Resistance to Colonial Conservation and Resource Management

In the remaining chapters we will focus increasingly on the response by colonized people to competition for, and commodification of, conquered environments. Political conflict over natural resources had deep historical roots in the Empire, and these issues were not resolved by dominion status for the British settler states nor decolonization after the Second World War. They fed into the politics of decolonization and into environmental debates within and beyond the post-colonial Commonwealth. Subsequent chapters traverse the moment of decolonization and explore elements of late twentieth-century political ecology. In South Asia and Africa state attempts to control and regulate natural resources changed power relations in the countryside and triggered popular resistance. Through conquest or annexation, some colonial and protectorate governments not only alienated large swathes of territory, but also assumed responsibility for and asserted rights over the natural environment. The governments of settler states moved to protect environments from careless settlers who ransacked it for wildlife or timber, and from indigenous peoples whose land-management systems were regarded as destructive. In some cases conservators recognized that European settlers wreaked more havoc than indigenes; Sim said of the Cape forests that the ‘Hottentot and Bushman inhabitants … were not intentionally destructive … But the advent of European civilization boded greater ill to the forests, and rapidly enough that ill has been accomplished.’ And some, such as Howard, saw value in local agrarian systems. But although regulation could affect all colonial subjects, it tended to bear most heavily on indigenous people. Colonial governments introduced policies of excluding humans from protected areas, as well as a wide range of other measures aimed at curbing customary user rights and maximizing state revenue. Stiff penalties were introduced to punish those who broke the new regulations, and thus the rise of bureaucratic conservationism often led to the criminalization of local resource extractors. In settler colonies the privatization of land transformed socio-environmental relationships, barring local communities from accessing resources they had long regarded as communally held and managed. In some early colonial settlements, this process echoed the enclosures of common land in eighteenth-century England. At a fundamental level it changed the value people placed upon land, setting in train a process towards individualized tenure, commercialization, and subdivision of territory.

Imperial Scientists, Ecology, and Conservation

Imperial scientists have appeared in a number of our chapters: Cleghorn, protagonist of forest conservation in India; Willcocks, the self-critical dambuilder extraordinary in Egypt and India; Simpson, the plague doctor, and Bruce, who researched trypanosomiasis in southern Africa. The early centuries of empire preceded professionalization, but scientific interests were even then at its heart. Species transfers were, as we have suggested, a long-term preoccupation and closely related to scientific enterprise. The maritime empires that characterized the last half-millennium depended upon nautical technology and navigation science, and this distinguished them from preceding, more geographically restricted, land empires. Naval power and the expansion of shipping permitted a different social geography of empire, linking Europe to the Americas, the tropics, and the southern temperate zones, and partly bypassing the torrid task of conquest in Europe and the Muslim world. Shipping carried the freight of trading empires, literally and metaphorically. Especially from the mid-nineteenth century, scientists were central actors in imperial development. They helped to pioneer new technologies that facilitated discovery, and vastly more effective exploitation, of hidden natural resources, such as gold, oil, and rubber. A growing arms gap underpinned the European power bloc and conquest was so rapid and so widespread in the later decades of the nineteenth century not least because it was relatively easy and inexpensive. Constraints imposed by environment and disease were gradually driven back, by dams, boreholes, and the partial prophylaxis against malaria. Communications, based around steam and iron, telegraphs, railways, and roads were the ‘tentacles of progress’ in the new empire, opening up new routes for exploitation. They bound together increasingly modern, planned cities, zones of hydraulic imperialism, mining, and similar enterprises. Scientists and science in empire have received intense critical attention over the last couple of decades. This is especially so in African history and social sciences which, from their inception as self-conscious areas of academic enquiry, in the dying days of colonialism, tried to write from the vantage point of Africans and to decolonize European minds. From the late 1970s, when it was clear that African nationalist narratives and ambitions had been corrupted, Africanists tended to evince an unease with modernization and development, so closely linked to both the late colonial and nationalist projects.

