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THE ABDUCTION OF
MODERNITY
Part 6b: Imperialism and
fragmentation
By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: The race toward
barbarism
Part 2: That old time religion
Part 3: Rule of law vs Confucianism
Part 4: Taoism and modernity
Part 5: The Enlightenment and modernity
Part 6a: Imperialism as modernity
While Western Europe marched steadily
toward integration, the non-Western world was, and
continues to be, fragmented for easy exploitation in the
name of national self-determination.
The British
and the French incited the Arabs with pan-Arabism
against Ottoman rule, in order to divide the Arab nation
into fragmented, weak entities dependent on British and
French protection and influence. While Asia and South
America are finally moving toward regional integration
in the 21st century, albeit still slowly, the Middle
East, the Balkans and Africa are still fragmented at the
mercy of neo-liberal neo-imperialism led by the United
States as the new post-Cold War hegemon. For the
non-Western world, resistance to Westernization has yet
to be recognized as a prerequisite to true
modernization. Globalization of Western culture is the
most insidious form of cultural imperialism. What is
needed may well be a new Ottomanism of political virtue
to rescue the Middle East and the Balkans from perpetual
Western domination and exploitation.
The Crimean
War (1854-56), like so many of the later Ottoman
conflicts with Europe, was instigated not by the
Ottomans but by inter-European rivalry. Czarist Russia,
Westernized by Peter the Great (1682-1725), was
primarily interested in territory as part of a quest for
warm-water ports to the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout
the 17th and 18th centuries, Russia had been gradually
annexing Muslim states in Central Asia. By 1854, Russia
found itself edging toward the shores of the Black Sea.
Anxious to annex territories in Eastern Europe,
particularly the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and
Walachia (now in modern Moldova and Romania), the
Russians forced a war on Ottomanism on the pretext that
the Ottomans had granted Catholic France, rather than
Greek Orthodox Russia, the right to protect Christian
sites in the Holy Land, which the Ottomans controlled.
The Crimean War was unique in Ottoman history in
that the conflict was not motivated, managed or even
influenced by Ottoman policy or interests. The war was a
European conflict fought on Ottoman territory, with
Britain and France allying with the Ottomans in order to
protect their own lucrative economic interests in the
region from Russian infringement. The war ended badly
for the Russians, with unfavorable terms in the Paris
Peace of 1856, but the Ottomans as victors fared even
worse. From that point onward, the Ottoman Dominion fell
under direct European domination and earned the derisive
label as "the sick man of Europe". The Crimean War
marked the decline in Ottoman morale and self-respect.
Europeans, for their part, no longer saw the
Ottoman state as an equal force as they had three
centuries earlier, but as a pliant victim that could be
manipulated for larger European purposes. This
Eurocentric geopolitics permeated beyond Ottoman
territories, throughout the whole world, especially in
the final decades of dynastic China.
The
imperialist push from Europe, revived after the defeat
of Napoleon Bonaparte, took on new economic and racist
dimensions. Colonization took on the added objective of
developing new markets for manufactured products of
European industrialization, and a self-righteous mission
of the White Man's Burden. It differed from the current
post-Cold-War neo-imperialism of finance capitalism, in
which manufacturing is outsourced to low-wage emerging
economies through the globalization of finance
controlled from New York, but with the equally
self-righteous mission of spreading Western democracy to
the non-Western world.
After the Napoleonic
Wars, which had lasted 22 years until the Congress of
Vienna in 1814, war-weariness had permeated throughout
Britain and Europe. Throughout that time, only Britain
had consistently opposed revolutionary France. Other
European nations had been defeated by the French grand
armies and/or had signed peace treaties with hitherto
invincible Napoleon.
Britain was still
recuperating from the huge sacrifice made during the
French Wars, which had cost it Stg600 million (British
gross domestic product even in 1850, 35 years later, was
only Stg570 million). Britain depended on mercantilist
trade for survival. Its colonies provided raw materials
and a ready market for its manufactured products.
Invisible earnings - banking and insurance, what modern
economists call factor income - provided rising amounts
of incoming cash to the British economy for further
industrialization. The two ancient civilizations, the
Ottoman Dominion and China, become ideal targets in the
British quest for new markets and colonies.
Trade invariably suffered in a shooting war, so
Britain adopted gunboat diplomacy. After 1830, Britain
became the "Workshop of the World", needing more raw
materials to maintain its growing industries financed
with new wealth reaped from overseas, and more markets
for the finished goods in a mercantilist trade regime.
