Imperialism |The World, Divided
Welcome to season 10 of 15-Minute History! Jon, myself, and the rest of the team are very excited to be back, and to welcome you back. This season, we will be exploring the forces the made us, both the good and the bad. These are big ideas, movements, or other events in history that have a direct effect on the wider world we know today.
Per usual, there will be episodes that will garner controversy, Jon and I won’t always agree, and friend of the show, Dan, will be joining more episodes. Throughout all these years and conversations with you, our promise hasn't changed: we'll approach every subject honestly, give you the facts along with our own take, and leave room for you to reach your own conclusions. When we get something wrong or leave something out, we'll own up to it, and we know we can count on you to let us know on Facebook or X, send us an email, or leave a comment on Spotify if you think we missed the mark. Also, we love your questions, and strongly encourage you to share them with us as meet you every single week this season.
Before dive into the topic of today, we do have some exciting additions to the show that we wanted to tell you about. First, we are giving the Pop Quiz segment a break. It’s been a great run, but we wanted to try a few new pieces of content in addition to our regular show on Mondays that we believe you will enjoy and learn from. Replacing the Pop Quiz will be four distinct segments, with one running each Thursday of the month.
The first will be a political discussion, where we look at the current issues and debates through a historical lens. The second is a segment called, Conspiracy, where I will dive deep into some of the most famous conspiracies in history, and through probability, determine if they are false. Really excited for that one. Third, Weird History, where Dan will detail some very strange happenings which have occurred in the past. And finally, History in Reverse, where Jon will walk back a current event or topic to the specific moment in history that caused it. Our children’s show, Sketches in History, will also continue, and we look forward to joining Lottie again as she travels back in time to experience history first-hand. We are very excited to bring these new segments to you and as always, encourage you to share the show with your friends and family.
Welcome again to the new season of 15-Minute History. Now, let’s start the show.
It is November 15, 1884, and representatives of fourteen powers gather at the German chancellor’s home in Berlin to discuss their competing ambitions in Africa. The room is full of representatives from Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany. The United States has sent representatives as well. Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire, has called the conference because European governments are pursuing overlapping claims, and they would prefer to settle before those differences become yet another war in Europe.
For three months, the delegates discuss commerce, navigation, and the conditions under which they will recognize one another’s territorial claim. They will not leave with a finished map, as most borders will be negotiated later. Establishing control will require soldiers, treaties, and wars against people who have their own governments and currently no intention of abandoning their own self-interests. Yet.
As talks continue, the people whose futures directly affected by these decisions are noticeably absent. No invitations were sent to those people, and no prior contact was made to include them. The delegates will disagree about almost everything else, save for who is entitled to conduct such a conversation and why those people were not invited. That decision is already clear.
What is Imperialism?
Imperialism is the extension of power over other territories and peoples through military force, political authority, or economic rule. That’s a broad definition, and most of the time very true, but different instances of imperialism show different kinds of application. Sometimes it means a governor and foreign soldiers, and others a local ruler who remains in place while an outside power controls the decisions that matter. Colonialism, through foreign administration or settlement, is one form of that larger relationship, sitting below the shadowy umbrella of imperialism.
Many modern readers equate the policy of imperialism with the concept of empire, but this can be a fallacy. Empire is ancient, going back over 4,000 years, and include examples like Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Rome, the Han dynasty, the Mongols, and the Ottomans. An empire is an political structure where a state or ruler controls a territory, but imperialism is a policy or ideology that extends power over a territory. It may sound the same, but it’s possible to have imperialism without an empire, and equally possible to have an empire that wasn’t built on imperialism. The latter can happen through economic control, bad treaties, or cultural dominance over another culture.
Imperialism, in the modern sense, began around 1415 and went into a decline that lasted from 1945 to 1975. In that time, a handful of European countries went from sending ships down the coast of Africa to claiming most of the world. Portugal and Spain started it, then the Dutch, the English, and the French, and by the late 1800s, Japan had joined in. The most aggressive stretch came near the end, between about 1870 and the First World War, when Europeans divided nearly all of Africa among themselves in roughly thirty years. By 1914, one estimate shows that European powers and their former colonies covered around 84 percent of land in the world. After two world wars in thirty years left those same countries broke and exhausted, the native people they had ruled started taking their independence back, India in 1947 and most of Africa and Asia over the following three decades.
