The Transformation of the World (196 page)

Second, these technical innovations speeded up all forms of circulation. Things moved faster even within cities, as the pedestrian gave way to the streetcar. To see this acceleration as a hallmark of the age has become almost a banality, but it is difficult to exaggerate the historic impact on human experience represented by the ability to move faster and more reliably than a horse or to travel on water without being at the mercy of the wind. By 1910 the railroad was established on every continent, even where there was little industry to speak of. For ordinary people in India, the chance of working on the railroad or one day traveling by train was considerably greater than that of seeing the inside of a factory.

Third, mobility was only now underpinned by infrastructure. Although we should not underestimate the complexity of communications in the Inca world, in the thirteenth-century Mongol Empire, or the mail coach network of Regency England, the fact remains that the laying of railroads, the initiation of global shipping lines, and the cabling of the planet brought a quite different level of technological application and organizational permanence. Mobility was no longer just a way of life for nomadic peoples, an emergency for refugees and exiles, or a way for seamen to keep body and soul together. It had become a dimension of organized social existence whose rhythms differed from those of local everyday routines. These trends continued without interruption into the twentieth century. The keyword “globalization” finds its place here, if we define it roughly—without exhausting the potential scope of the term—as accelerated and spatially extended mobilization of resources across the boundaries of states and civilizations.

(3) A further striking feature of the nineteenth century may be described, somewhat technically, as its tendency to
asymmetrical reference density
. “Increased perception and transfer across cultures” would be a less cumbersome, but also less precise, formulation for the same phenomenon. What is meant is that ideas and cultural content in general—more than the pieces of information transmissible by telegraph—became more mobile in the course of the nineteenth century. Again, we should not underestimate what happened in earlier epochs. The diffusion of Buddhism from India to many regions of Central, East, and Southeast Asia was an immense, multifaceted process of cultural migration often quite literally carried by the feet of itinerant monks. The novelty of the nineteenth century was the spread of media that allowed people to send news over great
distances and across cultural boundaries and to make themselves familiar with the ideas and artifacts produced in distant lands. There were more translations than in previous times: not only within Europe (where the eighteenth century had already been a great age of translation) but also in the more difficult interchange between European languages and others more remote from them. In 1900, the major libraries of the West had available in translation the basic texts of the Asiatic tradition, while European textbooks in many branches of knowledge, as well as a selection of writings in political philosophy and legal or economic theory, were accessible to readers of Japanese, Chinese, and Turkish. The Bible, of course, was translated into a great number of languages some of which had lacked a script before the advent of Christian missionaries. Some grasp of foreign languages, especially English and French, made it easier for educated elites in the East to become familiar with Western ideas at first hand.

“Greater reference density” means more, however, than a mutual widening of horizons. The American sociologist Reinhard Bendix has underlined the power of the “demonstration effect” in history: that is, the existence of “reference societies” serving as a model for imitation but also as a focus for the formation of identities through rejection and discriminating critique.
¹⁸
In the eighteenth century, France with its tension between court and salon was such a reference for large parts of Europe; and long before, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan had taken their bearings from China. Two things happened in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, such external orientations grew in number: while a great majority of the world population continued to know nothing of life in foreign countries, or else associated it with only the haziest imaginings, the educated elites began to observe the outside world more closely than ever before. On the other hand, the reference became asymmetrical or unipolar. Instead of a multiplicity of cultural models, the West now appeared as the global standard. But “the West” certainly did not mean the whole of Europe, nor did it always include the United States (which acquired importance as a distinct civilizational model only around the end of the century). For China, Japan, Mexico, or Egypt in 1870 or 1880, “the West” was first Britain, then France. Where the elite was impressed by the military and scientific achievements of the Bismarckian state—which it was in Meiji Japan, for example—Germany came to feature as an additional model.

Peripheries whose “Western” credentials were not entirely beyond doubt could also be found within the geographical confines of Europe. Russia, with its long experience as an outpost of Christianity, continued to see itself as a periphery in relation to the French, British, and German West. Debates there between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” bore more than a passing resemblance to those in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, or China. The spectrum of possible attitudes ranged from genuine enthusiasm for Western civilization—associated with a critical, indeed iconoclastic, relationship to one's own tradition—to contemptuous dismissal of Western materialism, superficiality, and arrogance. The convictions of most “peripheral” intellectuals and statesmen hovered in an ambivalent
middle. In many places across the globe, debates were raging about whether or how it might be possible to appropriate the technological, military, and economic achievements of the West without capitulating to it culturally. In China this was expressed in the pithy
ti-yong
formula: Western knowledge for application (
yong
), Chinese knowledge as cultural substance (
ti
). The same challenging paradox was familiar in a wide variety of contexts.

A perception that the Western model of civilization, with all its unconcealed internal differences, made it essential to find some political response resulted in various strategies of defensive modernization, from the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire to technocratic rule in the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz. In general, these were motivated by a sense that something useful could be learned from the West, but usually they also involved strengthening the country to forestall military conquest or colonization. Sometimes this was successful, but in many other cases it was not.

Liberal patriots, spread widely outside Europe if only in tiny circles, found themselves in a particularly difficult position. As liberals they enthusiastically read Montesquieu, Rousseau or François Guizot, John Stuart Mill or Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, and demanded freedom of the press and association, religious tolerance, a written constitution, and representative government. As patriots or nationalists they had to oppose the very West from which all these ideas stemmed. How was it possible in practice to separate the good West from the bad? How could controlled imports of culture or even finance be achieved
without
imperialism? This was the great dilemma of politics in the nineteenth-century peripheries. But once imperialism had struck, it was too late to oppose it for the time being. The room for maneuver shrank dramatically, the range of options was hugely reduced.

