A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Asians also migrated in unprecedented numbers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese had long emigrated from southern coastal regions to Southeast Asia, where they established mercantile communities, sometimes marrying local women in long-term temporary marriages, and sometimes forming separate ethnic enclaves. When these areas became part of European colonial empires, Chinese immigration increased, ranging from wealthy merchants who established tin mines to penniless laborers who worked in them, or on sugar, tobacco, cocoa, rice, tea, and rubber plantations alongside local people. Contractors traveled to China to recruit laborers for mines and plantations elsewhere as well, including Hawai‘i, South Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, where the end of the slave trade had created a labor shortage. Most of these were indentured laborers, hired under five- or eight-year contracts, paid almost nothing, fed badly, and placed in chains if they tried to flee. Japanese people migrated to Hawai‘i, California, Peru, and Brazil to work on plantations and produce farms. The USA banned further Japanese immigration in 1924, a move that politicians advocated in Brazil as well, as Japanese and other Asians did not fit with their policy of racial whitening. Indentured laborers were also recruited in India, and hundreds of thousands migrated to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, South and East Africa, Malaya, Fiji, British Guiana (now Guyana) and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) in northern South America, and the Caribbean, especially Trinidad; here they worked on plantations, built railroads, and opened shops. Some Indians returned home, but many stayed, expanding trade, business, and social networks based on kin and caste ties around the world in a global diaspora. The first wave of Indian migrants was often young, unmarried men, but they tended to arrange for women to be sent from home to marry rather than marry local women. Today people of Indian or mixed-Indian ancestry make up at least half of the population in Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname, and are significant minorities in Kenya, South Africa, Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore.

  5.5 Indentured plantation workers from India arrive in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1891. More than 130,000 immigrants from India came to Trinidad between 1845 and the official ending of the indentured labor system in 1917, and many stayed.

  The new imperialism

  The migration patterns and social systems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were shaped by population increase and racial ideologies, and also by the establishment of global European empires made possible, as Nehru asserted, through industrial technologies. They often built on or began as informal commercial empires run by companies, and then became formal political empires run by civilian or military officials. The social structures of these empires were different from those of the early modern period in several ways: gradually more women joined their husbands and fathers, and sexual relations involving European men and local women were generally seen as prostitution rather than marriage or another type of recognized relationship. European families attempted to recreate life “at home” as much as possible, eating imported industrially produced foods and wearing clothing dictated by European norms and weather. European families included those of Christian missionaries, now Protestant as well as Catholic, who attempted to model proper family life as well as convert and “civilize” the people among whom they worked.

  Imperial power was explicitly and implicitly linked with cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity for both colonizers and colonized. European (and later American) officials, merchants, and missionaries often viewed women's less restrictive dress in tropical areas as a sign of sexual looseness, men's lack of facial hair or trousers as a sign of effeminacy, and any marital pattern other than permanent monogamy as a sign of inferiority. They sought to impose their own views of proper gender relations on their far-flung colonies, establishing schools to teach Western values and using taxes, permits, and registration documents to impose Western family structures.

  In South Asia, largely independent regional governors and external enemies weakened the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century, and the British East India Company (EIC) came to govern more and more territory in alliance with local princes. The EIC exported Indian cottons by the boatload, but there was little demand for these in China, nor for anything else the EIC brought in except for silver. That changed when English merchants began to smuggle increasing amounts of opium grown in India into China. When in 1839 the Chinese government attempted to stop opium importation in order to halt the spread of addiction, the British responded with warships, took over key coastal cities, and forced the Chinese to agree to open ports to European trade (including opium). That still was not enough to solve the growing European addiction to tea in this era of industrialization, so the EIC sent a botanist to China, where he stole tea plants and the techniques of processing tea. Tea-growing was introduced to British-ruled Ceylon, Dutch-occupied Java, and then to Assam, a thinly populated forested region of northeast India. European planters who promised to grow tea were given land to cultivate, and the indigenous population was forced either to move or to work on tea plantations through methods similar to those used in the United States and Mexico, including military force, debt peonage, and the criminalization of hunting and foraging.

  Although the British government regularly supported the EIC, it also increasingly thought the company was corrupt, and in 1857 decided to rule India directly through a civil service, transforming an informal empire into a formal one. The upper echelons of the civil service were all white, and they created a lifestyle more luxurious than would have been possible back in England, with cooks, chauffeurs, gardeners, and maids instead of the one servant-girl common in most middle-class households. Because there were only a few thousand to govern a population of several hundred million, they depended on Indian officials and bureaucrats. Missionaries and social reformers opened thousands of English-language schools, where high-caste Hindus and well-to-do Muslims learned Western curricula; many went on to colleges and universities to study law and other advanced subjects. The British built railroads and irrigation systems to aid the expansion of agriculture, particularly plantation agriculture that raised cash crops such as coffee, sugar, cotton, opium, and tea.

