Università di Napoli Federico II
A. A. 2020-2021
Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche
Scuola delle Scienze Umane e Sociali
Master’s degree in International Relations
THE NEW GLOBAL PAST
An Introduction to the Global History of the Contemporary Age
(Prof. Teodoro Tagliaferri)
1 Contents
Part One. The New Global Past: A First Attempt at Conceptualization
I. Introduction §1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age §2. Twentieth-Century Inspirations and False Starts §3. The Post-Cold War Thrust towards Professionalization $4. The Categorical Cluster in Outline: A Preliminary Glossary
II. A Synoptic Overview of the Field of Study §1. World History Stoops to Conquer: the Global Point of View §2. The Global Past, (A): The Transregional and Transcultural Scales and Dimensions of Human History §3. The Global Past, (B): The «Human Community» and (or) the Long-Term History of Globalization §4. «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives» §5. «Dynamic Interactions»
III. An Introductory Case Study: Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History §1. The Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism §2. Hindu Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill
IV. Dynamic Interactions between Multiple Regional Modernities at the Roots of the Long Imperial Century
2 §1. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern World §2. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s Imperial Meridian §3. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions
V. On the Utility of World History for Public Life §1. «Differentiated Commonalities» and Contemporary «Pammixia» §2. The Ethics and Politics of the New World History: Pluralist Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship §3. A Global Past for a Common Future
Part Two. Variations, Integrations, Applications
1. Reconceptualizing the Expansion of Europe
§1. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step
§2. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History
2. Eurasia from the Multiple Expansions of the Early Modern Period to the 18th- and 19th-Centuries Crisis of the Old World Civilizational Balance
§1. Eurasia as the Center of Modern and Contemporary History
§2. Eurasia’s Multiple Expansions during the «Age of Discovery»
§3. Eurasia in the Period of the «Early Modern Equilibrium»
§4. The Eurasian Revolution: The Geopolitical Dimension
3 3. Expansion, Crisis and Renewal: the British Empire after the First World
War in the Perspective of Global History
4. World War Two in the Mediterranean in the Perspective of Global
History
Part Three. Old Global Pasts
1. Legitimizing Imperial Authority: Greater Britain and India in the Global
Historical Vision of John R. Seeley
§1. Elements of Continuity in the Liberal Imperialist Tradition
§2. Historians’ Legitimating Task
§3. The Republic of Humanity
§4. History as Political Prophecy
§5. Europe’s Manifest Destiny
§6. From the Country-State to the World-State
§7. England’s Providential Mission in Asia
§8. Unintended Consequences? Towards the United States of India
2. The Republic of Humanity: John R. Seeley and the Religious Sources of British Imperial Universalism
3. Eric Hobsbawm: The Last of the Universal Historians?
4 Part One
The New Global Past
A First Attempt at Conceptualization
5
I. Introduction
1. World History, Global History, Contemporary History, and the Beginnings of the Global Age
The following chapters are based on my lecture notes for a course in Global History of the Contemporary Age delivered in English to the students for a Master’s degree in International Relations at the University of Naples Federico II, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, in the academic years 2018/2019, 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, with some substantial additions from materials collected for two series of seminars addressing The New Global Past. Historiographical Background, Methodological Issues, General Outlines, which I gave in the academic years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 to first year students of the Doctorate in Global History & Governance, born in 2018 from a convention between the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the Federico II University, and then merged in the Scuola Superiore Meridionale of Naples. Both kinds of lessons ultimately responded to the mandatory institutional purpose of introducing their culturally varied postgraduate audiences (among whom Italians, Germans, Ukrainians, Rumanians, Magyars, Polish, Turkish, Latvians, British, Americans, Pakistanis, and a sizeable handful of Erasmus students) to the disciplinary field of Global History and its complex historiographical background, which here in Naples I teach also, in Italian, to the students for two other Master’s degrees – Relazioni Internazionali e Analisi di Scenario and Scienze Storiche –, offered respectively by the departments of Scienze Politiche and Studi Umanistici1.
1 As Storia Globale dell’Età Contemporanea at Scienze Politiche and Storia Globale at Studi Umanistici. At Studi Umanistici, to the students for the Master’s degree in Scienze Storiche, I teach a course in Storia della Storiografia Contemporanea too, after having taught for quite a long period, until ten years ago or so, Storia della Filosofia at the then Facoltà di 6 I deliberately chose to pursue this aim by sharply focusing, at the price of obvious omissions and simplifications, on a specific conceptualization of its subject-matter – the «new global past» alluded to in the title – which has clearly been emerging, in my view, over the past thirty or forty years in international historiography within the context of a coeval revival and renewal of World History. In order to avoid as much as possible unprofitable terminological disquisitions, when employing the two expressions – “World History” and “Global History” – I will very roughly follow the authoritative precedent set in 1990 in the prospectus of the «Journal of World History», which was written for its inaugural number by Jerry Bentley, the founder and first editor of the review until his untimely death in 2012. Bentley described the «official journal of the World Historical Association», an affiliated to the American Historical Association founded in 1982, as aiming to provide «A New Forum for Global History»2. We may pragmatically agree, therefore, on reserving the first expression to indicate, in the main, how an influential branch of its professional practitioners have grown accustomed to refer to the academic discipline of World History, and Global History to indicate both the discipline, as it sometimes is alternatively named in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the particular object of knowledge to which the academic world and global historians devote their work. The important thing to stress, however, is that, for the epistemological reasons given later, “World History” and “Global History” may be nowadays legitimately used as referring to the same thing when seen, respectively and reciprocally, a parte subjecti and a parte objecti. This elastic, nonbinding terminological distinction reveals itself useful also because not all those professional scholars who write on global history are necessarily World or Global Historians too.
The several courses of Global History I teach at Naples, being all aimed to students for an Italian “Laurea Magistrale”, differ substantially, both in their aims
Lettere e Filosofia of the Federico II. I give these personal details, unimportant in themselves, in order to provide the reader with a clue to my own individual approach to Global History. 2 Infra, II, §1 7 and their contents, from a course of Contemporary History for a Bachelor’s degree, if only because they presuppose that the students should have already acquired some basic knowledge of its fundamental outlines. In an important sense, however, their subject-matter is the same as that of the more general and elementary course I teach to the students for a “Laurea Triennale” in Scienze Politiche: the contemporary age. This means to me that, whatever epoch-making caesura one adopts as its beginning (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Congress of Vienna, the Seven Years War of the middle of the eighteenth century ecc.), the period covered by the teacher organically includes the present. Both study and teaching of Contemporary History include the present, at least logically and virtually, in the dual sense that 1) the present forms a part of it and 2) a pragmatic, problem-oriented understanding of the circumstances in which we all are called to act as citizens should be the ultimate goal pursued by the discipline. Contemporary History, as I believe, when true to its professional calling, is never about a non-existent “past in itself”, to be studied “for its own sake”. Contemporary History is about the present as seen from the perspective of its becoming what it is for us; it deals with that past in which the world around us, our collective and political present, reveals itself grounded and recognizes its roots. If it is so, in defining the subject-matter of contemporary history, which will vary according to the value-choices of each one of us, a teacher is preliminarily bound to clarify to himself as well as his fellow-students what is the present that he selects, among the many possible, as the starting point of his Herodotean round trip into the past – that present of which he is interested to investigate the extremely complex genealogy, being careful not to incur the two historian’s capital sins of anachronism and teleologism. Both in my global history and more basic contemporary history courses I regard as the explicandum the globalized society of our time and make the attempt to lead my students into an exploration of some significant aspects, at least, of its making and background. The global past which is being studied by the today’s World 8 Historians appears to me peculiarly well fit to cast light on the fundamental challenges confronting globalized humanity in the post-post-Cold War (and now post-Covid 19) era. My further intent, as far as the graduate students are specifically concerned, is to help them get intimately acquainted with a single well- defined approach to this inquiry, which focuses on the role played in the genesis of the world-wide ecumene of our days by a particular set of historical phenomena – the so-called transregional and cross-cultural interactions and connections. The approach I favour is that pioneered by the schools of historiography which can be grouped under the loose scientific paradigm on the New World History. Its fundamental tenets are concretely exemplified by the two modern classics around which the following pages will mainly center, in order to provide the reader with a kind of essay in applied methodology – Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, and John Darwin’s After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400 to 2000. Both authors are prominent practitioners of Imperial and Colonial History more recently turned into influential new world historians. By closely analyzing the historiographical texture of some parts at least of their works, the student should become familiar not only with the important aspects and phases of the making of the contemporary world they treat, but also with the premises and the procedures which connote the achievement of original results in the specialized field of global history. Here is another momentous difference between the teaching and studying of Contemporary History at undergraduate and Master’s levels. At Master’s level the teaching of whatever discipline must pursue a specializing purpose. To qualify for a Master’s degree the student is required to give proof, by means of a final dissertation, of having become able to produce some piece of genuine research work in his field of specialization. Global History is included in the curriculum for the Master’s degree in International Relations offered by my Department for two chief reasons. First, the specialized study of this branch of contemporary history is deemed (here in Naples at least) an essential component in the training of a master student in international affairs, 9 whatever the ultimate field of specialization he or she may choose to pursue. Second, a few students might legitimately choose to specialize in Global History as a first step in a historian’s career, or, more probably, devote part of their energies, at this stage of their education, to complete a Master’s thesis in Global History. An additional duty incumbent upon me when dealing with master students is therefore to teach them, in a more deliberate and systematic way than is the case at undergraduate level, how scientific knowledge is reached and advanced in my profession. What can be realistically attempted, in the time at my disposal and taking into account the different degrees of interest of the students, is to give them some preliminary notion about the logic and practice of research, the treatment of sources, the use of analytical categories, the technical language and terminology, the alternative models of interpretation of processes and events, the institutional organization of the scientific work and the modalities of exposition, circulation and evaluation of its results within and outside the scientific community, which characterize the discipline of World History. The need for specialization is the most obvious reason why the three courses from which the following pages draw did not purport to make a general survey of their whole subject-matter – the global history of the last quarter of a millennium or so –, but approached its study through an in-depth examination of a critical turning point in the history of globalization, namely (as the title of the program of the 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 courses read) The Crisis of the Eurasian Equilibrium and the Transition to Global Modernity. WhiIe never losing sight of the overall picture, I will deal in greater detail, in other terms, with that necessarily more limited but absolutely crucial subperiod corresponding to the first act in the drama of contemporary globalization and the making of the globalized society of our times and the world we are presently, at this very moment, living and acting in. This transitional phase I will dwell upon spanned the eight decades or so from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Thirties and Forties of the nineteenth century. It saw the concomitance of six phenomena whose links with one another, mutual dependence and partial overlapping the global historians are especially called 10 to disentangle: 1) a change in intensity and scale of the ecumenical connectedness which had established itself during the early modern age (as testified, to quote a sadly topical example, by the unprecedented transregional and transhemispheric reach of the first two pandemics of cholera originating in Bengal in 1817); 2) a new surge in the political, economic and cultural «expansion of Europe» started in the fifteenth century, drawing additional nourishment from the protracted conflicts of the «age of revolutions»; 3) the overthrow of the balance of power subsisting between Europe and the other cultural regions of the Eastern Hemisphere even after the Western and Russian explorers, traders, conquerors and colonizers had launched in their successful career as unifiers of the world both overseas and overland; 4) the building of the first European territorial empires in foreign civilizational areas belonging to the “Orient”; 5) a «world crisis» resulting from the intersection and commingling of the many and manifold «revolutions» which involved in these years not only Europe and the Atlantic world, but the Afro-Asian geo-historical space too; 6) the convergence of the autochthonous roads to modernity, which all the Old World regional societies had already undertaken since 1500, towards the homogenizing paradigms provided or imposed by Europe – the dawn, in other words, of what former generations of scholars called the «Westernization of the World». If we wanted to signalize the chronological bounds of this momentous subperiod by adopting as signposts some particularly emblematic dates or big events, we could employ to indicate its beginnings and its end, respectively, the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War (1839-1842), which marked in turn a further acceleration and the commencement of a new chapter in the history of globalization and the shaping of the present global world.
11 2. Twentieth-Century Inspirations and False Starts
But what does it precisely mean “to specialize”, or indeed “to professionalize”, in Global History?3 When I started doing some reading and research around this topic towards the middle of the 1990s, «a return of universal history» was beginning to become perceptible in international historiography. Since then I’ve written quite a lot about a favourite theme of it – the culture of British imperialism. But my scientific interest in the New World History first arose from my studies on the European historiographical tradition. The representations of the past elaborated by the authors of universal histories, histories of humanity, histories of the world, global histories (not to speak of the theologies and philosophies of history), have always seemed to me endowed with cultural meanings that make them strongly significant from the viewpoint of political as well as intellectual history. I must confess, moreover, that what contributed to attract me to such a figure as, for example, Arnold J. Toynbee, in spite of his largely outdated approach to the subject, and to the much more sophisticated scholars gathered around the «Journal of Modern History» under the ideal aegis of William McNeill (Toynbee’s biographer), or recruited from the ranks of British Imperial History, like Bayly and Darwin, was what I perceived as the profound relevance of their works to understanding key- issues of the post-Cold War world, which I (born in 1964) felt unprepared to cope with on the basis of the general historical education I had got at school and university in 1970s-80s Naples and Italy.
At the same time, I soon convinced myself that the incipient come-back of World History was worth attentively following up, because there were chances it would turn out to be an epoch-making development in the evolution of contemporary professional historiography.
3 This question applies of course all the more to students for a doctoral degree. 12 In a sense, the recognition of Global History as a «legitimate and even important» area of «specialization», both at MA and «doctoral level», of which the very aforementioned launch in 2018 of a Doctorate in Global History and Governance by the joint initiative of such prestigious Italian academic institution as the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Naples Federico II offers a promising instance, can be regarded as the single most significant aspect of the present flourishing of the discipline. The creation, in particular, of doctoral programs in World History centered on the study of global interactions, connections and comparisons represents in fact a novelty of the last quarter of a century also for the United States, which have been in many ways the epicenter of the so called «New World History Movement». In 2005 one among its chief protagonists, Patrick Manning, in the introduction to a collective volume expressly conceived as a kind of showcase for the debuting works by «recent recipients of doctoral degrees» in World History, evoked the atmosphere of doubt and skepticism that continued to surround «the launching of world history as a primary research field at doctoral level» «during the 1990s», when these young American «scholars» had begun «their graduate study». Not only «historians working in national and area-studies specializations gave virtually no support» – according to Manning’s testimony – «to graduate study in world history». But «even established world historians objected to the idea of doctoral specialization in world history, preferring to see it as a secondary concern adopted after primary training in a locality» (that is, in a particular subnational, national or regional history). There are many good reasons, of course, why one may shudder at the very thought of a postgraduate student “specializing” in World History, that sounds more like a contradiction in terms. I can remember a pair of distinguished Italian historians and good friends of mine saying me a dozen years ago, arguably in order to pour water on the too easy enthusiasms of a junior colleague, that global history was simply «irricercabile» («un-researchable») – that is, unattainable and therefore virtually non-existent as an object susceptible of sound empirical investigation. I myself am very far from underrating the seriousness of the difficulties pointed to 13 by these and many other certainly unbiased scholars. It is only too evident that, if you aspire to contribute any serious piece of really original research to the knowledge of any relevant event or process stretching across two or more geo- historical macro-spaces or macro-regional cultures, you must equip yourself with a range of competences which are rarely found even in the ranks of senior historians. Quite apart from the arduous requirements of this more practical and technical order, however, a major obstacle which has first delayed, then hampered specialization in World History in the past, has been the lack of any sizeable consensus around a workable definition of what doing scientific research in that field of study exactly implied, notwithstanding the periodical recognition and insistence on its need on the part of vocal minorities of historians. The present revival of World History can indeed be considered as the most recent and successful (at the moment) of a series of attempts which have periodically been made since la Belle Époque to widen the horizon of the historical study and teaching so as to bring into its purview the interconnected and interrelated pasts of all the human groups involved in the corresponding stages of contemporary globalization.
One of the most important expansive (and largely abortive) phases undergone by World History during the twentieth century – the give only a particularly significant example – occurred in the aftermath of the First World War. Its chief source of ethical and political inspiration was the confidence nurtured by many historians (among whom several protagonists of the coeval institutionalization of the discipline of International Relations, like Arnold J. Toynbee, and an influential amateur scholar like the celebrated novelist Herbert George Wells) that the pacifist project of the League of Nations would highly benefit from substituting nineteenth- century historiographical nationalism and Eurocentrism, which in their view shared the guilt of having created the cultural atmosphere that had led to the Great War and was still hindering the reconstruction of a viable international legal order, with a European and world history which would emphasize the legacy of the past
14 experienced in common by all the peoples of the earth notwithstanding the political, national, ideological, racial, religious and civilizational barriers which divided them. According to the female economic historian and ardent liberal internationalism Eileen Power, who in 1921 contributed a very interesting essay on The Teaching of History and World Peace to the multi-authored volume The Evolution of World- Peace, «the great aim of history teaching must be to show mankind its common heritage in the past and its common hopes for the future». The historical present, regarded as the outcome of centuries-old transnational and transregional interactions and connections among the peoples of the world, could supply them with the materials for building an ecumenical society. The success of the League of Nations depended in fact on the existence of a public opinion specifically educated to understand that, «in spite of national antagonisms and divergent interests, mankind as a whole is what the League of Nations presupposes it to be: a community with common aims and a common history». If the League of Nations had to become a working concern, an actually operating reality, it was necessary that the younger generations acquired through the school «some idea of the history of that other community to which they belong (besides and beyond the nation, N.d.R.), that is mankind». And the chief educational tool through which «this sense of mankind as a community» could be fostered in the youth was not else than «the teaching of world history». This shows, by the way, that the felicitous coupling of Global History and Global Governance in the newly born Neapolitan Doctorate has very deep and serious intellectual roots indeed. The elective affinity between World History and some kind of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalism (which only too often goes altogether unmentioned in the cursory and amateurish historiographical retrospectives plaguing the general literature on Global History produced in connection with its most recent return in vogue) has periodically resurfaced over the subsequent hundred years, sometimes in the form of a priori and teleological meta-narratives of the progress of mankind «towards the goal of human endeavours», whose visible structural similarities with the tradition of providential and eschatological theology and philosophy of history 15 go a long way in explaining and justifying the suspicions and skepticism with which empirical historians have usually welcomed such an intellectual hircocervus. What the several and largely abortive World History booms that followed each other during the twentieth century failed either singularly or cumulatively to achieve was the growth and academic institutionalization of self-organized bodies of world historians who did research and teaching in loose accordance with a distinctive paradigm that could be respected and partially shared also by members of other disciplinary communities working in more established fields of the historical profession. If, as I said, the new boom started around the 1980s marks possibly a breakthrough in the history of historical writing, it is precisely because in our own days World History seems to be finally entered into a stage of professionalization.
3. The Post-Cold War Thrust towards Professionalization
This opinion – it must be warned – is still far from being unanimously held by all the historians, critics and observers of contemporary historiography. In A History of
Histories from Herodotus to the twentieth century published less than fifteen years ago, the eminent British intellectual historian John Burrow argued that World History, for all its renewed fashionability, still remained «more an inspiration than an established body of historical writing» – a judgement, by the way, that applies especially well to the current Italian situation. An opposite evaluation was authoritatively expressed the following year by the late Georg G. Iggers in the final chapter, devoted to Historiography after the Cold
War, of the Global History of Modern Historiography composed in four hands with Q. Edward Wang, then the Secretary General of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. The concluding paragraph of the book dealt with what the authors comprehensively called «World History, Global History and History of Globalization» (and this very fact is all the more noteworthy when we observe that 16 in Iggers’ former influential work on Historiography in the Twentieth Century, published in 1997, the New Word History movement was not mentioned at all!). As described in Iggers’ and Wang’s 2008 survey, the momentous post-Cold War trend towards World History showed all the typical hallmarks of previous processes of historical professionalization: the launch of specialized reviews like the aforementioned «Journal of World History» in 1990 or the «Journal of Global History» in 2006; the birth of scientific societies like, first and foremost, the World History Association in 1982; the growing spaces conquered by World History in the universities and in particular in the training of graduate and doctoral students; the production of textbooks like Patrick Manning’s Navigating World History published in 2003; and many other external symptoms could be added to this list (like, for example, the creation in 1987 of a Toynbee Prize Foundation, affiliated to the American Historical Association, and devoted to promote an attitude to «thinking globally about history»). Iggers’ and Wang’s assessment has been subscribed to by Jürgen Osterhammel in an essay on the study of World History since the Second World War contributed to the last volume of the Oxford History of Historical Writing in 2011. Osterhammel preliminarily defines the subject as a kind of «transcultural history» provided with the maximum «temporal depth in the horizon of the known world». He regards its «spectacular» coming back, observable since the years around 1990, as the outcome of a tradition remounting back to the Enlightenment. During the next two centuries, roughly coinciding with the epoch that sees the professionalization of historical studies, this intellectual project precariously unfolded in an alternation of seasons of growth and seasons of stagnation or oblivion, without never managing to produce any significant cumulative effect. The distinguishing feature of the «new global history» which has been developing since the late twentieth century is that, despite its persistent state of fragmentation, it has finally shown conspicuous signs of «professionalization», giving rise to the first nuclei of a disciplinary community, with a larger and stronger presence in the United States, at least at the beginning, but with a scope, a character and an outlook more and more international and 17 transnational: «for the first time ever» – Osterhammel confidently concluded –, «world history crystallized as a movement aimed at procuring a place as one of the dominant historiographical paradigms». Like the professionalization and the professional practice of history in general, so the professionalization and the professional practice of any historical subdiscipline entail many things, only a few of which I have alluded to earlier. But there can be no doubt that its most basic presupposition consists in the existence of a minimal, elastic and evolving agreement, reached and maintained by a group of scholars, about a cluster of notions embracing the epistemological premises, the thematical contents, the categorical apparatus, the methodological and organizational procedures, the cognitive purposes, the pragmatic tasks of the particular branch of historiography they profess. Such a theoretical constellation, whose all-pervasive and inescapable operation in the actual performance of his craft every historian ignores at his peril, is exactly what I had in mind when I said, at the beginning of this introduction, that the following pages will focus on (and their title «The New Global Past» intends to refer to) a conceptualization of World History which can be recognized at the core of its ongoing «crystallization» – to borrow Osterhammel’s image – into an academic discipline. A key factor in the process of professionalization outlined by Iggers, Wang and Osterhammel seems to have in fact been the convergence of a critical mass of scholars around an articulated vision of study of World History embodied in, and relying on the indispensable support of, a series of paradigmatic works which offered a practical demonstration of its actual feasibility in terms of adherence to the rules and requirements of contemporary historiographical realism. This novel conceptualization, moreover, unlike in the past, is proving suitable to meet and mobilize the common consent of both the practicing or would-be World Historians and (not less importantly) other groups of specialists trained and operating within the disciplinary boundaries of the national histories, the area studies, the colonial and imperial histories, the so called “Expansion of Europe” 18 studies, but feeling the urgent need to overcome the conventional limitations of their respective subjects and serving at the same time as an invaluable recruitment basin for World History proper.
4. The Categorical Cluster in Outline: A Preliminary Glossary
For analytical and didactic convenience, I will decompose the notional cluster around which the professional identity of the World Historians is taking shape into a number of elements which can be grouped under nine headings. These are: 1) The Global Perspective; 2) The Transregional and Transcultural Dimension; 3) The «Human Community» and (or) the Long-Term History of Globalization; 4) «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives»; 5) Dynamic Interactions; 6) The Globalized Society; 7) «Differentiated Commonalities»;
8) Pluralist Cosmopolitanism; 9) Global Citizenship. No. 1 – The Global Perspective – refers to the non-objectivistic, non-holistic and constructionist conception of the «global past» with which the New World Historians, distancing themselves from the onto-teleological attitudes of so many of their predecessors, nowadays tend to identify the subject-matter of their discipline (as clearly intimated by the very subtitle of Patrick Manning’s textbook:
«Historians create a Global Past»). Nos. 2-3 refer to the particular geo-historical spatiality – embracing together a plurality of cultural regions and regional cultures –, and the resulting historical processuality – the development of the «human community» as an outcome of long- term globalization –, whose study the New World Historians claim as their professional task within the academic division of labour. 19 No. 4 refers to the New World Historians’ diversified approaches towards the commonly felt problem of the «Grand Narrative» and macro-historical synthesis. No. 5 – «Dynamic Interaction» – refers to their innovative, nonethnocentric view of the relationships unfolding among the connected regional histories in which the global past articulates itself (like in the crucial case of the interactions between “Occident and Orient”, or “the West and the Rest”, within the context of the modern and contemporary “Expansion of Europe”). No. 6 – The Globalized Society – refers to the central characteristic of the present age whose roots in the past, as already hinted before, the New World Historians aim to explore and elucidate. No. 7 – «Differentiated Commonalities» – refers to the essential legacy from the global past to today’s globalized humanity that the New World Historians seem chiefly interested to emphasize. No. 8 – Pluralist Cosmopolitanism – refers to the prevailing ethical and political option from which the New World Historians’ closely intertwined responses to the «challenge of the present» and the call of professional duty draw nourishment and inspiration.
No. 9 – Global Citizenship4 – refers to both the ultimate constituency that the New World Historians aspire to address, i.e. the citizens of the globalized society, and the pedagogical and public functions which their discipline appears to them especially entitled and called to discharge: the education for cosmopolitan citizenship in the ecumenical city of man.
4 P. K. O’Brien, Global History for Global Citizenship, in Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A.G. Hopkins, edited by T. Falola and E. Brownell, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, N.C., 2011, pp. 447-458. 20 II. A Synoptic Overview of the Field of Study
1. World History Stoops to Conquer: the Global Point of View
At the epistemological ground-level, a strategic precondition for the professional take-off of World History and its fruitful dialogue with other specialisms has been its critical self-distancing from the holistic ambitions and pretensions of «Universal History» which had continued to mar or make strongly feel their influences in the works of its earlier practitioners, like, in different ways, in the cases of Arnold J. Toynbee and William McNeill, well into the twentieth century and until very recently5. In Toynbee’s belief, for example, the supreme goal of historical knowledge (a goal that had been actually «achieved», according to him, in H.G. Wells’ Outline of History published in 1919) was «re-living the entire life of Mankind as a single imaginative experience»6. Written in 1934, these words were intended as a polemical rejoinder to «the professional historians», who insisted on disparaging and sometimes ridiculing «“Universal Histories”» realized by solitary individuals (rather than by cooperating teams of scholars in multi-authored volumes or series of volumes). Half a century later, speaking in his capacity of President of the American Historical Association, McNeill described as «the moral duty of the historical profession in our time» the production of «an intelligible world history» which would be able to inspire in his readers a feeling of personal empathy with its object, namely, the destiny of «humanity as a whole».
5 See also, infra, ch. 7, my observations on Eric Hobsbawm as The Last of the Universal Historian. 6 Wells’ book was subtitled «Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind», virtually embracing both nature and culture. 21 But while reacting and adapting to the particular circumstances of the different periods in which they were living and working, both Toynbee and McNeill, through the mediation of their shared mentor Lord Acton, were only revamping, in an important sense, an intellectual project that dated back to Leopold von Ranke and the very origins of professional historiography in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1896, echoing the definition given by Bishop Bossuet to his pupil le Dauphin de France little more than two hundred years before, Acton had exalted «Universal History» as the genre of historical writing dealing with «the common fortunes of mankind» – with that special category of events, in other terms, which involved and affected the human race in its entirety. World History, therefore, was not simply «a distinct branch», but «the sublimest branch», the consummation itself of the historian’s craft. And exactly this had been the firm conviction of «the father Ranke» (A. Momigliano) too. For Ranke, in fact, the final purposes of the rising historical profession had to be, first, the comprehension of the past life of humanity in its fullness and totality, second, the production of synthetic works of Weltgeschichte which would transform this knowledge into the general and common possession of mankind at large, starting from the educated public of the particular nation to which each scholar or group of scholars belonged. Compare now to these proud and high-sounding claims the unobtrusive, almost humble statement of aims prefaced to the first number of the journal of the World History Association (supra, Introduction, § 1), where Jerry Bentley expressly identifies the «systematic study and research in world history» with the production of scientific «articles that undertake historical analysis from a global point of view». What characterizes professional work in the disciplinary field of world history is, in other words, the conscious and deliberate choice of a heuristic perspective – the «global point of view» – which leads this particular community of researchers to neatly select as scientific object of their investigations a specific and circumscribed category of historical phenomena – the «global past». 22 So the new world historians do not claim to be new because they would have finally discovered a key to understanding the (non-existent) totality of the human past. On the contrary, they try to draw attention to the relevance of certain particular and well defined aspects of the past which have been completely neglected, or underrated, or dealt with in an unsatisfactory manner by their predecessors. More to the point, when the New World Historians claim the «global past» as the field of competence allotted to their discipline in the academic division of the historiographical labour, they refers – as I’ve already hinted – to the study of A) the «transregional» interactions and connections and B) the resulting development of the «human community».
2. The Global Past, (A): The Transregional and Transcultural Scales and Dimensions of Human History
In the jargon of the new world historians, therefore, the much-abused term “global” acquires a very specific and specialized conceptual meaning. According to them, historical events and processes qualify as global when, and only when, they «work their influence (and make their influence actually felt, N.d.R.) in more than one civilization or cultural region» and unfold therefore on an «interregional» scale, or on a «hemispheric» scale (embracing in this case an entire group of civilizations like the Afro-Euro-Asian ones), or on a literally «ecumenical», planetary scale. As important examples of global historical phenomena of this kind we may mention cross-cultural migrations and the creation of the relative diasporic communities; the establishment of long distance trade networks; the impact of innovations in transport and communication technologies; the encounters and the exchanges of religious, cultural, political and institutional traditions; missionary initiatives; the imposition and the exertion of economic, military, political and administrative control on colonial territories and attempts at empire-building 23 involving peoples rooted in far remote and far different civilizational backgrounds (like the Europeans and various branches of Asiatic peoples in the obvious case of British India); the diffusion of botanical and animal biological species and the spreading of diseases.
3. The Global Past, (B): The «Human Community» and (or) the Long Term History of Globalization
Correspondently, by «human community» – an expression employed in the mission statement of the World History Association and borrowed from the subtitle of an important book by William McNeill (The Rise of the West. A History of the Human Community) – the New World Historians mean the specific field of social activity which is generated throughout history by the interactions among human groups that take place in the «transregional» and «cross-cultural» geohistorical spaces. The «human community» is then a macro-society, a society of societies, composed of two or more great regional societies and regional cultures which interact both with it and with each other inside it. Within the human community, in other terms, there is interaction between the individual regional society and the global society at large as well as between the single regional societies among themselves. Moreover, the human community evolves in the course of time. This means that the human community has a history of its own – a history which can be empirically reconstructed and a history which is susceptible to periodization. This history may provide the thread for a unified narrative of world history centered on the prolonged genesis of «global cosmopolitanism». «Global cosmopolitanism» (according to McNeill’s definition) denotes the shape taken by the human community in the present epoch, in the world around us, where its development has reached a stage in which «all the cultural variety of mankind is now embraced within the bounds of an intimately interacting whole».
24 The global history of the modern and contemporary age (to which my course is more specially devoted) deals therefore with that period of the history of the human community through which the nowadays condition of global cosmopolitanism gradually matured and then actually took shape. Some world historians explicitly refer to the history of the human community as the history of globalization. This choice, given the ambivalences and the ideological implications of the word, presents disadvantages as well advantages. But it is clear that, in this acception, the term “globalization” does not intend to indicate a merely contemporary phenomenon. On the contrary, what the new world historians want to emphasize by appropriating the term is that contemporary globalization is only a phase in a process – the growth of the human community – which is ideally coextensive with the history of mankind. Not by chance, perhaps, one of the best definitions of the concept of “globalization” has been given by an Egyptologist, the German archeologist Jan Assmann. According to Assmann, globalization in world history can be described as «a process of general dissemination (of merchandise, technologies, news, political influence, religious ideas) across political and cultural boundaries and of the ensuing integration and coalescence of various previously isolated zones into one system of interconnections and interdependencies, where everything, that is, all nations, empires, tribes and states cohere in some way or other by political, economic, or cultural relations». Another influential conceptualization of globalization in world history has been proposed by Christopher Bayly, who has defined globalization as «a progressive increase in the scale of social processes from a local or regional to a world level» which is empirically observable in human history since antiquity. More precisely, the history of globalization deals for him with the human making and remaking of «global linkages» – with the changing patterns, in other terms, of those specific «networks and dominances» which are generated «by geographical expansion of ideas and social forces from the local and regional level to the inter-regional and inter- continental level». The «more integrated international society», «system», or 25 «order», whose «growth» is a major characteristic of the «long nineteenth century» (1780-1914) covered in his book on The Birth of the Modern World presupposed two previous stages in the «prehistory of “globalization”»: «archaic globalization» and «early modern» or «proto-capitalist globalization». A concrete and very significant example of periodization of globalization based on the application of the global perspective to world history is The Rise of the West by William McNeill, one of the recognized founding fathers of the New World History in the United States. This is precisely the book (published around the middle of the 1960s and never translated into Italian) whose subtitle reads «a history of the human community». In this pioneering and very influential work, Mc Neill identified three epochs in the history of what some global historians would call today globalization. The first epoch is the epoch of the Middle Eastern ascendancy between the seventeenth century and the fifth century before Christ. In this first epoch the «human community» firstly emerges – already presenting the features of a «cosmopolitan civilization» that encompassed a number of local civilizations and cultures – from the expansion of a Babylonian «“great society”» formed at the beginning of the second millennium before Christ. The following epoch is the epoch of the «Eurasian cultural balance» (or Eurasian equilibrium, as it has been more recently renamed by John Darwin). This second epoch spans the two thousand years or so from the «closure» of the entire Eastern hemisphere, occurring between the fifth century before Christ and the third century after Christ, to the threshold of the early modern age. During this period the «human community» expands into an even wider «Eurasian ecumene» – a unified space within which a variable constellation of four or five mildly connected civilizations interacts without anyone of them losing its autonomy or gaining ascendancy over the others. The third epoch, the epoch of the «Western dominance» opens in the aftermath of the discovery of the sea route to India and the discovery, conquest and colonization of the New World. It begins, in other words, with the early modern «closure» of a «global ecumene» which now becomes almost literally coextensive 26 with the inhabited world. This period sees the Eurasian equilibrium first «changing» to the advantage of the West (between 1500 and 1700), then «tottering» (between 1700 and the middle of the nineteenth-century), finally to give rise (since the 1850s) to that radical reconfiguration of the «human community» corresponding to the «global cosmopolitanism» of our day.
4. «Large-Scale Empirical Narratives»
Albeit in many ways outdated, McNeill’s The Rise of the West, whose republication in 1991 could be mentioned as a minor symptom of the incipient revival of World History, has been one of the inspirations for the resurgence of the belief in the possibility and necessity to produce great works of world-historical synthesis satisfying the scientific standards of academic historiography in the form of «large- scale empirical narratives», a trend which is to be regarded, as I said before, as a major component of the present surge of world history and a significant symptom of its persisting linkage with the tradition of “Universal History”.
Since the mid-1980s McNeill himself and other American scholars (among whom Jerry Bentley) have advanced and actually attempted to realize in their writings the project of an «ecumenical world history» centered on the «contributions by all peoples and societies to the making of larger global orders». One may mention, for instance, Bentley’s book Old World Encounters, published in 1993 and dealing with the «Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times», or McNeill’s The Human Web, published in 2003 and written in collaboration with his son, the well- known environmental historian John McNeill. The underlying idea was that the development and the metamorphoses of the «human community» could provide a coherent framework for a comprehensive and non-Eurocentric narrative of world history which would explain the genealogy of the contemporary mondialized society in terms of history of globalization.
27 The most immediate precedent for this kind of present-centered and future- oriented approach to «ecumenical history» (dating back to the decades of the pre- First World War globalization and renewed by Arnold Toynbee in the 1920s) was precisely McNeill’s The Rise of the West. This book can be read in fact as a teleological account of the advent of contemporary «global cosmopolitanism», which McNeill portrayed as the ultimate outcome of a process of progressive enlargement of the scale and growth of the historical significance of the spaces of cross-cultural interaction. In the Conclusion of the book McNeill made explicit that the title «“The Rise of the West”» was intended «as a shorthand description of the upshot of the history of the human community to date». His narrative culminated with a diagnosis of the present and a «vision of the future». According to it, mankind was faced with the alternative between a nuclear catastrophe and «the eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism», a «cosmopolitan world society» erected on the scaffolding of a «world state» enabled by its «world-wide political-military authority» to exercise «an overarching world sovereignty» (by analogy with the Roman unification of the Mediterranean or the imperial unification of Ancient China) and bearing, at least initially, «a Western imprint» (given the role played by the West in the history of the human community since 1500). The Human Web, published by McNeill father and son fifteen years ago, largely represents an updated version of the same conceptual model. The book aimed to provide the reader with «A Bird’s Eye View of World History» by emphasizing «the centrality of the webs of interaction in human history» as both significant factors of historical change and human creations whose transformation «constitutes» – according to the authors – «the overarching structure of human history». The history of the world would lend itself, in other words, to be entirely and organically described in terms of widening, thickening, growing power of conditioning exerted on both the social life and the biosphere by the «human web». So, in this later book, the evolving morphology of the webs of interaction takes the place of the history of human community as criterion of periodization of the 28 global past: from the first «world wide web», operating already before the Neolithic, to the denser «local or regional webs», forming inside it as a result of the invention and diffusion of agriculture, to the «metropolitan web» of the subsequent age of civilizations, to the Euro-Afro-Asian «Old World Web» which arose at the beginning of the vulgar era, to the «cosmopolitan web» of the Oceanic age, to end with the «single global web» of today. A different but not incompatible and not unrelated attempt at macro-historical synthesis which has been deeply influenced by the new world history is the multivolume Blackwell History of the World planned and edited by the British medievalist Robert Moore. What makes this series of special interest to us is that Moore managed to recruit among its contributors the distinguished specialist of Indo-British and Imperial history Christopher Bayly. Bayly wrote for the Blackwell History of the World both the now famous The Birth of the Modern World, 1770-1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, and its posthumous sequel, Remaking the Modern World, which has been published in 2018 and carries on Bayly’s story, focused on the «global connections», up to 2015 (the year of his death). It seems to me that Bayly’s volumes (and in particular the first one, devoted to the «long nineteenth century») can be numbered among the most successful attempts made in recent years to apply the global perspective and the notion of globalization in the realization of great works of synthesis dealing with the modern and contemporary periods. As declared by the editor Robert Moore in the general preface to the Blackwell History of the World, the ambition of the Series, originally planned in more than twenty volumes, is to offer the reader «a (…) comprehensive (…) account of the entire human past» by combining simultaneously two methodological approaches: the ecumenical approach, that identifies «world history» - as we’ve seen – with «the history of the contacts between peoples previously isolated from one another», and the macro-regional approach, which consists in adopting as units of geo-historical analysis and comparison such regional (or hemispheric, in the case of Islam) civilizations or «world systems» as – I quote from various lists of the volumes 29 planned by Moore – Oceania and the Pacific, Latin America, Japan, China, South-East Asia, India, the Islamic World, Russia taken together with Central Asia and Mongolia, Africa, the Mediterranean (or the Western Mediterranean, in the most recent list), the Western World. The organization of the Series reflects the belief that an «attempt to understand history as a whole» may be pursued with a reasonable hope of success only by alternating «volumes defined by regional parameters (such as the volumes devoted to the single regional or interregional or maritime geohistorical spaces I have quoted a moment ago) and volumes defined by global parameters», such as the volume written by Bayly (or the volume on the Early Modern World originally commissioned to another distinguished global historian, Sanjay Subrahmanyam). The alternation and the crossover of the two methodological perspectives should confer the Blackwell History of the World the shape of «a barrel», in which «the indispensable narratives of very long-term regional development» are «bound together by global surveys of the interactions between regions, and the great transformations which they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another (like global modernization)».
It is clear then that, in the overall economy of the Series, Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World was one of the volumes to be drawn up according to «global parameters» and called to act as circles, so to speak, of the barrel imagined by the editor. The task entrusted to Bayly was to treat the «long nineteenth century» between the American Revolution and the First World War as one of the great epochs of enhanced convergence in which historical change assumes ecumenical dimensions and characteristics by virtue of the closer connections establishing themselves between the various regional histories and requires to be analyzed in terms of their reciprocal interaction and from a cross-regional perspective. Bayly’s book deals therefore with the long nineteenth century as a historical period in which a dramatic acceleration of the pace of historical change coincides with an intensification of contacts already established among the regional societies 30 of Eurasia during the early modern age. Its theme is the classical theme of the revolutionary transition from the «ancient regime to modernity», but it regards this transition on a planetary scale, like a product of «global connections» and in its interactive aspects.
5. «Dynamic Interactions»
Also the strategy adopted by Bayly in his analysis of the transregional interactions appears in substantial agreement with the methodological positions of the New World or Global Historians, as it rests on the refusal to consider world modernization in Eurocentric terms. This brings us to a further and, in my opinion, to the most innovative and difficult point of the new conceptualization of the global past, which is its reliance on the crucial category of “dynamic interaction”. Many historians would agree today with McNeill in placing on the more or less remote background of contemporary globalization a period marked by the long persistence of a condition of relative equilibrium in the balance of power among the
Eurasian or Old World regional societies. Some of them (including myself, for what it counts) disagree from McNeill about the precise moment in which this equilibrium began to falter (Mc Neill argued, as you will remember, that this happened in the sixteenth century). According to this alternative periodization (elegantly outlined, among others, by Bayly and John Darwin), the «Eurasian revolution» only unfolded between the middle of the eighteenth century and the Thirties or the Forties of the nineteenth century.
This means that the interregional equilibrium subsisted – for a quarter of millennium – long after the Europeans had taken the lead in the process of world unification starting with the geographical discoveries. We will see later how this persistence (which is a key-problem of early modern history whose solution is of crucial relevance for the understanding of contemporary history) has to be interpreted.
31 In the meantime, it is all-important to observe that, whatever periodization they adopts, a central historiographical problem for the New World Historians remains to assess the unquestionably prominent role played in the making of the present global society by the so-called “expansion of Europe” and the ensuing encounters between Europe and the various regional cultures of the Eastern hemisphere, which developed along both the early modern and the contemporary periods of the history of globalization. Most world historians would probably agree that contemporary globalization driven, at least in its earlier stages, by Europe and European global imperialism has been so intense as to entail indeed a partial convergence and reciprocal assimilation between the cultural regions of the world in conformity with patterns provided by the West. One may mention as an obvious instance of this the diffusion on a planetary scale of the national State, largely a product of Western European history, as the fundamental model of organization of the political life and international relations of peoples belonging to very diverse civilizational traditions. The least that can be said is that Europeans and Westerners, also but not only through the means of the imperial control, have been leading actors in the process of global modernization. The foremost conceptual innovation introduced by the new world historians and their fellow-travelers working in the cognate fields of imperial history or the Expansion of Europe studies into the treatment of their subject-matter concerns precisely the way of conceiving the transregional or cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans which have shaped the trajectory of contemporary globalization. This is what I referred to earlier as the adoption of the category of dynamic interaction. To put it in brief, in the past the non-European peoples and societies who were involved in the interactive process leading to the expansion of Europe overseas, to transregional empire-building, to global modernization, tended to be regarded as historically static, powerless and passive vis-à-vis the dynamism, the overwhelming superiority and the enterprise of the Westerners. This was an enduring legacy of 32 the nineteenth century – the imperial age par excellence –, when the narrative of the European colonialism, for instance, «was written around the triumph of European society over native misrule» and «Indians and Africans were rarely more than a backdrop to the doings of colonizers, missionaries and merchants». But in the decades following decolonization – that means in the last half century or so – a revisionist trend has established itself, whose main purpose has been «to return agency» to non-Europeans, recognizing their full dignity as historical «actors». In the jargon of the new world historians the use and sometimes the abuse of the noun “interaction” (often coupled with the adjectives «dynamic» and «bilateral» in the expressions «dynamic interaction», «bilateral interaction») reflects a fundamental theoretical and ethical concern. It is aimed to underline that the «linkages» and «connections» binding together regional societies and regional cultures in the globalized spaces are not to be imagined as the imposition of an omnipotent center on helpless peripheries, but they emerge from and are operated by a much more complex multipolar field of historical forces with the effective contribution of all the peoples involved. Although these peoples are usually invested with different and shifting degrees of historical power, it never happens, especially in the Eurasia arena, that one of them can be utterly devoid of historical power. The main distinguishing feature of the New World Historians, as compared with their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, consists therefore in the propensity to invest the modern and contemporary extra-European worlds with four attributes: first, an endogenous dynamism prior to the encounter with the West; second, the ability to condition the European expansion abroad; third, an effective impact in the construction of global orders; fourth, the capacity to re-act and feed- back on the Western societies themselves. Seen from the theoretical perspective of the global history, the transition to global modernity appears in a very different light than in the past. As strongly underlined by Robert Moore in his editorial preface, Bayly’s book on the Birth of the Modern World doesn’t analyze global modernization «as something which some 33 people or some regions did to others less favoured or deserving, but as a series of transformations in which most of the people of the world participated, and to which most of them contributed, not simply as the objects or victims of the successes of others, but actively, independently and creatively». A closer examination of the notion of dynamic interaction and the full implications of its use in the study and interpretation of the modern and contemporary age is indispensable to elucidate the remaining four components of the New World History paradigm. So, in order to reach the required level of in-depth analysis, and provide you with a more concrete set of exemplifications, I will concentrate on the answers given by a few outstanding but at the same time representative authors to the two interrelated historiographical questions of the crisis of the Eurasian equilibrium and the transition to global modernity in the period between the Seven-years’ war of the mid-eighteenth-century and the first Anglo-Chinese Opium war (1839-1842).
34 III. An Introductory Case Study: Contemporary India in the Perspective of the New Global History
1. The Reinterpretation of the Origins of British Colonialism
An excellent starting point for this central part of our conceptual survey – it seems to me – is the reinterpretation undergone by the theme of the origins of British colonial domination in India in the last few decades. A close analysis of the new interpretation, put forward (among others) by Bayly himself since the nineteen- eighties and very well summarized in John Darwin’s book After Tamerlane, published in 2007, will provide you with a preliminary example of what might concretely mean to apply the global perspective in examining a major problem in modern and contemporary history. The emergence – or, in a longer term perspective, the re-emergence – of India as a major manufacturing power is one of those epochal novelties of our times that are evoked more frequently in international historiography by those scholars who advocate the urgent need to adopt a global perspective in the study and teaching of modern and contemporary history. John Darwin, who has been professor of imperial and global history at Oxford, and who is the author of the important volume on the rise and fall of the global empires from 1400 to 2000 some parts of which I have adopted as a text for my courses, argued for example that the ultimate goal of the historian is to envisage a genealogy of the «present». If this is true, a «present» which among its most characteristic features includes the redistribution of world industrial power to the benefit of large Asian societies such as China and India cannot but induce historians to modify the very same questions that they address to the past – their notions of which parts of the past is most essential for us to know and understand here and now.
