Daniel R. Headrick - The Tools of Empire - Technology and European Imperialism in The Nineteenth Century-Oxford University Press (1981)

THE J100LS OF EMPIRE
Technology and
European Imperialism
in the Ninete.enth Century
DANIEL R. HEADRICK
//
_.,
New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1981
Copyright© 1981 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Headrick, Daniel R
The tools of empire.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index
1. Imperialism-History. 2. Technology-
History. I. Title.
JC359.H4 303.4'83'09034 80-18099
ISBN 0-19-502831-7
ISBN 0-19-502832-5 (pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America

Preface
For the inspiration, encouragement, and assistance that have

contributed so much to this book, my debts run deep-to Pro-
fessors William H. McNeill and Ralph Austen of the Univer-
sity of Chicago; to Zohar Ben Asher; to Gerard Fabres; to
David Nort~rup; and to the librarians of so many superb in-
stitutions: in Chicago the Regenstein Library; in Paris the
Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer, Bibliotheque Na-
tionale, and Maison des Sciences de l'Homme; in London the
India Office Library and Records, British Library, National
Maritime Museum, and School of Oriental and African Studies;
in Brazzaville (Congo) the Organisation de la Recherche Scien-
tifique et Technique Outre-Mer and the Universite Marien
Ngouabi. For permission to use material from The Carl H.
Pforzheimer Library in New York, I thank the Carl and Lily
Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.
This book is dedicated to my father and the memory of my
mother, who nurtured my bookishness; to my children, Isa-
belle, Juliet, and Matthew, whose happy company cheered my
working hours; and to Rita, my wife, not for her typing but
for her thoughts.
Chicago D.R.H.
January I98I
V
Contents
j ntroduction: Technology, Imperialism, and History 3

Imperialism and technology. His,toriography of the causes of im-
perialism. The place of technology in the literature of imperialism.
The causes of this disregard. A new model of causality. Stages of
imperialism and the organization of this book.
PART ON,E: STEAMBOATS AND QUININE,

TOOLS OF PENETRATION
Chapter One: Secret Gunboats of the

East India Company 17
Invention of the steamboat. Introduction of the gunboat. First
steamers in India. The Burma War. The,Ganges steamers. The
Select Committee of 1834. Thomas Love 'Peacock. Francis Rawdon
Chesney. Macgregor Laird. Iron vs. wooden boats. The Euphrates
Expedition. Steamers for the Indus. More steamers for Mesopo-
tamia. Six more gunboats. Mystery of the Nemesis' d~stination.
The reasons for secrecy.
Chapter Two: The Nemesis in China 43

Sino-European relations. The opium trade. Demands for war. The
first steamers in China. Preparations for war. The Nemesis. Cap-
Vll
CONTENTS
tain Hall. The campaign of 1841. The Yangtze expedition, 1842.

Chinese paddle-wheelers. Gunboats in Asi~ after 1842. The inter-
action of means and motives.
Chapter Three: Malaria, Quinine, and

the Penetration of Africa 58
The paradox of unknown Africa. Early explorations. Macgregor
Laird and the 1832 Niger expedition. European military death rates
in West Africa. Malaria. Quinine. Experiments in Algeria. Experi-
ments in West Africa. Medical results of quinine prophylaxis.
Europeans enter Africa. Cinchona plantations and quinine supply.
Steamers and the conquest of Nigeria. Other rivers.
PART TWO: GUNS AND CONQUESTS
Chapter Four: Weapons and Colonial Wars of the

Early Nineteenth Century 83
Introduction. The modern gun. Muzzle-loading smoothbores. Per-
cussion. Rifling. Bullets. Early nineteenth-century colonial wars.
India. Chinese weapons. Burma. Algeria 1830-1850. Conclusion.
Chapter Five: The Breechloader Revolution 96

Introduction. The Dreyse. Single-shot breechloaders. Repeaters.
Smokeless powders. Gun manufacture. Machine guns. The arms of
colonial troops.
Chapter Six: African A~ms 105
Introduction. Dane guns on the ·coast. Sudanic weapons. Forest

weapons. African iron. Imports of breechloaders. Restrictions on
imports. Breechloaders in the Central Sudan.
Chapter Seven: Arms Gap and Colonial Confrontations 115
Explorers. Stanley. Disparity of firepower. The Eastern Sudan.

Samori Toure. Ethiopia. Strategy and tactics.
viii
CONTENTS
PART THREE: THE COMMUNICATIONS

REVOLUTION
Chapter Eight: Steam and the Overland Route to India 129

Colonial links to Europe. Speed of communications. Early ocean
steamers. Inefficiency. Three routes to India. Demand for steam
routes. Calcutta and the Enterprize.,Bombay and the Hugh
Lindsay. Steamer imperialism. The Red Sea Route. The p" arid 0.
Chapter Nine: The Emergence of Efficient Steamships 142

Advantages of iron. Early iron boats. The propeller and die
compass. The Great Britain. The economics of iron. The com-
pound engine.
Chapter Ten: The Suez Canal 150

Inauguration. Preparations. Corvee labor and construction
machinery. Impact.
Chapter Eleven: The Submarine Cable 157

The need for communication. Early underwater cables. Techno-
logical advances. The cable network of the sixties and seventies.
Eastern and Associated. British imperial cables.
Chapter Twelve: The Global Thalassocracies 165

Steel hulls. The triple-expansion engine. Size of ships. Number of
ships. Freight rates. Harbors and coaling stations. The demise of
sail. Industrial time. Shipping lines. British lines to Africa.
Mackinnon and the British India Line. French and German lines.
" British power. The lesser thalassocracies. Global change.
Chapter Thirteen: The Railroads of India 180

Traditional transportation in India. Motives for building railroads.
Stephenson. Guarantees. Construction. Later lines. Consequences
of Indian railroads.
ix
CONTENTS
Chapter Fourteen: African Transportation:

Dreams and Realities 192
Traditional transportation. Advantages and costs of railroads.
Chronology of African railroads. The African railroad network.
Steamers on the, Congo. The Matadi,Leopoldville railroad. The
Trans-Saharan projects.
lpter
J:perialism
Fifteen, The Legacyof Technological
204
The imperialism of British India. The crucial decades, 1860-1880:\
and the cost of conquests. Information flow and technological di£: )
fusion. Legacies of imperialism: jingoism, racism, fascination with ·
machinery.
Bibliographical Essay: 211
Index: 215
X
THE TOOLS OF EMPIRE
INTRODUCTION
Technology, Imperialism,
and History
Among the many important events of the nineteenth century,

two were of momentous consequence for the entire world.
One was the progress and power of industrial technology; the
other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and
much of Asia by Europeans. Historians have carefully de-
scribed and analyzed these two phenomena, but separately, as
though they had little bearing on each other. It is the aim of
this book to trace the connections between these great events.
The European imperialism of the nineteenth century-some-
times called the "new" imperialism-differed from its precur-
sors in two respects: its extent and its legacy. In the year 1800
Europeans occupied or controlled thirty-five percent of the
land surface of the world; by 1878 this figure had risen to
sixty-seven percent, a~db·y 1!)14ove; eighty-loui"perc~Y'of tlie
wor,fd's land area'was European-dominated. 1 Tlie~BrTtisiiEm-
pire alone, already formidable in 1800 with a land area of 1.5
million square miles and a population of twenty million, in-
creased its land area sevenfold and its population twentyfold
in the following hundred years. 2
Its legacy is harder to quantify. In today's Asia and Africa,
3
INTRODUCTION
European political and religious ideals barely survive as tenu-

ous mementos of a defunct imperial age-modern equivalents
of the Mosque of Cordoba or Hadrian's Wall. The real triumph
of ,European civilization has been that of vaccines and napalm,
of ships and aircraft, of electricity and radio, of plastics and
printing presses; in short, it has been a triumph of technology,
not ideology. Western industrial technology has transformed
the world more than any leader, religion, revolution, or war.
Nowadays only a handful of people in the most remote corners
of the 'earth survive with their lives unaltered by industrial
products. The conquest of the non-Western world by Western
industrial te1:hnology still proceeds unabated.
This conquest began in the nineteenth century and was
woven into the expansion of European empires. The connec-
tions between technology and imperialism must be approached
from both sides: from the history of technology as well as from
that of imperialism. The history of technology ranks as one of
the more popular forms of literature. Bookstores with only a
handful of biographies and national histories will offer whole
·shelves of books on the history of guns, antique furniture, vin-
0tage cars, old-time locomotives, and Nazi warplanes. Most of
these, are hardware histories, compilations of pictures and facts
about objects divorced from the context of their time. The so-
cial history of technology, in contrast, aims at understanding
the causes, the development, and the consequences of techno-
logical phenomena. Social historians 6£ technology generally
begin with a given technology and examine it in this Jight.
Examples abound: What was the impact of the cotton industry
on British labor during the Industrial Revolution? How did
firearms change warfare during the late Middle ~ges? How
did railroads contribute to the winning of the American West? 1
Reversing the question, however, can also shed light on the
historical process. Given a particular historical phenomenon-
for example, the new imperialism-how did technological
forces shape its development? This is the question that his-
4
TECHNOLOGY, IMPERIALISM, AND HISTORY
torians of imperialism have neglected to answer, and that we

must now confront.
The search for the causes of nineteenth-century imperialism

has spawned one of the liveliest debates in modern history.
Historians have offered a wealth of explanations for this dra-
matic
~
expansion of European_P,Ower.
~......--,-- ...... -
"<ime b.;;e
-.... !'i!~lJ
i5uch-poutical motives as international rivalries, naval strate ,