Throughout the history of imperialism, there were commonly held beliefs that justified, at least in the minds of those responsible, the actions as good or normal. Some adopted Darwin’s argument that civilized man would exterminate or replace who he, Darwin, and others defined as savages in the world. Others employed both religious and cultural prejudices that had been around for centuries. Regardless of the motivation, it was believed that the people holding the power were also the people best equipped to explain why they should hold it. A colonial administrator could honestly want to build a school and still oppose the idea that its students might one day vote on who governed them. Even people who spoke out against the cruelty of colonial rule often supported certain aspects of said rule, all while ignoring the basic question of whether such colonization is right or wrong.
In today’s episode, we are going to cover two examples of imperialism in history to show you what it was and what it was not. Knowing the history and practice of an ideology can and should call into question the results, and in doing so, remind us that might is not always right, and that there was a very good reason why imperialism is no more.
Leopold and the Congo
In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium got the major powers of Europe and the United States to recognize an enormous piece of Central Africa as his personal property. Again, to emphasize, this was his personal property, and not Belgium's. Named the Congo Free State. Leopold had his own administration and his own army, which answered to Leopold alone.
The King was able to sell it to the European powers as a humanitarian project, one where trade and improved social policy would make it an economic hub on the continent. In reality, his administration and the companies he granted concessions to decided who owned the land, what came out of it, and how much the native population owed and harvested. For a while that meant ivory, but then in the 1890s the world discovered the value of rubber, and the demand for the product skyrocketed. Tires, insulation, and other drivers pushed consumer demand to point that required constant trade and production. The Congo had wild rubber vines growing across huge stretches of forest, prompting the creation of a massive, and brutal operation where each village got a quota. The private army called the Force Publique – a colonial army of African soldiers under European officers – took woman and children hostage until it was met. Over time, villages that consistently fell short or resisted saw their people flogged, raided, burned, or killed. In addition, as a result of the majority of time spent in the jungle looking for the vines, farming decreased, people began to starve as the birthrate plummeted.
As time passed, word about the atrocities being committed spread as Congolese men and women fled, fought back, and gave testimony, and as a result, a case was built against Leopold. In 1890, George Washington Williams, an African American pastor, lawyer, and historian, traveled there and published an open letter to Leopold describing the horrors of what he’d seen, unimaginable terrors that I expect Jon to ask me about in our discussion. A few years later, a shipping clerk named Edmund Morel noticed that the ships coming back from the Congo were loaded with rubber and ivory, and the ships going back were carrying mostly guns and ammunition. If this was trade, where were the trade goods? Roger Casement, a British consul, investigated on the ground and produced an official report in 1904, which spoke of children whose hands had been cut off as punishment, unfilled quotas being met with flogging and torture, and entire villages simply vanishing from the face of the earth. Between the witnesses, the missionaries, the journalists, and the activists, Leopold ran out of room to deny it.
In 1908, Belgium took the Congo away from him and made it a Belgian colony. That ended Leopold's personal rule, but It didn't end colonial rule, and forced labor continued in various forms for decades. In the end, the Congo didn't become independent until 1960. The reform campaign was one of the first great international human rights movements, and it did actual good. But the fix it won was handing the Congo from one European owner to another, excluding the Congolese entirely.
India and the East Indian Company
British rule in India didn't start with the British government. The East India Company was an English trading business, owned by shareholders and granted a royal charter in 1600 to trade in Asia. It traded in spices, cotton, and tea, and over the next century and a half it built its own army, fought and won wars against Indian rulers, and in 1765 picked up the right to collect taxes across Bengal, a large and wealthy region in the east of India that today is split between India and Bangladesh. By the 1800s this private business was governing a large share of the subcontinent, with grievances growing as fast as its expansion.
But in 1857, everything changed. In the preceding years, internal corruption, decay, and external abuse began to exponentially increase. The Company's own army was made up mostly of Indian soldiers called sepoys, and in the spring of that year, the sepoys in northern India turned on their British officers in what was later called the Indian Mutiny by the English and the First War of independence by the Indians. Civilians joined the fray, as did Indian rulers who had lost their thrones to the Company. The British put the rebellion down, and in 1858 Great Britian took the whole operation away from the East India Company, and ran India directly.
That's the start of what is called the Raj, from the Hindi word for rule. Some provinces were governed straight from the British administration. Others, more than 500 of them, were princely states, where Indian kings and princes kept their titles and ran their own internal affairs as long as they accepted British authority over them.
It’s important to note that many historians and people who experienced the Raj, defend it. Britain built universities, courts, the Indian Civil Service, which was the elite corps of officials who actually ran the country, and railroads. The railroads linked markets, carried millions of passengers, brought down the cost of moving goods, and moved things around inside India, not just out to the ports. In addition to all these improvements, the people were allowed to exercise their faith and culture without fear of governmental reprisal or concern around ancient traditions. Britian had banned many of the more brutal and archaic components of the culture, such as human sacrifice and in some cases, cannibalism.
While these were improvements, the economic aspect of Imperialism was real and can be seen in the railroad system. For example, the early railroad deals guaranteed British investors a return of around 5 percent, and if a line didn't earn that, Indian tax revenue covered the difference. Two things were true at once, the railroad was incredibly beneficial for trade, jobs, and national growth, but it was also built on an arrangement that benefited the British more than the Indian national.
The railroad system is just one example. In 1943 during World War II, somewhere between two and three million people died in a famine in Bengal. There were a lot of causes. Japan, fighting on the other side of the war, had conquered Burma the year before. Burma, the country now called Myanmar, sits just east of Bengal and had been a major source of the rice Bengal imported, so that supply was cut off. A cyclone and crop disease had damaged the harvest and caused prices to exponentially rise so that poor families couldn't afford any food. The British, who were afraid Japan would invade India next, had carried out what they called a "denial" policy along the coast, making the issue much worse. They removed or destroyed boats and moved rice out of the area so an invading army couldn't use them.
With this example, it’s important to call out the reality of blame and not just say it was the result of Imperialism. The blame runs through four levels of government: Bengal's own provincial government, which by then had Indian ministers; the Government of India, the British-led administration in Delhi; and the government in London. Historians still argue over how much came down to an actual shortage of food versus people being unable to afford it, and how much the wartime decisions made it worse; we don’t have time to dive into that here. But the official inquiry, the Famine Inquiry Commission appointed by the British and reporting in 1945, sought out answers and found that the authorities failed to control supplies and prices and also failed to get relief going in time, which contributed adversely to the famine and its effects.
Before we move on from the Raj, it's worth noting a few things that bring additional context. The worst of the early abuses happened under the East India Company, a private business run for its shareholders, not the British government. When the rebellion of 1857 exposed what that arrangement had become, the government ended it and took responsibility for India directly. Over the next ninety years, Crown rule worked to ensure religious freedom, protected the faiths and family law of the people it governed, and brought in reforms that many Indians had been calling for themselves. In addition, many historians have highlighted that if Britain had simply walked away in 1858 after the removal of the East Indian Trading company, it wouldn't have left behind a free and united India. Instead, many historians believe it would have left a subcontinent with no central government, a dozen rival powers, and Russia and France taking advantage of the situation. None of that erases the famines, the drain of wealth, or the fact that Indians had little say in who ruled them, but it does mean the outcome and effect is more nuanced than some in the modern day would like to admit, and considering what the realistic alternatives were, we have to ask if the people living through it would have been better off under any of them.
Effects of the Force that Shaped Us
Imperialism is gone, but we still feel its effects. Look at a map of Africa and you'll find around 44% borders running in straight lines that don’t coincide with the geography. These were drawn in European capitals with little regard for the native people. India is still running on railways and courts the British built, with English still one of its official languages. Then look at the Congo, sitting on some of the richest ground in the world and still one of the poorest countries. Now, think of the globally traded goods like coffee and you have a modern example of how a plant was taken to many areas of the world, cultivated long after the colonization ended, and as a result, can supply the world with that wonderful liquid from heaven every single day.
With that said, the forces that shaped the world as a result of imperialism are more complicated than one group imposed their will on the other. Imperialist nations relied on local rulers, merchants, and soldiers and some historians argue that the economy under the Raj was shaped as much by geography, markets and Indian businesses as by British extraction. It is also important to note the difference we saw in the two examples, and the effects of both on the modern day. Again, India is still using much of what the British built and the Congo is still in poverty. The treatment of the countries, and the results that came after, are not the same.
The exploitation and theft that occurred under imperialism was evil and morally abhorrent, driven by entitled people who believed that they knew better than the individuals who already occupied the land, and made possible by the weapons and militaries and technologies of the known world. At the same time, one size does not fit all, and the different applications of the ideology warrant conversation and examination because the only way to recognize it the next time is to understand how it worked each time before.