Sheep, Pastures, and Demography in Australia

Succeeding phases of British economic growth prompted strikingly different imperatives for expansion, for natural resource exploitation, and for the social organization of extra-European production. In the eighteenth century, sugar, African slaves, and shipping in the Atlantic world provided one major dynamic of empire. But in the nineteenth century, antipodean settlement and trade, especially that resulting from expanding settler pastoral frontiers, was responsible for some of the most dramatic social and environmental transformations. Plantations occupied relatively little space in the new social geography of world production. By contrast, commercial pastoralism, which took root most energetically in the temperate and semi-arid regions of the newly conquered world, was land-hungry but relatively light in its demands for labour. The Spanish Empire based in Mexico can be considered a forerunner. By the 1580s, within fifty years of their introduction, there were an estimated 4.5 million merino sheep in the Mexican highlands. The livestock economy, incorporating cattle as well as sheep, spread northwards through Mexico to what became California by the eighteenth century. Settler intrusions followed in the vast landmasses of southern Latin America, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Australia was one of the last-invaded of these territories, and, in respect of the issues that we are exploring, was in some senses distinctive. Unlike Canada and South Africa, there was no long, slow period of trade and interaction with the indigenous population; like the Caribbean, the Aboriginal people were quickly displaced by disease and conquest. The relative scale of the pastoral economy was greater than in any other British colony. Supply of meat and dairy products to rapidly growing ports and urban centres was one priority for livestock farmers. Cattle ranching remained a major feature of livestock production in Australia. Bullock-carts, not dissimilar to South African ox-wagons, were essential for Australian transport up to the 1870s. But for well over a century, from the 1820s to the 1950s and beyond, sheep flooded the southern lands. Although mutton became a significant export from New Zealand and South America, wool was probably the major product of these pastoral hinterlands—and a key focus of production in Australia and South Africa. The growth in antipodean sheep numbers was staggering.

Environmental Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Caribbean Plantations

The Atlantic world became Britain’s main early imperial arena in the seventeenth century. Subsequent to Ireland, North America and the Caribbean were the most important zones of British settler colonialism. At the northern limits of settlement, around the Atlantic coast, the St Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and on the shores of the Hudson Bay, cod fisheries and fur-trading networks were established in competition with the French. This intrusion, while it had profound effects on the indigenous population, was comparatively constrained. Secondly, British settlements were founded in colonial New England from 1620. Expanding agrarian communities, based largely on family farms, displaced Native Americans, while the ports thrived on trade and fisheries. In the hotter zones to the south, both in the Caribbean and on the mainland, slave plantations growing tropical products became central to British expansion. Following in Spanish footsteps, coastal Virginia was occupied in 1607 and various Caribbean islands were captured from the 1620s: Barbados in 1627, and Jamaica in 1655. The Atlantic plantation system was shaped in part by environment and disease. But these forces cannot be explored in isolation from European capital and consumption, or the balance of political power between societies in Europe, Africa, and America. An increase in European consumer demand for relatively few agricultural commodities—sugar, tobacco, cotton, and to a lesser extent ginger, coffee, indigo, arrowroot, nutmeg, and lime—drove plantation production and the slave trade. The possibility of providing these largely non-essential additions for British consumption arose from a ‘constellation’ of factors ‘welded in the seventeenth century’ and surviving until the mid-nineteenth century, aided by trade protectionism. This chapter analyses some of these factors and addresses the problem of how much weight can be given to environmental explanations. Plantations concentrated capital and large numbers of people in profoundly hierarchical institutions that occupied relatively little space in the newly emerging Atlantic order. In contrast to the extractive enterprise of the fur trade, this was a frontier of agricultural production, which required little involvement from indigenous people. On some islands, such as Barbados, Spanish intrusions had already decimated the Native American population before the British arrived; there was little resistance.

The Post-Imperial Urban Environment

In this chapter we turn to themes of race, space, environmental justice, and indigenous reassertions in the post-colonial city. We will use as examples: services and urban planning in Singapore; riots in Sydney; and a comparative discussion of parks and public symbols. Although the location of cities had largely been fixed in the colonial period, they were undergoing rapid change by the mid-twentieth century as communities from the surrounding countryside poured into the urban areas. At the beginning of the twentieth century, one tenth of the world’s population lived in cities; by its end more than half did so. In 1900 the ten largest cities were located in Europe and the US, with the exception of Tokyo at seventh. By the early twenty-first century no European urban agglomerations were in this league. The balance shifted from the West to the rest, especially after 1950. Of former colonial cities, Greater Mumbai with about 16 million people, Kolkata (13 million), and Delhi (13 million) were in this group. Mumbai had housed around one million people in 1911. Cities in non-settler states became increasingly dominated, demographically, by the descendants of rural communities from their hinterlands. While English often served as a common medium of communication, regional languages also urbanized with their speakers. Overall, urbanization was linked with rising living standards. But, especially in mega-cities, the gap increased between the rich and overwhelming numbers of urban poor, most of whom were not able to make it into formal employment. Rates of growth in former settler cities were usually less sudden, but they also became increasingly culturally diverse. Canadian cities are one example. The small migrations of indigenous people were only one reason for this. Their increasing multi-ethnicity resulted largely from new sources of global migration: for example, the movement of people from non-British parts of Europe, from the Caribbean, as well as African Americans, Indians, and East Asians. Post-colonial conflict created new diasporas: some of the 80,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 went to Canada, and Toronto became home to the single largest population of expatriate Somalis.

