The Transformation of the World (88 page)

European interest in colonies was not very great during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, although individual politicians (Napoleon III in France or Benjamin Disraeli in Britain) tried to stoke it up for domestic political reasons. Where political control already existed over a colony (India, Dutch East Indies, Philippines, Cuba), the aim was to make better use of them economically. There were several new additions: Algeria, first invaded by France in 1830 but not really conquered until the end of the 1850s; Sind (1843) and Punjab (1845–49) in an expanding British India; New Zealand, where the Maoris kept on fighting until 1872; inland extensions of colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in Senegal; the Caucasus and the Khanate of Inner Asia. Britain and France, alone at midcentury in continuing aggressive expansion, established bases in Asia and Africa (e.g., Lagos and Saigon) that later served as springboards for territorial conquest, at the same time forcing Asian governments to grant concessions to European traders. The typical imperialist instrument was then not so much the expeditionary force as the cheap but effective gunboat, able to appear suddenly in a port and issue threats. But the two military conflicts with China (the First Opium War of 1839–42 and the Second Opium War, or “Arrow War,” of 1856–60) also involved operations on land and were by no means walkovers. Some imperial enterprises ended in failure: for example, the first British intervention in Afghanistan (1839–42) and Napoleon III's expedition to Mexico after it became unable to repay its external debt. This bizarre episode, costly in both French and Mexican lives (approximately 50,000!), saw the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian crowned “Emperor of Mexico,” only to be court-martialed and executed by firing
squad in 1867. That France initially had British and Spanish support for its adventure has often been overlooked.
²⁴

In the 1870s, a change in the procedures and aggressiveness of European Great Powers was already looming. The Ottoman Empire and Egypt, deeply in debt to Western creditors, came under financial pressure that the Great Powers were able to exploit to their advantage. At the same time, a number of spectacular and widely publicized research expeditions made Africa once again an object of public attention in Europe. In 1881 the bey of Tunis had to accept a French “resident-general” as the power behind the throne; it was the beginning of the colonial “division of Africa.” The race began in earnest the following year, when Britain occupied Egypt in response to the rise of a nationalist movement in a country that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had made hugely important for the empire. Within a few years claims were staked throughout the continent and soon enforced by military conquest. Between 1881 and 1898 (the year of British victory over the Mahdi movement in Sudan), nearly the whole of Africa was partitioned among the various colonial powers: France, Britain, Belgium (with King Leopold II rather than the Belgian state as “owner” of a colony), Germany, and Portugal (a few old settlements on the coasts of Angola and Mozambique). In a final phase Morocco became a French possession (1912), and the Libyan desert, scarcely governable but viewed with new interest in Istanbul, came under Italian control (1911–12).
²⁵
Only Ethiopia and Liberia (founded by former American slaves) remained independent. This “scramble for Africa,” as it was known, though often chaotic, opportunistic, and unplanned in its finer details, should be seen as a single process. Such an occupation of a vast continent within just a few years was without parallel in world history.
²⁶

Between 1895 and 1905, a similar scramble developed in China, although not all the imperial powers had their eyes on territorial acquisition. Some—especially Britain, France, and Belgium—were more interested in railroad or mining concessions and in staking out informal spheres of commercial influence. The United States proclaimed an “open door” principle for all countries in the Chinese market. At that time only Japan, Russia, and Germany appropriated quasi-colonial territories of any significance on the periphery of China: Taiwan (Formosa), southern Manchuria, and Qingdao with its hinterland on the Shandong peninsula. But the Chinese state remained in place, and the great majority of Chinese never became colonial subjects. The consequences of the “mini scramble” in China were thus much less grave than those of the “maxi scramble” in Africa.

In Southeast Asia, however, the British established themselves in Burma and Malaya, while the French took control in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Between 1898 and 1902 the United States conquered the Philippines, first from Spain, then from the Filipino independence movement. In 1900, Siam was the only nominally independent (if weak and therefore cautious) country in this politically and culturally diverse part of the world. The same justifications
were given everywhere for European (or American) conquests in Asia and Africa between 1881 and 1912: a “might is right” ideology, mostly suffused with racism; the supposed incapacity of native peoples to govern themselves in an orderly manner; and an (often preventive) protection of national interests in the contest with rival European powers.

This second grand narrative does not flow as directly as the first into the 1914–18 war. The colonial world had been stabilized for some years before the outbreak of the war, and to some extent tensions among the colonial powers were even regulated by treaty. Occasionally non-European locations provided the setting for power games directed at the European public: for example, in the Morocco crisis of 1905–6 and 1911, the German Reich staged military exercises in North Africa as a bluff, while the press demonstrated its fateful power to stoke up conflicts. But genuine colonial rivalries were rarely at issue. Since the First World War was not unleashed primarily by the clash of imperialisms in Asia and Africa, History No. 2 is often understood as a branch line of the History No. 1, which in turn points straight toward the summer of 1914. Quite a few general accounts of nineteenth-century Europe mention colonialism and imperialism only in the briefest possible way, creating the impression that Europe's expansion in the world was not an essential part of its history but only a by-product of events in its various countries.
²⁷

Consequently, diplomatic history and colonial history have seldom really converged. A global historical approach cannot be content with this but must find a bridge between Eurocentric and Asia- or Africa-centric perspectives. It thus faces two demanding tasks: to relate the history of the European interstate system (which toward the end of the nineteenth century became a global system) to the history of colonial and imperial expansion; and to resist allowing the international history of the nineteenth century to run teleologically toward the outbreak of war in 1914. We know the war began on August 4, 1914, but just a few years earlier not many had suspected that things would go so far so soon. A genuine world war was virtually unthinkable for policymakers and the general public at the time, and it would unduly restrict our understanding of the nineteenth century if we were to view it simply as a long prehistory of the great conflagration.