It also needed safe shipping routes. Lord Palmerston
(1784-1865) boasted that he wanted only peace and
prestige, a euphemism to justify his gunboat diplomacy
to expand illegitimate British interests all over the
world. The Opium War (1841) in China, "the sick man of
Asia", opened China to Western imperialism. While the
British smuggled opium to China from British India,
Yankee Clippers from Boston shipped opium from Turkey,
grown under British supervision. Much of the profit from
opium trade went to Boston and through Boston banks to
finance the expansion of the US west.
The war
indemnity of the Opium War in 1841 alone imposed on
China the payment to Britain of Stg10 million, Stg3
million of which was for the destruction of confiscated
opium. The Opium War opened China to five decades of
foreign aggression and exploitation, draining wealth on
a massive scale from China to Europe and the United
States. In 1900, the war indemnity from an Eight-Power
Coalition invasion of China as a result of the
xenophobic Boxers Uprising forced China to pay 982
million taels (1 tael = 34 grams) of pure silver at the
then market price of three taels per pound sterling,
yielding Stg327 million, of which Russia received 29
percent, Germany 20 percent, France 15 percent, Britain
11 percent, Japan 7.7 percent and the US 7.3 percent.
Still, this was a mere pittance compared with
the profits from systemic economic exploitation of
China. This massive drain of silver, coupled with
mounting structural economic domination and
exploitation, regularly transferred wealth out of China
for a century, robbing China of the capital resources
needed to modernize, which Westerners blamed instead on
China's failure to Westernize her "backward" society.
It was the wealth taken at gunpoint from the
non-Western world through imperialism that had fueled
the West's modernization, not the Enlightenment, not
Western democracy. Westernization was the cause of the
non-Western world's demise, not its salvation.
Westernization of the non-Western world made resistance
to Western gunboat diplomacy ineffective and rendered
Western domination a self-fulfilling proposition. This
simple fact is still true today - only today,
neo-imperialism is called "globalization" and gunboat
diplomacy has been replaced with cruise-missile
diplomacy.
In Britain, the Reform Bill of 1832
perpetuated the English medieval system of feudal
political rights and rejected the new radical ideas of
"equality for all" as espoused by the rhetoric of the
French Revolution. Instead of the French system of
political representation of equal number of voters under
the principles of liberty, fraternity and equality, the
British held on to the feudal practice of having members
of the House of Commons represent land-bound political
units such as boroughs and counties, with little regard
for population size or for efforts to create equal-size
electoral districts. The British suffrage was
distributed according to economic substance, reliability
and tenure.
The British prided themselves as
successful resistors of modernity and identified as
their strength an attachment to tradition.
Industrialization put British society on a dialectic
path toward a worker revolution, as compared with the
French Revolution, which was an aristocratic
insurrection against the absolute monarchy, taken over
by the bourgeoisie through manipulation of peasant
discontent with the aristocracy. Had Louis XVI sided
with the peasants instead of the aristocrats, France
might have ended up as a constitutional monarchy. The
Reform Bill diffused revolutionary energy in Britain and
provided a mechanism through which social changes could
be managed peacefully and accomplished gradually through
legal and political means. The secret of Britain's
success was its restraint of the rush toward modernity.
Socially progressive laws were only gradually
enacted over a period of 15 years, such as the 1833
abolition of slavery within the empire; the Factory Act
of 1833 forbidding child labor; the 1835 Municipal Act,
which broke up the old landed oligarchies; the Mining
Act of 1842 forbidding the use of women and of children
under 10 in underground mines; and the Ten Hour Act of
1847. The celebrated liberal John Bright, a Quaker and
cotton magnate, attacked the Ten Hour Act as "a delusion
practiced on the working classes", citing principles of
laissez-faire, free markets, free trade and individual
liberty for both employers and workers, in rhetoric
similar to that used by neo-liberals today in opposition
to the adoption of minimum wages and the regulation
against sweatshop conditions. The Ten Hour Act stood,
and British industry prospered.
The 1846 repeal
of the Corn Laws, which had protected domestic
agriculture controlled by the landed gentry, reaffirmed
the evolutionary consequences of the Reform Bill by an
alliance between factory workers who wanted lower food
prices, and their new industrialist employers in support
of free trade. Henceforth, free trade became British
national policy, and the need for imported food became
the popular justification for empire, which was to be
upheld by control of the sea by an unrivaled British
navy. The Age of the New Imperialism thus was born by
transferring British-European feudal systems of
privileges overseas to the non-Western World. There was
nothing modern about it.
