60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

contextualising violence in colonial africa 55
The British politician Leo Amery, a key fi gure in the Conservative
Party, leader of the empire economic union, and Colonial and Dominion
Secretary in the 1920s, is best known among Africanists as
the advocate of the colonial doctrine of settler dominance. This was,
however, also an important doctrine of national development. Settler
colonies held a trustee role for British welfare and for the ideal
British polity. So-called ‘constructive’ imperialism secured natural
resources and land, and made colonial labour more available. As colonial
settlement absorbed British excess labour, it provided outlets for
British private enterprise. In doing so, settler colonies had a crucial
role to play in preventing the emergence of what Amery termed the
‘confi scatory’ welfare state in Britain – that is, a welfare state based
on taxation (Cowen/Shenton 1996: 280, Amery 1908). Accordingly,
he hailed British imperial protection in the 1930s as the eventual endorsement
by the government of ‘nationalist internationalism’, which
he had long been advocating (Amery 1932: 4). Imperial blocs ought
to be clear-cut: Britain controlled its empire in a symbiosis of an industrial
and a raw material producing entity. Similarly, it was acceptable
that Germany exerted economic supremacy over Eastern Europe
(Amery 1939: 181-182).
Constructions of British ‘liberal imperialism’, by contrast, saw British
and global progress as being in harmony, according to the familiar assumption
that open economies and free trade would level out welfare
inequalities globally in the long run and thereby promote peace. Colonies
were a defensive tool against protectionism. Progress was defi ned in
terms of the power of core economies to which others would gradually
assimilate. From this viewpoint, Britain’s colonies in Africa were hardly
relevant in the 1930s. Their very marginality, though, entwined African
colonies with European development, and suggested a peace-enhancing
role for Africa in European interstate relations. The mandates
and colonies governed by the Congo Basin treaties were the last laboratories
for the assumed educational and welfare benefi ts of free trade.
Some liberal imperialists, like Lord Lothian, argued that ‘economic
nationalism’ in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany might be remedied by
enticing these countries back to liberalism (Lothian 1935: 11-13). Others,
like Lloyd George, emphasised the need for European colonial cooperation
with a Malthusian twist, arguing that the overseas expansion
of so-called emerging nations, like Germany, Italy and Japan, was inevitable
(House of Commons, 5 February 1936, vol. 308: 243-246).
In the mid-1930s, the French Popular Front pondered similar, though
ultimately abortive, ideas aimed at moderating complaints by fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany about the existing international political and