After Tamerlane (34 page)

5. Commodore Perry's entry into Tokyo harbour, 1853

The Eurasian Revolution had signalled the onset of a seismic change in the relations of continents and civilizations. It transformed the geopolitics of the early modern world. When the Russians took control of the Crimea, they opened up the Ottoman defences like an oyster and won a springboard for the Romanov annexation of Georgia in 1804. Georgia was the gateway to the Caspian provinces of Iran, soon wrenched from the Qajars' grasp in the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828). With their defences off balance, the Ottomans saw Egypt occupied first by the French and then by the British, before escaping into virtual independence under their rebellious viceroy Mehemet Ali. This drastic shift in the geostrategy of the Near East made both the Ottomans and the Iranians much more vulnerable than before to the rival ambitions of the European states. But their fate was not peculiar. A comparable revolution had occurred in South Asia, where a British ‘company state' based mainly in Bengal, had become the dominant military power by the 1830s after a half-century of war. From their port city of Bombay, the British could now drive their influence into the Persian Gulf and across the Indian Ocean into southern Arabia (Aden was seized in 1839), Zanzibar and East Africa. It was from eastern India and its South East Asian outposts (the ‘Straits Settlements') that they dispatched the forces that broke the historic seclusion of the Chinese Empire and compelled the Ch'ing to open their ports in 1842.

The Europeans' invasion of the Asian states, their breakthrough into the North American interior (once the settlers had thrown off British imperial control in 1783), their beachheads in the South Pacific and the spasmodic advances into West and Southern Africa showed how far they had broken free from the constraints of the early modern world. We have seen how their opportunism was stimulated by consumer demand in Europe for Atlantic commodities and Asian luxuries. The increasingly universalist claims of European religious and intellectual culture offered a justification for these conquests, an explanation
for their success, and a programme for advance. Technological innovation made (some) Europeans more productive than Asians and freed them from dependence upon the imported luxuries of the Asian world, especially textiles and porcelain. By the 1830s, Europeans were assembling the means for the physical, commercial and cultural domination of regions that had been beyond their reach only sixty years before, and whose civilizations had once seemed awesome and impregnable to European communities wedged at one end of the Eurasian land mass.

Yet even in the 1830s, such a European pre-eminence was not a foregone conclusion. The second round of discoveries and invasions and the technical innovation behind the Europeans' commercial and military expansion might have counted for little had European societies not adapted in ways that maximized their leverage in the non-European world. It is not difficult to imagine an alternative scenario in which Europe's new wave of expansion was slowed down or checked altogether. The most likely obstacle was the renewal of conflict within Europe itself. The peace of 1815 had sealed the defeat of Napoleonic imperialism. But a restless superpower, whose defeat had required a continental coalition; the ideological legacy of a violent revolution; gimcrack states (like the Netherlands); submerged nationalities (like Poland); and the fragile apparatus of dynastic overrule across Central and Southern Europe (the Habsburg Empire) together made up an unpromising recipe for continental peace. A new round of open warfare, or even an armed peace (a cold war), would have had far wider consequences. It would have blocked the channels of trade and encouraged a general return to the mercantilist self-sufficiency that the economist Robert Malthus predicted, choking off the British experiment in industrialism. (‘No great commercial and manufacturing state in modern times…' said Malthus, ‘has yet been known permanently to make higher profits than the average of the rest of Europe.')
¹
It would have delayed the diffusion of capital and technology that set off Europe's railway age after 1830.
²
It would have stopped in its tracks the flow of immigration from Europe that was feasible only when the sea lanes were safe and conscription was light. Indeed, any general war in Europe would have changed the face of the nineteenth-century world. As in earlier conflicts, the European states would have carried
their quarrels into the other continents. The temptation to seek allies among the great Asian states would have been irresistible. Even when they were at peace with each other, Britain, France and Russia competed fiercely for the favours of the Ottomans, Egyptians, Iranians and Chinese. With European allies, it might have been much easier than it proved for Asian rulers to modernize their armies and manage the pace of political change. In the meantime, the growth of the overseas ‘neo-Europes' in the Americas and Australasia would have been stalled as the flows of trade, capital and manpower on which they depended were dammed or frozen. After the upheavals of 1750–1830, the world would have drifted towards a new equilibrium. Sheltered by the bitterness of European divisions, the rest of Eurasia and many indigenous peoples in the Outer World would have gained a breathing space: to reconnoitre, rearm and reform.