emP~;
·,the instability oi:;imper.ial-frontiers, the diversion-:o~pµl
1a~t~~xpni domestic problems,::Pt:;the.inf!JJ.e.ru;.e~~~?5l
~~2.-~~...gn.:iwlitical...decision,makea_<jthers, following in the
footsteps of the English economist l A, Hobson, have stressed
~~~rtoniitm~iives:tbe"tie~Uil;,~~uremai'K~,
<U"..ll!~!!l.~ll.!JU?EOrtu!}~ties? -· ....,..,~,_ -
At first sight, these points of view seem to differ markedly.
Yet, we are struck by a common underlying element. Partici-
pants in the debate agree that the crucial factor i:q. the new
imperialism was the' motivation of the imperialists. What
made nineteenth-century politicians, explorers, traders, mis-
sionaries, and soldiers want to extend the influence of Europe
to hitherto untouched lands? Behind" this question lies the
tacit assumption that once Europeans wanted to spread their
influence, they could readily do so, for they had, the means
close at hand.
Rather than analyze in detail the debate on the new im-
perialism, let us consider a few recent and important contribu-
tions. These can be divided into three broad categories: those
that ignore the role of technology, those that disp~ra&"eit, and
those that gloss over it lightly. In the first category is Africa
and the Victorians by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher.
The authors consider the conquest of Africa in the last dec-
ades of the nineteenth century:
Why,•after centuries of neglect, the British and other European
governments should have scrambled to appropriate nine, tenths
of the African continent within sixteen years, i,san old problem,
INTRODUCTION
still awaiting an answer. . . . What were the causes and incen-

tives? Which of them were merely contributory and which deci-
sive? . . . A first task in analyzing the late-Victorians' share in
the partition is to understand the motives of the ministers who
directed it .... 4
Having asked these questions, the authors find that indeed the
scramble for Africa can be explained by the intentions and
hesitations of the statesmen, the "official mind" of the Euro-
pean powers.
A similar· perspective pervades Henri Brunschwig's French
Colonialism z87z-z9z4, Myths and Realities. 5 In this book the
author atgues that France acquired an empire mainly for psy-
chological reasons: wounded pride following the Franco-Prus-
sian War, and the desire to regain status and prestige among
the great powers. A less Eurocentric theory is advanced by
D. K. 'Fieldhouse in Economics and Empire z830-z9z4. Im-
perialism, defined as military and political conquest, was the
consequence of instability generated on the frontiers of empire
by advancing parties of traders, missionaries, and. other Euro-
peans coming into conflict with indigenous societies: " ... im-
perialism may be seen as a classic case of the metropolitan dog
being wagged by its colonial tail," he declares, or again,
" ... Europe was pulled into imperialism by the magnetic
force of the periphery." 6 After presenting myriad instances of
this phenomenon, however, Fieldhouse is left with the tan-
talizing question:
Is 'imperialism' merely shorthand for an agglometration of cau-

sally unrelated events which happened to occur at largely the
same time in different parts of the world? If so, why did the
critical period of imperialism happen to occur in these thirty
years after 1880?
These multiple crises and their timing were merely symptoms
of a profound change in the pathology of international relation-
ships. The world crisis was real and a solution had to be found.
By about 1880 there was a profound disequilibrium between
Europe .and most parts of the less-developed•world. Never had
6
one continent possessed so immense a power advantage over the

others or been in such close contact with, them.7
i.!1.!Peti'ltlism, then, was the sum of many little imperialisms

tiel toget'6.er by their timing. And their timing was the prod-
uct of "a profound change in the pathology of international
relationships," "a profound disequilibrium," \'.[P.oweratl'Vana
.........
.....,
..~,~,
~:;Here, on the very hrink of offering a concrete explana-
tion for the new imperialism as a unified movement, Fieldhouse
backs off, leaving us with hazy, mysterious forces.
In the works cited above, the authors disregard the tech-
nological factor in imperialism. Others mention it, but only
to reject it. This is the position taken by both Hans-Ulrich
Wehler and Rondo Cameron.
In his book Imperialismus, Wehler asserts:
. . . technological progress as such did not cause imperialistic

expansion directly, let alone automatically, but contributed as
the impetus in other areas. Imperialism.resulted, in a way, from
the socio-political inability, within the political framework, to
cope with the economic results of permanent technological in-
novations and their social consequences.s
In a later work, Wehler is even more categorical:
If one points to technological progress as the main factor of ex-

pansion, thereby defining imperialism as a sort of unavoidable
"natural'' consequence of technological innovations, one is led
astray too. There is no direct 'causal relationship between these
innovations and•imperialism.9
Rondo Cameron reached a similar conclusion in an article

entitled "Imperialism and Technolo&_y," which appeared in a
general history of technology:
It is sometimes asserted that the rapid progress of Western tech-

nology in the' 19th century was a major determinant of the im-
perialist drive .... Western superiority in ships, navigational
techniques, and firearms was a fact of Ion& standing, however. It
7
INTRODUCTION
cannot be used to explain the burst of expansion at the end of

the 19th century, after almost a century during which Europeans
showed little interest in overseas expansion.10
The rejection of the technological. fact,or by Wehler and

Cameron, and its disregard by Robi~on, Gallagp.er, Brun-
schwig, and Fieldhouse are not representatjve of the literature
as a whole. The majority of current works on imperialism con-
cede the jmportanc~ of the technological factor, paying it)ip-
service before hurrying on to something else. An excellent ex-
ample is the recent African History by Philip Curtin and
others. The authors recognize that, as. a result of advances in
medicine and pharmacology, iron, and steel, and firearms,
"conquest in Africa was not only far cheaper, than it had ever
been in the past; it was al,c;ofar cheap~r in lives and money
than equivalent operations would ever be again." Yet to these
"technological factors," they-devote only three pages. 11
The conclusion is inescapable; at the present stage of the
debate, historians give tedinological factors very low priority
amon,g the causes of Fhe new imperialism. Such a curt dis-
missal of the role of technology in nineteenth-centm::y imperi-
alism stands in striking contrast to the central role assigned to
technological chang~-better known as tlie Industrial Revolu-
tion-in the histories of European societies and economies of
th~ very same period. It co9-trasts even more with the careful
at;~t:ion that historians of the early, modern period have de-
votf!d to the technological. aspects of the oceanic discoveries
and of the exploration and conquest of the Americas. 12
. ,9ne reason for the disregard of technological factprs lies in
tliP
".
1tading-sectors model of the Industrial Revolutlon. This
; t'•'
widely accepted explanation concentrate's on the role of the
m&t innovative and fastest-expanding industries-textiles, rail-
ro~, rn.i.njng, and metallurgy-which exerted ~trong multi-
plier effects on the rest of the econoIJ1y. It is quite reasonable
for someone to consider these leading sectors and conclude
that they became important in the non-Western world only
8
late in the colonial period, and not in the earlier periods of

penetration and conquest.
If the more dramatic aspects of the Industrial Revolution
had only a marginal impact on imperial expansion, it does ~ot
follow that technology in general was inconsequenti~l. In
order to discover which inventions were important on the
frontiers of empire, we must look at Africa and Asia as well as
Europe, and at indigenous technologies and natural obstacles
as well as at the technologies of the imperialists.
A more fundamental reason for misunderstanding the role
played by technology-lies in the very concept of causality used
by historians. Almost all historians nowadays view imperialism
as the result of many'Causes; their interpretations ,differ in the
weights they attach to each cause. The problem with this way
of thinking is that. any attempt to emphasize the role of one
cause automatically reduces the importance of the others,,
thereby coming into conflict wit];J.other;interpretations. The
debate on the new imperialism is essentially the result of con-
flicts in the ordering of causes. To defend the importance of a
new factor is therefore to run head-on into ,other interpreta-
tions. And to advance the claims of technology-which many
still associate with the concept of matter over mind-seems at
first, to defy an axiom of Western historiography: that history
results from the interactions of human decisions.
This dilemma is much relieved if we divide causes into mo-
tives and means. A complex process, lik,,e imperialism results
from both appropriate motives and adequate means. If the
motives are too wea!c--as they were in the case of the Chinese
expeditions to the Indian Ocean in the 143os-or if the means
are inadequate-as in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the
189os-then the imperialist venture aborts.,Both types of causes
are equally important, and by focusing on one we in no way
discredit the other.
A model of causality in which the technical means are sepa-
rate from the motives does not imply that the two are unre-
9
INTRODUCTION
lated. On the contrary, the appearance of a new technology

can trigger or reinforce a motive by making the desired end
possible or acceptably inexpensive. For example, quinine pro-
phylaxis allowed Europeans to survive in tropical Africa. Con-
versely, a motive can occasion a search for appropriate means,
as when the American occupation of Cuba brought about the
investigation of the causes of yellow fever. The many instances
in which we will encounter both types of relationships will
serve as reminders that we must steer between two dangerous
determinisms: the technological-"what can be done will be
done"-and the psychological-"where there's a will there's a
way."
If we accept the equal necessity of both motives and means,
then the new imperialism could have resulted from any of
three possible scenarios: Adequate means were available, but
new motives triggered the event; sufficient motives existed, but
new means came into play, thus leading to the event; or,
finally, both the motives and the means changed, and both
caused the event.
The first scenario-which Cameron sums up with the words
"Western superiority ... was a fact of long standing"-has
formed the basis of the debate up until recently. Yet Western
superiority, insofar as it existed, does not suffice to explain
European conquests in Asia and Africa. The new imperialism
was not the result of mere superiority, but of the unleashing
of overwhelming force at minimal costs. Technological changes
affected the timing and location of the European conquests.
They determined the economic relations of colonialism. And
they paved the way for the astonishing reversal of the world
balance that we are currently witnessing.
If the first scenario overemphasizes motivations, the secon'd
one gives more credit to technological factors than the evi-
dence warrants. Europeans were not always equally interested
in Asia and Africa, and historians have rightly stressed the
growing demand for colonies in the late nineteenth century.
10
It is the .third of our scenarios, in which both means and

motivations changed and interacted, that best reflects the reali-
ties of the European conquest and colonization of the eastern
hemisphere during the nineteenth century. It is the purpose
of this book to argue this third scenario, by analyzing the tt:,c;h-
nological changes that made imperialism happen, both as they
enabled motives to produce events, and a~ they enhaqced the
motives themselves.
The goal and result of imperialism-9ne which was in fact

achieved in most territories before decolonization-was the cre-
ation of colonies politically submissivt; and economically pr9£-
itable to their European metropoles. The economic networks
that were established, and the technologies that entered into
the development and exploitation of colonial plantations,
farms, mines, and forests, are a complex subject that we must
leave for another time.
This book concentrates on an earlier period, that of im-
perial expansion. The imperialism of Europe in Asia and
Africa involved a number of stages before the goal of pacified
colonies eventually was reached. Thol}gh these occurred at
different times and in different ways depending 01).J.h_e _r~gion,
we can classify these stages roughly as ~follows.l.JJJ.~•.Jm,'!i,al
S!~aS"Tlrat' bf penet:ra'l:iori aijcf e'"~vtqtati9n !?Y_ the _fir!~E!!ro-
pean travelers. ·Tnen came .die cqhqile'st of the' indigenous
P,e"ople"':l'.nctrlie:;-i~posi~io~ of Eurooeari' rule 011,them. Final,fy,
i ,.~ ... ., ""- ~ ~... .,,,_. ,,,_ "' r
,before the colorw#cmyd b<:c;ome.r,alu~ble, as.an adjunH: tO'!a
}ur~pea~ ~~.?n?my,-~.~Prnnic;,~.til?}.!S1ng_,.tHnSP,Ort:tiw net-
~r,¥ ~a? !O~t'}or~~a: .
From the technological point of view, each of these stages
involved hundreds of diverse products and processes, from
pith-helmets to battleships. In' this book I will concentrate on
those that played the most crucial role, either by making
imperialism possible where it was otherwise unlikely, or by
making it suitably cost-effective in the eyes of budget-minded
11
INTRODUCTION
governments. In the penetration phase, steamers and the pro-

phylactic use of quinine were the key technologies. lhf!""se<t
oml~~te-t1!~t~co11qus~t4~pe~~~a~!Y on_rf!pid:'finng
rifles""ancr'macli~nquriUi!Jhe~has&,of· cohsoiidation,- the
.\iilk.lll:~d..th.e..ID~~
t"': ·~
to.Eu'x·2,PallJ1:.~9~e:!a 'their eco-
~'l,l&. !J: .i -1.-, "'
nontic .ex <;?1, a! If'iii,l:1tfde~nf~il,.mi~ip,Jine,&;•th~.$lJ.e'Z..€anal,
thei.§J..l iaq!e~:
.•Il}aYiIJi''tj!legra.pl;f, •"a'n.<1~.t:M
J:.<?lo~ialrailroads.
Q:Jie~.eJ~cl;m~lbgicaIJactQrsW~!1l.:s~R)es~:?!·tb~ work.
The effects of technological change were experienced almost
everywhere in the nineteenth century, but they were felt much
more st!:,~g_ry~parts of the world than in others.P9-
lert1cu~r..:,. .:.!~'!,~ "Js
~u~~ India and Africa, which were con-
quered. and colonized by Europeans, were more dee1;!2'.. affec~1
~r.eas_lik.e_}!,ersia..,2r....,rthina, over whic:TiEuropean in -
t~~.was.-exe:r.cisecl•, ..indire.ctl}(-tlu.;Q.µgl)._indigenuus,...rJilers. 13
Thus we shall award to each region a share of our attention
proportional to that which it received from nineteenth-century
imperialists. ,·
This book makes no claim, then, to destroy other interpre-
tations of nineteenth-century imperialism. Rather it aims to
open new vistas and to provoke fresh thinking on this subject;
by adding the technological dimension to the list of factors
other historians have already explored.
NOTES
1. D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire r830-r9r4 (Ithaca,

N.Y., 1973), P· 3·
2. F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Sea-Power and Empire (London, 1940),
P· 1 79·
3. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902). The de-
bate has grown to the point of generating its own anthologies and
historiographies. See, for example, Harrison M. Wright, ed., The
"New Imperialism": Analysis of Late Nineteenth Century Expansion,
2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1976); George H. Nadel and Perry Curtis,
12
eds., Imperialism and Colonialism (New Ybrk, 1964); and Ralph

Austen, ed., Modern Imperialism: Western Overseas Expansion and
its Aftermath, z776-z965 (Lexington, Mass., 1969). More analytical
studies of the debate will be found in E. M. Winslow, The Pattern
of Imperialism (London, 1948); George Lichtheim, Imperialism (New
York and Washington, D.C., 1971); Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe,
Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London, 1972);.and Benjamin
Cohen, The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of
Dominance and Dependence (New York, 1973). A detailed bibliog-
raphy of imperialism will be found in John P. Halstead and Serafino
Porcari, Modern European Imperialism: A Bibliography, 2 vols.
(Boston, 1974); on the historiography of imperialism, see 1:32-37.
4. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa
and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (Garden City, N.Y.,
1968), pp. 17-19.
5. Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism z87r-z9r4! Myths and
Realities, trans. William Glanville Brown (London, 1966).
6. Fieldhouse, pp. 81 and 463.
7. Fieldhouse, pp. 46o-61.
8. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, lmperialismus (Berlin and Cologne, 1970),
P· 1 3·
9. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Industrial Growth and Early German
Imperialism," in Owen and Sutcliffe, pp. 72-73.
10. Rondo Cameron, "Imperialism and Technology," in Melvin
Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., eds., Technology in Western
Civilization, 2 vols. (New York, 1967), 1:693.
11. Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan
Vansina, African History (Boston, 1978), p. 448. See also David
Landes, "The Nature of Economic Imperialism," The Journal of
Economic History 21(1961):511 for a similar approach; the author
recognizes the importance of technological factors, but does not ex-
plain or elaborate. In addition to these examples taken from the
general literature, the technological factor appears in specialized
writings on particular aspects of imperialism; see, for example, Philip
Curtin, "'The White Man's Grave': Image and Reality, 1780-1850,"
Journal of British Studies 1(1961):94-IIo and The Image of Africa:
British Ideas and Actions z780-z850 (Madison, Wis., 1964); Michael
Gelfand, Rivers of Death in Africa (London, 1964); a series of arti-
cles on firearms in The Journal of African History 12(1971) and
13(1972); Michael Crowder, ed., West African Resistance: The Mili-
tary Response to Colonial Occupation (London, 1971); and Henri
INTRODUCTION
Brunschwig, "Note sur Jes technocrates de l'imperialisme fram,;ais en

Afrique noire," in Revue franr;aise d'histoire d'outre-mer 54(1967):
171-87. Such specialized works, however, are rare and the authors
mak~ no attempt to generalize about the role of technology in
imperialism.
12. See, for example, Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Dis-
covery of• America: The Northern Voyages (New York, 1971), ch. 5:
"English Ships and Seamen 1490-1600"; Joseph R. Levenson, ed.,
European Expansion and the Counter-Example of Asia, IJOO-I6oo
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), ch. 1: "Technology"; Eugene F. Rice,
The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, I460-I559 (New York,
1970), ch. 1: "Science, Technology and Discovery"; J. M. Parry, The
Establishment of the European Hegemony: I4IJ-I7I5: Trade and
Exploration in the Age of the Renaissance (New York, 1961), ch. 1:
"The Tools of the Explorers: (i) Charts (ii) Ships (iii) Guns"; and
Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Ex-
pansion I400-I700 (London and New York, 1965).
13. As for Latin America, its history in the nineteenth century,
that is, in its post-independence or neo-colonial phase, is entangled
with that of American expansion and resembles that of Africa and
Asia since World War Two. To do it justice would require another
book.
14
PART ONE
STEAMBOATS
AND QUININE, TOOLS
OF PENETRATION
CHAPTER ONE
Secret Gunboats
of the East India Company
We have the power in our hands, moral, physical, and mechani-

cal; the first, based on the Bible; ,the second, upon the wonder-·
ful adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon race to all climates, situa-
tions, and circumstances . . . the third, bequeathed to us by the
immortal Watt. By his invenaon every river is laid open to us,
time and distance are short~ned. If his spirit is allowed to wit-
ness the success of his invention here' on earth, I can conceive
no application of it that would receive his approbation more
than seeing the mighty streams of the Mississippi and tlie
Amazon, ,the Niger and the Nile, the Indus and the 9anges,
stemmed by hundreds of steam-vessels, can:ying the glad tidings
of "peace and good will toward men" into the dark places of the
earth which are now filled with cruelty.1
Macgregor Laird
The steamboat, with its power to travel speedily upriver as

well as down, carried Europeans deep into Africa and Asia.
Few inventions of the nineteenth century were as important in
the history of imperialism.
The idea· of propelling a boat by the power of steam is an
old one, dating back to the seventeenth century, before there
were any worki~g steam .engines. In the late eighteenth cen-
STEAMBOATS AND QUININE, TOOLS OF PENETRATION
tury, many inventors in France, Britain, and the United States

experimented with steam-driven vessels. Most English-speaking
historians date the beginning of the age of steamboats from
Robert Fulton's Clermont, which navigated the Hudson be-
tween New York and Albany in 1807, a commercial as well as
a technical success.2 Americans took to the new device with in-
stant enthusiasm, for theirs was a land of great roadless dis-
tances crossed by broad rivers lined with trees which steamers
could use for fuel. Within a decade the Hudson 1 Delaware,
Potomac, and Mississippi and their tributaries all carried regu-
lar steamboat service.
Europeans took less eagerly to the new technology; tradition
lay thicker, there were good roads, and fuel was costly. Yet
soon the new invention appeared in European waters. Henry
Bell's Comet brought regular steamboat service to the Clyde
River in 1811. By 1815 ten steamboats operated on the Clyde
and several more on other British rivers. By 1820 hundreds of
steamboats plied the rivers and lakes of Europe, and a few
were venturing out into the Mediterranean, the Channel, and
the Irish Sea. From that point on, the history of steam vessels
took a new turn. Small river craft became so comn'lon that
they were taken for granted, as attention turned to the newer
railroads and ocean-going steamships.
If henceforth steamboats on European .rivers deserve little
mention, it d~~~ ~ot follow that European steamboats had lit-
tle impact elsewhere. The revolution they wrought occurred
in Asia and Africa, into whose interior they carried the power
that European ships had possessed on the high seas for cen-
turies. Indeed no single piece of equipment is so closely asso-
ciated with the idea of imperialism as is the armed shallow 1
draft steamer, in other words, the gunboat.
The date of the gunboat's introduction 'is still a matter of
debate. Antony Preston and John Major, historians of the
gunboat era, date its birth to the Crimean War (1853-56)
when the Royal Navy, suddenly forced to fight in the shallow
SECRET GUNBOATS OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
waters of the Black and Bal,tic seas, ordered scores of such

craft. Before that, they declare, "the word 'gunboat' was a ge-
neric term for a few minor vessels," as though only Royal
Navy gunboats mattered. 3
The naval historian Gerald Graham gives a more plausible
date for the opening of the gun~oat era. Speaking of Sino-
British relations in the early nineteenth century, he notes:
... the Royal Navy did.not count as an instrument of diplo·

macy, because Peking had no notion of its true capability .
. . . There was little or no hope in the 1820s that the Emperor
and his Court could be made to see reason, and come to terms.
If a final settlement were to be reached, it became gradually
clear to Foreign Office officials that ~eking would have to learn,
through 'imppsing demonstrations of force', the immense and
devastating power that lay in the hands of the Mistress of the
Seas....
Yet it was not until the beginning of the 1840s that the pro-
cess of demonstrating power, of 'showinl} the flag: beyond coastal
boundaries, became a practicable operation. The coming of
steam, by making possibJe the penetration of Chinese riv~rs,
opened up the interior to British warships. By 1842, steamers
like the Nemesis could guide or pull battleships as far as Nan-
king on the Yangtse-kiang, more than 200 miles from the sea.4·
The Opium War was the first event whose outcome was deter-
mined by specially built gunboats. Not by accident did gun-
boats appear in China at the right moment. They were the
end product of a complex process of creation resulting from
the confluence, in the mid-183os, of two historical forces: the
campaign to speed up communications between India and
Britain by the use of steamers\ and the innovative spirit of
three individuals- Thomas Love Peacock and John and Mac-
gregor Laird.
The first steamer in India was a small pleasure boat built

in 1819 for the Nawab of Oudh. The Britons of Calcutta saw
more practical applications for this new device, and in 1823
the Kidderpore dockyard built a 132-ton sidewheeler pro-

pelled by two 16-horsepower Maudslay engines. This vessel,
the Diana, was put to work as a tugboat in Calcutta harbor,
where sailing ships had great difficulty maneuvering. A year
later she was joined by the Pluto, built in 1822 as a steam-
dredge but then converte'd to a paddle-steamer.
These two boats were commercial failures but stimulated a
tremendous interest in steam navigation. The British com-
munity of Calcutta, which felt isolated from its homeland-a
round trip took a year or more-saw in steam a means of ac-
celerating communications. In 1825 it offered a prize to the
first steamer to make the trip in seventy days or less. In re-
sponse, a group of steam enthusiasts in London built the En-
terprize, a large ship with a weak and fuel-hungry engine. Al-
though the Enterprize was deemed a failure, taking 113 days
to make the trip to Calcutta, the voyage had several important
consequences, By demonstrating that steamship technology was
still too primitive to make ocean voyages commercially viable,
or even worthy of government subsidy, the voyage shifted at-
tention away from the unattainable "Cape Route" around
Africa to1'7ard more immediate ap,plications of steam: warfare,
the navigation of the Ganges, and the "Overland Routes" to
Britain via the Middle E'ast.
In December 1824 the British East India Company and

the kingdom of Burma had gone to war. Burma was separated
from Bengal by almost impassable mountains, and the only
easy access to the kingdom lay up tlie valley of the Irrawaddy
River from Rangoon to the capital city of Ava. The waF lasted
two years and inflicted, heavy casualties on both sides. The
Burmese, despite their antiquated weapons, showed their skill
as guerrillas in' the swamps of the Irrawaddy. The British lost
thtee quarters of their troops, most of whom were Indian se-
poys, largely from 'disease.,
The Enterprize ferried troops and mail from Calcutta to
Rangoon. The Pluto, hastily armed with four brass 24-
20
pounders, participated in the attack on the Arakan peninsula.

But the star of the war was the Diana. It was Captain Fred-
erick Marryat, the naval commander and a well-known novel-
ist, who had insisted that! she be brought to Butma. On the
Irrawaddy she towed sailing ships into position, transported
troops, reconnoitered advance positions, and bombarded Bur-
mese fortifications with her swivel guns and Congreve rockets. 5
The most important contribution of the Diana was to 'capture
the Burmese praus, or war boats. One British officer wrote:
The Burmese War boats were very fine in general about go feet
long pulling, 60 or 70 oars. Chiefs of consequence had gilt ones.
They had heavy guns 6 or g pounders lashed in the B9ws which
frequently they could neither train or elevate. Their number of
Boats were said to be very great but we never saw them in
greater numbers than 25 or 30 at a time, and altogether they
were a contemptible force and never evinced any spirit. They
were extremely swift, far beyond any of our Boats, the Steam
Vessel upon two or three occ~sions caught them by tiring their
crews out. About 60 were captured during the war.6 '
As another observer pointed out, the race between the Diana

and the praus was too unequal, for' "the muscles and sinews
of man could not hold out against the perseverance of the
boiling kettle .... " 7 By February 1826 the Diana, whicµ the
Burmese called "fire devil," had pushed with the British fleet
up to Amarapura, over 460 miles upriver. The king of Burma,
seeing his capital threatened, sued for peace. Thus the East
India Company secured Assam and acquired the Burmese
provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim. 8
It was quite by chance that the Diana took part in the An-
glo-Burmese War. Yet, for all her heroics she only hastened
the British victory, neither triggering the w:tr nor determining
its outcome. Her main contribution was to stimulate further
interest in river steamers among the British in India. They no
longer regarded steamers as just another type of vessel, but as
an'entirely new technology destined to enhance their power.
One application of steam power was internal. Transporta-
21
tion in British India was erratic and costly, for it depended on

human beings, horses, and bullocks. Only the Ganges River, a
natural highway through northern India that had been used
by slow country boats from time immemorial, provided de-
pendable, inexpensive transportation. Consequently, progress-
minded Anglo-Indians greeted the advent of steamboats with
the same enthusiasm exhibited by Americans opening up the
Mississippi. So clearly was transportation in the interests of
the Bengali government that steam service on the Ganges was
from the beginning a political enterprise, a means of consoli-
dating the British presence in Hindustan. In 1828, Governor-
General Sir William Bentinck encouraged Captain Thomas
Prinsep to begin surveying the Ganges River. Six years later a
regular steapi service between Calcutta and Allahabad was in-
augurated, relying on the iron steamer Lord William Bentinck,
a 120-foot sternwheeler with a speed of six to seven miles per
hour. Within two years several other steamers cruised up and
down the Ganges-the Thames, the ]umna, and the Megna-
all pulling accommodation boats for passengers and barges for
freight. 9
These steamers were much faster than any country boat,
taking only twenty, days to travel from Calcutta to Allahabad
in•the rainy season, and twenty-four in the dry season. Yet they
remained outside the economic life, of the country because of
their cost. A cabin from Calcutta to Allahabad cost·400 rupees
(thirty pounds sterling), the same as a cabin on a steamer
across the Atlantic or half the cost o{ a voyage from England
to India. Deck passengers paid h;_ilfas much, which was still a
small fortune. As a result only government,.oflicials, bishops,
planters, and Indian princes could afford the .trip; in all of
1837 only 375 passengers traveled on a Ganges steamer.
Freight rates, equally outragepus at six to twenty pounds
sterling per ton, limited the cargo on Ganges steamers to
mostly government merchandise. Guns, flints, medicines, legal
and official stationery, .;i.nddelicate instruments ~ere shipped
22
SECRET GUNBOATS OF THE EAST INDIA cbMPANY
up~tream; in exchange, documents and the receipts from tax

collectors flowed down to Calcutta. As for private freight, only
the household goods of traveling officials and precious cargoes
of silk, indigo, shellac, and opium could bear the cost of steam
transport. 10
The East India Company continued to operate steamers un-
til 1844, after which several private companies joined the ven-
ture. In time, though, the Ganges, became more difficult to
navigate, because of massive deforestation, e:fosion and silting,
and the diversion of water into irrigation, canals. The other
rivers of India, were too shallow or fickle to become major
highways of steamer traffic. One ingenious engineer proposed
in 1849 to build steamers with a twelve-inch draft and auxil-
iary wheels to overcome the sandbanks that blocked the Indus,
the Nerbudda, and other rivers. 11 By then, however, a mote
efficient wheeled vehicle-the railroad-had eclipsed ·the steam-
boat.
While the Diana and the Ganges steamers wefe proving, the
practicability of steam navigation on rivers, the dream of
rapid steamship,service between Incjia and Britain continued
to tantalize the Anglo-Indians. In their minds, the failure •of
the ·Enterprize was only a temporary se'tback. As' we Shall
see, the government of the Bombay Presidency launched the
steamer Hugh Lindsay, which steamed to Suez and back in
1830. The Court of Directors of the East India Company, ·the
Foreign Office, and the Admiralty did what they could to
frustrate these attempts by Anglo-Indians to open steam com-
munication independently. The steam lobby ir. India and il:s
agents in London thereupon flooded Rarliament with peti-
tions and the newspapers with letters, In June 1834, in ,re-
'sponse to this campaign, the House of Commons appointed a
Select Committee on Steam Navigation to India. Though con-
cerned primarily with communication, this committee led di-
rectly to the beginning of the gunboat era.
The Select Committee of 1834 heard testimony from many

witnesses, but three dominated the proceedings: Thomas Love
Peacock, Francis Rawdon Chesney, and Macgregor Laird.
Peacock is well known to students of nineteenth-century
English literature as a novelist and satirist, a close friend of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the father-in-law of George Mere-
dith. But he deserves equally to be known to maritime and
technological historians. If he is not, it is because technologi-
cal innovation often takes place in the discreet confines of
workshops and offices, far from the public notice that attends
literary and political lives.
In 1819, when Peacock first entered the East India Com-
pany, it had just created three new assistantships in the office
of the Examiner of Correspondence: justice, revenue, and pub-
lic works. After a two-year apprenticeship and some difficult
examinations, P.eacock became assistant to the examiner, in
charge of public works.12
In 1828, Thomas Waghorn, an officer who had been favor-
ably impressed with the Diana while serving in the Burma
War, arrived in London on behalf of the merchants of Cal-
cutta and Madras, hoping to persuade the East India Com-
pany to establish regular steam communication with India.
John Loch, chairman of the Court of Directors, asked Peacock
to look into the matter. 13In September 1829, Peacock drew up
a "Memorandum respecting the Application of Steam Naviga-
tion to the internal and external Communjcations of India."
In it he argued that steamers should be used between Britain
and India. Of the three possible routes-around Africa, via the
Red Sea, and via Syria and the Euphrates-he preferred the
Euphrates one, because river steamers wei:e more reliable than
seagoing steamships, the Euphrates pad been navigated suc-
cessfully since antiquity, and, most important, if Britain did
not secure Mesopotamia, Russia would:
The Russians have unlimited resources in coal, wood, iron, cat-
tle and corn. They have now steamboafs on the Volga and the
Caspian Sea. They will have them before long on the Sea of
24
Aral and the Oxus, and in all probability on the Euphrates and
the Tigris. It is not our navigating the Euphrates that will set
them the example. They will do every thing in Asia that is
worth the doing, and that we leave undone.14
In 1833, Governor-General Bentinck had sent Lieutenant Al-

exander Burnes to London to bri'ng the' question of steam-
ers before Parliament. On December 12, 1833, Burnes wrote
Bentinck:
I have not failed in all my communications with the authorities

in England to inform them of your Lordship's extreme anxiety
regarding a more extensive use of steam in India and a perma-
nent communication by means of it with Europe. Mr. Grant was
reading the minute last time I saw him. The chairman of the
court appears fully sensible of the great advantages of it and
declares his utmost readiness to comply with the suggestions if
the finances of IJ:)-diapermit of it. I was sorry to hear a gentle-
man at the India House, and a man of some consequence there,
Mr. Peacock, expressing his opinions of the disadvantages of a
more rapid commurtication with India. He tliought that the
brief and garbled accounts which the house would •receive in
hurried letters would be most unsatisfactory, but this is the voice
of one man and I cannot doubt that which is so apparently and
obviously necessary will no longer be denied.15
Perhaps Peacock truly was concerned, in his capacity as assis-

tant examiner of correspondence, with the quality of writing
in the letters he would have to read. More likely the satirist
was just teasing the poor lieutenant.
Before the Select Committee met, Peacock made the ac-
quaintance of Artillery Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney,
who had recently returned from a .tour of the Middle East.
Back in 1829, when Peacock was writing his "Memorandum,"
Sir Robert Gordon, British ambassador in Constantinople,
had sent Chesney to Egypt on a political mission. There, Con-
sul-General John Barker handed Chesney a series of questions
drawn up by Peacock as to the relative merits of the Egyptian
and Mesopotamian routes with respect to time of travel, secu-
rity, trade, navigation, fuel supplies, and local inhabitants.
25
The following year Chesney set out alone to explore the Eu-
phrates. When he returned to England, King William IV told
him of
serious apprehensions caused by the presence of the Russian

fleet at Constantinople, as well as by the gradual advance of that
Power toward the Indus, and the consequent necessity of
strengthening Persia; adding, that as an additional security to
our position it might be advisable to carry out [Chesney's] sug-
gestion by adding a steam flotilla to the Bombay Marine.16
Peacock encouraged Chesney to write a report stressing the

adval).tages of ,the Euphrates route., Foreign Secretary Viscount
Palmerston, who was pro-Ottoman, anti-Russian, and anti-
Egyptian, received the report favorably.1 7
In March 1834, Chesney and Peacock held several conversa-
tions in which, according to Chesney, they agreed that a Suez
Canal would be "quite practicable." They also discussed the
merits of high- versus low-pressure engines, and of towing a
second steamer as opposed to an accommodation boat. Chesney
came' away impressed that the East India Company's directors
were more enterprising than the government, and "more than
half inclined to go to the expense of opening the Euphrates
themselves." 18
The third major witness, Macgregor Laird, was both a
noted explorer and an expert on'steamboats. His father, Wil-
liam Laird, had moved from Greenock, Scotland, to Liverpool
in 1822, when Macgregor was thirteen years old. In 1824, Wil-
liam founded the Birkenhead lron Works, which he.renamed
William Laird and Son in 1828 when Macgregor's older
brother John became a partner. The following year the
Lairds built fheir first boat, the lighter Wye, for the Irish In-
land Steam Navigation Co. Then in 1830 came an order from
the City of Dublin Steam Packet Co. for a 133-foot, 184:-ton
iron paddle-steamer named Lady Lansdowne, for use on tht
Shannon River. The Lairds' third 'boat, the John Randolph,
was sent in sections to Savannah, Georgia; she was the first

iron boat in America.
During those years, Britain's iron production wa's fast in-
creasing, thanks in part to Nielson's hot-blast process. Mean-
while, British forests, had become inadequate to meet the
needs of the wooden shipbuilding industry, and foreign tim-
ber supplies were judged too vulnerable. It· was a propitious
time for an iron works to enter the shipbuilding business, ex-
cept for one drawback; the public and the major purchasers
of ships remained skeptical about the seaworthiness ,of both
steamers and iron ships. It would take spectacular examples to
dispel their doubts.
In 1832, Macgregor Laird organized ,aµ expep.ition to Africa
in two small steamers and a sailing ship. One of his three
ships, the Alburkah, was made of iron. When she sailed from
Liverpool she aroused comment and ridicule, for never before
had an iron steamer ventured out into the ocean. Laird wrote:
It was gravely asserted that the working in a sea-way would
shake the rivets out of the iron of which she was composed: the
heat of the tropical sun would bake alive her unhappy crew as
if they were in an oven; and the first tornado she might en-
counter would hurl its lightning upon a conductor evidently set
forth to brave its power.19
Yet the Alburkah performed very well and never even leaked,
despite repeated groundings.
While Macgregor Laird was away in Africa, his .father and
brother built an iron steamer, the Garryowen, for the City of
Dublin Steam Packet Co. In 1834, during a test cruise, she was
grounded in a storm that would have wrecked a ~hip of wood.
The survival of the Alburkah and ,the Garryowen did more
than any theory to gain the public's confidence in iron ships. 20
Macgregor Laird returned to England in early 1834, ill and
financially ruined, but famous. It was in 'those months before
the Select Committee met that he made friends with Thomas
Love Peacock. 2 1
Peacock's testimony fills half the "Report of the Select Com-

mittee on Steam Navigation to India." He recommended the
Overland Routes as preferable to the Cape Route, but of the
two Overland Routes, he preferred the Mesopotamian Route
as being less expensive and more easily navigated than the
Red Sea. He offered a wealth of details on the navigation of
the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Euphrates, much of
it based on ancient sources and travelers' reports. He waxed
most eloquent, however, on the need to prevent a Russian in-
vasion of Mesopotamia:
The first thing the Russians do when they get possession of, or
connexion with, any country, is to exclude all other nations
from navigating its waters. I think therefore it is of great im-
portance that we should get prior possession of this river.
When asked: "Is it your opinion that the establishment of

steam along the Euphrates would serve in any respect to coun-
teract Russia?" Peacock replied: "I think so, by giving us a
vested interest and a right to interfere."22
When in the course of h,is testimony, Peacock was asked
technical questions about steam navigation, he deferred to the
expertise of Macgregor Laird. Thus on the subject of the
proper ratio of power to tonnage in steamers, he declared:
Mr. M'Gregor Laird, who has had as much experience as any

man in this country, thinks he would not have more than two
and a half for the proportion of tonnage to measurement.23
The committee began by questioning Laird on his Niger

Expedition.-his ships, their qualities at sea and on the river,
the diseases his men suffered. One subject they were especially
interested in, and on which he was most eager to speak, was
the relative merits of his two Niger steamers, the Alburkah
and the Quorra, and of iron and wooden ships in general. In
his estimation the Alburkah had all the virtues: "She was a
much livelier vessel, she did not labour so much. . . . I think
myself that the principal reason of an iron vessel being so

much healthier is on account of her coolness and her freedom
from all manner of smell .... It is impossible for the iron
vessel to be struck by lightning. . . ." He went on to describe·
many other advantages of iron: freedom from vermin, dec.ty,
corrosion, and leakage; lightness, more cargo space, greater
speed with less fuel; resistance ·to puncture when grounding,
to breaking on rocks, to flexing in heavy seas, to splintering
from the impact of cannonballs; and the possibility of build-
ing an iron ship with watertight bulkheads, making it much
safer than a ship of wood. As for th<'!advantages of wood, he
knew of none.
He was, then asked about building an iron steamer. He went
into great detail on 'the proper ratios of the outer dimensions,
the power of the engine, cylinder diameter, piston stroke, type,
consumption and supply of coal, copper versus iron boilers,
steam pressures, oscillating cylinders, variable paddles, speed,
accommodations, cargo capacity: range, and mucli else. For
river steamers he recommended that the keel be flat in the
midships section, with parabolic sections fore and aft; that the
paddle shaft be placed one third the way from the stern at
the point of greatest beam; and that a single engine be placed
above deck. He described the ideal river steamer as being 110
feet long by 22 feet wide by 7Y2feet high with a 3-foot draft,
powered by a 50-horsepower engine. Ort the subject of steam
pressure he was a conservative, like most British engineers of
his day, and recommended a limit of 10 pounds per square
inch. "Are not the American vessels working as high as 30
pounds an inch?" he was asked. "Yes," he replied, "but they
kill about a thousand people every year."
The questioning then turned to the specifics of the Mesopo-
tamian Route. He gave estimates of the, cost of steamers of
vatious sizes and of providing regular service via the Euphra-
tes and via the Red Sea. He estimated tltat steamers for the
Euphrates could be built in six months. He advised sending
29
them in sections to Basra on the Persian Gulf or to Bombay,

and assembling them there and steaming up rather than down
the river. His testimony was that of an interested party, yet
from the questions he was asked it is clear that his expertise
was taken very seriously. 24
Chesney's testimony dealt mainly with the navigability of
the Euphrates and with the geography and ethnography of the
area. On one point only did his ideas differ significantly from
Laird's; he advised sending the steqmers in sections overlapd
to a point on the upper Euphrates, and steaming downriver
rather than up. On that point, his advice prevailed; i.t turned
out later to be a mistake. Otherwise the testimony of the three
key witnesses dovetailed nicely: To those familiar pressures for
imperial expansion, the clamor from J.he periphery of empire
and- the lobbying of interested business groups, Peacock added
a political justification for sen~ing steamers to the Euphrates:
the specter of Russia, that axiom of Palmerstonian foreign
policy. Behind these drive&, howev,er, lay a new opportunit)(
opened up by technological innovation; this was Laird's con-
tribution. The Middle East, }Vhich empires q£ the age of sail,.
had found to be only an obstacle, had now become worth
coveting.
The Select Committee of 1834 had just the eff~ct that the
Anglo-India!}. 'steam enthusiasts had hoped for. It gave the ap-
proval and financial backing of the .British government to
both Overland Routes....:.the,Egyptian and the,Mesopotamian.
'The Select Committee recommende,d that Parliament vote the
sum of £20,000 to send two steamers to the Eupl}rates. Captain
Chesney, whose knowledge of Middle Eastern, geography had
impressed the members, was giv.en, command of the expedi-
tion. From the Lairds the East India Company ordered two
boats resembling the description Macgregor Laird had giV,t!n,of
the ideal river steamer. The Euphrates was 105 feet long, the
Tigris 87; both were made of iron, dre.w less than 3 feet of wa-
ter, and carried several small artillery pieces. Their crews were
trained at the Laird shipyard.25 They were, in the words of
Captain Chesney, "the first of the flat armed steamers, whose
services have been so important in the rivers of Asia." 26
The Euphrates Expedition took far longer than expected.
The steamers were taken in sections by sailing ship to, the, Bay
of Antioch. It then took over a year-from the end of 1834 to
April 1836-to cart the pieces to Bir on the Euphrates and re-
assemble them. Mishaps attended the expedition, including
harassment by Egyptian ~aboteurs and the loss of the Tigris
in a storm. Steaming down the river to the Pe:i;sian Gulf took
another year, for Chesney wa,s more interested in surveying the
river and its inhabitants in minute detail than in setting
speed records. In mid-1837 he returned to England. 27
The Euphrates Expedition failed to achieve its purpose; by
the time the members returned, seagoing steamships had re-
placed river steamers as the preferred means of communica-
tion to India. Unexpected consequences, however, flow from
such failures: the Select Committee of 1834, by. bringing, to-
gether Peacock and the Lairds, had launched th';! gunboat era.
In 1836, upon the death of James Mill, Peacock was pro-
moted to chief examiner of correspondence, one of the highest
positions in the East India Company. Furthermore, he bad the
support and friendship of the powerful John Ca~ Hobhouse,
president of the Board of Control, the body through which
Parliament supervised the affairs of India. 28The respoqsibility
for steam navigation was now eqtirely his. In later years John
Laird modestly attributed to Peacock the credit for dev~l?ping
the gunboat, although he and his brother also deserve a
share:
. . . the late Mr Peacock was instrumental in extending and

improving Steam Navigation at a time when long voyages were
CQnsidered impracticable, and also in taking the responsibility of
adopting the plans suggested to him f~r constructing a new Class
of fton meh of war of light draught, but 'of sufficient strength to
31
enable them to carry guns of very heavy Calibre, a system very

generally adopted since by most nations.29
The East India Company now became Laird's most impor-

tant customer. Of the twenty-seven iron steamers built at the
Birkenhead Iron Works before 1841, twelve were for the
company. 30
In 1837 the company bought a Laird steamboat originally
built for an American customer. This boat, the Indus, was 115
feet long by 24 feet wide, and had a 60-horsepower engine.
She was shipped in sections to Bombay, reassembled, and sent
out to patrol the Indus River. 31 She was followed a year later
by two more steamboats, the 132-foot Comet and the 102-foot
Meteor. They drew too much water for the shallow river, how-
ever, and their engines were barely able to push them against
the swift currents. 32
In Mesopotamia, meanwhile, Chesney had handed over the
command of the Euphrates to Lieutenant Henry Lynch, who
proceeded to survey the Tigris River and show the British flag
as far a~ Baghdad. 33 In 1838 another Russian alarm arose,
coupled with a growing threat from the French-backed Mehe-
met Ali of Egypt. The East India Company now undertook to
strengthen its position in the area. In August 1838, Peacock
wrote a "Memo on the mode of obtaining stnall Steamers for
the Euphrates & Tigris Rivers":
The considerations also on which the policy of employing addi-
tional Steamers could be recommended, are themselves of a na-
ture, which it would not be desirable to disclose while they are
in progress; when the object to be attained is to establish an
influence in that quarter to the exclusion of that of other Euro-
pean Powers.
In this point of view it would be very desirable if it be prac-
ticable to obtain the Steamers by an order from the Secret Com-
mittee, instead of from the Court.34
This Secret Committee was composed of three directors whose

duty it was to transmit the orders of the Board of Control, in
32
particular of its president, John Cam Hobhouse, to the gover-

nor-general of India, bypassing the other directors.as
In September there followed a letter from Hobhouse, rec-
ommending that the Secret Committee purchase two or'three
small steamers for the Tigris and the Euphrates. 86 On October
5, the Secret Committee agreed to place an order with Laird
the following February and March for three armed iron steam-
ers powered by Forrester engines.at The following May, while
the steamers were being built, the, Secret Committee decided
that they should ostensibly be sent ~o South America, but with
secr~t instructions.as Behind tqis veil of secrecy, the Nimrod,
Nitocris, and Assyria were shipped in sections to Basra on
the Persian Gulf. John Laird later wrote:
These Vessels were 100 feet long, 18 feet beam, & 40 Horse
Power, and were shipped in pieces,, and workmen sent with
them to put them together on arrival at the mouth of the Eu-
phrates. Engineers, Carpenters, Joiners, Boiler-Makers, and Iron
Shipbuilders were sent out, and the Boats were at work on the
River before it was generally known such an expedition had left
England.39
They joined the Euphrates in patrolling the rivers of Mesopo-

tamia. They carried no mail or passengers. Rather, their pur-
pose was to demonstrate Britain's support for Ottoman rule
and to keep the Russians at bay.
By December 183~ the company had therefore ordered or
sent out eight iron gunboats-five for the Tigris and Euphra-
tes and three for the Indus. Furthermore, the Indiah Navy,
now reinforced with steamships, commanded the Indian Ocean,
the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Wherever along the south-
ern rim of Eurasia Britain's ships and boats could reach, she
had little to feav from any other power.
Yet at that moment the Secret Committee of the East' India
Company decided to order five more gunboats, and in the fol-
lowing month a sixth. This new series of steamers was to be
of the same general dimensions as the previous boats-100 to
33
130 feet long, 18, to 26 feet wide but with two important in-
novations: sliding keels that could be adjusted for deep or
shallow water and engines of 70 to 110 horsepower, compared
to 20 to 60 for previous gunboats in the area. 40
In the minutes of the Secret Committee, these new boats
were described as destined for the Indus River. However,
there is good reason to doubt the sincerity of this intention.
On April 1, 1839, George Eden, earl of Auckland, governor-
general of India, wrote to Hobhouse:
The Court is most liberal on the subject of Steamers and when
the keel which has been announced shall be {ompleted we shall
be strong indeed. I wou1d suggest that two of the ve~~ls which
will be adapted as wen for sea as for river navigation"should be
sent to Calcutta. They would be invaluable should that reckless
savage of Ava [the King of Burma] force us into hostilities with
him. And I suspect that their draft of water may be rather too
great for the Bar of the Indus.41
And on June 14 he wrote Hobhouse again:

I am happy to learn frolJl Bombay that they are putting together
for the Indus two of the iron steamers which you have sent out
and I shall be satisfied with these for the present and would
have any others sent to Bengal, where they will be of infinite
and certain use while the extensive application of steam to the
navigation of the Indus must for a time be speculative.42
Perhaps, as Auckland implied, the company had been over-

enthusiastic in ordering six more steamers for the Indus when
thre" sufficed. More likely, Peacock and the Secret Con'l.mittee
used the Indus as a cover for another purpose that they did
not wish to reveal.
T1Voof the gunboats, the Pluto and the Proserpine, were or-
dered from Ditchman and Mare at Deptford on 'the Thames.
They were small-less than 200 tons-and made of ~ood, with
sliding keels. Peacock himself supervised theil" construction.
The other four were to be built of iron by John Laird at BirJ
kenhead. The Ariadne and the Medusa were of medium size-
34
432• tons, 139 feet long by 26 feet wide inside the paddle-
boxes-with 70-horsepower engines and two 24-pounder can-
nons apiece. The Phlegethon was larger: 510 tons, 161 feet
long by 26 feet wide, with a go-horsepower engine.
The one that aroused the most interest, though, was the
Nemesis. The largest iron ship ever built thus far, she was also
the first of the new series to be launched. The appearance in
January 1840 of a heavily armed, radically new kind of craft
privately registered in the name of John Laird ardused a flurry
of speculation.
When the Nemesis paid a visiMo Greenock, the local Ship-
ping Gazette .wrote: "She will, it is said, clear out for Brazil;
but her ultimate destination is conjectured to be the east-
ern and Chinese seas."43 On February 27, Hobhouse wrote
Palmerston:
An Armed iron vessel, called the Nemesis, which has been pro-
vided by the Secret Committee of the East India Comp~ny under
the Authority of the Commissioners for the affairs of India, for
the service of the Government of India, is about'to proceed to
Calcutta ....
It is desirable that the destination of the Nemesis, and the
authority to which she belongs, should not be mentioned.44
A similar request went out from the Secret Committee •to the
Admiralty. 45 On March 28, wrote her captain William Hall,
"she was cleared out for the Russian port of Odessa, much to
the astonishment of every one; but those who ga~e themseJves
time to reflect, hardly believed it possible that such could be
her real destination." 46 Two days later The Times commented:
Sailed to-day'the Nemesis, private armed steamer, Hall master,

destination unknown. It is said this vessel is provided with an
Admiralty letter of license, or letter of marque; if .so, it can only
be ~gainst the Chinese; and for the purpose of smuggling opium
she is__.admirablyadapted. Others conjectur~ she is going to Cir-
cassia for sale, as she is also well suited to defend a port, or for'
offensive operations in shallow waters.47
35
Once underway, Captain Hall told his crew that they were
heading for Malacca via Capetown and Ceylon. Only when
he reached Ceylon in October did he receive the order to pro-
ceed to his real destination: Canton. 4 8
The secrecy that surrounded the new gunboats reveals some

of the contradictions between technological innovation and
military power in the mid-nineteenth century. Military power,
to Britain at that time, meant the Royal Navy. Of all the in-
stitutions in Britain, the Navy was among the most conserva-
tive in technological matters. It long refused to purchase
steamers, arguing that their wheels were too vulnerable to en-
emy fire, took up too much space needed for cannons, and
dragged when under sail. Worse, the engines' voracious appe-
tite for coal limited their range and made them too costly for
the ever-so-parsimonious lords of the Admiralty. As for other
Navy men, they had, in Gerald Graham's words, "no love for
foul-smoking steamers and dirtier men." 49
Iron was even more anathema to the Navy. Not until 1845
did it purchase its first iron ship. Even then Auckland, then
first lord of the Admiralty, could write:
. . . iron is a material which may very advantageously be used
for the construction of vessels intended to act in shallow, waters,
and indeed for vessels intended to be used for many other pur-
poses, but I apprehend that a construction of this material is not
adapted for the general purposes of war ... an iron vessel could
ill stand a heavy broadside.so
As late as 1851 the Admiralty informed the Peninsular and

Oriental steamship line that it would not approve any ship
