After Tamerlane (33 page)

Part of the reason was the mysterious dynamism of the European economies, especially Britain's, and the advantage this gave them commercially and technologically. Supplanting Asian producers in their export markets, and then on their doorstep (when the British sold their yarn in India), pushed former manufacturing rivals towards the humbler position of raw-material providers – though not all at once, and never completely. Technological change, especially in steam power and high-energy processes, began to confer a whole set of advantages: in easing access to inland regions (rubbing out the old safety of non-maritime states); in the speed of movement (especially of troops); and in transmitting information. By the 1840s, no states that lacked this new communications technology could hope to match the long-range exertion of power by those who did possess it. The result was to place them on the constant defensive: to encircle them strategically, much as the new pattern of commerce had begun to box them in economically.

Indeed, the transformation at work could almost be summarized quickly and crudely as Europe's gradual occupation of an imaginary ‘central place' from which the diplomacy and commerce of the rest of the world could be prodded and moulded into convenient shape. The great highways of international exchange (for goods, ideas and people) fell under the surveillance of European agencies – like the British navy. In the last section we saw how this intoxicating sensation of being at the centre of things – the principal source of cultural energy, the headquarters of knowledge, the entrepôt of world trade, and (for the evangelicals) the great depot of truth – had become almost a given in European thought by the end of the century. Not even China could retain its mystique. ‘The Empire of China', wrote Lord Macartney at the end of his abortive mission in 1794, ‘is an old crazy first-rate man-of-war [i.e. battleship], which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance.' But with lesser men at the helm her fate would be to be dashed to pieces on the shore.
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How was this great change in the balance of Eurasia – and hence of the world – to be explained? Had some overarching cause decided the fates of Western Eurasia (and its North American annexe) and the rest of the ‘world island'? A plausible case might be made for the growth of trade as the critical factor. Not just long-distance trade, but the increase in commercial activity found right across eighteenth-century Eurasia as a result of the division of labour, specialization and the widening of the market. Commercialization was a political and cultural as well as an economic phenomenon. It unsettled old habits, promoted new tastes, created new discontents, disempowered old rulers, and advanced new interests. It stretched and strained the social fabric. It was a source of alarm as well as of complacency, most of all, perhaps, in the richest of states. Dislike of new wealth and its dubious origins created a new moral climate in late Hanoverian Britain in which the slave trade (reaching its peak in the 1780s) came under ever-fiercer attack from conservative as well as radical opinion.
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According to this argument, what really mattered was that some parts of Eurasia were more successful than others at adapting to the demands of commercialization and exploiting its benefits. In fact the
critical issue for the survival and cohesion of states and societies can be described more precisely. It was whether their rulers were able to control the new flows of wealth to reinforce the power of the state against external attack. Four different cases may suggest how this worked. In North West Europe, British governments were able, by the ruthless deployment of maritime power and commercial regulation, to suffocate Dutch competition in the Atlantic trade and to tax Britain's new wealth to finance the costs of globalized warfare. In Middle Eurasia, the Ottoman Empire rejected the mercantilist doctrines favoured in Britain, allowing shipping and trade (and the revenues they promised) to fall into the hands of foreign merchants and the Christian ‘Levantines', who gained foreign ‘protection'. The fiscal resources with which to finance the stronger state needed by the 1780s were thus absent or lacking. In India, there were two different places where mercantilist states might have flourished. The first was Bengal, but it collapsed in the crisis of 1756–7 and became the East India Company's economic colony. The second was Mysore, whose political leaders were much more astute. It took the British thirty years and three wars to batter it to death. In the last case, East Asia, the verdict was still open until the late 1830s. For here, with far greater success than elsewhere beyond Europe, the rulers (of China and Japan) had preserved their control over foreign trade. What was much more uncertain was whether their grip on domestic sources of wealth would allow the courts in Edo and Peking to keep up their guard against Western intrusion.

Yet it should not be thought that non-European states had lost all room for manoeuvre. The Ottoman Empire passed through a terrible crisis in the 1830s, and came close to breaking up in 1833 and 1839. On both occasions it was saved mainly by the intervention of the European powers in a tacit admission that its survival (as both guardian of the Straits and governor of much of the Balkans, Anatolia and the Arab lands) had become an essential prop of Europe's postwar balance of power. Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) and Abdul Mejid

(r. 1839–61) used external pressure to force through the changes intended to strengthen their grip on the imperial system and recentralize a decentralized empire.
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Ironically, the greatest threat to Ottoman rule had come not from the Europeans, but from a rebellious vassal,
the pasha of Egypt. Mehemet Ali (an Albanian Mamluk), who had arrived in Egypt in 1805 as the Ottoman governor, exploited the wrecking of the old regime at Napoleon's hands. He smashed the remnants of Mamluk power, took back the land revenue from the tax-farmers, and turned Egypt's exports (of cotton and grain) into state monopolies. In 1816 he started a textile factory.
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Like Tipu Sultan in Mysore, his aim was to build a fiscal-military state that could master the region. In 1820 he invaded the upper Nile valley (modern Sudan) and founded Khartoum in search of black slaves to man his new army.
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By the 1830s he had a huge conscript army of Egyptian peasants, and had forced the sultan to acknowledge the autonomy of his Greater Egypt, including Syria, Crete and the Sudan as well as Egypt itself. Without European intervention in 1839–40, it is more than likely that this tough adventurer and his garrison state would have absorbed most of the Ottoman Empire in Asia.
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Checked though he was, he had turned Egypt into a dynastic state, with the most dynamic economy anywhere in the region.

