Mill, the realities of colonial rule—particularly what it meant for Britain to rule over other territories and peoples—challenged the worldview of many inside these political and intellectual circles. Mill, for his part, offered perhaps the most famous attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction in the mid-nineteenth century, as he proposed a tiered view of the world that positioned colonialism as a process leading to social uplift, where, through colonial rule, so-called civilized and modern Europeans were to guide the colonized—“barbarians” in Mill’s language—toward the light of civilization. Mill’s writings, among others, would in turn help lay the intellectual groundwork for a perceived progressive colonialism that, in the liberal worldview, positioned the colonized along a paternalist path leading toward a modern society.13
As Mill and others debated colonialism, they also began the process of reimagining their philosophical ideals in relation to world history. In doing so, they drew clear lines connecting liberal values of individual freedom, equality before the law, and utilitarian governance to the philosophical and political traditions of antiquity.14 Both politically and intellectually, the result was a naturalization of European liberal ideas within not only a particular school of European imperial thought, but also in key aspects of the global political imagination. As a result, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social commentators in both the colonial and metropolitan worlds turned to liberal thought and values in their political discourse. In doing so, they often projected onto colonial peoples their own assumptions concerning the enlightened human condition even as the ideal of a liberal imperialism began to fade from most colonial policy discussions in the second half of the nineteenth century.15 In 1897 Nigeria, for instance, the African editors of the Lagos Standard heralded both the uniqueness and the universality of Britain’s liberal traditions in their accounting of the promise of British colonial rule specifically. “The Natives of Africa—we venture to say all Africa, love the Queen not only for what she is,” the newspaper proclaimed, “but for what she represents—the freest and best system of Government the world has ever known.”16 Others, likewise, turned to liberal notions of free trade and commerce, as they linked (albeit not uncritically) aspects of the colonial mission to the continent’s future development.17 By the early twentieth century, the political, economic, and social relationships of colonial rule had thus become intertwined, in both the colonial and the metropolitan political imaginary, with the idealized progressivism implicit in the liberal worldview.
For many living both inside and outside Europe’s colonial territories, rhetorical gestures toward liberal ideals offered them new pathways to political and social claim-making during the first decades of colonial rule. At the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, for instance, organizers and delegates combined a language of racial self-help and uplift with a set of claims on the British colonial administration in which they demanded the free and fair treatment of Britain’s colonial subject populations. Delegates at the conference also called for the creation of a range of protections for colonial peoples in areas including labor, politics, and property. In doing so, they charged the colonial government with an obligation for ensuring Africans gain the political, social, and economic means necessary for the continent’s fruition in the modern world.18 Likewise, in 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been present in London, sought to rejuvenate that conference’s spirit as he organized in Paris the first of four Pan-African Congresses he would plan in the early interwar period. Set to coincide with the end of the First World War and the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, the 1919 Pan-African Congress—like its 1900 predecessor—integrated a liberal narrative of racial uplift and self-help into its demands on Europe’s colonial governments.19 In doing so, representatives to the congress insisted upon a colonial system absent the exploitation, violence, and alienation that had characterized the first decades of colonial rule in Africa. This realignment of colonial rule, they argued, would ultimately require a commitment to such practices as holding African land and imperial capital investments in trust for the continent’s peoples, the regulation and taxation of extractive industries for the public good, and the abolition of forced labor in all its iterations. Even more importantly for the congress-goers, they also called for the granting of African peoples “the right to participate in the government as fast as their development permits,” and insisted “that, in time, Africa be ruled by consent of the Africans.”20
Such pan-African demands for imperial reform coincided with a range of emerging international critiques of European imperialism during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Europe, debates over the wisdom, ethics, costs, and consequences of empire had long dotted the metropolitan political scene, with many worrying about the range of effects imperialism could have, and had had, on life in the metropole.21 Just after the turn of the century, J. A. Hobson would extend aspects of these arguments further as he sought to dissect the operation of the imperial system as a whole.22 A London-born economist who three years earlier had reported on the Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, Hobson presented a model for understanding imperialism that extended beyond the rhetoric of progress and civilization employed by colonialism’s most fervent proponents as well as by those seeking reform. Instead, he tied the imperial project to capitalism’s continuous need for expansion. Published in 1902, his Imperialism: A Study in turn detailed a political and economic process by which Europe’s colonial ambitions in Africa and elsewhere aimed to extract new wealth from colonies abroad and create new markets within these colonies for the goods it produced at home.23
In a 1915 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, W. E. B. Du Bois published a similar critique of imperialism.24 Emphasizing the colonialist roots of the First World War, Du Bois moved the economics of empire to the center of a quasi-Marxist analysis of the conflict. In doing so, he presented a picture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period marked by the increasing racialization of global extractive labor and of growing European consumerist demand. For him, the nationalisms that many saw as one of the war’s main causes, if not its primary cause, were in fact the direct result of a broader merging of interests between European capital and white labor over the last half of the nineteenth century. As a result, Du Bois argued that, through a period of labor reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white labor had become increasingly expensive, as workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions. For many white workers, the result was the creation of new avenues through which to accumulate wealth. However, the African American intellectual also insisted that it was only through the emerging colonial system that European capital was able to fund the mounting cost of labor at home, while also meeting the rising expectations of what was becoming a bourgeois working class. To this end, the forced labor campaigns made infamous by Leopold’s Congo, but practiced to some degree in all the major powers’ African holdings, provided European capital with a markedly cheaper and almost invariably nonwhite labor force. Echoing Hobson, Du Bois contended that the emerging colonial project introduced new sites into a global economy through which European capital could extend its extractive reach for the benefit of European personal and industrial consumption.25
Thus, for Du Bois, the First World War had its origins in the fragile but colonially buttressed and racialized alliance between European capital and labor. Key to the survival of this alliance was each side’s ability to cater to the other’s impulse to consume, an arrangement requiring ever more resources to sustain itself. As a result, in the decades leading up to the war, Europe’s major powers competed with one another for greater control of the world’s labor and natural resources. The Berlin Conference and the imperial pie-slicing that came out of it were but one mechanism to help temporarily regulate these impulses. For Du Bois, the war represented the inevitable breakdown of these agreements and their attempts to contain the expanding needs of imperial capitalism. To those in African and other colonies, the results were social conditions in which Africans and other colonial subjects had little choice but to serve as pawns in the fight for global control over labor and resources. Moreover, Du Bois averred that, absent the implementation of a postwar agreement rooted in a notion of democracy that could “extend . . . to the yellow, brown, and black peoples,” any postwar peace had little chance of breaking free from the rapacious nature of European capitalism. He also predicted that, in time,
