1. Society of States
- by the end of the 19th century largely based upon the principle of sovereignty
2. Market (labour, goods, capital)
3. Culture (values, styles, etc)
(By the end of the 19th century - the globe can be thought of as a UNITED system)
- Naval Battle (Spain/Britain that didn't matter by the time anyone heard of it)
- Around the World in 80 days
- Three vessels of transportation by the end of the 19th century
- Communication
- Impact of international institutions
- European penetration of Africa in the 1880s
- Quinine
- Scramble for Africa amongst European powers (By the end of the 19th century all of Africa had been divided)
- United system (before the end of the 19th century it had been more locally bound)
- Inequality (reflected legally)
- Sovereign states (Europe mostly, controlled the world by 1900, colonies especially)
- Sovereign states (Europe mostly, controlled the world by 1900, colonies especially)
- Traditional empires (Ottoman, Persian, Chinese) - resentment by the start of the 20th c
- Between 1876-1915
- The other side of globalization - understanding the 20th c
- Conquest (Romans versus Europeans, Congo)
1. ordinary lives
2. cultural
3. religious
4. ideological
5. violent
- Japan
- Violence & technologies
- European expansion
1. markets 2. religion 3. culture
- War against societies (never quit)
- German Southwest Africa
- Imperialism as a pejorative (start of 20th c)
- Historical differences covered by term imperialism + political slogans into analytical categories
Phileas Fogg (Around the World in 80 days) - 1873
Bet his friends in the London Reform Club that he could go around the world in 80 days
Which at the time was thought to take about a year's time
But he did it, his achievement can be credited to
1. Canals (Suez most notably)
2. Steamboats (which had replaced the sail as the means of navigation of the sea)
3. Railroads (which by the beginning of the 19th century were distributed for the most part in Europe and densely populated parts of the United States)
The world had become a more interconnected place.
Communication
Telegraphs had made communication much quicker, you could do it very quickly (about 2 mins, at a price) via a cable that ran under the sea.
In addition to speed, these changes in the networks connecting the international system greatly increased the impact of international institutions of the market as well as of political power into parts of the world where it had been relatively remote and untouched.
European penetration of Africa in the 1880s:
The French have colonized Algeria
British and Boer settlement in South Africa
By and large the penetration is all along the coast where Europeans set up either colling stations for their navy, where they had once had ports where they could buy and transport slaves (which by the 1880s is done) but where there are in other words outposts for trade.
To get into Africa was a dangerous/lethal enterprise.
Dr. Livingston (British missionary) gets lost in Africa and is found by American journalist Henry Stanley - the idea that you could get lost is a sign of how divided and remote the world was.....Much harder to get lost by the beginning of the 20th century.
Steamboats that can navigate Africa's river
Railroads to transport men, goods, soldiers
Drugs like Quinine that can allow you to combat malaria that killed Europeans whenever they tried to get deeper inland
Scramble for Africa amongst European powers
By the end of the 19th century all of Africa had been divided (except Liberia - formed by Americans, Ethiopia)
Not under complete control of Europeans but the map of Africa had been redrawn
European power penetrated deeper into societies where it had not existed before
there had been empires, transnational institutions, extension of markets, but before the end of the 19th century it had been more locally bound like the roman/chinese empire
now a crisis at some far off part of the world would reverberate through the system
as with all societies, there is inequality within the society of states
profound differe
nces in wealth and strength - certainly true by the end of the 19th century
THE DIFFERENCE IS at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the world is an unequal place and these inequalities are reflected in the LEGAL conditions of states.
By 2008, these inequalities remain but are grafted onto a formal legal equality (small, impoverished state - still sovereign, in the UN)
In 1900 there were sovereign states (European), peripheral powers of Northern Europe, the US, and the smaller powers of central america (but practically dependent on the US), former colonies of Latin America.
The truly sovereign powers were the European ones, while the US was only beginning to play an international role. OF COURSE they had an army, control over their currency, schools, trade markets. It separated you from states with a QUALIFIED sovereignty (the traditional empires)
1. Ottomans
2. Persians
3. Chinese
they had monarchs, bureaucracies, etc.
but in china if a european committed a crime he was tried in a european court.
In both China & the Ottoman Empire, Europeans controlled economic institutions (bank in Constantinople) to control the Ottoman debt. In China the Europeans had picked up pieces of land over which they had sovereign power (parts of Shang Hai, Hong Kong)
These 3 empires did not technically meet the 2 requirements of sovereignty
By the start of the 20th century people deeply resented the insurgence on their sovereignty.
Echoes of this resentment still heard in the successors of these empires, Turkey, People's Republic of China & Iran.
Sovereignty means something very different for those to whom it is at risk, whereas in America understanding this takes an act of will to understand.
