Colonialism and English
Colonialism does not occupy a single time frame or set of events or practices. In many situations it is discussed as the representatives of one country taking over, occupying or imposing ideas over another nation or group of people. Such a situation has been part of human history for a very long time.
The earliest period of modern European colonial expansion was undertaken by the Portuguese and Spanish (1400–1500s), closely followed by the Dutch and the English. The great rival of England for colonial power was France and throughout the history of the British Empire it has been France that has been the foil or enemy in so many battles and discoveries. Other European countries did not expand colonially or create colonies until later, such as Italy and Germany, which both took possessions in the late 19th and 20th century.
What is Colonialism?
Colonialism is the extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory beyond its borders with the establishment of either settler-colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled and/or displaced. Colonizing nations generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory, and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population (see also cultural imperialism). What this means it that colonialism is essentially a system of direct political, economic and cultural intervention based on power. Though the word colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism, the latter is sometimes used more broadly as it covers control exercised informally (via influence) as well as formal military control or economic leverage.
The British Empire was the largest empire in history and for over a century the foremost global power. It was a product of the European age of discovery, which began with the maritime explorations of the 15th century, that sparked the era of the European colonial empires. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s population. It covered about 36.6 million km² (14.2 million square miles), about a quarter of Earth’s total land area. As a result, its legacy is widespread, in legal and governmental systems, economic practice, militarily, educational systems, sports, and in the global spread of the English language.
At the peak of its power, it was often said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous colonies or subject nations. During the five decades following World War II, most of the territories of the Empire became independent. Many went on to join the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states. With the complexity and great size of the British Empire a discussion on the whole development would take a very long time. Instead, we will look at four areas once controlled by Britain but which today are called Australia, India, Southern Africa and England. Colonialism is a complex and often controversial topic, which should always be remembered in this series of lectures. The intention is not to weigh up the positive and negative elements of the colonial period, but rather to examine the historical conditions that created the cultures today that are found in these four areas.
The Beginnings of British Colonialism
The conquest of Ireland by the Tudors in the late 1500s and King James 1 (1566–1625) and the re-conquest by the forces of Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50 can be seen as an ongoing early example of colonialism on the part of England (which had already conquered Wales under the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan, although a formal Union did not occur until 1536 and in 1707 Scotland was formally united with England to form Great Britain with the Act of Union).
As the new century dawned, relations between Scotland and England had never been worse. Yet half a century later the two countries would be making a future together based on profit and interest. The new Britain was based on money, not God. BBC: A History of Britain
The early story of the British Isles is one of colonisation. Firstly, Celtic and Pict tribes arrived and formed the first communities in the British Isles. Then came the Romans. In 250AD, Rome sent a contingent of black legionnaires, drawn from the African part of the empire, to stand guard on Hadrian’s Wall. There is no evidence that these men stayed in Britannia and when the Romans finally quit in the fifth century, the way was clear for the Germanic tribes that would slowly become the English. Four hundred years after the Jutes, Angles and Saxons colonised modern-day southern England, the Vikings arrived, bringing a distinctive new influence to the cultural pot. The Vikings’ sphere of influence was northern Britain and modern-day East Anglia. The most dramatic of these immigrations was the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Normans, descended from Vikings who had settled in France, brought with them their early-French language which would fundamentally change the direction of English, government and law. To this day, a number of Parliamentary ceremonies can be dated back to the Franco-Norman era. The first Norman king, William the Conqueror, invited Jews to settle in England to help develop commerce, finance and trade. In the modern era colonisation brought great wealth to England but it also cost a lot. Wars were fought, ships sent out, colonies financed, deals made with Spain and France and the infrastructure of empire established. The rewards were of course huge, with raw materials and markets both ruled by the colonial power in the far flung empire.
Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War
Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599–3 September 1658)
It was Oliver Cromwell who formed the short lived Commonwealth of England, the republican government which ruled first England (including Wales) and then Ireland and Scotland from 1649 to 1660. Cromwell is a pivotal figure in the history of England and the British Empire. Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.
