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The Boxer Rebellion

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain, France, Russia, Japan and Germany controlled parts of China. The British had led the way in forcing themselves onto the Chinese, with the others not far behind. Foreign powers controlled much of China's economy. Russia had built railways across Manchuria and had taken possession of what the English called Port Arthur by leasing the peninsula there from the Chinese. China had conceded other "treaty ports" which the foreigners were using as naval stations. The imperial powers had forced China to open trade with them and to admit foreign enterprises, including railways and mining companies. China was obliged to accept Christian missionaries - about 2000 of them. China was forced to accept special privileges for Chinese converts to Christianity, and it was forced to accept "extraterritorial" rights for foreigners - in other words, obedience to their own laws rather than to Chinese laws.

Common Chinese had been upset with their country's humiliation since it was defeated by the Japanese in 1894 - a war over influence in Korea. It upset their vision of  foreigners as inferior barbarians, including the Japanese, whom they labeled "dwarf pirates." In 1899 in a few locations across China, groups encouraged by China's Dowager Empress, Cixi, went into the streets displaying slogans such as "protect the country," "justice on behalf of heaven," and "destroy the foreigner." At least half of them were youths. They wore red belts and a red cloth around their head. They were known as Boxers, and among them was the belief that their government had declared war on the foreigners. They believed that they had acquired immunity to the white man's bullets, and they feared magic created by the Christians. Filled with religious fervor, they began attacking and killing Christian missionaries and Chinese converts to Christianity. They saw Chinese Christians as likely spies, collaborators and traitors and as a danger in time of war. They called on Chinese Christians to renounce their faith.

In early 1900, Westerners and frightened Chinese Christians fled to European legations in China's capital, Beijing. Encouraged by its successes, the Boxer rebellion spread. The Boxers burned three villages within a hundred miles of Beijing, and they killed sixty Chinese Christians. In the treaty ports and in Beijing, more Christians sought refuge from the Boxers. From among the U.S., Japanese, German, Austrian, British and French ships in the treaty port of Tianjin (Tientsin), a force of 2,000 started for Beijing to relieve the people trapped in the legations. The Boxers had cut the rail line to Beijing, and for two weeks the troops from Tianjin fought and defeated the Boxers at various points along the way. In Beijing, Germany's representative in China was attacked and killed when he ventured into the street. Meanwhile, China's governor to Manchuria had joined the revolt by declaring war against Russia's presence in Manchuria. In the Manchurian city of Mukden, a Roman Catholic bishop took refuge in a cathedral, and with others he was burned alive. By now, the Boxers across China had murdered about 250 missionaries, fifty of their children, and 32,000 Chinese converts to Christianity.

In July and August, 1900, a substantial number of troops arrived from abroad - a cooperative effort, with no power willing to trust any of the others powers to quell the rising on its own. A force of 5,000 Russians, 10,000 Japanese, 300 British, 2,000 Americans and 800 French liberated the people in the legations in Beijing. Filled with vengeful wrath, the next day the troops moved through Beijing, attacking those they believed were Boxers. They injured and pillaged the property of innocent Chinese. The Dowager Empress, on September 7, 1901, signed an agreement with the Western powers, formally ending the rebellion. And leaders of the Boxer rebellion, other than the empress, were condemned to death. The Empress Dowager, a Manchu and viewed as a foreigner by the Chinese, was allowed to continue her rule. But the peace created by Western powers and the Japanese was to prove only temporary. Chinese nationalism would continue to disturb the early decades of the twentieth century. And into the century what would be called the Boxer Rebellion in the West, the Chinese would call the "Invasion of the Allied Armies." 

The British in Africa

The world was shrinking. Steamships replaced sailing ships in the transport of goods and military men. Steam driven locomotives made transport easier between colonized ports and inland, with raw materials being transferred from the interiors to the ports, and soldiers being transferred from the ports inland. The telegraph tied distances closer together.

At the turn of the century, the British were letting the Egyptians run their own internal affairs. The British were content in maintaining control over the Suez Canal and in charge of military and foreign affairs in Egypt. They left Egyptian lands to Egyptian landowners, who were growing cotton to sell to the British manufacturers. The British advocated no reforms in Egypt, fearing that talk of reforms there would inspire unrest.

