Carolyn Brown: Okay, let us begin.
My name is Carolyn Brown, I'm director of the Office
of Scholarly Programs and the John W. Kluge Center here
at the Library of Congress.
And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon
for a wonderful lecture by Professor William Roger Louis on the end
of European colonial empires.
Today's lecture is presented jointly by the National History Center
and the John W. Kluge Center.
And let me say a word about both of these.
The National History Center promotes research, teaching and learning
in all fields of history.
It was created by the American Historical Association in 2002
as a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching of history,
as well as to the advancement of historical knowledge in government,
in business, and for the public at large.
For more information, you can go to the
[ National History ]
Center's Web page, which is easy to remember;
it's www.nationalhistorycenter.org.
I would also note that our lecturer today, Dr. Louis,
is one of the key visionaries
who conceived the National History Center, and its founding director.
The Kluge Center, which is our space here, is cosponsoring this lecture.
It promotes advanced research in the collections
of the Library of Congress.
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the
[ John W. Kluge ]   Center was established in 2000.

The   [ John W. Kluge ]

Center supports financially some of the world's most senior scholars,
and the most promising fellows to conduct research here at the Library
[ of Congress ]
. We also sponsor lectures such as this one,
seminars and small conferences.
And you can find more information about the fellowship opportunities
and other programs at the Library's Web page --
also a predictable Web site, www.loc.gov.
Roger Louis is the Kerr Professor of English, History and Culture
at the University of Texas, where he is also a professor
in the Middle Eastern Studies Department.
Dr. Louis is the author or editor of approximately 30 books,
including the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire.
His most recent book, which is a collection of essays entitled "Ends
of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez,
and Decolonization," was published last year.
Dr. Louis is also chairman
of the U.S. State Department's Historical Advisory Committee --
a heartening body for many of us who didn't know they had such a group --
past president of the American Historical Association
and a special friend of the Library.
He serves on the Library's Scholar's Council, which advises the Library
about matters associated with scholarship and academia.
Dr. Louis is the inspiration behind the current "Seminar
on Decolonization" that's being hosted here at the Kluge Center.
It started on Monday and is being funded through a generous gift
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
I should say it's not just a matter of his inspiration, however;
he's also rolled up his sleeves
and is doing the hard work of leading the seminar.
And we're delighted to welcome many
of the participants here this afternoon,
and are particularly appreciative that Dr. Louis is willing
to share his knowledge and insights for this more public audience.
So, please -- we have a real, I believe,
exciting and inspiring talk.   Please welcome Roger Louis.

[ applause ]
Roger Louis: Thank you, Carolyn, for that very gracious introduction.
Welcome to the "Seminar on Decolonization,"
welcome to the 15 historians at the beginning of their careers,
who for the next month will be pursuing their research here
at the Library of Congress.
Decolonization is the phrase we use to denote the disengagement
of the European colonial powers from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean,
but whether the colonies actually became truly independent
or not is a different question.
What I'll be doing this afternoon is giving you the background
of the now distant age of European colonial rule.
I will look briefly at the major European powers, the Spanish as well
as the British, the Dutch as well as the German, and the Belgian
and the Italian as well as the French.
Now, this is an ambitious agenda,
but I think the subject can be made comprehensible by beginning
with the British view at the start of the 20th century,
a little over 800 years ago.
In the British and other cases, I'll pursue the argument
of the colonial state in its Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British,
French, Italian and Belgian incarnation,
and as it was subsequently known, the postcolonial state.
In the early 20th century, colonial empires were associated with ideas
of national greatness, competitiveness
and the survival of the fittest.
The colors painted on maps over vast areas of Asia
and Africa symbolized national power, prestige and destiny.
Could I have map one, please, Sadear   [ spelled phonetically ]

