Lecture 9 [extra-transcript]
Theme 9. The Age of Imperialism (1800–1914)
1. THE ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS
The French Revolution (1789–1799) became a turning point in the development of modern national state. Its reasons are the confrontation between ordinary citizens (Third Estate) and elite, which consisted of the Catholic clergy (First Estate) and the aristocracy (Second Estate). There was unfair tax system (the middle class had to pay heavy taxes). Added to this were the political ineptitude of France’s kings and the long-term debt (this was worsened in the 1770s by France’s financial support of the American Revolution). Also Enlightenment philosophy inspired people to seek fair government, social contracts and civil liberties. the time of 1787 to 1788 was marked with a financial crisis, inflation and unemployment and food shortages.
In 1789, the National Assembly demanded a constitution. In July, people seized the Bastille, the castle-prison in Paris. The Assembly guaranteed civil liberties in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (the Marquis de Lafayette). Future assemblies were to be elected by popular vote. Aristocratic status and privileges were done away with. Church and state were separated. Policy was guided by the motto “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality”.
Initially the new rights, including voting, applied only to white, Catholic, adult males. With time did Jews, Protestants, and blacks gain those rights. Women did not until well into the 1900s. Slavery was not ended in France’s colonies until 1794.
Revolution took a sharply radical turn. In April 1792, France went to war with Austria and Prussia. Other countries, including Britain, joined in against France. The economy worsened and early military failures caused mass hysteria.
Radical parties became more influential. The most important of them were the Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer. Between the summer of 1793 and the summer of 1794, radicals carried out a Reign of Terror, searching for traitors and counterrevolutionary foes. More than 300 000 were arrested and 30 000 to 50 000 were killed, many beheaded by the guillotine, including King Louis XVI. In July 1794, a coup within the Committee executed Robespierre, ending the Terror.
From 1794 to 1799, a more moderate regime, the Directory, presided over the revolution.
However, it proved unpopular and was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte, a talented general. Napoleon claimed to be a man of revolutionary ideals, but in reality he created a new dictatorship and in 1804 crowned himself emperor.
Napoleon is best known for his military career. From 1805 to 1811, his victories made France the most powerful in Europe; the only major nations not under his direct or indirect control were Britain and Russia. After this, several factors brought about Napoleon’s downfall:
his inability to counter British naval power,
bloody guerilla resistance to his authority in Spain,
and his invasion of Russia in 1812. He was defeated and exiled in 1814. In 1815, he escaped and had to be beaten again at the battle of Waterloo.
Peace was restored at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815). Napoleon died in captivity in 1821.
What made the French Revolution so important? For one, it did away with absolute monarchy in Europe. Also, the French Revolution, like the American Revolution, inspired future uprisings. The greatest legacy if both the American and French revolutions was to cause people to demand greater popular participation in government and to force nineteenth-century governments to be more attentive to their desires. The story of modern politics is primarily this story.
Haiti and the Latin American Wars of Independence. The impact of events in France spread far to Haiti and Latin America. The sugar- and coffee-producing colony of Haiti was called Saint Domingue by the French and Santo Domingo by the Spanish. Each country occupied half of the island and relied heavily on slave labor imported from Africa. After 1789, France’s revolutionary government decided at that point not to end slavery –
the Haitian Rebellion (1791–1804), the only large-scale slave revolt to succeed in the New World. In 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was born.
In the meantime, due to revolutionary impulses the Latin American wars of independence raged against Spain from 1810 to 1825.
The most influential of these revolutionaries was creole Simon Bolivar (1783–1830), known as the Liberator. He promised to fight for the rights of mixed-race Latin Americans and the emancipation of slaves. In 1819 – 1821, he gained control over present-day Venezuela and Columbia.
He joined with another freedom fighter Jose de San Martin, a general. In 1816 – 1820, San Martin had freed southern areas such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Together (under leadership of Bolivar) they had expelled royalists from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru by 1825. Spanish South America was free.
From 1810 to 1823 there was the Mexican War of Independence. It was complicated by the conflicts between various social classes. Initially it was led by the Catholic priests (Hidalgo killed in 1811 and Morelos killed by conservative Mexicans in 1815). The Mexican republic was proclaimed in 1823.
A year earlier (1822), the Brazil Republic was proclaimed.
2. WESTERN IMPERIALISM
From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s it took on a more aggressive and systematic character, referred to by many as the new imperialism.
Causes and motivations of the new imperialism
Industrialization made Western economies hungry for raw materials (timber, metals, coal, rubber, chemicals), which could be wrested from less powerful societies by force, and for overseas markets.
Industrial-era weaponry lent Western armies and navies military superiority.