By 1900 much of the world was under European control:
Colonies
- Africa (last decades of 19th c)
- India (partly ruled directly by Britain, partly indirectly by satellite states in the north)
Between 1876-1915
1/4 of earth's surface was distributed or redistrubuted amongst a handful of great powers
The British, French and Germans (+ Belgium, Italy, USA) increased their land ownings significantly.
The OTHER side of globalization: The colonial world had increased
Europe = appendage to the great Eurasian empire whose wealth extended upon the globe
To understand the 20th c is to try to grasp what this meant
1. extension of european power
2. & what its dimantling meant
Conquest is a part of human history, history books are about conquest, about its extension and its resistance.
The conquest that created the international system is of a distinct kind, that has about it an intensity, pervasiveness that has few parallels. The Romans conquered, if you payed taxes and behaved yourself you were left alone, if not you were wept out.
European conquest is of a different sort. Economically, in this stage of industrial capitalism, European conquest means an intrusion into the ordinary lives of people (family relations & property). As more and more of the world become caught up in markets, labour, goods, capital - markets with a global extent.
In the Congo which was owned by the King of the Belgians, in order to harvest rubber and to export it, it was necessary to create a labour force (IMPOSED & FORCED)
Not always so violent ^ But everywhere the expansion of the markets, sale of european goods, mobilization of local labour, gave to the Europenization of the world a transformative quality.
The conquest earlier empires had rarely had.
The same was true of the CULTURAL dimensions of this European expansion, with it religion. In the course of the 19th c that Christianity for the 1st time in its history, a world religion.
The 19th c is the great age of missionaries (christian) - throughout asia & africa.
Ideology spreads as well - people in the Ottoman empire, China, throughout Asian & Africa, intellectuals, local leaders, watching this expansion of European power ask themselves how they do it (being such a small group of people)
The only non-european state to take the european example and turn it against the europeans is JAPAN. Its leaders strived to establish a new european style empire, with its people like the europeans as well. So they studied European institutions & millitary. The Japanese case reminds us that as powerful as the desire to emulate Europe might have been, it didn't make people the same. The Japanse also knew they had to preserve their own national identity, to graft these European institutions on a sense of nationhood & on a sense of distinct national character.
Politics always rest on the potential for violence, transformative.
In the European expansion of the world, especially in its final phase, the degree of violence is intense.
Europe is a relatively peaceful place in the 19th c (compared to 18th and 20th)
But it is a great EXPORTER of violence
Behind the expansion of European MARKETS, RELIGION & CULTURE there is the Europeans' ability to impose their will. Partly due to their command over new technologies of violence => rifle, machine gun, airplane (start of 20th c.)
as well as to organize and project power
Railroad => as important as guns for deployment of troops and exerting of European will.
Europeans use a relatively small # of their own troops and large # of armed native allies.
Congo => ruled by a few 100 Belgian soldiers and a large # of African regulars who act as European agents.
The expansion of European power => very often preceded by a military disaster => But the Europeans never quit (same of the American cavalry) ~~:o~~~:o (ie Custard's Stand)
They fight what is a total war, not war between states in which you seek for advantage, and then have compromise and treaties, it is a war against societies, in which the exercise of violence results in the destruction of a way of life. Where resistance is evoked and a desperate dialectic of violence, terror, counter-terror ensue (ie Northern planes of America, Africa, Tibet, etc)
ie) German Southwest Africa
Germans -> late into colonial gain but eventually gained SWA, sending settlers who set off land & they sought to turn the local pop into labor & impose the only standards of property and labor relations that they knew. People resisted (for whom fences did not matter because their wealth was based on cattle and crops). The local governor tried to find a way of making modifications in european law to regulate this, to control the growing pressure of the settlers to use force. As violence increases amongst the native rebels, the possibility of imposing a political solution becomes impossible. The Germans dispatch troops, drive the hereros into the desert and commit what some call the first genocide of the 20th century.
A process that has its analogs in other parts of the world.
By the beginning of the 20th century the term IMPERIALISM is used for the first time as we use it now: a pejorative.
By the beginning of the 20th c a # of people have begun to see imperialism as an unequal, violent and economical extension of european power.
A word born in this particular historical circumstance, born as a part of a polemic about Europe's relationship with the world and we should recognize it as a symptom of this historical process.
Shouldn't overuse it because it covers too many historical differences between
1. formal and informal empires
2. violent european conquest and the more peaceful ones
3. between empires like China, the Ottomans and to some degree Japan who are both the victims and the perpetrators of imperialism
=> ie) the Ottomans are the victims of European imperialism but they are themselves colonizers over the Arabs & others
there is a complexity to this story that the slogan of imperialism much too easily fuzzes
=> symptom of this historical process
=> dangerous to turn political slogans into analytical categories