? Colonies seem to enrich national character
and to encapsulate national glory.
The natives -- as the inhabitants of much of the rest
of the world were then called -- were to be civilized,
while the raw materials and other resources
of the colonies would benefit the economy of the metropolitan country.
But this popular view was not entirely optimistic
or well-intended.
Technological advance made it easy to believe
in human progress throughout the world,
yet at the same time humanity seemed trapped in an evolutionary struggle.
Only the fittest nations and the fittest empires would survive.
Great powers should possess great empires, if necessary,
at the expense of lesser empires.
Before 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary,
spoke of Portuguese colonies as "sinks of iniquity" or "dens
of evil," and thought it would be merely a matter of time
until they were partitioned between Germany and Britain.
The possessions of the weaker colonial powers would be absorbed
by the stronger just as the territories of the dying nations
of Turkey and China would be annexed by more virile European nations.
The drive for empire contributed to a spirit of ruthless militarism.
It is thus ironic that the Portuguese, regarded at the time
by everyone as the weakest of the European powers,
virtually outlasted them all.
Future historians writing 800 years from now, when the general interest
in the details of the European empires may have faded even more
than today, will continue to record the phantasmagoric significance
attached to colonies in the years before 1914.
They will also note the frenzied energy of the explorers,
adventurers, soldiers, missionaries, traders and administrators who,
for better or worse, tangibly extended European influence
and affected the lives of non-Europeans throughout the world.
Docks, roads, railways, plantations and mines spread everywhere,
at the same time that Western goods
and money penetrated non-European societies.
The beginning of the century in that sense represented a Rubicon
from which there could be no return.
Indigenous societies would never be allowed
to continue their own natural evolution.
They would be modernized and in some cases assimilated.
Imperialism would be the engine of social and economic change.
Now each nation possessed colonial empires large and small,
and not only believed in the necessity of empire,
but each also possessed a sense of superiority as a governing race,
and each possessed a divine mission to civilize the non-European world.
This was perhaps a rationalization,
but it also became a galvanizing force --
the ethic of empire created its own dynamic.
Rudyard Kipling wrote of the British mission, "To us,
to us and not to others, a certain definite duty has been assigned,
to carry light and civilization into the dark places of the world,
to touch the mind of Asia and Africa with the ethical ideas of Europe,
to give thronging millions who otherwise would never know peace
or security these first conditions of human advance."
In a similar vein, the most eloquent of British proconsuls, Lord Curzon,
wrote of the British Empire as the "greatest instrument for good
that the world has ever known."
Now, the creation of the modern European empires was the work
of a single generation whose lifetime extended
from the last decades of the 19th century
through the period of the First World War.
The antecedents, of course, were historic.
Fundamentally, the empires were the product of the Industrial Revolution
and Europe's consequent lead over the rest of the world in technology
and weapons, though this looks quite different as seen, for example,
through Chinese or Arab eyes.
Europe, in any case, became a powerhouse generating trade
and commerce.
In the last decades of the 20th century and until 1914,
Europe expanded more rapidly than at any other time.
By 1914, European sway encompassed some 85 percent
of the world's surface.
The British Empire alone extended over one-fourth of the globe
and over one-fourth of its population.
The revolution in medicine as well as technology enabled explorers
to penetrate into the African interior,
and allowed Christian missionaries
to establish stations throughout the tropics.
The Western advance appeared to be irreversible.
Let me place this first in a British context.
The British Empire was distinct,
among other reasons, because of India.
And could I have map two, please, Sadear?
India, an empire in its own right,
extended over 1,270,000 square miles.
Now, Texas is only 270 square miles,
so India was 270 square miles plus one million square miles,
and possessed a population of some 300 million.
But here is the astonishing figure.   Only 1,000 British civilian officers

of the Indian Civil Service ruled India.
Think of that for a moment; 1,000 civilians ruling a population
of 300 million, all for a continent virtually the size of Europe.
The civilian officers were backed up of course by the Indian Army
and the British Navy, but nevertheless,
this is an astonishing statistic.
And the British Indian Empire, though the largest component,
was only one part of a gigantic empire stretching the world over.
I now begin with my tour of the European colonial empires.
And could we return, please, to map one?
I start with the smallest of the colonial empires
in the 20th century, the Spanish.
The loss in 1898 of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines
to the United States, and the Pacific Islands to Germany,
reduced the Spanish Empire mainly to the Spanish Sahara, a protectorate
and part of Morocco, and Spanish Guinea in equatorial Africa.
You may have to stretch your imagination to see Rio de Oro
in the northwestern part of the continent, near Morocco.
Now, the tradition of the old Spanish colonial empire nevertheless
continued to be significant.
It was authoritarian, legalistic and paternalistic; the forerunner
of the 20th century colonial state.   Of the lasting Spanish legacies,

perhaps the most remarkable was the assimilation of the Filipinos
to Catholicism and the Spanish way of life.
The effective colonizers were not the Spanish sea captains
and conquistadors, but the friars and monks who built churches
and created parishes and schools.
The class structure of the Spanish era remained intact, and the system
of patronage continued into the era of independence.
I want to mention the case of Spanish Sahara
because it remains controversial, and recent work has argued
that it has never been decolonized, but merely taken over
or usurped as part of Morocco.
Now, since I mentioned the takeover of the Spanish Empire
by the United States, let me say that the territorial possessions
of the United States, and for that matter the empire
of the Soviet Union, are beyond the scope of my comments this afternoon.
But it is useful to bear in mind at the same time
that the European colonial empires were expanding into Africa
and the Pacific -- in this case at the expense of Spain --
the United States established a comparable empire on the remnant
of the Spanish possessions.
And Russia continued to expand and consolidate a huge land empire
in central Asia, which by the turn
of the century had completed a vast railway network linking Siberia
with Vladivostok, the major Russian port on the Pacific.
The colonial domain of the United States included Guam as well
as the Philippines, and Puerto Rico as well as the Virgin Islands,
which were purchased from Denmark in 1917.
But the United States never described these colonial possessions
as colonies, but as territories
because of the American revolutionary
and anti-imperial heritage.   The acquisition of colonies in all

but name caused ideological embarrassment.
The United States and the Soviet Union were in this respect similar;
both consistently demonstrated an anticolonial empire,
though both had colonial empires of their own.
Now, to contemporaries observing the fate of the Spanish Empire,
much of which was taken over by the United States, it seemed inevitable
that the weak had given way to the strong.
No one anticipated that the lifespan
of the great colonial empires would be relatively short.
The preponderant view at the turn of the 20th century held
that the new empires would last for at least a thousand years.
Yet within a hundred years of what the Spanish called the "catastrophe"
in 1898, even the empire of the Soviet Union had collapsed
at the end of the last century.
Now, let me begin to elaborate the argument that I am presenting,
so far implicit -- and I now want to make it explicit.
So here it is.
It concerns what one writer has called the "mythological beast
of the colonial state," referred to by earlier writers
such as J. S. Furnival as the "colonial Leviathan"
which possessed certain qualities of the European states.
The colonial regimes, known collectively as the colonial state,
were nascent sovereign units.
The colonial state collected taxes and defended frontiers.
Its character varied slightly from French to British,
from Dutch to Portuguese and Belgian.
With few exceptions, each colonial regime attempted
to become economically self-sufficient.
In the stage of military conquest, which lasted roughly up to 1914,
the colonial state conscripted labor in such projects as road building
and railway construction to create the basis
for self-sustaining flows of revenue.
At its high point in the interwar years,
the colonial state reached the extent of the police in the degree
of productivity, while it encouraged indispensable collaboration
of indigenous regimes, soldiers, clerks,
traders and later journalists.   The last stage after World War II,

