Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:30:01.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

European colonial soldiers in the nineteenth century: their role in white global migration and patterns of colonial settlement*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

Ulbe Bosma
Ulbe Bosma
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

More than six million European soldiers were involved in nineteenth-century empire-building and a substantial number of them stayed behind in the colonies. Throughout history, soldiers have been priming the pump for settler colonies, being a reliable force in difficult pioneering circumstances with high mortality rates. In the age of European mass migration, however, these colonial soldiers were consistently excluded from migration statistics. This article argues that there is a nexus between the beginning of the age of mass migration and the exclusion of colonial soldiers from migration history. Their status as un-free labourers developed into an anomaly at a time when free labour and free European migration increasingly became the norm. An important implication of including these colonial soldiers in the purview of migration history would be a revisiting of nineteenth-century European emigration history. It would require a broader comparative perspective on coercive labour conditions among nineteenth-century European migrants (military and non-military). This effort could be part of an ongoing revision of the perception of the age of European mass migration as overwhelmingly free.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 317 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Steinfeld, Robert J., The invention of free labor: the employment relation in English and American law and culture, 1350–1870, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991Google Scholar; idem, Coercion, contract and free labor in the nineteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Gunther Peck, Reinventing free labor: padrones and immigrant workers in the North American West, 1880–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Jeremy Adelman, Frontier development: land, labour and capital on the wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

2 Walter F. Willcox and Imre Ferenczi, International migrations, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929–31, vol. 1, p. 630; P. Burroughs, ‘The human cost of imperial defence in the early Victorian age’, Victorian Studies, 24, 1980, p. 15.

3 Perdue identifies five waves of settlers in Xinjiang during and after the Qing conquest. The first two consisted of military settlers and the third of exiled criminals. See Peter C. Perdue, China marches west: the Qing conquest of central Eurasia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 343–9.

4 Haines, Robin F., Emigration and the labouring poor: Australian recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also François-Xavier Coquin, La Sibérie: peuplement et immigration paysanne au XIXe siècle, Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1969, pp. 747–9, for the Siberian immigration statistics between 1882 and 1915. For the Portuguese empire, see Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and orphans: forced and state-sponsored colonizers in the Portuguese empire, 1550–1755, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

5 Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomovitz, ‘Emigration from Europe to colonial destinations: some nineteenth-century Australian and South African perspectives’, Itinerario, 20, 1996, pp. 142–3; William A. Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles: with special reference to the development of the overseas dominions, London: P. S. King, 1929, pp. 146–7; Norman MacDonald, Canada, 1763–1841: immigration and settlement, London: Longmans, 1939; Rainer Baehre, ‘Pauper emigration to Upper Canada in the 1830s’, Social History, 14, 1981, pp. 346, 349; H. J. M. Johnston, British emigration policy 1815–1830: ‘shovelling out paupers’, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 34; Michael J. Heffernan, ‘The Parisian poor and the colonization of Algeria’, French History, 3, 1989, p. 393; Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: a labor history, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985, p. 67.

6 Of the 772,979 exiles sent to Siberia between 1832 and 1887, only a third were convicts (George Kennan, Siberia and the exile system, New York: Century Co., 1891, pp. 52, 78). About 165,000 British convicts were sent to Australia between 1788 and 1868 (http://landing.ancestry.co.uk/intl/au/convict (consulted 31 March 2009)), and approximately 30,000 French convicts to Cayenne (French Guyana) during the Second Empire and Third Republic (Michel Devèze, Cayenne: déportés et bagnards, Paris: Julliard, 1965, p. 142). Stephen Nicholas makes an important point when he argues that the judiciary may have marked individuals as criminals, but only socially and not necessarily in economic terms: Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict workers: reinterpreting Australia’s past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 7; Willcox and Ferenczi, International migrations, vol. 1, p. 102.

7 Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Plantation production and white “proto-slavery”: white indentured servants and the colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624–1645’, The Americas, 41, 1985, pp. 21–45; Nicholas, Convict workers, p. 7; Leo Lucassen, ‘Eternal vagrants? State formation, migration and travelling groups in western Europe, 1350–1914’, in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, migration history, history: old paradigms and new perspectives, Berne: Peter Lang, 1997, p. 228.

