The Transformation of the World (104 page)

Politically speaking, European imperialism was
less
than the sum of individual imperialisms. The mechanics of the system functioned, if at all, only among the five Great Powers
qua
European players, not among them as multicontinental empires. The system as such was not a supporting structure of “world politics.”

2 Spaces of Power and Hegemony

The imperial expansion of Europe and North America did not occur in politically unstructured spaces; any simple opposition between Europe and “the rest” is misplaced. First of all, relations of quasi-colonial dependence were by no means absent within Europe itself. Traditional diplomatic history makes only marginal reference to what it calls the “lesser European powers,” showing little interest in their scope for action in a world dominated by the Great Powers. Portugal, for instance, had an extreme economic dependence on Britain, keeping consumers there supplied with cork and port wine and sending 80 percent of its total exports in 1870 to the British Isles. Moreover, brutal exploitation was practiced in conditions that were no longer possible in Britain itself—for example, when British firms employed Portuguese children on piece rates to cut cork for bottles with cutthroat razors.
²⁵
Such outsourcing of high-risk and low-paid jobs is always an important indication of asymmetry in the world system.

The Americas

One space with its own distinctive structures of hegemony was the Americas. In the 1820s, the separation of the Spanish colonies from the mother country, together with the slowly unfolding impact of the Monroe Doctrine, made the New World more detached from the Old World than it had been for centuries. For a brief historical moment, in 1806–7, Britain was tempted to take over the legacy of the
conquistadores
in the River Plate region and elsewhere, but in the
end it never tried to intervene outside its already existing colonial domain. The United Kingdom would remain neutral in the conflict between Spain and its rebellious subjects in the Americas. Its trade with the region already increased during the independence wars, and by 1824 Latin America accounted for 15 percent of all British exports. London hastened to recognize the new republics, especially as US diplomats were by this time already seeking to extend the influence of their nation. Soon an international legal framework was in place that gave the protection of British laws to UK citizens in Latin America and, while not obliging Latin American countries to prefer British imports, required them to apply tariffs no higher than those imposed on most favored nations. Under this fairly light regime of “informal imperialism,” Britain long remained the principal trading partner of many Latin American countries until the United States increasingly took over this role toward the end of the century.
²⁶

As early as the 1830s, having for twenty years been the most troubled continent in the world alongside Europe, and having in the same period aroused great interest abroad thanks to the travels of Alexander von Humboldt and others, Latin America slipped from the sight of international diplomacy.
²⁷
Not a single country of the continent was drawn into intra-European power politics, nor did serious US-British rivalry break out in South America at any time in the century. Britain could not always successfully translate its economic weight into political influence. Its usual methods of diplomatic pressure failed to end slavery in Brazil (with which it otherwise had good relations). The Latin American countries themselves did not develop a distinctive interstate system; indeed, something closer to anarchy prevailed among the often arbitrarily defined splinters of the Spanish Empire. Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, ended his days despairing about the particularism of his compatriots. A genuine pan-Americanism, not instrumentalized by the United States, was never an important element in the situation. Many state borders were the object of dispute. Nothing was done for the external defense of the region; scarcely a single navy was capable of being deployed in battle.
²⁸

The grim War of the Triple Alliance, which in 1864–70 pitted Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, was not exactly characteristic, but its very possibility was eloquent testimony to the disunity of the continent. It was also the most costly conflict, in terms of human lives, in the whole history of South America. After 1814, under three successive dictatorships, little Paraguay developed into what has been described as an “enlightened Sparta”: egalitarian, tightly disciplined, heavily armed, and comparatively literate.
²⁹
A Brazilian border violation with Uruguay was the pretext for the dictator Francisco Solano López to march his well-trained army into battle with the second-rate troops of Brazil and Argentina. The first encounters ended in disaster for the Allies, who were soon joined by Uruguay. But in 1867 the war machine of Brazil, a country with a population twenty times larger than Paraguay's, went into top gear. By the end of the war, which Paraguay delayed in stubborn defensive actions, half
its population was dead—proportionally the highest military and civilian casualties of any war in modern times.
³⁰
The conflict became the central event in the history of Paraguay, the key datum in the collective memory, as well as a turning point in the history of the continent. Argentina also suffered heavy military and economic losses, and saw its previously unchallenged supremacy on the Plate whittled away; Brazil's regional superiority was confirmed.
³¹

The Pacific War or “Saltpeter War” (1879–83), which ended in victory for Chile over Peru and Bolivia and gave it important reserves of nitrates, had a similar effect on the participants. The unparalleled mobilization of Chilean society was its most intense collective experience since independence; and in Peru, where guerrillas fought against the invaders, the violence ushered in a breakdown of the state.
³²
Given the lasting volatility, which might be characterized both internally and externally with the formula “fragmentation plus weak stabilizing powers,” it is surprising that Latin America knew as much peace as it did.
³³

While the countries of South America did not develop a common security system, those of Central America came increasingly under the influence of North America. Here rivalry between Britain and the United States played a role, at least indirectly, since the British, as Mexico's chief creditor, were able to bring a certain political pressure to bear. Washington feared that London might thereby lay hands on the Mexican province of California, but there is much stronger evidence that the United States had been planning its annexation for some time. President James K. Polk played the imperialist game long before all Europeans had learned it. Having put the Mexicans under so much military pressure that they finally withdrew, he went on to present Congress with evidence of a Mexican attack and convinced it to issue a declaration of war.
³⁴
In the late summer of 1847, a US expeditionary force reached Mexico City, and powerful political actors in the United States, including the president himself, called for the whole country to be annexed. The men on the spot—usually inclined to press on for the maximum objectives of their paymasters—were in this case a moderating influence. Yet the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) was still a diktat. Paltry compensation was paid to Mexico for its forced surrender of territory corresponding to the present states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and Utah, as well as parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.

