The New Penguin History of the World (161 page)

Cambodia and Laos had been shaped by religious and artistic influences flowing from India, but one of the countries of Indo-China was much more closely linked to China by its culture. This was Vietnam. It had three parts: Tonkin in the north, Annam, its central area, and Cochin in the south. Vietnam had a long tradition of national identity and a history of national revolt against Chinese imperial rule. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was here that resistance to Europeanization was most marked. Europe’s connections with Indo-China had begun with seventeenth-century Christian missionaries from France (one of them devised the first romanization of the Vietnamese language) and it was the persecution of Christians which provided the excuse for a French expedition (briefly assisted by Spanish forces) to be sent there in the 1850s. There followed diplomatic conflict with China, which claimed sovereignty over the country. In 1863 the emperor of Annam ceded part of Cochin under duress to the French. Cambodia, too, accepted a French protectorate. This was followed by further French advance and the arousing of Indo-Chinese resistance. In the 1870s the French occupied the Red River delta; soon, other quarrels led to a war with China, the paramount power, which confirmed the French grip on Indo-China. In 1887 they set up an Indo-Chinese Union, which disguised a centralized regime behind a system of protectorates. Though this meant the preservation of native rulers (the emperor of Annam and the kings of Cambodia and Laos), the aim of French colonial policy was always assimilation. French culture was to be brought to new French subjects whose élites were to be gallicized as the best way to promote modernization and civilization.

The centralizing tendencies of French administration soon made it clear that the formal structure of native government was a sham. Unwittingly, the French thus sapped local institutions without replacing them with others enjoying the loyalty of the people. This was a dangerous course. There were also other important by-products of the French presence. It
brought with it, for example, French tariff policy, which was to slow down industrialization. This eventually led Indo-Chinese businessmen, like their Indian equivalents, to wonder in whose interests their country was run. Moreover, the conception of an Indo-China which was integrally a part of France, and whose inhabitants should be turned into Frenchmen, also brought problems. The French administration had to grapple with the paradox that access to French education could lead to reflection on the inspiring motto to be found on official buildings and documents of the Third Republic: ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Finally, French law and notions of property broke down the structure of village landholding and threw power into the hands of money-lenders and landlords. With a growing population in the rice-growing areas, this was to build up a revolutionary potential for the future.

Japan and China provided catalysts for Indo-Chinese grievances embodied in these facts and the legacy of traditional Vietnamese nationalism soon made itself felt. The Japanese victory over Russia led several young Vietnamese to go to Tokyo, where they met Sun Yat-sen and the Japanese sponsors of ‘Asia for the Asians’. After the Chinese Revolution of 1911, one of them organized a society for a Vietnamese Republic. None of this much troubled the French who were well able to contain such opposition before 1914, but it curiously paralleled conservative opposition to them among the Vietnamese Confucian scholar class. Though they opened a university in 1907, the French had to close it almost at once and it remained closed until 1918 because of fears of unrest among the intellectuals. This important section of Vietnamese opinion was already deeply alienated by French rule within a couple of decades of its establishment.

Further south, too, French history had already had an indirect impact in Indonesia. By the end of the nineteenth century there were some sixty million Indonesians; population pressure had not yet produced there the strains that were to come, but it was the largest group of non-Europeans ruled by a European state outside India. Their ancestors had nearly two centuries of sometimes bitter experience of Dutch rule before the French Revolution led to the invasion of the United Provinces, the setting up of a new revolutionary Republic there in 1795 and the dissolving of the Dutch East India Company and, soon afterwards, a British occupation of Java. The British troubled the waters by important changes in the revenue system, but there were also other influences now at work to stir up Indonesia. Though originally an outcropping of the Hindu civilization of India, it was also part of the Islamic world, with large numbers of at least nominal Muslims among its peoples, and commercial ties with Arabia. In the early
years of the nineteenth century this had new importance. Indonesian pilgrims, some of them of birth and rank, went to Mecca and then sometimes went on to Egypt and Turkey. There they found themselves directly in touch with reforming ideas from further west.

The instability of the situation was revealed when the Dutch returned and had, in 1825, to fight a ‘Java War’ against a dissident prince which lasted five years. It damaged the island’s finances so that the Dutch were constrained to introduce further changes. The result was an agricultural system which enforced the cultivation of crops for the government. The workings of this system led to grave exploitation of the peasant which began in the later nineteenth century to awaken among Dutchmen an uneasiness about the conduct of their colonial government. This culminated in a great change of attitude; in 1901 a new ‘Ethical Policy’ was announced, which was expressed in decentralization and a campaign to achieve improvement through village administration. But this programme often proved so paternalistic and interventionist in action that it, too, sometimes stimulated hostility. This was utilized by the first Indonesian nationalists, some of them inspired by Indians. In 1908 they formed an organization to promote national education. Three years later an Islamic association appeared, whose early activities were directed as much against Chinese traders as against the Dutch. By 1916 it had gone so far as to ask for self-government while remaining in union with the Netherlands. Before this, however, a true independence party had been founded in 1912. It opposed Dutch authority in the name of native-born Indonesians, of any race; a Dutchman was among its three founders and others followed him. In 1916 the Dutch took the first step towards meeting the demands of these groups by authorizing a parliament with limited powers for Indonesia.

