Thomas Hobbes has a theory of colonialism that has largely been overlooked by Hobbesian scholars. This is unfortunate considering the fact that one of the most significant phenomena of the period of history called the Modern Age, was Europe's domination of large areas of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Colonialism, the sociopolitical relationship that evolved out of Europe's contact with other cultures resulted in the disintegration (in varying degrees) of the traditional framework of values, norms, social organizations and institutions that existed in these precolonial societies. Particularly in Africa, the final theater of Europe's territorial expansion, colonial praxis established in its wake, a specific sociopolitical arrangement based on and sustained by the threat of, or application of force. And this praxis shares structural and programmatic affinities with Hobbes's theory of colonialism.

Before presenting Hobbes's theory of colonialism, a peroration of Hobbes's theory of state formation is warranted. In his major treatise, the Leviathan, Hobbes proposed two ways of state formation: commonwealth by institution and commonwealth by acquisition. For the former, Hobbes claims that before the rise of civil society, individuals existed in a state of nature, which is the inevitable result of circumstances in which there is no power which can enforce principles of justice and social order. Consequently, life within this state is characterized by a perpetual state of conflict in which every individual is each other's enemy. Such a conflict is further exacerbated by the relative equality of the power of different individuals, and by their inability to attain true personal security. Within this atmosphere, the individual according to Hobbes, suffers "continued fear, and the danger of violent death " and a way of life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"(Hobbes, 1996, 13:9).

The inconvenience of the state of nature, Hobbes claims, will impel individuals (by an act of compact) to establish a civil state headed by a sovereign with absolute monopoly over the means of coercion. The sovereign monopoly over power ensures that individuals are protected against other members of the society, and against the threat of an invasion from without. And it is from the recognition of the necessity for social order and peace that people's consent to the sovereign is seen by Hobbes to derive, and their corresponding obligation to obey the sovereign. (28:2)

Additionally, Hobbes holds that sovereign authority can also originate in conquest. Until individuals live in societies that are large enough and well organized, and well defended that each society must regard the outcome of a war against another as uncertain, individuals are faced with the alternative: fight or surrender. To fight, individuals must organize society for their defense and form sovereignty by institution, with a constituted authority. To surrender is to submit to a superior military power, and the outcome is a commonwealth by acquisition. Through conquest, the sovereign gains power, and physical control over the vanquished individuals. The conqueror may do with the conquered individuals whatever he thinks necessary: he may kill them or turn them loose. The political relationship, Hobbes insists, is not established by mere physical conquest, nor by the conqueror's grant of life to the conquered; it is created by the consent of the vanquished individuals. Essentially, a contractual relationship exists between the sovereign and the vanquished individuals. In this contract, one party, the vanquished individuals, make a covenant or consent to obey the sovereign, the latter however, does not make any promises. Hobbes underscores the element of consent in sovereignty by acquisition when he writes:

It is not therefore the victory that giveth the right of dominion over the vanquished, but his own consent. Nor is he obliged because he is conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he cometh in, and submitteth to the victor; nor is the victor obliged by an enemy's rendering himself (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yielding to discretion; which obliges nor the victor longer, than in his own discretion he shall think fit (20:11).

The master of the servant, is master also of all he hath; and may exact the use thereof; that is to say, of his goods, of his labour, of his servant, and of his children, as often as he shall think fit. For he holdeth his life of his master, by the covenant of obedience; that is, of owning, and authorizing whatsoever the master shall do. And in case the master, if he refuse, kill him, or cast him into bonds, or otherwise punish him for his disobedience, he is himself the author of the same, and cannot accuse him of injury (20:13).

Not every Hobbesian scholar accepts Gauthier's interpretation. For instance, Leo Rauch (1980) views sovereignty by acquisition in terms of a conceptual model. Rauch insists that when Hobbes claims that a voluntary and legitimate contractual arrangement can evolve out of conquest, Hobbes should not be taken literally:

If Hobbes is taken to be speaking factually, then it is simply not true that such arrangement is voluntary- any more than that the authority can be indefinitely authorized. We must conclude, therefore, that Hobbes is speaking not in terms of facts but in terms of some analogical models. The contract model is intended to show us that all government (whether voluntarily instituted or imposed by the sword) involves the surrender of self-rule on the part of the individual as well as the suppression of internal dissent by superior force. Above all, for Hobbes, the contract model shows that all government is government by consent- certainly not the subject's consent to the sovereign day-to-day decisions but consent in the sense that we are tacitly agreeing to gain our lives in exchange for obedience. (p. 37)

While there is no doubt that these diverse interpretations of Hobbes's sovereignty by acquisition are valid in their own right, nonetheless, as I will indicate below, these views do not uncover fully the essence of Hobbes's theory of state formation. My contention with these explanations is that they obscure a more profound feature of Hobbes theory, and that is the idea of colonialism.

