The Transformation of the World (25 page)

For the nineteenth century, which was characterized by the outwardly radiating model of “the West,” the Hungarian-American economic historian Iván T. Berend has suggested applying the term “Central and Eastern Europe” to the entire region stretching from the Baltic to the northern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, including the whole of the Habsburg Monarchy and European Russia. He bases his history of this region between 1789 and 1914 on its possession of a distinctive identity and a number of characteristic features that set it apart from Western Europe and other parts of the world.
¹⁰⁶
In this imagined cartography, the German Empire belongs in
Western Europe
.

Berend's dichotomy cuts across an older tendency to shun a binary opposition between East and West and to include eastern Europe within an all-European outline of history. The Polish historian Oskar Halecki, for instance, began in the 1920s to consider organizing the whole of Europe geographically and culturally along an East-West axis.
¹⁰⁷
The Hungarian medievalist Jenö Szücs gave a major impetus to the “Central Europe” discussion of the 1980s by distinguishing three “historic regions” of Europe.
¹⁰⁸
New conceptions of “historical regions” have also followed the model of “East-Central Europe.” A stringent historical geography of nineteenth-century Europe based on nonnational regional categories is in the making.

Eurasia

Finally, there are spatial names that are pure constructs: “Eurasia,” for example. “Asia” is itself a European invention, and the same is doubly true of the continental amalgam. The usage of “Eurasia” in Russia has been strongly ideological ever since the 1920s (there were precursors in the nineteenth century too), partly in the hope that Russia might play an “Asian card” to trump the West, but partly from fear of the disadvantages of being caught between Western Europe and China.
¹⁰⁹
The term can be useful, however, for two reasons.

First, there are human groups who have intensely experienced the connection between the continents, and who may therefore be said to have Eurasian
biographies. Among these are the “mixed ancestry” groups in Asia (known in India as the “Eurasian community”), most notably those of Portuguese-Asian and later British-Asian descent. In the early nineteenth century, many Indian Eurasian children of British soldiers had poor chances in the country's European marriage market on account of their low pay and social esteem. But in the early modern period and up to the 1830s, the ability of Eurasians to move and communicate between the two cultures made them essential to the functioning of the colonial system, accepted by Asians and Europeans alike. Predominately Christians, their status was comparable to that of Armenians or Jews. In the second third of the century, however, such European identities became more precarious. No one had had such a fast-track career as Lieutenant-Colonel James Skinner (1778–1841), a highly regarded cavalry commander and Knight Commander of the Bath. But now the “hybridity” of such men and their intermediate social existence was looked upon with disdain. Their upward mobility in the colonial civil service became more restricted than that of Indians and decreased still further as the century wore on. Their poverty, itself a result of limited opportunities, excluded them from the ruling stratum and placed them even below the “poor whites”; European racial theories considered them to be of lesser value. On the other side, they found themselves deprecated by the nationalism emerging in the various Asian countries.
¹¹⁰
Also categorized as biographically Euro-Asian were the colonial families who were linked to Asia for generations as settlers or officials, especially in the Dutch East Indies and British India.
¹¹¹

While that was a social and ethnic concept of “Eurasia,” the term has been revived for a space of interaction, though mainly in the early modern period.
¹¹²
Europeans then felt more closely tied to Asia than they did in the nineteenth century. An Occident-Orient dichotomy with hierarchical intent came into being only in the 1830s.
¹¹³
The temporary unification of the Eurasian world from China to Hungary in the Mongol empire and its successors has meanwhile become a standard theme in the writing of world history. In the centuries after those Asian “middle ages,” however, a world of plural states existed in continental Asia. An especially important factor here was the persistent integrative power of Islam, borne primarily by Turkic peoples.
¹¹⁴
“Inner Asia,” the old heartland of initiatives in world history, was gradually colonized by the three advancing imperial powers: Tsarist Russia, the Sino-Manchurian empire of the Qing Dynasty, and the British hegemon in India. The military power of the Mongols, which outlasted the collapse of their empire in the mid-fourteenth century, was broken once and for all in the 1750s by the Qing armies. By 1860 the Muslim khanates had been incorporated into either the Chinese or the Russian empire. As a result of imperial conquests and interventions, as well as of incipient nationalisms and of the dynamism of Western Europe and Japan, Eurasia became more and more centrifugal and heterogeneous. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was scarcely possible to speak of it any longer as a space of interaction between the empires. Such episodes as Japan's mainland conquests between 1931 and 1945,
which barely affected central Asia outside Inner Mongolia, or the construction of a Communist bloc from the Elbe to the Yellow Sea were able to change little in the overall picture. The Eurasian age—if one does not shy at such a pompous formula—began with Genghis Khan and ended sometime before 1800. For the nineteenth century, “Eurasia” is not a spatial category of prime importance.
¹¹⁵

5 Ordering and Governing Space

The ordering of space is an old responsibility of the state. But not all states order space. Feudal and patrimonial systems, in which local power and customs protect landowners against regulation from above, are unable to achieve this. Only despotic and constitutional states can impose top-down planning targets. The ordering of space requires a central drive for rationalization and the instruments to carry it through. These conditions are found first and foremost in the modern world, but not only there. Three examples should serve to illustrate the range of variation in the nineteenth century: China, the United States, and Russia.