the collaborators increasingly became nationalists
who used Western languages to define their own ambitions as well
as national identities, and to wrest political control
from the Europeans.
The legacy of the colonial state helps to explain the nature
of the 52 sovereign states, including Idi Amin in Uganda,
Bokassa's Central African Republic, and Mobutu's Zaire.
Now, this is a theme to which I'll return, but now I progress
on to the other European empires.   The German Empire, map three --


the German Empire was the shortest lived.
It was extinguished in 1919.
Most of it was concentrated in Africa.
The size of German East Africa was nearly double
that of imperial Germany.
The other German colonies included southwest Africa,
the Cameroons in Togoland,
and in the Pacific the Germans possessed German New Guinea,
otherwise known as Kaiser Wilhelm's Land.
Germany also occupied lesser territories in Asia and the Pacific,
including Kol Chai in China, the Bismarck archipelago,
part of the Samoan group, and the Caroline, Mariana
and Marshall Islands north of the equator.
For German settlers in the 20th century,
only a few regions attracted settlers.
Texas, for example, was much preferred over Togoland.
Despite the brutal suppression of a revolt in southwest Africa in 1904
and 1907, and an uprising in German East Africa in 1905,
the Germans were no more, but no less, barbaric than the French
in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Belgians
in the Congo before 1908.
And this theme connects with recent work by Caroline Elkins
and David Anderson on the theme of genocide
in Kenya, if genocide it was.
And a common fallacy about the German colonial empire held
that colonies were vital to Germany's economic prosperity.
Far from being an asset, however,
all of the German colonies before 1914 except the smallest --
Togoland, which was productive in cocoa
and rubber -- required subsidies.   German financiers as well

as immigrants demonstrated a distinct preference
for Eastern Europe and the Americas, rather than the colonies.
There has been, I mention in passing, significant recent work
on the German colonies, not least an excellent book
in the Historical Monograph Series.
Now, the German Empire was a casualty of the First World War.
In 1919 Germany lost her place in the sun,
and with it an unprofitable empire.
In the 1930s it seemed possible that some
of the colonies might be restored, or other territory in Africa ceded
to Germany at the expense of Belgium and Portugal.
It remains debatable how the social engineering
of the Third Reich might have affected black Africa, and whether
or not the Holocaust might have taken a slightly different direction
with places such as East Africa available, as the Nazis called it,
as a dumping ground for Jews and Gypsies.
The only thing that can be said with certainty is that after 1945,
the Germans were spared the trauma of decolonization.

During the First World War, Britain and France emerged
as major Middle Eastern powers,
and increased their colonial domains in Africa.
But the public mood began to change.
The European powers now paid lip service at least to the idea
that colonies should be held in trust
until the native peoples could stand on their own.
Now, Germany not only lost her colonies,
but through British propaganda unjustly acquired the reputation
of a barbarous power unfit to govern native peoples.
The German colonies were overrun by the British with the help
of Indian troops, and by French, Belgians, South Africans,
Australians, New Zealanders and Japanese during the First World War.
The Ottoman Empire was dismantled by the British and the French,
and to a lesser degree by the Italians.
The smaller colonial empires of the Dutch, the Belgians,
and the Portuguese remained intact.
So, also, did the larger empires of France and Britain,
but for the transcendent reason
that Britain happened to be the ally of Japan.
Japan's policing of the eastern seas during the First World War enabled
the British fleet to concentrate on European waters,
and therefore contributed to Allied victory
and the maintenance of the Allied empires.
But Japan had defeated China in 1884-95 and Russia in 1904-1905.
Japan then annexed Korea in 1910,
thus gate-crashing the white man's club of imperial domination.
Could we have map four, Japan in China?

During the First World War, Japanese influence increased both
in China and in the Pacific.   In 1919, the German islands north

