal Empire, to which they had to adapt. Thus, the concept of indirect rule, suggesting the collaboration of an Indian puppet regime, is inappropriate for that period of time.13 The early British-Indian encounters in Hyderabad have to be considered rather in terms of cooperation. Yet, as is equally apparent from the introduction, a common basis of mutual trust first had to be established. Agreements by treaty were crucial ways of building this trust. Even though the military and political power of the EIC increased considerably towards the end of the eighteenth century, the language of the various treaties concluded between the EIC and Hyderabad during the period of time covered represents the relationship as a static, consensual agreement between equal and befriended states.14 Thus, to grasp the real dynamics of the relationship, the full picture and processes of the contested intercultural diplomacy have to be taken into consideration. This chapter examines how the British and Hyderabad built up forms of cooperations as well as the structural and cultural shifts these engagements underwent up to the early 1800s, thus making a contribution to the broader narratives of the transition from ‘Mughal-centred to Companycentred diplomacy’15 and the emergence of an ‘empire by treaty’ in India.16

THE STRUGGLE FOR COMMON RULES OF ENGAGEMENT AND FOR INFORMATION, 1779–1789 The first Nizam of Hyderabad, Nizam-ul Mulk Asaf Jah, came to power over the Mughal Provinces of the Deccan through military victories. In 1724, he founded the Asaf Jahi dynasty and a separate administration, which made him a de facto independent ruler, even though the Nizam and the Mughal Emperor did not formally break with each other and the Nizam maintained symbolic allegiance. The political system of Hyderabad in the eighteenth century was organized along loosely structured, multicultural patron-client relationships and characterized by the military basis of the administration. Both army and civil officers were granted military ranks, indicated by the mansabs (position denoted by numerical rank and title), and were accordingly paid a salary or given a jagir (land grant). Specific duties for warfare, such as the collection of resources or the maintenance of troops, were attached to these ranks.17 The personal bond between ruler and status group among the high nobility manifested elements of vassal feudalism, with its strong emphasis on personal loyalty. But apart from that, change in allocated territories was common and the imperial household was open to incorporating administrative personnel and military entrepreneurs from outside.18



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Unlike in Bengal, where after its victory over the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Buxar in 1764 the Company expanded direct control over territory and revenue, British power in Southern India was limited to the centres at Bombay and Madras and their immediate hinterland. Consequently, the Madras Government had to play by the local rules and founded its relationship with Hyderabad on a land grant conferred by the Nizam in return for military assistance.19 This service met a specific demand of the regional market, as the rival South Indian Empires were in need of troops under European leadership and equipped with European weaponry. The lack of clear-cut borders in the nation state, the shifting loyalties and secessionist aspirations of the different patrons, particularly on the edges of the polycentric Indian state,20 often make it difficult to differentiate between a domestic and a foreign party. Until the 1760s, the Mughal nobility in North India sought to integrate leading British figures as another group into their cosmopolitan Mughal order of service, even awarding them Persian titles of honour.21 Similarly, Nizam Muzaffar Jung had tried to control the French, who were involved in Hyderabad’s succession wars after the death of Nizam-ul Mulk in 1748, by bestowing on the French Governor-General, Joseph-François Dupleix, the title ‘Zafar Jung’ and making him the deputy of designated territories.22 Yet the British officials at Hyderabad were never awarded with Persian titles such as the mansabs, which would have incorporated them into the imperial service and would have been a clear indicator of social standing within Hyderabad society.23 In addition, the governor-general and council in Calcutta, in order to avoid confusion with Indo-Persianate practice and terminology, decided that its diplomats at Indian courts should not hold Persian diplomatic ranks but be entitled ‘Resident’.24 Much indicates that the British were considered as representatives of a minor foreign power that could engage with the Hyderabad political system only on subordinate terms. According to the Residents Hollond and Johnson, the Nizam deemed the British to be mere auxiliaries, who were to provide him with troops if needed without him having to specify why they were required.25 Until the 1830s, British Residents were formally subjugated by the ceremony of presenting the Nizam with nazr, an offering, usually of gold coins, given from inferior to superior.26 The British Resident’s position in the Hyderabad political system of the 1770s and 1780s can best be understood as that of a wakil (representative or ambassador).27 Wakils were intermediaries of patron-client relationships within the Hyderabad state as well as of relations with authorities of foreign powers. In accordance with prevalent etiquette, members of the nobility seldom met with the Nizam or each other directly. They sent their

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wakil to attend court, negotiate business as well as personal matters and maintain friendly connections by ceremonially exchanging greetings, gifts and payments. Thus, British Residents in the last quarter of the eighteenth century can be ranked as being on the same level as envoys from other regional powers such as the wakils of the Peshwa, the Maratha chiefs Scindia and Holkar, and the Nawab of Arcot.28 That said, the individual standing of a wakil could differ considerably according to the general relationship with the patron he represented as well as his rank within his ‘home society’ and the personal bond of trust between him and his patron. In a highly ritualized court diplomacy that relied on face-to-face negotiations, uncertainty with regard to the rank and standing of an ambassador was a serious hindrance to building a basis for negotiation. This was already problematic between Indian powers. When in the 1790s a wakil of the Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan requested admission to court, the Hyderabad Government was reluctant to agree not only because of the strained relationship with its ambitious rival, but also due to the ambiguous standing of this envoy. Intelligence after weeks of investigations finally revealed that the wakil was not held in high trust with Tipu. Consequently, he had to leave Hyderabad without having been received by the Nizam once.29 The assessment of representatives of a structurally very different political organization was even more challenging. Hollond argued that he did not introduce James Grant – who had been despatched to Hyderabad as his potential successor – as his assistant, because the court officials would consider him in the inferior capacity of an akhbarnavis (newswriter). Consequently, they would never look at him as a person of the political leverage necessary for the position of a Resident.30 In general, the position of EIC officials at Indian courts was a difficult one because they were representatives of a trading company and Indian rulers despised merchants as inferior to warriors and rulers.31 Hollond complained with regard to the Residents’ standing that the commercial character of the company would ‘by no means, give them any title to Respect at the court of a Hindustan Prince, whose Government is purely military’.32 British Residents thus sought to incorporate themselves into the ranking on local terms by mimicking courtly appearances. Numerous requests to the Governor-General were made to purchase elephants for visits, hunting expeditions and parades. Hollond argued that a Minister in high trust without a train of elephants, and particularly on a march certainly makes, among the proud feudal Lords of this country, who are all well mounted in this way, a very unbecoming figure. … Where there exist ab-



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stract habits of contempt for mere Parade, the real uses of it are sometimes overlooked, it evidently is essentially necessary in public characters at foreign Courts, and particularly those of Hindostan, where the real Rank of a Minister may be unknown.33

But even when the British ambassadors were allowed to regularly attend the durbar as the central arena of communication and negotiation34 and were adapting perfectly to court ceremonials, it was not sufficient to enable them to negotiate. As late as in the 1780s the British were poorly informed about India outside their centres at Bengal, Banaras, Madras and Bombay.35 In contrast, the Hyderabad Government could rely on a network of intelligence all over the Indian subcontinent. It even had, through French officials – rivals of their British counterparts – and private European entrepreneurs in its service, access to global knowledge such as information about deployments of reinforcements from Europe or wars in other parts of the world. But probably most striking for the British was that the Nizam had superb knowledge of internal differences in the Supreme Council such as the Governor-General Hasting’s conflict with his board member Philip Francis.36 The dramatic asymmetries of information made the British reluctant to settle cooperations, as they feared being duped into accepting disadvantageous terms – a fear that was not completely unjustified. When the Nizam sought to push the EIC into an alliance against Tipu Sultan, he ordered the forgery of a letter of Haidar Ali, soliciting the Nizam’s assistance to extirpate the English for the sake of the holy faith of Mohammed and at the same time promising him a large sum of money and vast territories. The letter was then given to an experienced hircarrah (messenger), who was instructed to announce, in an assembled durbar that included the British Resident, that he just arrived from Haidar Ali’s country, giving detailed descriptions of the events of the war along the route he had supposedly taken.37 Thus, all British Residents were supposed to act in the double capacity of negotiators and spies.38 In the early years, they probably acted mainly as intelligence agents in order to catch up with local and interregional knowledge. It goes without saying that the Hyderabad Government tried to preserve the advantage of superior information. In the spatial order of the court the nobles were kept apart from the Resident. And outside, only governmentally controlled communication took place, when the Nizam sent one of his servants or, on rare occasions, the prime minister to the Resident’s place. According to Johnson, ‘from the first moment of my arrival, no person of any degree however low, has been suffered to approach my House or hold any Intercourse with me upon whatever pretence, publicly or privately’.39

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Due to this policy of isolation, the Residents could only guess at internal factions and the activities of other wakils by observing who was conversing with whom and for how long and to whom the Nizam gave the honour of a private audience. The only way for the British Residents to get any leeway was to copy and acquire the Indian rulers’ personnel, methods, channels and structures of information gathering. First of all, they employed Indian experts of communication and intelligence. As the Hyderabad patron-client relationships did not follow caste or kinship lines, but were formed on an individual basis,40 it was possible to win the cooperation of Asian servants. These professional groups within Indian society worked in very similar functions for the British as for the Mughal aristocrats.41 The dubashs, one of the first groups that were offered steady employment, were Indian agents who basically acted as their master’s contact with the Indian world. They managed the private affairs of their European master, primarily of a financial nature, but were also interpreters, brokers and undercover agents. Although there exists the stereotype that the dubashs were of humble origin and made spectacular fortunes by cooperating with the British, as Peter J. Marshall has argued, most of them were already men of some substance before.42 This is confirmed in the case of Hollond’s dubash, who was in contact with members of the high-ranking Hyderabad nobility, which made him a very valuable source of information.43 The dawks, postal routes with regular posts, were the arteries of interregional communication and intelligence, run by harkaras, messengers or even running-spies.44 The early Hyderabad Residents had to rely on the existing establishments of Mughal origin, but tried to employ their own bodies of harkaras. And so did Hollond for Pune in order to get information about the politics of the Maratha court, which at the time was at war with the EIC. But the connection was slow and unreliable and after many harkaras had been trapped, stripped and searched – presumably by thieves, but Hollond assumed by Government’s agents – he stopped dispatching them.45 An important feature of British intelligence gathering was the akhbar (Persian newsletter), drafted by newswriters, foreign correspondents stationed at different courts and centres of political power that were officially tolerated to gather intelligence and spy on court events.46 As the Residents of Hyderabad only occasionally received newsletters until the end of the 1780s, Hollond secretly stationed an undercover newswriter at the Pune court. But after he was discovered, he had to leave the city and return to Hyderabad.47 The right to place a newswriter meant more than access to information; it implied a legitimate interest in each other’s policies and an acknowledgment of the other as an equal sovereign.48



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The expulsion of the Resident’s newswriter, as well as the attacks on his harkaras, can be taken as another indicator of the poor standing of the British among South India’s power players. Thus, during this early period, the Residents still had to resort to the mediation of ‘friendly’ Indian rulers such as the Nawabs of Travancore and Arcot, who were willing to share at least selected parts of the information they received from their newswriters and wakils.49 As for Indian rulers and people, another rather informal, but vital source of information were the soucars (money lenders, bankers), who apart from their money transactions were also paid for their knowledge which emerged from their network of business partners in various places all over the subcontinent.50 The low standing of the representatives of the EIC and their lack of knowledge were not the only reasons for the failed missions of the early Residents. More significant was the fact that the Nizam and the court officials deemed the political structures of the merchant company insufficient for high diplomacy. In a typical orientalist reflex, the EIC officials deemed the ‘Moorish’ to be just ‘ignorant of our System of Government’ that was too complex for them to understand.51 But taking a closer look at the conversations at court, it becomes evident that the Hyderabad Government was in fact not only very well aware of how the Company was organized, but also that the critics of its structural weaknesses were entirely justified. The Nizam complained that the internal power struggles and unclear competences within and between the different Governments made it almost impossible for him to decide with whom to negotiate at all. In addition, he argued that the frequent succession of high officials prevented the build-up of trust so essential for cooperations, especially as he had no guarantee that a superior instance such as the Crown granted that agreements and treaties made were kept continuously.52 For this reason, the Hyderabad Government demanded the confirmation of drafted agreements with Johnson by King George. Similar concerns were expressed by Tipu’s wakil when he asked the British Resident of Hyderabad, John Kennaway, for the peace Treaty of Seringapatam of 1792 to be worded in such terms as to bind all future Governors on behalf of the Company and even be recognized by the King and highest Administration of Great Britain.53 However, what was problematic with regard to any communication with London – and this was another point put forward by the Nizam – was that the highest authorities were far away and correspondence took far too long to arrive to be able to operate day-to-day business and cooperations.54 To sum up, the Hyderabad Government’s expectations of the British were not met. The early Residents failed to convince their patron that they were credible and reliable partners of cooperation. Instead, the Nizam

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demanded that the Company should improve its political governance in order to create the basis of mutual trust necessary for alliances. Yet, the transformation of the EIC from a merchant company to a colonial government with clear administrative hierarchies that was part of the British Empire had already been initiated by the Regulating Act of 1773 and the India Act of 1784 – a faster and more radical transformation than the Nizam could have wished.

THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE: COOPERATION ON EQUAL TERMS, 1789–1792 It was 26 February 1792, in a sea of tents set up by the great powers of South India near Seringapatam: John Kennaway, the Resident of Hyderabad, set out to meet the two eldest sons of the Ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, who had arrived with fifty elephants, an entourage of numerous domestic servants, escorted by hundreds of military men. Kennaway conducted them in a ceremonial procession under nineteen salute guns to the tent where they would be received by the Governor-General Lord Cornwallis with great kindness and attention. Over the next few days the little princes, aged eight and fourteen, paid visits to the Ministers of Hyderabad and the Marathas.55 The pompous ceremonies somewhat obscured the tragic character of the event: Tipu’s sons had been taken hostage to ensure that their father fulfilled the negotiated stipulations of the peace treaty concluded with the victorious allies, the British, Hyderabad and the Maratha States. When at the end of 1789 Tipu Sultan had attacked the Raja of Travancore, whom the EIC considered an ally, Lord Cornwallis took the opportunity and instructed his Residents at Pune and Hyderabad to negotiate a Triple Alliance against Tipu.56 Due to administrative reforms and improved mail routes between the political residencies and army posts, the second Governor-General was able to rule more effectivly.57 The double advance moreover indicates the emerging Residency system. The Residents’ diplomatic activities at different Indian courts were increasingly coordinated under the supervision of the Governor-General, thus enhancing their negotiating power.58 In addition, Cornwallis commanded a significantly increased number of troops.59 However, the Company’s offer must have been more attractive than that of Tipu’s wakils, who had also been negotiating at the courts of Hyderabad and Pune. The military cooperations with the Marathas and Hyderabad did not run totally smoothly. Cornwallis complained that the troops of his allies were either a plundering rabble or a burden to the company’s army.



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Nevertheless, the campaign against the Mysore ruler was a success. Tipu was finally forced to retreat into his capital city and after siege operations made overtures for peace talks by the end of February 1792.60 According to British sources, their Indian allies were eager to destroy Tipu’s realm altogether, but were finally persuaded to conform to the moderate position of Lord Cornwallis, who presumably was not interested in extending the Company’s territory and only wanted justice.61 Yet, the perception of Michel Joachim Marie Raymond, an influential French military entrepreneur in the Nizam’s service, differed considerably. He claimed that it was the Marathas and the Nizam who urged Cornwallis to stop the war of destruction. In addition, during the peace negotiations it was the plenipotentiaries of them who moderated the excessive British demands because they had realized that they had to keep a counterweight to the growing British expansion.62 However, in the end the allied parties managed to perform their diplomatic cooperation basically on equal and on friendly terms. The ruler of Mysore tried, but failed, to bribe the allies into a separate treaty by accepting a ‘present of fruit’, and during the peace negotiations the allies combined the different cultures of negotiation, considered each other’s individual claims and presented them in one package. The agreement to divide half of Tipu’s territories must have suited the common interests of the expansion of revenues as well as the balance of power at a time when none of the parties involved was the clearly superior power. The allied representatives coordinated their performances during the peace talks well. When the negotiations became tedious, Mir Alam, the delegate of the Nizam, and the Maratha wakil, Buchajee Pundit, ‘made frequent motions for break up the meeting by ordering their Lights and Palanquins and other indications of their impatience to depart’, and Kennaway, who negotiated on behalf of the British, made a move to remove the tents of the allies. Finally, the Mysore wakils agreed to cede half of their master’s territories and to pay considerable war reparations.63 The British benefitted from the superior regional knowledge of their partners. When Tipu’s sons were not delivered on the agreed date because their families were too distressed by the separation, Tipu’s wakils excused their not handing them over even the day after on the pretext that it was an unlucky one. The British already set about removing their tents, but the Maratha wakil confirmed that it was in fact an unlucky day.64 And when the allies suspected that Tipu had exaggerated the amount of revenues collected from the territories he proposed to cede them, Mir Alam was able to prove from original documents that the Mysore officials had forged the accounts.65

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The different partners of cooperation mutually respected each other’s particular concerns and included them in the treaty stipulations. Cornwallis, for instance, agreed with Buchajee Pundit’s demand for ‘durbar charges’, a large sum of money which it was customary to pay after major negotiations as a ‘gratuity to the great officers of the three states’ such as Pundit himself, the Nizam’s deputies and the Resident of Hyderabad, who led the negotiations on behalf of the British66 – an offering that Kennaway, according to the new policies against corruption, presumably refused.67 For the British, in turn, it was a matter of great importance to demand that all prisoners taken by Mysore, going back to the times of Tipu’s predecessor Haidar Ali, should be released immediately. While the Nizam detested the Mysore rulers because he considered them his vassals and thus as usurpers,68 the British strongly resented them because they refused to release the British prisoners, mostly taken in the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1779–1784). Frequent reports and rumours about their mistreatment, their use as engineers, artisans and interpreters, and even forced circumcisions and conversion to Islam,69 touched British sensitivities in India. These stories fuelled the already omnipresent fears of the British minority of being entrapped by local habits and values.70 It seemed that Cornwallis was not entirely comfortable taking Tipu’s sons hostage. He justified this drastic step with ‘his duty to the public and the state he served’71 and assured Tipu solemnly to look after the children as if they were his own. However, it was very convenient for the British to join their Indian partners in their common custom of taking prominent hostages.72 This measure finally put them in a position to enforce the release of the British prisoners of war. Yet, the Nizam’s prime minister, Azim ul Omrah, deliberately delayed the release of the princes, claiming that minor details of his territorial demands had not yet been settled.73 When Tipu’s sons were finally handed over in April 1794, Cornwallis had already left India months before and Tipu would stay strongly resentful towards the Hyderabad Government.74

THE DRAMATIC SHIFT TO A SUBORDINATE COOPERATION, 1798–1800 The fourth Resident of Hyderabad, William Kirkpatrick (1794–1798), spent the month of January 1798 at the Cape of Good Hope to recover his health in a more moderate climate. There he met by coincidence the new Governor-General, Richard Wellesley (1798–1805), who was on his way from Great Britain to India. Kirkpatrick argued for closer alliances with



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Indian courts and was particularly obsessed with the idea to drive out the French ‘Republicans’. The interventionist visions of this experienced man on the spot left a deep impression on the ambitious, ruthless and arrogant nobleman, who would go down in history as the architect of British expansion and paramountcy in India.75 William Kirkpatrick’s mind-set can best be understood against the background of his frustrating experiences at the court of Hyderabad. The restrained policy of the former Governor-General, Sir John Shore (1793– 1798), who diligently fulfilled the Court of Director’s instructions by refraining from interference in the policies of Indian states, thus restricted him to the position of a silent observer.76 He spent the first year of his residency in a tent at the Nizam’s camp on the Maratha frontier, developing a very painful combination of gout and rheumatism. He was not even allowed to mediate between Hyderabad and the Marathas,77 who had come into conflict over territorial issues, and was confined to watch when in March 1795 the disputes between the former allies finally erupted into an armed confrontation at Kharda. The Nizam suffered a devastating defeat and had to accept a humiliating treaty. Back in Hyderabad, the once major posting that had made Kirkpatrick’s predecessor Kennaway a rich man was reduced considerably by the weakened power of the Nizam. In addition, the most important British advocate at court, the Prime Minister Azim ul Omrah, was missing. In an ironic twist, shortly after Tipu’s sons were finally released, after Azim ul Omra’s delaying tactics, it was Azim ul Omra himself who was taken hostage at the court of Pune. Unlike the British Resident, his French antagonist Raymond had considerably increased his wealth and political influence. The Nizam was grateful for his loyal services and conferred upon him two Persian titles as well as additional territories – in the heart of Hyderabad as well as adjacent to the British Northern Circars – and authorized him to increase his corps to 10,000 men.78 After the fall of Pondicherry in 1761 and other French strongholds, a large number of French soldiers were scattered all over India and embarked on careers in the military service of various Indian Princes.79 Even though Raymond was in the longstanding service of the Nizam and completely incorporated into the Hyderabad socio-political system, Kirkpatrick portrayed the Frenchman as a bridgehead of the expansionist plans of Revolutionary France.80 Yet it remains unclear whether Kirkpatrick’s worries were really due to security issues or his desperate financial situation. He was in debt and should have supported the maintenance and education of his four children in England, but the Residency allowance hardly covered his expenses.81 In such positions, wealth was gained by successfully

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negotiated cooperations between the Company and the Indian states. Yet the restrictive company policy and the Nizam’s close connection with the French condottiere Raymond represented fundamental obstacles. William Kirkpatrick’s deteriorating health forced him to resign before achieving any diplomatic success, but at the Cape of Good Hope he was able to convince Wellesley to appoint his assistant and beloved brother James Achilles Kirkpatrick as his successor. James Achilles Kirkpatrick would become a fascinating figure past and present due to his ability to adapt to local customs and his integration into the Hyderabad society: he adopted Mughal clothes and ways of living, immediately established an excellent relationship with the Nizam and even married the great-niece of the Prime Minister, Khair un-Nissa, under Muslim law. He became the protagonist of William Dalrymple’s historical novel White Mughals as ‘a reminder that it is indeed very possible to reconcile the two worlds’ of Christianity and Islam, rulers and ruled. According to Dalrymple, James Achilles Kirkpatrick’s political allegiances had lain as much with the ruler of Hyderabad as with the British.82 The ‘Treaty of Perpetual and General Defensive Alliance’ that James Kirkpatrick submitted to the Governor-General in April 180083 seemed to confirm this view. William Kirkpatrick, meanwhile Military Secretary to Wellesley, had to inform his brother that the Governor-General had ordered the immediate suspension of the treaty as it was completely contrary to Wellesley’s intention to put an end to Hyderabad’s external sovereignty. The Governor-General was particularly furious about the stipulated ambassador in England: The bare suggestion of such arrangement is extremely injurious to the dignity & vigour of the authority established by Parliament for the Government of the British Possessions in India and is calculated to … suppose that the Treaties concluded … are capable of being rendered more binding by a direct intercourse with the authorities at home or may be cancelled in England after the ratification of the Governor General in India. Acquiescence in such a proposal would infallibly … renew all the corrupt intrigues.84

While the battle at Kharda in 1795 had left Hyderabad considerably weakened, the final defeat of Tipu in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1798–1799 had shifted the distribution of power in South India even more in favour of the British. Wellesley claimed that it was obvious that due to the new asymmetries of power, the mutual defensive alliance was in fact a protective alliance to the sole benefit of Hyderabad. Consequently, he deemed it completely unacceptable that Hyderabad dared to impose any conditions at all.



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As a matter of fact, not the Resident, but his munshi (Indian secretary) Azi Ullah had conducted the negotiations with the Prime Minister Azim ul Omrah, who in the meantime had been released from captivity.85 Much indicates that James Kirkpatrick was simply too ill to examine the content of the drafted treaty and, with full confidence in his munshi, just forwarded it to the Governor-General. Since the residency of John Kennaway, the munshis, who had a superior knowledge of local diplomatic procedures, politics and customs, had become the main channel of negotiation with the Hyderabad Government. The British Residents entrusted them with even the most important and delicate business and considered them a part of the Company. James Kirkpatrick’s bad health would also explain why he submitted the drafted treaty without the usual additional comments and documents. Furthermore, James Kirkpatrick was additionally distressed because he had been drawn into a fatal love affair by a rebellious zenana (harem) policy. Due to his power position as the British Resident, combined with his affinity with the Hyderabad nobility, he became the target of local marriage strategies that can be considered as both an attempt to strengthen the position of familial power and bind the British into the Indian political system. Sharaf un-Nissa Begum, who opposed her father’s arranged marriage for her younger daughter Khair un-Nissa, took her chance to outflank him when he left for the campaign with the British against Tipu Sultan in 1798– 1799. The females of the family successfully pushed the fourteen-year old Khair un-Nissa into James Kirkpatrick’s bed – and soon the girl was pregnant.86 In order to avoid a scandal within the Hyderabad society, he saw himself forced to marry her and in consequence accept Islam. Thus, James Kirkpatrick’s conversion and local marriage should not be considered in terms of religious conviction or political loyalty. His affection towards the Mughal culture was to a large extent rooted in the pleasure of the lavish courtly lifestyle. And he knew exactly how to show his sympathy to local culture and people in order to win them over. He also realized how mellowed the sick Nizam Ali Khan had become after almost forty years of rule; the latter’s ‘only remaining source of amusement and pastime’ seemed to be the European clockworks the Residents gave him on occasions.87 While William Kirkpatrick had to pay the reparations on his house at Hyderabad from his monthly allowance,88 his brother convinced ‘old Nizzy’ to finance a palatial Residency in a fusion of British and Mughal tastes, surpassed in splendour only by the Government House at Calcutta.89 However, after the failure of the initial negotiations of the Treaty of 1800, the Governor-General personally drafted the extensive stipulations he demanded to ensure the British guarantee of security from internal and

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foreign attack. The Nizam had to pay for the maintenance of considerable British forces stationed within his territories from the revenues of granted territories. In addition, Wellesley asked the Nizam to assign hereditary land-grants from his own family and long-standing loyal vassal families, as he was obsessed with the plan of establishing a strategically defined boundary line. The Nizam refused to comply with this demand, claiming that he would lose his dignity towards the nobility and other Indian powers. James Kirkpatrick instructed his munshi to point out what would happen if the Marathas discovered that the British were not bound by treaty to interfere on behalf of the Nizam in case of differences. Such a menacing gesture had the intended effect and the Hyderabad Government finally acquiesced.90 Further terms included the stipulation that the Nizam was not allowed to employ any Europeans other than the British anymore. Finally, he was no longer allowed to conduct war on his own and the permanently stationed British Resident became the exclusive channel for communication with other Indian or European powers and political information.91 Thus, with the Treaty of 1800 the Hyderabad Government in fact lost not only external authority, but also to some extent internal authority as the so-called Subsidiary Force was a great drain on its economy.92 Hyderabad was the first Indian state to sign a series of unequal treaties. Wellesley submerged them into a system of so-called Subsidiary Alliances, from which the doctrine of British paramountcy was derived. In order to secure protection against internal and external threats, the Hyderabad Government had to agree to a subservient form of cooperation. During, as well as after, the conferences, Azim ul Omrah voiced on several occasions, and in an unusually blunt manner, his serious concerns about the unfair and dictatorial spirit that characterized the negotiations93 and that would ‘cause some interruption to the harmony existing between the two states’94 or even ‘cause abatement in friendship’.95 But in contrast to this, the language of the Treaty of 1800 suggested a mutually beneficial, international treaty between two sovereign nations that had the same interests, policy and sense of honour. And with regard to court ceremonials, the British still adapted to the local etiquette and even professed subservience until well into the nineteenth century.96 As in other parts of ‘Indian-India’, Indian rulers successfully maintained their patterns of diplomacy during the period of indirect rule.97 When the ‘Treaty of Perpetual and General Defensive Alliance’ was sealed and signed in the Nizam’s Palace on 12 October 1800, Azim ul Omrah announced that the Nizam wanted to adopt James Achilles Kirkpatrick, conferring on him the title of ‘much beloved son’ by presenting him with a valuable diamond.98 Yet, considering the subservient political cooperation



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the Nizam had just complied with, this adoption with material benefits could not have the effect of an incorporation of the British representative into the Indian political system and society anymore, but only might have won the Nizam some sympathies. James Achilles Kirkpatrick had achieved what he had aimed at: he was a rich man.99 But before he was able to return to England in order to live the splendid life of a Nabob, he succumbed to his illness in 1805. His testament reveals clearly where his real loyalty lay: his brother and patron William Kirkpatrick was almost the sole heir, while his Indian wife was left in a financially, as well a socially, desperate situation.100

CONCLUSIONS This analysis of intercultural diplomacies from the perspective of the edge of the empire and from below sheds new light on British empire building in India, with two broader points. British Residents initially failed to convince the Hyderabad Government that their patron was as a credible and reliable cooperation partner because of the EIC’s internal shortcomings. The Hyderabad Government’s expectations of a valuable ally were simply not met. Indian rulers generally regarded the merchant company as inferior to a military government. However, more important than this ‘orientalist’ stereotype was the fact that the administrative and political structures of the Company during the dynamic and uncertain phase of the 1770s and 1780s in fact proved insufficient and too instable for trustworthy diplomacy and alliance building. The Nizam first and foremost demanded that the Company should improve its political governance in order to create the necessary basis for mutual trust. Thus, it was not ‘oriental incomprehension’ or cultural misunderstanding that stood in the way of building trust and effective cooperation, but the insufficient structures of the Company that at that point in time could not meet the requirements of the two expanding empires. The failure of negotiations also deeply frustrated the Residents in charge. By that time wealth was only gained and imperial careers were only made through successfully negotiated cooperations between the Company and the Indian states. The men on the spot thus supported the Indian rulers in their request for clearer administrative hierarchies and pleaded for a stronger commitment to alliances with Indian rulers. To sum up my first point, this analysis of British-Indian relationships and diplomacy from the margins of empire reveals that British expansion and empire building in India cannot be solely explained by a topdown approach focusing on metropolitan implementations or high-level

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expansionist visionaries such as Wellesley. Rather, it reveals a double pressure from below: men on the spot, who suffered various frustrations in their everyday negotiations, and Indian Rulers required the improvement of the Company’s diplomacy, administration and governance towards more statelike structures. This chapter has identified as an additional obstacle to British-Indian cooperations the dramatic asymmetries of information that made the Company officials reluctant to settle agreements out of fear of being duped into disadvantageous terms. Therefore, part of the transformation process from a trading company into a territorial power was that the British Residents had to catch up with the superb Indian knowledge. They employed Indian rulers’ experts of diplomacy and intelligence and copied methods, channels and structures of information gathering. In addition, they adapted and adopted local diplomatic cultures and sought to incorporate themselves into the ranking on local terms by mimicking courtly appearances. Thus, my second main point is that Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and the ‘Mimic Men’ can also roughly be applied to the early British-Indian encounters – albeit in reverse. Where Bhabha speaks of Anglicized but not British go-betweens thus being at once resemblance and menace,101 we see here British officials mimicking Indo-Persianate diplomacy and culture at Indian courts. British Residents imitated the socio-cultural behaviour and structures of communication of the initially superior Indian powers in order to establish cooperation, thus in a sense reproducing Indian society but being not quite the same. The British mimicry was not a harmonious adaption, nor was its intention to reconcile the two worlds; it rather served as camouflage. Thus, the British at one point developed into ideal partners of cooperation, but at the same time became a lingering threat, soon liberating themselves from dependence on their Indian partners and maximizing the differences between them. Dr Tanja Bührer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her Ph.D. thesis on ‘Colonial Security Policy in German East Africa 1885–1918’ was awarded first prize of the Werner Hahlweg Prize of Military History and Sciences 2009/10. Afterwards she was awarded a Fellowship for advanced researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to work on her Habilitation (post-doctoral qualification) in the United Kingdom, France, and India. From 2015 to 2016 she was Visiting Professor for European and Modern History at the University of Rostock.



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NOTES  1. The Chronology of Modern Hyderabad, 1720–1890 (Hyderabad: Central Records Office, 1954), 60.   2. Treaty making with Indian rulers should not be considered a different strategy from waging war. Negotiations of formal treaties with Indian powers played a dramatically increased role during the military expansion of the Company from the mid-eighteenth century. R. Travers, ‘A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India’, in S. Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 140–41.   3. The Guntur Circar was a territory along the western side of the Bay of Bengal.  4. S. Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 1724–1857 (Secunderabad: Booklovers, 1963), 129–38. When Hollond addressed this issue at the court, ‘the painful emotions of His Highness were visible’. H.G. Briggs, The Nizam: The History and Relations with the British Government (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1861), 187.   5. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 10 October 1780, in British Library (hereafter BL), Add.MS 29146, 106. Already the English diplomatic mission under Sir Thomas Roe to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615 was not recognized as of equivalent status and from then Indian rulers shared the stereotype of the English as inferior merchants. Travers, ‘A British Empire by Treaty’, 138–39.   6. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 26 May 1780, in BL, Add.MS 29145, 134–35.  7. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 August 1780 and 25 February 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29145, 367 and BL, Add.MS 29148, 54–55.   8. Richard Johnson to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 26 June 1784, in BL, Add. MS 29164, 295–96.  9. Richard Johnson to Edward Hay (Secretary to the Governor General), Hyderabad, 8 July 1784, in BL, Add.MS 29164, 400. 10. Richard Johnson to the Bengal Board, Hyderabad, 1 August 1784, in BL, Add. MS 29165, 114. 11. Richard Johnson to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 17 July 1784, in BL, Add. MS 29164, 508. 12. Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 146. 13. According to Hira Singh, approaches that focus on the British impact on Indian governmental and socio-cultural structures are also problematic in cases with much bigger displays of British power, as they implicate the colonial view of a one-way process of Western implementation and agency. H. Singh, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography and the Princely States: Relations of Power and Rituals of Legitimation’, in W. Ernst and B. Pati (eds), India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism (New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2007), 16.

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14. M. Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad 1911–1948 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 32–33. 15. For a general overview on British-Indian diplomatic encounters in a long-term perspective, see M.H. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India, 1526-1858’, in H.V. Bowen, E. Mancke and J.G. Reid (eds), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Oceans Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 249–81. 16. Travers, ‘A British Empire by Treaty’, 132–60. 17. M.A. Nayeem, Mughal Administration of Deccan under Nizamul Mulk Asaf Jah (1720–1748) (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1985), 17–20, 42, 56, 70; K. Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies 30 (1970/71), 570, 572. 18. Pernau, The Passing of Patrimonialism, 33, 52–53. 19. This was agreed by the Treaty of 1766, but on very vague terms, and the British would never provide material support to the Nizam’s requests for assistance: Treaty with the Nizam Engaging to Furnish Him with a British Subsidiary Force when Required, dated 12 November 1766, in: C.U. Aitchison (ed.), A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, 14 vols (Calcutta: Government of India, 1929–1933), vol. 5, 22–25. 20. B. Stein, Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). General descriptions of empires are very similar: J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8, 13–14. 21. P.J. Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empire: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 259. The famous British triumph in the battle of Buxar 1764 did not result in territorial conquest or the annexation of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Rather, the diwani (right to collect revenues) was bestowed on the Company by the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, who handed over to governor Robert Clive an imperial grant. See Travers, ‘A British Empire by Treaty’, 148–51. 22. Regani, Nizam-British-Relations, 46–47. 23. Nayeem, Mughal Administration, 70. 24. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 260. 25. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29152, 79–96; Johnson: Attempt to investigate the question, which of the two following opinions is most advisable to act upon, in BL, Add.MS 29167, 273. The French, who in the 1740s and early 1750s were even more strongly involved in Hyderabad politics than the British in the 1770s and 1780s, were also described in the Chronology of Hyderabad as ‘auxiliaries’. See Chronology, 6. 26. M.H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1857 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 110–12; B.B. Cohen, Kingship and Colonialism in India’s Deccan, 1850–1949 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 87–88.



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27. Indian rulers also struggled to fit British diplomats into Mughal diplomatic categories. Persian texts used the term wakil, literally ‘Resident’, or the proper name of the individual British official. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 261. 28. Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System’, 572–73. 29. BL, IOR/H/563, Hyderabad Correspondence, 376–80. 30. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 22 September 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29150, 395–96. 31. B. Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in idem (ed.), Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 106–62, 112. 32. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29152, 81. 33. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Nizam’s Camp at Golconda, 12 March 1782, in BL, Add.MS 29153, 368–69. The later Resident William Kirkpatrick also considered elephants ‘indispensable’ for visits to His Highness. William Kirkpatrick to Captain Collins, Hyderabad, 1 May 1794, in BL, IOR MssEur F228/3, 10–11. 34. The Mughal durbars mixed Middle Eastern, Indian, Hindu and Muslim practices. The founding father of the Asaf Jahi Dynasty, Nizamul Mulk, introduced some minor changes, but from then the rituals of the Hyderabad court were kept. Cohen, Kingship and Colonialism, 77. For a detailed description of Nizamul’s court rituals, the etiquette of dress, headgear and coiffure, see Nayeem, Mughal Administration, 84–96. 35. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56. 36. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 14 November 1780, in BL, Add.MS 29146, 255–58. Francis, a member of the Supreme Council of Bengal, began a long struggle with the Governor-General Warren Hastings in October 1774, which in August 1780 led to a minute being delivered to the council board by Hastings, stating that he judged the public conduct of Philip Francis to be neither honest nor honourable. A duel was the consequence, in which Francis was seriously wounded. After his recovery, Francis returned to England in October 1781. His accusations in the Parliament ultimately led to the impeachment resolutions of 1787 against Hastings. 37. Extract of a Paper of Intelligence from Hyderabad to the Nawab Wala-Jah, 18 September 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29150, 478–79. 38. Fisher, Indirect Rule, 122. 39. Richard Johnson to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 24 September 1784, in BL, Add.MS 29166, 169. 40. Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System’, 571–72. 41. P.J. Marshall, ‘Master and Banians in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta’, in B.B. Kling and M.N. Pearson (eds), The Age of Partnership. Europeans in Asia before Dominion (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979), 191–93. 42. Ibid.

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43. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 16 April 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29148, 290. 44. The professional group of the harkaras were agents from the upper classes, highly educated and skilled in language and writing. Some of them also acted as minor ambassadors and checked on local officials; the majority of runners were of low caste, and merely transmitted information as couriers. Bayly, Empire and Information, 58–64. 45. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 23 October, 29 October and 20 November 1780, in BL, Add.MS 29146, 194, 205 and 280; John Hollond to Brigadier General Goddard, Hyderabad, 2 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29159, 224–25; Copy of a Paper of News from Poona, Received 3 April 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29146, 209–10. 46. Bayly, Empire and Information, 70–72. 47. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29152, 96. 48. Bayly, Empire and Information, 70–71. 49. R.J. Sulivan to Warren Hastings, 9 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29150, 275–76. 50. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 13 October 1780, in BL, Add. MS 29146, 127–28; 22 January 1781, in BL Add.MS 29147, 174–75; 25 February 1781, in BL Add.MS 29148, 54–55; 10 May 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29149, 18–19. 51. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 December 1781, in BL, Add. MS 29152, 85. It was a typical reaction of British diplomats to blame alleged ‘Moorish’ pride and ignorance for their diplomatic failures. Travers, ‘A British Empire by Treaty’, 139. 52. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, Hyderabad, 12 December 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29152, 81. 53. John Kennaway to Lord Cornwallis, Hyderabad, 24 May 1792: Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, 14-19 February 1792, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 37. 54. John Hollond to Warren Hastings, 16 November 1781, in BL, Add.MS 29152, 140. 55. De Fresne to Molleville, Ministre de la Marine et Colonies, 8 March 1792, in Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (hereafter ANOM), B/1660; Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 66. 56. Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 144–48. 57. F. Wickwire and M. Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 37–54. 58. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 256. 59. In 1744 the EIC had employed 2,500 European soldiers. In 1778 British army and Company forces comprised 67,000 and by 1790, 100,000 men. L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the Word, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 257.



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60. Wickwire and Wickwire, Cornwallis, 154–69. 61. Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 10–16. 62. De Raymond to de Fresne, camp at Pakandanja, 29 December 1791, in ANOM, B/1563; de Fresne to de Cossigny, Gouverneur général, 27 February 1792, in ANOM, B/1647. 63. Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 3–22. 64. Ibid., 60–63. 65. Ibid., 94–95. 66. Ibid., 29. 67. John Kennaway to the Honourable Court of Directors for Affairs of the Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies, Escott near Exeter, 21 September 1796, in Devon Heritage Service Exeter, Kennaway Papers, 961M/1/B/1. 68. Regani, Nizam-British-Relations, 149. 69. Notes on Wars in India, Prisoners in Mysore 1782, in BL, IOR/H/570, 270–71, 281–82. Tipu’s wakil Ali Reza Khan was aware of this and during the peace negotiations tried to convince Kennaway that the stories about the mistreatment of British prisoners were mostly made up in order to bring his master into disrepute as an evil and unjust prince. Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 23–25. 70. Colley, Captives, 253–84. 71. Statement of what passed at the different Conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 46. 72. There was a history of taking prominent hostages between European parties on the subcontinent as well. For instance, after the surrender of Madras to the French in 1746, important officials and merchants, their families or children were taken hostage until the stipulations of the Treaty of Ransom were fulfilled. H.D. Love (ed.), Vestiges of Old Madras 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from other Sources, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1913), vol. 2, 371. 73. Kennaway’s successor as Resident of Hyderabad, William Kirkpatrick, had to plead several times in the durbar to finally obtain the release of Tipu’s sons. William Kirkpatrick to Sir Charles Oakely Bart, Nizam’s Camp near Bedar, 25 February 1794, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/3, 3–4. 74. Notes on Wars in India: The Hostages taken from Tipu, in BL, IOR/H/570, 229–39. 75. S. Förster, Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 127–33. 76. The restrictive policy of the Court of Directors and the British government in London after the dynamic, yet uncertain, growth of British influence under Warren Hastings led to a withdrawal of the expensive Residents whenever an

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opportunity arose. With Wellesley’s arrival in 1798, policy shifted to aggressive expansion again. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 262–63. 77. William Kirkpatrick to Captain Collins, Bedar, 18 August 1794, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/3, 21–22. 78. Regani, Nizam-British-Relations, 167–76; W. Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 91–101. 79. S.P. Sen. The French in India 1763–1816, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971), 17–19, 56–65. 80. William Kirkpatrick to Jonathan Duncan, Hyderabad, 17 January 1796, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/5, 8–9. 81. William Kirkpatrick to Thomas Rickes, Hyderabad, 3 July 1793, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/5, 18–19; William Kirkpatrick to Captain Collins, Camp at Bedar, 24 May 1794, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/3, 15–16. 82. All citations from Dalrymple, White Mughals, xl–xliiii. 83. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to the Earl of Mornington, Hyderabad, 29 May 1800, in BL, IOR H/640:1800, 86. 84. William Kirkpatrick to James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Fort William, 17 May 1800, in BL, IOR H/640:1800, 36. 85. See the vast correspondence between Wellesley and James Achilles Kirkpatrick concerning treaty negotiations with the Nizam, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800. 86. Dalrymple, White Mughals, 178–82. 87. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 27 July 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 602–03. 88. James Kirkpatrick to Captain Collins, Camp at Bedar, 24 May 1794, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/3, 15–16. 89. Dalrymple, White Mughals, 325. 90. Translation of Moonshy Uzeez Ollah’s report of his conference with Azim ul Omrah on 22 July 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 563, 588, 696–97; James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 1 July 1800, in ibid., 117, 449–50. 91. Treaty with the Nizam, 1800, in Aitchison, Treaties, vol. 9, 62–71. This was the general strategy of the residency system of Company-centred diplomacy and a typical characteristic of unequal Anglo-Indian treaty making. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 257, 264. 92. Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 179–85. 93. Translation of Moonshy Azeez Ollah’s Report of this conference with Azim ul Omrah on 19 July 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 563–65. 94. Translation of Moonshy Uzeez Ollah’s report of his conference with Azim ul Omrah on 22 July 1800, in ibid., 585. 95. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 27 July 1800, in ibid., 603–605. 96. Fisher, Indirect Rule, 178; W. Barton, The Princes of India: With a Chapter on Nepal (London: Nisbet & Company, 1934), 20. 97. Fisher, ‘Diplomacy in India’, 254.



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98. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 12 October 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 951–52. 99. In a letter to his friend Hector Munro, James Kirkpatrick exclaimed: ‘why you should have any objection to my getting rich … I am at a loss to comprehend … you consider Riches as a useless matter’ (emphasis in the original). James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Hector Munro, Hyderabad, 25 June 1804, in BL, IOR MssEur F151/2, 54. 100. Copy of last will and testament, in BL, IOR MssEur 228/84. 101. H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 85–92.

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Chronology of Modern Hyderabad, 1720–1890. Hyderabad: Central Records Office, 1954. Aitchison, C.U. (ed.). A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads, Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta: Government of India, 1929–1933. Barton, W. The Princes of India: With a Chapter on Nepal. London: Nisbet & Company, 1934. Bayly, C.A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bhabha, H.K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Briggs, H.G. The Nizam: The History and Relations with the British Government. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1861. Burbank, J. and F. Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Cohen, B.B. Kingship and Colonialism in India’s Deccan, 1850–1949. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cohn, B. ‘Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in idem (ed.), Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 106–62. Colley, L. Captives: Britain, Empire and the Word, 1600–1850. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. Dalrymple, W. White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Fisher, M.H. Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1857. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.  . ‘Diplomacy in India, 1526–1858’, in H.V. Bowen, E. Mancke and J.G. Reid (eds), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Oceans Worlds, c. 1550–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 249–81. Förster, S. Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992.

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Leonard, K. ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies 30 (1970/71), 569–82. Love, H.D. (ed.). Vestiges of Old Madras 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from other Sources. London: John Murray, 1913. Marshall, P.J. ‘Master and Banians in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta’, in B.B. Kling and M.N. Pearson (eds), The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979, 191–13.  . Making and Unmaking of Empire: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nayeem, M.A. Mughal Administration of Deccan under Nizamul Mulk Asaf Jah (1720– 1748). Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1985. Pernau, M. The Passing of Patrimonialism: Politics and Political Culture in Hyderabad 1911–1948. New Delhi: Manohar, 2000. Regani, S. Nizam-British Relations, 1724–1857. Secunderabad: Booklovers, 1963. Sen, S.P. The French in India 1763–1816. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971. Singh, H. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography and the Princely States: Relations of Power and Rituals of Legitimation’, in W. Ernst and B. Pati (eds), India’s Princely States: People, Princes and Colonialism. New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2007, 15–29. Stein, B. Vijayanagara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Travers, R. ‘A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India’, in S. Belmessous (ed.), Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 140–41. Wickwire, F. and M. Wickwire. Cornwallis: The Imperial Years. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Chapter 4

Local Cooperation in a Subversive Colony Martinique 1802–1809 Flavio Eichmann

} In the midst of the global conflict between Napoleonic France and the British Empire, the British corvette Rosario entered the bay of Saint Pierre, Martinique, on 8 July 1807. Martinique was not only an important French naval base but also one of the richest colonies in the Antilles. About 80,000 slaves were being worked to death on the island’s sugar and coffee plantations.1 Surprisingly, the French batteries remained silent. The inhabitants of Saint Pierre gathered around the port to watch the remarkable scene. Once the Rosario’s captain, Manncey, had given orders to search some of the American ships in the port, he instructed his men to capture a French schooner, which belonged to a local merchant named Meynard. After witnessing the capture of the ship, one of Meynard’s associates made his way to the captured French schooner to discuss the payment of a ransom with the British captain. In the meantime, a young midshipman from the Rosario rowed into the city to buy wine, wood and fresh vegetables at the market. Neither the commander of Saint Pierre’s National Guard nor the port’s officers tried to take the midshipman prisoner; the young British officer walked unmolested in the city’s streets. After the midshipman’s return, Manncey abruptly ended the negotiations with Meynard’s associate, although the latter had offered him a considerable ransom. Manncey released the schooner’s crew, ten slaves and its captain, a free man of colour, but took the ship with him when leaving Saint Pierre.2 115

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How was such an event possible in the throes of a global conflict between Napoleonic France and the British Empire?3 It was no coincidence that the batteries covering the bay of Saint Pierre did not fire a single shot during the several-hour period in which the Rosario was in the bay. This incident was symptomatic of internal conflicts in Martinique regarding the structure of colonial rule, economic relations and the political loyalties of its French white elites. The governor of Martinique, Vice-Admiral LouisThomas Villaret de Joyeuse, did not find it necessary to report the event to his superiors in Paris.4 We know of this event thanks to his internal rival, the Colonial Prefect Pierre-Clement de Laussat, who had personally witnessed the remarkable scene. In his account to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, Denis Decrès, Laussat stated: Soon the British newspapers will celebrate his [Manncey’s] successes. Probably you will learn about it from them, which is why I did not hesitate to inform you about it. … I am upset by this insult, … because of the silence of the port’s guns … I am French and here I am also one of the Emperor’s representatives.5

While Laussat presented himself as a true Frenchman and loyal servant of Napoleon in one of the last outposts of France’s diminishing overseas empire, he suspected a large part of the colony’s planters – Ronald Robinson’s ‘pre-fabricated collaborators’6 – to be anglomanes. According to him, they were doing everything in their power to end French rule in Martinique as quickly as possible and were hoping for a British take-over. Given the recent past of the colony, his fears were not unfounded: in 1793–1794 leading planters in Martinique and its sister colony, Guadeloupe, handed the two islands over to the British government until a Bourbon king was back on the French throne. The reasons for the handover were manifold and included political as well as economic factors.7 Thus, the metropolis had good reason to distrust the loyalty of the colonial elite. Even Bonaparte, whose wife Joséphine was the daughter of a wealthy planter from Martinique, remained sceptical about the loyalty of the colony’s planters. Although Bonaparte named their self-proclaimed leader, Louis-François Dubuc, as the deputy of Martinique, he ordered him to be put under house arrest in Paris at the same time.8 Because of the dubious loyalty of Martinique’s elites, governing the colony became a difficult and tiresome mission for the French colonial administrators. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic Ocean. The colonial government could not hope for any large-scale military help from continental France in the event of a rebellion and sometimes remained without news from France for several



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months, occasionally even years.9 Colonial governments in the Caribbean therefore did not act as a simple extension of the metropolis, but instead formulated their policies according to local circumstances. Furthermore, colonial administrators – the infamous men on the spot – often pursued personal interests, which frequently collided with colonial policies devised in the metropolis.10 As Ronald Robinson observed, colonial states were relatively weak and therefore needed partners among the local elites to sustain imperial rule.11 Especially in a society based on slavery, the cohesion of colonial elites and their government was essential in order to avoid slave uprisings and maintain a colonial order based on a plantation economy and slavery.12 But how far did colonial administrators go in upholding the alliance between the colony’s elites and the colonial state? Why, for example, would the colonial state allow its own authority to be undermined through cooperation with local planters? This chapter will shed light on the structures of colonial rule in Martinique in times of war and peace by examining the relationship between the colonial state and colonial elites. Ronald Robinson’s assertion that white settlers, in this case the so-called grand blancs, were the ‘prefabricated collaborators’ for colonial governments will be challenged by taking into account interdependent political, economic, cultural and military factors as well as the interests of the different parties involved. The term grand blancs was used to designate the c. 250 richest sugar planters in Martinique, who controlled the biggest and best parts of cultivatable land and who were tied together by economic interests and family bonds. As descendants of the first colonists, the grands blancs saw themselves as the colony’s founders and claimed the lead in political affairs. The grand blancs usually ignored the interests of merchants from the colonial port cities and the owners of smaller plantations, especially coffee planters, which was a major source of the armed conflicts during the early French Revolution in Martinique.13 From the grand blancs’ point of view, the colonial state was a self-service shop, allowing them to enforce their interests.14 In this regard, their interests converged with those of colonial administrators, for whom a career in colonial service proved to be a lucrative source of personal enrichment.15 Yet, the grand blancs’ political aspirations could lead to serious conflict with the French metropolitan state that claimed to govern its colonial subjects and therefore excluded them formally from political participation. The rift between the colonial state and the aristocratic planter class was deepened even further by the fact that after the execution of their liege Louis XVI in 1792, the latter felt no more loyalty to France and saw Napoleon as a usurper on the French throne.16

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MARTINIQUE’S COLONIAL ORDER AND ADMINISTRATION IN THE NAPOLEONIC AGE During the peace negotiations between Great Britain and France in 1801 it was decided that Martinique would be returned to France after seven years of British occupation. This prospect alarmed the leading planters of Martinique. The return of French administration would possibly lead not only to a policy of vengeance against the colony’s leading planters for their betrayal in 1793–1794, when they handed the colony over to British forces, but also to the abolition of slavery. Consequently, the planters flooded British officials with requests for land concessions in the neighbouring British colonies of Trinidad, Dominica and Saint Vincent.17 Some planters even demanded that the British government cancel the peace negotiations and continue the war against the French Republic in order to prevent Martinique’s return to France.18 The British Governor of the island, William Keppel, was also very unhappy about the restitution of the colony to France. In his view, Martinique was already an integral part of the British Empire and the up-coming restitution of the colony would not only hamper the colony’s economy but would also be a serious setback for British overseas trade.19 Unsure of the future of the colony, the planters sent an envoy to Paris to learn about the government’s intentions.20 Decrès made it clear to the envoy that the First Consul had no intention of changing the colonial order in Martinique and would leave everything as it had been before the French Revolution.21 Although this meant that slavery would not be abolished and that the colony’s free men of colour would not be enfranchised, the grand blancs remained deeply suspicious of the First Consul’s long-term intentions regarding the colony.22 After Martinique’s restitution to France, the new Governor Villaret, a fervent advocate of slavery with widely known royalist leanings, published a proclamation announcing not only the maintenance of slavery but also an amnesty for planters who had betrayed the French Republic in 1793–1794. Aristocratic planters like Henri de Bexon, Ridouet de Sancé and Nicolas Bence who had actively supported the British war effort in 1794 were even given influential posts in the colonial administration.23 In a cynical letter to Decrès, Villaret reported that even the slaves were celebrating the preservation of slavery by shouting ‘Vive la République!’24 Meanwhile, opponents of slavery in Martinique, such as a Capuchin priest named Colné, who had allegedly incited free men of colour and slaves to revolt, were sent back to France at the request of the colonists.25 Villaret’s planter-friendly policy was accompanied by a repressive campaign against free men of colour. The civil war in Guadeloupe between the French expeditionary force under the



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command of General Antoine Richepance and the remnants of the former colonial army, consisting of free men of colour and former slaves, served as an ideal pretext for Villaret’s policy.26 A military tribunal was formed in Martinique to judge free people of colour who were found without proof of freedom from the period preceding 1789, as well as free people of colour found guilty of crimes no matter how negligible.27 Consequently, several hundred coloured men, whom according to Villaret ‘the public opinion was convinced or accused of assassinations, arson, poisonings’ and who all ‘had the blood of whites on their hands’, were deported to the coast of the Spanish province of Caracas – a country he believed was ‘populated by savages’.28 Evidently, Villaret’s fears of a potential uprising were a mere pretext; the establishment of a military tribunal gave the grand blancs a powerful instrument with which to settle old scores with coloured merchants from the port cities. Their socio-economic interests thus mainly dictated Villaret’s repressive policy, from which foreign coloured plantation owners were exempt.29 Coloured merchants and the owners of small shops were the primary targets of Villaret’s repression, because he feared their economic and political potential to resist the white planter elite: ‘The free men of colour have multiplied excessively in Martinique; they have replaced the petit blancs in all professions, which gave them the possibility to accumulate wealth and put them in a position to nurture their ambitions’.30 Villaret’s repressive policies had profound consequences for the community of coloured merchants in the cities: when Commodore Samuel Hood visited Fort-de-France in January 1803 he reported to London that with all the shops abandoned, the city resembled a desert.31 In order to facilitate the surveillance and persecution of free men of colour suspected of sedition, the colony’s police force was reinforced with loyal free men of colour and put under the command of the governor, further illustrating the fact that Villaret’s policy targeted specific groups among free people of colour. To avoid conflicts of competence with the Colonial Prefect Bertin, Villaret declared the colony to be in a state of siege, which gave him wide-ranging powers over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the colonial administration and downgraded his colleagues, the Colonial Prefect and the Chief Justice, to the status of his subordinates.32 The ‘moral siege of Martinique’ necessitated this step, while the state of the colonies outside of the constitution gave him the right to do so, as Villaret explained in a letter to Decrès.33 With the ongoing rebellions in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, Villaret capitalized on metropolitan fears of another possible uprising in Martinique to legitimize his far-reaching measures. In fact, there was little to suggest a possible general uprising of the slaves or the free men of colour.34 Villaret’s usurpation of power in times of peace was

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thus an extreme measure, especially since he would not give up his powers until the end of French rule in 1809, whereas the Governor of Guadeloupe, Lacrosse, declared the state of siege ended as soon as the insurrection of the former colonial army was defeated – seven weeks before the declaration of the state of siege in Martinique.35 As a small bonus for his hard work, Villaret used his new powers to double his annual salary and those of his colleagues so they would not oppose his usurpation of power.36 By declaring a state of siege, Villaret ensured that no power within the colonial administration would be in a position to question his authority and political conduct. His amnesty for the betrayers of the French Republic in 1793–1794 and his campaign against free men of colour were meant to obtain the planters’ support for the new regime in Paris. But with his planter-friendly policy Villaret tied the political, economic and military fate of the colony to an elite whose economic and political interests lay outside the warring Napoleonic Empire.

COLONIAL ECONOMY IN TIMES OF PEACE AND WAR In the summer of 1802, Bonaparte reintroduced the exclusif mitigé, the mercantilist trade regime of the Ancien Régime that economically tied the colonies to the metropolis by allowing only French merchant ships to trade with the French colonies.37 The First Consul’s intention was to stimulate the regeneration of the French merchant fleet, which would in turn provide a base for recruiting able seamen to the French Navy in a future war against the Royal Navy.38 This trade regime was contrary to the interests of the grand blancs, for whom the exclusif was a sign of metropolitan control and the dominance of the commerce national – the metropolitan merchants from port cities such as Bordeaux, Nantes, Marseilles, etc. Even before the French Revolution, the grands blancs tried to circumvent these economic restrictions through smuggling and used their influence to open as many ports as possible to foreign commerce. With the outbreak of the Revolution and the subsequent British occupation they finally achieved their goal: free trade. Under the British, they not only had access to British, Spanish and neutral commercial networks, especially American ones, but also to foreign credit.39 When Martinique was restored to France in September 1802, one of the first measures of the new French administration was to reintroduce the exclusif mitigé according to metropolitan guidelines. However, the reintroduction of the exclusif mitigé was deliberately not published by Villaret’s administration and thus was hardly known to the public.40 On the same day,



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another decree allowed the import of flour by foreign merchants, hence softening the very same law.41 Two weeks later, the colonial government went a step further and declared Fort-de-France, the administrative capital of the colony, a free port – a privilege previously only granted to Saint Pierre. It was the will of influential colonists from the region of Fort-deFrance, Villaret declared, that led him to this decision.42 Indeed, he had received a petition signed by 130 planters and merchants from the region of Fort-de-France asking for the opening of Fort-de-France as a free port. However, this petition was submitted to Villaret one day after he had issued the said decree, which illustrates that the Governor acted in anticipatory obedience.43 By opening Fort-de-France for foreign commerce, Villaret deliberately took sides in the old conflict between the merchants from Saint Pierre and the planters from the countryside about economic privileges, which had troubled the colony since the outbreak of the French Revolution.44 There is little doubt that after a decade of global war against the British Empire, the commerce national was hardly able to supply the French colonies.45 Yet, the alleged weakness of French commerce national is not as clear as the planters presented it in their petition. Several reports, including one authored by Villaret, indicate that there were a significant number of French merchant ships trading with Martinique.46 In light of this contradictory evidence, it appears that the colonists of Fort-de-France simply had no interest in ending the profitable trade relations with British and neutral merchants established during the era of British occupation in favour of the detested commerce national and its merchants from Saint Pierre. The importance of the planters’ transnational trade networks is underlined by the fact that, according to Jean-Michel Mallespine, an influential merchant from Guadeloupe, the planters of Martinique sold 15,000 barrels of sugar every year in the neighbouring British colony of Dominica – a practice that continued even during the war.47 With the opening of Fort-de-France for foreign commerce, Villaret demonstrated that he was willing to grant the city’s planters and merchants wide-ranging privileges in defiance of orders coming from Paris. His freetrade policy undermined a possible revival of the French merchant fleet during the short period of peace and thus hampered Bonaparte’s efforts to train able seaman for the French Navy. The breach of the metropolitan decree was loudly criticized by the commander of the French navy in the Eastern Caribbean, Vice-Admiral Pierre-Charles de Villeneuve. Villeneuve decried Villaret’s favouritism towards the planters and merchants of Fortde-France and rightly foresaw that the opening of the port would lead to corruption and widespread smuggling since there would no longer be any

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mechanisms to control the colony’s trade. According to Villeneuve, opening the port would also seriously hamper any efforts to arm corsairs in future wars, because the colony’s cabotage would suffer the most from Villaret’s free-trade policy.48 Yet, Villeneuve’s fleet was hardly able to fight the smuggling in the colony, because the ships’ crews were ravaged by yellow fever. Some navy officers even participated in the smuggling.49 When Decrès and Bonaparte learned of Villaret’s arbitrary opening of Fort-de-France they were furious. The First Consul immediately ordered the reintroduction of the exclusif mitigé.50 But all orders from Decrès and Bonaparte to close Fort-de-France for foreign commerce were ignored by Villaret. By taking advantage of the length of time it took to communicate between Martinique and France, Villaret deliberately delayed instructions from Paris. Bertin later even claimed that the colony was menaced by a slave rebellion, since there would not have been enough food to nourish the slaves had Fort-de-France not been opened to foreign commerce.51 Of course, this was nothing more than the old fear mongering of the planter lobby in their struggle for a free trade regime.52 The opening of the port of Fort-de-France had far-reaching consequences for the colonial economy. It attracted numerous foreign merchants to the colony’s capital and therefore weakened the position of Saint Pierre, undermining its traditional economic predominance in the colony. According to Bertin, the new arrivals took control of the colony’s commerce and smuggling became a real problem. French merchants, in turn, were leaving the colony and the French merchant fleet stopped supplying Martinique with French commodities. In light of the open criticism of their economic policies coming from the metropolis, Villaret and Bertin needed to demonstrate their loyalty and good faith to the authorities in Paris. In early 1803, they prohibited foreign merchants from doing business in Martinique and ordered them to leave the colony within the following five months.53 Yet these measures were mere window-dressing, since foreign merchants were at the same time offered naturalization. Thus, they could continue to operate their trade networks with foreign colonies and neutral powers as French men.54 However, they did not become loyal French citoyens, but instead, regularly supplied British officials with intelligence about the colony.55 Villaret’s free-trade policy meant that Martinique belonged to the French Empire politically but not economically. According to Mallespine, a consequence of Villaret’s free-trade regime was that Martinique turned into one of the Caribbean’s biggest hubs for British manufactured goods, which, in turn, were later sold in the Spanish mainland colonies. The merchants of Martinique were said to be so active in this trade that they hardly armed any corsair ships to attack British commerce.56 The influence of the British



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economy in Martinique can be measured not only by the exchange of colonial goods, but also by the extent of financial relations between Britain and Martinique. Close to a third of the grand blancs’ property was financed by British credit. Furthermore, the planters owed over six million francs to British creditors, while large parts of their savings were deposited in London banks. Financial relations between the grand blancs and the City of London continued even during the war.57 The renewal of war against Great Britain in the summer of 1803 muted all discussions of a renewal of the mercantilist regime. With the Royal Navy controlling the Atlantic Ocean and blockading all French ports, direct trade between France and its Caribbean colonies broke down almost entirely. All of Martinique’s ports were subsequently opened for neutral shipping in order to supply the colony with food, commodities and slaves. However, it is important to observe that during the short period of peace from 1802 to 1803, colonial officials did nothing to economically reintegrate the colony into the French Empire. In fact, they did everything in their power to obstruct this process. Villaret’s free trade-policy also tore a large hole in the colony’s budget, since the colony’s trade operated through all available ports but the necessary infrastructure to collect tariffs existed only in a small number of places. The loss of control over the colony’s trade and the subsequently wide-spread smuggling were necessary evils that one had to accept in order to gain the support of the colonists, Villaret later wrote to Bertin’s successor Pierre-Clement de Laussat.58 Villaret even warned Decrès that the planters might hand over the colony to the British if the colonial government tried to fight the contraband trade.59 In economic matters, Villaret obviously also complied with the interests of the grand blancs to obtain their support. By undermining the mercantilist trade regime devised by the metropolis, he fulfilled the planters’ old claims for a free-trade regime and thus created the political and economic foundations for a symbiotic relationship between local elites and a handful of colonial administrators for the remainder of the war. But he was not a mere pawn on their chessboard, acting according to the planters’ command. As will be shown in the following section, Villaret and his protégés also benefited from their cooperation with the grand blancs.

THE COLONIAL STATE AND THE GRAND BLANCS In return for Villaret’s planter-friendly policies, the grand blancs supported his colonial career and enrichment. To show their gratitude for his support, they collected money to offer him an estate in Paris worth 300,000 francs

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– a gift they had already presented to his British predecessor, William Keppel, during the British occupation.60 They even tolerated Villaret’s embezzlement of public money.61 In return, Villaret did not hesitate to support bankrupt planters and merchants with public funds – a measure he judged to be absolutely necessary in order to gain the support of the colonists.62 This cooperative relationship was tied together not only by mutual economic interests, but also by marriages between Villaret’s royalist protégés in the officer corps and the daughters of influential planters. For example, Villaret served as best man when Bence, one of his protégés and Chief Justice par interim, married the daughter of Pierre Dessalles, a leading planter from the town of Lamentin.63 The planters pursued their interests in the newly-founded cour d’appel. This appeal court was thus a powerful instrument for enforcing the interests of the grands blancs by legal means. Members of the cour d’appel were required to have a degree in law. In reality, not a single member did. The cour d’appel resembled the conseil souverain of the Ancien Régime, which continued to exist after the British capture of the colony in 1794. Most of its members kept their positions once it became the cour d’appel. Thus more or less the same people who had handed over the colony to the British in 1793–1794 kept their political influence after the restitution of the colony to France.64 To foster their interests, the grand blancs used the emperor’s family ties to the colony. When three new members had to be appointed in 1804, members of the cour d’appel asked Joséphine’s mother, Rose-Claire Tascher de la Pagerie, a fervent royalist herself, to write letters of recommendation for their candidates. She argued that it was traditional for the richest sugar planters to constitute the cour d’appel. The fact that none of her candidates held the requisite law degrees did not concern her. On the contrary, she claimed that metropolitan lawyers had no idea about local customs and warned Decrès that their appointment to the cour d’appel would lead the colony into disaster. Her candidates, by contrast, had a ‘good sense for justice’ and would ensure the wellbeing of the colony. That was of course only half of the truth; in fact, the grand blancs feared that outsiders from Europe could intervene in the colony’s day-to-day politics and question their dominant position within colonial society. In the end, Tascher de la Pagerie successfully threatened to use her daughter’s influence in Paris if her candidates were rejected.65 Joséphine’s mother would continue to use her connections to the inner circles of power in France until her death in 1808.66 The cour d’appel used all its power and influence to avoid the introduction of the Napoleonic administrative, economic and legal reforms. Many of Napoleon’s reforms, such as the emperor’s new mortgage law, conflicted



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with the economic interests of the planters and would have driven them into financial ruin. Hence Villaret blocked Laussat’s attempts at their implementation at the request of the members of the cour d’appel.67 Laussat lamented that the cour d’appel stymied his efforts to assert metropolitan authority and to reform colonial administration and law according to his instructions from Paris. In his eyes, their unwillingness to adopt the Code Napoléon – in a special version, already adapted to colonial circumstances in order to maintain racial segregation – was symptomatic of their disloyalty to metropolitan authorities. Hence, the civil law in Martinique was not called the Code Napoléon but instead the Code de la Martinique. Members of the cour d’appel further abused their power to assert the interests of their class. They decided almost every legal dispute between merchants of the port cities and their planter peers in favour of the latter, despite the fact that metropolitan law supported the merchants. Widespread discontent amongst the merchants was consistently ignored. The situation worsened when Chief Justice Jacques Lefessier-Grandprey left the colony for health reasons and was temporarily replaced by the royalist Bence – himself a creole, ignorant of law, friend to many grand blancs and, through his marriage, tied to them by family bonds.68 The cour d’appel not only maintained the class interests of the planters but also enforced racial segregation in a stricter manner than that prescribed by the Code Napoléon. Contrary to the Code Napoléon, marriages between whites and people of colour were proscribed. From Villaret’s perspective, such marriages were too dangerous in a colony besieged by the enemy and where Haiti’s rulers had allegedly tried to instigate a revolt. When Arisy, a tightrope walker from Genoa, wanted to marry the daughter of a coloured coffee planter in 1807, his marriage was prohibited by Villaret in consultation with the cour d’appel. In this matter Arisy’s status as a petit blanc was also an important factor; questions of class and race were thus intertwined. Although Laussat opposed the juridical emancipation of free men of colour, a class he judged to be ‘extremely dangerous’, he still felt that Arisy, as a white man, should be treated according to metropolitan law. Ironically, after being denied permission to marry his fiancée, Arisy declared himself a coloured person and so could not be prohibited from marrying her.69 In addition to the passive resistance in which members of the grand and petit blanc class engaged, slaves also waged open resistance. Incidents of poisonings of masters and livestock increased between 1802 and 1809.70 The grand blancs thus lived in permanent fear. Even Joséphine’s mother, Rose-Claire, was not exempt from slave resistance: her domestic slave Émilie tried to murder her in 1806 by mixing shards of glass into her food.