A third challenge we face is to take into account the diversity of imperial phenomena. It would, of course, be superficial to lump together everything that describes itself as an “empire.” The imperial vocabulary had quite different shades of meaning in different countries and languages. On the other hand, the consideration of frontiers in various contexts (
chapter 7
, above) has already brought to light great similarities between cases that are usually seen as unrelated. The same is true of empires. We must therefore seek to question the common distinction between the maritime empires of Western European powers and the land empires ruled from Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Istanbul, and Beijing. First of all, however, a glance is necessary at the nation-state.

2 Paths to the Nation-State

The Semantics of Empire

German and French historians in particular consider the nineteenth century as the age of nationalism and nation-states.
²⁸
The Franco-Prussian War was a conflict between one of the oldest European nation-states and a neighbor seeking to measure up to and outmaneuver the land of revolutions. Theirs were “entangled histories,” if any in Europe can be described as such—not between fundamentally unequal partners but within a constellation that would in the very long run lead to the post-1945 equilibrium. But can the Franco-German perspective sustain an interpretation of Europe or even the world in the nineteenth century? British historiography, without the resonance that
Reichsgründung
had for German historians, seldom placed so much emphasis on the process of nation-state formation, seeing the founding of the Reich as a German affair with implications for the rest of Europe. The British Empire, by contrast, did not owe its existence to any “founding” event, except perhaps for those who wished to glorify a couple of buccaneers from the Elizabethan age. It had not come about in a Big Bang but had developed through a complex and lengthy process in many world theaters, with no overall direction from the center. Britain, unlike Germany, did not need to found an empire in the nineteenth century, because for a long time it had already possessed one whose origins could not be precisely established. In fact, before the middle of the nineteenth century, it occurred to scarcely anyone that the scattered possessions of the Crown plus various settlements and colonies added up to something as definite as an empire. Until the 1870s the settler colonies, whose “mother country” Britain claimed to be, were seen as different in kind from the other colonies, where it was not maternal relations but a strict paternalism that prevailed.
²⁹
Later too, there would be much heated debate about the nature of the empire.

Also, in other cases the semantics of empire is multilayered, even contradictory. In 1900 the German word
Reich
had at least three different referents: (1) a young nation-state in the middle of Europe, which had endowed itself with a parvenu emperor (reminiscent of Peter the Great's self-elevation in 1721) and called itself the German Empire (
Deutsches Reich
); (2) a small overseas trading and colonial empire, to which the
Deutsches Reich
under Bismarck had gradually added a few colonial acquisitions in Africa after 1884; and (3) a Romantic fantasy of a sprawling land empire (for which Bismarck's petty German arrangement came as a huge letdown), a revived Holy Roman Empire, a gathering-in of all Germans or “Germanic peoples,” a German
Lebensraum
, or even a Germandominated
Mitteleuropa
—an empire, then, which would beckon in early 1918 with the diktat imposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia, and after 1939 would briefly become a reality under the Nazis.
³⁰
It could further be shown that concepts of empire have existed at all times and in many cultures, and that major
semantic differences existed in late modern Europe, even within individual countries. An empire cannot therefore be adequately grasped by how it defines itself, and it is not a convincing solution to regard
everything
as an empire that calls itself by that name. It must be possible to describe an empire structurally, in terms of certain observable features.

Nation-State and Nationalism

Empires are a pan-Eurasian phenomenon of ancient pedigree, going back to the third millennium BC, and are therefore charged with meanings from many different cultural contexts. Nation-states, on the other hand, are a relatively recent Western European invention, whose emergence can be studied under laboratory conditions, as it were, in the history of the nineteenth century. It has proved difficult, however, to give a definition of the nation-state. “The modern nation-state,” we read, “is a state in which the nation qua totality of citizens is sovereign, both determining and supervising the exercise of political rule. The equal right of all citizens to participate in the institutions, services, and projects of the state is its guiding principle.”
³¹
This definition, plausible as it is at first sight, contains such high participatory requirements that it excludes too much. Poland under communist rule, Spain under Franco, South Africa until the end of apartheid: there would have been no nation-state in any of these cases. And if the word “citizens” is taken as gender-neutral, how should one classify Great Britain, which adopted universal female suffrage only in 1928, or the France of the Third Republic, which followed suit only in 1944? In the nineteenth century there was scarcely any country in the world that would have qualified as a nation-state by such criteria: at most Australia (but only after 1906) and New Zealand, where the right of all women to vote was recognized in 1893, though to run for office only in 1919, and where the indigenous Maoris also had the franchise.
³²

An alternative way of approaching the nation-state would be via
nationalism
.
³³
This may be understood as a sense of belonging to a large collective that conceives of itself as a political actor with a common language and destiny. This attitude became operative in Europe from the 1790s on, resting on a number of simple general ideas: nations are the world's natural units, in comparison with which empires are artificial constructs; the nation—not the region or a supranational religious community—is the primary loyalty for individuals and the main framework for ties of solidarity; a nation must therefore formulate clear membership criteria and categorize minorities as such, with discrimination as a possible but not inevitable outcome; a nation strives for political autonomy within a certain territory and requires a state of its own to guarantee this.

The link between nation and state is not easy to grasp. Hagen Schulze has outlined how in a second phase “state-nations” and then “people-nations” took shape or even defined themselves as such, and how in the period after the French Revolution a nationalism with a broad social base—he calls it “mass nationalism”—took on the form of the state. Schulze avoids explicitly defining
the nation-state, but he explains what he has in mind by offering neat successive periodizations of the “revolutionary” (1815–71), “imperial” (1871–1914), and “total” (1914–45) nation-state.
³⁴
In any event, the nation-state appears here as a composite or synthesis transcending both state and nation: a
mobilized
, not a virtual, nation.