Ch 19 Empires in Collision: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia (1800-1900)

Empires in Collision: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia (1800-1900)

Introduction

The Opium War of 1840 marked the beginning of China's "century of humiliation" due to Britain's intrusion to sell opium.
Memories of the Opium War remain a central element of China's "patriotic education."
Several countries confronted an aggressive, industrializing West while maintaining formal independence: China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia (Iran), Ethiopia, and Siam (Thailand).
These states retained some ability to resist European aggression.
These countries dealt with the European moment in world history through:
- Facing the military might and political ambitions of rival European states.
- Becoming enmeshed in networks of trade, investment, and sometimes migration.
- Being touched by aspects of European culture (language, conversion to Christianity, literature, and philosophy).
- Engaging with the culture of modernity (scientific rationalism, technological achievements, nationalism, socialism, feminism, and individualism).
These societies resisted, accommodated, and adapted what came from the West.
This chapter focuses on China, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan.

Reversal of Fortune: China's Century of Crisis

In 1793, Emperor Qianlong rejected British requests for a less restricted trading relationship with China.
By 1912, the long-established imperial state of China had collapsed.
China was transformed from a central presence in the global economy to a weak and dependent participant in a European-dominated world system.

The Crisis Within

China's robust economy and American food crops enabled substantial population growth: from 100 million in 1685 to 430 million in 1853.
Agricultural production couldn't keep up and China's internal expansion didn't generate wealth like Europe's overseas empires.
The result was pressure on the land, smaller farms, unemployment, impoverishment, misery, and starvation.
China's centralized and bureaucratic state was unable to effectively perform its functions (tax collection, flood control, social welfare, and public security).
The central state lost power to provincial officials and local gentry.
Corruption was endemic among officials, and harsh treatment of peasants was common.
European military pressure and economic penetration disrupted internal trade routes, created unemployment, and raised peasant taxes.
This combination led to bandit gangs and peasant rebellion.
Rebellions drew on peasant grievances and opposition to the Qing dynasty (Manchu origins).

The Taiping Uprising (1850-1864)

Leaders rejected Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, finding ideology in a form of Christianity.
Hong Xiuquan proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus, sent to cleanse the world and establish a "heavenly kingdom of great peace."
They called for the abolition of private property, radical redistribution of land, the end of prostitution and opium smoking, and sexually segregated military camps.
Hong denounced the Qing dynasty as foreigners who had "poisoned China" and "defiled the emperor's throne."
Hong Rengan developed plans for transforming China into an industrial nation.
The uprising challenged gender roles, with Hakka women (whose feet had never been bound) fighting as soldiers.
The Taiping land reform program promised women and men equal shares of land.
Women were permitted to sit for civil service examinations and were appointed to supervisory positions.
Mutual attraction rather than family interests was promoted as a basis for marriage.
The movement's leadership demonstrated considerable ambivalence about equality for women.
Taiping forces established their capital in Nanjing in 1853.
Divisions and indecisiveness within the Taiping leadership provided an opening for Qing dynasty loyalists to rally and crush the rebellion by 1864.
Western military support for pro-Qing forces contributed to their victory.
Provincial military leaders crushed the rebel forces.
The Qing dynasty was saved but also weakened.
The intense conservatism of imperial authorities postponed any resolution of China's peasant problem.
The devastation caused by the civil war disrupted and weakened China's economy.
Estimates of the number of lives lost range from 20 to 30 million.
China's internal crisis provided an unfavorable setting for its encounter with a Europe invigorated by the Industrial Revolution.

