and French in West Africa were caught up in this, wanting to stop each other
gaining possessions as much as to occupy territory themselves. Hence the
‘scramble for Africa’ which could be explained partly in terms of trading
routes, safe ports of call, and the protection of trading posts and strategically
important areas, such as the Suez Canal zone. A comparable competition can
be seen earlier in the Indian sub-continent with the Portuguese in the six-
teenth century, and later the French and British, entering into agreements
with local power-holders over the establishment of ports, enclaves and con-
trol over the hinterland. These then provided bases for subsequent incursions
into the interior. That process was particularly associated in West Africa with
the slave trade, an important commodity in early imperialism.
Arghiri Emmanuel (1972b) added another factor to produce a more com-
plete explanation of the ‘costly and irrational’ impulse to colonize in sup-
port of European economic expansion and exploitation. Emmanuel argued
that the colonialists themselves, including not only the white settlers but
also the colonial civil servants and employees of the trading companies,
were an independent force behind colonialism. They promoted colonialism
because they found their livelihood in it.
Motives and justifications for imperial control also included racial ideolo-
gies and cultural prejudices. There was the overriding stereotype of ‘native’
peoples as needing the guiding light of European civilization, a view of trop-
ical and sub-tropical societies that was used extensively to justify the annex-
ation of vast territories and huge populations. Imperialism represented, in
Thornton’s words, ‘an immense responsibility for human welfare and the
opportunity for human betterment’ (Thornton, 1959, p. 305). Some justifica-
tions of empire typically ignored its economic motivation in favour of
a belief in ‘a duty imposed by some Providence on Englishmen to use their
power in the world as a power for good, without asking anyone else whether
they wanted to have good done to them or not’ (Kiernan, 1974, p. 70).
Imperialism for the imperialists meant bringing the benefits of their civi-
lization and technology, as well as of their liberty, justice, law and order to
people whose societies were thought to lack these qualities. It was easy
for the imperialists to convince themselves in their highly ethnocentric fash-
ion that the so-called savage and primitive races were simply awaiting the
benefits of Western civilization, that indeed there was a high moral duty to
carry those benefits into such backward areas. Gladstone, in a speech to the
House of Commons in 1877, referred to ‘the stupidity of those people who
cannot perceive the wisdom of coming under our sceptre’. He had been
asked why additions to the Empire so often involved so much bloodshed.
The reply was that the ignorant would inevitably resist what they did not
34 Understanding Third World Politics