of the equator became Japanese mandated territories.
And could we shift to map five, please, Sadear?
As in Germany -- right.
As in Germany in the 1930s, there emerged in Japan the doctrine
that markets and raw materials were necessary for survival.
After 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria,
to the south the greater coal prosperity spear during the Second
World War aimed to secure Japanese economic
and political hegemony in Southeast Asia.
In the early part of the war, the Japanese conquest
of the Philippines, Malaya and the East Indies, as well as control
of Indochina, demonstrated the vulnerability
of the Western regimes in Asia.
Now, had Japan emerged victorious from the Second World War,
Southeast Asia might have become part of an autarchic
or self-sufficient economic bloc not dissimilar from what the British had
in mind with the sterling area.
The islands north of the equator would probably have been swamped
with Japanese immigrants, and might have been assimilated
as an outlying territory of Japan.
As it transpired, the Japanese left very little legacy in Micronesia,
and no tradition of language or education, no statues or parks.
The most enduring feature of Japan's colonial experience was the profound
bitterness of the Koreans.
This is, however, a provisional judgment,
because I have become aware during recent visits to Japan
that there are major research projects being conducted
by Japanese historians on the Japanese colonial empire,
and especially on the enduring and bitter legacy in China.
In any event, after 1945 the loss of colonial possessions demonstrated
that Japan, like Germany, did not need a place
in the sun to recover economically.
Now, the Italian Empire was another casualty of the Second World War.
Could we have map six, please Sadear?
At the turn of the century, at the turn of the 20th century,
Ethiopia had not only remained free from European control,
but had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Italians
at the Battle of Adowa in 1896.
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935-1936 aimed explicitly
at revenge as well as the establishment
of a neo-Roman Empire in East Africa.
Italy's domain in East Africa included Eritrea,
with some 5,000 Italians, and Italian Somaliland,
one and three-quarters the size of Italy itself,
with Somaliland including some 1,500 Italian settlers.
Now, the numbers of Italians are significant because of the obsession
with what was called "excess population"
that characterized Italian public attitudes of the 1930s.
The principle outlet for immigration was Libya, which Italy had won
by conquest from Turkey in 1911.
In the interwar years, Libya became Italy's for sure,
and in 1938 had an Italian population of about 100,000;
a figure that bears comparison with the 20,000 whites in Kenya
and the 400,000 Jews in Palestine,
and nearly a million Europeans in Algeria.
Libya under Italian rule became one
of the most urbanized countries of North Africa.
The Italian fascist government built extensive harbors and roads,
but resettled the local Muslim nomads nearer the desert,
thereby reducing their numbers drastically, perhaps by half.
These projects were pursued for the greater glory
of the Italian fascist state, but to the end they were a drain
on the Italian budget and devastating
to the indigenous populations.
The Second World War destroyed another colonial system
of much greater substance and longevity.
Could we have map seven?   The Dutch East Indies.

The Dutch had held colonies since the 17th century.
In the West Indies, the colonial possessions included Surinam.
In the East Indies, in the vast Indonesian archipelago
of 13,000 islands extending well over 3,000 miles from east to west,
the Dutch had developed a colonial economy producing tobacco, tea,
coffee, sugar, copra, tin, coal, rubber and oil.
In neither the late 19th century nor the First World War did the Dutch
expand territorially.
The Dutch Empire's scope remained the same
in 1939 as it had been in 1815.
But from the late 19th century onwards,
the expansion of the economy brought
to the East Indies a new Dutch population
of businessmen and civil servants.
By 1939 there were some 250,000 Dutch, which was well less
than a quarter of the number of people who live in Dallas today.
Now, many of these immigrants regarded the East Indies
as their home; they raised their children there, they retired there
and they later became embittered during the post-war struggle leading
to Dutch eviction.
The size of the indigenous population had risen from six
to 30 million in the 19th century, and to some 70 million by 1940.
Dutch rule in part reflected the problem of how to govern
such a vast and changing population.
The Dutch from early on preserved native dynasties
and ruled through them.
Like the British system and in contrast with the French,
the Dutch system was characterized
by decentralization and indirect rule.
The extent of Dutch influence in densely populated areas
such as Java, as well as in the outlying areas,
as you can imagine, was uneven.
Now, the Japanese occupation in 1942 broke the continuity of Dutch rule.
The Dutch were interned
and the Indonesian elite assumed administrative positions
that they had previously been denied.
By enlisting the support of both nationalist and Islamic leaders,
the Japanese fostered the nationalist movement.
After the war the Dutch expected to reassert their control, but a long
and acrimonious struggle ended when the United States sided
with the nationalists and against their European allies.
The new nation of Indonesia achieved independence in 1949.
And, in the West it was regarded as one of the two great Asian events
of the year; the other being the emergence
of the communist regime in China.
We now come to the empires that endured into the latter part
of the 20th century: the Belgian, the French,
the British and the Portuguese.
Could we revert, please Sadear, to map one?
There were basic similarities.
Each colony had what was called the steel frame of military,
police and administrative officers who maintained order
and defended the frontiers,
the characteristics of the colonial state.
A European outpost in Africa might consist merely
of a district officer, a few interpreters
and a small military detachment.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Portuguese Empire more
than the others lacked both the military
and administrative resources to go much beyond military occupation.
Virtually all of the colonies developed revenue systems based
on taxation of crops,
which sometimes involved forced labor or its equivalent.
Each colonial power exported a simplified form of its own system
of government and law, and each colony possessed a system
of justice, though this often amounted
to unrestricted and arbitrary authority.
As administrative units of the European powers,
the colonies were also nascent states, each in the process
of acquiring the modernizing characteristics
of the states of Europe.
Each colonial system invested in ports, roads and railways,
as well as in education and health measures against,
for example, sleeping sickness.
By midcentury, each had developed a network
of government offices complete with files, typewriters and telephones.
Earlier it probably did not much matter whether an African,
for example, happened to be under one regime or another,
but by midcentury it mattered a great deal.

By midcentury the Belgian Congo had acquired the reputation
of a model colony.   It had not always been so.

