Imperial expectations and realities: El Dorados, utopias and dystopias

By Manchester University Press

A wide-ranging edited collection that interrogates colonial expansion, and the mismatch between intention, perception and hype, and the actual realities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784996475

Book preview

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 expedition had two aims: to compete with the Spanish by creating an English settlement in Guyana; and to find the mythical city of El Dorado, which he believed was the Indian city of Manoa. These aims were linked: finding El Dorado meant a settlement in Guyana, which meant competing with the Spanish. Yet Raleigh failed. He did not find El Dorado, but he was convinced that there was ‘a city of gold’ because he found gold on the riverbanks and in villages. Once back in England, he published The Discovery of Guiana (1596) an account of his expedition, which until recently was believed to have exaggerated what he had found, and had thus contributed to the El Dorado legend.⁶ In his book he identified El Dorado as a city on Lake Parime far up the Orinoco River in Guyana. This city was marked as such on English and other maps until its existence was disproved by Alexander von Humboldt during his Latin America expedition (1799–1804). In 1617, Raleigh returned on a second expedition in search of El Dorado, but by now an old man he stayed behind on Trinidad, while his son, Watt Raleigh, was killed in a battle with Spaniards. Then upon Raleigh’s return to England, King James ordered Raleigh’s beheading for disobeying orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish. Paul Sellin’s recent account however may have blown apart this received wisdom by showing that Raleigh had discovered a gold mine, but Raleigh did not discover El Dorado nor did the use and meaning of the El Dorado myth diminish in any way.⁷

Thereafter ‘El Dorado’ was used metaphorically for any place where wealth or any benefit could be rapidly acquired with ease and little effort. This meaning has been reflected in names given to many places around the world: from the small town in the north-east of Victoria, Australia, where gold was found during the 1850s; two former gold mining areas in Canada, one on Beaverlodge Lake in Northern Saskatchewan and the other in Madoc, Ontario; to the countless places in the USA, in Arkansas, California, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas (particularly Houston), Wisconsin, New Mexico, Minnesota and Nebraska. It was also reflected in the reference to Australia by the Irish in the nineteenth century as an ‘El Dorado’,⁸ and specifically to South Australians as ‘El Doradoans’.⁹

Importantly, the term El Dorado was consistently associated with places where wealth and value could be had, as its persistence as a stock trope in the London Times indicates. In an 1874 article entitled ‘The true El Dorado’, an ‘occasional correspondent’ exulted at the agricultural and mining wealth of California, no doubt hoping to attract more British investment.¹⁰ Rapid success in the ‘new America’ of the 1850s became associated with the Californian gold rush – ‘the California Dream’ – yet many forget that hard work, luck and the very present danger of lawlessness made that dream a hell for many rather than an El Dorado. This perhaps helps to explain why in 1874, a quarter of a century after the gold rush, British investment was being courted for the ‘true El Dorado’. In 1884 it was not ‘the true El Dorado’ being advertised, but ‘a neglected El Dorado’, that of Georgetown in Northern Queensland. The Times chose to publish the report made to the Queensland government by William Samwell, the Gold Warden of Georgetown. Although the report does not use the term El Dorado, The Times did not miss the opportunity to link the exaggerated descriptions of wealth, future world importance and utopian lifestyle, to El Dorado, in this case a real El Dorado ready to be exploited and enjoyed.¹¹ Although the report aimed to be scientific, Samwell’s last sentence ended with a flourish of exaggeration.

