After Tamerlane (18 page)

For all these reasons, the states of
ancien régime
Europe were politically ill-equipped to advance boldly towards the conquest of the extra-European world. With the significant exception of Russia, their aristocracies had little incentive to bear the burdens of territorial conquest. Yet it is sometimes argued that the competitive, pluralistic nature of the European states system, with its division into multiple states and antagonistic great powers, was a breeding ground for wars which spread inevitably to other parts of the world as well as prompting advances in military tactics and organization – so that Europeans acquired the motives and means to dominate the world almost despite themselves.

Ancien régime
Europe certainly spent heavily on its armies and navies, and their use in war accounted for some 54 per cent of public spending in the European monarchies during the eighteenth century.
⁴¹
European armies had grown rapidly in size after 1660.
⁴²
The French army peaked at some
400,000
men in the 1690s, and both Britain and the Netherlands (with far smaller populations) kept up armies of over
100,000
men during the War of the Spanish Succession (
1702–13
). Military organization also became increasingly professionalized, with the gradual introduction of common uniforms, drill and a regular officer corps.
⁴³
Frequent combat and the widespread use of foreigners as officers and ordinary soldiers encouraged the rapid dissemination of new techniques throughout Europe. But before the 1750s, and even after, there was little evidence that this precocious development of warlike skills conferred a significant advantage on Europeans in most other parts of the world. There were several reasons for this. European armies had evolved into highly specialized machines to fight
each other
– but not to fight military forces whose ‘strategic doctrine' was radically different. This was painfully apparent in the encounters between British troops and Native Americans in the 1750s.
⁴⁴
When British troops under General Braddock (more a veteran of the gaming table than of the battlefield) marched into the woods and fought a
battle near modern Pittsburgh, their close formation and brilliant uniforms (the secret of order and discipline in a European battle) turned into their death warrant. The wars of siege and manoeuvre characteristic of European conflicts could not be replicated elsewhere where geopolitical conditions were quite different – even if it had been possible to deploy the numbers required. European-style warfare had come to rely on an elaborate infrastructure of supply, and quickly ground to a halt where this was lacking. Even on the European continent, European armies performed poorly in marginal areas like Danubia
⁴⁵
or the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea.
⁴⁶
Not least significant were the terrifying effects of tropical disease, which destroyed European armies overseas more efficiently than any military resistance. When the British sent an expedition to capture Cartagena in the Spanish Caribbean in 1742, more than three-quarters of the troops were soon out of action. ‘A bilious fever… raged with such violence', wrote the naval surgeon turned writer Tobias Smollett, ‘that three-fourths of those it invaded died in a deplorable manner; the colour of their skins being, by the extreme putrefaction of the juices, changed into that of soot.'
⁴⁷
Even naval power was subject to some of the same limitations. Naval vessels were extremely expensive items of capital equipment whose value deteriorated rapidly in adverse conditions. Naval warfare too was dominated by caution and manoeuvre. The stakes were high: outright defeat might mean invasion or the destruction of the merchant fleet. Hence navies were usually kept close to home. Even the occasional foray to the Caribbean, where sailing conditions had been known since 1500, posed extreme risks from weather and infection, while fear of hurricanes or adverse wind conditions made it dangerous to linger on Indian coasts when the northern monsoon began in October.
⁴⁸
Of course, European warships usually enjoyed a significant advantage over their extra-European counterparts in armament, and sometimes in speed and handling. But they could rarely be deployed in force, and inland empires or land-based states elsewhere in Eurasia were largely immune to the naval harassment that played so large a part in European warfare.

