The New Penguin History of the World (148 page)

5
The European World Hegemony

By 1900 the peoples of Europe and European stocks overseas dominated the globe. They did so in many ways, some explicit and some implicit, but the qualifications matter less than the general fact. For the most part, the world responded to European initiatives and marched increasingly to European tunes. This was a unique development in world history. For the first time, one civilization established itself as a leader worldwide. One minor consequence is that the remainder of this book will be increasingly concerned with a single, global, history; indeed, by 1914 the first climax of what is now called ‘globalization’ had been reached.

It is important not to think only of the direct formal rule of the majority of the world’s land surface by European states (some people would prefer the term ‘western’ but this is unnecessarily finicky – the Americas and Antipodes are dominated by culture of European origin, not of Asian or African – and is also liable to mislead, because of the use of that word recently in a narrow political sense). There is economic and cultural hegemony to be considered, and European ascendancy was often expressed in influence as well as in overt control. The important distinction is between European forces which are aggressive, shaping, manipulative, and indigenous cultures and peoples which are the objects of those forces, and not often able to resist them effectively. It was by no means always to the disadvantage of non-Europeans that this was so, but they tended almost always to be the underdogs, those who had to adapt to the Europeans’ world. At times they did so willingly, when they succumbed to the attractive force of Europe’s progressive ideals or, most subtly of all, to new sets of expectations aroused by European teaching and example.

One way of envisaging the Europeans’ world of 1900 is as a succession of concentric circles. The innermost was old Europe itself, which had grown in wealth and population for three centuries thanks to an increasing mastery first of its own and then of the world’s resources. Europeans distinguished themselves more and more from other human beings by taking and consuming a growing share of the world’s goods and by the
energy and skill they showed in manipulating their environment. Their civilization was already rich in the nineteenth century and was all the time getting richer. Industrialization had confirmed its self-feeding capacity to open up and create new resources; furthermore, the power generated by new wealth made possible the appropriation of the wealth of other parts of the world. The profits of Congo rubber, Burmese teak or Persian oil would not for a long time be reinvested in those countries. The poor European and American benefited from low prices for raw materials, and improving mortality rates tell the story of an industrial civilization finding it possible to give its peoples a richer life. Even the European peasant could buy cheap manufactured clothes and tools while his contemporaries in Africa and India still lived in the Stone Age.

This wealth was shared by the second circle of European hegemony, that of the European cultures transplanted overseas. The United States is the greatest example; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the countries of South America make up the list. They did not all stand on the same footing towards the Old World, but together with Europe proper they were what is sometimes called the ‘Western world’, an unhelpful expression, since they are scattered all around the globe. Yet it seeks to express an important fact: the similarity of the ideas and institutions from which they were sprung. Of course, these were not all that had shaped them. They all had their distinctive frontiers, they all had faced special environmental challenges and unique historical circumstances. But what they had in common were ways of dealing with these challenges, institutions which different frontiers would reshape in different ways. They were all formally Christian – no one ever settled new lands in the name of atheism until the twentieth century – all regulated their affairs by European systems of law, and all had access to the great cultures of Europe with which they shared their languages.

In 1900 this world was sometimes called the ‘civilized world’. It was called that just because it was a world of shared standards; the confident people who used the phrase could not easily see that there was much else deserving of the name of civilization in the world. When they looked for it, they tended to see only heathen, backward, benighted peoples or a few striving to join the civilized. This was one reason why Europeans were so successful; what were taken to be demonstrations of the inherent superiority of European ideas and values nerved men to fresh assaults on the world and inspired fresh incomprehension of it. The progressive values of the eighteenth century provided new arguments for superiority to reinforce those originally stemming from religion. By 1800, Europeans had lost most of the respect they had once showed for other civilizations. Their own
social practice seemed obviously superior to the unintelligible barbarities found elsewhere. The advocacy of individual rights, a free press, universal suffrage, the protection of women, children (and even animals) from exploitation, have been ideals pursued right down to our own day in other lands by Europeans and Americans, often wholly unconscious that they might be inappropriate. Philanthropists and progressives long continued to be confident that the values of European civilization should be universalized, as were its medicine and sanitation, even when deploring other assertions of European superiority. Science, too, has often seemed to point in the same direction, to the destruction of superstition and the bringing of the blessings of a rational exploitation of resources, the provision of formal education and the suppression of backward social customs. There was a well-nigh universal assumption that the values of European civilization were better than indigenous ones (obviously, too, they often were) and a large obliviousness to any disruptive effects they might have.

Fortunately, it was thought, for the peoples of some of the lands over which ‘thick darkness brooded yet’ (as one Victorian hymn put it), they were by 1900 often ruled directly by Europeans or European stocks: subject peoples formed the third concentric circle through which European civilization radiated outwards. In many colonies enlightened administrators toiled to bring the blessings of railways, Western education, hospitals, law and order to peoples whose own institutions had clearly failed (it was taken as evidence of their inadequacy that they had failed to stand up to the challenge and competition of a superior civilization). Even when native institutions were protected and preserved, it was from a position which assumed the superiority of the culture of the colonial power.

