After Tamerlane (28 page)

The immediate result of France's political turmoil was further to weaken its claim to influence in Europe and the world beyond. In Eastern Europe, French weakness made it easy to finish off the Polish state, partitioned to death in 1793–5. When the armies of Austria and Prussia marched into France in 1792, the army of Russia marched into Poland.
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The spoils of victory included the western Ukraine, a vast new addition to Russia's Black Sea empire. But by the mid- 1790s the French revolutionary state had developed extraordinary powers of mobilization, levying the men and the means for war on a scale that the hidebound monarchies could hardly match. The patriotic fervour of its citizen armies and the resort to talent in the choice of generals helped turn France once more into a great military power. Territorial conquest paid part of the bill.
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Under Napoleon Bonaparte, this transition was crowned with charisma and genius. His victories in Italy made him a military hero. As first consul (1799–1804) and emperor (1804–14), he was dictator of France. Part of his aim was to restore the social discipline and administrative order that the revolution had dissolved. But he was also determined to revive
and extend the European primacy that the Bourbons had lost. The effect of this on Europe's relations with the Outer World – in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and even the Pacific – was bound to be large. The Eurasian implications in the Near East, Central Asia and India (and thus China) hardly less so.

The first round of this struggle was fought over Egypt. In 1798 Napoleon and Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, framed an extraordinary plan for the conquest of Egypt. For Napoleon, whose military idol was Alexander the Great, the appeal was obvious. ‘Europe is a molehill,' he is said to have exclaimed; ‘all the great reputations have come from Asia.'
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But his and Talleyrand's reasoning suggests how far they had grasped the scale of geopolitical change since mid-century.
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Control of Egypt would allow France to revive the Suez route between Europe and India, and counter the ever-growing dominance of Atlantic-borne trade. An Egyptian empire would compensate France for the loss of its American colonies – Quebec and Louisiana, lost in 1763. It would help check the forward movement of Russia towards its ultimate object, the Ottoman capital at Constantinople – a movement that seemed to be accelerating sharply. And it would raise the stakes for the British in India at a crucial time. With France lodged at Suez, at the head of the Red Sea, and French influence radiating towards the Gulf and Iran, the diplomatic and military position of the British East India Company would be drastically weakened. Overawing the Sikhs, the Marathas, Hyderabad and Mysore would become much harder, perhaps even impossible. If its costs and risks became too large, the British experiment in oriental imperialism might collapse altogether.

In July 1798 Napoleon landed in Egypt with
40,000
troops – an enormous force. He also brought with him a 165-strong team of astronomers, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, mechanical, constructional and civil engineers, surveyors, architects, zoologists, artists, composers, economists, antiquaries, printers, surgeons, physicians and pharmacists. Their task was to record the past and plan the future of Napoleonic Egypt. On 21 July, at the Battle of the Pyramids, Mamluk rule was shattered. Napoleon insisted that the French had come to liberate the people from Mamluk tyranny, and promised respect for the Islamic religion, even discussing with the leading
ulama
the terms on which a mass conversion of his army might be considered (circumcision proved a stumbling block). He dispatched friendly messages to the Muslim rulers along the North African coast as far as Morocco, to the sultan of Darfur, and to Tipu Sultan in India. Muscat in the Gulf was suspected by the British of being under French influence. Plans were laid for the march into Syria, so that France would control the whole Levantine coast, as well as the western half of the Fertile Crescent. The ultimate scope of Napoleon's aims remains unclear. He must have intended that the geopolitical shock of his blitzkrieg invasion would rebalance the scales in favour of France, drawing the Ottomans back to their old alliance against Russia and Austria. But the odds were against him. Within days of his arrival in Cairo, Nelson's victory at Aboukir Bay destroyed the French fleet and cut him off from France. Egypt was too poor, too weak and too vulnerable to bear the burden of French rule and carry an army without overseas supplies. Revolt and resistance increased. The Ottomans declared war. The Syrian expedition failed. The ‘Muslim' diplomacy came to nothing. By the time of Napoleon's secret departure for France in August 1799, Tipu Sultan was dead, defeated and killed by the British in May. The French army clung on, but there were no means in Paris to come to its aid. In June 1801 Cairo was captured by troops sent from Britain and India. The eastern project was finished.

