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.
The Wave Breaks
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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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The Rise of National Industrial Empires (1871-1900)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
This time I want to talk about how the wave of European Imperialism starts to
break early in the 1900s.
In the first place,
beating up on some of the local peoples was no longer quite so easy.
The ones who had still retained their independence were also
starting to acquire some European military technology.
Here's an example of that.
The Italians tried to take over one of the oldest independent African states,
Ethiopia.
The Italian army was decisively defeated at a battle Adwa in 1896.
Here's an Ethiopian illustration from that battle.
It's kind of interesting.
You see the Italians over here on the right, Ethiopians on the left.
But one of the things I want you to note is that it's not just the Italians with
rifles and canons charging unarmed natives.
Look over at these Ethiopians,
yes, some of them are the warriors wielding their swords.
But over here you'll also see that the Ethiopians
are armed with bolt action rifles.
A lot of this stuff can be bought in the open market by the 1890s.
And the war that really gripped the world's imagination between 1899 and
1902 was the one going on in South Africa.
Here's a map that gives you a sense of what was happening there.
The British had formed a Cape Colony in South Africa here.
The Dutch settlers that have originally founded the colony back in
the 1600s had formed their own state.
This is a state made up of farmers descended over
generations from those Dutch settlers who called themselves Afrikaners.
They very much regarded themselves as Native Africans too but of Dutch descent.
The British colony and
the Dutch claims finally come into conflict as the British keep expanding.
And the British start rushing in places like Kimberley here
where gold had been discovered in the 1890s.
That results in a war in which the British try to subjugate the Afrikaner state.
The Afrikaners, however, achieve some startling victories against the British
army in the early wave of this war and it captured the world's imagination.
The British finally grinding the Afrikaners down and win this war.
But at very great cost and
with a lot of debate in England over what are we doing all this for anyway?
Another example of fading imperial enthusiasm
was the American experiment in the Philippines.
The Americans might have thought that the Filipino independence
movement which is go away or accept the American tutelage, but it didn't.
Led by this man, Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipinos fought on.
Fought for their independence now from the Americans,
continuing a struggle they had been waging before against the Spanish.
That war dragged on for years.
The American forces found themselves committing atrocities in the course of
this war.
Atrocities that made the American public feel uneasy and
wondering what they had really gotten into.
By 1902, when Aguinaldo was captured, American enthusiasm for
further imperial expansion was already waned.
Indeed the Americans were offered another chance to go ahead and
grab the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean and turned it down.
Instead they begin concentrating on what kind of imperial partnership
they could form with Filipino elites.
In which they and their partners in the Filipino elite would slowing negotiate
terms, turning over increasing roles of self government to that Filipino elite.
Eventually by the early 1930's,
the Americans signed the agreement that would give the Philippines their
independents which was formally granted after World War II.
In addition to these struggles that are making Imperialism seem a little
bit harder, there really is a significant degree of revolution in
some of the Western countries.
As some of the atrocities committed by imperialists get more and
more the public attention in this popular press that now so many people can read.
In an earlier presentation, I talked about Joseph Conrad's story,
Heart of Darkness, where he began to call attention to the atrocities in the Congo.
That continued to get quite a lot of attention.
Mark Twain, the famous American author had been an outspoken opponent of American
imperial expansion back in 1898 and 1899.
And he was so angered by what King Leopold was disclosed to be doing in the Congo
that he wrote a bitter satire called King Leopold's Soliloquy.
In which poor Leopold is complaining about how the world won't
understand what it is he's trying to do.
These are illustrations that are actually drawn from Mark Twain's book,
King Leopold's Soliloquy, in which King Leopold is complaining that the pictures
of these mutilated people in the Congo are getting sneaked around everywhere.
And talking about his yearly income in the millions of guineas.
So let's take a moment and
parse out some of the different tributaries flowing into the stream
of anti-imperialism sentiment that's gathering strength in the early 1900s.
From the point of view of a liberal, there are some real problems with imperialism.
The stories of atrocities, of plunder, of government
negligence causing famine causes a good deal of revulsion in the West.
But also from the Western liberal point of view, it's harder and harder to sustain
the argument that these people should not be allowed to rule themselves.
Whites have already won self governing dominion status in places like Canada and
Australia.
Educated people in India are demanding equal political rights and
equal rights to the rule of their sub-continent.
So in the West, there's a Liberal Critique.
Let's look at the critique of some of the people in the East, in a place like India,
for example.
One point of view could be that we want to throw the British out and indeed,
we want to destroy all of British India.
We'd like to go back to having a Hindu state, a Muslim state, and so on.
For an Indian liberal, the kind of politicians who'd
gather in something called the Indian National Congress.
They don't want to go back to a state that's identified by clan or religion.
In other words, they don't want to turn the clock back and
go back to the Maratha Confederacy or the Mogul empire.
What they want to do is to keep the ideal,
the liberal ideal of the nation state with public education, called India.
But they want to take it over and run it themselves.
This new Indian creation ought to be run by the Indians.