"if built of iron or of any material offering so ineffectual a
resistance to the striking of shot."51
On the high seas, as long as no enemy challenged Britain's
naval supremacy, such a policy was no doubt quite sensible. It
was most ill-suited, however, to the shallow waters of imperi-
alist warfare. 52 For Peacock and the Lairds to have presented
their machines as men-of-war would have risked an adverse

reaction from those in power, who had grown up with a deep
reverence for wooden sailing ships of the line. This then is the
reason for the secrecy that surrounds the gunboats sent to
China. They were not camouflaged behind false destinations-
the Indus, Brazil, Calcutta, Odessa-to fool the Chinese; they
were hidden from the Admiralty and the government. Before
the age of military research and development, technological
innovation often had to'Sneak.through the back door.
NOTES
1. Macgregor Laird and R. A. K. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedi-

tion into the Interior of Africa, by the River Niger, in the Steam-
Vessels Quorra and Alburkah, in r832, r833, and r834, 2 vols. (Lon-
don, 1837), 2:397-98.
2. The early history of steamboats has been told many times,
though the accounts lack consistency. See in particular W. A. Baker,
From Paddle-Steamer to Nuclear Ship: A History of the Engine-
Powered Vessel (London, 1965), pp. 10-12; Ambroise Victor Charles
Colin, La navigation co7!1mercialeau XIXe siecle (Paris, 1901), pp.
37-38; Maurice Daumas, ed., Histoir,e generale des techniques, 3 vols.
(Paris, 1968), 3:332-33; Eugene S. Ferguson, "Steam Transportation,"
in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., eds., Technology
in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (New York, 1967), 1:284-91; ;Duncan
Haws, Ships and the Sea: A Chronological Review (New York, 1975),
pp. 100-01; F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Sea-Power and Empire (London,
1940), pp. 190--91; George W. Hilton, Russell A. Plummer, and
Joseph Jobe, The Illustrated History of Paddle Steamers (Lausanne,
1977), pp. g-12; George Gibbard Jackson, The Ship Under Steam
(New York, 1928), ch. 1; Thomas Main (M.E.), The Progress of Ma-
rine Engineering from the Time of Watt until the Present Day (New
York, 1893), pp. 10--16; Michel Mollat, ed., Les origines de la naviga-
tion a vapeur (Paris, 1970); George Henry Preble, A Chronological
History of the Origin and Development of Steam ,Navigation, 2nd
ed. (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 119-25; Hereward Philip Spratt, J"he
Birth of the Steamboat (London, 1958), pp. 17-40; Joannes Tram<;md
and Andre Reussner, Elements d'histpire maritime et coloniale
37
(r8r5-r9q) (Paris, 1924), p. 50; David B. Tyler, Steam Conquers the

Atlantic (New York, 1939), p. 112; and Rene Augustin Verneaux,
L'industrie des transports maritimes au XIXe siecle et au commence-
ment du XXe siecle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1903), 2: 16-23.
3. Antony Preston and John Major, Send a Gunboat! A Study of
the Gunboat and its Role in British History, r854-r904 (London,
1967), pp. 3 and 191 ff.
4. Gerald S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy
r830-r860 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 18-19.
5. Congreve rockets .are best known to ,Americans for the verses
they inspired: "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air/
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there."
6. "Captain Chad's Remarks on Rangoon and the War in Ava
1824-1825-1826" (written June 3, 1827), in British Library Add. MSS
36,470 (Broughton Papers), pp. 100-101.
7. United Service Journal 2(1841):215, quoted in Gerald Graham,
Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Stud, of Maritime Enterprise,
r8ro-r850 (Oxford, 1968), p. 352.
8. On the early steamers of India and their use in the Anglo-
Burmese War, see Graham, Indian Ocean, ):>p. 345-58; Henry T.
Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History
of India's Modernization through Science and Technology (Bombay,
1960), pp. 28-31; H. 'A. Gibson-Hill, "The Steamers Employed in
Asian Waters, 1819-39," The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
Malayan Branch, 27 pt. 1 (May 1954): 127-61; D. G. E. Hall, Europe
and Burma: A Study of European Relations with Burma to the An-
nexation of Thibaw's Kingdom, r88q '(London, 1945), p. 11'5; Col.
W. F. B. Laurie, Our Burmese Wars and Relations with Burma:
Being an Abstract of Military and Politital Operations, r824-25-26,
and r852-53 (London, 1880), pp. 71-72 and ug-20; John Fincham,
History of Naval Architecture (London, 1851), pp. 294-96; Charles
Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy (r6r3-r863), 2 vol~.
(London, 1877), 1:4120; The Mariner's Mirror: The Journal of the
Society for Nautical Research, 30(1943):223 and 31(1944):47; and
Oliver Watner, Captain Marryat, A Rediscovery (London, 1953),
p. 67. There is also some information on tlie subject in Preble, pp.
'76-77 and 120, but it is unreliable...,
9. The definitive work on this subject is Henry T. Bernstein's
Steamboats on the Ganges. See also Gibson-Hill, pp. 121-23; A. J.
Bolton, Progress of Inland Steam Navigation in North-East India
from r832 (London, 1890), p. 330; ancl J. Johnston, Inland Naviga-
tion on the Gangetic Rivers (Calcutta, 1947), p. 28.
'SECRET GUNBOATS OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
10. Bernstein, ch. 5; Johnston, pp. 28-29.

11. John Bourne, C. E., Indian River Navigation: A Report Ad-
dressed to the Committee of Gentlemen Formed for the Establish-
ment of Improved Steam Navigation upon the Rivers of India, Illus-
trating the Practicality of Opening up Some Thousands of Miles of
River Navigation in India, by the Use of a New Kind of Steam
Vessel, Adapted to the Navigation of Shallow and Shifting Rivers
(London, 1849).
12. Edward Strachey, "Recollections of Peacock," in Thomas Love
Peacock, Calidore & Miscellanea, ed. by Richard Garhett (London,
1891), p. 15; Carl Van Doren, The Life of Thomas Love Peacock
(London and New York, 19n), pp. 212-14; Edith Nicolls, '"A Bio-
graphical Notice of Thomas Love Peacock, by his Granddaughter,"
in Henry Cole, ed., The Works of Thomas' Love Peacock, 3' vols.
(London, 1875), 1:xxxvii; Sylva Norman, "Peacock in Leadenhall
Street," in Donald H. Reiman, ed., Shelley and His Circle, 4 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 4:709-23.
13. "Biographical Introduction," in Thomas Lovet Peacock, Works
(The Halliford Edition), ed. by Herbert Francis· Brett-Smith and
C. E. Jones, 10 vols. (London and New York, 1924-1934), 1:clix-clx;
Felix Felton, Thomas Love·Peacock (London, 1973), pp. 230-31. See
also Thomas Love Peacock, Biographical Notes from r785 to r865
(London, 1874), and Richard Garnett, "Peacock, Thomas Love,:· in
Dictionary of National Biography, 44:144-47.
14. The 1829 Memorandum can' be found in Parliamentary Papers
1834 (478.) XIV, pp. 610-18.
15. Cyril Henry Philips, ed., The Correspondence of Lord William
Cavendish Bentinck, Governor-General of India, r828-r834, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 1977), 2:1164-65.
16. Francis Rawdon Chesney, Narrative of the'Euphrates'Expedi-
tion Carried on by Order of the British Government During the
Years r835, r836; and r837 (London, 1868), pp. 4 and.145-46.
17. Chesney, p. 143; Halford Lancaster Hoskins, British Routes to
India (London, 1928), pp. 154-55.
18. Stanley Lane-Poole, ed., The Life of the Late General F~ R.
Chesney Colonel Commandant Royal Artillery D.CL., F.R.S.,
F.R.G.S., etc. by his Wife and Daughter, 2nd ed. (London, 1893),
pp. 269-70.
19. Laird and Oldfield, 1:7.
20. On the beginnings of the Laird firm, see Gammell Laird & Co.
(Shipbuilders & 'Engineers) Ltd., Builders of Great Ships (Birken-
head, 1959), ch. 1; P. N. Davies, The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster
39
in West Africa, z852-z97:z (London, n.d.), pp. 35-39 and 404 table 9;
Stanislas Charles Henri Laurent Dupuy de Lome, Memoire sur la
construction des bdtiments en fer, adresse a M. le ministre de la
marine et des colonies (Paris, 1844), pp. 4-6 and 117-19; Fincham,
pp. 386-87; Francis E. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey: An Eco-
nomic History of a Port z700-z970 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 52
and 84; "Laird, John," in Dictionary of National Biography, 11:
406-o7; "Laird, Macgregor," in Dictionary, 11:407-08; and Tyler,
pp. 30-36, 112, and 169. In the India Office Records and Library are
various letters and reports concerning the Lairds; see L/MAR/C
vol. 583 pp. 217 and 223 and vol. 593 pp. 695-96.
21. Nicollsin'Cole, 1:xxxviii. See also Arthur B. Young, The Life
and Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (Norwich, Eng., 1904), pp. 26--
27; anc;l Diane Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith
and Other LesserLives (New York, 1972), p. 60. Peacock and Laird
were to become relatives in 1844 when Peacock's daughter Mary
Ellen married a brother of Macgregor Laird's wife.
22. "Report from the Select Committee on Steam Navigation to
India, with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index," pp.
g-10, in Parliamentary Papers 1834 (478.) XIV, pp. 378--79. Peacock
also presented the committee with a series of papers 'relevant to the
issue of &team navigation: a short memorandum dated December
1833, quotations from travelers' accounts, and so on. There is a sum-
mary of the report in Edinburgh Review 6o(Jan. 1835): 445-82,
probably written by Peacock himself.
23. Report, p. 6, in Parliamentary Papers 1834 (478.) XIV, p. 375.
24. Report, pp. 56--70 in Parliamentary Papers 1834 (478.) XIV,
pp. 425-39.
25. Chesney, Narrative, p. 154; Hoskins, p. 164; Gibson-Hill,
p. 12J; 'Dupuy cfeLome, p. 6; and "List of Iron Steam and Sailing
Vessels Built and Building by John Laird, at the Birkenhead Iron
Works, Liverpool," in India Office Records, L/MAR:./C 583 p. 217.
The Euphrates had a fifty-horsepower engine; th(';re is much disagree-
ment over the power of the Tigris, with estimates ranging from
tw.enty to forty horsepower.
26. Francis Rawdon Chesney, The Expedition for the Survey of
the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris, Carried on by Order of the British
Government, in the Years z835, z836, and z837; Preceded by Geo-
graphical and Historical Notices of the Regions Situated Between
the Rivers Nile and Indus, 2 vols. (London, 1850), 1 :ix.
27. On the Euphrates Expedition, see also Ghulam Idris Khan,
"Attempt at Swift Communication between India and the West be-
fore 1830," The ]ourna( of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan 16 no. 2

(Aug. 1971):124-27; John Marlowe, World Ditch: The Making of
the Suez Canal (New York, 1964), p. 34; Low, 2:31-;-41; l\nd Gibson-
Hill, p. 123. The expedition also cost more than anticipated. In 1836,
Parliament voted another £8,000 on the understanding that the com-
pany would also contribute £8,000 to complete the expedition; see
Parliamentary Papers 1836 (159.) XXXVIII p. 418. Willson Beckles
says that the expedition cost a .total of £29,637 10s 3Y2d after de-
ducting £10,360 12s 9d for steamers, arms, ammunition, instruments,
and stores taken over by the company; see his Ledger and Sword; or,
The Honourable Comp~'ny of Merchants of England Trading to the
East Indies (r599-r874), 2 vols. (London, 1903), 2:393.
28. Hobhouse wrote of Peacock: "My intercourse with that .most
accomplished scholar, and most amiable man, has qeen oqe of the
principle [sic] charms and resources of my declining years." Sir John
Cam Hobhouse, First Baron Broughton, Recollections of a Long
Life, with Additional Extracts from his Private Diaries, 6 vols. (Lon-
don, 1910-u), 5:184. See also Young, p. 28.
29. John Laird, "Memorandum as to the part taken by the late
Thomas Love Peacock Esq in promoting Steam Navigation" (1873),
MS Peacockana 2 in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York. I
am indebted to The Carl and Lily Pforzhei,mer Library, Inc. on be-
half of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, and to Dr. Donald H.
Reiman and Dr. Mihai H. Handrea, for permjssion to consult this
document.
30. _The financial side of these purchases is unclear. We know that
much of the money came from the government under the rubric of
estimates for steam communication with India, as follows:
Year Amount in Parliamentary Papers

1834 £20,000 (492.) XLII. 459
1836 8,000 (159.) XXXVIII. 418
1837 37,500 (445.) XL. 401
1837-38 50,000 (313.) XXXVII. 386
1839 50,000 (142-IV) XXXI. 684
1840 50,000 (179-IV) XXX. 859
Generally, die East India Company was expected to pay half the cost
of steam communication east of Alexandria.
31. John Laird, "Memorandum."
32. Jean Fairley, The Lion River: The Indus (New York, 1975),
pp. 222-25.
41
33. Lynch and his brother opened a trading house in Baghdad in

1840, bought the Euphrates from the East India Company, and later
founded the "Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company"; see
Zaki Saleh, Britain and Mesopotamia (Iraq to z9z4): A Study in
British Foreign Affairs (Baghdad, 1966), p. 179.
34. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/4 pp. 25-31.
35. See Robert E. Zegger, John Cam' 1Iobhouse: a Political Life
z8zg-z852 (Columbia, Mo., 1973), pp. 249-52.
36. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/4 pp. 33-38.
37. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/4, pp. 73-76.
39. John Laird, "Memorandum." See also Dupuy de Lome,
pp. 4-5.
40. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/4, pp. 109-36: Minutes of the
Secret Committee dated December 1838 and January 1839 concern-
ing steamers for the Indus. '
41. Broughton Papers, British Library Add. MSS 36,473, p. 446.
42. Broughton Papers, 36,474, p. io9.
43. The Nauticai Magazine and Naval Chronicle for z840, pp.
135-36.
44. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/6, p. 167.
45. India Office Records, f./P&S/3/6, pp. 619-29.
46. William H. Hall (Capt. R.N.) and William Dallas Bernard,
The Nemesis 'in China, Comprising a 'History of the Late War in
that Country, with a Complete Account of the Colony of Hong
Kong, 3rd eci: (London, 1846), p. 6.
47. The Times (March 30, 1840), p. 7.
48. Hall and Bernard, pp. 18 and 61; India Office Records, L/
P&S/5/10: letter no. 122, Auckland to Secret Committee, Fort Wil-
liams, November'.i'3, #1840.
49. Graham, China Station, p. 140 n. 3. See also Bernarcl Brodie,
Sea Power in the Machine Age: Major Naval Inventions' and Their
Consequences on International Politics, z8z4-z940 (London, 1943),
pp. 156-57; Tramond and Reussrier, pp. 52-54; and Preston and
· Major, p. 6.
50. Peacock, Biographical Notes, pp. 28-29.
51. Hoskii;s, p. 261.
52. During the Crimean War, Macgregor ,Laird wrote a scathing
attack on official resistance to iron boats; see Cerberus (pseud.), "Som-
erset House Stops the Way," Spectator 27 (September 9, \854).
I
42
CHAPTER TWO
The Nemesis in China
For several centuries, China and Europe had toexisted, at

arm's length, having only limited contact. Each side knew a
great deal about the other. The Chinese imported European
clocks and instruments, and respected Western astronomy and
mathematics. Europeans, in• turn, purchased -the silks, porce-
lain, tea, and objets d'art of China, and admired some o( her
customs "and institutions.
Yet the exchange was quite restricted and showed little
promise of growth, even after ~wo and re•half centuries of di-
rect contact. This was especially galling to the '1rritis'Ii7who oy
<i'~ighteenth,~eh'.tli~r'ethtT.:~rJ:'.m~·)>ower in
the ur,~tt1t~e~elot1<~ .•a,-na?onal..cta..v~ fq:r Chinese'
tea. I~tj'(ang~ loi:'1)ifS:~t~{h~1 lit..\!,e}o?o'ffer; for
China .. was ,ecorromic:rlly'"se©trnic1ent.t~Hence ·the tea trade
cailed:Mii~us.:a~~t 2i~~f1-~~cr~si1xer,~~~~!n.i; ~:;~ef:"'~hi-
nese-go!tinmepJ'"inte:reJ.t~~ainl~i~r.e.rJJ.1g.!'.J1.!~~).a.· bar-
b~~· •.uvde(.con,.1rgJ<~delj}:}erateli.to1lt~~:!!1.;.;~.?~ ..!2..ser-
tai:ti"',mbchanfs•of
~ #"
Canton'. and' resisted-the-entreaties of such
•dffli~Lorc?Macartney (1793) ahd Lord
\." ....
'.A:mherst(1816).
43
The situation began to change, however, at the end of the

eighteenth century, when the British discovered that their In-
dian possessions could produce a commodity for which China
had a large and fast-growing demand: opium. As a result,
there arose a triangular trade; India produced the opium, the
Chinese exchanged the opium for tea, and the British drank
the tea. From the British side of the triaIJ.gle, there was not so
much a flow of goods as of political and military power.
1~-as,_µichael.,, Qret!l:.1?.~rgR~!H.!~2._~~ '~Je-
C"in,the;J9..~ner~,petty smuggli,pg tr<;!de,but probably the larg~st
~ommerce ..of..th~time-in..«ny..single. c..omwodi t~tt1lecen-
ter of this commerce stood the Honourable East India Com-
pany. The opium was grown mostly on company lands in Ben-
gal, and though private merchants carried out the trade to
China, they had to purchase their ware from the company,
which was the sole opium manufacturer after 1797. Further-
more, the company's main business, outside of administering
and taxing Indians, was the export of Chinese tea to England.
The company's monopoly of the China trade ended in 1834,
and relations with China were s9on exacerbated by the activi-
t~e.!.£L EEi,~ctte
.. British-traders.-l'~mese govern_m,.e}!t~
\CJllB,tf.d several times to!i.;.urtail.:t_h~;,d:'!&d!!~c, 1!ut ·~ Ii~
~ficcess. "Wliat Chinese officials...conside~~w~ e1;1ofcell1,'erit
agaimnttriigglil'f1fmtrtra'f'c'otics;'Tlil!! tnaets s'awastffl'.Jffltif~d
< in terference..with.free .en ter.prise......Wliliam) irdiiie oCtlie tr;'d-
ing firm Jardine Matheson and Co. wrote anonymously to the
China Repository in 1834:,
Nor indeed should our valuable commerce and revenue both in

India and Great Britain be permitted to remain subject to a
caprice, which a few gunboats laid alongside this city would
overrule by the discharge of a few mortars. . . . The result of a
war with the Chinese could not be doubted.2
That same year Jardine, Matheson, and sixty-two other British

merchants in China petitioned the king to send three war-
44
THE NEMESIS IN CHINA
ships and a plenipqtentiary to China, and "expressed the

opinion that there would be no difficulty in intercepting the
greater part of the internal and external trade of China and
the capture of all the armed vessels of the empire. 3
Even after the loss of its trade monopoly, the East India
Company kept an interest in CHina through its import of tea
and especially its manufacture of opium. Indeed opium yielded
one seventh of the total revenue of British India in the nine-
teenth century. The China trade was essential to the pros-
perity of the British Empire. It is no surprise, then, that the
East India Company became involved in the war with China.
If the tension between China and Britain was commercial in
origin, its persistence was a consequence of the state of mili-
tary technology. Like an elephant and a whale, China and
Britain evolved in "two different habitats. At sea, Britain was
invincible and could destroy any Chinese fleet or coas.tal fort.
China, on the other hand, was a land empire witli few inter-
ests beyond her shores ·and few cities along her coasts. As long
as the Europeans were incapable of pushing their way inland,
I
the Celestial Empire was invulnerable.
The steamer, with its ability to navigate upriver and attack
inland towns, ended the long Anglo-Chinese stalemate.
The first steamer to reach China, in 1830, was the 302-ton
Forbes, a seagoing ship built in India for the Calcutta-Macao
trade. In 1835, Jardine purchased a 115-ton steamer with two
24-horsepower engines, which he named Jardine. He and other
foreign merchants then petitioned the senior Hong merchant,
their Chinese counterpart, for permission to operate the Jar-
dine on the Pearl River between Caf\tOn and Macao. The act-
ing governor-general of Canton rejected their request:
... if he presumes obstinately to disobey, I, the acting gover-

nor, have already issued orders to all the forts that when the
steamship arrives they are to open a thundering fire and attack
her. On the whole, since he has arrived.within the boundaries of
the Celestial Dynasty, it is right that he should obey the laws
45
of the Celestial Dynasty. I order the said foreigner to ponder

this well and act in trembling obedience thereto.
When the Jardine steamed upriver in defiance of this order,

she was fired on and forced to retreat. 4
This setback notwithstanding, the foreigners, who now pos.-
sessed steamers, ,rffused to submit to threats of thundering
fire. The British merchants continued to petitipn their gov-
ernment to send a punitive expedition to China. The British
government, in particular the redoubtable Palmerston, also
believed a war with China }Vasinevitable. The only· question
was how to carry it out. Jardine, writing to Palmerston in
November 1839, a~vised sending two line-of-battle ships, four
frigates, two or three sloops, two large steamers, and "two
small flat bottomed Steamers for River work, which it may be
necessary to take out i\l frame and set up in China." 5 Palmer-
ston, who hoped to bring China to her knees by seizing an off-
shore island and stopping her coastal trade, pass~d o:µ this ad-
vice to the lords of the Admiralty. 6 Sir Gilbert Elliott, Lord
Minto, at the time first lord of the Admiralty, had .Ji clearer
idea of the difficulties involved. On February 16, 1840, he
wrote to his nephew Lord Auckland:
I hope you will be able to send a respectable land force with the
expedition. The mere occupation of an Island would not require
much, but I think it very probable that the' possession of one or
two of thl!it rowns or great commercial Depots on the line of..
inland communication, but which are approachable from the sea
may be very desirable, and to effect this a considerable force, in
troops would be necessary. However you are accustomed to work
upon so great a scale that I feel no apprehension of your stint-
ing this operation of whatever you think Iik'.ely to secure and
expedite its' success and shall not be much surprised if I re-
ceive a letter from Emily dated the Imperial Palace of Pekin.
For after all it is nothing more nor less than the conquest oI
China that •we have undertaken. I believe I have already told
you that we turn to the Indian Government for such steamers as
it may be able to furnish, we have none fit for such a \royage ex-
cept some giants of great draught of water, which would be of

little use in inshore and river operations, and consume an enor-
mous quantity of fuel.7
The parties involved in planning the war with China-Jar-

dine, Palmerston, Hobhouse, Minto, and Auckland-relied
mainly on the traditional tools of war (that is, sailing war-
ships and marine infantry) to defeat their enemy. If they
thought of river steamers, it was at most as .,small auxiliary
vessels that would have to l?e assembled in, China, a lengthy
and complicated process. Peacock, however, had other plans,
as John Laird explained:
The China war having commenced it was <:f!!cidedby the Se?'et

Committee of tJie East India Co, on the recommendation.of Mr
Peacock, instead of sending' all these Vessels out in pieces, and
putting them together at Bombay, to send 4 of them under
Steam round the Cape, an experiment at that time considered
very hazardous, especially as the "Nemesis" and "Phlegethon"
(two Vessels built by Mr Laird at Birkenhead) had to carry two
32 pounders on pivots, one at each end of,the Vessel.S
We know a great deal about the Nemesis as a machine and

as a protagonist, thanks to two sources. One is a report to the
Admiralty by the naval architect Augustin CI"euze,who at the
Royal Navy Dockyard at Portsmouth examined the ship after
she hit a rock off the Bay of St. Ives on the Cornish coast.9
The other was a book based on the notes of Captain William
Hutcheon Hall, who recounted the ship's history after she left
England. 10
Creuze gave a detailed technical description df the Nemesis.
She measured 660 tons burthen, 184 feet long overall (165 be-
tween perpendiculars), 29 feet wide, 11 deep with a draft of
6 feet when fully loaded and less than 5 in battle trim. She
was powered by two 60-horsepower Forrester engines and had
two masts. The armament she carried was heavy for a boat her
size: two pivot-mounted 32-pounder guns powerful enough to
1.
~·
l 47
blast a hole in a fortress wall. In addition, she had five brass

6-pounders, ten smaller cannons, and a rocket launcher. Her
interior was separated by bulkheads into seven watertight
compartments. She also had two ·sliding keels and an adjust-
able rudder. During trials she tore a gash in her hull; the
safety offered by her bulkheads and the ease with which she
was repaired impressed Creuze.
He also discussed the inaccuraty of compasses, which had
bedeviled iron ships from their inception. An iron hull deflects
the earth's magnetism, making uncorrected compasses unreli-
able on board. In 1838 the Astronomer-Royal, Professor George
Airy, discovered a method of compensating for the influence
of the hull, and applied it to several ships. Although he did
not adjust the compass of the Nemesis himself, the ship was
deemed fit to go to sea. 11 Creuze concluded, in his report to
the Admiralty, that iron was a better material for-shipbuild-
ing than timber.
To command the Nemesis the Secret Committee chose·Hall,
a master in the Royal Navy. As a young man, Hall had accom-
panied Lord Amherst's 1816 mission to China. In the late
1830s he became interested in steamers and spent two years
studying them in Glasgow and along the Clyde and the Mer-
sey. In June 1839 he crossed the Atlantic on the British
Queen, one of the first steamships belonging to Macgregor
Laird's British and American Steam Navigation Co. While in
America, he paid close attention to the steamboats on the
Hudson and Delaware rivers, then returned to England just as
the Birkenhead Iron Works was putting the final touches on
the Nemesis. Thus prepared, Hall joined the Nemesis in De-
cember 1839. On February 14, 1840, Peacock officially re-
quested the Admiralty's permission to appoint him captain of
the ship. The request was'granted on February 26.12
The Nemesis left Portsmouth on March 28, 1840. Her jour-
ney east was long and difficult. She was the first iron ship to
round the Cape of Good Hope and .almost sank in the Indian
Ocean when heavy seas caused her hull to split;, open next to
the paddle-boxes. After some improvised repairs at Delagoa
Bay, she steamed for Ceylon, arriving October 6. There Hall
received orders to proceed to China. Peacock meanwhile was
exultant: "I am in high spirits about my iron chickens; having
excellent accounts of them from Maderia [sic]. I have accounts
of 'Nemesis' from the •Cape, where she arrived in fine order,
and literally astonished the natives."13
By the time the Nemesis reached Macao on November 25,
1840, the war had been going on, desultorily, for five months.
The British fleet had harassed coastal towns like Amoy and
made preparations for an offensive against Canton. On Janu-
ary 7, 1841, strengthened by the arrival of the Nemesis and
some seagoing steamers, the British launched their first attack
on the Bogue forts defending the Pearl River below Canton.
The Chinese, whose defense strategy was static, had hoped to
hold off their enemy, but the broadsides of the British men-
of-war, towed into position by the steamers, quickly breached
their defenses. Marine infantry troops soon stormed the forti-
fications.
The Chinese fleet was equally vulnfrable. The war junks
were half the size of the Nemesis, or one ,tenth that of a first-
rate British battleship. They were armed with small cannons
that were hard to aim, and with boarding nets, pots of burn-
ing pitch, and handguns. Without much difficulty the Nemesis
sank or captured several junks; the rest were frightened off
with Congreve rockets. The Chinese also relied on fire-rafts
filled with gunpowder and oil-soaked cotton that were set
ablaze and pushed toward enemy ships. The steamers, hqwever,
quickly grappled them and towed them out of reach. The
previous year Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsii had purchased the
1080-ton American merchanCman Cambridge~ but for lack' of
sailors who knew how to handle the ship, she was kept idle be-
hind a barrier of rafts. She was soon lost to the Nemesis: 14
In a few days the river route to Canton was clear and the
49
sailing fleet began its slow ascent. As the fleet approached the
city in early February, the Nemesis entered the inner passage,
a labyrinth of narrow shallow channels that paralleled the
main channel of the river, a place'where no foreign warship
had ever dared venture. While approaching Canton from the
rear, she destroyed forts and junks at will and terrorized the
inhabitants. Commodore J. J. Gordon Bremer, commander in
chief of the Expedition Fleet, described the role of the Nemesis
in a letter to the earl of Auckland:
On proceeding up to Whampoa, three more dismantled forts
were observed, and at four P.M. the Nemesis cam~ into that an-
chorage having (in conjunction with the boats) destroyed five
forts, one battery, two military stations, and nine war junks, in
which were one hundred and fifteen guns and eight ginjalls,
thus proving to the enemy that the British flag can be displayed
throughout their inner waters wherever and whenever it is
thought proper by us, against any defence or mode they may
adopt to prevent it.15
Hall was exultant. On March 30, 1841, he wrote to John

Laird:
It is with great pleasure I infdrm you that your noble vessel is
as much admired by our own countrymen as she is dreaded by
the Chinese, well may the latter offer a reward of ,50,000 dollars
for her . . . but she will be difficult to take, they ~all her the
devil ship and say that our shells and Rockets could only be
invented by the latter. They are more afraid of her than all the
Line-of-Battle ships put together.16
And two months later he wrote Peacock:

With respect to the Nemesis I cannot speak too highly in her
praise she does the whole of the adv·anced work for the Expedi-
tion and what with towing Transports, Frigates, large Junks,
and carrying Cargoes of provisions, troops and Sailors, and re-
peatedly coming in contact with Sunken Junks-Rocks, Sand
banks, and fishing Stakes in these unknown waters, which we are
obliged to navigate by' night as wen' as by day, she must be f.he
strongest of the strong to stand it. . . . as far as fighting goes we
have had enough of that being alwa,ys in <!dvance, and most

justly do the Officers as well as the Merchants of Macao say
"that she is worth her weight in gold.'t11
Technically the British campaign of 1841 was a hug!! suc-

tess, and Hall may be forgive~ for his enthusiasll) over the
performance of his boat. But the politica\ results ,of the cam-
paign were nonetheless disappointing. The Britis,!i fully ex-
pected the government of China to sue for peace following the
destruction of the Chinese fleet and the capture of the Bogue
forts and of Canton. The Chinese,• though, were persqaded
~either by these victories nor by the subsequent British cap-
ture of Amoy, Tinghai, Chinghai, and Ningpo. The British
commander in chief, Adm1ral George Elliott, therefore de-
cided to strike at the Grand Canal-the jugular vein of China-
the principal north-south trade route along which boatloads of
rice' from Szechuan 'province wete sent to feed the population
of Peking, the capital. The idea may have originated in a let-
ter which Samuel Baker, tea inspector for the East India Com-
pany, wrote in February 1840 and which was transmitted td
Palmerston:
The Yang coo kiang as far JS its junction with the Grand Canal
ought to be examined and regularly surveyed. This might be
done with the aid of a steamer .... The island of Kiu Shan
would be a strong position and enable'us to distress tlie internal
commerce greatly by cutting off the communication between the
Northern and Southern Provinces by means of the Grand
Canal.18
Palmerston reiterated the proposal ip. a secret instruction to

the lords of the Admiralty dated February 20, 1840.19
By the start of the 1842 campaign, the British fleet had been
reinforced by several additional steamers. The Indian Navy
sent its steamships.Atalanta, Mp.dagascar, Queen, and Sesostris.
The gunboats destined for the Indus also appeqred on the
scene: the 510-ton Phlegethon, sister of the Nemesis, and the
smaller Medusa, Ariadne, Pluto, and Proserpine. Altogethei;
the fleet that advanced upon the Yangtze in May 1842 m-

cluded eight sailing warships, ten steamers, and over fifty
transports, troopships, and schooners.20
The Chinese had a vague idea of how steamers worked.
Commissioner Lin called them "wheeled vehicles which use
the heads of flames to drive machines, cruising very fast," and
Ch'i-shan, governor-general of Chihli, called them "ships with
wind-mills" and "fire-wheel boats." 21 An anonymous Chinese
source, whose translated account of steamers appeared in The
Nautical Magazine, described the Nemesis in these terms:
On each side is a wheel, which by the use of coal fire is made
to revolve as fast as a running horse .... Steam Vessels are a
wonderful invention of foreigners, and are calculated to offer
delight to many.22
In June 1842 the British fleet entered the Yangtze. The Chi-
nese were ready to receive their enemy, having assembled a
considerable fleet of sixteen war junks and seventy merchant-
men and fishing vessels requisitioned for naval duty. In the
forts of Woosung, near the mouth of the river, they had placed
253 heavy artillery pieces.
The Chinese also unveiled a secret weapon: paddle-wheelers
armed with brass guns, gingals, and matchlocks, and propelled
by men inside the hull operating treadles. Nin Chien, gover-
nor-general of Nanking, wrote of them:
Skilled artisans have also constructed four water-wheel boats, on

which we have mounted guns. They are fast and we have spe-
cially assigned Major Liu Ch'ang ... to command them. If the
barbarians should sail into the inland waterways, these vessels
can resist them. There is not the slightest worry.23
The battle of Woosung was swift. The British ships of the

line soon silenced the guns of the forts. The Nemesis, towing
the eighteen-gun Modeste, led the fleet into the river, firing
grape and canister at the Chinese crafts, which fled. The Nem-
esis and the Phlegethon thereupon chased the fleeing boats,
captured one junk and three paddle-wheelers, and set the rest
on fire.
The British were astonished to discover that their oppo-
nents had paddle-wheelers. Some saw them as proof of the
Chinese imitative ability. 24 In actuality the Chinese took the
idea of paddle-wheels from their own history-the paddle-
wheel boat was a Chinese invention of the eighth century or
earlier. Under the Sung dynasty, paddle-wheelers played a
celebrated role in battles against pirates in 1132 and against
the armies of Digunai in u61. From these examples, the hard-
pressed Nin Chien and other Chinese officials drew inspiration
in 1841 and 1842.25
Even more ironic is the appearance of the paddle-wheel in
the West. The first paddle-wheel steamer was built in 1788 by
Patrick Miller and William Symington, after Miller recalled
having read somewhere "that the Chinese had, in the long-
distant past, tried paddle-wheels fitted to certain of their junks
with the cranks turned by slaves. . . ."2 6 Like so many other
Chinese inventions, the paddle-wheel was to haunt China in
later centuries when her innovative spirit had flagged and her
technology was surpassed by that of the Western barbarians.
After the one-sided battle of Woosung, the British fleet en-
countered little resistance from the Chinese. Instead, its lum-
bering journey upriver was marked by a constant struggle
against currents, sandbars, and mud. Every one of the sailing
ships had to be towed by the steamers again and again. Fi-
nally, in July 1842, the fleet reached Chinkiang, at the inter-
section of the river and the Grand Canal. This time the court
at Peking realized its precarious situation and a few days later
sent a mission to Nanking to sign a peace treaty. Stearn had
carried British naval might into the very heart of China and
led to the defeat of the Celestial Empire.
After the Opium War, small armed steamers continued to

serve in the Far East. The Nemesis was assigned to chase pi-
53
STEAMBOATS AND, QUININE, TOOLS OF PENETRATION
rates in the Philippi,ie and Indonesian archipelagos. In the

Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, the British advanced
up the Irrawaddy with an, entire fleet of steamers, maµy of
them veterans of the Opium War. During the .Second Opiµm
War (1856-60), the Royal Navy brought up more than tw,enty,
five gunboats and other small steamers to attack Canton and
the Taku forts near Peking. Gunboats also figured promi-
nently in the French conquests of Tonkin (1873-74) aqq.
Annam (1883), and in the Third Anglo-Burmese War of
1885.27
The gunboat had become not ju~t the instrument, but tqe
very symbol of Western power along the coasts ;md ,up, the
nayi'gable rivers of Asia. One protagonist of the c~lonial wars
of that time, Colonel W. F.. B. l,aurie, put it succinctly: Steam-
ers, he declared, were "a 'political persuader,' with fearful in-
struments of speech, in an age of progress!"2S
The early history of .the gunboat illustrates the interaction

between technological innovation and the motives of ill}peri-
alism. Because his father had an iron foundry and a ~hipyard,
Macgregor Laird could turn his interest in Africa into an e;-
ploring expedition on the Njger. Peacock's classical erudition
and Russophobia led him to translate the Anglo-Indian ~on-
,c;erns with rapid communiq1tions into a steamboat expeditiqn
on the Euphrates. Their• cqmbination of interests persuaded
the East India Company to become the first major purchaser
of gunboats. In turn, the company's habit of acquiring gun-
boats led to Britain's victory in.the Opium War. Thw, in the
case of gunboats, we canno\ claim that technological, innova-
tion caused imperialism, nor that imperialist motives \ed to
technological innovation. Rather, the means and the motives
stimulated one another in a relatiorishiJ? of positive mutual
feedback.
54
NOTES
1. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China,

z800-42 (Cambridge, 1951), p. 10..4.
2. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (New York,
1969), p. 97.
3. William Conrad Costin, Great Britain and China, z833-60 (Ox-
ford, 1937), p. 27.
4. On the Forbes and the Jardine, see George Henry Preble, A
Chronological History of the Origin and Development of Steam
Navigation, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 142-45; H. A. Gibson-
Hill, "The Steamers Employed in Asian Waters, 1819-39," Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malayan Branch, 27 pt. 1 (May 1954): 127
and 153-56; H. Moyse-Bartlett, A History of the Merchant Navy
(London, 1937), p. 229; Arthur Waley, The Opium War Through
Chinese Eyes (London, 1958), pp. 105-06; and Peter Ward Fay,
fhe Opium War, z840-z842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire
in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which
They Forced Her Gates Ajar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), p. 51.
5. India Office Records, L/P&S / 9/ 1, pp. 411-12.
7. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, ELL 234: Letters from
Sir Gilbert Elliot; Lord Minto; on China 1839-41.
8. John Laird, "Memorandum as to the part taken by the late
Thomas Love Peacock Esq in promoting Steam Navigatioi:i" (1873),
MS Peacockana 2 in The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York.
9. "On the Nemesis Private Armed Steamer, and on the Compara-
tive Efficiency of Iron-Built and• Timber-Built Ships," The United
Service Journal and Naval and Military Magazine, part 2' (May
1840):90-100.
10. This book went through th,ree editions: The first, two are
William Dallas Bernard, Narrative of the Voyages and Services of
the Nemesis from z840 to z843,.2 vols. (London, 1844 and 1845); the
third edition is Captain William H. Hall (R.N.) and William Dallas
Bernard, The Nemesis in China, Comprising a History of the Late
War in That Country, with a Complete Account of the Colof!Y ,of
H.ong Kq_ng (London, 1846). The book was reviewed in "Voyages of
the 'Nemesis'," The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany 3, 3rd
series (May-Oct. 1844):355-59. For a recent look at the subject, see
55
David K. Brown, "Nemesis, The First Iron Warship," Warship (Lon-

don) 8(0ct. 1978):283-85.
11. "Mr. Airy, Astronomer-Royal, on the Correction of the Com-
pass in Iron-Built Ships," The United Service Journal and Naval and
Military Magazine part 2 (June 184n):23g-41. See also Stanislas
Charles Henri Laurent Dupuy de Lome, Memoire sur la construction
des bdtiments tn fer, adresse a M. le ministre de la marine et des
colonies (Paris, 1844), pp. 36-41; Edgar C. Smith, A Short History of
Naval and Marine Engineering (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 99-100; and
Hall and Bernard, p. 4.
12. India Office Records, L/P&S/3/6, p. 167: On Hall's career, see
"William Hutcheon Hall," .in William R. O'Byrne, A Naval Bio-
graphical Dictionary: Comprising the Life and Services of Every
Living Office in Her Majesty's Navy, from the Rank of Admiral.of
the Fleet to that of Lieutenant, Inclusive (London, 1849), pp. 444-
46; and "Hall, Sir William Hutcheon," in Dictionary of National
Biography, 8:978.
13. Edith Nicolls, "A Biographical Notice of Thomas, Love Pea-
cock, by his Granddaughter," in Henry Cole, ed., The Works of
Thomas• Love Pe'acock, 3 vols. (London, 1875), 1:xliii. On the east-
ward journey of the Nemesis, see Hall and Bernard, ch. 1.
14. On Chinese defenses, see John Lang Rawlinson, China's Strug-
gle for Naval Development, r839-r895 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967),
pp. 3-5 and 16-18; Fay, pp. 123-24, 207-09, 218, and 289; and
G. R. G. Worcester, "The Chinese War Junk," Mariner's Mirror
34( 1948):22.
15. Reprinted in The London Gazette Extraordinary 19984 (June
3, 1841): 1428.
16. India_Q_ffiC:eRecords, L/MAR/C 593, pp. 543-44.
17. India Office Records; L/P&S/9/7, pp. 59--60.
20. The Yangtze campaign of 1842 is described in Gerald S.
Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy r830-r860 (Ox-
ford, 1978), ch. 8; G. ·R. G. Worcester, "The First Naval Expedition
on the Yangtze River, 1842," Mariner's Mirror 36(1950):2-11; Hall
and Bernard, pp. 326-27; Rawlinson, pp. 19-21; and Fay, pp. 313
and 341-45.
21. Lo• Jung-Pang, "China's Paddle-Wheel Boats: Mechanized
Craft Used in the Opium War and Their Historical Background,"
Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies, NS no. 2 (1960):19o-g1. For a
different translation of Lin's description, see Waley, p. 105.
22. Letter from William Huttman, The Nautical Magazine and

Chronicle 12(1843):346.
23. Lo, p. 190.
24. Lo, p. 194; Worcester, "War Junk," pp. 23-24; and Fay, p. 350.
25. Lo, pp. 194-200; and Rawlinson, pp. 19-21.
26. George Gibbard Jackson, The Ship Under Steam (New York,
1928), p. 26.
27. On the last assignment of the Nemesis, see Parliamentary
Papers 1851 (378.) vol. LVI P,art 1, pp. 149-52. On the Second Anglo-
Burmese War, see Col. W. F. B. Laurie, Our Burmese Wars and
Relations with Burma: Being an Abstract of Military and Political
Operations, r824-25-26, and r852-53 (London, 1880), pp. 86-g2. On
gunboats in the Second Opium War, see Antony Preston and John
Major, Send a Gunboat! A Study of the Gunboat and its Role in
British History, r854-r904 (London, 1967), ch. 4. On French gun-
boats in Indochina, see Joannes Tramond and Andre Reussner,
Elements d'histoire maritime et coloniale (r8r5-r9r4) (Paris, 1924),
pp. 344-49, and Frederick Nolte, L'Europe militaire et diplomatique
au dix-neuvieme siecle r8r5-r884, vol. 3: Guerres coloniales et ex-
peditions d'outre-mer r830-r884 (Paris, 1884), p. 521. On the Third
Anglo-Burmese War, see A. T. Q. Stewart, The Pagoda War: Lord
Dufferin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Ava, r885-6 (London,
1972), ch. 5.
28. Laurie, p. 109.
57
CHAPTER THREE
Malaria, Quinine,
and the Penetration
of Africa
By the time Columbus first sighted the Americas, the Portu-

guese were well acquainted with the west coast of Africa, for
they had been exploring it for sixty years. Yet, during the next
three and a half centuries, Africa remained in the eyes of
Europeans the "dark continent," its interior a blank on their
maps, as they chose instead to explore, conquer, and settle
parts of the Americas, Asia, and Australia.
How can we explain this paradox? For one th'ing, there was
little motivation for Europeans to penetrate Africa before the
nineteenth century. The slave traders-Africans and Euro-
peans alike-who met along the coasts to conduct their busi-
ness wanted no outsiders with prying eyes disrupting their op-
erations. Furthermore, despite legends of fabulous wealth,
there was little concrete evidence that the profits to be derived
from the penetration of Africa would even approximate th'ose
resulting from the slave trade or from trade with Asia and the
Americas. Thus, the penetration of Africa that oc~urred in the
nineteenth century was tied closely to missionary and aboli-
tionist movements reacting against the slave trade.
But even more significantly, the means of penetration were
< ,,
MALARIA, QUININE, AND THE PENETRATION 6F AFRICA
also lacking. Much of Africa is a plateau. Rivers cascade from

die highlands to the sea in a series of cataracts. The coasts are
lined with mangrove swamps and sandbars. And throughout
the tropical regions, pack animals could not survive the nagana
or animal trypanosomiasis. Those' who wished to enter Africa
would have to do so on foot or in dugout canoes.
These deterrents were by no means• absolute prohibitions.
After all, Europeans had explored the Americas with primi-
tive means of transportation, despite difficult climates and to-
pographies. It was disease that kept Europeans out of the in-
terior of Africa. Although steamboats came to Africa and Asia
at the same time, in Asia they wrought a revolution in the
power of Europeans, whereas in Africa their effect was post-
poned for several decades. Before Eurppeans·could break into
the African interior successfully, they required anotl}er tech-
nological"advance, a triumph over disease.'!'
-In his novel War of the Worlds, H. G. ,Wells described a
group of extraterrestrial creatures who invaa.e the earth in
strange futuristic vehicles. As they are 'about l:o take over the
globe, they are decimated by invisible microbes and are forced
to flee. Wells could just as well nave been writing about the
various European attempts to penetrate Africa before the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century. In 1485 the 'Portuguese captain
Diogo Cao sent a party of men to explore the Congo River;
within a few days so many had died that the missiort had' to
be called off. In 1569, Francisco Barreto led ah: expedition up
the Zambezi valley to establish contact with the kingdom of
Monomotapa; 120 miles upriver, the horses and cattle fell vic-
tim to• trypanosomiasis and the men succumbed to malaria.
Hencefbrth until 1835, Portuguese communications with the
Zambezi interior were carried on through African or part-
African agents.1
Similarly, in 1777-79, during William Bolts' expedition at
Delagoa Bay, 132 out of 152 Europeans on the journey died.
Mungo Park's 1805 venture to,th~ upper Niger resulted .in the
59
death of all the Europeans present. In 1816-17, Captain James

Tuckey led an exploring party up the Congo River, in which
19 out of 54 Europeans perished. 2
These setbacks in no way curtailed, European attempts to
explore Africa. Each generation spawned a fresh crop of ad-
venturers willing to risk their lives to investigate the unknown
continent. With the nineteenth century appeared new motives
to do so: a revival of the Christian proselytizing ,spirit, the
abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and a curiosity elevated
to the rank of scientific research and funded by a newly
wealthy bourgeoisie. Among the enterprising explorers of ,this
era was Macgreg9r Laird, the younger son of the shipbuilder
William Laird, who was to play a pioneering role in opening
up Nigeria to British influence. In the early 1830s, his father's
firm had just begun to build iron steamboats. Macgregor
Laird, then twenty-three years of age, was not content to re-
main the junior partner in a struggling new business. He was
imbued with that restless spirit-part missionary fervor, part
scientific curiosity, part commercial hope-which inspired so
many nineteenth-century Britons to venture put and remake
the world. In 1832 he saw opportunity beckon along the Niger
River. Three decades earlier Mungo Park had explored the
upper reaches of this river down to the Bussa Rapids. Then in
1830 the brothers Richard and John Lander traveled north
from Lagos to the, rapids and sailed downriver in a canoe, thus
proying that the Niger and the Oil rivers, which flowed into
the Bight of Benin through a mangrove swamp, were one and
the same. When the Landers returned to England with the
tale of their discovery, Laird realized that a boat capable of
sailing up the ,river with a cargo qf trade goods-in other
words, a steamer-would open up an immense part of Africa
to the commerce and influence of Great Britain. 3 To do so, he
later wrote, would please
... those who look upon the opening of Central Africa to the
enterprise and capital of British merchants as likely to create
new and extensive markets for our manufactured goods, and
60
MALARIA, QUININE, AND THE PENE1RATI0N OF AFRICA
fresh sources whence to draw our supplies; and those who, view-
ing mankind as qne great family, consider it their duty to raise
their fellow creatures from their present degraded, deIJational-
ized, and demoralized state, nearer to Him in whose image they
were created.4
In 1832, therefore, Macgregor Laird and several Liverpool

merchants founded the African Inland Commercial Company
"for•the commercial development of the recent discoveries of
the brothers Lander on the River Niger." The directors sought
a charter and a subsidy from the treasury but were refused.
They went ahead with their venture anyway and hired Rich-
ard Lander to lead their expedition. They bought the brig
Columbine as a storeship and ordered two steamers in which
to ,ascend the Niger. The larger of the two, 'the Quorra, was
built of wood by Seddon and Langley. She measured 112 by 16
feet, drew 7 feet at sea and 5V2 feet on the river; she was pow-
ered by a 40-horsepower engine and carried a 26-man crew.
Macgregor Laird himself built the smaller one, the Alburkah.
She was 70 feet long by 13 feet wide with a draft of 4 feet g
inches. Except for the deck, she was made entirely of iron. She
had a 15-horsepower Fawcett and Preston engine and carried
a crew of 14. Both boats were heavily armed. In addition to
handguns, the Quorra had a 24-pound swivel gun, •eight
4-pound carriage guns, and an 18-pound catronade. The Al-
burkah carried a 9-pounder and six 1-pounder swivel guns. 5
Under Laird's command, the little fleet reached the Niger
delta without'incident. Leaving the Columbine in the Bight
of Benin, the steamers then went upriver, past the trading
towns of the delta to the confluence of the Niger and the Be-
nue. There Laird hoped to found a tr'ading post and to buy
palm oil at low prices.
Laird's steamers succeeded admirably in their assigned task,
and for this Laird deserves his reputation as an innovator and
an explorer. As a cultural and commercial missioh, however,
the expedition was a failure and his expectations were shat-
tered. Of the forty-eight Europeans present on the trip, only
nine returned, the rest having died of disease. Laird himself re-
turned ill to England in Janu;iry 1834 and never quite recov-
ered his health. Despite the power of steam, the African envi-
ronment had ohce again defeated the European attempt at
penetration. 6
Though very few Europeans ventured into the interior of

Africa before the mid-nineteenth century, a substantial num-
ber had for centuries been trading along the coasts. After
1807, in an attempt to end the slave trade, the British govern-
ment stationed a,fleet along the West African coast to inter-
cept slaving ships. Small army units were also placed at inter-
vals along the shores to lend weight to the abolition campaign.
Here and there the first Christian missions were founded.
These various groups of wqites were subject to the dieyea~es
prevailing in the region.
W,e }mow much more about the death rates among British
military personnel in West Africa than among the slave trad-
ers, ,their predecessors; for this was the time when the keeping
of statistica~ records became a vital part of Western culture .
•The R.oyal Afa;-icanCorps, stationed from the Gambia to tp.e
Gold Coast, was•composed pf military criminals and offenders
allowed to exchange their sentences for service in Africa. In
most cases this meant substituting death for prison. In 1840
the United $ervice Jqun;al and Naval and Military Magazint
devoted an article to the health of th,ese troops.7 It glive the
following figures. Of the 1,Slj3 European soldiers whq, served
in Sierra Leone between 1819 and 1836, 890, or 48.3 percent,
died. Tp.e worst year ;was 1825, in which 44 7 out of 571 (78.3
percent) succumbed' to disease. Despite a coostani:. influx, of
European arrivals, the size of the garrison declined by over a
hundred each year. The Gold Coast was just as deadly: Two-
thirds of t!;ie Europeans who landed there in the years 1S23-27
never lived to return home; in the year 1824 alone, 2i 1 out of
224 lost their lives .. On th~ whole, 77 percent of the white sol-
02
MALARIA,'QUININE, AND nIE PENETRATION'<'>F AFRICA
diers sent to West Africa perished, 21 percent became invalids,

and only 2 percent were ultimately found fit for future service.
Among West Indian soldiers stationed in the same region,
the death rate was only one tenth that for whites, though still
twice that prevailing in their native lands. During the 1825-26
epidemic in the Gambia which killed 276 out of 399 whites,
only one out of 40 or 50 West Indians fell victim to the ill-
ness. It is likely that the epidemic in question was yellow fe-
ver, a disease endemic to the West Indies against which many
West Indians had developed a resistance. In 1830 the British
government recognized the significance of the death rates and
stopped sending white troops to West Africa, except for hal£
a dozen sergeants to command the West Indian'soldiers.
The author~ of the article, of course, did not understand the
exact causes of this horrendous situatiofi. At least they did not
blame the men themselves, for' they noted that robust, teeto-
talling English missionaries living on the same coast were as
likely to suffer the effectS'of the, disease; of 89 who went to
West Africa betweeµ 1804 and 1825, 54 died and another 14
returned in bad health. Nor was the climate to blame, for dry
and windy stations were as dangerous as those adjoining feti'd
marshes. The cause of the problem, they concluded, was fevers,
either yellow or remittent. A scientific approach was begirt-
ning to replace the moralistic judgments of former times.
Philip Curtin, in his writings on the qq~stion, gives equally
appalling death rates. Among British military personnel re-
cruited in the United Kingdom, who served during the years
1817 to 1836, the death rates per thousand were~
on ,the eastern frontier of South Africa (1817-36) 12.0

in the United Kingdom (1830-36) 1 5·3
in Tenasserim, Burma (1827-36) 44.7
in Ceylon (1817-36) 75.o
in Sierra Leone (1817-36) (deaths from diseases
only)
in Cape Coast Command, Gold Coast (1817-36)
Among, Europeans serving with the Afrii;an Squadron of the

Royal Navy off the coast of West Africa, the death rate in
1825-45 was 65 per thousand; among British troops in West
Africa in 181g-36 it was 483 per thousand for enlisted men
and 209 for officers. Meanwhile, West African soldiers serving
in the British army in the same area suffered a death rate of
only 2.5 per thousand. It is for this reason that Africa became
known as the "white man's grave." 8
Though dysentery, yellow fever, typhoid, and other ills con-

tributed to the high death rates, the principal killer of Euro-
peans in Africa was malaria. Throughout history malaria has
probably caused more human deaths than any other disease.
It exists in several varieties. Tertian malaria, endemic through-
out much of the world, is caused by the protozoan Plasmo-
dium vivax and produces intermittent fevers and a gener;tl
weakening of the body. Another variety, brought on by the
Plasmodium falciparum, is endemic only to tropical Africa
and is far deadlier. It is found not only in swamplands and
rainforests, but also in the drier savannas. The body's resis-
tance, gained from a successful bout with the disease, is tem-
porary at best, and many Africans suffer repeated low-level at-
tacks throughout their lives. To adult newcomers to Africa,
who have not had the opportunity to build up a resistance,
the disease is most often fatal.
Early nineteenth-century European medical opinion, influ-
enced by the age-old association of malaria with swamps,
blamed humid air and putrid smells for the disease; hence the
French word paludisme (from the Latin word for swamp) and
the Italian mal'aria, or bad air. The strangest theory of all was
put forth by Macgregor Laird. In trying to explain the epi-
demic that had decimated his Niger expedition, he wrote
Thomas Peacock in 1837:
Captain Grant mentioned the possibility of getting firewood at
Fernando Po, nothing can be more injurious both to the Vessel
MALARIA, QUININE, AND THE PENETRATION OF AFRICA
and the Crew . . . to the Crew', as the miasmatic exhalations

from it will infallibly produce fever and disease. I have had
melancholy experience of the effects of wood taken on board &
used as Firewood for the Engines on the Coast of Africa.9
Not until 1880 did a French scientist, Alphonse Laveran, dis-

cover the Plasmodium that invades the bloodstream; and only
in 1897 was the vector of malaria, the Anopheles mosquito;
identified by the British physician Ronald' Ross and the Ital-
ian scientists Giovanni Batista Grassi anti Amico Bignami. 10
That the cause of malaria was not known to science until
the end of the century did not prevent a remedy from emerg-
ing much earlier out of a long process of trial and error. Be-
fore our own century, technological advances often preceded
a scientific explanation of the underlying natural phenomena;
technological advances arising out of scientific discoveries w"ere
the exception. We should riot think of tecgnology as "applied
science" before the end of the nineteenth century, but rather
of,science as "theoretical technology."
For centuries, people ,had sought relief front the dreaded
disease. In the seventeenth century, Jesuits had introduced the
bark of the cinchona tree as a cure for vivax·malaria and dis-
seminated it in Europe. Cinchona bark, though effective, had
a number of drawbacks. Because it came frorh trees theft grew
only in the Andes, the supply ,in Europe· was oftert limited.