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But the attempt failed because the shards were too large and Rose-Claire discovered them. Not much is known about the incident, but it seems likely that the pivotal position Joséphine’s mother occupied in the cooperative relationship between the grand blancs and the colonial state was known among the slaves. Émilie paid dearly for her deed: her punishment was to be burnt alive.71 Single acts of resistance from below, such as those of Arisy and Émilie, however, could hardly endanger the rule of the grand blancs. Laussat’s struggle to assert metropolitan authority in Martinique against the subversive relationship between the grand blancs and Villaret’s clique ultimately failed, too. When Laussat visited Villaret in his palace in Fort-de-France in early 1806 to discuss economic reforms, he was surprised to discover that the entire cour d’appel was present. As Laussat started to present his case, Villaret interrupted him and began to yell at him in front of everyone, calling him ignorant of local customs and circumstances. With this gesture, Villaret demonstrated his loyalty to the grand blancs and gave the cour d’appel carte blanche to further undermine his colleague’s authority. It was thus clear to everyone that Napoleonic France, represented by Laussat, was without any authority in Martinique.72 ‘There is no help to it, all the emperor’s powers fail here’, Laussat later wrote to Decrès.73

THE POLITICAL LOYALTIES OF THE GRAND BLANCS AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN MARTINIQUE Well aware of the rumours circulating in Paris about the anglomanie of Martinique’s elites, Villaret continually assured Decrès of the colonists’ attachment to France and its emperor.74 According to Villaret, newcomers unfamiliar with the colony and its customs were the source of the false allegations of anglomanie. The grand blancs were in fact the most loyal and obedient servants of his Majesty. That said, one could only gain their support by retaining the institutions and laws of the Ancien Régime. To support his position, Villaret pointed to his success in defending the colony against British forces in the region. The support of the grand blancs was his only source of power, he continued, on an island cut off from the metropolis, where the only news of the mother country came from British newspapers.75 Indeed, the lack of news from the metropolis was a serious problem for public morale. Laussat also conceded this point; the colonists felt abandoned by their emperor and so the administration’s authority dwindled.76 To lift public morale, Laussat concluded that it would be wise if Decrès sent French newspapers and French food with the next convoy destined for the Caribbean.77 French wine was especially lacking, Villaret lamented,



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as the one they imported from the United States was not drinkable.78 In order to provide the colonists and the colonial administration with information about the political situation in Europe, Villaret used the exchange of prisoners of war to negotiate for the distribution of British newspapers in Martinique with the commander of the British naval forces, Rear-Admiral Alexander Cochrane. In return, Villaret sent Cochrane barrels of nougat and vanilla.79 Unlike Villaret, Laussat did not believe that it was a lack of metropolitan support that drove the colony into the arms of the British Empire, but rather the colonists’ own disloyalty to France.80 In his eyes, it was not only the wartime situation of the colony that was at stake but also the longterm relationship between Martinique and France. With horror he reported to Decrès that the children of the grand blancs were abandoning French schools for boarding schools in Baltimore and London, where they would receive a foreign education, contrary to French customs and principles. Even during the war, he observed, this practice persisted. Laussat insisted to Decrès that after the war it would be absolutely necessary to send the children of the grand blancs to France for several years in order to teach them French manners and customs.81 Laussat was not alone in his doubts about the political loyalty of the colony’s creoles. Reflecting on his time in Martinique, Villaret’s aide-decamp, Moreau de Jonnès, similarly noted in his memoirs: ‘It is a forgotten fact and the emperor should have known it, that in the West Indies renegades were in the British service. They carried our cockade to deceive us. They betrayed us at every occasion, even before … the battle of Leipzig and on the eve of Waterloo’.82 Apart from these fundamental problems with the loyalty of the colony’s creoles, day-to-day political culture was also heavily influenced by such conflicts of loyalty. When the dispute between Laussat and Villaret reached its climax in 1805–1806, numerous caricatures, letters and songs directed against the Colonial Prefect circulated in the colony. In the caricatures he was shown as ‘the monster sent from Louisiana’, as a ‘gold stealing Jacobin’, as the ‘murderer of Louis XVI’ or as ‘a coq français eaten by the British lion’. The songs included such lyrics such as: ‘Respecting our property – giving us all the security – that’s the anglomanie – absorb our plantations, taxing our gold, for his [Laussat’s] vault – that’s the francomanie!’83 Much to Laussat’s embarrassment, these songs were sung everywhere and the caricatures were found in all the streets of Saint Pierre and Fort-deFrance. Even during an official banquet, members of Villaret’s clique and the cour d’appel dared to sing these songs, whilst simultaneously honouring their patron with another song that celebrated him as the saviour of the

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colony and defender of their ideals.84 Villaret waited for several days before taking action. When the gendarmerie found the author of the songs, they also discovered other poems directed against Napoleon, describing him as a Corsican thief on the French throne.85 Royalist ideals were widespread amongst the grand blancs: they neither identified with the usurper of the French throne nor with the Republic. The republican calendar was systematically ignored and the Gregorian calendar was used instead.86 Furthermore, the grand blancs continued to use the names of cities under the Ancien Régime; they still called Fort-de-France Fort-Royal.87 The disloyalty of the planters was also expressed by the fact that many of the newborn boys in the colony were named after the British Admiral Nelson.88 According to British intelligence, even the last remaining republicans among the planters and merchants of Martinique turned away from Bonaparte when the latter announced his coronation as emperor of the French in 1804.89 When Napoleon learned of the political culture in Martinique he was indignant, especially about the caricatures directed against him, Decrès wrote in one of his rare letters to Villaret. It was clear to metropolitan authorities that the public humiliation of their Colonial Prefect weakened metropolitan power in Martinique. Reports from French officers returning from Martinique were equally disturbing to the Minister. Captain Hulot of the French man-of-war Le Pandour reported to Decrès in 1805 that: ‘In Martinique, they are British, they love the British, … they treat them with care, they would like to see them in the colony’.90 Decrès thus ordered Villaret to take drastic measures against anyone who questioned national authority.91 His orders notwithstanding, Laussat continued to be systematically ridiculed in official festivities such as the annual celebrations for the victory at Austerlitz or the emperor’s birthday, all with Villaret’s implicit consent. Known anglomanes, members of the cour d’appel and the officer corps further undermined Laussat’s authority by usurping the latter’s place during military parades and deliberately sitting in his seat in the front row during mess.92 This public humiliation was a personal tragedy for Laussat, as he confessed to Decrès: ‘Here, I am the black sheep, the goat of Israel. I am being presented to some as a dangerous renovator, to others as a deported revolutionary, to everyone as a strict financier. If I leave, there will be bonfires, if I die, people will stone my corpse’.93 He considered it especially degrading that the anglomanes used public celebrations honouring Napoléon to mock the emperor’s sole loyal servant in the colony. By deliberately excluding the Colonial Prefect from festivities and ridiculing him in public, the close cooperation between the grand blancs and Villaret also materialized in Martinique’s everyday political culture. Consequently, metropolitan authority, which in Napoleonic



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France was based to a large extent on festivities and political symbols, was further undermined. Laussat thus decided to remain absent from such celebrations for the remainder of the war, which Villaret, in turn, interpreted as a sign of the Colonial Prefect’s disloyalty.94

MILITARY AND SOCIETY IN MARTINIQUE Villaret was not only wary of Laussat’s loyalty, but also distrusted his army. He was aware that the subversive structures of colonial rule in Martinique would also influence the armed forces. Villaret’s complaints that the garrison was not familiar with local customs and habits illustrate his well-founded fears that the soldiers of the garrison had more in common with the free men of colour and the petit blancs of the colonial cities than with the aristocratic planters whose lives and properties they were called to defend.95 According to British intelligence, the morale of the garrison was low. More than a third of the garrison died of yellow fever within the first three months after the restitution of the colony to France. Reinforcement from France came rarely and those men usually died of yellow fever within days.96 Those soldiers who were not dying in the colony’s hospitals tried to drink themselves to death.97 The men seldom received their pay and rebelled at every minor occasion. The German recruits of the garrison were even forced to work on the colony’s sugar and coffee plantations as craftsmen and lumberjacks – and of course their officers took their salary.98 But even the officers of the army and the navy were unhappy about their situation. They had come to the Caribbean in 1802 with high hopes of promotions and medals; instead, they hardly saw any fighting during the entire war. Furthermore, the officer corps was deeply divided between the aristocratic creole officers who had served the British during the Revolutionary Wars in the Caribbean and the bourgeois officers who climbed the career ladder in French Republican armies during the European campaigns and were mostly loyal to Napoleon. Whereas the royalist officers thought of the newcomers from Europe as parvenus, the latter mistrusted the loyalty of the former to the French cause.99 Doubts about the willingness of common soldiers to fight for the aristocratic planters hardened in the wake of several incidents in which French naval ships sought shelter from pursuing British vessels under the colony’s forts, but the latter’s batteries remained silent.100 Of course, Villaret did not inform Paris about the perilous situation of the armed forces but instead continued to swear the army’s readiness to fight a possible British invasion. Yet he could not even get the planters’ support for an additional war tax.101

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In light of the dubious loyalty of the garrison and their depletion by yellow fever, Villaret cynically took advantage of one group of people’s resistance to yellow fever, the very people who had been victims of his repressive policies since the beginning of his rule: free men of colour. When the renewal of hostilities seemed imminent, Villaret called them to arms for the National Guard as a means of replenishing his diminishing army. Thus, the following proclamation was published in June 1803: Men of colour, … you too bore the arms for the patrie in a memorable war and the patrie has not forgotten your services at all! Betrayers and the enemy are looking to persuade you of its injustices towards you. They want you to doubt the government’s intentions. Men of colour, to whom among you, was justice ever denied? Who among you has legitimate complaints? I’m ready to hear them. Count on my character and my loyalty. Your leaders have informed me about your feelings. Keep your subordination, which is the base of your wellbeing … Be brave, loyal, attached and don’t fear that the patrie will deny you the compensation you will deserve.102

While service in the colonial militia had previously provided a means of social advancement for free men of colour, this was hardly the case in Martinique during the Napoleonic age. Because of Villaret’s repressive policies against them, free men of colour in the colonial militia could not trust his promises. Those among them who were victims of Villaret’s repression policy proved to be especially hopeful for a return of the British, as Commodore Hood reported to London in 1803.103 It was an open secret that in the event of a British invasion, the National Guard would not participate in a possible siege of the colony’s principal strong point, Fort Desaix.104 The loyalty of National Guard officers to Napoleonic France was hardly any stronger, since they were largely drawn from the class of grand blancs. Nineteen out of twenty officers of the National Guard were ‘warmly attached to the British’, Rear-Admiral Cochrane reported to London prior to the British invasion.105 When the British attacked Martinique in January 1809, the National Guard refused to follow orders and dispersed into the woods without firing a single shot. Villaret later blamed their desertion on a British general’s threat to deport all free men of colour found with a weapon in their hands.106 While this may have been a factor, it seems more likely that Villaret’s repressive policy and the dubious loyalty of their officers were the main cause for their desertion. After the British invasion, the remaining French forces quickly withdrew to Fort Desaix, where they remained under siege for three weeks before finally surrendering on 24 February 1809. According to exchanged prisoners of war, who stopped in Martinique on their way back



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to Guadeloupe, the people of Fort-de-France were openly celebrating the end of French rule in Martinique.107 The French Governor of Guadeloupe, Jean-Augustin Ernouf, concluded that the colonists were not to be trusted and complained about Villaret’s naïve policies towards them.108 And Martinique’s colonists were not the only ones who were happy about the end of French rule: although they faced the gruesome prospect of captivity in British prisons,109 the defeated French troops could not wait to leave the colony. Their misery and their duty to defend the property of aristocratic planters, with whom they had nothing in common, would finally end. Accordingly, one British officer wrote in his journal: ‘The French troops immediately on being embarked, tho’ having so shortly before parted with their Eagles, were seen laughing and singing & dancing on the decks, just as they would have done in any little Cabaret near Paris, and in observing this, we could hardly refrain from envying their happy frivolity’.110

CONCLUSION Given the rumours about the royalism and anglomanie of Martinique’s planters that circulated in Paris, it is no wonder that accusations of treachery quickly surfaced when the news of Martinique’s surrender reached the capital. For a regime whose legitimacy derived largely from military victories, the maintenance of national unity and the assurance to the beneficiaries of the French Revolution (officers, notables, peasants) that the Bourbons would never return to power again,111 the loss of Martinique was not only a strategic setback – the French navy lost its last safe harbour in the Americas – but also a political disaster. How could the emperor have allowed the subversion of metropolitan authority in one of the last French colonies by a handful of royalist renegades? Consequently, when Villaret returned to France in 1809, Napoleon ordered him to be tried by a military tribunal on charges of high treason. The commission of inquiry presented numerous pieces of evidence proving that Villaret went too far in his cooperation with the colony’s royalist planter class and had consequently allowed the subversion of metropolitan authority in Martinique. Although he was acquitted of all the accusations thanks to influential friends in Paris, he consequently fell out of favour with the emperor for more than two years.112 Behind the question of who was to blame for the loss of Martinique lingered a structural conflict between the metropolis and colonial elites on how the colonies should be governed. Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery in 1802 may have been a rupture with the intellectual principles of the French Revolution,113 but it did not mean that the metropolis gave up its

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claim to govern the French colonies. Centralization, unification and bureaucratization were after all also central pillars of the French Revolution; and they persisted in Napoleonic France.114 These tendencies, represented by Laussat, were ultimately bound to collide with the interests of Martinique’s aristocratic planters, who demanded more self-governance and less metropolitan control. The specific structures of a slave-holding society further aggravated this conflict, as the metropolis’ attempts to govern its colonial subjects ultimately challenged the latter’s role as masters vis-à-vis their slaves. All things considered, it seems somewhat misleading to reduce the history of the Age of Revolutions in the Caribbean to the question of slavery, because such a perspective ignores the fundamental conflict between the metropolis and colonial elites on colonial governance. In fact, the latter struggle was sometimes even more important than the abolition of slavery. For example, Martinique’s grand blancs favoured the British Empire over Napoleonic France even though the former prohibited the slave trade in 1808. Despite this far-reaching measure, the British Empire remained more attractive for Martinique’s aristocratic planter class because Whitehall hardly ever intervened in the colonies’ interior politics. But given a metropolitan colonial policy that aimed at a complete reversal of the revolutionary achievements of the 1790s by re-introducing slavery and disenfranchising free men of colour, the question needs to be asked if Villaret’s administration had any alternatives to the subversive cooperation with the grand blancs? The grand blancs were the only social group that could ensure the preservation of a colonial order based on slavery and racial segregation. Only they could support the colonial careers of Villaret and his protégés. The price of the grand blancs’ cooperation with the dreaded Napoleonic regime was the complete undermining of the colonial state’s authority in matters of economy, day-to-day politics, administration and military. The colonial state itself was degraded to an executive instrument of their interests, while the planters abandoned the colonial state in times of war. It was thus not the colonial state that governed the planters but the latter who controlled the colonial state, although they did not formally participate in the political process. The lack of information, as well as the metropolitan inability to control the colonies because of the wartime situation, further accelerated the subversion of the authority of the colonial state. The only achievement of Martinique’s colonial state was to uphold the illusion of French control over the colony, when in fact it was leaning economically and culturally towards the British Empire. If colonial rule in Martinique by French administrators was a mere illusion, common ideas about the concept of colonial rule in settler colonies



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need to be questioned. Although the colonial state was able to maintain colonial order and racial segregation within the boundaries of its bureaucratic and military powers, it proved utterly unable and unwilling to control its white elites. Robinson’s notion of the ‘prefabricated collaborator’ thus requires some modification. From the perspective of the metropolitan authorities, cooperation with Martinique’s royalist planter class was a necessary evil after the re-establishment of slavery in 1802, because there were no alternatives left. Little did they anticipate, however, that the grand blancs had their own agenda and would use all their power to subvert metropolitan authority. For the men on the spot, in turn, who were driven more by their greed and personal ambitions than by their loyalty towards the metropolitan authorities, the grand blancs were the perfect partner to pursue their personal enrichment and foster their colonial careers. Dr des. Flavio Eichmann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has published several articles on war, revolution and abolition in the Caribbean during the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. His dissertation on war and revolution in the Lesser Antilles, 1789–1815 is being prepared for publication.

NOTES  1. For census data, see L. Elisabeth, La société martiniquaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: 1664–1789 (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 86. On the strategic importance of Martinique, see R.J. Singh, ‘L’importance stratégique des colonies antillaises dans la politique française de l’après-guerre (1763-1770)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 28(1) (1974), 37. The author would like to thank Emily Marker, Tessa Murphy and Andreas Stucki for their helpful remarks and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.   2. See Laussat to Decrès, 9 July 1807, in Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-enProvence (hereafter ANOM), C8A 115 F°157. There are no records about the Rosario’s actions in the bay of Saint Pierre in the archives of the British admiralty. However, the Rosario was stationed in the Eastern Caribbean at that time and its captain was named Manncey. Therefore, the old Italian saying applies for Laussat’s report: Se non è vero, è ben trovato (a good story, even if false).   3. On the global character of the Napoleonic Wars, see S. Förster, ‘The First World War: Global Dimensions of Warfare in the Age of Revolution 1775– 1815’, in idem and R. Chickering (eds), War in the Age of Revolution 1775–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 101–15.   4. The literature on Villaret is sparse and one-sided. For a rather uncritical biographical approach, see H. Ortholan, L’Amiral Villaret-Joyeuse: Des Antilles à Venise 1747–1812 (Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli Éditeur, 2005).

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  5. Laussat to Decrès, 9 July 1807, in ANOM, C8A 115 F°157. All translations from French are by the author.   6. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (New York: Longman, 1976), 124–26. Ironically, Laussat’s brother Antoine was the owner of a large trading house in Philadelphia whose wealth derived from its commerce with Haiti. See P.R. Girard, The Slaves who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801– 1804 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 327.   7. See M. Wagner, England und die französische Gegenrevolution 1789–1802 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994), 236–45.   8. Bonaparte to Decrès, 3 July 1802, in J.-O. Boudon (ed.), Corréspondance générale de Napoléon Bonaparte, 12 vols (Paris: Fayard, 2004–2015), vol. 3, 1015–16. See also S. Daney, Histoire de la Martinique jusqu’en 1815, 6 vols (Fort-de-France: E. Ruelle, 1846), vol. 6, 89.   9. On the problems of communication between Europe and the Caribbean, see K.J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 10. See D.K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830–1914 (London: Cornell University Press, 1973), 80–81. 11. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 120–24. 12. See O. Gliech, Der Sklavenaufstand von Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution: Eine Studie über Ursachen und Folgen des Untergangs der weißen Herrschaft in einer karibischen Plantagenwirtschaft (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011), 359–70. 13. On the conflicts during the French Revolution, see P. Pluchon, ‘Révolutions à l’Amérique’, in idem (ed.), Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1982), 295–307. 14. Laussat to Decrès, 9 June 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°111. 15. On colonial careering, see D. Lambert and A. Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in idem (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–24. 16. D.P. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 56–63. 17. See for example, de Beaumont to Keppel, 12 February 1802, in National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter TNA), WO 1/37/49; de Digne to Keppel, 10 February 1802, in TNA, WO 1/37/53; Dillon to Pitt, n.d., in TNA, PRO/30/8/129/294; Trigge to Hobart, 22 November 1801, in TNA, WO 1/90/613; Keppel to Hobart (Précis), 11 December 1801, in TNA, CO/166/4/14; Johnstone to Hobart, 20 December 1801, in TNA, CO 71/33; Lacrosse to Cambacères, 21 December 1801, in Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux (hereafter ADGB), 61J/31. 18. De Cely to de Curt, n.d. [1802], in TNA, WO 1/38/1. 19. Keppel to Hobart (Précis), 16 November 1801, in TNA, CO/166/4/11.



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20. Duny to Decrès, 22 February 1802, in ANOM, EE 777/28. See also Ménant to Lescallier (copy), 3 December 1801, in ANOM, C7A 57 F°211; Forfait to Bonaparte, 2 April 1801, in ADGB, 61J/55. 21. Decrès to Duny, 22 February 1802, in ANOM, EE 777/28; Bonaparte to Decrès, 7 October 1801, in Boudon (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 3, 801–802. On Bonaparte’s decision to re-introduce slavery, see P.R. Girard, ‘Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799–1803’, French Historical Studies 32(4) (2009), 587–618. 22. Keppel to Hobart, 10 February 1802, in TNA, WO 1/37/35. 23. Proclamation of Villaret, 14 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°74. On Villaret’s attitude to slavery, see Discours de Villaret sur l’importance des colonies & les moyens de les pacifier dans le Conseil des 500, 1 June 1797, in ANOM, F6/1 N°56. 24. Villaret to Decrès, 23 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°1. 25. Bertin to Decrès, 22 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°56; Requête adressée par un groupe d’habitants du Saint-Esprit au père Archange, préfet apostolique de la mission des Capucins, pour demander le départ de l’abbé Colné qui ne cesse d’exciter les gens de couleur à la rébellion, 19 July 1802, in ANOM, C8A 106 F°57. 26. See Villaret/Bertin, Ordonnance pour prévenir les débarquements clandestins dans la Martinique, 2 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 104 F°24. On the military expedition of General Richepance against the insurgents of Guadeloupe, see J. Adélaïde-Merlande, Delgrès: La Guadeloupe en 1802, 2nd edn (Paris: Karthala, 2002), 113–49. 27. Decree of Villaret, 3 November 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°95; Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 15 March 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°167. 28. Bertin to Decrès, 23 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 106 F°75; Villaret to Decrès, 22 November 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°64 (citations). Forty coloured deportees were recruited to man the French ship destined for Caracas, since the ship’s crew was ravaged by yellow fever. See Villeneuve to Decrès, 24 October 1802, in Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, Paris (hereafter SHD), FM/BB4/165 F°28. 29. Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 15 March 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°167. 30. Villaret to Decrès, 23 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°3 (emphasis in the original). Poor whites in the French Caribbean were called petit blancs. See Gliech, Saint-Domingue, 48–49. 31. Hood to [Nepean] (copy), 12 January 1803, in TNA, ADM 1/324. 32. See Villaret to Decrès, 14 November 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°31; Villaret to Bertin (copy), 30 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°22. 33. Villaret to Decrès, 17 April 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°78. 34. L. Elisabeth, ‘La domination française, de la paix d’Amiens à 1870’, in P. Pluchon (ed.), Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1982), 381. 35. Proclamation of Lescallier, 3 December 1802, in ANOM, C7A 58 F°10.

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36. Notice des principaux actes de l’administration de M. le Conseiller d’état Bertin, ex-préfet colonial de la Martinique, qui ont été blâmés par le gouvernement, n.d. [1804], in ANOM, C8A 109 F°79. 37. Decree of Bonaparte, 23 June 1802, in Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter ANP), AD/VII/17 N°140. On the exclusif mitigé, see J. Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: l’évolution du régime de l’Exclusif de 1763–1789, 2 vols (Paris: Université de Paris, 1972). 38. Girard, Slaves, 45. 39. During the British occupation, the colony’s ports also remained open for foreign trade, because the British Governor Keppel suspended the British Navigation Laws at the request of the planters. See Keppel to Portland (Précis), 21 February 1797, in TNA, CO/166/3/44. 40. Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 22 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°86. 41. Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 22 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°84. 42. Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 3 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°90. See also Villaret to Decrès, 23 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°11. 43. See Pétition adressée à Villaret par les négociants et habitants du Fort-deFrance demandant l’ouverture du port aux bâtiments étrangers, principalement américains, 4 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°12. 44. See A.A. Louis, Les libres de couleur en Martinique, 3 vols (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), vol. 2, 33–104. 45. Girard, Slaves, 50. 46. Bertin to Decrès, 23 July 1802, in ANOM, C8A 106 F°19; Bertin to Decrès, 5 August 1802, in ANOM, C8A 106 F°37; État des bâtiments français avisés en l’Isle de la Martinique et admis à y faire leur vente depuis le 30 Messidor dernier, n.d. [1802], in ANOM, C8A 106 F°41; Bertin to Bonaparte, 25 November 1802, in Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (hereafter ANPS), AF/ IV/1214 N°42; Villaret to Decrès, 23 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°1; Bertin to Decrès, 30 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°94. 47. Mauron/Mallespine to Ernouf/Kerversau, 10 May 1806, in ANOM, C7A 65 F°262. Dominica’s British Governor Prevost participated in this contraband himself. Even during the war, he had coffee from his plantation smuggled to Martinique and bought French luxuries in return. See A. Moreau de Jonnès, Aventures de guerre au temps de la République et du Consulat, 2 vols (Paris: Pagnerre, 1858), vol. 2, 266–67. 48. See Villeneuve to Decrès, 22 October 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°117; Villeneuve to Decrès, 5 February 1803, in ANOM, C8A 108 F°83. Villeneuve, Instructions Générale pour tous le Bâtiments composant la station des Iles du Vent de l’Amérique, 13 September 1802, in SHD, FM/BB4/165 F°19. The transport of colonial goods with small ships between different points of the island was called ‘cabotage’. It was usually run by free men of colour who were quick to transform their ships into corsairs in times of war. See Gliech, SaintDomingue, 47–48.



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49. Villeneuve to Decrès, 24 October 1802, in SHD, FM/BB4/165 F°28; Villeneuve to Decrès, 28 December 1802, in SHD, FM/BB4/165 F°43; Villeneuve to Decrès, 21 November 1802, in SHD, FM/BB4/165 F°37; Information from Dominica by Captn Bland, 12 December 1802, in TNA, ADM 1/324. 50. Bonaparte to Decrès, 23 November 1802, in Boudon (ed.), Correspondance, vol. 3, 1163; [Decrès], Analyse des lettres écrites au ministre depuis le 1er Vendémiaire, n.d. [1802], in ANOM, C8A 105 F°72; Notice des principaux actes de l’administration de M. le Conseiller d’état Bertin, ex-préfet colonial de la Martinique, qui ont été blâmés par le gouvernement, n.d. [1804], in ANOM, C8A 109 F°79. 51. Bertin to Decrès, 1 April 1805, in ANOM, C8A 110 F°155. 52. See J. Horan, ‘The Colonial Famine Plot: Slavery, Free Trade and Empire in the French Atlantic, 1763–1791’, International Review of Social History 55 (2010), 103–21. 53. Bertin to Decrès, 28.1.1803, in: ANOM, C8A 108 F°5. The concurrence between Fort-de-France and Saint Pierre in matters of colonial economy was one of the main causes of the revolutionary turmoil of the 1790s. See Pluchon, ‘Révolutions’, 296–301. 54. Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 19 February 1803, in ANOM, C8A 108 F°163. 55. Extracts of Intelligence, [?] May 1803, in TNA, ADM 1/324. 56. Mauron/Mallespine to Ernouf/Kerversau (copy), 10 May 1806, in ANOM, C7A 65 F°262; Decrès to Napoléon, 24 June 1805, in ANPS, AF/IV/1215 N°27. It should be noted, however, that it was emigrated Frenchmen who dominated the burgeoning US-American trade with the French Caribbean. Many of them had fled from the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue to the US where they were naturalized and re-established their trade networks between the Caribbean, North America and Europe. By using the neutral US flag, they could circumvent the British blockade and sell their colonial produce in French-occupied Europe. See S. Marzagalli, ‘Guerre et création d’un réseau commercial entre Bordeaux et les États-Unis, 1776–1815 : L’impossible économie du politique’, in idem and B. Marnot (eds), Guerre et économie dans l’espace atlantique du XVIe au XXe siècle (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006), 375–89. 57. Laussat to Decrès, 9 June 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°111. 58. Villaret to Laussat (copy), 19 October 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°270; Villaret to Decrès, 16 January 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°1. Of course, it was French taxpayers who had to finance Villaret’s free-trade policy. See Daney, Martinique, Vol. 6, 77. Bertin was relieved of his functions in summer 1804, because of the colony’s catastrophic financial situation. As his successor Bonaparte named Pierre-Clement de Laussat, a technocrat from Pau, who prior to his engagement in Martinique had observed the handover of Louisiana to the United States in 1802–1803. With the nomination of Laussat as Colonial Prefect, Bonaparte intended to bring back order to the colony’s finances and make sure that metropolitan reforms in political, legal and administrational matters were implemented in Martinique. See Notice des principaux actes de

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l’administration de M. le Conseiller d’état Bertin, ex-préfet colonial de la Martinique, qui ont été blâmés par le gouvernement, n.d. [1804], in ANOM, C8A 109 F°79. 59. Villaret to Decrès, 7 March 1805, in ANOM, C8A 110 F°1. 60. Laussat to Decrès, 2 February 1806, in ANOM, C8A 113 F°102; Laussat to Decrès, 3 February 1806, in ANOM, C8A 113 F°120. 61. Hood to [Nepean] (copy), 12 January 1803, in TNA, ADM 1/324. 62. Villaret to Laussat (copy), 5 December 1808, in ANOM, C8A 116 F°92; Villaret to Laussat (copy), 18 December 1808, in ANOM, C8A 116 F°94. 63. Dessalles to Bence, 4 March 1808, in Pierre Dessalles: La vie d’un colon à la Martinique au XIXe siècle, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Courbevoie: Henri de Frémont, 1980– 1986), vol. 1, N°2. 64. Laussat to Decrès, 28 October 1804, in ANOM, C8A 109 F°155. 65. Tascher de la Pagerie to Lefessier-Grandprey (copy), 2 October 1804, in ANOM, C8A 109 F°315; Tascher de la Pagerie to [Decrès], 3 October 1804, in ANOM, C8A 109 F°316; Lefessier-Grandprey to Decrès, 25 May 1805, in ANOM, C8A 110 F°78. 66. See, for example, Tascher de la Pagerie to Joséphine, 20 June 1803, in ADGB, 61J/47; Tascher de la Pagerie to Decrès, 17 March 1805, in ANOM, EE 299/8. Her influence in Paris was limited. As soon as fundamental political matters were involved, such as the opening of the port of Fort-de-France for foreign commerce, she was not heard. See Tascher de la Pagerie to Bonaparte, 15 May 1803, in ANPS, AF/IV/1214 N°49. 67. Laussat to Decrès, 12 November 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°244. See also Daney, Martinique, vol. 6, 185–86. 68. Laussat to Decrès, 5 September 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°117; Laussat to Decrès, 2 February 1806, in ANOM, C8A 113 F°102; Laussat to Decrès, 20 December 1807, in ANOM, C8A 115 F°212. 69. Laussat to Decrès, 24 August 1807, in ANOM, C8A 115 F°200; P.-C. Laussat, Mémoires sur ma vie, à mon fils, pendant les années 1803 et suivantes que j’ai rempli des fonctions publiques, savoir à la Louisianne, en qualité de commissaire du gouvernement française pour la reprise de possession de cette colonie et pour sa remise aux Etats-Unis; à la Martinique, comme préfet colonial; à la Guyane française, en qualité de commandant et administrateur pour le roi, 3 vols (Pau: Vignancour, 1831), vol. 2, 348–51. For the legal situation, see L. Elisabeth, ‘The French Antilles’, in D.W. Cohen and J.P. Greene (eds), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 143. 70. See also J. Savage, ‘“Black Magic” and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique’, Journal of Social History 40(3) (2007), 637–40; C. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, 6th edn (Knoxville, TN: University of Tenessee Press, 2004), 63–73; Laussat, Mémoires, vol. 2, 291–300.



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71. Lefessier-Grandprey to Decrès, 30 April 1804, in ANOM, C8A 110 F°76; Copie d’un jugement rendu par le Tribunal spécial de la Martinique condamnant à être brûlée vive la négresse Émilie, accusée de tentative d’empoisonnement sur la personne de Mme de la Pagerie, mère de l’Impératrice, 9 June 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°210; Villaret to Decrès, 15 June 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°219. In the Age of Revolutions, slaves were often very well informed about politics. See L. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 85–123. 72. Laussat to Decrès, 16 January 1806, in ANOM, C8A 113 F°18. 73. Laussat to Decrès, 13 November 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°140. 74. See, for example, Villaret to Decrès, 17 April 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°74; Villaret to Decrès, 16 January 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°1; Villaret to Decrès, 13 February 1808, in ANOM, C8A 116 F°9. 75. Villaret to Decrès, 10 March 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°110. 76. Contrary to famous arguments of historians such as David Fieldhouse and John Galbraith, the distance between the periphery and the metropolis could obviously prove to be a serious problem for the men on the spot when it came to their effort to maintain metropolitan authority. See J. Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2(2) (1960), 150–68; Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, 80–81. 77. Laussat to Decrès, 10 April 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°76. 78. Villaret to Decrès, 9 May 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°181. 79. Villaret to Cochrane, 18 July 1807, in National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), MS.2314/26; Villaret to Cochrane, 17 October 1808, in NLS, MS.2314/205. 80. Laussat to Decrès, 23 October 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°220. 81. Laussat to Decrès, 31 August 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°116. 82. Moreau de Jonnès, Aventures, vol. 2, 243. 83. Copie d’une chanson satirique contre le préfet colonial Laussat, 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°277. 84. Laussat to Decrès, 14 December 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°313; Laussat to Decrès, 26 November 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°275; Copie d’une lettre anonyme hostile à Laussat, 23 November 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°278; Chanson à l’honneur de Villaret-Joyeuse, 1 December 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°279. 85. Extrait de poèmes satiriques trouvés dans les papiers du s. Pichelin fils, n.d. [1805], in ANOM, C8A 111 F°317. 86. Laussat to Decrès, 9 June 1805, in ANOM, C8A 111 F°111. 87. See, for example, the letters in de Frémont, Dessalles, vol. 1. After the peace of Amiens in 1802 various towns in the French colonies were renamed to demonstrate the change of power in metropolitan France. See Decree of Bonaparte, 28 August 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°76. 88. Laussat, Mémoires, vol. 2, 268.

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89. Hislop to Myers (copy), 7 August 1804, in TNA, ADM 1/325. See also Copie d’un article publié dans la Gazette de la Dominique du 15 septembre 1804 au sujet de la situation politique de la Martinique, 15 September 1804, in ANOM, C8A 109 F°160. 90. Decrès to Napoléon, 24 June 1805, in ANPS, AF/IV/1215 N°27. 91. Decrès to Villaret (draft), 14 May 1806, in ANOM, C8A 114 F°227. 92. Villaret to Decrès, 16 January 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°1; Villaret to Decrès, 1 October 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°247; Laussat to Decrès, 16 January 1806, in ANOM, C8A 113 F°18. 93. Laussat to Decrès, 13 November 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°140. 94. Laussat to Decrès, 6 December 1806, in ANOM, C8A 114 F°145; Villaret to Decrès, 1 October 1806, in ANOM, C8A 112 F°247. On the importance of symbols and festivities in Napoleonic France, see A. Jourdan, L’émpire de Napoléon, 2nd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 206–208. 95. Villaret to Decrès, 20 June 1807, in ANOM, C8A 115 F°41. 96. See, for example, Villaret to Decrès, 23 September 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°4; Villaret to Decrès, 13 July 1808, in ANOM, C8A 116 F°32. 97. Information from Dominica by Captn Bland, 12 December 1802, in TNA, ADM 1/324; Villaret to Decrès, 29 December 1802, in ANOM, C8A 105 F°70. 98. Cochrane to Pole, 20 December 1808, in TNA, ADM 1/329. 99. Moreau de Jonnès, Aventures, vol. 2, 232–45; Villaret to [Ernouf], 7 October 1806, in ANOM, F6/2 N°113; Villaret to Decrès, 20 June 1807, in ANOM, C8A 115 F°41. 100. Laussat to Decrès (secret), 30 December 1808, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°225. In 1803, Commodore Hood reported that Martinique’s batteries behaved ‘very civil’. See Hood to Nepean, 26 November 1803, in TNA, ADM 1/324. 101. Laussat to Decrès, 13 November 1808, in ANOM, C8A 117 F°140. 102. Proclamation of Villaret, 23 June 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°177. In the French original Villaret used hommes de couleur instead of the pejorative gens de couleur. In addition to the colonial militia, a Compagnie des chasseurs was formed, consisting of 300 free men of colour. See Decree of Villaret/Bertin, 8 July 1803, in ANOM, C8A 107 F°180. 103. See Hood to [Nepean] (copy), 12 January 1803, in TNA, ADM 1/324. On social advancement in the colonial militia, see Dubois, Citizens, 54–55. 104. The number of European Troops…, n.d. [1808], in NLS, MS.2316/180. 105. Cochrane to Pole, 20 December 1808, in TNA, ADM 1/329. 106. Journal du Capitaine Général de la Martinique pendant la siège de cette Isle, 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°25; Proclamation of Beckwith/Cochrane, 30 January 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°103. Ironically, according to Ernouf, among the British black soldiers who attacked Martinique there were men of Guadeloupe’s former colonial army, whom Admiral Richepance had deported in 1802. See Ernouf to Decrès, 13 February 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°94. 107. Report of Kerenskoff, 13 February 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°96. 108. Ernouf to Decrès, 13 February 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°94.



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109. Prisoners were usually kept in old ship hulks anchored in ports. Given the climate, bad food and poor hygiene that prevailed, these hulks became death traps for the captives. See Girard, Slaves, 329–30. 110. R.N. Buckley (ed.), The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne 1807–1816 (London: The Bodley Head, 1987), 107–108. 111. On Napoleon’s form of rule, see J. Tulard, Napoleon oder der Mythos des Retters: Eine Biographie, translated by C. Vollmann, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1979), 191–92, 243. 112. Rapport présenté à l’Empereur par la commission d’enquête par le maréchal Sérurier sur la capitulation de Martinique, 29 November 1809, in ANOM, C8A 118 F°143. See also Ortholan, Villaret-Joyeuse, 262–63. 113. Y. Benot and M. Dorigny, ‘1802: la rupture avec les principes de la Révolution’, in idem (eds), Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800-1830). Aux origines d’Haïti (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003), 7–10. 114. W. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 408–409.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adélaïde-Merlande, J. Delgrès: La Guadeloupe en 1802. Paris: Karthala, 2002. Banks, K.J., Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002. Benot, Y. and M. Dorigny. ‘1802: la rupture avec les principes de la Révolution’, in idem (eds), Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830). Aux origines d’Haïti. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003, 7–10. Boudon, J.-O. (ed.). Correspondance générale de Napoléon Bonaparte. Paris: Fayard, 2004–2015. Buckley, R.N. (ed.). The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne 1807– 1816. London: The Bodley Head, 1987. Daney, S. Histoire de la Martinique jusqu’en 1815. Fort-de-France: E. Ruelle, 1846. Doyle, W. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dubois, L. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Elisabeth, L. ‘The French Antilles’, in D.W. Cohen and J.P. Greene (eds), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, 135–71.  . ‘La domination française, de la paix d’Amiens à 1870’, in P. Pluchon (ed.), Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane. Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1982, 379–412.  . La société martiniquaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: 1664–1789. Paris: Karthala, 2003.

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Fick, C. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville, TN: University of Tenessee Press, 2004. Fieldhouse, D.K. Economics and Empire 1830–1914. London: Cornell University Press, 1973. Förster, S. ‘The First World War: Global Dimensions of Warfare in the Age of Revolution 1775-1815’, in idem and R. Chickering (eds), War in the Age of Revolution 1775–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 101–15. Galbraith, J. ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2(2) (1960), 150–68. Geggus, D.P. Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Girard, P.R. ‘Napoléon Bonaparte and the Emancipation Issue in Saint-Domingue, 1799–1803’, French Historical Studies 32(4) (2009), 587–618.  . The Slaves who Defeated Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alamaba Press, 2011. Gliech, O. Der Sklavenaufstand von Saint-Domingue und die Französische Revolution: Eine Studie über Ursachen und Folgen des Untergangs der weißen Herrschaft in einer karibischen Plantagenwirtschaft. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. Horan, J. ‘The Colonial Famine Plot: Slavery, Free Trade and Empire in the French Atlantic, 1763–1791’, International Review of Social History 55 (2010), 103–21. Jourdan, A. L’émpire de Napoléon. Paris: Flammarion, 2006. Lambert, D. and A. Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in idem (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 1–31. Laussat, P.-C. Mémoires sur ma vie, à mon fils, pendant les années 1803 et suivantes que j’ai rempli des fonctions publiques, savoir à la Louisianne, en qualité de commissaire du gouvernement française pour la reprise de possession de cette colonie et pour sa remise aux Etats-Unis; à la Martinique, comme préfet colonial; à la Guyane française, en qualité de commandant et administrateur pour le roi. Pau: Vignancour, 1831. Louis, A.A. Les libres de couleur en Martinique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. Marzagalli, S. ‘Guerre et création d’un réseau commercial entre Bordeaux et les États-Unis, 1776-1815: L’impossible économie du politique’, in idem and B. Marnot (eds), Guerre et économie dans l’espace atlantique du XVIe au XXe siècle. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006, 375–89. Moreau de Jonnès, A. Aventures de guerre au temps de la République et du Consulat. Paris: Pagnerre, 1858. Ortholan, H. L’Amiral Villaret-Joyeuse: Des Antilles à Venise 1747–1812. Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli Éditeur, 2005. Pierre Dessalles: La vie d’un colon à la Martinique au XIXe siècle. Courbevoie: Henri de Frémont, 1980–1986. Pluchon, P. ‘Révolutions à l’Amérique’, in idem (ed.), Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane. Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1982, 265–328.



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Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. New York: Longman, 1976, 117–42. Savage, J. ‘“Black Magic” and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique’, Journal of Social History 40(3) (2007), 635–62. Singh, R.J. ‘L’importance stratégique des colonies antillaises dans la politique française de l’après-guerre (1763-1770)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 28(1) (1974), 27–43. Tarrade, J. Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: l’évolution du régime de l’Exclusif de 1763–1789. Paris: Université de Paris, 1972. Tulard, J. Napoleon oder der Mythos des Retters: Eine Biographie, translated by C. Vollmann. Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1979. Wagner, M. England und die französische Gegenrevolution 1789–1802. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994.

Chapter 5

Uncle Toms and Kupapas ‘Collaboration’ versus Alliance in a NineteenthCentury New Zealand Context Vincent O’Malley

} Almost the worst insult that can be levelled against a Maori person today is to call them a kupapa. The term is routinely used as a form of abuse towards Maori politicians accused of supporting government policies at the expense of their people’s interests. Maori police officers deployed during the hugely controversial 1981 South African rugby tour of New Zealand, which saw a series of ugly clashes between police and anti-Apartheid protesters, were also called kupapa.1 To be described as a kupapa is therefore to be accused of selling out or betraying one’s people. A kupapa, in popular parlance, is an ‘Uncle Tom’ or traitor to the cause, a collaborator. So how is it that a term that initially referred to Maori who stooped low or remained on the ground, and subsequently came to be applied to people who stayed neutral in a quarrel, has come to assume such negative connotations? The short answer is that by the 1860s the word had begun to take on another meaning. It came to refer to those Maori described in English as ‘friendly’ towards the government (or as ‘Queenites’ or ‘loyalists’) in its conflicts with other Maori considered ‘rebels’.2 As early as 1861 kupapa was being used to describe ‘friendly or neutral natives’.3 However, at least one official employed it in respect of those he described as ‘waverers’, highlighting the way in which the word’s meaning was still evolving.4 A range of situations could by this time be covered by the label, from those who simply wished to stay out of harm’s way and refused to commit to either party, 144



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to others who actively fought on the Crown side during the New Zealand Wars of 1845–1872. But the common assumption today is that Maori who did not take up arms against the Crown during those conflicts sold out their own people.5 Such a viewpoint is not only ahistorical but also reflects a poor grasp of Maori socio-political organization in the nineteenth century. There was no coherent entity known as the Maori people or nation at that time. Although a loose sense of Maori nationalism gradually took hold over the course of the nineteenth century, the primary forms of social structure were found elsewhere, in the iwi, hapu and whanau descent groups. These terms are often translated as ‘tribe’, ‘sub-tribe’ and ‘extended family’ respectively, implying a level of hierarchy that is belied by the fact that the hapu was the most important grouping for much of the nineteenth century. Hapu could and did pursue their own interests and with several dozen iwi around the country, each consisting of as many as ten or more hapu, a diverse, conflicting and oftentimes confusing range of agendas could be in play at any one time.6 In the decades before 1840, as many as 20,000 Maori were killed in a series of complex inter-tribal conflicts (dubbed the Musket Wars, after the introduction of European firearms) that spanned the length of New Zealand.7 One important legacy of these wars was a series of deep-seated rivalries between different hapu and iwi. It did not take much to re-ignite these animosities some decades later in the context of the New Zealand Wars. It is striking just how much the pattern of inter-tribal alliances and conflicts from the wars of the early nineteenth century were to be reflected in the later wars fought between the British and Maori. To take one example: in about 1807, members of the two tribes, Waikato and Ngati Maniapoto, fought and won a famous victory at Hingakaka against what has been described as one of the largest inter-tribal war parties ever assembled in New Zealand.8 Decades later many of their members fought together against British troops in the Waikato War.9 The notion that kupapa were akin to collaborators, with all of the negative cultural baggage that carries, is a deeply Eurocentric concept, implying as it does that Maori actions in the nineteenth century were entirely governed by and revolved around an imperial presence, rather than reflecting older and pre-existing tribal imperatives. Some Maori communities opted to ally themselves with the Crown out of a range of motives, few of which had anything to do with whether they supported the imperial project. Their cooperation with empire was not necessarily a form of endorsement and defies easy binary categorization of the ‘collaboration versus resistance’ kind. Cooperation might take many forms and stem from multiple and complex causes. As James Belich has commented:

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The motives of kupapa groups varied enormously, as did their degree of commitment to the British cause. The one common factor was that this commitment was never complete. The kupapa did not share British aims; they had their own, which seemed to them to be honourable and in their best interests. It was a matter of their aims intersecting with the British at certain points.10

Some Maori communities took an active combat role against other Maori deemed to be in ‘rebellion’ against the Crown. Their contributions became crucial as British Imperial troops were progressively withdrawn from the colony after 1865. Other Maori groups went out of their way to avoid taking part in the fighting. And some prominent rangatira (chiefs) considered to be kupapa were actually more like intermediaries, seeking to broker peace between the parties. Those Maori who actively assisted government forces on the whole did so not because they happened to identify with the Crown’s cause but because it suited their own strategic objectives. In this respect, they fought alongside the Crown rather than for it. These kupapa had their own battles to fight and their own reasons for fighting them. Tribal imperatives that determined such an alliance might include the kinds of older hapu and iwi rivalries alluded to above, besides the desire to prevent confiscation of their own lands by the Crown, securing payment and reward for their services, enhancing tribal mana (prestige or status) through victory on the battlefield, protecting existing trading networks, and in some cases, pure self-defence. One thing kupapa were not is passive tools of the Crown. A considerable degree of Maori agency was evident throughout the New Zealand Wars. In the remainder of this chapter, the motivations of particular communities, and the extent to which they demonstrated a willingness to actively assist the British cause, are examined in more detail. Overall, it is suggested, there was rarely any such thing as blind adherence to the Crown. At a fundamental level, the aspirations and objectives of those deemed kupapa or loyalists hardly differed from those of the hapu and iwi they fought against. All of the tribes and their leaders – regardless of whether nominally ‘loyal’ or ‘rebel’ – sought to retain sufficient lands for their own needs and expected to exercise authority over their communities, free from unsolicited interference on the part of the Crown. The difference was that some groups sought to achieve these objectives in alliance with the Crown (or at the very least did not wish to try to do so while engaged in war with it). Their cooperation with empire was purposeful, varied and selective. The decisions and actions of those deemed kupapa in the mid-nineteenth century reveal much about the persistence of a Maori worldview throughout the colonial era. And these notions of an alliance with the Crown fostered



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during the New Zealand Wars carried through into the twentieth century, when the most ‘loyal’ tribes were at the forefront of substantial Maori involvement in the two world wars – even as other iwi who had suffered invasion and land confiscations made clear (especially during the First World War) their bitterness at such brutal treatment by refusing to serve in the armed forces of the same Crown that had caused them so much misery.11 Whether the strategy of cooperation and alliance paid dividends for those groups who opted for such a path (or had it foisted upon them) is, however, a moot point. Although one historian has suggested that formerly kupapa Maori communities ‘mostly prospered’ in the wake of the wars,12 the evidence suggests altogether more limited gains. The dubious ‘loyalist’ and ‘rebel’ labels were, in any case, never fixed, and indiscriminate and ill-thought Crown policies and actions sometimes drove formerly kupapa Maori to take up arms against it. The supposed differences between kupapa and anti-government Maori had never been that great to begin with and the markers more artificial than real, making such a transition all the more feasible.

SOVEREIGNTY AND CHIEFLY AUTHORITY In 1840 the British Crown formally proclaimed sovereignty over the islands of New Zealand, after more than 500 chiefs had signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Yet all but a handful of rangatira (chiefs) signed a Maori-language version of the Treaty that appears to have stopped some way short of ceding outright sovereignty to the British Crown (kawanatanga, the term employed in the Treaty, is most commonly translated as ‘governorship’ or ‘governance’). Maori communities were promised tino rangatiratanga (‘fully chiefly authority’) over their lands and resources and clearly expected ongoing control over their own affairs. This tension between increasing Crown assertions of unbridled sovereignty and Maori expectations of continuing chiefly authority provided a key driver for the subsequent conflicts between the Crown and Maori.13 In the north of New Zealand, where contact and encounter with European whalers, traders, missionaries and others had been earliest and most sustained, these tensions were quick to come to a head after 1840. Maori there resented the imposition of customs duties, supplanting their own anchorage fees, along with the shift of the capital of the new colony from the Bay of Islands to Auckland. Both factors contributed to a sharp downturn in shipping trade further north and were seen to be contrary to the longstanding relationship between the Crown and the Ngapuhi tribe (a relationship that preceded the Treaty itself by nearly half a century).14

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Concerns over shoddy land dealings, and over the failure of European settlers to respect tapu (sacred) Maori sites, reflected a deeper anxiety that Ngapuhi independence and authority was being rapidly undermined.15 These concerns were shared by all northern Maori, only some of whom, famously led by Hone Heke, went on to take up arms against British forces between 1845 and 1846. Another group, headed by Tamati Waka Nene, were alarmed by Heke’s actions (he had felled the British flagstaff at Kororareka/Russell four times between July 1844 and March 1845) and calculated that, on balance, it was better to try and resolve their concerns without risking an open breach with the Crown. Both Maori groups were making some finely calibrated calculations, but Nene and his followers ultimately viewed Hone Heke as the greater threat to their own economic wellbeing.16 The ensuing war was one in which Nene and others nominally fought on the British side but in fact pursued their own war for their own reasons (at least some of which reflected existing inter-hapu rivalries between Nene and other Hokianga district chiefs against their Bay of Islands kin).17 And the fact that they were kin limited the extent to which Nene and his followers were prepared to actively take up arms. Cooperation with empire was in this instance carefully circumscribed and conditional. Some early battles fought without any British presence at all had ‘the character of restrained feuding, as befitted a contest for limited objectives between hapu of the same tribe’ and during engagements when they actually accompanied British troops, Nene and his men played a restricted part.18 Meanwhile, the majority of Ngapuhi remained neutral throughout the conflict, not wishing to commit themselves to either Hone Heke or Tamati Waka Nene (and certainly not to the British, who were almost irrelevant in this ‘war within a war’).19

THE MAORI KING While there were clearly a number of local dynamics at play in the Northern War, the underlying tension between sovereignty and rangatiratanga remained. An 1852 Constitution Act that provided for an elected assembly and responsible government excluded practically all Maori from participating in this new forum through a property qualification based exclusively on European land tenure.20 Denied any representation in Parliament, Maori explored alternative proposals, one of which involved electing a Maori king to promote better governance, control and unity within Maori communities. Senior Waikato rangatira Potatau Te Wherowhero was installed as first Maori king in 1858. Yet even within Waikato, the decision to elect a king



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had been far from unanimous. Wiremu Nera Te Awaitaia told one large meeting held in 1857 to debate the proposal that he had given his word to the first governor that he would stick with him and intended keeping his promise. Pointing to the Kingitanga party’s flag, he observed that ‘there is trouble in that flag. I am content with the old one [i.e. the Union Jack]. It is seen all over the world, and it belongs to me. I get some of its honour! What honour can I get from your flag? It is like a fountain without water’.21 The rangatira clearly viewed his relationship with the Crown as one that boosted rather than undermined his own mana and standing. On the other hand, the King’s flag promised nothing but trouble, and that was something that he could do without. Although leading proponents of the Kingitanga (Maori King Movement) denied that their intention was to challenge the Queen’s authority, they could never quite shake off the perception among some doubters that, in defying the might of the British empire, the Kingitanga was sowing the seeds of its own downfall. Local dynamics were also at play. Te Awaitaia and Te Wherowhero had been at the centre of a long-running land dispute at Whaingaroa between their respective hapu.22 Economic factors were also involved. Lower Waikato Maori closest to the lucrative market of Auckland (where produce and livestock of all kinds were traded) proved most resistant to recognizing the Kingitanga, while those further south were its greatest supporters. While the Kingitanga gained support from beyond the Waikato, many Maori shunned the movement. Tribal factors often proved decisive, as a result of which the Kingitanga never developed into the fully-fledged nationalist movement it might have aspired towards. Crown officials were not only happy to exploit pre-existing tribal rivalries to the utmost, but were also fully alive to the fact that many supposedly ‘friendly’ Maori were principally motivated by such factors. The premier, Alfred Domett, set this out clearly in a memorandum published in May 1863. Addressing the question of the ‘best mode of dealing with the “friendly Natives”’, Domett observed that: many of them may be safely relied on, especially those who have proved their fidelity to us, or which is nearly as satisfactory, their hostility to our foes, in past wars. Natives who have been generally considered as our friends, and who have a blood-feud or a land-feud of long standing with our enemies, may probably be relied on with much security, especially if they happen also to be the weaker of the two parties … Natives affected by motives like these might be safely entrusted with arms. It is perfectly true that persons acquainted with some even of these Natives may be found who entertain suspicions of them, and can cite circumstance enough to give colour to their suspicions. But we cannot look for any very hearty or zealous support from the Natives of our cause for its own sake.23

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Some officials advocated setting Ngapuhi on their old enemies the Waikato, in a clash that would pit the two largest iwi groups against one another. Tamati Waka Nene and other northern chiefs indicated their readiness to take up the fight, but amidst widespread distrust of their motives, and fears of arming such a large number of Maori, this offer was never taken up.24 In March 1860, British Imperial troops attacked Maori attempting to block the forcible survey of lands at Waitara that the Crown had purchased with only minority support from the owners, marking the start of the first Taranaki War. By the following month a ‘native auxiliary force’ had been approved. Yet the experiment proved a short-lived one, lasting just a few months.25 Although the conflict came to an inconclusive end the following year, fighting in Taranaki resumed several times after 1863. Under these circumstances, determining precisely who was or was not a ‘loyalist’ proved difficult, especially given differing types of engagement across several campaigns. The first Taranaki War had wider significance. Large numbers of Waikato Maori had gone to the aid of their Taranaki kin in 1860, not because they particularly cared about the fate of the 600-acre Pekapeka block, but because the dispute brought into relief the overarching issues of sovereignty and rangatiratanga discussed earlier.26 Their involvement in Taranaki, along with trumped-up talk of an imminent threat to the settlement of Auckland, later provided the basis for a British attack on Waikato that was intended to finally settle once and for all the question of Crown supremacy.27 When British Imperial troops invaded the Waikato district in July 1863 they did so with negligible support from local Maori. Some of those who might have been expected to at least remain neutral were almost literally driven into the arms of the Kingitanga by an edict issued just days before the invasion requiring all Maori living between Auckland and Waikato to either take an oath of allegiance to the Queen and surrender up all arms or otherwise retire into the Maori King’s territory south of the Mangatawhiri River. Nearly all of those living in this war zone opted to go back to their kin in the Waikato, a decision that might have been in part influenced by suggestions they would be required to fight for the Crown if they agreed to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria.28 There remained some local hapu within the settlement of Auckland itself. Yet in a climate of intense suspicion and mistrust, all Maori were vulnerable. Even ‘friendly’ chiefs walking the streets of Auckland were at risk of being abused or directly assaulted,29 prompting officials to draft a public warning in July 1863 as to ‘the great embarrassment to the Government caused by the indiscriminate suspicion with which all classes of Her Majesty’s native subjects are regarded by portions of the European



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population’.30 In the days preceding the invasion of the Waikato the government had itself issued orders that ‘no natives are allowed to come into the Town for the present’.31 A ban on the sale of any food and clothing to Maori was also contemplated.32 Wild rumours circulated by settlers warned that ‘after His Excellency has subdued the hostile natives he will then transport the friendly natives to some Island and brand them’.33 A nightly curfew was imposed on all Maori in the settlement, many of whom were encouraged to reside elsewhere, and it would seem that at some point ‘loyal’ Maori living within Auckland were issued with badges in order to identify them.34 Yet many Maori at this time defied easy categorization as ‘loyalist’/ ‘kupapa’ or ‘rebel’. An immediate priority for many families was to avoid getting caught up in the conflict.35 A number of Waikato hapu that had refused to commit to the Kingitanga did come to be identified as ‘loyalists’. Even here the situation was complex. A number of Wiremu Nera Te Awaitaia’s Ngati Mahanga kin were said to be so angered by his pro-Pakeha (European) stance that they had gone over to the Kingitanga in response.36 In other cases oral traditions record families deliberately dividing down the middle as a means of self-preservation, some going over to the Kingitanga side and others to the kupapa.37 Although there were some Waikato Maori considered ‘loyalists’, few took up combat duties during the 1863–1864 conflict. Rejecting the Kingitanga was one thing, but killing blood relations was another matter altogether. To the extent that ‘loyalist’ Maori assisted the British forces, it was generally in acting as guides or ferrying supplies up the Waikato River – important tasks in their own right, but nevertheless still part of a carefully circumscribed contribution to the British war effort. Lukewarm commitments were sometimes put to the test, resulting in a change of allegiances. In at least one instance, a garrison of kupapa Maori that came under attack at Camerontown in September 1863 offered only token resistance, before defecting en masse to the Kingitanga cause.38 Incidents such as these tended to reinforce the popular European perception that there was no such thing as a genuinely ‘loyal’ Maori.39 Critics of government policy found it troubling that some kupapa communities had been supplied with arms and ammunition, fearing that, even if particular rangatira remained committed to the Queen, they might find it impossible to control their supporters.40 Yet perhaps the most important role played by supposedly ‘loyalist’ rangatira such as Te Awaitaia was not in assisting the Crown but in acting as an intermediary between the parties. Rangatira were used to pass messages between the British and Kingitanga lines, sometimes on matters as minor as calling a temporary truce to allow for burial of the dead, but often in connection with the overall peace terms that might be

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offered. These men were more than just messengers but took an active role in seeking an end to the war, while having sufficient mana to be treated with respect on the Kingitanga side. Their overriding objective appears to have been less concerned with securing British victory than with bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible, thereby helping to minimize the overall damages sustained by the Waikato tribes.41 This was not so much a matter of cooperation as of containment. Ironically, that objective – ending the war as soon as possible – was one very much shared by Kingitanga leaders, who were, after all, waging a purely defensive campaign after being attacked by British troops. The problem was that the government was not prepared to accept anything less than unconditional submission and surrender. And however much Kingitanga leaders desired peace, dismantling the movement they had built and accepting the wholesale confiscation of Waikato lands went beyond what was palatable. On 2 April 1864, the Waikato campaign came to an end when the British inflicted a serious, though far from crippling, defeat on Maori at Orakau. The Kingitanga tribes retreated south of the Puniu River where, as James Belich memorably described it, for the next two decades they in effect operated as ‘an independent Maori state nearly two-thirds the size of Belgium’.42 Meanwhile, between 1864 and 1872 war spread elsewhere across the central North Island, drawing in new iwi and adding further to the complex matrix of tribal imperatives that determined how particular groups might respond.

WARFARE AFTER 1864 More distant hapu and iwi had the luxury of determining whether they wished to participate in the war. Those groups closest to the action were not so fortunate. Geography dictated that they would have to take a stance one way or the other. This was certainly the case with respect to the Te Arawa people of Rotorua and Maketu. With a few exceptions, they came to be seen as a staunchly pro-government iwi, going on to fight in a number of different campaigns before 1872. In reality Te Arawa’s hand was forced by news in 1864 that a large party of Maori from iwi and hapu to the south of them planned to make their way through Te Arawa territory to join in the fighting in Waikato. If Te Arawa leaders agreed to allow such a passage through their lands, then they would themselves be implicated in supposed ‘rebellion’ and thereby run the risk of Crown retribution. On the other hand, if they sought to block or oppose the group they were likely to incur the wrath of several powerful iwi.43



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Ultimately, Te Arawa leaders, having sought and received assurances from the Crown that they would not be abandoned or left exposed, declared that they would not allow the war party to pass through their lands. In effect, Te Arawa became kupapa by default, through the simple act of defending their own territory from assault. But once they had done so, fighting and repelling an 800-strong war party in the early months of 1864 at Rotoiti, Te Kaokaoroa and elsewhere, they found themselves drawn into an ever closer relationship with the Crown for their own protection. Ongoing cooperation was in this case largely a matter of self-preservation. Longstanding tribal rivalries with Waikato had seen most of Te Arawa turn their backs on the Kingitanga in the 1850s. But they now found themselves with a whole host of enemies and only one party they could turn to for assistance. Te Arawa as a whole had not gone to war so much as the war had come to them. Once it did, their geographical location meant Te Arawa would be in the thick of it for the next eight years. Yet allegiances were again not fixed in stone. Some of those who took part in repelling the invasion of their territory (thereby earning the label of ‘loyalists’, at least for a time) subsequently fought against the British at Te Ranga, near Tauranga, on 21 June 1864. One report noted that those concerned had explained that the earlier East Coast war party ‘came not only to attack the pakeha, but also the Arawa, and seeing their tribe in danger they joined the Arawas against the rebels; but the fight at Tauranga being solely against the pakeha, they took up arms on the side of the king’.44 Following the heavy Maori defeat at Te Ranga, some of those who had fought the British agreed to take an oath of allegiance, in some cases thereby probably changing their nominal status for the third time in as many months.45 The Arawa tribes found themselves surrounded by hostile iwi, many of whom vowed to seek utu (satisfaction) for their own chiefs slain in battle. And their enemies grew in numbers as Te Arawa men found themselves called upon to assist Crown forces many times over the next few years.46 Their own crops were left neglected as a result and their women and children at home exposed to attack from other iwi. Yet Crown assistance was minimal, perhaps because officials somewhat cynically calculated that Te Arawa by this time had no alternative but to support the government. Although some short-term rations were occasionally supplied, and ‘loyalists’ were later to receive 87,000 acres in land confiscated from ‘rebel’ iwi, throughout the late 1860s the people of Te Arawa paid dearly for their cooperation with the Crown. In 1867 one missionary described them as ‘heartily sick’ of the war, destitute and in a ‘sad state, the miserable effect of the war’. Regular outbreaks of typhoid and tuberculosis were attributed to poor food and sanitation. To make matters worse, that same year the

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Rotorua district came under direct attack from hostile Maori. Te Arawa had, in their own words, been ‘plunged into the midst of death regardless of consequences’.47 From 1867 onwards members of Te Arawa engaged in active service on behalf of the Crown began to receive more regular payments, at least improving this aspect of affairs.48 Yet this period happened to coincide with a new phase of the war in which ‘bush scouring’ was employed by both sides to destroy the homes and cultivations of enemy groups.49 Government officials and military officers became exasperated by Te Arawa efforts to conclude their own peace deals with tribal enemies. Reports of their ‘restlessness and dubious loyalty’ began to circulate.50 And yet, Te Arawa more than most held to the notion that they had entered into a genuine alliance with the Crown, one that required sacrifices on their part that they expected would be reciprocated by the government.51 Their alliance with the Crown was not a sham, but it was just that – an alliance entered into with strategic objectives in mind, in furtherance of tribal interests – and not simply a case of doing the Crown’s dirty work for it. Where the Crown was not perceived to be reciprocating, Te Arawa leaders were fully prepared to take their own path; and indeed, in the post-war period Te Arawa as a whole gained a reputation as among the most troublesome of the Crown’s allies. Their cooperation with empire was conditional rather than unqualified. Indiscriminate land confiscation left a legacy of bitterness, not just for those Maori condemned as ‘rebels’ (the supposed targets of confiscation) but also for the ‘loyalists’ who had been given unequivocal promises that their lands would be protected to them in full. The reality proved different and, once the full extent of confiscation became apparent, some formerly ‘loyal’ or neutral groups took up arms against the Crown.52 A general atmosphere of desperation across many North Island Maori communities provided fertile ground for the emergence of new millenarian faiths promising deliverance and a return to the lands of Canaan for true believers. The Pai Marire (‘good and peaceful’) religion, founded by Taranaki prophet Te Ua Haumene after a vision of the archangel Gabriel in 1862, was among the most influential of these new movements.53 It came to be viewed as a savage and fanatical movement among government officials and settlers, especially following the decapitation of British soldiers and the later killing of Opotiki missionary Carl Sylvius Völkner. Adherence to the Pai Marire (or Hauhau) faith came to be seen as synonymous with ‘rebellion’, regardless of whether or not those concerned had taken up arms. The wars were entering a phase in which it became much more difficult to remain neutral (or kupapa in its original sense). Polarizing pressures forced many Maori to take sides in a conflict they might otherwise have preferred to sit out.



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In the Whanganui district, economic factors appear to have been prominent in deciding which way particular communities would jump. When a group of mostly up-river Maori converts to the Pai Marire faith began descending on the township of Whanganui in May 1864, lower-river Maori, who gained most from the presence of the town in their midst, took up arms to block the movement. On 14 May, they fought and defeated the upriver group on the island of Moutoa, in the Whanganui River, killing more than fifty of their kin and losing sixteen of their own number. The settlers of Whanganui township were relieved enough to subsequently erect a monument (New Zealand’s first war memorial) ‘To the memory of those brave men who fell at Moutoa … in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism’. Lower Whanganui Maori had not risked their lives solely in defence of Europeans, much less law and order, but to protect their own economic interests and to defend tribal mana against kin threatening to destabilize their way of life.54 It was also feared that if they did not block the passage of the war party down the river, then all Whanganui Maori would be implicated in the attack on the settlers.55

THE WAR AT TURANGA Different factors were at play in areas only lightly settled by Europeans. The Turanga district (or Poverty Bay, as Captain Cook had called it after a fruitless stay there in 1769) was one such region. Although visited by Europeans from an early point, Turanga had long remained dominated by Maori; the first settlers to reside in the area were expected to marry into the local tribes and abide by their customs and laws.56 Turanga was a district in which the legal fiction of Crown sovereignty was just that – a fiction. Local Maori remained firmly in control, and it would take something dramatic to alter that state of affairs. The catalyst for change, and the ‘thin end of the wedge’ that some settlers had longed hoped for, was the arrival in the district of emissaries of the Pai Marire faith in March 1865. They had been sent by Te Ua Haumene to convey a token – a preserved Pakeha soldier’s head – to a local rangatira.57 Yet just days before their arrival at Turanga, some of the party had been implicated in Völkner’s murder.58 Local missionaries soon discovered, much to their horror, that there was ‘a general disposition to fraternize with these wretches’.59 The Pai Marire emissaries proved a sensation, and within weeks, large numbers of local Maori had converted to the new faith. Soon after, most settlers, along with the missionaries, had abandoned Turanga. At the end of April, the government issued a formal

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proclamation condemning the ‘fanatical sect, commonly called Paimarire’ and calling on ‘all well-disposed persons, whether Native or European’ to assist in its active suppression.60 The question was: how would Turanga Maori who had remained aloof from the Pai Marire movement respond to this call? Would they assist the Crown in its campaign, when to do so might jeopardize their own fiercely asserted independence and autonomy, opening the door for government intervention in the region? Significantly perhaps, in the Turanga region the old meaning of kupapa still held good, at least for a time. Turanga kupapa were neutral, while those who identified with the Crown were branded Kawanatanga (the government party).61 The number of the latter remained tiny, however, and the dominant outlook of many local Maori appears to have been summed up in the statement of Wiremu Kingi Te Paia early in May 1865: ‘If I join the Hauhaus there is evil; if I join the Governor there would be evil; therefore I remain neutral’.62 Maintaining such a balancing act became increasingly difficult and was complicated further by tribal politics. Late in May, Mokena Kohere from the Ngati Porou iwi to the north of Turanga hoisted a Union Jack on disputed land in the district. To object to the flag was to buy a fight with the Crown; to allow it to remain was to implicitly recognize Ngati Porou claims to mana and authority in the area.63 How to respond? According to one witness, local Maori were ‘afraid to bring on a disturbance for fear of embroiling themselves with the Govt’.64 Yet leading kupapa (neutral) chief Hirini Te Kani was soon threatening to join the Pai Marire party if the flag was not taken down, and Pai Marire supporters were thought likely to attack the tiny Kawanatanga faction if they did not remove the Union Jack.65 All was in a state of flux and confusion, which was no doubt precisely what Mokena Kohere had hoped to achieve through his actions. In June 1865, what began as a civil war between Pai Marire and antiPai Marire factions of the Ngati Porou tribe rapidly escalated – by virtue of the Crown’s decision to intervene – into a conflict between ‘rebel’ subjects and the Crown (supported by ‘loyalists’ along the East Coast). Some Pai Marire supporters from Turanga travelled north to assist their kin and some refugees from that conflict sought sanctuary at Turanga, further complicating the local picture. Meanwhile, local Pai Marire supporters went to great lengths to persuade remaining Europeans that their safety was assured. A deputation to one settler declared that ‘the Hauhau here will not molest you. We wish to remain at peace and protect our Pakeha friends, and trade with them as before’.66 Most local settlers were not interested in such reassurances: they wanted an excuse for the Crown to conquer Turanga and bring it under the rule of



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(English) law at last. Yet Mokena Kohere’s actions were beginning to backfire. Support for the Pai Marire faction was continuing to surge while even ‘professed Queen natives’ were said to be opposed to the flagstaff. Some Kawanatanga and kupapa Maori were reportedly holding regular communications with Pai Marire members.67 Matters remained fluid. News that the Ngati Porou Pai Marire group were on the back foot in their war further north prompted some kupapa to align themselves with the Kawanatanga party.68 Regardless of which nominal faction they belonged to, the key concern for most Turanga Maori at that time was to avoid bringing bloodshed to their own district. But in September 1865 a small party of military settlers and supplies of arms were landed at Turanga in an effort to persuade ‘Hirini & other waverers to join the Kawanatanga’.69 Soon after this, however, Hirini was said to have met with leading Pai Marire rangatira Raharuhi Rukupo, declaring his approval of the two groups fraternizing with one another and even suggesting that Rukupo should have half the soldiers who had been sent.70 Hirini denied these allegations, admitting only that he had told Rukupo that he would not join the fight if local Pai Marire remained quietly at home. Meanwhile, local Pai Marire leaders were said to be anxious that Turanga Kawanatanga keep quiet lest Ngati Porou should come and fight the Pai Marire, a prospect that neither party seemed to relish.71 Some observers calculated that if Ngati Porou were encouraged to attack the Pai Marire party at Turanga, it would force the hand of local Kawanatanga, compelling them to assist the invaders.72 However much some local Maori may have wished to, it was becoming increasingly difficult to remain neutral. Kupapa would have to become ‘loyalists’, as the new meaning of the term implied. With the East Coast war wrapped up by October, Crown troops and their Ngati Porou allies began to amass at Turanga. A ‘Notice to the loyal natives of Turanga’ was issued at about this time, warning against fraternization with the Hauhau.73 Local Maori could be for or against the government, but they would have to choose, and having done so were expected to cut all ties with those regarded as ‘the enemy’. Over the next few weeks local Maori of whatever nominal persuasion made desperate efforts to avoid fighting in their district. Their efforts were confounded by external parties – the Crown and its allies – who found the opportunity too great to resist. The government would never get a better chance to impose substantive sovereignty over Turanga. And so, on 17 November 1865, local Pai Marire holed up in the Waerenga-a-Hika pa (fortified position) were attacked by colonial troops and their Maori allies, surrendering some five days later after a siege in which at least seventy-one of their number were killed. Local Kawanatanga had been just as desperate

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as their nominal enemies to avoid the conflict. But once it began, they were expected to assist in the attack on Waerenga-a-Hika. This they did with considerable – and obvious – reluctance, reportedly throwing away their bullets (or by some accounts supplying them to the enemy), firing blank cartridges and remaining in a constant state of communication with those inside the pa.74 Clearly, this was not a war of religion or ideology between rival factions of the same tribe or tribes, but rather a war of conquest in which ‘[t]he ultimate victor is Europe; but the Ngati Porou, by shrewd calculation, earn … themselves a share … for the time being’.75 Kupapa (as in neutrals) had been squeezed out of the picture, forced to choose between the Kawanatanga and Pai Marire parties. But all local Maori shared an overriding concern to preserve their autonomy and to protect their lands and resources from external threats. In this context, the labels mattered little, since they had more in common than they had apart, and it was the actions of the Crown and its allies that proved decisive. Having fought and won their own civil war, before playing a major role in the conquest of Turanga, senior Ngati Porou rangatira such as Mokena Kohere and Rapata Wahawaha gained reputations as steadfast ‘loyalists’ of the Crown. Their alliance with the Crown was closer to the type of relationship that Te Arawa had forged than the kind of shotgun wedding that the Turanga Kawanatanga party had been forced to endure. Yet even for the groups that came to be most closely linked to the Crown, cooperation with empire remained selective and stemmed from particular tribal priorities and motivations. Just like Te Arawa, Ngati Porou fought for their own reasons and not those of the Crown. In fact, they soon made it clear that they had conquered the Turanga district not for the benefit of the Crown but in their own right. Immediately after the victory at Waerenga-a-Hika, Ngati Porou ‘went on a looting expedition’, seizing or destroying the property not just of local Maori but also committing ‘wanton destruction of Pakeha property’.76 The first claims for compensation were later filed in respect of their actions, alongside complaints that the ‘Hauhau fanatics could not have behaved worse’.77 It was customary after battle to muru (plunder) the property of those vanquished, and Ngati Porou were simply acting in accordance with this custom. Mokena Kohere had soon after battle ‘paraded all the prisoners … and commenced a war dance over them’.78 He did not take kindly to being informed that the prisoners were in the custody of the Crown, and not her allies. After all, Ngati Porou had old tribal scores to settle with the Turanga iwi. For one thing, Rapata Wahawaha had been captured and enslaved by Turanga tribe Rongowhakaata in the 1820s.79 Given the wherewithal and



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full blessing of the Crown in 1865 to return to Turanga and fight these same people, Rapata and his fellow chiefs did not require much persuading. In many respects, they were simply pursuing customary objectives using the new medium of the Crown. Although the government may have thought it was exploiting customary rivalries for its own ends, from the perspective of these rangatira they were the ones taking advantage of Crown assistance. Precisely whose war was being waged depended upon one’s vantage point. Almost exactly the same pattern of events followed more than three years later, when Ngati Porou again fought alongside Crown troops at Turanga, this time against the escaped prophet Te Kooti Ariki Te Turuki (one of those accused of supplying arms to the Pai Marire party in 1865) and his followers. Once again, the Ngati Porou party returned to their homes with considerable plunder. They demanded half of the Turanga district for services rendered, eventually having to settle for a smaller area of land that the Crown subsequently purchased from them. For the settlers of Turanga, any protection and security afforded by the presence of Ngati Porou in their midst was more than outweighed by what one writer at the time described as an organized system of ‘terrorism’.80 From a European perspective they had thrown their weight around rather too much, unwilling to accept the convenient fiction that they were merely the Queen’s soldiers, there to do her bidding.