Hobbes has a theory of colonialism that is hardly subtle. Here let me submit the evidence. It is found in Chapter 24, when Hobbes talks about the nutrition and procreation of the state, and in Chapter 30, where the focus is on the purpose of the office of the sovereign power. For Hobbes, the office of the sovereign

Consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people; to which he is obliged by the law of nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the author of the law, and to none but him. But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself (30:1).

The sovereign's task however is not limited to the promotion of the safety of the people. Hobbes further argued that the promotion of the economic well-being of the community, or the nutrition and procreation of the state is another important task. By nutrition, Hobbes is referring to the "distribution of materials conducing to life : in concoction, or preparation, and (when concocted) in the conveyance of it, by convenient conduits, to the public use." (24:1) Furthermore, since there is no one state that is self-sufficient in its resource needs, because "there is no territory under the dominion of one commonwealth, (except it be of very vast extent,) produceth all the things needful for the maintenance of the whole body," Hobbes expects the state to acquire those goods or resources that it is deficient by buying them from other states through normal trade, or by forceful possession through "just" war. (24:4)

Important consequences no doubt flow from the above statement. Goldsmith (1968) has interpreted Hobbes's trade policy as indicative of a tension between free market tendencies and mercantile impulses. But it seems to me that if anything, Hobbes is merely manifesting colonial and imperialistic impulses. This becomes apparent at the end of Chapter 24 when he writes about the procreation of the state:

The procreation, or children of a commonwealth, are those we call plantations, or colonies; which are numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formally void of inhabitants, or made void then by war. ( 24:14)

1. An indigent class is a persistent feature of society.
2. State assistance to the poor, or the creation of productive employment, may not necessarily solve the problem of poverty in the society.

 

 
 
 

If the population of the poor increase, they should be transplanted to other territories established by the sovereign through colonizing activities.

Inhabitants of the colonized territories should not be exterminated but have their land and labor expro-priated.

Societies exist in a state of nature without formal rules for mediation of international relations.

Though Hobbes espoused his theory of colonialism two centuries before the scramble for Africa by the European powers, nonetheless, one can discern some structural and programmatic affinities. Both are derived from similar economic and legalistic premises. Witness, for instance, this rationalization of colonialism by Lord Lugard, one of the most sophisticated builders of European empires in Africa: "The partition of Africa was . . . due primarily to the economic necessity of increasing the supplies of raw materials and food to meet the needs of the industrialized nations of Europe" (Lugard, 1923, p. 614). To achieve this objective, imperial conquest (i.e., sovereignty by acquisition) became the validating mechanism.

Imperial conquest has important consequences too. Like Hobbes, the European colonial powers viewed other nations as sovereign void lacking territorial personality and legal order, thus making them legitimate prey for colonial annexation. Because sovereignty has to originate in conquest, imperial conquest imports to the colonial powers, the right to assume jurisdiction over all persons in the annexed territories. Paradigmatic of the colonial notion of sovereignty is the following statement by Lord Lugard after he had defeated the Sokoto ruling class of Northern Nigeria in battle:

Now these are the words which I, the High Commissioner, have to say for the future . . . . The Fulani in old times under Dan Fodio conquered this country. They took the right to rule over it, to levy taxes, to depose kings, and to create kings. They in turn have by defeat lost their rule which has come into the hands of the British. All things which I have said the Fulani by conquest took the right to do now pass to the British. . . . You need have no fear regarding British rule . . . you have heard that British rule is just and fair, and people under our King are satisfied (Cited in Wilson, 1977, p. 94).

By claiming proprietary rights over African territories, the colonial power ceded to their colonial entities derivative territorial personality. Stated differently, the subject people were invited to share affective ties with the metrople not as distinct "nations" but as subordinated colonial people. The following statement issued by a French official at the 1900 Paris Universal is evocative of colonial attempts at synthesizing colonial territories into imperial centers: ". . . forty million men of all races, who have achieve the most diverse degree of civilization have entered the French community" (Marshall, 1973, p. 39).

