The Transformation of the World (24 page)

In the nineteenth century, British rule was the cardinal political fact in South Asia. India was the center of an extensive political-military and economic field of force. It served as the military base for control of the entire Orient; Indian troops (
sepoys
) were deployed in Egypt as early as 1801. The Government of India had a say in everything to do with the security of sea routes and also felt responsible for the British presence east of Calcutta. Trade and migration, each supported by the introduction of steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal, became the most important forces in integration. One peculiarity of the Indian Ocean, in comparison with other oceans, was the absence of neo-European settler colonies—if we leave aside South Africa, which, though a staging post on the route to and from Europe, did not have a strong maritime orientation in its economic structure. Thus, despite the unbroken European presence and control on the
coasts and major islands, the Indian Ocean remained Afro-Asian demographically. It was also constantly crossed by travelers, pilgrims, and migrant workers, who, in the decades around 1900, formed a transnational arena with a character in many ways as distinctive as that of the Atlantic.
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The Pacific and the Atlantic

Things were different in the Pacific, the largest ocean and the one with the most islands. Here the nineteenth century brought substantially greater changes than in the Indian Ocean. The Pacific had from early times been the habitat of genuine maritime civilizations that had mastered the skills of sea travel—a kind of classical Aegean on a gigantic scale. The half-millennium before 1650 must have been a long period of island-hopping migration, in which extensive communication networks were constructed.
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In 1571 the founding of Manila—which, with a population of 50,000, would be as large as Vienna by the mid-seventeenth century—had boosted the role of the Pacific in world trade, one of the main driving forces being China's demand for silver from the mines of the Andes and Japan. For a time in the eighteenth century, the European imagination was attracted by no distant place more than by Tahiti and similar tropical “island paradises.”
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In contrast, Japan, today such a key country on the “Pacific Rim,” was completely uninterested in the ocean, neither sending travelers across it nor making active use of its commercial potential—its educated classes sensitive only to their own coastal areas. The nineteenth century then brought revolutionary changes that left none of the Pacific countries untouched: the migration from Europe to Australia and New Zealand; the settlement of California and eventually the whole West Coast of the United States; the opening up of China and Japan to overseas goods and ideas and their involvement in migration flows; and not least the attachment of formerly isolated islands to international networks, with often fatal consequences for populations that lacked the biological and cultural capacity for resistance.
⁹⁰

In the case of the Pacific, historians have until now asked fewer questions about interaction than about mirrored economic development in the coastal regions on both sides of the ocean. One reason for this is the absence, with the exception of Chinese workers heading for America, of intensive migratory movements across the Pacific. Even private journeys by Europeans were unusual. The emphasis on economic development also reflects the experience of the second half of the twentieth century, when California, Australia, and Japan together, though not primarily as a result of a Pacific division of labor, became growth engines of the world economy.
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The Pacific moved up into the “first world,” while the Indian Ocean, once the trading sea of spices, tea, and silk, fell into third-world status. Way back in 1890 the Japanese economist Inagaki Manjirō predicted the coming of a “Pacific Age.”
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No such glorious future was foreseen for the Indian Ocean.

The countries bordering on the Pacific were culturally even less cohesive than those on the Indian Ocean, where Islam was a powerful cement everywhere
(even as far as southern Chinese coastal enclaves), though not in southern India, Ceylon, or the Buddhist lands of Southeast Asia. China and the American West faced each other as cultural extremes: the oldest and the youngest of the major civilizations; two powers with a claim to primacy in their part of the world, which China never gave up even in the decades of its greatest weakness. Politically, the Pacific was never as clearly dominated by a single great power as was the Indian Ocean, which for a time was virtually a British lake. Australia soon became a self-confident part of the British Empire, not at all a flunkey of London. No foreign power could wrest the kind of supremacy that the United States would achieve in the region after the Pacific War of 1941 to 1945.
⁹³