Making matters worse, what did reach the consumers was not
only expensive but often adulterated or deteriorated. More-
over, its Jesuit connection made it suspect among Protestants;
Oliver Cromwell, dying of malaria, is said to have refused the
"popish" remedy. It also was useless against yellow fever and
a number of other fevers that were then confused in medical
theory. And finally, it had an awful taste.
Yet up through the eighteenth century, medical authorities
regularly prescribed the bark. By the turn of the following
century, though, physicians favored treatihg fevers with doses
of mercury for salivation and calomel for its purgative 'quali-
ties. Frequent bleedings and blisters were other common treat-

ments. These "remedies" undoubtedly killed more patients
than they saved and must have contributed to the extraordi-
nary death rates among British military personnel in West
Africa. 11
The dawn of a breakthrough in treating malaria dates from
the year 1820, when twQ French chemists, Pierre Joseph Pel-
letier and Joseph Bienaime Caventou, succeeded in extracting
the alkaloid of quinine from cinchona bark. Commercial pro-
quction of quinine began in 1827, and by 1830 the drug was
being manufactured in large enough, quantities for general
use. 12
From the late 1820s on, doctors in malarial areas conducted
experiments with quinine a,nd published the results of their
investigations. The first important experiments were carried
out in Algeria, following Jhe French invasion of ,1830. Serious
health .problems plagued the, French troops stationed there,
;Yith,.~<!.~~!!~~utb eaks c ccurren~es. The
most severe problem, however, was mafaria. Bone, which was
surrounded by swamps, had the highest incidence of disease in
Algeria, and epidemks broke out every summer. In 1832, of
the 2,788 French soldiers stationed in that town, 1,62Qiwere
hospitalized. The next year, 4,000 O\}t of 5,500 were simila.rly
affected, and out of every 7 hospitalized, soldiers, 2, died. The
cause oLth,ese deaths was not disease alone, but also the t;eat-
.,,,,,. 1 ""' ~
ment the patients received. French army, doctors at the time

were influenced by Dr. J. Broussais,-]l;i"'d of the army_i4,;dical
$cfmm or Val-de~Grace, who taught that fevers should be
treaj(,;d....with_,purgatiyes~.breedings,'1e'echt:S, and a st.<U"~1!f>n
diet. Quinine, he believed, should be administered in tiny
''--cfosesonly after the seventq or eighth attack; among other
reasons, the new drug WclS too expensive, at twenty-five francs
an ounce, for military use'.•
Two ,army physicians, Jean Andre Antonini and Fran~ois
Clement M~illot, rebelled against the accepted practices of
66
their colleagues. Antonini noted that irttermittent fevers re-

sponded to quinine, 'and this permitted him to distinguish ma-
laria from typhoid fever. He moderated the 'bleedings and
gave his patients more food. Maillot, posted to Bone at the
height of the malaria epidemic of 1834, went further. At the
first sign of fever, he prescribed twenty-four to forty grains of
quinine immediately, instead of four to eight several days
later as Broussais had taught. He also fed his patients. a 'nu-
tritious diet. The results were m6st impressive. Only one out
of every twenty patients died, compared to two out o! •seven
the year before. Consequently, sick sbldiers began fleeing other
hospitals to come to Maillot's. In 1835 he described his meth•
o'ds to the Academie de Medecine in Paris, and a year later he
published his findings under the title Traite des fievres lou ir-
ritations cerebro-spinales intermittentes. Yet it was many years
before his methods were accepted by the French military med-
ical service. Finally, toward the end of his life, Maillot was
idolized as a hero of French science, and in 1881 the Scientific
Congress of Algiers honored him with· the phrase: "lt•is thanks
to ~aillot that Algeria has become a French~ndi it is)~~ wh,9
closecf'and sealed forever this tomb of Christians."1 3
In West Africa, too, the use of quinine became more com-

mon, while purgings and bleedings gradually feU,'into disfa-
vor. By the mid-184os, Europeans in the Gold Coast regularly
kept a jar of quinine pills by their bedside, to be taken at>the
first sign of chills or fever. Yet this tre~tment, although, bene-
ficial against the vivax form of malaria prevalent in Algeria,
was generally insufficient against falciparum malaria. To de-
feat the Plasmodium falciparum, the human bloodstream had
to be saturated with quinine before the' onset of the first in-
fection; in other words, throughout one's stay in falciparum
areas, quinine had to be taken regularly as a p.rophylactic.
Two chance events led to this discovery. The first occurred
in 1839, on board the North Star stationed off Sierra Leone.
STEAMBOATS AND QUININE, TOOLS OF\PENETRATION
While serving on the ship, twenty crew members took cin-

chona bark daily and one officer did not; he alone died of ma-
laria. The second incident took place two years later, when the
British government sponsored the largest of all the Niger ex-
peditions up to that time. With three new steamers-the 457-
ton Albert and Wilberforce and the 249-ton Soudan-Capt.
H. I). Trotter led 159 Europeans up the Niger to the conflu-
ence of the Benue. To avoid the health problems of previous
missions every known precaution was taken. The crew was
specially selected from among athletic young men of good
breeding, the ships were equipped with fans to dispel bad air,
and the expedition raced at top •speed through the miasmic
delta to reach the drier climate of the upper ,river as soon flS
possible. Nonetheless the first cases of fever appeare9- within
three weeks, forcing the Wilberforce and the Soudan to return
to the Atlantic as floating hospitals. Within two months,
forty-eight of the Europeans had died, and by the end of the
expedition another seven fell victim to the disease. Africa had
regairted its terrible reputation among the l3ritish. 14
Despite this disappointment, the Niger expedition of 1841
represents a major step toward a solution to the problem of
malaria, for the physician on board one of the ships, Dr.
T. R.H. Thomson, used the'opportunity to experiment with
various drugs. Some crew members received cinchona bark
with wine, others got quinine; Dr. Thomson himself took
quinine regularly and stayed healthy. He later wrote his ob-
servations on the matter in an article entitled "On the Value of
Quinine in African Remittent Fever" which appeared in the
British medical journal The Lancet on February 28,· 1846. A
year later, Dr. Alexander Bryson, an experienced naval phy-
sician, published his Report on the Climate and Principal Dis-
eases of the African Station (London, 1847), in which he ad-
vocated quinine prophylaxis to Europeans in Africa. In 1848
the director-general of,the Medical Department of the British
Army sent a circular to all British governors in West Africa,
recommending quinine prophylaxis. 15
68
Yet quinil\e prophylaxis was not immediately aqopted. It

took a spectacular demonstration to achieve this end. In 1854,
Macgregor Laird, never cured of his fascinat;jon with Africa,
proposed still another expedition to that contine:µt. Under
contract with the Admiralty, he had a ship called the Pleiad
specially built. She was a 220-ton iron prope1Jer-stea!11er rigged
as a schooner, designed to pull two or three barges behind her
on her way up the Niger. As was usually the case, she was
armed with a 12-pounder pivot gun, four smaller swiv~l c~n-
nons, rifles, and muskets. The crew consisted of twelvf! Eur<;>-
peans and fifty-four Africans.
Before the ship sailed, Dr. Alexander Bryson wrote a set of
instructions in which he described ,the clothing 1 diet, activities,
and moral influences best. suited to protect the health of the
crew. To prevent fevers he recommended that each cre1Vmem-
ber take six to eight grains of quinine a day from the time the
ship crossed the bar until fourteen days after she r~turned to
the ocean. The captain of the ship, Dr. William Baikie, .-"yas
himself a physician and saw to it that the crew followed this
advice. The Pleiad stayed 11,2 days on the Niger and Benue
rivers, and returned with all the European crew members
alive. Thomas Hutchinson, a member of the expedition, at-
tributed this to Dr. Bryson's suggestions; as he put it,
Since my first visit to Africa in 1850, I have felt firmly con-

vinced-and that conviction urges me to impress my, faith on fill
who read this work-that the climate would not be so fatal as it
has hitherto proved to Europeans, if a different mode of daily
living, a proper method of prophylactic hygiene, and 'another
line of therapeutic practice in the treatment of fevers, were
adopted. Before, and beyond all others, is the preventive influ-
ence of quinine as it was used in the "Pleiad," in the mod~ here
described .... 16
As the prophylactic use of quinine spread, and as purgings

and bleediqgs vanished, the death rates fell significantly. Pp.ilip
Curtin gives some statistics: In the Royal Navy's Africa Squad-
,pg
STEAMBOATS AND QUININE, TOOLS OF'l>ENETRATION
ron, the mortality rate fell from 65 per 1,oob in 1825-45 to 22

per 1,000 in 1858-67; in 1874, during the two-month military
expedition against Kumasi, only 50 of the 2,500 European sol-
diers died of disease; in 1881-g7, among Bri'tish officials in the
Gold Coast, 'the rate was 76 per 1,000, and in Lagos it was 53
per 1,000. On the whole, the first-year death rates among Euro-
peans in West, Africa dropped from 25<>-750per 1,000 to 50-
100 per 1,000. To be sure, this was still five to ten times higher
than the death rates for people in the same age bracket in' Eu-
rope. Africa remained hostile to the health of Europeans. Yet
psychologically the improvement was significant. No longer
was tropical Africa the "white man's gra~e," fit for only the
most ardent visionaries and the unluckiest recruits. It was now
a place from which Europeans could reasonably hope to re-
turn alive. In Curtin's words, ". . . the improvement over
the' recent past was understood well enough in official and mis-
sionary circles to reduce sharply the most serious impediment
to any African ac'tivity."17
One immediate consequence of' quinine prophylaxis was a
great' increase in the number and success of European ex-
plorers in Africa after the mid-century. Exploration, of course,
remained a dangerous business, but no longer was it qµasi-
suicidal. With the prospect before them of fruitful discoveries,
perhaps even glory and wealth, m~ny more adve·nturous souls
volunteered in the service of knowledge. David Livingstone,
the most lionized of all the explorers, first heard of quinine
prophylaxis while he was in Bechuanaland in 1843. During
his march across southern Africa in 1850-56 he took qujnine
daily. By 1857 he was convinced that quiµine was a preven-
tive. In preparation for his Zambezi expedition of 1858 he
made his European crew take two grains of quinine in sherry
every day. Throughout the expedition, many ~uffered from
malaria, but only three out of twenty-five died. Later he came
to doubt the efficacy of quinine as a pteventive, for it only
les~ned the impact of the disease. His favorite remedy for ma-
laria was a concoction of quinine, calomel, rhubarb, and resin

of julep which he called "L~vingstone Pills."18
In the footstep$ of the explorers, lesser protagonists of Euro-

pean imperialism penetrated the African interior: mission-
arjes, soldiers, traders, administrators, tngineers, planters and
their wives and children, and finally tourists. All of them
needed their daily qqinine. In India and ..other tropical areas,
the influx of Europeans ~dded to the growing demand for the
drug.
Until the 1850s all the world's cinchona bark came from the
forests of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, where the
tress grew wild. As world demand increasep., the bark exports
of the Andean republics rose from two million pounds in
1860 to twenty million in 1,881.At that point tl;ie 1).nd.eap.bark
was swept from the world market by the competitiqn of Indian
and Indonesian bark, the result of deliberate effo:utsby Dutc.h
and British interests.
The idea of growing cinchona in Asia had be~n disq1ssed
many times, but with little effect as long as demand was small.
In the early 1850s, as demand grew, Dutch botanists and hor-
ticulturists. in Java urged the.Netherlands East Indies govern-
ment to import cinchona seedlings. In 1853-54, Jus.tus Charles
Hasskarl, superintendent of the Buitenzorg .Botanical Gardens
in Java, traveled to the,Andes under an assumed name• and
secretly collected seeds; most of them perished, ho.wever. ,In
1858-60, Clements Markham, a clerk at the India Office, aided
by a gardener from the Bri.tish, Royal Botanic Gardens at' Kew
namect Weir, traveled to Bolivia and Peru, again secretly, to
collect seeds of the Cinchona calisaya tree. Simultaneously, the
English botanist Richard Spruce and another Kew gardener,
Robert Cross, collected 100,000 C. succirubra seeds ,and 637
young plants in Ecuador; of these, 463 seedlings reached India,
forming the nucleus of the cinchona plantations at Ootaca-
mund in the Nilgiri Hills near Madras.
There followed a period of intensive experimentation. At

botanical gardens in Bengali Ceylon, Madras, and Java, horti-
culturists and quinologists exchanged seeds and information,
and provided cheap seedlings and free advice to planters. A
hybrid species, C. calisaya Ledgeriana, grafted onto the stem
of a C. succirubra tree, formed the basis of the Javanese cin-
chona plantations after 1874.· Techniques such as mossing
(cutting strips of bark and wrapping the trees in moss) and
coppicing (cutting trees to the ground every six or seven years)
greatly increased the yield of alkaloids. While Peruvian bark
had a two percent sulphate of quinine content, scientific
breeding in Java raised the content to six percent by 1900, and
latei; to eight or nine percent.
In the late nineteenth century, after the demise of the An-
dean 'bark industry, a compromise was worked out between
the British and the Dutch. Plantations in India produced a
cheaper, less potent bark from which chemists extratted tota-
quine, a mixture of antimalarial alkaloids. Almost the entire
Indian production was destined· to British military and ad-
ministrative personnel in the tropics, and the excess was sold
in India. The Javanese industry, which produced the more po-
tent and expensive pure quinine, captured over nine tenths of
the world market by the early twentieth century. This:world
monopoly of cinchona resulted not only from scientific meth-
ods of cultivatfon, but also from a marketing cartel', the Kina
Bureau of Amsterdam, which coordinated the purchase of
bark and the price and qu'antity of quinine sold. Not until
the Japanese conquest of Indonesia in World War· Two and
the development of synthetic malaria suppressants did this
Dutch control over one of the world's most vital drugs come
to an ertd.
Scientific cinchona production was an imperial technology
par excelfence. Without it European colonialism would have
been almost impossible in Africa, and much costlier elsewhere
in the tropics. At the same time, the development of this tech-
72.
nology, combining the scientific expertise of several botanical

gardens, the encouragement of the British and Dutch colonial
governments, and the land and labor of the peoples of India
and Indonesia, was clearly a consequence as well as a cause of
the new imperialism. 19
River steamers had overcome the ob,5tacle of poor transpor-

tation, and quinine that of malaria. Tpgether, they opened
much of Africa to colonialism, that is1 to the systematic inter-
course with Europe on European terms. The scramble for Af-
rica has often been explained as a consequence of French po-
litical psychology after the Franco-Prussian War, or of thf
ambitions of King Leopold II of Bdgium, or as a byproduct
of the Suez Canal. ·No doubt. But it was also the result of,the
combination of steamers, quinine prophylaxis, and, as we
shall see, the quick-firing rifle. FrQIIl among the myriad events
of the scramble, let us consider only a few. that illustrate the.
arrival of steamers on the rivers of Africa, their European
crews now protected from a certain death by quinine pro-
phylaxis.
Macgregor Laird had not sent expeditions up the Niger
River out of curiosity or philanthropy alone. '(hey ,were, in
his eyes, investments that must surely pay off, for the Niger
trade was both lucrative and necessary to Britain. Palm oil,
which had replaced slaves as the principal export of southern
Nigeria, was essential as the raw material for soap and as a
lubricant for industrial machinery. But the price of palm bil
was kept unreasonably high by the Niger delta middlemen
who brought it to the coast, and by the ,small European trad-
ers who shipped it to Europe. The instrument that would
break through these bottlenecks, Laird believed, was the-steam
engine. In 1851 he wrote Earl Grey that steam "will convert a
most uncertain and precarious trade into a regular and steady
one, diminish the risk of life, and free a large portion of the
capital at present engaged in it. . . ."2°
73
STEAMBOATS AND QUININE, TOOLS OF-PENETRATION
What was needed was a double application of steam. One

was to be a steamship line between Britain and West Africa,
which we shall tonsider in a later chapter. The other was a
regular steaml:>cratservice along the Niger in order to bypass
the Nigerian middlemen. Laird's first appeals were rejected.
After the Pleiad expedition in 1854 had vindicated his faith,
however, the Royal Geographical Society convinced the Brit-
ish government to support his projects. In 1857 the Foreign
Office agreed to send Dr. Baikie to open relations with the
Caliphate of Sokoto on the middle Niger. The Admiralty con-
trac;ted with Laird to send three steamers up the Niger an-
nually for five years.
The Dayspring, the Rainbow, and the Sunbeam were built
by John Laird's Birkenhead shipyard for this service. In the
course of their voyages they naturally aroused the resentment
of the delta traders whose business they were ruining. In 1859,
after traders attacked the Rainbow and killed two of her crew
members, Laird appealed to the government for a warship to
accompany his steamers. Two years later H:M.S. Espoir en-
tered the Niger and destroyed the ~illages that had been re-
sponsible for the assault on the Rainbouf. By the 1870s several
British tompanies, were trading on the Niger with 'armed'
sreamers, an~ every year a military expedition steamed up the'
river 'to de,stroy any towns that ,resisted the British intrusion.
By the 1880s, Sit George Goldie's United Afri~an Company,
uniting all the trading interests in the area, kept a fleet ol
light gunboats patrolling the river year 'tound. In 1885"the
British government declared the Niger delta a protectorate.
Despite sporadic resistance, no African town along the 'rivers
and no war-canoe could withstand for long the power of Brit-
ish gunboats.21
'The Niger River was the scene of the earliest and most ac-
tive use of steamers by the invading Europeans, because it
was the easiest to navigate in all of tropical Africa. The other
74
major rivers-tpe Congo, the Zambezi, the upper Nil~, and

their tributaries-wen; broken by cataracts which ba:rred ac-
cess to them by seagoing steamers. Boats had to be brought in
pieces, portaged around the rapids, and reassembled before
they could be used to explore the upper reaches of these riv-
ers. To portage the steamers and equipment for an entire ex-
pedition required labor, technology, organization, an~ financ-
ing on a scale that the Niger,explorers had never faced.
Livingstone used a series of small steamers: the Ma Roberts,
the first steel steamboat, on which he explored the Zambezi
River up to the ~ebrabasa Rapids in 1858; the Pioneer, in
1861; and the Lady Nyassa, which was carded in pieces arc;mnd
the falls.to Lake Nyassa.22 Samuel Whit~.Baker had the ste,flmer
Khedive transported to the upper Nile. 23 ' To open up the
Congo river basin, Henry Stanley had a steamer, the nine-tbn
En Avant, carried in pieces from the Atlantic to Stanley Pool.
Shortly thereafter Savorgnan de, 1Brazza's Ballay ilso appeared
on the Congo. .
After that the number of steamers multiplied quickly,1 for
exploration, conquest, trade, and missionary work. They were
transported to the most remote regions of the c6ntinent. I:h
1895-97 the French lieutenant Gentil conquered the area' bf
the Ubangi and Shari rivers and Lake Chad using ,the first
aluminum steamer, the Leon Blot. 24 And jn 1898 on his cross-
Africa expedition, Commandant Marchand had two steamers
and three rowboats carried from the Ubangi •to the Nile, on
which he then steamed to his celebrated confrontation with
Kitchener at Fashoda. 25
I '
Given- the harsh topography of much of Africa, and the lack
of pack animals, it is doubtful ,whether Em:;opean,scould have
penetrated so fast or dominated sb thoroughly if they had•had
to go on foot. Regions lacking good water transpqrtation-for
example the Centrai' Sudan, ,the Sahara: E~opia, and ~e
KaJahari-were among the last to be colonized. The contrast
between the ease of water transport and the difficulty' of land
75
transport in nineteenth-century Africa accounts in large part

for the European patterns of penetration and control.
NOTES
1. John Ford, The Role of Trypanosomiasis in African Ecology:

A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem (Oxford, 1971), p. 327.
2. For the death rates on exploring expeditions in Africa, see
Rene-Jules Cornet, Medecine et exploration: Premiers contacts de
quelques explorateurs de l'Afrique centrale avec les maladies tro-
picales (Brussels, 1970), p. 7; Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa:
British Ideas and Actions I780-I850 (Madison, Wis., 1964), pp. 483-
87 and "'The White Man's Grave~: Image and Reality, 1780-1850,"
Journal of,British Studies 1(1961):105; and Michael Gelfand, Rivers
of Death in Africa (London, 1964), p. 18 anti Livingstone ,the Doc-
tor: His Life and Travels. A Study in Medical History (Oxford,
1957), PP· 3-12.
3. Laird was not the first to think of using a steamer to penetrate
Africa. Captain James Tuckey had intended to put a Boulton and
Watt engine on his riverboat Congo to explore that river in 1816;
the engine was too heavy for the boat, however\ and had to be re-
moved. See Andre Lederer, Histoire de la navigation au Congo (Ter-
Vl}ren, Belgium, 1965), p. 7; and John Fincham, History of Naval
Architecture (London, 1851), p. 329.
4. Macgregor Laird and R. A. K. Oldfield, Narra'tive of an Ex-
pedition into the Interior of Africa, by the River Niger,· in the
Steam-Vessel£ Q.uqrra"and Alburkah, in I832, I833, and I8J4, 2 vols.
<London, 1837), 1 :vi.
5. Laird and Oldfield, 1:5-9; Liverpool Shipping Register, Entry
92 and 93, 5 July 1832, cited in P. N. Davies, The Trade Makers:
Elder Dempster in West Africa, I852-I972 (London, n.d.), p. 409
table 9; ·"Report from the Select Committee on Steam Navigation to
India; with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index" in Par-
liamentary Papers 1834 (478.) XIV, p. 42·6.
6. On L~ird's expedition, see Laird and Oldfield; K. Onwuka
Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta I830-I885: An Intro-
duction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford,
1956), pp. 18 and 61-63; H. s'.Goldsmith, "The River ~iger; M:ac-
gregor'Laird and Those Who Inspired Him," Journal of the African
Society 31 no. 85 (Oct. 1,932):383-93; Christopher Lloyd, The Search

for the Niger (London, 1973), pp. 130-41; Sir Roderick lmpey
Murchison, "Address to the Royal Geographical Society of London,"
in Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 31 (1861):cxxvi-cxxviii;
and C. W. Newbury, ed., British Policy Toward West Africa (Oxford,
1965), pp. 6 and 66-79.
7. "Western Africa and it~ Effects on the Health of Troops,"
United Servic~ Journal and Naval and Military Magazine pt. 2 (Aug.
1840):509--19.
8. Philip Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political
Science Quarterly 83 no. 2 Qune 1968):203-u; Image of Africa,
p. 197; and "White Man's Grave," pp. 103-10.
9. India Office Records, L/MAR/C 582, pp. 597-600.
10. Jaime Jaramillo-Arango, The Conquest of Malaria (London,
1950), pp. 5-12; and.Michael Colbourne, Malaria in Africa (Ibadan,
Nairobi, London, 1966), p. 6.
11. Paul F. Russell, Man's Mastery of Malaria (London, 1955),
pp. 92-99; Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 192-93 and "White Man's
Grave," p. 100.
12. Russell, p. 105; Jaramillo-Arango, p. 87; Colbourne, p. 53.
13. A. Darbon, J.-F. Dulac, and A. Portal, "La pathologie medi-
cale en Algerie pendant la Conquete' et la Pacification," pp. 32-38;
and Gen. Jaulmes and Lt. Col. Benitte, "Les grands noms du Service
de Sante des Armees en Algerie," pp. 100-103, in Regards sur la
France: Le Service de Sante des Armees en Algerie I830-1958 '(Nu-
mero special reserve au Corps Medical, 2eme anne<:, no. 7, ,Paris,
Oct.-Nov. 1958). See also Rene Brignon, La. contribution de la
France a l'etude des maladies coloniales (Lyon, 1942), pp. 20-21.
14. William Allen, A Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her
Majesty's Government to the River Niger in I84I, 2 vols. (London,
1848); Paul Merruau, "Une exp/dition de la ~farine Anglaise sur le
Niger," in Revue des Deux Mandes 1(1849):231-57; Lloyd, p. 150.
15. Curtin, "White Man's Grave," p. 108; Gelfand, Rivers of
Death, pp. 57-59. Bryson also publish~d an jnflµential arti,cle, "On
the Prophylactic Influence of Quinine," in the Medical Times
Gazette of January 7, 1854, cited in Curtin, Image of Africa, pp.
355-56.
,16. Thomas Josepp Hutchinson, Narrative of the Niger, Tshadda
and Binuii Exploration; Including a Report on the Position and
Prospects of Trade up those Rivers, with Remarks on the Malaria
and Fevers of Western Africa (London, 1855, reprinted 1966), pref-
77
ace and pp. 211-21. See also William Balfour Baikie, Narrative of
an Exploring Voyage up the Rivers Kwora and Binue (Commonly
Known as the Niger and' Tsddda) in r854 (London, 1856, reprinted
1966); Curtin, "White Man's Grave," p. 109; Dike, p. 61 n. 2; Gel-
fand, Rivers of Death, p. 59; Goldsmith, 'I>·390; Lloyd, pp. 187-98;
and Newbury, pp. 73-77.
17. Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 362 and "White Man's Grave,"
pp. 109-10; and Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson
and Jan Vansina, African History (Boston, 1978), p. 446. In later
years, after the discovery of the mosquito transmission of malaria
and yellow fever, the death rates fell still further; in the Gold Coast
to thirteen to twenty-eight per thousand after 1902, and to less than
ten per thousand after 1922.
18. Gelfand 1 Livingstone, passim, and Rivers of Death, pp. 63-72;
Horace Waller, ed., The Last Journals of David Livingstone, 2 vols.
(London, 1&74),1:177.
19. On the cinchona transfer to India and Indonesia, see Lucile
H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the
British Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979), pp. 104-33; William H.
McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), pp. 27g-80;
George Cyril Allen and Audrey G. Donnithorne, Western Enterprise
in Indonesia and Malaya; a Study in Economic Development (Lon-
don, 1957), pp. 91-93; Wilfr~d Hicks Daukes, The ''.P. & T." Lantis
[Owned by the Angld-Dutch Plantations of Java, Ltd.] An Agricul-
tural Romance of 14.nglo-Dutch Enterprise (London, 1943), pp. 43-44
and 105; F. Fokkens 1 The Great Cultures of the Isle' of java (Leiden,
1910), pp. 27-31; and "Cinchona," in The Standard Cyclopedia of
Horticulture, ed.' L. H. Bailey, ..3 vols. (New York, 1943), 1:769-71.
20. Newbury, p. 114.
21. On the r~le of steamers in 'the British' takeover of Nigeria, see
A. C. G. Hastings, The Voyage of the Dayspring. Being the Journal
of the 'Late ·sir John Hawley Glover, R.N., G.C.M.G., Together with
some Accounts of the Expedition up the Niger River in r857 (Lon-
don, •1926);•Sir Alan CuthberJ Burns, History of Nigeria, 6th ed.
(New York, 1963), pp. 95 and 133-34; Goldsmith, p. 391; Dike,
pp. 204-12; Lloyd, pp. 128-30 and 199; Newbury, pp. 26, 78, and
114; Davies, pp. 40-48; and D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire
r830-r9r4 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), p. 132. On Nigerian resistance, see
Obaro Ikime, "Nigeria-Ebrohimi," and D. J. M. Muffett, "Nigeria-
Sokoto Caliphate," in Michael Crowder, ed., West African Resis-
tance: The Military Response to Coloni"al Occupation (London,
1971), pp. 205-32 and 26~9; and Robert Smith, "The Canoe in
West African History," Journal of African History 11 (1970):52&-27.
22. Gelfand, Livingstone, pp. 126, 165, and 17&-81; and Norman
Robert Bennett, "David Livingstone: Exploration for Christianity,"
in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Africa and its Explorers: Motives, Methods
and Impact (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 45.
23. Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan z820-z88z (London, 1959),
p. 132.
24. Pierre Gentil, La conquete du Tchad (z894-z9z6), 2 vols.
(Vincennes, 1961), 1:51-63.
25. Lederer, pp. 124-25; Marc Michel, La Mission Marchand z895-
z899 (Paris and The Hague, 1972).
79
PART TWO
GUNS
. AND CONQUESTS
CHA~TER FOUR
Weapons and Colonial Wars

of the Early
Nineteenth Century
Brethren! Ohl Be not afraid

Heaven your Christian work will afd;
Banish all your doubts and tears,
Rifles cannot fail 'gainst spears.
Take your banner! Onward go!
Chr~stian soldiers, seek your foe,
And the devil to refute,
Do not hesitate to shoot.1
Technology is power. It is the power wielded over the natutal

world, the defense against the hostile elements, the means of
using the forces of nature to do one's bidding add improve
one's condition. Quinine proph.ylaxis and river steamers were
technologies of this kind.
But technology is also power over people. Those ~ho c6n-
trolled key technologies-irrigation works in ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia, suits of armor and castles in medieval Europe,
for example-wielded great power over their subjects and
neighbors. ·Europeans who entered Africai and Asia in the
nineteen!h century often did so in the face of hostile popula-
i·
1·
tions. The history of imperialis,m is the history of warfare-of
I
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
strategy, tactics, and weapons. And in that most popular of

historical genres, the history of war, we will find some clues to
the causes of the new imperialism.
In the nineteenth century, the armies of the European pow-
ers p9ssessed similar weapons, and the outcome of battles was
determined by the number of soldiers on each side, or by
strategy and tactics. In distant parts of the world, however,
European forces faced-very different circumstances. There, in-
digenous armies were often much larger than the invading
'lo "l
forces, and knowledge of the terrain favored the local warriors.

Furthermore, European colonial armies were limited by econ-
omy-minded governments reluctant to commit troops or spend
money for military operations that did not noticeably enhanre
the security of the motherland. Nonetheless, European forces
were able to conquer large parts of Asia and Africa-empires
of truly Napoleonic proportions-at an astonishingly low cost.
What made this possible was the crushing superiority of Euro-
pean firepower that resulted from the firearms revolution of
the mid-century.
No period in history produced so dramatic a development

of infantry weapons as did the nineteenth .century. In terms of
effective firepower the disparity between the rifle of World
War One and the Napoleonic musket was greater than be-
tween the .musket and the bow and arrow. Unlike quinine
prophylaxis and river steamers, the modern. gun was devel-
oped almost' entirely for use among Europeans and Americans,
and its application to colonial warfare was 'a fortuitous side
effect. Yet ironically this new technology changed the balance
of power in the non-Western world more than it did in Eu-
rope itself.
The development of the modern gun was the product of a
complex series of minor advances from many different sources,
some of them centuries old. Two stages are of particular im-
portance in this evolutionary process. In the first stage, percus-
sion caps, rifling, oblong bullets, and paper cartridges brought
COLONIAL WARFARE IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY
the muzzle-loader to its peak of perfection. The second stage

began with the breechloading Prussian needle-gun and culmi-
nated in the Maxim gun. The shift from muzzle-loaders to
breechloaders in the 1860s was no ordinary technical achieve-
ment. It dramatically widened the power-gap between Euro-
peans and non-Wt;stern peoples and led directly to the out-
burst of imperialism at the end of the century. To understand
this momentous change, we must consider European and non-
Western weapons and tactics and the resulting power-gap both
before and after the 186os.2
At the beginning ot the nineteenth century the standard
weapon of the Europeal} infantryman was the muzzle-loading
smootfibore musket. It had a flintlock to detonate the p~wder
through a hole in the breech and a bayonet that could be at-
tached to the barrel for hand-to-hand combat. The Brown
Bess, which British soldiers used mUil 1853, was much the
same weapon their forefathers had carried at Blenheim in
1704. It had an official range of 200 yards but an effective one
of So, less than that of a good bow. Despite admonitions to
withhold their fire until they saw the whites of their enemies'
eyes, soldiers commonly shot away their weight in lead for
every man they killed., These muskets took at least a minute to,
load, so to maintain a steady rate of fire on the battlefield,
soldiers were drilled in the countermarch, each rank advanc-
ing in turn to shoot, then falling,back to reload. 3
One of the most serious drawbacks of the flintlock. muskets
was their poor firing record. Under the best ·conditions, they
fired only seven out of ten times, and in rain or damp weather
they ceased firing altogether. For this r,eason soldiers were
trained to use their weapons as pikes. In 1807, Alexander
Forsyth, a Scottish clergyman and amateur chemist, offered a
solution to this problem; using the violent explosive potas-
sium chlorate as a detonating powder and, a percussion lock
instead, of a flintlock, he made a gun that could fire in any
weather. Tests showed that a percussion lock musket mis-
fired only 4.5 times per thousand rounds, compared to 411
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
times for a flintlock. After 1814, Joshua Shaw of Philadelphia

improved upon Forsyth's invention by putting .the detonating
powder into little metal caps, thereby simplifying the loading
process and making the weapons even more impervious to the
elements. 4
There were those, of course, who deplored the march of
progress; as one correspondent wrote to the Gentleman's
Magazine in 1817:
Sir:
You will forgive my importunity if I take this occasion to add
my views on Mr. Forsyth's Patent Detonating Lock to those of
other recent correspondents. I cannot deny that Mr. Forsyth's
ilivention offers many vulgar advantages, among which the most
important are that the gun is made to shoot harder by conse-
quence of the forceful kindling of the powder, and the absence
of a touch-hole. Furthermore it will douptless fire in the most
inclement weather. True sportsmen, however, do not require the
new lock, for a good flint-lock will answer every conceivable pur-
pose a gentleman might wish. To those who say that it shoots
harder, I say, the patent breech flint-lock shoots hard enough; to
those who say it shoots faster, I say, if your flint-lock is good,
and you have learned to use it, the difference is too trifling to
merit attention by true sportsmen; to those who say it fires in
violent wind and rain, I say, gentlemen do not go sporting iry
such weather.
If, moreover, this new system were applied to the military,
war would shortly become so frightful as to exceed all bounds
of imagination, and future wars would threaten, within a few
years, to destroy not only armies, but civilization itself. It is to
be hoped, therefore, that many men of conscience, and with a
reflective turn, will militate most vehemently for the suppression
of this new invention.
I am, Sir, yours &c., &c.,
An English Gentleman5
Yet, from the military standpoint, the advantages of percus-

sion were evident enough, as this report from the Opium War
attests:
86
A company of sepoys, armed -with flintlock muskets, which

would not go off in a heavy rain, were surrounded by some thou-
sand Chinese, and were in eminent peril, when two companies
of marines, armed with percussion-cap muskets, were ordered up,
and soon dispersed the enemy with great loss.a
The -French army, which in 1822 became the, fir;;t military

force to adopt percussion locks, did not proceed to a massive
reconversion until the war scare of 1840. The Woolwich,Board
approved the first British percussion,gun, the Brunswick rifle,
in 1836, and three years later the British army began convert-
ing its 'old flintlocks to the new system. In the Opium War,
however, most British troops still carried flintlocks, and the
army was purchasing flintlocks as late as 1842. ,Evidently,
European armies were commanded by sporting gentlemen in
those days.7
If percussion made guns Ji.re more consistently, rifling made
them fire more accurately. Spiraling grooves inside the barrel
made the bullet spin on an axis parallel to the barrel instead
of tumbling randomly; this improved the range of guns con-
siderably. The principle of rifling, known since the sixteenth
century, was used mostly in hunting and target guns. A muzzle-
loading rifle of the early nineteenth century, such as the Penn-
sylvania-Kentucky rifle of the American frontiersman, had a
useful range of 300 yards, about four times that of a smooth-
bore musket.
During the War of Independence many American soldiers
were armed with hunting rifles. There were also rifle corps, in
the armies of the French Revolution, and the British created
their first Rifle Brigade in 1800. Yet early nineteenth-century
rifles were unsuited for the mass warfare of the times. They
took four times as long to load as muskets, and they fouled
quickly, thereby making them even harder to load. Sportsmen
could afford the time and care that these guns r.equired, but
'' ordinary soldiers could not be expected to display such .skills
in the heat of battle. Napoleon therefore banned rifles from
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
his armies in 1805, calling them "the worst weapon that could
be got into the hands of a soldier."
After the Napoleonic Wars, arms experts were once again
tempted by the rifle's advantages and tried to overcome its
drawbacks. Their goal was to develop a gun as accurate as a
rifle and as quick to load as a musket. The solution they found
lay not in the gun but in the bullet. An ideal musket bullet
should be small enough to slip easily down the barrel when it
is loaded yet large enough to grip the rifling snugly on its way
out. This would enable it to get the proper spin. To achieve
this, the bullet would have to swell at the moment of explo-
sion. In 1823, Captain Norton invented a bullet with a hollow
base, and in 1836 the gunmaker William Greener created one
with a wooden base plug that would force the bullet to ex-
pand; neither worked satisfactorily, however.
Meanwhile the French were experimenting with long bul-
lets that weight!d more than spherical bullets of the same cali-
ber. l';ong bullets could' be used only in riijes, for if they did
not spih, they would tumble end over end and fly erratically.
Finally, in 1848, a French army captain, Claude Etienne Mini~,
combined the two innovations, the hollow base and the ob-
long shape, into one bullet. His cylindro-og,ival bullet proved
to be remarkably accurate. At 100 yards a Minie rifle hit the
target 94.5 percent of the time, compared with a 74.5 percent
rate for the Brunswick; at 400 yards the percentages were 52.5
and 4.5 percent, respectively. In 1849 the French army began
issuing Minie rifles to its troops. In 1853 the British began re-
placing their Brown Bess with the Enfield, a new rifle with an
official range of 1,200 yards and an effective one of 500, six
times that of its precursor. It also used paper cartridges con-
taining the bullet and the correct amount of gunpowder; tal-
low was used to protect the cartridge from moisture.
Since Europe was at peace when the Minie and Enfield ap-
peared, these guns were tested in the colonies. The French is-
stled their. new rifles to the elite Chasseurs d'Afrique who
88
fought in Algc:ria. The British first tried out the "minny ball"
agai_nst the Xhosa in the Kaffir War pf 185,1.-52. The Enpeld
gained its most lasting notoriety in India, however. The revul-
sion of the Inqian sepoys at·using a cartri,dge greased with ani-
mal fat sparked the Indian revolution of 1857. 8
Before turning to the gun revolution of the late nineteenth

century, let us pause to consider the global balance of fire-
power before that time. Much has been said in the histories
of imperialism about the ,slow pace of European expansion in
the first half of the century, a slowness that has been attrib-
uted variousl~ to negligence, free trade, conservatism, and
other forms of lack of motive. By considering the warfare of
this period and contrasting it with that of the later decades
of the ceqtury, we shall see that this phenomenon was also
closely linked to the evolqtion of weapons and to the growing
disparity of power between the West and the non-West in the
age of the new imJ?erialism.
The British conquest of India was very long and, for the
Indian people, very costly. Part of the reason can be attributed
to the vastness of the subcontinent. But the,changing balance
of power between the Britisq and the Indian states was equally
responsible. Through centuries-old contact with Europeans,
the states of India had learned to raise armies on the Euro-
pean modtl, which were often trained by European instruc-
tors. In a recent article aµalyzing the Anglo-Indian wars of the
eighteenth and ear\y nineteenth centuries, Gayl Ness and Wil-
liam .Stahl have shown the remarkable evolution of this- bal-
ance of power.9
In the Mysore Wars at the end of the eighteenth ,eentury,
British forces of 10,000 to 15,000 easily, defeated Indian armies
six or seven times as large. The British advantage did not
come from tq.eir weapons, for the Indian forces had equally
good muskets, cannons, and ammunition. Rather, it lay in the
modern bureaucratic organization of the British armies in the
89
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
face of the armies of the Indian states, "aggregates of individ-

ual heroic warriors" tied together only by personal loyalties.
In the Mahratta Wars of the early nineteenth century, the
British armies defeated forces only twice as numerous.-Finally,
to defeat their enemies in the Sikh Wars of the 1840s, the
British had to bring into action armies equal in size and su-
perior in artillery firepower. What had happened was that the
Mahrattas and, to an even greater extent, the Sikhs had begun
to copy the European models of organization, recruitment,
taxation, and government, and the resistance they offered the
British had increased proportionally.
China, as Joseph Needham and his colleagues have demon-
strated, led the wotld in :rpost fields df technology until the
fifteenth century. 10 Yf:t when China confronted the West in
the nineteenth century, it'was with weapons outdated by one
or two centuries. The great forts at Taku, the Bogue, and
other points along the coa_stwere her main defense against the
sea barbarians. The better forts had plain walls without ditches,
bastions, or embrasures. Others were made of sandbags, mud,
and overturned boats. Their cannons were very heavy, made
for cannonballs up to thirty-seven pounds, but they were quite
old; some had been cast for the Ming emperors, three centuries
earlier, by Jesuit priests. Worst of all, they were fixed in the
masonry and could not be aimed at a moving target. In place
of field artillery, the Chinese used gingals, large muskets that
fired iron scrap or balls of up to.. one pound; these devices
made a deafening roar but did not carry far. As for infantry
soldiers, most of them carried bows, crossbows, swords, spears,
pikes, or even stones, relying on shields to protect them. Only
a few carried guns, poorly made matchlocks that they set on
a tripod to fire, and that they reloaded without wadding or
ramming the bullet. Finally, their war-junks, shallow but hard
to maneuver, were armed with small cannons firing balls up to
ten pounds; these guns were attached to blocks of wood and,
like the fortress guns, could not be aimed. Other naval weap-
go
ons included boarding nets, stink-pots of burning pitch hurled

by hand, and burning fire-boats set adrift to, run. into enemy
ships. 11
The Burmese, like their Chinese neighbors, also fell consid-
erably short of the military technology exhibited ·by their
European enemies. Their stockades were generally of wood
;md bamboo, and had few cannons. Their foot-soldiers were
ill-equipped as well. Some carried large two-handed swords or
spears. Others had matchlocks or flintlocks but were expected
to make their own gunpowder. Their bullets, of hammered
iron, fit loosely in the barrel and had a.short range, as Captain
Frederick Marryat explained: "Wh.en these muskets do go off
(and it is ten to one they do not), it is again ten to one that
the bullet falls short, from the inefficacy of the powder." And
he concluded:
... if the Burmahs had been as,well provided with every spe-
cies of arms equal to our own, the country would not have been
so soon subjugated as it was. Their system of defence was good,
their bravery undoubted, but they had no effective weapons.1 2
Algeria provides another example. Though much smaller

and less valuable than Jndia, this colony cost France far more
to conquer than India cost Britain. The peoples of Algeria
had a long, mostly hostile association with Europeans. They
had guns as good as the Europeans' and were equally p'roficient
at using them. The French expeditionary force that attacked
the city, of Algiers in 1830 was heavily equipped in the Na-
poleonic manner. The infantry carried muskets, the cavalry
had lances and swords, and the artillery was particularly pow-
erful, with thirty twenty-four-pounders, twenty sixteen-pound-
ers, and dozens of smaller cannons, howitzers, mortars, and
rockets. The biggest novelty, and the only one that would
have surprised Napoleon, was the steamer Sphinx, which
helped bombard the city.13 The Turkish janissaries and Al-
gerian militiamen defending Algiers had equally good flint
91
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
lock muskets, but their artillery was antiquated, and their de-
fenses soon collapsed under the French bombardment. 14
The resistance offered by the Algerians stiffened as the
French moved inland. The most important chief of the in-
terior, the emir Abd-el Kader, was determined to oust the
invaders. At first the French tried to buy his friendship, and
in 1833, General Desmichels gave him 400 new muskets and
ammunition. A treaty signed the next year between Desmichels
and Abd-el Kader guaranteed the Algerian the right to pur-
chase arms, powder, and sulphur. In June 1835, Abd-el Kader's
army, now well armed, -attacked a'nd defeated a French force
of 2,500. Again, to obtain peace, the French had to offer weap-
ons., By the secret protocol to the Treaty of Tafna in June
1837, General Bugeaud promised the emir 3,000 rifles and am-
munition. Thus, to secure their small enclaves, the French
provided Abd-el Kader with guns equal to their own. By 1840
the French were confined to the coastal cities, while Abd-el
Kader, with an arniy of 80,000, controlled the interior. He also
purchased some 2,000 rifles from Britain, which were smuggled
in via Gibraltar and Morocco. With the help of French and
Spanish artisans, he began manufacturing his own rifles at
Tagdempt and cannons at Tlemcen as well. When Bugeaud
(now a marshal) decided to take the offensive after 1840, the
French persuaded Britain to cut off arms supplies to Abd-el
Kader. Even then the conquest required over 106,000 men, or
one third of the French army. By the time Algeria was com-
pletely pacified in 1857 after many massacres and scorched-
earth compaigns, France had lost 23,787 men in action, and
thousands more from disease. 15
What conclusions can we draw from these four examples of

early nineteenth-centu:r:y imperialist warfare? In the First
Anglo-Burmese and Opium wars, the Burmese and Chinese
had two weaknesses; they were armed with antiquated weap·
ons and-as we saw earlier-they were vulnerable to attack by
92
river steamers. Thus the British were able to achieve their

objectives with modest forces in a relatively brief time. India
and Algeria were quite different. In the early nineteenth cen-
tury the Indian states and Algerian tribes possessed' infantry
weapons comparable to those of the Eµropeans. If at first they
did not have the most efficient organization, they soon devel-
oped it. And both were cases of warfare in areas where river
steamers were not essential. Consequently; the European forces
were eventually reduced to fighting on arl equal footing in the
midst of enemy territory. For this .reason the conquests of
India and Algeria were lengthy, costly, and difficult. In con-
trast to Burma and China, India and Algeria may serve as ex-
amples of imperialist warfare without the benefit of' techno-
logical supremacy. The motivation of the Europeans was there,
as was their willingness to sacrifice lives and. treasure. What
was lacking was the advantag<; that steamers g~ve the Euro-
peans in Burma and China, or that the breechloader was to
give them later, in Africa.
NOTES
!.,,Satirical "hymn," in Truth (Apr. 16, 1891) quoted in John

Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa I878-I895; a Study in 'the
'New Imperialism' (Cambridge, 1972), p. 15;
2. Sources consulted on early nineteenth-century European fire-
arms include William Young Carman, A History of Firearms from
Earliest Times to I9I4 (London, 1955); Russell I. Fries, "British
Response to the American System: The Case bf tlie Small-Arms In-
dustry after 1850," in Technology and Culture 16(July 1975):377-
403; Brig. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York, 1933);
William Wellington Greener, The .Gun and Its Development/ with
Notes on Shooting, 9th ed. (London, 1910); Robert Held, with
Nancy Jenkins, The Age of Firearms, 'a Pictorial History, 2nd ed.
(New York, 1978); James E. Hicks, Notes on French Ordnance, I7I7
to I936 (Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1938); Edward L. Katzenb'ach, Jr., "The
Mechanization of War, 1880-1919," in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll
93
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
W. Pursell, Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols.

(New York, 1967), 2:548-51; J. Margerand, Armement et equipement
de l'infanterie franfaise du XVIe au XXe siecle (Paris, 1945); Col.
Jean Martin, Ar"!es a feu de l'Armee franfaise: z86o a z940, his-
torique des evolutions precedentes, comparaison avec les armes
etrangeres (Paris, 1974); H. Ommundsen and Ernest H. Robinson,
Rifles and Ammunition (London, 1915); Thomas A. Palmer, "Mili-
tary Technology," in Kranzberg and Pursell, 1:489-502; "Small
Arms, Military," in Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1973), 20:
665-78; and G. W. P. Swenson, Pictorial History of the Rifle (New
York, 1972).
3. Greener, p. 624; Swenson, p. 12.
4. Swenson, p. 19; Held, pp. 171-74; Greener, pp. 112 and 117;
"Small Arms," 20:668; Fuller, p. 110; and Martin, pp. 58-64.
5. Quoted in Held, p. 173.
6. Lieut. Gen. Lord Viscount Gough to London Gazette (Oct. 8,
1841) quoted in Fuller, p. 128 no. 20.
7. preener, p. 624; Carman, p. 178; Margerand, p. !14; Martin,
pp. 64-70; Hicks, p. !n; Held, p. 182; Peter Ward Fay, The Opium
War, z840-z842.; Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early
Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced
Her Gates Ajar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), p. 130; John D. Goodman,
"The Birmingham Gun Trade," in Samuel Timmins, ed., The Re-
sources, Products, and Industrial History of Birmingham and the
Midland Hardware District (London, 1866), pp. 384-85.
8. On the development of the rifle and the oblong bullet in the
early nineteenth century, see Goodman, p. 385; Carman, pp. 104-13;
Fuller, pp. 110 and 128-29 n. 23; Greener, pp. 623-31 and 727; Held,
p. 183; Hicks, pp. 31-32; Margerand, p. 116; Martin, pp. 73-82;
Ommundsen and Robinson, pp. 18-22, 46-65, and 78-79; "Small
Arms," 20:669; and Swenson, pp. 16-25. Examples of the Brown
Bess, Minie, Enfield, and other early nineteenth-century military
guns can be seen in the Salle Louvois, M usee de l' Armee, Hotel des
Invalides, Paris.
9. Gayl D. Ness and William Stahl, "Western Imperialist Armies
in Asia," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 no. 1
(Jan. 1977):2-29. See also E. R. Crawford, "The Sikh Wars, 1845-9,"
in Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaign (London, 1967),
pp. 35-36.
10. Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, 7
vols. in• 12 parts (Cambridge, 1954-).
94
11. On Chinese weapons at the time of the Opium War, see Jack
Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (New York 1975), pp. 51-52;
Fay, pp. 209, 272-73 and 344-45; Greener, pp. 123-24; John Lang
Rawlinson, China's Struggle for Nav,,al Development, r839-r895
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. fi.'..15;G. R. G. Worcester, "The Chi-
nese War Junk," Mariner's Mirror 34(1948):22; and Barton C.
Hacker, "The Weapons of the -west: Military Technology and Mod-
ernization in 19th-Century China and Jaean," in Technology and
Culture 18 no. 1 Qan. 1977):43--:47· On display in the Cour d'Hon-
neur, Hotel des Invalides, Paris, are two Chinese bronze smoothbore
twenty-four-pounder cannons tl;lken at the Taku forts in 1858; they
are very similar to European cannons of the eighteenth century.
12. Capt. Frederick Marryat, Olla Podrida (Paris, 1841), pp. 80-82.
See also Maung Htin Aung, A History of Burma (New York and
London, 1967), p. 213. At the end of their article on "Western Im-
perialist Armies in Asia," Ness and Stahl glance briefly at the three
Anglo-Burmese Wars (pp. 22-23); by mentioning neither Burmese
weapons nor such British weapons as river steamers, breechloaders,
or machine guns, they mistakenly apply the Indian experience to
Burma; their conclusion that "technology alone does not appear as a
critical variable" is, in this case, in error.
13. Duncan Haws, Ships and the Sea: A Chronological Review
(New York, 1975), p. 126. There are two models of this ship in Paris:
one in the Musee de la Marine (along with a. model of its engine),
the other in the Musee de la Technique, Conservatoire National des
Arts et Metiers.
14. One of the cannons of Fort l'Empereur i°" Algiers was taken
by the french in 1830 and is now on display tn the Cour d'Honneµr,
Hotel des Invalides, Paris. It is a bronze smoothbore twenty-four-
pounder cast in Algiers by the Ottomans in 1581.
15. On the weapons of the French conquest of Algeria, see Pierre
Boyer, La vie quotidienne a Alger a la veille de l'intervention fran-
faise. (Paris, 1963), p. 140; Raphael ,Danziger, Abd al-Qadir and the
Algerians: Resistance to the French and Internal Consplidation (N;ew
York, 1977), pp. 25, 117, and 224-56; Charles-Andre Julien, Histoire
de l'Algerie contemporaine, V~l. 1: La Conquete et les debuts de la
colonisation (r8:z7-r87r) (Paris, 1964), pp. 53, 178-82, and 279; and
Maj. George Benton Laurie, The French Conquest of Algeria (Lon-
don, 1909), pp. 21-36, 91-101, and 208-09.
95
CHAPTER FIVE
The Breechloader
Revolution
The military rifles of the 1850s were farsuperior to their pre-

cursors the muskets in both accuracy and consistency of fire.
Yet they were slow and awkward to use. They fouled easily,
they emitted puffs of smoke, and their paper cartridges were
delicate and vulnerable to moisture. Worst of all, they:could
be loaded only when the soldier was standing, in other words
in full· view of the enemy. In a battle against less well-armed
adversaries the advantages they offered were substantial but
not overwhelming. The overwhelming firepower of European
colonial armies resulted from ;;mother innovation: breech-
loading.
The idea of loading a gun by the breech, like every other
innovation in gun design, occurred repeatedly over several
c~nturies before finall}'. coming to fruition. Some of the ear-
liest working breechloaders;-the Ferguson, the Hall, Sharp's
carbine-were American guns, the outcome perhaps of the in-
satiable appetite for firearms in a frontier environment. 1
In Europe the breechloader gained acceptance very slowly.
The ancestor of all European breechloaders was the Dreyse
needle-gun. Invented by Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse in the
96
THE BREECHLOADER REVOLUTION
late 1820s, this gun was adopted by the Prussian army in

1841-42 but it was not until 1848 that Prussia replaced her
muskets with Dreyses. The gun had a bolt-action breech mech-
anism and used paper cartridges; a long needle penetrated the
cartridge and struck a percussion cap at the base of the bullet,
igniting the powder.
The •Dreyse's forte was its loading speetl. 'During the war of
1866 between Pr,,ussiaand Austria over the mastery of the Ger-
man states, Prussian soldiers, kneeling or lying down, could
fire their Dreyses seven times in the span it took the Austrians
to load and fire once, standing up. The war, which was brief,
culminated in, a Prussian victory at Sadowa. This battle not
only assured Prussia's supremacy in• Germ~ny but revolu-
tionized the art of warfare.,Before that-battle, armies ~aw no
need to uniformly adopt new equipment; instead they grad-
ually acquired new weijpons as their old ones wore out.,After
Sadpwa, howeve-, all the great powers of Europe scrambled to
switch to breechloaders. An arms race had begun, renewed
eyery few years by the now rapidly•evolving technology of gun
design. Armies called for newer and better guns, and their
own laboratories competed with private -inventors to meet
their needs. Long ):\efore the generals realized the implications
of the new firepower, the .fate of ·nations in war came to de-
pend on the arms manufactured during times of peate. As for
the other peoples of the world, their fate now depended partly
on the increasing firepower of the great nations of Europe and
partly on the waves of discarded obsolete weapons that flooded
the international,arms market every few years.
In 1866, the year of Sadowa, the French 'army adopted the
Chassepot, a bolt-action needle-gun- that fired six times a min-
ute and 'had an official range of 650 yards, compared to the
Dreyse's 350. Old but s\ill serviceable Minie muzzle-loaders
were converted to breechloaders as well. Both types of rifles
were used in the Franco-Prussian War but neither satisfied the