The region named the Etheridge Goldfield, with its vast outlying districts of gold-bearing and mineral country, will soon become of vast importance to the commercial world, and its mining industry will be one of the greatest factors in the north in promoting the settlement of a large European population on the soil of this portion of the colony of Queensland – a colony whose many resources are inexhaustible, and whose life is still as young and fresh as a sunbeam of the morning.¹²

Georgetown never achieved the world importance Samwell predicted and by 1886 its mining industry was well and truly depressed and the population in decline.¹³ This neglected El Dorado remained true to the original Latin American myth. In 1898 The Times featured another article entitled ‘The Moroccan El Dorado’, lamenting the British government’s recognition of the incorporation of a portion of south-west Morocco to the Sultanate of Morocco and suggesting that the future of this region and its surrounds should be a European protectorate.¹⁴

The use of the term changed little after the Great War. Articles appeared in The Times entitled ‘White Australia: the settlers El Dorado’ in 1921, advertising that Australia needed immigrants but only white immigrants;¹⁵ while in the following year ‘The El Dorado of the Far East: China’s Vast Trade Markets’ criticised the great Liberal critics of Empire Richard Cobden and John Bright for questioning Lord Palmerston’s China policy in the 1860s as short-sighted because British trade with China was now booming¹⁶ – it was lost on the author that waiting six decades was hardly El Dorado.

The Times continued to link imperialism with El Dorado even after the Second World War, albeit somewhat more cautiously. In ‘Drawbacks to developing El Dorado’, the colonial correspondent for The Times argued that much hard work and government investment were finally seeing British Guiana reap the benefits of good British government – hardly, however, the story of fast wealth and opulent lifestyle.¹⁷

Then, in an interesting twist, the subsequent Professor of Social Anthropology, Michael Banton, published an article derived from his Ph.D. dissertation in The Times entitled ‘Britain’s Negro minority: the attraction of an imperial El Dorado’, which focused on the attraction of the imperial centre as a place of migration for colonial subjects. London and other British urban centres were, at least according to The Times, the new ‘El Dorados’.¹⁸ The case of ‘the empire comes home’ arose from both push and pull factors, but mostly the latter, and was hardly an El Dorado experience – it involved much hardship and hard work and enduring racism rather than acceptance.¹⁹

Literature, however, has primarily consigned El Dorado to the symbolic and therefore has been more sceptical and satirical, using the term as an ideal metaphor for exaggerated expectations of value and unsuccessful and greedy imperial expeditions. El Dorado has fascinated countless Latin American writers and almost as many English writers.²⁰ As John Silver noted, the Spanish historian Emiliano Jos claimed that ‘more territory was explored as a result of searches for El Dorado than for any other single reason’.²¹ Both Milton, in his Paradise Lost (Book XI: 408–11), and Voltaire, Candide (chs 18, 19), identified El Dorado as fantasy. Voltaire set some of Candide in El Dorado, where the city was made of material finer than gold and diamonds, which ended up being dirt and rocks, and as Silver noted, ‘no member of the French educated elite was expected to miss the ironical point when Candide mused … [that] surely, all is well only in El Dorado, and nowhere else in the world’.²² El Dorado was also the title and subject of a four-stanza satirical short poem by Edgar Allan Poe, about a knight’s failed search for the legendary city. Then the Polish author, Joseph Conrad, provided another pertinent reference in his novella Heart of Darkness, where the ‘Eldorado Exploring Expedition’ journeys into the jungles of Africa in search of conquest and treasure, only to meet an untimely demise.²³ He followed this in Nostromo where he transported El Dorado to its home continent when he explored how natives in Latin America were being branded ‘racially backward’ because they resisted European progress and efforts to create a utopia.²⁴

John Silver claimed that the ‘most formidable attempt to consign El Dorado to the past, and to cleanse geography of this anachronism, was made by Baron Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century’.²⁵ In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America Humboldt was the first European to advocate the promotion of European enlightened and scientific values and approaches to Latin America, by advocating for the ‘rational development’ of the continent, particularly agricultural development, as opposed to the exploitation of its people in pursuit of El Dorado and other greedy and get-rich quick schemes. For Humboldt, El Dorado was clearly a danger to science, and it therefore represented all that was bad with pre-Enlightenment Europe.²⁶ Yet as will be shown in this volume, El Dorados in various imperial traditions do not end with the coming and consolidation of Enlightenment ideas, and indeed they flourished in particular during a golden age of imperialism and colonisation, the five decades beginning with the 1870s.