Apart from the Mediterranean, no space of maritime interaction has been as extensively studied as the Atlantic. Large volumes have been written about its history
before
Columbus, whole libraries about the period since then. A new epoch began in 1492, and no one has doubted the intensity of the two-way traffic that developed between the Old and the New World. However, the forces driving this interaction and the effects resulting from it, as well as the respective shares of action and reaction, have long been the subject of debate. The European use of the word “discovery” has itself been sharply controversial in the case of the Americas; Creole “patriots” were already polemicizing in the eighteenth century against Eurocentric constructions of history.
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Since Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 interpreted North America's distinctive polity and society as a gradual advance of the
frontier
of settlement and “civilization,” the prehistory and history of the United States have no longer been described only from the viewpoint of the Atlantic coast. Yet another perspective appeared when the Trinidad-born historian and cricket expert C.L.R. James published
The Black Jacobins
in 1938—a book that made the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804 known to a wide public. Since then, histories of the slave trade and Atlantic slavery have moved away from a pure discourse of victimhood. A lively, pulsating “Black Atlantic” has come to light.
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As a space of interaction the Atlantic, too, has been more intensively studied and more vividly portrayed for the early modern period than for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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The historical trade in human beings and commodities has become visible in the square formed by the two Americas, Europe, and Africa, and so too has the context of coercive relations and ideas of liberty, revolutions, and new colonial identities. Whole national histories have been interpreted anew in an Atlantic and imperial framework; the Irish, for example, a self-sufficient island nation, provided the (often reluctant) pioneers of globalization.
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It remains a major challenge for historians to integrate the British, Iberian, and African Atlantic: what is distinctive about each of these partial systems? How can they be linked up and understood in a higher unity?
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What would such a unity be, given the fact that the Atlantic—like the other oceans, but unlike the ecologically quite uniform rim of the little Mediterranean—does not form a
natural
arena of history, a “theater” in Carl Ritter's sense of the term? This
raises a stream of other questions. How far does the “Atlantic space” stretch into the continental hinterlands? Does it reach as far as the Mississippi, where the Pacific region seamlessly begins? (In the case of the Seven Years' War, which in America, and in a British imperial perspective, was called “the French and Indian War,” it has been shown how closely events in the heart of Europe and events deep inside America were bound up with each other.) Or should we stick to the idea of broad coastal strips and draw a clear distinction between “maritime” and “continental,” so that there is an outward-looking and an inward-looking France (Nantes vs. Lyons) or Spain (Cadiz or Barcelona vs. Madrid), or a cosmopolitan New England and an introverted Midwest? Is not Sicily closer to North America than to Africa in terms of migration history? Should not Italy be seen as part of an Atlantic space of migration and socialization, at least for the period between 1876 and 1914 when fourteen million Italians left for North America, Argentina, and Brazil?
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In the nineteenth century, the Atlantic and the Pacific were subject to different tendencies. The “peaceful” ocean experienced a phase of integration in every domain; the two sides of the Atlantic drifted apart in reality and in people's minds. The slave trade, which involved the most important transactions across the early modern Atlantic, reached a peak in the 1780s and then began to decline, gradually at first, more abruptly in the 1840s. After approximately 1810 the flow of slaves headed mostly toward Brazil and Cuba; the United States and the British Caribbean withdrew from the trade.
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Ira Berlin has shown that, by the mid-eighteenth century, the growth of plantations had narrowed the lifeworld of North American slaves and increasingly disconnected them from a wider Atlantic world, which he calls “cosmopolitan.”
¹⁰¹
A second watershed was the independence of Hispanic America from Spain by 1826, and of Brazil from Portugal in 1823 (under the rule of a son of the Portuguese king), which severed a host of old imperial ties. In December 1823, US President James Monroe declared the eponymous doctrine that, though born out of specific problems in foreign policy, signaled a turning away from the Atlantic and a reorientation westward toward the interior of the continent. Subsequent trends down to the 1890s give the impression that, after a falling out that climaxed in the 1860s with the US Civil War and the French intervention in Mexico, Europeans and Americans drew closer again but with much hesitation. Only the mass emigration from the 1870s on, together with the innovations in transportation technology, makes it necessary to qualify the view that the Atlantic in the nineteenth century was by no means narrower than it had been in the densely entangled Age of Revolutions.