8 MacDonald, Canada, pp. 12–13.

9 This can also be illustrated by the German colonization project in Texas, established in 1842, which cost 3,000 immigrants their lives: Günter Moltmann, Instruktion für deutsche Auswanderer nach Texas, Berlin: Reimer, 1983 (first published Neu-Braunfels, 1851). For Cuba, see Sergio Díaz-Briquets, The health revolution in Cuba, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983, pp. 26–9.

10 Jan Lucassen, ‘Mobilization of labour in early modern Europe’, in Maarten Prak, ed., Early modern capitalism: economic and social change in Europe 1400–1800, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 162.

11 Burroughs, ‘The human cost’, pp. 11, 15. Burroughs’ table presents a total number of military forces sent to the colonies outside India of almost 600,000. These soldiers were, however, to serve two terms of ten years, if they survived. This would lower the figure to 300,000, to which we can add another 150,000–200,000 for British India, based upon its share of colonial troops.

12 P. J. Marshall, ‘British immigration into India in the nineteenth century’, in P. C. Emmer and M. Mörner, eds., European expansion and migration: essays on the intercontinental migration from Africa, Asia and Europe, New York: Berg, 1992, p. 194.

13 Brunschwig, H., Noirs et blancs dans l’Afrique noire française ou comment le colonisé devient colonisateur (1870–1914), Paris: Flammarion, 1983, p. 62.Google Scholar

14 Bossenbroek, Martin, Volk voor Indië: de werving van Europese militairen voor de Nederlandse koloniale dienst 1814–1909, Amsterdam: Van Soeren, 1992, p. 358Google Scholar; Edward M. Spiers, The army and society, 1815–1914, London: Longman, 1980, p. 138; Marshall, ‘British immigration’, p. 183.

15 See, for the example of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, John F. Baddeley, The Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Richmond: Curzon, 1999 (with a new foreword by Moshe Gammer; first published 1908), p. 126. He mentions a figure of 60,000 military personnel for the Caucasus alone for 1820.

16 Manuel R. Moreno Fraginals and José J. Moreno Masó, Guerra, migración y muerte: el ejército español en Cuba como vía migratoria, Gijón: Júcar, 1993, pp. 99, 121.

17 Curtin, Philip D., Death by migration: Europe’s encounter with the tropical world in the nineteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 To maintain the colonial troops in the Dutch East Indies at the level of 7,000 European soldiers in the first half of the nineteenth century, a yearly average of 1,511 men had had to be sent from Europe. In the second half of the century, a yearly average of 1,785 soldiers were sent to maintain the military presence at 13,000 European soldiers (Bossenbroek, Volk voor Indië, pp. 357, 358).

19 Hoerder, Dirk, Cultures in contact: world migrations in the second millennium, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Francis Paul Prucha, Broadax and bayonet: the role of the United States army in the development of the northwest, 1815–1860, Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1953, pp. 30, 41. During the Civil War, thousands of Irishmen were lured into the Union’s army by military recruiters operating clandestinely in Great Britain. These immigrants had to serve in order to pay off their fares: see Scott Reynolds Nelson, ‘After slavery: forced drafts of Irish and Chinese labor in the American Civil War, or the search for liquid labor’, in Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many middle passages: forced migration and the making of the modern world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 150–65.

21 Spiers, Army and society, p. 37; Marshall provides comparable figures for a British regiment in British India in the first half of the nineteenth century. To sustain a regiment of 705 troops for sixteen years, 2,170 men were needed, i.e. more than three times the actual strength (Marshall, ‘British immigration’, p. 185).

22 For the Spanish colonial army, see S. Rau, L’État militaire des principales puissances étrangères au printemps de 1891, Paris: Berger Levrault, 1891, pp. 327–32; Fraginals and Masó, Guerra, migración y muerte, pp. 99, 121.

