After Tamerlane (50 page)

Superficially, France had the resources and skills to stand comparison with this world-power quartet. France was still a formidable power on land, and a major naval power (though in relative decline). It was second only to Britain as a foreign investor (with about half the investment), mainly to Europe, especially Russia. The global influence of French ideas and culture and the prestige of French writers, institutions and art were as great as ever. Since the 1870s, France's great-power status had been strikingly symbolized in its Afro-Asian empire. Between 1880 and 1910, France's overseas possessions grewby more than twelve times in area (from
350,000
square miles to
4.6
million) and more than sixteen times in population (from 3 to 50 million).
⁵⁷
Much of North, West and Equatorial Africa, as well as Madagascar, Indochina and parts of the South Pacific, had come under French rule. France had fiercely asserted its claim to a generous share in the global partition. Yet this was not enough.

As an aspiring world power, France suffered from three disabling weaknesses. Domestically, its population was stagnant, and industrial development lagged far behind Germany's, let alone Britain's. Secondly, despite the vast scale of the French colonial empire, its economic potential was weak. France had no India to pay its imperial bills, and no settler countries to be its partners in trade and its allies in war. To make matters worse, much of this empire was a strategic hostage to fortune, since the naval power to defend it had been allowed to dribble away.
⁵⁸
One school of thought, led by the great foreign minister Théophile Delcassé (1898–1905), dismissed French Indochina as practically valueless, and urged instead an Afro-Mediterranean empire based on Morocco and Algeria.
⁵⁹
Thirdly, France's geographical position in Europe (with the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871) made it much more vulnerable to a knockout blowthan any other world power: no ocean barrier or masses of land lay between an invading army and the vital centres of government and industry. It was thus hardly surprising that French political opinion veered uneasily between closer friendship with Britain and reconciliation with Germany. The factional politics of the Third Republic, the rapid turn over
of governments and the bitter divisions over religious and secular loyalties (brought to light in the Dreyfus affair) aggravated these uncertainties in French foreign policy.

There is an old tradition in historical writing in which rampant imperialism, red in tooth and claw, formed the anarchic prelude to the great conflagration of the First World War. But before 1914 there was little sign that the world's most powerful states intended to fight each other for global supremacy. Instead, they adopted a form of ‘competitive coexistence' and recognized that, for the time being at least, a rough balance of power existed between them. Despite the jostling and friction in their mutual relations, they shared (along with the small colonial powers) a broadly similar view of how to behave towards the non-European peoples. To have backed a colonial movement against its imperial master, or espoused radical doctrines of national self-determination, would have seemed self-defeating at best. They took it for granted that their cultures were superior and that their ‘standard of civilization'
⁶⁰
justified intervention or colonization in ‘less civilized' lands. A world divided up into great colonial empires seemed natural and inevitable under modern conditions. The progress of the colonized towards eventual self-rule – if it happened at all – would be painfully slow. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to international peace was thought likely to come from the ‘dying empires' that had so far escaped partition. In the Ottoman, Iranian and Chinese empires, the stakes were higher and the chance of agreement was lower: over them the world powers might really fall out. It turned out, however, that there was a much more immediate danger. There was always the risk that the diplomatic rattling of sabres would get out of hand. A panicky ruler, an opportunist adviser, a rush of blood in the press, or simple miscalculation might tip the balance between peace and war. The fragile stability of global colonialism, and the peace of the world, really depended upon the mutual restraint of the main European states, and their respect for their own continent's uneasy balance of power. If that were to change, then the geopolitics of empire would be plunged into chaos.

Global colonialism was not simply a question of extending the area ruled by the European states. Such geopolitical change had an economic parallel. From the 1870s onward, a modern world economy emerged.
⁶¹
Of course, trade between continents had always existed. Indeed, as we saw in an earlier chapter, European access to American silver had created a system of global exchange in the sixteenth century, though one largely confined to bullion and luxuries. The eighteenth century sawa big expansion of seaborne trade, including the export of tea from China and of cotton fabrics from India to markets as faraway as America and West Africa. But much the heaviest intercontinental traffic was across the Atlantic. By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America. The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partly the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to newparts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia. One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.
⁶²
But it was not just a matter of there being more trade, although its value and volume continued to soar. It had reached nearly £ 3 billion by 1880,£ 4 billion by 1900, and then almost doubled between 1900 and 1913 to reach a pre-war figure of around £ 8 billion.
⁶³
The great increase of trade was accompanied by – in fact depended upon – two further changes that bound together the commercial life of different world regions.

The first was the rise of an international payments ‘circuit' into which any country could plug, and from which it could draw the foreign exchange needed to pay for its imports. It was no longer necessary to balance its books with every trading partner: as long as it had a surplus somewhere, it could use this credit in the payments circuit.
⁶⁴
This relieved an important bottleneck that had obstructed commerce. The second was the growth after
c
. 1870 of Europe's export
of capital on a much vaster scale, and to far wider targets than in previous years. Though most was invested in the Americas and in other parts of Europe, with only a lesser share going to Asia and Africa (around 30 per cent of British foreign investment by 1913 was in Afro-Asia), the world had become a single market for capital. That placed a premium on rapid and accurate commercial information (the main function of the telegraph), but also on the closer conformity of financial and property practices. In effect, global colonialism in its commercial guise meant drawing the rest of the world into an economic system that was centred on Europe and its western extension in the United States. More to the point, it meant a global division of labour in which the manufactures, capital and credit of the industrial-imperial countries were exchanged for the raw products and commodities of the rest of the world.

