To justify their conquests, the colonial powers appealed,
in part, to the time-honored maxim of “might makes
right.” In a manner reminiscent of the Western attitude
toward the oil reserves in the Persian Gulf today, the European
powers viewed industrial resources as vital to national
survival and security and felt that no moral justification
was needed for any action to protect access to
them. By the end of the nineteenth century, that attitude
received pseudoscientific validity from the concept of social
Darwinism, which maintained that only societies
that moved aggressively to adapt to changing circumstances
would survive and prosper in a world governed by
the Darwinist law of “survival of the fittest.”
Some people, however, were uncomfortable with such
a brutal view of the law of nature and sought a moral
justification that appeared to benefit the victim. Here
again, the concept of social Darwinism pointed the way.
According to social Darwinists, human societies, like living
organisms, must adapt to survive. Hence the advanced
nations of the West were obliged to assist the
backward nations of Asia and Africa so that they, too,
could adjust to the challenges of the modern world. Few
expressed this view as graphically as the English poet
Rudyard Kipling, who called on the Anglo-Saxon peoples
(in particular, the United States) to take up the
“white man’s burden” in Asia (see the box above).
Buttressed by such comforting theories, humane and
sympathetic souls in Western countries could ignore the
brutal aspects of the colonial process and persuade themselves
that in the long run, the results would be beneficial
to both sides. Some, like their antecedents in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, saw the issue primarily
in religious terms. During the nineteenth century, Christian
missionaries by the thousands went to Asia and Africa
to bring the gospel to the “heathen masses.” To others,
the objective was the more secular one of bringing
the benefits of Western democracy and capitalism to the
feudalistic and tradition-ridden societies of the Orient.
Either way, sensitive Western minds could console themselves
with the belief that their governments were bring-
ing civilization to the primitive peoples of the world. If
commercial profit and national prestige happened to be
by-products of that effort, so much the better. Few were as
effective at making the case as the French colonial official
Albert Sarraut. Admitting that colonialism was originally
an “act of force” taken for material profit, he declared
that the end result would be a “better life on this
planet” for conqueror and conquered alike.
But what about the possibility that historically and
culturally, the societies of Asia and Africa were fundamentally
different from those of the West and could
not, or would not, be persuaded to transform themselves
along Western lines? After all, even Kipling had remarked
that “East is East and West is West, and ne’er the
twain shall meet.” Was the human condition universal, in
which case the Asian and African peoples could be transformed,
in the quaint American phrase for the subject
Filipinos, into “little brown Americans”? Or were human
beings so shaped by their history and geographical environment
that their civilizations would inevitably remain
distinctive from those of the West? In that case, a
policy of cultural transformation could not be expected to
succeed.
In fact, colonial theory never decided this issue one
way or the other. The French, who were most inclined to
philosophize about the problem, adopted the terms assimilation
(which implied an effort to transform colonial societies
in the Western image) and association (collaborating
with local elites while leaving local traditions alone)
to describe the two alternatives and then proceeded to
vacillate between them. French policy in Indochina, for
example, began as one of association but switched to assimilation
under pressure from liberal elements who felt
that colonial powers owed a debt to their subject peoples.
But assimilation aroused resentment among the local
population, many of whom opposed the destruction of
their native traditions.
Most colonial powers were not as inclined to debate
the theory of colonialism as the French were. The United
States, in formulating a colonial policy for the Philippines,
adopted a strategy of assimilation in theory but was
not quick to put it into practice. The British refused to
entertain the possibility of assimilation and generally
treated their subject peoples as culturally and racially distinctive
(as Queen Victoria declared in 1858, her government
disclaimed “the right and desire to impose Our
conditions on Our subjects”). Although some observers
have ascribed this attitude to a sense of racial superiority,
not all agree. In his recent book Ornamentalism: How the
British Saw Their Empire, the historian David Cannadine
argues that in fact, the British often attempted to replicate
their own hierarchical system, based on the institutions
of monarchy and aristocracy, and force it on the
peoples of the empire.
World History
