IMPERIALISM AND CIVILIZATION

European imperialism, writes John Darwin, “provoked, and drew strength from, a fiercer assertion than ever before of Europe’s cultural mission to be the whole world’s engine of material progress and also its source of religious and philosophical truth. Europeans were uniquely progressive, it was variously claimed, because of their physical, social or religious evolution. This was the charter of their ‘race supremacy’. Last but not least, Greater Europe’s expansion into Afro-Asian lands too remote or resistant in earlier times seemed a tribute to its scientific and technological primacy. The ‘knowledge gap’ between Europeans and (most) others looked wider, not narrower, at the end of the century. Parts of Europe were entering the second industrial revolution of electricity and chemicals before the non-Western world had exploited coal and steam.”428
In 1897 many of the crowned heads of Europe assembled in London to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne. The Diamond Jubilee celebrations, bringing together representatives of every nation of the empire, marked the zenith not only of the British empire, the largest in extent to that date in world history, but the acme of the idea of empire in general, of empire as the bearer of great civilization.
The great poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), wrote a poem for the occasion, Recessional (referring to the procession of clergy out of church after a service), which was published in The Times the next day:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget…
Coming from the “jingoistic” poet par excellence, this call to humility was unexpected. The British Empire, he warned, could go the same way as those ancient empires of Nineveh and Tyre if it succumbed to pride… His words struck a chord in the heart of the people. “The novelist Walter Besant wrote, ‘The people, bewildered with pride, were ready to shout they knew not what – to go they knew not whither. And then the poet spoke, and his words rang true. I know of no poem in history so opportune, that so went to all our hearts – that did its work and delivered its message with so much force.’…”429
Pride in being the citizen of a great empire was fostered by governments in order to restrain discontent in the lower classes. As Hobsbawm writes, “Ever since the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed in 1895 that if one wanted to avoid civil war one must become imperialist, most observers have been aware of so-called ‘social imperialism’, i.e. of the attempt to use imperial expansion to diminish discontent by economic improvements or social reform or in other ways. There is no doubt at all that politicians were perfectly aware of the potential benefits of imperialism. In some cases – notably Germany – the rise of imperialism has been explained primarily in terms of ‘the primacy of domestic politics’…
“… Imperialism encouraged the masses, and especially the potentially discontented, to identify themselves with the imperial state and nation, and thus unconsciously to endow the social and political system represented by that state with justification and legitimacy. And in an era of mass politics… even old systems required new legitimacy. Here again, contemporaries were quite clear about this. The British coronation ceremony of 1902, carefully restyled, was praised because it was designed to express ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’ (my emphasis). In short, empire made good ideological content.”430
Paradoxically, therefore, the economic motives which were the primary cause of imperialism, had beneficial social, political and cultural side-effects by providing the emotional sop of “glory” to the discontented masses, which in turn had the effect of giving a belated boost to the now distinctly “old-fashioned” ideas of empire, dominion and hierarchy. Of course, the power of some of these European monarchs and emperors was at least partially subject to parliaments and so, as Hobsbawm says, symbolical. Nevertheless, there is power in symbols, especially if the symbols are persons who seem to justify themselves by continuing in power for long periods (Queen Victoria reigned for 64 years, and Franz Joseph had ruled Austria since 1848)…
And so the combination of the welfare state plus the “glory” of belonging to a powerful nation-state-empire helped to keep the revolution at bay for perhaps another generation. Indeed, the last decades before 1914 can be seen as a kind of “Indian summer” of the monarchical principle, when most European states, in spite of their democratic principles, were headed by monarchs, mostly German and mostly related in one way or another to Queen Victoria, the matriarch of Europe.