A consciousness of such superiority is no longer admired or admissible, even if secretly cherished. In one respect, nevertheless, it achieved an end which the most scrupulous critics of colonialism still accept as good, even when suspecting the motives behind it. This was the abolition of slavery in the European world and the deployment of force and diplomacy to combat it even in countries Europeans did not control. The crucial steps were taken in 1807 and 1834, when the British parliament abolished first the trade in slaves and then slavery itself within the British Empire. This action by the major naval, imperial and commercial power was decisive; similar measures were soon enforced by other European nations, and slavery finished in the United States in 1865. The end of the process may be reckoned to be the emancipation of slaves in Brazil in 1888, at which date colonial governments and the Royal Navy were pressing hard on the operations of Arab slave-traders in the African continent and the Indian Ocean. Many forces, intellectual, religious, economic and political, went
into this great achievement, and debate about their precise individual significance continues. It is perhaps worth pointing out here that though it was only after three hundred years and more of large-scale slave-trading that abolition came, Europe’s is also the only civilization which has ever eradicated slavery for itself. Though in the present century slavery briefly returned to Europe, it could not be sustained except by force, nor was it openly avowable as slavery. It cannot have been much consolation to their unhappy occupants, but the forced-labour camps of our own century were run by men who had to pay the tribute of hypocrisy to virtue either by denying their existence or by disguising their slaves as the subjects of re-education or judicial punishment.

Beyond this outermost circle of directly ruled territories lay the rest of the world. Its peoples were shaped by Europe, too. Sometimes their values and institutions were corroded by contact with it – as was the case in the Chinese and Ottoman empires – and this might lead to indirect European political interference as well as the weakening of traditional authority. Sometimes they were stimulated by such contacts and exploited them: Japan is the only example of an important nation doing this with success. What was virtually impossible was to remain untouched by Europe. The busy, bustling energy of the European trader would alone have seen to that. In fact, it is the areas which were not directly ruled by Europeans which make the point of European supremacy most forcibly of all. European values were transferred on the powerful wings of aspiration and envy. Geographical remoteness was almost the only security (but even Tibet was invaded by the British in 1904). Ethiopia is virtually the solitary example of successful independence; it survived British and Italian invasion in the nineteenth century, but, of course, had the important moral advantage of claiming to have been a Christian country, albeit not a Western one and only intermittently, for some fourteen centuries.

Whoever opened the door, a whole civilization was likely to try to follow them through it, but one of the most important agencies bringing European civilization to the rest of the world had always been Christianity, because of its virtually limitless interest in all sides of human behaviour. The territorial spread of the organized churches and the growth in their numbers of official adherents in the nineteenth century made this the greatest age of Christian expansion since apostolic times. Much of this was the result of a renewed wave of missionary activity; new orders were set up by Catholics, new societies for the support of overseas missions appeared in Protestant countries. Yet the paradoxical effect was the intensifying of the European flavour of what was supposedly a creed for all sorts and conditions of men. In most of the receiving countries, Christianity was long
seen as just one more aspect of European civilization, rather than as a spiritual message which might use a local idiom. An interesting if trivial example was the concern missionaries often showed over dress. Whereas the Jesuits in seventeenth-century China had discreetly adopted the costume of their hosts, their nineteenth-century successors set to work with zeal to put Bantus and Solomon Islanders into European garments which were often of almost freakish unsuitability. This was one way in which Christian missionaries diffused more than a religious message. Often, too, they brought important material and technical benefits: food in time of famine, agricultural techniques, hospitals and schools, some of which could be disruptive of the societies which received them. Through them filtered the assumptions of a progressive civilization.

The ideological confidence of Europeans, missionaries and non-missionaries alike, could rest in the last resort on the knowledge that they could not be kept away, even from countries which were not colonized. There appeared to be no part of the world where Europeans could not, if they wished, impose themselves by armed strength. The development of weapons in the nineteenth century gave Europeans an even greater relative advantage than they had enjoyed when the first Portuguese broadside was fired at Calicut. Even when advanced devices were available to other peoples, they could rarely deploy them effectively. At the battle of Omdur-man in the Sudan in 1898 a British regiment opened fire on its opponents at 2,000 yards’ range with the ordinary magazine rifle of the British army of the day. Soon afterwards, shrapnel shell and machine-guns were shredding to pieces the masses of the Mahdist army, who never reached the British line. By the end of the battle 10,000 of them had been killed for a loss of 48 British and Egyptian soldiers. It was not, though, as an Englishman put it soon afterwards, simply the case that

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not
,

for the Khalifa had machine-guns in his armoury at Omdurman, too. He also had telegraph apparatus to communicate with his forces and electric mines to blow up the British gunboats on the Nile. But none of these things was properly employed; not only a technical, but a mental transformation was required before non-European cultures could turn the instrumentation of the Europeans against them.

There was also one other sense, more benevolent and less disagreeable, in which European civilization rested upon force. This was because of the
pax Britannica
which throughout the whole nineteenth century stood in the way of European nations fighting each other for mastery of the
non-European world. There was to be no re-run of the colonial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the nineteenth, although the greatest extension of direct colonial rule in modern times was then going on. Traders of all nations could move without let or hindrance on the surface of the seas. British naval supremacy was a precondition of the informal expansion of European civilization.

It guaranteed, above all, the international framework of trade whose centre, by 1900, was Europe. The old peripheral exchanges by a few merchants and enterprising captains had, from the seventeenth century onwards, been replaced gradually by integrated relationships of interdependence based on a broad distinction of role between industrial and non-industrial countries; the second tended to be primary producers meeting the needs of the increasingly urbanized populations of the first. But this crude distinction needs much qualification. Individual countries often do not fit it; the United States, for example, was both a great primary producer and the world’s leading manufacturing power in 1914, with an output as great as those of Great Britain, France and Germany together. Nor was this distinction one which ran exactly between nations of European and non-European culture. Japan and Russia were both industrializing faster than China or India in 1914, but Russia, though European, Christian and imperialist, could certainly not be regarded as a developed nation, and most Japanese (like most Russians) were still peasants. Nor could a developed economy be found in Balkan Europe. All that can be asserted is that in 1914 a nucleus of advanced countries existed with social and economic structures quite different from those of traditional society, and that these were the core of an Atlantic group of nations which was increasingly the world’s main producer and consumer.