After Tamerlane (5 page)

The fourth assumption concerns our understanding of empire. Empire is often seen as the original sin of European peoples, who corrupted an innocent world. Of course its real origins are much older, and lie in a process almost universal in human societies. It was a human characteristic, remarked Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), to want to ‘truck, barter and exchange'.
²³
Smith was thinking of material goods: it was the habit of exchange that allowed the division of labour, the real foundation of economic life. But he might well have extended his philosophical insight to the parallel world of information and ideas. The exchange of information, knowledge, beliefs and ideas – sometimes over enormous distances – has been just as typical of human societies as the eagerness to acquire useful, prestigious or exotic goods by purchase or barter. Both kinds
of exchange bring consequences with them. A supply of cheap firearms (to take an obvious example) could shift the balance of power inside a society where firearms were scarce or unknown with astonishing speed, and unleash a huge cycle of violence against humans or nature. The spread of Christianity and Islam transformed their converts' conception of their place in the world, and their notions of loyalty to neighbours and rulers. As these cases suggest, at all times in history the exchange of goods and ideas has upset the cohesion of some societies much more than others, making them vulnerable to internal breakdown, and to takeover by outsiders. So a second propensity in human communities has been the accumulation of power on an extensive scale: the building of empires. Indeed, the difficulty of forming autonomous states on an ethnic basis, against the gravitational pull of cultural or economic attraction (as well as disparities of military force), has been so great that empire (where different ethnic communities fall under a common ruler) has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history. Imperial power has usually been the rule of the road.

But if empire is ‘normal', why has its practice by Europeans aroused such passionate hostility – a hostility still strongly reflected in most of what is written on the subject? Part of the answer is that so many post-colonial states found it natural to base their political legitimacy on the rejection of empire as an alien, evil and oppressive force. Some forty years on, this tradition is stronger than ever. Part of the reason is the far wider exposure to European empire-building than to that of (for example) the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks or the Chinese in Inner Asia. The constituency of the aggrieved is thus much larger. But the intensity of feeling also reflects the belief (expressed in much of the historical writing) that there was something qualitatively different about the empires that the Europeans made. Unlike the traditional agrarian empires that merely accumulated land and people, the arch-characteristic of European imperialism was expropriation. Land was expropriated to meet the needs of plantations and mines engaged in long-distance commerce. Slave labour was acquired and carried thousands of miles to serve the same purpose. Native peoples were displaced, and their property rights nullified, on the grounds that they had failed to make proper use of their land. Both native peoples
and slaves (by different forms of displacement) suffered the effective expropriation of their cultures and identities: they were reduced to fragments, without hope of recovering the worlds they had lost. They became peoples without a history. And where expropriation by subjugation proved insufficient, European colonizers turned to their ultimate remedies: exclusion, expulsion or liquidation. ‘If we reason from what passes in the world,' wrote the French thinker de Tocqueville in 1835, after a visit to America, ‘we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them.'
²⁴

This chilling account of the European version of empire (as practised outside Europe) seemed amply confirmed by what took place in the New World of the Americas, where Europeans (for reasons discussed in Chapter 2) were much freer than elsewhere to impose their will. Until
c
. 1800 it looked as if a variety of factors would prevent a similar pattern in other parts of the world. Distance, disease and demography would sustain much more determined resistance. Even where Europeans had established their bridgeheads, they would be forced to ‘creolize' and make social and cultural peace with Afro-Asian peoples. But this is not what happened. In the nineteenth century, Europe's expansion was supercharged by technological and cultural change. Europe's capacity to intrude and interfere was transformed on two levels. Europeans acquired the means to assert their will on the ground – by force if necessary – over far more of the world. Most spectacularly in India, they imposed their rule directly on the conquered population, taxing, policing and laying down the law. At the same time, the growth of a Europe-centred international economy, the extension of a Europe-centred international system with its own laws and norms, and the spread of European ideas via Europe-owned media (like the telegraph, mail and steamship services) created a new environment at the ‘macro' level. Europeans, it seemed, controlled all the lines of communication. Above the very local level, nothing could move unless it adapted to their ways. Trapped between these upper and nether millstones, it is hardly surprising that colonized peoples in Asia and Africa should have likened their condition to that of the Europeans' first victims in the Americas.

