The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (10 page)

Initially, Europeans were focused on finding products that people might want back home. This sometimes took the form of plunder; at other times, trade. They brought back furs from the Americas, spices from Asia, and gold and diamonds from Brazil. Soon, however, their involvement became more permanent. Their interests varied, depending on the climate. In temperate regions, starting with North and South America, Europeans settled, re-creating Western-style societies in far-off places. That was the beginning of what they called the New World. In lands they found uninhabitable, often tropical climes like Southeast Asia and Africa, they created a system of agriculture to produce crops that would be of interest in domestic markets. The Dutch set up vast farms in the East Indies, as did the Portuguese in Brazil. These were soon eclipsed by the French and English plantations in the Caribbean, which used Africans as slaves for labor.

Within a hundred years of initial European contact, one trend was unmistakable and irreversible: these encounters changed or destroyed the existing political, social, and economic arrangements in non-Western societies. The old order collapsed or was destroyed, or often a combination of the two. This was true no matter the country’s size, from tiny Burma, where the traditional structure crumbled under British rule, to the large tribes of Africa, where European nations drew new borders, created new divisions, and put favored groups into power. In many cases, this external influence introduced modernity, even if sometimes accompanied by great brutality. In other cases, European influence was regressive, destroying old ways but creating little to replace them. In any event, the Americas, Asia, and Africa were forever and irreversibly altered by their discovery by the West.

The direction of European expansion was determined by the balance of power. For several centuries, despite their mastery of the oceans, European nations did not have any military advantage over Turks and Arabs. So they traded with—but did not try to dominate—the lands of the Middle East and North Africa until the early nineteenth century. In Asia, the Europeans saw few easy pathways into the continent and instead set up trading posts and offices and contented themselves with the scraps ignored by the Chinese. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, by contrast, they were clearly stronger than the natives and knew it. Portuguese expansion started in Africa, with moves into the Congo and the Zambezi in the early sixteenth century. But the climate there was inhospitable for settlement, so they turned to the Western Hemisphere.

America was a mistake—Columbus was searching for a path to the Indies and bumped up against a large obstacle—but it turned out to be a happy accident. The Americas became Europe’s great escape valve for four hundred years. Europeans left for the New World for a variety of reasons—overcrowding, poverty, and religious persecution at home or simply the desire for adventure—and when they landed, they found civilizations that were sophisticated in some ways but militarily primitive. Tiny bands of European adventurers—Cortés, Pizarro—could defeat much larger native armies. This, coupled with European diseases that the natives could not withstand, led to the wholesale destruction of tribes and cultures.

Colonization was often done not by countries but by corporations. The Dutch and British East India companies were licensed monopolies, created to end competition among the businessmen of each country. The French equivalent, the Compagne des Indes, was an independently run state corporation. Initially, these commercial enterprises were uninterested in territory and concerned only with profits, but once invested in new areas, they wanted more stability and control. The European powers, meanwhile, wanted to keep rival countries out. Thus began the land grabs and construction of formal empires, of which Britain’s grew to become the largest.

With formal empire came grand ambitions. Westerners began looking beyond money alone to power, influence, and culture. They became, depending on your view, ideological or idealistic. European institutions, practices, and ideas were introduced and imposed, though always maintaining racial preferences—the British court system was brought to India, for example, but Indian magistrates could not try whites. Over time, the European impact on its colonies was huge. And it then spread well beyond the colonies. Niall Ferguson has argued that the British empire is responsible for the worldwide spread of the English language, banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative government, and the idea of liberty.
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Such an argument might gloss over the hypocrisy and brutality of imperial control—economic looting, mass executions, imprisonments, torture. Some—the Dutch and the French, for example—might quibble with the exclusively English provenance of such ideas. But in any case, it is undeniable that, as a consequence of empire, European ideas and practices blanketed the globe.

Even in the Far East, where the West never made formal annexations, European impact was massive. When the weak and dysfunctional Qing court tried to ban the opium trade in the early nineteenth century, Britain—whose treasury had become addicted to revenues from opium—launched a naval attack. The Anglo-Chinese wars, often called the Opium Wars, highlighted the power gap between the two countries. At their conclusion in 1842, Beijing was forced to agree to a series of concessions over and above the resumption of the opium trade: it ceded Hong Kong, opened five ports for British residents, granted all Britons exemption from Chinese laws, and paid a large indemnity. In 1853, Western ships—this time American—entered Japanese waters and put an end to Japan’s policy of “seclusion” from the world. Japan subsequently signed a series of trade treaties that gave Western countries and their citizens special privileges. Formal empire continued to grow as well, extending into the lands of the sickly Ottoman Empire as well as Africa. This process of domination culminated in the early twentieth century, at which point a handful of Western capitals ruled 85 percent of the world’s land.

Westernization

In 1823, the East India Company decided to set up a school in Calcutta to train locals. It seemed wise and straightforward enough. But the policy sparked a fiery letter to Britain’s prime minister, William Pitt, from a leading Indian citizen of Calcutta, Raja Ram Mohan Roy. The letter is worth quoting at length.

When this seminary of learning was proposed . . . we were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the Nations of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world.

