2006 will be defined by the confrontation between the United States, Russia and China. Russia is seeking to reverse geopolitical losses incurred during the early stages of the U.S.-jihadist war with Washington's moves into Central Asia and the U.S.-inspired (if not instigated) "color revolutions" around the Russian periphery. China this year is seeking to balance internal economic instabilities and social unrest by positioning itself elsewhere in the world, seeking levers to use to keep Washington off balance, or at least keep the United States from taking advantage of internal Chinese weaknesses.

For its part, Washington has refrained from significant pushes against Russia and China, instead needling where the opportunity presented itself and offering places for cooperation -- in essence seeking to shape, rather than contain, the two Eurasian powers. But Washington has recently viewed Russian and Chinese actions as going perhaps a few steps too far.

China's economic heft is growing rapidly, and while there are internal contradictions within the middle kingdom, China's absorption of raw materials and primary commodities, its ability to influence global commodity prices, and its widening trade imbalance with the United States continue to create rifts in its relationship with the United States. Beijing's conflicts with U.S.-ally Japan, and China's tightening ties with South Korea coming while it fails to bring North Korea back to the bargaining table, are threatening to begin reshaping the Northeast Asian security balance -- at least on the regional level.

The Iran issue has simply added one more distraction, as North Korea was before, leaving Beijing and Moscow more room to push their own international agendas without much U.S. resistance.

And here a third player will at least economically become of increased importance, India which a few days ago made a deal with Iran and earlier with Russia. Hence we will start with the British India Company in the Indian Ocean next moving on to China/USA in the  Pacific region, leading us to an understanding why China, is preparing for a war with the USA.

We earlier pointed out on this website that while the British Empire and the USA may have had their relative rise and fall at different times during the 20th Century, they have marched along a similar route, and to  similar tunes. Like for example the claim to be civilising dependent peoples. But for whatever the complaints of the left and the colonial nationalists about the nastier aspects of late British imperialism (such as torture in Kenya, or police brutality in the West Indies), the empire grappled with its Kiplingesque “recessional” with a fair degree of grace and a decent sense of timing. And although not necessarily America’s imperial retreat (example Iraq), might at times be, less easy and smooth. But imperialistic intentions is one, capitalism is another: both empires rose and spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and foreign investment, dubbed ‘free trade’ by the British and ‘globalization’ by the USA. And although not insisting on a similar approach by British Colonialism and the strategic defense by the US with its expansionist war in Iraq, we earlier indicated how the US can learn from past experiences. See Case Study:

The business success of the British India Company and many of its freebooting (in the business sense of the word), employees can be traces back to a Mughal imperial decree of 1717, which granted a suspension of tariff for some Company trade under limited conditions. This situation set the tone for the systematic misuse of also other grants, treaties, agreements, and understandings, each of which-for example in the case of the Diwani grant of 1765 ­became the pretext for the assumption of sovereign rights over trade, revenue, law, and land on the part of a monopoly joint stock company that was at the same time also violating the terms of its own relationship to the Crown and Parliament of England. And there were also the debates over the relative sovereignty of different Indian rulers, some of which had been prearranged. (Philip Lawson, The East India Company, 1993, p.120.)

Even one British sea captain, Captain Rennie, wrote about the injustice accorded the nawabs by various agents of the Company just after the fall of Calcutta : "The injustice to the Moors con­sists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as mer­chants-to protect and judge what natives were our servants, and to trade custom free-we under that pretence protected all the Na­bob's servants that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom free, to the great prejudice of the Nabob's revenue; nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought into our districts from the very people that permitted us to trade custom free, and by numbers of impositions caused eternal clamour and complaints against us at Court."( H. V. Bowen, Reve­nue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773, 1991, pp. 64-66.)

For the British, the fall (their loss) of Calcutta was short-lived, reversed by the victory at Plassey in 1757. Plassey itself was not a major military victory-despite the reputation it subsequently received around the putative military genius of Robert Clive-so much as it was the negotiated outcome of the decision by Mir Jafar the nawab of Bengal, to conspire with the English, by making Clive a high ranking ‘servant’(mansabdar) of the Mughal emperor. Yet by 1757, the British had begun on a trajectory of military conquest and occupation that gave them control, at least for a time, not just of growing swaths of India, but of Indian history too.

