By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Inner Asian Tradition of Empire-Building

At the start of this website we already described among others how by the early 1750’S the shell of the Mughal Empire, which had provided a framework of political unity for much of the subcontinent, was being cracked. In the inland heart of the empire, Mughal power was assaulted from two sides. Iranian and then Afghan adventurers pursued the old Inner Asian tradition of empire-building using the 'tribal' manpower of Inner Asia to impose their rule on the agrarian plains - just as the Mughals had done before them (or the Manchus in China). Their aim may have been to control the commercial traffic between northern India and Central Asia, still one of the world's great trade routes. Their attacks coincided with the decisive advance of Maratha power in western India: a Hindu confederacy of 'gentry' states bent on extending its rule and land-revenue system into the Mughal heartland on the North Indian plains. Under the stress of social and economic, as well as political, change, Mughal power was breaking down (or mutating) into a looser regime, coexisting with the new 'sub-empires' scrambling for territory, trade and revenue. In maritime India there was a similar threat. Here the agent of change was the rapid expansion of the commercial economy and overseas trade. New wealth and new revenues gave regional sub-rulers more ·and more freedom from Mughal supervision, and made them less and less willing to pay the tribute they owed. But this growing autonomy came with a price. Would-be state-builders had to keep a close watch on the merchants and bankers where funded their power - and to keep a sharp eye on the European interests who had tightened their grip on India 's overseas commerce. This was all the more vital when the Europeans showed signs of importing their quarrels into the Indian subcontinent. Getting themselves ready to fight each other turned the French and British into local military powers, and injected an explosive new element into a volatile political scene.

Between the 1750s and the 1830s the long equilibrium of cultures and continents was swept away by what we now call the Eurasian Revolution. During these years the European states gained for the first time a commanding lead over the rest of Eurasia and acquired the means to project their power into the heartlands of the great Asian empires, and not just their maritime fringe. Looking back at this change, historians have usually been struck most of all by the great transformation in economic potential from which the Europeans had profited. The 'Industrial Revolution' in technology and economic organization seemed the obvious source of the Europeans' new power. But there was also a revolution: in geopolitics,in culture and in economics.

These aspects were closely connected and mutually dependent. Each reinforced the others' effects, extending their range and increasing their force. Commercial expansion sharpened the rivalry of Europe 's maritime states. And this in turned helped to spread the 'industrial' methods through which European manufacturers hoped to copy these desirable products in order to compete and survive. But Europe 's overseas trade could not look after itself. The European traders' advantage lay in their system of credit and their command of the sea lanes. But before 1750 across much of Eurasia their position was far from secure. Without 'industrial' goods, their competitive position was weak as we have seen in the previous article.

To make matters worse, the cost of their fleets and fortresses where cripplingly high, mainly because of intra-European rivalry. Plus, in both India and China, the two greatest markets for European trade, commercial access depended upon the agreement of rulers who might choose to reject it as a political danger (as happened in Bengal) or restrict it drastically (the 'Canton system' in China).

As a result, a great geopolitical shift was required before the Europeans could reverse the commercial imbalance of their Asian exchanges.Hence before the arrival of steamships, European technology conferred little advantage.

Thus in the mid eighteenth century, an uneasy equilibrium still characterized the relations between the states and empires of the European, Islamic and East Asian worlds. That was also true of the balance of advantage between all the Eurasian powers on the one hand and the indigenous societies of the Outer World - in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and the Pacific - on the other. That is not to say that the position was static. The frontier between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire had moved backwards and forwards since the early years of the century. But, although the Ottomans had been forced to fall back since their last great invasion of Europe, in the 1680s, they had recovered ground lost before the 1730’s and had stabilized their defence against Austria 's earlier advance.

In the Outer World, too, there was little to hint that a decisive shift towards European hegemony was about to take place. The stand-off between the French and the British in North America (a function in part of their European relations), and the French alliance of convenience with the interior Native Americans, had halted the line of European settlement along the eastern foothills of the Appalachians.

Eurasia's equilibrium had not meant peace. Between 1700 and 175'0, as well as the wars between Iranians, Afghans, Marathas and Mughals, there were major wars between the European states, between Europeans and Turks, and between Turks and Iranians. But after 1750 the geopolitical scene was troubly transformed. The scale and intensity of Eurasian conflicts became much greater, and their 'knock-on' effects outside the Old World much more disturbing. The reasons behind this remain somewhat mysterious. But part of the answer may perhaps be found in the explosive convergence of two longer-term trends. Both were connected to the quickening pace of the commercial economy in the mid eighteenth century. The first was the pressure to secure and extend the markets and trades whose value was rising and protect them from rivals, or predatory intruders. This pressure was felt (and transmitted) by Asian merchants and rulers, by American traders and settlers, and by European monarchs and ministers. A spate of short wars over land and trade might have been the result. But as a second, it was commercial growth that sparked the critical phase.

