Vocational Imperialism
Imperialism as a Vocation
February 02, 2005
"Vocation" is typically used to refer to careers in which pay is not the object. People don't have "vocations" to become corporate lawyers or stockbrokers; they have vocations to become clergy, teachers, or professional soldiers. Therefore, "vocational imperialism" is imperialism that is sustained by a conviction on the part of the colonists that they belong. Missionaries are often regarded as imperialists because their mission is to replace the local spiritual traditions with those of their own society; yet missionaries are almost invariably underpaid, unencouraged, and unpopular with more conventional imperialists. In many cases, most notably Vietnam, missionary activity antagonized the local ruler, who responded by persecuting converts...which the French Navy used as a pretext for seizing power in Vietnam.1 However one may despise missionaries per se, though, it is unreasonable to accuse them of being witting partisans of their respective country's commercial interests. In the case of Southeast Asia and China, the missionaries were merely used as a pretext for aggression. They went there with motives outside the framework of their country's national interests, and on numerous occasions became activists against colonial abuses.A more compelling example is that of the military mission to "manage" a country indefinitely.
In 1919 the peace negotiations in Paris divided the colonies of Germany and Turkey among the victors. The division was notionally for political settlement and humanitarian management, although the participating countries squabbled over their division. The award of German possessions in China to Japan, despite the fact that the Chinese Republic had declared war on the Central Powers (and presumably was entitled to its territory back) was clear evidence that the mandate program was egregious plunder. Over the course of the War, the United States had occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic; US Marines landed in Nicaragua in 1912 and remained to 1933.2 These were strategic in character, but in many respects appear to have persisted as a result of the racial dynamic: white US military personnel administering Haiti were convinced that the people they ruled were unfit for self-government, and were the main source of policy advice and direction in the area.
This strikes me as a very peculiar category of colonialism: where the main impetus is the occupation force's misplaced sense of duty, not towards the subject peoples, but the hegemony of their own race. The commercial gains from logging in Hispaniola, however, must have been significant; also, both countries appear to have been the victims of unsolicited financial management services. Moreover, it was not confined to Hispaniola: virtually identical templates held in all of the mandates.
For the purposes of completeness, I'm going to list the mandate countries. Class descriptions are courtesy of Wikipedia.
Class A Mandates: The first group or Class A mandates were areas formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire deemed to "...have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory..."In addition to the Mandates awarded by the League of Nations, Eritrea (a former colony of Italy) was under military occupation by the UK from 1941 to 1952, when it was awarded to Ethiopia as a self-governing federal partner [*]. Libya, another ex-colony of Italy, was under allied administration (UK, some French) until 1952 as well, then awarded independence. The Japanese mandates in the Northern Pacific were made a trust territory of the USA, and remain politically and economically dependent upon it. Finally, the Union of South Africa defied the UN requirement to hand over its mandate in Southwest Africa and continued to occupy the country until 1990.Class B Mandates: deemed to require a greater level of control by the mandatory power: "...the Mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the territory under conditions which will guarantee freedom of conscience and religion". The mandatory power was forbidden to construct military or naval bases within the mandates.
- Syria (1920-1946; France)
- Lebanon (1920-1941; France; independence granted by Free French immediately after capture from Vichy government)
- Iraq (1920-1932; UK; in the eyes of many Iraqis, independence came only with the ouster of the monarchy, 1958. In 1942, the UK had invaded Iraq a second time.)
