After Tamerlane (36 page)

Ideologically, of course, America had certain peculiarities. Its constitution had been framed before the great upheavals of 1789–1815 that marked European liberalism so indelibly. The notorious American suspicion of executive power owed more to the ‘country party' tradition of eighteenth-century Britain than to the liberalism of Constant. In European eyes, the United States, with its colossal scale (even before the huge increase of territory brought by the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War of 1846–8) and extreme decentralization, was hardly a state at all. It had no foreign policy, no army or navy worth the name (between 1815 and the civil war), and virtually no government. The British, who had kept control of nearly half of North America after 1783, feared not so much a deliberate assault on their possessions as a filibuster by a frontier warlord that the president of the day would be too feeble to prevent. Europeans were also puzzled and alarmed by American populism – the very wide suffrage (for white men) and the universal tendency towards elective office, even for legal or judicial officials. The English radical Edward Gibbon Wakefield condemned the rootless mobility of American society, its lack of any sense of place, tradition or history, and most of all the vulgarization that was inevitable (he thought) without a leisured and
educated elite to set the tone. ‘I saw a people without monuments, without history, without local attachments… without any love of birthplace, without patriotism…'
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Alexis de Tocqueville, who had visited the country in the 1830s, admired the astonishing vigour of American self-government, but doubted whether its populism was ultimately compatible with intellectual independence.
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But the most paradoxical feature of the American democracy was its tolerance of black slavery. This was a major source of Anglo-American tension before 1863 (when slavery was abolished). It fuelled the suspicion across the Atlantic that American populism was a coarse and degraded version of European liberalism: violent, racist and unstable. The American West, remarked the English historian T. B. Macaulay, was like the wilder parts of seventeenth-century Britain, where justice was administered with the gun and the knife.

Of course the shortcomings of populism were widely noted by Americans too. ‘Whig' politicians denounced ‘Jacksonianism' for its reckless expansionism, its disregard of treaties with Native Americans, its crude agrarianism, and its antagonism to the commercial and financial establishment of the Old Northeast.
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In the 1850s the rise of abolitionism and the competition between slave and free states for control of the West (a struggle whose flashpoint was in Kansas) created a new popular ideology of ‘free soil' and ‘free labour'. On the eve of the civil war, the ‘republican' coalition forged by Abraham Lincoln united the Northeast and Midwest sections against the South and destroyed the remnants of Jacksonianism. With the victory of the North in 1865, American politics no longer diverged quite so vividly from European models of the liberal state. The crushing of the slave South confirmed the pre-eminence of the Old Northeast, the heartland of industrial and financial America, and its huge port city of New York. The rise of the Wall Street banks and the concentration of financial power in trusts and cartels created a new class of tycoons wielding enormous political and social influence. Plutocracy – aristocracy's parvenu cousin – had arrived. In the ‘Gilded Age' after 1865, the corruption of American politics became legendary. ‘We have', said Mark Twain with his tongue in his cheek, ‘the most expensive legislators in the world.' At the same time the scale of industrial employment, the rapid growth of large cities, the emergence of a
recognizable working class and the imminent end of the old frontier of ‘free' land – hitherto the safety valve (in theory) of the social tensions of the industrial East – drove home the point that, while America was still different from Europe – freer, richer, safer – it faced political and social issues that were comparable if not similar. An echo of this can be seen in the gradual change of American attitudes towards the imperial expansion of the European states. American ‘anti-imperialism' was rooted in the universal hostility of settler communities towards imperial authority and the fear of exploitation by merchants, bankers, shipowners and suppliers in the metropole. Until the 1860s, it was supercharged by Southern resentment at British anti-slavery and by the fierce competition between the Old Northeast and Britain for commercial and financial predominance on the American continent. But by the 1880s the Old Northeast had won that struggle, and its elites were cultivating imperial attitudes and a social ethos much more in sympathy with their counterparts in Britain. The ground was being prepared for the ‘great rapprochement'.

It would be reckless to deny that wide differences separated the political attitudes of Americans and Russians, British and French, Germans and Italians in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880. But these differences must be kept in perspective. For all the variations that sprang from local tradition and separate histories, the striking feature of the period is the steady convergence of all parts of Greater Europe towards a kind of ‘generic liberalism'. The benefits were huge. After 1815, nineteenth-century Europe escaped the violent religious controversies that had torn it apart in the seventeenth century, the grandiose dynastic visions so productive of conflict in the eighteenth, and the genocidal ideological warfare that was its terrible fate in the twentieth. Ideological convergence – hesitant, partial, grudging – allowed the countries of Greater Europe – a ‘proto-West' that extended by the 1860s across the northern half of the globe – to contrast their lot with that of the rest of Eurasia and the Outer World. It vindicated their sense of progress and dynamism – on which generic liberalism laid such stress – and heightened the difference with the ‘stationary states' of Asia. Vitally, it equipped all the numerous communities of an expansionist Greater Europe with a ‘road map' that could be applied
almost universally to interpret, organize and justify their relations with non-European peoples. The ‘civilizing mission' (not the mission to convert the heathen) was a liberal doctrine that appealed (in however crude a form) as much to imperial officials in Russia as it did to the frontiersmen of the American West. Unlike previous ideologies espoused by European expansionists – crusading imperialism, mercantilism, dynastic absolutism – generic liberalism proved remarkably attractive to some at least of the colonized. Its values were, or seemed, universal: they appealed to Indian, Chinese, African and Arab elites almost as much as to Europeans. Here was an astonishing and unprecedented third dimension to the expansive powers of the Europeans. It endowed them (that is, the more skilful practitioners of ideological politics) with a flexible new weapon in the search for allies in the non-Western world. It helped to prise open societies closed to all their other threats and blandishments. It was – or later seemed to its embittered foes – the Trojan Horse of European imperialism.

