The Transformation of the World (101 page)

Throughout the period from 1815 to 1914 (and despite the fact that after 1870 Britain found it somewhat, but not much, more difficult to have its way on the international stage) Pax Britannica mainly signified (a) an ability to defend the largest colonial empire in the world and even to expand it cautiously without a war with other powers; (b) an ability, beyond the limits of formal colonial empire, to utilize development disparities in such a way as to exercise strong or dominant informal influence in many countries outside the European system of states (China, Ottoman Empire, Latin America), backing this up with contractual privileges (“unequal treaties”) and the Damoclean sword of military intervention (“gunboat diplomacy”);
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and (c) an ability to provide the international community with services (a free-trade regime, a currency system, rules of international law) that did not require the user to hold British citizenship. The British Empire was unique in that its territorial core (the “formal empire”) had two concentric circles around it: the sphere without sharp contours in which Britain could informally exert decisive influence; and the space of a global economic and legal system that Britain had molded but did not control. Though exceedingly large, the empire did not contain the entirety or even the majority of British economic activity within its confines, not even in the midcentury decades when the United Kingdom was the only world power. Had it been otherwise, the transimperial, “cosmopolitan” free-trade policy would not have survived for long. This
is another imperial paradox: for Britain during its period of industrialization and the classical Pax Britannica, the empire was economically less important than it had been before the loss of the United States or than it would be after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

7 Living in Empires

Ever since there have been empires, the verdict on them has oscillated between two extremes: on one side, the rhetoric of the imperialists, either triumphantly militarist or soothingly paternalist; on the other side, the rhetoric of resistance fighters (called nationalists in the nineteenth century) referring to oppression and liberation. These primal postures are repeated in today's controversies. Some see empires as violent machines of physical repression and cultural alienation—a view essentially developed in the age of decolonization
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—while others conclude from the present world situation that empires did more than the chaos of immature nation-states to provide for peace and a modest degree of prosperity. Given the tensions built into this opposition, it is not easy to answer the question how “people” live in empires. Imperialist propaganda has drawn a veil over the realities, but this does not mean that every denunciation of an empire as a “prison of the peoples” is evidence of really unbearable suffering.

A second, related complication is that not all life in an empire or colony was shaped by imperial structures or a
situation coloniale
. It therefore makes little sense to treat the colonial world as a sphere closed in on itself, instead of attempting to understand it from the more general point of view of world history. Here it is difficult to find a middle way. Classical critics in the decolonization period were right to describe colonial relations as generally productive of deformations. By the measure of a fictitious normal condition, the ideal-typical colonizer and colonized both suffered damage to their personalities. However, we would be reinforcing the colonizer's fantasies of omnipotence if we were to see the whole of life in a colonial space as built upon heteronomy and coercion. Methodologically, it is also necessary to address the relationship between structure and experience, and here different approaches confront one another. A structural theory such as that associated with traditional Marxist interpretations often allows no room for the analysis of day-to-day realities and psychological situations within an empire. But, since the critical energies of Marxism have translated into postcolonialism, the opposite effect has made itself felt. An exclusive fixation on the microlevel of individuals, or at best small groups, has entirely blanked out wider contexts, making it difficult to grasp the forces that shape experiences, identities, and discourses in the first place.

Nevertheless, some general points can be made about typical and widespread experiences in nineteenth-century empires.

First
. In most cases, an act of violence lies at the origin of a region's incorporation into an empire. This may be a lengthy war of conquest, but it may also be
a local massacre—which seldom just happens and is often meant as an intimidating display of power.
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If the operation is successful, the resulting “shock and awe” paralyzes the adversary, demonstrates the superiority of the conqueror's weapons, stakes out his claim to rule, and leads to the disarmament of the local population that is necessary for a monopoly of force. Unless it tiptoes in noiselessly through a trade agreement or has the way cleared for it by missionaries, an empire always begins with traumatic experiences of violence. To be sure, these often do not burst into a peaceful idyll: not infrequently, they encounter societies already weighed down by violent propensities, as in eighteenth-century India where many successor states of the Mogul Empire were locked in combat with one another, or in the large areas of Africa torn apart by the European or Arab slave trade. In reality, violent conquest frequently gives way to colonial peace.

Second
. An imperial seizure of power does not necessary entail the sudden political decapitation of indigenous societies and their complete replacement by foreign authorities. Actually, this has rather seldom been the case. Dramatic examples are the Spanish conquest of America in the sixteenth century and the subjugation of Algeria after 1830. Imperial powers often look for members of the indigenous elite who are prepared to collaborate, some of whom, if only for cost reasons, can be assigned or reallocated to government functions. This strategy, which takes many forms, is called indirect rule. However, even in extreme cases where the practice of rule hardly seems to change under the new masters, the indigenous power holders end up damaged. The arrival of empire always leads to a devaluation of indigenous political authority. Even governments that have to make just a few territorial concessions under external pressure—as the Chinese did after the end of the Opium War in 1842—suffer a loss of legitimacy within their own polity. They become more vulnerable and have to reckon with resistance that at first, as in the Taiping movement after 1850, is by no means necessarily driven by anti-imperialist motives. As for the imperial aggressors, their legitimacy problem stems from the fact that colonial rule is always initially usurpation. Those who understand this soon make efforts to achieve at least rudimentary legitimacy, by gaining respect for their efficiency or by tapping local symbolic resources. But only in rare cases, and then almost always where cultural differences are not too great (as in the Habsburg Empire), does the usurpatory character of imperial rule become blurred over time. This is scarcely possible without mobilization of the symbolic capital of monarchy. If a society that came under an empire was not simply acephalous—as in parts of Siberia or Central Africa—but had a king or chief ruling over it, the colonial power tried either to drape itself in the mantle of imperial overlordship or to slip directly into the role of indigenous monarch. That this was not possible for republican France after 1870, proved to be a continual handicap at the level of symbolic politics.

