The Transformation of the World (98 page)

The geopolitical result was that Egypt's ruler established himself on the eastern shores of the Red Sea, entering a collision course with a great power, Britain, that had initially favored his operations against the unruly Wahhabis. In 1839 the British occupied the port of Aden in Yemen and put pressure on the pasha to withdraw from Arabia; this period is known in diplomatic history as the Second Muhammad Ali Crisis. In 1840 the pasha finally had to back down. His direct attack on the Ottoman Empire in Syria in 1831–32 confirmed his military strength (the Turkish army was crushed in December 1832 near Konya), but it
also showed his political vulnerability. When the crunch came, Britain, Austria, and Russia all chose for reasons of their own to maintain the Ottoman Empire: only France backed Muhammad Ali. In September 1840 a British fleet bombarded Egyptian positions on the coasts of Syria and Lebanon, and shortly afterward Austrian and British troops landed in Syria as the Turkish army advanced from the north. Facing such pressure, Muhammad Ali agreed to a compromise whereby he was recognized as hereditary ruler of Egypt but gave up any claims within the Ottoman Empire.
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This settlement had no impact on Egypt's policies and positions in Africa. Under both Muhammad Ali and his successors, the power of the “Turkish-Egyptian” regime in Cairo was extended to the whole of the Sudan, in a campaign of conquest that uniquely combined European-trained military units with slaves bought in African markets and trained as soldiers. After a time, however, the pasha realized that conscripted Egyptian peasants fought better than African slaves. Under Egyptian rule, the mineral wealth of Sudan—especially its gold—was extracted on a large scale. The Sudanese became subject to unusual forms of high taxation. All Sudanese resistance was ruthlessly suppressed. And on the frontier, new warlords appeared in the violence markets and put an additional burden on local people.

Khedive Ismail cited the “politically correct” aim of the eradication of slavery as a pretext for further expansion, making use of the legendary general Charles Gordon (who had proved his worth in the 1860s against the Chinese Taiping) to drive the Egyptian administration into the far south of Sudan. Against these twin objectives, a messianic-revolutionary movement finally developed in 1881, with a leader, Muhammad Ahmed, that it saw as the longed-for “Mahdi,” or redeemer. Its forces soon won control of most of Sudan and in 1883 annihilated a standing army under British command; Gordon, having exceeded his remit and hugely underestimated the enemy, now found himself completely isolated in Khartoum. Mahdi supporters caught up with him there in 1885. His killing drew a line under the Egyptian empire in Africa. The Mahdi's looser structure of rule rested on his charismatic authority and could scarcely survive his death. An extreme drought further weakened his authority so much that Lord Kitchener met little resistance when he moved to reconquer Sudan in 1898. The Mahdi movement arose in opposition to Egyptian-European incursions, with many typical features of an anti-imperial reaction. These included labeling the invaders as aliens—in this case, “Turks”—and as violators of religious norms.
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Conditions had been different in the similarly volatile world of late eighteenth-century Indian states. Most of those that succeeded the Mogul Empire, which had soon collapsed after the death of the Great Mogul Aurangzeb in 1707, were not what one would describe as empires. However, many did combine territorial expansion with rule over taxpaying farmers and elementary state-building measures often reminiscent of Muhammad Ali's in Egypt. The Sultanate of Mysore under Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, which might otherwise have
followed an Egyptian path, took on the might of the East India Company and was destroyed in 1799. The tactically more cautious maharajah in the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, who like Tipu before him brought in European officers to reshape his army, managed to found a temporarily powerful Sikh state to which weaker polities—and this was its imperial aspect—had to pay tribute. Unlike in the jihadi empires of the African savannah, religious motives played no role in this Sikh expansion all the way to Peshawar at the foot of the Hindu Kush. Ranjit Singh created a typically imperial (“cosmopolitan”) elite out of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. But, in the age of Ranjit Singh, the British were already so strong that the new state could survive only while it remained useful as a buffer against the unpredictable Afghans. After the death in 1839 of the autocratic maharajah—who, unlike Muhammad Ali in Egypt, created no institutions capable of outliving him—the Sikh state was annexed in 1849 and turned into a province of British India.
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Internal Colonialism in the United States

The spread of the United States across the North American continent may be interpreted as a special kind of secondary empire building, and one of the most successful of all.
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The United States of America began its existence in 1783 as one of the largest countries in the world, and over the next seventy years it further tripled in size. For Thomas Jefferson and many others with a keen sense of geopolitics, the advance to the Mississippi in the 1790s was an objective of prime importance. Beyond the river lay the vast land of Louisiana, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, with New Orleans as its capital in the Deep South. In 1682 France had taken possession of it more in name than in reality, with no plans for intensive colonization. Indeed, the French king showed so little interest in it that he ceded to the Spanish king that part of Louisiana that he had kept after the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Charles III received the gift without enthusiasm, and it was a long time before the Spanish actually took possession of it.
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By then American merchants had already reached the Mississippi from the north, so that considerable commercial interests were at stake. In 1801 Spain gave Louisiana back to France. Bonaparte, who once mooted a major military expedition to the Mississippi and fleetingly dreamed of Louisiana as an imperial jewel of the crown, performed a volte-face in April 1803. When President Jefferson instructed his ambassador in Paris to ask for talks about a cession of the mouth of the Mississippi, France's first consul—interested in good relations with the United States because of the prospect of a new war with Britain—surprisingly offered the whole of Louisiana (comprising all French territories in North America) at a bargain price. The American negotiators jumped at the opportunity. On December 20, La Nouvelle-Orléans was handed over to the US federal government.