Much can be said for the view that in the middle years of the nineteenth century the most powerful force for change across the world was the ability of Europeans to penetrate the economies of Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific far more deeply than ever before. The drive to exchange more, to seek out new markets, to find ‘new' products and commodities, and to draw the commerce of the world into one vast network centred on the great port cities of the West – London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Marseilles and New York – was the main dynamic behind the gradual formation between the 1860s and the 1880s of a ‘world economy' – a single system of global trade. This was an era of steadily rising prices after the depression of the 1840s until the major slowdown in the mid-1870s, and of rising demand for raw materials. Of course, vast areas of the world remained outside the pull of international commerce because they were too inaccessible, too poor, or too insulated by political or religious controls from external contact. The hallmark of the ‘world economy' was not the ubiquity of international trade but the way in which older regional
systems of exchange, regional systems of pricing and credit, and regional hierarchies of mercantile power (like that which gave such wealth and power to Arab traders on the East African coast) were being broken down. It was no longer just a matter of luxury goods. By 1880 the cost of basic commodities (like food grains) was set by their price on the world market.
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The supply of credit and commercial investment reflected the level of international, not merely local, demand – a change that could be seen in the spread of Western-style commercial banks to parts of Asia and Latin America. Western-based shippers, merchants, bankers and insurers were tending to displace, or subordinate, local mercantile elites in international trade.
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General peace and a significant degree of ideological convergence were vital elements in the ability of the emergent West to assert its economic dominance and to fashion a world economy to meet its needs. But the third crucial factor was the progress towards economic integration between the Western countries themselves. Without it there could scarcely have been the huge increase in the volume and value of international trade. The volume of trade grew by twenty-five times between 1820 and 1913, with the fastest rate of growth between 1840 and 1870. The wider integration of international markets was largely possible because of the extent to which the West itself had become a single economic space.
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The reasoning behind this claim will be explored in a moment. But first we should notice that, even in a period of astonishingly rapid growth in world trade, it was the volume of trade between Western countries that was the outstanding feature of the international scene. In 1876–80, Europe and North America supplied 76 per cent of the exports and took 77 per cent of the imports circulating in international trade.
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Britain was much the largest trading nation in the nineteenth century. In 1850, 1860 and 1880 over 60 per cent of British trade was conducted with continental Europe and North America, leaving the remainder to be divided between Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific.
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Britain's trade with the United States alone was larger by a fifth than its trade with the whole of Asia: in 1880 its imports from the United States had a value equal to the whole of British trade with Asia.
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Nor is this pattern surprising. It can partly be explained by proximity: it would have been strange if the British had not traded
more with their nearer neighbours. Yet Britain traded more with the United States, 3000 miles away by sea, than with France, Belgium and the Netherlands combined, though they were comparable in population and commercial development. What promoted trade and shaped the pattern of commercial relations was specialization. Maximizing production in the most profitable sectors was the engine of wealth, but it required a high degree of mutual dependence between trading partners. The active agent in making specialization possible was the speed, reliability and cheapness of communications. It was here that the countries of Greater Europe built up a decisive advantage over the rest of Eurasia and the Outer World.

The rapid spread of the telegraph (carrying commercial information, especially prices) and the steamship (at first mainly for mail and passengers) helped to unify the whole vast region from the Mississippi to the Urals from the 1830s and '40s onward. With the telegraph came the rise of press agencies: Havas (based in Paris) from 1835; Associated Press in New York from 1848; and Reuters in London from 1851.
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But the most powerful agent of economic connection was undoubtedly the railway. As railways became more efficient, they galvanized the zones they entered. They could drive down the cost of inland transport (where no waterway existed) by up to 80 per cent. Regions where self-sufficiency had been the rule, because bulk transport by road consumed all profit after twenty miles or so, could now send their produce to far more distant markets. Dependence and specialization (the Siamese twins of economic growth) became feasible. Railway mileage is thus a revealing index of economic integration and its benefits. Here the contrast between the West and Afro-Asia becomes overwhelming. In 1850, when Western countries had
24,000
miles of line, Asia, Africa and Latin America combined had scarcely 250.
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In 1860 the figure was
65,000
miles to 1,800. Even in 1880, when railway-building was well under way in British-ruled India, the Western countries still had (at
210,000
miles) ten times as much line as the rest of the world together. Russia, the least developed of the large countries of Greater Europe, had more miles of track in 1870 (and by 1890) than India, which had three times the population. In 1890 there were virtually no railways in China.

The ability to shift goods rapidly and cheaply between the countries
of the West was matched by the creation of a financial infrastructure. More and more merchant banks and finance houses sprang up to provide the funds needed for long-distance trade. The credit instrument supplied in London (the ‘bill on London') became the common currency of international commerce. Bankers in London and Paris (the Rothschilds operated in both) became the intermediaries for the raising of foreign loans – at first mainly for governments in Europe and America, but increasingly, by
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. 1860, for private enterprise, especially railways. After 1856 the Russian government turned to the foreign (mainly the French) investor to fund the modernization the reformers demanded. A stock exchange was established, and commercial banks appeared.
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Beyond Europe and North America, these kinds of financial relations seemed possible only in certain favoured enclaves whose trade connections were particularly strong, or in colonies like India, whose financial system was supervised by an imperial power.