Between 1405 and 1433,
a period when China possessed the world's most advanced
seafaring technology, the navigator/sailor Zheng He, a
Muslim Chinese, explored the seas not for imperialistic
expansion but to satisfy the Ming Court's demand for
exotic commodities from distant lands. Zheng even
brought back from Africa giraffes, ostriches and zebras.
Yet the Ming Court abruptly stopped Chinese navigational
adventure in 1433, after the death of Zheng. This
history baffles Western observers, whose later
experience in the West associates navigational adventure
with empire-building.
For 28 years (1405-33),
Zheng commanded seven fleets that visited 37 countries,
through Southeast Asia to faraway Africa and Arabia. In
1420, the Ming navy dwarfed the combined navies of
Europe. A great fleet of big ships, with nine masts and
manned by 500 men each, set sail in July 1405, almost a
century before Christopher Columbus's voyage to America.
There were great treasure ships more than 90 meters long
and 45m wide, the biggest being 134m long and 57m
across, capable of carrying 1,000 passengers. Columbus's
Santa Maria was only 26m long. Most of the ships were
built at the Dragon Bay shipyard near Nanjing, the
remains of which can still be seen today.
Zheng
He's first fleet included 27,870 men on 317 ships,
including sailors, clerks, interpreters, artisans,
medical men and meteorologists, but only a small number
of soldiers. On board were large quantities of cargo
including silk goods, porcelain, gold and silverware,
copper utensils, iron implements and cotton goods and
books. The fleet sailed along China's coast to Champa,
close to Vietnam and, after crossing the South China
Sea, visited Java and Sumatra and reached Sri Lanka by
passing through the Strait of Malacca. On the way back,
it sailed along the west coast of India and returned
home in 1407. Envoys from Calcutta in India and several
other countries in Asia and the Middle East also boarded
the ships to pay visits to China. Zheng He's second and
third voyages taken shortly after followed roughly the
same route.
In the autumn of 1413, Zheng He set
out with 30,000 men to Arabia on his fourth and most
ambitious voyage. From Hormuz he coasted around the
Arabian boot to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea. The
arrival of the fleet caused a sensation in the region,
and 19 countries sent ambassadors to board Zheng's ships
with gifts for Emperor Yong Le. In 1417, after two years
in Nanjing and touring other cities, the visiting
foreign envoys were escorted home by Zheng. On this
trip, he sailed down the east coast of Africa, stopping
at Mogadishu, Matindi, Mombassa and Zanzibar and may
have reached Mozambique.
The sixth voyage in
1421 also went to the African coast. Loaded with Chinese
silk and porcelain, the junks visited ports around the
Indian Ocean. Here, Arab and African merchants exchanged
spices, ivory, medicines, rare woods, and pearls so
eagerly sought by the Chinese imperial court. Zheng He
died in the 10th year of the reign of the Ming Emperor
Xuande (1433) and was buried in the southern outskirts
of Bull's Head Hill (Niushou) in Nanjing. Inscribed on
top of the tomb are the Arabic words "Allahu
Akbar" ("God is Great"). Unlike Columbus and Vasco
da Gama, Zheng He did not found any colonies for a
Chinese empire. Nor did China turn its seafaring
technology into empire-building as the British did in
the 19th century.
China never had an empire
structure in the Western concept of the term as
exemplified by the Roman Empire or the British Empire.
Chinese territorial expansion was more along the line of
the Ottoman Dominion or the European Union today, with
the eager peripheral aspired to join a reluctant center
for obvious benefits. Much of the historical expansion
of China took place when China was under "Barbarian"
occupation, such as the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty and the
Manchurian Qing Dynasty. The ruling dynastic houses of
"barbaric" origin were inevitably assimilated into
Chinese culture, much like the way the Germanic House of
Battenberg (Windsor) in Britain adopted British culture.
In this respect, the Chinese Empire was
different from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which the
diverse population was never homogenized and the ruling
house remained exclusively Germanic in ethnicity and
French in culture. Nor was it similar to the British
Empire, for similar reasons. Whenever China was strong
and prosperous in history, Chinese foreign policy tended
to be isolationist, fending off intruders, rather than
expansionist for conquest, as the European new
monarchies did. When China became weak and poor in the
19th century from Western imperialism, foreign partition
plots took the form of thinly disguised separatism
movements. The Ottoman Dominion had many common
characteristics with dynastic China.