Western Pressures

The shifting balance of global power became evident in China's changing relationship with Europe, registered in the Opium Wars.
The British used opium, grown and processed in India, to cover their trade imbalance with China.
By the 1830s, British, American, and other Western merchants had found a profitable market for this addictive drug.
From 1,000 chests in 1773, China's opium imports exploded to more than 23,000 chests in 1832.
Chinese authorities recognized a mounting problem at many levels:
- Opium importation was illegal, thus flouting Chinese law.
- Officials were corrupted.
- A massive outflow of silver to pay for the opium reversed China's centuries-long ability to attract much of the world's silver supply.
- China found itself with millions of addicts.
In 1836, the emperor decided on suppression.
Commissioner Lin Zexu led the campaign against opium use as a kind of "drug czar."
The British sent a large naval expedition to China, determined to end the restrictive conditions under which they had long traded with that country.
The First Opium War resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which imposed restrictions on Chinese sovereignty and opened five ports to European traders.
To the Chinese, that agreement represented the first of the "unequal treaties."
Britain's victory in the Second Opium War (1856-1858) was accompanied by the vandalizing of the emperor's Summer Palace outside Beijing and resulted in further humiliations.
Still more ports were opened to foreign traders.
Foreigners were allowed to travel freely and buy land in China, to preach Christianity, and to patrol some of China's rivers.
The Chinese were forbidden to use the character for "barbarians."
Following military defeats at the hands of the French (1885) and Japanese (1895), China lost control of Vietnam, Korea, and Taiwan.
By the end of the century, the Western nations plus Japan and Russia had carved out spheres of influence within China.
Many Chinese believed that their country was being "carved up like a melon."
China had been reduced to dependency on Western powers as it became part of a European-based "informal empire."
China was no longer the center of civilization but one weak and dependent nation among many others.
The Qing dynasty remained in power but in a weakened condition.
Restrictions imposed by the unequal treaties inhibited China's industrialization.
Chinese businessmen mostly served foreign firms.

Lin Zexu: Confronting the Opium Trade

In 1838, Lin Zexu was sent to Canton to enforce the policy against opium.
Lin undertook his task with moral appeals, reasoned argument, political pressure, and coercion.
Lin emphasized the health hazards of the drug and demanded that people turn in their supplies of opium and the pipes used to smoke it.
By mid-1839, he had confiscated some 50,000 pounds of the drug together with over 70,000 pipes and arrested some 1,700 dealers.
Lin applied a similar mix of methods to the foreign suppliers of opium.
A moralistic appeal to Queen Victoria argued that the articles the English imported from China were all beneficial.
He demanded that foreign traders hand over their opium, and without compensation.
After six weeks of negotiations, the Europeans capitulated, turning over some 3 million pounds of raw opium to Lin Zexu.
Lin offered a sacrifice to the Sea Spirit, apologizing for introducing this poison into its domain.

The Failure of Conservative Modernization

Chinese authorities implemented "self-strengthening" policies during the 1860s and 1870s to reinvigorate China while cautiously borrowing from the West.
An overhauled examination system sought the "good men" who could cope with reconstruction after the Taiping rebellion.
Support for landlords and the repair of dikes and irrigation helped restore rural social and economic order.
A few industrial factories were established, coal mines were expanded, and a telegraph system was initiated.
A number of modern arsenals, shipyards, and foreign-language schools sought to remedy this deficiency.
"Self-strengthening" was inhibited by the fears of conservative leaders that urban, industrial, or commercial development would erode the power and privileges of the landlord class.
The new industries remained largely dependent on foreigners for machinery, materials, and expertise.
They served to strengthen local authorities rather than the central Chinese state.
The general failure of "self-strengthening" became apparent during the Boxer Uprising (1898-1901).
The Boxers killed numerous Europeans and Chinese Christians and laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing.
Western powers and Japan occupied Beijing to crush the rebellion and imposed a huge payment on China.
Growing numbers of educated Chinese became disillusioned with the Qing dynasty.
They admired Western science, technology, and political practices.
They believed that only a truly unified nation could save China from foreign imperialists.
Traditional gender roles became yet another focus of opposition.
Chinese nationalism was directed against Western imperialists, the foreign Qing dynasty, and aspects of China's traditional culture.
A flurry of progressive imperial edicts in 1898, known as the Hundred Days of Reform, was soon squelched by conservative forces.
More extensive reform in the early twentieth century, including the end of the old examination system and the promise of a national parliament, was too little too late.
In 1912, the last Chinese emperor abdicated as the ancient imperial order collapsed.

