$Unique_ID{how04942}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
Settler Colonies And White Dominions: South Africa}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{british
boers
hawaiian
new
peoples
settlers
south
european
maoris
western}
$Date{1992}
$Log{}
Title:       World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony
Book:        Chapter 30: Industrialization And Imperialism
Author:      Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.
Date:        1992

Settler Colonies And White Dominions: South Africa

     The contested settler colonies that developed in Africa and the Pacific
in the 19th century were in important ways similar to the White Dominions. In
fact, the early history of South Africa, one of the largest of the contested
settler colonies, exhibited interesting comparisons and contrasts with that of
Canada and Australia, the largest of the White Dominions. European settlers
began to move into the southwest corner of South Africa and eastern Canada in
the middle decades of the 17th century, long before the settlement of
Australia got under way in the 1840s. The initial Dutch colony at Cape Town
was established to provide a way station where Dutch merchant ships could take
on water and fresh foods in the middle of their long journey from Europe to
the East Indies. In contrast to Canada, where French fur trappers and
missionaries quickly moved into the interior, the small community of Dutch
settlers stayed near the coast for decades after their arrival. But like the
settlers in Australia, the Boers (or farmers), as the Dutch in South Africa
came to be called, eventually began to move into the vast interior regions of
the continent. Though the settlers in each of the three areas were confronted
by wild, uncharted, and in some ways inhospitable frontier regions, they also
found a temperate climate in which they could grow the crops and raise the
livestock they were accustomed to in Europe. Equally important, they
encountered a disease environment they could withstand.

     The Boers and Australians found the areas into which they moved sparsely
populated. In this respec t their experience was somewhat different from that
of the settlers in Canada, where the Amerindian population, though far from
dense, was organized into powerful tribal confederations. The Boers and
Australians faced much less resistance as they took possession of the lands
once occupied by hunting-and-gathering peoples. The Boer farmers and cattle
ranchers enslaved these peoples, the Khoikhoi, while at the same time
integrating them into their large frontier homesteads. Extensive miscegenation
between the Boers and Khoikhoi in these early centuries of European
colonization produced the sizeable "colored" population that exists in South
Africa today, which is regarded as quite distinct from the black or African
majority. The Australian and Canadian settlers drove the "aborigines" they
encountered into the interior, eventually leaving those who survived their
invasions the uneasy occupants of remote tracts of waste, which were not worth
settling. In both cases, but particularly in Canada, the indigenous population
was also decimated by many of the same diseases that had turned contacts with
the Europeans into a demographic disaster for the rest of the Americas in the
early centuries of expansion.

     Thus, until the first decades of the 19th century, the process of
colonization in South Africa paralleled that in Canada and Australia quite
closely. Small numbers of Europeans had migrated into lands that they
considered "empty" or undeveloped. After driving away or subjugating the
indigenous peoples, the Europeans farmed, mined, and grazed their herds on
these lands, which they claimed as their own. But while the settler societies
in Canada and Australia went on to develop, rather peacefully, into loyal and
largely self-governing dominions of the British empire, the arrival of the
same British overlords in South Africa in the early 19th century sent the
Boers reeling onto a very different historical course. The British captured
Cape Town during the wars precipitated by the French Revolution in the 1790s
when Holland was overrun by France, thus making its colonies subject to
British attack. The British held the colony during the Napoleonic conflicts
that followed and annexed it permanently in 1815 as a vital link on the route
to India.

     Made up mainly of people of Dutch and French Protestant descent, the Boer
community differed from the British newcomers in almost every way possible.
The Boers spoke a different language, and they lived mostly in isolated rural
homesteads that had missed the scientific, industrial, and urban revolutions
that had transformed British society and attitudes. Most critically, the
Evangelical missionaries who entered South Africa under the protection of the
new British overlords were deeply committed to eradicating slavery. They made
no exception for the domestic pattern of enslavement that had developed in
Boer homesteads and communities. By the 1830s missionary pressure and
increasing British interference in their lives drove a handful of Boers to
open, but futile, rebellion, and drove many of the remaining Boers to flee the
Cape Colony.

     In the decades of the Great Trek that followed, tens of thousands of Boer
farmers migrated in covered wagons pulled by oxen, first east across the Great
Fish River and then over the mountains into the veld, or rolling, grassy
plains that make up much of the South African interior. In these areas, the
Boers collided head-on with populous, militarily powerful, and well-organized
African states built by Bantu peoples such as the Zulus and the Xhosa.
Throughout the middle decades of the 19th century, the migrating Boers clashed
again and again with the Bantu peoples, who were determined to resist the
seizure of the lands where they pastured their great herds of cattle and grew
subsistence foods. The British in effect followed the Boer pioneers along the
southern and eastern coast, eventually establishing a second major outpost at
Durban in Natal. Tensions between Boers and Britain remained high, but the
British were often drawn into the frontier wars against the Bantu peoples,
even though they were not always formally allied to the Boers.

