The distinctiveness of European imperialism

The remarkable thing about European imperialism is how ancillary it was to European states and societies.

The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson’s Bay, on 7 January 1841.

Imperialism is what states do, and it is what they do, if they can. Imperialism expands a state’s revenue base and access to resources, to the benefit of rulers and officials and those seeking their favour. As soon as there were states, there began to be imperialism. Without some notion of there being some “rightful” limit to a state, an imperial state is just a particularly successful state. Perhaps with some notion of ruling over sufficiently diverse peoples to count as “imperial”.

What is most distinctive about European imperialism is not its success but its ancillary nature. Across human history, in the normal course of imperial expansion, imperial conquest was the central military activity of any imperial state, requiring the application of the bulk, often the overwhelming bulk, of its military forces. Empire becomes the central focus of the state.

What is striking about European imperialism is how much it did not involve the majority of European military forces. On the contrary, it was generally true that the bulk of the military forces of European imperial powers remained within Europe and its environs, facing the much greater threat of other European powers.

The British Indian Army was a very partial exception to this as, except for its officers, it was an Indian force. It was a European-officered and organised Asian army. It is the origin force for the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi armies. Only the Gurkhas transferred to the British Army proper.

The rare occasions when the bulk of the military forces of a European imperial power were deployed outside Europe, it was because they were fighting other Europeans. In the case of Britain, during the American War of Independence and the Boer War. They lost the first because France and other European powers intervened. They won the second because no other European powers intervened. Given the overwhelming dominance of the Royal Navy at the time, none were in a position to.

European imperialism (outside Europe) was an ancillary activity because European states had such organisational (and increasingly) technological dominance. That dominance led to European imperialism being both startlingly successful and being an ancillary activity of European states, even in military terms.

Imbalance in state capacity
The most dramatic example of this huge imbalance in state capacity is the first Opium War (1839–1842). The Qing Emperor ruled over about a third of humanity, and about a third of world GDP. Yet the British state had over four times the income of the Qing central government (who had very little silver reserves), plus the capacity to borrow money, which the Qing government did not.

Chinese forces (numbering over 220,000) were defending their home territory against a British expeditionary force (of 19,000 troops and 37 ships, including only 3 ships of the line) that was a fraction of the British military capacity and yet the Qing forces were crushingly defeated. The British lost 69 killed in battle, plus another 197 prisoners executed (apparently by imperial order) and 87 who died of ill-treatment while in captivity. The Qing forces lost 3,100 killed in battle.

The European state most dependent on empire was the Spanish state due to the importance of American silver for its revenue. Over the longer term, this was not a strength but a weakness, as reliance on silver flows undermined the vitality of Spanish commerce and institutions, so that Spanish economic and institutional capacity increasingly fell behind those of other European states.

Dynamic capacity
As a result of competition between them, in a particular institutional context, European states had become hugely more capable than non-European states and increasing ruled over far more technologically and commercially vibrant societies. Imperialism was a by-product of the increased state capacity arising from dynamics interior to European states, economies and societies. Hence, European states abandoned or retreated from empire and yet their societies continued to become richer. The loss of empire caused remarkably little social or economic stress.

To see the colonial or imperial experience as central to European states, societies or culture is to misunderstand the state-driven nature of imperialism, the reasons for the success of European imperialism, and the dynamics of European societies that generated that imperial success. An imperial success that was as an ancillary derivative of their interactive dynamics within Europe.

This applied even to issues of imperial administration. The structure that the crown of Castile and Aragon used to administer its territories outside Europe was developed from the mechanisms the Kingdom of Aragon had developed to administer its island holdings in the Mediterranean.

Understanding European imperialism requires close attention to patterns and dynamics internal to Europe. Dynamics that were, to a remarkable degree, and despite the feedback of imperial revenues and imperial rivalry, independent of the dynamics of empire outside Europe.

Postcolonial theory, with its tendency to turn the imperial experience into the central reality of Western, well, everything is little more than self-righteous self-indulgence erected on bad history.

[Cross-posted from Medium.]