Curtin Chapter 6

Precis Curtin Chapter 6
Curtin in this chapter really focuses on administrations and their choices. He asks how these choices affected the administrations' situations in their colonies. He also asks how the European colonial governments created social consequences in the countries they controlled. He begins by stating how policy making about colonies was all good, but actually seeing it done in those colonies was a completely different matter. He then talks about how political and diplomatic history are usually more studies then administrative history. This being because there is always a sense of a game with players who make smart moves, bad moves, inefficient moves. And, of course, there are winners and losers. The new administrations were trying to gain a more centralized and efficient bureaucracy. The growth of administrative technology and organization paralleled the growth of industrial technology which allowed for much greater growth then if industrial technology had arrived on its own. European companies at first just created trade empires and trade diasporas. By the later half of the 1700s, the companies found themselves taking over territory and Asia and facing the same administrative problems as everyone else. These companies had taken over these other areas militarily, but they recognized the legitimacy of the local governors and did not want to disturb that balance. European governments were becoming totalitarian at the time, but Europeans did not have enough personnel overseas to form a totalitarian government, which meant that they had to use the local rulers in order to find any success and quell some tensions some might have had about being ruled by foreigners. Hence a system of dualism arose: both the European power and the natural rulers governed the colonial state. Advocates of dualism stated that because of racial and cultural differences, governments which worked in Europe may not work in Europe's colonies. Curtin then gives examples of European colonies under the influence of Dualism in South and Southeast Asia. He begins with Bengal. The British East India Company(BEIC) played the role of diwan of Bengal under the Mughal Empire. The BEIC used this subordinate role to mask its rise to power. In essence, “it was still a commercial firm with political and military functions on the side.”(Curtin 96) The Mughal Empire made most of its money off of revenue paid for working on the land. This meant that the Mughal Empire actually owned the land, not just had soverign control over it. The Mughals had a subordinate class called the Zamindari who collected revenue. This meant that Bengal was a very agrarian economy where the land was owned by the state, but the Zamindari controlled the land itself. The state wasn't collecting taxes or rent, it wasn't really sure what they were collecting. The BEIC, modeling off of the British system, gave the land to the Zamindari, who were responsible for paying land revenue. What ended up happening was that the original Zamindari could not pay the original high land revenue prices (the BEIC lowered these later), and had to sell the land to wealthy people outside of Bengal. The BEIC's system changed the Zamindari from being part of the local government, to rent collectors. The point Curtin tries to make with this example of Bengal, is that any new revenue policy would have drastic effects on the state in question. The central Asian state was very similar to Bengal. Under Muslim law, all land was the property of the ruler. But in general the local aristocrats and some Muslim charitable foundations actually ruled over the land. Russia declared that all the land stilled belonged to the state, but being skeptical of the aristocracy, had the people that worked the land rule over it. The only local rulers that the Russians kept were the village officials. This might seem like a revolutionary idea, but it was really meant to increase land revenue. This led to the impoverishment of the local aristocrats. When the Soviets came to power they created large collective farms. The number of settlers to Central asia allowed for there to be grassroots managers. With the local elites gone, the Soviets attempted to create a new elite class by Soviet standards. Those elites had no loyalty to the Soviets and when the Soviet Union collapsed, declared independence for their countries. The VOC in Java was an example of a different kind of administrative choice. The Bupati ruled thought a subordinate class called the priyayi. When the VOC originally arrived, they had no intention of taking over Java, but they did take Jakarta as their naval base. When the VOC took over, they recognized the Javanese leaders and called them regents. The VOC made sure that the regents controlled the peasants and told them what to produce for the European market (like coffee). When the VOC collapsed the Dutch government took over and assigned land to European planters. The Dutch were trying to create a powerful central bureaucratic government in Java. The Dutch felt the most danger from the village level religious leaders and from the western-education nationalists. In Malaya, the Siamese had the most influence. However, at the same time the Malay were ruled by various sultans. Malaya became a British protectorate where each sultan had to ask the British residents for advice. Eventually the sultans came together to the form the Malayan state The Malay had the problem of Chinese immigration and economic growth based on tin and plantations. The Malay decided to try and make a westernized government administration theoretically under the sultans, but in reality under the British residents' control. The British residents brought in British law, British officials... The sultans basically became constitutional monarchs who would only deal with culture and religion. The British needed these sultans more as representatives then as useful tools. This eventually led for the sultans to have no power, which meant that the nationalists in 1957 were the leaders leading the revolt against the British. However the sultans did not disappear, they were “kept on as a kind of corporate constitutional monarchy.”(Curtin 106)