After Tamerlane (74 page)

In theory, all kinds of empire were unavoidably subject to great stresses and strains, spasms of crisis, and an ultimate fall. It was a historical truism that no empire was permanent. Collapse could be triggered by a wide range of causes. Where an empire depended on the cooperation or loyalty of subject elites, rebellion or resistance at an inconvenient time could inflict irreparable damage on its prestige and authority. The need to appease its recalcitrant allies might cause
a slower, but fatal, erosion of the means of control. If exerting imperial power required the approval of public opinion in the imperial ‘homeland', or inflicted new burdens on its manpower or wealth, a revolt at the centre and not the periphery might be decisive in bringing an empire down. New ideologies (or religions) might destroy the moral and political credit on which empires could base their claim to legitimacy – the sense that they were part of the natural order of things. Just as common a danger was becoming unwieldy: when the weight of commitments became too much to bear, but the pain of disposal was too much to take. Imperial obesity was a drain on physical strength and a temptation to rivals. Empires were also exposed to the hazards of economic and environmental change. The resources and technologies on which their power had been built might begin to dry up or become obsolete. Material wealth and technical prowess might dribble away, or shift elsewhere to more favoured locations. Worst of all, perhaps, empires might be driven into wars of mutual destruction, in which the pursuit of limited ends could unleash willy-nilly a world-changing upheaval. Even without such a doomsday scenario, an insidious danger lurked inside most imperial systems. It was almost inevitable that their commanding heights would fall into the hands of well-connected elites who would dig themselves in. By degrees they would turn the imperial structure into a semi-private domain, geared to promoting their sectional interests. They would enlist the support of other factions and groupings to form a grand coalition, to defend a status quo from which they were the chief gainers. But this reluctance to change was a fatal mistake, since the price of empire was the constant adjustment to domestic, colonial and external pressures, and the swift exploitation of innovations in culture or economic activity.
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In the late nineteenth century it did indeed seem as if these multiple sources of decay and collapse would reshape the world. To most Western observers the conclusion was obvious. The remaining indigenous empires in Asia and Africa, large and small, could not survive long. The period during which they had coexisted uneasily with the European empires was reaching an end. Economic stagnation, cultural senescence and systemic corruption had destroyed their political will. They lacked the means to guard their frontiers. They faced the revolt
of their ethnic minorities. Their economic failure sharpened social conflict. Cultural stasis encouraged the hunger for foreign ideas, but bred an angry reaction, xenophobic or fanatical. Chaos and ruin awaited: these were ‘dying nations', defunct empires. By contrast, so it seemed, Europe's colonizing powers and their North American cousins had discovered the secret of perpetual progress and eternal empire – the hubris against which Kipling famously warned.
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They had broken the cycle of imperial decline. Industrialization, inorganic fuel (coal) and a far-flung resource base, drawing on produce from thousands of miles away, made old environmental limitations irrelevant. Their commerce and culture would attract a mass of new subjects, or at least their elites, whose loyalty (or collaboration) would keep the costs of empire low. The situation at ‘home' had also changed for the better. Empire ‘on the cheap' and the sense of growing dependence on faraway markets were much more favourable conditions to promote an ‘imperial' ideology. The increasing power of the ‘state nation' over domestic society was strengthening the idea of a ‘national' community, willing if need be to sustain empire abroad. Perhaps most potent of all, the adoption of ‘liberal' politics – more or less free competition in economic and political life – seemed a sure guarantee against the corrupt privatization of political power and rigid resistance to change. This progressive mentality was supposedly rooted in ‘race' – an incoherent amalgam of physical, social and cultural characteristics. That was why Europeans – or some of them – had discovered the secret of social evolution. The reward, they assumed, would be permanent mastery of the rest of the world.

The likeliest outcome – or so it appeared – was a new global order in which power was concentrated among a handful of ‘world states'. The remaining states and empires of the non-Western world would be parcelled out, or, if kept in existence, turned into semi-protectorates under close supervision. Support would be given to their ‘reformers' and ‘progressives', to break the resistance of their vast backward hinterlands. The price would be a willing acceptance of European rules: an open door to commerce and culture, and newlegal norms to protect foreign persons and property. This era of tutelage was expected to be long, perhaps infinitely so, with many failures and relapses. But it did not turn out like that.