Under the autocratic rule of King Leopold, 50 years earlier,
the Congo had been notorious.
Leopold ruled in the Congo in his own right,
and not as king of the Belgians.
His regime was exploitative and rapacious.
Africans were compelled to collect a quota of wild rubber under penalty
of punishment that sometimes let to atrocities.
Leopold demanded profits, but his administrative apparatus proved
to be too weak to prevent abuses.
In 1908, Belgium annexed the Congo to remedy the evils of her king.
The immense colony of the Congo extended
over nearly a million miles, 80 times larger than Belgium.
The Belgians never numbered more
than 100,000 settlers and administrators.
The resources included copper, diamonds and uranium,
as well as tropical agricultural products
such as rubber, palm oil and cotton.
Mining was the most valuable part of the economy, and by the standards
of the time, Belgian rule was benevolent and efficient.
No other colony had better labor conditions,
health facilities or primary education.
No other, perhaps, was as paternalistic.
Catholic missions provided for primary school attendance
of over 50 percent, the highest in Africa, but few Africans went
on to secondary schools, and fewer still to universities.
By the time of independence,
the Belgian Congo had produced only 16 Congolese
with university training.   In December 1959, riots

at Leopoldville shook the Belgian administration
into a belated recognition of the strength of Congolese nationalism.
The Belgians now made a fundamental miscalculation.
Fearing that the troubles might escalate into the equivalent
of the Algerian revolution, and nevertheless assuming
that the Congolese could not manage without, the Belgians decided
in favor of immediate independence on the 30 of June 1960.
The Congo quickly slid into anarchy, and the summer
of 1960 will always be remembered as the time of one
of the great disasters in European decolonization.
The phrases "Congo"
and "postcolonial chaos" became synonymous.
The Portuguese Empire was the last to be liquidated,
and it was in every sense an anachronism.
Paradoxically, by the time that other European colonial regimes were
in their death throes, the Portuguese had lost nothing
until India seized Goa in 1961.
And the question does rise in one's mind --
was India a postcolonial imperial power with imperial ambitions,
despite an anticolonial attitude?
The principle colonies were the immediate territories --
Portuguese colonies -- were the immense territories of Angola
in western Africa and Mozambique in eastern Africa.
Now, these regions had been discovered by Vasco da Gama
and others in the 15th century,
and held a vital place in the national psyche.
Portugal's other colonies included Portuguese Guinea in western Africa
and minor territories throughout the world including Macau off the coast
of China, near Canton.
Now, in the first decade of the 20th century the Portuguese were able
to uphold their largely fictional claims in the vast hinterland
of Angola and Mozambique only
because the other colonial powers did not want
to see the territories fall into the hands of their rivals.
By 1910, no more than a tenth of either colony was
under actual Portuguese control.
The effective colonizing instrument that evolved
[ was ]   in the shape of charter companies

or concessions dominated by British capital.
To develop plantations the companies relied on forced labor,
which roused international humanitarian protest
until the reform laws, labor laws of the 1920s.
Portugal acquired the reputation of a harsh and despotic colonial power,
almost competing with that of King Leopold's regime in the Congo,
but the reason lay in Portugal's own poverty and the carrying
over of 19th century labor practices into the 20th.
Portugal herself was an undeveloped, underdeveloped country.
The Portuguese had not experienced industrial revolution
and did not have a humanitarian movement.
The critical period of modernization began with Salazar's new state
in 1928, and in the renaissance
of the new Portuguese state the mystique
of empire held a prominent place.
Salazar presided over a period of colonial development
that included the introduction of the telegraphs and telephones,
ports and railways, hospitals and schools.
By midcentury, the Portuguese colonies had been brought into line
with the other European colonies, though observers commented
on a 20-year time lag, rather
like us visiting New Zealand today, as it was 20 years ago.
There was less of a color bar than in any
of the other European colonies, and the Portuguese viewed Angola
and Mozambique as multiracial societies on the model of Brazil.
They regarded the colonies
as an integral part of the Portuguese state.
But despite public subsidies to Catholic missions for education,
by 1950 there were only negligible numbers of assimilated Africans
in Angola and Mozambique.
In 1961, a nationalist uprising began in Angola,
and for another decade Portugal now fought rebel forces
in all three of its African colonies.
And it is a measure of the vitality of the Portuguese colonial mission
that the military commitment reached nearly 200,000 troops,
which represented a huge number of soldiers for a country
with a population of only eight million.
The Portuguese devoted half of the national budget
to the colonial war effort.
And in the end, the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa died
in 1974 as a result of revolution in Portugal,
and not defeat in the colonies.
Now, before the Second World War, the French empire stood
as the only worldwide empire comparable to that of the British.
Could we have map eight, please?
In 1939 the French Empire extended over some five million square miles
and had a population of 65 million.
Algeria, administered directly as part of France, was the major colony
of settlement and had nearly one million Europeans
and over six million Muslims, with one of the highest rates
of population growth in the world.   Other parts of

