by Kevin Reilly
Critics from the Colonies . Asian and African intellectuals have articulated a somewhat different critique, with a focus, obviously, on empire. It was not so much that European pressures had undermined traditional societies, for that was perhaps inevitable, but that so little had been done to construct viable modern societies. In Europe and America, industrialization had been at the very heart of the modernizing process, but in colonial and semicolonial societies, very little progress had been made toward developing modern manufacturing industries, even where it might have been profitable to do so. The profits from foreign investment were mostly remitted abroad rather than invested locally, and few local capitalists had sufficient wealth to make a real difference. Furthermore, little change in techniques of food production occurred in the colonies as Europeans focused their attention on the development of export crops. Thus, rapid population growth occurred without an agricultural revolution to provide adequate local food supplies, and massive urbanization took place in the absence of an industrial revolution to meet basic material needs or to provide employment opportunities. The result was social crisis or distorted development rather than the transmission of a balanced modernity.
Other voices within the Afro-Asian world called into question the very desirability of imitating the European model of society. The West African intellectual Edward Blyden in the early twentieth century compared European and African civilization and found the West wanting. Africa’s uniqueness, Blyden wrote, lay in its communal, cooperative, and egalitarian societies, which contrasted sharply with Europe’s highly individualistic, competitive, and class-ridden societies; in its harmonious relationship to nature as opposed to Europe’s efforts to dominate and exploit the natural order; and particularly in its profound religious sensibility, which Europeans had lost in centuries of materialism. To Blyden, Africa had a distinct global mission:
Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world. . . . When the civilized nations, in consequence of their wonderful material development, shall have had their spiritual sensibilities darkened and their spiritual susceptibilities blunted through the agency of a captivating and absorbing materialism, it may be, that they may have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith; for the promise of that land is that she shall stretch forth her hands unto God.21
Many Indian intellectuals likewise contrasted a spiritual East with a materialistic West. The great Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi largely rejected industrialization as a future direction for his country. Rather, he envisioned an India of harmonious self-sufficient villages that would make their own cloth, practice agriculture in cooperative ways, eliminate discrimination against women and the lowest castes, and keep in touch with the ancient traditions of Indian civilization.
Actors and Re-actors
Beyond the debates about modernity and empire lies the issue of agency: who shaped the changes associated with the great disturbance? Until fairly recently, historians generally pictured Europeans as the primary actors in the drama of modernity, casting Asians and Africans in the role of victims or beneficiaries but in either case largely passive in the process. But many elements of the modern transformation—urbanization, commercialization, technological change, and participation in the world economy—had deep roots in African and Asian societies and were well under way long before Western dominance was established. Furthermore, European modernity itself can hardly be understood without including Islamic scientific traditions, China’s economic achievements in the eighteenth century, the stimulus of India’s textile industry, the labor of countless African slaves, the wealth of the Americas, and the markets of the world.
In many cases, including Russia, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire, reformist and modernizing programs were established, with varying degrees of success, by existing state authorities, albeit under pressure from encroaching Europeans. Even in formal colonies, the apparatus of colonial rule was largely in the hands of the colonized. In French West Africa, an area eight times the size of France itself with a population of some 15 million in the late 1930s, the colonial state consisted of 385 French administrators and more than 50,000 African chiefs. And Asian and African intellectuals were culturally active in creating new identities of race, nation, and ethnicity; in reforming and reviving older religious traditions; and in adapting European ideas to the local environment. The spread of Christianity in Africa and the Pacific Islands was largely the work of indigenous catechists, priests, and teachers rather than the direct result of European missionaries. While large numbers of people “converted” to Christianity, they also converted that Christianity to their own cultures. For many Africans, the new religion was more akin to a traditional healing cult rather than a vehicle for salvation from personal sin and eternal damnation as the missionaries had taught. Whether for good or for ill, the great disturbance was never a wholly European enterprise but also the outcome of a collaborative though unequal venture.
Nor was it a one-way street. It brought change not only from the West to the rest but also in the other direction. The development of jazz in the United States was derived in large part from African musical traditions. Asian religions, especially Buddhism, have long attracted attention from westerners disaffected from the Christian faith and seeking an alternative spiritual path. Patterns of migration that brought South Asians and West Indians to Britain, Algerians to France, and Latin Americans and Asians to the United States have given rise to both social tensions and opportunities for cultural synthesis.
