Empire in Asia: A New Global History 9781472596666, 9781472596048, 9781472596062, 9781472596055, 1472596668

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Empire in Asia

Empire in Asia: A New Global History Volume Two The Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by Donna Brunero and Brian P. Farrell

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Donna Brunero, Brian P. Farrell, and Contributors, 2018 Donna Brunero, Brian P. Farrell, and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Sharon Mah Cover image © The Japanese occupying Formosa, February 1895 / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB set: 978-1-4725-9666-6 HB: 978-1-4725-9604-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9606-2 eBook: 978-1-4725-9605-5 Series: Empire in Asia Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Linguistic Conventions Notes on Contributors Series Introduction: Reordering an Imperial Modern Asia Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell Concepts and Historiography Definitions Revisiting Empire in Asia

viii ix x xii 1 2 4 6

Introduction: Globalizing Empire in Asia Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

9

Entanglements and Empire Framing Time, Place, and Themes

9 14

1 In the Center of It All: Thoughts from the Edge of Empire Thomas David DuBois Introduction Defining Empire Empires and States Material Foundations Empire and Culture Conclusion 2 Legal Fiction: Extraterritoriality as an Instrument of British Power in China in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Robert Bickers Designing and Implementing Extraterritoriality Establishing a British Supreme Court Practice in Amoy (Xiamen) Disciplining British Subjects Deploying the Regime More Widely Conclusion

31 31 33 36 38 43 47 53 56 59 62 66 69 72

Contents

3 East Asian Empire and Technology: Imperial Japan and Mobilizing Infrastructure, 1868–​1931 John P. DiMoia Science and Imperialism: Approaching the “Problem” of East Asia and the Early Modern Meiji Japan as a “Progressive” Model Meiji Japan: Infrastructure and Intimations of Empire, 1853–95 Rail and Colonial Expansion: Contested Spaces and Nascent Empire Taisho Japan and Styles of Colonial Rule: Apparent Contradictions The Embrace of the Rational: Toward an Imperial Modernity 4 Suzerainty versus Sovereignty: Establishing French Empire in Indochina Bruce M. Lockhart Sovereignty versus Suzerainty Cambodia, 1856–​67 Vietnam, 1874–​85 Laos, 1865–​93 Conclusion 5 Staking Out an Imperial States System: The Imperial Frontier in Asia in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Brian P. Farrell The Imperial Frontier The Nineteenth-​Century Frontier The Imperial Frontier and the Asian States System Conclusion 6 Human Mobility in Russia’s Asian Empire Paul W. Werth Russian Asia and Asian Russia Movement: Variations on a Theme Embracing Mobility The Discontents of Movement Conclusion 7 Faith in Empire: Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Jack Fairey Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance, ca. 1800 Relationship between Religion and State “Defensive Modernization,” Reforms, and the Threat of the West The Impact of the Tanzimat on State Ideology

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82 84 85 88 94 99 107 108 109 116 122 126 137 139 143 147 174 187 189 192 200 204 207 215 217 219 222 225

Contents

Narrowing of the Religious Sphere Soft Power and the Domestication of Religious Authorities Conclusion

228 232 235

8 Maritime Goes Global: The British Maritime Empire in Asia Donna Brunero

249

Maritime Empires in Asia Pre-​1800 The British as a Maritime Power in Asia A Thalassocracy: Victorian Imaginings? The Great Modern Asian Port Challenges to British Maritime Empire The Empire from the Deck of a Ship Conclusion

252 254 258 261 266 268 273

9 Empire in the Long Run: Asia in the Nineteenth Century Odd Arne Westad

281

Index

287

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Illustrations

Figures 1 .1 1.2 2.1 3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 6 .1 8.1 8 .2 8.3

Asynchronous map of Hulunbuir, showing its relation to historical empires Close-​up map of Hulunbuir Britain in China, January 1, 1927 “The Jap in the China Shop” Cartoon, 1895, from Punch Map of Southeast Asia from a Siamese perspective, ca. 1869 Map of Southeast Asia from a Vietnamese perspective, ca. 1838 Sketch of the countries between Hindustan and the Caspian Sea, 1879 Rough map of the Mohmand and Surrounding Country to illustrate the undemarcated portion of the Indo-​Afghan boundary between Nawa Kandau and Sikaram Peak, 1895 The Russian Empire in 1914 A map entitled “British Possessions in the Indian Seas,” with the main panel showing Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and inserts showing Melaka, Singapore, Penang, and Labouan, ca. 1872 Hong Kong, ca. 1880 Indian sketches: unloading ice at Bombay

32 33 74 90 127 128 163 170 208 256 262 263

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

Destination of FDI, 2003–​12, measured as a percentage of the national total 40 Declining volume of trade at the Ganjuur Temple Market 42 Herd size in Hulunbuir, 1906–​46 42 Population of Xiamen for 1881–​1901 63 Russian migrants settling in Asiatic Russia, 1801–​1914 198 Growth in Siberian population, 1622–​1911 198 Distribution of settlers in Asiatic Russia, 1893–​1912 199

Acknowledgments

These volumes emerged from a research project based in the Department of History, National University of Singapore, with which they also share a title. The investigators, editors, authors, and project members note with gratitude the support provided by the Singapore Ministry of Education through a research grant from the MOE Academic Research Fund, Tier 2, without which this work would not have been possible. Grateful thanks also to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, as well as the Department, for understanding and support. Claire Lipscomb and Emma Goode from Bloomsbury were more patient than we deserved and very supportive, for which our thanks. Among the authors, special mention must go to Thomas DuBois for doing so much to launch the entire project in the first place. Miriam Kaminishi and Ishizu Tomoyuki made timely and welcome contributions to the project as a whole. Most welcome and effective research assistance was provided by Michelle Djong, Daniel Lee, Aloysius Ng, Sandeep Singh, Amelia Tan, Wilfred Teo, and Jennifer Yip. Last but not least, the many students who over the years have taken our course HY2245 History of Empires, Colonies and Imperialism have our gratitude for inspiring the whole idea in the first place.

Linguistic Conventions

Personal and Place Names Personal names are generally given in the forms that will be most familiar to readers (e.g., Peter the Great instead of Pëtr Velikii). A few notable exceptions have been made, however, to bring anglicized names closer to their original form: for example, Chinggis for Genghis, Qubilai for Kubilai, Tīmūr for Tamerlane, Cha’adai instead of Chaghatai, and Humāyūn for Humayun. Similarly, place-​names are generally given in their modern, official form, with a few exceptions made for places that are better known under their historic names: therefore, Cochin and Banquibazar rather than Kochi and Ichapore (but Melaka rather than Malacca). Batavia, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras have also been used occasionally to refer to the cities of Jakarta, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, as the historic names also refer to the larger Dutch and British colonies and presidencies of which they were the capitals. For clarity, the modern official name will be given once in parenthesis upon the first use of such historic names.

Transliteration and Romanization Non-​English words are italicized upon first use only. Non-​English words such as “jihad,” “khan,” and “Sharia” that have entered regular usage have not been italicized, nor has any attempt been made to transliterate them in any systematic fashion (so jihad rather than jihād). Words and names from languages written in non-​Latin scripts are rendered according to the following systems. Arabic: as per the system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Chinese: as per the Pinyin system of romanization, without the diacritics showing tones Greek: as per the American Library Association—​Library of Congress (ALA-​LC) Japanese: as per the Revised Hepburn system of romanization Korean: as per the Revised Romanization of Korean (Gugeoui Romaja Pyogibeop) system Manchu: as per the Möllendorff transliteration system Mongolian: as per the system of Nicholas Poppe’s Grammar of Written Mongolian, modified by replacing č, š, and γ with ch, sh, and gh Ottoman Turkish:  as per modern Turkish orthography, except that final unvoiced consonants are left voiced (e.g., Ahmed not Ahmet and Mehmed not Mehmet)

Linguistic Conventions

Persian: as per the system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Russian: as per the American Library Association—​Library of Congress (ALA-​LC), slightly modified by removing all diacritic marks (e, ii, ts, iu, and ia for ë, iĭ, ͡ts, ͡iu, and i͡ a) Sanskrit: as per the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST)

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Contributors

Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol, and works on issues at the intersection of modern Chinese history, and the history of colonialism and empire. His books include Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003), The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (2011), and Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Foreign Domination (2017). He directs the “Historical Photographs of China” digitization project (www.hpcbristol.net) and currently leads a Hong Kong History Project. Britain’s imperial presence in Asia was an intermittent feature of his family history from 1885 for over a hundred years. Donna Brunero is senior lecturer in history at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the intersections between maritime and imperial history, with a particular interest in the colonial port cities of Asia and the treaty ports of China. She has published and has forthcoming works relating to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Britons in China, maritime ethnography, and colonial representations of piracy in Asia. She is coeditor of Volume Two of Empire in Asia, the author of Britain’s Imperial Cornerstone in China: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1854–​1949 (2006) and has a forthcoming coedited volume on material culture and port cities, titled Life in Treaty Port China and Japan (2018). Her current research project is on the representations of maritime Asia in the nineteenth century via East India Company journals. John P. DiMoia was associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore from 2008 to 2016, and is now affiliated as a researcher with Department III of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), based in Berlin. He works on the history of (1) medical practices (biomedical, “traditional) and (2) the development of systems of infrastructure in Northeast Asia (eighteenth to twenty-​first century), especially for energy and the two Koreas. Thomas David DuBois is a historian of modern China and transnational East Asia. He is the author of Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (2005), Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (2012), and most recently, Empire and the Meaning of Religion in Northeast Asia, Manchuria 1900–​1945 (2017), as well as about two dozen scholarly articles on the legal, commercial, and religious history of Northeast Asia. His popular and scholarly work has been published in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian translation. His current project on China’s animal industries is conducted in conjunction with scholars at Hulunbuir University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Contributors

Jack Fairey’s research work deals primarily with the history of the Mediterranean and Eastern Orthodox Christendom, with a particular interest in empires, religion, and diplomacy. He was Ted & Elaine Athanassiades Post-​Doctoral Research Fellow at the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton in 2005–​2006, and has previously taught European, Ottoman, and Mediterranean history at the National University of Singapore, and before that at Queens University and York University in Canada. He is coeditor of Volume One of Empire in Asia. His most recent publication, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War (2015), examines the role of the Orthodox Church as a locus for competing imperial agendas in the mid-​nineteenth-​century Ottoman Empire. The monograph shows how competition among the British, Russian, French, Austrian, and Ottoman governments over religious protectorates and clerical privileges contributed first to the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853–​56) and then to secularizing reforms in the Ottoman Empire. His other publications have dealt with the impact of religion and imperial ideologies on group identity in the Balkans, as well as with the intersections of British, French, Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean. Brian P. Farrell is professor of history at the National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching since 1993. His research and teaching interests focus on the military history of the British Empire, the Western military experience in Asia, and the modern history of Empire in Asia. He is the author of The Defence and Fall of Sinagapore 1940–​1942 (2005), The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940–​1943: Was There a Plan? (1998), and coauthor of Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from 1275–​1971 (1999; 2010), plus related edited books, chapters in books, and journal articles. Series editor for Empire in Asia, and coeditor for Volumes One and Two, he is currently working on a coauthored study of Great Powers and the geopolitical reordering of the Asia Pacific in the twentieth century. Bruce M. Lockhart is associate professor in the History Department at National University of Singapore. He trained at Cornell University in Southeast Asian history, and his specialization includes both Thailand and Indochina. His primary interest has always been the monarchy, and he has written a monograph on The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy (1993). Currently he is working on a history of constitutional monarchy in Thailand. He has coauthored the third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Vietnam in the Scarecrow Press series and coedited The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (2011). He has also written several journal articles and book chapters on Vietnamese and Lao historiography. As a follow-​up to his contribution to this volume, he hopes to look more deeply at French relations with Siam and Cambodia during the reign of King Mongkut (1851–​68). Paul W. Werth is professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, specializing in the history of the Russian Empire. He has held fellowships in Washington, North Carolina, Sapporo, and Munich, and for five years he was editor of the journal

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Contributors

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. His previous work has focused primarily on problems of religious diversity and toleration in Tsarist Russia, and his major publications include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-​Kama Region, 1827–​1905 (2002); The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (2014); and, in Russian, Orthodoxy, Unorthodoxy, Heterodoxy: Sketches on the Religious Diversity of the Russian Empire (2012). Having recently completed a term as head of his department, he is now researching a book on the significance of the seemingly obscure year 1837 for Russian history, while also contemplating future projects linking the histories of Russia and China. Odd Arne Westad is ST Lee Professor of US-​Asia Relations at Harvard University, teaching in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has won the Bancroft Prize, the Michael Harrington Award, and, for his book The Global Cold War, the Akira Iriye International History Book Award. His most recent major publications include Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, (2012) and The Cold War: A World History (2017).

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Series Introduction: Reordering an Imperial Modern Asia Jack Fairey and Brian P. Farrell In the Asia of the twenty-​first century, Japan is the only state still headed by a figure referred to in English as an “emperor” (tennō). The title is understood by all, however, to be an anachronism, given that Japan no longer professes itself an empire.1 Everywhere else in the world, explicitly imperial titles and forms of governance have disappeared. “Empire” itself has become a dirty word, used in reference to existing states only in order to condemn and revile them. And yet, this is a very recent state of affairs. Historically, more Asians have lived under imperial rule than under any other form of political organization and for longer periods of time. There is not a single Asian region, state, or people whose history was not shaped, usually decisively, by these experiences. It is precisely the diversity of imperial forms of governance present in Asia—​and the corresponding wealth of political terms in different Asian languages—​that has tended to obscure the full extent of the impact of empire, as a political form, on the region. Beyond the impact of empires on individual states and peoples, it has played a critical role in framing larger histories—​spatial, cultural, economic, and especially political—​of the region. Empires thus have not only helped to define modern Asia but also to mediate and connect its inhabitants to the wider world, long before the era of instantaneous mass electronic communications. Does the foregoing mean there is something inherently “Asian” about empires in Asia? The question is, of course, fundamentally flawed as it presupposes a monolithic “Asia” that has never existed. The inherent fallacy of the question, however, has not prevented a long line of European political theorists from answering it in the affirmative. Beginning in Classical Greece, writers such as Herodotus, Aeschylus, and Aristotle considered empire to be a characteristically “Asiatic” form of rule—​a generalization made slightly more pardonable by the stark contrast between the turbulent and fragmented world of the Greek city-​states and the absolutist and universal monarchs of Achaemenid Persia and Pharaonic Egypt.2 The notion that a fundamental distinction existed between the freedom-​loving peoples of Europe and the slavish masses of Asia became a recurring motif across centuries of European thought, showing up in the “seigneurial monarchy” of Bodin, the “oriental despotism” of Enlightenment thinkers such as Boulanger, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Condorcet, the “theocratic despotism” of Hegel, the “Asiatic mode of production” of Marx, and the “patrimonialism” and “sultanism” of Weber.3

1

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Such assumptions about “Asiatic despotism” used to be seen as self-​evident given not only that Asia was home to many of the most outstanding examples of empire from the Mongols to Qing China, but also that, in purely numerical terms, the majority of imperial states have been based in the central and eastern regions of the Eurasian supercontinent. The relatively brief epoch of Western global supremacy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the effect of turning this paradigm on its head so completely that empire and imperialism are now conceived of and studied as largely European—​ or, at least, trans-​ Atlantic—​ phenomena. Modern theorizing about the nature and practice of empire has thus, until quite recently, been done primarily on the basis of evidence derived from the modern British, Spanish, and French empires, with supporting evidence drawn from their Russian, Dutch, German, and Habsburg contemporaries. Asia was thus demoted, somewhat ironically, from the Urheimat of empire to one of its principal victims. This series will revisit the relationships between empire and Asia by asking questions about the historical experiences of empire in Asia. Those questions emanate from, and revolve around, three principal queries. First, how did empire, as a form of political organization, shape the spatial, cultural, economic, and especially political ordering of Asia and Asians? Second, what concepts, practices, and understandings of empire defined these Asian experiences? Finally, how did both these things connect Asia and Asians to wider worlds—​and to what ends? In order to answer these questions about the experience, impact, and importance of empire in Asia, however, we need to vault beyond old false binaries of “East and West” or “Europe and Asia.” The first volume of this series will examine how empire first shaped a larger Eurasia—​a supercontinent intimately connected, across time, by geography and the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas—​while the second volume will show how empire helped forge what we will call a “Global Asia” (a concept we will unpack in the introduction to that second volume).