We now find that the Government are establishing a Sanskrit school under Hindoo Pundits to impart such knowledge as is already current in India. This seminary . . . can only be expected to load the minds of the youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no value to the possessors or to society. . . .

The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a life time is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well-known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge. . . . Neither can much improvement arise from such speculations as the following; which are the themes suggested by the Vedant? In what manner is the soul absorbed into the deity? What relation does it bear to the divine essence? . . . I beg leave to state, with due deference to your Lordship’s exalted status, that if the plan now adopted be followed, it will completely defeat the object proposed.
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Whenever you hear the argument that Westernization was purely a matter of arms and force, think of this letter—and hundreds of letters, memos, and orders like it. There was coercion behind the spread of Western ideas, but there were also many non-Westerners eager to learn the ways of the West. The reason for this was simple. They wanted to succeed, and people always tend to copy those who have succeeded.

The West’s prowess at amassing wealth and waging war was obvious to its neighbors by the seventeenth century. One of them, Peter the Great of Russia, spent months traveling through Europe, dazzled by its industries and its militaries. Determined to learn from them, he returned home and decreed a series of radical reforms: reorganizing the army along European lines, modernizing the bureaucracy, moving the capital from Asiatic Moscow to a new, European-style city on the western edge of the Russian empire, which he named St. Petersburg. He reformed the tax code and even tinkered with the structure of the Orthodox Church to make it more Western. Men were ordered to shave their beards and wear European-style clothing. If a man persisted in the old ways, he had to pay a beard tax of one hundred rubles a year.

Since Peter the Great, there has been a long, distinguished list of non-Westerners who have sought to bring the ideas of the West to their countries. Some have been as radical as Peter. Perhaps the most famous of them was Kemal Atatürk, who took over the collapsing Ottoman state in 1922 and declared that Turkey had to abandon its past and embrace European culture to “catch up” with the West. He created a secular republic, romanized the Turkish script, abolished the veil and the fez, and dismantled all the religious underpinnings of the Ottoman caliphate. Earlier, in Japan in 1885, the great theorist of the Meiji Reformation, Yukichi Fukuzawa, wrote a famous essay, “Leaving Asia,” in which he argued that Japan needed to turn its back on Asia, particularly China and Korea, and “cast its lot with the civilized countries of the West.” Many Chinese reformers made similar arguments. Sun Yat-sen bluntly acknowledged Europe’s superior status and the need to copy it to get ahead.

Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, believed that ending his country’s “backwardness” required borrowing politically and economically from the West. Having been educated at Harrow and Cambridge, he had the outlook of a Western liberal: he once privately described himself as “the last Englishman to rule India.” Nehru’s contemporaries around the world were similarly steeped in Western thought. Postcolonial leaders tried to free themselves from the West politically but still wanted the Western path to modernity. Even the fiercely anti-Western Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt wore tailored suits and read voraciously in European history. His sources for policy ideas were invariably British, French, and American scholars and writers. His favorite movie was Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

We sometimes recall these leaders’ fiery anti-Western rhetoric and Marxist orientation and think of them as having rejected the West. In fact, they were simply borrowing from the radical traditions of the West. Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin were all Western intellectuals. Even today, when people in Asia or Africa criticize the West, they are often using arguments that were developed in London, Paris, or New York. Osama bin Laden’s critique of America in a September 2007 video tape—which included references to Noam Chomsky, inequality, the mortgage crisis, and global warming—could have been penned by a left-wing academic at Berkeley. In Joseph Conrad’s
Youth
, the narrator recalls his first encounter with “the East”: “And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. . . . The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in English.”

Non-Western leaders who admired the West have been most impressed by its superiority at producing wealth and winning wars. After its defeat at the hand of European forces in Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire decided that it had to learn from the ways of its adversaries. It bought weapons from Europe and, after realizing that it needed more than machines, started importing organizational skills, techniques, and modes of thought and behavior. By the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern commanders were organizing their troops into Western-style armies, with the same platoons and battalions, the same colonels and generals.
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Militaries around the world converged to a single Western model. Today, whether in China, Indonesia, or Nigeria, a country’s armed forces are largely standardized around a nineteenth-century Western template.

Men like Roy, Fukuzawa, and Nehru were not making an argument about intrinsic cultural superiority. They were not Uncle Toms. In Roy’s letter, he repeatedly compared Indian science in his day to European science before Francis Bacon. It was history, not genetics, that mattered. Sun Yat-sen was intimately familiar with the glories of China’s past and with the richness of its tradition of learning. Fukuzawa was a scholar of Japanese history. Nehru spent his years in British jails writing passionate nationalist histories of India. They all believed in the glory of their own cultures. But they also believed that at that moment in history, in order to succeed economically, politically, and militarily, they had to borrow from the West.

Modernization

The issue that non-Western reformers were struggling with in the twentieth century has returned as a central question for the future: Can you be modern without being Western? How different are the two? Will international life be substantially different in a world in which the non-Western powers have enormous weight? Will these new powers have different values? Or does the process of becoming rich make us all the same? These are not idle thoughts. In the next few decades, three of the world’s four biggest economies will be non-