All this limited the extent to which European conflicts could spill over into areas of the world that had not already been colonized. In practice, Europe's international politics were usually too introverted
to pose much of a threat to other parts of Eurasia. They were also compulsively unstable, since European diplomacy was dominated by two dynamic forces which reacted explosively with each other. The first was the struggle to maintain a rough equilibrium between the numerous and unequal members of the European states system.
⁴⁹
The second was the dynastic factor – an unpredictable mixture of dynastic ambition and the accidents of birth and personality. Disputed dynastic claims unleashed war on a massive scale between 1702 and 1713, lay behind the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden (1700–21) and provoked the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) when Frederick of Prussia seized Austrian Silesia. And, although the anarchy of dynastic politics was offset to some extent by the tendency of the dominant European powers to construct conservative diplomatic ‘systems' (a Spanish ‘system' until the 1680s, followed by a French one),
⁵⁰
any settled pattern was constantly threatened by events in the large zones of instability: the rickety Habsburg Empire; the frontier lands of South East Europe; anarchic Poland and the Baltic; and (in the later seventeenth century) the turbulent British islands. But the crucial fact of the equilibrium age was that no power in Europe was strong enough to dominate the others completely, or to embark upon a career of overseas conquest safe from the challenge of its European rivals.

The costs of this endemic instability, and the cockpit mentality it bred, were high. Whatever stimulus war may have given technically and commercially was likely to have been outweighed by its destructive effects, the waste of scarce resources, and the accentuation of economic uncertainty – in pre-modern conditions, already a huge barrier to investment and enterprise.
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European rivalries also worked to the advantage of extra-Europeans: the Native Americans of the trans-Appalachian interior; and most of all, perhaps, the Ottomans, who skilfully exploited European conflicts to protect their embattled imperial frontiers up until the 1760s. It was the urgent need to redeploy his army against Louis XIV that forced the Habsburg emperor to settle with the sultan in the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699. The technological and commercial expertise of the Occidentals was counterbalanced by the fact that their aggression and competitiveness were so largely turned in upon themselves.

These limits to European capacity and ambition are strikingly reflected in European thought and wider culture. A fundamental distinction was drawn by most contemporaries between Europe's relations with the Americas and those with Africa and Asia – the rest of the known world. America exerted a powerful fascination for the European imagination, even if one strand of scientific thought regarded this ‘new' continent as a harsh and hostile environment in which human physique displayed strong degenerative tendencies.
⁵²
What excited Europeans was the belief that they had both the right and the means to ‘make' or remake America in Europe's image, or even as an improved version of the old continent. This intellectual imperialism derived in part from the ease with which European rule had been established, and the completeness of the native collapse. But it was also founded upon a set of social and cultural assumptions famously expressed by John Locke. It was the Amerindians' failure to develop a system of property that Europeans could recognize, so Locke argued, that justified the Europeans' colonial land grab.
⁵³
But although Locke evidently regarded the Ottoman Empire as a hateful tyranny, and hoped for a revolt by the Christians it had conquered, he displayed no similar assurance that Europe had any title to the conquest and occupation of Africa and Asia – even if it had the means. In this, Locke, who was exceptionally widely read in the travel and geographical literature of his day,
⁵⁴
was probably reflecting the respectful tone of the most influential contemporary writing on the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal and Chinese empires. Rycaut, de Chavannes, Bernier and Du Halde described states and civilizations which Europeans might dislike or even despise; but they gave little warrant for thinking that European conquest was morally justified, let alone practically feasible. The Jesuits, who virtually monopolized sources of information about China, purveyed the image of a beneficent orderly regime presided over by scholar-administrators.
⁵⁵
Eighteenth-century critics held up Safavid Iran and Ch'ing China as a mirror to expose European bigotry, militarism and misgovernment. In
The Spirit of the Laws
(1748), Montesquieu, who had earlier expressed fashionable reservations about American colonization in his
Lettres persanes
(1721) – ‘empires were like the branches of a tree that sapped all the strength from the trunk'
⁵⁶
– portrayed China as an
efficient, powerful despotism where religion and the social order were far too closely integrated for any outside influence (including Christianity) to penetrate successfully.
⁵⁷
Indeed, much of Montesquieu's argument embodied the influential view that topography and climate had a decisive impact on the social and political order – a doctrine that implicitly stressed the danger and artificiality of European intrusion into the non-European world. ‘Those who are established there [America]', he thought, ‘cannot conform to the manner of living in a climate so different from their own; they are obliged to draw from the mother-country all the conveniences of life.'
⁵⁸
Others put it more simply. ‘Villainy is inherent in this climate,' wrote a British naval officer in Jamaica in 1731.
⁵⁹
Meanwhile, the optimistic belief of the early Renaissance in the possibility of a universal Christian culture had long since been replaced by an emphasis on the entrenched diversity of religions and civilizations.
⁶⁰