The derivative colonial personality conceded to the colonial territory, coupled with the centrality of law in the metropolitan state created the imperative for a legal order in the colonial polities. Such order provided the basis for official policies that were essentially Hobbesian in nature. Recall that Hobbes endorses territorial restrictions on vanquished individuals; Africans too suffered land alienation from colonial policy Since economic calculations-the need to exploit the natural resources of the colonial territory-underpinned colonial expansion, the colonial administrations adopted policies of land expropriation to bring these resources within their purview. For instance, in the Union of South Africa in the 1930s, alienation of Native land attained great proportions. Though Europeans comprised only 20 percent of the population, they controlled better than 87 percent of the land, while non-Europeans, constituting approximately 80 percent of the population, were left with less than 13 percent of the land. Similar conditions prevailed in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). In 1936 the European population was about 10,000 and the Native population was about 1,365,000, yet more than half of the country's acreage was set aside for non-Native settlement and mining. In Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the Land Appropriation Act of 1930, which was approved by the British government divided the 96,000,000 acres of the territory as follows: 47,176,000 acres of the best land were given to Europeans (who numbered about 60,000), while the native population (about 1,300,000 ) were assigned 21,600,000 acres for settlement (Wieschhoff, 1972).

Land policy in French colonies followed the same general pattern as described for the British territories. For instance, in Algeria, the native population was gradually dispossessed of their desirable lands by methods amounting to outright confiscation (although the means were always legalized in some form or other). In the main, two methods were employed in achieving this result; one was a policy called refoulment, or driving back of the Natives; and the other was a program of cantonnement-a kind of reserve policy restricting each ethnic group to only that land that it needed for the sustenance of its members, while declaring the rest of the country open to European settlement. In any case, by 1934 more than 4,000,000 acres of the best land were occupied by European settlers, leaving the native population only those areas that were less desirable from the colonial settlers' perspective (Wieschhoff, 1972).

In as much as the aforementioned examples bring into sharp relief the Hobbesian nature of colonial land policy, it should be stated that by European standards, Africans had a great surplus of land which were not fully utilized to best and fullest advantage. African agrarian economy was based on the frequent rotation of fields for cultivation and pasture-a system that required extensive acreage of land. Still colonialism ushered in competition of Europeans and Africans for land suitable for agricultural and pastoral purposes, a competition which invariably ended in the defeat of the native population who had to content with not only less desirable land, but also political subjugation.

Colonial land policies have no doubt been appealed to on the grounds that they bring to agriculture, new practices, methods and technology that helped the native population adjust to a modern, increasingly Westernized world (Fieldhouse, 1981; Bauer, 1976). The literature on the legitimacy of colonialism is extensive. But as Balandier (1966) and Kohl (1958) have noted, the ramifications of colonialism seem to include the loss of sovereignty, political alienation, and a relationship of subordination and inequality. Thus it seems to me that the seemingly utilitarian justifications instead raise perturbing questions regarding the nature of colonialism. For instance, why would colonialism which brings technology and material development require political subordination from its beneficiaries? And why should colonial subjects be bludgeoned (i.e, covenant) into accepting what is supposed to be in their best interest? Indeed it is lucid that colonialism reduced to its bare minimum is foreign rule imposed upon a people against their will.

In what has gone above, I have attempted to bring into sharp relief a theory of colonialism that has been largely ignored in the existing scholarship, namely, Thomas Hobbes's sovereignty by acquisition. According to Hobbes, a legitimate system of political rule can be formed when a sovereign power invades and conquers a territory, but grants the vanquished inhabitants their lives in exchange for their obedience and consent to the sovereign's authority. I have argued that Hobbes's theory of sovereignty by acquisition is undergirded by a theory of colonialism. This theory merits more than antiquarian interest because of the structural and programmatic affinities it share with Europe's administrative practices in colonial Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Balandier, G. (1966). The Colonial Situation: A theoretical Approach. In I. Wallerstein. (ed), Social Change: The Colonial Situation. New York: Wiley.

Bauer, P.T. (1976). Dissent on Development. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Fieldhouse, D.K. (1981). Colonialism, 1870-1945: An Introduction. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Gauthier, D. P. (1969). The Logic of the Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldsmith, M.M. (1968). Hobbes's Science of Politics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan. J. C. A. Gaskin (ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hobson, J. A. (1965). Imperialism: A Study. New ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Kohl, H. (1958). Reflections on Colonialism. In R. Stautz and H. W. Hazard (eds), The Idea of Colonialism. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

Kraynak, R. P. (1990). History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lugard, F. (1923). The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. Edinburgh: William Blackwell and Sons.

Marshall, B. (1973). The French Colonial Myth and Constitution-Making in the Fourth Republic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rauch, L. (1981). The Political Animal: Studies in Political Philosophy from Machiavelli to Marx. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Wieschhoff, H. A. (1972). Colonial Policies in Africa. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press.

Wilson, H.S. (1977). The Imperial Experience in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1820. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.

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