Part of the reason was geopolitical. The key precondition of Europe's advance into Asia had been European peace, the avoidance of general war. Fierce as they sounded, Europe's imperial rivalries in the mid and late nineteenth century had been artfully managed: croaking and crowing replaced actual conflict. But in 1914 this long interregnum of competitive coexistence was broken for good: the post-war efforts to revive it came to little or nothing. The Europe-centred world order was aborted almost before it began. Key parts of Eurasia kept the West at bay at a critical stage. Geopolitics, however, was only part of the story.

Most histories of ‘empire' after the mid eighteenth century share a common assumption: the only empires that matter are the colonial empires of the Europeans – until Japan starts to borrowthe colonial idea at the turn of the twentieth century. The drama of the African scramble has led to a distorted image of a rampant imperialism that nothing could stop. But if we look closer at Asia we get a different impression. For all their nibbling at its maritime fringes and their halting inland advance at the end of the century, with the grand exception of India the Europeans' domination of Asia was very partial at best. The case could be made that the real story in Asia in the long nineteenth century was one of Asian persistence and not of Asian defeat. The great example was China. Despite the ravages of dynastic conflict, civil war and revolution, China preserved an astonishing unity up to 1914. The idea of China survived both the end of the imperial monarchy in 1911 and the forty years of turmoil, occupation and war that followed soon after. More surprising, perhaps, was China's retention of its huge Inner Asian empire: Manchuria, Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet. Despite the desperate crisis of the 1930s and ' 40s, all were held on to (except Outer Mongolia). China today has much the same frontiers as the vast Ch'ing Empire into which Europe had crashed in the 1830s. Japan's perseverance in the face of the European challenge was even more striking. Its monarchy was reinvented to supply the ideological glue for a newpolitical order.

The result was a state that was strong enough to withstand the opening up to the West and soon to embark on an imperial career of its own.

A similar pattern can be seen in parts of Middle Eurasia. Exposed as they were to Europe's commercial and physical power, the main Muslim states in West Asia did not succumb to colonialism. Shorn though it was of its European provinces by 1913, and then forced to surrender its Arab dominions after 1918, the Anatolian core of the Ottoman Empire escaped the partition that the peacemakers intended, to become a new‘Turkish' state. The territorial extent of the Iranian Empire had waxed and waned under Safavids and Qajars. But the area nowruled by the Islamic Republic comprises most of ‘historic' Iran, including the four great cities of Tabriz, Isfahan, Tehran and Mashad. And even those parts of Middle Eurasia (like Egypt or India) whose political shape was drastically altered by Europe's intervention retained or constructed a distinctive identity that transcended the limits of a colonized culture.

What made this possible? Part of the answer, as we saw in an earlier chapter, was that Europeans lacked the resources and sometimes the motive to make global empire complete. Their imperial diplomacy baulked at the task of partitioning China, Iran or the Ottoman Empire before 1914. After 1918, their divisions were greater and the task even harder. But this is only one side of a complex equation. Just as important were the tenacious traditions of political and cultural autonomy in the great Asian states, which hemmed in outsiders like an invisible wall. These were strengthened and deepened by the state-building drive in early modern Eurasia, whose effects were felt right across the Old World and not just in Europe. The Ming renovation, the Tokugawa peace, the Safavid compromise and the Ottoman transition from a warrior state into an Asian, African and European empire were all achievements as striking as the new model monarchies being fashioned in Europe. They created forms of government that proved remarkably durable even under stressful conditions. Dynastic change in China (from Ming to Ch'ing) and Iran's time of troubles in the eighteenth century might have uprooted less entrenched political systems – not least in Iran, with its linguistic divisions and great tribal confederacies.

These early-modern reconstructions had a lasting importance. They
helped to preserve a continuous practice of statecraft through into the time when the pressure from Europe became much more intense. The states that the Europeans faced were
anciens reégimes
in need of renewal, not broken-backed states that had fallen to pieces. Those who had served them were often aware of their weakness and the need for ‘reform'. But that meant the grafting of newpolitical methods on to the original stock, not imposing an alien blueprint to which no one was loyal. It was a crucial distinction. Kemal's republic in Turkey was built on the foundations of Ottoman reform, not conjured from thin air. Its ‘official' version of history proclaimed not Turkey's subservience to Europe, but the world-historical significance of the Turkish people.
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Its political godfather (however quietly disowned) was Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), under whose rule state control of society was pressed forward vigorously.
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Reza Shah Pahlevi (r. 1921–41) could invoke Iran's ancient monarchial tradition to assert his authority over rebellious regions and tribes and strengthen the state. The emperor's charter oath was the warrant to impose a much more centralized rule in Meiji Japan, and deny its opponents an ideological base. Even in China, where the end of the Ch'ing dynasty signalled a more complete break with the past, the new nationalism laid claim to the Inner Asian patrimony bequeathed by the Ch'ing, and revived the old system of household surveillance to regain social control in the turbulent 1920s.