CONCLUSION Ngati Porou ‘loyalists’ were no more passive pawns of the Crown than any of the other groups examined here. But it bears asking whether such groups ultimately achieved their objectives. Besides occasional short-term plunder, had alliance with the Crown paid the kinds of dividends expected? Clearly the answer to this question might vary from one iwi to another. Te Arawa had been motivated in part by concerns that their lands might be vulnerable to confiscation. In the event, some Arawa lands were subject to confiscation, though mostly those belonging to particular groups that were perceived to be ‘rebels’.81 Arguably a much larger area might have been confiscated had more Te Arawa fought against the Crown. On the other hand, in the Waikato district and elsewhere kupapa found their own lands confiscated, sometimes receiving back no more than one-tenth of what had been taken from them.82 So clearly, as a general rule, cooperation and alliance with the Crown was no guarantee that land would not be confiscated. Whether tribal mana or prestige was enhanced through engaging with the Crown is in some respects a subjective question. However, if land

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retention can be seen as in some respects an important component of overall tribal well-being, then how well did the ‘loyalist’ communities fare on this measure in the longer term? Direct comparisons are made difficult here by other variables involved. For example, Ngati Porou retained a higher proportion of their original estate than many other iwi. But it is difficult to say that was because they were ‘loyalists’ when much of their territory was rugged and remote. Other ‘loyalist’ groups owning better quality lands at lower Whanganui and elsewhere did not fare so well, losing all but a small fraction of their estates through the workings of the Native Land Court.83 Kupapa communities sometimes came under intense pressure to sell their lands to the Crown as a sign of ongoing allegiance. So again, it would appear difficult to say that overall land retention was aided by alliance with the Crown. If anything, it may have been the opposite. What of wider political goals? Did Te Arawa, Ngati Porou and other iwi secure the kind of genuine partnership with the Crown they hoped for? Were real and meaningful steps taken to recognize their tribal autonomy? Here, the answer seems more clear-cut. Four dedicated Maori parliamentary seats were created in 1867. At the time Maori were entitled to around fourteen or fifteen seats in the seventy-two-seat house on a population basis. But that would have allowed them too much power and influence and so was never a real prospect.84 In any case, the four MPs could achieve little in an assembly mostly hostile to Maori aspirations. At best, they were able to achieve modest concessions, such as occasionally securing inquiry into the most egregious land grievances. Although the seats were generally occupied by representatives of the ‘loyal’ tribes, frustration at the failure of Parliament to listen to reasonable Maori requests saw such iwi increasingly seeking to make common cause with their former ‘enemies’ by the late nineteenth century.85 Old tensions were not entirely healed but Maori were striving to overcome these in furtherance of common goals. There had been no meaningful devolution of rangatiratanga to the ‘loyalist’ tribes, though movements such as the Young Maori Party drew on a ‘loyalist’ framework that sought limited concessions in exchange for cooperation.86 Apirana Ngata, heavily involved in the Young Maori Party at the turn of the twentieth century, much later described Maori involvement in the Second World War as ‘The Price of Citizenship’, reflecting a similar ethos and expectation.87 Yet many Maori increasingly came to feel that the price paid was much higher than the gains reaped.88 In that sense, post-war disillusionment constituted the ultimate repudiation of the ‘loyalist’ approach, giving rise to the emergence by the 1970s of ‘kupapa’ as almost the ultimate in Maori insults. Although former ‘rebels’ hardly fared better in the long-term,89 at least their descendants



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were not inheritors of labels like ‘kupapa’ that have come to assume such a derogatory meaning. In this respect the New Zealand Wars of the nineteenth century continue to exert a powerful and unwanted legacy today. Cooperation with empire could take many forms. In the New Zealand context, a label that is today synonymous with traitor has been shown to encompass a range of positions. Those different stances shared at least one thing: kupapa were not ‘Uncle Toms’. Far from selling out their people, such parties were endeavouring to advance the interests of their community through strategic alliance with the Crown. They did so out of a variety of motives, few of which had much to do with whether they supported the imperial project (though sometimes more immediate economic factors entered the equation). In this regard, the binary model of collaboration versus resistance is unhelpful. Cooperation was selective and purposeful. It did not imply any kind of abandonment of uniquely Maori priorities and outlooks. To cooperate with the Crown was not to desert the Maori cause, especially given the continuing primacy of tribal imperatives. On the overarching issues, most Maori in the nineteenth century shared common concerns. They cautiously embraced European settlement for the benefits it was expected to bring but were conscious of ensuring they retained sufficient lands for their own needs while also maintaining a degree of autonomy over the administration of their affairs. Different individuals and groups chose divergent paths towards a similar or shared endpoint. Recognition of these realities can contribute not only to a more nuanced understanding of the nature of indigenous responses to imperialism, but at a practical level might one day assist in lifting the stigma sometimes still unfairly attached to iwi and hapu considered kupapa. Dr Vincent O’Malley is Director of HistoryWorks, Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of a number of books on New Zealand history, including most recently The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (Bridget Williams Books, 2016).

NOTES   1. S. Hamilton, ‘Should “kupapa” be a swear word?’, Reading the Maps Blog, 9 July 2011 (http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/should-kupapa-beswear-word.html).   2. M. Soutar, ‘Kupapa: A Shift in Meaning’, He Pukenga Korero: A Journal of Maori Studies 6 (2011), 35–39.  3. Taranaki Herald, 22 February 1862.

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 4. Wellington Independent, 12 August 1862. Another report from 1864 suggested that ‘rebel’ Maori had themselves begun applying the label to those they considered ‘Queen natives’. New Zealand Herald, 17 June 1864.   5. See, for example, ‘Collaborators: Kupapa’, Te Iwi o Aotearoa 33 (1990), 3.   6. A. Ballara, Iwi: The Dynamics of Maori Tribal Organisation from c. 1769 to c. 1945 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998). Here, the term tribe encompasses both iwi and hapu, depending on the context.   7. J. Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), 157.   8. A. Ballara, Taua: ‘Musket Wars’, ‘Land Wars’ or Tikanga? Warfare in Maori Society in the Early Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), 288–91.   9. V. O’Malley, ‘Te Rohe Potae Political Engagement, 1840–1863’, report commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal (Wellington, 2010), 28. 10. J. Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), 212. 11. See P.S. O’Connor, ‘The Recruitment of Maori Soldiers, 1914–18’, Political Science 19 (1967), 48–83. 12. M. King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), 222. 13. On the Treaty, see C. Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987); R.M. Ross, ‘Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Text and Translations’, New Zealand Journal of History 6 (1972), 129–57; P. Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830–1847 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977); V. O’Malley, B. Stirling and W. Penetito (eds), The Treaty of Waitangi Companion: Maori and Pakeha from Tasman to Today (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010). 14. R. Johnson, ‘The Northern War, 1844–1846’, report commissioned by the CFRT (Wellington, 2006), 65–70. On the Ngapuhi relationship with the Crown from the 1790s, see V. O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642–1840 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012); A. Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans, 1773–1815 (Auckland: Penguin, 1997). 15. G. Phillipson, ‘Bay of Islands Maori and the Crown, 1793–1853’, report commissioned by the CFRT (Wellington, 2005), 320–28. 16. Belich, New Zealand Wars, 35–36. 17. Phillipson, ‘Bay of Islands Maori’, 359. 18. Belich, New Zealand Wars, 35. 19. Ibid.; Johnson, ‘Northern War’, 218. 20. B.J. Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, 1855–1870 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), 80. 21. Southern Cross, 5 June 1857. 22. Auckland Examiner, 16 March 1859. 23. Alfred Domett, Memorandum for Ministers, 23 May 1863, Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (hereafter AJHR), 1863, E-7A, 7–8 (emphasis in the original).



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24. Tamati Waka Nene and others to Governor Grey, 8 June 1863, Te Karere Maori/ Maori Messenger, 28 September 1863; V. O’Malley, ‘English Law and the Maori Response: A Case Study from the Runanga System in Northland, 1861–65’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 116 (2007), 14. 25. R.I.M. Burnett, ‘Kupapas’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 74 (1965), 227. 26. Belich, New Zealand Wars, 79. 27. The official British justification for the invasion of Waikato is examined in V. O’Malley, ‘Choosing Peace or War: The 1863 Invasion of Waikato’, New Zealand Journal of History 47 (2013), 39–58. 28. Henry Sewell, Journal, 19 July 1863, qMS-1787, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (hereafter ATL); J. Rutherford, Sir George Grey, K. C. B., 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government (London: Cassell, 1961), 488. 29. See, for example, Henry Munro (Native Office), Memorandum, 3 June 1863, IA 1/1863/1712, Archives New Zealand, Wellington (hereafter Archives NZ). 30. T. Russell, Draft public notice, 30 July 1863, J 1/1863/769, Archives NZ. It is not clear whether the notice was subsequently issued. 31. Grey, Memorandum to Ministers, 9 July 1863, G 35/1, Archives NZ. 32. Grey, Memorandum to Ministers, 24 August 1863, G 35/1, Archives NZ. 33. James Armitage to F.D. Fenton, 1 August 1863, J 1/1863/769, Archives NZ. 34. J.E. Gorst, The Maori King, or The Story of Our Quarrel with the Natives of New Zealand (London: Macmillan, 1864), 376; ‘Auckland: Lament for the Lost’, New Zealand Herald, 25 August 2010. 35. Waitangi Tribunal, The Hauraki Report (Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2006), 227. 36. O’Malley, ‘Te Rohe Potae Political Engagement’, 417. However, the rangatira had described himself as ‘neutral’ in 1861. Thomas Gore Browne, Diary, 19 June 1861, ADCZ 17006 W5431/4, Archives NZ. 37. V. O’Malley, ‘Te Rohe Potae War and Raupatu’, report commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington, 2010, 417. 38. Belich, New Zealand Wars, 136. 39. Otago Witness, 11 September 1863; Daily Southern Cross, 14 September 1863; Colonist, 15 September 1863. 40. For example: R.O. Stewart to Colonel Haultain and Robert Graham, 25 August 1860, IA 1/1860/1802, Archives NZ. 41. O’Malley, ‘Te Rohe Potae War and Raupatu’, chapter 2. 42. Belich, New Zealand Wars, 306. 43. V. O’Malley and D. Armstrong, The Beating Heart: A Political and Socio-Economic History of Te Arawa (Wellington: Huia, 2008), 67–68. 44. Daily Southern Cross, 7 July 1864. 45. Daily Southern Cross, 17 September 1864. 46. Full details of the campaigns can be found in J. Cowan, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period, 2 vols (Wellington: Government Printer, 1983).

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47. Poihipi Tukairangi and eight others to the General Assembly, 25 July 1866, AJHR, 1866, G-6, 2. 48. Such payments formed part of an ultimately unsuccessful wider strategy to regularize –and detribalize– kupapa Maori contributions to the war effort. Belich, Making Peoples, 244. 49. O’Malley and Armstrong, The Beating Heart, 79–80. 50. Donald McLean to H.T. Clarke, 22 July 1869, AGG-A 1/5/69/520, Archives NZ. 51. See, for example, H.T. Clarke to J.C. Richmond, 30 March 1867, AJHR, 1867, A-20, 54. 52. On confiscation (raupatu) generally, see R. Boast and R.S. Hill (eds), Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009). 53. See P. Clark, ‘Hauhau’: The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1975); B. Elsmore, Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand (Tauranga: Moana Press, 1989). 54. See D. Young, Woven by Water: Histories from the Whanganui River (Wellington: Huia, 1998), 54–65. 55. Waitangi Tribunal, ‘The Whanganui River Report’ (Wellington: GP Publications, 1999), 151–52. 56. See, for example, H. Wardell to Native Secretary, 20 September 1861, AJHR, 1862, E-7, 30–31. 57. Clark, ‘Hauhau’, 19. 58. Notably, Kereopa Te Rau, who was pursued by Crown forces for years in consequence, eventually being captured in November 1871 and hanged (following a deeply flawed trial) in January 1872. V. O’Malley, ‘Frontier Justice? The Trial and Execution of Kereopa Te Rau’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 120 (2011), 183–91. 59. William Williams, Journal, 14 March 1865, Williams Family Papers, MSPapers-0069-049, ATL. 60. New Zealand Gazette 14 (29 April 1865), 129. 61. M. Soutar, ‘Ngati Porou Leadership: Rapata Wahawaha and the Politics of Conflict’ (dissertation, Massey University, Palmerston North, 2000), 20. 62. Notes of a Meeting Held at Te Whakato, 4 May 1865, Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1866 [3601], 102. 63. K. Sanderson, ‘Maori Christianity on the East Coast, 1840–1870’, New Zealand Journal of History 17 (1983), 178. 64. W.L. Williams, Journal, 24 May 1865, MS-Copy-Micro-0628, ATL, cited in Waitangi Tribunal, Turanga Tangata, Turanga Whenua: The Report on the Turanganui a Kiwa Claims (Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2004), 71. 65. J.W. Harris to Donald McLean, 24 May 1865, McLean Papers, MSPapers-0032-327, ATL; J. Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), 44. 66. J.W. Harris to Donald McLean, 7 August 1865, McLean Papers, MSPapers-0032-327, ATL. 67. J.W. Harris to Donald McLean, 24 July 1865, IA 1/1865/2054, Archives NZ.



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68. W.H. Oliver and J.M. Thomson, Challenge and Response: A Study of the Development of the Gisborne East Coast Region (Gisborne: East Coast Development Research Association, 1971), 92; K.S. Neal, ‘Maori Participation in the East Coast Wars, 1865–1872: Local Politics and Greater Commitments’ (MA thesis, University of Auckland, Auckland, 1976), 31. 69. Donald McLean to William Williams, 13 September 1865, McLean Papers, MS-Papers-0032-019, ATL. 70. W.L. Williams, Journal, 14 September 1865, MS-Copy-Micro-628-1, ATL. 71. W.L. Williams to Donald McLean, 18 September 1865, McLean Papers, MSPapers-0032-641, ATL. 72. J.W. Harris to Donald McLean, 16 October 1865, McLean Papers, MSPapers-0032-327, ATL. 73. ‘Notice to the loyal natives of Turanga’, n.d., Williams Family Papers, MSPapers-0069-049, ATL. 74. Fraser to McLean, 21 November 1865, AJHR, 1886, A-6, 3; J.C. St. George, Diary, 20-22 November 1865, MS-Copy-Micro-0514, ATL. 75. Oliver and Thomson, Challenge and Response, 94. 76. W.L. Williams, Journal, 19 December 1865, MS-Copy-Micro-628-1, ATL. 77. J.W. Harris to Donald McLean, 25 November 1865, MS-Papers-0032-327, ATL. 78. St. George, Diary, 23 November 1865, ATL. 79. S. Oliver, ‘Rapata Wahawaha’, in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 5 vols (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990), vol. 1, 568. 80. Hawke’s Bay Herald, 30 January 1869. 81. Waitangi Tribunal, He Maunga Rongo: Report on Central North Island Claims (Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2008), 246–81. 82. Daily Southern Cross, 23 January 1867. 83. For comparative data on land loss across different districts, see A. Ward, National Overview: Waitangi Tribunal Rangahaua Whanui Series (Wellington: GP Publications, 1997), vol. 3. 84. M.P.K. Sorrenson, ‘A History of Maori Representation in Parliament (Appendix B)’, in Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System: Towards a Better Democracy (Wellington, 1986), 18–21. 85. See K. Sinclair, Kinds of Peace: Maori People After the Wars, 1870–85 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991); J.A. Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891–1909 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969); V. O’Malley, Agents of Autonomy: Maori Committees in the Nineteenth Century (Wellington: Huia, 1998). 86. R.S. Hill, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1900-1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), 43–47. 87. A.T. Ngata, The Price of Citizenship: Ngarimu, V. C. (Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1943). 88. R.S. Hill, Maori and the State: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950–2000 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009).

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89. However, there is some evidence that Maori living in areas largely closed to European settlement for a time, such as the King County or Urewera, did outperform other Maori demographically, at least until such areas were opened up to colonization from the late nineteenth century. M.P.K. Sorrenson, ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 65 (1956), 183–99; I. Pool, Te Iwi Maori: A New Zealand Population Past, Present and Projected (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991), 62–64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, P. Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830–1847. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977. Ballara, A. Iwi: The Dynamics of Maori Tribal Organisation from c. 1769 to c. 1945. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998.  . Taua: ‘Musket Wars’, ‘Land Wars’ or Tikanga? Warfare in Maori Society in the Early Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Penguin, 2003. Belich, J. The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986.  . Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Penguin, 1996. Binney, J. Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995. Boast, R. and R.S. Hill (eds). Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Burnett, R.I.M. ‘Kupapas’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 74 (1965), 227–30. Clark, P. ‘Hauhau’: The Pai Marire Search for Maori Identity. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1975. Cowan, J. The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period. Wellington: Government Printer, 1983. Dalton, B.J. War and Politics in New Zealand, 1855–1870. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967. Elsmore, B. Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand. Tauranga: Moana Press, 1989. Gorst, J.E. The Maori King, or The Story of Our Quarrel with the Natives of New Zealand. London: Macmillan, 1864. Hill, R.S. State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/ Aotearoa, 1900–1950. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004.  . Maori and the State: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950–2000. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Johnson, R. ‘The Northern War, 1844–1846’, report commissioned by the CFRT. Wellington, 2006. King, M. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin, 2003.



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Neal, K.S. ‘Maori Participation in the East Coast Wars, 1865–1872: Local Politics and Greater Commitments’, MA thesis, Auckland: University of Auckland, 1976. Ngata, A.T. The Price of Citizenship: Ngarimu, V. C. Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1943. O’Connor, P.S. ‘The Recruitment of Maori Soldiers, 1914–18’, Political Science 19 (1967), 48–83. O’Malley, V. Agents of Autonomy: Maori Committees in the Nineteenth Century. Wellington: Huia, 1998.  . ‘English Law and the Maori Response: A Case Study from the Runanga System in Northland, 1861–65’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 116 (2007), 7–33.  . ‘Te Rohe Potae Political Engagement, 1840–1863’, report commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington, 2010.  . ‘Te Rohe Potae War and Raupatu’, report commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington, 2010.  . ‘Frontier Justice? The Trial and Execution of Kereopa Te Rau’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 120 (2011), 183–91.  . The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642–1840. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012.  . ‘Choosing Peace or War: The 1863 Invasion of Waikato’, New Zealand Journal of History 47 (2013), 39–58. O’Malley, V. and D. Armstrong, The Beating Heart: A Political and Socio-Economic History of Te Arawa. Wellington: Huia, 2008. O’Malley, V., B. Stirling and W. Penetito (eds). The Treaty of Waitangi Companion: Maori and Pakeha from Tasman to Today. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010. Oliver, W.H. and J.M. Thomson. Challenge and Response: A Study of the Development of the Gisborne East Coast Region. Gisborne: East Coast Development Research Association, 1971. Oliver, S. ‘Rapata Wahawaha’, in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 5 vols. Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990, vol. 1, 568. Orange, C. The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Phillipson, G. ‘Bay of Islands Maori and the Crown, 1793–1853’, report commissioned by the CFRT. Wellington, 2005. Pool, I. Te Iwi Maori: A New Zealand Population Past, Present and Projected. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991. Ross, R.M. ‘Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Text and Translations’, New Zealand Journal of History 6 (1972), 129–57. Rutherford, J. Sir George Grey, K. C. B., 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government. London: Cassell, 1961. Salmond, A. Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans, 1773– 1815. Auckland: Penguin, 1997. Sanderson, K. ‘Maori Christianity on the East Coast, 1840–1870’, New Zealand Journal of History 17 (1983), 166–84.

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Sinclair, K. Kinds of Peace: Maori People After the Wars, 1870–85. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991. Sorrenson, M.P.K. ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 65 (1956), 183–99.  . ‘A History of Maori Representation in Parliament (Appendix B)’, in Report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System: Towards a Better Democracy, Wellington, 1986, 18–21. Soutar, M. ‘Ngati Porou Leadership: Rapata Wahawaha and the Politics of Conflict’. Dissertation, Massey University, Palmerston North, 2000.  . ‘Kupapa: A Shift in Meaning’, He Pukenga Korero: A Journal of Maori Studies 6 (2011), 35–39. Waitangi Tribunal. The Whanganui River Report. Wellington: GP Publications, 1999.  . Turanga Tangata, Turanga Whenua: The Report on the Turanganui a Kiwa Claims. Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2004.  . The Hauraki Report. Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2006.  . He Maunga Rongo: Report on Central North Island Claims. Wellington: Legislation Direct, 2008. Ward, A. National Overview: Waitangi Tribunal Rangahaua Whanui Series. Wellington: GP Publications, 1997. Williams, J.A. Politics of the New Zealand Maori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891–1909. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. Young, D. Woven by Water: Histories from the Whanganui River. Wellington: Huia, 1998.

Chapter 6

‘Collaboration’ or Sabotage? The Settlers in German Southwest Africa between Colonial State and Indigenous Polities Matthias Häußler

} State structures were already in place when settlers – except for a few early ‘pioneers’ – disembarked in German Southwest Africa (GSWA).1 This chapter examines the particular role settlers played in a state-centred colonization organized by an authoritarian state and accentuates their ambiguous relationship with the authorities, which ranged from ‘collaboration’ to proper sabotage.2 Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen have rightly distinguished this type of settlement from earlier, more or less inadvertent forms which were characterized by higher degrees of formal settler autonomy.3 Historically, each of these types of settlement possessed its own potential for violence and destruction. Time and again, unleashed settler violence culminated in the depopulation of entire regions, while state authorities occasionally exerted a moderating influence on these processes. Yet, throughout history states were the main agents of mass destruction, as they had the power and other resources to sustain extensive genocidal campaigns. But instead of being mutually exclusive, settler violence and state violence could combine, and herein lies the particular relevance of the case of GSWA: it provides an insight into how they combined and how their specific destructive potentials merged with each other, accumulating in synergy and eventually culminating in genocide. More precisely, it suggests that settlers who were backed by a state and could count on its support were particularly prone to resort to violence in order to assert their 169

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claims, thereby undermining the official policy and provoking conflicts in the course of which the full destructive force of the state could be released. This is what is meant by ‘ambiguous relationship’. This argument needs some clarification. Despite all rhetoric to the contrary, colonial rule differed considerably from political rule in Europe. To put it lightly, governmental bodies and state actors overseas tended to step out of character, i.e. out of the hierarchies of what Max Weber termed the ‘rational legal authority’ which characterizes political rule in vast parts of Europe during the late nineteenth century. Colonial rule hardly ever conformed to the legal standards established in the mother countries, but tended to be despotic, ‘personal’ and violent.4 At the same time, the colonial state was a weak state. While state authorities in GSWA reserved political decision-making for themselves, they hardly ever had the actual power to enforce their decisions and to implement the official policy. Settlers fit even less into the patterns of modern state authority. As Lorenzo Veracini has pointed out, they came as ‘founders of political orders and [carried] their sovereignty with them’.5 In GSWA they took far-reaching liberties, thus further undermining state power. However authoritarian German rule might have been elsewhere, the colonial state was unable – and, to some degree, unwilling – to control its subjects. Eventually, the long-serving governor Leutwein had to admit that the authorities had been ‘powerless’ in the face of the settlers’ actions.6 The behaviour of these colonists was far from civic and, above all, far from merely civilian in nature. Therefore, they obviously do not represent ‘ideal prefabricated collaborators’, as Ronald Robinson characterized white colonists with regard to other regions, although they surely did promote the German conquest of Southwest Africa.7 This case differs in at least one crucial aspect from the ones addressed by Robinson. While Robinson refers to colonists who represented relatively independent agents, this was not the case here. The colonists did not set foot on Southwest African soil before colonial rule had been established and thus were always politically and economically dependent on the state. They were not independent, ‘local’ collaborators helping the state gain a foothold. Instead, they themselves counted on state support to establish themselves, a support that entailed the subjection and dispossession of the autochthonous groups. This state of affairs makes for a specific relationship between settlers and state, marked simultaneously by a distinct closeness and a striking distance, thus generating a massive amount of violence. Although Imperial Germany possessed enormous resources, it would not deploy them in the colonies unless indigenous groups seriously challenged its domination. Settlers learned how to benefit from this



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mechanism, simultaneously asserting their claims against the indigenous population and the state, and thus playing their antagonists off against each other. The first part of this chapter will outline to what extent German settlers in Southwest Africa developed a true ‘African’ identity and what this emerging identity entailed. Two opponents were crucial to the settlers’ self-perception, as well as to their economic and political interests: first and foremost, there was the irreconcilable conflict with the autochthonous groups, in other words, the situation coloniale as described by Georges Balandier; second, there was the ever-present conflict with the state authorities. The whole colonizing venture aimed at white settlement, making settlers the key element, if not the actual aim, of the conquest. Conversely, settlers depended on the state and its colonizing efforts, as they could not subdue the autochthonous groups, comprising thousands of well-equipped warriors. The stage was set for cooperation, but it did not quite work out. Therefore, the second part of the chapter will explore how the settlers pursued their own goals. From 1897–1898 onwards, the power balance shifted towards the colonizers, a fact that seems to have had a considerable impact on the settlers’ conduct. Although the latter never tired of pursuing ‘tactics’ which may appear to belong to the repertoire of civil society, these ‘tactics’ increasingly gave way to mere violence. The authorities did not seem willing to meet the settlers’ peaceful demands, but violence and counterviolence forced them to intervene in the settlers’ favour. To conclude, I will further elucidate the nature of ‘collaboration’ between the settlers and the authorities.

THE SETTLERS’ EMERGING IDENTITY German colonial rule over Southwest Africa was short-lived, lasting from 1884 until 1915. Notwithstanding this fact, ‘colonial society’8 started to become estranged from its original society at a very early stage. Within a few years, colonizers developed a proper ‘African’ identity. However small, colonial society was characterized by manifold social distinctions, for instance between rural and urban areas or between various professional groups; the following considerations will focus primarily on farmers who are commonly regarded as the ‘key figures’ of settler colonialism in GSWA.9 An infrastructure to satisfy European demands, including a network of roads and water supply, had yet to be created in the colony. Private initiative was crucial to its development.10 This is why settlers prided themselves

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on their pioneering attitude, and having borne the actual brunt of the colonizing work.11 As they saw it, they bore the major risks, not the other members of colonial society; they invested their manpower, their fortune and, as the rebellions of 1904 showed, eventually even their lives. In short, they had put in way too much to leave everything behind in the blink of an eye, as many of their fellow colonizers could. In contrast to many officers and officials, settlers developed a profound bond with the country, which became their homeland. Contemporaries could not help noting the settlers’ ‘boundless patriotism for their adoptive fatherland’.12 Officers and officials ‘came and went’, as a farmer once stated.13 They primarily served the empire and remained part of hierarchies rooted in Europe. Obviously, it was much easier for them to leave the colony behind and return to Europe. Therefore, they were never officially considered as part of the ‘population’, which was a fiercely disputed term at that time.14 As a matter of fact, there was a great deal of fluctuation among officers and officials and many of them remained strangers to the colony.15 This was especially true of the large number of officers who came to GSWA solely on the occasion of war. A general colonial pattern, touched upon by Hubert Lyautey, occurred in the German dominion:16 the prospect of war induced many officers to join the colonial forces; ignorant and indifferent to the needs of the colony and its population, they would recklessly plunge it into ruin to satisfy their ambitions. However, ruthless ambition was not the only problem. The officers regarded the Empire and its elites as their true ‘clients’, to put it in Samuel Huntington’s term, not the colony and its population.17 This gave rise to severe problems, since the interests of the two sides were not at all congruent. The wars against the Herero and Nama (1904– 1908) brought to light the gap between empire and colony, as the needs of the colonial economy and the colonists played at best a secondary role to the empire and its strategic planning. First and foremost, the empire aspired to military prestige and set all other interests aside for this cause, even if this attitude brought about the destruction of all colonial resources, as can be seen from General von Trotha’s ruthless campaign against the Herero. What was the settlers’ identity based on? An individual who had embarked on an austere colonial life and faced the inconveniences of an inhospitable landscape and a hostile autochthonous population would confidently consider himself an Alter Afrikaner. This term underlined the settlers’ alienation from their homeland. At the same time, German ethnicity was frequently emphasized and remained crucial to the identity of the settlers who never grew tired of emphasizing the distinction between them



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and Boers or Britons. Nevertheless, this distinction should not be overrated; after all, all of the aforementioned were ‘white’. Skin colour appeared to be far more important than any subtle national, confessional or social differentiation within the ‘white’ community.18 However, if national belonging was held onto, it had no narrow political but rather a wider cultural meaning. Settlers considered themselves Germans, but surely not German subjects. Allegiance to the original homeland was divided, to say the least. Alte Afrikaner were characterized by self-reliance, industriousness and persistence, combined with a certain frugality and unpretentious bearing.19 However, the frugality ‘white’ people could afford to display was limited. ‘Africanization’ was a ‘balancing act between adaption and defence’, as Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber has rightly noted.20 Frugality and modesty were highly esteemed virtues, but negligence or indifference towards a ‘civilized’ lifestyle were condemned as manifestations of ‘regression’ which threatened to blur the dividing line between ‘white’ and actual Africans. To the ‘whites’, nothing was as abhorrent as ‘going native’ because it called into question the alleged superiority their rule was based on. The reason why Boers were held in such low esteem among German settlers was precisely the extent to which they had adapted to the country and to which they were alienated from European ‘civilization’.21 The process of ‘indigenization’ did not imply that settlers had turned into actual Africans, yet nevertheless served to mark their alienation from their origin.22 Within a few years, German settlers in Southwest Africa developed a proper identity, distinguishing them from those who had simply remained behind – or German subjects like the many officials and officers in the colony. This highlights the fact that settlers should be considered as an independent factor of colonization. As will be shown, they were engaged in a constant two-front battle, against the indigenous population on the one hand and state authorities on the other. These two opponents were crucial to their self-perception and interests.

THE BASIC CONFLICT: THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN SETTLERS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE According to Georges Balandier’s concept of the situation coloniale, social life in the colonies was marked by an irreconcilable antagonism between the conquerors and the subjected. Their co-existence was upheld by constant threats of violence, which further widened the gap between them.23 Southwest African settlers claimed to be experiencing a ‘race struggle’, which could not be compared to any conflict among ‘whites’ in Europe, not even

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to class struggle.24 Daily life was characterized by anxiety and suspicion, the ‘whites’ being alert to any sign of rebellion, the ‘case of emergency’ – a fear that had already disappeared in contemporary European societies.25 The military forts scattered all over the colony highlight this point: they were not designed to fend off European enemies equipped with artillery, but an enemy far less well-equipped – the enemy within, the autochthonous people.26 The security situation was aggravated by the extensive stock breeding that was common in Southwest Africa. It meant that farmers and their families lived far apart from each other amidst indigenous ‘enemies’.27 Such circumstances regularly led to the rise of rumours and mass hysteria among the ‘whites’ of South Africa;28 Southwest Africa, too, was notorious for its rumours and ‘stories’.29 More often than not, colonial conquests were characterized by utter brutality. The specific premise of settler colonialism made the situation even more serious. As Dirk Moses has pointed out, settler conquest amounted to a zero-sum game: what the conquerors had appropriated to themselves was irrevocably lost to the indigenous peoples.30 Settlers themselves considered their penetration as a ‘violation’, which consisted in ‘wrenching property and land from the indigenous population’. They expected to arouse the indigenous people’s ‘unbridled hatred’ and thus regarded the latter as a ‘constant threat’.31 ‘Race struggle’, however, did not necessarily involve genocide. To be precise, the option of exterminating whole autochthonous groups was not ruled out categorically in Southwest African settler discourse, but it was advanced ‘only’ when a specific group (like the Witbooi) had proved recalcitrant and not sufficiently productive in the eyes of the conquerors. Hence, under certain circumstances the need for indigenous labour could set limits to settler violence. Settlers opposed General von Trotha’s genocidal campaign against the Herero because they depended on their labour. Nevertheless, there was considerable potential for the ‘race struggle’ to escalate due to its existential character; in contrast to many officers, settlers did not take up arms for the sake of glory or the Kaiser but when they felt that their existence was at stake. Even though Southwest African settlers opted for co-existence with some autochthonous groups, this co-existence did not imply any equality nor any form of cooperation whatsoever. The indigenous peoples were to be ‘absolutely subjected’.32 ‘Race struggle’ meant a permanent, endless struggle, as the context of this demand illustrates. It was advanced at a time when the last remnants of the Herero nation were vegetating in concentration camps facing extermination. This was the time when systematic segregation was initiated.33



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THE SETTLERS’ SELF-CONFIDENCE State authorities reserved for themselves the right to make decisions on key issues of colonial policy and did not hesitate to defy settler demands. This attitude gave rise to conflicts in the course of which settlers initially resorted to measures of peaceful civil resistance. Settlers rejected any form of governmental patronizing.34 The mother country’s influence was considered an ‘annoying restraint’, the link to it a ‘restrictive fetter’.35 Moreover, settlers demanded ‘independence’ and claimed a right to ‘self-government’, aiming more or less blatantly at the democratization of political rule in the colony.36 The subversive tendencies among settlers were closely linked with a specific habitus. For many settlers, the original desire to move to a remote, unknown part of the world had been motivated by the urge to be free and get rid of the patronizing restrictions imposed on entrepreneurship and social advancement in Wilhelmine society. Whether or not that had been the case, their obvious contribution to the creation of the colonial infrastructure increased their confidence in dealing with the authorities.37 Moreover, the colony was thinly populated and farmers, the key figures of Southwest African identity,38 lived in relative isolation. Therefore, they had to be able to think and fend for themselves, making them even more suspicious of authority.39 In everyday life, a farmer was his own master, ruling like ‘a little king’ on his property and rarely having to comply with any regulations and formalities.40 The colony offered an opportunity for advancement regardless of a person’s social background. Everybody was given the chance to thrive, and this promoted a somewhat egalitarian atmosphere. The appreciation of every single member of the community constituted a crucial feature of the ‘bright side of democracy’. The settlers’ emerging civil consciousness found expression in peaceful dissent from official policy, which was articulated and spread through associations and newspapers. However, there was also a markedly ‘dark side’ to this development. The appreciation of the individual was based on the inverse devaluation of the indigenous ‘other’. Because the latter were categorically excluded from the universe of moral obligation, every ‘white’ was automatically held in higher esteem. The situation coloniale promoted – at least to some extent – in-group solidarity and, in turn, exclusion.41 Against this background, the strong demand for cooperation on behalf of state authorities was particularly incompatible with the settlers’ civil consciousness. Officials portrayed German settlers – in sharp contrast to Boers or Englishmen – as ‘nasty and demanding’ infants expecting to be

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fed.42 State benefits were markedly generous, being granted for putting up fences, building dams, loss of cattle resulting from vaccination and much more.43 One cannot help feeling that German settlers tried to seize opportunity wherever it could be found, deplored state intervention, but still tried to pass on all the risks to the state. In this respect, they appear as tame subjects rather than adventurous pioneers. General von Trotha mockingly noted in his diary that ‘every European no matter who he may be, may he have been down on his uppers back home, … expected to become a big lord over here within four weeks’, ‘untroubled’ and without being exposed to risk.44 Settlers expected the state to keep away any troubles and to support them in every way, while denying it any right to interfere with their business. Shortly after the Herero had taken up arms, settlers posed as innocent victims and hastened to present claims against the state, blaming it for what the situation had come to. However, neither the authorities nor the German public seem to have bought their version of the events. The German settlers’ attitude was therefore contradictory. They claimed autonomy and independence from the state and the metropolis, while relying and counting on nearly all-encompassing support. As soon as any trouble arose, they did not hesitate to call for help. As will be shown below, this inconsistent attitude is of utmost importance in the present context.

CONFLICTS BETWEEN SETTLERS AND STATE AUTHORITIES What was the government’s policy that the settlers so fiercely objected to? Governor Theodor Leutwein pursued what he termed a ‘peace policy’. He was committed to the goals of ‘white’ colonization and dominion, but in contrast to his opponents, did not, as long as he could avoid it, intend to resort to brutal means to achieve them. To him, it seemed only a matter of time before the indigenous people would succumb to the ‘pressure of civilization’.45 According to his deliberations, their insatiable hunger for European commodities would seduce the indigenous population into spending all their wealth; impoverished, if not indebted, they would then be compelled to work for ‘white’ employers. Little by little, they would become a fully dependent part of the colonial economy, forming a reserve of cheap labour. These deliberations affected military strategy. Throughout his governorship, Leutwein considered it possible to avoid the military conquest the settlers had been calling for since 1896.46 Under his command, warfare remained limited. He was eventually relieved from his command, when the imperial authorities began to lament the fact that he still adhered to this



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strategy despite the fact that the Herero had proved to be far from ‘pacified’ and in their attacks had mainly targeted civilians. The limitation of warfare was closely linked to three factors: resources, enemy and terrain. Leutwein’s predecessor, Curt von François, was a notorious sabre-rattler who had started a war of annihilation against the Witbooi, an expert guerrilla Nama-Oorlam group, that he could not bring to a victorious end. Unsurprisingly, Leutwein saw it as his prime duty not to lead the empire into any further costly military adventures. In fact, the policy of ‘divide and rule’ that he had pursued enabled him to consolidate Germany’s hold over the protectorate without any major financial effort. The resources at his disposal were limited. Indigenous enemies meanwhile proved superior in several respects, such as mobility, and the size of the country allowed for retreats. Obviously, annihilation was hard to accomplish under these circumstances and any strategy aiming at it risky. The situation called for a different strategic approach, if a pointless, protracted campaign with no prospect of an end was to be avoided. Leutwein’s approach entailed a fundamental willingness to settle with indigenous enemies. If this ‘golden bridge’, as Leutwein called it, was ever torn down and the indigenous enemies were left with their back to the wall, the consequences were impossible to predict. Therefore, Leutwein time and again refrained from far-reaching strategic aims such as annihilation, disarmament or expropriation.47 However, there was more to Leutwein’s position than just military strategy. In contrast to his successor, General von Trotha, he considered indigenous labour indispensable for the colony’s economic development.48 Moreover, he regarded himself as an independent authority above the particular interests of autochthonous and ‘white’ subjects. At least to some degree, he committed to the ‘treaties of protection’,49 which stated that the indigenous people were to be protected from potential violations. Settlers deeply resented Leutwein for acknowledging the autochthonous groups as autonomous parties alongside themselves. In addition, they could not put up with Leutwein’s benevolent, patrimonial attitude towards the indigenous population. As they saw it, it was their interests alone that should matter to the authorities, and each potential action was to be evaluated solely on this basis.50 They found it intolerable that the indigenous groups still constituted a political-military factor. Only a few days before the Herero rebellion broke out, they had again demanded that the indigenous people be completely crushed and disarmed, reproaching the authorities for having passed up so many opportunities to do so.51 For years, the settlers had been calling for the complete military conquest of the Protectorate.

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Whatever his precise intentions might have been, Leutwein acted only half-heartedly, antagonizing both indigenous and ‘white’ subjects.52 His ‘peace policy’ thus eventually ran aground in 1904. The more the influence of the metropolis grew, the more tensions between authorities and the ‘white’ population increased. In February 1904, the General Staff in Berlin took control over the operations in GSWA; three months later, Leutwein was relieved of command, a state of war was declared and a military dictatorship under General von Trotha was established. In the meantime, the conflict between settlers and authorities reached its climax. The General Staff and officers from Germany were in charge of the operations; first and foremost, these agents were committed to the codes of Imperial Germany’s military culture, not to the imperatives of colonial rule and economy. Although the settlers’ accusations and defamations had at least accelerated Leutwein being relieved of his command, they were more than ever afflicted by the emerging state of affairs. For years, they had been insisting on the revision of power and violence relations and advocated the intensification of warfare; as soon as policies that responded to their demands actually came into effect – and their consequences became visible – they reproached the authorities for their harsh measures and even shed tears over Leutwein’s relief.53 The level of force increased twenty-fold within eighteen months. New troops and many other strangers working on the docks or in transportation flocked to the colony, fanning fears of superalienation within the settler community.54 The settlers were particularly suspicious of the officers who had no idea of what it meant to live in the situation coloniale, yet would claim supremacy in all possible respects.55 They brought with them the subordinate relationship between civilians and officers they had been accustomed to in Germany. But these relations were deemed unacceptable overseas. Conrad Rust, a settler and author said to be relatively reasonable and moderate, sharply attacked the measures taken by General von Trotha.56 Rust accused him of acting according to purely military considerations, disregarding fundamental norms of racial policy and thereby thwarting ‘white’ supremacy. For instance, von Trotha re-introduced the obligation to salute military superiors. According to Rust, no ‘white’ should ever be compelled to assume a reverential attitude in the presence of autochthonous individuals because it would degrade him.57 For similar reasons, no ‘white’ should ever be punished in public. Rust even rejected the identification of ‘white’ sex offenders by indigenous women because he regarded this procedure as humiliating – to the ‘whites’.58 Apparently, the maintenance of ‘white’ supremacy was regarded as more important than the detection and punishment of crime. Settler press asserted, in the name of the ‘whites’, that in



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times of a ‘racial war’ authorities should desist from punishing any ‘white’, however depraved this person might be. Every such measure would degrade all ‘whites’ and harm the ‘white race’s prestige’.59

THE IMPACT OF THE RINDERPEST OF 1897/98 ON THE BALANCE OF POWER However, settlers were seemingly unable to avoid bowing to the administration’s decisions and restricting themselves to forms of civil protest. Some of their efforts tended in this direction, but others did not. If the settlers had left it at that, they would not have been able to achieve their radical objectives. The more the power balance shifted to their advantage, the more the general attitude towards the indigenous peoples changed – and the more settlers influenced the development of the colony. The first settlers had to adopt a cautious and careful approach. They had to win the local chiefs’ favour to be assigned a dwelling place and allowed to trade. Even if this behaviour did not fully comply with their selfperception as colonizers, they depended on the chiefs’ goodwill. As Helmut Bley has pointed out, early settlers sought social advancement and embraced the opportunity to associate with the local aristocracy, which made them a part of the upper classes.60 The background of the settlers who arrived around the turn of the century was different, as their move to the colony was motivated by fear of social decline and proletarianization.61 The rising immigration intensified competition and fanned the fear of failure. The relationship between these settlers and the autochthonous population was an uneasy one. The decisive turning point in the colonization of GSWA came with the outbreak of Rinderpest in 1897, a fatal epidemic that affected cattle. It cost some chiefs about ninety percent of their cattle, a development that had a significant impact on the balance of power in the colony.62 The Herero became impoverished and the chiefs were no longer able to support their followers.63 For the first time, Herero sought work with private ‘white’ employers.64 Due to the drastic decimation of cattle, herding had finally become profitable for ‘white’ farmers and more land than ever was available. It is not a coincidence that the number of settlers doubled in the following years.65 In the face of these changes, settlers not only felt all the more as members of a ‘master race’, but also began to behave as such in dealing with the indigenous people. This was particularly true of the newcomers who had never perceived the autochthonous groups as strong political-military

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factors.66 The Herero groups seemed broken up since they offered no resistance to the settlers’ increasing brutality. Rape and homicide became more frequent, from which even members of well-regarded Herero families were no longer spared. The settlers’ ‘race struggle’ intensified. The all-encompassing ‘racial hatred’ did not leave any room for thoughts of justice.67 The intensified co-existence of white and black populations as a result of the Rinderpest, which forced the Herero to work for ‘white’ employers as domestics, labourers or herders, led to an increase in violence.68 In this new situation, it was especially important to the ‘whites’ to establish a clear hierarchy between master and servant. Ubiquitous violence and cruelty aimed at the indigenous peoples made their submission complete. On the eve of war, the Hereros’ situation had become oppressive. In contemporary memoirs, the ever-present violence and cruelty – often leading to rape and murder – stand out. This is illustrated in the testimony of the Herero Samuel Kariko: ‘Our people were shot and murdered; our women were ill-treated; and those who did this were not punished. Our chiefs consulted and we decided that war could not be worse than what we were undergoing … yet we decided on war, as the chiefs said we would be better off even if we were all dead’.69 In his letter to Hendrik Witbooi, Samuel Maharero set out his reasons for leading the fight against the Germans. He emphasized the constant ‘ill-treatments’ and declared that he would rather die than live any longer with these humiliations.70

THE SETTLERS’ LINE OF ACTION: FROM CIVIL PROTEST TO PURE VIOLENCE The settlers’ extensive use of violence obviously contradicted all the values that civil society stood and stands for. Whatever influence these measures had on politics, it had nothing to do with civil protest or other activities commonly associated with civil society. The settlers behaved like ‘little kings’,71 not only on their own property but also beyond. Their aggressiveness was boundless, undermining the weak colonial state entirely. On the one hand, authorities simply did not possess the resources to control their ‘white’ subjects.72 As they were committed to the basic goal of ‘white’ settlement, they essentially sympathized with the settlers even if they disapproved of any excesses. On the other hand, Leutwein was in a weak position. His ‘peace policy’ involved concessions to the autochthonous groups, which were dramatized by the settlers. To calm the waves, Leutwein could not help making concessions to the settlers. This situation might account for his half-hearted measures to protect the indigenous population.



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However, when the settlers claimed their rights, they actually demanded a ‘right’ to arbitrariness in dealing with the indigenous people.73 From their point of view, only a white man’s unchallenged arbitrariness befitted the ‘prestige’ of a ‘master race’. Any attempt to make justice in the colonies conform to justice back in Germany was destined to failure, because it would involve ‘whites’ being subjected to norms and thus compromise their status as ‘masters’.74 It appeared desirable that ‘whites’ should always be aware of their moral ‘superiority’ and live up to it, which implied a certain temperance towards the indigenous population, the more so as any other approach would have complicated the task of colonization. That notwithstanding, it also seemed clear that any regulation whatsoever was in effect solely ‘for our sake’ and should therefore never become an obstacle.75 Thus, the use of violence did not lie with the state and its agents, but was the right and duty of every ‘white’. In the name of a common race interest, settlers attempted to rally the authorities to their cause. Many of these attempts succeeded as far as the lower ranks were concerned. The social barriers dividing the lower ranks from their officers were less permeable than the barriers dividing them from the civilian population. After having served in the colonial army and having enjoyed the liberties this service granted, many a private could not envisage his future in the barracks back home and decided to settle in the colony.76 Several active soldiers seriously considered this option and, for that reason, tried to stay on their prospective neighbours’ good side.77 Unsurprisingly, the population felt close to the lower ranks.78 At this level, distinctions between civilians and authorities blurred as closeness sometimes took the form of complicity, with the latter allowing for a further privatization of violence, which had become the settlers’ principal way of exerting influence on the overall political situation. Officers generally resisted the settlers’ attempts at fraternization. Despite the situation coloniale, they continued to regard themselves as agents of the Imperial authorities. As such, they could not possibly give in to pressures ‘from below’. Instead, they ostentatiously displayed contempt for the settlers. Leutwein, for instance, used to label them – particularly the former soldiers – as ‘inferior elements’.79 Conversely, officers repeatedly exhibited a somewhat benevolent, patrimonial attitude towards the indigenous people.80 Although this attitude was racist by virtue of infantilizing them, it lacked the blatant hostility the settlers usually displayed. Even so, their benevolence was not boundless. They, too, essentially were part of the ‘white’ community as their reactions to the revolt showed. Though some officers recognized the injustices the Herero had to suffer from the ‘whites’, they all disapproved of the revolt and adopted the

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settlers’ language, labelling the Herero as ‘black devils’ and their warfare as ‘gruesome’.81 However, for the settlers’ purposes, it usually sufficed to rally the lower ranks to the ‘common cause’. Complicity between settlers and the latter was a striking feature of settler society. A Herero survivor, Abraham Kaffer, retrospectively stated: We have never been able to understand the German Government … because every German officer, sergeant, and soldier, every German policeman and every German farmer seemed to be the ‘Government’. By this we mean that every German farmer seemed to be able to do towards us just what he pleased, and to make his own laws, and he never got punished. The police and the soldiers might flog us and ill-treat us, the farmers might do as they pleased towards us and our wives, the soldiers might molest and even rape our women and young girls, and no one was punished.82

Kaffer’s testimony shows that in daily life the state’s monopoly on the use of force was merely theoretical. Every ‘white’ person, whoever he was, assumed enormous liberties in dealing with autochthonous individuals; policemen participated in these assaults, while officials and judges remained inactive and partial.83 Indigenous testimonies carried no weight with the courts, whereas any form of violent self-help was severely punished.84 According to Willem Christian, the victimized aboriginals more than once considered fighting back, but finally desisted from doing so.85 With a view to the consequences and the fact that soldiers and policemen frequently took part in these assaults, individual resistance seemed to have no prospect of success. Being subjected to the arbitrariness of every single ‘white’, the indigenous people could not expect any protection whatsoever. The authorities would take no action except in rare, exceptionally severe cases. On the one hand, there were settlers who regarded it as a ‘master race’s’ prerogative to take the law into their own hands; on the other hand, there was a weak colonial state letting them get away with it.86 In the meantime, the state’s position was far from clear. For one thing, it insisted on its monopoly on the use of force and regarded itself as an independent authority above particular groups and their respective interests. But then again, it was well aware that the whole Southwest African colonial venture revolved around the idea of white settlement and that it was the authorities’ task to promote this goal. At the end of the day, the many (Africans) were to be governed by the few (whites), which is why experienced officials such as Leutwein never dared to reject the settlers’ claims completely. The authorities’ tendency to turn a blind eye on so many incidents, at least within certain limits, can be considered as a form of tacit cooperation. The trouble



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was that the settlers’ actions tended to exceed any limits and to undermine state power as such. Particularly after the power balance seemed to have shifted for good due to the Rinderpest, there was nothing left to curb the settlers’ aggression, and the Herero’s situation further deteriorated. The reasons Samuel Maharero gave for starting the war reveal the impact settlers actually had on politics. The momentum of this development became visible in the first months of war, after Berlin had started to monitor the operations in GSWA and Leutwein was questioned about rumours concerning German atrocities. Leutwein’s admission that the local authorities had given up trying to cope with the arbitrary violence ‘from below’ aroused indignation.87 It is certainly no coincidence that von Trotha’s first efforts aimed at containing violence ‘from below’,88 which indeed hardly succeeded.

CONCLUSION Addressing the failure of his ‘peace policy’ and the settlers’ role, Leutwein noted: ‘The previous system of keeping the colony in order with a small number of troops could have worked out only if we had succeeded in rallying the indigenous people to our cause. This could have been attained only if all the whites had committed to this goal’. As Leutwein pointed out, ‘public opinion, particularly in the protectorate, … excluded this completely’.89 Many ‘whites’ believed they were engaged in a ‘struggle with an inferior race’ and did not ‘even shy away from murder and homicide’. Authorities were ‘powerless’ in the face of this massive violence ‘from below’, which undermined Leutwein’s ‘peace policy’.90 When, in an address to Parliament, colonial official Oscar Stübel traced the revolt back to the Herero’s yearning for their former ‘absolute freedom … and licentiousness’ and their hostility to the ‘political and social order, we had to force upon them after all’, he perverted the facts.91 At least to some extent, cooperation might very well have been possible. Leutwein was probably right to assume that the Herero could have accepted state authority, but not the authority of each and every ‘white’.92 First and foremost, it was the ‘white’ population who, with their arrogant, aggressive demeanor, thwarted the government’s plans and threw the colony into turmoil. For a long time, the Herero had patiently endured ‘white’ brutality, but when they finally came to the conclusion that the authorities would provide no security whatsoever, they realized they had to fend for themselves and took up arms. Just a few days before the Herero rebellion broke out, a contributor to the settler press once again blamed the authorities for ‘sentimental

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humanitarianism’ that only ‘fanatic supporters of the mission’ or inexpert ‘idealists’ could adhere to. From his more ‘realistic’ point of view, colonizing was simply a ‘violation’ consisting in ‘wrenching property and land from the indigenous population’.93 The author of this piece regretted that previous insurgencies had not been used as an opportunity to crush the autochthonous groups once and for all. Instead, settlers had to deal with ‘armed hordes’ of ‘inferior indigenous people’ posing a ‘direct threat’.94 Despite the hardships it caused, the ensuing Herero rebellion was welcomed, since it provided a pretext for ‘wiping the slate clean in the whole country’95 and for tackling the ‘reorganization’ of the structures of domination.96 As Bley has shown, by 1904 the land question had not yet become acute and the effective number of settlers was still low. Thus, ‘objective’ factors cannot account for the escalation of the conflict and the outbreak of the rebellion; instead, factors that are more ‘subjective’ must be taken into consideration. I suggest that unleashed settler violence, condoned by the authorities, evoked an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety about the future, which prompted the Herero to take up arms; the settlers’ hostile and aggressive attitude was a principal cause of the outburst of violence. In fact, many a contemporary blamed the settlers for the outbreak of the rebellion.97 Wide sections of the German public could not help feeling that the settlers now posing as victims of indigenous perfidy, negligence of the authorities’ and metropolitan indifference were responsible for the insurgencies.98 Undoubtedly, the settlers had an interest in the escalation of the conflict, and finally attained their radical goals by the habitual use of force. In addition, one must not neglect either the extraordinarily demanding attitude the settlers displayed towards the state or the disregard the Germans showed for the Herero’s power and the risks a war would bring.99 The settlers had been acting on the assumption that they were backed up by a major power that would send troops to clear the air and would eventually bear the costs of the entire war.100 However exaggerated and illusory this assumption may have been, even wrong assumptions can have very real effects. One need not necessarily assume that the settlers pursued an elaborate strategy to provoke a war in order to bring about the desired radical changes in the structure of domination. A climate of mistrust, fear and aggression prevailed in the colony and grew over the years. Newcomers probably simply conformed to the ingrained mores of colonial society and acted like their fellow countrymen. Some may have felt encouraged to go further still. If the Herero were to give in, all the better; if they were to fight back, even more so, as the army would see to it. The settlers’ brute force was unambiguous. The only thing that remained obscure was the



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impact these acts would eventually have on the overall political situation. Hence it is fair to say that the settlers made every effort to thwart if not sabotage Leutwein’s ‘peace policy’. It was their attitude that undermined the Governor’s ambitions. Consequently, the German settlers of Southwest Africa were certainly not ‘ideal collaborators’. Nevertheless, there was ‘collaboration’ between settlers and authorities, and it never ceased. Their relationship was ambiguous. Most settlers depended on the colonial state and the benefits it granted them; conversely, the state needed them, too, as the colonizing process ultimately rested upon them, their working power and their initiative. The settlers constituted the spearhead of conquest and were in charge of building the colonial infrastructure; more precisely, their settling was not just the means, but the aim of the whole colonizing effort. This must have been the reason that the colonial state turned a blind eye to the violence and let the indigenous people down. Even though Leutwein saw clearly that the Herero had kept the peace despite the misery they had had to bear and that the settlers were to blame for the turmoil, he could not possibly side with the former. The racial ties were too strong to be cut. A deep-rooted sense of racial solidarity provided the basis for an indissoluble ‘collaboration’ between state and settlers. This ‘collaboration’ eventually resulted in a massive amount of violence. The combination of state power on the one hand and settlers endowed with no proper political right and responsibility but with far-reaching liberties on the other unleashed an enormous destructive potential and proved fatal for the indigenous peoples of GSWA. However, it is important to note that this outcome was not the result of a smooth process of ‘collaboration’, but of a highly conflictual relationship and therefore led to highly dissatisfying, dysfunctional consequences hardly anyone had wished for. Indeed, the settlers’ demand for the complete submission of the autochthonous polities, which Leutwein had been trying to avert, was finally granted, but the ensuing campaign, waged by the regular army led to the destruction of whole peoples – and along with them of ‘resources’ such as manpower and livestock that the colonial economy depended on. The settlers had called forth spirits that proved impossible to control. Dr Matthias Häußler earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2006 and was awarded the 1st International Maurice Blondel Prize for his dissertation. Subsequently, he conducted a research project at the University of Siegen, ‘Forms of War, Political Power, and Violence. On the Sociology of Colonial War: German Southwest Africa, 1904–1908’ which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is currently researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture.

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NOTES   1. H. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1914 (Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968), 15.  2. This chapter is based on a research project directed by Trutz von Trotha (University Siegen) and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). I wish to thank the DFG for their support. Further thanks are due to the von Trotha family for permission to use the original diaries and papers of Lothar von Trotha. Some parts of the chapter are based on work that has been published before (M. Häußler and T. von Trotha, ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft? Von der “kolonialen Gesellschaft” zur kolonialen Gewaltgemeinschaft in Deutsch-Südwestafrika’, in D. Spreen and T. von Trotha (eds), Zivilgesellschaft und Krieg (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012), 293–317; M. Häußler, ‘Grausamkeit und Kolonialismus. Zur Dynamik von Grausamkeit’, in T. von Trotha and J. Rösel (eds), On Cruelty (Cologne: Köppe, 2011), 511–37.   3. C. Elkins and S. Pedersen, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), 7.   4. Theodor Leutwein, GSWA’s longstanding governor, is an example of the deviant character of colonial rule. Under Leutwein, German dominion relied heavily on personal ties and personal influence. To some degree, the chiefs’ allegiance belonged to him as a person, not to the impersonal colonial power he represented. In this respect, he rightly compared his position to that of medieval German emperors. See T. Leutwein, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in DeutschSüdwestafrika, 4th edn (Windhoek: Namibiana, 1997), 240.  5. L. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3 (emphasis in the original).   6. Cf. Leutwein’s letter of 16 February 1904, National Archives of Namibia (NAN), ZBU D.IV.l.2: Herero-Aufstand 1904, Feldzug; Politisches, Bd. 4: Oktober 1904-Dezember 1905, 5. All translations from German are by the author.   7. R. Robinson, ‘The Non-European Foundations of Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in W.R. Louis (ed.), Imperialism – The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 128–51.   8. R. Delavignette, Les vrais chefs de l’empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1939).  9. B. Schmidt-Lauber, ‘Die verkehrte Hautfarbe’: Ethnizität deutscher Namibier als Alltagspraxis (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1998), 79. 10. ‘Über die Teilnahme der Bevölkerung an der Verwaltung’, DeutschSüdwestafrikanische Zeitung (DSWAZ) 7 (September 1904), 2–3. 11. Ibid.; ‘Zur Entschädigungsfrage’, DSWAZ (8 June 1904), 1. 12. L. Külz, Tropenarzt im afrikanischen Busch, 3rd edn (Berlin: Süsseroth, 1943), 144. 13. Conrad Rust, 1 July 1905. ‘Ein Ukas’, Windhuker Nachrichten (WN), 1–2, 2. 14. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 110. 15. W. Petter, ‘Das Offizierskorps der deutschen Kolonialtruppen 1889–1918’, in H.H. Hofmann (ed.), Das deutsche Offizierkorps 1860–1960 (Boppard: Boldt, 1977), 165.



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16. L.H.G. Lyautey, Du rôle colonial de l’armée (Paris: Colin & Co., 1900), 13–14, 33. 17. S.P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 9. 18. Häußler and von Trotha, ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft?’, 298. 19. Margarethe von Eckenbrecher’s observation perfectly captures the settlers’ habitus: ‘Only under these living conditions can one really see how little is needed to be happy’. See M. von Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika mir gab und nahm: Erlebnisse einer deutschen Frau in Südwestafrika 1902–1936 (Berlin: Mittler, 1940), 48. 20. B. Schmidt-Lauber, ‘Die verkehrte Hautfarbe’, 255. 21. E.g. Eine Reise durch die deutschen Kolonien, vol. 4: Deutsch Südwest-Afrika (Berlin: Verlag Kolonialpotischer Zeitschriften, 1911), 42. 22. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 21–22. 23. Cf. G. Balandier, ‘Die koloniale Situation – ein theoretischer Ansatz’, in R. von Albertini (ed.), Moderne Kolonialgeschichte (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1970), 105–24; T. von Trotha, Koloniale Herrschaft: Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des ‘Schutzgebietes Togo’ (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994). 24. ‘Die farbige Gefahr’, DSWAZ (28 February 1906), 1. 25. W.E. Mühlmann, ‘Der Ernstfall als ständige Erfahrung in den PrimitivKulturen: Über die Unwahrscheinlichkeit unserer modernen Existenz’, in R. Altmann (ed.), Der Ernstfall (Frankfurt a. M.: Propyläen, 1979), 198–211. 26. K. Schwabe, Dienst und Kriegführung in den Kolonien und auf überseeischen Expeditionen (Berlin: Mittler, 1902), 156. 27. G. Maercker, Unsere Kriegsführung in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: H. Paetel, 1908), 49. 28. J. Krikler, ‘Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition in South Africa: A Case-Study and Reflections’, Journal of Social History 28 (1995), 491–520. 29. Apparently, rumours were sometimes deliberately started to spread terror and provoke further escalation, which is why General von Trotha felt the need to announce on 6 December 1904 that all people starting and spreading rumours would be prosecuted (NAN, ZBU D.IV.l.2: Herero-Aufstand 1904, Feldzug; Politisches, Band 3: August 1904-September 1905, 110). 30. A.D. Moses, ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in idem (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 30. 31. ‘Die Zukunft Deutsch-Südwestafrikas: Ein Beitrag zur Besiedlungs- und Eingeborenenfrage’, DSWAZ (8 March 1904), 1. 32. ‘Mutterland und Kolonie (Teil IV.)’, DSWAZ 1 (August 1906), 1. 33. The number of floggings increased annually until the end of German colonial rule. See F.F. Müller, Kolonien unter der Peitsche: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1962), 112; cf. J. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster: LIT, 2001), 68–69.

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34. ‘Über die Teilnahme der Bevölkerung an der Verwaltung’, DSWAZ (7 September 1904), 2–3. 35. Ibid. 36. Settlers repeatedly demanded a ‘representation of the people’ (cf. Windhuker Nachrichten, 17 December 1903, 1). 37. Ludwig Conradt, who settled in Southwest Africa before it became a German colony, noted that people who had lived in SWA and had returned to Europe soon realized that they were no longer able to live there and decided to move back to the colony. To Conradt, the main reason to come back was that someone ‘who once had a taste of this free, informal life over here’ could no longer stand being patronized. See L. Conradt, Erinnerungen aus zwanzigjährigem Händler- und Farmerleben in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Göttingen and Windhoek: Klaus Hess, 2006), 75. 38. Schmidt-Lauber, ‘Die verkehrte Hautfarbe’, 79. 39. The physician Ludwig Külz portrayed the old-established settlers as stubborn, know-it-all people, noting that the ‘alte Afrikaner’ did not just pretend to know everything, but to know everything better than everyone else (Külz, Tropenarzt, 141). 40. Quotation taken from J. Zollmann, Koloniale Herrschaft und ihre Grenzen: Die Kolonialpolizei in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1915 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 275. 41. Cf. Häußler and von Trotha, ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft?’, 299. 42. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 230. 43. Ibid., 231. 44. Archive of the von Trotha Family, Lothar von Trotha Nachlass, Sign. 122/15, entry 1 July 1904. 45. Leutwein, Elf Jahre, 242; cf. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 157. 46. H. Bley, ‘Gewaltverhältnisse in Siedlergesellschaften des südlichen Afrika’, in C. Dipper and R. Hiestand (eds), Siedler-Identität: Neun Fallstudien von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1995), 148. 47. Cf. T. Leutwein, Die Kämpfe der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe in Deutsch-Südwestafrika in den Jahren 1894–1896, sowie die hieraus sich ergebenden Lehren (Berlin: Mittler, 1899), 5. 48. Archive of the von Trotha Family, Lothar von Trotha Nachlass, Sign. 122/15, entry 1 July 1904. 49. The last treaty was concluded with the Witbooi who had defied German rule until 1894. 50. Cf. ‘Mutterland und Kolonie’, DSWAZ (2 May 1906), 1–2; ‘Mutterland und Kolonie, II’, DSWAZ (9 May 1906), 1–2. 51. ‘Zur augenblicklichen Lage’, DSWAZ (5 January 1904), 1. 52. Cf. L. von Estorff, Wanderungen und Kämpfe in Südwestafrika, Ostafrika und Südafrika 1894–1910, 2nd edn (Windhoek: J. Meinert, 1979), 114. 53. ‘Der Aufstand’, DSWAZ (10 August 1904), 1. 54. ‘Nötige Reformen’, DSWAZ (25 October 1905), 1.



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55. ‘Aus dem Schutzgebiet’, DSWAZ (1 March 1905), 1. 56. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 284. 57. C. Rust, Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kriegsjahre 1904 (Leipzig: Kittler, 1905), 401–402. 58. Ibid. 403–404. 59. ‘Aus Deutschland’, DSWAZ (6 September 1905), 2, Appendix; cf. ‘Aus Swakopmund’, DSWAZ (5 July 1905), 1. 60. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 120–22. 61. Bley, ‘Gewaltverhältnisse in Siedlergesellschaften’, 146. 62. H. Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (1884–1915) (Berlin: Akademie, 1966), 119. 63. J.-B. Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 18901923 (Athens, OH: University Press, 1999), 139. 64. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 168. 65. Ibid., 176–77. 66. U. Kaulich, Die Geschichte der ehemaligen Kolonie Deutsch-Südwestafrika (1884– 1914): Eine Gesamtdarstellung (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2001), 247. 67. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 177. 68. T. von Trotha, ‘“One for Kaiser”: Beobachtungen zur politischen Soziologie der Prügelstrafe am Beispiel des “Schutzgebietes Togo”’, in P. Heine and U. van der Heyden (eds), Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Peter Sebald (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995), 535. 69. J. Silvester and J.-B. Gewald (eds), Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia. An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003), 95. 70. Leutwein, Elf Jahre, 468. 71. Zollmann, Koloniale Herrschaft, 275. 72. Cf. ibid. 73. Cf. Häußler and von Trotha, ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft?’, 306–307. 74. ‘Aus Deutschland’, DSWAZ (6 September 1905), 2, Appendix. 75. ‘Kamerun und Natal’, DSWAZ (25 April 1906), 1, Appendix. 76. ‘Die Zukunft Deutsch-Südwestafrikas: Beitrag zur Besiedlungs- und Eingeborenenfrage’, DSWAZ (8 March 1904), 1. 77. According to Oskar Hintrager, a former official in GSWA, in 1906 about 1,000 active troopers announced their intention to settle in the colony after the end of their service. See O. Hintrager, Südwestafrika in der deutschen Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1955), 84. Cf. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 108–109. 78. ‘Aus dem Schutzgebiet’, DSWAZ (1 March 1905), 1. 79. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 144. 80. The missionaries acknowledged Leutwein’s ‘serious’ attempts to protect the indigenous peoples’ rights (Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, Reichskolonialamt, R1001/2111, 215 [213?]).

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81. V. Franke, Die Tagebücher des Schutztruppenoffiziers Victor Franke: Bd. I: Die Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 16.5.1896–27.5.1904 (Delmenhorst: Swalit, 2003), 368. 82. Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, 159. 83. Leutwein emphasized the wide influence of lay assessors on penal procedures, noting that ‘racial hatred’ did not spare justice. See Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 177. 84. As a rule, whenever a ‘white’ person was killed, several indigenous people were sentenced to death; conversely, a ‘white’ who was (if ever) convicted of murder of an indigenous person was sent to prison for a period of between three months and three years. See Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, 94. 85. Ibid., 161. 86. Ultimately, Leutwein was also committed to the goals of colonization and ‘white’ settlement, and disputes with the settlers primarily arose from the question of how to achieve this goal. 87. Cf. Leutwein to Colonial Office, 17 May 1904, Bundesarchiv BerlinLichterfelde, R1001/2115, 63. 88. Cf. von Trotha’s decree, ‘Bestimmungen für das Militär-Gerichtsverfahren etc. während des Kriegszustandes in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika’ (NAN, BKE 220). 89. Cf. Leutwein’s reply to the Colonial Office’s enquiry of 24 January 1904, NAN, ZBU D.IV.l.2: Herero-Aufstand 1904, Feldzug; Politisches, Band 3: August 1904-September 1905, 14. 90. Cf. Leutwein to Colonial Office, 16 February 1904, NAN, ZBU D.IV.l.2: Herero-Aufstand 1904, Feldzug; Politisches, Band 4: October 1904-December 1905, 5. 91. Cf. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags (StBR), 19 January 1904, 14th Session, 363a-b. 92. Bley, Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur, 121. 93. ‘Zur augenblicklichen Lage’, DSWAZ (5 January 1904), 1. 94. Ibid. 95. ‘Der Aufstand’, DSWAZ (2 February 1904), 2, Appendix. 96. ‘Der Aufstand’, DSWAZ (19 January 1904), 1. 97. E.g. the missionary Jakob Irle, in an article published on 22 March 1904. Cf. Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft, 163). 98. This might explain why the settlers’ claims were so reluctantly recognized in Germany despite the prevailing patriotic enthusiasm. Amazingly enough, settlers themselves admitted that wrongdoings had been committed by ‘white’ people; indeed, they blamed these solely on the traders. Cf. Häußler and von Trotha, ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft?’, 312. 99. Even expert officers were surprised at the proportions of the rebellion (e.g. Estorff, Wanderungen und Kämpfe, 110) and the Herero’s fighting skills and tenacity (e.g. Maercker, Unsere Kriegsführung, 46). 100. In 1893, Chancellor von Caprivi had announced that German domination in GSWA should be maintained at any cost; Leutwein was firmly convinced that Berlin would be more willing to exterminate all insurgents than to relinquish



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the colony if German dominion should ever be challenged. There could be no doubt that the metropolis would never leave the settlers in the lurch once the indigenous people had resorted to violent measures, least of all in the days of von Bülow’s decidedly imperialistic politics. Within a few weeks, the settlers recovered from the horrors of the Herero attacks and presented claims against the state they blamed for the war.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Balandier, G. ‘Die koloniale Situation – ein theoretischer Ansatz’, in R. v. Albertini (ed.), Moderne Kolonialgeschichte. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1970, 105–24. Bley, H. Kolonialherrschaft und Sozialstruktur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1914. Hamburg: Leibniz, 1968.  . ‘Gewaltverhältnisse in Siedlergesellschaften des südlichen Afrika’, in C. Dipper and R. Hiestand (eds), Siedler-Identität: Neun Fallstudien von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1995, 141–65. Conradt, L. Erinnerungen aus zwanzigjährigem Händler- und Farmerleben in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Göttingen and Windhoek: Klaus Hess, 2006. Delavignette, R. Les vrais chefs de l’empire. Paris: Gallimard, 1939. Drechsler, H. Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (1884–1915). Berlin: Akademie, 1966. Eckenbrecher, M. von. Was Afrika mir gab und nahm: Erlebnisse einer deutschen Frau in Südwestafrika 1902–1936. Berlin: Mittler, 1940. Eine Reise durch die deutschen Kolonien, vol. 4: Deutsch Südwest-Afrika. Berlin: Verlag Kolonialpotischer Zeitschriften, 1911. Elkins, C. and S. Pedersen. ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies. New York: Routledge, 2005, 1–20. Estorff, L. von. Wanderungen und Kämpfe in Südwestafrika, Ostafrika und Südafrika 1894–1910. Windhoek: J. Meinert, 1979. Franke, V. Die Tagebücher des Schutztruppenoffiziers Victor Franke: Bd. I: Die Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 16.5.1896–27.5.1904. Delmenhorst: Swalit, 2003. Gewald, J.-B. Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890–1923. Athens, OH: University Press, 1999. Häußler, M. ‘Grausamkeit und Kolonialismus: Zur Dynamik von Grausamkeit’, in T. von Trotha and J. Rösel (eds), On Cruelty. Cologne: Köppe, 2011, 511–37. Häußler, M. and T. von Trotha. ‘Koloniale Zivilgesellschaft? Von der “kolonialen Gesellschaft” zur kolonialen Gewaltgemeinschaft in Deutsch-Südwestafrika’, in D. Spreen and T. von Trotha (eds), Zivilgesellschaft und Krieg. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012, 293–317. Hintrager, O. Südwestafrika in der deutschen Zeit. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1955. Huntington, S.P. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.

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Kaulich, U. Die Geschichte der ehemaligen Kolonie Deutsch-Südwestafrika (1884–1914): Eine Gesamtdarstellung. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2001. Krikler, J. ‘Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition in South Africa: A CaseStudy and Reflections’, Journal of Social History 28 (1995), 491–520. Külz, L. Tropenarzt im afrikanischen Busch. Berlin: Süsseroth, 1943. Leutwein, T. Die Kämpfe der Kaiserlichen Schutztruppe in Deutsch-Südwestafrika in den Jahren 1894–1896, sowie die hieraus sich ergebenden Lehren. Berlin: Mittler, 1899.  . Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Windhoek: Namibiana, 1997. Lyautey, L.H.G. Du rôle colonial de l’armée. Paris: Colin & Co., 1900. Maercker, G. Unsere Kriegsführung in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Berlin: H. Paetel, 1908. Moses, A.D. ‘Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History’, in idem (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. New York: Berghahn, 2004, 3–48. Mühlmann, W.E. ‘Der Ernstfall als ständige Erfahrung in den Primitiv-Kulturen: Über die Unwahrscheinlichkeit unserer modernen Existenz’, in R. Altmann (ed.), Der Ernstfall. Frankfurt a. M.: Propyläen, 1979, 198–211. Müller, F.F. Kolonien unter der Peitsche: Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1962. Petter, W. ‘Das Offizierskorps der deutschen Kolonialtruppen 1889–1918’, in H.H. Hofmann (ed.), Das deutsche Offizierkorps 1860–1960. Boppard: Boldt, 1977, 163–74. Robinson, R. ‘The Non-European Foundations of Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in W.R. Louis (ed.), Imperialism – The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976, 128–51. Rust, C. Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kriegsjahre 1904. Leipzig: Kittler, 1905. ———. ‘Ein Ukas’, Windhuker Nachrichten (WN) 1–2 (1 July 1905), 2. Schmidt-Lauber, B. ‘Die verkehrte Hautfarbe’: Ethnizität deutscher Namibier als Alltagspraxis. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1998. Schwabe, K. Dienst und Kriegführung in den Kolonien und auf überseeischen Expeditionen. Berlin: Mittler, 1902. Silvester, J. and J.-B. Gewald (eds). Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia. An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. ‘Über die Teilnahme der Bevölkerung an der Verwaltung’, Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung (DSWAZ), 7 (September 1904), 2–3. Trotha, T. von. Koloniale Herrschaft: Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des ‘Schutzgebietes Togo’. Tübingen: Mohr, 1994.  . ‘“One for Kaiser”: Beobachtungen zur politischen Soziologie der Prügelstrafe am Beispiel des “Schutzgebietes Togo”’, in P. Heine and U. van der Heyden (eds), Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus in Afrika: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Peter Sebald. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995, 521–51. Veracini, L. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.



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Zimmerer, J. Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia. Münster: LIT, 2001. Zollmann, J. Koloniale Herrschaft und ihre Grenzen: Die Kolonialpolizei in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1915. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011.