The concept
of Great Powers in geopolitics was formalized during the
Congress of Vienna of 1814, which produced a European
balance of power among the four European Great Powers -
Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia. France,
represented by the great diplomat Talleyrand, exploited
the rift between the victors over the Poland-Saxon
question to re-enter the diplomatic game as a power in
its own right. With Napoleon defeated and the abolition
of the Continental System - the precursor of the
European Union, with industrialization financed through
capitalism at home not for the benefit of the people but
for the further enhancement of the propertied class -
with no effective rival left for overseas domination,
and a virtual monopoly of naval power, Britain embarked
on its century of hegemonic superpower predominance,
which lasted from 1814 to 1914 and finally deferred to
the United States after World War II.
For
Britain, the Crimean War was part of the Eastern
Question of how to solve the problems posed by the
continuing territorial erosion of the Ottoman Dominion,
which had been going on since the 1780s and the time of
the ministry of Pitt the Younger (1759-1806). To
maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman
Dominion for the purpose of more effectively exploiting
its vast resources had become one of the principles of
Britain's foreign policy. By the Convention of Balta
Liman (1838), Britain had won widespread concessions
from the Sublime Porte (French for Sublime Gate), as the
Europeans called the Ottoman government, that included
special rates on most of the raw materials sold to
Britain throughout the Ottoman Dominion, and a host of
other benefits, grants, acknowledgements and
extraterritoriality, known as capitulations, that gave
Britain a very privileged position in the dominion.
Unlike the capitulations granted to France as an Ottoman
ally against the Holy Roman Empire three centuries
earlier, the capitulations granted to Britain were in
the form of unequal treaties by a government under
duress.
Consequently, Britain felt that it was
essential to keep control over the Mediterranean sea
routes and to preserve the Ottoman Dominion as a barrier
against further Russian expansion. A similar
anti-Russian calculation was central to British
opposition to imperialist partition of China. Britain
promoted free trade, which favored British national
interests, as a universal truth that would lead to world
peace and prosperity. The repeal of the Corn Laws in
1846 had set the course of Britain as a free-trade
nation.
By encouraging other nations to turn to
free trade, Britain was attempting to increase its own
wealth and dominance because its economy was more
advance in the exploitation of trade and, as Friedrich
List has pointed out, that it was the nature of trade
that once other nations fell behind in trade, they could
never catch up with the hegemonic leader. The British
boasted that they had the "secret of civilization" and
wanted to export their political and economic system to
the rest of the world through a network of local elites
acting as compradors for British interest in its
colonies and spheres of interest. It is a strategy that
the United States inherited after World War II,
particularly after the Cold War, in the name of
promoting, through trade, allegedly superior American
values, vaguely identified as democracy and free-market
entrepreneurship.
During this period of European
balance of power, the Ottoman sultans hoped to turn
their weakness into strength by exploiting
inter-European rivalry, a policy that had been
successfully practiced by Suleyman three centuries
earlier. But with the loss of political and economic
independence on the part of the Ottomans under the New
Imperialism, such a policy only reduced the Ottoman
Dominion deeper into semi-colonial status, further
dependent on Franco-British pleasure. The dominion had
become much weaker after the loss of territory to
Russia, from the separatist creation of new nations
dependent on foreign powers within the dominion, and
from British and French economic domination. Sultan Abd
al-Majid (reigned 1839-61), son and successor of Mahmud
II, relied heavily on foreign aid to help him hold the
remainder of his dominion together rather than embarking
on a struggle of resistance against foreign domination.
In 1799, Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman military
officer from the Albanian region, commanded an army in
an unsuccessful attempt to drive Napoleon from Egypt. As
pasha of Egypt after 1805, he was virtually
autonomous of his titular overlord, the Ottoman sultan.
