The World in Peaces: Imperial Peace and Peacemaking

Transitions from colonialism, by which relations among colonizers and colonized were made, to imperialism, by which they were maintained, took place at different times, in different places and in different ways.

Epitomizing imperial peace traditions are the works of a theologian and jurist, Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1564), who witnessed the shift to them from colonial traditions and expounded a realist approach to the problems of empires similar to a contemporary’s approach to those of city-states, Machiavelli.

a prince ought to subordinate both peace and war to the common weal of his State and not spend public revenues in quest of his own glory or gain, much less expose his subjects to danger on that account. Herein, indeed, is the difference between a lawful king and a tyrant, that the latter directs his government towards his individual profit and advantage, but a king to the public welfare.¹²

Vitoria considers natives as part of the public whose welfare imperial sov­ereigns ought to serve, as did Spanish imperial government at first. As he points out, the New World is new only to the Old, so forceful possession of inhabited lands is armed robbery, though uninhabited lands are fair game. Natives, he goes on, “undoubtedly had true dominion in both public and private matters,” unlawfully taken from them by colonists, which imperial governments could not only restore but also make amends for. While just war principles apply to New-Old World relations, he also articulated renewed principles for peaceful global relations, later taken for granted or which may still bear implementation: universal use and protection of ambassadors; compulsory participation in peace talks before war and mandatory acceptance of just peace terms afterward; interventions on behalf of those suffering or oppressed; respect for the lives and properties of neutral parties; rights of safe passage; restraint in warfare and sanctuary for civilians; the right to citizenship by standards of jus solis, birth within a country; and the right to become a naturalized citizen of any another country. Vitoria thus paradoxically provided both the basis for imperial governments to entrench and extend their control over their colonies and the grounds upon which non-violent anti-imper­ial movements were launched.

In contrast to the Spanish, Portuguese colonialism favoured trading posts over permanent settlements, a preference which in Brazil led to his­torically unique occurrences in cross-cultural collaboration and imperial government.

As if shooting for the best and worst of Iberian peace strategies, second-wave imperialists formed joint-stock or charter companies, from which modern corporations derive, initially as commercial vehicles for royalty and merchants to jointly establish monopolies. By the 1600s, a flurry of English, Dutch and French companies were in operation, pro­viding collective capital to finance colonial ventures while limiting the lia­bilities of private investors, but also invested with war- and peacemaking powers once reserved by public officials. The Dutch East India Company, for example, was empowered “to conclude treaties of peace and alliance, to wage defensive war” and to these ends enlist civilianand military per­sonnel who would take loyalty oaths to the firm as to the state.¹³ The Dutch West India Company was likewise authorized to make war and peace with “indigenous powers, to maintain naval and military forces, and to exercise judicial and administrative functions.”¹⁴ Peace was thus placed in the precarious position of a prerequisite for and perquisite of conducting booming imperial business.

The exemplar by far of such duplicitous complementary incorpora­tions was the British East India Company (EIC), chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, the peace policies of which were crucial to its short­term survival and long-term success. On his third spice-seeking voyage to India in 1608, EIC Captain William Hawkins approached the Muslim Mughal Emperor Jahangir with a proposal to set up a coastal warehouse at Surat for continuous trade. He agreed as long as tariffs were paid and his subjects well-treated. Seven profitably peaceful years later, a much broader agreement was reached between Jahangir’s son and the King’s ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, by which several more coastal trading posts were set up and tariffs reduced, in the end eliminated altogether.

It is the beggaring of Portugal, notwithstanding his many rich residences and territories, that he keeps soldiers that spends it; yet his garrisons are mean... It hath been also the error of the Dutch, who seek plantation here by the sword. They turn a wonderful stock, they prowl in all places, they possess some of the best; yet their dead payes consume all their gain. Let this be received as a rule: that if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade: for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India.¹⁵

By following this policy, the EIC had permanent representatives at the Mughal courts in 1639, through which it secured England’s first territory on the subcontinent, Madras, de jure for the King but de facto for the Company.

However, the EIC abandoned this policy when it began operating in Bengal, where ongoing Muslim-Hindu power struggles resulted in an absence of a central authority with which to make and maintain peace. Skirmishes with locals prompted the EIC to create militias of natives and newcomers, which increased rather than diminished tensions on all sides and led to a Mughal-EIC war in 1689. Mughals won, but allowed the EIC to resume its mutually profitable commerce in a peace that did not keep. After several seesaw battles, the declining Mughal powers granted the EIC authority to appoint a nawar charged with formerly separated civil func­tions in addition to a monopoly on trade. As subdar, this EIC employee was responsible for law and order; as diwan, for collecting taxes and all other revenues. By the eighteenth century’s end, the Company had assumed direct rule. In two hundred years, the EIC thus evolved from an exclusively economic entity seeking to make peace with native rulers to further trade, to an unrestricted ruling entity seeking to maintain peace among its native subjects to further direct rule and derivative income.

