A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Domination of Indigenous Peoples 847

trees and plants when the price of spices fell. Local populations were forced
over time to abandon traditional agricultural practices, ending up in a wage
economy as poorly paid laborers. They also lost traditional rights to hunt,
graze animals, and gather firewood on land they did not own, a process that
had also characterized the early stages of capitalist agriculture in Western
Europe.
In British Ceylon (Sri Lanka, captured from the Dutch during the
Napoleonic Wars), Dutch Java, and German East Africa, indigenous people
who could not produce formal, Western-style deeds or titles to their land lost
it to the colonial power. In North Africa, the French government promoted
the economic interests of French settlers, giving them the finest Algerian
land. The government also ordered land owned collectively by Arabs to be
sold as individual plots that only the French could afford to purchase. In
Morocco and Tunisia, the French claimed “unexploited” land, such as that
belonging to nomad peoples. In Algeria, the French government favored the
Kabyles because their monogamous, sedentary, and mostly secular society
with private property seemed to be more like republican France than did that
of the nomadic Arabs. Above all, French colonial administrators sought to
maintain order and collect taxes. One visitor found that “the head tax is
above all a very effective agent of civilization,” so that in one district “when a
village could not or would not pay its taxes in full, the custom was to seize a
child and place him in a village named ‘Liberty’ until the tax was paid.” In
some regions, taxes were collected through forced labor.
Portuguese colonists imposed conditions of virtual slavery in their
African colonies in the nineteenth century. They kidnapped people from
their colony of Angola, shipped them to the coastal island of Sao Tome,
and forced them to work on the cacao plantations for a “contract” period
of five years, which few workers survived. In Angola, villagers who could
not pay their taxes were required to work for the government for 100 days a
year. Forced labor on mine and construction sites by colonial merchants
and administrators alike was common; in the German Cameroons, about
80,000 Africans hauled goods for Germans on a single road in one year.
Forced labor, which might be considered slavery in disguise, was widely
practiced throughout most of the French colonies until 1946.

Colonial Administrations

European notions of the organization of states clashed with the way indige­

nous people lived. Almost all Africans lacked the European obsession with

fixing exact boundaries, one that intensified in the age of nation-states and

aggressive nationalism. For most Africans living in tribal societies, Europe­

an notions of “boundaries” and “borders” established by colonial powers

left many societies arbitrarily separated and sometimes interfered with

the movements of migratory peoples. Colonial powers exploited tensions

between peoples and tribes, purchasing the allegiance of temporary allies.