Imperial expectations and realities: El Dorados, utopias and dystopias 9781784997090

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This sequidit volume as explores how imperial powersdolumqu established anddenducil expanded Num delisincid quid eum alignis atibus mi, their empires through decisions that were often based on exaggerated occae sum, non nihit autat que int ma voluptate nim reius, quia doluptint. expectations and wishful thinking, rather than on reasoned and Apero ipis verro et dernam, quia de exaggerations nostias eatem through alicatus et scientific policies. It explores these thevolorehenis concepts magnatet volupic ipissum as eos–sed modipissequo conse quae of El Dorado, utopias andendi dystopias undertakings based on irrational ium haruptium, senihilla que porem abore nosthe apellorera esed perceived values – in case studiesquat from across sixteenth to quid the moluptae alignimand olliaep reperat aturem esciendis sanditincluding rerisci twentiethipitas centuries, incorporates imperial traditions mincideres simintis asi que pro cum il ipicia in nectem et magnis nis Scottish, British, French, German, Italian anddesti American. Various colonial molo queare parum a voles alicate vendipis eum deratur? Dis asEast, nulpa comnit spaces considered, from the Mediterranean, Middle Africa, ducitas peribus debis aut eos ut exceaque aceaso, si dolupta dolum nobit Australia, Asia and the Americas, and in doing the contributors offeradi occumquam quiofniendel escietand fuga. new insightssundici into theatatia nature imperialism colonial settlement.  Sunt, ni temporporiam es autempo remposto temmotives sinust ma im Thetem book does not try to explain the broader ofvoluptatur, imperialism esto ptatiaecatem is nobit, nos re peditatem illupta dolorero et utthese odiorio andblabore colonial settlement, but instead focuses on understanding blaborro quiainsecus. ventures, which unrealistic arguments were made that justified

Imperial expectations and realities will prove useful to academics and students at all levels, and in a variety of specialisms within history, but particularly in comparitive imperialism and colonialism, and policy studies. Andrekos Varnava is a Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Military History at Flinders University

Cover image: Vintage World Map, 2015 © Michal Bednarek, bednarek-art.com

VA R N AVA ( E D )

imperial and colonial interventions and envisaged rapid success. Such cases proved illusory and sometimes disastrous, and thus serve as deconstructive tools for demystifying imperial policy. These bad decisions were often twisted and turned to justify them differently, and there was a great reluctance to admit a flawed or failed policy, let alone reverse it. 

IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES

IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES

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STUDIES IN IMPERIALISM

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES El Dorados, utopias and dystopias

ISBN 978-0-7190-9786-7 978-0-7190-9189-6

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9 780719 097867 091896 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

EDITED BY A N D R E KO S VA R N AVA

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General editor: Andrew S. Thompson Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie

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When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. Studies in Imperialism is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Imperial expectations and realities

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SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities John M. MacKenzie MISSIONARY FAMILIES Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier

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Emily J. Manktelow

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THE COLONISATION OF TIME Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire Giordano Nanni BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE ed. Stuart Ward SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE Britain, 1870–1914 Douglas A. Lorimer GENTEEL WOMEN Empire and domestic material culture, 1840−1910 Dianne Lawrence EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy ed. John M. MacKenzie SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA ed. Saul Dubow BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN CYPRUS, 1878–1915 The inconsequential possession Andrekos Varnava

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Imperial expectations and realities El Dorados, utopias and dystopias Edited by Andrekos Varnava

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN

978 0 7190 9786 7

hardback

First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12pt Trump Mediaeval by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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Dedication This book is dedicated to my colleague and friend Professor Eric Richards. His prolific body of work on British and Australian immigration history, Scottish history and various other areas of British and Australian history are important in those varied yet interrelated fields of history and an inspiration to younger generations of historians, including myself. Not only an inspiration on the academic level, but also on the sporting field, over the last five years Eric and I have played many a close tennis match. In my retirement I can only hope to be as strong and vibrant in both my academic and sporting endeavours.

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CONTENTS

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Founding editor’s introduction ix Contributors xi Acknowledgements xv 1 El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement Andrekos Varnava

1

2 Darién and the psychology of Scottish adventurism in the 1690s Eric Richards

26

3 Greek expectations: Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–64 Leslie Rogne Schumacher

47

4 Bambuk gold: General Faidherbe’s Senegalese chimera Leland Conley Barrows 5 Salubrity and the survival of the Swan River Colony: health, climate and settlement in colonial Western Australia Ruth A. Morgan

66

89

6 Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific: metropolitan representations and colonial realities, 1884–1914 Holger Droessler

105

7 A place to speak the ‘language of heaven’? Patagonia as a land of broken Welsh promise Trevor Harris

125

8 Between heaven and earth: the German Templer colonies in Palestine Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz

144

9 Italy’s sexual El Dorado in Africa Daniela Baratieri 10 Dreaming in the desert: Libya as Italy’s promised land, 1911–70 Giuseppe Finaldi

166

191

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CONTENTS

210

12 Shattered images: French Indochina as a failed symbolic resource John Hennessey

228

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11 The British Mesopotamian El Dorado: the restoration of the Garden of Eden Ann Matters

A tribute to Eric Richards by John M. MacKenzie 248 Selected bibliography 258 Index 264

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FOUNDING EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Whatever else may be said about modern imperialism, it was unquestionably a phenomenon which had highly complex motivations arousing intense emotional desires. For the dominant people, it stirred hopes, ambitions, opportunities, all bound up with notions of discovering wealth, albeit in various forms. Trade and settlement offered visions of all of these for promoters and participants, while some sought religious freedoms, social advancement, different and perhaps idealised forms of society, alternatively opportunities to dominate and exploit the labour – and often the bodies – of others. As with all human endeavour, this swiftly divided the winners from the losers. For subordinate peoples it invariably meant dispossession and displacement, together with the violence, fear, illness and often death that went along with these. Such a maelstrom of emotionally charged events inevitably threw up equally complex sets of speculative ideas, seeking to analyse notions of power, of environmental and climatic contexts, of race and of forms of economic development. And such speculation invariably led to the formation of myths, myths about the past, myths about a heroic present, myths of national capacity and identity and above all myths of economic potential. The maritime and continental explorations of Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards were driven by ambitions to access wealth: in silks and natural products like fur, in spices, in drugs or in precious metals. The myths associated with these were driven by evidence of past success, by knowledge of the opulent products of China, India, the Middle East and Africa, as reflected, for example, in the apparent successes of the Ottoman Empire to tap into these. Such explorations were themselves driven by geographical myths, miscalculations about the scale of the globe, of opportunities to access the East through westward travel, and, once the reality of North and South America was understood, by illusory routes to the North-West – and for some to the North-East. The myth of El Dorado, associated with South America, was one of these. Again it soon seemed to have a precedent which demonstrated the possibility of converting such visions into reality: the Spanish exploitation of the silver mines of Peru seemed to contribute to the immense wealth and power of that greatest of early modern empires. Similarly, the immense success of the Dutch in accessing the spices of the East and transforming them into one of the richest traders of the era, offered powerful evidence to rivals of what could be achieved. [ ix ]

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FOUNDING EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Such successes always generated both envy and competitive emulation. But it was certainly gold which produced both the most strikingly ambitious visions, the most eager of searches, and the most potent urge towards exploration and migration. Gold was also to be the most long-standing promoter of imperial activity, running like a thread from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, continuing long after silver and spices had appeared to lose their allure. Once again past successes were soon translated into present and future ambitions. Gold was discovered and exploited, notably in West Africa, where it proved to be more significant even than the export of slaves for a period in the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century, golden El Dorados once again seemed capable of emerging as reality, whether in California or the colony of Victoria in Australia, in Canada, New Zealand, and in South Africa. Such events ensured that other regions might prove to be equally rich. Central Africa was a classic case. Gold had been mined there since at least the Middle Ages. The Portuguese hoped to tap into this in the Zambezi Valley from the late sixteenth century. And Cecil Rhodes, having failed to translate his great diamond wealth into the opportunities afforded by the gold of the Boer-dominated Witwatersrand, resolved to create new colonies in the interior that would redress the balance. Thus the often exaggerated hopes of empire were indeed based upon the knowledge of other sure successes. This volume examines a whole variety of El Dorados, well beyond the golden model. Andrekos Varnava introduces the subject in such a way as to demonstrate that here we have a significant factor in imperial expansion which has perhaps not been granted the significance it deserves. The examples in the rest of the volume cover a remarkable range of El Dorado-style dreams, as well of utopian visions. They are exceptionally diverse in time, in geographical spread, in subject matter, and in the empires that spawned them: from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, in the Americas, in Mediterranean islands, in Africa, Australia, the Pacific, the Middle East and Indochina, from various notions of promised lands, all ambitiously pursued by Scots, English, Welsh, Greeks, Germans, Italians and the French. Together they further enrich our knowledge and understanding of modern European imperialism, not least in helping to explain the variety of expansionist urges that fed into it. John M. MacKenzie

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CONTRIBUTORS

Daniela Baratieri is an Australian post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Australia, where, along with teaching History and Cinema, she is working on a project concerning women and Mussolini. Dr Baratieri received her Ph.D. from the European University Institute after studying anthropology at Goldsmiths College London. She has recently published Memory and Silences Haunted by Fascism: Italian Colonialism 1930s–1960s (2010) and the co-edited volume (with Mark Edele and Giuseppe Finaldi) Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories (2013). Leland Conley Barrows has been a professor of history at Voorhees College, Denmark, South Carolina, since August 2004. Although he teaches courses in American and African-American history and world history, his areas of research are on the French Empire and African history. Professor Barrows earned his BA in American History at Columbia University and his MA and Ph.D. in African history at UCLA. In addition to teaching history in higher education institutions in the USA and in Algeria, he served for twenty-one years (1983–2004) as the senior editor at the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education in Bucharest, Romania. Holger Droessler is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization Program at Harvard University. He received his MA in American cultural history from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in 2008. His research interests centre on the history of the long and global nineteenth century, especially US and European imperialism. Currently he is working on an entangled history of imperialism, racism and capitalism in the Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century. Giuseppe Finaldi is an associate professor in history at the University of Western Australia. He has published widely on different aspects of Italian colonialism and is currently writing a general history of Italian empire. He is the author of Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy’s African Wars in the Era of Nation-building, 1870– 1900 (2009) and Mussolini and Italian Fascism (2008). Most recently he published book chapters in Empires at War (2014); The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians from 1914 to the Present (2013) and in European Empire and the People (2011). He also co-edited the volume [ xi ]

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CONTRIBUTORS

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(with Mark Edele and Giuseppe Finaldi) Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories (2013). Matthew Fitzpatrick obtained his Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales and is currently an associate professor in international history at Flinders University, South Australia. Dr Fitzpatrick’s research is in the field of German and European history, particularly the history of European imperialism and German liberalism and nationalism, as well as the intellectual history of Roman imperialism. He is the author of Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (2008) and the editor of the volume Liberal Imperialism in Europe (2012). His forthcoming monograph is Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914 (2015). His most recent articles have appeared in Journal of World History (2011), Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (2012), Journal of Modern History (2013) and Itenerario (2013). Trevor Harris is a graduate of the University of Reading, where he also completed his Ph.D. (1987). He has worked at the University of Salford, the Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 and the Université François-Rabelais, Tours. He is currently Professor in British Studies at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British political and intellectual history. His recent publications include with Monia O’Brien Castro (eds), Preserving the Sixties: Britain and the ‘Decade of Protest’ (2014); with Cécile Coquet-Mokoko (eds), Crafting Identities, Remapping Nationalities: the English-Speaking World in the Age of Globalization (2012); with Richard Davis and Philippe Vervaecke, La Décolonisation britannique: perspectives sur la fin d’un empire 1919–1984 (2012); ‘Politique, nation, race: la Grande-Bretagne et l’Amérique du sud à la veille de la Grande Guerre’, in Alfredo Gomez-Muller (ed.), Constructions de l’imaginaire national en Amérique Latine (2012); and a journal article in Itinerario (2014). John Hennessey has a bachelor’s degree in history and French literature from the University of Notre Dame, IN, and a master’s degree in Asian studies from Lund University, Sweden. He has also studied at the French Université Catholique de l’ouest and Waseda University in Japan. His primary areas of interest include comparative colonial history, especially French and Japanese colonialism, nationalism, propaganda and discourse analysis. He has conducted research on the wartime diplomatic relationships between Vichy France, the colonial administration of French Indochina, and Japan as well as on modern Japanese [ xii ]

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CONTRIBUTORS

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depictions of ancient Japanese history in museums and textbooks. He is currently enrolled in an advanced Japanese course in preparation for researching Japanese colonists in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. Felicity Jensz received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Melbourne in 2007, and since 2008 has been a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research centres on the history of German missionaries in the English-speaking world and colonial history of the nineteenth century. Dr Jensz is the author of Moravian Missionaries in the British Colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848–1908: Strangers in a Strange Land (2010), and has published in various international books and journals. Ann Matters is a Ph.D. candidate in historical studies at Flinders University, South Australia. Her area of interest is how empires, particularly that of the British, functioned. She has combined this interest, with her interest in the development of the modern Middle East, and so her dissertation, tentatively entitled ‘British Imperialism in Mesopotamia, 1914–1932’, aims to explore the British role in the making of Iraq. Ruth Morgan is a lecturer in Australian history at Monash University. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Western Australia. Her Ph.D. dissertation combined environmental history and history of science to explore perceptions and understandings of climate, climate variability and water supplies in the greater south-west region of Western Australia since 1826. She examined how these perceptions and understandings have shaped and informed land settlement and resource use in the region, and their implications for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Dr Morgan is the author of Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015) and has published her research in Osiris, Australian Historical Studies and Radical History Review. Eric Richards is an emeritus professor who has occupied a professorial chair in history at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, since the early 1970s. He is a specialist in the history of Scotland, colonial Australia and Australian, British and international migration history. Most recently he has authored the monographs: Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901 (2008); The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (2008); Debating the Highland Clearances (2007); and Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (2004). In 2003 he received the Australian Centenary Medal for Services to the Arts and Australian Society. In 2009 Professor Richards won the New South [ xiii ]

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CONTRIBUTORS

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Wales Premier’s Literary Prize and in 2014 he was the Carnegie Trust Centenary Professor in Scotland, when he was based at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Leslie Rogne Schumacher received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota in 2012. His interest is in the history of the ‘Eastern question’ in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East. Dr Schumacher sits on the review panels of Victorian Network, Studia Historyczne, Britain and the World: Historical Journal of the British Scholar Society and the Marmara Journal of European Studies. For the last of these he also serves on the journal’s editorial board. Dr Schumacher is a central member of the British Scholar Society, serving on its administrative board as associate editor. He is also a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the North American Conference on British Studies. In autumn 2009 he was a visiting research student at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, and in spring 2012 he was a visiting fellow in the History Department at Harvard University. In 2012 and 2013 Dr Schumacher was visiting lecturer in history at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Andrekos Varnava is a senior lecturer in imperial and military history at Flinders University, South Australia, where he has worked since 2009. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne in 2006. He is the author of British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession (2009); and co-editor (with Michalis N. Michael) of The Archbishops of Cyprus in the Modern Age: The Changing Role of the Archbishop-Ethnarch, their Identities and Politics (2013); (with Hubert Faustmann) of Reunifying Cyprus: The Annan Plan and Beyond (2009); and (with Nicholas Coureas and Marina Elia) of The Minorities of Cyprus: Development Patterns and the Identity of the InternalExclusion (2009). His publications include articles in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (2005), The Cyprus Review (2005, 2010, 2014), Journal of Military History (2010), War in History (2012), Accounting History (2013), Historical Research (2014), Historical Journal (2014) and Itinerario (2014), and book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe (2011) and Liberal Imperialism in Europe (2012).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is my fourth edited volume and without doubt the most seamless, as regards contributions, to put together. This was the case because of the wonderful cast of contributors, who have produced expertly written chapters, to theme and to time. I thank them first and foremost for their work, because without them this volume would not be as rich as it is. I also thank Professors John M. MacKenzie and Andrew Thompson for their support of this volume from when I first officially pitched it to them in 2011. I am honoured that this is the last book introduced by Professor MacKenzie, who I would especially like to thank for his enthusiasm from the very first time I mentioned the concept to him at the Australasian Association of European Historians (AAEH) in Perth in 2011. The AAEH is the perfect environment for scholars on European history to meet and discuss their work and I owe those who organise this conference every two years a debt of gratitude as well, especially since at the conference held at the Victoria University of Wellington in 2013 I was allowed to chair two panels, a total of five papers, that are included in this volume (those by Eric Richards, Matthew Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz, Giuseppe Finaldi, Daniela Baratieri, Anne Matters). I would like to thank Matthew Fitzpatrick for his comments and revisions to my chapter for this volume. I would like to also express my appreciation to the amazing team at Manchester University Press. This is my second book in the Studies in Imperialism Series, and both times my experience working with the people at Manchester University Press has been wonderful. I am especially thankful to Emma Brennan, who is a first-rate, patient and professional editor. I hope that readers will see in this volume the important scholarship that edited volumes can produce and that it is a sorry state of affairs if publishers (not MUP) and universities destroy the edited volume. I thank MUP for sticking by this edited volume. Finally but not least I would like to thank my fellow historians at Flinders University and my family, the latter not always aware why I am so impatient and grumpy when I sometimes take work, like this volume, home with me.

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CHAPTER ONE

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El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement Andrekos Varnava

dupes of a great illusion, their competing greed and rivalry jostling them into a gold rush for an imaginary El Dorado. (Eric Stokes, ‘Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa’, in W. Roger-Louis, Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy, 1976)

El Dorado, the enduring myth of a rich promised land hidden in the heartlands of South America, is an appropriate term and metaphor for understanding what is essentially a particular psychology of most imperial and colonial projects. El Dorados as regards imperialism and colonial settlement are supported by promises of immediate enrichment, either at individual, corporate or state level. Across the centuries and across various imperial traditions, imperial powers established and expanded their empires, while states, companies and individuals, settled places, often on the basis of promising perceived and exaggerated expectations of value, rather than because of sound, evidenced-based reasoning. As regards El Dorados, it was often the irrational rather than the rational that determined and justified their selection, and often too, their retention, resulting in many places becoming misadventures. To be sure, almost every imperial and colonial venture was a search for El Dorado or a utopia. By exploring various cases this collection seeks to show how El Dorados arose in Europe across imperial traditions, colonial projects and periods in time. The aim is not to offer an overarching explanation for imperialism and colonial settlement, but to provide a comparative understanding of the phenomenon as it occurred in a number of imperial settings. In particular, two questions drive this investigation: (1) what is the best way to conceptualise the phenomenon of exaggerated imperial expectations and subsequent realities and deflation of these expectations?; (2) how does this phenomenon manifest itself across imperial traditions, periods of time and colonial spaces? [1]

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES

Related to El Dorados are utopias and dystopias. Utopias, as distinct from El Dorados, relate to finding a space that can be converted into a paradise for its inhabitants (for both settlers and indigenous peoples). Dystopias are what results when such expectations go horribly wrong. Crucially, utopias do not promise immediate benefits; rather, their supporters acknowledge that some work is required before the paradise will develop. Sometimes El Dorados develop into utopian schemes, particularly when the promise of immediate reward must be massaged to become a demand for delayed imperial gratification, a way to continue imperial or settlement policies by arguing that with hard work the place will become valuable if not idyllic, as seen in the cases in this volume of the Germans in Palestine and the Welsh in Patagonia. To be sure, many imperial and colonial ventures were speculative and arose from exploring places that were deemed to have potential from the comfort of the metropole without any scientific investigation on the ground and so they started as ‘blind experiments’ based on little scientific evidence. But what happens when such policies, based on decisions taken somewhere, do not go to plan, and indeed, sometimes, go horribly wrong? What does it reveal about the nature of imperial and settlement policies, policy-making and policy-makers? Should such poor, sometimes disastrous, decisions, not be critiqued? This volume aims to strip back imperial and settlement policies to just that, policies, and to scrutinise them in the same way that historians and other scholars scrutinise foreign, colonial or indeed any other policy. As this objective suggests, timescales are pivotal when trying to understand the policy aims, justifications and results of imperial and colonial endeavours. At the heart of each case in this volume is the understanding that a decision to embark upon imperial expansion or colonial settlement was based upon exaggerated expectations of value that did not match with the realities encountered on the ground. The time-frame for evaluating this failed policy is relatively small. Over time some places remained backwaters, while others developed some value. These changed circumstances over time are part of the story of both El Dorados and utopias/dystopias. Cases where imperialism and colonial settlement continue in the face of expectations that fail to be met say much about the decision-making that led to the initial policy and the decision to hold on. While some El Dorados may have acquired an unexpected value in the long term, it is still worth pointing out that such change frequently occurred well after the ‘El Dorado moment’ had passed. This volume is significant because it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of imperial and colonial projects, but also because of its value for contemporary policy-makers in two areas: for those grappling with foreign and trade policies which encroach on the sovereignty and [2]

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EL DORADOS, UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

interfere in the politics, society, culture and economics of another state or territory; and for what this volume reveals about reasons of state, construction of policy, and the contingencies of imperial governance and colonial settlement. It will argue, using the case studies, that states and other stakeholders do not always come to decisions logically or through evidence-based reasoning, and decisions are often wrong, yet reasons for bad decisions can be twisted and turned to justify them differently, and there is a great reluctance to admit a wrong or failed policy, let alone to reverse it. The role of emotions and psychology are interesting, given the clear part played by desire, hope and impulse in this story. One need only observe the efforts to reconstruct nations after conflict and foreign intervention in the last several decades and today to see that such ideas are relevant for the world today. This collection focuses on how imperial and settlement expectations were often based on exaggerations that were more wishful and hopeful than reasoned and scientific. It frames these exaggerations and realities upon the concepts of El Dorado and utopias/dystopias. By exploring El Dorados, utopias and dystopias, through a series of cases from across the centuries, from the sixteenth to the twentieth, from across various imperial traditions, Scottish, British, French, German, Italian, and from various colonial spaces, from the Mediterranean and Middle East, to Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, this volume offers new insights into the nature of imperialism and colonial settlement, but makes no attempt to offer an overarching explanation for the motivations of imperialism and colonial settlement, recognising that imperial causality consists of a series of interlocking motivations. Indeed this volume moves away from trying to explain the broader motives of imperialism and colonial settlement to focusing on trying to understand a subset of exemplar undertakings in which cases were built that ostensibly justified imperial and colonial interventions and envisaged rapid success for those who were involved in the policy-making, the implementation process and/or as supporters. Thus, El Dorados and utopias/dystopias serve as deconstructive tools for demystifying policy.

Historicising ‘El Dorado’ El Dorado, one of the concepts used to explain the wild imperial and settlement expectations of policy-makers in the cases explored in this volume, is a metaphoric use of the term, and therefore it needs historicising. ‘El Dorado’, Spanish for ‘the gilded one’, was the name of a Muisca1 tribal chief who covered himself with gold dust, but by 1559 ‘El Dorado had become a golden land rather than a golden man’, a legendary ‘lost [3]

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city’ of riches, and the name of a province that has captivated explorers since the days of the Spanish conquistadors.2 No evidence for its existence has been found, although a recent study claims that one of the more famous explorers of ‘El Dorado’, Sir Walter Raleigh, had found a gold-rich mine.3 Imagined as a place of boundless riches, El Dorado became the city of this legendary golden king that numerous European explorers attempted to find in order to gain immediate profit. Among the earliest stories was that told by Diego de Ordaz’s lieutenant, Martinez. In 1531 de Ordaz, a Spanish explorer and soldier, had been given permission to explore the lands of the mythical El Dorado, discovering the Río Orinoco, before abandoning his search and perishing in 1532 on the Venezuelan peninsula of Paria, as he was about to return to Spain. Martinez claimed to have been rescued from a shipwreck, conveyed inland, and entertained by El Dorado himself in 1531.4 In pursuit of the legend, Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro departed from Quito in 1541 in an expedition towards the Amazon Basin, as a result of which Orellana became the first European known to have navigated the Amazon River along most of its length. Inspired, in part, by Juan Rodriguez Freyle’s chronicle-narrative, El Carnero, which described the king or chief priest of the Muisca being covered with gold dust at a religious festival held in Lake Guatavita, near present-day Bogota, Colombia, the Muisca towns quickly fell to the conquistadores. In 1540 Gonzalo Pizarro had been made the governor of Quito in northern Ecuador. Pizarro had learned from the natives that a valley existed to the east that was rich in gold. With Francisco Orellana, his nephew, 340 soldiers and about 4,000 indigenous people, Pizarro led them east in 1541 down the Rio Coca and Rio Napo. Pizarro quit after many of the soldiers and natives died from hunger, disease and attacks by hostile natives, but he ordered Orellana to continue downstream, where he eventually made it to the Atlantic Ocean, discovering the Amazon. El Dorado had, however, remained elusive.5 The Spaniards soon realised that there were no golden cities, or rich mines, since the Muiscas obtained all their gold from trade. Yet the stories of ‘El Dorado’ continued to encourage Spanish and other European exploration. Many explorers led expensive (both in relation to money and men) expeditions trying to find El Dorado but without success. The most famous, or infamous, was perhaps Sir Walter Raleigh, an English aristocrat, writer, soldier, courtier and explorer. In 1594 he read a Spanish account of a great ‘golden city’ at the headwaters of the Caroní River. A year later, Raleigh sailed to the New World and explored what is now Guyana and eastern Venezuela in search of El Dorado. His expedition had two aims: to compete with the Spanish by creating an English [4]

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settlement in Guyana; and to find the mythical city of El Dorado, which he believed was the Indian city of Manoa. These aims were linked: finding El Dorado meant a settlement in Guyana, which meant competing with the Spanish. Yet Raleigh failed. He did not find El Dorado, but he was convinced that there was ‘a city of gold’ because he found gold on the riverbanks and in villages. Once back in England, he published The Discovery of Guiana (1596) an account of his expedition, which until recently was believed to have exaggerated what he had found, and had thus contributed to the El Dorado legend.6 In his book he identified El Dorado as a city on Lake Parime far up the Orinoco River in Guyana. This city was marked as such on English and other maps until its existence was disproved by Alexander von Humboldt during his Latin America expedition (1799–1804). In 1617, Raleigh returned on a second expedition in search of El Dorado, but by now an old man he stayed behind on Trinidad, while his son, Watt Raleigh, was killed in a battle with Spaniards. Then upon Raleigh’s return to England, King James ordered Raleigh’s beheading for disobeying orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish. Paul Sellin’s recent account however may have blown apart this received wisdom by showing that Raleigh had discovered a gold mine, but Raleigh did not discover El Dorado nor did the use and meaning of the El Dorado myth diminish in any way.7 Thereafter ‘El Dorado’ was used metaphorically for any place where wealth or any benefit could be rapidly acquired with ease and little effort. This meaning has been reflected in names given to many places around the world: from the small town in the north-east of Victoria, Australia, where gold was found during the 1850s; two former gold mining areas in Canada, one on Beaverlodge Lake in Northern Saskatchewan and the other in Madoc, Ontario; to the countless places in the USA, in Arkansas, California, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas (particularly Houston), Wisconsin, New Mexico, Minnesota and Nebraska. It was also reflected in the reference to Australia by the Irish in the nineteenth century as an ‘El Dorado’,8 and specifically to South Australians as ‘El Doradoans’.9 Importantly, the term El Dorado was consistently associated with places where wealth and value could be had, as its persistence as a stock trope in the London Times indicates. In an 1874 article entitled ‘The true El Dorado’, an ‘occasional correspondent’ exulted at the agricultural and mining wealth of California, no doubt hoping to attract more British investment.10 Rapid success in the ‘new America’ of the 1850s became associated with the Californian gold rush – ‘the California Dream’ – yet many forget that hard work, luck and the very present danger of lawlessness made that dream a hell for many rather than an El Dorado. [5]

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This perhaps helps to explain why in 1874, a quarter of a century after the gold rush, British investment was being courted for the ‘true El Dorado’. In 1884 it was not ‘the true El Dorado’ being advertised, but ‘a neglected El Dorado’, that of Georgetown in Northern Queensland. The Times chose to publish the report made to the Queensland government by William Samwell, the Gold Warden of Georgetown. Although the report does not use the term El Dorado, The Times did not miss the opportunity to link the exaggerated descriptions of wealth, future world importance and utopian lifestyle, to El Dorado, in this case a real El Dorado ready to be exploited and enjoyed.11 Although the report aimed to be scientific, Samwell’s last sentence ended with a flourish of exaggeration. The region named the Etheridge Goldfield, with its vast outlying districts of gold-bearing and mineral country, will soon become of vast importance to the commercial world, and its mining industry will be one of the greatest factors in the north in promoting the settlement of a large European population on the soil of this portion of the colony of Queensland – a colony whose many resources are inexhaustible, and whose life is still as young and fresh as a sunbeam of the morning.12

Georgetown never achieved the world importance Samwell predicted and by 1886 its mining industry was well and truly depressed and the population in decline.13 This neglected El Dorado remained true to the original Latin American myth. In 1898 The Times featured another article entitled ‘The Moroccan El Dorado’, lamenting the British government’s recognition of the incorporation of a portion of south-west Morocco to the Sultanate of Morocco and suggesting that the future of this region and its surrounds should be a European protectorate.14 The use of the term changed little after the Great War. Articles appeared in The Times entitled ‘White Australia: the settlers “El Dorado”’ in 1921, advertising that Australia needed immigrants but only white immigrants;15 while in the following year ‘The El Dorado of the Far East: China’s Vast Trade Markets’ criticised the great Liberal critics of Empire Richard Cobden and John Bright for questioning Lord Palmerston’s China policy in the 1860s as short-sighted because British trade with China was now booming16 – it was lost on the author that waiting six decades was hardly El Dorado. The Times continued to link imperialism with El Dorado even after the Second World War, albeit somewhat more cautiously. In ‘Drawbacks to developing “El Dorado”’, the colonial correspondent for The Times argued that much hard work and government investment were finally seeing British Guiana reap the benefits of good British government – hardly, however, the story of fast wealth and opulent lifestyle.17 [6]

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Then, in an interesting twist, the subsequent Professor of Social Anthropology, Michael Banton, published an article derived from his Ph.D. dissertation in The Times entitled ‘Britain’s Negro minority: the attraction of an imperial “El Dorado”’, which focused on the attraction of the imperial centre as a place of migration for colonial subjects. London and other British urban centres were, at least according to The Times, the new ‘El Dorados’.18 The case of ‘the empire comes home’ arose from both push and pull factors, but mostly the latter, and was hardly an El Dorado experience – it involved much hardship and hard work and enduring racism rather than acceptance.19 Literature, however, has primarily consigned El Dorado to the symbolic and therefore has been more sceptical and satirical, using the term as an ideal metaphor for exaggerated expectations of value and unsuccessful and greedy imperial expeditions. El Dorado has fascinated countless Latin American writers and almost as many English writers.20 As John Silver noted, the Spanish historian Emiliano Jos claimed that ‘more territory was explored as a result of searches for El Dorado than for any other single reason’.21 Both Milton, in his Paradise Lost (Book XI: 408–11), and Voltaire, Candide (chs 18, 19), identified El Dorado as fantasy. Voltaire set some of Candide in El Dorado, where the city was made of material finer than gold and diamonds, which ended up being dirt and rocks, and as Silver noted, ‘no member of the French educated elite was expected to miss the ironical point when Candide mused . . . [that] surely, all is well only in El Dorado, and nowhere else in the world’.22 El Dorado was also the title and subject of a four-stanza satirical short poem by Edgar Allan Poe, about a knight’s failed search for the legendary city. Then the Polish author, Joseph Conrad, provided another pertinent reference in his novella Heart of Darkness, where the ‘Eldorado Exploring Expedition’ journeys into the jungles of Africa in search of conquest and treasure, only to meet an untimely demise.23 He followed this in Nostromo where he transported El Dorado to its home continent when he explored how natives in Latin America were being branded ‘racially backward’ because they resisted European progress and efforts to create a utopia.24 John Silver claimed that the ‘most formidable attempt to consign El Dorado to the past, and to cleanse geography of this anachronism, was made by Baron Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century’.25 In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America Humboldt was the first European to advocate the promotion of European enlightened and scientific values and approaches to Latin America, by advocating for the ‘rational development’ of the continent, particularly agricultural development, as opposed to the exploitation of its people in pursuit of El Dorado [7]

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and other greedy and get-rich quick schemes. For Humboldt, El Dorado was clearly a danger to science, and it therefore represented all that was bad with pre-Enlightenment Europe.26 Yet as will be shown in this volume, El Dorados in various imperial traditions do not end with the coming and consolidation of Enlightenment ideas, and indeed they flourished in particular during a golden age of imperialism and colonisation, the five decades beginning with the 1870s.

Historicising utopia It is important from the outset to note that the word ‘utopia’ has a double meaning. Coming from the Greek ου’ meaning ‘not’ and τόπος meaning ‘place’, these together combine to make utopia, ‘no place’. The English homophone ‘eutopia’, derived from the Greek ευ’ ‘good’ and τόπος (place), means ‘good place’. The implication is that the perfectly ‘good place’ is really ‘no place’. This has given rise to an interpretation that suggests that utopia, although meaning a ‘perfect society’, is ultimately unreachable, and therefore more imagined than real. As is well known, the origin of the word lies with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The book described an ideal society in a fictional island of More’s creation, where there was religious freedom and integration, an equitable welfare state and no private property. There have been various interpretations of More’s Utopia, and disagreements centre on his intentions as to whether his utopia was possible or not. Quentin Skinner, an intellectual historian and leading scholar in interpreting early-modern political thinkers and their texts, claimed that Utopia was More’s ideal, but unobtainable, society,27 which explains why there were so many inconsistencies between the ideas in Utopia and More’s practice in real life, particularly with regard to religious freedom. This interpretation is bolstered by the books’ title and its confusion between utopia/eutopia, ‘no place’ and ‘good place’. The first recorded utopian proposal, and one which greatly influenced More, was Plato’s Republic (Πολιτεία, Politeia), a Socratic dialogue, concerning the definition of justice (δικαιοσύνη, dikaiosini), the order and character of the just city-state and of the just person. In it Plato proposes an authoritarian division of society into a rigid structure of ‘golden’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, and ‘iron’ socio-economic classes. The golden citizens are the elites trained in a rigorous fifty-year-long educational programme to be benign ‘philosopher-kings’. Their wisdom will eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, in a state that runs like clockwork and in which there are few laws and which rarely sends its people to war. [8]

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Applying the frames for utopia as conceived by More and Plato to imperialism and colonial settlement is most revealing. Three examples will suffice, one involving British colonial settlement in the USA in the sixteenth century; a second on French imperial expansion in NorthWest Africa in the mid-nineteenth century; and a third a Habsburg example for the late nineteenth century. Ethan Schmidt’s recent article showed how the early English failures to colonise the Americas planned to incorporate Native Americans into English social structures to be transposed to the colonial space. As regards Schmidt’s specific case, Virginia, these Englishmen planned a ‘well-ordered commonwealth’ in accordance with Sir Thomas More’s utopian view and those of others building on his, such as Richard Hakluyt and William Shakespeare. As in More’s Utopia, these Englishmen envisaged introducing the superior English culture to these backward people, but not forcing it on them, in order to create a blended, hybrid, multiracial utopian colonial–indigenous society. Schmidt shows that the early English colonisation projects adopted More’s ‘humanist’ third way (in antipathy to choosing uninhabited places or using violence)as a tool to persuade indigenous populations of the virtues of the colonisation project. Many other contemporaries of More wrote about forming such an integrated utopian society, thus colonisation was not merely driven by anticipated profit, but additionally, and perhaps primarily, by the hope of creating this ‘perfect’ and ‘ideal’ society – a utopian commonwealth of colonial settlers and indigenous peoples. Indeed many also claimed that the indigenous populations under Spanish domination would join this new Protestant Commonwealth. In Virginia, peaceful co-existence worked for a short while, before the English reverted to mass violence.28 Michael Hefferman’s article on Henri Duveyrier, a French utopian imperialist active in North Africa showed the limitations of the utopian imperial project in the mid-late nineteenth century. Duveyrier had been heavily influenced by the beliefs of his father, Charles, a follower of the utopian philosophy of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon. Saint-Simonians held complex beliefs that scientific and technological advancement would create a world of interconnected advanced, urbanised, industrialised and multicultural cities. They welcomed European imperialism as a way to develop commercial, religious and cultural integration linking Europeans (which they saw as masculine) and non-Europeans (feminine) to build on a new breed of humanity containing the best qualities from each ‘parent’ group. Henry Duveyrier explored the Sahara at the young age of 24, obtaining sought-after geographical expertise, and he argued that crossSaharan trade could be profitable to French imperialists, so long as [9]

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the matriarchic Touareg people were involved in coordinating this trade, despite earlier explorers dispelling the idea of a wealthy African interior. Hefferman argued that after the Franco-Prussian war the French became obsessed with compensating for European territorial losses and reasserting their international prestige and position as a power by expanding their empire in North Africa. Three European colonial projects involved Duveyrier in the first decade of the Third Republic, the last, the trans-Saharan railway, had tragic consequences, when Duveyrier’s brand of utopian colonialism was ignored in favour of violent military conquest.29 The third example, although grounded in Theodor Hertzka’s novel Freiland (1890), provides interesting parallels regarding the utopian colonial project. Set in an uninhabited place in East Africa, Freiland recounts the utopian settlement of enlightened Europeans, mainly Austrians and Germans, near the nomadic Masai. Hertzka, a JewishHungarian-Austrian economist and journalist, develops Freiland into a utopian society with 95,000 inhabitants in the first year, rising to 780,000 in three years, and reaching 40 million in twenty-five years, with 25 million Europeans and 15 million indigenous Africans. This multiracial society does not entirely resemble the utopian colonial projects of the previous two examples: although living harmoniously there is no integration or ‘cross-breeding’, there is deliberate avoidance of the indigenous Africans and a strong and elitist Germanic-inspired culture. Ulrich Bach argued that Hertzka’s Freiland structurally resembled actual nineteenth-century colonies in Africa.30 Yet there was one significant difference – actual colonies were not industrialised. Freiland succeeds as a utopian society because of its rapidly developing technologies and production methods, which compares well with the ideas of the Saint-Simonian utopian imperialists. These three examples not only highlight the differences between utopian imperial and colonial projects and those of El Dorado, but that utopian adventures were more complex and diverse in their conception. As mentioned earlier many cases of El Dorado make way for utopian ideas in order to justify the lack of rapid advancement, and many of the cases in this volume follow this pattern. But Holger Droessler’s chapter on the Germans in the Pacific is the most comparable to the three cases above, especially with the Saint-Simonian utopian imperialist project. Relevant too are the contributions dealing with planned religious utopias by Trevor Harris, on the Welsh in Argentina, and Matthew Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz with the German Templers in Palestine. Additionally, Richards’s chapter on Darién, an exemplar El Dorado, becomes a dystopia for Scottish colonists and investors, salvaged only by the union. [ 10 ]

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Historiography: theories and concepts As stated above, this volume does not aim to present the concepts of El Dorado or utopias/dystopias as overarching theories of imperialism, a caveat that will be further developed by a discussion of the traditional all-encompassing theories. The traditional and most popular explanations for imperialism are theories that revolve around anticipated economic profit (from the socialist John Hobson,31 to the Marxist politician Vladimir Lenin32 and historian Eric Hobsbawm,33 to more recent historians such as P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins);34 strategic gain (supported by the historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher);35 or the turbulent frontier thesis (proposed by John S. Galbraith36 and David K. Fieldhouse).37 These theories, however, never question the methodology behind the decisions to embark upon imperial expansion or colonial settlement or how these decisions are justified, nor are they interested in the psychology behind imperial and colonial projects and the role of emotions and thought processes. The first to question the rational underpinnings for imperialism was the Austrian-American economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter. He argued that European imperial expansion was explained by instinctive rather than rational behaviour, in the same way that war was a primitive response to a threat, imperialism was the instinctive response to social, political and economic crises or perceived crises. Schumpeter argued that this phenomenon was not new and that therefore imperialism was atavistic in character, because it was a primitive human response, and therefore possible during any period of time, depending on circumstances, such as anxieties, threats (both internal and external) and the individuals involved.38 Andrew Kanya-Forstner first referred to the ‘mythical’ or ‘El Dorado’ thesis to explain French expansion in Africa. Developing his theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kanya-Forstner, a student of Robinson and Gallagher, attributed French expansion in Western Africa to the myths and delusions of the official mind, primarily of men on the spot, who convinced the politicians back home of the value of the resources of Western Africa. Kanya-Forstner showed that no such resources existed, but instead they were invented to justify imperial expansion. For example, French imperialists evoked and recreated medieval legends about the wealth of Senegal when contemplating informal control in the 1850s. Men on the spot revived these in the late 1870s to justify formalising control. Fantastic official estimates of the resources and population of Western Africa were used to justify turning it into ‘the India of the French empire’ in 1879 – an ‘El Dorado’ of boundless [ 11 ]

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wealth. Another example manifested when French imperialists perceived a threat to French strategic interests and prestige after the British occupied Egypt, leading to French expansion into the Upper Nile, with the aim to threaten the British in Egypt. After diplomacy failed, the French decided on force in the 1890s, setting their sights on Fashoda. The move nearly resulted in an Anglo-French war. However, KanyaForstner showed that the aims behind the Fashoda strategy were based on unrealistic illusions and on the perceived importance of its strategic location. The move on Fashoda aimed to scare the British into negotiations, but instead ended in a humiliating French withdrawal, and the realisation that Fashoda had no intrinsic strategic value.39 Soon after appearing, the ‘mythical’ or ‘El Dorado’ theory was heavily criticised and it has been largely ignored by imperial historians. It was claimed that Kanya-Forstner failed to place the decision-making in a socio-economic context or to link it with ‘a frame of mind’ of imperialism.40 G. N. Sanderson thought the evidence to support the ‘mythical theory’ was not persuasive and did not explain why the myths suddenly took control of French policy in 1879. Robert Tignor wanted to know when and how the myths of wealth originated and why they were held in the face of accumulating counter-evidence.41 The criticisms, therefore, did not dismiss the overwhelming evidence of exaggeration, but questioned why such exaggerations were manifested at the time to justify imperial expansion. Here lies the important distinction between Kanya-Forstner’s approach and that of others attempting a general explanation: the latter focus on motivations, while the former focuses on whether these are real or exaggerated, driven by evidence or by hope. And it is to this second approach that this volume speaks. This distinction is vital. Understanding the concepts of El Dorado and utopias/dystopias means scrutinising what drove the imperialism and colonial settlement. Justifications here are also important, as they take on exaggerated hope. Such justifications are made internally within the group making and implementing the decision, and externally to convince the wider group outside the decision-making process (although sometimes this wider group is part of the implementation) of the wisdom of the decision. Often, however, such justifications are used by the wider group acting as a lobby or pressure group upon the more powerful group making the decisions. This volume argues that one dimension of most imperial and colonial projects are their quest for El Dorado and/or utopia and that there are psychological and emotional factors, from desire, hope, impulse and embarrassment, at play. Numerous historians have made reference to El Dorados and utopias either as part of general observations on imperialism and colonial [ 12 ]

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settlement, or when exploring cases (see below). For example Christopher Clark claimed in his most recent book:

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The idea of colonial possessions – imagined as eldorados with cheap labour and raw materials and burgeoning native or settlers populations to buy national exports – was as bewitching to the German middle classes as to those of the established European empires.42

Such observations indicate that historians have been more aware of the dimension of El Dorados and utopias in imperial and colonial settlement than perhaps the historiography indicates. Perhaps there has been an element of ‘this is too obvious’, and yet scholars have chosen to not pursue these ideas comparatively.

Historiography: cases across time and imperial traditions This volume is the first to consolidate the concepts of El Dorados and utopias/dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement and present them in a comprehensive comparative analysis, yet many historians have identified and discussed various individual cases that need mentioning. In Robinson and Gallagher’s seminal article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, they make a statement in their last paragraph, which historians have largely ignored, that implies that the justifications for imperial expansion into Africa did not accord with the traditionally held motivations. the historian who is seeking to find the deepest meaning of the expansion at the end of the nineteenth century should look not at the mere pegging out of claims in African jungles and bush, but at the successful exploitation of the empire, both formal and informal, which was then coming to fruition in India, in Latin America, in Canada and elsewhere. The main work of imperialism in the so-called expansionist era was in the more intensive development of areas already linked with the world economy, rather than in the extensive annexations of the remaining marginal regions of Africa. The best finds and prizes had already been made; in tropical Africa the imperialists were merely scraping the bottom of the barrel.43

This assertion allowed them to veer away from the economic impulse and put forward the broader strategic thesis. Yet also, and more importantly for this volume, Robinson and Gallagher hint at a process for justifying the scramble for Africa that finds the imperialists (as they would put it) exaggerating the necessity and value of acquiring territory in Africa, where they argue they were ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’. They therefore hint at a discord between the motivations, driven by [ 13 ]

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claims of economic and political value that reinforced and exaggerated the motivations, justifications, and realities. This discord connects with what James Belich has referred to as ‘boosters’44 – exaggerating and sometimes fabricating the realities in order to justify imperial and colonial projects. As historians such as Kanya-Forstner, Stokes (epigraph) and MacKenzie45 have argued, the ‘scramble for Africa’ was clouded in exaggerated expectations of value rather than based on tangible evidence and realities. The prolific Finnish historian (primarily of Tanzania) Juhani Koponen agreed. He referred to the justifications for the rapid European imperial expansion as a ‘mirage’ and, to be more precise, that ‘the European partitioners of Africa were more driven by visions than by realities and that the Africa they had before their eyes was a mirage’.46 Belich has also recently argued in his thought-provoking Replenishing the Earth that the first stage of British imperial expansion involved collective speculative manias – large risk-taking ventures built on exaggerations. Some of these were successful, others were not, but almost always the investment from the metropole and the work of settlers was greater than that originally envisaged.47 His views on settler colonialism and those of others discussed above on the ‘scramble’ are reflected in individual cases. The late Glenn Ames wrote about a Portuguese El Dorado in Africa in the 1660s. He convincingly argued that during the seventeenth century the Portuguese Crown was preoccupied with the Zambezi River basin as a site for ‘wishful speculation’, forming in their minds an ‘African El Dorado’ overflowing with rich mineral resources. Unlike the Scottish Darién scheme of a few decades later, which is the subject of the next chapter in this volume, the Portuguese met with some success along the Zambezi, but nothing remotely approximating the initial expectations. The Portuguese African El Dorado never materialised.48 One of the more fascinating and recently exposed British El Dorado cases was that of the small Irish county of Wicklow, south of Dublin, starting from 1795. What is so fascinating about this case is that like the original El Dorado, it was enduring, although obviously nowhere near as well known. Timothy Alborn showed that for six weeks in the autumn of 1795 Wicklow residents earned £10,000 in gold dust and nuggets sifting the sands of a stream that flowed through Croghan Kinsella. The authorities, wanting to restore public order and take control of the possible wealth, put an end to the free prospecting, but very little gold was subsequently found. Yet for the best part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, Wicklow served as both a literal and mythical El Dorado. People still waxed lyrical about the potential gold reserves in Wicklow, while others joked about the lack of it.49 [ 14 ]

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Another British example was the occupation of the Ionian Islands in 1815. Although not exactly identified as a case of ‘El Dorado’, recent historians50 have shown that it had been initially perceived to offer immediate and long-lasting strategic value, but the British did not fashion a strategic role for them and gave them to Greece within fifty years. During this time the British invested much time and money in fortifications, first building them, then tearing them down, building them up again, and then tearing them down once more.51 This was clearly irrational, yet common sense eventually prevailed, as Schumacher shows in this volume, but at what cost? Raymond E. Dumett and Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry too showed that the Gold Coast (Ghana) was the British African El Dorado during the ‘golden age of empire’. Although disagreeing on many points, they both showed that British imperialism in the Gold Coast centred around exaggerated expectations of value and little success in achieving these fantastic expectations, namely of finding vast quantities of gold.52 Another British case was the 1898 lease of Weihaiwei in China, which aimed to convert it into a naval base for immediate strategic benefit to counter the Russian base at Port Arthur. First under the Admiralty, then the War Office, it proved a poor base and in 1901 it was handed to civilian administrators. Successive British governments considered it worthless, but did not relinquish it to China until 1922. Two historians called the occupation of Weihaiwei the ‘irrationality of empire’53 and it is an excellent example of occupying territory based on misguided perceptions of advantage. The French case of Guangzhouwan in China offers an interesting parallel, and seems ripe for study. Palestine was another case, this time with a significant cultural pull. Although it did not figure in British strategic plans as much – official or popular – it was built up as the Promised Land within a popular culture that associated it with the family bible and Sunday church and school. But British soldiers and officials ruling it after 1917 were shocked that its appearance was so different from the biblical imagery and yet the religious impulse was still evoked.54 The British did not have this illusion to themselves, with German civil society groups also interested in it, as can be seen in the chapter in this volume by Matthew Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz. Additionally, one could easily make the case that Zionism also had both elements of El Dorado and utopia in its manifestation. The British were not alone. In 1982 John Wright showed that explorers, missionaries, politicians and intellectuals created myths to justify the Italian occupation of Libya. They wanted Italy to secure economic resources, settle a growing population (ten million Italians had emigrated from 1896–1915), increase prestige after losing a war with Abyssinia [ 15 ]

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in 1896 and to obtain a strategic position in the Mediterranean to end the perceived suffocation from France and Britain, especially the former, which had taken Tunis, the point in Africa nearest Sicily. All the territory suited to colonisation and Mediterranean strategy was taken except Tripolitania (Tripoli and Cyrenaica), since 1864 an Ottoman vilayet. A lobby consistently promoted their advantages and in March 1911, Italian nationalists launched a newspaper to promote Tripoli as the ‘Promised Land’.55 Finally the Italian government presented an ultimatum to the Ottoman government of the Committee of Union and Progress on 26 September, and the Ottomans replied with the proposal of transferring control of Libya without war, maintaining a formal Ottoman suzerainty (along the same lines as British Cyprus), but this was not sufficient for the Italian government, who ordered the bombardment of Tripoli on 3 October 1911, and the eventual invasion, which started a week later. This volume includes a chapter by Giuseppe Finaldi that provides a much needed update and extension of Wright’s work. The classic British example, and inspiration for this volume, was that of Cyprus, which the British occupied in 1878. My 2009 monograph exposed Cyprus as an inconsequential possession, once it had proved an El Dorado.56 By 1879 the idea that Cyprus would become a valuable imperial asset was largely ridiculed. Cyprus remained a backwater until the early 1950s, and even then its value was overstated. Until the Great War Cyprus was a backwater par excellence: a handful of troops garrisoned a peaceful island, which had little investment and no strategic value beyond being a pawn. Even as a pawn it failed, since the British failed to give it to Greece in 1915.57 It did serve as a valuable provisions and intelligence (both as regards gathering and counter-espionage) base during the war, but this was not a strong enough reason to justify retaining the island,58 which the British did and made it a Crown Colony in 1925. During the Second World War it played a lesser role than in the First World War. After the war, it was again decided to retain the island despite support in the Foreign Office for giving it to Greece. Finally, in 1952 a major role was found for it when it was decided to move the British Middle East HQ in the Suez Canal Zone to the island.59 Although it cannot be denied that the island now had a role, the British overstated their position that the entire island was needed as a base, and soon, in the face of right-wing Greek Cypriot violence aimed at uniting the island to Greece and more importantly the failed Suez escapade, the British concluded that only bases in the island were needed. This paved the way for Cypriot independence in exchange for British retention of sovereign military enclaves (99 square miles) and numerous other military installations in the Republic of Cyprus.60 [ 16 ]

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Even in the post-colonial military role of these bases, their vitality has been questioned. There can be no doubt that they have served as importing staging posts for training and intelligence gathering (namely in relation to the Middle East). Akrotiri, in particular, has served as a forward airbase. During the 1960s and 1970s, the British positioned nuclear weapons on these bases, thus imparting to them a vital role in Cold War deterrence strategy.61 Nevertheless, the value of these bases has been questioned, especially since the end of the Cold War.62 They are the remnants of a British ‘Mediterranean El Dorado’ and a ‘Mediterranean utopia’.63 Finally, the quest for El Dorado and/or utopia is not confined to the long forgotten cases of the past, but there are certainly contemporary examples. One example springs to mind, that of Jim Jones and his socialist utopian ‘People’s Temple’ which ended as a dystopia par excellence, when almost a thousand people perished in a mass suicide in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana.64 This example is an extreme case of dystopia. The El Dorados, utopias/dystopias explored in this volume, despite some differences, show remarkable similarities with the already published cases, especially as regards exaggerated expectations of imperial value based on rash, unsound or no research, rather than scientific evidence. This reflects the potential for every imperial and colonial project to be a quest for El Dorado or utopia.

Comparing the cases in this volume The remaining chapters in this volume are all cases and are arranged in a broadly chronological framework in order to explore El Dorados and utopias/dystopias across different colonial spaces, imperial traditions and periods in history since the seventeenth century. The first case is the famous Darién scheme analysed by Eric Richards. Darién was an ambitious Scottish venture to found a trading colony on the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. It was one of the most spectacular imperial misadventures of early modern history. It was speculative, yet propelled by hard-headed calculations which proved to be overly inflated. Scottish feelings of isolation gave urgency to the speculation, resulting in their placing all their eggs in one basket in order to vie with other imperial powers in the Caribbean. There was an element of emulation and anticipated fast returns to investment, but the scale and ambition of the project were beyond the financial possibilities of the Scots, who also lacked the political leverage in the context of the Caribbean rivalries of the European powers. Also the location proved so inhospitable that the Scots could not even stubbornly [ 17 ]

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hold on, as with numerous other similar cases of imperial expectations and harsh realities, such as with the British in Cyprus in 1878, or the Italians in Libya in 1912. The failed Darién scheme is a classic case of El Dorado, with the exception that the Scots did not hold on long enough for it to become an inconsequential possession, such as Cyprus and Libya, yet it was a dystopia for those involved, both on the ground and back in Scotland. Money, if not much time, was also wasted, this time by the British in the Ionian Islands, since they went through periods in their fivedecade rule during which they they spent large sums of money to develop their perceived strategic potential, only to give the islands to Greece in 1864. Leslie Rogne Schumacher shows that the Ionian Islands were a classic case of strategic El Dorado. The great initial exaggeration in British strategic conceptualisation of the Ionian Islands was not matched by the results, even though their cession was lamented by some. The assumption that possessing Corfu, in particular, helped protect Britain’s interests was based merely on the idea that territorial possessions in strategic areas were, ipso facto, useful to the Empire. Schumacher explains how this confidence in the intelligence of imperialism was misplaced and only made sense in an era prior to the overextension and fatigue of the British Empire, and was therefore contrary to the actual costs and benefits of imperialism. Just as Britain’s investment in Cyprus secured sparse returns in the defence of British strategic interests, Schumacher contends that Britain’s half-century control of the Ionian Islands may have served little purpose beyond upholding the notion that the Mediterranean must remain a ‘British lake’ for all time. The Ionian Islands became inconsequential, despite some advocates and investment, since they were eventually presented to Greece. Schumacher shows that possessing the Ionian Islands was based primarily on their value to British political and cultural discourse rather than on any rational reasoning. The next case by Leland Barrows is a classic case of French El Dorado in West Africa, specifically Senegal. By the 1850s it was well known that Bambuk, a region on the right bank of the Falémé River, a major tributary of the upper Senegal River, was a major source of the West African gold that had been traded through Ghana to North Africa. Many French officials had wanted to occupy Bambuk, but were prevented by distance, disease, difficulties of access, opposition of the local peoples to French penetration, restricted funding, and lack of sustained interest of metropolitan officials. After 1852, Louis Faidherbe, the governor of Senegal (1854–61), a military engineer, convinced himself that if the French engineer corps introduced modern mining techniques into Bambuk, it could be made to produce considerably more refined gold [ 18 ]

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than was being traded at Sénouébou, the existing French post on the Falémé River. In 1856 Faidherbe claimed to the French naval minister that Senegal had the richest gold mines in the world. He was soon leading an expedition to Bambuk in July 1858, where he occupied the village of Kéniéba, inland south-east of Sénoudébou, said to be a major centre of gold production. French sappers immediately sunk several deep shafts hoping to intersect an exploitable gold vein. While turning up sand, they noted that the local Malinké women who washed the earth that they scraped off the sides of a ravine near the shafts, captured more gold dust than they did. This result was obviously not sufficient to support the overhead costs of European mining technology; so, Faidherbe’s gold mining project failed. There are some similarities with the Swan River region on the western coast of Australia, with the difference being that the exaggerated expectations of value revolved around agriculture. Described, as Cyprus was in 1878, as the healthiest place on earth, salubrious, a land of fertility, and a paradise – in this case a veritable El Dorado of the Indian Ocean – Swan River fell flat. Such elevated descriptions of the Swan River provided fodder for an enthusiastic British press, seducing unsuspecting migrants, as of 1829, to the Swan River Colony. Yet the Swan River Colony remained an ‘inconsequential possession’ of the British Empire until the discovery of gold in the 1890s, which only momentarily provided some boost. During these difficult times, desperate boosters of the colony repeatedly deployed its reputation as a salubrious El Dorado of the Antipodes to attract permanent settlers. These cases compare well with the Germans in the Pacific, although here a utopian society propelled the settlement and not merely hopes of immediate profit. For centuries European were fascinated by the Pacific and its inhabitants, but in the nineteenth century, image and reality clashed in the context of colonisation. In the final decades of this century, the German Empire annexed colonies in the region, from New Guinea to Samoa. The South Seas were usually portrayed as an exotic garden where man and nature coexisted peacefully, free from the corruption of industrial modernity ravaging Europe. Yet Holger Droessler shows that what promised to be a German utopian society in the Pacific soon became a colonial venture just like any other: lucrative for a few and a nightmare for most, especially for the Pacific Islanders. Droessler explores the changing relationship between utopian representations of the German colonies in the Pacific and the violent realities on the ground from the 1870s when the Pacific emerged as a policy issue in Germany until the 1920s when Australia and New Zealand took control. What seemed ‘inconsequential’ or ‘irrational’ [ 19 ]

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to decision-makers in Berlin or Hamburg had very real and often dire consequences for Pacific Islanders. The next case, the Welsh in Argentina, compares very well with the Swan River Colony as a case of agricultural El Dorado and with the Germans in the Pacific as a cultural utopia, even though it differs because of its religious dimension. The industrialisation, urbanisation and Anglicisation of Wales prompted many Welsh during the nineteenth century to seek a new life elsewhere in order to preserve their Welsh culture. Destinations were many and varied: New York, Pennsylvania and Australia were popular. But in those places effective Anglicisation was in progress, bringing with it the same pressures that pushed the Welsh to leave Britain. Trevor Harris shows that separation from an English-speaking environment was consequently a key criterion in the search for a Welsh promised land. The region of Patagonia in Argentina was one of the preferred destinations, with the first Welsh emigrants arriving in 1865. But the area proved to be anything but the idyllic spot they had hoped for and expected. The venture seemed doomed. Lush valleys would have to be remade on the Patagonian pampas, and the new paradise built from scratch: a laborious task in which the original settlers were helped by several new waves of Welsh emigrants in flight from an enduring economic depression in Britain. Harris shows that Welsh colonisation in Patagonia was no El Dorado as had been expected: it was a very hard slog. He argues that exaggerated expectations made way for the paradoxical consequences of the Welsh Latin American episode. The German Templer settlement in Palestine resembles the Welsh Patagonian colony with an even stronger religious dimension. Matthew Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz show how the German Templers saw the colonisation of the Holy Lands by Christians such as themselves as a means of preparing the ground for the return of the Messiah. In accordance with their millenarian beliefs, they established a colony in Palestine that quickly expanded, but just as quickly came to lose much of its otherworldliness in the face of the practical tasks and pressures of colonialism. Palestine did not prove to be the El Dorado imagined: like the Welsh in Patagonia it was a great deal of hard work to make it work, let alone to gain any profit; while as for the religious utopia envisaged, it was anything but. By the First World War, the understanding of the mission of the colony changed both for the Templers and for secular German colonial enthusiasts who had encouraged it: they saw in the colonies of Sarona and Wilhelmina the beginnings of a German settler colony in Palestine. Fitzpatrick and Jensz show how the slippage between colonial desires and realities transformed the Templer colonies of Palestine from independent utopian religious [ 20 ]

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communities into supposed beachheads for German state imperialism in the latter years of the Ottoman and German Empires. Religious settler societies could not have been further from the minds of the Italians settling in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and as for utopias, they were heavily one-sided, and therefore could only be seen as dystopias for the locals. Daniela Baratieri shows how once the Italians occupied these places between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s they found them to be rather desolate, boring and therefore inconsequential. Eventually these places provided Italian men with a sexual El Dorado where they could immediately execute their wildest sexual fantasies and even go outside the boundaries and mores regulating sexuality in the metropole. Underage sex (indigenous girls were considered ‘ripe’ by the age of 11), bigamy, rape, homosexuality and sexual slavery were rampant. The conquest of Somalia did not offer the Italian state more than an imagined strategic position on the Indian Ocean, but well into the 1960s it remained in the common imagination, as the land inhabited by the ‘black female Vikings’, the ‘most beautiful women in the world’. Baratieri shows that the tension between colonial desire and the asymmetrical power to realise it reflects in Italian imperialism in east Africa a one-sided El Dorado and a colonial nightmare for the indigenous peoples. The Italians did not have time for such excesses in Libya however much it remained an inconsequential possession. Giuseppe Finaldi argues that the Italians believed that an Empire would solve a variety of problems that beset Italy after unification – its perceived backwardness, poverty, crime, social conflict, military weakness and the massive outflow of emigrants to Northern Europe and the Americas. Libya was regarded as a panacea for many of Italy’s woes. The ‘fertility’ of Libyan land, its strategic importance, the footsteps of the Roman legionaries of old (supposedly still visible in the sand), and the glories bestowed on an Italy fumbling to be a Great Power were imagined as a quick-fix solution available in Africa to a nation bold enough to take the initiative. After the conquest Italy instead was faced with a dangerous Arab rebellion and the laborious task of making something of Libya’s meagre resources. Despite the harsh realities, Italians held onto their dream (passing over the corpses of tens of thousands of Libyans) and launched a series of experiments to ‘validate’ their fantasies. Finaldi takes the work of John Wright65 to the next level by showing how from the very beginning Libya was an El Dorado that the Italians held onto despite its being inconsequential, much as with Cyprus and Weihaiwei. The British also had their own imperial dream in the desert which included oil – Mesopotamia. Ann Matters shows that numerous studies attribute the desire for oil as the principal reason for the British invasion [ 21 ]

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and occupation of Mesopotamia during the First World War – that alone would trigger the El Dorado theory. Yet other motives can be evoked to explain this invasion, which also fall into the El Dorado theory. From the early nineteenth century, two themes emerged: reclamation and restoration. With British-built railways and irrigation schemes, Mesopotamia’s wasted lands would be made fertile, and thus the Garden of Eden would be restored to feed the world. Nineteenthcentury traveller writers peopled the myth, promising the restoration of Mesopotamia’s glorious past, and twentieth-century British war propagandists perpetuated that myth. Before granting independence to Iraq in 1932 the British had visited and revisited schemes to develop the country but very little had been achieved. Matters show that the case of Mesopotamia, which compares well to the cases of Cyprus, Libya and Swan River, was a classic case of an El Dorado from which the imperial power extracted itself, however in a different way from its extraction from the Ionian Islands and Weihaiwei (and its attempted extraction from Cyprus in 1915), given that it maintained its informal control through a series of negotiated treaties. The final example shows how exaggerated expectations of value continued to impair imperial expectations well into the twentieth century and how such expectations became even more evident when the imperial power was under threat. John Hennessey explores how the French high expectations for the strategic and resource-usefulness of French Indo-China on the eve of the Second World War were grossly exaggerated, proving to be little more than a burden. Before the fall of France, French leaders hoped to draw on human and material resources from Indochina to support the war in Europe, but these proved sparse and could not be transported. The subsequent Vichy regime hoped to use French Indochina to revive French pride, but soon found itself unable to adequately defend Indochina and was embarrassingly forced to accede to dozens of Japanese demands.

Conclusion Together these cases show how El Dorados and utopias/dystopias are common to the story of imperial and colonial projects, and that they transcend periods of history, imperial traditions and imperial/colonial spaces. This volume hopes to offer a comprehensive exploration of imperial and colonial settlement policies that were overly exaggerated in their expectations and hopes compared to the harsh realities on the ground. How common these are across different historical periods, colonial spaces and imperial traditions indicates that they are not isolated examples but a part of the story of imperialism and colonial [ 22 ]

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settlement. That decisions on imperialism and colonial settlement can be explored as national policies that had motivations and justifications means the further breaking open of the previously confined debate on the impulses of imperialism and colonial settlement into a more nuanced (and diversified) understanding of its various thought processes, ideologies, hopes and desires that have social, cultural, philosophical and psychological dimensions and consequences at many levels.

Notes 1 The Muisca were the Chibcha-speaking people that formed the Muiscan Confederation of the central highlands of the eastern range of present-day Colombia. 2 John Silver, ‘The Myth of El Dorado’, History Workshop Journal, 34, 1992, 1–15, 1–2. 3 Paul R. Sellin, Treasure, Treason and the Tower: El Dorado and the Murder of Sir Walter Raleigh, Surrey, 2011. 4 Silver, ‘Myth of El Dorado’, 1–2. 5 See John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, New York, 1978. 6 Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana: With a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) etc. . . . performed in the year 1595 (ed.) Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, New York, 1970. 7 Mary C. Fuller, ‘Raleigh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discovery of Guiana’, Representations, 33, 1991, 42–64; Sellin, Treasure, Treason and the Tower. 8 David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Settlers: Immigration from Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colm Kiernan (ed.), Ireland and Australia, North Ryde, 1984, 29. 9 R. M. Gibbs, Under the Burning Sun: A History of Colonial South Australia, 1836–1900, Adelaide, 2013. I would like to thank Professor Eric Richards and Marilyn Arnold for this reference. 10 The Times, 4 August 1874, 4c. 11 The Times, 9 September 1886, 13f. 12 Ibid. 13 See http://queenslandplaces.com.au/node/359 14 The Times, 27 August 1898, 6d. 15 The Times, 14 October 1921, 12b. 16 The Times, 15 September 1922, 9a. 17 The Times, 8 December 1953, 9f. 18 The Times, 31 May 1954, 7f. 19 Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, Abacus, 2006, 308–47. 20 Silver, ‘Myth of El Dorado’, 2. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Jonah Raskin, ‘Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2(2), 1967, 113–31. 24 Silver, ‘Myth of El Dorado’, 13. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., 2–3. 27 Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe, Cambridge, 1990, 123–58. 28 Ethan A. Schmidt, ‘The Well-Ordered Commonwealth: Humanism, Utopian Perfectionism, and the English Colonisation of the Americas’, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, 7(3), 2014, 309–28. I am slightly reminded of Robert Owen’s plan to develop a colony in Texas during the 1820s based on the communitarian philosophy of utopian

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

socialism. Jose Maria Herrera, ‘Vision of a Utopian Texas: Robert Owen’s Colonization Scheme’, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 116(4), April 2013, 343–56. Michael Heffernan, ‘The Limits of Utopia: Henri Duveyrier and the Exploration of the Sahara in the Nineteenth Century’, Geographical Journal, 155(3), 1989, 342–52; Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2010. Ulrich E. Bach, ‘Seeking Emptiness: Theodor Hertzka’s Colonial Utopia Freiland (1890)’, Utopian Studies, 22(1), 2011, 74–90. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1900 and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, London, 1900. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, London, 1917. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914, London, 1987 (1994), 66. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914, London 1993; ‘The Theory and Practise of British Imperialism’, in Raymond Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism, London, 1999, 196–220. R. F. Robinson and J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, London, 1961. John S. Galbraith, ‘The “Turbulent Frontier” as a Factor in British Expansion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2, 1960, 150–68. D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘“Imperialism” – An Historiographical Revision’, Economic History Review, 14(2), 1961–62, 187–209. Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, New York, 1951, 83–5. A. S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sahara: A Study in French Military Imperialism, Cambridge, 1969 and ‘French Expansion in Africa: The Mythical Theory’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London, 1972, 277–94. Kanya-Forstner, ‘French Expansion in Africa’, 293. G. N. Sanderson, ‘The European Partition of Africa: Coincidence or Conjuncture’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30, 1974, 1–54, 14; Robert L. Tignor, ‘Review of The Conquest of the Western Sahara’, American Historical Review, 75(6), 1970, 1755–6. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers – How Europe Went to War in 1914, London, 2013, 141. I thank Dr Richard Scully, University of New England, for alerting me to this reference. J. A. Gallagher and R. E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6(1), 1953, 1–15. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford, 2009. John M. MacKenzie, The Partition of Africa 1880–1900 and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, 1983. Juhani Koponen, ‘The Partition of Africa: A Scramble for a Mirage?’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2(1), 1993, 117–35, 135. Belich, Replenishing the Earth. Glenn Ames, ‘An African Eldorado? The Portuguese Quest for Wealth and Power in Mozambique and the Rios De Cuama, c.1661–1663’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31(1), 1998, 91–110. Timothy Alborn, ‘An Irish El Dorado: Recovering Gold in County Wicklow’, Journal of British Studies, 50, 2011, 359–80. Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession, Manchester, 2009, 66–9. Michael Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, London, 1978, 61, 153; Bruce Knox, ‘British Policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847–1864: Nationalism and Imperial Administration’, English Historical Review, 99, 392, 1984, 503–29. Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labour, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900, Athens, 1998; Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, ‘To Wassa Fiase for Gold: Rethinking Colonial Rule, El Dorado, Antislavery, and Chieftaincy in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1874–1895’, History in Africa, 30, 2003, 11–36.

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EL DORADOS, UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS 53 Clarence Davis and Robert Gowen, ‘The British at Weihaiwei: A Case Study in the Irrationality of Empire’, The Historian, 63(2), 2000, 87–104. 54 Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, Oxford, 2005, 81, 88, 209, 247–94. 55 J. Wright, ‘Libya: Italy’s “Promised Land’’ ’, in E. G. H. Joffe and K. S. McLachlan (eds), Social & Economic Development of Libya, Wisbech, Cambs, 1982, 67–79. 56 Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 75–87. 57 Ibid., 202–71. 58 Andrekos Varnava, ‘British Military Intelligence in Cyprus during the Great War’, War in History, 19(3), 2012, 353–78. 59 George M. Alexander, ‘British Policy on the Question of Enosis, 1945–1946’, Kypriakai Spoudai, 1979, 79–94; George Horton Kelling, British Policy in Cyprus, 1939–1955, Austin, TX, 1988, 102, 131–41; Andrekos Varnava, The Cyprus Problem and the Defence of the Middle East, Melbourne, 2001, 23–36; Manolis Koumas, ‘Patterns of the Future? British Mediterranean Strategy and the Choice between Alexandria and Cyprus, 1935–8’, International History Review, 33(3), 489–500. 60 Andrekos Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy, 1957–1960’, Cyprus Review, 32(1), 2010, 79–106. 61 Ibid. 62 Costas M. Constantinou and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Long Mile of Empire: Power, Legitimation and the UK Bases in Cyprus’, Mediterranean Politics, 10, 1, 2005, 65–84. 63 Varnava, ‘Reinterpreting Macmillan’s Cyprus Policy’, 79–106. 64 Julia Scheeres, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, Free Press, New York, 2011. 65 Wright, ‘Libya: Italy’s “Promised Land’’ ’, 67–79.

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CHAPTER TWO

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Darién and the psychology of Scottish adventurism in the 1690s Eric Richards

Colonial misadventure The Darién project was the infamously aborted Scottish colony in the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. It is commonly regarded as the disastrous precipitant of the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, and has ever since been the subject of nationalist controversy. The Darién adventure was financed and organised from Edinburgh and Glasgow, with important links to London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. But it ultimately drew on a very high proportion of all of Scotland’s savings which were swiftly sunk in the Panamanian jungle, and then lost without trace. Darién was also an exercise in fledgling colonisation, a moment of incipient imperialism: it exposed the imperial aspirations of the Scots, propelled in part by a whiff of El Dorado, a quest for the golden fruits of empire, a place on the imperial stage. In brief, the idea was to set up a new colony, a New Caledonia, at the centre of the oceanic trade routes: it would become a vital trading emporium to enrich poor Scotland. The actual story of Darién was a catalogue of disasters. Two expeditions were sent from Scotland in 1698–99 and there were appalling death rates on both voyages and during the short career of the settlements; within twelve months the colonists encountered awful difficulties of terrain and climate; the plans went askew and the costs were enormous; on arrival the colonists in Darién faced disease, famine, dearth and high mortality.1 English participation and support was ruled out by diplomatic imperatives: the Spanish fleet blockaded the settlement ‘and by 1700 fever and lack of provisions forced the Scots to capitulate’.2 A great many of the 2,500 or so planters did not survive. No trade was achieved, not even with the local indigenes.3 It was a shambles: a ‘tragic farce’ according to T. C. Smout.4 [ 26 ]

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This chapter reviews current understandings of the story in the light of the general colonising psychology of ‘El Doradoism’. The Darién scheme was one of the most spectacular imperial misadventures of early modern history. It was certainly speculative but was propelled by hard-headed calculations which proved to be overly confident. The speculation was given urgency by nationalistic feeling in Scotland and an attempt to vie with other powers in the Caribbean. There was an element of emulation and anticipated fast returns to investment. Darién was a Scottish adventure precipitated by mercantilist and imperial aspirations which went badly awry. The scale and ambition of the project were beyond the financial scope of the Scots, who also lacked adequate political leverage in the context of Caribbean rivalries among the European powers.

The Scottish dream The original scheme had generated spectacular excitement across Scotland and its manic enthusiasm puzzled contemporaries no less than the historians who later examined its entrails. Most notable among the latter was Macaulay who claimed that the Darién disaster typified the Scots as being ‘peculiarly liable to dangerous fits of passion and delusions of the imagination’. Leaving objectivity to one side, Macaulay said that ‘The whole Kingdom seemed to have gone mad.’ ‘It seems incredible that men of sense should have staked everything in the success of that scheme.’ It was a dream and a nightmare ending, said Macaulay, in grief, dismay and rage.5 All this was a mere twenty years before London’s own South Sea Bubble which, of course, gave new meaning to the idea of financial mania.6 Scotland in the 1690s was one of the least developed countries in Western Europe and the Darién scheme absorbed and eventually swallowed up and nullified a very high proportion of its investable assets. Within a few years it caused not only a financial crisis but also a national emergency the circumstances of which fed directly into the divisive debate about Scottish independence and the Union of 1707. It left a permanent scar on the Scottish psyche, forever controversial in its causes and its consequences. A colony at Darién was not a new idea. Spain had been there almost 200 years before and had entertained the idea of a canal to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. They abandoned Darién in 1524, though it remained within the sphere of Spanish hegemony in the region. Nor was Darién the first attempt by Scotland to establish colonies in the seventeenth century – there had been several substantial efforts on the North American mainland. But Darién was much more ambitious [ 27 ]

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and had wider implications particularly in the early evolution of banking and the financial revolution of the 1690s. But it is mostly remembered as ‘The Scottish Dream of empire’.7

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Collective excitation The Darién scheme has all the hallmarks of an authentic Scottish ‘El Dorado’ moment. It combined two elements which make it an instructive case study of the genre. In particular Scotland was a relatively late starter in the annals of European imperialism and Darién was an attempted entrée into these ranks. In the case of Darién the genesis of the imperial impulse can be observed with unusual clarity. Second, Darién exhibited all the symptoms of feverish excitation associated with the El Dorado mentality – the speculative psychology, the manic expectation, credulity and the ultimate delusion of imperial greed and opportunism. The story is already heavily traversed in Scottish historiography, but the organising notion of ‘El Dorados and Empire’ offers a novel angle, as well as a comparative frame, with which to reconsider some aspects of the Scottish disaster. For, at the centre of the Darién scheme was a question of plausibility and expectations, of a pattern of behaviour on a national scale which possessed generic characteristics of El Dorados at large. The Scots in the 1690s appear to have been gripped by an imperial mania, blinded by propaganda and golden prospects. Two facets of the Darién episode provide substance for comparisons with other El Dorado scenarios. First, it presents a case study of collective excitation and gullibility which beggars belief; it presents a picture of a very large number of investors taking astonishing risks with the accumulated savings in a poor country and at a time of much diminished prospects, clouded further by recent and severe famines. Second, Darién required large numbers of quite ordinary people to emigrate to an unknown destination, to commit themselves, their families and their futures to that same dream. This aspect of the disaster has attracted little attention in the received accounts.

Speculative colonisation The history of imperialism is peppered with improbable schemes, even before the first El Dorados; it was behaviour that continued long after Darién. Some were wildly impractical and ended in disaster – such as the British penal colonies in West Africa in the early 1780s.8 But the wisdom of hindsight might mislead. Thus equally impractical was surely Botany Bay, at the end of the earth, but Botany Bay eventually succeeded [ 28 ]

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remarkably well. And some El Dorados emerged sensationally without any build-up whatever, including of course the many gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Colonisation, especially in the seventeenth century, was always a speculative enterprise, associated with high risks and heavy persuasion, often also with exaggeration and deception. This was the common language of El Dorado. Colonists were ‘adventurers’. Initiating any colony required capital, entrepreneurship and people to be committed for future gains at a great distance. All colonial enterprise was premised on a promise of future benefit – sometimes spiritual, sometimes strategic, but mostly a promise of accelerated economic betterment. In their turn, these expectations were enhanced and magnified by incentives and lures: this was the indispensable psychology required for speculative colonial enterprise. There were always two sides to each colonial narrative – on the one side was the attraction and credibility of the plan: and the more remote and exotic the location, the more likely that the extreme claims would be made on its behalf. On the other side was the persuadability of the participants (that is, the investors and the settlers) – and this depended on the state of mind of the society in which the plan was hatched. In principle, it is likely that the heavier the promise – the more outrageous the El Dorado prospect – the more extreme the enthusiasm and risk-taking involved. To use a phrase long ago employed in a different context by the Australian economic historian Noel Butlin, there was a weakening or a deterioration in ‘the criteria of investment’.9 This was evidently a behavioural factor liable to affect all imperial ‘adventurers’. The psychology of colonisation is replete with frenzied behaviour which seems to take over entire communities. Colonies were major enterprises: they needed capital and settlers. Consequently their projectors had to inspire and persuade potential investors and colonists; they required a clear rationale and the promise of betterment and excitement. So there was a built-in tendency to exaggerate and inflate prospects. They all begin with the promise of gain, an alternative to leaving your money or yourself at home. This inevitably put pressure on the normal criteria of investment. They were most often linked with mineral exploitation and prospects. Colonisation, by definition, requires some extraordinary inducement to defeat the forces of scepticism and inertia and the fear of distance. Some colonial projectors offered messianic prospects, new communities, new faith, new liberties and new societies. More common was the mundane appeal to attractive returns to capital, gold being the best of all as demonstrated repeatedly in the history of Peru, California, [ 29 ]

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Canada, Australia and New Zealand.10 At one extreme the El Dorado effect was a dream of avarice, of spectacular gain from overseas enterprise. Yet even the most sedate, respectable, conservative and upright of colonial plans inflated their appeal with special incentives. For example the new colony of South Australia in 1836 was a model of systematic planning and moral rectitude, but its projectors found no difficulty in holding out opium for China as a paying crop for the new colony.11 New South Wales, even as a convict colony, had offered flax and naval supplies as its selling point. Colonies, unless they were to be subsistence peasantries, needed a staple as an entrée into world trade.12 Gold was, of course, the best of all staples. In effect, therefore, most colonisation was tainted with an infection of the El Dorado bug – it was part of the marketing of all colonies. One of the most influential recent accounts of nineteenth-century colonisation in the Angloworld, by James Belich, has used quasi-El Dorado metaphors to conjure up the collective psychology of the process of grass-roots imperialism. He calls the expansion of Europeans across the globe in the 1820s and beyond ‘explosive Settlerism’ – a kind of manic expansion set off by revealed opportunities in new lands, some of the them fuelled by mining booms.13 The mentality was captured in a single word: ‘boosterism’. The situation facing the Scots in the 1690s was somewhat different, but many of the classic symptoms were present. At the centre of the collective psychology of Darién was the sheer suggestibility of the times, the place and the circumstances which carried the nation over the brink – in response to the commercial and colonial blandishments placed before them.