A decade after victory in its Revolutionary War against the British, the newly formed United States embarked upon a pragmatic but paradoxical policy of anti-imperial and imperial peace on a hemispheric basis. US War leader and first President George Washington hoped that “America will be able to keep disengaged from the labyrinth of European politics and wars;” another founding father, Alexander Hamilton, called for a “great American system superior to the control of all trans-Atlantic force of influ­ence, and able to dictate the terms of connection between the Old and the New World.”¹⁶ In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase of French territory west of the Mississippi River from Napoleon, who was in desperate need of war funds, putting into practice a policy somewhere between that of Washington and Hamilton: “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”¹⁷ The deal effectively ended France’s imperial presence in North America, doubling the size of the original thirteen US states without war between contracting parties. A diplomat sent to Paris to negotiate the pur­chase, James Monroe, became president in 1817 and soon entered into similar talks with Spain to purchase Florida, tendered in 1819. In the next few years, the US quickly recognized newly independent South American states inspired by its Revolution, including Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Colombia. Fearing the spread of republicanism, a Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Britain was formed in 1822 “to put an end to the system of representative governments, in whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its being introduced in those countries where it is not yet known.”¹⁸ In 1823, Monroe announced a new hemispheric foreign policy, designed by John Quincy Adams, which denounced European imperialism as “dangerous to our peace and safety.”

The principle of the Monroe Doctrine, as the policy is now called, was at once isolationist and interventionist: the US would not allow European monarchical empires to spread in the Americas and would not otherwise intervene in Europe. Closing the western hemisphere to further European expansion, the Doctrine was used to justify American expansion west­wards in the 1840s by a mix of wars and strategically broken peaces with natives. The US, now a bicoastal nation, then turned the Doctrine into a global policy. By the 1850s, the US was using imperial peace tactics, called gunboat diplomacy, in the Pacific, where the presence and warning shots of its navy intimidated Japan into reopening its markets, ushering in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) in which a pro-modernization monarchy was restored and Japan became an imperial force itself. In 1888, Germany, Great Britain and the US established joint rule over Samoa, which even the US Secretary of State acknowledged as a departure from the “traditional and well-established policy of avoiding entangling alliances with foreign powers in relation to objects remote from this hemisphere.”¹⁹ By the nine­teenth century’s end, the Doctrine was expanded to prevent Europeans from transferring imperial territories to one another, on the basis of US self-appointment as “impartial arbiter” in South American border dis­putes. The Doctrine proved so successful that Secretary of State Richard Olney, who in 1895 claimed to act as such an arbiter between Great Brittan and Venezuela over Guyana’s borders, boasted that “today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”²⁰ The Doctrine also paved the way for unprecedented US investments in Central and South America, eventually surpassing the British. In Cuba, which the US failed to purchase from Spain in several attempts, business interests were threatened by a rebellion against Spanish rule, so US officials tried to broker ceasefires and Cuban independence. But when a battleship mysteriously exploded just off of Cuba in 1898, US forces were deployed, as well as to Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the stated aim being “the forcible intervention of the United States as a neutral to stop the war.”²¹ Spain, defeated, ceded these territories to the US, making it an imperial power just over a century after gaining independence from one, both by following a foreign policy aimed at anti-imperial peace and by knowingly contravening it.

Meanwhile, third-wave nineteenth-century European imperial expan­sions were punctuated by two major peace congresses in Vienna (1814­15) and Berlin (1884-5). In continental affairs, the Congress of Vienna sought to redraw Europe’s map and rebalance its powers after Napoleon’s wars, occupations and defeats. These goals achieved, the so-called Concert of Europe of Austria, England, Prussia, Russia and France was formed in pledges to preserve peace by diplomacy and periodic meetings, a score they often read but rarely played. The first German Confederation

was also created which, after Prussia’s defeat of Austria and France, became the First Reich in 1871. In imperial affairs, the Vienna Congress’ outcomes were more one-sided because no conceivable counter-alliance could by this time redraw the map or balance the power of the British Empire, the imposing seaward supremacy of which is referred to as the Pax Britannica. However, having suffered serious losses in the Western Hemisphere as a result of the US Revolutionary War, the British were in the midst of shifting their imperial emphasis east. In Vienna, they secured global territories from the Portuguese, Dutch, and French for specie, priv­ileges and promises. The next two decades’ intensified competition for African territories not already under European control was branded the Scramble for Africa. Characterized by beliefs in cultural and racial supe­riority, backed by relatively advanced technologies and financial institu­tions, and aimed at direct rule, the Scramble also involved new or renewed approaches to imperial peace.