Change and Persistence
A final question of perspective involves that enduring issue of historical analysis—change and continuity. Most historians have described the nineteenth century as a period of profound change in human affairs. And surely it was. But are we in danger of overlooking the continuities of the historical process or the more subtle relationships between the old and the new?
Religious Revival and Consolidation . The nineteenth century is often viewed as a time of modernization that undermined or pushed aside religious belief as material progress and the secular ideas of science, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism took center stage. Yet that century was also a time of great religious vitality, expansion, and consolidation all across the world.22 The renewed energy of Christianity was most evident in the massive missionary movement that scattered representatives of the faith around the globe with perhaps 100,000 of them in Africa alone by 1900, all supported by the prayers and contributions of churches and congregations back home. Revivalist Islam took shape all across the Muslim world as ardent believers sought to purify and extend the faith. Religious revolutions in West Africa, for example, created a series of new Islamic states during the nineteenth century. Other Muslim intellectuals, such as the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh and the Indian Sayyid Ahmad Khan, laid the foundation for Islamic modernism as they argued for a synthesis between Islamic and Western traditions. And Islam continued its centuries-long expansion in Africa even while the continent was under the control of Christian European powers.
The nineteenth century also witnessed the emergence of a more distinctly “Hindu” religious tradition from what had been a vast array of sects, practices, rituals, and beliefs on the South Asian peninsula. Modern reformers and some Indian nationalists presented a revitalized “Hinduism” as India’s national religion, spiritually equivalent and in some ways superior to Christianity. Efforts to reconvert those who had turned to Islam or Christianity made Hinduism for the first time something of a missionary religion. In 1893, Swami Vivekananda, a leading figure in the revival of Hinduism, made a deep impression at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. There, he articulated a more or less unified Hinduism as a major world religion, casting India as a repository of a deep spirituality in contrast to the shallow materialism of the West.
The forces of “modernity” have in various ways strengthened rather than eroded long-established religious traditions. The European intrusion with its denigration of Afro-Asia
n belief systems and its efforts at Christian conversion stimulated a desire to revive and redefine these religions as a means of cultural defense. Railroads and later airplanes have enabled many to make a pilgrimage to Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim holy places, while the printing press, radio, and television allowed a wider dissemination of their sacred literatures and enabled much wider audiences to read or hear popular and simplified versions of ancient and complex texts.
Powers and Privileges . If older cultural and religious traditions persisted throughout the nineteenth century, so too did older patterns of society despite the pressures of revolution, capitalism, industrialization, and modernity. Global slavery, for example, died a slow death and was often replaced by other forms of coerced labor, such as indentured servitude, coolie labor, and colonial forced labor, where conditions of life were not far removed from that of slavery. Even in the United States, perhaps the most self-consciously modern nation and committed to the “rights of man,” the end of slavery was bitterly resisted in the Civil War and was followed by a system of sharecropping and pervasive racial discrimination. For many, it was a “new slavery.”
Landlords, aristocracies, and royal families likewise showed a surprising resilience in the face of liberal and democratic thinking. Landowning aristocrats dominated the highest levels of the British and German governments even at the end of the nineteenth century and often presented themselves as bearing the authentic national traditions of their countries while protecting the poor from exploitation at the hands of moneygrubbing capitalists. The Chinese imperial system and its scholar-gentry class also survived the many upheavals of the nineteenth century and made plans for more substantial reforms as the new century dawned. Japan’s emperor emerged as a more central figure in the Meiji regime, and members of the elite samurai class found positions of power and wealth in a modernizing country even as they lost their legal privileges.
Colonial rulers in Asia and Africa frequently allied with the most conservative and established elite groups—Indian princes and high-caste elites, Muslim emirs, and African chiefs and kings—freezing their privileges and protecting them from further change. In the colonies, European authorities were highly suspicious of both modern education and urban life, fearing that these influences would “detribalize” their colonial subjects, making them less easily controlled. Thus, they often acted to reinforce or even create what they regarded as “traditional” identities of tribe, caste, or religion. The colonial experience was deeply ambiguous, simultaneously driving and retarding the modernizing process.