INLAND IMPERIALISM:FROM MUSCOVY TO RUSSIA

Thus the main achievement of West Europeans in this period was the fuller development of their Euro-American maritime economy. But European expansion had two faces: towards the sea and towards the land. Between the 1620s and the 1740s, the most dynamic overland expansion by Europeans lay along the frontiers of Russia.

Russia's part in the overall history of European expansion has always been controversial. To Russian historians of the later nineteenth century, like Solov'ev or Kliuchevskii, the whole history of Russia was bound up with its colonizing endeavour and its heroic transformation into a great imperial state equal to the greatest powers of Central or Western Europe. To many West European observers, on the other hand, Russia often seemed a semi-barbaric ‘Asiatic' state, where a thin veneer of ‘Westernization' barely concealed the oriental roots of tsarist autocracy and completely failed to hide the backwardness of rural life.
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In more recent times Russia has been assigned an ambiguous role in the project of European world domination. One influential account of the origins of the ‘modern world system' argued
that, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia was transformed from an autonomous economic zone into part of the ‘semi-periphery' of European capitalism: the collaborator, instrument and victim of the drive for domination by the European ‘core', and eventually (after 1917) a rebel against it.
⁶²
Calling Russia a ‘semi-periphery power' usefully highlights its very partial economic and social transformation along Western lines, its persistent sense of difference, and the endemic struggle between ‘Westernizers' and ‘modernizers' in one camp and the ‘Old Believers', Slavophiles and
narodniks
(populists) who at various times denounced Russia's subordination to an alien (Western) culture. But it is also deeply misleading. However partial its ‘modernization', Russia was – perhaps after 1700, certainly after 1762–always one of the five or six great powers of Europe who made up the quarrelsome management committee of the continent's affairs. It became, after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia, and a colossal colonialist. Its official culture proclaimed a sense of the imperial civilizing mission that was just as strong as anything found in Britain or France – where there were also dissident movements that rejected the aggressive expansionist message of imperialist modernity. Above all, there can be no doubt that imperial Russia played a crucial role alongside the Western maritime states in securing the European domination of Eurasia in the nineteenth century: helping to encircle the Islamic realm, sapping the political fabric of the main Islamic states, and assisting in the demolition of the old China-centred world order in East Asia. As the terrestrial vanguard of European expansion in Asia, Russia's part in creating the ‘modern world system' in place by 1900 was second to none.

There is a further reason to resist a view of world history that relegates Russia to a secondary role as part agent, part victim of a capitalist juggernaut masterminded in the capitals of the European ‘core'. Europe – even ‘political Europe', as opposed to the ‘geographical Europe' that would have to include the Ottoman Balkans – cannot be reduced at any period to a hierarchy of capitalist ‘top powers' and their dependent ‘peripheries' and ‘semi-peripheries'. Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation' of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology
and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units and the amalgamation or disappearance of others. The result was a pattern of markedly differentiated states whose competition and conflicts were driven not simply by the urge to be the ‘top power' or to dominate the ‘core', but by the periodic (perhaps endemic) incompatibility of their dynastic, religious, strategic and territorial, as well as commercial, interests. This diversity repeatedly proved too deeply entrenched to be forced into continental homogeneity – even by the genius of Napoleon. Time and again it was a powerful check upon Europe's collective impact in the extra-European world. Ultimately, perhaps, the most persistent strand of intra-European conflict to affect the extra-European world was that between the great landward imperialist and its seaborne rivals. Thus Russia not only shaped European domination of Eurasia, but also subverted Europe's would-be world supremacy at crucial moments and in crucial ways.