Part VIII. Slavery and Imperialism Did Not Enrich Europe
And Other Imperialisms, External or Internal, Were Equally Profitless
The same accounting and magnitudes apply to other imperialisms. King Leopold II of the Belgians (reigned 1865-1909) was a ruthless thief in the Congo. Through his concessionaires and their native soldiers he starved and slaughtered and enslaved hundreds of thousands to gather rubber from the trees at zero cost to himself and sell it high in Europe. But what benefit were his crimes to the ordinary Belgians? Did Belgian growth depend on Belgium’s little and late-acquired empire — or to be exact, did it depend on the personal imperial income of the King, spent largely on castles in Belgium and southern France? Not at all. It depended on brain and brawn in coal mines and iron and steel mills at home from the early nineteenth century on, and the bourgeois polity dating back to the sixteenth century in the south Netherlands supporting them.
The Germans in East and Southwest Africa fought two little wars 1904-1906 against their new African subjects. In October, 1904, for example, General Lothar von Trotha issued a Vernichtungbefehl, an extermination order, an early German experiment in racial cleansing preparing for the greater experiment of the early 1940s: “Within German boundaries, every Herero [northern Namibian people], whether found armed or unarmed, . . . will be shot.”16 But there was no economic point to the Herero holocaust, three-quarters killed or starved in two years, because there was anyway no economic gain to Germany in the first place from having German Southwest Africa (modern Namibia), “whose assets comprised wealth of rock and sand, and whose liabilities [even before the war] cost the German taxpayers a subsidy of £425,000.”17
So it proved for almost all the scrambles for Africa — or those for Asia or Polynesia or even the New World. At the last the Spanish and Portuguese empires left Spain and Portugal among the poorest countries in Europe. Even when the colonized people were reduced to a form of slavery, as in the concessionary system invented by King Leopold for his Congolese subjects and imitated by the French in their own Congo, only a few people gained from the severed hands and depopulated districts. When someone is murdered in the course of a convenience-store robbery, the gain to the robber of $45.56 is not the same thing as the loss of life of the clerk. His lost life is not a gain to the robber. So European imperialism.
Individual Dutch people got rich trading spices from the Dutch East Indies, as Multatuli explains in his strikingly early and influential anti-imperialist novel, Max Havelaar (1860) — compare Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). From 1830 to 1870 the Dutch authorities compelled Javanese to produce coffee, sugar, and indigo at derisory prices for the benefit of the Dutch treasury, a third of which at times was supported in this way.18 But then down to 1913 the Dutch spent on navies and military conquest what they had gained by compulsion, and after the Great War, tortured now by guilt, “government expenditure on defense [well. . .], education, and public health” in the colonies was greatly increased.19 The Indonesians were damaged, of course, though in this as in other cases, short of Congo-ish horrors, it is not obvious that indigenous rulers, or an alternative European imperium, would have done much better for the common people. In the Dutch empire, writes Angus Maddison, “Control was exercised by the thick layer of European officials [and after 1870, entrepreneurs] who spent a good deal of time as watchdogs over a native administration whose ostensible dignity and regalia camouflaged their basic role as Dutch puppets.”20 Late in the game, in 1931, the Netherlands had a quite large Indonesian presence, 0.4 percent of the population there. It sounds small, but was eight times larger at the time than the British soldiers and administrators relative to the South Asian population they governed, and the number of Dutch in Indonesia relative to their countrymen in Holland was much higher than the parallel figure for the British. After the fall of empire the ex-colonial administrators bulked larger in Dutch society and literature than the comparable class of old India hands did in Britain.
But most Dutch people back in the Netherlands were not benefited by empire, and certainly not in the nineteenth century, by which time the “rich trades” in spices had been routinized, or competed away by such unhappy events as the reproducing of clove cultivation in far away and non-Dutch Zanzibar. Colonial pain in 1660 or 1860 or 1931 did not make for general European prosperity — merely for a few shocking fortunes, such as the Dutch royal family. The ordinary Dutch seaman or farmer earned what such work earned in Europe in 1660, or 1860, or 1931. The European supply and demand for labor determined the real wage, not the profit on spices constituting for all their glamour a tiny part of European expenditure.
Or again, would anyone claim that owning Greenland and Iceland and a few scattered islands elsewhere made the Danish farmers the butter merchants of Europe? No: what explains it were Danish liberties from the late seventeenth century on (though under attack from the imperial and divine-right pretensions of the Danish royals), and a bourgeois attitude among farmers. Did the French as a whole get great benefits from lording it over poor Muslims in Africa and poor Buddhists in Vietnam? One doubts it. French economic success depended on French law, French style, French labor, French banking, French education, French originality, French openness to ideas.
