After Tamerlane (4 page)

Europe thus engaged in a double expansion. The outward signs of the first were the spread of railways and steamships, building a vast web of connections much faster and more certain than in earlier times and capable of pouring a huge stream of goods into once inaccessible places. Harbour works, railway stations, telegraph lines, warehouses, banks, insurance companies, shops, hotels (like Shepheards' in Cairo or Raffles' in Singapore), clubs and even churches formed the global grid of Europe's commercial empire, allowing free passage to European merchants and trade and easing their access to a mass of new customers. The second mode was territorial. It meant the acquisition of forts and bases from which soldiers and warships could be sent to coerce or conquer. It meant the control of key zones astride the maritime highways that ran between Europe and the rest of the world: the classic case was Egypt, occupied by Britain in 1882. It meant a pattern of rule through which the products and revenues of colonial regions could be diverted at will to imperial purposes. Once their Raj was in place, the British taxed Indians to pay for the military power – a sepoy army – that they needed in Asia. Europe's commercial empire and its territorial empires did not overlap completely. But the crucial point about this double expansion was its interdependence. Territorial imperialism was a battering ram. It could break open markets that resisted free trade, or (as in India) conscript local resources to build the railways and roads that European traders demanded. It could promise protection to European entrepreneurs, or (as happened often in Africa) make them a free gift of local land and labour. But it also relied on the technological, industrial and financial assets that Europe could deploy. These might be decisive when it came to fighting – steam-powered ships and superior weaponry helped win Britain's first war in China in 1839–42 – though certainly not in all places.
¹⁸
The real advantage of industrial imperialism lay in scale and speed. Industrial technique and the supply of capital allowed
Europeans to stage a series of blitzkrieg conquests. They could lay down railways at breakneck speed to bring their force to bear hundreds of miles from the sea. They could flood a new zone with European settlers and transform its demography almost overnight, disorienting indigenous peoples and making resistance seem futile. They could transform alien environments with amazing completeness into a familiar European-style habitat: introducing wild animals, birds, fish, trees and flowers as well as crops and livestock. Above all, they could turn even the remotest parts of the globe into suppliers of the everyday goods like butter, meat or cheese once reserved for local producers at home. The gaunt freezing works with their grimy smokestacks that sprang up round the coasts of New Zealand after 1880 were the industrial face of colonization.

It would be wrong to suppose that Europeans lacked the support of allies and helpers; but they played the critical role in remaking the world. But how do we explain the extraordinary shift, which seemed all but complete by 1914, from a world of Eurasian ‘connectedness' to a global-imperial world? Despite the libraries of writing that deal with the subject, much remains puzzling. Those magical dates 1492 (when Columbus crossed the Atlantic) and 1498 (when Vasco da Gama arrived in India) may have signalled the start of Europe's new era. But the pace of advance was spasmodic at best. Three centuries after Columbus had made landfall, most of the North American mainland remained unoccupied and virtually unexplored by Europeans. It took nearly three hundred years for the corner of India where Vasco da Gama had landed to fall under European rule (Calicut was annexed by the British in 1792). The rush started only at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not just the timing, but the form and direction of Europe's expansion need more explanation. Why did the Ottoman Empire and Iran preserve their autonomy long after India, which was much further away? Why was India subjected to colonial rule while China was able to keep its sovereign status, though much hedged about, and Japan had become a colonial power by 1914? If industrial capitalism was the key to the spread of European influence, why did its impact take so long to be felt across so much of the world, and with such variable consequences? Why were Europe's own divisions, periodically unleashed with such lethal effect, not more destructive of
its imperial ambitions? And what indeed should be counted as ‘Europe'? Why did some parts of ‘non-Europe' succeed so much better than others at keeping Europe at bay, or throw off its grip more quickly? And how much was left, once Europe's empires collapsed, of the ‘world Europe had made'?