Historicising utopia

It is important from the outset to note that the word ‘utopia’ has a double meaning. Coming from the Greek ου’ meaning ‘not’ and τόπος meaning ‘place’, these together combine to make utopia, ‘no place’. The English homophone ‘eutopia’, derived from the Greek ευ’ ‘good’ and τόπος (place), means ‘good place’. The implication is that the perfectly ‘good place’ is really ‘no place’. This has given rise to an interpretation that suggests that utopia, although meaning a ‘perfect society’, is ultimately unreachable, and therefore more imagined than real.

As is well known, the origin of the word lies with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The book described an ideal society in a fictional island of More’s creation, where there was religious freedom and integration, an equitable welfare state and no private property. There have been various interpretations of More’s Utopia, and disagreements centre on his intentions as to whether his utopia was possible or not. Quentin Skinner, an intellectual historian and leading scholar in interpreting early-modern political thinkers and their texts, claimed that Utopia was More’s ideal, but unobtainable, society,²⁷ which explains why there were so many inconsistencies between the ideas in Utopia and More’s practice in real life, particularly with regard to religious freedom. This interpretation is bolstered by the books’ title and its confusion between utopia/eutopia, ‘no place’ and ‘good place’.

The first recorded utopian proposal, and one which greatly influenced More, was Plato’s Republic (Πολιτεία, Politeia), a Socratic dialogue, concerning the definition of justice (δικαιοσύνη, dikaiosini), the order and character of the just city-state and of the just person. In it Plato proposes an authoritarian division of society into a rigid structure of ‘golden’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, and ‘iron’ socio-economic classes. The golden citizens are the elites trained in a rigorous fifty-year-long educational programme to be benign ‘philosopher-kings’. Their wisdom will eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, in a state that runs like clockwork and in which there are few laws and which rarely sends its people to war.

Applying the frames for utopia as conceived by More and Plato to imperialism and colonial settlement is most revealing. Three examples will suffice, one involving British colonial settlement in the USA in the sixteenth century; a second on French imperial expansion in North-West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century; and a third a Habsburg example for the late nineteenth century.

Ethan Schmidt’s recent article showed how the early English failures to colonise the Americas planned to incorporate Native Americans into English social structures to be transposed to the colonial space. As regards Schmidt’s specific case, Virginia, these Englishmen planned a ‘well-ordered commonwealth’ in accordance with Sir Thomas More’s utopian view and those of others building on his, such as Richard Hakluyt and William Shakespeare. As in More’s Utopia, these Englishmen envisaged introducing the superior English culture to these backward people, but not forcing it on them, in order to create a blended, hybrid, multiracial utopian colonial–indigenous society. Schmidt shows that the early English colonisation projects adopted More’s ‘humanist’ third way (in antipathy to choosing uninhabited places or using violence)as a tool to persuade indigenous populations of the virtues of the colonisation project. Many other contemporaries of More wrote about forming such an integrated utopian society, thus colonisation was not merely driven by anticipated profit, but additionally, and perhaps primarily, by the hope of creating this ‘perfect’ and ‘ideal’ society – a utopian commonwealth of colonial settlers and indigenous peoples. Indeed many also claimed that the indigenous populations under Spanish domination would join this new Protestant Commonwealth. In Virginia, peaceful co-existence worked for a short while, before the English reverted to mass violence.²⁸