Concepts and Historiography We propose to conduct this examination by providing a general and comparative history of empire as a form of governance in modern Asia, across the span of time during which Eurasia, then Global Asia, evolved as geopolitical realities. The value of such a project stands on the premise that empire played a decisive role in shaping the histories of modern Asia: if so, then a clearer understanding of the histories of empire in Asia must surely strengthen our general understanding of modern Asia. This is not to suggest that the histories of individual empires in Asia have been neglected; far from it. But this series does suggest that there are important connections to make between them. Historians working on specifically Asian-​based empires, for example, in China or India, have tended for much of the past century to focus on these polities for their own sake, rather than in order to address larger discussions about empire or imperial governance. 2

Series Introduction

This tendency to compartmentalize has been even more in evidence outside Asian studies since, in English at least, the scholarship devoted to empire has focused disproportionately on the experiences of empire in Europe, or of empires built by Europeans.4 The winds of change are, however, clearly at work in recent scholarship. The healthy trend among historians working on Asian empires is to produce studies that take a more comparative approach. This can include comparing themes of empire, regions, aspects, and experiences, as well as seeing the histories of empire as encounters, connections, flows, and movements, and engaging all these things across time and space. Karen Barkey, Ariel Salzmann, Rifa’at Abou-​ El-​ Haj, and Suraiya Faroqhi, for example, have all reinterpreted the Ottoman experiences of empire in wider and more comparative contexts. Barkey’s comparative analyses focused on the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Roman experiences of themes such as centralization, state control, and social movements. Salzmann and Abou-​El-​Haj have compared processes of state formation in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Suraiya Faroqhi’s comprehensive studies of Ottoman politics, everyday life, and numerous other themes are best reflected in her book The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It, a wider analysis that encompasses Ottoman grand strategies, foreign policies, and empire-​building as integrated within the wider European, Middle Eastern, and Southwest Asian worlds the Ottomans fused together.5 Such vantage points make sense for the study of an imperial region that even today stands as the point of contact, on multiple levels, between “Europe” and “Asia,” and this sends us a message about those multiple contacts. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, among others, have produced work that reexamines the Mughal empire experience within multiple contexts and through an array of comparisons: as part of larger Islamic and Islamic imperial worlds, through interplay with Turco-​Persian political and cultural dynamics, through connections with Inner or Central Asia, as a regional hegemon in a subcontinental system of states and powers, and not least in interaction with European agents and powers.6 Victor Liebermann ambitiously sought to connect Southeast Asia with much wider connected experiences of empire in Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–​1830.7 Nicola di Cosmo, Thomas Barfield, and Christopher Beckwith all studied imperial experiences in Central Asia, or Central Eurasia, or Inner Asia, within such larger contexts as discourse with the Sinic world, engagement with the Turco-​Persian regions, contact with an expanding Russia, and intercourse with the Indian subcontinent.8 Peter Perdue changed our understanding of Qing China, both its nature and its place in wider Asian and global orders, through such work as China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire.9 The last-​mentioned study points us toward something important. All this work stands on the shoulders of much that went before. Some canonical works still resonate. In The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, published in 1974, Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s thesis of the “gunpowder empires” shaped two generations of work on the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman experiences, and made direct contributions to the emerging field of “World History” that Hodgson, together with William McNeill, 3

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did much to develop.10 That same year Immanuel Wallerstein published The Modern World System, which fostered the growth of the controversial “world systems theory,” later expanded by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank.11 The more recent waves of scholarship, identified above, have built on these foundations by more focused and penetrating comparative studies of just what constituted the experiences of empire across Asia and through time, and to what ends. One of the principal objectives of this two-​volume series is to bring such comparative work together, digest it as part of a wider reconsideration of the histories of “Empire in Asia,” and make it accessible to historians working on empire, in general, as well as in Asia, in particular, and to a wider interested readership.

Definitions The first step in so doing is of course to define what we mean by “empire”; historically, what was an empire? This is no easy task, as the term has generally been applied in haphazard and imprecise fashion. Indeed, there is a surprising lack of consensus among political scientists and historians as to the defining characteristics that would distinguish an empire from a kingdom, city-​state, federation or any other form of governance. We also cannot rely on empires to make our task easier by “self-​identifying” themselves as such. The wide array of terms that Asian states have used, across time and space, to refer to themselves raises difficult questions of commensurability: are tiānxià in Chinese, pādshāhī in Persian, and samrājya in Sanskrit, for example, all interchangeable words for “empire,” or did they describe fundamentally different kinds of entities? Then there is the question of whether it is appropriate or meaningful to apply a political term grounded in Roman and medieval European history to non-​European polities. At least one leading scholar of Imperial China, Mark Elliott, has gone so far as to say that China itself only really became an empire once Europeans started to refer to it as such.12 These objections and difficulties will be treated at greater length in the chapters that follow, but we will lay them aside for the moment to offer the working definition of “empire” we will use in these volumes. We will define an empire as any state that formally adopted some combination of an associated set of ideas and practices that manifested themselves in three ways: ideological, structural, and institutional. In ideological terms, empires considered territorial expansion and/​or incorporation of territories and peoples to be a good in and of itself, whether on civilizational, religious, legal, practical, or political grounds. Imperial states did not see their domain, in other words, as limited to a particular people, region, or religion. They did not always make an explicit claim to universal rule, but their political principles anticipated and implied it. Such universalism was less common in the historical experience of empires in Europe and became less prominent in Asia during the modern period. But in earlier periods of Asian history, as well as the global historical experience of empires, it was strongly characteristic.13 4

Series Introduction

An ideological corollary of imperial expansionism was a strongly hierarchical vision of the political order of the world, with one particular empire (or sometimes a group of mutually cognizant empires) at its pinnacle. As these hierarchical structures were seen as universally valid across time as well as space, empires commonly presented themselves as the literal or figurative heirs of other great, world-​conquering empires. Structural features of empire included two key facets: composite polities and unequal incorporation. Empires were typically made up of multiple distinct peoples and territories that retained their separate identities and, often, distinct institutions. Such peoples and territories were incorporated into the imperial state on different and often distinctly unequal terms, and administered as such, with very different privileges and responsibilities vis-​à-​vis the imperial center. And the key institutional feature was related: the frequency of indirect rather than direct rule, mediated through layers or delegations or accommodations, over most subject populations and territories. Empires were typically expansive and expansionist, composite, differentiated, and plural. Why should these kinds of polities have become so common across Asia, especially during its early-​modern and modern history? In part, this was the result of both active and passive diffusion of imperial ideas and concepts across the wider supercontinent of Eurasia. It was in the very nature of empires to cast long shadows, both over the lands they ruled and the neighbors they impinged upon. Successful empires, in particular, produced many imitators and heirs, who sought to draw not only on the prestige of the former but also on their practical experience. As Burbank and Cooper, Nexon, and others have pointed out, the diverse and composite nature of imperial polities required an unusually high degree of adaptability and resourcefulness, as the symbols, constitutional arrangements, and institutions that ensured the cooperation of one group might have the opposite effect on another. Empires therefore had to develop ample tool kits or repertoires of rule and to become masters of the art of multivocal or polyvalent signaling, that is, appealing simultaneously to the loyalty of many disparate subject groups.14 In practice, empires tended to develop in clusters or lineages that, while by no means identical, drew upon a common stock of time-​tested imperial institutions or practices. Examples of such “imperial lineages” would be the Sinic empires of East Asia or the Turko-​Persianate empires of Southwestern and South Asia, marked respectively by such common features as the adoption of Confucianism, literary Chinese, and the imperial civil examination system, and of Islam, literary Persian, and the employment of slaves (kul/​ghulām) as elite soldiers and bureaucrats. The widespread diffusion of imperial ideas and practices was thus as much a product of necessity as imitation. Simply put, empire, as a form of governance in Asia, worked—​ on multiple levels. Charles Tilly captured the point in a seminal work that applies very well to the Asian experience, when he argued that empire “has proven to be a recurrent, flexible form of large-​scale rule for two closely related reasons: because it holds together disparate small-​scale units without requiring much centrally-​controlled internal transformation, and because it pumps resources to rulers without costly monitoring and 5

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repression.”15 Empire, in other words, allowed one to govern far-​flung and stubbornly different places and peoples effectively yet—​relatively speaking—​inexpensively. Having defined “empire,” we must now turn to the issue of how to define “Asia.” Historically, what was Asia? Geographically, this is not painfully difficult, even if exact “borders” with Europe and Africa are more or less moot. The working premise can be that Asia encompassed the continental landmass between the Pontic Steppe, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Sinai Desert in the West; Japan, the Philippines, and the Pacific Ocean in the East; the Arctic Sea in the North; and the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago in the South. But the more important question is historical: why, for this series, is Asia a meaningful unit and focus of study? The answer returns us to our first page: strictly speaking, it is not. There was nothing specifically or uniquely “Asian” about the features we have identified as constituting the historical experiences of “Empire in Asia.” Notions of stagnant Oriental despotism and Asiatic modes of production simply do not stand up to close scrutiny of the evidence. Instead, it makes most sense to study Asia within the context and frame of a larger Eurasia. Regarding the experience of empire in history, there was an East, there was a West—​but only in reference to each other, subject to multiple variations across time and space, and neither was ever completely different from, or utterly alien to, the other. And they certainly did meet, and together they became something else again. Even Rudyard Kipling, despite his infamous assertion that “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat,” had to admit “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”16 Asia is thus important for our study not so much because we endorse it as a category in its own right, but in order to promote a greater understanding of the unities of Eurasian history by looking at its more ignored, eastern components. In this sense, we propose to study the “Asian history of empire,” in order to transcend it.

Revisiting Empire in Asia The structure of this series, its division into two volumes, is dictated by this larger argument we wish to make about the historical experiences of “Empire in Asia.” Contacts on multiple levels, of varying degrees of intimacy, between Asia and the rest of the world stretch back long enough to be lost in the proverbial mists of time. The wider interconnectedness we now call “globalization” is also a very old process, substantially accomplished long before the onset of the personal computer and mobile phone. It will be argued herein that the history of empire, both in Asia and everywhere else, was deeply intertwined with the history of globalization, in at least three ways. First, empires were fundamental drivers of the process of globalization because they consolidated large areas, and because they opportunistically pressed outward to incorporate new regions and resources. Second, practices of imperial governance provided much of the 6

Series Introduction

new structures and norms that regulated the resulting encounters from this consolidation and expansion; as empires moved toward each other, they increasingly sought to reconcile, one way or another, their mutually overlapping claims and interests. The modern concept of an “international order” should more accurately be seen as an order built primarily by empires, not by nation-​states. Finally, imperial governance was itself reshaped by globalization; empires became more and more alike through processes of influence, imitation, and assimilation. The history of empire is a central component of global history.

NOTES 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

Although they are not usually referred to in English as “emperors,” the kings of Thailand and Cambodia also currently sport titles (respectively, sayamminthrathirat—​“emperor of Siam,” and preah sri loka dhammika raja—​“virtuous king universally propagating the Dharma”) that could legitimately be understood as “imperial.” Ann Ward, Herodotus and the Philosophy of Empire (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008); Ryan Balot, Greek Political Thought (Malden, MA, Oxford, and Victoria, Australia: Blackwell, 2006), chap. 5. Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris: 1576); Nicolas-​Antoine Boulanger, Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental (London: 1762); Jean-​Antoine-​Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain:  Projets, Esquisse, Fragments et Notes (1772–​1794), ed. Jean-​Pierre Schandeler et al. (Paris: Éditions de l’Institut national d’études démographiques, 2004); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History: Introduction, Reason in History, trans. John Sibree (London: H.G. Bohn, 1861); Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1963); Lawrence Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975); Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978). Historians of Imperial Russia deserve to be seen as an exception to this observation but that exception only underlines the case being made here, as it has been driven by the sense that intermingling between European and Asian themes in the Russian experience was too intimate to be separated. The chapters by Paul Werth in Volumes One and Two of this series address this theme directly. Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ariel Salzmann, Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Rifa’at Abou-​El-​ Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991). Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-​Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Mughal State: 1526–​1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Victor Liebermann, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–​1830, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 2009). 7

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8 Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, coedited with Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989);Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 9 Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire, coedited with Huri İslamoğlu (London: Routledge, 2009). 10 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); William McNeill, A World History, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 4 vols (New York, San Diego, Berkeley: Academic Press and University of California Press, 1974–​2011); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 12 Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, coedited with James Millward, Ruth Dunnell, and Philippe Foret (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004); and “Was Traditional China an Empire?” Public Lecture, Nanyang Technological University, September 5, 2013; see also the chapter in Volume 1 of this series by Wang Jinping. 13 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 14 On “imperial repertoires,” see ibid., pp. 3–​4, 16–​17. On imperial “polyvalent signaling,” see Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe:  Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 99–​100. 15 Charles Tilly, “How Empires End,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-​ Building, ed. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 4. 16 Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 1889. The romantic but complex themes of empire Kipling addressed, and the context in which he crafted this work, are analyzed in the chapter by Brian P. Farrell in this volume.

8

Introduction: Globalizing Empire in Asia Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero Entanglements and Empire The story is familiar but it remains pertinent. In September 1793, George, first Earl Macartney, British Envoy to the Celestial Kingdom, met the Qianlong Emperor in a massive imperial tent, a yellow yurt, erected near the hunting grounds at Chengde. Macartney went to China to persuade the Qing to do four things: allow the British to establish a permanent official embassy; relax restrictions on commercial trade operations by British merchants, confined, with all other Western commercial agents, to an enclave in Guangzhou; allow British trade through other ports in China; and lease or cede a small island off the Chinese mainland to the British, to be developed as a commercial base. Macartney was an interesting choice. He served as the last English East India Company (EIC). President of the Presidency of Madras, from 1781 to 1785, and then, briefly in 1785, as the first Governor of the new British Province of Madras. In that capacity Macartney developed a keen interest in what had become the most dynamic venture being pursued by EIC agents: to expand trade in and with Qing China, where fortunes seemed sure to be made. But frustrations came first. From 1757 the Qing confined foreign trade and merchants to that small enclave in Guangzhou, operating through the Canton System and relying on local partnerships. These partnerships were anything but equal; factors were constantly at the mercy of local trading representatives. They were required to work through a guild of thirteen local trading companies known as the Cohong, vested by the Yongzheng Emperor with legal control over commerce through Guangzhou. The ensuing trade balance between British and Chinese interests ran heavily into surplus for the Chinese, driven by voracious British appetites for silks, porcelain, and above all tea—​which all had to be expensively paid for in silver, the only commodity the Qing government would accept in trade.1 EIC agents sought ways to break free of these restrictions and reduce this trade imbalance. The EIC was driven by the very real concern that they were accountable to their Board of Directors and shareholders, as well as commercial ambitions. Their commodity of choice turned out to be opium, for which Chinese appetites proved very strong. But Macartney was ambivalent about this, suggesting that relying on one problematic commodity was bad policy. He argued that introducing a wider range of new products to the Chinese market would be more likely, over time, to forge a sustainable expanding flow of trade with the Qing domains. And he joined a growing chorus, led by EIC agents and China-​based merchants, calling for state support to galvanize efforts

9

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to “open up” China to wider trade. The government of William Pitt the Younger heeded these calls, but decided to split the difference: the British government prepared a formal state mission to the Qianlong Emperor and his court, yet compelled the EIC to foot the bill on the grounds that it stood most directly to gain. Given that the British state had at great expense rescued the EIC financially twice in the previous generation, culminating in the controversial 1784 India Act, this was hardly surprising. It also rather nicely reflected the entangling of flag and commerce that already so marked British activity in Asia. The first mission was aborted when the chosen ambassador died before the expedition could reach China. But that entangling then became closer still when Henry Dundas, the senior EIC official who organized the ill-​fated first embassy, became Pitt’s Home Secretary, and Macartney advised him to try again. Dundas not only took the advice but he appointed Macartney to lead the mission. This meant being represented by the man who wrote in 1773, celebrating a wave of British territorial expansion after victory in the Seven Years War, that the British now boasted “this vast empire on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained.”2 Macartney led the most ambitious effort the British Empire had yet launched to insert itself into the political economy of the region Britons then referred to as “Tartary,” and later came to call the “Far East.” His delegation was more than 100 strong, including artists, scholars, scientists, gardeners, doctors, interpreters, and a military escort. And in addition to the four objectives noted above, the British government directed Macartney to carry out two other very interesting assignments: to open political and trade relations with “other nations of the East,” especially Japan; and to gather intelligence about China, including assessments of government and administration, military power, science and technology, foreign policy, society, and the condition of the people. Dundas, Pitt, and Macartney all hoped that establishing direct government-​to-​government relations with the Qing court would be the breakthrough, enabling British trade to break free from the straitjacket imposed by the Canton System. To that end, the idea was to impress the Qing with British wealth, power, science, and technology, for which purpose the Macartney Mission brought along a great deal of bric-​a-​brac, including weapons, textiles, and timepieces, to help woo the Middle Kingdom. It seemed at the time, and to many ever since, that the Macartney Mission failed because the Qianlong Emperor dismissed both the requests for a permanent embassy, with expanded access and trade, and the products his guests displayed to impress him. The Qing court was arguably at its wealthiest under Qianlong. But this is where the story gets interesting and why, for the study of empire in Asia in the nineteenth century, it remains so significant. Popular myths such as the story that the mission was rejected because Macartney refused to practice the full ceremonial kow tow gesture of submission to the Emperor have long been debunked. Yet there was a definite cultural failure to communicate. The argument that the failure stemmed from arrogant Chinese insistence that the Middle Kingdom had no peer, and only related to the rest of the world by dictating to it from a position of superiority, is not much more accurate than the kow tow myth—​but this point is subtle, nor is it difficult to understand why many Britons 10

