The Transformation of the World (94 page)

The greater the perceived or “constructed” cultural and racial differences, the more plainly a tension develops between the need for political inclusion and the tendency to social-cultural exclusion. The white club remains closed to the politically useful local potentate, who takes umbrage at the slight. On the other hand, settlers are useful business partners even when they achieve political emancipation. This was the basis of the dominion model, which functioned well for both sides. Similarly, Britain and the United States maintained close economic links after the war they fought against each other in 1812 and went on gradually—and despite many upheavals—to build a wider “special relationship.” At the other end of the typological spectrum are colonial systems with no vertical integration, most notably the slave societies of the eighteenth-century British and French Caribbean.

Theoretically, sources of
disintegration
may derive from the revaluation of integrative ties. But as it was already known in antiquity, most empires are prey not only to dissolution within but also to a combination of internal erosion and external aggression. Or, to put it more sharply, the greatest enemies of an empire are always other empires. It is striking that empires usually break up into smaller entities, realms, or nation-states; they seldom pass directly into hegemonic or federative structures. Plans for nations across the ocean, as mooted in the Bourbon reforms of Spanish America after 1760 or by the British colonial minister Joseph Chamberlain around 1900, inevitably fell short. The only success stories were a few (by no means all) federations under the umbrella of an overarching empire, such as Canada attempted in 1867 and Australia in 1901; similar projects for Malaya and British Central Africa during the decolonization period ended in failure.

Let us summarize what has been said so far in terms of an “ideal type.” An empire is a spatially extensive multiethnic entity with an asymmetrical, and in practice authoritarian, core-periphery structure, which is held together by a coercive apparatus and political symbolism and by the universalist ideology of the imperial state and its elite bearers. Social and cultural integration does not take place beneath the level of the imperial elite; there is no homogeneous imperial society and no common imperial culture. Internationally, the center does not allow the periphery to develop external relations of its own.
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Relations within an empire involve constant contestation, bargaining, and compromise: it is not one huge barracks, and scope can be found on all sides for resistance and independent initiative. If conditions are favorable, people at all levels of society can live well and securely in an empire. But none of this should make us forget its essentially coercive character. An entity that many or all join of their own free will is not an empire but—as was the case of NATO before 1990—a hegemonic association with mainly autonomous partners and a primus inter pares at the center.

4 Empires: Typology and Comparisons

Empires differ from one another by their size on the world map, their total population, the number of their peripheries, and their economic performance. For the whole of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands had in Indonesia a colony that (after India) was economically the most successful of the age. Since it had no other colonies apart from Surinam and a few tiny islands in the West Indies, its “empire” was of quite a different caliber from that of the British. In a very different way, the same applies to the German colonial empire that came into being after 1884: a collection of thinly populated territories in Africa, China, and the South Seas that were expendable for the home country. Whereas the Netherlands was a small country with a large and wealthy colony, Germany was the opposite. In the nineteenth century, only the British and the French had what could be described as world empires. The Tsarist Empire was so extensive and so ethnically diverse that it constituted a world of its own; the Mongol “world empire” of the Middle Ages was not significantly larger.

Leviathan and Behemoth

It is not possible to translate the above ideal-typical empire into a neat and full typology; imperial phenomena are too diverse for that, both spatially and temporally, even in a single century. But a few points may help us to identify certain variants.

The distinction between land and sea empires is often considered the most important, not only academically but as a deep antagonism within the world of politics. Some geopoliticians and geophilosophers, from Halford Mackinder to Carl Schmitt, have even viewed the supposedly unavoidable conflict between continental and maritime powers as a fundamental trait of modern world history. The long-known problem with this is that the two types of empire are assumed, generally without proof, to be incomparable. Narrow conceptions of “overseas history” have prevented the historical experience of Russia and China or the Ottoman and Habsburg empires—not to speak of Napoleon or Hitler—from being used for a comparative analysis of empire. In reality, the distinction between land and sea empires is not always clear-cut or helpful. For England and Japan, everything was “overseas.” The Imperium Romanum ruled both the Mediterranean and inland regions stretching all the way to Britain and the Arabian desert. A maritime empire in its pure form should be thought of as a transcontinental network of fortified ports, such as only the Portuguese, Dutch, and English constructed in the early modern period. Until the late eighteenth century, all of these contented themselves with controlling coastal footholds and their immediate hinterland. The sixteenth-century Spanish global empire already had a continental component insofar as it had to deploy techniques of territorial administration to consolidate its hold on the Americas. The East India Company had to develop similar techniques after it had gained control of Bengal in the 1760s.

Control problems appeared as soon as overseas bases expanded into, or were complemented with, territorial colonies. Geographical distance from the European imperial center was an important, though not the only, factor in their solution. Decentralization, one of the strengths of the British Empire, was a necessary result of the difficulties of communication in the days before the telegraph. Ever since the conquest of India, the British Empire was an amphibious structure, a Leviathan and Behemoth rolled into one. India and Canada were subordinate land empires of a special kind, gigantic countries that in the course of the nineteenth century were opened up, no less than the Tsarist Empire, by what geopoliticians considered the modern source of imperial land power: the railroad.
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Logistics in the age of the steam engine, on wheels and at sea, did not unambiguously favor either of the two basic types. Both land and sea empires changed their character with the increase in transportation speed and volume. In preindustrial times, the same distance was easier and faster to cover on water than on land, but at the end of our period came a world war in which the resources of two vast land masses were pitted against each other. The Allies were victorious not because of a built-in superiority of maritime forces over land powers, but because their merchant naval capacity gave them access to the land-based industrial and agricultural potential of America, Australia, and India.
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Meanwhile, the great battleship duel for which Germany and Britain had been steadily preparing failed to materialize.