[ its ]
North African and Middle Eastern Empire included the protectorates
over Tunisia and Morocco
and the mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon.
In Southeast Asia the French held sway over Indochina.
In the Pacific, France possessed Tahiti and various island groups,
as well as in the Caribbean.
In tropical Africa the French domain was larger than that
of any other power, extending from southern Algeria to the Congo,
and east to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
French possessions further included French Somaliland, Madagascar
and island groups in the Indian Ocean.
In all of these territories the aim, or at least one distinct aim,
since the time of the French Revolution remained the same --
France's republican heritage and civilization would be offered to all
of its subjects, allowing them
to become assimilated as French citizens.
The empire would become an integral part of France.
But by the early part of the 20th century, it had already become clear
that it would be difficult if not impossible
to assimilate entire societies in places such as Algeria,
Indochina and black Africa.
In 1924, there were only 94 black African citizens in West Africa.
And so the project of transforming Arabs and black Africans
into Frenchmen obviously had its limits.
The idea of assimilation nevertheless did not disappear.
The French colonial minister after the First World War had called
for investment to develop the colonies
and to make the colonial economies interdependent
with the metropolitan economy.
Now, this is significant because the French proved themselves,
and are still proving themselves, consistently more willing
to provide money and to commit military forces than any
of the other colonial powers.
The universalist assumptions of the French republican philosophy
and the civilizing mission might be impractical, but economic
and military commitment help the French to produce a small,
assimilated elite devoted to French civilization.
Now, assimilation was as much cultural as it was political.
But the assimilated Arabs, for example in Syria,
were not strong enough to prevent Syrian nationalists
from defending their independence in 1945.
The demise of France as a Middle Eastern power was a result
of the Second World War, which also sapped French strength in Indochina.
The year 1954 marked a humiliating and decisive French defeat
at Dien Bien Phu, and effectively ended France's empire in Asia.
In the same year, the French government reinforced Algeria.
One of de Gaulle's supreme achievements after his return
to power in 1958 was the resolution of both the future of Algeria
and the fate of the colonial empire.
In 1958 he offered the Africans a clear choice.
They could decide in favor of independence and a privileged place
within the French community, with the continuation of economic
and military assistance, or in favor of unfettered independence
and the abrupt breaking of all links.
Only Sekou Tour of Guinea chose to sever the bonds with France.
The rest remained within the French union,
and in April 1961 de Gaulle survived a military revolt of the French army
in Algeria and moved decisively toward Algerian independence.
It was Algeria that captured the world's imagination,
in part because of the movie --
one that has been playing in recent years here in Washington,
to see if there are any lessons to be learned for Iraq --
the movie called "The Battle of Algiers,"
which dramatically conveyed the message
that nearly a half million troops, sophisticated weapons
and torture could not destroy a revolution aimed
at national freedom.
In 1962, de Gaulle proclaimed Algeria independent.

Now, the British Empire differed from the French colonial system
above all because of the possession of India,
and by the autonomous dominions.
And map nine, please, "The end of the British Empire."
At the turn of the 20th century, India constituted,
as I have mentioned, an empire in its own right,
with a territorial scope of nearly two million square miles
and a population of 300 million.
India alone had a population nearly five times
that of the entire French colonial empire.
And was a measure not merely of firepower/r
but of British confidence and prestige,
that India was administered, as I have mentioned,
by fewer than 1,000 members of the Indian civil service.
Now, the Indian army, with a corps of 250,000 troops,
made Britain the greatest military power in the East
in the early part of the 20th century.
During that time the dominions of Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and South Africa had become self-governing
and virtually independent.   By formally marking the birth of the

[ British ]
Commonwealth, the Statute of Westminster
of 1931 merely recognized the actuality of nations of kith
and kin freely associating with each other in self-interest.
Now until 1947, the Commonwealth remained an exclusive white man's
club, representing only a small part of a still vast empire
that had reached its greatest territorial extent
in the interwar years.
In 1939, in the Caribbean, British colonies included Jamaica, Trinidad,
British Guiana, Honduras, the Leewards,
the Windwards, the Bahamas and Bermuda.
In the Pacific, the British administered Fiji,
Tonga and smaller island groups.
In East and Southeast Asia, British possessions included Hong Kong,
Balai, Burma, Singapore and parts of Borneo.
In the Middle East, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean,
Britain ruled over Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Palestine, Jordan, Aden,
the Persian Gulf protectorates, Ceylon,
Mauritius and the Seychelles.
The African territories included Gambia, Sierra Leon, the Gold Coast,
Nigeria, the Cameroons, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,
British Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia,
Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia.
And even this extensive list is by no means complete.
The   [ British ]

Empire and the   [ British ]

Commonwealth, I emphasize again, was a complex,
worldwide system stretching over some 12.2 million square miles,
roughly one-quarter of the earth's surface,
that included territories acquired during every stage
of colonization since the 16th century.
Now, in retrospect the interwar years represent the high noon
of British colonialism, at least in the imagination.
The district officer inspired trust in his subjects as well
as in the British public that colonial rule was just
and enlightened as portrayed
in the famous movie "Sanders of the Rivers."
The reality was much more complicated,
but the fictional accounts usually conveyed the essential point
that British rule depended on indigenous authority.
The Indian office as well
as the colonial office monitored a decentralized
and self-financing empire.
In India a system known as diarchy transferred
to Indian hands authority in education, public health,
public works and agriculture, while reserving
to the British the crucial departments such as justice, police,
finance and foreign affairs.
In Africa there emerged a similar design.
In 1922, Sir Frederick Lugard's famous book
"The Dual Mandate" developed the doctrine of indirect rule;
in other words, of allowing local administration to be left
in the hands of hereditary chiefs.
As in India, the goal was to secure collaboration
without weakening British control.   The aim was the same in India,