35 India, in particular, is playing a prominent role within some of the main thematic strands that historians are pursuing in an attempt to make the present and the contemporaneity intelligible as a result of the processes that have shaped the globalized world of our days. The first thematic strand involving India relates more generally to the reconstruction of the centuries-old process of growth of «global connectivity» whose current stage we are accustomed to name globalization and which global historians read in terms of interactions between large regional societies. The second thematic strand centering on India concerns the role played within this process by Europeans and Westerners, especially with the means of formal (i.e. political) or informal imperial domination. The third, very important thematic strand involving India focuses on the «resilience» of the other societies, cultures and states of Afro-Eurasia in the face of European expansion, and the dynamics and consequences of the encounters between «the world and the West». India has been affected by British conquest and domination for a period of little more than two centuries (from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century), to say nothing of other very important aspects of its relationship with West, like the Jesuit missionary initiative operating under the aegis of the Portuguese Crown. It is obvious, therefore, that in the case of India the three dimensions I have just mentioned tend to coincide, at least for a large part of its history – the history of globalization, the history of the Western expansion and imperial domination, the history of the reactions triggered by the impact of the West in the other societies that experienced it.
Less obvious, and still too little known to the general historical culture, especially in Italy, is the new, very original way in which historiography has come to radically rethink the relationship between these three dimensions in the interpretation of the emergence of British hegemony in the subcontinent. In order to define correctly the terms of the question, we need to start from a fact that is as obvious as it is overlooked. Until the eighties of the nineteenth 36 century, the imposition of an effective European imperial control over the non- European territories, peoples and states of Afro-Eurasia remained the exception rather than being the rule. If the growing unbalance of power on the European side had to translate itself into direct domination, certain conditions of possibility had to be realized. These conditions of possibility pertained, on one hand, to the conditions of non-European territories and societies where the European control had to be imposed, on the other hand, to the readiness of the European metropolitan societies and states to bear the huge costs (both material and political) of overseas empire. As far as this chronology is concerned, the exception, the «great exception» or the biggest exception is constituted precisely by the case of British India, where the cornerstone of the British Raj was laid in Bengal around the middle of the eighteenth century and where the British conquest of the entire subcontinent was substantially completed over the next century. So, what makes India «probably the most remarkable case of imperialism in modern times» are not only the dimensions, the duration, the general historical importance of British domination, but also the epoch, the precocity, the speed of its establishment. The European and British presence in the subcontinent originally, and for a long time, consisted of a mere network of commercial stations. The creation of a potential «bridgehead» for the British territorial expansion dates back to the early sixties of the eighteenth century, with the acquisition of Bengal by the East India Company. Bengal endowed British imperialism in India with a «security zone» from which it became difficult to dislodge it. This making epoch event, therefore, lays the premises for the Company to become itself an Indian power, able to compete on equal terms with the other regional powers in which the Mughal Empire was falling apart. Sixty years later, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, we find that the Company has become by far the dominant power of the subcontinent. In the following decades the Company would proceed to further conquests and annexations. In 1857, on the eve of the Great Mutiny of part of its native infantry
37 of sepoys, the East India Company seemed well underway to take direct administrative control of the whole of India. In the light of this chronology, the historiographic question that is to be posed becomes properly the following: why was India conquered before and more completely than almost every other part of Afro-Eurasia? And why did the British prove willing and able to assume the great risks and the heavy costs that its conquest entailed? The conventional response prevailed among contemporaries, under the influence of authoritative intellectuals like James Mill (not to be confused with his son, John Stuart Mill), who is the author of a celebrated History of British India published in 1817, was that the triumph of the East India Company had been the triumph of the character and intellect of the most civilized and advanced Europeans on the stagnation and anarchy of the indigenous society. Christopher Bayly, who has been a great historian of colonial India before becoming also a prominent global historian, recalled how, even at the beginning of the sixties of the twentieth century, when he attended the University of Oxford as an undergraduate, students were offered narratives of the establishment of the British Raj, dating back to the first decades of nineteenth century, when James Mill had written his History of British India, where the natives were treated like a crowd of extras, of background actors, destined to be quickly defeated and pacified. The historiography of the last decades, even under the influence of the contemporary economic performances of India, has completely reversed this verdict, because it has explored the alternative hypothesis that the key to British success should be sought not in the alleged backwardness and stasis of India, but, on the contrary, in its «openness» and accessibility to globalizing flows, and in the sophistication of its commercial and financial life. The British, according to this new interpretation, were able to exploit the advantages connected to the «modernity» of early modern India. The openness of India helped the British in many ways. During the eighteenth- century the crisis of the Moghul Empire was accelerated by a fresh wave of inland 38 Iranian and Afghan invasions whose probable objective was to seize the control of the commercial traffic along the route between Northern India and Central Asia, which remained, even after the early modern closure of the Ecumene by the European seafarers, one of the most important arteries of global trade. Although this had been for thousands of years the main route of travel followed by repeated invasions suffered by the subcontinent, nothing comparable to the Chinese Great Wall had ever blocked the way that, from the center of the Eurasian Heartland, led to the plains of the Indostan. In the coastal regions of India the activity of the English merchants was not confined to port cities (like Canton in the case of China). They were able to deal directly with indigenous merchants much more easily than was possible in China. The commercial economy of India, which in the eighteenth century was still one of the world's largest exporters of textiles, was much more outwardly oriented and internally integrated than the Chinese one and Indian prosperous merchants and bankers were far more free from the control of indigenous potentates. In maritime India, the British could therefore always count on the alliance with the local economic elites, for whom the investment opportunities offered by the East Indian
Company had become increasingly important, especially when a same threat from local bosses loomed over the interests of both Indians and British (like in the case of Bengal). Even more evident is how the advantages of modernity, and not the opportunities offered by backwardness, allowed the British to extend their power within the Indian mainland, not limiting themselves to the coastal areas. Here they could rely, in the first place, on the fact that a large part of the subcontinent was connected by an extensive and efficient credit system. In order to finance its wars, the East India Company did not have to rely solely on its commercial resources, but the British could resort to the financial services of Indian bankers. Secondly, starting from Bengal, when it took direct control of that very important province, the East Company could avail itself, for fiscal-military purposes, of the 39 monetary revenue (not in kind or other form) coming from a consolidated system of taxation of the land erected by the Mughal Empire in previous centuries. This crucial circumstance gave the British expansion the character of a self-sustaining colonialism –a colonialism that did not fall into the vicious circle of the so-called imperial oversizing and imperial overstretching (which occurs when an imbalance between military commitments and available resources pushes an imperial power to new initiatives of conquest which are sure to aggravate the initial imbalance, rather than compensating it, because they only move the balance point even further upwards). The process of British empire-building in India, in other terms, showed itself capable of self-financing, because the increased military commitments were paid through the acquisition of indigenous tax revenues. Its costs were paid by Indian society itself, without burdening the British taxpayers at home. It is only too obvious that this last was a crucial premise for the build-up and the preservation of a Metropolitan consensus around the colonial expansion. It is also well clear that the existence and profitability of the land tax presupposed a sufficiently commercialized and monetized economy in the Indian subcontinent. Thirdly, the Company was able to easily recruit an indigenous professional troop of sepoys who were loyal to their foreign employer. This was possible because in large parts of India, and especially in its great central-northern plains, the military profession had become specialized, with the formation of large mercenary armies overcoming the premodern logic of the personal devotion to a feudal warlord or the allegiance to military chieftains who were at the same time clan and tribal leaders. This standing army, based essentially on a very large number of native infantry, and much larger than the entire British army considered globally, was probably the greatest pillar of the British domination in South Asia. And it was an army whose costs, as it is worth repeating, the British were able to charge on India itself. Alongside this first, very broad category of indigenous «collaborators», other crucial allies of the East India Company in the making of British India were some elite groups – which in the Marxist terminology fashionable some decades ago would have been called «colonial bourgeoisies». The very presence and importance of these 40 groups in the life of the subcontinent testifies of the openness, the fluidity and the dynamism of Indian society. Western India had for centuries been welcoming communities of foreign merchants such as Zoroastrian Parsi of Iranian origin, who had come to dominate the great port city of Bombay and were to became strategic partners of the British. One of their Bengali equivalents in Eastern India can be considered the so-called bhadralok (the word means «respectable people»), that is a new Hindu middle class that came to replace the older Muslim élites at the top of local society. The bhadralok provided the British empire-builders with those «educated collaborators» they so desperately needed. To sum up: recent historiography has challenged the ingrained and die-hard cliché which portrayed India as «immobile», «ready to let itself be subjugated by a foreign power». What is taking its place is the image of an Indian world marked by change and innovation whose promoters are trying to forge themselves their own tools to cope with the political instability of the region. Some authors, like Christopher Bayly, have pushed themselves so far as to advance an interpretation of the onset of British domination that tends to emphasize (exaggeratedly, according to their critics) the protagonism of the indigenous historical actors. The British come to power – according to them – not so much as conquerors from overseas, but rather, at least initially, as partners of the attempt imagined by sectors of Indian modernizing elites to modify the balance of power in the subcontinent to their advantage. And even after the British domination was accepted, it had to «continue (...) to rely on a combination of local forces, (...) making sure that the Indians accepted the Raj (...) in view of their own interests». If in short the European expansion was successful, it was so also because it responded to needs arising from previous transformations promoted by autochthonous subjects, with whom the Europeans were constantly forced, for the same reason, to come to terms. Stressing the relative modernity of pre-colonial India, the new interpretation of the birth of the British empire in the South Asian subcontinent is predicated on the double historiographical premise that, during the previous two centuries and half 41 not only Western Europe but both India and the rest of the Eurasian world had been involved in processes of modernization which cannot be regarded as an exclusive feature of European history. Some scholars have spoken of multiple modernities in this regard. The notion of multiple modernities plays a key-role in Christopher Bayly’s interpretation of what I’ve called before the crisis of the Eurasian equilibrium and the transition to global modernity.
2. Hindu Civilization in the “Orientalist” Representation of James Mill
Before going on to examine Bayly's theses, I would like to use part of the time at our disposal to give you an example of another of the historiographical operations to which my course intends to introduce you. As I said at its beginning, the history course, at the master's degree level, has or should have among its objectives that of initiating the students to the historiographical practice and therefore to its methodology. Among the fundamental procedures of historiographical method there is of course the handling of documents. The document on which I want to draw your attention is represented precisely by some pages of the aforementioned James Mill’s History of British India
As we will see, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crisis of the millennial equilibrium between the cultural regions of Eurasia – the «Eurasian revolution», as John Darwin has called it – implied first a geopolitical, then an economic revolution. But the geopolitical and economic revolutions were accompanied by a cultural revolution too. This cultural revolution pertained, among other things, to the basic attitudes of the Europeans towards the non-Europeans. During the early modern equilibrium, the European culture retained an attitude of respect, if not of admiration, towards the non-Europeans. All this changed with the Eurasian revolution, when firstly the idea emerges of a hierarchy of cultures topped by the European civilization and placing 42 all the other civilizations of the Eurasian Orient (not to mention the primitive or savage peoples of Subsaharian Africa and the New World) on the lower steps of an assumed ladder of humanity. The effects of this form of cultural imperialism were not confined to the intellectual sphere, because it influenced deeply the mentality of the colonizers, the colonial policies and codes of law and provided imperial rule with a source of pseudo-scientific justification (cp. infra). Published in 1817, Mill’s History of British India is a very significant document of the denigratory, disparaging attitude towards Indian culture prevailing among the British colonizers in the early nineteenth century, especially since it was largely employed in the education of the personnel of the East India Company. I will focus my reading on of the tenth chapter of the second book, entitled Of the Hindus (about the Hindus). In these pages Mill tries his hand at a task of obvious and immediate practical relevance for an England called to govern India – to determine the exact position occupied by the Hindus in the scale of human evolution. The obvious objective of these pages is to dispel the current opinion – a product of the age of Eurasian equilibrium – that the Hindus possessed a high civilization, or that they had possessed it in the past. According to Mill, they had accomplished only the very first steps along the path of progress. But Mill’s argument is of considerable interest also because it extends in reality to the entire East, since he is convinced that the main peoples of Asia have in substance achieved the same level of civilization as the Hindustani. For what concerns its pars destruens the chapter therefore develops a polemic that targets all those who have described and praised the East, the Orient, as civilized, starting from the Greeks and the Romans and continuing with the Jesuits, the originators of the positive prejudice about China that even a man with a mind of Voltaire’s acuteness had shown himself willing to subscribe. The main target of Mill in relation to India, however, is William Jones, the great orientalist and Sanskritist, one of the discoverers of the Indo-European language family, responsible for having credited through his authority the idea that the Asian 43 countries had reached a high degree of civilization. Jones’s mistake consists, first of all, in using a concept of civilization so rudimentary and so vague that it can be adapted to all stages of social advancement except the lowest. In regard to the Arabs, his Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations reveals for Mill a romantic and idealizing attitude not unlike the sentimental exaltation of the «good savage» made by Rousseau. It is not surprising, therefore, that, placed before the Hindus, Jones had come to believe that they had reached the peak of civilization. Moreover, Mill argues, the fact that the Europeans acquired greater familiarity with the Hindus at the same time as they discovered the «savages» of the New World contributed to their exaggerated evaluation of the Hindus, because this coincidence had brought them to emphasize the greater closeness to them of the Asians as compared to the Amerindians. Whatever the reasons, the myth was destined to be exploded by the progress of the Europeans’ ability to observe reality for what it is, which could lead, according to Mill, only to an irresistible conclusion: the state of the Hindus must be considered just slightly different from that of semi-civilized nations. A further target of his criticism therefore becomes the fallacious opinion according to which the condition of degradation, in which the Hindus undoubtedly are immobilized, would in reality be a fruit of conquest and subjugation, which would have made them fall from a peak of civilization achieved in a legendary past. Mill believes, on the contrary, that the Hindus have been stuck in their present «semi-barbaric» state since very remote ages. The periods of foreign domination, imputable to their lack of ability to combine their forces together against an enemy, were the only ones in which something had been done, by foreigners, to remedy the consequences of paralysis: «How far they are from the truth those who claim that the Hindus enjoyed a high degree of civilization before their subjugation by foreigners, is shown by the fact that where they have always remained immune from the other domination [as in Nepal, or in some areas of the south-west coast] they are uniformly found at a lower grade of civilization than those who have long been subjected to a Mohammedan throne». 44 In strident contradiction with the belief in a golden age in which India would have been united in a universal monarchy conducive to civilization and intellectual life, historical reality offers the depressing spectacle of a subcontinent divided into small states in perpetual war with each other, which does not contrast with the possibility that from this struggle temporarily emerge indigenous potentates of greater magnitude, condemned, however, to an inevitable cycle of ascent and decadence. Moreover, Mill denies sharply, citing the examples of China, of ancient Persia, of the barbarian Russia, that a large state is in itself a sign of a high rate of civilization. In any case, «rebellions, massacres, and barbaric conquests, make up the history of this beautiful country» - an affirmation to be read in the light of the claim of legitimacy advanced by the British colonizers, in whose eyes the European domination over India would have benefited in the first place the natives themselves, preserving them from a proclivity to permanent anarchy. Distinctive features of Hindu society are also, in Mill’s opinion, the most extreme indigence, the alliance of despotism and priesthood in the exercise of a common tyranny over the people, the division in caste supported by the bleakest superstitions, so that «the Hindus, both in the soul in the body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race». Extremely backward the Hindus appear in the art of war, in medicine and in the useful arts in general, to which their educated class prefers astrology and other disciplines devoid of any intellectual and practical value. The only epoch in European history to which the present state of Hindu civilization can be compared are therefore the Middle Ages. But the comparison holds only up to a certain point, because the Hindus show themselves inferior to the men of the Western Middle Ages in matters of religion (and this although the religion of the European Middle Ages was, for Mill, the discredited Papism), of philosophy, of laws and institutions of government, of poetry, as well as in the military, artistic, architectural and agricultural fields. The only area in which Mill is willing to recognize a primacy for them is some branch of craftsmanship, such as
45 textile manufactures, soon to be destroyed by the competition of British industrialism, Mill’s denigration, moreover, extends from Indian law, culture and religion to the personal character of individual Hindus, not without resorting to gender stereotypes: «In terms of manners and temperament, the virility and courage of our ancestors, compared with the servile spirit and the cowardice of the Hindus, places them (the Medieval ancestors of present-day Europeans, N.d.R.) on a much higher step. Of course, our ancestors were inferior, as far as the sophistication of the customs is concerned, to this effeminate people (...). Our ancestors, on the other hand, though crude, were sincere, while under the external surface of the Hindu lies a general disposition to deception and perfidy». For Mill, on the other hand, the Hindus express, in their own way, a stage of civilization that would unite all the peoples of Asia in all the eras of their known history: not only, then, modern Arabs, Chinese and Persians, as well as some contemporary minor peoples such as the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Siamese, the Burmese, the Malays, the Tibetans, but also the ancient Persians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians: «Since the customs, institutions and achievements of Hindus have remained stationary for many ages, when we contemplate the Hindu of our day, we are contemplating the Hindus of many ages ago; and we are brought back, as it were, into the deepest recesses of antiquity (...). Conversing with a contemporary Hindu, we are conversing, to a certain extent, with the Chaldeans and the Babylonians of the age of Cyrus, with the Persians and the Egyptians of the age of Alexander the Great». It follows, for example, that Edward Gibbon’s account of the war against the
Persians (in his celebrated History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776) could serve as a description applicable to most of contemporary India, or that Zoroastrianism would possess «very strong resemblances» with Brahmanism. Therefore, the condemnation of India fully involves China, the backwardness of its agriculture and its network of communications, its shortcomings in the field of 46 natural philosophy and medical science, with some advantages to the Chinese, who, being of a more practical bent of mind, exhibit to a lesser extent those «false refinements, which the barbaric mentality exchanges for science». It is interesting to note, in conclusion, how this archaization of India is accompanied in Mill by a devaluation of the ancient Egyptian culture, much admired in the eighteenth century, at least in the artistic sphere, even by a neoclassicist like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was willing to concede to the ancient Egyptian art an historically relative positivity, as a step forward in the march of mankind towards the perfect beauty realized in the Greek art: «The admiration (...) for Egypt (...) presents not a few similarities with the admiration for the Hindus that has for so long prevailed among the Europeans. But the strength of modern intelligence has penetrated beyond the aura that surrounded it: and putting before us the state of Egyptian civilization in its authentic colours, shows us a people whose level of development, like so many famous nations of Antiquity (Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Arabs), coincides with that of the inhabitants of Indostan, as it shows all the distinctive features of a particular social stage». In this respect, the true inspirer of the extreme ethnocentrism of the utilitarian
Mill is to be probably identified in Adam Smith, the great economist, who was radically skeptical about the value of pre-classical civilizations, such as the Asian and the Egyptian, because they were too subject to the overwhelming domination of despotism.
47 IV. Dynamic Interactions among Multiple Regional Modernities at the
Roots of the Long Imperial Century
1. Christopher Bayly’s General Approach to Global History in The Birth of the Modern World
As argued before, the strategy adopted by Bayly in his analysis of the transregional interactions appears in substantial harmony with the approach of the New World History, as it rests on the refusal to consider global modernization in Eurocentric terms. On the other hand, the effort to highlight the multipolar nature of historical change does not leads the British scholar to deny the existence of differentials of power between the West and the rest of the world. Bayly’s long nineteenth century still remains the period in the history of the world in which the European dominance gives globalization a series of accelerations which push the different regional societies towards a unification that is carried out under the banner of the temporary hegemony of Western culture. Bayly therefore continues to identify the critical phase of the transition from the ancient regime to modernity at a planetary level with the revolutionary caesura which can be placed roughly in the decades between the American War of Independence and the Restoration after the Napoleonic wars. And this global watershed, that Bayly promotes to the rank of «an axial age in the history of the world», also coincides, for him, with «the first epoch of global (European, N.d.R.) imperialism». In Bayly's thought, however, the expansive élans of modern Europe are intertwined in a complex way with developments which were endogenous to the non-European societies invested by the Western initiative; and this not only in the
48 Eurasian arena, where the Europeans found other ancient civilizations on their path, but even in the case of those «native peoples» and «peoples without State» that still in the first half of the twentieth century were regarded unable to stem it and to escape, in the long run, to a destiny of extermination or complete assimilation. In Bayly’s model, therefore, the convergence among the regional histories does not give rise to cultural homologation, but to processes of hybridization, by virtue of which the surviving local or regional identities are modified by incorporating global uniformities (like the nation-state), that provide them with the means to give themselves a renewed expression. The «World religions» of the nineteenth century, like Islam and Hinduism for example, cannot be regarded as the mere legacy of ancient traditions, in deference to a tenacious stereotype of which even Max Weber fell victim, since they, to the eyes of the historian attentive to «global connections and comparisons», turn out to be a much more recent product of the planetary modernization, in the «invention» of which contacts, conflicts and mutual imitation with other expansive religions like missionary Christianity played a key role (infra, § 3). Disagreeing from too simplistic diffusionist interpretations of global
Westernization, Bayly tries to highlight how the reception of the allogenic Western models in the non-Westerns worlds was grafted on non-European, autonomous «passages to modernity» which were well under way long before the «impact with the West». These other modernities help to explain, at least in part, the establishment of the European imperial supremacy as the solution that the colonized societies themselves gave to systemic crises originating from their own internal and endogenous transformations.
Before becoming also a prominent global historian, Bayly has been a very influential specialist of Indo-British history. He has been among the protagonists of that revision of the conventional interpretation of the making of British India on which I dwelt previously (ch. III, § 1). In his 1988 book on Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Bayly argued that the inhabitants of the subcontinent had to be regarded as «active 49 agents and not simply passive bystanders and victims» in the process of empire- building. In subsequent works, Bayly progressively widened the range of his interactive interpretation of the emergence of the European hegemony, first, in a book entitled Imperial Meridian, to the zone of the Islamic empires extending from Morocco to Indonesia, then, in The Birth of the Modern World, to the entire zone of the agrarian empires from the Atlantic to the Pacific (including therefore also China and Japan). In his 2003 book Bayly adopts as the starting point for his analysis of The Birth of the Modern World what he terms the epoch of the «global ancient regime». During this epoch, embracing the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the Eurasian space was occupied almost entirely, and with the only possible exception of North- West Europe, by a chain of big peasant-based and ethnically composite agrarian empires. State power (in accordance with the theoretical model of the «segmentary state») fulfilled restricted functions and had a very limited capacity of penetration, which was conditioned to the collaboration of the peripheral élites. Correspondingly, the forms of political legitimacy reflected the dependence of the imperial authority on the equilibrium between centripetal forces and centrifugal forces. The ideology of the cosmic monarchy enhances the attitude of the sovereign to represent more things at the same time, that is, different things for each one of the various groups of his ethnically, territorially and religiously diverse subjects, rather than the focal center of a single shared collective identity (like nationality in the modern nation-State). The Ecumene of agrarian regimes has also known two phases of globalization - archaic globalization and early modern globalization. Early modern globalization is the gobalization driven by the expansion of Europe (about which more later). Early modern globalization coexists with an older form of globalization, archaic globalization, dating back to Antiquity. Archaic globalization was based on three main propelling forces. 50 The first ones were the long-distance traffic networks sustained by the demand for goods generated by the «humoral conception of the bodily well-being», which put a high premium on the consumption of substances, like the spices, deemed able to confer health to their consumers. The second globalizing force was the missionary initiative of the great world religions with their widespread networks of shrines, monasteries and pilgrimages (this was true not only of Christianity and Islam, but also, for example, in the case of Buddhism). The third globalizing factor was the ecumenical circulation of ethical-political ideals such as the universal monarchy and the civic republicanism of Aristotelian origin (infra, § 3), which contributed to give Eurasia also a relative cultural homogeneity. By placing such a strong emphasis on the uniformity of early modern Eurasia Bayly does not intend to deny for a moment the Western exception. Rather, he aims at redeeming Western exceptionalism from the crude readings of the so called «European miracle» which avail themselves of dichotomic schemes totally depriving the East of those traits they regard as uniquely Western.
In Bayly’s works, the specificity of the European development emerges from the particular configuration and intensity that assume, in the case of Europe, phenomena of change which can no longer be considered as a European prerogative and completely absent elsewhere. To this end, Bayly employs a comparative strategy that starts from the identification of categories (mostly already well tested in specialist studies related to single macro-regions) suitable both to highlight the dynamism of non-European societies and to correct, at the same time, the conventional image of Western modernization in the direction of a greater gradualism and a longer temporal extension, so as to reduce the distances and draw attention to the possible analogies between the different regional experiences. A good example of this methodology is provided by the plurification and application on a global scale of the concept of «industrious revolution».
51 Bayly rejects the stereotype that condemns the Oriental societies to a perennial immobility owing to the predominance of stifling «tributary economies». The Islamic and Asian agrarian empires too are a theater of the two imposing economic developments which connote, after all, the global ancient regime. The first process is the last «great domestication», namely the gigantic advance of the area conquered to agriculture and non-migratory or semi-nomadic pastoralism. The second process are the «industrious revolutions» (in the plural). The expression «industrious revolution» (in the singular) was firstly coined by the eminent economic historian Jan De Vries to designate a slower and more prosaic movement of rationalization of Western economic life that far preceded the «industrial revolution» proper, in consonance with another historiographical trend that tends to postpone the global impact of the latter towards the central decades of the nineteenth century. While the economic and social changes catalyzed by industrialization were the result of factors which operated on the supply side through the abatement of production costs, the behaviour of the agents of the «industrious revolution» was ascribable to the influence exerted on the demand by changes pertaining to the sphere of material culture and consumer values. The taking roots of new models of desire in the mentality of the middle sort of people, who were compelled to turn to the market for obtaining the goods necessary to satisfy their socially conditioned needs, urged them to a more efficient use of their work energies on a household basis which fostered an ever-increasing production of commodities. In The Birth of the Modern World Bayly tests the validity of the De Vries’ theory in a variety of non-European contexts. He hypothesizes suggestively, for example, that the role played in the Netherlands and England by the mechanical clock or the breakfast may have been surrogate in China, Japan and India by such commodities as, respectively, domestic furniture, samurai swords or pottery, in accordance with the values and social horizons prevailing in each cultural region. In this way Bayly’s attempt to define the differences through a greater emphasis on analogies differs from the more traditional forms of comparativism, because he 52 comes to the delineation of a multiplicity of «passages to modernity», without abandoning or neglecting, on the other side, the question concerning the long-term reasons of the primacy of Europe and the consequent «great divergence» between her history and the history of the rest of the world. Bayly identifies four main «competitive advantages» of the European West: economical, juridical, sociocultural and international. The first one consists in the asymmetrical structure of early modern globalization, which sees the Europeans – as unifiers of the world – in a position to link up the various «industrious revolutions» and to exploit the economic modernizations of the other parts of the world in their own interests. The second comparative advantage enjoyed by the Europeans is a political, institutional and legal framework of the European society which seems particularly well suited to favouring the cumulative development of the local «industrious revolution». Economic progress is supported also, in the case of early modern Western Europe – and this is its third advantage – by a custom of public criticism and a «civil society» which, although surely not a European prerogative, we find in early modern Europe
(and in eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe in particular) much more developed than anywhere in Eurasia. T The fourth factor advantaging Europe has to be seen in the pluralistic, multicentric nature of the European international states-system. This created a condition of chronic competition and interstate conflict, which acted as a permanent incentive for institutional and technological innovation and trans-oceanic expansion and both stimulated and exploited the precocious formation of patriotic identities on a national scale (which can be regarded perhaps as a fifth relative advantage of Europe as compared to the rest of Eurasia). An essential condition for the subsequent establishment of the European hegemony, however, was, according to Bayly, the general upheaval that during the eighteenth century overwhelmed the global ancient regime and a determining aspect of which was the quasi-simultaneity, convergence and interconnection of the 53 many «revolutions» to which it gave rise well beyond the borders of France, Continental Europe or the Atlantic world. The first to be involved in this world-wide series of global events was the Eurasian East. The crises that invest the different regional societies present numerous and important traits in common. They manifest themselves as fiscal-military crises (as lack of resources for financing big imperial armies), but their origins, according to Bayly, have to be traced back in the ideological and economic and social sphere. The ascent of the various types of middle classes benefiting from the «industrious revolutions» erodes, on the long run, the foundations of monarchical legitimacy. In a sense, the agrarian regimes paid the consequences of their own success. The autochthonous transformations which they had promoted or favoured generated a growing imbalance between the imperial centers and their peripheries. In the provinces the early modern modernization (if you allow me this word play) enhanced the power and the prestige of dynamic peripheral élites, who were able to coagulate a growing sense of belonging and local patriotism around themselves and around the new forms of moral or religious discourse of which they were often spokesmen or standard-bearers (analogous to contemporary Western public criticism) in challenging the more traditional imperial authority. The imperial centers, on their part, were suffering because of the worsening of their relative oversizing and were increasingly paralyzed by the impossibility of adequately financing their military apparatus. An additional factor of aggravation of the difficulties of Asian imperial systems was finally introduced by the world-wide impact of the crisis in which even the European ancient regimes proper precipitated in the aftermath of the Seven Years'
War of mid-eighteenth-century. The European crisis propelled a breakthrough, a leap forward in the Western initiative on the transoceanic geopolitical theaters at the same moment when the Asian empires (with the partial and temporary exception of China and Japan) were experiencing their own internal troubles. The Western response to the crisis of the European ancient regime took the shape, in fact, of a combination of internal revolution (in North America and then in 54 France Continental Europe and South America) and accentuated competition on a global scale between aggressive imperial powers. The international struggles between England and France, in particular, which developed on a literally world-wide scale, drew their impulse from the clash of opposites patriotic ideologies and nationalisms which revealed themselves capable of mobilizing the internal resources and the consent in both metropolitan societies (in England as well in France). In the crucible of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, political legitimacy itself had to be rebuilt on a new ideological basis, and this not only in France, but also (as it is less known) in England. And in both cases, the rebuilding of political legitimacy – in a liberal and democratic key in the case of France, in a neo-conservative key in the case of England – relied on myths of progress that erected the State, the public authority as the main protagonist of an action of reform and improvement of social conditions. These new progressive ideologies found their raison d'être in the role that the European States actually played in giving fresh impetus to the local «industrious revolutions». The global crisis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries thus created the conditions for the spectacular economic, political and cultural expansion of Europe in the long nineteenth century not only because it provided incentives and prepared the ground for the imperialist penetration, but for another important reason too. The global crisis marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of the human community or globalization because it multiplied, strengthened, thickened and tightened the linkages between the cultural regions of the Old World. At the same time, the global crisis allowed the Western model of presenting itself to non- European societies as the best solution for the continuation of the processes of development of the industrious classes and the related modernization of their forms of statehood, collective identity, public discourse and religious experience, which had begun to invest them in the age of equilibrium, well before, then, the great «Eurasian revolution» and the advent of the European dominance.
55 9. The Interactive Emergence of the British Domination in Afro-Eurasia in Bayly’s Imperial Meridian
It is important to observe that the conceptual model implemented in The Birth of the Modern World is the result of a development in Bayly’s historical thought. In the Nineteen-Seventies, at the beginning of his historiographical career (he was born in 1945), Bayly had established himself as a brilliant young historian of colonial India belonging to the so-called Cambridge School of Imperial History. In the next decade his scientific interest turned to the transition from precolonial to colonial India; and it was at this stage, when he advanced his theory of the interactive emergence of British domination in South Asia, that Bayly outlined the first sketch of what had to become his general approach to global history. But the most complete prefiguration of the categorical framework used in The Birth of the Modern World in 2003 has to be found in a more precise moment of Bayly’s historiographical path, coinciding with the production of another important book, entitled Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830. Imperial Meridian, which was published in 1989, spans the half century of expansion and refoundation of the British Empire from the pan-imperial crisis that accompanied American Independence to the aftermath of the defeat of Napoleon. This is the same period in which Bayly, in The Birth of the Modern World, will locate the climax of the global crisis of the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries leading to the transition to global modernity. Imperial Meridian, in other words, no longer deals solely with India, but does not specifically focus on global history yet. It deals with a critical moment of the history of the British Empire as a whole analyzing it – in all its components scattered all around the world –, within the framework of global history. Imperial Meridian marks therefore a new phase in Bayly’s professional career, in which the specialist of colonial and precolonial India expands the horizons of his historiographical reflection, both extending it from the Raj to the totality of the British «imperial system», including the British Isles, and trying its hand at the 56 difficult task of organizing in a unified analytical and narrative field the corresponding multiplicity and variety of large geo-historical spaces. In carrying out such a veritable tour de force Bayly outlined a complete reconceptualization of the imperial studies that already involved the identification of their territory of investigation with the «global past» investigated by the world historians and with those elements of the global past, in particular, in which we can trace «the origin of contemporary international order». Another prominent global historians of our days, Jürgen Osterhammel, who reviewed Imperial Meridian in 1993, noted that, although formally an essay in imperial history, «the scope and ambition» of Bayly’s work were «nothing less than universal» and suggested that it should be read «in the light of a current “return of universal history”». Another reviewer stressed (exaggerating a little, perhaps, but anticipating the further development of Bayly’s career) that the «real stuff» of Imperial Meridian wasn’t so much the British Empire as «the world» mentioned in the subtitle. Bayly himself not only declared that the purpose of the book was «placing British expansion in the wider context of world history», but made altogether explicit his intent to contribute to a «project» – to be prioritized by the «future historians» – aimed «to fit (…) together once again» the three huge «fragments» into which professional historiography had unfortunately broken the unity of the «history of the world» since the nineteenth-century: the history of Europe, Colonial History (the history of the settlement colonies), and Orientalism (the history of the Eastern or non-Western part of Afro-Eurasia). In Imperial Meridian – in the chapters consecrated to the rise of the British Empire in the East – Bayly had already adopted as a unit of analysis, if not Eurasia as a whole, the entire range of great Islamic kingdoms extending from the Maghreb and from the Balkans to Burma and to the Indonesian archipelago. Bayly’s analysis starts – already in this 1989 book – from the anti-Eurocentric assumption that the «empire in a world-historical sense (i.e. as a factor in global and world history, N.d.R.) can only be understood by examining social change in the 57 colonized areas as an essential component of an imperial system». Although its central theme is, after all, the rebuilding of the British Empire after the loss of the American colonies in the half century between 1780 and 1830, Imperial Meridian devotes dozens of pages to the «longer-term patterns of class formation and state- building» which can be found in Asia and North Africa since the sixteenth-century and which were destined to be «central to the emergence and form» of the British supremacy. Bayly justifies the adoption of this enlarged geohistorical and chronological scale by arguing that «the (historiographical, N.d.R.) genre of “imperial history” or of “European expansion” has no future unless it can draw on the growing body of studies of the extra-European world to illuminate the development (in the precolonial era, N.d.R.) of social institutions and ideologies which were as formative of the nineteenth-century colonial world as were the policies of European governments or the profit-hunger of their merchants». At the beginning of the modern age the territories composing the Afro-Eurasian scenario surveyed by Bayly were dominated by four big Islamic empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Moghūl Empire in India, the Muslim Empire of Mataram in Java.
Bayly sees the histories of these great cultural spaces as both distinct from each other and interconnected in even wider «interregional units». What they share in common according to Bayly (beside to the many links binding them in an interactive whole, like religion) is a three-phased evolutionary pattern which, far from confirming the nineteenth-century stereotype of the Asian «decline» divulged by Mill, reflects a complex dialectic of «crisis and reorganization» of the Imperial spaces. In the initial stage, these vast patrimonial and agrarian States, which are legitimized by the ideology of the cosmic monarchy, ensure stability and order to their territories. In turn, the Pax Islamica encouraged an interweaving of processes that denies «the (received, commonly believed, N.d.R.) notion according to which the modern capitalist system would have spread from West to East». During the first two centuries of the modern age not only the West, but the rest of Eurasia too 58 underwent such developments as the demographic growth, the geographical division of labour, the rise of a class of landowners rooted in the localities, the setting in motion of a plurality of «Asian routes to commercial agriculture», the flowering of the mercantile economy and a lively culture of consumption, the emergence of multiple forms of «“proto-capitalism”» and of «Asian (or North African) “capitalism”». But the very success of the Islamic empires created the conditions for the «general crisis» which had to fall on them in the eighteenth century. This happened because the main beneficiaries of the Pax Islamica were, on the long run, the newborn, modernizing agrarian and bourgeois provincial élites. As a further historical paradox, their centrifugal tendencies were also fueled by the very prestige of the monarchical institution. The Islamic ideal of cosmic royalty spread in peripheries that had preserved or had begun to develop «a strong sense of their own identity, expressed in religious differences or regional solidarity», and where therefore imperial universalism underwent a radical metamorphosis, which anticipated the process of rebuilding of political legitimacy in a State-national key which had to characterise the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, all the Islamic imperial polities had therefore to face an escalation of conflicts and internal contradictions, ultimately attributable to the «consolidation of Asian capitalism». And this happend before a new series of eigtheenth-century «tribal break-outs» which saw as protagonists the egalitarian warlike societies that survived at their margins and who decreee the end of the «Pax Islamica». What replaced it, however, was not that condition of decadence, stagnation, anarchy which will be evoked by James Mill and the historians engaged in the apology of the European conquest. Rather, the crisis of the Islamic peace gave start to a fundamental restructuring of the political spaces occupied by the dissolving agrarian regimes, in which Bayly invites us to recognize the feature of a new season of Afro-Asian state-building developing – this time – not on a macro-regional scale, but on a sub-imperial, provincial scale. 59 The «regional magnates» who posed as the would-be heirs of the universal sovereigns of the great empires adopted mercantilistic practices and endeavored to redress the balance of power between the State and rural landowners for the benefit of their own treasures. Moreover, the new provincial rulers had to legitimize realms which were much more compact, intrusive and exclusive than the old agrarian empires. But, in pursuing this legitimating aim, the new rulers were also able to exploit and mobilize the growing sentiments of territorial patriotism and religious affiliations which were more «tightly defined» that in the past. This gave them the opportunity to become a focal point of new unprecedent kinds of collective identity foreshadowing modern nationality. In this sense, according to Bayly, the late eighteenth century marked therefore «an important stage in the creation of the preconditions for the emergence of modern ethnicities and nation states» in Asia as well as in Europe. Nor does Bayly fails to underline with energy how this implies that «the regional ethnicities which were later seen as “nationalism” in Europe, Asia and North Africa had already begun to form before the full impact of the West was felt. They were not the simple product of “westernisation”» – of a Westernization, that is, interpreted according to a crude, simplistic diffusionistic model. More generally, the reasons that push Bayly to regard the endogenous changes in early modern Eastern societies as «a critical force in the creation of European world-wide dominance», rather than the «immobile background» of the expansion of Europe, are three. First and more obviously, endogenous changes generated both the «pressures and opportunities» that induced Westerners to take or to try to take the power (already before 1800) in «key regions» such as Bengal, Java or Egypt. Secondly, endogenous changes made available to the conquerors the administrative, financial and military tools elaborated by the «new “Asian states”». Three, and perhaps less obviously, endogenous transformations also cast some of the foundations of the «colonial world» and of the «para-colonial» States of the 60 nineteenth and twentieth centuries: they prepared, for example, the rise of indigenous proprietary classes destined to become «the keystone of the European colonial economy» and «the nineteenth-century export boom in primary agricultural produces». Moreover, endogenous changes acted as «critical precondition» of phenomena destined to shape «the modern world order», with effects recognizable to the present day, not less decisively than the globalization of the catchwords of the French revolution – «Liberty, Equality and Fraternity». The phenomena to which I intend to refer are, as already mentioned, the emergence of new paradigms of political legitimacy more attuned to the modern State than monarchical universalism, the beginnings of what had to become the «national consciousness», the religious fundamentalism or the so-called «communalism» (that means the tendency of people to be loyal to their ethnic or religious groups of belonging more than to the wider society and political State which they live in and are citizens of).
3. The World Historical Impact of «British Nationalism» in the Age of Revolutions
The need to highlight the much-underestimated analogies between European and extra-European histories and the multipolar nature of global change makes Bayly well aware of the faultiness of theories of historical globalization which emphasizes, in any sense, the overbearing role played by the West in it. The most obvious example are those normative stage theories of development which simply equate global modernization and Westernization.
But Bayly detects the same error in the opposite theory of the capitalist world system advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein, according to which the expansion of the European world-economy since the sixteenth century, far from promoting the progress of the other areas of the world, condemned them to a condition of uniform underdevelopment and subaltern integration as peripheries or semi-peripheries in the Western-dominated world order. 61 These theories, both denying, in different ways, the interactive nature of the process of globalization, appear inadequate to provide historiography with the synthetic, unifying categories which historians need in order of escaping the risk to remain locked in their respective specialist fields without sacrificing, on the other hand, the agency and the individuality of the single world «cultures or communities». Bayly, however, as I’ve said, is equally far from denying the relative exceptionality of the Western path to modernity and the existence of differences in power between «the West and the Rest». In the Birth of the Modern World, as we have seen, the specificity of the European way to modernity lies in the peculiar configuration and intensity with which changes take place, such as the «industrious revolutions», which can no longer be considered, in the light of the empirical findings of the area studies, completely absent elsewhere in Eurasia. In Imperial Meridian, at first sight, Bayly's criticism seems to focus mainly on the «Eurocentric» theories of imperialism. But in reality his methodological polemic is directed with equal vigor and urgency against the so-called «“excentric”» interpretations of imperialism developed in reaction to the conventional ethnocentric interpretations dating back to James Mill. For Bayly the «ex-centric school» is guilty of having exaggerated in turn the role played in the colonial expansion of Europe by such extra-European factors as «local crises» in the peripheries, availability of indigenous «collaborators», independent initiatives of European “men on the spot” operating in territories remote from the metropolitan center. In the 1980s (when Imperial Meridian was composed) this had led, for example, to a complete «Africanisation» of the factors taken into account in the historiographical debate on the partition of Africa. Bayly felt therefore obliged to remind his readers of the apparently obvious truth that the «Metropolitan impulses were, by definition, central to the process of expansion and to the creation of the social order of European empires». The opposing limitations of the two explanatory strategies, the Eurocentric one and the ex-centric one, are surmountable, in the eyes of Bayly, only if it is held 62 firmly in mind that the imperial experience «by definition was a dialogue between the metropolitan impulses and the history of the colonized societies». Perhaps the single most noteworthy aspect of the complex historiographical operation attempted by Bayly with his 1989 book is the virtual re-inclusion in the field of investigation of the imperial studies of l’histoire à part entière (the whole history) of the colonizing power. Bayly shows now a vivid awareness of the impossibility of neglecting what happened in the depths of the «British society» if we really want to understand «those societies which were touched by imperial power». This methodological awareness represents an important novelty with respect to Bayly’s previous work on India, as well as an essential prerequisite of its subsequent work on global and world history. In Imperial Meridian Bayly made an original attempt to reincorporate the internal history of Europe and the West as a whole in a field of inquiry of which the historiographical school that had influenced his beginnings as a historian of colonial India – the so-called Cambridge School – had rather privileged in an almost exclusive manner the overseas side.
In the preface to Imperial Meridian Bayly confesses that the composition of his 1989 book coincided for him with the resumption of an interest in national history – of British history -- which had remained dormant since he was an undergraduate. Bayly adds that this new interest was reawakened in particular by two historiographical trends. The first trend is the trend focusing on the very long-term role played in the history of British society by the so-called «British landed establishment» (which is exemplified by the work of the eminent historian David Cannadine on the prolonged Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy between the 1780s and the 1980s). The second research trend, whose chief exponent is Cannadine’s wife, Linda Colley, focused complementarily on the formation of British national identity in the context of the European international State-system, with particular reference to the
63 so-called Second Hundred Years War that opposed England and France from the end of the seventeenth century to the fall of Napoleon in 1815. In Bayly’s case, therefore, reinterpreting British and Western expansion by framing it in a global scenario doesn’t just mean to cross the boundaries of his original area of his specialization (colonial India) and to widen the range of his studies so as to embrace to all the regions of the Ecumene in any way interacting or comparable, at least, with England and its colonial system. Adopting a global perspective in the study of the British Empire also implies, in Bayly’s case, to rediscover and to revisit the past of the European Metropolis itself, whose very Anglo-Celtic core presents, after all, the character of a «British Empire in Europe». And in making this effort of «returning the British to» imperial history Bayly could avail himself of the guidance of colleague specialists in other areas of historical research who were intent, in their turn, to reintegrate into the purview of British national experience the international dimension, the imperial dimension, the «fiscal- military» dimension and the correlative culture of patriotism. All these dimensions of the British past – it has to be noted – had been neglected or put in the background by major currents of the historiography of the second half of the twentieth century as Anglo-Marxism (especially in the “populist” version given of it by the great social historian E. P. Thompson), which had tended to emphasize internal social conflicts and the moments in which ordinary people contested the hegemony of the ruling classes as the main theme of national history. The central thesis argued by Bayly in Imperial Meridian is that the «metropolitan impulses» played a preponderant role in giving impetus and form to empire-building during the expansive phase that it experienced between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. But its engine, in this particular historical conjuncture, was not industrial capitalism, which would begin to make its consequences felt on the Empire only later, in the Thirties and the Forties of the Nineteenth Century. The greatest thrust behind imperial expansion did not even come by the «Gentlemanly Capitalism» (a capitalism dominated – according to the proponents of 64 this thesis, Anthony Hopkins and Peter Cain – by a landed or gentrified elite prone to invest his wealth rather in commerce and finance than in industry). What propelled the extra-European expansion was, according to Bayly, the energetic response given by the broadly majoritarian sectors of the British metropolitan society which were under the hegemony of the oligarchic and aristocratic agrarian establishment to a succession of terrible internal and external challenges. The first challenge was represented by the «imperial crisis» concomitant with the secession of the thirteen American colonies in 1776. But the American independence only marked the triumph of a more general tendency toward the «creolization» which set itself in the colonies of settlement, including Ireland, after the Seven Years' War. By creolization we have to understand the transfer of imperial power from the metropolitan center to the colonial, peripherical white elites. Settlement colonies, or settlement empire, are named those parts of the European global empire which underwent a significant measure of white colonization, that is immigration. Ireland is often regarded as a settlement colony because it underwent the settlement and the ascendancy of an Anglo-Saxon or Scottish and Protestant population in the midst of a predominantly Celtic and catholic country. In the imperial crises of the eighteenth century it was the Anglo-Irish or Protestant establishment, and not Catholic Ireland, as in the following two centuries, to mobilize against the English domination. The British reaction to the American revolution, while failing to impede the American independence, arrested and inverted the more general trend towards creolization. In the Irish case, for example, the Act of Union of 1801 deprived Ireland of legislative autonomy, abolishing the Irish Parliament; Irish Protestants maintained the right to parliamentary representation but, after that, their representatives had to seat in the London “imperial” House of Commons; Irish Catholics remained excluded from any parliamentary representation whatever till the Emancipation Act of 1829. The Irish Act of Union was passed in the context of the British response to the second challenge which spurred Britain to imperial expansion between the late eighteen and early nineteen centuries. This second challenge came from the 65 competition with revolutionary and Napoleonic France and from the veritable «world crisis» that the further globalization of the inter-European international conflict contributed to triggering from the Atlantic world to South-East Asia. Bayly holds that this second and much wider crisis was «the first true (that is the first literally worldwide, N.d.R.) world crisis since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century». The British response to this succession of crises developed therefore on the ideological, political, institutional, military plans more and before than at economic level. Integrating significantly the mainly «ex-centric» approach followed in his previous works on the genesis of the colonial empire in India, Bayly examines now the «new imperialism» emanating from the British Isles as an organic part of the nascent «British nationalism», which was fomented by the aristocratic and noble ruling class in order to mobilize the consensus and resources, above all of the Metropolis, for the purposes of the anti-French struggle. The clash between England and France was, after all, a clash of ideologies. Which ideology did the British oppose to the French Gospel of the Revolution? The British ideology took the shape of a patriotic ideal which credited the British State with a providential mission and re-legitimized the Empire as an essential instrument for performing that mission. The anti-French and anti-revolutionary patriotism inspired a process of reinvention of the British monarchy which made the king (George III for most of the period) the symbolic personification of the British identity. This reinvention of the monarchy had been studied by Linda Colley in a series of essays published during the nineteen-eighties. In Imperial Meridian Bayly significantly complements Colley's investigations by tracing the manifestations of the new cult of the monarch also in the public rituals which were celebrated in the imperial peripheries, in the theaters of colonial power. On the other hand, Bayly differentiates himself from Colley’s paradigm, which devoted much attention to popular patriotism, because, in Imperial Meridian at least, he focused almost exclusively on élite nationalism. It is important to observe that this new British nationalism, for Bayly, did not draw its chief inspiration from the kind of anti-revolutionary conservativism and 66 constitutionalism represented by Edmund Burke. Burke’s celebrated and enormously influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (published in 1790) criticized the French revolutionary model and its British admirers and followers by arguing that that dangerous foreign, continental experiment was completely alien and antithetical to the spirit of the English institutions and political tradition. Burke condemned the arrogant French ambition of remaking State and society in conformity with abstract reason and extolled the contrary ideal of change-in- continuity supposedly realized in the history of England, whose Constitution had not been consciously and artificially “made” by men according to a preconceived overall plan, but had organically and naturally “grown” in time from precedent to precedent without never losing contact with its roots in the past. For Bayly, the political culture and mentality of the new anti-French and anti- revolutionary British nationalism and patriotism presents the very different aspect of a «constructive», dynamic, sometimes reformist and modernizing conservatism (it is not out of place to remember that, as a period in the political history of contemporary Britain, the 1980s, when Imperial Meridian was written, were dominated by the peculiar brand of “revolutionary conservativism” personified in
Margaret Thatcher). Its projection in the colonial world gave life therefore to a series of autocratic, militaristic, paternalistic regimes far remote from the Burkean ideal. These proconsular regimes, and the policies they pursued, were very similar to each other, so that they «began to impose uniform pattern of rule and uniform notions of “law” and “progress”» also to the heterogeneous mosaic of distant extra-European societies which were invested by its impact all around the world.
