This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
Breaking Open China and Japan
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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
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À partir de la leçon
The World Transformed (1830-1870)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi. Welcome back.
Make yourself comfortable.
Last time, we talked about how the Islamic world
was adapting to the revolutionary changes coming out of Europe.
Now, the Islamic world couldn't avoid having to interact with European changes.
They're right on the borderlands of Europe and the European world.
Very different story in East Asia. Powerful, wealthy China and Japan had
tried for generations, with a great deal of success, to simply keep the
Europeans at arm's length and not have to deal with them at all.
Now, we're going to zero in on how that changed, how
those generations of isolation were broken open, especially in the 1840s
and 1850s.
It's good to pick on the 1840s as a period in which Europe and
the Market Revolution really begin to think about the Pacific Ocean World.
So, for generations, they were very
focused, of course, on the Mediterranean World.
And, then they were very focused on that Atlantic World,
with all of its interconnections.
The Atlantic World, then, was expanded to really understand the
enormous Indian Ocean World:
Africa, India, the borderlands of Southeast Asia.
As the Indian Ocean World becomes crisscrossed by trade and the Indian
subcontinent itself becomes a huge base of both production and markets,
the gaze swings now into China, Southeast Asia, Japan.
And then you really
begin to focus on the Pacific World.
Meanwhile from North America, as the population is now oriented more
westward moving across the Mississippi, the United States, too, is beginning
to think: gee are we actually going to become a country
that operates in a Pacific World and not just the Atlantic World?
A good turning point in American consciousness
about this would be about, oh, 1840 or so
is a period in which the Americans begin to think, gee, we, we really need
to make sure that our country extends to the Pacific Ocean's side of North America,
and that we're strong on that side of North America or else the Mexicans, the
British coming down from Canada, the Russians
coming down from Alaska, they'll control the Pacific
side of North America and we won't. So this consciousness of the Pacific
World is a really important thing to understand about the 1840s and the 1850s.
So, here's an interesting map of the Pacific World as it
would have been seen by an American mapmaker in about 1856.
Focus in
on North America for a moment. During the 1840s, the United
States succeeds in cementing its claim to Oregon.
And also by the end of the 1840s, the United States
was able to secure a claim all the way down to
San Diego, here, along the Pacific coast of North America,
because of its victory over the Mexican Empire in the Mexican War.
And, it begins to establish, during the 1840s, in large settlements
at places like San Francisco.
Then, in 1848, gold is discovered in the hills to the east of San Francisco.
Thousands of people begin sailing all the way around the tip of South
America making their way up by this kind of yellow line you see here,
which is a typical steamship line route up
into San Francisco, and are beginning to populate this region.
British and American sailors are ahead of all the
others in exploring and mapping out this Pacific World.
The British, in particular, had already argued among themselves
whether they should try to establish a colony in California
in the 1840's and had decided not to attempt it,
at least at that time. The British had also established
an outpost in an absolutely critical place in this map.
It's hard to see it from this distance, but if you were to pick the most central
location among all the different trade routes, it
would probably be some place right around in here.
Let's zoom in and see what's there.
What's marked on this map is the Sandwich Islands, is what we would now
know today as the state of Hawaii, part of the United States of America.
Back then it wasn't clear who would end up ruling these islands.
There were local Polynesian rulers.
There was a good deal of influence from the British government and some increasing
interest from the Americans, as well, in what was going to happen to these islands.
The colored lines on this map all represent different steam ship routes.
Just to give you an example, let's look up here.
The mapmaker is telling his informed readers that if they want to get from
Canton, on the Chinese coast, or Manila, in the Philippines, to the Sandwich Islands,
that's about 55 days of steaming time.
If they don't stop off in the Sandwich Islands
and want to steam all the way to Acapulco on
the Mexican coast, that's a voyage of 90 to 100 days.
Okay.
Now let's zoom in on a different part of this opening Pacific world.
The world of Southeast Asia.
This is the world of Southeast Asia towards about 1860.
Let's study this map for a couple of minutes.
There is one key geographic point I want you to notice about this map.
How do you get from India and the Indian Ocean into the Pacific World?
There really only about three ways to do it.
Of course, one way is to go all the way
around Australia and New Guinea; that's very time consuming and difficult.
By far,
the key ways to break
into Southeast Asia and East Asia and the whole Pacific World from
Europe and the Indian Ocean World are really just through two routes.
