After Tamerlane (45 page)

Yet the Qajars were threatened by external dangers at least as acute
as those that confronted the Ottoman Empire. Russia's expansion into the Caucasus had cost them dearly. By the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchai (1828) they had been forced to give up their claim on Georgia and Armenia and surrender much of Azerbaijan. The growth of Britain's sea power in the Persian Gulf was bound to make them uneasy. It encouraged the unruliness of the great southern tribes, and might snap the allegiance of its coastal communities, like Mohammerah, whose great sheikh was ethnically Arab. After all, even late in the century, it was much quicker to reach Tehran from the Gulf by ship through the Black Sea and the Caspian and then south to the capital, rather than directly by road. When Nasir al-Din seized Herat (in modern Afghanistan, but a prized possession of the Safavid shahs) in 1856, the British forced him to disgorge it by bombarding Bushire and sending troops to Mohammerah. No shah could ignore the risk that a foreign defeat, or the loss of a province, would smash his prestige and unravel the bonds that held his multi-ethnic empire together.

Under Nasir al-Din (r. 1848–96), some efforts were made to strengthen the shah's power. The Ottoman model of
Tanzimat
reform was influential.
¹¹⁹
A college was founded to diffuse Western knowledge and produce a new administrative class. But this brief phase of ‘reform' coincided with the rise of the Babis, dissident Muslims, some of whom denounced the corruption of rule. When one of them tried to murder the shah, the movement was crushed: shah and
ulama
closed ranks. The reforming minister was dispatched to political and then physical oblivion. But, although the shah's authority was still bound to depend on the skilful manipulation of communities and interests, symptoms of a more unified polity slowly appeared. The border with the Ottomans was settled at last in 1847; Tehran's control over Sistan and Baluchistan was asserted in 1866; and the frontier with Afghanistan was agreed in 1872.
¹²⁰
The influence of Shi'ite Islam – chief source of cultural identity – was strengthened, partly as a result of the struggle with the Babis.
¹²¹
The reach of the bureaucracy became gradually longer, and state law replaced the sharia in matters of property.
¹²²
The telegraph linked Tehran to some of its provinces. The export of opium brought greater prosperity to the west of the country. By the 1870s, however, there were ominous signs that a crisis was coming.

Russia's advance was the obvious warning. By 1859–60 the tsar's army was in Turkestan. In 1866 Tashkent was annexed. By 1873 the Russians were in Khiva. They faced the north-eastern quarter of the shah's dominions, and the holy city of Meshed. Nasir al-Din had few means of resistance. His revenues were falling, while prices were gripped in an inflationary spiral. He set off for Europe to win fresh support. The quest for cash in the hand drove him to make a sensational bargain, the ‘Reuter's Concession'. Under its terms, rights to the profits from any new enterprise anywhere in the country – railways, minerals, irrigation works, factories – were granted away to a foreign entrepreneur (Julius Reuter, founder of the news agency) in return for £40,000 down. The furore this caused, and its hasty withdrawal, showed how far the shah was from a timely reinforcement of Iran's defences. Instead, he pushed on down what came to seem later a risky if unavoidable path: allowing foreign commercial interests to enter the country. Perhaps he calculated that they would balance each other. It was certainly true that Anglo-Russian antagonism was the best guarantee that neither country would be able to dominate Iran. It was also the case that Iran's geostrategic position and decentralized politics, as well as the strength of its religious elite, made it a hard nut to crack. But whether the Qajars, and Iranian independence, could survive the stresses of foreign intrusion in a land where Westerners had scarcely been seen
¹²³
would soon be revealed.