Nor did the nineteenth century fundamentally transform that most ancient of social hierarchies: the unequal relationship between men and women. Life certainly changed, especially for elite women in the West, but voting privileges came more slowly—first in New Zealand in 1893 and some European states and settler dependencies soon after but not until World War I for most women of the West. Colonial law codes in Asia and Africa usually entrenched male privileges, while capitalist enterprises such as mining and settler farms removed large numbers of men from rural villages, throwing an added burden on women. “Most historians of the family,” writes a leading scholar, “see few major changes in the structure of the family across the world in the course of the nineteenth century.”23
Conclusion: Toward
the Twentieth Century
Thus, the full impact of the “great disturbance” occurred only in the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. Industrialization, restricted to a few places in the 1800s, became then a global process. It brought with it a range of familiar problems—changing class structures, urbanization, and new roles for women, for example. But it also generated qualitatively new features in the new century, including massive population growth, environmental disruption on an unprecedented scale, and the challenge of communist revolutions. The new century also began with Europe’s global empires intact and apparently secure, but by the 1970s, those empires had disintegrated, dozens of new nations emerged from their ruin, and a very different balance of power prevailed. Both global connections and global divisions, forged in the nineteenth century and before, became deeper and more pronounced in the twentieth.
Suggested Readings
Adu Boahen, A. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. The colonial experience through the eyes of a prominent African intellectual and historian.
Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. An examination of the “long nineteenth century” on a global basis, emphasizing the role of the “non-West” in the emergence of modernity.
Conklin, Alice L., and Ian Christopher Fletcher, eds. European Imperialism, 1830-1930. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. A collection of classical and contemporary scholarship on Europe’s nineteenth-century empires.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts. London: Verso, 2001. Examines El Nino-induced famines in the colonial world and the failure of governments to deal effectively with them.
Orwell, George. Burmese Days. New York: Harvest Books, 1974. An insightful novel about the British colonial experience in Burma.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. A now classic account of how empire shaped and distorted European perceptions of the Islamic world.
Smith, Bonnie G. Imperialism: A History in Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. A combination of pictures, primary sources, and commentary by a prominent American historian.
Waley, Arthur. The Opium War through Chinese Eyes. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979. Various Chinese perspectives on European aggression in the nineteenth century.
Notes
1. Quoted in James Kritzeck, Modern Islamic Literature (New York: New American Library, 1970), 18-22.
2. Quoted in Magali Morsy, North Africa: 1800-1900 (London: Longman, 1984), 79.
3. Quoted in Heinz Gollwitzer, Europe in the Age of Imperialism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 136.
4. Rudyard Kipling “The White Man’s Burden,” in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940), 321.
5. See Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
6. R. Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), 51-52.
7. Quoted by Basil Davidson, The African Past (London: Longman, 1964), 357-58.
8. John Iliffe, Africa: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 208-11.
9. Quoted in Claude Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 121-22.
10. Quoted in John Dos Passos, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 5.
11. Colin Simmons, “Deindustrialization, Industrialization, and the Indian Economy, 18501947,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 600.
12. L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift (New York: William Morrow, 1981).
13. This section is drawn from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001). The quotes are on pp. 31, 33, and 37, respectively.
14. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 312.
15. Adam McKeown, personal email, August 1, 2010, regarding previous posting on H-World, February 23, 2001. See also Adam McKeown, “Global Migrations, 1846-1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 155.
16. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (New York: Norton, 2003), 215-16.
17. Robert Knox, Races of Man (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1850), v.
18. Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992), chap. 4.
19. Teng Ssu-yu and John K. Fairbank, eds. and trans., China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 69.
20. Shigenobu Okuma, Fifty Years of New Japan (Kaikoku Gojunen Shi), 2nd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1910).
21. Edward
Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), 124.
22. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), chap. 9.
23. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 399.
The Modern World and
Global Realignments
THE PAST CENTURY
The European Crisis: 1914-1945
World War I
The Roots of War
The Costs of War
A Global Conflict
Reverberations
Capitalism in Crisis
Racism and the Holocaust
Another World War
World War II
A World Reshaped
Revolution and Communism
The Birth of Communism
Russia
Eastern Europe
China
Making Communist Societies
Rural Communism
Communist Industrialization
Confronting Privilege and Inequality in China
Totalitarianism and Terror
The Communist World and the “Free World”