The precocious development in transport and finance helps to explain why so much of the world's trade was conducted between the countries of the West. But there was a third element that helped to make Greater Europe the most commercially dynamic part of the world: the returns on its human capital. After 1830, the trickle of migration out of Europe swelled gradually until by the 18 50’s it had become a flood. Over 8 million people left Europe between 1850 and 1880, almost all of them for the United States. This great migration had a double effect. It relieved the Old World of the worst of its rural overcrowding and transferred its population surplus to a region where impoverished migrants could become producers and consumers on a larger scale.

A striking fact about America was its vast reservoir of 'free' land waiting to be exploited by a mobile army of white settlers and (in the South until 1865) their black slaves. The cost of obtaining this land by force or purchase from other claimants (French, Mexicans, Native Americans) was astonishingly low. In fact America 's peculiar growth path was extremely influential. For all the scale of its farming frontier, America 's industrial and financial capacity made it a part of the Atlantic 'core' which drove the expansion and integration of Europe. Its trade helped enrich its Atlantic partners, but without consuming too much of their available capital. Its innovations in agricultural, mining, hydraulic and railway technology were readily diffused to other frontiers of European expan­sion. The telegraph was an American invention. So were three other devices that played a not unimportant part in the European conquest of Afro-Asia: the revolver (invented by Samuel Colt) and the Gatling and Maxim guns. In communications and weaponry, American ingen­uity added hugely to the arsenal of Europe 's colonizing technique. But perhaps one key aspect of America 's economic history was even more decisive.

For almost all the nineteenth century, raw cotton was America 's largest export, making up half the total from 1830 to 1860, and as much as a quarter as late as 1913. After 1830, with the rounding-out of the ' Cotton Kingdom ' in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, production rose sensationally under the regime of plantation slavery.

But it was after 1830, and not before, that Europeans began to strengthen their grip on the other continents and pave the way for the global supremacy that seemed theirs for the taking by the 1880’s.This great expansionist drive was fuelled by three sources of energy: cultural, commercial and demographic. The plausibility of the new universalistic models of social, commercial and cultural progress proffered by (to take only British examples) David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (whose History of India appeared in I8I7) removed old doubts about the Europeans' ability (and right) to reshape drastically the alien societies into which they had crashed or crept. Even in the late eighteenth century, the early British conquistadors in India had still been over-awed by the longevity and sophistication of the subcontinent's cultures. Across much of the world, the Europeans' desire to 'globalize' markets, sell their manufactures, and fill their ships with homeward cargoes, now, created a new form of commercial imperium that fell well short of colonial rule. Frequently, merchants and their governments gained commercial entry by agreements with local rulers and elites on terms that were, or seemed, mutually profitable. The merchant, after all, could sell only if he also bought.

This aim was pursued through a careful diplomacy of checks and balances. For example France supported a party in Poland to blunt the incipient domination of Russia and the European ambitions of the Romanov tsars. It allied with Prussia to maintain pressure on Austria, and with the Ottoman Empire to frustrate the expansion of both Austria and Russia. The Bourbon 'alliance' between France and Spain (both of whose monarchs were Bourbons) was meant to defend the status quo in the Mediterranean and Italy. Since the French and Spanish fleets together usually outnumbered the British, it also served to limit Britain 's maritime prospects in the Atlantic basin. Thus the 'conservative' primacy of France served unwittingly to uphold the larger equilibrium in Eurasia and the Outer World. It helped to guard the Ottoman Empire against an overwhelming combination of European enemies. It checked the influence of the English East India Company in South Asia. It blocked the way to the North American interior from the coastal settlements of the British colonies with an 'Indian' diplomacy directed from the impregnable fortress at Quebec.