- Transjordan (1919-1948; UK; internally self-governing)
- Palestine (1917-1947; UK)
Class C Mandates: considered to be "best administered under the laws of the Mandatory as integral portions of its territory"
- Ruanda-Urundi (1924-1961; independent as Rwanda & Burundi; Belgium)
- Togoland (1919-1960; divided between France and the UK. During WW2)
- Cameroons (1919-1960; divided between France and the UK. Reunited in 1960 in the modern Republic of Cameroon)
- Tanganyika (1922-1961; UK�integrated into the federation of Tanzania, 1964)
- Southwest Africa (Namibia; 1919-1990; Rep. of South Africa)
- German New Guinea (1919-1949; then, merged with Australian New Guinea to form Papua New Guinea and governed by Australia to 1975)
- Nauru (1918-1968; Australia)
- German Samoa (1919-1962; New Zealand; now Western Samoa)
- Caroline Islands (1920-1935, then annexed by Japan; captured by US in WW2 and administered as UN Trust Territories; now Palau [1994], Marshall Islands [1979], and Federated States of Micronesia [1986]; the Northern Mariana Islands remain in Commonwealth Association with the USA)
The list above excludes two previously-mentioned categories of transfers: occupations of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, all of which occurred during the War but prior to US entry; and post-war territorial awards outside of the mandate sytem, such as the acceptance of Japanese occupation of the Shantung Peninsula (formerly under German rule), Allied support of Greek operations in western Anatolia (the megaidea).
What was the perception that Europeans held toward this venture? There were admirable dissenters, but in the textbooks and newspaper editorials I've read, this is the prevailing sentiment towards one's own country's imperial ventures:
Lord Lugard wrote in The Dual Mandate the following summing-up of his conception of the white man's position in tropical Africa:In case it was not clear from this extract, the dual mandates are to enrich the colonializing nation and to uplift the subject peoples. His rhetoric conflates "mankind" and the international commercial sphere, which was in fact a rather small share of the human race.The civilized nations have at last recognized that while on the one hand the abounding wealth of the tropical regions of the earth must be developed and used for the benefit of mankind, on the other hand an obligation rests on the controlling Power not only to safeguard the material rights of the natives, but to promote their moral and educational progress.It may fairly be claimed that this position, reached by the opening years of the twentieth century, had been attained under British leadership and example. The principles above enunciated were adopted by the statesmen who framed the Versailles settlement and the League of Nations and were incorporated in the mandates for African territory issued from Geneva. In practice there has been less antithesis than might be expected between development for the benefit of mankind and promotion of the material rights and moral progress of the Africans. Social services, both material and moral, cost money, and the money has been drawn from great expansion of the mineral and vegetable production of the colonies for sale to mankind at large. In the process the average wealth and standard of living of the African populations has been raised, quite apart from any benefits directly derived from government activities. The two branches of the Dual Mandate are therefore interdependent and define one process of development, the transformation of poor, isolated and ill-governed peoples into progressive communities with a position in the modern world and a part of their own to play in the growing integration of human activities.
A Short History of British Expansion, Vol. II, Williamson, 1967; p.320
Departures from the opinion above, even among the left of Europe, are extremely rare today. Typically, even when colonial atrocities are too well-known to ignore, they are treated as anomalies. Let us, however, turn to the reality of colonialism in Africa:
The actual history of Western relations with "lower races" occupying lands on which we have settled throws, then, a curious light upon theory of a "trust for civilisation." When the settlement approaches the condition of genuine colonisation, it has commonly implied the extermination of the lower races, either by war or by private slaughter, as in the case of Australian Bushmen, African Bushmen and Hottentots, Red Indians, and Maoris, or by forcing upon them the habits of a civilisation equally destructive to them. This is what is meant by saying that "lower races" in contact with "superior races" naturally tend to disappear. How much of "nature" or "necessity" belongs to the process is seen from the fact that only those "lower races" tend to disappear who are incapable of profitable exploitation by the superior white settlers, either because they are too "savage" for effective industrialism or because the demand for labour does not require their presence.The link is to the complete, searchable text of Imperialism. Incidentally, since a "racial" group differs from an ethnic group insofar as "race" designates a power relationship, Hobson's use of "lower" has nothing whatever to do with any supposed shortcomings in the endowments of "Bushmen," et al. Hobson does not attempt to convince committed racists that racism is erroneous because he did not expect to succeed and used other lines of reasoning.