This may be seen as a cultural plus of imperialism. And yet the service that imperialism rendered in keeping alive the hierarchical principle in the imperial nation must be set against the disservice it did by encouraging racism – not only on a popular level, but at the level of so-called “science”. For the late nineteenth century was an age, on the one hand, of empire, and on the other of popular democracy, which on the face of it were incompatible concepts. And so a new justification of empire was needed, a justification that would justify the imperial people as well as the imperial dynasty - and that justification was provided by racism. As Dominic Lieven writes, “An autocrat or even an aristocracy could rule over ethnically different peoples citing the same justifications of divine appointment, prescription or superior culture that they used to legitimise their governing of peoples of their own ethnicity. But a sovereign democratic nation could only justify its rule over other peoples in the long run by doctrines of innate racial superiority.”431
“To some,” writes Diana Preston, “Darwinism seemed to legitimize distinctions between races and between individuals, and to justify the existence of social hierarchies and of rich and poor – indeed, of pecking orders of all sorts. Looking back over the nineteenth century, the well-known British journalist William Thomas Stead, later to go down with the Titanic, wrote: ‘The doctrine of evolution… may be regarded as the master dogma of the century. Its subtle influence is to be felt in every department of life. It has profoundly modified our conceptions of creation, and it is every day influencing more and more our ideas of morality. Men are asking, Why hesitate in consigning to a lethal chamber all idiots, lunatics and hopeless incurables? And in the larger field of national politics, why should we show any mercy to the weak? Might becomes right… Wars of extermination seem to receive the approbation of nature.’
“Both Britons and Americans saw the Anglo-Saxon race as pre-eminent among the white races, which, in turn, rightly dominated the rest. One writer thought the Anglo-Saxons ‘in perfect accord with the characteristic conditions of modern life.’ The Anglo-Saxon focused on physical interests and material possession and consequently triumphed in world markets ‘because he has supreme gifts as an inventor of material things which appeal to the average man of democracy.’ His success in driving self-interest and ethical standards in double harness marked him out from others, but the writer believed the Anglo-Saxon to be ‘supremely unconscious of this duality in his nature’, concluding smugly that ‘there is a psychological difference between English-speaking men and others, which makes that which would be hypocrisy in others not hypocrisy in them. They are sentimentalists, and, as sentimentalists, not the best analysts of their motive and impulses.’”432
The British were particularly interested in such ideas, for on the one hand, theirs was the largest of the European empires, and on the other, they saw themselves as the standard-bearers of democracy, having “the mother of parliaments” and a tradition of resistance to tyranny since the time of Magna Carta. They concluded that it was the greater innate intelligence and superior character of the British that made them into the world’s most powerful nation, and gave them a right to rule the less genetically endowed nations of Africa and Asia. So the British never tried – in contrast to the French, who tried to make Algerians into Frenchmen – to make the black and brown peoples of their overseas colonies British: the perceived difference was simply too great. They even made a significant contribution to the rise of German racism in the person of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), an Englishman resident in Germany, who regarded the master race as being, not the Whites, but the Aryans to Teutons. “True history,” he wrote, “begins from the moment the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.”433
As Ferguson writes: “If the British were, as Chamberlain and Milner believed, the master race, with a God-given right to rule the world, it seemed to follow logically that those they fought against were their natural-born inferiors. Was this not the conclusion drawn by Science itself – increasingly regarded as the ultimate authority in such matters?