What the increased British domination and influence spread globally, all around the world, starting from the colonial fringes of the British Isles themselves (Ireland and Scotland) were, first of all, the after-effects of the enormous strengthening of the «sinews» of the State that was produced by the imitative antagonism with France. The period, like any other period of world war or «war imperialism», saw a huge growth of the fleet, of the army, of the armaments industry, of the police 67 forces, of the bureaucratic institutions and personnel, as well a corresponding «revolution in government» (i.e. administrative) which was concealed behind the appearances of constitutional continuity. And the repercussions of all these developments were felt well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom proper. But at the same time the «new British Empire» forged in the struggles of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period conveyed outside its original English and Scottish laboratory a system of beliefs and attitudes that supported a pedagogical- religious «project» of regeneration of humanity which Bayly deems comparable, for its universalistic claims, to the much more well-known French revolutionary ideology. This project can be regarded, in some respects, as a prefiguration of the so-called civilizing mission that the nineteenth-century propagandists of colonial rule (like James Mill) will assign to the British Empire, which was called to convert backward peoples to Commerce, Civilization and Christianity (a celebrated Victorian triad). Bayly, on the other part, does not identify the intellectual basis of this first modern culture of imperialism with the doctrines of utilitarianism and free trade prevailing in subsequent periods of the European expansion. For Bayly, the chief inspiration of the new British nationalism and imperialism was a peculiar kind of civic republicanism – a form of political discourse, dating back to classical antiquity and Aristotelian politics (and spread out in various shapes at pan- Eurasian level, supra, § 1), which extolled as one of the highest form of self- realization of the human being the performing of the duty and the fruition of the right to take an active interest in the res publica, participate in his corporate life, contribute to its common good even at the cost of personal sacrifice, and was therefore both fully compatible with the cult of the King and much similar, in fact, to the Napoleonic conception of the administrative monarchy7. This specific form of
7 A Note on the Administrative Monarchy – If we try to go below the surface of legal-formal definitions, we see that the «administrative State» (whatever the institutional framework within which it is implemented) represents a post-revolutionary attempt to rebuild the relationship between State and society on the basis of new parameters of legitimization, which had been partly anticipated by the absolutist State itself, especially in its reforming eighteenth-century Enlightenment version, and whose legacy was to be transmitted to the 68 civic republicanism, that Bayly calls agrarian patriotism, was strongly indebted towards the ideas of the eighteen-century Enlightenment, and in particular towards the Scottish Enlightenment and the physiocracy. The physiocracy was a current of economic thought that regarded agriculture as the real source of the “wealth of nations” and advocated therefore the right to the full enjoyment of the land property rights and the free exchange of the products of agricultural work. Agrarian patriotism idealized therefore the figure of the «independent» big landowner or the «independent» yeoman (the rich peasant). «Independency» implied the practice of a whole cluster of economic, ethical and social virtues and values: enterprise, strength of character, public spirit etc. And we can find this worship of «independency» reflected in many ways both in the rhetoric and in the colonial institutions of the refashioned British Empire – the so called Second British Empire – resurrecting, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the First British Empire. The presumed degree of «moral independency» is placed at the foundation of a hierarchy of racial, social and cultural types more or less provided with this complex
liberal State during the «long nineteenth century». The administrative State and its ideology can be reconciled, in other words, with other forms of government than the administrative monarchy proper, such as the British constitutional monarchy. This means that the administrative State embodies characteristics and attempted solutions of problems which pertain to political modernity at large, among which, for example, the adaptation of the political discourse to a cultural atmosphere marked by a growing secularization. The most evident traits of the administrative State are institutional centralization, bureaucratic rationality and efficiency, zealous care of the general interest. But all these practices are to be seen as means to a further end. They all aim at basing the obedience and the consent to public authority (to an authority which in certain cases, like in the Napoleonic regime, can be placed outside the control of representative assemblies) on the integration and the active identification with the State of the most advanced and responsible strata of public opinion and civil society. The ideology of the administrative State or monarchy identified these privileged strata with various kinds of notables and elites, both bourgeois and aristocratic, who are enabled to the recognition of some public role (a subordinate public role in the case of the more autocratic regimes) by the exercise of the virtues inherent to the proprietary individualism, whose growth is precisely what the reforms undertaken by the administrative State have the task of favoring or generating, in a demiurgic enterprise of social technology and civil pedagogy. A typical example of the «activism» of the administrative State, which can be found both in Europe and in the colonies, is the construction or the modernization of the transport and communication networks. 69 of human virtues. This scale or ladder of humanity (a notion we’ve already found in James Mill) culminated of course in the Anglican or Protestant gentleman. In the period covered in Bayly’s book the scale of humanity was still conceived in an historical-evolutionary rather than in a biological way. This means that the “humanities” situated on its lower steps were regarded as susceptible of improvement; their improvement began to be considered indeed the very purpose of imperial government. In the colonies, however, the world-wide exportation of the cultural hierarchy inherent to agrarian patriotism propelled by global imperialism resulted already, well before the rise of biological racism, in a hardening of the boundaries between colonizers and natives (which previously had been much more fluid and porous), practices of exclusion, multiple forms of juridification of otherness. Faith in the virtues of agrarian individualism also inspired the legislative interventions of the imperial authorities regarding land regimes, which met, in this case, the demands of the rising (since the pre-colonial period) Asian «gentry». The decades of the rebirth and the rebuilding of the British Empire on a wider scale were also a period of significant missionary expansion of the Established
Church and British Christianity at large. It is true that, in these years, missionary initiative had for its recipients the British colonizers themselves or categories of not-Europeans who were already Christianized (such as, for example, the so-called Indian Eurasians, who were born from the marriage or the coupling between European males and Asian women). The missionaries, in other terms, did not aim at the direct conversion of the followers of other cults, at least in principle. All the same, the mere intensification of the Anglican and Christian presence in the colonial world, together with the explicitly Protestant character of the Second Empire’s legitimizing myth, was effective enough to provoke not only hostile reactions, but also attempts at emulation by Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. These religious implications of the new imperialism sound an eloquent confirmation of the capacity of British metropolitan nationalism to exert its influence, through colonial expansion, even on «the deeper historical experience of non-European peoples». 70 V. On the Utility of World History for the Public Life
1. «Differentiated Commonalities» and Contemporary «Pammixia»8
The analysis of the elements of affinity discernible in the «proconsular despotisms» predominating throughout the Empire during the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century fulfils a strategic function in Bayly’s attempt at reincorporating imperial history into world history. The homogenizing effects of the British expansion favoured «the emergence in varied colonies remote from each other of similar policies and similar types of colonial discourse», thus testifying to the globalizing effectiveness of forces of change which had their sources, in this case, in the very heart of the European civilization: «Out of the collision and accommodation between widely differing societies and these impulses to uniformity was generated much of the structure of the modern world». On the other hand, the fact that the new powerful expansive efforts accomplished by Europe were intertwined with previous dynamics which were endogenous to the non-European societies, and never ceased altogether to depend on these other paths to modernity (as an indispensable source of native «collaborators», for instance), helps to explain why the convergence between the regional histories, that was being realized under the aegis of a contingent and temporary Western hegemony, could not give rise, either now nor later, to mere cultural homologation or provoke resistances which were capable of preserving a mythical integrity of the threatened cultures. Imperial globalization, as described by Bayly, rather produced a numerous range of what the American scholar Emily Rosenberg has called «differentiated commonalities» – a type of hybridization in which the surviving local identities were
8 Cp. supra, § 4, The Categorical Cluster (nn. 6-7). 71 transformed by creatively incorporating the global uniformities that provided them with both the stimuli and the means to express themselves in completely renewed forms. The human condition that seems to be the point of arrival of the story of transregional encounters and clashes told in Imperial Meridian and The Birth of the Modern World, whose recently published sequel, Remaking the Modern World, carries the narrative literally to the present, offers a precious key to the ethical assumptions which were at the very heart of Bayly’s (and other new global historians’) approach to world history and to the practical purposes he pursued through his scientific work in this field of inquiry. It is quite striking how similar the globalized society whose roots in the past Bayly aimed to explore appears to a brilliant characterization of contemporary India first given by E.P. Thompson in the late 1970s and disseminated afterwards by Amartya Sen: «All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind».
What Thompson and Sen observed about Indian multiculturalism some decades ago, and Bayly’s «narrative of convergence» concurrently suggested about the historical present generally, could be truly repeated, with the necessary adaptations, for each and every part of the world of today. It is not only that, in the very shrunken planet we inhabit, the once remote regional cultures interact much more closely than in the past, so that their bearers and representatives may be found living, working and studying at each other’s elbow in the same streets, factories, offices and schools, or inveigh against each other on the same TV talk shows and social media. Contemporary globalization means something more. It implies that the world’s cultures have been increasingly penetrating, permeating and modifying the core identity of each other up to the level of the individual minds and souls of the people belonging to them (this already happened in the past, so there is no reason to believe that it couldn’t happen again), 72 if only because their unprecedented mixing forces us to react in some way or another to their ubiquitous presence and influence. And it is only too obvious that our political future will greatly depend on the way in which we cope with this melting pot situation, or pammixia. The term pammixia – an ancient Greek word which signifies the mixing of everything with everything – was employed by Arnold Toynbee in the 1940s to describe the cultural condition created by globalization, which he still equated with Westernization. Referring in particular to the possible role of Islam in future world politics, Toynbee evoked the «discordant pammixia set up by the Western conquest of the world» in order to warn that «a pammixia may end in a synthesis, but it may equally well end in an explosion». He believed that the investigator of the global past had both the power and the responsibility to help mankind to avert this last «disaster». Toynbee’s precedent may serve to introduce the examination of a further relevant affinity between Bayly’s position and the orientations of the US New World History, which pertains to the values choices related to the adoption of the «global point of view», and the results that the global historians should expect from it in the educational and public spheres.
2. The Ethics and Politics of the New World History: Pluralist Cosmopolitanism and
Global Citizenship9
Among the North American scholars, there is a widespread belief that the production of an intelligible world history would be «the moral duty of the historical profession in our time», because it would possess the virtue «to diminish the lethality of group encounters» and to favour «cross-cultural understanding and
9 Cp. supra, § 4, The Categorical Cluster (nn. 8-9).
73 global peace». A history written according to the methodological precepts followed by these scholars would reveal itself, according to them, as the natural ally of movements committed «to advance the causes of global citizenship, cosmopolitan democracy, cross-cultural dialogue» and analogous «globalist projects», as well as the international struggle for a «more just and equitable organization» of the world economy. These sanguine expectations are also reflected in R.I. Moore’s plan for the Blackwell History to which Bayly contributed both The Birth and Remaking the Modern World, so that we are allowed to suppose he partook of them to the full. The ideal readers to whom the series addresses itself are in fact the citizens of «a world which faces a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic transformation». A mature awareness of its common history would help the peoples who are living and appear destined to live together in a unified world make it into «a rational and humane cosmopolis» based on mutual respect and understanding among the identity groups involved. It is the consciousness of a shared present and future, in other words, that gives value and relevance to knowledge of the global past.
It is pretty clear that Bayly personally endorsed a belief in the ethical responsibility of the global historian professed by the editor of the Blackwell History, although he rarely expressed his own deepest convictions in public. This was witnessed by Richard Drayton in an obituary written for «The Guardian». Drayton describes his colleague’s and friend’s entire scientific work as tacitly «animated by a moral, even utopian, purpose». «Hidden» behind his impeccable professionalism, there was an «emotional» source of inspiration – Bayly’s «hope for a cosmopolitan liberal future, in which human beings, beyond race and nation, would live compassionately in a family of democracies». Bayly’s propensity towards some form of pluralist cosmopolitanism seems confirmed by a certain sensitivity on his own part to what he himself has critically defined as «the fascination which the vast, multi-ethnic empires of the agrarian world exercise on scholars and laymen». There is an obvious ideological dimension 74 to the historical-cultural myth which portrays such universal empires – when compared to the homicidal and genocidal intolerance of diversity displayed by the nation state in the contemporary age – «as benign political organisms providing their subject populations with the benefits of peace, law and order». And It is worth noting, moreover, that until the mid-twentieth century, the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations claimed to be the newest and the last incarnation of the ideal of the cosmic monarchy. Official propaganda represented the British world state as a great family of peoples scattered in every corner of the earth, all contributing to the richness of the whole in terms of their prized talents and peculiarities, and therefore realizing the utopia of unity in diversity. There is every reason to believe, on the strength of Bayly’s own autobiographical testimony, that he actually entered into contact with this kind of popular liberal imperialism through the mediation of both his parents when he was a boy (being born in 1945).
3. A Global Past for a Common Future
But how exactly did Bayly imagine that his scholarly activity in the field of world history could help ensure «a 21st-century global future for his kind of liberalism»? It is not an easy task to give an answer to this question, because Bayly never addressed it explicitly in his published writings and several recorded interventions. There may be no doubt, on the other hand, that he was confident in the practical usefulness of historical studies. He contributed to the World Bank Development
Research Group a dense paper on the Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development, analysing the cases of India and Africa and thus establishing a telling example of how imperial history could be concretely employed in the planning of policies aiming to face global poverty. It can be ruled out from the start, moreover, that Bayly attributed to the empirical knowledge of the common past of the globalized world any mystical virtue 75 of automatically converting into a choice of value in favour of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. This way of thinking was widespread among the world historians of previous generations. Many of them, often influenced by religious providentialism, believed that history possessed an objective teleological meaning – an immanent purpose, logic and direction. They therefore regarded the historical process as the realization, depending on the right use of human free will, of a predetermined end. For influential scholars, including Toynbee, this télos consisted in the reunion of mankind into a single «family» or «oecumenical society» (corresponding to the Church that the Christian tradition had posited as the ultimate beneficiary of the unification of the globe whose antecedent stages had seen as their protagonists secular actors like the Roman Empire). A man equipped with a truthful notion of world history could not help but take sides for some form of pluralist cosmopolitan way out from the predicament of globalized humanity, which was being torn apart by the intensification of the simultaneous «unifying and divisive movements» coexisting in the «Atomic Age». Some conspicuous traces of this old mode of viewing and trying to exploit the potentialities of the global perspective can be recognized in the work of William McNeill, the historian of the «human community» and a former contributor to Toynbee’s Survey of International Affairs. In 1985, McNeill was elected President of the American Historical Association, a significant indication of the emerging recognition of world history as a legitimate field of scientific professionalization. On this occasion, he delivered a remarkable address entitled Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians, whose main thesis was that, in order to perform the most urgent duty conferred on them by the society in which they lived and worked, professional historians had to take on the task of producing a world history which partook of both myth and historical truth. As history, «mythistory» had to be impeccably written from a scholarly point of view. But the «ecumenical history, with plenty of room for human diversity in all its complexity» envisaged by McNeill had to possess at the same time the narrative 76 structure and meaningfulness proper to a «myth». To this end, the would-be “mythistorians” were exhorted to reconstruct a synthetic overview of the entire human past around an organizational principle which sounds reminiscent, both in its hypothetical gnoseological status and particular content, of Immanuel Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. Resorting to the mythistorical approach in fact implied surveying the global past as if it were the long, difficult march of mankind towards the «eventual establishment of a world-wide cosmopolitanism». The resulting world historical narrative would have been able to generate in its readers «a sense of individual identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole». Bayly distanced himself much more markedly than McNeill from the teleological attitude of the old global history, albeit the two scholars in a way shared a similar religious upbringing (McNeill was the son of a Presbyterian minister, while Bayly’s father, Roy, had converted from his family’s Presbyterianism to free thinking). Bayly’s epistemological pronouncements indeed reveal a strict adherence to the precepts of the English empiricist tradition. He was radically sceptical about the possibility for the professional historian to base any judgement about how things ought to be on the knowledge of the past «wie es eigentlich gewesen» («as it actually happened», a celebrated phrase by Leopold von Ranke). More exactly, Bayly’s work is infused with a sophisticated understanding that history cannot by itself yield any ethical message, because the objects of historical research are shaped by the cognitive interest of the researcher and an indispensable role is therefore played in their shaping by values choices. The historian cannot draw his preferences from the realities he probes. What happens is rather the opposite: his evaluations give form and meaning to that portion of the past which he selects as the subject matter of his inquiry. It must be added that Bayly, as a historian of imperialism, opposed any apologetic whitewashing of its evil consequences and crimes, as well as the Manichaean posture of prejudicial and indistinct condemnation of this most ambivalent phenomenon which has for so long prevailed. He has shown himself only too aware, therefore, 77 that the vivid consciousness of a common history is not in itself conducive to a better mutual comprehension between peoples. After all, what the past co- experienced by the descendants of colonizers and colonized has left to the globalized present is first and foremost a heavy, almost unmanageable legacy of violent clashes and «inexcusable» wrong. For all these reasons, Bayly seems to have set himself a practical purpose which appears much more circumscribed, but at the same time much more well defined and actually achievable, than the ambitious edificatory goal of McNeill’s «mythistory». Far from attempting to convert anyone to his own brand of liberal cosmopolitanism, Bayly’s explorations of the global past aimed at counteracting the obnoxious ideological tendency of our times to reify as fixed and separate essences the fluid, overlapping, intricate group identities coexisting in the contemporary globalized society, so as to equip the aspirant builders of the future Cosmopolis with a realistic knowledge about the cultural materials which must be handled and the obstacles which must be overcome in order to advance towards its always imperfect realization.
But even within these rigorous limits, there remains an uplifting lesson in rational hope to be apprehended from reading and attentively studying Christopher Bayly’s books and essays. The critical investigation of the actual ways in which modern and contemporary globalization has come to shape the identity profiles of groups and inividuals involved in social interaction in the globalized world disproves the pseudo- historical and essentialist stereotyping that tends to credit the prejudice according to which between “Us” and “Them” (between “Us” Europeans or Italians, for example, and non-European Union migrants of various origins and provenance) there would exist irreducible differences, which can be classified in crude dichotomous schemes. Rather, the global history of the last two centuries and half has generated a very high number of Emily Rosemberg’s «differentiated commonalities». «Differentiated commonalities» are, as hinted before, resemblances between regional societies and 78 identity groups which result, on the one hand, from their sharing common or analogous experiences (that is a common past as defined by global historians), but which are everywhere inflected, at the same time, according to the most varied local codes. This means that the global interactions of the past, as they have made possible the present high degree of intercultural convergence and interpenetration among the peoples of the world, have bequeathed to us not only a tragic legacy of conflict and violence, but also vast and multiple opportunities for mutual accommodation between group identities that are anything but rigid, homogeneous, mutually exclusive and uncommunicating monads.
79 Part Two
Variations, Integrations, Applications
80 1
Reconceptualizing the Expansion of Europe
1. Overcoming Eurocentrism: the First Step
One of the chief sources that inspired the international revival of the World History, which has been going on for about thirty years now, must certainly be seen in the reconceptualization in a polycentric key that has invested, in the same period, the field of studies dealing with «The Expansion of Europe». This expression refers to the object of investigation privileged by a well-defined scientific and academic tradition, predominantly British or pan-Britannic, but with significant ramifications also elsewhere, like in the United States and the Netherlands, whose path has been followed, in earlier stages of their career, by paradigmatic exponents of the new global history like both Christopher Bayly and John Darwin. It is worth trying to outline a summary profile of this scholarly tradition because the works of its today’s best heirs suggest historiographical ideas which seem to me very useful in order to subtract the ongoing controversy about the role of Europe in the history of the modern and contemporary world to a false alternative in which this debate, especially here in Italy, risks too often to become entangled. I intend to refer to the false alternative between the polemical demand of «provincializing Europe» (which has been advanced in particular by the Indian post- colonial and subalternist historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) and the uncritical re- proposal, in reaction to the radical assault against Eurocentrism, of a European centrality which is undoubtedly in need of a profound rethinking.
81 «The Expansion of Europe» is actually the name of a prestigious and long-lived examination paper set up by the Cambridge History Department in 1945. It echoed pretty obviously the phrase «The Expansion of England», that is the title of a famous course of lectures held in Cambridge at the beginning of the 1880s by the founding father of the British imperial historiography, John Seeley. At the end of the nineteen-seventies the examination was split into a first part, which kept the old denomination of «The Expansion Europe», and a second part dedicated to the period after 1918, entitled «The West and the Third World» (but popularly known as «the West and the rest»). And the first part is the direct ancestor of the current Paper Twenty One of the Historical Tripos, Empires in World History, which corresponds to the course of World History dealing with the period from the Iberian colonization of the New World to the Great War (the Historical Tripos being the name given to the series of written examination which have to be passed by your younger colleagues in order to obtain the bachelor’s degree in History at Cambridge). According to the original program approved by the Council of the Faculty of History in April 1945 (a few weeks before the end of the Second Word War in
Europe), the courses related to the European expansion would have dealt «in outline with the political, economic and cultural contacts of the principal countries of Europe – including Russia – with the remainder of the world in the period since 1400» to the present. The subject-matter of the teaching is described in a list of contents that can be read in The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge for 1947. These are the great voyages of «exploration; the relevant missionary, humanitarian and political movements; the development of overseas trade and investment; the reaction of extra-European countries to European influence, including the effects on peasant economy of the opening of international markets and the industrialisation of colonial territories; the foundation of colonial empires, with the general features of the imperial policy of the principal European countries;
82 the problems of native self-government; international relations in the colonial sphere, with the relevant military and naval history»10. In the next decade also the organization of the research at Cambridge was formally adapted to the introduction of this remarkable didactic innovation, with the launch of a specific research seminar on the history of European expansion. But in order to fully grasp the meaning and the historiographical implications of these initiatives, it is essential to dwell for a few moments on the motivations put forward by their academic supporters and on the intellectual attitudes of some of the initial architects of their successful and rapid taking roots. Among the latter, a prominent place certainly has to be given to the young John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, two eminent revisionist historians of British imperialism. Starting in 1953 (the same year in which they jointly published a very influential article written in four hands on The Imperialism of the Free Trade in the «Economic History Review»), and for about thirty years, Gallagher and Robinson held for the most part, simultaneously or in turn, the two introductory courses on the fundamental outlines of the European expansion before and after 1850, namely the series of lectures dedicated to the synthetic presentation and macro-historical contextualization of the phenomenon of the European expansion. According to its proponents, the need to introduce the systematic study of the European expansion stemmed from the blatant inability of the colonial and imperial history that was taught at Cambridge to provide satisfactory answers to the questions raised by the momentous changes which were underway in the «European position in Asia and Africa» on the eve of decolonization. Many pupils and young teachers and researchers, including Gallagher and Robinson themselves, had recently had the opportunity of personally experiencing these epochal changes by serving in the armed forces on the different non-European fronts of the world war.
10 The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge, supplement for 1946-47, Cambridge, University Press, 1947, p. 99; Statutes of the University of Cambridge and Passages from Acts of Parliament relating to the University; Ordinances of the University of Cambridge, to 1 October 1952, Cambridge, University Press, p. 206. 83 In their diagnosis, the fault of colonial history was its excessive concentration on the «imperial factor» and neglect of the role played by the colonized people, whom the events of the war and its aftermath were bringing to the fore. The adoption of the broader category of «European expansion», in the place of that of «Expansion of England», responded first of all to a need of relativization and demythization of the British imperial experience11. But it was intended also to remedy a too narrow conception of colonial history still mostly focused in an almost exclusive manner on the victorious protagonism of European actors, so that – to quote again the testimony of Christopher Bayly referring to the state of things which subsisted at Oxford until the 1960s – «Indians and Africans were rarely more than a backdrop to the doings of colonizers, missionaries and merchants». One of the main purposes of the introduction of the new paper was therefore to widen the analytical context in which the empire-building processes and the different types of European presence and influence in the world had to be studied, so as to include in it the contribution of non-European forces which were recognized now able to interact dynamically with the Europeans and to condition the deployment and the outcomes of their colonial initiatives.
A well-known historiographical exemplification of this approach, and of its vast methodological repercussions, is offered to us by the much-debated theory of imperialism advanced by Gallagher and Robinson themselves. An essential element of this theory is its vigorous emphasis on the «Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism». According to them, even at the height of the so-called «triumph (...) of European domination» in the final decades of the long nineteenth century, British and European expansion and colonial power constantly depended on a multitude of forms of «collaboration», and therefore of compromise and negotiation, actively involving non-Europeans, albeit in a subordinate position. Later research influenced by the so-called School of Cambridge has showed, among other things, how the imperative necessity of making sectors of the elites
11 On Imperial History as a source of legitimation for Victorian colonialism see infra, ch. 7. 84 and other key strata of the native societies willing participants in the formal or informal control of the non-European peoples gave imperial government and domination the character of a «cross-cultural enterprise». This crucial circumstance offers a plausible explanation of why the representations of the non-European “Otherness” that can be found in the rhetoric of official legitimation of the imperial authority elaborated in the European Metropolis usually abstain from resorting (at least in the British case) to the most derogatory stereotypes of cultural differentialism and biological racism (even James Mill’s derogatory representation of the Hindus didn’t deny, after all, the possibility that the Hindus could be ultimately civilized) or to the language of the Kiplingean «white man's burden» This partially contradicts, or renders indispensable to rectify, Edward Said’s well-known thesis about the relationship between colonial culture and colonial power. The exercise of colonial power did not necessarily imply the utter stigmatization of the colonized. We can see therefore how, in this case, the awareness of the interactive nature of the relationship of colonial power reveals itself an essential prerequisite for a truly historical, non-ideological approach to the theme of the culture of imperialism, which has risen to the top of the agenda of the European studies in the last generation.
At the very beginnings of the Cambridge School we may recognize therefore that very propensity to organically connect within the same interpretative framework the dynamics unfolding in the European and non-European scenarios of expansion, which we have already found, in a more developed form, in the work of Christopher Bayly and which we will find again in John Darwin’s book on the global empires. This methodological attitude suggests a second qualifying aspect of the Expansion Studies paradigm on which I would like to draw attention, and that I would define, in a first approximation, the synoptic ambition cultivated by the major exponents of the Cambridge tradition. It is highly probable, of course, that the appeal exercised by the newborn discipline of «The Expansion of Europe» after the Second World War reflected to a large extent a growing interest for the knowledge of the extra-European worlds. The Expansion of Europe course provided the students with one of the rare opportunities 85 to pursue this interest in the English universities at the time. We see here the prodromes of a trend that from the mid-nineteen-sixties would have continued in the most congenial form of the disciplinary autonomization of the regional studies (the so called area studies). The fact remains that the Expansion of Europe course had been conceived and would have been kept alive until its explicit transmutation in the World History course which is presently taught at Cambridge for a more specific institutional purpose. This didactic purpose was to delineate the wider world historical and comparative horizon within which the more specialized teaching and study dealing with individual non-European regions or the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth would have to find their place. At the heart of the idea of «universal history» that informed the thought of the Cambridge historians after the Second World War, it is easy to see a persistent tendency to imagine the European expansion as a «many-sided» but intrinsically unitary phenomenon and to identify it, at the same time, with the vector of a process of «unification of the world» which, in the contemporary era, had reached the critical phase of its fulfillment.
This tendency dated back to the nineteenth-century historiography (Seeley himself, the founding father of Imperial History as an academic discipline, had been one among its foremost exponents during the Victorian age) and had recently resurfaced, in an updated form, in the writings of Arnold J. Toynbee. Even for Gallagher and Robinson, in fact, the «expanding» entity, driven by the «expansive energies of Europe» and in particular of the British industrial society, was properly the «western civilization»; and the various dimensions of its expansion had to be regarded as «radiations» in different shapes of the same «social energies», and constituted therefore «interconnected» «parts» of a «whole. Within this «totality», the European imperialism assumed a more informal or formal character according to the variable conditions of the extra-European areas which the civilizational movement impacted in its world-wide advance. Considered as an aspect of the expansion of Europe so conceived, British and European or 86 Western imperialism fulfilled «the political function» of «integrating new regions» if and when its help was needed to this purpose – as it was not at all inevitable that always happened. In its holistic impetus, the Cambridge school also conceives the temporal manifestations of the expansion of Europe as moments in one single centuries-old sequence of events that embraces together both the modern and the contemporary age and requires an appropriate internal periodization of its own. The historians belonging to this tradition see the ubiquitous spatial manifestations, both material and ideal, of the European expansion, as ramifications of «one great» geohistorical «movement». The national subcurrents of this movement, that is the expansions promoted by other European people and States, of which the English expansion would be «only the largest and the latest of a whole species», are regarded by these scholars as contributions to a common «European» or «Western» historical work. Last but not least, the Cambridge School regards the European and neo-European irradiation poles and the non-European destination areas of the expansive movement as internal articulations of a single large, virtually ecumenical theater of transregional and transcultural interactions.
Such methodological propensities seem to have been particularly pronounced in John Gallagher, who was an academic mentor both to Bayly and Darwin. In Gallagher’s intellectual personality, however, the holistic, «all-embracing» ambition coexisted, in a rare and fruitful combination, with a historiographical realism that appears indebted to the elitist empiricism and «anti-impressionist positivism» which came to dominate the British historiographical scene after World War Two under the influence of Lewis Namier (1888-1960).
It was in Gallagher’s teaching to undergraduates, however, that his leaning towards macro-history found its most congenial vent. Some former pupils, including Darwin himself, who in After Tamerlane declared to have learned from Gallagher to consider world history «as a connected whole», have witnessed (or suggested at least) that Gallagher, as university teacher, availed himself of a «global» approach
87 so as to make the expansion of Europe the reconstructive principle of a synthetic presentation of world history. Gallagher used to inaugurate his annual preliminary course on the fundamental outlines of the European expansion by warning his listeners that the subject-matter of the lessons would actually lead him to deal with the entire «Tokyo to Tipperary (which is a town in Ireland, N.d.R.) group of civilizations». This last testimony provides us with a precious clarification about the true theme of the history of the European expansion, because it shows as the founders of the Cambridge School conferred a privileged status to a hemispherical space (to which they were uncertain whether ascribing or not Sub-Saharan Africa) that they regarded as profoundly different from the transoceanic new worlds. Here, in the transoceanic new worlds to which has to be added Southern Africa, the Western civilizations expanded in the form of more or less homogenizing «gains» (i.e. acquisitions) which were promoted by the neo-European societies, that is, by the white colonial societies created by immigrant form Europe and their descendants. In the Americas and Oceania the Western society expanded by pushing forward its frontiers.
In the Eastern hemisphere, on the contrary, the Europe expanded by establishing «contacts» with people which possessed a kind and a degree of civilization comparable with their own. The Western expansion in the extra-European world acquired in this case the character of «contacts between civilizations in space». But this last circumstance has to be taken into the highest consideration not only because it peculiarly shapes the dynamics of expansion in the Old World in various ways. The fact is that the group of the Eurasian «civilizations» are ultimately the co-protagonists of a common history. This common history is given its structural unity, from a certain point onwards, by the «Western» expansion. At the same time, the common Eurasian history possesses a further meaning, which consists in the final convergence and reciprocal integration of the various regional societies into the contemporary global society.
88 To make altogether explicit the historical-universal assumptions which are at the basis of the originary paradigm of the historiography of the European expansion have been a couple of those non-British scholars, who, as I already mentioned, were involved in its launch alongside their British colleagues. The most complete definition of the post-war concept of history of the European expansion (among those which are known to me) was given by the Dutch historian Henk Wesseling when he described the institutional mission of the homonymous Center («Geschiedenis van de Europese Expansie» in Dutch) which was created at the University of Leiden in 1974. Studying the European expansion, according to Wesseling, amounted to concentrating research on the intertwining of a triple order of phenomena. The first theme was the «history of the encounters between different systems of civilization» generated by the European expansion. The second theme was the relationship of mutual «influence» that had established itself between these civilizations. The third theme was their «gradual growth towards a global, a universal system of civilization» (the modern and contemporary development of McNeill’s «human community», in other terms).
A further tacit key element of the Expansion of Europe paradigm is vividly illuminated by an observation that I draw from an essay published in 1959 by the American scholar Philip Curtin, the great historian of the Atlantic slavery turned world historian in the subsequent phases of his professional career. Since the mid- nineteen-fifties Curtin himself had held in various universities of the United States a course on «The Expansion of Europe» later renamed «The World and the West». According to Curtin, the basic assumption of the new discipline was that during the modern and contemporary age «the impact of the West» had been «the most important single factor in the history of any single country» of the extra-European world which experienced it and therefore, at the same time, «the unifying factor» in the history of the extra-European world taken as a whole. Focusing on the «impact of Europe» the historiography of the expansion could therefore legitimately aspire to sketch an organic, general and «comparative» outline of world history as a whole. 89 The conceptualization of the expansion of Europe that was elaborated at the dawn of decolonization recognized therefore a real capacity to interact with the West to the non-Europeans (or at least to the «civilized» non-Europeans of the Eastern hemisphere). But it continued to rest on a theoretical framework that circumscribed their «agency» within very narrow limits. Non-European agency was mainly described in terms of reactivity or response of worlds which were in themselves stagnant to an exogenous jolt or challenge. This first, genuine attempt of overcoming Eurocentrism left largely intact old stereotypes, remounting in some respects to James Mill, in so far as it still relegated the past of the Oriental societies prior to the «encounter» with the West to a kind of historicity (or kinds of historicity) which was qualitatively different, if not antithetic, to European historicity. The persistence and pervasiveness of such stereotypes should not be forgotten by those who today, faced with the opposite excesses of which the radical critics of historiographical eurocentrism are too often guilty, regret indiscriminately the time (which is after all, and fortunately, as far as I’m concerned, far from being yet over) when «in general historical representations Europe occupied a central place»
- as the late Professor Giuseppe Galasso declared in one of his latest interviews. I limit myself to an example taken from one of the university manuals of contemporary history on which I myself studied at the beginning of the nineteen- eighties. I refer to the volume of Alberto Caracciolo on «the age of the bourgeoisie and revolutions» published by Il Mulino in 1979, which is an example - I immediately add - made in my eyes all the more significant by the authoritativeness and by the particular intellectual distinction of its eminent author.
Like Bayly’s books on the Birth and the Remaking of the modern world, Caracciolo’s book was part of a series published by Il Mulino whose other three volumes – on the Middle Ages, on the «formation of the modern world», on the «triumph and collapse of European dominance» between 1870 and the present – were also authored by big names of Italian and European historiography of the time such as Giovanni Tabacco, Alberto Tenenti and Pasquale Villani. The editorial project 90 of the series presupposed (a little too optimistically, perhaps, even by the standards of the time) the existence of a potential market that was composed not only of «university students», but of a wider and growing audience of «cultured» readers, to whom the General Presentation of the series ascribed a keen interest in the «basic processes of the modern world». To the questions posed to history by these readers the series promised to offer «overall but rigorous answers» in the form of «a carefully updated interpretive synthesis» and focused – let’s note – on the history of «European civilization» considered «as a whole» spanning the «ten centuries» from the Middle Ages to the «late twentieth century». The four volumes of the series would have followed the «long process» of development of the West «in its successive expressions until today's crisis». To mark the overall macro-historical framework of this series of university textbooks was therefore the conviction that students and readers could gain an adequate and intellectually satisfying understanding of the entire genesis of the modern and contemporary world – of their own world – by retracing, under the guidance of their distinguished authors, the stages which had prepared and rhythmed, in the course of a thousand years, the rise of Europe to the «gradual rule over all the known world», culminating in its nineteenth-century «triumph» and twentieth-century «collapse». The Eurocentric perspective adopted by the editors of the series was clearly stated indeed in its very title: The European Civilization in World History. The volume of the series authored by Alberto Caracciolo has a paragraph entitled «The European civilization takes off», in which a student could read that, starting from the industrial revolution, which Caracciolo located yet in the second half of the eighteenth century, there had emerged in the world a division of mankind into two parts. There was «a part of humanity» which remained «underdeveloped», by which Caracciolo meant that it was «nailed to a substantial stasis and repetition of its own condition». And there was «another» part which was «involved», on the contrary, «in an ascending dynamic, in short in a practically uninterrupted “development”». 91 The developed and developing part of mankind, moreover, was rising to «a dominant position over all others» parts which were still underdeveloped, including those peoples - «Muslims or Indians, Chinese and Japanese», who «retained (...) the elevated levels of their traditional civilizations», despite the immobility and the cyclicity of their histories». The category of «traditional», understood as the opposite and the antithesis of «modern» and «progressive», is central to the general vision of the European expansion advanced by Gallagher and Robinson. Their macro-historical ideas are brilliantly summarized, in their characteristic non-academic if not anti-academic writing style, in the epilogue of another four-handed essay on The Partition of Africa which was published in 1962 in the New Cambridge Modern History. According to the co-authors, the European expansionism and imperialism of the long nineteenth century had been «the engine of social change» in the «totally not- European» regions of the world, namely Asia and Africa. And these past transformations promoted by the European expansion were at the roots of the «world revolution» which was unfolding on the contemporary scene, that is decolonization and the rise of the post-colonial State.
Gallagher and Robinson described indeed «colonial nationalism» itself as both a product and an «auxiliary» of the social changes triggered by the Western global empires, so much so that «colonial nationalism» had to be regarded as «the continuation of imperialism by other means». The European expansion had unleashed gigantic «disruptive forces upon the indigenous structures». In this way it had fulfilled the function, «of the first importance» from a world-historical point of view, «to wear down or to crack open the casings of societies» which had been «governed hitherto by traditional modes». The «many-sided» European expansion had subjected these traditional non- European cultures and societies to the rough treatment, based on «cuffs» and «hustles», which was necessary in order to remove them from the «postures of tradition» and to introduce them into «a new era of change» and «transformation».
92 The impact force of the expansion of Europe had therefore triggered and favoured «rapid» processes of «social mobility», formation and «rise of new elites», «change of values», conflicts between traditional potentates and «emerging groups». In these ways the Western expansion had put Asians and Africans in front of what Gallagher and Robinson called, with an expression borrowed from Arnold Toynbee, «the Western question». In a book published in 1922, entitled The Western Question in Greece and Turkey. A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Toynbee had drawn attention to the fact that the Expansion of Europe had forced upon the civilized non-Europeans (or non-Westerners, in the case of the Russians) a choice concerning what attitude to assume towards Europeanizing modernization and towards all those groups - Europeans or non-Europeans - who were promoting and carrying on it. This dilemma, this «Western question», and the different responses evoked by it, was the most single important process unfolding on the contemporary political scene. And it is precisely in the various possible «responses» to the inescapable «challenge» represented by the «Western questions» that Gallagher and Robinson in 1962 (as already Toynbee since 1922) identify the limited terrain of exercise of the restored historical «agency» of the non-Europeans. This means that Gallagher and Robinson circumscribed the field of the global – that is, the field of interaction and integration between the «civilizations» entered into «contact» with each other following the European expansion – exclusively to the phenomena pertaining to the chain of actions and reactions started by the European initiative (compare this to Christopher Bayly’s emphasis on the role played by non-European modernities in preparing the ground for the transition to global modernity during the long nineteenth century). It goes without saying that the option towards which the two English scholars manifested their greatest sympathy was not the «romantic, reactionary» «response» of the «Zealot», fundamentalist movements that reacted to the «shock» of Western-induced change by integrally opposing it, such as, for example, the theocratic Sudanese Mahdism. 93 Gallagher and Robinson showed a strong appreciation toward a range of «more positive responses» to westernization that saw as protagonists the much more «defter nationalisms of Egypt and the Levant» (that is of the Ottoman Empire), the Confucian Occidentalism of the so-called «Scholars of New Learning» committed to modernize the late nineteenth-century imperial China, the different sections of the Indian National Congress of the origins (who pursued a program of modernizing nation-building without severing India’s connection with the British Empire) as well as «the separatist churches of Africa» (that is the autochthonous, non-missionary Churches created by the initiative of the indigenous Christian Africans themselves). This second type of response amounted to an attempt made by non-Europeans to make use of the resources of various kinds put at their disposal by the encounter with the Western civilization in order to «re-form their personality and regain their powers by operating in the idiom of the westerners». They opted, in other terms, for a strategy of «sophisticated collaboration», by virtue of which the non- Europeans themselves became the agents of European expansion and strove at the same time to decline it according to their own cultural codes and to bend it to their own interests.
According to the «ex-centric» interpretation of imperialism advanced by Gallagher and Robinson, the novelty of the local crises produced by the «proto-nationalist awakenings» ultimately imputable to the consequences of the previous phases of the expansion of Europe (such as, for example, the nationalist revolt headed by Colonel Urabi which provoked the British military intervention in Egypt in 1882) played a crucial role in determining the late nineteenth-century turn towards «formal» imperialism.
Starting from the eighteen-eighties, it became more likely than in the past that the Europeans could choose to impose their «formal» control on extra-European territories rather than keeping to the methods of «informal imperialism». It was so because the expansionists did not prove to be sufficiently «creative» and audacious to adapt themselves to the changed conditions of «collaboration» with the non- Europeans that the expansion itself had generated. They failed to adopt also 94 towards the new, modernizing «emerging groups» – in a form corresponding to the novel, unprecedented social and cultural characteristics of these group – their old policy which had consisted in negotiating an alliance with the «more dynamic» elements in the extra-European society in order to ensure optimal conditions for the expansion at the minimum cost. And a relevant aspect of this diminished creativity was the deafness of the West to the authentic historical significance of the turbulences that manifested themselves in the wider world – the Europeans’ unwillingness to read in the extra- European tensions and crises anything else that «the signs of decrepitude and crack- up». For Robinson and Gallagher, on the contrary, the whole range of the late nineteenth-century «awakenings» (including, that is, the Zealots’ more seemingly archaistic responses to the Western question) reveals the existence in the Afro- Asiatic societies of «growth points», of fruitful seeds which were destined to mature in the «modern struggles against foreign rule» and in the colonial nationalism which was called to carry forward the Promethean work initiated by industrial imperialism. It is only too evident, if we follow attentively Gallagher’s and Robinson’s argument, and take also into account the eloquent metaphors which corroborate its logic, that the only possible «growth points» to be found in the non-European soil still completely coincided, for the founders of the Cambridge School, with the seeds implanted ex novo by the Western historical enterprise.
2. The Expansion of Europe in the Perspective of the New Global History
Until now I’ve insisted on the unsurpassed limits of the genuine efforts which were made by the founding fathers of the Cambridge School in order to overcome the Eurocentric approach to the theme of the expansion of Europe. To underline these conceptual limitations is essential for exactly measuring and qualifying the further progress made by their pupils and successors, among whom Christopher Bayly and
95 John Darwin, in the direction of a more complete de-ideologization and historicization of the phenomenon of European expansion. The profound «rethinking» of which «The Expansion of Europe» has been made the object since the mid-nineteen-eighties is well illustrated by the title and by the program of the today’s course of World History in which, as I’ve already mentioned, the examination paper instituted in 1945 has progressively evolved at Cambridge since then: Empires in World History from the Fifteenth Century to the First World War. As can be seen from various syllabuses published in the last years, the architects of the course (among which Bayly, who was Professor of Imperial History at Cambridge from the early nineteen-nineties to the beginnings of the last decade) continue to believe that the empirical study of causes, phases and modalities of the ascent of the «European and Atlantic world» to a «dominant» position «in the world economy and world politics», with particular reference to «what (...) that dominance meant for the rest of the world», is able to provide a unifying theme for the history of humanity during the period in which «the modern world came to be». But a crucial didactic innovation has to be seen in the fact that the course now proposes to deal with these issues by considering «the “expansion of Europe”» (the expression appears in inverted commas in the particular syllabus I’m quoting from) in close connection with the «major changes and developments» which also took place «in other world societies» of Eurasia, starting from the phase of consolidation of the great Asian empires during the early modern age and until the initial emergence the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries colonial «nationalisms». In the revised and updated version that has taken shape in recent years, the expansionist paradigm reveals itself, in other words, in substantial agreement with the primary methodological requirement of the coeval revival of World History, which consists in an invitation to reimagine the intensified cross-cultural interactions catalyzed by the western initiative, from which the globalized society of our time emerges, like the convergence, the confluence and the coalescence of the histories
96 – of all the histories and of the whole histories – of a plurality of dynamic macroregional spaces. This means that, on one hand, the Empires in World History course, as well as the works of synthesis that share its changed conceptual structure (like Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World and Darwin’s After Tamerlane), continues to employ as an indispensable narrative axis the histories of the European colonial empires, including (like the original Expansion of Europe course) the «multiple geographical directions of the Russian expansion». And yet the Empires in World History course professes and prides itself not to be «a European-centered course», not only because it emphasizes the transregional «movement of ideas, peoples and trades» which «bypass Europe», involving, that is, two or more other historical regions, but also and in the first place because – as declared in one of syllabuses – «it stretches the compass of empire» so as to include among the factors to be taken into account in order to understand the making of the modern world the «strategies of expansion» related to the early modern processes of empire-building and culture- building promoted also «by the Ottomans, the Mughals and the Qing and other polities beyond the West».
