The Transformation of the World (26 page)

The term “Islamic world” raises special problems of its own, since, as a reference to religious affiliation, it can never be given a precise territorial definition. As far as the modern age is concerned, it should include parts of South Asia, Afghanistan, and numerous islands of the Malay Archipelago. But this evidently does not accord
with the conventions. Cultural geographers have proposed various subdivisions of a narrowly defined “Islamic world”: for example, a “Turkic-Iranian world” spanning linguistic boundaries, alongside an “Arab world” further divided into “Middle East,” North Africa, and the Sahara.
¹²³
Unlike in East Asia and eastern Europe/North Asia, there was no all-encompassing political framework in the nineteenth-century Near and Middle East, even if the power of the Ottoman Empire to shape the administration of the region should not be underestimated.

The ordering of space operates at various levels—from the political restructuring of large regions (as at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919) to the regional planning of railroads down to the microorganization of agrarian property relations. The dissolution and privatization of common lands sometimes took place chaotically, without government regulation, while in other cases it was subject to planning and strict official instructions. Wherever the state levied taxes on land, it became essential to know
who
owed
what
to the revenue, whether from individual owners or occupiers (and no longer from village communities). All around the world, this was the strongest motive for the spread of government activity at the local level. Later came a further drive to disentangle jumbled landownership and to consolidate existing plots in a rational manner. Scarcely any of the land reforms of the nineteenth or twentieth century failed to make provisions in this regard.
¹²⁴
The organization of landholdings is a basic operation of the modern age. It was plainly visible in the huge collectivizations of the twentieth century, in the Soviet Union, East Germany, or China, but otherwise it has mostly remained hidden to historians. There is a rule, however: no state is “modern” without a land registry and the legal right to dispose freely of real estate.

6 Territoriality, Diaspora, Borders

Territoriality

Until now all the considerations in this chapter have presupposed a seamless two-dimensionality. Spaces in the nineteenth century were indeed highly uniform and continuous; they became so as a result of government intervention. Whether in the US land ordinances, in the systematic mapping and recording of landownership from the Netherlands to India, or in the colonial administration of hitherto weakly governed regions, the activity of the state had a thoroughly homogenizing effect. It was a tendency of the age, especially after 1860, to conceive of governance not merely as control of strategic centers but as ongoing activity on the part of regional authorities. This may be described as a progressive “territorialization” or “production of territoriality”—a process that had deep roots in the early modern period, not only in Europe.
¹²⁵
This territorialization was bound up with the projection of imagined shapes of the nation onto mappable space, with the formation of nation-states, and also with the reform of empires and the consolidation of colonial rule, which was understood for the first
time as control over countries rather than simply over trading bases. In line with this revaluation of viable territories, there was a dramatic reduction in the world total of independent political entities—in Europe from five hundred in 1500 to twenty-five in 1900.
¹²⁶
The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 (a law of the Imperial Diet that secularized a large number of clerical territories and licensed medium-sized states in Germany to swallow up their smaller neighbors), the founding of the German Reich in 1871, the abolition of the traditional system of princely domains in Japan in 1871, and the colonial conquest of India and Africa involved the elimination of hundreds of semi-autonomous rulerships. Outside Europe this was not only a consequence of European expansion. In mainland Southeast Asia, for example, the precolonial eighteenth century had already witnessed a fall in the number of independent entities from twenty-two to three: Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam.
¹²⁷
Diversified dynastic holdings were rounded off. Large states came into being—huge entities such as the United States, Canada (federated in 1867), and the Tsarist Empire, which only now really took possession of Siberia and expanded into southern Central Asia. The sober Friedrich Ratzel was not merely engaging in social Darwinist reverie when he elaborated a “law of the spatial growth of states.”
¹²⁸

Territoriality was not only an attribute of the modern state but also a kind of monarchical politics. In nineteenth-century Iran, for instance, a country still hardly touched by Western influence, it was an important criterion of the ruler's success that he gained additional land or at least successfully defended the existing borders. Had he proved incapable of this, it would have been a signal for other princes to rise up in arms and seek to overthrow him. Control of the country was the basis of the kingdom (
mulk
), as it was later of the nation (
millat
).
¹²⁹
In view of Iran's weakness vis-à-vis its imperial neighbors, this was not an enviable situation for a shah.

Discontinuous Social Spaces

One should not think of all spaces as continuous. In the nineteenth century too, the life of a society did not always unfold on a joined-together territory. The most important type of discontinuous social space is a diaspora: that is, a community that lives outside its real or imagined land of origin yet still feels loyalty and emotional attachment to it. It has its roots in forced dispersion from such a “homeland” or migration away from it in search of work, in business activity, or in colonial ambitions. An idealized myth of this (purported) homeland is cultivated down the generations, sometimes including plans to revive or rebuild it. Individual decisions to return there meet with collective approval. The relationship to the destination society is never completely untroubled; it always involves a sense of being tolerated as a minority, and may sometimes evoke fears that a new misfortune will befall the community. Also characteristic are empathy and solidarity with members of one's ethnic group who live in other (third) countries.
¹³⁰

Each diaspora differs from others in its origin and historical experience. The following categories may be identified: a victim diaspora (Africans in the Americas, Armenians, Jews), a labor diaspora (Indians, Chinese), a trade diaspora (Chinese, Lebanese, Parsi), an imperial diaspora (Europeans in settler colonies), and a cultural diaspora.
¹³¹
Those whose origins went far back
still
existed in the nineteenth century; others came into being in that period, for example, the Armenian diaspora after the beginning of anti-Armenian violence in 1895. Diaspora situations also vary according to the understanding of core and periphery: there may be no spatial core, as with the Jews before the
aliya
(the emigration from Europe to Palestine); a dominant core country that behaves protectively toward the diaspora (China); a colonized core (Ireland); or a foreign-ruled core that gives the diaspora the character of political exiles (nineteenth-century Poland, present-day Tibet). Diaspora groups vary according to their degree of acculturation in the host society. Limited adaptation, often a source of trouble, may sometimes be advantageous. The segregated Chinatowns that sprang up in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century provided a measure of mental and physical comfort and protection for those living in them.