Introduction

long felt this was what happened.3 The central piece of evidence is a famous letter the Qianlong Emperor sent to King George III to explain why he rejected the British requests in what he apparently regarded as a gesture to indicate no offense was taken or meant, and there was no reason why anything should change. The translated wording of that letter expressed, poignantly, vast differences in worldviews, perceptions of status, and understandings of how to manage relations between states. The Qing letter reflected very deeply established understandings of the world and how to behave in it, a world revolving around the Middle Kingdom. What the British considered gifts, the Chinese referred to in terms translated as “tribute,” a system they used as a way to order their relations with other, less important powers. Qianlong tried to assure George III that the “respectful humility” of his ambassador was “highly praiseworthy,” then paid what he thought was the compliment of explaining point by point, in detail, why he could not accept the British requests. This explanation revolved around two themes: existing trade arrangements were fair and satisfactory, and the fundamental differences between Chinese civilization and its cultural, political, and social norms, and those of the Europeans, were so profound that direct political relations, and expanded trade access, simply could not be made compatible with the existing civilizational order of Qing China. And that civilizational order was perfect as it was; nor did it make any sense to expect the Europeans to try to adopt it for themselves. This was simply not the way of the world. The Emperor noted that “I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Permission to trade through Guangzhou was already a “signal mark of favour” which allowed the British to “participate in our beneficence,” no small concession given that “our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders.” Qianlong pointed to his generosity in nevertheless treating the Macartney Mission with “extreme favour” and noted that he gave the British King a “mandate” to operate within the established Sinic world order. It therefore seemed routine to close the letter by expressing, in customary language, the Imperial expectation that this newest recruit to the “tributary system” by which Qing China ordered its world, and structured behavior, would behave accordingly. That included clear warning to respect the Empire’s decisions or face consequences: “Do not say that you were not warned in due time! Tremblingly obey and show no negligence! A special mandate!” The most familiar interpretation of this event is that this rebuttal was a fundamental mistake—​at worst, extreme arrogance—​by the Qing, who supposedly squandered an opportunity to establish amicable working relations with the British Empire before the Industrial Revolution decisively altered both the correlation of forces between Qing China and the European Great Powers and British attitudes toward behavior in, and relations with, their “Far East.”4 Despite the fact that the Industrial Revolution did indeed transform the correlation of forces, and this did influence attitudes, this analysis nevertheless cannot withstand close scrutiny. It is unhistorical. There was no opportunity to squander, because the differences between these two great empires in worldviews, and therefore in root understandings of how to order the world, 11

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were fundamental. The European practice of respecting notional equality of status between states, especially Great Powers, and communicating accordingly, dated back, in practice and in concept, to the Westphalian agreements of 1648. The Chinese understanding of the Empire as the Middle Kingdom, ordering a world that revolved around it regardless of current physical realities of power, and behaved accordingly, could not be reconciled with any notions of basing “foreign relations” on equality of status. This supposedly helps explain what has often been identified as the defining fact of the nineteenth-​century Asian experience: the decline of the Qing Empire and its world order, overwhelmed by the tsunami of European-​driven “High Imperialism,” fueled and sustained by the Industrial Revolution. Delayed for a generation by revolution and total war in Europe, an even stronger British Empire then resumed interest in “opening up” China and its trade, resorting to force to do so. Through two Opium Wars, during 1839–​ 42 and 1856–​ 60, punctuated by the imposition of “unequal treaties”—​ featuring settlement and trade concessions, extraterritorial privileges, and the enforced establishment of permanent embassies to the Imperial Court in Beijing—​the Great Powers, led by the British Empire, overwhelmed the Sinic World. The “answer” to the supposed arrogance, and apparent strategic blindness, of the Qianlong Emperor’s letter to George III came through the Treaty of Nanjing, the cession of Hong Kong, the destruction and wholescale looting of the Summer Palace, and finally, in 1900, the suppression of the so-​called Boxer Rebellion. Imperial China became an arena of geopolitical expansion and competition between the rest of the Great Powers. And as fared the Qing, so fared the rest of Asia. Such grand narratives laid it all out: stagnant, despotic, “backward,” and “Oriental” Asian-​based empires were superseded, or colonized, or dominated and marginalized, by “modern” industrial (and thus “progressive” and dynamic) European-​based empires, who, during the “long nineteenth century,” built a truly global “world order,” and hardwired Asia and its peoples into that order. There is much that still needs to be corrected or even set aside from these grand narratives. But one central theme stands intact as the basis for such correction: empire remained the principal instrument of what did indeed amount to an unprecedentedly extensive, and intensive, reordering of Asia and its peoples—​ within, finally, a truly global context. Empire and its concepts, practices, and norms was the principal vehicle for what we outlined in our first volume:  the forging of a supercontinental Eurasian Imperial Order, built by imperial states and societies whose characteristics, connections, and convergences ordered relations and intercourse within, and between, its polities. This centrality of empire within the historical processes did not change in what became a “long nineteenth century.” Nor did several of empire’s most fundamental characteristics: layered and delegated sovereignty and administration, expressed through networks and partnerships at various levels; hierarchy and differentiation of treatment; the importance of establishing legitimacy and asserting status. But some very important things did change: the physical correlation of forces between different imperial states and societies, which thus altered material, technological, economic, and military 12

Introduction

capabilities accordingly; and the impact this had on perceptions of status, power, and sophistication, which therefore affected notions of what was legitimate, and on what basis order should be constructed. Economic determinism plus technological development do not and cannot explain these changes, nor are they sufficient to periodize a “long nineteenth century.” But they are central and necessary to both. This was not, appearances to the contrary, a century defined by nationalism and the nation-​state. It was the century transformed by the Industrial Revolution, which enabled the construction of a truly integrated and permanently entangled global order of political economy: an order built by empires. The Imperial Order constructed in post-​Chinggisid Eurasia gave way to a Global Order that rewrote the political, territorial, and interstate map of Asia and, through empire, globalized that space and its peoples. The task of this second volume is to explain how and why this happened. Popular narratives interpreting such events as the Macartney Mission and the Qianlong Letter that told us more about their authors than about the events in question produced, over time, the backlash that forged the most obvious obstacle confronting this volume: what is by now the lazy concept, even accusation, of “Eurocentrism.” Taken too far, as too often happens, this means being condemned for suggesting that “Europeans” had anything to do with “Asian” history, and in the process producing at best lopsided or at worst congratulatory histories. In more restrained form, this is the accusation of denying historical agency to “Asians”; those addicted to jargon have used the term “epistemic violence.”5 Seen through the lens of empire, as we explained in Volume One, this did not make sense in the thirteenth century, let alone the nineteenth. Looking deeper into the evidence, beyond visceral inclinations to shout “orientalism,” the practices and concepts of Empire in Asia indicate something very profound: from the dying years of the eighteenth century, ambitions for fundamental change and appetites for transforming expansion—​ territorial, political, technological, economic and commercial, conceptual—​emanated very heavily from the Western portion of the Eurasian supercontinent, rippling through its larger Imperial Order. This was however far more complicated than simple binary stories of aggressor-​victim, active-​passive, evolving-​stagnant, or rising-​declining. The multiple and dynamic connections between the general and the local, the networks that combined both in chains of intercourse, the arrays of partnerships and alliances, all very much remained defining features of Empire in Asia and reordering Asia. But the three vectors of systemic geopolitical change we identified in Volume One as emerging later in the eighteenth century—​(1) the reordering and consolidation of vast continental spaces in Central Eurasia by expanding great imperial powers, increasingly bumping up against each other; (2) the ebbing of westward expansion by Asian-​based powers and the rising of eastward expansion by European-​based empires; and (3) the forging of a truly global order of political economy, heavily driven by maritime projects of empire, dominated by European-​based powers—​became, from the end years of that century, dominant profound forces reordering geopolitical Asia. While this remained a story that defied Eurocentrism binaries, this qualitatively different “Industrial Revolution 13

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imperialism” altered the nature of networks and partnerships when it altered, bringing a new level of intensity, the correlation of forces.6 European-​driven projects of Empire continued very emphatically to build on, or work from, what was already in place. But they did so with ever greater ambitions and a growing sense of difference. Attitudes changed. Seminal events punctuated and revealed this process. The Macartney Mission stands out more in retrospect as a moment of imperial collision, but only because it was eclipsed at the time by prolonged total war in Europe. That war generated the next such event: the French expedition to Egypt in 1798, featuring a much stronger and more aggressive military project but also incorporating wider intellectual, political, and even civilizational ambitions into the expedition. The ripple effect through the Ottoman Empire and Southwest Asia became a strong vector of imperial reordering. The British assertiveness that provoked the Opium War in 1839 brought this wider vector into East Asia and the Sinic sphere. That was followed by American coercion of Tokugawa Japan in 1853, reinforced soon after by British gunboat diplomacy. Russian expansion into Central Asia, as well as British paramountcy in South Asia, was more incremental but also more methodical. But they also featured their violent flash points of change: the British military conquest and annexation of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab in the 1840s, the Russian conquest and annexation of the khanates of Central Asia in the 1860s. Nor did Mainland Southeast Asia avoid such changes, reflected by French penetration into Indochina and up the Mekong in the 1860s and the British imposition of paramountcy in the Malay peninsula in the 1870s, having already established the same by force in Burma. Asian-​based powers did not simply stand by and observe this process. The Qing continued to exert themselves politically and militarily in their northwest, into Central Asia, and strove to suppress rebellion and “modernize.” Japan’s dramatic response to forcible reconnection with geopolitics is a fundamental part of the story of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century.” But most of the deep structural reordering, driven by striking attitudinal changes, very much emanated from forces projecting into Asia. Three things made this “long nineteenth century” a distinct period: the extent of the geopolitical reordering within Asia, the attitudes that drove it, and its globalization.

Framing Time, Place, and Themes This second volume sees the story of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century” as something best revisited within a broad framework sketched out by three recent studies of great importance, all rising well above older narratives of binaries and ruffled feathers. In 2000, Kenneth Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Four years later, Christopher Bayly published The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914. And in 2014 Jürgen Osterhammel’s 2009 study was published in English as The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century.7 This new scholarship helps us not only move beyond 14

Introduction

misperceptions, prejudices, and binaries, it also allows us to reconsider how to reconcile older but still valuable analyses of world systems—​Wallerstein, McNeill, Hodgson—​ with newer approaches to globalizing the histories of Empire in Asia: during the period when one was clearly the agent that embedded the other within the truly global geopolitical order so starkly challenged by the outbreak of Great War in 1914.8 Pomeranz’s argument can be laid out by unpacking his title. There was a “great divergence” between the characteristics and capabilities of some parts of the world compared to others. That did help forge a “modern world economy.” But this cannot be understood by comparing “China” as a whole to “Europe” as a whole, because closer examination of economic, structural, and political evidence indicates something fundamental: the real differences were between core regions and peripheral regions in both these larger areas. For a long time core regions had more in common with each other than with peripheral regions in their own part of the world. But, much later than was often supposed, well into the nineteenth century, core regions within Europe began to diverge markedly, in economic, structural, technological, and political characteristics, from core regions in China and elsewhere in Asia. The big question was not why there wasn’t any Industrial Revolution in China. It was why one occurred in core regions of Europe, and how it came to produce such a “great divergence” that the outcome was the European-​driven globalization of Asia and world political economy. The answer lay not in anything intrinsic to Europe, nor in any facet of its structure—​neither ideology, nor culture, nor organization, nor competitive international relations—​but rather in contingency and commodity. Stumbling on the New World, European core areas were eventually able to generate so much surplus wealth and power that they made the “leap off the land.” By drawing on an entirely new source for fuel supplies, labor expansion, and agricultural expansion, they were able to build viable long distance trading networks that added value as well as bulk, leverage their access to silver to gain dominance in pan-​Asian trade and commerce, and bolster their economic endeavors by ever more formidable military coercion. We do not in fact accept Pomeranz’s core arguments for contingency and commodity, and for comparing by region rather than larger polity. He himself is inconsistent in the latter, for example, in explaining European maritime penetration into Southeast Asia by comparing Qing failure to do the same; and the former ignores the ability to exploit windfalls that was provided by ideas and organization, and driven by competition and rivalry. But his analysis does make two powerful points: that the fundamental divergence in the correlation of forces did unfold in a way that divided European-​based entities from Asian-​based entities, but only well into the nineteenth century, driven by industrialization in the former; and that this did enable a globalization of political economy in Asia. Bayly took the analysis to a higher level in a magisterial study that reworked our understanding of modernity, globalization, and the nineteenth century. Bayly argued that our “long nineteenth century” was defined, and periodized, by unfolding historical processes that transformed human politics, economies, and societies by a series of transformations which began circa 1780, at the start of “the revolutionary age.” These 15

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resulted from active, creative, and dynamic interactions between regions, peoples, polities, practices, and ideas. Revolutions, political and industrial, accelerated these transformations; ideas crossed oceans and borders. The pace, extent and intensity of these changes, above all their entanglement, amounted to global transformation. This was far more complex than simple outward projection of forces, practices, and ideas from the Euro-​Atlantic regions to the rest of the world. The dynamic was much more interactive; rapidly developing connections created hybrid polities, mixed ideologies, and complex forms of global economic exchange.9 These very same connections often heightened the sense of difference and antagonism between people in different societies. Aptly, Bayly cites Arjun Appadurai’s seminal work, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, to observe that the global and the local fed off each other.10 Crucially, this did reflect, geopolitically, a “European moment.” Bayly argues that the root of this ultimate interconnectedness, and its consequences, was the evolution of Western European and North American economic dominance. The world of 1780, multipolar and dominated by agrarian empires, featured assertively independent Qing and Ottoman regional orders, and effectively autonomous Central Asian, African, and Pacific polities. This gave way, by 1914, to a connected global order, in which these orders had either fragmented, or incorporated, or were unraveling. Local, national, and regional history became global history, and the societies, economies, and polities of the world became more similar and more connected. Asian agency was central, multiple, and crucial, but continued to unfold within this larger Eurasian Imperial Order—​ one now globalized by power, practices, and ambitions that emanated heavily from European-​based empires. The “modern” world emerged from this new global order. Bayly argues that an important part of being modern was thinking you were. Modernity was a process driven by emulating and adapting. Globally, this could be seen in wide ranging examples, from European statesmen who wrote and spoke about modernity to Asian populaces who adopted its accoutrements, such as the watch, bowler hat, and umbrella.11 Modernity not only shaped society and the individual but also had a powerful influence on ideas relating to technology, statecraft, religion, and objects, all of which helped make sense of what it meant to be part of a modern, global world system. Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century focused more on explaining what defined the nineteenth century than on modernity per se: “this book is the portrait of an epoch.” But his explanations for what constituted modernity, and for the historical experience and agency of empire, are central to a study that for once deserves the title “definitive.”12 Osterhammel nods toward the Pomeranz school of analysis, noting that “the problem of the ‘great divergence’ between rich and poor regions has thus been shifted forward to the nineteenth century.” But he insists this is not his “central issue.” Osterhammel notes, “I see the nineteenth century even more sharply than he [Bayly] does as the ‘European century,’ ” but also stresses the need to respect the evidence and take a different approach to “world history.”13 His nineteenth century was “anchored in history,” in a wider, not date-​framed, history of both time and space. Closer examination of “subareas” of human experience, 16