The Ottoman Empire and the West in the Nineteenth Century

Like China, the Islamic world represented a civilization that felt little need to learn from the West until it collided with an expanding Europe in the nineteenth century.
The Ottoman Empire had long governed substantial parts of the Balkans and had posed a military and religious threat to Europe.
Neither the Ottoman Empire nor China fell under direct colonial rule.
Both were much diminished, launched efforts at "defensive modernization," and saw some people hold tightly to old identities and values while others embraced new loyalties associated with nationalism and modernity.

"The Sick Man of Europe"

In 1750, the Ottoman Empire was still the central political fixture of a widespread Islamic world.
By the middle, and certainly by the end, of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was no longer able to deal with Europe from a position of equality.
It was now known as "the sick man of Europe."
The Ottoman Empire was unable to prevent region after region from falling under the control of Christian powers.
The Ottoman Empire's own domains shrank at the hands of Russian, British, Austrian, and French aggression.
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 was a stunning blow.
Beyond territorial losses to stronger European powers, other parts of the empire, such as Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, achieved independence.
The inability of Europe's Great Powers to agree on how to divide it up helped to maintain the continued independence of the core region of the Ottoman Empire.
The central Ottoman state was weakened, particularly in its ability to raise necessary revenue.
The Janissaries lost their military edge, becoming a conservative force within the empire.
The technological and military gap with the West was growing.
As Europeans achieved direct oceanic access to the treasures of Asia, the importance of the Ottoman and Arab lands in Afro-Eurasian commerce diminished.
Competition from cheap European manufactured goods hit Ottoman artisans hard.
Agreements known as capitulations between European countries and the Ottoman Empire granted Westerners various exemptions from Ottoman law and taxation.
The Ottoman Empire came to rely on foreign loans to finance its efforts at economic development.
By 1881, its inability to pay the interest on those debts led to foreign control of much of its revenue-generating system.

Reform and Its Opponents

Ottoman leaders mounted increasingly ambitious programs of "defensive modernization."
Nationalist revolts on the empire's periphery represented the primary internal crisis.
Ottoman reforms began in the late eighteenth century when Sultan Selim III sought to reorganize and update the army, drawing on European advisers and techniques.
Opposition to his measures was so strong that Selim was overthrown in 1807 and then murdered.
Subsequent sultans crushed the Janissaries and brought the ulama more thoroughly under state control.
The Tanzimat (reorganization) took shape after 1839 as the Ottoman leadership sought to provide the economic, social, and legal underpinnings for a strong and newly recentralized state.
Factories producing cloth, paper, and armaments; modern mining operations; reclamation and resettlement of agricultural land; telegraphs, steamships, railroads, and a modern postal service were created.
Western-style law codes and courts were set up.
New elementary and secondary schools were established.
Non-Muslims were given equal rights under the law.
A mounting tide of secular legislation and secular schools competed with traditional Islamic institutions.
While the Tanzimat-era reforms did not directly address gender issues, they did stimulate modest educational openings for women
Reform-minded individuals generally favored greater opportunities for women as a means of strengthening the state.
What was the Ottoman Empire, and who were its people? Were they Ottoman subjects of a dynastic state, Turkish citizens of a national state, or Muslim believers in a religiously defined state?
The Ottoman Empire was an inclusive state, all of whose people were loyal to the dynasty that ruled it.
This was the outlook of a new class spawned by the reform process itself-lower-level officials, military officers, writers, poets, and journalists, many of whom had a modern Western-style education.
Dubbed the Young Ottomans, they sought major changes in the Ottoman political system itself
They favored a more European-style parliamentary and constitutional regime that could curtail the absolute power of the sultan.
Islamic modernism argued that Muslim societies needed to embrace Western technical and scientific knowledge while rejecting its materialism.
In 1876, Sultan Abd al-Hamid II accepted a constitution and an elected parliament but soon suspended the reforms and reverted to an older style of despotic rule.
Opposition to this revived despotism surfaced among both military and civilian elites known as the Young Turks.
Largely abandoning any reference to Islam, they advocated a militantly secular public life, were committed to thorough modernization along European lines, and increasingly thought about the Ottoman Empire as a Turkish national state.
A military coup in 1908 finally allowed the Young Turks to exercise real power.
They pushed for a radical secularization of schools, courts, and law codes.
They opened modern schools for women, including access to Istanbul University.
The nationalist Turkish conception of Ottoman identity antagonized non-Turkic peoples.
Nationalist sentiments contributed to the complete disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, but the secularizing and westernizing principles of the Young Turks informed the policies of the Turkish republic that replaced it.

