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

asis of wealth, now gave way to the vastly more profitable system of manufacturing
and industry, which required neither title nor pedigree.
To the lord, earl, or duke with a run-down castle or manor house and little
political and reduced economic power at home, the lure would have been appealing to
many brought up on the stories of Raleigh, Cabot, Drake, and Wellington. Adventure,
fame, and, if you were lucky, wealth, might be the reward for those with title and little
more. The colonial and military services provided the opportunity and means to
reinvigorate an old aristocratic line, or at least die trying. The queen would have wanted
it that way. Women, stifled by the legal disabilities of their gender at home, could see
opportunity, if not breathing room, in an empire far from the norms and restrictions of
the mother country. 59 The exponential growth of the press in Europe in the nineteenth
century was both fuel and fire with its daily dispatches from the colonies and the front. 60
What could be better for God, queen, and country? It was simply the most patriotic duty
one could offer, especially with the war business in Europe all but silenced.
Many of the earlier colonists of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries had left
their home country to find economic or religious freedom. They were fleeing from
religious persecution, economic deprivation or simply to economic opportunity. There
was less need for colonists of this nature in this last wave of imperialism. There was a
57
John Bierman, Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley (New York:
Knopf, 1990).
58
Hochschild. For a response see Vellut, ed.
59
Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Burke Leacock, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, 1st ed. (New York,: International
Publishers, 1972); and Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
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