Modern ships powered by coal (and then petroleum) required repair bases and refueling depots – Western sea power depended on control over islands and ports around the world.
Europe experienced overpopulation which caused migration not just to the Americas, but also to settler colonies far from the homeland.
Scientific development allowed for easier penetration of the African and Asian interior. In particular, medical advances – such as the anti-malarial treatment quinine – made it possible for Westerners to establish themselves in tropical zones where illnesses like sleeping sickness, yellow fever, and malaria had previously kept them from gaining footholds.
Finally, a complex set of cultural factors motivated empire building. A sense of racial superiority, buttressed in many cases by the doctrine of social Darwinism, was widespread among white Europeans and Americans.
Beyond that, many Westerners became convinced that they had a duty to teach and modernize the peoples of Africa and Asia – the white man’s burden (the English poet Rudyard Kipling) or civilizing mission (the French spoke about it) – liberal imperialism.
The Forms of Imperialism
Overseas empires and settler colonies were the best-known. By far the largest was Britain’s, on which “the sun never set”, as expressed in a famous motto of the time.
France gradually accumulated the era’s second-largest empire, and countries like Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, continued to hold on to certain overseas possessions. After 1870, new countries such as Germany and Italy began to build overseas empires, in an attempt to catch up with more established imperial powers.
Land-based empires expanded as well. Austria expanded in eastern and southeastern Europe, colliding with the empire ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Russia hold Siberia, much of Central Asia, and for a time, parts of North America. At the end of the century, Japan extended its imperial reach to the Asian mainland.
All of them practiced economic imperialism involved pressuring weaker nations to offer favorable trade terms. Prominent targets included Latin America, Qing China, and Egypt.
Geopolitical Tensions and Rising Conflict
Wherever imperial expansion was pursued, it caused rise in global conflict as the century passed. Tensions between empires were heightened by specific geopolitical conflicts:
1) the Eastern Question (how to fill the power vacuum caused in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Empire’s steady decline)
2) the Great Game (the collision of British and Russian spheres of influence in Central Asia)
3) the Scramble for Africa (the rush to subjugate the entire continent between the 1880s and the 1910s). In 1884 to 1885, in the Berlin Conference the European powers parceled Africa. The growing intensity of nationalism in Western nations added to the problem.
All this made it increasingly harder for Western states to maintain their balance of power. After mid-century, Western states began pitting against one another. Wars began, such as the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) that created the modern German state. The wars, though short, encouraged a growing spirit of belligerent patriotism (nicknamed jingoism by the British press). On the surface, relative stability among the Western powers was maintained between 1871 and 1914, a period in European history known as the Long Peace. However, the potential for a major conflict grew with every passing year.
During the 1890s and early 1900s, the European alliance system divided the great powers into two armed camps. Germany and Austria were already aligned with Italy in the Triple Alliance (formed in 1881). In the mid-1890s, France (bitter about defeat in the Franco-Prussian War) allied with Russia, which viewed Austria as a threat in the Balkans. In 1907, Britain informally partnered with the Franco-Russian alliance, forming the Triple Entente (previously Britain was retained by the Great Game but then Britain was sceared by Germany’s maritime development).
Political developments by regions
3. EUROPE
Between 1815 and 1848, most governments were convinced that even the slightest liberalism would lead to renewed political chaos. They attempted to minimize change or even undo what had transpired during the years of revolution. This arch-conservative stance, known as reaction, was the guiding principle of the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) which ended the Napoleonic wars and forged an informal agreement among Europe’s major powers to preserve order and prevent change. Monarchies were no longer absolute, but royal families were restored wherever possible, including France. Civil liberties were restricted, censorship was heavy, and secret police forces were common. Russia not only remained an absolute monarchy, but continued the practice of serfdom.
A key turning point came with the revolution of 1848, whose causes included popular impatience with reactionary rule, socioeconomic stress caused by industrialization, and a series of bad harvests (like the Irish Potato Famine) that cause a decade to be known as the “hungry forties.” The revolution began in France, where the king was deposed and Napoleon’s nephew appointed president. Uprisings then spread to much of the rest of Europe (except Britain and Russia).These were crushed by the summer of 1849. They compelled Austria and German states like Prussia to grant constitutions. Also the uprisings demonstrated the growing political importance of nationalism, since they involved ethnic revolts against Austrian rule. Uprisings inspired Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write The Communist Manifesto.
During the second half of the century, most European governments expanded political representation and legislated the improvement of working conditions.
In Victorian Britain, the Parliament gradually extended the vote to middle- and lower-class males by means of the Second (1867) and Third (1885) Reform Acts, and also granted economic concessions and fairer labor laws to the lower classes. It wrestled with the question of women’s suffrage and Irish nationalism.
