Late 19th Century: (Disorder and Civilizing Violence — The Growing Belief That African Society Was Fundamentally Flawed, Belloc’s Maxim Gun Couplet, Kipling’…

Late 19th Century: (Disorder and Civilizing Violence — The Growing Belief That African Society Was Fundamentally Flawed, Belloc’s Maxim Gun Couplet, Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, Chamberlain’s Defense That You Cannot Have Omelettes Without Breaking Eggs, Hobson’s Critique That the Means of Destruction Undermined the Civilizing Mission, and the Shared Assumption That There Were Indeed Backward Races Needing Saving): There was a growing belief in the need for more forceful intervention in African society. Some states stubbornly refused to halt the slave trade, societies struggling with transition underwent collapse and protracted conflict, and the opinion was forming that African society was indeed fundamentally flawed — violent, unstable, and fragmented. Belloc’s 1898 couplet about the Maxim gun summarized the age of high imperialism, while Kipling’s 1899 poem called upon youth to fight the savage wars of peace and bring order to peoples described as half devil and half child. The concept of an imposed peace brought about through violence was at the heart of late-nineteenth-century thinking. Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary in the late 1890s, declared this to be Britain’s national mission — that the Pax Britannica had brought greater security and material improvement wherever it was enforced, and that you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism without the use of force. Yet imperialism had critics: in France, it was described as creeping like bacteria in the blood; in Britain, Beatrice Webb deplored the pecuniary self-interest of empire-building, and J. A. Hobson in 1902 wrote despairingly of the jingoism and militaristic tendencies of the age. Chamberlain and Hobson disagreed over means but not ends — neither doubted that there were backward and lower races needing saving. Technology brought death but must also bring progress, and this became a core concern of colonial administrations.