Chapter 24: The West and the World

Industrialization and the World Economy

The Rise of Global Inequality

• The Industrial Revolution in Europe marked a momentous turning point in human history.

• Those regions of the world that industrialized in the nineteenth century (mainly Europe and North America) increased their wealth and power enormously in comparison to those that did not.

• In recent years historical economists have charted the long-term evolution of this gap.

• Three main points stand out.

• First, in 1750 the average standard of living was no higher in Europe as a whole than in the rest of the world.

• Second, it was industrialization that opened the gaps in average wealth and wellbeing among countries and regions.

• Third, income per person stagnated in the colonized world before 1913, in striking contrast to the industrializing regions.

• Only after 1945, in the era of decolonization and political independence, did former colonies make real economic progress, beginning in their turn the critical process of industrialization.

• The rise of these enormous income disparities, which indicate similar and striking disparities in food and clothing, health and education, and life expectancy and general material well-being, has generated a great deal of debate.

• Because these issues are complex and there are few simple answers, it is helpful to consider them in the context of world trade in the nineteenth century.

The World Market

• Commerce between nations has always stimulated economic development.

• In the nineteenth century Europe directed an enormous increase in international commerce.

• Take the case of cotton textiles.

• By 1820 Britain was exporting 50 percent of its production.

• Europe bought 50 percent of these cotton textile exports, while India bought only 6 percent and had its own well-established textile industry

• In addition to its dominance in the export market, Britain was also the world’s largest importer of goods.

• International trade grew as transportation systems improved.

• Wherever railroads were built, they drastically reduced transportation costs, opened new economic opportunities, and called forth new skills and attitudes.

• The power of steam revolutionized transportation by sea as well as by land.

• Steam power began to supplant sails on the oceans of the world in the late 1860s.

• The revolution in land and sea transportation encouraged European entrepreneurs to open up and exploit vast new territories around the world.

• New communications systems were used to direct the flow of goods across global networks.

• Transoceanic telegraph cables, firmly in place by the 1880s, enabled rapid communications among the financial centers of the world.

• As their economies grew, Europeans began to make massive foreign investments beginning about 1840.

• By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Europeans had invested more than $40 billion abroad.

• Great Britain, France, and Germany were the principal investing countries.

• Most of the capital exported did not go to European colonies or protectorates in Asia and Africa.

• About three-quarters of total European investment went to other European countries, or to settler colonies or neoEuropes—a term coined by historian Alfred Crosby to describe regions that already had significant populations of ethnic Europeans, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and Siberia.

• Much of this investment was peaceful and mutually beneficial for lenders and borrowers.

• Native Americans and Australian aborigines especially were decimated by the diseases, liquor, and weapons of an aggressively expanding Western society.

The Opening of China

• Europe’s development of robust offshoots in sparsely populated North America, Australia, and much of Latin America absorbed huge quantities of goods, investments, and migrants.

• For centuries China had sent more goods and inventions to Europe than it had received, and such was still the case in the early nineteenth century.

• For years the little community of foreign merchants in Guangzhou had to accept this Chinese system.

• By the 1820s, however, the dominant group of these merchants, the British, were flexing their muscles.

• At the same time, the Qing government decided that the opium trade had to be stamped out.

• It was ruining the people and stripping the empire of its silver, which went to British merchants to pay for the drug.

• The wealthy, well-connected British merchants appealed to their allies in London for support, and the British government responded.

• Using troops from India and taking advantage of its control of the seas, Britain occupied several coastal cities and in the first of two Opium Wars forced China to give in to British demands.

• In the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the imperial government was required to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain forever, pay an indemnity of $100 million, and open up four large cities to unlimited foreign trade with low tariffs.

• With Britain’s new power over Chinese commerce, the opium trade flourished, and Hong Kong developed rapidly as an Anglo-Chinese enclave.

• Thus did Europeans use opium addiction and military aggression to blow a hole in the wall of Chinese seclusion and open the country to foreign trade and foreign ideas.

Japan and the United States

• China’s neighbor Japan had its own highly distinctive civilization and even less use for Westerners.

• European traders and missionaries first arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century

• Japan’s unbending isolation seemed hostile and barbaric to the West, particularly to the United States.

• It complicated the practical problems of ensuring the safety of shipwrecked American sailors and the provisioning of whaling ships and China traders sailing in the eastern Pacific.

• After several unsuccessful American attempts to establish commercial relations with Japan, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo (now Tokyo) Bay in 1853.