To answer these questions, it seems wise to adopt a somewhat different approach from that of previous histories. Four basic assumptions have shaped the arguments advanced in this book. The first is that we should reject the idea of a linear change in the course of modern world history, in which Europe
progressively
rose to preeminence, then fell and rose again as part of the ‘West'. It is more productive to think in terms of ‘conjunctures', periods of time when certain general conditions in different parts of the world coincided to encourage (or check) the enlargement of trade, the expansion of empires, the exchange of ideas or the movement of people. The way that this happened might tilt the balance of advantage between different parts of the world, temporarily at least. One condition alone was rarely decisive. Producers and consumers might wish to do business. But governments and rulers also had to agree to permit free(ish) trade – or any trade at all. Politics and geopolitics were a vital part of the equation. The outbreak of wars and their unpredictable course could shatter one equilibrium and impose another. Thus the great expansion of trade in the late nineteenth century and the kinds of globalization it helped to promote came to a shuddering halt with the First World War. After 1929, ‘deglobalization' set in with catastrophic results. Europe's original breakthrough to a position of primacy in its global relations is much better seen as the unexpected result of a revolution in Eurasia than as the outcome of a steady advance in Columbus's footsteps. The appropriate imagery is not of rivers or tides, but of earthquakes and floods.

The second assumption is that we must set Europe's age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context. That means recognizing the
central
importance of Europe's connections with other Old World civilizations and states in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. Of course, Europe's forced entry into the ‘Outer World' and the ‘neo-Europes' it created in the Americas, Australasia and Southern Africa were a key part of the story. Without the exploitation of American resources,
and the commercial integration of North East America and North West Europe to form an ‘Atlantic' economy, the eventual creation of a global economy in the late nineteenth century might not have happened at all. But the staggering scale of American wealth – the wonder of the world for more than a century – should not distract us. The centre of gravity in modern world history lies in Eurasia – in the troubled, conflicted, connected and intimate relations of its great cultures and states, strung out in a line from the European ‘Far West' to the Asian ‘Far East'.

Perhaps surprisingly, the most forceful statement of this ‘Eurasian' view was made a century ago by a British geographer-imperialist, Halford Mackinder.
¹⁹
Mackinder was keen to remind his audience that the ‘Columbian epoch', when European sea power had seemed to master the world, was only an interlude. The advantage of sea over land as a means of travel was temporary, not permanent: the invention of railways had seen to that. Before long the dominant influence in the world's affairs would revert to the power(s) that commanded Eurasia (what Mackinder called the ‘world island') by controlling its ‘heartland'. From this central position, and with a network of railways to mobilize vast resources, a Eurasian empire could drive any rival to the world's maritime fringe – the ‘Outer World' of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, island South East Asia and Oceania – and even challenge it there. There is no need to follow Mackinder's geopolitical vision to its logical end (his aim after all was to puncture the complacency of the Edwardian Establishment), although the nightmare scenario of a ‘heartland' super-empire became less far-fetched in the age of Nazi and Soviet imperialism. What we can see today, perhaps even more clearly than he, is that the shifting balance of wealth and power between Eurasia's main elements, and the different terms on which these elements entered the global economy and the modern ‘world system', form the hammer and anvil of modern world history.

It might even be argued that Europe's annexation of the Outer World is only a part of this Eurasian history, and depended heavily upon Eurasian developments. In sub-Saharan Africa and in South East Asia, Europeans found themselves in competition with other Old World empires and their client states. After
c
. 1870, fear of a ‘peaceful invasion' by Chinese and Japanese settlers created racial paranoia all
round the ‘white' Pacific, in Australia, New Zealand and on the Pacific coast of North America. But it was also true that European efforts to create viable colonies in Outer World regions depended on co-opting or conscripting the resources of non-European Eurasia. India's taxes, soldiers, merchants and manpower (often in the form of indentured labour) helped throw open East Africa, parts of mainland South East Asia and the island Pacific as far away as Fiji to European (in this case British) enterprise. Chinese traders, miners and artisans were just as important in what became British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). The critical fact was that Chinese and Indians came not as the agents of a Chinese or Indian expansion, but as the auxiliaries and accessories of one directed from Europe.