Cromwell was born into the ranks of the middle gentry, and remained relatively obscure for the first 40 years of his life, at times his lifestyle resembling that of a yeoman farmer until his finances were boosted thanks to an inheritance from his uncle. After undergoing a religious conversion during the same decade, he made an independent style of Puritanism a core tenet of his life. Cromwell was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Cambridge in the Short (1640) and Long (1640–49) Parliaments, and later entered the English Civil War on the side of the “Roundheads” or Parliamentarians.
An effective soldier (nicknamed “Old Ironsides”) he rose from leading a single cavalry troop to command of the entire army. Cromwell was the third person to sign Charles I’s death warrant in 1649 and was an MP in the Rump Parliament (1649–1653), being chosen by the Rump to take command of the English campaign in Ireland during 1649–50. He then led a campaign against the Scottish army between 1650–51. On 20 April 1653 he dismissed the Rump Parliament by force, setting up a short-lived nominated assembly known as the Barebones Parliament before being made Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland on 16 December 1653 until his death. When the Royalists returned to power in 1660, his corpse was dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded.
The Plantations of Ireland
The Ulster Plantation and the Cromwellian Genocide in Ireland 1603–1680
Under the Tudor conquest of Ireland a plantation system was begun with confiscated lands made into large plantation farms run by English aristocracy in conjunction with a parallel system with smaller model farms being set up with the intention of the Irish copying them. The plantations in Ireland had a huge impact on Irish culture and society in the areas where they were established;
“The Plantation of Ulster with English and Scottish settlers was not initially intended as a religious campaign against Catholics. But it took on its own dynamic and effectively became such by the turn of the 17th century. For Protestant settlers too the century established the perception of Catholics poised to take revenge and dispossess them at the first opportunity, for the Ulster Irish had risen in 1641 and ‘massacred’ large numbers of the settler population. That the Ulster Plantation was never as total, nor the 1641 uprising as brutal as tradition allows, matters little. Both have continued to be axioms of respective communal identities and along with the religious demography of Ulster, established by the Plantation, these beliefs have remained virtually unchanged for over three centuries.” BBC Wars and Conflict: The Plantation of Ulster (Note this is a British source and therefore may explain the de-emphasis on the brutality of what lay behind the plantation system in Ireland).
In this long quote it is possible to see an example of the goal of this course, to understand that the scattered groups of people who speak varieties of English do so because of what has happened in the past. Not only is the language something they developed through the processes of colonisation, but the sort of society they live in, with its religions, laws, customs, education and media have been formed by the same processes. In the colonization of Ireland, particularly under the direction of Oliver Cromwell it is possible to see elements of all prior colonial projects within the frame of the British Empire; the establishment of administrative centers (usually on the coast), the dispossession of indigenous peoples from land, the imposition of religious and cultural systems by the colonisers (usually through education and propaganda), the implementation of economic systems advantageous to the colonizers and the merciless punishment of resistance and dissent.
Attitudes at the Beginnings of Empire
It is generally thought that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in 1610–11 at the dawn of the great age of British colonialism, which was well under way by the time Hogarth painted this painting. Caliban is the sole resident of the island depicted in the play who was actually born there; he is ‘the native’. The name of the character is widely considered to be a reference to the Caribs, the indigenes of the Caribbean encountered by early European sailors in their first journeys to the Americas. The name Caliban is also roughly anagrammatic to Cannibal, which was both a fear and a belief held by many Europeans at the time regarding the occupants of the ‘New World’. Later, in Hogarth’s century the concept of the ‘noble savage’ became popular in Western European intellectual cultures. The ‘noble savage’ can be described in relation to the character of Caliban as a representation of the ‘natural man’, that the tribal and non-industrialized cultures of the lands colonized by European powers where closer to nature and lived more ‘genuine’ lives reminiscent of the Garden of Eden myth of Christianity.