  In the last half of the nineteenth century, the British expanded their territory to include Burma, Malaya, and parts of Borneo, bringing in indentured laborers from India and China to harvest timber, mine tin, and grow rubber and rice. At the same time the French seized Vietnam, and then Laos and Cambodia, to form French Indochina in 1887, and the Dutch government took over direct control of Java and other islands from the Dutch East India Company, leaving Siam as the only independent state in Southeast Asia. Colonial regimes often required rural people who were unable to pay taxes to work on plantations or in mines, or to purchase certain items from government monopolies. In Vietnam, for example, French authorities required all villages to buy a designated amount of opium and alcohol from government authorities, which increased opium addiction and alcoholism.

  Map 5.2 Major overseas empires, 1914

  Imperialism followed a different course in Africa. The transatlantic slave trade slowly declined beginning in the 1830s, and small settlements of freed slaves shipped from British colonies and the USA emerged in Sierra Leone and Liberia. European colonies were limited to tiny areas along the coasts, for malaria and other diseases killed Europeans who ventured inland. In searching for an export good to replace slaves, British, US, and local merchants established palm tree plantations in West Africa, where workers harvested palm oil for lubricating machinery and manufacturing cosmetics and soap. (The brand Palmolive is a vestige of this, although now soaps and detergents are made from petroleum products.) Such plantations encouraged slavery rather than ending it, however, as local warlords continued slave-raiding, now sending men they had captured to grow crops, mine gold, and transport goods locally instead of to the Americas, while women were retained as workers and secondary wives, as they always had been. Some of these plantations were in states such as Sokoto (part of today's Nigeria
) where charismatic Muslim religious leaders had recently attracted broad followings by calling for a purer Islam purged of animist practices and local customs. A more orthodox Islam, including regular worship and the veiling of women, was becoming a vital cultural force, but this also contributed to the continuation of slavery, as Islam allowed the enslavement of non-Muslims. Slavery continued in East Africa as well, as Arabs built a commercial network centered on the island of Zanzibar, shipping slaves, ivory, and other natural products taken from the East African interior across the Indian Ocean.

  These patterns changed abruptly and dramatically in the period 1880–1914, when Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy scrambled to take what King Leopold II of Belgium called “a piece of that magnificent African cake.” European armies pushed insistently into the African interior, and by 1914 controlled almost all of the continent except Ethiopia and Liberia. The causes of this new imperialism were intertwined, just as were the causes of the Industrial Revolution, and many of them were directly related to industrialization. European companies sought direct access to raw materials and agricultural products and did not want African intermediaries. Once one nation began to grab territory, others worried that they would erect tariff barriers and lessen future opportunities, so grabbed their own. Industrially produced weapons, especially the Gatling gun, a hand-cranked machine gun that could fire 1,000 rounds a minute, and the Maxim gun, an automatic recoil-operated machine gun, allowed the easy slaughter and defeat of people armed with spears, swords, or at best rifles. As the Anglo-French writer, soldier, and historian Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) put it, speaking as the voice of Blood, in his poem “The Modern Traveller”: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Newly discovered quinine proved effective in controlling malaria, and steamships and later the railroad allowed medicine, manpower, weapons, and supplies to be delivered quickly. Agents of European governments preferred to acquire land by peaceful means such as treaties and bribes rather than have to waste manpower on war, but African leaders knew that resistance would be met with force. Despite this, political and military resistance, sometimes led by Muslim or animist religious leaders, in Sokoto, the Ashante kingdom (today's Ghana), among the Mandinka people of western Sudan and the Shona and Ndebele in southern Africa, slowed down the process of conquest.

  Ideas as well as technology played an important role in imperialism. In an atmosphere of nationalist rivalry and “survival of the fittest,” no nation wanted to appear weak or unmanly. Journalists and political leaders whipped up popular support for conquests, arguing that colonies benefited local people as well as European plantation and mine owners. Christian missionaries published accounts of the horrors of the slave trade, and Europeans and Americans came to believe they had a sacred mission to bring, in the words of the Scottish medical missionary and explorer David Livingstone, “Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization” to “Darkest Africa.” The English poet and official Rudyard Kipling referred to this as “the white man's burden,” a phrase that was later used to sell Pears’ Soap, which its advertisements proclaimed as “a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances.” There were critics of imperialism in Europe and the USA, but they were few.

