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Political domination is a crucial aspect of colonialism; as mentioned, without a significant reduction of the level of political sovereignty, we would not even speak of colonialism. From a sociological viewpoint, the historical pattern of foreign control does not depend on the official claim or de jure control. We treat all so-called “mandates” as colonies. Apart from Mongolia, which was in 19th/20th century mostly under Chinese supremacy, all countries of our sample had an experience of being dominated by one or several colonial powers.
Our concept focuses on different levels of intensification of political domination; coded was the maximal impact:
We call semi-colonialism the reduction of political sovereignty through “unequal treaties” or similar arrangements, the “weakest” form of colonial domination. These treaties usually were forced at gunpoint or were the results of wars, they were non-reciprocal and included elements like
These instruments were used mainly in dealing with the pre-colonial states and empires in Asia, where „the presence of large, antique, yet still death-defying political structures meant that indigenous authorities could not be taken over without promoting internal disorder, incurring massive expense and risking international conflict“ (Cain/Hopkins 1999: 397). Examples are the Bowring Treaty (1855 Britain-Siam) , the Tianjin Treaty (1858 Britain-China) and the Harris Treaty (1858 US-Japan). The group of (present) countries coded as semi-colonial consists of Afghanistan, Iran (Persia), Japan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Turkey (as the core area of the Ottoman empire), i.e. 7% of the cases in the sample.
In some cases, diplomatic relations became successively more unequal, as in the cases of the series of treaties of Britain with the small emirates at the Persian Gulf, which makes it difficult to define the exact onset of semi-colonialism/colonialism. In these cases, “truces” (which gave a part of the Gulf area its name for more than a century) were, between the 1820s and the 1890s, step by step upgraded until the British controlled completely the external relations of the emirates and assumed all responsibility for arbitrating in any disputes between them. Owtram (2004: 112) aptly called this a “British cocoon” which has isolated these emirates for almost a century. Such a “cocoon” stage is definitely more than semi-colonial domination; therefore, we define as indicators for the next level of intensification of political domination:
This form of colonial domination is usually called “indirect rule”, because traditional rulers stay in power and institutions remain at least formally unchanged. However, “indirect rule” had a strong impact on the political sphere, as a Furnivall (1941) argues in the case of Dutch rule in Indonesia:
„For under native rule the regents stood on their own feet as representatives of the social organism; under Dutch rule they hung from above, deriving their authority from the Dutch government. In fact, therefore, the Dutch system subverted the native principle of rule, and drained the vitality of social life.“ (Furnivall 1941: 9)
Lieberman (1993) characterizes Spanish rule in the Philippines as follows:
„By providing chiefs with unprecedented security in office, with novel economic opportunities, and with a wider arena for the exercise of patronage, the Spanish gradually en¬listed local headmen to serve not only as the lowest rung of the Spanish political structure, but also as cultural bro¬kers between Spanish friars and the rural population.“ (Lieberman 1993: 566)
However, because on most of the Philippine islands, no central/regional forms of government had been created before the arrival of the Spanish, the case cannot be coded as ‘indirect rule’. In general, the caveat by Trocki (1999) applies:
„While the legal status of the prior institutions could be taken as a formal guide to the presence of a system of direct or indirect rule, in practice there was often little to distinguish the systems. During this period, legal niceties were respected only at the convenience of the colonial power, though such technical points once again became of importance when questions arose regarding the structure of the post-colonial state. (...) indirect rule often signified no more than a transitory stage between the inception of a colonial presence and the development of a more comprehensive administrative machine.“ (Trocki 1999: 80)
Because the category “indirect rule” covers a large number of colonies, we differentiate between indirect rule with little interference in internal affairs (level 2) and indirect rule with strong interference in internal affairs (level 3). This is somewhat arbitrary, but the experience of coding the impact on traditional institutions and processes clearly confirmed the importance and practicability of this distinction.
In cases where the area of today’s country was politically divided and experienced different forms of domination over a longer period, as in the case of the Malay peninsula with directly ruled “settlements”, federated and unfederated Malay states with British residents , but different degrees of interference in internal affairs, we coded ‘3’ in view of the experience of the majority of the population. We “balanced” the coding in cases of several groups of the population with significantly different experiences, e.g. a “3” in a case with two groups with direct rule and two with indirect and little interference. One example for this is Cameroun, where in the British part and the northern French part administration was based on local authorities as the Lamibé and Sultans, while in the southern French part the administration was clearly direct. As mentioned in the introduction, we did not code traditional empires (Mughal, Ottoman, Omani etc.) as colonialism. Here we are confronted with the problem how to code areas/regions which were part of one of these empires and therefore were politically dominated already before ‘modern’ colonialism. The partition of the Ottoman Empire by European powers led to new entities for which new political ‘centers’ had to be created and which led to economic fragmentation:
„.. the creation of these new political entities entailed the creation of new national economies as well, each with its own boundaries, and each with its own centralized system of laws, taxes, and fiscal management. One result was the growth of separate national markets (...), another the development of barriers to the large movement of goods and labor that had been such a prominent feature in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.“ (Owen/Pamuk 1999: 51)
The problem gets even more complicated because the political reality of these empires often did not match the symbolic discourses and rituals of imperial unity. E.g. in the case of the Ottoman empire, the Egyptian regime of Muhammad Ali (reg. 1805-1848) was “virtually autonomous” (Lewis 1995: 301); Tunis and Morocco also enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. It was only in these areas that the option of ‘indirect rule’ through traditional institutions and dynasties was available (and therefore ‘level 2’ or ‘3’-codings). In others, colonialism not only created new political entities, but also founded completely new ‘dynasties’ (so the British with their Arab military allies in Jordan and Iraq; cf. Cleve-land 1994; Eilon 2007). These cases were coded as ‘level 4’-domination, as was the creation of chieftainces without historical precursors.
As result, 18 countries of 83 were coded ‘level 2’ (22%), 27 ‘level 3’ (33%) and 31 as ‘level 4’ (37%). This means that more than two thirds of the countries in our sample experienced strong colonial political intervention, with or without the dissolution of pre-colonial political institutions. As will be discussed later, the intensity of political domination correlates with level of colonial violence as well as with some indicators of economic transformation. British colonies were in general ruled less directly.
