After Tamerlane (53 page)

Perhaps not surprisingly,
Hind Swaraj
was immediately banned as subversive by the government in India, and Gandhi himself was not to become an influential figure there until 1918. Some of the ideas he advanced – especially the need for cultural and economic self-sufficiency – were already at work in the so-called
swadeshi
campaign in Bengal after 1905, and in the polemical writing of the Congress politician Bal Gangadar Tilak. But they lacked the touch of political genius that Gandhi brought to them. It was the Gandhian model of political and cultural resistance, conceived at the high tide of Europe's imperial expansion, that was to turn Indian nationalism into a nonviolent mass movement in the inter-war years.

It would be wrong to underestimate the enormous impact of Western ideas and the extent to which they penetrated the thinking of almost every society exposed to Euro-American influence. This often had the consequence – all the more powerful for being insidious – that non-European peoples began to see themselves (as well as Europeans) partly in terms of Western ideas and prejudices. But it would be equally wrong to deny that much of that impact sprang from attraction and sympathy, not forced imposition. Individual freedom, representative government, the nation-state ideal, empirical science and Christian doctrines all exerted an enormous appeal in the non-Western world. Nor could this cultural influence simply be harnessed to colonial rule or deployed in the interests of imperial dominance. Its content was pluralistic and sometimes contradictory. It evoked responses that were unpredictable and varied. It encountered local cultural networks that were deeply entrenched, and where cultural attitudes were closely bound up with religious identity. There were few colonial regimes that were able or willing to displace the cultural ‘gatekeepers' of local society, whose cooperation had to be purchased by a form of cultural ‘contract'. And exactly the weapons through which Western ideas were so widely diffused – the print media, cheap travel and educational institutions – could be turned to the tasks of cultural renovation and resistance.

This could even be seen in the use that was made of the idea of ‘race', usually thought of as the heaviest weapon in Europe's cultural armoury. Although its basic assumption was that cultural differences were hereditary, European racism was an incoherent doctrine with no claim to precision. It blurred the distinction between cultural and physical attributes, despite the best efforts of its ‘scientific' practitioners. It relied on a bank of stereotyped descriptions to cope with the differences within Europe itself, and the huge variation in the cultures and peoples of the non-Western world. However, it was ‘vulgar' racism, not its ‘intellectual' variant, that had the most impact. Europeans living in Asia and Africa knewperfectly well that their status and income depended on claims of insurmountable difference between themselves and the locals. It required little ingenuity to attach these claims to the story of Europe's material advancement and to reinvent themselves as the indispensable agents of civilization and progress. The need for security, fears of disease, and a pervasive suspicion that, left to their own devices, unattached Europeans would simply ‘go native' (subverting the social and cultural order) encouraged varying degrees of segregation and separateness. Thus European racism often appeared less like a cultural theory than like a set of crude social attitudes, bluntly and often aggressively displayed.

But the idea of race did not remain a European (or Euro-American) monopoly. It was highly exportable. If being a ‘race' was the secret of European power, then its attractions were obvious. By the end of the century, the newChinese nationalism of Sun Yat-sen was deploying the notion of a distinctive Han race, the true Chinese nation. In colonial Bengal, where the Hindu
bhadralok
(‘respectable people') resented exclusion from government and the disparaging language of their colonial masters, nationalist rhetoric turned the racial tables. The ‘Hindu race' was much the most civilized. It shared its Aryan origins with the Europeans. It had a distinctive race mission – not political greatness or military power, but the exertion of ‘spiritual energy'. By the deliberate emphasis upon cultural difference (wearing indigenous clothing), a cult of physical strength and courage, and the rediscovery of a heroic past, Bengalis could acquire all the hallmarks of a ‘race', different from but as good as the European version.
¹⁰²
‘A
race that has a past… must also have a future,' remarked the magazine
Bharati
in 1904.
¹⁰³