A conflict with Egyptian opinion remained concerning who ruled in the Sudan, just south of Egypt. The Sudan had been ruled by Egypt. But to ward off French expansion into the region the British had expanded there. In 1899 the British had fought a great battle against the Sudanese at Omduran, just north of the town of  Khartoum, and now, in British eyes, the Sudan was ruled by Britain. And, as in Egypt, the British left lands there in the hands of African landowners, who were also growing and selling cotton to Britain.

In southern Africa, Britain's high commissioner for South Africa and governor-general of its Cape Colony, Alfred Milner, was interested in the gold mines in Boer territory, and he wanted to create a Cape-to-Cairo confederation of British colonies. He pushed for political rights for those British who had entered the Boer territory in search of gold, and this heightened tensions between the British and the Boers. The Boers of the Transvaal - descendants of the Dutch - were feeling closer to the Germans that to the English, and they were looking to link with German Southwest Africa. The British wanted to prevent this. Seeing war coming, the Boers attacked first, with some success, at Britain's Natal and into Cape Colony.

The British sent around 350,000 volunteers to fight the Boers, while the Boers had no more than 40,000 men under arms at one time.  The British public supported their troops, with much singing of "Britannia Rules the Waves." Those distributing leaflets opposing the war found overwhelming hostility.

The British managed to defeat the Boers' regular military units, and the Boers resorted to guerrilla warfare. The British government sent their great general, Kitchener, from Egypt to take charge in South Africa. Kitchener built defensive block houses to protect rail lines. He strung barbed wire. He removed Boer women and children from their farms, and he began systematic drives against one small section of Boer country at a time. Deaths from poor sanitation and disease in the concentration camps killed around 20,000, and indignation arose among people, other than a few British, across the globe. The Boers surrendered unconditionally in May 1902. The British had lost 5,744 dead from combat, 22,829 wounded, and thousands of British soldiers had died from disease. More than 7,000 Boers are reported to have died in combat. 32,000 Boers were imprisoned by the British, and around 110,000 were in concentration camps.

Having won control over South Africa, the British now wanted the Boers to cooperate with their rule. Kitchener congratulated the Boers for their "good fight" and welcomed them as members of the British Empire. Amnesty was extended to all the Boers, and the British agreed to grant them loans and help in them restock their farms. Britain united its territories in South Africa, forming the Union of South Africa, which became a state within the British Commonwealth.

Uganda - just north of Lake Victoria - was an area of black peoples and an area that had been penetrated by Arabs from Africa's eastern coast, who brought with them firearms and Islam. Protestant and Catholic missionaries had been there since the late 1870s and had converted many to Christianity. But rather than peace and understanding, what followed were civil wars between factions of Islamic, Protestant and Catholic faiths. Then came the British, first in the person of a representative of the British East Africa Company, Frederick Lugard, then military engagements in which British suzerainty was established. The British established a protectorate in the region (rather than a colony), the British signing agreements there with local tribal chieftains, offering them autonomy under British protection. The chiefs viewed their agreements with Britain as between sovereign nations. The British brought peace to Uganda, Uganda chiefs and their legislators exercising their authority over their people and collecting taxes that were delivered to Britain, ostensibly for maintenance of the region. The British discouraged white settlers from moving into Uganda, and Ugandan lands remained in the hands of Ugandans. The British in Uganda encouraged cotton cultivation, and the larger Ugandan farmers began growing cotton as a cash crop for export.

At the turn of the century, the British were just beginning to establish themselves in Kenya. They found the hills, plains and woodlands of Kenya foreboding. Here the disease called rinderpest was killing herds of cattle. Locusts were devouring crops, and smallpox was decimating and sapping the energies of local people. The British intended merely to pass through Kenya, with a railroad they were building for transport between the coastal city of Mombasa to the inland commercial areas around Lake Victoria. But building the rail line required building fortified posts as a defense against hostile peoples. And passing through Kenya came to mean occupying it.

In Kenya, during the century's first decade, the British fought a series of skirmishes with the Nandi people. Military expeditions gave the British a reputation through much of Kenya, and peace was secured as tribes recognized the superiority of British arms. With British domination, the continuous tribal warfare that had plagued the region came to an end, replaced by arbitration. And with the end of tribal wars came a new freedom of movement. Hill dwellers moved onto plains. People spread out from their fortified villages. Lands that had been thought too dangerous to till came under cultivation. The British persuaded the Masai to move onto reservation land, where they would experience fewer designs on their women by intruding westerners but where they would feel restricted and would become more xenophobic and sink into indifference.