experts. They both fouled qlli.ckly an.cl leaked hot gases at the
breech, and the more they fouled the more they leaked, until
97
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
soldiers had to fire them at arm's length to avoid being singed.

This annulled any accuracy the rifles might have possessed.
It was the British who solved this problem. Rather than
throw out muzzle-loading Enfields of recent vintage, the Brit-
ish army parsimoniously converted them to breechloaders by
adding a breech-block mechanism invented,by Jacob Snider of
New York. Colonel Boxer, superintendent of the Royal Labo-
ratory at Woolwich Arsenal, realized that most of the disad~
vantages of breechloaders came from the cartridge. In 1866 he
developed the brass cartridge, which not only protected the
powder in transit, but completely sealed the breech at the mo-
ment of firing. The bullet could now be made harder and
tighter and the grooves shallower than before, without fear of
gas leakage. As a result the bullet had a longer and flatter tra-
jectory; the Snider-Enfield had a range three times as great as
that of the Dreyse. In 1869 the British army abandoned the
idea of converting its Enfields and instead adopted a brand-
new model, the Martini-Henry. This was the first really satis-
factory rifle of the new generation: fast, accurate, tough, im-
pervious to the weather, a weapon that made every other gun
obsolete. Of course the French and the Prussians did not lag
far behind. As soon as their war was over, they too began
to search for a better weapon. The French army was first to
rearm, adopting the Gras in 1874. Three years later the Prus-
sians follow.e.d_wijh the 1877 Mauser. Soon eveh smaller Euro-
pean countries followed suit. 2
No sooner had the great powers adopted .the latest breech-

loaders than they had to rearm again, this time with repeating
rifles. The earliest repeaters were American: the Smith and
Wesson of 1855, the Spencer and the Henry of the Civil War,
and the 1867 Winchester. Though quick firing,,.ti}ey had an
unfortunate tendency to explode if one bullet toµched an-
other in a certain way. In European armies, several systems
were designed to contain the bullets and feed them safely to
98
the breech. The French army- began converting its Gras single-
shot rifles into Gras-Kropatchek repeaters, using a seven-
cartridge tubular magazine under the barrel. The Germans
followed with various· Mausers of 'the 1880s, and the British
offered the Lee-Metford, which used James Lee's patent box-
cartridge of 1879.
Just as important as the repeating mechanisms was the in-
Nention of smokeless powder. In 1885 the Frenchman Vieille
discovered the explosive properties of nitrocellulose. This
chemical, and its relative nitroglycerine, burned without
smoke or ash, thus enabling soldiers to remain invisible and
reducing considerably the need to clean the barrel. Smokeless
powder had ·other advantages as well. It burned more evenly,
contained more energy than gunpowder, and was less vulnera-
ble to moisture; for use in colonial wars, the British army even
developed a specially stable explosive called Cordite.
Throughout the century, the caliber of guns (that is, the in-
side diameter of the barrel) diminished as their accuracy im-
proved: from .75" (19 mm) for the Brown Bess, to .584'' (14.6
mm) for the Enfield, to .44-.46" (u-11.5 mm) for such repeat-
ing rifles as the Martini-Henry or the Gras-Kropatchek. The
new explosives, thanks to their higher muzzle velocities, al-
lowed gunmakers to reduce the caliber still further, to .32" (8
mm) or even less for the repeaters of the 1890s, while increas-
ing their range and accuracy. .
The fact that European armies could ootain millions of
complex new rifles on short order is of course- an astonishing
phenomenon in itself. Contributing to this feat was the revo-
lution in the making of guns brought on by industrialization.
To describe·the evolution of the gun industry would take us
too. far afield. ·Suffice it to say that its two main components
were the 1 'American system" and steel. The "American system"
of intercb.angeable parts was first applied to gun making by
Eli Whitney in 1797 but did ,not 'reach the Old World until
some sixty years later. Much impressed with the American
99
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
guns shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, officials of the

Woolwich Arsenal sent a delegation to observe the Springfield
Armory in Massachusetts. The new Enfield Arsenal was built to
make Enfields with interchangeable parts by mass production
methods. As for .steel, it was an economic factor that made it
the choice material for military guns. Before 1875, rifle barrels
were' commonly made of wrought iron or, in high-quality
sporting guns, or mixed iron and steel. With the introduction
of the new Bessemer, Siemens-Martin, and Gilchrist-Thomas
steel-making processes in the third quarter of the'century, the
cost of crude ·steel dropped by three quarters or more, and
it became possible to produce high-quality barrels cheaply
enough for military use. These factors (as we will see) were of
the greatest importance in Asia and Africa, for it meant that
the newer European guns could no longer be copied or re-
paired by blacksmiths but demanded industrial steel and ma-
chine shops.a
No description of the gun revolution can be complete with-
out mentioning the machine gun. The first machine guns were
clumsy hand-cranked, multibarreled devices such as the Gat-
ling of the American Civil War, the Montigny Mitrailleuse
which failed to save France in 1870, and the Hotchkiss, Gard-
ner, and Nordenfelt of the late 1870s. These guns were heavy
and prone to failure, and served best on boats. Only with the
invention of smokeless explosives could a ·reliable machine
gun emerge. This was the brainchild of Hiram S. Maxim. The
gun he patented in 1884 used only one barrel. As smokeless
cartridges were consistent in their energy output, the loading
could be done by gas pressure or by recoil, instead, of with a
crank. The Maxim was light enough for,infantry to carry, it
could be set up inconspicuously, and it spat out eleven bullets
per second. Other manufacturers soon followed suit with small-
'Caliber, smokeless, quick-firing machine guns of their own. The
1892 Nordenfelt, made at the Enfield Armory, .had 'five barrels
and fired ten rounds 'per second, a rate three times faster than
that of its gunpowder precursor.
100
The gun revolution that had ,begun in the 1860s was com-
pleted by the 1890s. Any European infantryman could now fire
lying down, undetected, in any weather, fifteen rounds of am-
munition in as many seconds at targets up to half a mile away.
Machine gunners had even greater power. Though the gen-
erals were not to realize it for many decades, the age of raw
courage and cold steel had ended, and the era of arms races
and industrial slaughter had begun. 4
Colonial troops in Asia and Africa were among the first

beneficiaries of the gun revolution. In a few instances they re-
ceived new weapons even ahead of their ·counterparts sta-
tioned in Europe, and occasionally these colonial forces con-
tributed in small ways to the process of technological change.
Until the mid-187os the French colonial force's were armed
with Chassepots or with an earlier gun,, the muzzle-loading
Fusil de Marine et Tirailleurs Senegalais of '1861. In 1874-76
the Infanterie de Marine (France's colonial army outside Al-
geria) was armed with Gras single-shot breechloaders. •The
British meanwhile had become interested in machine guns
and had purchased a number of .45 caliber Gatlings for their
colonial troops; these guns saw service in the wars against the
Zulus in 1871 and 1879, and against 'the Ashanti in 1874.
Later, in 1884, the British used Nordenfelts in the campaign
of Egypt.
After 1-878,repeaters made their appearance in the colonies.
The first was the Gras-Kropatchek of 1878, which•was used in
the French attack on Tonkin in 1884 and in the campaigns in
the upper Senegal and upper Niger regions irl 1885-86.5 This
rifle was followed by the newer Lebel, which saw actio:Q.in the
Sudan beginning in 1892. T~e new rifles offered gre;ttr ad-
vantages to colonial troops than to forces in Europe. Their
brass cartridges and smokeless explosives were much more re-
sistant to long-distance transport and tropical c;limates than
were paper cartridges and gunpowder. They also weighed one
101
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
third less and thus required one third fewer porters to carry
them through the bush.
The 1890s saw the appearance on colonial battlefields of
Maxim and other light machine guns. Lord Wolseley, con-
queror of the Ashanti, paid Hiram Maxim a visit in 1885 and
"exhibited the most lively interest in the gun and its innova-
tor; and, thinking of the practical purposes to which the gun
might be put, especially in colonial warfare, made several sug-
gestions to Mr. Maxim." The German General Staff, still
strongly opposed to machine guns in the German army, al-
lowed a few to be sent to Africa to be used by colonial troops. 6
The machine gun was to prove as decisive in the colonial wars
of the turn of the century as the breechloader had been in the
seventies and eighties.
By the turn of the century there was some experimentation
in weapons design for colonial use. The French army, for ex-
ample, developed its "Modele 1902," an improved Lebel, espe-
cially for the Tirailleurs lndochinois; this gun later evolved
into the 1907 model "Fusil Colonial" issued to all colonial
troops, which in turn became the basic weapon of French in-
fantrymen in· World War One. In addition to these infantry
weapons, colonial units possessed a few light howitzers and
cannons with explosive shells to knock down the walls of forti-
fied towns; these pieces replaced the Congreve rockets used
earlier in the_~e_htury.7
The last bit of "progress" in the evolution of the gun arose
in response to the special needs of empire. In the words of the
historians Ommundsen and Robinson:
... savage tribes, with whom we were always conducting wars,

refused to be sufficiently impressed by the Mark II bullet; in
fact, they often ignored it altogether, and, having been hit in
four or five places, came on to unpleasantly close quarters.
The solution to this unpleasantness was patented in 1897 by

Captain Bertie-Clay of the Cartridge and Percussion Cap Fae-
102
tory at Dum-Dum outside Calcutta: the mushrooming or

"dum-dum" bullet. This particular device was considered so
cruel that even the "civilized" nations refused to use it against
one another. 8
NOTES
1. The breechloaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

displayed in the Musee de l'Armee in Paris were experimental guns
never produced in quantities.
2. On early breechloaders, see William Young Carman, A History
of Firearms from Earliest Times to r9r4 (London, 1955), pp. 117-21;
J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York, 1933), p. 116;
William Wellington Greener, The Gun and its Development; with
Notes on Shooting, 9th ed. (London, 1910), pp. 119-22, 590, 631, and
701-11; Robert Held, with Nancy Jenkins, The Age of Firearms, a
Pictorial History, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), p. 184; James E. Hicks,
Notes on French Ordnance, r7r7 to r936 (Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1938),
p. 26; J. Marger~nd, Armement et equipement de l'infanterie fran-
faise du XVJe au XXe siecle (Paris, 1945), p. 117; Col. Jean Martin,
Armes ti feu de l'Armee franfaise: r86o ti r940, historique des evolu-
tions prt!ct!dentes, comparaison avec les armes t!trangeres (Paris,
1974), pp. 124-86; H. Ommundsen and Ernest H. Robinson, Rifles
and Ammunition (London, 1915), pp. 65-go; Thomas A. Palmer,
"Military Technology," in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell,
Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civ(lization, 2 vols. (New York,
1967), 1:493-94; "Small Arms, Military," in Encyclopaedia Britannica
(Chicago, 1973), 20:670-71; and G. W. P. Swenson, Pictorial History
of the Rifle (New York, 1972), pp. 19-32.
3. On repeaters, see Carman, pp. 112-22 and 178; Russell I. Fries,
"British Response to the American System: The Case of the Small-
Arms Industry after 1850," in Technology and Culture 16Quly
1975):386-87; Fuller, pp. 111 and 120; Greener, pp. 241, 283-84, 590,
703-17, and 727-31; Held, p. 184; Hicks, pp. 27-28; Margerand,
p. 118; Martin, pp. 247-328; Ommundsen and Robinson, pp. 54-65,
78-101, 111-12, and 118; "Small Arms," 20:671-77; and Swenson,
pp. 24-35.
4. On early machine guns, see Lt. Col. Graham Seton Hutchison,
Machine Guns, Their History and Tactical Employment (Being Also
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
a History of the Machine Gun Corps, r9r6-r922) (London, 1938),

pp. 31-50; and "Machine Gun," in Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chi-
cago, 1973), 14:521-26.
5. Col. Henri-Nicolas Frey, Campagne dans le Haut Senegal et
dans le Haut Niger (r885-r886) (Paris, 1888), pp. 6o-62.
6. Hutchison, pp. 54-55.
7. Frey, pp. 52-53 ..
8. Col. Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and
Practice, 3rd ed. (London, 1906), pp. 378 and 438-39; Carman,
p. 81; John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New
York, 1975), pp. 82 and 98; Hicks, pp. 27-28; Hutchison, pp. 31-39
and 54; Margerand, pp. 117-18; Ommundsen and Robinson, pp. 93
and u8; Yves Person, Samori: Une Revolution Dyula, 3 vols. (Dakar,
1968), 2:907.
CHAPTER SIX
African Arms
The great rush of conquests that historians call the new im-
perialism took place in Africa: during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. Several factors influenced the timing of
the scramble for Africa: the discovery oLquinine prophylaxis,
the Franco-Prussian War, the ambitions of King Leopold of
Belgium, and the economic crisis of the 1880s, to name but a
fe;. The techniques and patterns of conquest, however, were
also a product of the gun revolution and the resulting dis-
parity of firepower between Africans and Europeans. We must
therefore now direct our attention to Africa and the weapons
of the African peoples.
Th~ armament of Africans in the nineteenth century varied
considerably from one region to another, depending on cul!
tural, economic, and ecological conditions. 1 We can distinguish
roughly three zones, keeping in mind that there was substan-
tial overlap and that the boundaries shifted in the course of
the century: Areas that had been in close contacf with Euro:
peans for a long time-principally those situated along the
West African coast-were well supplied with imported muskets
and ammunition. In intetior regions where horses could sur-
105
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
vive, albeit with difficulty, as in the savannas of the Sudan

which stretched across Africa from east to west, firearms were
known, but rare; here cavalrymen carried swords and spears.
Finally, in those areas where animal trypanosomiasis was en-
demic-a zone that covered most of equatorial, eastern, and
southern Africa-there were no horses and very few guns; the
principal weapons used were the assegai or throwing spear,
and the bow and arrow.
The peoples of the West African coastal states had known

firearms for at least three centuries. At the time of the slave
trade, imported guns had been one of the main commodities
for which slaves were exchanged, and in turn these guns were
used to capture more slaves. The importation of firearms did
not end with the official abolition of the Atlantic slave trade
but continued to grow. In 1829, Britain shipped 52,540 guns
to West Africa. In 1844, some 80,530 muskets, 596 pistols, and
6 shotguns reached the African shores. By the 1860s the export
of guns from Birmingham to Africa ran about 100,qoo to
150,000 per year. From 1845 to 1889, between 6.3 and 17.8 per-
cent of all British gun exports made their way to Africa; only
India imported as large a share of British guns. In addition,
the gunmakers of Liege, Belgium, produced an average of
18,000 muskets a year for Africa, and in some years over 40,000.
France, Spain, and other countries that exported little to In-
dia, also manufactured muskets for the African market.
The guns that were shipped to Africa were inferior to those
exported to other parts of the world. The so-called "Dane
guns" of the African trade were the simplest, cheapest, and
worst flintlock smoothbore muskets that European ingenuity
could create. While the average British musket sold to India
in 1844 cost over two pounds sterling, and several thousand
shotguns were sold there at an average price of over six
pounds, the British muskets destined for the African trade cost
less than half a pound apiece, and those made in Liege cost as
106
AFRICAN ARMS
little as four shillings. In West African terms, a musket in the

1870s was worth the equivalent of 17Y2 yards of calico or 13
pounds of gunpowder. 2
Weapons made so cheaply were as dangerous to their users
as to their targets. They seldom fired in wet weather, and they
frequently burst. Africans were aware of these defects; in 1855
the Igbo- boycotted the Lagos palm oil market for five months,
partly to protest the defective guns offered forsale there. Yet
in some ways Dane guns were well suited to Africa, for they
could more easily by repaired by village blacksmiths than
higher-quality weapons. The gunpowder available in Africa,
whether imported or locally made with imported sulphur, was
also of poor quality. Indigenous gunpowder absorbed mois-
ture and fired,inconsistently. Imported gunpowder was corned
to resist moisture and burn more easily, but it was more ex-
pensive. Because of the general inaccuracy of their barrels and
the high price of lead, African hunters often used several bul-
lets of polished stone, shotgun style. Only when the Europeans
entered Africa with really accurate rifles did Africans feel the
need for the same.a
In the Sudanic belt between the Sahara and the, West Afri-
can forests, horses were much prized by the aristocracy, and
the cavalry was the mainstay of the power of kings. Warriors
on horseback wort! light armor of chain-mail, quilted cloth,
or leather and fought with spears, swords, and shields. Foot-
soldiers shot unfletched poisoned arrows at short range or
wielded battle axes and assegais. Towns were protected by
walls of adobe. Guns were not unknown. Since the fifteenth
century, traders and raiding expeditions from North Africa had
repeatedly brought firearms into the Sudan. Armies equipped
with guns periodically took part in Sudanic wars. Yet the high
cost of imported guns and powder, and the inability of Sudanic
blacksmiths to produce their own, made firearms a sporadic
phenomenon. 4
The third region of Africa, from a -weapons point of view,
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
lay roughly south of the fourth parallel North. As one went

further from the coast into the interior of central and south-
ern Africa, guns got progressively rarer, a consequence of trans-
portation problems and the trading policies of the coastal
states. In those regions of the African interior where the tsetse-
borne trypanosomiasis made it impossible to keep horses, states
were small and loosely defined, and the main weapons were
the bow and arrow and the assegai. Here Africans had little
or no experience with firearms when they first met Europeans;
as o'ne African survivor of such an encounter recalled: "The
whites did not seize their enemy as we do by the body, but
thundered from afar .... Death raged everywhere-like the
death vomited forth from the tempest." 5 In other places the
few muskets that existed were used for psychological effect; in
David Birmingham's words, "although used with minimal
skill, the noise of a large, overloaded musket was a major fac-
tor in deciding the outcome of village warfare." 6 •It was here
also that Muslim slave-raiders from the Eastern Sudan and the
Indian Ocean coast, gradually moving forward in the course
of the nineteenth century, caused such havoc among the non-
Muslim peoples of the interior, though the raiders were armed
only with muskets. 7
The basic cause of sub-Saharan Africans' dependence on im-

ported gu~s _was the nature of their iron industry. lron was
made in village furnaces ventilated either by hand·operated
bellows or •by the natural ·updraft of the fire. The wheel was
practically unknown, and animals, wind, and falling water
were seldom used as sources of energy. Hen~e Africans did not
use mechanically operated bellows or air pumps. Because of
poor ventilation, their furnaces never got hot .,enough to pro-
d,uce cast iron. Instead the spongy iron bloom was repeatedly
hammered by blacksmiths into wrought iron or steel. The re-
sulting metal was adequate for hand tools but not t:onsistent
enough for barrels or precision parts. There was also a prob-
108
AFRICAN ARMS
lem of productivity, for the cost of African iron was simply too
high, and the supply too low, to meet ·the demand for guns or
to compete with cheap firearms from Europe. 8
The arrival after 1870 of Europeans with quick-firing breech-
loaders started an arms race in Africa, for it ga~e Africans a
powerful incentive to acquire these new weapons. On a few
occasions Africans were able to purchase weapons directly
from the manufacturers; for instance, the Khedive Ismail of,
Egypt ~ent a 'mission to Europe in 1866-67 to buy breechJoa,d-
ers and steel artillery. 9 Purchases from general traders 'and gun
runners were more commoh. As the armies of Europe periodi-
cally rearmed with ever more powerful weapons, their obsolete
models were 'sold to private entrepreneurs, who disposed of
them throughout the world. Thus when Napoleon III dis-
solved the Garde Nationale after 1866, its 600,000 muskets
were sold to merchants who shipped many to Africa. When
the French army rearmed with Gras rifles in 1874, its old
Chassepots went to gun manufacturers in Liege, who rebuilt
them and sold them to traders; by 1890, Chassepots were freely
available along the coasts of Africa. 10 In the 1890s the Fon of
Dahomey were able to buy large numbers of Chassepots and
other guns left,over from· the Franco-Prussian and American
Civil wars: Dreyses, Mausers, Mitrailleuses Montigny, Spencers,
Winchesters, and others. 11 According to British consular re-
ports, German, Portuguese, and French officials connived to
introdlfce firearms and munitions of all kinds into British East
Africa. 12
Black South Africans obtained modern weapons-from whites
living in their midst. •Settlers had up-to-date rifles which they
sometimes lost or gave away. Mine operators found ,thati they
could best recruit black laborers by offering them rifles. Gov-
ernments, desperate for revenue, benefited from:the high taxes
and import duties,on firearms and encouraged their prolifera-
tion. Even missionaries like Livingstone provided their con-
verts with weapons for self-defense. The ability of a number of
109
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
South Africans to resist the European intrusion, as in Lesotho

or Griqualand West, can be linked to these arms purchases. 13
Yet the barriers to the purchase of modern weapons were
formidable. One barrier was cost. In 1895, in Rabah's capital
of Dikwa in the Central Sudan, a Martini-Henry cost one hun-
dred Maria-Theresa dollars, as compared to three to seven for
a slave, Rabah's chief export commodity.1 4 And when Moham-
med bin Abdullah-the so-called "Mad Mullah"-rose up in
Somalia in 1898, he had to trade five or six she-camels for
every rifle he bought.is
The high price of modern rifles reflected not only the costs
of manufacture and shipping but also the many political re-
strictions to which they were subject. Europeans in Africa were
worried about Africans obtaining these weapons and tried to
prevent this from happening. From the mid-century on, the
white settlers of Natal and Cape Colony proposed many
schemes to register firearms, to restrict their sale, or even to
disarm Africans entirely. In r854, Britain agreed to stop sales
of breechloaders to Africans but to continue them to the
Orange Free State. 16 By the 1880s the influx of breechloaders
into Africa caused increasing anxiety among Europeans. Evan-
Smith, the British consul-general in Zanzibar, wrote,in 1888:
Unless some steps are taken to check this immense import of

arms into East Africa the development and pacification of this
great continent will have to be carried out in the face of an
enormous population, the majority of whom will probably be
armed with first-class breech-loading rifles.17
To stem the flow of arms, the Brussels Treaty of 1890 pro-

hibited the sale of breechloaders to Africans between the twen-
tieth parallel North and the twenty-second parallel South, but
permitted smoothbore muskets to be sold in this zone. The
European colonial powers were not satisfied with this mea-
sure, for they followed it up with similar acts in 1892 and
1899. On the whole, however, the policy achieved its goal. 18
The effect of arms restrictions was most noticeable in the
110
AI,1UCAN ARMS
Central Sudanic kingdoms of Sokoto, Bornu, and Wadai.

There, as we have seen, firearms were known, but rare and
precious. The reason is not difficult to discern. For arms to
reach the Central Sudan, they had to pass through several
other states, each of which had reasons to restrict the trade.
The French conquest of Algeria after 1830 and the Ottoman
occupation of Tripoli after 1835 effectively choked off the gun
trade from the north. As European traders penetrated' up the
Niger after 1854, some of their rifles found their way to Yoru-
baland .and Ibadan. The Brussels Treaty of 1?90, however,
put a stop to the open importation of modern weapons before
the advancing frontier of the rifle ~rade had reached the Cen-
tral Sudanic states.
The Sanusi, who took over Cyrenaica and some Saharan
oases after 1890, partly compensated for this cut-off by provid-
ing...a new source of aqns. The numbers of weapons found in
Wadai in the course of the century show the results of the
trade. Between 1836 and 1858, Sultan Muhammad Saleh ash-
Sharif seems to have ac~umulated 300 muskets; Sultan Ali
(1859 to 1874) had 4,000 muskets; and Sultan Doudmourra
(1902 to 1909) had 10,000 guns of which 2,500 were breechload-
ers. Doudmourra's troops, though, were not trained to use
their weapons. Until the very end, firearms in:the Central
Sudan were so valuable that" rulers entrusted their soldiers
with them only on the eve of battle, and powder and ammuni-
tiop were too precious to be wasted on target practice. Despite
a centuries-long acquaintance with guns, the Central 'Sudanic
ki9gdoms were just entering the age of firearms when the
Europeans invaded them.t9
NOTES
1. Fortunately, a number of articles have appeared recently on the

subject of weapons and warfare in nineteenth-century Africa. Among
them are a) In Michael Crowder, ed., West African Resistance: The
111
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
Military Response to Colonial Occupation (London, 1971): Michael

Crowder, "Preface," pp. xiii-xiv and "Introduction," pp. 1-18; J. K.
Fynn, "Ghana-Asante (Ashanti)," pp. 19-52; B. Olatunji Olorun-
timehin, "Senegambia-Mahmadou Lamine," pp. 80-110; Yves Per-
son, "Guinea-Samori," pp. 111-43'; David Ross, "Dahomey," pp.
144-69; Robert Smith, "Nigeria-Ijebu," pp. 170-204; Obaro Ikime,
"Nigeria-Ebrohimi," pp. 205-32; and D. }. M. Muffett, "Nigeria-
Sokoto Caliphate," pp. 268-99. b) In the Journal.of African History:
R. W. Beachey, "The Arms Trade in East Africa," 3 no. 3 (1962):
451-67; M. Legassick, "Fire~rm~ Horses and Samorian Army, Organi-
zation 1870-1898," 7(1966):95-u5; Robed Smith, "The Canoe in
West African History," '11(1970): 515-33; Gavin White, "Firearms in
Africa: An Introduction," 12 (1971): 173-84; R. A. Kea, "Firearms
and Warfare in the Gold and Slave Coasts from the Sixteenth to the
Nineteenth Centuries," pp. 185-213; Humphrey J. Fisher and Vir-
ginia Rowland, "Firearms in the Central Sudan," pp. 215-39; Myron
J. Eche~ber&", "Late Nineteenth-Century Military Technology in
Upper Volta," pp. 241-54; Shufa Mark~ and Anthony Atmore, "Fire-
arms in Southern Africa: A Survey," pp. 517-30; Anthony Atmore
and Peter Sanders, "Sotho Arms and Ammunition in the Nineteenth
Century," pp. 535-44; Anthony Atmore, J. M. Chirinje, and S. I.
Mudenge, "Firearms in South Central Africa," pp. 545-56; J. J. Guy,
"A Note on Firearms in the Zulu Kingdom with Special Reference
t9 the Anglo-Zulu War, 1879," pp. 557-70; Sue Miers, "Notes on the
Arms Tra'de and' Government Policy in Southern Africa between
1870 arid 1890," pp. 571-77; Joseph P. Smaldone, "Firearms in the
Central Sudan: A Revaluation," 13(1972):591-607; and R. A. Caulk,
"Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury," pp. 603-30.
2. Kea, pp. 200-201; John D. Goodman, "The Birmingham Gun
Trade," in Samuel Timmins, ed., The Resources, Products, and In-
dustrial History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District
(London, 1866), pp. 388, 419, and 426; White, pp. 176-83; Russell I.
Fries, "British Response to the American System: The Case of the
Small-Arms Industry after 1850," in Technology and Culture 16Quly
1975):380 and 398; David Birmingham, "The Forest a1;d Savanna of
Central Africa," in John E. Flint, ed., Cambridge History of Africa
vol. 5: From c. r790 to c. r870 (Cambridge, 1976), p. 264.
3. Beachey, 'pp. 451-52; K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in
the Niger Delta r830-r855: An lntroc(uction to the Economic and
Political History of Nigeria (Oxford, 1956), p. -107; Echenberg, pp.
251-52; Fries, pp. 392-93; Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and
112
r
AFRICAN ARMS
the State in Africa (London, i'971), p. 52; Jan S. Hogendorn, "Eco-

nomic Initiative and African Cash Farming: Pre-Colonial Origins
and Early Colonial Developments," in Peter Duignan and L. H.
Gann, eds., ·Colonialism in Africa, z870-z96b, vol. 4: The Economics
of Colonialism (Cambridge, 1975), p. 298; Kea, pp. 203-05; Robin
Law, "Horses, Firearms and Political Power," in Past and Present
72(1976): 113-32.
4. Fisher and Rowland, pp. 215-39. See also Echenberg, pp. 245-
54; Pierre Gentil, La conquete du Tchad (z894-z9z6), 2 vols. (Vin-
cennes, 1961), 1:55; Goody, pp. 47-58; Muffett, p. 277; and Thomas
R. De Gregori, Technology and the Economic Development of the
Tropical African Frontier (Cleveland and London, 1969), p. 121.
5. Marks and Atmore, p. 519.
6. Birmingham, p. 262.
7. H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn, "Technological Change,
Slavery and the Slave Trade," in Clive Dewey and Antony G. Hop-
kins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of
India and Africa (London, 1978), pp. 248-50; and Dennis D. Cordell,
"Dar Al-Kuti: A History of the Slave Trade and State Formation on
the Islamic Frontier in Northern Equatorial Africa (Central African
Republic and Chad) in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Cen-
turies" (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1977).
8. Walter Cline, Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa (Me-
nasha, Wis., 1937), esp. ch. 4 and ch. 10; and Goody, pp. 26-29 and
38. Europeans had used water wheels to power bellows and make
cast iron since the late fourteenth century, while the Chinese had
been making cast iron since the fourth century B.c. and had water-
powered .bellows from the first century B.c. on; see Joseph Needham,
The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (Lon-
don, 1969), PP· 38-39.
9. R. Hill, Egypt in the Sudan z820-z882 (London, 1959), p. 109.
10. Yves Person, Samori: Une Revolution Dyula, 3 vols. (Dakar,
1968), 2:908 and 991 n. 48.
11. Kea, p. 213; Ross, p. 158.
12. Beachey, pp. 454-67.
13. Atmore, Chirinje; and Mudenge, pp. 546-53; Miers, pp. 571-
72; Marks and Atmore, p. 517; Guy, p. 559.
14. Joseph P. Smaldone, "The Firearms Trade in the Central
Sudan in the Nineteenth Century," in Daniel F. McCall and
Norman R. Bennett, eds., Aspects of West African Islam (Boston,
1971), p. 162. ;,
15. Beachey, p. 464. J. J. Vianney gives a much higher and less
113
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
believable figure: 300 camels for a rifle in 1900; see his "Mohamed
Abdulla Hasan: A Reassessment," in Somali Chronicle (Mogadiscio,
Nov. 13, 1957), p. 4, cited in Robert Hess, "The 'Mad Mullah' and
Northern Somalia," Journal of African History 5(1964):420.
16. Atmore and Sanders, p. 539; Marks and Atmore, p. 524.
17. Beachey, p. 453.
18. Beachey, pp. 455-57; Marks and Atmore, p. 528; Miers, p. 577.
19. Smaldone, "The Firearms Trade" and "Firearms in the Cen-
tral Sudan," pp. 591-6o7; Fisher and Rowland, pp. 223-30.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Arms Gap and

Colonial Confrontations
Confrontations between Europeans and Africans after 1870

rank among the most lopsided in history. For Africans these
encounters brought bewilderment :\nd hopeless struggles, while
for Europeans they resembled hunting more than war. Breech-
loaders broke down African resistance as decisively as quinine
prophylaxis had overcome the barrier of malaria. To be sure,
there was a vast range of forms of encounter, from the lone
explorer passing through a village to, at the other extreme, a
full-scale military campaign. Yet all were marked by the qual-
ity of the weapons involved.
All explorers carried rifles. Some, like Livingstone, Caµieron,
or Barth, used them only for hunting and self-defense. They
made their way by befriending the people through whose lands
they traveled, delighting them with their shooting prowess;
thus Malamine, a Senegalese associate of Savorgnan de Brazza,
used his Winchester repeater to become the most famous
.,
,: hunter in the area around Stanley Pool and a friend of the
local chiefs.1
I,
Such friendly encounter& were the exception, however. All
f
too often the European traveler felt obliged to show off the
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
power of his guns. Hauptmann Kling, a German explorer who

traveled through West Africa in 1893, demonstrated the force
of his machine gun by destroying a wall. He thus gained the
respect of his hosts, if riot their love. 2 Gustav Rohlfs, a visitor
to Bornu, wrote that when the inhabitants of a village "showed
an inclination to oppose forcefully our camping there . . . a
few blind shots made them see reason." 3
Of all the explorers, none saw himself as a conquistador
quite as much as Henry Morton Stanley. While crossing.Africa
from east to west on his expedition of 1877-78, he got into a
dispute with the inhabitants of Bumbireh, a village on the
shore of Lake Victoria. To make his escape he fired his ele-
phant guns at the villagers armed only with spears and bows
and arrows. A few months later he returned with 250 men and
summarily decimated the settlement. Sir John Kirk, British
consul at Zanzibar, called the incident "unparalleled in, the
annals of African discovery for the reckless use of die power
that modern weapons placed in his hands over natives who
never before had heard a gun fired." 4
Later, traveling down the Congo, Stanley encountered peo-
ple who welcomed him with spears and arrows. Several tipies
his men chased adversaries •off .with the fire of their Winches-
ters and Sniders. He would then pursue them, he wrote,
... up to their villages; I skirmish in their streets, drive ¢.em

pell-mell into the woods beyond, and level their ivory temples;
with frantic haste I fire the huts, and end the scene by towing
the canoes into mid-stream and setting them adrift.5
On his last big journey, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of

1886-88, Stanley brought along 510 Remington rifles with
100,000 rounds of ammunition, 50 Winchester repeaters wjth
50,000 cartridges, and a Maxim gun, a gift of the inventor. He
also brought along 27,262 yards of cloth and 3,600 pounds of
beads as trade goods, and, for nourishment,.forty porter-loads
of the choicest provisions from Messrs. Fortnum and Mason of
u6
ARMS GAP AND COLONIAL CONFRONTATIONS
Picadilly. At no time in history has the distinction between

tourists and conquerors been so blurred. 6
On the heels of the explorers were the military. In the sev-

enties and eighties European statesmen, asserting their arro-
gant faith in the ability of their armies to overcome all African
resistance, drew lines on maps· of the continent to indicate
where .their future conquests would lie. In 1873-74, General
Wolseley defeated the Ashanti, one of West-Africa's most pow-
erful kingdoms, with a force of 6,500 men armed with rifles,
Gatling guns, and 7-pounder field artillery.7 Similar1y, the ;irmy
of ~he Senegalese ruler Mahmadou Lamine, with its spears,
Dane guns, and poisoned arrows, was defeated by a ·French
force of 1,400 men armed with &ras-Kropatcheks. 8
In the 1890s the addition of Maxim guns and quick-firing
light ,artill~~y to the arsenal of the colonialist troops made
European-African confrontations even mo;e lopsided, 'turning
battles into massacres or routs. In 1891, near Porto Novo, a
French detachment of 300 i:nen, firing 25,000 rounds of am-
munition in a 2Y2 hour battle', aefeated the entire Fon army. 9
In 1897 a Royal Niger Co. force composed of 32 Europeans
and 507 African·soldiers armed with cannons, Maxim guns,
and Snider rifles defeated the 31,000-man army of the Nupe
Emirate of 'sokoto; though some of the Nupe'had breechload-
ers, their insufficient training caused ~them to fire over tlie
heads of their enemies.
In Chad, a French force of 320, most of whom were ~ene-
galese tirailleurs, in 1899 defeated Rabah, reputedly the fierc-
est of the Sudanese"slave-raiders, with his 12,000 men ,and 2,500
guns. 10 The Caliphate of Sokoto firlally fell in 1903 after an
attack by a British force of 27 officers, 730 troops, and 400
porters. 11 And in 1908 the 10,000-man army of Wadai was
routed by 389 French soldiers. 12
Perhaps the most famous of all colonial campaigns--;a.t least
in the English-speaking world-was General Kitchener's con-
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
quest of the Sudan in 1898. The British believed the Sudanese

Dervishes were skilled but fanatical warriors and blamed them
for having defeated General Gordon in 1885. Kitchener's ex-
pedition was therefore well supplied with the latest weapons:
breechloading and repeating rifles, Maxim guns, field artillery,
and six river gunboats firing high-explosive shells.
At one point the British Camel Corps was almost over-
whelmed by a Dervish attack. Winston Churchill, who took
part in the campaign, described the British response:
But at the critical moment the gunboat arrived on the scene and
began suddenly to blaze and flame from Maxim guns, quick-
firing guns and rifles. The range was short; the effect tremen-
dous. The terrible machine, floating gracefully on the waters-a
beautiful white devil-wreathed itself in smoke. The river slopes
of the Kerreri Hills, crowded with the advancing thousands,
sprang up into clouds of dust and splinters of rock. The charg-
ing Dervishes sank down in tangled heaps. The masses in the
rear paused, irresolute. It was too hot even for them.
At Omdurman, Kitchener confronted the main Dervish army

of 40,000. According to Churchill:
The infantry fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or excite-
ment, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful. Be-
sides, the soldiers were interested in the work and took great
pains. But presently the mere physical act became tedious.
The Dervish side looked very different:

And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were
shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood
spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on
through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting
dusi:-suffering, despairing, dying.
After five hours of fighting, 20 Britons, 20 of their Egyptian

allies and 11,000 Dervishes lay dead.
Thus ended the battle of Omdurman-the most signal triumph
ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the
space of five hours the strongest and best-armed savage army yet
arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed
u8
and dispersed, with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small

risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.13
The general rule in late nineteenth-century Africa, that

Europeans easily overcame African resistance through supe-
rior firepower, is not without exception. In a few instances-
primarily in the Western Sudan and Ethiopia-Africans J.ield
back the Europeans for many years. These cases also illustrate
the importance of the new weapons.
Samori Toure, whose homeland was the high country be-
tween the upper Niger and the .upper Senegal, was an upstart
who assumed the traditional Islamic role of military-religious
leader. He was not hampered by obsolete military customs and,
better than any other African ruler of his time, he grasped the
importance of modern weapons. He was the first leader in the
region to arm all his troops with guns. In the early 1870s he
purchased a number of muskets, whi,ch gave him a tactical
superiority over other Sudanic rulers and helped attract fol-
lower~. By 1886 he had acquired fifty breechloaders, most of
them Chassepots. Begining in 1890, he bought as many Gras
and Mauser rifles as he could obtain from dealers in Sierra
Leone. After several battles with French troops armed with
repeaters-Gras-Kropatcheks and Lebels-Samori made every
effort to obtain these weapons by purchase from Sierra Leone
or by capture on the battlefield. His supply of repeaters in-
creased from 36 in 1887 to 4,000 in 1898, the year he was
finally defeated. During his last ten years he was able to hold
out against the advancing French forces through the judi-
cious use of his modern weapons and through the mobility of
his army; in fact, his methods came to resemble more closely
the guerrilla tactics of late twentieth-century liberation wars
than the mass attacks of the Dervishes.
The most interesting aspect of Samori's career was his at-
tempt to create his own arms industry. He sent a blacksmith
to work in the arsenal at Saint-Louis and learn French tech-
niques. He employed 300 to 400 blacksmiths who produced 12
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
guns a week, mostly copies of Gras-Kropatcheks; they also

turned out 200 to 300 cartridges a day, while their wives made
gunpowder. The manufacture of modem guns demands ma-
chine tools and high-grade steel, however, and Samori's home-
made weapons were never numerous or precise enough to stem
the French advance for very long. In the end he was defeated
when the French cut off his access to supplies from Sierra
Leone and Libya.14
A similar situation prevailed in Ethiopia, but on a larger
scale. During the reign of Tewodros (1855-68) various re-
gional armies' used muskets: cavalry, and artillery. In 1868 a
British force defeated Tewodros's army at Meqdela, thanks in
part to their breechloaders. The British returned home, al-
though ·~their technologic'al legacy remained. Tewodros used
missionary craftsmen to cast cannons. Bezbiz Kasa, a rival war-
lord, recruited an English sergeant named Kirkham to train
his troops. In 1~71, after defeating his rivals, Kasa became
Emperor Yohannis IV. 'I1he'188os in Ethiopia were marked by
wars bet:ween various regional lords and against the Sudanese
Mahdists to the west and the Italians to the east., In the' course
of these wars foreign arms poured into the country. 'Menelik
of Showa was able to obtain oreechloaders and ammunition
from die Italians at Massawa on the Red,Sea. 'By 1896 he had
a better-equipped army than arly African ruler hatl ever had.
His arsenal included several thciusarfd breechlo~ders, a few
machine guns, ,and even some field artillery. When an Italian
army of 17,ooo men advanced into Ethiopia, it' confrdrtt'ed an
army equally well equipped and even better trained'.: The 'de-
feat of the Italians at Aduwa on March 1, 1896, resulted as
much from their own Treaty of Wichelle, by which they had
agreed to supply Menelik with arms, as from, any tactical
blunders on the battlefield.1 5
Not just weapons but also the strategy and tactics involved
in colonial wars deserve our attention for what they reveal
120
ARMS GAP 1\ND COLONIAL CONFRONTATIONS
both about the armies that qmfron,t;ed one another and about
the thinking of European milita;ry theorists before World War
One. European forces in .(\sia, and, Africa broke most of the
classic rules of war. In forest and bush country thc::yoften ha,µ
to advance single-file along narrow paths. They ·were totally
d«;!pendent on exposed supply lines stretching for many II\il~s

over difficult terrain; sometimes they had to bring along food
and water for porters and pack animals as well as for soldiers. 16
Under such circumstances they would have been vulnerabl'e to
guerrilla tactics. In a few cases.,as in Algeria and on the north-
west frontier of India, indigenous resistance forces using guer-
rilla tactics were able to tie down large numbers of imperialist
troops for long periods of time. But guerrilla tactics were rare,
because they demanded a more flexible social structure and a
higher level of political consciousness than were common in
most non-Western societies of the time.
The mtthod of fighting that Eurqpeans most frequently en-
countered, from the Sudan;'to South Africa and from West
Africa to China, w;is the ~rontal assault, or rush, by large num-
bers of fighting men. These warrior~ often displayed superior
courage, and their tactics ,and discipline, were appropriate to
the kinds of warfare they were accustomed to. But against
modern rifles these methods were obsolete. Firing on the run,
reloading standing up, or dashing up to hurl a javelin at close
range w.er~, under these new circumstances, suicida,l. Against
the open assault of masses of warriors, the imperialist forces
resurrected the square of Napoleoni~ !imes, a human fortre~s
surrounded by an impeneti;able hail of bullets. It. was a near-
invincible defense against attacking forces armed.,witli inferior
weapons, no matter how numerous.17
Such a battle too%-place in Octqber 1893 near Zimbabo/e in
southern Africa. A colum:t;1. Qf50 Brttish Sout);i African Police
had enc01111ttr.edthe 5,000 Ndebele warriors of King 1.oben:
gula. The Ndebele,.carried assegais and shields; tl;J.eBritish had
121
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
four Maxims, a Nordenfelt, and a Gardner. Within an hour

and a half 3,000 Ndebele lay dead. Lieutenant Colonel Gra-
ham Hutchison, a British writer of the purple-prose school of
imperial history, described the confrontation:
Fierce tribesmen, inflamed with racial fanaticism, armed with
the assegais, formed their impis, and in great force went forth to
battle; while a thousand war-drums, in wild crescendo, beat
their primitive_ tatoo of ·vengeance amid the scattered kraals.
The B.S.A.P., though hurriedly reinforced by volunteer Rhode-
sians, were from the outset greatly outnumbered .... They
stood on the defensive, forming a wagon laager, within which
had been concentrated women, children and provisions, and
provoked the Matabele to charge. Maxim guns were placed at
the angles of the laager: and it is recorded how again and again
hordes of Matabele bit the dust far beyond the thrust of the
deadly assegai,18
Imperialist warfare presents a paradox. While the strategy

of the Europeans was primarily offensive-to seek out the en-
emy in his own territory, to destroy his forces and his govern-
ment,•and to seize his land-their tactics were primarily'defen-
sive. This combination of offensive strategy and defensive
tactics was the result of the newly '.increased firepower of the
J;uropeans and the inevitable time-lag on the part of Africans
and Asians in developing the tactical response of guerrilla
warfare. ,.
There has been little interest ·in the art and theory of colo-
nial warfare during the period 18171-1914. Most ,European
military writers, then and now, have considered this a time of
peace, and consequently paid scant attention to these "small
wars." 19 One of the very few studies of nineteenth-century colo-
nial warfare is Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice by
Colonel Charles Callwell. In this textbook for officers pub-
lished in 1906, the author recognizetl the curious juxtaposi-
tion of offensive strategy and defensive tactics but did not
pursue its implications. He took for granted the European su-
122
periority in firepower, hardly commenting on it. 20 Instead he

repeatedly stressed the purported moral differences between
the opponents: on the one hand were the European and Euro-
pean-led soldiers, full of zeal, re'solution, daring, vigor1 bold-
ness, courage, and other noble virtues; on the other, the hordes
of barbarians, savages, fanatics or, at best, the semicivilized
races.
Another such writer was Charles B. Wallis, a former district
commissioner in Sierra Leone; his West African Warfare, a
manual for British officers posted to that region, was a bit
more realistic. He too waxed florid about "the weird and
treacherous surroundings, the nerve-wracking effects of the
climate," and the "cunning savages . . . like the wild animals
of his own forests." He too spoke highly of "the stern disci-
pline and enthusiastic esprit de corps of the British army" led
by_"that indispensable factor in the machine of West African
warfare-the British officer." But at least, from personal ex-
perience, he knew the value of modern rifles and Maxim guns,
and in the event of a pitched battle he advocated the square
with Maxims at the corners. 21
The experience of colonial warfare may' help explain the
disastrous tactics of Worlcl,War One. For forty years, the only
wars that Britain, France, and Germany foug!tt were colonial
wars, and these only confirmed the Napoleonic principle that
the key to victory was an offensive strategy backed by over-
whelming firepower. What the generals of the First World War
misunderstood was that their new rifles and machine guns
were defensive weapons, and that colonial victories had been
achieved by defensive tactics against poorly anped enemies.
The caste and culture of Callwell, Wallis, and Hutchison
erected around the colonial forces a false aura of moral and
racial superiority; which hid the technological revolution in
tactics. The'soldier in the trenches df Flanders, with his rifle
or machine gun, was indeed as in_vulnerable to enemy attack
as his counterpart had been ip the square at Omdurman or in
123
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
the wagon laager in Ndebeleland. But conversely, the soldier

going over the top of a Flanders trench was as vulnerable as
any Dervish or Ndebele warrior. The surprise of World War
One was that the offensive had become suicidal, that vigor,
elan vital, courage, esprit de corps, and all the other presumed
virtues of the European fighting man were irrelevant against
the hail of bullets from these same rifles and machine guns.
The effect of modern infantry weapons on the battlefields
of Europe was quite the opposite of what it had been in Africa.
Instead of bringing about the quick and easy success the Euro-
pean powers had become used to, the new firearms made vie-·
tory impossible.
NOTES
1. Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism r87r-r9r4: Myths and

Realities, trans. William GlanviUe Brown (London, 1966), p. 47.
11.Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa
(London, 1971), p. 611. .
3. Wolfe W. Schmokel, "Gerhard Rphlfs: The I.'.onely Explorer,"
in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Africq and its Explorers: Motives, Methods
and Impact (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 1108.
4. Eric Hitlladay, "Henry Morton Stanley: The Opening Up of
the Congo Basin," in Rotberg, pp. 11411-45; Peter Forbath, The_ River
Congo: The Discovery, Exploration and Exploitation oft the World's
Most Dramatic River (New York, 1978), pp. 1178-81.
5. Halladay, p. 1144.See also Forbath, pp. 1196and 304--08; and
Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark. Continent, or the Sources
of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and aown
the Livingstone Rive/ to ,the Atlantic Ocean, ll. vols. (New York,
1879), 1:4 and 11:1111-111.
and 300.
6. Henry Mortpn Stanley, In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue,
and Retreat of Emin, Gov_ernor of Equatoria, 11vols. (New York,
189o), 1:37-39.
7. John Keegan, "Th~ Ashanti Campaign, 1873-4," in Briah
Bond, ed., Victorian Militafy Campaigns (London, 1967), p. 186;
124
J. K. Fynn, "Ghana-Asante (Ashanti)," in Michael Crowder, ed.,

West African Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occu-
pation (London, 1971), p. 40. ' '
8. B. Olatunji Oloruntimehin, "Senegambia-Mahmadou Lamine,"
in Crowder, pp. 93-105; M. Legassick, "Firearms, Horses and Samo-
rian Army Organization 1870--1898," Journal of African History
7(1966):102; and Col. Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their
Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (London, 1906), p. 378.
9. Callwell, p. 260; David Ross, "Dahomey," in Crowder, p. 158.
10. Pierre Gentil, La conquete du Tchad (r894-r9r6), 2 vols.
(Vincennes, 1971), 1:99.
11. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria r804-
r906: The Sokoto Caliphate and its Enemies (New York, 1971), pp.
182-83; Obaro Ikime, The Fall of Nigeria: The British Conquest
(London, 1977), p. 203.
12. Joseph P. Smaldone, "Firearm~ in the Central Sudan: A Re-
valuation," Journal of African History 13(1972):591-607; and Hum-
phrey J. Fisher and Virginia Rowland, "Firearms in the Central
Sudan," Journal of African History 12(1971):223-30.
13. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Account of the Re-
conquest of the Soudan (New York, 1933), pp. 274, 279, and 300. See
also Lieut. Col. Graham Seton Hutchison, Machine Guns: Their
History and Tactical Employment (Being Also a History of the
Machine Gun Corps, r9r6-r922), pp. 67-70; and Callwell, pp. 389
and 439·
14. Yves Person, Samori: Une Revol!'tion Dyula, 3 vols. (Dakar,
1968), 2:905-12, and "Guinea--Samori," in Crowder, pp. 122-23; and
Legassick, pp. 99-114. On the French side, see Alexander S. Kanya-
Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French
Military Imperialism (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 10--12.
15. R. A. Caulk, "Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the
Nineteenth Century," Journal of African History 13(1972):610-26.
16. On the logistics of colonial campaigns, see Callwell, pp. 57-63
and 86-87; J. J. Guy, "A Note on Firearms in the Zulu Kingdom
with ·special Reference to the Anglo-Zulu War, 1879," Journal of
African History 12(1971):567-68; and Crowder, p. 11.
17. See D. J. M. Muffett, "Nigeria--Sokoto Caliphate," in Crowder,
p. 290; Bond, p. 25; Crowder, p. 9; and Callwell, pp. 30--31.
18. Hutchison, p. 63. See also Edward L. Katzenbach, Jr., "The
Mechanization of War, 1880--1919," in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll
W. Pursell, Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols'.
125
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
(New York, 1967), p. 551; and John Ellis, The Social History of the
Machine Gun (New York, 1975), p. go.
19. For recent examples of this attitude, see Theodore Ropp, War
in the Modern World, rev. ed. (New York, 1962) and Maj. Gen.
]. F. C. Fuller, War and Western Civilization I832-I932 (London,
1939).
'20. See Callwell, p. 398.
21. Charles B. Wallis, West African Warfare (London, 1906).
PART THREE
THE
COMMUNICATIONS
REVOLUTION
CHAPTER EIGHT
Steam and the

Overland Route to India
Like the Romans, the British had always laid tremendous stress
on communications; and perhaps the genius of British colonial
method lay as much in engineering skill as in adlll:inistration.1
Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who left

their homes. for distant ,5hores had to be self-reliant, able to
survive for months or years without contact with Europe. They
acc;omplished"this by provisioning themselves largely with local
resources. Nineteenth-century Europeans in Asia and Africa
posst!ss'ed,far greater resources than did their: predecessors. Jn
exchange, though, they were aU the ,mor~ firmly tied to Eu-
rope. ,Rifles and cartridges, steam engines and, canned peas,
quinine, official stationery, and a thousand other necessities
had to be precision-made in factories and delivered halfway
around the world to uphold the might and the comfort of
Europeans in distant lands. Even more than ,goods, informa-
tion was the ,lifeblood of European imperialism; bu;iness deals,
administrative reports, news dispatches,. and personal messages
sustained the colonizers and assured them the suppprt of their
own people. The "new" imperialism 'of the nineteenth century•
was not new merely because it had been preceded by "old" im-
129
THE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION
perialisms. It was a qualitatively different phenomenon. For

the first time in history, colonial metropoles acquired the means
to communicate almost instantly with their remotest colo-
nies and to engage in an extensive trade in bulky goods that
could never have borne the. freight costs in any previous em-
pire. The world was more deeply transformed in the nine-
..
teenth century than in any previous millennium, and among
the transformations few had results as dazzling as the network
of communication and transportation that arose to link Eu-
rope with the rest of the world.
Up to the 1830s, when an Englishman corresponded with
someone in India, his letter, carried around Africa on an East
Indiaman, took five to eight months to reach its destination.
Because of the monsoons in the Indian Ocean, he did not re-
ceive a response until two years after he had mailed his letter.
By the 1850s a message from London went by train across
France, by steamer to 41exandria and from Alexandria to
Cairo, by camel to Suez, then by steamer to Bombay or Cal-
cutta, where it arrived thirty td forty-five days after leaving
London. The answer took an additional thirty to forty-five
days, for a round trip total of two to three months. 2 Twenty
years later, if a letter still took a month to reach Bombay, a
telegram got there in as little as five hours, and the answer
could be back the same day. And in 1924 at the British Em-
pire Exhibition, King George V sent himself a cable; it reached
him, having circled the globe on all-British lines, eighty sec-
onds later! Small wond~r many Britons of the imperiaf age
thought the world empire they had acquired was a not unrea-
sonable reward for the amazing ingenuity of their industry.
Almost as soon as steam proved itself a feasible means of

propelling a ship, some men dreamed of steaming across the
oceans, while others mocked the idea as preposterous and con-
tra'ry to natute. As often happens, both sides were right. The
promise of steam was obvious: freedom from the fickle winds
r
STEAM AND THE OVERLAND ROUTE TO INDIA
that made even the best sailing voyage a gamble against tir,ne.
But the climb to that achievement was long and difficult. Only
in the 1830s did steam-powered ocean crossings prove techno-
