Possessing the world: taking the measurements of colonisation from the eighteenth to the twentieth century / 9781845453381

Citation preview

European Expansion and Global Interaction

Possessing the World

General Editors

Pieter Emmer, Institute for the History of European Expansion, Leiden University Seymour Drescher, University Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh

It may be said that the question of how the technology, languages, institutions, and even pastimes of Western Europe came to dominate global civilization even came to create that civilization - is the greatest historical question of modem times. Yet scholars have paid relatively little attention to this veritable monumental phenomenon. This new series is designed to offer a forum for debate and bring new research to light.

Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

Volume 1

The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492-1800 Edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering

Bouda Etemad

Volume 2

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1400-1800 Edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering Volume 3

Translated by Andrene Everson

The Dutch Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley Paul Otto Volume 4

The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Joao Pedro Marques Translated by Richard Wall Volume 5

The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850 Pieter Emmer Volume 6

Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Century Bouda Etemad Translated by Andrene Everson Volume 7

Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World Edited by Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Contents

Published in 2007 by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2007 Bouda Etemad

Originally published as La Possession du monde: poids et mesunes de la colonisation. © Editions Complexe, 2000 ISBN 2-87027-783-0 D/1638/2000/3

This book was published with the support of the University of Lausanne (Commission des publications, Fondation du 450eme, Institut d'histoire economique et sociale), the University of Geneva (Fonds general de l'Universite, Fondation Ernest Boninchi) and the Fondation Karl Popper. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

List of Tables

vii

Introduction

1

Part I Tools of Empire and the Human Cost of Colonial Conquests 1. Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics 1.1 Overseas Necropolises 1.2 White Man's Solitude in the Tropics

11 11 18

2. Malaria, Quinine and Colonial Conquests 2.1 The American Phase: The 'Fever Tree' 2.2 The Asian Phase: The Greatness and Misery of the Plantation System 2.3 The African Phase: Quinine and Colonial Conquests

25 26 28 31

3. The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests 3.1 Asia and Africa Conquered by ... Themselves 3.2 An Attempt at Quantification 3.3 On Good Human Resources Management 3.4 Empires at Bargain Prices

39 39 46 48 51

4. European Losses During the Conquests 4.1 Typology and Assessment of Losses 4.2 Weapons Technologies and European Losses 4.3 Transportation, Communications and theCost of Empire

58 59 74 78

5. Indigenous Losses During the Conquests 5.1 Military Losses 5.2 Civilian Losses 5.3 Balance Sheet and Perspective

85 85 88 93

Part II Colonial Areas and Populations: A Comparative Study of Empires Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-84545-338-1 hardback

6. Measuring the Land and Counting Heads 6.1 The Limitations of the Key Criteria 6.2 Comparative Sizes of the Colonial Empires 6.3 Counting Heads 6.4 Measuring the Land

99 100 105 109 H4

vi I

Contents

7. The 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Rate and Scale of Colonisation Periodicity Major Trends Regional Differences List of the Colonial Powers

119 119 122 124 130

8. Comparative Portraits of the Empires I: 1760-1830 8.1 The Spanish and Portuguese Colonies: The First Models 8.2 The Metamorphosis of the English Domain 8.3 The French Domain: A Fragile Structure 8.4 The Dutch Domain: From the Trading Empire to the Java War

134 135 138 144

9. Comparative Portraits of the Empires II: 1830-1880 9.1 British Colonisation: Two Tiers 9.2 'New' and 'Old' French Colonies 9.3 Java and the Cultivation System

153 153 157 161

List of Tables

1.1. 148

10. Comparative Portraits of the Empires III: 1880-1938 10.1 The Old Empire Builders: Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal 10.2 The New Colonisers of Africa: Belgium, Germany, Italy 10.3 The Non-European Colonisers: Japan and the United States

165 175

11. The Decolonisation Period 11.1 Definition 11.2 The Causes of Decolonisation 11.3 Decolonisation Underway 11.4 After Decolonisation

188 188 189 194 200

165

181

Conclusion

205

Appendices

209

Sources

229

Bibliography

234

Index of Places

245

Index of Names

251

1.2.

3.1.

3.2.

3.3.

4.1. 4.2.

5.1. 6.1. 6.2.

6.3.

7.1.

7.2.

Mortality of European soldiers in the home country and in the colonies and cost of their relocation overseas in the nineteenth century Estimates of the size of communities of European origin in the principal colonies of the Americas, Asia and Africa circa 1760, in thousands of inhabitants Size and composition of the regular colonial armies in British India and the Dutch East Indies from the mid-eighteenth century to 1913, in thousands Estimated numbers and composition of the regular colonial troops during peacetime stationed in Asia, the Caribbean and Africa in about 1913 Annual mortality rates for the European and indigenous soldiers of the regular colonial armies participating in five military expeditions in Africa during the last third of the nineteenth century Summary of estimated European military losses during the colonial conquests, in thousands of dead Losses among the regular European troops during the conquests compared to the areas and populations colonised in 1913, listed by colonial power (not including British dominions) Summary of estimates of indigenous losses during the colonial conquests Number of colonies existing and no longer extant, 1415-1995 Comparison of various estimates of the populations and areas of colonial lands from 1700-1963, in millions of inhabitants and square kilometres Comparison of various estimates of the populations and areas of colonial lands circa 1880 and 1913, in millions of inhabitants and square kilometres Change in colonial areas and populations, 1760-1938, in millions of square kilometres and inhabitants Colonial areas and populations by large region, 1760-1938, as a percentage, totals in millions of square kilometres and inhabitants

16

21

40

47

49

70

71 94

104

106

108 123

125

List of Tables

viii I List of Tables

7.3.

7.4.

8.1.

8.2.

9.1.

9.2.

9.3.

10.1.

10.2.

10.3.

10.4.

10.5.

11.1.

Colonial areas and populations listed by colonial power, 1760-1938, as a percentage, totals in millions of square kilometres and inhabitants Relationships between the populations of the empires and those of the home countries, 1760-1938, as a percentage Areas of the European colonial domains in 1760 and 1830, in thousands of square kilometres and as a percentage of the total areas of the European colonies Populations of the European colonial domains in 1760 and 1830, in thousands of inhabitants and as a percentage of the total populations of the European colonies Areas of the European colonial domains in 1830 and 1880, in thousands of square kilometres and as a percentage of the total area of the European colonies Populations of the European colonial domains in 1830 and 1880, in thousands of inhabitants and as a percentage of the total area of the European colonies Estimates of the numerical size of communities of European origin in the Asian and African colonies in 1830 and 1880, in thousands and as a percentage of the total indigenous subject population Areas and populations of the British colonial domain, 1880-1938, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants, as a percentage of total colonial areas and populations Areas and populations of the French colonial domain, 1880-1938, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants, as a percentage of the total colonial areas and populations Areas and populations of the Dutch and Portuguese colonial domains, 1880,1913 and 1938, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants, and as a percentage of the total colonial areas and populations Areas and populations of the Belgian, German and Italian colonial domains, 1913 and 1938, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants, and as a percentage of the total colonial areas and populations Areas and populations of the Japanese and American colonial domains, 1913 and 1938, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants, and as a percentage of the total colonial areas and populations Estimates of the numerical size of foreign communities settled in the colonies of occupation and in the dominions in 1913 and 1938, in thousands and as a percentage of the total colonial population

11.2. 131

11.3.

132

Estimates of the number of repatriates and expatriates arriving in the European home countries after decolonisation, from 1945 to the beginning of the 1990s, in thousands, overall totals rounded The 'remnants of empire'. Areas and populations of European and American dependencies and possessions (not including Arctic and Antarctic possessions) in 2005, in thousands of square kilometres and inhabitants

135

136

154

155

159

167

171

174

178

184

191

Explanation of the abbreviations used in the tables _ zero data unavailable 0.0 smaller than the unit of measurement used

I

ix

197

201

Introduction

long with the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the phenomenon of colonialism is one of the major changes of direction in mankind's history. Like both of these other revolutions, colonisation was a massive phenomenon. From 1415, when the Portuguese took Ceuta (a North African town across from Gibraltar) during a crusade against Islam, to the end of the 1930s, when fascist Italy took over Ethiopia - that is, from the first manifestation of European colonial expansion to the last - empires (home countries and colonies) spread over about 70 per cent of the planet's 136 million square kilometres of dry land (not including the Arctic and Antarctic, which are essentially uninhabited). To paraphrase Jacques Berque, at the peak of colonisation, a 'simplistic and cruel contrast' held sway in the world.1 On the one hand, there were 'zones of light', that is, the centres of industrialisation and therefore of expansion; on the other, there were shadows - as if the reddish glow of the tall furnaces were casting a long shadow over the other continents. A small part of the inhabited planet - the European, American and Japanese home countries, which covered less than 9 per cent of all the dry land - 'cast the shadow of its own light on the rest of the world'. The contrast is still more striking in the case of colonial Europe. Though covering only 1.3 per cent of the earth's dry land area, it extended its domination over 41 per cent of the inhabited world on the eve of the Second World War. Today, more than 80 per cent of the populations of the developed countries (Europe, excluding the former U.S.S.R.; North America, Japan, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand) have a colonial past, as either former colonisers or former colonial subjects. As for the Third World, two thirds of its four thousand million inhabitants can find at least one chapter devoted to colonisation in their history books. Of all the countries involved in formal rule, only the United States has had the experience of being both a colonised and a colonising country, with more than a century elapsing between the two experiences. Only the Chinese, Afghans, Iranians, Thai, Mongolians, Turks, and perhaps Liberians can claim to have escaped the colonial yoke. Missing from the roll call of European colonisers are Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Ireland,

A

2

I Possessing the World

the countries of central Europe, and to a large extent the Scandinavian countries.2 Overall, today, about 70 per cent of the world's population has a colonial past - either as colonisers or as the formerly colonised - dating back to the beginning of the sixteenth century at the earliest. On the eve of the British Industrial Revolution, that is, in the mid-eighteenth century, this number was only 8 to 10 per cent. These figures show the extent of colonial expansion, more specifically the expansion of Europe since the age of the great discoveries. They confirm that due to its massive scope, this process has been one of the most striking occurrences in world history. Commenting from the European point of view, Adam Smith observed in the 1770s that 'the discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind'. Just like the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, colonisation also had global implications. It made America a 'creation' of Europe. The Old World imposed its civilisation on the New and exported its people there by the millions. This initial taking possession of the world was accompanied by the tragic obliteration of the Amerindian peoples and civilisations. Still, the first empires, which were centred on the Americas until the second half of the eighteenth century, were not yet a reflection of Europe's world supremacy. Rather, they expressed 'Europeans' [...] determination and ingenuity in using limited resources'.3 The European expansion following the Industrial Revolution affected different regions, in which it brought about transformations of another sort. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe ruled Asia, Africa and Oceania through the power of its industrial technology, and not by its skill in 'sailing the seas' to flaunt its superior naval artillery. Consequently, the legacy of modern colonisation is different from that of the first European advance into the Americas. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the colonial undertaking had a specific character, which England was the first to embody. From then on, colonisation became the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the planet. In Asia and Africa, unlike in America, it did not shake the demographic foundations of the subjugated peoples, but brought new technologies that undermined the existing economic and social structures. Of course, the spread of the new Western technologies was not restricted to the colonies, but extended throughout the world. The effects of the new technologies were felt to varying degrees to the farthest ends of the earth. But without a doubt, the colonised areas, being directly exposed, were more profoundly affected than areas where European influence was more indirect. Indeed, the new empires bom of the Industrial Revolution differed not only from the old American empires founded beginning in the sixteenth century, but also from those that preceded them. Long ago, other empires - the Macedonian, Chinese, Persian, Roman, Arab, Mongol, and Ottoman - also 'spread their appetites, norms and ways over immense continental

Introduction

I 3

expanses'.4 But while European colonisation incorporated the conquered populations into the dominant system, these other conquests were rather the prelude to absorption of the newcomers into the conquered societies. Does not the uniqueness of modern colonisation lie in its association of formal rule and the dissemination of the home country's civilisation, whereas in the other cases the two phenomena were usually separate? Moreover, colonisation after the Industrial Revolution was only a transitory form, that is, limited in time, and consisted of structural changes that continue today. As a turning point of world history, colonisation would seem to be too vast a subject to allow a single author to do it justice. Indeed, from Bartolome de Las Casas to Jean-Paul Sartre, by way of Karl Marx, Rudyard Kipling and Andre Gide, millions of pages have been devoted to it. Thousands of studies published by generations of historians have described and dissected the process. So why, the reader may ask, should we add another stone to an edifice that is already so impressive? There are at least three obvious reasons why new books on colonisation are needed. Firstly, despite prolific academic production and a long and rich historiography, there are still gaps and blank pages in the history of modern colonial empires. Secondly, each generation of historians asks new questions about the enormous body of accumulated material, seeking answers in the colonial past for the questions of a present filled with both hopes and fears. Finally, the greater the amount of material, which in this case is dizzying, the greater the need for summaries and comprehensive studies favouring a long term and a comparative perspective. To understand the viewpoint from which this book was written, identify the gaps it is to fill, and also specify what it does not cover, an overview of the historiography is essential. Since its beginnings, colonial historiography has been dominated by three major trends, focusing on the search for causes, consequences or resources. A brief review of them follows.5 The first question that historians have tried to answer centres on motivations. Why colonisation? Why - a question of special interest to students of modem history - did this process accelerate in the last third of the nineteenth century? Two dates and four numbers provide sufficient illustration of this skyrocketing growth. Around 1760, the colonial empires covered 18 per cent of the earth's surface and encompassed 3 per cent of the world's population. On the eve of the First World War, these percentages had grown to 39 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively. In the search for this phenomenon's origins, determination of the most important factor has long been the main point of contention. Proponents of economic explanations (the advantage of having protected markets available, ability to invest capital surpluses at profitable rates, reliable and abundant supply of raw materials) are countered by others who advance political or psychological reasons (nationalism, strategic and diplomatic interests, prestige, desire for power) as the cause.

4

I Possessing the World

In the same vein but on another level, a Eurocentric perspective, which considered the economic situation or changing socioeconomic structures in the home countries to be the cause of the expansion, gave way to the writing of colonial history as seen from the 'periphery'. According to this view, crises in Asian and African societies and economies that had come in contact with the industrialised nations created situations of extreme tension overseas, thus causing the European powers to question the benefits of indirect rule (commercial penetration) - which would have given rise to their preference for formal rule (territorial annexation and direct governance) and made it more widespread. Each of these factors explaining colonial expansion has had its day. However, none has succeeded in gaining such complete acceptance that the others were eliminated, so an increasing number of historians have rallied - whether out of conviction or resignation - to a sort of compromise. Acknowledging the complexity of the colonial phenomenon, they explain it by combining a series of different factors, in different proportions depending on the author. Rather than a mechanical causality, they see a convergence of different economic, strategic and ideological factors. The worsening of development inequalities between the North and the South in the twentieth century, the persistence of mass poverty in Asia and Africa, and structural changes in the Western economies beginning in the 1970s have revived historians' interest in the consequences of colonisation. More specifically, they are directing their attention to colonisation's role in the process of Western economic growth and in the process of underdevelopment of a 'third world', which was largely a result of decolonisation. Concerning the first point, historians understand the futility of trying to come up with a cost-benefit analysis for the home countries. Such a balance sheet - listing as liabilities the human cost of conquest, military expenses and equipment, non-profit loans, budgetary subsidies, depreciation of the invested capital and imperial preferences; and as assets the supply of raw materials, the facilities and security of protected markets, creation of jobs, and international prestige - cannot be meaningful. Rather than reducing colonisation to a series of addition and subtraction problems, today's historians prefer to ask about the colonies' utility, what function they served in the growth and structural transformation of the home countries' economies. Periodicity has a crucial place in this approach. Recent research shows how essential it is to follow the uneven development of the colonial contribution over the long term to determine the alternating growth phases during which, for example, the colonial outlets affected - depending on the time period - sometimes the leading industrial sectors and sometimes declining ones. The debate over the extent to which colonisation is responsible for the underdevelopment of the Third World divides scholars into two main camps. On the one side are those who hold it to be completely responsible,

Introduction

I 5

citing as evidence external economic factors that slow the economy (deindustrialisation, specialisation in the exportation of raw products, unequal balance of trade). On the other are those who minimise it, upholding stagnation factors within the colonies as the cause. Alongside these two approaches in historiography, one focusing on causes and the other on consequences, there is a third that tries to determine the means used by the West to conquer the world. How did Europe take possession of the world? Most historians who study modem colonisation avoid the issue. Unlike historians of older colonisation efforts, who have written abundantly on the technological aspects (navigational techniques, weapons, methods of warfare, etc.) of the exploration and conquest of the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, specialists on modern colonisation either are silent on the subject or minimise the role of technological factors when explaining the second European expansion.6 This book, or at least the first part of it, follows this third historiographic approach, which today is neglected. In this sense, it is akin to the concerns of the engineers of nineteenth-century colonisation - the soldiers, doctors and administrators who experimented in the field with various techniques for taking and controlling vast and distant lands harbouring populations hostile to the white man's advance. To be perfectly clear right from the beginning and avoid any misunder­ standings, I would like to state that this book deals with neither the causes nor the consequences of colonisation, except perhaps in occasional allusions. Why is it, one might ask, that historians of the modem period show so little interest in the technological factors in the European expansion that occurred after the Industrial Revolution? Perhaps they all agree that the cause is understood? Did not Europe take possession of the world simply because it was technologically superior? Did not industrialisation supply it with the weapons needed to impose its rule on the rest of the planet? Did not the 'tools of empire', that is, weapons technology (rapid-fire guns, machine guns), colonial medicine (quinine), modern transportation (steamboat, rail) and communications (telegraph), make the white colonists ultra-powerful? Yes, absolutely. But starting when? This is a question of the utmost importance, since in colonial issues it really is time that matters the most. The argument put forward in the first part of this book is that until the 1880s, that is, until the colonisation of sub-Saharan Africa, these new technologies played practically no role in European territorial acquisition. British India, the Dutch East Indies, Algeria and French Indochina, that is, the four largest, most populous and richest colonies which, as such, were the veritable pillars of the three great European empires, were conquered before the conquest technologies developed during the Industrial Revolution were usable. We will examine in detail (in Chapters 1 to 5) the 'preindustrial' conquest technologies that a colonising Europe tried in Asia and the

Introduction

6 I Possessing the World

Maghreb at a time when its 'superiority' over the colonised regions was not yet a decisive factor; because before the years 1860-1880, the development gaps between today's industrialised nations and today's Third World countries, that is, the inequalities in real income per inhabitant, were remarkably small compared with those of subsequent times. Between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880, such gaps slowly grew from 1 to 2 or 2.5 - then increased to 3.4 in 1913, 5.1 in 1950 and 8.2 in the early 1990s.7 When one knows that the industrialisation process remained slow and was restricted to a limited number of Western countries until the 1860s, the small gaps before 1880 are not at all surprising. In other words, Western rule, which had been implicit since the time of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama, became limitless, beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century. This periodicity gives the issue of the human cost of empires a new twist. Contrary to a commonly held idea, Industrial Revolution technologies contributed only very little to a reduction in the human cost of the colonial conquests that was borne by the home countries - in fact, the most important colonies of Asia and the Maghreb were actually conquered before these technologies gave Europe any superiority over the colonial world as far as firepower, medical protection and mobility were concerned. Since to date there has been no overall assessment of this human cost, Chapters 4 and 5 attempt to fill this gap by presenting comparisons of European and indigenous8 losses during the colonial conquests. While the first part of this book weighs the empires' tools and costs, the second deals mainly with an assessment of their size. Chapters 6 to 10, which combine a summary with an original contribution, are based on the use of a large database containing the areas and populations of over 160 colonies between 1760 and 1938 (Appendices C and D). This important statistical material made possible a comparative study of the modern empires (European, American, Japanese) covering a long period of time. It allowed the cadence and scope of modern colonisation to be determined using consistent criteria, which also served to paint comparative portraits of the empires (Chapters 8 to 10). The second part of the book is connected to the first by a demographic detail that lends remarkable continuity to the two centuries through which modern colonisation has lasted, namely, the enormous contrast between the geographical and human immensity of the Asian and African empires and the ridiculously small number of Europeans present there who were supposedly controlling this universe. The numerical inferiority of the whites lost in a sea of yellow and black, which we can say is an essential condition for limiting the human cost of empires right from the start, is an important characteristic of the entire modern colonial period. It also explains the speed with which the empires collapsed (Chapter 11). Thus, the book ends with an idea outlined in the very first pages, namely, that apart from its massive scope and global implications, modern colonisation remained an extremely fragile edifice from start to finish,

I 7

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

J. Berque, La depossession du monde, Paris, Seuil, 1964, p. 102; J. Berque et al., De I'imperialisme a la decolonisation, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1965, pp. 495-496. As the reader will by now have understood, in this book China is not considered to have been one of the colonised countries. Moreover, the cases of the Ottoman and Russian Empires are not discussed, since unlike the Western and Japanese colonial empires, they were geographically contiguous. D.K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires. A Comparative Survey From the Eighteenth Century, New York, Delacorte Press, 1966, p. 9. Berque, La depossession du monde, p. 104. For more detailed information about these trends, see my article 'Grandeur et vicissitudes du debat colonial. Tendances recentes de l'histoire de la colonisation', Revue Tiers-Monde, 28,112,1987, pp. 783-812. It was not until the 1980s, especially with the book by D.R. Headrick (The Tools of Empire. Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1981), that the 'technology' explanation began to return to favour. P. Bairoch, 'How and not Why? Economic Inequalities between 1800 and 1913: Some Background Figures', in J. Batou (ed.), Between Development and Underdevelopment. The Precocious Attempts at Industrialisation of the Periphery 1800-1870, Geneva, Droz, 1991, pp. 33-34; also, by the same author, Le TiersMonde dans I'impasse. Le demarrage economique du XVIIIe au XXe siecle, Paris, Gallimard, third ed., 1992, p. 459. The word is used here without the pejorative connotation attributed to it by the colonial government, but in its literal sense as a synonym of native, aboriginal, autochthon - i.e., a member of a human community living in an overseas territory prior to its colonisation.

