The Transformation of the World (166 page)

Commercial Minorities in the Growing World Economy

Not all quasi-bourgeois outside the West had an orientation to the world economy, but their network-building functions were undoubtedly one of their most striking features. Whole societies of traders, such as the Swahili in East Africa, could hold their ground for a long time through adaptation to changing external conditions.
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Quasi-bourgeois were for the most part active in trade and finance, two fields in which many families had acquired great wealth as far back as the eighteenth century. This was true of the
bania
in India, for example, on whom the British remained partly dependent long after they were able to dispense with Indo-Islamic administrative officials, or the Hong merchants who had conducted Chinese trade with Europeans before the Opium War. Such groups suffered in
various ways from the expansion of European, especially British, commerce after 1780, losing much of their prosperity and prestige: Indian merchants because of the East India Company's trading monopoly; their Chinese colleagues because the imperial foreign trade monopoly was undermined and eventually abolished, and China was opened up to a limited regime of free trade in which old commercial dynasties accustomed to parasitic bureaucratism and immobile monopolism found no new role for themselves.
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There was no straightforward path from these “early modern” merchant classes to a modern bourgeoisie, any more than merchant princes in Europe regularly mutated into industrial entrepreneurs. Everywhere except in Japan and the west of India (where Parsi merchants in the Bombay region got a cotton industry on its feet), little scope existed even in 1900 for entrepreneurial involvement in industry. The railroads, which gave such an impetus to private entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States, were mostly in foreign hands. At best, plantations offered a favorable, low-tech opportunity to break into capitalist production. The Singhalese bourgeoisie of colonial Ceylon, one of the oldest and most durable in Asia (some of its pioneering families still dominate Sri Lankan politics), owed its rise in the nineteenth century to such an early involvement in the plantation economy. Arab merchant dynasties in Malaya and Indonesia also invested in this sector.
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From the beginning of trade contacts with Europe, non-European quasi-bourgeois often exercised “comprador” functions as middlemen.
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In this way they were able both to widen their experience with indigenous trade networks and to link them into the world economy. First of all they facilitated exchange between different business cultures—for example, between those of India or China (the word
comprador
stems from an early modern Portuguese-Chinese context) and the West. They tapped sources of finance and used their contacts with business partners in the interior. In China alone there were roughly 700 compradors in 1870, and as many as 20,000 in 1900.
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Often religious or ethnic minorities (Jews, Armenians, Parsis in India, Greeks in the Levant) played such a role.
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(Nor was this an extra-European peculiarity: in Hungary, for instance, where a strong nobility had little interest in modern economic life, Jewish and German entrepreneurs occupied a central position in the emergent business community.
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) In China intermediary functions remained in the hands of special groups of Chinese merchants in the treaty ports; émigré Chinese were active in commerce, and to some extent mining (Malayan tin) and plantations, in every Southeast Asian country. They also formed internal hierarchies of wealth and prestige, stretching from family shopkeepers in a village in the interior to immensely rich, multifunctional capitalists in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, or Batavia.
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In the Dutch colony of Java, virtually the whole of internal trade was in Chinese hands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For its exploitation of the island, the colonial power depended almost entirely on a minority that had dominated business life in the capital, Batavia, since its founding in 1619. Although European interests later intruded more actively in Java, the Chinese
(comprising less than 1.5 percent of the population) remained indispensable to the colonial system and profited handsomely from it, acting as intermediaries between foreign firms and local Javanese until the end of Dutch rule in 1949.
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Sometimes commercial minorities conducted business over very large distances. Russian wheat exports via Odessa to the United States in the early nineteenth century were in the hands of Greek merchant families, most of whom originally came from the island of Chios.
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The position of such minorities was rarely protection against crisis, and there is little to suggest they enjoyed a self-confident bourgeois existence. After the Ottoman Empire adopted free trade in 1838, the proud Greeks from Chios were demoted to agents of Western firms and often acquired British or French citizenship. The ethnic Chinese compradors, for their part, were gradually replaced with Chinese employees working for large Japanese or Western import-export businesses along the coast of China.

State protection could not prevent repeated attacks and acts of expropriation, which became more virulent as nationalism grew among the majority population and reached dramatic proportions in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there were not yet events on the scale of the expulsion of European minorities from Egypt after the Suez crisis of 1956 or the massacre of Chinese in Indonesia in 1965.
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European colonial governments often protected minorities, on whom they relied for tax revenue. The weakness of quasi-bourgeoisies outside Europe, vis-à-vis both their indigenous society and world market forces, did not prevent them from deploying their own business policy and expanding their room for maneuver. But they were on their guard against one-sided dependence and often sought the security of property accumulation within their close or extended family—a way of minimizing risk that features in many variants of Asian capitalism. Another business strategy was to diversify as widely as possible, into trade, manufacturing, moneylending, agriculture, and urban real estate. If the main characteristic of bourgeois economic culture is selfreliant operations in high-risk environments, without much of an institutional safety net, then this was present to a high degree among self-made men on the “periphery” of the world economy.
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Modernity and Politics

Outside Europe, groups that may be regarded as quasi-bourgeois seldom exhibited an offensive political self-confidence; they had little influence in politics and tended to be socially isolated. Where they formed a conspicuous minority, as did Greeks in the Ottoman Empire or Chinese in Southeast Asia, their ability, and sometimes willingness, to adapt to the social environment was often limited. All the more did they cultivate a niche culture of their own, though in many cases it clashed with their striving to link up with global trends and conceptions of normality. A similar contradiction was present in the Jewish bourgeoisie of Western Europe: an interplay among assimilation to the social surroundings,
belief-driven adoption of universal cultural values, and a wish to preserve the tradition-based solidarity of a religious community.

