Peace

by Adolf, Antony

  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. In The Law of War on Indians (1532), he states that

  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. Landing there accidentally in 1500, at first Portuguese traders found little of value on the coast other than bark that could be made into dye. But within two generations, Brazil was made the world’s leading sugar producer by entrepreneurial families with royal charters under governor-generals fitting Vitoria’s definition of tyrants to a tee. Facing labor shortages, they began importing African slaves, eventually totalling three million. Revolts brutally supplanted, Africans fled inland to a region called Palmares after its vegetation where their captors had no control, which then lent its name to the quilombo or “slave republic” formed in 1603. Soon twenty thousand refugees strong with an area a third of Portugal’s size, Palmares became the first self-sufficient, postcolonial state in South America by practicing diversified agriculture of African origin rather than European single-crops. Loose associations of small communities trading among themselves, Palmarians welcomed those persecuted by Portuguese, including natives, mestizos, Jews, Muslims and Christians considered heretics. To keep peace, chiefs acted like Vitoria’s kings, enforcing strict penal codes and granting all equality in law and opportunity. In 1678, Palmarians agreed to peace terms with hostile Portuguese. When attacks continued, they armed and retreated in defence, an early form of guerrilla peace tactics. Defeated in 1684, twice-over refugees formed a new quilombo and actively resisted until 1797. Ten years later, Napoleon invaded Portugal and its regent fled to Brazil, where he re-established his court and declared the colony equal with Portugal. He remained until 1821, when a pressing political crisis prompted his return, leaving his son behind as representative. After an attempt to abrogate the imperial state’s new status, the son in defiance of his father declared the country independent. Backed by Brazil’s elite, in 1822 he became Emperor of the first colony in the hemisphere to gain independence without a violent revolution on the US model. A minor one did occur when the monarchy became a republic seventy-five years later, but even this shows to what extent Brazilians, native and newcomers, had danced to their own drums.

  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 short-term 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. While failed military manoeuvres against the Portuguese and Dutch threatened the EIC’s existence in the East Indies, these productive mixes of business and peace negotiations ensured its survival in India, moving Roe to give the following advice to the EIC:

  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. While EIC “rule by the pen” or administrative rule had not replaced “rule by the sword” but merely displaced it, in the
Western Hemisphere a former British colony found that it could come close to ruling it peacefully by doing comparatively next to nothing.

  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 (1814–15) 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 extende
d 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.