The New Penguin History of the World (155 page)

Of course, there was much more than Africa to the story of nineteenth-century imperialism. The Pacific was partitioned less dramatically but in the end no independent political unit survived among its island peoples. There was also a big expansion of British, French and Russian territory in Asia. The French established themselves in Indo-China, the British in Malaya and Burma, which they took to safeguard the approaches to India. Siam retained her independence because it suited both powers to have a buffer between them. The British also asserted their superiority by an expedition to Tibet, with similar considerations of Indian security in mind. Most of these areas, like much of the zone of Russian overland expansion, were formally under Chinese suzerainty. Their story is part of that of the crumbling Chinese empire, a story which paralleled the corrosion of other empires, such as the Ottoman, Moroccan and Persian, by European influence, though it had greater importance still for world history. At one moment it looked as if a Scramble for China might follow the partition of Africa. That story is better considered elsewhere. Here it is convenient to notice that the imperialist wave in the Chinese sphere as in the Pacific was also importantly different from that in Africa because the United States of America took part.

Americans had always been uneasy and distrustful over imperial ventures outside the continent they long regarded as God-given to them. Even at its most arrogant, imperialism had to be masked, muffled and muted in the republic in a way unnecessary in Europe. The very creation of the United States had been by successful rebellion against an imperial power. The constitution contained no provision for the ruling of colonial possessions and it was always very difficult to see what could be the position under it of territories which could not be envisaged as eventually moving towards full statehood, let alone that of non-Americans who stayed under American rule. On the other hand, there was much that was barely distinguishable from imperialism in the nineteenth-century territorial expansion of the United States, although Americans might not recognize it when
it was packaged as a ‘Manifest Destiny’. The most blatant examples were the war of 1812 against the British and the treatment of Mexico in the middle of the century. But there was also the dispossession of the Indians to consider and the dominating implications of the Monroe doctrine.

In the 1890s the overland expansion of the United States was complete. It was announced that the continuous frontier of domestic settlement no longer existed. At this moment, economic growth had given great importance to the influence of business interests in American government, sometimes expressed in terms of economic nationalism and high tariff protection. Some of these interests directed the attention of American public opinion abroad, notably to Asia. The United States was thought by some to be in danger of exclusion from trade there by the European powers. There was an old connection at stake (the first American Far Eastern squadron had been sent out in the 1820s) as a new era of Pacific awareness dawned with California’s rapid growth in population. A half-century’s talk of a canal across Central America also came to a head at the end of the century; it stimulated interest in the doctrines of strategists who suggested that the United States might need an oceanic glacis in the Pacific to maintain the Monroe doctrine.

All these currents flowed into a burst of expansion which has remained to this day a unique example of American overseas imperialism because, for a time, it set aside traditional restraint on the acquisition of new territory overseas. The beginnings lie in the increased opening of China and Japan to American commerce in the 1850s and 1860s and to participation with the British and the Germans in the administration of Samoa (where a naval base obtained in 1878 has remained a United States possession). This was followed by two decades of growing intervention in the affairs of the kingdom of Hawaii, to which the protection of the United States had been extended since the 1840s. American traders and missionaries had established themselves there in large numbers. Benevolent patronage of the Hawaiians then gave way to attempts to engineer annexation to the United States in the 1890s. Washington already had the use of Pearl Harbor as a naval base but was led to land marines in Hawaii when a revolution occurred there. In the end, the government had to give way to the forces set in motion by the settlers and a short-lived Hawaiian Republic was annexed as a United States Territory in 1898.

In that year, a mysterious explosion destroyed an American cruiser, the USS
Maine
, in Havana harbour. This became an excuse for war with Spain. In the background was both the long Spanish failure to master revolt in Cuba, where American business interests were prominent and American sentiment was aroused, and the growing awareness of the importance
of the Caribbean approaches to a future canal across the isthmus. In Asia, American help was given to another rebel movement against the Spaniards in the Philippines. When American rule replaced Spanish in Manila, the rebels turned against their former allies and a guerrilla war began. This was the first phase of a long and difficult process of disentangling the United States from her first Asian colony. At that moment, given the likelihood of the collapse of the Chinese empire, it seemed best in Washington not to withdraw. In the Caribbean, the long history of Spanish empire in the Americas at last came to an end. Puerto Rico passed to the United States and Cuba obtained its independence on terms which guaranteed its domination by the United States. American forces went back to occupy the island under these terms from 1906 to 1909, and again in 1917.

This was the prelude to the last major development in this wave of American imperialism. The building of an isthmian canal had been canvassed since the middle of the nineteenth century and the completion of Suez gave it new plausibility. American diplomacy negotiated a way around the obstacle of possible British participation; all seemed plain sailing but a snag arose in 1903 when a treaty providing for the acquisition of a canal zone from Colombia was rejected by the Colombians. A revolution was engineered in Panama, where the canal was to run. The United States prevented its suppression by the Colombian government and a new Panamanian republic emerged, which gratefully bestowed upon the United States the necessary territory together with the right to intervene in its affairs to maintain order. The work could now begin and the canal was opened in 1914. The possibility of transferring ships rapidly from one ocean to another made a great difference to American naval strategy. It was also the background to the ‘corollary’ to the Monroe doctrine proposed by President Theodore Roosevelt; when the Canal Zone became the key to the naval defence of the hemisphere, it was more important than ever to assure its protection by stable government and United States predominance in the Caribbean states. A new vigour in American intervention in them was soon evident.