The Empires in World History course does not cease, therefore, to reserve «central stage» to the phenomena of «resistance and adaptation of non-European peoples to western economic penetration, political dominance and evangelization», and to the «non-western modernities» or «religious resurgences» (in the case of Islam, for example) which emerge from them. It is worth repeating that the attention paid to the non-European or non-Western responses is not in itself a novelty in the tradition of the Cambridge School.
The real and very important novelty has to be seen in the fact that the «reactions» to the European expansion are no longer interpreted solely as a function of the «social change» induced by the «impact of Europe». The non-European reactions are regarded now, at the macro historical level, as moments and phases of pre-existing, prolonged and uninterrupted currents of historical life and activity which saw the «non-European peoples» as their agents and protagonists. 97 I have to repeat also, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that in the new historiography of the expansion of Europe the revaluation of the performances of non-European «cultures, economies and states» does not aim at calling in doubt the relative exceptionality of the European case and the temporary, contingent centrality and preponderance of the Europeans in the hierarchies of world power. On the methodological plan, this further step forward in the overcoming of Eurocentrism reflects the scientific need to reconsider the periodization, the geography, the morphology, as well as the legacies left to the present, of the global interactions which mark the rise and decline of European dominance in the light of the empirical results of area studies. The growing research conducted in this field has documented the presence in the rest of Eurasia, during the centuries of the early modern age and prior to the actual «impact of the West» on its regions, of endogenous dynamics of change which were for long time considered an exclusive prerogative of Europe. We may disagree with Bayly’s opinion that these other early modern Eurasian transformations can be regarded as «passages to modernity» which went parallel or were analogous to the European development. What remains true is that, within the theoretical horizon of the Cambridge School, such early modern Afro-Eurasian changes strongly suggest two new questions: what is the actual historical relationship, if any, between the acquisition by Europeans of the control of a particular area of the Eurasian world and the previous and long-lasting transformations in which this particular area now appears to have been involved? And in which ways, if any, did the antecedent endogenous changes contribute to defining the real terms in which the «Western question» arose for the Eurasian societies and influenced the «reactions» of their elites to the «challenge» of Europeanization? The argumentative strategies employed in order to answer these questions are well illustrated by John Darwin’s book After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000. Darwin’s work is based on a long experience of teaching imperial and global history not at Cambridge but at Oxford (where Gallagher, his 98 mentor, had moved for a period from 1963 to 1970). It represents the largest and, in my opinion, the most successful attempt realized up to now of reorganizing the overall field of the Expansion studies. In addition to covering a vast subject-matter, Darwin's work presents a historiographic structure that is both highly synthetic and, at the same time, very articulate and complex. Moreover, we fail to do justice to the book if we neglect to take fully into account how Darwin deals with the properly European, metropolitan and international sides of the expansion. Postponing for the moment a more balanced and detailed reconstruction of the whole conceptual framework of Darwin’s intellectual tour the force, I will briefly examine two aspects of his book which show with particular clearness the enlargement of the category of «dynamic interaction» and the redefinition of the expansionist paradigm pursued by the most recent representatives of the Cambridge School. These two topics are 1) Darwin’s interpretation of the genesis of British domination in India between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries and 2) Darwin’s interpretation and evaluation of the attempts at «self-strengthening» through the adoption of «European methods» which were made by the Empires and States of the «Afro- Asian world» during the nineteenth century.
Darwin is not a specialist of pre-colonial and colonial India, but his analysis of the connections between the history of Indian society and the European imperial expansion in the Asian subcontinent shows a clear affinity and complementarity with the somewhat controversial theses which have been advanced by the current of Indianist studies which counted among its major representatives Chris Bayly. Darwin inserts the formation of the British Empire in South Asia in the broader context of a turning point in the balance of power between European and non-
European societies, which can be located in the eight decades or so between the Seven Years War and the First Opium War. The «Eurasian revolution» – as Darwin calls it – coincides essentially with the initial phase of the prolonged transition process between two types of «global connectivity». The first type – the starting point of the transition process – consists in the global network woven by the Europeans in the quarter of a millennium following the 99 beginning of the oceanic explorations, during which among the societies of Eurasia there persisted, however, a situation of «equilibrium». The second type of «global connectivity» – the (temporary) point of arrival of the transition started from the «Eurasian revolution» – is, for Darwin, the «limited» «Europa-centric» «global imperial order» that emerged in the decades preceding 1914, which was sapped at the foundations by the First World War and its aftermath (cfr. infra, ), but was destined to survive, albeit on a reduced scale, in very precarious conditions and at the price of considerable modifications, until the Second World War and the decolonization. The «Eurasian revolution» is indeed the period in which the economic and technological effects of the industrial revolution began to modify, to the advantage of the Europeans, the relations between the West and the rest of Eurasia. But another component of primary importance of the Eurasian revolution (and an essential prerequisite for the take off and the maximizing of the global impact of industrialism) lies for Darwin in a two-phased «geopolitical revolution». Its first phase is marked by the progressive intensification, radicalization and globalization of the inter-European struggles culminating in the defeat of Napoleon. The second, post-
Congress of Vienna phase sees the tendential limitation of the international and ideological conflict between the European states, that left the two lateral Powers of the system, i.e. England and Russia, relatively free to pursue their expansionist «ambitions» towards the East. On the broader extra-European stage (which includes, let’s never forget, the New World) the «geopolitical revolution» had the result of shattering the barriers that, still in the first half of the eighteenth century, decisively hampered European expansion. The defeat of France, for example, weakened the resistance that the indigenous societies of North America had been able to continue to oppose to the advance of the white settlement colonialism by exploiting the inter-European rivalries and brought to an end the mercantilist compartmentalization of world trade preparing the terrain for the advent of free trade.
100 In another sector of the non-Eurasian «“Outer World”», the sector of the globe comprising «the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, island South East Asia and Oceania» – the inter-European competition of this period also provided an incentive for the annexation of Oceania to the area at disposal to the European settler societies for the construction of the colonial «neo-Europes». But as far as the equilibrium between the regional societies of the Old World is concerned, the further revolutionary geopolitical novelty of the period was that European Powers proceeded, for the first time, to the building of «territorial empires in Asia and Africa», among which the one built by the East India Company. In the case of India, it appears even more clear that the geopolitical revolution, given its chronology, precedes and is relatively independent from the advent of industrialism. Territorial empire-building in the subcontinent turns out to be the result of the synergic interweaving that now for the first time establishes itself between European history and Asian history, between the increased expansive movement of Europeans and certain peculiar regional conditions and dynamics that can ultimately be traced back to the Pax Mughalica of the early modern age and to the crisis in which it had entered in the late seventeenth century. For Darwin, recent historiography has falsified and debunked the «simplistic black legend» which for so long credited the idea that in the half century before the battle of Plassey (1757) and the acquisition of the «Diwan» of Bengal by the East India Company (1765) India had sunk into a chaos of «political disintegration», «economic decline» and anarchy from which only the British conquest could raise it. And a correct diagnosis of the crisis of the Mughal Empire, which has been made both indispensable and possible by historical research, is precisely the key to a more realistic understanding of the specific historical meaning that the «Eurasian revolution» assumes in the subcontinent. To summarize it in brief, Darwin subscribes to the thesis that, starting from the Fifties and Sixties of the eighteenth century the East India Company, driven among other things by the rivalry between England and France, was compelled or catched
101 the opportunity to become part of a number of contending States into which the Mughal imperial space had been disarticulating itself for some time. But the «centrifugal» forces which, in the case of the Mughals as well as in the partially analogous case of the Ottomans, favoured the disintegration of the Islamic empire were the product of processes of modernization of the Indian society which had been encouraged by the grandiose constructive work of unification, pacification and internal organization of India initiated by the Timurids in the sixteenth century (such as demographic growth, extension, specialization and commercialization of the agriculture, integration of India in the networks of the long-distance world trade – both terrestrial and oceanic –, development of the manufacturing activity, urbanization, rise of a class of landowners linked to localities and forms of mercantile capitalism). At the roots of the political changes which formed the presuppositions and the background for the advent of European colonialism there was therefore a shift in the balance of power in the subcontinent to the advantage of new peripheral élites, that were directly or indirectly the protagonists of a «new phase of Asian state building» whose most distinctive feature was an attempt to adapt the ideology and the institutions of the imperial epoch to the «regional» (i. e. provincial) scale. The ultimate origins of European domination are to be searched, in short, in the transformation of the Company into an «Indian power» – into one of those Asian states of a new type which were at the same time the gravediggers, the continuators of the work and the would-be heirs of the Mughal Empire. Understanding to which extent European expansionism in India was in the condition and revealed itself capable of intercepting and exploiting for the purposes of empire-building pre-existing currents of indigenous political, social and economic change also constitutes, for Darwin, the indispensable premise for trying to answer the historiographical problem posed by the «exceptionality» of the Indian case. In India, in fact, the process of colonial conquest, precociously started around the middle of the eighteenth century, prolonged itself without interruption and
102 «more completely than in almost every other part of Afro-Asia» until the eve of the rebellion of the sepoys in 1857-1858. Conquest was carried on, in other terms, well into the new period of the history of expansion which can be located between «the first epoch of global imperialism» from 1760 to 1830 and the «new imperialism» of the late nineteenth century. During these intermediate half century or so, the British and the Europeans showed themselves reluctant to proceed to new territorial acquisitions in «Afro-Asia» (this happened, after all, in India too, where, after the Great Mutiny, the British made the choice to let the remaining “princely states” survive as polities governed by native rulers on which they exercised their ultimate control through methods of «indirect rule»). Generally speaking – Darwin argues – in order that the growing disparity of the respective levels of power could translate itself into the imposition of an effective European control over Afro-Asian peoples and territories it was necessary that certain minimal conditions of possibility realized themselves. The most basic of them pertained, on one side, to the circumstances of those peoples and territories, on the other side, to the willingness of metropolitan countries to shoulder the burdens of colonial conquest and government. The reasons of the presence of these conditions in Indian society are not to be found in its backwardness, but, on the contrary, in those conspicuous traits of «modernity» that were the legacy of the pre-colonial period. India’s «openness» to world trade and the sophistication of its commercial and financial life meant that English merchants, whose activity was not confined to port cities like in the Canton system in China, could conduct their business directly with prosperous indigenous merchants and bankers who were much freer from the control of indigenous potentates than their Chinese counterparts. In maritime India, therefore, the Company could always count on the alliance with (and on the collaboration of) local economic élites for whom the investment opportunities offered by the British had become increasingly important.
103 But even more obvious (so obvious as to be most often overlooked) is the extent to which the special advantages that the Company could exploit to expand its power into the huge continental mass of inland India stemmed from «developments» that India had known in the course of early modern age. As we have already seen, India possessed an extensive and efficient credit system, thanks to which the East India Company was able to pay its wars without having to draw only on its commercial resources, but also rely on the services of Indian bankers. Furthermore, starting from the acquisition of the right to collect taxes in Bengal, the Company could employ the monetary revenue deriving from the consolidated system of taxation of land of Moghul origin (which presupposed in turn a sufficiently commercialized and monetized economy) in order to meet the costs of its fiscal- military apparatus without falling into the vicious circle of imperial oversizing. In this way, the Company could pursue a strategy of territorial expansion which sustained itself at the expense of the Indian society itself rather than the English taxpayer. Even the well-known dependence of the Company's army on the recruitment of a vast indigenous infantry, which had to be loyal, of course, to its foreign employer, presupposed the modernizing process by which, especially in the great central- northern plains of India, soldiering had become a profession, overcoming the feudal or tribal logic which prescribed that a soldier should be primarily a loyal follower, owing personal allegiance to a military leader who was at the same time his lord or clan chieftain. But alongside this more numerous category of indigenous «collaborators», the most significant manifestation of the openness, fluidity and social dynamism from which European expansion benefited in India remain for Darwin the extraordinarily rich and various range of regional élites among which the British colonizers could select their strategic partners - from the ancient diasporic communities of Farsi merchants in Bombay to the new educated Hindu middle class who was supplanting the older Muslim elites at the top of Bengali society.
104 Some historians, including Bayly, starting from historiographical premises which are very similar to the theses subscribed to by Darwin, have gone a long way in attempting to overturn the stereotype of an «immobile» India, «ready to allow itself to be subdued» by a foreign conquest of which it would be a purely passive «spectator and victim». They seem inclined to believe that the active «collaboration» of components of Indian society in the construction and functioning of the European colonial regime should be read as the continuation, in other forms, of an attempt which was already being made by the modernizing élites of a world vibrant with change and innovation to remedy its political instability and to modify the balance of power in the subcontinent to their own advantage. Darwin does not exaggerate to this point the co-protagonism of the indigenous historical actors in the making of the colonial society. On the other hand, there is no doubt that even for him the reason why the European expansion succeeded in India was that it responded to needs arising from historical transformations promoted by the «local forces» to which it, in turn, was obliged to «rely». As described in After Tamerlane, European imperialism announced itself – to paraphrase an aphorism by Gallagher and Robinson that I mentioned earlier – as «the continuation of the Indian way to modernity by other means». The theme of the continuity and «resilience» of the long-term stories of the Ottoman, Persian, Chinese and Japanese Empires in the period after the «Eurasian revolution» plays a central role also in the pages that Darwin's book dedicates to the «answers» which the respective dominating élites gave to the «challenge» of Europeanization (which is the second topic on which, as mentioned, I would call attention at this stage).
For Darwin, the «success story» of Japan (which starting from the 1868 Meiji Revolution reacted to the «Western question» by undertaking an original experiment in modernization from above) is not to be considered as an unicum with respect to a series of failed attempts to stop the decline and disintegration of the other Eurasian empires. Darwin rather represents the Japanese case as the extreme of a
105 continuum of reforming initiatives whose balance sheets show, in varying degrees, some not negligible lights in the middle of the prevailing shadows. Again, the essential point in Darwin’s argument is that the uninterrupted legacy of the experiences of «consolidation», «reconstruction», «expansion», «exceptional transformation» experienced by all the non-European imperial spaces (or non- Western imperial spaces if we include also Russia in their number) in the age of the Eurasian equilibrium made available to them decisive resources for resisting in some measure «the impact of the West» during the nineteenth century. The resources they had accumulated during the early modern age allowed the Ottoman, the Persian, the Chinese and the Japanese Empires to escape, after all, the fate of foreign conquest that had befallen the Mughals, leaving in turn important legacies to the nation States which succeeded them and which survive until now as key protagonists of contemporary (and future) world politics. But also in the very different cases of India or Egypt the legacies of the imperial past allowed the respective conquered or semi-conquered societies «to retain or construct a distinctive identity that transcended the limits of a colonized culture». In all the other cases, «the states that the Europeans faced» during their nineteenth-century expansion «were anciens régimes in need of renewal, not broken-backed states that had fallen to pieces». The Qing and Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals who were called upon to deal with the «Western question» could count, not unlike their Japanese (or Russian) counterparts, on «tenacious traditions of political and cultural autonomy». This last important circumstance allowed them to escape the rigid alternative between having to succumb to the expansion of the Europeans for refusing to adopt
«European-type armies, bureaucracies, schools and technologies» and jeopardizing internal «solidarity» and «social cohesion», which were equally indispensable to the survival of their kingdoms, through the imposition to their subjects of «an alien blueprint» that was incapable of arousing their «loyalty». The Eurasian modernizers were able to «graft new European political methods on to the original stock» of a historical past which was still alive. And this helped ensure that their efforts were 106 not completely lost or a mere factor of further weakening and decline of the Eurasian Empires. The reforming seasons that followed each other after the two Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) in the history of the Chinese Empire, dominated by the foreign Manchu dynasty since the middle of the seventeenth century, preserved and renewed the «huge residual strength» that China derived from the possession of a «unified culture» and a «working political system». The so-called yangwu movement of the 1860s-1880s, for example, pursued a devolution policy which favoured the hegemony of the provincial gentry in the countryside and its integration into an imperial élite made more homogeneous by an increasing rate of sinicization (that means the growing presence in it of the ethnic Chinese, or Han, element). These Westernizing initiatives are therefore to be counted among the key factors of the «resistance» that imperial China was ultimately able to oppose to its degradation to a «mere semi-colonial periphery» of the «Eurocentric world system». The Qing Empire was able to retain to the end almost unchanged the borders it had reached at the top of its «expansion» in the eighteenth century (which are still largely those of contemporary China) and to transmit to the subsequent Republican period (from 1911 onward) its own «idea of China», which is still recognizable under the new appearance of Han nationalism. Similarly, even in the case of the eternally moribund Ottoman Empire – the nineteenth-century «sick man of Europe» – Western domination remained after all an «unfinished business». Its «Anatolian core» could survive the «partition» that had been planned by the winners of the First World War to transform itself, largely cleansed of its Christian minorities, in the new Turkish national state erected «on the foundations of the Ottoman reforms». What made all this possible – at least in those parts of the Ottoman State where the necessary preconditions of «cultural cohesion» existed – was precisely the cumulative effect of a policy aimed to the «deliberate grafting of Western technique on to the social and political structure» of the Empire that had been adopted by Ottoman reformers, modernizers and Westernizers since the early decades of the nineteenth century. 107 In John Darwin’s general view of modern and contemporary history, the «resilience» revealed by non-European societies and cultures to the «impact of the West» confirms the original polycentric character of the Eurasian space. But this conclusion provides us at the same time, according to Darwin, with a historical precedent which authorizes us to suppose (or strengthens our actual perception) that this geo-historical space, even in our era of hyper-globalization, will continue to oppose «resistance» to cultural homogenization and to the hegemony of «a single great ruler». On the other hand, as I have tried to point out, in Darwin’s updated version of the old expansionist paradigm, the «resilience» and the polycentrism of contemporary Eurasia are fed in various ways by the same European expansion, configuring themselves as a result of the mutual interaction and permeation between European and non-European histories. The most recent outcome of the Cambridge tradition therefore points a way out from the too often ill-posed problem concerning the place to be assigned to Europe and European studies in global historiography to which I alluded before (supra, ). I will try to formulate it by using, entirely instrumentally and without any pretension of hermeneutical correctness, a quotation taken from an essay by the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Writing around the mid-nineteen-thirties, Huizinga maintained that European civilization is the first to consider «its past the past of the world», that «our history is the first to be world-history». The phrase in itself can be understood in different ways (in the sense, for example, that in an era of planetary interdependence, there is no history, no people in the world whose past does not become relevant, at least virtually, for us). But Huizinga’s words can also mean that European civilization, during its modern and contemporary «axial age» of expansion, has inscribed significant parts of its past in the past of the whole world. This implies that any scholar or student or citizen sincerely interested to understand the characters and the problems of the contemporary world (whether he be a European or not) cannot neglect to study, among many other things, the indelible traces impressed by the European expansion in the past of each of the 108 human groups coexisting in the globalized society with the realistic spirit and the ethical tension inherent to the historical discipline.
109 2
Eurasia from the Multiple Expansions of the Early Modern Period to the
18th- and 19th-Centuries Crisis of the Old World Civilizational Balance12
1. Eurasia as the Center of Modern and Contemporary History
As anticipated at the beginning, in my course I set myself the goal to provide the student with a reasonably detailed account of a specific period in the history of contemporary globalization – the period I’ve defined, following Christopher Bayly’s and John Darwin’s periodization, of the crisis of Eurasian equilibrium crisis, the first age of European global imperialism and the transition to ecumenical modernity. In doing so I will continue to rely, in particular, on the text of Darwin. The next lessons will be in a sense a closer analysis of chapters of After Tamerlane aimed to trace some further aspects of the conceptual model reconstructed in the first part of the course in the concrete historiographical and methodological texture of an outstanding and at the same time representative sample of the New World History and the reconceptualization of the Expansion of Europe studies. One of the most important conclusions we have reached until now concerns the need to arrive at a right assessment of the three centuries of the early modern age in order to understand the genesis of contemporary globalized society. My exposition will proceed with a more careful examination of the fundamental character of what Darwin calls the age of the Eurasian equilibrium, corresponding to
Bayly’s global ancient regime.
12 This chapter, and in particular the §§ 2-4, is in the main a selective and more or less detailed abridgment of John Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 1-217, aimed at highlighting the conceptual framework and argumentative strategies employed by the author in «rethinking the expansion of Europe» during the period under examination. 110 Let’s observe, and always keep in mind that, although Bayly’s and Darwin’s books largely share the same conceptual framework, their expositive structures and thematic priorities are both different and complementary. Bayly too pays much attention to the sequential phases of the birth of the modern world. In the first part of the book, on which we’ve mainly dwelt, after the introductory chapter describing the Eurasian «old regimes and “archaic globalization» as they presented themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the second chapter describing the «“long-term changes”» producing the various «passages from the old regimes to modernity» (which became more intense and visible during the eighteenth century), Bayly introduces a third chapter, entitled Converging Revolutions, where he offers us, in a quasi-narrative form, a «“history of events”» of the «World Crisis» that catalyzed the transition to the interconnected modernity of the contemporary age. But Bayly is also interested in dealing with global modernization in terms of a series of radical transformations which invested, at world level, key spheres of the human and social life such as 1) the economic and social sphere, 2) the forms of collective identity, 3) the political and institutional sphere, 4) the intellectual and ideological sphere, 5) the religious sphere, 6) the cultural sphere. Therefore, in the following sections of the book there are several chapters more specifically devoted to the phenomena related 1) to industrialization and urbanization, 2) to nationalism, 3) to the modern State, 4) to science, mentality and political ideologies, 5) to the world religions, 6) to the arts. In all these more thematic chapters Bayly follows more at length the further unfolding of the early modern pan-Eurasian changes he had stressed, in particular, in the second chapter of the first part of The Birth of the Modern World: «the last “great domestication” and the “industrious revolutions”», the emerging of new, more localized patriotic identities (as an alternative to monarchical universalism), the first signs of a corresponding reconfiguration and intensification of the activity of the State, the growth of «critical publics» (in the plural) not only in Europe, but in all the rest of Eurasia, where the mobilization of public opinion and the self-organization of civil 111 society took more often than not the misleading and often misunderstood form of religious movement. Darwin follows much more minutely than Bayly the vicissitudes of the global empires – all the global empires, and not only the European ones – in order to construct a dense, articulated narrative of the history of the world since the Eurasian Middle Ages. Moreover, each chronological section of his narrative is dealt with in terms of both the global tendencies prevailing in the corresponding period of world history and the historical developments involving, in that same period, each of the main regional, cultural or imperial spaces in which Darwin decomposes the overall Eurasian arena. For Darwin, in fact, as explicitly stated at page 19, «the centre of gravity in modern world history lies in Eurasia – in the troubled, conflicted, connected and intimate relations of its great cultures and states, strung out in a line from the European “Far West” and the Asian “Far East”». This is only another way to say that, according to Gallagher’s dictum quoted before, modern and contemporary global history deals with the Tokyo to Tipperary group of civilizations.
It is important to stress that Darwin’s «European “Far West”» includes the «Atlantic» world comprising «the West African coast, the Caribbean islands, the North American sea-bord, Mexico, Peru and maritime Brazil», which was «annexed» by Europe since 1500. But in the course of modern and contemporary history, following in the path of the “special relationship” between the North East of the United States and North West Europe, the Old European and the Neo-European components were ultimately «subsumed into a larger formation, the “West”».
Darwin’s approach (reflecting the historiographical propensities of the Cambridge School) inclines therefore toward substituting «Eurocentrism» with an exaggerated «Eurasian centrism»13. He seems interested in the global connections concerning
13 Maxine Berg. 112 the “Euro-Atlantic” or “Western” bloc only in so far as they influence, at the advantage of Europe, «Europe’s place in Eurasia» and the Eurasian balance of power. More generally, Darwin tends to incorporate all the non-Eurasian spaces colonized by the Europeans (not only the Americas, I mean, but Australasia and Southern Africa too) into his geo-historical scheme by treating Europe and the transoceanic «Neo-Europes» as a single unit – which in the nineteenth century becomes «the “West”» or a «Greater Europe» – and by regarding these same «Neo-Europes» (as the very term «Neo-Europes» indicates) and their integration into wider maritime- centered spaces (such as the so called «Atlantic world») as the mere result of the Expansion of Europe, underrating or neglecting altogether, first, the «dynamic interactions» between Europeans and Neo-Europeans and the role they played also in differentiating them from each and conferring a distinctive regional identity to the respective subdivision (like in the case of Latin America, for example), second, the «agency» of the non-Europeans in the making of the Neo-Europes and the oceanic world-systems (not to speak of the «global connections» by-passing Europe in this case). By the way, the active «participation» of Native Americans, Amerindians and
Africans to the building of the «Atlantic world» has been particularly stressed by Marcello Carmagnani, a distinguished Italian historian of Latin America, in his last book Le connessioni mondiali e l’Atlantico, 1450-1850, published by Einaudi in 2018. Let’s add that Darwin’s historical geography appears profoundly influenced by the ideas of Halford Mackinder, the founding father of geopolitics (and this is admitted by Darwin himself on page 19). In 1904, in a paper read at the Royal
Geographic Society in London and entitled The Geographical Pivot of History, Mackinder argued that the invention and the planetary diffusion of the railways (and in particular the advent of transcontinental railways) signaled the end of the Columbian age, in which the superiority of the maritime and particularly oceanic communications routes on land-based communications routes had temporarily made sea power the determining factor of hegemony in world politics. 113 In the new age that was beginning, according to Mackinder, preeminence in world affairs would have passed (or rather returned, as this had already happened in the past) from the thalassocratic powers to the terrestrial powers able to control the «heartland» of the «world-island» (as he called Eurasia). Mackinder’s Heartland, the veritable geographical pivot of history, is the area that extends, approximately, from the Volga to the Yangtze River and from Himalaya to the Arctic Sea. Who had actually taken control of the «heartland» and was able, in consequence, to mobilize its resources thanks to the railways, would have been in a position to drive away any rival from the entire Eurasian «world-island» and to relegate his enemies into that other large area of the Earth which Mackinder called the «outer world», including the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, Insulindia (the insular part of South East Asia) and Oceania, if not to extend its reach well into this great «insular crescent». Mackinder’s geopolitical thesis was an obvious warning, directed to his British fellow citizens, against the possibility that a new would-be world conqueror (that he believed could be a Russia made more efficient by an alliance with Germany and following in the footsteps of the Mongols in the Middle Ages), by controlling its
«heartland» or «pivot area», became the master of Eurasia and then challenged the other powers, and first of all the British Empire, for the mastery of the entire world. Darwin recalls also that, in the twentieth century, Mackinder’s geostrategic nightmare of a single Power controlling the Eurasian «heartland» has seemed more than once almost to the point of realizing, exerting a not negligible influence on the behaviour of international actors and military planners – first, during the First World War after the Bolshevik revolution and the peace of Brest Litovsk (pp. 377-380), then during the Second World War up to the Soviet victory in the battle of Stalingrad (p. 419), and then again during the Cold War. Apart from these particular geographical categories, what Darwin borrows from Mackinder is the idea that the relations between the main components of Eurasia are to be regarded as the very center of modern and contemporary history. Darwin suggests also that the specific «struggle for mastery» engaged by them on the 114 wider Eurasian scenario doesn’t really end with the failure of the attempt made by Tamerlane in the fifteenth-century to renew the tradition of Mongol pan-Eurasian «universal empire-building» (inaugurated by Gengis Khan two centuries earlier) and «challenge» the Eurasian pluralism, that is, at that time, «the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West (namely Christian Europe, N.d.R.), Islamic Middle Eurasia and Confucian East Asia». If it is true that «after Tamerlane no world- conqueror arose to dominate Eurasia» until now, so that «we still live in the shadow of Tamerlane» in the more precise sense that the persisting Eurasian pluralism reflects «the shadow of his failure» (p. 506), it is also true that, according to Darwin, the competition for hegemony over Eurasia among a cluster of expansionist regional «civilizations» constitutes a leitmotif in Eurasian history. Darwin’s narrative starts therefore (in the last paragraph of the introductory chapter, which is entitled Medieval Eurasia) with a brief overview of the state of the «old Eurasian world» «after Tamerlane» (who died in 1405) and immediately before the age of discovery which has also the purpose to introduce to the reader the protagonists of the story Bayly is going to tell him. The leading actors of the drama are initially defined by Darwin in both cultural and geo-historical terms: they are the three «(world) civilizations», or «great civilizational zones» corresponding to «Western Eurasia» (that is Europe, which is also the youngest among the three), «Middle Eurasia» (that is, «the Islamic world»), and imperial China under the Ming Dinasty. Each of them presents important internal articulations, that would soon have furtherly enriched, but more pronounced, at the moment, in the European zone. Since its «beginnings (…) as a viable, separate world civilization», which Darwin locates between the «recovery» of the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century and the «consolidation» of the feudal order in Western Europe in the eleventh century, Europe showed in fact a «double-headed nature». Bayly, in other words, refuses to subscribe to the thesis – argued in the nineteenth century by both Russophobes liberal intellectuals and anti-Western Slavophiles and repeated in the twentieth century, among others, by Arnold Toynbee – that the «Orthodox Christian» 115 civilization and its modern «offshoot», Russia, should be regarded as a distinct thing from a properly European civilization centering on Western Europe. Darwin follows the Cambridge tradition which, as we saw, assigned «a vanguard role in Europe’s expansion» to Russia and its «huge inland empire» hinged on «Inner Asia», which proved itself able to conquer «much of the North Asian land mass». And what helped decisively fuel Russia’s land-based imperialism and transcontinental expansion was its peculiar «European identity»: its membership of the European state-system, its integration in European economy and intellectual life, its sense of being called to perform through its expansion the civilizing mission of introducing the European culture in Asia.
2. Eurasia’s Multiple Expansions during the «Age of Discovery»
In the next chapter, Eurasia and the Age of Discovery, Darwin refers to the first post-Medieval period of global history – from the late fourteenth century to the first decades of the seventeenth – with the very conventional label of «the age of discovery». This, of course, must not deceive us. In terms of Eurasian history the «long sixteenth century» was certainly marked by the «Occidental breakout» led by the great Western European oceanic seafarers, which had its Oriental counterpart (never to be forgotten) in the beginning or the creation of the preconditions of Russia’s eastward expansion. But this first phase of the Expansion of Europe did not alter the «balance of power in Eurasia» nor should be regarded, in a teleological way, as a kind of prelude to an inevitable future European domination guaranteed by a European superiority that only needed time in order to be able to unfold its potentialities in all their fullness on the world scale. On one hand, the European, mainly Iberian conquests had for the moment, according to Darwin, a «limited impact» even in the New World. On the other hand, the other main Eurasian actors also experienced their first phases of early modern consolidation and expansion in the same period. In the Islamic world (or Middle Eurasia), there was an efflorescence of great Islamic States of a new type (Bayly’s Islamic Empires), much stronger and much more internally cohesive than in the past like the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Iran and the Mughal Empire in India, the so-called «gun powder’s empires» which adapted to their circumstances some aspects of the model of empire-building set by Tamerlane.
116 Tamerlane, in fact, is not only the last of a series of Turkish-Mongolian “conquerors of the world” (after the Seljuk Turks and Gengis Khan’s Mongol hordes) coming from Inner Asia who, in command of highly disciplined nomad armies composed of mounted archers, who take advantage of the exceptional mobility offered them by the great Eurasian steppe in order to build empires based on the control of the towns and commercial wealth of the Near and the Middle East. Tamerlane, despite the failure of its project (reminiscent of Gengis Khan’s) to unite the entire Islamic Near East under a Central Asia ruler reigning at Samarkand as first step towards a “world empire” embracing the whole of Eurasia, is also a transitional figure whose empire-building anticipates some features of the new type of empire- building that sees as its protagonists the three so-called “gun powder’s empires”. Up to Tamerlane, the history of the political formations which succeeded each other during the seven centuries of the Islamic Middle Ages, starting from the same Arab conquest, took place according to a recurring cyclical pattern, acutely identified and analyzed by the great Maghreb philosopher of history, contemporary of Tamerlane, Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun's theory of the rise and fall of Islamic imperial systems focuses on the presence and interaction, within Middle Eurasia, of two widely different areas: the area inhabited by settled populations, given to agriculture and highly urbanized, and desert areas inhabited by nomadic tribes. In the Ibn Khaldun’s model, the States of the settled zones suffer at their borders an incessant pressure on the part of the nomadic peoples, until their elites living in the cities, corrupted by the city life, renounce to defend themselves and open the doors to invasion and conquest. The invaders form a new urban ruling class, whose grip on the conquered territory depends on their ability to preserve their tribal unity, but it in the long run succumbs to the nefarious influence of city life, loses its pristine virtues and therefore disintegrates, giving rise to a new cycle of political rise and decline. To put remedy to the tendency to disintegration, the Islamic rulers introduced the system of recruiting military slaves from more backward Turkic communities in Central Asia, who were immune from tribalism and devoted only to their masters. From the ninth century to the death of Tamerlane in 1405, therefore, the political history of the Islamic world revolves around the attempts to State-building by Turkish tribal leaders relying on slave armies and succumbing in turn to Ibn Kaldun’s law. This recurrent cyclical pattern of mass military invasions followed by edification and collapse of vast imperial polities profoundly differentiates the Islamic medieval history from the European medieval history, where a tendency towards the gradual consolidation of territorial States more precociously establishes itself. What most clearly differentiates and makes more modern the new vast Islamic imperial regimes erected by the Ottomans, Safavids and Timurids with respect to their medieval antecedents (but also with respect to the persistent pluralistic character of the modern system of the European States that begins to show itself in the same period) is their unprecedented ability to acquire, maintain and extend the centralized monopoly of military force.
117 According to a famous and controversial thesis advanced by one of the founding fathers of New World History alongside McNeill, the Chicago Islamologist Marshal Hodgson, this ability would have much to do with the evolution of war technology, and in particular with the spread of firearms and heavy artillery, whose high cost, not being sustainable by all, creates at least the conditions of possibility of such a monopoly. Hence the definition of «gunpowder's empires» given by Hodgson to the three Islamic empires of the early modern age. Hodgson's hypothesis does not explain, however, why the adoption of the same war technique produced such diverging political results in Western Europe and in the Islamic area. Darwin, while referring to the «gunpowder age» in several passages of his book, puts his accent on other causes too. In the Ottoman case, the secret of the successful implantation and durability of large-scale imperial power must also be sought, according to his judgment, in the original combination of Islamic institutions, dynastic absolutism and «cosmopolitan statecraft». The central authority takes advantage of the common Islamic faith of the peripheral elites and of the unifying role of their high culture by exploiting the sovereign’s religious charisma. It is true that, already in the sixties of the sixteenth century, there was a slowing of the expansive momentum of the Ottoman Empire toward its exterior and, within the empire, there were tensions, conflicts and centrifugal tendencies that the declinist historiography preferred to interpret as the first signs of the perennial Ottoman decadence. But these apparent cracks, despite being partly the result of the Empire’s need to divide its forces between two fronts – the struggle against both Christian Europe and Shiite Persia –, can be read according to Darwin (who applies here an interpretative strategy well known to us because we have already seen it used by both Darwin himself and Christopher Bayly) as the adaptation of the Pax Ottomanica to the changed conditions that it itself has created, first of all involuntarily strengthening the class of the provincial notables. Behind the presumed crisis of the Ottoman authority (whose beginning in the nineteenth century Leopold von Ranke, the founding father of contemporary scientific historiography, had placed precisely between the forties of the sixteenth century and the twenties of the seventeenth century), there lies, in this case, the achievement of a new balance between centralization and devolution, which transforms the Empire into an Ottoman commonwealth, that is both decentralized and surprisingly cohesive, because it is based on a network of Islamic communities subject to the government of Ottomanized elites. In the Safavid Empire in Persia and in the Mughal or Timurid Empire in India we can discern, in this period, two variants of the same largely similar pattern. Also the Safavid Empire emerges from the consolidation of a confederation of Turkic tribes linked by a common loyalty to a religious leadership devoted, as I already mentioned, to Shiite Islam. During the sixteenth century, although the founding of a great agrarian empire cemented by a single high Islamic culture was in this case hampered by a stronger persistence of tribalism, probably due to the different proportion between agricultural areas and nomadic pastoral areas existing
118 in the Iranian plateau, the Safavid regime shows a tendency to endow itself with a Persian ethnic base, giving rise to a very effective mix of theocracy, popular faith and religious uniformity that was destined to leave deep and lasting traces in the identity of modern and contemporary Persia and which may perhaps help us to understand why the territorial legacy of the empire (I refer to the territory of modern Iran) has proved to be more considerable, in proportion, than the legacy the Ottomans (i.e. Turkey). If we add to all this that also the Eastern part of Eurasia – in China e in Japan – experienced its «long sixteenth century» of large scale empire-building, marked by the advent of the Qing or Manchu dynasty in China and the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan, we can see very clearly that, in the perspective of global history, the so called age of discovery sees the beginnings and only the very first intimations of the future convergence of the two trends – the expansion of Europe and the endogenous modernizations of the other Afro-Euro-Asian spaces – which were destined to decisively shape the globalized world and society of today. The widening of the European horizons and ambitions did not yet translate itself into the creation of a world economy dominated or exploited to their own exclusive advantage by the Europeans, into a depreciation of the comparative value of the other Eurasian cultures or into a weakening of their autonomy. As the example of the gunpowder weapons well demonstrates, the diffusion of technological or other kinds of innovations did not produce, at this stage, destabilizing effects nor created a disparity of power between the Eurasian states and empires on a regional or cultural basis, but reinforced all those of them which were successful in adapting the innovations to their needs. In the two centuries following the death of Tamerlane the cultural divisions not only persisted, but hardened in a way, because there was a strengthening of the civilizational and religious identities closely linked, as we have seen, to the internal empire-building processes. The real cross-cultural encounters and exchanges or clashes remained comparatively limited and superficial: they were not proportionate, according to Darwin, to the increased frequency of the contacts.
3. Eurasia in the Period of the «Early Modern Equilibrium»
Darwin properly reserves the denomination of epoch of «the early modern equilibrium», however, for the period following the age of discovery, which extends from the twenties of the seventeenth centuries to the forties of the eighteenth century (bringing us on the verge of the Eurasian revolution). In the new period, on one hand, the expansion of Europe seems to lose its initial momentum or rather to continue at a more gradual pace, while in reality Western Europe and Russia achieve very important progresses.
119 The Atlantic States of Western Europe are mainly the protagonists of a further advance in the Outer World, the colonization of fresh areas of settlement and potential expansion in the New World, the establishment of a growingly world-wide web of seaborne transports and communications involving more and more also other parts of Eurasia, even though the single most important novelty of the period is the first development of a Euro-Afro-American maritime economy. At the same time, it is in the age of equilibrium that Russia’s «inland imperialism» definitely confirms itself as the vehicle for the complementary overland expansion of Europe eastwards. On the other hand, the European global performances of this period not only continued to be limited by internal constraints (like the political divisions and international rivalries that hampered the development of settlement colonialism and capitalism and held up mercantilist policies which were harmful to the fuller economic integration of the Euro-Atlantic world), but were also matched and sometimes overshadowed by the achievements of the other Eurasian societies ruled by the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Qings and the Tokugawa shogunate, albeit among these lasts some more marked divergences of historical development begun to emerge. In Qing China and Tokugawa Japan the change of political regime was accompanied by a turn in the direction of a closure of the contacts with the outside world and the Europeans and, at the same time, by the quest for stronger political and cultural cohesion. This successful constructive efforts at state-building were favoured by, and favoured in their turn, the demographic growth, the enlargement of the agricultural areas, the internal economic unification of the two countries. This means that, for these two great countries, the age preceding the encounter with the West was an age of political, economic and cultural integration. The reconstructions that Eastern Asia underwent in this period played a crucial role in strengthening its regional civilizations against the full impact of the European expansion which was felt in a great part of the non-European world after 1750. Much more complex and diversified is the case of the Islamic empires, which were in themselves much more exposed to European influence and competition. Darwin’s age of equilibrium corresponds to the period in which, in Bayly’s model, manifested itself in full the contradiction between the ongoing indigenous modernizations allowed by the Pax Islamica and the political structure of the great monarchies established during the «age of discovery», which prepared the way for the Eurasian revolution and the advent of the European imperialism in Afro-Asia. Darwin too, as we already know, refuses to interpret the signs of reduced «dynamism», the «“peripheralization”» and the «centrifugal tendencies» which show themselves since the late seventeenth century in terms of backwardness and decline and points out at the different responses given to the contradiction diagnosed by Bayly in the Ottoman, in the Iranian and in the Mughal areas. Pressed at close quarters by the Europeans (much more so than its easterner counterparts in Iran and India), the Ottoman Empire revealed, after all, a strong «resilience» and «capacity of recovery», which was due to its cultural cohesion, to its strong «geostrategic security» (soon to be undermined by the Russian conquest
120 of Crimea in 1783) and to its traditional «flexibility» in integrating the «new provincial elites» who were benefiting from economic progress through a policy of «decentralization» (pp. 138-140). As for India, Darwin holds, as we have already seen, that in explaining the crisis entered by the Mughal empire in the first half of the eighteenth century we should give much more prominence to the underlying economic and social developments and to the efforts made by the Indians themselves in order to edify «new regional states». The protagonists of this new phase of Indian state-building (after the Mughal one), like the states composing the Maratha Hindu confederacy in the Deccan, initially aspired, however, to become the legitimate local and provincial representatives of the imperial order. The result could have been, like in the Ottoman case, «a more decentralized Mughal “confederacy”». What prevented this outcome was the interaction between two factors. To begin with, in 1739 and in 1759 Northern India, the heartland of the Mughal Empire, suffered the last of a long series of invasions from the tribal north-western frontiers (what in Imperial Meridian Bayly calls «tribal breakout»). The Afghan leader of the first – Nadir Shah – had previously profited from the failure of the Safavid to impose the control of the sedentary world on the nomadic world in Iran to take possession of their Empire (according to Bayly, the breakdown of the Safavid Empire in the seventeen twenties can be regarded, in the perspective of global history, as the first act of the century-long world crisis which marks the transition to global modernity). Nadir Shah and its successor Ahmed Shah Durrani should not be judged as mere barbarian invaders, but were in a sense the last modernizing empire-builders in the tradition of Tamerlane, trying to find a new formula to give stability and permanence to their conquest. Their efforts could have produced, Darwin argues, «a Greater Iranian Empire along Manchu lines» (that is, similar to the Qing Empire in China), «in which a nomadic warrior elite was transmuted into the hereditary administrative class of an agrarian state». The actual outcome of the new invasions in India, however, was the renewal of the conflict between the modernizing elites, represented by the Marathas as well as the Mughals, «who were striving to build a stable and sedentary order of towns, markets and settled agriculture, and “warrior” groups who were part of the old tradition of pastoralism on the upland plains connecting northern India and Central Asia». The second destabilizing factor for the Mughal Empire was the growing integration of maritime India into the global trade, who modified the relations of such wealthy provinces as Bengal with both the remaining of the Empire and the Europeans. Provincial rulers tended here to assert their political autonomy from the Imperial centre by means of proactive economic policies which were resented by the Europeans, whose interests had been better guaranteed in the past by the freedom of action that the much less intrusive imperial authority had allowed them. Even in the case of the Islamic world, however, the changes which were happening before the middle of the seventeenth century cannot be regarded as signalizing «an irreversible shift in the relative strength of Islamic and European societies», rather
121 than adaptations to new circumstances which did not substantially alter the «global equilibrium» (p. 138). To sum up, until the middle of the eighteenth century the global scenario remains generally characterized by a situation of intensified competition, collaboration and coexistence among the regional societies of the Old Eurasia World generated by their geographical expansions and growing economic interdependence. A symptomatic and very significant expression of the limitations of the power and ambition of the Europeans of conquering the world can also be found in the intellectual and cultural life of the Age of Equilibrium. The new perception of Europe’s position in the world documented by Mill’s History of Britsh India, insisting on the universal validity of European value system and institution, crystallized only later, in the second half of the eighteenth century. This arrogant claim was corroborated by the coeval breakthrough in the growth of the European commercial and political influence in the rest of the world, symbolized in the most astonishing way by the British conquest of India. It was premised on the conviction that European thought had explained the stages of human development, and that European science could systematically provide all the data needed to understand and classify the planet as a whole. But during the age of equilibrium the prevailing attitude had been inspired, on the contrary, to a sense of the limits and the peculiarities of European civilization. As far as the relations of Europe with the non-European societies were concerned, the European thought tended chiefly to draw a fundamental distinction between America and Afro-Asia. And it was only towards America that the Europeans, already in the age of equilibrium, initially adopted a position that presented the typical traits of intellectual imperialism. What stimulated the Europeans to take this view was the belief that they had both the capacity and the right to shape or reshape America in the image of Europe, if not in the image of an improved version of Europe itself. This intellectual imperialism partly reflected the relative ease with which the Europeans had subjected America under their domination, and the completeness of the collapse of native societies. But it was also based on some socio-juridical assumptions to which John Locke gave one of the clearest and most influential expressions. According to Locke, the indigenous societies had proved to be incapable of developing a system of property similar to the European one, and this was enough to justify the appropriation of their lands by the European colonizers. On the other hand, although Locke looked contemptuously at the Ottoman Empire, considering it a hateful tyranny, and hoped that the Christians who were suffering under its tyranny would revolt, he did not show himself as sure that Europe had any title to conquer Africa and Asia. The geographical and travel literature of the age of equilibrium shows in fact a respectful tone towards the four great non-European Eurasian Empires. It described states and civilizations that the Europeans could not like or could look down on; but it lent no credence to the belief that the conquest of these kingdoms was justifiable.
122 The image of China transmitted by the Jesuits was that of a beneficially ordained regime presided over by an order of intellectuals-bureaucrats. The eighteenth-century critics of bigotry, of militarism, of the misgovernment of the European States used the Safavid Persia and China to attack them through the comparison. The China portrayed by Montesquieu's in his Spirit of the Laws (published in 1748) was an efficient, powerful despotism, in which religion and social order were too tightly integrated for any kind of external influence, including Christianity, to penetrate successfully. Montesquieu's argument reflected the widespread belief that topography and climate had a decisive impact on the social and political order, a doctrine that implicitly underlined the danger and the artificiality of the European intrusion in the non-European world. Moreover, in the age of equilibrium the optimistic belief of the early Renaissance about the possibility of a universal Christian culture had long given way to an emphasis on the entrenched diversity of religions and civilizations.