PartI Tools of Empire and the Human Cost of Colonial Conquests

exss

- Chapter 1 -

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics

1.1 Overseas Necropolises he effects of the encounter between the first Europeans to venture into the tropics and the unknown pathological environment were frightening. Fevers, dysentery, and aggressive insects made initial attempts to establish a European presence in the West Indies, Asia and Africa a disaster from a health standpoint. In the seventeenth century, the West Indies were a veritable death-trap for whites and blacks alike. The Europeans who were settling in the region and the African slaves who were taken there saw their life expectancy plummet, to the extent that only the continual influx of new immigrants ensured the replacement of the white and African populations.1 A French attempt to start a settlement in Guiana in 1764, which involved 12 to 13 thousand immigrants, mostly unemployed persons from Lorraine and Alsace, ended with 80 to 90 per cent of the colonists dead of malaria and yellow fever in less then a year. The French expedition to reconquer Santo Domingo (Haiti) also turned into an epidemiological catastrophe. Out of a total of 59,000 soldiers sent from France, 49,000 died between 1791 and 1803; 80 per cent of these deaths were due to diseases. The picture was not much different in Asia. Until the nineteenth century, Batavia (Jakarta) was known as the 'Dutch cemetery'. In India at the end of the eighteenth century, 460 of the 1,200 British residents of Calcutta succumbed to diseases within the span of a few months,2 a mortality rate of 383 %o. During the first half of the nineteenth century, only 6 per cent of all deaths registered by the British army in the Indies were due to combat; the rest were caused by diseases. In the space of eight years, diseases reduced the number of recruits arriving in India by half. To compensate for these losses, some 10,000 new recruits were needed annually to keep the number of Europeans at 80,000 in the late 1880s.3

T

12

I Possessing the World

The situation in the Maghreb was hardly better. In the 1840s, a French general ironically noted that Algeria's only area of growth was cemeteries. But in the history of European expansion, no other region has succeeded in wresting the title of 'the white man's tomb' from western Africa. From the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, the death rate of Europeans living in the slave ports on the west coast of Africa reached 800 to 900 %o. Six out of ten whites arriving in the region died during their first year of residence, another two out of ten died between the second and seventh years, and only one escaped alive. Statistics remain silent as to the fate of the tenth man.4 Until the decade of the 1840s, half of the Europeans posted at slave embarkation points continued to die during their first year there.5 European expeditions in western Africa were particularly deadly. To take only the example of the six main exploration expeditions organised by the English between 1816 and 1841, which involved a total of 281 people, the mortality rate was about 490%o, mainly due to malaria and yellow fever.6 The maladies struck even European sailors off the coast - witness the case of the British naval squadron cruising along the coast of Guinea to enforce the law abolishing the slave trade, passed in 1807 by the English Parliament. The mortality rate among the officers and crew was so high there that the flotilla soon became known as the 'coffin squadron'. The cost of European penetration as measured in human lives, which was terrifying in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, remained high throughout the nineteenth. A doctor with the French troops who went off to conquer Sudan7 in the mid 1860s described the new colony as being nothing but a 'vast necropolis'. Death in the tropics was not reserved exclusively for privates in the army. In 1893, explorer Richard Burton described the residence of the British governor in Lagos as a 'corrugated iron coffin or plank-lined morgue containing a dead governor once a year'. His testimony was humorously confirmed by other British empire builders, who asserted of their minuscule colonies in western Africa - consisting in the nineteenth century of a few operational bases in Sierra Leone, in Gambia and on the Gold Coast - that each needed at least two governors: with one always ready to rush off and replace the other who was dying in office. The association of death and time spent in the colonies was made commonplace in the 1883 edition of the Littre French dictionary, in which the phrase 'll est mort aux colonies' [He died in the colonies] was a natural example used to illustrate the word 'colony'.8 All of this raises some questions. Did the Europeans leaving for Africa in the eighteenth century know when they were recruited that their chances of dying in the first year were five or six in ten? If so, why did they gamble with their lives in a version of Russian roulette in which more of the revolver's chambers were loaded than empty?9 How can we explain why, despite the alarming mortality rate for the first Europeans in the tropics, they never stopped flooding in? For the privates and enlisted men

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics

I

13

in the army, poverty and a lack of work in Europe were undoubtedly sufficient reason to go overseas. For the officers and traders, the hope of being promoted or making a quick fortune was a strong incentive to leave the Old World. Certainly, most of these first Europeans, once exposed to tropical diseases, died before returning to their home country. However, the fact that this was known and accepted would seem to indicate that it was all worth the risk. Above all, this human cost seemed bearable because, as we shall see, the number of Europeans (soldiers, administrators, traders, and missionaries) participating in the creation of empires was extremely small. The Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who did not know the origin of the tropical diseases against which they had no natural or acquired immunity, believed that all these losses were caused by 'fevers' and the 'pestilential climate'. In 1875, opening his course on tropical pathology, a professor at the Brest medical school addressed the young doctors going overseas with the French Navy in these terms: 'There [...] you will encounter the formidable sphinx of Malaria, pernicious Proteus, the delirious ghost of Typhus, the livid, icy spectre of Cholera, the yellow mask of Vomito Negro. Beware! A poisonous breath is exhaled from the earth and the waters'.10 In fact, the white man's most formidable enemies were yellow fever, cholera, and malaria - the latter being the main cause of death in the tropics in the nineteenth century, as it still is today.11 A virtual guinea pig immersed in a highly pathogenic environment, he would successively and sometimes simultaneously contract these usually fatal ailments. Given the almost complete absence of any preventive medicine in the European colonial armies until the mid-nineteenth century, said armies saw many more soldiers die of disease than in combat, up until the First World War (see Appendix A). For the soldiers turned loose into an epidemiological unknown, the fevers, dysentery and heat stroke were more to be feared than the arrows, the assegais or the trade guns of doubtful accuracy. This gave the colonisers - and those under their yoke - the idea that the tropical ecology was the best bulwark to protect against a permanent European presence overseas. Had not the first sixteenth-century attempts to start European colonies on the African coast and in the lower Congo basin all failed, because the white missionaries and commercial agents were literally devoured by these unhealthy lands? Had not diseases driven the Portuguese from the empire of the Mwene Matapa (now Zimbabwe)? Had not the tsetse fly, the vector of sleeping sickness, single­ handedly gained the upper hand over their military expeditions along the Zambezi River? The Portuguese, and the other Europeans as well, learned their lesson from these failures: after the end of the sixteenth century, they used local intermediaries to maintain contact with the African interior. The Europeans blamed the tropical environment for delaying their settlement and making economic penetration difficult. 'Conquering the

14

I

Possessing the World

issue of health in Africa will be the most effective means of political and social conquest by the Europeans', remarked a German author at the beginning of the twentieth century.12 Western Africans, for their part, could thank mosquitoes, the vectors of malaria, for having dissuaded the Europeans from establishing settlement colonies on their shores. Already in the seventeenth century, the only weapon Shakespeare could dream up for the native Caliban (a 'salvage and deformed slave') struggling against the white invader (personified by Prospero) was the fevers: 'All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him by inch-meal a disease!' (The Tempest, act II, scene 2). In the 1970s, the authorities in Sierra Leone proposed the creation of a Mosquito Medal, in homage to the insect that kept the white man from making their country another Rhodesia.13 Previously, on the eve of decolonisation, a Nigerian academic had congratulated himself on the mosquito's alliance with blacks: 'Let us give thanks to that little insect [...] which has saved the land of our fathers for us [...]. The least we can do is engrave its picture on our National Flag'.14 Obviously, the white man cannot join in this homage to the tropical environment. The diseases limited and delayed his hold on the tropics and hindered economic exploitation, thereby increasing the cost of the empire. Western medicine began a long crusade against them. In this veritable hundred years war, which lasted throughout the nineteenth century and on into the period between the First and Second World Wars,15 the European medical approach went through two main stages. Initially, 'emigration medicine' tried to protect the health of the European expatriates. Later, this perspective broadened to include all populations of colonised Asia and Africa. Tn both cases, the doctor was responsible for saving human lives, the most precious capital'.16 Let us first consider emigration medicine. We will come back to the second aspect of the Western medical approach later (in Chapter 5). To see whether emigration medicine met its objective of saving European lives, we will try to retrace the changes in the mortality rate for whites in the tropics in the nineteenth century. General studies in this area are extremely rare, which makes the study by P.D. Curtin17 all the more valuable. This famous American historian estimated the human cost of the movement of European soldiers from their original environment to the overseas colonies. To this end, he calculated a 'relocation cost', the relationship between the mortality rate of European soldiers in the home country and those in the colonies. Table 1, based on data compiled by Curtin, reveals that in the nineteenth century, the movement of European troops into Asia, Africa and the West Indies included a significant human cost. The only exception to the rule was Oceania (Tahiti, New Caledonia), where the European soldiers were at less risk of dying than if they stayed in their own barracks

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics

I

15

in their original environment. Everywhere else, white soldiers lost in the exchange. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the colonies with the most voracious appetites for whites were located in western Africa, in the West Indies, and on the Indian sub-continent. Around 1830, these colonies comprised 79 per cent of the total colonised area and 92 per cent of the colonised population (not including the British dominions, i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). The high relocation cost in Algeria (288 per cent) and in the Dutch East Indies (1,011 per cent) can be set aside. It can be explained by the fact that the French and Dutch colonists were involved in fierce wars of conquest there at that time. The fact that, in the 1830s, the mortality rates for French soldiers were five times higher in the West Indies than in France, and eight times higher in Senegal; and the fact that mortality rates for British troops overseas were five times higher in Bengal than at home and thirty times higher on the western coasts of Africa, can of course be explained by the diseases. On the eve of the First World War, the relocation cost for European soldiers overseas had not disappeared, but was decreasing everywhere except in India; however, the data for this region are not strictly comparable to those collected at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This cost was about 80 per cent in Algeria and the French West Indies; it exceeded 100 per cent in Asia and tropical Africa. In the period from 1909 to 1913, the mortality rate for European soldiers in Africa and colonial Asia was still double or triple the rate recorded in the home country. That said, the human cost of empire clearly decreased during the nineteenth century. Between the 1830s and the eve of the First World War, the mortality rate for white soldiers stationed in the colonies dropped by about 90 per cent.18 As Curtin puts it, this decrease marked a profound change in 'Europe's epidemiological relationship to the rest of the world'.19 The chronology of this significant reduction in European mortality in the tropics and an analysis of its causes are interesting to think about because they weaken the old theory of Western medicine as a 'tool of empire'. This idea, backed by the early colonial doctors and by the imperialistic circles of the second half of the nineteenth century, has medicine playing a crucial role in the success of European colonial • 70 penetration. Now, it turns out that the reduction in the mortality rate for whites in the tropics began during the decade from 1840 to 1850, that is, before microbiologists (Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch) had discovered the germ theory, before the huge vaccination campaigns had begun, and before quinine was used to prevent malaria.21 In other words, the decline in the death rate for European soldiers in the colonies occurred before scientific research and laboratory work had advanced far enough to allow an understanding of the origin and mode of transmission of the deadliest exotic diseases.

16 I

Possessing the World

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics I

Table 1.1. Mortality of European soldiers in the home country and in the colonies, and cost of their relocation overseas in the nineteenth century. Mortality rate (in %o)

c. 1830

1909-1913

20.2 15.3

2.9 2.6

78.2 164.7c 483.0 d 30.5

5.3 b 6.7 5.6 4.5

Relocation cost a (in %)

c. 1830

1909-1913

Europe

France Great Britain

-

-

Africa

Algeria French West Africa British West Africa Mauritius

-287.7 -716.4c -3,056.9 d -99.4

-82.3 -131.0 -118.0 -77.7

Asia

India Ceylon Dutch East Indies

71.4e 69.8 170.0

14.1 5.5 6.4

-366.7 e -356.2 -1,011.1

-452.3 -115.3 -150.4

130.0 106.9f

7.8 4.9

-749.7 -429.9 f

-204.3 -71.1

9.5 11.4

2.3 2.3

+50.0

+20.1

+21.1

+19.1

West Indies

Jamaica French West Indies Oceania

Tahiti New Caledonia

a) Relationship between the mortality rate in the home country and that in the colony. b) Algeria and Tunisia. c) Senegal. d) Sierra Leone. e) Bengal. Guadeloupe. Source: Adapted from P.D. Curtin. Death by Migration. Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 7-14.

The change in Europe's epidemiological relationship to the rest of the world beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century - as Curtin expresses it - was in fact due to emigration medicine, which had its origins at the end of the fifteenth century.22 This kind of medicine was for a long time short on personnel and resources, and in its early stages it was burdened with a hodgepodge of prejudices and naive ideas; but for a time it was open to the extra-European pharmacopoeia, from which it learned to use Cinchona to reduce fevers, limes to prevent scurvy and gourd seeds against tapeworms. Faced with the very high morbidity and mortality rates of the first European expeditions and settlements in unhealthy areas, the pioneers of

17

emigration medicine accumulated a knowledge of tropical pathology - by dint of trial and error, in the field. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a whole series of observations, statistical summaries and surveys led to the publication of many health guides and specialised reports, developed using an essentially empirical approach.23 Intended for expatriate whites in the colonies, they set forth a collection of health rules and precautions that had stood the test of time. These recommendations concerned mainly diet, dress, and protection against abrupt changes in temperature. Special attention was given to how one should drink, the purification of water (distilled water was commercially available beginning early in the nineteenth century) and the provision of drinking water for colonial troops. Another important topic was altitude, the oldest protective step taken by Europeans in the tropics. Medical geography studies established a correlation between altitude and good health. It was demonstrated that above an elevation of about 800 meters, malaria and yellow fever, for example, scarcely did any damage. Whenever conditions allowed, barracks were built on or moved to high locations. Other measures, directly inspired by similar steps taken in Europe, included construction of sewer systems, ventilation of the barracks rooms, and changing the barracks to provide more space for each soldier, which helped reduce the spread of contagious diseases. Practitioners of emigration medicine, mostly military doctors, also collected statistical data throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in order to evaluate the length of the stay in the tropics that would most limit the risk of death. Their observations on acclimatisation, made as they searched for an ideal 'exposure time', sometimes recommended a long rotation (ten years or more), and sometimes a short one (about three years). At a time when emigration medicine was still trying to find its bearings, this discrepancy should not be surprising. Moreover, until the end of the nineteenth century, there was still a degree of uncertainty as to how effective all the preventive health measures mentioned above really were. With regard to the time of exposure to the tropical environment, a consensus was reached beginning in the 1870s that the short rotation system was best (on this topic, see the account of the English expedition against the Ashanti in 1873 and 1874, found in Chapter 3). Another way of ensuring that a white soldier was acclimatised was to send him temporarily to a relatively healthy intermediate location to prepare him to better tolerate his stay in the tropics. Though considered to be ineffective by some, this type of measure had its faithful adherents. The English sent their colonial troops through Bermuda or Gibraltar. Spanish forces acclimatised by spending a year in the Canary Islands before departing for the Philippines or Cuba. Similarly, the French used Reunion for this purpose, as a 'stepping stone' to Madagascar.24 The same empirical process was used to perfect specific solutions for combating the deadliest tropical diseases. In the colonial world, the use of quinine against malaria dates to the years from 1830 to 1840. We will come

18 I Possessing the World

back later to a discussion of the hesitant, sporadic, and non-universal character of its use, which, incidentally, was of doubtful effectiveness (Chapter 2). The only remedy for yellow fever - and cholera as well consisted in temporarily removing oneself from the infected areas. At a time when the specific causes of these maladies had not yet been scientifically determined, this practice of avoidance was not always effective either. Notwithstanding, this type of 'purely empirical strategy' saved many European lives in the colonies in the mid-nineteenth century, as Curtin stresses.25 Many recent studies confirm this point of view.26 In India, for example, it was thanks to this kind of strategy that the mortality rate for British soldiers decreased to 69 %o in the 1860s, then to 15 %o at the end of the nineteenth century, 10%o between 1900 and 1909 and 7%o between 1920 and 1925.27 All in all, the high mortality rates recorded during the initial phases of colonial expansion discouraged the creation of European settlements in the tropics, and the use of white labour, but were not an insurmountable obstacle to formal rule by the whites. These diseases did not prevent the Europeans from taking possession of India, Algeria and Java, establishing a presence on the African coast, and even before that, developing plantation agriculture in the West Indies. These undertakings were successful enough that the (indigenous) population under formal European rule in the tropics increased from 25 million to 204 million people between 1760 and 1830. In this first part of the chapter, we have seen that without waiting for the advent of scientific medicine, Europeans succeeded in reducing the human cost of empire by improving health conditions, prescribing rules of hygiene, and reducing exposure time. But in the end, the white man's hold on distant lands was possible because he systematically relied on non­ Europeans. In the Caribbean sugar colonies, the European planters turned to a black labour force. Everywhere in the tropics, the colonists resorted to native intermediaries and auxiliaries to reduce the number of European soldiers and government officials exposed to the unhealthy conditions of hostile environments. It was indeed this ability to rule the Asian and African worlds with a numerically small European presence that limited the human cost of empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even made it bearable in the eyes of contemporaries. The remainder of this chapter is an attempt to 'weigh up' this presence.

1.2 White Man's Solitude in the Tropics From 1500 to the mid-twentieth century, about 75 to 80 million individuals fed the flow of intercontinental migrations associated with Europe's expansion overseas. Of this total, 60 to 65 million were Europeans, about 11 million were Africans taken to the Americas in the

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics I

19

transatlantic slave trade, and 2 to 3 million were Asians.28 The latter were Chinese and especially Indian 'contract workers' (indentured labourers) transported in the nineteenth century either to the West Indian plantations, Africa (Reunion, Mauritius, South Africa, Uganda), or Oceania (Australia, Fiji).29 More than 85 per cent of all these 'intercontinental migrants' were leaving their original environment - the Europeans voluntarily and the Africans and Asians mainly by force - after the mid-eighteenth century. Out of the total number of Europeans that left the Old World for overseas lands, less than 5 per cent went to the tropical areas involving a relocation cost for whites (West Indies, Asia, Maghreb, black Africa). Before 1760, about 2 million Europeans - out of a total of 3 to 3.3 million leaving for overseas - went to risky areas: some 600,000 to the West Indies (half to the British West Indies, a quarter to the French West Indies, the rest to the Netherlands Antilles and the Danish and Spanish West Indies), 1 to 1.2 million to Asia (especially the Dutch and Portuguese), and perhaps 200,000 to sub-Saharan Africa (primarily Portuguese).30 The human cost of this initial European presence in the tropics was very high. Of the 550,000 Europeans who emigrated to the West Indies from 1500 to 1800, 150,000 to 200,000 remained by the end of the eighteenth century (not including returns, for which the rate is unknown). Furthermore, the white populations living in the Portuguese colonies at that date represented no more than 400,000 persons, of whom 390,000 were in Brazil; whereas 1 to 1.5 million Portuguese had emigrated within the empire between 1500 and 1760.31 Which means that most parts of the overseas territories held by the Portuguese were located in unhealthy and hostile areas, thus putting the lives and health of Europeans at risk. The same danger threatened the European personnel sent by the Dutch East India Company (herein called by its Dutch acronym, VOC, for Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) to Asia to manage and defend its trading empire beyond the Cape of Good Hope. When recruiting soldiers, the category of the white population that was most exposed to death, the company supplied its needs from outside Holland, using German, Scandinavian and Swiss mercenaries. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the VOC hired a total of a million people (soldiers, clerks and officials); half of them died of diseases and never saw Europe again. So there is nothing astonishing about the fact that in about 1760, the city of Batavia (Jakarta), the centre of the VOC's commercial network in Asia, had 126,000 inhabitants, but only 2,000 of them were Europeans (a quarter born in Europe) and about 1,000 Eurasians.32 In January of 1800, when the VOC was dissolved, there were probably less than 10,000 Europeans living and working at the Dutch trading posts and operational bases in Asia. Were the Spanish who emigrated to the West Indies before 1800 the only Europeans to 'multiply' in a risky area? From 1500 to 1800, about 40,000 Spaniards emigrated to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the current Dominican Republic; the 'white' population in these locations grew to between 500,000

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics I 21

20 I Possessing the World

and 750,000 inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century.33 But how credible are such figures? Today, according to the last available Cuban census (1981), two thirds of the Cuban population is white! The census­ takers obtained this astonishing result because they allowed the respondents to answer the question about racial background themselves. Aside from the doubtful case of the Spanish West Indies, one fact remains: the white man's hold on the tropics still depended on the help he demanded from or was given by the non-European populations. In the West Indies, given the virtual disappearance of the Amerindians between 1500 and 1700, and the frightening mortality rate for the Europeans, the development of the land and the success of the plantation system (sugar, coffee, and later cotton) would have been impossible without the use of African slave labour. From 1500 to 1800, nearly 5 million slaves were imported to the West Indies, of whom only 2 million remained at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Already responsible for the demographic collapse of the Amerindians, white men succeeded in making a deported black population pay the very steep price of maintaining the colonies in this area and making them prosper. Similarly, the Portuguese were unable to settle in large numbers and prosper in Brazil until they had acquired a sufficient number of slaves. Around 1760, for a white population of 390,000, there were about a million blacks and persons of mixed race. Given the small population of their country, the Dutch had to fill out their recruitment for Asia by looking for overseas emigration candidates in the underprivileged regions of north-western Europe. The young and poor men who enlisted in the VOC's army, attracted by the colonial adventure in far-off Asia, were accompanied on their voyage by the spectre of death. However, this supply of men was clearly insufficient beyond the Cape of Good Hope. In the Dutch East Indies and India, the European, submerged by the Asian multitudes, could not do without local intermediaries. 'Thousands of slaves, servants, auxiliaries, associates and collaborators bustled around him, a hundred or a thousand times more numerous than the men who were not yet - but soon would be - the masters'.34 In Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, there were no more than 2,000 English in about 1700.35 There is reason to believe that at the time of the Battle of Plassey (1757), the number of Europeans residing in future British India did not exceed 5,000. The total number of Europeans in Asia about 1760 was not more than 15,000 to 20,000, or barely more than the number of white colonists living in Cape Town at that date. Between Asia and Africa, Reunion and Mauritius were the only other territories with communities of European origin, about 8,000 souls strong.

Table 1.2. Estimates of the size of communities of European origin in the principal colonies of the Americas, Asia and Africa circa 1760, in thousands of inhabitants.

Thirteen colonies of North America Louisiana Canada Newfoundland Saint-Pierre and Miquelon

4,900.0 1,268.0 10.0 85.0 13.0 1.0

Spanish America* Brazil French Guiana Belize (British Honduras)

3,000.0 390.0 0.6 1.0

Americas

Guadeloupe Martinique Santo Domingo (Haiti) 'West Indies'b Netherlands Antillesc Asia

British India French India3 Portuguese Indiae Ceylon Dutch East Indies Philippines Africa

Portuguese possessions1 Mauritius Reunion Cape Town Others8

Total

11.7 11.6 20.7 41.0 3.0 18.0 5.0 1.3 0.2 1.5 7.5 2.0

26.0 2.5 3.0 5.1 15.0 0.5

4,950.0

a) Including Cuba, Puerto Rico and the present-day Dominican Republic. b) Jamaica, Barbados, Tobago, Grenada, Antigua, etc. 9 Suriname, Curasao and dependencies. Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanam, Mahe, Chandernagore. e) Goa, Diu, Daman. fl Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, Guinea, Mozambique. 8) Trading posts, forts and operational bases of Great Britain (Gold Coast, Gambia) and France (Saint Louis and Goree in western Africa, and Fort Dauphin in Madagascar). Note: For the regional and general totals, the numbers have been rounded.

