The Transformation of the World (22 page)

Whoever believed in the 1870s that Europe was no more than a geographical concept reflected a general feeling of disgruntlement in an age when older revolutionary, liberal, and even conservative solidarities had vanished and Europeans had again been waging war with one another. He or she was not only making a political diagnosis but also expressing a particular understanding of space: a kind of great-power Darwinism. The Great Powers were locked in rivalry with one another and looked down on smaller European states as potential troublemakers. Countries such as Spain, Belgium, or Sweden were of little concern to, and were not taken very seriously by, Britons, French, or Germans. Ireland, Norway, Poland, or the Czech lands did not even exist as independent states. The idea of a European pluralistic order consisting of states of every shape and size, such as lay at the basis of Enlightenment peace projects or the plan for European unification since the 1950s, would have been unthinkable in the late nineteenth century.

Furthermore, in the so-called age of nation-states, the largest and most important players were actually empires. This set up “Eurofugal” tendencies, and not only in Britain's external relations and its associated view of space. France, for example, had closer links to the Algerian coast than to Spain and perceived the
Mediterranean as a less forbidding barrier than the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal clung to the remnants of their overseas empires, and throughout the century the Netherlands retained in what is now Indonesia a colony that was in many respects the most important European possession after British India. People at the time always saw the Europe of nation-states within a wider imperial framework.

In contemporary perceptions, Europe lacked not only internal homogeneity but even clear external boundaries. The eastern frontier at the Urals was (and remains) an arbitrary, academic construct with little political or cultural significance.
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In the nineteenth century, it lay hidden in the middle of the Tsarist Empire. This influenced discussion of whether Russia was part of Europe or not—still a question of great moment, including for Western Europe's understanding of itself. Russia's official ideologies sought to minimize the opposition between Europe and Asia. How Russia saw “Asia” was always partly a result of its position vis-à-vis Western Europe. A neo-Petrine push westward during the Napoleonic wars was followed, under Tsar Nicholas I, by a mental withdrawal into the ancestral Slavic lands after 1825. From the time of Peter the Great until the Congress of Vienna, Western Europe had thought of the Tsarist Empire as increasingly “civilized.” But after the suppression in 1825 of the moderately constitutionalist Decembrist movement, followed five years later by the defeat of the Polish November Uprising and the beginning of the “Great Emigration” of persecuted popular heroes, Russia became the great bogey of West European liberalism.
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The despotic rule of Nicholas I was a setback from which Russia's reputation in the West took a long time to recover, if it ever did. Public opinion there tended to see it as a sui generis civilization on the margins of Europe, and many Russians internalized this view.

The Crimean War, which it lost, and resistance to its great-power pretensions at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, drove the Tsarist Empire to look farther eastward. Siberia acquired a new luster in official propaganda and the national imagination, and a major scientific effort was made to “appropriate” it. Great tasks seemed to lie ahead for this redeployment of national forces. The conviction that Russia was expanding into Asia as a representative of
Western
civilization
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—an idea that had originated in the first half of the century—was now turned in an anti-Western direction by currents inside the country. Theorists of Pan-Slavism or Eurasianism sought to create a new national or imperial identity and to convert Russia's geographical position as a bridge between Europe and Asia into a spiritual advantage.
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The Pan-Slavists, unlike the milder, Romantically introverted Slavophiles of the previous generation, did not shrink from a more aggressive foreign policy and the associated risks of tension with Western European powers. That was one tendency. But the 1860s, after the Crimean War, also witnessed the strengthening of the “Westernizers,” who made some gains in their efforts to make Russia a “normal” and, by the standards of the day, successful European country. Reforms introduced by Alexander II seemed to restore this link with “the civilized world.”
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But the ambiguity between the “search for Europe” and the “flight from Europe” was never dissolved.