Scotland’s suggestibility The central historical question about this example of El Doradoism is how it was that a small poor country in north-west Europe was drawn into an ostensibly extreme example of imperial adventurism? How did Scotland become embroiled in such an imperial maelstrom? And why were its people prepared to accept such awful risks? The main task is to explain their suggestibility, the nascent imperial psychology of Scotland in the 1690s. One unifying theme throughout the story was the sheer passion that was invested in the episode, both at the time and ever since. Darién drew upon and concentrated the emotions of the nation. But why? The standard received account is plausible and it is based on the proposition that Scotland collectively felt impelled to enter the imperial stakes. This compulsion was set within a mercantilist context in which [ 30 ]

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trade and national strength were the keys to advancement. In particular Scotland felt itself poor and constricted and there was a national sense of frustration, even of strangulation.14 By the 1690s Scotland was experiencing an acute sense of ‘Empire envy’.15 Other states had felt the same emulative spirit. A century earlier England’s first imperial initiatives had been promoted explicitly in terms of El Dorado aspirations.16 In Scotland the mood had been growing for perhaps three decades. In the Age of Mercantilism all Western European states vied for trading advantages in what was regarded, ultimately, as a zero-sum competition for finite possibilities in the arena of international rivalry. The greatest advantages belonged to commercial monopolies in oceanic trade. Scotland itself laboured under several difficulties in this mercantilist milieu. In the last decades of the seventeenth century it was one of the least developed nations in Europe, with its prospects suggested by its small domestic market and its limited access to international commerce. Scotland had been left behind by Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Sweden, Brandenburg and Denmark. Breaking into external trade was seen as a panacea for its limitations, to emulate its neighbours.17 There was a view that Scotland’s heavy commitment in the colonisation of Ulster had effectively delayed its involvement in the Atlantic by forty years.18 The prospect of any kind of escape was heightened by the gloom hanging over the country in the 1690s – battered by famines, declining crop yields and trade collapse. The restrictive posture of England – its Navigation Act of 1660 had decisively constrained all its colonial trade to English and colonial shipping19 – similarly accentuated the idea that escape could be found only by a new opening into international trade and colonies. The idea was to escape the clutches of England’s trade restrictions.20 And trade was the key to state power and national prosperity.21 Even before, in 1668, there had been a proliferation of schemes to develop Scottish trade in America. According to Checkland, there had been ‘a new spirit of initiative in the West, as well as a sense of a need to act together’. There was a modest boom in the commercial sector – shipping indeed doubled in the thirteen years from 1668. Schemes for development were proliferating: in 1668 there a plan for a Scottish jointstock trading and colonising company to establish a base in America, to rival England and Holland. The Scottish Parliament had promoted an Act for the ‘Encouraging of Forraigne Trade’. Schemes were rising to meet the purpose and given official encouragement.22 It was a time of mercantilist manoeuvring. Glasgow merchants emerged as a force in the Atlantic, developing trading connections in that decade. Scotland in the 1680s was making good progress, especially in the more anglicised [ 31 ]

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parts of the economy.23 But the rise of Glasgow’s Atlantic interests was frustrated by foreign mercantilist restrictions, most of all by England’s trade restrictions which barred Scotland as a foreign nation.24 Meanwhile Scotland had initiated several colonial experiments in the previous half century. But in terms of commerce the essential problem was that Scotland was blocked from the wide horizons to international trade by the mercantilist restrictions of all the surrounding nations. The prevailing feeling in Scotland was one of constriction by mercantilist monopolists who were holding back Scottish enterprise. Breaking through these barriers would be a great national project, a leap into prosperity, and an escape from Scotland’s inferior status as a trading nation. This was the critical context in which solutions were seeded and hatched in the form of the Company of Scotland in the mid-1690s seeking at the start to promote trade to the East Indies. Smout describes it as a ‘Patriotic project’.25 The promoters were concerned about the economic future of their country. The standard view is that the Scots were excluded from foreign trade, especially by monopolies operated by European powers, but most of all by the provisions of the exclusion of the Scots from the commerce of the English Empire. David Armitage insists that the Scottish initiatives in the 1690s were driven by the imperative to break through the metropolitan dominance of England and to promote national prosperity. It was a classic mercantilist project.26 Ultimately the Company of Scotland and the Darién schemes were attempts to break through these constraints – it was a quintessentially mercantilist project for a mercantilist age, an explicit effort to join the imperial bandwagon.27 But it also grew out of a feeling of desperation, of Scotland being not only a poor country but one also falling behind in relation to all its neighbours in Europe.28 Scotland had fared very badly in the 1690s – a time of famines and hardships, of national disappointment and great frustration from which there seemed to be little chance of escape or relief. A contemporary spoke about the Company of Scotland as ‘the only means to recover us from our miserable and despicable condition’.29 Contemporaries bewailed the ‘Languishing condition of this Nation’.30 This was the critical context of the imperial schemes as they emerged. The nation was in search of a solution and this made it receptive to new ideas, indeed any panacea for Scottish woes. This was the source of its susceptibility to the Darién project.

Paterson’s initiative The idea of breaking into international trade had been brewing since the 1680s and was brought to practical realisation by a Scotsman, William [ 32 ]

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Paterson (1658–1719). He had advertised the possibilities in Scotland, London and Holland. He possessed impressive trading experience, and was based in London, a noted proprietor and financier, and was involved with the creation of the Bank of England. The original idea was for a Company of Scotland to trade with Africa and India. Trading posts would be established giving access to the lucrative commerce of the East Indies. The Company of Scotland was established in 1695 to promote trade with Africa and India: it was given the privilege by the Scottish Parliament, and it was advertised to appeal to investors in Scotland and England. The interest in England was keen among people excluded from the trade of Africa and India by the established English chartered companies. There had been persistent efforts by London merchants to find an outlet for their capital in Scotland and they had indeed sought a base for the eastern trade in Scotland from as early as 1693. Inevitably the London involvement in the Company of Scotland immediately aroused the jealousy of the East India Company. In this early phase in the creation of the Company of Scotland there was ‘revealed, in a most emphatic manner, that the native Scottish impulse towards participation in foreign trade was much stronger . . . than previously suspected’.31 The original idea therefore had been to seek trading posts in Africa and India which would provide access to the lucrative commerce of the East Indies.32 The astonishing sum of £600,000 was proposed. This was the point at which the Anglo-Scottish project raised large amounts of finance in both places, with amazing alacrity. Watt agrees with Insh that the Edinburgh merchant community was the initial driving force; it was not a matter of being led astray by Paterson.33 The investors comprised Scottish nobles, lairds, merchants, doctors, soldiers, and widows.34 But there was also a big English involvement – showing the initial confidence of the London-centric support.35 London investors quickly committed £300,000 in ten days.36 This demonstrated the commercial appeal of the scheme well beyond Scotland: it was emerging as a Scotch– English East India Company with much support in London. But the backers in both London and Edinburgh hugely underestimated the wrath and hostility of the existing East India Company.37 The fear in England was that the Scots were being given official licence to break into their monopoly – the Scots were interlopers to be opposed at all costs.38 This in itself was a measure of the seriousness of the Scottish project: the English East India Company protested vehemently and the English Parliament forced the English investors out of the project (there was a parallel reaction in Holland).39 The scheme then retreated to Scotland. The Company of Scotland was an audacious attempt to circumvent the mercantilist barriers to Scottish trade, and it had attracted capital [ 33 ]

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from parties in London who were no less constricted by the existing monopolies, notably those of the East India Company.40 One of the first ventures was directed to St Mary’s, an island off the coast of Madagascar, a prospective staging port for the traffic of the Indian and China seas. In reality St Mary’s was a pirate’s lair and with one object – to obtain slaves – a trade into which the Scots were as yet not fully engaged (though it developed later). Insh specifically described St Mary’s as ‘the El Dorado of the Scottish voyagers’.41 Two ships were sent to St Mary’s, though the project ended in fiasco – but not before wider plans were developed.42 The withdrawal of English and Dutch capital and support from the Company of Scotland might have put an end to the entire matter. Instead Scottish enthusiasm was redoubled and revitalised as an independent Scottish venture ‘in the spirit of all or nothing’. It became a great national adventure, though as yet the destination of the venture remained unspecified. Now an exclusively Scottish enterprise, the Company of Scotland determined to raise the colossal sum of £400,000. This was immensely popular and £50,000 was raised on the first day, and the rest in five months: ‘They came in shoals’.43 The investments were diverse: 48 per cent were of the landed classes, 23 per cent merchants of Edinburgh and Glasgow; but there were investors in the Company from all over Scotland. At this point Darién was not the focus or the lure – the investors were not aware of any specific plan but they invested nevertheless.44 Under Paterson’s persuasion, the plan was now transmuted westwards to the idea of a colony at Darién in Central America. It would be a trading colony, modelled on previous colonial projects, imitative in character. It did not entail large-scale settlement, though this was not discounted. Called New Caledonia, its commercial function was paramount, though several thousand settlers were envisaged from the start. It was an extremely ambitious attempt to set Scotland as the heart of trading worlds: ‘to hold the world’s entrepot between east and west’, to control world trade.45 At the time the imperial power of Spain seemed to be weakening and there were several possible locations for the Scottish colony: in the mouth of the Amazon, in the Bay of Mexico, at Crab Island, even in Chile. It was a backdoor effort to outwit the East India Company as a Freeport, but the Darién project did not exclude the idea of plantations.

The Frenzy The social psychology of El Doradoism entailed a heightened collective enthusiasm for a distant enterprise, and the implicit negotiation of risk in a colonial setting. The relevance of Darién had two aspects: one [ 34 ]

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was the mobilisation of capital, which was the most sensational aspect of the story. The other, far less noticed but integral to the scheme, was the recruitment of its personnel and migrants. There were widespread symptoms of a genuinely El Dorado excitation across Scotland. Walter Herries recollected in 1700 that the investors came: from all Corners of the Kingdom to Edinburgh, Rich, Poor, Blind and Lame, to lodge their Subscriptions in the Company’s House, and to have Glimpse of the Man Paterson.46

It was orchestrated by a marketing campaign headed by Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, as well as two other noblewomen, the Countess of Rothes and Lady Margaret Hope. There was a general ‘fervour of enthusiasm’.47 The propaganda proclaimed the great national project which would bring ‘Security, Peace and Greatness’. A ballad of the time compared Paterson to a biblical Solomon, ‘To fetch Home INDIAN Treasures’.48 The El Dorado promise was blazoned forth: Darién would be the emporium of Central America, a magnet to merchants and capital and would control the trade to the East Indies. Paterson himself said that Darién would be the ‘keys to the Indies and the doors of the world’. He acknowledged that the great hazard of the enterprise was its being overtaken by ‘a rash, raw, giddy and headless direction’.49 He was as aware of the frenzy as much as anyone. But Paterson had also been part of the hyperventilation: in 1701 (after the collapse of the venture) he was still saying that ‘trade is capable of increasing trade, and money of begetting money to the end of the world’.50 Gold was on the agenda: ‘Great Mines of Gold’ were promised and fanciful descriptions of gold were sent back to Scotland.51 Early reports said that there was a gold mine only two days’ journey from the colony; within two or three days’ march there were six gold mines and they were not being worked only from the lack of slaves.52 ‘The country though it be Rich and Fruitful on the surface, is yet far Richer in its Bowels there being great Mines of Gold.’ Pamphlets claimed that Darién contained enormous reserves, greater wealth indeed than the English sugar plantations, greater than the Peruvian gold and silver resources which were ‘like a Mouse to an elephant in comparison with the Mines of Darién’. The same pamphleteer told the Scots not to be ‘Doubting Thomases’.53 Thus trade was the main driver, the official idea, but gold and silver provided a glittering backdrop. Equally astonishing was the Scots’ belief that they could maintain a settlement in the centre of the Spanish Empire.54 [ 35 ]

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Even the promoters of the Company were amazed by the response from investors from all over Scotland: it ‘sucked much of the liquid wealth of Scotland’. Eventually £400,000 was raised, equal to four times the government revenue. The project spread its tentacles across all of Scotland. Lord Basil Hamilton remarked that: ‘He won’t be looked upon as a true Scotchman that is against it.’ Douglas Watt regards this phase as a genuine financial mania which drew in perhaps (albeit improbably) 200,000 people – one-fifth of the entire Scottish population. He describes the unprecedented psychological investment of the Scots: everyone knew about it and it was fuelled by a ‘Frantic optimism’.55 He quotes Patrick Hume: There is ane unaccountable inclination among people here to goe thither and by what I can find that undertakeing is not likelie to want all the support this countrie is able to give it either of men or money . . . but as you hint There is either a great advantage or a great prejudice acomeing God knowes which.56

T. M. Devine describes it as a ‘patriotic crusade’.57 There was an ‘irrational exuberance’ despite recent famines and it expressed the widespread confidence in Empires and riches. Subsequently the mania came to be regarded as a ‘frenzied bubble’. After the collapse some of the investors began to deride the original plan as ‘the mad scheme’ and raised accusations of corruption in its heart. Expectations had been raised far too high.58 Watt points out that the Scots were not uniquely susceptible to such a mania and notes similar madness famously related to tulips, coffee, gold, bonds and property.59 ‘At all stages there was an inappropriate appreciation of risk.’ ‘The directors lost touch with reality’, and were influenced by the manic ‘overconfidence of the nation’.60 Watt draws attention to the ‘the herd mentality, or the madness of crowds’, of people manipulated into a speculative mania of a classic variety, a true precursor of the South Sea Bubble and of the ‘dot.com madness’ of our own times. He also characterises the 1696 enterprises as an experiment with financial capitalism which most people would have regarded as ‘beyond the resources of a relatively poor northern European nation’. So great was the risk that ‘every penny of the capital was lost’.61 Smout among modern commentators refers to the incompetence and gullibility of the Scottish undertakers of the venture. Amid all the propaganda there was a sense of ‘their fantastick hope of getting gowpens of gold’.62 And the investors were ‘bewitch’d by the Golden Dreams of Paterson the Pedlar’.63 This was therefore the full dress version of the Scottish El Dorado: ‘the tragi-comic opera . . . a fiasco of stunning proportions in which [ 36 ]

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vast sums of money, thousands of lives, and national prestige were cast on a futile effort of planting a colony in Spanish territory’. Paterson himself was addicted to high-risk ventures and called the project ‘One of the most beneficial and best grounded pieces of Trade at this day in Christendom’. This kind of hyperbolic advertising and wishful thinking encouraged the rush of Scottish investors, all doomed to failure.64 This was barely rational: a perfect example of El Dorado-driven imperialism.

Relative madness Measuring the extent of the El Dorado madness contained in the Darién scheme is more difficult than it seems.65 In retrospect, and after the abysmal collapse, much derision was directed at the absurdity of the idea and the sheer gullibility of everyone involved. There is however a suspicion that the conventional account has become a caricature of the 1690s. There is indeed an alternative case for emphasising the sanity of the adventure, even in the febrile atmosphere of the times. The more positive view of the plan maintains that it was by no means as mad as the conventional version allows.66 Smout described the Darién company as ‘the most popular, the most ambitious, and easily the most heavily capitalised of all the commercial projects of the age’. It was in a different league from other projects of the times. It therefore requires a special explanation. It is important to acknowledge that this was not merely Scottish enthusiasm at work – the initial company, under Paterson’s persuasive leadership, had recruited Dutch and more particularly, London capital, which suggests that this was a good deal more that a hare-brained Celtic scheme.67 Their participation was part of the persistent efforts made by London merchants to circumvent the monopoly of the East India Company.68 Insh declared that it was ‘not the entirely mad venture that Macaulay made it out to be’. In 1695 there had been plausible talk about the great advantage that would redound to the nation by the promotion of trade to Africa, America and other foreign parts.69 For Scotland to seek colonies was a reasonable strategy in the context of the times and its efforts paralleled those of other small states.70 David Armitage is the most insistent commentator on the rationality of the case. He maintains that Darién was ‘not a frivolous and desperate episode’, even if it was enhanced by travellers’ tales. This is most evidenced by the instant and sustained hostility that it aroused.71 Armitage notes that the hopes of Darién, with ‘Mines and Treasures’, created serious fears in England that colonists would be diverted to Darién.72 It was not all quixotic. It was led by the wealthy elite who were neither [ 37 ]

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naive nor inexperienced in investment.73 Armitage says that Darién was well recognised as a crucial location for trade.74 Hardnosed Fletcher of Saltoun was in favour of the scheme which he regarded as the only remedy for Scotland’s woes. In London the Board of Trade was genuinely alarmed and began to make parallel plans. The new financial institutions of the time had altered the climate of investment and consequently the suggestibility of the public at large.75 And whatever the special Scottish causes of the speculative mania, it is clear that the pattern was fully repeated only twenty years later in the South Sea Bubble in which the Scots were heavily involved, astonishingly up to four times as much capital being sunk in the project as in the Company of Scotland.76 Joint-stock companies had activated the investment inclinations of the Scots.77 It may have been the case that the Scottish investors were simply dressing up their dreams of imperial avarice in a cloak of patriotic devotion. Douglas Jones writes that it was an investment frenzy ‘perhaps magnified by a patriotic intensity’ leading to an ‘irrational exuberance’, but it was also behaviour emanating from the core of the financial revolution of the times.78 Their speculative behaviour was more a response to opportunities generated not so much by a sudden manic fervour, but by the new opportunities and facilities being revealed by the new institutions of the financial revolution.

Disaster and recrimination Darién was evidently a form of embryonic imperialism, a manifestation of a basic colonising impulse activated by national frustration and mercantilist opportunism. A small country was attempting to elbow its way into the constricted trading routes of a mercantilist world of the late seventeenth century. Almost 3,000 settlers had set off in 1698–99 and they suffered huge losses from sickness and disease. The Company of Scotland was also making a claim over Spanish sovereignty. There was a serious diplomatic break within Anglo-Scottish relations and it was very divisive within Scotland. It came very badly unstuck. As Watt puts it, the great trading entrepot was abandoned after a mere seven months; the project was ‘in tatters’.79 It was a hopeless place – and is even now, it seems – wild, infested with bandits and guerrillas, altogether a bad geography. The colonists died in droves. And by 1701 all the money was gone, all lost.80 The extravagance of the expectations of Darién was matched by the extremes of anger and recrimination which followed. The sheer suggestibility of the Scots was part of Fletcher of Saltoun’s diagnosis of what went wrong. Darién had been a great patriotic project. When [ 38 ]

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it collapsed Scots ministers then allowed themselves to be bribed and prostituted: Scotland became more ‘like a conquered province, than a free independent people’, and it was their own fault.81 Fletcher was the most voluble and embittered of these Scottish patriots – an unforgiving opponent of the Union of 1707. In blazing anger he directed his recriminations not at the projectors of the scheme but at the enemies of the scheme – notably England. The gullible and the sinners were not the original projectors (of whom he was one) but the people who caved in afterwards, and sold Scotland down the drain. His own support for Darién had been part of the dash for independence. He blamed the subsequent fiasco on the English court. England had also drained Scottish capital to the south and had blatantly exploited Scottish manpower in the English and Dutch armies. These circumstances had caused ‘our poverty, misery and dependence’.82

The emigrants of Darién The El Dorado dimension of the Darién scheme is usually couched in terms of its disastrous financial consequences, its capitalistic mania, and its irrationality. But the colonists who joined the expedition to the Isthmus of Darién, the New Caledonia, risked much more than capital in the venture. Their embroilment in the disaster is no less an El Dorado puzzle. The recruitment of emigrants to accompany the trading venture and to service its requirements remains obscure. They were shadows, not even properly counted. Who were they and how did they get entangled in the mess? Were they an intrinsic part of the mania?83 The received history of Darién is almost entirely history from above: the capitalists and the politicians figure prominently but the main body of people who voyaged to Darién are barely mentioned. There appear to have been a total of about 2,800 emigrants involved. Little is known about them, or who paid for them or what their ultimate fate was. It is most likely that these people were caught up in the collective enthusiasm of the events. Nevertheless the task of recruiting 2,800 people to voyage to uncharted tropical America was an astonishing prospect. There had been earlier efforts at Scottish colonisation in Nova Scotia and South Carolina but they had been poorly coordinated.84 In 1684 Robert Barclay had sought emigrants for the colony of New East Jersey in a deliberate effort to recruit Scots.85 Specific efforts were devoted to recruitment in remote Strathnaver to help fill a ship of migrants under contract.86 This, and a dependence on convicts, suggests that the recruitment of emigrants was not easy. [ 39 ]

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In the 1690s a new factor was the availability of demobilised soldiers: Scotland had long supplied mercenaries to the continent. Only a few months previous to the first Darién expedition sailing (July 1698) the long drawn-out war of the League of Augsburg had ended and this led to sweeping reduction in the number of Scots required in the Scots Brigade in Holland and in the Scottish regiments in the British army. Nine companies in the Scots–Dutch contingent were disbanded in 1697–78 and consequently many Scottish solders were thrown out of employment. The Darién expedition recruited among this disbanded soldiery; they were part of the recruitment programme but apparently were poor settlers or planters.87 Insh suggested that much excitement for emigration was aroused across the country at large. The first expedition in 1698 was bruited in the coffee houses of Glasgow and Edinburgh and the excitement to enlist apparently spread widely: for instance, seven people from Stirling were being readied and then five others. They were given their ‘birth briefs’ – customary certificates for travels to overseas places.88 The recruits included many former officers and redundant soldiers. Specific calls were made to recruit one hundred women to the colony which suggests a colonising function beyond the mere freeport facility. The colonists were promised each 50 acres of land and a plot in the town.89 The emigrants were also to be accompanied by ministers who were ‘enjoined to instruct the native inhabitants in the gospels’.90 The colony was to be known as ‘Caledonia’ and was to be planted ‘in some place or other not inhabited in America, or in or upon another place, by consent of the natives and inhabitants thereof, and not possessed by an European Sovereign, Potentate, Prince or State’. For the second expedition there were renewed problems with supply and shipping which produced delays: ‘Recruiting agents of the Company made tours through both Highlands and Lowlands, and their invitations met with a ready response. Indeed, after the arrival in Edinburgh in the spring of 1699 of news from Caledonia there was widespread eagerness to migrate to the Colony.’ Marchmont in Edinburgh in April 1699, noted that ‘There is an unaccountable inclination among people here to go thither; and, by what I can find, that undertaking is not likely to want all the support this country is able to give it, either of men or money, so long as we have any.’91 The second expedition began with a complement of some five hundred men, to be conveyed in the Company’s ships the Rising Sun and the Hope; but as the numbers mounted – eventually the recruits reached the total of 1,300 – it was found necessary to charter two other vessels, the Duke of Hamilton and the Hope of Bo’ness, which in the summer of 1699 joined the Company’s ships at Greenock. These reports [ 40 ]

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suggest a degree of recruitability among the populace.92 According to Marchmont there was no shortage of willing recruits of some quality and indeed an ‘unaccountable inclination among people here to goe thither’.93 But another report said that a third of the colonists were ‘wild Highlanders that cannot speak nor understand Scotch’, though the real figure was probably only 10 per cent.94 The migrants themselves were not described. Five ships were equipped and 1,200 men enrolled, and the first expedition sailed in July 1698. Their destination was kept secret even from the captain until they received orders on the voyage. After a difficult three-month voyage, on arrival they found some friendly Indians, and began to build New Edinburgh. But Darién was a fever-infested swamp: ‘nor was there much demand for the cargo of wigs and woollen goods which they had brought’. Herries in 1699 gave a description of conditions that they faced in Darién: ‘Caledonia, where there’s nothing to be had but hard Labour, Sweat, Hungry Bellies and Shallow Graves’.95 ‘[W]e were sent to the back of Gods elbow, where we could see nothing but Death, starving and Spanish mines before our Eyes’. They were unlucky to arrive at a time of yellow fever in the Caribbean.96 Eventually 460 of the 1,300 were dead and more died after evacuation. Of fourteen ships which left only three returned. The fledgling colony was attacked by Spaniards. By July Darién was evacuated, and ‘the disaster for a small country was shattering’.

Aftermath The enthusiasm generated by the Darién project was clearly a nationwide phenomenon. It was a response to a promise of escape from Scotland’s self-perceived malaise. The condition of Scotland had made it suggestible. The nation was prepared to take a gamble on colonisation, to accept abnormal risks for the shaky promise of massive gain. It involved a collective psychology in which large numbers of individual investors each accepted the risk. The gamble was encouraged from above by leaders in Scottish society including hard-headed merchants, aristocrats and statesmen who placed themselves at risk. It was also encouraged by new financial facilities and clever advertising, but the gambling psychology was spread across the nation – born out of national desperation and enthusiasm which weakened the criteria of investment. Modern treatments of financial mania and risk-taking in markets have produced some startlingly reductive psychological theorizing about the biological and neurological origins of such behaviour. John Coates, much influenced by the dot-com mania of the 1990s, surveys examples of financial mania and says that typically the ‘excitement [ 41 ]

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and boundless potential of the markets [was] apparently . . . enough to validate their harebrained ideas. It was almost impossible to engage them in a reasoned discussion: history was irrelevant, statistics counted for little.’97 Coates describes this behaviour as ‘irrational exuberance’, a spontaneous eruption of what Keynes called ‘animal spirits’, a basic ‘characteristic of human nature’. It is a matter of ‘spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectation’. But Coates insists that ‘women were pretty well immune to the frenzy’. In the case of Darién, as shown above, there were many symptoms of frenzy and extreme enthusiasm which clouded judgements. But one point is clear, the idea that women in Scotland might have possessed any special immunity from the mania is negated by the prominence of aristocratic women from the start of the project.98 The aftermath of Darién remains the most contentious part of the story because it became entwined in the issues of Union with England. In terms of ‘rationality’ and the ultimate consequences of Darién scheme there were two ironies which, in a limited interpretation, met some of the original mercantilists goals of the scheme. The eventual Union in 1707 yielded terms which were highly contested then and ever since, yet there were two specific results not incompatible with the aspirations to the adventurers of 1695. First, the original investors were able recoup their losses against all the odds with a very respectable annual 5 per cent return on their original investment by way of the ‘Equivalent’: the English government compensated the Darién investors for their losses. And second, under the terms of the Union of 1707, Scotland traded in its independence yet seemed to emerge within a generation as a leader in the many facets of eighteenth-century life, most of all intellectually and not least in its economic development, well ahead of many other parts of Europe. Scotland had made a critical decision of which Darién was the curious precipitant.99 The ‘Equivalent’ was of immediate benefit to Scotland. The Union eventually became a highway into Empire for the Scots. This became obvious by the 1750s especially by way of their infiltration into the East India Company which became effectively half-Scottish.100 The precise objectives of the Company of Scotland were thus achieved, though only in the long run,101 by the Union. And Scotland’s imperial ambitions became conjoined with those of England, and perhaps very effectively so.102 Where all this leaves Darién in the spectrum of ‘Eldoraodism’ is arguable: there was obviously a degree of hyper excitation in the original scheme to colonise the Panamanian isthmus; there was also a degree of entrepreneurialism not uncommon in any new enterprise and especially in any new remote and seductive colony. [ 42 ]

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Notes 1 Conditions on the site are described in Mark Horton, ‘ “To Transmit to Posterity the Virtue, Lustre and Glory of their Ancestors”: Scottish Pioneers in Darién, Panama’, in Caroline A. Williams (ed.), Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, Aldershot, 2009, 131–50, esp. 131, fn 2, 135; and also in T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 1660–1707, Edinburgh, 1963, 252ff. 2 William Ferguson, ‘Darien’, in Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, Oxford, 2001, 163. 3 The story of relations with local indigenes is retold by Bridget McPhail, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Scots and Indians Converge at Darien’, Eighteenth Century Life, 18, 1994, 129–47. 4 Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 252. 5 T. B. Macaulay, History of England, IV, London, 1906, 465–89. 6 In 1719 London was overcome by a fever of speculation in a scheme which took over the National Debt in return for trading privileges – not unlike the aims of Darién. Shares rose by 1,000 per cent in six months, but there was widespread corruption followed by panic selling which ruined thousands of participants. 7 The phrase employed in the best-known book on the subject by John Prebble, The Darien Disaster, London, 1968. This account has been comprehensively superseded by many other works but most notably by Douglas Watt, The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations, Edinburgh, 2007, upon which the present chapter greatly depends. For an idiosyncratic view of the sources on Darién, see George Pratt Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, Edinburgh, 1938. 8 See Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place, New South Wales, 2010. On the common cycle of the dream followed by the harsh awakening, see Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca, Oxford, 1952, xiii. 9 N. G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861–1900, Cambridge, 1964, ch. VI. 10 Australia in the mid-nineteenth century had a reputation in Ireland as ‘El Dorado’: see David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Settlers: Immigration from Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colm Kiernan (ed.), Ireland and Australia, North Ryde, 1984, 29. 11 In July 1834 George Grote warned prospective colonists against foolish dreams of El Dorado. Morning Chronicle, 1 July 1834. The principal extravagance in the puffing of South Australia was to exaggerate its sheer respectability which was ultimately undermined by the realities of actual colonisation. Reference to opium was made by Robert Torrens; see Eric Richards, in Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, Netley, South Australia, 1986, 21. 12 Without a staple a colony was seriously constrained. To prosper a colony needed an exportable commodity which would propel internal development and yield returns to investors in the homeland. Precious metals, gold, silver and diamonds, were the classic model. More often the staple was more mundane, and bulkier, such as wheat or wool. In the Darién case the promise was more a purely commercial matter, as a trading post common in seventeenth-century commercial design, at the crossroads of intercontinental trade. 13 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford, 2009, xii and 573, reviewed by Eric Richards in Reviews in History (2010). 14 As early as 1681, in the Privy Council, the Duke of York had called upon mercantile interests to examine the causes of Scotland’s relative backwardness. Roger Emerson and Smout agree that Scots thought that they had fallen behind other states and felt ‘a sense of shame’. See T. C. Smout, ‘A New Look at the Scottish Improvers’, Scottish History Review, 91, April 2012, 125. 15 The phrase belongs to Niall Ferguson, Empire, Harmondsworth, 2003, 3. The Scots were playing catch-up among opponents who controlled the rules and the territory. There were previous efforts; see David Armitage, ‘The Scottish Vision of Empire:

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16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture’, in Armitage, Greater Britain, 1516–1776, Aldershot, 2004, 99. See Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discourse on the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a relation to the great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado), London, 1596 (Leeds, 1967); and David B. Quinn and A. N. Ryan, England’s Sea Empire, 1550–1642, London, 1983, 148–9, where they suggest that the dream was ‘not entirely chimerical’. The earliest English plans for colonisation had themselves been prompted by the frustration experienced in the restrictions and exclusions from foreign markets of the rival sea powers in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. See A. F. Pollard, Elizabethans and the Empire, London, 1921, 18–19. Watt, Price of Scotland, 8. On the volatility and dynamism of the transnational and intersecting Atlantic trading networks in the last decades of the seventeenth century and their crucial importance in all west European economic growth, see Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, New York, 2012, 527–9. See David Armitage, ‘Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World 1542–1707’, in Armitage, Greater Britain 1516–1776, 46. Scotland was in effect ‘ring fenced’ (ibid., 100). See also Watt, Price of Scotland, 20, fn 21, and Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Economy’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Basingstoke, 2002, 53. Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision of Empire’, 102. Ibid., 103. Sydney Checkland, Scottish Banking: A History 1695–1973, London, 1975, 16. See Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, Princeton, NJ, 1985, 74–6; The Papers of William Penn, III, 1685–1700, ed. Marianne S. Wokeck et al., Pennsylvania, PA, 1986, 62–3, 605–7. C. A. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold? 2nd edn, East Linton, 2001, 19. Whatley says there were serious English fears in 1668 that Scottish competition was endangering its cargo trade. But there were banking difficulties and a crisis in 1681. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 150. Riley argues that the political motives were just as large as the economic ones and more divisive longer term; see Patrick W. J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland, Manchester, 1979. Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’ and ‘Making the Empire British’, 102. Whately reports colonisation as being one solution to the economic malaise (Bought and Sold, 27). Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 126. Douglas Hamilton, ‘Darien investors and colonists’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2012; see also above, n. 13. Whately, Bought and Sold, 91. Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, 189, 184. Watt, Price of Scotland, 214. Ibid., 27, fn. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 44; John Bruce, Annals of the Honourable East India Company, II, London, 1810, 174–80. Whatley, Bought and Sold, 48. Smout, Scottish Trade, 251. Smout shows that the Scots in the 1690s were attempting to do something that the Danes and the Dutch achieved in the following century (ibid., 250, fn 50). George Pratt Insh (ed.), Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696–1707, Edinburgh, 1924, XXXI, 158. Watt, Price of Scotland, 214. Hamilton, ‘Darien investors’.

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DARIÉN AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCOTTISH ADVENTURISM 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

See Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’, 101. Ibid., 108. Watt, Price of Scotland, 47. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 2. Epigraph (ibid., v). Ibid., 1, 4. Horton, ‘“To Transmit to Posterity”’, 139. Watt, Price of Scotland, 16, 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 15. And this was a famous location – Dampier himself had extolled its potential. Ibid., 18, 82. Ibid., 21. Quoted in Watt, p. 86, fn 33. See also T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815, Harmondsworth, 2003, 44–8. See Whately and Derek J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union, Edinburgh, 2006, 168. Watt, Price of Scotland, 89. Ibid., 252–3. Ibid., xviii. Whatley and Patrick, Scots and the Union, 172. Ibid., 173. See Keith M. Brown, ‘Reformation to Union’, in Houston and Knox (eds), New Penguin History of Scotland, London, 2001, 206. There is no shortage of such remarks about Darién: C. E. Carrington wrote of the ‘hysterical rush to invest and play the market when money was cheap’: it was a ‘classic example of folly in colonisation’, altogether a ‘lamentable affair’ (The British Overseas, Cambridge, 1950, 67–8). Smout, Trade, 250. See Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, 201, 222 and also Ferguson, ‘Darien’, 162. There were also significant interests of Dutch, Armenian and English merchants in Amsterdam, even as late as 1699. Moreover, after the collapse of the Panama scheme there were further Scottish ventures to the east, in 1704 in particular. See Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800, Minneapolis, MN, 1976, 217. Insh at one time thought that the entire driving force came from London – that it was a London initiative. Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, 191. See Armitage, ‘Making the Empire’, 61–2. Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’, 98. Ibid., 109. There were real English fears of its success (ibid., 110–11). W. Douglas Jones, ‘The Bold Adventurers: A Quantitative Analysis of the Darien Subscription List (1696)’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 21, 2001, 25. Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’, 104. See Patrick Walsh, ‘The Bubble on the Periphery: Scotland and the South Sea Bubble’, Scottish Historical Review, 91, 2012, 124. Ibid., 112. They were also involved in the Mississippi scheme of 1719. See Jones, ‘Bold Adventurers’, 22. Ibid., 22–42, esp. 39, and fn 36. Watt, Price of Scotland, 1. Ibid., 149–50. John Roberston, ‘Andrew Fletcher’s Vision of Union’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England 1286–1815, Edinburgh, 1987, 206. Ibid. Note that more than 700 Scots had migrated to the East New Jersey settlements in the 1680s. See Gordon DesBrisay, ‘Barclay, Robert, of Ury’, in ODNB, III, 773–6. And that more 100,000 Scots had migrated to Ulster in the seventeenth century (Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 167).

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89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102

Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 164. Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes 1620–1686, Glasgow, 1922, 11; Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’, 102, calls them ‘planters’. Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, London and New York, 1932, 117. Horton, ‘ “To Transmit to Posterity”’, 136. See T. M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750–2010, London, 2011, 194. Insh, Historian’s Odyssey, 153–4. Ibid., 170. Watt, Price of Scotland, 182. Ibid., 187, fn. Ibid., 157. Whatley and Patrick, Scots and the Union, 171. John Coates, The Hour between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, New York, 2012, 18, 22, 153. Parallels with the role of irrationality in the history of scientific discovery spring to mind. Mario Livio in Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, New York, 2013, indeed asserts that ‘The road to triumph [is] paved with blunders’. See also Watt, Price of Scotland, 64ff. The role of women in the financial revolution in Scotland is emphasised by Patrick Walsh, ‘Bubble on the Periphery’, 119, 124, and by Whatley, Bought and Sold, 40. See Watt, Price of Scotland, xvii. Ferguson, Empire, 39–40. The financial benefits of the Equivalent to the Scottish financial system are given prominence by Jones, ‘Bold Adventurers’, 40. See also Eric Richards, ‘Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire’, in B. Bailyn and P. Morgan (eds), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991. The long delay on the accrual of the dividend on Union is emphasised by Armitage, ‘Making the Empire’, 98, following Smout, Trade, 279; Armitage also denies that this was any part of the original motivation. Some of the scepticism about the immediate benefits of Union is echoed in Douglas Hamilton, ‘Scotland and the Eighteenth Century Empire’, in T. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, Oxford, 2012, 424–5. Whately says that Darién demonstrated that Scotland could not get access to Empire without England (Bought and Sold, 58–60). The reparation by England suggests an implicit concession of sabotage of Darién. This view is warmly contested by Armitage, ‘Scottish Vision’, 116, 187–9.

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CHAPTER THREE

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Greek expectations: Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–64 Leslie Rogne Schumacher

Introduction Britain’s half-century official relationship with the Ionian Islands is a strange case in the history of imperialism. Indeed, it did not fit an imperial standard, but was rather an ‘amical protectorate’ organized as a theoretically democratic, self-governing federation and overseen by a British Lord High Commissioner as the nominal guarantor of the system. But as is known from British history, protectorates – ‘amical’ or otherwise – involved the positioning of the place within the general global, and thus imperial, scene.1 The history of the so-named ‘United States of the Ionian Islands’ therefore reflects the wider development of imperial categories in the British milieu, while at the same time it resists any easy label. Indeed, from the first the British quest to understand and form a relationship with the Ionian Islands appears to have been confused and challenging. In his preface to French General Guillaume de Vaudoncourt’s 1816 book, Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, English translator William Walton described thus the advantages and responsibilities Britain had after taking over the islands the year prior: The position of the Ionian Islands will be found superior, in a variety of respects, to that of Malta; and of these its contiguity and relations with ancient Greece is not one of the least interesting. It is impossible to preclude feelings of regard for our masters in the arts and sciences, or to be indifferent when we behold the present situation of a people with whose former exploits we are familiar. This great contrast can only result from the fidelity of the modern picture.2

Walton conflates different matters at hand in the Ionian case, constructing the islands’ nearness to the Greek mainland and their shared history with ancient Greece as a sort of tactical advantage for British interests in the Mediterranean. This was a telling bit of discursive slippage, as such an overlap was more a result of Walton’s struggle to fit this ‘new’ [ 47 ]

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place into a more established category in the British mind rather than it was a conspicuous and thoughtful attempt to reconcile the strategic, political, and cultural elements to which the Ionian Islands could be plausibly related. This chapter looks at discourse in British society regarding the theoretical bases of Britain’s Ionian protectorate, suggesting certain myths and illusions surrounding British imperialism. With the benefit of hindsight, an analysis of Britain’s Ionian myth-making offers insights into the broader intellectual foundations of Britain’s imperial programme. This was a programme that, in light of the Ionian case, appears not only blurred and perplexing, but at times incomplete and ill-considered – a fact supported by Andrekos Varnava’s insight into another Mediterranean isle within the Imperial British orbit that followed British Ionia, namely Cyprus.3 Walton’s buoyant language symbolized a time wherein the discovery of an Ionian ‘El Dorado’ seemed not only possible, but imminent. The ensuing decades would see Britons rudely awoken from their Ionian dreams into the real, frustrating world wrought by their imperial policies.

Historical background Despite this study’s provocative title, the Ionian Islands have a past that is not neatly understood as subsidiary to a notional Greek identity. Indeed, they were not always so Greek as they are considered to be now. From the thirteenth century on, the islands progressively came under Venetian rule and, by the 1500s, stood as a symbol of the limits of the Ottoman Empire’s westward expansion.4 This Venetian heritage accounts for the difficulties involved in placing the Ionian Islands into one category even now. Hence, it is still common to refer to the seven islands that make up the Ionian island group in the Italian form: Corfu, Ithaca, Zante, Paxos, Cerigo, Cephalonia, and Lefkas.5 Still, even in Corfu, the chief island in the archipelago and the one that experienced the longest and deepest influence of Venice, the Greek language and the Orthodox religion characterized the livelihood of those in the middle and, especially, lower strata of Ionian society throughout the Venetian centuries.6 Despite Venice’s slow decline, the Ionian Islands remained under the control of the Italian city-state until 1797, when Venice was taken by Napoleon and the islands thus incorporated into the French Republic. From 1798–99, however, a Russian–Ottoman force successfully overthrew each of the French garrisons in the Ionian Islands, leading to the establishment of a protectorate jointly run by the victors. An ironic arrangement, given the long-held animosity between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Septinsular Republic lasted until 1807, [ 48 ]

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when the islands returned to French rule as a provision of the Treaty of Tilsit. Like a decade earlier, though, the French soon came under assault, and the Ionian Islands successively fell to British attacks, with Corfu finally taken in 1814. The Treaty of Paris signed the following year established the British protectorate that is the subject of this study.

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Eastern promises: Britain’s Ionian strategy In February 1851 a letter appeared in the Daily News decrying the lack of a display devoted to the Ionian Islands at the Great Exhibition. Its author, Georgios Papanikolas, complained that the true shape of Ionian splendour was concealed by the islands having no representation in the expositional spectacle then taking place at the Crystal Palace: The Ionian Islands, of all the possessions, dominions, and colonies of Great Britain . . . although situated in the most luxuriant latitude of Europe, will remain unrepresented. So far, then, as regards these, once the richest, the most intelligent, the bravest and the noblest islands in the Mediterranean, they might as well have been buried in the ocean fifty fathoms deep, for all that their industry, the intelligence, the activity, and the enterprise of their people, will show of their fruits at the Great Exhibition.7

Papanikolas judged the omission a consequence of Britain’s ‘culpable indifference’ to the islands, which existed only as a repository for ‘English young gentleman’ to ‘lounge’ and ‘loll’ in a pretty place and find among the industrious locals a lifestyle that allowed them to avoid being industrious themselves.8 Later that year, Papanikolas would author a pamphlet on the Ionian Islands’ fate at the hands of, in his opinion, inept and inconsiderate policies.9 In it, Papanikolas framed his discussion with the straightforward condition that ‘the importance of the Ionian Islands as a military and naval post is well known to English statesmen’.10 Thus despite his anger about policy, he did not question the Protectorate’s strategic value. The general confidence in the strategic intelligence of a Britishmanned Ionian Islands was a theme of the early Protectorate era. This feeling went beyond the shores of the British Isles and reflected Europe’s growing anxiety about the problems of Ottoman decline, an issue that came to be known as the ‘Eastern Question’. Indeed, though he wrote from a French perspective, Vaudoncourt gave Britain’s role in the Ionian Islands the paramount position in his discussion of the geographical positioning of the islands in the landscape of Great Power politics.11 For him, the Ottomans could not be expected to put up a fight for themselves, as their military and political institutions belonged [ 49 ]

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to previous centuries and they were by nature incapable of ‘[adopting] the usages of Europe’ until they should ‘cease to be Mussulmans’.12 For Britain, the answer was therefore to take up a permanent presence nearby the points of strategic instability in the East, with the Ionian Islands a good place to prop up the ‘tottering’ Ottoman Empire and ‘furnish it with maritime succour’.13 Britain’s role in the Ionian Islands thus had a more outwardly strategic texture than the typical British possession, especially early on. Scottish traveller Hugh Williams complained in 1817 that the British presence in Corfu was ‘chiefly military’ and had a society characterized by ‘lax morals’, which he deemed a result of France’s occupation, not to mention soldiers’ predilection for taking local girls as concubines.14 Likewise, in 1812 Sir Henry Holland noted how the ‘red-face English soldier’ stood out as Britain’s initial representative figure in the islands, as it did in Malta and Gibraltar.15 Although military caste politics eventually gave way to a more complex society, in 1864 Lord Kirkwall still felt comfortable claiming that the real paradox of the Protectorate was that ‘the Ionian Islands never formed an English colony, nor did their inhabitants ever really manage their own affairs’.16 Although Thomas Gallant shows this was not quite true,17 the terms of the relationship certainly discouraged the development of a ‘normal’ British colony. This fact helps to account for Kirkwall’s judgement that the islands had been totally controlled by Britain without Britain having technically possessed them. For him, the aim had not been to conquer Ionia but rather ensure its ‘liberty and independence’, Britain having ‘disavowed all selfish ideas of conquest on arriving in the Islands’.18 Of course, selfless sacrifice was rarely a primary aspect of Britain’s imperial strategy, but then Kirkwall depended on the language of empire relevant to his time. Beyond their location, the islands’ strategic identity had another key factor, namely their role in Britain’s imperial economy. The feasibility of any extension of the empire theoretically depended on a territory being able to pay, in taxes and customs duties, for its administration.19 In this respect the Ionian Islands were immediately judged by British observers to have great promise. Holland commented on the ‘air of luxuriant fertility and richness’ on Zante, its eastern plain displaying the ‘abundant provision it affords for an export commerce’.20 Williams agreed, noting that Zante ‘has been named the Garden of the Levant’.21 Similarly, Tertius Kendrick argued for the commercial development of Lixouri, on the opposite side of the bay fronting Argostoli (Cephalonia’s principal city), as the former was ‘well calculated to promote commerce’ and would ‘[yield] a greater quantity of produce for exportation’.22 The theme, though, was that only through British influence would the [ 50 ]

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Ionian Islands reach their commercial potential. Williams felt that despite Zante’s ‘richness’ and ‘value of produce’, the island was ‘still far short of what it ought to be’, blaming the lack of development on the oppressive and careless nature of the Venetian economy.23 Ionia’s destiny would thus take but a little of Britain’s characteristic energy and efficiency to emerge out of myth and into reality. Venice’s tenure as Ionian overlord served as a contrast to Britain’s economic prowess. As Knight’s Penny Magazine put it, ‘As long as Corfu was in the hands of the Venetians its commerce was greatly shackled, both on account of Ottoman aggrandizement and their own monopolizing system, neither has it yet been able to recover its proper level.’24 The Edinburgh Encyclopædia’s entry on Corfu stated that the ‘ill judged restraints of the Venetian government’ had produced an ‘invincible repugnance to labour’ among the populace, leading to neglect of the island’s ‘natural advantages’.25 Gallant describes how the British often framed disappointments with the Ionian people by speaking of the difficulties in reversing centuries of ‘Venetian misrule’.26 Thus it is significant that Kendrick saw Britain’s entry onto the Ionian scene as evidence of a possible solution, namely in the obvious, manifest superiority of British capitalism: [The islands] coming into our possession, British ships made their appearance, and by offering articles of superior quality and fabrication, at lower prices, they soon obtained the preference, to the discomfiture of the former traders. Indeed, to place a competitor in our way, wherever trade is concerned, would only be to expose the rival to ruin; for the astonishing capital which our merchants commence their speculations with, offers an impediment in the shape of long credit, and lower prices, which the small trader finds impossible to cope with.27

Of course, there were limits to British traders’ ability to profit from every setting they penetrated, while the finances of the empire did not always reflect its broader economic development, with Britain’s mutual reliance on India (and the debt incurred there) serving as a clear example. Thus the myth of Britain’s economic dominance ran up against sticky realities, which in the Ionian case produced some interesting effects on Britain’s assessment of the islands’ value in its broader imperial strategy. During the 1820s, developments in Ionian commerce were seen in relation to the Greek War of Independence, mitigating negative economic data. Indeed, Robert Montgomery Martin, a colonial statistician, wrote in 1835 that Ionian trade was ‘considerable’ and ‘increasing so far as the disturbed state of the adjoining countries can be supposed to admit of’.28 In other words, things were good considering the mess Britain had been left with, and good considering the [ 51 ]

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depression in trade resulting from the war. During the 1830s and 1840s, British administrators attempted to put in place political and social reform to produce the kind of stable and prosperous protectorate that would reflect their feelings about the Ionian Islands’ potential.29 But as Michael Pratt illustrates, Britain’s inability to impose direct taxation impeded the islands’ transformation into a bountiful kingdom.30 Such was it that, by the 1850s, one notices that economic failures had begun to reflect on assessments of the islands’ strategic value. In 1852 Henry Jervis claimed that Corfu, of all the islands, was ‘the only one of any importance either in a military or commercial point of view’.31 Napoleon, he said, had correctly judged Corfu’s ‘value for strategical purposes’, while ‘its magnificent harbour will ever render it an object of cupidity to a commercial nation’.32 But, to Jervis, less important islands like Zante and Cephalonia had been better exploited for their economic potential, leading one to ‘think it strange that [Corfu], which has been so richly gifted by nature, should be so inferior through the inertness of man’.33 In other words, a Corfiot ideal that mated commercial potential to strategic value existed, but its fruition had been held back by the backward nature of the society with which Britain had to work. Similarly, in 1857 Lord High Commissioner Sir John Young wrote to the Colonial Secretary, Henry Labouchere, that ‘England is in a false position here, and the Islands are too widely separated geographically, and their interests too distinct, ever to form a homogenous whole, under foreign auspices’.34 He recommended annexing Corfu and Paxos, letting the rest be brought into union with Greece.35 Some even went a step further than Young. According to Irish MP John Maguire, ‘Many a man had before [Young’s letter] said – “In Heaven’s name, let us get rid of the Ionian Islands; they are of no advantage to us, either in a commercial or strategical point of view”. This I know to be the opinion of Members of this House to whom I have spoken upon the subject.’36 Eventually, then, it turned out that the strategic value of the islands was not so ironclad a principle as it had been in previous decades. One reason for this shift was the development in military and shipping technology, as steam-powered ships changed the nature of Mediterranean naval and trade networks.37 Moreover, the decade after the Crimean War (1853–56) saw the dynamics of the Eastern Question change and the development of Malta as a stronger base of operations, and thus the Ionian Islands no longer fitted Britain’s broader strategic needs.38 In the early 1860s, strengthened ties with the Ottoman Empire, a weaker Russia, and a stabilizing Greece allowed Britain to alter its Mediterranean policy. This was much as, as Andrekos Varnava has argued, Britain found Cyprus fall short of prediction half a century [ 52 ]

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later; the decline of the Protectorate, then, was an early example of an imperial possession becoming ‘inconsequential’ as time went on.39 Still, these changes do not completely elucidate the thought patterns and practices Britons employed in coming to terms with the fact that the islands had gone from a shining city of gold to an embarrassment. Indeed, as Paul Kennedy has shown, there is no such thing as ‘pure’ strategy, as the business of imperial strategy was no more immune to the influences of domestic society and politics than any other area of policy.40 Thus viewing the issue through the lens of British politics offers a fuller portrait of Britain’s Ionian ‘El Dorado’.

Imperial independence: Ionian political myths In June 1821 Radical MP Joseph Hume spoke in Parliament on the question of whether the behaviour of the Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, warranted the formation of an inquiry into the shape of British government in the Ionian Islands.41 Although the British had arrived in the islands as ‘deliverers’,42 Maitland’s tenure, Hume said, had seen ‘a complete despotism under the disguise of a representative government . . . more odious than the tyranny of Turkey or Persia [and] a disgrace to England’.43 The basis for his charge rested on the wording of the Treaty of Paris, which said that the islands ‘should constitute a single free independent state’.44 That Maitland had ‘deprived’ the Ionians of the ‘liberty given to them by the treaty’, and instead used underhand methods ‘to obtain individual subservience to his purpose’,45 was in Hume’s mind ‘a grave case against the colonial department in this country, which had permitted the name of Great Britain to be coupled with such acts of tyranny and injustice’.46 After a short debate, the House divided to vote and came back in large part against the motion. Significantly, among the minority was a young Lord John Russell, who would as Foreign Secretary oversee the transfer of the islands to Greece forty-three years later.47 This rich episode frames a central problem in the story of Britain’s Ionian experience, namely the fact that the Ionian Islands were almost immediately treated exactly contrary to their shape under the legal terms of the Protectorate. The isles of milk and honey posited by the likes of Walton and Williams was a myth whose shape depended on Britons having not yet gotten their hands very dirty in the business of governance. Yet it is in the praxis of such imperial theories that we see how that myth began to decay, especially in light of the inauspicious choice of Maitland as the first permanent Lord High Commissioner. Maitland carried to the Ionian Islands the title ‘King Tom’, which he had earned in Malta for his dictatorial methods – a style he had [ 53 ]

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commenced honing in his pre-Malta post, Ceylon. Maitland’s term in the islands from 1816 to 1823 therefore saw him further develop his own brand of personal rule,48 which was the product of Maitland’s service in Britain’s wider imperial realm. Thus it is in many ways no surprise that the office of the Ionian Lord High Commissioner was immediately imperialistic in policy, and not only in insidious ways but in bold, public ones: monuments were erected in Maitland’s honour, one of which, a triumphal arch in Corfu, Hume scathingly noted had been built and dedicated to Maitland’s service only two months after Maitland had been appointed!49 Maitland, and his supporters, seemed to feel that the duties of governing a possibly rich territory meant bending the place’s inhabitants to a vision of imperial glory and power. Put another way, it was Maitland as conquistador rather than Maitland as administrator, with the Ionians encouraged to worship him for having ‘found’ poor Ionia among the detritus left by old, tired civilizations, polishing it and thus revealing its value. Indeed, such trappings of authority as Maitland’s monuments and statues were clearly meant to symbolize the shape of the relationship the islands’ populace had with its protectors, as did Maitland’s comment to the Colonial Under-Secretary, Sir Henry Bunbury, that his influence on the Ionian constitution – initially, Maitland’s primary task – would give Britain ‘pretty nearly all the real power’.50 As Gallant sums up, ‘The trick was to devise a system of government that paid lip service to Ionian sovereignty while establishing British control’.51 Thus later reforms passing power to the Ionians themselves were, by design, never comprehensive enough to threaten Britain’s material control. As the Quarterly Review stated in 1852, Britain’s control over the Ionian Islands was of an ‘intimate character’, saying that ‘it is not easy to reconcile the idea of Ionian independence with a British protectorate, which all the articles of the [1815 Treaty of Paris] subsequent to the first explain pretty distinctly as equivalent to British sovereignty’.52 However, the real, complicated duties of imperial administration conspired to transform Britons’ initial sense of optimism turned into a gloomy obsession with perfecting a restless-natives policy – a development related to thwarting indigenous people power that was no less important to Britain’s loss of confidence in Ionia than its discovery that possessing the islands would not lead to overflowing coffers or glorious martial dominance. Feelings regarding Ionia’s seemingly imminent grandeur thus faded, replaced by a conviction that stabilization was Britain’s primary need. In the 1830s and 1840s Britain’s Ionian project therefore did not necessarily tend towards ‘real’ independence, but rather towards improving, or ‘softening’, the attitude of British authority so as to reduce problems with the islands’ inhabitants. This dynamic [ 54 ]

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produced some strange contradictions. Lord Seaton, for example, who served as Lord High Commissioner from 1843 to 1849, personally held strong Tory views and yet he attempted to liberalize the institutions and laws of the Protectorate so as to keep it stable and in place.53 Conversely, his successor, Sir Henry Ward, was in Bruce Knox’s words ‘a radical Whig of long standing’ and yet came under harsh criticism for responding to an insurrection in Cephalonia with brutal and disproportionate reprisal tactics.54 In 1850 Papanikolas wrote a letter to Ward saying that he had initially been hopeful that Ward’s ‘enlightened views’ would show themselves in Britain’s Ionian policy.55 But the hope that Ward’s place in British politics would define his role in the Protectorate was dashed by his Cephalonian policy, which ‘caused a stain on the English name throughout Eastern and Western Europe, which no future granting of a liberal Constitution can efface’.56 One thus cannot assume the character of British rule in the islands followed the political persuasions of the authorities. Imperialist Lords High Commissioner like Seaton were not necessarily more heavy-handed than nominally less imperialist ones like Ward. If it became increasingly clear that Ionia’s promises of wealth and power were more gilt than gold, then it appears this disappointment bled over into British administrators’ dealings with what they felt were an intractable populace. Of course, Ionians’ own frustration came from having been slotted into Britain’s imperial policy without Britain holding an unambiguous claim to power over Ionia’s destiny.57 In this, perhaps the British were victims of a twist of fate that made the Protectorate increasingly obsolete as time went on, foreshadowing Cyprus’s eclipse by Egypt in the 1880s.58 In the Ionian case, however, the development was linked directly to the formation of a state: the union of the Ionian Islands with Greece, ostensibly an alternative to a British administration, had not existed at the founding of the Protectorate as, of course, Greece had then still been a possession of the Ottoman Empire. This confounded the justification for British rule, as Greece was quite willing to lift the burden Britons’ increasingly felt they bore. Although it is often noted that the British Empire was among the few European powers to escape a revolution in 1848, Britain’s experience in the Protectorate provides an exception to this judgement.59 R. W. Seton-Watson felt that, if the Ionian populace had judged the pre-1848 Protectorate a ‘just, if sometimes arbitrary, government’, after 1848 Britain’s resistance to accepting Greek national feeling – and especially the call for union – came to dominate Ionians’ view of the Protectorate.60 The British thought that making the press freer and giving more power to the popularly elected Ionian Assembly would aid [ 55 ]

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relations between nationalist factions and the British administration, but exactly the opposite happened.61 During the 1850s, therefore, the British increasingly found that the reforms they passed had provided venues for organized resistance to form. With the advance of unionist political factions the islands became, as Gallant states, ‘ungovernable’ and ‘administrative gridlock resulted’.62 Ionian dissidents found that, with a free press and civil society, public outcry over Britain’s betrayal of Ionian self-rule was easier to incite, as when protests broke out in 1857 over a petition read in Parliament that referred to the Ionian Islands as a colony.63 Although the petition called for the Ionian people to elect an MP to send to the House of Commons, The Spectator reported that many members of the Ionian Assembly felt it showed that Britain ‘intended to deprive the islands of their independence’.64 Intriguingly, Ionian independence was here made to serve the interests of those who wanted to use the Ionian Islands’ sovereign rights to bring about the islands’ union with Greece, thus trading the British-authored myth of independence for inclusion in the mythic journey of the Greek nation. Indeed, perhaps Ionia’s dreams of enosis constituted a kind of ‘El Dorado’ in their own right. The Tory Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Lord Derby, felt that a prominent and unitary figure might salvage the situation, pressing William Ewart Gladstone to accept a position as a special envoy to the Ionian Islands.65 A noted Homeric scholar, it seemed that Gladstone might help restore British respect and prestige while giving the islanders an indication that Britain cared about the islands’ Greek character.66 Gladstone’s identity as a former Tory who had an uneasy relationship with Lord Palmerston, the leading Liberal and Derby’s predecessor, bolstered the decision.67 He was thus appointed to serve alongside Lord High Commissioner Young as ‘Lord High Commissioner Extraordinary to the Ionian Islands’, a title intended to ‘dazzle’ the Ionian people,68 whom the British believed were reliably impressed by such superlatives – a characteristic of imperial thinking, in which a legate must appear to be a kind of god-king as well as an administrator. But there was an inherent irrationality in the choice of Gladstone in that it served a role in British domestic politics, meaning that Britain’s engagement of Ionian problems proceeded from a place far removed and far different to the Ionian scene. Even if, as Colin Matthew thought, Gladstone himself did not see the acceptance of the position as an indication that he was being drawn back into the Tory camp,69 there is good reason to believe that Derby and his cohorts thought it possible.70 And if Gladstone should fail in his task, that was also a good thing – perhaps preferable. As Michael Partridge puts it, the Ionian mission would ‘take him out of Parliament at a crucial time. It would be [ 56 ]

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difficult to achieve anything, and failure in the Ionian Islands would only expose Gladstone to ridicule.’71 Gladstone’s role, then, existed largely on a plane other than the Ionian one. Still, Gladstone immediately grasped the need to confront Ionian politics, especially the Radical Union Party’s use of the islands’ sovereignty to advance the cause of union, on its own terms.72 Further, Ionian society was well aware of Gladstone’s stature in British politics. Indeed, when Gladstone resigned his post in early 1859 to remain eligible for a seat in Parliament, the Ionian political elite knew Gladstone’s return to the centre of British politics imparted a more crucial texture to his actions in and towards the islands.73 Thus it was that Gladstone’s dispatch of 27 December 1858, while rejecting union, rightly identified the solution to Ionian problems in the nexus between Britain’s strategic interests, the principle of Ionian independence, and the islands’ Greek character.74 The fact remains, however, that Gladstone’s interest in and understanding of Ionian problems did not issue from the Ionian state of being but Gladstone’s state of being. Imperial fantasies – the dreams of greatness and the epic plans to ‘improve’ the natives – came from the mind of the metropole; a happy, prosperous Ionian colony was a fiction that depended on values, memes, and metaphors whose origin was in British, especially English, culture. The irony, then, is that Gladstone did personally care about the Ionian Islands and his mission there.75 It was just that his affinity and concern for the region were the result of British culture’s broader Hellenic obsessions – a vital area of inquiry that concludes this study.

Ulysses and union: British Hellenic myths It should be made clear that the issue of whether or not the Ionian Islands are ‘actually’ Greek is not a salient matter for this brief inquiry. Taking this approach appears to, in the words of Athanasios Gekas, ‘[prioritize] the issue of “unification” . . . over other forms of historical narrative’, acting as an endorsement of the fundamentally unitary nature of an Ionian-Greek space.76 Instead, it was Britons’ understanding (and shaping) of the islands’ assumed Greekness and the significance of this question to British policy-making that are here of primary interest. That Lord Byron formed his first impressions of Greek society while staying in Cephalonia in 1823 during the Greek War of Independence, calling those he encountered (including, apparently, leaders of the revolt) ‘burglarious and larcenous . . . damned liars’, shows that the Ionian Islands offered Britain a venue for encounters with the Greek space and particular kinds of Greeks.77 If British thought was disrupted and changed by their Ionian experience, it also makes sense to look at [ 57 ]

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how it may have paralleled and had an impact on Britain’s ascending imperial world-view. This ascension of an imperialistic Britain directly implies a material component, namely the gathering of wealth and power as an adjunct to territorial expansion. Why, then, did Britain’s disappointment with its Ionian quest not lead to a stronger feeling that empire for profit was a bad bet? Put another way, one might ask why, not long after Ionia’s cession, Britain went ahead with the acquisition of another problematically Hellenistic locale, namely Cyprus. In this sense, it is perhaps the case that Britain’s Ionian journey was defined by a component distinguishing it somewhat from the Cyprus case, namely that the Protectorate was coincident with the apex (if not rise) and decline (if not fall) of British Hellenic obsessions.78 To be sure, early in Britain’s time in the islands, matters relating to Ionia’s Greekness were scattered and imprecise, burdened by the decade of tumult during the Napoleonic Wars and the islands’ Venetian heritage. Observers thus sought intellectual purchase in the ancient period, like Hugh Williams did in saying of his 1820 visit to Ithaca that ‘Ulysses seemed still, in our imagination, King of Ithaca, and our curiosity was stimulated by every circumstance which popular belief or ancient poetry had connected with his story and that of the Trojan war.’79 Likewise, Tertius Kendrick introduced his readers to Corfu by quoting lines from the Odyssey, noting of his 1822 visit that the look of the island from the sea ‘by no means accords with [Homer’s] account’.80 Throughout his discussion, he compares and contrasts Homeric myth with his own experiences, noting as to Corfu’s abundance that Homer’s ‘description . . . is valid to the present moment’.81 As for his taxonomy of the Ionians, Kendrick, like other early observers, collapses Greek ethnicity directly into religion, with the label ‘Greek’ used simply to refer to those of the Orthodox faith. When considering the essence of 1820s Ionian Greekness, then, Kendrick conflates the modern and the ancient, blaming Venice for the loss of Ionia’s Greek character: Drawn away from his native land, taught to believe that Venice was his mother-city, and bred up in all its vices and refinements, how was it possible that the Greek should nourish any part of the national spirit or character which formerly so distinguished itself? – He would blush to speak his own and proper language; he would envy the lot of those who were born in Venice; and, in so doing, became lost to all sense and consideration of his country, whilst he became the willing and corrupt slave of an artful state.82

The object of the British protectorate was thus, for some, concerned with redeeming the Greek character of the islands after centuries [ 58 ]

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smothered in Venice’s venal embrace. Britain’s Ionian mission was as dependent on this component as it was on the belief that the islands could produce revenues and house forts, or that the islanders would forgo their independence for an illustrious, benevolent British administration. Indeed, like Kendrick, C. P. De Bosset felt that Ionian Greeks’ ‘morals were corrupted’ by Venetian rule, and as such ‘the Greeks of the Ionian Isles are rather to be pitied than blamed’.83 In a plainly imperialist construction De Bosset said ‘it is only by patience, indulgence, good example, and a proper degree of firmness, that they are to be improved, and their attachment secured to the nation which protects them’.84 As Gallant shows, the Orthodox Church was not wholly opposed to this aspect of the Protectorate, but the Greek war made it impossible for there to be no direct conflict between Britain’s thinly veiled colonial mission and the projects of Orthodoxy.85 Further, Britain’s policy of neutrality during the war produced a contested understanding of the islands’ Greek nature, with Maitland and his successor, Sir Frederick Adam, dismissing Greek affinities and Byron and his cohorts believing that Ionians were implicitly Greek.86 Perhaps, especially for the latter group, participating in Hellenic fable helped make the Ionian ‘El Dorado’ fantasy so powerful in the first instance, but also made it so disappointing after Ionia failed to satisfy such artificially elevated expectations. British philhellenism, however, did not change the fact that the war showed that Greek nationalism was subversive to British control. In the 1830s and 1840s Britons’ assessment of Ionian Greekness thus became progressively identified with political and cultural ideals insurgent to British power. In time, Britain’s philhellenism began to dim, especially when applied to the Ionian case, which no doubt implied a causal relationship.87 Logically, one could not have myths of greatness linked to a part of the Hellenic world fail without reflecting back on one’s general Hellenic inclinations. On a policy level, then, the focus shifted towards purely protecting the integrity of the Protectorate’s power apparatus. Indeed, the reformist platforms of Lords High Commissioner Douglas and Seaton ran up against the feeling that the new class of unionist Ionians, backed by local Orthodox authorities, could not be given the liberal freedoms – like a freer press and wider enfranchisement – implied by the society such reforms engendered, as this would undermine Britain’s position.88 By the 1850s the Radical Union Party, who felt that the Protectorate had from the first been illegal, threatened British rule directly by claiming that the Kingdom of Greece now offered the protection the islands needed.89 Greek Ionia thus became associated with inconsistencies in the intellectual framework of British imperialism, which was often justified [ 59 ]

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by the idea that the empire extended justice, order, and protection to those who had none. Not only had Britons been unable to find Ionia’s hidden wealth, but they had been rejected from the throne of god-king by stupid, ungrateful natives and pushed out of the progression of Hellenic myth. Enosis did not accommodate sustained British rule in the islands, and so Britons reduced Ionian unrest to simple sedition. The erosion of the logic behind the Protectorate exposes a crudeness in Britain’s imperial project, with the miserable, oppressed Ionian Greek, once so in need of British support, now awkwardly clad in the uniform of an imperial mutineer – a warped historical perspective that became a feature of Britain’s subsequent confrontations with nationalist movements, from Cyprus, to Palestine, to India, to, indeed, Ireland.90 As Eastern Orthodoxy made up a large part of Greek national identity,91 British discourse also shifted towards identifying the islands’ religiosity as part of the problem. It is clear here that Britain’s perception of the Irish problem bled over into the Ionian one, as the widespread belief that an ignorant, superstitious Catholic clergy in Ireland undermined British authority is clearly parallel to feelings regarding Ionian Orthodoxy.92 Writing in 1842, John Davy called the Orthodox clergy ‘eminently ignorant’, citing a certain Dr John Hennen as saying (in a passage similar to later assessments of the clergy in Cyprus)93 that they were ‘taken from the very scum of the population’.94 In an 1840 dispatch to the Colonial Office Lord High Commissioner Douglas called the Ionian clergy ‘ignorant and bigoted’ and the people ‘semi-barbarous’, which Papanikolas deemed ‘[i]nconsiderate, [e]rroneous, and [l]ibellous’.95 Likewise, Henry Jervis called the clergy ‘slothful and uneducated’, impugning the Ionian Greek priest for acting as a ‘religious tax-gatherer’ by taking bribes to perform excommunications.96 In fact, Gallant argues that excommunication, which Jervis saw as priests taking advantage of the ‘superstitions of the people’,97 was actually encouraged by British officials to keep order and discourage radicalism.98 Intriguingly, the stereotype of the wretched, superstitious, mercenary Ionian Greek may have served a purpose in propping up Britain’s imperial establishment. Such a dynamic exposes the Protectorate’s increasing structural and operational cynicism, suggesting a rejection of any lingering romantic vision of Ionia as an imminently bountiful stronghold. Considering the tarnish on the islands’ reputation in Britain by this point, Gladstone’s take on the problem ultimately reinforced the tendency to adopt policies protecting the status quo, while intoning soft words of spiritual sympathy. Gladstone identified with philhellenism, but the unionist Hellenism of the Ionian populace was impossible to endorse.99 It is possible that Gladstone’s impression of the islands’ ancient qualities were destabilized by the modern version he found [ 60 ]

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in his short stay in the Ionian Islands – the indulgence of his Homeric fantasies contrasting with the dismal realities of Ionian social and political conditions.100 Ionian Greekness had turned out to be problematic, unpredictable, and unsatisfying, not to mention that there proved to be substantial blocks to shoehorning British-authored Hellenic ideals into Britain’s broader imperial programme. When confronted with this difficult situation, Gladstone took a wider view of the issue, feeling that delimbing Britain of Ionia would set a bad precedent in the rest of the empire, where other subject peoples might make their own case for withdrawal.101 As always, Ireland lurked not too far offstage in such matters, as did India in light of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Fear of imperial devolution – and the factors of ethnicity and nationalism therein – was a reliable companion to the empire’s growth, and Gladstone was throughout his career aware of these concerns.102 As it was, Gladstone only accepted the final cession of the islands to Greece in 1864 in keeping with his role in the Liberal government that authored the move,103 while the lack of public objection to union no doubt aided his decision to stay relatively silent on the matter.104 Gladstone’s increasingly volatile relationship with his rival, Benjamin Disraeli, who strongly opposed cession in the name of imperial defence,105 also likely influenced Gladstone’s decision to remain aloof. Still, as Richard Shannon states, ‘the camouflage of the warm glow of Homeric scholarship’ hid the fact that in the Ionian case Gladstone, in contrast to his totemic role in British philhellenism, fitted the mould of the cold imperialist far more neatly and willingly than his supporters would later claim.106

Conclusion Pondering the end of the Protectorate in 1864, Lord Kirkwall registered his hope ‘that the friendly feelings between the English and the Greek races’ would soon ‘become permanently established, to the benefit of civilization and of genuine enlightened Christianity’.107 However, Kirkwall wrote in a world that, in 1864, was very different to that of 1815. By 1864 the Protectorate reflected, as Pratt notes, Britain’s ‘eighteenth-century dilettantist approach’ to empire-building and administration more than the ‘stern improving spirit of the Victorian age’.108 The Ionian recessional reflected changed emphases in Britain’s imperial programme, and it no longer made sense to control a place without it being more comprehensively ‘owned’ – the Raj being a significant example contemporary to the end of Britain’s Ionian experience. Britons were also more alive to the cold realities of imperialism, and so the relevance of set-piece romantic fantasies in justifying British rule waned [ 61 ]

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in preference to a hazy dialectic of order and might makes right espoused by figures like Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, and Joseph Chamberlain. In time, this more calculated, territorially driven, and direct style of imperialism became the British norm – the ‘new imperialism’ as it eventually came to be called.109 The irony is that although the Ionian case bears some resemblance to the issues at hand in Britain’s new imperial world-view, the decision to allow the Ionian Islands to enter into union with Greece might appear to conflict with the general trend. Instead, one might say Britain ridding itself of the Ionian Islands cleared it of the need to continue justifying an ultimately flawed premise for control. As the British Empire was not built according to preordained or systematized plans, it had to account for the values of the historical moment. The myths that gave shape to, justified, and sustained Britain’s Ionian project now stood as symbols of past cultural ideals and relevances, just as the optimism for a strong, bountiful, and peaceable British Ionia morphed into a kind of intellectual Purgatory – a crushing angst disrupting Britain’s imperial destiny. The only solution was for Britons to accept that they had naively approached the Ionian Islands as an ‘El Dorado’, and in retreat allow their golden illusions to dissipate into the vagaries of history.

Notes 1 See Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge, 2005, 87–90; Ronald Hyam, ‘The Primacy of Geopolitics: The Dynamics of British Imperial Policy, 1763–1963’, in Robert King and Robin Kilson (eds), The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honor of Wm. Roger Louis, London, 1999, esp. 31–5. 2 Guillaume de Vaudoncourt, Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, trans. William Walton, London, 1816, iv–v. 3 See Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915, Manchester, 2009, esp. ch. 4, ‘The Sublime Illusions: 1878–80: The Mediterranean “Eldorado” ’, 93–126. 4 See Michael Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire: Reflections on the History of the Ionian Islands from the Fall of Byzantium, London, 1978, 7–11. 5 These are now usually transliterated from modern Greek into English as Kerkyra, Ithaki, Zakynthos, Paxi, Kythira, Kefalonia, and Lefkada. I have chosen to use the Italian/English styles to avoid confusion in handling primary sources. It does not reflect any preference on my part. 6 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 50–60. 7 ‘Ionian Islands and the Great Exhibition’, Daily News, 20 February 1851, included as Appendix A in George Papanikolas, The Ionian Islands: What They Have Lost and Suffered, London, 1851, i. 8 Papanikolas, Ionian Islands, i–ii. 9 Ibid. 10 Papanikolas, Ionian Islands, 1. 11 Vaudoncourt, Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, 444–66. 12 Ibid., 466. 13 Ibid., 467.

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GREEK EXPECTATIONS: BRITAIN AND THE IONIAN ISLANDS 14 Hugh Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, II, Edinburgh, 1820, 164. 15 Henry Holland, Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, &c. during the Years 1812 and 1813, I, 2nd edn, London, 1819, 18. 16 George Orkney, Viscount Kirkwall (ed.), Four Years in the Ionian Islands, I, London, 1864, iv. 17 See Thomas Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean, Notre Dame, IN, 2002, 57–74. 18 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, 76. 19 This was especially the case after government expenditures were cut back following the Napoleonic Wars – see Julian Hoppit, ‘Checking the Leviathan, 1688–1832’, in Donald Winch and Patrick O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience 1688–1914, Oxford, 2002, 285, 291–2. 20 Holland, Travels in the Ionian Isles, 20. 21 Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, 186. 22 Tertius Kendrick, The Ionian Islands: Manners and Customs, London, 1822, 141–2. 23 Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, 186. 24 ‘Corfu’, Knight’s Penny Magazine, 11 October 1834, 394–6, 396. 25 David Brewster (ed.), Edinburgh Encyclopædia, VII, Edinburgh, 1830 (‘Corfu’). 26 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 24–8. 27 Kendrick, The Ionian Islands, 100. 28 Robert Montgomery Martin, History of the British Colonies, V, London, 1835, 377. 29 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 130–2 30 Ibid., 115–19. 31 Henry Jervis, History of the Island of Corfú, and of the Republic of the Ionian Islands, London, 1852, vi. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 261. 34 Quoted in Robert Holland and Diana Markides, The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean, Oxford, 2006, 17. The original letter was dated 10 June 1857. 35 Ibid. 36 Hansard Parl. Deb. (series 3) vol. 162, col. 1663 (7 May 1861). Andrekos Varnava should be credited here with having made a similar observation on the subject of Britain’s Cyprus experience. See, Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915, esp., ch. 8, ‘ “Cyprus Is of No Use to Anybody”: The Pawn’, 246–71. 37 Jim Potts, The Ionian Islands and Epirus: A Cultural History, Oxford, 2010, 49–50. 38 Ibid.; Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, 17. 39 Varnava shows that changes in strategic policy, as well as the acquisition of Egypt, similarly rendered Cyprus “inconsequential” in Britain’s imperial programme (British Imperialism in Cyprus, 247–53). 40 See Paul Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–1980, London, 1981. 41 Hansard Parl. Deb. (series 2) vol. 5, col. 1139 (7 June 1821). 42 Ibid., col. 1129. 43 Ibid., cols. 1133–4. 44 Ibid., col. 1129. 45 Ibid., col. 1131. 46 Ibid., col. 1134. 47 Ibid., col. 1149. 48 Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, 15. 49 Hansard Parl. Deb. (series 2) vol. 5, col. 1131 (7 June 1821). 50 Quoted in Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 8. 51 Ibid. 52 ‘Ionian Administration – Lord Seaton and Sir Henry Ward’, Quarterly Review 91(582), 1852, 170.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 53 Bruce Knox, ‘British Policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847–1864: Nationalism and Imperial Administration’, English Historical Review, 99(392), 1984, 505; Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 130–1. 54 Knox, ‘British Policy and the Ionian Islands’, 505–6. 55 Papanikolas to Ward, 2 February 1850, in George Papanikolas, Usque Adeo? Or, What May Be Said for the Ionian People, London, 1853, 16. 56 Ibid., 17. 57 For a comparison with Cyprus, see Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 179–81, 189–90. 58 Ibid., 235–6. 59 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 12. 60 R. W. Seton-Watson, Britain in Europe, 1789–1914, Cambridge, 1937, 426. 61 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 132–43. 62 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 13. 63 Seton-Watson. Britain in Europe, 1789–1914, 426; Hansard Parl. Deb. (series 3) vol. 147, cols 437–9 (27 July 1857). 64 ‘The Ionian Islands’, The Spectator, 1 August 1857, 792, B. 65 Richard Shannon, Gladstone, I, Chapel Hill, NC, 1984, 363. 66 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898, Oxford 1997, 165–6. 67 See Roy Jenkins, Gladstone, London, 1995, 199–214. 68 Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, 20. 69 Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898, 107. 70 A. W. Ward and G. P. Gooch (eds), The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783–1919, II, Cambridge, 1971, 603; Shannon, Gladstone, 363. 71 Michael Partridge, Gladstone, London, 2003, 89. 72 Holland and Markides, The British and the Hellenes, 38–9. 73 Ibid., 40. 74 Jenkins, Gladstone, 195. 75 Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898, 166. 76 Athanasios Gekas, ‘Class and National Identities in the Ionian Islands under British Rule’, in Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (eds), The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Use of the Past (1797–1896), London, 2009, 161. 77 Quoted in Potts, Ionian Islands and Epirus, 90. 78 See Varnava’s comments on Disraeli’s ‘new crusade’ regarding Cyprus (British Imperialism in Cyprus, 55–60 and 73–5). 79 Williams, Travels in Italy, Greece, and the Ionian Islands, 194. 80 Kendrick, The Ionian Islands, 152. 81 Ibid., 156. 82 Ibid., 220–1. 83 C. P. De Bosset, Parga, and the Ionian Islands, 2nd edn, London, 1822, 161. De Bosset served as Britain’s Governor of Cephalonia (1810–15), 386–9. 84 Ibid., 161. 85 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 187–8. 86 Ibid., 10. 87 Woodhouse, The Philhellenes, London, 1969, 153. It is also the case that once Greece became a state it entered the diplomatic realm, and so it inevitably became open to British criticism within the Concert system. 88 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 128–32. 89 Eleni Calligas, ‘Radical Nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864)’, in Beaton and Ricks, Making of Modern Greece, 155–6. 90 Especially in regard to Cyprus, this perversion of history in the Ionian case was apparently not well sensed and thus reappeared. See Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 183–9. 91 Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 179. Also, for a more detailed view on this subject, see Victor Roudometof’s work, especially ‘Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies

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92 93 94

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95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

14(2), 1996, 253–301, and ‘The Glocalizations of Eastern Orthodox Christianity’, European Journal of Social Theory 16(2), 2013, 226–45. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 38–9. Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 161. John Davy, Notes and Observations on the Ionian Islands and Malta, II, London, 1842, 98 and 149 respectively; Potts, Ionian Islands and Epirus, 87 for details on Davy. Papanikolas, Usque Adeo?, 130. Douglas’s quotes come from a dispatch by Douglas dated 10 April 1840. Jervis, History of the Island of Corfú, 276. Ibid., 277. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion, 196. Jenkins, Gladstone, 195. For a description of Gladstone’s tour of the islands, see Shannon, Gladstone, 367–73. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898, 165–6. On the connection between imperial power and anxiety, see Daniel Binova, British Imperial Literature 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire, Cambridge, 1998, 19–21. Shannon, Gladstone, 474–5. Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 153. For details on Disraeli’s objections, see Richard Koebner and Helmut Dan Schmidt, Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1960, Cambridge, 1964, 46–9; Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 69. Shannon, Gladstone, 475. Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, 317. Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 156. See Anthony Webster, The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire, Manchester, 2006, 71–5.