logically possible, and it was not until the 1850s that such ven-
tures could justify themselves financially.
The first steamers tq go to sea were hybrids, sailing ships
with auxiliary engines. The Savannah, which crossed the At-
lantic from America to England in 1819, used her steam en-
gine for less than 4 days in her 27-day crossing. The steamship
Enterprize, first.of her kind to reach India, used steam for 63
of the 113 days she took to sail from Falmouth to Calcutta in
1825. Finally in 1838 two steamers, tp.e Sirius and the Great
Western, crossed the Atlantic on ste;im alone, and two years
later regl_\lar steamship service .across the Atlantic beg.an, of-
fering the public an alternative .at last to sailing ships. 3
The reason for the long delay.over a century since steam
engines had begun pumping water from English mines-is that
the low-pressure steam engine was ill suited to compete with
the free wind as a source of energy at sea. Before the 1830s
steam machinery was large and delicate and frequently in
need of adjustment and lubrication. Boilers, fed seawater, had
to be shut down every three or four days so that encrusted salt
deposits could be scraped off. High seas frequently damaged
the paddle-wheels of steamers. So risky were these vessels that
Parliament appointed a committee in 1831 to "take into con-
sideration the frequep.t calamities by Steam Navigation and
the best Means of guarding against their Recurrence .... "
Worst of all, steam engines were exceedingly fuel-hungry.
Near Britain where coal was c;heap, or along the tree-lined
Mississippi, this might not pose a big problem. But at sea they
had to either bring along an enormous supply of coal or be
supplied by sailing ships. Distance frorµ the sou,rce of coal of
course accentuated the problem. Th'7 Great W es{frn's 440-
horsepower engine, for example, burneq. 650 tons of coal to
cross the Atlantic, an average of eight pounds per horsepower
per hour. The first Cunard liner, the Britannia of 1840, had a
total cargo capacity of 865 tons, of which 640 tons were taken
up by coal, which she burned at approximately five pounds
per horsepower per hour. 4
The disadvantages of early steamers relegated them to those
tasks where their virtues outweighed the prohibitive cost fac-
tor. For lbng-distance transport this occurred along two cor-
ridors. One was between Britain and the United States, where
traffic was intense and the wealthy were- prepared to pay al-
most any price to get across the ocean quickly. The other was
between England and India.
There have been, historically, three 'routes between Europe

and India. One goes" across Egypt, down the Red Sea, and
across the Arabian Sea; the second leads across Syria to Meso-
potamia, then down the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf !Othe
Arabian'Sea; and the thira circumnavigates Africa. Each epoch
has seen one or another take precedence, depending ,on naval
technology and Middle Eastern poli\ics.
The Cape Route around Africa )\'.'asfavored by the East In-
dia Company in the early nineteenth. tentury. It was safe, for
Britain had swept the Dutch and French fleets from the seas
in the Napoleonic Wars. And it in;volved no transshipments,
no complex and delicate relations with' Turks, Egyptians, and
Arabs along the way. It was, however, very long. Monsoons,
blowing toward India half the yea,r and away the other half,
made sailing in each direction easy in one season and impos-
sible the next. Hence it took about two years for an East In-
diaman to complete a round trip.
Both routes through the Middle East were called "Over-
land" by the English. Th~ one through Mesopotamia offered
easy sailing between Europe and Sytia and again' froIP the
head of the Persian Gulf' to Incli:t. But in between lay a part
of the Ottoman Empire inhabited by xenophobic Arab tribes
and unreliable Turkish ~dministrators, subject to the some-
times uncertain foreign policy of the Sublime Porte itself. The

Red Sea Route offered fewer political difficulties but a'lmost
insuperable natural obstacles to sailing ships. The Red Sea
was notorious for its fickle winds, long calms, and sudden vio-
lent storms. Its bottom was dangerously studded with sub-
merged rocks and coral reefs, its coasts were jagged, and coastal
inhabitants welcomed the opportunity to plunder wrecked
ships.
Only occasionally did a hardy European traveler or a oun-
dle of urgent mail qiake jts way through the labyrinths of the
Overland Route; for the' most part the Cape Route• fiad Be-
come the pathway td the East by the early nineteenth century.
But all tJiat was to be clianged by the advent of steam· in East-
ern waters.s
To the East India Cohlpany, ah organization that ,owed its

profits to its monopoly on British' trade with the East and its
fine fleet of East Indiamen, the long voyage around Africa 'wa,s
a fact of life. Yet, with the volume of trade between India and
Britain growing rapidly, businessmen 'in both countries cried
out for a shorter route. Between 1790 ancr 1817, British ~x-
ports to the East rose from 26,400 tons to 109,4do tons. British
cloth exports to India were especially imp,ortant, risihg from
817,000 yards worth £201,182 in 1814,to 51,833,913 yards worth
£3,238,248 in 1832: The entrepreneurs who'handled'this trade
were the catalysts of' improved, communications in the nin'e-
teen th century.
In the year 1822 the naval officer James Henry Johpston,
finding much enthusiasm in Britain'for'steam navi~tiort, de-·
cided to initiate a steamer service between Calcutta and Su~z.
He sailed to India to sell his ·project to the Anglo-I:qdians''of
Calcutta. They needed no prodding. Inlluenced' by the perfor-
mance of the little Diana on the Hooghly Ri'ver, a gi-6up of
Anglo-Calcuttans founded a "Society •for the Encouragement
of Steam Navigation between Great Britain"and India." This
133
TI-IE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION
"Steam Committee" set up a "Steam Fund" of 69,903 rupees,

to which the gqvernor-general of India,, Lord Amherst, con-
tributesl 20,000 rupees, the nawab of Oudh another 2,000, and
various businessmen of Calcutta the rest. The m,oney was of-
fered as a prize to anyone whose steamship could make four
consecutive voyages between Bengal and England at an aver-
age of, seventy days per trip. This implied, of course, taking
the Cape Route. Johnston returned to England to build a ship
that wo:uld win the prize.
Johnston found ample .support among London capital~ts
and ,proceeded to build the fi~st British steamer designed for
the high ·seas. The aptly named Enterprize was large for her
day at 141 feet in length and 464 tons burden, and had two
60-horsepower Maudslay engines. Her builders confidently ex-
pected the ship to reach Calcutta in sixty days, with one re-
fueling stop at Capetown, and sent her out to sea in August
1825 without even a trial rqn. Unfortu:q.ately she was so slow,
al}-dher engines so voracious, that she ,soon ran out of fuel.
All in all she took 113 days to reach Calcutta, of which only
63 were under steam. Thus she forfeited the prize and disap-
pointed the steam enthu;Siasts of Calcutt<J..The Bengal govern-
ment bought her for use in the ~urma War, and, the Commit-
tee, in recogn~tion of a gallant try, awarcled half the pri~e to
"Steam" Johnston.6
Th~ voy~e of the Enterprize was a failure for Calcutta but
not for all of India. Because of the monsoons, a sailing ship
coming from Europe can reach the east coast of India faster
than it can the wesf coast. Steall!ers, however, go by distance,
not by the winds; and if the technology of the 1820s could not
produce a long-distance steamer for the Cape Route, it did
promise to open up th,e Overland Routes from Bombay and
make that city the new gateway, to India. For this reason the
Anglo-Indians of Bombay took up the idea of the Overland
Route, to the great mortification of the Anglo-Indians qf Cal-
cutta. Each community got the support of its, government: on
1 34
the one side, the Presidency of Bombay and the Indian Navy
(known until 1830 as the Bombay Marine); on the other, the
Presidencies of Calcutta and Madras and the governor-general
of India. And wavering between the rivals were the distant
East India Company and the British government. Steamship
technology, too costly for private enterprise alone, thus be-
came entangled in the labyrinthine politics of British India. 7
The credit for initiating steam communication between

Br~tain and India oiust go to the government of the Presi-
dency of Bombay rather than to business entrepreneurs. In
1823 and again in 1825-26, Mounrstuarl Elphinstone, gover-
nor of Bombay, asked the Court of Diiectors in London to
authorize a Red Sea steam service. Receiving no answer, he
went ahead with his plans and ordered the Bombay Marine
to begin surveying the'coasts of the Arabian and Red seas. His
successor after 1827, Sir John Malcolm, carried out Elphin-
stone's plans, ably assisted by two brothers, Sir Charles Mal-
colm, superintendent of the Indian Navy, and Admiral' Sir
Pulteney Malcolm, commander of the Royal Navy's Mediter-
ranean squadron. In 1828 coal stocks were deposited along the
way to Suez, and the Bombay Marine acquired the Enterprize.
When that vessel broke down, the Malcolms had a new ship
built at Bombay. In mock deference to the' Court of Directors,
which had vehemently forbidden the whole scheme; they
named the ship after its chairman, Hugh Lindsay.
The Hugh Lindsay was of teak, 140 feet long by 25 feet
wide, and powered by two So-horsepower Maudslay sengines.
Mindful that the Enterprize had failed because of hisufficient
fuel supplies, Charles Malcolm saw to it that the Hugh Lind-
say was well provisioned. She sailed from Bomoay on March
20, 1830, with her hold, her cabins, and her deck so full of
coal that she could hardly •move. Nonetheless she ran out of
coal at- Adeh, one third the way short' of her destination. Al-
most a third of the journey to Suez-twelve days-was spent
1 35
TIIE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION
refueling. All the fuel had been brought by sailing ship

around Africa at, a cost of up to £13 per ton, and the round
trip between ;Bombay and Suez was prohibitive at £1,700., B,ut
it was mqney well spent, for it ensured the Hugh Lind~ay's
success. Whereas the Enterprize took as long as a sailing ship
to reach India, the mail the Hugh Li~dsay carried from Bom-
bay reached.London in a record fifty-nine.days. 8
The bpening of the Red Sea Route suddenly thrust British
steam pow;er, hence British political power, into a new area
of the world. To provide the Hugh Lindsay with a coaling
station, tpe ruler of the island of Socotra, off the F(orn of Af-
rica, was invited to sell his island to the Presidency of Bom-
bay in 1835; .wqen he refused, troops seized ,it by force. Soon
Aden was found to offer a petter harbor and a healthier cli-
mate than Socotra. Its ruler, the sultan, was intimiqated and
bribed, but he yielded only to force in 1839.9 :The conquest of
Aden, like that of Burma or the Punjab, is a cla~sic case of
sec,qndary i:tpperialism-a territory taken not by Britain but by
British India and later, reluctantly, accepted by the ..British
governm~nt.
Meanwhile, the Red Sea Route wa~ flourishing. The Hugh
Lindsay steamed fast between Bombay and Suez; one voyage
took only twenty-one days. Fro~. Suez the mail went ori ca'm-
els' bad;s to Cairo, then on barges down the Nile to Alexan-
dria. At Ale,xandria it waited, sometimes as, long as a month,
for a chance merchant ship to ta}se,it to Malta, where the
British Admiralty's regular steam service began. The benefits
were slim-on some early voyages two passengers and a dozen
letters made the trip-and the costs were so high that the
Court of Directors repeatedly forbade any further steam trips
and refused to send a stearµf;!r to Alexandria to pick up the
mails.
But the same public pre~sure that forced Parliament to ap-
point a ~el~ct Committee in 1834 was still strong. In 1835 t]:ie
British Post Office annqunced it would accept letters to India
via Egypt. The French inauguratea a speedy steam service

from Marseilles to Alexandria, taking some traffic away froni
British ships. The next year Peacock, co'nvinced of tbe failure
of the Euphrates Route, persuaded the Directors to order two
new ships, "the Atalanta, displacing 617 tons ancf pdwe'retl by
a 210:horsepower engine, and the Berenice, displacing 765
tons with· -an .engine of 220 horsepower. Seagoing steamers
were now luhctio;al machines; the Atalanta reachecl India via
the Cape in sixty-eight days on steam power alone'.
When the members of the Euphrates Expedition returned
to England in June 1837, the former g6vernor-general of 1n-
dia, Lord William Bentinck, moved in'the House of Commons
that another Select Committee be formed :'to inquire into the
best··means of establishing a Communication by Stea& with
India', by way of the Red Sea."• Bentinck had beeri a "'steam
enthusiast for many years. A~-governor-general of India from
1828 to 1834, lie had introduced steamer service on •the
Ganges. Utter, as member of Parliament from Glasgow, he
had lent his name to a1hlost every scheme for steam communi-
cation to India. ,..o him, it was
... the great, engine of worki~g llndia's] moral improve1p.ent
. . . in proportion as the communic.ttion between the two COUJ'\-
tries shall be facilitated and shortened, so will civilized Europe
as
be approxhhated, as it'wc!re, to these benighted reg1ons; in no
other way can improvement ih any large stream be expected to
flow in.
Bentinck was elected chairman of the' new Select, Committee,
and Hobhouse became a member. The Committee discussed
the 'merits of the steamersi Hugh Lindsay, Atalanta, anti Ifere-
nice, and the costs and usefulness of additional steamers on
the Red Sea Route. Peacock once again was called to 'testify
on the costs of steamer service and on the relative' distances of
various toutes to India. The report of the Select Committee,
issued July 15, 1837, only confirmed what was ait·eady obvi-
ous: the victory of the Red Sea Route. 10
In 1838 the Court of Directors went a step further and pr-

dered the proud old Indian Navy transformed into a steam
service for mail and passengers. New steamers were soon
added:,,the Semiramis in 1838, the Zenobia and fictoria in
1839, and the Auckland, Cleopatra{ :;i.ndSesostris in 1840. Reg-
ular monthly st~am service via Egypt was now a reality. The
technological solution of the Bombay g~vernm~nt had tri-
umphed over the more poiitical considerai,:ions p(Palmerston
an~ the Calcutta steam lobby. 11
,Qnce the Indian Navy had opened the Red Sea Route, it
was not long before private enterprise joined in. The first firm
to do so was the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigatiqn
f:o.'" or P and 0. It originated as the Dublin and London
Steam Pack~t Co. but in 1835, after adding a service to Vigo
in,Spain, it becaipe the Peninsular Steam Navigation Co. Two
years later it won a contract to carry the mails to Gibraltar,
the first awarded by the British government to a private fi,rnv
henceforth it was to grow in the security of lucrative and re-
liable mail contracts. In 1840, under the pame Peninsular and
Oriental, it began serving Malta and Alexandria, connecting
with the Indian Navy's mail servi.ce from Bombay to Suez. In
1842 it entered the Red Sea and the Indian bcean with a con-
tract from Suez to Calcutta, thereby fulfilling the long-standing
dream of the Anglo-Indians of eastern India. For this service
it built the Hindostan, a ship so luxurious and so large (1,800
tons, 520 horsepower) that it made the Indian Navy's. armed
steamers seem cramped in comparison. The following year it
offered to take over th!! Bopibay-Suez route from the East In-
dia Company, saving the latter some £30,000 a year, but out
of pride the offer was refused.
l\1ean,while, Rassenger traffic by tp.e Overland Route was in-
creasing rapidly, from 275 passengei;s in 1839 to 2,100 in 1845;
in 1847, over 3,000 travelers mad.e the trip. And iu,the mid-
forties, 100,000 letters were in each Overl.and mail. In 1845 the
P and 0 extended its regular service to Penang, 'Sipgapore,

and Hong Kong. By the mid-fifties the once ;~,rduous and risky
trip to the Orient hafl become fast and comparatively ,easy.
For the Suez-Bombay route (which thq East India Company
finally gave up in 1854), the P and O commissioned the
world's largest steamer, the 3,500-ton Himalaya. Speeds in-
creased from eight or nine knots in the 1840s'to eleven to four-
teen ~nots in the mid-185os; the whole trip from London to
Bombay now took only a month. By the early 1860s the P and
O's thirty-nine ship~ served not only India but Malaya, Singa-
pore, China, and Australia as well. And to supply this fleet
with fuel, the company employed dozens of sailing colliers and
also, between Cairo and Suez,, a herd of several 'hundred
camels. 12
NOTES
1. G. S. Graham, "Imperial Finance, Trade ahd Communications

1895-1914," in E. A. Benians, James Butler, and C. E. Carrington,
eds., Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Empire
Commonwealth r870-r9r9 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 466.
2. Bernard S. Finn gives the follo\ving average number of days'
for mail to reach England in 1852: from New York twelve, Alex-
andria thirteen, Capetown or Bombay (via Suez) thirty-th!ee, Cal-
cutta (via Suez) forty-four, San Francisco or Sii;:igapore forty-five,
Shanghai fifty-seven, and Sydney seventy-three,. See 'his Submarine
Telegraphy: The Grand Victorian Technology (Matgate, 1973), p. 10.
See also C. R. Fay, "The Movement Toward Free Trade, 182&-
1853," in J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, and E. A. Benians, eds.,
Cambridge History of the B'ritish Empire, v~I. 2: The Growth of the
New Empire r783-r870 (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 412-i3.
3. The race between the Sirius and' the Great .Western was also' a
race between the majot figures in steamship development at tha't time:
for the Sirius, Macgregor Laird, secretary of the Board of I1ifectors
of the British and American Steam Navigation 'CO'.; and for the
Great Western, Isambard K. Brunel, chief engineer of the Great
Western Railway and later architect of the famous ships Great
139
IBE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION
Britain and Great Eastern. See L. T. C. Rolt, Victorian Engineering

(Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 85-88.
4. Harold James Dyos and Derek Howard Aldcroft, British Trans-
port (Leicester, ·1969), pp. 238-39; Carl E. McDowell and Helen M.
Gibbs, Ocean Transportation (New York, 1954), p. 28'; Charles
Ernest Fayle, A Short History of the World's Shipping Industry
(London, 1933), p. 241; Ambroise Victor Charles Colin, La naviga-
tiori commerciale au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1901), pp. 39-41 and 48;
Duncan .flaws, Ships and the Sea: A Chronolog!cal Review (London,
1975),, pp. 115-;19; H'.A. Gibson-Hill,. "The Steamers Employed in
Asian Waters, 1819-39," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Ma-
layan Branch 27 pt! 1 (May 1954): 147ff; and Rolt, pp. 85-86.
5 .. On the 'relative merits of the three routes in the early nine-
tej;!nth century, see Halford Lancaster Hoskins, British Routes to
India (London, 1928), pp. 82-83, 88-89, and 105; Ghulam Idris
Khan, "Attempts at Swift Communication Between India and the
West before 1830," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakis'tan 16
no. 2 (Aug. 1971):120--21; and John Marlowe, World Ditch: The
Making of the Suez Canal (New York, 1964), p. 41.
6. Concerning Johnston, the Calcutta Steam Committee, and the
Enterprize, see Hoskins, pp. 86-96; Khan, pp. ug-20, 142-44, and
151-56; Gibson-Hill, pp. 122 ~nd 134;-39; Henry ;r. Bernstein,
Steamboats pn the Ganges: An Ifxploration in the History of India's
Modernization through Science and Technology, (BolJlbay, 1960),
p. 32; Marischal Murray, Ships and South Africa: A Maritim,e
Chronicle of the Cape, with Particular Reference to Mail. a~d Pas-
s,;nger Liners from the Early Days of Steam down to the Present
(London, 1933)1 pp. 2-3; and Auguste Toussaint, History of th<;
Indian Ocean, trans. June Guicharnaud (Chicago, 1966), pp. 205--06.
On the amount of the prize and the dime~sions, of the, Enterprize,
which are much in dispute, 1 have, chosen to follow Gibson-Hill's
version.
IJ. See Khan, pp. 144. and 149; Jioskins, pp. 97-98; and Daniel
Thprner, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping
Enterprise in India, r825-r849 (Philadelphia, 1950), pp. 23-25.
8. On the Hugh Lindsay, see Hoskins, BP· 101--09 and 183-85;
Khan, pp. 150--57; Gibson-,Hill, pp. 147-5}; and Thorner, pp. 25-26.
9. ,.Hoskins, pp. 123, 188-;-89, and 196-207;, and Marlowe, Jforld
IJit,ch, pp. 33 and 42.
~o. "Report from the Select Committee on Steam Communication
with India; together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and
140
Index," Parliamentary Papers, 1837, VI:361-617; and John Rosselli,

Lord William Bentinck: the Making of a Liberal Imperialist (Berke-
ley, Calif., 1974), pp. 285--92.
11. On the triumph of the Red Sea Route, see Hoskins, pp. 109-
26, 193--94, and 209-25; Gibson-Hill, p. 135; Murray, p. 8; "Bio-
graphical Introduction," in Thomas Love P,eacock, Works (The
Halliford Edition), ed. by Herbert Francis Brett-Smith and C. E.
Jones, 10 vols. (London and New York, 1924-34}, 1:clxx; and Carl
Van Doren, The Life of Thomas Love Peact>ck (London and New
York, 19u), pp. 218-19. On the Ata'lanta and the Berenice, see India
Office Records, L/MAR/C 578: "Memoran<l,um and Appendix on
the progress of the 'Atalanta' and 'Berenice'," and 579: "Papers re-
lating to the construction, 8cc.of the 'Atalanta' and 'Berenice'." On
the Semiramis, see India Office Records, L/MAR/C 580: "Copies of
various papers relating to the purchase, repairs 8cc. of the 'Semi-·
ramis'," and letters by "Philatmos" (pseudonym for Peacock) and
"Old Canton" in The Times, October 31 and November 3, 6, and
7, 1838.
12. A. Fraser-Macdonald, ·our Ocean Railways; or, the Rise, Prog-
ress, and Development of Ocean Steam Navigation (London, 1893),
p: 95; W. E. Minchinton, "British Ports of Call in the Niheteenth
Century," Mariner's Mirror 62 (May 1976):149-51; Hoskins, pp. 213-
15 and 233-65; Khan, p. 151; and Thorner, pp. 33-?9.
141
CHAPTER NINE
The Emergence
of Efficient Stearp.ships
The steamships of the 1820s and 1830~ were so unprofitable to

operate that their use was limited to governments, and then
only when there was a pressing political need, such as commu-
nicatjons with India. Ordinary freight and passengers con-
tinued for many years to depend on sailing ships. Even the
P and O survived solely because of its mail contracts. Before
the seagoing steamship could become an object of unsub-
sidized private enterprise, economically competitive with sail-
ing ships on long voyages in eastern seas, several improve-
ments had to transform it into a wholly different machine.
These were the iron hull, the propeller, and the high-pressure
engine.
Iron offers great advantages over wood as a shipbuilding
material. It is so much stronger than wood that a two-
and-a-half-inch iron girder can do the work of a two-foot
oak beam. Thus an iron ship can weigh one quarter less than
a wooden one of the same displacement, have one sixth more
cargo space, and still be as strong. The savings in the weight
of the ship, and the additional cargo space, meant that sixty-
five percent of the weight of a fully loaded iron ship could be
THE EMERGENCE OF EFFICIENT STEAMSHIPS
cargo, compared with only fifty percent for a wooden ship. Its
lightness also enabled an iron ship to go further on 'less en-
ergy, a major consideration for fuel-hungry steamers.
Because of structural limitations, a ship of the best oak
could hope to measure at most only about 300 feet in length.
In the eighteenth century, merchantmen 150 feet long were
consicfered large; the Hope, one of the largest East Indianten,
was 200 feet long by 40 in beam. Even warships were small;
Nelson's. Victory measured 186 feet by 52, hardly oigger than
the Grace Dieu of 1418.
In contrast, an iron ship could be almost any size. !sambard
Kingdom Brunel, Britain's boldest engineer, calculated that
the resi~tance of a hull to niotion through water increases as
the sqdare of its dimensions, while its' capacity increases as
their cube. This led him to build ever bigger ships until in
1858 he launched the Great Eastern. With a length of 692
feet, she dwarfed every othership built before the twentieth
century.,. And if there had been engines, harbors, and cus-
tomers to match her capacity, she would have proved Brunel
right, for her hull fulfilled every promise:
As for shape, iron also offered advantages. A wooden ship
has to be fairly stout to resist 'the stresses of the nigh seas, and
the average wooden sailing ship of 1847 was 4.3 times longer
than ;he was wide. Iron made it possible to build ships with
long slim hulls, which encountered less resistance and carried
more sails, and were therefore faster. Indeed the'fastest sailing
ships ohhe 1870s were built of iron, with a length six, seven,
or even eight times their width. 1 Otlier shapes are also easier
to achieve in iron than in wood, for instance the characteristic
gunboat with a wide flat bottom and a moveable keel, shallow
enough for rivers yet strong enough to resist ocean waves.
Iroµ ships are' not ohly more cost-effective than wooden
ones,/ but_·are safer as well. First; iroh is stronger and more
flexitle than wood, therefore less likely to tear open in a col-
lision or grounding. Second, iron ships can' be• built with wa-
1 43
tertight bulkheads, co11,finingany flooding to a single compart-

ment should ,the hull break open. Finally, an iron ship is less
likely to bum, a consideration of some importance, especially
in steamers.
finally, iron ships are more durable than wooden ones.
They are not subject to many. of the ills that plague wooden
ships, especially steamers: dry-rot near the, boilers, bore-worms
and water beetles in warm waters, and the loosening cause,d !>y
the engine's vibrations. Under the best conditions a wooden
ship built of good oak properly treated and dried for ten years
could last as long as a century. But too often woodeq ships be-
gan to rot after only two or three years, and on the average 1
they lasted only twelve to fifteen. Iron ships, on the ,other
hand, if regularly painted, would..last until they were ship-
wreckeq or sold for sc:;rap.2
T11e advantages of iron ships were not apparent for a long

time. The introduction of iron into shipbuilding needed a
major eco,nomic stimulus to over,come inexperience and ,the
prejudices of an age-old industry., The first iron boats, were
small experimental craft made in the late eighteenth century:
a twelve-foot pleasure boat on the Foss River in Yorkshire in
1717, and the iron-master John Wilkinson's seventy-foot canal
boat Trial, built in 1787. The first iron steamer, the Aaron
Man(Jy, came from the Horseley Irqn Works in Staffordshire
in 1820. Manufactured in pieces, sh~ was transpo,rtecj: to Lon-
don and assembled on the Thames, thereby ina,ugurating a
long era of .British steamboat kits. I~ 1821 she stea~ed across
the Channel and up the Seine, where she provided passenger
service for the next thirty years.
Irc~n shipbuilding began in earnest in the 1830s, a time of
unprecede,nted innovation in maritime matters. In 1837 the
Lairds built the Ra(nbow,.. at ,198 feet in length the largest
iron steamer eyer constructed. The following year ,the Atlan-
tic ;was conquered by steam when the Great Westt:rn and the
1~4
Sirius, racing across the ocean in a record-breaking fifteen

days, reached New York within hours ,of each other. That
same year a new method of propulsion, the screw-propeller,
was installed on two' snips. One was Sir' Francis Pettit Smith's
Archimedes; the othet, the Robert•F. Stockton built by Laird~
had a propeller designed by the Swede John Ericsson. In a
tug-of-war between two sloops of equal size and power, the
propeller-driven Rattler and the paddle-wheeler· Alecto, the
fortner won easily, proving the superiority of the propeller.
This device was especially suited to ocean travel, where high
waves made paddle-wheels plunge in and out of the water,
damaging the paddles and strainin'g'the machinery: Within a
decade, practically all new steamships were built with propel-
lers.3 And' in 1839, Professor George Airy solved lhe compass
problem, as we saw'in the case of the Nemesis. 4 Technical ob-
jed:ions could no longer impede the acceptance of iron steani-
shi ps.
The culmination of these new technologies was Brunel's
Great Britain, launched in 1843. This ';«;ssel combined all the
latest ideas in shipbuilding. She was the largest ship ever
built, she was made of iron, and had a propeller. Luxuriously
fitted out, she was one of the first true ocean liners. Her ca-
reer since 1843 demonstrates the perfection of iron shipbuild-
ing in the 1840s. In 1846 she ran upon some r:ocks along the
Irish coast that would have destroyed any other ship, yet was
barely damaged. Soon repaired, the linet continued in service
for another forty years. From 1886 tc1 1937 she served as a
storage hulk, then was beached again on the Filkland Islands.
Today, rescued and repaired-, the Great Britain lies in the port
of Bristol where she was built, a museum and a monument to
the heroic age of steam and iron. Her hull is as strong as
ever. 5
The transition from wooden to iron ships was also the re-
sult of economic forces. During the eighteenth century and
145
the Napoleonic Wars, Britain sacrificed her last great forests

to build the ships upon which her safety and glory relied. The
cost per ton of a wooden ship rose frpm five pounds sterling
in 1600 to twenty pounds after 1775 and to thirty-six pounds
in 1805. The wood alone accounted for si,xty percent of the
cost of a warship of that period. 6 British shipbuilders increas-
ingly turned to foreign timber, mainly from Scandinavia and
North America. Meanwhile, the young United States, with as
vigorous a maritime tradition as Britain, had access to cheap
abundant timber to supply its boqming shipyards. J}y 1840
the United States had 2,140,000 .,tons of shipping, compared to
Britain's 2,724,000 tpn~. and threatened to surpass th,e British
merchant marine. 7
It was steall\ and ,iron, pillars of the Industrial ;Revolution,
thjlt rescued Britain. ,Pig iron became cheaper, as its produc-
tion climbect From £6.30 a ton in 1810 its price dropped to
£4.50 in 1820, to £3.44 in 1830, and to £2.60, on the average,
between 1840 and 1870. Output meanwhile rose as follows:
1800
1810
200,000
360,000
..
tons
1820
1830
400,000
'650,000
..
1840 1,400,000
1850 2,000,000
1860 4,000,000
1870 5,500,000
Tl\ese _factors, as much as the virtues of iron, proved persua-

sive to s~ipbuilders and their customers, and prolonged the
British shipbuilding and shipping supremacy for ,over half a
century. 8
Sometime around 1,850, the jron steamer ceased being a nov-
elty and became accepted as t~e. standard ship. This turning
point is much more elusive than the birth of an innovation
like the Aaron Manby, or a particularly renowned.example like
the Great ]lritain. It may have come in 1848 when the Penin-
sular and Oriental, tired of the termites that plagued its

wooden ships, bought its first iron steamers for the Indian
Oceal'l. Or perhaps it came in the mid-fifties. UntH then the
British Post Office insisted that the mails be carried on wooden
paddle-steamers, and in deference to its wishes the Cunard
Line waited until 1856 to buy its first iron ship, the Persia.
Also in 1856, Lloyds' of London issued specifications for iron
merchantmen. When such conservative institutions as these
finally accept an innovation, we can be sure it has truly
arrived. 9
The best steamships of the 184os-the Great Britain, for ex-

ample-were in almost all respects closer to the 'great ocean
liners of the twentieth century than to the Clermont or the
Hugh Lindsay; only their engines were still relatively rudi-
mentary. Since the beginning of the nineteenth ce'ntury, engi-
neers had known how to make engines more efficient by in-
creasing the pressure of the steam. Iu fact, stationery land
engines, such as those pumping water from the tin mines of
Cornwall, were more efficient than any marine engine. The
trouble with marine engines was that they used seawater,
which left salt deposits in their boilers. In high-pressure en-
gines these accumulations were, extremely dangerous. As a re-
sult, marine engines of the 1850s were limited to a pressure of
about 25 pounds pet square inch. In 1834, however, Samuel
Hall had invented a method of recycling steam back to the
boilers in the form of sc,1.lt-free
q.istilleq water; this saved boil-
ers from corrosion and allowed higher pressures. Hall's sur-
face condenser was gradually improved upon until the late
1850s, when it was incorporated into almost all new seagoing
steamers. 10
The high pressures allowed by surface condensers !n turn
prompted a device that p.tilized this pressure more effectively:
the compound engine. This syst~m, patented by Charles Ru-·
dolph and John Elder, used two cylinders-a small one fed'
1 47
high-pressure steam from the boiler and a larger one that was
filled with the low-pressure steam exhausted from the small
one. '{hough this devjce was introduced as early as 1854, it did
not come into its own until the 1860s. In 1862, Alfred Holt, a
civil engineer, built the Cleator specifically for long~distance
trade in eastern seas. Three years later he launched three more
compound-engine steamers, the Agamemnon, the Ajax, and
the Achilles, with which he founded the Ocean Steamship Co.,
sailing to the In.dian Ocean and the Far East. In contrast to
the Britannia of 1843 whose engine had a pressure of 9 pounds
per square inch and burned 5 pounds of coal per horsepower
per hour, Holt's ships had pressures of around 60 psi and a
coal consumption of 2.25 lbs/hp/hr. In 1865 one sailed from
England to Mauritius, 8,500 miles away, without refueling.
Rudolph and Elder, meanwhile, were building compound-
engine ships for their Pacific Steam Navigation C9. which
served the Far East. At last seagoing steamships were eco-
nomical enough to interest private shippers carrying ordinary
cargoes. 11
NOTES
1. Maurice Daumas, ed., Histoire generdle ·des techniques, 3 vols.

(Paris, 1968), 3:328.
2. On the advantages of iron .qver wooden ships, see Bernard
Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age: Major Naval Inventions and
their Consequences on' International Politics, I8I4-I940 (London,
1943), pp. 149-54; Daumas, 3:359; Gammell Laird &: Co. (Ship-
builder51 &: Engineers) Ltd., Builders of Great Ships (Birkenhead,
1959), p. 12; Ambroise Victor Charles Colin, La navigation commer-
•ciale au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1901), pp. 55 ;md 6o-61; Harold James
Dyos and Derek Howard Aldcroft, British Transport (Leicester,
1969), p. 239; Charles Ernest Fayle, A Short Hiftory of the World's
Shipping Industry (London, 1933), p. 240; Duncan Haws, Ships and
the Sea: A Chronological Review (New York, 1975); p. 117; L. T. C.
Ro1t, Victorian Engineering (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. '65-86;
David B. Tyler, Steam, Conquers tbe. Atlantic (New York, 1939),
p. 113; Rene Augustin Verneaux, L'industrie des transports mari-

times au XIXe siecle et au commencement du XXe siecle, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1903), 1:304 and 2:4-8; and Halford Lancaster Hoskins,
British Routes to India (London, 1928), p. 81.
3. W. A. Baker, From Paddle-Steamer to Nuclear Ship: A History
of the Engine-Powered Vessel (London, 1965), pp. 10-12; Colin,
pp. 41-43; Haws, p. 130; and Verneaux, 2:44-45.
4. See Chapter 2, note 11.
5. On the earliest iron ships, see James P. Baxter, III, The Intro-
duction of the Ironclad Warship (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), p. 33;
Charles Dollfus, "Les origines de la construction metallique des
navires," in Michel Moliat, ed., Les origines de la navigation d va-
peur (Paris, 1970), pp. 63-67; Haws, p. u7; George Henry Preble,
A Chronological History of the Origin and Development of Steam
Navigation, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 119-35; Hereward
Philip Spratt, The Bi.rth of the Steamboat (London, 1958), p. 40;
Tyler, pp. u2-13; and Verneaux, 2:8-9. On the Great Britain, see
Rolt, pp. 89-91 and Carl E. McDowell and Helen M. Gibbs, Ocean
Transportation (New York, 1954), p. 27.
6. Daumas, 3:359-60.
7. Colin, pp. 2-4; Dyos and Aldcroft, pp. 235-36.
8. On the economics of iron, see Charles K. Hyde, Technological
Change anµ the Brit,ish Iron Industry z700-z870 (Princeton, N.J.,
1977), pp. 137-39, 163, 170, 234, and 245. See also Brodie, pp. 131-33.
9. Haws, p. 142; Cammell Laird, p. 18; and Verneaux, 2:61-62.
10. On surface condensers, see A. Fraser-Macdonald, Our Ocean
Railways; or, The Rise, Progress, and Development of Ocean Steam
Navigation (London, 1893), p. 213; Rolt, pp. 96-97; "Ship," in En-
cyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1973), 20:407; and Daumas, 3:
355-56.
11. On the compound-engine ships of the 1850s and 1860s, see:
Colin, pp. 48-49; Dyos"and Aldcroft, pp. 238-40; Fraser-Macdonald,
pp. 213-14 and 225; Haws, pp. 120, 142, 149, and 157; Francis E.
Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey: An Economic History of a Port
r700-z970 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 53-54; Adam W. Kirkaldy,
British Shipping: Its History, Organization and Importance (London
and New York, 1914), pp. 90-101; McDowell and Gibbs, p. 28;
Thomas Main (M.E.), The Progress of Marine Engineering from the
Time of Watt until the "Present Day (New York, 1893), pp. 56-66;
"Ship," 20:409; Verneaux, 2:36-39; and Roland Hobhouse Thorn-
ton, British Shipping (London, 1939), p. 66.
1 49
CHAPTER TEN
The Suez Canal
Some technologies, like steam or iron, are born in obscurity,

and only gradually change their environment as they evolve.
Others on the contrary have the quality of a long-heralded
millennium. No event of the nineteenth century was awaited
with such fervent expectation, or celebrated with such drama
and $!nthusiasin, as the opening of the Suez Canal. dn Novem-
ber 17, 1869, Empress Eugenie of France ente;;red the canal on
board her imperial yacht Aigle for the three-day journey to
Suez, The emperor of Austria, the crown prince of Prussia,
the grand duke of Russia, and a host of other dignitaries, pub-
licity-seekers, journalists, and party-g;oers followed on board
sixty-eight steamers. Champagne flowed as speeches filled the
air. It was the social event of the century, and it cost a stagger-
ing £1,300,000.
The story of the canal is filled with ironies. While there
were canals from the Red Sea to the Nile in Pharaonic times,
the first to propose a Mediterranean-Red Sea canal was the
eighth-century caliph Harun al-Rashid. Napoleon Bonaparte,
during his invasion of Egypt in 1797-98, ordered his engineers
to survey the proposed canal route. A mistake on their part-
THE SUEZ CANAL
they concluded that the Red Sea was thirty-two incites higher
than the Mediterranean-postponed the project for several
decades.
The Red Sea Route pioneered by the Hugh Lindsay made
plain the need for a canal. In an otherwise easy journey, the
passage through Egypt quickly proved to be the most serious
bottleneck along the route tp the East. Travelers had. to spend
eight to ten days of misery crossing th~ desert, camping out, or
waiting in one of Suez's infamous squalid hotels. In addition,
all the coal for the steamers to India had to be brought to
Suez on the backs of camels.
In, the 1830s the explorer Francis Chesney and the French
engineer Linant de Bellefonds recognized tlie error in their'
predecessors' calculations and proposed to the pasha of Egypt,
Mehemet Ali, a sea-level canal·. I~ 1841,,in the midst of a war
between Britain and Egypt, the mapaging director of the P and
0, Arthur Anderson, journeyed to Egypt to study the Over-
land transit situation. Jie was graciously received by Mehemet•
Ali, to whom he mentioned the need for a canal. In 1846-47,
Prosper E!}fantin, a disciple of the positivist Count de Saint-
Simon, founded the, Societe d'Etupes pour le Canal de Suez.
Several teams of engineers surveyed the route of the proposed
canal, and all reached the same conclusions: The Red Sea and
the Mediterranean were at the same level, and between them
lay a flat land of sand dunes and salt marshes offering no seri-
ous ertgineering difficulties to canal, builders. Only political
obstacles prevented the Suez Canal from being completed
twenty years earlier thao. it was. "'
Mehemeb Ali was lukewarm to the idea' of a canal, and his
nephew Abbas, who·succeeded him (1849-54), disapproved of
it. Not until Mohammed Sa'id became pasha did the project
begin. Sa_i:dwas a,close friend of.the French consul, Ferdinanc\
de Lesseps, who hoped to carry out the plan proposed by Lin-
ant, de Bellefonds and Prosper Enfantin. On November 30,
1854, Sa'id gave de Lesseps the concession to build the canal.
A major obstacle remained, however: Palmerston's interpre-

tation of the Near Eastern question. Palmerston recognized
that a Suez Canal would be a second Bosporus, a waterway of
strategic importance to all the great powers. If it were built,
Egypt would break away from the Ottoman Empire and fall
into the orbit of whatever European nation controlled the ca-
nal. But Britain needed to support the Ottoman Empire
against the ambitions of Russia. Furthermore, a Frenchman
was directing the project, and since the French government
seemed- to favor it, the British government therefore had to
oppose it.
This policy was most unpopular with the British business
world. Shipbuilders, cotton manufacturers, the P and 0, the
East India Company, and the Calcutta Review (the voice of
the Anglo-Indian community) all supported the canal. The
tardiness of the British government to respond to the Indian
Mutiny of 1857 fueled their arguments. Year by year the gov-
ernment's position grew weaker. As a palliative, it offered sub-
s,titutes. One was the Cairo-Suez R'.ailroad, built in the 1850s
to the great relief of passengers, but of little consequence for
freight. The other was the projected Euphrates Valley Rail-
road, a reincarnation of the old Mesopotamian Route and,
like Chesney's dream twenty years earlier, just as much a
failure.
If the canal was the most logical solution, it did not emerge
victorious without a long struggle. Gradually de Lesseps inched
his way toward his goal. In 1856 he carried out a great public
relations campaign that gained him the support, of the British
business and shipping circles. He traveled incessantly between
Cairo, Constantinople, Paris, and London, conducting a one-
man diplomatic mission. In the end, of the 300,000,000 francs
(£12,000,000) spent on the canal, one third went for political,
promotional, and incidental expenses.
In 1859 de Lesseps sensed that the opposition had weakened
enough to tolerate a fait accompli. So he founded the Com-
THE SUEZ CANAL
pagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, mostly- with

French capital, and began construc~ion. Digging a canal from
the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was well within the engi-
neering knowledge of the time; indeed all ,over the world har-
bors and ships' channels were be,ing deepened and enlarged to
accommodate the ever-increasing size and number of ships.
The difficulties lay in the magnitude of the task and in the
environment.
Until 1864 the digging was done by corvee laborers supplied
by the Egyptian government under its contract with the canal
j
company. During the most active phase of construction, 20,000

or more men worked for a period of one month, then were re-
placed by ano~her 20,000. Including time spent tr~veling to
and from the canal site, these men were absent from their
homes for about three months. At the construction site there
were huge logistical problems. During the first years, fresh
water had to be carried in from the Nile; 3,000 camels and
donkeys were employed in this task alone. Nonetheless the
men often went thirsty and suffered outbreaks of dysentery
and cholera. After 1862 a Sweet Water Canal fz:om the Nile
reached Ismailia, midway between Suez and the Mediterra-
nean, alleviating this problem.
Tools were imported from Europe, causing, in some cases,
culture shock in a wheelless society:
At first therf' was some difficulty in gett~ng the indigenes to rise
the wheel-barrow; so much so, that some commenced by carry-
ing them on their heads. They were in the habit of using either
a small basket, holding only a few handfuls of earth; or one,
shovelled it into a sack, whilst another carried it away.1
More,difficult even than digging the canal was building a
new harbor at the northern terminus. Situated on a shallow
shifting sand beach, Port Said required two jetties, one of
them two miles long, out into the sea. To build the jetties and
the city itself, stone was brought by ship from the nearest
quarry, 150 miles to the west beyond Alexandria. Later 327,000
1 53
cubic yards of concrete blocks, made locally from canal dredg-

ings, were dumped into the sea to protect the harbor from
storms and currents.
As construction proceeded, the British government, which
had always viewed the canal with suspicion, began vehemently
to denounce the use of corvee labor. Behind its humanitarian
indignation at the involuntary servitude of the peasantry, crit-
ics noted, lay a concern also for the Egyptian cotton crop
which Lancashire industry sorely needed during the "cotton
famine" of the American Civil War. Whatever its motives,
British pressure on the Ottoman and Egyptian governments
forced a technological revolution upon the canal company.
By 1863 workers had dug a narrow channel, just big enough
for mechanical dredgers, most of the way across the isthmus.
At that point, to replace the corvee labor that was phased out
in June 1864, the company ordered machines, which began ar-
riving a year later. There were dredges with iron buckets
pulled by an endless chain around two drums, one at the end
of a movable arm, the other attached to a framework over the
hull; the largest of these dredges were 110 feet long, had sev-
enty-five horsepower engines, and cost £20,000 apiece. To
carry away the dredgings the French engineer Lavallay, one of
de Lesseps's contractors, designed two new pieces of machin-
ery. The long couloir was a duct 2\6 feet long sloping down-
ward away from the dredge, along which dredgings were
swept by a flow of water and a serits of paddles pulled by
a chain. For locations where the canal banks were too high
for the long couloir, he designed an -elevateur, a 164-foot-long
inclined plane along which boxes of dredgings were pulled by
a chain, and their contents dumped off the high end. Tram-
ways were built for dry excavating, their cars pulled by sta-
'tionary steam engines or donkeys.
By late 1868 these machines had cost the phenomenal sum
of £2,400,000. Every month they burned £20,000 worth of
coal and produced over 10,000 horsepower, to excavate up to
1
• 54
THE SUEZ CANAL
2,600,000 cubic yards of earth. Altogether, 78,500,000 cubic

yards were dug by machine in 1865-69, compared to 20,000,000
by hand from 1861 to 1864. Construction by massive man-
power, an Egyptian tradition since the first pharaohs, had
given way to the biggest concentration o'f mechanical energy
ever assembled.
As, the work neared completion, the Ottoman government
finally withdrew its opposition, as did the British. By 1869
British diplomacy was actively seeking to neutralize the c~nal
and guarantee its safety.
The Suez Canal drastically cut the distance between Europe
and the East. Compared to the Cape Route, the voyage from
London to Bombay was shortened by fifty-one percent, to Cal-
cutta by thirty-two percent, and to Singapore Qy twenty-nine
percent. Its most important impacts were upon the East-West
trade and shipbuilding. The first decade of the canal's opera-
tion was difficult, for sailing ships could not use it, and there
were as yet few steamers equipped for the long voyage east.
By 1882, 'however, the canal was operating at capacity. The
introduction of electric headlights on ships after 1887 allowed
night travel, cutti,ng the transit.time in.half. Several times the
canal had to be straightened, widened, and deepened to ac-
commodate the increasingly larger and more numerous ships
that passed through it. The followirfg table· shows the growth
of this traffic:2
Year Number of Ships Tons Capacity
1870 486 436,609
1875 1,494 2,009,984
1880 2,026 3,057,422
1885 3,624 6,335,753
1890 3,389 6,890,094
1895 3,434 8,448,383
1900 3,441 9,738,152
The Suez Canal, hinge of East and West, was a global

achievement. Built mostly with Egyptian labor and French
1 55
money and machinery, it served mainly the interests of Great

Britain. The first ship to pay a toll on the canal was British,
and within a few years, three quarters or more of the ships
that used it were of British registry. As the canal began to
make a profit, the Khedive Ismai1 sank deeper into debt. In
1875 he sold his 176,602 shares in the canal company to the
British government for £3,976,582. Four years later, bank-
rupted by his wasteful tastes and the generosity of the West-
ern powers in lending him money, he was deposed by the Ot-
tomans. In 1882, Britain added Egypt to her empire in the
name of financial solvency. The logic of the Red Sea Route to
India had overcome at last those long-lived British compunc-
tions about territorial aggrandizement. 3
NOTES
1. J. Clerk, "S~ez Canal," Fortnightly Review 5 (New Series, 1869):
207. For a reasoned explanation of the nonuse of the wheel in Arab

lands see Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1975).
2. Rene Augustin Verneaux, L'industrie des transports maritimes
au X!Xe siecle et au commencement du XXe siecle, 2 vols. (Paris,
1903), 1:329. Halford Lancaster Hoskins, British Routes to India
(London, 1928), pp. 447, 469, and 473, gives slightly different figures.
3. On the construction of the Suez Canal, see Clerk, pp. 80-100
and 207-25; John Marlowe, World Ditch: The Making of the Suez
Canal (New York, 1964); Lord Kinson, Between Two Seas: The
Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 1968), especially pp. 149-225;
and Hoskins, pp. 292-315, 345-72, 400-407, and 447-79.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Submarine Cable
It has become a commonplace to characterize our own time

by its "information explosion." The goal of higher education
is no longer erudition (how to store small amounts of infor-
mation) but research methodology (how to acquire and han:
die large amounts). The speedy acquisition of data has be-
come as central 'to the concerns of business as labor, machines,
and raw materials. As governments sink into ever deeper
bondage to their intelligence services, the media-struck pub-.
lie awaits the news each day, like investors at their ticker-tap'e
machines.
Addiction to data and speed are nothing new, of course.
The need for rapid information was one of the forces behind
the opening of steam communication with India. But it went
even further, creating a network of telegraph wires and sub-
marine cables that transmitted messages over global distances
at hitherto unimaginable speeds. These cables were, in the
words of the historian' Bernard Finn, "the grand Victorian
technology." 1
Land telegraphy had been a reality for two decatles before
underwater telegraphy came of age. This lag was not the re-
157
suit of a lack of desire or money, but of technology. Until the

1860s the ocean depths were unknown, and the physics of
transmitting electrical impulses over thousands of miles was
in its infancy. It took both scientific research and costly trial
and error to solve these problems.
The first attempt at underwater telegraphy seems to have
been a cable laid across the Hooghly River in Calcutta in
1839. Not until 1843, however, was a good insulating material
discovered; this was gutta-percha, a natural plastic formed
from the sap of a Malayan tree. In 1850, John and Jacob Brett
laid a cable across the English Channel. It was made of a sin-
gle strand of copper wire coated with gutta-percha. A few
hours after its debut, a fisherman's anchor broke it. The
next year another cable was laid alongside the first. This
one was made of four copper wires insulated with gutta-percha,
sheathed with iron. wire, and then wrapped in jute and coated
again with pitch; thus protected, it worked well into the next
century. Two years later, in 1852, a cable linked England and
Ireland. Submarine telegraphy was born.
The investing public, easily carried away by gold rushes and
railway booms, seized upon the new technology with un4,ue
qaste. If a cable could span the Channel, then surely a longer
piece of the same cable could span the Atlantic Ocean, thopght
the speculators. In 1857 and 1858 two steamers stretched a ca-
ble from Britain to America. A few messages were sc:;nf, in-
cluding one cancelling an order for two regiments of troops
to be sent from Canada to India, saving the British govern-
ment £50,000. Then the line died out.
A similar fate befell the first submarine cable to India. The
first,scheme to link Britain with India was formulated by the
European and Indian Junction Telegraph Co. Ltd., foµnded
in 1856 with the intention of laying a land line to the Persian
Gulf and a submarine cable thence to Karachi. At the tjme of
the Indian Revolt of 1857, the 4,500 miles of lap.d lines in In-
dia 4elped the British move troops quickly and crush the up-
rising in a few months. The question of a telegraphic link
THE SUBMARINE CABLE
with Britain therefore- became a major issue, receiving the at-

tention of the House of Commons and of Palmerston himself.
In 1856 the Red Sea and India Telegraph Co. was founded to
link Constantinople with Alexandrja, and Suez with Aden and
Karachi. In 1859 the first Red Sea cable.was laid. It was a sin=
gle strand of copper wire coated with gutta-percha and cov-
ere~dwith hemp, and it weighed one ton per mile. It was laid
by ,crude machines that pulled it taut so that it hung between
underwater peaks. In places terero bore-worms ate through
the insulation, and in other places the cable got so heavily en-
crusted with growths that it broke under their weight. The
first cable to India, which cost £800,000, never transmitted a
single message.
The disasters of the Atlantic Ocean and Red Sea cables
stirred the British government into action. The Board of
Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Co. appointed a joint com-
mittee to study submarine telegraphic technology. William
Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) advised the Atlantic cable proj-
ect; he designed instruments for sending and receiving mes-
sages and invented methods of deep-sea sounding. The ques-
tions surrounding cable construction and laying methods were
studied. When the joint committee finished its work in Sep-
tember 1860, the basic techniques of cable manufacture and
laying and of electrical transmission had been perfected. The
telegraph, at last; could reach across the seas and oceans.
There 'followed a rush to install submarine cables. In 1861
the French laid one from Port-Vendre irl, southern France to
Algiers, and the British laid one from Malta to Alexandria,
both with a clear col6nial role. From 1862 to 1864 a new sub-
marine cable joined Karachi ,with the Persian Gulf;· this one
weighed four times more than its precursor and worked well.
At the gulf, it connected with a land line through Persian and
Ottoman terr'itory to Constantinople; from there several land
lines radiated to Europe. In 18651 a year before the first cable
to America, the telegraph linked Britain with India.
If the very existence of this line demonstrated the impor-
tance of India in British eyes, its performance fell far short of

its imperial purpose. Between London and Constantinople,
the lines crossed various states whose own official telegrams
took precedence over foreign messages. It also grated on Brit-
ish sensibilities that their telegrams could be spied on, altered,
or postponed at will by Continental officials. Worse was the
fate of telegrams beyond Constantinople. There, long lines
across poorly controlled territories often broke down, Copper
wires were stolen. Turkish and Persian clerks, with a less than
perfect command of the English language, garbled the mes-
sages at the many relay stations along the way where telegrams
had to be taken down and retransmitted. As a result telegrams
between Britain and India often took a week, and occasionally
a month or more, to reach their destination.
As in all crises relating to the empire, the House of Com-
mons appointed another Select Committee in 1866 "to inquire
into the practical working of the present system of Tele-
graphic and Postal Communications between this Country and
the East Indies." Two new lines to India were laid. One, the
Indo-European Telegraph Co., was a British-owned land line
across Belgium, Germany, Russia, and Persia to the British
submarine cable in the Persian Gulf. The other was a com-
pletely British submarine cable to Gibraltar, Malta, and Alex-
andria, and from Suez to Aden and Bombay; only from Alex-
andria to Suez was there a land line, with British operators.
In 1870, at last, Britain and India were linked by an efficient
telegraph line that regularly conveyed messages in about five
hours.
In the 1870s, after the triumph of the cables to America
and India, there emerged a powerful submarine cable indus-
try. Aided by further technological improvements and the ac-
tive policy of the British government, it laid cables around the
world. Curb transmission, patented in· 1861, sharpened the
signal by sending a revers~ pulse immediately after the main
pulse. Duplex telegraphy, introduced in the mid-seventies, al-
160
THE SUBMARINE CABLE
lowed messages to be sent in opposite directions simultane-

ously over the same 'line, thus doubling its capacity. The si-
phon recorder and other automatic· machines replaced the
human hand with punched tape. These and other improve-
ments sped up telegrams and reduced their cost. A twenty-word
message on the first telegraph line to India cost 101 shillings
and took several days; by the end of the century such a,
message cost four shillings and took half an hour. And the
customers responded; whereas a few dozen telegrams were
sent in 1870, two million were transmitted in 1895. The new
medium not only existed, it penetrated and transformed the
daily routines of Anglo-Indian relations.
Soon dozens of other cables were laid throughout the seas
and oceans. In 1871 a cable linked India with Penang, Saigon,
Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and another went from Singapore
to Java and Port Darwin; Europe was now in contact with
Southeast Asia, China, and Australia. Two years later cables
linked Europe with Brazil and Argentina, and in 1875 a cable
reached the west coast of South America. In 1876 an extension
of the Australian cable reached New Zealand. In 1879 another