Sources: See sources, pp. 229-233

22

Mortality and Numbers of the First Europeans in the Tropics

I Possessing the World

Overall, the European presence in Asia and black Africa was to remain extremely small in the nineteenth century and during the period between the two world wars (see in particular Chapter 11). Speaking of the European expansion in Asia before 1800, F. Braudel stressed that 'there is a striking disproportion between the apparent means employed by [the whites] and the results of the European conquest'.36 This chapter has shown that this comment can also apply to the colonial conquest of the tropics in the nineteenth century. The Europeans' extraordinary ability to colonise economically was born of a need, namely, the need to limit the human cost of ruling. Just as the best contraceptive is sexual abstinence, the surest way to escape tropical diseases is not to live where they are endemic. This absolute weapon was used especially beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. For those who did risk their lives in unhealthy climates, a new kind of 'emigration medicine' experimented with remedies for the deadly fevers. Quinine was one of these remedies, and its story will be told in the next chapter.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

See R.S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves. The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies. 1642-1713, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1972, especially Chapter 9 entitled 'Death in the Tropics'. Cited by L.J. Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria from Prehistory to Eradication', in W. H. Wernsdorfer and I. McGregor (eds), Malaria. Principles and Practice of Malariology, Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone, 1988, p. 16. R. Ramasubban, 'Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900', in R. Macleod and M. Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, London, Routledge, 1988, p. 40. The author notes (on p. 39) that in the 1860s, 'the whole British army [about 65,000 men] went three times to hospital every year'. Concerning the mortality rate of white soldiers in India, see also P.J. Marshall, 'British Immigration into India in the Nineteenth Century', in P.C. Emmer and M. Morner (eds), European Expansion and Migration. Essays on the Intercontinental Migration from Africa, Asia, and Europe, New York, Berg, 1992, pp. 185-187, as well as D. Kumar (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c. 1757-1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 476-496. K.G. Davies, 'The Living and the Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, 1684-1732', in S. L. Engerman and E. D. Genovese (eds), Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975, pp. 83-98. See also H.M. Feinberg, 'New Data on European Mortality in West Africa: The Dutch on the Gold Coast, 1719-1760', journal of Africa History, 15,3,1974, pp. 357-371. P.D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, p. 282. At the end of the eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth, (very approximate) statistics on Europeans (explorers, soldiers, missionaries) arriving in Africa reveal annual mortality rates of 400 to 800%o. P.D. Curtin, The Image of Africa. British Ideas and Action, 1780-1850, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 483-487. Concerning the mortality rates of British soldiers in Sierra Leone and on the

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

I

23

coast of present-day Ghana during the first half of the nineteenth century, which were in the order of 650 and 750%o, respectively, see Headrick, The Tools of Empire, p. 62. These were the expeditions of: Captain Tuckey on the Congo River (1816), Hugh Clapperton (1827), Richard and John Lander (1830), MacGregor Laird (1832-1834) and Captain Trotter (1841) on the Niger River. Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', p. 21. Regarding the medical aspects of European expeditions in black Africa, see M. Gelfand, River of Death in Africa, London, Oxford University Press, 1964. A territory which, at the time, included parts of present-day Mali, Niger and Chad. E. Littre, Dictionnaire de la langue franqaise, Paris, 1883, republished in Geneva, Ed. Famot, 1976, p. 670. Phrase borrowed from Davies, 'The Living and the Dead', p. 98. Cited by Lapeysonnie, La medecine coloniale. Mythes et realites, Paris, Seghers, 1988, p. 38. For more details, see P.D. Curtin, Death by Migration. Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 62-79. Cited by J.-L. Vellut, 'La medecine europeenne dans l'Etat independant du Congo (1885-1908)', in P.G. Janssens, M. Kivits and J. Vuylsteke, Medecine et hygiene en Afrique centrale de 1885 a nos jours, Brussels, Fondation Roi Baudouin, 1992, p. 72. Newsweek, 22 May 1973, cited by Lapeysonnie, La medecine coloniale, pp. 42-43. Cited by G. Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man: A History of the Hostilities since 1880, New York, E.P. Dutton, 1978, p. 266. Until the 1920s, the future of European imperialism was thought to lie with the microscope, according to R. Macleod, 'Introduction', in Macleod and Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire, p. 7. Regarding this point, see also Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, Chapter 1. Vellut, 'La medecine europeenne', p. 62. Concerning the European medical approach in the tropics, see Vellut's article (especially pp. 61-62) and also D. Arnold, 'Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire', in D. Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 10-17. Curtin, Death by Migration. Ibid., pp. xvii, 159. Ibid., p. 1. Recently, this hypothesis has been convincingly revived by Headrick, The Tools of Empire. Concerning the chronology of the decrease in mortality rate for Europeans in the tropics, see Curtin, Death by Migration, namely pp. 80 and 159-160. Furthermore, we should point out that the set of medical techniques and corresponding administrative measures collectively known as 'colonial medicine' did not exist as such until the early twentieth century, and lasted until the end of the 1950s. Christopher Columbus took a doctor on his first voyage to the West Indies (April 1492). The first overseas hospital was built in 1497 by the Portuguese on the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast. Concerning the abundance and variety of this specialised literature, see the bibliography compiled by Curtin, Death by Migration, pp. 223-244. Examples cited in ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 70. See namely P. Burroughs, 'The Human Cost of Imperial Defence in the Early Victorian Age', Victorian Studies, 24, 1, 1980, pp. 7-32; M. Harrison, Public

24 I Possessing the World

Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medecine 1859-1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994; and Arnold, 'Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire'. 27. Ramasubban, 'Imperial Health in British India', pp. 38-39,48. 28. According to P.C. Emmer, 'European Expansion and Migration: The European Colonial Past and Intercontinental Migration; An Overview', in Emmer and Morner (eds), European Expansion and Migration, pp. 1-12. 29. These migratory movements do not include the Indians and Chinese who moved without leaving Asia. From 1871 to 1915, three quarters of the 15.8 million Indian emigrants went to other parts of Asia. Their return rate was very high (74 per cent). In the 1920s, about 10 million Indians and Chinese were living outside their own country, of whom more than 85 per cent were in Asian territories (Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Ceylon). From W.A. Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations. 1870-1913, London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1978, p. 185. 30. According to P. C. Emmer, 'Immigration into the Caribbean: The Introduction of Chinese and East Indian Indentured Laborers Between 1839 and 1917', in Emmer and Morner (eds), European Expansion and Migration, pp. 245-246; V. Magalhaes Godinho, 'Portuguese Emigration from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century: Constants and Changes', in ibid., pp. 13-48; and J. Lucassen, 'The Netherlands, the Dutch, and Long-Distance Migration in the Late Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries', in N. Canny, Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 172-173,181. 31. Magalhaes Godinho, 'Portuguese Emigration', pp. 18-19,24. The return rate for Portuguese who emigrated overseas remained low, in the order of 10 per cent, until the nineteenth century. 32. According to F. Spooner, 'Batavia, 1673-1790: A City of Colonial Growth and Migration', in I.A. Glazier and L. De Rosa (eds), Migration across Time and Nations. Population Mobility in Historical Contexts, New York, Holm & Meier, 1986, pp. 43-44. 33. Emmer, 'Immigration into the Caribbean', p. 266; and D. Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 326. These authors are divided as to whether mulattos should be included in the white population, which explains the significant differences in their estimates. Emmer, for example, adds half of the mulatto population to the total for the whites. 34. F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, vol. 3: The Perspective of the World, New York, Harper & Row, 1984, p. 489. 35. According to another estimate, the English presence in India before the 1750s never exceeded a thousand individuals. See N. Canny, Tn Search of a Better Home? European Overseas Migration, 1500-1800', in Canny, Europeans on the Move, p. 274. Note that to date, there is no study on the volume of British immigration to India. For scattered information on this subject, see Marshall, 'British Immigration into India', pp. 179-196. 36. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 3, p. 488. Braudel's emphasis.

Malaria, Quinine and Colonial Conquests

- Chapter 2 -

Malaria, Quinine and Colonial Conquests

rom the origins of mankind until our times, 'paludism' or malaria1 has single-handedly killed more people than all the wars of humanity. Of all diseases, it is also the one that costs mankind the most, because it is a major obstacle to the economic and social development of the affected lands. It is also the one that caused the most devastation during the colonial conquests. In the fight against this scourge that decimated exposed populations, annihilated development efforts and mowed down the ranks of the colonial armies, quinine - and before it, Cinchona powder2 - appeared as a miracle cure. For the first time, a chemical compound was successfully used against a contagious disease. 'No drug has had such good fortune as quinine', wrote Dr. Louis Destouches, also known as Louis-Ferdinand Celine, in 1925. In colonial historiography, this peaceful weapon against one of humanity's scourges, this cure for the suffering of millions of people, has become a 'tool of empire'. Several generations of historians have maintained that without quinine, European colonisation would not have been as extensive and its human cost would have been much greater. American historian Daniel Headrick recently wrote that 'scientific cinchona production was an imperial technology par excellence', and that without it 'European colonialism would have been almost impossible in Africa, and much costlier elsewhere in the tropics'.3 This point of view is arguable and must be strongly qualified. In fact, the purpose of this chapter is to define as precisely as possible quinine's role in the colonisation of Asia and Africa, and to assess the extent to which the drug effectively contributed to reducing the cost of empire. To this end, we will relate the main chapters in quinine's history. Before we do so, it would be well to begin by highlighting the degree to which this history is tied to that of European colonisation.

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de Chinchon,6 thus preserving her name for posterity. The bark of this tree was then known in Europe under various names: the Countess' powder, Peruvian powder, and Jesuit's powder. Produced exclusively in the Spanish colonial domains and sold in Europe by the Jesuits, Cinchona powder was regarded as a Catholic monopoly. Stricken by the malaria epidemic that ravaged England in 1655, Cromwell refused the 'papist powder'. He preferred to die rather than become 'Jesuitised'. As with quinine later, the first use of Cinchona powder unleashed both raptures and reprobation. "The curse of future generations' to its detractors but a 'marvellous powder' to Madame de Sevigne, the drug inspired a few verses by Jean de la Fontaine ('Poeme du Quinquina', 1682), a novel by Madame de Genlis (Zuma ou la decouverte de la quinquina [Zuma or the Discovery of Cinchona]) and a play that was performed in Paris in 1836. Still, the bark remained shrouded in mystery throughout the eighteenth century. Its properties were poorly understood. It must be noted that the powder consumed often contained little quinine, and its quality was doubtful. Its very high price limited its use to the aristocracy and the European courts. The first European scientists to cross the Atlantic and observe the magical tree in its native habitat were two French botanists: Charles Marie de la Condamine (1701-1774) and Joseph de Jussieu (1704-1779). Their very eventful study voyage lasted ten years. All the materials Jussieu had collected - the handwritten notes, the harvested seeds - were stolen just before he returned to Europe. Obsessed by the bark, he went back and disappeared into the forest. He was found 36 years later, insane. When he died, he left a report on Cinchona that was not published until 160 years later. La Condamine did not fare much better. While he did submit a description of the Cinchona tree to the Academie des sciences in 1738, he had no samples, as the plants he was bringing were lost at sea in a storm.7 This sort of misadventure helped increase the fascination that Cinchona exerted over the explorers, chemists, physicians, botanists and planters, most of whom were from European countries with colonial possessions. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of expeditions were organised to supplement La Condamine's brief description. All failed, until Alexandre de Humboldt made the first rigorous observations and brought various species of the plant back to Europe. From 1780 to the 1820s, more than 300 monographs were published, attesting to European scientists' curiosity about the Lark of the barks'.8 It took a half century of trial-and-error before two French chemists, Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaime Caventon, succeeded in 1820 in isolating an active substance from Cinchona, namely, quinine.9 From then on, industry seized on the product. At one end of the process were the Cinchona suppliers, and at the other the manufacturers of quinine, an extract of the pulverised and processed bark. Commercial quinine production began in the 1830s when France was engaged in the

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Possessing the World

conquest of Algeria and the British East India Company was looking for an inexpensive febrifuge able to protect Europeans in its service on the Indian sub-continent from malaria. At the same time, the first factories were built in the production zones (in South America, then later in India and Java), without much success in most cases,10 and in the West (in the United States and Europe). Beginning in the 1880s, quinine was extracted from Cinchona bark by specialised enterprises established in the Old World. The quinine market then came under the control of the London and Amsterdam markets, where the product was sold at auction. Quinine production, the history of which is difficult to trace given the fragmentary nature of existing statistics in this area, seems initially to have been unable to rise above a certain level. While demand was rising steadily beginning in the early nineteenth century, world production of Cinchona bark - which until 1870 was provided exclusively by the Andean countries in South America - could not meet it. For example, the volume of South American Cinchona exports, in the order of 500 metric tons, was not even sufficient to supply the British troops stationed in India in the 1850s.11 It took a significant increase in the demand for quinine by countries such as England and France, which kept military forces and officials stationed in colonies where malaria was endemic, to boost South American production. From a figure of 500 to 800 metric tons in the 1840s and 1850s, production leaped to some 6,500 metric tons in 1880.12 At the same time, the price of sulphate of quinine fell from 543 dollars per kilo in 1824 to 47 dollars in 1870, then to about 7 dollars in 1885. Afterwards it rose again and stabilised during the period between the world wars at about 9 dollars to 13 dollars per kilo.13 Production of 'wild' Cinchona peaked in 1882 at nearly 10,000 metric tons. At this rate of production, the use of the bark, which was collected using destructive methods that neglected the replacement of the species, ran up against natural limits.14 Moreover, given the proportion of the world's population that was infected with malaria, i.e., the number of people who carried the parasite in their blood, the amount of quinine needed to treat malaria, and the quinine content of the bark (from 2 to 5 per cent), we can form a rough estimate that at the beginning of the 1880s, 'wild' Cinchona production covered less than 5 per cent of the world's quinine needs. The amount of quinine obtained from 10,000 metric tons of Cinchona, which was about 300 metric tons, would treat about 10 million people, that is, some 3 per cent of the world's malaria-infected population.

2.2 The Asian Phase: The Greatness and Misery of the Plantation System Since the Andean 'fever tree', threatened with extinction, no longer could meet the demands of the quinine industry, it was necessary to cultivate

Malaria, Quinine and Colonial Conquests

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Cinchona to compensate for the inadequate supply. The history of Cinchona cultivation, which has yet to be written, is as much an adventure novel with bold, unscrupulous heroes and a hymn to the glories of science and Western technology, as it is a tale of martyrdom - the martyrdom of tens of millions of men and women who were exploited and humiliated on the Asian plantations. The first attempts to transplant Cinchona in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were made purely out of scientific curiosity; the trees were brought to the botanical gardens of the great European capitals. Outside Europe, naturalisation attempts became more frequent beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, due primarily to the initiative of European countries having colonial possessions in Africa and Asia. France tried it in Algeria, on the Reunion Islands and Madagascar, and in Indochina; Portugal in Sao Tome; Belgium in the Congo; Great Britain in Jamaica, India, and Ceylon; the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies. All these plantation trials show how anxious the European colonists were to have their own sources of supply. The instigators were usually at the highest levels of the colonial governments. In 1852, the Dutch Minister of Colonies himself personally told botanist Justus Karl Hasskarl to go secretly to Bolivia and Peru for the purpose of bringing back Cinchona seeds and young plants. This mission of veritable economic espionage, organised in the quiet chambers of a ministerial cabinet in The Hague, was set up in order to bypass the state monopoly on Cinchona decreed by the young South American republics. Hasskarl managed to send some contraband seeds and plants to Holland, then from there to Java.15 The British acted no differently. Near the end of the 1850s, the India Office and the management of Kew Gardens, supported by His Gracious Majesty's government, organised a series of secret expeditions to South America for the purpose of bringing back samples of various species of Cinchona, with the goal of naturalising the plant in India.16 This is how the first experiments with British and Dutch government plantations came to be started in colonial Asia. These were the only plantations to achieve profitability.17 For this to happen, the initiative of the colonising states, the cooperation of botanists and chemists, and the commitment of private capital were necessary, because cultivation of Cinchona turned out to be very demanding, not only in terms of climatic conditions, altitude and soil type, but also, as we shall see, in terms of economic and social organisation. In any case, the amount of effort put forth is a measure of the European desire to reduce the cost of empire by providing a reliable, inexpensive supply of quinine. The first shipments of bark from Asian plantations dated from 1867 on the London market and 1870 in Amsterdam. Still, the hundreds of thousands of red Cinchona trees planted by the English in India and yellow Cinchona trees planted by the Dutch in Java turned out to be varieties with a very low quinine content - less than 0.5 per cent.

30 I Possessing the World

It was not until the introduction in Java between 1865 and 1870 of a species called Cinchona ledgeriana, which is very rich in quinine (quinine content 7.5 per cent), and its hybridisation with other varieties, that the planters in the Dutch East Indies saw the beginning of an era of prosperity and monopoly that was to last three quarters of a century. Although government plantations in British India had been started at the same time as those in Java, they never managed to equal them. Indian Cinchona production - which, incidentally, supplied bark of highly variable quality - never even met the needs of the colony. The set-up of the Asian plantations was accompanied by a complete change in the supply areas. Until 1880, more than 95 per cent of bark was produced in South America. After a very brief period of domination by Ceylon, which supplied up to two thirds of world production in 1885,18 the Dutch East Indies came to the fore. During the period between the two world wars, the Dutch colony produced about 90 per cent of the world's supply of Cinchona bark. The rest came from India. In the 1920s, Javanese Cinchona plantations covered 18,000 to 19,000 hectares, that is, barely 2 per cent of the total area of the Dutch East Indies' principal export crops. At that time, Cinchona exports did not exceed 1 per cent of the total value of Indonesian exports. Beginning in the 1880s, private Dutch planters took over from the government in this sector that the colonial government had proven to be profitable. After that date, government plantations provided only 10 per cent of Indonesia's production, which in the 1920s was between 9,000 and 10,000 metric tons per year.19 One question begs to be asked: why Java? Many overseas countries satisfied the climatic, geological and geographical requirements for growing Cinchona. In fact, Dutch success in Java depended on the availability of abundant and inexpensive production factors: land and labour. Still, the growing of crops for export had started early there: some crops, such as coffee and tea, exhaust the soil, so land must have been rather rare and expensive during the last third of the nineteenth century, making it difficult to establish new plantations. The Dutch colonist was not slow to find a remedy: he rented land from the indigenous people at ridiculously low prices. 'Renting was more advantageous [for the Europeans] than purchasing, because growing Cinchona quickly exhausts the soil, and it was preferable, after a few years of intense cultivation, to leave the depleted land to its [...] owner rather than to have to "replenish" it using fertiliser'.20 In Java, European planters also had the advantage of an organised government with smoothly running methods of operation, a good communications network, and especially the high population density, which ensured that labour could be recruited. The abundance and skill of the Javanese labour force was a decisive advantage for a crop that demanded painstaking care (clearing, soil preparation, manuring, felling, peeling, etc.).

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The crucial issue of labour recruitment, which, in the end, determined the prosperity of the plantations, was solved by the European planters with the support of the Dutch government - in their own best interests. The planters had agricultural workers sign a 'contract' that required the workers to provide their services over a long period of time (often several years). The 'free' workers on the Javanese plantations could not get out of this commitment without being subject to severe penalties and corporal punishment. In fact, their situation hardly differed from that of the former slaves - slavery was abolished in the Dutch East Indies in 1863. This system, which amounted to forced labour, along with the rental of land to the European planters, was encouraged by local chiefs, who received a 'commission' on the transaction. This type of labour recruitment, a disguised form of a return to slave labour, was the key to success for the Javanese plantations. This is so true that none of the reform attempts begun in the home country since the 1890s had been able to truly change the system. At most, the exposure of the appalling working conditions in the sector by socialist members of the Dutch parliament gave the planters an incentive to take steps to reduce mortality among the agricultural workers.21

2.3 The African Phase: Quinine and Colonial Conquests At the beginning of this chapter, we said that traditional colonial historiography accords quinine a decisive role in European expansion. It was supposedly thanks to this drug, extracted from a plant native to the Andes and grown by what almost amounted to slave labour on rich Asian land rented at low prices, that the white man was able to penetrate and colonise the Dark Continent. What is attractive about quinine's history is that it ties together Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and so seems to be a microcosm of colonisation. But was quinine really a 'tool of empire' without which the colonial possessions would have been less extensive and the human cost of conquest higher? To answer this question, we must first remember that quinine can be used to both treat and prevent malaria. In tropical Africa, where the deadliest variety of malaria (Plasmodium falciparum') is rampant, only the preventive use of quinine could save the lives of 'unacclimated' Europeans. In the nineteenth century and throughout the period between the two world wars, however, malaria prevention increased only very sporadically. True, preventive use of Cinchona powder, and later quinine, seems to have been recommended early on in China by the Jesuits (1693), on the coasts of western Africa by the British Navy (in the 1760s), and in Saint Louis of Senegal by a French governor (1785-1787). However, enthusiasm for the new product was still very limited. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it had many detractors. The drug's unpleasant taste

32 I Possessing the World

and relative ineffectiveness against certain forms of malaria, the inability of practitioners to distinguish malaria from yellow fever or typhoid fever, and uncertainties about the remedy's proper dose and frequency meant that it was difficult to make a case for its use.22 Furthermore, there was a pronounced difference in the way that the English and the French approached preventive use of quinine. The French proved to be much more reluctant to use this method of combating malaria. Which is not to say that there was no resistance on the part of the British. In India, for example, Cinchona powder was introduced in 1757, at the same time the English were turning their victory in the Battle of Plassey to good account by annexing their first bit of the subcontinent. James Lind, a doctor in the British Navy, tested the powder on several hundred patients in Bengal. He recommended regular prophylactic doses for those who had already contracted the fever. However, too weak a dose made the treatment ineffective - so much so that Cinchona powder was abandoned at the end of the eighteenth century. Another attempt to use it in the Calcutta hospital in 1847 did not fail to cause great disturbances within the Indian Medical Service. In 1861, a treatment such as bloodletting was still preferred to quinine, a remedy that was judged to be 'rmorthodox' by the British medical establishment in India.23 The benefits of preventive use of quinine were not seen in colonial Asia, but on British Navy ships sailing along the western coast of Africa. In 1826, twenty members of the crew on the North Star, which was cruising off Sierra Leone, agreed to take quinine every day. The only malaria victim aboard was an officer who declined the drug. Similar experiments were tried again, with results so conclusive that preventive use of quinine became imperative in the British Navy in the 1830s and 1840s. The most resounding confirmation of the method's effectiveness - or at least the one that was to have an impact on English public opinion and on the European populations on the West African coasts - came during the Niger River scientific expedition of 1854. Preventive use of quinine allowed all the participants in this expedition to return to England in good health. This was in striking contrast to the two previous expeditions organised by the British with the same goal, which lost 83 per cent (in 1823-1824) and 35 per cent (in 1841) of their participants. Quinine doses prescribed at this time varied from 17 centigrams to 1 or even 2 grams per day.24 The experiment was successfully repeated from 1873 to 1874 in the context of the British military expedition against the Ashanti (in the centre of present-day Ghana). Among the very strict health measures taken by the organisers of this campaign, preventive use of quinine contributed significantly to a reduction in the mortality rate of the English troops (see Table 3.3). A lack of information makes it difficult to determine whether the British colonisers also used antimalarial prophylaxis in operations to conquer affected territories outside western Africa.

