The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories

John Marriott, Philippa Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317042518
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Written by leading scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of modern empires. Spanning the era of modern imperial history from the early sixteenth century to the present, it challenges both the rather insular focuses on specific experiences, and gives due attention to imperial formations outside the West including the Russian, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese. The companion is divided into three broad sections. Part I - Times - surveys the three main eras of modern imperialism. The first was that dominated by the settlement impulse, with migrants - many voluntarily and many more by force - making new lives in the colonies. This impulse gave way, most especially in the nineteenth century, to a period of busy and rapid expansion which was less likely to promote new settlement, and in which colonists more frequently saw their sojourn in colonial lands as temporary and related to the business mostly of governance and trade. Lastly, in the twentieth century in particular, empires began to fail and to fall. Part II - Spaces - studies the principal imperial formations of the modern world. Each chapter charts the experience of a specific empire while at the same time placing it within the complex patterns of wider imperial constellations. The individual chapters thus survey the broad dynamics of change within the empires themselves and their relationships with other imperial formations, and reflect critically on the ways in which these topics have been approached in the literature. In Part III - Themes - scholars think critically about some of the key features of imperial expansion and decline. These chapters are brief and many are provocative. They reflect the current state of the field, and suggest new lines of inquiry which may follow from more comparative perspectives on empire. The broad range of themes captures the vitality and diversity of contemporary scholarship on questions of empire and colonialism, encompassing political, economic and cultural processes central to the formation and maintenance of empires as well as institutions, ideologies and social categories that shaped the lives both of those implementing and those experiencing the force of empire. In these pages the reader will find the slave and the criminal, the merchant and the maid, the scientist and the artist alongside the structures which sustained their lives and their livelihoods. Overall, the companion emphasises the diversity of imperial experience and process. Comprehensive in its scope, it draws attention to the particularities of individual empires, rather than over-generalising as if all empires, at all times, and in all places, behaved in a similar manner. It is this contingent and historical specificity that enables us to explore in expansive ways precisely what constituted the modern empire.

1
Introduction

Philippa Levine and John Marriott

I

What is a modern empire? Beneath this seemingly innocuous question lie some troublesome currents. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters,1 writing together, have pointed out that ‘there is no historical or sociological agreement about the meaning of the term’ modernity. Slippery though the term is, it has nonetheless been in constant use among historians, and has fuelled valuable debates in the imperial field. The idea of colonial modernity has often been criticised for its tendency to highlight either western achievements (the positive view) or western impositions (the negative view), but this volume contends that while the term ‘colonial modernity’ needs to be scrutinised critically, we are by no means ready to abandon it. In his chapter in this volume John Marriott points out that the very idea of modernity derived in part from the processes of imperialism, but since it was not a uniform, consistent or uncontested phenomenon, the modern empire remains difficult to define with any precision. A modern empire, we might say, is an empire of the modern era. Tautology apart, this tends to raise as many questions as it answers. If, for the sake of argument, we agree with Chris Bayly that the modern era began around 1780 does it necessarily follow that modern empires also began at that time?2 The British perspective gives some weight to this argument, for Britain had just lost the thirteen colonies and was in the process of consolidating its hold over India, thereby laying the foundation for an empire of unprecedented scale and power. At a wider level, we might argue that this moment also signalled the ascent of European imperial might. This rather linear narrative of imperial ascent, however, marginalises imperial formations outside Europe, of which there were no small number. The Chinese, Ottoman and to a lesser extent Mughal empires were still powerful when European imperialism was growing in the eighteenth century. If, on the other hand, we define a modern empire as one displaying ‘modern’ characteristics, then we have to decide what these characteristics are, and identify their manifestations in various imperial experiences at different times. This almost inevitably complicates any notion of a linear narrative of the creation of a universal modern era, and also undoes a wholly Eurocentric reading of both modernity and empire. Tani Barlow has argued, for example, that ‘the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity’3 China was motivated by profit very early. The eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire was visibly consumer-oriented and the Mughal economy was monetised, also by the eighteenth century, all characteristics often associated with modernity. In thus moving the frame of modernity beyond and outside Europe as we have attempted to do in this volume, a broader reading of the contours and boundaries of colonial modernity both widens and deepens our scope.

In an attempt to untangle the arguments over the nature of colonial modernity, it is worth briefly reviewing the record of modern imperial expansion. That of Europe itself long predated the so-called modern era. As early as the thirteenth century, galleys from Genoa and Venice brought Italian merchants to the Netherlands and England who came to dominate the markets ‘as if in conquered lands’.4 The wealth created brought life to the Iberian Peninsula, thereby preparing the way for the so-called ‘age of discovery’. In the remarkable final two decades of the fifteenth century, Europeans showed an interest in the goods to be gleaned from Africa, the Americas and India, and although the opportunities thus opened up were slow to be exploited fully these discoveries heralded an age of European global dominance.