He Westernized his armed forces and administration,
created Westernized schools for children of the elite,
and began many public works, particularly irrigation
projects with foreign loans, to be paid back with
resultant agricultural output. The cost of these
Westernization reforms weighed heavily on the peasants
but brought them few benefits. In 1811, he exterminated
the leaders of the Mamluks, who had ruled Egypt almost
uninterruptedly since 1250. The Mamluks were a warrior
caste dominant in Egypt and influential in the Middle
East for more than 700 years. Islamic rulers created
this warrior caste by collecting non-Muslim slave boys
and training them as cavalry soldiers especially loyal
to their owner and each other. They converted to Islam
in the course of their training. With his son, Ibrahim
Pasha, Muhammad Ali conducted successful campaigns in
Arabia against the Wahhabis. In 1820, he sent his armies
to conquer Sudan. He scored great successes fighting for
the Ottoman sultan in Greece until the British, French,
and Russians combined to defeat his fleet at Navarino in
1827.
The sultan, Mahmud II, to secure the
intervention the Muhammad Ali in the Greek revolt, had
promised to grant him the governorship of Syria. When
the sultan refused to hand over the province, Muhammad
Ali invaded Syria. In 1839, he rebelled against his
Ottoman overlord in Asia Minor, but was forced to desist
when he lost the support of France and was threatened by
united European opposition, checked by the intervention
(1840-41) of Britain, Russia, and Austria. In a
compromise arrangement, the Ottoman sultan made the
governorship of Egypt hereditary in Muhammad Ali's line.
Muhammad Ali retired from office in 1848 because of
insanity.
The new Ottoman sultan, Abd al-Majid,
was advised by the British to introduce Western reforms.
Two decrees (1839, 1856) led to many superficial changes
but did not have fundamental or permanent effect.
Confident in receiving British and French support, Abd
al-Majid in 1853 resisted the Russian claim to act as
protector of the Greek Orthodox Christians in the
Ottoman Dominion. He had allowed the dominion to weaken
because history had shown that a legitimate cause could
always get help from a superior source, a cardinal
principle of Ottomanism. What he failed to understand
was that the New Imperialism was fundamentally
indifferent to the Ottoman doctrine of universal virtue
and justice. Europe supported the sultan not because it
considered it a just cause, but because European powers
benefited from such a policy over a despised race.
Russia found the Ottoman Dominion vulnerable in
resisting Russian access to the Istanbul Straits - the
Bosporus as the West calls it, the Sea of Marmara and
the Dardanelles - for easy passage into the
Mediterranean. Britain, jealously guarding its mastery
of the sea, considered it imperative that Russia must be
kept out of the Mediterranean, and the sultan knew it.
He continued to play off one European power against
another. Russia had shown that it was always going to
take any opportunity to probe into Turkish territory;
Britain's policy was that the Russians needed firm
handling to prevent them from invading Turkey. It was
thought that the Russians were not prepared to go to war
with Britain over Ottoman territory.
The failure
of the 1848 Revolutions turned Europe backward in a
retreat from modernity. The balance-of-power diplomacy
since 1815 became inoperative as reactionary governments
and despotic leaders took hold in Europe, exemplified by
Napoleon III in France. Power politics derived from
bourgeois dictatorship replaced issues of social
justice, political legitimacy and international balance
of power.
By 1850, Britain's sensitivity to the
Eastern Question increased because India, which had been
subjugated and maintained with a mere 75,000 British
troops, had become the most important part of the Empire
- a key economic asset and the "jewel in the Crown" - as
a result of imperialist free trade and overseas
expansion. India was a source of raw materials and a
populous market, and above all a living demonstration in
support of the British superiority complex. Britain
feared any threat to the overland rail route to India. A
century of the British policy of maintaining the
territorial integrity of the Ottoman Dominion on behalf
of British interests in the Middle East and the Balkans
was shaping up as a conflict to its policy on India.
Napoleon III, the bourgeois Emperor of the
French, needed glory through expansionism to uphold the
meaning of the "Second Empire", which was ideologically
different from the universal monarchist aim of the First
Empire. All through the 1840s, the pacifist government
of British prime minister George Hamilton Gordon
Aberdeen had given Czar Nicholar I the strong impression
that Britain would not go to war over the Ottoman
Dominion, which encouraged Russia to probe farther
south.
In 1815, Britain had been seen in Europe
as the principal agent in defeating France militarily,
through the successful activities of the Royal Navy and
then Arthur Wellesley Wellington's army in the
peninsular campaign and later in Europe, economically
through providing gold to its allies and supplies to the
allied armies and diplomatically through the
establishment and maintenance of four anti-Napoleon
coalitions. Britain was anxious to enhance its European
status after Waterloo and regarded itself as a major
force on the international scene. Of all European
nations, Britain's political system was the only one
that had remained intact throughout the French Wars.