Chapter 7

Chieftaincy as a Political Resource in the German Colony of Cameroon, 1884–1916 Ulrike Schaper

} There is no reason to destroy the natives’ existing political institutions, on the contrary, it would be advisable to conserve these institutions but to put them in the service of the colonial administration and to rule and administer the natives at all costs through their own leaders, supervised and guided by the colonial authorities. — Carl von Stengel, ‘Zur Frage der Mischehen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten’

With these words1 Carl von Stengel, an expert on constitutional law, in 1912 expressed his support for the integration of indigenous authorities into the colonial power apparatus. However, especially at the beginning of German colonial rule in Cameroon, the integration of local authorities was not only a question of political strategy but also a reaction to the lack of material and human resources. German colonial authorities in Cameroon relied heavily on the support of African precolonial authorities or men who – in cooperating with the colonial government – gained authority as chiefs. Historians have long tried to evaluate the importance of indigenous contributions to colonial rule. In his ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’ from 1972, 194



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Ronald Robinson stressed the significance of considering factors within the colonies when explaining the specific forms of colonial domination in a certain context.2 Since the 1990s, relations between the colonizers and the colonized who interacted with and contributed to colonial rule have received intensive attention in colonial historiography. In the wake of approaches influenced by postcolonial theory and transnational history, Robinson’s call to understand imperialism as a product of interacting processes in Europe and in the areas of imperial control has gained new weight – in Ann Laura Stoler’s and Frederick Cooper’s words: they ‘need to be brought into one analytic field’.3 What Robinson, with his interest in long-term structural developments, called the ‘imperial collaborative system’ also remains the focus of scholarly attention and is now often studied with reference to the behaviour of indigenous intermediaries in colonial and imperial contexts, their contributions to colonial rule and the intermediary political order that emerged out of these relations.4 However, these attempts do not embrace the term collaboration, but rather underline and reaffirm earlier criticism of its moral implications and its tendency to allocate rigid and clear-cut positions to individuals or groups within the imperial power structure.5 Instead, these recent approaches have focused on colonial subjects’ agency and their strategic juggling of different power sources in complex situations characterized by conflicting interests. Drawing on these approaches, in this chapter I want to look at the interaction between colonial officials and African authorities that accompanied the establishment and maintenance of colonial rule in the German colony of Cameroon. The role of chiefs as pivotal mediators of European colonial domination in Africa and their function in systems of indirect rule have attracted much scholarly attention.6 Some works have specifically addressed processes of re-traditionalization of chieftaincy in Cameroon and the role of chiefs within the colonial or postcolonial political system.7 But most works on Cameroon focus on the period after the First World War, in which the French and the British administered Cameroon as a mandate of the League of Nations. Close analyses of the role of chiefs under German colonial rule are rare.8 Looking at the early phase of colonial domination in Cameroon can help illuminate the workings of colonial government, its interaction with existing local structures and the ambivalent consequences of administrative arrangements in the initial phase of colonial control. In focusing on the ambivalent and dynamic nature of the relations between the ‘chiefs’ and the officials, I aim to highlight the power structures and mutual dependencies that shaped the process of colonial rule in Cameroon at that time. Chieftaincy, I argue, was not only an administrative structure but also

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provided a political arena for the negotiation of power and influence. While making apparent the ambivalent, sometimes contradictory consequences this arrangement produced, I explore how these complex relations influenced the way in which the colony was governed. After sketching the German administrative system, I will first examine the manner of interaction and possible benefits that cooperation between colonial officials and African authorities had, or at least was expected to have. To that end, this chapter analyses how the German authorities conceptualized the function of chiefs within the colonial administration, what responsibilities they delegated to them and in what areas officials and chiefs interacted. Subsequently, I show how the Germans tried to employ precolonial structures but at the same time heavily intervened in them. As examples for the positive effects that cooperation with the colonial administration could have for the Africans, I then discuss Karl Atangana and David Meetom, two men who gained influence as chiefs through their connection to the colonial authorities and benefited from cooperating with them. To counterbalance this picture and give credit to the ambivalences of cooperation, the last three parts of the chapter focus on the negative effects of this administrative arrangement for the colonial government as well as the appointed chiefs. They include an analysis of the risks the colonial authorities took by empowering chiefs as instruments of their rule and the consequences of the German intervention for the local power structure. Examining the chiefs’ perspective, I will show how they could be affected by their decision to cooperate with the colonial authorities, especially with regard to their authority within their own communities and how these changes retroacted with their role as intermediaries.

CHIEFTAINCY AS AN ADMINISTRATIVE POSITION European traders had been present on the West African coast since the fifteenth century. Shortly before Germany’s acquisition of the colony, it was mostly the British who had been active in the region. The British were initially reluctant to formally include this territory in the British Empire.9 Due to increasing rivalries (mainly with the French), the British authorities finally prepared to enter into contracts with African chiefs on the Cameroon coast that were to formally secure their claim to this region.10 The estuary of the Cameroon or Wuri (Wouri) river was populated by the Duala people, organized in a number of relatively independent social entities, built around trade and production networks.11 The Duala had great economic and political influence in the area of the littoral, because they



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dominated the intermediary trade with the population further inland. The British attempt to claim this region was prevented by representatives of German companies that were also trading in this area. In July 1884, the latter entered contracts with representatives of the Duala, who, according to the surviving document, handed over their sovereignty to the German Reich.12 This initial legal act was followed by further contracts with other African authorities as well as military actions.13 The first Governor, Julius von Soden, took office in 1885. The administration in Cameroon was set up slowly and in line with the ongoing conquest of the territory.14 Since the Germans entered the Cameroon territory via contracts with the Duala and up to 1901 also maintained the Governor’s seat in Duala (Douala), the area of the Duala settlements, German-Duala relations remained an important factor within German colonial politics. During the time of German colonial rule, two extended families, the Bell and the Akwa with their respective leaders, dominated Duala society, which included subordinate authorities who presided over their own communities in many respects independently of the Akwa and Bell. Above all, they, as well as the Akwa and Bell subchiefs, were able to arrange internal matters without the intervention of the Bell or Akwa leaders.15 By empowering Africans to function as chiefs (Häuptlinge), the German colonial authorities aimed to maintain stability and create a loyal elite within the African population that supported colonial rule as so-called ‘organs’ of the colonial administration.16 Chieftaincy became a strategy for building a political and administrative structure and a resource for the government of the colony. The German colonial authorities saw several advantages in this mediated system of rule. Above all, it promised to be an effective way of ruling the colony. The chiefs were seen as links to the African population who would communicate the demands and measures of the colonial government in the respective local contexts and ensure their realization.17 By having local authorities enforce its measures and thus deal with possible discontent, the colonial government intended to prevent strong disruptions and violent resistance directed against it. The chiefs functioned as advisers and contact persons, gathering information about the colonized territory and its population. At times, the colonial officials assembled the chiefs and asked for their opinion on draft decrees and reported the reactions back to the government.18 The interaction of chiefs and colonial officials, however, always happened within the framework of a colonial hierarchy that saw the chiefs as subordinated helpers and neither as equal colleagues nor as independent political partners. To fit the chiefs into their concept of colonial rule, legal scholars constructed the chiefs’ authority as deriving from the colonial

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government that delegated certain sovereign rights.19 Consequently, colonial authorities tried to eliminate the chiefs’ autonomy and restrict their power. In order to limit the use of force to the state, chiefs were no longer allowed to decide on matters of war or the life and death of their subjects.20 In fulfilling their duties as chiefs, they were subordinated to German state authority and could be held accountable by the same state authority for possible misconduct.21 Although constructed as agents of the colonial government, the chiefs were not formally part of the government apparatus, not least because they were not entitled to wages.22 In the coastal region from the 1890s onwards, the colonial government did pay the Kumi tribute payments, which had been paid for the right to trade in certain areas since before German colonial rule.23 But formally, these payments were an unspecified compensation, not a salary. The only compensation the colonial authorities granted the chiefs were court fees, which chiefs were to collect from the people under their jurisdiction. This indirect form of financial support was meant to distance the chiefs from official government employees. The colonial government was not willing to take financial responsibility for the intermediaries that enforced colonial rule on the local level.24 In 1890, the government proposed officially appointing Manga Bell as a native judge and granting him the right to collect fees in the name of the government. Manga Bell was the son of King Bell, leader of the Duala. He had just returned from a punitive exile to Togo and had been allowed to resolve disputes among the Duala. Although the proposition emphasized how well Manga Bell had been handling the jurisdiction, it was negated by the Colonial Department in Berlin, mainly with the argument that there was no need to single him out from the other chiefs who traditionally resolved disputes for a fee; additionally, it was argued that there was no need to allow him to collect fees in the name of the government.25 Secondly, the incorporation of local authorities was also seen as a stabilizing factor. By building on precolonial structures of legitimacy, political symbols and legal institutions, the colonial government hoped to soften potential clashes between different political cultures and to ease the transformation from precolonial times to colonial rule.26 This attempt to avoid harsh political and social disruption was accompanied by the decision to temporarily conserve the local African law in order to – among other reasons – prevent resistance and create stability.27 German law was only implemented for citizens of nations recognized by international law.28 ‘Natives’ fell outside this jurisdiction. Their legal cases were to be decided by either colonial officials or chiefs that had been vested with jurisdictional power by the colonial government. The chiefs had to decide the cases according to



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the existing local law.29 The Germans simplistically and often incorrectly understood the chiefs to be central political authorities and believed that traditionally they had held the jurisdiction over their community.30 When appointing chiefs, they therefore often gave them the right to preside over some of their community’s legal cases. The right of jurisdiction predominantly referred to cases that the Germans considered as civil law cases. These two different bodies of courts for the African population led to interaction between chiefs and colonial officials in the day-to-day business of jurisdiction. Chiefs sometimes requested the officials’ help in forcing people to attend their court sessions.31 Chiefs also relied on the colonial administration’s assistance for the arrest and transfer of people who had left the territory of their jurisdiction.32 The colonial authorities regarded the chiefs’ jurisdiction as part of the colonial court system; they had an interest in its effective operation. Therefore, they sometimes met their demands by issuing threats of punishment.33 Colonial officials also often fell back on local power structures when searching for suspects.34 They commanded chiefs to hand over wanted persons, often under the threat of punishment. Cooperation was thus not always voluntary. Chiefly jurisdiction was, thirdly, also meant to unburden the colonial officials from the tedious work of arbitrating unimportant disputes.35 Even conflicts between members of different chieftaincies, which had to be brought to the colonial officials in the first years of colonial rule, were in certain areas along the coast delegated to mixed courts (Eingeborenenschiedsgerichte) in the 1890s.36 The mixed courts were collective decision-making bodies staffed with Africans elected by the chiefs of a particular region. The Governor functioned as the appeal body for the mixed courts or, where there were none, for the chiefs’ court decisions. He monitored the verdicts and could ultimately decide the cases. The decrees introducing mixed courts thus linked native courts and colonial courts as different stages of the appeal process. The first mixed court was established in Duala. Manga Bell, who had been denied an official appointment as a judge for the government by the Colonial Department in Berlin, was appointed to the board of the court and functioned as president. As a side effect, the above-mentioned proposition to officially appoint him as judge and allow him to collect fees in the name of the government became obsolete.37 The mixed courts were responsible for cases in the region, notwithstanding the parties’ affiliation to a certain chief. They also functioned as courts to appeal against the chiefs’ decisions and were allowed to decide cases with a larger amount in dispute and even cases of petty crime. Apart from these petty crime cases, criminal law cases were reserved for the colonial officials, who had to loosely base their decisions on German criminal law while considering respective local customs.

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In his study of colonial state development in the German colony Togo, Trutz von Trotha termed the organization of local authorities integrated into the colonial administration ‘administrative chieftaincy (administratives Häuptlingswesen)’.38 This term is also appropriate for Cameroon, insofar as the colonial administration divided the local authorities into paramount chiefs, chiefs and subchiefs in order to meet administrative requirements and structure this group hierarchically. The colonial authorities tried to make use of this hierarchy by making paramount chiefs responsible for their subordinated chiefs and their discipline.39 The colonial administration thus established hierarchies and centralized the political structure, especially in segmented societies that had not been organized around central political authorities in precolonial times.40 By appointing chiefs and vesting them with juridical powers, German colonial authorities tied together the position of a chief and the right of jurisdiction. On the whole, the centralization of political and juridical power in the position of a chief gave them more responsibilities than they had had in precolonial times. However, the term ‘administrative chieftaincy’ is misleading if understood as a fully enforced, static system of authorities that depended solely on the colonial administration. Conditions in the German colony of Cameroon were chaotic, dynamic and heterogeneous. The colonial government’s influence was restricted to certain areas. Administrative chieftaincy can therefore best be understood as a guiding concept for organizing local authority. The title ‘chief’ was conferred on local authorities that, in the precolonial order, had had very different positions with diverse competencies. Chieftaincy encompassed a wide range of political functions, from the heads of small settlements to leaders of larger networks of lineages to rulers of politically centralized societies. Out of the German practice of empowering chiefs emerged a heterogeneous and dynamic network of authorities more or less cooperating with the colonial administration. The extent to which the colonial officials could control these ‘organs’ or how far they even knew what the chiefs were doing varied and generally decreased with the distance to the administrative centres.

MAKING (USE OF) CHIEFS: THE EMPLOYMENT OF ‘TRADITIONAL’ RESOURCES The documents of the German colonial administration give the impression that chiefs were chosen mainly according to considerations of practicability and political strategy. An article in the Koloniale Rundschau listed the ability to fill the post, loyalty and the political position within the existing African



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political order as important factors: ‘The choice of chiefs is made according to their capability and loyal attitude towards the government; their legitimate claims to succession or – if the position of chief is newly created – their possible descent from a family of chiefs is also considered’.41 This sentence captures the paradox of the Germans’ proceeding: they claimed to consider existing political structures and constructed the chief as a traditional function of the African political order, while often arbitrarily appointing individuals according to the needs of the colonial administration – being aware that they had thus newly created the so-called ‘traditional’ position of chief. Historians have shown how in the invention of pseudo-traditional positions, fluid systems of affiliation and dynamic legal situations were transformed into tribes, how political order was re-traditionalized and equipped with chiefs as leaders of groups understood as ethnic communities, and how by entrusting the chiefs with the jurisdiction over their community colonial governments ethnicized the law.42 Such processes of invention also occurred in Cameroon. Officials often lacked the knowledge to consider existing political structures.43 They had difficulties identifying persons who, according to the local order, could best fill the position of chief.44 To judge a candidate’s attitude towards the colonial government as well as their descent and family associations (which were to certify their ‘traditional’ legitimacy), officials had to rely on the information provided by the community or by other chiefs, often the paramount chief who affirmed the status of his subordinates.45 Of course the informants were all but disinterested in the choice of personnel and in defining the scope of jurisdiction.46 And even if officials had reliable information on the political landscape, they sometimes just ignored it for reasons of power politics. Power politics also played an important role in the dismissal of chiefs: ‘They [the chiefs] are appointed or affirmed by the government and when proving unsuitable they are degraded’.47 In many cases, ‘unsuitable’ just meant disobedient. The removal from the area of their power basis was a common means of intervening in local power relations. In order to increase the effect of these punishments, they were made widely known in the region.48 A conflict in Mangamba in the Abo region provides an example of the force that could be necessary to institute a pro-government chief who accepted the superordinate authority of the government-affirmed paramount chief.49 In the 1880s, the Duala’s inland trade expansion sparked rivalries among the Abo population.50 The tensions continued into the time of colonial rule. During the first years of German colonial rule, power struggles between various smaller rulers in the region preoccupied the colonial government, as can be seen in the documents of many meetings and in

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the frequency of punitive actions.51 In May 1898, missionaries informed the government about violent incidents and the resistance of three chiefs against the region’s paramount chief, Muele Koto.52 After being punished, two gave in, but one, Chief Priso, did not accept the paramount chief even after four weeks of imprisonment and was therefore exiled.53 His people in Bonakwasi were also made to feel the government’s force because they refused to choose a new chief or accept a chief chosen by the colonial government. They articulated ongoing support for Chief Priso. Ten people were captured for resistance against the government.54 Two days later, the Bonakwasi people did not appear at a meeting set by the government to settle the matter. In consequence, the colonial authorities set their houses on fire and in the end arrested ten more men. All twenty and the son of Chief Priso captured earlier were sentenced to one year in prison.55 The incident also sheds light on the power plays in the background of such proceedings, namely the attempt of Mpundu Akwa to use this unclear and dynamic moment to enlarge his sphere of control. Mpundu Akwa, son of Dika Akwa, head of the Akwa, had tried to win the chiefs in the Abo region over to the Akwa people and had also held court in the region.56 The colonial officials were convinced that Mpundu Akwa was behind the Bonakwasi resistance and forbade him to enter the Abo region.57 Finally, after the Governor gave his permission to exile Chief Priso, the Bonakwasi people gave in and agreed to choose a chief who accepted the paramount chief Muele Koto.58

CHIEFLY CAREERS How little the German practice of appointing chiefs was at times rooted in the precolonial order and how long-lasting the decisions to appoint someone as chief could be, is indicated by the life of Karl Atangana, who became an influential chief with close ties to the Germans in Jaunde (Yaoundé). His life illustrates how cooperation with colonial authorities could facilitate a career and secure influence under the protection of the colonial government. But it also shows how this connection could prove an obstacle in view of greater political changes, such as the transformation of the German colony into a League of Nations mandate administered by the British and the French. His biography can be sketched as follows: Karl Atangana, then named Atangana Ntsama, was probably born in the early 1880s in a village near the later German station Jaunde.59 He was the eleventh of the twelve sons of Essomba Atangana, one of many headmen of the Ewondo who lived in this



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area and belonged to the Beti society.60 In the mid-1890s, Hans Dominik, expedition leader and station manager of Jaunde, demanded to be sent children who could be educated by the missions and later function as support for the colonial administration.61 Atangana was one of the boys who arrived with Dominik. This choice was not so much a reward as the result of scepticism about the Germans and what they planned to do with the children, and Atangana’s slightly dubious parentage: His father was dead, he had been living with his uncle and rumours circulated that his mother had already been pregnant when she came to his father.62 But his disadvantaged origins proved to be the foundation of his later success. Atangana became one of the first Betis to be educated at the Pallotine mission school in Kribi and learned to read and write German. He was baptized a Roman Catholic and named Karl.63 After two years of schooling, Atangana first worked in Victoria as an interpreter for 500 Bulu (a population mainly located in the south of Cameroon). The Bulu were held captive and forced to work as punishment for a revolt against the Germans in 1899, which had also destroyed the mission where Atangana had been educated. Atangana then took up work as an office clerk and medical assistant in Buea. In 1902 he requested his transferal to the station Jaunde, where he worked as a writer and interpreter for the administration and the native court.64 His language skills and his close relationship with Dominik facilitated his ascent within the German administration, which secured his influence over the local population. In 1911, Atangana was appointed president of the mixed court of the region. In March 1914, the Germans appointed him paramount chief – the highest position for Africans within the colonial hierarchy. After the First World War had reached Cameroon, Atangana remained loyal to the Germans. He joined their retreat to Spanish Guinea in January 1916 and later travelled to Spain.65 Presumably he wanted to negotiate with the German government about money that had been disposed with the banks of the Basel mission and was inaccessible in consequence of the withdrawal of the Mission after 1916. Furthermore, he wanted to negotiate the terms of his return to Cameroon with the French Government.66 Atangana, who now took the French version of his Christian name, Charles, was allowed to return to Cameroon in 1920.67 He then tried to continue his career under French rule, but found it difficult to replicate his previous success, because the French mistrusted him due to his recent loyalty to Germany. In his absence, another chief had been appointed the French local representative and Atangana was sent to the North. In December 1921, he was allowed to return to Yaoundé and regained the title of paramount chief, yet did not have as much power as under the German regime. As a result of French colonial politics and the

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growing local resistance he gradually lost power. He died in 1943 and was not widely remembered until after Cameroon’s independence. Atangana himself judged the colonial authorities’ choice of chiefs as follows: ‘Back then, things were like this in Jaunde: if somebody could slightly understand broken English and the Europeans knew him, he was chief and betrayed the others’.68 The importance of English language skills and of being known (or at least known of) by a European hints at the dynamic situation following the first contact with the European colonial regime. In the beginning, colonial officials appointed chiefs relatively unrestrictedly. They tried to consolidate their power and extend their influence through friendly relations with individual chiefs. To extend their net of supportive chiefs, officials tried to make use of key people with whom they had already established friendly relations and who had a good standing and influence in the region.69 At this time, a quick decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with the colonial conqueror, or even a mere presence at a meeting with a responsible official, could influence political options in a lasting way.70 After a while, the colonial administration tried to be more restrictive about awarding the post of chief. They started to screen the applicants more closely for their loyalty, their ability and their legitimacy for this position. How far the willingness to cooperate with the German authorities could determine political influence within the intermediary colonial structure, especially in the dynamic situation following first contact, can be illustrated by the career of the Akwa David Meetom.71 He had been educated at the English Baptist Mission – active in the region since the 1840s – and had worked there as a missionary teacher.72 His English skills enabled him to play a part in various negotiations between the Germans and African authorities in the initial phase of German colonial rule. He established contact, interpreted and mediated in the negotiations.73 Meetom communicated the ‘traditional’ hierarchy to the colonial officials, informing them who was chief in which part of the region.74 In 1885, Governor von Soden appointed him government interpreter.75 Since he was one of the main channels of information and often controlled the communication between the colonial government and the local population, he gained political influence and considerable prosperity. Through his cooperation with the colonial government Meetom was able to improve his position beyond the hierarchies within Duala society. Governor von Soden assessed his rise thus: ‘David Mitom, a member of the Akwa family, influences his tribesmen to an extent which should not be underestimated. His influence is derived less from his social status than from his position as an interpreter and from his knowledge … which enables



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him to perform this job’.76 Atangana and Meetom are both examples of the chiefs’ importance in localizing colonial rule. The intermediaries’ impact on colonial rule was highest when they had personal relations with certain officials and were thus able to influence their decisions. From the perspective of African elites, cooperation with the colonial authorities could be an additional way to gain or enlarge their power. This option was even open to individuals who had held no important political position in the precolonial order. The reasons why individual chiefs cooperated with the colonial administration varied.77 In addition to the financial gains, jurisdiction gave them often unprecedented control over conflict resolution in their communities, which reached far into their community’s social life and family matters.78 For these reasons, jurisdiction was a coveted responsibility, as the many applications preserved among the colonial administration’s documents prove. In addition, chiefs could threaten their subordinates or rivals with sanctions from the superordinate colonial regime. In times of acute conflict, chiefs asked the Governor to support them with their presence or even with force and military power.79 With this ‘borrowed power’,80 they tried to uphold their own position – whether or not the respective colonial official actually backed the threat of colonial intervention.81

RESTRICTED CONTROL OVER ‘GOVERNMENT AGENTS’ Contrary to the older opposition of resistance and collaboration and contrary to the colonial authorities’ hope of simply instrumentalizing local authorities, the relationship between the colonial government and its chiefs was complex, sometimes tense, and could change during the course of their interaction. From the colonial authorities’ as much as the chiefs’ perspective, the consequences of the chief’s intermediary position could be paradoxical. The colonial officials depended heavily on the chiefs for the government of the colony, but their control over the consequences arising from this empowerment was limited. The official appointment vested a chief with new powers, which they were meant to use according to the colonial authorities’ orders, but which they could also use independently of the government’s interests. They were no passive instruments of colonial politics; instead, they used their position to pursue their own projects in their personal interest or in the interest of their communities. Some chiefs, for example, tried to profit financially from their jurisdiction and demanded increased court fees or defrauded money.82 When chiefs used their position as a resource for their own, rather than the colonial government’s

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interests, the colonial officials perceived these actions as a misuse of the delegated power or as unwanted attempts at political intervention. The trial against Meetom was such a case. In 1894 he was accused of abusing his authority. During the trial, lots of evidence was brought forward showing that Meetom had misused his position and reputation.83 From the official’s viewpoint, he abused his position when he accepted bribes to change the outcome of trials or to influence government policies, when he acted in the name of the Governor without any justification and when he confiscated goods and imprisoned people simply because they rejected his orders.84 In the end, Meetom was sentenced to three years of forced labour in exile. Meetom, at the first stop in Victoria, still in Cameroon, fled from the steamboat that was to take him to German Togo and was finally shot fleeing the colonial authorities.85 Cases like this hardened colonial officials’ scepticism of their intermediaries’ reliability. From the officials’ perspective, the chiefs were an element of uncertainty within the colonial power structure, making several measures of control necessary: trusted people, the so called ‘chiefly police’ (Häuptlingspolizei), had to watch the chiefs’ activities. To improve the communication process, chiefs had to provide messengers.86 And the officials increased the frequency of court minutes in order to prevent fraud and other misuses of jurisdiction. But these measures produced only limited success. On the whole, the colonial officials’ social distance from the African population and the limited possibilities of communication often hindered an efficient control of the chiefs’ activities. Through their appointment, chiefs were linked to the colonial authorities, but they also remained integrated into local power networks. This double power basis was a pre-condition for acting as intermediaries. Although relying exactly on this middle position, the colonial authorities perceived the plurality of power bases as a danger, at least when they feared losing control over their ‘agents’. A report about an expedition to the region between the rivers Wuri and Sanaga in the beginning of 1907 suggested that the Akwa used their role as mediators with the population further inland in the Bakoko region against the interests of the colonial administration. The expedition leader, Officer von Stein zu Lausnitz, warned in his report: They [the Akwa] use the Bakoko-chiefs’ jurisdiction and mixed courts they have procured, and they often buy chiefs’ daughters and bring them to Duala; this enables them to act like the masters of this region, and because they link the population to state institutions, because of their art of writing, and because we cannot control their routes of trade into the East, which are still unknown to us, in a way, they actually rule.87



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Besides the older practice of stabilizing alliances and economic relations through marriages, the Akwa used the chiefs’ jurisdiction to exercise control.88 This situation was even more dangerous for the colonial authorities, because they found it hard to gather exact information on how the Akwa built up their power. Von Stein zu Lausnitz complained that in the face of the expedition, the Akwa had extended their influence, without him being able to get any real information about their activities.89 His perception of Akwa influence in the Bakoko region hints at two aspects of uncertainty. First, the expedition leader feared that the Akwa had more control over the Bakoko chiefs than the colonial authorities. Secondly, he perceived the Akwa and their administratively approved chief as too powerful and, because of this power and because its working channels were hidden from the colonial authorities, dangerously uncontrollable.

CONTESTED POWER RELATIONS The implementation of an intermediary power structure could also lead to conflict between chiefs concerning their position within the colonial hierarchy and the scope of their jurisdiction. The colonial authorities’ interventions, including the nomination of chiefs and the regulation of their succession, dynamized the political and social structure. Consequently, political responsibilities and spheres of control were sometimes contested. Reports of court-related travel through the Cameroon littoral in the 1880s and 1890s note many incidents of Africans appearing before the official to claim a position as chief and demand jurisdiction, or objecting to the appointment of chiefs and the extent of their jurisdiction, or even asking the colonial officials to decide their quarrels over the extent of their chiefly authority or to help them enforce their position.90 The following example shows how severely the German practice of empowering chiefs uprooted the political landscape or added to earlier conflicts in the region. Qua Moto, authorized by the colonial government as paramount chief for the region of Mamelo (between the rivers Mungo and Dibombe, northeast of Jabassi [Yabassi]), in 1907 filed a case against Quantek, whom he considered a subchief to his authority. He accused Quantek of having defied his authority and called for disobedience against him.91 Some time before, Quantek had applied to the colonial government for jurisdiction. The district office in Duala empowered him to sit over cases; the colonial official who was interviewed in this case admitted that this authority was easy to obtain. A year later the authorization was

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withdrawn, mainly because the population in the district did not approve of the choice. At the same time, the station in Jabassi re-appointed Qua Moto as paramount chief. In the following trial, Quantek’s followers expressed their disapproval for the paramount chief Qua Moto. They were not willing to accept the authority that the colonial administration had assigned to him. Quantek’s opponents, however, complained that his claim to the position of chief was not grounded in the precolonial political order. In the trial minutes, one witness stated that Quantek had not been a chief in Mamelo until he had become rich, had strived for the position and had subsequently caused lots of unrest in the region.92 The official responsible in this case proposed to exile Quantek and his followers to a different district.93 This is only one example of how colonial officials used force and severe punishment to solve conflicts of hierarchy and rivalry. It is difficult to fully understand the background to this quarrel, but the case can be considered as an example of the conflicts that followed colonial interventions in the local political structure. It is symptomatic of the frequent lack of knowledge among colonial officials when it came to appointing local authorities and their sometimes arbitrary choices that ignored local conditions. But it also illustrates the fact that such cases could create trouble, which the officials did not try to solve by using force to uphold their candidate, but by removing disappointing candidates. Their limited power forced the officials to be responsive to local conditions rather than act against them. This incident thus also alludes to the fact that the officials’ power in appointing and degrading chiefs was limited. They did not have enough resources to sustain a whole network of chiefs by force alone. In addition, the functions the colonial authorities expected the chief to fulfil were hardly feasible for forcefully imposed candidates. As the next section shows, appointed chiefs needed support in their respective communities to be able to act in the interest of colonial government. For the colonial officials, the chiefs were only efficient instruments if the population accepted them as authorities. In addition, they were by no means able to fully control and dominate the political landscape. Especially in the beginning of German rule, and also at a later stage in the inland region, local authorities could wield influence without relying on the colonial administration as a power resource. The colonial authorities could withdraw their support for certain individuals, but they could not always discourage them from exercising control. Parallel to the ‘administrative chiefs’, political and religious authorities continued to act independently of any colonial sanctioning.



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CHIEFTAINCY – A MIXED BLESSING Meetom – at least for certain periods – benefited from his association with the colonial administration, but also faced the resentment of superordinate or rival authorities. As in the case of Quantek, their anger was directed at the fact that he had increased their influence and authority in a way that neglected or went against existing social and political hierarchies. In 1887 in a letter to the Governor, John Akwa reported of tension between Meetom, an Akwa subchief, and Dika Akwa, head of the Akwa lineage.94 In this conflict, Meetom tried to win over Dika Akwa’s people. John Akwa complained that Meetom’s actions of gathering people and going against Dika Akwa, ‘setting himself a Kingdom’, were illegitimate. He feared that these activities would end in violence and ‘create civil war in Acqua Town’.95 This case points at processes of transformation of the political order, which were either caused by the German colonial government’s will to draw on the African political order as a resource for their rule, or at least coincided with it. Within these power struggles, the reference to the ‘old order’ became an argument that the colonial officials were willing to accept. An official nomination as chief could, however, weaken rather than affirm a local authority’s position. Officials occasionally warned that it was necessary to strengthen chiefs’ political standing. These warnings reflected the fragility of the chiefs’ power basis.96 These demands were by no means disinterested: the chiefs’ ability to fulfil the officials’ orders depended – to a certain extent – on their strength and independence from the colonial administration. At the same time, their connection to the colonial government undermined this independence. When chiefs cooperated with the colonial administration, this could affect their relationship with their subordinates. Torn between the demands of the colonial officials and of their own communities, their willingness or necessity to cooperate with the colonial officials could, in the first place, result in severe disadvantages, not least because they often had to enforce the officials’ orders against the will of the population, for example by supplying workers or by delivering suspects. Their role as mediators and sometimes spear carriers of colonial rule could weaken their standing in their communities, thereby shifting their power basis even further towards the colonial government. A petition handed into the district office in Duala illustrates these potential negative effects. Chief Peter Alukwu Aluange of Bonakuamuang in Duala asked the government for a post as a translator at one of the mixed courts with a monthly salary of 100 Marks. As to why he needed the job, he stated: ‘My subjects do not come into my court as they used to do, and all the advantages that are due to a chief I no longer receive, because the

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people say that I tell the district office all the secrets of this country’.97 The boycott of his court sittings could severely impair a chief’s position, since court fees were an important source of income and, as stated above, the colonial authorities’ only financial reward for the chiefs. Moreover, under German colonial rule chiefs often lost alternative sources of income, as Alukwu Aluange calls ‘the advantages that are due to a chief’.98 The boycott of his court therefore deprived him of his main source of income. Because of his close association with the government, Alukwu Aluange did not expect any support from the members of his community. He reacted by trying to tie himself even closer to the colonial administration. In his petition, he reminded the officials of his services to the colonial government: He pressed charges against other Duala and claimed to have helped the colonial government prosecute them. He stressed that, unlike all the other Akwa, he had left land to the district office without charges, thereby possibly alluding to conflicts in the context of the expropriation of land through the colonial government.99 But the biggest sacrifice was the social and political standing he had lost and for which he sought compensation: ‘I, who for the government has lost my life among my people’.100 In the end, the district office consulted with the other Duala chiefs and they chose a different person as court interpreter. Not only does this decision allude to inner tensions, rivalries and changing alliances that pervaded the group of intermediaries, but it also sheds some light on the risky position of intermediaries. From the scarce information in the file we cannot decide if Alukwu Aluange had really been such a loyal and important mediator. But even assuming he had to some degree cooperated with the colonial government, according to colonial logic, the officials’ lack of support for their former agent would make sense: since he had lost the backing of his people he could no longer function as a link to them and was therefore no longer of use to the colonial government. For him, the cooperation with the colonial government did not prove to be so much a resource as a burden. Resentment towards a chief could result in boycott but also in violent action. Protest against the colonial government sometimes involved their local African agents. This can be illustrated by the following cry for help of two chiefs from Dibombari in the Mungo region: The people of our two towns Buelelo and Bosedu have unite yesterday and threatening our Courts they took all our prisoners from jails and says they don’t want any more of the Governments summons nor the civil courts which the Governments established in Dibombari. Lot of people comes to set the prisoners free with guns and spears and cutlasses, and curse the Imperial Governor …101



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They asked the governor to send them soldiers to re-establish their authority and catch the leader of the rebellion. The colonial government granted their request and sent an official. When he did not find the men reported as rebels, he burnt down their houses and took away their goods and women.102 In this case, the colonial government was willing to protect those chiefs they found suitable to function as mediators. The administrative documents about court sentences bear further evidence of this practice when they list offences like ‘disobedience to chiefs’.103 Such sentences were meant to secure the position of chiefs who were considered reliable and help them against their opponents. But the connection to the colonial government could also be fragile. If the colonial government did not consider a chief reliable, it could withdraw its support, degrade him or even punish him for not fulfilling his role as a mediator.

CONCLUSION By integrating local authorities into the government of the colony, the German colonial government created an arrangement that built on chieftaincy as an element of structuring power relations and ensuring local support. While attempting to employ pre-existing political structures, the system of ‘administrative chieftaincy’ contributed to their change, often ‘inventing’ the position of a chief in a way that centralized political and juridical powers in an unprecedented manner. In order to function as mediators and agents of the colonial government, chiefs needed to be accepted by their communities. This, to an extent, prevented the colonial authorities from making arbitrary choices. Nevertheless, not only did the colonial officials often lack the reliable information needed to acquire a sound understanding of local socio-political conditions, but they also often filled these positions with current power political strategy in mind. The limited administrative resources of the colonial power gave the chiefs importance as mediators of colonial rule. The colonial state not only delegated power to the chiefs, making them its agents, but was also a consumer of their power.104 But their integration into the power apparatus remained loose, given that it was meant to secure governance of the African population without having to execute colonial rule on a local level in all its details. In a way, the interaction with the chiefs was meant to reduce the colonial officials’ interaction with the rest of the African population. This arrangement was above all meant as an administrative relationship, as colonial authorities tried to delegate the enforcement of colonial measures to the chiefs. But it also had political implications and

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colonial authorities used it as a tool of power politics to balance the influence of rival groups. Chieftaincy was not always a reliable or straightforward resource: colonial authorities created an instable balance by installing chiefs as central political institutions and at the same time depriving them of their powers concerning external relations and restricting their autonomy in internal matters. But colonial authorities were not always able to control the effects of their nominations. The chiefs had their own interests and objectives. They tried to use their position to enlarge their power and advance socially or financially. They used their position beside or against the government’s interest. While such behaviour can be seen as the outcome of strategies to profit most from a position that was fragile and uncertain, colonial authorities perceived such behaviour as a misuse of power that had only been delegated to the chiefs by the colonial state. In their view, such incidents of corruption and abuse of authority affirmed their scepticism of the chiefs’ reliability and were taken as warnings to implement further measures of control. Furthermore, chiefs could lose their function as intermediaries when they lost the support of their subordinates. Although this often happened as a direct consequence of their connection to the colonial authorities, the colonial officials subsequently still regarded them as worthless allies: loyalty alone did not suffice to act as an intermediary. From the chiefs’ perspective, a chieftaincy could prove an alternative or additional power resource. But cooperation with the colonial officials could attract the resentment of their subordinates or fellow authorities as well as expose them to potential punishment by the colonial government. The intermediary power structure made German colonial rule inherently fragile. Colonial officials had to work within changing contexts and alliances. They could be drawn into the rivalries and power struggles between chiefs and their lineages. The practical implementation of colonial rule depended on the diverse local contexts, not least on the local authorities’ willingness to some degree to cooperate with the colonial authorities. The chiefs’ attitude was influenced by the power relations in a certain region, which were to a considerable extent shaped independently of the colonial authority. For the chiefs, what mattered was how far the colonial government appeared as an attractive and powerful partner who could help improve their position. Out of this fragile and changing set of relationships emerged the colonial state and its intermediary order. Professor Dr. Ulrike Schaper is a Junior Professor for the History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has worked on German colonial history and colonial law in Cameroon



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and is now researching West German sex tourism between 1965 and 1990 to examine intersections of globalization, gender and sexuality. Her publications include Koloniale Verhandlungen: Gerichtsbarkeit, Verwaltung und Herrschaft in Kamerun 1884–1916 (2012).

NOTES   1. Translations from German are by the author.   2. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen (ed.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Prentice Hall Press, 1972), 117–42.  3. A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in idem (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 15.   4. T. von Trotha, Koloniale Herrschaft: Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des ‘Schutzgebietes Togo’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994); B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).   5. J. Suret-Canale, ‘“Résistance” et “collaboration” en Afrique noire coloniale’, in J. Vansina and H. Brunschwig (eds), Études africaines: Offertes à Henri Brunschwig (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982), 319– 31; L. Vail and L. White, ‘Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique’, American Historical Review 88(4) (1983), 883–919; C. Newbury, Patrons, Clients and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); E.L. Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 32, n. 9. Robinson, however, distanced himself from any normative meaning of the term and stressed that alliances could change and that nobody stood permanently and clearly on one side. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations’, 120, 122.  6. Newbury, Patrons; E.A.B. van Rouveroy Nieuwaal and R. van Dijk (eds), African Chieftaincy in a New Socio-Political Landscape (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1999); A.E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeast Nigeria 1891–1929 (New York: Humanity Press, 1972).   7. P. Geschiere, ‘Chiefs and Colonial Rule in Cameroon: Inventing Chieftaincy, French and British Style’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 63(2) (1993), 151–75; P. Geschiere and J.J. Ravell, Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations Among the Maka of South-eastern Cameroon Since the Colonial Conquest (London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1982); B.J. Nantang, ‘Indirect Rule in Colonial and Post-Colonial Cameroon’, Paideuma 41 (1995), 39–47.  8. For the Bamiléké, see E. Rohde, Chefferie Bamiléké – Traditionelle Herrschaft und Kolonialsystem: Eine Studie zu den Veränderungsprozessen im Herrschafts- und

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Gesellschaftssystem der Bamiléké-Völker in West-Kamerun (Münster and Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1990).   9. R.A. Austen, ‘The Metamorphoses of Middlemen: The Duala, Europeans, and the Cameroon Hinterland, ca. 1800–ca. 1960’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 16(1) (1983), 11; V.J. Ngoh, History of Cameroon since 1800 (Limbe: Presbook, 1996), 51–57. 10. Ibid., 60. 11. Austen, ‘Metamorphoses of Middlemen’, 6. 12. Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (BArch), R1001/4447, Contract of 12 July 1884, 3 (original in English). 13. A. Kum’a N’dumbe, ‘Les traités Camerouno-Germaniques: 1884–1907’, in idem (ed.), L’Afrique et l’Allemagne de la colonisation à la coopération, 1884–1984: Le cas du Cameroun (Yaoundé: Africavenir, 1986), 42–68. 14. See K. Hausen, Deutsche Kolonialherrschaft in Afrika: Wirtschaftsinteressen und Kolonialverwaltung in Kamerun vor 1914 (Zurich: Atlantis, 1970), 96–105. 15. For the Duala, see R.A. Austen and J. Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 16. Archives Nationales de Cameroun, Yaoundé (ANY), FA 1/614, district office Buea to Government, 4 July 1905, 22–25, 23–24; Berké, Kirchhof, Krücke, Mansfeld, Rausch, Schlosser 1910. ‘Die politische Organisation der Eingeborenen und ihre Verwendung für Verwaltung und Rechtsprechung im Schutzgebiet Kamerun’, Amtsblatt für das Schutzgebiet Kamerun 3(1), 88; Drucksachen des Reichstags, 12/I, 1907/09, vol. 4, no. 323, 5. 17. H. Hesse, ‘Eingeborenen-Schiedsgerichte in Kamerun’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9(38) (1896), 299; Drucksachen des Reichstags, 12/I, 1907/09, vol. 4, no. 323, 22–23. 18. See for example the officials’ comments on the draft decree regulating African marriages from 1908 to 1909, ANY, FA 1/622, Ossidinge, 27; Jabassi, 30; Buea, 39; Johann-Albrechtshöhe, 50. 19. R. Mallmann, Rechte und Pflichten in den deutschen Schutzgebieten: Eine Studie über die Rechtstellung der Bewohner der deutschen Kolonien auf der Grundlage ihrer Staatsangehörigkeit (Berlin: Curtius, 1913), 63; R. Kühn, Die deutschen Schutzgebiete: Ihre Erwerbung und rechtliche Stellung (Leipzig: Buchdruckerei Robert Noske, 1908), 39. 20. W. Schütze, ‘Farbe gegen Weiß in Afrika’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialwirtschaft und Kolonialrecht 8(10) (1906), 734; Schütze demanded that chieftaincy should be constructed as a fake political position. 21. Schreiber, ‘Die rechtliche Stellung der Bewohner der deutschen Schutzgebiete’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialwirtschaft und Kolonialrecht 6(10) (1904), 767. 22. ‘Erlaß des Auswärtigen Amts, Kolonialabteilung betreffend die Einnahmen der Eingeborenen-Schiedsgerichte, vom 15.06.1906’, in J. Ruppel (ed.), Die Landesgesetzgebung für das Schutzgebiet Kamerun: Sammlung der in Kamerun zur Zeit



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geltenden völkerrechtlichen Verträge, Gesetze, Verordnungen und Dienstvorschriften mit Anmerkungen und Registern (Berlin: Mittler, 1912), no. 435. 23. For the Kumi see R.A. Austen, ‘Mythic Transformation and Historical Continuity: the Duala of Cameroon and German Colonialism, 1884–1914’, in I. Fowler and D. Zeitlyn (eds), African Crossroads: Intersections Between History and Anthropology in Cameroon (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 71. 24. With a similar intention, the mixed courts were defined as self-governing bodies that were not part of the colonial administration. See ‘Erlaß des Auswärtigen Amts’, in Ruppel, Landesgesetzgebung, no. 435. 25. BArch R1001/5003, Governor (i.V. Pfeil) to Reichskanzler, 9 July 1890, 12; BArch R1001/5003, Colonial Department to Governor Puttkamer, 14 October 1890, 15. 26. Stockhausen, ‘Verwertung der Eingeborenen-Organisationen Tropisch-WestAfrikas zum Zwecke Europäischer Verwaltung’, Koloniale Rundschau 5 (1911), 312. 27. See e.g. BArch, R 1001/5004, Government to Secretary of the Colonial Office, 21 September 1907, 2–3, 2; ANY, FA 1/622, Attachment to the report of the Station Akonolinga, 21 August 1912, 106; Schreiber, ‘Die rechtliche Stellung’, 768. 28. This group accounted for no more than one per mil of the total population, see A. Wirz, Vom Sklavenhandel zum Kolonialen Handel: Wirtschaftsräume und Wirtschaftsformen in Kamerun vor 1914 (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1972), 23. 29. For the debate on the character of customary law and its ‘invention’ in the colonial situation – a question I do not address in this paper – see e.g. P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Traditionalism and Traditional Law’, Journal of African Law 28(1/2) (1984), 20–27; M. Chanock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); F.G. Snyder, ‘Colonialism and Legal Form: The Creation of “Customary Law” in Senegal’, Journal of Legal Pluralism 13(19) (1981) 49–90. 30. ANY, FA 1/614, District Office Buea to Government, 4 July 1905, 22–25, 23; Berké, Kirchhoff, Krücke et al. Organisation der Eingeborenen, 88; see also Rohde, Chefferie Bamiléké. 31. ANY, FA 1/37, Report, 25 June (1894), 261. 32. ANY, FA 4/434, Wuri mixed court to District Office Duala, 28 November 1913, without page number. 33. A case in which the colonial government threatened to punish a chief in case he did not provide for the appearance of the defendant and a litigious child in the mixed court can be found in ANY, FA 4/434, note, 22 March 1913, without page number. 34. ANY, FA 4/434, Wuri mixed court to District Office Duala, 2 July 1913, without page number. 35. ANY, FA 1/614, District Office Buea to Government, 4 July 1905, 22–25, 24; ANY, FA 1/627, Station Jabassi to Government, 20 July 1905, 153; BArch, R 1001/5003, Governor to Reichskanzler, 16 May 1892, 34–39, 39; ANY, FA

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1/614, Government to District Office Edea, 31 January 1906, 28–29; BArch, R 1001/5003, Governor to Colonial Department, 23 April 1904, 168–69, 168. 36. ‘Verordnung des Gouverneurs, betreffend Einführung eines EingeborenenSchiedsgerichts für den Duala-Stamm’, in Ruppel, Landesgesetzgebung, no. 434, n. 3. 37. BArch, R 1001/5003, Leist for the Governor, 18 October 1890, 16. 38. von Trotha, Koloniale Herrschaft, 225. 39. ANY, FA 1/96, Report about a trip to the Wuri region, conducting of court sessions, 2 April 1891, 119–36, 122. 40. See for example Geschiere, ‘Chiefs and Colonial Rule’, 157–58. 41. Stockhausen, ‘Verwertung der Eingeborenen-Organisationen’, 311. 42. See B.J. Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism’, African Affairs 97(388) (1998), 305–41; Geschiere and Ravell, Village Communities, 148–51; Geschiere, ‘Chiefs and Colonial Rule’; C. Lentz, ‘Ethnizität und die Interpretation der Vergangenheit’, in J.-G. Deutsch and A. Wirz (eds), Geschichte in Afrika: Einführung in Probleme und Debatten (Berlin: Verlag das Arabische Buch, 1997), 149–74; M. Mamdani, ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4) (2001), 653–57; T.O. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 211–62 and T.O. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, in T.O. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-century Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 62–111. 43. Basel Mission Archive, E.2.14, annual report 1901, station Mangamba by Missionary Wittwer, 13 February 1902, 191. 44. ANY, FA 1/100, minutes, 30 November 1893, 49. 45. ANY, FA 1/96, note, 21 May 1892, 193; ANY, 100, Manga Bell to Vice Governor Leist, 1 August 1893, 52–53. 46. ANY, FA 1/ 100, Mikole to Vice Governor, 16 October 1893, 56. 47. Stockhausen, ‘Verwertung der Eingeborenen-Organisationen’, 311. 48. ANY, FA 1/96, Proclamation, 19 July 1887, 22–23. 49. See the respective reports in ANY, FA 1/101, 1–9; 25–44. 50. Austen and Derrick, Middlemen, 59. 51. See ANY, FA 1/101 and 1/96. 52. ANY, FA 1/101, Bohnert to the district officer in Duala, 25 May 1898, 25; I. Keller to Governor, 27 May 1998, 30. The respective documents are not numbered chronologically. 53. ANY, FA 1/101, to Station Rio del Rey, 23 December 1898, 28. 54. ANY, FA 1/101, 23 July 1898, 2. 55. ANY, FA 17101, sentence, 27 July 1898, 3. 56. ANY, FA 1/101, to Governor Seitz, 24 July 1898, 1; ANY, FA 1/101, 24 July 1898, 6; ANY, FA 1/101, 24 July 1898, 7; ANY, FA 1/101, 27 July 1898, 8. 57. ANY, FA 1/101, note Seitz, 17 August 1898, 9.



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58. ANY, FA 1/101, I. Keller to government, 28 July 1889, 32. 59. A report of his life and other autobiographical statements can be found in M. Heepe, Jaunde-Texte von Karl Atangana und Paul Messi nebst Experimentalphonetischen Untersuchungen über die Tonhöhen im Jaunde und einer Einführung in die Jaunde-Sprache (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1919), 89–90, 121–29, 129–38. For a discussion of different dates and places for his birth, see B. Ambach, ‘Charles Atangana. Ein kamerunischer Chef im Dienste der Kolonialmächte’ (dissertation, Hamburg, 1992), 61. With respect to his place of birth, Ambach states that he was not born in Mvolyé as often specified in the literature, but in exile because of a war between the Ewondo and the Bene, ibid. 62. 60. F. Quinn, ‘Charles Atangana of Yaounde’, Journal of African History 21(4) (1980), 486. 61. Ambach, ‘Charles Atangana’, 63. 62. P. Laburthe-Tolra, ‘Charles Atangana: un chef camerounais entre deux colonisations’, in C.-A. Julien (ed.), Les Africains (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1977), 114. 63. F. Hennemann, ‘Karl Atangana, ein christlicher Häuptling’, Der Stern von Afrika (1920), 36. 64. ANY, FA 1/173 Karl Atangana to councillor, 7 July 1902, 11–12; ANY, FA 1/173, Government to Station Jaunde, 28 July 1902, 12–14; Heepe, JaundeTexte, 90. 65. Quinn, ‘Charles Atangana of Yaounde’, 490–91. 66. Ambach, ‘Charles Atangana’, 121–30. 67. Ibid., 130. The following passage is based on F. Quinn, In Search of Salt: Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880-1960 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 81–84 and idem, ‘Charles Atangana of Yaounde’. 68. Heepe, Jaunde-Texte, 133. 69. ANY, FA 1/96 Report of the governmental secretary Wallmuth, 20 July 1889, 37–45, 41. 70. For an example of how chiefs could be bypassed in the delegation of jurisdiction because they did not appear at a meeting, see ANY, FA 1/96, minutes, Leist, 6 May 1893, 209. 71. For a more extensive analysis, see U. Schaper, ‘David Meetom: Interpreting, Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44(5) (2016), 755–780. 72. M. Buchner, Aurora colonialis: Bruchstücke eines Tagebuchs aus dem ersten Beginn unserer Kolonialpolitik 1884/85 (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1914), 94. 73. Ibid., 235–38. 74. ANY, FA 1/100, note by D. Meetom, 18 November 1893, 58; ANY, FA 1/100 report by D. Meetom, 20 November 1893, 66. 75. ANY, FA 1/37, Palaver, 17 July 1885, 3–7, 5. 76. BArch, R1001/4297, Governor von Soden to Bismarck, 8 August 1885, 3–5, 3.

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77. J. Gomsu, ‘Problématique de la collaboration: Les chefs traditionnels du SudCameroun dans l’administration coloniale allemande’, in A. Kum’a N’dumbe (ed.), L’Afrique et l’Allemagne de la colonisation à la coopération, 1884–1984: Le cas du Cameroun (Yaoundé: Africavenir, 1986), 123. 78. M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48, 110. 79. ANY, FA 1/100, 29 March 1889, without page numbers. 80. von Trotha, Koloniale Herrschaft, 308. 81. ANY, FA 1/101, To the Imperial Judge, 27 May 1900, 63. 82. ANY, FA 1/613, report about the mixed courts in the Abo und Wuri region, 20 February 1904, 26–27, 26; ANY, FA 1/613, revisionary report by Assessor Krücke on the mixed courts in the Abo und Wuri region from 1904, 26–31; ANY, FA 1/292, District Office Duala to government, 14 September 1906, 204; ANY, FA 1/627, Station Jabassi to Governor, 16 June 1905, 151–52. 83. Respective documents can be found under the court journal numbers 167, 168, 194, 200 (but with pages numbered consecutively) in ANY, FA 4/56. 84. ANY, FA 4/56, Verdict, 18 May 1894, 26–29. 85. ANY, FA 4/56, sentence, 18 May 1894, 26–29; ANY, FA 4/56, 9 August 1894, 39; Austen and Derrick, Middlemen, 104. 86. ANY, FA 1/71, annual report for Cameroon, 1909, 19. 87. ANY, FA 1/94, report of an expedition of Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, 1907, copy, 41. 88. For the Dualas’ marriage politics, see Austen, ‘Metamorphoses of Middlemen’, 4–5. 89. ANY, FA 1/94, report of an expedition of Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, 1907, copy, 42. 90. ANY, FA 1/101, Missionary Dietrich, Basel Mission to District Officer Obendorff, 31 August 1899, 59; ANY, FA 1/101, Wilhelm Basedow, Basel Mission to Assessor Diehl, 64–65. 91. ANY, FA 1/132, minutes of the trial chief Qua Moto of Mamelo against Quantek and his followers, 10 October 1907, 76. 92. Ibid. 93. ANY, FA 1/132, district manager in Jabassi to Government, 15 October 1907, 74–75, 75. 94. ANY, FA 1/37, John Akwa to Government, 24 January 1887, 49. 95. Ibid. How these tensions were resolved is not clear from the documents, which just note: ‘solved by word of mouth’ (mündlich erledigt). 96. ANY, FA 1/292, military station Ebolova to Government, 13 October 1902, 105–09, 108; ANY, FA 1/70, annual report of the district office Victoria, 1907/08, 74–79, 74; ANY, FA 1/66, annual report of the district office Kribi, 1905–6, 75–82, 76; ANY, FA 1/66, annual report of the station Jabassi, 1905/06, 200–17, 200. 97. ANY, FA 4/914, Peter Alukwu Aluange to the district office of Duala, 28 December 1913, without page numbers. This statement also contains a



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common trope of betraying the secrets of the land. Intermediaries, especially interpreters, were accused of supplying the colonial government with information they were not supposed to receive and of thus delivering the land and culture to the colonial conqueror. 98. See also Hausen, Deutsche Kolonialherrschaft, 169. 99. A. Eckert, Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und kolonialer Wandel: Douala 1880 bis 1960 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 112–24. 100. ANY, FA 4/914, Peter Alukwu Aluange to the district office of Duala, 28 December 1913, without page numbers. 101. ANY, FA 1/100, Ekobo und Njanga, Kings of Dibombadi to the Governor, 3 July 1893, 45 (originally in English). 102. ANY, FA 1/100, note Leist, 46. 103. See for example ANY, FA 1/618, list of sentences from Edea, 1908, 8–11, 29–30. 104. See K.E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 31.

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Eckert, A. Grundbesitz, Landkonflikte und kolonialer Wandel: Douala 1880 bis 1960. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999. Fields, K.E. Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Fitzpatrick, P. ‘Traditionalism and Traditional Law’, Journal of African Law 28(1/2) (1984), 20–27. Geschiere, P. ‘Chiefs and Colonial Rule in Cameroon: Inventing Chieftaincy, French and British Style’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 63(2) (1993), 151–75. Geschiere, P. and J.J. Ravell. Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations Among the Maka of South-eastern Cameroon Since the Colonial Conquest. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall, 1982. Gomsu, J. ‘Problématique de la collaboration: Les chefs traditionnels du Sud-Cameroun dans l’administration coloniale allemande’, in A. Kum’a N’dumbe (ed.), L’Afrique et l’Allemagne de la colonisation à la coopération, 1884–1984: Le cas du Cameroun. Yaoundé: Africavenir, 1986, 120–45. Hausen, K. Deutsche Kolonialherrschaft in Afrika: Wirtschaftsinteressen und Kolonialverwaltung in Kamerun vor 1914. Zurich: Atlantis, 1970. Heepe, M. Jaunde-Texte von Karl Atangana und Paul Messi nebst Experimentalphonetischen Untersuchungen über die Tonhöhen im Jaunde und einer Einführung in die JaundeSprache. Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1919. Hennemann, F. ‘Karl Atangana, ein christlicher Häuptling’, Der Stern von Afrika (1920), 34–38, 65–68. Hesse, H. ‘Eingeborenen-Schiedsgerichte in Kamerun’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung 9(38) (1896), 299–300. Kühn, R. Die deutschen Schutzgebiete: Ihre Erwerbung und rechtliche Stellung. Leipzig: Buchdruckerei Robert Noske, 1908. Kum’a N’dumbe, A. ‘Les traités Camerouno-Germaniques: 1884–1907’, in idem (ed.), L’Afrique et l’Allemagne de la colonisation à la coopération, 1884–1984: Le cas du Cameroun. Yaoundé: Africavenir, 1986, 42–68. Laburthe-Tolra, P. ‘Charles Atangana un chef camerounais entre deux colonisations’, in C.-A. Julien (ed.), Les Africains. Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1977, 109–41. Lawrance, B.N., E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds). Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Lentz, C. ‘Ethnizität und die Interpretation der Vergangenheit’, in J.-G. Deutsch and A. Wirz (eds), Geschichte in Afrika. Einführung in Probleme und Debatten. Berlin: Verlag das Arabische Buch, 1997, 149–74. Mallmann, R. Rechte und Pflichten in den deutschen Schutzgebieten: Eine Studie über die Rechtstellung der Bewohner der deutschen Kolonien auf der Grundlage ihrer Staatsangehörigkeit. Berlin: Curtius, 1913. Mamdani, M. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.



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 . ‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 43(4) (2001), 651–64. Nantang, B.J. ‘Indirect Rule in Colonial and Post-Colonial Cameroon’, Paideuma 41 (1995), 39–47. Newbury, C. Patrons, Clients and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ngoh, V.J. History of Cameroon since 1800. Limbe: Presbook, 1996. Osborn, E.L. ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 29–50. Quinn, F. ‘Charles Atangana of Yaounde’, Journal of African History 21(4) (1980), 485–95.  . In Search of Salt: Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880-1960. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Ranger, T.O. ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 211–62.  . ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, in T.O. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-century Africa. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, 62–111. Rohde, E. Chefferie Bamiléké – Traditionelle Herrschaft und Kolonialsystem. Eine Studie zu den Veränderungsprozessen im Herrschafts- und Gesellschaftssystem der Bamiléké-Völker in West-Kamerun. Münster: Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1990. Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen (ed.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Prentice Hall Press, 1972, 117–42. Rouveroy Nieuwaal, E.A.B. van and R. van Dijk (eds). African Chieftaincy in a New Socio-Political Landscape. Münster: Lit Verlag, 1999. Ruppel, J. (ed.). Die Landesgesetzgebung für das Schutzgebiet Kamerun: Sammlung der in Kamerun zur Zeit geltenden völkerrechtlichen Verträge, Gesetze, Verordnungen und Dienstvorschriften mit Anmerkungen und Registern. Berlin: Mittler, 1912. Schaper, U. ‘David Meetom: Interpreting, Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44(5) (2016), 755–80. Schreiber. ‘Die rechtliche Stellung der Bewohner der deutschen Schutzgebiete’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialwirtschaft und Kolonialrecht 6(10) (1904), 760–75. Schütze, W. ‘Farbe gegen Weiß in Afrika’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialwirtschaft und Kolonialrecht 8(10) (1906), 727–40. Snyder, F.G. ‘Colonialism and Legal Form: The Creation of “Customary Law” in Senegal’, Journal of Legal Pluralism 19 (1981), 49–90.

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Stengel, C. von. ‘Zur Frage der Mischehen in den deutschen Schutzgebieten’, Zeitschrift für Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialwirtschaft und Kolonialrecht 14(2) (1912), 738–80. Stockhausen. ‘Verwertung der Eingeborenen-Organisationen Tropisch-West-Afrikas zum Zwecke Europäischer Verwaltung’, Koloniale Rundschau 5 (1911). Stoler, A.L. and F. Cooper. ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in idem (eds), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 1–56. Suret-Canale, J. ‘“Résistance” et “collaboration” en Afrique noire coloniale’, in J. Vansina and H. Brunschwig (eds), Études africaines: Offertes à Henri Brunschwig. Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1982, 319–31. Trotha, T. von. Koloniale Herrschaft: Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des ‘Schutzgebietes Togo’. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. Vail, L. and L. White. ‘Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique’, American Historical Review 88(4) (1983), 883–919. Wirz, A. Vom Sklavenhandel zum Kolonialen Handel: Wirtschaftsräume und Wirtschaftsformen in Kamerun vor 1914. Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1972.

Chapter 8

Cooperation at its Limits Re-Reading the British Constitution in South Africa Charles V. Reed

} Sol Plaatje described the 1910 Act of Union, framed by representatives of the four South African colonies conventions at Durban, Cape Town and Bloemfontein and approved by the British Parliament, in terms of loss:1 With the formation of the Union, the Imperial Government, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained, unreservedly handed over the Natives to the colonists, and these colonists, as a rule, are dominated by the Dutch Republican spirit. Thus the suzerainty of Great Britain, which under the reign of Her late Majesty Victoria, of blessed memory, was the Natives’ only bulwark, has now apparently been withdrawn or relaxed, and the Republicans like a lot of bloodhounds long held in the lease, use the free hand given by the Imperial Government not only to guard against a possible supersession of Cape ideas of toleration, but to effectively extend through the Union the drastic native policy pursued by the Province which is misnamed ‘Free’ State, and enforce it with the utmost rigour.2

For Plaatje, and other missionary- and Western-educated Africans, South Asians and other people of colour in the Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the Union of South Africa, which brought together the colonies of southern Africa into a single union that failed to extend the non-racial franchise of the Cape Colony and limited membership in the union parliament to people ‘of European descent’, was a decidedly 223

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un-British formulation, in which the rights guaranteed to King’s subjects by the British constitution were sacrificed in order to reconcile the white settler population of southern Africa. In challenging the injustice of union, they appealed to their respectability (see below), loyalty to King and Empire and – in particular – the unredeemed promises of British constitutionalism in South Africa. They read and interpreted British constitutional tradition and claimed to possess a better, more authentically British, interpretation of it than the constitutional convention, the white settlers and ultimately the imperial parliament in London. These historical actors participated in a political, cultural and social space – and thus themselves were situated – between empire and nation. They had been educated in missionary or other European schools, participated in a public sphere of imperial and colonial politics (even if their voices often fell on deaf ears) and – most importantly – claimed to represent the African, Coloured and South Asian communities in independent newspapers. Conceptually grasping at these figures, hoping to categorize their worldviews and activities into the categories that the social scientists in us still cherish, poses a difficult if not impossible task. The notion of collaboration fails to capture these figures in all of their glorious complexities and contractions. On the one hand, made in and by empire, they made claims on their rights and responsibilities as British subjects and even saw themselves as British liberals and advocated a brand of imperialism (both within and beyond the borders of South Africa). On the other hand, they never rejected their African-ness (or other -ness) and employed their interpretations of the British constitution to challenge the injustices and un-Britishness of colonial rule in South Africa. The notion of cooperation better reflects the historiographical moment and captures the spaces that existed for some colonial subjects between empire and nation. Activists and intellectuals of colour did cooperate in the project of empire – arguing for the extension of British rule over Boers or German Southwest Africa or even the ‘common’ African – while at the same time claiming to possess a more authentic and sophisticated understanding of empire’s legitimizing framework, the British constitution. Mary Sarah Bilder has argued, from the perspective of Britain and in the context of Britain’s North America colonies, that the government practiced a brand of legal pluralism based on the concepts of repugnance and divergence. As she argues, ‘If the English empire and Englishness required transatlantic uniformity, then some nonuniform colonial laws would be judged repugnant. If the colony could demonstrate that differences related to the nature of the colony and its people, then the colonial laws would be judged divergent’.3 That is, there was a belief on the part of the metropolitan



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political order that colonies, settlement colonies anyway, should adhere to British legal principles and values as part of a larger cultural package of Britishness. Conversely, one of the most significant contributions of the growing body of work on legal pluralism has been to demonstrate how colonial subjects could employ legal strategies to make various claims.4 British subjects overseas, like their metropolitan counterparts, frequently appealed to an idiom of ‘the rights of Englishmen’ and British constitutionalism to question or challenge political and legal decisions from ‘Home’ and the empire. Much attention has been given to the idea of the American Revolution as a British civil war over the principles and rights of British constitutionalism.5 It was in the settler empire that the rights of Britishers were celebrated and defended in an environment of uber-Britishness as well as one where Britons overseas could believe – perhaps with some justification – that they had more liberty and freedom than the ‘British British at Home’. Largely missing from this scholarly melee until recently, however, are colonial subjects of colour, people labelled ‘indigenous’ or native in most accounts (though their identities were far more complicated than these terms suggest), who vigorously and passionately made claims on the rights of the British constitution and their place within an inclusive, colour-blind community of empire. A number of recent scholars have begun attending to these historical subjects, and they provide a compelling case for the relevance of empire to colonial subjects into and beyond the ‘age of nationalism’: Sukanya Banerjee’s Becoming Imperial Citizens, Isabel Hofmeyr’s excellent work on Mohandas Gandhi’s newspaper work in Natal, Anne Rush on the West Indies and my own work on royal tours and imperial citizenship all reflect on the ways in which colonial subjects of colour appealed to British traditions and rights to critique the excesses of empire and to demand a place in their global empire.6 Of particular value to this chapter is the work of Theodore Koditschek, notably on Surendranath Banerjea’s appeals to Macaulian constitutionalism and to ‘representative government, individual rights, the right to bear arms, “no taxation without representation,” [and] institutional checks and balances’ for India.7 Furthering this work, I argue here that colonial subjects across the empire turned the legitimizing framework of empire – based on racial and cultural difference – on its head by identifying white settlers as the true savages, beyond the pale of British traditions. The historical actors of this piece are ‘respectables’ of colour, a term that I employ both to avoid the negative description ‘non-white’ and to suggest the ethnic and racial fluidity that cannot be expressed through the language of modern identity politics.8 These men include John Tengo Jabavu, editor of the King William’s Town Imvo Zabunstundu (Native Opinion,

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first published in 1884) who came to ally himself with the Afrikaner Bond, educated at a Methodist mission school near Healdtown; Solomon (Sol) Plaatje, newspaper editor, linguist and political activist, trained by German missionaries near Kimberly in the Cape Colony; Abdullah Abdurahman, a coloured lawyer and activist who attended medical school in Glasgow and founded the African Political Organization (APO); and Mohandas Gandhi, editor of the Natal-based Indian Opinion (founded in 1903) who had read law at the Inner Temple in London and was the leader of South Africa’s South Asian community. They claimed respectability through dress, manners and language; they were, through their own self-ascriptions, civilized. While certainly different populations experienced the processes of colonization differently (the Xhosa Jabavu and the South Asian Gandhi, for instance) and these activists and intellectuals had political disagreements and rivalries with each other at different moments, they spoke in a shared idiom of loyalty and British constitutionalism. They were all missionary- or Western-educated, multilingual and cosmopolitan, and visitors to Britain at some point in their lives. This chapter explores how colonial subjects of colour in a South African context gleaned from their reading of the British constitution a belief in – appealing to the language of Cecil Rhodes – ‘equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambesi’ (of course, Rhodes believed in nothing of the sort). In assessing their (re-)reading of the British constitution as more authentic and true to British ideals than the settler communities of South Africa, the imperial government in London, and even their closest allies amongst the Cape’s political elites, they understood the Union as repugnant to the British constitution in spirit and letter. Making their case through petitions and newspaper articles and even taking their claim all the way to London, they argued that colonial law failed to provide the most basic protections to the King’s most vulnerable subjects. By appealing to and claiming an understanding of the British constitution, they employed a strategy that contrasted metropolitan law and constitutionalism with the legal orders of South Africa and judged the Union of South Africa as divergent. These respectables of colour were, in effect, liberal imperialists, arguing for South Africa’s place in a larger British imperial universe and the need for continued British presence and intervention in South African politics. They did this, in part, by playing on settler or Creole inferiority, exploiting the long-existing suspicion amongst at least some at home that settler societies were bad carbon copies of their original, societies that had drifted away from British civilization and descended into a kind of savagery. By gleaning their rights from a British constitutional tradition, political equality for all ‘civilized’ British subjects regardless of colour or



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creed, they carved out an ideological defence of empire and a demand for civil and human rights against the savagery of colonial politics.

LOYALTY, RESPECTABILITY AND THE NON-RACIAL FRANCHISE In the context of the Act of Union, the principle concern for the African and Coloured populations of South Africa was that the Cape’s non-racial franchise was not protected or extended, that – against all British traditions – a colour bar would be erected in the Union Parliament, and that the connection between British subjects of colour and the Mother Country would be broken, effectively abandoning them to deal with the white settlers of South Africa on their own. As Sol Plaatje complained, the majority of South Africans, most of whom wished to retain British sovereignty over local affairs, would be left without the vote, and the Union constitution created a scenario wherein the Cape’s non-racial franchise could be snuffed out by the parliament.9 Through their interpretation of the British constitution and the rights of Britishers, they claimed to be the authentic heirs of a constitutional tradition that settler society had rejected in a lust for minority rule and land and that the Mother Country had failed to fulfil. For them, the union was divergent from British traditions. While it might be easy to interpret these claims on British constitutionalism and loyalism as hyperbolic and/or strategic, they must be contextualized within the history of the nineteenth-century Cape. Certainly, pro-British and pro-monarchy sentiments have some source in cultural imperialism and propaganda. At the same time, the notion of Britain as a fount of equality had some historical basis, even if seen through the rose-coloured glasses of historical memory. But, many respectables of colour in southern Africa embraced – in the words of one letter to the Natal Mercury reprinted in John Dube’s Illanga Lase Natal (printed in Zulu and English, first in 1903) – ‘hearty acceptance of the British Flag and British Constitution’.10 According to Robert Ross, the Khoesan of the Cape considered Ordinance 50 of 1828, which abolished the pass system and allowed them to own property, as ‘the foundation of their liberty’, perhaps comparable to the Treaty of Waitangi in Maori history or the Royal Proclamation of 1858 in India.11 Similarly, Queen Victoria was celebrated by the pages of Imvo Zabantsundu and the Izwi Labuntu (published in Xhosa and East London by Alan Soga with funding from Cecil Rhodes, first in 1897) as a liberator who ended slavery and bestowed on her African subjects rights and respectability.

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These understandings of the relationship between a brand of liberal imperialism and colonial subjects are the stuff of a complex historical narrative and historiographical debate, that of the so-called Cape liberal tradition. Arguably, Ordinance 50 and the 1853 constitution bestowed more rights on British subjects of colour in the Cape than in any other colony. ‘Friends of the native’, such as Saul Solomon, defended the non-racial franchise and, to some measure, racial equality. Historians have argued that in Cape Town during the first decades of the nineteenth century an eclectic array of people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds co-mingled and lived together. A past generation of historians might have argued that the Cape liberal tradition demonstrates how an Afrikaner-dominated South African state diverged from the traditions of the Cape. During the 1970s, a younger generation of historians, particularly those of a Marxisant stripe, challenged this vision, arguing that the Cape was not immune from the kind of racialist thought that produced apartheid. For instance, Vivian Bickford-Smith has identified that, while significant fluidity existed amongst the lower classes of Cape Town, white elites effectively entrenched their power and limited the social and political possibilities of people of colour and lower class whites.12 Similarly, scholars have argued that Ordinance 50 and other supposedly humanitarian-inspired statutes had the effect of controlling the labour of indigenous peoples and former slaves.13 African, Coloured and South Asian activists and intellectuals understood the unfolding of British constitutionalism in South Africa as a decidedly incomplete process, thwarted not only by the white settler community but also by actors in the imperial government itself. The Cape’s non-racial franchise, enshrined in the 1853 constitution of the Cape Colony, was considered a prized possession by intellectuals and activists of colour – and many of their white allies. While respectables of colour recognized the non-racial franchise as a starting point in their struggle toward equal membership in a British South Africa, it became a frequent political target and a crucial stumbling block to white reconciliation. The franchise required voters to own £25 in property (nearly anyone who owned property), establishing a price tag on civilization or respectability. While no subject of colour was elected to the Cape parliament until after the Union, it was understood by British subjects of colour to represent the unredeemed promises of British constitutionalism in South Africa and a key ingredient of their respectable status.14 Over time, legislation weakened rather than bolstered the non-racial franchise. The Registration Act of 1887 disqualified ‘tribal forms of tenure’, removing a significant number of voters from the rolls. Of the native franchise, Cecil Rhodes argued: ‘The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India,



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in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa’.15 In 1892 the Cape Franchise and Ballot Act increased the minimum property qualification to £75. As Hermann Giliomee and others have argued, the non-racial franchise posed a social and racial problem to the white settler societies of the Cape, most notably the Afrikaner Bond, namely that ‘poor whites’ would continue to occupy the lower social stratum and dilute white minority rule.16 Though plans for federation dated back to Sir George Grey during the 1850s and 1860s, if not earlier, Stanley Trapido argues that the Cape franchise posed as the main stumbling block to many efforts at union.17 Certainly, by the time gold and diamonds were discovered, British consolidation of South Africa was a sought-after goal of colonial administrators in London. During the negotiations to end the South African War (1899–1901), the Boer republics feared the imposition of a non-racial franchise as a term of surrender. Likewise, the discussion of expansion of it was stillborn at the constitutional convention, supported by only members of the Cape delegation. To the independent African press, the Boers in particular posed the greatest threat to their rights as British subjects in southern Africa.18 The South African War, after all, had been fought – the propaganda asserted – against Boer tyranny and republicanism. The Prime Minister Lord Salisbury appealed to the contrast between British and Boer when he told the House of Lords in October 1899 that: the moment has arrived for deciding whether the future of South Africa is to be a growing and increasing Dutch supremacy or a safe, perfectly established supremacy of the English Queen … With regard to the future there must be no doubt that the Sovereign of England is paramount; there must be no doubt that the white races will be put upon an equality, and that due precaution will be taken for the philanthropic and kindly and improving treatment of those countless indigenous races of whose destiny, I fear, we have been too forgetful.19

As Bill Nasson’s work demonstrates, Africans – including Sol Plaatje – served the imperial war effort with the promise of racial justice in mind.20 People of colour overwhelmingly recognized this difference and served the imperial war effort in great numbers, through ‘irregular armed service, scouting, spying and intelligence, supplying crop, livestock, and other goods, and in providing remount, transport riding, and other labour for logistical services’.21 Yet, as Izwi Labantu argued, the British treated the Boers generously, too generously, at the end of the war, ‘surrender[ing] British rights at [the Treaty of] Vereeniging’. 22 Jabavu complained that in order to bring the Boer war [sic] to a close a month or two earlier than it otherwise would have taken place through the unconditional surrender of

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the Boers, [Joseph Chamberlain] and the Union Government … sacrificed the interest of His Majesty’s Coloured and Native subjects in the Natal and O[range].R[iver]. Colony, and handed them over bound hand and foot to the Boer and the Uitlander.23

In the name of a larger geopolitical agenda, the British in 1902 were willing to sacrifice the liberal empire through white reconciliation and consolidation of British control of southern Africa. By 1910, though many in the government were not particularly fond of the racially defined constitution, they were not prepared to intervene.24 There is a certain tragic irony in the fact that as respectables were pleading for imperial justice and intervention – closer bonds of empire – imperial culture was moving toward a more racialist and exclusive understanding of imperial belonging and citizenship. In the Cape, there existed considerable support for the non-racial franchise across the political spectrum (including, for instance, the Cape branch of the anti-British Afrikaner Bond). Some of this appears to have been simply in the cause of self-preservation, but it appears it may have gone deeper than this. According to Trapido, ‘non-whites were an interest group which White politicians had to take into account. Yet there is some indication that the acceptance of the non-racial franchise had become part of the values of an important section of the Colony’s White population’.25 Appealing to evidence gathered by the 1903–1905 African Native Affairs Commission, which itself sought to discourage witnesses from supporting the non-racial franchise, Trapido demonstrates that most respondents were in favour of the franchise (52 of 85 respondents) while most who opposed it favoured a New Zealandstyle scheme of separate representation for people of colour (the commission’s ultimate proposal). Cape politicians publicly defended the non-racial franchise, in part perhaps because they relied on the support of voters of colour. In 1908, Cape Prime Minister John X. Merriman suggested in a letter to General Jan Smuts a high educational requirement to prevent non-white voters from outnumbering white ones. Merriman and Smuts agreed before the convention that the individual states would retain their franchises but that the European population would determine representation.

