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Course: World History Project - Origins to the Present > Unit 6
Lesson 4: Imperialism | 6.3- READ: Industrial Imperialism, the “New” Imperialism
- READ: Responses to Industrial Imperialism
- READ: Ottilie Baader (Graphic Biography)
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Experiencing Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
- WATCH: Experiencing Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Asian Responses to Imperialism
- WATCH: Asian Responses to Imperialism
- READ: Dadabhai Naoroji (Graphic Biography)
- READ: Struggle and Transformation in China
- READ: Dual Consciousness
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Resisting Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
- WATCH: Resisting Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
- Imperialism
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WATCH: Experiencing Colonialism - Through a Ghanaian Lens
Colonialism is a big topic, but it can only be understood by looking at human experiences. Formal colonialism first came to the region we today call Ghana in 1874, and British rule spread through the region into the early twentieth century. The British called the territory the “Gold Coast Colony”. The British colonizers tried to control everything from trade and transportation to religion and social structures. But local people resisted in many different ways, reclaiming their ability to make their own decisions and shape their own lives and societies.
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Want to join the conversation?
- What happened after ghana was colonized(2 votes)
- The British came to rule Ghana, and the British built railroads and other industrial materials to extract resources and to get slaves. However soon the locals resisted, and after some hard work gained independence,(3 votes)
Video transcript
(Ghanaian music playing) Hello, my name is Trevor Getz. I'm a professor
of African history at San Francisco State
University, and I'm here in Ghana,
in West Africa, to talk to two historians, Ato Quayson and Jennifer Hart,
about colonialism. Before 1874, this entire region
was made up of independent states
and self-ruling communities. Then, in that year, the British declared
that this region would be the Gold Coast colony, and in the next two decades they pushed deep into
the interior. I'm interested in how
colonialism operated and how it felt to be colonized. It seems to me that colonialism
was a lot about control, about the colonial authorities getting to be in charge
of what happened and make things work the way
they want it to work. How did that feel? How did local people react? I'm going to be talking
to Professor Quayson and Professor Hart about what colonialism was like
in certain situations and get a picture
for all of Ghana. And we'll see whether we can use
that information to get a better sense
of colonialism and how it operated
around the world. We're standing on this very loud
street in Jamestown and there's this big, blue
official looking building behind us.
- Yes. What is this building? QUAYSON: Well, this building
is the Customs House. The Customs House built in 1926. And the Customs House was used to collect taxes on
imported goods. All imported goods
had to pass through here, the officials who assessed
their taxes on the goods. So, so this is one
of the ways that the British colonial
administration made their money? A lot of it, actually.
A lot of it. The thing is that this building
is not far from the Old Harbor. And the harbor was a shallow
water harbor. So the ships had to dock
three miles out at sea and the goods would be
carried in and out on canoes of different sizes. But everything was carried
on the canoes. Pianos, entire pianos were
brought in via the canoes, cars, vehicles,
spare parts, the parts were all brought in. Alcohol,
cases of alcohol. And then, in the other
direction, salt was exported, meat and gold, ivory, all kinds of...
- Palm oil. Palm oil, lots of palm oil was also sent the other way,
but all on the canoes. So from the British
point of view, the Customs House is there to,
first of all... - Income.
- ...financially collect money. - Income.
- And, second, to control... - Control goods.
- ...what's coming in and out. - Absolutely.
- Now, did Ghanaians, especially these canoe men
and others working, did they just accept this? Well, there are
lots of stories, but one of the ones
that I found out is that because everything
was brought in on the canoes, as I mentioned--
you know, car parts, pianos-- it wasn't unusual
or unknown for the canoe men to drop, to drop a crate
of, say, whiskey or alcohol into the sea. And at night they would go
back and go and fetch it. So what they did was that they dumped some of
the goods into the sea and then went and then
took them at night and then used it for themselves,
but alcohol was the favorite. Sure, so in a way this is a kind
of resistance. But really it's just them trying to use the system to get
what they want. Yeah, they didn't have the
money, they were just laborers. So how do they benefit from
this absent of material wealth that is flowing into the colony. - They find a way to divert it.
- They find a way to... - A little bit of it.
- And they take it. Jennifer, where are we? We are in La,
some people know it as Labadi, which is a suburb of Accra. And we are sitting
in the offices of the Law Drivers' Union,
it's a branch of the G.P.R.T., the Ghana Private Road
Transport Union, which is the largest union
in the country of drivers and transport owners. So, what was this place like
before colonialism? So, this place was
a relatively small suburb. It was considered pretty
far from Accra. Today it's really close,
(laughs) really close and part
of the city. But at that time
it was a pretty big distance because people would
have to walk between here and there. So when the colonial system came
into effect in the 1870s, it seems to be that the British
had this port then that they controlled, Accra, and they wanted to move
things out, right? I mean that was a large part of
the point of colonialism was to move out all
these goods coming in from the interior to Accra. So, what was their plan? How did they plan to move
things efficiently and make money off of them?