Introduction

thematic as well as regional, reveals a truly grand narrative which—​even though shaped by generalities—​can for that very reason capture the nature of “an epoch.” Osterhammel presented his study as a “kindred spirit,” pushing his work beyond Bayly’s scope.14 Both adopted a broad survey approach and resisted the temptation to break their study down to regions, civilizations, or continents, but Osterhammel applied his own distinct lens and methodology. He did not see the framing of the nineteenth century as chronologically clear-​cut as Bayly did, and he was more interested in the United States of America; for those reasons, his discussion ranged from before 1780 until, on some points, our own times.15 Both Osterhammel and Bayly regard colonialism and imperialism as an integral part of their larger narrative. Neither separates it from their main study of the century, both deliberately “keep it in view throughout.” Osterhammel argues that his thesis can be explained, from the global vantage point, by measuring, case by case, theme by theme, aspect by aspect, event by event, within “particular areas of historical reality,” the “gap between “Europe” (whatever that may have been at the time) and other parts of the world. Osterhammel describes the long nineteenth century as European-​driven because “other continents took Europe as their yardstick.”16 This European agency was projected via power (often violent), through influential channels of capitalist expansion (trade networks as an example) and by the force of example. His thesis is a dynamic balancing act: while insisting that in world history the notion of “Europe’s special path” does not withstand serious analysis, nevertheless “the history of the nineteenth century was made in and by Europe, to an extent that cannot be said of either the eighteenth or twentieth century, not to speak of earlier periods.”17 Our volume concludes that closer study—​theme by theme, aspect by aspect, of the continuing experience of Empire in Asia, during this broader period bounded, roughly, by the geopolitical ascendancy of European-​based powers—​supports this thesis, and its rationale. The dialogue between these framing studies helps explain our conclusion. Bayly argued there was a “great acceleration” and intensification of the profound forces building the modern world, from the 1890s into the Great War—​a world that simultaneously became more similar from region to region, but also more differentiated within regions. Osterhammel argues that his picture is more nuanced, his time frame more protracted. For him, the “innovations with a worldwide impact” which came “thick and fast” began in the 1860s, extended into the 1880s, and converged. This shaped a process of change over time that made the outbreak of the Great War, from a global point of view, something more than a “sudden, unexpected falling of the curtain.”18 The vantage point of Empire in Asia, as affected by the three vectors of change we identified above, bears him out. The striking changes in the broader correlation of forces certainly justify Osterhammel’s contention that “never had changes originating in Europe achieved such impact on the rest of the world.” Osterhammel’s three levers of European agency—​power, influence, and force of example—​all resonate through our story. Yet so do fundamental aspects of continuity and overlap. European-​based imperial projects 17

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of expansion did become transformative—​but never unfettered, unilateral, or all-​ conquering. “Asian” states, societies, communities, and individuals found themselves increasingly navigating and negotiating within a geopolitical frame being reordered by powers emanating from Europe. Bayly rightly notes that the global expansion of European power and its seeming pervasiveness proved transitory. But those powers, and their European agents, almost always strove to build on, and work within, legacies and legitimacies inherited on the spot; were compelled to work with, and often depend on, demographic, economic, political, and physical partnerships with Asian populations and polities they sought to reorder; and became heavily, sometimes powerfully, influenced by the constraints and burdens, as well as benefits and advantages, of wielding suddenly greater leverage in reordering a mega-​region which also made its own demands upon them. This was in fact not even a story of uncovering case by case, or aspect by aspect, explanations for gaps in agency and power: it was a story of entanglement. An Imperial Order, in which regions and polities defined themselves in relationship to each other, became, through the noise and fury of the “long nineteenth century,” a Global Order that brought European and Asian-​based powers, through this entangling instrument of empire, into an interwoven geopolitical and economic states system. To put it crudely, European industry, technology, money, ideas, and ambitions entangled fundamentally with Asian legacies, practices, structures and institutions, norms and expectations, societies, and physical environments. The shared and overlapping stories of the post-​Chinggisid Imperial Order became the blended stories of an integrated Global Order. This volume engages that story by proceeding thematically, rather than, as in Volume One, regionally. There are two principal reasons for this. First, the characteristics that made this a qualitatively distinct period in the wider history of Empire in Asia were so systemic, entangled, and interwoven that these profound changes over time can only really be brought out by analyzing them thematically, not by proceeding region by region. Second, our approach is to identify a series of developments that illustrate, when aggregated, why this was both continuing story and distinct change. The themes themselves, with some selective focus, are used to illustrate the wider experience of a particular dimension across Empire in Asia. The themes include: extraterritoriality and the use of legal codes to reorder and regulate relationships on the spot within projects of empire, or in spaces of competition between empires; technology and infrastructure as the organizing principles and physical eco-​skeleton of projects of empire and wider reordering; concepts of political sovereignty and their practical impact on geopolitical control of territories and peoples; the defining of imperial frontiers as a cornerstone of the process of reordering a “modern” states system; the mass movements and migrations of peoples, for a variety of reasons, as a driving force in reordering economies, states, and the states system; the changing relationship between religion and the politics of empire and state-​building, or state-​rebuilding; and the projection of maritime empire, commercial and political, across the oceans, high seas, and port cities of Asia, as the most dramatic expression of globalizing an Imperial Asia. A  final chapter considers 18

Introduction

our aggregated arguments for the importance of Empire in Asia in globalizing Asia in a “long nineteenth century.” Our project divided this reexamination of the history of empire in Asia into two important phases. This division was determined by what we saw as the changing nature, character, and consequences of the driving forces that reordered Asia, through empire. Those driving forces, indeed the historical nature of empire itself, are considered in an opening survey chapter that links some central themes explored by both volumes in this series: Thomas DuBois’s study of “the overlap of plural empires as a way of life.” DuBois identifies in Hulunbuir, the steppe grassland border province that now connects China, Mongolia, and Russia, a site through which to search, through the combination of “historical accident, cultural preference, and ecological constraint,” for what might be seen as “one or more uniquely Asian experiences of empire.” Geography, human movement and activity, and the flow and transmission of goods, ideas, and ambitions, made Hulunbuir a space in which multiple experiences of empire could coexist, and this should compel us to reconsider any static concepts of core and periphery. Material, cultural, and political expressions of empire produced for Hulunbuir a history in which “old networks did not vanish entirely, but rather continued to exist and evolve as new empires added new layers of connections symbols and loyalties.” Ranging from the Mongol through the Japanese projects of empire, the Hulunbuir legacies suggest that for Asia, on numerous levels, the experience of empire was always dynamic and plural. The theme of extraterritoriality and the application of legal codes remain the most emotive dimension of this story, time, and place. To cite just one potent symbol of perceived “Western” arrogance and Chinese “humiliation,” the myth of signs saying “No Dogs or Chinese” in the public parks of the Shanghai International Settlement refuses to die.19 Robert Bickers’s chapter examines extraterritoriality, primarily as developed by the British in expanding their presence and activity in Qing and Revolutionary China. Right away this theme raises deeper issues: the fundamental importance of external penetration and reordering in the Sinic sphere, and the wider Asian repercussions of this most dramatic change in the correlation of forces, between Imperial China and the rest of the Great Powers. The intelligence assessments Macartney brought home from his Mission might have been overshadowed for later generations more interested in the Qianlong Letter, but at the time they turned out to be part precursor and part prompt to attitude changes toward Imperial China that powerfully influenced the “long nineteenth century.” Macartney’s entourage produced much of lasting and wide interest, including detailed accounts, with engravings, of journeys that included crossing the Ming Great Wall, and an influential multivolume official report. But Macartney’s own journal observations seem most directly to have planted seeds of future ambitions: The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-​rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred 19

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and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbours merely by her bulk and appearance. But whenever an insufficient man happens to have the command on deck, adieu to the discipline and safety of the ship. She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and then will be dashed to pieces on the shore; but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.20 This portrait of an imperial state “in decline,” a theme atavistically familiar to classically educated Britons weaned on Gibbons’s classic study The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, coincided with an ever-​growing sense that commerce in China promised fabulous wealth.21 The Qing state and its administration might have become disorganized, sclerotic, and apparently isolationist, but Chinese economy and society remained dynamic, and hungry for engagement. Bickers’s chapter examines that most nuanced of issues: just how imperial powers, particularly the British, managed, on the spot, from the 1840s on, to insert their own commercial, economic, and administrative interests, and agents, within a Chinese political economy they sought to reorder, to “open to the world.” There is a limit to revisionism. British and International Settlements and Concessions were established on Chinese soil and British gunboats patrolled up China’s great rivers, but there were no Chinese concessions in Cornwall, nor any Chinese warships patrolling the English Channel. But Bickers presents a relationship much more complicated than the simple dispossessing of Chinese authority on their own soil in pursuit of some grander imperial agenda. Extraterritoriality reflected how complicated and unstable the whole project to “modernize” China by external intervention really was. Its most important rationale was to serve as a means to control and discipline the behavior of British and British-​controlled individuals and interests in China, not to exclude Chinese from enclaves carved out of their own hide. What mattered most about extraterritoriality was how it operated in practice, and the most important feature in that regard was that the system rested on the contingent needs of British individuals and interests on the spot in China, not on any imperial grand strategy. The system and its practice in fact reflected the nature of the British Empire itself, at least in this part of the world: an unstable array of networks and partnerships, very heavily localized and contingent in how they pursued their own interests, working through layers of administration and application. The most fascinating practical result of establishing the whole system was to reshape in practice the definition, in China, of just who was British—​entangled identities—​and just what interests were British-​protected. Bickers notes that this often stretched any such definition well beyond familiar notions of identity, ethnicity, and patrimony. Tracing the growth of the practice, Bickers points out that it became widespread throughout the whole Sinic sphere, including Qing attempts to impose it in their own interest in Korea and Japan. He points out that there were important differences in design and practice, between, for example, British and Japanese systems. He accepts that the operation of the system 20

Introduction

bounded in time the reordering of a China unable to set terms for external engagement in its own territory, with all that entailed. But he insists that these systems were embedded inside, working within, the Chinese-​dominated networks of commerce and trade that were essential to the prosperity of the foreign interests operating from settlements and concessions. And he concludes that the salient feature of the most important system, the British, was how improvised, local, and contingent it always was. Bluntly, “the seemingly hard principles underlying it could be superseded when it was deemed necessary.” The ramifications of the “globalization” of Imperial China by the combination of external and local forces cannot be underestimated. This was a cornerstone development of the “long nineteenth century.” It formed a wave that propelled another: the Japanese national decision to embark on two projects—​modernization and overseas territorial empire. This is often told as a unique story, standing in striking contrast to the apparent decline of all other significant Asian-​based imperial projects, from the Ottoman, through the Mughal, to the Qing. It is also frequently explained as a project that changed fundamentally in the twentieth century, becoming, after the Great War, a military march toward conquest and exclusive regional hegemony.22 John DiMoia challenges this latter interpretation in a chapter which argues that from a vantage point no less significant than geopolitics and foreign policy the Japanese project of overseas empire shows striking continuity, from the middle years of the Meiji period in the 1880s, in its focus on aggressive territorial expansion and establishing exclusive spheres of influence. That vantage point is the combination of technology and infrastructure, combining methods of organization with the structures built to develop a Japanese-​dominated political economy in mainland Northeast Asia. DiMoia argues that Japanese infrastructure development was the real driver of wider Japanese imperialism and thus a window into its very nature. Agreeing that external penetration into the Qing polity did trigger fundamental regional changes, DiMoia explains how Japanese efforts to build economic, technological, and administrative infrastructure reveal the underlying continuity of a drive to security and prosperity through expansion. Operating within the competitive and volatile period of “high imperialism,” railway building in particular, especially the development of the South Manchuria Railway system, not only points to the central importance of infrastructure in Japanese policy, it also reveals the wider ambitions of that policy. Far from being a reaction to circumstances during and after the Great War, this was an agenda that unfolded very consistently and with increasing momentum. Bringing a closer critical examination of more recent historiography to bear on the problem, DiMoia concludes that “the elements for an imperial approach were in place very early,” and rather than being an atavistic or moral reaction to post–​Great War geopolitical challenges, “Japan’s modern empire appears almost relentlessly bureaucratic and deeply rational in its pursuits.” Japanese imperialism was indeed a central development in forging a Global Asia. It remains the most striking evidence that this vast historical process was much more complicated than “the rise of the West”; but it was driven more by the Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s effort to wedge itself into that world, than by reactive militarism. DiMoia persuasively 21

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summarizes the nature, impact, and breadth of this deeper continuity of empire-​building through infrastructure: “Through materiality, with rail and industry representing key examples, Japan extended and carried out its aims abroad, and supplemented these spatial interventions with an increasingly interventionist military/​policing presence, one where the public health apparatus responsible for quarantine was located inside the colonial police.” This categorically demonstrated that an Asian-​based imperial power could effectively insert itself into the new Global Asia being reordered by empire. Seismic upheaval in the Sinic sphere also significantly influenced the experience of the region we now call Southeast Asia, a term not used during the “long nineteenth century.” This also often unfolded through the entangling of Chinese, local, and European interests and ambitions, influenced here by the absence of any dominant regional power. Island Southeast Asia, more accessible to European maritime power, was already heavily enmeshed in a European-​dominated imperial states system, politically territorially carved up by British, French, Dutch, and Spanish (and later American) projects. Mainland Southeast Asia now found itself literally stuck between its relationships with the Sinic Order of geopolitics and a massive increase in European-​driven ambition and penetration into the region—​partly as a component of reordering China, partly for its own sake. Bruce Lockhart studies this experience in a chapter that analyzes what was ultimately much more than a simple failure to communicate: a long and erratic clash between French concepts of sovereignty and local and regional understandings of suzerainty, as both defined, demarcated, and legitimized the exercise of political authority over territories and peoples. Lockhart argues that existing regional ideas of suzerainty relied on ambiguity and overlap, and were palpably layered, in order to manage the exercising of authority over land and people in a region whose physical environment often set limits to such authority, and which had long experience in negotiating a balance between practical autonomy and a relationship with Imperial China. He notes that the French understood the nature of these ideas and deliberately set out to supersede them with something very different. But this was a messy process indeed, especially because so much was literally, sometimes willfully, lost in translation. A term such as “independence” proved especially problematic. French empire-​builders, particularly agents on the spot, saw it as representing a fundamental change by defining exclusive political authority; Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Chinese agents tended to regard it as a rhetorical assertion that did not affect overlapping and ambiguous relationships of patron and vassal with which they were so familiar. This difference in perception, partly contrived, eventually provoked military conflict between the French and the Qing over whether or not French exclusive geopolitical authority would prevail in what the French now termed “Indochina.” Lockhart argues that French agents came to understand these differences in concept and leveraged them, “in effect, forcing a replacement of traditional multiple suzerainty (in the case of Cambodia and Laos) by a single suzerain, themselves.” French power, concepts, and agency did not dispel or erase deeper cultural and intellectual continuities between the region and the Sinic sphere. But French insistence on a very different 22

Introduction

“monopolistic suzerainty” and their ability to impose it did reorder the region geopolitically, by evolving “into direct sovereignty with the creation of French Indochina as a full-​fledged colony with clearly defined borders.” Imperial convergence was sharpest along the frontier and borders lie at the heart of the next chapter by Brian P. Farrell, which examines the nature and impact of imperial frontiers in the “long nineteenth century.” Farrell notes that a border formed only one component of a frontier; that frontiers were one of the oldest and most significant components of empire and geopolitical systems, in Asia as well as everywhere else; and that hitherto the imperial frontier was, more often than not, characterized by a fundamental theme: ambiguity. Ambiguous liminal zones in which people living in and moving through areas that lay at the margins between imperial states, with political, military, and economic relationships to one or more of these states that could be overlapping, or ambivalent, or even co-​opted, provided empires with an instrument that helped them manage, flexibly, such challenges as military security, economic intercourse, the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas, and the projection of status and authority. It is no exaggeration to say that “pre-​modern” empires were heavily defined by their frontiers, usually plural in nature as well as on the ground. From the middle of the “long nineteenth century,” European-​based empires made a determined effort to transform the geopolitical order of Central Asia in particular. This was part of what became a global drive toward constructing a “modern” states system, in which articulated standards of governance and administration, as well as norms and codes for acceptable economic, military, and political behavior, were defined as the basis for literally redrawing the political map. This was expressed as establishing an order composed of “civilized states.” That meant marking out clearly defined and accepted territorial boundaries to enable authorities that demonstrated they could meet the required standards and effectively control these borders to secure the territory and peoples within them. It can even be said, in modest simplification, that the global pursuit became to replace a world defined by frontiers with one regulated by borders.23 This understandably generated the trauma of change. Ambiguity suited empire, aligned as it was to diversity, differentiation, and layers. Stark clarity in definition fit less well with such a geopolitical model, and the rough edges of the fit emerged very clearly in the Asian nineteenth-​century experience. The crucial relationship was the link between the frontier and the state. European-​based empires adopted, over time, two concepts for their wider drive to reorder the states system: to distinguish between empty space and ordered space, which in their view meant the difference between territory not controlled by any authority that could meet the required standards and territory controlled by one that could; to identify, demarcate, and recognize scientifically surveyed geographical border lines, as instruments by which to manage both “international relations” and relations with peoples living inside these frontier areas. This was a major problem, because such peoples could and did complicate both internal security and “international relations,” which, through the medium of the frontier, were entangled too tightly to separate. The two greatest 23