FRAMING THE UNION At the constitutional convention, Colonel Walter Sanford, former chief magistrate in Transkei and descendent of the 1820 Settlers, advocated that Africans should be allowed to prove themselves as ‘good and worthy citizens and able to bear their full share of the burden of citizenship’.26 Afrikaner and Cape liberal J.W. Sauer echoed Sanford’s comments, although



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he qualified the Cape delegation’s advocacy for political equality, indicating that they were not advocating for social equality, which could not be legislated. Like Sanford, he argued that whatever ‘civilization test’ was chosen, it should be applied consistently across the union. Moreover, the Cape’s non-white voters, he contended, were the ‘most contented group in the British Empire’.27 With a bit of political manoeuvring by Merriman, by appointing Sauer to the relevant sub-committee (Trapido argues that Merriman saw him as tractable), the Cape’s franchise was protected but not extended, and the convention delegates agreed that only a two-thirds majority in the union parliament could tamper with it. Non-whites were barred from sitting in parliament without contest. The act thus established a colour bar for election to the new Union Parliament and the possibility that what remained of the non-racial franchise could be ‘taken away’ by a two-thirds vote in the same legislative body.28 More significantly, Clause 26 of the act (Qualifications of Senators) required any senator elected to the Union Parliament to ‘be a British subject of European descent’.29 Former Prime Minister W.P. Schreiner led the political campaign against the draft constitution’s affront to the Cape’s non-white population, which included participating in a delegation to London to appeal for imperial justice. Funded by African subscriptions, a group that included Schreiner, the Cape Coloured politician and doctor Abdullah Abdurahman, and the African newspaper editors, activists and intellectuals John Tengo Jabavu and Walter Rubusana took their concerns to London in order to submit their protest against the South Africa Act to the imperial government in person.30 This strategy sought to appeal to an imperial constitution from which the South African draft constitution diverged, taking advantage of the legal ambiguities that existed in a South Africa still within the orbit of British influence. In a letter to the Times, Abdullah Abdurahman appealed directly to the people of Great Britain in the name of ‘the millions of loyal British subjects whom we have been delegated to represent’ to challenge the act’s clauses barring non-whites from election to the Union Parliament on the grounds that: (a.) They are illiberal, unjust, and unreasonably offensive to the King’s subjects. (b.) They deprive the coloured people and the natives of the Cape Colony of existing rights granted them in 1852 and embodied in the Cape Constitution … rights of every duly qualified civilized British subject in a self-governing colony. (c.) They originate for South Africa a disqualification based upon colour which has never yet been embodied in any Imperial Act of Parliament, and they reverse the principle of equal rights for all qualified civilized men … affirmed by the late Hon. Cecil Rhodes.31

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In Abdurahman’s view, as the true inheritors of British constitutional tradition and defenders of imperial pride in South Africa, they were witnessing the ‘destruction of the liberties granted to them by the benign rule of the British government’.32 Rather than joining ‘the political family circle as true citizens of Empire’, as they had hoped, the true Britishers of South Africa were robbed of their rights through the un-British reconciliation of the white settler population.33 Activists and intellectuals of colour argued against the act not only as a divergence from the metropolis’ standard but from practice across the empire. In a letter to the Times of London, Jabavu argued that the British government be compelled to act in order to ‘retain the confidence of its coloured subjects of the King across the Empire’.34 Gandhi ’s Indian Opinion argued that ‘we would rather see Closer Union … postponed indefinitely, than that it should be accomplished at such a cost to the Empire’.35 Of particular concern was the portability of the rights of British subjects. Indian Opinion assessed the problem of the act as it related to the health of the empire: Mr. Tengo Jabavu and Dr. Abdurahman at the Cape will, in the South African Union, have the franchise, so long as they remain south of the Orange River, but if Professor [Gopal Krishna] Gokhale, or Mr. Dadabhai [sic] Naoroji, or Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree, the last two of whom have represented British Constituencies in the House of Commons, were, by some unlucky chance, to become resident of the Transvaal, their political status would be no higher than that of an aboriginal native … and their social status in the popular view … that of a ‘coolie’.36

Could a British Indian (to use the language of Indian Opinion) authorized to sit in the Mother of Parliaments in Britain be stripped of his status and rights upon entering South Africa? Might voters within the Union of South Africa be disenfranchised simply by crossing a provincial border? A group of Griqua in the Transvaal, some 4,000 of whom signed a petition protesting the draft constitution, also raised the problem of ‘taxation without representation’.37 Reaching across space and time to the language of the American Revolution revealed, perhaps, an implicit threat, but it seems to have been more an attempt to relate the plight of disenfranchised Transvaal Griqua to other struggles of constitutionalism in British history. While the delegation to London met with the Colonial Secretary and sympathetic Liberal and Labour MPs, their appeals for imperial justice fell largely on deaf ears.38 The Asquith Liberal government in London understood the details of the Union, a long-time goal of colonial administrators,



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to be a local matter developed free of imperial intervention. More than an imperial betrayal of Creole elites, to use the language of Vivian BickfordSmith, the passing of the South Africa Act through the British Parliament represented a symbolic failure of pro-empire loyalism and British constitutionalism as political strategies.39 The white settler empire was drifting slowly out of a British orbit, with British subjects of colour – the majority – stranded at sea without recourse. The independent African and South Asian press lamented their abandonment by the Mother of Parliaments and the British monarchy. They argued that similar acts of Parliament, the British North America Act (1867) and the Constitution of Australia Act (1900), had not defied British principles by establishing a colour bar. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion condemned the passing of the act and the Parliament itself: The splendid British traditions, the theories by which so many men live, that merit, character, soul, should be the only passports to power under the British Flag, and that birth and colour are no hindrance, have been again trampled in the dust and the Imperial Parliament has sanctioned at this critical moment a gross violation of Imperial principles.40

While the delegation received no audience with King Edward VII, little blame was placed on the king, who assented to the act on 20 September 1909. Despite the imperial betrayal and refutation of British principles, loyalty to King and Empire – so central to the system of beliefs expressed by respectables of colour – remained untouched. Even ‘friends of the native’ who represented the Cape at the constitutional convention were not immune from criticism for abandoning British constitutionalism and the Cape liberal tradition in the name of union. A minor row broke out between John Tengo Jabavu, editor of Imvo Zabunstundu, and other independent African papers over Sauer’s contingent approach to defending the non-racial franchise. Sauer attested that ‘We have had a franchise in this country for years … As a matter of principle, we departed gravely … from what was right … But on that account I am not prepared to say no Union’. Against his better judgment, Sauer said, he ‘appended [his] name’ to the draft constitution.41 Izwi Labuntu quipped that ‘according to [Jabavu’s] Imvo, one would almost imagine that the Lloyd Garrisons, Beecher Stows, and Wilberforces were not in the running with Sauer and [John X.] Merriman in their love for the Negro’.42 In the end, liberal ‘friends of the native’ proved no more helpful than the British government – ideologically inclined to defend the non-racial franchise but not willing to risk union or white reconciliation.

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CONCLUSIONS While the betrayal of Union certainly transformed how British subjects of colour imagined their social, political and cultural place within South Africa and the British Empire, the drift away from the imperial orbit was a slow one. Through the Native Lands Act (1913), the two world wars and other imperial betrayals, and the emergence of the apartheid state in 1948, appeals were directed at to the British Parliament and monarchy to ameliorate conditions and demand justice for the king’s subjects. In 1912, the South African Native National Congress was founded to promote respectability, as Plaate put it ‘to promote the social, educational and political upliftment of the Black people’ and the fulfilment of the British constitution. In his APO presidential address in 1913, Abdurahman remained dedicated to making demands in an idiom of British constitutionalism: ‘Justice and equity are our demands – are inherent rights of every man, especially a free-born British subject, even in South Africa’.43 Sol Plaatje travelled to Britain on a number of occasions to share the story of the ‘black man’s burden in South Africa’. Despite an almost unending stream of imperial betrayals, these cosmopolitans did more than cooperate with empire: they sought to remake it based on their understanding of Britishness and a British constitutional tradition. As we all know, African, Coloured and South Asian politics pivoted toward more radical solutions and ethnic nationalism, but pro-British and pro-imperial sentiment amongst such historical actors has been undervalued. By participating in and contributing to a British constitutional tradition, these respectables were appropriating British history and traditions to make a claim on British rights in a way that prefigures modern notions of hyphenated British identities. British constitutionalism continued to haunt South African nationalism even through its darkest days, and, some might say, helped it into the daylight. As Nelson Mandela admitted in his autobiography, ‘When I thought of Western democracy and freedom, I thought of the British parliamentary system’ and indeed, one of the first acts of Mandela’s government was to re-join the British Commonwealth.44 Mandela, without question, understood that although the British constitution allowed for the ‘pernicious system of inequality on [his people]’, it also retained an ideal, an unfulfilled promise of equality.45 With the passage of the Union of South Africa bill through the imperial parliament and its assent by King Edward VII, the respectables described herein were confronted with the limits and failures of their cooperation and loyalism. Between nation and empire, collaboration and resistance, these cosmopolitan historical actors sought to carve out a political, social and



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cultural space within empire. While their brand of politics would survive into the First World War and the interwar period (or, as above, even into Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island), the Union represents a watershed moment in history of pro-empire loyalism on the part of colonial subjects of colour. While the British government was far too concerned with the reconciliation of the white population of South Africa and currying favour with the white colonies of settlement to give much consideration to these claims, they represent an important and underrepresented discourse in the history of colonial politics and imperial culture. In demanding the rights of British subjects, regardless of race, ethnicity or colour, they were participating in a larger global movement for civil and human rights (one traditionally associated with European political movements). Moreover, when the symbol of British justice and fairness – the King – participated knowingly and willingly in such an imperial betrayal, it could be argued that the end of empire was all but inevitable. Professor Charles V. Reed is an Associate Professor of History at Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina, USA. He is the author of Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester University Press, 2016), editor of H-Empire, the H-Net listserv dedicated to imperial and colonial studies, and an Associate Editor of Itinerario.

NOTES  1. A small part of this chapter has been published in C.V. Reed, ‘Imperial Citizenship and the Origins of South African Nationalism’, in B. Behnken and S. Wendt (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2013), 103–22.   2. S. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 12–13.   3. M.S. Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 145.   4. L. Benton and R. Ross (eds), Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013); L. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2010); idem, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  5. B. Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); B. Black, ‘The Constitution of Empire: The Case for the Colonists’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 124 (1976), 1157–211; and J.P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities

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of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (London: W.W. Norton Publishing, 1990).   6. S. Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); I. Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); A.S. Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); C.V. Reed, Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016).   7. T. Koditschk, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: NineteenthCentury Visions of a Greater Britain (London: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 287.   8. For a useful take on the development of such identities, see V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town’, Journal of African History 36(3) (1995), 443–65.   9. S. Plaatje, ‘An Appeal to the British Brotherhoods’, Ilanga Lase Natal, 28 August 1914. Plaatje mocked the idea that this somehow represented local autonomy. By his estimates, one million South Africans would be eligible to vote; six million would be ineligible. 10. Natal Mercury, 9 January 1909, quoted in Ilanga Lase Natal, 22 January 1909. 11. R. Ross, The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 32. Of course, at least two of these documents were dual-edged swords, both identified as symbols of rights in appeals to imperial justice by colonial subjects and used as justification for control of those same subjects by settler colonial officials. 12. V. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 13. T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of a Racial Order (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 126. 14. R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173. Ross takes some issue with this claim, but it is generally accepted by scholars. 15. Ross, Status and Respectability, 174. 16. H. Giliomee, ‘The Non-Racial Franchise and Afrikaner and Coloured Identities, 1910-1994’, African Affairs 94(375) (1995), 205. 17. S. Trapido, ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation’ (dissertation, University of London, London, 1970), 185. See also S. Trapido, ‘The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’, Journal of African History 5 (1965), 37–54. 18. It should be noted that other communities in South Africa were concerned by the threat of Boer/Afrikaner values in the new union. In Grahamstown, home of the 1820 British settlers and a bastion of British identity in the Eastern Cape, the Journal argued that the constitution’s framers, their republican tendencies hardly veiled, ‘[will] merrily sacrifice every loyal and British element’.



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The editors argued that the Eastern Cape ought to stay out of the union if possible. Grahamstown Journal, 14 May 1908. 19. HL Deb, 17 October 1899, vol. 77, cc21–22. 20. B. Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War on the Cape, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); idem, ‘Why They Fought: Black Cape Colonists and Imperial Wars, 1899–1918’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 37 (2004), 55–70. 21. B. Nasson, The South African War, 1899–1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 22. Izwi Labantu, 2 March 1909. 23. Imvo Zabantsundu, 14 September 1909. 24. The Colonial Office was actually relieved that the proposal did not restrict the franchise further. See R. Hyam and P. Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa Since the Boer War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 82. 25. Trapido, ‘White Conflict’, 185–86, 195, 197. 26. Quoted in Trapido, ‘White Conflict’, 198. 27. Ibid., 199. 28. ‘Native Rights in South Africa’, Times, 30 July 1909. 29. HC Deb, 19 August 1909, vol. 9, cc1553. 30. For more on this, see Reed, Royal Tourists, chapter 5. 31. Abdullah Abdurahman, ‘South African Natives and the Constitution’, Times, 28 July 1909. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. John Tengo Jabavu, ‘The South Africa Bill’, Times, 19 August 1909. 35. Indian Opinion, 20 February 1909. 36. Indian Opinion, 27 February 1909. 37. Izwi Labantu, 9 February 1909. 38. See Reed, Royal Tourists, chapter 5. 39. V. Bickford-Smith, ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–1920’, in S. Hawkins and P.D. Morgan (eds), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 194–227. 40. Indian Opinion, 28 August 1909. 41. Izwi Labantu, 2 March 1909. Emphasis in original. 42. Izwi Labantu, 2 March 1909. 43. Quoted in Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/ epub/1452/pg1452.html (accessed 1 July 2014). 44. N. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little and Brown, 1995), 302. This excerpt has been frequently cited. See, in particular, T. Lodge, Mandela: A Critical Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6; C. Saunders, ‘Britishness and Otherness’, Humanities Research 13(1) (2006), 68. 45. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailyn, B. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Banerjee, S. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Benton, L. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.  . A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. London: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Benton, L. and R. Ross (eds). Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Bickford-Smith, V. ‘Black Ethnicities, Communities and Political Expression in Late Victorian Cape Town’, Journal of African History 36(3) (1995), 443–65.  . Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.  . ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–1920’, in S. Hawkins and P.D. Morgan (eds), Black Experience and the Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 194–227. Bilder, M.S. The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Black, B. ‘The Constitution of Empire: The Case for the Colonists’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 124 (1976), 1157–211. Giliomee, H. ‘The Non-Racial Franchise and Afrikaner and Coloured Identities, 1910–1994’, African Affairs 94(375) (1995), 199–225. Greene, J.P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788. London: W.W. Norton Publishing, 1990. Hofmeyr, I. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Hyam, R. and P. Henshaw. The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa Since the Boer War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Keegan, T. Colonial South Africa and the Origins of a Racial Order. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Koditschck, T. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain. London: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Lodge, T. Mandela: A Critical Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mandela, N. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. New York: Little and Brown, 1995. Nasson, B. The South African War, 1899–1902. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.  . Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War on the Cape, 1899–1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.



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 . ‘Why They Fought: Black Cape Colonists and Imperial Wars, 1899–1918’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 37 (2004), 55–70. Plaatje, S. Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Reed, C.V. ‘Imperial Citizenship and the Origins of South African Nationalism’, in B. Behnken and S. Wendt (eds), Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World. Lexington: Lexington Books, 2013, 103–22.  . Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860–1911. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016. Ross, R. The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ross, R. Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A Tragedy of Manners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rush, A.S. Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Saunders, C. ‘Britishness and Otherness’, Humanities Research 13(1) (2006), 61–69. Trapido, S. ‘The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’, Journal of African History 5 (1965), 37–54.  . ‘White Conflict and Non-White Participation’, dissertation. London: University of London, 1970.

Chapter 9

Key Alliance? ‘Native Guards’ and European Administrators in Sub-Saharan Africa from a Comparative Perspective (1918–1959) Alexander Keese

} ‘The captive wished to escape, so he managed to grab a knife and to attack a cipaio [or ‘native guard’] who had to kill the attacker to defend his life …’. This standard narrative appears regularly, for example in the report of the Portuguese District Commissioner of Gabela, in Angola’s CuanzaSul Province, with regard to a punishment campaign against refugees from compulsory labour services, and seems almost to exemplify the clichéd justification of the extrajudicial killing of prisoners.1 In the Portuguese empire in sub-Saharan Africa, this happened again and again. We find an abundance of cases in colonies such as Angola or Mozambique, where native guards killed locals in what was subsequently interpreted as ‘legitimate defence’. Although the Portuguese military had conquered most of the remote regions in the interior of the colonies shortly after the First World War, and although the colonial regime invested considerable resources to stabilize its rule in these regions, the brutality of such incidents destroyed any prestige that Portugal as a colonial power had managed to build up. The consequences on the ground were dramatic – for both the locals and the agents of colonial power. It comes as no surprise that this particular narrative of Portuguese colonial rule, with its history of brutality and mismanagement, has become a standard topic in African history. It is connected to the violent context 240



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of the relatively late Portuguese conquests, during which African allies and mercenaries were responsible for much of the ‘pacification’ of the interior in territories such as Angola and especially in Portuguese Guinea.2 According to this narrative, auxiliary troops became native guards and thus an integral part of the civil administration. In reality, social reorganization in the new colonial territories was less straightforward: many of the mercenary leaders in the service of the colonial powers were indeed installed as ‘traditional’ chiefs, but later removed if they behaved too violently, which was frequently the case. Only in the 1920s did the process of recruitment of native guards from villages become more organized and part of stable career paths. While the role of the cipaio has been commented upon in part of the literature on Portuguese colonial rule, analogous policing institutions in other colonial empires have rarely been discussed. Martin Thomas’s recent important study on police activities in colonial Africa clearly concentrates on other, more professionalized types of police forces and their confrontation with industrial or mine workers: he does not target the rural experiences of policing through ‘native guards’.3 For the French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, the native guards (gardes de cercle) mainly appear in scholarly research with regard to debates about early nationalist mobilization.4 A paradigmatic case of policing and repression directed against early nationalist elites is the territory of Côte d’Ivoire, where native guards acted against the adherents of Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire–Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (PDCI-RDA), which in the 1940s was a new, anti-colonial party, before, ironically, its leaders became some of the most valuable allies of French rule in the 1950s.5 Little is known, however, about the longer trends of the employment and the social history of these native guards under French rule. For the British Empire in sub-Saharan Africa, the situation is similar. The more clearly decentralized character of British rule over populations in African colonies makes it hard to find broader typologies of the participation of native guards. In the context of British colonialism, some guards were directly integrated in the structures of rule organized in the hands of local and regional chiefs. In the study of decolonization of British territories in sub-Saharan Africa, native guards as agents of ‘indirect rule’ have been little discussed.6 Colonial history has over the last three decades been pushed into a very awkward position in its relationship to African studies (although one may well ask if these labels make much sense). The analysis of African experiences and the discussion of structures of colonial rule are frequently no longer connected. Therefore, we still have very few monographs that

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engage with intermediaries.7 Exceptional studies, such as Emily Lynn Osborn’s path-breaking article on African colonial employees, focus clearly on the collection and negotiation of local information instead of discussing the more executive role of the guards.8 With regard to Ronald Robinson’s terminology and the terminological discussion presented in the introduction to this book, it needs to be said that native guards have to be imagined, nevertheless, as ‘collaborators’ through employment.9 Although this process was improvised in the early period of colonial domination, guarding and rural policing became a typical profession over much of the colonial period. As I will show, it was relatively cheap from the point of view of cost-efficient rule over ‘natives’ and exempted the European administrators from too much involvement in the rural districts. This may not be the type of ‘cooperation’ that Robinson had in mind. However, it needs to be included in any discussion of entanglement between local middlemen, elites and colonial agents: it leads to a more realistic approach to the role of local partners. Many of these partners were formally in the service of the European rulers; in practice, they had an immense room for manoeuvre and were very much at liberty to follow their own agendas. This chapter will show that African native guards were indeed a group with an essential and autonomous role. They negotiated social conditions, especially in rural communities; these negotiations were instrumental for the local life, as they contributed to define the burdens of tax liabilities and of compulsory labour. While different empires and different regions were not uniform, this role of the native guards was nevertheless a common factor. They chose their individual strategies according to local conditions, evading powerful local rulers and African mercenaries who could create difficulties for them and focusing instead on material (and sometimes sexual) exploitation of communities who had less protection. For the colonial subjects, it was thus very frequently the behaviour of these employees and partners of colonial rule that conditioned their life. As this is meant to be a pioneer chapter, I need to point out my methodological approach. Currently, historians who are interested in native guards have scant source material on which to rely, making it hard to single out individual careers. This defines clear limits to the qualitative study of the members of this group.10 For the moment, the role of native guards can only be discussed through a broader panorama: hence, the principal goal of this chapter is the systematic and comparative discussion of experiences of such native guards and of their functions within the colonial states. Any use of the comparative method with regard to native guards in the colonial empires in sub-Saharan Africa needs to follow the colonial view



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on scandals and spectacular facts.11 Oral history is a less suitable approach for this particular group. With forced labour as the research theme, oral interviews are likely to reproduce a contemporary, ‘simplified narrative’ on ‘collaboration’ under colonial rule. They do not point to the particular situations that characterize the functional role of these guards.12 In the following sections, I will interpret various contexts of the employment of native guards under colonial rule. This includes a discussion of the ‘conquest situation’ and the set-up of ‘native policing’. Afterwards, I will analyse the contribution of native guards in disciplining the territories during the interwar period and the position of the guards in scandals and repression in the period between the end of the First World War and the late 1950s.

NECESSITIES OF THE CONQUEST EXPERIENCE: SETTING UP A SYSTEM OF NATIVE GUARDS The conquest of African territories was a military venture during which European troops were as much drawn into the interior of the African continent by opportunities, as by the ‘necessity’ of ‘pacifying’ zones that had been acquired by a colonial power in negotiation processes in Europe – processes in which the African populations had, of course, not been consulted. However, it is now known that much of the conquest process was carried out by African mercenaries and allies. These groups remained after the end of the ‘pacification’ campaigns, and it was often difficult to deal with them, which made the creation of an administrative regime extremely complicated. In other words, and referring to the broader theoretical framework of ‘cooperation’ and ‘collaboration’, the conquest situation was in many ways a prolongation of the military cultures and traditions of recruitment of mercenaries that had preceded the European presence; these earlier forms were now transformed into conditions where these individuals became both more regular employees of the colonial power and important agents who occupied the open spaces of control that European rulers were unable to cover.13 French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française, AEF), an immense and sparsely populated group of territories north of the Congo Basin, is very instructive for understanding the early decision-making process. The French conquerors organized the interior of AEF through different regimes of control over compulsory labour, which were implemented through the employment of native guards. The differences between the

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early military administration and later civil administration were notable in these respects.14 Native guards played an important role in creating a civil administration: they were essential in the routine organization of road works through the labour tax – the ‘prestations’ (all male colonial subjects of a certain age were obliged to carry out ‘public work’ for a number of days per year).15 The guards had to fetch and accompany the local labour force to the road sites. In this early phase, the presence of military personnel on the ground made it difficult for such guards to engage in abusive behaviour: military forces had the priority in recruiting labourers for work regarded as essential for the occupation of a territory, and while the conditions of work for the military were often brutal, they were rarely routine.16 This changed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, notably during the penetration of the interior of territories such as CongoBrazzaville – part of AEF – in which the native guards were a key group. As they came to replace military units, the guards became crucial from the point of view of the colonial power. This was the case for police action, and above all, for the transport of goods, which had to be organized through the recruitment of forced labourers where no other porters were available.17 In the early 1910s, recruitment operations were extremely dangerous for the guards in AEF, and a considerable number of them were killed in action.18 Given the resistance in wide parts of Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Ubangi-Chari, the native guards struck back whenever they could. Many killings of local resisters took place in this early period, and they often constituted acts of revenge, which created a dangerous precedent.19 The fact that a high percentage of the first generation of civil native guards were of West African origin made their integration into systems of local rule even more complicated. For the British territories, the early steps in the establishment of the policing apparatus are not as well documented as they are for the French case. Many details are still unknown about the creation of British colonial administrations on the ground. The notion of the British Colonial Office as largely favouring indirect rule has obscured the analysis of the instalment of constables and district administrators. Even so, we find that the role of native guards and native police was surprisingly prominent in ‘traditional histories’ that we know from various regions that came under British rule. The histories of Ewe-speaking communities in the border region between the Gold Coast and German Togo – a very rich source – show the native guards as dangerous brokers for local chiefs, brokers who betrayed these chiefs as much as they helped them in asserting their authority.20 Individual guards could convince British officials that certain



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chiefs had a ‘real claim’ for a post – but they could also act in the opposite direction. The decentralized type of native guards used in most British territories in sub-Saharan Africa from the First World War onwards raises other questions. In most cases, native guards, such as the kapasus in Southern Africa, replaced the units of military guards who had been under the direct control of the British district commissioners from 1918. In many West African contexts, but even beyond the limits of British West Africa, the ‘native constables’ in the service of the European administrators had been Hausaspeakers; this created situations similar to that of the Senegalese and the Bambara-speakers in the French service in Equatorial Africa. Many tensions, and brutalities, were certainly rooted in existing conflicts between locals and ‘strangers’.21 In Northern Rhodesia, the transformation from central to decentralized structures meant that guards were, as early as possible, mainly paid through the native treasuries of the paramount chieftaincies that were created in the 1920s. In 1938, at a conference of district commissioners, all participants felt, however, that the salary of the guards was as miserable as the budgets of the chiefs. It was obvious that such conditions encouraged individuals to commit all manner of abuses, including extortion, to supplement their wages.22 However, between the 1910s and the 1930s, the constraints of British colonial ideology, which did not allow for more generous investment, made it impossible to offer higher local wages and allowances. It is interesting to ask why Portuguese practices of using native guards were more improvised and characterized by scandal than in the British and French cases. First, the Portuguese did not refrain from employing former ‘criminals’ as native guards in posts relatively close to their regions of origin. More than in the administrations of the other colonial powers, such recruitment became the norm. The district of Baía dos Tigres, an Angolan administrative unit adjacent to the border with German South West Africa, is illustrative of this practice. In Baía dos Tigres, there were several incidents where native guards were brutally manhandled by Portuguese settlers who considered them to be criminal elements instead of agents of the state.23 The recourse to individuals that were described as absolute outsiders in the colonial logic made their reputation, and their position, very difficult from the outset. Second, the Portuguese had fewer means than the colonial officials of other empires to pay competitive wages for their native guards. In many regions of the interior of the large colonies, the administration employed so-called ‘auxiliaries’, who were entitled to carry out the tasks of a cipaio

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but were remunerated with a miserable 30 Portuguese escudos per month. In regions such as Angola’s remote District of Alto-Cuanza, the whole administration relied on the existence of those employees.24 In some parts of the colony of Angola, it was impossible to recruit any volunteers willing to work as cipaios; the administration therefore relied on forced recruitment.25 Therefore, guards often attempted to improve their meagre salaries by hunting ‘native’ refugees from forced labour; blackmail and extortion were their usual methods.26 Norberto Correia, who was the administrator of a border district with South West Africa and an outspoken critic of the shortcomings of the Portuguese administration in Angola, described the lack of remuneration and prestige of the guards in detail – according to him (and various other observers) the conditions of the policing services in much of Angola became worse in the 1920s: In this regard [i.e. the organization of taxes and forced labour], the ‘native guards’ (cipaios) are indispensable. Without their contribution, although this may perhaps seem exaggerated, the general discipline suffers. The blacks (prêtos) know already that the posts do not have police forces, as they call them, to be sent to arrest them if they break the law or are disobedient, and from that situation come moments of passive resistance that are not at all convenient. Three cipaios per post, this is really very little. Today, a post responsible for a region of three or four thousand square kilometres has less police agents than what any department [in Luanda, the colonial capital] can boast of in terms of clerks for washing the water glasses of the employees and to sweep the house in the morning and to carry a dossier to another place over a distance of 200 or 300 metres.27

During mobilization for the world wars, native guards were needed to recruit for the military, a process that resembled a veritable manhunt. Even so, the number of guards in many parts of Equatorial Africa was insufficient to carry out these tasks.28 Other situations in which guards were essential included the pursuit of refugees from large infrastructure projects, which in the conquest period were typical for many colonies. In Portuguese Angola, the construction of the Benguela or the Mossâmedes Railways led to massive refugee movements – as did the Congo-Océan Railway in the case of the French Middle-Congo. In Angola, some cipaios were specially trained to hunt down such refugees.29 Again, the search for runaways in ‘the bush’ was a field where the intermediaries worked without any control, which opened the way for many abuses.



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ADAPTATIONS IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD: ‘FRENCH’ AND ‘PORTUGUESE’ GUARDS, EMERGENCIES AND BRUTALITIES, 1919–1945 The ‘normalization’ of colonial rule after the particularly violent conditions of the conquest period and the fever of recruitment for military service during the First World War could have given way to less brutal conflicts between native guards and local populations, in particular in the French and Portuguese empires in sub-Saharan Africa. Seen from a model of ‘collaboration’ following Robinson, Isaacman and Isaacman, or the schematic observations of political scientists such as Young, one would probably expect such a process to happen. However, in both cases, the guards’ integration into more stable local structures did not take place. In the French case, one also needs to point out that continued atrocities occurred not only in regions of Equatorial Africa that were difficult to access, but even in the better equipped colonies of West Africa. A brief look at the region of Casamance within the ‘model colony’ of Senegal gives us a useful starting point of comparison. In the French case, it was still usual in the interwar period to install former native guards as chiefs, both in West Africa and in Equatorial Africa. This often added to local tensions as this group of ‘traditional rulers’ lacked any basis for legitimacy. Abuses remained therefore quite common, as former guards often had a very weak connection to local structures. From the point of view of the French administration, the dilemma on the ground was whether to choose ‘corrupt’ native guards or ‘incompetent’ dignitaries relying on patronage. The case of Sédhiou in Casamance, in an especially turbulent region of French West Africa, is very instructive: In this canton [of Diana in the region of Sédhiou] we do not find any chief; before, we had the former native guard, ‘Chimere Fall’, who ruled the canton but committed so many abuses that one had to chase him away. Fodé Madou replaced him – a small, old, incapable and stupid person, who favoured the employment of trustees and gave doubtful traditional divorce decisions [in favour of his clients]. He is the instrument of his subjects but not the auxiliary of the Administration.30

Notwithstanding the racist tone of the description, this quotation illustrates the function of former native guards – and the principal dilemma regarding them. European administrators were principally unfriendly in their opinions about their most important collaborators, but felt that they had no choice but to use them. In Kolda in Casamance, the Kanako District

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was ruled by a former native guard, who had replaced a ‘weak’ member of the former ruling family (according to the French).31 As far as the native guards were concerned, these career opportunities made them hunt down ‘wrongdoers’ with extraordinary zeal. In AEF, some abuses were prevented by the fact that native guards were increasingly recruited within the larger region. However, this brought new difficulties for the guards themselves. The African military personnel employed in campaigns in Equatorial Africa frequently still came from West Africa: during the conflicts in the district of the Adoumas in the French Congo, where hundreds of native guards were employed to quell a local revolt, the sergeant in charge was one Amadou Diallo, a Bambara-speaking veteran soldier who had no knowledge of local issues.32 Many of the regular soldiers used in this operation also came from various regions of French West Africa – in one representative small unit, the Caporal Ramad and the soldiers Betar, Kakasse, Mahouemina and Djigangara were all from colonies of French West Africa.33 There is much evidence that these West African soldiers were quite unsympathetic in their views of Equatorial African civilian guards and treated them in brutal ways. The guards made local populations pay for these experiences by venting their frustration on them through violent behaviour of their own. The British administration had found a somewhat more promising approach towards commanding native guards, the advantages of which became visible in the interwar period. In Northern Rhodesia, native guards were often led by an induna (a Zulu term from South Africa used in other regions of Britain’s empire in southern Africa), who was usually a member of a local family of chiefs. This form of organization apparently reduced conflicts. However, many of the indunas had been engaged in military service in other British colonies, such as Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland or Bechuanaland: many were detached from local conditions.34 Under these circumstances, native guards were again likely to be mistreated by their officers and ready to turn this violence against local populations. Returning to the case of native guards under French rule in sub-Saharan Africa, for which we have the best evidence, it is useful to point to situations in which local conflict transformed itself into real military events and when many of the guards were integrated into the regiments of the colonial power as militiamen. This was an uncomfortable situation for native guards: other than the veteran soldiers, many of whom had been trained in the European battlefields of the First World War, the guards were very reluctant to participate in such operations.35 After a successful military campaign, such as in parts of Gabon in the late 1920s, the colonial power created a new military post in the region of the defeated ‘war chief’, but



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transformed it rapidly into a civilian post. The same guards that had had to participate in the ‘pacification campaign’ were installed as staff in the post. This position enabled them to intimidate the locals, but their authority was conditional on their performance during the campaign.36 For example, native guards that had violently forced local populations to grow more food to supply the market in Franceville were highly unpopular.37 The rebellion of the Awandji of rural Gabon in the 1920s is typical of the activities of native guards in the French Empire of the interwar period.38 In the District of the Adoumas, the administrator had to rely on his guards and a number of auxiliary soldiers in his dealings with the ‘rebel’ chief, Wongo.39 The hardships suffered by the populations of this region in the context of recruitment for the Congo-Océan Railway, where local villagers had to participate in construction work under dramatic circumstances, were at the heart of the problem. Although the view of many scholars was that the native chiefs were simple instruments of colonial rule, conditions with regard to Wongo were different. Reacting to the protests of his subjects in the region, their leader rose against the colonial power in 1928.40 However, the conflict with Wongo was partly due to the fact that contact between his community and the colonial power had over long periods been organized by native guards. In the two years preceding the rebellion, those guards had been sent into the villages to ‘prepare’ the payment of taxes; for some time, they had sufficiently brutalized the villagers to apparently guarantee the success of taxation measures. Shortly before the dramatic events of 1928, the chiefs had received tax payments without the presence of any native guard in these villages.41 The outbreak of violent conflict showed a lack of foresight on the part of the colonial rulers: they refused to increase the number of guards to police operations even in light of early resistance.42 After the conflict had intensified – forty native guards were concentrated in a column to deal with Wongo – other guards active in the region became singled out as targets of attacks: the native guard Djohn, who supervised the harvest of bananas in one rural region, was brutally killed.43 This was a symbolic murder with clear indications for problems to come. ‘Pacification’ was finally successful from the colonial power’s perspective.44 However, the guards who were associated with Turenne, the administrator of the district who was removed to another region in early 1929, now faced a difficult situation. Only under his successor did they slowly manage to stabilize their control over the region.45 For some time, the absolute reign of the native guards was over, although recruitment of compulsory labour through the Chief Micoumi and others had started up again by 1930.46 Even so, many of the local native guards no longer dared to demand excessive payments or gifts from villagers, out of fear of being murdered.

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In the interwar period, the control of forced labourers carrying out infrastructure labour under the labour tax remained a crucial task of the native guards. In AEF, they spent hours and days on the labour sites, and their interaction with the foremen active in these tasks was central to suppressing resistance.47 Therefore, in regions that were not the theatre of any spectacular revolt, such as in the Woleu N’Tem Region of Gabon, the native guards formed a stable system of control of local villagers, including for the recruitment and control of ‘vagrants’ and of subjects liable for service under the labour tax.48 In a third type of region, however – Gabon’s Okano District is an example – groups of rural populations who had escaped the labour tax and other tax pressures gathered in remote regions. These refugees often attacked agents of the authorities who carried out missions of punishment. The native guards were the principal targets of such attacks, and many of them feared for their lives whenever they entered these areas.49 Again in other cases, villagers simply fled and created a new settlement in the woods, and the guards had to track these refugees, who were lightly armed but difficult to find. Manhunts in Bouéni, in the remote Gabonese district of Djouah, in 1930, are an example of such an unpopular task.50 In both West Africa and Equatorial Africa, under French rule, several representative scandals came to light in the interwar period. In Kantora, a canton of Kolda District in Casamance, the native guard, Souleyman Sall, over the course of several years stole considerable quantities of groundnuts from the local cooperative. Sall profited in this from the support of the chief, Sara Daba Baldé, who received part of the illegal income from the sale of the goods. The groundnuts were brought into Gambian territory and sold to merchants in Fatoto. Sall used the funds received from these operations to finance ‘orgies’ in the district: he transformed himself into a rich patron and bought the compliance of local dignitaries.51 In the District of Woleu N’Tem in Gabon, by 1930 the frequency of scandals in which guards were involved was also very high. The number of native guards in the district was halved through a number of arrests. A group of native guards were put into prison for their participation in the theft of rifle cartridges. The West African officer of these guards, Moussa Sidibé, was tried for opening a number of letters passing through the administrative post and stealing their contents. Native guards in the rural zones were obviously frustrated about their material conditions, which led to these incidents: The general motivation is mediocre. The guards complain that there is no chance for them to advance. They believe that their comrades in the district capital enjoy more advantages than what they have. The tasks are complicated



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in the bush – they give their service. It would be good if they were rewarded, I addressed proposals to the Lieutenant-Governor, by priority letter.52

Little initiative was shown by the administration of Woleu N’Tem to improve the conditions of guards before the Second World War. In the Gabonese District of the Estuaire, the result for 1930 was equally dramatic. Several of the native guards were arrested for scandals, and although the French administrator in the region insisted that the accusations were mainly due to ‘exaggeration’, it is obvious that the guards were involved in a number of activities aimed at improving their meagre wages.53 The unenviable material situation of the native guards in the interwar period was thus paramount in creating a number of difficulties. African colonies under Portuguese rule knew the same difficulties, although starting from an even less satisfactory status quo. In the District of Alto-Cuanza in the interior of Angola, native guards, who were extremely underpaid, were known for their brutality and were quite unpopular. In the late 1920s, this brutality became so unbearable that some villagers took the risk of complaining about the treatment they had suffered. In October 1928, the chief of Chindemba, Tunguéissaça, was arrested and mistreated by the native guard Chipoia, who also beat several villagers. Fear of the cipaios as agents of the colonial state was too great under the circumstances, and the villagers did not defend themselves. However, the situation was dramatic enough to make them later report the incident. Even so, the colonial administration rarely took measures against the native guards: little changed unless the locals rebelled against their living conditions or fled from their villages.54 A variant of repressive activity was the hunt for villagers to be pressured into labour contracts in the notorious cocoa islands of São Tomé e Príncipe; this created a real system of extortion over wide parts of the Portuguese colonies. For some Angolan regions, we have clear evidence of how this system worked. Native guards came into villages to catch individuals who had (apparently) been late in their payment of taxes, and ‘convinced’ them to accept contracts in the plantation sector of São Tomé. The cipaios, however, used this situation to extort bribes from those villagers in exchange for an exemption. 200 to 300 angolares – three to five times the monthly wage of a plantation labourer – was a common amount for such a bribe. Even so, the villagers who paid that sum could not be certain that they would not be subsequently betrayed and sent off to the archipelago despite making the payments.55 These episodes show that under stable conditions of colonial rule, where little control was exerted and guards operated with little effective scrutiny, the gates remained wide open for a variety of

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abuses. Again, Portuguese rule may have constituted the extreme variant of the practices, but it was not far removed from the general level of violence involved.

THE END OF THE BRUTALITIES? GUARDS AND ABUSES IN THE LATE COLONIAL STATES From the 1930s, a new, reformist trend characterized the activities of British and French administrations in sub-Saharan Africa. This did not cause a general overhaul of the repressive and brutal elements of colonial rule, and social reforms were nearly always a top-down process at first, but the native guards were sometimes the object of reformist impulses. In these instances, the group of native guards under scrutiny was cast as an anachronism of colonial rule. In the logic of this book, the reform process between 1935 and independence may come closest to what has been commented on as replacement of ‘chiefs’ and ‘traditional rulers’.56 However, in the case of the guards as essential ‘collaborators,’ the rhetoric does not mean that effective action was taken. When in 1935 the Government-General of French West Africa discussed the grave problems of colonial administration in the African territories, the principal concern was about the cruelty of native guards who terrorized the locals.57 In Côte d’Ivoire, where the impact of the guards on the recruitment of forced labourers, including for settler plantations, was especially fierce, the administration was admonished by the colonial ministry from Paris to cease the use of native guards for the brutal recruitment of the locals.58 Officially, this seemed to indicate the end of the institution. However, the opposite was the case, as some examples clearly show. In Niari-Sibiti in the Middle-Congo, where, by 1941, there were nine native guards, many of the activities regarding taxation and the organization of forced labour were still left to the chiefs. The district administrator dispatched his guards selectively, to boost the prestige of the ‘traditional rulers’, in particular those that had been promoted by the French as ‘tribal chiefs’ of the Bayaka and the Balali. While the interference of the guards in issues of taxation was now limited, they had more free time to control the forced labourers, making them work a record 52,000 days over the year.59 Especially during the war years, the native guards enjoyed an absolute freedom in their activities. After the end of forced labour in the French colonies in 1946, the administration in French Equatorial Africa was worried that local populations would no longer be willing to work at all. Some officials thought that



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the native guards could be used to ‘explain’ to villagers their moral obligation to work. However, the governor-general was adamant that the guards were too widely loathed in the rural areas and should no longer be sent.60 This critique shows the official mindset and symbiosis between administrators and guards (in spite of criticism and contempt coming from the former), and on the regional level, illustrates that reforms towards liberalization were not always implemented. The developments in the use of native guards in the rural Middle-Congo after the Second World War can best be shown through the case of Makoua, on which we have detailed evidence. In Makoua, local populations were still pressured into ‘public work’ in the second half of the 1940s, and the colonial administrator sent native guards to ‘protect’ the populations who were active in the production of bamboo mats for the post. This ‘protection’ was, from the point of view of local officials, necessary to avoid the intervention of local leaders from the new democratic parties within the African colonies.61 The measures of control generally regained shape in the 1940s, and native guards participated in them through brutal intimidation measures.62 The native guards thus remained an important social group in the context of places such as Makoua, and like the African officials in the colonial service, they also participated in the discussion of local issues.63 In AEF, cooperation between guards and chiefs was seen as a key element to restore the prestige of the latter after the end of forced labour, so that the institution of chieftaincy could continue to exist.64 In this local panorama, the guards were active in measures against the local contraband trade and in visits and interrogations in villages whose inhabitants were said to be hesitant in their payment of taxes.65 However, in the case of a rural district such as Makoua, the increasing involvement of local staff in census and tax operations allowed local populations to finally complain in convincing ways about the behaviour of the native guards. Faced with these complaints, administrators in the Middle-Congo were surprised that some of the rural villagers had never had any direct contact with European officials.66 In many villages of this territory, the work of the native guards strongly resembled the activities that they had carried out before the abolition of forced labour in the French Empire in May 1946. They ‘accompanied’ road labour, as had been the case before the Second World War. Even in 1948 and 1949, native guards had a strong role in disciplining rural populations in the Congo, and they were mobilized to protect chiefs who were challenged by local protesters.67 The Middle-Congo was no exception within the French Empire, and particularly not in AEF. A short glance at the AEF territory of Chad, one of the central production regions of cotton, illustrates this point. In the

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zone of the agricultural concessions of COTONFRAN, the main cotton company in Chad, in the District of Kyabe, native guards crushed the resistance of local peasants against the compulsory cultivation of cotton. For the native guards, this finally became a dangerous job, as violent protests in 1956 targeted them as agents of the control of forced labour – this was particularly true as native guards were also employed to imprison chiefs who refused to contribute as planned.68 The fact that native guards had an important role in repressive measures as late as in 1950 in the MiddleCongo and in 1956 in Chad, demonstrates how well-entrenched their role ultimately was. Once again, one would expect changes in the context of British colonialism to be more straightforward. Through the alterations in British colonial policy in the late 1940s and 1950s, some territories were scheduled for decolonization at a relatively early date, while in others – such as the short-lived Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland – commitment to modernization was central. At first glance, this implied the professionalization of the disciplinary forces, with the regular police service in the territories taking over. In this logic, both the constables in the service of the district commissioners and the kapasus working for the ‘native administrations’ would have been relegated to purely auxiliary functions. However, this did not always happen.69 In theory – as becomes obvious from debates in the Region of Barotseland in the southwest of Northern Rhodesia, an especially conservative zone with strong chieftaincies – the wage levels of the indunas rose steadily in the 1950s and their position was slowly converted into that of assistant administrators for development tasks. However, with regard to the recruitment of porters and other labourers for local tasks, the kapasus often continued to be very brutal.70 The British administration did not press for change. In the mid-1950s, a number of scandals concerning compulsory labour in Northern Rhodesia’s Northern Province were hotly debated. Communities were expected to provide support for European personnel and their entourages during inspection missions. Women were forced to carry water over large distances and to weave mats for these purposes; men were obliged to construct huts and to carry the goods of the visiting party. The native guards were charged with the control of these measures. In April 1957, the Third African Provincial Council of the Northern Province discussed the details of abuses and protested strongly: kapasus had beaten and probably raped local women. It was clear to all discussants that such incidents had a long history.71 The case of Northern Rhodesia shows that even in the British Empire repressive action by native guards remained an important factor until the end of the 1950s.



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The same applies to the Portuguese empire in sub-Saharan Africa, where processes of reform occurred much later. In particular, amongst the employees of the Inspectorate-General of Overseas Administration (ISAU), a consensus about necessary improvements had emerged by 1945. The simple horror generated by the atrocities occurring in the colonies was sufficient to motivate some inspectors and officials to insist on better treatment of local populations. However, structural resistance was enormous within the group of lower- and middle-level administrators, and the authoritarian state in the metropole was unsympathetic to further liberal reforms.72 Unsurprisingly, by 1960 many practices of recruitment and repression by native guards continued to resemble the structures that had been characteristic of the interwar period.73 The lack of resources within the administration of the Portuguese Empire remained characteristic in spite of attempts to create development plans (leading to the First Development Plan for the Colonies instituted in 1953, which did not alter conditions in the rural areas): therefore, when it came to passive resistance against the many companies in the colonial territories, the colonial authorities had few native guards who could operate in the interest of company managers. On the coffee plantations of the Companhia Angolana de Agricultura (CADA), where repressive practices towards the labour force remained the standard in the early 1950s, theft of coffee beans became an ever more widespread problem; in part, it appeared as a particular form of resistance. The number of native guards was insufficient for its repression, and the difficulties were reminiscent of the interwar years. The report of the administrator of the region of Amboim shows the frustration of the agents of the Portuguese colonial power with the system of ‘native guards’ in their colonies: It is certain that the Law punishes theft, including that of coffee beans. But, to punish the criminals, one first needs to discover who practices these things, and to arrest them. Such operations would be the role of the police, but police forces are practically inexistent in Amboim and Seles. To replace them, the local authorities only have some rare native guards at their disposal, without any force nor power that would allow them to control hundreds of square kilometres of confusing forest wilderness, where several dozens of merchants live dispersed in the bush, and numerous natives with bad intentions. The black guards, which each farm owner might employ for the policing and supervision of his plantations and lands (with strong repercussions on the harvest, for which the available labour force has always been scarce) are incapable to finish with the shamelessness and audacity of the coffee thieves.

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For the rest, the existing legislation does not allow to introduce here customs such as in the ‘Far West’, where it is normal to walk with the revolver at the belt to defend proprieties and goods and where those are victorious who first aim and fire.74

The same complicated situation appeared to hold for Angola’s principal cotton zone, the Baixa de Cassange in the District of Malange. In this production zone, the concession company, the Companhia dos Algodões de Angola (COTONANG), continued after the Second World War with an extremely aggressive quota system employed to extract a maximum of the raw material. The Baixa de Cassange had already become an unruly place in the 1940s. Native guards were used in frequent missions to discipline angry peasants in the region. In 1945, the administration and the agents of COTONANG refined the system of repression through the employment of additional cipaios – which allowed for another cycle of repressive forced agriculture.75 In early 1961, repression through native guards finally led to the bloody revolt of Angola’s cotton zones.76 This was the last occasion where the behaviour of guards was the trigger of rebellion in the colonial context.

CONCLUSION Native guards were not almighty intermediaries. The European administrators often treated them with contempt, and African soldiers regarded them with disdain at best, seeing them as armed policemen with no real training. African troops often had impressive patronage networks through their experience with European officials, even if these reflected the racist visions of a military order. Native guards did not have such support: at best, they had a good understanding with the local administrator they worked for, but often the relationship was only lukewarm. Moreover, administrators changed and the guards then had to seek a new patron. Native guards thus could not rely on permanent protection, and their position was unstable at best. But far from being an especially weak group of collaborators – which might be the first impression if we wish to follow Robinson’s reflections – native guards could be extremely powerful on a local level. Indeed, they often became the principal protagonists of a system of negotiation and bribery, of improvisation on the spot and experimentation with violence. European officials were frequently brutal and abusive, but the illegality of such abuses acted as a kind of check on European excesses; the possibility of punishment for such breaches, even if the punishment would only



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slow the career of the official in question, was a disincentive to Europeans. Abuses were also illegal for native guards, but they came to represent part of their role. Orderly processes of activities were very rare for these auxiliaries. They even needed the moment of negotiation and extortion in order to create a position for themselves in the region. The fact that European administrators, whether they were themselves abusive or not, were flooded by paperwork and did not have the time to go to all localities in view of tax collection or labour extraction, gave their auxiliaries free reign. The latter took over such levers of power whenever they could. Of course – independently of the colonial system they belonged to – the native guards were subject to the effects of mechanisms of checks and balances. First, the existence of powerful ‘native authorities’ limited their room for manoeuvre. Native guards were not reluctant to manhandle a ‘traditional chief’, but this was only possible where the local populations did not stand behind their chiefs and did not fear their authority. Where they enjoyed a good reputation, chiefs at all levels – chiefs of provinces and districts as much as village headmen – took the other part in negotiations: they were able to set limits to the arbitrariness of the regime of the native guards. It is unsurprising that the ‘native constables’ under British rule were rarely able to exercise power in ways comparable to the brutalities seen in French and Portuguese colonies. In some cases, ‘native chiefs’ even had their own guards, who, if necessary, were all too willing to beat up abusive constables. Only in the vicinity of urban centres was it more likely that the British guards could be as powerful as in other colonies. For the Portuguese and French, such leading chiefs were not as common. Second, even where no other hierarchies of local power existed that could have checked the power of native guards, populations of rural zones often managed to adapt themselves to the danger. Guards were assaulted. Much more often, however, the inhabitants of villages voted with their feet; they escaped into remote regions. For the guards, this was often a disaster as they could be accused of having failed in their work and could lose their posts. Therefore, they had to anticipate the reactions of colonial subjects and find the right balance, restraining abuses so as not to trigger resistance or flight, and the skill to avoid overstepping in the exercise of power. It is clear that the role of the guards changed over time – in the conquest period, they were by far not the only ones to inflict brutalities. In fact, European (military) administrators and African soldiers left them little room – which did not lead to less violence, but to a different, more localized type of violence. The situation of ‘established’ colonial rule founded between 1918 and 1945 – a period in which the European personnel withdrew increasingly from the task of governing the rural areas – was the moment of

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greatest freedom for the native guards. Although their room for manoeuvre was subsequently reduced in the late colonial period, the improvement of conditions did not necessarily reach the remote rural zones very quickly. Finally, it is astonishing that the importance of the guards has rarely been analysed. Their activities show that colonialism on the ground had little to do with European control, and much more with improvised situations of flux and negotiation, led by intermediaries. However, these conditions were made possible by the colonial context. Across the colonial period, atrocities remained at a stable level, whether enacted by brutal administrators during the conquest phase or their violent auxiliaries after the establishment of routinized colonial administration. Alexander Keese is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of Living with Ambiguity: Integrating an African Elite in French and Portuguese Africa, 1930–61 (2007), of Administration and Taxation in Former Portuguese Africa (1900–1945) (2015, with Philip Havik und Maciel Santos), and of Ethnicity and the Colonial State: Finding & Representing Group Identifications in Coastal West African and Global Perspective (1850–1960) (2016).

NOTES Research for this article was financed by ERC Starting Grant n° 240898 under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission.  1. Arquivo Histórico Nacional de Angola, Luanda, Angola (AHA), 1790, Miguel A. de Freitas Barros, Intendência do Cuanza-Sul – Relatório sobre os acontecimentos ocorridos {no Amboim} em 19 de Janeiro do Corrente Ano: (without number), 24 February 1939, 5; A. Keese, ‘Searching for the Reluctant Hands: Obsession, Ambivalence, and the Practice of Organizing Involuntary Labour in Colonial Cuanza-Sul and Malange Districts, Angola, 1926–1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2) (2013), 238–58.  2. J.L. Bowman, ‘Abdul Njai: Ally and Enemy of the Portuguese in GuineaBissau, 1895–1919’, Journal of African History 27(3) (1986), 463–79; R. Pélissier, Naissance de la Guiné: portugais et africains en Sénégambie (1841–1936) (Orgeval: Pélissier, 1989); idem, Les guerres grises: résistance et révoltes en Angola, 1845–1941 (Orgeval: Pélissier, 1989).   3. M. Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).   4. We find some recent exceptions, however. See N. Courtin, ‘La garde indigène à Madagascar: une police pour la “splendeur” de l’état colonial (1896–1914)’, in J.-P. Bat and N. Courtin (eds), Maintenir l’ordre colonial: Afrique et Madagascar,



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XIXe–XXe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 45–65, and other chapters in that volume.  5. N. Lawler, ‘Reform and Repression under the Free French: Economic and Political Transformation in the Côte d’Ivoire’, Africa (London) 60(1) (1990), 88–110; T. Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002); J.R. de Benoist, L’Afrique occidentale française de 1944 à 1960 (Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982).   6. See, however, D. Anderson and D. Killingray, ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire’, in idem (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 8; G. Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945–1980 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 76– 77; G. Sinclair and C. Williams, ‘“Home and Away”: The Cross-Fertilization Between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921–1985’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35(2) (2007), 221–38.  7. B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts, ‘Introduction: African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration’, in idem (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 3–34.  8. E.L. Osborn, ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 29–50.   9. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 121–24; see also the equally classic A. Isaacman and B. Isaacman, ‘Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850–1920’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 10(1) (1977), 55–56. 10. R.A. Austen, ‘Interpreters Self-Interpreted: The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks’, in B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 159–79. 11. An example for the use of such methodology is A. Keese, Living with Ambiguity: Integrating an African Elite in French and Portuguese Africa, 1930–1961 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007). 12. On the problems of oral history with regard to forced labour in Portugal’s African colonies, see also J. Ball, ‘“I Escaped in a Coffin”: Remembering Angolan Forced Labor from the 1940s’, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 9/10 (2005/6), 89–114. 13. Some (rather schematic) ideas can be drawn from C. Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 78–79. 14. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (ANOM), GGAEF, 6Y/5, Picanon, Inspector-General of the Colonies, Transmission à M. le

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Gouverneur Général de l’A.E.F. des 16 Rapports de Détail N° 64 à 79 inclus (without number), 5 May 1919, 15. 15. An overview can be found in L. Freed, ‘Networks of (Colonial) Power: Roads in French Central Africa after World War I’, History and Technology 26(3) (2010), 212–15. 16. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Picanon to Office of the Administrator of the District of the Bakongos, Mission 1918: Rapport fait par M. Picanon, Inspecteur Général des Colonies, concernant la vérification de M. Loizeau, Administrateur de 3ème classe des Colonies, Chef de la Circonscription des Bakongos (MoyenCongo), à Mindouli, à l’époque du 12 Août 1918 et explications fournies par cet Administrateur sur les résultats de sa vérification (without number), 5 May 1919, 23–24. 17. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/13, Mounié, Assistant Administrator of the Administrator of the District, to the Chief Administrator of the District of Mossaka (n° 4), 27 August 1911, 2–3. 18. See, e.g., ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/13, Marcilhacy, District Administrator of FortRousset to District Administrator of Makoua, Incident à Koubou (n° 101), 13 August 1911, 1. 19. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/13, Levaique (from Fort-Rousset) to Administrator of Subdivision of N’Kouyou (without number), 10 August 1911, 4. 20. Public Records and Administration Department, Accra, Ghana (PRAAD (Accra)), 11/1/1620, Nani Hode, Head Chief of Anfoega, An extract of the manuscript of the History of Anfoe. (without number, Enclosure VI in Report), 9 February 1918, 1–2. 21. For the situation in the border regions of the Gold Coast at the start of the twentieth century, see PRAAD (Accra), ADM 41/1/10, Hall to Colonial Secretary in the Gold Coast (n° 50/1901), 16 February 1901, 1. 22. National Archives of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia (NAZ), SEC2/321, vol. I, R.S. Hudson, Appendix ‘M’. Note for Provincial Commissioners’ Conference (without number), 18 May 1938, 1, 9–15. 23. AHA 399, Governor of District of Mossâmedes to Norton de Matos, GovernorGeneral of Angola (n° 7/3/25), 17 January 1916, 4. 24. AHA 2080, José Pedro Domingues dos Santos, Administrator of District of Alto Cuanza, to Commanders of Administrative Posts (n° 524/1ª/12), 23 July 1934. 25. AHA 4987, Norberto Correia, Administrator of Subdivision of Baixo-Cunene, Relatório da Administração da Circunscrição de Fronteira do Baixo Cunéne no Periodo Decorrente de 1 de Julho de 1927 a 30 de Novembro de 1928 (Ultimo da gerencia do cap. Norberto Correia) (without number), July 1929, 78. 26. AHA 2093, Othello Henriques da Fonseca, Administrator of District of Alto Quanza in Chitembo, to Commander of the Fifteenth Native Infantry Regiment (n° 1128/6ª/28), 6 December 1928. 27. AHA 4987, Norberto Correia, Relatório … Baixo Cunéne, July 1929, 34.



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28. ANOM, GGAEF, 2H/24, Solomiac, Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, to Inspector-General of Public Works, Main-d’œuvre de complément nécessaire à la mobilisation au Service des Transports (n° 292c/AP), 5 May 1939, 2–3. 29. AHA 3802, Amadeu de Meneses, Administrator of the District of Mossâmedes, Pequeno relatorio da viagem ás empreitdas da construção de caminho de ferro de Mossamedes-Lubango (without number), 18 September 1917, 1–2. 30. ANS, 11D1/311, Administrator-General of Casamance to Governor of Senegal (n° 1215/AG-), 26 July 1929, 6. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Administrator of District of the Adoumas to Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon, A/S du chef Wongo (n° 468), 7 August 1928, p. 1; ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne to Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon, A/S. dissidence des bawandjis (n° 10), 23 January 1929. 33. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Cordier, Commander of Police Unit of Lastoursville, to Captain commanding the First Company of the Battalion of Tirailleurs Sénégalais of AEF in Brazzaville (n° 288), without date, 2. 34. National Archives of Zambia, Lusaka (NAZ), Loc. 5039, BSE 1/10/73, District Commissioner of Mankoya to Resident Commissioner of Barotseland in Mongu (n° 2/15), 13 April 1955, 1–2. 35. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Cordier to Administrator of District of the Adoumas (without number), 14 November 1928, 3; ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Journal de Marche: 14 au 19/11/28 (without number), without date. 36. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne to Cordier, Administrator of Subdivision of Booué (n° 700), 12 November 1928, 2–3. 37. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Note: Ravitaillement du poste (without number), 11 February 1929, 2–3. 38. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Pierre Bernard, Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon to Le Testu, A.S. de la rebellion de la tribu Awandji. (n° 33/c), without number, 1–2. 39. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Administrator of District of the Adoumas to Bernard, Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon, A/S du chef Wongo (n° 330), 5 June 1928, 1. 40. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Administrator of District of the Adoumas to Bernard, Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon, A/S du chef Wongo (n° 633), 10 October 1928, 2. 41. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Note: Impôt (without number), 11 February 1929, 1–2. 42. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Acting Governor of Gabon, to Administrator of District of the Adoumas, Adoumas (n° 1839), 30 June 1928, 2. 43. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Administrator of Subdivision of the Adoumas, to Bernard, A/S du chef Wongo (n° 407), 13 July 1928, 1–2. 44. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Collombet, Administrator of District of Haut-Ogooué, to Administrator of District of the Adoumas (n° 44), without number.

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45. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Deitte, Acting Lieutenant-Governor of Gabon, to Le Testu, Administrator responsible for the Mission in Lastoursville, Affectation Mr. Tavernier aux Adoumas (n° 19/c), 16 February 1929, 1–2. 46. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Cordier to Administrator of District of the Adoumas (without number), 31 August 1929, 1. 47. ANOM, GGAEF, 6Y/5, Turenne, Note: Prestations (without number), 11 February 1929, 1–2. 48. ANOM, GGAEF, 4(1)D/36, Colonie du Gabon – Circonscription de l’Estuaire: Rapport Trimestriel – Année 1930 – 2ème Trimestre (without number), without date, 3–4. 49. ANOM, GGAEF, 4(1)D/36, Da Costa, Colonie du Gabon – Circonscription de l’Okano: Rapport Trimestriel – Janvier, février et mars 1930 – Année 1930 – 1er Trimestre (without number), 31 March 1930, 3–4. 50. ANOM, GGAEF, 4(1)D/36, Carrot, Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique Equatoriale Française – Colonie du Gabon – Circonscription du Djouah: Rapport Trimestriel – Année 1930 – 1er Trimestre (without number), 12 April 1930, 4. 51. ANS, 11D/311, Administrator-General of Casamance to Maurice Beurnier, Acting Governor of Senegal (n° 1215/AG-), 26 July 1929. 52. ANOM, GGAEF, 4(1)D/36, Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique Equatoriale Française – Colonie du Gabon – Circonscription du Woleu N’Tem: Rapport Trimestriel – Janvier, février et mars 1930 – Année 1930 – 1er Trimestre (without number), 31 March 1930, 6–7, 28. 53. ANOM, GGAEF, 4(1)D/36, Rapport Politique [ - Estuaire] (without number), without date [1930], 6. 54. AHA 2093, Othello Henriques da Fonseca, Administrator of the District of Alto Quanza in Chitembo, to Commissioner of Post of Mutumbo (n° 992/1ª/3), 3 November 1928. 55. AHA 1830, Álvaro Corrêa de Freitas, Provincial Director of Civil Administration of Benguela, Informação (n° 140/S.T./2ª./951), 20 February 1951, 1–2. 56. See the introduction in this volume, 4. 57. ANS, 11D1/337, Jules Brévié, Governor-General of French West Africa to Lieutenant-Governors of the Colonies und Administrator of the District of Dakar, Sévices à l’égard des indigènes (n° 32/AP/2), 6 February 1935, 2. 58. ANS, 11D1/632, Mandel, Minister of the Colonies, to Pierre Boisson, Acting Governor-General of French West Africa, Situations des travailleurs autochtones en Côte d’Ivoire (n° 153), 24 May 1939, 1–2. 59. CADN, Fonds Brazzaville, 83, Charles Marmiesse, Administrator of Subdivision of Niari-Sibiti, Rapport politique: Année 1941 (without number), 31 December 1941, 1, 3, 9. 60. ANOM, GGAEF, 2H/2, Bayardelle, Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, to Governors of Gabon, Ubangi-Shari, and Chad (n° 66/AP.I), 5 June 1946, 3–4.



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61. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Admistrator of District of Makoua, [Rapport Politique Mensuel] (n° 13/Cf., n° 48), 30 September 1948, 1. 62. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Rapport Politique Mensuel – Février 1949 (without number), without date. 63. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Rapport Politique Mensuel – Novembre 1948 (n° 24/Cf), without date, 1. 64. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Rapport Politique: Mois de Mars 1949 (n° 3/Cf./RI), 31 March 1948, 1. 65. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Rapport Politique & Economique mensuel (mai 1949) (n° 6/Cf.), without number ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Ch. Schmautz, Rapport Politique Mensuel: Juillet 1948 et résumé des mois antérieurs (without number), without date, 1. 66. ANOM, GGAEF, 5Y/29, Schmautz, Rapport du Chef de District de Makoua sur la tournée effectuée du 18 au 21 Février 1948 dans les terres Okombé et Atékou (without number), 2 March 1948, 2–3. 67. ANOM, GGAEF, 5/29, Schmautz, Rapport Tournée Boya (without number), 2 November 1948, p. 1; CADN, Fonds Brazzaville, 78, Vincent-Génod, Commissioner of District of Pointe-Noire, to Commissioner of Region of Kouilou, Procès-Verbal (n° 194/DPN), 1 October 1951, 4–5. 68. ANOM, Fonds Fraisse, 8APOM/3, Morin, Commissioner of District of Kyabé, to Fraisse, Enquêtes sur plaintes diverses de M. J. Charlot (n° 23/Cf.), 9 August 1956, 1; ANOM, Fonds Fraisse, 8APOM/3, Fraisse to Governor of Chad (n° 150/RMC.Cf.-), 8 October 1956. 69. NAZ, Loc. 5032, BSE 1/10/38, F.M.N. Heath, District Commissioner of Luanshya, African Social and Political Development in Urban Areas (n° 113), 23 November 1951, 5. 70. NAZ, Loc. 5039, BSE 1/10/73, Minutes of a Meeting between the Resident Commissioner, the Ngambela and Indunas of the Saa-Sikalo Kuta held on Friday 1st July, 1955, at the Resident Commissioner’s Office (without number), without date, 4–7. 71. NAZ, Loc. 2008, MLSS 1/07/017, Extracted from the Record of the Fifth Meeting of the Third African Provincial Council – Northern Province. 3rd – 5th April 1957 at Kasame (without number), without date, 1–2. 72. A. Keese, ‘The Constraints of Late Colonial Reform Policy: Forced Labour Scandals in the Portuguese Congo (Angola) and the Limits of Reform under Authoritarian Colonial Rule, 1955–1961’, Portuguese Studies 28(2) (2012), 186–200. 73. AHA 3647, Telegram from Mário Augusto Ramalho to Provincial Department of Civil Administration of Benguela (n° 24), 26 Feb. 1953. 74. AHA 1830, Cunha Lima, Agent of the CADA, to Lima e Lemos (without number), 8 June 1950, 2. 75. AHA 1253, Telegram from Civil Prosecutor of Malange to Administrator of District of Nova Gaia (n° 9), 2 May 1945. 76. A. Freudenthal, ‘A Baixa de Cassanje: algodão e revolta’, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 18–22 (1995–1999), 245–83.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, D. and D. Killingray, ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire’, in D. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991, 1–17. Austen, R.A. ‘Interpreters Self-Interpreted: The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks’, in B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, 159–79. Ball, J. ‘“I Escaped in a Coffin”: Remembering Angolan Forced Labor from the 1940s’, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 9/10 (2005/2006), 89–114. Benoist, J.R. De. L’Afrique occidentale française de 1944 à 1960. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982. Bowman, J.L. ‘Abdul Njai: Ally and Enemy of the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, 1895–1919’, Journal of African History 27(3) (1986), 463–79. Chafer, T. The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? Oxford: Berg, 2002. Courtin, N. ‘La garde indigène à Madagascar: une police pour la “splendeur” de l’état colonial (1896–1914)’, in J.-P. Bat and N. Courtin (eds), Maintenir l’ordre colonial: Afrique et Madagascar, XIXe–XXe siècles. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, 45–65. Freed, L. ‘Networks of (Colonial) Power: Roads in French Central Africa after World War I’, History and Technology 26(3) (2010), 203–23. Freudenthal, A. ‘A Baixa de Cassanje: algodão e revolta’, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 18–22 (1995–1999), 245–83. Isaacman, A. and B. Isaacman. ‘Resistance and Collaboration in Southern and Central Africa, c. 1850–1920’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 10(1) (1977), 31–62. Keese, A. Living with Ambiguity: Integrating an African Elite in French and Portuguese Africa, 1930–1961. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007.  . ‘The Constraints of Late Colonial Reform Policy: Forced Labour Scandals in the Portuguese Congo (Angola) and the Limits of Reform under Authoritarian Colonial Rule, 1955–1961’, Portuguese Studies 28(2) (2012), 186–200.  . ‘Searching for the Reluctant Hands: Obsession, Ambivalence, and the Practice of Organizing Involuntary Labour in Colonial Cuanza-Sul and Malange Districts, Angola, 1926–1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2) (2013), 238–58. Lawler, N. ‘Reform and Repression under the Free French: Economic and Political Transformation in the Côte d’Ivoire’, Africa (London) 60(1) (1990), 88–110. Lawrance, B.N., E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts. ‘Introduction: African Intermediaries and the “Bargain” of Collaboration’, in B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the



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Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, 3–34. Osborn, E.L. ‘“Circle of Iron”: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa’, Journal of African History 44(1) (2003), 29–50. Pélissier, R. Les guerres grises: résistance et révoltes en Angola, 1845–1941. Orgeval: Pélissier, 1989.  . Naissance de la Guiné: portugais et africains en Sénégambie (1841–1936). Orgeval: Pélissier, 1989. Robinson, R. ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Longman, 1972, 118–40. Sinclair, G. At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945– 1980. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Sinclair, G. and C. Williams. ‘“Home and Away”: The Cross-Fertilization Between “Colonial” and “British” Policing, 1921–1985’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35(2) (2007), 221–38. Thomas, M. Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Young, C. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.