In the case of China, one is struck by a stability of spatial schemas that has no match elsewhere in the world. The division of the empire into provinces goes back to the thirteenth century. The basic template of spatial organization created at that time is still visible today.
¹¹⁶
Since China is equal to Western Europe in size, it would be as if the territorial structure of Europe had not changed appreciably since the Middle Ages. China's provinces are not organically evolved “landscapes” in the sense of European constitutional history; they are administrative constructs. Over many generations, the extraordinary normative strength of this territorial ordering has left its mark on human lifestyles. Even today, strong provincial identities shape the self-image of Chinese people and perceptions of people from other parts of the country, in much the same way that national stereotypes operate within Europe. Sometimes, though not always, the provinces are analytically meaningful units of economic and social geography. But in historical and geographical research, they are now usually combined into eight or nine (mainly physical) “macroregions” such as the Northwest, Lower Yangtze, or Upper Yangtze, each the size of a large European nation-state.
¹¹⁷
In any event, the classical regional names already covered supraprovincial areas, which in the Qing period were often assigned to a governor-general responsible for two or three provinces.

China's stable imperial ordering of space is an exception rather than the historical norm. The only comparable case is the United States of America, whose interstate boundaries have also changed less than those of many European or Latin American nation-states. But whereas the Chinese ordering of space remained the same in the nineteenth century—the empire lost control at the edges, but the provincial boundaries were unchanged—the United States continually expanded. When it was founded, it was already one of the largest
political entities in the world. By 1850 it had tripled in size, and there was still no end in sight.
¹¹⁸
New territories were incorporated in various ways: through straightforward purchase (Louisiana from France, New Mexico and southern Arizona from Mexico, Alaska from Russia), through a treaty with indigenous tribes, and through occupation by settlers or cession following a successful war (Texas). In each case, entry into the Union involved political difficulties of one kind or another. The question as to whether slavery should be permitted in a new territory was extraordinarily explosive, and of course it was the constitutional issue that eventually led to the US Civil War.

The westward movement of white settlers may seem at first sight to have been unplanned and spontaneous. But the United States was the first country in the world—even before the thorough reorganization of space and cadastral registration in Napoleonic France—to apply one simple ordering principle to the whole of its national territory. The American landscape is still today marked by a square planar grid to which state boundary lines as well as the layout of townships and private landholdings often conform. Complaints are often heard that frontiers in Africa were artificially drawn by the colonial powers, but it should be considered that the political geography of the United States was formed with equally deliberate artificiality. This grid, which covers roughly two-thirds of the country, goes back to the land ordinances that US congressional committees worked on and approved in 1784, 1787, and 1796. Its inspiration was the geometrical linear projection of navigational cartography associated with the sixteenth-century cosmographer Gerhard Mercator. A set pattern that could have only a fictitious astronomical character on the high seas was literally engraved on the “ocean-wide,” untouched wilderness of North America. In sharp contrast to the confusion that reigned in England, the grid served the purpose of administrative rationalization and legal uniformity. To prevent anarchic appropriation, Thomas Jefferson and other architects of the system aimed to ensure that land was measured first before being sold to private individuals.

In the wake of westward expansion across the American landmass, the grid functioned as “a machine that translated sovereignty claims into property issues, territorial interests into economic interests, and in so doing bound together public and private interests in the acquisition of land.” It meant that both the grand politics of nation building and the life choices of individual settlers became capable of planning.
¹¹⁹
It also brought in revenue to the state that allocated land to individuals. In the same way, the imperial government of China began in 1902 to sell off state lands to settlers in Manchuria in order to plug holes in the budget.
¹²⁰
The policy aims in the United States went beyond mere mapping. Official surveys in the nineteenth century always involved conceiving of large tracts of land as uniform geometric surfaces to be recorded and registered
once and for all
; such was the case in India after 1814, when definitive surveys at every level were supposed to end the cartographic disorder and to bring geographical knowledge to completion. A scarcely older, partly contemporaneous model in Europe was
the British-sponsored land survey in Ireland, which went far beyond the one conducted in England itself.
¹²¹
In the United States, on the contrary, the point was not (only) to describe the existing lie of the land as accurately as possible. The “grid system” was the outline of a plan for the future.

A third type of central ordering of space occurred in Russia: namely, the top-down founding of cities, which was very rare in modern China or the early United States. For that there needed to be a single will capable of imposing a decision, such as was lacking in American democracy (the founding of Washington as the new capital was an exception), and a capacity to see it through, such as the autocratic Chinese state could no longer summon up after 1800. A Tsarist administrative reform between 1775 and 1785, under Catherine II, divided the empire into forty-four governorships (the later
guberniyas
) and further subdivided these into 481
uyezds
. Administrative entities with a population of 300,000 to 400,000 now sprang up in place of the historical provinces and oblasts, and since there were not enough cities to go around, a number of village settlements were converted into new ones by fiat. Special care was taken to found cities in the eastern and southeastern borderlands. However, by no means could all the new entities live up to the status of a city, and the promotion process was discontinued in the nineteenth century.
¹²²
But although it did not come to fruition—unlike the American grid system—the Russian reform of territorial administration left permanent traces in the historical geography of the Tsarist space.

The Chinese ordering of space in the medieval period, as well as the later Russian and American equivalents, gave their names to the spaces of the nineteenth century. In other parts of the world the situation is more complicated. The norm is a mixture of indigenous names for regions and designations introduced from outside, the two origins standing in a highly varied relationship with each other. If today's atlas of nation-states is not to be uncritically projected into the past, historians must make an effort to ascertain the geographical nomenclature in the period they are studying. This applies especially to India, Africa, and western Asia. Not infrequently the present names for countries are at odds with nineteenth-century usage. By “West Sudan,” for instance, an almost vanished term, people understood the whole gigantic stretch of savannah immediately south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to Darfur in the country now known as Sudan. Before 1920, “Syria” denoted a geographical region roughly encompassing the territories of today's Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. As to India, there used to be four by no means coextensive nomenclatures: (a) the pre-British political geography that survived in the princely states; (b) the British presidencies (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras) and provinces of the colonial period; (c) the federal states of the present-day Republic of India; and (d) the natural divisions of the area used by geographers.