EARLY BELGIAN COLONIAL EFFORTS - The University of Texas at ...

imperialism were generally thought of as simple assets of the mother country. Colonies
were the basis of mercantilism and there were very little interests on the part of the
earlier imperial powers to transplant a part of England or France or Spain to the
colonies. 26
The colonies, of, course reflected their mother country but only to the extent
necessary to manage the extraction of the maximum volume of gold, silver, wood, or
other materials needed by that country. 27 It would be the loss of these early colonial
empires, including the thirteen colonies in North America, the colonial implosion of the
Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere, and the Sepoy mutiny in India, that would
cause a great reexamination of why imperialism had failed and what had to change to
make it work. 28 The change, with the rhetoric of European nationalism fresh in
everyone’s experience, was to make the colony, as best one could with what one had to
work with, into a reflection of the mother country. That meant the imposition of
national culture, language, religion, and political economics upon the uncivilized
natives of the colonies. Europe moved its thousand year history of war, conquest,
intolerance, and struggle for power and borders to the colonial empires of Africa and
of securing the Nile Valley, whose light soil was largely unproductive. Robinson and Gallagher
concluded that the European powers had scrambled in rather than for Africa, their primary concern being
to deny each other rather than aggrandize themselves.” Wolfe, 400-1.
26 British colonization on the North American continent, especially what became the thirteen
colonies, was a notable exception.
27 This was true for all but the British who were colonists first, explorers and merchants second,
at least at that time.
28 Ora-Westley Schwemmer, "Belgium and the Nicaraguan Canal Project (1841-1845)," in
L'Expansion belge sous Léopold 1er, 1831-1865; recueil d'études. De Belgische expansie onder Leopold
I, 1831-1865; verzameling studi, (Brussels: ARSOM, 1965), 292-310.
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