After Tamerlane (39 page)

America was where most migrants went, and America's remarkable economic history explains why the great migration succeeded. What made America so attractive? More to the point, what made its economy so absorbent? Its astonishing natural wealth forms an obvious part of the answer: the huge reserve of fertile land; vast tracts of timber; deposits of iron, coal, lead, silver and gold; and a river system that opened up the interior and carried out its produce. But what made America so receptive was not the gradual exploitation of these natural riches, but the amazing speed with which they were harnessed to a market economy. It was speed that was critical in enabling America's population to grow so quickly and to accommodate so many Europeans without more signs of social stress. What made the peopling of America (by natural increase as well as by immigration) so swift and this frontier of Greater Europe so dynamic was (once again) the impact of industrialism: the transplanted industrialism of America itself.

We can see this at work in a number of ways. Large-scale agricultural settlement required tools, social organization and a variety of services (not least financial services) if the settlers were not to remain isolated, ignorant, and dirt-poor subsistence farmers. These needs had to be met locally if they were to be suitably ‘customized' and not prohibitively expensive. Just as a fighting army needs a large ‘rear' to service it with supplies, intelligence and direction, so an army of settlers needs an urban ‘rear' nearby for farming equipment, market information and cultural amenities. Without these it quickly slips into a slough of stagnation. The remarkable feature of the American frontier was not so much the torrent of farmers who moved west, but how rapidly towns followed in their wake. Towns grew much more quickly in size than the population as a whole.
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Town sites attracted artisans with industrial skills. In the 1820s and '30s, foundries, mills and smelters could be found in the new western cities, busily serving their local hinterlands. Steam power was early on the scene. Well before 1830, hundreds of steam engines were being built in the West,
many for use on the steamboats that plied the Ohio and Mississippi. With engineering and industrial skills at hand, it was little wonder that railways spread quickly, bringing the means of industrial transport directly into the frontier regions. Railways and steamboats not only brought people in, they also moved people on to new opportunities, accelerating the demographic mobility on which industrialized settlement depended.

The deeper roots of this success story – the virtuous circle of incessant growth – can be found in the benign conditions that America enjoyed as part of Greater Europe. The absence of external threats, making a decentralized ‘enterprise' culture rather than a regulated bureaucratic economy much easier to sustain,
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was one. The colonial legacy of transatlantic trade was another. Together they had helped to make the Old Northeast a commercial and industrial region on a European scale and extremely efficient (partly for linguistic reasons) at importing and redeploying skills and the skilled from the most advanced regions of Atlantic Europe. The American frontier was thus not a pure dependency of the Old World. It needed (as we have seen) only small amounts of European capital. It enhanced its imports of goods and capital with the ‘added value' of home-grown skills, output and institutions. It was the dynamic fusion of Old and New Europe that underlay its success. In Australia and New Zealand, the furthest-flung frontiers of European settlement, the same stimulants can be seen at work, but on a much more modest scale. These countries' natural endowments were less generous. Both were far further away than America, and distance was costly.
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They lacked the head start America enjoyed before 1800. They were more dependent on inputs from Europe. But in other ways they drew upon the same industrial toolkit to tailor their environments for alien settlement. They introduced plants and animals and changed the landscape with ruthless energy (often by fire) to meet their needs. A box of matches, it was cynically said, was the pioneer's most useful tool. They did not adapt themselves so much as adapt the environment to a European community. To have done so much so quickly, at such vast distance from ‘home', and on the scale required to keep up the momentum of settlement, would have been inconceivable without the apparatus, physical and intellectual, of an industrial civilization.
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There was another similarity of huge importance in the frontier story. The frontier was usually a place of steady, grinding economic advance. But it was also frequently the setting for a ‘rush': for gold and silver, as well as for land. It was a place of feverish, cash-driven speculation, more the result of manias and crazes than of sober economic calculation. This was the manic tendency in the industrial culture of mobility, and it had important results. Rushes changed the direction as well as the pace of settler expansion, creating new and unpredicted lines of advance. The demographic effects could be electric. The discovery of gold doubled Australia's population in the 1850s and New Zealand's in the 1860s. In America, the westward drift of pioneer farmers towards the Pacific became a torrent in 1849 when gold was found in California's Central Valley. San Francisco boomed as the mining metropolis of the Far West.
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Its commercial, financial and technical influence soon radiated up and down the Pacific coast and inland as far as Nevada, Utah and Idaho.
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California's new wealth speeded the arrival of the telegraph in 1861 and the Union Pacific railway (by 1869). When gold was found in the Rockies in 1858, 600miles west of the settler frontier,
100,000
people poured into the Colorado territory in little more than a year.
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Another stream of hopefuls raced north to Montana when gold was found at Virginia City in 1863:
30,000
arrived in a year. The consequences were not simply economic.

