Re: Age Of Empires - Warlords Ii
Sandrine Willert
The First World War saw the colonial empires of France and Britain mobilised to aid European and imperial war efforts. This mobilisation and the difficulties of demobilisation placed considerable strain on imperial systems which were only partly addressed through post-war reforms. The Great War also unleashed an unprecedented ideological challenge to colonial rule embodied in the ideas of Woodrow Wilson which took form through the mandatory system. Although there were some restrictions placed on the activities of the colonial powers, both Britain and France maintained their imperial rule, often violently suppressing anti-colonial nationalist challenges.
One way of examining this post-war transition is to focus in on the confusion of the aftermath of the conflict, to highlight the violence and dislocation over attempts at imposing order and cohesion. This is a methodology that has been well-developed for the upheavals experienced between 1917 and 1923 in the European dynastic empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans.[5] In central and eastern Europe, competing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces stepped into the power vacuums left by the collapse of these imperial regimes. Within the extra-European colonial world during the Great War and its aftermath, with the exception of the Middle East, comparable power vacuums were relatively infrequent. When they did occur they were rapidly filled by competing imperial powers. In the colonies of Togoland and the Cameroons for instance, German colonial administration was replaced by French and British rule during the first half of the war.[6] In many other parts of the colonial world, the First World War offered little opportunity for a change in the colonial regime. Crucial French possessions, such as Algeria and Indochina, or the key elements in the British world system, India, Egypt and the white settler Dominions, remained unchanged at the end of the war.
For Portugal the war was an imperial disaster. Both Angola and Mozambique experienced numerous anti-colonial rebellions, fuelled in part by German military incursions. The use of local auxiliaries to suppress rebel movements only served to increase the fragility of the Portuguese Empire in Africa and exacerbate inter-ethnic tensions and rivalries.[8] Despite the chaos of the wartime experience for both the Italian and Portuguese Empires, their decision to join the Entente cause ensured that they ultimately emerged from the war with their empires intact. Moreover, numerous colonialist politicians in both states, notably the Italian Foreign Minister Gaspare Colosimo (1859-1944) and Portuguese Prime Minister Afonso Costa (1871-1937), saw the war as an opportunity to promote their respective imperial causes, although with varying degrees of success.
At the heart of the story of the French and British colonial empires in the aftermath of the First World War is the question of whether the conflict marked a shift towards decolonisation. 1914-1918 can be seen as paralleling, or anticipating, the events that would follow thirty years later when the Second World War invigorated a series of anti-colonial nationalist movements that would ultimately pull down the imperial edifice by the mid-1960s.[10] The changes in sovereignty inherent in decolonisation, as well as the related alterations in social, cultural and economic norms associated with the collapse of colonial regimes, had their roots in the events of 1917-1918. The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 seemingly heralded a new age in which imperial rule could no longer survive as oppressed subject populations mobilised politically. Woodrow Wilson's (1856-1924) Fourteen Points Speech in January 1918 pushed the idea of an altered international framework even further.[11] He was clear that America would not accept an annexationist peace at the end of hostilities, one in which the colonial powers would merely reshuffle the imperial deck. Instead, national self-determination became the guiding principle. By November 1918, the dominance of Wilsonian and Bolshevik thinking on an end to imperial aggrandisement had even resulted in an Anglo-French declaration that self-determination should be applied to the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire. The world of autumn 1918 was one which felt very unsafe, particularly in ideological respects, for the colonial empires, both victorious and defeated.
It was not only colonial soldiers who contributed to the French and British imperial war efforts. As important were the large numbers of civilian labourers recruited to work in French factories, maintain the lines of communication and run the array of support services that modern armies required to wage a "total war" on the Western Front. Nearly 50,000 Indochinese workers served alongside 35,000 Moroccans, 18,500 Tunisians and 76,000 Algerians. Britain deployed 215,000 labourers from the colonial world to Europe, including over 31,000 black South Africans and 92,000 Chinese workers.[23] The First World War was not only a moment of military upheaval but one of mass migration, with labouring populations flowing around the world to meet wartime demand. This was a process highly disruptive to colonial economies, particularly those based on manpower-intensive agrarian production.
In Senegal, the problems facing returning soldiers were not just economic. The colony was in crisis due to outbreaks of bubonic plague in most major urban centres during 1919 which killed at least 700 in Dakar and over 430 in Rufisque. Attempts by the colonial authorities to contain the problem were sluggish. Urban clearance and the isolation of infected individuals in quarantine hostels caused widespread local anger. In rural areas, vaccination schemes and the disposal of the dead ignored local customs, traditional medicine, religious practices and funeral rites. The colonial state appeared to be destroying indigenous society while at the same time professing to save it.
The same story of restricted rights and limited reforms was evident in North Africa. Muslim voters in Algeria formed a separate electoral college and could only vote for their representatives. The settler community retained its political dominance despite its numerical inferiority. Although new electors were exempt from the provisions of the indignat, they remained subject to the jurisdiction of special criminal courts. The fundamental iniquity of colonial rule remained: Muslim Algerians were still denied any representation in Paris. Again, the opportunities for gaining French citizenship appeared to be illusory as access to such status was conditional on Algerians revoking their Muslim identity. This served to deter all but 1,700 Algerians from seeking to become citizens between 1919 and 1936.[31]
The comparison of French West and North Africa with British India implied above is somewhat unfair, suggesting that the best traditions of the British Empire as a liberal reforming force were applied universally after the First World War.[32] In many respects, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were an aberration born of British weakness in the face of the growing mass political strength of the Indian National Congress. Such reforms were not applied more widely across the British Empire, with territories in Africa run with as little regard for the local population as those of the French. Colonial reform was thus a chimerical notion for many subjects of the British and French Empires.
Reform of the colonial system after the Great War was not solely a product of the "benevolence" of imperial rulers. It was, in some respects, forced upon Britain and France by the shifting nature of international relations, most notably the rise of Wilsonian ideals of internationalism embodied most prominently in the League of Nations. One of the key areas of the peace settlements that pertained to the colonial world was the question of how to deal with the former German and Ottoman imperial territories. Wilson led the charge for a peace that was without annexations and which would see colonial claims dealt with in a transparent manner. This was a direct challenge to the great power division of the colonial world that had dominated for much of the nineteenth century. Britain and France were equally clear that the newly occupied colonies would not be returned to their defeated former colonial masters. In presentations at the peace conference both argued that the insertion of some form of international regime as a colonial steward would be certain to fail.[33] The solution was the creation of the mandate system by which these colonial territories and populations were to be administered by the colonial powers on the principle that "the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization." This bond of trusteeship would be monitored by the League of Nations to whom the mandatory powers were required to make annual reports and which instituted the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) as an oversight body.
The establishment of the mandate system as a functioning element within the colonial division of the world, the enshrining of the principle of trusteeship in the League of Nations charter, and the role of the PMC as a check on the actions of the mandatory powers appeared to indicate a clear shift in international relations. Supporters of the League saw the mandates as a progression from discredited 19th century forms of imperial rule, benevolent in intent and, crucially, intended to be of limited duration. Critics, in the interwar years and since, often labelled the mandatory system as little more than a faade for imperial rule, providing it with a degree of international acceptability but in reality changing little for subject peoples. Yet as Susan Pedersen has argued, it is very difficult to generalise about the administration of the mandates, as there was a great deal of variation in the manner in which individual territories, even those supposedly of the same category, were administered.
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