In Kenya, Indian tradesmen migrated up the rail line from Mombasa, as did white settlers hoping to farm. Kenya was becoming a racial mix, European, Asian and African. The Europeans established a policy of forbidding Asians from settling in areas designated for Europeans. European and African farmers competed with one another in selling their products. African farmers - largely Kikuyas - were often able to undersell Europeans farmers, and many European immigrants with small farms failed at farming. The European farmers who continued to farm learned that the best crops to plant were coffee, sisal and maize. Those with larger farms were hiring African laborers. And some Africans on the edge of European areas began working on European-owned lands as tenants, growing their own crops and grazing their animals.

Along the Atlantic coast in western Africa, the British ruled in Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (now called Ghana) and Nigeria. They had followed trading companies, including slave traders. And by the twentieth century, where the British ruled, the Africans recognized the superiority of British arms and reluctantly accepted British domination. Here Britain had colonies rather than protectorates. The British encouraged African agriculture, and the Africans produced the greatest amount of the world's cocoa and exported cocoa, palm oil, groundnuts and timber. And while feeling superior to the Africans of along the Atlantic coast, the British were impressed by how hard and diligently they worked at advancing their agriculture.

From the Gold Coast and from the coast of Nigeria, the British tried to push inland at the beginning of the century. Inland from the Gold Coast they encountered the Ashanti (Asanti) Empire, and rather than  local people feeling liberated from Ashanti rule, they were outraged by British arrogance. The British found several months of fighting was required to subdue these peoples. The British also had to fight to extend their rule into the interior of Nigeria, where a black Muslim ruled and where many people had never seen a white man.

In forcing their rule onto the Africans, the British wished to be thought of as civilizing people and as extending order, modernity and freedom. And by Britain bringing an end to tribal wars and stronger Africans preying upon weaker Africans, Africans under British rule had more time to devote to their economic activities and to peaceful trade.

But all this was not serving the British economically. During the first decade of the twentieth century, profits from their empire were not covering the expenses in maintaining their presence in Africa - even in Uganda. British taxpayers were subsidizing their African empire.

The French Around the World

French pride was injured by Germany's defeat of France back in 1871, and French pride was hurt too by the minor role they were playing in European affairs. Some in France saw themselves as descendants of the Roman Empire and held up the Roman Empire as a model for France, and clinging to such glory they wished not to be outdone in empire by the British.

Already, since the early 1840s, the French had been ruling in Algeria, having conquered that country militarily. They had extended their rule into what is now Tunisia, which they were ruling indirectly, preserving local institutions and collaborating with local ruling elites. The French had followed their Catholic missionaries to Tahiti and their military had fought a four-year war against the Tahitians, defeating them by 1847, creating what they called a protectorate over Tahiti and surrounding islands. They had acquired New Caledonia, near Australia, and in 1853 they turned it into a penal colony. They had annexed the Marquesas Islands. In the 1870s the French had pushed into Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And they had established rule in Madagascar - a sparsely populated island off the southeastern coast of Africa - where, at the turn of the century they pacified a rebellion and unified the island politically.

Like the British, the French in Africa had ruled for decades at tropical spots along the Atlantic coast, places such as Senegal and farther south at Guinea (just south of Portuguese Guinea), and at the Ivory Coast, Dahomey and Gabon. Like the British, at the turn of the century the French were extending their rule inland, where their rule was to be indirect (rule through local chieftains) and by force of arms. At the turn of the century the French were expanding into the sparsely populated savanna, pasture lands and semi-desert areas of the western Sahara. In early 1900 the French fought a war against the black imperialist and sometime slave trader, Rabih Fadlullah, a doctrinaire Muslim and a brutal despot who had modern weapons, and in April 1900 the French killed Fadlullah, at the battle of Kuseri, fifty miles southeast of Lake Chad.

In Africa, the French were less racial in their attitude than were the British. They believed they could remake Africans and others colonized people into French persons. But the French did not translate this attitude into a greater benevolence for their African subjects. Unlike the British, they were taking agricultural land from Africans. In the tropics and semi-tropics of French controlled Western Africa, forty French companies held half the land, and, backed by French troops, these companies felt free to operate in ways they would not dare in France, such as using forced labor.