The temptation to attribute the Industrial Revolution to the overseas adventures of the Europeans from the 1490s to the 1950s comes from the confusion I have noted before in Landes, Kennedy, Diamond, Findlay, O’Rourke, and many other between conquest and enrichment. And it comes from the crude correlation in time. Again it is a case of post hoc — or rather dum hoc — ergo propter hoc. It is true that the British for example prospered at the about same time that they acquired their empire — although, to repeat, the crucial industrializing decade of the 1780s, just to take one temporal problem with the argument, is precisely when Britain lost its first empire and had not established a firm grip over its second one. And Japan, one might argue to make the case for empire by contraries, turned away from foreign trade and foreign conquests as growth-making just when the Europeans were getting started in the business. Had Japan opened themselves to foreign ideas in 1603 as they did in 1868, and especially had they adopted earlier the idea of bourgeois dignity, their lack of colonies such as they later acquired (afterindustrialization) in Korea or Taiwan or Manchuria would not have mattered. One can point to specific factors in the non-European cases that made overseas imperialism less tempting to, say, Tokugawa Japan and Qing China — and therefore left them without the wonderful advantages of overseas empire for making the modern world. European colonization was easy in the Americas because the conquistadors and the Pilgrims brought measles and smallpox in their baggage. It was not so easy, at least on account of the disease gradient, in, say, India, or Indonesia. China therefore lacked, Kenneth Pomeranz argues, easily colonized foreign lands to provide raw materials like cotton. And indeed, Pomeranz observes, in 1750 China had internally probably the largest source of cotton in the world. Why bother conquering India?
The point is that China and Japan could have industrialized without colonies, or indeed without world-girdling trade. Yet they didn’t. Pomeranz argues that there was in China no political alliance in favor of foreign trade. That’s no exaggeration. But the drawing back after the adventures of the great fleets in the early fifteenth century was in part a consequence of a much deeper obstacle to rapid industrialization in China, the disdainful attitude towards all merchants. (Goldstone would perhaps disagree, observing as he does that venturing beyond the Indian Ocean lacked point for China. But the disdain for merchants was palpable.) Foreign merchants were confined for a while to the port of Ghangzhou (modern Canton) in the south and Kyakhta in the northern inland, on the border with Russia, some 2500 miles away. It would be as though the inlets to European trade were confined to Cadiz in the south St. Petersburg in the north. Again the political unity of China figures. The Spaniards certainly wanted to make Seville and then Cadiz the sole entrepôt for the trade from the New World. But the pesky French and English would have none of it. They made Le Havre and Bristol into New-World entrepôts, even going so far in their presumption as to seize Cadiz from time to time and burn the Spanish ships.
Sic transit all manner of claims that Western wealth is founded on the despoilment of the East or the South. Rich countries are rich mainly because of what they do and did at home, not because of past or present foreign trade, foreign investment, foreign empire, or foreign anything except foreign ideas such as the inventions adopted from China and the crops adopted from the New World. If the Third World was transported tomorrow by magic to another planet, like the two-planet system in Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), in the long run the economies of the First World would scarcely notice it. In the short run there would be of course great disruption. But the economies of the West would adjust, rather as they adjusted to $150-a-barrel oil for a while in 2008, or to the abolition of slavery in British Empire in 1833-40, or to the papal decision in 1537 that native Americans were to be treated as though they had souls. The one exception to the post-War loss of a literal empire supported by guns and tanks, that of Russia, was a failure. Russian income per head grew more slowly enchained to its Eastern European colonies than it would have if by some happy miracle it had adopted Western innovation in 1945. Look at East Germany vs. West, where the controlled experiment was in fact tried. Labor productivity in Ossi factories ended in 1991 at one-third what it was in Wessi factories.21
That is, we cannot account for the riches of rich countries by reference to exploitation of poor people. This, to repeat, is not to say that there was no exploitation — that British or Belgian or French or Spanish or Portuguese imperialism was good news for the people imperialized. That is a separate question, and sometimes has a rather obvious answer. For example, yes, Belgian imperialism in the Congo was an appalling event for the Congolese. Roger Casement recorded in 1903 what the people said about Leopold’s concessionaires: “From our country each village had to take 20 loads of rubber. . . . We get no pay. We get nothing. . . . It used to take 10 days [per month] to get the 20 baskets of rubber — we were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food. . . . then we starved. Wild beasts — the leopards — killed some of us while we were working away in the forest and others got lost and died from exposure or starvation and we begged the white men to leave us alone. . . . but the white men and their [black] soldiers said: Go. You are beasts yourselves.”22
But remember the convenience-store robbery. That a brutal imperialism or other forms of exploitation backed by the brief Western lead in the technology of guns and a peculiarly Western obsession with large-scale foreign adventuring was often bad for the non-European victims does not at all in logic — or as it happens in most facts 1492 from 1960 — imply that the average citizen of the European perpetrator countries was greatly enriched by it.