The putative simultaneity of Europe’s imperial ascent, globalisation and the birth of the modern world has led many to see an intimate interconnectedness. According to this logic, because European powers made possible for the first time a truly global and modern ecumene, modernisation was distinctively European – that is, it was through European intervention that the non-European world was able to enter into the modern age. The trouble here is that not only did Europe (or the west if we include the Americas) continue to display significant characteristics that might be regarded as pre-modern, but many of the features identified as modern were to be found equally in societies beyond and often unconnected to Europe. China, for example, had developed a ‘modern’ bureaucracy based on merit, and a technologically sophisticated economy long before the rise of the west, and which continued to provide a standard of living for its people comparable to Europe at least until 1800. India and the Ottoman lands pioneered scientific advances in navigation, mathematics and manufacturing technology upon which the west would come to depend. The Ottoman and Russian were both broad and diverse empires. Meanwhile, Britain clung to a long-standing hierarchy in which a landed aristocracy pulled many of the strings of financial and political power while the majority of the population lived in poverty and without the franchise. The slave trade not only enriched many western nations but persisted into the twentiet century, and its divisive legacy of the ‘colour line’ dogs United States politics even now. And it was largely those countries regarded as the most advanced which, in the twentieth century, waged wars of monumental slaughter and destruction, and committed acts of genocide unprecedented in their scale and ferocity.5

What this evidence suggests is that the modern was neither exclusively western, nor definitive of a particular moment. Does this mean that we cannot legitimately distinguish modern empires from their predecessors? Was there nothing about the modern imperial experience which set it apart? Not entirely. One of the most striking features of the modern imperial formation was its spatial ordering. Previous empires had been extensive, and possessed vaulting ambitions comparable to any western power in the modern age, but even at the height of their power they mostly remained regionally based. Extant technology, communications, financial structures and strategies of rule placed real and physical limits on the geography of imperial endeavour. Furthermore, power in the ancient world was shared among empires in such a way that expansionist empires such as Rome and Greece inevitably came into conflict with one another, testing their imperial ambitions and perhaps speeding their decline.

In spatial terms, the modern imperial experience contrasted sharply with its ancient predecessors. In 1760, Europe colonised 18 per cent of the world’s land area, 3 per cent of its population. After the American Revolution the colonised land area fell, but then climbed dramatically in the nineteenth century as the combined imperial endeavours of Europe, the United States and Japan extended its reach to virtually every part of the globe. By 1938, at the height of western imperial ambition, 42 per cent of the world was colonised, 32 per cent of the population.6 This was facilitated by a welter of technological advances which conferred decisive advantages on the colonising powers. The supersession of wood and sail by iron and steam ensured supremacy over the world’s oceans, and provided unprecedented ease and speed of conveying human and commodity cargoes. Medical treatments to combat diseases such as malaria, which had taken a heavy toll on the lives of Europeans, enabled them to penetrate into and claim previously uncharted territories, which they could defend with the newly acquired Maxim machine gun and its ilk. Telegraphy, unreliable and expensive though it may have been in the early stages, was nothing short of a revolution in communication. The transmission of messages between the metropole and colony, or within a colony such as India, which had previously taken months by sea and land, now took seconds.

The technologies emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around transport, communications, commercial production and medicine, in particular, also exercised a tremendous influence on the identity of modern empires. Colonialism was frequently trumpeted as a beneficient exercise in scientific progress bringing everything – from railways to vaccination, from electricity to the production line – to those unschooled in modern technology. It was not just doctors and engineers who could harness such sentiments, but missionaries, too, whose often pioneering efforts in health care afforded them some degree of entry into local communities. However, science, technology and medicine were often divisive forms of knowledge, working to strengthen the idea that it was from the west that all such innovation emerged.7

The beneficence of science and technology was perhaps most visible in the era of public health; as the European empires expanded ever further into the tropics, there was increasing emphasis on protecting the health of whites, whether settlers or not. What Alison Bashford has dubbed ‘lines of hygiene’ demarcated the boundaries of colonial rule, separating safe and unsafe, clean and unclean areas and constructing borders to segregate these, designed with the safety of Europeans in mind.8 Not infrequently these sanitary states overlapped with political ones, and areas that were unsafe medically were often coterminous with those regarded as unsafe politically. Medical improvement, then, more often than not benefited the colonisers more than the colonised, and was occasionally the leading edge of increasingly interventionist colonisation. Furthermore, proclamations of sanitary danger illuminated the neutral ground science often claimed for itself. The growing insistence that the empirical method produced value-free knowledge of colonial dirt, lack of reason or lower intellectual capacity, formed one more justification for imperial rule, this one made in the name of scientific progress.