The French in Africa who managed affairs there denied local people the right to sell rubber. They compelled people to produce quotas of rubber and other products. They taxed the Africans, and rather than spend part of this tax money by hiring people to do public works, they exploited Africans further by regularly drafting entire communities to labor on public works. French overseers were often simple men who were poor at communicating other than with the threat of brute force. Occasionally people were worked to death. The patience of Africans had its limits and revolts were inevitable, and when they occurred the French crushed them with considerable violence.

The average person in France was unaware of conditions in their African colonies. And the same can be said concerning French rule in Vietnam, where the French were equally oppressive. In the late nineteenth century, the French overthrew a feudal monarchy and fought long, extended military campaigns against resistance to their rule. Many of Vietnam's educated elite opposed French rule and would not work for the French, but the French found a few opportunistic Vietnamese who would.

In Vietnam, and elsewhere in Indochina, Frenchmen grabbed lands, and they built plantations that produced rubber and other forest products. In the first decade of the twentieth century, France's colonial administration in Vietnam encouraged French commercial enterprises. They built railways, roads, and hydraulic works to serve these enterprises. Vietnam was a thickly populated, predominately peasant society, but projects that would have served Vietnamese farmers were ignored. Vietnam's farmers continued to suffer from the usual droughts and floods, while under the French, per capita rice consumption declined. And what had been Vietnam's handicraft industry was destroyed.

A new class of Vietnamese had come into being: people who labored for the French as servants, or who labored in French-owned mines, on French-owned plantations, at French construction sites or in French-owned factories. The French paid them as little as they could - hardly enough for survival, and sometimes less than enough for survival. As in Africa, the French were taxing the Vietnamese and drafting them to work on public works. On one such project - the Hanoi-Yunnan Phu railway - 25,000 Vietnamese died. Conditions in Vietnam in general were creating a decline in Vietnam's population.

The French in Vietnam established a monopoly in the production of salt, alcoholic beverages and opium. They taxed consumption of these. They encouraged Vietnamese to buy their opium, and money gained from their opium trade was an important part of the colonial administration's income. A French company, Fontaine, held a monopoly in making and selling alcoholic beverages in Vietnam, and all other distilling was banned and severely punished with imprisonment and confiscation of property. And in 1902 the colonial administration made buying alcoholic beverages compulsory, each Vietnamese village having to consume a definite quantity in proportion to its population - more of the behavior that French commerce and government dare not perpetrate on people in France. .

In 1908, Vietnamese farmers responded to a rise in taxes by marching to the French administration headquarters. For weeks, thousands of peasants picketed the governor's office in Hue and made passionate speeches, not only against taxes but forced labor. The protest spread, and the French countered with ferocity. Demonstrators were gunned down. Whole villages were razed to the ground. Thousands were arrested, and two Vietnamese scholars who had spoken against French policies were executed.

But in Vietnam and Africa, while French commercial operations were benefiting privately owned French companies, revenues from France's colonies were not paying the cost of maintenance and administration. The average French taxpayer - like British taxpayers - were subsidizing their nation's colonies.

Germans in Africa, Asia and Oceania

After the Spanish-American war concluded in 1898, Germany brought from Spain various islands in the Pacific: the Mariana Islands - except for Guam, which the United States had expropriated - and the Caroline and Marshall islands. In December 1899, an agreement signed by Britain, the United States and Germany gave recognition to Germany's control over Western Samoa, Germany having been involved in that part of the world for a half century or more.

At the turn of the century, the Germans were declaring China's Shandong peninsula as their sphere of influence, and they were established in Africa. They were established in Tanganyika (later to be known as Tanzania) on the east coast of Africa. And they  were established in Togoland, in Cameroon and in Southwest Africa - areas that Germany had claimed for itself in the mid-1880s.

Cameroon was largely tropical wilderness and sparsely populated, and there the Germans suffered from a scarcity of labor as they tried to produce and export rubber and to harvest and export palm kernels. In Southwest Africa, water was too scarce for agriculture, and the Germans were hoping to create a German owned cattle industry. By 1903, 4,700 Germans civilians were in Southwest Africa, enough Germans for an expansion that drove local people from their tribal lands. In 1904, the pastoral Herero and Nama peoples, who traditionally had warred against each other, rebelled against the Germans. German troops crushed the rebellion, killing local chieftains and one-third of the Nama nation. Five thousand Germans died in the war. Thousands of Hereros were driven into exile, and only one-third of the Herero people remained in Southwest Africa after the war.

