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The Age of Empire The Age of Empire EJ. HOBSBAWM VINTAGE BOOKS A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. NEW YORK To the students ofBirkbeck College First Vintage Books Edition, April 1989 Copyright © 1987 by E.J. Hobsbawm All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in Great Britain, by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, and in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobsbawm, EJ. (EricJ.), 1917- The age of empire, 1875-1914 / E.J. Hobsbawm.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-679-72175-4 (pbk.) i. History, Modern— 19th century. I. Title. D359.7.H63 1989 909.81 —dci9 Manufactured in the United States of America 579B86 CONTENTS Illustrations ix Preface xiii Overture i I The Centenarian Revolution '3 2 An Economy Changes Gear 34 3 The Age of Empire 56 4 The Politics of Democracy 84 5 Workers of the World 112 6 Waving Flags: Nations and Nationalism 142 7 Who's Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie 165 8 The New Woman 192 9 The Arts Transformed 219 IO Certainties Undermined: The Sciences 243 Ii Reason and Society 262 12 Towards Revolution 276 '3 From Peace to War 302 Epilogue 328 Tables 34i Maps 353 Notes 361 Further Reading 379 Index 39i CHAPTER 12 TOWARDS REVOLUTION Have you heard of Sinn Fein in Ireland? ...Itisa most interesting movement and resembles very closely the so-called Extremist movement in India. Their policy is not to beg for favours but to wrest them. Jawaharlal Nehru (aged eighteen) to his father, 12 September 1907' In Russia the sovereign and the people are both of the Slav race, but simply because the people cannot bear the poison of autocracy, they are willing to sacrifice millions of lives to buy freedom... .But when I look at my country I cannot control my feelings. For not only has it the same autocracy as Russia but for 200 years we have been trampled upon by foreign barbarians. A Chinese revolutionary, c. 1903-42 You are not alone, workers and peasants of Russia! If you succeed in overthrowing, crushing and destroying the tyrants of feudal, police-ridden landlord and tsarist Russia your victory will serve as a signal for a world struggle against the tyranny of capital. V.I. Lenin, 1905' I We have so far considered the Indian summer of nineteenth-century capitalism as a period of social and political stability: of regimes not only surviving but flourishing. And indeed, if we were to concentrate only on the countries of'developed' capitalism, this would be reasonably plausible. Economically, the shadows of the years of the Great Depression lifted, to give way to the brilliantly sunny expansion and prosperity of the 1900s. Political systems which did not quite know how to deal with the social agitations of the 1880s, with the sudden emerg- 276 TOWARDS REVOLUTION ence of mass working-class parties dedicated to revolution, or with the mass mobilizations of citizens against the state on other grounds, appeared to discover flexible ways of containing and integrating some and isolating others. The fifteen years or so from 1899 to 1914 were a belle tpoque not only because they were prosperous and life was exceedingly attractive for those who had money and golden for those who were rich, but also because the rulers of most western countries were perhaps worried about the future, but not really frightened about the present. Their societies and regimes, by and large, seemed manageable. Yet there were considerable areas of the world in which this clearly was not the case. In these areas the years from 1880 to 1914 were an era of constantly possible, of impending or even of actual revolution. Though some of these countries were to be plunged into world war, even in these 1914 is not the apparently sudden break which separates tranquillity, stability and order from an era of disruption. In some - e.g. the Ottoman Empire - the world war itself was merely one episode in a series of military conflicts which had already begun some years earlier. In others - possibly Russia and certainly the Habsburg Empire - the world war was itself largely the product of the insolubility of the problems of domestic politics. In yet another group of countries - China, Iran, Mexico - the war of 1914 played no significant part at all. In short, for the vast area of the globe which thus constituted what Lenin in 1908 acutely called 'combustible material in world politics',4 the idea that somehow or other, but for the unforeseen and avoidable intervention of catastrophe in 1914, stability, prosperity and liberal progress would have continued, has not even the most superficial plausibility. On the contrary. After 1917 it became clear that the stable and prosperous countries of western bourgeois society themselves would be, in one way or another, drawn into the global revolutionary