to win over the nationalists before they became embittered enemies
of the British.
For a while it appeared that the strategy might succeed.
In 1945, no one would have believed that the end would come so quickly,
though it was already clear
that India could not be held to the empire.
The labor government was committed to India's freedom,
and in any event, economic
and military weakness dictated retrenchment.
Now, the dismantling of the empire began first in Asia by the granting
of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947,
and at about the same time to Ceylon and Burma.
All except Burma remained in the commonwealth;
the commonwealth providing a psychological cushion during the era
of decolonization.
In 1948 the British were driven out of Palestine,
in part because of the intervention of the United States in favor
of the Zionists, and the creation of the state of Israel.
Now, it might be tempting to regard these events as the beginning
of a preordained decline and fall, but it did not seem so at the time
to those who hoped to rejuvenate the empire
in the Middle East and Africa.
With India lost and Palestine shrugged aside,
Africa would be developed as a replacement for India,
and the oil of the Middle East would sustain Britain
as a great world power.
The collapse of the empire would be prevented by genuinely coming
to terms with African and Middle Eastern nationalists as equals
and not treating them as inferiors, as in the earlier period.
Such was the aspiration, and it is interesting to speculate how the end
of the British Empire might have come about had it not been
for the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the British government,
under the leadership of Sir Anthony Eden, and in collusion with France
and Israel, attempted to turn back the clock
in the Middle East by invading Egypt.
The United States and the world at large
in the United Nations protested,
and indeed the United States conducted virtual economic warfare
with the British, and demanded withdrawal.
Now, I should add that there are still defenders
of the Suez operation; those who believe
that the world would be a more peaceful and happier place if all
of the Middle East were under European
and American direct control.
In any case, Suez demonstrated the extent of British military
and financial weakness, as well as dependence on the United States.
In the wake of Suez, Harold Macmillan became prime minister,
and proceeded to liquidate the empire
as a questionable economic asset, and as a liability
in Anglo-American relations.
Above all, Harold Macmillan responded to the winds
of African nationalism, the winds of change.
He wanted to avert colonial wars
and what he called a British Algeria in central Africa.
Independence for the Gold Coast and Malai had been planned for 1957,
and the goal already set for Nigerian independence in 1960.
But it was Macmillan's colonial secretary,
the Scotsman Iain Macleod, who now dramatically stepped
up the pace in the years 1959-1961.
And largely as a result of Iain Macleod's accelerated timetables,
many of the British dependencies gained independence
in the early 1960s.
Tanganyika, Cyprus, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, gained independence in 1961;
Uganda, Jamaica, Trinidad in 1962; Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963;
and Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Malta in 1964.
Now, the resolution of the Rhodesian problem was left
to another generation 20 years later.
But essentially the empire, as represented by those great expanses
of red on the map, had come to an end
within a four-year period from 1960.
Or to put it differently, in about a quarter of a century from 1945,
marked at the end by the recall of all troops east of Suez in 1971.
The calculation of decolonization on the British side was ruthless
and entirely in British self-interest.
A prolonged British presence would end in colonial conflict.
It was better to end colonial rule sooner and hope for African goodwill
and collaboration, rather than later with the certainty
of ill will and bloodshed.   Now, in the aftermath

of decolonization the world has witnessed the rise and fall
of such tyrants as Idi Amin of Uganda and of course Saddam Hussein,
and it will be long debated how the European colonial powers might
better have prepared the colonies for independence, and the extent
to which the new states are responsible for their own troubles.
Now many of the former colonies are hostages
to the international economy, but the legacies
of colonialism are cartographic, cultural and aesthetic,
as well as economic and political.
For better or worse, the boundaries drawn by the colonial powers
in Asia, the Middle East and Africa over a hudred years ago have proved
to be remarkably durable.
So, also, have the French, English, Spanish
and Portuguese linguistic blocs of the non-European world.
French cultural influence probably exceeds that of the British,
though in the world of sports -- cricket and soccer --
the British have left a lasting legacy.
The French, as I have mentioned, have proved far more willing
than the British and others to commit troops
and economic assistance to the former colonies,
not least those torn by ethnic and religious strife.
And French cultural influence seems to have a more lasting impact
than any of the other colonial regimes.
Now, I end where I began with wishing good luck to the members
of the decolonization seminar in pursuing these and other themes
in their research here at the Library of Congress.
Thank you.   [ applause ]

Carolyn Brown: Okay, we'll take a few questions.
And we have a mic.   Please wait for the mic to come.

Male Speaker: Is this on?
I suppose, given the breadth and the scope of this talk, it may seem kind
of churlish to complain that you haven't done enough,
but I want to raise in particular the issue
of the so-called white dominions,
and the role that they play in decolonization.
It seems to me that you've replicated the traditional sort
of historiographically story about where the dominions fit
into the story of empire, and that is
that they really are a separate case that needs
to be dealt with in a different way.
But I wonder the degree to which that in fact is true.
Shouldn't we also see places like Canada, Australia,
New Zealand as territories that are in fact going through a process
of decolonization, as well in some cases rather simultaneous to,
but not as dramatic, as the cases in Africa and Asia?
And I want to raise in particular the case of South Africa, which is,
I think, particularly the wild card here, because that is identified
as a white dominion in that classic sense, and yet in fact what happens
in the South African case --
although it's granted formal independence,
it's granted to a white minority regime that ultimately fails
and collapses by the 1980s, 1990s.   So that's my question/comment.