Perhaps the most fascinating case of howthe racial idea was adapted can be seen in the career of Edward Wilmot Blyden.
¹⁰⁴
Blyden was born in the West Indies, and went first to America and then (in 1850) to Liberia, as part of the movement to bring freed slaves ‘home' to West Africa. He became a Presbyterian minister. Blyden's conviction that racial boundaries were hardening led him to argue that what Africans needed was a stronger sense of their racial identity. ‘We need some African power, some great centre of the race where our physical and intellectual strength may be collected,' he wrote. Blyden had in mind a West African nation, but it must, he insisted, be authentically African. Africans should avoid Western-style clothes.
¹⁰⁵
They should preserve indigenous custom. They should also avoid interracial marriage.
¹⁰⁶
(Blyden believed that only ‘pure' blacks could foster African nationalism, and rejected the idea of ‘race amalgamation'.)
¹⁰⁷
In
Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race
(1887) he argued that Islam was more suited to Africa than the Christian religion. Intriguingly, Blyden, who served for a time as a colonial official in Sierra Leone, saw no conflict between his racial ideals and his project of building a West African nation under the auspices of British imperial power. But it was already apparent, before 1914, that the appeal to race could be used as much against Europe's hegemony as on its behalf.

By the 1880s, Europeans and Americans had been probing the commercial promise of East Asia for more than a century. They had pushed commercial bridgeheads (the ‘treaty ports') into China and Japan, and subjected both countries to ‘unequal treaties' that gave extraterritorial privileges to foreign residents and property. They had enforced a low-tariff regime in the interests of their trade. They had fought two wars against China to assert these rights and extend them more widely. They had forced the Ch'ing emperor to admit the diplomatic equality of the Western states and adopt (in 1876) the
European practice of resident ambassadors.
¹⁰⁸
But in 1880, despite the scale of the foreign presence, they were far from imposing on China as a whole (let alone on Japan) the kind of colonial subjection – or even semi-colonial dominance – that was fast becoming the rule elsewhere in Afro-Asia.

One reason for this was that East Asia was still comparatively remote from Europe, and the volume of trade between the two regions was considerably less than that between Europe and India (not to mention the Americas). But the Europeans' caution also reflected China's huge residual strength as a unified culture and a working political system. The adventurers and filibusters who shot their way into Africa, and carved out private empires with a handful of mercenaries, would have had short shrift in China. The cultural and political fragmentation that made it so easy for European intruders to pick up local allies in Africa had no counterpart here. There was a similar pattern on the commercial front. European merchants in their treaty-port godowns were in no position to control internal trade. They faced a highly organized commercial life, entrenched behind the barriers of language and China's complicated currency. They were forced by necessity to deal through the large Chinese merchants, who acted as ‘compradors' (go-betweens) for the Western firms.
¹⁰⁹
As late as 1893, this commercial relationship could still be portrayed on the Chinese side as one of mutual benefit, not foreign exploitation.
¹¹⁰
For all its travails in the middle years of the century, the imperial political structure was still in operation under the reformist rule of Li Hung-chang, the most powerful official for most of the period between 1870 and 1900. The ethnic consciousness of the Han majority had yet to be roused fully against the Manchu ruling caste who manned the inner citadel of the Ch'ing regime.
¹¹¹
Not least, perhaps, the Ch'ing imperial government, with its tradition of parsimony, had studiously avoided incurring foreign debts, the Trojan Horse of outside interference. By the conciliatory treatment of the foreign enclaves and interests – and allowing expatriate management (under Chinese authority) in the sensitive sphere of maritime customs – Peking hoped to forestall a violent confrontation while China ‘self-strengthened'.

Yet Manchu prestige and the stability of Ch'ing rule also depended upon China's central place in the East Asian ‘world order'. The
Ch'ing's greatest achievement had been to attach the vast Inner Asian hinterland of Tibet, Sinkiang, Mongolia and Manchuria to the East Asian heartland of China proper. Foreign penetration of this imperial periphery threatened to unravel this far-flung network of power. In the 1880s the Europeans chipped away. The Russians pressed forward from Central Asia. The British conquered upper Burma. France forced Peking to abandon its claim to the suzerainty of Annam (much of modern Vietnam). But it was the fate of Korea that brought on the crisis. Korea was vulnerable to external pressure from Russia (which envied its ice-free ports) and Japan. Its Confucian polity had been badly shaken by domestic opponents, some of them Christians. Yet the Peking court could not run the risk that Korea might lean towards another power and cut its long-standing ties with China. The ‘hermit kingdom' was the maritime gateway into Inner Asia. It was the springboard for advance into the empty space of Manchuria. Its loss might destabilize much of China's steppe diplomacy, turning Inner Asia into a hostile borderland. So when a Japanese-backed coup overthrew Korea's sinophile regime in 1894, Peking refused to back down. But, in the short war that followed between July 1894 and March 1895, it was China that suffered a humiliating defeat.

