Deck 19: B: Colonial Encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania 1750-1950

Question 1

In what ways did the lives of women in Africa change with the arrival of colonial empires?

Answer 1

•Before colonization,women almost everywhere in Africa were active farmers,with responsibility for planting,weeding,and harvesting in addition to food preparation and child care.Women were expected to feed their own families and often were allocated their own fields for that purpose,and many were also involved in local trading activity.Though clearly subordinate to men,African women nevertheless had a measure of economic autonomy.
•Following colonization,women's lives diverged more and more from those of men.Women assumed near total responsibility for subsistence production,while men dominated cash-crop agriculture.
•Men increasingly migrated to the cities,leaving management of the domestic economy to their wives,who often took on traditionally male tasks.The lives and cultures of men and women increasingly diverged,with one focused on the cities and working for wages and the other on village life and subsistence agriculture.
•In response to these changing circumstances,women sought closer relations with their birth families,introduced labor-saving crops,adopted new farm implements,and earned money as traders.In the cities,they established a variety of self-help associations.
•Colonial economies sometimes offered women opportunities,particularly in small-scale trade and marketing,which could give them considerable economic autonomy.
•Colonial society often made women nearly independent heads of households;others took advantage of new opportunities in mission schools,towns,and mines to flee the restrictions of rural patriarchy.

Question 2

How did race and gender define colonial relations in the nineteenth century?

Answer 2

•European colonizers were mostly male and contrasted their "active masculinity" with the soft,passive,feminine qualities of the "conquered races."
•The inferiority of women was linked to people of color,merging gender ideology and racial prejudice to justify colonial rule.
•European women were viewed as bearers and emblems of civilization in need of protection against the alleged lust of native men.
•Certain segments of colonial society were gendered as masculine or "martial races" (Sikhs and Gurkhas in India,Kamba in Kenya,Hausa in Nigeria).

Question 3

How did the demands of the state and the market shape colonial labor in the nineteenth century?

Answer 3

•The state demanded unpaid labor on public projects (called statute labor in French Africa).
•The Congo Free State authorized the use of forced labor in the collection of rubber.
•The cultivation system in the Dutch East Indies required peasants to focus on growing cash crops at the expense of food production in order to meet state demands for taxes.
•Some farmers benefited from cash-crop agriculture due to high prices for their products in the international market (rice farmers in Burma,cacao growers in the Gold Coast).

Question 4

How was the British colonization of Australia and New Zealand during the nineteenth century similar to the earlier colonization of North America?

Question 5

In what ways did Africans shape Christianity in regions where it arrived with colonial powers in the nineteenth century?

Question 6

Why did some colonized people choose to support European colonial regimes?

Question 7

What were the rationales used to justify Western imperialism in the nineteenth century?

Question 8

What kind of employment was available to migrants in the colonial world of the nineteenth century?