• Relying on gunboat diplomacy by threatening to attack, Perry demanded diplomatic negotiations with the emperor. Japan entered a grave crisis

• Over the next five years, more treaties spelled out the rights and privileges of the Western nations and their merchants in Japan. Japan was “opened.”

• What the British had done in China with two wars, the Americans had achieved in Japan with the threat of one.

Western Penetration of Egypt

• Egypt’s experience illustrates not only the explosive power of the expanding European economy and society but also their seductive appeal.

• Of great importance in African and Middle Eastern history, the ancient land of the pharaohs had since 525 b.c.e. been ruled by a succession of foreigners, most recently by the Ottoman sultans.

• First appointed governor of Egypt in 1805 by the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Ali set out to build his own state on the strength of a large, powerful army organized along European lines

• Muhammad Ali’s modernization program attracted large numbers of Europeans to the banks of the Nile.

• The port city of Alexandria had more than fifty thousand Europeans by 1864.

• To pay for his ambitious plans, Muhammad Ali encouraged the development of commercial agriculture.

• This development had profound implications.

• These trends continued under Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail, who in 1863 began his sixteen-year rule as Egypt’s khedive, or prince.

• Educated at France’s leading military academy, Ismail was a westernizing autocrat.

• Yet Ismail was too impatient and reckless.

• His projects were enormously expensive, and by 1876 Egypt owed foreign bondholders a colossal debt that it could not pay.

• Foreign financial control evoked a violent nationalistic reaction among Egyptian religious leaders, young intellectuals, and army officers.

• The British said their occupation was temporary, but British armies remained in Egypt until 1956.

• They maintained the façade of Egypt as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, but the khedive was a mere puppet.

• British rule in Egypt provided a new model for European expansion in densely populated lands.

• Such expansion was based on military force, political domination, and a self-justifying ideology of beneficial reform.

Global Migration Around 1900

• A poignant human drama accompanied economic expansion: millions of people pulled up stakes and left their ancestral lands in the course of history’s greatest migration.

• It was, in part, because of this global mass migration that the West’s impact on the world in the nineteenth century was so powerful and many-sided.

The Pressure of Population

• In the early eighteenth century European population growth entered its third and decisive stage, which continued unabated until the early twentieth century.

• These figures actually understate Europe’s population explosion, for between 1815 and 1932 more than 60 million people left Europe.

• The growing number of Europeans provided further impetus for Western expansion, and it drove more and more people to emigrate.

• Before looking at the people who emigrated, consider these three facts.

• First, the number of men and women who left Europe increased rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century and leading up to World War I.

• Second, different countries had very different patterns of migration. People left Britain and Ireland in large numbers from the 1840s on.

• Third, although the United States did absorb the largest overall number of European emigrants, fewer than half of all these emigrants went to the United States.

• The common American assumption that European emigration meant immigration to the United States is quite inaccurate.

European Emigration

• Determined to maintain or improve their status, immigrants brought great benefits to the countries that received them, in large part because the vast majority were young, typically unmarried, and ready to work hard in the new land, at least for a time.

• The likelihood of repatriation varied greatly by nationality.

• People who emigrated from the Balkans, for instance, were much more likely to return to their countries than people from Ireland or eastern European Jews.

• The mass movement of Italians illustrates many of the characteristics of European emigration.

• As late as the 1880s, three of every four Italians worked in agriculture.

• Many Italians had no intention of permanently settling abroad.

• Some called themselves “swallows.”

• After harvesting their own wheat and flax in Italy, they “flew” to Argentina to harvest wheat between December and April.

• Ties of family and friendship played a crucial role in the emigration process.

• Many people from a given province or village settled together in rural enclaves or tightly knit urban neighborhoods thousands of miles away.

• Many landless young European men and women were spurred to leave by a spirit of revolt and independence.

• Thus for many, emigration was a radical way to gain basic human rights.

• Emigration rates slowed in countries where the people won basic political and social reforms, such as the right to vote, equality before the law, and social security.

Asian Emigration

• Not all emigration was from Europe. A substantial number of Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Filipinos— to name only four key groups— responded to rural hardship with temporary or permanent emigration.

• In the 1840s, for example, the Spanish government actively recruited Chinese laborers to meet the strong demand for field hands in Cuba.

• Emigration from Asia would undoubtedly have grown to much greater proportions if planters and mine owners in search of cheap labor had been able to hire as many Asian workers as they wished.

• The explosion of mass mobility in the late nineteenth century, combined with the growing appeal of nationalism and scientific racism, encouraged a variety of attempts to control immigration flows and seal off national borders.

