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Heather DeLancett

HIST 445 Spring 2011

Prof. Michael Bitter

Last Short Paper

Indigenous Resistance to Colonialism

In the readings weve reviewed for this topic, two of the authors in the Conklin & Fletcher

European Imperialism book stand out in my mind as being important for ongoing discussion and

consideration. James C. Scott, in his essay Peasant Weapons of the Weak seeks to reveal to us The

Unwritten History of Resistance and Frederick Cooper, in his essay Wage Labor of the Anticolonial

Resistance in Colonial Kenya discusses the difference in industrial capitalist wage labor that relies on

clock time. I will briefly highlight and discuss what I find important in these essays.

James C. Scott finds a left-wing academic romance with wars of national liberation and an

excessive amount of scholarly attention devoted to the subject of peasant rebellions and revolutions.1

He points out that large scale peasant revolutions are rare, nearly always crushed unceremoniously,

may bring small gains even with failure but definitely bring carnage and demoralization upon defeat,

and even when successful are often found to replace one oppressor with an even worse one.2

What we

do not seem to focus on in our studies of indigenous resistance is the everyday forms which challenge

the ruling order, the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to

extract labor, food, taxes, rents and interests from them, which may includethe ordinary weapons of

relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulations, false compliance, pilfering, feigned

1James C. Scott, Peasant Weapons of the Weak, in European Imperialism, 1830-1930 - Climax and Contradiction,

ed. Alice Conklin, & Ian Fletcher(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) p. 184.

2Ibid. p. 184-85

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ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth.3

Scott surmises that these forms of resistance, which

require little or no formal leaders, coordination or planning, often represent an individuals self-help

while avoiding direct conflict with authority and elite norms. This is what happens between those

periods of heightened tension that spawn revolts in the meantime the peasants use defiance as best

as possible to defend their own interests.

These forms of resistance do not make headlines and are not recorded as part of history and so

easily go undetected because it is in neither partys best interest to draw attention to these acts. For

most of the peasantry throughout history there is very little chance of a change in social class or status.

Open defiance to conformity of the ruling elites public and symbolic goals invites ferocious and rapid

retaliation and makes life more difficult for the peasant. However, small acts done from safe in the

shadows of anonymity multiplied many thousandfold, such petty acts of resistance by peasants may in

the end make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be superiors in the capital.4

The colonists are not likely to wish to publicize the acts of defiance and insubordination because it

shines light on the unpopularity of their policies and exposes vulnerability. This creates what Scott calls

a complicitous silence which keeps these everyday forms of resistance to colonial and imperial tactics

from being recognized as an ongoing part of history.

Frederick Cooper brings to discussion the very important point of differing attitudes towards

labor and the introduction, enforcement and resistance to clock time. Max Weber wrote a fabulous

analysis of the changes in conditions, lifestyles and work ethic attitudes that came along with

industrialization and the switch to clock time versus natural time, or traditional time, and

Frederick Cooper is obviously borrowing heavily from Webers analysis which can be found in his works

regarding the Protestant Work thesis (see especially, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of

3Ibid. p. 185

4Ibid. p. 187.

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Capitalism, 1904). Cooper cites E.P. Thompson (1967) for his reference to this thesis instead, but

adequately describes the contrast between the attitudes toward time and work discipline being vastly

different between the indigenous task time of intensive and focused labor tasks that were often

seasonally cyclical and integrated into social life and that of capitalist wage labor dominated by

hierarchal authority structures and clock time.5

He points out that the work rhythms that dominated

modern Europe, (and I will add, as well as those of our own society), were not natural characteristics of

a particular culture, but historical developments associated with the rise of capitalisms wage labor.6

These differences in work attitudes and traditions led European colonizers to consider African lazy and

underdeveloped.

Cooper goes on to discuss the slave society, and forms of resistance such as escape into maroon

communities, Christian missions, or becoming allies to the potential enemies. The remaining enslaved

people resisted the cultural onslaught of their owners, keeping up dances, the initiation rites, and other

practices of their home societies.7

After abolition in Kenya in 1907, previous slaveholders seeking

replacement labor expected the now free, formerly enslaved people to continue work rhythms as

previously defined, but resistance in the forms of squatting, private crop production (such a rubber), and

short-term agricultural labor helped the ex-slaves regain a precolonial concept of time again.8

I find both of these essays to be complimentary and rich with continued research possibilities

for historical review of past and present societies forms of class struggle. The ideological construction

of the concept of time, and how it is properly used, or in our common vernacular how it is spent, is

most definitely one of Imperialisms greatest tools, and as these essays show, also a potential

vulnerability.

5Frederick Cooper, Wage Labor and Anticolonial Resistance in Colonial Kenya, in European Imperialism, 1830-

1930 - Climax and Contradiction, ed. Alice Conklin, & Ian Fletcher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) p. 190.6

Ibid.7

Ibid. p. 192.8

Ibid. p. 195-96.

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Bibliography

Conklin, Alice & Fletcher, Ian, ed. European Imperialism, 1830-1930 - Climax and Contradiction. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1999.