“La Turquie en Europe”

While the endless expansion across Siberia meant that Christian Europe saw its northeastern flank as open, both mentally and in reality, an old antagonism governed its attitudes to the southeast. Even after the much-discussed and often-dramatized “decline” of the Ottoman Empire could no longer be ignored in world politics
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—that is, at the latest after its defeat by the Tsarist Empire in 1774 (Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca)—the Habsburgs thought it necessary to maintain a buffer zone (the so-called Military Frontier) between themselves and their southern neighbor. This area of military settlement, which stretched all the way from the Adriatic coast to Transylvania and survived in some degree until 1881, changed its purpose over time from a defending against Turkish armies to incorporating territories and population groups gradually wrested from the Ottomans. On the eve of its final dissolution this special zone was still an autonomous military state, with an area of 35,000 square kilometers (larger than Belgium and Luxemburg combined).
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In the nineteenth century the Habsburg Monarchy no longer had any expansionist goals or extra-European ambitions, but it did remain a kind of “frontline state” against the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, Vienna was very cautious throughout the century in the support it gave to anti-Turkish national movements, since these might easily acquire a pro-Russian and anti-Austrian coloration. In 1815, Ottoman rule still extended as far as Moldavia, and Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia were all in Ottoman territory. The war with Russia in 1877–78 lost it roughly one-half of its Balkan possessions, but until the second Balkan War of 1913, “La Turquie en Europe” was still a significant force and appeared under that name on most maps of the time.
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For centuries the European Great Powers had had diplomatic relations with the Sublime Porte and entered into various treaties with it; in 1856 they formally admitted it into the Concert of Europe, which, though no longer effective in preserving peace, involved a circle of participants comparable to today's “G8” roundtables.
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Although history books influenced by Orientalist clichés and “cultural arena” theories long regarded the Ottoman Empire as an alien presence in nineteenth-century Europe, many people living at the time saw things differently.
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Even someone who, following old Turkophobic traditions and the wave of aggressive philhellenism in the 1820s, condemned Ottoman rule in Europe as illegitimate could not avoid recognizing its de facto sovereignty over a large, if shrinking, area of the Balkans. So long as nation-states had not taken shape in the region, there was no nomenclature with which to visualize the political geography of southeastern Europe. In 1830 “Romania” and “Bulgaria” were ideas that stirred only a handful of activists and intellectuals. The British public discovered the South Slavs for the first time only when a travel report was published in 1867.
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Scarcely anyone in the North had heard of “Albania” or “Macedonia.” And even Greece, which by the grace of the Great Powers had been founded in 1832 as a
kingdom of destitute peasants covering only a half of its present territory, played little or no role in the geographic imaginary of “civilized” Europe; it soon fell into oblivion after the great pro-Greece agitation of the 1820s has died down.

All descriptive spatial categories need to be situated historically. The insights of social geography seem to confirm the historian's belief that it would be wrong to treat areas or regions as so many givens. A historical (or “deconstructive”) approach must pay close attention to academic studies and school textbooks, to journalistic coverage of world politics, to maps with a contemporary or historical reference, and to the compilation of maps in the atlases of the day. For maps are particularly effective bearers of geographical terminology and instruments of spatial awareness. The most diverse aims could lie behind the nineteenth-century need for precise cartography: not only the familiar ones of transport, warfare, or colonial control but also the urge to make one's nation visible. By now this close link between national awareness and cartographic representation has been extensively studied and documented.
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Even more than compact nation-states, empires strung out across the world required their possessions to be made visually present. Indeed, there is much to be said for the view that only the publication of world maps, with their famous imperial red from the 1830s on, generated a sense of empire in the British public.

Chinese Spatial Horizons

Mental maps are part of everyone's basic cognitive equipment. The spatial images that individuals and groups have of the world stand in a complicated two-way relationship with each other.
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Spatial perceptions should not be interpreted only as static world pictures and fixed codes; it is simplistic to speak of
the
Chinese or
the
Islamic vision of space. Images of space are always open to the new; they have to assimilate things that were literally unheard of. The historian Daniel K. Richter once tried to imagine how the original inhabitants of North America came to know of the arrival of Europeans on the East Coast: first a series of dramatic (perhaps contradictory) rumors would have spread with great effect; then strange objects might have begun to appear in villages by various convoluted routes; and finally, at a later stage, the Indians would have came face to face with white men.
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In this way a completely new native American cosmology was built up over time. Many peoples around the world have had similar experiences.

