The Transformation of the World (86 page)

The main project in the nineteenth century was the draining of the 18,000-hectare Haarlemermeer between 1836 and 1852. This low-lying lake, in the middle of Holland province, had taken shape during the storm floods of autumn 1836 and wreaked havoc with the road system, in particular the technically advanced interurban
straatwegen
(made of brick and natural stone) of which the Dutch were especially proud. There were also fears that the ever-expanding Haarlemermeer would endanger Amsterdam and Leiden, while a new concern with economic policy focused on the employment effects. The drainage was organized along modern lines that are still customary in infrastructural projects. Precise scientific calculations preceded and accompanied the work; legal experts were hired to reconcile the numerous interests of people living on the shores of the lake. The project was put out to tender and entrusted to private firms. The laborers, known as
polderjongens
, worked in teams of eight to twelve under an overseer. Most of them were single, but some brought along their family and lived with them in reed and straw crofts near the construction site. In summer, at the height of activity, several thousand workers would be employed at the same time. Like other projects on this scale, it did not fail to pose health risks as well as problems to do with crime and the supply of drinking water. From 1848 on, the project was able to employ British steam pumps and three large pumping stations—another example of the diverse application of steam engines outside industrial production.
²²⁶
By 1852 the Haarlemermeer was dried out and could be slowly converted into farmland. Today's Schiphol Airport lies on part of this reclaimed land.
²²⁷

All frontiers have an ecological dimension. They are both social and natural spaces. This does not mean that social relations should be naturalized frontier-style: the expulsion of hunting peoples is something different from the
evacuation of seawater; nomads and steppe are not indistinguishable elements of one and the same “wilderness.”
²²⁸
However, the rollback of steppe, desert, or rainforest always entails that habitat is destroyed and that the people living there lose their livelihood. The nineteenth century was the period in world history when resource development reached its maximum extent, and when frontiers acquired a social and even political significance they have never had before or since. In today's zones of rainforest destruction, or in outer space, no new societies are being formed as they were in the nineteenth-century United States, Argentina, Australia, or Kazakhstan. Many frontiers—not only the one in the United States—were “closed” around 1930. Often they had originated in the early modern period, but it was the nineteenth century that founded a new era of mass migration, settler economies, capitalism, and colonial warfare. Many frontiers had a “posthistory” in the twentieth century, as we can see in the stateorganized colonial subjugation of “living space” between 1930 and 1945, or in the giant social and environmental projects conducted under the banner of socialism, or in the politically driven expansion of the Han Chinese, who in the late twentieth century turned Tibetans into a minority in their own land.

Frontiers were many things in the nineteenth century: spaces of cultivation and increased production, magnets for migration, disputed zones where empires came into contact with one another, focal points in the formation of classes, spheres of ethnic conflict and violence, birthplaces of settler democracy and racial domination, breeding grounds of phantasms and ideologies. For a time frontiers became major foci of historical dynamics. Only a conception of the epoch narrowly centered on industrialization will limit this dynamic to the factories and furnaces of Manchester, Essen, or Pittsburgh. As far as its consequences are concerned, we should not overlook an important distinction. Industrial workers in Europe, the United States, and Japan became increasingly integrated into society, creating organizations to represent their interests and improving their material lot from generation to generation. But the victims of frontier expansion were excluded, dispossessed, and disenfranchised. Only in recent years have courts in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a few other countries begun to recognize many of their legal claims, while governments have accepted moral responsibility and apologized for past misdeeds.

CHAPTER VIII

 

Imperial Systems and Nation-States

The Persistence of Empires

1 Great-Power Politics and Imperial Expansion

All the chapters in this book have something to say on empire and colonialism. That aspect of the nineteenth century is omnipresent, as it has to be in any attempt to employ a world-historical perspective. Thus, there is no need to provide a comprehensive overview of the various empires and to cover the standard topics of imperial history.
¹
Nor is it necessary to join the debate about the peculiar position of the nineteenth century in the long sweep of global power politics and economic dynamism, a debate that leads invariably to a probing of the roots and causes of the “great divergence” that made Europe and the United States—usually bracketed as “the West”—for some time the masters of the world. How this “virtuous circle of incessant growth” (John Darwin)
²
of wealth and power came about and how it is connected to empire has intrigued the greatest minds for the better part of two centuries. Recent attempts to solve this mystery of mysteries, formerly labeled “the rise of the West,” have been made (among others) by Daron Acemoglu, Robert C. Allen, John Darwin, Jared Diamond, Niall Ferguson. Jack A. Goldstone, David S. Landes, Ian Morris, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Jeffrey G. Williamson; the debate has been monitored by supreme critical spirits such as Patrick K. O'Brien or Peer Vries. In spite of all these efforts and a long tradition of reflection on the “European miracle” from Adam Smith via Karl Marx and Max Weber to Immanuel Wallerstein, E. L. Jones, and Douglass C. North, agreement is nowhere on the horizon, and even basic methodological issues—do all those great historians and social scientists address the same questions and do they agree on a strategy and logic of explanation?—remain to be solved. In this bewildering situation, the present essay sets itself a decidedly more modest task: it sees empire as a special type of
polity
³
and as a framework for social life and individual experience, and it simply argues that the nineteenth century was much more an age of empire than, as many European historians continue to believe and to teach, an age of nations and nation-states.