• Such attempts were often inspired by nativism, beliefs that led to policies giving preferential treatment to established inhabitants above immigrants.

• A crucial factor in the migrations before 1914 was, therefore, immigration policies that offered preferred status to “acceptable” racial and ethnic groups in the open lands of possible permanent settlement.

Western Imperialism, 1880-1914

• The expansion of Western society reached its apex between about 1880 and 1914.

• In those years, the leading European nations not only continued to send massive streams of migrants, money, and manufactured goods around the world, but also rushed to create or enlarge vast political empire.

• Because this renewed imperial push came after a long pause in European expansionism, contemporaries termed it the new imperialism

The European Presence in Africa Before 1880

• Prior to 1880, European nations controlled only 10 percent of Africa.

• The French had begun conquering Algeria in 1830, and by 1880 substantial numbers of French, Italian, and Spanish colonists had settled among the overwhelming Arab majority there.

• At the southern tip of the continent, Britain had taken possession of the Dutch settlements in and around Cape Town during the wars with Napoleon I.

• After 1853 the Boers, or Afrikaners, as the descendants of the Dutch in the Cape Colony were beginning to call themselves, proclaimed their independence and defended it against British armies.

• In addition to the French in the north and the British and Afrikaners in the south, European trading posts and forts dating back to the Age of Discovery and the slave trade dotted the coast of West Africa, and the Portuguese maintained a loose hold on their old possessions in Angola and Mozambique.

• After 1880 the situation changed drastically. In a spectacular manifestation of the new imperialism, European countries jockeyed for territory in Africa, breaking sharply with previous patterns of colonization and diplomacy.

The Scramble for Africa After 1880

• Between 1880 and 1900 Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy scrambled for African possessions as if their national livelihoods depended on it.

• The Dutch-settler republics also succumbed to imperialism, but the final outcome was different.

• The British, led by Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) in the Cape Colony, leapfrogged over the two Afrikaner states— the Orange Free State and the Transvaal— in the early 1890s and established protectorates over Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), named in honor of its founder.

• In the complex story of the European seizure of Africa, certain events and individuals stand out.

• Of enormous importance was the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, which established the new model of formal political control.

• By 1876 Leopold’s expansionism focused on central Africa.

• He formed a financial syndicate under his personal control to send Henry M. Stanley, a sensation-seeking journalist and part-time explorer, to the Congo basin.

• Leopold’s intrusion into the Congo area called attention to the possibilities of African colonization, and by 1882 Europe had caught “African fever”

• The Berlin Conference established the principle that European claims to African territory had to rest on “effective occupation” (a strong presence on the ground) to be recognized by other states.

• The Berlin Conference coincided with Germany’s sudden emergence as an imperial power.

• Prior to about 1880, Bismarck, like many other European leaders at the time, had seen little value in colonies.

• Meanwhile, the British began enlarging their own West African enclaves and impatiently pushed northward from the Cape Colony and westward from Zanzibar.

• A decade later, another British force, under General Horatio H. Kitchener, moved cautiously and more successfully up the Nile River, building a railroad to supply arms and reinforcements as it went.

• Continuing up the Nile after the Battle of Omdurman, Kitchener’s armies found that a small French force had already occupied the village of Fashoda.

• The British conquest of Sudan exemplifies the general process of empire building in Africa.

• The fate of the Muslim force at Omdurman was inflicted on all native peoples who resisted European rule: they were blown away by vastly superior military force.

Imperialism in Asia

• Although their sudden division of Africa was more spectacular, Europeans also exerted political control over much of Asia.

• Two other great imperialist powers, Russia and the United States, also acquired territories in Asia.

• Russia moved steadily forward on two fronts throughout the nineteenth century.

• The great conquest by the United States was the Philippines, taken from Spain in 1898 through the Spanish-American War.

• Some Americans protested the taking of the Philippines, but to no avail. Thus another great Western power joined the imperialist ranks in Asia.

Causes of the New Imperialism

• Many factors contributed to the late-nineteenth-century rush for empire, which was in turn one aspect of Western society’s generalized expansion in the age of industry and nationalism.

• Economic motives played an important role in the extension of political empires, especially in the British Empire.

• By the late 1870s France, Germany, and the United States were industrializing rapidly behind rising tariff barriers.

• Actually, the overall economic gains of the new imperialism proved quite limited before 1914.

• The new colonies were simply too poor to buy much, and they offered few immediately profitable investments.