Michael Hefferman’s article on Henri Duveyrier, a French utopian imperialist active in North Africa showed the limitations of the utopian imperial project in the mid-late nineteenth century. Duveyrier had been heavily influenced by the beliefs of his father, Charles, a follower of the utopian philosophy of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon. Saint-Simonians held complex beliefs that scientific and technological advancement would create a world of interconnected advanced, urbanised, industrialised and multicultural cities. They welcomed European imperialism as a way to develop commercial, religious and cultural integration linking Europeans (which they saw as masculine) and non-Europeans (feminine) to build on a new breed of humanity containing the best qualities from each ‘parent’ group. Henry Duveyrier explored the Sahara at the young age of 24, obtaining sought-after geographical expertise, and he argued that cross-Saharan trade could be profitable to French imperialists, so long as the matriarchic Touareg people were involved in coordinating this trade, despite earlier explorers dispelling the idea of a wealthy African interior. Hefferman argued that after the Franco-Prussian war the French became obsessed with compensating for European territorial losses and reasserting their international prestige and position as a power by expanding their empire in North Africa. Three European colonial projects involved Duveyrier in the first decade of the Third Republic, the last, the trans-Saharan railway, had tragic consequences, when Duveyrier’s brand of utopian colonialism was ignored in favour of violent military conquest.²⁹

The third example, although grounded in Theodor Hertzka’s novel Freiland (1890), provides interesting parallels regarding the utopian colonial project. Set in an uninhabited place in East Africa, Freiland recounts the utopian settlement of enlightened Europeans, mainly Austrians and Germans, near the nomadic Masai. Hertzka, a Jewish-Hungarian-Austrian economist and journalist, develops Freiland into a utopian society with 95,000 inhabitants in the first year, rising to 780,000 in three years, and reaching 40 million in twenty-five years, with 25 million Europeans and 15 million indigenous Africans. This multiracial society does not entirely resemble the utopian colonial projects of the previous two examples: although living harmoniously there is no integration or ‘cross-breeding’, there is deliberate avoidance of the indigenous Africans and a strong and elitist Germanic-inspired culture. Ulrich Bach argued that Hertzka’s Freiland structurally resembled actual nineteenth-century colonies in Africa.³⁰ Yet there was one significant difference – actual colonies were not industrialised. Freiland succeeds as a utopian society because of its rapidly developing technologies and production methods, which compares well with the ideas of the Saint-Simonian utopian imperialists.

These three examples not only highlight the differences between utopian imperial and colonial projects and those of El Dorado, but that utopian adventures were more complex and diverse in their conception. As mentioned earlier many cases of El Dorado make way for utopian ideas in order to justify the lack of rapid advancement, and many of the cases in this volume follow this pattern. But Holger Droessler’s chapter on the Germans in the Pacific is the most comparable to the three cases above, especially with the Saint-Simonian utopian imperialist project. Relevant too are the contributions dealing with planned religious utopias by Trevor Harris, on the Welsh in Argentina, and Matthew Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz with the German Templers in Palestine. Additionally, Richards’s chapter on Darién, an exemplar El Dorado, becomes a dystopia for Scottish colonists and investors, salvaged only by the union.

Historiography: theories and concepts

As stated above, this volume does not aim to present the concepts of El Dorado or utopias/dystopias as overarching theories of imperialism, a caveat that will be further developed by a discussion of the traditional all-encompassing theories.

The traditional and most popular explanations for imperialism are theories that revolve around anticipated economic profit (from the socialist John Hobson,³¹ to the Marxist politician Vladimir Lenin³² and historian Eric Hobsbawm,³³ to more recent historians such as P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins);³⁴ strategic gain (supported by the historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher);³⁵ or the turbulent frontier thesis (proposed by John S. Galbraith³⁶ and David K. Fieldhouse).³⁷ These theories, however, never question the methodology behind the decisions to embark upon imperial expansion or colonial settlement or how these decisions are justified, nor are they interested in the psychology behind imperial and colonial projects and the role of emotions and thought processes.

