The Transformation of the World (23 page)

Japan began earlier to focus on events in the outside world and on their spatial aspects. In the mid-seventeenth century, when Japan sealed itself off from Europeans, the Tokugawa shogunate constructed a kind of foreign secret service to gather intelligence about events in mainland Asia, especially the dramatic conquest of China by the Manchurian Qing Dynasty between the 1640s and 1680s.
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There were fears that the “barbarian” Manchus would stage a repetition of the attempted thirteenth-century Mongol invasion of Japan. The eighteenth century saw the development of “Holland studies” (
rangaku
), when a small number of European employees of the Dutch East India Company were allowed to reside in the country under strict conditions and close supervision. In the port city of Nagasaki, where they were allocated a special trading post, a whole hierarchy of translators busied itself with the evaluation of literature in Dutch (and later in English and Russian) for the use of politicians and scholars. Consequently in 1800 the Japanese were much better informed than the Chinese about the West and its colonial activities in Asia.

The real “discovery” of the West, however, had to wait until the opening up of the country in the 1850s, when Western geography began to receive widespread attention and methodical attempts were made to collect information and impressions from abroad. In 1871 forty-nine Japanese dignitaries and senior officials, comprising half of the ruling oligarchy, set off on a journey of discovery to the United States and Europe that was planned to last one and a half years. Some things were already known from books, and from nearly two centuries of diplomatic contacts. But much else surprised those who took part in this “Iwakura mission” (named after its leader): not only the strange lifestyle habits of foreigners but also Japan's backwardness in many fields, the differences between Europe and America, the decline of the level of civilization within Europe as one moved farther east from Paris and London, and above all the fact that Europe's spectacular successes had been achieved only within the past few decades.
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Two concurrent and in many ways related processes unfolded in the second half of the nineteenth century.
First
, European professional and amateur geographers pursued their program of discovery more systematically than ever before, increasingly competing with one another along national lines. Blank patches on the world map were gradually filled in, and travelers and geographers produced
a growing body of knowledge that was of direct use to colonial and imperial rulers. At the same time,
local
cartography became more sophisticated. After all, the first map of Paris that accurately reflected the lay of its buildings dated only from the beginning of the 1780s, not as a service to tourists but as a tool for the resolution of property issues.
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The result was a new standard in the objective, nonperspectival, geodetically precise depiction of the world—a scientific representation of the earth's surface, not a mental image of it tied to a particular place. The completion of this endeavor before the First World War contributed to the worldwide prestige of Euro-American geoscience. Military leaders were grateful for this material, and the better quality of maps served the Japanese well in their wars against China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05).

Second
, this greater objectivity went hand in hand with a general rearrangement of subjective spatial images. Horizons widened, centers lost their centrality. Many observers suddenly realized that they were no longer in the middle of a world of their own but on the periphery of newly developing larger contexts, such as the international system of states or trade and finance networks. New centers and reference points made their appearance. For example, after 1868, Japan changed its orientation away from nearby China toward the faraway, but militarily and economically closer, “West”—until it rediscovered mainland Asia thirty years later as a space for its own imperial expansion. Societies whose eyes had been turned inland realized that they faced new and unprecedented threats from overseas, but also that new opportunities seemed to be opening up from the same direction. New prospects beckoned to established imperial centers: the Ottoman leadership, for one, as it was gradually being pushed out of the Balkans, began to discover the potential value of Arabia.

4 Spaces of Interaction: Land and Sea

Historical geography works with various concepts of “space” that can also be used for questions relating to world history. Five concepts are especially important; they lead to distinctly different types of narrative.
⁶⁸

(a)
Space as a distribution of places—histories of localization.
How are phenomena from different times distributed in space, and is it possible to detect any regularities in the study of their distribution? Such questions suggest themselves in the history of population settlement, for example, including the spatial form of urbanization in the nineteenth century. They also arise in agrarian history with regard to the distribution of land use and enterprise types, or in the history of industrialization in areas close to abundant natural resources.
⁶⁹
This approach is helpful not least because it can address the spread of institutions, technologies, and practices beyond national boundaries—for example, the printing press, the steam engine, or the agricultural cooperative. It also includes spatial analysis of epidemics or the use of particular languages. All this can be graphically presented on maps in cross sections over time.

(b)
Space as environment—histories of
Natura naturans
and
Natura naturata. How do human communities interact with their natural environment? Whereas the spaces of localized histories are rather empty and formal areas on which relations, proportions, and classifications are projected, those of environmental history may be understood as action spaces. The life of society rests upon natural premises: climate, soil quality, access to water and natural resources. Distance from the sea is also an important variable. The fact that Britain and Japan are both archipelagoes, for instance, cannot be totally disregarded.
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As far as
world
history is concerned, Felipe Fernández-Armesto has suggested a sweeping environmental approach: he looks for correspondences between environmental conditions and forms of civilization, developing a typology of natural forms as they put their imprint on the evolution of societies: desert, uncultivable grassland, alluvial soil, temperate woodland, tropical lowland, highland, mountain, coastland, and so on
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The early nineteenth century was the last period when such habitats had an inescapable impact on social life in many parts of the world. In the industrial age, which for most of the world began only after mid-century, intervention in nature was greater than ever before. Industrialization signified a huge increase in the capacity of societies to reshape nature; major technological changes to environmental space as a result of transport, mining, or land reclamation became a hallmark of the times. They were machine-driven operations. Later, the twentieth century became the age of chemistry (use of artificial fertilizer to raise agricultural output, exploitation of oil and rubber, development of synthetic materials).