Chapter 10

The Cooperation between the British and Faisal I of Iraq (1921–1932) Evolution of a Romance Myriam Yakoubi

} In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. The sultan-caliph, the temporal and spiritual leader of Islam, declared a holy war against the Allies. This threatened the British Empire, which to a large extent was a Muslim empire.1 A new front of the war was opened, and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire became theatres of operations. The British were keen to protect their vital interests in that part of the world, through which the route to India passed. In 1914, these British strategic concerns coincided with the ambition of Sharif2 Hussein, who was Governor of Mecca and head of the Hashemite family.3 The latter were the traditional keepers of the Holy Places of Islam, a position they owed to their lineage, which they purported could be traced back to the Prophet Muhammad. With his sons, Hussein made overtures to the British to discover if they would support a rebellion against the Ottoman authorities. This offer chimed with British interests, since Hussein’s religious credentials enabled him to counter the caliph’s religious appeal. In June 1916, Hussein thus launched a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and with the help of British military advisers, he and his sons led the various tribes of the Hedjaz and Transjordan in guerrilla operations against the Hedjaz railway (connecting Damascus to Medina). After the seizure of 266



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Aqaba in July 1917, the sharifian troops4 were put under the command of General Allenby, who was fighting against the Ottomans in Palestine. The Arab Revolt, as it became known, inaugurated cooperation between the British and the Hashemites. However, this partnership was equivocal from the beginning, for while they provided technical and military assistance, the British feared the political consequences of a Hashemite victory. They were most worried about the ambitions of Hussein, who expected to see his efforts rewarded with a large, independent Arab kingdom, which he would rule after the war.5 In fact, not only were the British reluctant to recognize Hussein’s claims, but they also made commitments that conflicted with Hussein’s expectations. In 1916, they promised much of Syria to the French in an agreement about the future partitioning of the Arab Middle East.6 One British agent seemed determined to put the Hashemites’ ambitions before the Allies’ interests. Thomas Edward Lawrence had been sent to the Hedjaz as a liaison officer between the British and the army of Hussein’s son Faisal, who was commanding a force south west of Medina. Faisal was born in the Hedjaz but grew up in Constantinople, and had been a representative in the Ottoman parliament before the war. In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), Lawrence described his encounter with him as no less than a revelation. Not only was Lawrence impressed by his personal charm and regal appearance,7 but the British agent also singled out Faisal as the ideal leader of an Arab national movement. For him, Faisal was the embodiment of Arab nobility and authenticity, but with the necessary European knowledge, training and manners to play a significant political role after the war with the support of Britain.8 Therefore, Lawrence represents the two aspects of the British attitude towards the Hashemites. One the one hand, the British considered the family as weak allies who would necessarily depend on them, but their perception of the Hashemites was also influenced by their cultural representations. There was a long tradition of fascination for Arabia among British travellers and imperial agents, which stemmed from a specific cultural attitude. In the way that the British perceived and categorized the Middle East, there was an implicit comparison between Arabia and the Levant. The latter was seen as having a long history of European influence. As a result, the British perceived the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as a melting pot of various identities – a racial and cultural mix they looked at with contempt. By contrast, Arabia seemed impervious to European influence, and was therefore perceived as pure and authentic. As they were from the Hedjaz and came from a prestigious dynasty, the Hashemites had the best claim to represent the Arabs in the eyes of the British. Driven by his

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romantic perceptions and his ambitions for the region, Lawrence encouraged Faisal’s move northwards, until he reached Damascus in October 1918. Hussein’s son set up an administration there, forestalling the French. After the war, however, imperial politics developed at the expense of the partnership between the British and Hussein. Britain failed to create Hussein’s longed-for Arab kingdom, leaving him to be only king of the Hedjaz. As for Faisal, he was crowned king of Syria after the Arab revolt, and in 1919, he was chaperoned by Lawrence during the Peace conference in Paris. He came to represent Arab interests, and impressed British and American leaders by his charisma and determination.9 But his and Lawrence’s plans were shattered when the French were awarded a League of Nations mandate over Syria during the San Remo Conference of March 1920. Four months later, the French drove Faisal out of Syria, but this was not the end of his political career. He was to start afresh in another territory controlled by the British. During the war, the British had conquered the territory they then called Mesopotamia, in order to protect their interests in the Persian Gulf.10 From 1918 to 1920, they settled in Iraq and handled the transition from military to civil administration on a British Indian model. This system was supposed to be temporary, but they prevaricated, pondering over what the final form of government for Iraq should be. In 1920, after the announcement that Iraq would in fact become a mandate of the League of Nations ruled by the British, a revolt broke out, which the British managed to put down at a high human cost.11 Because of this event, Britain concluded that direct rule was not viable and that a form of indirect rule had to be implemented. Those events provided Lawrence, who was now an adviser in the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office, with the opportunity to present Faisal as the ideal ruler for Iraq.12 In Britain, Lawrence could count not only on the support of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, and Prime Minister Lloyd George, but also of the British officers who had acted as advisers to Faisal during the Arab revolt and who were now working in the Middle East Department with him.13 In Iraq, Gertrude Bell, the Oriental Secretary, who acted as adviser to the High Commissioner, had first been sceptical about Arab government but she later changed her mind and became a supporter of Faisal’s promotion.14 The final decision, however, was to be taken by Winston Churchill. In March 1921, the Colonial Secretary convened a conference in Cairo to set Britain’s Middle Eastern affairs in order. The Hashemites were at the heart of his strategy: Faisal would become the king of Iraq, and his brother Abdullah was entrusted with the territory of Transjordan.



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This Anglo-Hashemite partnership in Iraq during Faisal’s rule is what this chapter aims to investigate. We will first examine the process through which Faisal was officially selected as king of Iraq, before dwelling on the cooperation between Faisal and the British as a power struggle, in which the two parties, while working together as de facto partners, also strove to pursue their own agendas. Finally, Faisal’s strategy to put an end to his cooperation with the British in Iraq will also be examined. By exploring all the stages of this relationship until Iraq’s formal independence in 1932, this chapter intends to analyse the way in which the British discourse about Faisal evolved and was influenced by cultural representations. This analysis will therefore draw on the work of Edward Said, who in Orientalism described a set of prejudices as well as biased and racist attitudes that constituted the western discourse about the East, and that paved the way for the latter’s subjugation.15 However, one of the limits of Said’s work was that he did not emphasize the role of eastern intermediaries in western imperial enterprise. Even though this chapter will focus on Faisal as the object of the British discourse, he should by no means be considered a passive figure. On the contrary, the chapter intends to shed light on how Faisal actively tried to negotiate his cooperation with the British and how the latter perceived his attitude.

THE CREATION OF THE HASHEMITE MONARCHY OF IRAQ: A BRITISH IMPERIAL STRATEGY The choice of Faisal as ruler of Iraq was part of a specific British imperial strategy. The Colonial Secretary aimed to reinforce Britain’s control on her mandated territories while taking into account Britain’s post-war financial constraints.16 During the discussions on Mesopotamia, Percy Cox (the High Commissioner) and Churchill agreed that the reduction of military spending and the improvement of the political situation went hand in hand. They both therefore advocated the formation of ‘a local Government of real prestige and authority’.17 The reports of the discussions show that Churchill was impressed by Faisal’s sharifian status, thanks to which he was endowed with a natural authority likely to be respected by all Muslims, whether Sunni or Shiite. This statement echoes Lawrence’s assessment of Faisal’s personality, which he described as ‘inspiring’ enough to unite what he called ‘the scattered and backward elements of a half civilised country’.18 In the British discourse, Faisal thus emerged as a conciliatory figure, whose pedigree would allow him to transcend the ethnic and religious differences of the people of Iraq. For his part, Cox stressed

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the fact that Faisal was a moderate Muslim, which distinguished him from Ibn Saud, his family’s rival.19 Consequently, the latter’s candidacy, once considered, was dismissed. So too was the possibility of nominating a local candidate such as Abd al-Rahman al-Naqib, an elderly Baghdadi notable and leader of a religious order who headed the provisional government, or Sayyid Talib, another Iraqi notable from Basra. In fact, the British preferred an outsider in order not to face the hostility of part of the Iraqi political elite, arguing that the latter would never agree as to whom among them should be the ruler.20 Cox concluded that the last alternative was a member of the family of the Sharif of Mecca, ‘provided that it was not too obvious that he was being nominated by His Majesty’s Government’.21 The candidacy of Abdullah was considered by the British, but was quickly rejected by Lawrence, who reckoned that ‘Amir Abdullah was lazy, and by no means dominating’.22 The British thus seem to have naturally fallen back on Faisal. The report also shows that choosing Faisal for Iraq was part of a larger British strategy, which consisted in taking advantage of the fact that his brother and father would be the rulers of two other British client states. This offered the British the possibility of blackmailing Faisal if they deemed it necessary.23 In his assessment of the suitability of Faisal as Iraq’s future ruler, Churchill depended heavily on the information Lawrence had given him. According to David Fromkin, Churchill thought that Faisal and the Hedjaz tribes had had a prominent role in the Arab revolt, whereas the latter had in fact been planned and financed by the British.24 Therefore, Churchill certainly believed that Faisal’s war experience would allow him to raise a local army in Iraq as quickly as possible, thus relieving the British of the cost of maintaining their own forces. The influence of Lawrence, who after the war claimed that the British had wronged the Arabs, can also be felt in a relative feeling of guilt on the part of the British. For example, just before the Cairo conference, a document from the War Office citing the various reasons why Britain should support Faisal described the latter’s appointment as a way of making up for the failure of the British to keep the promises they had made to Hussein’s family, which had been loyal to Britain during the war. According to the document, nothing less than Britain’s reputation in the Muslim world was at stake.25 Choosing Faisal also offered other advantages: the British saw the Amir as malleable, as someone who would be willing to listen to their advice and who was aware that his power would necessarily depend on them. They also appreciated the fact that he was already familiar with the British methods of government.26 Finally, the War Office stressed that it was well known that Faisal hated bolshevism, which for them was an important



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strategic asset.27 After the French were assured that Faisal would give up his ambitions in Syria, it only remained for the British to impose him, while giving the impression that he had ‘naturally’ been chosen by the Iraqis themselves. The British thus considered bypassing the opinion of the provisional government, which Cox had set up, hoping that Faisal’s mere personality would have ‘an inspiring effect’.28 However, despite their claiming that Faisal’s personality would do the job, the British left nothing to chance. Unwilling to bet on Faisal’s charisma alone, they stifled opposition to their plan both inside and outside the country.29 Even though the British had taken the necessary steps to forbid the emergence of any other candidacy, they decided that Faisal should tour Iraq in the hope of gathering support before the ‘elections’. Faisal left the Hedjaz and arrived in Iraq in June 1921, but his reception was rather lukewarm. There were indeed signs that the prospect of a close cooperation between the British and Faisal was not well received among what Bell called the ‘extremist circles’ in her intelligence reports.30 The Oriental secretary knew that the romance of the Arab revolt was now fading away. On 12 June 1921, she wrote: ‘Faisal walking hand in hand with us will not be so romantic a figure as Faisal heading a Jihad might be!’31 She also started to perceive the future difficulties inherent in Faisal’s position. The former champion of Arab nationalism would have to put ‘real inspiration’32 into an Arab state, which he owed to his cooperation with an imperial power. Despite those misgivings, Bell was enthusiastic in her support of Faisal during the two months which preceded his ‘election’. During a meeting with the Dulaim tribe in July 1921, she described Faisal as ‘a great tribesman amongst famous tribes and, as I couldn’t help feeling, a great Sunni among Sunnis’.33 Even though Faisal had never set foot in the country before, Bell felt that in Iraq, he was ‘in his own country, with the people he knew’.34 As the Hashemites were a clan of the Prophet’s own tribe, the Quraysh, and as they had led a tribal uprising in their homeland, Bell firmly believed in Faisal’s tribal credentials. She was also impressed by the fact that Faisal was a descendant of the Prophet.35 However, as an outsider, not to say a foreigner, Faisal could not directly relate to Iraqi history and identity. As a result, Bell in particular focused on his tribal and religious qualities, as though the latter would entirely make up for Faisal’s lack of Iraqi roots. The Oriental secretary also frequently highlighted Faisal’s Arabness to connect him to his future people. For example, she once told Faisal the history of the Arab conquest of the city of Ctesiphon, near Baghdad, and reported in a letter that this was ‘the tale of his [Faisal’s] own people’,36 even though the conquest had taken place in the seventh century. Therefore, Bell naturally associated

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Faisal, whom she saw as ‘the finest living representative of his race’,37 with Arab history. In her eyes, he became the embodiment of this Arab heritage, which was supposed to encompass a specific Iraqi identity and history. Therefore, the British showed no apprehension about the fact that the ruler they had chosen to rule Iraq had no direct link to the country. Percy Cox was more worried about some of Faisal’s supporters, whom he perceived as nationalists who were suspicious of Britain’s intentions.38 Even though he felt that Faisal was ‘reasonable’,39 a disagreement between him and Churchill soon emerged. The League of Nations mandate was at the heart of the problem. Aware that it was synonymous with imperial rule, Faisal wanted the British to replace it with a bilateral treaty, which would serve as the legal basis for the relationship between Iraq and Britain. Churchill let Faisal know that while the British government agreed to establish its relationship with Iraq on a treaty basis, this treaty could only be concluded within the framework of the mandate, not in place of it. For Faisal, this was a serious setback. He told Cox that T.E. Lawrence had assured him that the British were ready to give up the mandate within a year of his crowning.40 Faisal made it clear to Cox that if he were to rule a mandated territory, he would be a weak monarch with no real authority. He particularly resented the organic law designed by the British, which specified that the final authority in the country as far as internal affairs were concerned was that of the High Commissioner. While he agreed that Britain should have the final say in financial or military matters, Faisal wanted to exercise his sovereignty on Iraq’s internal affairs.41 Surprisingly, Cox himself supported Faisal’s claims, as he thought that giving him real power would create a wave of enthusiasm and grant Britain the support of the Iraqi population.42 However, Churchill was not convinced by Cox’s argument, nor was he moved by Faisal’s plea. For the Colonial Secretary, as long as Britain was financially responsible for Iraq, it would have the final say in the way the country was run.43 After some negotiations, a compromise was reached when Faisal was granted the possibility of drafting the organic law himself, its provisions having to be approved by Cox. On the other hand, Churchill insisted that Faisal should mention the mandate in his coronation speech.44 With this arrangement, the ‘elections’ could finally take place. As Faisal was the only candidate, they were turned into a referendum, whose result was a 96.5 percent vote in his favour.45 Faisal was thus proclaimed King of Iraq on 23 August 1921. In a letter Bell wrote to her father to describe the coronation ceremony, she seems to have missed the irony of the situation. Her account is full of British symbols: Faisal himself wore a British military uniform, and he was surrounded by British troops and



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civil servants (though Iraqi dignitaries were also present). After the official proclamation of Faisal as king, a military band played ‘God save the King’, since, as Bell admitted, Iraq did not have a national anthem yet. Bell was not disturbed by the artificiality of the ceremony, an attitude that sharply contrasts with her assessment of past events of the same nature. Liora Lukitz records that when Bell had attended the Durbar of King Edward VII organized by Lord Curzon in 1903, she had described the event as a ‘gorgeous fantasy’.46 Lukitz calls the lavish ceremony a ‘combination of imported modernity and borrowed tradition’47 whose purpose was to promote the unity of India and the British people, but which Bell had not found convincing at all. It is ironic therefore, that a few years later, she partook in a ceremony, which resorted to British tradition and symbols to celebrate what was supposed to be a founding event for Iraq. In fact, Faisal’s coronation and the British mandate represented a historical rupture, and as the British did not have the time to invent new national symbols for Iraq, they imported their own coronation ritual. Therefore, while this ceremony does not exactly fit into what Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger coined ‘the invention of tradition’,48 it fulfilled one of the purposes of such traditions as identified by the authors. The aim of the ceremony was to establish and legitimize the new monarchy, and it thus helped to formalize and institutionalize this new stage in the history of the country.49 History was indeed foremost in Bell’s mind. She concluded her letter to her father by writing: ‘It was an amazing thing to see all Iraq, from North to South gathered together. It is the first time it has happened in history’.50 This emphasis on Iraqi history reveals the way in which the British conceived their role in this country. They were willing to turn the page on centuries of Ottoman rule, which they regarded as having been very detrimental to the country,51 by creating a new political order. In doing so, they were inspired by Iraq’s ancient history, and proclaimed their desire to revive the country’s past glory. On entering Baghdad in 1917, General Maude had referred to the days ‘when Baghdad was one of the wonders of the world’,52 hinting at the ancient city of Babylon and its hanging gardens. As for Bell, the same year she had written that she hoped to turn Baghdad into ‘a great centre of Arab civilization’,53 impressed as she was by Baghdad’s past as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. She had also described the task of setting up a British administration in Iraq as ‘the making of a new world’.54 Iraq was thus a tabula rasa, where the British could build new institutions, and the creation of the Hashemite monarchy was the cornerstone of this endeavour.

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THE POLITICS OF COOPERATION: NEGOTIATION, ADAPTATION AND CONFRONTATION The institutional background of the cooperation between Faisal and the British in Iraq was the mandate system of the League of Nations. It is worth dwelling on this legal framework as it was the object of a negotiation between the Amir and the British. Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant described the mandate system as a ‘tutelage’ of the people who lived in countries that had been defeated during the war by ‘advanced nations’. According to the Covenant, this responsibility was ‘a sacred trust of civilisation’,55 carried out on behalf of the League, which meant that the mandatory powers were accountable to it. However, as historian Susan Pedersen has shown, this system was conceived as a compromise between Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the principle of self-determination, and the desire of the old colonial powers to maintain their interests in the territories they had conquered during the war.56 In 1918, to conciliate the American President and the local populations, the British and the French had issued a common declaration, which promised self-determination to the peoples of the Middle East.57 As the time of old-fashioned land grabbing was over, the British tried to adapt to this new international context. They used the creation of the Hashemite monarchy with Faisal at its head as the token of their pledge to give the Iraqi people the freedom to rule themselves. The mandate system thus gave the British the leeway they needed to create the modern state they envisioned. After some hesitation, and without giving up the mandate, they agreed to conclude a treaty with Iraq, because Churchill now realized that opposition to the mandate was widespread in the country. For Faisal, this institution remained a source of embarrassment, and through the negotiations over the first Anglo-Iraqi treaty, he sought to erase the traces of Iraq’s – and his own – dependence on Britain. However, this role plunged him into a real trial of strength with his British partners, which in turn triggered an evolution of the latter’s discourse about Faisal. The treaty gradually became a bone of contention, which poisoned the relationship between Faisal and the British for more than a year. In November 1921, as Faisal did not even want the mandate to be mentioned in the Anglo-Iraqi treaty, Churchill lost his temper and denounced Faisal’s attitude. He also censured Percy Cox, whom he thought was too lenient with the king: I am getting tired of all these lengthy telegrams about Feisal and his state of mind. There is too much of it. … Has he not got some wives to keep him quiet? He seems to be in a state of perpetual ferment, and Cox is much too ready to



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pass it on here. … Cox ought to go into the financial aspect with him and show him that the country on to whose throne he has been hoisted is a monstrous burden to the British Exchequer, and that he himself is heavily subsidized.58

Here, the words of the Colonial Secretary sharply contrast with the rhetoric of partnership and friendly relations which had first been used by the British. As the latter sustained most of the cost of running the country, Churchill did not think that the two allies were on an equal footing. His indictment of Cox’s attitude also reveals the difference of outlook between the officials in London and the man on the spot. Cox was more ready to take local conditions into account, and he understood the compromises Faisal had to make to be credible in the eyes of both the Iraqi political elite and the people of Iraq at large. Churchill on the other hand, saw the situation through a strictly financial point of view. It is also worth noticing Churchill’s reference to Faisal’s wives (in fact there was only one wife), which is reminiscent of the orientalist cliché of the harem. It is surprising that Churchill should associate this cliché, which was used to portray the Ottoman ruler and his court, with Faisal. Even though the latter had been brought up in Constantinople, his birthplace of the Hedjaz and the rather strict environment in which he grew up suggest a very different setting. It seems that as Colonial Secretary, Churchill, who had to deal with Britain’s mandates in the Middle East, saw that region through cultural images inherited from the past. He deemed Faisal to be politically immature, and he expected him to simply enjoy his status and the pomp that went with it, without getting involved in politics. Faisal, however, was determined to play an active role. He did his best to put pressure on the British by discreetly encouraging the opposition to the mandate and to the treaty.59 Despite proposals which aimed to modify the treaty, he was still not satisfied with its terms. The length of this political crisis, which spread to the year 1922, exhausted the patience of the British, who resorted to various strategies to subdue the king. In April 1922, Cox suggested to Churchill that he should try to make Faisal feel guilty by expressing disappointment,60 thus trying to shift the issue at stake from the political to the moral and personal sphere. The other aspect of Cox’s strategy was to threaten to resign if Faisal acted without consulting him.61 As the negotiations still dragged on, Churchill tried to use threats to overcome Faisal’s refusal and even resorted to an ultimatum: either Faisal accepted the conditions of the British, or the latter would simply evacuate the country.62 Churchill was confident that this blackmail would have an effect on Faisal. Aware that the French had already ousted the latter from Syria, he told Cox: ‘He [Faisal] will be a long time looking for a third

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throne’.63 Therefore, while Faisal tried to make the most of the existing opposition to the mandate, the British on the other hand, tried to make the most of Faisal’s dependence on them. He could not have collaborated with any other foreign power. The French were still suspicious about his intentions regarding Syria, Turkey had claims over the province of Mosul, Iran encroached on the Iraqi government’s authority over the Shiites of the country, and Ibn Saud was a historical enemy of Faisal’s family.64 The latter could not do much for him either. His brother was even more dependent on the British, and the authority of his father was at most a moral, religious authority, which had been discredited by his cooperation with the British. At the same time, Churchill tried to convince Faisal that the efforts made by the British in Iraq did not serve British interests, but were carried out ‘from a sense of duty to the people of Iraq’ as well as in the name of the ‘friendly relationships’ established with Faisal’s family during the war.65 Churchill continued to cajole Faisal by explaining that far from restricting Iraq’s powers, the mandate system was in fact meant to check the mandatory power itself.66 After several months of failed negotiations, Cox himself found it more and more difficult to sympathize with Faisal. As he was taking stock of the negotiations, he wrote to John Shuckburgh of the Colonial Office: I am anxious to make all possible excuses for Faisal, but I fear he has in these recent episodes unmistakably displayed the cloven hoof. I have endeavoured to be absolutely straightforward and frank with him, and to treat him like a brother, but there you are, when he is scratched deep enough the racial weakness displays itself.67

The fact that Cox now racially stigmatized Faisal in such a fatalistic tone, as though his behaviour had been predictable, is an illustration of the prejudices underlying the relationship between Faisal and the British. The High Commissioner’s indictment also shows his frustration over the political stalemate. Moreover, Cox’s reference to his attempt to treat Faisal as though the two were on an equal footing at a personal level underscores the fundamentally unequal political relationship at work. As Faisal stood his ground in this power struggle, his once praised personality and moderation were forgotten. Even Gertrude Bell was disappointed by Faisal’s propensity to be influenced by the ‘extremists’, but she expressed her feelings in more personal terms. She admitted that ‘the beautiful and gracious image’ she had formed was now disappearing and she even wrote about ‘the evaporation of the dream which had guided me’.68 Bell thus indirectly confessed that her expectations of Faisal were probably too high to be fulfilled.



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In his efforts to bargain with Cox, Faisal tried to play for time. At the end of June 1922, the council of ministers accepted the treaty but Faisal insisted that it would have to be ratified by the constituent assembly, which was to be elected. He also delayed his signature, using translation problems as an excuse, which led Cox to describe his attitude as ‘crooked and insincere’.69 The crisis reached its peak on 23 August 1922, which was the anniversary of Faisal’s coronation. A demonstration against the mandate and the treaty was organized by the king’s chamberlains, and Faisal himself was stricken by a crisis of appendicitis, which prevented him from giving Cox the explanations he wished for. Reckoning that the situation was getting out of hand, the High Commissioner took drastic measures against the opponents of the mandate and of the treaty. After this show of force, Faisal had little choice but to thank Cox for the trouble he had gone through during his illness,70 and the treaty was finally signed in October 1922. Gertrude Bell now also interpreted Faisal’s attitude during the crisis as stemming from ‘the fatal defects of the Oriental’.71 Her judgment of the king was not altogether negative. She saw him as ‘naturally fine and discriminating’72 but fundamentally weak. This recurring accusation must have come from the fact that Faisal had to take Iraqi nationalists into account, which prompted the British to judge Faisal as subservient to them. The king thus challenged the British in an indirect way, an attitude that they saw as a particularly egregious form of double-dealing, whereas Faisal’s biographer has argued that this was part of the king’s strategy to find a way out of ‘impossible situations and choices’.73 But the British did not give Faisal the credit for having any political strategy, and they accounted for his actions by resorting to explanations about his personality, his identity as an Oriental and his psychological disposition. This shows that despite the British claim to treat Faisal fairly, they did not consider him to be on an equal footing with them intellectually. In March 1924, the Iraqi constituent assembly was convened. It ratified the Anglo-Iraqi treaty, but with a short majority and again in a context of friction. Henry Dobbs, who replaced Cox as High Commissioner in January 1923, blamed Faisal for the demonstrations which had taken place before the ratification. Some members of the assembly had indeed criticized the treaty for being too favourable to Britain.74 The organic law of the country defined its political regime as a constitutional monarchy, in which the king had substantial powers. Allawi underlines the fact that endowing Faisal with such powers was necessary if the British were to control Parliament and Iraqi politics through him.75 However, the king’s privileged adviser remained the British High Commissioner.

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While Faisal did not hesitate to clash with the British for political reasons, his adaptation to British culture seems to have gone smoothly. In 1921, his impeccable Arab and (Sunni) Muslim credentials, allied with his political training in Constantinople and, later, his close diplomatic contacts with European powers, had made him the ideal intermediary to rule Iraq. His cultural background was thus central to the way in which the British had perceived him. Once he was king, the British scrutinized his political attitude, but they also continued to comment on his identity and social behaviour. In Iraq, Faisal had to maintain his credibility in the eyes of both the British civil servants with whom he had to work and the leaders of the various sections of the local society. Therefore, he did not become a completely Europeanized leader, nor did he try to pass as a purely traditional Arab ruler. Rather, it seems that he tried to adapt to different circumstances. In her letters, Gertrude Bell often remarked on Faisal’s clothes, as the king sometimes wore European outfits and sometimes traditional Arab dress. On several occasions, she described Faisal as ‘playing his part’,76 whether in company of British or Arab society, or both. Bell was very happy to see that the king knew exactly how to behave with everyone, an adaptability which he made the most of from a political point of view. In the private sphere, Faisal’s Anglicization seems to have been more pronounced. The king embraced British hobbies such as playing bridge, hunting and watching polo, which the British had introduced in the Iraqi army.77 He also had a country farm built for himself. British culture seems to have pervaded even his family life. For example, when Faisal’s son joined him in Iraq, Gertrude Bell chose new clothes for the boy, and a British governess was hired. Bell was also involved in Ghazi’s education, and she was the one who suggested that he should be sent in England for schooling.78 Bell’s letters are also evidence of another imported tradition. British court rituals were introduced in the Iraqi royal palace, where a Mistress of the Robes, a Lady of the Bedchamber or a Lady in Waiting served the queen. Therefore, for all their previous fascination with Faisal’s Arabness, especially on the part of Gertrude Bell, the British found it natural that Faisal should adapt to British cultural practices and encouraged such a cultural adaptation. In Ornamentalism, David Cannadine discussed this apparent contradiction between the British taste for exoticism and their propensity to reproduce familiar social structures. For him, ‘the British Empire was about the familiar and domestic, as well as the different and the exotic: indeed it was in large part about domestication of the exotic – the comprehending and the reordering of the foreign in parallel, analogous, equivalent, resemblant terms’.79 If the British were disappointed by Faisal’s political attitude, it seems that from a cultural point of view, he appeared as an ideal go-between who perfectly fulfilled his social obligations.



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NEGOTIATING THE END OF THE COOPERATION After the British had imposed the basic legal framework of the mandate, Faisal continued his efforts to promote his own political agenda. He focused on the issue of conscription to build the Iraqi army, but this led to more tensions with the British, who accused him of having despotic ambitions. In 1924, Britain and the Iraqi government concluded military agreements, which stipulated that the latter had to be responsible for the defence of Iraq by 1928. So far indeed, Iraq’s defence and internal order had largely been assigned to the Royal Air Force.80 Therefore, the Iraqi government had to determine the way in which the country would be able to reach this military independence. As it could not afford to pay professional soldiers, it thought that conscription was the only workable solution from a financial point of view. Faisal also hoped that through the army, all Iraqis, regardless of their ethnic or religious group, would develop a feeling of loyalty towards the state. However, this measure was not popular in Iraq, as Shiite tribal chiefs feared that the army would be used to crush the tribes if they rebelled. As for the British, they made it clear to the Iraqi government that they would not intervene to suppress the demonstrations, which they believed would inevitably take place against the project. The issue of conscription was closely intertwined with that of Iraq’s application to be a member of the League of Nations, which Faisal hoped would take place in 1928. Faisal thought that Britain’s support for Iraq’s independence would trigger a wave of popular enthusiasm, which would allow him to promote his conscription project. While he was rather in favour of Iraq’s application to the League in 1928, Henry Dobbs was bitterly opposed to conscription and could now count on the Shiite leadership who shared his opposition to the project.81 The conflict that followed between the British and Faisal gave birth to a new discourse about the king as a would-be despot. Dobbs accused Nuri Said, who was Faisal’s closest ally, of wishing to create a powerful army ‘for the purpose of enabling him at some future date to make a coup d’état in favour of Faisal and declare him an absolute monarch’.82 Bernard Bourdillon, who served as Acting High Commissioner when Dobbs was on leave, also accused Faisal of intending to build an Arab empire thanks to a powerful army.83 These allegations found an echo in two British newspapers, whose description of Faisal reveals British anxieties about conscription in Iraq. In 1927, what caught the attention of those two British newspapers was the resignation of Major-general Daly, a British advisor in the Iraqi defence ministry. Daly had supported conscription as the best option to shape Iraq’s army. This opinion, however, led him to clash with the High

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Commissioner, who was firmly against it. Daly’s resignation thus triggered the comments of the newspaper Truth, on 9 November 1927: The reason [for the resignation] has been kept very secret, but it is certain that General Daly has completely possessed himself of the suggestions of Nuri Pasha, the Minister of Defence, which are also the suggestions of King Feisal. This Arab soldier longs for conscription; he has tremendous dreams of a glorified military despotism in Iraq, in which power should be exercised, not constitutionally as at present, but by a handful of men, in the traditional Oriental Autocratic fashion.84

The article also accused Faisal of looking up to Mustafa Kemal, the leader of Turkey, and to Reza Shah Pahlavi in Persia. It added that Faisal’s real motivation for encouraging conscription was that he hoped to break the power of the tribes of Iraq, described as ‘the backbone of the country’.85 The newspaper’s rhetoric thus relied on the old cliché of oriental despotism, used in the eighteenth century, in particular by Montesquieu, to criticize the system of government of the Ottoman Empire. While Faisal’s family had been praised as eminent representatives of the Arab race, and while they had actually rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, Faisal now found himself associated with the most enduring cliché about Ottoman rule. As for the British, they were portrayed as the only guarantors of constitutional and legal rule in Iraq. The reference to Mustafa Kemal (the President of the modern state of Turkey from 1923) and Reza Shah Pahlavi (Prime Minister in 1923 and crowned Shah of Iran in 1926) may be explained by the fact that they had both modernized their respective countries and had sought to rid them of any foreign interference. Therefore, the British may have feared the influence that such strong regimes could have had on Iraq, lest the latter would be tempted to imitate them.86 The second newspaper, the Western Morning News and Mercury, mentioned Faisal’s wish ‘to create a military despotism’, but praised the opposition of Henry Dobbs, ‘a man of strong purpose and clear vision’.87 Again, the newspaper accused Faisal of wishing to subjugate the tribes of Iraq and to put an end to their autonomy.88 This specific concern for Iraq’s tribes echoes the vision that the British had of this specific section of Iraqi society, as well as the policy they implemented towards it. Toby Dodge has shown that the British had a romantic vision of the tribes, which they perceived as unaffected by modernization and its negative effects, contrary to the urban population which was naturally prone to corruption as it had been more exposed to Ottoman despotism. Dodge has also shown that the British made an artificial distinction between townsmen and tribesmen, as they usually considered those two groups as diametrically opposed and without any connection.89



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Consequently, the British reinforced the power of the tribes in order to counterbalance that of the urban elites. Tribal chiefs were set up as special intermediaries and allies, to whom they delegated the maintenance of law and order in the rural areas in exchange for privileges. The tribes were even subjected to a different legal system (tribal law), a measure that Dobbs enthusiastically supported.90 In the light of those facts, it seems easier to understand the reference made by the newspaper Truth to Reza Shah, who when he had first been in power in 1926, had endeavoured to break the power of the tribes in his country by putting an end to their nomadic lifestyle and by taking away their arms. Therefore, conscription threatened the key element in the British strategy to rule Iraq. For all Bell’s enthusiasm about Faisal’s familiarity with tribal manners, the British had actually reinforced the power of tribal leaders to counterbalance Faisal’s,91 and did not hesitate to cooperate directly with tribal chiefs. Moreover, it is clear that the British were against conscription because they feared that a large army would enable the Iraqis to put the British trusteeship into question. In their eyes, the role of the Iraqi army should be restricted to internal defence.92 Even though the rhetoric used in the newspapers mentioned above is very similar to the tone used by Dobbs himself when writing to the Colonial Office in London, it is difficult to know whether the articles actually fed British anxieties or merely reflected them. What is certain is that in slightly more than five years, the British opinion about Faisal had dramatically changed. Whereas he had been seen as loyal to Britain, he was now accused of wishing to oust her from Iraq by force thanks to a large army. Previously praised for his moderation, he was now accused of an excess of ambition. Conscription was not the only issue that prompted accusations of despotism by the British. According to Ali Allawi, from 1925 onwards, as the legal bases of the country had been set up and the question of its borders settled,93 Faisal focused on reinforcing and extending his powers in order to negotiate Iraq’s independence as soon as possible.94 The king resorted to political manoeuvres to assert himself, which increasingly irritated the High Commissioner. In June 1927, he wrote to the Colonial Office about Faisal’s ‘pursuit of autocratic and personal influence’.95 The British may also have been afraid of Faisal’s ambitions outside of Iraq. Allawi reports that in 1925, as the French were facing a revolt in Syria (the Druze revolt), they approached Faisal and asked him to serve as an intermediary between them and the Druzes, and even considered, though for a very short time, making him king of Syria.96 At the time, Dobbs had written that Faisal’s ‘excitable brain’ was likely to be filled ‘with dreams of immediate restoration of glories of early Arab empire’.97 The British feared that Faisal considered

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unifying Iraq and Syria under his leadership. Again, there is a sharp contrast between this suspicion and the way in which the British had dismissed Faisal’s potential Syrian ambitions when they had made him king in 1921. In fact, Allawi confirms that Faisal thought about Syria until the end of his life.98 The British did not want to fuel Faisal’s ambitions, so they remained firm in their refusal to support conscription, arguing that it was too unpopular to be imposed.99 This issue would still be on the agenda for some years, but for the time being, Faisal focussed on getting Britain’s support for Iraq’s candidacy to be an independent member of the League of Nations. As he hoped that the British would accept Iraq’s independence in 1928, Faisal endeavoured to negotiate key points with them, including the issue of the future use of military bases. For Dobbs, Faisal’s attitude during the discussions was vain, as he believed that the king merely wanted to strengthen his position in the eyes of the Iraqi people and politicians. For Dobbs, the fact that Faisal wanted to embody the cause of Iraq’s independence could lead to a sort of nationalist agitation that the king would not be able to control, an argument that had also been used by Cox a few years before. Dobbs thus blamed Faisal’s ‘vexatious and obvious tactics’,100 and criticized his stubbornness. While Dobbs was not completely opposed to granting Iraq its independence in 1928, the Colonial Office refused to do so. The British mainly had in mind the protection of their own interests, but they also advocated the maintaining of internal order and many other reasons to remain in charge of the country. As Allawi underlined, they were in fact probably simply caught in an imperial logic.101 Faisal was disappointed since in his mind, as long as Iraq was not independent, its army would be perceived as being controlled by the British and the Iraqis would therefore refuse to serve in it.102 He played his last card by encouraging his government to resign, a strategy that Dobbs called ‘petulant and childish’.103 The High Commissioner condemned Faisal’s public exposure of the differences of opinion between the Iraqi government and Great Britain, thus encouraging nationalist agitation. Faisal argued that, on the contrary, this could only have a positive effect as it showed that Iraq’s government was not a British puppet. Dobbs was increasingly at odds with Faisal and tried to account for his attitude in sometimes quite a subjective manner. He once described Faisal as being tête montée ‘owing to the glorification of him in Lawrence’s book’.104 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had indeed been published the previous year (1926) and Dobbs seems to have thought that Lawrence’s praise of Faisal had given him enough confidence to challenge the British in Iraq. Even though he had failed to convince the British to officially announce their support for Iraq’s independence in 1928, Faisal



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wanted to go to London to renegotiate the Anglo-Iraqi treaty. Dobb’s private letters show that he thought Faisal’s strategy useless and ridiculous: … it now appears that Faisal has set his heart on going to London almost at once with me and two of his ministers to negotiate a new agreement direct with King George and the British Govt. in record time and return to Baghdad as the saviour of his people. … He is quite impervious to argument, puerile and petulant.105

In a typically orientalist fashion, Faisal’s immaturity and irrationality were now recurrent in the discourse of the High Commissioner. As his relationship with Faisal was becoming increasingly strained, Dobbs used the question of Iraq’s admission to the League to put pressure on the king. Since Dobbs’ reports to the Colonial Office were an important source of information that the British used to ponder whether or not Iraq was ready for independence, the High Commissioner let Faisal know when he was displeased and threatened that he would warn the Colonial Office about his attitude, implying that it could delay Iraq’s independence.106 This form of blackmail, with a ‘carrot and stick’ approach, reminiscent of what one does with a child who misbehaves, shows both the condescending attitude of the High Commissioner and his frustration. Faisal was finally invited to London in the summer of 1927. Before he left, the Iraqi press was extremely critical of the British government, which angered the Acting High Commissioner, Bernard Bourdillon. According to him, the king had certainly planned the press attacks himself, since the newspapers were supposed to be controlled by Iraqi ministers.107 The final version of the treaty was adopted in 1928 and stipulated that Britain would support Iraq’s application to the League in 1932. That same year (1928), a conscription bill failed in the Iraqi parliament.108 In November 1929, it was up to Francis Humphrys, the last British High Commissioner in Iraq and its first ambassador, to negotiate a last Anglo-Iraqi treaty, whose purpose was to define the relationship between the two countries after the independence of Iraq. Humphrys’ interlocutor was Nuri Said, who was very much in favour of the British connection. The two parties came to an agreement and in 1930, it was decided that after its independence, Iraq was to be responsible for its defence and internal order, which met the expectations of MacDonald’s Labour government, elected the previous year. However, the treaty allowed Britain to retain its strategic interests as well as its political influence. Nuri Said’s powerful network of political clients within the Iraqi parliament allowed the treaty to be passed without any difficulty, especially as he had abandoned the conscription project.109 In 1932, the British

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were thus free to submit Iraq’s application to the League of Nations. The Council of the League unanimously voted in favour of Iraq’s admission in October, thus making it the first class A mandate to be integrated into the League of Nations as an independent country. Faisal lived long enough to see this long-awaited event, but as he died a few months later, he did not have the opportunity to witness the development of the relationship between Britain and Iraq in a post-independence – but not yet genuinely post-imperial – context.

CONCLUSION Faisal’s personality, manners and experience had all carried much weight when he was selected as Iraq’s ruler in 1921. But his loyalty was taken for granted and the British expected him to behave as a subordinate more than as an ally. In fact, Faisal refused to be a mere onlooker while the British created modern Iraq. He was eager to defend his credibility in the eyes of the Iraqi people by acquiring a legitimacy other than that which had been given to him by the British. His attitude, combined with the local opposition to the mandate and the treaty, made things more difficult for the British. The latter were taken aback by Faisal’s determination to set his own agenda and to use his margin of manoeuvre as much as he could.110 His technique was often to push things to their limit in order to trigger a crisis, a method that made the British furious. However, given his position, Faisal certainly had no other means to get concessions from them.111 The result was a relationship that was so uneasy that one might wonder whether it can be called cooperation. It seems that most of the time, Faisal and the British worked against each other instead of together. Yet to a certain extent, Faisal and the British had the same goal. The British knew that they could not keep their mandate indefinitely. But for them, Iraqi independence was conditional upon the preservation of their interests, whereas Faisal wanted it to take place as soon as possible. Thus, there was a disagreement as to how and when it would be reached. Moreover, Faisal resented the terms of his cooperation with the British, which were unfavourable to Iraq and to his own position, but he did not altogether reject cooperation.112 In fact, both Faisal and the British benefited from the creation of the Hashemite monarchy of Iraq. For the British, it was an imperial project which allowed them to maintain strategic interests. As for Faisal, he could have been reduced to a romantic wartime figure, had the new monarchy not allowed him to continue to exist politically. Ultimately, it was probably Faisal’s agency which turned the relationship into a form



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of cooperation, even though it was a strained one. Faisal established himself as a political player the British had to reckon with, thus forcing them to negotiate and to anticipate his actions, even though they had the final say most of the time. It should also be noted that during this period, both Faisal and the British did not hesitate to build other political relationships and to cooperate with diverse sections of the Iraqi political scene in order to counter each other’s political agendas. Therefore, there were in fact several cooperations. A complex political game took place between Faisal and the British, in which Faisal in particular tried to increase his power inch by inch. Even though the mandate and the treaty institutionalized it, Faisal’s cooperation with the British was not fixed. It was mainly a political exercise in which he constantly had to renegotiate his position in the relationship according to the evolution of the balance of power. The Anglo-Arab romance which had marked the beginning of Faisal’s relationship with the British thanks to a romanticized war quickly vanished when it was put to the test of imperial politics. The evolution of the British discourse about Faisal shows that there was a sharp gap between their cultural representations and their political expectations. In fact, the way in which they saw Faisal shows the continuing prevalence of racial thinking, which still shaped the British vision despite the changing political discourse of the time. The British related to Faisal’s Arabness either through a romantic bias, or through a stigmatizing one, unable as they were to criticize his political motives without ultimately ascribing them to what he was. When Faisal died in 1933, it was the romantic vision that prevailed in the British press and among British leaders. This is best illustrated by the speech General Allenby delivered on the radio, rekindling the romance and the epic of the Arab revolt. While his address barely referred to Faisal’s twelve-year rule in Iraq, it dwelt at length on Faisal’s role in the Arab revolt. Allenby’s appraisal of Faisal’s personality is thus very different from what Cox and Dobbs wrote about him in their time. Once more, Faisal appeared as straightforward and above all, loyal to Britain: Death has been busy of late among the great men of the earth. Now, with the passing of King Faisal of Iraq, has disappeared a personality, one of the most picturesque of those who took a leading part in the Word War. Picturesque literally as well as figuratively! Tall, graceful; handsome to the point of beauty – with expressive eyes lighting up a face of calm dignity; he looked the very type of Royalty. I first met Faisal on the day after the fall of Damascus, the 1st or 2nd October, 1919, when he entered that city with his army of the Hedjaz. Accompanied and aided by a band of ardent young British officers, he had led that army northwards, through the Syrian desert, securing the right flank of my main army – the Egyptian Expeditionary Force – and ably assisting in the

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battles which led to the overthrow of our enemy. In Damascus Faisal unfurled the flag of the Hedjaz. There, with the approval of the Allies, he took up the reins of government as King of Syria. However, in 1920 there arose friction with the Mandatory Power and his rule came to an end. In August 1921 Faisal became King of Iraq – Mesopotamia – under the British Mandate. When the Mandate expired in the present year, last June, King Faisal paid an official visit as an independent sovereign to King George of England. During that visit I had the honour of being attached to King Faisal’s suite. Before the war the Emir Faisal had been active in Turkish politics, but when his father, King Hussain of the Hedjaz, threw in his lot with us against Turkey, Faisal became our ally in war. He combined the qualities of a soldier and statesman, quick of vision, swift in action, outspoken and straightforward. Iraq has to mourn a wise and valiant Ruler. Our country is poorer by the loss of a loyal friend.113

Dr Myriam Yakoubi is a Fellow at the University of Paris 8, France, where she is a member of the HPSS research group. She completed a doctoral thesis about the British perception of the Hashemite family from 1914 to 1958.

NOTES  1. M. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 8.  2. Sharif is a title of respect reserved for descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. It literally means ‘noble’ or ‘illustrious’.   3. The name of this Arab dynasty comes from the name of a clan, the banu Hashîm, which was part of the Prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh.   4. Apart from the Bedouin irregulars, the troops also included a regular army made up of Syrian and Iraqi officers trained in the Ottoman army and who either deserted to the Sharif or were made prisoners by the British and joined the Sharif later. A French military mission was also attached to the sharifian troops.   5. Hussein’s expectations stemmed from a correspondence he had with Henry MacMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, in 1915–1916, but the British ‘promises’ were ambiguous, and the exchanges were full of misunderstandings and evasions.   6. The Sykes-Picot agreements of May 1916 split the Arab Middle East into two zones, which were to be ruled ‘directly’ by Britain and France, as well as into two spheres of influence. In the north, the French sphere of influence encompassed much of Syria. In November 1917, through the Balfour Declaration, the British also committed themselves to creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.



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  7. T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), 76.   8. Ibid., 82.   9. M. Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 387. 10. The Persian Gulf was a vital communication route to British India and the oil facilities of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Abadan, Persia. 11. C. Tripp, A History of Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44. 12. T. Paris, ‘British Middle-East Policy-making after the First World War: The Lawrentian and Wilsonian Schools’, The Historical Journal 41(3) (1998), 773–93. In his efforts to promote Faisal’s candidacy, Lawrence made the most of his popularity, which he owed to the picturesque photographs taken during the Arab revolt by the American journalist Lowell Thomas and to his 1919 film With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. 13. Paris, ‘The Lawrentian and Wilsonian Schools’, 786. 14. Gertrude Bell had made a name for herself thanks to her pre-war travels in the Middle East. For a short time, she was part of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, before being sent to Mesopotamia in March 1916, where her knowledge of the area’s tribes was judged particularly useful. Bell visited Syria in 1919 and realized that Arab nationalism had become a political force to be reckoned with. She recorded her impressions in a report entitled ‘Syria in October 1919’, note enclosed in ‘Despatch from Civil Commissioner, Mesopotamia, to Secretary of State for India’, 15 November 1919, TNA: CAB 24/96, 11. 15. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1–28. 16. C. Catherwood, Winston’s Folly, Imperialism and the Creation of Modern Iraq (London: Constable, 2004), 124. 17. ‘Report on Middle East Conference held in Cairo and Jerusalem, March 12th to 30th 1921’, TNA: CAB 24/122. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibn Saud was the ruler of Nejd in central Arabia. His dynasty had embraced Wahhabism, a rigorist, puritan Muslim doctrine. 20. Cox thus stated that ‘there was no individual who would be accepted or even tolerated by all parties in Iraq’. G. Bell, Selected Letters of Gertrude Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 266. 21. ‘Report on Middle East Conference’, TNA: CAB 24/122. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. D. Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989), 498–99. 25. ‘Proposed Kingdom of Mesopotamia’, TNA: WO 32/5619 (February 1921). 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. ‘Report on Middle East Conference’, TNA: CAB 24/122. 29. Sayyid Talib, who hinted at the possibility of seeing another tribal rebellion in Iraq if the British tried to impose Faisal, was kidnapped and exiled. Ibn Saud

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also protested against a Hashemite’s promotion at so short a distance from his own territory, but Cox silenced him by increasing the subsidy the British gave him. 30. ‘Iraq, Despatches’, TNA: CO 730/4 (1921). 31. Newcastle University Library, Letter from Gertrude Bell to Hugh Bell, 12 June 1921, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=477. 32. Ibid. 33. G. Bell to H. Bell, 31 July 1921, in Newcastle University Library. 34. Ibid. 35. For example, see G. Bell to H. Bell, 30 July 1922, in Newcastle University Library. 36. G. Bell to H. Bell, 6 August 1921, in Newcastle University Library. 37. G. Bell to H. Bell, 31 July 1921, in Newcastle University Library. 38. Cox to Churchill, 11 August 1921, TNA: CO 730/4 (‘Iraq, Despatches’). 39. Ibid. 40. Cox to Churchill, 16 August 1921, TNA: CO 730/4 (‘Iraq, Despatches’). 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Churchill to Cox, 20 August 1921, TNA: CO 730/4 (‘Iraq, Despatches’). 44. Ibid. 45. The elections were rigged. See for example W. Lyon, Kurds, Arabs and Britons: The Memoir of Wallace Lyon in Iraq, 1918–1944 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 95. 46. L. Lukitz, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 34. 47. Ibid. 48. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 49. Ibid., 4–9. 50. G. Bell to H. Bell, 28 August 1921, in Newcastle University Library. 51. T. Dodge, ‘Stephen Hemsley Longrigg et ses contemporains: Le despotisme oriental et les Britanniques en Irak (1914–1932)’, Maghreb-Machrek 204 (2010), 42. 52. Maude’s proclamation was reproduced in ‘Report, proceedings and memoranda of cabinet committee on Iraq’, TNA: CAB 27/206. 53. G. Bell to H. Bell, 10 March 1917. 54. G. Bell to H. Bell, 18 May 1917. 55. According to the original text, which can be read on the website of Yale University: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp 56. S. Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American Historical Review 112(4) (2007), 1103. 57. This declaration, issued on 7 November 1918, claimed that Britain and France intended to set up ‘national governments and administrations that shall derive their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations’. It is reproduced in G. Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1969), 435.



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58. ‘Iraq, Miscellaneous’, Minute of the Colonial Office, TNA: CO 730/16 (1921). 59. T. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (London: Hurst and Company, 2003), 21. 60. Cox to Churchill, 7 April 1922, TNA: CO 730/21. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Churchill to Cox, 20 April 1922, TNA: CO 730/21. 64. A. Allawi, Faisal I of Iraq (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 397. 65. Churchill to Cox, 20 April 1922, TNA: CO 730/21. 66. Ibid. 67. Cox to John Shuckburgh, 28 April 1922, TNA: CO 730/21. 68. G. Bell to H. Bell, 4 June 1922, in Newcastle University Library. 69. Cox to Churchill, 29 July 1922, TNA: CO 730/21. 70. ‘Report of the High Commissioner on the Development of Iraq, 1920-1925’, TNA: CO 935/1/11 (1926). 71. G. Bell to H. Bell, 8 September 1922, in Newcastle University Library. 72. Ibid. 73. Allawi, Faisal, 30. 74. Ibid., 441. 75. Ibid., 447–48. 76. For example, on 13 February 1924 she wrote to her father about a meeting between Faisal and sheikhs from Nejd, in Arabia. For Bell, ‘he [Faisal] was playing the part of King of the Arabs in his finest manner’. On 4 June 1922, after a party at the British Residency, Bell had written to her father: ‘He [Faisal] made the circle, saying the right thing to everyone – he plays his part’. 77. Allawi, Faisal, 432. 78. Lukitz, Quest in the Middle East, 212. 79. D. Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xix. 80. The Royal Air Force played a central role in the military administration of Iraq. The decision to rely on air force was taken during the Cairo Conference. It was first motivated by economic reasons (air force was cheaper than maintaining significant land forces) but it was also considered as particularly useful to control populations which were considered as backward. For example, in 1928, Hugh Trenchard, then Marshall of the RAF, wrote: ‘when employed in backward countries there is the favourable factor that the enemy has little or no air power to counter our action. This enhances the moral effect on the inhabitants, who find themselves attacked by a weapon against which they cannot retaliate’. Memorandum by Hugh Trenchard, 8 May 1928, TNA: CO 732/35/6: Use of Air power in Arabia. 81. Allawi, Faisal, 481. 82. Dobbs to Colonial Office, 27 June 1927, quoted in ibid., 477. 83. Ibid., 477. 84. Truth (9 November 1927), ‘Conscription’, TNA: CO 730/108/1.

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85. Ibid. 86. British fears in that respect might have been fed by the fact that the sharifian officers who had founded the state of Iraq with Faisal had been trained by the Ottomans and therefore had the same vision of the state and of the role of the army as Mustafa Kemal. 87. The Western Morning News and Mercury (17 November 1927), ‘Conscription’, TNA: CO 730/108/1. 88. Ibid. 89. Dodge, Inventing Iraq, 69–70. 90. Ibid., 98. 91. P.-J. Luizard, La Question irakienne (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 49–50. 92. M. Rey, ‘L’armée en Irak de 1932 à 1968: Entre arbitrage et contrôle du pouvoir’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 124 (2014), 34. 93. In 1925, the former province of Mosul, which was claimed by Turkey, was awarded to Iraq by the League of Nations. 94. Allawi, Faisal, 474–75. 95. Henry Dobbs to Colonial Office, June 1927, quoted in ibid., 476. 96. Allawi, Faisal, 544. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 545. 99. Henry Dobbs to Jafar Al-Askari, 2 January 1927, ‘Conscription’, TNA: CO 730/108/1. 100. Dobbs to Amery, 11 April 1927, ‘Correspondence regarding the admission of Iraq to membership of the League of Nations’, TNA: CO 935/1/1. 101. Allawi, Faisal, 484. 102. Dobbs to Amery, 30 June 1927, ‘Correspondence regarding the admission of Iraq to membership of the League of Nations’, TNA: CO 935/1/13. 103. Dobbs to Amery, 28 May 1927, TNA: CO 935/1/13. 104. Ibid. 105. Henry Dobbs to his wife, 27 May 1927, quoted by Allawi, Faisal, 482–83. 106. This is obvious in Dobbs’ private letter to his wife, on 15 April 1927, quoted in Allawi, Faisal, 485. 107. Bourdillon to Amery, 1 August 1927, TNA: CO 935/1/13. 108. Conscription was finally adopted in 1934 and triggered the rebellion of Shiite tribes of the mid and lower Euphrates. See Luizard, Question irakienne, 44. 109. Tripp, A History of Iraq, 67. 110. Ibid., 49. 111. Allawi, Faisal, 507. 112. According to Allawi, Faisal thought that Iraq could not do without Britain’s economic, military and diplomatic support, but he wanted Iraq to run its own domestic affairs. See ibid., 510. 113. Speech delivered by Allenby on 8 September 1933, transcribed in H. Sinderson, Ten Thousand and One Nights: Memories of Iraq’s Sherifian Family (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), 154.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Allawi, A. Faisal I of Iraq. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Antonius, G. The Arab Awakening. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1969. Bell, G. Selected Letters of Gertrude Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. Cannadine, D. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Catherwood, C. Winston’s Folly, Imperialism and the Creation of Modern Iraq. London: Constable, 2004. Dodge, T. Inventing Iraq, The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied. London: Hurst and Company, 2003.  . ‘Stephen Hemsley Longrigg et ses contemporains: Le despotisme oriental et les Britanniques en Irak (1914–1932)’, Maghreb-Machrek 204 (2010), 33–58. Fromkin, D. A Peace to End All Peace, Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922. London: Andre Deutsch, 1989. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lawrence, T.E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Ware: Wordsworth, 1997. Luizard, P.-J. La Question irakienne. Paris: Fayard, 2002. Lukitz, L. A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006. Lyon, W. Kurds, Arabs and Britons: The Memoir of Wallace Lyon in Iraq, 1918–1944. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Macmillan, M. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Paris, T. ‘British Middle-East Policy-making after the First World War: The Lawrentian and Wilsonian Schools’, The Historical Journal 41(3) (1998), 773–93. Pedersen, S. ‘Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay’, American Historical Review 112(4) (2007), 1091–117. Rey, M. ‘L’armée en Irak de 1932 à 1968: Entre arbitrage et contrôle du pouvoir’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 124 (2014), 33–45. Said, E. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sinderson, H. Ten Thousand and One Nights: Memories of Iraq’s Sherifian Family. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973. Tripp, C. A History of Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wilson, M. King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987.

Chapter 11

Collaborating on Unequal Terms Cross-Cultural Cooperation and Educational Work in Colonial Sudan, 1934–1956 Iris Seri-Hersch

} So our policy has been to employ highly skilled and knowledgeable staff from overseas, associate them in their experiments closely with the Sudanese, give the resulting handbooks to new and old teachers … —ʿAbd al-Rah.man ʿAlī T. aha, Handbook to Elementary Education: 18 June 1950

When ʿAbd al-Rah.man ʿAlī T. aha, the first Sudanese minister of education (1948–1953), wrote down these words, Sudan had been under British rule for fifty years and was fiercely disputed between the two nominal governing powers, Britain and Egypt. Addressing Sudanese elementary teachers, ʿAlī T.aha undoubtedly felt the need to justify the presence of British educators in the country and valorize collaborative work across the colonial divide. Yet beyond the legitimization of Anglo-Sudanese collaboration as part of a late colonial nationalist rhetoric, what did cross-cultural cooperation mean, entail and produce in the Sudanese educational field? This chapter aims to contribute to broader historiographical debates1 on cooperation and cross-cultural relations in imperial/colonial settings through a case study of Sudanese education in the last two decades of colonial rule (1934– 1956). The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956) has received relatively little attention from scholars of imperialism and colonialism. This is due to a combination of several factors: the country’s ‘multiple marginality’2 292



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as an in-between space between the Arab Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, as a frontier area between Arabic-speaking and English-speaking Africa, and as a border zone between Islamic and Christian Africa; its anomalous status as a ‘condominium’ within the British Empire, a type of dual colonial regime only echoed in the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides islands in the South Pacific (1906–1980); and the fact that Sudan was never the home of any significant settler community of European origin. Despite Sudan’s relative marginality in colonial and imperial histories, several important studies dealing mainly or partly with the issue of collaboration/cooperation in colonial Sudan have been produced since the 1970s. Whereas Gaafar Bakheit and Justin Willis have decrypted the ‘native administration’ system of the 1920s and analysed the shift towards ‘local government’ in the 1940s, Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim has focused on the evolving relations between the Neo-Mahdist, pro-independence Umma party and the British-dominated Sudan Government in the 1940s.3 More recently, Ahmed Ibrahim AbuShouk has drawn on Ronald Robinson’s theory of collaboration to interpret shifting patterns of collaboration between the central government in Khartoum and various Sudanese actors (tribal leaders, educated classes, merchants, Sufi orders and political parties) in the Condominium era.4 By contrast, Heather Sharkey’s thorough analysis of Sudanese civil servants as ‘human bridges’ between colonialism and nationalism relies both on Robinson’s political study and on more recent works by postcolonial or ‘new imperial’ historians, hinting at continuities or compatibilities between these different approaches.5 Sharkey brings to light the contradictions and dilemmas experienced by a group of educated Northern Sudanese who were at once colonial officials and fervent Sudanese nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s. This chapter sheds new light on the politics of cooperation in colonial Sudan by focusing on education, an understudied field of cross-cultural interaction. Understood as the educational discourses, policies and practices devised by the colonial officials of a given territory, colonial education is fascinating, because it often simultaneously involved collaborative processes, unequal power relationships, disciplining mechanisms and emancipating dynamics. Who were the collaborating actors and in what ways did they collaborate? What were some of the concrete results that such cooperation achieved? What were the obstacles to collaboration? How did various collaborating actors experience and later remember cross-cultural work in colonial Sudan? Collaborative mechanisms at different levels of the Sudanese educational system in the 1940s and 1950s will be examined in

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order to demonstrate the importance of multi-layered cooperative dynamics in late colonial Sudan.

ON METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES: TERMINOLOGY AND SOURCES Investigating collaboration/cooperation in imperial contexts involves terminological issues and problems related to the use of sources. In their introduction to this volume, the editors argue that it has become difficult to use ‘collaboration’ to refer to relations between the colonizers and certain sectors of colonized society, because the term has been historically associated with treason and carries an anachronistic meaning derived from a postcolonial perspective.6 They suggest replacing ‘collaboration’ with ‘cooperation’ as a more valuable heuristic tool. But what exactly is the distinction between the two terms? As opposed to ‘collaboration’, which currently bears an excessively negative connotation, ‘cooperation’ carries a positive meaning. Yet, like ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’ may seem anachronistic, given the term’s use in the context of the ‘developmental’ policies of exmetropoles/European states towards their former colonies or countries of the global South in the postcolonial era. One only needs to think of the British Department of Technical Cooperation (1961–1964), the French Ministère de la Coopération (1959–1999) and Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle (SCAC), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC). Hence, the distinction between ‘collaboration’ and ‘cooperation’ basically lies in the different value judgments underlying the use of each term. One solution to this terminological impasse is to look for the terms that were used by the historical actors themselves. For late colonial Sudan, we would find that British and Northern Sudanese educators resorted to expressions such as ‘intimate, daily association of British and Sudanese staff’, ‘joint effort’, ‘partners’, ‘activities and organizations in which black and white people work together’, ‘fruitful intercultural cooperation’, ‘cooperating’ and ‘close cooperation’.7 Rather than ‘collaboration’, the terms ‘cooperation’ and ‘close association’ were frequently used in the Sudanese educational field. One way to tackle the semantic issue is to bring to light these ‘categories of practice’8 and try to specify their meaning in relation to the historical context in which they were deployed. Another solution is to use ‘collaboration’ or ‘cooperation’ interchangeably (as analytical tools), having stated that such use implies no value judgment about the attitudes



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and choices of the historical actors. One needs to make clear that these terms are meant to convey the notion of a common employer (the colonial state), daily professional relations, the conduct of joint projects, political alliances or the exchange of services. This will be our approach in the following pages. What kind of primary evidence do we use to study cooperative dynamics in imperial contexts? What problems may arise in the interpretation of these sources? In the Sudanese case, one may rely on correspondence by British and Sudanese actors, confidential notes exchanged between colonial officials, articles and books published in the 1950s, as well as memoirs, interviews and articles produced by British and Sudanese individuals after the period under review.9 There are sometimes strong dissonances between various types of sources; even between sources authored by the same individual at different times in his or her life. These divergences are in part due to the nature of primary evidence. Correspondence and confidential notes of a private nature provide different insights into collaborative mechanisms than published works meant to be diffused to a larger audience. Private sources convey more often the personal opinions, dilemmas and emotions of their authors, while public sources may tend to either minimize or exaggerate problems to serve a political or ideological agenda; their authors may be more easily inclined to idealize or disparage cross-cultural relations when knowingly addressing an audience rather than a specific individual. It is therefore essential to consider various types of sources in order to come up with nuanced and contextualized interpretations of cooperative dynamics in imperial contexts. Let us illustrate this point with a specific example from late colonial Sudan. Robin A. Hodgkin, a geography teacher at the Gordon Memorial College (then a secondary school) from 1939 to 1946, became director of the Publications Bureau (1946–1949) and principal of the Institute of Education at Bakht er Ruda (White Nile) from 1950 to 1955.10 In a private letter written to his mother in 1941, Hodgkin described his Sudanese colleagues at the Gordon College in rather negative terms. He depicted the teachers of Islamic religion and Arabic as ‘mostly fairly useless old men’.11 Referring to the College magazine, he hinted at a strict division of labour among the editors, himself being in charge of the English section and ‘not … bothering about what goes in the [Arabic] half’, which he left to the ‘Sheikhs’ (the very ‘useless old men’ he referred to).12 Hodgkin gave quite a different picture of Anglo-Sudanese cooperation in published articles, both in those written in the 1940s and forty years later. No value judgment on the quality of his current or past Sudanese partners appeared in these published works. On the contrary, cooperation between British and Sudanese

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members of the education department was represented in idealized terms (a ‘dialectical process’, a ‘cultural mixing process’, ‘high-level cooperation’, ‘cross-cultural overlap’).13 Such an idealized perspective cannot be solely attributed to the selective memory of an ageing man in the late 1980s: it was already present in public writings he produced in the 1940s. Two years after setting up the Publications Bureau (1946), it seems that Hodgkin was eager to display optimism and good progress to the readers of Oversea Education, a quarterly journal on educational issues in the British Empire sponsored by the Colonial Office. Hodgkin’s perception of collaboration may also have evolved towards a positive appreciation from his first years as a secondary teacher to his later position as the director of the Publications Bureau.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: COLLABORATION AND THE POLITICS OF SUDANIZATION In the first half of the twentieth century, Sudan was in theory ruled by a dual Anglo-Egyptian administration known as the Condominium.14 The country was not a colonial territory in the legal sense, being attached to the British Foreign Office rather than to the Colonial Office. In practice, however, Britain retained all decision-making powers in Sudan, for Egypt was herself subject to British control to varying degrees from 1882 to 1956. The Sudanese Government was dominated by the Sudan Political Service, a British elite corps modelled upon the Indian Civil Service. This did not mean that the British ran this vast country alone; as in most other territories under colonial rule, they were a small elite (from a few hundred in the 1920s to a maximum of 1,200 in the early 1950s) who had to rely on the collaboration, work and knowledge of thousands of local chiefs, clerks, translators, accountants, tax-collectors, judges and teachers. In the Sudanese case, these local or regional actors were mostly Sudanese, Egyptians and ‘Syrians’ (a label that included all Levantines).15 The social composition of the administration accounts for the necessary, albeit varied and unequal, cooperation between individuals of various cultural and national backgrounds in colonial Sudan. Mechanisms of cooperation existed at different levels: within the Khartoum central government, between the central government and local/provincial administrations, and between the colonial state apparatus and Sudanese organizations (tribes, Sufi orders and later political parties). These mechanisms took various shapes and names at different times during the Condominium. The system of local administration evolved from ‘native administration’ in the 1920s (when the British mainly collaborated with ‘traditional’ Sudanese tribal leaders) to



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‘local government’ in the 1940s, when the British increasingly sought the cooperation of ‘modern’ Sudanese elites (Northern Sudanese educated in government schools). The Anglo-Egyptian dispute over Sudan escalated after the Second World War. While Egypt and her Sudanese allies (the ‘unionist’ parties) championed the cause of a united Nile Valley, the British Sudan Government and its Sudanese partners (the ‘independentist’ parties) overtly supported Sudanese independence. In 1946, British officials in London and Khartoum declared Sudanese self-government as the official aim of British policy in Sudan.16 With a view to counter Egyptian influence and co-opt Sudanese elites, the British Sudan Government sped up the ‘Sudanization’ of the administration, that is the replacement of British with Sudanese officials. This process significantly affected cooperation dynamics, as a growing number of key positions were taken up by Sudanese between 1946 and 1954. In 1948, a ministry of education was established with Northern Sudanese educator and politician ʿAbd al-Rah.man ʿAlī T.aha at its head. ʿAlī T. aha became responsible for all educational matters that had previously been handled by the (British) director of education and governor-general.17 In the last colonial decade (1946–1956), power relations, social hierarchies and mutual perceptions between British and Sudanese in and outside the government service were significantly reshaped. Sudanization was by no means a simple procedure. Deeply-rooted hierarchical representations of self and other complicated the process. In early 1946, Hodgkin, the geography teacher mentioned above, criticized the ‘unofficial colour-bar’ that in his view still restricted access to many administrative posts.18 In practice, official hierarchies were sometimes reversed. Some British civil servants found themselves subordinated to Sudanese officials, a situation they accepted with more or less ease.19 Between 1946 and 1953 many British officials were worried about too quick a Sudanization, both because they did not wish to release their posts and because they genuinely cared for what they termed the ‘standard’ of their Sudanese successors.20 Political developments nonetheless led to the acceleration of Sudanization from 1953. Indeed, the 1952 Free Officers revolution in Egypt triggered a change in the balance of power between Egypt, Britain and Sudanese nationalists. Anglo-Egyptian negotiations over Sudan had been in a deadlock since 1946. The new Egyptian president Mohammed Naguib accepted the principle of Sudanese self-determination and concluded direct agreements with all Sudanese political parties in January 1953. Faced for the first time with a united Egyptian-Sudanese front, the British had no choice but to sign a treaty with Egypt (February 1953), which provided for the Sudanization

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of the administration, the organization of parliamentary elections and the realization of Sudanese self-determination within three years.21 In 1954 some 800 posts were Sudanized, out of which only six went to Southern Sudanese and the rest to Northern Sudanese.22 Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956. It was the first territory to be decolonized across British Africa.

WHY DID THEY COLLABORATE? LOOKING BEYOND POLITICAL ANTAGONISMS AND CULTURAL GAPS Various historical factors facilitated cooperation between British and nonBritish individuals within the colonial administration of Sudan. A number of considerations and interests on both sides allowed for collaboration despite political antagonisms and cultural gaps. The British perceived cooperation with local and regional actors as a necessity for financial, political, cultural and pedagogic reasons. Sudanese, Egyptian and Levantine staff were cheaper than British personnel. Politically, employing educated Sudanese in the administration was a means of co-opting those who were viewed as potential or real ‘agitators’.23 Throughout the Condominium, but especially from the 1920s, the British favoured Sudanese over Egyptian personnel, the latter being associated with propaganda agents who could disseminate ‘subversive’, nationalist ideas within Sudanese society.24 In addition, the British thought, Sudanese officials had the immeasurable advantage of knowing local social codes and cultural norms; hence their authority among their fellow men derived from an ‘indigenous’ type of legitimacy rather than from an assertion of external power. British education officials viewed the securing of Sudanese cooperation as essential to the success of their projects. Sudanese educators and teachers were assigned a key role in implementing school reforms and popularizing them among the broader Sudanese public. In the 1940s new materials had to be tested by local teachers in the classrooms. New pedagogic principles had to be explained to Sudanese teachers and parents: it was thought best to resort to a Sudanese educator, typically ʿAlī T. aha (vice-principal of the Institute of Education from 1939 to 1948), to do the job.25 On the Sudanese side, positions within the colonial administration were increasingly seen as a social and economic asset from the 1920s. Whereas in the early years of the Condominium the Sudanese had been rather suspicious of colonial institutions, including schools and governmental offices,26 attitudes changed as the British administration established itself more firmly and the number of Sudanese graduates grew steadily. Government



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jobs came to be associated with career opportunities, regular salaries and upward social mobility. Some Sudanese also equated these jobs with modern urban life (which included access to facilities such as electricity, running water and education) as opposed to what was considered traditional life in rural areas.27 Cash salaries could replace livelihoods based on agriculture, cattle rearing, or trade. In the early 1930s government positions seem to have been popular to the point that the British chief inspector of education, George C. Scott, complained that many Sudanese saw government schools only as a means to achieve civil servant status.28 In retrospect, some of the historical actors involved in cross-cultural cooperation in colonial Sudan, as well as their descendants, have tended to rationalize cooperation. In the late twentieth century Sudanese and British individuals tried to explain how collaboration was made possible despite political tensions and cultural differences, legitimizing it beyond financial imperatives. Hodgkin, for instance, stressed that in the 1930s, ‘a few Sudanese … came to share an important vision with a few English educators. This was a tacit belief in eventual Sudanese independence. Because this belief was rarely made explicit, this underlying confidence about a central issue created a good context for action’.29 In Hodgkin’s eyes, this shared political outlook was the main reason why ‘intelligent and patriotic Sudanese’ agreed to work with the ‘imperialists’ on educational reform.30 According to Fadwa ʿAbd al-Rah.man ʿAlī T. aha, ʿAlī T. aha’s daughter and a historian at the University of Khartoum, personal relations are the key to understanding collaboration in colonial Sudan. Her father and Vincent L. Griffiths were bound by a close friendship and values of mutual respect that facilitated cooperation not only between them, but also between Griffiths and Shaykh Ah.mad Abū Bakr, the headmaster of an experimental elementary school at Bakht er Ruda.31

COLLABORATING IN THE EDUCATIONAL FIELD: MODES AND OUTCOMES Cooperative mechanisms operated at various levels in the Sudanese educational field of the 1940s and 1950s. At the macro level, broad educational planning involved British and Northern Sudanese officials from the mid-1930s onwards. The Institute of Education was headed by a British educator32 seconded by a Sudanese vice-principal.33 These two officials were responsible for designing and implementing educational policies in Northern Sudan until 1948 and thereafter in the whole country.34 At the meso level, the teaching staff of the Gordon College (the single secondary

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school in Sudan until the 1940s and a college of higher education after the Second World War) included British, Northern Sudanese, ‘Syrian’ and possibly Egyptian teachers. In 1944 there were eight British ‘tutors’ (heads of subjects) and ten non-British teachers at the College.35 Another example of collaboration at the meso level can be found in the activities of the Publications Bureau. From 1946 to 1956 its Anglo-Sudanese staff produced hundreds of literacy readers, children’s booklets, youth magazines and adult education pamphlets in Arabic. The Bureau also published schoolbooks prepared by educators and teachers at the Institute of Education in Bakht er Ruda.36 In the first three years it was headed by Hodgkin and a Sudanese assistant managing editor, ʿAwad. Sātī; it was thereafter directed by Northern Sudanese editors.37 At the micro level, the production of specific textbooks for elementary schools involved cross-cultural cooperation. For instance, history handbooks for Sudanese teachers of the 3rd and 4th elementary grades were co-authored by a British inspector of education (John A. Haywood) and a Northern Sudanese teacher (S. ālih. Muh.ammad S.ālih. ).38 One can find ample evidence for cooperative mechanisms in the Sudanese educational sphere of the 1940s and 1950s. Yet cooperation did not mean symmetrical relations. British actors were almost always in a dominant position in what may be termed an unequal collaborative system. They held the highest posts, guided broad policies and kept an upper hand on joint projects until they were replaced with Sudanese officials in the very last years of colonial rule. The example of history handbooks raises complex issues of authorship. The part played by the British and the Sudanese partners in the production of these schoolbooks (which were published in Arabic as this was the medium of instruction in elementary schools) is not entirely clear, but the teaching methods outlined in the introduction to the books were derived from pedagogic approaches developed at the Institute of Education under Griffith’s guidance.39 What was the outcome of joint work by British and Sudanese educators? Some concrete examples can give us a sense of the achievements and limits of cross-cultural cooperation in the specific context of late colonial Sudan. Bakht er Ruda’s staff put great efforts into extending and improving the training of elementary teachers (all of whom were Sudanese). The post-elementary education of incumbent teachers was lengthened from three years in 1934 to six years in 1944.40 Refresher courses of two to three months were organized for in-service teachers to make them familiar with new textbooks and teaching methods. Taking place at the Institute of Education, these intensive sessions also aimed at helping teachers to improve the management of their class, develop tools for self-criticism, build their professional confidence and appreciate practical work as valuable education, as well as



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encouraging them to ‘clarify their ideas about the qualities of character needed in a modern state’.41 Griffiths andʿAlī T. aha co-authored several handbooks that provided guidance to teachers on these matters. A booklet titled Class Management or How to Add Many Hours to the Time-Table without Working Any Longer Yourself was first published in 1943 and reprinted until 1960. A series of three books dealing with character training was published in Khartoum in a bilingual Arabic-English version in the mid-1940s. The books were then published by the London based editor Longmans in a collection unequivocally titled ‘The Good Citizen Series’.42 They were part of a late colonial endeavour to prepare Sudanese society to enter what the educators considered the modern world, that is the club of independent nations. Fifteen ‘qualities of character’ deemed essential to this end were explained to trainee teachers: physical energy, mental energy, perseverance, reliability, autonomy, modesty, initiative, self-control, leadership, obedience, objectivity, sincerity, loyalty, altruism and courtesy.43 Despite the efforts invested in these books, it seems that they did not produce the desired outcomes. Looking back after forty years, Hodgkin estimated that the books on character training did not have a significant impact upon Sudanese society because the European theories of psychology on which they were based were far too removed from ‘Sudanese family traditions’, the Qur'an and the ‘rough, demonstrative Sufism’ of local religious orders.44 The cultural divide was not easily bridged. In 1951, the ministry of education headed by ʿAlī T. aha edited a general handbook for Sudanese elementary teachers. This was again the result of joint work by Northern Sudanese and British educators. Written in Arabic and English, the handbook included a visual demonstration of the pedagogical principles that guided the reform of elementary education. The drawings (Illustration 11.1) were produced by Sudanese artist ĀdamʿIsā.45 The outmoded model of education was represented by a pair of teacher and pupil, both of whom were depicted as ‘white’ individuals. The teacher appeared as a horrible old professor wearing a jallābiyya (an Arab garb) with a whip in his hand. The pupil looked intimidated and powerless. By contrast, the new educational model took the shape of black, smiling teacher and pupils. The teacher was young and dressed in Western clothes. Whereas the old didactic tools amounted to a blackboard, a book and a whip, the new tools included a wide range of materials and objects. Rather than being seen as passive receptacles of knowledge, modern pupils had to be given the opportunity to learn through games, experiments, creative handwork and plays. Black and white contrasts strengthened the opposition between two approaches and two eras; they also eased the identification of Sudanese teachers with the second, ‘modern’ model.