Instead they found themselves in a race against time: a race to ‘self-strengthen' before European power and wealth could overwhelm their defences. Far from renewing their internecine quarrels, European societies recoiled from war and embarked instead upon an uneasy experiment in political and economic cooperation under the ideological banner of a wary, limited and contested liberalism. A ‘Greater Europe' emerged to include both Russia and the United States in a vast zone in which political and cultural differences were moderated by a sense of shared ‘Europeanness' (‘Americanness' was merely a provincial variant) in the face of recalcitrant nature, hostile indigenes or ‘Asiatic' competitors. It was a crucial if unexpected evolution, a huge accretion of strength by default, a vast material reinforcement. For if Europe was to transcend its old Eurasian limits and command the centre of the world, it had to become something more. It had to be reinvented as the ‘West'.

It might seem strange to argue that across the vast expanse of the Northern world from the American West to the Russian East a form of pax prevailed during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Half a dozen exceptions would spring to mind. There were wars
between the European states: the Crimean War (1854–6), in which Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire fought Russia; the wars of Italian (1859–60) and German (1866) unification, involving France, Piedmont–Sardinia, Naples, Austria and Prussia; the War of the Danish Duchies (1864); and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. There were wars on the borders of Europe between Russians and Ottomans in 1877–8, between French and Muslims in North Africa, between the British and Egyptians in 1882. The longest and bloodiest conflict of all was fought on the American continent in the civil war between North and South (1861–5). But, numerous and bloody as these conflicts were, none of them led to a
general
war between the states and societies of Greater Europe. The Crimean War, which involved three great powers, and nearly a fourth (Austria), was practically localized in the Black and Baltic seas. The wars over Italy, Denmark, and German unification, and the Franco-Prussian War, were short, relatively limited, campaigns in which the great powers not directly concerned refused to participate. The Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–8 was concluded without blood being spilt between the European powers. The American Civil War involved no other power, although the North's blockade of the South came close to provoking intervention by the British.

More to the point, the result of these wars was not to instigate a wider struggle for continental or hemispheric supremacy. In Italy, Germany and the United States, their main effect was to demolish the regional barriers that obstructed the building of more cohesive nation states. Devastating as they were to the combatants and civilians caught up in them, the limited character of these ‘Western wars' may have contributed to the widespread belief that armed conflict was an acceptable, perhaps necessary, means of resolving international differences and ‘building the nation'. But what force restrained Europeans from the unlimited wars of mutual destruction in which they had engaged before 1815, and to which they resorted, even more catastrophically, after 1914?

The most important influence was the memory of the great war that had swept across Europe for a generation after 1792. The endless cycle of campaigns and conflicts, the seeming impossibility of any lasting peace, the experience of revolutionary turmoil and military
despotism, and the terrifying fragility that the wars revealed in nations' social fabric made a huge impression on European opinion. It discredited the
ancien reégime
, which had failed so dismally to keep the peace, and the old diplomacy, which now seemed so cynical, opportunistic and irresponsible. It demonstrated the urgent need for collective action against any great power that seemed to threaten the general peace. And it highlighted the importance of reconstructing Europe in the interests of its geopolitical stability. The Vienna settlement of 1815 and the ‘concert system' that was meant to uphold it were the handiwork of statesmen whose watchword was ‘never again'.
³