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Although quinine was isolated from Cinchona bark in 1820 by two Parisian chemists (Pelletier and Caventon), the French military and medical establishments were quite reluctant to use it.25 In Algeria in 1834, when French Colonel Francois Clement Maillot, an army doctor posted in Bone (Annaba), became the first in the French colonial empire to use quinine to treat French soldiers suffering from malaria, it was a radical departure from the dominant French medical practices of the time. Maillot prescribed quinine for soldiers who were already the victims of fevers, in doses of 1 gram per day or up to 3 or 4 grams in serious cases. To believe his patients, the results were encouraging: the soldiers in Algeria called the department in which Maillot practised the 'department where you don't die'.26 But Maillot fought alone in his battle to replace bloodletting, which was the treatment recommended by the upholders of official medical opinion, with quinine. His ideas were supported by General Bugeaud, who orchestrated the conquest of Algeria. But the lesson was quickly forgotten. The French colonial circles of the day were visibly more willing to listen to the highly placed military doctor who stated with disgust that 'an army that could only remain fit by taking a pill every morning was no longer an army'.27 We should clarify that throughout the entire nineteenth century, quinine was used only for curative purposes in French colonial domains. Exceptionally, some preventive doses of quinine were required in 1832 for men contaminated at unwholesome Algerian outposts.28 It was not until the period between the two world wars, and even after the Second World War, that it was systematically used there as a preventive to be taken on a regular basis. In their war on malaria in Algeria, the French much preferred draining swamps to administering quinine. Additionally, until the end of the 1880s, treatment of malaria usually combined quinine with other healing methods (bloodletting, purges, etc.). Even after the medical authorities had recommended regular intake of quinine, their advice usually was not followed, as regretfully noted by a French government report from the 1930s.29 This mistrust or lack of interest can be explained by the fact that until the beginning of the twentieth century, these authorities did not themselves know how to use quinine correctly. Apparently, the campaigns in Dahomey (1892-1894) and Madagascar (1895) were the only two French colonial expeditions in the nineteenth century to include preventive use of quinine among the health measures ordered. The European soldiers in the Dahomey expeditionary force were to take a febrifuge: 'At reveille, the Europeans shall receive an allotment of Cinchona wine with quinine (15 to 20 centigrams of quinine per man)'.30 Despite this precaution, despite the use of large numbers of indigenous soldiers, and despite the forcible recruitment of a number of bearers to relieve the European soldiers of half of what they ordinarily carried, the mortality rate due to diseases among the white troops was high, in the order of 120 to 125%o. And out of 1,423 European combatants, 53 per cent were repatriated.31 The reason that the morbidity and mortality were so

34 I Possessing the World

high in spite of the unusual care taken in preparing for this expedition is probably that the prescribed dose of quinine was too low.32 It was also because a significant proportion of the force was composed of 'unacclimated' young soldiers (aged eighteen to twenty-two years). As for the Madagascar campaign, one of the rare French experiments with prophylactic use of the antimalarial drug failed due to supply problems, the men's refusal to take the quinine, and disagreements among the doctors about the usefulness of such a measure. Later (in Chapter 3), we will come back to this disastrous expedition, which saw its rate of mortality due to disease in the European soldiers climb to 330 %o, with 90 per cent of the victims succumbing to malaria. What was the practice of European colonial powers other than Great Britain and France, as far as malaria prevention was concerned? This question is difficult to answer, due to a lack of in-depth studies on the issue. In any case, it is unlikely that in the nineteenth century and between the world wars, Portugal and Italy used quinine preventively. Like the French, the Belgians remained very reticent about quinine. 'For a long time, [the] doctors [in the Belgian Congo] contented themselves with recommending its use'.33 This advice was taken by comic-book hero Tintin who, upon departing for the Congo in 1931, did not forget his quinine. There is reason to believe that the Germans took a more British approach in that, beginning in the early twentieth century, they systematically used quinine preventively in their African colonies to protect the native populations from malaria - with rather disappointing results, however.34 Outside Africa, quinine certainly played only a minor role in conquest. In the cases of the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent, this was for a simple reason of chronology: these regions were placed under the colonial yoke before the drug was brought to market. In Indonesia, the Dutch colonists devoted more effort to developing Cinchona plantations to produce bark for export, than to using quinine to provide malaria protection to the white troops engaged in the conquest of the archipelago during the last third of the nineteenth century. The decreased mortality recorded for European soldiers in Indonesia, and nearly everywhere else in the colonial world, during this phase was due to improvements in food, health conditions, and hygiene among the colonial troops.35 So all things considered, how important was quinine to the colonisation of Africa and Asia? We have just seen that its use did not really make the colonial conquests any easier, and did not contribute to a reduction in the human cost of the conquests, except in the case of the English - and perhaps the Germans - in tropical Africa; in other words, as of 1913, in 49 per cent of the colonised area and 57 per cent of the colonised population in black Africa, or, respectively, 27 per cent and 9 per cent of all colonised areas and populations at that time (not including the dominions). We must remember that even in the English and German cases, it is not certain that quinine was used with equal effectiveness everywhere. In the case of the French empire, it has been demonstrated

Malaria, Quinine and Colonial Conquests I 35

with certainty that this medical weapon against malaria had only a very limited impact on the conquerors' high mortality rate. This in no way dissuaded them from annexing 9.6 million square kilometres between 1830 and 1913, and subjugating 47 million Africans and Asians. The French experiences, and also those of the Portuguese and Belgians, demonstrate that the perfection of a medical weapon against malaria, the number one enemy of Europeans in the tropics, was not a direct cause of the partitioning of Africa. This said, and it would be childish to deny it, quinine was a decisive innovation for the Europeans of western Africa.36 Beginning in the 1840s, it contributed to a reduction of 50 per cent or more in the mortality rate for whites living on the coasts of present-day Sierra Leone, Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria. Of course this decrease was not due to quinine alone, but also to all the health improvements and progress made, beginning in the mid­ nineteenth century, and to which we alluded in the preceding chapter. A change of this magnitude indisputably encouraged colonists, especially British colonists, to expand into the interior of Africa. Curtin is right to stress that 'the history of tropical Africa would certainly have been very different if European mortality had continued at the old rate', that is, at the same level as during the second half of the nineteenth century.37 But quinine is far from being the only agent of change here. Although quinine was not a 'tool of empire' during the colonial conquest phase, it undoubtedly helped to avoid considerable human losses and to save priceless lives after the formation of the empires was complete. Once conquest had ended, it preserved the health and lives of the officials, traders, missionaries and white colonists in the tropics. Without quinine, the movement of some 20 million coolies38 to the four corners of the colonial world would have been unimaginable without great harm on the human front.39 Without it, plantations in Asia and Africa would have operated under conditions that were even more disastrous for the indigenous labourers who worked there. In India, the coolies under contract on the great tea plantations had to take their dose of quinine each morning. As malaria prevention came into general use after the First World War, the war on malaria helped create favourable conditions for the 'development' of colonies that were at risk during the period between the world wars. In 1906, a French colonial doctor pointed out 'all the interest in fighting a disease that causes so much waste and turns so many willing people away from our colonial domain'. After the Second World War, malaria prevention was still considered by the tens of millions of people living in affected areas as the way to accede to economic and social development.40 Japan's invasion of Indonesia in 1941 destroyed the approximately 20,000 hectares of Cinchona plantations there, thus bringing one chapter of quinine's history to an end. By depriving the world of Cinchona bark, it accelerated the search for replacement products and opened a new chapter

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of this history, which was dominated by synthetic antimalarial agents, produced from 1925-1926. The perfection of synthetic drugs and the discovery of contact insecticides41 were the starting points for an increasing number of huge malaria prevention campaigns after the Second World War. Such campaigns had their limits, however: the parasites developed resistance to the synthetic antimalarial drugs and the disease reappeared (especially in Central America and south-east Asia), where malaria was thought to have been eliminated. In 1969, the hope of eradicating malaria worldwide was finally abandoned. This led to a return to the cultivation of Cinchona in Indonesia and in the former Zaire. Another plant that has been used in Chinese medicine for two thousand years to combat fevers now seems hopeful, namely qinghaosu or sweet wormwood, from which is extracted artemisinin, highly effective against acute malaria. Promethean medicine has not spoken its last word, however. At the University of Bogota in Colombia, one of the countries of origin of the 'fever tree', Professor Manuel Patarroyo and his team have developed a vaccine against malaria (SPf66, still of limited effectiveness). In May 1995, they offered it to the World Health Organisation to develop, manufacture and distribute throughout the world at the lowest possible cost.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

The term malaria, from the Italian mat'aria, meaning 'bad air', has been in use since the Middle Ages. 'Paludism' comes from palus, palud or palude, terms used beginning in the mid-sixteenth century to designate swamps. It seems that the first uses of the terms 'malaria' and 'paludism' in a medical text date to the 1740s and the mid-nineteenth century, respectively. From the Amerindian kina-kina, that is, 'the bark of the barks'. Headrick, The Tools of Empire, p. 72. Harrison, Mosquitoes, Malaria and Man, Chapters 1 and 2, and P.F. Russel, Man's Mastery of Malaria, London, Oxford University Press, 1955, pp. 2-74. Thus, malaria was scientifically explained two and a half centuries after the Europeans discovered the therapeutic properties of Cinchona powder in Peru. See Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', pp. 16-17. Concerning the difference in spelling, see Russel, Man's Mastery ofMalaria, p. 94. According to another version of the story (ibid., p. 95), the plants were supposedly scattered by a wave on the Amazon River. Note that in 1751, La Condamine presented another paper entitled Sur une resine elastique nouvellement decouverte a Cayenne [On an Elastic Resin Just Discovered at Cayenne], a resin that he called 'cahuchu' [caoutchouc, or rubber], Cited by H. Hobhouse, Seeds of Change. Five Plants that Transformed Mankind, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985, p. 14. Pelletier and Caventon isolated two alkaloids from Cinchona powder: cinchonine and quinine, and combined them with acids. Quinine turned out to be a far better drug than the raw product from which it was extracted. Such as the example of a factory started in India in 1871 by a Briton, a fervent disciple of the Fourierist doctrine of socialisation of the means of production,

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

I 37

which turns the factory over to the workers. The experiment came to a sudden end. According to Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, p. 16. According to J.-M. Lebret, L'organisation du marche du quinquina et de la quinine, Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris, Faculty of Law, Paris, Imprimerie A. Lapied, 1942, p. 21; and Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, p. 16. A. Cloetta, Le probleme economique et social de la quinine, Ph.D. thesis, University of Geneva, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, Geneva, 1928, pp. 113-165; and Russel, Man's Mastery of Malaria, p. 106. Both mention some scattered elements concerning the development of quinine and its price. As early as 1795, Humboldt noted that each year in the Peruvian region of Loxa-a large bark producer-alone, 25,000 trees were lost. This mass sacrifice of Cinchona trees due to overuse foreshadowed that of rubber trees at the end of the nineteenth century. In the Andean countries, secret exportation of Cinchona seeds and plants was punishable by death. The Dutch government rewarded Hasskarl by making him a Knight of the 'Netherlands Lion' and Commander of the 'Oaken Crown'. Concerning these expeditions and Clements Markham, the central figure involved with them, see Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, pp. 19-20. Such fraudulent practices were widespread and went back a long time. In order to uncover the secret of making silk, which had been jealously guarded by the Chinese for over twenty centuries, the Emperor Justinian sent two monks to Asia in the sixth century A.D. The monks brought some silkworm eggs back to Byzantium hidden in their hollow bamboo canes. In the seventeenth century, some Europeans stole tea seeds from the forbidden areas of the Chinese Empire. In the early 1870s, Englishman Henry Wickham transported some contraband seeds of Hevea brasiliensis to Liverpool. Forty years later, the rubber plantations of British Malaysia would supplant Brazil's production. Concerning other attempts to start plantations, see Cloetta, Le probleme economique et social de la quinine, pp. 30-59. Concerning Ceylon's experiment, see Lebret, L'organisation du marche du quinquina et de la quinine, p. 20; and Cloetta, Le probleme economique et social de la quinine, pp. 37-38. Changing Economy in Indonesia. A Selection of Statistical Source Material from the Early nineteenth Century up to 1940, vol. 1: Indonesia's Export Crops 1816-1940, begun by W. M. F. Mansvelt; revised and continued by P. Creutzberg, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1975, pp. 52-53. Cloetta, Le probleme economique et social de la quinine, p. 62. On a plantation employing 400 indigenous persons, 120 deaths were recorded in 1897 (a 300 per cent mortality rate). In 1917, the number of deaths among the 245,000 workers-90 per cent of them 'contract' workers-employed by 300 enterprises was 2,500 (a rate of 10 per cent). Cited by ibid., pp. 72-73. P.D. Curtin, 'The White Man's Grave: Image and Reality, 1780-1850', Journal of British Studies, 1,1961, pp. 100-101; Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', p. 21; Russel, Man's Mastery of Malaria, pp. 124-190. Curtin, 'The White Man's Grave', p. 100; Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', pp. 18-21; Russel, Man's Mastery of Malaria, pp. 98-100. Curtin, 'The White Man's Grave', p. 105; Curtin, Death by Migration, pp. 64-65; Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', pp. 21-22. W.C. Cohen, 'Malaria and French Imperialism', Journal of African History, 24, 1983, pp. 23-36. In recognition of his actions, a village of colonists founded in 1880 in Kabylia was named after him.

38

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

I Possessing the World

Cited by A. Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa, London, Brassey's Defence Publishers, 1988, p. 56. Reported by P. Azan in L'Armee d'Afrique de 1830 a 1852, Paris, Pion, 1936, p. 88. Cited by Cohen, 'Malaria and French Imperialism', p. 29. G.A. Reynaud, Considerations sanitaires sur Vexpedition de Madagascar et quelques autres expeditions coloniales frangaises et anglaises, Paris, Society franchise d'editions d'art, 1898, pp. 170-171. For the indigenous soldiers of this expeditionary force, the drug was replaced by a ration of two kola nuts! According to ibid., pp. 176-179,473. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the usual doses prescribed in the French empire ranged from 10 to 50 centigrams. In the 1920s, the League of Nations recommended a daily dose of 1 to 1.2 grams. Cited by Cohen, 'Malaria and French Imperialism', p. 27. Vellut, 'La medecine europeenne', p. 70. The emphasis is Vellut's. Bruce-Chwatt, 'History of Malaria', p. 23. For confirmation of the phenomenon in Indonesia, see M. Bossboek, 'The Living Tools of Empire: The Recruitment of European Soldiers for the Dutch Colonial Army, 1814-1909', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23,1,1995, p. 48. Curtin, 'The White Man's Grave', especially pp. 100-110. Ibid., p. 110. 'Coolie' is a Tamil word meaning 'wages'. By extension, it means one who is paid wages, a labourer or a workhand. According to Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, pp. 30-31, 37. By the same token, without the introduction of antimalarial measures, the total human losses during construction of the Panama Canal would have been much higher. At present, more than 40 per cent of the world's population remains exposed to die risk of malaria. 'The global incidence of clinical malaria is estimated at about 110 million cases annually, and the prevalence of the infection to be in the order of 270 million parasite carriers'. World Health Statistics Annual 1990, Geneva, World Health Organisation, 1991, p. 11. Today, one to two million people die of malaria each year. Namely DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichlorethane), originally invented not to rid the world of malaria, but to protect Swiss wardrobes from mites and Swiss potatoes from the potato beetle. Paul Muller, an employee of the J.R. Geigy SA company (in Basle), was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine in 1948 for his work on DDT.

- Chapter 3 -

The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

xcept in very rare cases (Algeria and Southwest Africa), the conquest of Asia and Africa by Europe was primarily the work of non-European soldiers. Can we even imagine the English conquering India, then expanding their rule elsewhere in Asia and part of Africa, without making use of the subcontinent's immense human resources? Need we remind the reader that 'Africa was not conquered by Europeans, [but] by its slaves and peasants'?1 By limiting the number of European soldiers exposed to disease and enemy fire, the use of natives in the colonial armies contributed - as we shall see in this chapter - to a reduction in the cost of empire borne by the home country, for obvious reasons: the Asian and African soldiers recruited into the colonial armies were adapted to the environment, they were more resistant to diseases than their white counterparts, and they cost less.2

E

3.1 Asia and Africa Conquered by ... Themselves The use of indigenous recruits is a very old practice. The Portuguese used it in their embryonic empire starting in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The other European colonisers did not hesitate to follow suit.3 The practice expanded into India and Indonesia in the eighteenth century, the Maghreb in the nineteenth, then into black Africa. In most cases, the indigenous troops were levied during the year following the beginning of the conquest. It is interesting to note that the widespread use of natives as regular troops was specific to European colonisation of Africa and Asia. The Aztec and Inca empires were conquered without any such assistance. In his march on Mexico City, Cortez had the support of several thousand Indian auxiliaries, but only two blacks and one Indian were given the title of conquistador.4

40

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The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

Asia All the Western colonial powers used native recruits in Asia, but none took the practice as far as did Great Britain in India. And for good reason - in the seventeenth century, the Mogul army was capable of mobilising up to a million men, an unthinkable number on the European scale. The Portuguese were the first to compensate for their small numbers on the Indian coast by hiring indigenous soldiers in the sixteenth century. The French gave this practice a more polished character in the mid-eighteenth century by training and equipping their Indian troops after the European fashion. Thanks to the significant financial resources accumulated by the East India Company between the end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, the English succeeded in applying the formula over a large scale and a long period of time. At the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which marked the beginning of the British territorial conquest of India, the Company's army, commanded by R. Clive, consisted of about 3,000 men, a third of them sepoys.5 The Company's takeover of the riches of Bengal allowed it to maintain an army of over 100,000 men beginning in 1780; only 10 per cent of these were Europeans. With such large forces, the English reduced the imbalance of power that until then had tilted in favour of Indian entities, and could catch a glimpse of the prospect of ruling all of India. In 1808, the Company's 155,000 man army, which was European in organisation and equipment, became a formidable war machine. The development of its forces is traced below. Table 3.1. Size and composition of the regular colonial armies in British India and the Dutch East Indies from the mid-eighteenth century to 1913, in thousands. Europeans

Natives

Total

Europeans (% of total)

India

1740 1773 1808 c. 1850 1881 1913-1914

2 9 25 40 70 76

45 130 311 125 172

2 54 155 351 195 248

100.0 16.7 16.1 11.4 35.9 30.6

Indonesia

1815 1820 1830 1850 1877 1898 1913

5.7 10.5 9.3 17.0 17.0 10.4

5.6 9.0 12.0 22.5 26.0 23.4

1.7 11.3 19.5 21.3 39.5 43.0 33.8

50.4 53.8 43.7 43.0 39.5 30.8

I 41

Almanach de Gotha. Annuaire genealogique, diplomatique et statistique, J. Perthes, Gotha; and Statesman's Yearbook. Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World, London: MacMillan & Co., various editions. Supplemented for India by G. Mondaini, La colonisation anglaise, Paris, Ed. Bossart, 1920, vol. 2, pp. 38-39; R. Ramasubban, 'Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900', in R. Macleod and M. Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire. Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion. London, Routledge, 1988, p. 39; A.N. Porter (ed.), Atlas of British Expansion, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 118-124; G. Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 134-136. And for Indonesia by J.A. De Moor, 'Warmakers in the Archipelago: Dutch Expeditions in the Nineteenth Century Indonesia', in J.A. De Moor and H. L. Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War. Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1989, pp. 50-55; M. Kuitenbrouwer, The Netherlands and the Rise of Modern Imperialism. Colonies and Foreign Policy, 1870-1902, New York and Oxford, Berg, 1991, p. 114; M. Bossboek, 'The Living Tools of Empire: The Recruitment of European Soldiers for the Dutch Colonial Army, 1814-1909', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23,1, 1995, pp. 30-33.

From 1740 to 1850, that is, during the century when all of India became British, the Company's army grew in strength from 2,000 to 350,000 men. Originally composed exclusively of Europeans, on the eve of the Great Mutiny of 1857 it included more than 310,000 sepoys, that is, nearly 90 per cent of the total force. This proportion decreased to 64 per cent in 1881, then rose again slightly, though never again reaching the same level as during the first half of the nineteenth century. The British did not content themselves with mobilising the subcontinent's immense military resources merely to conquer India and maintain internal order there. They also used them to support English troops in other theatres of operation. It is true that the geographical location of India was much superior to that of Great Britain for extending and consolidating the British Empire in Asia and eastern Africa. After 1762, in the context of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), a detachment of 650 sepoys fought alongside the British troops when Manila was taken. In 1810 and 1811, Indian troops occupied the Dutch possessions of Ambon, the Moluccas, then Java,6 as well as the French islands of Reunion and Mauritius. It was their contribution, on the colonial front, to England's war against Napoleon and his allies. Later, the Indian troops participated in British expansion into Burma (at various times between 1824 and 1885), Persia (1856-1857), China several times (1839-1842, 1857-1860, and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900), Afghanistan (1878-1880), Egypt (1882-1885), eastern and central Africa (1897-1898 and 1902-1904), and western Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. Of the 21,000 men on the British expedition to Abyssinia in 1867 and 1868, one of the most well-organised overseas military undertakings of the nineteenth century, 80 per cent of the soldiers were natives of Bengal and the Punjab.

42

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The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

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Nowhere else in the nineteenth century can we find mobilisation on such a gigantic scale. No other colonial power had a human pool of India's size, as Great Britain did. About 1815, when the East India Company's army of 200,000 men was one of the most powerful in Asia, the Dutch had only about 10,000 soldiers in the Dutch East Indies. It is true that before Java was taken in 1830, they reigned over a territory of only 70,000 square kilometres and a population of 2.5 million. This does not alter the fact that large-scale recruitment of indigenous soldiers into the Royal army of the Dutch East Indies was a late development. A quick glance at Table 3.1 shows that the army that conquered the Indonesian archipelago (1830-1913) was composed of about 40 per cent white soldiers, compared with less than 15 per cent for the British conquest of India (circa 1750-1850). Moreover, the Dutch never managed to expand their territorial hold beyond Java until they decided, in the last third of the nineteenth century, to increase the number of soldiers enlisted locally. In 1890, they created a military force composed almost exclusively of 'Indonesians'. This elite unit specialised in anti­ guerrilla warfare and quickly became very active, to such an extent that in 1913, when the conquest of the archipelago had just ended, indigenous soldiers made up 70 per cent of the colonial army in the Dutch East Indies.7 In French Indochina, the 'indigenisation' of the colonial army really began in the 1880s. After initial attempts in 1858 and 1870, the enlistment of indigenous persons intensified during the conquest of Tonkin with the creation, between 1884 and 1886, of several units of Tonkinese infantry, amounting to 16,000 men in 1886. The Indochinese campaign devoured men. Disease decimated the ranks of the French expeditionary corps, which from 1882 to 1885 shrank from half a million men to at most 35,000, of whom 85 per cent had come from the home country. In 1886, the bulk of the expeditionary corps was sent home, and in 1889 the white force was reduced to 8,000 men. This reduction was compensated by levying native troops who, when the conquest of Indochina ended in about 1895, represented approximately two thirds of the regular army. In the Philippines, the last Asian example we will cite, the Americans made much less use of native soldiers. In 1913, Filipino recruits made up less than 30 per cent of the total force of the American colonial army (see Table 3.2). The United States did not follow a typically European tradition in this matter. Had not the Spanish colonial army, which the Americans dislodged from the archipelago in 1898, consisted of 90 per cent indigenous soldiers in the mid-nineteenth century?8

The Maghreb As we have already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Algeria is the only country other than Southwest Africa to have been conquered by regiments exclusively from the home country. This Algerian idiosyncrasy is explained at least in part by the fact that between the Seven Years' War

I 43

and the Napoleonic Wars, France lost all the possessions of its first colonial empire (see Chapter 8). This meant that unlike England and the Netherlands, it had nowhere else to look for human resources but at home. There was also a certain mistrust of recruiting Muslim soldiers in Algeria who might turn their guns against the invaders, whom they also considered to be unbelievers. Begun with 37,000 men in 1830, the French expedition had a maximum of 108,000 men in 1846. At that date, a third of the French army was stationed in Algeria.9 Into this force, which was of considerable size for its day, were incorporated troops levied locally, namely Zouaves10 and African chasseurs [infantry]. These units quickly became French recruiting units (Algerian French, non-combatants ranking with the combatants, draftees of Jewish origin), to such an extent that in 1848, i.e., in the last days of the conquest, less than 8 per cent of the 87,000 men making up the African army were indigenous.11 The first Algerian infantry regiments that were made up exclusively of natives (the Turcos) were formed in 1842. Algeria's special situation as 'simultaneously an occupied land, an extension of the home country, and a bridgehead for colonial conquest'12 explains the size of the white forces stationed there: from 70,000 to 80,000 men between 1880 and 1903. That was more than the total number of troops from the home country that were distributed throughout the rest of the French empire, excluding the expeditionary forces. On the eve of the First World War, Algeria was guarded by 55,000 men, 'only' 40 per cent of whom were indigenous Algerians. The African army, which was smaller than the British Indian army and had a different composition, played a similar role in expanding France's second colonial empire. The Turcos were involved in Senegal and Cochin China (1859-1863). They were used in the conquest of Tunisia (1881-1882), Gabon and Senegal (1882-1883), the Sudan (1892), the Saharan oases (1900-1901), and Morocco (1903-1907).13 All in all, the conquest of the Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Libya) was accomplished with the assistance of more limited indigenous contingents than in Asia or black Africa: European troops made up more than three quarters of the conquering armies.

