Authors: John Darwin
These changes were bound to set them on a collision course with the
bakufu
in Edo. The balance of power within the
bakuhan
system was shifting. The 1858 treaties and the shogun's appeasement in the face of foreign pressure divided and weakened the
bakufu
and exposed it to xenophobic demands to âclose the country'. The
bakufu
's own efforts to rearm were timid and indecisive, but it opposed the full
opening to the West urged by some reformers, fearing the collapse of its ideological prestige. As the Western presence loomed larger, the political mood grew anxious and violent. Both Choshu and Satsuma came to blows with the West in 1863â4 and discovered at first hand its strength and their weakness. The next three years saw a rapid decline towards civil war as Choshu and Satsuma, with other domain allies, tried to win the emperor's support against the Tokugawa, and the
bakufu
in turn waged war on Choshu.
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No compromise could be reached between
han
demands for greater autonomy and the shogun's determination to reassert his control. In 1866 the leading clans in south-western Japan formed an alliance against him. By January 1868, ChoshuâSatsuma forces, better armed and better led, had overwhelmed the Tokugawa and driven the shogun into abdication. To fill the vacuum, and legitimate their revolt, the rebel leaders proclaimed the restoration of imperial rule.
Thus far, the Japanese crisis had followed a familiar enough pattern. Close contact with an outside power, and the seductive appeal of its trade and technology, had unsettled local politics and discredited the ruler. As new men struggled for mastery, and the old regime fell to pieces, the time became ripe for foreign intervention: annexation, a protectorate, or yet more onerous âunequal treaties'. Japan was saved from this fate partly by the reluctance of the several Western powers to interfere in its civil war
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âperhaps because none of them could be sure to gain from its uncertain outcome â but even more by the speed and determination with which the new regime set about the building of a modern state.
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The pace and scale of the change were astonishing. The charter oath of the emperor (6April 1868) promised government by public discussion (a promise long deferred) and the search for knowledge âthroughout the world'. Government departments on the Western model were established, including a foreign office. Much more significant was the end of vassalage, transforming the hereditary domain rulers into removable governors, a step followed in 1871 by the outright abolition of the
han
and their replacement by âprefectures'. The feudal conglomerate had become a unitary state with a single capital at Tokyo, as Edo was renamed in 1869. In 1872 the old system of tribute was swept away in favour of a uniform land tax, to be paid in cash, and in 1873 universal military service was introduced
in place of the samurai and the feudal levies. The samurai were pensioned off, in money not rice. In a blizzard of reform between 1870 and 1873, legal equality, freedom of occupation, the right to sell land, and even the Western calendar transformed the social landscape of the Tokugawa era. The halting steps before 1868 to transform Japan along Western lines had given way to a headlong rush towards European-style âmodernity'. In the race against time, the Japanese had become the champion sprinters.
Two questions arise. Why did the new government follow such a dramatic course, and how was it able to impose such drastic change on a deeply conservative, not to say xenophobic, society? It had seemed more than likely that the rebel domains would seek merely to replace the Tokugawa shogunate with one of their own. In fact they could not do so. None of the rebel clans was strong enough to replace the Tokugawa by itself, and the attempt would have prolonged the civil war indefinitely. Dissolving the
han
was the only guarantee of political peace. Secondly, the leading figures in the rebel alliance were determined to âself-strengthen' Japan against the West, and came from domains where the advantages of foreign trade, foreign knowledge and foreign methods for this purpose were widely acknowledged. The most urgent need was for a single army along European lines. To pay for it meant a unified system of taxation and revenue. Thirdly, in ways that remain partly obscure, the reformist samurai who led the new regime sympathized with the demands of the merchant class for an end to the stringent regulation of economic life and status. But it was one thing to embark on so ambitious a change, quite another to impose it on doubters and dissidents. The huge samurai caste (more than a million people) in particular might have been expected to resist the abolition of its hereditary status and military function. The peasant majority, upon whom fell an ever heavier tax burden, had even less to celebrate. The Western powers waited in the wings, determined to punish any ill-treatment of their nationals or their trade.