So far we have ignored one crucial influence on these frontier histories: the resistance of indigenous peoples to displacement or conquest. Though there were minor variations, by the 1880s indigenous opposition had been largely brushed aside in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The epic victory of the Lakota over Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876, or that of the Nez Perce at Big Hole a year later, made no difference. But why was the resistance of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maoris overwhelmed so completely in a space of forty years or less? Weaponry is part of the answer,
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though sophisticated firearms were acquired by native peoples and used to good effect – strikingly so against Custer's army. On the American plains, sudden environmental change (the destruction of the bison herds by commercial hunters and modern rifles) destroyed much of the basis of native livelihood and culture.
But the underlying reason almost everywhere was the frantic pace of the whites' forward movement: there was almost no time for native peoples to reorganize politically, redeploy socially, form wider alliances, or develop more effective military tactics. This was where the rushes were so important. The whites did not advance at a steady pace. They lunged forward unpredictably in crowds, leaping over vast distances at the lure of gold, silver or ‘free' land. It was a gold rush in Dakota that drove the Native Americans from lands they occupied under treaty and led to the showdown to which Custer's defeat was the dramatic prelude. Elsewhere, speculative rushes constantly outflanked indigenous peoples or confronted them with an irresistible enemy whose numbers, organization, resources, equipment and transport bore the hallmarks of industrialism. In the temperate lands of settlement, the Europeans had decisively won the race against time by the 1870s.

Elsewhere, the verdict was much less clear. The Eurasian Revolution allowed Europeans to force their way into parts of Afro-Asia where before 1750 they had had a beachhead or a ‘factory' at best. As new technologies, more attractive trade goods, and better information became available, they could venture into the interior with greater confidence. In the right conditions, obstructive rulers and their armies could be pushed aside, bought out, or pensioned off – a process that went furthest (for reasons discussed below) on the Indian subcontinent. By the 1830s and '40s, Europeans were hammering on the gates of China, forcing entry into the Ottoman Empire for their trade, infiltrating the Iranian sphere in the Caspian and the Gulf, pushing Christianity in Indochina, and even reconnoitring Japan. There were schemes to colonize the Niger valley, a French invasion of Islamic Algiers (the germ of a vast North African empire), and a private empire on the island of Borneo won by the English adventurer James Brooke. In 1839 the British seized the barren rock of Aden.

But, despite this frenzy of commercial, political and philanthropic activism, the imposition of effective European imperial control over
the states and peoples of Afro-Asia remained the exception not the rule until the 1880s. In much of Afro-Asia, the years between 1830 and 1880 were a ‘loaded pause' before the growing disparity in power, wealth, weaponry, mobility and information between (most) Afro-Asians and Europeans reached its widest point. It was only then that a new form of ‘world economy' and a new system of ‘world politics' combined to produce a Eurocentric world order and the near-universal extension of formal and informal colonialism.

In the meantime, the forward movement of European control showed recurrent signs of hesitation and uncertainty. There was plenty of pressure to push deeper and wider and expand the bridgeheads of European influence. Merchants complained of restraints on trade. Missionaries wanted to save more souls, or to save the souls they had won already. Soldiers wanted a strategic hill, sailors yearned for a deeper anchorage. Proconsuls claimed that a larger colony would mean cheaper rule. Each of these groups could count on lobbies at home to harry its government into intervention or conquest. Each could deploy the seductive rhetoric of free trade, the ‘civilizing mission', religious duty, ‘imperial defence' or the threat of rebellion to boost its appeal in the press, in Parliament or to public opinion. Sometimes European governments found it easier to bow to these demands than to resist them. But they were just as prone to pull back if a military failure or financial difficulty undermined the support for a forward policy. In hindsight, this looks like a waiting game before the full-blown imperialism of the 1880s. But to contemporaries the bounds, the scale, the stability and even the point of Afro-Asian empires seemed speculative, controversial and uncertain.