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projects of Empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century” generated a bitter and volatile rivalry, from the late 1820s, over how to manage the relationship between their great Asian projects: the consolidation of British paramountcy in India and the territorial expansion of Tsarist Russia. Defining the imperial frontier became the very essence of that rivalry, the principal instrument by which both empires sought to reorder Asia, build this new “modern” states system, establish “ordered space,” and contain the expansion of the other. The focal points of this so-​called Great Game were, not coincidentally, the heartlands of the old Timurid Empire, from whence his descendants moved into India to establish the Mughal Empire: what the British called their Northwest Frontier, straddling India and the state of Afghanistan, violently overlapping into the khanates of Central Asia and impinging on the Qing’s own Northwest Frontier. Farrell makes five arguments. First, the British consciously worked from within legacies and strategies inherited from the regional powers they supplanted, and relied fundamentally on local agents and relationships, at all levels, for all their endeavors. Second, British policy was distorted by long-​running bitter internal arguments—​which ran in a rolling discussion, that lasted for decades, from higher direction in London, down through central administration in India, and out to include political and military men on the spot along the Northwest Frontier. The argument was over how to manage the volatile relationship with Russia in Asia, which itself became defined by linkage between specific problems in the region and much wider strategic rivalries. This was in fact one of the most powerful manifestations of “globalizing Asia”: the forging of strategic connections between Great Power politics in Europe and this dynamic, and protracted, “Cold War” in Asia. Third, the problem of what they saw as “empty space” dominated both British and Russian thinking about this rivalry and how to manage the problem of frontiers, and both identified the status of Afghanistan as the pivotal issue. Fourth, the British tried to resolve their problem by defining what they called a “scientific frontier” for Northwest India; the very concept reflected the spirit of the times and the dynamics of their wider empire project. Finally, the general problem was never resolved. It was only surpassed by geopolitical developments elsewhere, to which this rivalry was connected. The result was the persistence of one of the last “imperial frontiers” left on the planet—​an “empty space” surviving within, and despite, an aggressive, wide, and deep reordering of the Asian states system by these fractious empires. In this respect, the “long nineteenth century” lingers still. This wider and deeper reordering is pursued in the next chapter by Paul Werth, who analyzes the multiple movements of masses of people, throughout the “long nineteenth century,” across what became the vast spaces reorganized by Russian imperial expansion. Werth makes some cardinal points: the Russian project of empire was, overall, going into the twentieth century, a striking success by any metric one cares to use; Russia by itself reconstructed a Eurasian order that bonded the whole of North Asia into a polity stretching from the Pacific Ocean into central Poland; and during the “long nineteenth century” Russia became “an Asian power in terms of its geographical composition and 24

Introduction

the geopolitical preoccupations of its elites.” The effects flowed both ways: “just as Asia became increasingly important to Russia and its leaders, so too Russia became central to Asia’s future as the nineteenth century progressed.” Russian expansion was fundamental to the dynamic already identified over frontiers: the merging of European Great Power rivalries and their states system with their larger projection of imperial power, and states system reordering, across Asia. Werth argues that movements of peoples were central to all these developments. Linkage, the connecting of strategic pressures and challenges in one region to those in another, became a defining feature of Russian imperialism. A frequent primary motive to threaten the British along their Northwest Frontier was to compel the British to back down, or reduce the pressure, in other regions, such as the Balkans and the Ottoman sphere. Moving peoples, either by design or in enabling more spontaneous flows, became a preoccupation of the expansion of Russia into Asia. Peopling vast spaces, to anchor them politically, physically, and economically to the wider Russian polity, relied on these great movements. People moved east, and southeast, as refugees, pilgrims, settlers, convicts, traders, merchants, soldiers, engineers, and administrators. By far the biggest such driver was unleashed by the emancipation of the serfs, which reflected a major change in the hitherto guarded Russian state attitude toward spontaneous mass movements into Asia. This enabled, by the 1880s, a demographic movement of settlers to people the vast spaces of Siberia and what became the Russian Far East. The older dynamic of defining frontiers with Imperial China culminated in massive territorial expansion that brought Russian Empire to the Pacific Ocean, made it a major player in the external imperial penetration in Qing China, and brought it into confrontation with Japanese imperialism in Manchuria and Korea. Werth notes poignantly that “in virtually all cases, this movement entangled Russia and Russians more deeply in the affairs of their neighbors, while also implicating non-​Russian subjects in the fate of the tsarist empire.” Nowhere was that more stark than in Central Asia, the old Timurid heartland, whose political autonomy eventually disappeared under Russian territorial expansion that created imperial frontiers with Qing China and the buffer state of Afghanistan. These flows, powerful as they were, also remained far from one-​sided. Strong emphasis from the 1890s on trying to use demographic movements to Russianize and therefore “civilize” newly absorbed Asian territories often found more complicated realities on the ground: “conditions often compelled [Slavic migrants] sooner to adapt to habits of their new neighbors than to compel the opposite.” But the flows remained powerful. As with frontiers, flows of people could be a source of instability or represent new opportunities for the state. The massive expansion of the railway and communications network across this Russian Empire literally connected the political economies of East Asia to those of Europe, along an unbroken and patrolled economic land artery, for the first time since the Mongol postal route. Russian orchestrated, enabled, driven, or tolerated movements of peoples literally made North Asia as a geopolitical fact, reordered Central Asia, and constituted one of the strongest drivers in building a Global Asia. Werth concludes that this theme makes clear “it was in the nineteenth century that [Russia and the other great 25

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Asian-​based empires, Ottoman, Persian, Chinese] became fundamentally entangled, and human mobility proved to be a critical ingredient in this convergence.” Convergence also featured in the theme engaged by Jack Fairey in Chapter 7: the relationships between religion and experiences of imperial governance and administration. Fairey poses a clear question to focus his chapter: “how did imperial practices and attitudes toward religion change?” How, in other words, did “political actors across Asia in the nineteenth century use ‘religion’ to assist in constructing and administering imperial states?” Fairey addresses these questions by examining four things:  official state ideology; day-​to-​day practices of imperial governance; managing relations between subject religious communities; and relations between states. He focuses on the Ottoman Empire, as the most significant non-​European based power that continued to frame policies and decisions involving religion in an era where, across Asia, such things increasingly emanated from European power. The Ottomans thus represent not only an important case study but also a crucial outlier, for the larger theme of how religion influenced, and was influenced by, geopolitical globalizing in Asia. Fairey explains the role and impact religion played in the Ottoman polity, which was central to both its internal dynamics and its relations with the rest of the world. He argues that the French invasion of Egypt triggered seismic geopolitical waves that over time persuaded Ottoman administrators, who remained confident in their own traditions of governance, that “those traditions had become corrupted or fallen into abeyance, and that . . . deeper reform and renewal were required.” This involved experimenting with new administrative ideas, forms, and practices. That led, along a path of so-​called defensive modernization, toward truly significant change:  the attempt to inculcate “a new, trans-​confessional sense of ‘Ottoman-​ness’ that placed patriotism to a common ‘fatherland’ or ‘father-​state’ over loyalty to any particular religion.” This unsettled the very core of the Ottoman polity, within which religion had always been understood as the primary individual and communal source of identity, and the conduit through which both related to the state and the empire. Religions were communities, with layered and delegated political roles. Displacing this by forging a new imperial identity, outflanking religion, summed up in an 1876 constitution that declared “all subjects of the Empire are without distinction called Ottomans, no matter what religion they profess,” was fundamental change. The need to pursue such change seemed driven home by the dramatic change in the correlation of forces, which placed the Ottoman state on a geopolitical front line bordering the Great Powers and the Concert of Europe. They increasingly came to see the Ottomans as the “Sick Man of Europe,” identified as the “Eastern Question” the issue of what consequences would ensue from a collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and increasingly took up communal issues within that empire as international concerns that required their involvement. This was role reversal from the long years of Ottoman penetration into Central Europe, and it helped motivate the so-​ called Tanzimat Reforms that aimed to strengthen the Ottoman state by centralizing it. That gravely disrupted long established layers and hierarchies of administration, and

26

Introduction

differentiation—​especially communal bodies defined by religion—​through which this polyglot empire was defined and governed. Fairey agrees with Bayly that a central feature of the “long nineteenth century” was the progressive imposition by Western states of “a new pattern of internationalism on the old world order.”24 This undermined the ambiguity, in international relations as well as internal administration, that was so foundational to the practice of Empire in Asia, nowhere more so than in the Ottoman sphere. Religion as a political factor, and its agents, became something to be controlled by imperial states, not accepted as part of their necessary ambiguity. The Ottomans also embarked on a cultural and political campaign to promote Islam, as a way to enhance their own geopolitical influence and in response to European pressure on Ottoman arrangements. That only underlined the new concept of harnessing religion as an instrument to be employed by a stronger imperial state. Instead of governing through power-​sharing arrangements resting on differentiation and ambiguity, the Ottomans, and other imperial states, tried increasingly to co-​opt religious leaders as subordinate agents working directly for a more centralized imperial state. Despite some wide variations in how different imperial states tackled the relationship between religion and the state, a strong trend of convergence, one reflected by the Ottoman experience, became clear: “it was imperative to increase government capacity—​to do more as a state and to extract more from one’s subjects than ever before.” This forged an “imperial religion,” featuring drives to strengthen centralized states, “nationalize” such forces as religion that had long been sources of pluralism, and redefine the place of religion and its elites in political life. For Asia in general the consequences of this substantial shift were palpable. For the Ottomans, they were existential: “the religious policies of the nineteenth century failed dismally to bring about more effective direct rule and arguably brought the empire to an end that was sooner, messier, and bloodier than might otherwise have been the case.” Through such vectors, the Ottomans actually exercised great agency, to their detriment, in answering their own “Eastern Question.” The final thematic chapter, written by Donna Brunero, tackles the most visibly dramatic aspect of globalizing Asia through empire: the construction of a global maritime empire, weaving the sea lanes and maritime infrastructure of Asia into what became a truly global network of networks, chain of chains. Brunero focuses on the British as the imperial power that drove this maritime globalization, a persuasive feature of the era that overlapped with the “Pax Britannica.” She pursues three themes: what constituted the elements of British maritime power and empire in Asia and how they made that empire a thalassocracy, which she defines as “rule by those who control the sea”; how did Britons understand and promote this thalassocracy they built in Asia; and how we can understand imperial flows and experiences by exploring from the vantage point of one of their fundamental components: the deck of a working ship. The British inherited the elements of a maritime empire from earlier activity led by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch.

27

Brian P. Farrell and Donna Brunero

But from 1815 British maritime power was so formidable that it gave them unprecedented agency to redevelop the imperial use of the great waters. In Asia, however, that project revolved around a fundamental reality: maritime power must amount by its very nature to the exploitation of land-​based networks and nodal points of trade, commerce, and security—​and in Asia, those land-​based networks and nodal points relied, fundamentally, on truly massive local engagement and involvement. What the British did over time was to build a series of maritime networks, linking colonial port cities, that created a global economic network of networks. This series of networks very much built on long established local trade and commerce relationships; it deeply entwined the flag and trade as British naval power became the great enabler of port and maritime investment and development; and it absolutely relied on Asian populations, on land and at sea, for labor, finance, and markets. It marks yet another example of entanglement in the process of creating a global Asia. Nothing did more to globalize Asia through the agency of empire-​building; but no such project was more deeply characterized by an array of partnerships between Asian and European, in all ways, and at all levels, than this one. The list of great commercial cities of contemporary Asia coincides almost exactly, and not coincidentally, with the list of great colonial port cities developed through this project of a “British world order.” Arne Westad’s summary chapter ponders the collective effort by this volume to argue three main conclusions. First, there was a “long nineteenth century,” bounded not by dates but by vectors of change, during which empire, not nation-​state or substate actors, remained the principal instrument of reordering in Asia. Second, that reordering was unprecedented in breadth and depth, culminating in the geopolitical reconstruction of an Asia now hard wired into a global states system of political economy. Finally, such reordering unfolded during the period when the Industrial Revolution and other profound forces altered the correlation of forces so massively that a “great divergence,” from the mid-​nineteenth century, vested global ascendancy and initiative into European Great Powers, who used it to dramatically reorder geopolitical Asia—​but did so through concepts, practices, policies, and endeavors that were fundamentally blended with local reality, legacy, partnership, and agency, at all levels. The older Eurasian Imperial Order simply globalized. The editors conclude this introduction by noting their debt to one other influential analysis. David Abernethy argued that it is possible to study both the interactions of Asians with Europeans and the interactions of Asia with Europe. But these historical agents were so deeply intertwined, for so long, that this must be done with eyes wide open. The experience of Empire in Asia, in what was indeed a distinct “long nineteenth century,” bears out both the argument and the caution. Abernethy argues that only Western Europe—​to which we might add the United States and perhaps Imperial Japan—​produced an outward projection of sheer power that, over time, established their regional states system as a truly global system. Agreed. But as he notes himself this was due to very specific and contingent historical circumstances, as well as profound forces.25 Europe might have exported itself to remake its world—​but Asia and Asians were so influential in determining how 28

Introduction

those processes unfolded on the super-​continent that this can only be seen as a wider, blended, outcome of empire.

NOTES 1 Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), pp. 35–​49, provides an excellent short overview to these themes. The Canton System and the Cohong are examined in context by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2013); and in detail by John D. Wong, Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Frank Dikötter, Lars Lamaan, Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 2 The genesis and organization of the Macartney Mission is examined in James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), Part 3; and Alain Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 2013 [1992]). Macartney’s statement is recorded in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 55. 3 Critical evaluations of the Mission include Hevia, Peyrefitte, and Robert Bickers (eds), Ritual & Diplomacy: The Macartney Mission to China 1792–​1794 (London: The Wellsweep Press, 1993); Frances Wood, “Britain’s First View of China: The Macartney Embassy 1792–​1794,” RSA Journal 142, no. 5447 (1994); and Ruth W. Dunnell et al. (eds), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (New York: Routledge, 2004). An influential contemporary account is Aeneas Anderson (ed.), An Accurate Account of Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China (New York: Forgotten Books, 2016 [1797]). 4 The Qianlong letter can be examined at http://​www.fas.nus.edu.sg/​hist/​eia/​documents_​ archive/​qianlong.php. The established interpretation may be engaged in John King Fairbank, “On the Qing Tribute System,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (June 1941); and, as editor, The Chinese World Order: Traditional Chinese Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Fresh reinterpretations include Tom Cunliffe’s evaluation of Henrietta Harrison’s forthcoming work, “Emperor Qianlong’s Letter Strategic, Not Arrogant,” at http://​www.china.org.cn/​china/​2015-​01/​30/​content_​34686142.htm; and Tim Chamberlain’s blog essay, “The First British Embassy to China 1793–​1794,” at http://​ eccentricparabola.blogspot.sg/​2014/​05/​the-​first-​british-​embassy-​to-​china-​1793.html. 5 An influential work in this vein is Gayatri Spivak’s chapter “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-​Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 6 David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415–​1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–​1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 7 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914 (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 29

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8 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 4 vols (New York, San Diego, Berkeley: Academic Press and University of California Press, 1974–​ 2011); Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); William McNeill, A World History, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 9 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914, pp. 1–​2. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 11 and 330–​40, for religion, modernity, and imperial power. 12 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, pp. xv–​xxi, lays out what is discussed here in summary form. 13 Osterhammel himself noted the marked difference between his own background as a China scholar and Bayly’s expertise as a South Asianist, suggesting that this scholarly training was at least partly responsible for the significant point that the two historians have differing points of emphasis on understanding the modern world (ibid., xvii). 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., pp. 362–​8, for a comparison of the frontier in the American and Russian contexts, issues taken up by Chapters 5 and 6 in this volume. 16 Ibid., xx. 17 Ibid., xx–​xxi. 18 Ibid., xviii. 19 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832–​1914 (London: Penguin, 2012); James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth Century China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003). 20 Helen Henrietta Macartney Robbins, Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney with Extracts from His Letters, and the Narrative of His Experiences in China, as Told by Himself, 1737–​1806, from Hitherto Unpublished Correspondence and Documents (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 386. 21 A sense that ran through the twentieth century—​for example, Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, first published in 1937, was reissued as recently as 2008. 22 Robert A. Carter, The Kyoto School: An Introduction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); James Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 23 An interesting take on this theme is Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalization in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 24 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914, pp. 234, 237. 25 Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance.

