False Sunsets (1648-1919)

Much effort has gone into proclaiming the end of empires as a political form and the advent, in its stead, of the nexus of territory-people-government.^[2878] One candidate, more popular among political scientists and international relations specialists than historians, is 1648, the origin of something called Westphalian sovereignty: here are the supposed roots of the territorially bounded sovereign entity, equivalent to other such sovereignties, hard, homogeneous sovereignties that scholars can liken to bil­liard balls and analyze how they bounce off one another and occasionally knock one out of play.

The development of the idea of the nation after the late eighteenth century has been an even more attractive candidate, but the argument becomes stronger if one asks how nation articulated with empire, rather than how nation eclipsed empire.^[2880] The North American, Haitian, and South American revolutions were all struggles within empire—for citizenship, for political voice, for freedom—before they became struggles to get out of empire.^[2881] North and South American revolutionaries had their own empire-building projects; European empires underwent processes of reform, reconfiguration, and, above all, inter-empire conflict; opponents of em­pire imagined alternatives to both existing imperial structures and independent nation-states.

Imagined communities were more varied and complex than the nation, and Benedict Anderson’s argument for a “horizontal” vision of community fails to come to grips with the hierarchies of North and South American societies that were built around slavery and the exploitation or extermination of indigenous peo­ples.

Napoleon—who was Corsican and European as well as French—tried to forge a new Rome in the beginning of the nineteenth century. His defeat was the work of other empires—Russian and British most notably—more so than the mobilization of national sentiments in the parts of Europe he hoped to integrate. Only by doing history backwards can we treat the nineteenth-century continental empires— Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian—as anachronisms; they had more than one act up their sleeves. It was not for nothing that the ruler of a newly united German monarchy—whose population spoke Danish, Polish, and French as well as German, but which did not attempt to embrace all German speakers—chose “Kaiser” for his title and “Reich” for the name of his polity.^[2885] Alliances and rivalries involving all the European empires brought about the Crimean War and eventually World War I.

Not just the continuities of imperial power, but the new initiatives of empire­builders, need to be taken into account. Some scholars argue that the wave of colonizations of the late nineteenth century were a new phenomenon, a national en­terprise.^[2886] Some go so far as to refer to a “second” French or British empire or a new imperialism. The new empires were supposed to be more territorial, less composite, more clearly distinguished by a subordinated “periphery” dominated by an impe­rial “center” than the older variety, in a word, more colonial.^[2887] Imperial rulers were certainly using new techniques of rule and responding to changing circumstances, but the basic project of holding together a diverse polity, recruiting and disciplining intermediaries capable of administering far-flung spaces, and profiting from its re­sources and preventing others from doing so continued. It is less artificial to think of a shifting repertoire of rule rather than the end of one empire and the beginning of another. One should not underestimate the intensity of subordination in the co­lonial empires from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century or underestimate the compromises with elites in conquered territories that had to be made in the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries to maintain order at an affordable cost. The idea of developing a "colonialism of modern people" - to take the title of a much-circulated book of 1874 by a French author - was a colonizer’s claim, not a description of an on-the-ground reality.^[2888]

The colonization of Africa, the last frontier of European colonization, illustrates both the extremes of power—and the denigration of certain categories of people that went along with it—and their limitations. For one, the entire episode was short by the standards of empire history - 70 to 80 years, compared to the 600 years of the Ottoman empire, the 1000 of the Byzantine, or the 2000 years in which Chinese dynasties claimed the mantel of their predecessors.