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CHAPTER FOUR

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Bambuk gold: General Faidherbe’s Senegalese chimera1 Leland Conley Barrows

By 1858, Governor Louis Faidherbe of Senegal had fulfilled much of the Plan of 1854 that had called for ending Moorish control of the gum trading posts along the Senegal River, abolishing the trade taxes that the leaders of the Mauritanian tribes and other African polities, Fouta-Toro, for instance, charged French traders to navigate and trade along the Senegal River, and in general, forcing recognition by African rulers that France held sovereign ownership of the river. Faidherbe’s troops had also defeated the armies of Al Hajj Umar and were thus pushing Umar’s movement eastward into Kaarta and Ségou. Faidherbe therefore felt free to take up a long-simmering French project, that of developing the goldfields of the Falémé River region of the Upper Senegal. French know-how, he believed, would trump African inefficiency and would give France an El Dorado of its own. Not only might such an El Dorado finance further French penetration into the Western Sudan, believed to offer an additional El Dorado of trading possibilities, but success in carrying out the project would be an additional feather for Faidherbe’s cap.

A French El Dorado in West Africa? Gold from the interior of West Africa was a major component of the trans-Sahara trade from antiquity onwards. That the Western Sudan might be the site of one or more El Dorados was suggested by the extravagant gifts of gold dust and nuggets made by Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali and his entourage, when they passed through Cairo in 1324 on their way to Mecca. As early modern Europe became increasingly committed to bullionist theories of wealth, explorers and officials from Portugal, France, and England sought access to West African gold. Even though the Atlantic slave trade would come to dominate the export trade of West Africa until it was outlawed beginning in 1803, the lure [ 66 ]

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of gold, in particular, and in general, a growing belief that the Western Sudan, its initial focal point being Timbuktu, offered unlimited trade possibilities continued to tantalise Europeans and contributed to French and English efforts to occupy the mouths of the Senegal and the Gambia Rivers, respectively, and to create trading posts upstream at their navigable limits. By the time Major Louis Léon César Faidherbe of the French Army Engineer Corps began his first governorship of Senegal (1854–61), Europeans had known for many years that one of the sources of the West African gold traded through ancient Ghana to North Africa was Bambuk,2 a region lying along the middle course of the Falémé River, that, like the Senegal River into which it flows, has its source in the Fouta Djalon Mountains of Guinea. The Senegal and the Falémé Rivers flow in a parallel north-north-western direction until they meet just upstream from the village of Aroundou on the Senegal River in Gadiaga (Galam). Much of the area on the right bank of the Falémé is Bambuk; the area on the left bank is Bondou. A portion of Bambuk that was conquered by the Almamate of Bondou, including the area in which the French authorities under Faidherbe would open two fortified posts and engage in gold mining, is attached to Senegal. The rest forms part of the Republic of Mali. The gold was mostly alluvial derived from quartz formations that had been broken up by erosion and washed down from the Tambaoura Escarpment that parallels and separates the Falémé and the upper Senegal/Bafing Rivers. The population of Bambuk consisted (and still consists) mainly of Malinké peasants organised into a number of autonomous villages. Because Bambuk could be reached seasonally (albeit with difficulty) by boat, several officials representing the chartered companies that successively founded and managed the French seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury fortified trading posts in Senegal, particularly André Brue who administered these posts from 1697 to 1702 and again from 1714 to 1720, attempted to trade with and even to implant fortified trading posts in Gadiaga and Bambuk. Distance, disease, the opposition of the local peoples to French penetration, restricted funding, the low yield of gold, and the two periods of British occupation of Saint-Louis (1758–78 and 1809–17) impeded these attempts. However, French interest not only in Bambuk but also in the commercial possibilities of the Western Sudan continued to simmer. After France reoccupied Saint-Louis in 1817 and constructed the Bakel fort in Gadiaga in 1818, the Paris authorities and the local governors regularly brought up the question of Bambuk gold and the assumed commercial potential of the Niger River valley proposing exploration missions and worrying about British commercial competition coming from Gambia. [ 67 ]

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The ambitious governor and the Plan of 1854 Faidherbe served twice as Governor of Senegal (1854–61 and 1863–65). Many French colonial historians, those who wrote during the colonial period and some contemporary historians as well, credit Faidherbe with completing the French conquest of Senegal and of laying the basis for the occupation of the rest of French West Africa.3 It seems, however, that in terms of the actual conquest and administration of colonial territory, he was conservative. He preferred to pacify and to dominate native societies rather than to totally defeat and rule them. In a sense, he used force to create an informal empire in the Senegal River valley and later along other Senegalese waterways where, because France was the only European power present, the whole territory bathed by these streams might seem more like a territorial colony than it was.4 During Faidherbe’s first four years as governor, he executed a plan of action that bore the imprint of a former governor, Admiral Edouard Bouët-Willaumez, and of the owners of the Maurel and Prom Company of Bordeaux that had risen to a premier position in Senegambia by the 1840s. This ‘Plan of 1854’ called for the securing of the Senegal River by France, the abolition of the coutumes (trade taxes) that French traders had been required to pay for the right to participate in the gum trade with the right-bank Mauritanian tribes, the abolition of transit fees payable to certain riverine rulers for the right to navigate along the Senegal River, the cantonment of the Mauritanian tribes on the right bank of the Senegal River, and the selective occupation of territory around French posts including the whole kingdom of Walo, the Woloff state nearest to Saint-Louis. The unanticipated start of Al Hajj Umar Tal’s jihad and state-building activities forced an adaptation of this plan to include the defeat of Umar’s movement in the presumed French sphere but tacit French approval of its migration eastward into the Bambara kingdoms of Kaarta and Ségou.

Linking gold to the Plan Bringing Bambuk and the gold that it produced more firmly into the riverine trade system to be protected and expanded seemed like a logical corollary to the Plan of 1854. The view that Faidherbe adopted that the Bambuk mines should be worked by Europeans using ‘modern’ methods, rather than relying on native producers and local middlemen of various backgrounds to deliver gold to French traders, was a departure from what had been the common trading practice since the French reoccupation of Saint-Louis in 1817. But Faidherbe was not alone in believing that ‘Europeans can do it best’. Also his prior experience of [ 68 ]

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military conquest in Algeria and the willingness of the French government in the 1850s to approve the use of limited military force in Senegal pushed him towards greater action, in Senegal, in many areas, than had been the case earlier. Until the start of the Cayor campaigns in 1861, Faidherbe’s military actions had been essentially amphibious, involving the use of steam gunboats to control the navigable course of the Senegal River and, later on, the navigable courses of the Saloum and the Casamance Rivers as well as the lagoons composing the Southern Rivers in Guinea. The French boats enabled the launching of raids inland from the river banks by relatively small numbers of French troops supplemented by native auxiliaries and the construction of small fortresses at strategic points used as much to secure trade as to ensure defence. One such construction, the Sénoudébou trading fort that was opened in 1845 on the left bank of the Falémé River, some 45 kilometres upstream from its junction with the Senegal River, was intended to attract gold sellers from Bambuk and other African traders who might otherwise have taken their goods to Gambia. The French claimed extraterritorial rights for these forts as well as for the immediately surrounding land.5 Having accomplished the basic plan by 1858, Faidherbe could take up the task of occupying a part of Bambuk so that a contingent of engineer troops and civilian workers, normally stationed in Saint-Louis, might engage in gold extraction using the French technology available in the mid-1850s. Faidherbe’s interest in Bambuk gold may have had a personal side to it. Two of his biographers, André Demaison and Georges Hardy, have claimed that early in his military career when he had a pressing need for money both to aid his widowed mother and to pay off gambling debts incurred during a two-year stint (1840–42) at the postgraduate Ecole d’application de l’artillerie et du génie at Metz following his graduation from the Ecole Polytechnique in 1840, he considered giving up his commission and moving to California to prospect for gold.6 The California part of this story is doubtful, given that the gold rush there did not get under way until 1849; however, Faidherbe most likely considered leaving the Army in 1843 because, as demonstrated by his poor professional evaluation for that year, he was discouraged and bored with garrison duty in France.7 Also, he did have money problems. A few items in his private papers indicate that he longed to get away to something more exciting and exotic.8 His timely transfer to Algeria in 1843 probably saved his military career. He had two postings there (1843–846 and 1849–52) and one in Guadeloupe (1848–49) before being transferred to Senegal in 1852. In addition to offering the young engineer officer (he was 25 years old in 1843) some military action and [ 69 ]

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construction work in Algeria, plus adventure, the exotic, and a higher salary, they stimulated in him a lifelong fascination for the history, geography, anthropology, and languages of the peoples of North and West Africa. A notebook that Faidherbe compiled during this first two years in Senegal while serving as the Director of the Engineer Detachment in Saint-Louis indicates that he absorbed the history of European, particularly French and English, attempts to identify the sources of the Senegal and the Niger Rivers, to trace the course of the Niger River, and to reach Timbuktu.9 He also familiarised himself with the writings of explorers and French officials about Bambuk and its purported wealth. He apparently did not question the various claims, going back to a sixteenth-century Portuguese attempt to occupy Bambuk, that the region abounded in gold, nor did he comment on the fact that all the Portuguese and French efforts to effectuate a long-term occupation of Bambuk had failed. Superficial evidence compiled by French explorers and colonial officials going back to the 1697 arrival of André Brue, plus wishful thinking, suggested that the gold available was plentiful and not difficult to extract. The Portuguese, who had attempted to open a trading fort at Farabana, the capital of Bambuk, during the second half of the fifteenth century, had named the creek connecting this village with the Falémé River the ‘Ryo de Ouro’ (possibly a translation of the Bambara name, Sanou Kholé, which means River of Gold).10 André Brue and his successors had pressed ahead, with mixed success, to open fortified trading posts in the upper Senegal and Falémé Rivers. Slaves, however, rather than gold, became the principal trading commodity for the French, but agents of the French companies that successively administered the French possessions in Senegal did purchase small quantities of gold.11 Nevertheless, for Jean-Baptiste Léonard Durand, the company director in the 1780s, the Bambuk mines were fabulously rich, ‘greatly surpassing those of Brazil and Peru . . . the nature of the terrain being such that six men could extract more gold from Bambuk than one hundred men from the most [productive] mines in Spain and Portugal’. He added that the Bambuk miners barely knew how to extract the gold from their rich soil: ‘They are convinced that gold is a clever spirit which enjoys tormenting those who love it and for this reason frequently changes its position.’12 Two explorers, who were active in Senegal immediately prior to Faidherbe’s, arrival strongly influenced French policy regarding Bambuk. The first one was Anne Raffenel, a naval administrator who undertook two exploration missions to the upper Senegal in 1843–44 and 1846–48, writing and publishing extensively about both missions. He [ 70 ]

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was involved in the negotiations with Almami13 Saada that led in 1845 to the founding of the Sénoudébou trading fort. He argued that the French occupation of Bambuk and the introduction of French mining technology would greatly increase the output of the Bambuk mines.14 The other explorer was Pierre-Louis Rey, the Commandant of the Bakel fort who in 1851 and 1852 explored the upper Senegal River almost to Bafoulabé and then visited Bambuk. He strongly urged French penetration into this area citing its presumed commercial potential and the potential for serious gold extraction in Bambuk provided that the labour was undertaken by Africans supervised by a few Europeans.15 The French historian, Yves Saint-Martin, hints that Rey’s enthusiasm for Bambuk and the upper river was stimulated by his need to pay off heavy debts, the result of failed commercial ventures in Saint-Louis.16 He had obtained permission to engage in private trading in parallel with his official duties as Commandant of Bakel, such moonlighting being tolerated at the time by the colonial administration in the case of civilian officials. Did Rey hope to profit personally from a French occupation of Bambuk? He died in 1854, aged 32. Writing in 1855, two long-term residents of Senegal, the jurist, Frédéric Carrère, and the gum trader turned post commandant, Paul Holle, authors of De la Sénégambie française, claimed with typical El Dorado exaggeration that the gold of Bambuk was ‘so abundant that one finds it mixed with the dust raised by sweeping out huts’.17

The occupation of Kéniéba In early 1854, instructions given to Governor Auguste-Léon Protet by Jean-Théodore Ducos, the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, and Henri-Joseph Mestro, his Director of Colonies, linked the planned construction of the Podor fort in Western Fouta-Toro to the future exploitation of the Bambuk gold mines as well as to French expansion from the upper Senegal region to the upper Niger region: [The Podor fort] . . . that is expected to assure unobstructed communication along the middle Senegal, would fail to achieve one of its most essential objectives if it did not become the starting point for a new era of operations and achievements for our trade with the upper river, notably with Bambuk and Kaarta.18

This dispatch included a copy of a detailed report by Mestro dated 31 December 1853 on the Bambuk mines and gold mining in general in West Africa culled from a number of sources. It evoked previous French efforts, particularly those of Raffenel, to explore the upper Senegal region and to purchase gold there. [ 71 ]

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The dispatch also described a proposal that an American mining engineer, Robert Parish, had presented directly to Emperor Louis Napoleon. Parish and his associate had asked that Bambuk be granted to them as a gold-mining concession along with a generous subsidy to start up a modern gold extraction enterprise. The proposal had been politely declined both because it was vague and because the government was in no mood to subsidise it. Nevertheless, the idea that private enterprise would ultimately offer the best means to develop Bambuk and other gold-bearing areas would resurface periodically. Mestro evoked the optimistic projections of Raffenel and Rey. While admitting that between October 1852 and October 1853 the Sénoudébou post had brought in only 2,000 francs worth of gold, he added that ‘the small quantity of gold exported can be explained by the backward extraction procedures employed by the natives . . . If intelligent and well-organised extraction methods were employed, far more gold, specimens of which indicate that African gold is of very high quality, could be extracted.’ In the next sentence, however, Mestro qualified the assertion made by Parish and his associate that Bambuk and West Africa in general could produce gold as abundantly as California and Australia as ‘very exaggerated’. And he added his own exaggeration to the effect that ‘if Central Africa were to produce the same quantity of gold that California and Australia can produce, the resulting fall in value of this metal would raise the greatest barrier to the success of [Parish’s plans]’.19 Mestro and other officials in the Ministry of the Navy nevertheless continued to push the French administration in Senegal to find ways to increase the production of gold and its export to France, but almost always with the caveat that native techniques would not be able to do the job appropriately. Therefore some form of French intervention would be needed. One option was to implant a colony of European mining specialists along with a certain number of African labourers to operate the gold mines with European methods. Another option was to train the people of Bambuk themselves to exploit their mines more efficiently by employing European techniques. A variant of the first option, one of occupying Bambuk militarily by French forces and using French miners if not to operate the mines themselves at least to supervise the native miners, had been proposed by André Brue during his second administration (1714–20).20 Neither option, however, had ever been put seriously to the test, particularly after 1817, nor had the feasibility of working the mines with French mining equipment which would need to be transported over 1,000 kilometres via a river system that was navigable in its upper reaches for barely three months of the year. What had always prevailed was a third option, [ 72 ]

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that of purchasing the gold which native producers and middlemen offered for sale to the French via their upper river trading forts. Upon becoming governor in December 1854, Faidherbe inherited the ministerial instructions given to his predecessor. His own correspondence through 1858 would increasingly reflect enthusiasm for a French occupation of one or more sites in Bambuk as well as his awareness of the course of gold prospection in California and Australia. Thus he came to favour a mild adaptation of the first option, that of implanting a few French mining technicians, engineer troops, and other colonial employees in Bambuk, accompanying them by a certain number of workers from Saint-Louis supplemented by locally available labour. He was convinced that Europeans could survive in Bambuk if they took proper health precautions and avoided physical labour. By the summer of 1855, Faidherbe had come to understand that the semi-Islamised Malinké villagers of Bambuk and the more thoroughly Islamised inhabitants of Bondou, including a claimant to the Bondou almamate, Bokar (Boubakar) Saada, might support a French presence in Bambuk and even become French allies because of their fear of Al Hajj Umar’s Tijjani jihadist movement.21 In October 1855, upon his return from Médine in Khasso where his men had constructed the fortress that from April to July 1857 would withstand several direct attacks and a siege by Al Hajj Umar’s talibe (disciples – holy warriors), Faidherbe wrote as follows to the newly appointed Minister of the Navy and Colonies, Admiral FerdinandAlphonse Hamelin: based on the experience that I gained from the expedition to Médine and the knowledge that I gained of the affairs of the hinterland . . . I declare that the occupation of Bambuk and the direct exploitation of [its] mines by us is not only possible but easy whenever you give the order [to proceed].22

Faidherbe had not yet visited Bambuk at the time that he penned these words. So, in order to obtain the most up-to-date information, he dispatched his Director of Exterior Affairs, Lieutenant Louis Flize, on a fact-finding mission to Bondou and Bambuk during the rainy season of 1856. Flize returned with a very favourable view of the possibilities of gold mining in Bambuk. Faidherbe published Flize’s report in the Moniteur du Sénégal in March 185723 no doubt to drum up local support for the projected occupation of Bambuk. That same summer of 1856, Faidherbe requested and received permission to visit France to discuss the question of Bambuk and other matters with officials in the Ministry of the Navy. In a memorandum which he wrote for the Minister, Admiral Hamelin, he claimed, [ 73 ]

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apparently quoting the early nineteenth-century armchair geographer, the Marquis d’Aubusson de la Feuillade, that Senegal had the richest gold mines in the world.24 The decision taken was that the colonial government would occupy one or more points in Bambuk and install and operate a modern system of gold extraction. It was hoped that by this means the colonial government would earn sufficient revenue so that the subsidy it received from Paris might be reduced or eliminated. In 1858, the total budget of Senegal was 2 million francs, while local sources of revenue were only contributing about 250,000 francs a year.25 Although Faidherbe and Ministry officials initially suggested that the Bambuk operation begin during the rainy season of 1857, the need to relieve the Médine fortress under siege and attack by Al Hajj Umar’s army had, perforce, to take precedence. So, the occupation of a point in Bambuk, Kéniéba, began during the rainy season of 1858 by which time the upper river appeared to be relatively secure. Planning for the project was well under way both in Paris and in SaintLouis by the end of 1857. Although both the Ministry and Faidherbe agreed that the official in charge at Kéniéba, once the place was occupied, should be an army engineer officer, the Ministry was also concerned to recruit one or more civilian mining engineers via the Ecole des Mines of Paris and of Saint-Etienne. By December of that year, the Ministry had designated Captain Alfred Maritz of Strasbourg to be the Director of the Mines. A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole d’Application de Metz, and with prior service in Algeria, his background was similar to that of Faidherbe. He would arrive in Saint-Louis in June 1858, with no prior Senegalese experience and very little direct experience of mining. But he had been able to persuade the Ministry to hire a civilian, Baur, to serve as the Deputy Director of the Mines. Apparently trained as an accountant, Baur had nevertheless been a mine owner in Alsace where he had gained experience prospecting for gold in the gold-bearing sands of Alsacian streams.26 This choice turned out to be very wise, for Baur had greater success working in Bambuk than the two mining engineers who were successively hired. The Saint-Louis business community had little if anything to do with this project. Nobody was particularly opposed to it, but, at the same time, nobody was particularly interested in it either. The mining equipment was to be purchased in France, and for the most part, shipped in naval vessels. Marc Maurel, the Saint-Louis representative of the Maurel and Prom Company, mentioned the project only once in his correspondence with Hilaire Maurel, his uncle, and this to suggest that the operation of the mines be granted to a concessionaire and not be undertaken by the colonial government itself.27 [ 74 ]

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The operation began on 13 July 1858 with the departure of Faidherbe at the head of a large expedition for Bambuk. The political situation, so far as Al Hajj Umar’s jihad was concerned, augured fairly well for the expedition. In March, Umar had begun to move from Koundian, south-east of Bambuk, where his forces had regrouped following their defeat at Médine, to his homeland in Fouta Toro where he undertook a recruitment campaign for the settlement of Toucouleur talibés and their families in Kaarta and eventually Ségou. He gave instructions to his talibés to let the French boats pass unhindered, as he was more interested in recruiting Toucouleur settlers for a new almamate in Kaarta and in combating the Malinké and Bambara peoples whom he accused of being lax Muslims, than in opposing French navigation along the Senegal River.28 The trip was not easy. The rains came somewhat late that year and as a result shallow water held up the main convoy at Garli in eastern Fouta Toro for six days before it could proceed to Bakel. From here, a small column including two companies of Senegalese riflemen (tiraillleurs sénégalais) and their officers marched overland, with great difficulty, to Sénoudébou, while Faidherbe himself, who was impatient to get to destination, travelled with an advance party in an open boat from Bakel to Sénoudébou because the Falémé River was still too shallow for the steamboats to pass. Just inside the Falémé River, Faidherbe’s boat capsized, spilling its twenty-five occupants and some equipment and chemicals into the river.29 After the full expedition had regrouped at Sénoudébou, it travelled the rest of the way on foot, 36 kilometres in two days, from Sénoudéou to Kéniéba, arriving on 29 July.30 Faidherbe’s magnum opus, Le Sénégal: la France dans l’Afrique occidentale, relates that this advance party arrived with only four days of supplies and that the men had to build straw shelters for themselves because the tents had not arrived. Then, little by little, supplies began to trickle in, and the work of building a small blockhouse and prospecting for gold could start.31 Faidherbe’s official report to the Minister of the Navy dated 30 August 1858 gave a rosier account of the arrival. It suggested that the advance party was well enough equipped when it reached Kéniéba that digging for gold could begin almost immediately. The first shafts were sunk 2 kilometres from Kéniéba, at the foot of a hill that the French labelled Mount Cothily, and as Faidherbe reported, the crews began their work without ‘consulting in any way the local sorcerers or waiting for them to perform the usual rites, thus scandalising and terrifying the natives’.32 Over the next few days, Faidherbe negotiated a protectorate treaty with Bougoul, the ruler of Farabana, who had a vague claim to [ 75 ]

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paramountcy over all the Bambuk chieftaincies. He was quite pleased to be rid of Al Hajj Umar and his talibés who had occupied his village and other points in Bambuk and Bondou, including Ndangan, the village along the Falémé river, 16 kilometres from Kéniéba, that the French also occupied so as to use it as a landing for Kéniéba. Bougoul recognised French sovereignty over the Falémé River from Ndangan to its junction with the Senegal River. By this treaty the French also claimed a two-year monopoly on the purchase of gold mined within a 20-kilometre radius of Kéniéba while leaving the actual mining of gold free for all parties. The treaty recognised Bougoul as the paramount chief of Bambuk. An annex to this treaty, signed on 15 and 18 August 1858, by Bougoul, Almami Bokar Saada, the pro-French claimant to the Almamate of Bondou whose claim Faidherbe recognised, confirmed the late 1780s contested annexation by Bondou of a portion of the right bank of the Falémé, including Ndangan and a part of Kéniéba itself.33 So in a sense, the French activities of 1858–60 in Bambuk took place on territory much of which was claimed by Bondou. The border, the Lally Creek, bisected Kéniéba; however, the French installations were placed on the right bank, Bougoul’s side. These 1858 treaties confirmed French sovereignty over the Falémé and Senegal Rivers and over a future road to link Bakel and Sénoudébou. The two principal rulers were not in a position to contest Faidherbe’s will, for both of them as well as those of their followers who opposed Al Hajj Umar’s jihadist activities and Tijani reformism knew that they were marked men should the Umarians ever again get the upper hand in this region. Like Diouka Sambala of Khasso and other rulers of mostly Soninké and Malinké chieftaincies in the upper Senegal region, these rulers cast their lot with the French believing that ultimately their positions and the continued autonomy of their states would be better guaranteed by the far-off French in Saint-Louis than by the more immediate and revolutionary Al Hajj Umar who would have made them, at best, into tightly supervised vassals if he did not have them executed as apostates. The settlement worked out by Faidherbe in the upper river region serves as a good example of the crucial importance of what Ronald Robinson refers to as ‘collaborating and mediating elites’ without whose support the European colonial empires of the nineteenth century could not have been created and maintained.34 Because the French made few demands on most of the societies of the Upper Senegal region until the mid-1880s, Diouka Sambala and Bokar Saada remained powerful local rulers, supported, at a distance, by the French, until they died, the former in 1880 and the latter in 1885. Bougoul, however, died in 1859, but in 1860 the French withdrew from Kéniéba. [ 76 ]

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Faidherbe officially inaugurated the Kéniéba venture on 15 August, St Napoléon’s day, delivering a rousing speech at the foot of Mount Cothily at the top of which a French flag had been raised.35 According to the description of the event that appeared in the Journal du Havre (14 October 1858), Faidherbe’s speech equated the creation of the Ministry of Algeria and the Colonies by Emperor Napoleon III, under the jurisdiction of which Senegal was placed, and the appointment of the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Jérôme Bonaparte as the Minister (effective 24 June 1858), to the wealth of Kéniéba’s gold-bearing soil (an unwittingly prophetic analogy given that the new Ministry lasted less than two years). ‘This circumstance’, he intoned, ‘can only inspire in us an even greater confidence in the future of our establishment, the mineral wealth of which we have confirmed during the seventeen days that I have been present’.36 This account appearing in the Journal du Havre was for public consumption. To Prince Jérôme, Faidherbe reported without comment that while his men were struggling to dig proper shafts, and finding precious little gold in the process: the women [were going] to the small ravine that descended from the mines to the Lally Creek in Kéniéba after each rain, washing the earth that they picked up from the bed of the ravine or scraped off its sides, without digging, and extracted more gold than we did from the earth dug from our shafts.37

Faidherbe would soon recognise the significance of this simple observation. He returned to Saint-Louis a few days later leaving Captain Maritz in charge. One wonders if the local notables felt vindicated by the failure of the French to extract much gold given that they had not sought the assistance of the local official, the diala nila, whose job it was to appease the local spirits guarding the gold so that it could be successfully taken from the ground.38 Shortly thereafter, Faidherbe left for Saint-Louis on his second mission and period of leave in France.

Failure of the project The Bambuk project carried on as best it could, that is, rather poorly. At the end of September 1858, just as the river began to fall, more than half the personnel had to be evacuated owing to illness. Only some 150 workers remained. They spent the next few months building a small fort at Kéniéba that would be able to withstand a siege of several months if necessary – even though Faidherbe had claimed upon arrival in Bambuk that the political situation was perfect, that [ 77 ]

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there were ‘no hostile manifestations within a radius of 25 leagues’.39 Assuring a reliable source of drinking water for the upcoming dry season was also a major concern as it was feared that the Lally Creek might run dry. Thus some of the first shafts dug were wells. The lack of locally available building materials added to the late- or non-arrival of prefabricated barracks ordered from France required the men to build straw huts for themselves. In a long set of instructions, Faidherbe urged Maritz to seek the advice of the local Bambuk population as to the proper way to construct such huts. He added that he had lodged in one during the whole period of his stay in Bambuk finding that it was comfortable and that it sheltered him from the torrential rains that fell during what was then the rainy season.40 Thus the serious work of mining started late. The first underground galleries linking adjoining shafts sunk along the slope descending from Mount Cothily to the Lally Creek were not excavated until after January 1859. Six months later Capitain Maritz’s progress report, parts of which Faidherbe published in the Moniteur du Sénégal, gave an optimistic twist to what was at best an ironic situation. ‘We are not exploiting any veins; we are not crushing any large rocks, only sand and easily ground up alluvial deposits.’ ‘Having no laboratory, we cannot conduct chemical analyses; all we can do is wash sand and gravel . . . Not having any heavy rock crushers, [we cannot process] numbers of rocks that might contain gold’. Because several rocks when smashed by hand with hammers yielded some grains of gold, Maritz concluded that large crushing machines would definitely give good results and were thus badly needed. Citing his use of traditional mortars and pestles to extract gold dust from pieces of quartz rock, he asserted that when 100 kilograms of gravel and sand were panned in the traditional African way or washed on washing tables, they would yield 0.177 grams of gold; when the residue was pounded four more times, 1 more gram of pure gold could be extracted; thus, 1,177 grams of gold per 100 kilograms of pounded sand and gravel.41 In short, for lack of the heavy machinery that Maritz wanted and never received, he and his team were forced to employ extraction methods that were very similar to traditional Bambuk methods and with the same general yield. Given that many if not most of the Europeans present lived in traditional Bambuk huts, one can conclude that to survive in Bambuk and to extract any gold, the Europeans needed to Africanise the way they lived and worked. In Bambuk it seemed that ‘Africans could do it best’. The mining engineers sent from France were disappointing. Both were young and inexperienced. The first one, Arbelet, who had studied at the [ 78 ]

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Ecole des Mines of Saint-Etienne, was unable to resist the environmental rigours of Senegal. He arrived in 1858 but was ill much of the time and died in 1859 having spent very little time in Kéniéba. Braconnier, a student at the Ecole des Mines of Paris, who replaced him, was recruited in December 1859. He remained in Paris until May 1860 spending his time advising the Ministry as to the proper mining equipment to be sent to Kéniéba and attempting, despite the impossible logistics involved, to correspond with Faidherbe and Maritz on this question. Maritz and Braconnier never reached agreement as to what equipment was really needed. Part of the problem was that Maritz, even though advised by Baur, was unable to explain in terms that were comprehensible to the manufacturers of mining equipment in France what he really needed and wanted.42 It seemed that he wanted large, powerful rock crushers, but the message did not get across,43 possibly because Braconnier, present in Paris, was calling for the use of lighter, animal and/or human operated, crushers. He first proposed what he called a ‘concentrator’ and then changed his mind and called for a ‘pulveriser’, a hand-operated device that could pulverise about 1,400 kilograms of rock and gravel in a 24-hour-period – assuming manpower was available to operate the device.44 By the time Braconnier got to Saint-Louis in May 1860, Faidherbe and the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, the Minister of the Navy and Colonies under whose jurisdiction Senegal had once again been placed, had already decided that Kéniéba should be evacuated and Maritz transferred to Saint-Louis to head the Engineer Detachment there. Although Braconnier, who brought a ‘pulveriser’ with him, would hold the title, Director of the Mines, he was assigned to Sénoudébou where he would take charge of conducting assays throughout the Bambuk/Falémé area – not the same level of responsibility and accomplishment as that of heading a true mining establishment. Faidherbe, who increasingly doubted the competence of Braconnier, informed Chasseloup-Laubat that ‘the arrival of Braconnier [would] not change a thing’.45 Following a brief visit to Kéniéba, Braconnier died of fever at Sénoudébou in late July 1860. Faidherbe’s comment to ChasseloupLaubat was that Braconnier had failed to take proper health precautions. ‘If’, added Faidherbe, Braconnier ‘had been in France what he had proven to be in Senegal whoever [had] recommended him . . . as being able to perform the slightest service in regard to the exploitation of the Bambuk mines had seriously misled [the ministry]’.46 Thus Baur, the accountant, thanks to his robust constitution, prior mine ownership, and experience extracting gold dust from alluvial sands in his native Alsace, provided much of the technical expertise that the two mining engineers were unable to provide. [ 79 ]

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Although Faidherbe, in leaving Bambuk in August 1858, had left orders for Maritz and Baur to visit other gold-bearing areas in Bambuk and to collect samples for assaying in France,47 they could not accomplish this task given the difficulties they faced at Kéniéba. Rain and humidity spoiled the chemicals needed to test the ore. All but one of the mules brought to Kéniéba in August 1858 to haul ore from Mount Cothily to Kéniéba and to move supplies from Ndangan to Kénieba became ill and died. Donkeys obtained locally did not fare any better. When beasts of burden were no longer available, Maritz obtained the services of some 50 laptots (Senegalese boatmen and naval workers) on a temporary basis from Bakel and Sénoudébou to serve in their place.48 To these specific problems were added numerous others resulting from the isolation of Kéniéba. While in France from September 1858 to January 1859, Faidherbe still extolled the wealth-generating possibilities of the Kéniéba mines but with the caveat that they would not reach full potential unless ‘as in California numbers of Europeans could live there’. Still, he added, ‘the mines of Senegal . . . cannot avoid producing a great deal’.49 By the end of 1859, however, Faidherbe was facing the reality that the Bambuk venture was in trouble. In two letters dated 7 and 10 December 1859 addressed to the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, Faidherbe complained bitterly about the non-arrival of essential equipment which he felt was seriously setting back the project. He also hinted that the project might have to be abandoned.50 In the first of the two letters, he suggested that the whole operation be handed over to a private company to be given a monopoly of gold mining and gold purchasing in the Upper Senegal and Falémé River region. Faidherbe’s budget proposal for 1860 included the avowal that the results obtained so far ‘indicate[d] that a thorough study of the gold mining possibilities of Bambuk should have been undertaken [before operations began]’.51 He and other promoters of the Bambuk project, Mestro, the former Director of Colonies, even Prince Jérôme Bonaparte who had strongly supported the project during the less than two years that he had served as Minister of Algeria and the Colonies, had been overly swayed by visions of El Dorado. Chasseloup-Laubat, no doubt piqued at the suggestion that his Ministry was at least partly to blame for the problems besetting the Bambuk venture, particularly the delays in the shipment of equipment, reminded Faidherbe that he had been given ‘the widest possible powers and the most sincere encouragement’, adding: My letters to you can leave no doubt in regard to my heartfelt wishes for your success: I follow Senegalese affairs with great interest. Only

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you, however, can keep me accurately informed so that I can form an opinion based on the facts . . . If the project in and of itself is untenable it will no doubt have to be abandoned. But nobody, I hope, will ever claim that any abandonment was the result of a failure on the part of my department to co-operate.52

As for the question of privatising the project, Chasseloup-Laubat perceived that such an arrangement was not feasible. Perhaps, he suggested, privatisation might be the path of the future, but for the time being, ‘in order for a concession to be granted it would be necessary to have some clear prior confirmation that the enterprise would have some chance of success; today, however, there is no evidence [of any potential that might] attract private capital [to Bambuk]’.53 Before this dispatch reached Faidherbe in Saint-Louis he had already addressed a report to Chasseloup-Laubat in which he attempted to justify his own early enthusiasm for the Bambuk project and why he was now suggesting that private enterprise take it over. He very much contradicted his earlier assertions of 1855 and 1856 that the Engineer Corps assisted by other military and civilian employees of the colonial administration was best suited to conduct the operation. Now he was arguing that at such distances, nobody has a direct stake in the success of the venture; and day by day operations are dependent on too many functionaries to establish effective co-operation, and nothing arrives on time. One year there is funding and personnel, but no supplies and equipment; the next year the supplies and equipment begin to arrive, but there is no funding; and over the third year, once supplies and equipment have arrived, there will be no available personnel.54

He did not explain how private enterprise would avoid these same pitfalls. However, in proposing private enterprise as the solution, Faidherbe was probably thinking of how he could minimise his own responsibility for what was clearly proving to be a fiasco by suggesting an alternative method of development that the government might favour particularly if it cost the government very little or nothing. Private enterprise had been in the backs of the minds of Mestro and Ducos when Robert Parish had proposed his plan for a mining concession in Bambuk. By 1860, the Second Empire was moving rapidly into its liberal phase. Faidherbe justified himself: I pressed hard to [be enabled] to exploit the Bambuk mines; it was a necessity to be absolutely certain, given all that had been said about these mines, and the Government certainly wanted action. After all, it

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addressed a dispatch to [my predecessor dated 16 January 1854] stating: ‘I seize this occasion to remind you of the new efforts that must be made at this time to make profitable use of the wealth [gold] that our colony . . . possesses, wealth, that one must admit, has never been exploited to [full] advantage.’55 Today [Faidherbe added] the wealth of these mines has been proven. But I strongly believe that the State must abandon [the project]. It will not succeed. However, it would be desirable . . . that American or English [entrepreneurs] come and attempt to exploit [the possibilities of Bambuk] with the perseverance, the resources of all kinds, and the experience gained in California and Australia.56

Chasseloup-Laubat’s negative response to Faidherbe’s recommendation that free enterprise come to the rescue of the Bambuk project was already on its way to Saint-Louis as Faidherbe posted his report. At least Faidherbe had expressed his commitment to free enterprise at the start of the liberal Empire, but then his whole career in Senegal had been based on close cooperation with the principal Saint-Louis and Bordeaux business interests, particularly the Maurel and Prom Company.57 The task of evacuating Kéniéba and Ndangan fell to Maritz, before he was transferred to head the engineer detachment at Saint-Louis, and to Baur. Initially they were asked to retain at Sénoudébou the equipment and materials that might be needed to provide for the continued assaying of rock specimens from various gold-bearing places in Bambuk, along the Tambaoura Escarpment, and along the Falémé River. During the early months of 1860, indeed, Baur explored some of the area, in particular making a study of the possibilities of extracting the alluvial gold that could be found in the sands of the Falémé River between Sansandig and the Sanou Kholé Creek. He judged that the quantities of pure gold that could be extracted per ton of sand from the Falémé River were ‘acceptable’. Baur also visited and collected rock samples from several mines on the Tambaoura Escarpment. But he observed, in regard to Bambuk as a whole, that except for the banks of the Falémé River where the temperature was lower than inland and water was abundantly available and safe to drink, Bambuk was a ‘land of misery with an unhealthy climate in which Europeans could only live and work with difficulty’. He therefore recommended that instead of trying to mine the gold directly, the government and the Saint-Louis traders simply purchase the gold from the producers and the local middlemen as had been done in the past.58 Although the profit to be made by the French buyers in such circumstances might be as high as 300 per cent,59 the quantity traded would still be very small. Baur returned to France in October 1861 having spent three years in Bambuk and Bondou. The Interim Governor of Sénégal at the time he left, L. Stéphan, recommended him for the Legion of Honour.60 [ 82 ]

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Writing from Saint-Louis in July 1860, Faidherbe informed Chasseloup-Laubat that the value of gold mined at Kéniéba through April of that year had been almost nothing. His figures revealed the following: January, 159.59 francs; February, 133.49 francs; March, 88.96 francs, and April, 40.50 francs even though the appropriation earmarked for Kéniéba for that year was approximately 81,500 francs.61 Shortly thereafter definitive orders came from Paris to evacuate and to apply any funds left over to other public works projects being undertaken elsewhere in the colony.62 Baur’s departure from Sénoudébou ended the last vestige of Faidherbe’s Bambuk project.

No negative consequences for Faidherbe Faidherbe’s career continued to thrive despite a fiasco that could have had very negative consequences. There were several ways by which Faidherbe could justify his actions. To begin with, he could show that the Paris authorities had always been attracted to the possibilities of Bambuk gold and had, from time to time, proposed projects to occupy Bambuk or at least to find ways to stimulate the local producers to increase the output of the mines. Faidherbe had simply inherited an ongoing project and had committed himself to it. Second, he was able to demonstrate that the occupation of Kéniéba fell within the scope of the Plan of 1854, an objective of which was to strengthen French control over the African societies of the upper Senegal River up to and even beyond its limit of seasonal navigability. The unexpected launching of Al Hajj Umar’s jihad in 1854 appeared to threaten the accomplishment of this objective. Thus Faidherbe and the commercial community in Saint-Louis and Bordeaux encouraged the authorities in Paris to authorise vigorous opposition to Umar. The occupation of Kéniéba could be viewed as part of the same French reaction to Umar’s movement that had led three years earlier to the construction of the Médine fort and its successful defence by Paul Holle in July 1857. Given that fear of Al Hajj Umar turned Chief Bougoul of Farabana and Almami Bokar Saada of Boundou into staunch French allies, the occupation of Kéniéba, although proving to be temporary, represented a good long-term political outcome that might have had the added advantage of earning a profit for the colonial government. Even though the gold-mining venture failed, the area remained securely in the French sphere, a reality which contributed to the negotiated peace between the French and the Umar’s Empire in 1860. The treaties that Faidherbe made with the rulers of the upper Senegal states at a time when they were forced by circumstance to collaborate with the [ 83 ]

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French represented a clear strategic gain for France. The terms of the treaties were observed for many years even though the French evacuated Kéniéba in 1860 and Sénoudébou in 1863. In the latter case, they even permitted Almami Bokar Saada to occupy the Sénoudébou fort as his residence.63 Third, Faidherbe could cite the fact that the Bambuk project was part of a larger French project: expansion from Senegal into the interior of the Western Sudan, a part – sometimes a major part – of the French colonial agenda dating from their earliest occupation of Saint-Louis. By the nineteenth century, French officials and businesspeople familiar with West Africa believed the Western Sudan to be well populated and potentially able to offer unlimited markets for French goods. The target was Timbuktu even though the French explorer, René Caillé, who had visited the town in 1828, had reported that it was poor and unimpressive. Later the target would be Lake Chad. Although the Bambuk project did not deliver the results expected, the urge to complete the larger project was not negatively affected. A fourth explanation as to why Faidherbe’s career did not suffer from the failed Bambuk project was that he never lost the support of the Bordeaux and Saint-Louis business interests that had promoted his appointment as governor. Its costs were borne by the government, not by them. When Faidherbe realised that the government must abandon the project, he suggested that private enterprise could take it over if it so chose, thus shielding himself by offering to private enterprise the right of final refusal. Finally, the very good reputation that Faidherbe had earned for himself during his first administration was confirmed indirectly by the perceived failures of his successor, Captain Jean-Bernard Jauréguiberry. The new governor quarrelled with subordinates who had been well regarded by Faidherbe. Revolts broke out in Fouta-Toro and Cayor because Faidherbe’s system of pacification that had depended, to a great extent, on his presence and force of character began to fall apart when he departed. Jauréguiberry was blamed, not the insufficiencies of Faidherbe’s system of domination. The heads of the major Bordeaux and Saint-Louis trading firms, particularly those of the Maurel and Prom Company, lobbied for Faidherbe’s return to Senegal.64 With the blessing of the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, Faidherbe was promoted to brigadier general and sent back to Senegal for a second term as governor from 1863 to 1865. His second assignment was not as spectacular as his first one, but he was able to dispatch the diplomatic mission led by Lieutenant Eugène-Abdon Mage to Ségou aimed at negotiating a commercial treaty with Al Hajj Umar or his successor Ahmadou.65 [ 84 ]

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Faidherbe by then was openly pursuing the Timbuktu myth (Caillé’s poor impression of Timbuktu notwithstanding) of which the quest for Bambuk gold had been a part. Later, as a Senator in the French Third Republic, he would champion efforts to expand French rule from Senegal into the Western Sudan to Timbuktu and beyond.66 In short, he shifted his El Dorado sentiments from concentration on a specific gold-mining project to the more general El Dorado project of French occupation of the Western Sudan, a project that in many ways had attracted him before he became Governor of Senegal and would drive him in his later career as an author, a senator in the government of the French Third Republic, and an adviser to several expansion-minded French politicians.

Conclusion For Faidherbe, there was no El Dorado in Bambuk, and that reality would characterise Bambuk until the last decade of the twentieth century. Although the availability of exploitable gold dust might suffice to support the seasonal subsistence methods of the Bambuk gold miners which they alternated with subsistence agriculture, it could not support the overhead costs of European gold extraction methods, as Faidherbe himself came to realise.67 But, as it turned out, this failure did not kill the El Dorado idea in its colonial context in this part of West Africa, for it applied to the Western Sudan as a whole where in particular, Timbuktu beckoned and where military campaigns would provide an El Dorado of rapid military advancement for a select number of ambitious French officers.68 Later efforts to exploit the gold of Bambuk were hardly more successful than those undertaken by Faidherbe. A British company, La Valée d’Or de la Falémé, was chartered in the 1890s to operate mines in Bambuk. It never got off the ground.69 By 1911, a French company, the Compagnie Minière du Soudan did manage, for a few years, to operate a gold dredge on the Falémé River, but the effort was discontinued.70 For many years following the achievement of independence by Senegal and Mali in 1960, Bambuk, split between Senegal and Mali, remained a backwater, but one that still yielded small quantities of gold obtained by traditional methods of extraction. The situation changed in the 1980s and 1990s as the world price of gold rose and large multinational firms sought not only gold but also uranium and iron ore in Bambuk and other places in the headwater areas of the Senegal, Falémé, Gambia, and Niger Rivers. Today several multinational extraction companies are active in these areas, and Mali is said to be the third largest gold-producing country in Africa, thanks [ 85 ]

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to the Bambuk gold mining on its side of the Senegal–Mali frontier. So, Faidherbe and those who claimed that modern industrial methods would make Bambuk gold extraction productive and profitable were correct but only up to a point given that the ‘modern’ methods of the mid-nineteenth century were inadequate. However, it seems that the local inhabitants are not benefiting from the expanded extraction of gold and that the extraction methods employed that call for the blasting out of very large quantities of rock, the levelling of hills, and the large-scale use of the cyanide process are wrecking the natural and human environment. For the people of Bambuk, the industrialised extraction of gold is more a curse than a blessing.71

Notes 1 Although I am aware of the orthography for Senegalese (and Malian) personal and place names adopted in 1971 by the Senegalese government for historical writing, I have chosen to use the standard French orthography, French being the official language of Senegal and Mali. Exceptions include a few place names, like ‘Bambuk’, for which a recognised English spelling exists. 2 Philip Curtin, ‘The Lure of Bambuk Gold’, Journal of African History, 14, 1973, 623–4. 3 A hagiographic account of Faidherbe’s governorships of Senegal appears in Joseph Emile Froelicher, Trois colonisateurs, Paris, 1903. Almost as hagiographic was the discussion of Faidherbe in the chapter on French West Africa in Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau (eds), Histoire des colonies françaises, 4 vols, Paris, 1931, prepared for the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. Two examples of contemporary appreciation of Faidherbe are reflected in Barnett Singer and John Langdon, Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire, Madison, 2004, esp. ch. 3, and a recent biography, Alain Coursier, Faidherbe: du Sénégal à l’armée du Nord, Paris, 1989. 4 I have taken this position in the following: ‘The Merchants and General Faidherbe: Aspects of French Expansion in Senegal in the 1850’s’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 61, 1974, 236–83, and, ‘L’œuvre du général Faidherbe et les débuts de l’Afrique noire française: une analyse critique contemporaine’, Le Mois en Afrique: études politiques, économiques et sociologiques africaines, 235–6, 1985, 120–50; 236–7, 1985, 130–56; 239–40, December 1985–January, 1986, 120–50. 5 A renewed treaty with the ruler (almami) of Bondou regarding Sénoudébou stated that ‘The French are the masters and are completely independent in their establishments. They will leave the government of the country to its legitimate chiefs, Boubakar [Bokar] Saada and his successors’ (Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS): 13G 5, 15, August 1858). 6 Georges Hardy, Faidherbe, Paris, 1947, 15–16; André Demaison, Faidherbe, Paris, 1932, 34–5. 7 Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (SHAT), Vincennes, Dossier Personnel Faidherbe, Inspection de 1843. 8 Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (CAOM), Fonds Faidherbe. 9 Ibid. 10 Yves-Jean Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le Second Empire: naissance d’un empire colonial (1850–1871), Paris, 1989, 372. 11 Madina Ly-Tall, ‘Le Haut-Sénégal et le Haut-Niger dans la politique française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au milieu du XVIII siècle: l’attrait de l’or du Bambouk et du commerce du Soudan’, Bulletin de l’IFAN, 43 B, 1981, 30, 42.

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BAMBUK GOLD: FAIDHERBE’S SENEGALESE CHIMERA 12 Archives Nationales de France (ANF), Victor Ballot Papers, quotation from JeanBaptiste Léonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal, Paris, 1802. 13 The title, almami, common to the rulers of several eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury West African Islamic conquest states is derived from the Arabic, Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful). 14 Anne Raffenel, Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres, II, Paris, 1856, 228–32. 15 Pierre-Louis Rey, ‘Voyage à Farabana (Haute Sénégambie)’, Revue Coloniale, 2nd series, 12, January–June 1854, 60. He recommended a start-up consisting of about ten white or mulatto supervisors, one hundred blacks from Saint-Louis who were presumably used to French ways of working, and additional workers to be hired locally. The latter, he added, might prove to be useless because ‘they are still too backward to adopt our ways’ (61). 16 Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le Second Empire, 1989, 197. 17 Frédéric Carrère and Paul Holle, De la Sénégambie française, Paris, 1855, 171. 18 Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS), 1B63 and Section Outre-Mer des Archives Nationales de France (SOM), Sénégal XIII 54c, Ducos, to Protet, 16 January 1854. 19 Ibid. 20 Ly-Tall, ‘Le Haut-Sénégal et le Haut-Niger’, 29, 37. 21 SOM, Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to MMC, 1 October 1855. 22 Ibid., 22 October 1855. 23 Nos 51 and 52, 17 and 24 March 1857. 24 SOM, Senegal I 43b, Faidherbe to Hamelin, 5 August 1856; Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le Second Empire, 374 n. 9. 25 Jules Duval, ‘Politique coloniale de la France: le Sénégal’, Revue des deux mondes, 17, 1858, 861. 26 ANS, 1B73, Hamelin to Faidherbe, 22 February 1858. 27 Maurel and Prom Company Papers, Bordeaux (MPP), Marc Maurel to ‘Mon cher oncle’, 1858. 28 David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Oxford, 1985, 215–41. 29 SOM, Sénégal I 43a, Faidherbe to Prince Jérôme, 30 August 1858. 30 Ibid. 31 Louis Léon César Faidherbe, Le Sénégal: la France dans l’Afrique occidentale, Paris, 1989, 216–19. 32 SOM, Sénégal I 43a, Faidherbe to Prince Jérôme, 30 August 1858. 33 ANS, 13G5, Special Convention between the Governor of Senegal, Bougoul, Chief of Farabana, and Boubakar [Bokar] Saada, Almami of Bondou, 15 August 1858; Treaty with the Almami of Bondou, 18 August 1858; Treaty with the Chiefs of Farabana, 18 August 1858; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Supplementary Evidence, Madison, 1975, 23. 34 Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London, 1972, 120–4. 35 Clipping from the Journal du Havre, 14 October 1858, in SOM, Sénégal I 43c; see also Moniteur du Sénégal, 24 August 1858, 126. 36 Ibid. 37 Senegal I 43a, Faidherbe to Prince Jérôme, Saint-Louis, 30 August 1858. 38 Curtin, ‘Lure of Bambuk Gold’, 629. 39 ANS, 3B73, Faidherbe to Maritz, 12 August 1858. 40 Ibid. 41 Alfred Maritz, ‘Mines d’or de Kéniéba’, Moniteur du Sénégal, 11 August 1859, 177. 42 ANS 1B77, Chasseloup-Laubat to Faidherbe, 10 April 1860. 43 SOM, Sénégal XIII 55c, Chasseloup-Laubat to Faidherbe, 10 December 1859. 44 Ibid 45 SOM, Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to Chasseloup-Laubat, 14 April 1860. 46 Ibid., 17 August 1860. 47 ANS, 3B73, Faidherbe to Maritz, 12 August 1858. 48 ANS, 3B77, Robin to Maritz, 25 October 1858.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 49 SOM, Sénégal I 45a, Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal par le gouverneur Faidherbe, 1 October 1858. 50 SOM, Sénégal XIII 54c, Faidherbe to Chasseloup-Laubat, 7 and 10 December 1859. 51 Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le Second Empire, 1989, 386. 52 ANS, 1B77, Chasseloup-Laubat to Faidherbe, 21 January 1860. 53 Ibid. 54 SOM, Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to Chasseloup-Laubat, 16 January 1860. 55 ANS, 1B63 and SOM, Sénégal XIII 54c, MMC to Protet, 16 January 1854. 56 SOM, Sénégal I 46a Faidherbe to Chasseloup-Laubat, 16 January 1860. 57 Barrows, ‘The Merchants and General Faidherbe’, 270–6; Archives de la Marine, Paris, Jauréguiberry Private Papers (JPP), ‘Biographies sénégalaises: composition des familles des employés du gouvernement au Sénégal’, and ‘Négociants et commerçants établis à Saint-Louis’, compiled by Governor Jauréguiberry, 1862; Henri Brunschwig, ‘Le docteur Colin, l’or du Bambouk et la “colonisation modern”’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 58, 1975, 187–8. 58 ANF, Victor Ballot Papers, Baur to ‘Monsieur le Directeur’, 19 July 1860. 59 Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le Second Empire, 386. 60 SOM, Sénégal I 47b, Stéphan to Chasseloup-Laubat, 30 October 1861. 61 SOM, Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to Chasseloup-Laubat, 16 July 1860. 62 SOM, Sénégal I 46b, Chasseloup-Laubat to Faidherbe, 22 July 1860. 63 ANS, 3B83, Chasseloup-Laubat to Faidherbe, 24 August, 1862; 3B92, Faidherbe to Boubakar [Bokar] Saada, 28 August 1863; SOM, Sénégal I 50b, Faidherbe to ChasseloupLaubat, 28 September 1864. 64 Barrows, ‘Merchants and General Faidherbe’, 276–80, cites a number of references to the Maurel and Prom Papers; see, in particular, Marc Maurel à ‘Mes bons amis’, 7 May 1863. 65 Robinson, Holy War of Umar Tal, 252–6. 66 Louis Léon César Faidherbe, ‘Chemin de fer de Médine au Niger’, Fascicle 2, Le Soudan français, Lille, L. Danel, 1883, 9–10, and Barrows, ‘L’œuvre du général Faidherbe’, vols 239–40, December 1985–January 1986, 138–43. 67 SOM, Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to MMC, 14 April 1860. 68 A. S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military Imperialism, Cambridge, 1969, 263–74. 69 Curtin, ‘Lure of Bambuk Gold’, 626. 70 Ibid. 71 La voix des sans-papiers – Bulletin du mouvement et des collectifs de lutte autonomes, 6, 26 October 2011, 1–8.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Salubrity and the survival of the Swan River Colony: health, climate and settlement in colonial Western Australia Ruth A. Morgan

In his 1873 account of his antipodean travels, Australia, novelist Anthony Trollope described the condition of each colony he visited. He was struck by the ‘beauty of Sydney Harbour’, the ‘pleasant, prosperous’ Adelaide, ‘boastful’ Melbourne, and Queensland’s ‘great sources of wealth – wool, cattle, sugar and gold’.1 By comparison, the western third of the continent was a poor relation. Not only was it isolated and its farming unsophisticated, it was also sparsely populated, politically underdeveloped and unfashionable. The cause of these problems, Trollope surmised, was that Western Australia had been ‘colonised because she was there, not because she was wanted for any special purpose, either by the community at large, or by any small section of it’.2 ‘And thus’, he declared, ‘Western Australia has struggled on since 1829, having undergone many difficulties; not much heard of in the world; never doomed like Sierra Leone or Guiana; never absolutely ruined as have been some of the West Indian Islands; but never cropping up in the world, an offspring to be proud of, as are Victoria and Canada.’3 Although the Australian colonies bristled at some of Trollope’s assessments, few could disagree with his appraisal of Western Australia and his predictions of its bleak future. Trollope’s description of Western Australia was a far cry from the portrayals that had sent hopeful Britons across the globe in a wave of Swan River ‘mania’ to the empire’s first agricultural colony to be established since the American War of Independence. The role of such glowing descriptions in the efforts to establish and populate the colony at Swan River, and the gulf between rhetoric and reality that they produced, has not gone unnoticed by historians of Western Australia.4 Most recently, Geoffrey Bolton has characterised Western Australia’s settler history in terms of ‘vision and mirage’, whereby a patriarchy of ‘bold [ 89 ]

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entrepreneurs have pushed projects for investment and development on the basis of inadequate research and over-hopeful assessment’, producing a rhythm of boom and bust since its colonisation in 1829.5 Although Western Australia was long the ‘Cinderella’ of the Australasian colonies as a result, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that it was not alone in what might be seen as a broader imperial pattern of seizing territories of which there was scant knowledge and few firm plans for their development. Transportation aside, historians have placed little emphasis on attempts to populate and stimulate the Western Australian colony during the nineteenth century after its near collapse in the 1830s. Drawing on promotional literature and travel accounts of Western Australia, this chapter examines the enduring emphasis on the salubrious climate conditions of the colony prior to 1901. The advertisement of a ‘healthy climate’ was a common theme of this particular genre of writing, representative of the prevailing environmental anxieties associated with imperial mobility and migration.6 For Western Australia, its salubrious climate was one of the few attractions of this apparently inconsequential possession of empire. This chapter explores how officials and visitors frequently promoted the colonial climate in concert with the Swan River’s proximity to India, Britain’s jewel in the crown, from colonisation to Federation. The repetition of this rhetorical pairing, I contend, reveals Western Australian efforts to exploit the environmental anxieties of health and race in British India for its own benefit. In doing so, I widen the historical gaze of colonial Western Australia beyond the other Australasian colonies to consider its place in the wider web of empire and the expansion of the Angloworld.7

Imperial interests Britain’s concerns about France’s territorial ambitions are widely held to have been the stimulus for the establishment of a British settlement on the west coast of New Holland. Before and during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain warily eyed the exploratory voyages of d’Entrecasteaux (1792), Baudin (1801), Freycinet (1818) and Dumont d’Urville (1827) along the south and west coasts of the continent, and Matthew Flinders (1801) and Philip Parker King (1822) were dispatched to protect British interests in the region.8 Although these concerns grew after New Holland had been claimed for the British Crown with the establishment of a military garrison at King George Sound in 1826,9 the urgency of the French threat was largely exaggerated to support the personal ambitions of Captain James Stirling.

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In early 1826, James Stirling had been summoned to New South Wales to receive instructions to disestablish the depot at Melville Island in northern Australia and to find a more appropriate site for its re-establishment.10 On his arrival, Stirling presented Governor Darling with a thorough argument for the ‘various advantages’ of a British settlement at Swan River. Located at the transition between the trade winds and the westerlies, the site was well situated for trade and defence. Furthermore, it was three weeks closer to Europe, the Cape Colony, Mauritius, India and the Malay Islands, than Port Jackson in New South Wales, and a settlement there could also profit from trade with China. Although the British had yet to explore the region, Stirling was confident that its situation on the same parallel as New South Wales indicated that ‘it is in other respects similar to this Country’. At this site, the British could establish a ‘Naval and Military Station upon a Great Scale’, which could ‘command India, the Malay Islands, and all the Settlements in New Holland’. The region’s ‘healthy and bracing Climate’ made it ideal as a convalescent station for British troops and civilians serving in India, which would negate the long voyage for recuperation in Europe. In light of all these advantages, Stirling concluded, it was imperative that the French were prevented ‘from occupying a position of such Value’.11 Darling soon acquiesced to Stirling’s request to explore the Swan River region and in January 1827, Stirling set sail with the New South Wales botanist Charles Fraser aboard HMS Success. Stirling’s arguments were so persuasive because the Swan River was no terra incognita – aside from territorial rivalries, the region was already invested with preconceptions of its climate based on theories and experiences drawn from Europe and North America. Although the Aristotelian theory of climate remained influential, which held that climate was constant along each latitude, the growth of colonial trade and expansion of commodity markets during the eighteenth century had precipitated the development of more sophisticated climatological means to determine the profitability of prospective sites of extraction and colonisation.12 In 1744, Swiss-born civil servant Jean Pierre Purry proposed an ‘optimal’ or ‘best’ climate for colonial exploitation. The regions in possession of such a model climate, he surmised, were located around 33˚ South or North, in the so-called Fifth Climate, which included the agriculturally productive areas of Spain, Syria, Egypt and Persia.13 Their productivity, he argued, was the result of their proximity to this parallel, which accounted for the fertility and habitability of Carolina, New Mexico and the Rio de la Plata in the New World.14 Based on this reasoning, Purry had earlier recommended that the Dutch

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East India Company colonise Nuyts Land, near Cape Leeuwin (34°), which historian James Cameron considers to be the ‘first definite proposal to colonise part of Western Australia’.15 Despite the unfavourable Dutch and French assessments of the continent’s west coast, subsequent reviews of the economic potential of south-western Australia echoed Purry’s expectations of a fertile and productive land.16 Such favourable assessments arguably provided fertile ground for the positive reception of Stirling’s account of his visit to the Swan River (32°) in early 1827. Stirling and Fraser submitted their reports to Governor Darling in April 1827. Their accounts of the vegetation, soil and weather they encountered were nothing short of effusive.17 In his dispatch, Stirling also included the report of the Royal Navy Surgeon, Frederick R. Clause, who had accompanied the exploratory voyage. Clause declared, ‘I am decided in my opinion that it is the most healthy part of the globe I have visited, having proof positive from the state of my sick list from our arrival off King George’s Sound to our return, a lapse of a month, during which time I had only slight cases of colds etc.’18 As a climate was understood to have productive capacities, the emigration and colonisation of new lands were a considerable source of environmental anxiety for Britons throughout the Empire. The experience of European armies in the tropical world had already exposed the severe ‘relocation costs’ of stationing troops abroad.19 And here lay one of Swan River’s major advantages: its proximity to India. As Stirling argued: The mildness of the Climate, the shortness of the distance from India . . . make a Settlement on this Coast an object of the greatest interest and importance to the India Company . . . With a pleasing country so near at hand, a bracing Climate and a great variety of Mineral waters, voyages to England and long leave of absence would no longer be necessary. It is not to the Company alone that the place has this recommendation. His Majesty’s Naval and Military Forces on the Indian Establishment might occasionally be reinvigorated and restored, and kept in condition for Service which long residence in Tropical Climates is able to render them unfit for.20

Clause’s report, in which he provided a Hippocratic assessment of the healthiness of the region’s climate, buttressed Stirling’s claims and gave assurance that a British settlement at the Swan River would prosper. Stirling’s reference to India reflected his awareness of the growing imperial anxieties about the suitability of the Indian climate for European constitutions, which had been exacerbated by the First Burma War (1824 – 26).21 After all, Stirling had close connections to the East India [ 92 ]

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Company through his marriage to Ellen Mangles, whose father, brothers and cousins held prominent positions in the Company. Although the British had triumphed, climate and disease exacted a heavy toll on both sides of the Burma campaign.22 These experiences had confirmed the shifting European perceptions of India’s climate and its implications for the defence of the British Empire. Such was the shift in medical focus that Mark Harrison has argued the Burma War was ‘probably the most important stimulus to the topographical enterprise which came to dominate Anglo-Indian medicine in the years ahead’.23 The emerging field of medical topography identified the environment, particularly the climate, as the most important determinant of both physical and moral health, and its practitioners sought to identify the healthiest areas for the stationing of European forces in India.24 Under this schema, tropical climes posed the greatest threat to European constitutions and therefore, to British rule.25 The suitability of the Swan River climate for a convalescent station, therefore, situated Stirling’s imperial aspirations in broader discourses of tropicality, the accompanying ‘veneration of the temperate’, and the environmental anxieties of empire.26 As this chapter shows, ‘tropical othering’ continued to feature in Western Australian attempts to improve its circumstances long after the Colonial Office agreed to support Stirling’s plans to establish a colony at the Swan River.27

An El Dorado? Public interest in the possibility of a new colony grew after April 1829, following John Barrow’s article in the middle-class journal, the Quarterly Review. Barrow, a Secretary of the Admiralty and later, the author of The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS Bounty, elaborated on Stirling’s 1827 report.28 Now a keen advocate of the Swan River Colony, he portrayed its surrounds in glowing terms, omitting any unfavourable descriptions and presenting conjecture as fact.29 Speculators added to the building mania in other reports and pamphlets, such that by January 1830, the Westminster Review pronounced it an ‘Australian Hesperia’, a mythical utopia.30 This titillation reflected the ‘paradise complex’ common to the wave of booster literature that followed in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.31 As evidenced by the enquiries to the Colonial Office about Swan River, many Britons were very receptive to the opportunities purportedly available to them in Australia.32 Perhaps even more than other parts of the growing Angloworld, the Swan River case supports James Belich’s observation that ‘colonisation was driven as much by dreams as by reason’.33 [ 93 ]

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But a vast gulf lay between this rhetoric and the reality of the new colony. The emigrants landed at Garden Island in June 1829 to find no preparations had been made for their arrival and that the fertility of the soil and vegetation had been greatly overstated.34 Many of the settlers were ill-prepared for these challenges, the trials of establishing a colony in primitive conditions overwhelming their relative youth and urban upbringing.35 Reports of their struggles soon reached the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, as well as the Cape. One new arrival described the melancholy scene before him: ‘The flats up the Swan [River], the badness of the soil, the heat of the weather, with many other things of the same kind, appeared to be the subjects of general conversation, when worshipping at the shrine of Bacchus.’36 As the Sydney Gazette declared in January 1830, ‘Depend upon this, that the very instant the first account of the disasters reaches London, the whole will fall into the ground . . . and the poor deluded sufferers either starve . . . or come out here for something like a habitable place to live on’.37 These descriptions were so disheartening that at least five ships en route to the colony were diverted to other ports, and by the mid-1830s, migration to the colony had virtually ceased.38 Stirling lamented that ‘people expect a Garden of Eden’, seemingly oblivious to his own contribution to their disappointment.39 His efforts to remedy their plight were met with little sympathy from Westminster, where the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Viscount Goderich, a most experienced politician, having briefly served as Prime Minister after the death of George Canning in 1827, dismissed his requests for assistance in 1833. Pointedly, Goderich reminded Stirling and his colonists that The present Settlement at Swan River, owes its origin . . . to certain false rumours which had reached the Government of the intentions of a Foreign Power to establish a Colony on the Western Coast of Australia.40

Furthermore, ‘[T]he first establishment of the Settlement originated in a private speculation, and it would not have been undertaken on public grounds alone’.41 Goderich’s response reflected the growing doubts about the merits of the Western Australian colony, which the Treasury considered lacked ‘any prospect of national advantage’.42 In Britain at least, this ‘antipodean paradise’, a veritable El Dorado, had already become a disappointing example of imperial ambition.43

Seeking salvation A decade after the Swan River Colony’s troubled establishment, Nathaniel Ogle reported in his 1839 Manual for Emigrants that its [ 94 ]

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‘climate is the steadiest and healthiest of any known in Australia’ and ‘is perhaps the healthiest and most genial on the earth’.44 That the boosting of Western Australia’s salubrious climate persisted highlights the colony’s precarious position long after its foundation. David Hamer argues that in many towns in the New World the purpose of such promotional literature was not only ‘to preach, spread and inculcate unqualified optimism’, but also ‘to suppress information about, or divert attention from, the darker, grimmer, less hopeful aspects of urban life’.45 The British theorist of colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, for instance, declared Western Australia as ‘the best example of the worst form of colonising’ because the availability of cheap land had allowed the population to disperse over a vast area and produced labour shortages.46 Karl Marx later drew on this critique of Swan River in Das Kapital, in which he highlighted the flaws of both capitalism and colonisation.47 The promotional literature also helped to conceal the ongoing settler process of coming to terms with the colonial climate. Some colonists, like Anglican clergyman John Wollaston, were increasingly of the opinion that Perth did not have ‘so pleasant a climate as has been represented’.48 And despite Alfred Gill’s declaration of the colony’s ‘perfect freedom from miasma’ in 1841, the Perth Gazette reported in 1848 that, ‘[T]he families living on the borders of [swamps] constantly complain of such illness as is likely to arise from miasma’.49 Such complaints led to the drainage of the lakes and swamps in Perth by the end of the century.50 Boosters evaded such doubts by attributing ill-health to the moral shortcomings of the sufferers. In 1830, for instance, the colony’s surgeon Alexander Collie had considered ‘great irregularities of conduct’ to blame for the poor health of colonists at the troubled settlement of Clarence, south of Perth.51 Likewise, Captain Frederick Chidley Irwin, commander of the regiment stationed in the colony, reported in 1835 that, ‘after being four years in that climate, the troops continued in good health, with the exception of those who suffered from their intemperate habits’.52 Gold fever in California (1848) and Victoria (1851) threw Western Australia’s plight into stark relief as these rushes each attracted over half a million people during their first decade.53 Discoveries in New South Wales (1851), New Zealand (1861) and Queensland (1867) followed soon after, bolstered by a new wave of booster literature in Australasia and faster passage from the late 1840s.54 As one visitor to Western Australia observed in 1851, the colony had ‘dwindled to comparative insignificance’ with fewer than six thousand colonists spread across the western third of the continent.55 Even South Australia, which had been founded in 1836, had a population of over 50,000 [ 95 ]

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people.56 In the meantime, Western Australian pastoralists placed increasing pressure on the Legislative Council to remedy labour shortages in the colony.57 Much to the chagrin of the other Australian colonies, which had ceased transportation by the late 1840s, Western Australia became a destination in 1850 for what Trollope described as ‘compelled immigrants’, convicts.58 Resentful of the contamination of their society, colonists again turned to India as events there presented an opportunity for Western Australia’s salvation with the outbreak of the First War of Indian Independence in May 1857. The loss of troops to disease during the conflict represented a crisis in military health for the British in India, the resolution of which was a matter of urgency for the Empire as the proportion of British to native troops was to be increased.59 Following so closely behind the Crimean War (1854 –56), where poor sanitary conditions had also taken their toll, the War of Indian Independence led to the establishment in 1859 of a Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India. Among the witnesses were two military physicians who had served in Western Australia as well as the colony’s Surveyor General, John Septimus Roe, and Sir James Stirling.60 Their submissions described Western Australia as an ‘excellent asylum’ from a climate ‘highly uncongenial to British constitutions’, and that the colony, ‘in climate and position, will be found to possess unequalled advantages over all the other Colonies for the formation of such Establishments’.61 Although Western Australia was the only colony to represent itself at the Royal Commission, it was nonetheless vying with other outposts of the Empire. In addition to the Cape Colony, which the Commissioners also considered, Western Australia also faced competition in Australasia from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, as well as New Zealand.62 For Western Australia, a sanatorium and the influx of European convalescents might stimulate the economy and provide a civilising presence in the penal colony.63 But medical tourists expected the urbane institutions of civilisation to be a precondition, not a product, of their visit.64 Flattering reports from visitors like Colonel James Hanson from Madras in 1831, who was convalescing in the colony, were therefore ‘a fortunate circumstance for the colony’, as prominent diarist George Fletcher Moore recorded.65 In his own account, Hanson reported that King George Sound (Albany) was ‘blessed with a climate it is impossible to eulogise too highly’ and that he ‘quadrilled and waltzed until midnight’ at the sophisticated soirees of Swan River.66 In an 1849 edition of London’s New Monthly Magazine, J. W. F. Blundell noted that Western Australia ‘boasts, for so small a community, a very superior order of settlers’.67 Regardless [ 96 ]

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of these glowing appraisals of Western Australian society, they had little bearing on the recommendations of the Royal Commission. Although the Commissioners considered that Western Australia ‘appears to possess many advantages as a locality for a sanitarium [sic]’, they concluded in 1863 that there was insufficient evidence to recommend the colony for such a role.68 They opted instead for stationing one-third of the British forces in Indian hill stations, even though they conceded that these only offered a preservative, not curative, function.69 Western Australia, meanwhile, continued to bear the convict stain. In contrast to the case put forward to the Commissioners, the promotion of the colony’s climate in the interests of transportation was more tempered. Far from a reflection of a change in perception, this moderation was the product of efforts to ensure the ongoing supply of convict labour. At a meeting in London in 1863, for instance, Captain Mangles advised the colonial government not to say anything of the salubrity of the climate of Western Australia as there was no wish on the part of the public that the convicts should be sent to a Paradise – that they should change the convict prison for the Garden of Eden; but that they should be forwarded to some healthy station, where they would be worked hard and have a chance of being reformed.70

According to his logic, the climate of Western Australia was so salubrious that it might undermine, rather than support, the colony’s transportation demands. The more measured description of the colony as a ‘healthy station’ for work and possible reform aligns more closely with what Katherine Foxhall describes as ‘the dual identity of convicts as both British rejects and a vital colonial labour force’.71 The arrival of nearly 10,000 male prisoners and 2,000 serving girls, as well as the Pensioner Guard and their families between 1850 and 1868 not only helped to increase the size of the colony nearly fourfold (from 5,886 to 22,915), but also provided markets for local produce and the labour for the construction of public works.72

After transportation By the 1870s, the colony was once again in the doldrums. Transportation had ended in 1868 and the colony had failed to recover from the cessation of the flows of funds and people. With Perth the smallest and most isolated of the Australian capital cities and the rest of the population distributed sparsely across the vast territory of Western Australia, the colony languished.73 Even the opening of the Suez Canal [ 97 ]

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in 1869 did little to improve Western Australia’s situation.74 Its dilatory position did not go unnoticed: after a visit to King George Sound (Albany) in 1879, Henry Cornish told the Madras Mail that it ‘possesses one of the finest climates in the world’.75 He added, however, ‘Politically, Western Australia is the most backward of all the colonies’, dwelling on the growing demands from Western Australians for responsible government, which the other Australian colonies had achieved by the 1850s.76 Attempts to stimulate the economy through assisted passages from Britain in the late 1870s had brought more than a thousand emigrants to Western Australia, where they took up grants of land under special regulations. But as employment opportunities declined, this government assistance was withdrawn.77 By the time Governor Frederick Napier Broome took office in June 1883, Western Australia’s fortunes were slowly beginning to turn. Already public expenditure in the colony was growing following the British government’s relaxation of the controls of loan funds.78 Governor Broome visited Britain in late 1884 to promote the colony to potential investors and to raise a loan for public works in Western Australia.79 In a paper he presented to the Royal Colonial Institute in March 1885, he acknowledged Western Australia’s slow development, ‘She has been the Cinderella of the Australian family, while her more fortunate sisters have got on in the world, have been gay and prosperous, and have received much company in the shape of immigrants, she has led a solitary and unnoticed existence.’80 Among the colony’s attributes, Governor Broome invoked a familiar rhetoric in proclaiming its climate ‘the best and healthiest in the world’, neglecting to mention a recent measles epidemic in the colony.81 Furthermore, he argued: Close to India as it is, Western Australia would make an excellent sanitorium [sic] for Her Majesty’s Indian troops. The Red sea journey and the cold English winter, and much loss of life and efficiency resulting therefrom, would be avoided, and the troops would be near at hand for return to their garrisons.82

Broome himself was well aware of the potentially debilitating effects of tropical climes, as his wife’s health had suffered at their previous post of Mauritius. In contrast, Lady Broome found the Western Australian climate ‘delightful’.83 In December 1885, Broome directed this proposal to the Viceroy of India, arguing that it ‘would save the lives of a considerable number of British soldiers every year’.84 The response was brief: ‘the Government of India are not are present prepared to take any steps in the direction suggested’.85 In contrast to earlier proposals for sanatoria in Western Australia, which had attempted to capitalise on the perceived [ 98 ]

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weaknesses of the British in India, the British Empire had by the 1880s strengthened its dominance of the Indian Ocean as Burma, the Maldives, most of the Malay Peninsula and most of southern Africa had become British possessions.86 Moreover, the hill station, and the refuge it offered imperial forces from the Indian plains, no longer served merely a therapeutic purpose: they had become important sites of political and military supervision over the Raj.87

Gold at last In his observations on Western Australia in Australia and New Zealand in 1876, novelist Anthony Trollope also identified a Dickensian trait within the colony, what he described as the ‘Micawber condition’.88 The ‘West Australian Micawbers’, Trollope noted, were convinced that, ‘If gold could only be found, Western Australia would hold up its head with the best of them.’89 A decade after Trollope’s visit, these Micawbers finally had their wish, first with the discovery of gold in the Kimberley in 1885, and more famously, in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the early 1890s. These finds drew thousands of people seeking the latest El Dorado and precipitated an influx of wealth to the colony. Mirroring Victoria’s mid-century gold fever, Western Australia’s population trebled during the 1890s, drawing many emigrants across the Nullabor from the depressed colonies of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.90 As historian James Sykes Battye wrote in 1924, this gold rush transformed Western Australia ‘from being a slow, backward and practically unknown community in 1891’ to being ‘known the world over as a country of immense wealth, of progressive ideas, and of almost boundless possibilities’ on the eve of Federation.91 By this time, Britain had granted the colony self-government in 1890, reflecting its greater confidence in the future of what had long been an underwhelming colonial enterprise. The influx of wealth provided the means for the Forrest government (1890 –1901) to invest in overdue public works such as communication and transportation infrastructure linking Perth to Fremantle, Albany and Geraldton, as well as the eastern goldfields by rail and telegraph, which helped to overcome the tyranny of distance that had hampered the colony’s development. The partnership of Premier Sir John Forrest with engineer Charles Yelverton O’Connor also produced the deeper harbour at the port of Fremantle and a water pipeline from Perth to the goldfields, nearly 600 kilometres away. At the end of the nineteenth century, as historian Frank Crowley observed, ‘the colony had become the chief advertisement and the centre of attraction amongst the British colonies in the Antipodes’.92 [ 99 ]

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No longer viewed as a failure, the promotion of Western Australia’s possibilities ceased to refer to its potential in terms of its proximity to India. Once a source of opportunity, being close to India and Asia now represented a threat to the new White Australia with its accompanying anxieties of peopling the continent’s ‘empty north’.93 With vast, sparsely populated territories lying north of the Tropic of Capricorn, Western Australia was especially vulnerable.94 Meanwhile, the appointment of an Agent-General in London in 1891 ensured that Western Australia was actively promoted in the metropole, where its healthy climate continued to play a significant role in attracting prospective emigrants to its shores long into the twentieth century.95

Conclusion The decision to establish a British settlement at the Swan River in 1829 was largely the result of the mobilisation of imperial anxieties about tropical climates. During the nineteenth century, propagandists and visitors highlighted the colony’s potential as a convalescent station for Europeans in India. By focusing on the health of European troops in India, such booster literature sought to benefit from the contrast of the temperate and healthy Swan River with the unhealthy tropics of India. Although these imperial concerns about ‘relocation costs’ were real enough, these were not sufficient to outweigh Western Australia’s less favourable qualities, not least its isolation, political backwardness, and later, its convict heritage, such that the colony remained an inconsequential possession of empire until the end of the nineteenth century. Western Australia continued to play Cinderella to her more prosperous and populated Australian sisters after Federation and only outgrew its status as a claimant state in the late 1960s.96 Exploring the promotion of Western Australia in the broader context of imperial irrationality enriches our historical understandings of the state’s development, the mobility of imperial bodies, and the ways that Western Australians perceived their place as a temperate outpost of empire in the British Indian Ocean.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Anthony Trollope, Australia, 1st edn, 1873, St Lucia, 1967, 71, 225, 375, 636. Ibid., 559. Ibid., 577 – 8. For instance, James M. R. Cameron, Ambition’s Fire: The Agricultural Colonisation of Pre-Convict Western Australia, Crawley, 1981; Pamela Statham-Drew, James Stirling: Admiral and Founding Governor of Western Australia, Crawley, 2003. See also, Joseph M. Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process, Canberra, 1977.

