EMPIRE AND AFTER^429
Subsequent discoveries were happy surprises and sometimes so
changed the incentives as to provoke new fighting for control. Thus
southern African gold mines drew a flood of rough-and-ready prospec
tors to the Transvaal, spawned disputes with the Afrikaner authorities,
brought Britain into the quarrel, and led to the Boer War.
Radical and skeptical observers denounced this late land grab as,
first, the product of capitalist greed, and then of need—a prior condi
tion of European prosperity. The first was partiy true. Greed now had
free play—not necessarily capitalist greed, but simple human greed.
Thanks to repeating rifles and machine guns, grabbing and killing were
now easy—so easy that European brutes rejoiced at massacring natives
like game birds and called them "brutes." (For so-called gentiemen,
hunting was a school for brutality and cowardice. It still is.) Here is the
young Winston Churchill, anticipating the imminent battie of Om-
durman, revenge for Gordon at Khartum: "... a good moment to
live," he wrote, and: "Of course we should win. Of course we should
mow them down." And: "Nothing like the battle of Omdurman will
ever be seen again. It was the last link in the long chain of those spec
tacular conflicts whose vivid and majestic splendour has done so much
to invest war with glamour." Native peoples soon learned to disappoint
their conquerors by giving up too quickly. No killing; no medals and
promotions.^8
The second assertion, that Europe needed these acquisitions for cap
italism's sake, is simply nonsense. Some businessmen made money in
these strange and distant places; many more did not. But European
economies as economies gained little if anything from these exotic
connections. Good businessmen knew it. When Belgium's King
Leopold, venality wearing a crown, invited the German banker Gerson
Bleichrôder to help with his huge domain in the Congo, Bleichrôder
politely declined. He was as interested as any good banker in the op
portunities of such a partnership, but he could spot a clinker a long way
off. A few years later (early 1880s), Bismarck thought to pick up some
pieces in far-off Africa and among the Pacific islands. Would Bleich
rôder help? Here the banker had to be more forthcoming, because
Bismarck was his private client and patron; even so, he asked for a
guaranteed minimum return.
The public was a different matter. You can fool some businessmen
some of the time; politicians much of the time; and voters almost all the
time. Listen to Paul Leroy-Beaulieu explain to the French electorate
why imperialism was a good thing: "The most useful function that
colonies perform ... is to supply the mother country's trade with a