Many other Afro-Asian states faced the same challenge as China, Japan and the Ottoman Empire in the middle years of the nineteenth century, including Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) and Siam (modern Thailand). They feared invasion and the loss of lightly ruled borderlands where their writ had run. They mistrusted the motives of European merchants. They were anxious to modernize their armies and (necessarily) their revenues. They hoped to play off the Europeans against each other, and preserve their freedom by indirect means. They toyed with methods of state-led growth, sometimes by licensing concessionaires from Europe, or encouraging immigrants. All faced the dilemma that drastic change in states where the central power was weak risked chaos and revolt, heightening the danger of outside intervention. All faced the reality that by the 1880s the gap between
the technological, financial and demographic resources of Europe and those of Afro-Asia seemed to be widening rapidly. The race against time after 1880 had entered the home straight.

6. French soldiers at Tientsin (Tianjin) in the Boxer Rebellion

After 1880 the frontiers of Greater Europe surged forward as if the final subjection of the non-Western world was only a matter of time. The most obvious sign of this was the rapid partition of those parts of the globe that had escaped the attention of European colonizers in earlier decades. The most famous case was Africa, shared out between Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany and the Belgian king (who held his vast stake as a private fiefdom) in an astonishing series of bargains after 1884. But Africa was not unique. There were other partitions in South East Asia and the South Pacific. Nor was Greater Europe's advance just territorial. It rode upon a huge expansion of international trade and a dramatic increase (from small beginnings) in the amount of capital sent to regions previously dismissed as too risky or unprofitable. It coincided with a colossal rise in the flow of migrants out of Europe, most of them heading for North or South America, but with enough left over to provide a settler spearhead in tropical Africa and Asia, and a much larger bridgehead in Russian North Asia. It provoked, and drewstrength from, a fiercer assertion than ever before of Europe's cultural mission to be the whole world's engine of material progress and also its source of religious and philosophical truth. Europeans were uniquely progressive, it was variously claimed, because of their physical, social or religious evolution. This was the charter of their ‘race supremacy'. Last but not least, Greater Europe's expansion into Afro-Asian lands too remote or resistant in earlier times seemed a tribute to its scientific and technological primacy. The ‘knowledge gap' between Europeans and (most) others looked wider, not narrower, at the end of the century. Parts of Europe were entering the second industrial revolution of electricity and chemicals before the non-Western world had exploited coal and steam.

The result was to impose, for the first time in world history, a global hierarchy of physical, economic and cultural power. It worked through a set of institutions, practices and conventional beliefs that largely held sway until the Second World War. To an extent inconceivable as late as 1860, the world of 1900 was an imperial world: of
territorial empires spreading across much of the globe; and of informal empires of trade, unequal treaties and extraterritorial privilege (for Europeans) – and garrisons and gunboats to enforce it – over most of the rest. Concepts of international law (invented in Europe) dismissed claims to sovereignty (and justified foreign intervention) unless the state concerned met a ‘standard of civilization' that was approved in Europe. In economic theory, and increasingly in practice, this imperial world implied a division of labour. The imperial powers were (in varying degrees) also industrial powers. They supplied (or tried to supply) manufactured goods, capital investment, technical know-how and skilled personnel. The role of the colonies, and of ‘semi-colonial' lands (like China or Argentina), was to produce the foodstuffs, raw materials and commodities that the industrial world wanted and to take in return its manufactures and capital – an economic rule that meant enforcing free trade against local interests and their protected markets. Demographically, the imperial world was a white man's world. Europeans were more or less free (wars and depressions permitting) to migrate where they wished, or could make a living. Imperial rulers promoted Afro-Asian migrations to develop their colonies, and discounted the claims of local communities to keep their land to themselves. The cultural theory of this imperial world was perhaps its most pervasive feature. Europeans convinced themselves, and persuaded others, that, while non-European civilizations and cultures were exotic, fascinating, romantic or beautiful, they were at best a series of culs-de-sac. Only Europe's way was a proven path to ‘moral and material progress' – the title of the annual report issued by the (British-run) government of India.