(c)
Space as landscape—histories of the experience of nature.
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The concept of landscape opens up the question of cultural specificity. Societies—or rather, parts of societies—differ according to whether they are conscious of the landscape and, if so, to what degree. Paul Cézanne once remarked that the peasants of Provence had never “seen” the Montagne Saint-Victoire—the mountain near Aix that he painted numerous times.
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What this implies, more generally, is that agrarian societies labored “naively” in and with natural environments, but did not gaze in admiration at landscapes. Of course, a word of warning about unhistorical, “culturalist” ascriptions is in order here. The Chinese, for example, had no “typical” attitude to the environment:
everything
, from ruthless exploitation and destruction to careful resource husbandry and delicate landscape poetry and painting, could and did appear at various times and in various social constellations.
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From a transnational point of view, the most interesting processes are transfers—for example, the reception of the Asian garden aesthetic in Europe or the export of certain ideal landscapes by European settlers.
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The reading of landscapes also has a history, as does the judgment of what constitutes a threat to, or destruction of, nature.

(d)
Space as region—histories of localized identities.
In any space, a central question concerns the factors that underlie its unity and make it possible to speak of an integrated context. In the optic of global history, regions are spaces
of interaction constituted by dense networks of transport and migration, trade and communications. But they may also be understood as subnational units, since actual historical interactions, even over large distances, take place most often between territories that are smaller in size than nation-states. Networks are formed between regions. One region dispatches migrants, while another receives them; one region produces raw materials while another, on a remote continent, consumes or processes them. The economic center of the British Empire was not “Great Britain” but London and southern England.
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Even comparisons are often meaningful or permissible only between regions. Thus the results are different if we compare the whole of Britain with the whole of China or only central and southern England with the regions around Shanghai and Nanjing (which have been economic powerhouses for centuries
⁷⁷
). Of course, it is not always easy to establish what constitutes a region. Galicia, for example, in east-central Europe, was generally recognized in the nineteenth century as a small distinct region with a multiplicity of sharply divided nations, languages, and religions—one defined more by contrasts than by unity, whose main function was that of a bridge.
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There are many similar cases of an in-between zone characterized by a high degree of ambiguity and instability.

(e)
Space as arena of contact—histories of interaction.
Spaces of interaction are spheres in which more than one civilization is in ongoing contact with another, and in which, despite manifold tensions and incompatibilities, new hybrid formations repeatedly come about. Since, in the age before air travel, ships were especially important in ensuring multicultural diversity and interaction, the oceans have been among the favorite spaces of global historians.
⁷⁹
But their main focus of attention has been the early modern period; many interactive contexts are waiting to be explored for the nineteenth century.

The Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

Ever since Fernand Braudel published his classic work in 1949 (a thoroughly revised edition came out in 1966), the Mediterranean and the “Mediterranean world” have been the prototype of a space of maritime interaction.
⁸⁰
Despite the successive rise and fall of Roman, Arab, Christian-Italian, and Ottoman dominance, the Mediterranean area was characterized over the centuries by “dense fragmentation complemented by a striving toward control of communications.”
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In the nineteenth century we see contradictory developments. On the one hand, the North established an unparalleled maritime and colonial presence in the form of the riparian French state (with interests in North Africa), the Russian Black Sea fleet (rebuilt after the Crimean War), and above all the external power of Great Britain, which occupied the key strategic points from Gibraltar through Malta and Egypt to Cyprus; meanwhile the once respectable Ottoman navy disappeared as a force, as did the Algerian pirates. On the other hand, the
entire
Mediterranean region, including the Balkans and the French, British, and Italian colonies to the south, fell ever further behind economically as industry
progressed north of the Alps. While Black Sea links forged by medieval Genoa were strengthened, Odessa developed into a major port, and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, transformed the Mediterranean into one of the main transit routes in the world.
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Historically minded anthropologists have long debated whether, over and above the geographical distances and the opposition between Islam and Latin or Greek Orthodox Christendom, it is possible to speak of a cultural unity at a more fundamental level, expressed for example in the traditional value of “honor.”
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The fact that the question can be posed with even a minimum of justification testifies to the
relatively
high degree of integration of the Mediterranean region.

Concentration on the oceans has long distracted attention from all the Mediterranean-type areas of water that were easier than the high seas for a sailing ship to navigate, and whose clear layout facilitated a high frequency of contacts. The Baltic and the North Sea are such “medi-terranean” seas or secondary arms of the oceans; so too are the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, and even the North American Great Lakes, around which several Indian civilizations grew up.

A Braudelian approach—which also involves inserting coastal hinterlands and port cities into the picture—was first transferred to the Indian Ocean. The most imaginative author to try this out was K. N. Chaudhuri, who moved from a fairly conventional history of interaction centered on long-distance trade to a grand canvas of four civilizations that developed on the ocean shores.
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Unlike in Braudel's Mediterranean, where sixteenth-century Christians and Muslims had at least the inkling of a common destiny, historical subjects in the arc stretching from East Africa to Java—and in Chaudhuri's later vision, even to China—lacked any sense that they belonged together.
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The early strong positing of culturally “alien” agents in trade was a peculiarity of this interaction space. The old notion that Europe's East India trading companies dominated trade in the Indian Ocean before the nineteenth century may have become untenable, but rigorous quantitative research has also corrected the opposite view that early modern European trade in Asia dealt only in unimportant luxury goods.
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