In Iran, too, there was a surprising recovery from the chaotic conditions after the death of Nadir Shah in 1747. A rump state emerged to rule the west of the country under a Zand tribal leader, Karim Khan, who governed (at least nominally) as a Safavid viceroy.
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The north and east (Khorasan) remained beyond his control. A new period of disorder broke out on his death, but by the mid- 1790s another Turkic clan from the north had recovered most of what the Safavids once ruled. The first Qajar shah, Agha Mohammed, was crowned in 1796. His successor, Fath Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834), was forced to surrender the suzerainty of Georgia and part of Azerbaijan to the aggressive imperialism of the Russian generals in the Caucasus. The attempt to resist ended in the humiliating treaties of 1813 and 1828. But by a cautious rapprochement with the suspicious
ulama
, the careful refurbishment of ancient imperial tradition, Machiavellian tactics against the refractory tribes who controlled much of Iran,
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and increasing skill in playing off the British against the Russians, the Qajar shahs reversed the drift towards internal collapse and bought time for reform.
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On the South East Asian mainland, the age of European dominance seemed still more remote. The Burmese Empire, with its capital at Ava
on the upper Irrawaddy, had been plunged into crisis in the mid eighteenth century (at about the time of Plassey) by the revolt of its subject peoples, the Mon and the Shan. But, far from falling apart, it staged a dramatic recovery under the Kon-baung kings.
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Its northward expansion towards the Himalayas, not British aggression, was the cause of the First Anglo-Burmese War, in 1824–5. In Siam, a similar pattern of consolidation could be seen after 1750. Like the Burmese kings, the Chakri monarchy skimmed the profits from the ‘country trade' between India and China to fatten their patronage and cultural prestige. Most striking of all was the reunification of long-divided Vietnam under the Nguyen emperors in 1802. In all these cases, the local divisions and conflicts that had favoured the Europeans in maritime India and the Indonesian archipelago were conspicuously lacking.
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Nor, of course, was Europe's advance always a barrier to non-Europe's expansion. Europe's markets and merchants could be turned to advantage, and so could its politics. The imam of Muscat, whose Omani domain guarded the entrance to the Persian Gulf, put them all to good use. Omani sailors and traders had an old connection with the east coast of Africa. By the 1820s they had stolen its slave trade from the Portuguese in Mozambique and had turned Zanzibar into an emporium attracting British, German and American shipping. The rising demand for slaves (in the Middle East) and ivory (in Europe) fuelled the rapid enlargement of a mercantile empire on the East African mainland. By the 1840s, Zanzibar had become so prosperous that the imam had moved his capital there.
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But why did the British – committed since 1807 to destroying the slave trade at sea – exempt the imam from their general ban? He was too useful an ally of their sea power in the Gulf, the chief source of their influence on the shah of Iran. Too brusque a suppression of his profitable trade, warned the Indian viceroy, might cause ‘even our old and faithful ally, the Imam of Muscat… to be estranged from us'.
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It was an ill wind that blew no one any good, the imam might have reflected, as he pondered the growth of his monsoon empire.

Finally we should cast a glance at the most intriguing case of all. One great Eurasian state had remained almost untouched by the expansion of Europe. The Tokugawa shoguns had preserved Japan's
seclusion far more rigorously than the Ch'ing rulers had protected China. They allowed a handful of Dutch traders to come to Deshima, in Nagasaki harbour, and permitted an occasional visit to Edo, partly, it seems, for the fun of seeing the barbarians walk and talk in their peculiar fashion. They also permitted some trade with China (there was a Chinatown in Nagasaki). Despite their extreme hostility to the subversive influence of Christianity, they allowed the limited circulation of ‘Dutch (i.e. Western) knowledge' among the scholarly class. But they remained vigilant to the point of paranoia against the activity of ‘spies'. One scientific visitor who was caught with maps of Japan in his baggage was imprisoned for a year; his Japanese contacts suffered a drastic penalty.

Under seclusion, Japan had become very largely autarkic. Foreign trade was tiny. The domestic economy was divided into separate
han
or princely domains, although the demands of Edo (whose million people made it perhaps the largest city in the world) had created a massive internal trade, especially in foodstuffs. In the eighteenth century, a stable population (unlike China's great surge) and an ‘industrious revolution' – more intensive farming and the use of household labour for spinning and weaving – had allowed a modest rise in prosperity. But there were warning signs that agricultural production was now close to its limits. Bad weather brought famine in the 1780s and, after a brief remission, again in the 1830s. Rural hardship provoked rural unrest on a growing scale. The impoverishment of the samurai and the decline of the shogun's revenues (both arose from the difficulty of raising the land tax against peasant resistance) stirred a debate on the social and political order. To make matters worse, from the 1790s there was a series of alerts that Japan's long immunity from European interference had come to an end. A Russian expedition appeared on Hokkaido in 1792. Ten years later the Russians returned to ask for admission to the trade at Nagasaki. Still more alarming was the unexpected arrival in Nagasaki harbour in 1808 of a large British warship, which departed only when its menacing demand for supplies had been met. This was the shogun's first warning of the changes in the Euro-Atlantic world since the 1770s. Other casual visitors, whaling ships seeking water and food, were an unwelcome reminder that Western shipping had come to stay in the North Pacific and that Japan lay
across the main sea lane between America and China. Until the 1840s, however, the impact of all this was surprisingly limited. The dominant view among Japanese scholars fiercely affirmed the innate superiority of the ‘Divine Realm' over the Western barbarians and their insidious thoughts. The prohibition on foreigners' landing was enforced even more strictly.
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And, as it turned out, Japan's geopolitical niche, at the furthest remove from European power, and shielded by China (the primary object of European attention), preserved the country's seclusion for two further (perhaps crucial) decades. But the race against time was coming even to Nippon.