The first to question the rational underpinnings for imperialism was the Austrian-American economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter. He argued that European imperial expansion was explained by instinctive rather than rational behaviour, in the same way that war was a primitive response to a threat, imperialism was the instinctive response to social, political and economic crises or perceived crises. Schumpeter argued that this phenomenon was not new and that therefore imperialism was atavistic in character, because it was a primitive human response, and therefore possible during any period of time, depending on circumstances, such as anxieties, threats (both internal and external) and the individuals involved.³⁸

Andrew Kanya-Forstner first referred to the ‘mythical’ or ‘El Dorado’ thesis to explain French expansion in Africa. Developing his theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kanya-Forstner, a student of Robinson and Gallagher, attributed French expansion in Western Africa to the myths and delusions of the official mind, primarily of men on the spot, who convinced the politicians back home of the value of the resources of Western Africa. Kanya-Forstner showed that no such resources existed, but instead they were invented to justify imperial expansion. For example, French imperialists evoked and recreated medieval legends about the wealth of Senegal when contemplating informal control in the 1850s. Men on the spot revived these in the late 1870s to justify formalising control. Fantastic official estimates of the resources and population of Western Africa were used to justify turning it into ‘the India of the French empire’ in 1879 – an ‘El Dorado’ of boundless wealth. Another example manifested when French imperialists perceived a threat to French strategic interests and prestige after the British occupied Egypt, leading to French expansion into the Upper Nile, with the aim to threaten the British in Egypt. After diplomacy failed, the French decided on force in the 1890s, setting their sights on Fashoda. The move nearly resulted in an Anglo-French war. However, Kanya-Forstner showed that the aims behind the Fashoda strategy were based on unrealistic illusions and on the perceived importance of its strategic location. The move on Fashoda aimed to scare the British into negotiations, but instead ended in a humiliating French withdrawal, and the realisation that Fashoda had no intrinsic strategic value.³⁹

Soon after appearing, the ‘mythical’ or ‘El Dorado’ theory was heavily criticised and it has been largely ignored by imperial historians. It was claimed that Kanya-Forstner failed to place the decision-making in a socio-economic context or to link it with ‘a frame of mind’ of imperialism.⁴⁰ G. N. Sanderson thought the evidence to support the ‘mythical theory’ was not persuasive and did not explain why the myths suddenly took control of French policy in 1879. Robert Tignor wanted to know when and how the myths of wealth originated and why they were held in the face of accumulating counter-evidence.⁴¹ The criticisms, therefore, did not dismiss the overwhelming evidence of exaggeration, but questioned why such exaggerations were manifested at the time to justify imperial expansion.

Here lies the important distinction between Kanya-Forstner’s approach and that of others attempting a general explanation: the latter focus on motivations, while the former focuses on whether these are real or exaggerated, driven by evidence or by hope. And it is to this second approach that this volume speaks. This distinction is vital. Understanding the concepts of El Dorado and utopias/dystopias means scrutinising what drove the imperialism and colonial settlement. Justifications here are also important, as they take on exaggerated hope. Such justifications are made internally within the group making and implementing the decision, and externally to convince the wider group outside the decision-making process (although sometimes this wider group is part of the implementation) of the wisdom of the decision. Often, however, such justifications are used by the wider group acting as a lobby or pressure group upon the more powerful group making the decisions. This volume argues that one dimension of most imperial and colonial projects are their quest for El Dorado and/or utopia and that there are psychological and emotional factors, from desire, hope, impulse and embarrassment, at play.

Numerous historians have made reference to El Dorados and utopias either as part of general observations on imperialism and colonial settlement, or when exploring cases (see below). For example Christopher Clark claimed in his most recent book:

The idea of colonial possessions – imagined as eldorados with cheap labour and raw materials and burgeoning native or settlers populations to buy national exports – was as bewitching to the German middle classes as to those of the established European empires.⁴²

Such observations indicate that historians have been more aware of the dimension of El Dorados and utopias in imperial and colonial settlement than perhaps the historiography indicates. Perhaps there has been an element of ‘this is too obvious’, and yet scholars have chosen to not pursue these ideas comparatively.