Continental Spaces

Continental land masses lend themselves less readily than bodies of water to fast and intensive contacts. Under preindustrial conditions it was quicker and more comfortable, though not necessarily safer, to travel long distances on a ship than on the back of a horse or camel, in a coach or a sledge, on one's own
two feet or those of sedan-chair carriers. Europe was an exception in this respect. Thanks to its structured coasts, abundant harbors, and navigable rivers, travel by ship here played a much greater role than in other parts of the world. But it was possible to combine the technical advantages of land and water transport—in a way that happened elsewhere only in Japan, with its 28,000 kilometers of coastline.
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The inexhaustible, and easily ideologized, question as to what Europe does and does not have in common with other (supposedly quite different) civilizations should be of less interest to historians than the division of the continent into regions whose boundaries rarely coincide with those of political entities. Another commonplace image that Europe has of itself is that more than any other part of the world, it combines unity with diversity. But how is this unity organized, and how should its elements be called? From Johann Gottfried Herder and his followers in the early nineteenth century comes the Romantic triad that is applied to the history of nations: “Latin—Germanic—Slav.” It still echoed strongly in the propaganda of the First World War, and the Nazis later revived it in an extreme form.

Regional groupings of nation-states seem unproblematic in comparison. But even for the innocuous-sounding “Scandinavia,” which Pliny the Elder already mentioned in his
Historia naturalis
, it is doubtful whether its regional coherence can be taken for granted for the nineteenth century. The conceptual division between northern and eastern Europe did not exist before the nineteenth century, when Russia was shifted from “the North” to a “semi-Asiatic” East. The prerequisite for a Scandinavian identity was the final collapse of Swedish great-power ambitions with the disappearance of the Polish-Lithuanian dual state in 1795 and the loss of the Grand Duchy of Finland to the Tsarist Empire in 1809. The “Scandinavianism” that appeared around 1848 in small political and intellectual circles was incapable of overarching the nascent nationalisms of the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians. In 1864 Sweden did not practice Scandinavian solidarity in relation to the German-Danish war. And Norway, which the Swedes had taken from the Danes in 1814, strove for statehood that it finally achieved in 1905. Finland—which, though linguistically separate from the other three countries, has Swedish as a second language—has existed as an independent state only since 1917. A Scandinavian self-image became widespread in the region only after the Second World War. Today the four countries refer to themselves collectively as “Nordic,” whereas observers from outside the region usually include Finland in “Scandinavia.”
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If the right word for a rather clearly demarcated region like Scandinavia causes such difficulties, what is to be said about the conceptual precision and stability of other everyday names? “Western Europe,” with the inclusion of (West) Germany, owes its designation to the post-1945 Cold War. As a term for Europe
west
of Germany, it was meaningless
before
the unification of the Reich in 1871 and the sharp clash between German and French nationalism. It presupposes an Anglo-French solidarity that did not exist before the First World War. In foreign policy France
and Britain began to move closer to each other only in 1904, but it would be wrong to say that in the long run they shared the same constitutional-democratic values. The British political class still viewed the “despotism” of Napoleon III with grave mistrust. “Western Europe” is therefore a problematic entity as far as the nineteenth century is concerned. “Central Europe,” at first a politically innocuous term that geographers dreamed up for a federated economic area rather than a Germanic imperial space, was later usurped by German hegemonism and wheeled into service during the First World War for the pursuit of maximum aims.
¹⁰⁴
Only after the end of the Cold War did it again enter discourse as a term encompassing the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. And today further versions, untouched by the lure of a Greater Germany, propose that it should also include Germany and Austria.
¹⁰⁵
What has gained most ground, however, is “East-Central Europe”—with a strong anti-Russian note.