“In 1863 Dr. James Hunt had dismayed his audience at a meeting in Newcastle of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by asserting that the ‘Negro’ was a separate species of human being, half way between the ape and ‘European man’. In Hunt’s view the ‘Negro’ became ‘more humanized when in his natural subordination to the European’, but he regretfully concluded that ‘European civilization [was] not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character’. According to one eyewitness, the African traveller Winwood Reader, Hunt’s lecture went down badly, eliciting hisses from some members of the audience. Yet within a generation such views had become the conventional wisdom. Influenced by, but distorting beyond recognition, the work of Darwin, nineteenth-century pseudo-scientists divided humanity into ‘races’ on the basis of external physical features, ranking them according to inherited differences not just in physique but also in character. Anglo-Saxons were self-evidently at the top, Africans at the bottom. The work of George Combe, author of A System of Phrenology (1825), was typical in two respects – the derogatory way in which it portrayed racial differences and the fraudulent way in which it sought to explain them: ’When we regard the different quarters of the globe [wrote Combe], we are struck with the extreme dissimilarity in the attainments of the varieties of men who inhabit them… The history of Africa, so far as Africa can be said to have a history… exhibit[s] one unbroken scene of moral and intellectual desolation… ‘The Negro, easily excitable, is in the highest degree susceptible to all the passions… To the Negro, remove only pain and hunger, and it is naturally in a state of enjoyment. As soon as his toils are suspended for a moment, he sings, seizes a fiddle, he dances.’ The explanation for this backwardness, according to Combe, was the peculiar shape of ‘the skull of the Negro’: ‘The organs of Veneration, Wonder and Hope… are considerable in size. The greatest deficiencies lie in Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, Ideality and Reflection.’ Such ideas were influential. The idea of an ineradicable ‘race instinct’ became a staple of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing…
“Phrenology was only one of a number of bogus disciplines tending to legitimise the assumptions about racial difference that had long been current among white colonists. Even more insidious, because intellectually more rigorous, was the scientific snake-oil known as ‘eugenics’. It was the mathematician Francis Galton who, in his book Hereditary Genius (1869), pioneered the ideas that a ‘man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance’; that ‘out of two varieties of any race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life’; and that on a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, a ‘Negro’ is two grades below an Englishman. Galton sought to validate his theories by using composite photography to distinguish criminal and other degenerate types. However, a more systematic development was undertaken by Karl Pearson, another Cambridge-trained mathematician, who in 1911 became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London. A brilliant mathematician, Pearson became convinced that his statistical techniques (which he called ‘biometry’) could be used to demonstrate the danger posed to the Empire by racial degeneration. The problem was that improved welfare provision and health care at home were interfering with the natural selection process, allowing genetically inferior individuals to survive – and ‘propagate their unfitness’. ‘The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind,’ he argued in Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage (1912). ‘As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.’
“There was, however, one alternative to state intervention in reproductive choices: war. For Pearson, as for many other Social Darwinists, life was struggle, and war was more than just a game – it was a form of natural selection. As he put it, ‘National progress depends on racial fitness and the supreme test of this fitness was war. When wars cease mankind will no longer progress for there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock.’
“Needless to say, this made pacifism a particularly wicked creed. But fortunately, with an ever-expanding empire, there was no shortage of jolly little wars to be waged against racially inferior opponents. It was gratifying to think that in massacring them with their Maxim guns, the British were contributing to the progress of mankind.”434
Racist ideas based on the pseudo-sciences of Social Darwinism and physical anthropology appear to have been a contributory factor in other colonial empires: in the terrible exploitation of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold after 1886 and in the suppression of the Hereros by the Germans in 1904. “The proportion of the population estimated to have been killed in the Congo under Belgian rule may have been as high as a fifth. The estimated mortality rate in the Herero War was higher still… Colonial authorities were encouraged to treat subject peoples as ‘subhuman’.”435
40. AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
Russia and America were the exceptions among the "Greater European" empires - Russia because she rejected the democratic ethos of the others, and America because she rejected the very idea of empire. In fact, she was officially so anti-imperial that "when Santo Domingo (the future Dominican Republic) effectively offered itself up for annexation in 1869, the proposal was defeated in Congress."436 And yet America was an empire in all but name. Essentially, she was the same type of commercial empire as the British, and by the later part of the nineteenth century had even overtaken the British, thanks to the techniques of standardization of parts and mass production. "In 1870," writes Landes, "the United States had the largest economy in the world, and its best years still lay ahead. By 1913, American output was two and a half times that of the United Kingdom or Germany, four times that of France. Measured by person, American GDP surpassed that of the United Kingdom by 20 percent, France by 77, Germany by 86."437