In Shakespeare’s day, most of the planet was still being “discovered”, and stories were coming back from distant islands, with myths about the Cannibals of the Caribbean, faraway Edens, and distant Tropical Utopias. With the character Caliban Shakespeare may be offering an in-depth discussion into the morality of colonialism. Different views are discussed, with examples including Gonzalo’s Utopia, Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban, and Caliban’s subsequent resentment. Caliban is also shown as one of the most natural characters in the play, being very much in touch with the natural world (and modern audiences have come to view him as far nobler than his two Old World friends, Stephano and Trinculo, although the original intent of the author may have been different). There is evidence that Shakespeare drew on Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals (1603), which discusses the values of societies insulated from European influences, while writing The Tempest.
Beginning in about 1950, with the publication of Psychology of Colonization by Octave Mannoni, The Tempest was viewed more and more through the lens of postcolonial theory. This new way of looking at the text explored the effect of the colonizer (Prospero) on the colonized (Ariel and Caliban). Though Ariel is often overlooked in these debates in favor of the more intriguing Caliban, he is still involved in many of the debates. The French writer Aimé Césaire, in his play Une Tempête sets The Tempest in Haiti, portraying Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonizers. Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation. Although scholars have suggested that his dialogue with Caliban in Act two, Scene one, contains hints of a future alliance between the two when Prospero leaves, in general, Ariel is viewed by scholars as the good servant, in comparison with the conniving Caliban — a view which Shakespeare’s audience would have shared. Ariel is used by some postcolonial writers as a symbol of their efforts to overcome the effects of colonization on their culture. Michelle Cliff, for example, a Jamaican author, has said that she tries to combine Caliban and Ariel within herself to create a way of writing that represents her culture better. Such use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon, as Ariel is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism. (Wikipedia)
The People of Empire
Many people (not all) who participated in the colonisation of subjected lands in the British Empire did so with the belief that they were better than the peoples they had conquered. Often using philosophies of Social Darwinism (not to be confused with Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution,which it really does not represent — this film), where the survival of the fittest idea was adapted to social and cultural contexts, the industrialized and militarized organisations that represented the British Empire oppressed, enslaved and regulalry massacred outright the peoples of the lands they colonised.
Along with this brutal collective face of colonialism there existed other aspects. Christian missionaries who worked to convert the peoples of the colonies. The orientalists who studied them with a romantic sense of admiration. The merchants and entrepreneurs who wished to make money and develop businesses in the colonies. As well there were the poor and middle class citizens of England who either immigrated or were sent to the colonies to either better their lives or because they had no choice. It is important to remember that the urban working class of England were often not so far behind the most oppressed in the colonies, considering a boy born in inner Liverpool in 1851 had a life expectancy of only 26 years (BBC). The urban centers of the Midlands, London and the north grew enourmously between the late 18th and mid-19th century.
The poverty of 19th century Victorian England was extream. By looking at the lives of the most vunerable members of the urban population we can gain an idea of how it was to be poor in England in the 1800s. Children suffered particularly when their surroundings where defined by poverty. An example from 1849 of living conditions in relation to sewage: Henry Mayhew was an investigative journalist who wrote a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle about the way the poor of London lived and worked. In an article published on 24th September 1849 he described a London Street with a tidal ditch running through it, into which drains and sewers emptied. The ditch contained the only water the people in the street had to drink, and it was ‘the colour of strong green tea’, in fact it was ‘more like watery mud than muddy water’. This is the report he gave: ‘As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it’. Mayhew’s articles were later published in a book called London Labour and the London Poor and in the introduction he wrote: ‘…the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world”, is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us’.
(For more on the conditions for impoverished children in Victorian England)
This account of Liberals and Conservatives: from AD 1832 in England gives a picture of Whigs and Tories, Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League, and say what the Factory Act of 1833 was in response to.