Roger Louis: Yes.
About the only generalization that can be made is that the dominions
and their constitutional
and political evolution did follow a similar course of decolonization,
and it is also true that the dominions, with the exception
of South Africa, were in the forefront
of the movement of decolonization.
South Africa -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand at the conference
in San Francisco in 1945 were those
who supported the anti-imperial declaration leading
on to the trusteeship regime, and it is remarkable how the Canadians
and especially the New Zealanders played a very prominent
international part in the United Nations
and the continuing international influence in the colonial empires.
South Africa, as you rightly say, is distinct from all of these
because of the Afrikaner regime attempting not only
to preserve the racial balance in South Africa, but holding the line
in South Africa until the fall of the apartheid regime,
at about the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This was, we tend to forget, one of the great surprises
of the late 20th century.
And it was not only the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was something
that virtually no one, and certainly not myself, really,
thought would ever come in our own lifetime;
the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Yes. Male Speaker: You said that the disillusion
of the British Empire began in Asia,
and my feeling has always been the disillusion
of the British Empire begins earlier,
and the place where it begins is Ireland.
I would wonder if you would like to address the Irish case
as an instance of decolonization.   Roger Louis: Certainly.

In that sense, what Dane   [ spelled phonetically ]

remarked, that I was following in a traditional historiography --
because from a British point of view, Ireland as a precedent was one
that they really wanted to forget.
And they did not want this to become the example of the future
of the colonial territories throughout the world.
Now, we tend to look at the result of the decolonization process,
especially because of partition in India and partition in Palestine,
which was a continuation in a way of the story
in Ireland a generation earlier.
But it's rather easy to forget that partition was the solution
that the British wanted to avoid at almost any cost.
The partition of India meant, among other things,
the division of the Indian army and thus the end
of Britain's strategic position in Asia.
In other words, partition represents the end of the line; a bankruptcy -
a bankrupt policy, and yes, this is what the British had to confront
in India, and miraculously, through a combination of circumstances,
not least the contribution made by two individuals --
Nehru and Mountbatten -- managed to keep both India
and Pakistan in the Commonwealth.
In the partition of Palestine, the result is either happy
or unhappy depending on whether you are a Zionist or an Arab.
And for the British it was entirely an unhappy ending to the story.

Yes. Male Speaker: Let me first thank you for the oversight.
I'm from the Caribbean, and I'm from part of this still ongoing empire
in the Caribbean, the French and the Dutch empire in the Caribbean,
a small island by the name of St. Marteen.
And like most kids of the elite class there, my whole history kind
of mirrors that in the sense that I went to the Netherlands, and worked
and was educated in the Netherlands, et cetera, et cetera.
But you said one thing that I think maybe you can develop some more;
the notion that all of these European empires develop a small,
co-opted elite class; in essence
to help them rule over these territories.
I was wondering how do you see the continuing development
of this class now, within the postcolonial period,
and do you believe that to a certain extent that these countries need
to be decolonized from this co-opted class?
Roger Louis: Well, since I was taking as my point
of view the vantage point of the European colonial powers,
including the Dutch as well as the British and the French,
the result can be summed up in a word -- disillusion.
It did not quite work out the way that they had hoped.
In the case of the British, it is a very interesting case in point
because the British wanted to federate all
of the British West Indies including Trinidad, and so you can imagine
in your own imagination what the Caribbean would look like today
if there were a single federated territory
of the West Indian former colonies, including Trinidad and Jamaica
as the powerhouses of the federation,
rather than the fragmented island territories
that we know today in the Caribbean.
Now, the problem was that neither Jamaica nor Trinidad wanted
to pay the cost of the federation.
And that was the underlying cause, and this was what the British
and the other Europeans discovered; that they had no actual control
over the elites that they had fostered.
Yes. Male Speaker: From the sweep of historical introduction
that you gave, could we sort of draw a parallel with William's theory
on slavery in capitalism, wherein he says that capitalism had
to destroy slavery in order not to be destroyed by it?
So the colonizers had to destroy colonialism
in order not to be devoured by it.
Would that be something that you have been considering lately?
Roger Louis: I'm really not sure that I understood the question,
but I see here two people that did.   Would you like to respond?

Female Speaker: It's an interesting idea to think
about Eric Williams's notion of slavery having to disappear in order
for capitalism to rise; you know, the phoenix that rises
from the ashes, as it were, of slavery, right;
to think about whether in order for the modern world order --
I think that's what you're suggesting --
to appear for colonialism to be destroyed.
I think my response to that, and I don't know whether you'd agree,
Roger, but I'm not sure colonialism has entirely disappeared.
But I think that the term postcolonialism,
as Anne McClintock has argued, is a term that can disguise quite a lot.
Not only are there still places which bear the yoke of colonialism,
although it's quite a small number, but the very fact
that Roger was talking at such eloquent length about the kinds
of problems in the contemporary world,
which are themselves the legacies of a series of European colonialism,
suggests to me that either that destruction is not yet complete,
or that that isn't going to happen.
So I think that would be my response.
Dane? Male Speaker: No, that's all right.
Roger Louis:   [ Inaudible ]

add that there is no more a lasting and provocative thesis
than the one put forward by Eric Williams that the slave trade,
not for humanitarian reasons but because of the decline
of the sugar interest -- in other words, declining economic reasons.
And there's no better a way to get a discussion going
in a graduate seminar than to introduce the Eric Williams thesis.
John. Male Speaker: It's clear from your lecture that empires come
and empires go, but is imperialism with us always?

Roger Louis: I'll only say that I hope in the case of Iraq
that it will not last much longer.   [ laughter ]

Thank you.   [ applause ]

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