If we look for an orientation common to various parts of the world, then it was an aspiration not so much for political power or independent cultural hegemony as for
civilization
. A bourgeois existence in Asia and Africa from the late nineteenth century on (as for Western European Jews since the time of Moses Mendelssohn) meant linking into the development of “civilized” morals and lifestyles, not necessarily seen as an emanation from Europe and by no means perceived by those involved only as a process of slavish imitation. Unmistakable as the civilizing trends were in metropolises such as Paris, London, or Vienna, quasi-bourgeois forces outside Europe were sufficiently self-aware to see them as a general feature of the times in which they could have an active share. Istanbul, Beirut, Shanghai, and Tokyo were being modernized, and in writing about them indigenous intellectuals created the city as “text.”
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All around the world, middle classes recognized one another by their wish to be modern, any limiting epithet being of secondary importance. Modernity should and did acquire an English, Russian, Ottoman, or Japanese flavor, but what mattered more was its indivisibility. Only thus was it possible to avoid the fatal distinction between the genuine article and imitations. The program of multiple modernities, already outlined in the late nineteenth century before being assigned such a major role in present-day sociology, was therefore a double-edged gift for Asia's newly emerging quasi-bourgeois elites. Modernity had to have a culturally neutral, transnational appeal if it was to command acceptance and be generally comprehensible. It should be a single symbolic language with local dialects.
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If middle classes were to found on different sides of the colonial divide—as they were first in India and by 1920 in Indonesia and Vietnam—the relationship between them was ambivalent. Partners could turn into economic and cultural rivals. However useful Europeanized Asians or Africans might be as cultural intermediaries, they disturbed the value system of modern Europeans. Indigenous claims to modernity were sharply rejected, and the insults were felt with special bitterness. Failure to be recognized as equals—also in the sense of citizenship—converted some of the most “Western” Asians into implacable opponents of colonialism. Middle classes in Asia and Africa took to a nationalist politics of their own only after about 1900—or, to be more precise, after the First World War, when waves of protest shook the imperial world from Ireland to Russia, Egypt, Syria, and India to Vietnam, China, and Korea. Even in Japan, the country with Asia's most progressive constitution, it was only around this time that representatives of bourgeois values were able to gain a hearing in a political system that until then had been dominated by Meiji figures with a samurai background. In general, the impulse from the revolutions of the twentieth century (including post-1945 decolonization) was a precondition rather than a result of opening up spaces of “civil society” to be filled with the political life of freshly emerging citizens.

Elements of civil society had, of course, been widely present earlier in prepolitical spheres. The European culture of clubs and associations, which extended eastward as far as Russian provincial cities, found equivalents in other parts of the world. Prosperous merchants in China, the Middle East, or India, often pooling their efforts across regions, involved themselves in disaster relief, founded hospitals, collected money to build temples or mosques, and supported preachers, scholars, and libraries.
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In many cases, organized philanthropy was the innocuous starting point for a wider preoccupation with public affairs, as well as an arena in which private individuals from the “middle” of society rubbed shoulders with aristocrats and representatives of the state. Another element of civil society was the municipal guilds, which in the central Chinese metropolis of Hankou, for example, took over more and more functions from the 1860s on and played an important role in crystallizing a community that encompassed a broad cross-section of the urban elite.”
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“Bildungsbürgertum”: Education, Cultural Hegemony,
and the Middling Ranks

Some “bourgeois” social types were more universal than others. The Protestant high school teacher in Imperial Germany (carrying the title and prestige of a “professor”) or the coupon-clipping rentier in the French Third Republic who derived his income from Chinese government bonds was a special local product, less exportable than the industrial or financial entrepreneur to be found almost everywhere around the year 1920. Middle-class traders were anyway common enough, but the
Bildungsbürger
was a specifically central European, indeed German, phenomenon.
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What was so distinctive was not only the content of his education (its linguistic form, its expression in aesthetic and philosophical idioms incomprehensible elsewhere) but also the value attached to it in society. On the ground of the educational reforms of 1810 and the subsequent years, and often with an input from the distinct cultural world of the Protestant parsonage, the educated middle classes in Germany spread their wings in opposition to the less-than-intellectual priorities of the average nobleman and the forms and themes of aristocratic culture. The bourgeois could assert his aspirations and superiority only because the values of premodern elites lay in other domains—which did not exclude extraordinary connoisseurship and practical competence on the part of aristocrats, for example, in Viennese musical life in the age of Haydn and Beethoven. It was possible only under particular historical conditions for people without roots in genealogy and tradition to become creators and guardians of the national culture and enthusiasts for an ideal of individual fulfillment through self-education. The most important of these conditions was the state promotion of the educated classes, carried to its highest pitch in the German lands. It lastingly associated professions with a comprehensive education and created public-service opportunities for social ascent that did not obey the laws of the free labor market.
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We need look no farther than Switzerland or England
(not to speak of the United States) to find market regulation of the “liberal professions” without the heavy state intervention typical of Prussia or Bavaria. On the other hand, such a system did not yet guarantee homogeneity in the development of an educated middle class. In the Tsarist Empire, the self-assurance of senior officials—most of whom had a legal background—was based not on higher education but on their place in the formal hierarchy of ranks.
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