Where Robert Clive conquered Bengal, it was Warren Hastings who first seriously began to rule it. And his first act was to undertake direct management of revenue collec­tion in Bengal rather than relying on the nawab. To do this, he had to devise an entirely new revenue system, establishing direct administration over local agencies and landlords. Hastings also instituted new systems of civil and criminal law, crafted on the basis of a thor­ough study of indigenous systems of justice. Nevertheless he would later be put on trial in England, found guilty of misuse of power, following which Hastings is said to have taken his own life. (For details see N.B.Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, 2006.)

By the time Hastings returned to London in 1785, he had changed the fundamental nature to colonial rather than metropolitan considerations when starting to project its vision across the Indian ocean, soon that of Britain's Indian empire. And little over a century later, it was the colonial British Indian empire that fought the first Gulf War of the twentieth century against the precolonial Ottoman Empire. The Indian soldiers who were sent out to fight played both a global and an Indian Ocean role and they understood the difference as we will see.

Yet it was this huge asymmetry in economic power relations on a world scale that led Indian and Chinese intermediary capitalists to build their own lake in the stretch of ocean from Zanzibar to Singapore. Highly specialized capital and labor flows connected different parts of the Indian Ocean rim. Initially investigated by Ashin Dasgupta, who in Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), concluded that: Intimations of "modernity" in the Indian Ocean interregional arena are discernible as early as the sixteenth century. It was K. N. Chaudhuri however who posed the question: "Is the 'Indian Ocean' as a geographical space the same as Asia?" His answer, following Braudel, was to draw a distinction between a physical unit and a human unit. "Asia as a continent," suggesting that the Indian Ocean was a more meaningful human unit for historical analysis. (Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, 1985, p. 4, ibid see also chapter 5.)

Thus global and local communitarian histories have combined in recent years to rescue history from the nation. Even attempts to put the nation in its place by directly juxtapos­ing the global to the local have not achieved much more than inventing the clumsy word "glocal." They have missed the continuing significance of the interregional arena for the crafting of an extraterritorial and universalist anticolonialism that coexisted and contended with territorial nationalism. The interplay between nationalism and universalism illuminated the thought and politics of expatriate patriots like for example Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who grew up in S.Africa. So also, the ummah, the worldwide community of Islam, was a quintessentially Indian Ocean experience for Muslims from India, Malaya, and Java.

There was, something other than the "nation," narrowly defined, that intermediated the levels of the global and the local. And where historians this past decade have reclaimed the phenomenon of globalization from the clutches of social scientists and journalistic commentators who saw it simply as a contemporary development about a quarter of a century old, like we  pointed out on this website, globalization instead can in fact be said to have started with humanity’s move out of Africa. Others have defined later periods as the archaic era, followed by ­ the proto-modern, the modern, and the post­colonial. (A. Bayly, "Archaic and Modern Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750-1850," in A. G. Hopkins, ed, Globalisation in World History, 2002, pp.47-73.)

Because there is an inherent danger residing in a schematic view of glob­alization, which gives the modern phase, as it were, to Europe and the West, we have postulated a different approach. (See our two part case study for details, starting here:)

T. N. Harper has shown through his examination of the twin themes of diaspora and language in Southeast Asia how for example at the turn of the twentieth century the globalism of the colonized was different from the globalization of the territorial nation­state by colonial empires. (Harper, "Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism, 1850-­1914," in Hopkins, Globalisation in World History,2002, pp. 141-166.) This calls for a modification of the claim that the century spanning the 1860’s to the 1960s constituted the era of territoriality. It may well have been in the form and structure of states, but alternative universalistic allegiances were never wholly disavowed as recently seen with bin-Laden’s war and Islamist perseverance. Thus even in the age of proto-modern globalization straddling the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proponents of a "Muslim universalism" can be regarded as equal partners with Europeans in the authorship of the globalization process. (Amira K. Bennison, "Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization," in Hopkins, Globaliration in World History, 2002, pp. 74-97.)

Colonial empires correctly recognized that the challenge to their dominance in the early twentieth century transcended the boundaries of particular colonies. As seen for example by their crack down of the secret society complex of the Chinese, Islamicist conspiracies and “bamboo networks." (Harper, "Empire, Diaspora and the Languages of Globalism," pp. 150-1.)

Thus almost twenty years ago, Homi Bhabha had called for a "travelling theory" of nation and narration that was "alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities" marked neither by horizontal space or simultaneous time. The "metaphoric move­ment" of these peoples required "a kind of 'doubleness' in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a 'centred' causallogic." (Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 1990, p. 293)

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