was laid along the east coast of Africa from Aden to Zanzibar
and Mozambique, reaching South Africa. Finally in 1885 two
cables along the west coast of Africa linked Europe with West
and South Africa. All the while, along the earliest cable routes
in the Nortli Sea, tire Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean,
new cables were added alongside the old •as demand rose; for
example, in 1900 there were seven cables between France and
Algeria.
The earliest cables were laid by a· number of entrepreneurs
or hastily formed companies. The seventies saw the consolida-
tion of these groups into one giant monopoly. In 1864, John
Pender, a Manchester merchant, brought together the Gutta
Percha Co. and Glass Elliott and Co. into the Telegraph Con-
struction and Maintenance Co., or T C and M. In 1866 he
took shares in the Atlantic Telegraph Co:, which laid the ca-
161
ble to America that TC and M had manufactured. By 1870,

Pender was chairman of the British Indian Submarine Tele-
graph Co. Two years later he founded the Eastern Telegraph
Co., a firm that soon became the Eastern and Associated Com-
panies, or "Electra House Group," controlled by the Pender
family. Of the approximately 190,000 miles of submarine ca-
bles in the world in 1900, seventy-two percent were British-
owned, mostly by Eastern and Associated, as several foreign
authors ruefuJ!y noted.2
Though owned by private investors, the cable network of
the seventies was no triumph of free enterprise, but the bene-
ficiary of governmental munificence. The first windfall came
in .1870 when the British government nationalized its domes-
tic telegraph companies, releasing i:;apital fop investment• in
submarine cables. Later it subsidized cable companies either
annually or in a lump sum; for instance, it paid £1,100,000 to
the Eastern and South African Telegraph Co. to lay the Aden-
South Africa cable, and £19,000 a year to the Africa Direct
Telegraph Co. for its West African line: Just.as mail contracts
kept the Peninsular and Oriental and the Cunard lines pros-
perous in good times and bad, so.did subsidies support the ca-
ble firms. Not once between 1873 and 190\ did Eastern' make
less than 6.75 percent profit per.annum.
The cable network of the seventies was composed of eco-
nomic cables, that is' to say, lines that were useful to business
and private customers. After 1880 such opportunities were de-
pleted, and a new era opened. The Admiralty and the Colo-
nial, War, and Foreign offices had gotten accustomed to com-
municating by telegram and wished to extend that possibility
to all parts of the British Empire. As jingoist sentiments rose,
it became increasingly galling to have British telegrams cross
non-British territories. Thus, ever more distant lines with ever
les.~economic value were laid for political reasons. Ohe such
cable was the Suez--Suakin ·line laid as part of the British in-
vasion of Egypt in 1882. Another was a direct cable from Brit-
THE SUBMARINE CABLE
ain to the Cape of Good Hope in 1899-190.1, which was used

in the Boer War. Under Admiralty pressure this line was ex-
tended to Mauritius and from there to Ceylon, Singapore, and
Australia in 1901-02. While these lines duplicated the Eastern
cables, they did not pass through Egypt or the Red Sea, and
therefore were thought to be strategically safer.
The epitome of strategic cables was the "All-Red Route," a
scheme to gird the globe with a cable passing only through
British territories. By the 1890s there were several cables to
Canada and Australia. The missing link was a cable from Brit-
ish Columbia to New Zealand. Since not even so patriotic a
firm as Eastern and· Associated would get involved in any
scheme so patently unprofitable, the plaq was handed to the
Pacific Cable Board, a qmsortium owned by the governments
of Great Britam, C::i,nada, New Zealand, and Australi~. 1 In
1902 this line was completed, and all parts of the British Em-
pire could henceforth communicate by a cable network upon
1
which the sun never set.a,
Cables were an essential part of the new imperialisµi. At the

rudest level, they gave valu~ to a liandful of mostly deserted is-
lands in the most, isolat~d parts of the world: Ascension, St.
Helena, Norfolk, Rodriguez, Fanning, and Cocos. Like Guam
and Midway for the United States, these islands served a~ re-
lay stations for Britain. '1n a few instances, cables helP.,ed the
empire to expand: Sol,\th Africa in 1879 and ~901, Egypt in
1882, and West Africa in 1885 all came under Britain's wing.
But more important, cables served to tie the European em-
pires together. In times of peace they were the lifelines'of tlte
ever-increasing business communications that bound imperial-
ist nations to their colonies around the world. In times of cri-
sis, they were valuable tools of diplomacy; in the Fashoda con-
frontation of 1898, Kitchener communicated with London by
way of an underwater telegraph cable sunk in the Nile, while
his French opponent Marchand was cut off from Paris. 4 And
in times of war, the cables were security itself. In World War

One the British and French empires, held together by the
telegraph, supplied their metropoles with troops, food, and
raw materials. And the German Reich learned in August
1914, when its cables were cut, that the world communicated
on British sufferance.
NOTES
1. Bernard S. Finn, Submarine Telegraphy: The 'Grand Victorian

Technology (Margate, 1973). See also Frank James Brown, The
Cable and Wireless Communications of the World; a Survey of
Present Day Means of International Communication by Cable and
Wireless, Containing Chapters on Cable and Wireless Finance (Lon-
don and New York, 1927); E. A. Benians, "Finance, Trade and Com-
munications, 1870--1895," and Gerald S. Graham, "Imperial Finance,
Trade and Communications, 1895-1914," in E. A. Benians, James
Butler and C. E. Carrington, eds., Cambridge History of the British
Empire, vol. 3: The Empire-Commonwealth IB70--I9I9 (Cambridge,
1959), chs. 6 and 12, respectively; August Roper, Die Unterseekabel
(Leipzig, 1910); and Willoughby Smith, The Rise and Extension of
Submarine Telegraphy (London, 1891). On cables to India, see Hal-
ford Lancaster Hoskins, British Routes to India (London, 1928),
pp. 373-97.
2. See Ambroise Victor Charles Colin, La navigation commerciaJe
au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1go1), p. 147; and Roper, p. 85.
3. On the strategic value of cables, see P. M. Kennedy, "Imperial
Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870--1914," English Historical
Review 86(1971):728-52.
4. Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan I8:20--I88I (London, 1959);
and Kennedy, p. 728.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Global
Thalassocracies
While the Suez Canal and the cables JI?,arkeddramatic turning

points, the world communications network also benefited from
the more gradual evolution of shipbuilding and shipping. On
the engineering side, the main improvements were the intro-
duction of steel hulls and triple-expansion engines. The eco-
nomics of shipping, meanwhile, led to ever larger and more
specialized vessels, to improvements' in harbors and other navi-
gational infrastructures, and to organizations designed• to make
the most efficient use of these means.
The introduction of steel in shipbuilding followed natura1lt
in the wake of the switch from wood to iron and involved
none of the moral and social qualms of the earlier transition'.
Because steel was stronger than wrought iron, a steel ship
could be,, built fifteen percent lighter than an iron ·ship of
equal strength and' dimensions. This in turn brought about
higher speeds and lower fuel consumption.
The first steel-hulled vessel was the little river steamer Ma
Roberts, which Laird built for Livingstone's Zambezi River
Expedition in 1858. She gave poor service, unfortumttely, for
her hull rusted badly and her engine was too weak. She finally
was wrecked on the banks of the Zambezi. 1 Next came the

Banshee, a blockade-runner in the American Civil War, and a
number of other steel warships designed for speed, not econ-
omy. Only in the late 1870s, after the price of steel had be-
come competitive with that of wrought iron, did steel replace
iron in the construction of merchantmen. 2 The first large steel
ocean liner was the 1,777-ton Rotomahana, built for the Union
Steamship Co. of New Zealand' in '1879_.After the P and 0
found that its steel-hulled Ravenna gave better service than
iron-hulled ships, it ceased ordering the latter. By 1885, forty-
eight percent of all new steamers were built of steel, and by
1900, all but five percent were similarly constructed.3
Just as steel was the natural successor to iron, so was the

triple-expansion engine the successor to the compound en-
gine. ;The use of steel in th,e manufacture of boilers, pipes,
and engine parts allowed engineers to increase the steam, pres-
sure fro~ 60 psi in the 1860s to· 150, ps\ in tp.e late seventies,
then to 200 psi in the.nineties. At these higher pressures, steam
did not lose all its expansive power even after passing through
a second cylinder; it was to capture this remaining energy
that engineers added a third cylinder.
The resulting engine ran faster and more smoothly on con-
siderably less fuel than a-compound engine of the same' power.
Liners of the 1860s and 1870s,had burned 1.75,to 2.5q pounds
of coal per horsepower per hour. The Aberdeen, the first I,arge
triple-expansion-engine ship, burned only 1.25. This ship, es-
pecially well suited to very long.routes, set a record by sailing
from Plymouth to Melbourne in forty-two days .. Later triple-
expansion engines burned as little as o~e pound o( coal per
horsepower per hour. Put another way, the ,energy contained
in one sheet of paper, if burned in such an ei;igine, co.uld
move a ton of freight one mile. The triple-expansion engine
was to be (along with a few quadruple-exp~nsion engines) the
l~st and most pc:;rfectexpression of the ~ewcomen-Watt recip-
166
THE GLOBAL :I'HALASSOCRACIES
rocating steam engine that had so revolutionized the world of

the nineteenth century. By World War One, however, two
newcomers, the steam-turbine and the diesel engine, had be-
gun to replace it. Such was the pace ..of maritime progress. 4
Shippers, ever on the lookout for greater efficiencies, had

not forgotten Brunel's revelation that a big ship can carry
cargo at a lower cost than several small ones (other things be-
ing equal). In the 1850s Bruhel had badly miscalculated· the
world's demand for his Great Eastern; the world of the nine-
ties, however, was qpite ready for such large ships. The largest,
were the Atlantic liners, stars of tf\e ocean, whose story has
often been told. But in the humbler trades also, every decade
saw iarger ships. In the ,1850s a steamer of 2,000 tons was con...
sidered large. By the 1890s ships of 6,000 to 8,000 tons were
quite common. The average P and O liner in 1860.displaced
1,490 tons, and the largest 2283 tons; in, 1897 the average in-
creased to 4,896 tons, and the largest displaced 8,000. By 1914
steamers of 20,000 tons or more were not unusual. 5
Steamers grew in number as well as size. The maritime his-
torian Adam Kirkaldy gives the following figures on the ton-.
nage of the world's steamships: 6
1850 700,000 tons
1860 1,500,000
1.
1870 2,700,000 "
1880 5,500,000
1890 10~200,000
1900 16,?po,009 "
1910 26,200,poo "
The increased efficiency of steamers, the competition resulting

from the greater number of ships and the shortened distances
through the Suez Canal all contributed to a significant decline
in freight rates during this period; Accordip.g, to the maritime
historian A. Frasel"-Macdonald, the cost of shipping a ton of
cargo from Bombay to England fell 'from ten or twelve pounds
sterling in 1869 to twenty or thirty shillings in 1893, a ninety-

percent decline; rates on longer routes fell even more. 7 Other
authors cite less extreme declines but all agree that the rates
dropped at least sixty percent, and that much of this decline
occurred because of lower insurance and handling charges on
goods carried in safe and reliable steamships. 8
The growth in the size and number of ships was paralleled
by a great expansion in trade. Between 1860 and 1910, Brit-
ain's trade with India increased threefold, from £38,600,000 to
£116,100,000; with Australia from,£17,100,000 to £60,000,000;
and with South Africa from £3,900,000 to £29,900,000, and all
during an era of gradually falling prices. 9 The Suez Canal,
forced to ,accommodate ships that were, on the average, over
three times larger than those for which it had been designed,
was deepened and widened, so that large sp.ips could pass
through 'simultaneously. By 1914 all 1.mportant seaports had a
minimum depth at dockside of thirty-six feet. Harbors deep
and spacious enough to handle the new ships 1\'ere enlarged
and protected with concrete breakwaters. Among the most
important ports of the' post-Suez era were brand-new colonial
cities such as Karachi, Mombasa, Singapore, Port Sai'd, and
Aden. Older cities like Shanghai and Bombay were trans-
formed beyond recognition. By 1892, Hong Kong, the little
island wrested from China in the Opium War, cleared more
shipping than Liverpool and almost as much as London. 10
All the world's seaports sold coal to passing steamers, but
some were almost exclusively coaling stations and ports-of-call,
with little other trade: Port Sai'd, Mauritius, Acheen, Las
Palmas, St. Vincent, and PaJ)eete are a few examples. Others,
like Aden, Djibouti, Singapore, and Honolulu, also became
important naval bases.11
When steamers conquered the seas, it was not at the expense

of sailing ships but with their assistance. The early years of
the ocean liners coincided with the greatest age of sailing
168
THE GLOBAL THALASSOCRACIES
ships, brought close to perfection by their rivalry with steam.

In their pursuit of speed through harmony with the forces of
nature, naval architects of the mid-century created the China
clippers, triumphs of aesthetics and technology, the cathedrals
of the'sea. 12 Such was the increase in maritime trade in the
forties -and fifties that each type of vessel had a role to play,
and a growing one. While steamers took over the North At-
lantic passenger service and the mail service to India, sailing
ships carried the mundane freight traffic of other seas.
The ·Suez Canal ended the dipper era, but it did not banish
sails from the oceans of the world. Sailing ships held their own
in two types of trade until the end of the century. One ';Vas
carrying bulky cargo from areas most remote from the world's
coal mines: Australian wool and wheat, Indian rice and jute,
grains from the American West Coast, and nitrates from
Chile. The other-and more significant-was the outbound
shipment of coal to satisfy the fuel needs of steamers on all
the world's oceans. Even after coal was discovered in India,
South Africa, Japan, and elsewhere, ships still paid a premium
for the higl)er-quality Welsh anthracite. In 1879, Britain ex-
ported u,703,000' tons of coal, and in 1895, 33,101,000 tons,
much of it on sailing ships.
The turn of the century, however, marked the end .of the
sailing era. In 1875, 56,537 out! of 61,902 ships in Lloyd's Reg-
ister (ninety-dn.e percent) were ,sailing ships; their tonnage
represented seventy-two percent of the figure for the world. By
then Britain was already building more steam than sailing
tonnage. In 189g-1900, sixty percent of all ships (22,856 out of
38,180) were propelled by the wind, but their tonnage' :cepre-
sented only one quarter of the world's total (6,795,782 tons
out of 27,673,528).13
Two changes doomed the sailing ship after the 1880s. One
was the greater fuel efficiency of steamers brought about by
size and triple-expansion engines; not only could steamers now
sail much further, but coal could be carried as cheaply in

steamers as in sailing ships. The other occurrence was more
than a matter of economics; it was a new attitude toward time.
The industrial elites, imbued with a sense of commandi,ng the
destiny of the world, demanded of events both speed and pre-
dictability. Among sailing ships, only the clippers could com-
pete with steamers in sheer speed, and they,became deservedly
famous for it. Not even the clippers, however, could meet a
schedule. Once the thought had taken •root ,that one could le-
gitimately expect certain events to take place at certain pre-
cise• times-an. idea first implanted in people's minds by the
experience of the railroads-it became increasingly unbearable
to think that one's shipment or person might not arrive at a
predictable moment. The qualms and doldrums and shifting
winds of the open sea became the enemies of industrial man,
creature of his calendars and clocks.14
In the maritime world, the spirit of scheduling was em-
bodied in the institution of the shipping line. In 1875 a steam-
ship kept on a regular schedule was the equivalent, in annual
carrying• capacity,• of three sailing, ships of comparable ton-
na_ge. By 1900 the ratio had risen to four-to-one. 15 Owners of
expensive steamers had every incentive to use them to their
maximum, for the investments were enormous, aJ).d ob~oles-
cence rapid. In other words, they had to, schedule their cus-
tomers to meet their timetables. And the customers, were only
too willing to cooperate, for goods-in-transit represente,d capi-
tal uselessly tied up.
The earliest steamship lines were heavily subsidized ahd reg-
ulated. The Peninsular and Oriental, for example, received
£160,000 a year beginning in 1845 for its service to India and
China. By the 1860s the British government was spending over
a million pounds a year on mail contracts to steamship com-
panies, several of which proudly bore the name "Royal Mail."1 6
In addition to carrying the ,mail, these. contract steamers
served the government as transports in wartime; in fact, they
were built to Admiralty specifications for this purpose. And

many did serve: P and O ljners were requisitioned in the
Burma campaign of 1852, in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and
in the Sudan expedition of 1884; ships of the Calcutta and
Burmah Steam Navigation Co. served in 1857 and in the Abys-
sinian campaign of 1863; and Cunard liners were used in Cy-
prus in 1878, Egypt in 18821 and the Sudan in 1884-85.17
Like the P and O,and the British India, lines to Africa also
owed their beginnings to·mail subsidies. Thus the Union Cas-
tle Line serving South Africa traces its origins to the Union
Steam Collier Go.., later called Union Steam,Ship Co., which
obtained the mail contract to Capetown in 1857. Between Brit-
ain and West Africa the pioneer line was the African Steam-
ship Co. It 'was founded in 1851 by the Liverpool mei;chant
Thotnas Sterling and the indefatigable Macgregor t.aird. Its
purpose was to link Britain to the ,Niger basin via Laird's pro-
jected steamboat service on the Niger River, thus carrying
palm oil and otlter products of the West African interior to
Europe at producers' prices. This would have a double bene-·
fit. It would bypass the middlemen, both African and Euro-
pean, who hampered a beneficial trade by burdening it with
outrageous markups. And it would deliver the perishable palm
oil to Europe in a fresher condition by avoiding the notorious
West African coastal doldrums that often delayed sailing ships.
for weeks on end. To start a steamship line, however, the new
firm needed a subsidy. In 1852, Laird obtained, a contract of
£2'1,250 per year to carry the mail once a month between ,Brit-
ain and West Africa .
. Yet there were limits on the amount of, mail and the gen-
erosity of• the British government. Steamships conquered the
seas on their 'mer.its as safe, reliable, and speedy means of
transporting freight. In the West·African trade this happened
in the 1860s, when the British and African Steam Navigation
Co. began competing with the African ·Steamship, qo. By 1880
three times more steamers than sailing sliips• entered• Lagos,
carrying six times more tonnage. In later years the competitors

merged to form the Elder Dempster Line, which still serves
the West African coast.is
In the Indian Ocean the introduction of unsubsidized ship-

ping lines coincides with the three technological advances
mentioned earlier: the compound engine, the Suez Canal, and
the submarine cable. The cable was as important as the other
two developments, for it allowed the headquarters of shipping
companies to maintain contact with their ships, and shippers
to coordinate their shipments with current schedules and
the needs of their customers. It served also unscheduled, or
"tramp," steamers, routing them according to the latest quota-
tions on the world commodities market; in other words, it led
them from places where they could buy low to places in
which they could sell high. No longer were the economic for-
tunes of a ship entrusted to blind luck and the captain's busi-
ness acumen. Whole fleets of ships were now controlled from
headquarters, half a world away.
By the 1880s there were many British-owned steamship lines
operating in the Indian Ocean and in Far Eastern waters.
Though the first was the Peninsular and Oriental, the real pio-
neer among steamship lines was its rival the British India.
This was the creation of a pious and energetic Scot, William
Mackinnon. Born in Campbeltown, Argyleshire, in 1823, he
began work as a clerk in Glasgow. In 1847 he went to India
to seek his fortune and rose to a prominent position in one of
India's leading trading houses, Smith, Mackenzie and Co. The
Anglo-Indians of Calcutta, meanwhile, had become dissatisfied
with the Peninsular and Oriental's monthly service and de-
manded better communications with the rest of the world.
Mackinnon and several associates saw their opportunity, and
in 1856 they founded the Calcutta and Burmah Steam Naviga-
tion Co. with three steamers. The following year they were
THE GLOBAL .THALASSOCRACIES
awarded the Calcutta-Rangoon mail contract, and in 1862 the

company was renamed the British India Steam Navigation Co.
Mackinnon was its director and principal shareholder.
Mackinnon's thriving company soon introduced the com-
pound engine into the Indian Ocean and later became the
first to use the Suez Canal. Taking advantage of a booming
market, Mackinnon extended his lines in all directions: to the
Persian Gulf, to Singapore and Malacca, to the Dutch East
Indies, to England, Australia, and China. By 1869 his fleet
nnmbered fifty vessels, among them the most modern steamers
available. While the P and O concentrated on the long-distance
passenger, and mail business, the British India became the
most important cargo line of the Eastern seas. As Portuguese
captains had discovered over four centuries earlier, there was
as much profit carrying freight between th<; Eastern ports as
to and from Europe. Thus by 1893 the British India Line had
110 ships covering twice as many miles as the Peninsular and
Oriental routes.
Mackinnon was more than a successful shipping magnate.
He was, as the Times put it, "a perfect type of old-fashioned
Scotch Presbyterian," driven by his Calvinist morality· to do
his best in worldly and in moral affairs. In the 1870s he be-
friended Sir John Kirk, the British consul at Zanzibar, an en-
thusiast for the abolition of the slave trade in Africa. He also
became friends with King Leopold Ir 0£ Belgium and witp.
General George "Chinese" Gordon. In 1872 the British India
Line was awarded the mail contract between Aden, Zanzibar,
and Natal. For Mackinnon this was the beginnin'.g of a deeper
involvement in African affairs. By the 1880s .he began losing
interest in business and developed a spasmodic obsessiQU with
Africa. His faith in progress and•Christian morality led him to
believe that British rule would bring the blessings of civiliza-
tion and salvation to those less fortunate. Hence he founded
the Imperial British East Africa Co., chi;irtered to extend the
British Empire into East Africa. Like Macgregor Laird before
him, Mackinnon combined the motives of the Crusaders with

the methods of the Industrial Revolution. 19
The British were not long alone in adopting the new ship-
ping to link metropole and colonies. In the 1840s, French
steamers between Marseilles and Alexandria proved so fast
and luxurious that many British travelers preferred them,
taking P and O ships only east of Suez. In·the 1860s the Com-
pagnie des Services Maritimes des Messageries Imperiales (later
changed to Messageries 'Maritimes) extended its. operations
from the Mediterranean to .the Indian Ocean. A government-
subsidized line like the' P and 0, it followed the French flag,
first. to Algeria, then to Indochina and China. In service and
speed, it rivaled the Peninsular and Oriental, and as it also
served India, Singapore, and Australia, it captured a consid-
erable British clientele. By 1875 it owned almost two thirds of
all French steam tonnage. 2P
The Messageries for the most part neglected France's Afri-
can possessions. Beginning in 1856, a;1 sJ11allpaddle-wheeler,
'the Guyenne, stopped at Dakar on its way to an:d from South
Ameri~a. Consistent service, however, did ,not commence un-
til the eighties under smaller firms such as Maurel et Prom
(Bordeaux-Senegal) and Compagnie Fabre-Fraissinet (Mar-
seilles-West Africa). Similarly, it was in 'the 1880s that .a Bel-
gian line, Walford et Cie., connected Belgium and the Congo,
and that the first derman steamship lines-the Woermann, the
Atlas, and the Sloman-appeared in African ports. The. lag of
the French, Belgians, and Germans behind Britain canrlot be
explained so much by their d~layed industrialization as by
their delayed conque~t of Africa and its econoniic insignifi-
cance in the nineteenth century, in coml?arison' with India. 21
Among empires, the most unusual kind is thaf of the sea.

The Minoans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Vikings
all dominated for a time the seas around them. But :only once
174
has there been a, truly global thalassocracy, a nation whose

fleet and merchant marine were dominant on almbst all the
seas of the world. This was Great Britain in the nineteenth
century.
There were those who attributed the power of Britain to
the unique virtues of the British nationa'l character, or to di-
vine grace. Others-mostly foreigners-saw in it only proof of
Albion's perfidy .lnd greed; as one Arab sheik explained to a
member of Chesney's•Euphrates Expedition, "The English are
like ants: if one finds a bit of meat, a hundred follow." 22 But
thalassocracy requires something other than divine grace or
perfidy; it requires a superior,technology·and an economy to
back it up. In the early nineteenth ceqtury, Britain's hard-won
maritime supremacy was threatened by an .American ship-
building boom based on limitless supplies of cheap timber.
TJie spift to iron ships rescued Britain's dominance. From bne
quarter of the world's tonnage in 1840, Britain's .share' rose to
42.7 percent.in 1850 and remained 'between forty and fifty per-
cent until World War One. 23Between 1890 and .1914, half the
world's seaborne trade was carried in British-owned vessels,
and Britain built two thirds of the world's pew ships. 24
Britain's lead in the steam-engine and metal-hull industries
was reinforced by another factor. Slie possessed the richest de-
posits of the world's best steamer coal within a few miles of
her coasts. Much of the coal later discovered near the' Indian
Ocean-in Natal, Bengal, and Borne~was located in British
colonies, as were the most convenient coaling stations. In fact,
Britain practically' monopolized the world's naval' coal sup-
plies, just as she dominated the global• submarine cable ,net-
work.25 (The, importance of these factors is readily apparent
when one contrasts them with their twentieth-century equiva-
lents, petroleum•and the radio, for neither of these gave any
nation the edge that coal and· cables had once given Britain.)
In the shadow of Britain's domination of the sea, Jesser
thalassocracies could also claim the title of empire. Some', like
France and Germany, were authentic great powers within Eu-

rope. The French, uncertain of their status after the defeat of
1871, found consolation in possessing more land than the Brit-
ish, while the Germans were half-proud and half-ashamed of
the few backwater colonies they belatedly acquired. Nations
that were small and -weak by European standards-Italy, Por-
tugal; Belgium, the Netherlands-used colonies to achieve im-
perial status. All in all, half the world was Europe Overseas,
thalassocracies bound together by delicate webs of steamship
lines and cables.26
The enormous expansion of shipping and communications

in the nineteenth century was part of an even larger change
in world economic relations. Throughout historic times and
until the nineteenth cep.tury, trade between East and West
bore .two characteristics. One was the high- cost of transporta-
tion, whether through the Middle East or around Africa,
which made \rade worthwhile only for the most precious
goods: tea, porcelain, spices, indigo, silk, pearls, gems, and
bullion. The other was the unbalanced nature of the trade,
with the East offering products that Europeans coveted, while
the £uropeans had little to offer in return, save bullion and
later opium. The steamships demolished this age-old system,
and in its place fostered a new,economicrelationship in which
both sides exchanged bulky commodities at low freight rates.
Europe offered the products of its industry-cotton, machin-
ery, iron, and coal-in exchange for Eastern raw materials and
cheap agricultural goods: wheat, rice, jute, rubber, gutta-
percha, tin, and other products. 27
Steam, cables, and the Suez Canal revolutionizec:l the rela-
tions between East and West more than did the great dis-
coveries five centuries earlier. The Portuguese caravels and
Spanish galleons had closed the global-ecumene, bringing peo-
ples all around the world into contact with one another. The
new technologies of the nineteenth "century deepened these
contacts into a constant flow of goods, people, and ideas. They

turned isolated subsistence economies with limited trade con-
tacts into parts of a single world market in basic commodities.
They shattered tradHional trade, technology, and political re-
lationships, and in their place they laid the foundations for a
new global civilization based on Western technology.
NOTES
1. George Gibbard Jackson, The Ship Under Steam (New York,

1928), p. 149; W. A. Baker, From Paddle-Steamer to Nuclear Ship:
A History of the Engine-Powered Vessel tLondon, 1965), p. 57.
2. A. Fraser-Macdonald, Our Ocean Railways; or, 1the Rise, Prog-
ress, and Development of Ocean Steam Navigation (!:on.don, 1893),
p. 228, cites the Bessemer process, whereas Bernard Brodie, Sea
Power in the Machine Age: Major Naval Inventions and their Con-
sequences on International Politics (London, 1943), p. 164, empha-
sizes the Siemens-Martin method as the determining factor.
3. On steel ships, ·see 'Brodie, p. 164; Ambroise Victor Charles
Colin, La navigation commerciale .au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1901),
pp. 57-58; Fraser-Macdonald, p. 228; Duncan Haws, Ships and the
Sea: A Chronological Review (New York, 1975), pp. 163-64; Carl E.
McDowell and Helen M. Gibbs, Ocean Transportation (New, York,
1954), p. 29; "Ship," in Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1973),
20:409--10; and'Rene Auzustib. Verneaux, L'industrie des transports
maritimes au XIXe siecle et au commencement du XXe siecle, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1903), 2: 10.
4. On the triple-expansion engine, see Colin, p. 51; Harold James
Dyos and Derek Howard Aldcroft, British T.ransport (Leitester,
1969), p. 242; Fraser-Macdonald, pp. 210-20; Adam W. ,Kirkaldy,
British Shipping: Its History, Organisation and Importance (London
and New York, 1914), pp. 130-37; Thomas Main (M.E.), The· Prog-
ress'of Marine Engineering from the Time of Watt until the Present
Day (New York, 1893), p. 70; Auguste Toussaint, Historl'j of the In-
dian Ocean, trans. June Guicharnaud (Chicago, 1966), P'· 212; Ver-
neaux, 2:39; and W. Woodruff, Impact of Western Man: A Study of
Europe's Role in the World Economy I750-I960 (London, 1966),
P· 239.
5. Colin, pp. 53 and 74-77; and Dyos and Aldcroft, p. 243.

6. Kirkaldy, appendix XVII.
7. Fraser-Macdonald, p. 102.
8. Dyos and Aldcroft, pp. 244-45; Haiford Lancaster Hoskins,
British Routes to India (London, 1928), p. 219; Woodruff, pp. 239-
40; and Paul Bairoch, Revolution industrielle et sous-developpe-
ment, 4th ed. (Paris, 1974), pp. 177-78.
9. Kirkaldy, p. 343 and appendix XIV.
10. E. A. Benians, "Finance, Trade and Communications, 1870-
1895," in E. A. Benians, James Butler and C. E. Carrington, eds.,
Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Empire-
Commonwealth r870-r9r9 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 201; Gerald S.
Graham, "Imperial Finance, Trade and Communications 1895-
1914," 'in Cambridge History of the fJritish Empire, 3:457; Hoskins,
p. 472; Toussaint, p. 213; and Verneaux, 1:314-15.
11. See the map in Kirkaldy; also W. E. Minchinton, "British
Ports of Call in the 'Nineteenth Century," Mariner's Mirror 62 (May
1'976):145-57.
12. See Gerald ,S. Graham, "The•,Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship,
185o-85," Econo1J1,icHistory Review 9(1956):74-88.
13. Colin, pp. 4-5. Op the demise of sailing ships, see also Be-
nians, p. 203; Charles Ernest Fayle, A Short History of the World's
Shipping Industry (London, 1933), pp. 244-46; Kirkaldy, p. 318;
McDowell a,nd Gibbs, p. 251; Toussaint, p. 211; Verneaux, 2:13-14;
anp. Woodruff, pp. 242-43.
14. The epitome of schedule-mania, without ,a doubt, was the idea
entertained by the German General St.:1ffbefore 1914 that they could
defeat a more powerful coalition of enemies by dint of split-second
timing. Even Napoleon's faith in his lucky star seems less mad.
15. Colin, pp. 4-q·
16. For example, the Cunard Line was. the nickname of the Brit-
ish and North American Royal Mail Steam, Packet, Co. See Roland
Hobhouse Thornton, British Shipping (London, 1939), p. 40; Haws,
pp. 119 and 133; and Fraser-Macdonald, p. 94.
17. Fraser-Macponald, pp. 163, u2 and 1u.
18. See P. N. Davies, The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster in West
Africa, r852-r972 (London, n.d.), ch. 1; and his "The African Steam
Ship Company," in John Raymond Harris, ed., Liverpool and Mer-
1eyside: Essays in the•Economic and Social History of the Port and
its Hinterland (Liverpool, 1969), pp. 2u-38. See also Sir Alan Cuth-
bert Burns, History of Nigeria, 6th ed. (New York, 1963), pp. 263-
64; Anthony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New

York, 1973), pp. 149-50; Christopher Lloyd, The Search for the
Niger (London, 1973), p. 189; Murray, p. 29; and H. Moyse-Bartlett,
A History of the Merchant Navy (London, 1937), p. 235.
19. On Mackinnon's career as an imperialist in East Africa, see
John S. Galbraith, Mackinnon and East Africa r878-r895; a Study
in the 'New Imperialism' (Cambridge, 1972). On his ·maritime career,..
see Galbraith, pp. 1-45; Fraser-Macdonald, pp. 106-10; Haws, p. 149;
Hoskins, pp.,412-20; and "Mt1-cki~non, Sir William," in Dictionary
of National Biography, 22:999.
20. Colin, pp. 168-69; Hoskins, pp. 263, 412-13, and 436; -r:ous-
saint, pp. 206-o7; and Verneaux, 2:47-49.
21. On French and German lines to Africa, see Emile Baillet, "Le
role de la marine de commerce dans l'implantation de la France en
A.O.F.," Revue Maritime 1350uly 1957):832-40; D. K. Fieldhouse,
Economics and Empire r830-r9r4 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), p. 287; Hop-
kins, pp. 130 and ,149; Roger Pasquier, "Le commerce de la Cote
Occidentale q'Afrique de 1850 a 1870," in Mich~! ~ollat, ed., Les
origines d<: la nq;uigation a vapeur (Paris, 1970), pp. 122-24; Ver-
neaux, 1:322-33; and Andre Lederer, Histoire de la navigation au
Congo (Tervuren, Belgium, 1965), p. 127.
22. W. F. Ainsworth, Personal Narrative-of the Euphrates Expedi-
tion, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 2: 197, quoted in Hoskins, p. 193.
23. These figures are from Kirkaldy (appendix XVII), who calcu-
lated one steamer-ton as the functional equivalent of four sailing-
tons.
24: Dyos and Aldcroft, pp. 23-32; and Woodruff, p. 238.
25. Brodie, pp. 113-15; Minchinton, p. 151.
26. dn the idea of thalassocracy; see Herbert Luthy, "Colonization
and the Making of Mankind," Journal of Economic History 21
(1961):483-95.
27. On the economics of colonial trade, see the books by Field-
house and Hopkins cited above.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Railroads of India
But a more powerful agency than that of laws, roads, bridges,

canals, or even education, was destined to arouse the Hindoo
from his torpidity. The steam-engine ... with its advance was
overturning prejudices, uprooting habits, and changing customs
as tenaciously held and dearly loved almost as life itself.
(Captain Edward Davidson, consulting engineer for railways to
the government of Bengal)l
. . . the real operation, after all, is to make the Hindoos form

the railways, and enable us to reap a large portion of the profits.
(Hyde Clark, lobbyist for Indian railroads)2
India has tempted European empire seekers since the Mid-

dle Ages. She was the prize that Columbus sought, that
da Gama found, and that Portugal, Holland, France, and Brit-
ain fought over many times thereafter. Yet three centuries
after da Gama, European influence was still predominantly
coastal, weakening as it got further from Bombay, Madras,
Calcutta, and other ports. The difficulties of inland transpor-
tation weighed heavily against the European presence.
India offered no formidable obstacles to penetration com-
180
THE RAILROADS OF INDIA
parable to the African disease barrier. The Deccan is a large

plateau that slopes down toward the Bay aof Bengal and
falls off abruptly on its western edge. The Gangetic Plain is
equally accessible. Yet several hindrances did impede progress
inland. During the dry season, dirt roads are open. to pedes-
trians, bullock carts and pack animals; in the rainy summer
monsoons, however, they become impassible. Except for the
Ganges, the rivers of India are barely navigable i'n the dry sea-
son. Before the age of steam, the natural pathways of India
were just adequate for slow travel and communication but
closed to the economic transportation of most freight. Grain
could not be taken more than fifty miles on bullock carts, for
beyond that distance the animals ate more than they carried.
Bales of cotton carried to Bombay arrived so dirty with road
dust or so soaked with rain as, to be almost worthless. Only
precious cargoes of opium, indigo, and shellac could bear the
cost of long-distance freight. India was a land of -isolated vil-
lages and subsistence agriculture.
The 1840s were a time of railroad fever in the Western

world, and most of all in Britain. Railroad enthusiasts dreamed
of covering the whole earth with their iron rails and puffing
clattering trains. And few parts of the world seemed so des-
perately in need of the new invention as Britain's prized col-
ony. Building the railroad system of India became the most
monumental project of the colonial era; it involved tli'.elargest
international capital flow of the nineteenth century, and pro-
duced the fourth longest rail network on earth, behind only
those of the United States, Canada and Russia. Today's India,
too poor to afford automobiles or air travel for, the masses, is
probably the world's most railroad-dependent nation'. Yet, for
all its evident usefulness, this railroad network remains a
cause of argument among historians, for it illustrates· on a
large scale the grandeurs and miseries of coloniali~t enterprise.
Several disparate interests coincided to create the Indian
railroads. There were the visionaries, the promoters, and the

journalists, whose justifications for wanting railroads were
often vaguely expressed; thus John Chapman, promoter of
the Gre?,t Indian Peninsular Railway, wrote in 1850 of "the
double hope of earning an honourable competency and of aid·
ing in imparting to our fellow subjects in, Jndia, a ,participa-
tion in the advantages of the greatest invention of modern
times." 3 The Economist noted in 185j that railroads in India
would spread "English arts, English men and English opin-
ions," and the engineer Davidson regarded them as "firm and
unaltered memorials of British rule.'' 4
Others had a direct, financial stake in railroads. The Anglo-
Indian merchants and the East India trading houses in ,Lon-
don saw railroads as a means of extending their business to
inland towhs. The P and 0, J}ewly arrived in India, took a
great interest in a railroad to the coal mines of Raniganj,
northwest of Calcutta. Manufacturers of cutlery, kitchenware,
firearms, and sundry metal goods perceived a great potential
market in the interior of the subcontinent. But m9st of all, it
was tqe cotton barons of Lancashire who supported the Indian
railroad projects. They had a double objective: .to sell their
products"to the masses of Indians,. and to secure a more•reli-
able source of cotton than the United States. The American
cotton failuro•of 1846 gave a great impetus to the railroad
from Bombay to .the cotton districts, and Chapman com-
mented in 1848 that the 1merchants of,Lancashire "consider it
. . . as nothing more than an extension of their own line from
Manchester to Liverpool."5
Finally, there were military motives. The strategic value of
railroads is a familiar topic in the history of Germany, Russia,
and the American West; it was a powerful motive in India as
well. Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India, wrote .in a
"Minute to ,the Cclurt of Directors" in 1853 that railroads
would provide "full intelligence of any event to be,transmitted
to Government at,five times the speed now possiJ.>le;as well as
the concentration of its military strength on every given point,

in as many days as it would now require months to effect."6
Dalhousie's prediction came true in the Indian Revolt of
1857, which led to a rash of railroad building,in 1858 and
1859.7
The pioneer of the Indian railroad system was Rowland

Macdonald Stephenson, a railroad' engineer and a visionary
who dreamed of laying tracks from Europe to India and China.
His campaign was in many ways the continuation of the strug-
gle to open steam communication, which had resulted in the
victory of the 'P and O in 1842. In 1841 he tried to •persuade
the Court of Directors of the East India Company to subsidize
railroads in India but was rebuffed. He then turned to lobby-
ing. In the Calcutta newspaper The Englishman he presented
his plan for a railroad network spreading outward from Cal-
Cl\tta, and justified it with the usual mix pf business and secu-
rity reasons. His plan met with the wholehearted approval of
the Bengal government and the Calcutta merchants. With the
support of some London• businessmen, Stephenson ,then pre-
sented the Court of Directors with a new prop9sal for a rail-
way company, this time boldly requesting a four percent guar-
antee on its profits. Though the Court of Directors rejected
this plan also, they nonetheless formed the East Indian Rail-
way Co. in March 1845. At the same time, another group
headed by John Chapman formed the Great Indian Peninsula
Railway, which planned to lay tracks radiating from Bpmb3;y.
Later that year Stephenson went to India to survey the. route
from Calcutta to Delhi,, and reported favorably on it ·t6 the
stockholders ·Of his company. ,Chapman meanwhile traveled to
Bombay with the engineer G. T. Clark to survey the western
half of the country.
All that was lacking was the approval of the 'East India
Gompany, with a guarantee of profits. The promoters •there-
fore organized a powerful publicity campaign, enlisting the
support of The Times, The Economist, and a number of bank-

ers, businessmen, railroad engineers, and members of Parlia-
ment from Lancashire and the Midlands. Such was the in-
fluence of the railroad, lobby that the East India Company
surrendered, and in 1847 it granted the promoters a guarantee
of five percent profit for twenty-five years, plus free land and
other facilities. In 1849, Chapman's Great Indian Peninsula
was authorized to build a line from Bombay to Kalyan, thirty-
four miles away. Work began in February 1852, and in April
1853 the first twenty-four-mile sectiqn to Thana went into ser-
vice.
Once the financial and political obstacles had been sur-
mounted, several additional companies sprang into existence:
the Madras Guaranteed (1852), the Bombay, Baroda, and Cen-
tral India (1855), the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi (1856), the
Eastern Bengal (1858), the Great Southern of India (1858), and
the Calcutta and South-Eastern (1859). And all of them were
given a guarantee of four-and-a-half or five percent profits,
with any deficit to be paid by the Indian treasury, and any
surplus to be shared equally by the railroad company and the
treasury. 8
It is this guarantee policy, rather than the railroads them-
selves, that has become the object of criticism, especially on
the part of Indian historians. Critics point out that the guar-
antee promised the shareholders in Indian railroads-almost
all of them wealthy Britons-that if their c'ompanies performed
poorly, the taxpayers of India would take the loss, a "heads-I-
win, tails-you lose" proposition. Furthermore the guarantee
0
has been accused of encouraging corruption, waste, and ex-

travagance, since, as one critic put it, "it was immaterial to
him [the investor] whether the funds that he lent were thrown
into the Hooghly or converted into bricks and mortar." 9
On the other hand, supporters of the guarantee argue that
the capital invested in Indian railroads-some £95,000,000 be-
tween 1845 and 1875-would never have left Britain otherwise.
It turned what would have been a risky speculation in rail-

road construction into a•gilt-edged investment in the solvency
of the Indian government and in its ability to tax the Indian
people. Thanks to the guarantee, ·the Indian railroads were
able to raise money at a lower interest rate than almost any
other foreign or colonial railroad before 1870. While it is true
that the lndian treasury had to subsidize the railroads in their
early years, this subsidy was justified by the social value of the
railroads, which outweighed their financial returns. 10
The guarantee problem aside, the ·fact remains that India

obtained a well-built rail network at a reasonable cost. For
the most part construction was easy because much of India is
flat and labor was abundant. Two types of terrain, however,
challenged the engineers. One was the Western Ghats, where
the edge of the Deccall"plateau falls off to the coastal plain ifi
a jagged precipice 1,800 to 2,000 feet high. James T. Berkley,
chief engineer of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, chose
to confront the cliffs at two points, the Thull Ghat· toward
Delhi· and the Bhore Ghat toward Madras; The Thull Ghat,
which rose 972 feet in 9.326 miles, required thirteen tunnels
and six viaducts; the Bhore Ghat, which climbed 1,831 feet
in 15.86 miles, necessitated the construction of twenty-five tun-
nels and eight viaducts. On the steepest· portions, Y-shaped
reversing stations allowed trains to stop, switch their locomo-
tives to the other end, and tackle the next section backwards.
Construction of the ascents required unprecedented ffforts.
Up to 42,000 workers toiled at one time on the Bhore Ghat;
while cutting and tunneling used up two and a half tons of
gunpowder a day. The Bhore Ghat was finally finished in 1863
after seven years of rigorous labor, and the Thull -Ghat in
1865.
The other natural obstacle was the .great rivers of India
which frequently brought devastating floods. To span them,
engineers had to build bridges and approaches that dwarfed
any in Europe. The Kishna River bridge, with its thirty-six

10o•foot spans, was 3,855 feet long. The Jumna River had two
bridges, one of ten 250-foot spans, the other of twelve. The
conquests of the Ghats and ·the rivers were among the most
monumental achievements in railway building, a tribute to
the lab<tr of Indians and the skill and daring of British engi-
neers.
Elsewhere there were few major difficulties. The East India
Railway, which began in 1854 with a line from Calcutta to
Raniganj on the Ganges, 121 miles away, reached Delhi, 1,130
miles. distant1 twelve years later. There it was met in 1870 by
the Great Indian Peninsula line from Bombay. The following
year the rails linked Bombay•with Madras. By 1872, India had
over 5,000 miles of track.
The first' lines conformed to high technical standards, for
the work was supervised by Indian Army engineers. The rail-
roads· were also ,built in one o~ the world's broadest gauges,
1.67 meters, or 5y2 feet, which accommodated speeds and loads
commensurate with the size of the subcontinent. And the cost
was, all , things considered, quite reasonable. Thanks to the
support of the Indian government, the railroads incurred no
legtH expenses, received free land, and recruited•cheap labor.
The Indian railroads built up to 1868 cost, on the average,
£18,000 per mile,-c;;ompared with a cost of £62,000 per.mile in
Britain. 11
The'successful construction of the major trunk lines tlid not

quell the criticism of the guarantee system. In 1869, Viceroy
Lord Lawrence proposed to end the system in which,, he said,
"the whole profits go to the Companies, and the whole loss to
the Government." 12 The Indiarl government thereupon under-
took to build its own railroa1s, adding 2,175 miles to the net-
work between 1869 and 1880. It was motivated in part by the
need to bring food to famine areas; for in times of £am'ine the
traditional means of transporting f<;,oddisappeared 'as the bul-
186
locks starved. To save money, many of the new lines were

built to meter gauge, saddling India with two incompatible
systems and prompting delays and pilferage of m,erch:'mdise at
the poin~ of interconnection. So inefficient was state construc-
tion that in 1880 the state reverted to the guarantee system
and began. buying up existing private lines, signing contracts
with the former owners to manage their former lines. J
By 1902, Britisli·India (today's India, Pakistan, Bang!a'flesh
and Burma) had 25,936 miles of railroads, more thai;i the rest
of Asia put together, over three times as much ,as Af;ica, and
more both in total and per capita than Japan. The major trunk
lines, one third of the• total mileage, were government-owned.
The history of the Indian railroads illustiates'the dangers of
calling the nineteenth century an age of fr,ee enterprise. Em-
pires were bu~lt and maintained by a mixed economx of state
and private capitalism, a system designed to temper the effi-
ciency and greed of the private sector with the inefficiency and
social conscience of,government. 13 1
Railroads are more than tracks and trains; they are it whole
new way, of life, the forerunners of a new 1:ivilization. Their
impact on Indian society was very different from that on its
Western equivalent; because of the colonial context in which
they were·built. Let us cast a brief look at the consequences of
railroads.
Many progressive-minded Westerners of the mid"hineteenth
century believed railroads would bring the Industrial Revolu-
tion to India. Edward Davidson, the railroad engineer, ,de-
clared, that railroads
. . . would surely and rapidly give rise within this empire to the
same encouragement pf enterprise, the same, multiplication of
produce, the sa~e discovery <?£.latent wealth, anfl to some simi-
lar progress in social improvement, that have marked the intro-
duction of improved Jnd extended communication in• various
kingdoms of the' Weste,rn world.14
And Karl Marx prophesied in 1853:
I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with

railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished ex-
penses the Cotton and other raw materials for their manufac-
tures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the
locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are
unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain
a net of railways over an immense !=ountry without introdpcing
all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate
and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which
there must grow the application of machinery to those branches
of industry not immediately connected with railways. The rail-
way system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner
of modern industry .... Modern industry, resulting from the
railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor,
upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments
to Indian progress and Indian power.is
Alas, nothing of the sort happened. Almost all the private

capital spent on Indian railroads was raised in Britain; of the
50,000 holders of Indian railroad shares in 1868, only 400 were
Indian, because shares could only be traded in London. It was
the policy of the railroad companies, the East India Company,
and the British government to hire British contractors and dis-
courage Indian enterprises. Two fifths of the capital raised for
the railroads were spent in Britain. Skilled workers, foremen,
and engineers were brought from Britain and paid twice the
home rate, plus free passage, medical care, an<J allowances.
Rails, locomotives, rolling stock, and other iron goods were
imported. A lack of suitable timber for sleepers, resulting from
the unreliable practices of Indian timber merchants, led the
railroads to bring to India sleepers of Baltic fir creosoted in
England. Even British coal was sometimes preferred to the
cheaper Indian coal.16
The railroads substantially' lowered freight costs tn India;
this, indeed, had been one of Stephep.son's major arguments
when he wrote to the Court of Directors, of the East India
Company:
188
. . . the people of India are poor, and in many parts thinly

scattered over extensive tracts of country; but on the other hand
India abounds in valuable products, of a nature which are in
a great measure deprived of a profitable market by want of a
cheap and expeditious means of transport. It may therefore be
assumed that remuneration for railroads in India must, for the
present, be drawn chiefly from the conveyance of merchandise,
and not from passengers.17
Woodruff calculated the cost of inland transport in India in

United States cents per short-ton mile; in the 1830s, it was
12¢; in the 1860s, 8¢; in 1874, 2¢; and in 1900, .8¢.18 Sirqilarly,
Paul Bairoch has noted a drop in land transport costs on the
order of twenty-to-one, principally between 1860 and 1880.19
This tremendous decline did not contribute, as Woodruff be-
lieved, to the industrialization of the subcontinent, but to its
dependence on British industry. India exported raw cotton,
jute, grain, and other agricultural products, and in return im-
ported cotton cloth, metalware, and manufactured goods from
Britain. In the process many of India's traditional handicrafts
withered away. The craftsmen thus deprived of their employ-
ment began to flood the cities, where few new industries were
growing to give work to the unemployed. 20 In 1853, Marx had
predicted that "England has to.fulfill a double mission in In-
c\ia: one destructive, the other regenerating-the annihilation
of old Asiatic society, and the laying [of] the material founda-
tions of Western society in Asia." 21 Half tlfe program-the de-
structive mission-was accomplished; the other half had ·to
await the end of British rule.
Contrary to Stephenson's prediction, within a few years pas-
sengers were the main source of revenue of the railroad c;:om-
panies. Liberated from nature's timeless restraints on human
mobility, Indians flooded the cities and places of pilgrimage.
Those who predicted that Brahmins, Untouchables, and mem-
bers of other castes would refuse to sit ,together, proved a~so
to be wrong. The only concession the railroads made to the...._
caste system was to have trains .stop for a few minutes at meal-
189
times, so passengers could get off and prepare their food in

their own traditional manner. 22
But if the railroads brought together Indians of different
castes and regions, they demonstrated that a new caste system
had arisen, one not blessed by age-old religious sanctions. On
the railroads the workmen were Indian, but the best jobs-as
stationmasters of large stations, drivers of express trains, and
administrators-were held by Britons. The railroads delib-
erately lost money on their first-class passengers, who were for
the most part British, and made it up by packing their third-
class compartments with poor Indians. And in the stations,
first-class passengers enjoyed waiting rooms and rooms "re-
served for ladies," while third-class passengers had waiting
sheds and rooms for "women only." 23 T~e railrqads were in-
deed "firm and unaltered memorials of British rule." Was it a
coincidence that Indian anti-British nationalism appeared at
the same time as the railroads? 24
NOTES
1. Edward Davidson (Capt., R.E.), The Railways of India: With

an A~count of their Rise, Progress and Construction, Written with
the Aid of .the Jley:ords of the India Office (London, 1868), p. 3.
2. Quoted in Daniel Thomer, Investment in Empire: British Rail-
way and Steam Shipping Er,iterprise in India, r825-r849 (Philadel-
phia, 1950), p. 12. .
3. J. Chapman, "Letter to the Shareholders o(the G.I.P.R." (Lon-
don, 1850), quoted in W. J. Macpherson, "Investment in Indian
Railways, 1845-72,~' Economic History Review 2nd series no. 7
(1955):182.
4. Macpherson, p. 177; Davidson, p. 4.
5. Quoted in Thomer, p. 96; see also pp. 8, 18-23, and 112-13,
and Macpherson, pp. 182-85.
6. Quqted in Davidson, p. 87.
7. Macpherson, p. 179.
8. On the organization and financing of the first Indian railroads,
see Thorner, pp. 44-61, 126, 140-47, 169, and 177; Romesh Chundc:r
Dutt, The Economic History of India in the Victorian Age, 3rd ed.
(Lo~don, 1908), pp. 174-75; M. A. Rao, Indian Railways (New
Delhi, 1975), pp. 14-20; and, J. N. Westwood, Railways of India
(Newton Abbot and North Pomfret, Vt., 1974), pp. 12-17.
9. On the antiguarantee side of the argument, see Dutt, pp. 353-56
and Rao, pp. 25-27.
10. This' is the argument of Macpherson, pp. 177-81. Thorner
(ch. 7) and Wesnyood (pp. 13-15 and 37) take a more balanced
position.
11. On the constrpction of the Indian railroads up to 1871, see
Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot, Cassell's Railways 'of the World,
3 vols. (London, 1924), 1:72-83 and 140-150; Davidson, pp. 231-78;
Rao, pp. 20-23; and Westwood, pp. 18-35.
12. Rao, pp. 27-28.
13. On the railroads of India after 1871, see Rao, pp. 13-14, 24-
31, and 268-69; Macpherson, p. 177; Dutt, pp. 246-50; Westwood,
pp. 42-58; Carl E. McDowell and Helen M. Gibbs, Ocean Trans-
portation (New York, 1954), pp. 37-38; and W. W,~odruff, Impact
of Western Man: A Study. of, Europe's Role in the World Economy
r750-r960 (London, 1966), pp. 233 and 253.
14. Da~id~n, pp. 87-88. ,,
15. Karl Marx, "The Future Results of British Rule in India,"
New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853, p. 5.