However, such shyness about her imperial ambitions began to fade once America had acquired a powerful navy. For "until such times as the United States had a world-class navy, it could not really enforce its claim to what amounted to a hemispheric exclusion zone. In the 1880s the American fleet was still an insignificant entity, smaller even than the Swedish. However, inspired by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's hugely influential book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, the United States embarked on a navy-building program more ambitious even than Germany's. The achievement was astonishing: by 1907 the American fleet was second only to the Royal Navy. With this, the Monroe Doctrine belatedly acquired credibility. When Britain and Germany blockaded Venezuela in 1902, in response to attacks on European ships and defaults on European debts, it was Theodore Roosevelt's threat to send fifty-four American warships from Puerto Rico that persuaded them to accept international arbitration. By the early 1900s Great Britain recognized the United States as one of those rival empires serious enough to be worthy of appeasement."438
It is in the 1890s that we see the first signs of the American's future role as the world's major liberal "anti-imperial empire", whose main motivation was commercial gain. However, the Americans were never as committed to Free Trade as the British, their predecessors in the role. And more "purely" imperial reasoning also played its part. Thus "the American imperialist Albert Beveridge claimed, 'We are a conquering race, we must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands.' The Pacific was 'the true field of our operations. There Spain has an island empire in the Philippines. There the United States has a powerful squadron. The Philippines are logically our first target.'"439
The new imperial mood "was vividly caught in 1898 by one newspaper's observation that 'a new consciousness seems to have come upon us - the consciousness of strength - and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength... whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle. It means an Imperial policy..."440
In 1895 a rebellion against Spain broke out on Cuba. In 1898 the Americans under President McKinley decided to intervene in the struggle between the insurgents and the colonial power. The trumped-up excuse for declaring war on Spain "was the accidental explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay, supposedly the fault of Spain..."441 McKinley at first hesitated to intervene. But then his political opponent Theodore Roosevelt mocked him, saying that he had "no more backbone than a chocolate éclair".442 McKinley crumbled; and after a "splendid little war", in the President's words, the Spanish conceded defeat in both Cuba and the Philippines.
In Cuba, writes Joseph Smith, "the military intervention of the United States transformed a struggle for national liberation into a war of American military conquest. Americans used their superior power to dictate the peace settlement and the future political status of the island. The pre-eminence of the United States in Cuba was symbolically demonstrated in Havana on 1 January 1899 when the American military authorities refused to allow armed rebel soldiers to participate in the ceremonies marking the formal evacuation of the Spanish army from the island. It was a historic moment ending almost four centuries of imperial rule by Spain... Cuba had finally become independent in 1902. But independence was more nominal than real. Overshadowed by 'the monster', Cuba entered the twentieth century as an American protectorate rather than a truly independent nation."443
In the Philippines it was a similar story. "McKinley's reported justification for annexing the [Philippines] was a masterpiece of presidential sanctimony, perfectly pitched for his audience of Methodist clergymen: 'I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you... that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way - I don't know how it was but it came... (1) That we could not give them back to Spain... (2) That we could not turn them over to France and Germany - our commercial rivals in the Orient... (3) that we could not leave them to themselves - they were unfit for government... (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.'
"As McKinley portrayed it, annexation was an onerous duty, thrust upon the United States by the will of Providence. Such religious appeals doubtless had considerable public resonance. The decisive arguments for the occupation with the American political elite were nevertheless more military and mercenary than missionary" - especially in view of the fact that the Philippinos were Catholics.
At the Treaty of Paris, the Philippines were ceded to the United States for $20 million - a good price, it would seem. But the eventual cost was much greater, because the Filipinos decided not to accept the Americans as their new colonial masters.
As John B. Judis writes, "the United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed."444 The war alone, not counting post-war reconstruction, cost $600 million.445
American imperialism was not always so violent. In 1898, after decades of interference, the Americans annexed Hawaii without bloodshed, and Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States by Spain in the same year. However, it was the violent conquest of the Philippines which proved to be the turning-point in American foreign policy.