Consider for example the sorry history of South African racism. Keeping the blacks uneducated and landless and the coloreds excluded from certain occupations in the twentieth century did not benefit white South Africans on the whole, no more than conservative Muslim men are made better off on the whole by keeping their women illiterate and refusing to allow them to drive. The novelist Alan Paton wrote in 1948 in the voice of progressive whites just as apartheid was about to come to a climax: “the earth has bounty enough for all, and . . . more for one does not mean less for another.” The reply to such liberalism from the voice of conservatives is always about the political system as a whole, and the standing of the hegemonic group within it: “this is a danger, for better-paid labor will . . . read more, think more, ask more, and will not be content to be forever voiceless and inferior.”23 But we are discussing economics, not the pleasures or anxieties of a profitless hegemony.
From 1917, about when the trammeling of blacks and coloreds in South Africa got seriously theorized, to 1994, when democracy was established, the real incomes per head of South African whites grew at about 2 percent per year.24 Two percent per year is a respectable but not an unusually high rate of growth. At such a rate one’s real income doubles every 35 years, a welcome event, and approximately what has been happening in the United States since the eighteenth century. But it is no Swedish or Japanese or Korean miracle. On its face it does not justify a notion that the whites were greatly enriched by extracting loot or labor from people with non-European ancestors.
Look at closely comparable cases. The white growth rate of real income in South Africa 1917-1994 was somewhat higher than in Australia. The Australians did lack a large internal oppressed class. The tiny number of Aborigines who survived Western diseases, it is said, were still being hunted for sport in the 1930s by drunken Western Australians of European descent. Yet no one would seriously claim that such activities were the basis for the Australian economy. Everyone in Australia worked, pretty hard. Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click. The European Australians were not up on horses ordering blacks about as die base (“the bosses,” which until well into the twentieth century was the crippling career presumption of quite ordinary Afrikaners). The South African white growth rate was also a little higher than in New Zealand, which did have a large class of Maori aboriginals for Europeans to lord it over, though not anything like so large as South Africa’s endowment on this score. Yet in Canada or Ireland white incomes grew at about the same rate as in South Africa, with no such class of exploitables. And other countries entirely lacking a separate racial group to exploit at artificially low wages in mining or housework, such as Italy, Greece, Finland, and South Korea, had a higher rate of growth than the privileged whites of South Africa achieved by their alleged profiting from privilege. Oppressing people is bad. But commonly if not always the oppression helps only a few rich and powerful people, while hurting or not benefiting the ordinary folk alleged in the racist rhetoric to do well.
Of course oppression sometimes makes some of the oppressors better off — the rich and powerful and rare, to repeat. That is the prudence-only explanation of why they engage in the oppression, and often it explains something. But such beneficiaries are tiny minorities, such as the unusually well-connected or the unusually violent, a few Afrikaner trade unionists in South Africa and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia. True, South African whites for a long time believed that their prosperity depended on oppressing non-Europeans. It is the rhetorical, non-prudent explanation for apartheid. But a belief in fairies does not strictly imply that fairies exist. (A report on an Irish woman, asked in the 1830s whether she believed in fairies: “She did not, she said, but they were there all the same.)25 That people believe they are made better off by being associated with an empire or apartheid or slavery or segregation or discrimination or patriarchy does not mean they actually are. Because of improved varieties of cotton, American slavery was profitable right to its end for the Southerners who owned slaves (a small group — unlike the Cape Colony during the eighteenth century, in which nearly every white family owned a slave).26 Yet slavery did nothing good for the poor whites of the Confederacy except to make them feel superior to at least somebody. Alas, like working-class imperialists in Britain, they thought the exploitation of others by rich people was good for them as poor whites, and therefore they flocked to the colors in 1861 under the command of plantation owners. Likewise in 1914 the cockneys and agricultural workers flocked to the British Empire’s colors of the Pals Brigades or territorial regiments under the command of middle-class infantry officers (whose cousins were policemen in Burma).