Organized collective action against infringements of the Vienna treaty broke down soon enough. But the main principles of the concert system had a much longer life. They outlawed any unilateral act that would upset the overall balance of influence among the five great powers of Europe, the ‘management committee' of its public affairs: Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Russia. Change in the control of Europe's lesser states, or in the provinces of its dynastic empires, required the collective consent of the powers in conference. Of course, even this provision fell into disuse when the great powers quarrelled among themselves: their disunity was exploited by the French and Piedmont against Austria in 1859, and by Bismarck against Austria and later France. But the underlying convention was remarkably tenacious. Even Russia, often cast as the uncivilized bear of European diplomacy, with an insatiable appetite for control of the Straits, deferred to the concert idea, and its Balkan diplomacy was much less adventurist than was often portrayed by its critics in Britain and France.
⁴

The strength of the concert system derived from self-interest: not just the fear of war, but nervousness about geopolitical change. British leaders were sometimes inclined to play to the domestic gallery and denounce the politics of their European neighbours. Austrian repression in northern Italy and Hungary was a favourite target. But even a minister as pugnacious as Lord Palmerston usually preferred rhetoric to action.
⁵
A bond far stronger than the concert principle united Austria, Prussia and Russia in an unspoken conservative alliance. All three ruled over vast tracts of Eastern Europe in defiance of
any national principle. All three had reason to fear (especially after the 1848 revolutions) that any falling-out between them would set off a general explosion in which subjugated Poland (of which each had a share) would sound the first and loudest blast (the Polish revolt of 1863 was a timely reminder). This was why Bismarck (a Prussian
Junker
from east of the Elbe), for all his talk of ‘blood and iron' and his reputation for
Machtpolitik
, stopped well short of any drastic reordering of the European map. His ‘German Empire' of 1871 carefully preserved the old states and monarchies of the Germanic Confederation and repudiated the
Grossdeutsch
ideal of uniting all ethnic Germans (including those under Habsburg rule) in a single state. Indeed, the main challenger to the Vienna order up to 1870 was not Prussia but France. It was Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Bonaparte who had proclaimed himself emperor in 1851, who plotted the downfall of Austrian hegemony in the Italian peninsula. But even the French (least of all the peasants on whose votes Louis Napoleon depended) had no appetite for revolutionary warfare, and the paradoxical result of their intervention was not the client state in northern Italy that they wanted but an all-Italian Mediterranean rival. Ten years later, in 1870, the hollowness of France's claim to continental primacy was brutally exposed at Sedan.

Thus it might be too much to claim that peace prevailed across the ‘Western Zone' from the 1830s to the 1880s. But it would be reasonable to conclude that a broad geopolitical stability – a pax – was maintained. This stability had several important results. Firstly, although Britain's maritime primacy was never wholly secure,
⁶
the sea routes within Greater Europe (especially the North Atlantic) as well as between Europe and the rest of the world remained open and safe throughout the period.
⁷
This had a huge bearing on the cheapness, reliability and speed of intercontinental connections and the gradual extension of Europe-centred trade. The large investment in new fleets of steamships from the 1840s onwards would have been unthinkable in conditions of maritime disorder. Secondly, the careful balance the continental states maintained among themselves, combined with the maritime strength of Britain, ruled out intervention in either North or South America, and allowed the United States to develop a
sifit
really was isolated, unburdened by the need for external defence. This
enormous benefit permitted the single-minded pursuit of economic growth and a local settlement of the violent disputes that constantly threatened to tear the Union apart right up to the final solution of 1865. Thirdly, the structure of European diplomacy conferred a wide freedom on Russia, France and Britain (the three ‘world' powers up to the 1880s) to pursue their interests outside the continent, but simultaneously restrained them from an imperial free-for-all. The careful preservation of the Dutch colonial empire in South East Asia after 1815 and the equal trading and consular rights enjoyed by most European states in China after 1842 (mainly secured by British force) were symptomatic of the concern of metropolitan governments to avoid a violent clash of interests in Asia or the Outer World. Fourthly, geopolitical stability in Greater Europe favoured the growth (gradual, erratic, contested) of a minimal common ideology of ‘limited liberalism'.