Outcomes: Comparing China and the Ottoman Empire

By the beginning of the twentieth century, both China and the Ottoman Empire had experienced the consequences of a rapidly shifting balance of global power.
Now they were "semi-colonies," within the "informal empires" of Europe.
Neither was able to create the industrial economies or strong states required to fend off European intrusion and restore their former status in the world.
China and the Ottoman Empire gave rise to new nationalist conceptions of society.
In the early twentieth century, that future witnessed the end of both the Chinese and Ottoman empires.
In China, the collapse of the imperial system in 1912 was followed by a vast revolutionary upheaval that by 1949 led to a communist regime.
By contrast, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I led to the creation of the new but much smaller nation-state of Turkey.
China's twentieth-century revolutionaries rejected traditional Confucian culture more thoroughly than the secularizing leaders of modern Turkey rejected Islam.
Almost everywhere in the Islamic world, including Turkey, traditional religion retained its hold on the private loyalties of most people.

1896: The Battle of Adowa

On March 1, 1896, Ethiopian forces defeated Italian forces near the town of Adowa in northern Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, like China, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and Thailand, was among the countries that retained their independence in an era of rampant European empire building.
Ethiopia's mountainous highlands made external invasion difficult.
Its long tradition of independent statehood and a common Christian culture provided a strong sense of identity alongside the ethnic diversity of its population.
Emperor Menelik actively took advantage of European rivalries to pursue agreements with and to buy arms from Russia, France, Germany, Britain, and Italy. To do so, he was willing to cede some territory in Northern Ethiopia and to acknowledge Italian control of Eritrea, in exchange for financial assistance and military support.
Menelik's diplomacy and military strategy proved effective.
In early 1895, Italian forces moved into Ethiopian territory, and he prepared for war.
Troops assembled, and in October 1895 a huge force began a five-month march from the capital of Addis Ababa to Adowa, where the decisive battle took place.
That victory placed Ethiopia, uniquely, in the category of countries that RETAINED their independence in an era of rampant European empire building.
For Italy, it was a national humiliation.
For Ethiopia itself, Adowa had an immense significance that bears comparison with the experience of Japan.
Both Japan and Ethiopia became beacons of hope and inspiration to societies that had fallen under colonial rule.
Furthermore, both nations went on to construct empires of their own.
Menelik expanded Ethiopian control to the south and east, doubling the territorial size of his country.
Ethiopia came to symbolize African bravery and resistance to white oppression.

The Japanese Difference: The Rise of a New East Asian Power

Like China and the Ottoman Empire, Japan confronted the aggressive power of the West during the nineteenth century, most notably in the form of U.S. commodore Matthew Perry's "black ships," which steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forcefully demanded that this reclusive nation open up to more "normal" relations with the world.
The outcome of that encounter differed sharply from the others.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan undertook a radical transformation of its society-a "revolution from above," turning it into a powerful, modern, united, industrialized nation.
Far from succumbing to Western domination, Japan joined the club of imperialist countries by creating its own East Asian empire, at the expense of China and Korea.
In building a society that was both modern and distinctly Japanese, Japan demonstrated that modernity was not a uniquely European phenomenon.