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SALUBRITY AND THE SWAN RIVER COLONY 5 Geoffrey Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1826, Crawley, 2008, 1. 6 James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800 –1920, New York, 2011; Warwick Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, Carlton, Vic., 2006, 15 –16. 7 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783 –1939, Oxford, 2009; Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, New York, 2002. 8 Reginald T. Appleyard and Toby Manford, The Beginning: European Discovery and Early Settlement of Swan River, Nedlands, 1979, 23 – 5. 9 Pamela Statham, ‘Western Australia Becomes British’, in Pamela Statham (ed.), The Origins of Australia’s Capital Cities, Oakleigh, Vic., 1989, 122. 10 Appleyard and Manford, The Beginning, 35 – 6. 11 Captain Stirling to Governor Darling, 8 December 1826, Historical Records of Australia, series 1, 12, 1919, 775 – 80. 12 Vladimir Jankovic, ‘Climates as Commodities: Jean Pierre Purry and the Modelling of the Best Climate on Earth’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 41, 2010, 204. 13 Ibid., 206. 14 Ibid. 15 Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 9. 16 Ibid., 11. 17 Statham-Drew, James Stirling, 69 – 85. 18 Frederick R. Clause, 31 March 1827, cited in ‘6. Report to Darling (and the Colonial Office) on Swan River, 1827’, in P. Statham-Drew (comp.), The Stirling Reports and Other Key Documents, 2003, MS0109B, Reid Library, University of Western Australia. 19 Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1989. 20 James Stirling, cited in Statham-Drew, James Stirling, 85. 21 See, Frank Crowley, ‘Stirling, Sir James (1791–1865)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, II, Melbourne, 1967, 484 – 8. 22 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600 –1850, New York, 1999, 116. 23 Mark Harrison, ‘Differences of Degree: Representations of India in British Medical Topography, 1820 –c.1870’, Medical History Supplement, 20, 2000, 57. Emphasis in text. David Arnold argues that these anxieties had already developed during the eighteenth century. See, Colonising the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India, Berkeley, CA, 1993, 11– 60, 76 – 7. 24 Harrison, ‘Differences of Degree’, 57, 59. 25 David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford, 1996, 142. Fears of tropical climes were not universal. See, for instance, see David N. Livingstone, ‘Race, Space and Moral Climatology: Notes towards a Genealogy’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28(2), 2002, 161. 26 Livingstone, ‘Race, Space and Moral Climatology’, 160. 27 Arnold, Problem of Nature, 149 – 57. 28 Appleyard and Manford, The Beginning, 144. 29 Cameron has critiqued John Barrow’s account of Swan River in, ‘Information Distortion in Colonial Promotion: The Case of Swan River Colony’, Australian Geographical Studies, 12, 1974, 57 – 76. 30 Cameron, ‘Information Distortion’, 19. 31 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 154. 32 Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 51– 8. 33 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 288. 34 Appleyard and Manford, The Beginning, 148. 35 Ibid., 147; Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 60 – 8.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 36 Joseph Hardy, Feb. 1830, quoted in Journal of the Western Australian Historical Society, 1, 1938, 63, cited in Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 98. 37 Sydney Gazette, 14 Jan. 1830, cited in Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 86, 88. 38 Ibid., 91. 39 Ibid., 92, 107. 40 Goderich, cited in Statham, ‘Western Australia Becomes British’, 232. 41 Ibid. 42 Treasury, cited in John J. Eddy, Britain and the Australian Colonies 1818 –1831: The Technique of Government, Oxford, 1969, 170 –1. 43 Cameron, Ambition’s Fire, 3. 44 Nathaniel Ogle, The Colony of Western Australia: A Manual for Emigrants, London, 1839, 85, 281. 45 David Hamer, New Towns in the New World: Images and Perceptions of the Nineteenth Century Urban Frontier, New York, 1990, 60 –1. 46 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, 3rd edn, Port Melbourne, Vic., 2009, 80. 47 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, I, 1867, New York, 1977, 932 – 4. 48 John Wollaston, ‘An influenza epidemic (Dec, 1841)’, in Marian Aveling (ed.), Westralian Voices: Documents in Western Australian Social History, Nedlands, 1979, 206. 49 Alfred Gill, Western Australia: containing a statement of the condition and prospects of that Colony and some account of the Western Australian Company’s settlement of Australind, London, 1841, 53 – 4; ‘The Independent Journal’, Perth Gazette, 1 July 1848, 2. 50 Hugo Bekle and Joseph Gentilli, ‘History of the Perth lakes’, Early Days, 10(5), 1993, 447. 51 Alexander Collie, 1830 cited in Statham, ‘Western Australia Becomes British’, 178. 52 Frederick Chidley Irwin, The State and Position of Western Australia, Commonly Called the Swan River Settlement, London, 1835, 5. 53 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 307. 54 Ibid., 311. 55 Henry Melville, The Present State of Australia, London, 1851, 51; Reginald T. Appleyard, ‘Western Australia: Economic and Demographic Growth, 1850 –1914’, in Tom Stannage (ed.), A New History of Western Australia, Crawley, 1981, 212. 56 Pamela Statham, ‘Swan River Colony 1829 –1850’, in Stannage, New History of Western Australia, 181. 57 The extent to which a labour shortage existed in the colony remains under question. See Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage, 22; Statham, ‘Swan River Colony 1829–1850’, 181– 210. 58 Trollope, South Australia and Western Australia, 4. 59 Arnold, Colonising the Body, 67; Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 20. 60 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Sanitary State of the Army in India, London, 1863, 202. 61 H. H. Jones, Western Australia, recommended as a sanatorium for the restoration to health and usefulness of European soldiers, Guildford, 1859, 2; James Stirling, Observations on the climate and geographical position of Western Australia and on its adaptation to the purposes of a sanatorium for the Indian Army, London, 1859, 1, 7. 62 Andrea Inglis, Summer in the Hills: The Nineteenth Century Mountain Resort in Australia, Melbourne, 2007; James Beattie, ‘Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s’, Health and History, 14(1), 2012, 100 – 20; James Beattie, ‘Tropical Asia and temperate New Zealand: Health and Conservation Connections, 1840 –1920’, in Henry M. Johnson and Brian Moloughney (eds), Asia in the Making of New Zealand, Auckland, 2006, 36 – 57. 63 Ogle, Colony of Western Australia, 19.

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SALUBRITY AND THE SWAN RIVER COLONY 64 Harriet Deacon, ‘The Politics of Medical Geography: Seeking Healthiness at the Cape during the Nineteenth Century’, in Richard Wrigley and George Revill (eds), Pathologies of Travel, Amsterdam, 2000, 282. 65 George Fletcher Moore, Extracts from the Journals and Letters of George Fletcher Moore, London, 1834, 88. 66 ‘Colonel Hanson’s Pamphlet’, Perth Gazette, 19 Jan. 1833, 11. 67 J. W. F. Blundell, ‘Western Australia’, in New Monthly Magazine, 86, 1849, 170. 68 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, 152. 69 Curtin, Death by Migration, 48; Dane Kennedy, Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley, CA, 1996, 26. 70 ‘Transportation to Western Australia’, Inquirer and Commercial News, 22 Apr. 1863, 3. 71 Katherine Foxhall, ‘From Convicts to Colonists: The Health of Prisoners and the Voyage to Australia, 1823 – 53’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39(1), 2011, 2. 72 Tom Stannage, The People of Perth: A Social History of Western Australia’s Capital City, Perth, 1979, 93; Frank Crowley, Australia’s Western Third: A History of Western Australia from the First Settlements to Modern Times, London, 1960, 40. 73 Stannage, People of Perth, 85. 74 See Patsy Brown, ‘Western Australian Merchants and Political Agitation: The Struggle for Fremantle Harbour in the Late 19th Century’, Great Circle, 12(2), 1990, 73 – 94; Frank Broeze, ‘The Ports and Port System of the Asian Seas: An Overview with Historical Perspective from c.1750’, Great Circle, 18(2), 1996, 73 – 96. 75 Henry Cornish, Under the Southern Cross, Madras, 1879, 38. 76 Ibid., 31. 77 Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, 60. Similar schemes operated in the other Australian colonies, see Robin Haines, ‘ “The Idle and the Drunken Won’t Do There”: Poverty, the New Poor Law and Nineteenth-Century Government-Assisted Emigration to Australia from the United Kingdom’, Australian Historical Studies, 38(108), 1997, 1– 21. 78 Jenny Gregory, ‘Corporate Survival during the 1890s Land Bust: The Western Australian Connection’, Journal of Australian Studies, 12(22), 1988, 42. 79 Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, 91. 80 Frederick Napier Broome, ‘Western Australia’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 16, 1884 – 85, 181. 81 Broome, ‘Western Australia’, 189; Su-Jane Hunt and Geoffrey Bolton, ‘Cleansing the Dunghill: Water Supply and Sanitation in Perth, 1878 –1912’, Studies in Western Australian History, 2, 1978, 4. 82 Broome, ‘Western Australia’, 189. 83 Frank Crowley, ‘Broome, Sir Frederick Napier (1842 –1896)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, III, Melbourne, 1969, 248 – 50; Mary Anne Barker, Colonial Memories, London, 1904, xviii, xxi. 84 Letter from Frederick Napier Broome to the Viceroy of India, 11 December 1885, His Excellency the Governor – Sanatorium for Indian Troops, Despatches re. West. Australia as, 1886/2474, Cons. 527, State Records Office of Western Australia (hereafter, SROWA). 85 Letter from O. N. Newmarch to Frederick Napier Broome, 16 February 1886, His Excellency the Governor – Sanatorium for Indian Troops, Despatches re. West. Australia as, 1886/2474, Cons. 527, SROWA. 86 Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History, New York, 2004, 139 – 40. 87 Judith Kenny, ‘Climate, Race and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85(4), 1995, 699; Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 1. 88 Trollope, Australia, 573. Wilkins Micawber is a character in Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel, David Copperfield. 89 Trollope, Australia, 572. 90 Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, 87.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 91 James Sykes Battye, Western Australia: A History from Its Discovery to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth, Oxford, 1924, 434. 92 Crowley, Australia’s Western Third, 82. 93 See, for example, Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness; Warwick Anderson, ‘Geography, Race and Nation: Remapping “Tropical” Australia, 1890 –1930’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 11(4), 1997, 457– 68; Alison Bashford, ‘Is White Australia Possible? Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(2), 2000, 248 – 71; David Walker, ‘A Sunburnt Country: Reflections on Race, Whiteness and the Geopolitics of Settlement in Australia’, Health and History, 4(2), 2002, 118 – 24. 94 Marilyn Lake, ‘White Man under Siege’, History Workshop Journal, 58(1), 2004, 41–62. 95 Mark Brayshay and John Selwood, ‘Dreams, Propaganda and Harsh Realities: Landscapes of Group Settlement in the Forest Districts of Western Australia in the 1920s’, Landscape Research, 27(1), 2002, 81–101; Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather, ‘Visions and Realities: Images of Early Postwar Australia’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16(4), 1991, 470 – 83; A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: A Life History of British Postwar Emigration to Australia, Manchester, 2005, 40 – 9, 61– 72; Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, Oxford, 2003, 83 – 4. 96 Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage, 159.

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CHAPTER SIX

Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific: metropolitan representations and colonial realities, 1884 –1914 Holger Droessler

Introduction On 18 October 1910, the Sokehs had had enough. Fed up with harsh work conditions and regular violence, two hundred workers on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei took up clubs and rifles to fight against their German overseers. The outraged workers set their bosses running and managed to kill the new German district chief who had contributed to the escalating conflict. It was only with a heavily armed navy intervention with over 700 men that the ‘Sokeh Rebellion’, as it became known, was finally suppressed in January 1911. Overall, almost a dozen Sokehs died in combat (fifteen more were later executed), along with seven Germans, four Melanesian police soldiers, and five government workers from the neighbouring Caroline Islands.1 More than any other episode in the history of colonial resistance in the German Pacific, the events in Pohnpei revealed the dramatic tension between the idealised views of the colonisers and the very real suffering of the colonised. This chapter explores the changing relationship between metropolitan representations of the German colonies in the Pacific and the violent realities on the ground from the 1880s, when the Pacific emerged as a policy issue in Germany, until the First World War, when Australia and New Zealand took over the Kaiserreich’s faraway possessions.2 During these decades, the German Pacific appeared as an El Dorado for different groups of Germans: dreamy-eyed utopianists, profit-ogling capitalists, paternalist colonial officials, and the exoticismhungry German public at home. For most of the colonised Pacific Islanders, however, Germany’s ‘El Dorado in the Pacific’ turned out to be hell on earth, prompting them to resist their subjection as much as they could.3 [ 105 ]

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To trace the contours of this German discourse on the Pacific, its effects on colonial policy, and the often clashing realities for the colonised, the remainder of this chapter is divided into four parts. The first three parts focus on different German actors for whom, for different reasons, the Pacific came to appear as an El Dorado. The analysis opens with the often idealising representations by German utopianists, moves on to the more mundane but no less optimistic writings of German boosters and administrators, and ends with their combined effects on the overwhelming majority of Germans who never set foot on one of these distant islands. In a fourth and final part, the focus shifts to the experiences of the colonised Pacific Islanders themselves, whose traditional homelands the German colonialists turned into everything but an El Dorado. Finally, evidence for widespread violent and non-violent resistance of colonised Pacific Islanders from Pohnpei and Samoa will help to reveal the limits of approaching colonial history through the eyes of the colonisers.4 But, first, it is important to analyse precisely these eyes to understand what they saw and how their visions shaped Germany’s colonial involvement in the Pacific.

Of (ig)noble savages and cocovores Throughout the nineteenth century, German images of Pacific Islanders vacillated between fear and fascination. German artists, ethnographers, travellers, and a motley crew of adventurers – some of whom never saw the Pacific with their own eyes – all worked to construct this fundamentally ambivalent image of the Pacific.5 Pacific Islanders were either ‘noble savages’, whose pure ways of life, physical beauty, and sexual availability they found attractive, or, by stark contrast, ‘ignoble savages’ whose uncivilised ways (cannibalism) or all too civilised ways (mimicry) were to be feared and contained. Polynesia, in particular, turned into something like a living museum of European antiquity.6 The famous Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent the last years of his life in Samoa, for instance, likened his new home to Homer’s lotus islands.7 This trope of associating Samoa with European antiquity even spilled over into official correspondence when, writing a decade into formal German colonial rule over the islands, Rear Admiral Erich Gühler idealised the Samoans as the Greeks of the South Seas.8 In the context of Social Darwinism and the rise of racial anthropology, this purportedly cultural association assumed racial dimensions as well. Adolf Bastian, one of the leading ethnologists of the time, claimed that Pacific Islanders were children of nature, but could be seen as [ 106 ]

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distant ‘cousins’ of the Caucasian race.9 Moreover, the sometimes more imagined than real communal lifestyles of some Pacific Islanders became attractive alternatives for artists and cultural critics of a greatly accelerating Germany on its way into industrial modernity and an atomised Gesellschaft. Hence, the German-speaking lands were inundated by photographs, stereo images, and paintings of indigenous types and natural settings from the Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century. For the select few visitors who had the privilege of embarking on the months-long trip to the Pacific themselves, a wealth of mass photographs with representations of ‘typical’ scenes and stock motifs were available for purchase as cartes de visite at the various ports of call. Brought home to Germany, these visual souvenirs then extended the reach of stereotypical imagery about the Pacific and its peoples throughout the metropole.10 In representing the German Pacific, the line between art and imitation was sometimes blurred beyond recognition. From the summer of 1908 to the spring of 1910, the first Hamburg South Seas Expedition visited German New Guinea and various other islands in the Pacific and brought home no fewer than 15,000 objects providing material for three dozen weighty scientific volumes published into the 1930s.11 The expedition’s official artist, Hans Vogel, relied heavily on readily available stock photographs in addition to his own photographs as models for his paintings.12 The second major scientific expedition into the German Pacific a few years later hosted an even more famous artist: Emil Nolde. One of the leading German expressionists at the turn of century, Nolde and his wife Ada stayed in German New Guinea from December 1913 to March 1914. Travelling through the colony, Nolde painted a series of tropical scenes, including lush and intensely colourful landscapes as well as indigenous types in the tradition of the slightly more well-known Paul Gauguin. Nolde’s paintings encapsulated the fundamental ambivalence of dominant German visions of the Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century.13 Torn between fascination with and fear of radical alterity, Nolde, like many of his German contemporaries, saw in these faraway islands under German rule an El Dorado, first and foremost, for creative expression.14 The life story of August Engelhardt presents another dominant strand of German engagements with the Pacific.15 Born in Nuremburg in 1875, Engelhardt immersed himself in life reform movements from an early age. He joined a community of vegetarian nudists in the Harz Mountains in central Germany, but when the police detained its founder on charges of fraud, Engelhardt turned his eyes away from the provincial constraints of his home. In autumn 1902, not even 30 years [ 107 ]

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old, Engelhardt set out to the Pacific with a plan to start his own community of sun disciples and coconut eaters. In October 1902, he purchased the small island Kabakon off the coast of Neulauenburg (today’s Duke of York Island) from Emma Forsayth, an AmericanSamoan businesswoman who had settled in German New Guinea. On his newly acquired 200 acres of tropical paradise, Engelhardt built a wooden cabin with porch and settled down with the over 1,200 books he brought along from Germany. Engelhardt’s relations with the roughly forty Islanders who had been living on Kabakon were surprisingly friendly, and some even helped him collect coconuts and other fruit for sale in the main port of Herbertshöhe. Apparently, Engelhardt thought little about the fact that his dream was being built on the lived realities of a Melanesian community. Engelhardt spent most of his day walking around the island naked and followed a strict vegetarian diet, centred on the fruit he held sacred: the coconut. According to Engelhardt, coconuts were God’s fruit since they grew closest to the sun: ‘Naked cocovorism is God’s will’, he wrote, ‘The pure coconut diet makes one immortal and unites one with God.’16 After some time as the only white man on the island, Engelhardt began advertising his cocovoric colony in the South Seas in German magazines. And, indeed, a first disciple arrived in early 1904 from another island closer to Germany, Helgoland, but died within a mere six weeks, probably of fever. In summer 1904, Engelhardt welcomed a more prominent new member: Max Lützow, one of the most famous German composers and conductors at the time. Two months after his arrival, Lützow wrote an enthusiastic letter back home exalting the natural beauty and paradise-like life in Engelhardt’s coconut colony. According to Lützow, there were no flies or diseases on Kabakon, the ‘natives’ were peaceful (he made sure to emphasise that cannibalism had ceased to be practised on the island), and days were spent sunbathing on the island’s white beaches and jumping into the fairy-tale ocean.17 ‘We go naked’, the famous musician went on to explain, ‘so the heat does not disturb us. The hustle of culture we do not know, our venture is communistic, every colonist becomes part-owner.’18 Lützow’s panegyric descriptions of Engelhardt’s El Dorado in the South Seas set off a formidable boom in metropolitan Germany. A wave of new members arrived in Kabakon, but, in contrast to Engelhardt’s optimistic writings, there were never more than two dozen white people living on the island.19 Soon, however, Engelhardt’s El Dorado turned into a nightmare. Lützow and several other new arrivals became sick with fever, and when Lützow tried to reach the government hospital in nearby Herbertshöhe he was caught in a bad storm and drowned. The other disciples left [ 108 ]

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the island soon thereafter. Engelhardt also became ill with scabies and suffered from general weakness (he weighed a mere 86 lbs at a height of 5 ft, 5 in.). With a good dose of luck, he survived in the government hospital thanks to a hearty meat stew provided by the staff. The nutritional monoculture that was central to Engelhardt’s utopian project in the Pacific had finally reached its natural limits.20 When Engelhardt’s confidante and fellow naturalist August Bethmann suddenly died under mysterious circumstances and Engelhardt turned increasingly mad, the German colonial government across the bay made its scepticism about the coconut colony within a colony more explicit and started to warn potential new recruits of the grave dangers they faced. Yet it was not until 1909 that Engelhardt finally decided to abandon his sun order. He opened his plantation to curious tourists from all over the world, who came to see this (barely) living specimen of European flight from the pressures of capitalist modernity. Engelhardt and his emaciated body, thus, came to symbolise the dangers of ‘going native’ and, more generally, the limits of Germany’s Pacific as an El Dorado. Engelhardt’s biting critique of European civilisation with which he tried to recruit followers (‘Europe-poisoning is the name of our suffering!’) had now turned against him, as the visiting tourists observed the results of the self-poisoning of a white man in the tropics.21 The Australian soldiers that occupied German New Guinea during the First World War interned Engelhardt in Rabaul, but he survived to see the end of that cataclysmic war that spelled the end of German colonial rule, not only in the Pacific. Engelhardt finally died in May 1919, most likely of the long-term effects of exhaustion of body and soul.22 The lives of August Engelhardt, Emil Nolde, and Hans Vogel represent prominent examples of German visions of the Pacific as seen through the eyes of (life) artists. On the one hand, brief visitors such as Vogel and Nolde imagined the German Pacific as an El Dorado where violence and death were merely hinted at. Engelhardt’s coconut colony, on the other hand, tried to turn these idealised visions into lived reality, but failed spectacularly.23 As will become clear in the following part, Engelhardt was not so different from other enterprising Germans, who dreamed of the Pacific as an El Dorado for profit-making and social engineering.

Cash cropping and salvage colonialism German traders had been active in the Pacific since the middle of the nineteenth century. Mainly due to companies such as Godeffroy & Co., trading coconuts and copra in the South Pacific, German trading [ 109 ]

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houses were exporting over 6 million Reichsmark of products by 1879.24 Yet, overall, Germany’s colonies in the Pacific remained marginal to its burgeoning economy until the very end. As late as 1913, trade with the Pacific colonies accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of overall trade volume.25 In the decade between 1901 and 1911, for instance, German taxpayers supported the Caroline and Mariana Islands with no fewer than 263,000 Reichsmark per year.26 Only German Samoa, alone among the German colonies, managed to become independent from government subsidies in 1908. Germany’s Pacific colonies were of secondary importance also in military terms, or, at least, little was done to build substantial fortifications against outside attack. German strategists liked to think of a geographic line connecting the only major naval station in Kiaochow with Apia in Samoa, but, in reality, there were few suitable ports in between. And, regrettably for the German Navy, one of the best ports in the entire South Pacific – Pago Pago on the eastern Samoan island of Tutuila – was taken over by the US Navy. The telegraph, too, took a long time to connect the German colonies in the Pacific. Although the British and American Pacific cables were completed in 1902 and 1903, respectively, German Samoa was not connected to Europe until summer 1914 – just in time to receive the news of world war on the continent (and the imminent end of German colonial rule in the Pacific). In secret, even the German Admiralty acknowledged the relative strategic insignificance of the Pacific possessions, particularly in light of the intensifying arms race with Great Britain in the Northern Sea.27 German interests in the Pacific – and especially in Samoa – thus rested less on economic or military considerations, but more on the power of symbolism and national prestige.28 Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, for instance, repeatedly declined British offers to swap German claims in Samoa with territorial gains in western Africa or an objectively safer harbour in neighbouring Tonga, pointing to public opinion in Germany. Samoa, Bülow argued in February 1899, had, for the German public at least, ‘a certain sentimental value’.29 This sort of affective attachment to Germany’s colonies in the Pacific (and to Samoa, in particular) reached into the highest echelons of the German imperial state. Emperor Wilhelm II was said to be extremely fond of Samoa, while the German Navy had a special connection to Samoa after Samoan soldiers had managed to kill over fifty German marines in 1888.30 While Germany’s Pacific trade was negligible in absolute as well as relative terms, small but powerful economic players had a vested interest in the colonies. The Hamburg-based Godeffroy trading dynasty, [ 110 ]

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for instance, reaped sweet profits from its copra business in the Pacific into the 1870s when global economic depression and increasing competition from other European traders cut into its margins. By the early 1880s, the reconstituted German Trading and Plantation Company of the South Seas [Deutsche Handels- und Plantagengesellschaft der Südsee-Inseln, or DHPG] paid off dividends again and flourished even more after 1900 when the western parts of Samoa came under formal German control.31 Between 1908 and 1914 alone, the company earned a net profit of 8 million Reichsmark, or roughly the sum of total investment into its plantations up to that point.32 The Jaluit Company, also based in Hamburg and active in Micronesia since the 1880s, enjoyed substantial profits from its trading monopoly. Until 1906, company representatives practically ran the German administration on the Marshall Islands. As a consequence, dividends rose steadily from 12 per cent in 1900 to 20 per cent in 1906.33 Further west, the Bremen-based German South Seas Phosphate Company [Deutsche Südsee-Phosphat-Gesellschaft] ran a lucrative business extracting phosphate from the depths of the Palauan Islands, especially in Angaur. In 1912 alone, the company exported 54,400 tons of phosphate mainly to Germany, Australia, and Japan.34 Most profitable of all, the Pacific Phosphate Company, a German–British joint venture, started mining phosphate in German-controlled Nauru and the British Gilbert Islands in 1899. The mining business proved to be so successful that the company paid extraordinary dividends, ranging from 30 per cent up to 50 per cent between 1906 and 1911.35 Among the major German companies operating in the Pacific at the time, only the German New Guinea Company [Deutsche NeuguineaKompagnie, or DNGK], founded in Berlin in 1882, had a more mixed record. After large initial investments (particularly in land for potential settlers), the company suffered heavy losses throughout the 1890s as it became clear that virtually no settler was willing to take the risk to move to the Pacific. In 1898, the company had to be rescued by a government subsidy that included more than 120,000 acres of land as well as 4 million Reichsmark in cash. Only when the company changed its investment strategy from buying land to specialising in the more lucrative trading business in the first years of the twentieth century did profits materialise. In 1912, three decades after its founding and considerable amounts of investment, the company finally paid its first, rather modest, dividend of 5 per cent.36 Beyond high dividends for a select few German investors, the Pacific colonies also excited the administrative fantasies of Germany’s fledgling colonial service. Officials in the German Pacific pursued a policy of ‘salvage colonialism’ aimed at preventing the proletarianisation of [ 111 ]

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the colonised Pacific Islanders.37 This attempt to halt – or, at least, slow down – the advance of capitalist modernity in the colonies was predicated on a particular vision of the Pacific and its peoples established by a long line of artistic, ethnographic, and travel writings. Drawing on the wide-ranging immersion into the cultures they were sent to administer, German colonial officials used this ethnographical capital to legitimise and realise their visions of the Pacific as an El Dorado for social engineering. The fundamental paradox of this policy of paternalist preservationism of indigenous ways of life was, of course, that the presence of the German colonisers – particularly in the form of missionaries and traders – radically changed the very cultural practices colonial policy set out to protect. The case of Wilhelm Solf in German Samoa is a good illustration. Partly due to his legal and philological training, Solf identified with the Samoans and styled himself as their benevolent tama¯, or father. In true pastoral mode, he passed various regulations designed to ‘protect’ Samoan ways of life – including a prohibition on the alienation of native lands – which instead helped to undermine traditional structures of authority within Samoan society and, thus, bolstered German colonial rule over Samoans.38 Since the German colonial states in Samoa as well as in Kiaochow were relatively independent both from local (trade and missionary) and metropolitan interests, German officials in both colonies could afford to realise their visions of native policy relatively unhindered. For colonial officials with sufficient ethnographical capital at their disposal, the colonies, thus, presented a kind of El Dorado in which they could let their visions of a well-ordered society roam freely. In German Kiaochow and Samoa, at least, European colonies became quite literally ‘laboratories of modernity’.39 These fantasies of colonial engineering were, however, challenged both by the colonised themselves and some vocal traders and planters who called for more forceful policies.40 Adventure capitalists, such as Richard Deeken in Samoa, had their own visions of a more literal El Dorado in the German colonies in the Pacific. Deeken, a young career officer in the German military in Berlin, travelled through the Pacific in 1900 and spent some time in the new colony of Samoa. Upon his return to Germany, he sought to attract capital and fellow settlers to move to Samoa and start cocoa and copra plantations. In his travelogue-cum-commercial advertisement Manuia Samoa, published in 1901, Deeken promised easy profits from cultivating cocoa in Samoa with little seed capital.41 Concerned about the influx of small German planters into Samoa and its threat to salvage colonialism, Governor Solf sought to draw Deeken’s credentials into doubt and tried to keep him and his fellow [ 112 ]

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settlers away from the colony. To that purpose, Solf hired Professor Ferdinand Wohltmann, a respected plant expert, to visit Samoa in 1902. Wohltmann duly offered a more pessimistic assessment of the economic opportunities for German settlers in Samoa, noting the high costs for land and labour and the significant competition from the DHPG (which continued to enjoy the support of German officials). Moreover, Wohltmann observed that more than half of the forty-six smaller planters then living in German Samoa were already in need of government aid in 1903.42 For the time being, Solf had defended his vision of a Samoa without proletariat. Deeken, however, did not take long to regroup and fight back. He and other small planters in the colony grew frustrated with the policies of the colonial administration, particularly the prohibition on selling Samoan lands to foreigners and the rather hesitant support for recruiting additional plantation labourers from other Pacific Islands or even China. They increasingly blamed the colonial government for stifling their business plans and founded a planters’ association in January 1903. After repeated lobbying, Deeken’s German Samoa Company [Deutsche Samoa-Gesellschaft, or DSG] combined with other smaller planters hard pressed for labour, and managed to convince the colonial administration to recruit labourers from China. But even with the aid of Chinese labourers toiling on cocoa and copra plantations, the DSG never paid dividends to its shareholders in Germany and had to close down its business under heavy losses in June 1914.43 Deeken’s dream of an El Dorado in German Samoa ultimately foundered on the shoals of Solf’s competing vision of a colony free from small settlers. In the end, promises of an El Dorado in the German Pacific turned out to be overblown. What to many Germans looked golden from afar, turned out to be merely gilded from up close and outright poisonous for most on the receiving end. There were, however, a select few among the colonised that took advantage of the new opportunities German colonial rule brought with it. Emma Forsayth, who sold Engelhardt his island, was a case in point. Born to a Samoan mother and an American father, she relocated to New Guinea in 1879, built up a formidable copra trading business there and also owned large tracts of land. By 1897 the three dozen trading stations of her E. E. Forsayth & Co. made annual profits of 200,000 Reichsmark.44 ‘Queen Emma’, as she became widely known throughout the Pacific, lived a turbulent life and died under mysterious circumstances in a casino in Monte Carlo in 1913.45 Forsayth, however, remained a dazzling exception among the droves of colonised labourers and their disappointed employers. [ 113 ]

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Germany’s place in the tropical sun The visions of the German Pacific as an El Dorado for artists, capitalists, and colonial officials – however marred by colonial realities – took strong hold of Germans living in their more temperate Heimat. If Bismarck had been a rather reluctant imperialist, his successors, starting with Bülow, had fewer qualms about claiming a seat at the colonial table for the young and sprightly German Empire. The newly founded Pan-German League and fellow expansionist and nationalist lobby groups pushed for a more aggressive German foreign policy, in general, and an enlargement of the German Navy, in particular, following in the footsteps of the US Navy under Alfred Thayer Mahan.46 Most Germans, however, generally cared little about events in faraway places (much like their contemporaries in Great Britain, France, and the USA), but that did not mean they did not support the ambitious plans of their leaders. By and large, the German public at the turn of the twentieth century shared an often implicit consensus that their country deserved a place under the tropical sun. Numerous articles in newspapers keeping the public abreast of recent events in the German colonies, as well as lengthier feature articles in travel magazines such as the popular Globus, helped to spread awareness of Germany’s presence in the Pacific.47 Samoa, again, took centre stage in this burgeoning discourse on the German Pacific as it became generally known as the so-called ‘Pearl of the South Seas’.48 Countless articles appeared in German newspapers and magazines in the 1890s that hammered home this image.49 Samoa was presented as the most valuable piece in Germany’s chain of colonial possessions in the Pacific, which stretched from the naval base in Kiaochow through New Guinea via the Caroline and Marshall Islands all the way to Samoa in the centre of the South Pacific. In other words, the German public was offered the appealing picture of an El Dorado in the form of a chain of archipelagic pearls. This image of Samoa as the pearl of the South Seas was so popular at the time that Governor Solf used it to argue for increased subsidies from the German Parliament. Addressing the Reichstag just before the new colonial budget was to pass, Solf said: ‘I can assure you that Samoa is indeed the pearl of the South Seas and in my name and on behalf of my brown charges I would be most grateful to the house if you would not spare on gold for this pearl’s setting.’50 No other book helped to establish and popularise this image of the material and symbolic value of Samoa among Germans more than Otto Ehlers’s Samoa – Die Perle der Südsee [Samoa – The Pearl of the South Seas], published in 1895.51 A travel writer and amateur [ 114 ]

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ethnographer, Ehlers had been voyaging through Samoa and other parts of the Pacific in the 1890s and published his observations to popular acclaim. New editions of the book had to be printed shortly after its first publication. When, after the third edition had been published in 1896, it became known that Ehlers had been killed and eaten by indigenous people in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land in the preceding autumn, reading about his experiences in this exotic yet dangerous part of the world gained additional (and often macabre) attraction. The basic message Ehlers sought to convey in his book was that Samoa, at the time administered jointly by Germany, Great Britain, and the USA under a so-called tridominium, had to come under exclusive German control to protect its preponderant trade interests. While in Samoa, Ehlers had enjoyed the comforts of being ‘embedded’ with the DHPG, including the privilege of being shipped around on DHPG-owned ships and being hosted on company plantations. In Ehlers’s book, the vision of the German Pacific as a financial El Dorado and as a peaceful paradise for German settlement went hand in hand. ‘A German Samoa’, he wrote, ‘can become a valuable colony for us. The country is as beautiful as paradise, the climate the most pleasant, the soil of inexhaustible fertility and the inhabitants the loveliest of our planet.’52 Only a few shadows fell on the edenic garden in the South Pacific, according to Ehlers: the Samoan inhabitants happened to be unreliable, deceitful, and, most enervatingly, rather work-shy. As a consequence, workers had to be recruited from other islands.53 Ehlers’s image of Samoa as paradise on earth depended on a form of epistemic appropriation that elided his subject position as white, male ‘expert’ on Samoan otherness and, thus, paved the way for the imminent process of formal colonisation by the German state. Not incidentally, this act of forceful appropriation of Samoan culture on the part of Ehlers paralleled the much-feared anthropophagism practised by some of the colonised, but which – alongside similar uncivilised brutalities – had died out in Samoa some time ago, as Ehlers did not fail to mention.54 In the end, Ehlers’s advertisement for German colonialism in Samoa, presented the faraway islands as an idyllic place where – thanks to German war ships, administration, and an expanding plantation economy – German colonisers (especially men) could make their dreams come true.55 Yet, the German colonies also came home in a more literal sense. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw an increase in the exhibition of exotic otherness throughout the global North. Non-white, often colonised peoples, were put on stages in ethnographic shows, behind fences in zoos, or captured on camera for photographic display.56 As part of this general fascination with showcasing the evolution of humankind with white Euro-American civilisation safely on top, several [ 115 ]

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groups of Pacific Islanders also visited the German Empire at the turn of the century. Between 1895 and 1911, four different Samoan troupes toured Germany, performing traditional dances, acrobatic feats, and simply showing off their physical beauty. Samoan men were usually presented as natural acrobats and proud warriors, while Samoan women played the roles of elegant beauties and passionate seducers.57 In performing a sanitised version of paradise for the curious German spectators, the Samoan visitors were also living their own El Dorado. Not only did they get to travel thousands of miles from their homelands to a cold yet fascinating land (and returned with loads of European gifts and products), but they also seized on other opportunities that presented themselves while on tour. More than a few Samoan men and women came closer to their German admirers than initially planned, causing public outrage and ultimately leading to a ban on the recruitment of colonial subjects for purposes of exhibition in 1901.58 On the whole, however, the Samoan shows were widely popular in Wilhelmine Germany. For example, tens of thousands visitors came to see the Samoan troupe in the Frankfurt Zoo in summer 1901. Advertisements for the Samoa show described the ‘rocky islands in the South Seas’ as one of the ‘most beautiful places on earth and its inhabitants as one of the most beautiful and most gallant people’.59 In 1911, Samoan chief Tamasese even used his stay in Germany for a diplomatic mission, including a brief meeting with fellow aristocrat William II in Berlin.60 Tamasese’s bold reinterpretation of his visit to Germany points to the ways in which Pacific Islanders resisted the demands of their rulers, the subject of the final part of this chapter.

Resistance from Pacific islanders Many Germans perceived their colonial empire in the Pacific as an El Dorado, often with little to no regard for the realities on the ground. But what seemed promising to decision-makers in Hamburg and Berlin did have very real and often dire consequences for Pacific Islanders in Pohnpei or Apia. Put simply, German imperialism in the Pacific was – with very few exceptions – everything but an El Dorado for the colonised peoples. The occurrence of widespread resistance of colonised Pacific Islanders across the German Pacific serves as unmistakable evidence. Pacific Islanders chose from a wide spectrum of resistance strategies, ranging from the use of the so-called ‘weapons of the weak’ (e.g. slow work or pilfering on plantations) to large-scale violent resistance (e.g. in Pohnpei).61 Significantly, the blind spots in the visual archive of German colonialism in the Pacific point to a gap between the idealised representations [ 116 ]

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and the often brutal realities on the ground. The hundreds of photographs of German colonialism in the Pacific that survived into the present do not, for instance, depict the regular corporeal punishment of the colonised, such as Melanesians in German New Guinea or Chinese in German Samoa.62 Neither were the widespread diseases that European settlers contracted in the Pacific recorded in these photographs (malaria was especially prevalent in German New Guinea, for instance), let alone their regular result: death. Judging from the photographic record, at least, Europeans did not seem to have died in the German Pacific. This silence on the brutal realities in the German colonies in the Pacific stands in stark contrast to the existence of photographs depicting corporeal punishment in the German colonies in Africa.63 Part of the reason for this contrast lies in the medium of photography itself. In a sense, the revolutionary facticity of photography made the representation of a common fact of colonial life virtually impossible: the death of the supposedly virile and racially superior white European settler.64 Pupu, the first Samoan man executed under German rule in May 1901, seemed to have understood photography’s potential for representing colonial violence when as his last wish he requested to be photographed by his German executioners.65 Not surprisingly, the photograph, if it was taken at all, has perished along with Pupu. Two cases of direct resistance to German colonial rule from Pohnpei and Samoa serve to illustrate the limits of Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific. The most violent case of indigenous resistance against German colonial rule in the Pacific occurred on Pohnpei. This tiny island in the eastern Caroline Islands came under German control in 1899 when Spain agreed to sell the remainder of its colonial possessions in the Pacific in the wake of the devastating defeat against the USA. One of the ethnic groups living on Pohnpei, the Sokehs, already had a record of violent resistance against the Spanish colonisers when, in 1887, they killed some forty Spanish and Filipino soldiers as a revenge against withheld wages and dishonour against one of their chiefs.66 Similar troubles arose more than two decades later when the new German district chief Gustav Boeder started his term in Pohnpei in April 1910. Boeder had served in the colonial administration in German East Africa before, which made him rather deaf to the wishes of the colonised. He pushed forward with a plan to construct a path around the small island of Dschokadsch (today’s Sokehs Island) just off the coast of Pohnpei’s main island. Under a new regulation, Pohnpeians were mandated to work fifteen days a year to pay for new land taxes, and most workers were used to help build the new path. Work conditions in road construction were generally harsh and German overseers occasionally hit workers to speed up the project.67 [ 117 ]

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This tense situation escalated in October 1910 when a Sokeh worker by the name of Lahdeleng resisted the German overseer Otto Hollborn, and was punished with ten blows from two Melanesian police soldiers. In the eyes of the race-conscious Sokehs, this added insult to injury, and when fellow Sokehs came to visit Lahdeleng to inspect his wounds, a vocal majority decided to make war against the whites, out of fear that, sooner or later, they might share the same fate. The next morning, the Sokeh workers engaged in construction of the new path took up arms, including clubs and rifles. The German overseers and managers fled into the Catholic Mission and asked for help. Alarmed by a messenger, district chief Boeder arrived in Dschokadsch with a mere six workers from the Mortlock and Truk Islands, and no support from police soldiers, to resolve the dispute with the Sokehs. With a different vision of their future in mind, the Sokehs did not hesitate to open fire against the agents of their exploitation. Boeder was killed by a shot to the head and his secretary Brauckmann was beheaded with a knife.68 In utter shock and determined to take revenge, the new German first-in-command Girschner ordered hundreds of men from other Pohnpeian districts to the capital of Colonia to assist him. The Sokehs let the Germans know that they attacked Boeder because ‘before they were to be treated as pigs, they would rather die’.69 A massive buildup for the planned punitive expedition followed until January 1911, when four heavily armed German warships with 745 men (including 200 Melanesian police soldiers brought in from German New Guinea) commenced their attack on the Sokehs who had entrenched themselves in Dschokadsch. To the surprise of the German forces, who had thought they had planned for all eventualities, most Sokehs managed to escape to the main island unhindered by the German warships. In return, Germans troops resorted to a strategy of scorched earth on the main island, forcing more and more Pohnpeians to surrender. Finally, in February 1911, Sokeh leader Soumadau surrendered to the German forces. Overall, almost a dozen Sokehs had died, along with seven Germans, four Melanesian police soldiers, and five government workers from neighbouring Caroline Islands.70 After pacifying the island under heavy losses, the German authorities decided to organise a show trial to set an example. Fifteen of the Sokeh ringleaders were executed only hours after the trial by a shooting guard, twelve more Sokehs were sentenced to lifelong exile with five years of forced labour, and all other Sokehs involved in the rebellion were exiled to Palau (some 1,800 miles west), where they were forced to remain until the end of German colonial rule in the Pacific in 1914. The suppression of the Sokeh Rebellion in 1910 –11, perhaps more than any other instance in the history of colonial resistance in [ 118 ]

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the German Pacific, revealed the gulf between the idealised representations of the colonisers and the brutal realities on the ground. This became evident in the writings of a young German marine who had participated in the fighting in Pohnpei and addressed the preface of his post-Second World War memoirs apparently to his former comrades: Do you still remember how we pillaged around in the bountiful orchards of Pohnpei, how the wealth of an entire people was squandered and destroyed by you in a matter of days? Because you were with me in the war against the rebels. Do you still know how we marched through the blooming land scorching and burning, with wafting columns of smoke from burning villages as guideposts for the day, as glowing torches for the night?71

Paradise and hell on earth merged into one in this nostalgic retrospective on Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific. The second case of indigenous resistance to German colonial rule in the Pacific comes from Samoa. Partly due to the presence of three imperial powers (Germany, Great Britain, and the USA), Samoans had retained a considerable amount of political, economic, and military power at the beginning of German colonial rule in the twentieth century. In 1888, for instance, Samoan troops, led by Chief Mata’afa, inflicted fifty-six casualties on their German enemies and forced them to retreat. Civil war among Samoans, exacerbated by the increasing competition among the three imperial powers, continued to flare up into violence throughout the 1890s. In 1899, Germany, Great Britain, and the USA agreed to split the islands into a western part under German control, an eastern part under US control, and compensations for Great Britain in other colonial areas.72 The first years of German colonial rule passed in relative calm. Then, in 1904, a movement to found a Samoan-owned cooperative company to trade in copra emerged to challenge the German administration. The so-called ‘oloa [Samoan for goods] movement proposed an alternative vision of a commercial El Dorado – made possible by the commercialisation of the Samoan cash crop economy by European traders – based on Samoan ownership and profit-making. Designed to free Samoans from their enslavement by white traders, the leaders of the cooperative company introduced a copra tax among its members. This posed a direct threat to the government monopoly on taxation. Governor Solf cracked down on the movement by arguing that the venture was hopelessly ‘utopian’ and eventually succeeded in splitting the movement, at least for a time. But the organisational groundwork had been put in place for a more concerted and dangerous resistance movement that would resurface only a few years later.73 [ 119 ]

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In 1908, Lauaki, one of the most charismatic Samoan talking chiefs and a shrewd political schemer who had been the driving force behind the ‘oloa movement, threatened war against the Germans. Lauaki and his supporters were protesting against the use of their taxes for purposes unrelated to the public good and Solf’s subtle and quite effective subversion of traditional structures of authority, which threatened the future of the Samoan chief system. Given repeated clashes with the German smallholders around Deeken, Solf suspected that Deeken had probably played a part in inciting this tax rebellion. In a daring, last-minute gamble, Solf managed to outmanoeuvre Lauaki in an oratorical battle, but war still seemed imminent. Disillusioned with his pet project of salvage colonialism, Solf called in the cavalry, or rather the German Navy. In March 1909, SMS Leipzig arrived in Apia from Kiaochow, putting additional pressure on Lauaki and his followers. Lauaki finally surrendered in April 1909 and he and eight of his followers and their families were deported to the Northern Mariana island of Saipan, thousands of miles away from Samoa. And there they remained until the end of German colonial rule, much like the Sokehs who were to be exiled to Palau only two years later. In a final tragic twist, Lauaki was allowed to return to his Samoan home in 1915, but died just days before reaching more familiar shores.74 In a sense, this punishment by exile that Lauaki and the Sokehs had to endure can be seen as the all too real reverse of the idealised perceptions of the Pacific among the colonisers. Even though the Samoans, as well as the Sokehs, successfully resisted colonial rule for a while, German revenge came in the form of exile to faraway islands with unfamiliar cultures. Thus, the German vision of the Pacific as an El Dorado peopled with submissive ‘natives’ turned into a nightmare for those who resisted it.

Conclusion The case of Germany’s colonies in the Pacific shows that the costs of empire are not easily measured and often distributed in radically unequal ways. While some German investors profited greatly from the trade in exotic products from the Pacific, most Pacific Islanders paid a high price toiling on plantations and giving their lives in outright violent resistance against their rulers. After Germany lost its colonies in the First World War, colonial revisionists exploited the idealised representations of the German Pacific to prove German superiority in ruling alien races.75 The long tradition of representing the Pacific as paradise on earth continues in present-day academic publications, historical romances (in literature and film), as well as in [ 120 ]

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tourist advertisements.76 In a peculiar German variation of post-colonial melancholia, German public television has produced a multi-part documentary series on German colonial history, Die Deutschen Kolonien [The German Colonies] in 2009.77 Featured in this popular historical documentary, produced by the ‘Godfather’ of German public history Guido Knopp, is a rather large segment on the life of August Engelhardt. No mention, however, is made of the most violent episode in German colonial history in the Pacific, the Sokeh Rebellion in Pohnpei.78 In the battle for viewers, coconuts trumped colonial resistance. Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific, it seems, has survived into the twenty-first century.

Notes 1 Thomas Morlang, Rebellion in der Südsee: Der Aufstand auf Ponape gegen die deutschen Kolonialherren 1910/11, Berlin, 2010, 75 –123. 2 Between 1884 and 1899, the German Empire annexed a series of Pacific islands, including the Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands (including Pohnpei), Nauru, north-eastern New Guinea, the northern Solomon Islands, and western Samoa. For an overview, see John A. Moses and Paul M. Kennedy (eds), Germany in the Pacific and Far East, 1870 –1914, St Lucia, 1977. 3 El Dorado designates a colonial imaginary that in the minds of many Germans at the turn of the twentieth century associated colonisation in the Pacific (and elsewhere) with beautiful natural settings, pliable ‘natives’, and easy profits. Utopia forms a subset of ideas within this wider imaginary of El Dorado, whose adherents (utopianists) actually pursued their projects of individual and social improvement within metropolitan Germany as well as in its colonies. Infrastructure set up by settlers, investors, and government officials made colonised spaces, such as the German colonies in the Pacific, privileged destinations for utopianists. 4 The vast scholarship focusing on the experiences of Pacific Islanders under colonial rule includes Peter. J. Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance, Canberra, 1978; Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa, Suva, 1987; Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in Epeli Hau’ofa, Vijay Naidu, and Eric Waddell (eds), A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, Suva, 1993, 2 –16; Damon Salesa, ‘“Troublesome half-castes”: tales of a Samoan borderland’, unpublished, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1997. 5 The influence of missionaries in the German Pacific on the construction of these images would be another fruitful venue of research. 6 George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, Chicago, IL, 2007, 248. The subdivision of Pacific Islanders into Polynesians, Melanesians, and Micronesians was, of course, itself part and parcel of European Oceanism. 7 Cited ibid., 12. On German fantasies of Samoa, see Hilke Thode-Arora, ‘ ‘‘Ach, die von Samoa!” Deutsche Fantasien’, in Hilke Thode-Arora (ed.), From Samoa with Love? Samoa-Völkerschauen im Deutschen Kaiserreich – Eine Spurensuche, Munich, 2014, 189 – 97. 8 Cited in Hermann Hiery, Das Deutsche Reich in der Südsee (1900 –1921): Eine Annährung an die Erfahrungen verschiedener Kulturen, Göttingen, 1995, 32. 9 See Adolf Bastian, Einiges aus Samoa und andern Inseln der Südsee: Mit ethnographischen Anmerkungen zur Colonialgeschichte, Berlin, 1889, 55, 76.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 10 Alison D. Nordström, ‘Photography of Samoa: Production, Dissemination, Use’, in Casey Blanton (ed.), Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875 –1925, Daytona Beach, FL, 1995, 14, 20 – 31. 11 Hans Fischer, Die Hamburger Südsee-Expedition: Über Ethnographie und Kolonialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 1981. 12 Antje Kelm, ‘Skurrile Exoten und liebenswerte Menschen: Ethnographische Anmerkungen zur kolonialen Südseefotografie’, in Hermann Hiery (ed.), Bilder aus der deutschen Südsee: Fotografien 1884 –1914, Paderborn, 2005, 28. For a more detailed account of Vogel’s work, see Hans Fischer, Randfiguren der Ethnologie: Gelehrte und Amateure, Schwindler und Phantasten, Berlin, 2003, ch. 5. 13 Andrew Zimmerman, ‘From Natural Science to Primitive Art: German New Guinea in Emil Nolde’, in Cordula Grewe (ed.), Die Schau des Fremden: Ausstellungskonzepte zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Wissenschaft, Stuttgart, 2006, 294ff. 14 Ingried Brugger, Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern, and Manfred Reuther (eds), Emil Nolde und die Südsee, Munich, 2001. 15 Engelhardt’s life sketch is based on Dieter Klein, ‘Neuguinea als deutsche Utopia: August Engelhardt und sein Sonnenorden’, in Hermann Hiery (ed.), Die Deutsche Südsee 1884 –1914: Ein Handbuch, Paderborn, 2001, 450 – 8. 16 Cited ibid., 452. 17 Ibid., 454. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 455. 21 Ibid., 453. 22 Ibid., 457. 23 As did similar plans by US adventurers to set up a ‘United Brotherhood of the South Seas’ in the Solomon Islands in 1897. See Hugh Laracy, ‘“Quixotic and Utopian”: American Adventurers in the Southwest Pacific, 1897–1898’, Pacific Studies, 24(1–2), 2001, 39 – 62. 24 Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders, 16. 25 Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 21f. 26 Morlang, Rebellion in der Südsee, 42. 27 Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 23. 28 Acutely aware of this tension, the Imperial government cracked down heavily on critics who questioned the idealised images of colonial life. See Sibylle BenninghoffLühl, Deutsche Kolonialromane, 1884 –1914, in ihrem Entstehungs- und Wirkungszusammenhang, Bremen, 1983, 208. 29 Cited in Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 27. 30 Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 342. 31 In neighbouring American Samoa, the aptly named El Dorado Oil Works company, headquartered in San Francisco, traded in locally produced copra. 32 Stewart Firth, ‘German Firms in the Western Pacific Islands, 1857 –1914’, Journal of Pacific History, 8, 1973, 19. 33 Ibid., 25. 34 Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 205. 35 Firth, ‘German Firms’, 26. 36 Ibid., 20f. 37 Steinmetz, Devil’s Handwriting, 317ff. 38 Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa. 39 The question whether European colonies functioned as laboratories of modernity has spawned a veritable cottage industry in colonial studies. See, most influentially, Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, MA, 1989; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC, 1995. In 1910, Carl Eduard Michaelis, a utopianist in the spirit of Engelhardt, recommended setting up a natural reserve park in Savai’i. Cited in Thomas Schwarz, Ozeanische Affekte: Die literarische Modellierung Samoas im kolonialen Diskurs, Berlin, 2013, 153. On

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41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58

59 60 61

the eve of the First World War, the famous German botanist and ethnologist Augustin Krämer even suggested turning the entire German colony of Palau into a natural reserve park. See his ‘Palau als Naturschutzpark’, Deutsche Kolonialzeitung, 31(10), 1914, 159 – 61. Hiery even ventures that the German-run copra plantations and phosphate mines could be seen as a kind of El Dorado for Melanesian cultural contact. See Hiery, Deutsches Reich, 175. Richard Deeken, Manuia Samoa! Samoanische Reiseskizzen und Beobachtungen, Oldenburg, 1901. Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders, 39. Firth, ‘German Firms’, 19. Ibid., 22. Andreas Blauert, ‘Queen Emma of the South Seas: Die Karriere der Emma Forsayth (1850 –1913) in Deutsch-Neu Guinea’, in Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (eds), Das Meer als kulturelle Kontaktzone: Räume, Reisende, Repräsentationen, Konstanz, 2003, 247; Robert W. Robson, Queen Emma: The Samoan-American Girl Who Founded an Empire in 19th Century New Guinea, Sydney, 1971. Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I, Ithaca, NY, 2012. Gabriele Dürbeck, Stereotype Paradiese: Ozeanismus in der deutschen Südseeliteratur, 1815 –1914, Tübingen, 2007, 208 – 80. Tahiti was the original ‘Pearl of the South Seas’ since the times of Bougainville. German colonialists started applying this feminised descriptor of colonial subjection to Samoa in the mid-1880s. See Schwarz, Ozeanische Affekte, 16, 35, 78. For close readings of these articles, see Kathrin DiPaola, ‘Samoa – “Perle” der deutschen Kolonien? “Bilder” des exotischen Anderen in Geschichte(n) des 20. Jahrhunderts’, unpublished, Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. Cited in Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 28f., and Christopher B. Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas, New York, 2007, 125. On Ehlers, see Dürbeck, Stereotype Paradiese, 192–207; Schwarz, Ozeanische Affekte, 77 – 82. Ehlers, Perle der Südsee, 198. Ibid., 126. Ibid., 128; see also Dürbeck, Stereotype Paradiese, 204. Dürbeck, Stereotype Paradiese, 207. The literature on ethnographic shows in turn-of-the-century Europe and the USA is vast. See, for instance, H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany, Chapel Hill, NC, 2002; Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, New Haven, CT, 2004; Hilke Thode-Arora, Für fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen, Frankfurt am Main, 1989; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of American Empire at American International Expositions, 1876 –1916, Chicago, IL, 1984. See especially Hilke Thode-Arora (ed.), From Samoa with Love? Samoa-Völkerschauen im Deutschen Kaiserreich – Eine Spurensuche, Munich, 2014; Balme, Pacific Performances, ch. 5. Harald Sippel, ‘Rassismus, Protektionismus oder Humanität? Die gesetzlichen Verbote der Anwerbung von “Eingeborenen” zu Schaustellungszwecken in den deutschen Kolonien’, in Robert Debusmann and János Riesz (eds), Kolonialausstellungen: Begegnungen mit Afrika?, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, 52ff. Cited in Jutta Steffen-Schrade, ‘Samoaner im Frankfurter Zoo’, in Gerda KroeberWolf, and Peter Mesenhöller (eds), Talofa! Samoa, Südsee: Ansichten und Einsichten, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, 381. Thode-Arora, From Samoa with Love, 165. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT, 1985; Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert (eds), Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, Honolulu, 1993.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 62 Flogging remained legal as punishment for Chinese workers in German Samoa and in the rest of the German Pacific until 1912 when Chinese political pressure forced its abolition, at least formally. Corporeal punishment for Samoans had been illegal since the beginning of German colonial rule (Hiery, Deutsche Reich, 121). 63 Hermann Hiery, Bilder aus der deutschen Südsee: Fotografien 1884 –1914, Paderborn, 2005, 10. 64 Ibid., 11. 65 BArch Berlin, R1001/4789 ‘Die Rechtspflege in Samoa’. 66 Morlang, Rebellion in der Südsee, 29. 67 Ibid., 75. 68 Ibid., 77. 69 Cited ibid., 84. 70 Ibid., 119f. 71 Edgar von Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim, Kriegsbilder aus Ponape. Erlebnisse eines Seeoffiziers im Aufstande auf den Karolinen, Berlin, 1912. Cited in Morlang, Rebellion in der Südsee, 160. 72 Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa, 21– 45. 73 Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders, 51– 72. 74 Ibid., 72. 75 Schwarz, Ozeanische Affekte, ch. 5. Examples of colonialist fiction on the German Pacific after the First World War include Erich Langen, Toloa: Die heilige Wildente – Ein Roman aus der Südsee, Vienna, 1919; Erich Scheurmann, Paitea und Ilse: Eine Südseegeschichte, Berlin, 1919; Frieda Zieschank, Ein verlorenes Paradies, Leipzig, 1923. For representations of German colonies in Weimar film, see Tobias Nagl, Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino, Munich, 2009. 76 Over the last few years, German television has seen a resurgence in schmaltzy melodramas set in former German colonies. See Wolfgang Struck, ‘Reenacting Colonialism: Germany and Its Former Colonies in Recent TV Productions’, in Volker Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, New York, 2010, 260 – 77. Swiss writer Christian Kracht’s award-winning recent novel follows the life of cocovore August Engelhardt (Imperium, Cologne, 2012). 77 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York, 2005. For a discussion of postcolonial melancholia in the German context, see Volker Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, New York, 2010. 78 To be fair, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa as well as the bloody suppression of the Maji-Maji rebellion in German East Africa is covered in more extensive, if superficial, detail.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

A place to speak the ‘language of heaven’? Patagonia as a land of broken Welsh promise Trevor Harris

At the end of April 1865, Reverend Abraham Matthews, 32, of Llwydcoed, Aberdare, Glamorgan, deep in the coal and iron country of South Wales, was among those about to emigrate to a new Welsh colony in Patagonia, Argentina. A meeting was held in the village chapel to bid him farewell. On 29 April a local newspaper, the Merthyr Telegraph, reported that ‘Mr Matthews received, in addition to the good wishes of his friends, an acceptable purse of gold’. Just under a year later, another of the Patagonian colonists, John Jones, wrote from Argentina to his relations back in the old country in the most unambiguous terms: ‘If you wish to become a rich man and live well, make haste to come here.’1 The circumstances appeared to be favourable and the stage set for a highly successful colony in a distant promised land. This optimism, however, was not necessarily well founded. Indeed, Welsh adventures in the far south of Latin America had not had the most auspicious of beginnings. Prior to the arrival of the colonists, there had been contact between Britain and Patagonia as a number of Protestant missionaries attempted to establish settlements there in the early decades of the nineteenth century. But the omens were not good: for example, the schooner Allen Gardiner, which carried Welsh missionaries to Tierra del Fuego from Bristol in 1854, met with a violent end, the ship’s company, according to the Cardiff Times, being ‘massacred by the natives’ in 1861.2 And yet the industrialisation, urbanisation and Anglicisation of Celtic Britain continued to prompt many to seek a better life beyond British shores. Celtic migration – dominated statistically by the Irish diaspora – was, of course, part of a large-scale migration out of Europe, and especially Britain, between the middle of the nineteenth century [ 125 ]

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and the First World War: a period which is often seen as the first age of, or the prelude to, globalisation.3 But Anglicisation, and particularly the racialisation and politicisation of the ‘Celt’ in Britain from the late eighteenth century,4 ensured that emigration from Ireland, Scotland and Wales (together with that of their Celtic near neighbours, the Cornish, many of whom were able to market similar skills in the mining sector)5 remained a significant element of the broader movement of the British population around the globe – to the USA, the white settler colonies of the English-speaking world, and to Latin America. This chapter examines a range of sources to explore Welsh colonisation in Patagonia, its difficulties, its development, and some of the paradoxical consequences of the Welsh colonial adventure. There clearly existed what would have to be described as a South American dream in the valleys of Wales: but what were its specificities? And did the reality live up to those high expectations?

Economic and cultural factors affecting Welsh emigration Some considerable incentive was needed to incite potential emigrants – many of them from the coal and iron towns of Wales – to brave the horrors of several months of steerage class travel across the Atlantic, deep into the southern hemisphere, and in ignorance of what lay in store if and when they arrived safely in the projected colony. Important elements in the decision were the fact that the cost of emigrating was often paid by the emigration society promoting the scheme or, later, subsidised by remittances (or ‘home pay’)6 sent back by emigrants already established. Correspondence, too, played an increasing part in the decision, as colonists wrote home with sometimes exaggerated reports on such topics as the climate or the favourable evolution of the colony’s institutions. These factors were augmented by a strong economic ‘push’ and ‘pull’: though the nature of these varied enormously depending on the ultimate destination of the emigrants. In the case of British industrial workers emigrating to the USA, for example, job insecurity, low wages and escaping from debts in Britain no doubt constituted a sufficient ‘push’ package. For those in the Welsh coal or steel industries with marketable skills, this was accentuated by competition from the inward migration of English workers into South Wales. The lure of better wages in America and the prospect of promotion added a significant ‘pull’. But, beyond the universal criterion of the emigrant families improving their financial lot, the case of the Welsh emigrants to Patagonia [ 126 ]

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clearly does not fit this approach very well: motives were far more complex than a straightforward concurrence of the rational and the economic. Clearly the latter played some role: potential colonists’ attentions would necessarily have been attracted, for example, by word-of-mouth reports, or by advertisements in local newspapers prepared by an increasingly efficient emigration business, or indeed by emigration ‘fever’ which occurred from time to time.7 An undeniable ‘pull’ was provided by the Argentine government’s readiness to offer land to the colonists: although it has to be said that this act of generosity was made in full knowledge of the remote and arid conditions the Welsh settlers were bound to meet.8 The remote location of the colony, and the complete lack of any infrastructure whatsoever, meant that material disincentives were very strong indeed. But these immigrants were not passive economic entities driven solely by material considerations: a combination of personal and cultural factors, aspirations and ideals played a crucial part in their decision to emigrate. In the case of the Welsh departures to Argentina, these factors included a religious incentive, since Welsh Congregationalists or Methodists experienced day-to-day difficulties and discriminations in line with those experienced by nonconformist communities throughout midnineteenth-century Britain. Welsh religious dissent and Welsh national identity were clearly linked: and both were in turn linked to radical political action.9 But language, far more than the religious dimension, was a major constituent of that identity and of the decision to emigrate to Patagonia. Writing about emigrants to America from Treherbert in the Rhondda Valley during the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, André Poulin underlines that ‘the migration question provoked a particular controversy in Wales’, and that it was ‘very quickly assimilated to debates about language’.10 Despite the fact that Wales had been brought under English domination in the early sixteenth century,11 the Welsh language continued to resist the onward march of English. This ‘uncanny persistence’12 points to the strong likelihood of a two-way process – as is the rule when languages and cultures come into contact – in terms both of mutual linguistic interference and cross-cultural relations. Despite the massive deployment during the nineteenth century of what Laura O’Connor calls ‘linguicism’, or linguistic racialism,13 and the consequent gobbling up of Celtic language and culture, or (to use the term coined by Louis-Jean Calvet) ‘glottophagy’, in Wales and throughout the Gaeltacht, the English language was clearly itself modified even as the English ‘pale’ advanced.14 British culture, too, may itself have registered ‘some of the cultural losses entailed by linguistic imperialism’ and the anxieties attending [ 127 ]

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the production of an ‘English-only monolith’.15 Little Wales, of course, with a population of some 1.2 million in the 1860s, was dwarfed by its English neighbour (population c.18 million). Any very minor cultural losses for English, therefore, were far outweighed by the overall economic benefits to England of Anglicisation in Wales: Matthew Arnold’s cultural and aesthetic strictures merely underlined the extent of the continuing threat to Welsh: [T]he sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better for Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent service by pushing the English wedge further and further into the heart of the principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of living literature; and in this respect Eisteddfods encourage, I think, a fantastic and mischiefworking delusion.16

In short, getting on in industrial Britain, including the now heavily industrialised South Wales, required the learning of English and the consequent, inevitable retreat of Welsh: as William Hugh Williams, one of the Welsh emigrants to the Chubut valley in Patagonia put it, ‘day after day we felt the oppression of foreign cultures that were penetrating our places’.17 He was speaking from what was already an entrenched sentiment in Wales by the mid-nineteenth century, and one which had developed throughout the Industrial Revolution. The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion had been established in 1751 as a focus for Welsh cultural and social activity, and Iolo Morganwg – Edward Williams (1747 –1826) – a talented and flamboyant, if intellectually flawed, promoter of Welsh culture, founded the Gorsedd (‘throne’) of the Bards in 1792:18 a community dedicated to the promotion of Welsh language and culture, and to the propagation of the idea that the Welsh were the true inheritors and exponents of the ancient Celtic druidic traditions. Iolo’s cultural politics were also taken up by his contemporary William Owen Pughe (1759–1835), a lexicographer who began publishing a Welsh–English dictionary in 1793, which he later supplemented by intricate tinkering with Welsh grammar. Pughe’s and Williams’s fascination with the lineage of Welshness, its cultural credentials and the objective of making the totality of that culture available, are typical of the age of Ossian, and of the Encyclopédie. But they also illustrate some of the more ambivalent aspects of that ‘Enlightened’ intellect. For both Pughe and Williams, Welsh culture, and particularly the Welsh language, constituted one of the most authentic remaining links to human protolanguage, to a [ 128 ]

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primitive linguistic purity where form and meaning were one. This was the Ursprache, the Adamic or Edenic language before the fall, a language closer to the divine, ‘the language of heaven’.19 Pughe and Williams were using modern learning to gain access to, and demonstrate the value of, the ancient; using the ‘age of reason’ to advance an essentially Romantic theory. Here was an example of the ‘invention of tradition’,20 an Enlightened antiquarianism or the antiquarian face of the Enlightenment, which persisted into the Victorian age with the collision between the fully mature Industrial Revolution and Victorian medievalism. The intense ‘rationalisation’ of the Welsh language carried out by figures such as Pughe, in what was a direct challenge to the growing hegemony of English, translated a form of cultural nationalism which, in practice, found a number of mid-Victorian British echoes, and not only in Wales.21

A Welsh Wales in an ‘out-of-the-way part of the world’ This transfer of ‘the language of heaven’ to the Welsh Patagonian colony, and its paradoxical programme – to establish a brand new community in which to practise an ancient culture – were further characterised and consolidated by an essentially utopian desire to recreate that community in total isolation: in isolation from the English language, but also isolated from the social and political hegemony of England. The Welsh-speaking colony was intended to be a place of (religious) freedom from the spiritual, as well as the material, impoverishment visited upon the Welsh by English political and social institutions. In a report entitled The Welsh Settlement in Patagonia published at the end of 1866, one of the original party of emigrants, Lewis Humphreys, writes in detail on the conditions prevailing in the colony and insists that, ‘each man there feels he is a freeholder. He has no fear of rent-day or church-rates22 before his eyes, nor does he risk receiving notice to quit’. An anonymous ‘Conservative’ is driven to recognise that overpopulation of South Wales indeed means that ‘there is no remedy save what comes from emigration’: the correspondent in question, consequently, as a solution to the rural poverty of Cardiganshire, makes the following recommendation: ‘Let our poor farmers then, who are oppressed with heavy rents and taxes, let them go away and form a colony where their labour would make them independent and free, and their children after them.’23 So it was that Anglicisation, and the economic and social exclusion/Welsh cultural erasure which this entailed, were important factors in prompting many Welsh during the [ 129 ]

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nineteenth century to seek a new life elsewhere in order to preserve their Welsh culture. The Welsh were less likely to emigrate than the Irish, English or Scots,24 although precise figures are difficult to calculate since, with growth of trade from Liverpool, some Welsh leaving from there may have been recorded as ‘English’.25 Although, as for other groups, destinations for Welsh emigrants were many and varied (as noted above), the USA was statistically the most popular. Notwithstanding the demonstrable material benefits of emigrating to the USA, however, there too ‘Welsh leaders had a passionate loyalty to Cymraeg, which many believed was, is, and ever shall be the language of paradise’.26 And, as Ellis shows, in North America, also, effective assimilation, and therefore Anglicisation, was often in progress: white, English-speaking Protestants were easily assimilated, or ‘redefined as a fragment of an American identity’,27 many of them soon becoming upwardly mobile.28 Not that the USA became their El Dorado: ‘Not all Welshmen found a pot of gold in America. In fact, some found poverty, disease and unemployment.’29 Assimilation was no doubt a logical outcome in the US context, especially post-1863 during the Reconstruction era when national cohesion was the paramount objective. Welsh immigrants were therefore faced with an irony of history since, in escaping the many limitations on Welshness imposed by the British industrial revolution and its legacy, the emigrants in question served only to bolster the industrial revolution in the USA – a country where the assimilationist pressures were even greater than in the country they had left. For those who sought actively to preserve their Welsh linguistic and cultural heritage, the new situation in which they found themselves often came to resemble closely the one which they had fled. ‘Everything here’, wrote one Welshman in the USA in 1872, ‘destroys our common heritage’.30 Michael D. Jones (1822–98), one of the prime movers of the Patagonian scheme, was keenly aware ‘that the Welsh language is speedily dying out, that with it the most valuable national peculiarities and virtues will be lost, and that the only way to preserve it as a living tongue is to establish a colony governed by Welshmen and having its affairs conducted in the Welsh language’.31 As a consequence, complete isolation from an English-speaking environment was a key criterion in the search for a Welsh promised land overseas and the founders of the Patagonian settlement were ‘determined to found a colony in such an out-of-the-way part of the world that they could, unmolested, perpetuate the mother tongue of Wales’.32 The region of Patagonia in Argentina was to become one of the preferred destinations: precisely [ 130 ]

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because of its remote location, but also because it was in a country which lay outside the formal ‘British world’. During the period when a small group of Welshmen were prospecting for a likely destination, one contributor to a South Wales newspaper made the point in these terms: ‘No spot in the British empire, however remote from other settlements, can meet their views, for contact with the English and their language is the very thing they want to avoid.’33 To that end a Welsh Emigration Society (Y Gymdeithas Wladfaol) was formed in Liverpool and meetings held to promote the project of a colony in Patagonia. The Reverend Michael D. Jones was introduced, at a meeting in Cardiff in November 1862, as ‘a man whom everyone feels satisfied will not get intoxicated with his subject, and lead people astray by false promises and misrepresentations’.34 This was perhaps true: yet Jones, if determined, was not free of exaggeration, or of contradiction. At a meeting in Aberdare about a fortnight later, Jones waxes lyrical about the illustrious past of the Welsh, who, we are invited to believe, ‘established those cities which afterwards became the most important in the world’; it is upon Welsh laws that ‘are founded the laws of Britain, of the United States, and the whole of the British colonies’: and even Aristotle ‘testified that the Greeks were indebted to . . . [the Welsh] for the elements of their philosophy’. The Welsh, he claims, have long ‘celebrated themselves as emigrants’, though there is still room for the population to grow in Wales. Indeed, rather than some far distant land, it was Wales itself which was the El Dorado, if only the Welsh were allowed to make it so: ‘The resources of Wales, if developed, are very extensive. By an improved treatment of its soil, and enclosing its commons, its agricultural produce might be doubled. Its mineral resources, also – taking its coal, iron, slates, lead and brass in consideration – are more than that of California, if there is nothing there but gold.’35 Emigration is required now only because the English keep Wales down at heel: ‘we do not expect that our legislature and the aristocracy would adopt such measures of improvement and advancement that would at once put an end to emigration’. Accordingly, he finds himself bound to promote the South American colony and two members of the group promoting the scheme – Lewis Jones and T. L. D. Jones-Parry – are to visit Patagonia.36 Just a few days later, however, another Welsh newspaper was already carrying an account which explicitly called into question the suitability of the area chosen by the two men: ‘Never was there a more unpromising region’. The author of the article continues, rather sarcastically, ‘If the intending settlers go out in the spirit of martyrs, and with every prospect of an untimely end either by violence or want, it is well, as they are not likely to be disappointed.’37 [ 131 ]

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Just over 160 Welsh emigrants left Liverpool aboard the tea-clipper Mimosa at the end of May 1865. The group was composed mainly of families – over one hundred of the ship’s complement – accompanied by a number of single men and a smaller number of single women. The group had clearly been put together with the long haul in mind: the average age of the colonists was just over 21 and there were forty children aged 12 or younger. The Mimosa arrived off the coast of Patagonia two months later, landing at Puerto Madryn.38 Several deaths had occurred during the voyage, including that of an 11-month-old baby: there had also been two births and a marriage on board.

Setting up the colony: early difficulties, new hopes On arrival in Patagonia, any thoughts of getting rich or living like an English lord were quick to recede. The journey to the site from the point of arrival was extremely arduous. The land set aside for the colony proved to be anything but the idyllic spot the emigrants had hoped and expected to find. It was uninhabited, save for small groups of Tehuelche Indians who were initially suspicious of the Welsh colonists. The first two harvests failed and for a time it looked as though the whole scheme might become entirely inconsequential. The settlement’s doctor, Thomas Greene, left as early as November 1865, preferring to go to Buenos Aires. Financial pressures on the main organisers of the scheme quickly mounted (by October 1871 Michael D. Jones was declared bankrupt). The lush valleys of Wales would – literally – have to be remade in the arid Patagonian pampas, and the new paradise built from scratch: including the construction of an elaborate irrigation system to carry water from the Chubut River to the land under cultivation39 – a laborious task in which the original settlers were to be helped by several new waves of Welsh emigrants in flight from the enduring economic depression in Britain. At best, the early years of the colony yielded conflicting evidence to those back in Wales. The Dorothy, docking in Liverpool from Buenos Aires in February 1866, brought with it ‘a dreadful account of the new Welsh colony in Patagonia’ which was widely reported in the Welsh press.40 This account, possibly fostered by early deserters from the original party who quickly beat a retreat to the Argentine capital, was contradicted a few weeks later by a much more detailed account in the Aberdare Times (24 February) in which, however, it is obvious that conditions are difficult, one settler making it clear that ‘the only people wanted there at present are those that can “rough it” and be content to labour’. This is an allusion to the mismatch between the profile of those emigrating aboard the Mimosa and what was actually [ 132 ]

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needed on the ground in the Chubut Valley of Patagonia. Most of the new colonists lacked even the most basic skills required for farming. The British chargé d’affaires in Buenos Aires diplomatically referred to ‘a want of knowledge in the art of husbandry’.41 In the conclusion to the detailed report on the progress of the colony sent to London, the chargé d’affaires wonders whether this ill-composed body of colonists are capable of proving themselves worthy pioneers to a scheme of colonisation which, if fairly established and properly carried out, would work incalculable benefits, by bringing under the banner of civilisation large tracts of rich country which at present are uninhabited but by savage tribes of Indians.42

The colony very nearly did not come into being at all, since the Argentine Congress had attempted to block its creation, underlining tensions within the young state in respect of the nation-building process. The visit by Lewis Jones and Jones-Parry had led to an agreement between them and the Argentine interior minister, Guillermo Rawson.43 But with the Mimosa approaching Argentine shores, the Congress voted to reject the contract made with the Welsh. Their argument was one which, ironically, would probably have found a more than sympathetic ear among the passengers of the Mimosa: ‘wherever a body, however small, of the Anglo-Saxon race had established itself, they had always finally succeeded in possessing themselves of the whole country’.44 Rawson’s explanation of this manoeuvre to the British diplomatic staff in situ has a familiar ring even to the reader in the early twenty-first century: ‘the principal objection the Congress had to the establishment of an English colony in Patagonia was the proximity of our settlement at the Falkland Islands’. Further on in the report of his meeting with Rawson, the British chargé d’affaires adds: His Excellency asked me whether Her Majesty’s Government would not be disposed to take into consideration the possibility of the islands being ceded to the Argentine Republic, adding that if it were in his power to put forward this prospect, Congress, he was convinced, would put no obstacle in the way of the original contract with the Welsh committee being carried out.45

The wariness of the new Argentine state in relation to a British colony so close to the Falklands is understandable. But there is considerable irony, even comedy, in describing the future Welsh colony as ‘English’, though the joke would have been entirely wasted on the group of devout Celts who had departed from Wales in order, precisely, to escape from ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’ which was attempting to ‘possess [ 133 ]

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the whole country’. Rawson, as it transpired, was able to persuade the Congress to accept the colony, but the control which Congress clearly wished to exert meant that prospects for the effective isolation and independence of Welsh Patagonia were not good. The establishment of the colony – described in detail in a report written by the Rev. Lewis Humphreys (a member of the original party who had now returned to Wales),46 is clearly an ‘adventure’ marked by ‘misfortunes’, ‘mishaps’ and ‘accidents’, as well as ‘defective arrangements made by the settlers themselves’. But whether induced by the facts, by a sense of genuine nostalgia for the adventure which he had now left behind, or – as seems more likely – by the need to develop a propaganda strategy to recruit readers as new emigrants to the colony, Humphreys’ account develops a strong utopian strain, in which the arid settlement in the Chubut valley is transformed into an Arcadian, bucolic idyll of natural abundance: ‘Cattle are fat and horses plenty’; ‘Our horses and cattle were remarkably fine and fat, even in winter’; ‘the pasturage is abundant and excellent all year round’; ‘the whole territory literally swarms with game’: the colonists have even begun to ‘tire of a superabundance of fresh meat’. Humphreys extols, notably, the quasi-Elysian virtues of the Patagonian climate: ‘Indigestion, headache, toothache, colds and consumption are unknown there’, he declares, ‘although I and many others have frequently slept in the open air night after night in the depth of winter, which is so genial that no evil effects followed an amount of exposure which would certainly have proved fatal in Great Britain’. Humphreys’ utopian vision persisted in the eyes of some observers. Jonathan Ceredig Davies (1859–1932) of Llangynllo (Cardiganshire), folklorist, genealogist, lover of all things Celtic, and all-round traveller/adventurer, went to Patagonia in 1875 at the age of 16 and returned to Wales in 1891. The following year he published a short monograph, Patagonia: A Description of the Country and the Manner of Living at Chubut Colony,47 where he affirms that, ‘During a rainy season the country appears almost a paradise.’48 At the very least, the ‘spin’ Humphreys places on his Patagonian experience amounts to deliberate over-embellishment. By early 1867 the Welsh population of the new colony in Chubut had perhaps fallen below one hundred, as some members of the original party dispersed to other parts of Patagonia, or to Buenos Aires itself. The situation did begin to stabilise during 1868, by which time, according to one Welsh newspaper, the colony had ‘succeeded in weathering the trials which beset its infancy’,49 though it was clearly overstating things wildly to suggest, as did ‘Cymro’, that ‘a few years may witness the rising of great cities, and the birth of a new nation, the offshoot of Old Wales, [ 134 ]

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on the eastern shores of the southern continent of America’.50 The evidence emerging from the colony continued to be contradictory. There were a few new arrivals early in 1870, but there remained an obvious difficulty in attracting people to Chubut. The former British naval officer, turned explorer, George Chaworth Musters (1841– 79), travelled through Patagonia in 1869 – 70 and published an account of his journey in 1871. His own assessment of how the colony was faring was anything but upbeat: ‘The visionary scheme of a Welsh Utopia, in pursuit of which these unfortunate emigrants settled themselves, ought not to be encouraged, likely as it is to end in the starvation of the victims to it.’51 Some, however, remained determined that they could turn the colony into the promised land they so ardently desired. It was in the same year, 1871, that Edwin C. Roberts, together with two other men, set off to search for gold in the Andes: they found none. Several other fruitless expeditions took place during the 1880s. Roberts later made a second attempt, prompted by a Captain William Richards, who had arrived in Patagonia in 1882 via Australia, and together with Richards took a group of men to the Andes again in 1890. Some gold was discovered, and Roberts returned to Wales in 1892 to help raise money and set up a ‘Welsh Patagonian Gold Fields Syndicate Ltd’, which was duly done in November of that year. But ‘from the first, the venture was a highly speculative one’,52 and, like many of the valleys in the Andes in which Roberts had prospected, the scheme proved to be a dead end. Roberts himself died in Wales, in September 1893, before he had had a chance to move the project forward. Thereafter, the whole scheme was beset by a series of financial and administrative wrangles, mainly connected with the Syndicate’s unsuccessful attempts to secure full title to the relevant digging sites. The company was to have a very brief existence, its activities effectively ceasing in November 1894, though it was not legally dissolved until December 1900, no profit having ever been returned.

