Komes
We have created 10 sets for the main collection each containing 24 wonderful miniatures. They have attracted fantastic interest from connoisseurs and collectors. And we really wanted to reward them for their love of military-historical miniatures and tin soldiers. So we decided to create a number of additional bonus sets (12, 9 or 6 miniatures each). The first of which is presented on this page. It is dedicated to colonialism.
In the Age of Enlightenment, the East was characterised in the West as mysterious and attractive, but backward, underdeveloped, aggressive and not conforming to European standards. Therefore, naturally, the peoples of the East ‘needed’ the help of the civilised and enlightened West. Thus, in the XVIII-XIX centuries, Western Europe's right to lead the ‘barbarians’ and to colonial domination was ‘legitimised’ in ideological terms. The ideological justification of colonialism was implemented through the need to spread Western culture (civilisation, modernisation, westernisation), which was reflected in the poem ‘The White Man's Burden’ by the English poet
Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1899. Directly administering the dependent territories was a labour-intensive business, so metropolises had to create oligarchic, aristocratic groups - colonial administration. Colonial domination was expressed either in the form of administration of the colonies (dominion) by the metropoles through the appointment of a viceroy or governor-general, or in the form of a protectorate, when the actual colony was under the military protection of the actual metropolis. The English East India Trading Company went the furthest and became an almost parallel political structure to Britain in the colonies.
The system of government in the colonies changed dramatically after the introduction of the telegraph and railways. In 1870, a telegraph service was established between London and Bombay. A centralised system of government became possible. In the 19th century, monopoly colonial trading companies were abolished. In particular, the Indian Administration Act of 1858 ended the history of the East India Company as a political institution. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the beginning of the era of imperialism and the formation of nation-states that successfully fought against private monopolies. The priority of national officialdom over clan structures was established. All this did not reduce the intensity of exploitation of the
colonies. The colonisers consolidated feudal and pre-feudal relations, considering the feudal and tribal nobility in the colonised countries as their social support. In the colonies, conflicts between hostile tribes were maintained and apartheid policies were pursued. The struggle for territorial division of the world caused resistance of the peoples of the East. The most famous were the Anglo-Afghan, ‘opium wars’ and the Ichatuan rebellion in China, the Anglo-Boer War.
Colonialism is a policy of conquest and exploitation by military, political and economic methods of peoples, countries and territories with predominantly non-national populations, who are imposed alien religion, language, culture, etc. In the 19th century, the picture began to change: trade colonialism was transformed into industrial colonialism. This century was a time of intense rivalry between the powers, especially England and France, for control of the African continent. The colonial policy of the West required an appropriate ideological justification, which was formulated in the European Enlightenment.
It should be said that the motto of the Great French Revolution ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ did not spread universally: it was limited exclusively to the Western civilisational area, which is why the century following the Enlightenment became at the same time the century of colonial expansion. European powers justified colonialism in Africa with a moral obligation to ‘civilise’ and ‘Christianise’ Africans. Ideas about the mental backwardness of Africans compared to European peoples were expressed and ‘scientifically’ justified. However, both the ‘civilising mission’ itself and French policy in Africa were completely racist, and colonisation was an act of state-sanctioned violence. The French regarded Arabs and Africans as barbarians, and
democracy and colonialism as perfectly compatible. In the 19th century, Africa began to be regarded by European industrial circles as a vast market for manufactured goods, as an area for capital and as a source of raw materials.
Africans still played the role of slaves, but not so much across the ocean in America as on their own land. The nineteenth century was the time of the ‘triumphal march’ of capitalism through the countries of Europe. Africa, this vast continent of fabulous wealth, became the object of lust for the ruling and commercial-industrial circles of the West, both as a place to sell their own goods and capital, and as a source of minerals. These tendencies, which were barely outlined by the middle of the 19th century, had become much stronger by the 1870s: France considerably extended its colonial borders in North Africa and continued to move up the Senegal River, capturing strongholds on the coast of Dahomey and French Somalia. However, the significance of these still small territorial acquisitions was not determined by their area, but by the role that the Western powers had prepared for them: they were outposts for penetrating the interior of the continent. One of the main goals of European expansion into the interior of Africa until the 1870s was the seizure of river trade routes, and the desire to seize strategically important territories and trade routes played a major role.