We shall see later on why this was too pessimistic, in some cases at least. Even supercharged Europe needed local cooperation, and had to pay its price. Some of what it offered was quickly adapted for local ‘self-strengthening', building up the local capacity to build states and cultures. Some of it chimed with the aims of local reformers. Some of the claims of colonialism's fiercest antagonists now look less patriotic and more like the outcry of privilege displaced. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that we will be able to take a detached and apolitical view of Europe's empire-building for a long time to come. In too much of the world its effects are too recent to be allowed to slip into the ‘past' – that zone of time whose events we regard as having only an indirect influence on our own affairs. It may be an age before we regard it more coolly as a phase in world history – perhaps an inevitable phase – rather than as the result of the moral and cultural aggression of one part of the world.

There is one final complication that we may need to unravel. It is commonplace to talk of the ‘modern' world, to describe the changes that made it as ‘modernization', and to treat the attainment of ‘modernity' as the most critical change in the history of a state or community. The intermeshing processes that we call globalization are usually thought of as part of modernity, since ‘modern' societies supposedly interact more intensely with each other than did their ‘pre-modern' counterparts. Modernization thus has a close and uncomfortable affinity with the expansion of Europe.

But modernity is a very slippery idea. The conventional meaning is based on a scale of achievement. In political terms, its key attributes are an organized nation state, with definite boundaries; an orderly government, with a loyal bureaucracy to carry out its commands; an effective means to represent public opinion; and a code of rights to protect the ordinary citizen and encourage the growth of ‘civil society'. Economically, it means the attainment of rapid, cumulative economic growth through industrial capitalism (with its social and technological infrastructure); the entrenchment of individual property rights (as a necessary precondition); and the systematic exploitation of science-based knowledge. Culturally, it implies the separation of religion and the supernatural from the mainstream of thought (by secularization and the ‘disenchantment' of knowledge) and social behaviour; the
diffusion of literacy (usually through a vernacular rather than a classical language); and a sense of common origins and identity (often based on language) within a ‘national' community. The keynotes of modernity become order, discipline, hierarchy and control in societies bent on purposeful change towards ever higher levels of ‘social efficiency'.

It is easy to see that most of these criteria are really a description of what was supposed to have happened in Europe. Europe became modern; non-Europe stayed pre-modern – until modernized by Europe. The result is often a crude dichotomy that sees Europeans as the invariable agents of progress in a world elsewhere glued to ‘tradition'. We have seen already that this view is hard to defend. There are three other difficulties. First, the elements of modernity (as listed above) were rarely all present in a single society. In much of Europe they were barely visible until very recent times. Even those countries that we think of as pioneers of modernity had strong pre-modern features. Slavery was lawful in the United States until 1863. The ruling class of Victorian Britain was largely chosen by birth, and religion remained central to social aspiration and identity. Twentieth-century America was a caste society whose marker was colour, used to exclude a large social fragment from civil and political rights until the 1960s or later. Post-revolutionary France confined the Rights of Man to men until 1945, when women gained the vote. Viewed from this angle, the threshold for modernity becomes very uncertain. Was Nazi Germany modern, or Soviet Russia? Are there objective tests for modernity, or is ‘modern' simply a label for regimes we approve of? Second, some of the key features of conventional modernity were also to be found in parts of Eurasia far away from Europe. The classic case is China, which developed a ‘modern' bureaucracy selected on merit, a commercial economy and a technological culture long before Europe. Was China modern, with some pre-modern survivals, or the other way round? Nor was Western-style modernity eventually taken up in the non-Western world without many local adjustments. How are these to be seen? Is there one modernity, or are there ‘many modernities'?
²⁵
Third, it may be the case, as the example of China suggests, that other kinds of modernity were not doomed to failure because their flaws were inherent. Instead it seems possible (some would say obvious)
that Europe's expansion amounted in part to a deliberate assault on the modernizing ventures of other peoples and states. Perhaps it was not Europe's modernity that triumphed, but its superior capacity for organized violence.