The French system was far-flung, but its burdens were great. France had to be the greatest military power in Europe and maintain a standing army poised to intervene in Germany against Austria or Prussia. It had to compete with the British navy to preserve the Atlantic 'balance' and protect its colonial empire in the Caribbean, where its valuable sugar colonies rivalled the British. France must also be a Mediterranean power, with a fleet at Toulon to watch its interests in Italy, and keep the Near Eastern balance between the Ottomans and Austria - France 's main rival in Europe. Where this commercial understanding worked best, as in parts of Latin America, there was little incentive for the European states to scheme about conquest. Where local cooperation was not forthcoming and the ruler was determined to exclude foreign trade or regulate it closely (the most notorious case was China), the merchants' programme demanded government action. But even in China (where the British government obliged) this forcible intervention - in the opium wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60 - created little more than a maritime condominium in a series of 'treaty ports' scattered along the China coast and up the Yangtze. Here Europeans enjoyed privileged freedom to trade. But penetrating inland China still seemed dauntingly difficult in the 1870’s.

In India, where colonial rule was rapidly extended before 1850, the detail was different but the pattern similar. British merchants in their 'agency houses' (there were forty-seven in Calcutta in 1835 concentrated on the export-import trade in the main port cities and supplied the needs of the tiny foreign population in the interior. But they made little attempt to penetrate the up-country trade or the vast agricultural economy. Almost everywhere the danger of commercial failure was high. Extremes of climate, unreliable information, volatile currencies, losses at sea or political turbulence multiplied the ordinary risks of long-distance trade so that 'mortality' among European firms in India and China was heavy. Europeans, acquired enclaves, bases, strongpoints and emporia for trade - such as Aden, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Lagos or St Louis in Senegal. Their commercial activity and political influence was radiated out from these and other bridgeheads. Treaties were made - or imposed - to prohibit slave-trading or to extirpate piracy. Quasi-protectorates propped up pliant rulers - often with ambiguous or unsatisfactory results. But no general scheme of imperial partition seemed desirable, necessary or practicable until the 1880s. The main exceptions were found in India (where special conditions applied), parts of Central Asia close to Russia's Caspian provinces, in the far north-west and far south of Africa, and in South East Asia, where the British, French and Dutch advanced uneasily into the Malay peninsula, Indochina and the 'Outer Islands' of the Indonesian archipelago. It was the huge enlargement of these 'uncer­tain empires' in the new global conditions of the 1880’s that triggered the highest stage of Western dominance before the crash of 1914.

In many parts of the world, the frontiers of Greater Europe were vague and imprecise - zones of interaction with Africans and Asians, rather than of purposeful incorporation. The missionary's and trader's frontiers depended on the cooperation of locals, whether in pursuit of god or mammon. By 1880 they had conquered or occupied almost the whole of what became the forty-eight states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) of the USA. In Canada they had filled up the eastern farmlands and were poised (the delay proved considerable) to press on into the prairies. In Australia, 2 million settlers had fanned out over most of what could be used for agriculture or sheep-raising by the 1880’s, leaving only a vast, dry empty interior. In New Zealand, where settlement had barely started in 1840, most usable land had been occupied by 1880, except for the redoubts of Maoridom in North Island. In all these places, the flood of white settlement had driven all before it: removing or excluding the native populations, fencing them into 'reserves'.

The main exceptions were found in India (where special conditions applied), parts of Central Asia close to Russia's Caspian provinces, in the far north-west and far south of Africa, and in South East Asia, where the British, French and Dutch advanced uneasily into the Malay peninsula, Indochina and the 'Outer Islands' of the Indonesian archipelago. It was the huge enlargement of these 'uncertain empires' in the new global conditions of the 1880s that triggered the highest stage of Western dominance before the crash of 1914.

When in the mid-1750’s France was being challenged by both the rising power of Britain in the West, and Russia , in the East, the result was a continental and maritime war that broke the back of Bourbon diplomacy. The Seven Years War of 1756-63 smashed French primacy, but replaced it with nothing. The age of war and revolution that followed in lasted more than fifty years, until a new and experimental five-power 'concert' (of Britain , France , Russia , Prussia and Austria ) emerged: It the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15.In Eastern Europe and in Middle Eurasia, the main beneficiary of France 's decline was the imperial Russia of Catherina the Great (r.1762-96). Without the shadow of help from its usual protector, the Polish republic was eaten alive - in stages. The first partition was in 1772, when Russia, Austria and Prussia each took a bite. The Russian share was the eastern borderlands. What remained of Poland was now de facto a Russian protectorate under a client king, Stanislalas Poniatowski (one of Catherine the Great's lovers). The Polish agreement left the Russians free to complete their war against the Ottomans (1768-74) and gain their long-cherished objective: a firm foothold on the Black Sea at Kberson, under the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji in 1774. In 1783 they annexed the Crimcan peninsula and made themselves masters of the Black Sea 's north shore. Grigori Potemkin (Catherine the Great's favourite and lover) unleashed his furious energy as viceroy of 'New Russia'. Another war against the Ottoman Empire (fought by the Turks in a vain attempt to reverse their losses) brought a new round of prizes. Odessa was founded in 1793 to be the metropolis of this new southern empire. The road had been opened to conquer the Caucasus, and perhaps even Constantinople. It was a critical phase in the ascent of Russia as a global power.