J.A. Hobson, Imperialism 1902 p.252
"Vocational imperialism" is a term useful for referring to campaigns intended to uplift and transform a society; it describes the official motivation of the mandates, the occupations of Hispaniola, and was adopted as a post hoc justification for the colonial projects everywhere else. In the Class A Mandates, where the societies under occupation had long histories as polities, violent resistance was endemic; in Syria and Iraq, fighting ultimately ended the mandates. Vocational colonies are conceived, however, with no obvious commercial benefit. Washington- and New York-based planners could easily have contrived more useful expenditures of US treasure and lives than the protracted struggle to repress insurgencies in Hispaniola. It's not surprising that someone in an office at the National City Bank in Manhattan thought that the rape of Haiti could be carried out cheaply; but to persist in this occupation for the next 18 years, after 3,000 Haitians had been killed, was not characteristic of a businesslike mind. Haiti needed to recover between bouts of pillage, and the immense profits to be had logging the island into a moonscape were, for the most part, not transmitted to the US government or all but a tiny minority of taxpayers. If the NCB was "making" Washington persist, then it was rejecting the lucrative path of indirect rule in favor of a path of intnesive social transformation.
In fact, there were repeated promises by American presidential candidates to end the unpopular project in Haiti, including that of Warren G Harding. Harding's administration in fact did negotiate an end to the Dominican occupation [LoC country study], contingent on Domincan approval of one last scam: borrow $2.5 million for "public works" and all decisions made while under occupation, and we'll leave. And that's how the occupation ended.
The occupation of Haiti persisted, however, in its highly cost-ineffective way, however, not because of some sadism on the part of the National City Bank, but because the class of professional soldiers deployed in Haiti had a stake in prolonging it.
Many of the Occupation officers are in the same category with the civilian place-holders. These men have taken their wives and families to Haiti. Those at Port-au-Prince live in beautiful villas. Families that could not keep a hired girl in the United States have a half-dozen servants. They ride in automobiles � not their own. Every American head of a department in Haiti has an automobile furnished at the expense of the Haitian Government, whereas members of the Haitian cabinet, who are theoretically above them, have no such convenience or luxury. While I was there, the President himself was obliged to borrow an automobile from the Occupation for a trip through the interior.They had their loyal cadres of supporters, who equated withdrawal from Haiti with "appeasement of Communists" and "hatred of America."
"The American Occupation," James Weldon Johnson, Aug 1920
Those who spoke out against the slaughter and enslavement of Haitians on corv�es to build military roads, were accused in effect of blood libel: accusing the USA of killing unjustly. So the killing persisted:
The five years of American occupation, from 1915 to 1920, have served as a commentary upon the white civilization which still burns black men and women at the stake. For Haitian men, women, and children, to a number estimated at 3,000, innocent for the most part of any offense, have been shot down by American machine gun and rifle bullets; black men and women have been put to torture to make them give information; theft, arson, and murder have been committed almost with impunity upon the persons and property of Haitians by white men wearing the uniform of the United States. Black men have been driven to retreat to the hills from actual slavery imposed upon them by white Americans, and to resist the armed invader with fantastic arsenals of ancient horse pistols, Spanish cutlasses, Napoleonic sabres, French carbines, and even flintlocks. In this five years' massacre of Haitians less than twenty Americans have been killed or wounded in action.The extreme racial snobbery is documented in the letters of, for example, Gen. Littleton Waller, who was the effective ruler of Haiti ("Make no mistake,... there are some fine-looking, well-educated polished men here but they are real nigs beneath the surface") for nine months of the Occupation. The occupation of Haiti, as with the mandates, led to the creation of what were in fact unusually secure enclaves of white power and racial aggression against the natives. French colonialism, for example, is famous for its cohorts of enthusiastic collaborators, aristocrats who eagerly assimilated French culture and political ends. Not in Syria or Togo, where the administrators and military men slashed and chopped the borders (in favor of Lebanon and Dahomey, respectively). Opposition to French rule in Syria was universal; there were no classes that developed a rapport with the French there.Of all this Americans at home have been kept in the profoundest ignorance.