4. The Eurasian Revolution: The Geopolitical Dimension
Around 1750 what characterizes therefore the global relations between the States and the empires of Europe, the Islamic world and East Asia in Eurasia is still a substantial equilibrium. The same thing, however, on closer inspection, can be said as regards the power relationships between the societies of the Eurasian hemisphere as a whole and the indigenous societies of the extra-Eurasian world (in the Americas, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in South-East Asia, in the Pacific Ocean). The European borders of the Ottoman Empire had certainly undergone a retreat after the failed siege of Vienna (1683) – the last great invasion suffered by Europe – but already before 1730s the Ottomans had recovered in part the lost ground, and they had stabilized their frontier against the Austrian advance in the Balkans. To the north, where they confronted the Russian expansion, the coasts of the Black Sea - which remained an Ottoman lake - continued to be held by Muslims – that is, the Crimean khanate, a client state of the Ottoman Empire. In the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Levant, the European maritime powers showed no tendency to challenge the Ottoman nominal sovereignty. In the area of the Caspian Sea, which was another important frontier world between Islam and European Christianity, the movement of the Russians from the Volga delta to the south was just beginning, although the commercial traffic between the Russian towns and Iran, Central Asia and Northern India was intensifying. In India, the 1740s certainly saw the crisis of the Mogul Empire, with invasions by Iranians, Afghans and Mahrattas hitting the Empire in its very heart in the
123 northern plains of the Subcontinent, while its tributaries on the shores of the Ocean, such as Bengal, increasingly affirmed their autonomy from the imperial centre. It is also true that along the coasts of South Asia the British, Dutch and French possessed fortified bases and commercial enclaves, and that during the 1740s they fought among themselves even on those distant theaters (during the eighteenth century the European wars increasingly became world wars). But around 1750 it would have seemed absurd to foresee that the struggle for the remains of the Empire in the plains of Northern India would have ended with a triumph of European imperialism (rather than Asian imperialism). The most probable outcome, for an observer at the time, would have seemed its partition between an Afghan empire and a Mahratta empire, with maritime India destined to follow a different and much more cosmopolitan trajectory. As for China, in 1750 the Qing monarchy is preparing to finally destroy the military power of the nomads of the steppes of the Inner Asia (which had always been the greatest threat to the Sino-centric «world order»), with the conquest of Sinkiang, or East Turkestan, which seemed to make the Chinese Empire more impervious than ever to external disruptive factors, and less willing than ever to make concessions to foreigners who urged it to open up its trade (like the British in 1793). But even in the relations with the indigenous worlds, as I mentioned, at the middle of the eighteenth century there are few signs that a change in the direction of a European hegemony is about to occur. In North America, the stalemate in the struggle between the French and the British and the alliance of convenience between the French and the Native Americans inhabiting the interior of the continent makes the frontier of the European settlement stand still on the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. Even the advance of the Spaniards from the South, from their Mexican bases, appears blocked by the semi-arid climate of the great North American plains and their warlike “savage” peoples and by the distance and inhospitableness of California (the Spaniards will only occupy San Francisco, after all, in the 1770s)14. In South America, vast forest regions and pampas (in the Amazon River basin, in Argentina and in Chile) resist the still faint penetration of the Creoles and the Peninsulares (white settlers born in the Iberian peninsula). In sub-Saharan Africa, the Europeans limit themselves to frequent the coastal terminals of the Atlantic slave trade. In Southern Africa, the Boers settled in the Cape region see their advance barred by the Bushmen, to the north and to the west, and by other tribal communities to the east. In Africa it is above all the Islamic influence to spread - in West Africa, along the Nile in the direction of Ethiopia and attracting the coastal areas of East Africa towards the centres of gravity of the Persian Gulf and India.
14 Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire, Yale University Press, 2008.
124 Also striking, retrospectively (especially from the point of view of an Englishman like J. Darwin), appears the indifference of the Europeans to the Pacific world, albeit they of course went through it by sea. In 1750 Australasia, the island world of the Pacific Ocean and the coasts of Canada facing the Pacific Ocean are still almost unknown even to the European geographers. This global geopolitical equilibrium did not naturally mean absence of war. The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed numerous conflicts that saw opposing Iranians, Afghans, Moguls, Mahrattas, or European states among themselves, or Turks and Europeans, or Turks and Iranians. But starting from 1750 we perceive an evident leap in quality: the Eurasian conflicts intensify, increase in scale, their effects on the old Eurasian world become enormously more destabilizing than before. For what reason? The main reason, according to Darwin, is to be sought in the convergence of two long-term historical trends, both related to the acceleration of the growth rate of the global commercial economy. On the one hand, there was a growing pressure to secure and extend valuable markets, protecting them from rivals or predators. This pressure was felt everywhere: by Asian merchants and rulers, by American merchants and settlers, by European merchants and statesmen. All this could have resulted in a simple quantitative increase in trade conflicts. But the commercial growth produced qualitatively much higher political effects than in the past due to the qualitative leap made in this period by another geopolitical trend. In eighteenth-century Europe, the fiscal stability and strength of the State determine the scale of its military power. But the fiscal stability and strength of the State, in turn, depend less and less on the magnitude of its revenues and on the efficiency of the tax collection system and presuppose more and more a close and mutually beneficial partnership between the State and the financial market (where the State is only the richest buyer). The key to the maintenance of a well-armed army and military fleet therefore becomes the possession of a financial system capable of mobilizing the resources of a country quickly and at the lowest possible cost. Financial resources become a crucial variable in the military fortunes of a state, and commercial expansion (as it is called to generate an adequate mass of financial capital) thus directly contributes to military power. This helps explain the growing sensitivity of rulers to commercial interests. In order to provide a measure of the magnitude of the phenomenon, Darwin cites a single datum: in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the government of London can count on resources ten times higher than a century before. The «fiscal-military state» does not in itself create conflicts (although, as we have already noted, it can help to understand some aspects of the dynamics of imperial expansion). However, it certainly paves the way for a redefinition of the criteria of political power and modifies the rules that determine the success or failure of a state in international competition.
125 There are, according to Darwin, two main epicentres of geopolitical turbulence in 18th-century Eurasia. The first in Europe, the second in South Asia. The conditions of permanent war in Europe are due to the fact that most European states are instinctively expansionist. In the pre-industrial age, in fact, power is based on the possession of the land and on the population that inhabits it, or on the possession of commercial monopolies able to provide monetary revenue in precious metal. In Western Europe, the four-party struggle that had taken place during the previous century between France, Spain, England and Holland had had as its stake the role of dominant power in Atlantic Europe, namely the monopoly of the control of the maritime accesses to the Atlantic extensions of Europe in North and South America. The other major theater of antagonisms in Europe involved the vast open frontier of Eastern Europe (a sort of «internal America», as Darwin calls it) which was disputed by the four States and Empires of Austria, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire (whose weakening excited the appetites of the neighboring Powers). Until the mid-fifties of the eighteenth century the internal balance of Europe had been determined principally by the primacy that France continued to enjoy. The hegemonic designs of Louis XIV had failed. But France remained the arbiter of European international politics, because it had the largest population, the largest army, the largest public revenue of any other European State, plus cultural prestige, a highly developed trade, an impressive fleet, a sophisticated apparatus of diplomacy and intelligence. Even if it was not able to dominate Europe alone, France could aim to regulate European conflicts so as to preserve its pre-eminence. This aim was pursued by France through a policy of alliances. In Poland, France relied on the anti-Russian party which best guaranteed it from the ambitions of the Tsarist Empire. It also allied itself with Prussia in anti-Hapsburg function, and with the Ottoman Empire in both anti-Hapsburg and anti-Russian function. The dynastic alliance with Bourbon Spain allowed France to defend the status quo in the Mediterranean and in Italy. Since the fleets of France and Spain also exceeded, if taken jointly, the English naval power, the so-called “family pact” between the Bourbons of France and the Bourbons of Spain also helped France to limit the danger of an English thalassocracy in the Atlantic. In this way, the primacy of France in Europe, characterized by a “conservative” tendency (to preserve, that is, rather than to modify existing international relations), was functional to support the more general global balance in Eurasia and in the extra-Eurasian world. The French primacy in fact protected the Ottoman Empire from a possible overwhelming combination of its European enemies. France, being also present in India, put a check on the influence of the East India Company in the subcontinent. Moreover, from Quebec, as hinted before, France blocked the road to the interior of the North American continent to the British colonies on the east coast by means of its alliance with the American Indians. The burdens imposed on France by this very extensive international system were huge. Managing effectively the system involved being the first military power in
126 Europe; keeping a standing army ready to intervene in Germany against Austria or Prussia; competing with the British fleet to preserve the balance of power in the Atlantic and to protect the French colonial empire in the sugar-producing Caribbean. France also had to be a Mediterranean power, with a fleet stationed in Toulon to watch over its Italian interests, and to preserve the balance in the Near East between Ottomans and Austria (France’s main European rival). During the eighteenth century the financing of this multitude of extremely heavy commitments was proving increasingly difficult. After 1713 the army created by Louis XIV, strong of four hundred thousand men, had to be halved. Around the middle of the century it was already doubtful whether the future of France was in the Atlantic, in its colonies, in the development of ocean port cities like Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, or in the preservation of its continental position, and if its revenues would allow it to bear the costs of both. Around the mid-fifties of the eighteenth century the precarious stability of French pre-eminence began to fail. The French system was challenged at the same time both in the West and in the East. The factor that set the crisis in motion, at a time when the French military force had reached its maximum limit under the old regime, was the growing power of Britain and Russia. Russia could no longer be excluded from Europe. The financial vigor of Great Britain had become sufficient to finance a fleet capable of winning a war, two American armies, the granting of subsidies to the European allies. The result was a continental and maritime war that shattered the edifice of French diplomacy. The Seven Years War sent the French primacy to the air without replacing it for the moment with nothing else. It triggered a geopolitical earthquake. The half century of war and revolution that ensued led to the emergence of a new “concert” of five powers ratified at the Vienna Congress of 1814-15. The first signs of French yielding ground appeared in North America. In the previous Austrian Succession War (1740-48), France had substantially held up. But the great French fortress of Louisburg, which protected the access to the sea of Saint Lawrence River in Canada, the principle French gateway to the interior of North America, was captured by a colonial army of Anglo-Americans protected by the British fleet. At the end of the war the British were forced to give back Louisburg, but they built a new base in Halifax in Nova Scotia. Further south, the British merchants settled in the Thirteen Colonies were competing energetically with French merchants for the control of the trade with the natives of the interior. Here the British could benefit from both the lower cost of the money they borrowed and the commodities they sold and shorter supply lines (as compared to the network of rivers that connected Montreal and Quebec with the Ohio River valley where the Native Americans lived). At the beginning of the 1750s the French were so anxious about British rivalry that they were building on the site of the current Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, a fort, Fort Duquesne, in order to strengthen their influence on the Ohio tribes and keep the Anglo-Americans at bay. But the pressure from the British continued to grow. A map of 1755, Darwin recalls, claimed the
127 territories up to the Mississippi to the British. Merchants, settlers, speculators, missionaries, appeared determined to challenge the French claim to control the interior, based on the fragile support of the alliance with the natives and an extremely small force of Catholic priests, soldiers and French-Canadian woodmen. In the British colonies, where elective assemblies and local interests were extremely powerful (with respect to central imperial metropolitan authority and its direct emissaries, the colonial governors), the expansion to the West seemed the only way out of economic stagnation; and this opinion was shared by many governors appointed by London. To light the fuse of an Atlantic war was an expedition, led by the young Virginian George Washington, aimed at testing the strength of the precarious French monopoly. The French, allied with the Native Americans, managed to turn the expedition into a route for the American settlers. Both sides reacted strongly to the episode. For the French, the expedition proved conclusively that the British were intent on a renewed assault on their continental empire and its headquarters in Quebec. So the following year, in 1755, they sent reinforcements to Canada. In England the French moves were in turn interpreted as a threat to the British colonial future on the North American continent. American interests and their metropolitan political friends succeeded in persuading England to send a fleet that intercepted French reinforcements before they could cross the Atlantic. They did not succeed, but the naval skirmish that ensued gave rise to a new Atlantic war. It was not obvious that this Atlantic war compromised the French position. The British attempt to capture Quebec, the main French stronghold in North America, could have failed as other times. The British could have been diverted from their North American objectives by threats to their European interests. But the American conflict between France and England came to weld with a political-military crisis in Eastern Europe. The Seven Years War thus reveals the high degree of globalization that the European state system has reached as well as the alertness of some contemporaries to this new condition. As Darwin emphasizes, it is Frederick the Great of Prussia himself, who, in attributing to the American events the beginning of the state of war in which Europe is in 1757, observes that «there is now no conflict in the world, however small, that does not risk to involve the whole of Christendom». In Eastern Europe, the epicenter of the crisis is the disintegration of Poland, which at this moment badly holds together a territory extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, in the sui generis form of an aristocratic republic headed by an elective monarch. Poland was the key to French diplomacy in Eastern Europe. It limited the growth of Prussian power, strengthening at the same time Russia’s dependence on France. It held Austria in check. It limited the capacity for intervention by Russia in Europe. But in the 1750s, as a result of the rise of Russian power, the Polish electoral kings had become Russian puppets, and this encouraged rebellious tendencies within the nobility. For the King of Prussia the temptation to meddle in Polish things in order
128 to revive Prussia’s challenge to Austria as the hegemonic power of the German world, was very strong, but was not encouraged by France. France pursued a policy of preservation of the status quo in Eastern Europe, in order not to push Austria to take the side of England (its traditional ally) in the Anglo-French struggle. The famous reversal of the alliances that acts as a prelude to the Seven Year’s War leads France and Austria to join forces to suppress the emerging Prussia. The Franco-Austrian alliance, which brought together the two most powerful states in Europe, could have led to a conservative peace, allowing France to concentrate its forces on the Atlantic chessboard. But the resistance of Frederick, the victory reported by his State of a military-bureaucratic type humiliates the two opposing powers - the too distant France and the disorganized Austria. Frederick could not win the war, but his fight (helped by the subsidies that Prussia received from England) and the damage that England was bringing to the French on the Atlantic, contributed to force the enemies of Frederick to sit at the table of the peace. From this moment on, the French primacy begins to rapidly unravel. While Frederick was giving his European opponents a hard time, the British had put together the military force necessary to conquer New France in North America. In 1759, the year of victory, England gained control of the Atlantic by cutting the French supply line to Canada. In September 1759, in the brief space before the time when winter froze the San Lorenzo, and the British fleet must therefore retreat, General Wolfe captured Quebéc, key to French power in North America.Having defended it from a French counterattack in the winter of 1759-1760, the British were now in a position to destroy the French system of influence in the interior of North America. At the same time, the British began to attack the junior partner of the Bourbon alliance, i.e. Spain, whose empire was dangerously exposed to their naval power. In 1762 the British captured La Havana, the Gibraltar of the Spanish Caribbean, causing Spain to seek peace. France was close to bankruptcy. Already in 1759 it had had to declare its public debt insolvent. Moreover, Russia, under the impression of Frederick II’s exploit, dissociated itself from the anti-Prussian alliance. The Peace of 1763 was in a sense a truce of exhaustion. France was almost expelled from the North American continent, it kept the Caribbean sugar-producing islands, as well as the fishing bases near Terra Nova (the islands of Miquelon and Saint Pierre). Louisiana went to Spain, which in turn ceded Florida to the British. But the most important general result of the Paris Peace was that France was no longer the arbiter of Europe. The French system had collapsed. The next thirty years (1763-1793) saw the progressive dismantling of the ancient geopolitical balance in Eurasia and in the extra-Eurasian world. As a result, in the long run, the global aggrandizement of England could no longer be contained.
129 In Eastern Europe and in the intermediate part of Eurasia, the main beneficiary of the French decline was the Imperial Russia of Catherine II (1762-1796). Having been left without its former French protector, Poland was dismembered in successive stages. In the first partition of 1772 Prussia, Russia and Austria acted in agreement. Russia obtained the lands on the eastern border. What remained of Poland was in fact a Russian protectorate ruled by a client-king such as Stanislaw Poniatowski (a lover of Catherine). Furthermore, the agreement on Poland allowed the Russians to carry out the war against the Ottomans victoriously (1768-1774) and thus obtain a first outlet on the Black Sea - Kherson - on the basis of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji. In 1783 Russia managed to annex Crimea, thus becoming the mistress of the Black Sea northern coast. Catherine sent her favorite Grigori Potemkin, as viceroy of New Russia. Odessa was founded in 1793 as the capital of this new southern empire. In this way the road to the conquest of the Caucasus and Constantinople had been opened. These are crucial years for both Russia’s rise to global power and the subsequent fate of the Ottoman Empire. The trend of the British expansion was different. The British too had felt the weight of the war, and the desire for a compromise solution was very strong. In a situation of financial hardship, the assumption of new commitments in North America, inherent in a new American empire, was viewed with fear. The imperial government was concerned with pacifying rather than launching new imperial developments. With regard to the new French-Canadian subjects of the new province of Quebec, they promoted a policy of reconciliation, refusing to create a new elective assembly requested by the colonists from New England who moved there. Quebec was organized as a military colony, intended to oversee the old French influence zone in the American Midwest. What infuriated the American colonists was the London decision to trace, using the natural boundary of the Appalachians, a Proclamation Line, beyond which the American territory had to continue to be an Indian territory, subtracted to the colonial settlement and ruled by imperial officials in the interests of peace and the financial economy. The British were also determined to force the colonists to shoulder some of the costs of imperial defense. In other words, they had to pay imperial taxes decreed by the central Parliament. To this was added a tendency to enforce in the most rigorous way the mercantilist regulation of colonial trade (the Navigation Laws which forbad the colonies’ direct trade with countries that were not Great Britain), also through a fight without quarter to smuggling. The ensuing rebellion was very badly confronted by the British, who had to fight a war that had already been made objectively difficult by the length of the North Atlantic supply lines. The Atlantic triumph of 1763 seemed to have been annulled (in the English historiographical tradition American Independence is described as the end of the first British Empire). Britain's maritime rivals (who went to war alongside the colonists in 1778), were able, with the combined forces of France, Spain and
130 the Netherlands, to restore the balance of naval equilibrium in the Atlantic. The British lost control of the Atlantic at a crucial time, which marked the fate of the Thirteen colonies. Under such conditions, their main land army in the colonies was forced to surrender in Yorktown in 1781. Although their naval defeats were only temporary, the British were compelled to recognize American independence, while retaining Canada, in the Peace of Versailles of 1783. Considered, however, in terms of global equilibrium, the almost complete reversal of the outcome of the Seven Years War in North America takes on a different aspect. The uprising of the white settler societies of British origin against imperial control was in fact a definitive confirmation of the only provisional triumph of 1763. The American interior only now fully opens up to the expansive dynamics of the neo-Europeans of the Atlantic coast. The settlers began to cross en masse the old Proclamation Line of the Appalachians. One of the first acts of the new US government was a program of territorial expansion outlined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The push for settlement in the Ohio Valley and the Old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi) led to a series of border wars with indigenous peoples. Divided, in military but also increasingly numerical inferiority, the natives were driven further and further west, while their abandoned lands became settlements for the white colonists and their Afro-American slaves, preparing the ground for the nineteenth-century “white deluge” in North America. In 1830 the white wave had reached and passed the Mississippi. Within half a century, the still precarious and struggling colonies of the Age of Equilibrium had generated a Neo- Europe on the American continent. At the same time, American independence could be considered as the starting point of another global trend – anti-colonialism – which was destined to develop all over the world in the following two centuries. If the result of the geopolitical revolution in the wealthiest regions of the extra- Eurasian world (North America) is the creation of the premises for the European occupation, another not less significant aspect is the beginning after 1750 of the expansion into another area that previously had escaped invasion: Oceania and the Pacific. On the wave of victory in the Seven Years’ War, inspired by a new sense of its global supremacy, the British navy launches an initiative of systematic survey of the oceans, currents, and winds (a kind of knowledge obviously vital for a maritime power in the age of sailing). One of the chief commanders of these expeditions of discovery, James Cook, not surprisingly had stood out in the maritime attack in Quebec in 1759. The first of Cock’s travels in the Pacific, in 1768, had the purpose to observe the transit of Venus and verify the hypothesis about the presence of a Continent in the south-western part of the basin. His explorations lasted for a decade (Cook will find his death in Hawaii following a conflict with the natives). Cook's reports, assisted by scientists such as Joseph Banks, revealed a vast Pacific world hitherto almost ignored by the Europeans.
131 The societies and cultures of the Pacific Islands struck European imagination as a tropical paradise, a haven of ease and innocence. But his exploration had a more than simply cultural significance. His travels on the Pacific coast of Canada showed that a new route could be opened between Canada’s fur regions and the Chinese market. However, its greatest discovery concerned the South Pacific. Cook exploded the myth of a great Terra Australis that would extend to the extreme south of the globe, carefully mapping the island-continent of Australia and claiming (on August 22, 1770) the western half to Britain. He had already circumnavigated New Zealand. Ten years after Cook’s death (1779), the British government had already established the first of its colonial settlements populated by deported convicts in Eastern Australia (the penal colony of Botany Bay, 1788), probably with the strategic purpose of strengthening its control over the sea route between the Indian Ocean and China. In the 1790s whale and seals hunters, traders, missionaries and shell collectors, both American and European, were beginning to arrive in force in the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand. The settlement was slow, given the great distance from the motherland and the persistent threat of France (a factor not to be underestimated in the history of European expansion in this area). But in the 1830s the colonization of Australia was in full development, driven by sheep breeding. In 1840 British settlers would arrive in New Zealand. It was the beginning of the formation of a second British neo-Europe. The thirty years after 1763 saw therefore a huge extension of Europe’s grip on the territorial resources of the extra-Eurasian world, although the wealth of the “new lands” was still to be exploited to the full (this will be a major theme of the next phase of the world and global history). But this development happened in coincidence with an equally evident change in the balance of power in the Old Eurasian world, providing the second pillar of the European supremacy in the nineteenth century. This last change is evident in the cases of the Islamic world and India, but in the 1830s it begins to involve also the Far East. The massive arrival of Russian power on the northern shores of the Black Sea in the 1770s and 1780s marked a crucial stage in the opening of the Islamic Near East to the European political and commercial influences. It took time for the consequences to be fully felt, but the loss of the Crimea was a strategic catastrophe for the Ottomans. Until then, the Black Sea had been a Turkish lake and an essential part of the Ottoman imperial system. By controlling it, they could easily monitor the approaches to their Empire from the north. Without supplies by sea, a Russian invasion of the Ottoman Balkans would have been difficult, if not impossible. On the other side of the Black Sea, an advance in the Caucasus along the western side of its mountainous chain would have been even more arduous without naval support. The Black Sea, in other words, was the naval defensive shield of the Ottoman Empire. It restricted the strategic frontier which the Ottomans had to watch over against their greatest European enemy. The only possible alternative
132 line of attack was the Western Balkans – an inhospitable region where the advantages were all on the defenders’ side –, reducing the rival powers to only one, Austria, with which the Ottomans shared a land border. This circumstances also allowed the Ottoman fleet to concentrate in the Eastern Mediterranean, where it could protect the Aegean islands, the approaches to Constantinople and the coasts of Egypt and the Levant with little to fear from the other European naval powers (Great Britain, France, Holland, Spain). Above all, the strategic benefit of the Black Sea control was political: the security it granted to the empire had allowed that decentralization of power in the Ottoman Empire, which represented a vital ingredient of its residual stability and cohesion in the eighteenth century. It was thanks to this protection towards the North that the Ottomans had withstood the reverses of the early eighteenth century, when their prestige as imperial rulers had been weakened, but had not fallen apart, also participating in the Machiavellian game of European diplomacy. But in the 1780s the cornerstone of the Ottoman system failed, and the decline of France, its traditional ally, amplified the consequences of this. A new impatience of the Ottoman rule manifested itself in the Christian communities of Greece and the northern Balkans. The Empire began to change, at first almost imperceptibly, from a great power of recognized (though often ill-tolerated) vigor, to a disputed region and a vast territorial prey around which a host of European competitors were wandering for the spoils. The transformation of the Ottomans into the “sick-man of Europe” was among the main features of the second phase of the geopolitical revolution, occurring after 1790. Before then, the effects of the other great pole of geopolitical turbulence in eighteenth-century Eurasia began to be felt very noticeably. At the beginning of the 1750s, a double revolution had already been underway for some time in India. The old envelope of the Moghul Empire (1526-1857), which had provided an infrastructure of political unity to most of the Subcontinent, had begun to cracks. 1) In the continental heart of the Empire, the Moghul power was assaulted on two fronts. Iranian and Afghan adventurers had continued the old tradition of Inner Asian empire-building by using its human “tribal” resources to impose their own dominion over the northern plains (just as the Mughals themselves had done before them, as well as the Manchus in China). Their goal was probably to control commercial traffic along what remained one of the most important global trade routes, the route between Northern India and Central Asia. But their attacks had coincided with the establishment of the Mahratta Confederation in Western India: a confederation of Hindu noble States tending to expand its power and system of extraction of land rents in the heart of the Mughal system in the northern plains of the Subcontinent. Subjected to the pressures generated by economic and social as well as political changes, the imperial Moghul power was disintegrating or changing into a weaker
133 regime, coexisting with the new regional sub-imperialisms fighting for the territory, the control of trade and the fiscal revenues. Something similar was happening in maritime India. Here the agent of change was the rapid expansion of the commercial economy and transoceanic traffic. Increased wealth and increased tax revenues gave regional potentates subject to imperial sovereignty ever greater freedom from imperial oversight, making them more and more reluctant to pay the tribute due to the Mughals. But this growing autonomy came with a price: the new state-builders had to keep in check the great merchants and bankers who financed their power and to exercise the greatest vigilance over the European interests that had tightened their grip on India’s transoceanic trade. All the more so since the Europeans in turn tended to increasingly make India one of the theaters of their global competition. The need to arm themselves against each other transformed the British and French into local military powers, introducing a further element into the chaotic local political scene. The main theater of these conflicts ended up being Bengal, the most prosperous and the most dynamic of these coastal economies. Here the production of cotton fabrics had developed greatly to meet the growing demand of the world market. The river routes provided by the Ganges and its Delta and the foodstuffs grown in agricultural areas recently removed from the forest were vital supports of this export-oriented economy. Political power was in the hands of the subahdar, that is, the viceroy of Emperor Moghul, and the Muslim magnates who aspired to succeed him in fact, if not formally. In 1756, the new subahdar (or nawab) Siraj ud-Daulah was induced by political rivalries, and above all by the suspicion he had of Hindu bankers and merchants, such as the Jagat Seth, who ran the trades on which his income depended, to adopt an anti-English line. The Hindu trading community had strong ties to European traders, and especially the East India Company, with its fortified factory in Calcutta and its freedom from the Nabob’s control granted by an imperial firman. The Nabob feared that the Company was complicit in a plot against him. In June 1756 he took over Calcutta, and Company officials who were unable to escape were imprisoned15. For a moment it seemed as if this anti-imperial coup d’état marked the emergence of a new South Asian mercantilist state: an Oriental Holland able to survive on its own. But the East India Company had the means to react, as well as its good reasons, because the loss of Calcutta had cost her more than two million pounds. Six months later a naval team arrived in the Ganges carrying troops from Madras under the command of Robert Clive, who quickly reconquered Calcutta and made contact with the dissident magnates who wanted to see the nawab overturned. The military strength and power of the nawab collapsed following the battle of Plassey (in June 1757) that made Clive master of the situation. Clive was reluctant to assert the direct government of the East India Company in Bengal, considering the acquisition of political sovereignty over its territory too vast
15 This was the origin of the myth of Calcutta’s black hole, on which see Partha Chatterjee The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (2012). 134 a task for a commercial company, such as the East India Company, without the assistance of the metropolitan nation. Instead, he started an experiment in what would later be called indirect rule, installing a new Muslim nobleman as the new nawab. But the experiment failed, because the members of the Company, pursuing their private traffics, refused to recognize the authority of the new Nawab and to pay the tributes owed to hum. A new war, fought this time against the Nawab allied with the regional power of the Awadh, ended with the new victory of Clive at Buxar (in 1764). The following year the Company assumed the diwan of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, that is the civil administration and the right to levy taxes. Clive, however, resisted the idea of marching on Delhi, pushing even further the extension of the Company’s political and military power. Furthermore, the beneficiaries of the changes that were taking place were not only the British. In the west and in the center of the subcontinent, the rise of the English was matched by that of the Mahratta confederation, which captured Dehli in 1784. In South India, the formation of two new states, Hyderabad and Mysore, showed that new local indigenous political entities could take advantage of the decline of the empire. In the case of Mysore, a Muslim soldier of fortune, Haidar Ali, began building a new type of fiscal-military State after 1761, with revenues and an army that made him a formidable neighbor for the Company in Madras. Under his son, Tipu Sultan (1783-1799), the State came to practice trade, to subsidize the building of boats, to finance a standing army equipped with artillery and an infantry whose training and combat tactics were equally modern than those of the Company’s army. Mysore remained a thorn in the side of the Company for forty years. And if the Company was able to prevail, it was only thanks 1) to the resources acquired in Bengal, with which it brought the strength of its army from the eighteen thousand men of 1763 to the one hundred and fifty thousand at the end of the century, 2) to the military and naval support of the motherland and 3) to loans from Indian bankers. Indeed, it can be pointed out that the British would have had much greater difficulty in having their conquests recognized by the powerful Mahratta Confederation if they had not emerged triumphant from the second phase of the European conflict. In 1790 the two main theaters of the greater Eurasian political upheaval had begun to integrate more and more. Before returning to deal with Europe around 1790, it is important also to stress that, in the meantime, the revolution initiated in Bengal by Clive was already beginning to act as a lever for another momentous change in the equilibrium in Eurasian relations. Long before the Europeans entered the Indian Ocean, maritime India had served as a cornerstone between the Asian trade and those of the Middle East and the West. In the eighteenth century, Europeans had increased indeed their trade with China, but this had continued to be confined to brief visits to the port of Canton. The East India Company dominated this trade, limiting itself to exchange precious metals
135 (silver bars, the only commodity required by the Chinese) for tea supplies for the growing British domestic demand. It lacked the means to expand this traffic, to finance it more abundantly, to attract Chinese customers with products more appealing to them. The conquest of Bengal solved this economic impasse: with its new stream of revenues, the Company could acquire Indian products that were in great demand in China – raw cotton, textiles, opium – without resorting to silver or increasing exports to India. The Company, nominally a monopolist, also tolerated, for convenience, a growing volume of private trafficking conducted by European soldiers and civilians working under it, who were able to make a fortune through looting or privileged trade (these were nicknamed in England “nabobs”, viewed with hostility at home, especially on the occasion of their return as it was feared that Eastern corruption would be introduced in England through them). These earnings were reinvested in merchant voyages to China. The credit obtained was given to the Company (in the form of tea, the purchase of which the Company held the monopoly) in exchange for sterling credits due in London. Private traffic was also the means by which opium was introduced into China (the Company was prohibited from trading opium). In this way, the conquest of Bengal opened the way for a commercial revolution with gigantic geopolitical consequences, because it entailed an increasing involvement of China in the triangular trade between India and England. The incipient involvement of China was only another aspect of the huge transformation in the relations between the different parts of Eurasia, as well as between Eurasia and the New World, opened up by the geopolitical change we are attempting to trace. In its second phase, which began in 1790, and substantially coincides in chronological terms with the “age of the revolutions”, the full extent of the transformation becomes ever clearer, and the features of a new global order, barely observable in the late Eighteenth century, begin to emerge with greater clarity. But this came only after a second and more gigantic wave of geopolitical change in Europe and a new global war, which decided the issue of which European power would dominate European politics (or better to say, whether any single power would dominate Europe) and what European power would be able to advance along the road to world power. The crisis I’m alluding to is naturally that triggered by the French Revolution. The Bourbon state, on the one hand, experiences a legitimacy crisis from which, towards the end of the eighteenth century, no great dynastic power of the time seems to be immune (including Great Britain itself after the loss of the Thirteen colonies, and Russia, as observed by Catherine herself). It is devoid of popular support, it has alienated its traditional aristocratic and bourgeois allies, its intellectual and cultural prestige is exposed to the attack of Enlightenment criticism and popular satire, etc. However, what makes the crisis so dangerous for the Bourbon regime is the simultaneous collapse of its historical role as guarantor of French greatness in Europe and in the world, albeit in the form that this greatness had assumed after the failure of Louis XIV’s hegemonic designs.
136 The financial crisis exacerbated the loss of internal prestige and international status. In 1778 France had tried to reverse the verdict of the Seven Years’ War by allying itself against the British with the rebel colonies. The costs had been very high, the gains almost negligible. An increase in the public debt ensued. The French public debt was lower than the English one, but more difficult to manage, as well as much more expensive. On the eve of the Revolution, the payment of interest on the debt consumed roughly half of the public spending. In 1789, the collapse of prestige and financial bankruptcy pushed the monarchy to go along with the wave of constitutional change, giving effective political power to the Third Estate and the National Assembly. With the growing of financial chaos and socio-political instability, so grew the threats of intervention by the conservative powers headed by Austria. The fear that the King was conspiring with them to overthrow the constitution he had signed in September 1791 radicalized French politics. In the spring of 1792, France was at war with Austria. Military reverses and fear of invasion destroyed the influence of moderate reformers, leading to the abolition of the monarchy in September 1792 and the execution of the sovereign in January 1793. The pillar of the old European regime, the archetype of the dynastic State had become a militant revolutionary republic, devoted to exporting its subversive doctrine of human rights. The initial result of the French upheavals was to further weaken the French influence in Europe and in the world. In eastern Europe the French weakness made it possible to complete the partition of Poland in 1793-1795. While the Austrian armies attacked France, the Russian armies entered Poland. And the spoils of the victory included Western Ukraine, a vast addition to the Russian Empire on the Black Sea. But around the middle of the 1790s, the French revolutionary State had developed a unprecedented capacity for mobilization, recruiting men and resources for war on a scale that the retrograde monarchies of the Continent could not hope to equal (and producing an imitative effect). The patriotic fervor of its armies of citizens and the recourse to the career open to talent system in the promotion of officers and general, contributed to making France once again a great military power financing itself through territorial conquest. In the Napoleonic and Imperial phase (1799-1804, 1804-1814), the personal dictatorship of a genius and military hero like Bonaparte served in part to restore the social discipline and the administrative order destroyed by the Revolution. But it is clear that Napoleon’s ultimate aim was to restore and expand the European supremacy of France that the Bourbons had lost. The effects of all this had to be felt on a global scale too, that is both in the relations of Europe with the extra-Eurasian world (in the Americas, in Sub-Saharan Africa, even in the Pacific) and in Eurasia (in the Near East, in Central Asia, in India and, through India, in China). The first phase of this renewed global competition was fought about Egypt. In 1798 Napoleon and Talleyrand elaborated an extraordinary plan for the conquest of
137 Egypt. A certain historiographical tradition has Napoleon actually interested in renewing the glories of an oriental-type monarchy, following in the footsteps of his military idol Alexander the Great (he would have said that «Europe is next to nothing; all the great reputations came from Asia»). In any case, the design is related to the geopolitical change that began around the mid-eighteenth century. Control of Egypt would have allowed France to revive the Suez route between Europe and India to its advantage, counterbalancing the weight and dominance of the trade across the Atlantic. An Egyptian empire would compensate France for the loss of the North American colonies lost in 1763. It would help curb Russia’s momentum towards its ultimate goal, the conquest of Constantinople. And it would have made the establishment of British hegemony in India much more difficult and complicated. With France settled on the Red Sea, with its influence radiating in the Persian Gulf and Iran, the diplomatic position of the East India Company would have drastically deteriorated. It would have been much more difficult to intimidate the member states of the incipient Indian state system. (the Mahratta confederation, Hyderabad, Mysore, the Sikhs in Punjab). If its costs and risks had become too high, the experiment of Eastern imperialism initiated by the British could have ended from the start with nothing or far more modest results. Napoleon landed in Egypt in July 1798 with a huge army of 40,000 men and a host of scientists charged with the task of recording the past to plan the future of the country. In the Battle of the Pyramids the power of the Mamluks fell apart. Napoleon presented himself as a liberator of the people from tyranny, promised that he would respect the Islamic religion, even discussed with the ulama a possible mass conversion of his army to Islam (it seems that circumcision proved an insuperable obstacle). He sent friendly messages to Muslim rulers across North Africa as far as Morocco, to the Sultan of Darfur, and to Tipu Sultan in India. In the Persian Gulf, Muscat was suspected by the British of having already fallen under his influence. Napoleon also planned an invasion of Syria, so that France would also control the Levantine coast, as well as the western part of the Fertile Crescent. What ultimate goal Napoleon pursued in Egypt is actually unclear: probably a rebalancing of the geopolitical balance of power in favor of France, such as to induce the Ottomans to resume their traditional place alongside France against Russia and Austria. But a few days after its entry into Cairo, the English fleet led by Nelson destroyed the French at Abukir (1 August 1798), cutting off its supply lines. Egypt was too poor, weak and vulnerable to bear the weight of fiscal-military imperialism alone. The resistance and the revolt of the locals increased. The Ottomans declared war on France. Napoleon’s pro-Islamic diplomacy did not produce the desired effects. At the time of Napoleon’s secret departure for France in August 1799, Tipu Sultan had been defeated and killed (May 1799). The French army held out for some time, without help from the motherland. In June 1801 Cairo was captured by troops sent from Great Britain and India. Napoleon’s oriental design had failed. The end of Napoleon’s hope of challenging the British at sea came with the Battle of Trafalgar, in October 1805, in which Nelson dealt a decisive blow to the French and Spanish fleets. Napoleon had already abandoned the American continent, with
138 the sale of the Louisiana (recovered from Spain in 1800) to the USA. Haiti, the richest colony in France, had been conquered by a revolt of self-liberated slaves in 1804. The absolute dominance of the seas at this point allowed the British to erect a barrier around their Asian empire. They captured the Cape, in South Africa, in 1806, Mauritius in 1810. The Indian Ocean thus became a British lake. In 1811 they also captured the Indonesian Empire of Holland, which had become a client of Napoleon. Napoleon may have dreamed of renewing a French-dominated alliance including Ottomans and Iranians, in part to neutralize Russia in Europe. But his main objective remained hegemony in Europe, which he seemed close to achieving with the triumph of Austerlitz over the Austrians and Prussians in the same month of Trafalgar (October 1805). Napoleon declared the Holy Roman Empire dead (1806) and established in its place a Germanic Confederation subordinated to France, resurrected Poland as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and with the 1807 Peace of Tilsit he befriended the old Russian enemy. At this point, with Europe apparently at his feet, Napoleon turned his attention back to England with the Continental Block (Berlin, 1806, Milan, 1807), which closed the entire continent to the traffic with Great Britain, as if to want to oppose the British thalassocracy with a complete exclusion of maritime power from a secluded land sphere. If it had been successful, it could have rebalanced the balance of the global confrontation, which after the expedition from Egypt hung on the side of England. But a) probably the measure came when it was already too late; b) the measure was largely ineffective; c) the measure guaranteed that Europeans did not accept the Napoleonic version of the Empire, as well as making its costs exorbitant, because it required the emperor to effectively conquer and occupy the entire European territory. Despite the charismatic appeal exercised by his name on all opponents of the ancient regime, the Napoleonic Empire was too burdensome for other Europeans. For Russia, in particular. Russia rejected the imposition of the yoke represented by the continental system. It also required a promise from Napoleon that the Poles would not regain an independent kingdom. In 1812 Napoleon had therefore come to the conclusion that only the conquest of Russia would stabilize his continental hegemony. The defeat in Russia, the defeat of the Grand Army in the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig in October 1813, the invasion of French territory from Spain by the British as well as from the East, brought about the collapse of his imperialism, preparing the ground for the settlement of Vienna. What is the significance of the Congress of Vienna in terms of global history? The peacemakers knew well that a quarter of a century of wars and revolution made a return to the status quo ante unthinkable. They were therefore concerned with creating a territorial arrangement that would maintain a balance between the five Great Powers, so as to ensure that no one could dominate the other. They invented the Concert of Europe, aimed at managing differences in order to maintain the balance without a new general war or too virulent conflicts. From this point of view, the work they carried out had to prove lasting, because Europe would have avoided
139 a new general war for another century. Partly as a result of this, Vienna ensured the conditions under which the two great “lateral” powers of the system, Great Britain and Russia, could be left free to pursue their extra-European ambitions, unless they compromised European peace. Vienna paved the way for the encirclement of Asia both from the South and the North. The defeat of Napoleon’s imperial project marked the culmination of the great geopolitical change that he was unable, in either of the two ways attempted, to alter. Free from the threat posed by him, Great Britain quickly became the master of the Indian Subcontinent. The commercial penetration of the Chinese world underwent an increase. Although they returned the Indonesian empire to Holland, the British retained Singapore, making it the emporium of much of the trade in Southeast Asia. In the West, the naval disaster suffered by Spain in 1805 cost it control of the Latin American empire, whose trade opened up, especially to the British economy. The cumulative effect of Napoleon’s failure and British success led to the annihilation of what remained of the old mercantilist system. The old trading empires, with their fleets, their fortresses, their privileged companies, had been rendered obsolete by the oceanic thalassocracy of England. The East India Company itself was forced in 1813 to give up the monopoly of trade with India, which was opened to merchants who were not associated with it (while it kept it with respect to China until 1833). The main brake on the expansion of trade – the high costs represented by the maintenance of rival merchant empires – had disappeared. How would the new opportunities, opened up as a result, be exploited by private interests under a free trade regime during the next phase of the expansion of Europe?
140 3
Expansion, Crisis and Renewal:
the British Empire after the First World War
in the Perspective of Global History16
The categories of Global History can be profitably used to understand not only the rise and the logic of operation, but also the decline of European global imperialism during the twentieth century, and in particular the situation which arose after the First World War within the largest among them, the British Empire. To adequately account for the impact of the conflict of 1914-1918 and the events of the first postwar period on the «British world system», it is essential to adopt an approach that does not focus too exclusively on the «permanence» of the British Empire in comparison with the catastrophes that befall its continental counterparts (with the partial exception of Russia, where a Soviet Empire will rise from the ashes of the Tsarist empire), nor on the signs of «decline», preluding to decolonization, which it would begin to show from now on. Instead, it is necessary to go beyond the opposite stereotypes – the exceptionalist stereotype and the declinist stereotype – and dilute the due emphasis on the «permanence» or «survival» of the Empire in an analysis that does not neglect, on one hand, the risks of «dissolution», to which even the victorious British Empire was soon exposed (in the opinion, for example, of Sir Henry Wilson, who in 1921 gave a lecture entitled The Passing of the British Empire, made particularly significant by the fact that the lecturer was the British Imperial Chief of Staff himself). On the other hand, the resilience and ability of the Empire to recover and
16 Based on a paper delivered at the Roundtable 1919: Dissoluzione, permanenza, rinascita. Gli Imperi alla fine della Prima guerra mondiale, held at the University of Naples, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici on October 23, 2019. 141 creatively adapt to the changed historical-universal context revealed by the post- war crisis, so as to inspire other contemporaries with a strong confidence in its perpetuity17, should not be neglected either To summarize its main outlines, the imperial history of these years is the story of how a multinational, multicultural, transcontinental and transoceanic polity, which had seemed to emerge from the terrible ordeal of the Great War not only «unharmed», but launched into a new phase of its centuries-old global career by virtue of favorable circumstances determined by the War itself, abruptly finds itself having to face, between 1919 and 1922, a «General Crisis» on a Eurasian scale that threatens to overthrow it (at least in the eyes of many and very authoritative contemporaries such as the aforementioned Wilson and Winston Churchill himself), but that the Empire proves to be able to overcome, if not «reborn» (as in the case in some respects analogous of Soviet Union rising from the ashes of Tsarist Russia), so transformed, with respect to the configuration it had assumed during the long nineteenth century, that it could be described as a «Third British Empire», based on the recognition of an original version of the nationality principle (again as in the case of the Soviet Union. –
Of course, the three components that can be identified within the narrative of the post-war imperial history – 1) «Permanence» and renewed expansion; 2) «Decline», «crisis» and risk of «dissolution»; 3) survival, recovery and relaunch through an unprecedented combination of self-reform and (never to be forgotten) repression of the most extreme separatist forces – should not to be seen as moments in a sequence of chronological phases clearly distinguishable from each other, but as concomitant aspects or themes of a plot, to unravel which we have to focus on the annus mirabilis 1919.
17 By way of example I will quote as a document of this second attitude a course on the history of the British Empire held in 1927 by a young professor at the University of Toronto, Lester Pearson (a future Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1957 for his role in resolving the Suez Crisis and Liberal Prime Minister of Canada in the 1960s), who declares himself completely «confident» that, in 2027, a successor of his would entertain students, from the same chair, on The Successful Solution of Britain's Imperial Problems in the Twentieth Century. 142 First of all, it should be remembered that 1919 marks the «apogee» of a new season of massive expansion of the territory and area of influence of the British Empire (comparable in some ways to the «first epoch of global imperialism» that C.A. Bayly and other historians place between 1760 and 1830, or rather to its central episode – the fight to the death between Great Britain and Revolutionary and Napoleonic France). In geopolitical and geostrategic terms, what distinguished this renewed effort at expansion was the deliberate attempt (conceived by top sectors of the metropolitan establishment) to build «a Middle Eastern empire» which should extend from Asia Minor and Egypt to Afghanistan and Trans-Caspia (up to the limits of Chinese Sinkiang), passing through Trans-Caucasia and Iran, by means of a plurality of formal or informal imperial domination techniques: protectorate, direct colonial control even if dressed in the newest guise of «mandate» of the League of Nations, client states, recourse to proxies such as Greece in Anatolia. The creators of this very ambitious empire-building project – among whom stands out the figure of Lord Curzon (a former viceroy of India, member of the war cabinet and, since October 1919, the foreign minister in the government chaired by the liberal Lloyd George) pursue the ultimate goal of providing «a definitive guarantee» to the «external security» of British India, which, in turn (as we will see in a moment), is called upon to play a crucial role in their plans, because they still count on being able to draw from India the military resources – the Indian army – necessary to implement it (a circumstance – this latter – to be kept very well in mind, by virtue of the decisive consequences that we will see deriving from it). The relatively brief expansionist phase that reaches its peak in 1919 has been described by some historians (among whom J. Gallagher himself) as an exemplary case of «war imperialism» – an imperialism, that is, supported by the temporary enlargement of the «sinews» of the imperial state as a function of a prolonged global
143 military effort which is carried out in the context of an international struggle without quarter18. And it appears in fact a product of war in at least three senses. In the first place, the formation in the dramatic summer of 1916 – the summer of the Battle of the Somme – of a Cabinet committed to victory at any cost, such as the Cabined presided by Lloyd George (who was then confirmed in office until 1922 as head of the coalition government with a conservative majority that emerged victorious in the «khaki election» of December 1918) brings back to the command posts figures of assertive imperialists and classic expansionists such as the aforementioned Lord Curzon or Lord Milner (who had been among the main responsible for the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899), who were obviously inclined to exploit for imperial purposes the geopolitical opportunities opened up by the course of the conflict in its final stages. Secondly, it was the total mobilization and the war economy that made available, politically as well as materially, the forces employed by the British in the East, first, in an attempt to provoke the collapse and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, then, after the peace of Brest-Litovsk, to stop the advance of the Germans in southern Russia and of the Ottomans between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, finally, in the immediate postwar period, to try to impose «imperial solutions» to the problems of reorganization of the area left open by the failing of so many competing powers19. Thirdly, the imperialist programs and initiatives of the British in the «Greater Middle East» between the Eastern Mediterranean and India and China must be related to a mixture of anxieties and opportunities generated by the very rapid succession of revolutionary geopolitical conjunctures provoked by the war, such as the collapse of Russia and the elimination of Germany and the Ottoman Empire from the playing field. The plans and measures for a «British controlled Middle East»,
18 In this lies its affinity both with the formation of the «second British Empire» between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and with similar phenomena and dynamics observable during the Second World War. 19 For some time, the only power able to stand up to England seems to be, somewhat paradoxically, the ally France. 144 which were so apt at introducing an element of radicalization in British foreign policy (particularly evident, for example, in the case of the support given to the landing of the Greeks in Smyrna in May 1919), originally had a defensive purpose. As a matter of fact, they were adopted, with the aim of containing the probable advent of a «continental hegemon», in the spring of 1918, that is, after and following the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, when for a moment it seemed on the verge of materializing (as will happen again in 1941-1942) the geostrategic nightmare, prophesied by Halford Mackinder, of a Germany able to control the Eurasian «Heartland» through Central and Eastern Europe and Ukraine and to threaten from here, in its «assault to world power», not only India but the entire «southern British world». Once this threat faded, the expansionists cultivated the illusion that Britain itself could, in that area, take advantage of the disintegration of the Russian imperial space, evidently regarding it as a consequence of the war that was anything but transient (as it would have revealed very soon). Already in the same 1919, on the other hand, the symptoms of a halt in the new expansionist trend began to appear and multiply, due to the convergence and the peculiar interaction of three factors:
1) the end of the consensus, or at least of the acquiescence that metropolitan society had guaranteed to the «war imperialism»; 2) the mobilization of nationalisms from Ireland to China and the increased political dynamism of colonial subjects in general, in a climate of growing contestation of the nineteenth-century ideology of the civilizing mission, that also actively involved sectors of Western public opinion, and not only the extra-European intelligentsia; 3) the new change in the international scenario produced by the incipient re-entry of Communist Russia. The convocation of the independence parliament in Dublin in January 1919 can be regarded as a kind of domestic prologue to an extraordinary succession of interconnected crises, which continues with the Egyptian uprising and the Punjab riots in March and April, the May 4th Movement in China and the agitation of the Muslims of India in defense of the Ottoman Caliphate, with the Iraqi revolt of the 145 summer of 1920 and the clashes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine in the following year, for culminating in the Gandhian campaign of non-cooperation of 1921-22, sometimes resulting in veritable «disasters» such as the debacle of the anti-Turkish policy pursued by Lloyd George in Anatolia in 1922. Almost simultaneously, since the mid-1920s, the British find themselves having to deal in various ways with international Bolshevik pressure in Trans-Caucasia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. However, if this set of unfavorable circumstances that the expansionists had not been able to calculate had the power to induce the British to downsize (without ever completely abandoning) their aims on the Middle East, to withdraw from positions that were no longer tenable and to relieve themselves of the commitments undertaken in the recent expansionist phase, to significantly review their methods of imperial and colonial control in Eurasia, the primary reason for all this is to be found in the acute problem of relative oversizing which the Empire suffered as a consequence not so much (this has to be strongly stressed) of the strength or threateningness of its non-European and international opponents (which, at this stage, should not be exaggerated beyond a certain degree), as of the epochal reconfiguration of the relationship between metropolis and colonial dependencies that revealed itself in the aftermath of the Great War. To grasp the meaning of this great change, which affects not only the logic, the structure and the overall geo-historical habitat, so to speak, of the British colonial system, but the position of Europe and the West in the world in general, we must briefly recall that during the «long nineteenth century», the «imperial century» par excellence, British global imperialism had been able to count on the actual realization of a double set of conditions of possibility. The 18th-19-century expansion depended, on one side, on the conditions of the non-European territories subject to the formal or informal rule of the British and on the corresponding methods of exercising colonial control, on another side, on the readiness on the part of the metropolitan society to assume the burdens and bear the costs, both political and material of imperialism. 146 The British for example, as we have seen, had been able to conquer India with a mainly locally recruited army and to use it as an essential prop of their «world system» from the Mediterranean to China. But this could happen only because the Indian army had been the instrument of a «military imperialism» that was «acceptable», if not exactly «attractive» to metropolitan society, in that it financed itself at India’s own expenses (rather than by drawing on the pockets of the British taxpayer) and with the help, we must add now, of a light, non-intrusive, low-cost administrative system, based on the «collaboration» of indigenous elites whose cooperation the nineteenth-century Raj had been able to bargain from a position of senior partner and at a price, political and economic, which was, after all, very limited. What makes the difficulties of post-war imperialism particularly significant, in my view, is that they testify precisely to the simultaneous ending, on both sides of the global interaction between the metropolitan center and the colonial peripheries, of the favorable conditions of which the extent and functioning of the British world system had benefited during the «imperial century». Bringing into focus the very different constellation of historical forces that in 1919 was taking over their places is extremely important not so much in order to explain the failure of Lord Curzon’s Middle Eastern dream (an episodic «extravaganza» that was undoubtedly linked to very particular and volatile circumstances and condemned from the start, in a sense, by its own Napoleonic titanism), or from the retrospective, and dangerously teleological point of view, of an investigation into the remote roots of post-1945 decolonization, as in order to understand what new challenges the persistent imperial ambitions of the British (which certainly do not end with the rapid setting aside of the original version of the Middle Eastern program) had to face, and what new policies they therefore put in place in an attempt to respond to these challenges. First of all, it should be noted that, in the post-war period, the overall contraction of the metropolitan economy, the weakening of the financial power of Great Britain, the appearance on the national territory of large pockets of structural 147 unemployment, as well as the rise of the Labour Party, forced the Conservatives themselves, pressured at the same time by a Right which was clamouring for a reduction in taxes, to review their traditional minimalist approach to welfare policies. This contributed, together with a unanimous movement of weariness and refusal of war, to bring the issues of internal «reconstruction» back to the center of the public arena and to put (probably for the first time in the history of the Empire) the military and imperial expenses, which had soared, as said, in the heat of the world conflict, in real competition with social spending. Therefore, the post-war demobilization prolonged itself, so to speak, in an inter- party convergence around an option for disarmament, which also appears inspired by the almost generalized belief that peace, or the prevention of a new clash with one or more Great Powers, had become Britain's supreme national interest, not least because another war would have now jeopardized the very survival of the imperial system. Suffice it to recall that between the financial year 1919-20 and the financial year 1922-23 the expenses for the army went from 395 to 45 million pounds, that is, decreased at a rate of about 50% per year; and this by virtue of decisions taken not by anti-imperialist Radicals, but by governments which were Conservative or dominated by a large Conservative majority. «Our small army», the aforementioned Chief of the Imperial Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, complained already in May 1920, «is too scattered (…). There is not a single theater in which we have sufficient forces, not in Ireland, not in England, not on the Rhine, not in Constantinople, not in Batum (in Georgia, N.d.R.), not in Egypt, not in Palestine, not in Mesopotamia, not in Persia, not in India».
It is true that, in the calculations of the architects of the prospective «Middle Eastern Empire», as I pointed out earlier, the Indian Raj and its finances should have provided for the notorious inelasticity of the military resources available in the Motherland, in line with the nineteenth-century practice that had made India the barracks and the Indian army the «ram’s head» of the Empire in Eurasia. During the First World War the contribution of the Asian subcontinent to the British effort, 148 especially in the East, had in fact been very conspicuous. And in 1920 the Indian army, in addition to being used to protect India’s internal security, saw its contingents deployed in Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Southern Russia, Northern China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Aden, Ceylon and the Persian Gulf. And yet, in the pan-imperial crisis of 1919-1922, it is precisely this key postulate of the “grand strategy” of the British Empire that reveals itself non-existent, or no longer existing in the same terms as in the past. To understand the reason of this crucial development we must now turn our attention to the great changes taking place on the political scene of colonial societies. In the Indian case, the novelty that must attract our attention is not represented only by the intensity and capacity for mass mobilization of the radical agitation personified in Gandhi's charismatic leadership, which, after a peak reached in 1921- 22, tended to deflate, only to regain momentum towards the end of the decade. Equally remarkable, although less conspicuous and I would say almost unknown to our general historical culture, is the strong increase in the contractual strength of moderate and constitutionalist nationalism, i.e. of the currents of the national movement willing to remain within the channel of the diarchic regime established by the Government of India Act of December 1919 with a view to India’s gradual advancement in the direction of responsible self-government. This important reform measure, adopted by the London Parliament in fulfillment of an official commitment undertaken by the Secretary of State for India Montagu during the war (in August 1917), while retaining the essential levers of central power in British hands, granted to the Indians a larger share of participation in the government of the provinces, as well as a majority in the Legislative Assembly of
Delhi (a nominated consultative body), with the aim of containing the process of politicization of Indian civil society at the local level, slowing down its nationalization as much as possible and preventing as much as possible the risks of its radicalization. On closer inspection, the Government of India Act of 1919 was in continuity with a trend, already manifested by the British imperial authorities in the pre-war years, 149 to limit or discipline the effects of their growing interventionism in the life of colonial subjects by widening the spaces of political viability opened to the Indian notable elites. It is only too evident that, if the new diarchic system was to work, there was a need for a genuine, substantial transfer of resources from the center to the provinces. And in India as well as in Britain, this could not fail to have repercussions on military spending, which in 1920 absorbed over 40% of the annual budget of the government of India, as well as on the choices regarding their final destination. Already in 1921 the Indian Legislative Assembly passed a resolution, adopted in 1923 by the London Cabinet itself, according to which Indian troops should not normally have been deployed outside the borders of the Raj, while the cost of any their external employment would have to be borne either by the colony that would benefit from them or by the British government. When in 1938-39, faced with the worsening of international tensions and on the eve of a last «revival» of «war imperialism», London returned to focus on the Indian army, finally putting its hand to its necessary modernization, it was precisely the British taxpayer (probably for the first time since the mid-18th century onwards) that had to pay the bill.
We can conclude therefore that, in the aftermath of the Great War, old-fashioned colonialism found itself caught between the rigid conditioning imposed on it by the changed metropolitan economic and political context, the nationalist challenge and the revolt against Western hegemony, the deterioration of the terms of its «collaboration» with the indigenous elites deriving, ultimately, from the unstoppable and exponential growth of «colonial governance». Old-fashioned colonialism thus began to be clearly perceived by the imperialists themselves as «dysfunctional» with respect to the aims it had traditionally been called upon to fulfill within the larger «British world system» - that is, to place at its disposal a very cheap political and institutional instrumentation when any other means of a more «informal» nature proved unsuitable or insufficient for imperial control. In an attempt to cope with the multiple crises that had occurred since the beginning of 1919 onwards, the British were therefore induced by the pressure of 150 things to experiment, as an alternative to the «obsolescent» and ineffective practices of «formal colonial rule», a range of new solutions, which seemed to gain (at least immediately and with the important exception of Palestine) a certain degree of success and justify, on the part of some contemporaries, more confident, optimistic expectations in the future of the Empire (see above, note …). It seems to me that the recipes of various kinds applied by the British to the different crises of imperial control that I have listed before were all inspired, upon careful analysis, by a same, sensibly innovative guiding idea. What they had in common was the belief that Great Britain was still able to safeguard and promote its interests and its status as a great global power by adopting what I would define a flexible strategy, to be modulated case by case, of “appeasement” towards those secular, moderate, “transigent” nationalisms, which showed themselves willing to pragmatically come to terms with the West. It is a formula that is well suited to a plurality of compromise solutions attempted by Great Britain to quell post-war conflicts such as the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 (which gave life to an Irish Free State still nominally subject to the British Crown); the creation, that same year, within the framework of the Mesopotamian Mandate, of a British-administered Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, which became independent as early as 1932; the abolition of the Egyptian protectorate and the unilateral (on the part of the British) declaration of the independence of Egypt in February 1922; the signing of the second Washington treaty of 6 February 1922, which committed the signatories to respect the sovereignty, independence and integrity of China, and was followed, in 1926, by the British adoption of a bi-partisan policy of revision of the “unequal treaties” (imposed on China since the first opium war and the 1842
Treaty of Nanking); the peace with the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the progressive investiture of another “strong man”, Reza Khan Palhavi, from 1922 onwards, of the role of guarantor of imperial interests in Persia (like Mustafa Kemal, Reza Palhavi is apologetically represented by the British propaganda of the twenties emanating, for example, from the Royal Institute of International Affairs, as a
151 vigorous modernizing and westernizing nation-builder in the tradition of the Czar Peter the Great20). Let’s not forget, moreover, that the recognition to the former white colonies, in 1925, of the «status of Dominion»21, despite being the result of a much more gradual and longer process, which had entered its final phase already at the Paris Peace Conference (where four of the future Dominions had been assigned a separate seat in the League of Nations, as indeed British India), was also placed on the political agenda by one of the many «Oriental crises» of the four-year period 1919-1922, the Chanakkale crisis of September 1922 (when, after the defeat of the Greeks, Great Britain seemed point of entering into open war with the Kemalist troops), which pushed Canada to declare that it wouldn’t have regarded itself automatically involved in a possible conflict between the United Kingdom and Turkey, thus raising the problem of a more precise definition and formalization of the constitutional relations between the Dominions and their ancient Motherland. It must be added that the transition to what can only be defined as a first approximation a «strategy» of compromise with various kinds of nationalism – metropolitan (in the case of Ireland), colonial, post-colonial and extra-European in general – actually proceeded, especially at the beginning, on a piecemeal, pragmatic, case by case basis, amid the many dissensions of a part of the governing class and the establishment that saw in it, and denounced in it, an attitude of renunciation heralding the abandonment of the Empire22. It was only after the fall of the second Lloyd George cabinet on the Turkish question in October 1922 that the new policy could benefit from the bi-partisan convergence of the large majority of the Conservative Party and the large majority of the Labor Party (in power for the first time in 1924 and then again between
20 The same special treatment will be accorded by Westerners to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before his fall from grace in 1990-91. 21 That is, a form of national independence substantially differing from the American Independence, because it was qualified by the ex colonies’ permanence within the British Commonwealth of Nations and aimed at preserving the integrity of the Empire. 22 This was the purpose of the lecture by Wilson I quoted at the beginning. 152 1929 and 1931), could rise almost to the rank of official line of the Empire and could be systematized in a doctrine of the «Third British Empire», which described the Empire, according to the principle of «progressive self-government», as «a wide variety of communities located at a multiplicity of stages along the road to complete self-government».
153 4
World War Two in the Mediterranean
in the Perspective of Global History*
It seems to me that we should be sincerely grateful to Marco Aterrano and our colleagues from abroad who accepted his invitation to Naples for the organization of this scholarly meeting on World War Two in the Mediterranean in a Global Perspective. The today’s workshop has focused on a topic of obvious importance for any contemporary history scholar and university teacher, especially if Italian and working here in Naples, and not only for the distinguished specialists involved. But the title of the workshop alluded to an even more far-reaching methodological question: what exactly does it mean to study the Second World War, or a particularly relevant aspect of it, or any relevant theme of contemporary history for that matter, in a global perspective? This is a question of urgent concern, by the way, to the doctoral students of our newborn Doctorate in Global History and Governance who are among the audience and are pondering just now on their research project; and this is a question – I feel compelled to add – which is not always really addressed, or satisfactorily addressed, in the growing mass of articles and volumes purporting in their title to adopt a “global” approach to their subject-matter.
* Based on my contribution to the concluding Roundtable of the International Workshop World War Two in the Mediterranean: A Global Perspective, held at the University of Naples Federico II, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, on November 19, 2018. The papers referred to in the text were Andrew Buchanan, The Lilliputian Bathtub: the Mediterranean in its Global Dimension during World War II, Richard Hammond, The Sea, Shipping, and British Wartime Strategy: Mediterranean Opportunities versus Global Vulnerabilities, Pablo Del Hierro, A Global Metropolis: Tangiers during the Second World War.
154 I definitely agree with Sebastian Conrad’s contention, which has been quoted today by Pablo Del Hierro, that the notion of global history doesn’t implies worldwide coverage. In my view, the adoption of a global perspective in historiographic analysis implies the attempt to contextualize the historical phenomena in space and time by the critical use of geo-historical categories specifically suitable to highlight the trans-regional and cross-cultural dimensions of the interactions among human beings. I don’t know if the today’s speakers would subscribe to this minimal definition. But what really counts is that none of them failed to address, not in abstract but in very concrete historiographical terms, the methodological question I referred to before. So that their able papers provide us with a series of thought-provoking exemplifications of possible global approaches to the Mediterranean War which seem to me both richly diversified and complementing each other. For Andrew Buchanan, the global significance of the Mediterranean War and its aftermath fully emerges when we locate its events within a hemispheric geopolitical frame of reference and comparison. The «global context» evoked by Buchanan is structured around the distinction between a Eurasian heartland and a couple of
Mediterranean sea-worlds suitable, more or less, to project triphibiuos military power into corresponding portions of the continental land mass. Buchanan explicitly borrows his geo-historical categories from Nicholas Spykman, who reversed Halford Mackinder’s thesis that the control of the Inner Eurasian Pivot area was the precondition to control the Eurasian «marginal crescent» and thence the Outer World. Just like in the analogous case of the Japanese attempt at empire-building in the
Pacific Mediterranean – Buchanan has argued today –, what prepared the ground for the successful transformation of the Mediterranean proper in a much more solid basis for the prospective American ascendancy in Western Europe was the
155 «regional» clash between Mussolini’s «proletarian imperialism» and the oversized and overstretched British «global empire»23. In his today’s presentation, Buchanan has shown himself chiefly interested to underline this last crucial and neglected (to my knowledge) historical connection between the original inter-imperial conflict in the Mare Nostrum and the future, only partially successful US bid for global hegemony. Therefore, his sequential narrative directly passes from summer 1942, when Italy with German help appeared to be on the verge of a complete success, to the change in the military balance of power due to US actual military intervention in the Mediterranean after November of that year, leaving out of the picture (or keeping tacitly in the background) the British role in the resistance to and the defeat of the Axis. Richard Hammond, on his part, has stressed the positive contribution made by the British aereo-naval forces to the Allied victory (with the help, to be sure, from a certain point onwards, of the Americans) on this particular theatre of operation, in contrast with the general vulnerability of a British world system which was strongly dependent on global maritime communications. But I am sure that Andrew Buchanan will agree that, in order to obtain a fuller account of the global implications of the Mediterranean War, it is necessary to give due weight (among many other things) to the multiple imperial and colonial dimensions of the British response to the Fascist «regional challenge».
23 It is perhaps worth remembering that a Eurasian geo-historical frame of reference has been adopted some years ago by John Darwin for his history of the world from the fifteenth century to two thousand centered on the rise and fall of the global empires (I refer to After Tamerlane, published in 2007). According to Darwin, «the centre of gravity in modern world history lies in Eurasia – in the troubled, conflicted, connected and intimate relations of its great cultures and states, strung out in a line from the European “Far West” and the Asian “Far East”». Darwin’s approach, however, is heavily indebted to the Mackinder’s geopolitical model. All the same, Darwin and Buchanan do not substantially differ in their conclusions, because they follow their geopolitical mentors only up to a certain point. Darwin devoted the last pages of his book to the «resilience» revealed by non-European Eurasian societies and cultures to the «impact of the West» until today, their continuing «resistance» to the hegemony of «a single great ruler». Buchanan has underlined today that the US world hegemony was undermined from the start by Spykmans’s Pacific Mediterranean failure to provide the Americans with an adequate basis for their projection into Eastern Eurasia.
156 This response, on the other part, cannot be interpreted only in terms of reaction to the Italian threat. It reflected also a long-standing and deep-seated geopolitical anxiety of the much more Mackinder-minded British élite about the fate of Eastern Europe and the Pivot area, providing therefore a significant link between the struggle in the Mediterranean and the struggle in Western Eurasia. As remarked by John Darwin, plans for a «British controlled Middle East» called to contain «a continental hegemon» and introducing «a radical new element in British foreign policy» were firstly made in 1918 after Brest Litovsk. And Mackinder’s geostrategic nightmare of a Germany controlling the Eurasian «heartland» through Central Eastern Europe seemed on the verge of materializing again after June 1941. The very geo-historical configuration of the British imperial system made certain that the war effort, in all its manifold aspects, should affect (and should be affected by) a wide range of patterns of transregional and cross-cultural interactions, quite beyond the more obvious interdependence among the different war theatres. On these themes much good research work has been done in recent years, in particular by Ashley Jackson. The commitment to the defense at all costs of the Middle East – to give only a few very well known examples – favoured the logistic, military and economic consolidation of a Greater Middle East stretching from India to the Mediterranean. The demands of the colonial or para-colonial war economies stimulated processes of economic growth, industrialization and urbanization which paved the way for the transfer of the leadership of the anti-colonial nationalist movements from the old moderate upper-class circles (represented for example by the Wafd in Egypt) to a new generation of more radical nationalists represented for example by Nasser and the Ba’ath parties in Siria e Iraq. The competition between the war enemies for the support of the colonial and semicolonial subjects increased the bargaining power of the subject and contributed in its turn to alter the conditions of the imperial control. Colonial ideology underwent therefore a profound reformulation that was also dictated by the radicalization of the metropolitan public opinion and the pressures of the American ally. 157 The mobilization of the colonial resources and manpower for military and civilian purposes had transformative effects on a variety of distant peoples and territories both in loco and through the mediation of the personnel who had moved to the various fronts and workplaces. Like in Europe, the recruitment of women for such mansions as hospital nurses affected gender relations and identities in the Muslim world too, and so on. Pablo Del Hierro has – very opportunely and fascinatingly too – reminded us how the increased and modified interconnectivity promoted by the War could generate (or reinvent, in the case of Tangier) its own kaleidoscopic sites of territorialization, place where its representatives bodily mixed, met or collided and gave their imprint to the human landscape. These globalized and globalizing sites – like the military basis, the missionary station or the colonial workplaces of the imperial era – exemplify a further kind of geo-historical space (besides the geopolitical and the imperial ones) which can be fruitfully investigate in order both to decode the global significance of the Second World War and to probe its global impact at a deeper anthropological level. As Pablo mentioned Naples in his list of «global metropoles» comparable to
Tangier, I cannot find a better way to end my intervention than express the hope that a similar global perspective should be employed also in the study of the history of our city after the Liberation, when Naples entered a new epoch of its very ancient history of trans-regional and cross-cultural encounters.
158 Part Three
Old Global Pasts
159 1
Legitimizing Imperial Authority:
Greater Britain and India in the Global Historical Vision
of John R. Seeley*
From the final decades of the nineteenth century, when British historiography entered the critical stage of the professionalization process, until the Second World War, historians played a prominent role in the production of colonial discourse, availing themselves of the channels offered by pressure-group propaganda, civil society agencies, governmental initiatives, as well as by academic institutions24. Some recent works, dealing with the impact of late Victorian historicism on imperial thought or the involvement of historians in the making of the Commonwealth, suggest that current debates about how the British saw their Empire would benefit considerably from looking more closely into the works of such scholars as Seeley, Holland, Curtis, Toynbee, Zimmern, Coupland, Keith, and into the historiographical dimension of their contribution to the imperial ideology25.
* Paper presented at the International Workshop “The Production of Colonial Historiography”, organized by the Internationales Graduiertenkolleg “Politische Kommunikation von der Antike bis in das 20. Jahrhundert” and the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, October 4th and 5th, 2010. Published in «Storia della Storiografia», 2012, pp. 75-91. 24 D. S. Goldstein, “The Professionalization of History in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century”, Storia della Storiografia, 3 (1983): 3-25; D. S. Goldstein, “History at Oxford and Cambridge: Professionalization and the Influence of Ranke”, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. G. G Iggers and J. M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 141-153; R. N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: the University, History and the Making of an English Elite, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); I. Hesketh, “Diagnosing Froude’s Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain”, History and Theory, 47 (2008): 373-395. 25 D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain. Empire and the Future World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); W. D. McIntyre, The Britannic Vision. Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-1948 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009); T. Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination. Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2011). 160 Historians’ specialized skills found scope for application in many fields of imperial activity. But their ways of describing the Empire deserve attentive scrutiny, chiefly because they provide insights into the core of its legitimating rhetoric. The obvious affinities between the imperial idea and British historiography seem to be ultimately traceable to the consonance between the system of myths, beliefs, sentiments evoked by the imperial authority when trying to persuade the varied mass of the subjects about its right to make decisions for all of them, and an exalted notion of the historian’s task, which was widely subscribed to among the profession. Imperial rhetoricians were wont to justify colonial rule in terms of a historical teleology that translated traditional Christian providentialism into an idiom more congenial to a cultural atmosphere of increasing secularization and scientificization. At the same time, confidence in the possibility of accomplishing the intellectual programme pursued by theology and philosophy of history through the more promising methods of modern research persisted in some areas of British historical culture well into the twentieth century26. The historians who took charge of the legitimation needs of the Empire believed themselves to be performing the supreme duty – at once scientific, civic, and religious – that was incumbent on their discipline and entitled it to the spiritual leadership of the nation. The purpose of this paper is to sketch, on the basis of a series of studies I have been conducting over the past decade, a hypothesis about the connection between the historiographical representations of the Empire and the rhetoric of liberal imperialism. I will then concentrate on the example of Seeley, in an attempt to provide a synoptical account of his imperial vision and intellectual system. For a
26 T. Tagliaferri, Storia ecumenica. Materiali per lo studio dell’opera di Toynbee (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002), 83-93; T. Tagliaferri, “La Rivoluzione francese nella Storia universale del mondo moderno: Lord Acton e il progetto della prima Cambridge History”, Archivio di storia della cultura, 16 (2005): 119-141; “Storia e profezia politica nella visione imperiale di J. R. Seeley”, Ricerche di storia politica, 10 (2007): 301-326; T. Tagliaferri, Comunità e libertà nell’epoca dell’industria. Storia, politica, religione nel pensiero di A. Toynbee (1852-1883) (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008), 1-20. 161 fuller treatment of the several interpretative issues involved, I must refer the reader to my essays on Seeley mentioned in the footnotes27.
1. Elements of Continuity in the Liberal Imperialist Tradition
The generalizations formulated in the last years about the metropolitan images of the Empire, while deserving credit for having pointed out the pervasiveness of derogatory attitudes such as racialism, orientalism, ornamentalism, fail to take into account the constraints under which its official or semi-official spokesmen had to operate28. The inherent complexity of the legitimation problem confronting the British imperial system made most ‘representations’ and ‘discourses’ related to it of dubious usefulness for people whose job was to argue the Empire’s claims to legitimacy in such a manner as to help colonial authority maintain the obedience of both citizens and colonized, mobilize their support, avoid disruptive conflicts. As far as the peripheries were concerned, the Empire came increasingly to depend on a multiplicity of forms of collaboration with both non-European and white colonial populations, which rendered governing it a multicultural affair. The acute awareness of the precariousness of their power induced even the Victorians to adopt a wider range of attitudes towards ‘the Others’ than is normally supposed, among which the crudest stereotypizations could never predominate29. The Empire, at any rate,
27 T. Tagliaferri, “Il futuro dell’Occidente e il «contatto fra le civiltà»: Toynbee interprete del primo dopoguerra”, Alle origini del moderno Occidente, ed. F. Cammarano (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003); T. Tagliaferri, “Greater Britain, Stati Uniti, India nella visione imperiale di J. R. Seeley”, Archivio di storia della cultura, 21 (2008): 7-93; T. Tagliaferri, “Democrazia, nazione e Impero nella modernizzazione della monarchia britannica”, Sovrani a metà. Monarchia e legittimazione in Europa tra Otto e Novecento, ed. G. Guazzaloca (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2009), 93-117; T. Tagliaferri, “Dalla Greater Britain al World Order. Forme del progetto imperiale britannico”, Impero, imperi. Una conversazione, ed. R. Romanelli (Napoli: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2010), 177-207. 28 A. Webster, The Debate on the Rise of British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 93-143. 29 L. Colley, Captives. Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (London: Cape, 2002). 162 had to cope with a difficult legitimacy question on the domestic front too. During the years of the transition to democracy, the definition of Britain’s identity as an imperial State stirred harsh party controversies. If references to the Empire in public debate had to become more attuned to the consensual logic of parliamentary government, it was indispensable that a minimal agreement emerged about its value, meaning, and conditions of possibility30. The process took several decades, and went on very unevenly; insofar as it succeeded, it was the liberal imperialist tradition to provide the ground for convergence. In the context of this paper, the expression ‘liberal imperialism’ is used as a convenient label to indicate a recurrent pattern of discourse which took shape around the 1880s, underwent radical changes from the Edwardian age onwards, but proved able to adapt itself to the intellectual and political environment of the new century so as to retain well recognizable continuities with its Victorian matrix31. Although sharing significant elements with contemporary strands of imperial rhetoric, like a reluctance to extend the attribute of historical agency to non- Western societies32, this particular way of speaking about the Empire exhibits a clearly distinguishable profile within the intricate variety of imperial visions which radiated from the Metropolis. By stressing its importance, I don’t intend to claim for it a superior scientific status (as more representative or influential, for example) in comparison with other paradigms which have attracted scholarly attention over the past decades. My main contention is that the liberal version of the imperial idea provided the Empire, in the long run, with a rhetoric which was suitable also for legitimation purposes. Its hegemonic appeal may be inferred from its gradual
30 P. J. Durrans, “A Two-Edged Sword: The Liberal Attack on Disraelian Imperialism”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 10 (1982): 262-284; A. S. Thompson, “The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895-1914”: Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997): 147-177. 31 D. Worsley, Sir John Seeley and His Intellectual Legacy: Religion, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Victorian and Post-Victorian Britain, (University of Manchester, Ph. D. Dissertation, 2001). 32 T. Tagliaferri, “«Principio di individualità» e occidentalizzazione del mondo nella filosofia della storia di A. J. Toynbee”, Civiltà del Mediterraneo, 3-4 (December 2004-June 2005), 85-86. 163 inclusion in the self-representation of the post-Victorian monarchy. After the loss of their vestigial political powers in the early nineteenth century, British royals had learnt that their prestige and influence depended on their capability to personify the unifying values of the nation. When we therefore come across monarchic propaganda describing «Greater Britain» as the association of the most progressive communities ever seen on the earth and the main prop of England’s «planetary hegemony», or George V himself extolling the Empire as «a Commonwealth of peace», uniting in one «family» a variety of races, cultures, and forms of government unheard of in the history of world, we may at least presume that these well- established liberal imperialist tópoi had become acceptable to several sections of public opinion33. The common basis of the different discourses articulated by subsequent generations of liberal imperialists was the central significance they assigned to the political macroentity composed by the Mother Country and the self-governing communities of white settlement. To be sure, the ideal and the reality of the British Commonwealth of Nations – a multinational free association, whose only constitutional glue was the allegiance of its members to the Crown – seem to be worlds apart from the late Victorian dream of a «United States of Greater Britain», which some imperial federalists imagined as a homogeneous nation-State34. Liberal imperialists of all shades of opinion, however, assigned similar values to the different kinds of unity they saw realized, or desired to see realized, in this portion of the Empire. Formal unity was deemed essential for preserving Britain’s power status35; it was based on a shared cultural heritage, which made it consistent with various
33 J. E. C. Bodley, The Coronation of Edward VII. A Chapter of European and Imperial History (London, Methuen, 1903), 30, 201; “King’s George V’s Silver Jubilee Speech”, D. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan. A Life in History (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 237-238. See The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present, ed. A. Olechnowicz (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2007). 34 R. Koebner, H. D. Schmidt, Imperialism. The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840-1960 (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1965), 177. 35 T. P. Peardon, “Sir John Seeley, Pragmatic Historian in a Nationalistic Age”, Nationalism and Internationalism, ed. E. M. Earle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 285-302; A. J. Toynbee, The World after the Peace Conference (London: O. U. P., 1926), 56. 164 interpretations of the principle of nationality36; it was coincident with the highest level of political progress of humanity37; it incarnated an institutional model which secured a state of permanent peace among the peoples involved, safeguarded their individuality and was susceptible of world-scale application38. The relationship existing between the Metropolis and the Colonial Empire or the Dominions provided therefore the main argument for the continuation of the ‘dependent Empire’: the justification for the British rule laid in its commitment to guide the non-self- governing colonies to self-government within the Empire through their Westernization and transformation in modern nations after the European model39. Finally, Britain’s resulting global hegemony would constitute a decisive factor in the advent of the pax oecumenica prefigured in the imperial system. The intertwining of liberal imperialism with liberal internationalism introduces us to a more fundamental set of rhetorical assumptions, which pertain to the overall meaning of Britain’s imperial experience and may be summarized under five headings: universalism, cosmopolitanism, secularized providentialism, post- millenarism, Protestant incarnationalism. A major characteristic of the liberal imperialist narratives is the solemn humanitarian claim they put forward on behalf of the Empire. Colonial institutions and policies actually embodied, according to them, the «Brotherhood of Man», or were phases in its process of realization, and expressed therefore normative modalities for the reaggregation of mankind into a
36 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), 37-55; A. E. Zimmern, The Third British Empire, second edition (London: Milford, 1927), 77-78. 37 J. R. Seeley, “United States of Europe. A Lecture delivered before the Peace Society”, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (1871), 443; Seeley, Expansion, 149; A. J. Toynbee, The Conduct of British Empire Foreign Relations since the Peace Settlement (London: O. U. P., 1928), 15-16. 38 D. Bell, “Unity and Difference: J. R. Seeley and the Political Theology of International Relations”, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005): 559-579; P. Rich, “A. Zimmern’s Cautious Idealism: The League of Nations, International Education, and the Commonwealth”, Thinkers of the Twentieth Years’ Crisis. Inter-War Idealism Reassessed, ed. D. Long and P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 79-99. 39 H. Cotton, New India, or India in Transition, popular edition (London: Kegan Paul, 1886); A. E. Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 7. 165 single family both inside and outside the imperial boundaries40. By regarding the Empire as a crucial agency, a laboratory, an example for still larger fraternal unions of peoples, liberal imperialists were carrying on the traditional «cosmoplastic» attitude of the British elites, who, as long as Britain could nurture the illusion of global power, held on to the belief that their country had both the duty and the resources to play the role of architect of a just world order41. The specific objects they recommended to Britain’s demiurgic exertions in the age of nationalism and its globalization were the abolition of interstate anarchy, and the prevention of the conflicts with the non-Europeans engendered by Western expansion. To this end, they advocated the reorganization of the ecumenical space in a federation or a ‘society’ providing the institutional framework for the juridification of international relations and open to new self-governing communities emerging from the modernization of national groups rooted in the traditions of non-Western civilizations42. Liberal imperialists never regarded the Empire as the only vehicle for Britain’s mission. They also stressed, for example, the importance for «the whole future of the planet» of its «unique relation» with the United States43. But it is only too obvious that they aimed at justifying colonial domination as a means to a higher purpose than sheer national greatness. An integral feature of this argumentative strategy was therefore an effort to provide the imperial ideology with a vision of universal history «in weltbürgerlicher Absicht». Such a vision turned on an evolutionary political taxonomy culminating in the planetary federation (or the League of Nations) and stressed the world-historical significance of the growth in
40 A. Toynbee, «Progress and Poverty». A Criticism of Henry George (London: Kegan Paul, 1884), 55; C. Bayly, T. Harper, Forgotten Wars. The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Penguin, 2008), 97. 41 R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, 1918-1968 (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2006), 1. 42 J. R. Seeley, Ecce Homo (London: Macmillan, 1865), 244; D. Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth. A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: O. U. P., 1995). 43 J. R. Seeley, Expansion, 150; Toynbee, The World after the Peace Conference, 18, 27- 31, 37, 44, 46, 56, 65. 166 scale of various types of human association, interaction, geographical expansion from the local to the global level44.
2. Historians’ Legitimating Task
What the historians contributed to the liberal imperialist discourse was then, first and foremost, a set of categories apt to conceptualize the imperial system and its constituent parts in terms of their function in the implementation of a plan immanent in human affairs and demonstrable (in their opinion) by scientific methods. Britain’s several kinds of colonial supremacy on non-Europeans were thus given the dignity of a national vocation coming from the ‘natural’ logic of the human development, and the professional historian became the privileged interpreter of God’s will as revealed through history. Located within this world-historical epic, whose end goal was the fraternal coexistence of all men in a universal polity of some sort on the premise of the conversion of its non-European members to the core value system of Western civilization, British activities in the two areas of imperial experience which mainly attracted the interest of the historians – the settlement colonies and India – were legitimized as stages and operational forms of the political and spiritual unification of mankind. Greater Britain and the Commonwealth were conceived as the most perfect development of the European State and regarded therefore as the consummation of the history of freedom, a specimen of a new type of Great Power, whose peculiar nature and caliber would guarantee Britain a voice in the destiny of the planet, and a paradigmatic precedent for the future world order. A different experiment was under way in India, where the British Raj was superintending to the encounter between Western Christianity and two other members of the family of the Eurasian world-religions, Islamism and Hinduism. The liberal variant of British orientalism stereotypized its ‘Others’, who were recognized
44 Lord Bryce, World History (London: The British Academy, 1919); A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 10 vols (London: O. U. P., 1934-1954); L. Curtis, Civitas Dei, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1934-1938). 167 the status of ‘civilized Others’, albeit more backward or stagnant, from the perspective of a cultural imperialism which aimed at their final inclusion in the international order as so many «provinces» of the Westernized world-community45. In this way, liberal imperialist historians recast the myth of the providential Empire, which had been central to the religious consciousness and public discourse of nineteenth-century Britain, into the mould of historical and political science46. Many of them retained strong links with traditional religion and subscribed to the tenets of Protestant liberalism. They longed for a Christianity emancipated from dogmatism, supernaturalism, otherworldliness, focused on the ethics of love, and so enabled to meet the challenge of scientific rationalism and overcome internal dissensions as well as the barriers separating it from the Eurasian sister-religions. What therefore distinguished the British late imperial philosophy of history from similar manifestations of the modern trend towards the secularization of Biblical providentialism47 was the propensity of some among its most prominent adherents – like Seeley, Curtis, Toynbee – to identify the télos of secular progress with the realization of the kingdom of God announced in the New Testament. They represented indeed the eirenic utopia, which was Britain’s task to build, as a historicized equivalent of the very object pursued by the man Jesus48. The insistent recourse to religious imagery should not be dismissed as mere sanctimonious phraseology. It reflected the deepest convictions of the liberal imperialists and provides a further clue for understanding the role played by their
45 J. R. Seeley, Natural Religion (London: Macmillan, 1882), 232; R. Coupland, The Study of the British Commonwealth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). See L. Di Fiore, “L’Islam di A. J. Toynbee”, Contemporanea, 13 (2010): 423-456; L. Di Fiore, “Imperium et libertas in Oriente. A. J. Toynbee e l’utopia del British Commonwealth of Nations”, Le Carte e la Storia, 13 (2010): 121-144. 46 S. J. Brown, Providence and Empire. Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815-1914 (Harlow: Pearson, 2008). See also M. Bentley, “Victorian Historians and the Larger Hope”, Public and Private Doctrine, ed. M. Bentley (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1993), 127- 148. 47 K. Löwith, Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 48 Curtis, Civitas Dei, vol. 1, 164; A. J. Toynbee, Christianity and Civilisation (London: S. C. M., 1940). 168 rhetoric in the metropolitan culture of empire. The thesis that the ethics of fraternity, embodied in the British Empire and the future world-commonwealth, was coincident with Christian love applied to politics on the largest scale implied a distinctly post-millenarian interpretation of Biblical eschatology. Christian liberal imperialists regarded the apocalyptic «kingdom of the Saints» as the culmination of a natural plan of education of mankind to be brought to completion by men’s own efforts. They rejected the pre-millenarian readings of Johannine prophecies, which had been so influential with the nineteenth-century missionary movement and regarded the millennium as only possible after Christ’s second coming, because of the irredeemable corruption of human nature49. The Christian liberal imperialists’ vision of history was grounded, on the contrary, upon a sanguine perfectionist belief in man’s capacity for salvation, holiness, beatitude in present life. The essence of Jesus’ teaching was that all human beings could gain self-fulfilment by consecrating themselves to the service of each other. This anthropological optimism induced them to refute any conception of the relation between Christianity and ‘the world’ that might lead to quietism and indifferentism. They reacted vigorously against the denigration of the civitas terrena as the sphere of the libido dominandi. It was not only that man’s capacity for goodness made all his activities susceptible of sanctification. Politics was «the greatest and the most important of the human pursuits»50. It offered the individual, all the more so if he was the citizen of a great Empire responsible for the welfare of mankind at large, the opportunity to fulfil his highest moral obligation, which bound him to all fellow-men as such, and to become a co-worker with Jesus in the edification of the Kingdom of Heavens. The historical teleology expounded by scholars imbued with Christian socialism, liberal
Anglicanism, High Church incarnationalism, Oxford idealism, helped to recruit for the Imperial State momentous changes in religious ethos which since the mid-nineteenth century had been remodelling middle class identity, fuelling a profound reorientation
49 N. Etherington, “Introduction”, Missions and Empire, ed. N. Etherington (Oxford: O. U. P., 2005), 16-17. 50 J. R. Seeley, “Milton’s Poetry”, Macmillan’s Magazine, 19 (1868), 407. 169 of Protestant Christology «from Atonement to Incarnation» and receiving expression in other areas of public discourse, like the debate on the social problem51.
3. The Republic of Humanity
This peculiar blend of progressive theology, philosophy of history, scientific professionalism, pan-Britannism, and cosmopolitanism, is well exemplified by Seeley. The Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1869 to 1895, whom Edward Said included among the «great rhetoricians of theoretical justification for empire after 1880»52, is an obvious choice when studying historiography as a legitimating agency. He is commonly regarded as the founding-father of the academic study of Imperial History53. His enormously successful and influential lectures on The Expansion of England, published in 1883, added significantly to the intellectual armoury of Victorian ‘new imperialism’54. Furthermore, he was a chief contributor to the religious debates of his time. Seeley’s other best-seller, Ecce Homo, published in 1865, and his most ambitious theological treatise, Natural
Religion, which appeared as a series of ten articles for the Macmillan’s Magazine between 1875 and 1878 and was published in book form in 1882 with significant
51 B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement, 1785-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 333- 334; G. Studdert-Kennedy, Providence and the Raj. Imperial Mission and Missionary Imperialism (London: Sage, 1998); T. Tagliaferri, La nuova storiografia britannica e lo sviluppo del welfarismo. Ricerche su R. H. Tawney (Napoli: Liguori, 2000), 122-145. 52 E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 128. 53 P. Burroughs, “John Robert Seeley and British Imperial History”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 1 (1972-1973): 191-211; Wm. R. Louis, “Introduction”, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford: O. U. P., 1998-1999), vol. 5, Historiography, ed. R. W. Winks, 8-10; D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2000), 16-20; R. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2010), 48, 474. 54 L. Howsam, “Imperial Publishers and the Idea of Colonial History, 1870-1916”, History of Intellectual Culture, 5 (2005), 4-6; Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 150-178. 170 alterations and additions, provide a key-source for analysing the relation between liberal Christianity and imperial historiography55. Seeley – a Broad Church Anglican – portrayed Jesus as a model of human perfection which was attainable on a plane of pure immanence. Christ’s divinity itself consisted in an unconditional devotion to the development of each individual’s ideal humanity. Since his «enthusiasm of humanity» was nothing else than a natural sentiment of love elevated to the highest degree, the doctrine of Incarnation simply meant that the life of Jesus had been a revelation of men’s own innate predisposition to sanctity and to live together in a community of brothers engaged in mutual edification. The historical realization of this «Universal Republic» was the goal Jesus had in mind when he proclaimed the Kingdom of God and founded the Christian Church56. Seeley’s incarnationalist redefinition of Christianity as an eminently practical and social religion resulted in an anti-Augustinian rehabilitation of politics as the proper sphere of human progress. His theological ideas were combined with a philosophy of history, according to which the natural sympathy had to undergo an orderly series of developmental phases before becoming the actual source of an enthusiastic love for all men. Since government depended in the last resort on the disinterested self- sacrifice of the governed to the public good, the political group had an essential part to play in the growth of the oecumenical society. Christian brotherhood itself presupposed ancient patriotism: tribes, republics, great States, were «the germs
55 See R. T. Shannon, “J. R. Seeley and the Idea of a National Church”, Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. R. Robson (London: Bell, 1967), 236-267; S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons, second edition (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1981), 155-180; R. N. Soffer, “History and Religion: J. R. Seeley and the Burden of the Past”, Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society, ed. R. W. Davis and R. J. Helmstadter (London: Routledge, 1992), 133- 150; M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1980- 2001) vol. 3, Accomodations, 87-98; H. M. Carey, God’s Empire. Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801-1908 (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2011), 30-31. 56 On the great religious debate sparked by the publication of Ecce Homo, see D. Pals, “The Reception of Ecce Homo”, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 16 (1977): 63-84. See also J. Stevens, The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 49-52. 171 and embryos» of the Church. Seeley regarded world history as a progression of political forms – clan, city-State, nation-State, world-State, international federation –, in the course of which human «sociability» realized itself more and more extensively and which was preparatory to the universal commonwealth envisaged by Jesus57. It is clear then that, from Seeley’s perspective, representing the Empire as instrumental in furthering the unity of mankind was tantamount to conferring upon it the sanction of «natural Christianity» as well as of historical science58. Involvement in its secular activities acquired the meaning of an updated Imitatio Christi.
4. History as Political Prophecy
In The Expansion of England and other writings related to the activities of the Imperial Federation League and such imperial events as the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition or Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, Seeley pronounced himself in favour of two political causes: the transformation of the imperial connection between
Britain and the white Colonies into a federation, and the perpetuation of the British Raj in India with the task of uniting spiritually East and West. The reasons why Seeley’s advocacy was welcomed so warmly by the English public have been many times elucidated by contemporary commentators and later historians. He managed to reconcile, even in the eyes of significant strata of progressive opinion, the aspiration to national greatness previously monopolized by Disraelian Toryism with liberal values and beliefs at a time when liberalism was being forced to reconsider its articles of faith by a series of perceived menaces to Britain’s internal cohesion and power status: the economic depression and the reopening of the ‘condition of England’s question’, the advent of mass politics, the renewed challenges of
57 Seeley, Ecce Homo, 172; Seeley, Expansion, 274; J. R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (London: Macmillan, 1896), 13-14, 17, 68. 58 Seeley, Natural Religion, 182-208. 172 socialism and Irish nationalism, the rise of aggressive competitors in the commercial, international and colonial spheres59. But the durable impact made by Seeley’s intervention cannot be fully understood without giving prominence to the communicative medium in which the Regius Professor encoded his explicit political message, namely, the language of nineteenth-century scientific historiography. A further purpose of Seeley’s Cambridge lectures was to give a practical exemplification of his ideas about the method and the end of historical science60. Like his successor, Lord Acton, he belonged to a post-Rankean generation of English historians who believed in the final reconciliation between the empiricism inherent in their professional code and the older faith in the presence of design in history61. The subject-matter of history was «man in communities, […] struggling forward towards some ever-brightening ideal under a vast providential law, which slowly reveals itself, of secular progress»62. Professional historians pursued the same end as the philosopher of history, but «in an inductive manner»63. Seeley was convinced indeed that scientific history could become the «modern form» of prophecy, reconstruct a «vision of history as a whole» analogous to the «map of history» previously derived from the Scriptures and be entrusted with the guide of the nation in a time of bewildering changes64.
