H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (December, 2007)
Bouda Etemad. _Possessing the World: Taking the Measurement of
Colonisation from the 18th to the 20th Century_. Translated by Andrene
Everson. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. x + 252 pp. Tables, notes,
appendices, bibliography, index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-338-1.
Reviewed for H-Diplo by John Laband, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier
University
Counting Colonialism
Ernest Labrousse, the originator of the quantitative history known as
"Cliometrics," reputedly declared that "to be an historian, one ought to
know how to count." Bouda Etemad, professor of history at the
Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, is clearly a scholar steeped in
Labrousse's statistical methodology, for he deploys it in an attempt to
explain the construction and collapse of European overseas colonial
empires between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The
focus of Etemad's study is on neither the causes nor the consequences of
colonialism, but on the factor he believes most current scholars neglect
because it seems so self-evident, namely, the technological superiority
in weaponry, medicine, transportation, and communications that made
European expansion in the age of the Industrial Revolution inevitable.
For Etemad, the crucial question is _when_ this self-evident superiority
came into effect. In the first five chapters, he argues that until the
Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, these new technologies had not
developed sufficiently in such areas of conquest as South Asia and North
Africa to give Europeans any decisive edge over their adversaries. In
particular, colonizers remained extremely vulnerable to tropical
disease. Etemad shows that it was the widespread and effective
recruitment of native soldiers that allowed Europeans successfully to
shift the human cost of empire to indigenous populations.
In the spirit of Labrousse and the Annales School of historians with
whom he collaborated, Etemad devotes the second half of the book to
historical demography. Through the construction of a large statistical
database showing the enormous geographic extent of colonies between 1760
and 1938 and the minute number of the European colonizers living there,
he demonstrates the extreme and continuing numerical inferiority of the
colonists to their Asian, West Indian, and African subjects, and their
absolute reliance on indigenous intermediaries to uphold their rule.
This proves to Etemad that modern colonization was never more than "an
extremely fragile edifice from start to finish," and explains why
decolonization after the Second World War was so rapid and inevitable
(p. 6). To underline this demographic determinism, Etemad draws a
statistical comparison between this data and that of colonies of
settlement. The latter, with their overwhelming settler majorities over
aboriginal inhabitants, followed a very different trajectory from
imperial possessions that were administered but not settled.
Etemad's conclusions will hardly come as a surprising revelation for
scholars steeped in the history of imperialism in the modern period.
Where the real value of this book lies is in the substance that
quantification lends to widely held, but qualitative, impressions. It is
instructive, for example, to have a more precise indication of the
proportion of indigenous soldiers in colonial armies (table 3.2), the
size of settler communities as a percentage of entire colonial
populations (table 11.1), or the comparative deaths due to disease and
combat among European troops (appendix A).
Nevertheless, quantification brings its own methodological problems.
These are not limited to having to rely on data that can be both
incomplete and unreliable, and anyone who works in the field knows that
statistics garnered by colonial administrators might be little better
than impressionistic. This is especially so when population counts are
derived from estimations based, for example, on the payment of the hut
tax in Africa. Potentially even more vexed is the matter of the initial
creation of the categories in which the data is deployed. The author (as
we have seen) satisfactorily justifies the temporal parameters of the
study, but does not adequately explain why geographically contiguous
empires have been excluded from consideration. After all, the most
successful empires extant in the world today are those of Russia, China,
and the United States. They still rule conquered and determinedly
colonized territories like Siberia, Tibet, and the huge tracts ceded by
Mexico. Difficulties also arise when dealing with the complicated and
volatile ebb and flow of the frontier in sectors like southern Africa
that render calculations of colonial areas and populations taken at set
intervals decades apart of questionable comparative utility.
Such problems aside, this book represents a valiant attempt to bring
quantitative methodology to a statistically slippery and emotively
complex subject, and serves as a very useful corrective to technological
determinism in explaining European colonialism.
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