"The Conquest of Haiti," Herbert J. Seligmann, Jul 1920
The UK had a huge contingent of personnel conditioned to expect everlasting political control from Westminster; yet the mandates in Iraq involved two invasions, protracted guerrilla wars, and bombing campaigns. Mandates in Ruanda-Urundi involved a massive invasion by Belgians (actually, four years before the mandate was declared) and the effective enslavement of the countries for coffee interests. Prior to that time, Ruanda-Urundi's dozen or so component kingdoms were essentially priesthoods, with subsistence economies. Thereafter, they became rigidly fuedal kleptocracies, with identity cards and racial classifications. Two decades after rebuking their king and "reforming" the Congo (LoC), the Belgian colonial system was growing into a clinical replica of Leopold's CFS.
These vocational empires tended to hand off the great rents and profits of plunder to well-paid handmaids like the National City Bank (often blamed for instigating the invasion of Haiti); they were porly run, wasting lives and treasure on micromanagement of the native society, corv�es to build military roads, and military campaigns to stop the corv�e-provoked insurrections. Their administrators�"men on the spot," scornful of the critics back home�were heavy-handed and openly disdainful of the natives; this, too, caused more rebellions, and made collaborators difficult to recruit. Natives often wondered at the perversity of their needless rudeness, and the absurd costs of exploitation under such a system.
It seems that under these types of colonial possessions, the usual contraints on seasoned military men to placate merchants and local elites, was here overridden by the different manner in which the colonies were obtained, the limited horizons of exploitation, and the opportunistic modes of exploitation. Rather than a long-planned scheme of cultivating lands and taxing the harvest, the new method was to plunder the occupied country's lumber, minerals, or financial system. The military men were typically from ranks heretofore confined to infantry, not supervision: the occupation of Haiti, for example, was by a group of rednecks, not civil servants. As such, the piss-and-vinegar professional soldier, drawn from an embittered white underclass, actually commanded a loyalty and sympathy from the "mother country" that the polished civil servant could only dream of.
When United States sailors were arrested at Veracruz for trespassing on dock facilities, the commander of the United States naval forces off Tampico demanded ceremonial salutes of the United States flag by Mexican personnel. When the United States demands were not met, United States troops occupied Veracruz. Indignation brought about a series of reprisals against United States citizens and their flag throughout Mexico. In the face of growing disorder, Huerta resigned on July 8, 1914.As it happened, the US President Wilson disapproved of Mexican President Huerta's seizure of power (involving as it did the lynching of his precessor); it seems that Wilson might have intended to humiliate Huerta in order to get rid of him, since the method of the secret coup was still not in common use. If so, it was a clumsy method: the incident and others triggered waves of massive anti-US riots, attacks on US nationals, seizures of facilities operated by US firms, and actual incursions by armed bands. In 1916, one raid by Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing 12 Americans before cavalry drove it off. Wilson responded with a punitive expedition and the dissolution of diplomatic relations; Villa responded by retreating deep into Mexico. The expedition at one point engaged intense fighting with the Mexican Army. In 1917, the expedition withdrew, a failure. Villa's forces continued to control Northern Mexico until 1920. All sources from the Library of Congress country studies except the last�GlobalSecurity.org.
US Marines occupied Cuba in mid-1917 during a revolution there (OnWar.com). On resistance to US occupation of Haiti; Domincan Republic.
Some further thoughts on Vocational Imperialism
February 06, 2005
"Imperialism as a Vocation," Hobson's Choice
In my first essay I focused on Haiti, which is perhaps an ambiguous example. There were millions to be made in looting Haiti, yet the looting seems to have been opportunistic. The National City Bank benefited handsomely from the invasion, and may well have played a role in bringing it about, but probably was not the primary cause. The invasion occurred in a period of relative insecurity, after a long succession of expeditionary forces to the Haitian capital to defend foreign lives or property. Having seized the country, the military governors then sought to quell a rebellion that could easily have been ignored by purely plunder-minded invaders.1 The occupation dragged on, as the US marines sought to transform Haiti.
