South Asia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Australia [individual assignment]
South Asia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Australia
SOUTH ASIA
India
In the 18th century India, the once-mighty Mughal Empire fractured. The Sihks created their own state in the Punjab, and the Hindu Maratha Empire appeared as well as Muslim states like Mysore. Another threat was steadily growing European presence in South Asia. Britain pushed out France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Until the mid-1800s carried out the colonization of India. One initial interest was the cotton industry, although the company traded in tea, spices and opium. Britain expanded through a combination of diplomacy, warfare and the training of native elites.
To save on human power, the company relied as much as possible on native personnel. For administration and tax-gathering, the British turned to native officials and zamindar landowners (zamindars overtaxed their countrmen and seized land from peasants who could not pay. It led to famines). The most famous native personnel were the sepoys, or Indian soldiers trained and equipped in Western style.
In 1857-58 the Indian Revolt occurred. Sepoys were the main forces of uprising. They proclaimed the aged Mughal sultan the new emperor of India. In 1858, the British, with native troops, put down the rebellion and declared the end of the Mughal dynasty.
After the Indian revolt, the British crown took over from the British East India Company as India’s colonizing authority. Many Indians became attracted to national-liberation movements, including the Indian National Congress, which formed in 1885.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
Indonesia
Southeast Asia – rich in rubber, petroleum, and metals like copper, tin, chrome, and aluminium ore (bauxite) – also came under Western dominance. The Dutch East Indies, known today as Indonesia, had been administered by the Dutch East India Company since the 1600s, although the Dutch government stepped in after 1798, when the company went bankrupt.
Singapore and Burma
The British, as they tightened their grip on India, made parallel advances into Southeast Asia. In 1819, the British established the outpost of Singapore at the tip of the Malay Peninsula: a strategically placed stronghold and trading center that became one of Britain’s most prized possessions in Asia. Nearby, Burma fell to Britain in 1826.
Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos)
The French developed their own interest in Southeast Asia, gradually detaching Indochina—the region that comprises Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—from China's tributary system, and then colonizing it in the 1880s and 1890s. More so than the British, the French emphasized religious conversion, and so their native elites were almost exclusively Catholic. In other respects, the French imperial model was similar to that of Britain’s.
Siam (Thailand)
The one mainland state in Southeast Asia to avoid European colonization in the 1800s was Siam, or Thailand, due to good leadership and good luck. Like Meiji in Japan, King Mongkut, who ruled from 1851 to 1868, saw industrialization and Western-style reform as the key to continued freedom. Siam’s geographic setting was also fortunate: it served as a convenient buffer zone between British-controlled Burma and French Indochina.
Philippines
The last major acquisition in Southeast Asia was the U.S. annexation of the Philippines, a Spanish colony since the early 1500s, but forfeited to the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. The Filipinos, whose Katipunan national-liberation society had long been struggling against Spanish rule, initially welcomed the Americans as liberators. But then the United States, fearing that the Philippines would fall into Japanese hands (and realizing what a superb naval base the islands would make), proclaimed a policy of “benevolent assimilation” and took possession of them in 1899. Tragically, this led to a Philippine-American War of occupation, in which a guerrilla force led by the Katipunan rebel Emilio Aguinaldo resisted the U.S. takeover until 1902. Over 200,000 Filipinos died during this conflict.
NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIA
Thanks to explorers like Britain's James Cook, the Pacific became increasingly familiar to Europeans and increasingly subject to their colonial authority. Cook charted and claimed Australia’s east coast in 1770, and the nearby islands of New Zealand, home to the Polynesian Maori, came under English control as well. Full-scale settlement of Australia began in 1788. For years, the population consisted mainly of soldiers, colonial officials, and criminals transported to the colony as punishment. (In the 1700s, New England and the Caribbean had been the most common destinations for those “transported” by the British.) In 1830, Britain extended its authority to all of Australia, and the rate of free settlement increased, bringing miners and sheep farmers to the colony in large numbers. Often with violence, Australia’s Aborigines, who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, were dispossessed and driven into the bush. During the “musket wars” of the early 1800s, New Zealand’s Maori gained access to gunpowder, and it took another series of conflicts, the Land Wars of 1845-1872, for the British to bring them fully under control.
Hawaii
The United States expanded its Pacific presence in 1867, by purchasing the Russian colony of Alaska. It also extended its reach to the Hawaiian kingdom, which had been founded in 1795, when Kamehameha I used Western weaponry to forge the Hawaiian islands into a European-style absolute monarchy. Hawaii evolved into a constitutional monarchy and noteworthy producer of fruits and sugar (many immigrants from China and Japan arrived to work in these industries). However, it was attacked several times by powers like France and, in the 1840s, sought protection from the United States. Although they recognized Hawaii as an independent nation, the Americans gained much influence over its affairs in the late 1800s—and in 1893, when Queen Liliuokalani proposed to amend the constitution in ways contrary to U.S. interests, she was overthrown. With the monarchy ended, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898, just prior to its occupation of the Philippines.
Questions for experts
1. What factors influenced on the considered regions’ history?
2. What were the differences and similarities between South Asia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Australia?
3. What distinguishes the given regions from the other regions considered in this topic? (Before answering read about other region in the topic 9).