An overview of the long-term

The mercantilist period in the sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries was characterised by an insatiable thirst for acquiring territory to use as sources of cheap primary products and markets for manufactured goods.

This is the context in which the Dutch people (latterly known as ‘Afrikaners’ or ‘Boers’), for example, settled in South Africa in 1647 and 1652. To this end, the Dutch East India Company was involved in violent skirmishes with indigenous people for land, cattle and natural resources. The British colonialists did not arrive on the scene until the 1800s. After initial set-backs (such as the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879 in which the British were defeated by King Cetshwayo’s Zulu army, and the protracted Boer Wars of 1880—1 and 1899—1902), the British, with their superior armoury, were finally able to subjugate both the indigenous people and the rival Dutch colonialists.

In pre-colonial Africa, farmers and peasants were producing for either their own use or to trade for other goods, though the concept of production for the others (i.e. foreign colonial masters) did not exist for them. Some authors (Gennaioli and Rainer, 2007; Heldring and Robinson, 2012, 2013) also contend that, before colonial expansion, politically centralised states such as the Tswana states in Botswana were shining examples of accountability of local chiefs to ‘higher-level traditional authority’. Greater accountability in this hierarchical system is explicable from either pre-colonial states having been ‘sociologically more advanced’ to facilitate effective adoption of western technologies, or being able ‘to organize politically and thus restrain abusive national leaders, fostering democracy’ (Kittrell, 1973).

In colonies of white settlement [such as the self-governing dominion of South Africa] the most important factor was that the highly extractive nature of colonial rule and land grabs manifested themselves... in quite serious immiseration of Africans during the colonial period. The evolution of the international dissemination and diffusion of technology plus the relative absence of slavery in this part of Africa makes it likely that, absent colonialism [sic], African living standards would have slowly improved.

(Heldring and Robinson, 2013, 2)

However, similarly to Ferguson (2003) — who contends that, if there had been no British Empire (an essentially ‘good’ empire despite the racism, cruelty, snobbery and authoritarianism), then the situation would have been markedly worse under less scrupulous Spanish or German empires — counterfactuals are not easy to prove. How did classical economists conceptualise these earlier colonial ‘invasions’? The ending of slavery, which was followed by the adoption of a free trade policy (1846), and the abolition of Navigation Acts (1849) and preferential customs, weakened mercantilist arguments. Protectionist ideas were denounced by classical economists and Evangelicals on economic (taxing trade and licensing monopolies) and moral grounds (a sense of ‘unfairness’).

Adam Smith’s laissez-faire ideas were intended to address this so-called ‘distorted and inefficient allocation of national resources’ (Lorrain, 1991, 226) and perceived ‘sense of unfairness’. Kittrell (1973, 88) notes that, for Smith, ‘emigrants carry with them to the colonies superior knowledge of agriculture and of the useful arts, and the cultural attributes favourable to stable government. When this is combined with the colonial land that is cheap and plentiful, where there is no rents and taxes are nil, accumulation will progress rapidly’. However, it must be noted that, unlike other classical political economists (Malthus, Say, James Mill, J.S.

The former argued that ‘enlightened nations’ with their ‘superior civilisations’ were duty bound to change ‘savage nations’ whose ‘inferior civilisations’ were characterised by cultures of superstition, preference for leisure, laziness and lack of motivation associated with hot climates, and the inability to save for a rainy day (Ferguson, 2003). Granted: ‘Smith did not oppose colonialism in general... For Smith, colonial trade could be most advantageous for both the colonies and the colonial powers so long as there was no monopolistic control of it' (ibid., 227). Indeed, for both Smith and Ricardo, the struggle was against:

a possible ‘stationary state' of society... they assumed that those [‘backward'] nations could not carry out their own transition [from various forms of feudalism] to capitalism without European colonial tutelage... Hence colonialism could even be justified as a way of establishing, enforcing and maintaining free trade in other parts of the world, thus securing development for both advanced and backward nations.

(ibid., 229; also see Ndhlovu and Cameron, 2013)

Given readily available cheap land in the colonies, wages would be bid up, enticing more people to emigrate, and thus higher productivity would follow (Smith, 1937, 533; Ndhlovu, 2012; Ndhlovu and Cameron, 2013). There was therefore every reason to believe that more would be produced since, in these ‘savage and barbarous nations', the relatively small size of the market limited the division of labour. It was against this background that McCulloch (1826, 64—5) argued that the pressures for labour as the market expanded would eventually lead to (white) settlement and the need for government to maintain growing emigration to the colonies.