Legally speaking, it was annexation. The 50,000 or so whites living in Louisiana, who had first been French, then Spanish, then French again, now found
themselves subjects of the United States, without ever being asked for their views on the matter. At a stroke of the pen, and at very little cost, the largest republic in the world doubled in size. At the same time, it ended the potentially dangerous presence of another power (the militarily strongest of the age) on North American soil. Precisely twenty years after shaking off its colonial status, the United States swallowed up the first colony of its own—a case of secondary empire building without the use of force. Many characteristic problems of colonization then ensued: above all, a clash with the culturally foreign (French-speaking) population, which disliked the transfer of power and regarded as a hostile act the break with Spanish and French law and the introduction of the American system based on English common law. In Louisiana before 1803, free people of every color had enjoyed the same civil rights, whereas now they lost nearly everything as soon as an iota of “colored” blood was suspected.
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In 1812, Congress in Washington made ex-French Louisiana the first of thirteen newly defined “federal states,” but it took a long time to become Americanized. New immigrants came in dribs and drabs from France, and by the thousand from Cuba, where many planters, having fled the Haitian revolution, had found life unpleasant during the Spanish war of resistance against France. New Orleans, planned as a typical French colonial city, was divided into districts for English-speaking Americans and French-speaking Creoles even during the economic boom of the 1830s. Despite the harsh American race laws, however, the “color line” was less sharply drawn than elsewhere in the South. As Donald Meinig writes in his monumental geohistory of the United States, Louisiana was precisely what the country's self-image could not accept: an “imperial colony.” That might perhaps have still been compatible with the ruling ideology if Louisianans had really been liberated from all forms of bondage. But they were “peoples of foreign culture who had not chosen to be Americans.”
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In this they did not differ from the original inhabitants of the continent, the Indians.

The question as to whether one should speak of “US imperialism,” even in relation to the conquest of the Philippines after 1898, or to the numerous military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean during the early decades of the twentieth century, has long been the source of heated debate. Some regard the United States as an anti-imperialist power by definition; others see in it the acme of capitalist imperialism.
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Donald Meinig frees the discussion from its ideological entanglements by convincingly pointing to structural similarities between the United States and other imperial formations. In the middle of the nineteenth century, he argues, the country was four things at once: a collection of regional societies, a federation, a nation, and an empire.
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Why an empire?

The United States maintained a huge military apparatus, complete with forts, roadside checks, and so on, to repel and hold down the Indians. Special areas with even minimal autonomy were not tolerated. There were no protectorates for land belonging to the Indians, and no enclaves in the style of the princely states of India. During the years of the Indian wars, white America was in a
position similar to that of the Tsarist Empire vis-à-vis the Kazakh steppe peoples. There, too, the imperial center asserted a general claim to sovereignty, costly military installations were created, and armed settlers were given encouragement at the frontier. The Kazakhs were more numerous and less divided among themselves, however, and they could not be subjected to totally arbitrary treatment. Their continuing cultural, and to some extent military, self-assertiveness underlined the multiethnic character of the Tsarist Empire. Today they have their own nation-state. The policy of military occupation and land acquisition makes it justifiable to speak of the imperial character of the United States. But it would be too simple to claim that the United States can be exhaustively described as an empire. It was an expanding nation with a federal type of organization, which could not derive a shared identity from a single national genealogy. All white and all black inhabitants of the United States were somehow “newcomers.” The myth of the cultural melting pot, as remote as it was from reality, never corresponded to the nation's basic perception of itself. But neither did the “us” and “them” dichotomy of European nationalism enter the picture. It was never possible to say unequivocally who “we” were. Nineteenth-century Americans were obsessed with a fine hierarchy of differences, with the indispensability but also the instability of “race” as an category of imposing cognitive order.
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This was a typically imperial mental grid that translated into manifold practices of segregation.

6 Pax Britannica

Imperial Nationalism and Global Vision

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire was by far the largest in both area and population,
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but it also differed from others in its essential character. Britain was what one may call an imperial nation-state: that is, a nation-state that, by virtue of tendencies internal to it, became politically unified and territorially fixed in pre-imperial times, and whose politicians learned over time to define national interests as imperial and vice versa. Recent histories have pointed out that one should not exaggerate the national homogeneity of the United Kingdom; that Great Britain still contains four different nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Much in its imperial history speaks in favor of this way of seeing things. Scots were disproportionately active within the British Empire—as businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries. The position of the Irish was ambivalent: the Catholic population of the island had every reason to feel itself disadvantaged in a quasi-colonial manner; yet many Irish—including Catholics—enthusiastically participated in the activities of the empire.
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Nevertheless, the fact remains that Britain was perceived in the outside world as a closed imperial nation-state.

For a long time it was part of the self-image of the British upper classes and intellectuals that the country had been spared the virus of nationalism. Blinkered
Continentals might be nationalistic; Britons had a cosmopolitan way of thinking. Nowadays one would no longer put it quite like that. What was distinctive, rather, was the paradox of an
imperial
nationalism. This arose in the 1790s as a sense of nationhood that drew its energy mainly from the imperial victories of the day.
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The (male) Briton thought his superiority to lie in the art of conquest, in commercial success, and in the benefits that British rule brought to all who came into contact with it. He was superior not only to colored peoples, who were in need of disciplined and civilizing leadership, but also to European peoples, none of which acted overseas with anything like the felicitous touch displayed by the British. This special imperialism lasted throughout the nineteenth century, its occasional jingoistic intensification being less important than its essential continuity over time. Imperial nationalism was associated with a Protestant sense of mission, in which values such as leadership and strength of character were of major importance. The idea that the British were a tool of Providence for the betterment of the world became a kind of ground bass among sections of the population whose gaze was directed beyond their own local sphere. Rather like the French after the revolution, the British felt themselves to be a kind of universal nation, both in their cultural achievements and in their resulting entitlement to spread them all around the world.