In Tanganyika, the Germans tried to create a plantation agriculture, introducing a rubber industry and the growing of tea and cinchona. In 1905, the German administration in Tanganyika ordered local people to give up their traditional pursuits and raise cotton on communal plots. The distressed people turned to their tribal priests, who gave them water medicine (maji) said to be powerful enough to protect them from the bullets of white men. A violent uprising against the Germans began in July 1905, and within a few weeks the Germans broke the main thrust of the revolt. But order was not restored in Tanganyka until 1907, with the war, famine and disease having killed an estimated 75,000 Africans.

The Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians

At the beginning of the 20th century the Dutch ruled a few islands just north of Venezuela, called the Netherlands Antilles, and they ruled in Surinam, on the South American continent just east of British Guiana. But their biggest holding was in the East Indies, now known as Indonesia. The Dutch East India company had established itself in the East Indies in the 1600s, and of the more than three thousand islands in that area, the Dutch established rule over all of the big islands of Java and Sumatra and most of Borneo. Singapore remained British, and Bali remained independent.

Being traders and merchants, the Dutch wiped out local merchants and traders. They behaved much as the French did in Vietnam, instituting forced labor and acquiring monopolies. They took control of local lands and began growing crops for export: pepper, rubber, tea, kapok, copra. Local peoples disliked the intrusion, and before 1900 the Dutch suppressed numerous rebellions.

By the turn of the century, the Dutch had suppressed wars and established order through the East Indies - called the "Dutch Peace" - much as the British were doing in Africa. Meanwhile, European-owned estates had grown, and only a small percentage of the products being exported were grown by Indonesians. The bulk of profits from Indonesian agriculture was not benefiting Indonesians, and the Dutch were not investing in or stimulating modernization among the Indonesians. And Indonesian intellectuals resented the Dutch for what they saw as Dutch responsibility in maintaining backward conditions for the majority of their fellow Indonesians.

The Portuguese

At the turn of the century, Portugal controlled a portion of Guinea in Africa's far west. They controlled the coastal region of Angola, and they controlled the coast of Mozambique. The Portuguese held a few islands in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa, Goa (a 1,394 square-mile speck of land on the southwestern coast of India) and Macao (an island off the coast of southern China).

Slavery had been abolished in Portugal's colonies in 1878, but some slavery continued under the name of contract labor. Portugal was itself a poor and mostly agricultural nation. Its colonies remained the poorest in Africa. And British and German observers saw Portuguese colonial administrations as corrupt and cruelly inefficient.

Every year, the Portuguese shipped thousands of people from Angola to coffee and cocoa plantations on the Island of Sao Tome, to do forced labor. Another migration of labor went from Portugal's Mozambique to work in mines in British controlled Rhodesia - a voluntary move as men preferred the better working conditions in Rhodesia to the work forced on them in Mozambique. The Portuguese controlled the recruitment of this labor to Rhodesia, taking revenue from each worker that they allowed to leave - a passport fee bringing millions of dollars in revenue for the Portuguese.

The Belgians

The Belgians ruled in what was called the Belgian Congo. There a Belgian company, Union Miniere, was extracting minerals, and other companies were extracting rubber and ivory. As in the neighboring French colony, companies were forcing local people to work for them. Here, gang bosses used whips to motivate workers, the companies giving gang bosses incentives to increase production. When villages failed to produce their assigned quota of rubber, they might be attacked by soldiers recruited by the Belgians from among Africans. Or the errant villages might by attacked by company guards. Villages were looted. Village chiefs and women were taken as hostages against deliveries of the required production of rubber. Men were assigned to control local villages, and they established themselves as despots, using women as they pleased, taking what food supplies they wished, and killing or maiming those who resisted. In an effort to control their supply of workers, the Belgians resorted to mutilation - cutting off a hand, arm or some other extremity. In May 1903, members of Britain's House of Commons began complaining about the Belgian treatment of people in the Congo, and in August that year Britain sent a note of protest to Belgium. And King Leopold of Belgium responded by rejecting what he called British interference in his colonial affairs.

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