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Illustrations 11.1–11.4 Drawings from: Ministry of Education, Sudan, Handbook to Elementary Education for Boys’ Schools and Boys’ Clubs in the Sudan (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951), p. 39–42



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Illustration 11.3

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Illustration 11.4

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Another outcome of cross-cultural cooperation was the revision of elementary and intermediate curricula, which resulted in the production of dozens of schoolbooks for teachers and pupils. Between 1934 and 1950, Bakht er Ruda’s staff prepared textbooks for all elementary subject matters: Arabic, arithmetic, Islamic religion, geography, history, science, handwork, physical education and gardening. By 1955, two hundred books and other publications had been issued by the Sudanese Institute of Education.46 Locally produced schoolbooks went through a number of welldefined stages from the moment they were written until they were used in Sudanese schools. The various stages of production involved both British and Sudanese actors: a first version was written, which in some cases had to be translated from English into Arabic; the book was tested in experimental classes at Bakht er Ruda and revised in line with feedback from (Sudanese) teachers and (Sudanese and British) inspectors; the book was then tested in provincial schools and subjected to other revisions before being validated and sent to the ministry of education; it was then published and distributed to all elementary schools across the country. The process could last several years.47 The three new history handbooks for elementary teachers that were prepared in the 1940s were the result of collaborative work between British and Sudanese historians, educators, teachers, translators, engineers and artists. As mentioned above, the 3rd and 4th grades books, which dealt with Islamic and European history (3rd grade) and Sudanese history (4th grade), were co-authored by Haywood and S.ālih. . Separately printed pictures to be used during the lessons were drawn by British illustrator Heather Corlass and Sudanese artist Ibrāhīm Dhū al-Bayt. A Sudanese engineer of the department of public works, H.asan Abū Bakr, produced maps for the 4th grade handbook.48 The 2nd grade handbook, which focused on the history of human inventions and discoveries, involved several waves of contributors: Griffiths and Makkī ʿAbbās, who wrote the new lessons and tested them in the early 1940s; Peter M. Holt and S. ālih. , who completed the first version and prepared it for publication in 1945–1946;ʿAlī T. aha and ʿUthmān Ibrāhīm, who translated the lessons from English into Arabic; and al-Bayt, who produced illustrations for the book sometime between 1946 and 1948.49 More than five years had elapsed from the time the lessons were first worked out until they were published in the shape of a handbook ready for use in elementary schools. Besides teacher training and textbook production, an important area of cross-cultural cooperation emerged from the activities of the Publications Bureau. Founded in 1946 in Bakht er Ruda, the Bureau was relocated to Khartoum after a few months. Under the joint leadership of Hodgkin and



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Sātī, the Bureau organized Arabic literacy campaigns, set up adult education projects in rural areas, and produced a youth magazine, Al-S.ibyān (‘youth’ in Arabic). These projects were part of a larger trend across the post-war British Empire, namely the shift of colonial policy from a focus on law and order to a broader concern for social life, the standards of living of indigenous populations and self-government.50 What was hitherto termed ‘native education’ gave way to ‘mass education’ and ‘community development’, two notions that postulated a close connection between education, agriculture, health, social welfare and ultimately the political progress of colonized peoples.51 Cross-cultural cooperation in the Sudanese educational field was necessary, even pervasive, yet it was neither easy nor evident for the individuals involved. Cultural differences often hampered collaboration and social relations between British and Sudanese officials. In 1936, Griffiths and ʿAlī T. aha had jointly published a book called Sudan Courtesy Customs, which intended to help British officials understand Northern Sudanese social codes and politeness norms. The relevance of the book for its contemporaries is indicated by the fact that it was reissued in 1950.52 Ten years after this first attempt at bridging cultural gaps, an interesting document relating to the same issue was produced. The text was cowritten by unnamed Sudanese and British individuals. It aimed at ‘help[ing] British and educated Sudanese to like each other better by understanding each other better’.53 The basic assumption of its authors was that there were certain ‘broad differences of thought, custom and opinion between the British in the Sudan and the educated Sudanese’ and that it was useful to understand these differences in order to facilitate cooperation. The document then charted mutual perceptions of British and educated Sudanese, as well as self-perceptions of both groups, vis-à-vis a number of issues such as temper, personal dignity, national dignity, breaches of confidence, loyalty to government, proper planning, initiative, generosity and family loyalty. These observations were followed by practical suggestions meant to ‘improve cooperation’ between the two groups. This 1946 text went several steps further than the 1936 book on Sudanese customs in two senses: it was intended not only for British officials, but for both British and Northern Sudanese; and it tackled the issue of cultural and political differences, whereas the book dealt exclusively with social manners. Reflecting perceived differences between British and educated Sudanese, the 1946 document was an attempt at acknowledging those differences in order to overcome them. By distancing themselves from their own perceptions, the authors thought that the British and the Sudanese would be able to cooperate effectively despite political antagonisms and cultural gaps.

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DIFFICULTIES AND OBSTACLES TO COLLABORATION However determined some colonial educators were to facilitate cross-cultural cooperation, significant obstacles still stood in their way. In Sudan as in other British territories, relations between British officials and educated local elites were often tense. Northern Sudanese who had been educated in government schools adopted some elements of metropolitan culture such as clothing, literary references and political models. In the 1940s and 1950s they were nicknamed ‘third-class Europeans’, ‘partially uprooted Africans’ or ‘de-tribalized intellectuals’ by the British.54 These local elites constituted a symbolic and political threat to the colonial regime. By appropriating certain aspects of British culture, they made it more difficult for the colonizers to maintain a visible distance from the colonized and thus manifest colonial domination. In addition, Northern Sudanese elites had intellectual and organizational tools to fight efficiently against European colonialism. They criticized the discrepancy between European discourses on human rights and democracy on the one hand and colonial authoritarian practices on the other. They articulated nationalist ideologies through political bodies such as graduates’ clubs after the First World War and political parties from the early 1940s.55 Thus many British officials were suspicious vis-à-vis educated Sudanese; they favoured ‘uneducated’ rural people whom they saw as ‘authentic’ Sudanese that had not been spoilt by Western civilization.56 Moreover, some British had doubts about their own European culture, which they did not always view as a model to be universally diffused.57 Yet these threatening Northern Sudanese educated elites were integrated into the colonial state apparatus: they were the ones with whom the British ought to collaborate. Sudanese civil servants were supposed to distance themselves from any political bias, but in practice many were involved in political and literary anti-colonial activities after office hours.58 Political obstacles to collaboration were aggravated by a persistent cultural divide. British lack of knowledge of Arabic, as well as differences in British and Sudanese social norms and cultural values, hindered the development of close relationships between British officials and their Sudanese colleagues. According to Scott, a leading official of the education department in the 1930s and 1940s, the British social and cultural background was so different from that of the Sudanese that it was ‘almost impossible to have normal social relationships with them [the Sudanese]’.59 Scott’s view about certain unbridgeable gaps was shared by many British and Sudanese officials, yet it seems that personal relations were still easier in the educational field than in other spheres of cross-cultural interaction.60 In their daily work, colonial educators had to pay special attention to the meaning



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and use of words. The same term could be understood in a totally different way by Sudanese and British people. Although the idea of playing was central in the pedagogic approaches developed at Bakht er Ruda, ʿAlī T.aha replaced the word ‘play’ with ‘handwork’ in many publications and oral presentations. Indeed, from a Sudanese perspective, ‘play’ was not an acceptable idea for education.61 Sudanese and British conceptions of the ideal pupil were also far removed from each other. Whereas Sudanese educators expected from the pupils a quiet and obedient attitude, their British colleagues valued above all active involvement and personal initiative.62 Different conceptions of personal dignity significantly impinged on teacher-pupil relations in Sudanese classrooms. Colonial educators introduced a new freedom to ask questions, which was not really ‘assimilated in local custom’: the pupils did not always know how far to go while the teachers did not know how to distinguish between freedom to discuss academic questions and freedom to argue about disciplinary measures. Consequently, many cases of misunderstanding and clashes between pupils and teachers occurred in Sudanese schools.63 Some more serious controversies arose as a result of unbridgeable gaps between British and Sudanese social norms and value systems. Corporal punishments at school and the issue of female circumcision are cases in point. Lashes were frequently used as a disciplinary measure in Sudanese schools for boys. In the 1930s and 1940s, some British educators wanted to have this practice reduced; one of them even wished to abolish it altogether. Sudanese teachers agreed to have it reduced. The lack of uniformity in punishments across the school system motivated the educators to work out a punishment code. Various penalties (negative marks, temporary exclusion, lashes, dismissal from school) were applied to pupils who arrived late, forgot to bring their books, did not wash their dishes or stole items from the school. Except for dismissal, all punishments were administered by Sudanese rather than British staff.64 Female circumcision was a controversial issue throughout the Condominium era. Most Northern Sudanese women were circumcised at the time. The British had considered it as a serious social problem from the early twentieth century, though not as a priority issue. After the First World War, they sought to have female circumcision practices reduced or abolished in Northern Sudan and fought against their spread to Southern Sudan.65 In their attempt to reach these goals, the British authorities used religious arguments, legal tools and educational action. In 1939, the Mufti of Sudan (the highest religious figure in the country) issued a fatwa (an advisory opinion on religious law) forbidding the so-called ‘Pharaonic’ circumcision on the basis of a h.adīth (saying of the prophet Muhammad). Lesser

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forms of female genital mutilation such as clitoridectomy were not prohibited in the fatwa, even though the British would rather have had all types of excision forbidden.66 In 1946 a law was enacted, which penalized infibulation practitioners as well as those who knew about such practices but had failed to report them to the authorities. Northern Sudanese elites were divided on the complex issue of female circumcision. Some leading politicians such as SayyidʿAbd al-Rah.man al-Mahdī and SayyidʿAlī al-Mīrghanī collaborated with the British in the struggle against it. Others like Mah.mūd Muh.ammad T.aha saw the 1946 law as an unacceptable attack on Sudanese culture.67 From 1939 to 1949 the controller of girls’ education, Ina Beasley, led a vigorous campaign against female circumcision. A hygiene course for the 4th elementary grade included the following questions to be addressed to ten-year old girls: Do you know that the Sudanese can never rise to be a nation on the same footing as others while this custom persists? Do you know that it is prohibited by your religion? Do you know that it increases sterility? Do you know that your sons and grandsons are lessened by it? Do you know how shocked and disgusted people are in other countries when they hear of the custom in your country?68

Political, religious, medical and moral arguments were invoked to delegitimize and criminalize circumcision. In both the cases of corporal punishment and female genital mutilations, colonial educators sought to reshape Sudanese social relations in line with British value systems. They sometimes appealed to local Islamic beliefs (or beliefs presented as such) to ease the implementation of their policy. Even if unsuccessful with regard to their intended effects, such interference in the most intimate spheres of social life certainly complicated Anglo-Sudanese collaboration in late colonial Sudan.69

CONCLUSION: EXPERIMENTING AND REMEMBERING COLLABORATION IN COLONIAL SUDAN Cross-cultural collaboration was not perceived in the same way by the various actors involved. Multiple experiences and memories emerged from different individuals. Time was also a central factor in the evolution and perception of cooperation in colonial Sudan: both the timing of collaboration and the moment when collaboration was remembered (during later interviews or in the process of writing a book) deeply affected the ways in



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which British, Sudanese and Syrian officials experienced this feature of colonial rule. Commenting in the 1950s, late 1970s or early 1990s, several leading British educators presented a neat picture of cross-cultural cooperation in late colonial Sudan. In 1953 Griffiths wrote about what seemed to be a clear division of labour at Bakht er Ruda: the British staff supplied ‘modern’ ideas, designed teaching methods, and defined the standards that should be aimed at, while their Sudanese colleagues taught experimental lessons, translated schoolbooks, presented new ideas and methods to the Sudanese teachers and the wider public, and collected ‘local reactions’ to the new teaching.70 One year after Sudanese independence (1957), Hodgkin referred to such collaboration as a ‘fruitful form of culture contact’.71 Drawing on Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), he later produced a diagram charting ‘British only’ activities (e.g. evening drinks, women visiting, tennis, Christmas party), ‘Sudanese only’ activities (e.g. coffee and shop talk, women visiting, whist, religious festival), and a middle zone of ‘cross-cultural overlap’ (e.g. curriculum work, experimental lessons, formal tea parties) as a way of representing the working of Sudan’s Institute of Education in the early 1950s.72 In Hodgkin’s view, the success of Anglo-Sudanese collaboration at Bakht er Ruda was largely due to the dual practice of having regular discussions within the separate cultural groups and mixing in non-intellectual activities and experiences (Bakht er Ruda’s annual celebration, tea parties, difficult journeys, inspection tours, professional hardships).73 For Hodgkin, one example epitomizing AngloSudanese cooperation was the Erkowitz Study Camp. Initiated by Griffiths and Douglas Newbold (Civil Secretary 1939–1945) in the later years of the Second World War, these annual two-week study sessions were attended by approximately forty British and Sudanese officials and teachers. They would borrow materials from Khartoum University College (the ex-Gordon College), gather on a hill to discuss ‘important’ topics such as socialism or planning, and produce a written report of the session. At the time these study camps were, in Hodgkin’s words, a ‘new kind of cross-cultural conference’.74 William  M.  Farquharson-Lang, another British educator who served in the education department from 1931 to 1955, remembered in the early 1980s that in the early 1940s it had been easy to develop close friendships with Sudanese students and staff at the Gordon College and at Wadi Seidna secondary school, where he had been headmaster from 1945 to 1950. He recalled bonding with Sudanese colleagues during shared trips across the country and stressed that he still corresponded with them forty years later.75

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Sudanese and Syrian civil servants have usually depicted a less rosy image of their collaborative experience with the British in colonial Sudan. Many accounts give the impression that they acutely felt the weight of official, social and cultural hierarchies separating them from their British colleagues or superiors. Yet there was undoubtedly a tremendous change between the 1920s and the 1940s. Edward Atiyah, a Syrian teacher at the Gordon College in the late 1920s, described the military atmosphere at the College and the rigid hierarchies and barriers erected between the British staff on the one hand and the Sudanese and Syrian staff on the other. He resented what he experienced as professional discriminations on a racial or national basis (British tutors were ‘senior officials’ while he was a ‘junior official’ even though they had all been recruited to the government service in the same year) and, at the social level, the arrogance of the British, which he attributed to their status as rulers of the country.76 Collaboration in the 1940s and early 1950s was a different story. Generational change, the evolution of social codes, a new political climate in which nationalist feelings had their place while the legitimacy of colonial rule was seriously questioned, and the transformation of official hierarchies through Sudanization made possible other modes of interaction and cross-cultural cooperation. When asked about British attitudes towards the Sudanese, Jamal Muh.ammad Ah.mad, a Northern Sudanese editor at the Publications Bureau in the late 1940s and later a Sudanese ambassador in Iraq (1956–1959) and Ethiopia (1959–1964), protested against over-generalizing assessments. According to his experience, a variety of attitudes had coexisted in late colonial Sudan, ranging from arrogance and paternalism to full equality. With regards to Hodgkin, of whom he had been a close associate, he said that he ‘never gave you the impression he was guiding and protecting you or ruling you’.77 Ah.mad highlighted feelings of equality between British and Sudanese in the teaching profession. He talked about the ‘absolutely free atmosphere’ of the Gordon College student union, contrasting the lack of barriers between the [British and Sudanese] teachers and the [Sudanese] taught with the hostility that erupted between the students and the police during nationalist demonstrations.78 Yūsuf Badrī, the son of the ‘father of girls’ education’ in Sudan79 and himself an educator who contributed to the opening of Ahfad private schools in the 1940s and 1950s, had more mixed feelings towards his British ‘partners’. His collaboration with Dennis H. Hibbert, then director of education (1950–1954), was not an easy one. Badrī had been Hibbert’s student in secondary school in 1930, so he respected him as his former English teacher. However, in the early 1950s, Badrī felt that Hibbert, though socially a pleasant man, distrusted him in professional matters. The director of education hinted that Badrī and his



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Sudanese colleagues had misused a large sum granted by the government to the Ahfad College. Badrī responded to the allegation with insolence.80 Hence, working relationships between the two were tense rather than based on full trust and mutual respect. Changes in collaborative patterns between the 1920s and the 1940s were also apparent in services that had traditionally been more rigidly hierarchized than the education department. Dāʾud ʿAbd al-Lat.īf, a Northern Sudanese who had served in the Civil Service for more than twenty years, remembered how in the early 1940s he and some of his Sudanese colleagues had ‘decided that “No Sir” was as good as “Yes Sir” if you were honest’, and how from then on the British took their views into account and even started treating them ‘as friends’.81 As a concluding note one may wonder, as did Hodgkin himself forty years after he had retired from the Sudan Service: who was educating whom in colonial Sudan?82 This question captures some of the complexities and uncertainties of collaboration in colonial contexts. It also conveys the fundamentally bidirectional nature of educational work in inherently cross-cultural situations such as imperial and colonial settings. Finally, it hints at the inevitable, but all the more fascinating, discrepancies between immediate experiences of cross-cultural cooperation in colonial Sudan and later recollections of a period that many actors came to associate with their youth, a spirit of experimentation and sweeping political changes at the twilight of the British Empire. Iris Seri-Hersch is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Middle East Studies, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France. A historian of modern Sudan and Palestine/Israel, her research interests include education, history didactics, imperial circulations, colonial land conflicts and processes of spatial appropriation, oral history, and historiographical practices in and about the modern Middle East. She has published academic articles and book chapters on Mahdist Sudan, Sudanese-Ethiopian relations, education in colonial Sudan and the British Empire and Sudan Studies. She currently investigates the social, political and ecological history of the Palestinian Israeli village of Jisr al-Zarqāʾ.

NOTES The writing of this chapter was made possible by a generous Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (2012–2014).  1. R. Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–42; T.C. Weiskel, French

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  4.

  5.   6.   7.

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Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration, 1889–1911 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); F. Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review 99(5) (1994), 1516–45; A. Piriou, ‘Intellectuels colonisés et écriture de l’histoire en Afrique de l’Ouest (c. 1920–c. 1945)’, in S. Dulucq and C. Zytnicki (eds), Décoloniser l’histoire? De ‘l’histoire coloniale’ aux histoires nationales en Amérique latine et en Afrique, XIXe–XXe siècles (Saint-Denis: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 2003), 59–81; B.N. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); C.A. Bayly, ‘Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development: The Case of Colonial India and Africa’, in The World Bank Development Research Group, Poverty Team, January 2008, Policy Research Working Paper, 4474 (2008); M.J. Wiener, ‘The Idea of “Colonial Legacy” and the Historiography of Empire’, Journal of the Historical Society 13(1) (2013), 1–32. A. Mazrui, ‘The Multiple Marginality of the Sudan’, in Y.F. Hasan (ed.), Sudan in Africa (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1971), 240–55. G.M.A. Bakheit, ‘Native Administration in the Sudan and its Significance to Africa’, in Y.F. Hasan (ed.), Sudan in Africa (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 2006 [1971]), 256–78; J. Willis, ‘Hukm: The Creolization of Authority in Condominium Sudan’, Journal of African History 46(1) (2005), 29–50; idem, ‘Tribal Gatherings: Colonial Spectacle, Native Administration and Local Government in Condominium Sudan’, Past & Present 211(1) (2011), 243–68; H.A. Ibrahim, ‘The Neo-Mahdists and the British, 1944-47: From Tactical Cooperation to Short-Lived Confrontation’, Middle Eastern Studies 38(3) (2002), 47–72. A.I. AbuShouk, ‘The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: From Collaboration Mechanism to Party Politics, 1898–1956’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38(2) (2010), 207–36. H.J. Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See the introduction to this volume, p. 7–10. V.L. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education: An Account of the Attempts to Improve the Lower Stages of Boys’ Education in the Moslem Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1930–1950 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1953), 33, 47, 48, 60; R.A. Hodgkin, Education and Change: A Book Mainly for Those Who Work in Countries Where Education is Part of a Process of Rapid Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 15, 80; ‘Dāʾud ʿAbd al-Lat. īf, Interview, 1973’, quoted in F.M. Deng, ‘In the Eyes of the Ruled’, in R.O. Collins and F.M. Deng (eds), The British in the Sudan, 1898–1956: The Sweetness and the Sorrow (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 223; ‘W.M. Farquharson-Lang, Interview, 1978–1981’, quoted in F.M. Deng and M.W. Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1990), 24.



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  8. These are categories used by social actors as opposed to the analytical categories used by scholars. See R. Brubaker and F. Cooper, ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29 (2000), 4–5.   9. There are obviously additional types of evidence that could be used; Egyptian sources are not used here. 10. Established in 1934 by Vincent L.  Griffiths, who became its first principal (1934–1950), the Institute of Education initiated far-ranging reforms in Sudanese elementary and intermediate education, produced new curricula and didactic materials, provided teacher training and launched adult education projects in rural areas. 11. R.A. Hodgkin, ‘26 May 1941’, in idem (ed.), Exploring: Robin Hodgkin’s Letters from the Sudan, 1939–1947 (Oxford: Adam & Christopher Hodgkin, 2005), 62. 12. Ibid. 13. R.A. Hodgkin, ‘The Sudan Publications Bureau: Beginnings’, Oversea Education 19(3) (1948), 697; idem, ‘The Reform of the Sudan’s Primary Education: Some Historical Perspective’, in D. Lavin (ed.), The Condominium Remembered: Proceedings of the Durham Sudan Historical Records Conference, 1982, 2 vols (Durham: Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Durham, 1982), vol. 2, 158, 165. 14. The Condominium regime was invented by Lord Cromer, the British ConsulGeneral in Egypt (1883–1907), in order to further British interests in the Nile Valley without offending Egyptian and French sensibilities. 15. See the tables in M.O. Beshir, Educational Development in the Sudan, 1898–1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 198 and N. Grandin, Le Soudan nilotique et l’administration britannique (1898–1956): éléments d’interprétation socio-historique d’une expérience coloniale (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 130. 16. M. Abbas, The Sudan Question: The Dispute over the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1884–1951 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952),  112; AbuShouk, ‘The AngloEgyptian Sudan’, 217. At that time, most British officials did not envisage the realization of Sudanese independence before another twenty years. 17. Beshir, Educational Development, 177–78. 18. R.A. Hodgkin, Letter to His Mother, 13 February 1946, SAD 904/1/5, Sudan Archive, Durham University Library [hereafter SAD], UK. 19. Deng, ‘In the Eyes of the Ruled’, 230; Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 26, 121; M. Beheiry, Glimpses from the Life of a Sudanese Public Servant (Khartoum: Sudan Currency Printing Press, 2003), 75. 20. D. Sconyers, ‘Hurrying Home: Sudanization and National Integration, 1953– 1956’, Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 15(1/2) (1988), 64–74; J.W. Robertson, The Last of the Proconsuls: Letters from Sir James Robertson KT, GCMG, GCVO, KBE, Order of the Nile (4th class), K St J, Civil Secretary of the Sudan 1945–1953, Governor-General of Nigeria 1955–1960 (London: Radcliffe Press, 1994), 33; K.D.D. Henderson, Sudan Republic (London: Ernest Benn, 1965), 87; Beheiry, Glimpses from the Life, 48. A satirical song titled ‘Sudanisation Blues’

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was composed at the time: A.C. Beaton, K.D.D. Henderson and T.R.H. Owen, Sudan Verses (London: Chancery Books, 1963), 66–67. 21. W.T. Hanes III, Imperial Diplomacy in the Era of Decolonization: The Sudan and AngloEgyptian Relations, 1945–1956 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1995), 158. 22. P.M. Holt and M.W. Daly, A History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day (London: Longman, 2000 [1961]), 139. This was largely due to a broad gap in education and development between Northern and Southern Sudan, which had been widened by the British practice of separate rule (the ‘Southern Policy’) from the early twentieth century to 1947. 23. Deng, ‘In the Eyes of the Ruled’, 223. 24. N. al-Sayyid, Taʾrīkh al-Siyāsa wa-l-Taʿlīm fī al-Sūdān (Khartoum: Dār Jāmiʿat alKhart.ūm li-l-Nashr, 1990 [1975]), 151; R.O. Collins, Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918–1956 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1983), 234. 25. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education,  32–33, 60–61; Hodgkin, Education and Change, 17. 26. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 5, 145; Beshir, Educational Development, 35; Y.F. Hasan, ‘Interaction between Traditional and Western Education in the Sudan: An Attempt towards a Synthesis’, in G.N. Brown and M. Hiskett (eds), Conflict and Harmony in Education in Tropical Africa (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), 130. 27. Beheiry, Glimpses from the Life, 9. 28. George C. Scott. May 1932, ‘Note on Education in the Northern Sudan’, in Beshir, Educational Development, 223–24, 235–36. See also E.S. Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story (London: John Murray, 1946), 143; A.R. Ali Taha, ‘Economic and Political Aspects of Education in the Sudan’, in K.W. Bigelow (ed.), Cultural Groups and Human Relations: Twelve Lectures Before the Conference on Educational Problems of Special Cultural Groups Held at Teachers College, Columbia University, August 18 to September 7, 1949 (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1951), 130; Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 145. 29. Hodgkin, ‘The Reform of the Sudan’s Primary Education’, 158. 30. Ibid. 31. F.A.R. ʿAlī T. aha, ʿAbd al-Rah.manʿAlī T. aha 1901-1969 bayna al-Taʿlīm wa-l-Siyāsa wa-Arbajī (Khartoum: Dār Jāmiʿat al-Khart.ūm li-l-Nashr, 2004), 73–74. 32. Vincent L. Griffiths (1934–1950) and then Robin A. Hodgkin (1950–1955). 33. Hamza H. usayn Hamza (1936–1939), ʿAbd al-Rah.man ʿAlī T. aha (1939–1948), Nasr al-Hājj ʿAlī (1948–1951) and ʿUthmān Mah. jūb (1952–1955). 34. In 1947 the abandonment of the Southern Policy gave way to the ‘unification’ of the North and the South, which included the melding of the previously distinct Northern and Southern school systems into one. 35. Sudan Government, 1  July  1944, Half Yearly Staff List of the Sudan Government, 11–12; http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/asc/sudan/staff_lists/ (accessed 3 May 2013). By the 1940s most non-British teachers were Sudanese.



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36. Hodgkin, ‘The Sudan Publications Bureau: Beginnings’; Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 139–42. 37. ʿAwad. Sātī (1950–1951) and ʿAbd al-Gādir Ibrāhīm (1952–1955). 38. J.A. Haywood and M.S.. S. ālih. , Qis.as. min al-Mād. ī: Majmūʿa min al-Qis. as.alTaʾrīkhiyya li-l-Sana al-Thālitha al-Awwaliyya (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif li-l-T. ibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1950); idem, Min Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān li-l-Sana al-Rābiʿa al-Awwaliyya (Khartoum: Maktab al-Nashr bi-l-Khart.ūm, 1958 [1949]). 39. Inspired by the ideas of the American philosopher John Dewey, these approaches focused on the needs and interests of the pupils while promoting ‘learning by doing’ methods. 40. ʿU.A. al-Amīn, Bakht al-Rud.ā, SittatʿUqūd fī Masīrat al-Taʿlīm: 1934 / 1935–1994 / 1995 (Khartoum: Mat. baʿat Jāmiʿat al-Khart.ūm, 2007 [2005]), 24. 41. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 59, 62–64, 149. 42. V.L. Griffiths, Character Aims: Some Suggestions on Standards for a Rising Nation. With the Assistance of Abdel Rahman Ali Taha (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949); idem, Character Training: An Explanation of the Principles of Character Training for Parents. With the Assistance of Abdel Rahman Ali Taha (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949); idem, Character: Its Psychology. An Introduction (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1953). 43. Griffiths, Character Aims. For an analysis of this moral education, see I. SeriHersch, ‘Civilizing Teachers, Modernizing the Sudanese: Colonial Education and “Character Training” in Postwar Sudan, 1945–1953’, in C. Mayeur-Jaouen (ed.), Adab and Modernity: A “Civilization Process”? (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 44. R.A. Hodgkin, ‘A National Curriculum for the Northern Sudan: The Attempt by British and Sudanese Teachers at Bakht er Ruda to Reform Education in the Years before Independence’, 1993, SAD 904/12/39. 45. Ministry of Education, Sudan, Handbook to Elementary Education for Boys’ Schools and Boys’ Clubs in the Sudan (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951), 39–42. 46. J.A. Bright, ‘Memoirs of J.A.B.’s Career as a Teacher in the Sudan 1939– 1967’, 1985, SAD 727/2/17. Very few imported British schoolbooks were used in Sudanese elementary and intermediate education in the colonial era. Secondary education, which was conducted in English, was another matter. 47. T.A. Suleiman, ‘History and Development of Teacher Training in the

Sudan with Special Reference to Teacher Education, Framing of Syllabuses and Production of Text-Books’, in Y. Bedri (ed.), Education in the Sudan: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the Philosophical Society of the Sudan (Khartoum: Philosophical Society of the Sudan, 1963), 17; al-Amīn, Bakht al-Rud.ā, 131–33.

48. Haywood and S. ālih. , Qis. as. min al-Mād. ī, 5; idem, Min Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān, 1. 49. Shuʿbat al-Taʾrīkh bi-Bakht al-Rud. ā, Nah. nu wa-Ajdādunā: Majmūʿa min alQis.as. al-Taʾrīkhiyya li-l-S. aff al-Thānī Ibtidāʾī (Khartoum: Maktab al-Nashr bi-l-Khart.ūm, 1970 [1948]), 4.

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50. See Colonial Office, Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, Mass Education in African Society, Colonial no. 186 (London: HMSO, 1943), 4, BW 90/58, National Archives, London, UK. 51. For more details on Arabic literacy campaigns and Al-S. ibyān magazine, see I. Seri-Hersch, ‘Towards Social Progress and Post-Imperial Modernity? Colonial Politics of Literacy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1946–1956’, History of Education 40(3) (2011), 333–56. 52. V.L. Griffiths and A.A. Ali Taha, Sudan Courtesy Customs: A Foreigner’s Guide to Polite Phrases in Common Use Amongst the Sophisticated Arabic-Speaking Population of the Northern Sudan (Khartoum: Sudan Government, 1936). In the late 1970s, K.D.D.  Henderson, a British official who had served in the Sudan Political Service from 1926 to 1953, remembered the book as an important tool helping the British handle social relations with Sudanese people: Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 40. 53. ‘The British and the Educated Sudanese’, n.d. [1946], G//S 1297 box 4, SAD. 54. See respectively Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 147; R.A. Hodgkin, ‘From Dependence to Independence’, 1954, SAD 904/12/17; J.A. Haywood, ‘Training for Democracy in the Sudan: The Part Played by Education and Local Government in Preparing the Sudanese for Independence. Lecture Delivered in Various Cities in Germany in April 1956 at the Invitation of the Foreign Office’, 1956, SAD 638/10/15. 55. The two main Sudanese political parties in the 1940s were the unionist ‘proEgyptian’ Ashigga (founded in 1943) and the independentist ‘pro-British’ Umma (founded in 1945). 56. G.C. Scott, 29 April 1946, ‘The Educated Sudanese and Sudan Government Policy’, SAD 959/7/17; Griffiths,  An Experiment in Education, 124; Hodgkin, ‘From Dependence to Independence’, SAD 904/12/18. 57. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 144, 147. 58. Beheiry, Glimpses from the Life, 45; Sharkey, Living with Colonialism, 102–11. 59. Scott, ‘The Educated Sudanese’, SAD 959/7/15. In 1946 Scott noted that hardly 1 percent of British officials could or did read the Arabic press. 60. See Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 33–43, 114, 124. 61. Griffiths,  An Experiment in Education,  64;ʿAlī T. aha,ʿAbd al-Rah.manʿAlī T.aha, 82. 62. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 149. 63. Ibid., 110. 64. Ibid., 109–11. This was possibly meant to legitimize the punishments in the eyes of the pupils and prevent the latter from associating sanctions with the British colonial regime. 65. R.M. Abusharaf, ‘“We Have Supped So Deep in Horrors”: Understanding Colonialist Emotionality and British Responses to Female Circumcision in Northern Sudan’, History and Anthropology 17(3) (2006), 214. 66. Ibid., 220. 67. Ibid., 211, 220, 224–25.



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68. I. Beasley, 24 January 1946, ‘Progress Report on the Propaganda Campaign with Draft Handbills Used to Educate Sudanese Women’, SAD 657/4/87. 69. The 1946 law was resisted and excision practices continued: Abusharaf, ‘“We Have Supped So Deep”’, 225. In the late 1970s, a British ex-official viewed the ‘barbaric’ practice of female circumcision as an ‘insurmountable barrier to full social relations between British and Sudanese families’ throughout the period of his service (1929–1954): Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 35. 70. Griffiths, An Experiment in Education, 38, 60–61. 71. Hodgkin, Education and Change, 80. 72. Hodgkin, ‘The Reform of the Sudan’s Primary Education’, 165. 73. Ibid., 160–61. 74. ‘Hodgkin, Interview, 1978–1981’, in Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 63–64. 75. ‘Farquharson-Lang, Interview, 1978–1981’, in Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 36. 76. Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story, 137–38. 77. ‘Jamal Muh.ammad Ah.mad, Interview, 1978–1981’, in Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 122. See the tribute to Ah. mad by Hodgkin upon the former’s death in the mid-1980s: R.A. Hodgkin, ‘The Sudan’s Publications Bureau’, Sudan Studies 2 (1987), 8–10. 78. ‘Ah.mad, Interview, 1978–1981’, in Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 123. 79. Bābikr Badrī (1860–1954) founded the first school for girls in Sudan in Rufāʿa on the Blue Nile (1907). From 1919 to 1924 he was the first Sudanese inspector for education hired by the Sudan Government. He left the Sudan Service in 1929 and devoted the rest of his life to the development of the Ahfad school network in Omdurman. 80. ‘Yūsuf Badrī, Interview, 1978–1981’, in Deng and Daly, ‘Bonds of Silk’, 111. 81. ‘ʿAbd al-Lat.īf, Interview, 1973’, in Deng, ‘In the Eyes of the Ruled’, 228. 82. Hodgkin, ‘The Reform of the Sudan’s Primary Education’, 164.

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Al-Sayyid, N. Taʾrīkh al-Siyāsa wa-l-Taʿlīm fī al-Sūdān. Khartoum: Dār Jāmiʿat al-Khart. ūm li-l-Nashr, 1990 [1975]. Sconyers, D. ‘Hurrying Home: Sudanization and National Integration, 1953–1956’, Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 15(1/2) (1988), 64–74. Seri-Hersch, I. ‘Towards Social Progress and Post-Imperial Modernity? Colonial Politics of Literacy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1946–1956’, History of Education 40(3) (2011), 333–56. ———. ‘Civilizing Teachers, Modernizing the Sudanese: Colonial Education and “Character Training” in Postwar Sudan, 1945–1953’, in C. Mayeur-Jaouen (ed.), Adab and Modernity: A “Civilization Process”? Leiden: Brill (forthcoming). Sharkey, H.J. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Shuʿbat al-Taʾrīkh bi-Bakht al-Rud. ā. Nah. nu wa-Ajdādunā: Majmūʿa min al-Qis.as. alTaʾrīkhiyya li-l-S. aff al-Thānī Ibtidāʾī. Khartoum: Maktab al-Nashr bi-l-Khart.ūm, 1970 [1948].

Suleiman, T.A. ‘History and Development of Teacher Training in the Sudan with Special Reference to Teacher Education, Framing of Syllabuses and Production of Text-Books’, in Y. Bedri (ed.), Education in the Sudan. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the Philosophical Society of the Sudan. Khartoum: Philosophical Society of the Sudan, 1963. Weiskel, T.C. French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples: Resistance and Collaboration, 1889–1911. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Wiener, M.J. ‘The Idea of “Colonial Legacy” and the Historiography of Empire’, Journal of the Historical Society 13(1) (2013), 1–32. Willis, J. ‘Hukm: The Creolization of Authority in Condominium Sudan’, Journal of African History 46(1) (2005), 29–50. ———. ‘Tribal Gatherings: Colonial Spectacle, Native Administration and Local Government in Condominium Sudan’, Past & Present 211(1) (2011), 243–68.

Part II

} Concluding Essays

Chapter 12

Indigenous Agents of Colonial Rule in Africa and India Defining the Colonial State through its Secondary Bureaucracy Ralph A. Austen

} The modern colonial state is usually defined by its racially determined dichotomy between European rulers and indigenous subjects.1 As a political form it first emerged in India during the later eighteenth century and in the course of the nineteenth century became a model for subsequent regimes in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and, especially, tropical Africa. In terms of the liberal ideology that informed politics in the metropoles of these colonies – Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and even Wilhelmine Germany – the missing element here was citizenship, the constitutional rights of populations within a given territory to participate by some means in their own governance. Yet within the authoritarian framework of the colonies themselves there was still considerable room and great need for cooperation across the racial divide. In fact, most day-to-day governance was in the hands of local people, since the small cadre of well-compensated European administrators (modelled after the Indian Civil Service or ICS) was restricted, for the most part, to senior positions of supervision and policy-formation.2 During the first phase of late and postcolonial historiography, less attention was given to this secondary bureaucracy – perceived as collaborationist in the most negative sense – than to an emerging and initially 325

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triumphant nationalist elite, usually more western-educated and committed to development of various kinds than the landlords, chiefs and clerks who had worked under Europeans. Disillusionment with the initial phases of independence has produced many revisions of how we examine the colonial past, among them – especially for Africanists – a new interest in indigenous ‘intermediaries’.3 The present chapter, based largely but not entirely on secondary sources, brings three agendas to this topic. One is to define the colonial state as a general regime type in more nuanced terms than ‘the rule of colonial difference’ or even the models of elite co-optation that have dominated the collaboration literature. The term ‘cooperation’, as defined in the introduction to the present volume, may best capture these relationships. The second goal is to compare the two major cases of such regimes, Africa and India, to see if their resemblance at the top and bottom – European bureaucrats and indigenous peasants – is matched by the structures and social base of their middle. Finally, I will consider the degree to which corruption among indigenous agents of European rule explains the more massive malfeasance found among public officials in both African and Indian postcolonial regimes. Admirable as such a project may be, it is not easy to carry out. For one, the records, including personal writings and archival files, of subordinate colonial functionaries are not easy to locate, at least for Africa.4 Moreover, the quotidian office routine of their regular work does not itself make for very interesting narratives. To the extent that such figures have entered historical writings it has been when they stepped out of their working roles, sometimes when organizing for better working conditions and status,5 but more often when caught in illegal activities. Such accusations first of all create an archive that historians can easily use and secondarily provide an element of drama also appealing to imaginative writers.6 There are serious scholars who see corruption as a major basis and legacy of colonial rule and I will address them in the final section.7 The main portions of the present chapter also make continuous references to corruption but largely see it as background to two other questions: first, the continuity of indigenous colonial bureaucracies with precolonial state systems in both India and Africa; and second, the skills, training and salaries associated with such posts. In examining these matters, I will focus upon only one of the major functions of colonial governance, the collection of taxes.8 My time frame for India is the long nineteenth century (from the 1790s to the First World War) and for Africa the period from around 1900 to the Second World War, i.e. in both cases the ‘classic’ colonial era, when European regimes were stabilized but not yet seriously challenged by nationalist movements and the prospects of decolonization.



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PRECOLONIAL BUREAUCRACIES AND COLONIAL REGIMES The one indigenous element of colonial regimes that has received the most attention from scholars is ‘indirect rule’, meaning the maintenance by European administrations of the local authorities already in place at the time of their arrival. The focus of such research upon the top layers of these inherited governing systems has produced two problems: most generally, a failure to give sufficient attention to ground operations like tax assessment or collection and, in comparative terms, a rather fruitless equation of African chiefly apples with the oranges of Indian princely states.9 If we focus upon sub-district and especially village officials and their role in taxation, a very sharp precolonial distinction – and one that would carry over into the colonial era10 – emerges between India and Africa. Briefly, the British in India inherited from the Mughal empire and its parallel or successor states11 a quite effective land tax system based upon a bureaucracy literate in both the official governing language of Persian and/or a number of regional vernaculars. In some precolonial African states, literacy in both Arabic and local vernaculars had developed mainly in the centuries immediately before colonial conquest, but was nowhere used to administer direct taxation of state subjects. The British Indian empire is conventionally referred to as the Raj and, in the more controversial formulation of the Cambridge School, perceived as a European adaptation to a South Asian imperial form.12 Such continuity can certainly be perceived in the land taxation practices where the Mughal kaghaz raj (paper empire) set a clear precedent for the British ‘document raj’.13 Despite (or because of) constant British concern with its reform, the existing tax systems provided not only the initial prize that defined British rule on the sub-continent but also the apparatus that would allow such a revenue source to be sustained. The Mughals, like the British, used their senior staff to periodically assess the production of peasant farmers and maintained a permanent staff of lesser administrators to determine the tax obligations of individual cultivator units. The system had many imperfections, especially at the village level, where its agents were locally appointed and paid, but higher-level authorities could (as the British after them) at least periodically audit their records and express their own goals and critiques in well-documented manuals.14 This land revenue, converted to local silver currency, also appears to have been the main and sufficient basis for a large-scale system of Mughal state finance and was maintained to a considerable degree by the successor states of the eighteenth century.15 In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, no states maintained anything like the centralized military and administrative apparatus of the Mughals, nor

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did any strike their own coinage, although some used imported cowrie shells or silver coins as well as locally-mined gold as forms of currency. Such polities did require regular revenue of some kind to support non-productive agents and clients of the rulers. In the absence of written records on the subject it is difficult to calculate the proportion of state income that came from taxing rural cultivators although available descriptive evidence suggests that the major portion was based upon more easily accessible mines and trading centres, along with raiding. The general obstacles (aside from limited bureaucratic capacity) to extracting revenue from free rural populations are linked to ecological conditions: high transportation costs limited what goods could be moved from provinces to state capitals, and high ratios of land to population allowed farmers to move away from the territory of overly-demanding rulers. Thus a key alternative to taxation, but one that would be morally unacceptable to modern colonial regimes, was enslavement, i.e. forcibly bringing outsiders to work on the estates of elites as well as to serve in the military and export as ‘human commodities’ to Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Atlantic markets in exchange for military and luxury goods.16 Still, some systems of taxing free rural households did exist in a number of African states and I will examine three of them more closely – Buganda in East Africa and the Asante and Sokoto empires in West Africa – when discussing how colonial regimes developed their own fiscal capacities.

INDIA: CONTINUITY AND REFORM The British regime in India retained indigenous governing institutions at two levels. The one that has received the most systematic attention is the princely states, i.e. post-Mughal political units occupying approximately 41 percent of the land mass of colonial India but left intact by the British, who were represented only at the local capital by a ‘Resident’ and his immediate staff. Although often labelled a form of ‘indirect rule’ (which it literally was), this mode of European hegemony might more usefully be designated as a ‘protectorate’ or ‘client state’17 in that local rulers retained formal sovereignty and internal affairs (including taxation) were left entirely in their hands.18 Of more immediate concern for comparison with Africa are the ranks of Indian officials who operated at the provincial and district level of ‘British India’ under the supervision of European officers. Rural taxation remained the single most important responsibility of this apparatus since, through the first decades of the twentieth century, land revenues remained



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the main source (varying between 40  and 50  percent) of government income.19 The study of colonial rule at this level does not lend itself to easy generalizations, although the historiography has been growing and a good deal can be learned about it from studies of specific regions and districts during the colonial era.20 What we know most about are the upper levels of office most in contact with Europeans and subject to policy debates, especially during the first half-century of British rule (ca. 1765-1830). These included, most famously, the zamindars, landlords responsible for collecting taxes in rural districts.21 Under the inherited regimes, zamindars had been a constantly changing mix of appointed and hereditary agents, recruited from among military leaders and sometimes even ex-royalty, who enjoyed considerable local autonomy although they were subject to tax expectations based on imperial revenue surveys of their domains.22 The Cornwallis reforms of the 1790s, which laid the basis for the new model of senior European administration in India, also replaced what was seen as a very corrupt revenue system in Bengal (a province where the Mughals and their successors had not produced a wide-scale assessment) with a ‘Permanent Settlement’ of their own, in which taxes were to be collected from peasants by their local zamindars. The incentive for such agency was not civil service status like that of their European supervisors but rather enhanced rights in rural property, with the hope of turning the zamindars into ‘improving landlords’ on a somewhat imagined British model.23 During the first half of the nineteenth century the Cornwallis tax settlement was challenged by first a ryotwari (individual peasant-based) and then mhalwari (collective village-based) revenue system, both involving more direct encounters between Europeans and rural Indian society, at least during periodic revenue surveys.24 Following the major revolt of 1857, incited in part by the annexation of the northern Indian state of Awadh (Oudh) and the displacement of many of its taluqdars (the local equivalent of Bengali zamindars), the British reverted to a more conservative policy of working through the local landholding aristocracy and renounced any further annexations, thus allowing the survival of both zamindars and ‘princely states’.25 Within the British-administered areas of India variants in revenue systems had a significant impact upon economic development and land rights, but the administrative structure reaching from the senior European officers (not incidentally labelled ‘collectors’), whether or not via zamindars, to the largely rural populace was very similar throughout the Raj, and much of it retained, in name and often in substance, the inherited Mughal structure. The ideological battles over revenue systems focused upon the

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middle levels of administration between district and village, where zamindars were located. Struggles over bureaucratic power on the ground, however, gave greater prominence to the Indian officials closest to and most distant from the local European headquarters. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, British administrative reformers gave greatest attention to the deputy collectors, tahsildars, shrishtadars and mamlatadars who operated either at or just below the level of the British collector. In two of the original presidencies, Bengal and Madras, these officers were perceived as both defrauding the Raj and oppressing those beneath them.26 The solution (undertaken from the beginning of British rule in Maharashtra) was to reduce the autonomy of such positions by closer supervision, compensating them through fixed salaries rather than percentages of revenue along with systems of recruitment less subject to local networks of kinship and caste.27 In the political terminology of the Raj, these higher-ranking Indian officials belonged to the ‘uncovenanted services’, that is they were not part of the same corps as the senior British administrators who, from the time of the pre-Raj East India Company, offered a bond that they would ‘faithfully, honestly diligently and carefully, serve the said Company’.28 The reforms of 1793 explicitly ‘sought to remove Indians from all but minor offices, to remove Company servants from the corruption of “Dubashism” [the culture of indigenous commercial agents, R.A.]’.29 When, in 1802, the very liberal Thomas Munro suggested that senior Indian revenue officials would, like the covenanted British service, become more honest if given higher pay, his superiors in the Madras Presidency refused on the grounds that ‘Native servants … are so far from being governed by any principal of honour’ and were best disciplined ‘under the operation of that Fear which is excited by a vigilant and rigid Controul [sic]’.30 In the course of the latter nineteenth century, highly-educated Indians were gradually admitted into the covenanted ranks of the ICS but up to the First World War only in very restricted numbers. However, the uncovenanted service also included a significant minority of Europeans who helped agitate for improved salaries and conditions of employment. By 1892 Indians serving as deputy collectors and higher-level magistrates were organized into a ‘Provincial Service’, while the next level of tahsildars and qanungos (registrars) became part of a less prestigious ‘Subordinate Service’.31 Even when later receiving significantly greater compensation, Provincial and Subordinate Service administrators were still recruited and employed within their home regions, usually on some basis of caste and kin affiliation and could not avoid being further influenced by such personal ties in the carrying out of their duties. By contrast, ICS official were not only foreign



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but also, by the 1850s, an ‘all India’ service potentially rotated throughout the sub-continent. At the village level, the British Raj continued to depend upon headmen and patwaris32 (accountants) to collect taxes and keep records (in regional vernacular writing) of local landholdings and their marketable output. As with the Mughals, the status of such officers always remained ambiguous and troubling. In formal administrative terms, patwaris, to say nothing of the clerks beneath them, were generally not incorporated even into the Subordinate Service and thus remained dependent upon either zamindars or village councils and headman for most of their (usually quite modest) pay. Even when (as in portions of Madras) they became district employees, they remained susceptible to the influence of local landholders. Further conflicts of interest derived from the patwaris’ village elite status as literate members of higher or at least intermediate castes (Brahmins or Kayasthas) who not only inherited their offices but also earned much of their income from shop keeping, money-lending and landholding. The patwaris – along with local police forces – represented a level of colonial administration that the British recognized as corrupt but were unable or perhaps unwilling to regulate.33 The apparent reasons for such tolerance were both economic and political: it would have been very costly for the British to intervene in the affairs of every Indian village or village cluster; at the same time, the failings of the patwaris did not – any more than the nepotism and patronage networks of the Provincial and Subordinate Services – threaten the major political and economic goals of the Raj or even the moral status of the ICS.34 Peasants were the major victims of the patwaris (to say nothing of often excessive tax rates). However, despite various forms of local resistance, this class ‘did not pose a direct threat to British rule between 1858 and 1914’.35 Where peasants did rise during the 1857 revolt and the Deccan [Maharashtra] riots of 1875, their major targets were not the local tax agents but rather a variety of newer irritants, most notably alien baniya moneylenders.36

AFRICA: INDIRECT RULE AS DISCONTINUITY African colonial administration, at least in most British tropical territories, also operated theoretically in two distinct spheres. On one side were the organs of Indirect Rule: traditional rulers gazetted as Native Authorities, presiding over their own Native Courts and – most importantly for the present discussion – collecting taxes of which a significant percentage was deposited in Native Treasuries.37 European administrators, along with

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their own staff of African clerks, interpreters, etc., were paid from, among other sources, the portion of local taxation passed on to the territorial government. The distinction between the apparatus and jurisdiction of the Native Authorities and that of the British District Commissioner was taken very seriously by British colonial thinkers, not only in administrative terms but also as the political adjunct of peasant economies, perceived as less exploitative than white settler regimes38 Nonetheless, it is hardly comparable to the difference between Princely States and British India in the South Asian Raj. Most critically, African ‘chiefs’, whatever their inherited titles, were salaried agents of the European regime. In the words of Lord Lugard, the prophet of Indirect Rule, ‘there are not two sets of rulers – British and native – working either separately or in cooperation, but a single Government in which the native chiefs have well-defined duties’.39 Moreover, in designating two of the functions of such rulers, exercising general authority and dispensing justice on internal matters, according to ‘native law and custom’ (or even the Islamic sharia), British practices were no different from those of other colonial powers in Africa (or elsewhere). The distinct British institution, then, was the native treasury, designed to give local African rulers a direct stake in both the collection and spending of local revenue. But before examining how this worked, in three brief case studies, several general and somewhat contradictory considerations need to be kept in mind. First, direct taxation of rural populations constituted a far smaller proportion of government revenue (generally well under 40 percent) in Africa than in India, especially in British colonies.40 Such revenue became possible when colonial regimes introduced cash crops such as cocoa, coffee, cotton and peanuts into areas where they had not previously been grown and where new transport and security could allow them to be sold. But it often appeared easier (especially in British West Africa) to collect duties on such goods (and/or complimentary consumer imports) at markets than to impose direct taxes upon often unwilling rural households and individuals. On the other hand, without admitting any continuity with precolonial slavery, colonial regimes depended for public works upon the obligatory, often unpaid, labour of their subjects.41 Third, the work of tax collection and record-keeping within the realm of a native authority had to be carried out by clerks who were not very different from those employed by Europeans and – as opposed to India – usually imposed upon African polities as a colonial innovation. Finally, native treasuries were designed – first in Northern Nigeria, the key model of indirect rule – less to enhance the power of African rulers than to make their finances more transparent to



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British residents or district officers, who were thus also provided, in contrast with both native authorities and French, Belgian or other colonial administrators, with a great deal of budgetary autonomy. The three cases that follow here – Buganda, Asante and the Sokoto Caliphate – have been chosen because they represent powerful precolonial African states with quite elaborate ‘bureaucracies’ that were all incorporated into British colonial regimes. The focus will be upon the indigenous systems of collecting tax/tribute – their penetration into rural communities and their administrative instruments – and the degree and manner to which these were then adapted to colonial needs. Buganda, a kingdom in present-day Uganda, had developed institutions sufficiently compatible with the needs of a European regime and its elite ‘could thus assert themselves as virtually equal partners [of the British]’.42 The features of the Ganda state that seemed to meet such requirements included a ruler, the kabaka (king), who had managed to impose his own agents in the various clan-based regions of the country, down to the village level. The duties of such officials included collecting tribute from individual households in the form of scarce trade items (bark-cloth), agricultural produce and labour. The relative compactness of the kingdom (about one million inhabitants in an area of about 19,000 square miles) and a good system of roads made it possible to move such goods and services to both local chiefs and the kabaka’s capital as well as exchanging some of them in regional markets.43 While organized on clearly hierarchical lines, this system also allowed a good deal of social mobility for men who displayed military prowess and political ability. However ‘equal’ Ganda political cooperation eventually became, the transition to a new colonial order here was hardly smooth. Until the 1840s – half a century before the beginnings of British rule – Buganda had had no direct contact with the outside world and thus lacked, among other things, any use of writing in its administration. More critically, the first contacts with Arab-Swahili coastal merchants (as well as internal population problems) put the state upon a path of violent external expansion in which ‘plundered ivory and slaves were more valuable than land and subjects’.44 At the same time, the demands for the export of such goods, especially slaves, needed within a demographically declining Buganda, contributed to the undermining of the Ganda state.45 Despite the power of the kabaka and his agents, the stability of this regime had rested, like in less densely populated regions of Africa, upon reciprocal exchanges between authorities and their subjects, with even the lowest free peasants able to change locations and patrons if dissatisfied. When the British arrived, the country was in a state of violent civil war between followers of Islam and

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mutually competing Protestant (British) and Catholic (French) missionaries. The one positive process that accompanied this turmoil was that the Ganda elite, ever eager to seek assets for political advancement, took enthusiastically to literacy, thus preparing themselves for future careers in a colonial bureaucracy. In establishing Buganda as the centre of their new colonial territory, the British neither followed the (not yet established) doctrine of Indirect Rule46 nor did they restore the Ganda state to any version of its ‘traditional’ form. Instead, they followed a policy something like that of Bengal over a century earlier by reducing the kabaka to a largely symbolic role, although his ministers and Lukiko (council of twelve county chiefs) still wielded considerable authority. Subordinate district chiefs at all levels were turned into landlords, in this case proprietors of mailo (multiples of one mile-square) landed estates on the most productive land in the kingdom. Instead of creating rural capitalism (in this case, it was also hoped, with major European settler participation), the mailo-system turned into a form of subsidy for chiefs who gained rights to rent over properties still farmed by smallholders. The peasants themselves eventually achieved security of tenure and met their obligations to landlord and state as well as new consumer needs by producing marketable cotton and coffee. In return for the boon of rents (whose cash value declined in significance over time, as did state revenues from the Bengal ’Permanent Settlement’), the Ganda chiefs agreed to collect hut taxes, which they had to pass on to the British authorities. They did invest their initial advantage as landlords in further education and their long-term material award became salaries, thus turning them from figures of ‘traditional’ honour and status into essentially civil servants, albeit still enjoying the prestige of their indigenous titles. Following the 1900 Uganda Agreement, British authorities were required to make a detailed survey of the lands in question. Unlike the Indian cases, however, the purpose of this exercise was not to establish the productive capacities for land taxation but rather to provide a basis for claims to mailo land – many of which were nonetheless continuously disputed.47 Tax rates throughout Uganda, as in most of colonial Africa, were flat amounts, ‘hut and poll taxes’, based simply upon counting households. These payments initially imposed great hardships on Ganda peasants, but once cotton production took hold they became less onerous and provided only about 30 percent of government revenue throughout Uganda.48 More burdensome were extensive public labour obligations, enforced by chiefs but no longer seen as a form of reciprocal obligation.49 However, during the 1920s Ganda increasingly met this demand through cash payments. This money provided the Ganda government with a major source



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of autonomous income but also created the opportunity for the European authorities to exercise direct supervision of Lukiko finances in the manner of the classic Native Treasury.50 Despite not fitting the standard Native Authority model, Buganda appears to be one of the most successful British examples of the indirect rule/ peasant syndrome. Within the rest of Uganda, the example of Buganda and the use of literate Ganda agents to establish colonial administration assured that a system of eventually salaried and similarly educated hereditary chiefs (but never with the same land rights) would be used as the local apparatus of rule and, more specifically, tax collection.51 The disadvantage of this model from the British perspective was its modest economic returns. Could inherited political systems from regions of Africa more integrated into precolonial global markets yield more dynamic results? The Asante state in modern Ghana is a good candidate for such a comparison, since it had developed over several centuries in a region that had long been a major participant in the West African gold, slave and kola markets, linked first to trans-Saharan networks and then primarily to the Atlantic. The metropolitan core of Asante had a mid-nineteenth-century population of about 325,000 in an area of about 25,000 square miles and was thus less densely populated than precolonial Buganda.52 By the late eighteenth century the rulers of this expansive state had established an appointed bureaucracy to manage its various administrative, commercial and diplomatic affairs, including the collection of tributes and taxes from the entire expanse of what had clearly become an empire.53 The tax apparatus was centred in the office of a treasurer, the Gyaasewahene, at the capital, Kumasi, but he had agents in the main provincial centres, all connected to the capital by well-maintained roads. Within the core area of the state, by the nineteenth century taxes were collected regularly and directly from individual household heads in small units (onetenth of an ounce) of gold, which may have been generated either by the subjects’ own mining efforts or through market exchange. The rulers of the outer provinces dispatched tribute to Kumasi, but we have no information about how this was procured. The list of goods involved – gold, cattle, snails, slaves, cloth and sheep – suggests that they were less the products of agriculture than of mining, urban artisanry and military plunder. Arabic writing had been introduced into Asante from its SudanicSaharan connections and a scribe is reported as working in the treasury, but no written records for financial procedures have been identified. Instead, a less permanent accounting system was used, first by transferring (or retaining) state income in the form of gold-dust units and tracking these holdings by maintaining an equivalent box of cowrie shells (the main, but low-value,

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imported currency), which were moved back and forth to designate the payment in or out of gold. When the British took over control of Asante in the 1890s the outer provinces were placed under other jurisdictions and the central ruler, the Asantahene, removed from office until 1935, but the core of the state remained an administrative unit, ruled ‘indirectly’ through the federated chiefdoms that had been its constituent units.54 Instead of building upon the existing Asante tax system, however, the British replaced it with their general British West African policy of imposing no such immediate levies. During the first decade of their rule, before a railroad and motor roads connected Asante to the coast, the British made extensive use of obligatory labour for carrying goods. After about 1910 such forced recruitment was only used for maintaining local roads, under the supervision of chiefs.55 But the major British source of cash revenue (and justification for all investments in transport) was the burgeoning cocoa economy of the region. Taxes on cocoa exports (culminating in 1939 with monopoly control through a Cocoa Marketing Board), along with rising consumer imports, assured the government of a relatively high (by colonial African standards) income. The chiefs were also relieved (except for labour levies) from the duty of collecting taxes and thus did not become salaried agents of the colonial regime. Their main regular sources of income were based on control of land: royalties on mines, timber-cutting and rents for farming by non-subjects on stool (chiefdom) territory as well as cocoa revenue from their private lands (often initially cleared by obligatory labour). One element of more formal Indirect Rule was introduced in the late 1920s, ‘Stool Treasuries’ that provided an accounting of payments to the chiefly office – initially just court fees – thus allowing greater financial scrutiny by European administrators, but also by suspicious subjects and subordinates.56 The Asante case indicates that in perhaps the most developed of their African colonies and in regard to one of the most precociously ‘protomodern’ of extant African states, African intermediaries could operate somewhat in the way the Bengal zamindari system had been imagined, as landlords rather than bureaucrats. Of course, the Asante chiefs did not, any more than their Bengali or Ganda counterparts, transform agriculture in a more capitalist direction nor, in the often-cited ‘spirit of indirect rule’, did the British want any such destabilizing change. The way in which Ghana (and Southern Nigeria) most resembled colonial India was in the important role played by local lawyers, who resisted any expansion of the power of chiefs.57 But that issue addresses a different dimension of the colonial state. British colonial rule in Northern Nigeria is both an early exception to West African policies of avoiding direct taxation and the classic example



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of Indirect Rule. The link between these practices is the Sokoto caliphate, the precolonial African state that most closely approximated the kind of early modern bureaucracy that the British had found in India. Among the similarities between these widely separated regimes are a well-established culture of Muslim literacy and a land tax reaching from the capitals of Sokoto’s constituent emirates to their rural villages. Because of its visibility, this precolonial tax system and its colonial successor has been subjected to far greater study than that of any other African region.58 In contrast to India, however, the British inherited a revenue organization in Northern Nigeria that was ill-suited to their needs and stated values. Most obviously, a large share of state elite income came from slave estates rather than levies upon free peasants who, in most areas of even this relatively populous region, could move to new lands if overly taxed. The main reason we cannot determine the proportions for sources of public revenue is that the literacy of state actors here did not extend to the keeping of written financial records. The major regional rulers and estate-holders within each emirate tended to reside at the capital and used mobile agents, jakadu, to travel to the villages and assess their tax capacities. The jakadu are reported to have been very skilled at procuring such information, but in the absence of any auditing possibility they were also under suspicion of embezzlement and were almost immediately dismissed by the colonial regime established here in 1905. British officials in Northern Nigeria did have Indian precedents in mind when they developed their own revenue system. However, in contrast to the often-cited princely states, or even zamindars, the model here was British India and its post-Permanent Settlement ryotwari system, i.e. relatively direct rule over peasant (riyot) taxpayers.59 The emirs and other traditional rulers down to village heads were thus put on salaries, paid out of newly invented Native Treasuries. British district administrators, aided by their own staff of locally-trained surveyors, undertook regular revenue assessments, called taki (footsteps), whose goal was not only to measure how much land was under cultivation (even producing cadastral maps) but also the varying qualities of local soils, whether cultivated or not, and thus their potential yield. This system increased revenue yields through the 1920s but also produced, as in pre-colonial times, a disincentive for peasants to extend their visible cultivation. It was thus soon restricted to the most densely settled zones of the Kano emirate (the largest and richest of the Sokoto vassal states) and particularly those near its capital, a major market for smallholder produce. Other areas of the rural landscape paid the same flat taxes (in this case, on the basis of the number of household heads) as under most

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colonial regimes in tropical Africa. Within the Kano ‘closely-settled zones’ the more intensive tax system is remembered less as corruption or a colonial innovation but, more like in British India, as a form of ‘“oppression”, zalunci – which has a connotation of being bad but is also naturally to be expected from those who hold office’. Nonetheless, it was evaded wherever possible by peasants and abolished two decades after independence in 1979.60

THE RECRUITMENT AND FORMATION OF COLONIAL INTERMEDIARIES: INTERPRETERS, BABUS, CLERKS AND TAKI MALAMAI If the heritage of precolonial tax systems and the ecological conditions that sustained them produced such differences between ground-level colonial revenue administration in India and even the paradigmatic site of African Indirect Rule, is there some common ground in the way indigenous agents were formed to manage these systems? Here at least there are parallels between the two regions, which perhaps reveal something about the general character of what we can call a colonial state. The categories listed in the sub-title of this section designate a range of indigenous auxiliaries defined as much by their education and skills as by their functions within European regimes. By interpreters I mean agents used in the early periods of such rule in both India and Africa whose main value came from their precolonial learning. Babu, an Indian figure present only discursively in most of colonial Africa, is an agent (or would-be agent), sufficiently educated in European schools so as to aspire to high office within the territorial regime. ‘Clerk’ here designates a local educated only to function at a level well below that of European administrators or technical professionals. Finally, the Hausa (Northern Nigerian) term taki malamai represents men made literate only in a local vernacular so as to function at the bottom of the colonial bureaucracy. Interpreters entered nascent colonial regimes from greatly varied sources and (measured by literacy) levels of local knowledge. The classic exemplar was the Indian munshi,61 a Mughal secondary administrator trained in the classical Persian culture of that empire. Many munshis were Hindus either of the middle Kayasthas caste or (in the south) Niyogi (non-priestly) Brahmins, and their qualifications included both Persian learning and siyaq (accounting).62 Thus they were able to serve their new British employers in a number of ways beyond simply keeping records: carrying on diplomacy and correspondence with local rulers according to appropriate protocols,



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deciphering newsletters from such courts, and also teaching Persian, along with other classical ‘oriental’ languages, to British officers.63 In colonial Africa, many of the early interpreters were illiterate ex-soldiers, often of servile origin, whose only skill was a rudimentary French or English.64 The closest equivalent to munshis here were the Muslim scholars (mallams, ‘ulama) who served as colonial intermediaries. They too carried out most of their learning and writing in a non-vernacular classical language, Arabic in this case, and served as writers, diplomats, jurists and general agents, especially for the French in Senegal and Mauretania, but also (along with many less-learned figures) for the British in Northern Nigeria. Throughout colonial Africa, in places where no suitable political authorities were to be found (including many portions of Northern Nigeria) interpreters were also installed as chiefs.65 However, Muslim scholars had not served anywhere in precolonial Africa as accountants, so that for ordinary administrative service they had to be replaced by (or transform themselves into) a different type of agent more quickly than the Indian munshis. In the higher levels of provincial Indian service (Deputy Collectors and Tahsildars) Persian was replaced in the first half of the nineteenth century by English as the administrative idiom and as the service itself became more bureaucratized its incumbents were also required to meet fairly high standards of English literacy and even to pass examinations, if not on the same competitive terms as the senior ICS.66 There were more than enough Indians, mostly Hindu, to fill these posts, because from this same time the Raj had established – or permitted the private establishment of – a large number of English-medium secondary schools and universities. This form of education met a demand from the Indian – particularly the Bengali – upper-caste elite, but its products, under the name of babu, were disparaged by both patriotic Indian intellectuals and condescending British commentators for precisely their ambitions of obtaining the best possible employment within the colonial regime.67 Yet even what had once been among the most racist and frustrating aspects of the Raj – its barring of ‘natives’ from the ranks of the ICS – the British regime finally gave way so that by independence in 1947 almost half of the ICS was Indian.68 For the architects of colonial rule in Africa, there was very little in the way of an inherited state bureaucracy to replace and little desire to encourage the demands for promotion and even self-government associated with contemporary (i.e. early-twentieth century) India. Once European colonial rule pushed in from the coast in the last decades of the 1800s, even the small group of West Africans with advanced western learning was demoted from its previous senior positions within embryo colonial administrations and missionary churches.69 Thus no institutions were established to produce

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anything resembling the lamented babus of British India. Instead, in order to avoid what Lugard called ‘the failure of the Indian education system’,70 the rulers of both British and French Africa embraced a mode of ‘adapted’ European education, less ‘literary’ and more isolated from the metropolitan secondary-university track than the South Asian model.71 The product of such a level of education, more or less equivalent to European middle school,72 is what I am calling a ‘clerk’, i.e. an indigenous official formally responsible only for the routine functions of office work rather than real administrative initiatives. Many senior/chief clerks (the main object of concern here) took on far more than such routine work but still could not claim parity with their European supervisors.73 In India, the figure fitting this definition was the qanungo, an official placed immediately above village authorities and below the tahsildar, who was responsible for the revenue of a larger sub-region.74 Under the Mughals and the early Company regime, qanungos received a more elementary maktab Persian education than munshis (who generally went on to madrasas) and gave more attention to accounting skills.75 Qanungos (their title was sometimes changed to Native Registrars) used this knowledge to register both the information produced in the vernacular by village patwari-accountants and their own surveys of rural lands and revenue capacities. In the north, Kayasthas dominated these offices even more than those of munshi and in the south, the majority were again Niyogi Brahmins. In the early 1800s Company officials had suppressed the qanungo office in much of the Madras presidency, Bengal and the North-Western Provinces with the aim of instituting more direct and disinterested supervision over villages, but the results were highly problematic, so that at least in the north the position was reinstated.76 From the 1830s onward, as Persian was replaced by English in the upper-level administrative records, the official language of all local revenue administration shifted to the regional vernaculars of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu, but this posed no problem for the already multilingual clerks, who now moved from maktabs to Anglo-Vernacular schools. In Africa, senior/chief clerkships represented the highest rank generally available to indigenous administrators. While colonial African education systems could not entirely avoid the forms of education that had seemed to cause such problems in India (for one ‘literary’ learning was necessary for even low-level clerical employment, to say nothing of other colonial-era job opportunities),77 they still produced a body of intermediate administrators whose career ambitions did not threaten the colonial order.78 In French West Africa, such politics did develop among teachers, who constituted more than half of the graduates of the elite Ponty school but often felt that the colonial regime did not give them the (largely illicit) economic opportunities



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enjoyed by less educated clerks.79 But opportunities to advance these claims had to await the global transformations of the post-Second World War era. The taki malamai (taki [footstep] scholars) were local land surveyors trained by the British regime of Northern Nigeria in an entirely new form of literacy: Hausa written in the Roman rather than established Arabic alphabet.80 In their immediate function, using foot-pacing and other methods to survey farmland for tax purposes, these agents had, as seen, only a limited impact. However, they also represented a base level of administration that, more than political doctrines, distinguished British from French rule in Africa, i.e. the use of vernaculars as media of oral communication and written record-keeping. The key source of this distinction was French Third Republic anti-clericalism as opposed to heavy British reliance upon missionaries (with a strong investment in proselytizing through vernacular literacy) for schooling. Ironically, British authorities would not allow missionaries into most of heavily Muslim Hausaland, so that their own local administration became strongly dependent upon English-speaking immigrants from Southern Nigeria, especially Igbos, with resulting ethnoreligious tensions that continue today to produce high levels of violence.81 Throughout India a practice of practical vernacular literacy (as opposed to Persian, Arabic or Sanskrit)82 through locally supported village schools (known through much of Northern India as patshalas) was well-established by the Mughal era.83 The scribe castes of Kayasthas or Niyogi Brahmins were the authors of the teaching manuals used in these institutions and usually the gurus (teachers), at least in Bengal, although the students came from a wider social base. The curriculum of these very informal institutions, most of which used the ground or palm leaves rather than paper for writing surfaces, included literacy, land surveying and accounting, so they seem to have been the training grounds for patwaris and their subordinates as well as for merchants. Such instruction satisfied British as well as Mughal needs, although the low level of attendance (generally under 10 percent of male children) and methods of teaching were constantly criticized by missionaries. After 1854, Indian elementary schools became subject to a series of reforms aimed to bring them more into line with European conceptions of such education, although still based on vernacular languages. The motivation for these changes was less practical, in terms of administrative needs – on the contrary, more ‘literary’ subjects such as history and science were now added to the curriculum – than ideological, an attempt by the Raj to meet criticisms that its education efforts neglected the rural Indian masses in favour of anglicized urban elites (babus). However, such programmes suffered from insufficient funding and an unwillingness of most rural cultivator

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families to pay for an education that did not provide the clear social or economic benefits that Anglo-Vernacular schools did for clerical groups.84

CONCLUSION: COMPARISON, CORRUPTION, POSTCOLONIAL CONTINUITIES The underlying assumption of this chapter is that India and tropical Africa experienced very similar colonial regimes, taking the political form of an authoritarian and racist administrative apparatus and economically based upon the taxation of peasants. This similarity stands in sharp contrast to both the precolonial and postcolonial relationship of the two regions to one another and the global economy. Before 1800 India ‘clothed the world’ (including African slaves and slavers) with its cotton textile industry,85 and since at least the 1990s has become a recognized member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group of emerging global economic powers. Africa meanwhile remained in both eras and through alternative cycles of postcolonial growth and stagnation a politically fragmented and socially unstable provider of raw materials (including emigrant labour) to the outside world.86 The examination of indigenous elements within the South Asian and African colonial experience reveals that these longer-term historical contrasts also marked the periods of European rule. Despite the claims of the ICS to be the ‘the most distinguished Civil Service in the world’,87 it was clearly the literate and deeply penetrating public revenue structure inherited by the British from the Mughal empire that provided the Raj with greater state capacity than any colonial regime in tropical Africa.88 Yet a family resemblance between both colonial and postcolonial India and Africa also emerges in the allegations of massive corruption attached to indigenous government agents in both regions. Here the problem is one more of continuity than of comparison. For neither India nor Africa has there been very extensive and systematic examination of colonial-era corruption. The most ambitious works along these lines are two recent studies of indigenous subordinate officials in British South Asia by Bhavani Raman and Jonathan Saha, which claim that abuse of their authority by indigenous officials effectively defines the colonial state.89 In Saha’s terms, ‘Misconduct [by subordinates] was both a discourse for imagining the state and a set of practices through which the state was constituted’.90 The problem with such claims is that they are restricted, as is a less ambitious account of both European and indigenous misconduct in French West and Equatorial Africa, to the formative stages of European rule.91 Two



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other studies of pervasive corruption in both India and Nigeria deal with late stages of European rule, when party politics and impending decolonization accelerated social pressures upon the state apparatus.92 In contrast to the more Foucauldian Bhavani and Saha, Robert Tignor (as well as James Searing dealing with a more normal period of interwar Senegalese colonial history),93 also shows that the discourse of corruption, which is what shows up in the archives, was significantly motivated by political rivalry among African contenders for power and thus was never entirely reliable as an indicator of the degree to which such practices reached a level of serious dysfunctionality for public services. In the discussion that follows (some actually based on primary sources), I will make my strongest case for ‘cooperation’ between European and indigenous cadres of colonial regimes by arguing that the distribution of legitimate incomes between the two groups, as well as incentives for major embezzlement under colonial regimes, limited the levels of corruption during this era. Africanists often base their arguments for continuity between colonial and postcolonial corruption on the incompatibility between the impersonal bureaucratic norms of European administration and the social values of African communities with little prior experience of effective state rule.94 Tignor, in an earlier article, made a more historical case for the imposition of colonial authority on such groups producing ‘a decisive break with the pre-colonial political past’ as well as ‘political corruption and an intense competition for office’.95 There is some support for such an argument in Southern Nigeria between 1916 and 1929, when attempts to impose elements of the Sokoto model of Indirect Rule (both with and without direct taxation) produced three serious rebellions that included charges of corruption by African clerks and chiefs.96 However, British officials were well aware of the problems involved in such innovations both before and after they were instituted and eventually worked out compromises with local societies; thus it is as difficult to establish a link between these events and postcolonial corruption as it would be to read them as proto-nationalism. Moreover, the high degree of corruption in independent India, where colonial administration was very much built upon pre-existing state systems, suggests that the introduction of European bureaucracy is not the decisive factor in explaining such a shared postcolonial outcome. My own claim, based in part on a ‘banality of virtue’ that produces no records, is that during the decades (many for India, relatively few for tropical Africa) when colonialism became routinized and seemed unchallenged, corruption was not only manageable for European rulers but also within the norms of oppression (the Hausa zalunci) that its indigenous victims

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(even in areas without previous histories of centralized rule and direct taxation) could also tolerate.97 One set of data that provides a potential explanation for a discontinuity between colonial and postcolonial levels of corruption derives from the salaries paid to educated indigenous officials in both regions, producing incomes that put them in a privileged position at least comparable to their European superiors and vastly superior to the wages of ordinary workers, as shown in a preliminary fashion by the table on the opposite page.98 It is not conclusively evident that the desire to retain such employment would reduce corruption as it apparently did with European colonial administrators – the expectations for redistribution of wealth to less advantaged kin and other dependents might actually increase with the perception of such privilege for Indian and African officials99 – but it is a possibility that needs to be kept in mind when considering the eventual stabilization of these subordinate colonial bureaucracies. At this point I can only offer a speculative explanation of why corruption should have increased to the point where it impeded state capacity in the postcolonial era. The key here seems to be the distinction between the developmental goals of the colonial state and those of its postcolonial (or even late-colonial) successors. In the first instance, a limited ruling apparatus lacking popular legitimacy was adequate for the modest tasks at hand and to its indigenous agents the risk of losing a well-paying position in the regime was high in ratio to the rewards available from large-scale theft of limited public resources. In the context of late- or postcolonial developmentalism and mass politics, material temptations and social expectations were far higher, thus exposing the defects of the inherited regimes. In Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s much-cited account of an African colonial clerk, the highly corrupt actions of the protagonist, Wangrin, are presented as a challenge to the authority of the French colonial regime and the local chiefs it supports. My own investigations into the career of the man upon whom Wangrin is based indicates that the major acts of corruption attributed to him by Hampâté Bâ are largely a literary invention.100 Can we then infer that the kind of politics suggested by Hampâté Bâ are likewise retrospective ideological inventions and that the actual relations between European and African agents of colonial regimes were largely cooperative, constructed around a common project of producing and maintaining a political system that could support itself and assure both sets of civil servants a comfortable income and a good deal of prestige? The evidence offered here is far too limited to answer such a question convincingly, but it at least suggests that we rethink the colonial-postcolonial trajectory of Africa and India, something I hope to pursue in my own continuing research.