The third assumption is that we need to think out very carefully what that ‘Europe' was. There are obvious objections to treating Europe as a unity when it was at best a loose and quarrelsome ‘commonwealth'. Thus when we talk about ‘European primacy', what we really mean is the collective primacy of the European states, especially those most active in overseas trade and empire. Part of the difficulty is that the word ‘Europe' has acquired at least three different meanings: a geographical space; a socio-political community; and a cultural programme.
²⁰
An easy solution, in writing of Europe's global expansion, has been to treat the continent's north-west corner as its centre of power. Britain, the Low Countries, northern France and western Germany become the ‘quintessence' of Europe, setting the ‘European' standard of economic and cultural modernity. Explaining Europe's successes is then a straightforward matter of invoking the strength and efficiency of its representative ‘core states'.

In any long view of Europe's place in Eurasia (or in global history) this reductive approach is very misleading – for three different reasons. Firstly, the north-western states were not free agents who could disregard events in the rest of the continent – even after they had become Europe's richest section. Their wealth and safety were always dependent on the general stability of the European ‘states system'. Turmoil in Central or Eastern Europe, or a major disturbance in the overall balance of power, could threaten their sovereignty or bring them windfall gains – in Europe or beyond. In fact in the period covered by this book no part of Europe achieved a lasting supremacy over all the
others. The commercial prosperity of the north-western states was balanced by the military and demographic weight of the empires further east. The Europe of nations (in the west) might look down its nose at the Europe of empires (in the east), but it had to live with it. Coexistence was often explosive. The quarrels and conflicts of the European states, reaching a terrible climax in the twentieth century, were a constant limiting factor on their collective ability to impose Europe's domination on the rest of the world.

Secondly, too narrow a view of what Europe was ignores the problem of Russia. A long liberal tradition took a sceptical view of Russia's European credentials, seeing tsarist Russia as an ‘Asiatic despotism', too crude and too poor to be ‘one of us'. Some Russian thinkers returned the compliment by insisting that Russia was a separate (and superior) civilization untainted by Europe's amoral industrialism. A realistic view would see Russia, like Spain or the Habsburg Empire, as one of the frontier states that played a vanguard role in Europe's expansion.
²¹
The eventual predominance of the West European states across much of Southern Asia after 1815 was really achieved in a fractious involuntary partnership with Russia. Russia's huge inland empire, pivoted around Inner Asia, gradually absorbed much of the North Asian land mass. Ottomans, Iranians, Chinese and Japanese faced the British and French with Russia closing in behind them. The vast (but incomplete) encirclement of Asia by Europe was the great geopolitical fact of the nineteenth-century world. But, for all the pedantry of liberals and Slavophiles, the ‘power supply' behind Russia's expansion was in fact its European identity: the leverage granted by its first-class membership of the European states system; the economic energy that flowed from Russia's integration into the European economy; and the intellectual access that Russians enjoyed, from the sixteenth century onward, to the general pool of European ideas and culture. Russians, like other Europeans, claimed their conquests as a ‘civilizing mission'.

Thirdly, there is a powerful case for broadening our notion of ‘Europe' to the west as well as the east. The importance of the Atlantic economy has already been mentioned. A vast economic space that included the West African coast, the Caribbean islands, the North American seaboard, Mexico, Peru and maritime Brazil was annexed
to Europe commercially after 1500. The precise contribution of this mainly slave-labour zone to Europe's later industrialization has remained controversial, and may not have been large.
²²
But the important point is that by the early nineteenth century, and perhaps even before, a significant part of this Atlantic world can no longer be seen as Europe's dependent periphery. The ‘Old Northeast' of the United States, with its metropolis in New York, was functionally part of Europe's leading commercial region. It was an active – and became the dominant – partner in developing the agrarian lands in the American South and Midwest, its inland empire. By the 1870s it was financially and industrially on a par with Europe's richest countries. Although America's separate identity was loudly proclaimed by its politicians and writers, and fear of involvement in European quarrels ruled its diplomacy, America's relations with Europe were not cold or detached. Between the Old Northeast and North West Europe, the traffic of goods, technology, ideas and people was extremely dense. In culture and technology it was a two-way movement, with a strong mutual influence. By fits and starts, with retreats and advances, Old Europe and New Europe were being subsumed into a larger formation, the ‘West'. It was a volatile process, on which the peculiar trajectory of American capitalism – with its huge corporate scale and aggressive protectionism – had a powerful impact. But it was one of the keys to Europe's place in Eurasia, and to both the duration and the mutation of Europe's leading place in the world.