Advantages such as these empowered western imperial ambition to the extent that it could now take on other great empires, shifting the balance of world power decisively in its favour. The story is a familiar one. Late in the eighteenth century, the Chinese and Ottoman empires could still act as counterweights to, and place limits on, European imperial ambition, and, despite the weakened state of the Mughal Empire, European powers in India were forced to acknowledge its sovereignty and symbolic power.9 In the nineteenth century, however, China’s ability to police its trade with foreign powers by restricting them to commercial enclaves on the coast was breached by the two Opium Wars from which the British, with superior military technology, emerged victorious. British merchants after the 1840s could sell opium and other commodities freely. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was vulnerable at its North African boundary. Ottoman governors in Egypt had already begun to assert a degree of independence from Istanbul when the pasha Mehemet Ali set about the modernisation of the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. He relied on European expertise and knowledge, providing British and French merchants with opportunities to exploit Egyptian trade, and later construct the Suez Canal. A threat to its interests in the canal provided the British with a pretext to put in place a protectorate in Egypt in 1882. Simultaneously, the French asserted their interest in Algeria, another region of the Ottoman Empire vulnerable to incursion from foreign powers.

By the time France declared itself a republic in 1871, it had effective control of Algerian institutions. In the Balkans a series of nationalist struggles forced the Ottomans to cede further territory to Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, so that on the eve of the First World War the empire was greatly reduced in size, and could do little to resist the devastation which followed. Britain occupied Istanbul in 1920, and the League of Nations formalised the parcelling out of former Ottoman lands to the European victors in the war, declaring the Ottoman Empire defunct in 1922.10 By the early twentieth century Japanese territorial expansion represented the major exception to European imperial dominance, albeit one which the Europeans regarded as a serious threat to their pre-eminence. The Japanese were just as mindful of European expansion in the region, and wary of its effect on East Asian power formations. The spread of Japanese imperialism in the 1940s, and its easy conquests over a number of European overseas territories, did much to undermine European claims of supremacy.

Superior technology was not the entire story underpinning changing imperial power structures. Radical new visions of the nature of imperial expansion and rule were also important. Changing concepts of labour, in particular, were crucial in determining the success of new empires. One of the key transitions from older forms of empire to a characteristically modern mode inhered in the Atlantic slave trade. The buying and selling of African bodies, available not as the spoils of war but by routine commercial transaction, signalled a market-driven approach to labour in which older understandings of mutual obligation between worker and owner were obliterated. Slave labour produced goods bound for the broader market places, and as the free-trade lobby grew the unmistakably coercive form of slavery came under increasing political, judicial and philosophical scrutiny. The liberty of the subject – the freeborn Englishman, the new American, the non-aristocratic Frenchman, figures always depicted as male – which was the clarion call of late eighteenth-century Europe cast a long shadow on the unfree labour of slavery, and lent abolitionism a helpful and powerful rhetoric.

Many factors beyond the humanitarian helped in the fight against slavery for, as Philip Morgan has argued, abolitionism was ‘a mix of moral and material motives’.11 The slave trade, however, did not suddenly or quickly disappear in the colonies it had done so much to enrich.12 Its dismantling was slow and uneven; at the end of the nineteenth century there was still a need for the Brussels Conference Act (1890), a collection of anti-slavery measures aimed at ending what it called the ‘Negro slave trade’. Moreover, as a recent collection demonstrates, the rhetoric around slavery and abolition lived on well into the twentieth century.13 The effect of colonialism was to move the Atlantic world which had dominated eighteenth-century European imperialism from what Ira Berlin called ‘societies with slaves’ to ‘slave societies’.14 In the former, slaves worked alongside other types of labourers – free and indentured – as was the case in the Spanish and British colonies in the Americas. Over the course of the century a tighter and more rigid separation of these categories of labour cohered around racial difference.

The property-in-person which underpinned the condition of slavery was only one of the new forms of property right associated with modern empires. From the seventeenth century, labour in the Americas became increasingly migratory as indigenous workers were replaced by a mix of enslaved and indentured migrants with no local connections to the land. Far more than in earlier imperial formations, modern empires thus frequently involved the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the alienation of their individual and collectively owned lands in favour of absolute ownership imposed by colonising forces. Even after slavery began to ebb, the relationship between labour and property remained important, forming the basis of class difference in a variety of locations. Forced from the land, many former slaves found a livelihood as landless labourers under various forms of contract.

In general, modern imperial rule fostered a growing distance between coloniser and colonised, visible in property, occupation and other material ways as well as in culture and religion. This fed the growing interest characteristic, particularly of (but not exclusive to) modern European empires, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: TIMES
• PART II: SPACES
• PART III: THEMES
• Bibliography
• Index