Modernity is too useful an idea to be thrown away. But it may be wise to accept it as a fuzzy abstraction – as a rough-and-ready checklist of the social and cultural patterns that favoured the production of wealth and power at a particular time. For the term to be helpful, however, it ought to throw light on the relative success of different communities caught up in the greater regional and global connectedness that accelerated so sharply after the mid eighteenth century. Being modern was not an absolute state, but a comparative one – indeed a competitive one. The best test of modernity might be the extent to which, in any given society, resources and people could be mobilized for a task, and redeployed continuously as new needs arose or new pressures were felt. In principle, many different societies possessed this ability. In practice, and for reasons that we are far from understanding fully, for almost two centuries after 1750 it was North West European societies (and their transatlantic offspring) that mobilized fastest and also coped best with the social and political strains that being mobile imposed. Far-flung empires, and a global economy shaped to their interests, were to be their reward.

Before 1400, an observer who was able to survey the world would have had few accurate clues as to which of the main civilizations in Eurasia would eventually assert a worldwide pre-eminence. China, the Islamic realm in Middle Eurasia, and Europe had each attained a high degree of socio-political organization and material culture. They had all displayed a notable capacity for territorial expansion. But each was inhibited by internal divisions and weaknesses (as well as by the logistics of distance) from achieving predominance over the others.

Of these three great civilizational zones, fifteenth-century Europe was in many ways the parvenu. Since classical times (300
BC
to
AD
300), and earlier, culture and wealth in Western Eurasia had
clustered round the coasts and river valleys of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. This was the nursery of city states and empires, where agriculture and trade had been most advanced and profitable. The great hinterland of ‘Outer Europe' beyond the Alps was a barbarian region, to be explored, conquered and colonized by the civilized states to the south and east. The Gallic wars of Julius Caesar (58–50
BC
) were the crucial stage in its annexation by the new power that had united the eastern Mediterranean and much (not all) of the Near East under the hegemony of Rome. But, despite their hunger for its treasure, commodities and slave manpower, the Romans could not incorporate the whole of Europe in their empire. Instead they partitioned it, keeping the ‘barbarians' at bay beyond their frontier defences that stretched from Hadrian's Wall and along the Rhine and Danube into Illyria in the Balkans. Beyond the line lay regions too remote, rebellious and poor to repay the effort of conquest by an imperial system whose centre of gravity remained firmly fixed in the eastern Mediterranean.

By the 400s, Roman rule in the West was breaking down in the face of successive waves of migration pressing in from Europe's northeastern limits. The centre of the ‘civilized world' retreated southeastward to Byzantium (Constantinople) to guard the wealthiest region in Western Eurasia.
²⁶
In Outer Europe, towns dwindled to mere junctions on old Roman roads; society and economy became overwhelmingly rural and preoccupied with subsistence. Only where churchmen congregated or rulers established their emporia – licensed depots for the long-distance trade in luxuries – did any vestiges of urban life survive.
²⁷
For much of the period between
AD 500
and 1000, even parts of Europe that had once been Romanized became too poor and inaccessible to be of much interest to traders and rulers in the Mediterranean and Near East. After 600, the imperial heartland in Western Eurasia was itself convulsed by the rise of Islam and the amazing speed with which Muslim armies overran much of the Near East (including Iran), Egypt, North Africa and most of Spain. The Byzantine Empire, Rome's legatee, shrank to the point where its survival was doubtful. For a time it seemed as if the whole of Mediterranean Europe would be annexed as part of the Islamic world. Charlemagne's attempt to build a neo-Roman regime in the West had
fallen apart by 843. It was the astonishing recovery of the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century, and the gradual consolidation of a feudal order in Western Europe in the eleventh, that marked the beginnings of Europe's emergence as a viable, separate world civilization.