Haiti under US occupation was clearly a project of social engineering. The neighboring Dominican Republic was evacuated after seven years, two of them spent haggling over the terms of future relations; Haiti remained an enclave, an American Sparta ruled by a stern class of genteel racists. This was a class of people whose vision of the ideal society was the antebellum South, in which the men were business managers and soldiers, while the manual labor was done by a "lower race." This vision was no longer tenable in the USA, and of course the actual "South" had suffered from a ruling class as venal as anyone could find; the US marines, however, had discipline and regimentation, and while they considered it no sin to expropriate from the Haitians, they were scrupulous towards each other.
In power, they hated the idea of relinquishing it "in the foreseeable future." The Haitians "needed" a stern guiding hand. The island's resources were needed by the outside world, and so naturally the Haitians had to be made to log the forests or harvest the sugar. The military community took the place of all civil functions, and toasted US-based merchants on its own, as a plenipotentary rather than a defense force. They forced the natives to work on corv�es building roads, or shore up terraces. The mulatto population was treated with the same disdain as the Black population, but ironically given the ability and the obligation to order them about. In the years that followed the occupation, the Mulattos were a target of reprisal and suspicion, as collaborators.
In order to understand this, it is necessary to know some peculiar cultural traits of the US military in the pre-war era. To an even greater degree than today, recruits were Southerners, and if deployed in Haiti, White. They tended to have a notion of civilian society as degraded, and Northern society as morally craven. There was a legend of the South as an agrarian, morally pure, guileless land of chivalrous White gentlemen, and of course in the military, these gentlemen were free of pecuniary motives. This was a knightly order of warrior-nobles. Of course the officers in Haiti knew perfectly well this was fantastical, but they supposed it was true long before, and they saw it taking shape in Haiti. To leave Haiti would have meant not only giving up handsome villas and access to a car, but also giving the Negroes the run of the place once it had been "redeemed" by Whites.
In the event, the knightly order was hammered by the falling prices of farm commodities: The student strikes began in late Oct. 1929, when the students at the Service Technique’s central agricultural college at Damien walked out in a body protesting a reduction in incentive scholarships for city students and corresponding increases in scholarships for field work. Students in the medical college and law college followed in a sympathy strike, and the strike quickly spread throughout the nation to both public and private schools. Idle students milled about in the streets for a period of five weeks while General [John H.] Russell [the U.S. high commissioner] tried unsuccessfully to meliorate the situation by conceding a substantial raise in student scholarship rates. (...)
High Commissioner Russell later expressed the opinion that the striking students were acting according to Latin and European radical political action. He described the strikes as a petty students’ affair which was being used by disgruntled politicians, the outs, to undermine the Occupation. In fact, Haitian nationalists of all ages were already much exercised over the cancellation of elections and the prospect of Borno’s being foisted upon them for a third term. Opposition agitators and newspapers, of course, made the most of the situation. The Forbes Commission announced to the Hoover Administration, in terms it could believe, that the US occupation was hated by all classes and regions of Haitian society. The agitation that had led to the Cayes Massacre was not a Communist plot, and there was not ambivalence about the presence of marines; they were loathed by all, regardless of political affinity.
Haiti is not the only example of a vocational colony; many, if not most, of the League of Nations mandates were also vocational in character. Typically, the missionary aspect of transforming the country was quite different: few Europeans believed that any of their colonies could be "culturally redeemed" the way American authorities usually thought they were supposed to have done; and the Plato's Republic that US military personnel sought to establish in Haiti was most closely replicated in some of the Japanese possessions of the Pacific (the Caroline Islands). In the case of the Class A Mandates of Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, the vocation was blended with strategic considerations: Syria was to be transformed into a reliable, stable ally of France; Iraq, of the UK. Ruling classes loyal to the colonial powers were to be to be trained as the most progressive elements, natural leaders and accepting of English or French aims.
In all cases, the results were disastrous: the military elites or civil servants could not sustain the sort of ideological enthusiasm, and resentment against the colonial power became all-encompassing.
Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti: The stolid domination of the Occupation, which had for so long effectively controlled Haiti with so little overt resistance, was broken by explosive political and economic forces which converged in the fall of 1929. Economic distress caused by falling coffee prices and increases in government taxes were coupled with discontent over the postponement of the 1930 legislative elections and the apparent continuance of [Louis] Borno as client-president. These factors exacerbated the latent hatred of the Occupation inspired by American racial condescension and boorish military dictation. A poor coffee crop in 1928, the collapse of the coffee market in 1929, and the restriction of migrant labor emigration to Cuba were compounded by the Occupation’s policy of pressing new tax collections. By the fall of 1929, unbeknown to complacent officials and the State Department, popular discontent in Haiti needed only a rallying point to develop into a major uprising against the Occupation. This rallying point was provided by a series of student strikes against the Service Technique [a U.S.-sponsored technical training program].
This culminated in the Cayes Massacre, in which a crowd charged a detachment of marines, who fired at them and killed 12 (?). President Hoover thereafter made it a top priority to end the occupation. He appointed W. Cameron Forbes, a former governor-general of the Philippines, to head a commission of inquiry, and this commission essentially challenged the military commissioner's testimony for the first time in 14 years.
Comments
on this Post:
Interesting remarks that provide quite an historical landscape for present military adventures in the Middle East. [I am still mulling over your use of the term 'vocation' to give this Imperialism some character. My difficulty stems I think from the old-fashionedness of it: one's vocation = one's 'calling' with historical roots in Calvin? So the imperialism is not just for the looting, but for the higher, civilized, (freedom and liberty-loving you say?) and yes 'the doing of God's work' [as it were]. I'm a little distracted by the suspicion that a late 19th century idea of a Nation was closer to what we recognize today as an Empire. That as these political structures evolve, the terms/cocepts to describe them are not as fixed/accurate as one would like.
Posted by: calmo at February 6, 2005 03:20 PMI used to think we were evolving from empires to more decentralized structures, nations, but maybe not, as your writing suggests.
So the imperialism is not just for the looting, but for the higher, civilized, (freedom and liberty-loving you say?) and yes 'the doing of God's work'
Given the belief system and moral system of those involved, certainly. There is a thread in many religious traditions in which the true object of worship is the tribe. In some cases, I've seen this taken to an extreme, where religious strictures against fornication or unlawful violence are subordinated to White Power (e.g., the fanatic in The Dirty Dozen). It's much more common for this to coexist with largely secular traditions, like Plato's vision of an aristocratic republic sustained by huge numbers of slaves per freeman.
I'm a little distracted by the suspicion that a late 19th century idea of a Nation was closer to what we recognize today as an Empire. That as these political structures evolve, the terms/cocepts to describe them are not as fixed/accurate as one would like. I used to think we were evolving from empires to more decentralized structures, nations, but maybe not, as your writing suggests.
This reminds me of when I was working on my "Citizenship in the World" merit badge for the Boy Scouts. The discussion of communications and international community brought up the fact that, in 1900, nearly everyone in the world lived in one of 9 polities. Today, the 22% of the human race that lived in the British Empire is now "dispersed" among 54 countries; the French Empire has shed 18 countries, Russia 16, Ottoman Turkey, 13, and so on.
On the other hand, the British Empire in India included over 500 princely states (home to one-third the population, and of protectorate status); financially, the Indian Empire was treated separately from the UK or the dominions, and within the areas administered from Calcutta, there was a huge zamindar class that extracted tribute for the authorities. Indirect rule was the norm in most of the region, including Nigeria (where the Hausa tribal headmen were effectively made an oligarchy over the entire country), Uganda (where the Buganda Dynasty was built up to resemble a contemporary Balkan despotate), and the numerous protectorates in the Gulf or Zanzibar. Ottoman Turkey governed by delegating as much power as possible to the millets (confessional communities) or to the khedives (hereditary governorates).
The empires also tended to delegate immense authority to commercial enterprises; so that Qejar Persia was effectively governed by the British tobacco monopoly (in the southern provinces) while the majority of Han Chinese lived under the control of European or Japanese trading companies.
Hence, the hisotry of nationalism was often that of the struggle to subordinate commercially-held prerogatives to the nation. In the case of France, this took the form of equating centralization with democracy (a sentiment I confess I respect quite a lot).
Posted by: James R MacLean at February 7, 2005 01:12 AM