In respect of settlement colonies such as Australia, South Africa and Zambia, this raised questions about the cost and methods of financing colonisation.

Wakefield

did believe that his proposal for colonial self-government and selective emigration from all strata and both sexes, and especially young married couples, would make colonization easier, given a colonial lands sales policy based on his doctrines. The quantity and quality of the emigrating forces would be enhanced; and he felt these policies would certainly be instrumental in developing an old world society in the new world — a cherished dream — in the shortest period of time. Likewise the provision for using the proceeds of land sales to defray the costs of immigration was advocated by Wakefield. In the first place this would permit a lower price on the lands than otherwise; and secondly, he was keenly aware of the political appeal of a plan that transferred the cost of emigration to the colony.

(ibid., 99-100)

Despite criticisms from James Mill, McCulloch, Malthus, Cairnes, Senior and James Spedding (of the Colonial Office), who questioned the computation of the ‘sufficient price' and wondered whether government regulations from a distance would be effective, that is, imputed equilibrating forces of the free market (ibid., 91—103):

In practice, Wakefield felt that the best approach was for the government to fix a relatively low price, and as experience dictated, gradually raise the price until the rates of wages and profits indicated that the price was sufficient.

(ibid., 91)

It is noteworthy that ‘Wakefield... was asking that the abundant factor (land) be made relatively scarce through the instrument of the restrictive sufficient price. And as his critics noted, Wakefield conceived of some optimum combination of the factors in the colonies that rested on technological instead of economic considerations’ (ibid., 93). Although Wakefield’s writings were persuasive enough to convert Jeremy Bentham and Robert Torrens, the inertia at the Colonial Office, hostility from friends and foe and the Free Trade movement had begun to steal a march on his arguments.

In the meantime, from a very different perspective, Karl Marx was also grappling with issues surrounding the development of capitalism and colonisation. It is important to note the evolution in Marx and Engels’ thought before and after 1860. Lorrain (1991, 229—32) argues that before 1860, Marx concentrated on national struggles whose success was inextricably linked with the class struggle in England. While acknowledging the ‘immiseration’ effects of capitalism, Marx nevertheless viewed the system as ‘progressive’ insofar as it ‘advanced’ the productive forces (Ndhlovu, 2012; Ndhlovu and Cameron, 2013). Sourcing cheap raw materials and extending the market as widely as possible helped to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In the circumstances, Marx believed that the English proletariat would play a leading role in the (world) liberation movement. However, for Marx after 1860, particularly in 1869 and 1875, the English working was no longer absolutely crucial to the liberation of colonies.

Furthermore, Lorrain (ibid., 232) notes that the ‘early’ Marx (in 1853) regarded the impact of colonisation (through infrastructural development i.e.

Nevertheless, in Victorian Britain, colonial expansion was still being rationalised, not as a way of benefiting the mother country, but instead the Darwinian theory of evolution was used to invoke a racist ideology where European colonisation in the nineteenth century was presented as a civilising mission of primitive peoples under the guidance of a ‘benign’ imperialist state. Despite racial hierarchies, a sense of superiority and efforts to supplant indigenous cultures, features that had been noticeable in some of the classical economists’ analyses, Ferguson (2003) argues that the enlightened British population were always at hand to curb the empire’s worst effects. The lack of progress in curbing racism is put squarely on the shoulders of white settlers in the colonies. Moreover, the empire facilitated the spread of liberal capitalism and bequeathed Protestant Christianity and the English language on the colonies (ibid.). This ambiguity between capitalist principles of self-interest (individual freedom) and social justice is captured by Nelson Mandela (1995) in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela recalls the arrogance of missionaries, whom he describes as benign dictators, during their ‘civilising mission’ of students like him at the University of Fort Hare. He contrasts this with their pious ideals of forgiveness, humility and equality in the eyes of God.

Notwithstanding Ferguson’s (counterfactual) argument, it appears that ‘there was a broad [Darwinian] acceptance of the idea that human societies progressed and that therefore the different “races” could be ranked within a hierarchy of primitive to civilised’ (Hewitson, 2013, 92). In so far as concepts such as the nuclear family (with its patriarchal and hierarchical structures) distinguished the ‘civilised’ race from the ‘savages’ in the colonies, a body of thought could be built to rationalise the violent usurping of land in southern Africa by colonialists and subordinate its peoples in the name of progress. For those of a Smithian persuasion, once these peoples were ‘liberated’ from their ‘uncivilised’ ways or cultural chains, they could, imbued with self-interest, participate in free trade, while the ‘invisible’ hand was credited with bringing about the smooth workings of the market (Offer, 2012).