Though European ideas of nationalism were by the early years of the twentieth century at work in almost all Asian countries, they took their different expressions from different possibilities. Not all colonial regimes behaved in the same way. The British encouraged nationalists in Burma, while the Americans doggedly pursued a benevolent paternalism in the Philippines after suppressing insurrection originally directed against their Spanish predecessors. Those same Spanish, like the Portuguese elsewhere in Asia, had vigorously promoted Christian conversion, while the British Raj was very cautious about interference with native religion. History also shaped the futures of colonial Asia, because of the different legacies the various European regimes played upon there. Above all, the forces of historical possibilities and historical inertia showed themselves in Japan and China, where European influence was just as dramatic in its effects as in directly ruled India or Vietnam. In every instance, the context in which
that influence operated was decisive in shaping the future; at the end of a couple of centuries of European activity in Asia, much (perhaps most) of that context remained intact. A huge residue of customary thought and practice remained undisturbed. Too much history was present for European expansion alone to explain twentieth-century Asia. The catalytic and liberating power of that expansion, none the less, was what brought Asia into the modern era.

BOOK SEVEN
The End of the Europeans’ World

In 1900 Europeans could look back on two, perhaps three, centuries of astonishing growth. Most of them would have said that it was growth for the better – that is, progress. Their history since the Middle Ages looked very much like a continuing advance to evidently worthwhile goals questioned by few. Whether the criteria were intellectual and scientific, or material and economic (even if they were moral and aesthetic, some said, so persuasive was the gospel of progress), a look at their own past assured them that they were set on a progressive course – which meant that the world was set on a progressive course, for their civilization was now spread worldwide. What was more, limitless advance seemed to lie ahead. Europeans showed in 1900 much the same confidence in the continuing success of their culture as the Chinese élite had shown in theirs a century earlier. The past, they were sure, proved them right.

Even so, a few did not feel so confident. They felt that the evidence could equally well imply a pessimistic conclusion. Though there were far fewer pessimists than optimists, they numbered in their ranks men of acknowledged standing and powerful minds. Some of them argued that the civilization in which they lived had yet to reveal its full self-destructive potential and sensed that the time when it would do so might not be far away. Some of them saw a civilization more and more obviously drifting away from its moorings in religion and moral absolutes, carried along by the tides of materialism and barbarity – probably to complete disaster.

As it turned out, neither optimists nor pessimists were wholly right, perhaps because their eyes were glued too firmly on what they thought were the characteristics of European civilization. They looked to its own inherent powers, tendencies or weaknesses for guidance about the future; not many of them paid much attention to the way Europe was changing the world in which her own ascendancy had been built and was thus to alter once again the balance between the major centres of civilization. Few looked further than Europe and Europe beyond the seas except the unbalanced cranks who
fussed about the ‘Yellow Peril’, though Napoleon had a century earlier warned that China was a sleeping giant best left undisturbed.

It is tempting to say in retrospect that the pessimists have had the best of the argument; it may even be true. But hindsight is sometimes a disadvantage to the historian; in this instance it makes it difficult to see how the optimists could once have felt so sure of themselves. Yet we should try to do so. For one thing, there were men of vision and insight among them; for another, optimism was for so long an obstacle to the solution of certain problems in the twentieth century that it deserves to be understood as a historical force in its own right. And much of what the pessimists said was wrong too. Appalling though the disasters of the twentieth century were, they fell on societies more resilient than those shattered by lesser troubles in earlier times, and they were not always those feared nearly a century ago. In 1900, optimists and pessimists alike had to work with data which could be read in more than one way. It is not reprehensible, merely tragic, that they found it so hard to judge exactly what lay ahead. With better information available to us, we have not been so successful in shorter-term prediction that we are in a position to condemn them.

1
Strains in the System

One historical trend very obvious as the twentieth century opened was the continuing increase of population in the European world. In 1900 Europe itself had about 400 million inhabitants – a quarter of them Russians – the United States about 76 million and the British overseas Dominions about 15 million between them. This kept the dominant civilization’s share of world population high. On the other hand, growth was already beginning to slow down in some countries in the first decade of this century. This was most obvious in the advanced nations which were the heart of western Europe, where growth depended more and more on falling death-rates. In them there was evidence that keeping your family small was a practice now spreading downwards through society. Traditional contraceptive knowledge of a sort had long been available, but the nineteenth century had brought to the better-off more effective techniques. When these were taken up more widely (and there were soon signs that they were), their impact on population structure would be very great.

In eastern and Mediterranean Europe, on the other hand, such effects were far away. There, rapid growth was only just beginning to produce grave strains. The growing availability of outlets though emigration in the nineteenth century had made it possible to overcome them; there might be trouble to come if those outlets ceased to be so easily available. Further afield, even more pessimistic reflections might be prompted by considering what would happen when the agencies at work to reduce the death-rate in Europe came to spread to Asia and Africa. In the world civilization the nineteenth century had created, this could not be prevented. In that case, Europe’s success in imposing itself would have guaranteed the eventual loss of the demographic advantage recently added to her technical superiority. Worse still, the Malthusian crisis once feared (but lost to sight as the nineteenth-century economic miracle removed the fear of over-population) might at last become a reality.

It had been possible to set aside Malthus’s warnings because the nineteenth century brought about the greatest surge in wealth creation the
world had ever known. Its sources lay in the industrialization of Europe, and the techniques underlying this growth were far from exhausted or compromised in 1900. There had not only been a vast and accelerating flow of commodities available only in (relatively) tiny quantities a century before, but whole new ranges of goods had come into existence. Oil and electricity had joined coal, wood, wind and water as sources of energy. A chemical industry existed which could not have been envisaged in 1800. Growing power and wealth had been used to tap seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, both agricultural and mineral – and not only in Europe. Its demand for raw materials changed the economies of other continents. The needs of the new electrical industry gave Brazil a brief rubber boom, but changed for ever the history of Malaysia and Indo-China.