     In the early 1850s the hard-liners among the Boers established two
republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, in the interior, which
they sought to keep free of British influence. For over a decade they managed
to keep the British out of their affairs. But when diamonds were discovered in
the Orange Free State in 1867, British entrepreneurs, such as Cecil Rhodes,
and prospectors began to move in, and tensions between Boers and British began
to build anew. In 1880 and 1881, these tensions led to a brief war in which
the Boers were victorious. The tide of British immigration into the republics,
however, rose even higher after gold was discovered in the Transvaal in 1885.

     Though the British had pretty much left the Boers to deal with the
African peoples who lived in the republics as they pleased, British migrants
and financiers grew more and more resentful of Boer efforts to limit their
numbers and curb their civil rights. British efforts to protect the settlers
and bring the feisty and independent Boers into line led to the republics'
declaration of war against the British in late 1899, and Boer attacks on
British bases in Natal, the Cape Colony, and elsewhere. The Boer War that
resulted raged until 1902 and began the process of decolonization for the
European settlers of South Africa, while at the same time it opened the way
for their dominance over the African majority.

Pacific Tragedies

     The territories the Europeans, Americans, and Japanese claimed throughout
the South Pacific in the 19th century were in some cases outposts of true
empire, in others contested settler colonies. In both situations, however, the
coming of colonial rule resulted in demographic disasters and social
disruptions of a magnitude that had not been seen since the first century of
European expansion into the Americas. Like the Amerindian peoples of the New
World, the peoples of the South Pacific had long lived in isolation. This
meant that like the Amerindians they had no immunities to many of the diseases
European explorers and later merchants, missionaries, and settlers carried to
their island homes from the 1760s onward. In addition, their cultures were
extremely vulnerable to the corrosive effects of outside influences, such as
new religions, different sexual mores, more lethal weapons, and sudden
influxes of cheap consumer goods. Thus, whatever the intentions of the
incoming Europeans and Americans - and they were by no means always benevolent
- their contacts with the peoples of the Pacific islands almost invariably
ushered in periods of social disintegration and widespread human suffering.

     Of the many cases of contact between the expansive peoples of the West
and the long isolated island cultures of the South Pacific, the confrontations
in New Zealand and Hawaii are among the most informative. As we saw in
Chapters 10 and 21, quite sophisticated cultures and fairly complex societies
had developed in each of these areas. In addition, the two island groups
contained, at the time of the European explorers' arrivals, some of the
largest concentrations of population in the whole Pacific region. Both areas
were subjected to European influences carried by a variety of agents from
whalers and merchants to missionaries and colonial administrators. After the
first decades of contact, the peoples of both New Zealand and Hawaii
experienced a period of crisis so severe that their continued survival was in
doubt. In both cases, however, the threatened peoples and cultures rebounded
and found enduring solutions to the challenges from overseas that combined
accommodation to outside influences and revivals of traditional beliefs and
practices.

New Zealand.

     The Maoris of New Zealand actually went through two periods of profound
disruption and danger. The first began in the 1790s when timber merchants and
whalers established small settlements on the New Zealand coast. Maoris living
near these settlements were afflicted with alcoholism and the spread of
prostitution. In addition, they traded wood and food for European firearms
that soon revolutionized Maori warfare - in part by rendering it much more
deadly - and upset the existing balance among different tribal groups. Even
more devastating was the impact of diseases, such as smallpox, tuberculosis,
and even the common cold, that ravaged Maori communities throughout the north
island. By the 1840s only eighty to ninety thousand Maoris remained of a
population that had been as high as 130,000 less than a century earlier. But
the Maoris survived these calamities and began to adjust to the imports of the
foreigners. They took up farming with European implements, and grazed cattle
purchased from European traders. They cut timber, built windmills, and traded
extensively with the merchants who frequented their shores. Many even
converted to Christianity, which the missionaries began to proselytize after
their first station was established in 1814, though observers noted the
Maoris' continuing adherence to their old beliefs and rituals.

     The arrival of British farmers and herders in search of land in the early
1850s and the British decision to claim the islands as part of their global
empire, again plunged the Maoris into misery and despair. Backed by the
military clout of the colonial government, the settlers occupied some of the
most fertile areas of the north island. The warlike Maori fought back,
sometimes with temporary successes, but they were steadily driven back into
the interior of the island. In desperation in the 1860s and 1870s, they
flocked to religious prophets who promised them magical charms and
supernatural assistance in their efforts to drive out the invaders. When the
prophets also failed them, the Maoris seemed for a time to face extinction. In
fact, some British writers, heavily influenced by the work of "social
Darwinists," such as Herbert Spencer, predicted that within generations the
Maoris, like the Arawaks and Tasmanians before them, would die out.

     The Maoris displayed surprising resilience. As they built up immunities
to new diseases, they also learned to use European laws and political
institutions to defend themselves and preserve what was left of their
ancestral lands. Because the British had in effect turned the internal
administration of the islands over to the settlers' representatives, the
Maoris' main struggle was with the invaders who had come to stay. Western
schooling and a growing ability to win British colonial officials over to
their point of view eventually enabled the Maoris to hold their own in their
ongoing legal contests and daily exchanges with the settlers. A multiracial
society has now evolved in which there is a reasonable level of European and
Maori accommodation and interaction, and which has allowed the Maori to
preserve much of value in their traditional culture.