Assimilation, dashed dreams and re-emigration Subsequently, the Welsh colony was progressively assimilated into the Argentine Republic. True, in 1875, the Welsh settlers had finally been given title to the land they occupied. But ‘the central authorities were increasingly suspicious of the Welsh colony because they interpreted the lack of enthusiasm for Spanish and Argentine culture as a form of inherent isolationism that suggested they were covertly pro-British and could seek to develop themselves into a British protectorate.’53 Birt goes on to explain how ‘a knowledge of Spanish began to be viewed [ 135 ]

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increasingly as a necessity amongst the inhabitants of the Lower Chubut valley’.54 There was some qualified success for the colony, and new arrivals in Chubut helped to strengthen the settlement.55 But the in-migration to the towns of Rawson or Trelew by the early 1890s was mainly non-Welsh.56 The Argentine government passed legislation in 1896 to make Spanish the official language of tuition in all schools. And when in 1899 the River Chubut again flooded, but this time causing devastation in the whole of the lower Chubut valley, large numbers of the Welsh colonists finally concluded that not only were the physical conditions unlikely to improve, but also that the Argentine state was now, in practice, encroaching on the Welsh just as much as the British state had in the past. After the departure to Canada in 1901 of a small group of around 30 Welsh colonists, a much larger group – in excess of 200 (out of a total population in the colony of c.2,500)57 – followed in 1902: they boarded the Orissa on 15 May, bound for Liverpool, from where they transferred to the Numidian, to travel on to the ‘reserve’ allotted to them by the Canadian government at Saltcoats in Saskatchewan. The Patagonian colony, in practice, had accumulated a number of paradoxical characteristics which, from the outset, undermined the intellectual and material cohesion of the settlement. It was a rural colony, completely dependent upon the agricultural expertise of its inhabitants; but the latter only included one farmer in the original group of settlers. It was a colony established in a remote and arid plain; but the main watercourse was nonetheless liable to frequent flooding, causing untold damage and difficulty for the colony. The settlers originally hoped to establish a politically independent Welsh colony; but they were heavily dependent from the moment of their arrival on the Argentine government and its willingness to provide regular supplies. The projected infra-national, non-conformist, cultural reawakening was consequently predicated on the success and reliability of a young, republican, Catholic, centralised state and the old culture of Cymru would therefore only be reborn thanks to a new and ambitious Spanish-speaking polity. None of this necessarily condemned the settlement to failure, but it did underscore the less than entirely realistic plans and objectives fuelling the project, as well as the contradictions inherent in what was essentially a communitarian scheme. This Welsh utopia, with its reassertion of religious and cultural roots and rejection of modernity, at one and the same time reviled liberalism and relied heavily upon it. The colony, true, was the source of some inspiration to revivalist Celts beyond the British Isles. The French Bretons, notably, expressed racial solidarity with their Welsh brethren. Charles de Gaulle (1837– 80), [ 136 ]

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uncle of the future president of France and specialist and defender of all things Celtic,58 warmed to the prospect of ‘the distant shore of a new Cymru’,59 and enthused about ‘the swarm of Britons [sic] beyond the sea’. He pledged the support and admiration of the ‘Armorican Bretons’. Yet, despite his flights of Romantic fancy, de Gaulle, in practice, was more lucid than some of his Welsh brethren, and stressed that the objective of the Welsh emigrants to Argentina should be to avoid ‘absorption’ and, more broadly, ‘that the overfull (the overfull only)60 of the Celtic populations, may gather in some unoccupied and free region’ instead of spreading themselves ‘throughout the United States, Australia etc. where the settlers, or at least the settlers’ children, lose their national feeling and distinctive character’. He accordingly expresses immense disappointment that the colony had accepted ‘the domination of the Argentine Republic’, and that the Welsh migrants were not holding out for a fully independent state, ‘an independent Celtic people to show to the other nations what our race is able to do’. He concludes that ‘the settlers will not be more independent there than they are now in Wales’: as we have seen, events were to prove de Gaulle right. In their defence, and given the demanding conditions in which they found themselves, it is difficult to see what else the Welsh colonists might have done apart from accept Argentine assistance. Indeed, had they not accepted the help of the Argentine government they probably never would have been able to settle at all. De Gaulle, notwithstanding his regret on this point, clings to the hope that these ‘pioneers’ will still be able to ‘lay the foundation of a great Celtic nation’, and will provide ‘the great spectacle that will be exhibited by an old race colonising a new and remote land’. The Welsh emigrants to Patagonia, whether consciously or not, were expressing their own version of a European tradition of the search for the ideal ‘city’ beyond the seas, a tradition stretching back, at least, to the Ancient Greeks and the legend of Hyperborea. In the postColumbian world, the location of this utopia was to migrate across the Atlantic and from the northern hemisphere to Latin America. The myth, duly removed to a remote and supremely isolated location, now combined the attraction of a pristine environment with tales of immense riches: El Dorado, the City of Gold, the City of the Caesars. From the time of Magellan right up to the end of the eighteenth century, South America captured the European imagination as a place thought to abound with precious stones and metals, and inhabited by exotic and wonderful races of men. The ‘Patagons’, the mythical giants mentioned in accounts from the 1520s, still figure in narratives from Enlightenment Europe: notably Restif de la Bretonne’s La Découverte australe (1781). [ 137 ]

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By the time of the Welsh emigration to Patagonia, some eighty years later, this mythical dimension of the region was long discredited, but the utopian credentials of the region and its exoticism remained at least partly intact, while its remoteness – even for the people of Argentina itself – was undeniable. The Welsh colonists certainly came with the intention of building a society which would be shielded by that remoteness: a place where their language and culture might be preserved and protected from the incursions of a fast-changing world, a place where the Welsh soul might still sing. But this was already utopia in a minor key, a utopia located firmly in the past, in the fear of loss more than in the hope of gain. In this sense, Y Wladfa (‘the Colony’) was a rejection of modernity and emerged from a vision of the future as threat, not promise: a trend from utopia to dystopia whose British variant would be developed by Samuel Butler, William Morris and George Orwell. This little Wales, then, was clearly part of an evolving relationship between culture and modernity, and one which had not yet exhausted its South American possibilities. The Welsh immigration to Patagonia is therefore certainly not unique: its motivation and its execution were similar to those of other communitarian projects through the second half of the nineteenth century. It was part, moreover, of a huge European migration to Latin America, and highly typical of that, since by far the greater proportion of those European emigrants to South America headed for Argentina, as the latter developed a resolute nation-building policy in a highly competitive regional environment. The Welsh diaspora in Patagonia also needs to be seen as part of the history of empire, as it were, on the move, of the relationship between formal and informal empire, and of the dynamics of the British World: not only in the sense that Welsh emigrants undertook such an arduous journey in the first place, but also to the extent that, although some stayed and became part of that Argentine nation, many of the Welsh colonists later re-emigrated to the USA, Canada and Australia. This Welsh chapter, finally, not only brings clearly into view networks of migration, re-migration and return migration which developed, particularly through the second half of the nineteenth century, but also the extent to which the creation of a truly insulated community was by then already impractical, in spite of its very real geographical isolation. The very networks that the Welsh colonists themselves were helping to develop inevitably created links with a rapidly evolving transnational and global economy, and with the global political culture of an emerging international system. In this sense, the Welsh experiment at Chubut stands as an eloquent example of how a small ethnic minority was unable to both prosper and yet remain in the [ 138 ]

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margins of a fast-modernising society: the colonists in the Chubut valley were also quickly snared in the geopolitics of relations between the Argentine and its neighbours in Latin America, notably Chile, and those between the Argentine and Britain (with the Falklands/ Malvinas question already proving a sticking point between the two countries). The Welsh Patagonian adventure, an understandable move from the perspective of those directly concerned, was perhaps, in the end, a case of innocents abroad. Marginalised by the British state, their language and culture the object of contempt and discrimination, a group of idealists developed an unsurprising and powerful desire to leave Britain. But the strength of that desire made them all the more willing to grasp at unrealistic hopes. Longing to find the perfect place where they could protect their threatened way of life, they possibly succumbed to the cry of ‘any port in a storm’: Puerto Madryn, as it transpired, was a false h(e)aven. The settlers, ill-adapted, at least initially, to the rigours of camp life, subsequently watched as their dream of a Celtic home on the Patagonian plains was snuffed out by the inexorable advance of regional and international politics: there would be no Celtic alchemy on the Pampas, and the arid earth of Chubut would not be converted into gold.

Notes 1 Aberystwyth Observer, 2 June 1866, 3. 2 Cardiff Times, 16 May 1862, 6. 3 See, for example, Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850 –1914, Cambridge, 2010; A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, London, 2002; Peter Iadicola, ‘Globalization and Empire’, International Journal of Social Inquiry, 1(2), 2008, 3 – 36; Luke Martell, ‘Britain and Globalization’, Globalizations, 5(3), 2008, 449 – 66. During the period indicated, rather more than 13 million people left Britain, though nearly half of these later returned temporarily or permanently. 4 One of the founding texts in this respect was Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) where it is a question of the ‘shortcomings of the Celtic race’ (p. ix), ‘his Saxon subduers’ and the ‘echo’ of the Celts ‘growing every day fainter and more feeble; gone in Cornwall, going in Brittany and the Scotch Highlands, going, too, in Ireland’ (p. 6). See also Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, New Brunswick, NJ, 1998. 5 Perhaps as many as 250,000 Cornish emigrants left Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century: many for South America. The decline of the tin and copper industries in Cornwall was a major factor. The Cornish always transported their culture as well as their labour. In 2009 the town of Réal del Monte in Mexico’s Hidalgo province, for example, still twinned with the town of Redruth in Cornwall, organised the first International Pasty (or paste) Festival. Its success has led the Consejo Regulador del Patrimonio Cultural Réal del Monte Cornwall to open a Cornish pasty museum (2011), and to the introduction of a pasty festival in Redruth itself. For an authoritative account of the Cornish diaspora, see Philip Payton, The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s Great Emigration, Fowey, 2005.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 6 See, for example, Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 19 April 1867, 8. 7 Bill Jones, ‘ “Raising the Wind”: Emigrating from Wales to the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Cardiff Centre for Welsh American Studies, 2004, 12. 8 The Welsh colonists were, in effect, helping the Argentine government to settle land which was still the object of a dispute between Argentina and Chile: ‘After 1861, when the Argentines stopped tearing themselves apart, they looked further afield, toward the “conquest of the desert”, equivalent to the conquest of the West for the United States, and conducted with the same ferocity where the native peoples were concerned’ (‘The Falkland Islands have never been Argentine’, in Paolo A. Paranagua’s blog, Le Monde, 11 March 2013). 9 Welsh farmers, for example, were required to pay a tithe to the Anglican Church – of which they were not members – one of the factors leading to the famous Rebecca Riots of 1834. 10 André Poulin, ‘Industrialisation, migration et anglicisation dans le sud du Pays de Galles: Treherbert, Vallée de la Rhondda, 1861–1891’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 37, 2002, 229–51 (230): translations here, and elsewhere in the chapter, are my own. Poulin’s observations confirm those made earlier by E.G. Bowen, ‘The Welsh Colony in Patagonia 1865 –1885: A Study in Historical Geography’, Geographical Journal, 132(1), 1966, 16–27: ‘Due to the depressed conditions at home, many people from rural Wales emigrated overseas in the first half of the nineteenth century. They sought new homes in territories as far apart as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and South Africa, and in two or three generations their descendants became good citizens of their adopted lands. They often ceased to be able to speak the Welsh language and soon lost contact with Welsh life and culture. The establishment of the Welsh colony in Patagonia was an attempt to counteract this, and to establish a new home overseas where the Welsh emigrants could live together and maintain the language and way of life of the homeland’ (16). 11 ‘Wales might be considered as the first colony of an expanding English state’, Colin H. Williams, ‘The Anglicisation of Wales’, in Nikolas Coupland (ed.), English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict and Change, Clevedon, 1990, 19. 12 Laura O’Connor, Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization, Baltimore, MD, 2006, xii. 13 That is ‘English as a medium of linguistic racism and ethnicised class antagonism, which produces and maintains the social differentiation that elevates members of the Anglo elite over their audibly different inferiors’ (ibid., xiii). 14 Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme: petit traité de glottophagie, Paris [1974], 2002. 15 O’Connor, Haunted English, xv. 16 Celtic Literature, 12 –13. 17 Quoted in Margaret H. Blabey, ‘A Study of Welsh Culture and Staying Power in Wales and Argentina’, The Monitor: A Journal of International Studies, 7(1), 2000: online journal at http://web.wm.edu/so/monitor/issues/07–1/2–blabey.htm (accessed 24 August 2013). 18 See John T. Koch and Antone Minard (eds), The Celts: History, Life and Culture, Santa Barbara, CA, I, 515ff. 19 Along with the Gorsedd, the ‘language of heaven’ is a concept which was carried across the Atlantic to the Welsh colony in Patagonia. In 1911, for example, we find a certain Rev. Roberts, during a Gorsedd ceremony, expressing his preference for using the ‘Idioma del Paraiso’, but – significantly – deferring to Spanish ‘for the sake of all those attending the ceremony that did not speak Welsh, including the local authorities, like the governor of the province’ (Walter Ariel Brooks, ‘Welsh print culture in Y Wladfa: the role of ethnic newspapers in Welsh Patagonia 1868 –1933’, Ph.D. thesis, Cardiff University, 2013, 156). See also John Edwards, Language and Identity, Cambridge, 2009, esp. 103 –10 ‘God’s Language – And Ours’. 20 For a seminal and detailed analysis, see the essay by Prys Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983, 43 –100.

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PATAGONIA AS A LAND OF BROKEN WELSH PROMISE 21 In England itself, for example, in the work of the historian E. A. Freeman (1823 – 92), who deliberately saturated his prose with words of Anglo-Saxon origin, in his effort to demonstrate the primacy of the ‘Teutonic’ as opposed to the ‘Latin’ roots of British culture and the British state. 22 A tax levied by the Church of England in every parish, including those in Wales. 23 ‘The result of the election in Cardiganshire’, Cambrian News and Merionethshire Standard, 10 April 1869, 3. This sentiment seems to have been a lasting one for some visitors to the colony: J. C. Davies, for example, writing in 1892, Patagonia: A Description of the Country and the Manner of Living at Chubut Colony, Treorky, 20, underlines that he ‘feels himself quite as much of a gentleman as any country esquire in Wales’. 24 According to one Welsh newspaper – Usk Observer and Monmouthshire Central Advertiser (10 June 1865, 1) – a total of 36 ships left Liverpool during May 1865 with emigrants aboard. The vast majority (16,670 people) were in steerage class. Of these, 8,472 were recorded as Irish, 4,859 as English and 306 ‘Scotch’. 25 See for example Ronald L. Lewis writing on Welsh immigration to the USA: ‘Their actual numbers were undoubtedly higher, perhaps double the official figure, because census takers often lumped the Welsh and English together’ ‘Reconstructing Welsh Identity in the American Coalfields’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 6(1), 2011, 32 – 52, 32. 26 David Maldwyn Ellis, ‘The Assimilation of the Welsh in Central New York’, Welsh History Review, 6(4), 1973, 424 – 50, 437. 27 Aled Jones, review of William D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh, 1860 –1920, Cardiff, 1993, in Welsh History Review, 17(2), 1994, 283 – 5, 284. 28 ‘Welsh heritage did not present an obstacle to assimilation into American society, so there was no second “ill-adjusted” generation; they simply and quickly became Americans’ (Ronald L. Lewis, Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields, North Carolina, NC, 2008, 307). 29 Ellis, ‘Assimilation of the Welsh in Central New York’, 433. 30 Quoted in Elizabeth Rokkan, ‘America as Idea and Reality in the Context of Welsh Settlement’, American Studies in Scandinavia, 19, 1987, 85–91 (90). Ronald L. Lewis confirms ‘the loss of native language ability among the Welsh in America was significant throughout the nineteenth century’ (‘Reconstructing Welsh Identity’, 47). Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Terminal Decline? The Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 1(2), 2001, 59 – 67, is resolutely downbeat in his assessment, concluding of Welsh that ‘its demise is assured’ (66). 31 Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 20 December 1862, 5. 32 John R. Spears, The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, London/New York, 1895, 168 – 9. 33 Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 20 December 1862, 5. 34 Cardiff Times, 7 November 1862, 6. 35 These quotes from the Cardiff Times, 21 November 1862, 6. Jones may rail against the English, but his recommendations, with their call for the use of fertilisers and enclosure, sound remarkably like the productivist reforms applied during the English agricultural revolution. 36 Lewis Jones (1836 –1904), a printer by trade, and one of the chief publicists for the venture. He was to be heavily criticised by the early settlers for having given inaccurate, over-embellished accounts of the site chosen for the colony. Sir Thomas Duncombe Love Jones-Parry (1832 – 91), landowner and Liberal MP, had financed much of the original fact-finding trip with L. Jones. 37 Potter’s Electric News, 10 Dec. 1862, 3. 38 See Fernando Coronato, ‘The First Welsh Footstep in Patagonia: The Primitive Location of Puerto Madryn’, Welsh History Review, 18(4), 1997, 639 – 66. 39 The main crop grown was wheat, though there were also some fruit orchards. 40 For example, Cardiff Times, 9 February 1866, 8. 41 Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt (eds), British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print. Part I. From the

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42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51

52

53

Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War. Series D. Latin America 1845–1914, ed., George Phelp, Volume 1 River Plate 1849 –1912, USA, 1991, doc. 158, 257. Ibid., 258. Guillermo Rawson (1821– 90), whose US father, Haman Rawson (1792 –1847) had emigrated to Argentina in 1818 and settled in San Juan. The city of Rawson in the Chubut valley (originally Trerawson – Welsh for ‘the town of Rawson’, see Trelew, ‘the town of Lewis’ [after Lewis Jones]) was named after him to honour the role he played in helping to set up the colony. Ibid. Ibid. Published in Potter’s Electric News in December 1866. Treorky, 1892. Davies also spent four years (1898 –1902) in Western Australia and published (1902) Western Australia: Its History and Progress, the Native Blacks, Towns, Country Districts and the Goldfields, Nantymoel, WA. Page 7. The Patagonian paradise of which Humphreys and Davies boasted was one of a number of South American utopias. William Lane (1861–1917), after spells in Canada and the USA, emigrated from England to Brisbane in 1885, and from there to Paraguay, in 1893, at the head of a party of 220 Australian colonists to found the utopian settlement of ‘New Australia’ or ‘Colonia Nueva Australia’, south-east of Asuncion: the project petered out among much bitterness, Lane’s autocratic style of leadership being a major contributory cause. See Ben Stubbs, Ticket to Paradise, Sydney, 2012; Anne Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid: In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay, St Lucia, 1997; Michael Wilding, The Paraguayan Experiment, Harmondsworth, 1984. Other examples include the Colonia Mauricio, a Jewish agricultural colony established in the province of Buenos Aires in 1891. Y Dydd, 10 July 1868, 11. Aberystwyth Observer, 6 February 1869, 4. At Home with the Patagonians: A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro, London, 1871 (Kindle edition, location 4943). Having reached the rank of Commander, Musters left active service in 1869 and settled briefly in the Falklands. But he soon left to travel to Punta Arenas, and then to journey north with a group of Tehuelche Indians through the eastern foothills of the Andes, then across Patagonia. His meticulous observations – of the customs of the Indians, but also of the interior of Southern Argentina – were officially recognised by the Royal Geographical Society who awarded him a gold watch in 1872. Musters, orphaned at the age of 4, was raised by his uncles, one of whom, Robert Hammond, had sailed as a ship’s mate aboard the Beagle with Robert Fitzroy, and it was Fitzroy (Bourne and Watt, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, doc. 170, 268) who had reported that ‘on the River Chupat [sic] there was a locality admirably adapted for a settlement’. Fitzroy’s ship, of course, was also carrying the young Charles Darwin. Though they would not have been aware of the fact, it is curious to muse that the Welsh colonists, in search of the ideal place to construct their de-Anglicised, Celtic idyll, should have chosen the site spotted by such loyal servants of the British Establishment. I am indebted for material in this paragraph to Jean Lindsay, ‘ “Not El Dorado”: W. J. Parry and the Welsh Patagonian Gold Fields Syndicate’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, new series, 3, 1997, 136 – 63, 138. See also Glyn Williams, The Desert and the Dream: A Study of the Colonization in Chubut, 1865 –1915, Cardiff, 1975, 102 – 4. The Vice-Chairman of the Syndicate was none other than David Lloyd George, whose considerable frustrations at the mismanagement of the company Lindsay explores. His involvement in the scheme was sporadic. See also Roy Hattersley, David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider, London, 2010, 90 – 6; Matthew Parry, ‘David Lloyd George, W. J. Parry and the Patagonian Gold Fields Syndicate (1891– 96)’, MA thesis, Aberystwyth, 1997. Paul W. Birt, ‘The Welsh Language in Chubut Province, Argentina’, in Diarmuid O’Néill (ed.), Rebuilding the Celtic Languages: Reversing the Language Shift in the Celtic Countries, Ceredigion, 2005, 115 – 51, 127.

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PATAGONIA AS A LAND OF BROKEN WELSH PROMISE 54 Ibid., 124. 55 According to Davies (p. 10) some 500 new Welsh settlers arrived in 1875 – 76 from Wales, and from the USA: but the colony was struck, that same year, by a very poor harvest. 56 The website ‘Glaniad’ www.glaniad.com/stories.php?lang=en&storyId=36055&t=2 (accessed 3 September 2013) on the history of Welsh emigration to Patagonia confirms that ‘by the end of the 1890s, the future of the Settlement as a Welsh-speaking community was under threat. There was a decline in the number of immigrants from Wales and an increase in immigrants from other cultural backgrounds.’ 57 HC Deb. vol. 102, cols 668 – 9 (7 Feb. 1902) 58 Author of Appel aux représentants actuels de la race celtique, Nantes, 1864 59 This and following quotes from taken from Charles de Gaulle, Letter to Rev. Michael D. Jones, 21 April 1865 http://education.gtj.org.uk/item.php?lang=en&id=18025&t=1 (accessed 25 July 2013). 60 Emphasis in original.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

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Between heaven and earth: the German Templer colonies in Palestine Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz

Introduction In 1899 Prince Carl von Urach, Count of Württemberg, announced the establishment of the Society for the Assistance of German Settlers in Palestine (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Palästina). Alongside a dozen other Stuttgart notables, including professors, lawyers and a bishop, von Urach founded the association to ‘satisfy the need for expansion that has been created by the German settlers in Palestine’. The association was designed to help to expand the scattering of German colonies established from 1869 by the millenarian Christian Templers of Württemberg in Ottoman Palestine, by raising 300,000 marks; capital which would enable the settlers to select and purchase suitable land in the regions of Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. Praising the ‘perseverance’, ‘the hard work’ and ‘indomitable faith’ of ‘this vanguard of German work in the Orient’, this civil society organisation insisted that those ‘who have remained so loyal to their Fatherland and have brought it such honour should not have the assistance of their home denied them; indeed it is a question of honour and patriotic duty that this assistance be provided’. This robust appeal to nationalist sensibilities in support of German colonisation in Palestine did not go unheeded, with those answering the association’s call for investors including King Wilhelm of Württemburg and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who donated 128,500 marks between them.1 Such clear signals of high-level support for German expansion in Palestine certainly help to confirm the findings of a number of historians who have effectively revised Edward Said’s (and more recently Suzanne Marchand’s) judgement that Germany’s ‘intellectual authority’ over the Orient was not related to the types of imperial interests that characterised British and French Orientalism.2 As this post-Saidian research has demonstrated,3 a web of asymmetrical political, economic [ 144 ]

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and cultural ties structured relations between the German and Ottoman empires prior to the First World War. Clearly, this literature tells us that the Ottoman Empire was of importance if not to the immediate politico-material interests of the Kaiserreich, then to its conception of where its future interests lay. By 1914, numerous plans for German penetration of parts of the Ottoman Empire were well advanced, with the Baghdad Railway the most obvious manifestations of this.4 In fact, prior to the First World War, parts of the Ottoman Empire appeared to the German colonial movement and broad segments of German civil society if not as the Promised Land, then certainly a land of enormous promise. This sense of a burgeoning economic, cultural and even settler colonial mission for Germany in the Middle East, was of course interrupted by the First World War, which saw Germany’s shares in the Baghdad Railway expropriated by the British, the Turks and the French, and ex-Ottoman territories partitioned between the victorious powers and transformed into Mandates, to the exclusion of Germany. The hopes of German hegemony or empire in the exOttoman territories would remain spectacularly unfulfilled.5 That a Middle Eastern empire would remain an illusory El Dorado became clear only in the stark light of the post-war settlement. Given the numerous discussions of fin de siècle German Orientalism, the role played by the approximately 2,200 Templer colonists in wider German plans for expansion in the Ottoman Empire has remained surprisingly undervalued.6 Despite their initial distance from nationalist circles and objectives, this group of messianic Christians from Württemberg who settled in Palestine in 1869 for almost exclusively religious reasons were viewed as being at the forefront of Germany’s pre-war penetration of the Ottoman Empire.7 As the following makes clear, notwithstanding their foundational otherworldly intentions, at the height of the German Empire’s colonial period, the Templers’ colonial enterprise was touted by the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) and the nationalist German press as a Trojan horse for wholesale German settlement in the Levant. Shorn of their religious idiosyncrasies, they were reconfigured as a symbolically important emblem of the dynamism of Germandom (Deutschtum) abroad. The visit of the Kaiser to their colonies during his ‘Orientreise’ in 1898 only heightened this perception.8 As religious communities motivated by an eschatological teleology, the Templer religious colonies represent not so much an intrinsically ‘irrational’ mode of colonialism, as a form of colonial praxis informed by a peculiar form of religious rationality. The Templer colonists were not anti-Enlightenment per se; indeed they planned their emigration [ 145 ]

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carefully, applying the most current technological and scientific methods to the establishment and consolidation of their colonies,9 but bent these techniques to serve their religious community’s foundational Christian logic. Nonetheless, given the enormous slippage between their initial millenarian expectations and the eventual material modesty of the colonies, the Templer colonial project certainly qualifies as a religious El Dorado based on illusory, chiliastic expectations. In addition, the Templer colonies exemplify how a marginal civil society colonial organisation learned to accommodate and adapt to the priorities of the dominant secular imperial–nationalist movement, in the interests of attaining a common imperial goal in Palestine, the radical differences in their underlying colonial rationality notwithstanding. Although the Templers and secular liberal imperialists were motivated by radically dissimilar Weltanschauungen and teloi, the cleft between the religious teleology of the Templers and the geopolitics of Germany’s liberal imperialists was increasingly concealed by both groups as their tactical interdependence grew. Despite the gradual reimagining of the Templers as a loyal subsection of the Auslandsdeutsche (Germans abroad), the Templer colonies would ultimately founder not merely because of the erroneous nature of their religious predictions. In the medium term, they failed even in strictly material terms, under the pressures of secular geopolitics. Even after the concealment of the Templers’ putatively sacred purpose behind the more profane tropes of nationalist zeal, ‘Fleiß’ (hard work) and ‘Tugend’ (virtue), even after Germany’s secular imperialists through their weight behind their endeavours, the hopes of a network of German agrarian and trade colonies in the Holy Land, arising as a flourishing outpost of Deutschtum, proved to be as much of an El Dorado as the hope of preparing the ground for the return of the Christian Messiah. Through a study of archival and press material, this chapter foregrounds the textual and teleological differences between two initially discrete discourse communities. It also charts the political convergence of the two, by highlighting the attempts to overcome the conceptual chasm between the Templers’ millenarian, utopian plans and the secular imperialist agenda of the German Colonial Society and Pan-German League. By mapping these shifts, this chapter reveals the steady incorporation of the Templers within secular, nationalist imperialist plans, their ongoing religiosity notwithstanding.

The Templers’ eschatological teleology and its limits At its inception, the colonial mission of the Württemberg Templers was a product of a strongly teleological theology which engendered a [ 146 ]

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conceptualisation of time and space that was radically different to that of German society more broadly. The Templers saw the world as situated at the end of history, and viewed their role as colonisers as being to facilitate the parousia through the reclamation of Jerusalem for God’s people. Under this chiliastic reading of history, the true goal of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Holy Land was the preparation of the region by devout Christians for the return of the Messiah; a utopian aim that clearly went far beyond the narrower nationalist preoccupations of other German imperial enthusiasts.10 In accordance with these millenarian beliefs, Templer colonists established a colony in Palestine in 1869 which quickly expanded to seven settlements.11 Initially concentrating on farming, they quickly expanded into trade and light industry, mechanising agricultural production, introducing new forms of transport and transport infrastructure such as roads and bridges purpose-built for carriages, and establishing one of the first hotels in Palestine.12 Far from being indicative of a peculiarly German competitive nationalism, this eschatological enterprise was understood as being undertaken on the behalf of a transnational community of faith which saw the need to colonise the Holy Land by Christians as a logical extension of their utopian expectations. Indeed, the Templer Association’s charter made no mention of allegiance to any secular power.13 Although their millenarian goals were far more pronounced than most, the Templers shared the Holy Land with a number of European Christian groups in Palestine working towards religious ends.14 Indeed, there were numerous other groups and individuals, including some Germans, who were applying a range of models of colonisation to the Holy Land, ranging from the ‘southern-German model’, in which a whole community was sent out (often as an agricultural colony), to the ‘Prussian model’, in which locals were exposed to the Christian message through the establishment of hospitals and schools.15 The Templers’ colonising model included both of these aspects. Prior to the German Templers, a number of other, predominantly American, religious colonies in Palestine had failed in their own attempts to establish a presence on behalf of the global Christian community. The first American colony in Palestine dated back to 1848, and was established by Cloarinda S. Minor, who was influenced by the apocalypse-preaching Millerites. A number of German colonists were involved in this colony, which dispersed after Minor’s death in 1857. In 1866, charismatic American leader and prophet of the Church of the Messiah, George J. Adams, also established an American colony in Palestine with 156 colonists. From its establishment the colony was besieged by problems, not the least of which was Adam’s excessive [ 147 ]

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alcohol consumption. It lasted only two years, despite calls for help from the colonists to the American consul in both Jaffa and Jerusalem. The Templers were not only aware of these earlier colonial enterprises, they in some ways inherited their legacy. They were, for example, able to acquire from the Ottoman government the title to Adams’ failed colony.16 Convinced of the veracity of the prophetic Book of Revelation, the Württemberg Templers shared Adams’s religious motivations for colonising Palestine. Along the lines previous established by Adams, they were firm in their belief that ‘the Jews had forfeited their right to inherit the Holy Land’.17 Accordingly, on behalf of all Christendom the Templer saw their colonial task as being to prepare Jerusalem for a pan-Christian assembly that would herald the Second Coming. This was not a colonisation project conceived of as a part of a broader national project of global economic and colonial penetration. For the Templers, colonisation was merely the medium rather than the goal of their primarily religious aspirations.18 Other German imperial endeavours, on the other hand, whether private sector, civil society or state directed, worked towards a different end, namely global German economic and colonial penetration commensurate with that of Britain and France. Without overly homogenising clearly disparate projects, these nonreligious endeavours were essentially conceived of in terms congruent with Friedrich List’s principles of a nationalist political economy,19 seeking to weave together diverse economic and colonial spaces with the common thread of a global national community of Germans (Auslandsdeutschtum). For their part, the Templers’ embrace of contemporary geostrategic considerations reached as far as believing that the ostensibly weakened position of the Sultan after successive crises such as the 1853 outbreak of the Crimean War had created the prophesied historical conditions within which Palestine might be ‘reclaimed’ for Christendom as a prelude to the parousia.20 Although the Templers saw their colonies as being legitimated by biblical prophecy, their self-representation coincided at points with the contemporaneous secular, nationalist–imperialist discourse, in particular in their self-perception as ‘bearers of culture’ (Kulturträger). Yet there remained an enormous disparity between their respective understandings of precisely which culture was to be borne and exactly what their cultural mission entailed. Writing in 1870, just one year after arriving in Palestine, the Templer Elder Christoph Hoffmann stated that a ‘duty of our time is to raise the Orient, in particular the farthest lands of the Turkish empire, from their decay up to a better condition’; a statement that would not be out of place in the charter of the secular [ 148 ]

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Kolonialgesellschaft.21 Yet Hoffmann’s explanation continued in a way that demonstrated the distance between his understanding of the goal of colonisation and that of secular nationalists, arguing that while the ‘Oriental question’ consumed Europe’s secular leaders, they could never definitively solve it, as this would simply contribute to the ‘oppressive tension’ between the Great Powers and would result in a general European war. In any case, he continued, the betterment of the Orient could not be achieved through weapons, or at a purely material level; it was only obtainable through spiritual (Geistig) means, that is, through the colonising presence of the Christian faithful.22 With their unfailing belief in the immediate relevancy of biblical prophecy, the small, yet committed group of Templers positioned themselves as religious colonists unhampered by nationalist ideology, as the only group capable and willing to solve the ‘Oriental question’ legitimately. This guiding sense of detachment from German secular authority was mutually felt and was indicative of the marginality of the Templers within Germany after they established their own religious community in 1861, having broken from the state church’s teaching.23 Having formally renounced any ties with the religious communities within which they lived, they were shunned by other Pietists, not to mention by non-Pietist, Protestant communities. They were also suspected by the government of Württemberg as being politically suspicious fanatical zealots.24 Quite clearly, the Templers began their colonial endeavours from well outside the national community in both a religious and a secular sense. Their outsider status did not, however, discount the need to appeal in more worldly terms to potential benefactors, and the Templers occasionally (and pragmatically) drew upon their rights as subjects of Württemberg and later Germany when asking for support from government agencies. As early as 1854, they sent a formal letter of request to the Bundestag in Frankfurt for permission to settle in the Holy Land, a proposal that was not even considered.25 The Templers also looked beyond the German state, seeking the patronage of prominent individuals such as the Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, to champion their cause among European governments.26 Once established in Palestine from 1869, however, they explicitly foregrounded their Swabian and German origins in their letters, petitions, pamphlets and flyers. In 1872, the Templers publicly proclaimed to potential German supporters that they were the best vehicle for the penetration of the Holy Land, because ‘Germans are more capable and prepared for this task than other peoples’.27 In the same year, they wrote to King Karl of Württemberg, hoping to convince him of the prestige that their work was bestowing upon his Kingdom as well as the service that they were [ 149 ]

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doing for the Fatherland’s interests in the Orient.28 The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, they recalled, had also shown his interest in the Holy Land, championing the ‘Prussian model’ of colonisation through the establishment of a hospital in Jerusalem as well as by rebuilding of the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem29 (which the Sultan would later present to the King as a gift).30 King Karl of Württemberg’s response, however, was to ensure that he was discretely apprised of the conduct of the Templers through the Royal Ministry for the Interior and Church and School, which kept files on them and other known ‘zealots’.31 Despite their primary commitment to a transnational Christian millenarianism, and the indifferent dividends their appeals to nationality initially offered, the Templers had always understood that it made practical sense for them to stress their national origins when pursuing material support from German officials. Initially, the material situation for the Templers in Palestine was so difficult that they were forced to dedicate themselves to their colonies’ survival rather than their broader religious ideals. Matters were not helped by events in 1874 which saw fundamental differences in ideology as well as practicalities result in one-third of the settlers break away from the Templers and return to the ranks of mainstream German Protestantism, reducing the levels of support that the Templers in Palestine could expect from Germany.32 Having weathered these initial storms, however, the Templer colonies grew in size, number and also wealth, with the 2,200 settlers successfully gaining an economic foothold in Palestine, largely through the introduction of modernising technology in the fields of transport, finance and agriculture, which offered them a comparative advantage over the existing population.33 Astute manipulations of the Palestinian property market were also critical, with the Templers quietly coming to monopolise natural springs, hitherto used communally for irrigation, by purchasing properties abutting these sources of water. Not only did this guarantee irrigation for their farms, it also had the effect of ruining and driving down the sale prices of neighbouring properties – allowing the Templers to buy them at a reduced price.34 By the end of the century, however, the hostility of local authorities and the influx of missionary groups, European settlers, and particularly Jewish settlers, had forced the Templers to call for more political and popular support from Germany. This plea was most firmly crystallised in the public discussion surrounding the issue of the Templers’ ownership of the land on which their colonies were built; an issues which sparked the interest of secular colonists, because it had the potential to impact upon their own ability to further German colonial settlements in the Ottoman Empire.35 [ 150 ]

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The secular–imperial nationalist teleology Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Levant and the Ottoman Empire more broadly had also been of interest to nationalist Germans.36 Unlike the Templers, Germany’s Kaiserreich secular imperialists saw themselves at the dawn of a new modern era, where the viability of the new nation state would be predicated upon its capacity to insinuate itself within the broader global logic of empire. This secular imperialism harboured its own utopian expectations of a waiting El Dorado for German emigrants. Complaining about these exaggerated expectations of German overseas imperialism, the colonial expert Max Buchner, for example, dismissed the ‘confusion of chatter’ regarding Africa, ‘this newest El Dorado’.37 For Germany’s secular imperialists, the Ottoman Empire was not merely the location of the Holy Land, but was also situated in a key geostrategic position straddling the Turkish Straits, the Suez Canal and the rivers of Mesopotamia which flowed into the Persian Gulf. In conjunction with the Baghdad Railway, a future German Palestine offered an opportunity to counterbalance Britain’s Mediterranean hegemony, which was continuously strengthened by the occupation of Malta in 1800, Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882, as well as its monopoly over all of the arterial routes to India and points further East; by sea via the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and South Africa, and overland via Mesopotamia and Persia. As early as 1841, Helmuth von Moltke had argued that Palestine could become an important imperial asset for Germany, should the Ottoman Empire fall.38 In the same year, the großdeutsch liberal nationalist Friedrich List argued that the cadaverous Ottoman Empire would soon be ‘atomised’ by the pulverising air of European, specifically German/Austrian influence, commenting that: All Continental powers have a particular collective interest in ensuring that the two routes out of the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf are neither brought under the exclusive possession of England nor remain impassable due to Asiatic barbarism. Obviously, the transfer of responsibility for these important points to Austria would afford the best guarantee for all European nations.39

In 1848, Wilhelm Roscher went so far as to opine that Asia Minor was more suitable for German colonists than North America.40 Initially, however, secular nationalist enthusiasts for a future, postOttoman German empire in Asia Minor and the Levant had little use for the pan-Christian chiliasm of the Templers and either criticised them or overlooked them entirely. The nationalist press’s enthusiasm [ 151 ]

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for the enlargement of the Templers’ colonies was also tempered by the obvious fact that the Ottoman Empire, as a sovereign state recognised by and well disposed towards the German government, still existed. Accordingly, support for the Templer colonial cause was initially muted among liberal nationalists. Even the Pan-German League predicated their future colonisation plans on the eventual absence of an Ottoman state. As late as 2 May 1885, for example, the Kölnische Zeitung attempted to hose down reports that discussions were under way with the Sublime Porte (the central government of the Ottoman Empire), to cede a colonial territory in Palestine to German colonists. ‘It is not to be believed’, the newspaper concluded, ‘that the German government would take any steps to support the nonsense of the Templers’.41 When in the late 1880s the Templers were beginning to be more favourably discussed, their stark religiosity and commitment to a global spiritual community was ignored in favour of their nationality. Rather than outposts of ‘zealots’ who had severed their links to mainstream German Protestantism in the service of an eschatological teleology, the Templer colonies were now depicted as strong overseas outposts of Germandom (Auslandsdeutschtum), with their inhabitants now described as ‘brave German colonists’.42 By 1896, this revised vision of the Templers role in building a German Middle East had been consolidated by the Pan-German League, in their book Germany’s Claims on the Turkish Inheritance.43 Like the Templers, and indeed most of Europe, the Pan-German League expected the Ottoman Empire to disintegrate ‘in the foreseeable future’, and when it did they also expected that it was reasonable for the other European powers to allow Germany part of that empire as a site for German settler colonialism. With regard to the attitude of the existing population and the opportunities for German settler colonists, the Pan-German League was particularly sanguine: Neither the population of Anatolia, nor the thinly spread Arab inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Syria would give the intrinsically just rule of Germany particular difficulties, rule which would without doubt be coupled with a powerful economic boom in the region . . . The climate and the quality of the soil would offer German migration a rich and fruitful field of endeavour, and under a strong German government of those lands (which once counted among the most prosperous of the known world), German hard work and knowledge would transform them into a territory of similar importance to the Reich as India is for Great Britain.44

At the same time, without deviating from the secular–imperialist goals of their nationalist political economy, Germany’s ‘secular’ imperialists had no hesitation in borrowing from the biblical lexicon, consistently drawing upon religious allusions as a potent rhetorical strategy when discussing Palestine. Underlying this usage were chauvinistic assumptions [ 152 ]

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about the Levant’s Muslim inhabitants, as well as a global, geostrategic rationale that saw the Middle East as one of many important sites for German imperialism. Neatly illustrating this is an article from the Allgemeine Zeitung from July 1884, which used religious allusions to rationalise the dispossession of the local inhabitants of Palestine and to offer material and cultural imperatives for Germany’s imperial expansion there: If one takes the German colony in Syria [Palestine] as a point of departure for a discussion of the contemporary colonial endeavours of the German Empire, one comes to the conclusion, that the establishment of German colonies, whether in Syria or a different part of the earth is to be recommended without reservation . . . It is known, that the climatic conditions of Syria and Palestine are very favourable; as the Bible says it is the land where milk and honey flow. Of course the Muslims have decided to eradicate the milk and honey, but the climatic and topographical conditions could not be Islamified.45

Discursive convergence Material difficulties and generational change within the Templer community saw some profound changes within their self-conception. Like many radical movements, the second generation of Templer colonists reacted to the difficulties they faced in a hostile physical and political environment by seeking mainstream legitimation rather than increasing their militancy.46 Accordingly, they shifted their publicly pronounced colonising goals from their original millenarian teleology towards the more immediate and indeed mainstream missionary ambition of ‘improving the situation in the Holy Land and providing a good example for its inhabitants’.47 As Alex Carmel has suggested, this move away from millenarianism towards a more recognisable mission civilisatrice saw a concomitant shift in the public perception of the Templers in Germany, who for a time became ‘the darlings of public opinion and of the royal court in their homeland’.48 As a result of the well-publicised legal difficulties faced by the Templer colonies within the Ottoman Empire, the Templer settlers regularly sought German consular assistance. Crucially, however, they also sought to marshal German public support for their plight through open letters and petitions in German newspapers requesting public support and government intervention.49 Within these petitions and pleas, the Templers tactically shifted towards deploying nationalist tropes and foregrounded their German origins and their importance to Germany’s international position, a move eagerly endorsed and reciprocated by the Colonial Society, and the Pan-German League. [ 153 ]

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Exemplifying this was the Palestinian land dispute of the 1890s. Throughout the 1880s, the Templers had experienced various difficulties with Ottoman officials having their title to land confirmed, particularly in the case of inheritance situations.50 Although there had been complaints regarding the legal and taxation position of the Templer colonies in the German press in the late 1880s,51 the most serious impediment to the Templers’ colonial expansion lay in the 1891 reclassification of their land holdings as rented Crown Land (Mirieh) instead of freehold title (Mülk) once Ibrahim Pasha (denounced by the German press as ‘a fanatical Muslim and enemy of Christians and foreigners’) became governor of Palestine.52 With Crown Land attracting ten times the taxation burden of freehold, the reclassification threatened to bankrupt the Templer colonies. By 1893, German newspapers had picked up on the story and the plight of the Templers became a cause célèbre in the nationalist German media, largely courtesy of a concerted campaign by the Pan-German League and the Colonial Society.53 Several newspaper articles implicitly linked the issue of land security for German colonists with the need for more overt displays of German naval power in the region, as in the 6 January 1895 edition of the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten which alleged that the difficulties of the Templers could be ascribed to the cessation of naval patrols by the German fleet along the Syrian coastline. Apart from merely ‘showing the flag’, these patrols had in the past also played a role in assisting German military and civil intelligence, with the Templers providing German naval commanders, and thereby the German Foreign Office, with intelligence about the situation of German interests in Palestine.54 The Berliner Neueste Nachrichten article argued that the timid practice of keeping ships to the German coast for fear of provoking an incident was a product of the lack of leadership evident during Caprivi’s chancellorship, which in their eyes represented the nadir of German foreign policy. Far better, it was claimed, would be a policy of staging naval demonstrations in this region, which to their eyes was so vital to German interests. Such naval displays would not only force the Ottoman Empire to treat the German colonists with respect, but would similarly force the respect of German interests in the region by other European powers active in the Mediterranean.55 In many ways, this sense of the importance of a Middle Eastern naval presence mirrored the opinion of the German navy itself, which had long argued that the sight of the German flag had been enough to ‘convince the Orientals of the earnestness of the German Reich for the care of its subjects’.56 With the Templers’ plight already having been reported in the press, and documented in the bureaucratic reports of national and state governments,57 the issue was first discussed in the German Reichstag [ 154 ]

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on 14 January 1895 in a speech by the indefatigable Leipzig National Liberal, Colonial Society member and leader of the Pan-German League Ernst Hasse. To the approval of his party colleagues in the Reichstag, Hasse expressed his outrage that supporting the Templers had been left to the King of Württemberg alone, when it was clearly a matter for the Reichstag.58 The issue received more attention a few weeks later when the Stuttgart National Liberal Gustav von Siegle petitioned the Reichstag for its support on 11 February. His plea was met with support from the State Secretary for the Foreign Office, Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein, who gave a detailed report on the lengths to which the German consul in Constantinople had gone to help the Templers, despite the fact that the European powers and the Sublime Porte had originally agreed as a condition of their permission to settle that European colonists within the Ottoman Empire would be treated in the same manner as Ottoman subjects by Ottoman law, without recourse to consular intervention.59 Given that he was representing official government policy, Marschall’s highly positive assessment of the Templers is telling. Indeed, his speech illustrates the extent to which the colonists were now understood by the imperial government as Auslandsdeutsche deserving of state protection because of their national significance: Indeed, our colonists in Jaffa have earned not only the support of the state, but also the interest of the Reichstag. These are loyal, hardworking Christian men who have maintained their German nationality, who have fulfilled their military service, for which purpose a warship visits the Syrian coast each year, to conduct the necessary examinations.60

Not so supportive of these newly-admitted and beleaguered representatives of the Auslandsdeutsche was the Bremen trader and Liberal Union party member Hermann Frese, who, in reply to Hasse’s January speech rebuked the delusions of those believing an easily won El Dorado awaited them overseas. His message to those who had convinced themselves that fortune and riches awaited the indolent abroad was simple; on your own head be it. For Frese, those Germans who complained of their circumstances abroad were simply unsuitable for the heroic difficulties of colonisation, which was the preserve of those who had sufficiently equipped themselves to strengthen rather than diminish the standing of the German nation abroad: Gentlemen, among those who go overseas there are those who have suffered some sort of disaster in the Fatherland, who then go abroad expecting mountains of gold which they do not find and instead of holding themselves accountable for their deficiencies and poor commerce – they do not even know how to work – they seek to blames others and in the end call for the government to assist them in their dubious circumstances.61

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Through the reporting on this legal wrangle over Ottoman property rights,62 there was a surge of interest in Templers in the German secular press after 1894. By now, the press had become firmly supportive of the millenarian Templers. While acknowledging their religiosity, the press focused squarely on their importance to the German nation, as colonial settlers in the heart of the ostensibly crumbling Ottoman Empire. In early February 1895, the National-Zeitung demanded that consular officials become more actively involved in the Templers’ dispute with Ottoman authorities, while in April of the same year, the Hamburgischer Correspondent neatly sidestepped the settlers’ ‘chiliastic’ tendencies, focusing instead on their role as ‘brave pioneers of Germandom in the Orient’, able to overcome the ‘fanaticism of the Catholic clergy, the jealousy of the local population and the ill will of the government’ in Palestine.63 The National-Zeitung too maintained its support for the Templers, with another article bemoaning their difficulties in April 1895.64 In July 1895, the Kölnische Zeitung also cited State Secretary Marschall as saying that the Germans abroad most deserving of protection were those who were ‘real pioneers who work peacefully and whose interests correspond with those of the homeland’. Such were the Templers, the newspaper argued: ‘these labouring pioneers who have proven themselves to be German in their thinking and manner’. The lives and property of hundreds of German families, the article concluded, were in jeopardy.65 So too, the Allgemeine Zeitung saw in the Templers the best hope of the Germans to secure Palestine in the face of rival forms of colonisation, such as that of Zionists. ‘With indomitable energy and truly German perseverance the land has been cultivated and settlements built, so that in a place which was a wilderness 25 years earlier there is now a blooming German community with, among other things, its own schools and choral societies.’ With Jewish emigration on the rise, the support of the German state was now needed, even though, the newspaper opined in perhaps the poorest piece of political forecasting in history, ‘the dream of making Palestine Jewish once again will remain as unfulfilled as the hopes of re-establishing the Polish state’.66 The German press and the public mood in favour of the Templers was so supportive that the imperial government opened a German consulate in Jaffa in February 1896,67 for the express purpose of supporting the Templer colony in their difficulties with the Ottoman officials.68 As the naval visits of the 1870s had been, this embassy became, over time, a valuable conduit of reliable intelligence, able to counter some of the wilder reports that originated from other sources in Palestine.69 It also grew to accommodate more urgent needs; during the 1912 Muslim uprising against Christians, it was the consul in Jaffa [ 156 ]

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who pleaded with Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to provide warships to protect the interests of the German colonists.70 Despite an overly hasty report in the National-Zeitung which declared in August 1895 that the land title issue had been resolved,71 it remained a serious stumbling block until 1898, flaring up most noticeably once again in the lead-up to the Kaiser’s visit to the Holy Land in November of that year. Ernst Hasse continued to lobby on behalf of the Templers, warning in an April 1898 letter to the Foreign Office that it would reflect badly on it if the issue were not resolved favourably and the Templers were forced to complain directly and publicly to the Kaiser of their plight during his visit to Palestine.72 The issue continued to find significant traction in the German press, with the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten linking the two issues of the Templers’ difficulties and the Kaiser’s Orientreise with its claim that the visit would be greeted by German colonists in Palestine with enthusiasm, and that the visit offered an opportunity to settle the land title dispute.73 The Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung also discussed the two issues through the lens of a comparison with Britain, which had sent a squadron of ten naval vessels to the region as a show of strength, ostensibly as part of the Queen’s birthday celebrations. Caustically, the paper remarked that ‘we can only wish that the German Empire was also in a position to show such a display of strength’, before going on to raise hopes that perhaps the Kaiser’s visit would motivate the Sultan to proclaim in favour of the Templers’ land rights.74 Most strongly, the liberal National-Zeitung wrote warmly of colonial plans in Palestine in July 1898 and of its hopes that the Kaiser’s visit would enable this: It is highly desirable that new farmers and pastoralists from Germany will be moved to join [the colony] . . . The dominant position of Germandom in Palestine should be maintained and strengthened, and every civilised and hard-working Germany is welcome. It would be excellent, when a concrete decision in this direction could be made by the time of the Kaiser’s arrival.75

For their part, in their internal discussions, the Templers declared that, while the Kaiser’s impending tour was a sign of his benevolence and goodwill towards Germany’s expatriate colonists,76 his visit to Palestine was centred around the dedication of the evangelical Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem and was therefore primarily a religious visit in keeping with their own purposes.77 Nonetheless, the visit and the associated secular press coverage in Germany kept discussion of the Templers within a secular framework. On the question of their rights and hopes of future expansion, upon arriving in Palestine the Kaiser was supportive of the Templers without being forthright in [ 157 ]

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the exact nature of the type of support Germany might offer. Certainly no promise of state assistance in expanding the colonies was forthcoming in his multiple speeches directed towards the Templers; rather blandishments in praise of their cultural role were offered.78 According to the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the Kaiser said to the Templers in Jerusalem: I am greatly pleased that you have offered a good example to your neighbours through your own lives, and that you have shown how one must act in these lands to earn for Germany a good reputation. You have, as I have seen in the other [Palestinian] colonies, earned honour for Germany here, as well as a good reputation for yourselves here and abroad, through your hard work and piety. You have shown how vigorously one must act to make barren fields fruitful once more . . . If any of you require my protection, I will be there. You may turn to me, irrespective of confession, and happily the German Empire is in the position to offer its enduring protection to its citizens abroad.79

The Kaiser’s equivocations disrupted neither the growing interest in the Templers’ plans for expansion nor the rising profile of these colonising endeavours in German civil society. In their periodicals, the Templers spoke of their hope that the Kaiser’s visit would spark an expansion in evangelical missionary activity; they also expressed the very material hope that the visit would strongly encourage German business ventures in Palestine.80 It was in support of this latter, materialist line which, in a long article in October 1898, the Hambürgischer Nachrichten also came out strongly in favour of expanding Germany’s colonial presence in Palestine, which the newspaper described as a site for German colonists where their characteristic ‘Germanness’ could be maintained. Referring to the millenarian dimension of Templer religion and the ‘zealots’ (Schwärmer) who had founded them in strictly historical terms, the newspaper commended them for their perseverance in the face of the land dispute with Ottoman authorities and their hard work which had transformed ‘the desert into an orchard’. It also praised the creation of the Palestine and Orient Society, which was attempting to create a German financial infrastructure in Palestine that would facilitate greater capital flows between Germany and the Palestinian colonies.81 With the attention that had been brought to these endeavours in Palestine by the Kaiser’s visit, it continued, the chances of a truly German colony in Palestine had greatly increased. In terms of a future site for ‘planned emigration’ to the region, the newspaper came out in favour of Haifa.82 Also directly resulting from the Kaiser’s visit was the establishment of the Stuttgart-based Society for the Assistance of German Settlers in Palestine with which this chapter opened, which represented the [ 158 ]

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Templers as ‘brave compatriots’, and the ‘vanguard of German work in the Orient’. Mindful of the Templers’ millenarian beliefs, in their subscription announcements seeking to increase the seed funding donated by the Kaiser and the King of Württemberg, the society’s leadership reassured the German public that many of the Templers had rejoined the mainstream of German Protestantism. As such, all Germans could in good conscience help to ‘play a role in Palestine and in German colonisation’.83 The Colonial Society also continued to lobby for support from the Foreign Office for the Templers on the basis of the imperial visit. ‘As a result of the journey of His Majesty the Kaiser to Palestine’, one letter began, ‘the attention of the people has been diverted to the settlements there of the German Temple Society and their importance to the future of German influence in the Orient has been made clear’. This letter, from the Stuttgart branch of the Colonial Society in 1899, urged the Foreign Office to address the ongoing problems experienced by the Templers in cooperation with the colonial lobby group’s committee, given that the Templer colonies were (in their eyes) inextricably linked to the future of German power in the Ottoman East.84 In the Reichstag, the Kaiser’s visit also framed the appeal of the Württemberg National Liberal Johannes Hieber to the then State Secretary of the Foreign Office, Bernhard von Bülow, who appealed for Foreign Office intercession to ensure the property rights of the ‘Swabian’ Templers. The assistance of the German government, Hieber argued, would represent ‘a welcome service to one of the best and oldest German colonising endeavour’.85 Bülow responded in the same Delphic manner as the Kaiser had in 1898, that ‘the endeavours of the Templers, whose colonies I visited personally a few months ago, have always met with particular interest. We will continue to support the interests of these colonies in the future where possible and those particular matters raised by the previous speaker will receive careful and sympathetic scrutiny.’86 By the end of 1898, the land issue was suddenly resolved with the Sultan decreeing that the Templers be issued with title deeds to all non-state land in their possession.87 This did not see the end of Templer appeals to Germany for ongoing support, however, as by this stage the Templers’ concerns had broadened to include not only their difficulties with local Ottoman authorities, but also the enormous financial resources of colonial rivals in the region, particularly Zionists, whose numbers had been swollen by the Russian pogroms of the early 1880s, and whose capacity to buy Palestinian land had been aided by the deep pockets of the Jewish philanthropist Edmond de Rothschild.88 Despite an early phase of mutual cooperation between Jews and Templers that [ 159 ]

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helped the latter secure a foothold in Palestine,89 with the advent of the Herzl-inspired wave of Zionists, a race for property and a concomitant real estate price boom took place, leading the Templers to call ever more shrilly for assistance to secure their position.90 In August 1899, the leader of the Templers Christoph Hoffmann II, urged all Germans to finance the expansion of the colony as a means of denying property to Zionist Jews, a call answered by Stuttgart’s Society for the Assistance of German Settlers in Palestine.91 By the turn of the century, however, Zionism was in the ascendancy and the German colonies were facing difficulties expanding,92 even if to outsiders such as the Manchester Guardian it still appeared as if ‘the Germans are quietly taking possession of Palestine’.93 Facing these new colonial pressures, a small number of Templers actually left Palestine, choosing instead to participate in the colonisation of German East Africa.94

Conclusion The convergence of secular imperialist plans for the colonisation of Palestine and those of the Templers, while successful in engendering German media, popular and to a certain degree political support, also had the long-term consequence of arousing the deep suspicion of the Sublime Porte. As the German consul in Pera reported to Chancellor Bülow in 1901, the embrace of the Pan-German League for the Templers’ idea that ‘Syria and Asia are a field for German colonisation’, together with its agitation in favour of the Baghdad Railway, had led to the Porte harbouring ‘a deep mistrust of all further land acquisitions by Germans and against the settlement of the Templers’ legitimate petitions’.95 Accordingly, from 1903 until the First World War, the Ottoman authorities continuously attempted to block German private sector and civil society efforts to support the expansion of the Templers’ Palestinian colonies.96 The German Templer community in Palestine often figured in pro-colonial and nationalist literature as an archetypal example of the hard work (Fleiß) and virtue (Tugend) of the Auslandsdeutsche. Similarly, the millenarian Templer sect was often quick to remind Germans, particularly in times of trouble, that its members too were German, and more specifically Swabian, and as such deserving of the support of the state and the empire. This positioning and self-positioning of the Templers was often strategic in nature, with German pro-colonial propagandists and the Templers themselves glossing over the radically religious teleology that had underwritten the colonial mission of the Templers, in an attempt to garner economic and political support for their Ottoman colonies. This was not all [ 160 ]

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disingenuous; as the Templer colonies matured, they had lost their initial radically chiliastic overtones,97 with their goals moderating towards ‘setting a good example’ through their superior technological capability, expanding their land holdings and restructuring the local economy in line with their own priorities: goals that were clearly understood and endorsed by nationalist–imperialist organisations such as the Colonial Society and the Pan-German League. If in the 1860s and 1870s the aims of German nationalist imperialists and the Templer religious colonists in the Holy Land were only tangentially related, by the turn of the century each had come to rely upon the other to support their efforts in aid of furthering Germany’s colonial penetration of Palestine. Nonetheless, something of the utopian, pan-Christian and antinationalist element of the Templers’ initial colonial project remained and would re-emerge in the twentieth century, albeit shorn of its chiliastic enthusiasm. After Germany’s loss in the First World War, and the confiscation of Germany’s formal state-run colonial empire, the Levantine imperial project of the Templers lost an important ally in the expansionist Wilhelmine imperialist milieu. The Templer colonies, however, outlived the Kaiserreich and remained in Palestine. It would take the cataclysmic events of the next World War to usher in the final chapter of the Templer colonies in the Holy Land. In 1941, the majority of the Templers were deported to Australia, where their religious communities still exist.98 It was not until 1956 that the last plot of Templer land in Palestine was sold, finally ending their hopes of realising their religious El Dorado in the Holy Land.99

Notes 1 ‘Aufruf zur Förderung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Palästina’, October 1899 in Bundesarchiv [BA] Berlin R901/31731. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 2003, 18–19. For an excellent discussion of how Germanists have approached Said’s pronouncement on German Orientalism, see Nina Berman, German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989, Ann Arbor, MI, 2011, 9–13; Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge, 2009. Also unconvinced of state-level plans for German imperialism in the Ottoman Empire is Friedrich Scherer, Adler und Halbmond: Bismarck und der Orient 1878–1890, Paderborn, 2001. 3 As a representative sample of this work, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms, Ann Arbor, MI, 2007; Berman, German Literature on the Middle East; Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900, Berlin, 1996; Jan Stefan Richter, Die Orientreise Kaiser Wilhelms II. 1898. Eine Studie zur deutschen Außenpolitik an der Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert, Hamburg, 1997; Abdel-Raouf Sinno, Deutsche Interessen in Syrien und Palästina 1841–1898, Berlin, 1982; Necmettin Alkan, Die deutsche Weltpolitik und die Konkurrenz der Mächte um das osmanische Erbe. Die deutsch–osmanischen Beziehungen in der deutschen Presse 1890–1909, Münster, 2003.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 4 Sean McMeekin, The Berlin–Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, Cambridge, 2010; Jonathon S. McMurray, Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway, Westport, CO, 2001. 5 On attempts to revive German interests in the ex-Ottoman territories after the First World War, see Francis R. Nicosia, ‘Drang Nach Osten Continued? Germany and Afghanistan during the Weimar Republic’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32(2), 1997, 236–8; Francis R. Nicosia, ‘Weimar Germany and the Palestine Question’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 24(1), 1979, 321–45. 6 For the number of colonists, see Alex Carmel, ‘Hoffmann, Christoph (1815–1885)’, in Gerhard Müller (ed.), Theologische Realenzyklopädie, pt 1, 15, Berlin, 1993, 473–5. 7 For more detailed studies of the Templers’ life in Palestine, see Alex Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer in Palästina 1868–1918, Stuttgart, 2000; Jakob Eisler (ed.), Deutsche in Palästina und ihr Anteil an der Modernisierung des Landes, Wiesbaden, 2008; Paul Sauer Uns rief das Heilige Land. Die Tempelgesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit, Stuttgart, 1985. For a corrective to Carmel’s Orientalising assumptions, see Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘Templers as Proto-Zionists? The “German Colony” in late Ottoman Haifa’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 28(4), 1999, 40–54. For a popular history from within the Templer community, see Helmut Glenk, From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges: The History of the German Templer Settlement of Sarona in Palestine 1871–1947, Victoria, 2005. 8 Richter, Die Orientreise Kaiser Wilhelms II, 3–4. 9 Jakob Eisler (ed.), Deutsche in Palästina und ihr Anteil an der Modernisierung des Landes, Wiesbaden, 2008. 10 For German imperialism before 1884, see Matthew P. Fitzpatrick Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884, New York, 2008; Bradley D. Naranch, ‘Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy and German National Identity, 1848–1871’, in E. Ames, M. Klotz and L. Wildenthal (eds), Germany’s Colonial Pasts, Lincoln, 2005, 21–40. 11 Between 1868 and 1875, Haifa, Jaffa, Sarona and Jerusalem were established; Wilhelma, Bethlehem and Waldheim between 1899 and 1914. 12 Ruth Kark and Naftali Thalmann, ‘Technological Innovation in Palestine: The Role of the German Templers’, in Haim Goren (ed.), Germany and the Middle East: Past Present and Future, Jerusalem, 2003, 201–24. 13 Verfassung der Tempelgesellschaft in BA Berlin, R901/30186. 14 On the missionary context, see BA Berlin R901/39548; Ruth Kark‚ ‘Missionary Societies in the Holy Land in an International Context’, in Eisler, Deutsche in Palästina, 14–29. 15 For more on the two models, see Martin Lückhoff, ‘Anfänge deutscher evangelischer Palästina-Arbeit’, in Eisler, Deutsche in Palästina, 1–13. 16 Peter Amann, ‘Prophet in Zion: The Saga of George J. Adam’, New England Quarterly, 37(4), 1964, 477–500; William Claiborne, ‘U.S. settlers in Palestine 100 years ago’, Washington Post, 4 October 1981, C3; Christoph Hoffmann, Nachricht über die Anfänge der Ansiedlung des Tempels im Heiligen Lande. Marbach a/R, Ph. Gattinger, 1870, 10–12, 26. 17 Alex Carmel, ‘The German Settlers in Palestine and Their Relations with the Local Arab Population and the Jewish Community 1868–1918’, in Moshe Ma’Oz (ed.), Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, Jerusalem, 1975, 456. 18 Christoph Paulus and Heinrich Aberle, ‘Plan zur Hebung des Orients durch christliche Colonisation zunächst in Palästina’, Elben, Stutgart, 1872, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart [HA Stuttgart], E14 Büschel [Bü] 1585. 19 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, New York, 1966. 20 Hartmann, Nachricht, 8; Paul Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land. Die Tempelgesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit, Stuttgart, 1985, 21; Roland Löffler, Protestanten in Palästina: Religionspolitik, Sozialer Protestantismus und Mission in den deutschen evangelischen und anglikanischen Institutionen des Heiligen Landes, 1917–1939, Stuttgart, 2008, 64–5; Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer, 10–23; Carmel, ‘German Settlers in Palestine’, 443; Yazbak, ‘Templers as Proto-Zionists?’, 40.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

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Hoffmann, Nachricht, 5. Ibid., 5–6. Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer, 16. In the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg the file on intelligence about the Templers is titled ‘Sekten und Schwärmer’ (sects and zealots). Hartmann, Nachricht, 13–14, Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer, 17–19. Christoph Paulus and Heinr[ich] Aberle, ‘Plan zur Hebung des Orients durch christliche Colonisation zunächst in Palästina’, Elben, Stutgart, 1872, HA Stuttgart, E14, Bü 1585. See HA Stuttgart, E14, Bü 1585, Sekten und Schwärmer (1818–87). Folder 3, particularly, Christopher Paulus (Vorsteher der Tempelgesellschaft Württemberg) to His Majesty King Karl from Württemberg, 4 June 1872, No. 5439, HA Stuttgart, E14, Bü 1585. Detailed at the time in ‘Nachrichten aus Palästina’, Die Warte, 17 August 1854, in Alex Carmel (ed.) Palästina-Chronik, 1853–1882. Deutsche Zeitungsberichte vom Krimkrieg bis zur ersten jüdischen Einwanderungswelle, Vaas Verlag Ulm, 1978, 29. ‘Orientposten’, Die Warte, 5 August 1886, in Alex Carmel (ed.) Palästina-Chronik, 1883 bis 1914, Langenau-Ulm, 1983, 84–5. HA Stuttgart, E14, Bü 1585. Carmel, ‘German Settlers in Palestine’, 443–4. Eisler, Deutsche in Palästina und ihr Anteil an der Modernisierung des Landes. Yazbak, ‘Templers as Proto-Zionists?’, 44–52. The influx of Jewish settlers at the end of the nineteenth century led the Ottoman government to reduce foreign land ownership. See Nachum T. Gross, ‘Die Deutsche Palästina Bank 1897–1914. Ein Forschungsfragment’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmungsgeschichte, 33, 1988, 149–77. William O. Henderson ‘German Economic Penetration in the Middle East, 1870–1914’, Economic History Review, 18(1/2), 1948, 54–64. Max Buchner, Kamerun: Skizzen und Betrachtungen, x, in John Philip Short (ed.), Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany, Ithaca, NY, 2012, 8. Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, Zionism, 1897–1918, Oxford, 1977, 3–4; William Otto Henderson, Studies in German Colonial History, London, 1962, 75–6. Friedrich List, Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie, Cotta’scher Verlag, Stuttgart, 1851, 397–8. As a großdeutsch nationalist, for List Austria’s gain was the gain of the entire German people. Alldeutscher Verband, Deutschlands Ansprüche an das türkische Erbe, Munich, 1896, 11–12. Kölnische Zeitung, 2 May 1885. See, for example, ‘Die Deutschen in Palästina’, National-Zeitung, 29 March 1888; Württembergische Landes-Zeitung, 5 May 1889; ‘Das deutsche Colonisationswerk in Palästina’ (untitled, undated), BA Berlin, R901/30179, 196. Alldeutscher Verband, Deutschlands Ansprüche an das türkische Erbe. Ibid., 4–5. Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 July 1884. N. J. Demerath III and Victor Thiessen, ‘On Spitting against the Wind: Organizational Precariousness and American Irreligion’ American Journal of Sociology, 71(6), 1966, 674–87, 682. Carmel, ‘German Settlers in Palestine’, 444. Ibid. See National-Zeitung, 4 July 1894. For an overview on European land acquisitions in Palestine, see Ruth Kark, ‘Changing Patterns of Land Ownership in Nineteenth Century Palestine: the European Influence’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19(4), 1984, 357–84. On Ottoman landholding practices more generally, see Lorenzo Kamel, ‘Whose Land? Land Tenure in Late Nineteenthand Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 41(2), 2014, 230–42. See, for example, Württembergische Landes-Zeitung, 5 June 1889.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 52 Berliner Tageblatt, 8 November 1893. 53 For details of Alldeutscher Verband support, see BA Berlin R901/30182. On the interest of the Kolonialgesellschaft in colonising Palestine, see BA Berlin R8203/485. 54 Auswärtiges Amt, Bericht über Lage und Verhältnisse der Deutschen in Palästina und Syrien, insbesondere der in der Küsten-Plätzen Jaffe, Haifa und Beirut angesiedlten deutschen Kolonisten [~1877], HA Stuttgart, Q3/55, Bü 67. 55 Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, 6 January 1895. 56 Commandant Graf von Hacke, ‘Betreffend den Schutz der Christen in Palästina [von 1877–1878]’, Auswärtiges Amt, HA, Stuttgart, Q3/55, Bü 68. 57 See HA Stuttgart, Q3/55, Bü 67 and Bü 68. 58 Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bd 138 1894/95, 14 January 1895, 322–3. The speech also discussed support for private sector and civil society German colonists in South America. 59 Marschall von Bieberstein in Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bd 138 1894/95, 11 February 1895, 807. 60 Ibid., 806–7. 61 Hermann Frese in Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bd 138 1894/95, 11 February 1895, 808. 62 See Carmel, Palästina-Chronik. 63 Nationalzeitung, 5 February 1895; Hamburgischer Correspondent, 12 April 1895 64 Nationalzeitung, 17 April 1895. 65 Kölnische Zeitung, 7 July 1895. 66 Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 August 1895. 67 For continuing press support for the Templers, see National-Zeitung, 2 February 1896. In this article the view is held that the land title issue was important, given German interests in the Middle East, its ‘current colonial endeavours’ and the growth in its population. 68 Franz Ludwig von Arenberg, in Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bd 144 1895/97, 14 February 1895, 960. 69 See, Auswärtiges Amt, HA Stuttgart, Q3/55, Bü 68. 70 Brode to Bethmann Hollweg, 14 November 1912, Ausärtiges Amt, HA Stuttgart, Q3/55, Bü 68. 71 National-Zeitung, 21 August 1895. 72 Ernst Hasse to the Foreign Office, 2 April 1898, in BA Berlin R901/30184. 73 Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, 6 March 1898. See also articles of 31 May 1898 and 6 July 1898, confirming that the land dispute was unresolved despite that ‘for six years the press, the Reichstag, the Foreign Office, the German ambassador and German consuls have all worked on it’. 74 Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 June 1898. 75 National Zeitung, 3 July 1898. 76 ‘Orientpost’, Die Warte, 17 February 1898, in Carmel, Palästina-Chronik, 200–1. 77 Paul Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land, 85. 78 ‘Die Kaisertage in Palästina’, Die Warte, 1 December 1898, in Carmel, PalästinaChronik, 206–8; ‘Die Kaisertage in Palästina (Fortsetzung II)’, Die Warte, 8 December 1898 (ibid., 213–14). 79 Norddeutsche AllgemeineZeitung, 3 November 1898; also reproduced in the Templer periodical, Die Warte, see: ‘Die Kaisertage in Palästina (Fortsetzung II)’, Die Warte, 8 December 1898, in Carmel, Palästina-Chronik, 213–14. 80 ‘Die Kaisertage in Palästina (Fortsetzung IV. und Schluß)’, Die Warte, 12 January 1899, in Carmel, Palästina-Chronik, 228–9. 81 On the Deutsche–Palästina Bank which grew from this enterprise, see Nachum T. Gross, ‘Die Deutsche Palästina Bank 1897–1914. Ein Forschungsfragment’ Zeitschrift für Unternehmungsgeschichte, 33, 1988, 149–77. 82 Hambürgischer Nachrichten, 21 October 1898. 83 ‘Aufruf zur Förderung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Palästina’ October 1899 in BA Berlin R901/31731. The appeal was repeated in 1904. See also Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land, 89.

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THE GERMAN TEMPLER COLONIES IN PALESTINE 84 Erwin von Ruppto (Foreign Office), 3 February 1899, BA Berlin R901/30185. 85 Johannes Hieber, 11 March 1899, in Verhandlungen des Reichstages Bd 166, 1898/ 1900, 1497–8. 86 Bernhard von Bülow, 11 March 1899 (ibid., 1498). 87 Helmut Glenk, Desert Sands to Golden Oranges, 30. Yuval Ben-Bassat argues that this was a direct result of the intervention of the German embassy in Istanbul (Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine, London, 2013, 160–1). 88 Carmel, ‘German Settlers in Palestine’, 458. 89 Ibid., 457. 90 Die Warte, 2 February 1898, 37; 21 April 1898, 122–3; 28 April 1898, 129–30. 91 Christoph Hoffmann II, 28 August 1899, BA, Berlin R901/30185 92 For consular and press reports on the competition with Zionists for land and the resulting real estate bubble, see BA Berlin R901/31731; R901/31732; R901/30181. See also Yazbak, ‘Templers as Proto-Zionists?’, 44–52; Carmel, ‘German Settlers in Palestine’, 461. This rivalry would continue until 1946, when radical Zionists murdered a prominent Templer, Gotthilf Wagner, who had instructed Templers not to sell their property to Jewish migrants. See Horst Blaich, Exiled from the Holy Land: The Loss of the Templer Settlements in Palestine and Deportation to Australia, 1941–1950, Victoria, 2009, 202–4. 93 Manchester Guardian, 1 May 1903, in BA Berlin R901/30187. 94 Helmut Glenk, Horst Blaich and Peter Gatter, Shattered Dreams at Kilimanjaro, Victoria, 2011; Paul Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land, 90; Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer, 70–1. 95 Pera to Bülow, 20 February 1901, in BA Berlin R901/30187. 96 Pera to Bülow, 26 April 1903, in BA Berlin R901/30187; see Tägliche Rundschau, 25 December 1907, on the deliberate Ottoman blocking measures to stop German expansion in Palestine and the subsequent consular discussions (BA Berlin R 901/ 31731; R901/31732; R901/31729). 97 Yazbak, ‘Templers as Proto-Zionists?’ 50. 98 Blaich, Exiled from the Holy Land; Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land, 380–91 99 Sauer, Uns rief das Heilige Land, 328.