30

Chapter 1

In the Center of It All: Thoughts from the Edge of Empire Thomas David DuBois Introduction To the visitor arriving by airplane, the vast grassland of Hulunbuir will feel as remote as anywhere in the world. Traveling overland from Harbin or Chita makes the distance (about 800 kilometers in either direction) all the more tangible. The distance from the great imperial centers might give the impression that a region such as Hulunbuir would have been free of state power, a northern version of the Southeast Asian highlands that James Scott has characterized as ungovernable by the empires of the lowlands.1 But the region (Figure 1.1) was geographically peripheral to empire, but hardly isolated from it. Up to the nineteenth century this seemingly isolated region had been formally or informally part of four integrated polities that this volume refers to as empires: the Mongol, Chinese Ming and Qing, and Asiatic Russia. In 1932, it was incorporated into the Japanese Empire as part of the client state of Manchukuo, and there it remained until the Japanese surrender in 1945. Each of these empires brought to the region distinct interests, threats, and opportunities. The layered legacy of multiple empires remains inescapable in Hulunbuir (shown in close-​up in Figure 1.2) today. The main city of Hailar boasts Chinggis Park, befittingly crowned by a statue of Chinggis (aka Genghis Khan) on horseback, and a large concrete cairn (oboo) where visitors come to deposit stones carried from the conqueror’s birthplace in neighboring Mongolia. The surrounding countryside is divided not into counties and districts, as would be the case elsewhere in China, but rather into banners (qi), a system that derives ultimately from the structure of the Manchu Qing military. Near the modern train station in the bustling border town of Manzhouli, a small crowd of derelict wooden izba (Russian-​style houses) stands as silent testimony to the history of Russian imperial interest in the Chinese Eastern Railway. The 1903 opening of this line initiated a new era of imperial competition, as Moscow, Beijing, and Tokyo each tried to pull the region into their spheres of economic and military control. The extent of this rivalry remains visible in the remains of Japanese-​era fortifications just outside of Hailar, and the preserved site of the 1939 Nomonhan Incident (also known as the Battle of Khalkhin Gol), a defeat that convinced imperial Japan to seek peace with the Soviet Union. Since 1949, the region has been part of the People’s Republic of China, which has itself been accused of a “neo-​imperialist” policy of flooding ethnic minority regions such as Hulunbuir with Han-​Chinese settlers and tourists. 31

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Russian Empire

Aigun 1858

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iak

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Figure 1.1  Asynchronous map of Hulunbuir, showing its relation to historical empires. Map by author.

This chapter introduces regions like Hulunbuir as expressions of a distinct face of empire—​one seen not from the center of power, but from its margins. Such places reveal the plurality of ways that empires could make themselves felt, both inside and outside of political borders, and thus inspire reflection about the nature and operation of empire itself. As presented here, Hulunbuir itself is not intended to speak for pastoral societies, Chinese minorities, or any larger ecological or cultural niche; like anywhere, its particular ethnic, political, and productive makeup is unique, and is best understood as such. Rather it exemplifies some of the ways that power and interest flow through peripheral and contested regions—​similar lessons would be true, or at least relevant, in the mountains between Burma and Yunnan, or the rocky sea coves that spanned the coasts of Guangdong and Vietnam. Such regions present a unique experience of empire: neither the self-​portrait of empire as an integrated system, nor, as Scott would claim, its 32

In the Center of It All

Legend O U N T A I N S

Boundaries International Provincial Sub-Provincial River Railway 100

Genhe

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Ang angxi

Xing’an League

Figure 1.2  Close-​up map of Hulunbuir. Map by author.

absence, but rather the overlap of plural empires as a way of life. As the Asian empires discussed in the first volume entered a new era of European ascendance, this sort of overlap would become increasingly common and complex.

Defining Empire If we are to understand places like Hulunbuir as sites of imperial overlap we must first address some fundamental issues about empire itself. The first is literally one of language: talking about “empire” in Asia is itself an exercise in circular logic. The terminology of empire, and the foundational ideas of what empire is and does, draw overwhelmingly from Western historical experience, particularly the two prototypical examples of Rome for the ancient world and Britain for the modern. Adapting these 33

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ideas to fit the political aspirations of thirteenth-​century Mongol tribes, the commercial networks of Malay maritime traders, or the wandering of Buddhist monks up and down the trade highways of Central Asia is a task we must approach with the greatest care. It is, however, worth doing, if only because the fact and image of empire as an identifiable political type are so integral to the historical vocabulary. The language and symbols of empire echoed across Europe for centuries after the decline of the Roman imperium, and retained an evocative currency deep into Africa and Western Asia. European visitors took this symbolism with them on their voyages of discovery, referring to distant Asian lands as “empires,” regardless of whether they desired to connote civilizational grandeur or political tyranny, or simply as a placeholder term for any large polity they did not yet understand. As European power took on a global character, these new ventures came to supplant the ancient world as the point of reference for the idea of empire. When in 1868 Japan named itself an empire (even creating a new term in its own language for the occasion), it was clearly thinking of the image of contemporary Britain more than it was of Byzantium or ancient Rome. By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of empire had global currency. Three decades after Japan declared itself an empire, neighboring Korea followed suit, an act that referenced admiration and apprehension of Japan itself. The latter was certainly warranted: after just over a decade, Japan annexed the peninsula. Empire is an evocative concept, but not a unitary one. The term carries with it such strong iconic value that the library of historical writings on empire is itself an archive of sorts, one that shows the different ways empire as an ideal has been used as a mirror (often a dark one) reflecting the issues of the day. Eighteenth-​century political philosophers used the tyrannical or enlightened rule of distant Asian emperors as a straw man in their debates over political ideals at home.2 Such critiques became more focused as the center and stakes of empire moved from Asia to Europe. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx condemned British imperialism, but for very different reasons. Whereas Smith treated the acquisition of American colonies as the unsustainable dream of venal monopolists, Marx focused instead on the moral injustice of the enterprise, claiming that the British plunder of India far exceeded in brutality the worst of their Asiatic antecedents.3 For each, empire was a symbol, a cautionary tale, and an embodiment of ideals betrayed. Although the idea of empire lost much of its nominal legitimacy in the wave of decolonization after the Second World War (what political system today would refer to itself as an empire?), the term continues to wield considerable symbolic power. Empire remains in popular usage in part because it can act as an empty signifier. The same people who understand the negative connotations implied by Ronald Reagan’s 1983 characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” or American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that “we [the United States] don’t seek empires, we’re not imperialistic” will still speak with admiration of empires of fashion, taste, or commerce. The new era of American dominance at the end of the Cold War, with the subsequent entry of the United States into a series of military commitments in Iraq and 34

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Afghanistan, was a factor in the resurgence of scholarly interest in empire as a mode of political organization. However, even this wave of critical scholarship was not free of the pull of iconic and occasionally reductive images of empire. During the years after the 2003 US-​led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, classic accounts such as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire enjoyed a resurgence of both popular appeal and scholarly citations. Tales of imperial degeneration continue to appeal to a wide array of constituents, each of whom sees in them a very different set of historical lessons.4 There is value to seeking in empire a set of rules and typological patterns. Perhaps the most sweeping view comes from Michael Doyle. Doyle addresses the full range of causal explanations for imperial development: an explosion of energies from the center (Lenin, Schumpeter); instability or weakness at the periphery (Robinson and Gallagher); or an international system unable to accommodate a dramatic power imbalance between regions. He terms these causal forces metropolitan, pericentric, and structural, respectively, and sensibly concludes that all three must be present, and further that they mutually shape each other.5 Some scholars have divided historical empires into types and families, distinguishing, for example, the aims and trajectories of outward-​looking seaborne empires such as Britain and Spain from the layered sovereignty of land empires in Central Europe.6 But these big images of empire are still by and large drawn to and from very specific moments in European history. Even the field of postcolonial studies, devoted as it is to recapturing the lost voices of empire, is disproportionately concerned with the experience of former British colonies. Yet as this volume makes abundantly clear, the phenomenon of empire encompasses a far broader set of arrangements than the Western experience alone. The challenge, then, is to discover how the patterns and expressions of empire discussed in the first volume adapted to newer paradigms of empire during the nineteenth century. But just how different were they? We may anticipate a certain degree of similarity with the evolving European experience of empire. In addition to necessary functions such as defense, any sufficiently large and complex polity would also face similar structural challenges, such as balancing central oversight and local autonomy, and managing internal diversity so as to channel aspirations and energies toward the center. Other similarities can be tied to waves of transformation, such as advances in communication, transportation, or technology, and particularly of the rise of the state form that would eventually supplant empire as the political norm.7 Complicating the idea of typologies is the fact that empires did learn from and emulate one another, and in this sense, it is possible to speak of an evolving global form, notably so during the period covered in this volume. Yet surface similarities may mask causalities and conflate independent processes and concerns that may in reality have been coincidental or even antagonistic. Apparent similarities, for example, in the colonial policies even of contemporaries such as British Malaya and Japanese Taiwan, might denote either something fundamental to the behavior of states in a system or the copying of policy between neighbors. But it is just as likely that such similarity might represent two very 35

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individuated paths to the same point, with differences in motivations and aspirations intentionally masked by the universal language of empire. Conversely, much of what makes individual systems unique may be traced to cultural norms or material constraints. Distinct paradigms and idioms of rulership, legitimacy, and authority evolve and accrete over the rise and fall of successive polities, becoming embedded in the languages and cultures of kingship.8 The institutions of rule will reflect the realities of productive ecology—​a sparsely populated mountain region will obviously operate under different constraints than a cosmopolitan city-​state. But here again the problem is one of causality. It is one thing to say that a state will organize itself so as to overcome resource deficiencies, and another to say, as would Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” or Wittfogel’s idea of “hydraulic empires,” that these realities are truly the source of cultural expectations or political mindsets, particularly when such ideas themselves outlast changes in ecology or production.9 Empire is both systemic and local, expressing at both levels a combination of historical accident, cultural preference, and ecological reality.

Empires and States Returning to Hulunbuir, what was it about such places that allowed different systems of power to coexist? One reason may be the simple limits of power extension, but at least as important was that different sorts of political interests and idioms did not always conflict. Here the current state system provides a useful point of contrast; while the parameters of empire are subjective and shifting, the rules of the nation-​state are fixed by a global diplomatic order that both legitimates and dictates this form like it does no other. Since the early twentieth century, the legal personhood of states has rested on a clear set of objective criteria: the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States defines these as a permanent population, defined territory, functioning government, and the capacity to enter into relations with the other states.10 Such terms will no doubt strike the modern reader as a very sensible description of government, and indeed all have been widely accepted at least since the mid-​twentieth century. Yet although intentionally written to be expansive, these definitions do come with political values attached. The artificial permanence of the state form, as expressed in criteria such as stable borders and populations, requires a radical reshaping of society (both past and present) to conform to political parameters. Borders are set and made absolute. Populations are fixed, and languages, histories, and identities are reworked so that the mythos of the nation can expand up to, but not past, political boundaries. Precisely because these definitions of the state are not value free, they become interesting at the point that they no longer work, particularly when applied in retrospect. Conditions such as a permanent territory and population, for example, are easily adapted to much, but not all, of the early-​modern world. Both would have been largely workable in the core agrarian regions of Europe or East Asia, where land was the primary 36

In the Center of It All

foundation of wealth, but far less so in pastoral areas, where land was plentiful but largely unsuitable for intensive agriculture, and where wealth was counted in herds of livestock—​sheep, cattle, and horses—​that remain seasonally mobile, often over great distances.11 The same ecological constraints that made meaningless the idea of settled populations within fixed borders also shaped the nature of authority. Unable to coerce stable revenue from sources such as land tax, political power in a pastoral setting grew instead out of the ability to command the fealty and labor of a subject population, who were tasked with the care of princely or monastic herds. For most, the emergence of stable rule meant an end to intertribal conflict and access to resources that could provide a degree of security against the whims of nature. Among the ranks of the powerful, it appealed to a different set of virtues: ties of personal allegiance cemented by bonds of kinship, the charisma of the ruler, and the lavish gift giving that was a hallmark of Chinggisid rule. If the realities of pastoral statecraft were foreign to the postimperial order of the twentieth century, they were equally so to their own agrarian contemporaries. The Ming and Qing were stable bureaucracies based primarily in the interests of agriculture, but each one claimed suzerainty over large regions of grassland. Although the Ming emphasized separation and subjugation of the frontier, and the Qing voiced the relationship as a treaty alliance with its banner Mongols, both created policies to keep the pastoralists at a distance, while at the same time preventing the encroachment or rise of rival military powers, and ensuring the steady supply of strategic grassland commodities such as horses. Most important, even after the Qing placed Hulunbuir under direct administration, it continued to exert authority through native structures and distinct legal codes. Whether due to ecological constraints, an understanding of ethnic difference, or simply the logistics of ruling people who were very far from the center of power, these Chinese dynasties ruled the grasslands as a distinct and often mediated entity. In the same way, the pastoralists themselves viewed the Chinese center as both a threat and an opportunity. The Qing was at times highly aggressive in taming its inner frontiers, exerting devastating military force in its campaigns against the Zunghars, as well as relocating entire populations.12 But in the intervening periods, the dynasty as a political entity could feel quite remote. Its material demands were relatively light, and made primarily in the form of tribute (especially of valuable local items such as furs) paid by princes, rather than tax levied directly on the producers.13 Across China’s entire periphery, the ability to demand tribute, and thus the cost of even nominal fealty actually declined as dynastic power weakened, a fact that explains why other weak empires such as the later Mughal were able to remain together in the absence of a strong rival. Moreover, a stable relationship with agrarian China facilitated the vital trade in goods that would otherwise have had to be attained by other means.14 However, the Qing always remained vigilant toward the possibility that their allies might be pulled away toward an alternate center of power. They were right to be concerned. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both Russia and later the Soviet Union actively tried to court the political loyalty of communities across Central 37

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Asia, including Tibet, and the Muslims in Xinjiang, and were very active in Hulunbuir as well. Russian merchants had been visiting the annual Ganjuur temple market since at least the 1860s, and across the region, actively sought opportunities to reroute the highly lucrative Mongolian livestock trade away from their Chinese competitors. Sandwiched between the two great powers, places like Hulunbuir were hardly a passive victim of their rivalry. There were always alternate opportunities for those on the periphery of empire.15 This layering of influence reveals the overlap of very different sorts of power. Well into the twentieth century, Hulunbuir, positioned at the center of the grasslands and on the periphery of the agrarian world, negotiated two very different political idioms, neither of which corresponds neatly to the totalizing conventions of the modern nation-​ state. The completion of the Russian railway brought the region into range of a competing agrarian core, as well as auguring a third incipient idiom, that of state-​led developmentalism.16

Material Foundations Political forms grow to suit the nature of material conditions. The difference between agrarian and pastoral empires was fundamentally one of resources, both productive and strategic. Painting in very broad strokes, Chinese empires had used the wealth of agriculture to build stable political institutions, while the Mongols used the pasture as a productive resource, but drew their military strength from a strategic domination of space. The grassland, like the open sea, is both a productive resource in its own right, and a highway of commerce linking and in some ways threatening densely settled agrarian regions. Thus, Anthony Disney’s prescient separation of seaborne empires from maritime powers, that is, the use of the sea as a productive resource or a strategic one, holds true not only for the powers of archipelagic Southeast Asia and the oceanic Pacific, but in a way, also for their steppe counterparts as well.17 The question of resources shaped the viability of that most “imperialistic” of political acts, territorial expansion. Looking at classical depictions such as those on Trajan’s Column, with its images of treasure-​laden Roman soldiers returning to the capital, it is easy to imagine imperial aggression being its own reward. Sometimes it was: one estimate claims that Rome’s military predation brought fifteen to twenty thousand slaves per year into the capital.18 At least for a time, plunder justified the cost of the military, and motivated Rome to continue to push outward. In the words of Catherine Steel, “A year with no conflict was a year in which Rome was not exploiting its power to the full. War was a means of collecting tax.”19 However, as Roman expansion moved further from the Italian peninsula, the dividends of conquest grew comparatively smaller, and less easily transported, and there was little to be materially gained in moving further beyond already fraught borders.20 There are many ways for individuals to profit from war, and many strategic reasons to engage in violence, especially in the pursuit to acquire specific commodities or to deny them to competitors.21 But as an economic 38