As well the Great Exhibition of 1851 took place in London, it celebrated the power and achievements of the Empire. The Great Exhibition was the first international fair of trade and industry, that is it was international in that it showed off products from the whole of the Empire. As well the machines of industrialised England were on display;
“James Nasmyth’s famous steam hammer was there (the machine used by Robert Stephenson to drive home the piles of his bridge at Newcastle). Garforth’s riveting machine, marine engines from Maudsley’s works, McNicholl’s travelling crane and De La Rue’s Patent Envelope Machine. Operated by only two boys, this could cut , fold, gum and stack thousands of envelopes an hour in “a series of the most beautiful mechanical movements it is possible to conceive ”. There was even an alarm bed that ejected its occupant at a pre-set time.” The Great Exhibition
The life of convicts kept on the prison hulks, huge floating prisons in river estuaries was horrible, and transportation to Australia was worse.
Prison hulk
A prison ship, historically sometimes called a prison hulk, is a vessel used as a prison, often to hold convicts awaiting transportation to penal colonies. The vessels were a common form of internment in Britain and elsewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charles F. Campbell writes that around 40 ships of the British Navy were converted for use as prison hulks. One was established at Gibraltar, others at Bermuda, at Antigua, and off Brooklyn in Wallabout Bay and Sheerness. Other hulks were anchored off Woolwich, Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Plymouth. Private companies owned and operated the hulks holding prisoners bound for penal transportation.
Women in the British Empire
While British women in the empire were always outnumbered by British men, from the beginning of empire women traveled to many sites of empire, where they established homes and found opportunities and a way of life not available to them in Britain. Beginning around 1850, the numbers of white women living in the empire increased, partly because the empire grew considerably in the later 19th century — the period historians call the Age of New Imperialism — and partly because of the rising concern in Britain over the relationships between British men and indigenous women. Encouraging white British women to travel to the colonies was seen by the British as a way to protect and maintain the social hierarchy of the colonial world, while preserving British racial purity. In evaluating the role of British women in the empire, it is important to differentiate between colonies in Africa and India and white settler colonies where the situation of British women was substantially different. In Australia, where the number of British settlers rapidly outnumbered the indigenous population, men substantially outnumbered women, especially in the early stages of white settlement. Male convicts outnumbered female convicts 4 to 1, and the beginning of the colony in Australia was marked by the rape of women — both white and indigenous. In Australia, the numbers of women did not equal that of men until after World War II. As the colony developed, most settlers moved to isolated rural farms where women lived hard working lives. By contrast, in New Zealand, while men did outnumber women, it was a colony that encouraged settlement by families — a factor that shaped the lives of women. Interestingly, in 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.
The White Man’s Burden
“The White Man’s Burden” is a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 — January 18, 1936). It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure’s in 1899, with the subtitle ‘The United States and the Philippine Islands’. “The White Man’s Burden” was written in regard to the U.S. conquest of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies. Although Kipling’s poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase “white man’s burden” as a characterization for imperialism that justified imperial policy as a noble enterprise.
“The White Man’s Burden”
Take up the White Man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain
Take up the White Man’s burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard —
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899.” Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929).
The Navy and Empire
The British navy was the largest and most effective in the world between the early 18th and late 19th century. As well as its military role the Royal Navy sponsored and trained many of the most successful explorers who charted territories and claimed lands in the name of the crown. One of the most famous of these was Captain James Cook. Captain James Cook FRS RN (7 November O.S. 27 October 1728–14 February 1779) was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook died in Hawaii in a fight with Hawaiians during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific in 1779.
By 1800, the British had yet to achieve an empire on which 'the sun never sets', but British possessions were scattered across the globe. During the Napoleonic Wars, British naval supremacy enabled it to annex overseas territories from France, and by extension, its confederate, the Dutch.
By 1850 the British Empire stretched from the wilds of northern Canada to the tip of Tasmania. In between was India, large parts of Africa, along with five treaty ports in China as well as Hong Kong Island.
At its height it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913 the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23 per cent of the world population at the time, and by 1920 it covered 35,500,000 km2 (13,700,000 sq mi), 24 percent of the Earth's total land area.
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