The Tokugawa Background

For 250 years prior to Perry's arrival, Japan had been governed by a shogun (a military ruler) from the Tokugawa family who acted in the name of a revered but powerless emperor.
The chief task of this Tokugawa shogunate was to prevent the return of civil war among some 260 rival feudal lords, known as daimyo, each of whom had a cadre of armed retainers, the famed samurai warriors of Japanese tradition.
Successive shoguns gave Japan more than two centuries of internal peace (1600-1850).
To control the daimyo, they required these local authorities to create second homes in Edo (Tokyo), where they had to live during alternate years.
Families stayed behind, almost as hostages.
The daimyo retained substantial autonomy in their own domains and behaved in some ways like independent states with separate military forces, law codes, tax systems, and currencies.
With no national army, no uniform currency, and little central authority at the local level, Tokugawa Japan was "pacified. . . brrt not really unified."
The Tokugawa regime issued highly detailed rules governing the occupation, residence, dress, hairstyles, and behavior of the four hierarchically ranked status groups into which Japanese society was divided-samurai at the top, then peasants, artisans, and, at the bottom, merchants.
The samurai evolved into a salaried bureaucratic or administrative class amounting to 5 to 6 percent of the total population.
Centuries of peace contributed to economic growth, commercialization, and urban development.
Entrepreneurial peasants grew more rice than ever before and engaged in rural manufacturing enterprises as well.
By 1750, Japan had become perhaps the world's most urbanized country.
Well-functioning networks of exchange linked urban and rural areas, marking Japan as an emerging market economy.
The influence of Confucianism encouraged education and generated a remarkably literate population, with about 40 percent of men and 15 percent of women able to read and write.
Such changes undermined the shogunate's efforts to freeze Japanese society in the interests of stability.
Some samurai found the lowly but profitable path of commerce too much to resist.
Many merchants prospered in the new commercial environment and supported a vibrant urban culture.
Many daimyo found it necessary to seek loans from these social inferiors.
Despite prohibitions to the contrary, many peasants moved to the cities, becoming artisans or merchants and imitating the ways of their social betters.
Corruption was widespread.
The shogunate's failure to deal successfully with a severe famine in the 1830s eroded confidence in its effectiveness.
A mounting wave of local peasant uprisings and urban riots expressed the many grievances of the poor.

American Intrusion and the Meiji Restoration

Since the expulsion of European missionaries and the harsh suppression of Christianity in the early seventeenth century, Japan had deliberately limited its contact with the West to a single port, where only the Dutch were allowed to trade.
The United States forced the issue, sending Commodore Perry in 1853 to demand humane treatment for castaways, the right of American vessels to refuel and buy provisions, and the opening of ports for trade.
Japan agreed to a series of unequal treaties with various Western powers.
That humiliating capitulation eroded support for the shogunate, triggered a brief civil war, and by 1868 led to a political takeover by a group of young samurai from southern Japan.
This decisive turning point in Japan's history was known as the Meiji (MAY-jee) Restoration, for the country's new rulers claimed that they were restoring to power the young emperor, whose throne name was Meiji, or Enlightened Rule.
The patriotic young men who led the takeover sought to save Japan from foreign domination not by futile resistance, but by a thorough transformation of Japanese society drawing on all that the modern West had to offer.
Japan now had a government committed to a decisive break with the past.
The defeat of the Taiping uprising had deprived China of any such opportunity for a fresh start.
Japan was of less interest to Western powers than either China or the Ottoman Empire.

Modernization Japanese-Style

Japanese modernizing efforts were defensive, based on fears that Japanese independence was in grave danger.
Those reforms were revolutionary in their cumulative effect, transforming Japan far more thoroughly than even the most radical of the Ottoman efforts, let alone the limited "self-strengthening" policies of the Chinese.
The first task was genuine national unity, which required an attack on the power and privileges of both the daimyo and the samurai.
The new regime ended the semi-independent domains of the daimyo, replacing them with governors appointed by and responsible to the national government.
The central state, not the local authorities, now collected the nation's taxes and raised a national army based on conscription from all social classes.
The samurai relinquished their ancient role as the country's warrior class and with it their cherished right to carry swords.
The old Confucian-based social order with its special privileges for various classes was largely dismantled, and almost all Japanese became legally equal as commoners and as subjects of the emperor.
Limitations on travel and trade likewise fell as a nationwide economy came to parallel the centralized state.
There was widespread and eager fascination with almost everything Western.
Knowledge about the West--its science and technology; its various political and constitutional arrangements; its legal and educational systems; its dances, clothing, and hairstyles-was enthusiastically sought out.
"Civilization and Enlightenment" was the slogan of the time, and both were to be found in the West.
Japan proceeded to borrow more selectively and to combine foreign and Japanese elements in distinctive ways.
The Constitution of 1889, drawing heavily on German experience, introduced an elected parliament, political parties, and democratic ideals, but that constitution was presented as a gift from a sacred emperor descended from the sun goddess.
Likewise, a modern educational system, which achieved universal primary schooling by the early twentieth century, was laced with Confucian-based moral instruction and exhortations of loyalty to the emperor.
Christianity made little headway in Meiji Japan, but Shinto, an ancient religious tradition featuring ancestors and nature spirits, was elevated to the status of an official state cult.
Like their counterparts in China and the Ottoman Empire, some reformers in Japan argued that the oppression of women was an obstacle to the country's modernization and that family reform was essential to gaining the respect of the West.
Although the new Japanese government included girls in their plans for universal education, it was with a gender-specific curriculum and in schools segregated by sex.
Any thought of women playing a role in public life was harshly suppressed.
At the core of Japan's effort at defensive modernization lay its state-guided industrialization program.
The government itself established a number of enterprises, later selling many of them to private investors.
It also acted to create a modern infrastructure by building railroads, creating a postal system, and establishing a national currency and banking system.
By the early twentieth century, Japan's industrialization, organized around a number of large firms called zaihatsu, was well under way.