One of those routes is here, through the Strait of Malacca.
And the other opening is, here,
through the Sunda Straits. Let's zoom in now on this part of the map,
and you can see how the key mercantile powers have established their outposts.
The area in pink belongs to the British. The key British bastion is right here
at Singapore.
The British had taken control of some key points
in the Dutch East Indies during the Napoleonic Wars.
After those wars, the British supported the
creation of a new state in the Netherlands.
There are longstanding historic ties between the
British government and the rulers of Holland.
So the British felt that in returning the East Indies to
the Dutch, they were now returning it to a reasonably friendly power.
The Dutch, in turn, are spending a lot of time, in the 1820s and 1830s, to
expand their domains around the East Indies, here and here.
And
here.
The Dutch, in fact, find themselves in a significant
war in the second half of the 1820s
against rebels inspired by Islamic beliefs;
Sufi brotherhoods had been active in Java.
But, also in Southeast Asia, there are still powerful independent rulers:
independent Nguyen Vietnam,
although the French established a key outpost in Saigon in 1859 from which they
are going to try to eventually expand
their influence into Southeast Asia and beyond.
The Spanish had established themselves centuries earlier
in the Philippine Islands, here, in which
the Spanish are still trying to establish a
little bit of colonial rule, not very much.
So now let's dive in to exactly how the European powers
and the United States break open the door into China and Japan.
A key event is the Opium War with China.
That's in 1841-1842.
The Opium War can really
just be understood as an outgrowth of
the Market Revolution that we've been talking about.
Let's understand the global dynamic that's at work here.
So, this is a map that nicely illustrates that tobacco
originates as a plant that can be grown in colonial North America.
Tobacco actually finds a market centuries earlier, in China,
where people begin smoking tobacco and mixing
it in with some opium, a practice that's
already widespread in the early 1700s in China.
A historical center of opium production is actually here in India.
Alright.
So now let's take a moment and think about a trade dynamic.
The British and others really want tea, and the best tea comes from China.
So...
[SOUND]
In exchange for all that tea, the British have to
come up with something the Chinese want. Well, that's silver.
Silver is a pretty scarce and precious commodity.
And pretty soon, the British are running out of enough silver
to pay for all the tea that they want to buy.
They need something else that they can trade
in exchange for tea, something instead of silver.
And they come up with the idea of expanding the Chinese market for opium
that they can trade instead, because there is
some demand in the Chinese market for opium.
The British now have a much firmer grip on Indian commerce.
They can supply plenty of it.
Seems like a natural solution to the East India Company except
the Chinese government authorities don't want more opium sold in their country.
They think it's a bad habit.
The British insist on the right to open facilities for their trade.
The Chinese resist, and there's a fight.
What really happens in this war is the British leverage their superiority
at sea to sail their vessels into Chinese
ports and to blow apart any Chinese opposition,
embarrassing the Chinese government and establishing their dominance.
Here's a painting that illustrates this.
In this painting, the Chinese vessels are in
the foreground, especially the one that's just exploded.
The key actor, of course, is right here.
You notice, that's a British steamship.
It's the HMS Nemesis. Aptly named for the Chinese.
This war in 1841-42, was the first in a series of such raids by the British,
later allied with the French, in the 1840s, 1850s, and early 1860s.
The effect of these raids is to embarrass and humiliate the Chinese government
and force the Chinese government to let these foreign powers have outposts
from which they can trade in legal safety.
Here's a map that just gives you a sense of the scope of these British raids
and later French raids.
Just along different parts of the Chinese coast
to open it up.
There are no armies of occupation sent here to hold large areas of land.
These are basically battles wages by navies,
assisted by small groups of expeditionary soldiers,
to punish the Chinese and break open these different points of entry.
Here's a map that tries to graphically portray the spread
of these foreign spheres of influence in the foreign treaty ports.
So, if you look at this map, it looks like
the French are very strong in this part of China.
The British are very strong in this part of China here.
The Russians are very strong in this part of China.
The map actually exaggerates the degree of this influence.
Mostly, the foreigners are clustered in a handful of places from which
they trade or, in the case of the British, send out missionaries.
The map is also a little misleading in that it
includes a lot of stuff that happens in the 1890s.
That's actually a very different historical period.
What I really do want to focus on, and use
this map to illustrate, is where these treaty ports are.
