Comparative Colonization in Asia

Kallie Szczepanski
Updated on February 07, 2019

Several different Western European powers established colonies in Asia during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of the imperial powers had its own style
of administration, and colonial officers from the different nations also displayed
various attitudes towards their imperial subjects.

Great Britain
The British Empire was the largest in the world prior to World War II and included
a number of places in Asia. Those territories include what is now Oman, Yemen,
the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Myanmar (Burma), Sri
Lanka (Ceylon), the Maldives, Singapore, Malaysia (Malaya), Brunei, Sarawak
and North Borneo (now part of Indonesia), Papua New Guinea, and Hong Kong.
The crown jewel of all of Britain's overseas possessions around the world, of
course, was India.

British colonial officers and British colonists, in general, saw themselves as

exemplars of "fair play," and in theory, at least, all of the crown's subjects were
supposed to be equal before the law, regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity.
Nonetheless, British colonials held themselves apart from local people more than
other Europeans did, hiring locals as domestic help, but rarely intermarrying with
them. In part, this may have been due to a transfer of British ideas about the
separation of classes to their overseas colonies.

The British took a paternalistic view of their colonial subjects, feeling a duty --- the
"white man's burden," as Rudyard Kipling put it --- to Christianize and civilize the
peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World. In Asia, the story goes, Britain built
roads, railways, and governments, and acquired a national obsession with tea.

This veneer of gentility and humanitarianism quickly crumbled, however, if a

subjugated people rose up. Britain ruthlessly put down the Indian Revolt of 1857
and brutally tortured accused participants in Kenya's Mau Mau Rebellion (1952 -
1960). When famine struck Bengal in 1943, Winston Churchill's government not
only did nothing to feed Bengalis, it actually turned down food aid from the US
and Canada meant for India.
France
Although France sought an extensive colonial empire in Asia, its defeat in the
Napoleonic Wars left it with just a handful of Asian territories. Those included the
20th-century mandates of Lebanon and Syria, and more especially the key colony
of French Indochina --- what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

French attitudes about colonial subjects were, in some ways, quite different from
those of their British rivals. Some idealistic French sought not just to dominate
their colonial holdings, but to create a "Greater France" in which all French
subjects around the world truly would be equal. For example, the North African
colony of Algeria became a department, or a province, of France, complete with
parliamentary representation. This difference in attitude may be due to France's
embrace of Enlightenment thinking, and to the French Revolution, which had
broken down some of the class barriers that still ordered society in Britain.
Nonetheless, French colonizers also felt the "White man's burden" of bringing so-
called civilization and Christianity to barbaric subject peoples.

On a personal level, French colonials were more apt than the British to marry local
women and create a cultural fusion in their colonial societies. Some French racial
theorists such as Gustave Le Bon and Arthur Gobineau, however, decried this
tendency as a corruption of Frenchmen's innate genetic superiority. As time went
on, social pressure increased for French colonials to preserve the "purity" of the
"French race."

In French Indochina, unlike Algeria, the colonial rulers did not establish large
settlements. French Indochina was an economic colony, meant to produce a profit
for the home country. Despite the lack of settlers to protect, however, France was
quick to jump into a bloody war with the Vietnamese when they resisted a French
return after World War II. Today, small Catholic communities, a fondness for
baguettes and croissants, and some pretty colonial architecture is all that remains of
visible French influence in Southeast Asia.

The Netherlands
The Dutch competed and fought for control of the Indian Ocean trade routes and
spice production with the British, through their respective East India Companies.
In the end, the Netherlands lost Sri Lanka to the British, and in 1662, lost Taiwan
(Formosa) to the Chinese, but retained control over most of the rich spice islands
that now make up Indonesia.
For the Dutch, this colonial enterprise was all about money. There was a very little
pretense of cultural improvement or Christianization of the heathens — the Dutch
wanted profits, plain and simple. As a result, they showed no qualms about
ruthlessly capturing locals and using them as enslaved laborer on the plantations,
or even carrying out a massacre of all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands to
protect their monopoly on the nutmeg and mace trade.

Portugal
After Vasco da Gama rounded the southern end of Africa in 1497, Portugal
became the first European power to gain sea access to Asia. Although the
Portuguese were quick to explore and lay claim to various coastal parts of India,
Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and China, its power faded in the 17th and 18th
centuries, and the British, Dutch, and French were able to push Portugal out of
most of its Asian claims. By the 20th century, what remained was Goa, on the
southwest coast of India; East Timor; and the southern Chinese port at Macao.

Although Portugal was not the most intimidating European imperial power, it had
the most staying power. Goa remained Portuguese until India annexed it by force
in 1961; Macau was Portuguese until 1999 when the Europeans finally handed it
back to China, and East Timor or Timor-Leste formally became independent only
in 2002. 

Portuguese rule in Asia was by turns ruthless (as when they began capturing
Chinese children to sell into enslavement in Portugal), lackadaisical, and
underfunded. Like the French, Portuguese colonists were not opposed to mixing
with local peoples and creating creole populations. Perhaps the most important
characteristic of the Portuguese imperial attitude, however, was Portugal's
stubbornness and refusal to withdraw, even after the other imperial powers had
closed up shop.

Portuguese imperialism was driven by a sincere desire to spread Catholicism and

make tons of money. It was also inspired by nationalism; originally, a desire to
prove the country's might as it came out from under Moorish rule, and in later
centuries, the proud insistence on holding onto the colonies as an emblem of past
imperial glory.

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