Imperial expectations and realities

El Dorados, utopias and dystopias

Andrekos Varnava

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784996475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This volume explores how imperial powers established and expanded their empires through decisions that were often based on exaggerated expectations and wishful thinking, rather than on reasoned and scientific policies. It explores these exaggerations through the concepts of El Dorado, utopias and dystopias – undertakings based on irrational perceived values – in case studies from across the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and incorporates imperial traditions including Scottish, British, French, German, Italian and American. Various colonial spaces are considered, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, and in doing so, the contributors offer new insights into the nature of imperialism and colonial settlement.

chapter one

El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement

Andrekos Varnava

dupes of a great illusion, their competing greed and rivalry jostling them into a gold rush for an imaginary El Dorado.

(Eric Stokes, ‘Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa’, in W. Roger-Louis, Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy, 1976)

El Dorado, the enduring myth of a rich promised land hidden in the heartlands of South America, is an appropriate term and metaphor for understanding what is essentially a particular psychology of most imperial and colonial projects. El Dorados as regards imperialism and colonial settlement are supported by promises of immediate enrichment, either at individual, corporate or state level. Across the centuries and across various imperial traditions, imperial powers established and expanded their empires, while states, companies and individuals, settled places, often on the basis of promising perceived and exaggerated expectations of value, rather than because of sound, evidenced-based reasoning. As regards El Dorados, it was often the irrational rather than the rational that determined and justified their selection, and often too, their retention, resulting in many places becoming misadventures. To be sure, almost every imperial and colonial venture was a search for El Dorado or a utopia. By exploring various cases this collection seeks to show how El Dorados arose in Europe across imperial traditions, colonial projects and periods in time. The aim is not to offer an overarching explanation for imperialism and colonial settlement, but to provide a comparative understanding of the phenomenon as it occurred in a number of imperial settings. In particular, two questions drive this investigation: (1) what is the best way to conceptualise the phenomenon of exaggerated imperial expectations and subsequent realities and deflation of these expectations?; (2) how does this phenomenon manifest itself across imperial traditions, periods of time and colonial spaces?

Related to El Dorados are utopias and dystopias. Utopias, as distinct from El Dorados, relate to finding a space that can be converted into a paradise for its inhabitants (for both settlers and indigenous peoples). Dystopias are what results when such expectations go horribly wrong. Crucially, utopias do not promise immediate benefits; rather, their supporters acknowledge that some work is required before the paradise will develop. Sometimes El Dorados develop into utopian schemes, particularly when the promise of immediate reward must be massaged to become a demand for delayed imperial gratification, a way to continue imperial or settlement policies by arguing that with hard work the place will become valuable if not idyllic, as seen in the cases in this volume of the Germans in Palestine and the Welsh in Patagonia.

To be sure, many imperial and colonial ventures were speculative and arose from exploring places that were deemed to have potential from the comfort of the metropole without any scientific investigation on the ground and so they started as ‘blind experiments’ based on little scientific evidence. But what happens when such policies, based on decisions taken somewhere, do not go to plan, and indeed, sometimes, go horribly wrong? What does it reveal about the nature of imperial and settlement policies, policy-making and policy-makers? Should such poor, sometimes disastrous, decisions, not be critiqued? This volume aims to strip back imperial and settlement policies to just that, policies, and to scrutinise them in the same way that historians and other scholars scrutinise foreign, colonial or indeed any other policy.

As this objective suggests, timescales are pivotal when trying to understand the policy aims, justifications and results of imperial and colonial endeavours. At the heart of each case in this volume is the understanding that a decision to embark upon imperial expansion or colonial settlement was based upon exaggerated expectations of value that did not match with the realities encountered on the ground. The time-frame for evaluating this failed policy is relatively small. Over time some places remained backwaters, while others developed some value. These changed circumstances over time are part of the story of both El Dorados and utopias/dystopias. Cases where imperialism and colonial settlement continue in the face of expectations that fail to be met say much about the decision-making that led to the initial policy and the decision to hold on. While some El Dorados may have acquired an unexpected value in the long term, it is still worth pointing out that such change frequently occurred well after the ‘El Dorado moment’ had passed.

This volume is significant because it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of imperial and colonial projects, but also because of its value for contemporary policy-makers in two areas: for those grappling with foreign and trade policies which encroach on the sovereignty and interfere in the politics, society, culture and economics of another state or territory; and for what this volume reveals about reasons of state, construction of policy, and the contingencies of imperial governance and colonial settlement. It will argue, using the case studies, that states and other stakeholders do not always come to decisions logically or through evidence-based reasoning, and decisions are often wrong, yet reasons for bad decisions can be twisted and turned to justify them differently, and there is a great reluctance to admit a wrong or failed policy, let alone to reverse it. The role of emotions and psychology are interesting, given the clear part played by desire, hope and impulse in this story. One need only observe the efforts to reconstruct nations after conflict and foreign intervention in the last several decades and today to see that such ideas are relevant for the world today.