In fact the transition was far from peaceful. Many of the new regime's leaders fell victim to samurai vendettas. For many years, recalled Yukichi Fukuzawa, the most famous exponent of Western learning, he was too fearful of assassination to venture out at night.
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The Satsuma rebellion in 1877 brought
30,000
samurai and their
followers into the field before it was crushed by Tokyo's new army. There were numerous peasant risings. But the Japanese reformers enjoyed much more favourable conditions than their counterparts in imperial China. The new government controlled from the start the Tokugawa domains, extending over a quarter of Japan, and a vital reservoir of money and men. Secondly, the huge social power of the samurai caste, potentially so dangerous, was turned to the government's advantage. More than anything, this was crucial to success. The prestige of leaders like Saigo Takamori and Yamagata Aristomo
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disarmed samurai fears, and large numbers took service in the Meiji state as soldiers, bureaucrats, policemen and clerks. The social discipline they had traditionally exerted, especially in the countryside, helped keep in check the peasant unrest that came so close to unseating the Ch'ing government in Peking. Thirdly, to a far greater extent than was possible in China, the long-secluded emperor could be reinvented as a powerful symbol of the new regime, the focus of a civil religion, complete with its shrines and state priests.
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Finally, Japan's remarkable degree of ethnic unity neutralized a potential source of internal division and solidified the new state against external influence.
This political strength would have counted for little had the reformers failed on the second front. Economic self-strengthening was as vital as political. Economic failure would have been the Trojan Horse through which foreign influence turned into foreign control. This could happen in several ways. Western merchants might demand better access and bully their home governments into intervening more. More insidiously, a modernizing government in Tokyo might borrow heavily abroad, becoming financially dependent upon Western lenders. Worst of all, the difficult entry into the volatile world of international trade carried a heavy risk of bankruptcy, and a bankrupt regime, discredited at home and vulnerable abroad, had few defences against foreign intervention. The Japanese evaded these hazards with remarkable success. Of course their achievements should not be exaggerated. Industrialization was relatively slow. In 1880 two-thirds of Japanese exports were made up of raw silk and tea. In 1887 perhaps 90 per cent of Japan's overseas trade was managed by foreign merchants.
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As late as 1890 it was easy in the West to see Japan as a picturesque oriental state whose solvency depended on a narrow range
of commodity exports. In fact the main foundations had already been laid for economic independence and industrial advance. In the key industry of cotton textiles, domestic output matched imports by 1880, and exports began in 1883.
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The key institutions behind commercial and industrial success â the specialized foreign trade banks, the large trading houses (
zaibatsu
) that combined manufacture and commerce, and the system of government subsidy â were all in place. The wild inflation of the 1870s (the result of too much paper money) was savagely checked in the deflationary 1880s and a stable currency was established. In the crucial transition phase, the Japanese borrowed almost no money abroad. The Cape Horn of modernization â financial collapse and social revolt â had been rounded.
Superficially, the Japanese had followed the same prescription as the Ch'ing reformers. The state had encouraged merchants into industrial enterprises and shipping, and had subsidized their efforts. It had given huge priority to making modern weapons. It acknowledged that foreign merchants would demand reasonable access, commercial security and moderate taxes. But the Japanese had already been more successful than the Chinese by the 1880s, and the difference in performance had become spectacular by 1914. To some extent this may have been the result of Meiji Japan's favourable inheritance from the Tokugawa past. âTraditional' Japan had been a society with high levels of literacy and artisanal skills. It also had a remarkably centralized economy centred on Osaka and Edo. There was a long tradition of big banker-merchants, like the famous house of Mitsui, which dated back to the early 1600s, out of which the
zaibatsu
evolved. Some large domains had pursued foreign trade and Western technology well before the restoration. But these arguments can be overdone. Tokugawa Japan was not a free-market economy. Its income levels were âfar below' the initial levels in other states that industrialized successfully in the nineteenth century.
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The travails of economic change might have easily forced a retreat or led to chaos. For a latecomer like Japan, entering the international economy required both a strong state and an unusually disciplined social order. It was this that made Japan exceptional. The samurai caste, whose leaders had made the restoration, dominated the new state. Samurai-led governments borrowed from the great banker-merchants and paid
them back with the knock-down sale of government-funded enterprises.