Other crowned heads had been removed from their thrones;
countries had had their systems of government overturned
and replaced, sometimes several times in the period. In
Britain, it was felt that only Britain was stable enough
to pull Europe together again, because of its
conservatism, not its modernity.
Europe was
looking to Britain to slow the process of modernization.
Britain could not afford to distance itself from Europe
because of the proximity of potentially huge markets and
the fact that continental instability, particularly the
march toward modernity, would adversely impact its
domestic affairs.
Britain had adopted the
principle of balance of power after the defeat of
Napoleon, with itself as first among equals, in an
attempt to prevent the domination of Europe by any one
other power, and to prevent the march of modernity from
again destabilizing Europe. In the past and at various
times, different nations had dominated Europe - Spain,
France, and Austria-Hungary in particular - with
consequences that ended up in war. The Treaty of Paris
in 1815 and the settlement at the Congress of Vienna of
1814 ensured that there were no spectacular winners or
losers from the French Wars. Britain wanted to maintain
the status quo of 1815, not to herald a new modern age.
Britain wanted to contain France through cooperation
with the other powers. This was a priority in 1815, a
policy that was shared by all other European nations.
Later, this policy became a British national
prejudice that caused it to fail to note the rise of
Prussia. Britain was almost paranoid about a possible
replay of French expansionism in the name of modernity,
whether it was diplomatic, territorial, economic or
through hegemonic influence. Britain tried to keep
France pinned down within its borders because France was
seen as the most radical and dangerous nation in Europe
that could challenge British hegemony. This policy
toward France was backward-looking and was maintained
for far too long. Even by 1850, the British Foreign
Office was still virtually blind to the rise of Prussia,
which steadily emerged as a greater threat to the peace
and stability of Europe than France. Prussia under Otto
von Bismarck was able to delude Britain diplomatically.
In 1875, the Slavic peoples living in the
Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina were
encouraged by the Western European powers to rise up
against Ottomanism. The decline of the Ottomans led two
independent, neighboring Slavic states, Montenegro and
Serbia, to aid the rebellion. Within a year, the
rebellion spread to the Ottoman province of Bulgaria.
The rebellion was part of a larger Pan-Slavic movement
that had as its goal the unification of all Slavic
peoples, most of whom were under the control of Austria,
Germany, and the Ottoman Dominion, into a single
political unity under the protection of Russia. Anxious
also to conquer the Ottomans themselves and seize
Istanbul, the Russians allied with the Slavic rebels
Serbia and Montenegro and declared war against the
Ottomans.
The war went against the Ottomans, and
by 1878 they had to sue for peace. Under the peace
treaty, the Ottomans had to free all the Balkan
provinces, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria.
Russia also took substantial amounts of Ottoman
territory as "payment" for the war. The Ottomans fell
out of the picture, but the Russian victory produced a
European crisis over the expansion of Russia. By the
early 20th century, the Ottoman Dominion in Europe had
receded to a small coastal plain between Edirne and
Istanbul. One measure of the losses: before 1850, about
50 percent of all Ottoman subjects lived in the Balkans,
while in 1906, the European provinces held only 20
percent of the total.
Foreign wars on the Balkan
frontiers, sometimes against the Hapsburgs but
especially against Russia, continued to shred Ottoman
domains. Within the dominion, many provincial notables
during the 18th century had enjoyed substantial degrees
of autonomy while acknowledging the titular legitimacy
of Ottomanism and the Ottoman state. Seldom, if ever,
had rebels sought to break out of or destroy Ottomanism.
There had been revolts, but generally these had worked
within the Ottoman system, claiming as their goal the
rectification of problems within the Ottoman realm, such
as the reduction of taxes or restoration of provincial
justice. But in the 19th century - in the Balkan,
Anatolian, and the Arab provinces alike - movements
emerged that actively sought to separate particular
areas from Ottomanism and Ottoman rule to establish
independent, sovereign states subordinate to no higher
political authority, except European protection.
Further, in almost every instance, one or
another Western European powers supported the
anti-Ottomanism revolts of the 19th century, and Western
assistance was crucial to the success of all separatist
movements. Thus the 19th century was different in that
many of the territorial losses resulted from revolts and
rebellions on the part of Ottoman subjects against their
suzerain or sovereign occurred with the direct
instigation and support of European imperialism.
The 18th century had closed with Napoleon's
invasion of Egypt in 1798 to strike at British interests
in the Middle East, having successfully evaded Horatio
Nelson's fleet to take Malta on the way to Egypt.
