The Transformation of the World (180 page)

The nineteenth century stands out from the sequences of ages by the fact that never before, and never again after the First World War, were the political and educational elites of Europe so sure of marching at the head of progress and embodying a global standard of civilization. Or, to put it the other way around: Europe's success in creating material wealth, in mastering nature through science and technology, and in spreading its rule and influence by military and economic means, brought about a sense of superiority that found symbolic expression in talk of Europe's “universal” civilization. Toward the end of the century, a new term for this made its appearance: modernity. The word had no plural; only in the final years of the twentieth century would scholars begin to speak of “multiple modernities.” The concept of modernity has to this day remained enigmatic: there has never been agreement as to what it means and when the corresponding phenomenon emerged in historical reality. Its geographical compass has also varied over time. It often applied to Western European civilization
as a whole
, distinct from all other cultures, but then two levels of contradiction
within
Europe itself were built into the picture. First, “modernity” and “modernism” referred to avant-garde attitudes among small circles opposed to the traditionalism and philistinism of the majority—a narrow sense covering various movements of renewal in the arts that went beyond accepted aesthetic norms. Second, in many parts of Europe around 1900, it was at most the lifestyles, consciousness, and taste of urban elites that counted as modern; the rest of the country vegetated in a rural torpor. From the viewpoint of London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, but also from Boston and Buenos Aires, it was questionable whether large areas at the respective periphery were dispensers or needy recipients of civilization. Did the Balkans, Galicia, and Sicily; Ireland and Portugal; or the rustic frontier societies of the American continent belong at all to the “civilized world?” In what sense were they part of “the West?”

Arrogant pride in one's own civilized status, and a belief that one was entitled or even duty-bound to spread it throughout the world, were in one respect pure ideology. In numerous cases this was used to justify aggression, violence, and plunder. Civilizational imperialism lurked within every kind of civilizing mission.
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On the other hand, the relative dynamism and ingenuity of Western European and neo-European societies should not be ignored. The asymmetry at the level of historical initiative was temporarily in favor of “the West,” so that others appeared to see no future for themselves except in imitating it and trying hard to catch it up. For those who were convinced of the West's lead in civilization, the rest of the world was trapped in a primeval condition with no history to speak of or had been left wrestling with the dead weight of tradition.

By 1920 the material differences between the rich Western countries and the poorest societies elsewhere had grown much larger than they had been a century before when such theories first came to be proposed. And yet the first forces challenging the West's claim to universality, though very weak at the end of the First World War, were beginning to stir. The League of Nations, newly founded
in 1919, did not yet offer them the forum that the United Nations would become after 1945. The promise of 1919, when US president Woodrow Wilson awakened hopes of emancipation with his vague talk of “self-determination,” soon lost the wind in its sails.
²²
The colonial empires of the victorious powers remained intact. For the time being, the disenchantment of Europe, whose self-butchery others had watched with stupefaction, produced few tangible consequences. Though prone to doubt internally (see Oswald Spengler's German bestseller
The Decline of the West
, 1918–22) and faced with challenges externally, above all from the rise of the Japanese empire, the pride of Europe and North America in the superiority of their civilization was not yet seriously endangered. Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Asian adversary in the interwar period, put it in a nutshell when a journalist asked him what he thought of Western civilization. “I think it would be a good idea,” he replied, tongue in cheek.
²³
Yet many nationalist leaders of the Indian freedom struggle did not hesitate to side with their British oppressors in the late 1930s, when a rift opened in the West and British arrogance began to pale alongside the Nazi's murderous race hatred.

2 Slave Emancipation and White Supremacy

More Slavery in the West than in East Asia

In 1800 barbarism still nestled at the heart of civilization. The countries that thought of themselves as the world's most civilized still tolerated slavery in their areas of jurisdiction, which included their overseas empires. By 1888, a hundred years after the first small abolitionist groups were founded in Philadelphia, London, Manchester, and New York, slavery had been declared unlawful throughout the New World and in many countries elsewhere.
²⁴
It was then but a small step to the present legal situation, where slavery is considered a crime against humanity. The traces of an institution that for centuries had underpinned large parts of the Americas, including the Caribbean, did not disappear overnight. The mental and social consequences of slavery persisted for decades, and many are still discernible today. In Africa, which supplied the slaves for American plantations, remnants of the slave trade and slavery itself survived until well into the twentieth century. Only in the 1960s, a full century after the abolition of slavery in the United States, did the Islamic world reach a broad consensus against its juridical legitimacy and social acceptability. In 1981, Muslim Mauritania became the last country in the world to outlaw the practice.
²⁵

Nevertheless, 1888 marked a watershed in the history of humanity. The institution that, more than any other, contradicted the liberal spirit of the age was largely delegitimized and spurned outside the Muslim cultural area. If there were still societies
with
slaves, there were no longer any outright
slave societies
. A last relic of the seventeenth century, when slavery had enjoyed its first great blossoming in postmedieval times, withered away once every region in the European and
neo-European sphere ceased to allow the treatment of human beings as property to be bought and sold and inherited.

