Chapter 20
How and why did Hinduism emerge as a distinct religious tradition during the colonial era in India?
• Only during the colonial era did leading intellectuals and reformers in India begin to define their region's endlessly varied beliefs, practices, sects, rituals, and schools of philosophy as a more distinct, unified, and separate religion that is now known as Hinduism. • It was in part an effort to provide for India a religion wholly equivalent to Christianity, to create tradition and a sense of historical worth in spite of the humiliation of colonial rule. • The idea of Hinduism gained in importance during the period because it provided a cultural foundation for emerging ideas of India as a nation, but it also accentuated a more conscious split between Muslims and Hindus.
How were the lives of African women altered by colonial economies?
Before colonization, African women were almost everywhere active farmers, with responsibility for planting, weeding, and harvesting in addition to food preparation and child care. Women were expected to feed their own families and often were allocated their own fields for that purpose, and many were also involved in local trading activity. Though clearly subordinate to men, African women nevertheless had a measure of economic autonomy. • Following colonization, women's lives diverged more and more from those of men. Women dominated subsistence production, while men took a dominant role in cash-crop agriculture. • Men migrated to the cities, leaving women to manage the domestic economy almost alone. Women were forced to take on traditionally male tasks in addition to their normal responsibilities. • The lives and cultures of men and women increasingly diverged, with one focused on the cities and working for wages and the other on village life and subsistence agriculture. • In response to the situation, women sought closer relations with their birth families, introduced laborsaving crops, adopted new farm implements, and earned some money as traders. In the cities, they established a variety of self-help associations. • The colonial economy sometimes offered women a measure of opportunity, particularly in small-scale trade and marketing that could on occasion give them considerable economic autonomy. • Women of impoverished rural families often became virtually independent heads of household in the absence of their husbands, while others took advantage of new opportunities in mission schools, towns, and mines to flee the restrictions of rural patriarchy.
In what way were "race" and "tribe" new identities in colonial Africa?
Before the colonial period, African peoples had long recognized differences among themselves based on language, kinship, clan, village, or state, but these were seldom sharp or clearly defined. • The idea of an Africa sharply divided into separate and distinct "tribes" was in fact a European notion that facilitated colonial administration and reflected their belief in African primitiveness. • But while Europeans may have created or sought to impose these categories, Africans increasingly found ethnic or tribal labels useful; this was especially true in rapidly growing urban areas, where migrants found it helpful to categorize themselves and others in larger ethnic terms.
What impact did Western education have on colonial societies?
For an important minority, the acquisition of a Western education generated a new identity, providing access to better-paying jobs and escape from some of the most onerous obligations of living under European control, such as forced labor. • It also brought them elite status within their own communities and an opportunity to achieve, or at least approach, equality with whites in racially defined societies. • Education created a new cultural divide within Asian and African societies between the small number who had mastered to varying degrees the ways of their rulers and the vast majority who had not. • Many of those who received a Western education saw themselves as a modernizing vanguard leading the regeneration of their societies, in association with colonial authorities. In India, Western-educated people organized a variety of reform societies, which sought a renewed Indian culture that was free of idolatry, child marriages, caste, and discrimination against women, while drawing inspiration from classic texts of Hinduism. • But there was disillusionment among those who received a Western education as well, as Europeans generally declined to treat Asian and African subjects, regardless of their education, as equal partners in the enterprise of renewal.
How did cash-crop agriculture transform the lives of colonized peoples?
In some regions, like Burma and the Gold Coast, colonial promotion of cash crops for trade benefited the farmers who participated in the system. • In other regions, like the Netherlands East Indies, cash-crop agriculture was forced on the local population by the colonial power, burdening the people and contributing to a wave of famines. • Cash-crop agriculture did lead to some social changes, as the cultivation of crops for markets and wage labor on plantations that were set up to grow cash crops shifted normal labor patterns.
What kinds of wage labor were available in the colonies? Why might people take part in it? How did doing so change their lives?
Members of colonial societies could find paid work in European-owned plantations and mines, on construction projects, or as household servants. • Their participation was driven by the need for money, by the loss of land adequate to support their families, or sometimes by the orders of colonial authorities. • Their lives became dependent on wages that were low and earned through hard and often dangerous labor. Many colonial workers settled in overcrowded cities where, because of the cost of living, normal family life was virtually impossible for many wage laborers.
What were the attractions of Christianity within some colonial societies?
Military defeat shook confidence in the old gods and local practices, fostering openness to new sources of supernatural power that could operate in the wider world now impinging on their societies. • Christianity was widely associated with modern education, and, especially in Africa, mission schools were the primary providers of Western education. • The young, the poor, and many women found new opportunities and greater freedom in some association with missions. • The spread of the Christian message was less the work of European missionaries than of those many thousands of African teachers, catechists, and pastors who brought the new faith to remote villages as well as the local communities that begged for a teacher and supplied the labor and materials to build a small church or school. • Christianity in Africa soon became Africanized, maintaining older traditions alongside new Christian ideas.
How did the power of colonial states transform the economic lives of colonial subjects?
Some groups found ways of working within and profiting from the colonial system, including some farmers who produced cash crops for export, as was the case of rice cultivation for export in Burma and the raising of cacao in Ghana. • Others learned to find a place within the system, like those African women who became small-scale traders. • Wage labor on plantations and in mines became a far more common way to sustain oneself.
Why might subject people choose to cooperate with the colonial regime? What might prompt them to rebel or resist?
Subject peoples might choose to cooperate for a number of reasons, including the employment, status, and security that they found in European-led armed forces. • There might be an opportunity for some local elites to maintain much of their earlier status and privileges while gaining considerable wealth by working as local intermediaries for the colonial powers and exercising authority, both legally and otherwise, at the local level. • European education created a small Western-educated class, whose members served the colonial state. • Many chose to resist colonial rule, including local rulers who had lost power; landlords deprived of their estates or their rent; peasants overtaxed by moneylenders and landlords alike; unemployed weavers displaced by machine-manufactured European goods; and local religious leaders threatened by the missionary activities that accompanied colonial expansion.
What was distinctive about European colonial empires of the nineteenth century?
The nineteenth-century European colonial empires differed from earlier empires in several important ways, including the prominence of race in distinguishing between rulers and ruled. • Also distinctive was the extent to which colonial states were able to penetrate the societies they governed. • They had a penchant for counting and classifying their subject peoples. • Their policies for administrating their colonies contradicted their core values and their practices at home to an unusual degree.
Did colonial rule bring "economic progress" in its wake?
This question is debatable, especially since definitions of "progress" vary widely, but however one views the impact of colonial rule, it is clear that several important developments took place during the period. • Colonial rule served, for better or worse, to further the integration of Asian and African economies into a global network of exchange now centered in Europe. • Europeans conveyed to the colonies some elements of their own modernizing process, including modern administrative and bureaucratic structures, communication and transportation infrastructure, schools, and modest provisions for health care. • Nowhere in the colonial world did a breakthrough to modern industrial society of Japanese dimensions occur.
In what different ways did the colonial takeover of Asia and Africa occur?
through the use (or threatened use) of military force. • in India, the British East India Company, rather than the British government directly, played the leading role in the colonial takeover of South Asia. • in South Asia and the Dutch in Indonesia were able to assert themselves in part because the regions were politically fragmented. • In Africa, the colonial takeover coincided with intense competition between European powers to establish colonial holdings, followed by slower efforts to enforce their claims.