Empire and Imperialism

For all the European powers, policies toward overseas areas of influence, or so-called informal empire, were dictated by local circumstances. As far as formal colonies were concerned, however, the European powers evolved policies that were justified by imperial theories. For the French Empire, the universalist ideals of the French revolution meant that some colonies, such as Algeria, were regarded as an integral part of France. The administration of such colonies was centralized on Paris, with metropolitan laws applied directly to the colonial territory; deputies from the colonies sat in the legislature in Paris from the 1870s onwards. Indigenous chiefs or agents who were utilized within the French administrative system were seen as employees of the French state. Underlying this was the idea of "assimilation," that subjects of the empire would in time become citizens of France. This centralization was reflected in economics too, with the introduction of tariffs around French colonies during the 1880s and 1890s. Belgian colonialism was equally centralized, while German autocratic centralization meant that the German Emperor was the sole legislative authority for the colonies.

British imperial ideas in theory differed. British policies, rooted in earlier approaches toward the so-called colonies of settlement, stressed the ultimate aim of colonial self-government. Underlying this was the idea of trusteeship with regard to colonial subjects, with the aim of British rule being to enable subjects ultimately to stand on their own feet. In a process beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, these colonies of settlement, including Australia and Canada, were granted self-government from Britain, culminating in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Such ideas of trusteeship also influenced the rest of the British Empire in the shape of what came to be termed "indirect rule." This is reflected in the ideas of Frederick Lugard (1858–1945), a hugely influential governor of Nigeria in the early twentieth century, and involved acceptance of, and administration through, the existing political structures of indigenous society, with local chiefs given considerable latitude as agents of imperial rule.

Whatever the theoretical distinctions between these colonial policies, over time there came to be little difference between them. A pragmatic adjustment to the realities of indigenous society became the norm as the European colonial powers attempted to make their empires pay their way. One way of doing this was through encouraging settlement from the imperial mother country, or metropole, as it is more usually termed by scholars. For the French, Algeria was their main settlement colony; by 1954 nearly one million French people lived in Algeria. For British emigrants, their main destinations in the British Empire were the colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, though significant numbers, encouraged by the Empire Settlement Act (1922), settled in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia.