Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (review)

Price, a distinguished specialist on the social history of Great Britain, has now voyaged across the seas to study the making of an imperial society in nineteenth-century South Africa. His endeavor is both a welcome expansion of British history beyond its insular and national moorings and a corrective to differing tendencies in the literature on European colonialism. He finds nothing like the "liberal empire" celebrated by some historians or the "colonial modernity" that postcolonial theorists like to denounce. He brings to a small part of a large empire the best characteristics of British social history—meticulous reading of sources, attention to language, and sensitivity to the perspectives of all sides in a complex encounter.

Price's goal is to elucidate what he calls a "culture of imperial rule" on the ground. Between 1779 and 1879, the Xhosa people of South Africa's eastern Cape fought nine wars against, first, the Dutch and then the British, but only near the end of that period was anything like "colonial" rule established. As settlers came to the region, the British tried to keep Xhosa at a distance, but for the most part left de facto power in the hands of chiefs. In the beginning, the most intense British–Xhosa interactions came through missionary activity, which depended on the consent and support of chiefs but which threatened to introduce fissures in structures and ideologies of power. Over time, British interventions intensified, but Price emphasizes "how fragile" British power actually was (6). In 1847, the Cape government tried to define a territory that it could control—British Kaffraria—but the project failed, and a decade later, officials were not even sure whether Xhosa were British "subjects."

One of the virtues of Price's book is that his characters, on all sides of the encounter, are far from faceless. His missionaries emerge from diaries and letters as men impelled by a "profound otherworldliness" (25)—a deep conviction of their calling—but with a curiosity about Xhosa culture and a belief in "universal humanity" (31). Their sense of possibility gradually eroded as Xhosa culture proved resilient to the Word, and by the 1840s, missionaries' engagement was giving way to criticism of backwardness and duplicity. British officials—some of them bullying personalities (George Grey, John Cox Gawler) bred on the ground in South Africa or elsewhere in the empire—moved from trying to harness chiebondwomen. One highlyfly power to state purposes to trying to humiliate and destroy chiefs. Several chiefs (Hintsa, Maqoma, and Mhala) emerge as strong personalities, maneuvering through their own cultural codes and understanding the limits of what the British could do. The story ends in tragedy—deepening fissures in Xhosa society, a millenarian movement that may or may not have had the support of chiefs, and an episode of destroying cattle that did not produce the expected supernatural intervention.

Price did not allow the endpoint of his story or preset views of colonialism to get in the way of a careful reading of sources. The result is a rewarding narrative and nuanced analysis of nineteenth-century colonization. Yet, there is much that a study of imperial culture in a specific place cannot do. Empires featured wide repertoires of power. To London, the eastern Cape was of no great importance in itself; part of what made a culture imperial was understanding where to deploy different strategies and where not to push too hard. Price's view of growing missionary racism and official destructiveness is consistent with trends documented in the West Indies but at variance with the pattern of trading relationships that prevailed in West Africa until later. But Price's accomplishment is not only to put together one piece of a bigger puzzle but also to make clear the value of his interactive perspective on imperial encounters wherever they occurred.