59 J. Morley, “The Expansion of England”, Macmillan’s Magazine, 49 (1884), 291-294; A. Rambaud, “Préface”, in J.-R. Seeley, L’expansion de l’Angleterre (Paris: A. Colin, 1885), XXVI-XXVII; P. Villari, “Il presente e l’avvenire dell’Inghilterra giudicato da due storici inglesi”, P. Villari, Saggi storici e critici (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1890), 452-455; H. A. L. Fisher, “Sir John Seeley”, Fortnightly Review, 60 (1896), 183, 191; O. Barié, Idee e dottrine imperialistiche nell’Inghilterra vittoriana (Bari: Laterza, 1953), 173-192; D. Deudney, “Greater Britain or Greater Synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder, and Wells on Britain in the global industrial era”, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001): 187-208. 60 J. R. Seeley, Our Colonial Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1887), 1. See J. R. Seeley, “History and Politics”, Macmillan’s Magazine, 40-41 (1879-1880): 289-299, 369-378, 449-458, 23-32, and D. Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1980). 61 L. Krieger, “Preface”, Lord Acton, Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History, ed. W. H. McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), V-VII. 62 Seeley, “Milton’s Poetry”, 421. 63 J. R. Seeley, Classical Studies as an Introduction to the Moral Sciences (London: Bell and Dadly, 1864), 20. 64 Seeley, Natural Religion, 243-244, 271-272, 296, 298-299. 173 Accordingly, Seeley’s apology for the Empire was, in its substance, an attempt at demonstrating that the policies he was recommending were consistent with a series of world-historical trends generated by the early modern ‘closure’ of the Oikoumene and accelerated by the industrial revolution and by nineteenth-century nationalism, which were pushing mankind towards its final unity and which depended for their completion on England’s decisions about her relationship with the Colonies and India. The practical teaching he wanted to transmit to his fellow-citizens took on the form of a veritable prophetic admonition and was calculated to inspire imperialism and colonial rule with a sense of ethical and religious purposefulness by showing their conformity to the providential design unfolding in history65.
5. Europe’s Manifest Destiny
Seeley described the Empire as a gigantic, ubiquitous, dishomogeneous «world- State». But he imposed order and meaning on this chaos by means of the meta- geographical device of dividing the whole into three main historical areas: an Old
World centre, corresponding to the British «country-State», a New World periphery, corresponding to the Colonial Empire, an Old World periphery, corresponding to British India66. The Eurasian centre belonged to a brotherhood of nations organized in a competitive States-system, but sharing a common culture, the «Western civilization»67. In Seeley’s vocabulary, «civilization» means «religion» as expressed in collective institutions. «Religion», in its turn, stands for the spiritual values shared by a social group. Western religion, which included Christian morality, the worship of Beauty and scientific rationalism, corresponded to the «natural religion». By
65 O. Browning, “Personal Recollection of Sir J. Seeley and Lord Acton”, Albany Review, 2 (1908), 551. 66 Seeley, Expansion, 293. See M. W. Lewis, K. E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents. A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 67 Seeley, Natural Religion, 236; Seeley, Expansion, 238-239. 174 affirming the actual existence of a Western civilization and its «universal» character, Seeley intended to emphasize both the fundamental unity underlying Europe’s divisions and the potential for pan-human diffusion of its culture68. Seeley regarded Europe’s political fragmentation as only temporary. Since the early 1870s, he had diagnosed a permanent crisis of the Continental balance of power. First of all, given the increasing virulence of popular nationalism, the costs of the wars necessary to preserve the equilibrium were becoming unsustainable. Besides, German unification made him doubt whether «the combined force of all the European States» would remain «clearly superior» to the strength of the new Power. On this reading, Seeley believed that Europe’s «manifest destiny» was the establishment of an international federation aimed at the abolition of war. The alleged spiritual unity of Western civilization and its world-wide expansion could provide the basis for a «universal nationality» and citizenship69.
68 Seeley, Natural Religion, 232-235, 238, 255, 263, 276. For Seeley’s religious philosophy of culture, see also his “Goethe”, Contemporary Review, 46 (1884): 161-177, 408-506, 653-672. 69 Seeley, “United States of Europe”, 436, 438, 443-448; J. R. Seeley, The Life and Times of Stein, 3 vols (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1878), vol. 2, 46; Seeley, Natural Religion, 232. Italian historians of federalist thought, focusing on Seeley’s 1871 address to the London Peace Society and taking too little account of the nationalistic implications of his imperial federalism, have usually assigned to him a prominent place among «the leading exponents of European unity» who, from Kant onwards, have expounded «the idea of a European federation as the first stage in the building of world unity». See S. Pistone, “Raison d’État, Peace and the Federalist Strategy”, The Federalist, 43 (2001), 28; L. V. Majocchi, “John Robert Seeley”, Il Federalista, 31 (1989): 164-172; L. Levi, Il pensiero federalista (Bari: Laterza, 2002), 63-69. The Life of Stein and Natural Religion provide irrefutable evidence that Seeley openly adhered to a form of «cosmopolitan nationalism» till the early eighties (Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 152). In subsequent years his pacifism and cosmopolitanism faded further away into the background. Seeley’s concern with the need to equip his countrymen for the incoming epoch of renewed international rivalry, which he perceived on the more immediate horizon, became predominant only in his later writings, which amply justify the opinion that regards him as the nearest English counterpart to Droysen, Treitschke and the Prussian historical school. See J. R. Seeley, “Georgian and Victorian Expansion”: Fortnightly Review, new series, 42 (1887), 138-139; J. R. Seeley, The Empire (Aldershot: Aldershot Military Society, 1889); J. R. Seeley, The Growth of British Policy, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1895); K. Passmore, “Historians and the Nation-State”, Writing National History. Western Europe since 1800, ed. S. Berger, M. Donovan, and K. Passmore (London: Routledge, 1999), 286-287; J. W. Burrow, “Historicism and Social Evolution”, British and German Historiography, 1750-1950. Traditions, Perceptions, and 175
6. From the Country-State to the World-State
What for Seeley most significantly distinguished Britain among the Great Powers, giving it a key-role in world unification, was its being part of a Greater Britain. He represented the Colonies as communities in the full vigour of youth, capable of accommodating within their «empty» territories the flow of immigrants from the congested Mother Country and of increasing their own demographic size in few decades. Furthermore, they were refusing to import the ruinous «political geography» of Europe into the New World and were beginning to give birth to political entities of continental dimensions by constituting intercolonial federations (like in the case of Canada)70. The New World periphery was involved in one of the most momentous tendencies observable in contemporary history. The abolition of distance by steam and electricity was favouring the attitude of the modern world to realize large-scale political unions and the emergence of a new class of Great Powers destined to revolutionize the international competition in a couple of generations71. The Colonial Empire gave Britain a chance to become one of the three super- powers of the twentieth century. But it was so only because Greater Britain wasn’t properly an empire. According to Seeley, empires most usually are huge and composite polities born from conquests, and therefore «inorganic States». They lack
Transfers, ed. B. Stuchtey and P. Wende (Oxford: O. U. P., 2000), 255-258. Richard Shannon, whose influential interpretation of Seeley’s world-view tended to downplay its universalist and humanitarian dimension, projected back these later developments and went so far as to deny the very pacifist and internationalist inspiration of the 1871 lecture. See R. T. Shannon, “J. R. Seeley and the Idea of a National Church”, 254-255; P. Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870-1914 (Oxford: O. U. P., 2001), 52. 70 J. R. Seeley, “Introduction”, Her Majesty’s Colonies (London: Royal Commission on Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886), XIV, XVII-XIX. 71 Seeley, Expansion, 74-75. See G. Barraclough, “Europe in Perspective. New Views on European History”, G. Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 179, 182. 176 the fundamental element of a «vital» State, namely, the ethical unity of government and governed72. Greater Britain possessed all the conditions for an «organic State»: ethnic homogeneity, common religion, common political traditions and interests. It was potentially a transoceanic nation-State73. What it lacked was a corresponding group-consciousness. The Eurasian centre had not yet learnt to regard the New World periphery as belonging to the same national community as itself74. In more explicit terms, Seeley redefined the ‘colonial question’ as a question of nation-building, analogous to the national questions brilliantly solved by the Italian Risorgimento, German Unification, and American federalism. The particular problem confronting England was how to prevent the drift towards fragmentation of a unitary nationality whose branches were scattered all over the world. The lesson of the American Civil War was that the only solution lay in the consolidation of this still precarious transoceanic polity into a federation patterned on the United States75. The possibility of federating Greater Britain, however, depended on the rise of a «pan-Anglican» consciousness, whose creation provided work for «an entire branch of specialists» in colonial studies76. Historians, in particular, had the momentous task of refashioning the national identity by means of a narrative of England’s past reincorporating its much-neglected imperial dimensions and portraying its planetary «expansion» as the most essential chapter in the development of modern Europe, which always remained, for Seeley, «the very centre of human history»77.
72 Seeley, Expansion, 46, 149, 177, 273-275. On Seeley’s political philosophy see H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 55-59. 73 Seeley, Expansion, 220, 223, 224-225. 74 Seeley, Expansion, 61, 256; Seeley, “Introduction”, XIV-XV, XXI, XXX. See E. H. H. Green, “The Political Economy of Empire, 1880-1914”, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, 346-350. 75 Seeley, “United States of Europe”, 440-445; Seeley, Expansion, 299. On Seeley’s attitudes towards the United States, see H. A. Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth: the Anglo-American Background (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), 128- 131, and T. Tagliaferri, “Il significato della guerra civile americana e i doveri dell’Inghilterra”, La guerra civile americana vista dall’Europa, ed. T. Bonazzi and C. Galli (Bologna: il Mulino, 2004), 43-45. 76 Imperial Federation. Report of the Conference held on July 29, 1884 (London: I. F. L., 1884), 20-22. 77 Seeley, Expansion, 238-239. 177 When he delivered his lectures, Seeley did not have in mind to promote Imperial History in the sense of adding a new ‘subject’ to the range of the academic specialisms. His intent was more ambitious. The Colonies and the Empire had to stop being peripheral to national history, which was traditionally monopolized by the domestic constitutional development, and become its main focus78. Seeley’s neo- Rankean conceptual model postulated the identity of English history with the history of the English State. The «expansion of England» implied the metamorphosis of England’s political organism from a country-State to a world-State under the influence of the ‘great spaces’ opened up by the Oceanic Age – a third epoch in universal history, after the Potamic and the Thalassic, whose specific teleological function was the globalization of the European politics and civilization79. Seeley explained the genesis of Greater Britain as the outcome of three main factors. First, the power-struggles between the five Atlantic Powers, which had propelled the early mondialization of the European States-system and had been won by England only because it had taken advantage of its insularity80. Second, the peculiarities of the areas of the New World conquered by Britons, which extended in the temperate zone, were inhabited by peoples occupying the lowest place in the
78 P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism. Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 36-40. In recent years Seeley’s model has attracted the attention of scholars engaged in the search for an integrated approach to British, Imperial, Atlantic and Global history: see B. Schwarz, “Introduction”, The Expansion of England. Race Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. B. Schwarz (London: Routledge, 1996), 1-8; D. Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?”, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 429-431; C. Hall, “Introduction”, At Home with the Empire. Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. C. Hall and S. O. Rose (Cambridge: C. U. P., 2006), p. 8. 79 Seeley, Expansion, 87. Seeley borrowed this scheme of periodization from O. Peschel, “Ueber die Beziehungen zwischen Geschichte und Erdkunde”, O. Peschel, Abhandlungen zur Erd- und Völkerkunde, 3 vols, ed. J. Löwenberg (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1877-1879), vol. 1, 398-412. On Seeley, Ranke and the neo-Rankeans, see J. L. Herkless, “Seeley and Ranke”, The Historian, 43 (1980): 1-22; J. L. Herkless, “Introduction”, A. J. Rein, Sir J. R. Seeley. Eine Studie über den Historiker (Langensalza: Beyer, 1912), English translation (Wolfeboro, N. H.: Longwood, 1987), I-XXIX; B. Stuchtey, “World Power and World History: Writing the British Empire, 1885-1945”, Writing World History, 1800-2000 (Oxford: O. U. P., 2003), 213-253. 80 Seeley, Expansion, 54-55. 178 ethnological scale and were therefore both open to European settlement and apt to secure the ethnic homogeneity between Colonies and Mother Country81. Third, the distinctive character of the European country-State, which made modern colonialism quite different from the Hellenic precedent. According to Seeley, transoceanic colonization reflected the tendency inherent in the modern State to identify itself with the nation, and its consequent predisposition to «unbounded territorial expansion». Migration implied a growth in size of the political community emanating the migratory flow and raised it to a higher level of internal development. The contact with the New World gave England the opportunity to exploit the evolutionary potentiality inherent in the European State and to perform the double transition from country-State to continental or transoceanic State and from representative government to federal government82. At this point, the manifold teleological meanings of Seeley’s pan-Anglicanism should become clear. Federation was indeed a means to enhance Britain’s world- power. But the experiments under way at intercolonial and imperial level, in dynamic continuity with the English constitutional tradition, made Greater Britain a precedent for the future pan-human federation too. Their success could provide the nation with the strategic resources necessary to impose, in alliance with the United States, the internationalist solution at European and global level from a position of world- hegemony83.
81 Seeley, Expansion, 44-46. 82 Seeley, Expansion, 37-43, 54-56, 62, 101, 149, 168, 300. See R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 333-335. 83 The affinities between Seeley’s and Yankee expansionism are interestingly underlined in A. K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of National Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935), 197-198, 219, 264, 267. See A. Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire. The Pax Romana, Britannica, and Americana (London: Routledge, 2009), 61-137. 179 7. England’s Providential Mission in Asia
If Seeley’s historiography legitimized the Colonial Empire as a step forward in political progress, his apology for the British Raj turned instead on the idea that the Old World periphery provided the theatre for an advance towards the cultural unification of mankind. Since the Subcontinent was both impervious to European settlement and already occupied by peoples belonging to different civilizations, it opposed an insurmountable barrier to the expansion of England as a nation-State. The immense majority of the subjects and the dominant minority were separated by a spiritual gulf. Lacking the prerequisite of an organic State, British India was an inorganic State of the lowest type – a military imperialism, an Orientale Empire84. Seeley, however, refused to classify India in the category of the conquered countries, which are governed against their will. Due to the absence of a sense of shared national identity, it didn’t constitute a conscious political whole85. It is important to observe that Seeley was far from denying that India could become a nation86. He argued that the unifying cultural influences emanating from the English rule were unintentionally fostering the growth of a pan-Indian nationality, whose rise to full self-consciousness would certainly involve the immediate collapse of the European domination87. England, therefore, had to contemplate the possibility of being forced by circumstances to quit the Subcontinent. Nonetheless, the Regius Professor took great pain to explain why English rule could and should continue as long as possible: «a time may conceivably come when it may be practicable to leave India to herself, but for the present it is necessary to govern her as if we were to govern her for ever»88.
84 Seeley, Expansion, 11, 175- 177, 219, 222, 228, 236, 301-302, 304. 85 Seeley, Expansion, 202, 219, 223, 228. 86 As implied, for example, in U. S. Metha, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth- Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 149, 151. 87 Seeley, Expansion, 233-234. 88 Seeley, Expansion, 193-194. 180 What justified the imperial power was, in this case, the responsibility incumbent on the nation of introducing India «in the modern city of God» and uniting two ancient Asian civilizations in «marriage» with the West89. The acculturative task was imposed on England’s shoulders by the logic of historical development. Its Oriental Empire differed from a mere «Asiatic despotism» in a crucial respect, «the superiority in civilisation of the conquerors to the conquered». This circumstance was very rare in universal history, where conquering races had generally been inferior in civilization to their victims. The only two precedents were the Roman rule over the barbaric races of Western Europe and Alexander’s conquest of civilized Asia90. The exceptions, however, were destined to become the norm in the near future. The industrial revolution had endowed the West with so overwhelming a power that «the outlying world […] for the first time in history now lies prostrate at the feet of Christian civilization». Non-European peoples offered immense scope for the irresistible diffusive impulse felt by Western civilization when «confronted with the races outside it or the classes that have sunk below it». The Indian Empire was the instrument of a veritable historical law, according to which when a civilization or religion encounters and feels the contrast with the «outer world», it «becomes aggressive or missionary, and one of those
89 Seeley, Natural Religion, 237; Seeley, Expansion, 261. The importance of this aspect of Seeley’s argument is underestimated in K. Mantena, Alibis of Empire. Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 46-48, and T. Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination, 334-341. Both authors neglect the substantial references to India in Natural Religion as a source for understanding Seeley’s attitude. 90 Seeley, Expansion, 176, 236, 238-239, 241, 261-262. Seeley’s parallel between ancient and modern imperialism should be read in close connection with his views on the world- historical function of the Roman Empire: Seeley, Classical Studies, 14-18; J. R. Seeley, “Roman Imperialism. II. The First and the Last Periods of Roman Imperialism Compared”, Macmillan Magazine, 20 (1869), 281-284; Seeley, Introduction to Political Science, 371- 372. See L. Loreto, Guerra e libertà nella repubblica romana. J. R. Seeley e le radici intellettuali della Roman Revolution di Ronald Syme (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1999); R. Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: the Imperial Origins of Roman Archeology (London: Routledge, 2000), 23-25; P. Vasunia, Greater Rome and Greater Britain, in Classics and Colonialism, ed. B. Goff (London: Duckwort, 2005), 34-68; R. S. Mantena, “Imperial Ideology and the Uses of Rome in Discourses on Britain’s Indian Empire”, Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, ed. M. Bradley (Oxford: O. U. P., 2010), 54-76. 181 great spiritual movements takes place which mark at long intervals the progress of humanity, such as the conversion of all nations to Judaism, to Romanism, to Hellenism»91. But the process actuated by the Indian Empire had, according to Seeley, more similarity with its Hellenistic than with its Roman equivalent. England’s empire was «the empire of the modern world over the medieval» and the resulting cultural dynamics showed therefore the distinctive aspect of an encounter between civilizations, albeit of unequal value92. Seeley felt no doubts about the universality of Western ethics, aesthetics and science, and applied to India the habitual Victorian clichés: its peoples were locked in their Asiatic traditions and «primitive custom» from immemorial time, morally and politically degenerated as a consequence of centuries of «despotism», prone to «mythological dreams», «fatalism» and a peculiarly inhuman sort of asceticism. Moreover, he couldn’t see any endogenous movement developing in India93. On the other hand, Seeley emphasized the circumstance that the «past», in which India was «petrified», was not a «barbaric» one, but corresponded to «the medieval phase» of Western history. In the particular case of the «Brahminism», it was the past of a race, the Aryans, who, before stagnating, had revealed the same propensity for progress in the Subcontinent as in Europe. The redemptive work committed to the colonial power consisted, in short, in the reactivation of an arrested civilizational process94. Within very narrow limits, therefore, Seeley acknowledged a bilateral dynamism in the cultural encounter developing in India. He diagnosed the existence of a ‘Western question’: the colonized were, after all, the sons of ancient and complex cultures who couldn’t let themselves be permeated by foreign influxes without
91 Seeley, Natural Religion, 234-236, 257. 92 Seeley, Expansion, 244. 93 Seeley, Natural Religion, 234-237; Seeley, Expansion, 168, 176. 94 Seeley, Expansion, 240-244. In this use of the category of ‘Aryanism’ Seeley followed the lead of F. Max Müller. See T. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race. Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 41-44. Said’s juxtaposition of Seeley with Gobineau, therefore, appears altogether inappropriate: E. W. Said, “Introduction”, R. Kipling, Kim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 30. 182 adopting a suspicious and selective attitude toward their agents95. Furthermore, he admitted that «good things» could be preserved within the millennial Asian traditions and argued that their more positive aspects should be protected against the destructive influences emanating from the West96. He hinted also at the possibility that the cultures of the colonized, being in possession of spiritual goods of which modern West was much in need, would beneficially react on the colonizers. In general terms, the most relevant precedent of India’s modernization, the «fusion of Greek with Oriental thought» which had given birth to Christianity, testified to the extraordinary historical fecundity of the contacts between civilizations97. It is not easy to ascertain which consequences Seeley expected from the «marriage» of East and West. His stern Euro-centrism precluded him from envisaging a process of cultural hybridization. The most probable hypothesis is that he anticipated, in analogy with his latitudinarianism in religious matters, a partial cultural convergence of Christians, Muslims and Hindus, made possible by their subscription to the creed of the «natural religion»98. Seeley did not discuss the political implications of India’s Westernization. But it seems quite obvious that the development of a sense of common identity would enable the three branches of the human family which inhabited the Eurasian periphery to live together in the same State – a British Raj made finally «organic» by the cultural change, or a new Indian national State, destined to become a member of the universal federation uniting all the peoples converted to Western civilization. These, at any rate, were the lines along which prominent British sympathizers of the Indian national movement, like
95 Seeley, Expansion, 244, 96 Seeley, Natural Religion, 237-238; Seeley, Expansion, 305. 97 Seeley, Expansion, 239, 278. See F. M. Müller, India: What can it teach us? (London: Longmans, 1883). Said gave an oversimplified account of Seeley’s position in Culture and Imperialism, 226, 228. 98 For the Broad Church approach to Britain’s mission in India, see B. F. Westcott, “The Universities in Relation to Missionary Work”, B. F. Westcott, On Some Points in the Religious Office of the Universities (London: Macmillan, 1873), 25-44; F. M. Müller, On Missions (New York: Scribner, 1874); B. F. Westcott, “The Empire”, B. F. Westcott, Lessons from Work (London: Macmillan, 1901), 367-384. 183 Charles F. Andrews, were to push the logic of Seeley’s argument in the following century99.
8. Unintended Consequences? Towards the United States of India
Up to now I have examined Seeley’s legitimizing discourse on the assumption that he addressed the metropolitan public opinion. It seems appropriate, in conclusion, to hint briefly at how his liberal imperialist approach, given its universalist premises, lent itself to be incorporated into the ideology of the early Indian nationalism through the mediation of progressive members of the Anglo-Indian elite. In 1883 The Expansion of England was reviewed by the positivist Henry Cotton, one of the tiny group of civil servants who were arguing the urgent necessity to steer India on the way of self-government along the same route followed by the white Colonies and were involved in the launching of the Indian National Congress100. In 1885 Cotton republished the review as the introductory chapter of his influential New India. In this book, soon translated into the principal vernacular languages and
«read avidly by educated Indians», he advocated the creation of the «United States of India» as the ultimate object of the imperial government. Cotton appropriated Seeley’s categorial model, but assuming that an Indian national consciousness already existed, he drew from it an immediate political lesson which Seeley must have found difficult to subscribe. The Regius Professor had rightly understood the role played by British influences in creating a pan-Indian nationality. The process,
99 C. F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India. Its Missionary Aspect (London: C. M. S., London 1912), 27-30; C. F. Andrews, North India (London: Mowbray, 1908), 22-23. See Studdert- Kennedy, Providence and the Raj. 100 H. Cotton, “Review of J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England”, The Academy, October 20, 1883, 257-258. See S. R. Mehrotra, India and the Commonwealth (New York: Praeger, 1965), 15, 34; E. Moulton, “Early Indian Nationalism: H. Cotton and the British Positivist and Radical Connection, 1870-1915”, Journal of Indian History, 60 (1982): 25-59; A. Read, D. Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (New York: Norton, 1998), 75. 184 however, had gone further than Seeley was ready to admit. This did not mean that England’s withdrawal from India was imminent, but that its rule could not continue in an autocratic form. The high degree of Westernization inherent in the «adolescent» nationality gave the Empire the opportunity to determine, by means of timely reforms, the rhythm and outcome of the transition, securing the permanence within its fold of a federal «New India» enjoying a position similar to the self-governing Colonies101. From Cotton’s autobiography we learn that during the agitation against the partition of Bengal Punjabi nationalists were arrested for circulating extracts from The Expansion of England102. Seeley would have been very surprised. In his perspective, the spiritual effects flowing from the Raj were the supreme justification not only for its continuation, but for the British imperial system as a whole. By accomplishing its civilizing mission in Asia, the nation rose to the summit of greatness, consecrating its world-power to the fulfilment of the «ultimate lesson of morality»: «the Christian unity of mankind»103.
101 H. Cotton, New India, 1-10, 121-122, 129-130; Mehrotra, India and the Commonwealth, 31. 102 H. Cotton, Indian and Home Memories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), 323. 103 J. R. Seeley, “The Church as a Teacher of Morality”, Essays on Church Policy, ed. W. L. Clay (London: Macmillan, 1868), 276-277.
185 2
The Republic of Humanity:
John R. Seeley
and the Religious Sources of British Imperial Universalism104*
I desire first of all to express my most sincere gratitude to Professors Caroline Douki, Emmanuelle Siebeud and Ann Thomson for their invitation to address their seminars and the opportunity they have provided to me of submitting to your attention, comment and criticism some interim conclusions I’ve reached at the present stage of my research and reflection on the ideology of the late British Empire. The title I’ve suggested for my seminar, «The Republic of Humanity», hints to the definition of the nature and ultimate ends of the Empire inherent to a recurrent pattern of imperial discourse that may be discerned among the immense and intricate variety of imperial representations produced and radiated by the metropolitan culture in the period spanning from the last third of the nineteenth century to World War Two and its aftermath, and that may be conveniently described as the rhetoric of liberal imperialism. This particular way of speaking about the Empire, about Britain’s global power, about their world-historical meaning, took on a distinct shape in the 1880s, with the decisive contribution of the Cambridge historian, political scientist and religious thinker John Robert Seeley. It underwent fundamental changes from the Edwardian age onwards, but proved able to adapt itself to the intellectual climate and political environment of the new century retaining, under this much altered form, well recognizable links of continuity with its late Victorian matrix.
* Paper presented at a joint session of the Seminairé d’histoire intellectuelle e the seminary on Colonisations, migrations et histoire globale, University of Paris VIII-Saint Denis, 20 May 2011.
186 The first and most basic element that the different images of the Empire employed by the subsequent generations of liberal imperialists shared in common (and that distinguished liberal imperialism from the conservative interpretations of the British imperial vocation, such as that expounded by Disraeli, which focused on India) was the central significance they assigned to the so-called Greater Britain and her 20th-century heir and counterpart, the British Commonwelth of Nations. Both expressions indicated the political macro-entity composed by the European Mother Country and the group of «self-governed communities» of white settlement which were mainly referred to as the “Colonial Empire” (as opposed to the autocratic Indian Empire) or, from the beginning of 20th century onwards, as the Dominions of the British Crown (which in the early 1920s came to include the Irish Free State). Colonial self-government was the result of a long devolutionary process started in the 1830s on the basis of what could be summarily described as a monarchical compromise, by which the colonies gained full control over internal affairs in the form of responsible government but remained, owing to their allegiance to the Crown, formally subordinated to the London Parliament and substantially dependent form the metropolitan Government as far as foreign affairs and defense policy were concerned. Prior to the emergence of liberal imperialism, however, British liberals were wont to describe the reformed Colonial Empire as the Grecanic part of the Empire (as opposed to the “Roman” part, represented by autocratic India), or England’s Magna Graecia, in the intention to anachronistically stress an assumed analogy between the “settlement empire” and the prestigious precedent of the Hellenic apoikìa, which had been self-governing and politically independent from the Metropolis. Some of them, like Goldwin Smith at the beginning of the 1860s, had advocated a policy of deliberate «colonial emancipation» on the part of the Mother Country, which should have prevented that what they saw as the inevitable final separation took on the character of violent secession (after the precedent of the American revolution), leaving behind a legacy of animosities. It was among their ranks that, in the late 1860s, had emerged the notion of a Greater Britain, coined by the liberal politician 187 Charles Dilke. It is important to underline, in order to grasp the novelty of the later liberal imperialist rhetoric, that in its original acceptation Greater Britain, while excluding the Mother Country, had included, besides the Colonial Empire, both the US and India: the expression referred, in other words, to the informal, non-political area of global irradiation of the English civilization. The single most important contribution made by Seeley to the liberal imperialist thought consisted in a radical redefinition of the meaning of Greater Britain. Seeley’s Greater Britain both comprises the Mother Country and includes only the self- governing colonies, thus emphasizing the residual links of political solidarity which hold together this peculiar group of communities in a single transoceanic State (or «world-State»). According to Seeley, Greater Britain was a global polity endowed, at the same time, with a substantial linguistic, cultural and religious homogeneity, that could have preserved it from dissolution, acting as a centripetal factor, but only on a double condition: first, the underlying homogeneity had to develop into an actual pan-Anglican nationality (that Seeley defined in term of subjective consciousness of a common identity); second, the transoceanic State had gradually to transform itself into a federal commonwealth. The North American Union, having survived the trial of the Civil War, demonstrated, in the eyes of Seeley, both the actual viability of the project of a United States of Greater Britain and the absolute necessity to strengthen the weak political bond of unity provided by the monarchical compromise through the establishment of a center of authority endowed with the essential attributes of modern sovereignty (such as an Imperial Parliament for purposes of common defense and coordination of migration policies with a view to solving the social problem in the congested earth of Empire), if Greater Britain had to be preserved from dissolution. For Seeley, who at Cambridge coupled the teaching of history with the teaching of political science in a positivistic vein, the importance to preserve the Colonial Empire and consolidate its link with the Mother Country laid in no small part in the evolutionary continuity he perceived between the normative stages of 188 constitutional progress represented by British parliamentary government and American federalism. There may be no doubt, however, that Seeley saw in the US of Greater Britain the key-response to the sea changes in the geopolitical scenario, threatening British national security and world power status, foreshadowed by the American Civil War, Italian and German Unification, renewed Anglo-Russian and Anglo-French rivalry in Asia, which he was among the firsts to interpretate (since the early 1870s) as the possible symptoms of a permanent crisis of the balance of power in continental Europe, the globalization of the struggle for hegemony, the entry into the international competition of new actors far superior to the traditional Great Powers in territorial and demographic dimensions, the beginning of an age of terribly destructive wars, waged by popular States actuated and propelled by mass nationalism. To be sure, the late Victorian dream of a United States of Greater Britain, conceived by Seeley and other imperial federalists as a homogeneous transoceanic nation-State, and the reality of the Commonwealth, enthusiastically celebrated at its birth by the liberal imperialists of the Twenties and the Thirties as the panacea for any type of international and inter-civilizational conflict, are far from being the same thing, if only because the Commonwealth was a multinational free association, whose States members were held together exclusively, from the constitutional point of view, by their common allegiance to the Crown. Liberal imperialists of all shades of opinion, however, agreed in that they attached the same ethical values to the political unity they saw realized, or desired to see realized, in the Greater Britain or the Commonwealth. Federal unity or monarchical unity – they argued – was essential to the preservation of Britain’s world power status; it was based on the common cultural heritage of the peoples involved, which made it consistent with the principle of nationality; it coincided with the highest stage of the political progress of humanity; it embodied an institutional model which secured a condition of permanent peace among the communities which benefited from it and safeguarded at the same time their autonomy and cultural individuality, and which was susceptible of universal application. 189 The kind of constitutional relation uniting the self-governing colonies or dominions with the Mother Country, as well as their internal self-government regime, provided therefore the main argument put forward by the liberal imperialist tradition for the continuation of the «dependent Empire»: the ultimate justification for the British rule lay in the mission of leading the non-self-governing colonies to self- government within the Empire or the Commonwealth through the Westernization of the non-European subject peoples and their transformation in modern nations on the European model. Furthermore, the rhetoric of liberal imperialism represented Britain’s world power and influence as the main instrument for the advent of a condition of pax oecumenica which was prefigurated by the British imperial system as a whole, intertwining with and becoming at times indistinguishable from the rhetoric of British liberal internationalism. This last aspect of the liberal imperialist discourse introduces us to another and more fundamental set of assumptions underlying it and communicated by it – a set of assumptions which properly pertains to the interpretation of the overall meaning of British imperial experience advanced by the liberal imperialist rhetorician and which may be summarized under five headings: its universalism, its cosmopolitan internationalism, its providentialism, its millenarism, its religious implications. It is on thess assumptions that I will mainly concentrate in the remaining part of my exposition. But before continuing, I feel compelled to give you some more explicit explanations about the exact historiographical relevance I attach to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism. I am very far from claiming for it any privileged scientific status in comparison with other paradigms of imperial and colonial discourse which have mostly and deservedly attracted scholarly attention in recent years. I don’t believe, in particular, that liberal imperialist rhetoric should be regarded as more representative or more influential than derogatory attitudes towards colonial subjects which were only too
190 well represented in the metropolitan culture (not to mention colonial agents on the spot) – such as racialism, orientalism, differentialism and ornamentalism105. I rather believe that the specific significance of liberal imperialist rhetoric lays in the fact that it uniquely provided the later British Empire with a pattern of discourse which was suitable also for legitimation purposes. For the sole purpose to recall briefly, in an impressionistic way, which were the legitimation needs of the Empire that the metropolitan culture was called to meet on the ideological plan in the period under consideration, I’ll adopt a very simple operational notion of political legitimacy and legitimation, articulated in three main propositions. (1) Every political authority requires, besides other things, that the members of the human group over which its jurisdiction extends shall be intimately persuaded of its right to make decisions binding upon all of them, so as to obtain and maintain their obedience, mobilize their support, exercise the power of command without provoking too disruptive conflicts. (2) It avails itself, therefore, of systems of myths, beliefs, sentiments, specifically aimed at legitimizing the ruler in the eyes of the varied mass of the subjects. (3) The character of the
105 In the last decades, as we all know, important attempts have been made at formulating generalizations about «how the British saw their Empire» (David Cannadine). Their authors are to be given credit for having drawn attention to a too neglected field of research and having cast light, in particular, on derogatory attitudes towards colonial subjects which actually only too well represented in the metropolitan culture (not to mention their use by colonial agents on the spot) – such as racialism, orientalism, differentialism, ornamentalism. What leaves me unsatisfied in such approaches is not only that they, as generalizations, simply don’t tell all the truth, failing to take into account, in particular, the peculiarities of the liberal imperialist tradition and grossly misrepresenting sometimes, as a result, the point of view of their expounders. I personally believe in the possibility to arrive at more convincing generalizations, stressing the elements that all the various strands of imperial rhetoric seems to have undoubtedly in common, such as, for example, the reluctance to recognize any endogenous dynamism and the capacity for historical agency to non-Western societies, which were invariably portrayed as only reacting to the external stimuli of some European initiative even by the most advanced liberal imperialists and internationalists. But beyond this I reflect on the fact that I am, after all, a historian; and what is incumbent upon me, when studying the meaning of ideas and representations, is do not to forget to ask some simple preliminary questions: who produced or employed them – which person, what institution? whom he or it was addressing to? and for what pragmatical purpose they were produced and employed?
191 representations and discourses apt to perform the legitimizing function will depend, in its turn, on the general orientation of the cultures and mentalities prevailing at a certain epoch among the different sections of that group. Now, in my belief, if we apply this notion to the British imperial system as a whole, it becomes apparent very soon how complex and how difficult was the legitimation problem which it had to cope with; and if we survey the culture of imperialism keeping well in our mind this conclusion, we cannot fail to perceive that not all the “representations” and the “discourses” related to the Empire were always available to its official or semiofficial spokesmen. I will limit myself to mention only the two more obvious aspects of the problem. As far as the peripheries were concerned, in which we should never forget to include also the settlement colonies, during the period under consideration British authority came increasingly to depend on a plurality of forms of compromise and collaboration with the non-Europeans and the white colonial populations, which made the government of Empire a multi-cultural affair. The acute awareness of the precariousness of their power induced even the late Victorians to adopt a wide range of attitudes towards the “Others”, their religions, their civilizations, among which the crudest forms of racialist, orientalist, differentialist or ornamentalist derogatory stereotypization could never predominate. But let’s not forget that the Empire had to confront a thorny legitimation problem on the domestic front too. During the first years of the transition to democracy and mass politics, the definition of Britain’s identity as an imperial nation-State and a global power was at the center of harsh party controversies, whose main contenders – liberals, radicals, conservatives, unionists, socialists – often put forward antithetical proposals and employed the imperial discourse in order to delegitimate their adversaries (as in the case of the epic battles between Gladstone and Disraeli, or during the Anglo-Boer war). In order that references to the Empire in public debate could become less controversial, more attuned to the consensual logic of British constitutional system of parliamentary government, it was necessary that a minimal consensus emerged among the parties about the value, the meaning, the 192 conditions of possibility of the Empire. The process took several decades, and went on very unevenly, but insofar it was successful, and successful it was indeed, so as to involve the Labour Party in the national consensus, it was the liberal imperialist tradition, in the long run, to provide the ground of convergence. The strong hegemonic potential and appeal of the liberal interpretation of the imperial idea may be inferred from the crucial circumstance that it was gradually appropriated by the post-Victorian monarchy. In a commentary written in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII «by His Majesty’s Gracious Command», for example, we find Greater Britain described as a political association of the most progressive communities never seen on the face of the Earth and the main prop of England’s «planetary hegemony». Later in the century, in George V’s Jubilee Speech, which was written by the great Whig historian George Macaulay Trevelyan and read in 1935 before both Houses of the Parliament and representatives of the Dominions and the Indian Empire, we find the imperial system as a whole described by the King himself as «a Commonwealth of peace» uniting in the same «family» a variety of nations, races, cultures and forms of government unheard of in the history of the world.
After the loss of their vestigial political powers in the first decades of the 19th century, the British Royals had learned quite soon that their legitimacy, prestige and influence depended on their capacity to transform themselves in living symbols of the values shared by all the national community. Therefore, when we come across monarchic propaganda echoing well-established tòpoi of liberal imperialist discourse, as in the two cases I’ve just quoted, we may guess that they had become acceptable to large parts of public opinion, at least in the sense that their content lent itself to be construed by each part according to its favourite version of the imperial idea106.
106 The last observation brings me to mention a further reason for paying more attention to liberal imperialist rhetoric than usually is made – a further reason which is suggested, first of all, by the comparative study of the imperial systems. Opponents of imperial authority in the peripheries of the system do not limit themselves to refute legitimizing discourses radiating from the centre. They are influenced by it, actively take possession of 193 Part of the strength of the liberal imperialist tradition was that it put at the service of the Empire a kind of legitimating rhetoric which was the product of a more or less conscious effort to translate an older Christian interpretation of Britain’s imperial vocation into a language more congenial to a cultural atmosphere of increasing secularization, scientificization and professionalization of public discourse107. A major common characteristic of the liberal imperialist narratives is the exalted pretension they put forward on behalf of the Empire. The British imperial system and its constituent parts were portraied as actual embodiments, or stages in a process of gradual implementation, of a set of values which were synthetically referred to as universal brotherhood, and therefore normative forms and modalities for the political and cultural unification of mankind in a single community or family both inside and outside the Empire. It was not only, in fact, that the Empire was putting into effect the ideal of universal fraternity within its formal boundaries (or its more direct sphere of informal influence). Liberal imperialists regarded it as a crucial agency, a laboratory, an exemplar model for still larger aggregations of peoples, and, ultimately, for the final instauration of the Republic of Man at planetary level. It is important to recall that as long as Britain was, or could nurture the illusion of being a global power, her elites maintained the attitude towards world affairs that Ronald Hyam has aptly termed «cosmo-plastic». They believed, in other words,
it, remould it for their own exigencies, if only to turn it as a weapon against the authority by pointing out the discrepancy between the words and the reality. 107 One further aspect of the liberal imperialist rhetoric which may have concurred to make it appealing to significant strata of colonial subjects too (see note 3) is that it spoke the language of a Christianity interpreted as a religion of humanity. Recent studies in the global history of ideas have shown the strong influence exerted by Western secularized religions of humanity incorporating Christian values and modes of thought (such as Idealism, Positivism, Mazzinianism) on liberal trends within non-Western religious traditions who, particularly in India and the Muslim world, were dealing with the problem of adapting their evolving systems of values and beliefs to a historical environment undergoing the changes accelerated by European domination. It seems to me a not implausible hypothesis that British liberal imperialism might have act, both directly and through the legitimating rhetoric he contributed to shape, as a similarly globalizing factor. 194 that Britain had both the duty and the resources (soft power resource, if no longer material and strategic resources) to play the role of architect and demiurge of a well-ordered world society. The specific objects envisaged by the 19th- and 20th-centuries liberal imperialism as the ultimate goal of Britain’s cosmoplastic exertions was the abolition of war and interstate anarchy, and the prevention of the potential conflicts with non-European civilizations engendered by Western expansion. As a means to this end, they advocated the reorganization of the ecumenical space in a world federation or a world society providing the institutional framework for the juridification of international relations and open to the participation of new self- governing national communities emerging from the modernization of societies rooted in the tradition of non-Western world-religions (like islamism and hinduism). The links between British liberal imperialism and internationalism, to which I’ve already alluded before, were to become quite apparent in the interwar years when a peculiarly British variant of internationalism emerged for a time as a now forgotten third alternative to both Wilsonian and Leninist anti-imperialist internationalism. The liberal imperialists of this period all agreed in rejecting the equation between the right of national self-determination and the right of absolute national sovereignty. Most of them, like Alfred Zimmern and Arnold J. Toynbee, expoundeded the cause of the League of Nations, imagining the League as a global counterpart to the newly- born British Commonwealth of Nations and regarding them as indispensable to each other. An influential minority, in face of the failures of the League, advocated an International Commonwealth and a World Government patterned on the United States, like in the case of Lionel Curtis and a handful of visionary constructive federalists. The general connection between liberal imperialism and internationalism, however, dated back to the nineteenth century. And Seeley had had a prominent part in forging it, pioneering in the early Seventies the idea of a federation of the United States of Europe aimed at the «abolition of the war» in the Old Continent and the application of the Christian principles to the international relations. In 195 subsequent years Seeley continued to conceive the Greater Britain as only instrumental to the future advent of as a world-wide federal State, favoured by a predictable reaction against the destructivity and exclusivism of contemporary nationalism and premised on the substitution of the modern European States- system with a Pax Anglosaxonica imposed on planetary scale by the combined strength of the two branches of the «English race», the British Empire and the United States. Seeley’s «universal State», however, was a in a sense a nation State. He believed that it would be the political expression of a «universal nationality», of a sense of group identity finally embracing all the branches of human family and made possible by their conscious sharing of a «universal religion», whose essential creed was already professed by the cultured elite of an actually existing «universal civilization», the «Western civilization». The future world federation, the federation of humanity, would be foreshadowed and complemented, therefore, by a new «universal church», built on the ruin of Roman Catholicism and centered around the spiritual hegemony of a reformed, latitudinarian Anglo-American Protestantism. To Seeley’s fertile historical imagination the universal federation presented itself as a post-modern or ultra-modern dialectical Aufhebung (sublation) of the trend towards fragmentation of the originary «unity of Europe» which had prevailed during the last four centuries, conserving and transcending at the same time both the thesis – the medieval cosmopolitanism of Church and Empire – and its antithesis – the political and ecclesiastical particularism that had taken its place. The «universal state», then, would fully recognize the rights of «local nationalities» and «national religions», but only as hierarchically subordinate «provinces of humanity».
Seeley seems to have been ready to admit also a confederated and self- governing pan-Indian national State among the larger local units of the Cosmopolis (like Canada or the United States of Europe), as the final outcome of the Westernizing and homogenizing influence exerted upon the Subcontinent by the British rule. The grand world-historical mission committed to Britain’s Asiatic Empire was that of overseeing the civilizational «marriage» between East and West and 196 leading India into the «modern city of God», by which Seeley meant the «universal civilization» binding together all the European peoples in a «brotherhood of great nations». Britain had to help the mosaic of Indian peoples and cultures to accomplish their momentous metamorphosis in yet another political, religious and ecclesiastical «province of humanity». These, at any rate, were to be the inevitable conclusions which successive generations of prominent British sympathizers of the Indian national movement felt themselves authorized to draw from Seeley’s teaching, acting as intermediaries between liberal imperialism and internationalism and Indian nationalists. Liberal imperialists never regarded the Empire as the only instrument of Britain’s cosmoplastic mission. Through the entire period under consideration, for example, they stressed the significance for «the whole future of the planet» – Seeley’s words – of an assumed «unique relation» between Great Britain and the United States. But it is only too obvious that, when they emphasized the instrumentality of Empire and British world power in furthering the unity of mankind, they aimed at legitimizing Britain’s imperial institutions and policies as a means to a higher purpose than sheer national greatness, power, prestige.