Even so, a few differences between “pure” land and sea empires should not be overlooked. Foreign rule does not have the same meaning when it defines the relationship between old neighbors and when it comes about through the leap of an invasion; in the former it may be part of a long-term back-and-forth movement, such as that which occurred over centuries between Poland and Russia. In land empires, great efforts must be made to justify and assert an overarching claim to sovereignty. Examples include the dynastic unions that made Austria's emperor the king of Hungary, Russia's tsar the king of Poland, and China's Manchu emperor the great khan of the Mongols. The secession of part of a tightly knit contiguous empire tends to be more dangerous for the center than are Creole autonomy movements across the seas. They reduce the territory of the empire as a great power, possibly creating a new enemy or a satellite of a rival empire on its borders. The geopolitics of land empires is therefore different from that of sea empires. But it should not be forgotten that both Britain and Spain made huge military efforts to prevent the loss of their American possessions in the age of the Atlantic revolutions.

Colonialism and Imperialism

The artificial term “periphery,” often used in this chapter, has a somewhat broader meaning than the more common “colony.” In the nineteenth century, the power elites of the continental empires (Russian, Habsburg, Chinese, Ottoman) would have indignantly rejected any idea that they ruled over colonies,
whereas others (e.g., the Germans) were proud of “possessing” some. In Britain, people insisted that India was not an ordinary colony but something unique; in France a sharp dividing line was drawn between Algeria (part of the French Republic) and the colonies proper. We should bear in mind that a
structural
definition of “colony” must be sufficiently tight to exclude other kinds of periphery.
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The late nineteenth-century term “colony” has a connotation of social-economic backwardness vis-à-vis the metropolis. But the Polish territories in the Tsarist Empire, Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy, and Macedonia in the Ottoman Empire were by no means underdeveloped—though they were certainly dependent peripheries whose political fates were decided in Saint Petersburg, Vienna, or Istanbul. Within the British Empire, there were few similarities in 1900 between Canada and Jamaica. Both were peripheries in relation to the imperial center, but one was a democratically self-governing proto-nation-state, the other a crown colony in which the governor exercised nearly unlimited power on behalf of the colonial minister in London. In many respects, the dominion of Canada was more akin to a European nation-state than to a Caribbean or African colony within the same empire. The same was true of peripheral lands in the Tsarist realm. For most of the nineteenth century Finland was a semiautonomous grand duchy, occupied by Russian troops, in which a minority of originally German-speaking Swedish landowners and merchants set the social tone. Its dependence was thus scarcely of the same type as that of Turkestan, first conquered in the 1850s and (after the fall of Tashkent in 1865) treated more like an Asian colony of Britain or France than any other part of the Tsarist Empire.
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Not all imperial peripheries were colonies, and colonial frontiers were not equally dynamic in all empires. Colonialism is but one aspect of nineteenth-century imperial history.

The rapid conquest and partition of the African continent, a new swashbuckling tone in international politics, and political support for European banks and resource-development corporations created a widespread impression around the end of the century that the world had entered a new “imperialist” phase. Many clever things were written to analyze this phenomenon. In particular,
Imperialism: A Study
(1902) by the British economist and journalist John A. Hobson can still be read today as a profound and partly prophetic diagnosis of the times.
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This literature, including important contributions by Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, and Nikolai Bukharin, sought above all to get to the bottom of Europe's (or even “the West's”) new global expansionist dynamic.
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For all their differences on points of detail, all were agreed that imperialism was an expression of tendencies characteristic of the modern age. Only the Austrian all-around social scientist Joseph A. Schumpeter raised the objection in 1919 that imperialism was in fact a political strategy of antiliberal pre-bourgeois elites, or of capitalist forces shying away from the world market.
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In that, there was a lot of truth. Apart from the shock of the new that impressed people at the time, we can now see more clearly long-term continuities of European and other
processes of expansion,
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and the very different impetuses and motives that lay behind them.

A descriptive concept of imperialism therefore has the advantage that it does not bind one to a particular political, economic, or cultural explanation, since it refers to the sum of actions geared to the conquest and preservation of an empire. It would thus be possible to speak of Roman, Mongol, or Napoleonic imperialism. The phenomenon is characterized by a certain kind of politics that involves the crossing of borders, disregard for the status quo, interventionism, rapid military deployment at the risk of provoking war, and a determination to dictate the terms of peace. Imperialist politics bases itself on a hierarchy of peoples, always divided into the strong and the weak and usually graded by culture or race. Imperialists consider that their superior civilization entitles them to rule over others.

The theories that postulated an affinity between imperialism and capitalist modernity were referring to a special situation around the turn of the twentieth century, albeit one of exceptional significance. In the long sequence of empires and imperialisms, a “first age of global imperialism” began in 1760 with the Seven Years' War.
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A second age got under way around 1880 and ended in 1918, while a third stretched from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 down to the end of the Second World War. The second age of global imperialism, often known as High Imperialism, came about through the intertwining of four originally independent processes: (a) world economic integration in leaps and bounds (early “globalization”), (b) new technologies of intervention and domination, (c) the collapse of mechanisms to preserve the peace in the European system of states, and (d) the rise of social-Darwinist interpretations of international politics. Another novelty in comparison with the first age was that imperialist politics was no longer conducted only by Great Powers—or in other words that the Great Powers allowed weaker European powers a share of the imperial cake. King Leopold II, acting in an individual capacity, could even go over the head of Belgium's state institutions and get the Berlin Conference on Africa in 1884 to guarantee the giant Congo Free State as his private colony.
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