Persistence was cultural as well as political. The role of religion, language and literature in creating national identities in Europe is a familiar story. There were several reasons why the nation-state idea developed more intensely in Europe than in other parts of Eurasia before 1914, not least the effects of the revolutions and wars that raged across much of the continent between 1789 and 1815. Across most of Eurasia (and including much of Eastern Europe), the link between culture and state had not followed the model that appeared in Western Europe. Absolute loyalty to a territorial state and its ruler conflicted with notions of an Islamic community of believers – the
umma
– and the autonomous authority of those who interpreted the Koran and the sharia. In the vast subcontinental empire of China, with its periphery of smaller, weaker or dependent states, the cockpit mentality of dynastic conflict and state-building that shaped European
nationalism was conspicuously lacking. In Japan, two centuries of seclusion reinforced an intense suspicion of outsiders. But little need had arisen to identify Japaneseness with a strong central state. Yet, if the European obsession with the nation state as a union of culture and politics had little meaning elsewhere, the effort to bind society together with common values and practices (from diet and dress through to history and cosmology) was taken just as seriously. Across the rest of Eurasia, just as in Europe, traditions of learning were maintained and transmitted by teachers and texts. Around them were gathered the educated elites who enjoyed social prestige and exerted cultural authority. In Iran and China, this class was closely identified with the idea of the state. From Safavid times onward, the
ulama
asserted the claim that the Iranian state's first duty was to protect Shia Islam from the assaults of its enemies. The minority status of Shia in the Islamic world made this all the more urgent. In China, the scholar-gentry formed the administrative cadre as well as the cultural elite of the imperial system – a role, it seems likely, that they continued to fill in the ‘nationalist' era that followed. Even in India, where British rule was gradually imposed from the mid eighteenth century, pre-colonial traditions survived, because they were already deeply embedded in vigorous vernacular cultures. Regional patriotisms, ideas of just government, and alternative visions of history coexisted uneasily with the cultural apparatus of the colonial regime.
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In the late nineteenth century, when the Indian vernaculars were being transformed into ordered literary languages, regional sentiment acquired a powerful new means to express social and political concerns. Without this foundation, it seems very unlikely that the movement through which Gandhi was able to make Indian nationalism into a popular cause would have gathered strength so quickly after 1914.

The importance of all this is that when Europe's cultural impact on the rest of the world reached a peak of intensity, in the late nineteenth century, it faced an increasingly well-organized resistance. Yet, to the guardians and ‘gatekeepers' of other Eurasian cultures, the struggle for survival appeared a closely fought contest. They dreaded the outright collapse of their cultural tradition amid the tidal surge of a Western modernity. They were oppressed by the fear that they would lose their authority over their own lower orders, for whose moral and cultural
welfare they saw themselves as responsible. They grasped the significance of Europe's technological lead, and the social and cultural innovations that helped to sustain it, but were deeply ambivalent about the moral and social effects of those. Hence they were strongly attracted to versions of modernity that, while framed in the West, were bitterly hostile to its liberal capitalist values and imperial claims. Gandhi's campaign to awaken the masses took its original cue from Tolstoy's conception of a self-sufficient rural utopia. The appeal of Marxism–Leninism lay in its promise of industrial progress without the social conflict that seemed inherent in capitalism. Both seemed to offer a path to modernity that could be controlled. In the regimes that emerged after 1918 in Iran, Turkey and nationalist China, in the political leadership that was to govern India after 1947, and (more emphatically still) in Communist-ruled China after 1949, the strict supervision of foreign cultural imports seemed just as essential as the building of barriers against foreign industrial power. The growing reach of the state through education, broadcasting, propaganda and censorship was harnessed to the task. If this came to resemble a cultural ‘siege mentality', this was hardly surprising. The intense ideological storms that swept over the world for most of the twentieth century made an open society into a gamble with fate.