European entrepreneurs were guaranteed high profits at the expense of the poor living standards of the indigenous population, political and social discrimination, mass land expropriations. In order to achieve the goals of colonial expansion, Europe, even after the conquest of the African continent, repeatedly turned to methods of exploitation characteristic of slavery. An example is the history of the Congo Basin, where, in the early 20th century, the Belgians and the French created a system of forced labour that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. During the occupation, the colonisers destroyed entire regions, towns,
villages and killed thousands of civilians. France introduced the practice of ‘direct rule’ in its colonies, which implied weakening/destruction of traditional institutions of power and creation of new ones in their place, modelled on European ones. There was no fundamental difference between the two systems - the French and the ‘indirect’ British - of political subjugation: under direct rule, the lowest administrative work was transferred to Africans, whether they belonged to the ruling dynasty or not.
Until the late 1870s, the colonies were robbed on the basis of non-equivalent exchange. By buying up the produce of African peasants for nothing, the colonisers set prices for food and manufactured goods imported into Africa that were several times higher than in the metropolis. By the end of the nineteenth century, the colonies had come to be regarded as one of the main areas of application of capital. The penetration of European monopolies into the economic life of African countries was carried out through two channels - by
subjugating the local small-scale commodity economy and by exploiting mineral resources. The means of both economic and extra-economic coercion were used to force peasants to grow export crops for the needs of the metropolis or the world market. On the eve of World War II, between 67 per cent and 98 per cent of the value of all exports of most colonies came from a single crop. In the Gambia and Senegal, for example, it was groundnuts, in Zanzibar it was cloves, in Uganda it was cotton, in the Gold Coast it was cocoa, and in Southern Rhodesia it was tobacco. In Gabon and some other countries, valuable timber species became monocultures. The territories occupied by France in Tropical Africa represented the most extensive part of the French colonial empire. To master the continent's hinterland, the Elysee Palace used strongholds scattered along the Atlantic coast from Saint-Louis in Senegal to Libreville in Gabon. Roadless terrain, compounded by the difficulties of navigating the rapids, made it difficult to transport supplies. The entire able-bodied population of captured areas was often hijacked to carry military equipment. Colonial regimes almost everywhere restricted the sphere of activity of national capital. Mining and other large industrial enterprises, banks, wholesale trade, transport, plantations and farms were owned or controlled by foreign businessmen.
Monopolies supported by colonial authorities discouraged African entrepreneurship because Europeans saw Africans as potential competitors. Only in Egypt and the Maghreb countries were local businessmen able to occupy certain niches in the economy; in sub-Saharan Africa, local entrepreneurship was largely confined to the creation of small enterprises. Thus, the economic backwardness and a number of contemporary socio-economic problems of African countries can be attributed, to a large extent and quite reasonably, to the history of their relationship with European conquerors, slave traders and colonisers. Not only the added value produced, but also part of the necessary product was forcibly withdrawn from the economies of colonies, which, at the expense of
poverty and even the death of a significant part of the local population (this was claimed to be a natural process), made it possible to solve the internal problems of the metropolis and guarantee the standard of living and rights of Europeans. World colonial expansion was accompanied by the looting of cultural values. However, it was perhaps Africa that suffered the most: more than half a million of the most valuable artefacts, or approximately 80-90% of African art, were stolen and exported outside the continent.
Each tin soldier is handmade by the finest craftsmen in the industry.
Here are all 10 miniatures from the set.
(please click on the picture to learn more about each miniature and the character depicted)
Shivajirao Holkar,
Maharaja of Indore
Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo,
King of the Zulu
Sardar Singh,
Maharaja of Jodhpur
Agoli-agbo,
King of Dahomey
Menelik II,
Emperor of Ethiopia
Prempeh I,
King of the Asante
Muhammadu Attahiru II,
Sultan of Sokoto
Osman Digna,
Mahdi in Sudan
Prince
Jamalutdin Tarkovsky