Though its motives and techniques were different – for one thing, there was virtually no permanent American settlement in the new possessions – the actions of the United States can be seen as part of the last great seizure of territories carried out by the European peoples. Almost all of them had taken part except the South Americans; even the Queenslanders had tried to annexe New Guinea. By 1914 a third of the world’s surface was under two flags, those of the United Kingdom and Russia (though how much Russian territory should be regarded as colonial is, of course, debatable).
To take a measure which excludes Russia, in 1914 the United Kingdom ruled 400 million subjects outside its own borders, France over 50 million and Germany and Italy about 14 million each; this was an unprecedented aggregation of formal authority.

At that date, though, there were already signs that imperialism overseas had run out of steam. China had proved a disappointment and there was little left to divide, though Germany and Great Britain discussed the possibility of partitioning the Portuguese empire, which seemed to be about to follow the Spanish. The most likely area left for further European imperialism was the decaying Ottoman empire, and its dissolution seemed at last to be imminent when the Italians seized Tripoli in 1912 and a Balkan coalition formed against Turkey took away almost all that was left of her European territories in the following year. Such a prospect did not seem likely to be so free from conflict between great powers as had been the partition of Africa; much more crucial issues would be at stake in it for them.

7
Asia’s Response to a Europeanizing World

A perceptive Chinese observer might have found something revealing in the disgrace which in the end overtook the Jesuits, at first so acceptable, at K’ang-hsi’s court. For more than a century these able men had judiciously and discreetly sought to ingratiate themselves with their hosts. To begin with they had not even spoken of religion, but had contented themselves with studying the language of China. They had even worn Chinese dress, which, we are told, created a very good impression. Great successes had followed. Yet the effectiveness of their mission was suddenly paralysed; their acceptance of Chinese rites and beliefs and their Sinicizing of Christian teaching led to the sending of two papal emissaries to China to check improper flexibility. Here, for historians, if not for contemporaries, was a sign that Europeans, unlike other intruders, might not in the end succumb to its cultural pull.

There was a message for all Asia in this revelation of the intransigence of European culture. It was going to be more important to what was about to happen in Asia – and was already under way there – than even the technology of the newcomers. It was certainly more decisive than any temporary or special weaknesses of the eastern empires, as China’s own history was to show. Under K’ang-hsi’s immediate successors, the Manchu empire was already past its peak; its slow and eventually fatal decline would not have in itself been surprising given the cyclical pattern of dynastic rise and fall in the past. What made the fate of the Ch’ing dynasty different from that of its predecessors was that it survived long enough to preside over the country while it faced a quite new threat, one from a culture stronger than that of traditional China. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Chinese society would have to change, not the imported culture of a new wave of barbarian conquerors. The Chinese Revolution was about to begin.

In the eighteenth century, no Chinese official could have been expected to discern this. When Lord Macartney arrived in 1793 to ask for equality of diplomatic representation and free trade, the confidence of centuries
was unshaken. The first western advances and encroachments had been successfully rebuffed or contained. The representative of George III could only take back polite but unyielding messages of refusal to what the Chinese emperor was pleased to call ‘the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea’. It can hardly have made the message more palatable that George was also patted on the back for his ‘submissive loyalty in sending this tribute mission’ and encouraged to ‘show even greater devotion and loyalty in future’.

The assumption of their own cultural and moral superiority came as naturally to the educated Chinese as it was to do to the European and American missionaries and philanthropists of the next century, who unconsciously patronized the people they came to serve. It embodied the Chinese world view, in which all nations paid tribute to the emperor, possessed of the Mandate of Heaven, and took it for granted that China already had all the materials and skills needed for the highest civilization and would only waste her time and energy in indulging relations with Europe going beyond the limited trade tolerated at Canton (where by 1800 there were perhaps a thousand Europeans). Nor was this obviously nonsense. Nearly three centuries of trade with China had failed to reveal any manufactured goods from Europe which the Chinese wanted except the mechanical toys and clocks they found amusing. European trade with China rested on the export to her of silver or other Asian products. As a British merchant concisely put it in the middle of the eighteenth century, the ‘East India trade… exports our bullion, spends little of our product or manufactures and brings in commodities perfectly manufactured which hinder the consumption of our own’.

Yet for all official China’s confidence in her internal regime and cultural superiority, signs of future difficulties can be discerned in retrospect. The secret societies and cults, which kept alive a smouldering national resentment against a foreign dynasty and the central power, still survived and even prospered. They found fresh support as the surge of population became uncontainable; in the century before 1850 numbers seem to have more than doubled to reach about 430 million by 1850. Pressure on cultivated land became much more acute because the area worked could be increased only by a tiny margin; times grew steadily harder and the lot of the peasantry more and more miserable. There had been warning signs in the 1770s and 1780s, when a century’s internal peace was broken by great revolts such as those which had so often in the past been the sign of dynastic decline. Early in the next century they became more frequent and destructive. To make matters worse, they were accompanied by another economic deterioration, inflation in the price of the silver in which taxes
had to be paid. Most daily transactions (including the payment of wages) were carried out in copper, so this added to the crushing burdens already suffered by the poor. Yet none of this seemed likely to be fatal, except, possibly, to the dynasty. It could all be fitted into the traditional pattern of the historic cycle. All that was required was that the service gentry should remain loyal, and even if they did not, then, though a collapse of government might follow, there was no reason to believe that in due course another dynasty would not emerge to re-enlist their loyalty and preserve the imperial framework of an unchanging China. This time, though, it was not to happen like that, because of the drive and power of the nineteenth-century barbarian challenge.