Imperialism in the Modern World

Sources and Interpretations

William Bowman, Frank Chiteji, J. Megan Greene, William Bowman, Frank Chiteji, J. Megan Greene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315508115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Imperialism in the Modern World combines narrative, primary and secondary sources, and visual documents to examine global relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The three co-editors, Professors Bowman, Chiteji, and Greene, have taught for many years global history classes in a variety of institutions. They wrote Imperialism in the Modern World to solve the problem of allowing teachers to combine primary and secondary texts easily and systematically to follow major themes in global history (some readers use primary materials exclusively. Some focus on secondary arguments). This book is more focused than other readers on the markets for those teachers who are offering more specialized world history courses - one important trend in global history is away from simply trying to cover everything to teaching real connections in more chronologically and thematically focused courses. The reader also provides a genuine diversity of global perspectives and invites students to study seriously world history from a critical framework. Too many readers offer a smorgasbord approach to world history that leaves students dazed and confused. This reader avoids that approach and will therefore solve many problems that teachers have in constructing and teaching world history courses at the introductory or upper-division levels. The reader will allow show students how to read historical documents through a hands-on demonstration in the introduction. The book also incorporates images as visual documents. Finally, the book conceives of global history in the widest possible terms; it contains pieces on political, diplomatic, economic, and military history, to be sure, but it also has selections on technology, medicine, women, the environment, social changes, and cultural patterns. Other readers can not match this text's breadth because they are chronologically and thematically so extended.

Part I
The Imperialists

INTRODUCTION

The rapid and remarkable changes in patterns of global history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused many observers to attempt to define or analyze what was going on around them. The period from the 1870s to the First World War (1914–18), in particular, brought wide-scale changes in political and economic relations. Historians and other scholars have defined this era as an age of “high” or “new” imperialism. The name is intended to recognize that although imperialistic relations had been a part of world historical patterns for centuries and even millennia, this period (1870s to 1920s or 1930s) was nevertheless marked by distinctively intense and broad-based colonial activity. European nations especially were heavily involved as colonial powers in Africa and Asia and also played a significant role in the economics and culture of South America. In Africa, for example, huge swaths of territory came under the direct political control of British, French, German, Belgian, or other European administrations. Although European nations did not acquire as much land directly in Asia as in Africa, they were nevertheless very active throughout the continent and especially in the Indian subcontinent, China, and Southeast Asia. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, European countries had become the political or economic overlords of most of Africa and either played that same role in many Asian lands or were at the very least involved in the economic and cultural affairs of many Asian peoples.

In the Americas, the situation was in some respects quite different, but patterns of global interdependence predominated here as well. In North America, the United States offered an interesting model of historical development; having won its war of independence from the British in the late eighteenth century and withstood a challenge to its very existence in a civil war, the United States emerged as a major economic, political, and cultural player by the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the United States became a formal imperial power in its own right by the turn of the twentieth century and was increasingly involved in global affairs thereafter. At the same time, indigenous natives and people of African origin in the United States struggled with a wide range of legal, economic, and cultural problems and biases—a condition some have described as suffering from the effects of “domestic imperialism.”

South American nations had freed themselves from the political and administrative grip of Spain and Portugal in the first half of the nineteenth century, but these same countries had become increasingly enmeshed in world economic patterns, which meant that they were in turn also progressively more deeply integrated into a larger global network. Because of the high degree of economic dependence of Latin American and Caribbean countries upon Europe and later increasingly upon the United States, many scholars have described this global relationship as neocolonial or neo-imperial. In this view, economic and sometimes cultural conditions in South America and the Caribbean were in some ways similar to those in areas being newly colonized in Africa and Asia.

Such dramatic shifts in the global balance of power and in economic and cultural patterns called for explanations and analyses. In this part of the reader, students will find arguments in favor of imperialism and colonialism. The texts and images are drawn primarily from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” is perhaps the classic statement on the subject of western involvement in the affairs of Asian and African people. The work and ideas of Herbert Spencer, a well-known social Darwinist, also contributed to pro-imperialist sentiment at the turn of the nineteenth century. These famous writings were, however, but a small sample of the range and style of arguments in favor of the new colonialism. Commentators from around the world and from a wide variety of perspectives attempted to justify or explain the dramatic changes in global politics, economics, and culture. Some of these explanations, like that of Karl Marx (a surprising supporter of British colonial policy in India), were primarily economic in character and focused on patterns of world development. Students should keep in mind, of course, that thinkers as dynamic as Spencer, Kipling, and Marx wrote on a wide variety of topics. Although they are grouped here in a section entitled “The Imperialists,” they represented a very wide spectrum of opinion and perspective. They would have made strange bedfellows indeed if one could have brought them all together. Moreover, someone like Marx, while explaining and advocating for British overseas action in India, would probably chafe at the label “imperialist” applied to him.