• Along with economic motives, many people were convinced that colonies were essential to great nations.

• Treitschke’s harsh statement reflects not only the increasing aggressiveness of European nationalism after Bismarck’s wars of German unification, but also Social Darwinian theories of brutal competition among races.

• So did the industrial world’s unprecedented technological and military superiority.

• Three aspects were particularly important.

• First, the rapidly firing Maxim machine gun, so lethal at Omdurman, was an ultimate weapon in many another unequal battle.

• Second, newly discovered quinine proved no less effective in controlling malaria, which had previously decimated whites in the tropics whenever they left breezy coastal enclaves and dared to venture into mosquito-infested interiors.

• Third, the combination of the steamship and the international telegraph permitted Western powers to quickly concentrate their firepower in a given area when it was needed.

• Finally, certain special-interest groups in each country were powerful agents of expansion.

• The actions of such groups pushed the course of empire forward.

A “Civilizing Mission”

• Western society did not rest the case for empire solely on naked conquest and a Darwinian racial struggle or on power politics and the need for naval bases on every ocean.

• A favorite idea was that Westerners could and should civilize more primitive nonwhite peoples.

• According to this view, Westerners shouldered the responsibility for governing and converting the supposed savages under their charge and strove to remake them on superior European models.

• Many Americans accepted the ideology of the white man’s burden.

• It was an important factor in the decision to rule, rather than liberate, the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

• Peace and stability under European control also facilitated the spread of Christianity.

• Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed with Islam south of the Sahara, seeking converts and building schools to spread the Gospel.

• Such occasional successes in black Africa contrasted with the general failure of missionary efforts in India, China, and the Islamic world.

Orientalism

• Even though many Westerners shared a sense of superiority over non-Western peoples, they were often fascinated by foreign cultures and societies.

• In the late 1970s the influential literary scholar Edward Said(1935–2003) coined the term Orientalism to describe this fascination and the stereotypical and often racist Western understandings of non-Westerners that dominated nineteenth-century Western thought.

• As Said demonstrated, it was almost impossible for people in the West to look at or understand nonWesterners without falling into some sort of Orientalist stereotype.

• Such views swept through North American and European scholarship, arts, and literature in the late nineteenth century.

• The emergence of ethnography and anthropology as academic disciplines in the 1880s were part of the process.

• Scholars, authors, and artists were not necessarily racists or imperialists, but they found it difficult to escape Orientalist stereotypes.

• In the end they helped spread the notions of Western superiority and justified colonial expansion.

Critics of Imperialism

• The expansion of empire aroused sharp, even bitter, critics.

• A forceful attack was delivered in 1902, after the unpopular South African War, by radical English economist J. A. Hobson (1858–1940) in his Imperialism, a work that influenced Lenin and others.

• Like Hobson, Marxist critics offered a thorough analysis and critique of Western imperialism.

• Rosa Luxemburg, a radical member of the German Social Democratic Party, argued that capitalism needed to expand into noncapitalist Asia and Africa to maintain high profits.

• Hobson and many other critics struck home, however, with their moral condemnation of whites imperiously ruling nonwhites.

• Critics charged Europeans with applying a degrading double standard and failing to live up to their own noble ideals.

• Only by renouncing imperialism, its critics insisted, and giving captive peoples the freedoms Western society had struggled for since the French Revolution would Europeans be worthy of their traditions.

• These critics provided colonial peoples with a Western ideology of liberation.

Responding to Western Imperialism

The Pattern of Response

• Generally, the initial response of African and Asian rulers to aggressive Western expansion was to try to drive the unwelcome foreigners away.

• When the power of both the traditionalists and the modernizers was thoroughly shattered by superior force, some Asians and Africans accepted imperial rule.

• Political participation in non-Western lands was historically limited to small elites, and ordinary people often did what their rulers told them to do.

• Nevertheless, imperial rule was in many ways an imposing edifice built on sand.

• Support for European rule among subjugated peoples was shallow and weak.

• Such leaders always arose, both when Europeans ruled directly and when they manipulated native governments, for at least two basic reasons.

• First, the nonconformists— the eventual anti imperialist leaders— developed a burning desire for human dignity, economic emancipation, and political independence, all incompatible with foreign rule.

• Second, and somewhat ironically, potential leaders found in the Western world the ideologies underlying and justifying their protest.

• Thus the anti-imperialist search for dignity drew strength from Western thought and culture, as is particularly apparent in the development of three major Asian countries— India, Japan, and China.

Empire in India

• India was the jewel of the British Empire, and no colonial area experienced a more profound British impact.