23 Keep, John L. H., Soldiers of the tsar: army and society in Russia, 1462–1874, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985, p. 376.Google Scholar

24 The estimate of fewer than 2,900,000 Indian indentured labourers is based upon McKeown’s estimate of total Indian migration and Northrup’s observation that, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, fewer than 10% of the migrants were indentured. According to Northrup, the number of indentured Indians to Africa (including the Mascarenes) and the Caribbean was 1,334,000, with 1,754,000 Indians migrating to Malaysia. Within South Asia, 1,164,000 went to Burma and another 2,321,000 to Ceylon (David Northrup, Indentured labor in the age of imperialism, 1834–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 9–10, 53). These figures exclude Indian labour migration to Assam, Javanese migration to Sumatra, and the migration of Ambonese and Nepali soldiers.

25 For Great Britain, it has been estimated that 2.5% of the entire male population was under arms (officers excluded) in 1815, declining to 1% after a massive demobilization in the 1820s, rising again to 1.6% just after the Great Mutiny in India: Spiers, Army and society, pp. 36, 38–9. Since yearly recruitment was about 10% of the army’s strength and at least half of all recruits ended up overseas, the proportion of young men in the colonial armies could easily have been between 2% and 4% (see Burroughs, ‘The human cost’, p. 11). The data in Table 1 suggest that the percentages were, by and large, the same for France, Spain, and Portugal. For the Netherlands, see Ulbe Bosma and Kees Mandemakers, ‘Indiëgangers: sociale herkomst en migratiemotieven (1830–1950): een onderzoek op basis van de Historische Steekproef Nederlandse bevolking (HSN)’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 123, 2, 2008, p. 167. The relatively low percentage can be explained by the fact that about 30% of the Dutch colonial troops were recruited from other European countries.

26 Table 1 does not include most of the European soldiers who fought in the Boer War or in the Crimean War, because their mobility was part of a military campaign and their stint was not intended to become part of the existing social order overseas.

27 Ulbe Bosma, ‘Sailing through Suez from the south: the emergence of an Indies–Dutch migration circuit, 1815–1940’, International migration review, 41, 2, Summer 2007, p. 523.

28 Graham Dominy, ‘Women and the garrison in colonial Pietermaritzburg: aspects and ambiguities of the domestic life of the military’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 13, 1990–1991, p. 41; idem, ‘The making of the rough and the respectable: the imperial garrison and the wider society in colonial Natal’, South African Historical Journal, 37, 1997, p. 53; Carolyn Strange, ‘[review of] Fingard, “The dark side of life in Victorian Halifax’”, Urban History Review, 18, 1990, p. 256. For Algeria, see for example Marc Baroli, Algérie: terre d’espérances: colons et immigrants (1830–1914), Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992, p. 79.

29 The net figure for military migration to the Dutch East Indies is based upon data drawn from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN). According to Swierenga, net migration to the United States in the nineteenth century was between 80% and 85%; for the Italian colonos in Brazil it was 66%; for the migrants who went to the Argentinian pampas it was 54%. Net migration was much lower for the Spanish labourers in Algeria (19%) and Cuba (18%) and for the Indians in the Caribbean (20%). See Kingsley Davis, The population of India and Pakistan, New York: Russel and Russel, 1951, p. 100; Thomas Holloway, Immigrants on the land: coffee and society in São Paulo, 1886–1934, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, p. 58; Adelman, Frontier development, p. 118; Willcox and Ferenczi, International migrations, vol. 1, pp. 543, 828–31, 839, 850–2, 856–7; Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Two dangers, one solution: immigration, race and labor in Cuba, 1900–1930’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 51, 1997, p. 33; Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and family: Dutch immigration and settlement in the United States, 1820–1920, New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000, p. 5.

30 Fraginals and Masó, Guerra, migración y muerte, p. 101.

31 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.Google Scholar

32 Allen, Theodore W., The invention of the white race, vol. 1: racial oppression and social control, London: Verso, 1994, pp. 21, 32Google Scholar; Thomas C. Holt, The problem of freedom: race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 236; Roxanne Wheeler, The complexion of race: categories of difference in eighteenth-century British culture, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p. 38; Waltraud Ernst, ‘Introduction’, in Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris, eds., Race, science, and medicine, 1700–1960, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 1–29.

33 Galenson, David W., White servitude in colonial America: an economic analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.4Google Scholar. Steinfeld, The invention of free labor, p. 53. See also Steinfeld, Coercion, contract and free labor, p. 29.