The United States and Britain found themselves on a collision course not over Mexico and California but because of events farther south, in Central America, where the British initially dominated a weak proto-system of states. As the United States rapidly grew more interested in trade with Asia, attention turned from the annexation of California and Oregon (1848) and the California gold rush to the transit possibilities offered by Central America. In 1850 a British envoy and the American foreign minister reached an agreement (the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), which stipulated that neither country would acquire new colonies in the region or build a canal across the isthmus without the other's consent. Symbolically this put Britain on an equal footing with the United States in
Central America. In the subsequent decades Washington continually expanded its influence, and in the 1870s and 1880s it landed combat forces several times in Panama (then a province of Colombia) “to restore order” and “to protect U.S. citizens.”
³⁵
The US-British equilibrium in the region disappeared over time, and in 1902 Congress unilaterally decided to build a canal through Panama. When Colombia balked at the purchase price offered for a canal zone, private interests arranged with US support for a new state of Panama to declare independence. The Canal Zone was then leased forthwith to the United States, and in 1906 several hundred workers were hired from Spain (soon to be joined by another 12,000 Spanish, Italians, and Greeks) to begin the construction work. The Panama Canal opened to shipping in August 1914.
³⁶

In South America the political map changed little after independence, with its mosaic of weakly articulated states all more or less in search of nationhood. Not even Brazil, on account of its Portuguese origins, was capable of soaring to hegemony in the continent; nor did Britain or (until the 1890s) the United States fill the gap. The Great Powers had clientelist relations with individual countries, but not a capacity to define a broad structural context that is implied in hegemony. No one any longer entertained the dreams of the bygone liberation period, when visions had been entertained of a great Hispanic American federation taking shape along the lines of the United States. Rather, the model was European diplomacy, in which secret treaties might be reached but no supra-national forms of organization would come into being—not even a Latin American “concert.” Compared with the climaxes of the military contest among Europeans, the countries of Latin America got on fairly peacefully with one another in the nineteenth century. The lack of genuine great powers was in
this
respect more a blessing than a disadvantage for the continent. On the other hand, South America was left without states and military forces capable of resisting the growing dominance of the United States.

President Monroe's message—“America for the Americans!”—became a “doctrine” and attained its maximum effect only in the decades after the French defeat in Mexico in 1867. In the Venezuela crisis of 1895–96, the United States for the first time used threats of war to assert its claims to leadership (against those of Britain) south of the Central American isthmus too. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States claimed the right to “civilizing” intervention anywhere in South America. This effectively turned Monroe's idea on its head: he had protected Latin American revolutions, whereas Roosevelt now wanted to act against them; he had sought to keep South America free of armies, whereas Roosevelt looked to the supremacy of North American arms. The Roosevelt Corollary merely set the seal on current practice: US troops had already intervened twenty times in Latin America in the years between 1898 and 1902.
³⁷

What took shape in the 1890s was not a fully fledged American system of states but a rather a less-than-benevolent hegemony—“unilateralism” in today's
parlance—practiced by the economically and militarily superior United States. This often remained only latent, however: Washington was not able to push through all its objectives. For example, the various regimes in Brazil kept up good relations with the United States without according the economic privileges that the latter desired. Nothing became of the idea of a pan-American free-trade zone.
³⁸
It should also be recognized that, unlike Asia or Africa and partly as a result of the US umbrella, Latin America was spared involvement in two world wars. In the nineteenth century, the two countries of
North
America also did not constitute a “system” in keeping with the European model. Of greater importance was their agreement in 1817 to demilitarize the Great Lakes—an early example of bilateral disarmament. After the final resolution of all border issues in 1842, the United States and British Canada settled into a cool but peaceful relationship with each other, a zone of tranquility in the turbulent international history of the nineteenth century.

Asia

In other parts of the world, Europeans encountered older state formations that they were neither able nor willing to overturn. In South Asia in the eighteenth century, the French and British (and eventually only the latter) entered the power game along with the states that had succeeded the Mogul Empire. The British conquest of India can only be explained as a power grab from within the Indian world of states, supported by military and administrative forms of organization that the British brought with them or developed and tested on the spot. Under fully developed British rule—that is, after the annexation of the Punjab in 1849—there was only a semblance of pluralism in the Indian states. The five hundred or so remaining princedoms, where the East India Company and after 1858 the British Crown did not exercise direct rule, were in no position to pursue an independent external or military policy. A maharajah who took up with the Russians, for instance, would have been immediately removed from office. Any succession to the throne needed approval from the colonial authorities.
³⁹
The British were also careful to ensure that horizontal links between princedoms were as weak as possible. The all-India princely assemblies (
durbars
), which from 1877 took place at wide intervals with great ceremonial pomp, had no political content and were in effect pseudo-feudal rituals of homage to the distant monarch and her (or later his) viceregal representatives.