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CHAPTER NINE

Italy’s sexual El Dorado in Africa Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Daniela Baratieri

The influence of songs on colonial recruitment. At the bases of all expansion, sexual desire. (Ennio Flaiano, Aethiopia. Appunti per una canzonetta 1935–36)

In February 2011 Silvio Berlusconi, the 75-year-old and longestserving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, was charged with paying the under-aged Moroccan Karima El Mahroug for sex. Berlusconi also faced charges for abuse of office in that he had arranged to have El Mahroug released from police custody during an incident in which she was accused of the theft of €3,000. While the investigators claimed to have evidence based on the lawful interception of mobile phone calls, Berlusconi’s lawyers denied the allegations, calling the investigation absurd and without foundation.1 The former Italian Prime Minister was found guilty on both charges in June 2013, although due to his age he did not risk jail for his offences. Later that year the cartoonist Alessio Spataro depicted a porcine Berlusconi standing alongside the famous Italian journalist Indro Montanelli who in his youth in the mid-1930s had also indulged in sex with an under-aged girl, in his case a 12-yearold Eritrean temporary wife, a madama.2 In different interviews over his distinguished if controversial career Montanelli had often mentioned his child mistress: ‘I think I made a good choice’, he once recounted, ‘she was a beautiful girl, Milena . . . this wife would also arrive with a basket on her head full of my laundry’.3 A decade later he remembered that She was twelve years old . . . but at that age those girls down there were already women. I bought her at Saganeiti together with a horse and a rifle, everything for five hundred lire. She was a docile little beast. I built her a tucul with chickens. Every fifteen days she would reach me wherever I was stationed with the other ascari’s wives.4

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Before returning to Italy, Montanelli entrusted his madama, sometimes referred to as Milena, at others Fatima,5 to the small personal harem of General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli.6 These tawdry episodes divided by sixty years of Italian history shed light on the dynamics of the international sex industry or sex tourism7 where, in most cases, men from rich and developed countries travel abroad to gratify desires, which they find cannot be fulfilled at home. Interestingly, the El Mahroug affair revealed that Berlusconi referred to the bawdy parties where his offences took place as ‘bunga bunga’, apparently associating thereby his unconventional sexual behaviour with ‘an African style ritual’.8 The liminal essence of sexual tourism, broken in this instance by Berlusconi’s escapades being located in Italy, was nevertheless restored by the use of such ‘African’ terminology and without doubt El Mahroug’s presumed exoticism also played its part. Conceptions of margins, liminality and deviance are well-established tools used in anthropology to interpret fringe groups in society. Victor Turner, for example posited that ‘The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae are necessarily ambiguous, since the condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.’9 Historically, nowhere has such a vast liminal, marginal and deviant space existed as with Europe’s colonial empires. Europeans literally made of entire continents a liminal and ambiguous reality whose populations were deemed to inhabit a state of betwixt and between. Although necessarily regarded as human, the indigenous of Europe’s empires were nevertheless not considered to be as human as Europeans and it followed that in their regard European social mores and rules, especially with regard to sex, did not fully apply. Historian of the British Empire Ronald Hyam summarises the situation in this way: ‘The expansion of Europe was not only a matter of Christianity and commerce, it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage. Sexual opportunities were seized with imperious confidence.’10

Beginnings of Italian colonialism Yet there was always ambivalence in such predation. What, after all could justify European territorial possession if that liminal space was closed by whites themselves? Holding to the rules of the homeland was surely what made Europeans European? When in the 1880s Italy embarked on its first round of African colonisation, in the British Empire, according to Hyam, the idea that the white man abroad could legitimately shack up with some indigenous woman encountered in situ, indeed that one of the boons of the imperial venture lay in the [ 167 ]

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supposed laxity of the empire’s sexual mores compared to the straitlaced Victorian homeland, was coming to a close. Around the 1880s a generalised ‘laxity’, Hyam argues, was replaced by ‘the enthronement of flaccid respectability’.11 Imperial functionaries and settlers were no longer excused for falling prey to the temptations of their exotic surroundings but were expected to maintain a sexual aloofness, tinged with a healthy and uplifting racism. Indeed the very justification of Empire had moved on from the days in which lascivious nabobs made the rules. As Christopher Bayly puts it with reference to India: ‘The flourishing, if dubious Anglo-Indian partnerships of the eighteenth century were discouraged in the new age of Victorian probity.’12 As Britain itself democratised, the Empire was meant to be a force for a kind of common good rather than a mere commercial enterprise, and the empire’s functionaries now justified their hold on power with an ethos of service, discipline and self-control. Stiff upper lips, cricket, clubs and meticulous separateness were, in theory anyhow, taking the place of satrapy and seduction. The Italians made their first move into Africa precisely when this Victorian probity was becoming the norm in the British imperial context, supplanting the utopia of sexual excess which preceded it. This chapter will investigate a fundamental drive that indirectly supported Italian expansionist lusts in Eritrea, Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia. Officially Italy joined the Scramble for Africa to ‘secure the air for Italy’s lungs’13 as put by Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in the 1890s. In 1911 operetta singer Gea Della Garisenda, draped just in the national flag, performed at the Theatre Belbo in Turin proclaiming Tripoli to be Italy’s ‘land of love’.14 Covetous Italians labelled that part of North Africa as Italy’s ‘fourth shore’. The acclaimed poet Giovanni Pascoli celebrated the conquest stating in a celebrated speech that, ‘the great proletarian nation has stirred . . . Italy, the great martyr among nations, has done its duty and contributed to the advancement and civilisation of the peoples, and asserted its right not to be penned in and suffocated in its own waters.’15 In the 1920s, Fascism ‘pacified’ the ‘fourth shore’, adding to the colonial venture ancient Roman flavour, but the methods used to suppress the resistance of the local population were very much the product of the twentieth century. In 1936 with Ethiopia added to Italy’s tally of African colonies Benito Mussolini declared the era of the ‘Fascist empire because it carries the indestructible signs of the Roman lictor’s will and might . . . The Italian people have created an empire with their blood. They will fertilise it with their work and will defend it against anybody with arms.’16 For all the bluster, or perhaps because of it, the ‘least of the great powers’ found it inordinately difficult to match political, economic and [ 168 ]

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strategic promise with reality. Italy’s colonies were poor and rebellious, territories that had been passed over with indifference by the real colonial players Britain and France, who had bagged Africa’s choice pickings long before. Doggedly, Italy persisted to hold to its dream, imagining wealth where there was none, fresh water instead of sand, farmland despite deserts, and compliant natives despite constant guerrilla war. There was always sex; it perforce allured Italian men into the continent more than anything else. This sexual El Dorado, however, was tied to a phase of Italian colonial expansion much as had been the case when British or Dutch empires got off the ground.17 Things began to change, although fleetingly for Italians who lost control of their African possessions during the Second World War, once the colonies needed to be administered and organised. The utopia of sexual excess was becoming a bitter dystopia. Racial intermingling, even in brothels or in the privacy of household concubinage, was no longer deemed acceptable. Disciplining the intimate acquired great political importance and abolishing the liminal space of a colony in the making got on the agenda. But the Italian empire would not last long enough to fully experience the impact of the racial laws and Fascist segregationist policies. It never quite emerged from its expansionist phase, never passing, as was the case for Britain’s or the Netherlands’ colonies, to a more restrained and controlled phase of consolidation. In this chapter Italy’s African colonies, it is argued, provided Italian men with an El Dorado of sexual excess, a place outside the boundaries and mores regulating sexuality in the metropolis. Indigenous girls were deemed to be ‘already made’ by the age of 10 or 11, bigamy was allowed, rape and homosexuality tolerated and slavery overlooked. As a ‘latecomer’ in the European colonial orgy Italy only very belatedly sought to regulate the sexual contact that was becoming frowned upon in the British imperial context. Italians seized sexual opportunities in Africa almost as if to make up for lost time. Yet, as in all El Dorado myths, there was a discrepancy between the dream utopia and the reality of African sexploitation. Historian Alessandro Triulzi described this continent as imagined by Italians while they sought to possess parts of it: [it was] a schematic and stereotypical image of a continent where women are dissolute, and the men either layabouts or warriors. Nor arts, nor crafts, nor production of riches or knowledge, nor towns or agricultural businesses – only prostitutes and fanatics with a spear in their hand . . . Out of context, projected on a dream like horizon, portrayed on neutral backgrounds, the colonial fictional male and female Africans work to plan: the women are there to be conquered and the wars to be won.18

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Images in photo galleries This image was not only available to those that travelled to the Dark Continent but was becoming ever more viewable at home. In 1888–89 Italy’s move into Africa also coincided with the birth of the first portable photographic machines, the Kodak-Eastman camera. As Asa Briggs put it: ‘photography brought the Empire into the home’19 and documented European expansion in detail. In her classic study Susan Sontag drew attention to the fact that photography immediately established itself as a means to empower some and to dominate others. ‘The photographic act’ she wrote, ‘has something of the predatory. To photograph people amounts to violate them by looking at them like they will never be able to look at themselves, having a consciousness which they may never have; it is the same as transforming them in an object which can be symbolically possessed.’20 Libya’s coastal area, for example, imbued by Muslim probity, for Italian colonists became an extension of orientalist visions with inviting women wrapped in veils21 or locked away but enticingly held captive in the harem.22 A Florentine countess, Onorina Bargagli Petrucci’s photographs testify to this. In 1932 she travelled to Tripolitania on a botanical expedition, in which she took photographs and wrote a memoir. The pictures pass from those near Tripoli of Arab notables’ wives in harems, to those of Sebha’s oasis where there lived ‘shriveled and wrinkled old women, with henna red hair, who looked exactly like witches in children’s fairytales [and where] the youngest and more beautiful were reserved’,23 to those of Murzuk, in the Fezzan, depicting a brothel with half-naked women adorned with jewellery, stating in a caption, ‘There is no sin where there is no malice’.24 East African women were the most photographed subject by the colonising Italians,25 which produced a flourishing market of postcards and photos at home. Already from the first years of Eritrea’s colonisation, postcards and photos of extremely young local beauties circulated among Italian men: the dancers of Massawa officers’ club or naked ‘female types’. This iconographic production dates back to Luigi Naretti, Italy’s ‘first real [Italian] colonial photographer’26 who resided in Eritrea in the years up to the turn of the twentieth century. Naretti became internationally famous with all sort of African photographs. Analysing this growing production, one may concur with Silvana Palma in noting a normalisation of reality in stereotypical and reified pictures aimed to ‘satisfy the voyeuristic taste of potential buyers’ to convey ‘a knowledge of the African other, that in itself was an instrument of control and appropriation’.27 As Gabriella Compassi and Maria Teresa Sega point out: [ 170 ]

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The black woman became the symbol for Africa . . . the relationship between the white man and the black woman became symbolic of the imperial–colonial nation: the man is he who gives his fertilising and reviving virility, the woman is she who receives from this enrichment the realisation of herself as complementary to the expansion of the masculine ego.28

The Italian popular image of Africa of those years fits Anne McClintock’s outline of a porno-tropics tradition,29 that is, a cultural trend that, from the age of discovery, from the sixteenth century onwards, erotised the colonial space superimposing on the land to be conquered the image of women, fertile and inert to subjugation. In this setting one can distinguish three genres of photographs: pornographic, ethnographic and ‘bourgeois’. Pornographic pictures were taken in brothels and hospitals for syphilitics, created for an Italian clientele, but also in photographic studios, far away from Italy where penal sanctions were applied on such activities since 1861. Nonetheless, Italy, together with France and Austria, was among the biggest consumer of these products.30 This promoted the diffusion of an idea of Africa as a territory where everything was permissible. Naretti took many pictures of this kind. The photo ‘Sifilicomio di Massaua’, portraying eleven naked women, four in inviting poses, as if advertising this site of prostitution, can be added to studio-created nudes of ‘black Venuses’: girls completely naked, embellished with necklaces and bracelets, depicted in sexual poses. These kinds of pictures do not tell us the name of the woman or anything about her identity. Stripped and deprived of any individuality, these girls are sexual objects and their body reigns sovereign. This is also true for those pictures classified according to their racial or ethnic origins. It is not surprising that the juxtaposition of exoticism and eroticism, sustained also by the cultural milieu, ended in fully justifying violence with sexual intent: The reading of the diversity of sexual rules and mores in terms of licentiousness and moral laxity . . . reveals itself as capable of orientating also the application of the law through sentences that those prejudices and stereotypes tend to strengthen. In one of the first and rare trials for rape, at Massawa, against an Italian indicted of violence towards a nine years old girl, the tribunal’s sentence granted the accused extenuating circumstances in view of the local laxity of morals.31

Pornography sold so well, that specialised firms were set up, such as the Edizioni Artistiche Fotocine in Mogadishu, whose production extended well beyond sexually explicit material.32 As late as 1935, when Italian soldiers took ship to the Dark Continent to conquer [ 171 ]

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Ethiopia, many carried photographs of nude African women in their pockets, a legacy of Italy’s previous colonial adventures, apparently distributed by the government to get willing recruits.33 The most recurrent and long-lasting image was that of young Somali women, depicted as seducing and provocative towards the male audience, very often with bare breasts, posing as oriental odalisques. Analysing the advertising industry under Fascism, Karen Pinkus concurs, asserting: Of all the African women encountered by Italians down there, it was almost universally agreed that the Somali were the most desirable, in a sense because their beauty was perceived to be only an exaggeration of whiteness, and not a degenerate opposite of it.34

In particular Pinkus points out that in publicity it was the ‘smoothness’ of Somali women’s bodies which was stressed. The explorer Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti in 1899 gave this ethnographic account suffused with eroticism: In those young Somalis we discover a combination of Greek and Roman femininity mixed with the lean profile and the warm and smooth tonality of that particular colour proper to Arab blood. Seeing them, I involuntarily compared them to the vivid and beautiful Jewish figures that radiate with loveliness and soft grace from the canvasses of Van Dyck and Caracciolo. This is how Raphael imagined the Virgin of the Marriage, like Rebecca at the well or Judith with the head of Holofernes. But in these brown and graceful daughters of the sun, blossoming like gentle flowers in those tropical hothouses, we find, again, a mellowness of forms, a fullness of lines, and a vague sweetness of expression that rouse the blood with acute fascination . . . from the tiny, oblong head, to the soft, ample and voluptuous curves of the thighs, to their rounded breasts, upright and turgid, which jut forth from the cloths that, in vain, try to constrain them.35

These sorts of description are counterpoints to the Hottentot Venus type, pathologically with steatopygia, or, put more simply, with protruding buttocks: the epitome of degeneracy.36 Bricchetti, together with his contemporaries, had absorbed nineteenth-century racist scientific discourse which linked ‘abnormality’ of the buttocks with malformed genitalia, and thus associated black sexuality in general with ideas of disorder and disease. Next to the pictures of local beauties, in fact there was another kind in which the black woman was again reduced to be a mere object of the scientist’s gaze, but in a completely different way. The black feminine body is studied in its specific racial traits and sexuality recedes from prominence. This discourse was diffused through specialised scientific journals, as well as through more popular magazines. In this way nineteenth-century [ 172 ]

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anthropological or criminological categories to classify human ‘types’ entered the Italian collective imaginary. It is not so much acclimation to a foreign sexuality, but to the primitive nature of entire populations and to their deemed inferior evolution. On one hand black beauty is in a contest with the Italian one. Lei, an Italian women’s magazine of the 1930s, explains: We must remember that we live in an age in which black beauty has upset white beauty to which we had previously attributed supremacy: blacks have silky skin, not only on their legs, but over their entire bodies, like a sweater. Just look at Josephine Baker! She is nude, but her nudity is dressed. And since Europeans cannot transform themselves into Antilleans or Senegalese they invented stockings and they show them with pride . . . Oh competition!37

On the other hand, with growing intolerant and aggressive racism, which became law in 1937, the scientific gaze was classifying and splitting humanity into contradictorily defined categories.

Sciarmutte38 or prostitutes Gianluca Gabrielli explains: In Italian expansion in the Horn of Africa this aspect of Italian domination, connected to its essentially male character, employed two different forms on the bases of the social class of origin of the white man: the sciarmuttismo, indigenous prostitution reserved for soldiers and ordinary workers, and the madamato, the temporary rental of an indigenous woman, or more often a girl, who was purchased and maintained by the officer or functionary.39

Italian colonialism made a rigid separation between legal and clandestine prostitution by trying to break the traditional links between sewa and tej40 drinking houses and prostitution and by labelling prostitutes as carriers of disease. The colonial government attempted to segregate them in distinct areas of the city and began a vigorous operation to criminalise clandestine sex work. At the time when street patrolling increased, another law regulating prostitution was decreed in 1916 to segregate prostitutes in a town’s particular areas ‘established by the regional police station’ and each controlled by an older woman, called the caporala [she corporal].41 Close watch and surveillance were exercised over native quarters’ prostitutes by the colonial authorities, which included doctors and zaptie.42 This was done ‘to avoid the spread of venereal disease and syphilis’ and fight clandestine prostitution.43 Francesca Locatelli talks of a ‘venereal disease syndrome’ affecting the Ministry of the Colonies in its attempt to enforce stricter control [ 173 ]

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over the activities of the native quarters.44 Measures against venereal diseases were rather flawed in their purpose, which ended up being an excuse for severe repression of native activities. As prophylaxis, finding a personal madama was favoured even by the government up to the mid-1930s. The madama inhabited a zone that shared much with prostitution, although distinguished from it as a superior way of not having to recur to common sciarmutte.

Madama or concubine From the very beginning in the Italian colonies there were temporal unions of conjugal character between coloniser men and colonised women. This phenomenon was called madamato in Eritrea or Ethiopia and mabruchismo45 in Libya. The 1905 law regulating the colony of Eritrea, besides setting out that a subject native woman married to an Italian citizen did not qualify her for citizenship (art.15), prohibited an Italian woman from marrying a subject or assimilated native man (art.74).46 The numbers of mixed-race children, born during the Italian occupation, indirectly testify to the magnitude of the phenomenon.47 As late as 1935 one could read in a popular travel account: For who doesn’t know, the madama Eritrea has many points of similarity, apart from a greater dignity, with the menagères of the Belgian or French equatorial Africa, as well as Indochinese ‘little wives’. The madama, in other words, is the provisional native partner of the Colonialist who lives in Africa . . . these unions between a white and an indigenous woman have nothing immoral about them. According to ancient Christian-Coptic customs, the marriage dämòz, or for merchandise, is considered, in fact, to be perfectly legitimate.48

Barbara Sòrgoni explains why the colonial leitmotiv legitimising the madamato by equating it to the dämòz, a local form of temporary marriage, was untenable. First, only the Amharic people among the Tigrinya plateau populations, the majority of whom in any case lived outside Italian territory, practised the dämòz. Among the populations of the South-West there was a form of marriage which could last a long time or be interrupted, but did not have an institutional character. Second, the dämòz bound the man with clear obligations towards the spouse including maintenance and provision of an inheritance for children issuing from the marriage. No institutional protection was afforded to concubines, who could be abandoned for no reason and without any means of subsistence.49 As an example one might mention Lieutenant Amedeo Guillet, the last Italian to continue fighting, at the head of his ascari, against the British in ex-Italian East Africa. Although [ 174 ]

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when Guillet first went to Africa he was engaged in Italy to a certain Bice Gandolfo, after some time in the colony he paired up with the 17-year-old and ‘beautiful’ Kadija from Semien in Ethiopia. Guillte lived and fought with the latter until his return to Italy whereupon, abandoning his African madama, he married in 1945 his former fiancée Bice Gandolfi.50 As Ann Laura Stoler points out ‘miscegenation signaled neither the presence nor absence of racial discrimination; hierarchies of privilege and power were written into the condoning of interracial unions, as well as into their condemnation’.51 Photography offers a mirror for this situation with officers getting their madame, for example, to pose sitting by a little table and fully clothed in bourgeois European dresses, as if they were young ladies of distinction back home. Interestingly from these depictions, in which the madama’s children seldom appear, what is invariably absent is the Italian ‘husband’. By comparing such an absence to contemporary middle-class Italian family portraits (where the husband was always present and often standing up) one understands that the white man’s relationship with the madama, for all its supposed ‘legality’ and respectability, was needs hidden to those that mattered back home.52 In fact things were frequently less than honourable. Legal expert Gennaro De Stefani was more honest than the sham portraits of heavily clad madame Italian officers and functionaries were fond of keeping in their wallets. De Stefani wrote in 1907 Who does not know that today, in the shadow of our honest civilisation, behind the bulwark of our pure intentions, of our dignity, one can have a girl not yet deflowered for a few pennies?53

It was a sexual El Dorado for old men also: according to an excolonial Italian, the colony ‘was a paradise for old men’ who could take advantage of girls as young as 12.54 Indigenous women were literally like prizes to be distributed in a raffle. As part of what came to be known in the Italian press as the ‘Massawa scandals’ of the 1890s, a local Arab businessman Kantibai Aman was murdered in a Massawa jail and his considerable riches distributed among the officers of the Italian colony. He also happened to possess five young wives (now widowed). Deprived of their husband, it was decided that these women were to be considered part of Aman’s confiscated property. To ensure a fair distribution governor of Eritrea general Antonio Baldissera resolved that: Tomorrow, at evening muster, those gentleman subaltern officers of indigenous troops stationed at Asmara who desire to participate in the raffle of the wives of Kantibai Aman must present to the commanding

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officer an application on plain paper stating the following: ‘the undersigned (indicate the rank and the battalion to which the officer belongs) desires to take with him one of the former wives of Kantibai Aman and undertakes to maintain and treat her well.’

For the record, an officer present at the lottery, Oreste Calamai reported that, ‘lieutenant medic Virdia proved the most fortunate among the raffle participants as fate would have it that the most attractive of the five girls was allotted to him’.55 Neglected and deserted women were particularly vulnerable. In the case of the violent rape of the 9-year-old Desta Basià Ailù, the accused Pietro Di Cesare, although he had concealed and imprisoned the girl for several days in his house against her will, was only charged with rape and not kidnapping. He was eventually granted extenuating circumstances in view of the fact that the girl had been previously abandoned.56 Often Italians also resorted to explicit deception, marrying indigenous women exclusively in Church, which to the ‘wives’ appeared as an indissoluble marriage, but which Italians knew (before the Lateran’s Pacts of 1929) to be non-binding according to Italian law. In 1899 Governor of Eritrea Ferdinando Martini pressed the Franciscan missionary Michele da Carbonara not to perform any more of these ‘sham’ ceremonies, insisting that the whites’ prestige and authority, as well as the ‘propaganda of the Catholic mission’ was at stake.57

Mulatti or métis Few Italians were good fathers considering their predilection to abandon the offspring produced by these ‘marriages’. By Italian law if the Italian father recognised the child, it would automatically have acquired Italian citizenship. The census of 1931 put the number of mixed-race Italian citizens in Eritrea to little over 500 in an Italian population of 4,200.58 There is no way of knowing how many métis were left unrecognised, but without doubt there were far more. Although Martini had recorded that fathers were increasingly providing for their children59 it would appear that the number of children brought back to Italy by their fathers was extremely small.60 Interestingly, a law of 1914,61 which states that métis could not become colonial officials, suggested that the mixed-race population was acquiring an unwelcome status in colonial society. Legislation in 1933 for Eritrea and Somalia confirmed that métis children once recognised by their Italian fathers automatically gained Italian citizenship. It also established exclusive parameters for children of unknown parents. Those whose ‘physical

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characteristics . . . indicate that both parents were of white race’ automatically obtained Italian citizenship; while those who appeared to be biracial could gain Italian citizenship only if a judge considered them worthy of it.62 By 1936 the new law for Italian East Africa cancelled out these possibilities.63 Four years later64 the young ItaloAfrican community was even excluded from schools and educational institutions that had been expressively created for them throughout the colonial period.65 S. G. di Mirandola, Modena, who left for Africa in 1935, remembers: The majority of Italians, there in Mogadishu, was without wife, and had the so-called madama, a local woman, for service, but also to live together. I had one for all the time I was there without any problem, because I pretended she was a domestic servant and nobody could check. I also had a child with a Somali woman. One was not allowed to marry between whites and blacks. Everyone had found a loophole; some would take a woman just for a day or night and would pay her depending on the situation, but they were all illegal unions. My daughter was born in 1938. I could not legitimise her immediately, because of the racial laws. In 1940, when I was recalled, I put my daughter in a nuns’ institute, because the mother wanted to move back with her family in the interior. So that the mission would put my daughter up I legitimised her. There are too many children in that condition and religious people could not host them all. I returned to Italy with a bit of nostalgia.66

Slaves In the Italian colony of Somalia, one of the most pressing issues in the Italian press was how far Italian rule (which had begun in the 1880s) had stamped out slavery. In 1903 parliamentarian and journalist Gustavo Chiesi travelled to Somalia on an official enquiry and discovered documents attesting to the fact that slaves were being bought and sold under the very nose of Italian district commissioners, in the markets of Brava, Merca and Mogadishu. When he interviewed some Somali notables, documents in hand, asking what justified them in so openly flouting the authorities, the bemused evil-doers stated the following: ‘Given that the whites, your brothers, were buying our girls, we did not think it wrong to buy and sell slaves seeing as there is no law against the practice.’ Chiesi objected: ‘The whites are buying those women to set them free.’ The Somalis retorted: ‘Not at all, they bought them for their pleasure, to make them into surie (concubines), not to redeem them. Why did they not buy old women too? Or the destitute? Or indeed men?’67

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Poverty: homosexuals, transvestite and diavoletti The anti-colonialist memoirs of the labourer Tertulliano Gandolfi, who travelled to Eritrea seeking work in 1889, provide interesting reading in terms of how Italians regarded sexual opportunity in the colony. In the first few pages of his 1910 book Gandolfi sets out the aims of mulling over his time in Africa: ‘to show that we Italians have brought to those lands nothing but desperate poverty, rape, and civilisation from the barrel of a gun’.68 In Eritrea he witnessed the famine that gripped East Africa between 1889 and 1891. A shantytown inhabited by thousands of desperate and starving Ethiopians grew up near Massawa. Gandolfi was horrified to see the festivities at the ‘officers’ club’ while a few hundred metres away skeletal children sifted through camel droppings in the hope of finding a few grains of sorghum. Any crumbs of food thrown in the direction of these starving wretches by Italians were only derisory payments for the gratification of the monstrous sexual licentiousness of Italian officers and soldiers, free of the constraining morals of home. ‘I once saw, in full daylight’, Gandolfi noted, ‘a junior officer bugler, like an animal in heat, bent over and raping a sickly child, nothing more than skin and bone and less than eight years of age’.69 Among the Italians resident in Massawa, there was much talk of the ‘hidden beauties’ to be found among the starving. According to Gandolfi after a good meal an evening’s ‘entertainment’ for officers and men of the Italian garrison was to be had in the shantytown. There in the midst of this mass of bones still holding on to living souls, hunger and disease took a horrendous toll (If some individuals escaped the clutches of death it was not due to charity of the whites but the generosity of some blacks who lived in the neighbourhood). In this ocean of suffering some girls and boys were to be found who, despite such a calamity, still gave the illusion of having preserved their virginal purity and this had excited the bestial lusts of the white men. The latter swept into the camp, sniffing the air like hyenas set on their prey, and armed with a few coppers or a crust of bread, proceeded to pillage these poor innocents abandoned by humanity and by God. During the day it was the lower class Italians who committed these heinous acts and at night it was the turn of the well to do . . . the signori, who like wild beasts needed the protection offered by darkness . . . Towards evening the civilised would descend, like white vultures to their prey, seeking to gorge themselves on the tender flesh.70

The entrepreneurial spirit of the Italian migrant was also at play in this hellish description of Massawa. One, an Italian transvestite, was no doubt a colourful character, but the humour with which he is described serves only to set off the undercurrent of violence and depravity which was gripping the colony: [ 178 ]

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In the camp, a Romagnolo (around forty years old with a big and square shaped head) had set up a ‘tavern’ he commanded with his mezzo-soprano voice. You could see him dressed in the get up of a rich Ethiopian woman, or a music hall dancer . . . with his wrists and ankles heavy with silver bracelets. When he was thus made up you could hear him exclaim with some sadness that he would have paid anything to have been a girl and then he really could have had fun . . . He had become the unquestioned leader of the poor women around the camp . . . Around his neck, along with a host of images of saints and Madonnas, he always carried a whistle with which [at the approach of a client] he called to muster the poor souls he referred to as ‘his little girls’.71

Another fast developing institution jibed at ironically by Gandolfi was that of i diavoletti or little devils, indigenous boys between the age of 10 and 20 who rented themselves out to the lonely Italian men stationed in the colony. By the early 1890s it had become common practice for each Italian soldier to have a special Ascaro to ‘warm him’ in his tent and it was meant to be funny that at balls to celebrate some patriotic festivity in Italy i diavoletti would sit ‘with the air of honest maidens waiting for their cavalieri to invite them to dance’.72 Such was the affection for these little devils that, according to Gandolfi the fame of Italians, of their glorious heritage and their military virtues had spread like wildfire throughout Abyssinia to the point that it was being touted around that to win any war against them all that was required was a hundred diavoletti ready to bare their arses at the appropriate moment.73

If the madamato remained an unspoken subject in Italy, homosexuality was simply taboo. Legally, the penal code of the Sardinian Kingdom, promulgated in 1839 and issued in 1859 in anticipation of its extension throughout united Italy, punished (with article 425) ‘libidinous acts against nature’ where they involved violence, such as rape, abuse of incapacitated persons, as well as sex with a minor of 12. The 1859 Code came into effect in 1860 and remained the penal code of the new Italian state until 1889. Peculiarly, just when the Code was extended to Italy’s southern regions and Naples article 425 was abrogated.74 The commission studying the extension of the law explained that these provinces could not ‘renounce some legal traditions which were compatible with scientific progress’.75 Stefano Bolognini suggests that in the southern provinces a phase of homosexual behaviour was taken for granted as part of any individual’s development.76 Interestingly, in the Italian South it seems that the label homosexual or ‘pederast’ was applied only to the ‘sexually passive’ individual or the one who accepted anal coitus, while those practising anal sex in the active role were considered maschio or men.77 At the same time the new order, [ 179 ]

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while it did not punish homosexuality within the home, criminalised public soliciting. The Zanardelli penal code of 1889 continued in this vein, not including anything specific about homosexuality and Fascism perfected this path attempting to make homosexuality invisible by negating its existence. In 1931 no article on homosexuality was inserted in the Rocco Code in order not to ‘sully the image of the new Italy, strong and male’.78 During Fascism, a few hundred passive ‘sodomites’ were sent to exile in remote locations or confino and in 1936 as part of the campaign ‘In Defence of the Race’, homosexuality became the object of a specific legal intervention that saw many homosexuals sent to the confino.79 As far as the colonies are concerned, Giulietta Stefani comments: ‘The general scarcity and the dubious nature of hints made about the homoerotic and homosexual reality in the Italian colonies prevents an interpretation of these texts that goes beyond the observation of taboo and stigmatization concerning the subject.’80 She quotes from Mitrano Sani’s Femina Somala, a novel on the relationship between an Italian officer, Ettore Andriani, and his madama, Elo, which was banned after 1938, to enquire into colonial homosexuality: ‘I know, you would like to tell me the usual little story of the officials from the forts who need a safety valve to avoid the nasty consequences of onanism or homosexuality; which have been indulged in and always have been despite the regulations.’81 Again she looks at Walter Pierelli Le mie tre guerre in Africa Orientale to ascertain the ambiguity in the relationships between army officers and their subordinates and the ascari’s generally negative attitude towards homosexuality. In his book Pierelli mentions a certain colonel Trocchio, referring possibly to the then colonel Ruggero Tracchia, who attempted to enlist youngand good-looking natives.82 Traces of the phenomenon can be gauged from Nicola Labanca’s collection of colonial life histories published in 2001. For example, in one extract, Aldo Polcri describes the intimate relationship between an officer and his impiastrino or little nuisance (so I call my little negro) who becomes every day more attached to me . . . if I did not have my music and my little negro, the little chocolate as he is called by general Marchi, I could not take it. In the difficult moments when nostalgia for Italy is overpowering, I ask to be embraced by those little black arms and I put my face next to that beautiful black face, and so I feel tender and good.83

Adriano Pedemonte instead tries in its own way to explain male prostitution: There was also a local male prostitution, due to the fact (I don’t know if what has been told to me is true) that according to their religion during the coitus the sperm should not go outside the human body. So not to

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impregnate their wife, the man was terminating his function working off his orgasm in the anal orifice of a young boy. These young boys, sometimes still children, would publicly prostitute themselves. On the street they would come close to us soldiers, literally saying aloud: ‘I stay arse in the air (franculino), would you like me for ten liras’. I was told by marshal Poverelli that the ascari despised those commanders who used not just women, but also men.84

Fascism and the racial laws The reputation of the Italian colonies as a sexual El Dorado, a utopia of sexual excess, increased by leaps and bounds. After Libya’s conquest, the phenomenon extended to the new territories. On 17 May 1932 Rodolfo Graziani, Cyrenaica’s governor, sent out a circular from Bengasi, which repatriated four officers because they had been involved with local women. The governor stated: The mabruchismo is a scourge which has plagued the colony and of which traces of nostalgia remain, that I absolutely want to eradicate . . . On their part the officers in charge and regional authorities, will try to meet the sexual needs of the troops providing, wherever possible, brothels where they are lacking.85

By the time Mussolini was in power and the conquest of Ethiopia had, in 1935, become a stated aim of the regime, Italy’s small colonial holdings had become permanently associated with sexual laxity, or for Italian men sexual opportunity. ‘Faccetta nera’, the song topping the charts when half a million Italians made the journey to Africa, was about the Italian Army liberating ‘a little black face’ from slavery. Nicoletta Poidimani comments on the existence of chocolates called Faccetta nera as emblematic of the cannibalisation or desire to swallow Africa.86 If in 1935 the government distributed photographs of naked African women to its soldiers to spur them on, by May 1936 Mussolini’s proclamation of the Empire and fears of ‘racial disorder’ brought to life a new phase in the Fascist campaign to create a national character, embodied by a language of difference. On 21 May an article appeared in the Gazzetta del Popolo entitled ‘The Italian Empire cannot be an Empire of mix-raced mulattos’;87 in June on the first page of the same newspaper was Paolo Monicelli’s ‘Wives and Oxen from your own country’88 (an old Italian saying implying it was better to never marry outsiders); while on 23 May the regime’s determination to separate the natives from Italian colonists become known internationally. The same day a journalist of the News Chronicle wrote about the strange coincidence of the banning of ‘Faccetta nera’ and the disappearance of postcards of young African women from shop [ 181 ]

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windows. By royal decree, n. 880, 19 April 1937, and then by a law of 30 December of the same year,89 concubinage (madamato) was outlawed, with a penalty of five years’ imprisonment. Italians living more uxorio with indigenous women could be sentenced from one to five years’ imprisonment. As Stoler pointed out: concubinage was a domestic arrangement based on sexual service and gender inequalities which ‘worked’ as long as European identity and supremacy was clear. When either was thought to be vulnerable, in jeopardy, or less than convincing, at the turn of the century and increasingly through the 1920s, colonial elites responded by clarifying the cultural criteria of privilege and the moral premises of their unity. Structured sex in the politically safe context of prostitution, and where possible in the more desirable context of marriage between ‘full-blooded’ Europeans, replaced concubinage.90

In the mid-1930s the large influx of Italians into the Italian empire, and the administration of vast new territories in Africa, quickly meant that the problem of maintaining a distinct European identity led to the promulgation of laws against miscegenation. Before 1935–36 there were simply too few Italians in Africa for the problem not to be contained but now the very notion of an ‘Italian’ East Africa would have been jeopardised by Italian men’s propensity to take on local ‘lovers’. One of the main problems that the regime had to face in organising propaganda was that of converting the themes of deeply sexualised imperialism to its opposite in the name of discipline and the containment of the Italian colonial population’s sexual practices.91 In spite of disagreements about the employment of Italian prostitutes, Mussolini ‘personally ordered that brothels with white prostitutes be organized in each centre of the empire where significant number of Italian men lived’.92 The directives were implemented quite successfully, even though they never managed to import enough ‘white female skin to use’,93 as Emilio De Bono, imperial governor, once put it. Notwithstanding the regime’s efforts to forbid sexual contact between whites and blacks, so that Italian men would not ‘liquefy before any black prostitute’,94 they proved difficult to implement. Historian Angelo Del Boca noted the increasing number of children born to African women and Italian fathers in the mid to late 1930s in the Italian empire to claim that the Fascist policies of segregation had completely failed.95

Post-war memories After the collapse of the Italian empire memoirs of and interviews with Italian men who had lived in the colonies consistently bore witness [ 182 ]

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to the fact that the few words in local languages picked up by Italians were those necessary to assess the marital status of any women they encountered.96 Furthermore in different ways the interviewed expressed the existence of warnings from superiors or anxieties about dangers in terms of cleanliness and contagious illnesses related to sexual intercourse with Africans.97 These fears were possibly reaching a climax in the late 1930s, in parallel with government policies promoting controlled prostitution and laws restricting interracial sexual relationships, as the cartoon ‘Words . . . and deeds (with rancid butter)’ published in Il 420 in 1936 suggests.98 The latter, showing two African women chatting and wondering why a certain white man has not fallen for their charms and fled holding his nose, suggests that the reality of bedding an African woman was not all it was cracked up to be. There was much talk of the apparently repugnant custom of Ethiopian women rubbing their hair and bodies with ‘rancid’ butter. Turning to Mary Douglas’s work in Purity and Danger,99 it must be recognised that such ideas and feelings establish symbolic boundaries, which are also fundamental for the perception and establishment of social order. However, without neglecting the impact of immediate policies on ideas of pollution, the different and deeper plane of reality occupied by perceptions and fears makes it plausible not to expect synchronic changes between such symbolic systems and those of the policy-makers. In this sense one may observe how concerns about the potential bodily pollution of the African, although by no means dominant in Italy’s post-war period, resurfaced in different kinds of genres. One example of a mid1950s ethnographic account may suffice here. In the series L’Italia in Africa the anthropologist Enrico Brotto’s treatise on the Somali population included: ‘The custom of spreading butter on one’s head is not constant, also because the Somali is very clean and does not tolerate unpleasant smells’.100 The fact that this sentence is embedded in a scientific genre text with its classifications of the population by race and language betrays the tenacity of the colonial symbolic system regulating bodily functions. Individual oral memories, where smell, dirt and defilement recurrently crop up, tend to confirm that some basic sensual perceptions were shared among Italian men and were intertwined with racial classifications and hierarchies. Referring to the greased head and body of some African women, an ex-soldier active in Africa in the mid-1930s remembered: ‘They stank of booty’.101 In the post-war period the overriding images, however, tended to change from containing anxieties and nitty-gritty perceptions into seemingly neutral aesthetic appreciations of female African bodies and in some cases character. A patriarchal male partiality or point of [ 183 ]

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view can be read in the lack of a similar treatment of male African bodies. In the same way different degrees of colonial bias can be gauged at times in the combination of African women with the natural world and its fauna and landscapes, as well as in a nearly universally accepted racialised perspective that accords different aesthetic grades to race. A good example may be found in Massimo Mauri’s 1960 insert in the Italian glossy magazine Epoca entitled: ‘The black female Vikings, tall and slender, their bodies wrapped in the soft folds of Arabic futa, the long-limbed Somali women are the most beautiful in Africa, perhaps in the whole world.’102 Having described the birth of the new independent Somalia to Italian readers, before heading off on a journey across Somalia to depict its wildlife and its hunting opportunities, the journalist embarked on a different kind of photographic safari. This safari included a gallery of portraits of Somali women classified according to their distance from what was called the pure Somali race, which was used to determine their position in a hierarchy of beauty. In a caption one reads: ‘They are extremely clean and don’t use poultices in their hair’.103 Mauri, similarly to his contemporaries, expresses some concern about cleanliness, but for him it was not so much the smell as the smearing of poultice that was aggravating. The overall feeling conveyed by severing Somali women from their social context was that they exist as easily available objects of desire. The article also contains a specific reference to Italy’s recent colonial past, from which it may be inferred that Italian men had freely enjoyed Somali female bodies. Below a photo of women working as telephonists one reads: ‘the mulattos . . . are girls mainly born in the period round 1939, that saw the majority of our fellow-countrymen in Somalia’.104 No guilt, no trauma can be registered on this score. If anything these ‘mulattos’, a term commonly used to designate interbreeding between postulated human races containing an inbuilt analogy to the mule, the infertile offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, represent with their modern profession the success of the Italian sowing of civilisation. Overall the article points to a quiet satisfaction in the suggestion that although Italy’s colonies may not have achieved much compared to the great colonial empires, they nevertheless contained Africa’s most beautiful women. Perhaps after all Mino Maccari in 1950 with his satirical cartoon for Il Mondo captured in a nutshell a fundamental aspect that kept Italian memory tellers entangled with the colonial past. It illustrates an Italian soldier in the desert looking at a sexy black woman walking away, with the caption ‘Sickness of Africa’.105 Del Boca, criticising the famous Italian journalist and historian Indro Montanelli (who had enthusiastically participated in the 1936 campaign in Ethiopia), noted [ 184 ]

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a contradiction between ‘Montanelli the historian and Montanelli the veteran’, pointing out: ‘he joined the chorus of the nostalgic to exalt the African adventure, which reminded him of his green youth, his twelve years old wife bought and sold, and many other exciting memories’.106 As Del Boca argues to demonstrate the existence of the little documented Somali madamato, the desire and appreciation of the Somali female body was not the prerogative of nostalgic veterans but the fate of Italian journalists and writers who had set foot in the colony since the 1930s. Even this highly critical scholar lets the following striking remark slip into his historical narration: ‘Also because, actually, Somali women are more attractive than Eritreans and Abyssinians.’107 This is testimony to the extent that a white male gaze stretched across the Italian imaginary and how it tends to escape notice precisely because taste and desire are often perceived as neutral, unchangeable experiences. Returning to the Somalia of Cesare Maria De Vecchi and to the 1930s, Del Boca continues: ‘Source of desire, once the Somali woman carried out her duty she would return to the world of the dominated, of the serfs.’108 This allows one to gauge that the Italian male desire of the 1930s was considered beyond criticism. Sex between male colonisers and female colonised has been taken as proof of Italians’ lack of racism towards the colonised, while passed over in silence were the power inequalities inherent in these sexual practices. Historian of Italian colonialism and journalist Franco Bandini wrote in the 1960s: Our soldiers (and from different epochs) were attracted or found consolation . . . in the country ‘with the easiest and most corrupt women in the whole world’ . . . they found it advantageous to spend the winter in the Colony, generously comforting themselves without the rigid customs left in the homeland. The Italian was (and is) the only one who can live together with native populations . . . within some limits faccetta nera,109 the song of our soldiers in 1935 and 1936, established a meeting point and a mediation, that is the prerogative of our people.110

Bandini considered the existence of interracial sexual relationships between colonised and Italian men as the corroboration of an Italian benevolent colonialism.111 Irma Taddia, the respected historian, also considers the madamato as proof of Italians being extraneous to the Fascist mentality propounded by high-ranking officers.112 The oral historian makes this explicit where she argues somewhat naively: The regime’s mythology is not visible in the protagonists if not covertly . . . the interracial relationships in fact were free, full of reciprocal collaboration typical of people living together. Only officers and Fascist party official were strictly following the ideology that was coming from above.113

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The African proverb: ‘when memory goes picking dried wood, it comes back with the bundle that it chooses’114 seems to make the point. The words of the manual worker Gandolfi remind us that: There may well be some baleful pages in the history of a nation but in those of a colony there are many more. This is because in the colonies the uniformed man is completely free to make and unmake, to commit injustices and to oppress, to murder, to steal and to rape . . . In this he can be absolutely certain that no control, no voice, no hand can be raised against him because he represents the King and the Fatherland under whose wings he feels powerful and free to commit any manner of evil.115

The sexual El Dorado imagined by Italian men was a utopia that hardly ever came true; new rules and mores were regulating sex in the shadow of power imbalances. Power inequalities were drenching the liminal and deviant space created by colonialism, turning what was imagined as a utopia into dystopia.

Notes 1 BBC News World, ‘Italian ex-PM Berlusconi sentenced in Ruby sex case’, 24 June 2013, at www.bbc.com/news/world-23034167 2 Alessio Spataro, ‘Di Silvio e Indro non si butta via niente!’, L’Espresso, 10 July 2013. 3 Gianni Bisiach, L’ora della verità, Rai, 1969. 4 Enzo Biagi, Intervista, Rai, 1982. 5 Correva l’anno, Rai3, 17 August 2010. 6 Intervista, Rai3, 13 October 2008. 7 Chris Ryan and Rachel Kinder, ‘Sex, Tourism and Sex-Tourism: Fulfilling Similar Needs?’, Tourism Management, 17(7), 1996, 507–18. 8 Emma Alberici, ‘Exile an option for besieged Berlusconi’, ABC News, 9 November 2010. www.abc.net.au/news/2010–11–09/exile-an-option-for-besieged-berlusconi/ 2330272 9 Victor Witter Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY, 1974. 10 Ronald Hyam, ‘Empire and Sexual Opportunity’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14, 1986, 35. 11 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality the British Experience, Manchester, 1990, 201. 12 Christopher Bayly, British Society and the Making of the English Empire, Cambridge, 1988, 202. 13 Francesco Crispi, Scritti e discorsi politici di Francesco Crispi 1849–1890, Rome, 1890, 736–8. 14 Giovanni Corvetto and music of Colombino Arona, ‘Tripoli bel suol d’amore’, 1911. 15 Giovanni Pascoli, ‘La grande proletaria si è mossa’, in Prose di Giovanni Pascoli, vol. 1: Pensieri di varia umanità, Milan, 1952, 557–69. 16 Benito Mussolini, speech, 9 May 1936. 17 Hyam, Empire and Sexuality; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002. 18 Alessandro Triulzi, ‘L’Africa come icona. Rappresentazioni dell’alterità nell’immaginario coloniale italiano di fine Ottocento’, in Angelo Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Roma–Bari, 1997, 271–4.

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ITALY’S SEXUAL EL DORADO IN AFRICA 19 Asa Briggs (ed.), ‘From Today Painting is Dead’: The Beginning of Photography, London, 1972, 13. 20 Susan Sontag, ‘Nella grotta di Platone’, in Sulla fotografia: Realtà e immagine nella nostra società, Turin, 1992. 21 Silvana Palma, L’Italia coloniale, Rome, 1999, 54. 22 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Minneapolis, MN, 1986; Catia Papa, Sotto altri cieli. L’Oltremare nel movimento femminile italiano 1870–1915, Rome, 2009; Fatema Mernissi, L’Harem e l’Occidente, Florence, 2000. 23 Onorina Bargagli Petrucci, Nel Fezzan, Florence, 1934, 71–2. 24 Ibid., 83. 25 Silvana Palma, L’Italia coloniale, Rome, 1999, 44. 26 Silvana Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia: l’Eritrea di Luigi Naretti. 1885–1900’, Quaderni Storici, 37(109), 2002, 85. 27 Ibid., 97–8. 28 Gabriella Campassi and Maria Teresa Sega, ‘Uomo bianco e donna nera: L’immagine della donna nella fotografia coloniale’, Rivista di storia e critica fotografica, 4(5), June–October 1983, 55. 29 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York, 1995, 22. 30 Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’, 100–7; Luigi Goglia, ‘Le cartoline illustrate italiane della guerra 1935–1936: il negro nemico selvaggio e il trionfo della civiltà di Roma’, in Centro Furio Jesi (ed.), La menzogna della razza: documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, Bologna, 1994, 37. 31 Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’, 104–5. 32 Luigi Goglia, Colonialismo e fotografia. Il caso italiano 1885–1940, Messina, 1989. 33 Campasso and Sega, ‘Uomo bianco donna nera’, 61–2. 34 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism, Minneapolis, MN, 1985, 54. 35 Luigi Robecchi Bricchetti, Somalia e Benadir, Milan, 1899, 43–6 (translated in Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 51). 36 Sander L. Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality’, in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, London, 1985. 37 Lei, 1 February 1935, 19. 38 Sciarmutta is the Italianisation of the Arabic term sharmãta, meaning prostitute. 39 Gianluca Gabrielli, ‘Un aspetto della politica razzista nell’impero: il “problema” dei meticci’, Passato e presente, 15(41), 1997. 40 Sewa and tej are Eritrean homemade beers. 41 Bollettino Ufficiale dell’Eritrea, Decreto Governativo, 14 September 1916, n. 2634. 42 Local carabinieri were called zaptie. The carabinieri are military police corps with civil police tasks. 43 Bollettino Ufficiale dell’Eritrea, ‘Regolamento pei commissariati regionali e per le residenze’, supplement to n. 31 of 1 August 1903. 44 Francesca Locatelli, ‘Beyond the Campo Cintato: Prostitutes, Migrants and Criminals in Colonial Asmara (Eritrea), 1890–1941’, in Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent (eds), African Cities: Competing Claims on Urban Spaces, Boston, MA, 2009, 232. 45 Mabruchismo is the Italianisation of the Arabic term mabrukah, meaning woman. 46 Disegno di codice civile, 1905. 47 The Italo-Eritrean Association in 1947 maintained it stood for 15,000 mixed-race persons and 17,000 women who had lived with Italians or were mothers of mixedrace children. Four Power Commission of Investigation for the Former Italian Colonies, Report on Eritrea, London, 22 June 1948, app. 111; Memorandum of the Italo-Eritrean Association, Asmara, 10 December 1947, London, UNP 211, P53/1353. 48 Pietro Gerardo Jansen, Abissinia di oggi. Viaggio in Etiopia, Milan, 1935, 42–3. 49 Barbara Sòrgoni, Parole e Corpi: Antropologia, discorso giuridico e poliche sessuali interrazziali nella colonia Eritrea 1890–1941, Naples, 1998, 127–9.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 50 Vittorio Dan Segre, La Guerra privata del tenente Guillet: la resistenza italiana in Eritrea durante la seconda Guerra mondiale, Milan, 1993. 51 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia’, in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1991. Sòrgoni has confirmed this analysis in reference to the Eritrean case (Parole e corpi, 215–16). 52 Palma, ‘Fotografia di una colonia’, 145–6. 53 Gennaro De Stefani, I costumi penali abissini e il Fethà Neghest, Rome, 1907. 54 Fabienne Le Houérou, L’épopée des soldats de Mussolini en Abyssinie 1936–1938: Les Ensablés, Paris, 1994. 55 Oreste Calamai, Rivelazioni Africane, Leghorn, 1891, 75–6. 56 Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Tribunale di Massaua 1892, sentenza 21, 16 February 1892. 57 Ferdinando Martini, Diario eritreo, I, Florence, n.d., 145. 58 Vittorio Castellani, ‘La popolazione italiana dell’Eritrea dal 1924 al 1940’, Rivista italiana di demografia e statistica, 1948, 536. 59 Ferdinando Martini, Diario eritreo, IV, Florence, n.d., 48. 60 Giulia Barrera, ‘Colonial affairs: Italian men, Eritrean women, and the construction of racial hierarchies in colonial Eritrea (1885–1941)’, Ph.D. dissertation, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University, 2002. 61 Regio Decreto, 10 December 1914, n. 1510, art. 3. 62 Ordinamento organico per l’Eritrea e la Somalia, Law 6 July 1933, n. 999. 63 Regio Decreto, 1 June 1936, n. 1019. 64 Law n. 822, 13 May 1940. 65 Gian Paolo Calchi Novati, L’Africa d’Italia. Una storia coloniale e postcoloniale, Rome, 2001, 246. 66 Irma Taddia, La memoria dell’Impero, Autobiografie d’Africa Orientale, Manduria, 1988, 90–1. 67 Gustavo Chiesi, La colonizzazione europea, Turin, 1909, 285–6. 68 Tertulliano Gandolfi, I misteri dell’Africa italiana, Rome, 1910, 8. 69 Ibid., 127. 70 Ibid., 125–6. 71 Ibid., 127–8. 72 Ibid., 53. 73 Ibid., 55. 74 Bruno P. F. Wanrooij, Storia del pudore. La questione sessuale in Italia 1860–1940, Venice, 1990, 212. 75 Commission of legislative study, para. 3, n. 3, February 1861. 76 Stefano Bolognini, ‘Diritto e omosessualità tra Ottocento e la Seconda guerra mondiale’, in Bilotta Francesco (ed.), Le unioni tra persone dello stesso sesso, Milano, 2008. 77 Giovanni Dall’Orto, ‘Omosessualità e razzismo fascista’, in Centro Furio Jesi (ed.), La Menzogna della Razza: Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, Bologna, 1994, 140; Marzio Barbagli and Asher Colombo, Omosessuali moderni: Gay e lesbiche in Italia, Bologna, 2001, 226, 236–7. 78 Carlo D’Ippoliti and Alexander Schuster (eds), DisOrientamenti: Discriminazione ed esclusione sociale delle persone LGBT in Italia, Rome, 2011, 38–40. 79 Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista, Milan, 2005; Giovanni Dall’Orto, ‘Omosessualità e razzismo fascista’. 80 Giulietta Stefani, Colonia per maschi. Italiani in Africa Orientale: una storia di genere, Verona, 2007, 130. 81 Gino Mitrano Sani, Femina somala, Naples, 1932, 159 (quoted in Stefani, Colonia per maschi, 129). 82 Walter Pierelli, Le mie tre guerre in Africa Orientale. Prima Guerra, Bologna, 1987, 169–70 (quoted ibid., 129).

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ITALY’S SEXUAL EL DORADO IN AFRICA 83 Aldo Polcri, ‘Il soldato e il negretto’, in ed. Nicola Labanca (ed.), Posti al sole. Diari e memorie di vita e di lavoro dale colonie d’Africa, Rovereto, 2001, 252. 84 Adriano Pedemonte, ‘Prostituzioni’ (ibid., 254). 85 Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’impero, Rome– Bari, 1981, 354. 86 Nicoletta Poidimani, Difendere la ‘razza’: identità razziale e politiche sessuali nel progetto imperiale di Mussolini, Cuneo, 2009, 61. 87 ‘L’impero italiano non può essere un impero di mulatti’, Gazzetta del Popolo, 21 May 1936, quoted in Richard Pankhurst, ‘Fascist Racial Policies in Ethiopia: 1922– 1941’, Ethiopia Observer, 12(4), 1969, 274. 88 Paolo Monicelli, ‘Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi’, Gazzetta del Popolo, 13 June 1936. 89 Law of December 1937-XVI, n. 2590 ‘Sanctions for relationship of conjugal nature between citizens and subjects’, quoted in Sòrgoni, Parole e corpi; Gianluca Gabrielli, ‘La persecuzione delle unioni miste 1937–1940 nei testi delle sentenze pubblicate e nel dibattito giuridico’, Studi piacentini, 20(1), 1996, 83–140 (ibid.); ‘Un aspetto della politica razzista nell’impero: il problema dei meticci’, Passato e Presente, 15(41), 1997, 77–105. 90 Stoler, ‘Carnal Knowledge’, 60–1. 91 Liliana Ellena, ‘Da Tripoli a Giarabub: orientalismo, razzismo e propaganda nel cinema coloniale italiano’, Film d’Africa: film italiani prima, durante e dopo l’avventura coloniale, Turin, 1999, 249. 92 Barrera, Colonial Affairs, 346. 93 Ibid., 343. 94 Ferdinando Martini, Diario eritreo, I, Florence, 1946, 220. 95 Angelo Del Boca, ‘Le leggi razziali nell’impero di Mussolini’, in Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani and Mario G. Rossi (eds), Il regime fascista. Storia e storiografia, Rome–Bari, 1995, 351. 96 Labanca, Nicola and Annalisa Marchi (eds), Memorie D’Oltremare: Prato-Italia-Africa, Florence, 2000. 97 Ibid., 24–6. 98 Carlo Domenici, ‘Le parole . . . e i fatti (al burro rancido)’, Il 420, 22(1125), 5 July 1936, 5. 99 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Harmondsworth, 1970, 11–16 [1st edn, 1966]. 100 Enrico Brotto, ‘Le popolazioni della Somalia’, in Elio Migliorini Elio et al. (eds), Il territorio e le popolazioni, Rome, 1955, 189. 101 Quote from the interview collected at the Circoscrizione Iolo Sud, Prato, 6 November 1997, as part of the project ‘Memorie d’Oltremare’ coordinated by Labanca and Marchi, Prato, 1997–98. 102 Massimo Mauri, ‘Le vichinghe nere, alte e slanciate, il corpo fasciato nelle pieghe morbide della futa, le longilinee donne somale sono le più belle dell’Africa, forse del mondo’, Epoca, 14 August 1960, 35–41. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Mino Maccari, ‘Mal d’Africa’, Il Mondo, 4 February 1950, 2. In the mainstream magazines the idea of a syndrome, affecting those who have been in Africa, characterised by a strong nostalgia for that continent, every so often resurfaced under the name mal d’Africa. In one of the ‘Confidenze del Direttore’ it is said, for instance: ‘Il mal d’Africa really exists. Many have been there and feel its call.’ Franco Bandini associates this syndrome with the madamato. See Franco Bandini, ‘Mal d’Africa’, La Domenica del Corriere, 22 May 1960, 4 and ‘L’enigma di Menelik’, in Franco Bandini (ed.), ‘Faccetta Nera’ 3, La Domenica del Corriere, 10 October, 1965, 40. 106 Angelo Del Boca, ‘Una lunga battaglia per la verità’, in Del Boca (ed.), I gas di Mussolini, Rome, 1996, 29–30. 107 Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale: vol. 2. La conquista dell’impero, Rome–Milan, 1992, 89 [1st edn, 1979]. 108 Ibid., 90.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 109 Del Boca talks of the popularity of Micheli and Ruccioni’s song in 1935 (Conquista dell’impero, 285–7). 110 Franco Bandini, ‘Le ultime vittorie’, in ‘Faccetta nera’ 4, La Domenica del Corriere, 17 October 1965, 34. 111 For Bandini the interracial relationships involved also the high-ranking Fascists who did function as mediators: ‘The fascination with Ethiopia in an underhand manner filtered to the high hierarchy.’ Furthermore, he assures that although Italians ‘started buying a wife after another . . .’ the fate of these women, or at least of those who became madame was totally dissimilar to that of Giacomo Puccini’s Japanese Madam Butterfly, because their past association with Italians increased their status in society (‘L’Impero’, in ‘Faccetta nera’ 23, La Domenica del Corriere, 20 March 1966, 35 and ‘Faccetta nera’, 4, 34). 112 Sòrgoni and Barrera commented likewise on Del Boca and Taddia’s interpretations (Sòrgoni, Parole e Corpi, 255–6; Barrera, Colonial Affairs, 11–12). 113 Taddia, La memoria dell’impero., 38–9. 114 Françoise Zonabend, La Mémoire longue, Paris, 1986. 115 Gandolfi, I misteri dell’Africa, 59.

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CHAPTER TEN

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Dreaming in the desert: Libya as Italy’s promised land, 1911–70 Giuseppe Finaldi

Introduction In January 1958 a piqued Enrico Mattei complained to a New York Times journalist that Italy’s state oil company ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), of which he was president, had been brusquely excluded from prospecting in Libya thanks to shady dealings between US firms and Libya’s monarch Idris es-Senussi.1 Referred to by the US newspaper as the ‘Emperor of Italian Oil’, Mattei, a rags-to-riches and larger than life politician-businessman, symbolised the Italian boom. In the late 1950s Italy was in the middle of its ‘economic miracle’. Industrialisation was proceeding at breakneck speed; Italy’s historic cities were assailed by a biblical exodus of peasants abandoning the countryside and the South for jobs in the refineries, factories and power stations springing up like mushrooms in the North. The new Autostrade thrust their way through the peninsula shrugging off the mountains, rivers and valleys which had once made of the country a fragmented patchwork of languages and cultures. Fiat cars, filled with fuel pumped from ENI’s brand new and glittering network of petrol stations, got Italians on the move and the television game shows of ‘Mike’ Bongiorno, gluing Italians to the small screen and perhaps for the first time to each other, promised easy riches and a way of life undreamed of a generation before. In all the clamour and the white heat of change the irony in Mattei’s indignation at missing out in the Libyan oil bonanza may well have been lost. Italy for thirty years had ruled over the very land through which the drills of Texan and Californian oil barons were slurping up black gold, but not a drop had been discovered while the Italians had had it just below their feet.2 Mattei was expressing far more than disappointment at his country and his company failing to get a piece of the Libyan resources sector. The oil gushing out of the Saharan sand, about to transform beyond [ 191 ]

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recognition this African country of pastoralists, of date and olive cultivators, was the greatest testament to Italy’s failure in having made of the colony the El Dorado which had been foreseen with such enthusiasm in the early 1900s. Yet Mattei’s 1958 grievances proved to be premature. The following year Italian companies were grudgingly allowed a small part in the Libyan prospecting rush and for the first time some of that territory’s wealth began to flow north across the Mediterranean. Salaries for any Italian worker who could secure a contract there were very high indeed. According to the Corriere della Sera newspaper a loan for a brand new lorry could be paid off by its Italian driver with a mere six months’ work at the Libyan oilfields. A sheet metal worker could earn up to 250,000 lire a month, around five times the average salary in Italy for the same job.3 In the 1960s the few thousand Italian settlers left over from the colonial period and still tilling the land must have looked on with some bitterness at the ‘new’ Italians commanding salaries which made their plots, once bombastically heralded as the solution to Italy’s rural poverty, look decidedly insignificant. Things got even better for the newcomers as the oil began to flow and in 1969 political developments ousted King Idris. If Italians ever discovered a Libyan El Dorado they did so in the 1970s when the rest of the world’s exasperation with the posturing of Muammar Gaddafi allowed Italian firms to take a leading role in the conversion of his petrodollars into infrastructure and weapons. For some Italians at least, according to historian Angelo Del Boca, Libya had finally become if not El Dorado then the ‘land of Cockaigne’, although the bonanza was to be relatively brief.4 In all its years as an Italian colony (1911–42) Libya had never even come close to fulfilling such promise. Its vast reserves of oil lying unnoticed, the Italians, like the local inhabitants, had had to make do with what was above ground: a sun-scorched and arid desert land dotted here and there with fertile oases and meagre pastures for scrawny goats and sheep. Libya’s population was necessarily small, less than half a million in its major eastern region Cyrenaica and a little more in its western one of Tripolitania when Italy decided to conquer what it bombastically called its ‘fourth shore’.5 It had no rivers and even on the coast rainfall was scarce; inland trade had to negotiate the vast expanses of the Sahara and by the turn of the twentieth century, with European railways criss-crossing Africa and steamships plying rivers and coasts, even the proverbial efficiency of the camel had been called into question. To move products from Tripoli to say Lake Chad 2,000 kilometres south across the desert it was cheaper to send them to Liverpool by steamship. From that British port they were sent on to their destination by sea and partly by rail via Lagos in Nigeria.6 [ 192 ]

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LIBYA AS ITALY’S PROMISED LAND

Even for the Ottoman Empire, hardly a thriving concern in the late nineteenth century, the vilayets (provinces) of Tripoli and Cyrenaica had been considered backwaters.7 Despite its evident poverty it should come as no surprise that in 1911 Italians cast covetous eyes upon this last remaining Ottoman possession in Africa. North Africa in its entirety, not to speak of the rest of the continent, had been parcelled out among the European colonial powers with Britain, as was its wont, getting the choicest part: Egypt. France, after British promises in 1878, made do with the vast expanses of the Western Maghreb, including Tunisia which, until it had been grabbed from under Italy’s nose in 1881, Italian politicians had regarded as reserved for them.8 Although the surest sign that Libya was not worth having was that Britain and France never got it, by 1911 there was simply nothing else left with which the ‘Least of the Great Powers’ could slake its thirst for international prestige and self-assertion. Italy’s restrained and down to earth Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, who was responsible for launching the ships across the Mediterranean in 1911, called the conquest in an uncharacteristic phrase for him, a ‘historic fatality’, as if there had been some irresistible force driving his country on. It was implied that before this force’s impetus there had simply been no alternative; a cost–benefit analysis would have been niggardly, unpatriotic and out of step with the ‘spirit’ pervading the country.9 Herein lay the reasoning behind the elaborate forgery which Italy’s conquest and possession of Libya necessitated. Uncompromisingly poor, it needed to be paraded to the Italian people as a prize worthy of Italy’s fiftieth birthday as a unified nation and of the bright future awaiting the fatherland. An intricate panegyric to the colony’s potential came into being. The idea therefore of Libya concealing untold wealth, of it being a secretive El Dorado, was created to obfuscate the ‘box of sand’ and recalcitrant population which were in plain view and which were an unpleasant reminder that in the colonial stakes Italy was as ever a very minor player. Giolitti’s ‘fatality’, what might be termed the Libyan ‘El Dorado’ myth, was built around three or four correlated and endlessly repeated tropes. The first consisted of the notion that Libya, despite its reputation, concealed an almost limitless supply of fertile agricultural land. The second, which gave rise to the theory of Italy’s unique, ‘proletarian’ colonialism,10 came to the fore once the initial hopes of finding this easily available and secretive bounty had been dashed. It held – a common theme in European empire’s purported capacity to reinvigorate once bountiful territories neglected for centuries by their present and unworthy owners – that through an investment of Italy’s surplus labour [ 193 ]

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Libya would ‘return’ to being the fabulously wealthy province it had been under the ancient Roman Empire. For many the Libyan war also represented the first time the Italian nation state bowed to the needs of its poorer and weaker citizens.11 In a period of mass migration the government claimed the ‘spazio vitale’, the lebensraum necessary to staunch what was regarded as a haemorrhage to the Americas of workers, lost to the Italian economy and to the fatherland. More subtle and plausible in this spectrum of significance assigned to the conquest was the idea that, whatever the colony’s ‘true’ worth, its occupation represented a turning point of great importance in the life story of the youthful Italian nation. The conquest, ‘decided upon independently’ and ‘carried through to victory’ (as put by the great Italian historianphilosopher Benedetto Croce), was regarded as tangible evidence of an Italy which had ‘grown up’ and was now fully in command of its own destiny, ready and able to assert its own interests on the world stage.

The promised land Olive and orange trees bear witness to the fertility of this land, where the Arab merely scratches the surface of its reddish topsoil and where plentiful water flows hidden in the womb of the earth. It’s sufficient to throw the seeds of wheat and barley onto the ground and luxuriant plants leap upward. One needs only to dig a few metres down to see the water gush up to the surface . . . No sooner has the hand opened to scatter the seed it must close again to gather up the harvest.12

Travel writer and playwright Domenico Tumiati’s depiction of the lushness of Tripolitania, which he apparently witnessed as he put it in ‘Roman Africa’, in 1904, would have whetted the appetites of many Italians. There, a few miles from Sicily, lay a bountiful land which for centuries had lain undiscovered and unproductive. Wasted, due to the indolence and ignorance of Arabs and the ineptitude of its Ottoman rulers, it was high time for the vigour, youth and laboriousness of a European people to take that land and transform it into the garden it had once been. Italians were that European people; overflowing with energy, fecundity and the capacity for graft, yet not provided for by the meagre resources bestowed by nature and by history, all Italy had to do was step forward and claim the prize. However, things were perhaps not quite as simple as Tumiati claimed. Diplomatically, what cleared the way for the Italian conquest was the resolution of Great Power rivalry in Morocco in spring 1911. With France emerging as predominant there, and Germany being compensated in West Africa, as Giolitti wrote in his memoirs: ‘I judged that the time had come to act.’13 But it was not just the Great Powers which [ 194 ]

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needed to be mollified. Italy’s previous African adventure had ended in disaster at Adowa in 1896 and, apart from that defeat’s calamitous consequences for Italian prestige abroad, revolts and political turmoil had resulted at home. Prime Minister Francesco Crispi had been swept from power and the troops were hastily recalled from Africa but the defeat had contributed to a rift opening between state and nation which over the first decade of the twentieth century Giolitti had struggled to close. The emergence of a strong Socialist Party and a growing Catholic political movement meant that the hegemony of the liberals who had been victorious in the unification struggles and who had relied on a restricted franchise and the indiscriminate use of police and army to curb political and social unrest was severely tested. The Nationalist Association challenged liberals on the turf they had once monopolised, advocating expansionist patriotism and intensifying military preparedness. The economy too was creating further imbalance and uncertainty. While Italy’s north-west surged forward on a wave of industrialisation, much of the rest of the peninsula lagged behind, locked into a trap of peasant poverty. The millions heading for a new life in the Americas were the most tangible sign that whatever political progress may have been made in Giolitti’s Italy the social question loomed as large as ever.14 This African adventure needed to avoid the pitfalls of the first. Apart from not losing when it came to a fight, the conquest required that this time there should be a much clearer identification between the perceived needs of the Italian people and the government’s leadership. Indeed it has been argued that the Libyan conquest was very much part of Giolitti’s broad strategy of winning over different sections of, for want of a better word, Italian public opinion by carefully dosed concessions.15 Italy needed to be cast as a young, exuberant and dynamic nation setting out to take what it wanted for the benefit of its citizens. It is a testament to Giolitti’s success that leading up to the invasion in October 1911 and as the war progressed, Italian culture rose to the occasion. Civil society, from political parties to town councils, to schools and clubs, to newspapers, to poetry and prose writers, and much more were swept into a passionate debate about the merits of a new campaign in Africa. An assessment of Libya’s worth to the nation was at the focal point of discussion. Would this territory within Italy’s grasp really provide land for the nation’s poor and swing the haemorrhage of emigration away from the shores of America to the fertilisation of a new Italy just across the sea? Would a ‘fourth shore’ come into being by which Italy’s overabundant population would suddenly become an asset rather than a liability to the nation? Did Libya possess the means to make this dream a reality?16 [ 195 ]

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In a chorus which reached a crescendo in the months leading to October 1911 Italian culture did its best to answer in the affirmative. One of the most strident voices in this positive assessment of the Libyan prize in the lead-up to the invasion, very much in the style of Tumiati, was journalist Giuseppe Bevione who used the pages of the Turinese newspaper La Stampa as a platform for a barrage of articles (later published as a book) purporting to deliver the truth about Italy’s prospective colony. Bevione travelled to the Ottoman provinces in the spring of 2011 and sent back his ‘eyewitness’ account. Perhaps what exudes most obviously from his flood of words was the urgency with which intervention was warranted. If Italy did not act soon Libya would slip through its fingers: the consequences of inertia would be dire: ‘[Libya]’, he wrote, ‘is the Promised Land which we must conquer and thereby prosper or alternatively lose, dissipating ourselves throughout the world to serve others and to suffer’.17 Libya would transform the plight of millions of Italians; it reminded the Turinese journalist of the prairies of the Argentine Pampas,18 but wasted on a handful of Arabs incapable of utilising the immense resources placed at their disposal: ‘hundreds of thousands of settlers could prosper on this land of incomparable value’, he urged, ‘where today a few hundred Bedouin eke out a miserable living’.19 Sometimes he failed even to mention the latter considering vast parts of Libya to be ‘uninhabited, unfarmed, but fertile’.20 ‘I can compare’, he stated drawing attention to what could be achieved if only European methods were to be employed throughout the territory, ‘the European plough with its Arabic brother; it is a shameful comparison for the poor Arab tool and in of itself this is enough to explain Arab poverty’.21 There might be a few Arab farms on the oases and in the immediate vicinity of the towns and villages but ‘beyond that the land is used by nomads who have no legal title there: it is’, he beckoned to Italy, ‘res nullius’.22 In one article singing the praises of Cyrenaica, Bevione sought to convince his readers that between the fall of the Roman Empire and the present-day centuries of neglect had transformed a fabulously wealthy land into what appeared to be a desert. Its present poverty had nothing to do with climate or the barrenness of the land itself but the result of neglect. Pockets here and there, Bevione insisted, had somehow lingered from the great day of Rome testifying to Cyrenaica’s huge potential. ‘For days on end’, he related we rode among olive trees. Colossal olive trees, as big as oaks, heavy with fruit, of indescribable fertility. I photographed one whose trunk ten Arabs were unable to link hands around. They are thousands of years old. Perhaps some of these in their youth provided the oil which Leptis Magna sent to Rome in honour of Septimus Severus.23

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For an Italy with a land-starved peasantry, Bevione dangled a Libya where the ‘available farmland [comprises an area] as big as the whole of Italy itself’.24 It may have looked like desert Bevione insisted, ‘but a permanent layer of water is to be found just below the surface in all of Tripolitania from the mountains to the sea, and can transform the desert into a single gigantic oasis’.25 In the few areas which were farmed ‘properly’ Bevione waxed lyrical: I have seen mulberries as big as beech trees, olive trees more colossal than oaks. Alfalfa is scythed twelve times a year. Fruit trees take on spectacular dimensions. Wheat and corn in average years gives three or four times the crop of the best land in Europe, if farmed rationally. Barley is the best available anywhere and is quickly bought up by the British to make their beer . . . the vine gives bunches of grapes weighing two or three kilograms. Rock melons grow to an incredible size, twenty or thirty kilos per fruit. The dates are the sweetest in the entire continent.26

The notion that Italy had stumbled upon a promised land brimming with untapped resources and of vast potential was simply too appealing and politically expedient to not be embraced. Saying that Libya was a ‘good thing’ became a political line drawn in the sand: those who sang its praises were the optimistic patriots, trusting in the mettle of the Italian people, while detractors were labelled as ‘piedi di casa’, stay-at-homes, having no faith in a greater destiny which awaited a bold fatherland. Once the debate had been set in these terms dissenters were easily stifled. Bevione, in a series of ‘open letters’ to Giolitti published in newspapers in the months leading up to the war, cunningly challenged the colonial disbelievers with the following question and answer: ‘should we eternally believe our people to be incapable of any grand endeavour? Logic does not oblige us to answer in the affirmative; a faith in the virtues of our race permits us rather to answer in the negative.’27

‘Herodotus and Pliny, Nationalists’ ‘For eight months of the year the people of Cyrenaica do nothing except harvest.’28 These words, pronounced by Enrico Corradini, the founder of the Italian Nationalist Association, in a lecture tour in May 1911, were meant to be a quotation from Herodotus. In the leadup to the Italo-Turkish war, a frantic search for authoritative ‘sources’ backing up spurious claims about Libya’s wealth resulted in a torrent of ‘authoritative’ opinion paraded in newspapers, speeches, popular publications, poetry and, as in this example, jingoistic lecture tours. Hoping to drive a cautious Giolitti and an as yet undecided public [ 197 ]

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opinion to action, the chorus of intellectuals singing Libya’s praises included journalists such as Bevione, Giuseppe Piazza and Luigi Barzini, and the poets Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; prose authors of the calibre of Matilde Serao and Ada Negri, also added their voice to the choir.29 Unlike Tunisia, which had a substantial Italian population, for Italians Libya remained something of a mystery. Explorers heading for the Dark Continent had concentrated on East Africa; so there was little concrete information available on what the prospective colony was really like. Hence the need to call upon opinions, such as that of Herodotus, which had been set down in the fourth century bc. It was not just the ancient Greek historian who was brought in to testify on Libya’s bounty. Latin scholar Pliny, the Corriere della Sera reported in September 1911, noted that Augustus had once been presented with an ear of corn containing 400 seeds harvested at Bizacio ‘a town to the East of Tunis’. Nero, it added, had been the recipient of another miraculous wheat stalk, this time grown in Cyrenaica, and laden with 340 seeds.30 Recourse to such improbable sources did not go unquestioned, notably by historian Gaetano Salvemini who almost single-handedly ran a campaign against what he regarded as Libyan bombast from the pages of his newspaper L’Unità. It was he who drew attention to the absurdity of transmuting the Libyan ‘scatolone di sabbia’ (‘big box of sand’) into a new Eden via a few classical quotations. On the contrary, he examined those quotations in depth and pointed out that what Herodotus had said was not that the ancient Cyrenaican did ‘nothing but harvest’ for eight months a year but quite simply the climate and geography in that part of Africa was so varied that there was likely to be a harvest going on in different parts of the country at different times of the year.31 As for Pliny’s astounding ears of corn hailing from Italy’s prospective colony, the Corriere della Sera journalist Andrea Torre had twisted the report of the Roman encyclopaedist to mislead his readers: Pliny himself had expressed doubts as to the veracity of his own sources, and in any case ancient Bizacio was in Tunisia, not Tripolitania. More importantly, Salvemini pointed out, Torre had failed to quote Pliny’s overall judgement of Libya, which he had dubbed full of ‘deserted beaches, snakes, wild beasts and lonely and vast deserts’,32 and which compared unfavourably to Europe and Asia. Salvemini was not alone in denouncing the madness. Giuseppe Prezzolini, influential editor of the Florentine journal La Voce, had drawn his readers’ attention to a recent and this time ‘scientific’ assessment of how far Libya was suitable for European colonisation. The Jewish Territorial Organization (known as the ITO), a breakaway section of the [ 198 ]

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broader World Zionist Organization, had been very active in the first decade of the twentieth century in surveying possible localities in Africa and the Middle East for Jewish settlement: Cyrenaica was one of these.33 According to Prezzolini the team of experts who had travelled to what was still an Ottoman possession had been unanimously disappointed. This ‘scientific’ study,34 the journalist continued, contained three maps, seventy photographs, chemical analyses of the soil, statistics on rainfall, the plans for the construction of ports at Derna and Bengasi, advice on the most suitable housing for settlers and calculations of the cost of the most important railways needed before colonisation could begin. The ITO had concluded that Cyrenaica was entirely unsuited to European colonisation and it dismissed the old myths of this part of Africa’s fertility. More extraordinary still was the assessment made of the Arab population, which in Italian propaganda was waiting with bated breath for ‘liberation’ from the Turks. According to Prezzolini the ITO had judged the natives to be ‘a martial and well-armed race which would be a formidable adversary’.35 Even more shocking, Prezzolini recounted, was the fact that although the Jewish Territorial Organization had been aware of the reputation of Cyrenaican fertility it had considered ‘the tremendous responsibility of asking a people to go to so distant a land’, and that ‘a decisive and competent survey [was paramount] before any action was taken’.36 Italy, Prezzolini implied, was about to embark on a major war for a territory about which it knew nothing. Compared even to an institution as insignificant as the ITO, in Italy amateurishness and humbug were the watchword fuelled by the madness of a few ultra-nationalists. ‘The Nationalists’, he concluded, ‘desire only one thing: to break their heads. Any wall will do for the purpose. The problem is that it’s not their head that will be broken but that of the nation.’37

The Libyan El Dorado, Italian labour and school textbooks In September 1912 Salvemini noted that one year after the declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire the myths which had created ‘enthusiasm similar to being drunk’38 had already reached the hangover stage. The invasion was meant to have been a ‘passeggiata’ (a promenade) with a Europe looking on benevolently. Libya’s untold wealth beckoned and the Arabs awaited ‘liberation’ with open arms. Salvemini pointed out that by now the war had become a difficult and bloody slog, with Italy still occupying little more than a few square kilometres beyond the coastal cities; Europe’s stance towards Italy was hostile. Libya’s wealth had already revealed itself to be a chimera [ 199 ]

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and the Arabs had become ‘obstinate and irreducible adversaries’.39 Salvemini was telling the truth, as had Prezzolini, but the machinery of hope and desire that had been set in motion by the likes of Bevione, Pascoli and Corradini lumbered on by inertia. A 1913 school textbook, for example, could happily state that ‘the countryside around Bengasi is often covered with sand, but a few centimetres down there lies an incredibly fertile humus which has been resting for centuries; a little below this there is plenty of water’.40 Salvemini published a letter by an Apulian peasant recently migrated to Buenos Aires who wrote the following to his wife in early 1912: My dear wife I write to you to answer your letter where you say you want to come here in America. I do not want you to because things have changed and once the war is over I have to put some money to one side and we will go together to lovely Tripoli. It will be America there and not here and all those that are here are preparing to go.41

Salvemini was appalled that the nonsense in the style of Bevione was being spread so nonchalantly even among the poor Italian migrants of distant Argentina. Closer to home historian and friend of Salvemini, Giustino Fortunato noted that in November 1911 the peasants of Lavello, a village in the Basilicata, ‘thirsting and hungry for land hoped to get a “quota” in Tripoli and were enthused about the whole Tripoli enterprise’.42 An entire host of Italians resident in Tunisia had crossed the border into Libya in the wake of the invasion, anticipating the imminent distribution of land; they were quickly disappointed and returned to Tunis convinced that they were better off under the French flag.43 In Sicily in the early months of the war more than 10,000 peasants joined the ‘Sicilian Cooperative Society for the colonisation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica’44 and a similar organisation attracted a large number of prospective ‘colonists’ in the Veneto.45 Twenty thousand passport applications were made in a few weeks after the Libyan war began attesting, according to some commentators, to a peasantry falling over itself to go to Africa.46 Soldiers newly arrived in Libya sent letters home and some commented on the fertility of the land they saw. A private posted in Tripoli assured his mother that it was all true: ‘there are plenty of trees with nice fruit, and gardens with cabbage and different fruits’.47 Another, hailing from Vigevano, wrote to his father telling him not to worry because ‘we have found another America down here’.48 An enthusiastic soldier writing to his parents from Bengazi assured them that ‘Italy has taken more territory than the whole of Italy and Italy will now change and we are now the greatest nation for civilisation and everything else.’49 Writing to his wife, a soldier pointed out that ‘the countryside [ 200 ]

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looks good but it will need a lot of Italian muscle to be turned into the real garden of Italy’.50 The hope of making Libya a ‘new America’ for the Italian peasantry persisted however stark the reality encountered in Africa. Yet by the mid-1930s the Italians who had gone to farm land there as peasant colonists numbered no more than 4,500, hardly a spontaneous shift in migration patterns from across the Atlantic to across the Mediterranean.51 Nevertheless the draconian and brutal ‘pacification’ of the colony carried out by the new Italian Fascist government over the 1920s and early 1930s52 had literally cleared enough Arabs off their land to make some form of Italian agricultural colonisation possible. In 1938 and 1939 some hugely publicised and state-sponsored colonisation projects finally brought a consistent number of settlers to the colony. Around 30,000 Italian peasants were granted newly cleared land. Fascism adopted liberal Italy’s El Dorado myth, but with the amendment that there would be no easy fortune to be made in the colonies; rather, it would be hard work pure and simple which would transform the desert into flourishing agricultural land. This idea survived well beyond the fall of Fascism. The style now as signalled by a 1933 primary school textbook which stated: Italy’s colonial future, even in the few colonies that we do possess, is very bright, because our tenacious and hard-working population will bring water where it is lacking, will plough the lifeless and arid ground and will put together the right soil for the right plant and the right animal. Wherever the Italian makes his home he will show that enterprising spirit that has always been his fundamental characteristic.53

A 1934 school textbook was already suggesting that ‘where once there was desert new plantations are now flourishing’.54 By the late 1930s in another textbook Libya was depicted to the Italian population as ‘another region of Italy’ where Italian hard work and expertise (as well as the firm will of the Fascist government) was in the process of fulfilling the dream of 1911. Libya has been raised to the dignity of an Italian region and the first contingent of 20,000 Italians have moved there. These have found comfortable and hygienic housing, fresh and plentiful water, roads, schools: everything that is necessary for civilised life. Today Libya really is the fourth shore of the Mare nostrum.55

During the Second World War while in North Africa the battle for possession of Libya was being convincingly and decisively lost by Italy, school textbooks being published at home were still prey to the Libyan myth: [ 201 ]

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Tens of thousands of Italians have been going there. These were no longer the poor immigrants that filled the hulls of the ocean liners heading for foreign countries, they were the sons of a great nation going to fertilise with their labour the dominions of the fatherland. On arrival there, they saw not a foreign and hostile country speculating on their sweat, but an Italian and friendly land and houses and fields and villages prepared for them. Day by day the immense labour proceeded: the arid lands, uncultivated for centuries, once again became fertile.56

Defeat in the war did not change what was now regarded as Italy’s supposedly ‘immense achievement’ in Libya. A school textbook published in Florence while the city was still rebuilding after the devastation of the war told Italian children aged 11 that: The Italians worked very hard in Libya. Where there were arid deserts, hard Italian work created fertile fields; where there were miserable huts and Bedouin tents, comfortable houses were built, where there was drought ridden land, Italians brought fresh water.57

In 1947 with the fate of the Italian colony still to be decided at the United Nations, an overall assessment of Italian colonialism in Libya was put forward in a school textbook again for 11-year-olds: In 1911 Italy conquered Libya and made it fertile with a huge effort. We must, however, make a distinction: whereas other peoples who possessed territory in Africa or Asia exploited the labour of the indigenous population, Italians themselves went to work in the conquered territories. They were, that is, true colonisers.58

Libya and Italy’s ‘Coming of Age’ ‘Where there was least hope, there the sands gave forth fruit’: these words introduce a 1951 Settimana Incom newsreel which, on a backdrop of images of Italian street names and Roman ruins adorning the Libyan capital narrates: Who can forget Tripoli that provoked so much passion in our hearts at the time of our childhood and adolescence? For some months Tripoli is an independent capital, [but] its new life is owed to the period of Italian rule which was connected ideally to this statue of Caesar and the vestiges of Rome left behind in Libya.