National Parks and the Growth of Tourism

Imperial expansion transformed and destroyed nature in many areas; yet, as we argue, it also contained conservationist impulses. On the one hand these involved attempts to modify practices on land that was used for agriculture both by settlers and indigenous people. On the other, land was reserved more directly by creating zones where human settlement was disallowed. In the case of forests, this often implied scientific management and controlled commercial logging—although some forests were more tightly protected. With regard to wildlife and protected habitats, settler and colonial governments placed greater emphasis on exclusion in their conservation strategies. This chapter will chart changes in attitude and policy towards protected areas, as tourists replaced elite travellers and white hunters in answering the call of the wild. As in the last chapter, our discussion moves beyond the colonial period. While we focus on countries that became part of the Commonwealth, independent states were operating in a changing international context of which the imperial heritage was only one element. We recognize the shift towards community management of natural resources, and the potential for tourism to generate income for poor people. But we argue that the legacy of exclusive conservation, informed partly by new concerns and interests, remained powerful. It is an ambivalent legacy, still the subject of intense debate and contestation, and heavily criticized in recent literature on Africa. While conservation has helped to preserve some habitats and threatened species, a point not often recognized in critiques, it has not often won local legitimacy. In discussions of wildlife protection, policies of preservation are sometimes distinguished from conservation. The boundaries between these ideas are not easily drawn. In general, preservation is seen as an earlier phase and ‘is posited on…the prevention of any active interference whatsoever’. More recently, such strategies have been adopted in highly protected wilderness zones. Conservation is seen as a later, more interventionist phase. It implies wise usage or management to ensure the long-term viability of a natural resource—much in the way that ‘sustainable’ is used now. In fact, preservation often also requires some degree of management. With respect to wildlife, conservationist approaches became associated with viewing by tourists.

Empire and the Visual Representation of Nature

Science and technology helped to shape resource frontiers in the Empire and conquer environments. They also framed new understandings of environmental change and conservationist policies. In a different way, visual representations conjured the Empire for British people and permeated their view of it. They were an inescapable element in the imagining of imperial nature. The growing range of images, we will argue, similarly had potential for encouraging possession, exploitation, and conservation of natural resources. In 1926, an Empire Marketing Board was established in Britain to promote the consumption of food and products from the colonies and dominions. In its short life till 1933, it produced some of the most striking pictorial representations of empire in the shape of over 700 posters. These were carefully commissioned with explicit instructions to some of the leading designers and poster artists in the country. Many captured the central themes that we have tried to illustrate: they depicted commodities, such as South African fruit, Australian wool, Ghanaian cocoa, or Malaysian pineapples, against a background of vivid landscapes, and sometimes the people who worked to turn nature into commodities. They promoted a positive image of an interdependent empire, in which exotic and beautiful environments, partly tamed, gave forth their riches for the British consumer. In this chapter, we try to describe some of the images transmitted about the landscape and environment of empire, especially in the century from about 1850.While our major focus is on British-based representations, some reference is made to artistic work elsewhere that fed into the imperial visual store. Visual material such as Marketing Board posters familiarized British audiences with far-flung conquered zones, and naturalized their exploitation. However, these images were only one style of representation; there were many others and it is important to capture some of the complexity and variety of visual imaginations, developed in many different media. Images could transcend their intended purpose, and, as in the case of approaches to nature itself, there were conflicting and contending voices. Jostling alongside images that celebrated exploitation were others that championed nature or portrayed it sympathetically. Because of the power of visual media, it is arguable that these had a particular influence on environmental thinking.