In after 1848 France, all adult males could vote, but in 1851, the president, Louis Napoleon, staged a coup and crowned himself Napoleon III. He was not an absolute dictator, and he helped to modernize Paris and industrialize the country, but his humiliating defeat during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) caused his abdication. After a short but bloody revolution, a new democratic republic arose in 1871 and lasted until 1940.
Nationalism affected politics in Italy, Germany, and Austria.
The unification of Italy as a parliamentary monarchy took place in the 1860s.
The unification of Germany was spearheaded by Prussia in a series of three short conflicts, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The new German emperor shared power with a legislature called the Reichstag, and all adult males technically had the vote.
With Otto von Bismarck serving the emperor as chancellor (and also as Europe’s most skilled diplomat), Germany rapidly modernized, thanks to a policy of state-directed industrialization.
In Austria, post-1848 liberalization led to the creation of a parliament in 1861 and various concessions to the empire’s many minority populations. The Ausgleich (compromise) of 1867 granted equal status to Austria’s largest minority, the Hungarians, and the state was renamed the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As in other parts of Europe, anti-Semitism became a major part of political life here.
In 1853–1856, autocratic Russia was shaken by loss in the Crimean War. Moderately liberal Alexander II modernized Russia with a series of “great reforms,” the most important of which was his 1861 emancipation of the serfs. The conservative tsars who succeeded him undid many of his changes. Nicholas II, who met with a terrible defeat during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), almost lost his throne during the 1905 Revolution. This compelled him to share power with a new and popularly-elected legislature, the Duma – but once the danger passed, Nicholas weakened the Duma and avoided cooperating with it. Anti-Semitic persecution escalated, and pogroms, or anti-Jewish raids, became common.
4. THE AMERICAS
The United States
The USA quickly became the dominant power in the Americas, practicing economic imperialism in much of Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) warned Europe against intervening in the western hemisphere’s political affairs. The USA won Spanish-American War (1898) and gained control over Caribbean and Philippine territories.
The USA expanded through the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), numerous Indian wars, the 1867 purchase of Alaska and the annexation of the Hawaiian kingdom in the 1890s. From 1907 to 1909, following the order of Theodore Roosevelt, the great white fleet (16 warships) rounded the world. This was the manifestation of the USA as a major power.
Indian Removal Act of 1830 pushed many tribes of Indians west of the Mississippi. The Indians were placed on reservations. The American South was based on slavery and the Atlantic slave-trade.
It was the underlying cause of the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). During the last two-thirds of the 1800s, the United States equaled and then surpassed Europe as an industrial power.
Political freedom and economic opportunity drew huge quantities of immigrants – nearly 17 million between the 1830s and the 1890s – from Europe and Asia. Anti-immigrant sentiment was common.
5. MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA
The Ottoman Empire was in decline and came to be derided as the “sick man of Europe.” Algeria was taken by France in the 1830s.
The chief dilemma was that sultans and reformers who wished to modernize met with resistance from Islamic traditionalists or influential conservative groups.
For instance, janissaries, now privileged but outdated, blocked any attempt to improve the military, to the point of assassinating the sultan in 1807.
Janissary power was broken in the 1820s.
From 1839 to 1876, in a series of changes known as the Tanzimat reforms: the government promoted greater religious tolerance for non-Muslims; introduced Western science and technology into the educational system; boosted industrialization and built railroads and telegraphs; the army and navy were upgraded and Westernized.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II even proclaimed the constitution of 1876 and agreed to share power with an elected legislature. Unfortunately, in 1878, the sultan suspended the constitution for 20 years.
Ottoman domestic policy in general was handicapped further by rebellions and wars that threatened the empire with disintegration. The Greek War of Independence (1821– 1832). The Balkan Crisis of 1876– 1878, when Bulgarians, Serbs, and others revolted. Russia warred against the Ottomans on the rebels’ behalf. The rebel nations went free.
Ottoman control over North Africa likewise weakened. Egypt remained outside the Ottomans orbit, and then, after 1850s, fall under European influence. The 1854 – 1869 construction of the Suez Canal, financed by the French-dominated Suez Canal Company.
In 1908 – 1909, the pro-Western Young Turks led army officer Enver Pasha, removed Abdul Hamid II in 1908– 1909. Young Turks installed a figurehead sultan and restored the constitution of 1876. The Young Turks pursued a program of industrialization, secularization, and socioeconomic reform. However, they continued to lose territory in North Africa and the Balkans. Also, they took side of Germany that would determine their fate.
6. 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.
7. EAST ASIA
Japan
As for Japan, the Tokugawa shogunate had sealed itself from the wider world: Christianity had been banned since the 1600s, and only through the port of Nagasaki did the regime allow a trickle of foreign trade.