In what happened in the Philippines, as Ferguson writes, "seven characteristic phases of American engagement can be discerned:
Impressive initial military success
A flawed assessment of indigenous sentiments
A strategy of limited war and gradual escalation of forces
Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict
Premature democratisation
The ascendancy of domestic economic considerations
Ultimate withdrawal."446
Judis writes: "Prior to the annexation of the Philippines, the United States stood firmly against countries acquiring overseas colonies, just as American colonists once opposed Britain's attempt to rule them. But by taking over parts of the Spanish empire, the United States became the kind of imperial power it once denounced. It was now vying with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan for what future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called 'the domination of the world'.
"Some Americans argued the country needed colonies to bolster its military power or to find markets for its capital. But proponents of imperialism, including Protestant missionaries, also viewed overseas expansion through the prism of the country's evangelical tradition. Through annexation, they insisted, the United States would transform other nations into communities that shared America's political and social values and also its religious beliefs. 'Territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause,' U.S. President William McKinley said of the Philippines in October 1900, 'and whenever it does the banner of liberty will float over it and bring, I trust, the blessings and benefits to all people.' This conviction was echoed by a prominent historian who would soon become president of Princeton University. In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: 'The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.'
"The two presidents who discovered that the U.S. experiment with imperialism wasn't working were, ironically, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had been an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. takeover of the Spanish empire. '[I]f we do our duty aright in the Philippines,' he declared in 1899, 'we will add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national life, will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and above all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting mankind.' Yet, after Roosevelt became president in 1901, his enthusiasm for overseas expansion waned. Urged by imperialists to take over the Dominican Republic, he quipped, 'as for annexing the island, I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.' Under Roosevelt, U.S. colonial holding shrunk. And after the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, Roosevelt changed the United States' diplomatic posture from competitor with the other imperial powers to mediator in their growing conflicts.
"Upon becoming president, Wilson boasted that he could 'teach the South American republics to elect good men.' After Mexican Gen. Victoriano Huerta arranged the assassination of the democratically elected President Francisco Madero and seized power in February 1913, Wilson promised to unseat the unpopular dictator, using a flimsy pretext to dispatch troops across the border. But instead of being greeted as liberators, the U.S. forces encountered stiff resistance and inspired riots and demonstrations, uniting Huerta with his political opponents. In Mexico City, schoolchildren chanted, 'Death to the Gringos'. U.S.-owned stores and businesses in Mexico had to close. The Mexico City newspaper El Imparcial declared, in a decidedly partial manner, 'The soil of the patria is defiled by foreign invasion! We may die, but let us kill!' Wilson learned the hard way that attempts to instil U.S.-style constitutional democracy and capitalism through force were destined to fail."447
From 1900, as J.M. Roberts writes, there began "the building of an isthmian canal to connect the Caribbean and the Pacific, a project canvassed since the middle of the nineteenth century, and once attempted by the French. The half-century's talk of building one was coming to a head when the Spanish-American war broke out. American diplomacy negotiated a way round the danger of possible British participation; all might have seemed plain sailing, had not a snag arisen when, in 1901, a treaty with the United States providing for the acquisition of a canal zone from Colombia was held up by the Colombian legislature. A revolution was more or less overtly engineered in Panama, the area of Colombia where the canal was to run, and the revolutionaries were given United States naval protection against the Colombian government. A new Panamanian republic duly emerged which gratefully bestowed upon the United States the necessary land together with the right to intervene in its affairs to maintain order. Work at last began in 1907 and the canal was duly opened in 1914 [more precisely, on August 3, 1914, the day Germany declared war on France], an outstanding engineering triumph. The capability it created to move warships swiftly from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back transformed American naval strategy. A deep distrust had been sown, too, in the minds of Latin Americans, about the ambitions and lack of scruple of American foreign policy."448
And no wonder. For while the New York Times not inaccurately called the American engineered revolution that preceded it "an act of sordid conquest"449, the project itself cost 5,600 lives (mainly black employees)...450 In view of the fact that the new century was to be America's century, in which "the empire of liberty" supposedly "saved the world for democracy" against fascist, communist and Muslim dictators, it is as well to remember this imperialist prelude to its greatest acts, acts that presaged, perhaps, its ultimate fate.
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