  This new imperialism changed Africa dramatically. Government authorities and private companies used violence to appropriate land, retain control, and force Africans to work long hours at demanding and dangerous jobs. European powers established strong authoritarian control in the name of “good government,” building up armies and police forces of Africans to protect property and put down revolts, and bureaucracies to collect taxes. In the early twentieth century they built railroads to get raw materials from the interior to ports, and then roads for trucks. Slavery ended slowly, replaced in many places by a system of forced labor in which Africans worked for wages or exchanged their labor directly to pay taxes and purchase goods. Commercial agriculture for export and mining both employed many more men than women, and men left their villages for years at a time to grow cocoa, mine diamonds or gold, or build railroads, leaving women to continue subsistence agriculture, a gendered labor pattern similar to that of Latin America. Where the climate was cooler, such as British East Africa (today's Kenya) and southern Africa, settlers from Europe and from India immigrated in substantial numbers, and formed the bulk of the urban professional and mercantile class. In other places, such as the Gold Coast (today's Ghana), there was less immigration and a westernized African elite of lawyers, businesspeople, civil servants, and professionals educated in missionary schools and sometimes European universities gained some control over economic resources. As in South Asia, imperial power was maintained by giving some individuals and groups from among the subordinated population special privileges, and convincing them the new system was beneficial or preferable, a system referred to as hegemony.

  The new imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was primarily a European venture, although the USA and Japan acquired overseas territories as well, with opinion leaders in both countries arguing that expansion was essential for a strong, manly nation. American settlers led by sugar planters and US troops overthrew the ruling queen of Hawai‘i in 1893, and the USA annexed the islands as a territory. In the Spanish-American War (1898–1902), the USA coopted revolutions against Spanish rule in Cuba and the Philippines, transforming them as well as Guam and Puerto Rico into formal colonies or effectively colonies. Japan successfully fought China over influence in Korea and Taiwan, and in 1910 took over both as outright colonies. Opposition to Japanese rule and attempts at cultural assimilation in Korea took widely varying forms, including political demonstrations, conversion to Christianity, and the growth of a strong ethnic nationalism emphasizing the purity of the Korean “race” or bloodline (minjok in Korean).

  Total war and modern culture

  Nationalism led European states into a frantic rush to plant their flags over as much of the globe as possible, and it also led to a war of unprecedented scope, which strengthened anti-imperial nationalism around the world but also spurred the creation of authoritarian regimes that sought to create completely new types of societies. World War I (1914–18) was sparked by nationalists in the Balkans who wanted to carve their own countries out of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and was prefaced by a series of Balkan Wars. It eventually pitted most of the countries of Europe, including Russia, against one another in a war that was enormously destructive. Nationalistic propaganda encouraged young men to enlist and whipped up support, portraying the outbreak of war as a great heroic moment, when “the flashing of the unsheathed sword” could lift men from their “wish for indulgence and wretched sensitiveness.” Both sides fielded huge armies that fought in trench or battlefield warfare in which millions were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Their weapons and supplies included all the newest products of industry: heavy artillery, giant battleships, poisonous gas, canned food, mass-produced uniforms, synthetic rubber. The British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in battle a week before the war ended, captured the effects of gas on a soldier who did not get his gas-mask on in time: “Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning / … the white eyes writhing in his face, / … the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Nations mobilized their populations to be part of the war effort, rationing food and other goods, organizing production, allocating labor, setting wage rates, and encouraging more women to join the paid labor force with facilities such as child care centers. More than a million conscripted or recruited colonial troops fought in Europe and in European colonies around the world, often very successfully, destroying the impression that Europeans were somehow superior and creating resentment at the tens of thousands of wasted lives.

  After three years of slaughter on the eastern front, a revolution of soldiers, peasants, and city residents overthrew the tsarist government of Russia in 1917, and in the d
isorder that followed the communist Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) came to power. Renaming their nation the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Lenin and other Communist Party leaders asserted that imperialism was the direct result of industrial capitalism and that communist revolution would bring an end to colonial exploitation, an idea that proved attractive around the world but also provoked anti-communist “Red Scares” of government crackdowns on labor leaders, immigrants, and advocates of civil rights.

  The United States entered the war shortly before Russia left it, and this tipped the balance of power in the favor of the Allies. The Treaty of Versailles negotiated in Paris in 1919 declared Germany and Austria were responsible for the war, demanded they pay reparations, and transferred Germany's colonies to France, Britain, and Japan (an ally of Britain), denying Germany an empire. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dissolved and the League of Nations was established as an attempt to prevent future wars, although the USA refused to join and retreated into formal political isolationism. World War I allowed the USA to leap ahead of Europe economically, and by 1919 it was producing 42 percent of the world's industrial output, more than all of Europe combined.