34 I am using here the definition for indentureship as given by Bush, who puts the emphasis on the role of the state in sanctioning and, if necessary, enforcing the contract: M. L. Bush, Servitude in modern times, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, pp. 28, 41. Indentured labour distinguishes itself from other types of un-free labour by the fact that it is based upon a written contract, an indenture, signed by the worker and his creditor and sanctioned by the state. In the case of Dutch sailors, ‘desertion’ was not decriminalized until 1938: see Peter Schuman, Tussen vlag en voorschip: een eeuw wettelijke en maatschappelijke emancipatie van zeevarenden ter Nederlandse koopvaardij 1838–1940, Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995.

35 This is based on my own research on the European military forces in the Netherlands Indies. However, there is comparable evidence from other sources: see, for instance, Burroughs, ‘The human cost’, p. 11; Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian army at home: the recruitment and terms and conditions of the British regular, 1859–1899, London: Croom Helm, 1977; Spiers, Army and society; Joan Casanovas, ‘Slavery, labour movement and Spanish colonialism in Cuba’, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and unfree labour: the debate continues, Berne: Peter Lang, 1997, p. 254; Dominy, ‘The making’, p. 53; De Nieuwe Vorstenlanden, 18, 27 May 1887, p. 2.

36 Curtin defines transfrontiers as sparsely settled vast areas, where ‘Europeans were technically capable of exploiting vast resources, new to them and underused by the people they displaced’: Philip D. Curtin, ‘Location in history: Argentina and South Africa in the nineteenth century’, Journal of World History, 10, 1999, p. 43.

37 The question has been asked by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘International flows of un-free labour’, in K.S. Jomo, ed., The long twentieth century: globalization under hegemony: the changing world economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 200–1.

38 De la Fuente, ‘Two dangers’, p. 33. De la Fuente speaks of 800,000 between 1902 and 1931, whereas, according to Willcox and Ferenczi, 524,000 Spanish immigrants went to Cuba in the last eighteen years of the nineteenth century. The great majority of them might have been servicemen. See Willcox and Ferenczi, International migrations, vol. 1, pp. 850–2, 856–7.

39 For Brazil, see Holloway, Immigrants on the land, pp. 43, 56–7. In 1889, a peak immigration year, 40% of the total influx was government assisted: Adelman, Frontier development, p. 106.

40 Philip D. Curtin, ‘“The white man’s grave”: image and reality, 1780–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 1, 1961, pp. 94–110.

41 See Bosma, ‘Sailing through Suez’.

42 F. Burot and Maximilien Albert Henri André Legrand, Les Troupes coloniales, tome 1: statistique de la mortalité, Paris: Librairie J.B. Baillière et fils, 1897–98, p. 26.

43 Curtin, Death by migration, p. 1.

44 Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, tome 1: la conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827–1871), Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1979 (first published 1954), pp. 403, 407.

45 Reports from the Select Committee on Colonisation and Settlement in India; with proceedings, minutes of evidence, appendix and index, 1857–58, Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970, pp. 17–18; Verslag aan den Koning betreffende Europesche kolonisatie in Nederlandsch Indië, The Hague: Van Cleef, 1858. See also P. P. Roorda van Eysinga, Voorlezingen over kolonisatie door Nederlanders in Nederlandsch-Indië, en gedeeltelijke vergelijking der Indische maatschappij met die van Nederland: gehouden in de maatschappij Felix Meritis, Haarlem: A. C. Kruseman, 1856.

46 Turnbull, David, Travels in the West: Cuba with notices of Puerto Rico and the slave trade, London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1840 (reprinted New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) p. 259Google Scholar; Christopher Schmidt-Nowarra, Empire and antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, pp. 18–36.

47 David Arnold, ‘“An ancient race outworn”: malaria and race in colonial India, 1860–1930’, in Ernst and Harris, Race, science, and medicine, p. 125.

48 David Arnold, ‘White colonization and labour in nineteenth-century India’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 11, 1983, p. 144.

