Africa During the Scramble: The First Dominos

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article here

 

[Charles EP M.]

I wonder how the scramble would gave gone if there hadn't been recruitment of African troops (for whatever handwave reason) and everyone killed in the wars came from the metropole? It sounds like everyone would e far, far more cautious about starting anything that couldn't rely on gunships

 

[Thande]

You raise the point that Charles X was deposed soon after the intervention, which definitely seems like a major what-if of history. But I also wonder if the intervention would have been more temporary if Charles had survived longer - under the last century of the ancien régime, French and other European naval forces had briefly taken over bits of North Africa to cow piracy and so on, only to abandon them a few years later. I wonder, was it precisely because of the July Monarchy's more democratic support base and the popular support you allude to which made French Algeria a permanent colonial project rather than a mere transient foothold like its predecessors?

 

[Gary Oswald]

You raise the point that Charles X was deposed soon after the intervention, which definitely seems like a major what-if of history. But I also wonder if the intervention would have been more temporary if Charles had survived longer - under the last century of the ancien régime, French and other European naval forces had briefly taken over bits of North Africa to cow piracy and so on, only to abandon them a few years later. I wonder, was it precisely because of the July Monarchy's more democratic support base and the popular support you allude to which made French Algeria a permanent colonial project rather than a mere transient foothold like its predecessors?

Hmm, that's an interesting question and one that perhaps other people can answer better than I can.

It was always a much larger scale intervention than the classic European Gunships turn up, bomb the city, depose a Bey and then sail off sort of thing that normally happened, like in terms of men it was much more significant. It's not impossible that it goes the way of Spanish Tunis but my instinct is that it is hard to remove yourself from Empire no matter who you are.

 

[RyanF]

A few interesting PODs here, main one that grabs me is Egypt retaining some independence. It's close enough to Europe that it couldn't be ignored forever as that continent lurches further and further to a general war (think it unlikely to avoid completely, the board is out but not all the pieces are on it yet), maybe if it survives long enough it becomes too potential a crisis-in-waiting for any direct intervention so instead winds up entangled in the alliance web.

 

[OwenM]

You raise the point that Charles X was deposed soon after the intervention, which definitely seems like a major what-if of history. But I also wonder if the intervention would have been more temporary if Charles had survived longer - under the last century of the ancien régime, French and other European naval forces had briefly taken over bits of North Africa to cow piracy and so on, only to abandon them a few years later. I wonder, was it precisely because of the July Monarchy's more democratic support base and the popular support you allude to which made French Algeria a permanent colonial project rather than a mere transient foothold like its predecessors?

I think there was also at least some worry in the July Monarchy that the troops sent to Algeria had been the ones most loyal to Charles and thus bringing them back would be asking for trouble.

 

[Redolegna]

Indirect empire as the policy of choice of the French for most of the nineteenth century is very much David Todd's thesis in Velvet Empire, the intellectual theory being built by publicists often working for Talleyrand in the 1810s and 20s. Why try to be second-best at territorial empire (and risk race-mixing, for some of them) behind the British rather than do something they were better at and let the UK lead? His second chapter is per force on why it wasn't like that in Algeria but points out that there had been trading post and factories before and that the invasion might have just been short-lived if Charles X (moron!) had stayed on, but that Louis-Philippe now needed the legitimacy and also proof to the rest of Europe that nearly republican France wouldn't turn its might on the rest of them as it once did (hence securing permission for the intervention in Belgium). After that, sunk costs, the need to save face (Abd-el Kader nearly pushed them into the sea several times), combined with utterly horrible ways of waging war (smoking people who had fled into caves to death).

In Egypt, Mexico and other places where France was dominant, Todd argues it did so through investment and soft power: consumption patterns by elites, fashioned onto the French practices, boosted by France keeping an aristocracy and a monarchy of some sorts for most of the century that conservative elites in Asia and Latin America wanted to emulate. The Fairs and Exhibitions helped. However, once France became anticlerical republican and the informal empire couldn't look upon it as political and social model, those ties fell very fast, while the Republic was after legitimacy of some sort to make up for the loss of 1871. And when it turned out it had been pushed out of Egypt entirely even though it had been dominant there for more than 80 years and built the Suez canal, after ties with Mexico had been severed, over serious mishandling, suddenly direct empire looked a much more palatable choice.