All this changed in 1853, when the American gunships captained by Commodore Matthew Perry appeared. With the threat of force Perry asked the Japanese to open up to trade. Once the shogun agreed other Western fleets made similar demands.
It appeared that Japan might suffer the fate of colony, but in 1867-68 a coalition of samurai clans abolished the office of shogun and restored the emperor – a symbolic figurehead since the 1200s – to a position of full authority.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868, named after the new emperor, began Japan’s modern age. Meiji, who ruled until 1912, rapidly industrialized Japan’s economy and modernized political and social life. Meiji swept away the feudal social hierarchy of the Tokugawa era. In the 1870s, the samurai lost their hereditary privileges, including their immunity from taxation and right to wear swords in public. Access to political positions depended on merit and civil service examinations. The lower classes gained access to public education and were allowed to serve in the military.
Meiji’s Constitution of 1890 created an elected parliament, the Diet, and the Civil Code of 1898 updated Japan’s legal system. The Meiji regime excelled at Westernization, economic efficiency, and militarization.
Japan took Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea from China, gained concessions in Manchuria, and took half the island of Sakhalin from Russia. The Russo-Japanese War (1904– 1905), the first large-scale conflict of the modern era in which a non-Western state defeated a European power.
China
China never became a colony; The Qing dynasty hung on until 1911 to 1912. Qing China in the late 1700s still enjoyed wealth.
Qianlong (Хунлі) (1763–95) is remembered as the Qing dynasty’s last truly capable ruler. Confucian-based social stratification remained rigid. The cost of defending China’s frontiers (north and west) combined with too-rapid population growth (from 300 million in 1799 to 400 million a century later) burdened the economy.
Popular discontent erupted in uprisings like the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804). The government grew more corrupt and incompetent after Qianlong’s death. The Europeans could trade only in several cities (especially in Canton).
The Qing continued to believe that China was the Middle Kingdom and that all outsiders were barbarians. In the meantime the British and other Western nations, including the United States, flooded China with opium from British India. Silver flowed out and opium addiction became widespread. Millions of farmers and workers were too incapacitated to work.
Chinese attempts to stop opium trade led to the First Opium War (1839–1842) and Second Opium War (1856–1860). The war ended with the Treaty of Nanking, the first of many “unequal treaties” forced on China by the Western powers. The Qing surrendered Hong Kong to Britain.
The coerced collaboration of the Qing with Britain and the United States led to history’s largest civil war, the Taiping Rebellion against colonizers, from 1850 to 1864, in which 20 to 30 million Chinese died.
France seized Indochina after a short conflict with China in 1883. Japan thrashed China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), occupying Korea and Taiwan. In 1899, the United States’ Open Door Policy arranged equal access to Chinese markets for all Western nations. In 1900, China was shaken by the Boxer Rebellion quickly suppressed by the European forces. China was forced to pay reparations.
8. AFRICA
Africa remained comparatively free of direct outside influence until well into the 1800s. The Ottomans controlled North Africa, Omani Arabs – most of the East African shore and Swahili ports. Many African societies, such as Benin, Dahomey, Kongo, and the Ashanti (Asante) kingdoms played roles in the Atlantic slave trade; in exchange for gold and guns, they took prisoners from enemy peoples and sold them to slavers. Among this era’s most powerful African states were the Barbary states of Islamic North Africa (present-day Motocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). Corsairs from these states threatened European and American shipping.
As the century progresses, nearly every part of Africa lost its freedom to European states. South Africa which had been colonized by Dutch Boers (or Afrikaners) as early as the mid-1600s came under British control after the Napoleonic Wars.
Displaced by the British, the Boers made a Great Trek to the north during the 1830s and founded their own states on the border of British South Africa.
The Boers and British periodically clashed with each other, and more regularly with the local Xhosa and Zulu until the capitulation of the latter in the Zulu War of 1879.
The French colonization of Algeria was carried out during the 1830s and 1840s.
Despite all of this, only about 10 percent of African territory fell under European control before 1880. At that point, the so-called Scramble for Africa began, lasting until the eve of World War I and rapidly subjugating the entire continent. Thanks to geographical knowledge gained between the late 1700s and the nid-1800s, and also to industrial-era weaponry and effective medical treatments for tropical diseases, Westerners were now able to press fully into the African interior. A pivotal moment in the Scramble for Africa was the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), convened by the German statesman Otto von Bismarck to defuse diplomatic tensions to carve up Africa.
In the Americas, Africa, and Asia, growing demand for sugar, cotton, rubber, tea, and other raw materials encouraged environmentally destructive plantations, often worked by quasi–slave labor.
In wars that pitted machine guns against spears and assegais, European powers carved up Africa and ruled it for the best part of a century.