We know, of course, that this powerful system of European dominance was never completed and did not endure. A citizen of its strongest unit, the British Empire, who was born in 1890 might have lived to see it decay and collapse. One of the central questions in modern world history is why this happened. Much of the answer can be found in the great world crisis of 1914–45. But we can also find some important clues in the previous era. ‘Global colonialism' was an impressive construct. But it was erected at speed, and its foundations were shallow. Perhaps more to the point, its equilibrium depended upon a set of conditions that could not remain stable. The diplomacy
of imperialism, like its economics and ideology, turned out to contain a ‘genetic flaw' that could not be cured.

After 1880, it became a commonplace that the world had shrunk. This was partly a reaction to the rapid spread of swift communications. Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph had been widely adopted in Europe and North America from the 1830s and ' 40s. By the 1870s they were colonizing vast new areas of the world, carving corridors of access into regions where travel had been difficult (and costly) and information scarce. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant the extension eastward of the steamship lines and their scheduled services, creating the great trunk road of merchant shipping all the way to Shanghai and Yokohama. Submarine cables and the overland telegraph could nowbring commercial and political news from East Asia to Europe within days, and then hours. But most of all it was the railway that revolutionized thinking about distance. The late nineteenth century was the greatest age of railway imperialism. The British and French built colonial railways in West, East and Southern Africa to bind restless hinterlands to their coastal bridgeheads. The Trans-Caspian Railway (1880–88) carried Russian power into Central Asia. The Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1904), the grandest of all these imperial projects, was meant to turn Russia's Wild East into an extension of Europe. Other lines were planned on a heroic scale but were left unfinished: the Bagdadbahn to connect Hamburg to Basra (and the Persian Gulf); a ‘Trans-Persian' railway, linking Europe to India; and Cecil Rhodes's dream, a Cape to Cairo railway running all the way over a British-ruled Africa. The railway, thought the great British geographer Halford Mackinder, would change world history. The ‘Columbian epoch', when sea power was everything, was about to give way to a new age of great land empires that commanded vast resources and were virtually impregnable.
¹

By the end of the century, no part of the world could be considered immune from the transforming effects of the communications revolution. In its strategic nature as well as in its economic relations, the
world had become – or was rapidly becoming – a single space. The annihilation of distance became a late-Victorian clicheé. The intimate jostling to which Europeans were accustomed on their own crowded continent would now be reproduced on a global scale. The quarrelsome tendencies with which Europeans were so familiar – commercial rivalry, diplomatic friction and cultural animosity – would require global, not merely continental, solutions. International society, a European concept, would have to be widened to embrace non-European states with whom contact was becoming more frequent and regular. In all these ways, it was easy to think that the trend of the times was towards the universal interdependence to which mid-century free-traders (like Richard Cobden) had looked as the best guarantee of general progress and peace. But cutting across this ‘cosmopolitan' future (to which many liberal thinkers were deeply attached) was a contrary trend that came in retrospect to define the age.

We have already seen in previous chapters how the growing wealth and power of the Euro-American world had encroached on the sphere of many African and Asian societies. Some had been conquered, others disrupted, and still others put on notice that without swift renovation they had little chance of survival as autonomous states. But until the 1870s there was still room for doubt over the scale of the change and the speed of its happening. European resources were limited. Resistance or rebellion in their existing domains had made European governments hesitate to assume newliabilities. ‘It is well for our countrymen in China to understand', remarked
The Times
in 1875, ‘that we are not in the mood to undertake the responsibilities of another India.'
²
The restorative powers of Afro-Asian states were still regarded as plausible. The 1870s sawa sea change. By the end of the decade, a vast geopolitical crisis was unfolding across the still independent states of Afro-Eurasia: in the North African Maghrib; sub-Saharan Africa; the Ottoman, Egyptian and Iranian Middle East; the khanates of Central Asia; mainland South East Asia; and China. Here lay a mass of apparently failing states – what one contemporary statesman called ‘dying nations' and another the ‘outlived oriental states'. Their political systems seemed on the verge of collapse. Internal order was breaking down. Their finances were in chaos. They could
not defend their frontiers, which were often ill-defined. They had no means of protecting foreign property or persons. Violence, banditry and religious fanaticism threatened their old social order. The question was: what would become of them?