The Treaty of Shimonoseki (in April 1895) unleashed a whirlwind of change. It forced China to recognize the independence of Korea. Part of Manchuria was to be transferred to Japan, as well as Taiwan and the Pescadore islands. China had to pay a huge financial indemnity, equal to a year's worth of its public revenue. Among China's literate class – the provincial scholar-gentry on whose loyalty it depended – the Ch'ing dynasty suffered a devastating loss of prestige. To make matters worse, the imperial government was now forced to borrowabroad to help pay the indemnity and recoup its shattered military strength. Among the European powers, already alarmed by symptoms of impending collapse, this set off a race to lend China money, secured against the collateral of territorial and commercial rights. Russia led the way with a loan in return for Peking's permission to build a railway across Manchuria to its new eastern city at Vladivostok, along with an eighty-year lease to exploit the economic resources found along the line.
¹¹²
In 189 8 Germany, Russia and Britain each acquired a naval base in North China near the maritime approach to
Peking. The great powers made agreements among themselves on the zones where they would have preference in the concessions for railways that the Ch'ing government now seemed poised to grant. In this feverish climate, the imperial court suddenly announced a long list of decrees to reform education, the army and the bureaucratic system along lines broadly similar to Meiji Japan. Before they could be implemented, the emperor's mother, the notorious dowager empress (Tz'u-hsi), staged a
coupd'
éta
t
and dismissed the reformers. Into the bitter atmosphere of political conflict burst the violent disorders aimed against Christian conversions in north-east China, the Boxer Rebellion of 1898–1900. With the complicity of the court, the Boxers (literally the ‘Fists of Righteous Harmony', a fiercely anti-Christian movement) and their sympathizers occupied Peking, cut off the city, and besieged the foreign legations. If the aim was to enlist xenophobic mass feeling in defence of the dynasty (the Boxer slogan was ‘Support the Ch'ing, exterminate the foreigner'), it backfired spectacularly. The foreign powers (the Europeans, Americans and Japanese) sent a large armed force (45,000 men) to rescue their diplomats and punish the Boxers. It seemed that China's rulers had blundered willy-nilly into an armed confrontation with the rest of the world.

The outcome inevitably was further humiliation. The dowager empress and her court fled the city. Another huge indemnity was imposed upon China. Under the terms of the Boxer settlement, the Chinese government was also forced to agree tariff reforms that would favour foreign trade. Browbeaten by the ‘diplomatic body' – the collective weight of the foreign ambassadors – it seemed almost certain that Peking would yield railway concessions that extended foreign control deep into the Chinese interior. At the same time, there was every sign that the invading armies that had suppressed the Boxers would be slowto leave. More than two years later, despite a promise to go, Manchuria was occupied by nearly 150,000 Russian soldiers.
¹¹³
The momentum towards an economic share-out, or even a territorial scramble as the other powers reacted to Russia's aggrandizement, nowseemed unstoppable.

Yet China escaped partition and the economic tutelage from which foreign commercial interests had hoped to profit. The reasons were complex. There was, in the first place, almost no chance that the great
powers could agree on a share-out in the way they had just done in Africa. The Russians might have liked an empire in North China. But the British, whose commercial interest was much the largest, were determined not to agree on a split. This was partly because of the viewin London that there should be ‘no more Indias' – vast Asian possessions to defend and control – least of all a ‘second India' with a Russian army on its doorstep.
¹¹⁴
That the Boxer crisis coincided with Britain's embarrassing difficulty in defeating the Boers, and growing war-weariness in public opinion at home, would have made any such scheme a form of political suicide. An undivided China, with a compliant government, was a much better prospect for both trade and investment. So the British and Americans (whose outlook was similar) encouraged Japan to oppose Russia's forward movement, and in 1902 the British concluded a regional pact, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, promising military (i.e. naval) support if Japan came to blows with more than one great power – that is, if France, Russia's ally, were to enter the fray.
¹¹⁵
Neither France nor Germany, the remaining great powers with an interest in China, had sufficient incentive or adequate means to try to enforce a partition against London and Washington.