The American Colonization Society was founded in 1817 to repatriate freed black slaves to Africa. With Congress’ financial support, ironically granted during Monroe’s administration, the Society established Liberia with native consent but it remained in the Society’s hands for nearly a century. Belgium’s King Leopold II held a conference in 1876 to discuss “opening up” and “elevating” Africa to Europe and its standards. An International African Association was created to this end and, on its behalf, explorer Henry Stanley charted the Congo and negotiated hun­dreds of “peace” treaties with native chieftains for resource rights and trading posts, which became Leopold’s personal possessions. The native African Kongo Empire (c. 1400-1914) had already signed several similar treaties with Portugal, which the British now recognized to stem the Association’s expansion. France occupied huge tracts of North and West Africa, including what became Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and Indochina, later called Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Newly unified Italy seized parts of Eritrea and later Ethiopia, Russia and Austria took apart the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while the British took control of Egypt, formally still Ottoman, and with it the Suez Canal. Germany claimed Togo, Cameroon, West Africa (now Namibia) and East Africa (now Burundi, Rwanda and Tanganyika) by Otto van Bismarck’s extension of realpolitik into weltpolitik or “world politics.” Shortly after the Berlin Congress, aimed at settling the “Balkan question,” a new balance of European imperial powers emerged: on the one hand were Germany, Austria and Italy, and the other France, Russia and England, close to the reverse of that before the Congress of Vienna. Arguably, it is at this point in history that peace and peacemaking became exclusively synonymous with the machinations of nation-states and their empires, short-sighted limitations from which they still suffer.

Contemporaneous European imperialism elsewhere in Asia was more commercial than territorial, leading to different peace prerogatives. The British found the Chinese had sufficient stores of bullion, little interest in their goods and slightly more in their missionaries. However, one thing they could not get enough of was opium. Late Qing Dynasty Emperors realized the threat the drug posed to their peoples, but when they barred its trade the British forced it upon them after the winning the Opium Wars (1839-42). Included in the peace terms was the mandatory opening of extraterritorial “treaty ports” under foreign protection, later extended to Germans, French, Russians and Americans. One Qing diplomat still claimed “the various barbarians have come to live in peace and harmony with us.”²² Less than a decade later, native dissatisfaction with the Qing reached a climax when a schoolmaster named Hong Xiuquan under mis­sionary influence developed a large and loyal following by proposing to establish a Heavenly Kingdom of Peace (Taiping Tianguo), calling himself the brother of Christ. Like the Yellow Scarves two millennia earlier, he convinced tens of thousands of his poor followers to overthrow the ruling regime in what is now known as the Taiping or Great Peace Rebellion (1850-64). After capturing Nanking they made it their capital, from which they instituted gender equality in the civil service of their theocratic Kingdom for the first time in Chinese history, transferred all property to the state and outlawed opium, prostitution and gambling. By 1860, Western powers began to fear that if the Qing fell, so would foreign trade, so they backed their Imperial army as they crushed the Second Great Peace, which had cost twenty million lives.

Though the Qing still ran the civil service, following the First Sino- Japanese War (1894-95) nearly all of China was partitioned into foreign spheres of influence. The Emperor sought to modernize state and educa­tion systems but his efforts were stifled by an uprising sponsored by the Empress dowager aimed at expelling foreigners once and for all, called the Harmonious Fists or Boxers in the West. Their leader declared that “only when one can fight can one negotiate for peace,” and proved that they could live up to the first part of his statement by attacking treaty ports, killing missionaries, diplomats and civilians.²³ As Boxers besieged Beijing, rickshaws or dongyangche (“eastern vehicles”) with the characters for “foreign” in them were all relabelled Taipingche (“Great Peace Vehicles”). The Boxer Rebellion makes explicit a principle only made implicitly so far: xenophobic conditions are not conducive to peace, espe­cially when foreigners get involved. Governors of southern provinces signed separate peaces with Western powers, and for the first and last time in imperial history, British, French, Russian, American, German and Japanese cooperated in crushing the Boxers, ushering China into the twentieth century as a subject nation. The capitulation treaty (1901) between the Western powers and Qing Emperor contained humiliating and debilitating articles, including public apologies, an immense indem­nity, treaty port concessions and the stationing of foreign troops through­out the country to protect foreigners. Germany’s representative noted that in peace the “interests of the European Powers are entirely different and a co-operation... is quite impossible.”²⁴ Upon a remark that during the joint battle against the Boxers nationality distinctions between Western soldiers were never mentioned, he simply and accurately replied “It is not so now.”