Listing an impressive series of Italian achievements, the construction of farms, buildings and roads, the newsreel goes on to focus on the Italian-owned plantation at Azizia where, according to the narrator, desert has been replaced by fertile agricultural land abounding in citrus, olives and wheat. Azizia, in the staccato newsreader’s prose, warrants [ 202 ]

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a congratulatory quotation from Virgil’s Georgics extolling the virtues of hard work and the bending of nature’s harshness to the will of sturdy Italian pioneers.59 Prominent in this newsreel, the metaphor of the conquest of Tripoli constituting a rite of passage from the childhood and adolescence of Italietta (this term signified the stay at home, cautious and fractured Italy of the pre-First World War era) to the maturity and vigour of Fascism, or even the egalitarian and ouvrierist Republic. The 1947 republican constitution stated in its first article that Italy was ‘founded on work’. ‘Work’ was ever present in the Italian vision of the Libyan El Dorado. The myth was not so much that Italy had discovered a land of milk and honey in Africa; rather, that Italian labour had had the will and tenacity to take on the monumental task of making the desert bloom. Graft and technical know-how was what Italy could offer to the Libyan sands. It was a ‘proletarian’ version of Empire whose appeal was meant to transcend class and regional difference at home; a leaving behind of the infighting of the peninsula in a noble and unifying cause abroad. In the spring of 1938 Gioacchino Volpe, in the fulfilment of his duties as professor of history at the University of Rome, took a group of students to Libya. ‘Something of a guide, teacher and companion’, as he styled himself, Volpe later described the significance of his trip for a broader public on Italian radio. With the full weight of his erudition and the authority of his professorial mantle he conferred enormous importance on Italy’s acquisition, twenty-seven years before, of that North African colony. The conquest of Libya in 1911, the professor related, ‘was the first endeavour on the road to Italy’s rebirth . . . it was a kind of colonial 1848’.60 To any educated listener of the late 1930s Volpe’s historical allusions would have been very familiar: the conquest of Libya had a few years later been followed by victory in the Great War (with the redemption of Trento and Trieste), hard on its heels Fascism took power and (in Volpe’s view) re-established Italy as a force to be reckoned with in the world; the vanquishing of Ethiopia in 1935–36 confirmed Italy’s ‘rejuvenation’ in a new Risorgimento. In 1938 Volpe confidently assumed that ‘of the broad strip of land between sea and the mountains a small Italy is in the making’.61 He turned his students’ and radio listeners’ attention to what Italy’s taking of Libya had signified back in 1911: ‘I have still before my eyes’ he reminisced the great torrents of people celebrating in the streets of Rome . . . the political redemption and the moral revolution [of the country] . . . Italy had been cured of the African phobia of 1896, the year of Adowa, the anti-colonial parties had split and many members passed to the enemy . . . Hardened pacifists cried Long Live War! . . . Italy was alive and enthusiastic about

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life . . . and as the ways of the Lord are mysterious so too are those of History . . . that small and not so easy war won us an inestimable treasure: a greater consciousness of what we are.62

Volpe was a regime historian of the type conjured up by all fledgling nations to compose ‘usable’ pasts.63 As far as his Fascist paymasters were concerned, he never disappointed. Less independent minded than contemporary Benedetto Croce, but perhaps less of an ardent functionary than Giovanni Gentile (with whom he had shared a thesis supervisor), Volpe, like a phalanx of intellectuals of his generation, had experienced the defeat of Adowa against Ethiopia in 1896 at an impressionable young age. He remembered the factions for and against revenge, the ‘anti-africanisti’ and the ‘megalomani’ which, at his university the Scuola Normale of Pisa, divided students to the point of ‘scuffles and boxing matches’.64 Years later he looked back with some nostalgia to that moment which he described as ‘in some senses the first time Italian youth had been confronted with grave issues which might be regarded as it own’.65 Whether in his formative years Volpe had been among the anti-africanisti or the megalomani (one presumes the latter) he declined to say but in the intellectual vigour of middle age he rued Italy’s ‘immaturity’ (which had allowed the anti-africanisti to win) back then, blaming a ‘bourgeoisie with no traditions and abjectly poor in terms of a consciousness of itself’.66 Croce too, in his influential history of Italy written after the Great War, wondered at the acceptance of that defeat but was more moderate in his judgements. ‘It was an inglorious conclusion’, he summarised, ‘but it was bred of the courage and force of mind which turns a deaf ear to the pleadings of self-esteem, refuses to be obstinate in error, and prepares the soil from which the nation may at some future date reap a fruitful harvest of good, and even glory, if glory is forthcoming’.67 For the Italian philosopher the conquest of Libya was that ‘harvest of good’, a confirmation that Italy ‘was no longer what she had been fifteen years before, but was now ready and able to organize a military expedition and carry it through to victory’.68 The view that the taking of Libya marked an Italy ‘coming to selfconsciousness’, having surmounted the ‘immaturities’ of the Crispian period was a standard interpretation of Italy’s recent history. Among the Italian intellectual establishment in the two or three decades following the conquest, as historian Emilio Gentile has pointed out The war was celebrated in itself as a rite of passage . . . towards achieving the status of Great Power. The colonial adventure was hailed as a new resurrection of the nation which, through the sacrifice of its sons, delivered Italy from the indignity of Adowa . . . The Italian soldiers fighting

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in the Libyan desert were transformed into heirs of the Roman legionaries, champions of a renewed Italian race fortified with the rehashed civilising mission, which was the incumbent duty of the heirs of Rome . . . To this was added the recent myth of the ‘proletarian nation’ . . . and finally the idea that the common struggle for victory superseded divisions of class and ideology.69

Such an analysis penetrated Italian culture beyond the ivory towers, libraries and archives in which Volpe and Croce were most at home. Volpe, for example, was able to transmit his views, as well as on the radio, in a series of school textbooks published in the mid-1930s in which he told 14-year-olds that a few miles from Sicily . . . lay a great expanse of territory . . . which the Romans had once conquered and . . . the Italians of a United Italy wanted to return to. There, instead of in faraway countries, they would find work and land. They had finally forgotten Adowa and that unfortunate battle! They no longer thought of abandoning Africa but desired to go there to acquire honour and greater power.70

School textbooks from the Libyan war onwards defined the conflict as symbolising the ‘coming of age’ of the Italian state and nation, a new feeling of confidence children should be proud of compared to the anguish of the previous decades.71 ‘With the Libyan war’ stated a textbook for 13-year-olds published in 1914 Italy’s possessions have grown significantly . . . and in this way Italy has increased its prestige before all the other states, not only as a strong and united nation, but as a colonial power, which to the civil virtues of its people, economic prosperity of its commerce and industry, to the rebirth of arts and sciences, unites a wise government and the valour of its soldiers.72

Three examples here then, the newsreel from post 1945, the school textbook from the liberal period and Gioacchino Volpe’s writing from the Fascist period, attest to a general continuity in the public narrative of the meaning assigned to the colonisation of Libya. That such importance was bestowed on what was on the face of it a minor colonial war and an impoverished colony – so worthless in fact as to never have whetted the appetite of the other colonial powers – needs to be understood in the light of the political context of Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century, and how that context effectively marked a socio-cultural shift which was not fully reneged until the 1960s. In 1911 contemporaries noted the change. Pascoli named it as the ‘stirring of the great proletarian nation’73 and his colleague D’Annunzio had granted it the poetic licence of the slogan (he imagined Italy as a ship [ 205 ]

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which would) ‘arm the prow and set sail into the world’.74 Much of this torrent of words was bombastic, rhetorical and untrue but as Richard Bosworth has so cogently argued, in the exertion of Italian power abroad it was the art of words that made up for incoherence and lack of raw power.75

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Conclusion Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, liberal and then Fascist Italy declaimed Libya’s virtues, but even the republic born of the Second World War tried very hard to keep hold of the colony after Italy’s collapse in North Africa. Having failed to do so – in 1950 the United Nations decided to grant Libya its independence after a period of British rule – an emotional and rhetorical ‘memory’ permeated the Italian media suggesting that the African El Dorado in the making had been cut short just as the harvest was about to be reaped.76 Having failed to extract anything of great significance from the colony Italians were loath to dispel the dream which they had embraced with such enthusiasm in 1911. When it never came true it was always possible to pretend that it had. By the late 1960s, however, even that false dream had dissipated in the El Dorado of consumption and wealth being birthed in Italy itself; Libyan oil in part fuelled the ‘proletarian’ nation’s great leap forward, but it was the Beatles, the pill, abortion, education, Fiats and Vespas which fired up this new and post-colonial Italy. The little plots of land in Africa about which previous generations had expended so much ink and blood could be forgotten. The few who remembered the dream failed to see that it had all been something of an absurdity. When Gaddafi came to power the beleaguered Italian farmers still residing in Libya were expelled as representatives of a ‘colonial mentality’ no longer attuned with the times. Landing in the home country in 1969 one of these was interviewed by La Stampa, by a remarkable coincidence the very same newspaper which had carried all the words spilled a lifetime before by Giuseppe Bevione. Housed in makeshift camps, one ‘refugee’ from the Libyan El Dorado appealed to the government with the kind of rhetoric which had long since ceased to resonate: ‘the South is still depressed’, he pleaded, ‘give us a piece of Sardinia and we’ll turn it into a thriving region. We’re not afraid of unforgiving land, after all we are the ones who reclaimed a desert.’77

Notes 1 ‘Oil Emperor of Italy: Enrico Mattei’, New York Times, 6 January 1958, 5. 2 ‘A touch of more Nostrum’, Time, 20 January 1958, 71(3), 26. 3 ‘La Libia galleggia su un mare di petrolio’, Corriere della Sera, 1 March 1963.

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LIBYA AS ITALY’S PROMISED LAND 4 Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, dal Fascismo a Gheddafi, Milan, 1994, 485. 5 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, New York, 1994, 44; John Wright, ‘Libya: Italy’s ‘Promised Land’, in E. G. H. Joffe and K. S. McLachlan (eds), Social & Economic Development of Libya, London, 1982, 67–79. 6 Giuseppe Piazza, La nostra pace coloniale, Rome, 1917, 36–7. 7 Rachel Simon, Libya between Ottomanism and Nationalism, Berlin, 1987, 1. 8 On Italian colonialism in Libya, see Claudio Segrè, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya, Chicago, IL, 1974; Francesco Malgeri, La guerra libica (1911–1912), Rome, 1970. Helpful is also Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford, 1949. Above all Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, Tripoli bel Suol d’Amore, Milan, 1993 and Nicola Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911–1931, Bologna, 2012. 9 Giovanni Giolitti, Discorsi extraparlamentari, Turin, 1952, 261. 10 Formulated most ‘scientifically’ by sociologist Robert Michels, L’Imperialismo italiano: studi politico-demografici, Milan, 1914. 11 Giuseppe Finaldi, ‘“The Peasants Did Not Think of Africa”: Empire and the Italian State’s Pursuit of Legitimacy, 1871–1945’, in John MacKenzie (ed.), European Empire and the People, Manchester, 2011, 210–17. 12 Domenico Tumiati, Tripolitania, nell’Affrica romana, Milan, 1905, 76 13 Giovanni Giolitti, Memorie della mia vita, II, Milan, 1922, 338. 14 See Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 15 Alexander De Grand, The Hunchback’s Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882–1922, Westport, CO, 2001. 16 Antonio Schiavulli (ed.), La guerra lirica, il dibattito dei letterati italiani sull’impresa di Libia (1911–12), Ravenna, 2009. 17 Giuseppe Bevione, Come siamo andati a Tripoli, Turin, 1912, 162. 18 Ibid., 90. 19 Ibid., 69. 20 Ibid., 89. 21 Ibid., 71. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 99. 24 Ibid., 167. Bevione’s colleague and fellow African ‘expert’ Giuseppe Piazza, calculated that the farmland available in Libya was almost twice the entire surface area of Italy (La nostra terra promessa. Lettere dalla Tripolitania. Marzo-Maggio 1911, Rome, 1911, 35). 25 Bevione, Come siamo andati, 168–9. 26 Ibid., 171. 27 Ibid., 178. 28 Enrico Corradini, Discorsi Politici, 1902–1924, Florence, 1925, 121. 29 See on this Salvatore Bono, Tripoli bel suol d’amore, testimonianze sulla guerra italo-libica, Rome, 2005; Isabella Nardi and Sandro Gentili (eds), La grande illusione: opinione pubblica e mass media al tempo della guerra di Libia, Perugia, 2009 and Antonio Schavulli (ed.), La guerra lirica, il dibattito dei letterati italiani sull’impresa di Libia (1911–12), Ravenna, 2009. 30 Geatano Salvemini, Come siamo andati in Libia e altri scritti dal 1900 al 1915, Milan, 1973, 135. 31 Ibid., 131. 32 Ibid., 136–7. 33 Stuart A. Cohen, ‘Israel Zangwill’s Project for Jewish Colonization in Mesopotamia: Its Context and Character’, Middle Eastern Studies, 16(3), 1980, 200–8. 34 John Walter Gregory, Report on the Work of the Commission sent out by the Jewish Territorial Organization under the Auspices of the Governor-General of Tripoli to Examine the Territory Proposed for the Purpose of a Jewish Settlement in Cyrenaica, London, 1909; Israel Zangwill, A Land of Refuge, London, 1907.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 35 Giuseppe Prezzolini, L’Illusione Tripolina, in La Voce, 18 May 1911, in Giuseppe Prezzolini, La Voce, 1908–1913, Cronaca, antologia e fortuna di una rivista, Milan, 1974, 704–10. 36 Ibid., 706. 37 Ibid., 710. 38 Salvemini, Come siamo andati, 236. 39 Ibid. 40 Domenico Chiavelli, Nozioni di geografia per gli alunni delle scuole elementari, Palermo, 1913, 40. 41 Salvemini, Come siamo andati, 180. 42 Giustino Fortunato, Carteggio 1865–1911, Rome–Bari, 1978, 369. 43 Tommaso Tittoni, Questioni del giorno, Milan, 1928, 30. 44 Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, Tripoli bel Suol, 153. 45 Guido Podrecca, Libia, impressioni e polemiche, Rome, 1912, 164. 46 Malgeri, La guerra libica, 80. 47 Salvatore Bono (ed.), Morire per questi deserti. Lettere di soldati italiani dal fronte libico 1911–12, Catanzaro, 1992, 63. 48 Ibid., 57. 49 Ibid., 67. 50 Ibid., 104. 51 Giorgio Rochat, Balbo, Turin, 1986, 266. 52 Alexander De Grand, ‘Mussolini’s Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935–1940’, Contemporary European History, 13, 2004. 53 R. Compagnoni, Terra e cielo, Testo di geografia ad uso della seconda classe, Lanciano, 1933, 85. 54 G. Cremonini, Geografia per le scuole di avviamento professionale, II, Milan, 1934, 205. These and the following selections on Italian school textbooks are in Italian in my ‘La Libia nei manuali scolastici italiani 1911–1960’, in Nicola Labanca (ed.), La Libia nei manuali scolastici italiani 1911–2001, Rome, 2003, 61–108. 55 B. Ducati, Dal primo al secondo impero di Roma, Milan, 1939, 71. 56 F. Valsecchi and V. Parrino, Eventi e figure. 57 Luigi Giannitrapani, Il libro di storia e geografia per la V classe, Florence, 1946, 88. 58 V. Durante-De Blasis, Nozioni di storia e di geografia per la V classe elementare, Rome, 1947, 49. 59 ‘Dal deserto alla vita’, Documentario Incom D018305, 1951. Available at www. archivioluce.com/archivio (accessed 22 March 2013). 60 Gioacchino Volpe, L’Italia che fu, Milan, 1961, 103. 61 Ibid., 113. 62 Ibid., 104. 63 Martin Clark, ‘Gioacchino Volpe and Fascist Historiography in Italy’, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, London, 1998, 189–201. 64 Gioacchino Volpe, Italia Moderna, I, Florence, 1973, 290–1 [1st edn, 1949]. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 293. 67 Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, 1871–1915, Oxford, 1929, 199. 68 Ibid., 261. 69 Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia, Milan, 1997, 52. See also in this vein and for the Fascist period Charles Burdett, ‘Italian Fascism, Messianic Eschatology and the Representation of Libya’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11(1), 2010, 3–25. 70 Gioacchino Volpe, La storia d’Italia raccontata ai ragazzi delle scuole di avviamento professionale, II, Messina, 1936, 142. 71 Nicola Labanca and Salvatore Bono (eds), La Libia nei manuali scolastici italiani 1911–2000, Rome, 2003. 72 Francesco Bertolini, Racconti storici educative ad uso della sesta classe, Turin, 1914, 81–2.

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73 Giovanni Pascoli, ‘La grande proletaria si è mossa’, 1911. Available at http://cronologia.leonardo.it/storia/a1911f.htm (accessed 25 March 2013). 74 Gabriele D’Annunzio, La Nave, Treves, Milan, 1908. 75 Richard Bosworth, ‘Mito e linguaggio nella politica estera italiana’, La politica estera italiana (1860–1945) eds. Richard Bosworth, Romano Sergio, Bologna, 1991, 38. Also see his classic Italy, the Least of the Great Powers, Cambridge, 1979. 76 Daniela Baratieri, Memory and Silences Haunted by Fascism: Italian Colonialism 1930s–1960s, Bern, 2010. 77 Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, dal Fascismo a Gheddafi, 469.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

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The British Mesopotamian El Dorado: the restoration of the Garden of Eden Ann Matters

Sir William Willcocks, the well-known British irrigation engineer, whose achievements included the planning and construction of the first Aswan Dam on the river Nile, delivered a speech at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1909, framing the explanation for his irrigation scheme for the restoration of Mesopotamia in the following terms: In her long history of many thousands of years Babylonia has again and again been submerged, but she has always risen with an energy and thoroughness . . . Again it seems that the time has come for this land, long wasted with misery, to rise from the very dust and take her place by the side of her ancient rival, the land of Egypt. The works we are proposing are drawn on sure and truthful lines, and the day they are carried out, the two great rivers will hasten to respond, and Babylonia will once again see her waste places becoming inhabited, and the desert blossoming like the rose.1

In the British imperial imagination Mesopotamia referred initially to the southern portion of present-day Iraq. Alternatively, in official documents the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul were referred to as Turkish Arabia, or Turkey in Asia – a part of the Arabian quadrilateral as distinct from the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The use of the old Greek term ‘Mesopotamia’, meaning the land between the rivers, evokes a historical connection with the West, a subject which has been explored by scholars in relation to western imperial imaginings regarding the Orient. Re-evaluations of Edward Said’s Orientalism opened a new field of scholarship concerning ‘spiritual’, or, more broadly, cultural imperialism, which feeds into the relatively neglected Mesopotamian utopia trope. Critiques of Said’s East–West dichotomy reveal a ‘double vision’ in the imperial imaginary: the East as ‘other’, strange and exotic, but at the same time familiar, since Europeans’ knowledge of the East prior [ 210 ]

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to the early nineteenth century was based on stories from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.2 However, the Bible was not the sole source of information regarding Mesopotamia’s past. Throughout the course of history, western invaders had left their mark on the landscape – Greeks and Romans occupied the spaces, if only fleetingly, so together with Bible stories, classical history played an important part in the process of familiarisation. A description given by a member of the first official expedition, mounted in 1836, to find an overland route from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, while containing frequent references from the Bible, looks principally to classical Roman historians to identify landmarks. For example, he noted that the expedition passed Jaber Castle, owing its origins to Alexander the Great, and a ford, ‘the point where in all probability, the 10,000 Greeks and the army of Alexander crossed the river Euphrates’. The Chab (Araxes) river, near Deir es Zor, was identified as the river which Trajan descended to reach the Euphrates, the same route later taken by Julian.3 Similarly, in the early stages of the British military campaign in Mesopotamia in 1914, the Commanding Officer of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’, 6th Division, General Charles Townsend, wrote ‘we are now manoeuvring where Belisarius manoeuvred 600 years after Christ when with a small Roman army he was repelling the Persian invasion of the Roman province of Mesopotamia’.4 However, these familiar landmarks and events were woven into an idealisation of the Mesopotamia of antiquity – the site of the Garden of Eden, and the cradle of western civilisation.5 Thus western travellers to the Ottoman Empire received a shock when the contemporary landscape they encountered did not match with the ‘land of plenty’ they expected to find, and they ascribed the desolation to three centuries of Ottoman neglect. The same phenomenon has been described in relation to Cyprus6 and Palestine, where the ‘mere presence of a desert, that most non-European feature, signified inefficiency, laziness, and bad government’.7 More specifically, in Mesopotamia, while Ottoman misrule was deemed responsible for the contemporary state of the land, the origins of the desolation were traced to the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, during which the ancient irrigation systems which had once existed were destroyed.8 In all three examples Europeans drew on biblical, ancient and medieval history to seek to redeem the landscape, efforts which ultimately foundered. In the sense in which the term is used here, the El Dorado was not, as may be imagined, Mesopotamia’s oil reserves, the actual and existing commodity of enormous value which that country possessed, but, rather, the vastly exaggerated agricultural potential, with irrigation, of the desert and semi-desert regions of Mesopotamia. While the rivers [ 211 ]

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Tigris and Euphrates were deemed to be central to the strategic and commercial importance of the region to Britain, and for a time as transport corridors on the overland route to India, ‘redemptive discourse’9 is common in the imperial imaginary in relation to rivers flanked by arid land, and thus the rivers are central to the Mesopotamian agricultural El Dorado story. Varnava refers to the role of the men on the spot in the development of the myth in relation to Cyprus,10 and this is true also for Mesopotamia, as explorers, archaeologists, investors, India ‘old hands’, middle-class educated early-twentieth-century travellers, and a number of officials attached to the British embassy at Constantinople developed the utopian myth in the years prior to the First World War. The singularity of the Mesopotamian utopia is its longevity, and the fact that its perpetuation served a number of different purposes over the course of nearly a century of British interest in Mesopotamia, not just as a justification for imperial expansion, but also for remaining when public opinion, the parliamentary opposition and some members of the Cabinet urged evacuation from the Mesopotamian minefield in the 1920s, when Great Britain held the League of Nations mandate for Iraq, well after the redemptive discourse had given way to the harsh reality of post-war financial stringency. A partial answer is given by Malcolm Yapp, who considers that the El Dorado justification was utilised as camouflage for, in this case, British policy regarding Mesopotamia’s oil.11 While that may have been so in the twentieth century, the myth was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, well before oil became a policy consideration. This chapter, therefore, seeks to trace the construction of the myth and its perpetuation as a justification for British imperialism in Mesopotamia. Before the First World War, Mesopotamia was a place Britain did not want to occupy, but it did not want another European power to usurp British commercial predominance in the region. A thriving British trade, primarily with India, had existed at Basra since East India Company merchants ventured into the Persian Gulf in the seventeenth century. However, there was little interest in the hinterland beyond Baghdad.12 In 1789, the perceived Napoleonic threat to march to India overland through Mesopotamia did not materialise,13 and in the nineteenth century, Muhammad Ali’s ambition for a greater Egypt was ultimately thwarted by the intervention of the Great Powers (excluding France) in 1840.14 However, with the short route to India via the Suez isthmus to the Red Sea, established in 1771,15 threatened in both cases, the British government recognised the need to find an alternative overland route. The Euphrates Expedition of 1836, mounted with the express [ 212 ]

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purpose of testing the navigability of the Euphrates River, as part of an overland route from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, also marked the origin of the El Dorado myth. The vision of the promoters of the expedition ranged further than finding a route to India,16 and they were not disappointed. Letters and reports from members of the expedition revealed ‘the great commercial possibilities of Mesopotamia and the level and unbroken valley leading from the mountains of Syria to the head of the Persian Gulf’.17 William Ainsworth, surgeon and geologist with the expedition, wrote that the establishment of a centre for commercial operations on the River Euphrates ‘would secure to Great Britain power in the most wealthy and populous districts of the East’.18 While the Euphrates Expedition proved that the river was not suitable for the passage of shallow-draught steam boats, as was envisaged, twenty years later a plan emerged for opening the region to British trade by railways rather than river boats.19 Following the Crimean War, the Porte’s financial difficulties opened up new opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs in the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of the saga of the Euphrates Valley Railway, during which the agricultural El Dorado in Mesopotamia trope was firmly planted in the British imperial mind. Francis Rawdon Chesney, the leader of the Euphrates Expedition twenty years earlier, was instrumental in successfully negotiating with the Porte for the granting of a concession to the Euphrates Valley Railway Company for the construction of the first section of the railway in early 1857. In a report to the Company, Chesney explained that [t]he opening of this route would . . . enable large tracts of country to be cultivated, which now lie comparatively useless . . . Nothing is wanting but an outlet and moderate protection, to develop the resources of this large tract of country – superior in fertility to Egypt – and to produce an enormous commerce in Mesopotamia and Babylonia.20

In June of that year, a deputation of interested parties approached the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, seeking a guarantee from the government in order to attract private capital for the construction of the railway. Led by Lord Shaftesbury, the deputation included Chesney and several other former participants in the Euphrates Expedition, and William Patrick Andrew, chairman of the Scinde, Punjab and Delhi Railway Company. According to Andrew’s later account, Lord Shaftesbury ‘pointed out in forcible language, the vast importance to this country of securing an alternative route to India, and the great interest generally felt throughout the country in this great undertaking, so calculated to promote commerce, civilization and Christianity’.21 Andrew added that the countries through which the railway would pass were ‘the richest [ 213 ]

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and most ancient in the world, and might again become the granaries of Europe’.22 However, Palmerston signalled that the government was not prepared to provide a guarantee for railway construction in the Ottoman Empire, so the project was shelved, temporarily. In 1871–72, two House of Commons Select Committees reconsidered the project, and recommended that the railway should be constructed, based on evidence given by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, British Ambassador to the Porte.23 However, there was no consensus on a suitable site for the Mediterranean terminus, and the project was shelved again. The acquisition of Cyprus in 1878 regenerated interest in the Euphrates Valley Railway project.24 At the same time, evidence that the El Dorado myth was spreading appeared in a letter to the editor of The Times, from Grattan Geary, editor of the Times of India, in which he asserted that a railway from the Mediterranean to the Valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris would pass through countries of great natural resources, and would tap provinces of wonderful fertility and boundless extent . . . British enterprise and British capital will furnish the means, and all the world, we may hope, will profit not inconsiderably by the result.25

The Euphrates Valley Railway project was not resurrected, however, and by 1882, when all hope of government support seemed to have been lost, or perhaps because it had, the agricultural potential of Mesopotamia was pitched even higher. In the House of Lords, the Conservative politician, Lord Lamington, claimed that possession of an alternative route would bolster British prestige in India. Furthermore, with a Britishowned railway through Mesopotamia, while not profitable initially, in a few years ‘the cultivation of grain would increase a hundredfold, and would go on increasing a thousandfold, and would attain to a magnitude and extension quite impossible to calculate’. And, introducing the cultural element of the myth, he asked, ‘where could a better field be found than the fertile plains of Mesopotamia, the cradle of mankind?’.26 An undated clipping from the St James’s Gazette (c.1901–2) entitled ‘Backing out of Baghdad’ represents the Liberal response to imperial adventures of the kind envisaged by Lord Lamington. The article stated that ‘it was no part of the mission of Great Britain to turn Mesopotamia into a garden. There is enough for us to do within the boundaries of our own Empire.’27 Ultimately, decades of non-committal to the project by successive governments assured that the railway would not be constructed by a British company.28 On the other hand, by the early twentieth century, British trade in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamian markets amounted to 79 per cent of the total European trade.29 Moreover, while trade may have [ 214 ]

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been the most important, it was not the only concern of the British in Mesopotamia: long-standing social and commercial ties existed, primarily with India. In 1861, the Lynch Brothers’ Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company established a passenger and cargo service between Basra and Baghdad, and a British-subsidised service on the Karun River in south-west Persia, linking with the British India Steam Navigation Company’s subsidised mail service between Bombay and Basra, established in 1862. Communications with India were further enhanced by the establishment of the Indian Postal Service at Baghdad and Basra in 1868, and British technicians manned the Indo-European Telegraph station at Fao, adjacent to the point at which the Shatt al-Arab emptied into the Persian Gulf.30 Additionally, the substantial Indian community in Basra established close ties with Indian Shi’a pilgrims travelling to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, assisted by funds from the Oudh Bequest, which were distributed by the British Resident at Baghdad.31 In mid-November 1903, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, 1899– 1905, undertook a three-week ‘triumphal procession’ around the Persian Gulf, during the course of which he announced to an assembly of Gulf sheikhs that ‘the influence of the British Government must remain supreme’.32 In the first decade of the twentieth century, British trade amounted to 79 per cent of European trade in the Persian Gulf, but by 1914, as a result of German competition, that figure had fallen to 76 per cent.33 However, increasing German commercial activity sparked interest in expanding British trade into the Mesopotamian hinterland, and precipitated a reiteration of the Mesopotamian utopia in 1907 and 1908. George Lloyd, honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Constantinople, was despatched on a mission for the Board of Trade in 1908, seeking opportunities for expanding British commerce in the region between Basra and Trebizond on the Black Sea coast. Critical of the British policy of maintaining the moribund Ottoman Empire, and the lack of interest shown by British traders in the hinterland beyond Baghdad, Lloyd utilised the El Dorado rhetoric to good effect in issuing a call for the kind of imperial adventure advocated by Lord Lamington more than twenty years before. Lloyd claimed that the potential wealth of Mesopotamia was almost without parallel . . . the country is rich and ready to be worked on, and its past riches and development have left traces which may be useful in the future. . . . Great expanses of level country stretch out before his gaze; great waterways divide the land into areas of potential fertility, and natural obstructions are non-existent. Political obstructions . . . are to be overcome once it is decided that we must go ahead in the country

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and take up a forward positive instead of a retro-gressive negative policy in this part of Turkey.34

Lloyd added that the ‘evidence of past greatness is there for all to see: all that is wanting is for the innovative and industrious twentieth century engineer to imitate or improve what was done 1000 years ago’.35 Priya Satia skilfully brings together the cultural and material elements of the Mesopotamian El Dorado, by suggesting that Mesopotamia ‘was constituted as a geographical and political object centred on the basic developmental “problem” of an ancient river system ringed by desert . . . its past, as constructed in British representations, meant everything . . . [so that] there development could be framed as preservation, as a restoration of the country’s lost greatness’.36 And restoration and redemption was the task that Sir William Willcocks set himself when in 1908 he was employed by the Ottoman government to develop an irrigation scheme for Lower Mesopotamia, which became in his mind, a scheme to restore the Garden of Eden.37 In a speech, delivered at the Royal Geographical Society in London in November 1909, Willcocks prophesied that, should his extensive irrigation system be completed, it would provide for the restoration of 3 million acres of land, capable of producing summer and winter crops, in addition to providing pasture for ‘millions’ of sheep.38 When war intervened in late 1914, little of the work on Willcocks’s grand scheme had been completed, however, the utopian trope survived, entering official discourse in 1915. The occupation of Basra by Indian Expeditionary Force ‘D’ in November 1914 provided, for Lord Curzon at least, the opportunity to express the hope that ‘under the new conditions . . . the desert may again blossom as the rose’.39 Furthermore, the El Dorado trope was employed in response to the question of war aims in the Ottoman Empire. In response to the Constantinople Agreement which awarded Russia a sphere of influence over Constantinople,40 and recognised French claims in the Levant, the British government was forced into making a decision regarding its desiderata in the Ottoman Empire, should the war end in the Allies’ favour. An interdepartmental committee was appointed in early 1915 to make recommendations to the government, and its report and accompanying papers are replete with references to the Mesopotamian agricultural El Dorado. The committee considered four options: maintenance of the status quo; maintenance of a reformed and decentralised Ottoman Empire; division of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence, or partition between the Powers. Ultimately, the committee opted for a conservative approach: the maintenance of a reformed, decentralised Ottoman Empire. The committee’s discussions concerning partition, which was to attain fruition in the Sykes–Picot [ 216 ]

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Agreement a year later, reveal that the El Dorado estimate had grown even larger. While the inclusion of Mosul was considered necessary in any British claim to Ottoman territory on account of the suspected oil deposits in the region, the committee considered that since Mosul too secures the full command of the area which will eventually come under irrigation and of the water supply for that purpose, its possession is therefore called for if we are to take full advantage of our opportunity to create a granary which should ensure the ample and unhampered supply of corn to this country.41

Furthermore, the partition scheme allowed ‘greater freedom to restore and develop the swamped and buried wealth of Mesopotamia . . . It would be no small claim to the gratitude of posterity to have given back 12,000,000 acres of fertile soil’.42 Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, agreed. While stressing the strategic importance of Mesopotamia in relation to communications with India, and the defence of British oil interests in Persia, Kitchener also stated that ‘strong arguments can be adduced for incorporating Mesopotamia in the Empire merely on the grounds of its potential agricultural resources’.43 Foreshadowing the later propaganda campaign, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, secretary of the Political and Secret Department at the India Office, invoked the agricultural El Dorado theme as justification for the occupation of Basra by British Indian troops in November 1914. However, he believed that restoring Mesopotamia’s past was not enough – Britain required a moral justification; that is, that Ottoman neglect had transformed the Garden of Eden into a wilderness and had left it in that state for three centuries. Therefore, according to Hirtzel, ‘the Power that detaches those regions from the Ottoman Empire cannot stop at that. By its action it has to make itself morally responsible to humanity and to civilisation for their reclamation and development.’44 In February 1917, the newly established Department of Information launched a propaganda campaign, based on ‘old late-nineteenth century values’ deriving from ‘related sets of dominant influences, the great public schools, a few influential academics at Oxford and Cambridge, powerful publishers, and the new enlightened despotism of the imperial proconsuls’.45 Essentially, the propaganda repeated the themes of Turkish despotism, misrule and the devastation of the once-rich lands, thus perpetuating the myth, which is evident in the proclamation delivered to the notables of Baghdad, following its occupation by the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in March 1917. Composed by Sir Mark Sykes, and amended by officials in the India and Foreign Offices and the Viceroy of India, the proclamation delivered on 19 March 1917 contained the promise that the British government, in association [ 217 ]

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with the Allies, desire ‘that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world’.46 (This, of course, was historically inaccurate, but the message was clear.) Later that year, referring to the military campaign in Mesopotamia, Sir Mark Sykes stated that ‘the ideal was “not . . . conquest but . . . redemption” ’.47 The redemptive theme was repeated by Lord Curzon, temporary manager of Mesopotamian policy as Chairman of the Mesopotamian Administration Committee, established in the wake of the occupation of Baghdad. In response to Labour Party concerns regarding Mesopotamian policy, Curzon penned a memorandum justifying the British occupation in similar, but more forceful terms, than those employed by Hirtzel two years earlier: if the splendid natural resources of the country are once again to be revived after centuries of neglect and decay, the responsibility of the undertaking must be assumed by a civilising power. The only civilised power that is either equipped for the task or is interested in it is Great Britain, and if she were to throw it up, the result would not only be detrimental, and even dangerous to herself but positively disastrous to the native peoples.48

At the same time, the authorities in Mesopotamia and India organised a commission to study the commercial potential of Mesopotamia, with a view to encouraging British companies to establish operations before the war ended and the peace conference decided Mesopotamia’s future. The commissioners’ preliminary report emphasised the importance of irrigation and river control for the ‘restoration of the regime of the rivers’ and the ‘redemption’ of the desert.49 While the commissioners’ report was not published at the time, the promise of an El Dorado seems to have aroused the ambitions of potential investors, eager to establish businesses in Mesopotamia ‘before the whistle blew’. To give one example, among the many proposals which were received at the India Office in 1918 was a scheme concocted by a Colonel Macdonald, who hailed the ‘opportunity to create one of the greatest grain growing areas in the world . . . in two years two million acres of land could, by simple and temporary measures for irrigation control, be placed under cultivation’.50 However, doubts were also expressed by H. V. Cox, Military Secretary at the India Office, who stated that ‘even if it were a practical proposition from a political point of view the military authorities would not be at all likely to approve of the Army of occupation turning their swords into ploughshares as seems to be contemplated’.51 [ 218 ]

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While some scholars claim that the agricultural El Dorado served as camouflage for securing Mesopotamia’s oil deposits as the motive for the military campaign in November 1914,52 others suggest mid1918 as the time at which the camouflage was applied, on the basis of correspondence in August of that year between Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, and the Foreign Secretary, A. J. Balfour. Hankey wrote to Balfour on 30 July 1918: ‘The retention of the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Persia in British hands, as well as a proper strategic boundary to cover them, would appear to be a first-class British war aim.’53 Balfour replied that he was reluctant to make oil a war aim ‘on the grounds that it was too imperialist an objective, so Hankey widened the argument to include water, as well as oil’.54 Hankey wrote to Balfour on 12 August that since the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were situated in the Mosul province, British control was essential in order to secure ‘an adequate water supply to the lands already under occupation to the south’.55 It is a convincing argument, however, water and the retention of the area containing the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, and coincidentally, the oil-bearing districts, had long been promoted by Hankey, among others, since the de Bunsen Committee deliberations in 1915.56 Yet the Sykes–Picot Agreement contains no mention of oil, and furthermore, Mosul, where the largest oil deposits were thought to exist, was included in the French area (a) of indirect control in that Agreement. Article 4 of the Agreement, however, provided for ‘a guarantee of a given supply of water from area (a) for area (b)’, the British area of indirect control, in exchange for which, the British government pledged not to cede Cyprus to a third power without the consent of the French government.57 Therefore, it may be concluded that oil was only one factor in policy decisions regarding Mesopotamia, while a continuous and adequate supply of water was vital for its development. In 1918, reservations expressed by authorities on the spot signalled the beginning of the end of the promise of an agricultural El Dorado in Mesopotamia. Sir John Hewett, Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces, was despatched to Mesopotamia by the War Office to examine and report to the Army Council on Army expenditure on irrigation and agriculture, and to report if civil, rather than Army funds could be used for these schemes.58 Hewett reported that although there were good prospects for future agricultural prosperity, there was no likelihood of and El Dorado immediately, and therefore large irrigation schemes should not be undertaken without first determining whether the land to be irrigated was indeed cultivable at all.59 The acting Civil Commissioner, Captain Arnold Wilson, expressed similar concerns when discussing the proposed transfer of military departments to the civil [ 219 ]

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administration in late 1918. Wilson stressed that the civil administration was not in a position to fund irrigation works from its revenues, which were collected largely from local taxes. He further advised that only if the government considered it necessary ‘on imperial grounds’ to undertake such schemes, and funds were provided from the Imperial Treasury could such work be contemplated, but even so the policy of the civil administration for years to come should be to endeavour to . . . improve quality of crops grown . . . and to improve local methods of cultivation rather than to seek to open up fresh areas.60

There was a measure of prosperity in Mesopotamia in the immediate post-war period, largely as a result of the development projects of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, and the employment opportunities they provided to the local population. Politicians again referred to Mesopotamia as a granary for the world.61 However, the prosperity did not extend beyond southern Mesopotamia – in the central and northern areas, war resulted in ‘economic disaster’.62 However, the prosperity was short-lived, and doubts and cynicism soon emerged regarding Mesopotamia’s agricultural potential. An editorial in The Times criticised the waste and ‘lavish’ expenditure on development projects by the ‘prodigal’ War Office, given that while the Chancellor of the Exchequer stated that Great Britain was heading for bankruptcy, ‘we seem to be planning to spend money on the development of Mesopotamia to an extent which would have startled Lord Cromer and the other regenerators of Egypt’.63 Moreover, the writer challenged the traditional theory regarding the desolation of the landscape, stating that there had been no sufficient explanation given for the state of ruin in which the ancient irrigation works were found and the country laid waste. Expert opinion, the writer claimed, was divided on this point: either the country was ‘overwhelmed’ during the Mongol invasions, ‘ruined’ by malaria, or as seems more likely, was ‘left to decay either because the soil became waterlogged or because artificial irrigation stimulated the action of salts in the soil which rendered the crops useless’.64 Another article which appeared in The Times a month later corroborated that sentiment, and would appear to have ended all hope for an agricultural El Dorado in Mesopotamia, stating that There has been a good deal of eulogistic writing and talking by uninformed people on the subject of the potential of Mesopotamia, which has been described as either the future granary of the world, or the new Garden of Eden. I do desire emphatically to point out that in the present financial and economic crisis there is no money to spend on visionary philanthropic

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enterprises that cannot show for generations to come an adequate return for the capital expended. For practical purposes it is useless to dwell on Mesopotamia’s glories of the past, and the fact remains that the greater part of Mesopotamia is today a miserable wilderness of barren desert alternating with vast swamps.65

These gloomy accounts did not deter politicians from referring to the utopian trope when necessary. In 1920, during a debate on Army Estimates in the House of Commons, when withdrawal to Basra was under consideration, Conservative MP William Ormsby-Gore resorted to the, by now, familiar theme, but made an even more exaggerated claim concerning Mesopotamia’s potential, stating that we are going to undertake the gigantic task of restoring to production the 14,000,000 acres that once formed part of the cultivable area of Mesopotamia which was once the granary of the world, but now, owing to man’s destructive zeal, has become a desert.66

In a later account, referring to one of Willcocks’s schemes which had been abruptly halted upon the outbreak of war, A. T. Wilson, the former Civil Commissioner in Baghdad, wrote by 1920, ‘only a few long stretches of mud-banks emerging from the dreary waste of water remained to show what had been, and to suggest what might have been’.67 Moreover, by 1921, the newly appointed manager of the Middle East mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia, Winston Churchill, had found another location for the agricultural utopia.68 In a letter to the President of the Dundee Liberal Association, Churchill stated that the government could no longer expend vast sums on development in Mesopotamia, given ‘the immense fertility and value of our West African and East African territories and the far better opportunities they offered for imperial development as compared with the Middle East’.69 In response to a press campaign in 1922 to ‘Quit Mesopotamia’, and mounting public anger over the cost of maintaining British troops in the country, the newly elected Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law, appointed an interdepartmental committee to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of withdrawing from Iraq and the responsibilities of the mandate. If the agricultural El Dorado had served as camouflage for Britain’s oil policy since 1918, during the committee’s discussions the camouflage was removed. While still holding out some hope for increasing the agricultural productivity of Iraq, the utopian myth was replaced by the other, more realistic, source of wealth Iraq possessed. The Colonial Office Middle East Department prepared a note for [ 221 ]

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circulation to the committee members, arguing against withdrawal, and reminding members that in Mosul province, there existed

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what may prove to be one of the most important oil-fields of the future . . . [i]f we cut our losses now, we shall have nothing whatever to show for all our heavy sacrifices of blood and treasure. If, on the other hand, we exercise patience for a little longer, we may reap some tangible reward.70

There was no evacuation; Britain retained the mandate for Iraq until the end of 1932. While the Mesopotamian agricultural El Dorado may have failed to materialise, the cultural dimension of the myth lingered in the imperial imagination. Churchill’s scheme, introduced in 1922, utilising the Royal Air Force for the defence of the country in lieu of a large land force, and for the pacification of the turbulent tribes in the isolated regions of Iraq, brought forth a new image of aeroplanes, deriving from old myths concerning the East: You remember that Sinbad the sailor, who used to voyage from Baghdad to Basra and thence towards the ocean and mysterious islands, turned airman and flew on a great bird. The great birds have come again . . . The age of miracles has happily returned, and we may see strange Arabian nights in the coming years.71

At the same time, opponents of the British mandatory experiment took the opportunity to lambast the cultural foundations of the El Dorado myth. During a lengthy debate in the House of Commons in 1926, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Leo Amery, invoked the Mesopotamian agricultural utopia, to howls of derision from the opposition benches. Labour MP Clement Attlee, with a good deal of sarcasm, referred back to an earlier time, and the rosy visions of the right hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs (Mr Lloyd George) when he was engaged in making a new Heaven and a new earth, after the hell of the war. He used to talk a great deal about Iraq, his knowledge being derived, so far as I could make out, from the first few chapters of Genesis. Iraq was then going to be an enormous asset to the Empire, a mass of money was going to be poured into it, and it was going to flow with milk and honey, cotton and oil, and everything else that was good.72

Given Attlee’s comments, after eighteen years of British control of Iraq, both direct and indirect, it is useful to examine what remained of the utopian dream by the late 1920s. A Financial Mission headed by Sir Hilton Young, MP, visited the country in 1925 to enquire into the financial position of the Iraq government. Chief among his recommendations for reducing government expenditure, Young suggested [ 222 ]

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reductions in the Ministries of Education, Health, Agriculture and Irrigation, where staff numbers were reduced, and proposed new work was postponed.73 While some portions of William Willcocks’s irrigation scheme were re-studied in 1927, work did not proceed due to lack of funds.74 Ironically, while a law was passed in 1926 to encourage the use of oil-fuelled pumps enabling flood irrigation on a scale not hitherto envisaged, a lack of adequate drainage resulted in high levels of soil salinity and subsequent crop failures. In addition, periodic locust infestations and uncertain water supplies all contributed to the area of land under cultivation falling short of the modest expectations of the authorities on the spot,75 and a great deal less than the millions of acres claimed by the purveyors of the myth of a Mesopotamian utopia. The context in which the agricultural El Dorado was invoked provides the answer to the question of its longevity. The only instance in which it was not used as justification for another motive was Willcocks’s irrigation scheme, which was, at the time it was conceived, presumably for the benefit of the Ottoman Empire. In all other cases the restoration, redemption and development of Mesopotamia was employed as a justification for something else: for attempting to secure government support for the construction of railways; in response to the perceived threat to British commercial interests in the Persian Gulf by German competition in the early twentieth century; as justification for British war aims in the East in 1915; for the occupation of Mosul in November 1918, and in order to attract British investors before Mesopotamia’s political future was decided at the Peace Conference. Post-war invocations of the myth, given the actual situation on the ground, are more easily identified as camouflage for other imperial desiderata, primarily oil, and thus Amery’s invocation in 1926 received the derision it deserved. Given the strong support for evacuation in 1922, it seems the argument for Iraq’s strategic importance may also have been an exaggeration. Ministers, bureaucrats, potential investors and imperial proconsuls, if not seduced by the claims of an agricultural utopia in Mesopotamia, certainly employed it whenever the need arose. Myth-making, the exaggeration of threats to British interests and the puffing of ‘prestige’ are, after all, essential elements of the process of imperialism.

Notes 1 William Willcocks, ‘Mesopotamia: Past, Present, and Future’, Geographical Journal, 35(1), 1910, 15. 2 S. Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was, Cambridge, 1999, 12. 3 ‘Continuance of the General Statement of the Labours and Proceedings of the Expedition to the Euphrates under the command of Col. Chesney, Royal Artillery, FBS,

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7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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from its Departure from Balis, in April 1836, until its arrival in Baghdad on the Tigris in September of the Same Year’, 73–4 (Euphrates Expedition Papers, Appendix 55, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1837, no. 540). General Charles Townsend, private letter to Lord Curzon, 7 November 1915. Curzon Papers F112/163, India Office Records, British Library. N. Atia, ‘A Relic of Its Own Past: Mesopotamia in the British Imagination, 1900–14’, Memory Studies, 3(3), 2010, 232. A. Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession, Manchester, 2009. E. Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism, Oxford, 2005, 81. D. Gillard (ed.), British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, p I, series B, vol. 18, Arabia, the Gulf and the Baghdad Railway, 1907–1914, 358: Lt-Col. F. R. Maunsell, ‘Proposals for New Railways in Asiatic Turkey’, 28 September 1908. C. Mauch and T. Zeller (eds), Rivers in History: Perspectives on waterways in Europe and North America, Pittsburgh, PA, 2008, 1. Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 18, 82–4, 93–7. M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 1792–1923, London/New York, 1987, 332. S. Lloyd [1947], Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration, London, 1980, 33. E. Ingram, Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800, Oxford, 1981, 292. M. S. Anderson (ed.), Great Powers and the Near East 1774–1923: Documents of Modern History, London, 1970, 49–51. Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 50. Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust, 82. H. L. Hoskins, British Routes to India, New York, 1928, 327–8. William Ainsworth to Col. Chesney, 10 July 1836, Euphrates Expedition Papers, 36. Hoskins, British Routes to India, 328. FO656.350/149813, E89, John Crerar Library, University of Chicago: Major-General F. R. Chesney, ‘Report to the Chairman and Directors of the Euphrates Valley Railway Company’, 13 February 1857, 2, 4. W. P. Andrew, India and Her Neighbours, London, 1878, 369. http://openlibrary.org/ books/OL722367OM/India_and_her_neighbours (accessed 17 July 2012). Ibid., 370. Ibid., 297–8. D. E. Lee, Great Britain and the Cyprus Convention Policy of 1878, Cambridge, 1934, 135. The Times, 25 July 1878, 4. Hansard, House of Lords Debates, vol. 272, col. 676 (17 July 1882). British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers, F112/356, folio 294. A concession for the first stage of the proposed Berlin to Baghdad Railway was granted to the German-backed Anatolian Railway Company in 1889. When the formal conventions were signed in 1902, it was revealed that the railway was to be extended to the Persian Gulf, and when a further convention was signed with the Porte in 1908, granting a guarantee for extension of the line to Boulgourlou, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, a number of British railway schemes were considered, but ultimately rejected in favour of participation in the Baghdad to Basra section of the line (Memorandum Respecting the Baghdad Railway, 1909, Foreign Office, 28 January 1910, BDFA, pt I, series B, vol. 18, 370). P. Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, London, 2007, 249, n. 34. P. W. Ireland [1937], Iraq: A Study in Political Development, New York, 1970, 47–8; B. C. Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914, Los Angeles, CA, 1967, 36. P. Satia, ‘Developing Iraq: Britain, India and the Redemption of Empire and Technology in the First World War’, Past and Present, 197 (Nov. 2007), 246, n. 116. As Satia

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33

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explains, the Oudh Bequest originated from a loan given by the king of Awadh in 1825 to the East India Company to finance its military operations in Nepal. While the loan was not repaid, the government of India was to use the interest accruing for specific purposes, one of which was to support religious education in Najaf and Karbala. In 1852, the British Resident at Baghdad persuaded the authorities in India to allow the Residency to control the distribution of the funds. The Rt Hon. the Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon, II, London, 1928, 316. Curzon’s most recent biographer cites a letter from the Secretary of State for India to Curzon upon his return to Calcutta, informing him that in Whitehall, politicians were, with some cynicism, referring to the Persian Gulf as the Curzon Lake (D. Gilmour [1993], Curzon: Imperial Statesman, London, 1994, 269). Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 249 n. 34. A possible explanation for the fall in total British trade can be found in accounts from men on the spot, who indirectly criticised the methods of British traders in the Persian Gulf. The British Vice-Consul at Ahwaz, wrote that German traders dealt with their customers honestly, and treated them with respect (L/P&S/10/366, register no. 2993: Vice-Consul Ranking, Ahwaz, to Consul, Mohammerah, 14 May 1914); and in July, Lord Inchcape, director of British India Steam Navigation Company alluded to the fact that German traders were calling at ports in the Gulf which British traders bypassed (ibid., register no. 2658: Inchcape to T. W. Holderness, Under-Secretary of State, India Office, 3 July 1914). British Documents on Foreign Affairs, Part I, series B, Vol. 16: The Ottoman Empire, Arabia and the Gulf: British Commercial and Financial Interests, 1890–1914: G. Lloyd, ‘Report to the Board of Trade Advisory Committee on Commercial Intelligence, 1908’, 125. Ibid., 160. Satia, ‘Developing Iraq’, 215. Willcocks, ‘Mesopotamia’, 1. Ibid., 10–11, 15. See A. T. Wilson, Loyalties, Mesopotamia 1914–1917: A Personal and Historical Record, London, 1930, 104. J. C. Hurewitz [1956], Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, Vol. II, 1914–1956, Princeton, NJ, 1958, 7–9: the Constantinople Agreement, 4 March–10 April 1915. British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers, F112/254: ‘British Desiderata in Turkey in Asia, Report, Proceedings, and Appendices of a Committee appointed by the Prime Minister’, 30 June 1915, 9. Ibid., 49. British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers F112/254: de Bunsen Committee Report, Appendix X, ‘Alexandretta and Mesopotamia’, memorandum by Lord Kitchener, 16 March 1915, 104. Interestingly, Kitchener’s view of deserts differs profoundly from the ‘empty land’ thesis, which ascribes the desolate landscape and sparse population to Turkish misrule. See Bar-Yosef, Holy Land in English Culture. For Kitchener, from a military point of view, the desert provided a natural defence against the enemy. National Archives, FO800/377: ‘Note by the Secretary, Political and Secret Department, India Office, 14 March 1915. J. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester, 1984, 208, 255. British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers, F112/256: the Baghdad Proclamation, 19 March 1917. Sir Mark Sykes, ‘Political note on our Advance in Iraq’, 17 September 1917, cited in Satia, ‘Developing Iraq’, 228. British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers, F112/286: ‘British Policy in Mesopotamia’, 21 September 1917, 4–5. Ibid.: ‘Report of Mesopotamian Trade Commissioners (Messrs R. E. Holland and J. H. Wilson), Summary of Recommendations’, 6 February 1918. The preliminary report of the commissioners, dated 15 June 1917, was received at the India Office in January 1918, and copies circulated to other departments of state with interests in Mesopotamia. However, the Foreign and India Offices agreed to suppress publication

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of the report, lest it alert non-British investors to the fabulous commercial potential of the redeemed desert. The relevant correspondence can be found in the India Office Records, L/P&S/10/367, register no. 2090. British Library, India Office Records, L/P&S/11/141, register no. 5078: ‘Food Production in Occupied Territories in Mesopotamia, Arabistan, Palestine and Syria’, Col. J. Macdonald, October 1918, 3. Ibid., H.V. Cox note, 30 October 1918. The records show that the Secretary of State for India refused to consider Macdonald’s proposal, while Sir Arthur Hirtzel and J. E. Shuckburgh in the Political and Secret Department believed it was a worthy scheme, however, they agreed that nothing of that nature could be contemplated until Mesopotamia’s political future was determined. For example, see H. Mejcher, Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928, London, 1976. S. Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, Vol. I, 1877–1918, London, 1970, 583. M. E. Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, 332; also cited in V. H. Rothwell, ‘Mesopotamia in British War Aims, 1914–1918, Historical Journal, 13(2), 1970, 290. V. H. Rothwell, ‘British War Aims’, 290. British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers F112/254: De Bunsen Committee, second meeting, 13 April 1915. British Documents on Foreign Affairs, pt II, series I, vol. 11, 26–7: M. Sykes, ‘Arrangements of May 1916, commonly known as the Sykes–Picot Agreement’ (English Text). It seems by 1916, the guarantee of a water supply for Mesopotamia was more important to the British government than was the retention of Cyprus, while the strategic implications to France of the cession of Cyprus were problematic. For a discussion on this issue, see J. Fisher, ‘The Cyprus Proposition: Lord Curzon and Cyprus in British Imperial Strategy, 1914 to 1919’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 23, 1999, 140–63. The jurisdiction of Mesopotamia from March 1917 to early 1919 amounted to divided responsibility between the War and India Offices in London: the India Office responsible for the civil administration, and the War Office for the conduct of military operations, and for the exploitation and development of the country’s resources. British Library, India Office Records, L/P&S/10/750, P. 3156/1918, pt 2, register no. 8225/1919: Memorandum on Mesopotamia by Sir John Hewett, 7 May 1919, 10. L/P&S/10/666, P. 978/1917, register no. 4679: Political Baghdad telegram no. 9256 to India Office, 29 October 1918. E. Main, Iraq: From Mandate to Independence, London, 1935, 212. Yapp, Making of the Modern Near East, 213. The Times, editorial, 14 August 1918, 11. Ibid. John Mackenzie makes the same conclusion concerning ancient irrigation systems in the Middle East, and more recently, those in India (‘Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment’, in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Edinburgh, 1997, ch. 14, 218). Sir George Cunningham Buchanan, ‘The development of Mesopotamia I: exaggerated hopes, an orgy of waste’, The Times, 23 September 1919, 9. During the war, Buchanan was transferred from Rangoon to improve the port facilities at Basra, and to devise a plan for the conservancy of the rivers (Satia, ‘Developing Iraq’, 221). Cited from A. T. Wilson, A Clash of Loyalties: A Personal and Historical Record, London, 1931, 241. Ibid., 93–4. From 1920, ‘Mesopotamia’ was increasingly replaced by ‘Iraq’ in official discourse, and abandoned in 1921 upon the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq. ‘Mr Churchill on the Middle East: Mesopotamian policy’, The Times, 4 March 1921, 11. This was not a new idea. In July 1918, Sir Theodore Morison, a former member of the Council of India, and subsequently a Political Officer in German East Africa, 1916–18, referring to earlier notions of Mesopotamia as a colony for India’s surplus population, offered the proposition that post-war, the former German East African territories should become an Indian colony. The notion of providing India with a

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71 72 73 74 75

colony speaks to the larger imperial problem of India’s rapidly expanding population, which exercised the minds of ministers and bureaucrats for some time. The exclusionary policies of the white dominions prevented Indian immigration to those countries, hence the consideration of Mesopotamia and East Africa. See British Library, India Office Records, Curzon Papers, F112/182: T. Morison, ‘A Colony for India’, July 1918. CO730/34/61243: Cabinet Committee on Iraq, IRQ2, ‘Note prepared by the Middle East Department’, Colonial Office, 11 December 1922. ‘A traveller in Mesopotamia: romance of the land’, book review of By Tigris and Euphrates by Mrs E. S. Stephens, The Times, 14 December 1923, 8. Hansard, House of Commons Deb., vol. 191, cols 2277–8 (18 February 1926). CO730/93/C12169: Acting High Commissioner, Baghdad, no. CO 93, to Secretary of State, 21 January 1926. CO730/144/12, no. 68299: ‘Memorandum on the Habbaniyah Lake Project’, W. Allard, Baghdad, 22 June 1929. C. Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000, 69; S. H. Longrigg, Iraq, 1900– 1950, London, 1953, 171; K. C. Ulrichsen, ‘The British Occupation of Mesopotamia, 1914–1922’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30(2), 2007, 363.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

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Shattered images: French Indochina as a failed symbolic resource John Hennessey

Colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an enormously complex and multifaceted enterprise. Especially in the case of larger colonies like French Indochina, it is difficult to evaluate the overall ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the colonial project from the standpoint of the colonizing country, since this consisted of many dimensions. ‘Success’ could be measured among other ways in raw materials, strategic advantage, or converted souls.1 In economic terms, by the early twentieth century Indochina was arguably France’s most prosperous colonial possession. Nevertheless, a closer investigation of French governments’ primary goals for the colony reveals that this relatively late profitability masks Indochina’s repeated failure to live up to its rulers’ expectations. Analogously to many other cases explored in this book, the initial conquest of Indochina was driven by a thirst for imagined wealth, but the colony’s raison d’être in the French Empire shifted to utopian fantasies when such treasure was not forthcoming. Although the classic El Dorado search for treasure was indeed one of the Second Empire’s primary motivations in colonizing the Indochinese peninsula, the bulk of this chapter will discuss a less tangible but equally alluring resource: what successive French leaders believed to be Indochina’s symbolic potential to augment their authority at home and abroad. Whether as an emblem of the power of a new regime or as a distraction from a dispiriting situation at home, French leaders of all stripes saw in Indochina a symbolic treasure trove. Nevertheless, just like other utopias, the mythic Indochina constructed by French propaganda repeatedly proved indeed to be ‘no place’ when confronted by harsh realities. Indochina dashed French leaders’ hopes to exploit it as a symbolic resource, instead time and again becoming a source of national embarrassment. Indochina’s elusiveness as a utopian symbolic resource may seem trivial when compared to the colony’s early-twentieth-century economic [ 228 ]

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prosperity, but Indochina’s propaganda value was in fact of central importance in the concrete decisions of successive French leaders to maintain French control over Indochina. France’s successful commercial ventures in Indochina in the early twentieth century were largely unrelated to the original goals for the French subjugation of SouthEast Asian territory. Even after Indochina’s economic prosperity had been belatedly established, prestige and political symbolism continued to be the driving force of French colonial policy in the region. As Raoul Girardet argues, Third Republic Prime Minister Jules Ferry justified French expansionism with economic, political and ‘humanitarian’ reasoning, but ‘it is not the patriotic argumentation that should be considered the alibi for economic imperatives, but rather the economic theorization that served to legitimize the nationalistic plans’.2 As this chapter will argue, this was in fact the case for every French regime from Napoleon III to Charles de Gaulle. Repeated failure never seemed to destroy the allure of Indochina as a symbolic resource for French leaders. In some ways, it is an oversimplification to speak of an ‘Indochina’, as if the colony were a homogeneous entity. In reality, the Union of Indochina comprised five territories with differing administrations and a variety of ethnic groups. Nor was it the case that the symbolic imagery that each constituent part conjured up in the French imagination was the same.3 Cambodia invoked great ancient civilizations, Tonkin a gateway to China, and Cochinchina rich agricultural resources, to give but three examples. There have been several excellent studies of Indochina’s individual constituent parts,4 but even if it is something of an simplification, this short chapter will attempt to show that Indochina as a whole nevertheless had a cumulative symbolic presence of its own that captivated succeeding generations of French officials. French colonial discourse and symbolism have received intense scrutiny in a plethora of academic works, with regard to Indochina notably by Panivong Norindr.5 Norindr presciently argues that French colonial boosters ‘transformed the Indochinese colony into an alluring and commodified object, a familiar icon or sign to be desired or possessed’ that was more a mythic construct than a reflection of reality.6 Nevertheless, post-colonial historians sometimes have a tendency to overemphasize the effectiveness of colonial propaganda in their (quite justifiable) strivings to convey the destructive power of imperialism. Although it is easy to assume that the colonizer benefited in equal measure to the suffering of the colonized, the essays in this volume reveal that such was not always the case. Often, while proving mercilessly effective at subjecting the indigenous populations of a conquered territory, Western colonialism failed to meet the expectations of its [ 229 ]

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perpetrators. This chapter hopes to show that despite the sophisticated discursive structure underpinning French rule, the cognitive dissonance between colonial propaganda and certain key moments of failure in fact made the symbolic gains anticipated by French leaders as much a chimera as any other El Dorado treasure. The reality of a colonial dystopia could at times disturb the utopian image of colonial propaganda, at least temporarily. The repeated inability of the French to keep their symbolic image of Indochina intact was partly a result of poor planning and unwillingness to make serious investments on the part of the colonizer and partly due to the resistance of the colonized to this image. After describing the disappointed hopes for a lucrative trade with southern China that largely prompted France’s takeover of the Indochinese peninsula, this chapter will present an overview of the cyclical history of dreams and disappointment that kept the French in South-East Asia for the better part of a century.

The Second Empire: the lure of China The Frenchmen responsible for initiating the conquest of Indochina were actually not much interested in the Indochinese peninsula itself; what they were really keen on were what they believed to be the riches of South-Eastern China, particularly Yunnan province. In a striking historical parallel to France’s search for a North-West Passage through North America centuries earlier, mid-nineteenth-century French expansionists believed Indochina to contain a riverine route that they could use to access southern China’s precious metals, silk, tea and (they presumed) large market for French goods. With Britain largely controlling commerce along the Chinese coast, many French colonialists and businessmen feared British domination of trade with China if an alternate path of entry were not found. The Mekong River seemed to many to be the route they were looking for. As Britain expanded its massive Indian domain eastwards, French military leaders also came to feel that a significant foothold in South-East Asia was of strategic and symbolic importance in the global Franco-British imperial race. Thus, rather than an object of interest in itself, the colonization of Indochina was originally seen by its proponents as a stepping stone towards larger imperial goals. With these dual underlying motivations of trade and prestige, Napoleon III authorized a punitive expedition to the Vietnamese Dai Nam Empire in 1857, ostensibly to put an end to the mass persecution of Catholic missionaries and their Vietnamese converts. The resulting expedition, which was only given vague and highly ‘flexible’ instructions by Paris,7 ended up annexing the area around Saigon in [ 230 ]

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1862. This would be expanded in subsequent years to form the colony of Cochinchina, giving the French direct control over the mouth of the Mekong. Expectations of using this waterway to access Yunnan were thwarted, however, after Francis Garnier’s 1866–68 expedition revealed that many stretches farther from the coast were not navigable. After the Mekong proved to be a disappointment, French hopes turned to the Red River in Dai Nam’s northern Tonkin region. Much like Garnier’s voyage ten years earlier, an expedition led by Alexandre Kergaradec determined in 1876–77 that even this river left much to be desired when it came to commercial shipping.8 The two expeditions’ disheartening results do not seem to have quelled French enthusiasm for Yunnan and what was popularly believed to be its gateway in Tonkin, however. As the chances of finding a convenient route to Yunnan became more remote and the French presence in South-East Asia became more established in the last decades of the nineteenth century, questions of imperial prestige in the race against Britain began to weigh more heavily in French imperial decision-making, although dreams of Chinese riches did not die. In the 1890s, imperial lobbyists advocated outright annexation and envisioned Indochina as the first piece of a vast French South-East Asian empire comprising Siam and a large swath of southern China.9 Such a territory was perhaps envisioned as a French equivalent to British India. The newspaper La République Française in fact likened it to the territory that France had earlier lost to Britain on the Indian subcontinent.10 After China suffered a devastating defeat at the hands Japan in 1895 and especially after the Boxer Rebellion was crushed by a multinational force in 1900, many in Europe came to believe that China was on the verge of collapse and that there would be a ‘scramble for China’ by the imperial powers like the recent scramble for Africa.11 Indochina’s Governor General Paul Doumer was among those eager to annex Yunnan and oversaw the construction of a railway line connecting it with Tonkin, finally creating the link that the French had sought for decades. French colonialists’ imagined South-East Asian domain was not to be, however. Content with unequal treaties and spheres of influence, other powers decided that it was not worth the risk of war and the trouble of direct rule to carve up the Middle Kingdom.12 Afraid of conflict with Britain and Japan, the French Foreign Ministry put a stop to Doumer’s plans for annexation.13 Although the French progressively nibbled away at its eastern provinces up until 1907, Thailand was to remain (nominally) independent as a neutral zone between British Burma and French Indochina.14 France did wrestle special economic concessions in south-eastern China from the Chinese government, but [ 231 ]

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its authority there was to remain informal and Yunnan was to prove less profitable than the French had long dreamed of. According to C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, around the turn of the century, ‘the French Consul in Yunnan insisted that the Eldorado in South China to which the French colony was supposed to be the commercial gateway simply did not exist’.15 By the 1910s, all but the most zealous imperial lobbyists had abandoned their hopes of bringing Southern China and Siam under French control.16 France was left with a stepping stone towards aborted grand projects that held limited appeal in itself, at least from the perspective of trade and defence. Although French geopolitical interest in Indochina diminished greatly after the turn of the century,17 successive French governments held on to the colony largely because they came to see it as having potential as a symbolic resource. Just as earlier colonialists envisioned a giant French dominion in South-East Asia, French leaders dreamed of constructing a utopian model colony that would prove to the world France’s colonial prowess and demonstrate to the residents of the metropole the competence and power of their administration.

The early Third Republic: Jules Ferry and the defeat at Lang-Son Although French designs on southern China and Siam were never realized, these dreams died slowly and noiselessly. Their quiet demise therefore did little to shake the image of Indochina as a symbol of French grandeur that colonial boosters had built up from an early date. At several points in the subsequent history of French colonization in Indochina, however, a spectacular fiasco would leave this façade shattered for a time until France’s Indochinese dreams were rebuilt by an ensuing government. The first of these disasters came during the early Third Republic under the auspices of one of its strongest leaders, Jules Ferry, and started off as a response to another disaster closer to home: France’s defeat at the hands of Germany that was sealed at the 1870 Battle of Sedan. In the short term, the Franco-Prussian War temporarily diverted French attention from Indochina, but in the longer term it helped to incite further expansion. After the debacle, many nationalists came to see imperial expansion as a way for attenuating the loss of AlsaceLorraine and reinvigorating French pride. This was hardly a position shared by all nationalists (‘I’ve lost two sisters’ French patriot Paul Déroulède complained, ‘and you offer me twenty servants!’),18 but it became an increasingly popular strategy among French politicians eager to deflect public scrutiny away from their inability to retake France’s [ 232 ]

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lost north-eastern territories. Competition with Britain and other powers in the imperial race that was really taking off at this time and a desire for glory were also important motivating factors for renewed colonial expansion. French Republicanism had long been characterized by strong universalist rhetoric and after two decades out of power, Republicans enthusiastically called the nation to actively spread French civilization across the globe. Expansionist Prime Minister Ferry depicted France’s mission in grandiose terms: ‘She [France] cannot only be a free country, but she must also be a great country [un grand pays] . . . she must spread [her] influence around the world, and bring everywhere she can her language, her customs, her flag, her arms, her genius’.19 Fuelled by this sense of mission, Republican leaders expanded the French Empire dramatically during the first decades of their rule. During the first half of the 1880s, spearheaded by Ferry, the young Third French Republic took over the rest of Dai Nam, eventually dividing it into two protectorates, Annam and Tonkin. France’s aggression brought it into conflict with China, which had long exercised suzerainty over Dai Nam. When French forces suffered an unforeseen defeat in 1885 at Lang Son near the Chinese border, fears of ‘a colonial Sedan’ gripped a shocked metropole.20 As this phrase reveals, rather than proving a distraction as French leaders hoped, events in Indochina often became an allegory for metropolitan woes. Penny Edwards has insightfully shown that Cambodia likewise became a stage onto which French malaise was projected, with its lost provinces of Siem Reap, Battambang and Sisophon habitually called Cambodia’s ‘Alsace-Lorraine’ and the ancient Khmer people’s supposed extinction taken as a warning for a France that was having trouble keeping up its birth rate.21 Even disregarding these allegorical concerns, for French leaders trying to sell the idea that their country was at the pinnacle of civilization in an age when colonial expansion was underpinned by scientific racism, losing to China was deeply humiliating. Although France was quickly able to reverse its military fortunes and solidify its hold over the new protectorates, the high cost and uncertain rewards of the expedition appear to have combined with the embarrassment of Lang Son to turn public opinion against Ferry and imperialism in South-East Asia. The Tonkin expedition is generally believed to have been the decisive factor in Ferry’s fall in France’s 1885 elections.22 Shattered imperial ambitions not only toppled Jules Ferry but in fact ended up permanently weakening the French position in Indochina. Remembering how Ferry’s costly campaign in Tonkin had brought down his government, most subsequent French leaders were only interested in Indochina if it came at a bargain price.23 Large budgets for colonial projects were too difficult a sell to a now highly critical French [ 233 ]

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populace. Moreover, the industrialization of Indochina was stunted as a result of the lobbying efforts of metropolitan producers.24 The principle that colonial production, industrial, agricultural, or otherwise, should not compete with metropolitan businesses held fast until the Second World War.25 In fact, France ended up hurting itself in the long run through its failure to better facilitate the economic development of the colony, as some contemporary French leaders recognized. For one thing, although privileged access to markets for French goods was a frequent argument for imperialism, keeping the mass of the colonized in poverty left their purchasing power at low levels. Moreover, the lack of colonial industry only increased the vulnerability of distant territories in times of war when they were likely to be cut off from the metropole and reduced the munitions production of Greater France as a whole. While Indochina did indeed prove highly lucrative for certain French business interests during the early twentieth century, an almost systematic lack of serious investment would keep the more ambitious French dreams from becoming reality and would return to haunt France during the Second World War.

First World War: hollow promises The Lang Son fiasco notwithstanding, by the first decades of the twentieth century, the Third Republic was once again making full use of Indochina in metropolitan propaganda. As in the late nineteenth century, Indochina, along with other French colonies, was promoted as a source of national pride at a time when France’s fortunes in Europe were waning. Even more frequently, politicians used the vast populations and resources of Indochina and the rest of the empire in an attempt to reassure an increasingly anxious metropolitan population of France’s military might. This was a dangerous game, however, for in reality Indochina was more of a liability than an asset in time of war, as many French leaders were well aware. The pace of French overseas expansion slowed in the early twentieth century and came to be achieved more by diplomacy than ‘heroic’ exploits in the field, but French politicians merely shifted the rhetorical emphasis from glorious conquest to the size and richness of the existing empire and France’s ‘civilizing mission’ there. Propaganda centring on Indochina laid heavy focus on its material and cultural wealth. Many French colonial propagandists viewed France as the heir to the great civilizations of South-East Asia. The Cambodian temple complex of Angkor Wat, in particular, came to symbolize the richness of France’s empire, and its image became familiar in the metropole through reproductions on myriad print media and souvenirs.26 More [ 234 ]

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generally, French nationalists were happy to add a large outpost in Asia to their colonial world maps and images of Indochina’s colonized peoples to their posters and textbook images depicting the multitude of ethnic groups under French tutelage. Indochina was thus a significant component of colonialist attempts to portray France as a first-rate global power on a par with Great Britain. More important to government propagandists, however, was the need to convince the French that their country’s defences were secure. One of the French populace’s greatest fears was that, unlike Germany, France’s birth rate had long been in decline, leaving its threatening neighbour with a significantly larger population. As a result, Indochina’s large population quickly became a leitmotiv in colonial military propaganda. The obvious implication of this was that the colonies could provide large numbers of soldiers. The idea of an African ‘force noire’ (‘Black Army’) became popular after a 1910 bestselling book with this title.27 A comparable ‘force jaune’ (‘Yellow Army’) from Indochina also had its proponents, especially General Théophile Pennequin, but nevertheless found much less support in France.28 Despite frequent allusions to Indochina’s large population in French propaganda, racist stereotypes of most Indochinese belonging to ‘non-warrior races’ that were effeminate or unable to withstand cold European winters kept French military leaders from raising Indochinese troops during the first two years of the Great War and making full use of them later on.29 Ironically, other military officials were opposed to training too many Indochinese troops out of fear of anti-colonial nationalism.30 As the war dragged on, desperate military leaders authorized the transport of several tens of thousands of men from Indochina to France, long after approval was given for raising Algerian troops. Even then, the French lacked the means to transport as many Indochinese troops as optimistic proponents anticipated could be mustered and racism continued to complicate their assignment to appropriate roles once in France. Still considered by many to be unsuitable for battle, most Indochinese recruits were consigned to non-combat roles such as nursing and factory labour. Those who did fight were often split up, placed in mixed units and frequently moved around because of their perceived lack of leadership and technical abilities. Richard Fogarty has argued that ‘such piecemeal deployment’ was confusing and ‘disrupted the organization and command structure of the units’.31 In the end, thousands of men from Indochina did make a contribution to the First World War, but French military leaders both limited and underappreciated their contribution due to deeply entrenched ideas that they were unsuited to combat, notwithstanding evidence and colonial propaganda to the contrary. [ 235 ]

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In addition to manpower, a much discussed but underutilized Indochinese wartime resource was food. During the First World War, propagandists proudly stated that Indochina had the ability to export enormous amounts of rice, which was desperately needed in France. Nevertheless, this proved unrealistic due to the distance of the colony and the insufficiency of the French merchant marine, long neglected like many other colonial investments. As a result, only one-fifth of the colonial ministry’s anticipated Indochinese rice production made its way to the metropole in 1917.32 Nor was this only an Indochinese issue; that same year even Morocco ‘was left with “thousands of sacks of wheat rotting on the wharves of Safi while there was a shortage of bread in France, only three days’ sail away’’ ’.33 Perhaps even more alarming than the inability of France to make use of Indochinese foodstuffs were the dismal prospects for Indochina’s defence should it be threatened by other powers. As many in the French military recognized as soon as it became clear that Indochina was the full extent of the territory France could hope to acquire in South-East Asia, Indochina was practically impossible for them to defend. It was much too far from other major French colonies, let alone the metropole, and the loyalty of Indochinese soldiers remained suspect in the eyes of many leaders. A number of politicians and military men argued that Indochina should be traded with another imperial power for other, more desirable colonial possessions. A 1904 book by Onésime Reclus entitled Lâchons l’Asie, prenons l’Afrique’ (‘Let’s leave Asia and take Africa’) echoed many pundits’ belief that Africa had more future potential than Indochina.34 Aware that it was not of much use in war despite all the propaganda to the contrary, French leaders apparently seriously considered giving Indochina to Japan during 1914–15 in exchange for the Japanese sending troops to the Western Front.35 Fortunately for the leaders of the Third Republic, the Germans were too busy in Europe to threaten Indochina. Most metropolitan citizens of France were probably too preoccupied with events in Europe to be seriously bothered by the failure of Indochina to live up to the promises made by government propagandists. There is little evidence that Indochina’s unused resources caused any serious uproar outside of certain small government circles. Although warning signs should have been apparent, the French government persisted down its pre-war path of churning out propaganda about Indochina’s value to France without backing this up with serious investment or reform until world war broke out a second time. This time, though, the French government had worse luck. The utopian image of Indochina that it had continued to build up began to crack during the inter-war years before finally shattering during the Second World War. [ 236 ]

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The phony war: rival images and repeated mistakes The year 1931 witnessed what could be described as the apotheosis of French colonial propaganda: the Paris Colonial Exposition at Vincennes. The French Empire was displayed on a grandiose scale, and Indochina occupied a central position. One of the exposition’s foremost attractions was, predictably, a massive reproduction of the temple complex of Angkor Wat. Nevertheless, the apex of French colonial propaganda occurred considerably after Western colonialism’s golden age, instead taking place at a time when colonial rule was increasingly losing legitimacy. A well-known counter-exhibition mounted by the Surrealists near to the fairgrounds presented anti-colonial claims, and according to Norindr, perhaps more importantly a large number of Vietnamese students demonstrated against the Vincennes expo. The harsh crackdown and punishment of these students reveals how important it was to French leaders to suppress any challenges to their utopian, symbolic Indochina.36 Although the messages of the official exposition reached a far larger number of people than either of the protests, the French government’s monopoly on representing Indochina was starting to come apart at the seams. Far more seriously, the year before had seen a large uprising in Yên Bái in northern Indochina in which a significant number of local troops had mutinied in a concerted effort to overthrow colonial rule. The revolt was quickly put down, but still sent shockwaves through French public opinion.37 As war with Germany once more loomed on the horizon in the 1930s, the same high expectations for Indochina’s contribution to France’s strength in war were broadcast, but once again without being followed up by serious investments and action until it was too late.38 Unlike two decades earlier, however, by the late 1930s Indochina’s security was seriously threatened. Eager to expand its resource base and provoked by French aid to Nationalist China, Japan would soon shatter the image of colonial strength painted by French propaganda. At this time Indochina’s standing army was pitifully small and its military forces had a limited number of outdated weapons, with the air force being in particularly bad shape. In spite of the rising military threat, France only took action to strengthen Indochina’s defences in mid1939 by appointing army general Georges Catroux as governor general.39 Although deliberations had been under way for years over whether to take action to rectify Indochina’s deficient industrialization to meet French military needs, approval was only granted after war had been declared on Germany, and then only for defence-related production that did not compete with metropolitan producers.40 Indochina’s new governor general was charged with quickly building up local munitions [ 237 ]

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industries, especially an aircraft factory. Germany’s invasion of France brought these eleventh-hour defence measures in Indochina to an abrupt end and soon the war rendered transport between colony and metropole all but impossible. France would soon pay dearly for its short-sighted strategy of ‘inexpensive domination’41 and under-industrialization of Indochina. War not only blocked shipments of machinery from France but once again halted the export of Indochinese raw materials to the metropole. In a state of affairs remarkably similar to that of the First World War, France ordered Catroux to stockpile large amounts of grain and other agricultural products at Indochinese ports in preparation for transport to France, but cargo ships never arrived as planned. Indochina’s governor general proposed alternative shipment plans, but these were rejected by Paris, much to his frustration. With the clock ticking on an enormous amount of valuable, perishable goods, the governor general finally decided to sell the foodstuffs to Chinese merchants at a considerable loss.42 Similar mismanagement squandered valuable human resources. A significant number of notables from colonial administration and business were mobilized for wartime service but never used, further irking Catroux, who was forbidden from employing them himself.43 Once again, there proved to be a large disparity between French propaganda lauding colonial resources and the reality of France being incapable of using them. The official utopian image of Indochina was severely weakened during the 1930s and the stage was set for a fiasco far greater than Lang Son in 1885, one which would shake the colonialist fantasy to its very core. Nevertheless, after the invasion of France, a desperate Vichy government with precious little to boast about domestically would rely more than ever on Indochina to preserve some shred of French pride.