49 A military colony was established at Puspo (1890–1900) in the regency of Pasuruan; it was a failure. See Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, ‘Being Dutch’ in the Indies: a history of empire and creolisation, trans. Wendie Shaffer, Singapore and Athens, OH: Singapore University Press and Ohio University Press, 2008, pp. 291–2. The Governor of Madagascar, Joseph Gallieni, established military colonies at Iménina and Betsiléo in central Madagascar. These colonies failed, and when individual colonists succeeded in these areas it was because they had sufficient means, which military veterans as a rule did not. See, for Madagascar, Capitaine Condamy, Étude sur les différents systèmes de colonisation militaire expérimentés en France et à l’étranger, Paris: Charles-Lavauzelle, 1906, p. 95.

50 Graves, Adrian, Cane and labour: the political economy of the Queensland sugar industry, 1862–1906, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993, pp. 47–8, 60–1Google Scholar; Eric Richards, ‘Migration to colonial Australia: paradigms and disjunctions’, in Lucassen and Lucassen (eds), Migration, p. 171.

51 In 1902, 17% of the workforce on the Hawaiian sugar plantations consisted of Caucasians, mostly Germans and Portuguese: see John M. Liu, ‘Race, ethnicity, and the sugar plantation system: Asian labor in Hawaii, 1850–1900’, in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor immigration under capitalism: Asian American labor before World War II, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 198–9; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, pp. 86–7; Jean Ann Scarpaci, ‘Immigration in the New South: Italians in Louisiana’s sugar parishes’, Labour History, 16, 1975, p. 167.

52 Arnold, ‘White colonization’, pp. 154–5; Laura Gbah Bear, ‘Miscegenations of modernity: constructing European respectability and race in the Indian railway colony, 1857–1931’, Women’s History Review, 3, 1994, pp. 531–48.

53 Bossenbroek, Volk voor Indië, p. 180; Spiers, Army and society, p. 42.

54 Bosma, ‘Sailing through Suez’.

55 Marshall, ‘British immigration’, p. 185.

56 Ibid., pp. 193, 195.

57 See Bosma, ‘Sailing through Suez’.

58 Arnold, ‘White colonization’, p. 150.

59 Ann L. Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34, 3, 1992, pp. 514–51. See also Ulbe Bosma, ‘Citizens of empire: some comparative observations on the evolution of Creole nationalism in colonial Indonesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46, 4, 2004, p. 660.

60 For Singapore and its dependencies, the numbers of Europeans and Eurasians were 360 and 922 respectively in 1850, and 1,323 and 2,164 in 1871: see Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1 February 1850) and Straits Times (21 April 1877). See also E. B. Denham, Ceylon at the census of 1911: being the review of the results of the census of 1911, Colombo: H. C. Cottle, 1912, pp. 238–9; Bosma, ‘Sailing through Suez’.

61 Gaikwad, V.R., The Anglo-Indians: a study in the problems and processes involved in emotional and cultural integration, London: Asia Publishing House, 1967, p. 39Google Scholar; Dennis B. McGilvray, ‘Dutch burghers and Portuguese mechanics: Eurasian ethnicity in Sri Lanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24, 1982, pp. 235–63.

62 Buettner, Elizabeth, Empire families: Britons and late imperial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 84, 104Google Scholar; see also Bosma and Raben, ‘Being Dutch’ in the Indies.

63 Meijer, Hans, In Indië geworteld: de geschiedenis van de Indische Nederlanders in de twintigste eeuw, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2004.Google Scholar

64 For the figure of transatlantic migration, see Hoerder, Cultures in contact, p. 156. See also table 2 of US Department of Homeland Security, 2007 yearbook of immigration statistics, pp. 6–11, which presents a total number of 31,896,350 European immigrants obtaining legal residence between 1840 and 1939.

65 See Ulbe Bosma, ‘Beyond the Atlantic: connecting migration and world history in the age of imperialism, 1840–1940’, International Review of Social History, 52, 2007, pp. 120–1; Adam McKeown, ‘Global migration 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15, 2004, pp. 156–7. See also Willcox and Ferenczi, Internationalm Migrations, vol. 1, p. 190.

66 Steinfeld, Invention of free labor; idem, Coercion, contract and free labor; Peck, Reinventing free labor; Adelman, Frontier development.