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strategy, naked predation works best in times of instability or transition, and is by definition only temporary. Trade could be a resource, but could also carry political costs. Commerce brought wealth to the realm, and material benefit to the state. Merchant houses could be taxed, made to pay for state-​sanctioned monopolies, or asked to perform services, such as helping to coordinate the movement of goods. Traders spread word of imperial glory, and brought in new ideas. However, merchant interests could easily run counter to those of the state. Political elites had to remain vigilant against merchants who evaded tax and smuggled contraband. There was always a threat that the power of money would prove too great for the state to control, such as when merchants used their wealth to act above their station, to bribe corrupt officials, or to extract political concessions in return for financing political or military projects. Just as commerce was a resource for empire, empire was a resource for commerce. Empire backed trade but also directed its flow. Merchant houses benefitted from the security and administrative infrastructure that empire created. The Silk Road that connected China to the Mediterranean flourished during periods when great powers such as Tang China or the united Mongols were able to maintain effective order (and like the Southeast Asian kingdom of Srivijaya, to actively promote trade) across vast swathes of Central Asia.22 The explosive growth of oceanic trade during the late nineteenth century owed much to advances in transportation and communication (transatlantic transport costs fell roughly 60 percent between 1870 and 1900 alone), but these developments would have meant significantly less without the security guarantees provided by the global reach of the British and other imperial navies.23 At the same time, empires restricted trade by prohibiting the export of strategic commodities or precious metals, limiting the numbers of licensed trading houses, or banning commerce with certain regions. But even with these limitations, the convenience of remaining within one political system or trading with countrymen using the same laws and language was a powerful incentive to channel commercial activity into the nodes and networks of empire itself. Despite the rhetoric of free trade, the commerce of the British Empire flowed disproportionately to its own settlements, colonies, and dominions: Argentina, Australia, Canada, and India together absorbed five times as many British exports as the United States in 1913.24 The private money of the London markets preferred lending to British colonies for apparently no other reason than the greater trust they placed in British rule.25 The connections forged by empire can long outlast it. Even today, the flow of foreign direct investment continues to reflect the lingering influence of empires long since disbanded, with a small but perceptible tendency for British investment to remain within the Anglosphere (including former colonies in southern Africa, from which American interest is notably absent), and a marked preference for Central and South America as a destination for investment originating in Spain (Table 1.1). What about the material footprint of empire on the ground? Who benefits from imperial integration, and who pays the price? One argument claims that empire disproportionately benefits its periphery by opening global markets, while providing 39

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Table 1.1  Destination of FDI, 2003–​12, measured as a percentage of the national total Destination Australia United States Europe Southern Africa Central America South America

Source of investment UK

USA

3.6 21.8 40.2 5.1 4.0 2.4

4.1 45.4 0.6 13.1 5.2

France

Germany

Spain

0.2 11.7 62.0 2.1 0.8 3.8

0.3 4.7 81.0 0.0 0.6 3.6

0.25 9.5 61.4 0.3 7.5 24.5

Source: OECD International Direct Investment Database, available online at http://​stats. oecd.org (data accessed August 1, 2015).

investment and good administration that are financially supported by the imperial center. Another (referring to what might be called economic imperialism) argues just the opposite: that empire by that or any other name allows states or politically leveraged investors to exert an unfair advantage over colonies, systematically stripping colonies of resources and capital, and coercing them into relationships that make them dependent on the imperial center.26 There is little common ground between these two perspectives and even less point in trying to debate them in the abstract. In fact, the diversity of such relationships is itself an effective warning against seeking any unitary image of empire. Rather, to understand the drivers, advantages, and costs of empire, we must understand in detail the range of interests that connect imperial centers and peripheries, and the specific nature and degree of political advantage that empire creates. Like political empire, the waves of material interest in Hulunbuir were highly individuated, each representing a distinct mix of concerns, threats, and opportunities. Pastoralists had for centuries traded with agricultural core regions in China, Korea, and Manchuria through a number of lucrative networks in which the region sold live animals and animal products, particularly wool and processed hides and pelts, and bought grain, tea, and cloth. Circulation increased during the period of Mongol unification, when newly created walled outposts came to serve as markets for Chinese, Uighur, and other traders.27 In contrast, the Ming aimed less to integrate the region than to isolate it, surrounding the grasslands with fortifications, delineating a no-​man’s land in which settlement and agriculture were forbidden, and restricting trade to thirteen official markets on the Mongol border (Chosŏn Korea used a similar policy).28 Despite having a more cordial relationship with the Mongols, and more direct control over the region, the subsequent Qing continued to control trade. In a decree of 1696, they abolished the Ming horse markets, and instead restricted trade to approved firms, who paid for the privilege. The bottleneck of trade rights not only raised revenue for the dynasty, it also gave them willing partners to help enforce a ban on contraband, such 40

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as the import of metals, which could be used for weapons. (Conversely, the dynasty also waived tax on the import of necessary items such as coffins.) At the same time, the Qing also depended on the merchant houses for logistics. Three times during his long reign, the Qing Kangxi emperor (r. 1651–​1722) commissioned merchant firms to ship grain and fodder to troops stationed in Hulunbuir. This highway of provisions, conveyed by two hundred thousand conscripted laborers, itself became a major source and destination of trade.29 Many of the great names in nineteenth-​century Mongolian trade had gained their political foothold by provisioning the Qing military in its campaigns against the Zunghars. The completion of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) threw open the region to a new and entirely different sort of opportunities. While the old model made money on conveyance, the new availability of transport shifted value instead to production and processing. The railway facilitated the traditional trade in livestock and animal products, but also opened up entirely new industries, such as mining and timber. Within a few years, new Russian and Chinese banks, merchant houses, and export-​oriented ventures were crowding for space in the city of Hailar and the border boomtown of Manzhouli.30 Trade flowed both east and west. The construction of the CER did not trap Hulunbuir in a relationship with a better-​developed center; to the contrary, it opened the region to competing markets in Russia and China. Access to new markets created new possibilities for pastoralists, whose herds grew steadily over the next two decades (Table 1.3). Chinese and Russian entrepreneurs (including the railway itself) expanded slaughtering and tanning capacity in Hailar and Manzhouli, thus keeping more of the value of processing within the region.31 This new prosperity was reflected in daily life. No longer tied solely to the annual Ganjuur market, pastoralists had increasing freedom to sell their livestock at more advantageous conditions. And while a source from 1908 had lamented the hardship of importing “every grain of rice” from great distances, the increase of railway traffic would make necessities such as cloth and foodstuffs ever cheaper.32 Not everyone benefitted. The reliance on foreign markets directly exposed the region to the effects of external shocks such as the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the instability of externally issued currency, and the global economic depression of 1929. Chinese merchant houses were displaced, not by empire as such, but by their own compatriots, the better organized houses from Harbin who were able to leverage capital and their access to the railway. New trade networks disrupted old ones. Japanese investigators who visited the Ganjuur market in 1912 recorded massive exchanges of cattle, horses, and wool. By 1938 the market, separated from the railroad and bypassed by new exchanges, was a pale shadow of its former glory (Table 1.2).33 The more overtly developmental influence was not in the grasslands, but rather to the east of the Xing’an Mountains, where pasture gradually gave way to agriculture. While the pastoralists saw only an increase in the volume of trade, the completion of the railroad introduced Hulunbuir’s farmers to new ways of life, particularly if they produced for the global market. In 1905, agriculture was devoted almost exclusively 41

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Table 1.2  Declining volume of trade at the Ganjuur Temple Market 1912 1924 1926 1938

Cows

Horses

Sheep

Camels

6,000 3,000 1,700 1,183

1,500 2,500 1,500 589

15,000 3,000 5,000 3,454

90 60 50 4

Table 1.3  Herd size in Hulunbuir, 1906–​46 1906 1925 1937 1946

Cattle

Horses

Sheep and goats

124,418 170,688 200,809 105,304

170,172 180,896 175,592 50,192

1,460,876 1,597,995 1,167,072 540,422

Source:  Hulunbeier meng zhi [Gazetteer of Hulunbuir] (Hailaer: Nei Menggu wenhua chubanshe, 1999), 790–​2.

to grain for local consumption. By the late 1920s, land under cultivation had roughly doubled, and was 40 percent planted in soybeans, the export crop that had become a mainstay of the Manchurian economy, driving improvements in the production, sale, and transport of agrarian produce.34 Here as well, there were losers. While the CER had created new opportunities for pastoralists, the farmers’ almost complete dependence on the railway for exports narrowed the choice of buyers to a few conglomerates. Existing industries ranging from commercial houses to moneylenders were squeezed out by better capitalized competitors, particularly those from Japan.35 But overwhelmingly, the gains outweighed losses. Even the decimation of markets during the Great Depression did not affect farmers as much as it did the capital-​intensive processing industries (such as flour milling and oil pressing), which were disproportionately owned by foreign interests.36 The late 1930s saw yet another face of empire, as Japanese-​controlled Manchukuo incorporated Hulunbuir into a command economy that centered on serving the needs of the Japanese military. Massive areas of land were thrown open to new cultivation. Between 1935 and 1942, the total area of farmland increased from 610,000 to 2 million mu (approximately 40,000–​ 130,000 hectares).37 Rice-​ growing agrarian colonies (including a number of “frontier villages” [kaitaku mura] founded by settlers brought in from Japan or Korea) were established throughout Manchuria, including newly opened farmlands in and around Hulunbuir.38 As part of a Soviet-​inspired Five Year production plan, Hulunbuir itself was given a target quota of cattle, sheep, and wool, but at prices set so artificially low that many preferred to slaughter their stock rather than selling it. By the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945, the numbers of horses and sheep fell to less than a third of what they had been in 1906 (Table 1.3).39 42

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The simple point is that there is no simple way to characterize the material drivers or impact of empire in Hulunbuir. This one region saw the full range of imperial policies designed to develop or discourage trade, state development, and resource extraction. The material motivations of empire changed over time, and were experienced differently by each sector of the population; growth in one area did not necessarily come at the expense of another. One thing that is clear is that economically as well as politically, Hulunbuir was both periphery and center of very different sorts of relationships.

Empire and Culture The culture of empire presents two aspects: the internal expression of legitimacy and hierarchy, and the external face that empire presents to the world. The former begins with the culture of kingship. Within Asia some differences in internal cultural expression become quickly evident. Bruce Lockhart contrasts the Theravada Buddhist emphasis on the personal karmic virtue and authority of the sovereign with the dynastic emphasis and thus greater continuity of the Sinic model. A similar distinction might be made about other expressions of personalized versus delegated or bureaucratic rule, but these are difficult to pin down to imperial types. Jack Fairey’s description of Turco-​Persianate rule, for example, shows the integration of elements from both traditions.40 In each of these traditions, the court itself embodied the culture of rule. Courtly cultures were living repositories of classical languages and traditions, and centers of learning. The desire of a succession of imperial rulers to gather all the knowledge of the world under the roof of the palace (the Chosŏn printing of the Buddhist Tripiṭaka, the great encyclopedic compilations of the Ming Yongle and Qing Qianlong emperors, or the great libraries of Istanbul, Agra, or London) intellectually reflected the universalizing pretensions of the empire. Highly literate societies invariably portrayed the sovereign as a great patron and lover of knowledge. Of the illiterate Mughal Akbar, it was said that “there are no historical facts of past ages, or curiosities of science, or interesting points of philosophy with which his Majesty, a leader of impartial sages is unacquainted. He does not get tired of hearing a book over again, but listens to the reading of it with more interest.”41 The court itself was a repository of classical manners, languages, and traditions, although the elaboration of these traditions was itself sometimes a sign that both intellectual energies and real power had moved elsewhere. As heterogenous political entities, empires had to manage or at least explain the logic behind their own internal diversity. There was no avoiding hierarchy. Explanations and management of hierarchical structures might be based on mobile cultural signifiers such as the Hua-​Yi discourse Ming China used to embody its own sense of civilizational superiority both to its neighbors and to the less civilized internal minorities within its own borders.42 Or hierarchy might be racially conceived, as it was, for example, in Spain’s New World Empire (with a new vocabulary of quadroons, octoroons, and quintroons to precisely denote proportions of African descent). However, the sprawling nature and 43

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internal diversity of empire could also pull in the opposite direction, away from hierarchy and toward the notion not so much of principled equality as of the equal responsibility of the sovereign to the many people of the realm. Such an attitude explained the ability of highly religious polities such as the Ottoman and Russian empires to incorporate confessional diversity, not merely within their borders, but also within their own political worldview. Although sultan and tsar were each legitimated as protectors of the faith, they also cultivated an alternate, but strictly compartmentalized, legitimacy based on their duty to care for their non-​Muslim and non-​Orthodox subjects.43 In the same way that imperial rule often relied on the cooperation of local elites and indigenous aristocracies, empire did not erase cultural differences. By supporting existing structures and hierarchies, it often strengthened them. Externally, political empire often relied on what would now be called “soft” power, the use of culture to entice people to support the imperial project. The monuments and architecture of the capital physically displayed the strength, inevitability, and necessity of empire, motivating city dwellers and visiting provincials alike to devote their own energies to the imperial enterprise. Schools and missions served as two-​way bridges, spreading the culture and language of the imperial center to the provinces, and drawing upwardly mobile provincials to seek their fortunes and status in the capital. Both during and well after the heyday of the British Empire, institutions such as Eton and Oxford inculcated in a global diaspora of colonial elites a set of shared tastes, manners, and experiences. Even when some of these same elites came to lead the struggle against empire, they never lost the ability to operate in the imperial world and speak in its language. Earlier versions of this phenomenon can be seen throughout premodern Asia: the use of Byzantine and Hellenic cultural referents throughout Western Asia, the persistence of Persianate culture as the unifying discourse of the Mughal court, the circulation of Buddhist missions between Korea and Japan, or the elaborate expression of Confucian fealty on display in diplomatic communication with China. But culture was not merely a tool of imperial governance, nor is it ever under the complete control of the state. The interests of private cultural actors sometimes coincided with those of political empire, and sometimes opposed them. Like commerce, religion was always a double-​edged sword; missionaries were sometimes the foot soldiers of empire, sometimes its greatest nuisance. During the nineteenth century, France unilaterally placed the Catholic Church in Asia under its diplomatic protection, enabling it to use the persecution of missionaries as a pretext for military action in Indochina and Korea. But these inroads came at a price. French minister to China Alphonse de Bourboulon expressed his annoyance that missionaries who were sure of military backing came to “totally lack prudence,” seeking out conflict with no regard for the effect on French interests and prestige.44 Missionaries could be quite politically influential in the capital. Congregants and well-​wishers who would never personally experience the physical sprawl of empire received many of their clearest and most visceral images of distant lands from mission publications and reports. In this capacity, some missionaries acted as successful cultural interlocutors, 44