Historiography: cases across time and imperial traditions

This volume is the first to consolidate the concepts of El Dorados and utopias/dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement and present them in a comprehensive comparative analysis, yet many historians have identified and discussed various individual cases that need mentioning. In Robinson and Gallagher’s seminal article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, they make a statement in their last paragraph, which historians have largely ignored, that implies that the justifications for imperial expansion into Africa did not accord with the traditionally held motivations.

the historian who is seeking to find the deepest meaning of the expansion at the end of the nineteenth century should look not at the mere pegging out of claims in African jungles and bush, but at the successful exploitation of the empire, both formal and informal, which was then coming to fruition in India, in Latin America, in Canada and elsewhere. The main work of imperialism in the so-called expansionist era was in the more intensive development of areas already linked with the world economy, rather than in the extensive annexations of the remaining marginal regions of Africa. The best finds and prizes had already been made; in tropical Africa the imperialists were merely scraping the bottom of the barrel.⁴³

This assertion allowed them to veer away from the economic impulse and put forward the broader strategic thesis. Yet also, and more importantly for this volume, Robinson and Gallagher hint at a process for justifying the scramble for Africa that finds the imperialists (as they would put it) exaggerating the necessity and value of acquiring territory in Africa, where they argue they were ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’. They therefore hint at a discord between the motivations, driven by claims of economic and political value that reinforced and exaggerated the motivations, justifications, and realities. This discord connects with what James Belich has referred to as ‘boosters’⁴⁴ – exaggerating and sometimes fabricating the realities in order to justify imperial and colonial projects.

As historians such as Kanya-Forstner, Stokes (epigraph) and MacKenzie⁴⁵ have argued, the ‘scramble for Africa’ was clouded in exaggerated expectations of value rather than based on tangible evidence and realities. The prolific Finnish historian (primarily of Tanzania) Juhani Koponen agreed. He referred to the justifications for the rapid European imperial expansion as a ‘mirage’ and, to be more precise, that ‘the European partitioners of Africa were more driven by visions than by realities and that the Africa they had before their eyes was a mirage’.⁴⁶

Belich has also recently argued in his thought-provoking Replenishing the Earth that the first stage of British imperial expansion involved collective speculative manias – large risk-taking ventures built on exaggerations. Some of these were successful, others were not, but almost always the investment from the metropole and the work of settlers was greater than that originally envisaged.⁴⁷ His views on settler colonialism and those of others discussed above on the ‘scramble’ are reflected in individual cases. The late Glenn Ames wrote about a Portuguese El Dorado in Africa in the 1660s. He convincingly argued that during the seventeenth century the Portuguese Crown was preoccupied with the Zambezi River basin as a site for ‘wishful speculation’, forming in their minds an ‘African El Dorado’ overflowing with rich mineral resources. Unlike the Scottish Darién scheme of a few decades later, which is the subject of the next chapter in this volume, the Portuguese met with some success along the Zambezi, but nothing remotely approximating the initial expectations. The Portuguese African El Dorado never materialised.⁴⁸

One of the more fascinating and recently exposed British El Dorado cases was that of the small Irish county of Wicklow, south of Dublin, starting from 1795. What is so fascinating about this case is that like the original El Dorado, it was enduring, although obviously nowhere near as well known. Timothy Alborn showed that for six weeks in the autumn of 1795 Wicklow residents earned £10,000 in gold dust and nuggets sifting the sands of a stream that flowed through Croghan Kinsella. The authorities, wanting to restore public order and take control of the possible wealth, put an end to the free prospecting, but very little gold was subsequently found. Yet for the best part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, Wicklow served as both a literal and mythical El Dorado. People still waxed lyrical about the potential gold reserves in Wicklow, while others joked about the lack of it.⁴⁹

Another British example was the occupation of the Ionian Islands in 1815. Although not exactly identified as a case of ‘El Dorado’, recent historians⁵⁰ have shown that it had been initially perceived to offer immediate