Nevertheless, during the Qing capitulation negotiations, US Secretary of State John Hay circulated among the victors his “Open Door Note” (1900), urging them to still work together to

bring about permanent safety and peace to China, preserve Chinese terri­torial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.²⁵

Fearing possible outcomes of acting otherwise, they nominally agreed. Far from the first to link peace and free trade, discussed in the next chapter, Hay only applied existing general principles to the particular case of China. James G. Blaine had already articulated a distinctively American take on such principles in accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1876: “We seek the conquests of peace... While the great powers of Europe are steadily enlarging their colonial domination in Asia and Africa... our foreign policy should be an American policy in its broadest and most comprehensive sense - a policy of peace, of friendship, of commercial enlargement.”²⁶ Although not elected President, he became Secretary of State and his proposed foreign policy prevailed. US intelli­gence officers stationed worldwide began reporting not only on military matters to the Department of Defense, but also on investment opportuni­ties to the Department of Commerce, while government officials abroad doubled as solicitors for American investors. A financial journal later stated that “trade follows not the flag but the dollar - and the pound ster­ling, and the yen,” when in actuality they and peacemaking with them went together.²⁷ As monetization of peace became as rampant as state col­laborations with businesses, the validity of previous ideological principles was called into question.

For the US, the Monroe Doctrine thus had to be reinterpreted or rejected. When, in 1902, Italy, Britain and Germany blockaded Venezuela to collect debts, the US pressed for arbitration. Britain and Italy agreed and withdrew; Germany only did so when President Theodor Roosevelt threatened to send out the navy. Two years later, Roosevelt put forth his activist Corollary to the passive Monroe Doctrine, introducing the world to the notion of a Pax Americana, as if reversing history by enacting imperialism before colonialism:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.²⁸

The Roosevelt corollary was the “beginning of a diplomacy which was to serve the requirements of American investments in foreign countries, as the old diplomacy served the requirements of territorial expansion and of commerce,” which took on two parallel forms.²⁹ One is referred to as “big stick,” the other as “dollar diplomacy.” US relations with Santo Domingo, later renamed Dominican Republic, show how the two could work concurrently for and against peace. In 1906, they tendered a treaty by which, in exchange for paying off Santo Domingo’s foreign debt, the US would control its customs on foreign trade - dollar diplomacy at its best. But American investors soon acquired monopolies on fruit and sugar trade and, when guerrilla warfare erupted, US armed intervention followed - big stick diplomacy at its worst. Put metaphorically, dollar diplomacy was walking through the Open Door with foreign economic partners peacefully hand in hand, while big stick diplomacy was dragging them through the Open Door unwillingly, in certain cases slamming it in their face after crossing the threshold.

The US put diplomatic pressure on Honduras in 1911 on behalf of the banking syndicate of J. P. Morgan & Co. to secure its investments there; in 1912 another US protectorate on the Santo Domingo model was estab­lished in Nicaragua, followed by one in Haiti in 1915. The US, which had rocked the imperial world with its Declaration and War of Independence, redefined it for its protectorates, which now spanned the globe:

It would appear that ‘independence’ as a technical term employed in treaties relating to such protected States does not mean full freedom of action as a positive attribute, but rather the absence of any such restrictions upon the protected State as would amount to an infringement of its international per­sonality and take from it a certain theoretical legal competence to be the arbiter of its own destiny.³⁰

Having propagated anti-imperial peace by the Monroe Doctrine in ensur­ing independence from European monarchical imperialism, the US by the Roosevelt Corollary reduced independence to a technicality in the interests of its economic imperialism, non-violent as dollar diplomacy, violent as the big stick. In 1912, President William Taft reaffirmed that US foreign policy “may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our mer­chandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment which shall inure to the benefit of both countries concerned.”³¹ Growth in eco­nomic interests abroad, at first with the pacific pretext of mutual profit, spurred diplomatic and military support provided by the state; but as state concern for foreign economic affairs grew, this pretext was discarded and benefits became asymmetrical - a variation on longstanding patterns in the modern economics of peace.