This collection focuses on how imperial and settlement expectations were often based on exaggerations that were more wishful and hopeful than reasoned and scientific. It frames these exaggerations and realities upon the concepts of El Dorado and utopias/dystopias. By exploring El Dorados, utopias and dystopias, through a series of cases from across the centuries, from the sixteenth to the twentieth, from across various imperial traditions, Scottish, British, French, German, Italian, and from various colonial spaces, from the Mediterranean and Middle East, to Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, this volume offers new insights into the nature of imperialism and colonial settlement, but makes no attempt to offer an overarching explanation for the motivations of imperialism and colonial settlement, recognising that imperial causality consists of a series of interlocking motivations. Indeed this volume moves away from trying to explain the broader motives of imperialism and colonial settlement to focusing on trying to understand a subset of exemplar undertakings in which cases were built that ostensibly justified imperial and colonial interventions and envisaged rapid success for those who were involved in the policy-making, the implementation process and/or as supporters. Thus, El Dorados and utopias/dystopias serve as deconstructive tools for demystifying policy.

Historicising ‘El Dorado’

El Dorado, one of the concepts used to explain the wild imperial and settlement expectations of policy-makers in the cases explored in this volume, is a metaphoric use of the term, and therefore it needs historicising.

‘El Dorado’, Spanish for ‘the gilded one’, was the name of a Muisca1 tribal chief who covered himself with gold dust, but by 1559 ‘El Dorado had become a golden land rather than a golden man’, a legendary ‘lost city’ of riches, and the name of a province that has captivated explorers since the days of the Spanish conquistadors.2 No evidence for its existence has been found, although a recent study claims that one of the more famous explorers of ‘El Dorado’, Sir Walter Raleigh, had found a gold-rich mine.3 Imagined as a place of boundless riches, El Dorado became the city of this legendary golden king that numerous European explorers attempted to find in order to gain immediate profit.

Among the earliest stories was that told by Diego de Ordaz’s lieutenant, Martinez. In 1531 de Ordaz, a Spanish explorer and soldier, had been given permission to explore the lands of the mythical El Dorado, discovering the Río Orinoco, before abandoning his search and perishing in 1532 on the Venezuelan peninsula of Paria, as he was about to return to Spain. Martinez claimed to have been rescued from a shipwreck, conveyed inland, and entertained by El Dorado himself in 1531.4 In pursuit of the legend, Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro departed from Quito in 1541 in an expedition towards the Amazon Basin, as a result of which Orellana became the first European known to have navigated the Amazon River along most of its length. Inspired, in part, by Juan Rodriguez Freyle’s chronicle-narrative, El Carnero, which described the king or chief priest of the Muisca being covered with gold dust at a religious festival held in Lake Guatavita, near present-day Bogota, Colombia, the Muisca towns quickly fell to the conquistadores. In 1540 Gonzalo Pizarro had been made the governor of Quito in northern Ecuador. Pizarro had learned from the natives that a valley existed to the east that was rich in gold. With Francisco Orellana, his nephew, 340 soldiers and about 4,000 indigenous people, Pizarro led them east in 1541 down the Rio Coca and Rio Napo. Pizarro quit after many of the soldiers and natives died from hunger, disease and attacks by hostile natives, but he ordered Orellana to continue downstream, where he eventually made it to the Atlantic Ocean, discovering the Amazon. El Dorado had, however, remained elusive.5 The Spaniards soon realised that there were no golden cities, or rich mines, since the Muiscas obtained all their gold from trade. Yet the stories of ‘El Dorado’ continued to encourage Spanish and other European exploration.

Many explorers led expensive (both in relation to money and men) expeditions trying to find El Dorado but without success. The most famous, or infamous, was perhaps Sir Walter Raleigh, an English aristocrat, writer, soldier, courtier and explorer. In 1594 he read a Spanish account of a great ‘golden city’ at the headwaters of the Caroní River. A year later, Raleigh sailed to the New World and explored what is now Guyana and eastern Venezuela in search of El Dorado. His expedit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prelims
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Founding editor’s introduction
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement
• 2 Darién and the psychology of Scottish adventurism in the 1690s
• 3 Greek expectations: Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–64
• 4 Bambuk gold: General Faidherbe’s Senegalese chimera
• 5 Salubrity and the survival of the Swan River Colony: health, climate and settlement in colonial Western Australia
• 6 Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific: metropolitan representations and colonial realities, 1884–1914
• 7 A place to speak the ‘language of heaven’? Patagonia as a land of broken Welsh promise
• 8 Between heaven and earth: the German Templer colonies in Palestine
• 9 Italy’s sexual El Dorado in Africa
• 10 Dreaming in the desert: Libya as Italy’s promised land, 1911–70
• 11 The British Mesopotamian El Dorado: the restoration of the Garden of Eden
• 12 Shattered images: French Indochina as a failed symbolic resource
• A tribute to Eric Richards by John M. MacKenzie
• Selected bibliography
• Index