After Tamerlane (38 page)

Even missionaries rode the wave of commercial change, and without it their influence, activity and resources would have been much smaller. Indeed, missionaries like Gutzlaff or Henry Williams (in New Zealand) happily combined their religious and business activities, Gutzlaff by selling opium as he preached. European – especially British – merchants and their industrial suppliers demanded entry to the once-closed markets of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and put pressure on their governments to force it if necessary. A merchants' lobby had overthrown the old East India Company monopoly of trade with India in 1813 and with China in 1833. Merchant pressure drove London into the First Opium War (1839–42) and, through the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, secured the first real opening of China's trade to European commerce. Armed with the products of industrializing Europe, especially its machine-made textiles, European traders at last had a cargo of near-universal appeal, since cheap cotton cloth was a consumer good that could be sold almost anywhere, even against local artisan competition. The one requirement was an ‘open' market in which European goods could be sold without the barrier of tariffs or prohibitions. For the European merchant it was ‘free trade' that mattered, not conquest or political rule.

This commercial priority helps to explain the distinctive pattern of the West's expansion after 1830. Across much of the world, the Europeans' desire to ‘globalize' markets, sell their manufactures, and fill their ships with homeward cargoes created a new form of commercial imperium that fell well short of colonial rule. Frequently, merchants and their governments gained commercial entry by agreements with local rulers and elites on terms that were, or seemed, mutually profitable. The merchant, after all, could sell only if he also bought.
What he offered to those who controlled the land was a market for produce they could not sell nearby – because land was abundant and its produce cheap. Landowners who had once been condemned to a subsistence economy could now be consumers – of clothes, furniture, iron goods, groceries (like tea or coffee) and tools – if they could grow the crops that Europeans would buy. Where this commercial understanding worked best, as in parts of Latin America, there was little incentive for the European states to scheme about conquest. Where local cooperation was not forthcoming and the ruler was determined to exclude foreign trade or regulate it closely (the most notorious case was China), the merchants' programme demanded government action. But even in China (where the British government obliged) this forcible intervention – in the opium wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60 – created little more than a maritime condominium in a series of ‘treaty ports' scattered along the China coast and up the Yangtze. Here Europeans enjoyed privileged freedom to trade. But penetrating inland China still seemed dauntingly difficult in the 1870s.

In fact in many parts of the non-Western world European traders were forced to accept a rough and ready division of labour. Where they were barred from the interior – frozen out by native merchants, or baffled by the complications of currency, credit and distribution – as often happened in inland China and Africa, they had little choice but to rely on local middlemen. The European merchant stayed at the coast in his ‘godown' (or warehouse), or cruised along it – a common practice in West Africa.
⁴³
In India, where colonial rule
was
rapidly extended before 1850, the detail was different but the pattern similar. British merchants in their ‘agency houses' (there were forty-seven in Calcutta in 1835) concentrated on the export–import trade in the main port cities and supplied the needs of the tiny foreign population in the interior. But they made little attempt to penetrate the up-country trade or the vast agricultural economy. Almost everywhere the danger of commercial failure was high. Extremes of climate, unreliable information, volatile currencies, losses at sea or political turbulence multiplied the ordinary risks of long-distance trade so that ‘mortality' among European firms in India and China was heavy. This was the age of the mercantile pioneers, so brilliantly evoked in Conrad's tales, plying the Eastern seas in search of cargoes, and luck.

Even so, Europe's trading frontier made a steady advance into Afro-Asia in the fifty years after 1830. In East Asia, the first great rush of merchants had been to Hong Kong, seized by the British in the First Opium War and kept as a safe haven on the China coast. By 1860 more than forty British firms had set up in the port, attracted by quick profits in the opium trade.
⁴⁴
Parsi merchants from Bombay and a sprinkling of other Europeans and Americans were also there. After the Second Opium War, the number of treaty ports grew rapidly, and small European-style towns with parks, esplanades, banks and offices were built as enclaves within (or close to) the main Chinese cities. By then Shanghai had already become the real entrepô t for the trade of China, the main port of entry from Europe and America. It lay at the end of what was fast becoming the great trunk highway between Europe and Asia that ran via Bombay, Colombo, Rangoon (growing quickly as a centre of the rice and timber trade) and through the maritime crossroads of Singapore, founded as recently as 1819, but with over
100,000
people by the 1870s.
⁴⁵

Symptomatic of this commercial growth was the network of more or less regular and rapid communication between Europe and Asia that appeared after 1840. In that year the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (the ‘P&O') gained a royal charter for a mail monopoly between London and Alexandria. Two years later it had a contract to carry mail between Suez, Sri Lanka, Madras and Calcutta; and by 1845 its service was extended to Singapore and China. In the 1860s and '70s, India and China were linked to Europe by telegraph. But the greatest change came with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, cutting weeks off the sea route to India, speeding the transit of passengers and mail, and breaking down the barrier (as much psychological as physical) that once seemed to separate Europe from the ‘Eastern World'. ‘The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam', wrote Joseph Conrad in 1902, ‘let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade.'
⁴⁶
Easier access to Europe awakened the merchants' interest in neglected backwaters off the main sea lane. The Persian Gulf and the East Africa coast, once the preserve of Arab dhows, began to attract the attention of Bombay-based British merchants.
⁴⁷
A new commercial front had been opened.