- Mm-hmm. So, in Britain itself, moving things was primarily done
through the railway. And the railway had kind of
grown hand-in-hand with the growth of
industrial capitalism-- so the development of factories
and the discovery of coal. So when the British
came to Africa, they saw this as an
important technology, the British kind of
prided themselves on their railways. But it was also a
very easy kind of centralized means of controlling
the flow of goods and people around the countryside. By the beginning
of the 20th century, they started building railroads
first into the mining areas and then about a decade or two
later in the 1920s, into the cocoa-growing areas. And their goal was to try
to control the movement of, of produce or primary
materials like gold, from the interior to the coast so that they could maximize
the amount of money that they could profit off of, and control the kind of access
to and flow of goods. Okay, so, there's
a precolonial system and then the British come along and they want everybody
to use the railroads that they can benefit from. And then what do Ghanaians do? Did Ghanaians say, "Yeah,
we'll just use the railroads?" No, Ghanaian farmers were
extremely resistant to using British railways
for various reasons. Unlike other parts
of the continent, Ghanaians or Africans
in the Gold Coast had control of land and were the primary producers
of cash crops, particularly cash crops
like cocoa and palm nuts. And so they had access
to capital. They had control of the market in various really
important ways. They wanted to control
their produce all the way to the coast so that they could get the
highest profit possible, selling it directly to
the exporters at coastal ports. The British, by contrast,
wanted them to just take it to the nearest railway terminus and sell it to local agents
in the interior where they would get
a lower profit. So they weren't interested
in that at all. So, instead, they would
in some cases bypass the colonial railways
using head carriers, but increasingly by
the 1920s and 1930s, started investing
some of the profits of their cocoa farming
in lorries. And so they started
purchasing lorries, and hiring or finding
young men in their families
to drive the lorries, and then transporting
the goods themselves using those, in many cases,
those same footpaths the carriers had used before, just using this new technology. GETZ: I know that today in
Ghana, a lot of people travel by taxi or by tro-tro,
which is a minibus that people can pick up
and drop off of. How did that industry start? HART: Tro-tros emerge
also because of this lack of access to vehicles
in the city. But what we see is, so these mammy trucks
or mammy lorries would come in from
the eastern interior. They would be carrying goods and they would continue on
into the center of the city, Accra, where there would be
a major market and a major lorry park. On their way
they would see market women, and women are the primary
traders in Ghana. They would see them standing on the roadside with
their goods. There was a municipal bus system
at the time, but those buses were very small and they didn't have a lot of
storage space. And so they weren't very
convenient for traders. So, the, the lorry drivers
would stop on the side of the road
and pick up these women who really liked the idea of
being able to travel in a lorry because it provided
a lot more cargo space, and it was a much more
flexible... and it took them directly
to the lorry park, which was right by the market
where they were trading. So what I'm hearing from you
is essentially that the British colonial model was to have a
centralized bus system, to have a state-run
railroad system, and Ghanaians didn't
find these things useful and so they kind of built
their own transportation systems to try to get what
they needed instead. Yeah, and the British
found this incredibly challenging, right? So they, they actually call
these lorries "pirate passenger lorries."
- "Pirates"? Yes, I know, right?
(laughter) So, we think about pirates
in terms of like, "Pirates of the Caribbean,"
right? And they're these kind of almost
cartoonish figures. But in the colonial period
all over the world, the British in particular, and the French and other
European colonial powers, were very concerned
about piracy. To call somebody a pirate
is not just a kind of name you give
to somebody who's on a ship or somebody who
looks a certain way or wears certain
kinds of clothes, right? It is a reflection of that person's undermining
of authority. (car horns honk in distance) GETZ: So, we're here in the
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, which was built in 1894
here in Jamestown. You know, I look around this
church, it's amazing. It's a very English looking
church. - It is.
- In the middle of Ghana. - Yeah.
- And one of the most amazing things is these plaques
that are on the walls to those who died, and I'm just noticing
there's a Dale over there. There's a Pine over there. There's a Frasier. These are all Europeans.
- Mm-hmm. Where are the African plaques
in this church? The African plaques come later. So, from 1894 and well into
the 20th century, the pews were segregated.
- They were actually segregated. They were actually segregated
because it was the official colonial church. So, the colonial administration, all the senior colonial
administrators attended church here. And because of the hierarchy
that they established, the colonial officers
sat in front and the African members
sat behind them. GETZ: But then, somewhat later,
we do get plaques of that. QUAYSON: This is much later,
and, of course, the plaques for Africans
are senior Africans who contribute to the church
and so on. So the church becomes
a microcosm of the colonial enterprise. (children talking indistinctly
in background) When I first began to explore
colonialism in Ghana, I speculated that colonialism was really a question
of authority. Just how in charge was
the colonial administration and to what degree could
Ghanaians evade or resist what the colonial administration
wanted to happen? And certainly we've seen both
things over the past few days. We've seen ways in which
the colonial administration could dominate the way that people moved goods
or themselves. We've seen the way
that colonial taxes dominated what came in
and what went out. We've even seen the ways in
which churches had hierarchies and segregation. But we've also
witnessed the fact that Ghanaians could
sometimes push back. They could be pirate taxis, they could force
desegregation in the churches, they could find lose and find, mysteriously,
bits of cargo. So, in the end,
it sort of seems like there was a bit of a balance between the colonial
administration's ability to control them and their
ability to do what they wanted. I wonder if that's true in other
parts of the world as well. (Ghanaian music playing)