Why did European powers do so little with their apparent power? For one, that power was less than it appeared, and the usual constraints of exercising control over large spaces limited colonizers’ ability to routinize administration or exploitation. Then too, European states did not have to exploit Africa systematically, since they were above all focused on each other. The scramble for Africa was an instance of preemptive colonization: the fear, in a world dominated by a few major powers, that others would gain control over potential resources and prevent the other industrial polities from gaining access.^[2889] Thinking of the scramble as preemptive coloniza­tion in a world dominated by inter-empire competition helps to explain not only the suddenness of the intervention by Germany, Belgium, Britain, and France and the limits of what they did once they had gained possession of their shares of the continent, but also the scramble out of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Once the major European empires had brought so much destruction to each other in World War II, they no longer feared imperial monopolies and could finally rely on market mechanisms to gain access to resources and outlets.^[2890]

On the ground, European rule in Africa resembled the common image of the Mongols more than anyone would care to admit: mobile armies inflicting terror and moving onward, leaving in place a thin administrative veneer, although not the religious and cultural tolerance that the Mongols practiced. Except in areas of white settlement, mining, or urban concentration, European rulers had to rely on indige­nous elites to collect taxes and round up labor; otherwise, colonial revenues would not have paid the administrative bill.^[2891] Bureaucratic rationality appeared more on paper than in practice.

The African example I have dwelled on, with its own variations, hardly represents the only colonial situation. On a world scale, colonization was a varied phenom­enon, driven not only by violence, greed, and cultural arrogance, but also by the complexities encountered on the ground, not least how much the economic enter­prise depended not just on brute labor and extraction of local resources, but on the commercial initiative and financial acumen of certain elites among the colonized. Studies on South and Southeast Asia have particularly emphasized the hierarchies within colonized societies.^[2892] These elites presented both opportunities and dangers for European (and later Japanese) colonizers, because peasants and workers were engaged in struggles over resources and over autonomy with indigenous elites as well as with colonizers. These multi-dimensional social struggles would later affect the possibilities of former colonies after the passing of colonial rule.

Empire has always had its edges, both geographically and conceptually, and those edges were often a source of change. The independence of much of Latin America in the early nineteenth century, had among its effects the opening of the possibility for what Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher famously called the “imperialism of free trade” - an asymmetrical economic relationship between formally sover­eign polities, notably Great Britain and economically weaker states. Although Latin American elites engaged willingly in these connections, they can be considered im­perialism not just because of the economic inequality of the parties involved but also because of the possibility that an unsatisfactory turn in the relationship could lead to the intervention of the British navy and even colonization, as it did in much of Africa.^[2893] The overlap of the colonizing of territory, the colonizing of land in for­mally independent countries, and asymmetrical economic relations suggest how much the trajectory of empires pushed beyond their territorial boundaries when, as in much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, empires, with their reach into different parts of the world, coexisted with other sorts of political entities.

The conceptual boundaries in the late nineteenth century between “colonial” empires and the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires was not clear cut. The Ottomans had their colonizing ventures in Yemen and what is now Libya, the Russians in Central Asia; Austria-Hungary took over the Ottoman province of Bosnia and treated it as something of a colony. These empires had their historic ways of dealing with local elites and adapted across their domains in flexible ways that complicated colonial-type relationships. People considered “Russian” as well as those from conquered peoples were all subordinated to the Tsar; the power of the Ottoman Sultan depended to a large extent on high-ranking subordinates who were not Turkish; the Habsburg Empire after 1867 became the dual monarchy of Austria- Hungary. In the late nineteenth century, the power of the emperor was challenged at the center at least as much as in distant provinces. What made the world situation so uncertain at the beginning of the twentieth century was not the rise or fall of any particular form of polity, but the volatility of their interaction.