Other observers, especially European apologists such as Jules Ferry, tended to describe the new imperial activity either as an important part of “great nation” status or as a type of “civilizing mission,” religious or secular in nature. These types of arguments usually stressed either the political or moral dimension of colonialism. Within Europe, for example, there were various ways of promoting overseas expansion, from claims of the superiority of European culture and technology to the need for areas to develop trade or to settle immigrants. Pro-imperialists came from a wide variety of backgrounds and used an equally wide variety of media to press their arguments. Posters, advertisements, parliamentary speeches, and literature could all be employed to illustrate or convince people of the virtue or necessity of overseas colonies and imperial relationships. In this section of the reader, students will therefore find examples of visual images, political addresses, and literary works, all of which carried a pro-imperial slant.

Joseph Conrad, the Polish-born novelist who wrote in English, might be described as an ambivalent imperialist. In his writings, he was frequently critical of European motives and methods in colonizing Africa. Some of his writing is indeed a satire on European attitudes toward imperialism. At the same time, his writings often reflected some of those same attitudes by referring to Africa as a “dark” and uncivilized continent, which had corrupting influences upon Europeans. Conrad is represented in this part of the reader by a selection entitled “An Outpost of Progress.” Arthur James Balfour was one of the most experienced politicians of the early twentieth century. His name is most often associated with a 1917 “declaration” that committed Great Britain to a policy of allowing Jewish migration to Palestine, a development that would lead to much conflict and controversy throughout the twentieth century and indeed to the present day. In the selection provided here, Balfour is addressing the British Parliament on the question of his nation’s involvement in Egypt in particular and “the Orient” in general. He argues that one should recognize the historical greatness of a land like Egypt but still realize that “oriental” states have not produced self-government, a gift that comes from Europeans and which gives them the right to rule over Africans and Asians. Balfour’s is a complex and subtle pro-imperialist statement. The selection from Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures offers a fascinating perspective on colonial activity in the nineteenth century. As a Creole woman from Jamaica, she might have been a critic of expanding European empires in the nineteenth century. Seacole, however, found herself supporting in general the extension of European influence around the globe.

As we have already seen, imperialism and colonialism were global phenomena in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. States as diverse as Meiji Japan and the Ottoman Empire were concerned with either maintaining their hold over territories or acquiring new ones to fuel imperialist ambitions and often used western approaches to accomplish these goals. In the selection, “Emperor Meiji’s Letter to President Grant on Iwakura Mission, 1871,” we see how a strengthening Japan articulated its own pro-colonial aims. In the piece, “An Ottoman Government Decree Defines the Official Notion of the ‘Modern’ Citizen,” we have an attempt by an older imperial state to employ contemporary rhetoric and definitions—“the modern cit-izen”—to shore up its control over subject peoples. Some historians have also seen the expansion of Russia and the United States as examples of land-based empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students should keep all of these issues in mind as they read the various pieces from Part I.

Le Tonkin et la Mère-Patrie (Tonkin and the Motherland)

JULES FERRY

In the late nineteenth century, European commentators from a variety of backgrounds voiced their opinions about imperialism. Some of these commentators offered contemporary intellectual or cultural reasons to justify Europe’s dramatic expansion into overseas territories, primarily in Africa and Asia. Jules Ferry (1832–93) was the French prime minister from 1880–81 and again from 1883–85, the period during which the age of high imperialism took off. Ferry was an ardent supporter of French colonial expansion and as such was a major participant in the Berlin Conference of 1885 (see Introduction). While prime minister, he oversaw France’s expansion into Tunisia, Madagascar, central West Africa, and Indochina.

Following is an excerpt from Ferry’s lengthy introductory chapter to a book about Indochina published in 1890. Ferry’s chapter is first and foremost a defense of his policies while prime minister, policies that had since received some criticism in the public arena. The portion of the chapter reproduced here offers Ferry’s explanation for why imperialism was inevitable and natural for industrialized nations.

QUESTIONS

1. How, according to Ferry, are industrialization and colonial expansion related?
2. Note that Ferry uses the word natural more than once in this excerpt. Why do you think this might be?

[…] Colonial policy is the daughter of industrial policy. For rich states, where capital abounds and accumulates rapidly, where the manufacturing regime is on the path of continual growth, attracting to itself if not the majority, at least the most awake and lively among the population of manual workers, where the culture of the land is condemned to support industrialization, exports are an essential factor in public prosperity, and the use of capital, like the demand for work, is measured by the size of foreign markets. If there could be established among manufacturing nations something along the lines of a division of industrial labor, a methodical and rational allocation of industry according to ability and the economic, natural, and social conditions of the different producing countries—placing here the cotton and metallurgy industries, reserving for one alcohol and sugar, and for another wool and silk—Europe would not have to look beyond its own borders for outlets for its products. It was with this ideal in mind that they made the treaties of 1860. But today, everyone wants to spin and weave, forge and distill. All of Europe manufactures sugar in excess and wishes to export it. The arrival on the scene of the latest comers to industrialism—the United States on the one hand, Germany on the other, the advent of the small states, of sleepy and lazy people, of the regenerated Italy, of Spain enriched by French capital, and of Switzerland, so enterprising and informed—to the industrial life, has sent the entire Occident, except for Russia, which is still preparing and growing, on a slope that cannot be climbed back up.

From the other side of the Vosges, as from beyond the Atlantic, the protection system has multiplied manufactures, suppressed old outlets, and thrust on the European market a formidable competition. To defend one’s perimeters by raising barriers is someth...