After the Empires

The Dissolution of Foreign Powers and the Creation of New States in East Asia

P. Preston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137345677
• eBook ISBN: 9781137345684
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The shift to the modern world in East Asia was accomplished in part via the experience of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Following imperial crisis in the 1930s and 1940s, independent nation states formed from which the political structure of East Asia is based today.

1

State-Empires and the Shift to the Modern World

As Europe and East Asia moved into the modern world, the political form constructed and reaching its apogee in the years before the Great War was a system of state-empires. Each state-empire functioned as a unit; the metropolitan centres¹ of these state-empires were in Europe; the associated territories were in various parts of the world and were drawn into the system at various times and with various levels of integration. The system of state-empires linked two areas in particular – Europe and East Asia – where the former was the accidental originator of industrial capitalism, whilst the latter was the pre-eminent pre-modern economic, political and cultural centre. Asserting the intermingled nature of the process entails reworking familiar metropolitan histories (which typically stress the one-sided nature of the process, stereotypically, ‘bringing civilization’) and the equally familiar nationalist histories of post-colonial states (which also often stress the one-sided nature of the process, stereotypically, ‘repression and exploitation’). Against these interpretations a more plausible story points to the intermingled nature of the process of making and running state-empires in the shift to the modern world, where this includes exploitation, collaboration and learning.² Finally, the process of creating and sustaining state-empire systems was attended by violence, both active, in overcoming local rulers,³ and passive, through maintaining colonial armies and police forces; absent the violence and there would have been no state-empire systems.

Here, first, remarks on running the arguments – that is, the intellectual resources available, both positive (what can be said) and negative (displaying the limits of what can be said). Then, second, an orienting sketch of the still unfolding process of the shift to the modern world. Finally, a note on the agenda for the rest of the text with its concern for the nature of life in the hitherto peripheries after the empires themselves had faded from view.

Modernity and empire: Running debates

This text will present a substantive treatment of the long historical exchanges of Europe and East Asia. However, as with all interpretive social scientific scholarship, there are parallel intellectual debates running in respect of the business of making the arguments that carry the substantive claims, and in general these have three distinct foci: first, the contexts of theorizing, second, the resources and commitments of the theorists, and third, the audiences to whom their various arguments are addressed. It is the particular mix of these three elements – context, theorist and audience – that shapes the resultant substantive claims.

So, cast in these terms, first, the text is made in the early twenty-first century, and the state-empire systems are long gone, but their legacies remain to be unpacked, and yet such tasks take place in quite new circumstances – the successful recovery of both regions from the disasters of the early part of the twentieth century, in Europe taking the form of the project of the European Union, in East Asia appearing in the guise of great economic success (albeit coupled with unresolved political and security problems). Second, the text rests on definite deep assumptions. It is lodged within the classical European tradition of social theorizing: formally, the tradition is interpretive, critical and oriented towards dialogue,⁴ and substantively, the focus of the tradition is upon the ways in which agents make sense of their ever-changing circumstances. This text is concerned with unpacking the legacies of state-empire systems in East Asia whilst a complementary text looks at the legacies of the state-empire system for the metropolitan heartlands of the former British state-empire.⁵ And third is the audience: the text is addressed to all those concerned with better reading the received histories of the collapse of the state-empire systems.⁶

Thereafter, more specifically, looking at the concerns of this text, a number of debates run through the materials addressed in this opening chapter (other debates run through the later materials and these are intermingled debates so all of the substantive claims made are carried on a broad raft of debate and assumption): first, the nature of the shift to the modern world; second, the logics of state-empire systems; and third, the use of metaphors to grasp these large-scale historical processes.

The shift to the modern world

The first area of debate concerns the ‘shift to the modern world’. It is a debate that has its roots in the response of social theorists to the changes wrought to the European social world from the seventeenth century onwards, and much of the intellectual apparatus deployed today has its occasion in the work of nineteenth-century theorists, as accumulating pressures for change swept through the social world and demanded a response.⁷ For the present purposes there are three areas of reflection: the nature of the modern world; the reasons for its emergence in Europe; and the related question for this text of what was going on in East Asia around this time. A number of available positions in these debates can be noted and a variant advanced centred on the idea of contingency.

(i) The modern world

The core of the notion of the modern world points to the world of natural science-based industrial society. It picks up on the ideas of reason and livelihood and the expectation attached is of further advances in respect of both aspects: natural science will accumulate knowledge of the natural world,⁸ and such knowledge will inform the pursuit of livelihood.⁹ In brief, the modern world is a world of progress,¹⁰ scientific, material and – as an extension to the argument – moral/cultural.

