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Introduction: From colonialism to decolonization

Progressive history

To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.1

With these words on 12 September 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium reached out to fellow Europeans with his project to capture the giant Congo region of West Africa. At a lavish Geographical Conference in his palace in Brussels, the king spoke of how 'pacification bases' would be set up in the Congo river region 'as a means of abolishing the slave trade, establishing peace among the chiefs, and procuring them just and impartial arbitration'.2

To many of those who heard it, this clarion call sounded wonderful. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French developer of the Suez Canal, suggested that Leopold's venture was 'the greatest humanitarian work of this time'.3 British attendees at the conference were greatly impressed and the positive feeling towards Leopold lingered for years. In 1884, the Daily Telegraph glowingly reported, with a nod to the British-American adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, how 'Leopold II . has knit adventurers, traders and missionaries of many races into one band of men, under the most illustrious of modern travellers to carry into the interior of Africa new ideas of law, order, humanity, and protection of the natives'.4

By around 1890, much of the Congo Basin was under Leopold's control. Local people were being killed, mutilated and taken hostage, their villages burned down and their crops destroyed in order to ensure deliveries of rubber and ivory to pay off the king's investment and fund his extravagant lifestyle. The population of the Congo Free State area dropped by an estimated 10 million people between 1880 and the 1920s, due to a combination of mass murder, starvation, exhaustion and exposure to disease and the much reduced birth rate which resulted from these things.5 Leopold's public assertions had sounded great to his audience, but the reality on the ground, once his representatives had got to work, was a nightmare of brutality and despair.

Leopold's Congo is an extreme example of how Europeans and their descendants in America and elsewhere used ideas of progress and civilization to justify colonial expansion and control. Progress, as a belief in change, directed by its believers, remains the animating idea of Western civilization today, including among those movements that are trying to abolish it.

Leopold himself was particularly influenced by the British example, having a personal copy of The Times brought across the Channel daily to keep him abreast of developments. He spoke of how he wanted Belgium to follow in the footsteps of Britain, taking her part in the great work of civilization. There was cynicism behind Leopold's words. But they were well chosen. For these sentiments were held genuinely - if rather naively - by many in Britain and elsewhere. The hero-explorer Dr David Livingstone had moved many with his talk of a worldwide crusade to open up Africa, defeat the powerful Arab-Swahili slave trade and bring in the '3 cs': Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. By that time, the humanitarian movement had become a major force in British public life. Already, in 1807, Britain had passed a law to ban trade in slaves followed by another in 1833 to ban slavery itself within its Empire, accompanied by pressure on others to do the same. It deployed squadrons of warships off the West and East coasts of Africa to intercept slavers, confiscate their ships and return captured slaves.

The push against slavery arose largely out of evangelical religion which merged into a much wider missionary zeal, 'to save . Africa from itself' as the historian Thomas Pakenham has put it.6 The religious impulse to save and convert Africans found itself aligned to a wider, secular notion of bringing civilization and progress to the continent, thereby saving its people from barbarous ways and oppressive rulers. This merging of Christian and progressive standpoints has endured, as has the Western idea of saving Africa and telling Africans how to behave. President Macron of France for example caused a storm in 2017 by referring to the problems the continent faces as 'civilizational' in character, evoking France's colonial 'civilizing mission' on the continent. Previously, Tony Blair had offended many by linking his 'passion for Africa' to its status as an apparent 'scar on the conscience of the world'. The writer Richard Dowden has said of Blair, 'His messianic mission to save Africa was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century missionary zeal that set teeth on edge. It sounded like saving Africa from the Africans.'7 There is another similarity in the way many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in Dowden's words, 'find themselves operating like mini-governments, responsible for everything from providing food aid to employing their own private armies'.8 Back where the NGOs are based and raise their money all the talk is of doing good and saving lives, but on the ground much more earthy political realities often prevail - a very similar dynamic to that of colonial times.

Dr Livingstone was followed by a host of other missionaries and explorers, many inspired more by dreams of wealth and glory than the ideals he passionately held. Pakenham says that the Brits who followed Livingstone 'all conceived of the crusade in terms of romantic nationalism'.9 Their French counterparts shared a similar feeling about extending French civilization to the world. The explicit idea of progress had largely been a French invention: and colonialism was a way to spread it around the world.*

To gain necessary support in circles of power and in public opinion for colonial ventures, the idea that these European countries had an historical mission and destiny to export their superior ways was essential. Of the British experience, the historian Robert Tombs writes of how:

Ideas of Progress had burrowed to the centre of the Victorian world view. The Scottish Enlightenment had already elaborated the idea of successive stages of civilization: from the decline of savage and violent feudalism to the growth of peaceful and civilized 'commercial society', which England seemed to epitomize. Historians wrote a saga of Progress: the Great Men of history, seen by Carlyle as crucial, were to be judged by progressive criteria: 'Were their faces set in the right or wrong direction? . Did they exert themselves to help onward the great movement of the human race, or to stop it?' Central to the 'great movement' was the growth of freedom, associated in England with Protestantism and Parliament, and enshrined in the Whig interpretation of history by writers such as Macaulay.10

He adds:

It was strongly felt to be an obligation to provide leadership and assist the forces of progress, preferably by peaceful means, but by force if necessary against 'barbarity'. The moralizing, missionary aspect of nineteenth-century politics should not be underestimated, despite Cecil Rhodes' cynical quip that empire was philanthropy plus 5 per cent profit.11

Tombs talks of a 'progressive colonialism' which was meant not so much to conquer as to civilize foreign domains, with Christianity, free trade and ending slavery all part of the mix. One of the most prominent imperialists, Lord Curzon, wrote of how, 'In the Empire, we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.'12 There was significant support for this vision of imperialism even on the left of politics, notably from the Fabian Society.

However, the actions and interests of settlers, traders and officials often stood in stark contrast to the noble ideals of pontificators thousands of miles away in Europe. Being on the spot, they were also able to mould the realities and exploit possibilities to impose their will. Rhodes made a fortune in the Kimberley diamond mines and came to dominate Cape Colony politics largely by balancing the interests of British settlers and the white majority Boers of mainly Dutch descent. Exploiting his wealth and power on the ground, Rhodes also succeeded in bending the untrusting British authorities to give him a Royal Charter to move into what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia, exploiting fear of German and Portuguese strategic threats in the area. For Rhodes and his colleagues, land and lucrative mineral concessions were there for the taking. The promise of free trade, which British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone and others regarded as a sort of moral law, proved to be a mere abstraction and irrelevance when set against the interests of those on the spot. In practice, in Africa as elsewhere, progress and civilization often appeared as the assertion of power, backed up by modern weaponry.

In 1883, the pioneer historian of the British Empire John Seeley concluded that imperial expansion was now the 'goal of English history' since constitutional liberty within Britain itself was 'a completed development'. As Tombs points out, a variant of this view became part of the national myth of...