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Table 12.1 Comparative Annual Earnings

British Officer India (1892–1893)*

Collector†

(in rupees)

18,000– 30,000

Indigenous Indigenous Officer Clerk Deputy Qanungo Collector

Urban Worker

3,000–10,800

15.4–19‡

1,200–3,000

Ratios: Collector/Deputy Collector: 6/1–3/1; Collector/Qanungo 15/1– 10/1; Clerk/Worker: 78/1–158/1 British West District (not available) Chief Clerk Africa (1930s)§ Commissioner £ 690–960 £ 208–396 £ 13–16.9 Ratios: District Commissioner/Clerk: 3.3/1–2.4/1; Chief Clerk/Urban Worker: 16/1–23/1 Notes: * Secretary of State for India, The India Office List for 1893 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1893), 51–54; Civil Lists of Bengal (1894), Bombay (1893), Madras (1893); Misra, Administrative History of India, 217. † By this time just under 5 percent of ICS officers (8 percent in Bengal) were Indians and they were paid the same salary as British occupants of the same rank, although they sometimes received fewer supplemental allowances; Tinker, ‘Structure of the British Imperial Heritage’; Bengal (1894) list. ‡ Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1889–90 to 1898–99, Thirty-Fourth Number (London: HMSO, 1900), 294–96. These numbers, taken from Calcutta and Madras are slightly skewed upward compared to the African ones because they include only skilled labour. § Gold Coast and Nigeria from: Gold Coast Blue Books (Accra: Government Printing Office, 1929–1933); P. Bennell, ‘The Historical Legacy of Colonial Civil Service Salary Structures in Anglophone Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (1982), 127–54; E. Frankema and M. van Waijenburg, ‘Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965’, CGEH Working Paper Series 24 (2011), Appendix table 1a, http://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989839 (accessed 24 December 2015); this table is not in the version of the paper published in the Journal of Economic History.

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Ralph A. Austen is an Emeritus Professor of African History at the University of Chicago, USA. His publications include  African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (1987), Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: the Duala and their Hinterland (1998) and Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (2010). His main current research project is a comparative study of proto-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history in tropical Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia.

NOTES   1. I want to thank Muzaffar Alam, the late Christopher Bayly, Hayden Bellenoit, Emily Lord Fransee, Sarath Pillai and Marlous van Waijenburg for their help with this project.   2. In 1857 there were just fewer than 900 senior European civil servants in India, while the uncovenanted ranks (above the village level) amounted to ‘5,928, of whom 3,082 were either Europeans or Anglo-Indians [mixed race] and the remaining 2,846 Indians’. See B.B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes: their Growth in Modern Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 316.   3. B.J. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); see also R. Johnson and A. Khalid (eds), Public Health in the British Empire: Intermediaries, Subordinates, and the Practice of Public Health, 1850–1960 (New York: Routledge, 2012).  4. R.A. Austen, ‘Interpreters Self-Interpreted: The Autobiographies of Two Colonial Clerks’, in B.J. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 159–79; R.A. Austen, ‘Colonialism from the Middle: Examining African Clerks as Historical Actors, and Discursive Subjects or Objects’, History in Africa 38 (2011), 21–33; for reasons to be discussed below Indian documents of this kind should, in principle, be more accessible but I know of no studies that have used them.   5. There are a few such studies for Nigeria and Tanzania, which also provide useful insights into the general conditions of African employment in colonial government; see citations in Austen, ‘Interpreters’, and also A. Eckert, ‘Cultural Commuters: African Employees in Late Colonial Tanzania’, in B.J. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn and R.L. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 253–55; but in the case of India I have not found anything yet.   6. See the discussion of Joyce Cary’s ‘Mr. Johnson’ and its Indian film adaptation, ‘Massey Sahib’, in Austen, ‘Colonialism from the Middle’; on the historical validity of the equally canonical A.H. Bâ, L’étrange destin de Wangrin ou, Les roueries d’un interprète africaine (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973), see R.A.



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Austen, ‘Finding the Historical Wangrin or the Banality of Virtue’, Journal of West African History 1 (2015), 1–22.   7. B. Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); J. Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c. 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); G. Blundo and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the State: Citizens and Public Officials in Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2006), 37–47.   8. In a larger comparative study of ‘the colonial state’ I will give equal attention to the administration of law.   9. I do not have space here for an extensive critique of such comparisons but in one of the most serious efforts in this direction, based upon excellent analysis of the princely states, the author admits that ‘“Indirect Rule” as an explicit term was not current before the twentieth century, even in India, where the practice developed’ and concludes with rather modest claims for the relevance of these cases to the very explicit versions of indirect rule in Africa: M.H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4, 468–74. See below for more detail on this issue. 10. I am inspired here to carry further a recent trend among economic historians of Africa to look more closely at taxation and see its variations as based on endogenous i.e. local conditions rather than the policy choices of differing colonial regimes; see E. Frankema and M. van Waijenburg, ‘Metropolitan Blueprints of Colonial Taxation? Comparative Fiscal Development in British and French Africa, 1880–1940’, Journal of African History 55 (2014), 371–400. 11. In what follows I will sometimes use ‘Mughals’ as shorthand for early modern precolonial regimes even in areas of the sub-continent never included in this empire. 12. For a classic example of this approach, see D.A. Washbrook, ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988), 57–96. 13. H. Bellenoit, ‘Paper, Pens and Power between Empires in North India, 1750– 1850’, South Asian History and Culture 3 (2012), 351; Raman appears to have coined the second term in her book title (Document Raj, 2). 14. I. Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 154–68, 240–54, 331–38. 15. J.F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 69–76, 185–90; for scholarly controversy around this self-sufficiency, see idem, ‘Mughal State Finance and the Premodern World Economy’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(2) (1981), 285–308 and K. Leonard, ‘Indigenous Banking Firms in Mughal India: A Reply’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(2) (1981), 309–13. In The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c. 1595: A Statistical Study (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 127–29, 200–201, S. Moosvi estimates that land taxes accounted for about 75 percent of Mughal state revenue. See also I.G. Khan, ‘Revenue, Agriculture and Warfare in North

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India: Technical Knowledge and the Post-Mughal Elites, from the Mid 18th to Early 19th Century’ (dissertation, SOAS, London, 1990). 16. R. Law, ‘Slaves, Trade, and Taxes: the Material Basis of Political Power in Precolonial West Africa’, Research in Economic Anthropology 1 (1978), 37–52; R.A. Austen, ‘Imperial Reach versus Institutional Grasp: Superstates of the West and Central African Sudan in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009), 1–32. 17. Such terms have occasionally used by both colonial era and contemporary scholars, e.g. C.L. Tupper, Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and Its Indian Feudatories (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1893); W. Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India (London: Macmillan, 1894); S.H. Rudolph, L.I. Rudolph and M. Singh, ‘A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System’, Journal of Asian Studies 34(3) (1975), 717–53. 18. Some of these states did undergo major changes influenced by the neighbouring territories of British India, but these seem to have been carried out more or less voluntarily and always via Indian rather than British bureaucrats; see Fisher, Indirect Rule and various chapters in R. Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes, and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). 19. D. Kumar, ‘The Fiscal System’, in idem and M. Desai (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2, 916–30. 20. Raman, Document Raj; Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State; Bellenoit, ‘Paper, Pens and Power’; idem, ‘Between Qanungos and Clerks: the Cultural and Service Worlds of Hindustan’s Pensmen, c. 1750–1850’, Modern Asian Studies 48 (2014), 872–910. 21. I am using the term zamindar somewhat loosely (as it often was in Raj colonial discourse) to denote a certain combination of landholding status and revenue authority although outside Bengal other titles were often employed (see below on Awadh taluqdars). 22. Richards, Mughal Empire, 79–93, 291–96. 23. R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963); R. Ray, Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c. 1760–1850 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979). 24. On the debates around these policies, see S.C. Gupta, ‘Retreat from Permanent Settlement and Shift Towards New Land Policy’, in B. Stein (ed.), The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770–1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65–83. 25. T.R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); B.N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56–59. 26. R.E. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848; A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); D.H.A. Kolff,



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Grass in their Mouths: the Upper Doab of India under the Company’s Magna Charta, 1793–1830 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 27. Kolff, Grass in their Mouths, 44–68; Frykenberg, Guntur District, 51–58, 76–85, 241–44; S. Guha, ‘Society and Economy in the Deccan, 1815–1850’, in B. Stein (ed.), The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770-1900 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 187–214. 28. A.K. Ghosal, Civil Service in India under the Company (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1944), 23–25. 29. C.A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 78. 30. T.H. Beaglehole, Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras, 1792–1818: The Origins of the Munro System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 57–58. 31. B.B. Misra, The Administrative History of India, 1834–1947: General Administration (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 201–26. 32. In South India such officials were known as kulkarni, kanakkuppillai, kanakkan or karanam. 33. A major effort to reform patwaris was made during the initiation of the mhalwari revenue regime in the 1830s and some 2,500 of them were replaced in the North-Western Provinces but with no lasting effect. See P. Penner, The Patronage Bureaucracy in North India: the Robert M. Bird and James Thomason School, 1820–1870 (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986), 24, 39; on the more problematic police, a topic I will address at greater length elsewhere in relation to ‘the rule of law’, see P.J. Griffiths, To Guard my People: The History of the Indian Police (London: Benn, 1971); D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); A.A. Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 103–11. 34. W. Gould, Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s (Milton Park: Routledge, 2011), 42–47. 35. D. Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1. 36. E. Stokes, The Peasant Armed: the Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); D. Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 213–15. Hardiman even notes that in Gujarat, then under the same British regime as the Deccan, there was no organized uprising in 1875, due to the fact that money-lenders, like patwaris, were all local. 37. R.A. Austen, ‘Indirect Rule’, in W.A. Darity, Jr. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1986), vol. 3, 617–18; J.W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in J.M. Brown and W.R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vol. 4, 237–43. 38. B. Porter, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895– 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1968), 313–36; for the French equivalent, G. Spittler,

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Verwaltung in einem afrikanischen Bauernstaat: das koloniale Französisch-Westafrika (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1981). 39. F.D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1922), 203. 40. Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Metropolitan Blueprints’, 385–87 (this data also shows an inverse relationship between dependence upon direct taxation and general levels of government revenue, so if tropical Africa were to be treated as a single colonial territory, the percentage would be even lower). 41. M. van Waijenburg, ‘Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor’, African Economic History Working Paper 20, 2015: https://www.aehnetwork.org/working-papers/financing-the-africancolonial-state-the-revenue-imperative-and-forced-labour/; she estimates that for long periods (especially in the earlier decades), this was the principal source of particularly French colonial revenue. 42. T.O. Ranger, ‘African Reactions to the Imposition of Colonial Rule in East and Central Africa’, in L.H. Gann and P. Duignan (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 1, 293–324. 43. R. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 98–111. 44. S. Doyle, Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro: Population & Environment in Western Uganda 1860–1955 (London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 2006), 57–58. 45. Reid, Political Power, 160–73; H.E. Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 59–112. 46. Nonetheless, the term is often invoked in describing the system, e.g. R.C. Pratt, ‘The Politics of Indirect Rule in Uganda’, in D.A. Low and R.C. Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 1900–1955: Two Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 161–316. 47. H.W. West, Land Policy in Buganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 11–30. 48. Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Metropolitan Blueprints’, 386. These numbers are only for 1925; in time, I intend to carry out my own research on this issue. 49. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 154–55, 169–77. 50. Pratt, ‘Politics’, 223–27. 51. A.D. Roberts, ‘The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, Journal of African History 3 (1962), 435–50; a similar phenomenon occurred in the ‘Middle Belt’ of Northern Nigeria, where the British used Muslims from the neighbouring Sokoto caliphate to promulgate ‘indirect rule’; see M.E. Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). 52. G. Austin, Labour, Land, and Capital in Ghana: from Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 56–60.



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53. Unless otherwise indicated, all references in this section are to I. Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: the Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 64–71, 414–41. 54. Unless indicated otherwise, what follows comes from Austin, Labour, Land and Capital, especially 39, 103–11, 212–17, 239–40. 55. Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Metropolitan Blueprints’, 390–92, show that direct government labour demands in British West Africa were generally far lower than in British East Africa or French territories. 56. W. Tordoff, Ashanti under the Prempehs, 1888–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 256–60, 269–70. 57. J. Simensen, ‘Jurisdiction as Politics: The Gold Coast during the Colonial Period’, in W.J. Mommsen and J.A. de Moor (eds), European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 257–77. 58. T. Garba, ‘Taxation in some Hausa Emirates, c. 1860–1939’ (dissertation, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, 1986); M.G. Smith, Government in Kano, 1350–1950 (Boulder: Westview, 1997), 308–14; S. Pierce, Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 174–88. 59. Lugard, the founder of the system but not the architect of its details, had been born and served in India but claimed to remember very little about the resident system there; C. Newbury, Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-Rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109; on actual Indian revenue models among Lugard’s successors, see Garba, ‘Taxation’, 241–42. 60. S. Pierce, ‘Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006), 890– 92. On parallel, and largely tolerated, corruption in another British territory, see S.C. Chipungu, ‘Accumulation from within: the Boma Class and the Native Treasury in Colonial Zambia’, in idem (ed.), Guardians in their Time: Experiences of Zambians under Colonial Rule, 1890–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 74–96. 61. Cited frequently as a model in a major African case study, P. Afeadie, Brokering Colonial Rule: Political Agents in Northern Nigeria, 1886–1914 (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008); the term dubash (Hindi: ‘two heads’) more explicitly connotes ‘interpreter’ but in the British usage referred only to commercial agents or household servants; see entries in H. Yule and A.C. Burnell, HobsonJobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (London: J. Murray, 1903). 62. Bellenoit, ‘Paper, Pens and Power’, 356. 63. C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69– 78, 144–49; B. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, in idem (ed.), Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 16–25; S.K. Das,

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Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William (New Delhi: Orion Publications, 1978). 64. Austen, ‘Interpreters’ (mainly on French West Africa). 65. C. Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 51–52; D. Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), 79–96; Afeadie, Brokering Colonial Rule. 66. Misra, Administrative History, 201–31; Fisher, Indirect Rule, 331–64, provides a more analytic account of this shift, although within the more limited residency bureaucracy of the princely states. 67. ‘“Baboo” in Bengal and elsewhere, among Anglo-Indians, it is often used with a slight savour of disparagement, as characterizing a superficially cultivated, but too often effeminate, Bengali. And from the extensive employment of the class, to which the term was applied as a title, in the capacity of clerks in English offices, the word has come often to signify “a native clerk who writes English”’; Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson. For a discussion from the Indian perspective, see A. Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 43, 52, 101–08, 161–62. 68. H. Tinker, ‘Structure of the British Imperial Heritage’, in R.J.D. Braibanti (ed.), Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966), 29–30, 54–64. 69. V. Bickford-Smith, ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–1920’, in S. Hawkins and P.D. Morgan (eds), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194–227. 70. Lugard, Dual Mandate, 426; after retiring from administration, Lugard became an influential figure in formulating British colonial education policy; see M. Perham, Lugard: The Life of Frederick Dealtry Lugard, later Lord Lugard of Abinger, (London: Collins, 1960), vol. 2, 657–62. 71. P. Gifford and T.G. Weiskel, ‘African Education in a Colonial Context: French and British Style’, in P. Gifford and W.R. Louis (eds), France and Britain in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 663–712. 72. There were a handful of institutions that went beyond this level in both British and French Africa, but up to the 1940s most of their graduates were trained to become senior clerks (French commis) or teachers and technical paraprofessionals in various service departments; on the most famous of these, the Ponty School in French West Africa, see J.-H. Jézéquel, ‘Histoire de bancs, parcours d’élèves’, Cahiers d’études africaines 169–170 (2003), 409–33; idem, ‘Les mangeurs de craies: sociohistoire d’une catégorie lettrée en Afrique de l’Ouest. Les diplômés de l’école normale William-Ponty (c. 1900–c. 1960)’, 2 vols. (dissertation, EHESS, Paris, 2002). Parents and students aspiring to a more liberal education could get around these restrictions to some degree, especially in British Africa, but they generally sought career paths outside the colonial



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administration; on secondary school student occupational aspirations (in the 1960s), see R. Clignet and P. Foster, The Fortunate Few: A Study of Secondary Schools and Students in the Ivory Coast (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 127–63. 73. On this training, see Austen, ‘Colonialism from the Middle’; Chipungu, ‘Accumulation from within’, 53; N.S.C. Jones, ‘Native Treasuries in Northern Rhodesia’, Rhodes Livingstone Institute Journal 2 (1944), 40–48. 74. Until recently little had been written about such clerks but we now have Bellenoit, ‘Between Qanungos and Clerks’ and his new book (not yet seen by me), idem, The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 (London: Routledge, 2017). 75. The munshi valuing of literary over financial skill is illustrated in the analysis of one of their autobiographies: ‘nowhere in his account of his education does he even speak of it [accounting/siyaq], as if such banal details were beneath mention’. M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, ‘The Making of a Munshi’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2004), 71. 76. Raman, Document Raj, 67; Yang, Limited Raj, 97–103; Kolff, Grass in their Mouths, 61–65. 77. P. Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 78. Nigerian and Tanganyikan clerks did undertake organized protests and gained some access to the lower ranks of European administration, although always serving in the central secretariat rather than the field: M. Mason, ‘The History of Mr. Johnson: Progress and Protest in Northern Nigeria, 1900–1921’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 27 (1993), 196–217; R. Okonkwo, ‘The Nigeria Civil Service Union, 1919–1922’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993), 609–22; J. Iliffe, ‘The Spokesman: Martin Kayamba’, in idem (ed.) Modern Tanzanians (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973), 82–84. 79. J.H. Jézéquel, ‘Les enseignants comme élite politique en AOF (1930–1945)’, Cahiers d’études Africaines 178 (2005), 519–43; idem, Les mangeurs de craies. 80. On British decisions about language policy in Northern Nigeria, see J.E. Philips, Spurious Arabic: Hausa and Colonial Nigeria (Madison, WI: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000), 31–32. 81. Mason, ‘History of Mr. Johnson’; the degree to which records were kept in the vernacular by various British African ‘native authorities’ is not well documented even in my own writings on indirect rule in northwest Tanzania, although I can testify that Kiswahili was used for this purpose there, as also seems to have been the case with Luganda in Buganda; see also Pratt, ‘Politics’, 213–18; L. Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories, (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1979 [1950]), vol. 1, 12. More generally (but with little documentation): A.A. Mazrui and A.M. Mazrui, The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience (Oxford: J. Currey, 1998), 142–43. 82. It must be noted that the major Indian vernaculars had developed literary traditions from between 1000 and 1500 ce but they were still not generally

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used for higher-level administration; S. Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 83. Bellenoit, ‘Paper, Pens and Power’, 352–54 (on Bengal and neighbouring regions); S. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education in the United Provinces of Agra & Oudh (1840–1926) (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1930), 12–66; G.W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Panjab Since Annexation and in 1882 ([Patiala]: Languages Dept., Panjab, 1971 [1882]), 10–44, 143; Raman, Document Raj, 106–21 (on South Indian ‘veranda schools’). 84. K. Shahidullah, Patshalas into Schools: the Development of Indigenous Elementary Education in Bengal, 1854–1905 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1987); idem, ‘The Purpose and Impact of Government Policy on Pathshala Gurumohashys in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, in M. Hasan (ed.), Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1998), 119–34; S. Nurullah and J.P. Naik, A History of Education in India (during the British Period) (Bombay: Macmillan, 1951), 321–73. 85. G. Riello (ed.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 15001850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 86. According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent African Competitiveness Report, ‘despite 15 years of strong growth, Africa’s overall competitiveness has remained stagnant’; http://reports.weforum.org/africa-competitivenessreport-2015/overview/ (accessed 15 December 2015). 87. Citation from a postcolonial Pakistan recruiting pamphlet in A. Kirk-Greene, Britain’s Imperial Administrators, 1858–1966 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 87. 88. Arguments can also be made for the greater development in colonial India of ‘a vision of law that was at once enforced by, yet separate from, the state’; see J.K. Ocko and D. Gilmartin, ‘State, Sovereignty, and the People: A Comparison of the “Rule of Law” in China and India’, Journal of Asian Studies 68 (2009), 72. But this complicated issue cannot be pursued here. 89. Raman, Document Raj; Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State. 90. Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, 10. 91. H. Brunschwig, Noirs et blancs dans l’Afrique noire française, ou, comment le colonisé devient colonisateur, 1870-1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 21–24, 105–23. Brunschwig and others also rely too much on a novel by a former indigenous clerk who appears to have invented or grossly exaggerated a good deal of the chicanery it describes; see Austen, ‘Finding the Historical Wangrin’. 92. W. Gould, ‘“The Dual State: The Unruly Subordinate”, Caste, Community and Civil Service Recruitment in North India, 1930–1955’, Journal of Historical Sociology 20(1-2) (2007), 13–43; R.L. Tignor, ‘Political Corruption in Nigeria before Independence’, Journal of Modern African Studies 31(2) (1993), 175–202. 93. J. Searing, ‘Accommodation and Resistance: Muslim Leaders and Politicians in Colonial Senegal, 1890–1934’ (dissertation, Princeton University, Princeton, 1985), 12, 306–24 and 549–57.



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94. J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, ‘État, bureaucratie et gouvernance en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone: Un diagnostic empirique, une perspective historique’, Politique africaine 96(4) (2004), 139–62. 95. R.L. Tignor, ‘Colonial Chiefs in Chiefless Societies’, Journal of Modern African Studies 9(3) (1971), 339–59. 96. A.E. Afigbo, ‘The Native Revenue Ordinance in the Eastern Provinces; the Adventures of a Colonial Legislation’, in B.I. Obichere (ed.), Studies in Southern Nigerian History (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 49–63; J.A. Atanda, ‘The Ìs.éyìnÒkèihò Rising of 1916: An Example of Socio-Political Conflict in Colonial Nigeria’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 4(4) (1969), 497–514; H.A. Gailey, Lugard and the Abe. okuta Uprising: the Demise of E. gba Independence (London: Frank Cass, 1982); A.E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891-1929 (London: Longman, 1972). 97. For accounts of other bureaucracies that come to such conclusions, see B.W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); M. Herzfeld, ‘When Being Good Requires an Excuse: Ethical Reversals and Cultural Intimacy’, paper presented at Conference ‘Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm: The Social Construction of Illegality’, Tervuren, Belgium, 2012. 98. For similar statistics, see Austen, ‘Finding the Historical Wangrin’, 14; Brunschwig, Noirs et blancs, 109–15. 99. J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, ‘A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?’, Journal of Modern African Studies 37 (1999), 25–52 (more convincing than his previously cited historical article); see the complaints of economic pressures (possibly during the late colonial era) in J. Kuoh Moukouri, Doigts noirs: ‘Je fus ÉcrivainInterprète au Cameroun’ (Montréal: les éditions à la page, 1963), 52–62. 100. Austen, ‘Finding the Historical Wangrin’.

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Ocko, J.K. and D. Gilmartin. ‘State, Sovereignty, and the People: A Comparison of the “Rule of Law” in China and India’, Journal of Asian Studies 68 (2009), 55–100. Okonkwo, R. ‘The Nigeria Civil Service Union, 1919–1922’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993), 609–22. Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. ‘A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa?’, Journal of Modern African Studies 37 (1999), 25–52. ———. ‘État, bureaucratie et gouvernance en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone: Un diagnostic empirique, une perspective historique’, Politique africaine 96(4) (2004), 139–62. Penner, P. The Patronage Bureaucracy in North India: The Robert M. Bird and James Thomason School, 1820–1870. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986. Perham, M. Lugard: The Life of Frederick Dealtry Lugard, later Lord Lugard of Abinger. London: Collins, 1960. Philips, J.E. Spurious Arabic: Hausa and Colonial Nigeria. Madison, WI: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000. Pierce, S. Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. ———. ‘Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006), 887–914. Pollock, S. (ed.). Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Porter, B. Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa 1895–1914. London: Macmillan, 1968. Pratt, R.C. ‘The Politics of Indirect Rule in Uganda’, in D.A. Low and R.C. Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 1900–1955: Two Studies. London: Oxford University Press, 1960, 161–316. Raman, B. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ramusack, B.N. The Indian Princes and their States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ranger, T.O. ‘African Reactions to the Imposition of Colonial Rule in East and Central Africa’, in L.H. Gann and P. Duignan (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 1870– 1960, 5 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, vol. 1, 293–324. Ray, R. Change in Bengal Agrarian Society, c. 1760–1850. New Delhi: Manohar, 1979. Reed, B.W. Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Reid, R. Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda. Oxford: James Currey, 2002. Richards, J.F. ‘Mughal State Finance and the Premodern World Economy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(2) (1981), 285–308. ———. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Riello, G. (ed.). How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500– 1850. Leiden: Brill, 2009.



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Roberts, A.D. ‘The Sub-Imperialism of the Baganda’, Journal of African History 3 (1962), 435–50. Robinson, D. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000. Rudolph, S.H., L.I. Rudolph and M. Singh. ‘A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System’, Journal of Asian Studies 34(3) (1975), 717–53. Saha, J. Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c. 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Sartori, A. Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Searing, J. ‘Accommodation and Resistance: Muslim Leaders and Politicians in Colonial Senegal, 1890–1934’, dissertation. Princeton: Princeton University, 1985. Secretary of State for India. The India Office List for 1893. London: Harrison and Sons, 1893. Shahidullah, K. Patshalas into Schools: The Development of Indigenous Elementary Education in Bengal, 1854–1905. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1987. ———. ‘The Purpose and Impact of Government Policy on Pathshala Gurumohashys in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, in M. Hasan (ed.), Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational Institutions in India. New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1998, 119–34. Simensen, J. ‘Jurisdiction as Politics: The Gold Coast during the Colonial Period’, in W.J. Mommsen and J.A. de Moor (eds), European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia. Oxford: Berg, 1992, 257–77. Smith, M.G. Government in Kano, 1350–1950. Boulder: Westview, 1997. Spittler, G. Verwaltung in einem afrikanischen Bauernstaat: das koloniale Französisch-Westafrika. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1981. Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1889–90 to 1898–99, Thirty-Fourth Number. London: HMSO, 1900. Stokes, E. The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, ed. C.A. Bayly. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.Tignor, R.L. ‘Colonial Chiefs in Chiefless Societies’, Journal of Modern African Studies 9(3) (1971), 339–59. ———. ‘Political Corruption in Nigeria before Independence’, Journal of Modern African Studies 31(2) (1993), 175–202. Tinker, H. ‘Structure of the British Imperial Heritage’, in R.J.D. Braibanti (ed.), Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition. Durham: Duke University Press, 1966, 23–86. Tordoff, W. Ashanti under the Prempehs, 1888–1935. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Tupper, C.L. Our Indian Protectorate: An Introduction to the Study of the Relations between the British Government and Its Indian Feudatories. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1893. Waijenburg, M. van. ‘Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor’, African Economic History Working

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Paper 20, 2015: https://www.aehnetwork.org/working-papers/financingthe-african-colonial-state-the-revenue-imperative-and-forced-labour/ Washbrook, D.A. ‘Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720–1860’, Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988), 57–96. West, H.W. Land Policy in Buganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Wilks, I. Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Yang, A.A. The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793– 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Yule, H. and A.C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. London: J. Murray, 1903.

Chapter 13

Indigenous Cooperation Foundation of Colonial Empires or New Historical Myth? Wolfgang Reinhard

} Historical studies often solve certain problems, but inevitably also raise new ones. Some of the issues addressed in the course of this volume shall be discussed here again because they require further clarification. This is particularly true for topics such as gender, religion and education.1 They are essential if we assume that colonial empires are always based upon indigenous cooperation. Therefore, I shall try to elaborate on some of these issues. By using the more neutral or benevolent concept of cooperation instead of Ronald Robinson’s rather negative original term ‘collaboration’, we have already opened up a new, creative perspective on these topics. The very concept of empire, be it colonial or not, is based on the need for indigenous cooperation. The famous sixteenth-century parliamentary declaration that England is an empire did not refer to extra-European possessions but was just the designation of a sovereign monarchy, equivalent to Reich in German. An empire in this original sense did not have to be very large. Sixteenth-century England was still a small country. This kind of polity was, and is, not a fully centralized modern state with its, at least in theory, ethnically homogeneous population and unlimited capacity for control and resource mobilization. In contrast, an empire is a loosely structured, decentralized political construct consisting of territories with different legal statuses and populations that do not belong to the dominating nation. Quite often, they do not even speak the same language. From the centre towards the periphery of an empire, political control typically 363

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decreases more or less in concentric circles, sometimes changing gradually into mere hegemony without exact territorial borderlines. Because the central authority cannot afford a large administrative apparatus, the local elites inevitably enjoy some degree of autonomy. Therefore, cooperative self-administration is the necessary foundation of every empire. Worldwide and throughout history, this type of empire has always been typical of larger polities. Of course, one might call this a state, but certainly not a modern state. The modern nation state emerged gradually and exclusively in Europe, reaching final perfection only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 At that time, there was no empire anywhere in the world that could compete with it. Even in the sixteenth century, Castilian state building was advanced enough to make Spain much stronger than the Inca and Aztec polities. Therefore, European powers could rather easily build additional empires around their national core states. Most significantly, one did not speak of ‘colonies’ before the eighteenth century. As Spain was still called Las Españas, the Castilian empire was known as Las Indias consisting of several kingdoms under viceroys similar to Naples or Sicily. The British Empire in its heyday was an incoherent collection of territories answering to different ministries of the government. Even under the rule of centralized France, colonial proconsuls enjoyed remarkable independence. Only Russia tried – quite successfully – to integrate colonies into the nation state, because in contrast to overseas empires Russian conquests were territorially contiguous. Accordingly, almost everywhere, colonial powers employed traditional pre-modern systems of administration based upon cooperation with local elites that were controlled by comparatively few metropolitan delegates. Empires were created for the profit of the colonial power. Where this was not the case, they were supposed to at least maintain themselves at no expense to the metropolitan taxpayer. The famous indirect rule was neither an exclusively British practice nor was it a result of British political wisdom, but rather of British economizing. To some extent, India was an exception with an established English and Indian bureaucracy, the Indian Civil Service and the Provincial Civil Service. But then, India was an extremely profitable jewel of the English crown. Perhaps, cooperation and non-cooperation can be calibrated by degrees. This might become especially fruitful if applied to particular groups and constellations. Such an attempt has been made in the context of an alternative model of empire building originating from research in Portuguese economic history. From this perspective, empire-building is the result not of national political activities but of self-organizing cooperative networks originating from private, mostly economic or social interest. However, in



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the long run such networks have no choice but to cooperate with political authorities at home or in the overseas countries where they operate. This new approach is an overdue correction of the traditional bias of historical research, which has been inclined to attribute the expansion of Europe to the policies of five to seven national states. In reality, the early Portuguese expansion in Africa and India resulted from a complicated interaction of private and crown interests, with Prince Henry and the Crown acting as commercial entrepreneurs. The Spanish exploration and conquest of America was due to private initiative and capital. When the Spanish crown took over, some conquistadores felt double-crossed, for good reason.3 In the Netherlands and England, self-organization of private networks with some assistance by the state resulted in the creation of powerful chartered companies. Although state control gradually increased, such a company ran British India until 1858. This model was re-employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – at least in the case of Rhodesia, with some success. German and British politicians tried to use this system to make those people pay for the colonial enterprise who started it in the first place.4 After all, even by the late nineteenth century men on the spot still masterminded imperial expansion.5 Governments often just reacted to political crises that these people had provoked. In such situations, a concern for national prestige necessitated government action to help fellow countrymen out of trouble. Of course, colonial empire-building is based first of all on cooperation between Europeans. However, in many cases cooperation with indigenous people plays an important part, too. American and African kings and chiefs as well as South and Southeast Asian princes were forced or lured into cooperation. Sometimes an unfriendly indigenous ruler was replaced by another one, who was willing to cooperate on the terms of the European intruders. Early modern European traders in Asia created large networks of business partners that provided them with goods for the European market, especially cotton textiles from India and coffee from Java. Less well known but even larger were the intra-Asian trade networks which European businessmen joined for extra profit – the so-called ‘country trade’.6 Competition between the trade and network of European companies and the private businesses and trading networks of their employees was quite a common phenomenon. Quite a few of these traders made enormous fortunes through this kind of corruption. For example, the original endowment of Yale University originated from such a fortune.7 Some British families established worldwide networks between North America, the Caribbean, Africa and India, which also included indigenous partners and servants, including women.8

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The role of women in this context is important indeed and needs further examination.9 At first glance, the expansion of Europe in general and empire building in particular appears to have been a male business – just consider the large amount of violence involved. Sexual violence against women was all too often part of that. But women were not always just victims. To a remarkable extent, they were also active agents of cooperation. There were sexual partnerships besides rape, sometimes based upon ritual exchanges of women to provide powerful males with female companions. A travelling French Governor-General of West Africa who had women provided for himself and his retinue every night is probably an excessive case, but only by European standards.10 Sometimes this developed into a more stable relationship where a woman like Cortes’s lover Malinche might wield considerable influence.11 Even marriage was a possibility, not only between conquistadores and Inca Princesses but also between simple German farmers and equally simple Khoikhoi women of Namibia. However, formal and informal standards were not in favour of such unions. Besides cases of bigamy with two or more local wives, some conquistadores like Cortes or Alvarado left their Amerindian partner for a Spanish marriage which provided better social standing.12 In addition, racial prejudice was present right from the beginning. Albuquerque wanted his single Portuguese men to marry Indian women, but not the dark-skinned ones from South India.13 In 1905 the German administration of SouthwestAfrica prohibited mixed marriages; in 1908 they were even annulled.14 But any sexual partnership was always an affair between a European man and an indigenous woman, almost never the other way around, and this not only for the obvious reason that many more European men than women lived in the overseas empires. Yet female cooperation was not limited to sexual partnership. Women could also act as business partners, and some of them were very successful slave traders.15 In addition, they sometimes participated in political cooperation. We know of quite a few female chiefs in the service of colonial governments.16 Of course, sexual partnership produced mixed offspring, and perhaps we should also consider this a facet of creative cooperative activity. Especially in Latin America, where a comparatively large number of single European men met a numerous indigenous population, mestizos became an important group in several countries.17 The so-called Eurasians of South and Southeast Asia must not be forgotten either. People of mixed origin could act as natural go-betweens and cultural brokers.18 Quite a few of them became important cooperators indeed.



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In addition, another kind of gendered cooperation originated in the nineteenth und twentieth centuries: the contact of indigenous people with European women who at that time started to play a more important role in the European expansion. Female protestant missionaries and catholic nuns19 worked as religious instructors and teachers, teaching not only indigenous girls and women. European women also participated in growing numbers in the colonial health and education services. And many male and female ‘natives’ worked as servants in colonial households. This was a necessary kind of cooperation because colonial lords and ladies could never do without indigenous servants.20 The concept of ‘network’ can provide us with quite a useful social theory, despite the cover-all character it has assumed since the emergence of the World Wide Web. Yet there is also an elaborate mathematical network theory, which is rarely applied to historical research. It can, on the one hand, produce useful information on the status (centrality) of a person (node) in a network of social relations.21 On the other hand, network theory does not explain how self-organization creates institutionalized cooperation. This requires a different vocabulary. Such institutions are often said to emerge, implying their origins cannot be explained at all or at least not yet. Nevertheless, a closer look at cooperating indigenous people should produce some idea of how cooperation worked. In terms of power relations, we must consider these people as elites because colonial powers had no choice but either to cooperate with established power holders or to create their own cooperators or to combine both methods. From the point of view of the indigenous cooperators, any activity in the service of the new lords therefore provided them with a kind of elite status. However, once again, more questions arise than can be answered. Did cooperation necessarily entail Europeanization? To what extent were precolonial traditions of administration and literacy – if literacy existed at all – kept alive and applied to the service of colonial powers? Was the respective indigenous culture, especially the traditional political culture, compatible with the new administration? Much of the political and legal vocabulary of Europe was untranslatable because no corresponding notions existed in many indigenous languages. Private property, rule of law, sovereignty and even ‘the state’ were unknown to other peoples. They could never imagine that Europeans might go as far as to sue their own princes in court. In short, colonial rulers had to face the same problem as Christian missionaries: how to translate the vocabulary and habits of their own culture into those of another world. In practice, cooperative colonial rule often worked on the basis of a pragmatic mixture of political cultures.22 Most probably, colonial intrusion

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and colonial rule were not radically new experiences for the American, Asian and African subjects of the Europeans, although some components of the new systems were originally unknown to them. Therefore, both sides were able to arrive at a working arrangement, which, was, however, sometimes based upon some mutual misunderstanding, but worked very well nonetheless, perhaps because the very misunderstanding made cooperation easier. On the other hand, Europeans sometimes slid into an indigenous role, whether this was deliberately based upon a political calculation or inadvertent. The subjects of a European administrator might treat him as their new chief and he himself might deliberately or subconsciously accept certain attributes of that role.23 At the same time, the indigenous chief – whatever he was called – was the essential cooperator of all colonial empires,24 beginning with Mexican nobles and Peruvian curacas in the sixteenth century down to the African ‘chefs’ and ‘chiefs’ of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. He or sometimes she was appointed or at least confirmed by the colonial power. Sometimes the colonial power simply accepted an established traditional power holder such as the Indian princes or the emirs of northern Nigeria. Sometimes they created the position of chief ex nihilo as in the case of African acephalous societies. Such chiefs remained totally dependent on the authority of the imperial power. In that sense, their role did not differ much from that of a lower level administrator. However, most chiefs probably possessed a mix of traditional and dependent authority and developed a self-confident mode of behaviour in both worlds. Their focus of identity was at least compatible with colonial rule, if not even created by it. In the British and French empires, a kind of transcultural Britishness or Frenchness developed. Some francophone Africans became députés, cabinet ministers and, as in one prominent case, even a member of the Académie française,25 whereas in the British case, the claim of assimilated Africans to be treated as British subjects on the same footing as native Britons was regularly frustrated. Here, implicit racial prejudice served to protect national privilege. The difference between the nation state as core and the empire as periphery was never bridged. All cooperators were to some extent Europeanized. Members of new elites were even trained by European-style educational systems, yet not completely so. Colonial education was designed to produce qualified cooperators and therefore, with some exceptions, remained limited to more technical issues. Real elites in the metropolitan sense were in those days still qualified in the humanities, not in science or engineering. But at least indigenous elites as a rule refused to accept education in the vernacular but insisted on learning in the language of power. In America, Africa and



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to some extent even in Asia, literacy – in some social contexts – is still considered an English, French, Portuguese or Spanish literacy. The existence of traditional scripts as in India does not change this fact; it simply offers a second alternative literacy, which does not exist in other former colonies. Education in the vernacular was often the project of missionaries who wanted to penetrate indigenous culture and spread their gospel to everyone. Sometimes this was combined with the good but somehow romantic intention of protecting the indigenous culture from the corrupting influence of the Western world and modernity. Deliberately or not, this also served to maintain the gap between colonial subjects and their rulers. In addition, missions provided technical and agricultural training in the service of the colonial economy. But indigenous people preferred missions which offered education in the language of the colonial power. This qualified them even better as cooperators and finally enabled them to interact with their lords on the same level. Many leaders of African independence movements were former students of missionary schools. Was indigenous conversion therefore just an entrance ticket to the modern world of the colonial powers, which means that it was fake from the Christian perspective? Conversion to Christianity certainly offered new chances in life, but such chances were seen as elements of an overall better life in the service of a stronger god. Conversion was the result of attraction through the soft power of an apparently superior culture26 but always with the hard power of colonial rule in the background and the necessity to cooperate with it. Conversion was comparatively easy because most indigenous religions were not religions in the Western sense. They often lacked a clearly defined system of beliefs and an efficient ecclesiastical organization, notwithstanding the existence of some kind of priesthood. It is very important to note that only Muslims, with their rigid orthodox beliefs, were immune to missionary activity.27 Accordingly, conversion in the opposite direction – Westerners becoming Muslims or adherents of some other non-Christian religion – is mostly a postcolonial phenomenon, because religious alternatives were originally not very attractive for them. But cooperation of Westerners with non-western empires in the fields of technology and practical knowledge was no exception at all. Portuguese mercenaries, especially gunners, in Siam and Burma,28 Jesuit scientists, technicians and artists at the imperial court of China, and French military instructors of Indian princes were just the predecessors of the numerous but carefully selected Europeans and Americans who helped modernize the Empire of Japan after 1868.29 Sometimes Europeans became ‘Mimic Men’ who adopted an indigenous role, such as certain representatives of the East India Company at the court

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of Hyderabad or Jesuits who behaved like members of the Chinese learned elite. But these people were not subjects of these respective empires. All empires are based upon cooperation with local elites, colonial empires therefore upon cooperation with indigenous elites. Colonial powers even strengthened the position of traditional power holders in order to stabilize the rule they exercised through them. Elective positions became permanent and hereditary, traditional procedures of control and replacement were abolished, the assent of the ruled or of their elders was no longer necessary to maintain authority. The backing by the colonial power was sufficient. Quite often indigenous cooperators were used to execute the dirty jobs of government such as flogging, torturing and killing. As a side effect, this separated them from their people and made them even more dependent on their foreign lords. At the same time, their share of the profits from power increased. Some managed to expand their own rule on the basis of a position that was given to them by the colonial administration.30 After a careful analysis of Cooperation and Empire, we can conclude that colonialism was a system of rule based upon an alliance of exploitation between colonial powers and indigenous elites at the expense of the common colonial subjects. This conclusion is obvious and convincing but it appears to be less than politically correct, resembling almost a new apology of colonialism. Until about 1945, few except for some extravagant thinkers challenged the glorious imperial histories that were filled with the brilliant achievements of the western colonial heroes. The cooperation of indigenous agents did not matter to these stories. Even during and after decolonization, when a total inversion of the historical perspective took place – something which usually happens only after lost wars – things did not change in that respect. Subalterns still did not matter, because they were now considered the helpless victims of capitalist exploitation with no chance of escaping from economic dependency. Dependency theory, now notorious for its latent racism, was simply not able to conceive of subaltern victims as capable of making remarkable micro-arrangements inside the macro-condition of exploitation. Empirical research has discovered innumerable cases of indigenous agency, be it as cocoa farmers or as market women. Agency theory claims that agents have a choice between different options and, in addition, are quite often better informed than their principals. Applied to Ronald Robinson’s famous findings, agency theory made his collaborators active participants of colonial rule. Yet, this does not automatically lead us to a theory of quasi self-colonization, with subjects continuously bargaining with their rulers for influence and power. This post-leftist model of governance, still flourishing



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in the historiography on early modern Europe, does not work there and even less in the context of colonial empires. After all, lords and subjects very rarely bargain on the same level – if they bargain at all. Therefore, cooperating colonial elites may indeed participate in colonial rule and in colonial profits but at most as junior partners. The rules of business are always set by the colonial powers and final responsibility rests with them. Therefore, a reasonable application of agency theory produces remarkable nuances but not a total revision of imperial histories. The myth of empire and the subsequent myth of dependency must not be replaced by a new myth of agency. Certainly, victims turn into perpetrators as soon as they get a chance. But indigenous colonial elites got their real chance only after decolonization.31 Professor Wolfgang Reinhard is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Freiburg i. Br., Germany. Born in 1937 he received his Dr phil. in history at Freiburg in 1963. He enjoyed research fellowships at Rome from 1966 to 1973. After the habilitation at Freiburg in 1973 he became professor of early modern history at Augsburg University in 1977. In 1990 he moved to Freiburg where he retired in 2002. In 2001 he received the German History Award (Preis des Historischen Kollegs) and in 2012 an honorary Dr phil. of Konstanz University. Besides the British Academy he is member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften.

NOTES   1. Statements without notes are based on my book: W. Reinhard, Die Unterwerfung der Welt: Globalgeschichte der europäischen Expansion 1415–2015 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016).  2. Idem, Geschichte des modernen Staates: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck Wissen, 2007), 7–20.  3. H. Pietschmann, Staat und staatliche Entwicklung am Beginn der spanischen Kolonisation Amerikas (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1980).   4. H. Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 6th edn (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2012), 61–65.   5. D.K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1973).  6. M. Krieger, ‘Konkurrenz und Kooperation in Ostindien: Der europäische Country-Trade auf dem Indischen Ozean zwischen 16. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 84 (1997), 322–55.   7. P. van der Veer, ‘The Global History of Modernity’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41 (1998), 258–94, 289.   8. E. Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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 9. A. Jones (ed.), Außereuropäische Frauengeschichte (Pfaffenweiler: CentaurusVerlagsgesellschaft, 1990); A. Höfert, C. Opitz-Belakhal and C. Ulbrich, ‘Geschlechtergeschichte global’, L’homme 2 (2012), 5–12. 10. O. White, ‘Conquest and Cohabitation: French Men’s Relations with West African Women in the 1890s and 1900s’, in M. Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, 2 vols (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), vol. 2, 180. 11. C. Wurm, Doña Marina, la Malinche: Eine historische Figur und ihre literarische Rezeption (Frankfurt a. M.: Veruvert Verlag, 1996). 12. J.E. Kelly, Pedro de Alvarado: Conquistador (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932 [repr. Kennikat Press: Port Washington, 1971]). 13. C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 252. 14. J. Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 94–109; F. Becker (ed.), Rassenmischehen – Mischlinge – Rassentrennung: Zur Politik der Rasse im deutschen Kolonialreich (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004). 15. G.E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the 16th to the 18th Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003). 16. Cf. L.R. Day, ‘Nyarroh of Bandasuma, 1885–1914: A Re-Interpretation of Female Chieftaincy in Sierra Leone’, Journal of African History 48 (2007), 415–37. 17. Cf. S. Gruzinsky, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002). 18. M. Häberlein and A. Keese (eds), Sprachgrenzen – Sprachkontakte – Kulturelle Vermittler: Kommunikation zwischen Europäern und Außereuropäern (16. –20. Jahrhundert) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010). 19. C. Paisant (ed.), La mission au féminin: Témoignages de religieuses missionaires au fil d’un siècle (XIXe–XXe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). 20. L. Loosen, Deutsche Frauen in den Südsee-Kolonien des Kaiserreichs: Alltag und Beziehungen zur indigenen Bevölkerung, 1884–1919 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014). 21. For an early discussion of this problem, see W. Reinhard, ‘Freunde und Kreaturen. Verflechtung als Konzept zur Erforschung historischer Führungsgruppen [1979]’, in idem (ed.), Ausgewählte Abhandlungen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 289–310. 22. J. Willis, ‘The Creolization of Authority in Condominium Sudan’, Journal of African History 46 (2005), 29–50. 23. C.C. Crais (ed.), The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 16. 24. C. Newbury, Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftaincy and Over-Rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 25. I. Hanf, Leopold Sedar Senghor (Munich: Fink, 1972).



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26. An adaptation of the political theory of J.F. Nye, Soft Power: The Means of Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) to cultural and religious matters. 27. M. Fuchs, A. Linkenbach and W. Reinhard (eds), Individualisierung durch christliche Mission? (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2015). 28. B. Ruangsilp, Dutch East India Company Merchants at the Court of Ayutthaya: Dutch Perceptions of the Thai Kingdom, c. 1604–1765 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 29. A.W. Burks (ed.), The Modernizers: Overseas Students, Foreign Employees, and Meiji Japan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985); O. Checkland, Britain’s Encounter with Meiji Japan, 1868-1912 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 30. J. Parker and R. Reid (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 164. 31. W. Reinhard, ‘Wie aus Opfern Täter werden: Wandel des Wissens von der Weltgeschichte’, in M. Häberlein, S. Paulus and G. Weber (eds), Geschichte(n) des Wissens: Festschrift für Wolfgang E. J. Weber zum 65. Geburtstag (Augsburg: Wissener-Verlag, 2015), 161–76.

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Index

} ʿAbd al-Rah.man, Fadwa, 299 Abdurahman, Abdullah, 226, 231–232, 234 AbuShouk, Ahmed I., 293 Act of Union 1910, 13, 223, 227 Africa, 8–9, 16–17, 59, 74, 195, 241, 243, 293, 298, 325–328, 331–344, 365–369 Sub-Saharan Africa, 9, 240–258, 293 West Africa, 70, 195, 244–245 Afrikaner Bond, 226, 229–230 Ah. mad, Abū Bakr S., 299 Ah. mad, Jamal M., 312 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 61–63, 366 ʿAlī T. aha, ʿAbd al-Rah.man, 292, 297–303, 307 Allawi, Ali A., 281–282 Allenby, Edmund, 267, 285 Alukwu Aluange, Peter, 209–210 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. See under Sudan Angola, 240, 245–246, 251, 255–256 Antilles. See under Caribbean Aqaba, 267 Arab Revolt, 1, 11, 266–268, 270–271, 285 Asaf Jah II, Nizam Ali Khan, 9, 90–106 Asaf Jah, Nizam ul-Mulk, 92–93 Asante, 328, 333, 335–337 Atangana, Karl, 196, 202–205

Atrocities. See under violence Auckland, 147, 149–151 Australia, 233 Awadh, 329 Aztecs, 18, 34, 38, 364 babu, 338–341, 352n67 Badrī, Yūsuf, 312–313 Baghdad, 207–271, 273, 283 Baía dos Tigres, 245 Bakheit, Gaafar, 293 Bakht er Ruda, 295, 299–300, 303, 307, 309, 311 Balandier, Georges, 171, 173 Balfour Declaration, 286n6 Banerjee, Sukanya, 225 Banta (island of), 67 Bayly, Christopher A., 7 Beauharnais, Joséphine de, 116, 124– 126 Bechuanaland, 248 Belcher, Wendy L., 68 Belich, James, 145, 152 Bell, Gertrude, 14, 268, 271–273, 276– 278, 281, 287n14 Bell, Manga, 198–199 Bengal, 7, 16, 93, 329, 334, 336, 339, 340–341 British Government of, 91, 93, 95, 330 377

378 Index

Nawab of, 93 Bertin, Louis Charles Henri, 119, 122– 123, 137n58 Bhabha, Homi K., 4, 106 Bickford-Smith, Vivian, 228, 233 Bilder, Sara Mary, 224–225 Bley, Helmut, 179, 184 Bloemfontein, 223 Blunt, Wilfried Scaven, 1–2 Boers, 173, 175, 224, 229–230 bolshevism, 270 Bombay, 93 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 116–117, 120– 122, 124, 126–129, 131–132 booty, 14, 42, 158–159, 333, 335 Bordeaux, 120 Bourdillon, Bernard, 279, 283 Boxer, Charles R., 62 Boyajian, James C., 62 Brahmans, 62, 331, 338, 340–341 Brazil, 369, 342 British empire, 14–15, 98, 105, 116, 118, 121, 127, 132, 149, 231, 234, 241, 254, 278, 293, 296, 307, 313, 364 British Raj, 9, 19, 327, 327, 329–332, 339, 341–342 British West Africa, 245, 332, 336, 345 Brito Nicote, Filipe de, 64 Buganda, 328, 333–335 Burbank, Jane, 3 bureaucracy, 1, 4, 9, 12, 14, 16, 325– 345, 364 Burke, Edmund, 15–16 Burma, 369 caciques, 10, 34–47, 53n49 Calcutta, 93, 103 Calderon, Luisa, 15 Calicut, 67 Cambridge School, 9, 327 Cameroon, 16, 194–211 Camorim, 66 Cannadine, David, 278 Cape Colony, 100, 102, 223, 226–233

Caracas, 119 Caribbean, 15, 35, 115, 117, 121–123, 126, 129, 131–132, 225, 325, 365 Casamance, 247 Catholicism, 12, 14, 36, 41–43, 47, 50n17, 62, 68, 203, 334, 367 Chad, 253–254 Chamberlain, Robert, 35 chiefs, 4–5, 10, 12, 16, 35, 38, 41, 72, 146–150, 153, 159, 179–180, 186n4, 194–211, 241, 245, 248–249, 252, 257, 296, 326, 332–334, 336, 343, 368 China, 65, 70, 342, 369 Christian, Willem, 182 Christianity, 14, 41–42, 45, 61–63, 65– 68, 74, 102, 203, 293, 367, 369. See also Catholicism and Protestantism Churchill, Winston, 268–276 citizenship, 8, 13, 118, 132, 160, 223– 235, 325 Coates, Timothy, 60 Cochin-China, 71, 73 Cochrane, Alexander, 127, 130 Cohn, Bernard, 10 Congo-Brazzaville, 244 conquistadores, 14, 18, 38–39, 43, 46, 365–366 contraband, 12, 15, 47, 120–123, 253 conversion, 12, 14, 36, 61–63, 65, 100, 102–103, 154–155, 203, 369 Cooper, Frederick, 3, 24n44, 195 Cornwallis reforms, 16, 329 Cornwallis, Charles, 98–100 corruption, 7–8, 14–17, 45, 100, 121, 212, 247, 250–251, 280, 326, 329– 330, 337, 342–345 Côte d’Ivoire, 241, 252 Coulão, 66 Cox, Percy, 269–277, 282, 285 Dalrymple, William, 102 Damascus, 266 Deccan, 92, 331

Index 379

decolonization, 4, 16, 241, 243, 254, 298, 326, 370–371 Decrès, Denis, 116, 118–119, 122–124, 126–128 dependency theory, 370–371 diseases, 18, 39, 42, 51n33, 74–75, 122, 129–130, 135n28, 153, 179 Diu, 63, 67 Dobbs, Henry, 277–285 Dodge, Toby, 280 Domett, Alfred, 149 Dominica (island of), 118, 121 Duala, 196–199, 201, 204, 206–207, 209–210 Dupleix, Joseph-François, 93 Durban, 223 Dutch empire, 73

Fort-de-France (Martinique), 119, 121, 127, 131 France, 101, 115–132, 325, 364. See also French Empire Francis, Philip, 95, 109n36 François, Curt von, 177 free men of colour, 115, 118–119, 125, 130, 132, 135n28, 136n48. See also people of colour French empire, 115–132, 249, 253 French Equatorial Africa, 243–248, 250–253, 342 French Revolution, 101, 116, 118, 120, 131–132 French West Africa, 247–248, 250, 252, 340–342 Fromkin, David, 270

East India Company, 2, 7, 11, 15–17, 73–74, 80n26, 83–106, 330, 340, 369 education, 1, 5, 13–14, 68, 72, 127, 223– 224, 226, 230, 234, 278, 292–313, 326, 338–343, 363, 368–369 Egypt, 292, 296–298 Elkins, Caroline, 169 England, 101–102, 105, 278, 363, 365. See also Great Britain Epidemics. See under diseases Estado da India, 59–61, 65, 68, 79n8, 365. See also India Ethiopia, 68, 312

Gabon, 244, 248–250 Gallagher, John, 2–3 Gandhi, Mohandas, 225–226, 232–233 German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia), 17, 169–185, 224, 245, 366 Giliomee, Hermann, 229 Goa, 60–64, 67, 74 Gold Coast, 244 Grant, James, 94 Great Britain, 100, 118, 123, 231, 282. See also England Grey, George, 229 Griffiths, Vincent L., 299–303, 307, 311 Guadeloupe, 116, 118–121, 131, 140n106

Faisal I, 1, 11–12, 267–286 famine, 40, 42 Farquahrsson-Lang, William M., 311 Farriss, Nancy M., 39 Findly, Ellison B., 69 First World War. See under World War One forced labour, 16, 36, 42, 206, 240, 243–244, 246, 249–250, 252–254, 334, 336. See also slavery

Haidar, Ali, 90–91, 95, 100 Haiti, 125. See also Saint Domingue Hampâté Bâ, Amadou, 344 Hastings, Warren, 15–16, 91, 109n36, 111n76 Heke, Hone, 148 Herero, 18, 172, 174, 176–177, 179–185 Hibbert, Dennis H., 312–313 Hinduism, 61–62, 65, 338–339 Hobsbawm, Eric, 10, 273

380 Index

Hodgkin, Robin A., 295–297, 299–301, 307, 311–313 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 225 Hollond, John, 90–96 Hood, Samuel, 119, 130 Hormuz, 67, 79 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 241 Humphrys, Francis, 283 Huntington, Samuel, 172 Hussein, Sharif, 266, 268 Hyderabad, 9, 12, 90–106, 369 hygiene, 14, 72, 74, 310 Ibrahim, Hassan A., 293 Imperial Assemblage of 1877, 11 Inca, 18, 364 India, 2, 7, 9, 11, 14–17, 19, 60, 90–106, 227–228, 325–331, 336–344, 364– 365, 369 Indian Civil Service, 296, 325, 330–331, 339, 342, 346 Indian uprising of 1857–1858, 14, 19, 227, 329 indigenous clerks, 2, 5, 296, 326, 331– 332, 338, 340, 343 indigenous soldiers, 2, 5, 18–19, 33, 40, 42, 53n49, 93, 130, 150, 157–158, 243, 248, 256, 339 indirect rule, 9, 92, 195, 241, 327–328, 331–332, 334–338, 343, 347n9, 364, 368 information. See under knowledge interpreters, 5, 66, 72–74, 96, 100, 203, 209–210, 218n97, 296, 332, 338–339 invention of tradition, 10, 201, 273 Iraq, 11–12, 268–286, 312 Islam, 12, 61–62, 65, 67–68, 100, 102– 103, 266, 269–270, 278, 293, 295, 309–310, 332–333, 339, 341, 369 Jabavu, John T., 225, 229, 231–233 jakadu, 337 Japan, 64–65, 72, 369

Jaunde, 202–204 Java, 365 Johnson, Richard, 91–97 Juliana Dias da Costa, D., 67–68 Kaffer, Abraham, 182 Kannur, 63, 67 Kano emirate, 337–338 Kariko, Samuel, 180 Kemal, Mustafa, 280, 290n86 Kennaway, John, 97–103 Keppel, William, 118, 124 Khair un-Nissa, 102–103 Khan, Ghulam Husain, 7 Khartoum, 293, 296–297, 299, 307, 311 King Edward VII, 233–234, 273 Kirkpatrick, James A., 12, 102–105 Kirkpatrick, William, 100–102, 105 knowledge, 3, 8, 10, 37, 43, 59, 72–76, 94–98, 103 106, 126–127, 132, 139n76, 201, 204, 207–208, 218n97, 248, 267, 296, 301, 308, 338, 340, 369 Koditschek, Theodore, 225 Kohere, Mokena, 156–158 Kumasi, 335 kupapa, 19, 144–161 Lacrosse, Jean-Baptiste R., 120 Lakshmibai, 14 Latin America, 33, 366 Laussat, Pierre-Clement de, 116, 123, 125–129, 137n58 Lawrence, Thomas E., 1, 267–270, 272, 282 League of Nations, 195, 268, 272, 274, 279, 282–284 Lefessier-Grandprey, Jacques, 119, 125 Leonor de Ataíde, D., 63 Leutwein, Theodor, 170, 176–178, 180– 183, 185, 186n4 Lloyd George, David, 268 López Medel, Thomas, 40 Louis XVI, 117

Index 381

Lugard, Frederick D., 332, 340, 351n59 Lukitz, Liora, 273 Lyautey, Hubert, 172

Munro, Thomas, 330 munshi, 103–104, 338–340, 353n75 Mysore, 90, 94, 98–100

Macao, 64–65, 70, 73 Macpherson, John, 91 Madras, 73, 95, 331 British Government of, 90–91, 93, 330, 340 Maharashtra, 330–331 Maharero, Samuel, 180, 183 Malabar Coast, 63–64, 66 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 311 mamlatadars, 330 Mandela, Nelson, 234–235 Maori, 19, 144–161, 227 Marathas, 90–91, 94, 96, 98–99, 101, 122 Marseilles, 120 Marshall, Peter J., 96 Martinique, 15, 17, 115–133 Maude, Frederick S., 273 Mauretania, 339 Maya, 34, 37–40, 43, 45–46 Medina, 266–267 Meetom, David, 196, 204–206, 209 Mendes Pinto, Fernão, 67, 70–71 Merriman, John X., 230–231 Mesopotamia, 268–269 Mexico, 33, 37–39, 44, 368 Middle Congo, 252–253 Middle East, 1, 8, 11, 70, 267–268, 275, 293 missionaries, 36–37, 40–44, 46–47, 52n41, 59, 62, 64–65, 68, 147, 153–155, 202–203, 223–224, 226, 333–334, 339, 341, 367, 369 Moluccas, 67 Montejo, Francisco de, 38 Moses, Dirk, 174 Moto, Qua, 207–208 Mozambique, 71–72, 240 Mughals, 7, 9, 11, 15, 67–69, 91–106, 327, 329, 331, 338, 340–342

nabobs, 15, 91, 105 Nagapattinan, 64 Naguib, Mohammed, 297 Nama, 18, 172, 177 Nantes, 120 Napoleon I. See under Bonaparte, Napoleon Nasson, Bill, 229 Natal, 223, 225–227 nationalism, 19, 145, 234, 271, 287n14, 293, 343 native guards, 5, 16, 19, 240–258 Nelson, Horatio, 128 Nene, Tamati Waka, 148, 150 New Zealand, 19, 144–161, 230 Newbold, Douglas, 311 Newbury, Colin, 6 Ngata, Apirana, 160 Ngati Porou, 145–160 Nigeria, 332, 336–339, 341, 343, 346n5, 368 North America, 137n56, 224, 233, 365 Northern Rhodesia, 245, 248, 254 Nyasaland, 248, 254 Omrah, Azim ul, 100–101, 103–104 Orange Free State, 223 Ordinance 50 of 1828, 227–228 Osborn, Emily L., 242 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 3 Pattani, 64 patwaris, 331, 340–341 Paxbolon, Pablo, 12, 34, 43–47 Peace Conference of Paris, 1, 268 Pedersen, Susan, 169, 274 Pegu, 64 people of colour, 223–235. See also free men of colour Persian Gulf, 268, 287n10

382 Index

Picton, Thomas, 14 Plaatje, Solomon, 223, 226–227, 229, 234 Planters. See under settlers Plunder. See under booty police forces, 119, 182, 206, 331. See also native guards Pombaya, Nhay, 67 Pondicherry, 101 Portuguese empire, 8, 14, 16, 58–77, 240–241, 247, 251, 255, 257, 365 Portuguese Guinea, 241 postcolonial studies, 3–5, 22n24, 195 princely states, 11, 101, 327–329, 332, 337, 368 Protestantism, 334, 367. See also Christianity Provincial Civil Service, 330–331, 339, 364. See also Indian Civil Service Pune, 96, 98, 101 qanungo, 330, 340 Quantek, 207–209 Queen Victoria, 11, 150–151, 227 Quirimba, 66 racism, 3, 118–120, 173–174, 178–183, 185, 228, 230–231, 234, 247, 269, 276, 295, 297, 308, 325, 342, 368 Raman, Bhavani, 342–343 Ranger, Terence O., 10, 273 Raymond, Michael J.-M., 99, 102 Reid, Anthony, 69 Reigota, Isabel, 70 Restall, Matthew, 34 Reza Shah, 280–281 Rhodes, Cecil, 226–228, 231 Rhodesia, 365. See also Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia Richepance, Antoine, 119, 140n106 Robinson, Ronald, 2–6, 17, 46, 76, 116–117, 132, 170, 195, 242, 247, 256, 293, 363, 370 Ross, Robert, 227

Rubusana, Walter, 231 Rush, Anne, 225 Russa, 342, 364 Rust, Conrad, 178 Saha, Jonathan, 342–343 Said, Edward, 3–4, 269 Saint Domingue, 119. See also Haiti Saint Pierre (Martinique), 115–116, 121–122 Saint Thomas of Millipore, 64 Saint Vincent (island of), 118 San Remo Conference, 268 Sanford, Walter, 230–231 Santos, João de, 65–66 São Tomé e Príncipe, 251 Sati, 65 Sātī, ʿAwad., 300, 307 Sauer, J. W., 230–231, 233 Scandals. See under corruption Schmidt-Lauber, Brigitta, 173 schools, 13, 37, 74, 127, 203, 223–224, 226, 278, 292–313, 338–342, 369 Schreiner, William P., 231 Scott, George C., 299, 308–309 Searing, James, 343 Second World War. See under World War Two Senegal, 247, 339, 343 Sepoys. See under indigenous soldiers Seringapatam, 97–98 settlers, 5, 13, 15, 17–18, 60, 116–118, 128–130, 132–133, 155–156, 169– 185, 226, 231, 233, 235, 245, 252 Sharkey, Heather, 293 Sheshan, Radhika, 73 Shore, John, 101 shrishtadars, 330 Siam, 70, 369 Silveira, Luisa da, 69 slave resistance, 121, 125–126, 139n71 slave trade, 123, 132, 333, 342, 365–366 slavery, 7, 38, 40, 117–118, 131–133, 328, 332

Index 383

British abolition of, 227 French abolition of, 118 French reintroduction of, 118–119, 133 slaves, 38, 40, 42, 61, 63, 65, 67–68, 71, 73–75, 80n26, 115, 118–119, 123, 125, 132, 158, 228, 333, 335, 337, 342 Smuts, Jan, 230 Soden, Julius von, 197, 204 Sokoto Empire, 328, 333, 336–338, 343 South Africa, 13, 144, 174, 223–235, 245, 248 South African War, 229 Southern Rhodesia, 248 Spanish empire, 8, 12, 33–47, 122, 365 Spanish Guinea, 203 Stengel, Carl von, 194 Stoler, Ann Laura, 195 Sudan, 13, 292–313 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 286n6 Syria, 267–268, 271, 275–276, 281–282, 285–286 taki malamai, 338, 341 talugdars, 329 Tascher de la Pagerie, Rose-Claire, 124–126, 138n66 tashildars, 330, 339–340 tax collection, 8–9, 16, 36, 127, 242, 249–253, 257, 326–344 Te Arawa, 152–159 Te Awaitaia, Nera, 149, 151 Te Kani, Hirini, 156 Te Paia, Wiremu Kingi, 156 Te Ua Haumene, 154 Te Whereowhero, Potatau, 148–149 theories of imperialism, 2–3, 21n7 Thomas, Martin, 241 Tignor, Robert, 343 Tipu Sultan, 94–95, 97–99, 100–102 Togo, 198, 200, 206, 244 Tongking, 71 Translators. See under interpreters

Transvaal, 223, 232 Trapido, Stanley, 229–231 Treaty of Waitangi, 147, 227 Trinidad, 14, 118 Trotha, Lothar von, 172, 174, 176–178, 183 Trotha, Trutz von, 200 Ubangi-Chari, 244 Uganda, 333–335 Ullah, Aziz, 103 Vasconcelos, Francisca de, 63 Veracini, Lorenzo, 170 Villaret de Joyeuse, Louis-Thomas, 116, 118–133 Villeneuve, Pierre-Charles de, 121–122 violence, 6, 16–19, 36, 39, 41–42, 46, 169–170, 173–174, 180–184, 202, 211, 240–258, 341, 366, 370. See also warfare Völkner, Carl Sylvius, 154–155 Wahawaha, Rapata, 158–159 Wangrin, 344 warfare, 16–19, 39, 130–131, 144–148, 150, 152–157, 176–178, 197, 243, 333–334 Wars of the American Revolution, 90–91 Watson Andaya, Barbara, 70 Weber, Max, 170 Wellesley, Richard, 9, 12, 100, 102–104, 106, 112n76 West Indies. See under Caribbean Whig Party, 15 White, Richard, 6, 76 Willis, Justin, 293 Wilson, Woodrow, 274 Witbooi, 174 Witbooi, Hendrik, 180 women, 5, 14, 33, 36, 40, 42, 44, 59–76, 102–103, 124–126, 180, 182, 211, 254, 274–275, 309–310, 365–367

384 Index

World War I, 1, 11, 147, 195, 203, 235, 240, 243, 245, 247–248, 266, 273, 308, 326, 330 World War II, 3, 147, 160, 251, 253, 256, 297, 326, 341 Wuri river, 196, 206

Yaoundé. See under Jaunde yellow fever. See under diseases Yucatàn, 10–11, 33–47 Zambesi river, 71, 226 zamindars, 16, 329–330, 336–337, 348n21