Empire and Imperialism

There were many in Europe who responded to the newly acquired possessions with enthusiasm and propagandized about their potential benefits. The German Kolonialverein, a society set up in 1882 to campaign in support of Germany's colonial expansion, was one such example, while the French Union Coloniale Française, an association of business leaders with colonial interests established in 1893, was another. Many politicians enthusiastically supported imperial causes, Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) and Leo Amery (1873–1955) in Britain and Jules Ferry (1832–1893) and Albert Sarraut (1872–1962) in France being the most prominent. Supporters justified empire on the grounds of economic self-interest and the alleged moral good—the "civilizing mission"—that Europe brought to the conquered populations of Africa and Asia.

Yet popular enthusiasm for empire, at least before 1914, was limited. For the working classes in particular, conscious of increased taxation and the human cost of wars, support for empire was episodic. Chamberlain's campaign for tariff reform as part of a broader policy of imperial federation in 1903–1906 came to little. "Little Englander" ideas that emphasized the cost of colonies to the taxpayer, so prevalent within mid-nineteenth-century Britain, remained strong. Such ideas reinforced a moral critique of empire that questioned Europe's assumed right to rule other peoples, given the horrific human, environmental, and economic cost of conquest to Africans and Asians. The South African War (1899–1902) between the British Empire and two Boer republics was an important moment in this critique, as the stories of the deaths of white civilians in British camps stimulated a burgeoning movement of imperial critics in Britain, a process reinforced thereafter by revelations of appalling atrocities in the Belgian Congo. Such atrocities were all too common.

This anti-imperial trend was reinforced by the changing international climate of opinion generated by World War I, and particularly new ideas of self-determination. Following the war, in which colonial personnel and resources had played a significant role, and with the emergence of the League of Nations in 1919 and its concept of colonial "mandates" (the term applied to the former possessions of defeated Germany and Ottoman Turkey), colonial rule had increasingly to justify itself with ideas of trusteeship. This view, best summed up in Lugard's Dual Mandate (1922), was that imperial rule combined self-interest and moral good. This was reflected in Britain's Colonial Development Act of 1929 and, later, in the French Fonds d'investissement et de développement économique et social, established in 1946, whereby funds were made available for investment in the colonies' economic and social welfare.

Perhaps more significantly, these ideas coincided with critics from within the colonies who, from the late nineteenth century, took up European ideas of national self-determination and applied them to the colonial situation to demand reforms. The most significant of these was the Indian National Congress, established in 1885. In time these critics moved from an accomodationist position to a rejectionist one, demanding independence from their colonial rulers. With the growing importance of trusteeship arguments after 1919, such critics found an increasingly appreciative global audience by the interwar years.