Transport organisation and colonial order: provision for extraction

Last week we focused on the "unthinking transfer" of transport and development models from one society to another and noted the "transport gap" evident in Africa at the end of the colonial period and persisting into the present.The purpose of today's class is to draw attention to the role that empire played in transport organisation within present day Africa. The transport organisation of colonial Africa reflects and is shaped by its many externally imposed political boundaries and those fragmentations in transport infrastructure continue to show strongly within present day transport organisation and provision. The colonial legacy is one of continental transport inefficiencies which reveal themselves as the "transport gap" identified by Hilling (1996:see last week's notes.)

A good place to start to explore these relationships is in the work of Daniel Headrick:

Among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequences for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology: the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans. (Headrick, 1981:3

Headrick notes that whilst historians had carefully described and analysed both of these phenomena, they had been treated separately. His thesis is that there are very many connections between the two phenomena. He gives us a very quick handle on the scale of empire:

The European imperialism of the nineteenth century - sometimes called the "new imperialism" - differed from its precursors in two respects: its extent and its legacy. In the year 1800, Europeans occupied or controlled thirty five per cent of the land surface of the world; by 1878 this figure had risen to sixty seven per cent, and by 1914 over eighty forur per cent of the world's area was European dominated. (Headrick, 1981:3)

And a handle on its purpose:

The goal and result of imperialism - one which was in fact achieved in most territories before decolonisation - was the creation of colonies politically submissive and economically profitable to their European metropoles. (Headrick, 1981:11)

He provides us with an understanding of the stages of empire and the role of transport within these:

The initial stage was that of penetration and exploration by the first European travelers. Then came the conquest of the indigenous people and the imposition of European rule on them. Finally, before the colony could become valuableas an adjunct to a European economy, a communication and transportation network had to be forged.(Headrick, 1981:11)

Each European empire had its own communication and transportation network centred on its homeland and operated through its own language. The consequence is that the transport circumstance of present day Africa is the residue of many distinct communication and transport networks where the centre has retracted the bulk of its financing and operation of links between the hub and the spokes and the spokes have been left largely to themselves to find the financing and organisation to link up effectively outside of imperialism. Africa is a continent of stranded mobility. To provide a graphic example, persons travelling by air between different French speaking states of Africa frequently have to travel through Paris to accomplish their journey.

Headrick provides us with a charting of transport technology relationships at the various stages of empire:

In the penetration phase, steamers and the prophylactic use of quinine were the key technologies. The second phase - that of conquest - depended heavily on rapid firing rifles and machine guns. In the phase of consolidation, the links that tied the colonies to Europe and promoted their economic exploitation included steamship lines, the Suez canal, the submarine telegraph cables and the colonial railroads. (Headrick, 1981: 12)

Within his book, he investigates each of these relationships between industrial technology and imperialism in great detail.

The steam boat, with its power to travel speedily upriver as well as down, carried Europeans deep into Africa and Asia. Few inventions of the nineteenth century were as important in the history of imperialism. (Headrick, 1981:17)

Most English speaking historians date the beginning of the age of steamboats from Robert Fulton's Clermont, which navigated the Hudson between New York and Albany in 1807, a commercial as well as a technical success. Americans took to the new device with instant enthusiasm, for theirs was a land of great roadless distances crossed by broad rivers lined with trees which steamers could use for fuel. Within a decade the Hudson, Delaware, Potomac and Mississippi and their tributaries all carried regular steamboat services.(Headrick, 1981:18)

The very technology which brought development to an independent America brought exploitation to Asia and Africa. Within empire, the steamboat was combined with the gun and used to force submission.

The revolution they (steamboats) wrought occurred in Asia and Africa, into whose interior they carried the power that European ships had possessed on the high seas for centuries. Indeed no single piece of equipment is so closely associated with imperialism as is the armed shallow draft steamer, the gun boat.(Headrick, 1981:18)

The early history of the gunboat illustrates the interaction between technological innovationand the motives of imperialism. Because his father had an iron foundry and a ship yard, Macgregor Laird could turn his interest in Africa into and exploring expedition on the Niger, Peacock's classical erudition and Russophobia led him to translate the Anglo-Indian concerns with rapid communications into a steamboat expedition on the Euphrates. Their combination of interests persuaded the East India Company to become the first major purchaser of gunboats. In turn the company's habit of acquiring gun boats led to Britain's victory in the Opium War. Thus, in the case of gunboats, we cannot claim that technological innovation caused imperialism. Rather, the means and the motives stimulated one another in a relationship of positive mutual feedback. (Headrick, 1981: 54)

