Domination of Indigenous Peoples 845baldly: “If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” The
British colonial armies alone absorbed thousands of “surplus” Scots and
Irish, the latter making up about 40 percent of the non-Indian troops in
India. By this view, then, colonies could serve as a social safety valve.
Technological Domination and Indigenous Subversion
Europeans employed technological advances in travel and weaponry in
their subjugation of indigenous peoples. Railways aided imperial armies in
their conquest and defense of colonial frontiers, although horses, mules,
and camels still hauled men and supplies across African deserts and bush
country. The steamship, like the train, lessened the time of travel to distant
places. By the end of the century, thanks to the completion of the Suez
Canal in 1869, linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas, British bureau
crats, soldiers, merchants, and tourists could reach India in about twenty
days. The heliograph, which sent messages by means of a movable mirror
that reflected sunlight, and then the telegraph speeded up communica
tions and led to better coordination of troop movements. Observation bal
loons and, later, power searchlights aided European armies.
Advanced military technology invariably overcame open colonial rebel
lions. Along the South African frontier, Zulu warriors resisted the British
advance in the late 1870s, earning several victories with surprise attacks.
But by the 1890s, they were no match for cannon. The gunboat was the pro
totypical instrument of European power and enforcement, as it had proven
to be in China during the Opium War in the early 1840s. The Gatling, or
machine, gun and the single-barreled Maxim gun, which could fire rapidly
without being reloaded, proved devastating. A contemporary quip described
relations between colonists and the colonized: “Whatever happens we have
got the Maxim gun, and they have not.” A single gunner or two could fend
off a large-scale attack, and British casualties were reduced to almost none.
To soldiers, colonial battles now seemed “more like hunting than fighting.”
The colonial powers tested new, lighter artillery that could be moved
quickly and new, more powerful shells. The British developed the “dum
dum” bullet, which exploded upon impact, with the shooting of attacking
“natives” in mind. (It took its name from the arsenal in Calcutta where it
was developed.) For the most part, there was little to stop the European
onslaught other than malaria and yellow fever carried by mosquitoes, and
sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse fly.
Yet indigenous peoples could express resistance to powerful outsiders in
other ways besides risking annihilation in open rebellion. The “weapons of
the weak” ranged from riots and individual subversion to foot-dragging and
gentle but determined defiance. The latter included pretending not to
understand, or sometimes what Chinese called “that secret smile” that sug
gested not compliance but rather defiance in the guise of deference. Such
play-acting in daily life offered only glimpses of the ridicule of Europeans