Napoleon won a brilliant battle over the Mamluks in the
Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798. But the invasion
was cut short when the French fleet was destroyed by
Nelson in Aboukir Bay. Napoleon returned to France in
1799. In the turmoil, Muhammad Ali eventually seized
power in 1805 and established himself as master of
Egypt. During his reign (until his death in 1848),
Muhammad Ali built up a formidable military that
threatened the European balance of power and the
Ottomans' hold on the sultanate itself. Egypt embarked
on a separate course for the remainder of Ottoman
history. It remained the sultan's nominal possession
after the British occupation in 1882 but, in 1914,
formally became part of the British empire with the
Ottoman entry into World War I on the German and
Austro-Hungarian side.
At the same moment that
Muhammad Ali was seizing control of the southeastern
corners of the Ottoman Dominion, the Serbs in the
northwestern corner rebelled in 1804. Instead of
appealing to the sultan to correct abuses at the hands
of the local administration, Serb rebels turned to
Russia for aid. A complex struggle involving the two
powers and Serb separatists evolved. By 1817, hereditary
rule by a Serbian prince had been established and from
that date, in reality, Serbia was a state separate from
the Ottoman Dominion, falling into the Russian sphere of
influence. Legally it became so only in 1878, as a
result of the Congress of Berlin. In a sense, this
pattern from direct rule to vassalage to independence
reversed that of the process of Ottomanism. Other losses
derived from the more familiar pattern of war with
Russia, ending with a formal agreement, as instanced by
the 1812 Treaty of Bucharest that acknowledged the loss
of Bessarabia.
The overall pattern in the
Balkans was confusing in detail but clear in overall
direction. Often a revolt would meet with success with
the Russians driving very deep into the southern
Balkans. But aroused Western concern, fearful of Ottoman
disintegration or Russian success, would convene a
gathering to undo the extreme results but allow some
losses of Ottoman territory to ensue. The 1829 Treaty of
Adrianople typified this pattern. In 1828, Russian
armies, while winning major victories in eastern
Anatolia, drove down through the western Black Sea
areas, through Varna, captured the former Ottoman
capital of Edirne on the present-day border of Turkey
and Bulgaria and seemed poised to attack Istanbul
itself. Nonetheless, despite the decisive victories,
Russia yielded up nearly all of its conquests, settling
for a few small pieces of land and actual but not formal
Ottoman withdrawal from Moldavia and Walachia.
The "Eastern question" continued to be addressed
in the manner over the course of the 19th century. On
the one hand, many European leaders came to understand
the grave risks total Ottoman collapse posed to the
general peace held together by a delicate balance of
power. Thus they agreed to seek to maintain Ottoman
territorial integrity, reversing the potentially
devastating results of war at the negotiating table and,
in 1856, admitting the Ottoman state into the "Concert
of Nations". Thus, the European consensus that the old
empire should be maintained, tottering but intact,
helped preserve the Ottoman state. The same policy
applied to the Open Door policy for China by Western
imperialist powers. On the other hand, through their
wars and support of the separatist goals of rebellious
Ottoman subjects, European powers abetted the very
process of fragmentation that they feared and were
seeking to avoid. Nationalism was fanned as a weapon
only against collapsing empires, not rising ones.
The 1821-30 Greek war of independence clearly
illustrates the central role of international
geopolitics in the revolts against the sultan. After
failing to suppress the Greek rebels, Sultan Mahmut II
in 1824 invited Muhammad Ali Pasha to intervene with his
powerful navy and army. When the Greek rebellion
appeared to be over, in 1827, the combined British,
French and Russian fleets annihilated the Egyptian navy
at Navarino, and three years later the 1830 Treaty of
London forced the Ottomans to acknowledge the formation
of a new state, in the southern area of modern Greece.
This sequence of events in turn led to a near
takeover of the Ottoman Dominion by Muhammad Ali Pasha.
Believing that his help against the Greek rebels
entitled him to the Syrian provinces, Muhammad Ali sent
his son Ibrahim Pasha against his Ottoman overlord in
1832. Conquering Acre, Damascus, and Aleppo, the
Egyptian army won another major victory at Konya in
central Anatolia and seemed poised to capture Istanbul
(as Russia had been just three years before). In an
irony of geopolitics, the Russian nemesis landed its
troops between Muhammad Ali's army and Istanbul and
became the Ottomans' savior. The century-old foreign foe
thwarted a major domestic rebel's intent of overthrowing
Ottoman rule. Fearing that a strong new dynasty leading
a powerful state would become its neighbor, the Russians
backed the Ottomans and signed the 1833 Treaty of
Hunkiar Iskelesi to confirm their protection. The
Ottomans fell from the status of a rival to the status
of a Russian protectorate.