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It was an alliance of necessity against two enemies: the West and the threat of upheaval at home. The loser was the peasantry. With its new ânational' army and police, the Meiji state could repress rural discontent, tax the peasants as never before, and concentrate economic power in the countryside in the hands of landlords.
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It was the peasants who paid when the fierce deflation of the 1880s drove down prices. The Japanese embrace of Western methods, rules and institutions was real enough. But at the heart of âsamurai capitalism' was the ruthless exploitation of the peasants to subsidize the struggle for industrial and commercial independence.
These features of Japan's transition may have made it unique. An advanced pre-industrial economy, the exceptionally strong social and political order forged at the restoration, comparative remoteness from the West and its firepower, and the fortune of timing that allowed âself-strengthening' to begin before the full weight of Western power was felt in the Asian Pacific after 1890 were crucial determinants of its success in the race against time. In the third case, that of the Ottoman Empire, these features were conspicuous by their absence or worked to its disadvantage. The result by the late 1880s was subjection to a form of economic tutelage and the deepening prospect of disintegration and wholesale partition among the Western powers whose quarrels over the âSick Man of Europe' sometimes seemed the main reason for his survival. It was true, of course, that Ottoman governments had a much less favourable geographical inheritance than the Chinese or Japanese. The Ottoman Empire was neither compact like Japan nor endowed with the vast, productive agricultural heartland that was China proper. Spreadeagled across three continents, it was (by the 1830s) exposed at many points to the sea power of the Europeans. As well as its âexternal' frontier with Europe in the Balkans, it had to defend a series of âinner' frontiers against tribals, nomads and desert-dwellers: in Anatolia (against the Kurds), in the Jezireh (modern Iraq, with its Shia majority), in Syria (where desert Arabs were pressing more and more strongly against the cultivated fringe), and in faraway Yemen, the empire's southern pole. Arguably, by the 1830s its geostrategic equilibrium had suffered irreversible damage.
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But Ottoman
leaders had accepted much earlier and more completely than Chinese and Japanese that the survival of the empire depended upon the deliberate grafting of Western technique on to the social and political structure of their Islamic empire.
This process had already begun in the 1820s with the liquidation of the overpowerful janissaries and their gradual replacement by a more European-style army. It was the terrible crisis of the 1830s, when the combination of Russian aggression from the north and the French-backed attempt at imperial takeover by the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt came close to overthrowing the empire, that made drastic change seem much more urgent. To conciliate the British â a vital ally â Constantinople agreed in 1838 to throw open its markets to foreign trade. Then, in 1839, wide-ranging reforms that became known as the
Tanzimat
or âreorganization' were announced â partly, no doubt, to improve the empire's image abroad and win support from the European powers. Under the Edict of Gulhane, all Ottoman subjects were to have equal rights (ending the old distinction between Muslims and unbelievers), protection of their person and property was guaranteed, and sweeping changes were proposed in taxation and in the administration of the army and of the legal system, more or less on the model of an âadvanced' European state like France. In the â
Tanzimat
era' that followed, from 1839 to 1876, the Ottoman sultans (Abdul Mejid 1839â61, Abdul Aziz 1861â76) seemed committed to a systematic âself-strengthening' that would safeguard the empire against the economic, political and ideological pressures that emanated from Europe. Four reformer-statesmen, the pashas Reshid, Fuad, Ali and Midhat, were determined to give the central government and its officials far more control over what had become a decentralized and unruly realm. They reorganized the army and (through conscription) hugely increased its size (from some
24,000
in 1837 to over
120,000
men).
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Through the
vilayet
law of 1864, they imposed a more uniform system of provincial rule and cut down the power of local notables. They promoted secular education, to train new generations of bureaucrats and army officers in the scientific, technical and legal methods of the West and reduce the influence of Muslim clerics. They set up a finance ministry and a budget system, and founded the Ottoman Imperial Bank to serve some of the purposes of
a central bank. Above all, they struggled to promote a new conception of Ottoman citizenship to replace the old regime of non-Muslim
millets
or religious communities, grouped around and inferior to the âcore' population of Muslims on whose loyalty the sultan's power had always depended. It was a heroic programme.