Black Africa In sub-Saharan Africa, the use of indigenous troops by the European conqueror dates back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, a time when the Portuguese were recruiting their first 'black army' in western Angola. In 1655, the Portuguese defeated the Congolese by putting together an army nearly 3,500-men strong, of whom 90 per cent were African soldiers. The French followed their example. The Senegal Company appears to have begem enlisting black soldiers in the seventeenth century. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the French East India Company hired black sailors to protect its vessels

44 I Possessing the World

engaging in trade with Senegal. Used until the mid-nineteenth century, especially as auxiliaries, the Africans became full-fledged regular soldiers with the Imperial Decree of 1857, which created a Senegalese infantry corps. From 1823 to 1914, the force of black troops, levied from all of French West Africa, grew from 125 to 17,350 soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mangin, singing their praises in a famous article, wrote early in the twentieth century that 'the conquest of the African West was their work'. Saluting their contribution to the conquest of French black Africa, Mangin considered that the black troops 'had given France a territory more vast than Europe and inhabited by 20 million people;14 they held it for her with a force of 12,500 men; in all our possessions in western Africa and CongoChad, the only European force is a single battalion (450 men) quartered in Dakar to defend this base of operations for the fleet'.15 France also used black troops levied in western Africa in Madagascar, Algeria, Indochina, and Morocco. It did not hesitate, when the opportunity arose, to deploy them in the home country. In 1939, the Senegalese infantry intervened against strikers in Marseilles. After the Second World War, African and Algerian soldiers were sent against communist and anarchist demonstrators (in Nice and Toulouse). Jean Jaures accused the supporters of the 'black force', guardian of the empire, of wanting to create 'a praetorian army to serve the bourgeoisie and capital'.16 In British-held areas, regular colonial armies made up of the chartered companies' private militias and consisting of over 90 per cent natives appeared in western Africa in 1897 (West African Frontier Force) and in eastern and central Africa in 1902 (King's African Rifles). The English were the only colonisers to use soldiers from other parts of their empire in Africa: West Indians in western Africa17 and soldiers from India in eastern and central Africa. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British possessions in western and eastern Africa, Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) were held by about 12,000 indigenous soldiers, supervised by fewer than 300 European officers.18 The Germans and Belgians relied on their local recruits just as much.19 The Belgians undoubtedly had the most cosmopolitan of the colonial armies. Contrary to the general practice, the Germans preferred not to use black soldiers in the conquest of Southwest Africa (1904-1907), which was considered to be a 'white country'. The Italians and Portuguese did not depart from the rule. The Italians invaded Eritrea with 2,000 bachi-bouzouk;20 then northern Ethiopia with 3,500 Eritrean ascari21; in Somalia, they were at it again, almost entirely with native soldiers. The Portuguese subdued Mozambique and Angola thanks to their long experience with incorporating natives into their forces. R. Pelissier says 'Mozambique conquered itself'. It was the Africans themselves - allies, mercenaries, and those in forced or voluntary collaboration with the Portuguese - who wounded and shaped the 22

The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

I 45

Before creating a general and comparative table of the numbers of indigenous troops in the colonial armies on the eve of the First World War, we will take a look at who these Asian and African recruits were. In India, the colonists drew from the great pool of soldiers in the northern States. The black soldiers were slaves purchased from their masters, prisoners of war, or volunteers. Everywhere, the colonisers recruited from among the 'warrior races': Rajputs, Jats, Sikhs, and Gurkhas in India; Ambonese in Indonesia; Pampangas in the Philippines; the Hausa and Yoruba in western Africa; the Masai in eastern Africa; etc. They showed a marked preference for indigenous people who had converted to Christianity, such as the topasses and mardijkeers of India and Indonesia. Recruiting, which was done with the help of chiefs who had been won over or subjugated, was accomplished according to classic 'racial politics'. In black Africa, the fetishist Bambara were enlisted to contain the Muslim Tukulor. The British used the Fanti against the Ashanti and the Masai against the Nandi. In Madagascar, the coastal Sakalava served to counterbalance the Hova from the high plateaus. 'Prenationalist' Asia and Africa '[had] no psychological objection to recruiting men from one ethnic group to fight against the men of another group'.23 In India, the wages, which were relatively high and above all were regularly paid, were sufficiently attractive to encourage indigenous warriors to sign up for service with the East India Company. In black Africa, the signing bonus was quite small and was only a weak inducement. In the absence of attractive financial incentives, the African soldiers still had the takings from pillaging and the distribution of 'free wives'. To most of the colonised people who enlisted in the conqueror's army, military order may have seemed less unjust than colonial society. However, the use of indigenous soldiers was always a double-edged sword. Their enlistment was an opportunity for integration, but also gave them experience in armed combat that would be used against the coloniser in the wars of independence. We know the role played in the Algerian War by Muslims who had fought for the French army in Indochina. The Algerians proved to be much more susceptible to the Viet Minh's anticolonial propaganda than either the black Africans or the Moroccans. This outline of the history of indigenous recruitment in the colonial armies would be incomplete without a few words on the Japanese case. First, we must stress that it is very difficult to find any figures concerning the number of soldiers from the Japanese army that took part in the colonial conquests. At most, we can get an idea of the size of the Japanese military presence at the end of the Second World War, when the empire was collapsing. After 1945, the number of Japanese soldiers and officers repatriated to Japan was close to half a million. Out of this total, about 200,000 were leaving Korea, 160,000 Taiwan, and 100,000 the possessions in the Pacific.24 Thus, around 1945, there were about 70 colonised people

46

The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

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per Japanese soldier. Compared with the Western military presence in the colonies in 1913 (Table 3.2), it seems that the Japanese kept disproportionately large military forces in their colonies, given the small size of their empire. It is difficult to say more along these lines because, on the one hand, the year 1945 cannot represent the entire colonial period, and on the other, the Japanese did not usually call on the army to maintain order in the colonies. For this purpose, they had a much more efficient instrument available: the police.25 The Japanese colonial police system was first developed and implemented in Taiwan; later it was expanded to the rest of the empire. It was in Korea, the rebellious colony, that it was carried the farthest. One of its distinctive characteristics was that it incorporated indigenous collaborators who were recruited locally. From 1910 to 1941, the number of police officers in Korea grew from 6,000 to about 60,000. During the colonial phase, the proportion of indigenous officers was 40 to 50 per cent. That said, the fact remains that Japan was the only modern colonial power that did not use regular soldiers recruited from among the colonised peoples. Koreans and Taiwanese were of course recruited during the Second World War, but only as labourers,26 never in combat emits.

(British India, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and the Philippines) and the rest were in the Maghreb and black Africa. Nearly half of the total forces were concentrated on the Indian subcontinent. Furthermore, the approximately 520,000 men who made up the regular colonial armies around 1913 represented less than a quarter of the total military forces stationed in the home countries. The large numbers of troops recruited by the two great colonial powers, Great Britain and France, are clearly evident. Italy has displaced the Netherlands, 'traditionally' third-ranked, because at that time it was engaged in the conquest of Libya (Tripolitania and Cyrenaica). The relatively large American military presence in the Philippines can be explained by the harshness of a 'pacification' that lasted until 1913. All of this allows us to calculate the number of the colonised subjects 'held' by each European soldier. For all the colonial powers combined, except Spain and Japan, there was a ratio of 3,000 to 3,500 colonised people per white soldier around 1913.28 By way of comparison, this ratio was in the order of between 150 and 180 to 1 in the home countries. Table 3.2. Estimated numbers and composition of the regular colonial troops during peacetime stationed in Asia, the Caribbean and Africa in about 1913.

3.2 An Attempt at Quantification After this side trip to Japan, we will now attempt to draw up a comparative summary of the role played in the European conquests by natives enlisted in the colonial armies as regular soldiers. We will begin by estimating the total number of soldiers participating in the conquests or enforcing the pax colonia. Estimates of this number by specialists in the field vary widely. Depending on the case, the forces are considered to be very large or very small. This confusion can be explained by the problem of often unreliable sources in this area, the thorny issue of choosing criteria, the plethora of case studies from which it is difficult to determine any general trends, and the organisational differences of the colonial armies, which make a comparative study difficult. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of the issue, I have collected and organised the series of hard figures shown in Table 3.2. The period immediately prior to the First World War was chosen as a chronological reference point. Around 1913, the conquest and 'pacification'27 were complete almost everywhere in Asia, and on the way to completion in black Africa and the Maghreb (except in Morocco, where resistance to the invader continued until the mid 1930s). These figures show that around 1913, the colonial powers, not including Spain and Japan, together had over half a million men stationed in the colonies of occupation. Of these, about two thirds were in Asia

I 47

Number of colonised people per home country soldier (in thousands)

Colonial troops (in thousands)

Proportion of indigenous soldiers in the colonial armies (% of total force)

6.5 18.3 33.8 47.8 10.2 18.5 101.6 280.7 247.5

62.2 97.6 69.2 75.8 69.0 29.7 86.7 63.9 69.3

4.4 24.9 4.8 2.0 1.8 0.7 3.6 3.7 4.1

517.4

69.8

3.3

Colonial Powers

Germany® Belgium6 Netherlands® Italy Portugal United States6 France® United Kingdomf India Total and averages

Eastern Africa, Southwest Africa, Cameroon. b) Belgian Congo. c) Dutch East Indies. In 1913, there were 497 colonial soldiers in the West Indies (Suriname and Curasao). d) Philippines. e) Active European colonial troops + regular indigenous troops not including the colonial forces stationed in the home country (28,600 in February 1914). Not including the dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), or North China.

48

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I Possessing the World

Sources: From the national statistical yearbooks of the colonial powers and various editions of Statesman's Yearbook. Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World, London: MacMillan & Co., Almanack de Gotha. Annuaire genealogique, diplomatique et statistique, Gotha: J. Perthes. Supplemented by G. Pedroncini (ed. in chief), Histoire militaire de la France, vol. 3: De 1871 a 1940, Paris, 1992 PUF, pp. 54,61.

In other words, the Western military presence was about 20 times smaller in the colonies than in the home countries - but only six times less if indigenous troops are included in the calculation.29 The numbers given in the second and third columns of Table 3.2 apparently show that the higher the proportion of indigenous soldiers in the colonial armies, the smaller this presence was. This is particularly obvious in the case of the Belgian Congo, the Dutch East Indies, the German colonies, and British India. The systematic recruitment of natives was forced on the European colonisers, who had to be sparing of a rare commodity, that is, the white soldier, whose life in the tropics hung by a thread and whose upkeep in distant lands was expensive. Thus these astonishing statistics: around 1913, India, with its population of 315 million, was being 'held' by 76,000 English soldiers; in the Dutch East Indies, 10,000 European soldiers were able to contain 50 million Indonesians; in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, there was a single white battalion of 450 men to about 14 million blacks; and in the Belgian Congo, there were less than 450 European officers for a territory that was home to 11 million people. One estimate covering the entire nineteenth century shows that the number of European officers supervising the colonial armies did not exceed 3 to 4 per cent of the total number of regular troops.30

3.3 On Good Human Resources Management From the moment the colonisers realised that indigenous recruits had a much lower mortality rate than those from the home country, they found it essential to be sparing in the use of European troops in the tropics. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, empirical studies established that adult natives, acclimated to their own native environment, died of tropical diseases less frequently than Europeans, who were not immune. In the 1820s and 1830s, the annual mortality rates among British troops stationed in western Africa were 483 %o for the soldiers and 209 %o for the officers. For west African soldiers recruited into the British army, it was 2.5 %o. For soldiers native to the West Indies who were transferred to this region, the rate was one tenth that of the European soldiers, but was double the prevailing rate in the British West Indies.31 Other available figures indicate that in this same region the number of deaths was nine times higher among the white soldiers than among the African soldiers at the beginning of the nineteenth century.32

Though less pronounced, these differences in mortality rates persisted during the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout this period, the mortality rates for European soldiers stationed in black Africa and Asia were two to six times higher than for their indigenous counterparts enlisted in the colonial armies.33 Such disparities persisted until the end of the nineteenth century, inasmuch as not all the European colonisers were equally effective at reducing the mortality rate for white troops in the tropics, as shown by the numbers in Table 3.3. The large differences in mortality rates for European soldiers participating in these five colonial expeditions - for which adequate statistical data are available - can be explained by many factors, which we will quickly review. This study will confirm that saving European lives during conquests in tropical lands depended more on the wise use of the available human resources and a good knowledge of the environment than on the superiority of Western medical and military technologies. The military expedition organised by the English against the Ashanti (in Ghana) from 1873 to 1874 serves as a model of this. This 'war of engineers and doctors' was waged in an unhealthy region of Africa against an Ashanti army that was well organised but had no modem weapons. The expedition was planned using an approach that received great publicity at the time.34 Its success was due to a few rules that were strictly enforced. The first rule was to ensure optimal health conditions for the European soldiers involved, whose numbers were intentionally limited. For example, the expedition was begun at the best time, that is, during the dry season (December to April). Before coming ashore, the white troops were kept on board ships far from the coast, to keep them away from the 'dangerous emanations'.

Table 3.3. Annual mortality rates for the European and indigenous soldiers of the regular colonial armies participating in five military expeditions in Africa during the last third of the nineteenth century. Ashanti 1873-1874

Tonkin Mar. -Oct. 1884

Dahomey 1893

Madagascar 1895

Morocco 19071910/1911

4,931

7,600

3,599

18,000

12,138a

Proportion of indigenous soldiers (%)

48.2

30.3

60.5

25.0

Mortality (%o) European Indigenous

18 19 18

35 40 24

Locations and dates of expeditions Total Fighting Forces

a) December 1910. Sources: See Appendix A.

63 122 24

303 336 208

53.4

12 13 11

50

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Certain precautions - quarantine and vaccination against the smallpox present in the surrounding African populations - were taken to protect the troops from any possible epidemics in the region where the campaign was to take place. The food - brandy was replaced with cold tea - and clothing were adapted to the climate and topography. The men took quinine every morning. Second, European combatants were to be spared long marches, unnecessary weight and hard labour because, as one colonisation expert of the day put it, 'in the warm countries, the European soldier is a superior combat weapon that must be treated carefully [...] so he will arrive before the enemy with his value intact'.35 For the expedition against the Ashanti, no less than 6,000 African bearers were forcibly enlisted to 'take the load off' the 2,554 English soldiers. Road construction was assigned to West Indian soldiers. Of the forty-three indigenous soldiers that died of disease during the campaign, forty-one of them worked on this job. The last rule consisted in limiting the exposure of the European troops to 'bad climatic influences' as much as possible. Once the fighting had ended, the English soldiers were quickly taken back to their ships, which took to the seas in the area of the trade winds. The expedition against the Ashanti lasted only two months. On the British side, there were sixty-one victims of the confrontations: forty-eight dead of diseases and thirteen killed by enemy fire.36 Other than the fairly late expedition in Morocco, this British expedition was the one colonial campaign out of all those in the nineteenth century that best preserved the lives of European and indigenous soldiers (see Table 3.3). Though this experiment was known in colonial circles, the French were unable to draw any inspiration from it. In Indochina and Madagascar, soldiers from the home country were subjected to long marches under the full sun. They suffered from excessive fatigue, because insufficient numbers of indigenous bearers and labourers were recruited.37 In Indochina, they had to carry backbreaking loads. In Madagascar, their loads weighed up to 34 kg, more than the maximum weight a native bearer could be made to carry (30 kg) in Dahomey in 1892-1894!38 In south-east Asia and on Madagascar, French soldiers were required to do excavation work. Compelled to do the same in Algeria, a French soldier 'himself dug the grave where he might have to be buried the next day'.39 A low proportion of indigenous soldiers among the troops and an insufficient number of native bearers meant longer marches, heavier packs, harder work, and in a word, a higher mortality rate for the white soldiers. When errors were compounded by negligence, as in Madagascar in 1895, the colonial venture turned into an epidemiological catastrophe. We have already said that preventive use of quinine was recommended for this expedition. However, it could not be implemented because stores of quinine were lacking in the troops' dining halls. In Madagascar, as in Dahomey, it was especially the choice of men that is to be blamed. The expeditionary force had too many young soldiers from the home country

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I 51

who were under twenty-three years old and so had not yet been exposed to the tropical environment. While older white soldiers, already tested by a colonial tour, had a mortality rate between 240 and 250 %o, the rate for the young enlistees was between 400 and 630%o 40 All in all, the mortality rate for white troops on the Madagascar expedition was 18 times higher than the rate recorded twenty-two years earlier for the first British campaign against the Ashanti (see Table 3.3). The veritable martyrdom endured by the French expeditionary force in Madagascar left 5,750 dead in four months over the 510 km travelled. Only twenty-five of them died as a result of combat.41 As with the use of quinine, we can see that there are differences in the approach to managing human resources. In the nineteenth-century European colonial expeditions, the English and to a certain extent the Dutch used indigenous soldiers and labourers more often than the French. The conquests of Algeria, Tunisia, Indochina, Madagascar and Morocco required large numbers of troops; indigenous soldiers made up, on average, not more than 20 to 25 per cent of the total force. In addition, the extreme example of Madagascar reveals that the human cost of conquest could be exorbitant when the coloniser did not stick to certain rules that had proven their value.

3.4 Empires at Bargain Prices The use of natives illustrates the principle of colonisation that is economical in terms of both the home country's human strength and its money, because white soldiers in the tropics, literally devoured by diseases, were expensive. In the mid-nineteenth century, the recruitment and upkeep of European troops in India cost three times more than at home.42 According to estimates by a French Ecole Polytechnique student, in the 1870s an Annamese or Senegalese infantryman cost 25 per cent less than his counterpart from France 43 The gap seems to have increased with time. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Sudanese soldier, a Senegalese infantryman, and a Tonkinese infantryman cost, respectively, 44 per cent, 53 per cent and 74 per cent less than a French soldier.44 Such gaps were confirmed on the eve of the First World War by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mangin. He reported that a Senegalese infantryman in Africa cost 550 francs per year, for all expenses (wages, bonuses, food, clothing, lodging, weapons, and hospitalisation). In France, a soldier cost 1,137 francs.45 The gap would be even greater if the comparison included the cost price of a French soldier in western Africa instead of in France. Such a comparison was done in 1948 and indicated that the gap remained at one to two until after the Second World War: at that time, a French soldier stationed in French West Africa cost 111 francs per day, compared with 57 francs for an indigenous soldier 46

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For porterage activities, equipment transport and roadwork, the cost price of a European in the tropics was prohibitive. For example, if this type of work had been assigned to a French soldier instead of a native, it would have cost France 16 to 17 times more in black Africa and up to 110 times more in Indochina.47 It is obvious that with such gaps, the monetary cost of colonial campaigns varied as a function of the degree to which natives were used in the conquests. However, there were also other factors, such as the size of the contingent and the duration of the fighting, which itself depended on the enemy's ability to resist. For this reason, it is difficult to make comparisons in an area where, in any case, statistical data are rare and of doubtful reliability. Once again, we must be content with orders of magnitude. During the second half of the nineteenth century, every war of colonial conquest waged by Great Britain in black Africa and Asia cost on the average about 20 million current dollars. For example, the cost of an expedition such as that against the Ashanti in 1873 and 1874 was 4.4 million dollars. The conquest of the Sudan cost the English 36 million dollars, the first Burmese campaign (1824-1826) cost 73 million, and the Zulu war and the occupation of Egypt about 20 million dollars each. The average 'price' of France's colonial campaigns during the same halfcentury seems to have been higher, perhaps in the order of 30 million dollars.48 The bill for the Madagascar expedition came to 18 million dollars. There is also reason to believe that about a hundred military campaigns were undertaken in Africa and Asia during this period by the three most important colonial powers (Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands). If expeditions by other colonial nations (Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain) were included, the number of campaigns would probably be about 150.49 It can be deduced from the foregoing that for all the wars of colonial conquest undertaken between the mid-nineteenth century and the eve of the First World War, 3,000 to 4,000 million dollars had to be paid out, that is, 0.2 to 0.3 per cent of the GNP of colonial Europe. In comparison, the Boer War alone (October 1899-May 1902) cost more than a 1,000 million dollars. It was fought between over half a million men on the British side and some 90,000 Boers, and killed 47,000 soldiers, all white. Compared to this 'great war', the European colonial campaigns in black Africa, the Maghreb and Asia look like 'small wars', with budgets and human losses in proportion. Moreover, we must realise that just as the recruitment of natives was intended to limit the Europeans' human cost in the colonies of occupation, the monetary cost of the conquests was passed on to the colonised subjects to lighten the burden on the home country's public finances. Not only did the colonised peoples subjugate themselves, they also paid for their own subjugation. Thus, in the British domain, the monetary cost of the conquest and defence of the empire was not paid by the home country except in the case

The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests

I 53

of the dominions. From 1860 to 1912, military expenses represented 35 to 40 per cent of the budget for the British dependencies. Instead of paying the costs itself, London succeeded in making India shoulder a significant part of these expenses.50 Unlike Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, India and the dependencies did not have any institutional power that would allow them to refuse to bear the burden of military expenses. For example, nearly the entire cost of the Boer War was borne by the English taxpayer.51 That said, around 1913, more than 90 per cent of British colonial troops were stationed in the dependencies, with 80 per cent of them in India. And the conquest and defence of India did not cost the home country a farthing. They were financed entirely by revenues drawn from the territories successively conquered between the mid­ eighteenth century and the second decade of the nineteenth. It was not only the cost of maintaining native troops that was borne by the Indians, but also the cost of the British regiments stationed on the subcontinent. Moreover, India also bore a large part of the monetary cost of the Indian troops used in British colonial ventures elsewhere in Asia and Africa. All this led one English author to say that the British Empire 'was being got at bargain prices'.52 The conquest of Indonesia followed the same pattern. Military expenses, which from 1871 to 1914 amounted to about 30 per cent of the budget for the Dutch East Indies,53 were paid for with moneys obtained from Java by the Dutch coloniser. The French case was different, since the colonies' military budget was paid for by France. But even with this 'constraint of sovereignty', the cost of French colonial expansion from 1850 to 1913 did not exceed 6 per cent of the French government's final budgeted expenditures. The author of the estimate concludes that 'while colonial costs seem in the end to have been relatively slight for the French taxpayer, let us not forget that others paid also, and perhaps more, namely, the indigenous taxpayers'.54 Not all the colonial powers succeeded in passing the financial burden off to their colonial subjects. The Italian colonial wars, for example, were ruinous for Italy. In this case, the cost of the military conquest, which were borne entirely by the taxpayers back home, far exceeded the colonial development costs.55 Due to the human resources required and the logistics used (aircraft towing chemical bombs), the Ethiopian campaign (1935-1936) bankrupted the fascist state. At the time, Italian public opinion, subjected to a disinformation campaign, had no way of measuring the financial hole dug by the colonies. In this regard, as in many others, the conquest of Ethiopia is not akin to the wars of the nineteenth century; rather, it was a forerunner of the 'dirty wars' of decolonisation (Indochina, Algeria). But Italy remained an atypical and marginal case. To be convinced of this, one need only recall that around 1913, it was to Great Britain, Holland and France, in which the cost of colonial troops was borne mainly by the colonial subjects, that over 85 per cent of the colonised areas and populations belonged.

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54 I Possessing the World

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

Cited by Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa, p. 397. The conquest and occupation of Asian and African lands could have cost even more if the auxiliaries and allies had not provided local assistance. This aspect, which is sometimes poorly explained, will be omitted in this chapter in order to focus on the use of indigenous regular soldiers. Concerning the early phases of the history of indigenous recruitment in, for example, the French empire, see Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa, passim. A total of about 2,100 conquistadors made a real contribution to the conquest of the Aztec Empire. B. Grundberg, L'univers des conquistadores. Les hommes et leur conquete dans le Mexique du XVIe siecle, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1993, pp. 104-107. Concerning the Amerindian contribution to the conquest of Mexico, see the solid study by R. Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, London and New York, Longman, 1994. The first corps of sepoys (from the Persian word sipahi, soldier, which also gave rise to the French word spahi) was levied by the British East India Company in Madras in 1748. G. Mondiani, La colonisation anglaise, Paris, fid. Bossart, 1920, vol. 2, p. 38. Half of the 11,000-man expeditionary corps that occupied Batavia (Jakarta) in 1811 consisted of Indian soldiers. Concerning the Royal army of the Dutch East Indies, see J.A. De Moor, 'Colonial Warfare: Theory and Practice. The Dutch Experience in Indonesia, 1816-1949', Journal of the Japan-Netherlands Institute, 2, 1990, pp. 98-114; and Bossenbroek, 'The Living Tools of Empire', pp. 26-53. In about 1850, the military forces stationed in the Spanish colonial possessions amounted to some 13,000 men in the Philippines, 25,000 in Cuba and about 4,000 in Puerto Rico. In the two West Indian possessions, which were exposed to the threat of the United States and to slave revolts, most of the regular troops were Spanish soldiers. Anuario estadistico de Espana, Madrid, 1859, p. 700. Concerning the history of this army, see C.A. Julien, Histoire de I'Algerie contemporaine, vol. 1: La conquete et les debuts de la colonisation (1827-1871), Paris, PUF, 1964, pp. 270-341. From Zwava, a tribe of Kabylia from which the Ottomans 'supplied' their troop needs for one of their militias. The term 'African army' originally meant the Algiers Expeditionary Corps, then, under the Third Republic, the nineteenth Army Corps stationed in the military region bearing the same number (Algiers, Oran and Constantine). G. Pedroncini (ed. in chief), Histoire militaire de la France, vol. 3: De 1871 a 1940, Paris, PUF, 1992, p. 45. The soldiers of the African army also participated in campaigns beyond the imperial borders: in the Crimea (1854-1856), Italy (1859), the Levant (1860-1861), Mexico (1861-1867), China (1860), and Prussia (1870). In fact, the population of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa around 1913 was in the order of 14 million. Mangin, 'Troupes noires', Revue de Paris, 4,1909, pp. 71-72. Cited by M. Michel, 'L'armee coloniale en Afrique occidentale frangaise', in C. Coquery-Vidrovitch (ed. in chief), L'Afrique occidentale au temps des Frangais. Colonisateurs et colonises (c. 1860-1960), Paris, La Decouverte, 1992, p. 70. The 'West Indians' were a miniature version of the same type of English force as was used in India. Note that West Indians appeared sporadically among France's black troops in Senegal at the end of the eighteenth century. L.H. Gann and P. Duignan, Rulers of British Africa 1870-1914, London, Croom Helm, 1978, p. 84.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

I 55

For Belgium, see R. Cornevin, 'De la Force publique a l'Armee nationale congolaise', Le Mois en Afrique, 14, 1967, pp. 74-112; and L.H. Gann and P. Duignan, The Rulers of Belgian Africa, 1884-1914, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 73-84. For Germany, see L.H. Gann and P. Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1977, pp. 118-125. Meaning 'headstrong' in Turkish. These irregulars from the Ottoman army were given this name because they were known for being undisciplined. Ascari or askari, which means 'soldier' in Arabic, designated a Black who was part of a caravan escort in eastern Africa. The conquest of Mozambique (1854-1916) required the hiring of nearly 200,000 soldiers. 6,000 to 7,000 of them were Europeans and 9,000 to 10,000 thousand were Africans from the regular army; about 70,000 were sepoys, and there were about a 100,000 black auxiliaries. R. Pelissier, Naissance du Mozambique. Resistance et revoltes anticoloniales (1854-1918), Orgeval, Pelissier, 1984, vol. 2, pp. 726-727. B. Davidson, L'Afrique au XXe siecle, Paris, fid. J. A., 1980, p. 82. B. Taeuber, The Population of Japan, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1958, p. 346. The other instrument used by the Japanese were the indigenous systems of community control. On this subject, see C.C. Chen, 'Police and Community Control Systems in the Empire', in R.M. Myers and M.R. Peattie (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 213-239; and A.C. Nahm, Korea. Tradition & Transformation. A History of the Korean People, Hollym, Elizabeth, N. J., 1988, pp. 225-229. From 1938 to 1943, 20,700 Koreans and 3,500 Taiwanese were incorporated into the Japanese army. Additionally, 422,000 Korean labourers were sent to Japan and more than 22,000 to Karafuto (Sakhalin Island) and Nan'yo (possessions in the Pacific). Taiwan supplied about 150,000 labourers to the Japanese army stationed at home. Within the colonial empire, mobilisation was still more impressive: in Korea 2.6 million natives were pressed into Japanese service in 1945 as forced labour. From Chen, 'Police and Community Control Systems in the Empire', pp. 232-233; and Nahm, Korea. Tradition & Transformation, p. 227. An ambiguous and hypocritical term for colonial war, which was characterised by an almost complete absence of pitched battles. Rather, military actions were more like police actions. 'Pacification' can be said to have combined the use of armed violence with political pressure. To arrive at this figure, the populations of the British dominions and the Japanese and Spanish empires were subtracted from the total colonial population (554 million people). See Appendix D. These differences would be smaller if the totals included police officers and gendarmes, who maintained public order in the home countries, whereas in the European colonies, this responsibility was usually taken on by the army. Estimate made based on the sources cited in Table 3.2. According to Curtin, 'The White Man's Grave', pp. 94-110; and, by the same author, 'Epidemiology and the Slave Trade', Political Science Quarterly, 83, 2, 1968, pp. 203-211; and Image of Africa, p. 197. From 1810 to 1825, the annual mortality rate for west African soldiers enlisted in the English colonial army was 37%o, compared with 331 %o for the white soldiers and 173 %o for their officers. From R.R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Fairfield-Hassocks, Augustus M. Kelley Publishers-The Harvester Press, 1977, vol. 1, p. 16.

56

33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

The Use of Indigenous Troops in Colonial Conquests I 57

I Possessing the World

To clarify, the numbers for the first third of the nineteenth century are for troops stationed at their garrison, while the numbers for the second half of the nineteenth century are for the combatants in the expeditionary corps. See Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, pp. 102-103. Reynaud, Considerations sanitaires, p. 180. It took two more English military expeditions (1895-1896 and 1900) to annex the Ashanti kingdom. For about 13,500 French soldiers in the Madagascar expedition, there were only 7,300 bearers, in comparison to the 6,000 bearers for 2,554 British soldiers in the Ashanti campaign of 1873-1874 or to the 5,000 bearers for 1,423 European soldiers on the Dahomey expedition. In Dahomey, the weights carried were as follows: non-commissioned officers 13.5 kg, artillerymen 12.7 kg, European infantrymen 15.6 kg, indigenous soldiers 19.8 kg. Julien, Histoire de I'Algerie contemporaine, p. 292. Reynaud, Considerations sanitaires, pp. 435-436. Y.-G. Paillard, 'The French Expedition to Madagascar in 1895: Programme and Results', in J.A. De Moor and H.L. Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War. Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1989, pp. 183-184; and Reynaud, Considerations sanitaires, pp. 467-473. Paillard estimates the total losses at about 6,700 dead, counting those who died after returning to the home country. For a more general viewpoint concerning the issue of soldiers who died after returning home, see P.D. Curtin, 'The End of the "White Man's Grave"? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 21,1,1990, pp. 75-78. According to the results of a survey taken in 1863 on the health status of the colonial army stationed in India, cited by Curtin, Death by Migration, p. 4. Pedroncini (ed. in chief), Histoire militaire de la Erance, p. 59. According to G.A. Reynaud, Hygiene des colonies, Paris, vol. 2, p. 3, cited by Cohen, 'Malaria and French Imperialism', p. 32. Mangin, 'Troupes noires', p. 397. W.F. Gutteridge, 'Military and Police Forces in Colonial Africa', in P. Duignan and L.H. Gann (eds), Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960, vol. 2: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1914-1960, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 294. According to G.A. Reynaud, Hygiene des colonies, vol. 2, p. 3. Cited by Cohen, 'Malaria and French Imperialism', p. 32. Furthermore, contemporary sources cynically report that the death of a native, whether he was a soldier or a bearer, carried no political weight at home, and that in most cases natives received no pension from the conquering nation. Some estimates of the monetary cost of the colonial campaigns are given for Great Britain by V.G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815-1960, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1982, pp. 140-141; for the French by C. Fourniau, 'Colonial Wars in Indochina', in De Moor and Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War, p. 75; and by J.-L. Miege, 'The French Conquest of Morocco', in idem, p. 211. According to H.L. Wesseling, 'Les guerres coloniales et la paix armee, 1871-1913. Esquisse pour une etude comparative', in Histoires d'outre-mer. Melanges en I'honneur de Jean-Louis Miege, offered by the Institut d'histoire des pays d'outre-mer, vol. 1, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l'Universite de Provence, 1992, p. 108. This estimate of 150 colonial campaigns does not include military actions and secondary operations associated with conquest and 'pacification'. There were often many operations and military actions within a single campaign. In Angola and Mozambique alone, for example, there were no less than 360 of these actions between the mid-nineteenth

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

century and the 1920s. Germany launched 84 military operations in Ostafrika (Tanzania) alone between 1888 and 1902. See L.E. Davis and R.A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire. The Political Economy of British Empire, 1860-1912, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 154-156. Chapter 5 of this book is devoted to the British Empire's defence costs. Concerning the exorbitant cost of this conflict, see T. Lloyd, 'Africa and the Hobson's Imperialism', Past and Present, 55, 1972, p. 143; and C. Trebilcock, 'War and the Failure of Industrial Mobilisation: 1899 and 1914', in J.M. Winter (ed.), War and Economic Development. Essays in Memory of David Joslin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 139-151. Kiernan, European Empires, p. 140. According to Wesseling, 'Les guerres coloniales et la paix armee', p. 110. F. Bobrie 'Finances publiques et conquete coloniale: le cout budgetaire de l'expansion franijaise entre 1850 et 1913', Annales ESC, 6,1976, p. 1240. During the period studied by Bobrie, Algeria alone absorbed over half of France's colonial costs. See G. Maione, 'I costi delle imprese coloniali', in A. Del Boca (ed. in chief), Le guerre colonie del fascismo, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1991, pp. 400-420; and F.A. Repaci, Lafinanza pubblica italiana nel secolo 1861-1960, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1962.

European Losses During the Conquests I

59

4.1 Typology and Assessment of Losses

- Chapter 4 -

European Losses During the Conquests

To begin, we will use the criterion of the number of dead among the colonising troops to classify the conquests into three main categories. The first category will contain the conquests that caused less than 1,000 deaths among the white troops. The second will include those that caused from 1,000 to 10,000 deaths, and the third those that caused over 10,000 deaths. Right from the start, this classification reveals some sharp contrasts, for example, between the conquest of Algeria - which is reminiscent of La Grande Messe des morts, a requiem composed in 1837 by Hector Berlioz and intended for performance by an enormous number of musicians in a vast space - and the African colonial wars at the end of the nineteenth century, which in comparison look like music-hall spectacles.4

Conquests of the First Type e will probably never know the exact number of Europeans (soldiers, officials, traders, missionaries, and colonists) that perished during the formative stages of the empires. How could the colonial powers even have counted them? From 1750 to 1913, conquest operations involved up to 162 territories covering more than 53 million square kilometres. If we have to decide right from the beginning that we cannot cover all of it, then what is left for us to examine? Hard data do exist concerning the most exposed category of Europeans, namely, the soldiers. Fragmentary and dispersed though these data may be, they at least allow us to determine an order of magnitude for losses within the colonial armies. It is this criterion - the number of soldiers who died from disease and/or enemy fire - that we will use to classify the conquest operations by losses suffered from among the ranks of the European troops committed. Before describing this classification, we need to say a word about the sources. Those used here are mostly second-hand sources. They have been supplemented by international statistical sources and national statistical yearbooks. Early hopes with regard to the great statistical compilations on wars proved to be unfounded. These compilations have the defect that they have neglected the colonial campaigns. The authoritative source on the subject1 omits many of the colonial wars because its authors used very strict selection criteria.2 The other compilations have the same shortcomings.3 This lack of interest in the colonial campaigns can be explained by the fact that they are usually (wrongly) considered to be 'small wars'. We must admit that the discovery of these gaps was at first very disappointing, then discouraging given the work that would have to be done to fill in the blanks. But curiosity won out in the end. Drawing up an overall balance sheet of the human losses in the colonial conquests is a very tempting exercise, one must concede. It is also a large task, hence the length of this chapter.

W

The reader will already have understood that conquests that took the lives of less than 1,000 European soldiers took place mostly in black Africa. The major ones were as follows. In western Africa, the cost of empire paid by the white soldiers seems ridiculously low. The first British campaign against the Ashanti from 1873 to 1874 caused the death of sixty-one English soldiers. Subsequent military operations to conquer present-day Ghana (1895-1896 and 1900) suffered minimal losses. The French expedition in Dahomey was faced with a large and wellorganised African army that did battle seventeen times over more than three months in one of the most insalubrious countries in the world. Experts of the day considered the number of men killed by the enemy to be proportionately higher than for the other colonial expeditions. The expedition cost the French 220 men. We should also clarify that these two expeditions used exceptionally large numbers of troops: 4,931 men for the 1873-1874 campaign against the Ashanti and 3,599 men in the Dahomey campaign. In all the other western African operations, the forces involved were very small. In western Sudan, the Segou expedition was accomplished with 750 regular soldiers, of whom 350 were Europeans, supported by many auxiliaries. The Joffre column to Timbuktu consisted of 397 officers and privates, of whom 43 were French. The capture of Ahmadu's Tukulor Empire cost 20 or 30 French soldiers their lives. Fighting against Samory, a seasoned military leader with well-organised and well-armed troops, the French lost 120 white soldiers - a hundred of whom died of yellow fever.5 On the eastern side of black Africa, on the high plateaus of Kenya, the British undertook about thirty military operations between 1893 and 1911 that resulted in a total of half a dozen deaths among the ranks of the white troops. While conquering present-day Tanzania, the Germans were faced with two great revolts, which they quelled by mobilising several thousand

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soldiers. Over a thousand men, including sixty European officers and non­ commissioned officers, helped crush the 'Arab Revolt' (1888-1891); twenty-two Europeans were killed. In 1906, the Germans sent over 4,000 men to stop the Maji Maji uprising;6 there were not more than a hundred deaths among the white soldiers - who, admittedly, represented only about 10 per cent of the total strength of the regular colonial army. The picture in central Africa was the same, as illustrated perfectly by the case of the Belgian Congo. During the first phase of European expansion in the Congo (1877-1885), which was of an essentially commercial nature, there were no major armed confrontations. Belgian territorial expansion really began in earnest between 1886 and 1888 after the creation of the Force publique, the regular colonial army, which quickly grew from 1,487 men in 1889 to 19,028 men in 1898. The most decisive and deadliest military operations were undertaken between 1889 and 1899. In 1914, the 'pacification' of the Congo was complete, although the Belgians still continued to organise police actions against African communities until the 1920s.7 The conquest of the Congo required the creation of a large colonial army, but in contrast caused very slight European losses. Just before the First World War, the Force publique numbered 18,300 men, which was more officers and soldiers than the entire colonial army of Portugal (10,200 men) or Germany (6,500 men) in black Africa. Belgium's military presence in the Congo was nearly as large as France's in western Africa (13,500 men) and equatorial Africa (7,000 men). While over 70,000 men joined the ranks of the Force publique from 1886 to 1914, the conquest of the Congo took the lives of only 700 European soldiers, an average of 24 per year.8 The contrast between the military resources set in motion and the European losses recorded is of course explained by the origin of the troops comprising the Force publique, which we have already said was the most cosmopolitan of all the colonial armies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were five different European nationalities represented among the officers and non­ commissioned officers (Belgian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Swiss). As to the African regulars, they were recruited not so much locally as on the east and west coasts of Africa. But the really unique characteristic of the Belgian Congo was the unusually high proportion of Africans in the colonial army. In 1913, there were only 441 Europeans in the Force publique, which was 2 per cent of the total force (see Table 3.2). Can such a disparity be explained by the fact that early Belgian colonial expansion was kept secret? Before the Berlin West Africa Conference (15 November 1884), Leopold II was of the opinion that 'it would be better not to have to give a list of the foreign or Belgian officers, if it can be avoided'.9 It was not until later that the conquest of the Congo would be staged as a spectacle. In 1892, at the Royal Circus in Brussels, the 'general public watched, in open-mouthed wonder, the arrival of a balloon in a native village, the attack on the village by Arab slave traders, Stanley's

European Losses During the Conquests I

61

intervention, the negotiations leading to the peace treaty, with battles, a salute to the flag, and [...] the triumph of Civilisation in the end'.10 All in all, with the exceptions of Madagascar, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique and Southwest Africa, European losses in the conquest of black Africa are counted only in the hundreds. Conquest operations in Oceania and some Asian territories (namely, British Malaysia) and the West Indies can also be classified in our first category. To give just one example, the military campaign leading to the U.S. annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 was called a 'picnic'. It lasted nineteen days and resulted in three deaths on the American side.

Conquests of the Second Type The second category of colonial conquests includes territories - in black Africa, the Maghreb and the Philippines - where annexation killed between 1,000 and 10,000 white troops. The conquest of Tunisia in 1881 took the lives of over 2,000 soldiers from the home country (98 per cent of them died of disease) out of a total force of 38,000 men. It can be estimated that the conquest of Morocco, which lasted from 1901 to 1934, resulted in about 3,800 deaths among the white troops.11 The disastrous Madagascar expedition, which left 5,000 dead, mainly from among the young French recruits, also falls into this category.12 The conquests of Angola and Mozambique by the Portuguese must certainly have yielded similar results, although the total number of human losses remains very difficult to determine. The best expert on the issue estimates that establishing a colonial hold on these two territories cost the Portuguese and their allies 'several thousand dead' from 1850 to 1920.13 Considering that the conquests of Angola and Mozambique required the mobilisation of, respectively, 40,000 regular soldiers (including about 25,000 Europeans) and 19,000 regular soldiers (including 9,000 Europeans), and assuming that the Portuguese losses were about the same as the average for the campaigns in Tunisia, Morocco and Madagascar (i.e., 15 to 20 per cent),14 it is likely that the subjugation of Angola and Mozambique cost the Portuguese 4,500 and 1,500 dead, respectively. The Italians, for their part, lost 4,000 men at Adowa (Ethiopia) in 1896 (see Chapter 10), and about 1,000 soldiers and officers in the conquest of Libya, for which they mobilised a maximum of 35,000 men. Two other cases that fall into the second category are worth mentioning again, namely Southwest Africa and the Philippines. The conquest of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) required the enlistment of 15,000 German soldiers and marked the first time in modern colonial warfare that more men (752) were killed by enemy fire than by disease (689). In the Philippines, a long insurrection (1899-1908) against the American takeover forced the United States to send 100,000 to 125,000 soldiers to the archipelago. Of these, 4,243 died.

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Conquests of the Third Type The third category of our classification system includes the colonial conquests that caused the death of more than 10,000 European soldiers. This applies to four territories: Algeria, British India, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina, that is, the most populous colonies, and also the richest; those that made up the central nucleus of the empires of the three most important European colonial powers. In 1913, the population of these four colonies amounted to 388 million people, or 70 per cent of all Africans and Asians under the colonial yoke. First we will examine the case of Algeria, the most atypical of the four, then the three great Asian entities, which will not all be treated equally. For obvious reasons, we will devote the most attention to India.

Algeria Early estimates of the number of French soldiers who died during the Algerian colonisation effort date back to the conquest phase. For the most part, they have been reused in the specialised literature.15 Rather bizarrely, the most complete of them, Boudin's,16 is rarely cited in the literature. According to these various estimates, the 1830 expedition to Algiers cost the French army 400 dead. From 1830 to 1834, 8,322 French soldiers died in Algeria (about 1,700 per year). According to a doctor who was with the colonial troops, the number was 3,000 per year during the first five years of the 1830s, which seems high. In 1840 alone, losses came to 9,868 men, of which 4,200 died of diseases during the first few months of the year. In the mid-1840s, a doctor who was also a French major estimated that 'an army of 100,000 men suffers an annual loss of 7,000 dead'. For some operations, the French losses were actually counted. In November 1836, the 8,000 man expedition against Constantine ended in disaster for the colonial troops, who lost 1,000 soldiers by this venture. A year later, there was another expedition against the same city, this time with 20,000 men and 33 pieces of siege artillery. The city fell with the loss of about a hundred lives on the French side. Later, operations undertaken in the area south of Constantine in 1849 cost the white forces over 2,100 lives. Six hundred of the dead were cholera victims. In what is sometimes considered the final action of the Algerian conquest, the 1857 campaign against Kabylia, four hundred of the 37,000 French soldiers who participated in this action were killed. As can be seen, French losses fluctuated greatly. The uneven mortality rate among the officers illustrates this very well. From 1830 to 1847, the number of officers killed was 304, or seventeen per year. In 1840, there were forty-four; other years, only two.17 These ups and downs are in part a reflection of the changes in the size of the African army. Algiers was taken in 1830 by an expeditionary force of 37,000 men. A large part of the force - which, as a reminder, consisted

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exclusively of French regiments - was later sent home, so that at the end of 1830 and the beginning of 1831, the African army forces that remained were reduced to 15,000 men.18 In 1837, they again grew to 42,000 men. During the extremely deadly year of 1840, they increased first from 40,000 to 58,000, then to 63,000. The peak was reached in 1846 with 108,000 men. The first impression we get from this series of statistics is that the number of French soldiers buried in Algeria during the conquest phase was very high. This may have been due to geographical obstacles, the resistance of native populations, or erroneous command decisions on the part of the French - but certainly even more to diseases. For despite the fierceness of the fighting in Algeria, French combat losses were minimal: less than 5 per cent of the total victims, according to Boudin. "The [French] officers were in the habit of making fun of a conflict that cost so little'. From their point of view, it cost even less since 'while the soldiers bent in the harness and, exhausted by the marches, paid the heavy toll exacted by disease, the mounted officers, less fatigued and better fed and cared for, had very low losses'.19 The preferential diet and privileges accorded the European officers overseas were given to them because they were a tiny minority.20 The bottomless pit of Algeria swallowed up the soldiers from France, who were dying not only of diseases but also of accidents, and even alcoholism. According to a colonial physician, a quarter of the French losses in Algeria were likely due to alcohol abuse, which gives an idea of the sordid conditions under which the European soldiers lived in the early days of the conquest. The Foreign Legion's high mortality rate due to disease in the early 1830s can thus be explained by the well-known intemperance of the men in this unit. In fact, perishing far from conquest operations was the norm. For the men of the expeditionary corps in 1830, fighting the enemy was almost a 'recreational pursuit' in comparison to the suffering caused by the environment and the climate, 'suffering as depressing to their morale as it was disastrous to their health'.21 They were dying in the barracks and on the job. And when they couldn't stand it any more, they committed suicide. We have reached the point where we might dare to draw up an overall balance sheet of the French losses in Algeria. The numbers cited above would seem to indicate that from 1830 to 1848, the annual average size of the African army was from 50,000 to 55,000 men, and annual losses were in the order of 7 to 9 per cent, that is, a ratio of about 1:13. In other words, during the conquest phase, Algeria was responsible for 3,500 to 4,950 deaths each year among the French troops.22 This corresponds to a lower mortality rate than those recorded later among the white troops participating in the expeditions in Indochina, Dahomey and Madagascar (see Table 3.3). The difference between the conquest of Algeria and the colonial conquests of the second half of the nineteenth century is that the conquest of Algeria lasted nearly two decades, while, for example, in Madagascar, the military campaign of 1895 was over after four months. Hence the 'spectacular' character of the total losses for the African army:

64 I Possessing the World

from 1830 to 1848, no fewer than 67,000 to 94,000 soldiers were swallowed up by the bottomless pit of Algeria. The figures would be even worse if they included the thousands of deaths caused by the final conquest operations (1849-1857). In that case, the total would be in the order of 85,000 deaths, but certainly would not exceed 100,000 to 110,000. In a recently published brief article, Marc Michel states that from 1830 to 1857, the total French losses in Algeria were 'probably many more than 100,000 dead'. He does not indicate how he arrived at this figure, which seems high to me.23 Regardless, the total losses in Algeria were still very high. This is explained by the duration of combat and by the almost exclusive use of white troops. This latter characteristic is very much an exception in the nineteenth-century colonial context. Another distinctive characteristic is the size of the forces committed. In Algeria, France mobilised up to 100,000 men or more in the mid-nineteenth century, while the maximum number of European troops stationed in British India (around 1913) and the Dutch East Indies (last third of the nineteenth century) did not exceed 76,000 and 17,000 men, respectively, despite the fact that India was fifty-six times more populous than Algeria, and Indonesia was nine times more populous.

India The conquest of India was a major event in the history of colonisation and in modern history. Along with the conquest of the Amerindian empires by the Spanish, it is the most fascinating episode in the story of European colonialism. How can we explain how a private commercial company was able to keep a vast and powerful Asian empire, home to one of the most brilliant civilisations in the world, at its mercy?24 Was it because of the break-up of a Mogul Empire undermined by internal quarrels and social contradictions based on religious antagonism? Or because of English political skill, firepower and organisational superiority? Most likely, it was through a combination of internal and external factors. D. Fieldhouse settles the question in a laconic sentence: 'British power [in India] grew as a parasite on the decay of the Mogul Empire'.25 By reducing the enormous gap existing between the power of the Indian land forces and the East India Company's resources for acting, the break-up of the Mogul Empire during the first half of the eighteenth century encouraged the Company to move away from the policy of avoiding any territorial sovereignty in India. The first opportunity to do this presented itself in Bengal, where the English were able to resolve a crisis to their advantage, a very minor effort to begin with, but one that had unforeseen consequences. In 1756, the new nabob26 of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Dawlah, attacked British Fort William at the same time as his local rivals. He occupied Calcutta and demanded higher payments from the British East India Company in return for trading rights. The Company reacted strongly by sending a troop

European Losses During the Conquests I 65

commanded by Robert Clive, one of its agents. Made up of 700 European soldiers and 2,000 sepoys, this troop confronted the nabob's army of over 50,000 men trained and armed by the French. The affair was quickly settled on 23 June 1757 at Plassey (from pilaci, the gentle name of a local flower), a place north of Calcutta. The Battle of Plassey, which is mentioned in all the history texts and is highly symbolic because it really was the beginning of the European colonial era in Asia, was in fact less a battle than the denouement of a series of intrigues and bargaining sessions, with the Company being only one of the parties. R. Clive, sometimes called the Cortez of India and the future Baron of Plassey in the peerage of Ireland, took care to ally himself with the Muslim nabob's local enemies. These included rich Hindu merchants who were incorporated into the commercial network dominated by the English. These Indian capitalists bought off the nabob's generals, so most of his army did not even participate in the battle. Moreover, R. Clive and a majority of the British officers, thinking they could save themselves a battle, were from the beginning opposed to crossing swords. At the end of the encounter, which consisted mainly of a brief artillery exchange, the English had twenty-two dead (of whom six were Europeans) and fifty wounded (including thirteen Europeans). Needless to say, neither of the parties grasped the significance of the event. The Mogul court in Delhi reacted militarily - and unsuccessfully - to the incorporation of Bengal's government into the English Company. The Indian army was defeated at Buxar (or Baksar) in October 1764. The troops of Major H. Munro won the day, although with great difficulty. The victory at Buxar, which cost the lives of only twenty-five European soldiers and officers despite the fierce fighting, was more decisive than that at Plassey, because it was a coalition of Mogul forces that was defeated. The Treaty of Allahabad (August 1765), forced the Mogul emperor to grant the Company diwani, that is, financial management, of the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Still, until the end of the eighteenth century, the stated policy of the English consisted of avoiding any new territorial acquisitions. Did not the India Act, by means of which the British state began supervising the Indian government through local representation by a governor general, stress that 'The pursuit of schemes of conquest was repugnable to the honour and policy of the British nation'? But the persistent threat from the French and the need to protect the possessions already acquired forced the creation of a system of alliances with neighbouring Indian entities. This resulted in an interventionist dynamic that the Company could not resist - all the more so because the proceeds of pillage and the income from taxes and tributes paid in return for English protection of eastern India gave it the financial means needed to conquer tine rest of India. As R. Clive wrote in a letter to the Company, 'We must decide whether or not we want to take it all for ourselves. The Grand Mogul's empire [...] could be in our power tomorrow [...]. We must be the ones to become the nabobs'.

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In fact, the conquest was continuing. Mysore, in southern India, was taken in the 1790s. The English sent significant resources against Tippu Sultan, the dashing ruler of this kingdom of rich lands. During the campaign against Seringapatam, Tippu's capital, the Company mobilised 40,000 men, of whom 10 per cent were Europeans, accompanied by about 100,000 camp followers. The movement of this significant force was compared by a young English standard bearer to the emigration of the Israelites from Egypt.27 The victory over Tippu, who was considered to be one of the most formidable adversaries the Company would have to face in its conquest of India, cost the lives of less than a hundred European soldiers and officers. Once their rule of southern India was assured, the English turned their attention to the north. There they clashed with the Marafhas, with whom they had already fought a first war (1776-1780) without success. A second war (1803-1804) and a third (1814-1818) were needed to ensure English supremacy over central and western India, ruled by a Maratha confederation that was at its peak during the last two thirds of the eighteenth century. The annexation of Maratha territories also came at a minimal cost: the second and third Maratha wars left not more than 300 to 400 dead among the European troops. After the Battle of Assaye (1803), which resulted in 200 English deaths, the Company's directors criticised the head of their army for having paid such a high price for the victory. The end of the Maratha wars in 1818 involved some impressive forces. Over 120,000 men hunted down the Pindari, bands of marauders that threatened many of the Company's territories, and destroyed them, suffering practically no losses themselves. The Maratha collapse marked the beginning of the pax britannica in India. Between 1818 and 1845, the English undertook two disastrous campaigns within their nascent empire (in Burma and Afghanistan), to which we will come back in a moment. First, we will take a look at the last great act in the 'enclosure' of India. It took place in the Punjab, the 'land of five rivers', the only important Indian state that was not yet under the Company's control. Of all the wars of colonial conquest in India, the Sikh wars (1845-1849) assuredly caused the most bloodshed. Never since the time of Tippu had the English encountered such resistance. In the mid­ nineteenth century, the Punjab was a vast kingdom inhabited by about 10 million people. The Sikh army had up to 70,000 regulars and 800 pieces of artillery. It was a European-type army, having been organised and trained since the 1830s by Western experts. The Sikh soldiers 'proved very courageous in battle, especially since they were fighting for their land, unlike a number of Indian armies composed of recruits from different regions, and for their religion'.28 In a series of bitterly fought engagements, this formidable adversary probably cost the English more than 2,000 men. The Battle of Chilianwala, called a 'veritable slaughter' by a British officer, cost the company's army nearly 3,000 casualties. On only three other occasions had the East India Company's army suffered such heavy losses.29 In Burma (1824—1826), where an expeditionary corps sent to Rangoon was decimated by diseases, 3,000 to 3,500 of the 15,000

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dead on the English side were European. Then, in Afghanistan (1842), during the retreat from Kabul, almost the entire contingent of an expeditionary corps consisting of 4,500 combatants and 12,000 camp followers perished in the winter snows and at the hands of Afghan bands. According to a contemporary chronicler, 'the frost and the snow had destroyed more than the jezails and the knives of Afghans'.30 Finally, during the Great Mutiny of 1857, British forces counted 11,021 dead among their ranks.31 The Great Mutiny began in the Bengal army, the largest of the East India Company's three armies, the two others being the armies of Bombay and Madras. In the beginning, the British military authorities took a whole series of inopportune steps. The one that caused the greatest discontent among the ranks of the sepoys was the introduction of the new Enfield gun. Th.e cartridges of this gun had to be removed from their packaging using the teeth, which put the native recruits at risk of being contaminated by contact with impure substances (pork fat for the Muslims, beef fat for the Hindus). The Great Mutiny, a manifestation of hostility to British rule by a fraction of the Indians, occurred exactly a century after the day that R. Clive had laid the foundations of the English empire in India at Plassey. This is probably the origin of the legend that later spread, according to which English rule would not last more than a hundred years. An entire year of bloody confrontations, punctuated by cruel acts on both sides, convinced the British government to give the East India Company its coup de grace. The 'John Company' ceased to exist in August 1858. Nothing more was to threaten the integrity of the Indian Empire. The occasional wars along its borders (Afghanistan, Upper Burma) were all of a limited nature and cost only a few tens of lives on the British side. It should be noted, in the context of reinforcing the Indian glacis, that a century before the Soviets, the English suffered a second humiliating setback in the Afghan mountains. In July 1880, the roughly 3,000 men commanded by General Burrows faced almost 25,000 Afghans at Maiwand. 'Our troops were completely routed', reported a high-ranking British officer, 'and had to thank the Afghans for their apathy in pursuing them; which allowed them to escape total destruction'.32 If we consider that the colonial conquest phase lasted from 1757 to 1857, that is, from the Battle of Plassey to the Great Mutiny, what were the overall European military losses in India during this century? Based solely on the foregoing, they would not have exceeded 10,000. However, to this number it is also appropriate to add the European soldiers who died of disease without fighting. From 1757 to 1857, the number of officers and white soldiers enlisted in the East India Company's army grew from 1,000 to about 40,000. During this period, the European troops represented about 12 per cent of the total force of the Indian army. In addition, the annual diseaserelated mortality rate for white troops stationed on the subcontinent was in the order of 60 to 70 %o between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century;33 thus, during the century of the Company's territorial expansion in India, from 80,000 to 100,000 Europeans from the

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colonial army very probably died of diseases. If we suppose that 8 to 10 per cent of the total losses were due to enemy fire,34 then the overall total would be in the neighbourhood of 90,000 to 110,000 deaths.

Dutch East Indies From 1596, when the first Dutch fleet arrived in the waters of the East Indies, until 1760, the Dutch had a 'trading empire' in Indonesia that operated without any territorial base at all (see Chapter 8). After the VOC was dissolved in 1799, the Dutch state took over the management of the few small parts of the vast Indonesian archipelago over which the Company exercised authority; at that time, it had only a minuscule army available locally. In 1622, the Batavia garrison numbered 143 soldiers; in 1816, the regular colonial troops mustered 1,700 men. The numbers grew only as the Dutch gained more territory. This territorial expansion lasted about a century: from the decade following 1810 until 1913. It is impossible to discuss all stages of it here (see Chapters 9 and 10). Besides, it would be difficult to find figures on the number of enlistees and the losses sustained by the Dutch East India colonial army for all the countless operations it undertook in the islands over this long period of time. Limiting the discussion to the main colonial expeditions and wars - those against Java (1825-1830), the Minangkabau lands in central Sumatra (1821-1838), Bali (1846,1848,1849), and Aceh in northern Sumatra (1873-1909) - will give us an idea of the order of magnitude of European losses from among the ranks of the colonial army during the nineteenth century. The first armed confrontation pitted the valiant Prince Diponegoro, with his approximately 5,000 soldiers, against the Dutch, who mobilised 12,000 men against him, of whom half were European recruits. The first years of battle did not go in the colonial army's favour. Its troops lacked mobility against an adversary that declined to fight pitched battles and instead relied on numerous skirmishes. Only after the arrival of reinforcements (3,100 men) in 1827 and a change in tactics (see below) did the tide turn in favour of the Dutch. After six years of very difficult battles, the Dutch had lost 15,000 men, including 7,000 Europeans.35 The Padri War (1821-1838), which was named after a reformist Muslim community in central Sumatra, placed even more constraints on the Dutch colonial army than had Java. The heavy columns of infantry and artillery, followed by a multitude of coolies and bearers, had great difficulty moving through this mountainous and inaccessible region. Although we have no numbers, we can say that Dutch losses could be called heavy. The number of men mobilised by the military expeditions against Bali was between 4,700 (1846) and 7,500 (1849). The land operations were supported by warships. In a single month of combat in 1849, the Dutch recorded 1,600 deaths among the regulars and 2,000 among the coolies - all dead of diseases. The hostilities ended in confusion: the Dutch occupied no

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territory, the Balinese acknowledged Dutch supremacy, but kept their military potential intact. Territorial expansion beyond Java accelerated beginning in the 1870s and 1880s. It gave rise to a number of military expeditions in Kalimantan, the Celebes, and again on Bali. The one sent to the kingdom of Aceh in northern Sumatra had the most difficult time, becoming bogged down in a long and deadly war (1873-1909). The first Dutch expedition against Aceh (1873) numbered 3,400 men; the second (1874), 7,500 men, 4,300 coolies and bearers, and 1,500 reserves. From 1875 to 1905, the Dutch mobilised on average more than 7,000 soldiers each year.36 The military action and political manoeuvres intended to cause social division in Aceh got the better of the Muslim elite and the people in arms but at what a price? From 1873 to 1909,2,009 regulars from the colonial army were killed in battle, and 10,500 others died of diseases.37 In the coloniser's eyes, the size of the Dutch forces, the unusually high human losses, and the exorbitant monetary cost of the operations - which was borne by the Javanese in the form of additional taxes - was justified by the discovery at the time of oil-rich northern Sumatra's economic potential. A final word will round out the preceding facts and figures on the average mortality rate of European soldiers in the Dutch East Indies colonial army. This rate was about 100 %o in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with a maximum of 450%o in 1827 and 1828 during the Java War. Later, it gradually decreased to 10 %o at the beginning of the twentieth century.38 Based on the foregoing, and taking into account the fact that from 1830 to 1900, white troops made up about 45 per cent of the regular colonial army, we can attempt to estimate the total losses. The Pyrrhic victories of the Dutch in Java, Bali, Aceh and against the Padris probably resulted inbetween 15,000 and 20,000 deaths. Added to that were the soldiers taken by diseases each year. By way of example, for a force with an average of 10,000 European soldiers and a 30 to 50 %o mortality rate, 14,000 to 24,000 men would have died between 1830 and 1877, that is, 300 to 500 white soldiers per year. There is reason to believe that overall, the conquest of Indonesia between 1820 and 1913 cost the lives of some 40,000 Dutch and European officers and soldiers.

Indochina Using the same methods of estimation, we can suggest that French losses during the conquest of Indochina came to about 15,000 French regulars. The relatively large number of losses can be explained by the use of large forces (in 1885, the French expeditionary corps consisted of 35,000 men, of whom 30,000 were sent from France), and by the improvised nature of military operations led by mediocre officers.39 After 1886, the number of troops from France decreased from 30,000 to 8,000. There was a 'Vietnamisation' of the war, which contributed to a reduction in European losses after that date. Even more than in Indonesia, the enemy in Indochina refused combat. The French were waging a war there in which battles, in the usual sense of the

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term, were almost nonexistent. In Indochina, as elsewhere in the tropics, losses due to enemy fire were minimal; those due to diseases were countless.

Table 4.1. Summary of estimated European military losses during the colonial conquests, in thousands of dead. Asia

British India Dutch East Indies Indochina Philippines

Algeria Tunisia French Morocco Spanish Morocco Libya

159.0 100.0 40.0 15.0 4.2

1830-1857 1881 1901-1934 1922-1926 1911-1912

105.0 85.0 2.0 3.8 13.5 1.0

1848-1926 1854-1916 1895 1904-1907 1887-1896 1896 1935-1936

26.0 4.5 1.5 5.0 1.4 9.5 4.0 4.4

Black Africa

Angola Mozambique Madagascar Southwest Africa Italian colonies Ethiopia Ethiopia Overall Total

Note: The regional and overall totals are rounded.

Sources: See text and Appendix A.

France United Kingdom The Netherlands Italy Portugal Germany United States Belgium Spain Totals from above

Total

Losses (as % of total)

Areas colonised (as % of total)

Populations colonised (as % of total)

39.7 36.2 13.8 3.4 2.1 0.7 1.4 0.3 0.4

28.3 39.0 6.0 5.9 2.4 8.6 1.0 6.9 1.0

9.0 70.1 9.3 0.4 1.1 2.3 1.9 2.1 0.2

98.0

99.1

96.4

290.0a

34.2b

534.0c

a) Thousands of deaths. b) Millions of km2. Millions of inhabitants. Sources: See Appendices A, C and D.

1757-1857 1820-1913 1858-1896 1898-1908

Maghreb

71

Table 4.2. Losses among the regular European troops during the conquests compared to the areas and populations colonised in 1913, listed by colonial power (not including British dominions).

Balance Sheet and Perspective Tables 4.1 and 4.2 summarise European military losses during the colonial conquest phase. From 1750 to 1913, colonial Europe sent 280,000 to 300,000 of its soldiers to death to conquer 34 million square kilometres of Asian and African land and subjugate 534 million 'natives'. A comparison of the geographical distribution of losses with the demographic weight of the three large regions colonised by Europe shows that it was in the Maghreb that the human cost of conquest was the highest, due to the 'bottomless pit' of Algeria. In relationship to the sizes of the colonised populations, European military losses were eight times higher in North Africa than in Asia or black Africa. Table 4.2 lists losses by colonial power, and reveals that France, the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal paid a higher price for their empires than Great Britain, Germany or Belgium. Finally, these figures also indicate that nearly 75 per cent of European military losses occurred before the 1850s, that is, during the time when India and Algeria were being conquered.

I

290.0

To get back to our total estimate: the conquest of the 'new' empires cost the lives of 280,000 to 300,000 white soldiers. To what can this macabre figure be compared? Ideally, to losses of the same type recorded before, during and after those suffered during the colonisation of Asia and Africa. In fact, the choice of points of comparison remains limited. In the current state of research on colonisation prior to the Industrial Revolution, we do not know, for example, how many soldiers died before the populations of the Americas were subdued. A recent thesis has provided interesting information on the conquest of the Aztec Empire. It shows that Mexico's densely populated high plateaus were added to the possessions of the Spanish crown in the early sixteenth century by only 5,000 conquistadors. Of the 2,100 Spanish soldiers that actually participated in the conquest of Mexico, over half died in combat, 5 per cent died of diseases or other causes, 800 survived the conquest.40 But how can we generalise based on this single case study? This would not be an entirely lost cause if we could know the European losses resulting from the slave trade, that 'by-product' of the colonisation of the Americas. Because the transatlantic trade in Negro slaves undertaken by the Europeans did not decimate the blacks alone. All the research on the deportation of Africans to the Americas indicates that the mortality among the white crews of the slave ships was higher than

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among the transported slaves. In a sample of 794 slave ships sailing from Nantes between 1712 and 1777, the average mortality rate per ship for the slaves was 14.9 per cent, compared with 18.3 per cent for the crews.41 If we borrow the calculation method used by Davies to estimate the number of English sailors that died after participating in the transatlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century,42 we arrive at an astonishing total. Knowing that 11 to 12 million slaves were taken aboard along the African coast between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, and also knowing the approximate number of slaves and sailors per ship, and assuming mortality rates during the slave voyage of between 16 and 18 per cent for the crew, it turns out that of the 1.5 million European sailors who took part in this enormous deportation, 240,000 to 270,000 died at sea, primarily of diseases and malnutrition43 - in other words, nearly as many as European military losses in colonial Asia and Africa. One might object that the 250,000 European sailors who died taking the 10 million or so African slaves to the Americas represent an 'indirect' loss and cannot be compared to the 'direct' losses sustained by the European colonial armies in the nineteenth century. The attempt to retake Haiti, which we have already used as an example to illustrate European mortality in the West Indies, might be a better comparison. We recall that it required that 59,000 men be sent from France from 1791 to 1803. Less than 10,000 returned. Nearly 40,000 men succumbed to malaria and yellow fever and, even more revealing, about 8,000 French soldiers died in combat. This sad record for deaths under enemy fire was not beaten until 150 years later in the wars in Indochina (1945-1954) and Algeria (1954-1962). In spite of itself, France held the record for a century and a half. One of the editors of the first volume of L'histoire des colonies frangaises [The History of the French Colonies], published during the period between the world wars, specifies that these losses, that is to say, 49,000 deaths, were sustained by the land forces only. 'If we could add together the men from the army and the navy [...] who were swallowed up by the abyss of the West Indies, we would see a total of perhaps 100,000 men'. He also noted that '[France's] modern colonial effort has perhaps not sacrificed more for Algeria and Tonkin!'44 One need only refer to Table 4.1 to see the accuracy of this remarkably intuitive statement. Just this one estimate of European losses during the colonial campaigns in the French West Indies would lead us to believe that the total overall European losses for the conquest of America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries should come to several hundred thousand deaths. Of course, such a generalisation is based on some very fragile premises. But has it not been asserted that 80,000 Spaniards died to conquer the New World in the sixteenth century? And from 1550 to 1650, Portugal built its trading empire by sacrificing 70,000 to 100,000 human lives, for the most part lost during the round-trip voyages from Lisbon to the East Indies.45

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Can the colonial wars be compared with other wars of the modern era? H.L. Wesseling, one of the rare authors to have considered the question, answers in the affirmative. According to him, the size of the forces committed by the colonial powers and the losses suffered by the victors and vanquished alike were such that 'the colonial wars should not be considered as modest military operations resembling police actions, but as a series of wars comparable in size and intensity to many of the great wars of European history'. For this author, the essential difference between the colonial wars 'wrongly called small wars' and the classic wars lies in the methods used.46 In the four 'great wars' of the nineteenth century, namely the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), the Crimean War (1853-1856), the American Civil War (1861-1865), and the Boer War (1899-1902), there were a total of nearly two million 'direct' deaths, of which more than 80 per cent were due to diseases. The Crimean War alone (about 260,000 deaths) had almost as many victims as all the colonial wars of Asia, the Maghreb and black Africa. A comparison with the military losses in the First World War (8.6 million) would make the human cost of the colonial conquests look even smaller, since the number of white soldiers who died in the tropics was only 3.5 per cent of the total number of combatants who fell on the battlefields of the Great War. If indigenous military losses were added to the European victims of the colonial wars (see Table 5.1), this percentage would increase to about 15 per cent. The example of the British Empire confirms yet again that the white conqueror knew how to operate economically in Africa and Asia. In fact, the human cost of conquest there was nine to ten times higher, in relative terms, in the settlement colonies (dominions) than in the colonies of occupation (dependencies). The conquest of the dominions (not including the United States), which in 1913 contained 5 per cent of the total population of the British Empire, cost the lives of about 50,000 to 55,000 European soldiers, whereas the conquest of the tropical colonies, which were home to 95 per cent of the Empire's 395 million subjects, caused the loss of 105,000 to 110,000 troops. More English soldiers (17,000 in less than three years) were killed by enemy fire in the Boer War alone - in which all the soldiers were white - than in all of Great Britain's colonial wars in Asia and black Africa from 1750 to 1913 (about 10,000 to 11,000). In the Boer War, the British mobilised over half a million soldiers, of whom 450,000 were sent directly from the home country. That was as many soldiers as the total number that were in the European colonial armies in 1913 (Table 3.2). We still need to compare the human cost of modern colonisation with that of decolonisation, again using the number of European soldiers killed as the criterion. The European military losses caused by the three great wars of independence (Indochina, Algeria and Portuguese Africa) will be estimated in Chapter 11. For now, let us simply recall that in the space of only thirty years (1945-1975) these 'dirty wars' cost the lives of about 75,000 white soldiers and officers.

74 I Possessing the World

In short, regardless of the terms of comparison we select, European military losses during the modern colonial conquests can be seen to have been extremely limited - all the more so when we consider that beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, they must be related to larger populations in the home country. We have every right to wonder whether we should not consider other, previously neglected, explanations for the ridiculously low numbers of these losses. After all, the Europeans did enjoy obvious technological superiority. Did not the effectiveness of their weapons and the unquestionable advantages offered by their modern transportation and communications networks significantly reduce the human cost of the empire? The last two sections of this chapter will provide some answers to these questions.

4.2 Weapons Technologies and European Losses Our usual picture of the colonial wars is marked by great contrasts with, on the one side, a handful of disciplined white soldiers with effective - that is, deadly - weapons, and on the other, a multitude of poorly equipped native warriors, heading off to battle in extended order, with very little chance of winning or even surviving. Everything works to confirm this vision: the numerical inferiority of the white troops, the modest losses among the colonial armies, whose systematic successes made them, by definition, victorious armies. So, although it is often difficult to evaluate the exact strength of the forces present there, in black Africa the European colonial troops clashed with indigenous armies having up to ten times their numbers, but their losses were ten to twenty times smaller. Moreover, European military defeats in the colonial world were extremely rare: Maiwand (Afghanistan, 1842), Isandhlwana (Zululand, 1879), El Obeid and Khartoum (Sudan, 1883 and 1885), Adowa (Ethiopia, 1896), Annoual (Spanish Morocco, 1921). Except for the disaster at Adowa (see Chapter 10), these humiliations were without consequence, simply bumps in the road. Most experts believe that the near invincibility of the white troops was due to the superior weapons technologies of the Western colonisers, which allowed them to reduce the human cost of empire. In a book devoted to the innovations affecting the art of war in Europe in the sixteenth century, G. Parker explains why, of all the great regions of the world, it was Europe that 'so totally and effectively [embraced] the gunpowder revolution'. This author notes that the European military system could not easily be copied, namely, by the great Asian empires, to the extent that it was the product of specific economic and social structures. Throughout his book, Parker supports the idea that this 'military revolution' played a decisive role in the rise of the Western hegemony in the world, and that it was through military superiority that little Europe compensated for what it lacked in human and material resources.47 Along the same lines, D.R. Headrick

European Losses During the Conquests

I 75

states that the European armies overseas 'were able to conquer large parts of Asia and Africa [...] at an astonishingly low cost', despite their smaller numbers, lack of knowledge of the terrain and limited financial resources. According to him, this is explained by the Europeans' overwhelming superiority in firepower due to the revolution in firearms that began in the mid-nineteenth century.48 In the context of modern colonisation, this hypothesis cannot in fact be verified except in an extremely small number of cases. We shall see that in India, Indonesia, Algeria, and to a large extent Indochina - that is to say, in the territories where the European military forces suffered over 80 per cent of their total losses during conquest - the colonisers' victory was not due to their superior weapons. Only in the case of black Africa did the Westerners' unquestionable superiority in this field really contribute to reducing the human cost of conquest. At least until the end of the nineteenth century, the colonisers' victory did not stem from their technical superiority, either because, as in India's case, their adversaries had access to Western weapons; or because, as in the Dutch East Indies, the colonisers were hesitant to use the most modern weapons; or, finally, because, as in the Maghreb and even black Africa, their methods of warfare were not adapted to the new forms of combat, such as guerrilla warfare. In India, from the second half of the eighteenth century on, European military technology was available to the indigenous states through thirdparty Western experts. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred experts, mostly French, were building up an impressive set of field artillery for the Maratha Confederation - even the British themselves were boasting of its excellence.49 As we have already seen, these new cannons, which were used by Maratha sepoys commanded by Europeans, did not prevent the East India Company's forces from winning the second Maratha War. This example is a perfect illustration of a fact emphasised many times by historians who specialise in India: the Company's army conquered the subcontinent not so much because of its technological superiority over its Indian rivals as because of its better organisation and greater experience. In the Marathas' case, they still had not completely mastered the technique of deploying their new artillery by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The quality of the military leadership, the strict discipline imposed on the troops, the availability of abundant financial resources, the support of the London government, and also the absence of sufficiently unified opposition after the splintering of the Indian elite all explain the East India Company's victory better than does its technological lead. "The success of a small group of European traders and administrators over the much more numerous Indian elite is explained above all by the ability of this group to mobilise human and material resources from both India and Britain more efficiently'.50

76 I Possessing the World

In India, the British East India Company's army and the Indian armies fought pitched battles in the open country, as in classic European wars. With the conquests of Java and Algeria, colonial Europe discovered 'small wars'. According to the inventor of this expression, it applies 'to guerrilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field'.51 In Indonesia, fighting against an adversary that refused to engage in pitched battles, that withdrew to the interior of inhospitable lands to engage in a war of harassment waged in skirmishes, the Dutch were forced to invent new combat techniques.52 They painfully experimented with anti-guerrilla tactics that were not taught in the European military academies. To this end, the Dutch colonial army was reorganised into mobile columns armed with light weapons that could quickly intervene in a partisan war peppered with sporadic incidents and raids. However, under no circumstances did the Dutch conquer Indonesia because of their technological superiority. Until the 1880s, the Royal army of the Dutch East Indies was using antiquated weapons. 'The idea of a link between the arms revolution [...] and simultaneous rapid territorial expansion is not applicable to Indonesia'.53 In fact, the introduction of modern weaponry that resulted from this revolution occurred after the conquest of Indonesia had been completed. The fact that Holland took control of Indonesia between 1870 and 1913 at a minimal human cost is due essentially to changes in art of colonial warfare and to stepped-up recruitment of indigenous troops.54 Like the English in India, the Dutch also took advantage of internal rivalries to establish their supremacy, but did not have the political support of the home government until late only after the 1880s. Thanks to the revenues generated in Java, they also had the advantage of financial power. The technological superiority of the French over their Arab adversaries does not explain the conquest of Algeria, any more than it explained that of India or Indonesia. As in the Dutch East Indies, the colonial war there did not follow any of the prescribed traditional rules of warfare. 'In Algeria, [there were] no great battles, where the cannon could devastate, but skirmishes, chases, individual combat, manhunts, repeated incessantly'.55 Unable to defeat the Algerians in this type of confrontation, the French decided to alter their methods of warfare and considerably increase the size of their forces. From 1840 on, the military leaders (La Moriciere, Bugeaud) recommended the 'razzia' or raiding technique. 'The Arabs', said Bugeaud, 'must be prevented from planting, harvesting or grazing without our permission'. This technique, which postulated that the coloniser was fighting, not 'against an enemy army, but against an enemy people',56 degenerated into a method of systematic devastation. The correspondence of the French officers gives an idea of this methodical sacking: 'We lay waste, we burn, we pillage, we destroy houses and trees. Battles, few to none'.57 For this destructive work, the French mobilised up to 100,000 men and more in 1846. The disproportion between the forces

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77

was unusually great: the number of Abd el Kader's troops did not exceed 50,000 men in the 1840s. What is unusual about the Algerian case is not so much the numerical superiority of the colonising troops as the importance of this numerical advantage. After all, it was not rare in the nineteenth century for the colonial troops to outnumber the opposing armies. For example, this was the case in India, Indonesia, and Indochina, with smaller gaps than in Algeria. The new methods of warfare, tested by the Dutch in Indonesia and shamelessly used by the French in Algeria, were then reused during the partition of black Africa. Thenceforth, the coloniser knew how to obliterate the adversary by counting on the quickness and mobility of lightly equipped columns. It also knew what methods to use to subjugate a people. Faced with fierce popular resistance in Tanganyika (Tanzania) in the 1890s, the Germans 'applied a scorched-earth policy on a large scale, focusing on the civilian population of the productive regions, especially during planting season, in order to break the opponent by starving him'.58 The extreme violence used by the Germans in Southwest Africa (Namibia) in the early twentieth century had only one purpose: to destroy the Herero nation that opposed their colonial hold. 'Any Herero found within the German border, with or without a gun, with or without livestock, will be shot', read the official extermination order (Vemichtungsbefehl) issued in October 1904 by General von Trotha. But above all, the firearms revolution during the last third of the nineteenth century made the conquest of sub-Saharan Africa a very distinctive episode in the history of modern colonisation. To the African peoples' misfortune, it gave the white man incomparable destructive power. Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, a series of innovations (breech loading, repeater mechanism, pyroxylated or 'smokeless' powders, smaller calibre) improved the range, accuracy and firing rate of firearms. In the 1880s, a machine gun appeared that was easy to handle and more effective than those made since the 1860s. Patented by Hiram Maxim in 1884, it could fire eleven rounds per second.59 The European colonial armies in black Africa also had light, mobile artillery, were supported by steam-powered warships, and made use of railroads, the telegraph (see following section) and later aviation on a regular basis.60 At this time, European weaponry was reaching such a degree of technological and industrial complexity that it was becoming inaccessible to the natives. After the 1870s, Samory could no longer count on African blacksmiths to repair the foreign weapons he bought as contraband. The high cost of these new firearms was an additional obstacle.61 Never during the entire colonial drama, perhaps, had the imbalance between the players been so large. Facing European firepower, the African armies were decimated in open country. Samory was one of the first African war chiefs to give up pitched battles and use guerrilla warfare. The choice is reminiscent of that made by the fragmented African societies that began fighting the colonists using combat methods (night-time fighting, or

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fighting in areas with cover) that were more effective than those of the large centralised states. But the new European weapons demonstrated their deadly efficiency almost everywhere that the African wars were fought at the end of the nineteenth century. In October 1893, in Zimbabwe, a column of fifty English soldiers faced King Lobengula's 5,000 Ndbele warriors. The Ndbele had only assegais and shields against British machine guns: in an hour and a half, the guns mowed down 3,000 African attackers. In 1897, a detachment of thirty-two Europeans and 507 African soldiers equipped with cannons, machine guns and rapid-fire rifles defeated the 31,000-man army of the Emirate of Sokoto (Nigeria). In September 1898, at Omdurman (Sudan), General Kitchener faced 40,000 Mahdist warriors at the head of a force of 25,000 men, of whom 8,000 were British. After five hours of battle, the firepower of the new European weapons had decided the outcome of the battle. Losses on the British side were forty men, including twenty white soldiers; the Sudanese lost 11,000. The European soldier, the master of such destructive technologies, soon came to be associated with his weapon. In German Rwanda, the Africans gave white machine gunners the nickname Bwana Tikitiki ('Tikitiki Man'). In the final analysis, the white coloniser won the colonial wars thanks to better organisational abilities and the adaptation of his fighting techniques, but also to liberal use of indigenous recruits in Asia, and the use of large numbers of French troops in Algeria. In any case, the very fact that 90 per cent of all European military losses during the conquest were due to diseases (see Appendix A) makes the issue of weapons a secondary one in calculating the human cost of empire. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial wars remained essentially, to borrow C.E. Callwell's words, a series of 'campaigns against nature'/2 As one African chief noted after the failure of a British military campaign against his kingdom in 1863-1864, 'The white man brings his cannon to the bush, but the bush is stronger than the cannon'.63 All those in Asia and Africa who resisted European colonial expansion also knew that diseases were their surest allies. In the Caribbean, the nationalist Cuban chiefs who were fighting the Spanish coloniser in the 1880s were in the habit of saying that June, July and August - the months during which yellow fever was rampant - were their best generals.

4.3 Transportation, Communications and the Cost of Empire Did the creation of modem transportation and communications networks, which reduced travel time for white troops and the time required to transmit information, reduce the cost of empire borne by the home countries? Not really, given that the establishment of such networks did not precede or accompany colonial expansion except in a limited number of cases.

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79

The new resources constituted by railroads, steam navigation and the telegraph in fact did not become 'tools of empire' until after the 1880s, when colonial Europe was busily dividing up black Africa.64 But the first railways were built in India (1853) and Algeria (1862)65 once the territorial conquest was already underway or finished. In the Dutch East Indies, more than three decades passed between the Dutch annexation of Java (1830) and the opening of the first railroad line (1864). In Asia, the original railway lines were constructed concomitantly with the colonial advance only in the cases of Indochina and Taiwan.66 Similarly, before the 1870s and 1880s, the European colonial armies involved in the conquest of the Indian subcontinent and the Dutch East Indies were unable to take advantage of the reduced travel time for the sea voyage between Europe and Asia, which came with steamship improvements. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a sailing ship took about two years to complete the round trip between Europe and India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In the mid-nineteenth century, a steamship could travel from London to Bombay in a month. Once the Suez canal opened in 1869, the distance between the two cities was reduced by 41 per cent, a gain of three weeks. As for the telegraph, the conquerors of India and Algeria could have felt nothing but regret at having been deprived of an instrument that did not reach its peak efficiency until the 1870s. In 1830, when the French expeditionary force was landing on the beach at Sidi Ferruch, it took three to five weeks to send a message from Paris to Algiers and get a reply. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a letter mailed in England took between five and eight months to arrive at its destination in India; and given the pattern of the monsoons in the Indian Ocean, the sender had to wait two years for a reply. The electric telegraph was to revolutionise the world of communications. The installation of transcontinental telegraph cables began in earnest in the 1860s. In 1861, the link between France and Algeria was completed. England was linked to India in 1865, a year before another cable tied it to North America. In the 1870s, the telegraph connected Europe to all of Asia, Oceania, and South America. To get back to our earlier example, the telegraph initially reduced the transmission time for a message between London and Bombay from two and a half years to one week, then in the 1870s to about five hours (with same-day reply), and finally to a few seconds after the First World War. In 1857, the English realised, perhaps for the first time, the full scope of the telegraph's potential as a 'tool of empire', when the 7,200 kilometres of telegraph lines they had installed throughout the length and breadth of India allowed them rapidly to move colonial troops to contain the Great Mutiny, by coordinating their military intervention to focus on the hot spots. This final episode in the 'enclosure' of India gave an inkling of the advantages that the European coloniser would derive from modem means

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European Losses During the Conquests

of transportation and communication in its conquest of sub-Saharan Africa. During this last great act of modern colonisation, the white conqueror did indeed lay railway lines and erect telegraph poles at the same time he was establishing his hold over the space and the people. The train and the colonial conquest were inseparable in black Africa, where rail, that 'fantastic agent of civilisation' penetrated the inviolate regions and made itself king. French colonial penetration into western Africa depended on the construction of two rail lines: one connecting Saint Louis to Dakar (1879-1885), and the other ascending the Senegal River all the way to Upper Niger (1881-1906). In Angola and Mozambique (1889), the Belgian Congo (1893), Ghana and Nigeria (1901), and Kenya (1897-1901), locomotives also prepared the way for conquests. The creation of the German colonial domain was also facilitated by rail, in Southwest Africa (1897-1902), Tanganyika (1894-1905), Cameroon and Togo (after 1904). Steamships and the telegraph, which proved effective beginning in the 1870s, also served the European colonial armies in black Africa. Just before the Conference of Berlin, at which the partition of Africa was decided, the telegraph network was extended to the east coast (1879), then to the west coast (1885) of the Dark Continent. We can now understand how the use of these 'tools of empire', combined with the Europeans' firepower, reduced the human cost of the late nineteenth-century colonial conquests there. In Asia and the Maghreb, the creation of modern transportation and communications networks contributed rather to consolidating the conquests and facilitating 'pacification'. Everywhere, these new networks tied the colonies more closely to their home country, and so prepared the way for the future 'development' of the tropics by a Europe involved in its second Industrial Revolution.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

J.D. Singer and M. Small, The Wages of War 1816-1965. A Statistical Handbook, New York, J. Wiley & Sons, 1972. The criteria for losses is 1,000 deaths on both sides for a war between States (interstate war) and 1,000 deaths per year per colonial power for a war outside the system of international States (extra-systemic war). See Singer and Small, The Wages of War, pp. 36-37, 71-75, 396-397. Concerning the sample of colonial wars selected in this way, see pp. 58-59. Note that for the colonial wars discussed by Singer and Small, the figures for European losses cited by the authors are often very different from those I have used for my estimates. Singer and Small carefully review the compilations that predate their own (see pp. 7-11,79-127). Rather surprisingly, they do not mention the existence of an encyclopaedia that is very handy even though it contains only fragmentary hard data on the colonial wars: R.E. Dupuy and T.N. Dupuy, The

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

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Encyclopedia ofMilitary History from 3500 B.C. to the Present, New York, Harper & Row, 1970 (second ed. 1986). Images borrowed from J. Londsdale, 'The European Scramble and Conquest in African History', in R. Oliver and G.N. Sanderson (eds), The Cambridge History of Africa, from 1870 to 1905, vol. 6, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 722. A.S. Kanya-Forstner, 'The French Marines and the Conquest of the Western Sudan, 1880-1899', in De Moor and Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War, pp. 138-139. In Swahili, maji means 'water'. The African warriors drank or sprinkled themselves with a potion prepared by the healers; according to them, this beverage had the property of protecting them from the German bullets. J.-L. Vellut, 'La violence armee dans l'Etat independant du Congo. Tenebres et clartes dans l'histoire d'un Etat conquerant', Cultures et developpement, 16, 3-4,1984, pp. 671-707. During this period, 719 of the 2,423 European officers and noncommissioned officers - of whom 662 and 2,260, respectively, were Belgian - died in the Congo. From E. Wanty, Le milieu militaire beige de 1831 a 1914, Brussels, Academie royale de Belgique, 1957, p. 61. Concerning the Belgian colonial army in the Congo, see also Gann and Duignan, Rulers of Belgian Africa, p. 52-84. Cited by Wanty, Le milieu militaire beige, p. 162. Ibid., p. 231. A. Clayton (France, Soldiers and Africa, p. 119) indicates that from 1901 to 1934, there were 8,268 deaths in Morocco on the French side-i.e., for the European soldiers plus the indigenous regulars. In January of 1914, the total strength of the colonial army was 74,800 men, of whom 30,000 were soldiers sent from the home country. W. C. Cohen ('Malaria and French Imperialism', p. 31) opines that this is not such a very steep price for conquering such an important territory! R. Pelissier, Les guerres grises. Resistance et revoltes en Angola (1845-1941), Orgeval, Pelissier, 1977, p. 520; and Naissance du Mozambique, vol. 2, p. 731. See also 'La colonisation portugaise en Afrique. Apercus de quelques mythes et certaines realites', by the same author, in Materiaux pour l'histoire de notre temps, 32-33,1993, especially p. 8. That is to say, combat experiences in which diseases successively did their deadly work, the enemy had not insignificant firepower, and the battles were waged over several decades. For example, see J. Garbage, Histoire contemporaine du Maghreb de 1830 a nos jours, Paris, Fayard, 1994, pp. 90-91; Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa, pp. 56, 396; Kiernan, European Empires, p. 130; and M. Michel, 'Une guerre interminable', L'Histoire, 140,1991, p. 22. J.M.C. Boudin, Histoire statistique de la colonisation en Algerie, Paris, Bailliers, 1853, p. 53. Julien, Histoire de I'Algerie, p. 314. Furthermore, it was with military forces of this order that the Ottomans had 'held' Algeria before the arrival of the French. Julien, Histoire de I'Algerie, p. 314. All the statistics available concerning the mortality rate for European troops overseas confirm that the losses among the officers were slight, that they were due to disease or enemy fire (see the figures cited in Chapter 3 on the mortality rates of British soldiers and officers stationed in western Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century). For example, from 1817 to 1908, the number of French officers killed in colonial expeditions was 287, of whom 42 died in Algeria. G. Bodart, Losses of Life in Modern Wars. Austria-Hungary, France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1916, p. 154.

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82 I Possessing the World

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

Here is the number of officers expressed as a percentage of the total regular colonial troops for the year 1913: British India, 2.5 per cent; Dutch East Indies, 3.8 per cent; German African colonies, 3.3 per cent; Belgian Congo, 1 per cent; Italian Africa, 1.9 per cent; Portuguese Africa, 6.4 per cent. From the sources cited in Table 3.2. Azan, L'Armee d'Afrique, p. 27. By way of comparison, Boudin estimated an average annual size of 60,000 men for the period from 1831 to 1851, and annual losses of 4,500, that is, a ratio of 1:13.3. Additionally, in the last years of the conquest, from 1842 to 1848, recruitment of indigenous soldiers into the African army began. During these seven years, they made up about 5 per cent of the total force. Their participation in the military operations certainly did not cause more than 300 deaths per year among their ranks. Michel, 'Une guerre interminable', p. 25. For his part, D. R. Headrick (The Tools of Empire, p. 92) cites an estimate of the French losses in Algeria due to enemy fire, namely 23,787 men between 1830 and 1857. This would mean that 75 to 80 per cent of the total losses during this period would have been attributable to diseases. For parts of an Indian historian's answer to this question, see K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance. A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch to Asian History 1498-1945, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1967, pp. 95-104. More than forty years after it was first published-the first English edition dates to 1953—this study is still irreplaceable on this point. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires, p. 162. Deformation of an Arabic word designating the provincial governors of India's Muslim kingdoms. Later, in Europe, applied to the English who became rich on the Indian subcontinent. Cited by P. Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, Duckworth, second ed. 1990, p. 286 (first ed. 1989). C. Markovits (ed. in chief), Histoire de I'lnde moderne. 1480-1950, Paris, Fayard, 1994, p. 327. Although it was not always possible to determine the losses sustained in the European ranks. J.W. Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, London, R. Bentley Publisher, 1857, vol. 2, p. 389. Apparently, the only European to escape the Kabul garrison was Dr. William Brydon, the Company's assistant surgeon. Concerning this tragic episode, see Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, pp. 526-542. Note that 82 per cent of the deaths were due to disease. Kiernan, European Empires, p. 48. This quotation appears in the French translation, but not in the Englishlanguage version. Colonel C.E. Callwell, Petites guerres. Leurs principes et leur execution, Paris, H. Charles-Lavanzelle, 1899, p. 250. Of the 2,476 men participating in the Battle of Maiwand, 934 lost their lives, including 20 English officers. According to Ramasubban, 'Imperial Health in British India', pp. 38-39. We should recall that this rate decreased to 15 %■> at the end of the nineteenth century and to 7%o at the beginning of the 1920s. Ramasubban ('Imperial Health in British India', p. 39) indicates that for the first half of the nineteenth century, only 6 per cent of the total losses in the Indian army were due to enemy fire. J.A. De Moor, 'Warmakers in the Archipelago: Dutch Expeditions in the Nineteenth Century Indonesia', in De Moor and Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War, pp. 51-52; M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300, London, Macmillan, second ed. 1993, p. 117 (first ed. 1981).

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

I

83

M. Kuitenbrouwer, The Netherlands and The Rise ofModern Imperialism. Colonies and Foreign Policy, 1870-1902, New York-Oxford, Berg, 1991, p. 375. P. Van't Veer, De Atjeh-oorlog, Amsterdam, 1969, p. 260, cited by Wesseling, 'Les guerres coloniales', p. 113. Bossenbroek, 'The Living Tools of Empire', pp. 30,50-51. On this aspect, see C. Fourniau, 'Colonial Wars in Indochina', in De Moor and Wesseling (eds), Imperialism and War, pp. 72-86. Grundberg, L'univers des conquistadores, pp. 104-107. H.S. Klein and S.L. Engerman, 'Facteurs de mortalite dans le trafic fran