There are a number of related terms: ‘modernity’, pointing to the general cultural style of the form of life;¹¹ ‘modernism’, pointing to an art form exploring and celebrating this form of life;¹² and recently ‘modernization’, pointing to the acquisition of the traits of the modern world, although unfortunately the term has been rendered unusable as a result of its use in the 1950s and 1960s propaganda by Western governments and Western development theorists¹³ such that the end-point of the process of modernization was taken to be exemplified by the contemporary USA.¹⁴ These ideas can be variously deployed and they revolve around theories of change: first, that Europe was the starting point, that the shift to the modern world marked a break with pre-existing forms of life and that the process was in general progressive:¹⁵ second, that the process thus described made being and becoming industrial the key issue for political philosophy and the social sciences;¹⁶ third, that the process thus described combined evident material advance with equally clear moral decay;¹⁷ fourth, that the process thus described is a misdescription and the experience of Europe were far from novel as the rise of ‘industriousness’ was widespread;¹⁸ and fifth, later, that progress had its counterpart in barbarism made evident in the processes of the bureaucratic-rational mass production of death seen in particular in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁹ These matters continue to be debated.

(ii) European origins

The shift to the modern world has its origins in Europe from, say, the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries, and over this period what had been a poor marginal area within the extant set of economies within the global system became a powerful region, and thereafter the influence of its constituent countries was spread widely, creating, over time, a geographically dispersed system of state-empires. A number of explanations have been offered: first, science/technology (scientific advances triggering wider social change, in particular the familiar tale of the rise of merchants in towns and the equally familiar tale of guns and sails favouring European sailors/traders²⁰); second, industry/trade (the familiar tale of aggressive involvement in the then extant Asian networks of trade – part cooperation, part exploitation²¹); third, religion/ethics (the familiar ‘protestant ethic’ fuelling a restless concern for material success – domestically at the expense of the less energetic and externally at the expense of other cultures where such ideas were absent²²); and fourth, location/linkages, – thus in the early modern period, Europe made use of links across the Atlantic to bring in Latin American silver (fuelling economic expansion), to import primary products from Central and North America (food and raw materials such as sugar and cotton) and later to export surplus population (which colonized the two continents).

A related debate has been pursued which asks why these changes did not begin in East Asia because, after all, the area was rich, ordered and centred on a long-established sophisticated civilization. Some earlier explanations offered during the high tide of empire expansion, ideas that come down to the present as popular clichés, were cast in terms of race (people lower in the evolutionary given competition of race groups) or culture (Asian peoples as exotics inhabiting moribund forms of life that are now rejected). Newer debates have in common that they reject explanations cast in terms of the putative essential characteristics of Europeans and Americans. First, some argue for European success bleeding resources from the East as they build up their own region;²³ second, some argue for the successful utilization of locally available energy resources plus trade links in Europe, activities which were comparatively less successful in East Asia;²⁴ third, others argue more directly that the West took cultural resources from the East to inform its rise;²⁵ and, as a note, fourth, reconstructed long-run data on these processes has also been presented.²⁶

(iii) East Asia

In the years prior to the arrival of the modern world, the region was home to long-established civilizations: Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Malay.²⁷ The Chinese cultural sphere was central to the region (in the spheres of economy, society, culture and polity): it was an agrarianbased, bureaucratically ordered, hierarchical, conservative form of life (in summary terms, successful, stable and wealthy). Its precise economic condition of sphere on the eve of arrival of Europeans is disputed,²⁸ although one influential line of argument suggests that the empire had reached an economic ceiling whilst politico-culturally it was unable to generate the necessary internal reforms;²⁹ that said, it is clear that the Chinese sphere was the most powerful of the contemporary economies. Moreover, the cultural impact of China had spread widely throughout the region and it was particularly influential in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, all places that embraced variants of the Chinese model, each attaining high levels of civilization. And thereafter, Chinese traders carried this influence further afield, in particular along sea-lanes to the south where there were collections of institutionally more fluid predominantly Malay maritime and riverine empires.³⁰ In all, this broad region was home to forms of life that were long established, sophisticated and successful.