The most important reason for this was a widespread scepticism as to whether the cost of such empires would be justified by their benefits. The cost might arise from the need to defend them against European rivals. But the immediate cause for doubt usually came from the difficulty of imposing European authority on rulers and peoples who were determined to resist it. The period of the loaded pause was, across much of Afro-Asia, an age of resistance. In the North African Maghrib the French effort to conquer the hinterland behind Algiers lasted for decades, although Algiers itself was reinvented as a European city. In West Africa, Governor Faidherbe pushed France's influence up
the Senegal valley and along the coast. But expansion stalled after 1860, and was not resumed until the 1880s.
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In the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), the shrivelled British colony on the coast was so much at risk from the inland kingdom of Ashanti that its abandonment was mooted in the 1860s. Even in South Africa, where the Boers had conquered the highveld interior after 1840, a real white supremacy was delayed until the 1880s. The Transvaal republic was bankrupted by its unsuccessful war against the Pedi in 1876, while the Zulu ‘menace' loomed over the British colony of Natal until the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879.

In many parts of Asia, attempts to assert European rule suffered a similar check. In the northern Caucasus (modern Chechnya), the Russians fought a long and bloody war before ‘Circassian' resistance was broken in 1864. Only then was their road to Central Asia opened up. Russian rule was gradually imposed there, but not until the 1870s and '80s. Two British invasions of Afghanistan (1838–42, 1879–80) were aborted. The Burmese kingdom lost its coastal provinces to the British in 1826 and 1852, but the inland state survived until its overthrow in 1885. In Indochina, the French intervention in 1858 to protect the Tonkin Catholics ended with the occupation of Cochin China (in the Mekong delta) and a nominal protectorate over neighbouring Cambodia. But a real French imperium over the rest of Vietnam, the Lao states and Cambodia could not be achieved until the 1880s and '90s. In island South East Asia it was a similar story. The Dutch had control over Java and much of Sumatra. But in Acheh (in northern Sumatra), Bali, eastern Borneo, Sulawesi and the island chain stretching out towards New Guinea their paramountcy was delayed until the end of the century or even after it.

What made this resistance so effective? It could not usually exclude all European influence (or try to do so), but it did stave off European rule. In some cases, of course, a little resistance went a long way against European interlopers who lacked the means, the manpower and the motive to persist. Remoteness and poverty might be the best defence. But usually resistance required Afro-Asian states and societies to maintain a critical level of solidarity and cohesion in the face of European intrusion or attack. In fact many of these states were surprisingly well equipped against the European style of colonial war
fare. Colonial armies – British, French, Dutch, Russian, American – had certain advantages. They were (more or less) professionals. They usually had greater firepower. Where access from the sea was possible, they could arrive suddenly (like the French off Da Nang in Vietnam in 1858) and achieve surprise. Sometimes they could use their naval firepower to intimidate the defence, as the British did in the First Opium War against China. But colonial campaigns were radically subject to the law of diminishing returns. None of the imperial powers could afford to keep many of its soldiers tied up indefinitely in frontier regions. It was costly, and they were needed elsewhere. Secondly, the longer that foreign troops stayed, the harder it was to ensure their supply and keep up their fighting strength. Right through the nineteenth century, disease continued to ravage the health of European troops in the tropics. Thirdly, the downside of surprise was often the lack of essential intelligence. Afro-Asians may not have known that the Europeans were coming: but the Europeans knew little of what they were coming to. With little to go on about the plans of the local ruler, his strengths, weaknesses, supplies and manpower, an invading force was often reduced to blind man's buff. Hence the pattern of so many colonial campaigns: the staging of a symbolic victory – the wrecking of a palace or the burning of a capital – before a retreat to the coast in dignified impotence. Joseph Conrad's description (in
The Heart of Darkness
) of a French cruiser aimlessly ‘firing into a continent'
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is an ironic comment on this undirected violence.