An integral feature of their argumentative strategy consisted in the attempt to put at the service of the imperial ideology a teleological vision of universal history «from a cosmopolitan point of view» (reminiscent of Kant’s philosophy of history). It focused on an evolutionary taxonomy of the forms of free government (formally analogous to Hegel’s philosophy of history), which started from the family or the clan society, passed through the intermediary stages of the city-state, the nation- state, the continental or transoceanic State, and culminated in the international federation or the League of Nations. Liberal imperialist philosophies of history also stressed, complementarily, the world-historical significance of the progressive growth in scale from the local to the global level of the human groups, their various forms of association, interaction, and geographical expansion (on the model, even in this case, of a still more ancient “ecumenical” approach to world history resuscitated by the early modern historiography of mission). 197 By representing their country as the foremost agent and her multiple cosmo- plastic activities as essential aspects and moments of the unification of mankind, liberal imperialist rhetoricians refashioned in the idiom of historical and political science the myth of providential empire, which had been central to the religious consciousness and public discourse of nineteenth-century Britain. Many among its most prominent intellectual adherents did not eschew, well into the 20th century, from explicitly identifying the tèlos of the secular progress, the republic of humanity, with the historical realization of the kingdom of God announced in the New Testament. They represented indeed the irenic planetary utopia, whose building was entrusted to Britain and her Empire by the logic of world history, as a historicized equivalent of the ultimate goal pursued by the man Jesus. Seeley, as we’ve seen, referred to the «universal civilization» destined to give birth to the future world-state and world-church as the «modern city of God». His most direct twentieth-century heir, Lionel Curtis, published in the Thirties an ambitious work of philosophy of history, bearing the double title Civitas Dei-The Commonwealth of God, tellingly changed in World Order in the first American edition. As the various titles clearly indicate, one intent of the book was to emphasize the evangelical roots of the International Commonwealth advocated by Curtis, who once described its constitution (in a very anti-Weberian manner, by the way) as the Sermon of the mount translated in political terms. Curtis had no doubts, in other words, that the kingdom of Heavens of which Jesus spoke in that occasion was a social system to be implemented on Earth and aiming at the union of all men in a single community. But Arnold Toynbee too, a liberal imperialist and internationalist who dissented from Curtis’s constructive federalism, conceived the ecumenical society, that he hoped could emerge from the experiment of the League of Nations, as the final outcome of the transformation of the civitas terrena in a «province of the kingdom of God», showing himself in agreement with Seeley’s and Curtis’s rejection of a dualistic interpretation of Saint Augustine theory of the two cities. This insistent recourse to religious language and imagery should not be dismissed as mere phraseology or sanctimonious irrelevance, because it reflected the deepest 198 convictions of the liberal imperialists and may provide an important clue to the understanding of the exact role played by their rhetoric in the metropolitan culture of empire. The thesis that the ethics of universal brotherhood embodied in the British Empire and in the future world State was coincident (in terms of both historical continuity and moral and emotional content) with the ethics of universal love taught and exemplarily incarnated by Jesus in his life and work and with its application to politics on its largest scale, implied a distinctly post-millenarian interpretation of Biblical eschatology. Christian liberal imperialists, in other terms, regarded the millennium, the apocalyptic «kingdom of the Saints» on earth, as the culmination of a natural plan of education of mankind unfolding in history and to be brought to completion by men’s own efforts. They rejected the pre-millenarian readings of the apocalyptic prophecies, so influential with the nineteenth-century British missionary movement and its attitude towards the Empire, which saw the millennium as only possible after Christ’s second coming, because of the irredeemable corruption of human nature and human world. This is to say that Christian liberal imperialist visions of the future world order were grounded upon an extreme form of anthropological optimism, emphasizing man’s capacity for perfection, salvation, heroic holiness and beatitude in present life. The essential lesson they felt authorized to draw from Jesus’ teaching and example was that every human being had to seek and could have attained complete personal self-fulfillment through an existence spent in the «service» of the others. This perfectionism brought the liberal imperialists and internationalists to distance themselves from any interpretations of the relation between Christianity and politics leading to quietism and indifferentism. They reacted with particular force against the denigration of the State, the civitas terrena, as the mere sphere of the libido dominandi, the sinful desire of ruling over others. It was not only that man’s capacity for goodness made all his activitities virtually susceptible of sanctification. Politics, according to Seeley, was «the greatest and the most important of the human pursuits». It offered to the individual, all the more 199 so if he was the citizen of a great Empire responsible for the future welfare of entire mankind, the opportunity to discharge his highest moral obligations, those that bound him to all other men as such, becoming not only an imitator Christi, but a co- worker with Jesus, a veritable coadiutor Dei in the building of the Kingdom of God. In a letter written in 1918, Lionel Curtis, who was a prominent imperial statesman too, being involved, among other things, in the drafting of the Government of India Act of 1919 and in the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the Irish Free State in 1922, confessed that he had the strong personal feeling that, in helping to bring to completion the project of the British Commonwealth, he was accomplishing the task of building the Kingdom of God upon Earth, that Jesus had initiated and committed to his followers. The millenarism and optimism of the liberal imperialists depended in its turn on very definite opinions on the nature of God and his relations with man. Their common position on these matters may be defined as Incarnationalist and testifies to the close links connecting imperial rhetoric to powerful currents of religious sensibility, which, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been remodeling the Christian identity of the British middle class, propelling a profound reorientation of British Protestant theology, and finding expression in other areas of public discourse, such as the debate on the social problem, and which the liberal imperialists managed to harness in the service of the legitimation of the Empire. The term “Incarnationalism”, taken in its narrower technical sense, refers to the dominant current of Anglican theology from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. The beginning of its rise to ascendancy is conventionally dated to the publication of a collective volume, entitled Lux Mundi. A Series of Studies in the Religion of Incarnation, edited in 1889 by one of the most the prominent Anglican theologians of his generation, Charles Gore. Gore and his friends belonged to the so-called High Church Party, which emphasized the sacramental role of the Church. But Lux Mundi was an attempt to synthesize the legacy of Anglo- Catholicism with various strands of “liberal” Protestantism. Gore himself had been a pupil of Thomas Hill Green (the Idealist philosopher) and later in life, in 1927, in a 200 series of lectures on Christ and Society, he described Seeley’s most influential religious work, Ecce Homo, an essay on the life of Jesus published anonymously in 1865, as an unsurpassed account of Jesus’ moral teaching. By “Incarnationalism”, therefore, scholars also mean a set of ideas held in common by a broader spectrum of theological schools, some of which dating back to previous decades of the 19th century, like the Christian Socialism of F. D. Maurice, the Broad Church (or latitudinarian) Anglicanism of Seeley himself, and the immanentist philosophy of religion of the Oxford neo-Hegelians. These schools shared, first of all, a common enemy – the theology of Atonement that had come to dominate the Protestant, and especially Evangelical thinking on social and political affairs in the period from the French Revolution to the publication of Seeley’s Ecce Homo, whose editorial success in the Sixties has been sometimes given a symbolic periodizing value as a symptom of the turning of the tide in favour of the Incarnationalist theology (in the broadest acceptation). Atonement theology placed an unbridgeable gulf between God and man, extolled the vicarious sacrifice of the Cross as the unique, superhuman act of love by which Christ gratuitously offered salvation to a damned race, which original sin had made utterly incapable of contributing to her own redemption. Incarnationalists, on the contrary, saw in Jesus the prototype of redeemed humanity, the supreme revelation of the possibilities of the humankind, of the divinity of man. This is what Seeley alluded to by entitling his book Ecce Homo, that in the King James version of the Vulgata reads Behold the Man. Pilate’s words might be construed as an intimation (unintentional indeed) to recognize in Jesus the Ideal Man, man’s higher self: «See what a man is, see what a man can become». To be more precise, Incarnationalists believed that, with Jesus, «what was godlike in man» had expressed itself to the full in a really and purely human life. Jesus had set a standard of perfection which was attainable for each man who followed his example. According to Maurice’s doctrine of «universal salvation», the true meaning of the Incarnation, of God becoming human, was that man’s nature had not become corrupt to the point of rendering him unable to triumph over sin in present life. The world-historical function of Jesus, 201 as interpreted by Seeley in Ecce Homo, was to help humanity to reach this goal by her own means. We have already considered which political consequences the liberal imperialists drew from their theological premises. I would only add that, at this level of discourse, intermediate between theology and political prescriptions, the rhetoric of Christian imperialism and internationalism exactly coincided with the rhetoric of late 19th- century Christian socialism, which was also strongly indebted towards Incarnationalism in the larger acceptation and had to become the hegemonic school of social teaching within British Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century. Both rhetorics focused on the idea of the Kingdom as a system of right relationships progressively taking shape in history and to be realized, in the intentions of Jesus himself, in the present world. Both rhetorics refuted any interpretations of Christianity leading to exclude any part of human behaviour from the field of morality or confining religious experience to the exclusive dimension of individual interiority. And both rhetorics described the international commonwealth, or the national community recovering its lost solidarity – broken from the industrial revolution – through economic reforms, as the result of the reorganization of the respective spheres of conduct by free acts of will on the part of men capable to conform themselves to the will of God as revealed in and through Jesus. The contribution given by British Protestant social thought to the ideology of the welfare state is only too well known108. Historians have also investigated the role played by Incarnationist social Christianity in shaping and giving expression to a new middle class Incarnationist ethos and religiosity and in recruiting her support for liberal social reform policies. But Incarnationalism helped to provide the rising welfare state with a much-needed legitimation resource also more indirectly, by contributing to the formation of a kind of non-denominational and immanentist Christianity which seems to have been the main beneficiary of the so-called process
108 The very phrase “welfare state” having been coined or at least popularized during the Second World War by the archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who was an heir to the Lux Mundi tradition. 202 of secularization in Britain as far as the public sphere and public discourse are concerned. This consensual Christianity celebrated the sacred value of “service”, was ritualized in the liturgies of the monarchy, and aspired to the rank of semi- official civic religion of the nation and of the Empire. Nothing analogous has been attempted to clarify the role that Incarnationist imperial Christianity might have played in reflecting and canalizing the middle-class changing sense of the sacred for the benefit of the imperial State and in attracting imperialism into the orbit of the emerging national religious consensus. But the whole topic of the impact of Christian liberal imperialism on the metropolitan culture of Empire has been surprisingly little studied, and what is known about it finds it hard to penetrate into the general historiographical awareness. Suffice it to say that in a recent, valuable work of synthesis on religion, politics and society in Britain in the long 19th century (Providence and Empire, by Stewart Brown) Seeley is treated as a very significant mid-century writer on Christological and ecclesiological matters from a Broad Church point of view, but Seeley the imperialist, Seeley the prophetic historian, is not mentioned ever once! There are important exceptions indeed, like the studies of Gerald Studdert-Kennedy on the complex interconnection and interaction between British Christianity and British India in the interwar period, where the significance of the Incarnationalist tradition is rightly stressed. Studdert- Kennedy does full justice to Seeley the providential historian and political scientist, but what almost disappears, in this case, is Seeley the religious thinker! I’m concentrating my attention upon Seeley because he obviously forms, so to speak, a class apart among the Christian liberal imperialists, having been a chief contributor on his own account to the process of remaking of middle-class religious identity both signalized, reflected and propelled by the turning of mainstream Protestant Christology «from atonement to incarnation». His strictly religious writings, which were constantly intertwined with the historical and political ones, provide the key source for sounding the relation between liberal Christianity and liberal imperialist rhetoric at its profoundest level.
203 Seeley, to be sure, was in no sense a theologian. When he hastily wrote Ecce Homo, in the summer of 1865, he had been the Professor of Latin at London University College for a couple of years and was engaged in a critical edition of Livy’s history of Rome. He wanted Ecce Homo to be read as a truly historical account of the «plan» or «design» of moral regeneration of mankind pursued by Jesus in founding the Christian Church. The book enjoyed immediate success, was reviewed by such Victorian eminences as John Henry Newman or William Gladstone, and seems to have been universally read and discussed. In 1909, fifteen years after Seeley’s death, Ecce Homo status as a popular “world classic” received a kind of semi-official recognition by its inclusion in the Everyman’s library. The reasons of such an impact, however, are not to be found in any original contribution on the part of Seeley to the so-called «quest for the historical Jesus». Seeley’s attitude towards the Biblical sources was extremely conservative. He claimed that the evidence he could draw from the Gospel enabled him to penetrate into the very mind of Jesus, so that, from the purely scholarly point of view, Ecce Homo came very soon to be regarded in academic circles as «one of the least “scientific” books never written on a historical topic», more of the nature of a historical novel. Now, in my belief, if the publication and the reception of Ecce Homo has title to be regarded as a significant event in the religious history of Victorian England, it is just because Seeley managed to translate the basic Incarnationist assumptions of the Broad Church and Christian Socialist theology (under whose sway he had fallen during the 1850s in the process of reacting against an orthodox Evangelical family upbringing) into a powerful historical myth about the true human «character» and teaching of Jesus. That myth proved so convincingly realistic and appealing to the British general educated public because it exactly reflected their changing social values, aspirations, and intellectual needs. Ecce Homo, in other words, offered a suitable definition of the meaning of being a Christian to a generation which was experiencing both a crisis of belief, being called to adapt its faith to the scientific world view and the new German currents 204 of Biblical criticism, and an increasing gap between her moral sensibility and the ethical implications of the more traditional religious teaching. And to provide such an answer through a historicist and positivist approach to the religious problems was exactly the task that Seeley had set to himself in composing Ecce Homo. According to the image of the historical Jesus depicted in Ecce Homo, to be a Christian did not imply the faith in any dogmatic creed. The essential feature of a Christian existence (such as that exemplarily incarnated by Jesus) was a practical conduct of life entirely and ascetically devoted to the satisfaction of the virtually innate desire of each man to benefit all others even at the cost of the greatest personal sacrifices. This unconditioned and unlimited altruistic attitude and behaviour follows altogether spontaneously from a correspondent natural sentiment of universal love, the «enthusiasm of humanity», which has its ultimate root in the distinctively human faculty of sympathy – «the power to feel by reflection what other men feel» – and which Seeley identified with «the godlike in man». Every individual entirely possessed of such an enthusiastic passion is made by it not merely a virtuous, but a holy man partaking of the divine, because it silences his lower animal, self-centered passions, preserving him from the very temptation of doing harm to others. Christian morality, that could not consist in anything else than the specific principles of conduct inwardly inspired by universal love, was an active morality, dictating a whole new table of positive duties. The most obvious duty dictated by the Christian feeling of unlimited altruism was the law of philanthropy, by which Seeley meant the enthusiastic desire to improve the physical well-being of others. As applied to modern conditions, Christian philanthropy implied a commitment to scientifically oriented social reform aimed at removing structural causes of poverty and suffering (including war) and at making available the best opportunities of satisfying bodily wants (in the largest acceptation) to the greatest number. But in order to grasp the full political implications of Seeley’s Incarnationalism we have to concentrate our attention on what he regarded as the supreme duty of positive morality, the duty of each man of edifying others. The highest norm of life 205 for a Christian eager to benefit his fellow men was obviously that which prescribed to him of helping them to reach and conserve in their turn the same enthusiastic condition of feeling. Seeley named it «the law of edification», because every human being in which the «enthusiasm of humanity» is fully operative becomes an element of the fabric of a societas perfecta, whose members seek personal self-fulfillment in devoting themselves to the self-fulfillment of each other. To establish such a society was the purpose Jesus had had in mind in founding the Church, which was conceived by him, however, only as a means, although an indispensable one, for the final unification of mankind in the same community. Seeley defined therefore a life of active citizenship in the secular Kingdom of God as the summum bonum of human existence. Salvation cannot be achieved by the individual in isolation and without any aid from his fellow-creatures, not only because the altruistic impulses need to be satisfied through the actual service of others, but also because the enthusiastic passion only can be kindled and fueled by stable personal contacts and intimate affective connections with other individuals actuated by the same feeling. Christian charity corresponded only to the highest form of development of the natural love for all men inherent in the divine faculty of sympathy, which grows in proportion to the moral worth of the individuals one encounters in ordinary social interactions and the ethical standard prevailing in a given community. In its earlier stages of historical development, natural love incarnates itself, at its best, first, in the paternal, or the filial, or the brotherly love, then, in the civic hero who immolates itself for the pòlis or the country. It inspires two inferior forms of morality, such as family morality and national or «ethnic morality», which resemble each other in three respects: they are exclusive, not recognizing any obligations towards individuals external to the community; they mostly prescribe negative duties (like in the case of the Mosaic law) under threat of various kind of punishments and sanctions; they require indeed from the individual the unconditioned, disinterested devotion to the common good, but only in exceptional cases.
206 Family and national morality, however, have another and more fundamental characteristic in common in that they are religious systems of morality (as distinguished, for example, from philosophical systems of morality) and depend on a religion of Man. In such cases, moral behaviour draws inspiration from a condition of feeling, which Seeley calls «worship» and which consists in an attitude of permanent admiration mixed with gratitude towards individuals (both real and mythical) who embody in a paradigmatic way the axiological values of the community. This crucially implies that in primitive family-based societies, ancient republics and nation-States, patterns and incentives of ethical behaviour are inculcated in the individual through the personal ascendancy of charismatic heroes, backed by social pressure to conform to their example. According to the anti-Hobbesian principles of Seeley’s political science, government authority ultimately depends on that unique peculiarity of human «sociability», the capacity for self-devotion109, which finds expression, in this case, in the willingness of the governed to sacrifice themselves to the common interest if and when necessity requires it. Every vital State, therefore, presupposes (and is at the same time) a Church, whether organized or not, a community worshipping and fostering the worship of the same human Gods. The political group, then, being so interested to promote the kind of virtues of which it vitally needs, plays an essential preparatory role in the process of moral education of mankind, which enters its final stage, the stage of universal morality, with the foundation of the Christian Church. Christian morality differs from family and ethnic moralities because it is universally comprehensive rather than exclusive, prescribes new positive duties and infuses a new spirit in the old negative ones, making both of them independent from fear of punishment or hope of reward, regards altruistic self-devotion as the rule rather than the exception. But also Christianity is far from being a mere system of
109 According to Seeley, the fact that the unions of men may count on man’s capacity for self-devotion is the distinguishing feature between human and mere animal sociability. 207 ethics: it is a moral religion of man (like Buddhism), centered on the loving worship and grateful admiration of an exemplar human hero embodying in a perfect way some socially valuable human quality. And Christianity too avails itself of social and institutional means to bring his chàrisma to bear upon the practical life of the votaries. With the advent of Christianity the object worshipped by the religion of Man finally becomes the Ideal man as incarnated in Jesus. Universal love, a love finally extended to all mankind across its division in tribal and national groups, is not conceivable as a love for what each man actually is, taken in his concrete individuality, but only as a love for what every man could become, taken in his abstract universality. The world-historical role played by Jesus in the moral education of mankind consisted then in revealing a new standard of human perfection, which has rendered each human being worth of enthusiastic loving. But Jesus, according to Seeley, made much more than this. He employed his own human excellence in erecting that system of hero-worship which was indispensable if the new universal morality was to take roots in men’s consciousness. Jesus deliberately nurtured his charismatic influence, owed to his human excellence and after the model of the hero-king of the Jewish tradition, in order to promote the cult of his own personality and to cement the «allegiance» of his followers, and founded the Church as a corporate agent for the perpetuation and expansion of his personal influence through the evocation, imitation, application to the changing circumstance of his example. In Ecce Homo, in other words, Jesus is portrayed as a kind of political genius and Carlylean Hero, who makes use of the most ordinary and elementary religious agencies and mechanisms of cultural, social and political cohesion (individual chàrisma and its institutionalization) for giving birth to the universal church. The Church, on its turn, is the greatest and most perfect creation of human «sociability», of man’s capacity for self-sacrifice, which finds its anterior expression, as said before, in the family and the political community. The States and the republics of
208 the Antiquity were therefore, according to Seeley, «the germs and embryos» of Christian brotherhood110. Seeley repeatedly refers to the Church as a State, a commonwealth, a republic, and not in a metaphorical sense. What he wants to point out is the fact that also the Church «claims unlimited self-sacrifice on the part of his members», differing in this from other kinds of human associations and partaking of the essential characteristic of the State. The universal church, on the other part, is properly the specialized organization evolved by humanity for the cultivation of universal love, for developing in free consenting individuals the natural sense of what is right. To perform this task she doesn’t need to wield any direct political authority, or identify herself with the State. The fundamental reason why, on the other part, the spiritual city of God constantly strives throughout history for permeating the civitas terrena and transforming it in the republic of humanity, so that the universal Church portends the political unity of mankind, is that, as we have seen, the religion of Man is inseparably linked with the complex web of family relations, class relations and international relations in which each individual spent his life. Their ethical content determines the level of human worth which the individual has the chance to experience, to admire, to worship, and therefore the degree of intensity and the range of inclusivity of his natural sympathy and love. In this non-materialistic sense, society contributes to shape the character of the men that the Christian enthusiasts aim at edifying, on which the degree of success of their efforts depends. In the light of Seeley’s Incarnationalist perspective, which is at the roots of all subsequent attempts to build a Christian sociology in Britain, all ordinary human relations acquire a properly sacramental value, and every person who is involved in them, and can have a voice in the historical process by which they are continuously transformed by human choices, virtually becomes a mediator, a channel of grace. Christianity,
110 Seeley writes that the «union of politics and morals» is among the essential characteristics of Christianity.
209 therefore, cannot avoid and will always irresistibly pushed to concern herself with “the world”. The application of Christian principles to the relations among the States, which for Seeley, as we know, can be achieved only on the basis of the substitution of international anarchy with a universal federation, is made imperative not merely by the philanthropic horror at the consequences of war. The lesson of contemporary history is that, under «a permanent condition of international hostility», the modern sentiment of national solidarity shows a tendency to pervert itself into a form of patriotism reminiscent of the exclusiveness of the ancient, pre-Christian «ethnic morality», becoming an obstacle to the development of the «enthusiasm of humanity». Every national Church, therefore, acting as an ecclesiastical «province» of the not yet self-conscious and organized modern universal Church, must assuredly teach the duties of patriotism incumbent upon the citizen of a particular State in connection with its peculiar «vocation» in world affairs. But, in discharging this task, the Church will never leave the faithful in doubt that patriotism may be only a «step», although a necessary one, «to the higher morality», the «universal morality», and that «the ultimate lesson of morality» is «the Christian unity of mankind». Fifteen year after he wrote these last words quoted, Seeley the scientific historian discovered and communicated to his fellow-countrymen that, by a happy but at the same time challenging coincidence, the «national vocation» that England had received from history was to carry out to completion that task of giving «unity to mankind» which had been undertaken for the first time in late antiquity, under conditions much less favourable to its success, by the alliance between Christianity and the universal Empire of Rome.
210 3
Eric Hobsbamw:
The Last of the Universal Historians?*
There is more than one reason why the historians, and the Italian historians in particular, must feel deeply grateful towards Richard Evans for his painstakingly researched and engagingly written life of Eric Hobsbawm. According to a famous dictum by Edward Carr, before studying a historian’s works we would do well to study the historian himself111. Until today, when confronted with this task in the case of Hobsbawm, we had to rely on a mass of very uneven critical literature exclusively based on his copious published writings112. For the rest, we had to be satisfied with Hobsbawm’s own autobiography, Interesting Times: a remarkable book on its own right indeed, in composing which, on the other hand, the author had deliberately restricted himself to what he defined the «personal-political» dimension, to the almost complete exclusion of his more intimate and private Erlebnisse113. Professor Evans’ full-length and all-round biography draws on the vast amount of papers left by Hobsbawm (among which the more than six hundred pages of the manuscript diary he intermittently kept, mostly in German, from 1934 to 1951) in
* These pages are an expanded version of my contribution to the Book Roundtable on Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Live in History (London, Little, Brown, 2019), Naples, Scuola Superiore Meridionale, November 14, 2019. 111 E.H. Carr, What Is History?, The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge, January-March 1961, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, pp. 26, 54. 112 The invaluable Eric Hobsbawm Bibliography (https://www.hobsbawm.shca.ed.ac.uk/) also contains a short, not altogether satisfactory section of selected critical and biographical writings on Hobsbawm’s life and work (https://www.hobsbawm.shca.ed.ac.uk/category/appraising-hobsbawm). 113 E. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. XIV. 211 order to cast light on his «inner life» and «personal views, feelings and experiences» too, and provides therefore an indispensable new tool for applying Carr’s injunction to one among the most globally influential historians of our times114. Italy is among the countries where, since the early 1960s, Hobsbawm’s books have been more regularly translated (and in a few cases originally published) and have enjoyed a relatively vast popularity among academics, university students, politicized and educated readers115. All the same, we should be careful not to take it for granted that the present generation of Italian students and younger researchers are fully aware of the groundbreaking and long-lasting impact he made on an astonishing variety of disciplinary fields, international research trends and scholarly as well as ideological controversies. Hobsbawm was a protagonist in the renewal of British labour history after 1945116. He sparked the debates on the general crisis of the seventeenth century and the effects of the first industrial revolution upon the standard of living of the English people117. He pioneered the study of the «pre-political» forms of action, thinking and mobilization of the subaltern classes and the social history of jazz118. He composed a now classical fourth-volume history of the «long nineteenth» and
«short twentieth» centuries119. He explored previously neglected aspects of the
114 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 8, 439. 115 A.M. Rao, Transizioni. Hobsbawm nella modernistica italiana, in «Studi Storici», LIV (2013), 4, pp. 761-790; A. Di Qual, Eric J. Hobsbawm tra marxismo britannico e comunismo italiano, Venezia, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020. 116 E.J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. 117 Id., The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century, in «Past and Present», 5, 1954, pp. 33-53; Id., The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, Part Two, in «Past and Present», 6, 1954, pp. 44-65; Id., The British Standard of Living, 1790-1950, in «The Economic History Review», new series, X (1957), 1, pp. 46-68. 118 Id., Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959, p. 2; Id., The Jazz Scene, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1959 (published under the pseudonym of Francis Newton); Id., Captain Swing, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969 (with G. Rudé); Id., Bandits, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1969. 119 Id., The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; Id., The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975; Id., The Age 212 history of Marxism120. He launched or contributed to launch the ongoing vogues of the “invention of tradition” and “nations and nationalism” studies121. He was involved in the acrimonious post-Cold War disputes about the meaning of the Soviet and Communist experience and the state of the world after its collapse122. But what I would like to emphasize today is that, even beyond all the achievements I’ve just listed, Hobsbawm played a central and in some respect unique role in the general development of professional historiography during the second half of the twentieth century. Through the paradigmatic example given with his empirical researches and the hypotheses advanced in his more generalizing essays, his frequent interventions in methodological discussions123, his leading involvement in the workings of the key institutions of the discipline (scientific journals, societies and conferences, university teaching, publishing initiatives etc.), Hobsbawm established himself, in the decades after World War Two, as one of the chief followers and promoters of the «historiographical revolution» started in the interwar period by the «Annales» and their British counterparts and allies grouped around the «Economic History Review» and the London School of Economics and Political Science (among whom Michael Postan, Hobsbawn’s much-admired academic mentor at Cambridge in the second half of the 1930s)124. The economic and social historians operating on the northern side of the English Channel after the Great War had aimed to emancipate history from its traditional identification with the «past politics». They proposed to transform its study in an
of Empire, 1875-1914, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987; Id., Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994. 120 Id., How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism, 1840-2011, London, Little, Brown, 2011. 121 E. Hobsbawm, T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983; E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 122 Id., Age of Extremes; Id., Intervista sul nuovo secolo, with A. Polito, Bari, Laterza, 1999; Id., Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism, London, Little, Brown, 2007. 123 Id., On History, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997. 124 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 99-102; P. Burke, The French Historical Revolution. The «Annales» School, 1929-89, Cambridge, Polity, 1990. 213 «histoire intégrale» engaged in a cross-fertilization with the social sciences and open to the contribution of Marxism, provided that Marxism was employed as a canon of historical interpretation rather than an empirically unfalsifiable and ideologically motivated general theory of society enslaved to party interests125. Hobsbawm took part in the process of thematic, conceptual and methodological reorientation advocated by his senior colleagues as an exponent of a new generation of middle and lower middle class Marxist professional intellectuals who had converted to revolutionary Communism in the Red Decade in response to the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler to power and what they were disposed to regard as the success of Stalin’s Soviet Union in giving birth to a «new civilization» and in providing a bulwark against the rising tide of fascist barbarism126. Recent research in the newly born field of the transnational and transcultural «history of history» suggests that this peculiar «Marxism of intellectuals», as Hobsbawm himself termed it, contributed very significantly to the globalization of contemporary historiographical trends. In several extra-European countries the very beginnings of a modern tradition of scientific historiography sometimes coincided with the reception and adaptation of a variety of Marxist models127. In Western
Europe, and especially in Britain, the Marxist professional historians belonging to Hobsbawm’s generation cooperated to the enlargement of disciplinary horizons envisaged by the «Annales» School under an umbrella paradigm capable of gathering
125 T. Tagliaferri, La nuova storiografia britannica e lo sviluppo del welfarismo. Ricerche su R.H. Tawney, Napoli, Liguori, 2000, pp. 251-309. 126 B. Webb, S. Webb, Soviet Communism. A New Civilization?, 2 vols., London, Longmans, 1935; T. Tagliaferri, «Storia scientifica» e reinterpretazione della Guerra Civile inglese nella prima produzione di Christopher Hill (1938-1957), tesi di laurea in Storia della storiografia, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, A.A. 1992-1993, pp. 82-187, 238-258. 127 E.J. Hobsbawm, Gli intellettuali e l’antifascismo, in Storia del marxismo, 4 vols., Turin, Einaudi, 1978-1982, vol. 3, Il marxismo nell’età della Terza Internazionale, II, Dalla crisi del ’29 al XX Congresso, p. 475; D. Wolf, A Global History of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011; D. Woolf (ed.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 vols, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011-2012, vol. 5, Historical Writing since 1945, edited by A. Schneider and D. Woolf, passim. 214 together a much wider range of scientific approaches and ethical and political stands (from the New Left to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s moderate conservatism)128. As rightly underlined by Professor Evans in the conclusion of his book, Hobsbawm’s individual «contribution to the rise of the so called (…) societal history cannot be divorced» from a series of «collective» experiences he shared with various networks of «colleagues, comrades and friends»129. The first decade of his career coincided in particular with his membership to the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain130. The Group disintegrated after the vast majority of them (not including Hobsbawm and other key-figures like the older Maurice Dobb and Arthur Leslie Morton)131 left the Party in 1956. But their collaboration survived the disruption of the Group thanks, above all, to the broader forum provided by «Past and Present», the «Journal of Scientific History» that some members of the Group had conceived and launched in 1952 as the meeting ground for a sort of «popular front of historians» uniting Marxist and non-Marxist scholars132. Both before and after 1956, then, in loose alliance with other schools of innovators, Hobsbawm and the British Marxist historians were at the forefront of the efforts to bring into the purview of the discipline those aspects of the economic, social, political and cultural past, and those actors of historical change, which their
128 C. Hill, R. Hilton, E.J. Hobsbawm, Past and Present: Origins and Early Years, in «Past and Present», 100, 1983, pp. 3-14; H.R. Trevor-Roper, Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean, in «The Journal of Modern History», LIV (1972), 4, pp. 468-479 129 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 470, quoting and subscribing to Hobsbawm’s self-assessment in 2008. See E. Hobsbawm, Geschichtswissenschaft: Impulse für Menschen, nicht nur Fußnoten, in G. Botz, H.C. Ehalt, E.J. Hobsbawm, J. Kocka, E. Wangermann, Geschichte: Möglichkeit für Erkenntnis und Gestaltung der Welt: Zu Leben und Werk von Eric J. Hobsbawm, Vorträge im Wiener Rathaus anlässlich der Verleihung der Ehrenbürgerschaft der Stadt Wien an Eric J. Hobsbawm am 22 Januar 2008, Wien, Picus Verlag, p. 69-78. 130 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, in M. Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes. Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, pp. 21-48. 131 The authors of two foundational texts of the Group – Morton’s A People History of England (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), and Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, Routledge, 1946). 132 J. Obelkevich, Past and Present: Marxisme et histoire en Grande-Bretagne depuis la guerre, «Le debat»,́ 17, décembre 1981, p. 91. 215 predecessors had, in their opinion, unduly neglected. The Marxist historians devoted much energy to device both the categories and the technical tools which were necessary to make these innovations feasible in terms of their conformity to the empirical and evidential rules of professional historiography. What characterized as more specifically Marxist or Marxist-inspired Hobsbawm’s and his comrades’ (or former comrades’) participation in the historiographical revolution of the twentieth century was, above all, their determination to overturn the conventional elitist bias of academic historiography, by «returning agency» to the popular masses and by reinstating the people’s struggles at the very center of historical change. At the same time, they put a strong emphasis on the interconnectedness and mutual interaction between the class conflicts, the political dynamics and upheavals, the cultural, religious and intellectual movements related to the historical protagonism of the common people133. Furthermore, and this is especially evident in the case of Hobsbawm, whose homonymous «Past and Present» articles started the still ongoing and expanding General Crisis debate134, Marxism was a major source of inspiration and encouragement to macro-historical generalization in a period of increasing specialization, providing a key-component to the background of the post-Cold War revival of world history135. This last circumstance risks being obscured by the predominant «Eurocentrism» of Hobsbawm’s approach to global history rightly underlined by Professor Evans136. It is therefore not out of place to observe that,
133 H.J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis, new edition, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995; C.A. Bayly, Ashin Das Gupta, in «Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient», XLIII (2000), 1, p. 16. 134 G. Parker, L.M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edition, London, Routledge, 2005; G. Parker, Global Crisis. War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, abridged and revised edition, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017. 135 J. Osterhammel, World History, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5, Historical Writing since 1945, pp. 93-112. 136 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 345. It is important to observe, however, that in his last years Hobsbawm sympathized with Christopher Bayly’s attempt to overcome the Eurocentrism of the classical Marxist approach to world history by giving prominence to the «interactive» character of the global modernization. See Hobsbawm’s noteworthy Preface to C.A. Bayly, 216 when we read Christopher Bayly’s first venture in the field of global history, his book on the rise of the Second British Empire, which was written in the second half of the 1980s, we come across the notion of a «‘general crisis’» that upset the entire chain of great Islamic empires extending from the Maghreb to Indonesia, and prepared the ground for the advent of European domination in India and elsewhere. What Bayly was overtly attempting to do here was to transpose and adapt to a hemispherical scale a thesis that had been tested on a pan-European scale for more than three decades in the discussions about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in order to highlight a parallel and analogous dynamics of change in the early modern societies of the Eurasian Orient. One of the reasons which can explain the world- wide resonance of the work of Hobsbawm and the Anglo-Marxist professional historians is that they elaborated conceptual tools which proved particularly well- suited, at least at an initial stage, to the needs of those of their colleagues who were beginning to try to «return agency» to non-Europeans actors too137. A further important peculiarity of Hobsbawm’s involvement in the historiographical revolution appears more directly linked to the passionate ethical and political commitment which ultimately was at the root of all his other methodological options. I’m alluding to his sensitiveness to the need of communicating specialized historical knowledge beyond the borders of the scientific community and exploring ways of presenting the past that could actually reach a much wider public of «lay» or «general readers»138.
La naissance du monde moderne (1780-1914), Paris, Les Éditions de L’Atelier, pp. 13-14, and T. Tagliaferri, Bayly’s Imperial Way to World History, in M. Griffo, T. Tagliaferri, From the History of the Empire to World History. The Historiographical Itinerary of Christopher A. Bayly, Naples, FedOAPress 2019, pp. 81, 88, 89. 137 C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830, London, Longman, 1989, pp. 24, 61. For further examples of Bayly’s tendency to adopt Marxist or Marxistisant categories and terms at this stage in his research itinerary, see T. Tagliaferri, Christopher Bayly e «the return of universal history», in Id., La persistenza della storia universale. Studi sulla professione di storico, Roma, Bordeaux, 2017, p. 53, n. 96. 138 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 293, 342; H.R. Trevor-Roper, History: Professional and Lay, An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 12 November 1957, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957. Hobsbawm figures prominently in Peter J. Beck’s Presenting 217 For Hobsbawm and the British Marxist professional Historians, the education of the people, the «real maker» of history139, to a form of active, militant, non- subaltern citizenship, was part and parcel, indeed the very purpose of scientific historiography. In striving for a nouvelle histoire dressed in the left-wing garb of a people’s history, they imagined to reconciliate a refashioned academic professionalism with their previous existential decision to live the life of the Marxist intellectual longing for the unity of theory and praxis. The resulting tension between the sincere adherence to the professional code and the introjected imperatives of ideology constitutes a Leitmotiv in Hobsbawm’s biography, as exactly diagnosed by Professor Evans: «Throughout his career as an historian, Eric was pulled one way by his Communist and, more broadly, his Marxist commitment, and another by his respect for the facts, the documentary records and the findings and arguments of other historians whose work he acknowledged and respected»140. In 1978 Hobsbawm himself testified that at no time the readiness of the members of the Historians’ Group to spontaneously adopt the stern attitude of Bolshevik «cadres» was more apparent than in the course of the debates they held, at the beginning of the Cold War, about the social meaning of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. The British Communist Party, in an attempt to legitimize its opposition to the Labour Government which was implementing the Welfare State, decided to celebrate as a major political event the tercentenary of the abolition of the «feudal-absolutist» monarchy in 1649, which the Group, in an official statement published in the party press, duly interpreted as the highpoint of the necessarily revolutionary leap forward of English society to capitalism141.
History. Past and Present (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 69-90), as a case study illustrative of the Marxist «presenter of the past». 139 C. Hill, Marxism and History, in «The Modern Quarterly», new series, III (1948), 1, p. 59. 140 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, p. 389. 141 The 16th-17th Century Section of the Historians’ Group of the C.P.G.B., State and Revolution in Tudor and Stuart England, in «Communist Review», July 1948, pp. 207-214; Hobsbawm, The Historians’ Group, pp. 30-31. See D. Parker (ed.), Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution. Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940-1956, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 2008. 218 The risk of succumbing to what a ferocious critic, Hugh Trevor Roper, branded, not altogether unfairly, as a «Procustean» handling of historical evidence, which contradicted the norms of their métier and stiffened their historical materialism into an a priori dogma, was obviously much higher when the Communist professional historians were engaged in the self-imposed task of creating a body of Marxist works specifically «written for the people». This short-lived experiment in «“popular” historical writing» aimed at countervailing the sedating influence of the history that the people learned at school and at emphasizing the presence, continuity and centrality in English national history of a «non-gradualist tradition» to which the Communists would have been the most faithful heirs142. This particular kind of historiographical literature is well exemplified by Christopher Hill’s famous 1940 essay on The English Revolution, which was reissued in second edition in 1949, or by The Good Old Cause, a collection of documents, also published in the year of the tercentenary, in which Hill selectively used and commented extracts from contemporary sources to buttress his thesis that the Civil War had been the English «bourgeois revolution», providing an easy target for polemical attacks by academic reviewers143.
Hobsbawm was fully involved in the most ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful collective attempt realized by the Group to give birth to a historiography that could be at once scientific and «popular». The Good Old Cause was part of a series of sourcebooks published under the title “History in the Making” and the general editorship of Dona Torr (one of the most influential member of the Group). In 1948 Hobsbawm contributed to the Series the short volume relating to the founding of
142 H.R. Trevor-Roper, Marxism and the Study of History, in «Problems of Communism», V (1956), 5, pp. 40-41; A.L. Merson, The Writing of Marxist History, in «Communist Review», July 1949, pp. 593, 596; Hobsbawm, The Historians’ Group, p. 43 (quoting Christopher Hill). 143 C. Hill, The English Revolution, in C. Hill (ed.), The English Revolution, 1640: Three Essays, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1940, pp. 9-82; C. Hill, E. Dell (eds.), The Good Old Cause. The English Revolution of 1640-60: Its Causes, Course and Consequences, Extracts from contemporary sources, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1949, p. 30. 219 the modern British labour movement in the last two decades of the nineteenth century144. This relatively minor episode goes strangely unmentioned in Professor Evans’ book145. But its significance, in my view, lies in the fact that, according to Hobsbawm’s own later testimony, the relative fiasco of the “History in the Making Series” and some other similar editorial ventures made the Marxist professional historians fully aware of the absence of the very first condition for the take-off of their historiographical project, namely a sympathetic readership recruited among the ranks of politicized trade-unionists and the Workers’ Educational Association, owing to the «declining radicalism of the British people after 1950»146. From the beginning of the following decade, the Anglo-Marxist academic historians devoted therefore a growing portion of their energies to disseminate their views within the ranks of their professional community. Their most important common initiative was the foundation of «Past and Present» in 1952. The experience of this review reveals that, under the latitudinarian definition of the historian’s task outlined by Hobsbawm and his colleagues in the introduction to its first issue, the tension between professionalism and Marxist commitment could well result in the refashioning of Marxism into a heuristic model of increasing sophistication and its integration into an enlarged paradigm shared by the Marxists with other currents aiming at historiographical renovation which were autonomously attempting to absorb, in a more eclectic way, selected components of the Marxist theory147.
144 E.J. Hobsbawm (ed.), Labour’s Turning Point, 1880–1900, Extracts from contemporary sources, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1948. 145 Professor Evans had briefly referred to Labour’s Turning Point, 1880–1900, in his Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, 1917-2012, «Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy», XIV (2015), p. 217. 146 Hobsbawm, The Historians’ Group, p. 29; J. Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain. A Commentary, London, Faber and Faber, 1988, p. 115. 147 T. Tagliaferri, «Diventare storici anche del tempo presente»: la crisi del 1956 e la storiografia marxista britannica, in «Studi Storici», XLVII (2006), 1, pp. 146-157. 220 What remained unfulfilled, throughout the 1950s, was the persisting ambition of the British Marxist Historians to address and educate a broader non-specialist readership. This only began to become feasible in the next decade, as masterly reconstructed by Professor Evans in the substantial part of his volume justly dedicated to Hobsbawm’s activities and triumphs as «paperback writer». The expansion of the secondary and university education, coupled with the fresh waves of radicalization of the 1960s-1970s, generated a sizeable audience of scholars, students, general readers for an altogether new kind of popular historiography which acted at the same time as a powerful medium for the haute vulgarisation of the historiographical revolution at international level too. Hobsbawm was a key- protagonist in the invention of the multilayered language which was necessary to address such a diverse constituency, so that his books stand out as essential documents for the study of the changes that have been affecting the global historical culture of our age148. Here I come to a last, in my view the most unique aspect of Hobsbawm’s contribution to the general reorientation of contemporary historiography, namely his work and achievements in the specific field of world history149. In 2005 The Folio
Society of London has republished Hobsbawm’s tetralogy (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes) under the unifying title The Making of the Modern World in its collection of fiction and nonfiction «classics»150. Only time will show if Hobsbawm will obtain or retain that status of a “classic”, to be counted among the fifty or hundred «key thinkers» on history «von Homer bis Hobsbawm», to which he has been often elevated even before his death
148 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 287-340. Some reviewers have taken exception to the detailedness of this aspect of his book but, from the standpoint of the history of historiography at least, one is compelled to disagree with them. 149 H.J. Kaye, Eric Hobsbawm on Workers, Peasants and World History, in Id., The British Marxist Historians. 150 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Making of the Modern World, London, The Folio Society, 2005. 221 in 2012151. In the meanwhile, we are on solid ground, I believe, in regarding Hobsbawm’s four volumes as comparable to the most significant and representative specimens of a particular category of «great historical enterprises»152. Seen from a longer-term perspective, Hobsbawm’s history of the modern world stands in fact at the confluence between two major trends in intellectual history – the twentieth century historiographical revolution and an older, thin line of authors running throughout contemporary historiography from Ranke onwards, of which Hobsbawm could be considered perhaps the last heir. What all these scholars have in common, whatever their obvious differences, is the firm belief that the ultimate goals of the historical profession should be, first, the explanation of the development of humanity as a whole, second, the production of synthetic and intelligible overviews of the human past which would transform this knowledge into the possession of mankind at large153. In Hobsbawm’s case, this interpretation of the professional historian’s task was intimately connected (as we are now in the position to better understand thanks to the biographical materials put at our disposal by the work of Professor Evans) with his precocious, adolescent’s choice to become a «Marxist intellectual» searching for personal salvation in the community life of the global missionary «Church» directed from Moscow154. What the young Hobsbawm absorbed from his way of experiencing Marxism was, first of all, a set of meta-empirical and mythistorical assumptions which never ceased to pervade and shape his approach to the past. The most fundamental one was an ontological notion of the unity of human history – the idea, I mean, according to which history was a single secular process of self-realization of man in time whose
151 M. Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers in History, 2nd edition, London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 178-188; W. Berthold, M. Kessler, Klios Jünger: Hundert Historiker-Porträts von Homer bis Hobsbawm, Leipzig, Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 2011. 152 D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises, London, Nelson, 1962. 153 T. Tagliaferri, Dimensioni della storiografia contemporanea, vol. I, Nel Secolo della Storia, Napoli, Giannini, 2013, pp. 151-153. 154 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 64, 205. 222 essential content was «progress», understood in the sense of an objectively given possibility to advance towards the goal depending, in the last resort, on human conscious efforts155. From the pages of Hobsbawm’s diary we discover that, during his school years in London, well before undertaking a historian’s career, Hobsbawm developed the habit of organizing his historical knowledge by combining together every bit of relevant information he came across into the comprehensive framework of what he continued to compare for a time to an edifice of «bricks» – «the house of my idea of history», as he noted in 1940. «While I read and listen», he had written in 1935, referring to the conventional teaching of history at school,
«I put what is useful into my mental apparatus. Gradually I see (…) how a picture of history is crystallizing out of it all. At the moment I just see individual contours – in some instances cornerstones, in other just simple rows and groups of bricks. The longer I study, the more I hope to enlarge my picture. Of course, you never put it together completely, but perhaps one day I’ll have all the cornerstones there. Thanks to the dialectic, I’m on the right way».
But this holistic perception of the subject-matter of history (in which the whole, the vision of the overall plan of the house, intuitively and logically preceded the parts, the single factual bricks) was only one aspect of Hobsbawm’s more general positivist-romantic attitude to reality. To be a Marxist meant in fact, for the seventeen years old Eric, to possess a wonderfully «all-embracing», cosmic «Weltanschauung»156. Still sixty years later, in a 1995 interview, Hobsbawm dwelt on the enduring traces left upon him by his original approach to Marxism. Having been asked to explain why he had recently described himself as a «paleo-Marxist», Hobsbawm remembered how he had grown up as a Marxist in a tradition, leading from Engels to the Soviet Marxism of the Thirties, which believed that Marxism could be an interpretation of the entire universe, not simply of politics or human society.
155 E.J. Hobsbawm, Introduction, in K. Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1964, p. 12. 156 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 49 (my Italics), 56, 144. 223 And he added that he had never found easy to escape from this combination of historical and dialectical materialism in subsequent decades157. To be sure, in an article written for «Rinascita» in 1987, Hobsbawm recognized his debt towards Antonio Gramsci as the author who had helped the Marxists of his generation to free themselves from the interpretation of Marxism «as a variant of determinist positivism» codified in the notorious Chapter Fourth of the Stalinist Short Course of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938)158. Indeed, what clearly emerges from his papers is that Hobsbawm’s juvenile enthusiasm for the DIAMAT and the impersonal forces making for the socialist Last Judgment was inflected from the start by a belief and admiration in the creative powers of man. This humanist faith, on the other part, tended to focus on the heroic deeds of a minority of global revolutionaries and was tempered by a certain distrust in the ability of the mass of mankind as a whole (its 95 per cent, Hobsbawm wrote in 1934!) to rise above the level of the «average human being» only by their own forces, in an admixture of stentorian determinism and elitist voluntarism which was after all typical, in different combinations, of the Marxism of the Third International159.
But these are only few examples of the multitude of hints scattered in the book, in particular in its first half. I’ve dwelt a little on the seemingly more abstract facets of Hobsbawm’s biography because I wanted to draw attention to the profound relevance of Professor Evans’ work to the history of ideas too. Lewis Namier once wrote that, underlying the ideas, there is a music of the emotions «to which the ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality»160. I don’t share in any way Namier’s disparagement of ideas. But there is some truth in the first, more
157 M. Hanagan, L. Grande, N. Mohajer, B. Moazami, History in the “Age of Extremes”: A Conversation with Eric Hobsbawm (1995), in «International Labor and Working-Class History», 83, Spring 2013, pp. 19-20. 158 E.J. Hobsbawm, Per capire le classi subalterne, in «Rinascita», 28 febbraio 1987, p. 23. 159 Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, pp. 50, 51. 160 L.B. Namier, Human Nature in Politics, in Id., Personalities and Powers, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1955, p. 4. 224 constructive part of his maxim. The very rare merit of Professor Evans’ work, due in part to the extraordinary richness and literary quality of its sources, in part to the mastery with which the biographer managed to make the most of Hobsbawm’s unpublished papers, is that his book provides invaluable insights into the emotional roots of the thoughts of a great historian, allowing the reader to understand his ideas – so to say – from the inside out. It remains to be hoped that the music emanating from so many pages of Professor Evans’ book will not go lost in a prospective Italian translation that we must look forward to see very soon on the shelves of our country’s libraries and bookshops.
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