the wisdom of ancestors in order to solve disputes over land, family affairs or
economic activities, make decisions concerning the welfare of the commu-
nity, or deal with conflicts with neighbouring communities. In societies with-
out obvious structures of chieftaincy or other political offices it was much
more difficult to integrate indigenous political authority into an imperial sys-
tem. Offices had to be artificially created for the purposes of colonial govern-
ment, a source of great discontent and alienation in the communities affected,
sometimes leading to political instability and problems of social order.
A consequence of such local economic, social and political variety, com-
bined with the varying motivations of the imperialists, was that different
forms of colonial intervention developed. In some areas plantations were set
up in which industrialized forms of agricultural production were created,
requiring large numbers of wage labourers and European managers.
Elsewhere mining activities required the encouragement of the local popula-
tion into the formation of an industrial labour force. In other areas imperial-
ism required the encouragement of peasant cash cropping without changing
the relations of production by the introduction of wage labour or new tech-
nology. Another variation on the colonial theme was European settlement on
the best land available, leading to permanent commitments on the part of
white minorities. It was common to find more than one form of colonial
intervention in a single colony – as in Kenya and Tanganyika, where peasant
production was combined with plantation and settler agriculture.
Economically one form was usually dominant, as in the Gold Coast, where
peasant commodity production dominated a colonial economy that included
European-owned mining operations (Berman, 1984).
The introduction of capitalism
The variation in the forms taken by colonial penetration and imperialism and
the different activities engaged in by the Europeans, combined with the dif-
ferent circumstances encountered by them, led to a debate among historians
and social scientists about whether colonialism transformed pre-capitalist
societies into capitalist societies through incorporation into a network of
capitalist relations that extended from metropolitan centres as new territo-
ries were absorbed into empires; or whether capitalism simply traded upon
pre-capitalist relations and modes of production that were part of traditional
society, so that even though the firms extracting raw materials and agricul-
tural produce from the colonies were capitalist, the actual processes of pro-
duction remained largely unchanged. This controversy formed an important
Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism 39