None of the non-European world pictures could compete with European cosmology in the nineteenth century. Nowhere else did an alternative metageography arise that systematically divided continents and major regions from one another. Three central features of the modern European discourse of geography were: (1) the natural (not cultural or political) equivalence of different spaces; (2) the foundation in precise surveying and measurement; and (3) the reference to large inclusive entities up to the level of the world or, to put it the other way around, the general hypothesis of the earth as a global structure. A fourth
characteristic was the autonomy of geographical discourse and its institutional crystallization in a separate branch of science. Premodern maps, for example, are often illustrations of
other
narratives: a religious history of human salvation, a series of travels, a military campaign, and so on. Modern geographical discourse, by contrast, is self-sufficient in both its text and its imagery.

A considerable amount is known about China, which may therefore serve as an example. Official scholars of the Qing period, who acted as administrators and bearers of culture, placed great value on news-gathering from the four corners of the empire. They used cartographic methods to perfect the internal ordering of space. They showed great interest in the boundaries between various provinces and districts, as the territorial organization of government, justice, and military affairs made geographical knowledge indispensable as a means of central control.
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Surveying and mapmaking were geared to the same foreignpolicy objectives that European monarchs were pursuing in the eighteenth century: to stake territorial claims in relation to neighboring states, especially the Tsarist Empire. However, the fully developed Qing Dynasty had no interest in the spatial form of the world beyond its own borderlands. Before the end of the Opium War in 1842, China sent no official travelers to distant countries, did not encourage private journeys, and made less and less use of Jesuits present at the imperial court as a source of information about Europe. The earliest firsthand accounts from overseas came in only after China opened up to the world. In 1847 the young Lin Qian set off from Xiamen (Amoy) to New York as an interpreter on a trade mission, and a year and a half later he returned and wrote a little book of “travel sketches of the Far West” (
Xihai jiyoucao
). So, it was not Europe but America that provided the first impressions of “the West” (as it was already known in China too). As far as we know, the book is the first account published by a Chinese about a Western country: rather skimpy in comparison with the voluminous works by European authors, but surprisingly open-minded about America's material culture and technology, which Lin Qian thought it would be good to transfer to China.
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Though not cast in the form of a country report, it remains close to reality and by no means speaks of things foreign with dismissive incomprehension. But Lin Qian was a nobody in the Confucian system of scholar-statesmen; his text was not representative of how Chinese saw the world at that time, nor did it reach enough readers to have any real impact.

Much more influential was
Haiguo tuzhi
(Illustrated treatise on the overseas kingdoms), which the scholar and official Wei Yuan published in 1844. The versatile author developed an interest in foreign countries only as a result of the recent defeat in the Opium War. But although he collected much information about Europe and America, his chief focus was on China's long-neglected relations with maritime Southeast Asia; his conservative policy goal was to create (or re-create) supremacy over the hierarchically structured tribute system in the South China Sea, as a means of defending China against the European colonial powers.
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Wei did not found a scientific tradition of world geography, nor did his
successor in the study of foreign countries, the official Xu Jiyu, whose
Yinghuan zhilüe
(Short report on the maritime districts [1848]) was the first comprehensive account of the world political situation from the viewpoint of Confucian realism. Xu knew no foreign languages and had to rely for his source material on the little that had already been translated into Chinese.
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It was only after 1866 that Xu's book won recognition and a wider readership in officialdom. By then China had had to endure a second war with Britain (this time joined by France) and had made knowledge of the West an urgent priority. In the nineteenth century, the Chinese did not explore global spaces intellectually but only tried to find their bearings in them when this became unavoidable in the mid-1890s.
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