In the nineteenth century, empires and nation-states were the largest political units in which human beings led a common existence. By 1900 they were also the only ones with real weight in the world: nearly everybody lived under the rule of one or the other. There was no sign yet of world government or of supranational regulatory institutions. Only deep in rainforests, steppes, or polar regions did small ethnic groups live without paying tribute to a higher authority. Autonomous city-states no longer played any role: Venice, for centuries the epitome of a civic community well capable of defending itself, had lost its independence in 1797; the Republic of Geneva, after an interlude under French rule (1798–1813), had joined the Swiss Confederation in 1815 as a yet another canton.
⁴
Empires and nation-states provided the framework for the life of society. Only the communities of a few “world” religions—the Societas Christiana or the Muslim
umma—
had an even wider scope, but no political entity of similar extent corresponded to them. Empires and nation-states also had a second side to them. They were players on the special stage of “international relations.”

Driving Forces of International Politics

International politics is essentially about questions of war and peace. Until the state-organized mass murders of the twentieth century, war was the worst of man-made evils; its avoidance was therefore especially valued. Although the fame of conquerors might be more dazzling for a time, all civilizations have—at least in retrospect—thought more highly of rulers who created and preserved peace. Those who both won an empire and subsequently brought peace to it have enjoyed the highest esteem of all: Augustus or the Kangxi Emperor, for example. Like the apocalyptic horsemen that bring pestilence and famine, war attacks a society as a whole. Peace—the inconspicuous absence of war—is the basic prerequisite for civil life and material existence. Hence international politics is never an isolated sphere: it has a close interrelationship with all other aspects of reality. War is never without implications for economics, culture, or the environment, and other dramatic moments in history are usually associated with it. Revolutions often arise out of war (as in seventeenth-century England, the Paris Commune of 1871, or the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917) or flow into it (like the French Revolution of 1789). Only a few revolutions, such as those of 1989–91 in the Soviet sphere of hegemony, remained free of military consequences,
⁵
although the events of 1989–91 had indirect military causes too (the arms race of the “Cold War,” about which no one could ever be sure that it would not escalate into a hot confrontation).

This multiple interweaving with the life of society should not make us forget, however, that in modern Europe international politics has partly followed a logic of its own. There have been specialists in interstate relations ever since the emergence of (European) diplomacy in Renaissance Italy, and their thinking and values—for example, concepts of reasons of state, dynastic or national interests, or the prestige and honor of a ruler or state—have often been alien
to the ordinary subject or citizen. They constitute distinctive “codes,” rhetorics, and sets of rules. And it is precisely this ambiguity of autonomy
plus
social insertion which makes international politics such an intellectually appealing field for historians.

The nineteenth century saw the birth of international relations as we know it today. This has become especially apparent in recent years, because the end of the “bipolar” nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union brought to the fore many patterns of warfare and international behavior that remind one of the period before the Cold War or even the two world wars. But there is a major difference. Since 1945 it has no longer been self-evident that states wage war in order to impose their political objectives. By international agreement, offensive war has lost its legitimacy as a means of politics. The capacity to engage in it is no longer considered—as it still was in the nineteenth century—to be a proof of modernity, if we leave aside the symbolic importance of nuclear weapons for certain countries in Asia today. Five major nineteenth-century trends are identifiable.

First
. The American War of Independence (1775–81) represented a transitional form between the old duel led by officer castes and the role of patriotic militias. But it was the wars accompanying the French Revolution that established the principle of arming the people. The starting point was the decree of the National Convention on the
levée en masse
(August 23, 1793), which, coming after a four-year preparatory period, made all Frenchmen subject to permanent conscription.
⁶
The nineteenth century would be the first age in which mass armies were conceivable, and constant improvements soon appeared in their organization. Compulsory military service was introduced at various times in Europe (in Britain only in 1916), and there were wide variations in its practical effect and public acceptance. If, after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, such armies were seldom deployed over the next hundred years in international wars, the reasons were not only countervailing forces such as deterrence, the balance of power, and rational circumspection, but also the rulers' fear of the uncontrollable tiger of an armed people. Nevertheless, the instrument of the conscript army now existed. Especially where the armed forces were seen as an embodiment of the national will, not merely as a tool of the government, a new kind of war became a latent factor that could always be deployed.

Second
. In the nineteenth century it is possible to speak for the first time of an
international
politics that sets aside dynastic considerations and obeys an abstract concept of raison d'état. It presupposes that the normal unit of political and military action is not a princely ruler's arbitrary patrimonium but a state that defines and defends its own borders, with an institutional existence not dependent on any particular leadership personnel. This is, again in theory, a nation-state. But it is a special kind of state organization, which first emerged in the nineteenth century and began to spread hesitantly and unevenly around the world. International politics in the nineteenth century was acted out between
“powers” organized partly as nation-states, partly as empires. Practice conformed most closely to this model after other players had quit the stage: pirates and partisans, semiprivate military operators and warlords, transnational churches, multinational corporations, cross-border lobbies, and all other forces on a medium level of activity, forces that can be understood by the term
communauté intermédiaire.
⁷
Parliaments and democratic public opinion muddied the waters in new and unpredictable ways, and “foreign policy experts” went to great pains to restrict their influence. In this sense, the period from 1815 to the 1880s was the classical age of craftsmanship in interstate affairs, shielded to a higher degree than before or after from other intervening factors, and largely in the professional (though not necessarily capable) hands of diplomats and military men.
⁸
This by no means ruled out populist actions for public effect; we find them even in a traditionalist-authoritarian system like the Tsarist Empire.
⁹
The discovery that public opinion was not merely a pliant sounding board for official foreign policy but one of its driving and elementary forces pointed beyond the nineteenth-century understanding of politics. An early and dramatic example was the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which a jingoist mass-circulation press egged on the initially reluctant President William McKinley to confront the forces of (a by no means innocent) Spain.
¹⁰