During the 1830s,
Muhammad Ali controlled a section of southeast Anatolia
and most of the Arab provinces and, in 1838, threatened
to declare his own independence. The Ottomans attacked
his forces in Syria, but were crushed and again rescued,
this time by a coalition of Britain, Austria, Prussia
and Russia (but not France). These clashes stripped
Muhammad Ali of all his gains - Crete and Syria as well
as the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina - leaving him
only hereditary control of Egypt as compensation.
The lesson seemed clear. The Western powers were
unwilling to permit the emergence of a dynamic and
powerful Egyptian state that threatened Ottoman
stability and the international balance of power.
Muhammad Ali did not become the master of the Middle
East in significant measure because the European states
would not allow it. Much of current US policy toward
Iraq can be understood in a similar light.
The
severance from the Ottoman state of its Egyptian
province entered a final phase in 1869, when the
Egyptian ruler, the Khedive Ismail, presided over the
opening of the Suez Canal under British protection, with
the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida". The canal
brought British occupation of the province by 1882.
Britain declared a protectorate over Egypt in 1914,
nearly four centuries after the armies of Sultan Selim I
had entered Cairo and incorporated the Mamluk empire
into the Ottoman Dominion.
The Eastern Question
revealed the diplomacy after the Ottoman-Russian war of
1877-78 that triggered major territorial losses for the
Ottomans. In the first round of negotiations, Russia
forced the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of San Stefano,
creating a gigantic zone of Russian puppet states in the
Balkans reaching to the Aegean Sea itself. Such a
settlement would have vastly enlarged the Russian area
of dominance and influence and destroyed the European
balance of power.
Bismarck, the German
chancellor who was the leading statesman of the age and
in history, and who after 1871 had feared that another
European war would jeopardize the new German Empire,
proclaimed himself an "honest broker" seeking peace and
no territorial advantage for Germany and convened the
Powers in Berlin. There the assembled diplomats
negotiated the Treaty of Berlin, which took away most of
the Russian gains and parceled out Ottoman lands to
other treaty signatories as door prizes. Serbia,
Montenegro and Romania all became "independent" states
under Austrian protection. Bosnia and Herzegovina were
lost in reality to Hapsburg administration but remained
nominally Ottoman, until their final break in 1908, when
they were annexed by Austria. The Greater Bulgaria of
the San Stefano Agreement was reduced, one-third
becoming independent and the balance remaining under
qualified and precarious Ottoman control. Romania and
Russia settled territorial disputes between them, with
the former obtaining the Dobruja mouth of the Danube and
yielding southern Bessarabia to Russia in exchange.
Other provisions included the cession to Russia of
pieces of eastern Anatolia and to Britain the island of
Cyprus, a strategic naval base to protect the Suez Canal
and lifeline to India. France was appeased by being
allowed to occupy Tunis.
The Treaty of Berlin in
1878 shows the hegemonic power of Europe over the whole
world during the last part of the 19th century, able to
impose its wishes on the world with little resistance
from non-Europeans, drawing lines on maps and deciding
the fate of peoples and nations with impunity for the
benefit of Europeans. It would do so again on many more
major occasions - for example, partitioning Africa in
1884, the near-partition of China and the partition of
the Middle East and the Balkans after World War I.
With historic consequences, the peoples of both
Western Europe and the non-Western partitioned lands
falsely concluded that military strength/weakness
implied cultural, moral and religious strength/weakness.
The victims were brainwashed to believe that their
failure to modernize their armed forces was the result
of their cultural backwardness and as such had brought
them a deserved fate of foreign domination. Western
barbarism is misconstrued as modernization, and
Westernization is seen to have been ordained as the only
path to modernization for the non-Western world, rather
than the cultural suicide that it actually was. The
fateful history of oligarchic Sparta's conquest over
Athens, the model of Greek democracy, during the
Peloponnesian War, which set Western civilization on the
wrong path, has been repeated globally age after age,
all the way into modernity.
Next:
Imperialism resisted
Henry C K Liu is chairman of
the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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