That they ought to have equal rights.
Indeed, they would love for
Indians to be taking charge of an India that also had dominion status.
And they believed the only thing that's separating them from supreme power is,
above all, racial prejudice.
So as these liberals look around,
what they're more concerned about is decaying dynasties.
Some of these dynasties are imperial ones, like the Russian Empire.
Some of them are in places like China, with the Qing Empire.
Liberals then would believe the Russian Empire ought to be
replaced by a Russian Republic.
And that the Chinese Empire ought to be replaced by, well,
a Chinese republic, not some foreign empire.
There's a different kind of critique though,
that's also being voiced by people in Asia and in Europe.
A more radical critique.
This is a critique that sees the whole movement of global imperialism as more of
a systemic problem.
A world wide problem.
Let me give you a couple of examples of this.
One is this man, Jose Rizal.
Rizal grew up in the Philippines, from an affluent family,
extremely well educated, but against Spanish rule.
Spain was still in charge of the Philippines at the time.
Rizal made his case both in the Philippines and in Europe.
He felt a sense of solidarity with people all over the world who were struggling
to overthrow foreign rule, whether it was Spanish rule in the Philippines or
Spanish rule in Cuba, or British rule in places.
A sense of worldwide solidarity against the system that wasn't letting local
people realize their dreams.
Rizal, who himself never really engaged in violent revolutionary activity,
was none the less arrested by the Spanish and executed by a firing squad in 1896.
He's revered today as one of the fathers of the Filipino nation.
Another example of the radical critique is from this man, JA Hobson.
Hobson is writing in reaction to the Boer War,
where it looks to him like capitalist financiers trying to exploit the mines
of South Africa are waging a war on behalf of international finance.
Hobson's argument then is imperialism is a product of the capitalist world system.
In which the capitalists seeking new markets,
new access to raw materials are really going to push their governments around and
make them go acquire the things that they need.
He explains the Boer War in this way.
This track is influential and
especially is influential among people in the socialist movement.
Where one young man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a Russian revolutionary,
will find Hobson's argument a really good guide for
anti-imperialism is also the same thing as anti-capitalism.
And ought to be a tenet of the communist movement that he is trying to lead.
But now let me turn your attention to a different kind of anti-imperialism.
I call this the Pan-Responses.
This is almost kind of a counter movement against imperialism
that calls upon different kind of solidarity.
I've talked before in another presentation about this kind of nationalism or
racial identity.
It is an anti-imperialism movement too.
Japanese for example, feel like they're the leaders of a Pan-Asian movement.
I talked last time about how the Japanese are involved in
imperial acquisitions in China.
But actually back home in Japan,
the Japanese are very ambivalent about how to feel about China.
On the one hand, there are Japanese who see opportunities for
greater power there for their country.
On the other hand,
there are Japanese who feel a great sense of solidarity with the Chinese and
think that they should join in a Pan-Asian alliance to overthrow foreign rulers.
That's why some of those Chinese exiles who've been reformers in the court of
the Ching empire, when they flee, they find refuge in Japan.
So a Pan-Asian response is both anti-imperialist,
but it can be something more.
Same with a Pan-Islamic response or Pan-Slav response.
In addition to being anti-imperialist, it can actually be counter-imperialist.
In other words,
the way I'm going to counter your empire is build up an empire of my own.
I'm going to counter the European empires with a Pan-Asian empire.
And of course, any empire needs a leader.
The Japanese, for example, see themselves as the potential leaders of
a Pan-Asian federation which, of course, to some people might just seem like
a hypocritical mask for Japanese selfish ambitions.
But there's something that many Japanese sincerely believed in.
But you can see here the way the Japanese are slowly beginning to expand
their empire now to the Asian mainland.
In addition to Taiwan which became part of Japan in 1895,
they set up a protector over Korea.
And finally turn Korea into a full blown colony by 1910.
After beating the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, they get
a settlement in which Japan's spear of influence begins to spread in Manchuria.
Manchuria isn't under formal Japanese control or formal Russian control.
But the control of the Chinese government over Manchuria decays more and more.
It becomes a matter of foreigners partnering with local
warlords to try to exploit Manchurian resources.
A kind of chaos that would become a really important subject of international
politics during the 20th century.
So step back.
What we've tried to do in this whole week of discussion is look back over what
a phenomenon imperialism is in the second half of the 1800s.
And how it really takes off in the later part of the 1800s.
Sweeping across Africa and almost coming to the point of carving up China itself.
But how as you get into the early 1900s, the global empires are still there.
They're still very strong.
But all kinds of anti imperialist movements have really taken a firm grip,
not only in Europe, but also in Asia.
And we've also noticed that sometimes,
you oppose imperialism by asserting an alternative imperialism of your own.
That's one of the themes that we'll come back to when we talk more about
the 20th century.
Because the 20th century is still going to be marked specially in its first half
by struggles over people who have global empire and people who want it.
But next week, I want to talk about some other things that are transforming
the world at the end of the 1800s and at the beginning of the 20th century.
I'll see you then.
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