If you just follow the places that are opened up:
notice, especially, Shanghai in the 1840s, Fuzhou,
the bastion at Hong Kong, all in the early 1840s. Followed by ports
along the Yangtze River Valley: Nanjing, Hankou, and so on.
In 1860, treaty ports are also established in the Huang He,
or Yellow River Valley, in Northern China. Here and
here at Tianjin, back then known more as Tientsin.
You'll often see this written as T-I-E-N-T-S-I-N
in the contemporary documents, which is the port holding the overland route
to the imperial capital in Beijing, then called Peking by the West.
So the key geographic takeaway from this is extensive foreign influence in ports in
Southern China, on the Yangtze River Valley,
and increasingly up into North China, as well.
What really makes this foreign influence important
in Chinese history is that to protect
themselves the foreigners demand, as a condition
of their presence, what's called extraterritoriality.
That means the foreigners working in these
Chinese ports are not subject to Chinese laws.
They're subject to their own laws.
So the British in Shanghai set up their own court system that adjudicates
their people. Increasingly, Chinese who were
living in the foreign concession areas are
also exempt from Chinese law and are
judged according to the law of the foreigners.
And the foreigners begin extending their legal protections
to their Chinese friends, including Chinese converts to Christianity.
Now, in my discussion of this so far, I've made it look like the Chinese
are pretty passive actors in all of this.
And indeed at first, the great Qing Empire regarded the
foreigners as a nuisance and these concessions as pretty modest.
But, by the 1860s, it's a much more serious matter. In 1862, a
British and French expedition actually marches all the way to Peking and burns
the Imperial Summer Palace, looting and pillaging, acting like the foreign
barbarians that the Chinese thought that they were.
They got the treaty they wanted, and increasingly now,
the foreign presence is something the Chinese Empire cannot ignore.
They're going to have to adapt to that somehow.
In another talk, I'm going to come back to
the issue of how the Chinese choose to adapt,
later in the 1860s, under the pressure of
both the foreign intrusions and an enormous civil
war that the Chinese have to contend with,
also partly produced by the foreign influence.
What I want to turn to now, though, is what's going on with Japan.
The Japanese story is totally different.
The foreigners are trying to break in, warships arrive in a
Japanese harbor, but there's no war, at least not with the foreigners.
Let�s talk about what happens when the barbarians come to Japan.
Here they arrive actually in American ships,
led by a commodore named Matthew Perry,
in 1853.
The Japanese had allowed foreigners to do a little bit of trading.
They tried to keep them isolated to one harbor in southern Japan: Nagasaki.
But Commodore Perry steamed his ships right into Tokyo
Bay, at the very heart of the Japanese imperial domains.
The Japanese, instead of fighting him, decided to
receive him, listen to him, and then make
some decisions of their own as to how they were going to handle all of this.
The Japanese are also fascinated by the steam power
warships that Perry brings with him into the harbor.
This is actually a mechanical diagram in which
the Japanese are breaking down and very carefully illustrating
the parts of the paddle wheels that are helping to drive
one of Perry's vessels.
The Japanese decide not to fight.
Instead, the Japanese decide to study the Westerners, think about
what this implies, and make some big decisions about their national future.
We'll come back to those choices, and the Chinese choices, in a later presentation.
For now, I just want to stop and take stock
of where we are with what we've covered this week.
First, we talked about the opening of a great divergence between
East and West.
We broke that down into some particular circumstances that enabled Westerners,
especially West Europeans,
to develop some extraordinary new capabilities:
capabilities that created a whole new world situation for them.
And then we saw how those societies made choices responding to that new situation.
Choices that changed their economics,
their culture, their politics.
Second half of the presentations, we really
focused on how other societies interacted with this.
You see that the Islamic World, the Asian World,
really, these are no longer just their own historical narratives.
These are stories that can only be understood as global interactions.
The way the Islamic World is interacting and
adapting, actually, in the period up to about 1870,
with a fair degree of success.
The East Asian World is trying to keep the Europeans at arm's length.
We saw how, in the 1840s and 1850s and beyond, they just can't do that anymore.
So, what you have then is across the whole world,
by the 1850s and 1860s, every society is having to
make some choices as to how it's going to cope,
reorganize, rethink in response to new global forces.
Next week we'll concentrate on perhaps the most important of these choices:
the creation of national industrial states.
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