The efforts of imperial regimes to extend and maintain themselves have rarely gone uncontested. Conquests were resisted; dynastic rulers faced dynastic challengers; people who conceived of themselves as a people or nation tried to secede or take power themselves; peasants and slaves revolted. The movements that posed the most successful challenges to the global predominance of impe­rial regimes were the revolts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of people of European descent in the Americas who claimed independence from Britain, France, or Spain, sometimes to build polities with an imperial reach them­selves. Theirs was not the only model. From at least the Victorian era, activists in India were claiming “imperial citizenship”-that as British subjects they should have rights and political voice.^[2894] In the Ottoman empire, Arabs and Jews made claims as Ottoman citizens, in the press or in the moments when political representation was allowed.^[2895] Historians of the Habsburg Empire have lately pointed out that much of the claim-making by nationalists was not for founding their own states, but for recognition and voice within the empire. Such pressure led imperial rulers to take a more nationalist position themselves - nationalism from above one might say.^[2896] As claim-making came to be made in the name of supposedly universal values, the kinds of vertical ties - the arrangements between top elites, intermediaries, and re­gional or ethnic power brokers - that had long been a mainstay of imperial lon­gevity could be called into question. But in the early twentieth century, the most immediate danger facing empires - from the British to the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman - was each other.

The empires that came to an end after World War I did not die a natural death from an intrinsically anachronistic condition; their demise was the consequence of the clash of empires. Had the machinations of statesmen before the war or the German advance on the western front gone a little differently, the Ottoman Sultan, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, the Russian Tsar, and the German Kaiser might well have sat on their thrones for some time longer. The world might have known other catastrophes, but not the ones it had. The point is not to minimize the impor­tance of “the national” in political structures or sentiments, but to underscore the temporal and spatial overlap of different political forms in a context where global power was contested among a small number of states capable of exploiting and mobilizing diverse populations.^[2897]

World War I itself - and its aftermath - are problematic candidates for an end- of-empire story unless one insists on teleological narratives inevitably converging on the present as we perceive it. The warring empires mobilized imperial, not just national forces, Britain and France more effectively than Germany.^[2898] The empires of the losers were dismantled, but the winners added another category to the varied repertoire of colonies, dominions, and protectorates by which they exercised power over much of the world—that of mandate. The very idea of an international man­date conveyed the conceit that there was a morally and politically correct way of doing colonialism, and while new fora for critique were opened up, the Western European powers were in a position to keep questioning of their actions in the mandates to a minimum. Many non-white people in the overseas empires believed that post-war talk about self-determination applied to them, but they were soon disillusioned.^[2899] Their disillusionment played into anti-colonial mobilizations in the ensuing years—and one needs to trace their dynamic across time—but the colonial empires did not, until after another world war, lose their capacity to contain the challenges.

The very decentralization of rule in Africa also made it easier for colonial empires to keep rebellions within ethnic or regional containers. Colonial empire in the inter-war years appeared to have maintained a mediocre stability - punctu­ated most notably in parts of southern Africa by zones of high-levels of exploita­tion of subordinated labor around settler farms and mines. Challenges were more far-reaching in India and Southeast Asia, and connections were being made in Paris, London, or Moscow among critical intellectuals that reveal the development of inter-empire critiques and mobilizations against colonialism and racial domi­nation. Anti-colonial networks in the 1930s were in fact as long-ranging as impe­rial power, sometimes crossing the boundaries of the different European empires, sometimes focused on the claim for rights within the political framework of each empire, sometimes embracing collectivities spread widely across space, as in the pan-African or pan-Islamic movements.^[2900] It was, however, easier at the time for anti-colonial intellectuals to connect with each other in imperial capitals than to reach into the villages and urban neighborhoods of each colony. The very fragmen­tation that colonial policy had encouraged made it easier to contain protests within the colonies.

Empire in the first third of the twentieth century had its beginnings as well as its ends, and new entrants pushed the empire-form in different directions: the Third Reich, with its self-conscious reference to two previous Reichs and its em­brace of empire as something run by Germans without compromise with a variety of intermediaries, something other empires were prudent enough to temper; the Soviet Union, with its notion of national republics replicating with indigenous per­sonnel a system of party domination; Japan, challenged by other empires' poten­tial monopoly of resources, consciously emulating rules set by European empires while insisting on a pan-Asian conception of itself; and the United States, whose interventions abroad, especially in Latin America, did not produce a coherent vi­sion of itself as a colonial power.^[2901]