Although people in the West congratulated themselves on this great advance of civilization, which was supposed to have finally established a truly Christian society, it would be only fair to point out that the barbarism of slavery and the slave trade had not marked every region in the world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The two previous centuries had seen a reversal of the European tendency to freer labor relations, both in the overseas colonies and—in the form of a “second serfdom”—east of the Elbe. During the same period, in China a long-term trend toward negotiated labor relations softened the harsher forms of social subordination and led to the retreat of the most degrading forms of bondage. Things there had become more complicated after the victorious Manchus had grafted military slavery and other Inner Asian concepts of slavery onto Chinese notions and practices of servitude and dependency. By the end of the eighteenth century, bondage still affected millions of people in the Qing Empire. But in contrast to the mature systems of slavery and serfdom in the Americas and Russia, the state, its laws, and its courts did not explicitly uphold coercive relationships. Qing policy, with some success, sought to move against the penchant of landlords to debase the status of agricultural workers and, to some extent, also against the sexual exploitation of women. Where it continued to exist, slavery was not seen as the core institution of society, but as an aberration from the norm of the legally free commoner tilling the soil as the owner or tenant of his land. In this sense, China around 1800 was a decidedly “freer” country than Russia, Brazil, Jamaica, Cuba, or the southern United States.
²⁶
Slavery was even rarer in Japan where both the external and the domestic slave trade had been banned since 1587 and agriculture came to rely on unencumbered labor. “Historians are generally agreed that slavery, as a significant form of labor relationship, had more or less ceased to exist in Japan by the end of the seventeenth century.”
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The story was different in Korea, where slavery was abolished as late as 1894 under Japanese influence.
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In Vietnam, shaped by Confucianism, servile relations gradually declined in the course of the eighteenth century; nor were they reintroduced in the early modern period, the time of their great Western renaissance.

In the late eighteenth century, then, China and, a fortiori, Japan—but not the West—were civilizations where slavery was absent or on the wane. Buddhism, whose influence was greatest in Southeast Asia, dissociated itself from slavery more strongly than either Islam or mainstream Christianity, although formal abolition was decided upon only in the nineteenth century. When Siam, after decades of rolling back servile labor and extreme forms of social stigmatization, passed a first abolitionist decree in 1874 and lifted the few remaining exemptions in 1908, it did so less in response to direct Western pressure than as the result of a Buddhist revival centered on the exemplary life of the Buddha. This was supported by a determination on the part of the monarchy to strengthen its newly emerging image of modernity. In the early twentieth century, the enlightened
absolutist monarchy that lasted until 1932 ensured that the old land of slavery acquired a new identity. The essence of modern Thailand was shaped precisely by its lack of extreme forms of coerced servility.
²⁹

Chain Reactions

Such comparative observations were rarely made in the West around the turn of the century. People generally had such a low opinion of Eastern societies, with the exception of Japan, that they were unwilling to perceive the major historical leap that had been achieved there. Another point that got lost amid the selfcongratulation over the end of slavery was that it had not been brought about automatically through the march of progress, that it would not have advanced as far as it did if a sizable number of individuals had not been prepared to convert moral sensitivities into political action. There was a real struggle against slavery. Its opponents in Europe and America had to swallow many a setback, and the powerful interests supporting slavery meant that many of the victories were meager and precarious. It did not “die out” in the course of time, did not disappear because it became outdated. Its fate was bound up with the great convulsions of the age. Slavery suffered its main defeats not in peacetime but in the context of revolutions, civil wars, and sharp international rivalry.

In the late nineteenth century, the end of slavery at home provided Europeans and North Americans with fresh grounds to assert their civilizing missions. The “civilized world” appeared once more to have demonstrated its right to global leadership; it was possible—not without reason—to adopt an attitude of serene moral superiority, particularly in relation to the Islamic world, where slavery was not yet considered wrongful. In Africa, the European war on slavery even became a primary motive and justification for military intervention, enabling colonialism to present itself as being on the side of progress. Progressive imperialists, white abolitionists, and African American opponents of slavery joined forces to carry the battle to the African side of the Atlantic,
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pushing into the interior to stamp out the slave trade and to destroy the political power of slave owners.

Slavery did not return to the lands colonized at the height of the imperialist age. Harsh forms of compulsory labor were certainly the rule, but none of the European overseas empires accepted the slave trade or inscribed slave status into colonial law. Whereas Europeans in the early modern period had sharply separated their legal systems at home from those in their foreign possessions, high imperialism brought about a unified jurisdiction at least in this special regard. Nowhere in the British, Dutch, or French empires was it permissible to sell, buy, or give away other human beings, or to subject them to serious physical cruelties without the sanction of the penal code.

The suppression of slavery and the slave trade developed as a transatlantic chain reaction, in which each local incidence acquired additional meaning from a broader context. British abolitionists saw themselves from the beginning as activists working for a global cause. After victory was achieved in their own
territories, they sent delegations to various slave states and organized international congresses.
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Opponents and supporters alike kept a close eye on what was happening around the world and tried to assess the changing balance of forces. The chain reaction was not without interruptions: the emancipation process was punctuated by long periods of stagnation, or even by revivals of slavery.

The historical location of the Haitian revolution was thus thoroughly double edged. On the one hand, a slave system was overthrown by revolution in the 1790s in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which became the independent state of Haiti in 1804. Wherever slaves in the Atlantic area heard of it, the event operated as a signal for liberation. On the other hand, the outcome in the former sugar colony strengthened slavery elsewhere. French planters flocked from there to British Jamaica and the Spanish island of Cuba, contributing in each case to the consolidation of a slave economy. It was this inflow of capital and migrant energies that changed Cuba from a forgotten corner of the colonial world into a country with an export-oriented agribusiness.
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Anyone there or in the southern United States who wanted arguments for avoiding any concession to restless slaves could find them in the fact that the looser grip during the years of the French Revolution had opened the way for militant protests among the slave population.