A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 1 a cape of asia A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 2 A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 3 A Cape of Asia essays on european history Henk Wesseling leiden university press A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 4 Cover design and lay-out: Sander Pinkse Boekproductie, Amsterdam isbn 978 90 8728 128 1 e-isbn 978 94 0060 0461 nur 680 / 686 © H. Wesseling / Leiden University Press, 2011 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 5 Europe is a small cape of Asia paul valéry A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 6 For Arnold Burgen A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 7 Contents Preface and Introduction 9 europe and the wider world Globalization: A Historical Perspective 17 Rich and Poor: Early and Later 23 The Expansion of Europe and the Development of Science and Technology 28 Imperialism 35 Changing Views on Empire and Imperialism 46 Some Reflections on the History of the Partition of Africa, 1880–1914 51 Imperialism and the Roots of the Great War 65 Migration and Decolonization: the Case of The Netherlands 76 european identities What is Europe? 91 Realism and Utopianism 95 France, Germany, and Europe 99 The American Century in Europe 104 Eurocentrism 108 A Peace Loving Nation 112 european civilization European Ideas about Education, Science and Art 119 History: Science or Art? 130 Two Fin de Siècles 134 Johan Huizinga and the Spirit of the Nineteen Thirties 146 Notes 161 Acknowledgements 170 About the Author 172 Index of names 173 A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 8 A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 9 Preface and Introduction This is a book of essays about European history. The title and the motto are taken from a text by the French philosopher and writer Paul Valéry. These few words date from 1919 and can be seen as the shortest summary of the new mood that came over Europe in the interbellum years. Until 1914 nobody had seen Europe as a Cape of Asia. Rather, Asia was seen as a backyard of Europe, a region to be conquered, ruled and exploited by Europeans as they brought the light of modern, i.e. Western, civiliza- tion to these backward areas. The same was true, and to an even greater extent, for Africa, which had almost entirely been submitted to European rule during the last decades of the 19th century. While Asia was consid- ered a stagnated and backward part of the world, European thinkers also realized that once, long ago, the first great civilizations had flourished there. Such ideas did not exist about Africa. In the eyes of the Europeans, the dark continent had never played a role in world history. Indeed, it did not have a history at all, at least not before Europeans arrived there. The most famous formulation of this opinion was given by the German phi- losopher Hegel who wrote: ‘Africa […] is no historical part of the World […]’ (see: ‘Eurocentrism’). This Eurocentric world view was the result of the dominant position Europe had acquired over a great number of years. And that dominant position was seen as proof of the superiority of European civilization. There are many formulations to be found of this European feeling of supremacy but probably none more pertinent and powerful than the words that John Henry Newman wrote about this in his The Idea of a University. According to Newman, Western civilization ‘has a claim to be considered as the representative Society and Civilization of the human race, as its perfect result and limit, in fact’. In ‘European Ideas about Edu- cation, Science and Art’, I discuss these ideas at length. Newman formulated these ideas extremely forcefully, but they were held then by virtually the entire Western intellectual world. Not surpris- ingly, this resulted in a Eurocentric view of world history, one in which non-European nations only entered the stage when they were confront- ed with and subjected to the Europeans (see: ‘Eurocentrism’). After all, 9 A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 10 history in its modern, scientific form was a European invention anyway. The essay ‘History: Science or Art?’ describes the way modern, scientific history was developed in 19th-century Europe. When Newman gave his lectures on The Idea of a University, European supremacy was nearing its zenith. This was the result of a centuries-long process. It began in the 1490s with the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama and ended in 1945. The first essay of this book, the one on ‘Glo- balization’, offers an overview of this process and the historical interpre- tations of it. My argument here is that what we today call globalization extends back a long way in history. It is the result of two long-term pro- cesses, the expansion of Europe and the Industrial Revolution. The expansion of Europe is a subject that I have studied for well over three decades. The first book I published on the subject, Expansion and Reaction, dates from 1978. In this book I defined the expansion of Europe as ‘the history of the encounters between diverse systems of civilization, their influence on one another and the gradual growth toward a global, universal system of civilization’. Today I have some doubts about this. I am not a believer in Huntington’s theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’, which I consider too simplistic, but I also have some doubts about Fukuyama’s ‘End of history’ because I see the potential for new ideological controver- sies, for example about ecology and sustainability, in other words about the question of how to deal with Planet Earth. However this may be, the point is that according to this definition, European expansion includes more than colonization and imperialism alone. It also includes informal forms of empire, economic interconnections and cultural exchange. One could argue that the most important form of European expansion was the creation of the New World, a new Europe overseas that, even after it acquired political independence, was very strongly connected to the old Europe. The languages spoken in the New World are English and French, Spanish and Portuguese, the religion is Christianity and the civilization European. The expansion of Europe became ever more powerful after the Industrial Revolution. This revolution was rooted in science and tech- nology and resulted in the division of the world into rich nations and poor nations. That division still persists today. The contributions on ‘The Expansion of Europe and the Development of Science and Technology’ and ‘Rich and Poor: Early and Later’ are about these developments. Euro- pean expansion culminated in the colonization and imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among historians of European expansion, there exists a certain division of labor between those specialized in this period 10 a cape of asia A Cape of Asia.indd | Sander Pinkse Boekproductie | 10-10-11 / 11:44 | Pag. 11 of colonization and imperialism and the others, whose main interest is in the earlier years. I belong to the first group. My publications in this field include The European Empires, 1815–1919, a textbook, and Imperialism and Colonialism, a book of essays. The articles ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Changing Views on Empire and Imperialism’ offer an overview of the debate on the subject of imperialism and some new insights into it, respectively. Whereas initially imperialism was considered as having originated in response to economic problems in Europe (the need for foreign markets for European capital and commodities and for raw materials for Europe’s industry), from the 1950s political motives received more attention. European imperialism was, of course, often connected with warfare. Generally speaking, the colonial powers were successful in these con- flicts. The idea of moral and technical superiority that resulted from this series of nearly always successful battles had some influence on the way Europeans fought the Great War (see: ‘Imperialism and the Roots of the Great War’). The most spectacular, though not the most important feature of Euro- pean imperialism was the partition of Africa. In little more than twenty years, that entire continent was divided up among European powers and submitted to European rule. In 1991 I published a book on this subject that was later translated into English and several other languages. The essay ‘Some Reflections on the History of the Partition of Africa’ offers some afterthoughts on the matter. The First World War did not bring an end to European colonial rule. On the contrary: in 1919 Europe ruled over a larger part of the world than it had ever done before. When the remains of the Ottoman Empire in the Near East were divided between France and Britain, the domain of European rule reached its greatest extent. The self-confidence of the colonial powers was still intact. As a matter of fact, it was only then that the French became conscious of the fact that they had become a world power, and enjoyed it.