Of course, this newglobal market was not just the result of purely commercial activity. Nor could it have been. In several crucial ways it depended upon the assertion of power, an expansion of empire both direct and indirect. In East Asia, for instance, the regime of free trade had been imposed by force and by the armed diplomacy of the ‘unequal treaties'. It was maintained in India by the unequivocal insistence of the London government (against the doubts of local British officialdom). Secondly, the multilateral pattern of commercial payments that was centred on Britain would have functioned less smoothly – if it had functioned at all – had the British not enjoyed a favourable balance of payments with their Indian empire, secured as much by rule (Indians paid a ‘service charge' to their foreign masters) as by commercial success.
⁶⁵
Thirdly, in Australia, NewZealand, western Canada and Latin America, and more marginally in Africa, the global market was extended by Europe's demographic imperialism, the occupation of lands by European settlers, and the displacement (by agreement, force or fraud) of their indigenous owners. As the flows of trade and investment revealed, this form of ‘empire' was much the most economically dynamic. Fourthly, in their colonial territories and in other countries as well, European governments promoted a property regime that would safeguard the interests of expatriate enterprise.
⁶⁶
By local laws if possible, by extraterritorial privilege if necessary (as in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Iran, Siam, China and
Japan), the sphere of market institutions was to be steadily expanded.

The main driving force behind the newglobal economy was the great improvement in transport and its extension worldwide. Between 1869, when the Suez Canal opened, and 1914, when the Panama Canal was finished, much of the rest of the world was drawn into the nexus of communications that already existed between Europe and America. Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph, with its submarine cables, nowgirdled the earth. After 1900, the extension of this network to include every productive region seemed only a matter of time. The exchange of products on an ever-growing scale encouraged specialization and mutual economic dependence. As trade flows increased, they seemed to promote an inexhaustible appetite for more exotic products. So did the changing demands of industrial production in America and Europe. Rubber, tin, other base metals and fuel oil joined the older staples of international trade: cotton, wool, grain, timber, sugar, tea and coffee. From the 1880s, the newtechnology of refrigeration allowed an export trade in perishable produce from remote locations like Argentina and NewZealand to European consumers many weeks away. Nothing symbolized better the astonishing possibilities of a world economy than Britain's growing dependence upon basic foodstuffs carried by sea for more than
12,000
miles.

The growth of new trades and the expansion of old ones were plainly visible in the swelling size of the world's port cities. They were numerous enough in the North Atlantic world. But, in the late nineteenth century, new (or much larger) port cities appeared in the other continents. The population of Buenos Aires, the commercial hub for the newly conquered pampas, rose from
300,000
in 1880 to 1.3 million only thirty years later.
⁶⁷
Cape Town grew rapidly to serve the up-country eldorados of diamonds and gold. Bombay took advantage of the Suez Canal to dominate India's westbound trade and extend its influence into the Persian Gulf.
⁶⁸
Singapore continued its meteoric rise as the western gateway into the South China Sea and the grand entrepoô t of South East Asian trade.
⁶⁹
Shanghai strengthened its claim to be China's chief port and the commercial outlet of its most productive region in the Yangtze basin. Melbourne and Sydney (and remote Dunedin) connected Australasia's hinterlands with their suppliers and markets on the other side of the world.

Being a successful port city meant feverish activity to improve the harbour, to organize the docks, to build vast railyards and push the line of rail (or its riverine equivalent) ever further up-country.
⁷⁰
The outward sign of commercial success was the rapid construction of customs houses, railways stations, banks and hotels, as well as lavish clubs and residences for the newmerchant class. Bombay railway station, the Raffles' Hotel in Singapore, the ‘Parisian' splendour of the new Buenos Aires, Cape Town's Standard Bank (where Rhodes had his account), the Shanghai Bund, Collins Street in Melbourne and the exuberant architecture of Sydney's leading banks (around Martin Place) showed the confidence and prosperity of this commercial world. It was served by a growing army of dockers, porters, railwaymen, packers, warehousemen and clerks. Its masters were a mobile and often cosmopolitan elite whose long-distance connections were frequently the key to their commercial success and to their credit rating. British, and especially Scottish, businessmen could be found on every continent. But there were many others who were just as enterprising. In the Near East and Black Sea, they were usually Greeks. The biggest merchants in Bombay were Parsis (originally from Iran) rather than Hindus. Parsis, Jews and Armenians (like the Sassoons) followed the trade routes east.
⁷¹
Their business houses could be found in Singapore (where there is still an Armenian church), Hong Kong and Shanghai. One of the largest shipowners in late-nineteenth-century Singapore was of Arab descent, part of a community of traders and seafarers long established in the Malay archipelago. Others were Chinese. The grandfather of Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, owned a steamship line serving Singapore and Batavia (modern Jakarta).

In the late nineteenth century it was not unrealistic to think that, despite cultural differences, the members of this mercantile network had a great deal in common. They were economic liberals by instinct. They favoured easy movement across jurisdictions and frontiers. They disliked the interference of bureaucrats and officials. They wanted sympathetic governments who would invest in ‘progress' (in its most concrete forms). They placed a high valuation on the keeping of contracts, and the rights of property. They needed reliable currencies and trustworthy banks. Their interests, in short, were against a global partition that would seal the world into closed imperial blocs. Still
less did they want the kind of colonial regime that scorned business influence and practised exclusion by race. Resentment at this had made the Bombay Parsis among the earliest champions of Indian rights against the British Raj. On the other hand, even non-European merchants had nothing to gain if the world that commerce had made was divided into a patchwork quilt of fractious nation states whose rulers' aims were unlikely to chime with those of the chambers of commerce in the great port cities.