Hawaii.

     The conversion of Hawaii to settler colony status followed familiar basic
imperialist patterns, but with a number of specific twists. Hawaii did not
become a colony until the United States proclaimed annexation in 1898, though
an overzealous British official had briefly declared the islands for his
nation in 1843. Hawaii came under increasing Western influence, however, from
the late 18th century onward - politically at the hands of the British,
culturally and economically from the United Stares whose westward surge
quickly spilled into the Pacific Ocean.

     While very occasional contact with Spanish ships during the 16th and 17th
centuries is probable, Hawaii was effectively opened to the West through the
voyages of Captain James Cook from 1777 to 1779. Cook was first welcomed as a
god, partly because he had the good luck to land during a sacred period when
war was forbidden. A later and less well-timed visit brought Cook's death, as
Hawaiian warriors sought to take over his ship with its metal nails, much
prized by a people whose elaborate culture rested on a Neolithic technology.
Cook and later British expeditions convinced a young Hawaiian prince,
Kamehameha, that some imitation of Western ways could produce a unified
kingdom under his leadership, replacing the small and warring regional units
that had previously prevailed. A series of vigorous wars, backed by British
weapons and advisors, won Kamehameha his kingdom between 1794 and 1810. The
new king and his successors promoted economic change, encouraging Western
merchants to establish export trade in Hawaiian goods in return for increasing
revenues to the royal treasury.

     Hawaiian royalty began to imitate Western habits, in some cases traveling
to Britain and often building Western-style palaces. Two powerful queens
advanced the process of change by insisting that traditional taboos
subordinating women be abandoned. In this context vigorous missionary efforts
from Protestant New England, beginning in 1819, brought extensive conversions
to Christianity. As with other conversion processes, religious change had wide
implications. Missionaries railed against traditional Hawaiian costumes,
insisting that women cover their breasts, and a new garment, the muumuu, was
fashioned from homespun American nightgowns with the sleeves cut off. Backed
by the Hawaiian monarchy, missionaries also quickly established an extensive
school system, by 1831 serving 50,000 students from a culture that had not
previously developed writing.

     The combination of Hawaiian interest and Western intrusion produced
creative political and cultural changes, though inevitably at the expense of
previous values. Demographic and economic trends had more insidious effects.
Western-imported disease, particularly venereal disease and tuberculosis, had
the usual tragic consequences for a previously isolated people: By 1850 only
about 80,000 Hawaiians remained of a prior population of about half a million.
Westerners more consciously exploited the Hawaiian economy. Whalers helped
create raucous seaport towns. Western settlers from various countries (called
haoles by the Hawaiians) experimented with potential commercial crops, soon
concentrating particularly on sugar. Many missionary families turned to
leasing land or buying it outright, impatient with the subsistence habits of
Hawaiian commoners. They did not entirely forget their religious motives -
among other things, many American missionaries had a strong antislavery
background and shunned the most intense forms of exploitation; but it remained
true that many families who came to Hawaii to do good ended by doing well.

     Western businesses were mainly encouraged by the Hawaiian monarchy, eager
for revenues and impressed by the West's military power. In 1848 an edict
called the Great Mahele imposed Western concepts of property on Hawaiian land
that had previously been shared by commoners and aristocrats. Most of the
newly defined private property went to the king and the nobles, who gradually
sold most of it to investors from the West. As sugar estates spread,
increasing numbers of Americans moved in to take up other commercial and
professional positions - hence an increasingly "settler" pattern even in a
technically independent state. Given Hawaiian population decline, it was also
necessary to import Asian workers to staff the estates. The first Chinese
contract workers were actually brought in before 1800, and after 1868 a larger
current of Japanese swelled the immigrant throng.

     Literal imperialism came as an anticlimax. The abilities of Hawaiian
kings declined after 1872, in one case because of problems of disease and
alcoholism. Under a weakened state, powerful planter interests pressed for
special treaties with the United States that would promote their sugar
exports, and the American government claimed naval rights at the Pearl Harbor
base by 1887. As the last Hawaiian monarchs turned increasingly to the
promotion of culture, writing a number of lasting Hawaiian songs but also
spending considerable money on luxurious appointments, American planters
concluded that their economic interests required outright United States
control. An "annexation committee" persuaded American naval officers to
"protect American lives and property" by posting troops around Honolulu in
1893, and the monarchy was disbanded. An imperial-minded United States
Congress obligingly took over the islands in 1898.

     As in New Zealand, Western control combined with considerable respect for
Polynesian culture. Americans in Hawaii did not apply the same degree of
racism that had described earlier relations with North American Indians or
with African slaves. Hawaii's status as a settler colony was further
complicated by the arrival of so many Asian immigrants. Nevertheless, Western
cultural and particularly economic influence extended steadily, and the
ultimate political seizure merely ratified the colonization of the islands.