This was not the end of the struggle, although the roof soon fell in on Napoleon's hopes of challenging the British at sea. In the decisive battle near Cape Trafalgar off the Spanish coast in October 1805, his nemesis, Nelson, shattered the French and Spanish fleets beyond hope of recovery. Napoleon had already abandoned the American mainland: Louisiana, recovered from Spain in 1800, had been sold for cash to the United States. St Domingue (modern Haiti), France's richest colony, was lost to a black revolt by 1804. Command of the sea allowed the British to seal off their empire in Asia. They captured the Cape in 1806, and the French Ile de France (modern Mauritius) in 1810. The Indian Ocean became a British lake. In 1811 they seized the Indonesian empire of Napoleon's client kingdom in the Netherlands.

Napoleon may have dreamed of renewing a French-led alliance with the Ottomans and Iran, partly to neutralize Russia in Europe,
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but little came of this. His main object was still European hegemony.
In the same month as Trafalgar, his triumph at Austerlitz brought this prospect closer. The Austrians and Prussians were crushed. Napoleon redrew the map of Germany for a new client state, the Confederation of the Rhine, and reinvented Poland as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. In 1807 at Tilsit, he and Tsar Alexander met on a raft and pledged Russo-French friendship. With Europe subdued, Napoleon turned the screws on Britain. Decrees at Berlin in 1806 and Milan the next year closed the whole continent to trade with the British. A reverse blockade was declared, to wreck the British economy, suck out its bullion, and force London to terms. If the British wished to be masters at sea, Napoleon seemed to be saying, he would drown them in their own element.

Had he succeeded, he might have recovered the ground France had lost since the failure in Egypt. But it was almost certainly too late. The ‘continental system' that was meant to exclude British trade leaked like a sieve. It also destroyed any chance that Europe would accept Napoleon's version of empire. ‘To ensure its success', wrote his former secretary caustically, ‘it was necessary to conquer and occupy every country, and never to withdraw from any.'
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Despite the magnetic appeal of his name for those discontented with the arthritic regime of the European dynasts, Napoleon's empire became intolerably burdensome. Russia rejected the commercial yoke, and demanded a promise that the Poles would never regain their kingdom. By 1812 Napoleon had reached the conclusion that only Russia's conquest would guarantee peace. Catastrophe followed. In the ‘battle of nations' at Leipzig in October 1813, Napoleon's Grand Army, ravaged by its winter retreat from Moscow, was decisively beaten by the Austrians, Russians and Prussians. As France itself was invaded from the east and the south (by a British army from Spain), he went into exile (on Elba). His empire collapsed. Once his last bid for power (the ‘hundred days' in 1815) had failed on the battlefield at Waterloo, the Vienna peace conference could reach its conclusions. In fact the decisions it made were Eurasian – if not global – in scope. The peacemakers grasped that there was no going back to the dynastic free-for-all of the
ancien
reégime. Twenty-five years of revolution and war made the prospect unthinkable. Instead they constructed a territorial settlement to preserve a balance of strength between five great powers – Austria,
Prussia, Russia, France and Britain – designed to ensure that no single one could dominate the others. They invented the ‘Concert of Europe', a process by which the five were to arbitrate differences and preserve the new distribution of power.
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The Vienna settlement proved remarkably durable: Europe avoided a general war for nearly a century. Partly in consequence, it secured the conditions in which the two ‘flanking' powers, Britain and Russia, were left free to pursue their extra-European ambitions except where they threatened the European peace. Vienna opened the door to Asia's encirclement from the north and the south.