Japan and the World

By the early twentieth century, Japan's economic growth, openness to trade, and embrace of "civilization and enlightenment" from the West persuaded the Western powers to revise the unequal treaties in Japan's favor.
The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 now acknowledged Japan as an equal player among the Great Powers of the world.
Not only did Japan escape from its semi-colonial entanglements with the West, but it also launched its own empire-building enterprise.
Successful wars against China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905) established Japan as a formidable military competitor in East Asia and the first Asian state to defeat a major European power.
Japan gained colonial control of Taiwan and Korea and a territorial foothold in Manchuria.
The rise of Japan generated widespread admiration among those who saw Japan as a model for their own modern development and perhaps as an ally in the struggle against imperialism.

Reflections: Success and Failure in History

If the measure of success is national wealth and power, then the Industrial Revolution surely counts as a great accomplishment.
But if preservation of the environment, spiritual growth, and the face-to-face relationships of village life are more highly valued, then industrialization, as Gandhi argued, might be more reasonably considered a disaster.
British artisans who lost their livelihood to industrial machines as well as Japanese women textile workers who suffered through the early stages of industrialization might be forgiven for not appreciating the "success" of their countries' transformation, even if their middle-class counterparts and subsequent generations benefited.
Success is frequently associated with good judgment and wise choices, yet actors in the historical drama are never completely free in making their decisions, and none, of course, have the benefit of hindsight, which historians enjoy.

Chapter Review

What's the Significance?

Taiping Uprising, 836-38
Opium Wars, 838-40
Commissioner Lin, 839-41
unequal treaties, 839-41
self-strengthening movement, 842-44
Boxer Uprising, 843
Chinese revolution of 1911-1912, 844
"the sick man of Europe," 844-46
Tanzimat, 847
Young Ottomans, 848
Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, 848-49
Young Turks, 849
informal empires, 849
Battle of Adowa, 850-51
Tokugawa Japan, 852-54
Meiji Restoration, 855
Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, 859

Working with Evidence: Changing China

Source 19.1 Toward a Constitutional Monarchy

Key Points:
*Kang Youwei advocates for reform through a constitutional monarchy, drawing inspiration from Confucianism and the examples of Peter the Great of Russia and the Meiji Restoration of Japan.

Source 19.2 Education and Examination

Key Points:
*Criticism of the traditional Chinese examination system for being impractical and disconnected from the country's modern needs.
*Emphasis on the importance of practical, useful studies and aligning education with the necessities of the times.

Source 19.3 Gender, Reform, and Revolution

Key Points:
*Calls out the difficulties faced by Chinese women, emphasizing inequality and mistreatment.
*Advocates for self-reliance, education, rejection of footbinding, and active involvement in society.

Source 19.4 Prescriptions for a Revolutionary China

Key Points:
*Sun Yat-sen outlines his vision for a revolutionary China based on the Three People's Principles: nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood.