#23 Understanding Colonialism: Settler and non-Settler Colonies
Colonisation in the 19th and 20th centuries
At the outset of these blogs, I set out to explain how a small part of the world increased both its wealth and power so that by 1900 Europe and North America had become the richest parts of the world. Put very simply, colonial invasions and occupation had led over this period to the extraction of resources on such a scale that the rest of the world became impoverished. The mechanism that had been utilised to extract the surplus varied in both time and place. Previous blogs have given readers some indication of how surpluses were extracted from different territories There are rich pickings for doctoral students to document in detail how resources were extracted around the globe. It is as if Walter Rodney’s How Europe Undeveloped Africa could be rephrased to ‘How Europe Underdeveloped the World’.
Settler and non-Settler Colonies
From 1492 to the end of the 1939-45 war, the Europeans invaded and colonised territory across the globe. The first 250 years, from 1492 to around 1750, were focused primarily on the Americas including the islands of the Caribbean. The lands were invaded and settled by the Europeans of the invading country. Agricultural plantations were the primary form of settlement, these were the days before industrialisation.
The early Colonies from 1492 onwards were all ruled and settled by ‘white settlers.’ The areas settled included the Americas and to a small extent the Portuguese colonised Africa, and the Dutch settled in Southern Africa in 1652. All of these can be characterised as ‘settler colonies.’
After the 1760s, settlers were not a necessity. The latter colonies included the continents of India, China, Africa and the Middle East; all were all invaded and colonised after the middle 1700s. Rule without a dominant settler population was often common. It is this distinction between rule by settler and non-settler colonisation I discuss in this blog.
After the middle of the 18th-century political rule and collecting taxes was undertaken by maintaining the local centralised existing structures as in India, i.e. ruling through local monarchs. Or, where there was no centralised political structure, as in many parts of Africa, the colony created new structures from local tribes. This was done by giving some peoples power to collect taxes and keep the peace.
Settler Societies
Colonial settler societies over the centuries had quite distinctive characteristics which help to explain some of the violence which occurred from time to time.
Settler societies need also to be broken into two periods. The time before white women regularly accompanied husbands and the time afterwards from 1815 to 1945. Before 1815, only intrepid or desperate women ventured forth into colonies. Settlements were primarily men only.
Ireland is a good example. First invaded in the 12th century and settled by Catholic landlords. They intermarried and when the 2nd invasions occurred by Cromwell in 1640, well over 300 years later, the English landlords were sufficiently integrated into Irish society that they took the Irish side. Cromwell introduced a large new layer of Protestants to run the country. The new Protestants behaved as if the Catholics were ‘black’ and intermarriage was forbidden. The Catholic/Protestant divide has usually been seen as a religious division; which is of course correct. But the division was as if it was a racial divide, and it is also insightful to see Irish relations in this view.
William Dalrymple in a fascinating book, White Mughals describes a similar process in 18th century India. British East India men were falling in love with Mughal princesses and converting to Islam. They took on Indian manners and clothing and had begun the process of integration which had occurred 5 centuries earlier in Ireland. But this was not the way that colonisation was expected to happen. And in practice, it was only a short interlude until separation would be imposed again.
Generally speaking, settler societies both pre and post 1815 had very distinctive characteristics whether they were Dutch, German, English or French. The distinction can be summarised by one word: separation. Settlers kept themselves separated from the local population. For instance, the Dutch Calvinist settlers in the Cape were separated from the domestic populations from the day they arrived to the present. Don’t think please that because the Dutch Calvinists were so different from you or I that they behaved differently to the vast majority of white settlers across the world arriving at different times.
Separation meant that the settlers behaved as if they had set up a local branch of the society they had come from. Time might alter the culture of the originating society, but settlers generally represented the historic moment of when they arrived. Settlers did not learn local languages, did not share in the local cuisine and had no respect for local history. In short, they ignored every aspect of the culture which made local people human. Only when settlers intermarried did the chasm of separation alter.
I personally first became aware of the peculiar culture of settler society when I visited a large farm home in Kenya in the 1960s. I was doing my doctorate and arranged a visit. The owners must have felt I was a safe bet as I was from the ‘homeland’. I was entertained by servants and fresh-cut sandwiches on white bread in a genteel surrounding that might have come from a high-ranking house 50 years earlier in England. I realised at the time that I was experiencing a culture that had stayed static.
Later I was able to generalise the experience. White settlers tend to try and reproduce the culture they came from. First-generation immigrants the world over often behave in similar fashions. Their children go to school and soon take up the accents and the culture they find around them. Education helps children integrate. White settlers do exactly the opposite. They either sent their children back to their home country for education or set up their own schools separate from local languages and customs.
The idea of being a ‘superior race’ only further determined settler regimes across the world. Christianity was considered a superior religion and morality. So deep were the assumptions of superiority that indigenous peoples were eradicated in Australia, New Zealand and throughout the continent of the Americas, that few white people to this day query what happened.
It was this certainty of their superiority that allowed such feral responses from settlers when slaves revolted, or the people rose in revolt. After the Indian mutiny, people were strung up, burnt alive, were castrated etc. This form of behaviour continued right up to revolts in Kenya and in Algeria in the 1960s.
Colonial governments preferred to have to deal with white settlers despite the facts the settlers preferred independence. Asia though was already densely populated. And while Africa and the Middle East less so, both latter areas were colonised just before or after periods of war and mayhem in Europe, 1884 to 1945… Settlers were less easy to find.
Non-Settler Colonies
It is useful to contrast settler colonies to non-settler colonies. Though it is worth bearing in mind that the distinction was never absolute. In the period after 1815, as naval vessels rapidly improved and times on oceans reduced, women began to accompany their men in greater numbers. Equally, this was the period of sustained Christian missionary activity largely in the three continents of India, China and Africa.
In non-settler colonies, the British and French developed a whole new section of government. They trained young men from their own elite social classes to become Provincial and District officers. These officers were sent out to the colonies and were expected to oversee local government tax collection.
The practice involved finding groups of peoples who would cooperate with the invading power. These were often peoples who were from the lower ranks of society and this process is often called ‘divide and rule’. This practice worked for the benefit of the colonial occupying power, but after independence often led to bitter local disputes and civil war. Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Cyprus are just some examples.
Conclusion
Colonial governments always preferred to deal with their own and made huge attempts to bring in settlers. These were often given land, which later caused great turmoil and sometimes civil war, as peoples tried to retake land they knew were their own. The civil war in Kenya and Algeria are examples of this.
These two wars were brutal; they illustrated how white settlers felt about the local people. Despite the wide variety of time, the earlier White Settlers in the Americas, the Dutch Boer settlers in Southern Africa like the white settlers in Kenya or Algeria had little thought for the humanity of the people that had been colonised.
Once Christian Missionaries and white wives became the norm, the divide in all colonies became absolute. The ideas of racialism, civilisation, and backwardness of the ‘natives’ ruled throughout the colonial world. Wives of senior men were expected to support the missionary work in ‘saving souls from damnation’. They really did use this type of language and believed they were doing good work for mankind in these ‘civilising missions.’
As an addendum, it should not surprise readers that few novels have survived the 400 years of the colonial experience. We have had to wait for the independence in the 20th century for the African, Indian and Caribbean writers to begin to make up for the loss. There are exceptions: Doris Lessing, a white young woman in Rhodesia, ( Zimbabwe) The Grass is Singing is without the racism that so dominated and destroyed creative colonial life.
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Colonisation in the Indian subcontinent was a different experience when compared to the invasions in the Americas or Russia. In 1600, the Indian subcontinent (that is modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) was an ancient civilisation of huge diversity. The whole country had a centralised government run by the Mughals, alongside some 500 distinct but powerful and equally ancient kingdoms.