Vichy France: upping the stakes The Second World War manifested how precarious the unstable blend of unrealistic expectations and contradictory, ambivalent French (mis)rule had made Indochina. The Vichy regime, unwilling to continue the fight against Germany from the colonies as some French leaders advocated, paradoxically clung even harder to the notion of the empire as the salvation of France in its propaganda. With morale in France at an all-time low, Vichy leaders feared humiliation in Indochina more than ever. A note between two cabinet ministers dated from September 1940 reveals the regime’s apprehensions: ‘As for French or indigenous dissent, it proceeds from a war lost in the Metropole, to which we are very concerned with not adding a war lost in Indochina.’44 In other words, [ 238 ]

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French policy-makers clearly believed that signs of military weakness directly affected the loyalty of the colonized and even residents of the metropole. The Vichy regime therefore continued the high stakes game of building up faith in Indochina’s promise for France’s future through propaganda, even though the French position in South-East Asia was perhaps more tenuous than ever before. Though largely forgotten for several decades, an abundance of recent scholarship has shown that colonialism comprised an integral part of Vichy’s political agenda.45 The perennial French strategy of using the empire to divert attention from domestic crises was taken to new levels as the Vichy-controlled Pathé-Gaumont news devoted nearly 40 per cent of its attention to the empire during the two years following the German invasion.46 The Vichy government even created a peripatetic museum train devoted to exhibiting France’s imperial glory to towns around France.47 Indochina was one of Vichy’s most significant remaining colonial possessions, especially after the regime began to lose colonies in Africa and elsewhere to Free France. By the fall of 1943, Indochina was Vichy’s last remaining colony.48 Vichyites and Free French alike were determined to retain Indochina as a symbol of French pride, but this was to prove difficult. The period from 1940 to 1942 was a perilous one for the French in Indochina. Threatened by aggressive Japanese demands, a militant Thailand still smarting from territorial losses to France several decades earlier, and a host of internal nationalist movements, the situation appeared grim indeed. Nevertheless, conflicts between the Vichy regime and its colonial administration in Hanoi only further weakened the French position. There was consensus between both parties that maintaining French control over Indochina should be their top priority, but they were often unable to agree on how best to do so. Vichy had sacked the newly appointed Governor General Catroux because of such quarrels, but even their handpicked successor for the post, Admiral Jean Decoux, soon riled Vichy by criticizing their decisions and sometimes even disobeying their orders. Unlike his predecessor, however, Decoux quickly realized that he could use metropolitan leaders’ fears of losing the colony as leverage against Vichy when their views diverged. He claimed over and over again in his telegrams that replacing him or otherwise undermining his authority would perilously destabilize the colony, a strategy which apparently allowed him to hold onto his post for the duration of the war.49 The reason for the frequent disagreements between Hanoi and Vichy mostly stemmed from metropolitan leaders’ marked ignorance of the international situation in Asia coupled with a determination to micromanage the colony’s diplomatic affairs. This was illustrated [ 239 ]

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by metropolitan politicians’ inconsistent attitudes towards Japan. In the months preceding the Second World War, French leaders had shrugged off the Japanese threat to their colony. In spite of repeated protests from Tokyo, France drew Japanese ire by taking China’s side in the Second Sino-Japanese War and supplying the Nationalist Chinese with petrol and other crucial resources via the Tonkin–Yunnan railroad.50 In June 1940, Japan issued an ultimatum threatening fullscale invasion if the French administration did not permit Japanese inspections of railway shipments. Not receiving any orders from the metropole and seeing no other course of action, Governor General Catroux unilaterally gave in to Japanese demands. Somewhat belatedly, Vichy decided to make a show of French strength by rejecting the Japanese request, surprising Catroux and forcing him to resign after he protested against this decision. Only a few months later, Vichy evidently realized that it had grossly underestimated the Japanese threat and abruptly reversed its position, calling instead for ‘integral collaboration and cooperation’ with the Japanese.51 Newly appointed Governor General Decoux realized that this was a dangerous overcorrection: if standing up to a powerful Japan was hazardous, inviting the Japanese to Indochina with open arms was almost as bad. Decoux resisted Vichy’s plan to the best of his ability, directly disobeying instructions for closer cooperation with Japan and refusing to sever ties with the nationalist Chinese by recognizing the Japanese puppet government at Nanjing.52 However, he was unable to completely outmanoeuvre Vichy, which used French ambassadors to convey its decisions directly to Indochina’s Asian neighbours. Moreover, despite depending on Decoux for intelligence, Vichy’s ministers not infrequently kept him in the dark when making crucial decisions about Indochina. Decoux repeatedly had to beg Vichy to keep him informed of their diplomatic agreements, even major ones such as the FrancoJapanese negotiations over economic and defence matters conducted in August 1940.53 This often placed the Admiral in a very difficult situation, as he frequently had to react quickly to Japanese provocations but was not aware what Vichy had agreed with Tokyo.54 It was not long before a serious crisis occurred. In mid-September 1940 the Japanese issued another ultimatum, demanding a large number of airfields and naval bases throughout Indochina, the stationing of thousands of Japanese troops at these, and even more favourable economic conditions than in previous agreements. In the absence of outside help, Decoux acquiesced to Japanese demands at the last minute. However, this was apparently insufficient to appease the Japanese Army of Canton, which independently decided to invade Tonkin. In a repeat of 1885, French forces suffered a devastating defeat at Lang [ 240 ]

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Son, leaving the nearby federal capital of Hanoi perilously vulnerable. Although Tokyo apologized for and stopped the unauthorized invasion, the battle would remain a painful reminder to the French of the consequences of standing up to the Japanese.55 In spite of their original limited goal of inspecting French rail shipments to China, the Japanese soon made it clear that they intended to stay. A briefing for Vichy from January 1941 complained that the Japanese were behaving like an occupying army, requisitioning goods, conducting reconnaissance missions, and even setting up their own telegraph lines.56 It was no longer a question of keeping Japan out of Indochina; the French now had to worry about hanging on to whatever limited authority they could. Throughout the next two years, the Japanese were constantly bullying the French into granting them more and more concessions. Neither Decoux nor Vichy could do much to stop these humiliations. The French in both Vichy and Hanoi were progressively forced to sign away much of their sovereignty, granting Japan military bases and the right of passage in more and more areas of the colony, the right of extraterritoriality, and increasingly farreaching economic privileges. As if Japanese aggression was not enough for the French to have to deal with, it was not long before the Thai decided that the Japanese pressure on Indochina afforded them the perfect opportunity to reclaim lost territory. In November 1940, Thai military forces began a series of attacks on French border posts, dragging France into a second war. The French were desperately short of military resources and already threatened by Japanese troops in Tonkin. Concerned as always with maintaining Indochina as a source of French pride, France nonetheless decided to stand up to Thailand. During the first months of the war, Indochina’s lack of modern aeroplanes put it at a strong disadvantage, since Thailand profited from new planes and other materials supplied by the Japanese.57 While French fortunes on land and in the air did not improve, French naval forces stationed near Indochina routed the Thai fleet. However, at this point Japan intervened, pressuring the French to let them ‘mediate’ the conflict. Both Vichy and Hanoi felt that they had no choice but to accept.58 The settlement imposed by the Japanese returned nearly all of the disputed areas to Thailand, including the Cambodian region encompassing Angkor Wat, which had been a special source of French pride. Losing territory to Thailand, a part of the earlier colonialist vision for a South-East Asian supercolony, was even more embarrassing for the French than the concessions to Japan. By 1942 relations between Japan and Indochina had stabilized, largely because the French had been forced to give in to the majority of Japan’s demands. After the Japanese secured their primary goals in Indochina, [ 241 ]

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namely military bases and access to raw materials, the Japanese top brass deemed it most expedient to leave the French administration in place to conserve military resources. Japan also began to lose interest in Vichy and increasingly negotiated with Decoux directly, treating him as Indochina’s de facto head of a state by 1943.59 It was not long before Vichy was out of the picture, swept away with the Allied invasion of France, leaving Indochina in a curious state of limbo as a colony without a motherland. Although Decoux was now free from Vichy control and his leadership continued to be respected by the Japanese, destabilizing internal conflicts did not cease as the Admiral’s direct control over Indochina’s colonists and military began to slip. To his horror, Decoux discovered that several subordinate officers had long been in contact with Free France and had been trying to organize a resistance movement. With some effort, Decoux managed to secretly get General Charles de Gaulle’s approval to remain in power, apparently convincing him, as he had Vichy, that a change in leadership would provoke the Japanese and permanently deprive France of her prized colony. Nevertheless, this argument was insufficient to stop Free French activities in Indochina.60 De Gaulle believed that Indochina and other French colonies would be an important asset for rebuilding France’s post-war power and prestige and by some accounts apparently hoped that an anti-Fascist resistance movement would strengthen France’s case for maintaining colonial rule during post-war negotiations.61 If this was indeed de Gaulle’s intention, it turned out to be a miscalculation, as the small resistance movement merely provoked the Japanese. On 9 March 1945, Japanese forces began a lightning-fast attack throughout the Indochinese Union, routing the unprepared French forces. The French were largely massacred or imprisoned in terrible conditions. Most French soldiers who managed to reach China were detained in prison camps. Facing no Allied invasion in Indochina, as they had feared, the Japanese maintained control of the colony until the end of the war, when a post-war settlement arranged for the occupation of the region by Allied forces. As Decoux and a number of other French officials had feared,62 however, this six-month period was a turning point in Indochina’s history: a period without the French. Shortly after Japan’s surrender to Allied forces, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence. The French would now have to attempt to reconquer their former colony, a venture destined to failure. As in 1885 and the early twentieth century, Vichy’s plans to use imperial prestige and martial glory in Indochina to make up for military weakness at home were thwarted. The embarrassing disaster suffered by the French in Indochina during the Second World War made very [ 242 ]

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clear the hollowness of the government rhetoric lauding Indochina as a sign of French superiority and a reservoir of military might. French leaders’ use of Indochina in nationalist propaganda had backfired: it merely drew more attention to their astonishing mismanagement of the colony and their military weakness.

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The Fourth Republic and beyond: Indochina’s utopian allure lives on Indochina’s seizure by the Japanese was reported in detail in the new pro-Free French newspaper Le Monde.63 Despite the shattering of the image of Indochina as a bastion of French strength and a rapidly changing geopolitical situation, de Gaulle followed the long-established pattern of ignoring reality and clinging to Indochina as a utopian rallying point for French pride. Days after the Japanese attack, Le Monde assured readers of the loyalty of the indigenous populations of Indochina and listed the colony alongside Alsace and Lorraine as territories to be returned to their rightful (French) owners.64 In a radio speech transcribed in the paper, de Gaulle depicted the resistance of the minute French forces in South-East Asia as valiant and not without hope.65 In fact, Indochina’s military had already been crushed by the time the broadcast was made. Perhaps in a war-torn nation that had just experienced fascist rule, many may have had trouble reading Free French assertions of French power and loyalty overseas without a fair dose of cynicism. With France having just been liberated from German occupation, it was likely difficult for French news sources to credibly refute Japanese claims to have liberated the Indochinese from a foreign occupation. De Gaulle’s assertion that ‘the Union of Indochina has never been more opposed to the enemy which has come from the North’ proved to be ironically true, but not in the way that he meant.66 After the defeat of Japan, the fact that the peoples of Indochina did not welcome back the French with open arms made French imperial propaganda untenable once more. Perhaps this explains the apathy shown by the greater part of the French populace towards the ensuing bloody war that the new Fourth Republic pursued to maintain a fictional image of Indochina that had already been shattered.67 The dreams of colonial grandeur espoused by the French leadership failed to inspire the nation and yet again only proved to be an embarrassment when confronted with the reality of Vietnamese nationalism. The ultimate humiliation for French leaders, losing their colony for good after a horrific, protracted conflict, finally came in 1954. Far from leaving a legacy of French might, today French ‘Indochina’ is inextricably linked in most people’s minds with Dien Bien Phu. Perhaps because of the [ 243 ]

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indifference of the populace, the loss of Indochina did not topple de Gaulle and the Fourth Republic as the defeat at Lang Son had done to Ferry, but the succeeding colonial war in Algeria would. As Norindr’s book has made clear, however, French elites’ efforts to use colonial Indochina as a symbol to increase national prestige have not abated after formal decolonization. A host of nostalgic films and works of literature have breathed new life into the phantasmatic Indochina of old, including several state-subsidized films intended to cast Dien Bien Phu in a heroic, or at least elegiac, light. Norindr fears that unless post-colonial historians actively dismantle the myths created by such works, they may come to dominate the future French historical memory of Indochina.68 As this chapter has argued, the mythic Indochina that served as a symbol of French grandeur was repeatedly shattered when contested by a very different colonial reality at intense moments of crisis. After formal decolonization, when there is no longer a colonial reality to disturb the utopian French image of Indochina, Norindr may indeed be correct that there is a danger of the phantasmatic Indochina becoming hegemonic as never before.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed to show that France’s colonization of Indochina was poorly planned and often motivated by unrealistic expectations. The fantasies of a South-East Asian El Dorado that motivated early French agents of empire were almost entirely without basis in reality. Large sums were spent and lives were lost chasing visions of an Asian North-West Passage, exaggerated riches in Southern China, and a grand empire on a par with that of Britain that never materialized. Even before these hopes were stymied, French leaders dreamed of turning Indochina into a colonial utopia that could reawaken a sense of pride in a nation short on luck in Europe. The mythic Indochina preached by nearly every French regime from the mid-nineteenth century onwards failed to materialize, but its allure proved very durable. Nonetheless, major fiascos like Lang Son in 1885, losses to Japan and Thailand during the Second World War and French Indochina’s ignominious end in a bloody and (for the French) futile war repeatedly dashed French leaders’ hopes to exploit Indochina’s apparent symbolic capital. Among historians, Indochina is seldom thought of as an El Dorado mainly due to how lucrative it proved for French business interests in the early twentieth century. This is misleading because intentions matter. No matter how prosperous Indochina might have become for certain French companies, the fact remains that these developments were not among the main reasons that France conquered the colony [ 244 ]

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in the first place. Later, pursuing vain dreams of French grandeur or distracting the metropolitan populace from other problems were arguably the primary motives behind successive French governments’ unwillingness to let Indochina go. What examining El Dorado cases should make clear is that regardless of the later outcome, many cases of imperial conquest were poorly thought out and based on exaggerated expectations. This should give pause to those who think of states as rational actors. It is disturbing, but important, to remember that colonialism, an enormous, expensive undertaking that caused so much death, denigration and suffering, could be carried out even if its value to the colonizing power (to say nothing of the colonized) was often so unclear.

Notes 1 The author is grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this volume for this insight. 2 Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962, Paris, 1979, 87. All translations from works in French are my own. 3 The author is grateful to another of the anonymous reviewers of this volume for this insight. 4 See, for example, Søren Ivarsson, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860–1945, Copenhagen, 2007; Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945, Honolulu, 2007. 5 Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature, London, 1996. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochine: La colonisation ambiguë, 1858–1954, rev. edn, Paris, 2001, 33. 8 Ibid., 36. 9 C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “Colonial Party”: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885–1914’, Historical Journal, 14(1), 1971, 117–19. 10 Quoted in Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 78. 11 Ibid. 12 C. M. Andrew and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion, London, 1981, 34. 13 Ibid., 22–3. 14 Patrick Tuck has argued that Siam in fact came precariously close to annexation, but that a lack of French administrative coordination and Thai efforts to maintain government stability undermined French colonialists’ efforts (The French Wolf and the Siamese Lamb: The French Threat to Siamese Independence 1858–1907, Bangkok, 1995). 15 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, ‘French “Colonial Party” ’, 119. 16 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 33. 17 Ibid., 35; Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, ‘French “Colonial Party” ’, 120. 18 Quoted Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 103. 19 Quoted ibid., 86. 20 Phrase originally from Le Temps, quoted in Brocheux and Hémery, Colonisation ambiguë, 53. 21 The French long believed Cambodia’s modern inhabitants to be unrelated to the builders of Angkor Wat (Edwards, Cambodge, 11, 20). 22 See, for example, Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 109.

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IMPERIAL EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES 23 Brocheux and Hémery, Colonisation ambiguë, 75. 24 Ibid., 133. 25 Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La perception de la puissance française en 1938–1939 – le mythe impérial’, in René Girault and Robert Frank (eds), La Puissance en Europe, 1938–1940, Paris, 1984, 227–44. 26 For a detailed description of the importance of Angkor Wat to French colonial discourse and propaganda, see Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters, New York, 2001; Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, ch. 1; Edwards, Cambodge. 27 Charles Mangin, La force noire, Paris, 1910. 28 Mireille Le Van Ho, ‘Le Général Pennequin et le projet d’armée jaune (1911–1915)’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 75(279), 1988, 146–67. 29 Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918, Baltimore, MD, 2008, 25, 45. 30 Le Van Ho, ‘Le Général Pennequin’, 153. 31 Fogarty, Race and War in France, 67. 32 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 142. 33 Quoted from ministerial documents (ibid.). 34 Onésime Reclus, Lâchons l’Asie, prenons l’Afrique, Paris, 1904. 35 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 237. 36 Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 33. 37 Ibid., 39; Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 203. 38 Ageron, ‘Perception’, 240. 39 Andrew Roth, Japan Strikes South: The Story behind Indo-China’s Change of Masters, New York, 1941, 32. 40 Ageron, ‘Perception’, 231. 41 Brocheux and Hémery, Colonisation ambiguë, 75. 42 Georges Catroux, Deux actes du drame indochinois: Hanoï, juin 1940; Dien Bien Phu, mars–mai 1954, Paris, 1959, 24–6. 43 Ibid., 23–4. 44 ANOM (Archives nationales d’outre-mer), Fonds Ministériels, Nouveau Fonds: Indochine, Dossier 1110, ‘Négociations entre Vichy et Japon, 1940’. 45 For example, Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944, Stanford, CA, 2001; Eric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire, L’Illusion coloniale, Paris, 2005; Anne Raffin, Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and Its Legacies, 1940 to 1970, Lanham, MD, 2005. 46 Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas, 250. 47 Deroo and Lemaire, L’Illusion, 152. 48 Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, 215. 49 See, for example, ANOM. Papiers d’Agents: Papiers Decoux. Dossier 11. ‘Nomination de P. Pagès comme gouverneur général adjoint, février–mars 1941’. 50 Roth, Japan Strikes, 1. 51 Paul Isoart (ed.), ‘Aux origines d’une guerre. L’Indochine française. 1940–1945’, in L’Indochine française, 1940–1945, Paris, 1982, 11; ANOM, Fonds Ministériels, Nouveau Fonds: Indochine, Dossier 1110, ‘Négociations entre Vichy et Japon, 1940’. 52 Isoart, ‘Aux origines d’une guerre’, 11. 53 ANOM, Fonds Ministériels, Nouveau Fonds: Indochine, Dossier 1143, ‘Vichy – Japon négociations, 1940–1943’. 54 For an example, see Roth, Japan Strikes, 63. 55 Ibid., 67–71. 56 ANOM, Fonds Ministériels, Nouveau Fonds: Indochine, Dossier 1143, ‘Vichy–Japon négociations, 1940–1943’. 57 Ibid. 58 Jean Decoux, A la barre de l’Indochine: Histoire de mon Gouvernement Général, 1940–1945, Paris, 1949, 140–3. 59 Shiraishi Masaya, ‘La présence japonaise en Indochine’, in Isoart, L’Indochine française, 218. 60 Decoux, A la barre, 303–22.

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FRENCH INDOCHINA AS A FAILED SYMBOLIC RESOURCE 61 This argument is made by an acquaintance of Decoux: Michel Huguier, L’Amiral Decoux sur toutes les mers du monde, Paris, 2007, 279. Historian Paul Isoart corroborates this with a revealing quote from de Gaulle, but argues that de Gaulle had hoped that his resistance fighters would fare better against the Japanese than they did (L’Indochine française, 35). 62 See, for example, Isoart, ‘Aux origines d’une guerre’, 35. 63 A number of articles covered the attack. The longest was ‘Le coup de force japonais en Indochine’, Le Monde, 13 March 1945. 64 ‘La mainmise du Japon sur l’Indochine’, Le Monde, 13 March 1945; ‘Les événements d’Indochine’, Le Monde, 14 March 1945. 65 ‘Le général de Gaulle parlant hier à la radio a dit l’espoir et la volonté de la France de retrouver l’Indochine libre’, Le Monde, 16 March 1945. 66 Ibid. 67 Girardet, L’idée coloniale, 288–9. 68 Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 158.

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A tribute to Eric Richards

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John M. MacKenzie

Eric Richards is a commanding figure who has spanned two distinct, but related, scholarly areas of history. These are on the one hand the Highland Clearances and related aspects of Scottish history and on the other migration studies in the British Empire. In each case, he has made contributions of such significance as to transform research in these fields. But while the word ‘commanding’ fits the scholar, it does not entirely fit the man – despite his considerable height! For Eric is essentially a modest and humane figure, a person who never stands on his dignity, is never full of himself, and is always eager to speak sympathetically to everyone who approaches him. He is also notable for his quiet good humour, his gently witty delivery, and his desire to help students and fellow scholars in every way that he can. My first memorable encounter with him was in Dunedin, at a conference to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Scottish Otago Settlement of 1848. Though I felt somewhat in awe of his reputation, already considerable, I greatly enjoyed his company and was particularly impressed with the interesting way in which he handled a round-table discussion in which we debated migration from Scotland, Scottish identity, as well as associational culture in New Zealand and elsewhere. I well remember him saying that his background was Welsh and that he preferred to avoid ethnic distinctions, but to see migration and settlement as an opportunity for the cultural melting pot, smoothing out distinctions rather than emphasising them. As is apparent in his books, human equality and the creation of opportunities for all are very important to him. His books are also highly sensitive to affinities with place, to the pain of departure and the mix of problems and pleasures that can be found in re-settlement. This sensitivity undoubtedly comes from his own family experiences. He was born into a rural family in North Wales during the Second World War, a family which had experienced all the pain of the depression of the 1930s, a pain ultimately compounded by bankruptcy and the necessity of leaving the land. His parents moved into Wrexham, indulging in ‘urban drift’ as he later put it, referring to a common characteristic of migrants who initially settle on the land. Although the Richards later migrated across the border into Shropshire, [ 248 ]

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Eric still learned Welsh. During Eric’s early years, the family was also experiencing the anxieties of separation with the fears engendered by war since his father had been swept up into the conflict with Hitler’s Germany. Later Eric was the first in his family to go to university, and that fact must have made him eager to see such opportunities extended more widely to others. To all of this we can add his personal experience of emigration, seizing the chances afforded by the ‘ten-pound pom’ scheme to migrate to Australia where he became a tutor and then lecturer in economics at the University of Adelaide. Thus his own life was spanning several worlds, rural and urban, Welsh and English, British and Australian. Astonishingly he found time in Adelaide to write his Ph.D. thesis, his first excursion into the wealth of the Sutherland family, largely created in the English Midlands, and their actions in the great estates in the far northern Scottish Highlands. The title of this thesis was ‘James Loch and the House of Sutherland 1812–1855’, successfully presented at Nottingham in 1967. It was later to form the basis of his first book, The Leviathan of Wealth. In the same year he added Scotland to the mix when he became a lecturer at the new University of Stirling and began an extraordinarily rich and productive association with that country, including research that took him back to the rural and the agonies of dispossession. After four intensely productive years in Stirling, Australia called to him again and he moved to Flinders University, Adelaide, where he was to stay for the rest of his career. But although he was by then fully committed to South Australia, he retained his cosmopolitan leanings, pursuing academic experiences on three continents, through an amazing range of visiting research fellowships and visiting professorships at Glasgow, Warwick, Canberra, London (both Birkbeck and King’s Colleges), Florence, Cardiff, Cleveland Ohio, and, most recently, the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland. Somehow, in the middle of all of this, he even found time to be Head of the History Department at Flinders for quite a number of years. All of this represents the manner in which his presence has been valued and welcomed in so many institutions and places across the globe. This is not surprising, for his books (several of which have been prize-winners) have strikingly spanned economic, social, political, and environmental history, integrating them all into people-centred histories. While he has always demonstrated a full and sophisticated understanding of technical and theoretical positions in all these fields, he has never written anything approaching ‘dry-as-dust’ work. His writing always captivates the reader, subtly conveying important ideas through an approachable and flexible style. In these respects, the books and the style neatly reflect the man. The other notable characteristic of his work is the way in which he [ 249 ]

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has covered both the macro and the micro, looking at both big and small movements, treating all as worthy of attention and often infusing what seems on the face of it minor events with major ideas and wider significance. An excellent example of the latter is his examination of the movement of people from St Kilda, that remote island group far into the Atlantic west of Scotland, to Victoria, Australia, with all the health and other problems that this entailed. The people of St Kilda had in effect been ‘cleared’ from their extraordinary islands (which I have had the privilege of visiting on two occasions) both in the period Eric studied, and later conclusively in the twentieth century, by the harshness of their environment and by the growing difficulties of living there, not least from the point of view of the provision of health services, education, and spiritual sustenance. But Eric had turned his attention to the major clearances in the Highlands and Islands promoted by landowners seeking alternative and more profitable uses for their land. Until the 1960s, the history of such clearances had been written from the (entirely understandable) point of view of the grievance and victimisation school of history. But Eric brought a new, evidence-based, and sophisticated approach to these events. He never forgot the hardships caused to the people who were cleared, no doubt bringing to bear his own family memories of rural problems and dispossession, but he also set out to explain the pressures on Highland proprietors and the nature of, and reasons for, their estate management policies. He first did this in 1973 with his book The Leviathan of Wealth: the Sutherland Fortune in the Industrial Revolution, which set out to explain not only how the Sutherland family embarked upon clearing the small tenantry from the straths on their vast landholdings, but also how they attempted to use their great wealth to try to create opportunities for the cleared families to make a living on the coast. This was facilitated by the fact that the Sutherland family had decided in the 1960s, at a key time for Eric’s research, to open their estate records to scholarly study – a decision that was certainly more helpful to them than the previous policy of keeping them closed. He was soon extending these techniques to other Highland estates, not least in a remarkable book, co-authored with the late Monica Clough, Cromartie: Highland Life, 1650–1914, published in 1989. The time-span of that book was particularly notable. Monica became a great friend of his and he described her house at Milton, Drumnadrochit as one of his favourite places in the world. He later returned to the Sutherland question with his 1999 work Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances: Homicide, Eviction and the Price of Progress, Sellar having been the notorious Sutherland factor much vilified in Highland lore (so much so that he has an unusually critical [ 250 ]

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plaque on a wall in Inverness). This book places Sellar in the intellectual climate of the time, his role in the achievement of the Sutherland plans, and the ways in which his behaviour rendered him extremely unpopular. It also demonstrates the manner in which he became the focus of a strikingly sophisticated exercise in collective action by and on behalf of the small tenants. This is a classic example of a book which is highly respectable academically, yet is eminently readable for a more general audience. That no doubt helped it to win the Scottish History Book of the Year award for 1999. These three books would have more than confirmed Eric’s distinction in the field, but he threw his net further. He proceeded to produce a series of works covering the widest possible range of estates on which evidence is available. In 1982 he published A History of the Highland Clearances: Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886, providing a major narrative of the Clearances and using an impressive range of documentary sources (most of the evidence collected by himself) in a judicious manner such that he was creating neither an apologia for the proprietors nor a manifesto for their detractors. This won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. In 1985, he followed this with a more analytical sequel, A History of the Highland Clearances, Vol. 2: Emigration, Protests, Reasons. This analysed the changing attitudes of the landlords to emigration and intriguingly followed some of the emigrants’ fortunes in Scotland and overseas. It also considered popular resistance to the Clearances, leading to the crofters’ agitation of the 1880s and the ultimate failure of landlord plans for economic development. This book had clearly signalled a shift by Eric in the direction of emigration studies, but he was still unwilling to leave the Clearances behind. In 2000 he produced The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil, which examined the full range of removals, synthesising and updating material from his earlier works, and seeking to answer questions that had aroused major controversies. His striking conclusions can be summed up in his suggestion that ‘in significantly different intensities, the clearances were tragic for almost all parties involved in the great Highland transformation’. This book was so successful that new editions appeared in 2008 and 2013 with extended prefaces taking account of the continuing wave of material being published. In 2007, he published Debating the Highland Clearances: Eviction and the Price of Progress, reviewing debates among historians and demonstrating his ability to writing engagingly for a non-specialist audience. It usefully contains eighty-two carefully selected and edited documents. By this time Eric had confirmed what had long been apparent, that he was without question the leading historian of the [ 251 ]

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Clearances. Throughout all this work, his affection for the people and landscape of the Highlands had become increasingly apparent. Moreover, all of this work had been achieved at some personal discomfort. He graphically described to the present writer the many freezing estate archives in which he had to research in order to gather his material. Yet it may be eminently appropriate that this distinguished body of work should have been produced by a Welshman living and working at the other end of the world. Perhaps it gave him a certain distance from the passions the Clearances had generated, bringing to bear the analytical mind of the sympathetic, but dispassionate scholar. And in a very real way these facts merely support his contention, first recounted in my presence in Dunedin, that transnational and inter-ethnic understanding is what really matters. Although, as we have seen, Eric continued to publish on the Clearances throughout, his situation in Australia and his own personal experiences had led him increasingly in the direction of migration studies. But first he wrote of Scots in Australia. In the 1980s, the National Library of Scotland mounted a sequence of highly original and fascinating exhibitions on Scots in the British Empire. There was one on India, one on Africa, and another on Australia. Eric was much involved in the publication associated with the latter: That Land of Exiles: Scots in Australia (1988). He wrote an extended introduction to this with the title ‘Scottish Australia 1788–1914’. He asserted on the first page that ‘Australia, therefore, was part of the wider Scottish empire’, an idea that was to be picked up in books by Michael Fry and Tom Devine, as well as by myself in developing notions not only of a Scottish empire, but also of the empires of the ‘four nations’ of the British and Hibernian Isles. At the end of this essay he wrote that ‘the collective efforts of these Australian Scots were designed to sustain a measure of Scottish fraternity and identity against the grain of its gradual dissolution’. This was also to feed into many studies of ‘associational culture’ throughout the British Empire which were to follow in subsequent years. The ambition and extraordinary range of Eric’s work were to be beautifully demonstrated in his 2004 book Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600. First, we should note the emphasis on the four nations: a Welshman who wrote so copiously and well about Scotland now looked at the emigration of all the ethnicities of the islands. Second, we can observe the striking chronological range, extending from the beginning of the seventeenth century right through to the twentieth. He wrote that ‘practically every family was represented’ among UK migrants. He wrote of triumphs and failures, of those who wrote of their experiences and [ 252 ]

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those who remained silent, of people who stayed and of those who returned. As fellow migration historian Stephen Constantine has written ‘he never turns migrants into “human resources” motivated only by impersonal economic forces and driven merely by economic calculation’. Moreover, Constantine continues ‘he also deserves credit for separating out what the data allows and the analysis needs’. The final paragraph of Britannia’s Children deserves to be quoted because it encapsulates much of Eric’s credo: In reality most emigrants were not engaged in a national mission, nor were they uprooted or exiled; they departed in a spirit of enterprise which fitted well with the unrivalled freedom of movement fostered under the Pax Britannica. Eventually the British overlapped with other diasporas, even within the empire. At the start of the twenty-first century, the British have spread across the globe, but as a diaspora they are barely recognised. The British had been the first mass emigrants but they were destined, finally, to fuse with other diasporas and take leave of their imperial past.

Yet again, migrants are viewed as individuals rather than as a ‘movement’ and certainly not as part of some grand imperial destiny. We are back to the ‘melting pot’, back with the notion of diversity and fusion. This does indeed reflect the extraordinary diversity of immigration to Australia in the later twentieth century, from the Continent of Europe and from non-European regions, notably Asian. And that leads naturally to a consideration of Eric’s 2008 book Destination Australia, a worthy winner of the New South Wales premier’s literary prize in 2009. This deals with immigration to Australia from the start of the Commonwealth federal era through all the military and economic vicissitudes of the twentieth century. It deals frankly with the white Australia policy, but cannot conceal its satisfaction when that policy is ‘dismantled’ (Eric’s word) in the 1970s. Although he is professionally dispassionate to the last, the reader suspects that he writes of the diverse origins of immigrants to Australia in more recent times with some pleasure. Once again, Eric the economic historian made sure that his statistics were as helpful and accurate as he could make them, but they were very much blended with the human stories, with the ethnic and cultural contexts of donor societies and receiver country. The book has a most intriguing dedication: ‘To the Neurology Department and the Comprehensive Epilepsy Program of the Austin Hospital, Heidelberg, Melbourne’. This is explained in the preface where he writes of the illness of his daughter and the treatment she received at the Austin Hospital. It is worth quoting in full. He writes [ 253 ]

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of all the medical team who had conducted an operation of ‘extreme audacity and delicacy’: Some were from the Pacific Islands (one of whom might have been a rugby player); others were Greek in origin; one was clearly Japanese, another Chinese from Hong Kong; one was an Indonesian Muslim in traditional dress. There was a homesick nurse from Lusaka in Zambia, another from Nigeria; they were supported by a technician from Sheffield and a legion of doctors from various parts of Asia. The medical teams were orchestrated by a Highland Scot and a person of rather obvious Irish connections.

He also recounted the manner in which his daughter had been almost denied re-admission to Australia in 1971 because of her condition, but had made it because she had been born there. Then he concludes: And thus the Austin Hospital in November 2007 had assembled a full cast of multi-cultural modern Australia, a remarkable interacting convergence of the elements of the new Australia, here vividly working to a better future. It was also a scene which was, in virtually every respect, totally inconceivable in 1901 and a demonstration of the change that had been wrought upon this continent during the intervening century, the subject of this book.

As always, Eric appears to maintain his objectivity, but his satisfaction at this transformation is only barely concealed. Still, as with the work of all notable scholars, it would be wrong to concentrate merely on Eric Richards’s authored books. He has published extended essays on Scottish Food Riots (1982) and on the St Kilda emigration to Australia in 1852 (2010). He has edited or co-edited a number of significant works, including Historical Statistics of South Australia (1984) and the Flinders History of South Australia: Social History (1986) and from the 1990s until recent years a series of booklets entitled ‘Visible Immigrants’, one on sources, one on poor immigrants, one on women, and one on the twentieth century. In 2002 he was involved in co-editing (with Jim Hammerton) Speaking to Immigrants: Oral History and the History of Migration. (Given this interest in the oral testimony of migrants, he was amused to have become an oral informant himself recently when interviewed about the early history of the University of Stirling.) The Visible Immigrants series has been important in illustrating what Jim Hammerton has called Eric’s ‘assiduous mentoring and collaborative strengths’. Each of the seven of this series was based upon a symposium which brought together promising postgraduates with both young and more experienced scholars. Hammerton has suggested that ‘Plenty of scholars do admirable mentoring work, but Eric’s series illustrates a quite systematic and remarkable dedication which has been sustained for nearly [ 254 ]

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a quarter of a century. This is another way in which he has made such an impressive contribution to the history of migration.’ His chapters in books, scholarly articles, and entries in the Dictionary of Australian Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are far too numerous to list, but they are strikingly diverse. His biographical contributions have covered merchants, businessmen (even motor body manufacturers), politicians, an auctioneer, a customs and shipping agent, colonial officials, as well as inevitably members of the Sutherland family and Patrick Sellar. His articles and chapters have ranged over Irish settlers, women, aristocrats, poverty and the poor, the demography and economy of St Kilda, local history, Cornwall, literacy, death and the funeral business, radicalism, land agents, the industrial revolution, regional imbalance and poverty in Britain, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, agriculture and veterinary science in the Enlightenment, the geologist Hugh Miller, rural transformation, Malthus, the finances of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, the electoral influence of the Trentham interest, as well as aspects of economic history and, inevitably, many pieces on various areas of migration. He has also written illuminatingly about the processes of return migration. It is perhaps not surprising that with all this diversity Eric has for many years held the fellowships of both the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences as well as of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Nor does it come as a surprise to find that he was declared to be the Australian Historian of the Year in 2012. Interviewed at that time he announced that he was fascinated by the ‘fundamental origins of the shift of people from the land to the cities’, which constituted ‘the greatest evolution of modern times’. We need, he went on, ‘to know more about the underlying dynamics of this great transformation to humanity’ which has led to more than 50 per cent of the world’s population living in the urban setting. Indeed, Eric continues to work on the genesis of modern international migration as well as on Highland history. That there is indeed more to come from his ever fertile brain is well represented by his Carnegie Visiting Professorship at Scotland’s newest university, the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), in 2014. The first director of the UHI’s Centre for History, Jim Hunter, has written that Eric’s presence constituted a ‘key milestone’ in the Centre’s – and indeed the University’s – development. Starting from modest beginnings, the Centre now provides undergraduate and postgraduate courses to hundreds of students not only in the North of Scotland, but internationally. There was a special significance to Eric’s presence since the Centre is located in the Sutherland town of Dornoch, not far from the subject of his researches on the Sutherland [ 255 ]

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estates. Since this was one of the most depopulated and run-down parts of the Highlands, Eric might never have envisaged that it would become the home of such a successful and wide-reaching history department. Eric himself was overjoyed to see the ways in which UHI is contributing to the social and economic regeneration of the area. The presence of an internationally renowned scholar of the stature of Eric provided a great boost to the morale of all involved as well as serving to spread his knowledge and wisdom among local people through his lectures, visits to history societies, and interviews with local newspapers. Eric himself described his period at the UHI as ‘a time of intellectual renewal and a source of much new data and new links with many parts of the Highlands’. His programme was intensive. He wrote seven papers for his speaking engagements in Inverness, Edinburgh, Stornoway, Helmsdale, Brora, as well as a keynote at the ‘Strathnaver Conference’ in Bettyhill, which attracted no fewer than ninety-four delegates. The titles of these papers are typically intriguing, including one on ‘popular resistance and the role of women during the Clearances’ and one on ‘Accidental emigrants to colonial Australia’. He was involved in teaching by videoconference and participated in postgraduate supervision. He was interviewed by the celebrated television presenter Sir Tony Robinson for a programme Walking in History and opened up several new lines of research, including comparative work on sheepfarming in the Highlands and in Australia, emigrant letters, and case studies in what he called ‘precipitate mass migration’. He was also able to develop his major new study entitled ‘The Origins of Modern Migration’. At the end of his visit, he did some more research in the Stafford Record Office. Eric is often to be found ‘on the wing’ to his many international academic assignments, so it is perhaps not surprising that his most recent book has the title On the Wing: Mobility before and after Emigration to Australia (2013). Scholars who encounter him on these peregrinations or, perhaps, scholarly migrations would be able to reminisce about the many keynotes, lectures, as well as social occasions at which he always stands out. I cannot resist recounting my memory of a keynote he delivered in the Eden Court Theatre Inverness on the occasion of an important conference connected with the Scottish Year of Homecoming in 2009. He spoke to a packed audience about the economic connections between Scotland and Australia, in particular the remarkable scale of investment by Scots in Australian development. The event was chaired by the ‘facilitator’ of the conference, the formidable Scottish columnist and commentator Lesley Riddoch. Eric was typically balanced, suggesting that it could well be that such outward investment, while it clearly had a downside, might ultimately [ 256 ]

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have produced some substantial benefits for Scotland. Lesley had presumably expected a lecture arguing more strongly for the detrimental effects upon Scotland – or maybe she was just being devil’s advocate – for she subjected Eric to a fierce cross-examination. Visibly taken aback, Eric’s reaction was typical of the man: it combined courteous control with acute analysis and the audience was provided with a magnificent academic ‘spectator sport’ almost akin to a court-room drama. Eric’s barrister (and professor of law) wife, Ngaire, sitting in a theatre box with me, looked on with evident approval. Perhaps the final word should be given to another distinguished migration historian, Marjory Harper. She has written of his ‘immense contribution to our understanding of the theory and practice of migration and diaspora’ and goes on ‘more importantly, he is an encourager, who takes a genuine and generous interest in the work of others. It is always a pleasure to encounter Eric at a conference or seminar, and to benefit from his expertise and insight.’ There must be many who would say ‘hear hear’ to that. Acknowledgements: I am particularly indebted to my friend and Glasgow contemporary Finlay McKichan for leading me expertly through Eric Richards’s work on the Highland Clearances. I am also grateful for many insights and helpful ‘links’ to Stephen Constantine, Jim Hammerton, Marjory Harper, Jim Hunter, Angela McCarthy, John McCracken, Andrekos Varnava, and David Worthington.

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The following list does not include all references but a very select list of secondary sources. All sources are listed in full the first time they are referenced in the notes. Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif, The Making of Modern Libya, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994. Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., ‘To Wassa Fiase for Gold: Rethinking Colonial Rule, El Dorado, Antislavery, and Chieftaincy in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1874–1895’, History in Africa, 30(2003), 11–36. Alborn, Timothy, ‘An Irish El Dorado: Recovering Gold in County Wicklow’, Journal of British Studies, 50, 2011, 359–80. Ames, Glenn, ‘An African Eldorado? The Portuguese Quest for Wealth and Power in Mozambique and the Rios De Cuama, c.1661–1663’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31(1), 1998, 91–110. Andrew, C. M. and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘The French “Colonial Party”: Its Composition, Aims and Influence, 1885–1914’, Historical Journal, 14(1), 1971. Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Arnold, David, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Bach, Ulrich E., ‘Seeking Emptiness: Theodor Hertzka’s Colonial Utopia Frieland (1890)’, Utopian Studies, 22(1), 2011, 74–90. Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Palgrave: New York, 2002. Balme, Christopher B., Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Barrows, Leland C., ‘The Merchants and General Faidherbe: Aspects of French Expansion in Senegal in the 1850’s’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 61, 1974, 236–83. Bar-Yosef, Eitan, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Bayly, Christopher, British Society and the Making of the English Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Beattie, James, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ben-Bassat, Yuval, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine, London: IB Taurus, 2013.

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Berman, Nina, German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Binova, Daniel. British Imperial Literature 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bolton, Geoffrey, Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1826, Crawley, University of Western Australia Press, 2008 Cameron, James M. R., Ambition’s Fire: The Agricultural Colonisation of Pre-Convict Western Australia, Crawley, University of Western Australia Press, 1981. Carmel, Alex, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer in Palästina 1868–1918, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2000. Choate, Mark, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Coates, John, The Hour between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust, New York: Penguin, 2012. Cooper, Nicola, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters, New York: Berg, 2001. Coronato, Fernando, ‘The First Welsh Footstep in Patagonia: The Primitive Location of Puerto Madryn’, Welsh History Review, 18(4), 1997, 639–66. Curtin, Philip, ‘The Lure of Bambuk Gold’, Journal of African History, 14, 1973, 623–4. Curtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Davis, Clarence and Robert Gowen, ‘The British at Weihaiwei: A Case Study in the Irrationality of Empire’, The Historian, 63(2), 2000, 87–104. Dumett, Raymond E., El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labour, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900, Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1998. Eisler, Jakob (ed.), Deutsche in Palästina und ihr Anteil an der Modernisierung des Landes, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008. Evans, Julia, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s–1910, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Finaldi, Giuseppe, ‘ “The Peasants Did Not Think of Africa”: Empire and the Italian State’s Pursuit of Legitimacy, 1871–1945’, in John MacKenzie (ed.), European Empire and the People, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, 210–17. Fitzpatrick, Matthew P., Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884, New York: Berghahn, 2008. Friedman, Isaiah, Germany, Turkey, Zionism, 1897–1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Gallagher, J. A. and R. E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6(1), 1953, 1–15. Gallant, Thomas W. Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

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Geppert, Alexander C. T., Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in fin-de-siècle Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gibbs, R. M., Under the Burning Sun: A History of Colonial South Australia, 1836–1900, Adelaide: Peacock Publications for Southern Heritage, 2013. Gilroy, Paul, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York, Columbia University Press, 2005. Glenk, Helmut, From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges: The History of the German Templer Settlement of Sarona in Palestine 1871–1947, Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2005. Gross, Nachum T., ‘Die Deutsche Palästina Bank 1897–1914. Ein Forschungsfragment’ Zeitschrift für Unternehmungsgeschichte, 33(3), 1988, 149–77. Gunning, Lucia Patrizio, The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum, London: Ashgate, 2009. Harrison, Mark, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Heffernan, Michael, ‘The Limits of Utopia: Henri Duveyrier and the Exploration of the Sahara in the Nineteenth Century’, Geographical Journal, 155(3), 1989, 342–52. Hemming, John, The Search for El Dorado, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. Henderson, William Otto, Studies in German Colonial History, London: Frank Cass, 1962. Hopkins, A. G. (ed.), Globalization in World History, London: Pimlico, 2002. Horton, Mark, ‘“To Transmit to Posterity the Virtue, Lustre and Glory of their Ancestors”: Scottish Pioneers in Darién, Panama’, in Caroline A. Williams (ed.), Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality the British Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Iadicola, Peter, ‘Globalization and Empire’, International Journal of Social Inquiry, 1(2), 2008, 3–36. Ingram, E., Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia, 1797–1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Kanya-Forstner, A. S., The Conquest of the Western Sahara: A Study in French Military Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Kanya-Forstner, A. S., ‘French Expansion in Africa: The Mythical Theory’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London: Longman, 1972, 277–94. Kennedy, Dane, Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Kennedy, Paul, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–1980, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981. Knox, Bruce, ‘British Policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847–1864: Nationalism and Imperial Administration’, English Historical Review, 99(392), 1984, 503–29. Kontje, Todd, German Orientalismus, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

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Koponen, Juhani, ‘The Partition of Africa: A Scramble for a Mirage?’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2(1), 1993, 117–35. Lal, Brij V., Doug Munro and Edward D. Beechert (eds), Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Landsman, Ned C., Scotland and Its First American Colony, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Langbehn, Volker, ed. German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, New York: Routledge, 2010. Laracy, Hugh. ‘ “Quixotic and Utopian”: American Adventurers in the Southwest Pacific, 1897–1898’, Pacific Studies, 24(1/2), 2001, 39–62. Lloyd, S. [1947], Foundations in the Dust: The Story of Mesopotamian Exploration, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980. McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge, 1995 MacKenzie, John M., The Partition of Africa 1880–1900 and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, London/New York: Methuen, 1983. MacKenzie, John M., Propaganda and Empire: the Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Magee, Gary B. and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ma‛Oz, Moshe (ed.), Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1975. Marchand, Suzanne, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Martell, Luke, ‘Britain and Globalization’, Globalizations, 5(3), 2008, 449–66. Moses, John A. and Paul M. Kennedy (eds), Germany in the Pacific and Far East, 1870–1914, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977. Nicosia, Francis R., ‘Weimar Germany and the Palestine Question’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 24(1), 1979, 321–45. Norindr, Panivong, Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature, Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1996. O’Connor, Laura, Haunted English: the Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Penny, H. Glenn, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Poignant, Roslyn, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Powell, Joseph M., Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977. Pratt, Michael, Britain’s Greek Empire: Reflections on the History of the Ionian Islands from the Fall of Byzantium, London: Rex Collins, 1978.

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Rabinow, Paul, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Raleigh, Sir Walter, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana: With a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) etc . . . performed in the year 1595 (ed.) Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, New York: Burt Franklin, 1970. Robinson, Ronald, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London: Longman, 1972. Robson, Robert W., Queen Emma: The Samoan-American Girl Who Founded an Empire in 19th Century New Guinea, Sydney: Pacific Publications, 1971. Said, Edward, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 2003. Sanderson, G. N., ‘The European Partition of Africa: Coincidence or Conjuncture’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30, 1974, 1–54. Sauer, Paul, Uns rief das Heilige Land. Die Tempelgesellschaft im Wandel der Zeit, Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 1985. Schmidt, Ethan A., ‘The Well-Ordered Commonwealth: Humanism, Utopian Perfectionism, and the English Colonisation of the Americas’, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, 7(3), 2014, 309–28. Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Segrè, Claudio, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Sellin, Paul R., Treasure, Treason and the Tower: El Dorado and the Murder of Sir Walter Raleigh, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Seton-Watson, R. W., Britain in Europe, 1789–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Silver, John, ‘The Myth of El Dorado’, History Workshop Journal, 34, 1992, 1–15. Skinner, Quentin, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 123–58. Steinmetz, George, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Stokes, Eric, Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa, Salisbury: Central Africa Historical Association, 1963. Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Varnava, Andrekos, ‘Punch and the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 29(2), 2005, 167–86.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Abyssinia, 15, 21, 179, 185 see also Ethiopia Adams, George J., 147– 8 Admiralty, 15, 93 Afghanistan, 162 Africa, 166 –75, 177, 180 – 4, 192 –5, 198–203, 205– 6, 231, 236, 239, 252 Ailù, Desta Basià, 176 Ainsworth, William, 213, 224 Akrotiri, 17 Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O., 15, 24 Alborn, Timothy, 14, 24 Alexander the Great, 211 Algeria, 8, 24, 69, 70, 74, 77, 244 Alsace-Lorraine, 232 – 3 Aman, Kantibai, 175– 6 Amazon, 4, 34 American War of Independence, 89 Amery, Leo, 222 Amsterdam, 26, 45, 103 Anatolia/Asia Minor, 151– 2 Andes, 135, 142 Andrew, C. M., 232, 245 Andrew, William Patrick, 213 Anglican Church, 140 Angkor Wat, 234, 237, 241, 245– 6 Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, 35 Apia, 110, 116, 120 Arabia, 210 Arabic, 184, 196 Arabs, 194, 196, 199, 200 –1 Araxes (Chab) River, 211 Argentina, 10, 20, 125, 127, 130, 137– 8, 140, 142, 200 Argostoli, 50 Arkansas, 5 Armitage, David, 32, 37, 43 Asia, 3, 100, 151, 160, 198, 202, 210, 230 – 6, 239, 243, 254

Aswan Dam, 210 Atlantic Ocean, 4, 66, 126, 137, 201, 250 Attlee, Clement, 222 Australia, x, 3, 5, 6, 20, 30, 72 – 3, 82, 89 –100, 105, 111, 135, 137– 8, 161, 249–50, 253– 4, 256 Australians, 29, 89, 90, 93– 4, 96 –100, 109, 249, 252, 255– 6 Austria, 151, 171 Babylonia, 210, 213 Bach, Ulrich, 10 Baghdad, 210, 212, 214 –15, 217–18, 221– 2 Baghdad Railway, 145, 151, 160 Balfour, Arthur James, 219 Bambara, 68, 70, 75 Bambuk, 18, 19, 67– 86, 87, 88, 259 Bandini, Franco, 181, 185 Banton, Michael, 7 Barclay, Robert, 39 Barrow, John, 93 Barzini, Luigi, 198 Bastian, Adolf, 106 Basra, 210, 212, 215 –17, 221– 2 Bayly, Christopher, 168 Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, Benjamin Belich, James, 14, 30 Berlin, 20, 111–12, 116 Berlusconi, Silvio, 166 –7 Bethmann, August, 109 Bevione, Giuseppe, 196 – 8, 200, 206 Bible, The, 15, 18, 35, 148 – 9, 152, 153, 191, 211 Bieberstein, Adolf Marschall von, 153 Blundell, J. W. F., 96 Boca, Angelo Del, 182, 184 – 5, 192 Boeder, Gustav, 117–18

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INDEX

Bogota, 4 Bokar (Boubakar) Saada, 73, 76, 83– 4 Bolognini, Stefano, 179 Bolton, Geoffrey, 89 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 48, 52, 72 Bonaparte, Prince Jerome Napoleon, 77, 80 see also Napoleonic Bonar Law, Andrew 221 Bondou, 67, 73, 76, 82 Bono, Emilio De, 182 Bordeaux, 68, 82 – 4 Bosset, C. P. De, 59 Bosworth, Richard, 206 Botany Bay, 28 Bouët-Willaumez, Edouard, 68 Boxer Rebellion, 231 Brandenburg, 31 Bretonne, Restif de la, 137 Bricchetti, Luigi Robecchi, 172 Briggs, Asa, 170 Britain, 16, 20, 47– 62, 90, 94, 98 – 9, 110, 114 –15, 119, 125 – 8, 131– 2, 134, 139, 148, 152, 157, 168 –9, 193, 212 –14, 217–18, 220 – 2, 230 –1, 233, 235, 244, 255 British, 3, 5 –7, 9, 12 – 22, 28, 40, 47– 62, 67, 85, 90 –100, 110 –11, 125–7, 129 – 39, 144 –5, 167–9, 174, 192 – 3, 197, 206, 210 –19, 221– 3, 230 –1, 248–9, 252– 3 British Empire, 18 –19, 55, 62, 93, 99, 131, 167, 248, 252 British Gilbert Islands, 111 British India Steam Navigation Company, 215 British Middle East HQ, 16 Broome, Frederick Napier, 98 Brotto, Enrico, 183 Brue, André, 67, 70, 72 Buenos Aires, 132 – 4, 200 Bülow, Prince Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von, 110, 114, 159– 60 Bunbury, Sir Henry, 54 Burma, 92 – 3, 99, 231

Butler, Samuel, 138 Butlin, Noel, 29 Byron, Lord, 57, 59 Caillé, René, 84 –5 Cain, P. J., 11 Cairo, 66 Calamai, Oreste, 176 California, x, 5, 29, 69, 72– 3, 80, 82, 95, 131 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 127 Cambodia/Khmer, 229, 233 Cameron, James, 92 Canada, x, 5, 13, 30, 89, 136, 138 Candide, 7 Canning, George, 94 Cape Colony, 91, 96 Carbonara, Michele da, 176 Carmel, Alex, 153 Carolina, 39, 91 Caroline Islands, 105, 117–18 Caroline and Mariana Islands, 110 Caroni River, 4 Carrère, Frédéric, 71 Casamance River, 69 Catroux, George, 237– 40 Cayor Campaigns (1861), 69 Celtic, 37, 125– 8, 134, 137, 139 Cephalonia, 48, 50, 52, 55, 57 Cerigo, 48 Chamberlain, Joseph, 62 Chasseloup-Laubat, Marquis de, 79– 84 Chesney, Francis Rawdon, 213, 229 Chile, 34, 139 China, ix, 6, 15, 22, 30, 34, 91, 113, 229– 33, 237, 241– 2, 244 Churchill, Winston, 221 Clause, Frederic R., 92 Cobden, Richard, 6 Cochinchina, 229, 231 Cold War, 17 Colombia, 4 Colonial Office, 60, 93, 221 Company of Scotland, 32– 4, 38, 42 Compassi, Gabriella, 170

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Conrad, Joseph, 7 Conservative/Tory Party, 55– 6 Constantinople, 155, 212, 215–16 Corfu, 18, 48, 49– 52, 54, 58 Cornish, 126 Cornish, Henry, 98 Corradini, Enrico, 197, 200 Cox, H. V., 218 Crab Island, 34 Crimean War, 52, 96, 148, 213 Crispi, Francesco, 168, 195 Croce, Benedetto, 194, 200 Crowley, Frank, 99 Crown Colony, 16 Crystal Palace, 49 Curzon, George Nathaniel (Lord Curzon), 215–16, 218 Cyprus, 16, 18 –19, 21–2, 48, 52, 55, 58, 60, 151, 212, 214, 219 Cyrenaica, 16, 192– 3, 196 –200 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 199, 205 Dai Nam, 230, 233 Daily News, 49 Dardanelles see Turkish Straits Darién, 10, 14, 17–18, 26 – 8, 30, 32, 34 –5, 37– 42 Darwinism, 106 Das Kapital, 95 Davies, Jonathan Ceredig, 134 Decoux, Jean, 239– 42 Deeken, Richard, 112–13, 120 Deir es Zor, 211 Demaison, André, 69 Denmark, 31 Derby, Lord (British Prime Minister), 56 Déroulède, Paul, 23, 32 Devine, T. M., 36 Dien Bien Phu, 243 – 4 Diouka Sambala, 76 Disraeli, Benjamin, 61–2 Doumer, Paul, 231 Dublin, 14 Ducos, Jean–Théodore, 78, 81

Dumett, Raymond E., 15 Dunant, Henry, 149 Dundee, 221 Durand, Jean-Baptiste Léonard, 70 Dutch, ix, 34, 37, 39– 40, 91–2, 169 see also Holland, Netherlands Duveyrier, Henry, 9–10 dystopia, 10, 17–18, 138, 169, 186, 230 East India Company, 33– 4, 37, 42, 92, 212 East Indies, 32– 3, 35 Eastern Question, 49, 52 Ecuador, 4 Edinburgh, 26, 33–5, 40 –1, 51, 256 Egypt, 12, 55, 91, 151, 193, 210, 212–13, 220 Ehler, Otto, 114 El Carnero, 4 El Dorado, ix, x, 1–22, 26, 28–31, 34 –7, 39, 48, 53, 56, 62, 66, 71, 80, 85, 93– 4, 99, 105–9, 112–17, 119121, 130 –1, 137, 145– 6, 151, 155, 161, 169, 175, 181, 186, 192–193, 201, 203, 206, 211–23, 228, 230, 244 –245 El Doradoism, 27, 30, 34 El Dorado theory, 12, 22 Engelhardt, Auugust, 107–9, 113, 121 Enosis (Cyprus), 60 Eritrea, 21, 168, 170, 174 – 6, 178 Ethiopia, 21, 168, 172, 174 –5, 178, 181, 183– 4, 203– 4 Euphrates (river and railway), 211–13 Euphrates Expedition of 1836, 212–15, 219 Europe, 1, 8, 19, 21–2, 27, 30 –32, 42, 49–50, 55, 66, 91, 109–10, 125, 137, 152, 167, 197–9, 214, 231, 234, 236, 244, 253 Faidherbe, Louis Léon César, 18 –19, 66–70, 73–86

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Falémé River, 18 –19, 66 –7, 69–70, 75– 6, 79– 80, 82, 85 Falkland Islands, 133 Farabana, 70, 75, 83 Fascism, 168, 172, 180, 201, 203 Fashoda, 12 Ferry, Jules, 229, 232– 3, 244 Fieldhouse, David K., 11 Filipino, 117 First Burma War (1824 –26), 92 First World War, 6, 16, 20, 22, 105, 109, 120, 126, 145, 160 –1, 203 – 4, 212, 235– 6, 238 Flinders, Matthew, 90 Florence, 202, 249 Forgarty, Richard, 235 Foreign Office, 16, 154 –5, 157, 159 Forrest, Sir John, 99 Forsayth, Emma (‘Queen Emma’), 108, 113 Fortunato, Giustino, 200 Fouta-Toro, 66, 71, 84 Fouta Djalon Mountains, 67 Foxhall, Katherine, 97 Franco–Prussian War, 10, 232 Fraser, Charles, 91–2 Freiland (1890), 10 Fremantle, 99 France, x, 3, 7, 9–12, 15, 18 –19, 22, 47– 9, 66 –77, 82–5, 90 – 2, 136, 144 –5, 174, 200, 216, 219, 228– 45 French, 16, 22, 31, 66–9, 72 –5, 77– 80, 82, 84, 114, 137, 148, 169, 171, 193 – 4, 212, 231– 44 French Empire, 11, 228, 233, 237 Gabrielli, Gianluca, 173 Gaddafi, Muammar, 192, 206 Gadiaga, 67 Gallagher, John, 1, 11, 13 Gallant, Thomas, 50 –1, 54, 56, 59 – 60 Gambia, 67, 69, 85 Gandolfi, Tertulliano, 178 –9, 186 Gandolfo, Bice, 175

Garden Island, 94 Garisenda, Gea Della, 168 Gaulle, Charles de (uncle of President of France), 136 Gaulle, Charles de (President of France), 229 Georgetown (Queensland), 6 Geraldton, 99 German Colonial Society, 145– 6 German New Guinea, 107– 9, 111, 117–18 German New Guinea Company, 111 German South Seas Phosphate Company, 111 German Trading and Plantation Company of the South Seas, 111 Germany, 19, 105, 107– 8, 110 –13, 115–16, 119 –20, 145, 149, 150 – 3, 157– 60, 194, 232, 235, 237– 8, 249 Germans, x, 2, 10, 19–20, 105– 6, 109, 113 –14, 116 –18, 120, 146– 9, 151, 155– 6, 159– 60, 236 German Empire, 19, 114, 116, 151, 153, 157– 8 Gibraltar, 50 Giolitti, Giovanni, 193 –5, 197 Girardet, Raoul, 229 Gladstone, William Ewart, 56 –7, 60 –1 Glamorgan, 125 Glasgow, 26, 31, 34, 40, 249, 257 Godeffroy & Co., 109 –10 Goderich, Viscount, 94 gold, x, 1, 3 –7, 14 –15, 18–19, 29– 30, 35– 6, 53, 55, 66 – 80, 82 – 3, 85– 6, 89, 95, 99, 114 –15, 130 –1, 135, 137, 139, 155, 191 Gold Coast (Ghana), 15 Graziani, Rodolfo, 181 Great Exhibition (1851), 49 Greece (ancient), 47 Greece (modern), 15–16, 18, 47, 52– 3, 55– 6, 59, 61–2 Greek War of Independence, 51, 57

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Guadeloupe, 69 Guangzhouwan (French), 15 Guillet, Amedeo, 174 –5 Guinea, 67, 69 Guyana, 4 –5, 17 Haifa, 144, 158 Hamburg, 26, 26, 107, 110 –11, 116 Hamer, David, 95 Hamilton, Lord Basil, 36 Hankey, Sir Maurice, 219 Hanoi, 239, 241 Hanson, James, 96 Hardy, George, 69 Harz Mountains, 107 Hasse, Ernst, 155, 157 Heart of Darkness, 7 Heligoland/Helgoland, 108 Hennen, John, 60 Herodotus, 197– 8 Herzl, Theodor, 160 Hertzka, Theodor, 10 Hieber, Johannes, 159 Hirtzel, Sir Arthur, 217–18 Ho Chi Minh, 242 Hoffmann, Christoph, 148 Hoffmann II, Christoph, 160 Holland, 31, 33, 40 see also Dutch, Netherlands Holland, Sir Henry, 50 Holle, Paul, 71, 83 Hollweg, Bethmann, 157 Holy Land, 146 –51, 153, 157, 161 Homer (Homeric), 56, 58, 61 homosexuality, 21, 169, 179– 80 Hong Kong, 245 Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, The, 128 Hope, Lady Margaret, 35 Hopkins, A. G., 11 Houston (Texas), 5 Humboldt, Alexander von, 5, 7– 8 Hume, Joseph, 53– 4 Humphreys, Reverend Lewis, 129– 34 Hyam, Ronald, 167– 8

Idris, King of Libya, 191–2 Illinois, 5 India, ix, 11, 13, 33, 51, 60 –1, 90 – 3, 96, 98 –100, 151, 152, 168, 212 –15, 217–18, 231, 252 Indian Mutiny (1857), 61 Indian Ocean, 19, 21, 99, 100 Indian Postal Service, 215 Indo-China, 22 Ionian Islands, 15, 18, 22, 47–57, 61–2 Iraq, 22, 210, 212, 221–3 see also Mesopotamia Ireland, 60 –1, 126, 252 Irish, 5, 14, 52, 60, 125, 130, 254 –5 Irwin, Frederick Chidley, 95 Isthmus of Panama, 17, 26 Italy, 15, 21, 166 – 9, 171, 175 –7, 179 – 80, 191–7, 199 – 206 Italians, x–xi, 15, 18, 21, 168 –70, 172, 176 – 9, 181– 3, 185, 191– 4, 196, 198, 200 – 2, 205 – 6 Italian Empire, 169, 181– 2 Italian Nationalist Association, 197 Ithaca, 48, 58 Jaffa, 144, 148, 155– 6 Jaluit Company, 111 James, King, 5 Japan, 111, 231, 236 –7, 240 – 4 Japanese, 22, 236, 239– 43, 254 Jauréguiberry, Jean–Bernard, 84 Jerusalem, 144, 147– 8, 150, 157– 8 Jews, 10, 148, 150, 156, 159– 60, 172, 198 – 9 Jones, Douglas, 38 Jones, Jim, 17 Jones, John, 125 Jones, Lewis, 131, 133 Jones, Reverend Michael D., 13 –132 Jones-Parry, T. L. D., 131, 133 Jonestown (Guyana), 17 Jos, Emiliano, 7 Kaarta, 66, 68, 71, 75 Kabakon (Duke of York Island), 108

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Kansas, 5 Kanya-Forstner, Andrew, 11–12, 14, 232 Karbala, 215 Karun River, 215 Kendrick, Tertius, 50 –1, 58–9 Kéniéba, 19, 71, 74 –7, 79– 80, 82 – 4 Kergaradec, Alexandre, 231 Khasso, 73 Kiaochow, 110, 112, 114, 120 King, Philip Parker, 120 Kinsella, Croghan, 14 Kirkwall, Lord, 50, 61 Kitchener, Horatio (Lord), 217 Knox, Bruce, 55 Koponen, Juhani, 14 Labanca, Nicola, 180 Labouchere, Henry, 52 Labour Party (British), 218 Lagos, 192 Lake Chad, 84, 192 Lake Parime, 5 Lamington, Lord, 214 –15 Lang Son, 232 – 4, 238, 244 Lateran Pacts (1929), 176 Latin America, 5 –7, 13, 20, 125– 6, 137– 8 see also South America Lauaki, Chief, 120 Le Monde, 243 League of Ausburg, 40 Lefkas, 48 Leipzig, 155 Lenin, Vladimir, 11 Levant, 50, 145, 151, 153, 161, 216 Libya, 15–16, 18, 21– 2, 168, 170, 174, 181, 191– 206 List, Frederich, 148, 151 Liverpool, 130 – 2, 136, 192, 255 Lloyd George, David, 222 Locatelli, Francesca, 173 London, 7, 26 –7, 33 – 4, 94, 96 –7, 100, 133, 139, 210, 216, 249 Lützow, Max, 108

McClintock, Anne, 171 MacKenzie, John, xv, 14 Maccari, Mino, 184 Madagascar, 34 Madoc, 5 Madras, 96, 98 Mage, Eugène-Abdon, 84 Magellan, Ferdinand, 137 Maguire, John, 52 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 114 Maitland, Sir Thomas, 53 Maldives, 53 Mali, 66 –7, 85– 6 Malinké, 19, 67, 73, 75– 6 Malta, 47, 50, 52 – 4, 151 Manchester Guardian, 160 Mansa Musa, 66 Mariana Islands, 110, 120 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 198 Maritz, Alfred, 74, 77– 80, 82 Marshall Islands, 11, 114 Martin, Robert Montgomery, 51, 71 Martini, Ferdinando, 176 Marx, Karl, 95 Maryland, 5 Mattei, Enrico, 191 Matthews, Reverend Abraham, 125 Maurel, Hilaire, 74 Maurel and Prom Company, 68, 74, 82, 84 Mauritius, 91, 98 Masai, 10 Mata’afa, Chief, 119 Matthew, Colin, 56 Mauritanian, 66, 68 Médine, 73 –5, 83 Mediterranean, x, 3, 16 –18, 47– 9, 52, 151, 154, 192 – 3, 201, 211, 213 –14, 230 Mekong River, 230 Melanesian, 105, 108, 117–18 Melbourne, 89, 223 Mesopotamia, 9, 21– 2, 151– 2, 210 – 23 see also Iraq Mestro, Henri-Joseph, 71– 2, 80 –1

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Methodists, 127 Metz, 69, 74 Micronesia, 105, 111 Middle East, ix, x, 3, 16 –17, 145, 152– 4, 199, 221 mines, ix, x, 4, 19, 28, 31– 2, 35 –7, 41, 68, 70 – 4, 77, 79– 83, 85, 90 mining, 5– 6, 18 –19, 30, 67, 71– 4, 76, 78 – 81, 83, 85, 111, 126, 219, 239 Minnesota, 5 Minor, Cloarinda S., 147 Missouri, 5 Mogadishu, 171, 177 Mosul, 210, 217, 219, 222 – 3 Moltke, Helmuth von, 151 Mongol, 211, 220 Monicelli, Paolo, 181 Montanelli, Indro, 166 –7, 184 –5 Monte Carlo, 113 More, Sir Thomas, 9 Morocco, 6, 194, 236 Moroccans, 6, 166 Morris, William, 138 Morthlock and Truk Islands, 118 Muhammad Ali (Egyptian ruler), 212 Musters, George Chaworth, 135 Mussolini, Benito, 168, 181–2 Najaf, 215 Naples, 179 Napoleon, Emperor Louis, 72 Napoleonic, 58, 90, 93, 212 Naretti, Luigi, 170 –1 Nauru, 111 Navigation Act (1660, English), 31 Ndangan, 76, 80, 82 Nebraska, 5 Negri, Ada, 198 Netherlands, 169 see also Dutch, Holland New Caledonia, 26, 34, 39 New Guinea, 19, 107–9, 111, 113 –14, 117–18 New Mexico, 5, 91

New South Wales, 30, 91, 94 – 6, 99, 253 New York, 20, 191 New York Times, 191 New Zealand, x, 19, 30, 95– 6, 99, 105, 248 News Chronicle, 181 Niger River, 67, 70, 85 Nigeria, 192, 254 Nile River, 12, 210 Nolde, Emil, 107, 109 Norindr, Panivong, 229, 237, 244 North Africa, 9 –10, 18, 67, 168, 193, 201, 203, 206 North America/Maghreb, 193 Nostromo, 7 Nova Scotia, 39 O’Connor, Charles Yelverton, 99 O’Connor, Laura, 127 Ogle, Nathaniel, 94 Ohio, 5, 249 Oklahoma, 5 Old Testament, 211 Ontario, 5 Ordaz, Diego de, 4 Orellana, Francisco, 4 Orientalism, 144 –5, 210 Ormsby-Gore, William, 221 Orwell, George, 138 Ottoman Empire, ix, 48, 50, 52, 55, 145, 150 – 6, 193, 199, 210 –11, 213 –17, 223 see also Sublime Porte Oudh Bequest, 215 Pacific, x, 10, 19, 20, 27, 84, 103 –21, 201, 222, 245 Pacific Phosphate Company, 111 Palestine, 2, 10, 15, 20, 60, 144 – 61, 211, 221 Palestine and Orient Society, 158 Palma, Silvana, 170 Palmerston, Lord, 6, 56, 213 –14 Pan-German League, 114, 145 – 6, 152 –5, 160 –1

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Papanikolas, Georgios, 49, 55, 60 Paris, 28, 35, 49, 53– 4, 67, 72, 74, 79, 81, 83, 89, 157, 196, 230, 237– 8 Parish, Robert, 72, 81 Partridge, Michael, 56 Pascoli, Giovanni, 168, 198, 200, 205 Patagonia, 2, 10, 125– 39 Paterson, William, 32 –7 Paxos, 48, 52 Pedemonte, Adriano, 180 Pennequin, Theophile, 235 Persia, 53, 91, 151, 211–15, 217, 219, 223 Persian Gulf, 151, 211–15, 223 Perth (Western Australia), 95, 97, 99 Peru, ix, 29, 35, 70 Petrucci, Onorina Bargagli, 170 Piazza, Giuseppe, 198 Pierelli, Walter, 180 Pizarro, Gonzalo, 4 Plato, 8 –9 Poe, Edgar Allan, 7, 58, 168, 195, 197– 8, 205 Pohnpei, 105 – 6, 116 –19 Poidimani, Nicoletta, 181 Polcri, Aldo, 180 Polynesia, 106 Port Arthur (Russian), 15 Port Jackson, 91 Portugal, 31, 66, 70 Portuguese, x, 14, 70 Pratt, Michael, 52, 61 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 198 –200 Protet, Auguste–Léon, 71 Pughe, William Owen, 128 –9 Pupu, 117 Quarterly Review, 54, 93 Queensland, 6, 89, 95 Rabaul, 109 Radical Union Party (Ionian Islands), 57, 59 Raffenel, Anne, 70 – 2 railways, 22, 192, 199, 213, 222

rape, 21, 169, 171, 176 –9 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 4, 5 Rawson, Guillermo, 133 – 4, 136 Reclus, Onésime, 236 Red River, 231 Red Sea, 98, 151, 212 Redcliffe, Lord Startford de, 214 Republic, 8 Rey, Pierre-Louis, 71 Rhonnda Valley, 127 Richards, William, 135 Rio Coca, 4 Rio de la Plata, 91 Rio Orinoco, 4 Risorgimento, 203 Roberts, Edwin C., 135 Robinson, Ronald, 11, 76 Roe, John Septimus, 96 Roman, 21, 168, 172, 194, 196, 198, 202, 205, 211 Rothes, Countess of, 35 Rothschild, Edmond de, 159 Royal Air Force, 222 Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, 96 –7 Royal Georgraphical Society, 210, 216 Russell, Lord John, 53 Russia, 48, 52, 216 Russians, 15, 48, 159 Saint-Louis, 67–71, 73 – 4, 76 –7, 79, 81– 4 Saigon, 230 Saint-Martin, Yves, 71 Saint-Simon/Saint-Simonians, 9 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, 9 Saipan Island, 120 Salisbury, Lord, 62 Saloum River, 69 Salvemini, Geatano, 198 – 200 Samoa, 19, 106, 110 –17, 119 – 20 Samoans, 106, 112, 119 – 20 Samwell, William, 6 Sanderson, G. N., 12

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Sanou Kholé (river of gold), 70, 82 Sardinian Kingdom, 179 Sarona, 20 Saskatchewan, 5, 136 Schmidt, Ethan, 9 Scine, Punjab and Delhi Railway Company, 213 Scotland, 18, 26 – 8, 30 – 42, 126, 248 – 52, 255 – 7 Scottish, 3, 10, 14, 17, 26 – 8, 31– 4, 36 – 42, 50, 106, 248 – 9, 251– 2, 254, 256 Scottish Highlands, 249 Seaton, Lord, 55 Second Sino-Japanese War, 240 Second World War, 6, 16, 22, 119, 169, 201, 206, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 248 Sega, Maria Teresa, 170 Ségou, 66, 68, 75, 84 Senegal, 11, 18 –19, 66 – 80, 82 – 6, 173 Sénouébou, 19 Serao, Matilde, 198 Seton-Watson, R. W., 55 Shaftesbury, Lord, 213 Shannon, Richard, 61 Schumpeter, Joseph, 11 Siam, 231– 2 see also Thailand Siegle, Gustav von, 155 Sicily, 16, 194, 200, 205 Sierra Leone, 89 Silver, John, 7 Skinner, Quentin, 8 slaves, 34 – 5, 70, 177 slavery, 21, 169, 177, 181 Smout, T. C., 26, 32, 36, 37 Society for the Assistance of German Settlers in Palestine, 144, 158, 160 Sokehs, 105, 117–18, 120 Solf, Wilhelm, 112 –14, 119 – 20 Somalia, 21, 168, 176, 177, 184 –5 Sontag, Susan, 170 South Africa, X, 151

South America, ix, 1, 126, 131, 137– 8 see also Latin America South Australia, 5, 30, 95 – 6, 99, 249, 254 Spain, 4, 27, 31, 34, 70, 91, 117, Spanish, ix, 3–5, 7, 9, 26 –7, 35, 37– 8, 41, 117, 135– 6 Spataro, Alessio, 166 Stefani, Gennaro De, 175, 180 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 106 Stirling, James, 90 – 91, 96 Stoler, Ann Laura, 175, 182 Stuttgart, 144, 155 – 6, 159– 60 Strasbourg, 74 Sublime Porte, 153, 155, 160 see also Ottoman Empire Sudan, 66 –7, 84 –5 Suez Canal, 16, 97, 151 Swan River, 19, 22, 89, 91– 6, 100 Swan River Colony, 19– 20, 93 Sweden, 31 Sydney, 89, 94 Sykes, James, 99 Sykes, Sir Mark, 217–18 Sykes-Picot Agreement (16 May 1916), 216, 219 Syria, 91, 152 – 3, 160, 213 Taddia, Irma, 185 Tamasese, 116 Tambaoura, 67, 82 Tanzania, 14 Tasmania, 96 see also Van Diemen’s Land Tehuelche Indians, 132 temple, 17, 159, 234, 237 Templers, 10, 20, 144 – 61 Texas, 5 Thailand, 231, 239, 241, 244 see also Siam The Discrovery of Guiana (1596), 5 The Spectator, 56, 257 The Times, 6 –7, 30, 37– 8, 206, 214, 220 Tigris, 212, 214 –15, 219

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Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company, 215 Timbuktu, 67, 70, 84 –5 Tonkin, 229, 231, 233, 240 –1 Torre, Andrea, 198 Townsend, Charles, 211 Tracchia, Ruggero, 180 Treaty of Paris (1815), 49, 53– 4 Treaty of Tilsit, 49 Trento, 203 Trieste, 203 Tripoli, 16, 168, 170, 192 – 3, 200, 202 – 203 Tripolitania, 16, 170, 192, 194, 197– 8, 200 Trollope, Anthony, 89, 96, 99 Tumiati, Domenico, 194, 196 Tunis, 16, 198, 200 Tunisia, 193, 198, 200 Turkish Straits, 151 Turner, Victor, 167 Ulster, 31 Ulysses, 57– 8 Umar, Al Hajj, 66, 68, 75 – 6, 83 – 4 Union of Scotland and England (1707), 26 United Nations, 202, 206 United States, 47, 131, 137 Urach, Prince Carl von, 144 utopia, 1, 7– 9, 12, 15, 17, 20, 93, 135– 8, 168 – 9, 181, 186, 210, 212, 215, 221– 3, 244 Utopia (1516), 8 – 9 Van Diemens Land, 94 see also Tasmania Vecchi, Cesare Maria De, 185 Venice, 48, 58 Venetians, 48, 51, 58 – 9 Venezuela, 4 Vichy France, 28, 238 – 42 Victoria (Australia), x, 5, 89, 95 – 6, 99, 250 Vietnam, 242 Vietnamese, 230, 237, 243

Vincennes, 237 Virgil, 203 Virginia, 9 Vogel, Hans, 107, 109 Volpe, Gioacchino, 203 – 5 Voltaire, 7 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 95, 255 Walo, Kingdom of, 68 Walton, William, 47– 8, 53 Ward, Sir Henry, 55 Watt, Douglas, 36 Weihaiwei (British), 15, 21–2 Wales, 20, 30, 91, 94 – 6, 99, 125 – 38, 248, 252– 3 Welsh, x, 2, 10, 20, 125 – 39, 248 – 9 Welsh Patagonian Gold Fields Syndicate Ltd., 135 West Indies, 17, 27, 41 Western Australia, 89 – 90, 92 –100 Wicklow, 14 Wilhem II, Kaiser, 144 Wilhelmina, 20 Williams, Edward, 128 Williams, Hugh, 50, 58 Williams, William Hugh, 128 Willcocks, Sir William, 210, 216, 221, 223 Wilson, A. T., 221 Wilson, Arnold, 219 Wisconsin, 5 Wohltmann, Ferdinand, 113 Wollaston, John, 95 Woloff, 68 World Zionist Organisation, 199 World War I, see First World War World War II, see Second World War Wright, John, 15 Young, Sir Hilton, 222 Young, Sir John, 52 Yunnan Province, 230 – 2, 240 Zakynthos (Zante), 48, 50, 52 Zambezi River, 14 Zionism, 15, 160

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