Third
. Incorporation into an empire involves linking up with a larger communicative space, where the flows typically radiate between the core and the periphery. Of course there is also communication among individual colonies
and other peripheral areas of the empire, but it has rarely been dominant. The imperial metropolis often controlled the means of communication, viewing with particular suspicion any direct contacts between the subjects of various colonies. But, whenever it was technically possible and state repression did not prevent it, peripheral elites took advantage of the new opportunities.

One instructive field is the use of imperial languages.
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Multilingualism used to be more or less the norm throughout history, until the nineteenth-century equation of a nation with a single language complicated matters. Thus, in the Muslim world it was very common for people to speak three tongues: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. But there was a functional differentiation, since Arabic was the language of the (untranslatable) Koran, while Persian enjoyed especially high literary prestige and was the lingua franca in huge areas stretching from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire to the Ganges. To see in the spread of imperial languages nothing but a diktat of European cultural imperialism is to oversimplify a complex reality. In early nineteenth-century India and Ceylon, it was the subject of extensive and sophisticated debates without a clear outcome.
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Sometimes education in a foreign language was not imposed but freely accepted. Egypt, for instance, whose experiences of the French occupation between 1798 and 1802 were by no means uniformly pleasant, adopted French as the second language of the educated classes in the course of the nineteenth century. This was a voluntary measure on the part of the Egyptian elite, from a country considered to be the leading cultural nation in Europe. French maintained its status there even after the British occupation of 1882. In the Tsarist Empire too, as every reader of Tolstoy knows, French remained for a long time the prestige language of the aristocracy. Absorption by an empire did not automatically mean adoption of the new rulers' language.

Fourth
. Many countries that were incorporated into an empire would previously have been part of an extensive economic circuit. Often, though not always, the imperial center broke these connections, by raising mercantilist tariff barriers, introducing a new currency, or closing down caravan or shipping routes. But it also created the possibility of linking up with a new economic context. In the nineteenth century that meant the “world market,” which over the long run was growing in volume and density. By the eve of the First World War, few regions on the planet were completely unaffected by it. Insertion into the world market—or better, into particular world markets—took the most diverse forms. It always led to new kinds of dependence, and often also to new opportunities. Any empire is an economic space sui generis. Incorporation into it did not leave local relations unchanged either.

Fifth
. Dichotomies between perpetrators and victims, colonizers and colonized are suitable at best for crude approximate models. They constituted a kind of founding contradiction in colonial societies. But only in extreme cases, such as Caribbean slavery in the eighteenth century, was this so dominant that it accurately described the social reality—and even then there were intermediate strata of “free persons of color,” or
gens de couleur
. As a rule, societies incorporated
into empires had a hierarchical structure that contact with the empire called into question. The empire differentiated between its friends and enemies. It divided indigenous elites and played their various factions off against one another; it sought collaborators, who had to be paid. The colonial state apparatus needed local personnel at every level—and on a large scale in the case of late-nineteenth-century telegraphy and railroads, and the customs service. Insertion into world markets created niches for upward social movement, in commerce or capitalist production, which minorities such as the Southeast Asian Chinese knew how to exploit. If European real estate law was introduced, it inevitably led to radical changes in property relations and rural stratification. In short, with the rare exception of low-key indirect rule in areas such as Northern Nigeria or Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, imperial absorption resulted in far-reaching transformation, sometimes approaching a social revolution within the space of a few years.

Sixth
. Personal and collective identities change at the cultural frontier of an advancing empire. It would be too simple to see this as a transition from an equable self-image to “multiple” forms of personality and socialization. Even the emergence of what is sometimes called “hybridity” is not necessarily a distinctive feature of colonial and imperial constellations. The older sociological concept of “role” is more useful here. Any social situation becomes more complex if additional factors appear; the repertoire of roles grows larger, making it necessary for many people to master several at once. A typical colonial role, for example, is that of the middleman and interpreter. The position of women was also affected when new ideas about female conduct and labor were introduced, often by Christian missionaries. “Identity” is a dynamic category: it is recognized most clearly when it takes shape in acts of demarcation. This was not peculiar to colonial situations, of course, but perhaps we may say that in general it was important for imperial rulers to be able to sort their confusingly varied population into a number of clear-cut “peoples.” Nation-states tend toward cultural and ethnic uniformity and seek to bolster it by political means. In empires, however, the emphasis is on difference. Postcolonial critics usually attack this as a grave offense to human equality, but it should not be evaluated in purely moral terms. Ethnic stereotyping undoubtedly intensified in the late nineteenth century under the influence of racial doctrines; it emanated, however, from various directions. Colonial systems tried to bring order into complexity by artificially creating “tribes” and other categories for the classification of their subject population. The aspiring science of anthropology/ethnology was influential here, and the census was useful in giving taxonomies some material weight. Certain social groups took shape in reality only once they had been defined in theory.
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Colonial states first created difference, then went to great pains to order it. This happened in varying degrees of differentiation. The French presence in Algeria was constructed around a simple opposition between “good” Berbers and “degenerate” Arabs.
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British India, on the other hand, elaborated a classificatory grid of pedantic sophistication.