The course of British expansion was much less heroic. The British had felt the strain of war, and the pressure to compromise was strong. In this mood of financial stringency, the burden of a new American empire was almost an embarrassment. The thought of new commitments there was horrifying. So British ministers made haste to tranquillize their new acquisitions, not to develop them. They appeased the French Canadians in the new province of Quebec, and refused to set up the elective assembly demanded by incomers from the thirteen colonies. Quebec was to be governed as a military colony to supervise the old French sphere in the American Midwest. To the fury of the American colonists, a 'Proclamation Line' was drawn along the Appalachian mountains. Far from being the spoils of American victory, the "interior was to remain an 'Indian' country, closed to American settlers and policed by imperial officials in the interests of peace, and financial economy. As if this was not enough, the British were also determined to force the American colonists to meet some of the costs of imperial defence. The colonists were to pay imperial taxes -like the notorious stamp duties. Colonial trade was to be more closely regulated to enforce the navigation laws prohibiting foreign trade where it bypassed ports in Britain and to suppress the widespread practice of smuggling.

The sequel is well known. The settlers rebelled. The British mismanaged what was anyway a difficult war with a long and uncertain supply route across the North Atlantic. When they failed to deal quickly with the colonial revolt, their Atlantic triumph of 1763 became increasingly frail. Their maritime rivals, eager to restore the Atlantic balance, seized the chance for revenge. In 1778, three years after the beginning of the colonial war, France, Spain and the Netherlands joined in.

By now Captain Cook had revealed a vast Pacific world of which Europeans had had barely an inkling. The societies and cultures of the Pacific islands struck the European public as a tropical Eden, a paradise of leisure and innocence. But Cook's revelations had more than a cultural significance. His voyage to the Pacific coast of modern Canada hinted that a new trade route could be opened between the fur-bearing regions of North America and a lucrative market in China. His greatest discovery, however, lay in the South Pacific. Cook exploded the myth of a Great Southern Land stretching south to the bottom of the world. Instead, he accurately charted the island continent of Australia, and on 22 August 1770 claimed its eastern half for Britain. He had already circumnavigated New Zealand. Within ten years of Cook's death the British government had established the first of the convict settlements in eastern Australia, perhaps partly to tighten its grip on the southern sea route that ran between the Indian Ocean and China. By the 1790’s, European and American whalers, sealers, traders, missionaries and beachcombers were beginning to arrive in force in the Pacific islands, including New Zealand. Settlement was slow in what was still a region remote from Europe.

The thirty years after 1763 thus saw a huge extension of Europe 's grip on the territorial resources of the world, although the wealth of the 'new lands' was as yet more prospective than actual. What made this all the more significant was that it coincided with a no less dramatic shift in the balance of power in the Old World of Eurasia, forming the double foundation of European supremacy in the nine­teenth century. This shift could be seen in the Islamic realm, in India and, by the 183 os, in East Asia as well. The arrival of Russian power (in strength) on the northern shores of the Black Sea in the 1770’s and '80’s marked a crucial stage in the opening of the Islamic Near East to European political and commercial influences.

But well before 1830 in fact, the first great phase of Britain 's industrialization had already transformed the most important commercial relationship between Europe and Asia. Europe 's insatiable appetite for Indian cottons, and the competitiveness of Indian cloth in third markets elsewhere! had been the central fact of East-West trade since the seventeenth century. In fact the intriguing possibility that might help to explain Europe's industrial transformation was its origins in a defensive response to Asia 's global predominance in manufactured exports.

The second half of the eighteenth century then saw the crystallization of a new and remarkable view of Europe 's place in the world. The sense of the limits and peculiarities of European civilization characteristic of the Age of Equilibrium had been replaced by a conviction that Europe's beliefs and institutions had a universal validity. This confident claim drew strength from the expansion of dominion, trade and influence, strikingly symbolized in the conquest of India. It rested on the conviction that European thought had explained the stages of history, and that European science could provide - systematically - all the data that were needed to understand the globe as a whole. The vital ingredients for a new mentality of global preponderance had now been assembled.

For updates click homepage here