Diaspora formation as a result of mass migration was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. Only the French stayed at home. China, the epitome of a rounded civilization that no one might be expected to leave, became the source of overseas communities. After a first wave of emigration in the Ming period, the foundations were now laid for a “Greater China.” Even the travel-shy Japanese, who had never before left their islands, now asked their government for permission to start a new life in North America. Between 1885 and 1924, a total of 200,000 headed for Hawaii and 180,000 to the North American mainland.
¹³²
The number of Japanese in the United States only became noticeable when they started to be interned after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Nations were formed in order to unify those who felt they belonged together ethnically and culturally. Paradoxically, however, the readiness to recognize far-flung diasporas as part of the nation increased at the same time—even if no claims to foreign territory could be derived from the existence of such communities.

Diasporas led to the formation of discontinuous social spaces. For some this was a transitional stage on the road to integration into the society that received them. In many large American cities—New York, for example—Germans formed a compact community but in the long run were not resistant to New World assimilation.
¹³³
In other cases the diaspora existence took forms that went far beyond nostalgia and folklore. “Lateral” networks between the destination society and the society of origin became indispensable sources of support for the overseas “homeland”: parts of southern China, India, Sicily, Ireland, and (in the early twentieth century) Greece became downright dependent on financial transfers from compatriots living abroad. In the nineteenth century, the discontinuous social space of the diaspora acquired proportions never seen before—which puts into perspective the thesis that territorialization was generally on the
rise. The formation of nation-states in Europe made the lot of minorities more difficult, so that they were more willing to emigrate at moments when overseas labor markets were thrown open. At the same time, improved communications systems made it easier for emigrants to remain in contact with their homeland. The rounding off of national spaces, where government control and emotional attachment centered on a single unambiguously defined territory, went hand in hand with the development of transnational spaces whose territorial moorings were weaker but by no means nonexistent.
¹³⁴

Borders
¹³⁵

Spaces end at borders. There are many different kinds of borders: those of soldiers, economists, lawyers, or geographers.
¹³⁶
They seldom overlap. More concepts of borders appeared in the nineteenth century and found ardent champions. Linguistic borders, for example, were not much considered in the early modern period, but postrevolutionary France compiled statistics about languages and was soon entering them on maps; similar maps objects began to appear in Germany in the 1840s.
¹³⁷
Still, the old military meaning of “borders” remained relevant throughout the nineteenth century: conquered lands were demarcated, borders would again and again become a casus belli. The history of relations with a neighboring country takes material shape in borders. The limits of sovereignty are nearly always expressed in symbols: frontier posts, watchtowers, border architecture. Political boundaries are therefore concrete: physical reifications of the state, symbolic and material condensations of political rule (since the state is constantly tangible there on a day-to-day basis).
¹³⁸
On the other hand, there are also almost invisible symbolic borders that are sometimes much more stable, and much more difficult to move, than national boundaries.

The idea of political borders presupposes an “egocentric conception of the state” in which might is right.
¹³⁹
Agreed borders come later—the more peaceful conception of legal theorists. In the nineteenth century there were both: imposed and negotiated borders. For the creation of the state of Belgium in 1830, the Great Powers reactivated the provincial boundaries of 1790.
¹⁴⁰
The new German-French border of 1871 was dictated to the side that had lost the war. The political map of the Balkans was redrawn in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, without any say from representatives of the Balkan countries. In Africa, borders were set by various protocols and conventions among the colonial powers; European commissioners had a good look at the place in question and put up signposts in the landscape. When the high-ranking Conference on West Africa met in Berlin in 1884, chaired by Bismarck, the territorial markers had already been laid down “on the spot” by the governments active in the region (Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and Liberia). At first it was only a question of customs boundaries, but in the 1890s these hardened into international borders between the respective colonies (plus the independent state of Liberia). The Conference of 1884 also approved borders for territories in which no European had ever set foot, most
notably in the Congo Free State belonging to King Leopold II of the Belgians.
¹⁴¹
On the other hand, the borders between the republics of Latin America were largely drawn without any outside intervention.
¹⁴²

The traditional view is that in modern times and especially the nineteenth century, borders became more entrenched and border
lands
were reduced to boundary
lines
. But this does not bear the weight of the evidence, given that sovereign territories with borders already existed at a time when personal jurisdiction was the norm. Besides, “linear” frontiers between countries were by no means a European invention carried by imperialism into the non-European world. Two treaties of 1689 and 1727, negotiated when there was an approximate balance of power in the region, bound the Qing empire and the Tsarist empire to a precise demarcation of their sovereignties in northern Central Asia. That such frontiers followed a geometrical line was by no means the rule. It was true of Africa, where roughly three-quarters of the total length of borders (including those through the Sahara) ran in a straight line, but was far less applicable to Asia.
¹⁴³
There Europeans sometimes followed their ideology of “natural” borders, a dogma from the age of the French Revolution, and tried to establish “meaningful” frontiers.
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