upheavals which began on the periphery of the single, interdependent world system this society had created. The bourgeois century destabilized its periphery in two main ways: by undermining the old structures of its economies and the balance of its societies, and by destroying the viability of its established political regimes and institutions. The first of these effects was the more profound and explosive. It accounts for the difference in historical impact between the Russian and Chinese revolutions and the Persian and Turkish. But the second was more readily visible. For, with the exception of Mexico, the global political earthquake zone of 1900-14 consisted mainly of the great geographical belt of ancient empires, some reaching back into the mists of antiquity, which stretched from China in the east to the Habsburgs and perhaps Morocco in the west. By the standards of the western bourgeois nation-states and empires 277 THE AGK OF EMPIRE these archaic political structures were rickety, obsolete and, as the many contemporary believers in Social Darwinism would have argued, doomed to disappear. It was their breakdown and break-up which provided the setting for the revolutions of 1910-14, and indeed, in Europe, the immediate setting for both the coming world war and the Russian Revolution. The empires which fell in these years were among the most ancient political forces in history. China, though sometimes disrupted and occasionally conquered, had been a great empire and the centre of civilization for at least two millennia. The great imperial civil service examinations, which selected the scholar-gentry that ruled it, had been held annually with occasional interruptions for over two thousand years. When they were abandoned in 1905, the end of the empire could not but be close. (In fact it was six years away.) Persia had been a great empire and centre of culture for a similar period, though her fortunes fluctuated more dramatically. She had survived her great antagonists, the Roman and Byzantine empires, resurfaced again after conquests by Alexander the Great, Islam, Mongols and Turks. The Ottoman Empire, though very much younger, was the last of that succession of nomadic conquerors who had ridden out of Central Asia since the days of Attila the Hun to overthrow and take over the eastern and western realms: Avars, Mongols, various brands of Turks. With its capital in Constantinople, the former Byzantium, the city of Caesars (Tsarigrad), it was the lineal heir of the Roman Empire, whose western half had collapsed in the fifth century AD but whose eastern half had survived - until conquered by the Turks - for another thousand years. Though the Ottoman Empire had been pushed back since the end of the seventeenth century, it still remained a formidable tri- continental territory. Moreover the sultan, its absolute ruler, was regarded by the majority of the world's Moslems as their khalif, the head of their religion, and as such the successor of the prophet Mohammed and his seventh-century conquering disciples. The six years which saw the transformation of all three of these empires into constitutional monarchies or republics on the western bourgeois model patently mark the end of a major phase-of the world's history. Russia and the Habsburgs, the two great and shaky multinational European empires which were also about to collapse, were not quite comparable, except insofar as both represented a type of political structure - countries run, as it were, like family properties - which increasingly looked like some prehistoric survival into the nineteenth century. Moreover both claimed the title of Caesar (tsar, Kaiser), the former through medieval barbarian ancestors looking to the Roman Empire of the east, the latter to similar ancestors reviving the memories of the Roman Empire of the west. In fact, as empires and European 278 TOWARDS REVOLUTION powers both were comparatively recent. Moreover, unlike the ancient empires, they were situated in Europe, on the borders between the zones of economic development and backwardness, and thus partly integrated from the start into the economically 'advanced' world, and as 'great powers' totally integrated into the political system of Europe, a continent whose very definition has always been political.* Hence, incidentally, the enormous repercussions of the Russian Revolution and, in a different way, of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire on the European and global political scene, compared with the relatively modest or purely regional repercussions of, say, the Chinese, Mexican or Iranian revolutions. The problem of the obsolete empires of Europe was that they were simultaneously in both camps: advanced and backward, strong and weak, wolves and sheep. The ancient empires were merely among the victims.
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