The defeat of Napoleon and of his project of empire had a wider significance. It was the real culmination of the great geopolitical shift whose course we have traced, and whose radical impact he had failed to deflect. Once the British were free from the threat he had posed, they quickly made themselves masters of the Indian subcontinent. The commercial penetration of China, under way already before 1800, began to speed up. Although they handed the Indonesian archipelago back to the new Netherlands kingdom (designed as a barrier to French expansion in Europe), the British retained Singapore island and made it into the entrepô t for much of South East Asia. In the west, Spain's share of naval disaster in 1805 soon cost it control of its Spanish-American empire, whose trade was thrown open, mainly to Britain. Thus the cumulative effect of Napoleon's failure and Britain's success was to smash what remained of the old mercantilist system. The rival empires of trade, with their fleets and fortresses, their chartered companies and commercial monopolies, had been made obsolete by Britain's ‘command of the ocean'. Even the British East India Company was forced to open up India to non-Company merchants in 1813–although it kept its China monopoly until 1833. The most powerful check on the expansion of trade – the huge overhead costs of rival mercantile empires – had melted away. It remained to be seen how soon private trade – ‘free trade' – would exploit the new opportunities that this great change presented.

The geopolitical revolution had three major effects. Through the occupation and settlement of Outer World regions, it broke down the barriers to Europe's physical expansion. The North American interior and the South Pacific would soon be annexed as demographic extensions of North West Europe: they would become ‘neo-Europes'. Secondly, in the critical stage after 1803 (when the European war was resumed after the briefest of respites) British sea power demolished the mercantilist zoning that had subdivided world trade into exclusive blocs, by destroying the naval balance of power on which it depended: the combined strength of the Spanish, French and Dutch fleets. The overhead costs (and risks) of long-distance trade, the excuse for commercial monopoly (justified in the past on grounds of the high price of protection) and the bar to new entrants were all cut away. Thirdly, the great transition in South Asia, carried through in stages between 1757 and 1817 (when Maratha power was broken), had offered the British huge windfall gains. By seizing control of the revenue and trade of Bengal, India's wealthiest region, the British acquired at a stroke the lever they needed to force open the door into South China's economy. With India as the base for their shipping and credit, the regional trades of East and South East Asia could be hooked up more easily to the long-distance traffic between Asia and Europe. The commercial seclusion of the East Asian world could at last be challenged.

It was unlikely, however, that these striking advances would have yielded much more than a temporary gain without a further great change in the economic relations between the European states and the rest of Eurasia. The great limitation on Europe's commercial exchanges with most of the rest of Eurasia had been the miserably small scale of the trade. It was almost entirely confined to luxury goods, tiny in bulk, and with a limited market. A year's worth of imports from Asia (so Jan de Vries has calculated) would scarcely fill up one modern container ship. Part of the problem had been that Europeans had little to sell that appealed to Indian or Chinese customers except bullion: that was why cotton and opium from India had been such a
boon to the East India Company's agents buying tea in Canton. The only sure way of wedging open their access to the Asian consumer was to find European products in general demand, and discover some means of distributing them widely. Unless they did that, the growth in trade volume and value would soon level off: the doors they had pushed open might be closed again by more resolute rulers, and the Indian windfall be soon eaten up by the costs of conquest and rule.

What this meant in practice was that the enlargement and reordering of Europe's Asian trade that geopolitics had made possible would have to be supercharged by technological change if this trade was to escape stagnation. A technological transformation would be needed before European producers could overcome the historic advantage of their Asian competitors: the much lower costs of production in their artisan industries. The technology of travel required a similar change in Asia (and elsewhere) if the scale of exchange was not to be crippled by the costs of transport that isolated inland regions. Last, but not least, if the natural reluctance of indigenous rulers, whether Asian, African or even Latin American, to admit foreign traders and trade on more or less equal terms was to be overcome, or ‘discouraged', then the ability to project power at very long range and at reasonable cost would have to be found. Since Europeans hitherto had enjoyed no obvious military advantage over other Eurasian (or African) states, except on the high seas, this also implied a technological solution.