16. Westwood, pp. 31-37; Macpherson, p. 177; Rao, p. 14; David-
son, pp. 110-11; arld John Bourhe, C. E., Indian River Navigation:
A Report Addressed to the Com"!ittee bf Gentlemen Formed for the
Establishmen~ of Improved Steam Navigation upon the :,livers of
India, Illustrating the Practicality of Opening up Some Thousands
of Miles' of River Navigation in India, by the Use of a New Kind of
Steam Vessel, Adapted to the Navigation of Sh'allow and Shifting
Rivers (London, 1849), pp. 26-27.
17. Quoted in Horace Bell, Railway Policy in India (Lohdon,
1894), PP· 3-4.
18. Wqodruff, p. 254.
19. Paul Bairoch, Revolution industrielle et sous-developement,
4th ed. (Paris, 1974), p. 179.
20. Woodruff, p. 233; Bairoch, pp. 173-87.
21. Marx, p. 5.
22. Westwood, pp. 23 and 71.
23. Westwood, pp. 72-73 and 81-82.
24. On this point, see Westwood, pp. 38-40.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
African Transportation:
Dreams and Realities
To the colonialists of the nineteenth century, Africa needed

new transportation systems at least as much as ·India. South of
the Sahara Desert, they found the indigenous transportation
systems wholly unsatisfactory. Canoes on the rivers were too
small and slow. The tsetse fly barred pack animals, turning
human beings into beasts of burden for both freight and,white
men. Not only was human porterage morally degrading (al-
though not all Europeans disapproved of it), it was evil in
practical ways as well. Porterage routes drained the surround-
ing countryside of able-bodied men, some being forcibly con-
scripted for the detested work, others fleein,g from the recrui~-
ers. In underpopulated regions, J?Orter caravans took both food
and food-producing labor, leaving malnutrition in their wake.
They spread syphilis, trypanosomiasis, smallpox, and other
diseases. Finally, human porterage was inefficient, hence ex-
pensive.
So in Africa as in India, the colonialists' thoughts turned to
railroads. The report of the nrussels Conference of 1876 rec-
ommended "the construction of railroads for the purpose of
substituting economical and rapid means of transport for the
AFRICAN TRANSPORTATION:'DREAMS AND REALITIES
present human porterage." 1 The railroad expert Balzer put

the situation in quantitative terms. Porters, he pointed out,
carried twenty-five to thirty kilograms (5<>--70lbs.) a distance of
twenty-five to thirty kilometers (15-20 mi.) a day, on the aver-
age. A train carrying fifty tons of freight at twenty kilometers
per hour (13 mph) could thus do the work of r3,333 porters. 2
The problem was to find places in Africa where the carry-
ing capacity of 13,333 porters could be justified. Railroads
need a heavy ,investment in infrastructure, and consequently
require a considerable traffic to make them remunerative. Such
traffic can consist either of passengers and processed goods-the
traffi~ of cities-or of raw materials-the products of farms and
mines.
Many of the railroads built in tropical. Africa handled the
second kind of traffic. There were groundnut and palm oil
railroads in West Africa, copper railroads from Katanga and
Rhodesia to the sea, and cotton railroads in the Sudan and
Uganda. These ·lines, even when they were quite long (as from
Katanga to South Africa) served ,essentially one purpose; they
were feeder lines for the shipping companies that carried off to
Europe the products of the African soil.
The other main raison d'etre of railroads, to link popula'-
tion centers, was lacking in Africa before 1914, for there were
few towns and no cities located inland. Outside of the mining
and, plantation districts, if railroads were built they would
have to create,their own demand, causing large populations to
gather and cities to arise in places where there wete only scat-
tered villages. Thus the colonialists of Africa were caught be-
tween their own pressing transportation needs and the im-
possible economics of railroads. The result was a great many
projects, and a few completed railroad lines, justified either by
dreamy speculations of {uture profit, or by completely non-
economic reasons.
In 1873, Sir Garnet Wolseley proposed the construction of a
narrow-gauge railroad in the Gold Coast from Cape Coast to
1 93
the River Prah to transport trodps and materiel for his Ashanti
campaign. 3 Though this' line was never built, military rail-
roads were later completed by the British in the Sudan, by
the Italians in East Africa, and, especially,' by the French from
Senegal toward the Niger valley. Additional lines were con-
structed in Uganda to hasten the end of the slave trade and in
British West Africa to prevent the French from stealing the
inland commerce. In every case railroads were seen as agents
of development or, in the jargon of the time, of civilization.
'!Colonial railroads,";wrotf the German Balzer, "are the prin-
cipal means to a~ieve the economic and political goals of a
rational colonial policy of the mother country," and the
Frenchman Lionel Wiener declared: "It is especially railroads
that bring civilization behind them., ... " 4
The first railroad in •Africa was the Alexandria-Cairo line

built in the 1850s as part of the 'Red Sea ,Route to India. After
that came a few short lines in South· Africa in the 1850s and
6os; the big rush to build railroads i!l that part of the conti-
nent came in the 1870s after, the discoveEy oE diamonds in
. West Griqualand;md in the 1880s when gold was found near
Johannesburg. Before the turn of the century, South Africa,
like Algeria, already had a respectable network.~
In tropical Africa th~ French were for a time the most en-
thusiastic 'railroacl builders. In 1879, soon after beginning
their penetration of the Western Sudan, they laid plans for a
railroad from Senegal inland. Their first line was inaugurated
in 1885 between Saint-Louis and Dakar, a distance of 163
miles. Another line, from Kayes on the Senega'i Riiver to
Koulikoro on the upper Niger, was begun in 1881·and com-
pleted in 1906; this was primarily a military line whose pur-
pose was to transport troops through unconquered· territory.
Yet another line, linking Konakry in French: Guinea to the
upper Niger, was built between 1899 and 1914, mostly for the
export of natural rubber. After that the" French did relatively
little railroad building.a
1 94
AFRICAN TRANSPORTATIO,N: DREAMS AND REALITIES
The British were next to construct railroads iµ Africa. They

built a line across Kenya from Mombasa to Lake Victoria in
1901. In West Africa they were slower than the French to
claim vast stretches of the interior,.and their one large colony,
Nigeria, was well served by river steamers. There were finan-
cial considerati9ns as well. After its Indian, experience, the
British government refused to guarantee railroad investments
in West Africa. Nor would the home government simply give
railroads. to the colonies, for political reasons, as the French
were doing. Therefore each colony had to pay for its own rail-
roads out of taxes, duties, and loans. Only after Joseph Cham-
bertain became colonial secretary in 1895 did construction be-
gin in earnest. 7
The Germans likewise got a late start. Their Jirst lines went
from Swakopmund to Windhoek i~ Southwest Africa (1897-
1902) and from Tanga to Mambo in German East Africa
(1894-1905). After 1904 they began a crash program of rail-
road building in both these colonies, in Cameroon, and in
Togo. 8
One independent African country, Ethiopia, also acquired a
railroad in this period. In 1894, Emperor .Menelik gave a con-
cession to the Cothpagnie Imperiale d'Ethiopie to build a
line from Djibouti to' the Nile; when this company went bank-
rupt. in 1907, the work was continued, by a French firm, the
Compagnie.du Chemin. de fer Franc~-Ethiopien de Djibouti a
Addis-Abeba, which finished the work in 1918.9
By 1914, Africa already had the ·patter~ of railroads that
exists to this day. The northern and southern 'Parts of the con-
tint;nt had fairly complete networks linking their major towns
and agricultural and mining areas. In the period 1910-14,
South Africa had 7,586 miles of railroads, followed by Algeria
with 2',004miles, Egypt with 1 1485 miles, ap.d Southwest Africa
with 1,474 miles. 10 Railroad s'tatistics from the thirties show
more of the same: South Africa had 13,027 miles, Algeria had
3,007, Egypt had 2,799, the Belgian. Co~go had, 2,064, and
Southwest Africa had 1,680.11 In per capita terms the co~trasts
195
are even stronger. Africa as a whole had 3.3 miles of railroad

lines for every 10,000 inhabitants. Some regions had far less;
for instance, French Equatorial Africa had only 1.06 miles,
French West Africa had 1.55, and Egypt 2.05. In comparison
South Africa had 18.4 miles and Southwest Africa, a land of
many mines and few people, had 64.6 miles for every 10,000
inhabitants. 12
In terms of railroads, the difference between Africa and In-
dia is astounding. India caught the railroad boom at its height
and emerged from the colonial age with a complete and effi-
cient railroad system. In contrast tropical Africa emerged from
colonialism with only scattered unconnected lines, serving
mainly Europe's need for raw materials. And now that trucks
and aircraft provide the same (or better) service as railroads
at a much lower initial outlay, the development of an African
rail network is likely to be a long time coming.
To understand the needs and problems of modern trans-

portation systems in Africa let us consider the opening of the
Congo River basin. The Congo River (also called Zai"re and
Lualaba) and its tributaries (the Ubangi, Sangha, Kasai, and
others) form one of the largest networks of navigable rivers in
the world, covering an area the size of Western Europe. The
promise of such a network as a means of developing and ex-
ploiting central equatorial Africa was obvious to Europeans
who entered the region. The great river basin, however, is not
accessible from the sea, for its last few miles (between Kinshasa
and Matadi) are broken by rapids and falls. This is the reason
the Congo basin was not explored until some forty years after
the penetration of the Niger.
Henry Stanley understood well the technological needs of
the region he had crossed in 1875-77. In 1882 he declared that
"the Congo basin was not worth a two-shilling piece in its
present state. To reduce it into profitable order, a railroad
must be made between the Lower Congo and the Upper
AFRICAN TRANSPORTATION: DREAMS AND REALITIES
Congo, when with its accessibility will appear its value."13 It

took eight years-from 1890 to 1898-to build that railroad,
against some of the most• difficult terrain, climate, disease, and
labor problems that ever beset such an enterprise. Meanwhile,
Stanley and his employer, King Leopold II of Belgium, were
eager to begin tapping the wealth of the Congo. This meant
transporting steamboats in pieces on the heads of porters from
Matadi to Stanley Pool on the upper Congo. The first of these
boats, the little nine-ton En Avant, created enormous prob-
lems. Just to clear a path around the first falls between Vivi
and Isangila, a distance of fifty-four miles, took an entire year,
from February 1880 to February 1881. Not until December
1881 was the En Avant launched on the upper Congo. Once
the road was cut and the workforce assembled, other steamers
quickly followed: the Congo Free State's Belgique, Esperance,
A.I.A., and Royal, and the mission steamers-Peace and Henry
Read. 14 In 1887 alone, porters carried six steamers from Matadi
to the new town of Leopoldville (today Kinshasa) on the Pool;
between May and October of that year 60,000 men carried 992
tons of freight, most of it steamer parts. S"teamers were, in fact,
the backbone of the Congo Free State; as Leopold put it in
1886: "Take good care of our Marine; it about sums up ail our
governmental authority at this moment." 15
By the time the first train arrived in Leopoldville in 1898,
porters had carried forty-three steamers, weighing in all 865
tons, to the upper river. Of these, twenty-one belonged to the
Congo Free State, six to the Belgian trading firm Societe
Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut Congo, five to the
Dutch firm Nieuwe Afrikaansche Handelsvennootschap, three.
to the French Congo, and seven to various missionary socie-
ties.16 These steamers, in addition to the railroad, absorbed
ninety percent ·of the capital "invested in the Congo between
1878 and 1898.11
The needs of the Congo basin attracted innovations as well
as investments. By the 1880s sternwheelers, an American in-
197
vention, began replacing the British-style sidewheelers. At the

end of the century, the screw-propeller, "'.hich had replaced
the wheels on oceangoing ships fi(ty years earlier, made its
appearance on Congo steamers. The difficulty had been to find
a way to keep a propeller two feet or more ii,. diameter en-
tirely under water, yet no deeper than a few inches below the
surface. The solution, developed by the English boat-builder
Alfred Yarrow, was to place the propeller under the rear of
the craft inside a tunnel which would fill with water as soon as
the boat began to move. Finally, to facilitate the assembly· of
steamer kits and avoid the need to Quild launching ramps,
Yarrow also created floating sections of boats that could be
bolted together in the water; the first such boat was the thirty-
ton Stanley which was shipped to the Congo in 1883.18
After the Matadi-Leopoldville railroad was completed in
1898, the, transportation of steamers jumped . .Among the first
shipments carried on the new railroad was the Brabant, a
steamer of 150 tons, five times the size of any other on the up-
per Congo at the time, and equipped with a dining room, a
bathroom, and cabins for twenty-four ,passengers. By 1901
there were 103 steamers on the Cong<,>river system, transport-
ing Europeans and their machines upriver and natural rubber
downriver. 19
Building ~he_ Matadi-Leopoldville railroad necessitated a

much more massive and su~tail;led effort than that required
for transporting steamers. Stanley and Leopold had discussed
the railroad project in 1878, immediately following Stanley's
return from his first trip to the Congo. At the time, the Congo
was still an area open to the enterprise of all, and the first
group to try aqd organize a railroad included Stanley, William
Mackinnon, and several English entrepreneurs. When this
plan fell through, the initiative passed to the Belgians. In
1887, Captain Albert Thys, aide-de-camp to King Leopold,
founded the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l'In-
dustrie, or C.C.C.I. Two yea.rs later this firm spawned the
Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo, which was granted

a concession to build the railroad. 20
The distance to be covered between Matadi and Leopold-
ville was 241 miles. Construction lasted eight 'years, and cost
three times more than the founders had expected. The terrain
near Matadi, up the Palabala ramparts, was very rough; the
first 5Yi! miles, which tool{ two years to build, required 99
bridges, 1,250 viaducts, and gradients of up to twenty-to-one.
Respiratory illnesses, hunger, dysentery, beri-beti, and malari'a
decimated the workers; goo died in the first twenty-seven
months, 1,800 altogether, not counting 132 European engi-
neers and foremen. Up to 60,000 porters worked on' the site at
one time. As the area around the railroad was underpopu-
lated, the company had to recruit workers at great distances.
Some 2,000 workers were brought in from West Africa and
Zanzibar, but many escaped, went oii strike, or demanded to
be repatriated. Finally, the British and French governments
forbade the railroad to recruit any furthh in their African
territories. The Belgians then brought in 300 Barbadians and
550 Chinese from Macao. The Barbadians rebelled, many were
shot; and others died of dise.tse. Of· the Chinese, 300 died or
ran off into the interior in the first few weeks, never to reap-
pear.21
Despite the horrors of its construction, the'railroad paid off
handsomely, transporting the cololliali~ts' e({uipment and ex-
porting first natural rubber and later the copper of Katanga.
In 1898-gg it carried 14,092 tons;·in 1913-14, 87,082; and in
1919-20, 123,458. Profits averaged nine percent and reached
thirteen percent in 1912-13. So great was the demand for trans-
portation, in fact, that by World War One the railroad proved
inadequate; plans were soon laid to replace it with a new1
straighter, electrified broad-gauge line, with ten times the ca-
pacity of the bld.22
Whatever judgment one casts upon the methods of its con-

struction, at least the Matadi-Leopoldville railroad was neces-
199
sary and useful. Other.projects of the same period, in contrast,

lie more in the realm of dreams than of practical business.
The French were especially guilty of extravagant projects, for
their colonialism was less business-oriented than that of the
Belgians, the British, or the Dutch. Among thejr projects, few
were as wasteful as those concerning the Sahara Desert.
Interest in the Sahara arose soon after the Franco-Prussian
War. The first adxocates of Saharan projects, as Henri Brun-
schwig has pointed out, were not imperialists so much as tech-
nocrats inspired by the recent completion of the Suez Canal
and the Unioll Pacific; Railroad: "What interested them most
of all was neither mercantilism nor nationalism but the crea-
tive research of the inventor and b~ilder." 23 In 1874, Captain
E. Roudaire published a plan to create an inland sea in the
chotts, or depressions, to tpe south of Tunisia by digging a
canal to let the Mediterranean Sea .flow into the desert. This
idea stimulated discussions in the P,tri,s So<;ietyof Geography
and in the,Aqdemy of Sciences, and resulted in two missions
of explpration .in 1874 and 1876.24
Thei first to prqpose a railroad across the Sahara were the
explorer Paul Soltillet and the engineer Adolph!! Duponchel.
I~ 1873, Soleillet led an expedition, financed by the Algiers
Chamber of Commerce, to the Tuat Oasis. Three years later
he and Duponchel' publicized the idea of a railroad linking
Algeria to the Niger. Duponchel attributed quasi-magical pow-
ers to such a railroad which, he said, would create "a vast
colonial empire . . . a French India rivalling its British coun-
terpart in wealth and prosperity." 25 The publicity encouraged
Minister of the Nayy and Colonies Admiral Jaureguiberry and
Governor ,Briere de l'Isle of Senegal to begi:o.construction of a
railroad £rpm Senegal toward the Niger valley, il project which
was carried to completion in 1906.20
The idea also appealed ,to Minister of Public Works Charles
de Freycinet, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and an
enthusiast for overseas expansion. In a report to President
200
Jules Grevy in 1879 he endorsed die railroad project for sev-

eral reasons: France was closer to Africa than most European,
countries; the greatness of France demanded that she place
herself at the head of the movement for the conquest of Africa;
and the project was certainly feasible, for had the Americans
not just recently builr a railroad from New York to San Fran-
cisco?27 Freycinet thereupon appointed a committee under
Ferdinand de Lessep9 "for the study of questions relating to
the railroad' communications of Algeria and Senegal with the
Soudan." The 'National Assembly appropriated' first 200,000
francs and later 600,000 for preliminary studies. In 1880 an
exploring pai;,ty led byColpnel Flatters Jeft Algeria in, the di-
rection of Lake Chad, but was massacred by Tuaregs under
Turkish instigation. This proved that building a railroad
through uncortquered territory would be impossible, and the
project was shelved for a decade.2s
The Tran~-Saharan idea re\lppeared in .188~90 after France
had penetrated from Senegal to the Niger and from Gabon to,
the Congo. As time passed, project~ •became more elaborate,
and fanciful. Two railroads were proposed, one to link Algeria
with Lake Chad, the other with Senegal or Dahomey. Other
projects involved railroads from Algiers to Djibouti and from
Lake Chad to Johannesburg, for the convenience of British
travelers in a hurry. 29 One retired cavalry officer suggested that
a canal •be dug from Timbuktu on, the Nigei; to the Atlantic
coast near the Canary Islands.a 0 And a railroaaexpert, writing
around 1910, looked forward to a~ even more grandiose f'uturt
By the year 1925 there is every reason to believe we shall have a
complete and fairly direct Trans-African Railway· from the ex-
treme north to the extreme south, and we shall be able to
traverse Africa by a variety of more or less meandering,routes
from west to east.31
But these pi;ojects all encountered the same obstacle. The cost
would hc),vepeen prohibitive, for French }\frica ~a\ not an-
other Indi~, and the Trans-Saharan fOuld never h3;v1;paid for
201
itself. Today a line reaches 160 miles into the Sahara to

Colomb-Bechar, while columns of-uucks roar across the desert,
and airplanes fly overhead.3 2
NOTES
1. Andre Lederer, Histoire de la navigation au Congo (Tervuren,

Belgium, 1965), p. 129. The same recommendation was repeated in
1889-90; see Olufemi Omosini, "Railway Projects and British Atti-
tudes Toward the Development of West Africa, 1872-1903," Journal
of the fl.istorical Society of Nigeria 5(1971):502.
2. F. Balzer, Die Kolonialbahnen, mit besonderer Berilcksichtigung
Afrikas (Berlin and Leipzig, 1916), pp. 21-22.
3. Omosini, p. 493.
4. l}alzer, pp. 15-16; Lionel Wiener, Les chemins de fer coloniaux
de l'Afrique (Brussels and Paris, 1931), p. 5.
5. Wiener, pp. 20-21 and 340-42.
6. Emile Baillet, "Le role. de la marine de commerce dans !'im-
plantation de la France en A.0.F.," Revue Maritime 135Quly 1957):
837; Wiener, pp. 82-93; and Jacques Mangolte, "Le chemin de fer de
Konakry au Niger (1890-1914)," Revue fran~aise d'histoire d'outre-
mer 55(1968):37-105.
7. Omosini, pp. 492-506.
8. Balzer, pp. 27-29.'
9. Wiener, pp. 134-37.
10. Balzer, pp. 98-99 and 463.
11. Col. J. Mornet, "L'outillage compare des differents pays
d'Afrique," L'Afrique Fran~aise, Bulletin Mensuel du Comite de
l'Afrique Franraise et du Comite du Maroc 44 no. 10 (Oct. 1934):
580-84; see also Wiener, pp. 142 and 562--63.
12. Mornet, p. 581.
13. Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Res-
cue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, 2 vols. (New
York, 1890), 1:463.
14. Lederer, pp. 39 and 56-58.
15. Lederer, p. 95.
16. Lederer, p. 130.
17. Andre Huybrechts, Transports et structures de developpement
au Congo. Etude du progres economique de r900 a r970 (Paris, 1970),
pp. g--10.
202
18. Eleanor C. Barnes, Alfred Yarrow: His Life and Work (Lon-
don, 1924), ch. 14 and p. 164; and Alfred F. Yarrow, "The Screw as
a Means of Propulsion for Shallow Draught Vessels," Transactions
of the Institution of Naval Architects 45(1903):106-17.
19. Lederer, pp. 111 and 134-37.
20. Rene-Jules Cornet, La bataille du rail. I.,a construction du
chemin de fer de Matadi au Stanley Pool (Brussels, 1947), pp. 2g-81;
Wiener, pp. 19o-g3; Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot, Cassell's
Railways of the World, 3 vols. (London, 1924), 3:610-16.
21. Huybrechts, pp. 11-12; Wiener, pp. 195-97; Comet, Bataille,
pp. 12q-34 1 • ' '
22. Huybrechts, p. 71; Balzer, pp. 23-24; and Wiener, pp. 193-94.
23. Henri Brunschwig, "Note sur les technocrates de l'imperialisme
fran~s en Afriq1;.1enoire," Revue fran~aise d'histoire d'outre-mer
54(1967): 171-73.
24. Captain E. Roudaire, "Une mer interieure en Algerie," Revue
des Deux Mondes 3(May 1874):323-50; Agnes Murphy, The Ideology
of French Imperialism r87r-r88r (Washington, 1948), pp. 70-75; and
Brunschwig, "Note," pp. 173-75.
25. Adolphe Duponchel, Le Chemin de fer transsaharien, jonctiort
coloniale entre l'Algerie et le Soudan (Montpellier, 1878)1 p. 218,
quoted ~n Alexander S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the West-
ern Sudan: A Studi in French Military Imperialism (Cambridge,
1969), p. 61.
~6. Omosini, p. 499; Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer
(Paris), Afrique XII, Dossier 2a: various papers concerning the
Senegal-Niger railroad project; and Kanya-Forstner, pp. 64-69.
27. Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer (Paris): Afrique XII,
Dossier 2a no. 455, July 12, 1879.
28. Archives, Dossier 2b; Kanya-Forstner, pp. 6,2-67; Murphy,
pp. 85-90; and Brunschwig, "Note," pp. 176-78.
29. Brunschwig, "Note," pp. 176-83.
30. Archives Nationales Section Out're-Mer (Paris): Afrique XII,
Dossier 4: "Project Levasseur de Tombouctou a la Mer," and Tra-
vaux Publics, A.0.F., Carton 47, Dossier 3: "Canal maritime de
Tombouctqu a la mer. Proposition Levasseur 1896."
31. Ernest Protheroe, The Railways of the World (London, n.d.),
p. 652.
32. On later projects, see Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Le Sahara, le Sou-
dan et les chemins de /er transsahariens (Paris, 1904); Commandant
Roumeris, L'imperialisme fran~ais et les chemins de fer transafricains
(Paris, 1914); and Brunschwig, "Note," pp. 184-86.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Legacy of
Technol~gical Imperialism
The history of European imperialism in the nineteenth cen-

tury still contains ,a number of paradoxes, which an under-
standing of technology can help elucidate. One of them is the
expansion of Britain in the mid-century, a world power claim-
ing to want no more imperial resppnsibilities yet reluctantly
acquiring territories "in a fit of absent-mindedness." Was this
really a case, as Fieldhouse put it, of "a metropolitan dog be-
ing wagged, by its colonial tail"? A more appropriate metaphor
might be the pseudonym Macgregor L,aird used in writing to
The Spectator: Cerberus, the many-headed dog.
For the imperialist drive did not originate from only one
source. In the outposts of empire, and most of all in Calcutta
and Bombay, were eager imperialists, adventurous and greedy
for territory. They lacked, however, the industry, to manufac-
ture the to9ls of conquest. Had they been able to create the
instruments appropriate to their ambitions, 'they might well
have struck out on their own, like the ~ettle:i;sin the Thirteen
Colonies of North America. But against Burma, China, the
Middle East, and Africa they needed British tf!chnology.
In Britain, meanwhile, the politicians were at times reluc-
THE LEGACY OF TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM
tant; the lengthy delay in occupying Egypt is an example of

this. But the, creators of the tools of empire-people like Pea-
cock, the Lairds, the arms manufacturers-were provisioning
the empire with the equipment that the peripheral imperial-
ists required. The result was a secondary imperialism, the ex-
pansion of British India, sanctioned, after the fact, by London.
Imperialism in the mid-century was predominantly a matter

of British tentacles' reaching out from India toward Burma,
China, Malaya, Afghanistan, Mesopotamia, and the Red Sea.
Territorially, at least, a much more impressive demonstration
of the new imperialism was the scraml:Slefor Africa in the last
decades of the century. Historians generally agree that from 'a
profit-making point of view, the scramble w'as a 'dubious un-
dertaking.'Here also, technology helps explain events.
Inventions are most easily described one by one, each in
its owrt technological and socioeconomic setting. Yet the inner
logic of innovations must not blind us to the patterns of chro-
nological coincidence. Though advances occurred in every pe-
riod, many of the innovations that proved useful to the im-
perialists of the scramble fi'tst had an impact in the two decades
from 1860 to 1880. These were the years in which quinine pro-
phylaxis made Africa safer for Europeans; quick-firing breech-
loaders n!placed muzzle-loaders among the forces stationed on
the imperial frontiers; and the .compound engine, the Suez
Canal/ and the submarine cable 'made steamships competitive
with sailing ships, not only oh ·government-subsidized mail
routes, but for ordinary freight on distant seas as well. Euro-
peans who,set out to conquer new lands in 1880 fiad far more
powet over nature and over the people they encountered than
their predecessors twenty years earlier had; they could accom-
plish their tasks with far greater safety a,nd comfort.·
Few of the inventions that affected the course of empire in
the nineteenth century were indispensable; quinine propfiy-
laxis tdmes closest, for it is unlikely that many Europeans
would willingly have run the risks of Africa without it. The
muzzle-load_ers the French used in fighting Abd-el Kader could
also have defeated other non-Western peoples; but it is un-
likely that any European nation would have sacrificed for
Burma, the Sudan, or the Congo as much as France did fqr
Algeria.
Today we are accustomed to important innovations being so
complex-computers, jet aircraft, satellites, and weapons sys-
tems are but a few examples-that only the governments of
major powers can defray their research and development costs;
and generally they are eager to do so. In the nineteenth cen-
tury European governments were preoccupied with many
things other than imperialism. Industrialization, social con-
flicts, international tensions, military preparedness, and the
striving for a balanced budget all compete'd for their atten-
tion. Within the ruling circles of Britain, France, Belgium,
and Germany, debates raged on the need for colonies and the
costs of imperialism.
What the breechloader, the machine gun, the steamboat and
steamship, and quinine and other innovations did was to
lower the co&t, in both financial and human terms, of pene-
tq1ting, conquering, and exploiting new territories. So cost-
effective did they make imperialism that not only national
goverµments but lesser group,s as well could now play a part
in it. The Bombay Presi<lency opened the Red Sea Route; the
Royal Niger Company cbnquered the Caliphate of Sokoto;
even individuals like fyfacgregor Laird, William Mackinnon,
Henry Stanley, and Cecil Rhpdes could precipitate events and
stake out claims to vast territories which later pecarqe parts of
empires. It is because the flow of new technologies in the nine-
teenth century made imperialism so cheap that it reached the
threshold of acceptance among the peoples and governments
of Europe, and led nations to become empires. Is this not as
important a factor in the scramble for Africa as the political,
diplomatic, and business motives that historians have stressed?
:w6
THE LEGACY OF TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM
All this only begs a further question. Why were these· inno:
vations developed, and why were they applied, where they
would prove useful to imperialists? Technological innovations
in the nineteenth century are usually described in the context
of the Industrial Revolution. Iron shipbuilding was part of
the growing use of iron in all areas of engineering; submarine
cables resulted from the needs of business and the dev~elop-
ment of the ele'ctrical industry. Yet while we can (indeed: we
must) explain the invention and manufacture of specific new
technologies in the context of general industrialization, it does
not suffice to· explain the transfer and application of these
technologies to Asia and Africa. To understand the diffusion
of new technologies, we must consider also the flow of informa-
tion in the nineteenth century among both Western arld non-
Western peoples.
In certain parts of Africa, people .!re able to communicate
by "talking drums" which imitate the tones of the human
voice. Europeans inflated this phenomenon into a great myth,
that Africans could speak to one another across their conti-
nent by the throbbing of tom-toms in the night. This myth of
course reflected the Westerners' obsession with long-range com-
munication. In fact, nineteenth-century Africans and Asians
were quite isolated from one another and ignorant of what
was happening in other parts of the world. Before the Opium
War,,the court of the Chinese emperor was misinformed about
events in Canton and ignorant of the ominous developments
in •Britain, Burma, and Nigeria. People living along the Niger
did not know where the river came from, 'nor where it went.
Stanley encountered people in the Congo who had never be-
fore heard of firearms or white men'. Throughout Africa, war-
riors learned from their own experiences but 'rarely 'from those
of their neighbors.
To be sure, there were cases in which Africans or Asians
adopted new technologies. Indian princes hired Europeans to
train their troops. The Ethiopian Bezbiz Kasa had an English
sergeant make cannons for,.him, while Samori Toure sent a

blacksmith to learn gunsmithing from the French. Mehemet
Ali surrounded himself with European engineers and, officers
in a crash program to modernize his country. What is remark-
able about these efforts is their rarity and, in most cases, their
insufficiency. In the nineteenth century, only Japan succeeded
in keeping abreast of Western technological developments.
In contrast, Western peoples-whether Europeans or'descen-
dants of Europeans settled on other continents-were intensely
f
interested in events.elsewhere, technological as, well as other-
wise. Physicians in,Africa published their findings in 'France
and Britain. American gun manufacturers exhibited their
wares in London, British experts traveled to America to study
gunmaking, and General Wolseley paid a visit to the Ameri-
can inventor Hiram Maxim to offer suggestions. Macgregor
Laird was inspired by news of events on the Niger to try out a
new kind of ship. Dutch and British botanists journeyed to
South America to obtain plants to be grown in Asia. Scientists
in Indonesia published a journal in French and German for
an international readership. The latest rifles w,ere copied in
every country and sent to the colonies for testing.' The mails
and cables transmitted to and from the financial •centers of
Europe up-to-date information on products, prices, and quan-
tities of goods around the world. And the major newspapers,
especially the London Times, sent out foreign correspondents
and published detailed articles about events in faraway lands.
Then, as now, people1 in the· Western world were hungry for
the latest.news and interested in useful technological innova-
tions. Thus what seemed to work in one place, whether 'iron
river steamers, quinine prophylaxis, machine guns, or com-
pound engines, was quickly known and applied in other places.
In every part of the world, Europeans were more knowledge-
able about events on other cohtinents than indigenous peoples
were about their neighbors. It is ,the Europeans who had the
"talking drums.",
208
THE LEGACY OF TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERfALISM
European empires of the nineteenth century were economy

empires, cheaply obtained by taking advantage of new tech-
nologies, and, when the cost of keeping thein rose a century
l,ater, quickly discarded. In the ptocess,• they unbalanced world
relations, overturned ancient ways of life, and opened the way
for a new global civilization.
The impact of this technologically based imperialism on the
European nations who engaged in it is still hotly debated. The
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of
overweening national pride, of frantic, often joyful, prepara-
tions for war. The cheap victories on the imperial frontiers,
the awesome power so suddenly acquired over the forces of na-
ture and over whole kingdoms and races, were hard to recon-
cile with the prudence and compromises which the delicate
European balance required.
The era of the new imperialism was also the age in which
racism reached its zenith. Europeans, once respectful of some
non-Western peoples-especially the Chinese-began to con-
fuse levels of technology with levels of culture in general, and
finally with biological capacity. Easy conquests had warped the
judgment of even the scientific elites.
Among Africans and Asians the legacy of imperialism re-

flects their assessment of the true value of the civilization that
conquered them. Christianity has had little impact in Asia,
and its spread in Africa has been overshadowed by that of
Islam. Capitalism, that supposed bedrock of Western civiliza-
tion, has failed to take root in most Third World countries.
European concepts of freedom and the rule of law have fared
far worse. The mechanical power of the West has not brought,
as Macgregor Laird had hoped, "the glad tidings of 'peace and
good' will' toward men' into the dark places of the earth which
are now filled with cruelty."
The technological means the imperialists used to create
their empires, however, have left a far deeper imprint than

the ideas that motivated them. In their brief domination, the
Europeans passed on to the peoples of Asia and Africa their
own fascination with machinery and innovation. This has
been the true legacy of imperialism.
,210
Bibliographical Essay
The information contained in this book came from hundreds of

sources, most of them citea in the footnotes. Of the published
sources, a few dozen were especially helpful, and I recommend them
to the reader wishing to pursue certain topics in greater detail. For
a general introcluction to the theme, see Daniel R. Headrick, "The
Tools. of Imperialism: Technology and the Exp:tnsion of European
Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Modern
History 51 no. 2 Qune 1979):231-63.
PART ONE
STEAMBOATS A'.ND QUININE, TOOLS
OF PENETRATION
For the early history of steamboats in Asia, see Henry T. Bernstein,

Steamboats on the Ganges: An Exploration in the History of India's
Modernization through Science and Technology (Bombay, 1960), a
model monograph in the social history of technology; ,H. A. Gibson-
Hill, "The Steamers Employed in Asian Waters, 1819-39," The Jour-
nal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malayan Branch 27 pt. 1 (May
1954):127-61; and Gerald S. Graham, Great Britain in the Indian
Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise, r8ro-r850 (Oxford, 1968).
The most readable recent account of the Opium War is Peter
Ward Fay, The Opium War, r840-r842: Barbarians in the Celestial
211
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War
by which They Forced Her Gates Ajar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). On
the steamers employed in that war, see William Dallas Bernard,
Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis from z840 to
z843, 2 vols. (London, 1844), but note that there is a second edition
of this work (London, 1845) and a third edition: Captain William
H. Hall (R.N.) and William Dallas Bernard, The Nemesis·in Chinrr,
Comprising a History of the Late War in that Country, with a Com-
plete Account of the Colony of.Hong, Kong (Londpn, 1846). See also
Gerald S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy z830-
z860 (Oxford, 1978).
Steamers in the European penetration of Africa are best described
in Macgregor Laird and R. A. K. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedi-
tion into the Interior of Africa, by the River Niger, in the Steam-
Vessels Quorra and Alburkah, in z832, z833, and z834, 2 vols. (Lon-
don, 1837); Christopher Lloyd, The Search for the Niger (London,
1973); and Andre Lederer, Histoire de la navigation au Congo
(Tervuren, Belgium, 1965).
Still the best biography of Peacock is Carl Van Doren, The Life
of Thomas Love Peacock (London and New York, 1911).
Malaria and quinine prophylaxis in the pe~etration of.Africa are
dealt with in Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas
and Actions z780-z850 (Madison, Wis'., 1964), a brilliant piece of
historical research; but see also Mi~hael Gelfand, Rivers of Death
in Africa (London, 1964).
PART TWO
GUNS AND CONQUESTS
There is a bewildering choice of books on guns and rifles. The ones

I found most useful were William Young• Carman, A History of
Firearms from Earliest Times to r9r4 (London, 1955); William
Wellington Greener, The Gun and Its Development; With Notes
on Shooting, 9th ed. tLondon, 1910); Graham Seton Hutchison,
Machine Guns, Their History and Tactical Employment (Being Also
a History of the Machine Gun Corps, r9z6-r922) (London, 1938);
and H. Ommundserr and Ernest H. Robinson, Rifies and Ammuni-
tion (London, 1915).
On the use of firearms in the.colonial wars of the nineteenth cen-
tury, especia1Iy in Africa, see a series of interesting articles in the
Journal of African History vols. 12 (1971) and 13 (1972); and also
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaigns (London, 1967); Col.

Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice,
3rd ed. (London, 1906); and Michael Crowder, ed., West African
Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation (London,
1971).
PART THREE
THE COMMUNICATIONS .REVOLUTION
The history of steamships and shipping in the nineteenth century,

like that of firearms, has received a great deal of attention. I have
found the following works most helpful: Ambroise Victor Charles
Colin, La navigation commerciale au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1901);
A. Fraser-Macdonald, Our Ocean Railways; or, the Rise, Progress,
and Development of Ocean Steam Navigation (London, 1893); Adam
W. Kirkaldy, British Shipping: Its History, Organisation and Im-
portance (London and New York, 1914); Carl E. McDowell and
Helen M, Gibbs, Ocean Transportation (New York, 1954); Michel
Mollat, ed., Les origines de la navigation a vapeur (Paris, 1970);
Roland Hobhouse Thornton, British Shipping (London, 1939); and
Rene Augustin Verneaux, L'industrie des 'transports maritimes au
XIXe siecle et au commencement du XXe siecle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1903).
On communications with overseas colonies, see Frank James
Brown, The Cable and Wireless Communications of the World; a
Survey of Present Day Means of International Communication by
Cable and Wireless, Containing Chapters on Cable and Wireless
Finance (London and New York, 1927); Bernard S. Finn, Submarine
Telegraphy: The Grand Victorian Technology (Margate, 1973);
Halford Lancaster Hoskins, British Routes to India (London, 1928,
reprinted 1966), still the definitive study on this subject; P. M. Ken-
nedy, "Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870-1914,"
English Historical Review 86(1971):728-52; John Marlowe, World
Ditch: The Making of the Suez Canal (New York, 1964); and Rene
Augustin Verneaux, L'industrie des transports maritimes au XIXe
siecle et au commencement du XXe siecle (Paris, 1903).
On the railroads of India and Africa see M. A. Rao, Indian Rail-
ways (New Delhi, 1975); Daniel Thorner, Investment in Empire:
British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India, r825-r849
(Philadelphia, 1950); J. N. Westwood, Railways of India (Newton
Abbot and North Pomfret, Vt., 1974); and Lionel Wiener, Les
chemins de fer coloniaux de l'Afrique (Brussels and Paris, 1931).
Index
Aaron Manby, 144, 146 French conquest of, 88-89, 91-93,

Abyssinia. See Ethiopia 111, 121
Aden, 135-36, 15g-62, 168,173 malaria in, 66-67
Admiralty, 35-37, 46-48, 51, 69, 74, Antonini,.Dr. Jean Andre, 66-67
136, 162--{i3,171. See also Royal Arabian Sea, 132, 135
Navy Ariadne, 34, 51
Africa. See also Algeria; Egypt; Ashanti. See Gold Coast
Ethiopia; Libya; Sahara; South· Assegais, 1o6-8, 1~1
Africa; Sudan; West Africa; Atalanta, 51, 137
Zanzibar Atlantic Ocean, 48, 131, 144, 158-59,
conquest of, 117-24 161, 167, 171, 201
exploration of, 58-62, 7o->j1, 115- Auckland, Earl of, 34, 36, 46--47, 59
117. See also Brazza; Laird, Australia, 139, 161, 163, 168-6g,
Macgregor; Livingstone; Park; 1 73-74
Stanley
transportation in, 192-202
Baikie, Dr. \Villiam, 69, 74
weapons in, 105-11, 115-20
Belgian Congo. See Congo Free
African Steamship Co., 171
State
Airy, George, Astronomer-Royal, 48,
Bengal, 22, 34, 44, 72, 134, 181, 183-
145
184
Alburkah, 27-28,61 Bentinck, Sir William, Governor of
Alexandria, 130, 136-38, 153, 159- India, 22, 25, 137
160, 174,194 Benue, 61, 68-6g
Algeria, 159, 161, 174, 194-95, 200- Bezbiz Kasa, Ethiopian ruler
201, 206 (Yohanqis IV), 1;0, 207
INDEX
Birkenhead Iron Works. See Laird Canton,36,45,4g-51,54,207

(shipyard) Cape Route to India, 20, 28, 132-34,
Board of Control. See House of 154-55
Commons Cartridges, 84, 88, 96---g8,101-2,
Bombay,23,30,32,34, 130, 134-39, 116, 120
155,160, 167-68, 180-86,204, Chad, 75, u7, 201
2o6 Chapman, Jghn, railroad entre-
Bombay Marine (Indian Navy), 26, preneur, 182-84
33, 51, 135, 138 Chassepot rifle, 97, 101, 109, u9
Bornu, 111, 116 Chi~a.9,37, 121,139. 16o, 170, 173-
Brazza, Savorgnan de, French 174, 204-5, 207. See also Canton
explorer, 75, 115 in Opium War, 19, 43-54, 86-87,
Breechloaders, 85, 96-103, 109-11, 90---91,93, 168
115-20 Chesney, Capt. Francis Rawdon, 24-
Britain. See Great Britain 26, 30-32, 151-52, 175
Britannnia, 132, 148 Cinchona,65-66,68,71-,3
British Empire. See Great Britain Coal, 131-32, 135-37, 148, 151, 154,
British India Steam Navigation Co., 166, 16S-,o, 175-'76, 182,188
171-73 Commons. See House of Commons
Broussais, Dr. J ., 66-67 Congo (river and region), 5g-6o, 75,
Brown Bess, 85, 88, 8!) 115-16, 174, 196---g9,201,207
Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, Congo Free State, 195---99,206
engineer, 143i 167 Congreve rocket, 21, 4g-50, 102
Brunschwig, Henri~ 6, 8, 200 Constantinople, 115, 152, 15g-6o
Brunswick rifle, 87-88 Corveelabor, 153-54, 198
Brussels Court of Directors. See East India
Conference"of 1876, 192 Company
Treaty of 1890, no-11 Creu:te, Augustin, naval ar'chitect,
Bryson, Dr. Alexander, 68-69 47-48•
Bullets, 84, 87-88, 91, 97---98'.See Cunard Line, 132,147,162,171
also Dum-dum; Minie Curtin, Philip, 8,631 6g, 70
Burma, 63, 171-72, 204-'-7
Anglo-Burmese Wars, 20-21, 34,
54, 91, 93, 134, 136 Dahqmey, 109,117,201
Dane guns, 106-'], 117
Davidson, Capt. Edwar,d, railroad
Cable. See Submarine cable entrepreneur, 180, 182-.,187
Cairo, 130, 136, 139, 152, 194 Death rates in Wes,t,Africa, 62-64,
Calcutta, 1g-20, 22-24, 34-35, 37, 45, 6g-7g •
130-35, 138, 152, 155, 158, 172- Deccan, 181, 185
173, 180, 182-84, 186,204 Delhi, 183, 185-86
Calcutta and Burmah Steam Navi- Dervishes, uS-19, 123-24
gation Co. See British India Diana, 20-24, 1g3
Steam Navigation Co. Dreyse, Johann Nikolaus von. See
Callwell, Co}. Charles, 122-23 Needle-gun
Cameron, Rondo, 7, 8, 10 Dum-dum, 102-3
216
INDEX
Eastern and Associated CQJnpanies, France

162-63 in Algeria, 66-67, 88-89, 91-g3,
East India Company 111, 159, 161, 174
and the development of gunboats, in Egypt, 150-53
17-37 firearms,87-88,97;10~
in the Opium War, 44-54 in the Sahara, 200-202
and railroads in India, 183-84, 188 shipping, 174
Secret Committee of, 32--35 in West Africa, 101, 111, 117, 119,
and steamship routes to India, 194, 196
132-39. lij2 Freycinet, Charles de, 200-201
East Indiamen, 130, 132-33, 143 Fusil Colonial, 102
East Indian Rail\\(lly Co., 183, 186
Economist, The, 182, 184
Eden, Sir George. See Auckland, Gambia, the, 62-63
Earl of Ganges, 17, 20, 22-23, 137, 181, 186
Egypt,25.30,32, 101~109, 132, 137- Gardner machine gun, 100, 122,.
138, 150-56, 162-63, 171. 19.3-g6, Gatling machine gun, 100-101, 117
205. See also Alexandria; Cairo; Germany, 102, 123, 160, 164, 174,,
Mehemet Ali; Nile; Suez; Suez 176, 182, 195, 200'. See also
Canal Prussia
Elder, John, engineer, 147-48 Gold Coast, 62-63, 67, 70, 101--2,
Elliott, Admiral George (son of 117, 193-g4
Lor~ Minto), 51 Gordon, Gen. George "Chinese,"
Elliott, Sir Gilbert. See Minto, Lord 118, 173
En Avant:75, 197 Graham, Geri!ld S., 19, 36
Enfield Grand Canal, 51, 53
rifle,88-89,98-100 Gras-Kropatchek rifle, 9g--101, 117,
Arsenal, 100 u9, 120
England. See Great Britain Gras rifle, 98-g9, 101, 109, 119
Enterprize, 20, 23, 131, 134-36 Great Britain.,See also House o(
Ethiopia (Abyssinia), 9, 75, ll!r20, Commons; India; Royal Navy
171, 195 in Africa, 62-63, 66--70, 73-74,
Euphrates 101-2, IID-;ll, ll7, 123-24,
river, 24-26, 28-33, 132, 137, 152 195
Expedition, 30-31, 175 in Burma, 20-21, 34, 54, 91"134,
Euphrates, 30, 32-33 136
in China, 19, 43.:-54, 86-87
firearms of, 87-89, 92, 98-,103
in the Middle East, 24-25, 30--33,
Fieldhouse, D.K., 6-S, 204 136, 152, 154-55
Firearms. See Breechloaders; submarine fable policy of, 157-64
Bullets; Cartridges; Gun- trade of, 106, 133-35, 168
powder; Machine guns;, Great Brit(lin, 145-47
Muskets;, Rifles Great Eastern, 143, 167
Flintlocks, 84-87, 91. Great Indian Peninsula Raihyay,
Fon. See Dahomey 182-;86
INDEX
Great Western, 131, 144 Indian Ocean, 9, 28, 33, 48-49, 130,
Gunboats. See also Nemesis; 138, 147, 172-'74
Phlegethon Indonesia, 71-'73, 161,173,208
in Africa, 61, 74-'75, u8 Indus, 17,26,32-34,37
in China, 43-54 Industrial Revolution, 4, 8-g, 146,
in India and Burma, 17-21, 23-37 174, 187,207
in Mesopotamia, 30-33 Iron
Gunpowder, 91, 99 in African guns, 1o8-9
in Africa, 107, 120 in shipbuilding, 27-29, 36, 142-46
Guns. See firearms Irrawaddy, 20-21, 54
Gutta-percha, 158-59, 176 Ismai1, Khedive of Egypt, 109, 156
Italy, 9, 120, 176, 194
Hall, Capt. William Hutcheon, 35-

36, 47-51 Jardine, William, 44-47
Hobhouse, Sir John Cam, 31, 33-35, Java. See Indonesia
47, 137 Johnston; James Henry "Steam,"
Hong Kong, 139, 16o, 168 133-34
Hotchkiss machine gun, 100
House of Commons, 131, 136-37,
158-60, 184 Karachi, 158-59, 168
Board of Control, 31...32 Kinshasa. See Leopoldville
Select Committee (1834), 23-25, Kirk, Sir John, British consul in
27-31 Zanzibar, u6, 113
Select Committee (1837), 137 Kitchener, Gen. Horatio Herbert,
Select Committee (1866), 16o 75, u7-18, 163
Hugh Lindsay, 23, 135-37, 147, 151
Laird (shipyard), 26, 30-33, 48, 74,

India. See also Bengal; Bombay; 144-45, 165
Calcutta; Ganges; Indus; Laird, John, shipbuilder, 19, 26, 31,
Madras; Oudh 33-36, 47, 50, 74, 145, 205•
cinchona in, 71-73 Laird, Macgregor, explorer and
conquest of, 8g--90 shipping entrepreneur, 17, 19,
opium produced in, 44 24, 26-30, 36, 48, 54, 171, 173,
railroads in, 18o-go 204-6, 208-g
Revolt of 1857, 89, 152, 158, 171, Niger expeditions, 27-29, 6o-65,
183 69,73-74
routes to. See Cape Route; Laird, William, shipbuilder, 26, 6o
Euphrates; Mesopotamia; Lander, Richard and John,
Overland Routes; Red Sea explorers, 6o-61
steamboats in, 22-23 Lebel rifle, 101-2, u9
submarine cables to, 157-64 Lee-Metford rifle, 99
trade with Great Britain, 1113-35, Leopold II, King of'Belgium, 73,
167-6g, 174 105,173, 197-g8
Indian Navy. See Bombay Marine Leopoldville (Kinshasa), "i96-99
218
INDEX
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, Suez Canal Menelik, Emperor of Ethiopia, 120,

builder, 151-54, 201 195
Libya, l ll, 120 Mesopotamia, 24-25, 28-30, 32-33,
Lin Tse-Hsii, Commissioner at 132, 152, 205
Canton, 49, 52 Messageries Maritimes, 174
Liverpool, 26-27, 61, 168, 171, 182 Minie rifle, 88, 97
Livingstone, David, explorer, 7fr7I, Minto, Lord (Sir Gilbert Elliott),
75,, 1og, ll5, 165 Lord of the Admiralty, 46-47
Lord William Bentinck, 22 Montigny machine gun, 100, 1og
Muskets, 83-g3, 96-g7, 99, 101, 105-
109, u7-19
Muzzle-loaders, 84-85, 101
Ma Roberts, 75, 165
Macao,45,49, 199
Machine guns, 85, 100-102, 109, 116- Needle-gun, 85, 96-g8, 109
ll8, 120-23. See also Gardner; Nemesis, 35, 43-54,;45
Gatling; Hotchkiss; Maxim; Netherlands East Indies. See
Montigny; Nordenfelt Indonesia
Mackinnon, William, shipping New Zealand, 161, 163, 166
magnate, 172-74, 198,206 Niger (river and region), 17, 59, 70,
Madras,24,71-72, 135,180, 184-86 171, 194-g6,200-201,207
Mail, 130, 135-36, 138, 142, 147, 162, conquest of the, 73-74, 101, Ill,
169-71 ll9
Maillot, Dr. Fram;:ois Clement, expeditions to the, 28-29, 6o-65,
66-67 68-69
Malaria, 58-76 Nigeria. See Benue; Niger; Sokoto
in Africa, 58-59, 64-72, 199 Nile, 17, 75, 136, 150, 153, 163, 195
in Algeria, 66-67 Nordenfelt machine gun, 100-101,
Malaya, 139,158,205 122
Malta, 136, 138, 15g-60
Marchand, Commandant Jean-
Baptiste, explorer, 75, 163 Omdurman, battle of, llS-19, 123
Marryat, Capt.,Frederick, naval Opium War. See China
officer, 21, 91 Ottom;m Empire, 25-26, 33, u1,
Marseilles, 137, 174 132-33, 152, 154-56, 15!)-60,201.
Martini-Henry rifle, 98-gg, llO See also Constantinople
Marx; Karl, 188-89 Oudh, Nawab of, 19, 134
Matadi, 196-g9 Overland Routes to India, 20, 28,
Mauser rifle, 98-g9, 109, ll9 129, 132-34, 138, 151. See also
Maxim gun, 85, 100, 102, 116-18, Euphrates; Mesopotamia; Red
122-23 Sea
Maxim, Hiram S., inventor, 100,
102, 208
Medusa, 34, 51 P and 0. See Peninsular an~
Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, 32, Oriental Steam Navigation Co.
151, 208 Paddle-wheelers (Chinese), 52-53
219
INDEX
Palmerston, Viscount (Henry John Red Sea, 24, 28-29, 33, 120, 132-38,
Temple), Foreign Secretary, 26, 150-53, 156,159,163, 194,205-6
30, 35, 46-47, 51; 138, 152, 158 Remington rifle, 116
Park, Mungo, explorer, 5g--60 Repeaters, 98-102, 109, 115-23
Parliament: See House of Commons Rifles, 84, 87-89, 92, 96-103, 109-10,
Peacock, Thomas Love, East India 115-23. See also Cartridges
Company official, 19.,24-32, 34, Royal Navy, 18-19,36-37,47-48,54,
36,47-50,54,64, 137,205 64, 69. See also Admiralty
Pearl River, 45, 49 Russia, 24-26, 28, 30, 32-33, 35, 150,
Peilang, 139,160 152, 160, 181-82
Pender, John, telegraph magnate,
161-62
Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Co., 36, 138-39, 142, Sahara, 75, 107, u 1, 192, 200-02
146-47, 151-52, 162, 166-67, Sailing ships, 168-70
17<>-74,182-83 Samori Toure, West African leader,
Percussion; 84-87, 97 11g-.!20,208
Persian Gulf, 30-31, 33, 132, 158-60, Secret Committee. See East India
1 73 Company
Phlegethon, 35, 47, 51-52 Select Committee. See House of
Plasmodium vivax, falcipdrum, 65, Commons
67. See also Malaria Senegal, 101, u7, 119, 174, 194, 200-
Pleiad, 69, 74 201
Plutb (1822), 20 Sepoy, 87, 89
Pluto (1839), 34, 51 Sesostris, 51, 138
Port Said, 153, 168 Shipp,ing lines. See African Steam-
Por'tugal, 58-59, 109, 180 ship Co.; British' India Steam
Propeller, 142, 145, 198 Navigation Co.; Cunard,Line;
Proserpine, 34, 51 Messageries Maritimes; Penin-
Prussia, 85, 97---98,105, 150 sular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Co.
Sierra Leone, 62-63, 67, f1g-:!O, 123
Sin'gapore, 139, 155, 161, 163, 168,
Quinine, 10, 58. See also Cinchona 173-74
in Algeria, 66--67' Sirius, 131, 145
production of, 71--'73 Snider-Enfield rifle, 98, 116-17
in West Africa, 67--'71,73 Sokoto Caliphate, 74, 111, 117,206
!{uorra, 28, 61 South Africa, 70, 89, 101, 109-10,
121-24, 161-63, 168-69, 173,
193--96
Rabah, uo-17 Stanley, Hertry Morton, explorer,
Railroads 75, 11'6, 196----g8,
206 .
in Africa, 192-202 Stanley Pool, 75, u5, 197
in Egypf, 152~194 Steamboats, 31-32, 48. See also
in India, i 81)-!.go Gunboats; Steamships
Rainbow, 74; 144 in Africa, 27-29, 73-75, 197--98
220
INDEX
in China, 45-46, 4g--54 Tigris, 25, 32-33

in India and Burma, 17-23 Times, The (London), 35, 173, 184,
Steam engines, 131, 147-48, 165-67, 208
172
Steam navigation. See Gunboats;
Shipping lines; Steamboats; United States, 154, 182, 204
Steamships firearms,84,87,98-100,208
Steamships,31,48, 12g--39, 142-48, railroads, 181,201
165-'77 ships and shipping, 131, 146, 166,
Steel 1 75
in rifles, 100, 120 steamboats, 18, 26-27, 29, 48, 197
in shipbuilding, 165-66 submarine cables, 159, 162-63
Stephenson, Rowland Macdonald,
railroad entrepreneur, 183, 188-
189 Wadai, 111, u7
Strategy, 120-24 West Africa, 60-03, 66-68, 101-2,
Submarine cables, 157-64, 172, 176 117-19, 161-63, 171,174, 193--96,
Sudan, 107,206 199, 201
Central, 74-'75, uo-u, 116-17, West Indians, 63
201 Winchester rifle, 98, 109, n5-16
Eastern, 108, 118-19, 123, 171, Wolseley, Gen. Sir Garnet, 102, u7,
1 93-94 193,208
Western, 101, u9, 194, 201 Woolwich Arsenal, 87, 98, 100
Suez,23, 130,133, 135-39, 15i-53, Woosung, battle of, 52-53
15g--6o, 162,174
Suez Canal, 26, 73, 150-56, 165, 167-
169, 172-'73, 176,200,205
Yangtze, 51-53
Yohannis IV. See Bezbiz Kasa
Tactics, 120-24
Telegraph. See Submarine cable
Telegraph Construction and Zambezi, 59, 70, 75, 165-66
Maintenance Co., 161-62 Zanzibar, 110, n6, 161, 173, 199
221

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Daniel R. Headrick - The Tools of Empire - Technology and European Imperialism in The Nineteenth Century-Oxford University Press (1981)

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THE J100LS OF EMPIRE

New York Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

For the inspiration, encouragement, and assistance that have

j ntroduction: Technology, Imperialism, and History 3

PART ON,E: STEAMBOATS AND QUININE,

Chapter One: Secret Gunboats of the

Chapter Two: The Nemesis in China 43

tain Hall. The campaign of 1841. The Yangtze expedition, 1842.

Chapter Three: Malaria, Quinine, and

PART TWO: GUNS AND CONQUESTS

Chapter Four: Weapons and Colonial Wars of the

Chapter Five: The Breechloader Revolution 96

Chapter Six: African A~ms 105

Introduction. Dane guns on the ·coast. Sudanic weapons. Forest

Chapter Seven: Arms Gap and Colonial Confrontations 115

Explorers. Stanley. Disparity of firepower. The Eastern Sudan.

PART THREE: THE COMMUNICATIONS

Chapter Eight: Steam and the Overland Route to India 129

Chapter Nine: The Emergence of Efficient Steamships 142

Chapter Ten: The Suez Canal 150

Chapter Eleven: The Submarine Cable 157

Chapter Twelve: The Global Thalassocracies 165

Chapter Thirteen: The Railroads of India 180

Chapter Fourteen: African Transportation:

Bibliographical Essay: 211

Among the many important events of the nineteenth century,

European political and religious ideals barely survive as tenu-

torians of imperialism have neglected to answer, and that we

The search for the causes of nineteenth-century imperialism

i5uch-poutical motives as international rivalries, naval strate ,

still awaiting an answer. . . . What were the causes and incen-

Is 'imperialism' merely shorthand for an agglometration of cau-

one continent possessed so immense a power advantage over the

i.!1.!Peti'ltlism, then, was the sum of many little imperialisms

. . . technological progress as such did not cause imperialistic

In a later work, Wehler is even more categorical:

If one points to technological progress as the main factor of ex-

Rondo Cameron reached a similar conclusion in an article

It is sometimes asserted that the rapid progress of Western tech-

cannot be used to explain the burst of expansion at the end of

The rejection of the technological. fact,or by Wehler and

late in the colonial period, and not in the earlier periods of

lated. On the contrary, the appearance of a new technology

It is the .third of our scenarios, in which both means and

The goal and result of imperialism-9ne which was in fact

governments. In the penetration phase, steamers and the pro-

1. D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire r830-r9r4 (Ithaca,

eds., Imperialism and Colonialism (New Ybrk, 1964); and Ralph

Brunschwig, "Note sur Jes technocrates de l'imperialisme fram,;ais en

We have the power in our hands, moral, physical, and mechani-

The steamboat, with its power to travel speedily upriver as

tury, many inventors in France, Britain, and the United States

waters of the Black and Bal,tic seas, ordered scores of such

... the Royal Navy did.not count as an instrument of diplo·

The first steamer in India was a small pleasure boat built

the Kidderpore dockyard built a 132-ton sidewheeler pro-

In December 1824 the British East India Company and