CHANGES IN THE SCOPE OF EMPIRE

West European countries added a little more than half a million square miles to their empires during phase 4:104,000 in the Middle East in the early 1920s and 460,000 in the Horn of Africa as a result of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935-36.

The acquisitions by Britain and France were most significant politically. The rise of the Ottoman Empire five centuries earlier severely reduced European influ­ence in the eastern Mediterranean, stimulating the Atlantic explorations that were so crucial to phase 1 expansion. Collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I produced the opposite result: a power vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean which leading European states moved swiftly to fill. The area was vital to the British, who considered control of the Suez Canal essential for ruling and trading with colonies in the Indian Ocean basin. Late in phase 3 they took de facto control of two territories nominally under Ottoman rule: Cyprus (1878) and Egypt (1881-82). After the Ottoman Sublime Porte allied with Germany in late 1914, Britain abandoned the legal fiction, unilaterally annexing Cyprus and declaring a protectorate over Egypt.

The form this award took limited it in novel respects. The league set up what it termed a mandate system to govern non-Turkish parts of the former Ottoman Empire and Germany’s ex-colonies. Administrative authority over these territories was granted from above by the league, not simply asserted by a metropole on its own behalf as in the past. Moreover, the grant of authority was conditional. Mandatory powers had to agree to exercise “tutelage... on behalf of the League [over] peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Tutelage was based on the principle that “the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization.”²

Granted, the mandate system was premised on the idea of a hierarchy of races that Europeans used to explain and justify imperialism in phase 3. That the league’s paternalism was benevolent could not disguise the feet that its benevolence was deeply paternalistic. Its ability to monitor and change the behavior of mandatory powers was also limited, both in theory and practice. Nonetheless, acknowledgment by colonial powers that they had a moral and legal responsibility to foster the well­being of colonized peoples on behalf of the larger international community was an important break from the past.

Assignment of responsibility for administering Germany’s former colonies was another indication that the world was less Eurocentric than in previous phases. Several territories were handed over by the league to Britain, France, and Belgium, in a reshuffle reminiscent of the aftermath of the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic wars. But non-European actors also received mandates.

The only instance of outright seizure of overseas territory in phase 4 uncon­nected with World War I and unsanctioned by the League of Nations was Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia. Protests over this action by the league, including its west European members, went for nought. Yet the fact that other metropoles protested at all over the kind of behavior they themselves had engaged in a few decades before is significant in its own right. One explanation is that formation of the league repre­sented a broadening of earlier conceptions of the international political system. Whereas in phase 3 uncolonized areas of Asia, Africa, and Oceania were regarded by Europeans as residual space lacking clear legal status, by phase 4 territories unincor­porated into European empires were more widely acknowledged as having legal and political rights of their own.

The astute diplomacy and military skill of Emperor Menelik II having en­abled Ethiopia to retain independence throughout the scramble for Africa, the coun­try was accorded regular membership in the League of Nations. Invasion of Ethi­opian soil was deemed just as unacceptable as violation of any other sovereign state’s boundaries. If Italy’s temporarily successful aggression harkened back to phase 3, the league’s hostile reaction anticipated a phase 5 view of international relations that rejected earlier European assumptions about who mattered and who did not.³