But there was as yet little sign that this buzz of economic activity
would mean any large extension of European rule in Afro-Asia. Europeans, with the British in the van, acquired enclaves, bases, strong-points and emporia for trade – such as Aden, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Lagos or St Louis in Senegal. Their commercial activity and political influence was radiated out from these and other bridgeheads. Treaties were made – or imposed – to prohibit slave-trading or to extirpate piracy. Quasi-protectorates propped up pliant rulers – often with ambiguous or unsatisfactory results. But no general scheme of imperial partition seemed desirable, necessary or practicable until the 1880s. The main exceptions were found in India (where special conditions applied), parts of Central Asia close to Russia's Caspian provinces, in the far north-west and far south of Africa, and in South East Asia, where the British, French and Dutch advanced uneasily into the Malay peninsula, Indochina and the ‘Outer Islands' of the Indonesian archipelago. It was the huge enlargement of these ‘uncertain empires' in the new global conditions of the 1880s that triggered the highest stage of Western dominance before the crash of 1914.

In many parts of the world, the frontiers of Greater Europe were vague and imprecise – zones of interaction with Africans and Asians, rather than of purposeful incorporation. The missionary's and trader's frontiers depended on the cooperation of locals, whether in pursuit of god or mammon. But they were far from being the sole or most important theatres of European expansion. Up until 1880, and long thereafter, Europe's most dynamic frontier was demographic – its frontier of settlement. Here the scale of advance was startling. In 1830 white settlers in the United States had settled up to the Mississippi. By 1880 they had conquered or occupied almost the whole of what became the forty-eight states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In Canada, they had filled up the eastern farmlands and were poised (the delay proved considerable) to press on into the prairies. In Australia, 2¼ million settlers had fanned out over most of what could be used for agriculture or sheep-raising by the 1880s, leaving only a vast, dry empty interior. In New Zealand, where settlement had barely started in 1840, most usable land had been occupied by 1880, except for the redoubts of Maoridom in North Island. In all these places, the flood of white settlement had driven all before it: removing or excluding the native populations, fencing them into ‘reserves', often destroying
their livelihood and making them dependent on white charity. After 1880 only four zones were left for large-scale colonization by Europeans: the Canadian prairies, the Argentine pampas, the temperate lands of southern Brazil, and Siberia. In a fifth zone, Southern Africa, turned by main force into a ‘white man's country', whites could dominate, but were too few to exclude, the black population, or live without its labour. In a sixth, Mediterranean Africa, European settlement was the sickly stepchild of French military power from start (1830) until finish (1962).

This great forward movement permanently altered the economic, cultural and political geography of the globe. By the end of the century, even sober commentators could assume that the future of the world was European. The population of ‘New' and ‘Old' Europe in 1800 had been 170million, calculated the eminent British statistician Sir Robert Giffen. By 1880 it was 400million. By contrast, apart from India, ‘the non-European races have been stationary… The forces of civilization, as against those of the black and yellow races, have become practically irresistible.'
⁴⁸
He thought that by
AD 2000
‘Europeans' would number 1,500 to
2,000
million, the Chinese a mere 400million. Giffen extrapolated too much, but the demographic explosion of Greater Europe was real enough. Yet in 1800, except in parts of eastern North America, the great European land-grab was barely more than a series of claims to territory whose actual peopling was a dream. Why and how did this peopling happen, and so quickly?

The precondition of Europe's demographic imperialism was that so many Europeans wanted to leave their homes and were free to do so. It was no coincidence that most migrants up to 1880 came from regions with easy access to Atlantic ports. But this cannot be the whole explanation, since very few migrants came from France, or even from Spain until late in the century. What pushed people into moving was their expected life chances at home and imagined opportunities abroad. The British Isles were the main source of migrants until the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the largest source overall up to 1914. They were also the part of Europe affected first and most by the social and economic changes of industrialism. Changes in land use – like the conversion of marginal farmlands in Scotland into sheep runs – drove people off the land and into the towns – or abroad. In
parts of England, the decline of old rural industries had a similar effect. There was no vast hinterland of small peasant farms (as in France) that could soak up the un- or under-employed. The extreme case was Ireland, where the terrible subsistence crisis after 1845 killed perhaps 2 million people and drove millions more into emigration, some of it to mainland Britain. It was relatively easy for those on the move to continue their journey beyond urban Britain to America (most) or Australia (a few). The sea lanes were peaceful. No legal barrier prevented emigration. And there were now transport systems that could carry large numbers of passengers to the ports and ship them quickly and cheaply across the Atlantic.

In this way, the physical consequences of industrialism pushed people into moving and then helped them to do so. The social and cultural effects of industrialism also had a role to play. Many of those who were uprooted stopped first in British cities. If urban conditions had been different, and the safety nets stronger, more might have stayed there. Instead, what grew up was a culture of mobility, fed by the eager propaganda of the emigration agents, shipping lines, migration societies, land companies and religious enthusiasts, and disseminated cheaply by the printed word – another consequence of industrialism. The urge to emigrate, originating in poverty and economic fear, was supercharged by the belief in migration as the means to a better life. Skilfully inflated by a host of emigration ‘entrepreneurs' (migration was a business), it took root with amazing speed in the social imagination.

But migration was not just a matter of wishes and dreams, nor even of the cheapness of the one-way ticket. Much migration was paid for with remittances sent home by the ‘advance guard'. ‘Chain migration' was (as it is now for Third World migrants) the only practicable way for large numbers of poor emigrants to make the journey. But ‘chain migration' also assumed a favourable report on the preferred destination, and the economic success of those who had travelled first. For movement on the scale that occurred after 1840, it was vital for the receiving societies to accept the incomers, and for their economies to be able to absorb them. Had economic conditions been unfavourable, poverty at home would have been replaced by destitution abroad (where the safety net was even smaller) and the chain would have
broken. The prospect of a horde of indigent migrants, driving down wages and swamping the labour market, would soon have turned the ‘old inhabitants' against an open door to new arrivals. The great migration would have come to a shuddering halt.