In South Africa from 1936 to 1960 the policies devised mainly in the 1920s succeeded in raising Afrikaner unskilled workers and English trade unionists above migrant blacks and South African coloreds (that is, mixed race or people of Indian origin) and blacks. Incomes of lower class Afrikaners did rise smartly, as they took jobs on the railways, and as their sons went to engineering school. Yet from 1975 until 1994, at the very height of a system supposed to enrich them, Afrikaner or English whites saw negligible growth in their real incomes (one would need to correct the price deflators in such calculations for the improvement in the quality of goods). And indeed South Africans as a whole, black and white and colored, saw their real incomes stagnate or actually fall. More to the point the rates of growth were below those even in many other African countries.27 And unsurprisingly in no period since its founding did the system succeed strikingly for blacks and whites considered together. No wonder, a materialist would exclaim, that after 1986, gradually, like communism after 1991, the pass laws and the rest were given up. But then he would have to explain with the same materialist hypothesis why they were adopted in the first place.
What comes out of the economics, in other words, is that on the whole, and time and again, the attempt to live off poor people has not been very profitable. Even the rich in former times, who for millennia did in fact live off poor people, remained poor by the standard of ordinary people after modern economic growth. As Adam Smith memorably put it at the end of the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, “the accommodation . . . of an industrious and frugal peasant . . . exceeds that of many an African king.”28 Smith was following Locke: in America, for want of improvement of the land by labor, “a king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day laborer in England.”29 For 1690 or 1776 this may in fact be doubted. The obas of Benin 1170-1897 did seem to have lived pretty high off the hog, well above the standard of an English day laborer or an industrious and frugal peasant in the Lowlands of Scotland.30 But by now, imagining the riches in health and wealth of a working person in Italy or New Zealand, and comparing these to the riches extracted in olden times from the poor, or still extracted today by the last absolute monarch in Africa, King Mswati III of Swaziland, Smith’s proposition cannot be doubted. As soon as the hierarchy relented, and positive-sum invention became prestigious, the rich and the poor became astonishingly better off. Even poor people in a modern economy have access to vaccination, air-conditioning, automobiles, the internet, reliable birth control, and flush toilets. The very Sun King himself had access instead to smallpox, open windows, bumpy carriages, a small list of books, leaky condoms, and relieving himself in the staircases of the Palace of Versailles.
If contrary to fact the exploited poor people were rich, not poor, and if the gain was all a matter of pass laws and violence, not mutually advantageous exchange, then some big parts of some societies, I repeat, could possibly benefit from violent imperialism abroad or violent apartheid at home. But that’s not what the accounting and the magnitudes suggest about the British empire, or for that matter about apartheid within the Southern United States or South Africa. And even enslaving rich people is not such a wonderfully enriching idea, as Hermann Göring’s program of Continental enslavement showed. The formerly rich slaves didn’t produce V-2 rockets or Messerschmitt Me 262 jet planes fast enough to tip the balance. And stealing paintings from Paris and Amsterdam did not enrich ordinary Germans.
Voluntary trading with free, rich people, as against exploitation of poor people, turns out to be the better plan. In fact the more the rich countries trade with each other (as they mainly do) the richer they become — though remember that innovation, not such trade, is the engine of growth. As the financial historian Niall Ferguson has observed, Germany did better in “dominating” (which is mercantilist lingo for “trading with”) Eastern Europe after 1945 and especially after 1989 than any of its imperial ambitions of the 1910s or its lebensraumische plans of the 1930s could achieve. Ditto Japan. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of Japanese militarism was economically speaking a dismal failure by comparison with Japan, Inc. We are made better off by having fellow citizens who are well-educated and well-trained and fully employed, even though we will then have to sacrifice having plentiful maids (the living rooms of middle-class people in Brazil and South Africa are strikingly clean, because they do have such maids). If exploiting poor people of color had been such a grand idea for rich white people, such as certain white Brazilians and white South Africans, then the white people in such countries would now be a lot better off than whites in Germany or Portugal or England or Holland, or the United States or Australia — places from which their ancestors came or to which their cousins went. They are not, and were not.
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[back] Pakenham 1991, p. 611.
[back] Pakenham 1991, p. 602.
[back] Emmer 2003, p. 391.
[back] Emmer 2003, p. 392.
[back] Maddison 2007, p. 137.
[back] Ardagh 1991, p. 448.
[back] Quoted in Pakenham 1991, pp. 598-599.
[back] Paton 1948, p. 71.
[back] Feinstein 2005, p. 11, Figure 1.3.
[back] Eagleton 1996, p. 273n1.
[back] Olmstead and Rhode 2008.
[back] Feinstein 2005, p. 145, Table 7.2, itself from Maddison 2001.
[back] Smith 1776, I, i, 11, p. 24.
[back] Locke 1690, Bk. II, para. 41, p. 136.
[back] Exhibit, Chicago Art Institute 2008.