Transport technology was an important aspect of imperial penetration but technologies to control disease were also an important part of the equation:

It was disease that kept Europeans out of the interior of Africa. Although steam boats came to Africa and Asia at the same time, in Asia they wrought a revolution in the power of Europeans, whereas in Africa their effect was postponed for several decades. Before Europeans could break into the African interior successfully, they required another technological advance, a triumph over disease. (Headrick, 1981: 59)

One immediate consequence of quinine prophylaxis was a great increase in the number and success of European explorers in Africa after the mid-century. Exploration, of course, remained a dangerous business, but no longer was it quasisuicidal. (Headrick, 1981: 70)

The production of anti-malarial medication was an important imperial technology:

Scientific cinchona production was an imperial technology par excellence. Without it European colonialism would have been almost impossible in Africa, and much costlier elsewhere in the tropics. At the same time, the development of this technology, combining the scientific expertise of several botanical gardens, the encouragement of the British and Dutch colonial governments, and the land and labor of the peoples of India and Indonesia, wa clearly a consequence as well as a cause of imperialism. (Headrick, 1981:73)

Headrick sketches how the combination of river steamers and reasonably effective protection from malaria combined with steamship lines between Britain and West Africa opened up the path for the commercial exploitation of Africa:

Palm oil, which had replaced slaves as the principal export of southern Nigeria, was essential as the raw material for soap and as a lubricant for industrial machinery was kept unreasonably high by the Niger delta middlemen who brought it to the coast, and by the small European traders who shipped it to Europe......What was needed was a double application of steam. One was to be a steamship line between Britain and West Africa....The other was a regular steam boat service along the Niger in order to bypass the Nigerian middlemen. ....In 1859, after traders attacked the Rainbow (one of the Niger steam boats) and killed two of her crew...Two years later HMS Espoir entered the Niger and destroyed the villages that had been responsible for the assault...By the 1870s several British companies were trading on the Niger with armed steamers, and every year a military expedition steamed up the river to destroy any towns that resisted British intrusion.....In 1885 the British Government declared the Niger delta a protectorate. Despite sporadic resistance, no African town along the rivers and no war canoe could withstand for long the the power of British gun boats. (Headrick, 1981:73-74)

The Niger river was the scene of the earliest and and most active use of steamers by the invading Europeans because it was the easiest to navigate in all of tropical Africa. (Headrick, 1981:75)

In discussing the patterns of imperial penetration of Africa, he notes the importance of topography and the susceptibility of pack animals to disease in Africa:

Given the harsh topography of much of Africa and lack of pack animals, it is doubtful whether Europeans could have penetrated so fast or dominated so thoroughly if they had had to go on foot. Regions lacking good water transportation .....were among the last to be colonised. The contrast between the ease of water transport and the difficulty of land transport in the nineteenth century Africa accounts in large part for the European patterns of penetration and control. (Headrick, 1981: 75-76)

Next week we will discuss the development of railroads in Africa in some detail: to end our discussion topic for this week, we reflect with Headrick on the extractive purpose for which most African transport infrastructure was developed:

Railroads need a heavy investment in infrastructure, and consequently require a considerable traffic to make them remunerative. Such traffic can consist either of passengers and processed goods - the traffic of cities - or of raw materials - the product of farms and mines.

Many of the railroads built in tropical Africa handled the second kind of traffic. There were groundnuts and palm oil railroads in West Africa, copper railroads from Katanga and Rhodesia to the sea, and cotton railroads in the Sudan and Uganda. These lines even when they were quite long (as from Katanga to South Africa) served essentially one purpose; they were feeder lines for the shipping companies that carried off to Europe the products of African soil. (Headrick, 1981: 193)

Extractive transport networks hubbed to the colonial centre with a history of the destruction of local economies and local internal transport systems were the basis of colonial transport organisation. The legacy left behind is a major transport gap without indigenous resources to make good the deficit in the foreseeable future. This legacy will bring us to a consideration of the remedial action that can be taken with the assistance of information communication technologies in achieving more appropriate and progressive transport organisation in Africa.

References:
Headrick, D.R. (1981) The tools of empire - technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century. Oxford University Press. Cornell Library ref: T19.H43

e-mail at m.grieco@napier.ac.uk