(iv) The idea of contingency

In this text a variant argument will be presented. It can be granted that the modern world began in Europe but thereafter an idea of contingency can be invoked. Available in the work of Richard Rorty,³¹ it points to the ineluctably social nature of human being; forms of life are just that and there are no extra-social guarantors. In this present context there are two aspects: modernity and Europe. First, the modern world began as a result of a coincidence of factors – crucially, science and industry – and these combined to put in place a form of life that was very energetic, routinely deepening the demands that it made on its domestic populations and routinely seeking to expand its sphere of operations outside its core territory. Second, these factors became available in Europe as a result of contingent changes or events, including, schematically, the increasing influence of urban merchants in Northwest Europe, shifts in power of extant churches (division between Protestant and Catholic) and accidents of military power relations.

There was nothing essential to the nature of extant Europeans – it was all happenstance or accident, and the shift to the modern world could have happened elsewhere.³² But it did not, it happened in Europe, and thereafter Europeans exported their form of life around the globe, variously remaking the multiplicity of other cultures with which they became involved.³³ This process had multiple aspects – exploitation, collaboration and learning – and the resultant patterns were contingent, the ever shifting out turn of a multiplicity of social processes. And these dynamics ran down through time. Contemporary populations inherit these processes and they remain contingent, so that what there is, is the world that we have and it has no essences, no guarantees and no unilinear direction of travel, hence, contingent.

State-empire systems

A second area of debate concerns the conceptualization of the systems of empire and here there are two familiar political styles of argument or discourse: first, those made by commentators in the metropolitan territories where, one way or another, claims to the superiority of the central territories are lodged (economic, social, cultural or political), which, thereafter, both explain and justify the extension of these practices to the more outlying areas and where, crucially, a division is asserted between metropolitan centres and associated territories; then, second, those made by commentators in these outlying areas, claims to the exploitation and/or suppression, one way or another, of indigenous forms of life, so, once again, a division is posited between cores and peripheries but now the valuations are reversed and now the metropolitan centres are not bringers of civilization and progress – rather, they despoil and exploit what were otherwise functioning forms of life.

Both lines have been pursued over many years, they run concurrently with the shift to the modern world, from early travellers’ tales, through the records of nineteenth-century colonial officials and later colonial administrator-scholars to the work of critics of one sort or another, local nativist traditionalists, religious groups, early nationalists plus metropolitan core dissenters and reformers. And these themes find expression in recent years – that is, after the collapse of these systems, for example, in discourses of globalization or development, or critiques of American aspirations to empire.

This extensive literature and its arguments can be reviewed but, thereafter, against both of these lines, which have in common that they grant that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between core and periphery, this text will argue that state-empire systems were integrated units and are best analysed as such.

(i) So, first, the types of claims to superiority

Claims to superiority could be cast in comparative terms: economic, socio-political and cultural.

There have been many claims in respect of economic systems, typically celebrating the activities found in the core and dismissing other forms of economic activity. It was claimed that European systems were more efficient, innovative, dynamic and so on, and this obtained domestically and via trade was exported around the planet. These arguments took shape in the eighteenth century. Thereafter, in the nineteenth century, an appeal to the positive value of trade was routine. Thus Linda Colley records that positive evaluation of the role of trade figured in the creation of Britain. Following the 1707 Treaty/Act of Union, Britain had a single marketplace. Later the benefits of trade were theorized by David Ricardo and the positive role of trade became a core idea of nineteenth-century political economy, and the idea was readily deployed not just for trade within the domestic sphere but internationally where it offered a justification for one key element of the rise of the British state-empire system in East Asia – that is, the trade in opium. This trade was crucial to funding the empire in the East and the trade was lucrative for the business community, but it had opponents and one defence was the claim to the virtues of free trade.³⁴

The package is summed up by Cain and Hopkins:³⁵

Gentlemanly capitalism undoubtedly helped to promote expansionist forces of investment, commerce and migration throughout the world, including Europe and the United States. Its main dynamic was the drive to create an international trading system centred on London and mediated by sterling . . . The whole package was to be tied together by a regime of international free trade, which would encourage specialization, cut transaction costs and create an interlocking system of multilateral payments . . . This vision was not inevitably imperialistic . . . [but] there was a tendency for expansionist impulses to become imperialist, especially where they came up against societies which needed reforming or restructuring before expansionist ambitions could be realized, and which also seemed to be either amenable to change or incapable of resisting it.

Such claims were rehearsed by Marx and Engels...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. State-Empires and the Shift to the Modern World
• 2. State-Empire Systems: The Players
• 3. State-Empire Systems: The Logics
• 4. State-Empire Systems: Fracture Lines
• 5. General Crisis: System Failure and the Collapse into Warfare
• 6. State-Empire Dissolution
• 7. After the State-Empires: Territories, States, Nations and Development
• 8. Powerful Regions and the Surprising Costs of Success
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index