Greater reference density was neither something as innocuous as a simple gain in knowledge and education nor so free of contradictions that it could be summed up in the crude term “cultural imperialism.” In most cases it was a question of politics, but not always with one clear way forward. Almost never was the power of European colonial masters great enough to force on unwilling subjects the most prestigious of all Western cultural exports: the Christian religion. Reference density was asymmetrical not only within the (always unbalanced) colonial relationship but for two other reasons besides. First, the major European powers repeatedly abandoned their fragile alliances with Western-oriented reformers in the East and the South, if this seemed to be advisable in pursuit of national or imperial interests. By the turn of the century, scarcely anyone in Asia or Africa believed that the West, committed to hard-nosed
realpolitik
, was interested in the genuine modernization of colonies and of those independent peripheral states that thought of themselves as promising aspirants to modernity. The utopia of a benevolent West-East partnership in modernization, having peaked in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s with the late Tanzimat reforms, the khedive Ismail in Egypt, and the Rokumeikan period in Meiji Japan,
¹⁹
had given way to a deep mistrust of Europe.

Second, knowledge of the non-European world increased appreciably in the West, thanks to the rise of Oriental philology, ethnology, and comparative religious studies, but it yielded no practical consequences. Whereas the East borrowed all it could from the West—from legal systems to architecture—no one in Europe or North America thought that Asia or Africa offered a model in anything. Japanese woodcuts or West African bronzes found admirers among Western aesthetes, but no one suggested, for example, taking China as a model for the organization of the state in Western Europe (as some had done in the eighteenth century when the Chinese bureaucracy won a number of admirers in the West). To some degree reciprocal in theory, cultural transfer was in practice a one-way street.

(4) Another feature of the century was the
tension between equality and hierarchy
. In a major textbook, the Swiss historian Jörg Fisch has rightly described “the successive realization of legal equality through the removal of particular areas of discrimination and the emancipation of groups affected by them” as one of the central processes in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century.
²⁰
This tendency toward legal equality was associated with rules and patterns of societal stratification that reduced the importance of family origin, making the market more important than ever before in determining social position and possibilities of advancement up the ladder. With the abolition of slavery, the transatlantic part of the West, already less marked by status hierarchies than the Old World, joined the trend toward
general
equality.

Europeans were thoroughly convinced of the perfection and general validity of their conceptions of social order. As soon as elites in non-European civilizations became familiar with European legal thinking, they realized that it was both specific to Europe and capable of universalization; it contained a threat and an opportunity, according to circumstances and political belief. This applied especially to the postulate of equality. If Europeans denounced slavery, the inferior position of women, or the repression of religious minorities in non-European countries, this was liable to present an explosive challenge to the established order. The outcome had to be radical changes in power relations: a limitation of patriarchy, the toppling of slave-owning classes, or the ending of religious and ecclesiastical monopolies. Social equality was not just a European idea: utopian visions of leveling, fraternity, and a world without rulers were widespread in many different cultural contexts, In its modern European guise, however, whether based on Christian humanitarianism, natural law, utilitarianism, or socialism, the idea of equality became a matchless weapon in internal politics. Conservative reactions were inevitable, cultural battles between modernists and traditionalists became the rule.

The commitment of Westerners to their own principle of equality, however, proved to be limited. New hierarchies formed in international relations, for example. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had substituted a simpler ranking system
for the older plethora of finely shaded relations of subordination and privilege—even if it is much too simple to imagine that the diplomats at the peace congress instantly created a “Westphalian system” that would last until 1914 or even 1945.
²¹
Only in the nineteenth century, and above all after the geopolitical upheavals of the 1860s, do we see the disappearance of small and medium-sized international actors from the European political scene (temporarily, as developments in the late twentieth century were to show). Only then did the famous “pentarchy” of great powers have things all to themselves. Any country that could not keep up in the arms race ceased to count in world politics. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal, for example, were demoted to the status of low-ranking owners of colonies without political clout. The extent to which the weaker countries of Europe became irrelevant was demonstrated in 1914 when Germany violated Belgian neutrality without any scruples.

Non-European countries, including the Ottoman Empire (a sixteenth-century superpower) but obviously not the United States, were assigned places at the bottom of the hierarchy. Only Japan, relying on unprecedented national exertions, an astute foreign policy, and a little luck, managed to break into the exclusive circle of the major powers. But it did so at the expense of China and Korea, after one of the bloodiest wars of the age, and not without some galling snubs from the “white” protagonists of world politics. The decisive turning point came at the Washington Conference of 1921–22, which finally recognized Japan's position as a front-ranking naval power in the Pacific and hence its great-power status.

What might be called the “secondary” hierarchies, newly established in the last third of the century, further sabotaged the postulate of equality. The achievement of equal civil rights by the Jewish population of Western Europe was followed in short order by their subjection to social discrimination. And the abolition of slavery in the United States soon led to novel practices of segregation. The new social distinctions were formulated at first in the language of fully attained versus deficient “civilization,” and later in a racist idiom scarcely ever called into question in the West. The racist cancellation of the principle of equality pervaded the international order for an entire century, from about the 1860s through decolonization. Only a quiet revolution in international human rights norms, also involving antiracism, more robust principles of territorial sovereignty, and a strengthening of the right to national self-determination, has finally led since the 1960s to a turning away from the nineteenth century.