• Unlike Japan and China, which maintained a real if precarious independence, and unlike African territories, which Europeans annexed only at the end of the nineteenth century, India was ruled more or less absolutely by Britain for a very long time.

• Arriving in India on the heels of the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company had conquered the last independent native state by 1848.

• The last “traditional” response to European rule— an attempt by the indigenous ruling classes to drive the invaders out by military force— was broken in India in 1857 and 1858.

• Those were the years of the Great Rebellion (which the British called a “mutiny”), an insurrection by Muslim and Hindu mercenaries in the British army that spread throughout northern and central India before it was finally crushed, primarily by loyal native troops from southern India.

• India was ruled by the British Parliament in London and administered by a tiny, all-white civil service in India.

• British women played an important part in the imperial enterprise, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made it much easier for civil servants and businessmen to bring their wives and children with them to India.

• British women played an important part in the imperial enterprise, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made it much easier for civil servants and businessmen to bring their wives and children with them to India.

• With British men and women sharing a sense of mission as well as strong feelings of racial and cultural superiority, the British acted energetically and introduced many desirable changes to India.

• This new native elite joined British officials and businessmen to promote modern economic development, a second result of British rule

• Finally, with a well-educated, English-speaking Indian bureaucracy and steps toward economic development, the British created a unified, powerful state.

• Despite these achievements, the decisive reaction to European rule was the rise of nationalism among the Indian elite.

• By 1885, when educated Indians came together to found the predominantly Hindu Indian National Congress, demands were increasing for the equality and self-government that Britain had already granted white-settler colonies, such as Canada and Australia.

• The common heritage of British rule and Western ideals, along with the reform and revitalization of the Hindu religion, had created a genuine movement for national independence.

The Example of Japan

• When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Tokyo in 1853 with his crude but effective gunboat diplomacy, Japan was a complex feudal society.

• When foreign diplomats and merchants began to settle in Yokohama, radical samurai reacted with a wave of antiforeign terrorism and antigovernment assassinations that lasted from 1858 to 1863.

• Then in 1867 a coalition led by patriotic samurai seized control of the government with hardly any bloodshed and restored the political power of the emperor in the Meiji Restoration, a great turning point in Japanese history.

• The immediate goal of the new government was to meet the foreign threat. The battle cry of the Meiji reformers was “Enrich the state and strengthen the armed forces.”

• In 1871 the new leaders abolished the old feudal structure of aristocratic, decentralized government and formed a strong unified state.

• Yet the overriding concern of Japan’s political leadership was always to maintain a powerful state and a strong military.

• By 1890, when the new state was firmly established, the wholesale borrowing of the early restoration had given way to a more selective emphasis on those things foreign that were in keeping with Japanese tradition.

• Japan also successfully copied the imperialism of Western society.

• Expansion proved that Japan was strong and cemented the nation together in a great mission.

• Japan became the first non-Western country to use an ancient love of country to transform itself and thereby meet the many-sided challenge of Western expansion.

Toward Revolution in China

• In 1860 the two-hundred-year-old Qing Dynasty in China appeared on the verge of collapse.

• Efforts to repel foreigners had failed, and rebellion and chaos wracked the country.

• Two factors were crucial in this reversal.

• First, the traditional ruling groups temporarily produced new and effective leadership.

• Second, destructive foreign aggression lessened, for the Europeans had obtained their primary goal of establishing commercial and diplomatic relations.

• The parallel movement toward domestic reform and limited cooperation with the West collapsed under the blows of Japanese imperialism.

• China’s precarious position after the war with Japan led to a renewed drive for fundamental reforms.

• Like the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, some modernizers saw salvation in Western institutions.

• In 1898 they convinced the young emperor to launch a desperate hundred days of reform in an attempt to meet the foreign challenge.

• The efforts at radical reform by the young emperor and his allies threatened the Qing establishment and the empress dowager Tzu Hsi, who had dominated the court for a quarter of a century.

• A violent antiforeign reaction swept the country, encouraged by the Qing court and led by a secret society that foreigners called the Boxers.

• The imperialist response was swift and harsh. After the Boxers besieged the embassy quarter in Beijing, foreign governments organized an international force of twenty thousand soldiers to rescue their diplomats and punish China.

• The years after this heavy defeat were ever more troubled.

• Anarchy and foreign influence spread as the power and prestige of the Qing Dynasty declined still further.

• The transformation of China under the impact of expanding Western society entered a new phase, and the end was not in sight.