Water, Irrigation, and Agrarian Society in India and Egypt

Water drives the world. Without it, our bodies cannot function, settlement is impossible, livestock die, and farmers cannot grow crops that feed millions. Great civilizations have been built upon irrigation, and fallen when the irrigation failed. Water carried armies, navies, commodities and labour across the globe, into places unreachable by land transport, and at far lower cost. When harnessed it produced steam engines and electricity, and helped to power industrial society. This natural resource, both fresh and salt, helped shape the patterns of empire in terms of the location of settlement and routes of communication. Irrigation became a major enterprise in the British Empire. Dammed and channelled water did not become a commodity in quite the same way as sugar, furs, or teak. But direct charges were often made for channelled water, and its value was also materialized in crops and livestock. In many places, control of water was intimately bound up with command over territory. State-owned irrigation is a highly visible assertion of power, and management of water has sometimes required a centralized and ruthless bureaucracy, not least in order to collect the new revenues generated. As with forestry, colonial states tended to claim that their approach to water involved greater rationality and efficiency, in contrast to existing indigenous practices—though individual engineers did praise the ingenuity of the latter. Some scholars have argued that despotism has followed human attempts to assert authority over water and its products, because it is a very basic way in which one group of people can dominate other, weaker groups. Such controls could also be a bedfellow of capitalist enterprise and empire. Making the link between the control of water and the rise of empires, Donald Worster has written of the American West: ‘[It] can best be described as a modern hydraulic society, which is to say, a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting…The technological control of water was the basis of a new West’. Ultimately, it helped to make California the leading state in America.

Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia

The rise of the motor car created two very different commodity frontiers in the British Empire, one producing oil and the other rubber. The demand for rubber followed an often-repeated pattern in that it was shaped by scientific invention, technological change, and new patterns of consumption in the industrialized world. It was related directly to the development of new fossil fuels. Coal transformed shipping and overland transport by rail. Oil (Chapter 15) opened new realms for mobility. The invention in 1867 of the internal combustion engine by a German, Nikolaus Otto, and in 1885 of automobiles powered by gasoline-driven engines revolutionized transport, culture, and the South-East Asian environment. During the late nineteenth century, wild natural rubber booms swept through the tropical world, from Brazil to the Congo, leaving in their wake hardship and scandal. In Malaysia, there was a very different outcome—the development of plantations on a new capitalist agrarian frontier. Rubber became one of the single most important commodities produced in the Empire, and was enormously valuable to Britain not only for its own motor industry but also to sell to the United States. Whereas demand for some earlier imperial commodities was largely British, there was also significant consumption of rubber and oil in other parts of the Empire, especially the settler dominions. In the early decades of the twentieth century, rubber plantations, in parallel with expanding sugar production in Queensland, Natal, Trinidad, and Fiji, extended and intensified Britain’s engagement with the tropical zones of the world. Indentured workers replaced slaves as the major plantation workforce. South India was the major labour source for Malaysia, where the ports and tin-mining centres already had substantial Chinese communities. British colonialism in Malaysia left as its legacy a multi-ethnic society. By the 1930s about 55 per cent were indigenous Malays and Orang Asli, 35 per cent of Chinese origin, and close to 10 per cent Indian. Although capital was increasingly mobile by the late nineteenth century, extraction and production of the three major commodities of the twentieth century Empire proved to be highly location specific. Gold and oil were trapped in particular geological formations.

Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis in East and Central Africa

Disease, we have argued, influenced patterns of colonization, especially in West Africa, the Americas, and Australia (Chapter 2). In turn, imperial transport routes facilitated the spread of certain diseases, such as bubonic plague. This chapter expands our discussion of environmentally related diseases by focusing on trypanosomiasis, carried by tsetse fly, in East and Central Africa. Unlike plague, this disease of humans and livestock was endemic and restricted to particular ecological zones in Africa. But as in the case of plague, the changing incidence of trypanosomiasis was at least in part related to imperialism and colonial intrusion in Africa. Coastal East Africa presented some of the same barriers to colonization as West Africa. Portugal maintained a foothold in South-East Africa for centuries, and its agents expanded briefly onto the Zimbabwean plateau in the seventeenth century, but could not command the interior. Had these early incursions been more successful, southern Africa may have been colonized from the north, rather than by the Dutch and British from the south. Parts of East Africa were a source of slaves and ivory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The trading routes, commanded by Arab and Swahili African networks, as well as Afro-Portuguese further south, were linked with the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slave-holding expanded within enclaves of East Africa, such as the clove plantations of Zanzibar. When Britain attempted to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and policed the West African coast, East and Central African sources briefly became more important for the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves from these areas were taken to Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Britain did not have the same intensity of contact with East Africa as with West and southern Africa until the late nineteenth century. There was no major natural resource that commanded a market in Europe and British traders had limited involvement in these slave markets. But between the 1880s and 1910s, most of East and Central Africa was taken under colonial rule, sometimes initially as protectorates: by Britain in Kenya and Uganda; Germany in Tanzania; Rhodes’s British South Africa Company in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi; and by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.