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completing monumental feats of scholarship in ethnography and translation, both literal and cultural. Others, quite often the same missionaries who clamored most vocally for diplomatic protection abroad, had no qualms about presenting highly exaggerated images of darkness and depravity in order to increase donations to mission coffers, and arouse the outrage of their home congregations for use as political leverage. These issues are separate still from the question of cultural imperialism, a term that often has more rhetorical than analytical value. Similar to the idea of economic exploitation, the problem with cultural imperialism was that it conflated the overt actions of empire in promoting certain elements of culture with the positional advantage enjoyed by private cultural actors who operated under the imperial umbrella. The latter might (like the aforementioned missionaries) appeal to legal or diplomatic structures to help them in local disputes, but the advantage need not be so visible, nor take the form of overt conflict. Rather, the efficiency of cultural exports might be so great that the sheer ubiquity of an imported culture allowed it to overwhelm and displace local ideas and values. Such logic drives criticism of what has been called global “McDonaldization,” the claim that American mass consumer culture is intentionally made to be so cheap, convenient, and easily available that it essentially destroys competitors by flooding markets—​the cultural equivalent of dumping.45 However, this analogy must be strictly qualified. Unlike economic imperialism, which had clear winners and losers, cultural flows were more fluid, more layered, and ultimately subject to interpretation. No political power can truly dominate culture. However, these are modern examples. Would things have worked differently in a premodern setting, in which the spread and reception of culture moved much more slowly? Although places like Hulunbuir circulated material culture for centuries, the most significant cultural flows before and during the period of Chinese dynastic rule took the form of migration to and from the region, and these massive population movements were all directed by empire. Under Mongol rule, the region was politically divided between vassals, who moved their populations accordingly. The Ming and Qing each took steps to restrict the flow of Han migrants, but did so for completely different reasons. The Ming aimed to isolate the pasturelands as part of its policy of purging the Han population of Mongolian customs (the same policy that threatened with exile Chinese parents who cut their children’s hair in Mongolian fashion).46 The Qing, in contrast, aimed to protect pastoralists from being overwhelmed by Han settlers, although they did relent somewhat during the late nineteenth century, allowing limited cultivation of new lands to the east of the Xing’an range.47 At the same time, empire moved different groups of Mongols into the area, particularly for defense. Following a practice developed by Chinggis, the Yuan brought tens of thousands of Mongol households to the region, to herd during peacetime and defend during war. Immediately after signing the Treaty of Kiakhta in 1727, the Qing moved populations of Barga, Daur, and Oroqen to resettle the region along the newly established Russian border.48 45

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The new migrants brought with them culture, most visibly religion. The Mongols, who by way of an alliance with Tibet adopted Lamaist Buddhism in the sixteenth century, brought their religion with them in a very tangible way by importing large numbers of lamas. The 3,000 Barga Mongols who were resettled in 1734 brought with them no fewer than 157 lamas. Fifty years later, this same banner completed construction of the Ganjuur Temple (known in Chinese as the Shouning Monastery, for which the Qianlong emperor personally penned the calligraphy). Other banners built lamaseries over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.49 As the trickle of Han migrants grew more pronounced during the nineteenth century, they founded a complex of visibly Chinese temples in and around the growing city of Hailar.50 In contrast to its commercial interest, Russian cultural influence in the region was distinctly muted. Here as in much of the Chinese Northeast, the Russian Orthodox Church operated primarily within communities of Russian settlers and sojourners. Unlike the massive missionary undertakings of the Catholic and Protestant churches, the Russian Orthodox clergy had very limited interest in expanding the local church beyond the handful of Russian villages that dotted the Ergun River border.51 Rather than trying to Russify the region, Soviet agents chose instead to chip away at Chinese influence by appealing to Mongol separatism.52 Beyond facilitating the movement of populations, the Qing and its subsequent states both manipulated and ornamentalized the marks of internal cultural distinction. Qing emperors appealed to the distinct political idioms of Tibetan Buddhism (e.g., by literally painting the emperor as a reincarnation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī) and disbursed titles and awards to Mongol leaders, though these gestures may have carried more importance for the self-​image of Qing than for the Mongols on the ground.53 Although the dynasty demanded fealty, the preservation of internal ethnic difference meant that in most matters imperial authorities gave banners a wide berth. Like the Ottomans, the Qing dynasty maintained a policy of “legal pluralism,” in part by giving legal weight to ethnic customs in matters such as family or commercial disputes.54 This policy was embraced by the subsequent Chinese Republic, and actually enhanced by the Japanese Manchukuo regime, which based its own legitimacy on the idea of the managed ethnic harmony of the “five races” (usually expressed as Han, Mongol, Muslim, and Japanese/​Korean). Manchukuo was so invested in local customs that it created a separate legal system for its Mongol provinces, and organized massive ethnographic projects to collect information on marriage and inheritance practices in preparation for writing local practices into its new civil code.55 A similar dynamic of managed cultural diversity remains visible today, perhaps even more so than during the period of formal empire. Soon after its founding, the People’s Republic of China fixed ethnic identities through a series of Soviet-​inspired classificatory campaigns, and contemporary Chinese policy continues this tradition of simultaneously protecting and engineering ethnic identities.56 Although there is no question that ethnic minorities receive immense consideration in terms of education and materials needs (particularly the exclusive access to the grasslands given 46

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to Mongol pastoralists), China has also faced intense international criticism for its attempts to exert state authority over Tibetan Buddhism, as well as fence in and resettle former nomads.57 Most tellingly, the current state continues to promote the image of harmonious ethnic diversity. It is unapologetic in its attempts to co-​opt the history and culture of its ethnic minorities, painting a somewhat implausible picture of conquerors such as Chinggis’s grandson Qubilai as heroes of the Chinese people, and selling the image of the exotic frontier both at home and abroad. The road from Hailar to Manzhouli is strewn with hotels built to resemble yurts, and promising Chinese tourists a taste of canned life on the grasslands. Pastoral culture has become a commodity.58

Conclusion Looking back on the waves of empire that washed through Hulunbuir, the discontinuities are what immediately stand out. Even if the region was itself often too remote to warrant direct conquest, Hulunbuir visibly shifted orientation a number of times, each time integrating into new networks of fealty and tribute, culture and commerce. Yet, the old networks did not vanish entirely, but rather continued to exist and evolve alongside new layers of connections, symbols, and loyalties. Of course empires could and did clash. Hulunbuir was militarily contested, even if much of the fighting took place elsewhere. The material surplus of the region, particularly its valuable animal trade, was politically channeled by the Ming and Qing, sought by Russia, and aggressively extracted by Japan. At a more symbolic level, the memory of past empire was a potent weapon for those seeking alternatives: Chinggis remained a potent symbol of Mongol unity to secessionist movements well into the early twentieth century.59 But overlap did not always produce antagonism, and was certainly something more complex than an epochal contest between “old” and “new” imperialism. Russia and China each established individual and largely nonconflicting commercial interests. For centuries, such suzerainty as imperial China could claim rested on the compliance of local structures. Even now, Beijing exerts authority through political forms that retain at least the nominal distinction of ethnic autonomous rule. The lessons of Hulunbuir can be transported to similar sites of imperial overlap—​ such as the Caucasus, Yunnan, or the Malay Peninsula—​but they also suggest that notions such as core and periphery need to disaggregated. From an agrarian perspective Hulunbuir was undoubtedly a periphery, but it has been and remains very much the center of certain industries, most notably of stockbreeding. The cultural world of the pastoralists, of which memory (accurate or not) of imperial glory remains a vital part, undoubtedly centers on the history and geography of the grassland, while urban centers like Beijing or Shanghai are at best places to sojourn for work and study. Every periphery is somebody’s center, and even in the capital, empire is always plural. 47

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NOTES 1 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 2 A very different set of images was created by Europeans in the “precolonial” era. Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–​ 1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 3 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New York Daily Tribune (1853). available at https://​ www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1853/​06/​25.htm (accessed September 1, 2015). Adam Smith’s extensive critique of mercantilist policy by Britain and others appears in the chapter “On Colonies,” Book IV, ­chapter  7, of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available at http://​www.econlib.org/​library/​Smith/​smWN.html. 4 Paul Kennedy among others has made the connection between the overreach of past empires and the predicament facing the United States. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, NY: Random House, 1987). 5 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, available at https://​www. marxists.org/​archive/​lenin/​works/​1916/​imp-​hsc/​ (accessed June 15, 2014). J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: J. Nisbet, 1902); Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialisms,” in idem, Imperialism and Social Classes, ed. and intro. Paul M. Sweezy (New York and Oxford: A.M. Kelley Blackwell, 1951); John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, New Series, 6, no. 1 (1953), 1–​15; Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 6 A. I. Miller and Stefan Berger (eds), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014). 7 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), examine critically the often assumed trajectory from empire to nation. See also A. I. Miller and Stefan Berger, “Building Nations in and with Empires—​A Reassessment,” in Miller and Berger (eds), Nationalizing Empires, pp. 1–​30. For an understanding of how the nation-​centric perspective has been retroactively rewritten into Asian history, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 8 On the development of Sanskrit as a political language, see Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California, 2009). 9 Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). For a history and critique of Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production, see Chun Lin, China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History, and Contemporary Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 17–​40. 10 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. Text available at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations: http://​www.cfr.org/​sovereignty/​montevideo-​convention-​ rights-​duties-​states/​p15897 (accessed September 11, 2015). 11 There are many types of pastoral mobility. On the range of pastoral strategies as well as Hulunbuir specifically, see Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath, The End of Nomadism? Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 12 Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 13 See Loretta Kim’s useful dataset of tribute presented to the Qing from Heilongjiang: Tribute Data Curation: Change of Gift Types (Hong Kong Baptist University Library, History in Data, 2014): http://​digital.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/​history/​tribute-​gift.php (viewed January 14, 2016).

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14 On the constantly changing relationship between pastoral and agrarian societies, and of political power in the former, see Nicola Di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History,” Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 1–​40. For China specifically, see Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1989); and Pamela Crossley, “The Rulership of China,” American Historical Review 97 (1992), 1468–​83. For a glimpse of the hierarchical material relations between princes and subject herdsmen, see Petitions of Grievances Submitted by the People (18th–​Beginning of 20th Century), trans. Š. Rasidondug and Veronika Veit (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1975). 15 On Russian trade, see Pages from the Past: The 1910 Moscow Trade Exhibition Expedition to Mongolia, trans. Elizabeth Endicott (Eastbridge, Norwalk, 2007). On Russian political interest, see Sören Urbansky, “Tokhtogo’s Mission Impossible: Russia, China, and the Quasi-​independence of Hulunbeir,” Inner Asia 16, no. 1 (2014), 64–​94; Christopher Atwood, “State Service, Lineage and Locality in Hulun Buir,” East Asian History 30 (2005), 5–​22; see also F. Vermote, Chapter 3 of Volume One. On the ability of a generation of Mongolian political activists to navigate the opportunities presented by China and the Soviet Union, see Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–​1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 16 The idea of the “developmental state” was first used in reference to the industrial reconstruction of postwar Japan, but draws on an earlier legacy of political legitimation based on the promise and institutions of economic and social development. See Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–​1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); and Meredith Woo-​Cumings (ed.), The Developmental State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 17 David Armitage and Alison Bashford (eds), Pacific Histories:  Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); see also A. Disney, Chapter 9 of Volume One. 18 Peter Fibiger Bang, “Predation,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. W. Scheidel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 200–​202. 19 Catherine Steel, The End of the Roman Republic, 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 66. 20 M. I. Finley, “Empire in the Greco-​Roman World,” Greece & Rome 25 (1978), 8; Mireille Corbier, “Coinage and Taxation: The State’s Point of View, A.D. 193–​337,” in The Crisis of Empire, AD 193–​337 (2nd edn), vol. 12 in Cambridge Ancient History, ed. Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron, and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 328. 21 Philippe Le Billon, Wars of Plunder:  Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of Resources (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 22 Michal Biran, “The Mongol Transformation: From the Steppe to Eurasian Empire,” Medieval Encounters 10, no. 1–​3 (2004). 23 Nils-​Gustav Lundgren, “Bulk Trade and Maritime Transport Costs: The Evolution of Global Markets,” Resources Policy 22, no. 1 (1996), 5–​32. 24 John Ravenhill, “The Study of Global Political Economy,” in Global Political Economy, ed. Nils-​Gustav Lundgren (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 9. 25 Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, “The Empire Effect: The Determinants of Country Risk in the First Age of Globalization, 1880–​1913,” The Journal of Economic History 66 (2006). 26 For different iterations of this basic theme, see Lenin, Imperialism; William I. Robinson, “Globalization and the Sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein: A Critical Appraisal,” International Sociology 26, no. 6 (2011); and Utsa Patnaik, “The Free Lunch: Transfers from the Tropical Colonies and Their Role in Capital Formation in Britain during the Industrial

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Revolution,” in The Long Twentieth Century: Globalization under Hegemony: The Changing World Economy, ed. K. S. Jomo (New Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27 Zhao Yue, Gudai Hulunbeier [Ancient Hulunbuir] (Hailar: Neimengu wenhua chubanshe, 2004), pp. 156–​7, 241–​4. 28 Michael J. Seth, A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), p. 144. 29 Ma Hongxiang, Hulunbeier lü Mengshang [Mongolian itinerant merchants of Hulunbuir] (Hailar: Nei Menggu wenhua chubanshe, 2010), p. 7. 30 Notably the Harbin-​based Bank of Manchuria (Dong sansheng yinhang). Cheng Tingheng and Jiafan Zhang, Hulunbeier zhi lüe [Draft gazetteer of Hulunbuir] (1923, repr.; Hailaer: Tianma chubanshe, 2012), p. 211. 31 Hulunbeier meng er qinggongye bianzuan weiyuanhui. Hulunbeier meng er qinggongye zhi [Gazetteer of secondary industries in Hulunbuir] (Hailaer: Nei menggu wenhua chubanshe, 1989), pp. 26–​9; “Hoku Manshū Tōyō tetsudō soshakuchi ni okeru shōkuniku juyō shōkyō hōkoku no ken” [Report on the requirements for meat in the concession areas of the CER in Northern Manchuria], 1907; National Archives of Japan (hereafter JACAR), item ref: B11092063800. 32 Cheng and Zhang, Hulunbeier zhi lüe, p. 109. 33 The Ganjuur market is described in Ma Hongxiang, Hulunbeier lü Mengshang, pp. 55–​100. Chart from p. 79. Original data on this market are recorded in a series of Japanese consular reports: “Kanjōru shi” [Ganjuur market], 1924, JACAR: B12083628300; “Kanjōru ichiba” [Ganjuur market], 1930, B08061603700; and “Manshūkoku Kanjōru teiki ichi” [Manchukuo Ganjuur periodic market], pt. 1, 1931, B08061754900, and pt. 2, 1940, B08061755000. 34 Hulunbeier Meng shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Hulunbeier Mengzhi [Gazeteer of Hulunbeier league] (Hailaer: Nei Menggu wenhua chubanshe, 1999), pp. 898–​900. 35 Opinions differ on whether Japanese domination of the soybean market developed or exploited agriculture, the accusation for the latter being that consignment purchase trapped farmers in a cycle of debt. This debate was played out in the early 1970s in Herbert Bix, “Japanese Imperialism and the Manchurian Economy, 1900–​31,” The China Quarterly 51 (1972); and Ramon H. Myers and Herbert Bix, “Economic Development in Manchuria under Japanese Imperialism: A Dissenting View,” The China Quarterly 55 (1973). On the role of the railway in the marketing of agrarian produce, see Yasutomi Ayumu, “Teikiichi to kenjō keizai—​1930 nen no zengo ni okeru Manshū nōson shichō ni okeru tokuchō” [Periodic markets and the economy of the county town—​characteristics of Manchurian rural markets before and after 1930], Ajia keizai 43–​10 (2002). 36 Tim Wright, “The Manchurian Economy and the 1930s World Depression,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 5 (September 2007). 37 Hulunbeier meng zhi, p. 872. 38 On the agrarian cooperative movement, see Manshū nōson gassakusha undō no ronsō [Collected writing on the Manchurian agrarian cooperative movement] (Harbin: Hinkōshū kyōnō gassakusha rengakai, 1941). 39 Hulunbeier meng zhi, pp. 790–​2. 40 See J. Fairey, Chapter 7, and B. Lockhart, Chapter 4, of this volume. 41 Abul Fazl ‘Allami, Ain-​i-​Akbari, vol. 1, chap. 85, trans. H. Blochmann (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873). 42 Another variation of the division between Hua and Yi was that between Fan and Han. Shao-​ yun Yang, “Fan and Han: The Origins and Uses of a Conceptual Dichotomy in Mid-​Imperial China, ca. 500–​1200,” in Political Strategies of Identity Building in Non-​Han Empires in China, ed. Francesca Fiaschetti and Julia Schneider (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014).

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43 See also P. Werth, Chapter 6, and J. Fairey, Chapter 7, of this volume; Howard Eissenstat, “Modernization, Imperial Nationalism, and the Ethnicization of Confessional Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Miller and Berger (eds), Nationalizing Empires; Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 44 Jean-​Paul Wiest, “Catholic Activities in Kwangtung Province and Chinese Responses,” PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1977, pp. 42–​8. On the complex interaction of French diplomatic and missionary interest in China, see Ernest P. Young, Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On subsequent attempts by the Vatican to divest itself of national missions in China, see Thomas David DuBois, Empire and the Meaning of Religion in Northeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 187–​209. 45 The idea of “McDonaldization” was first coined in George Ritzer in his eponymous The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press 2004). The influence of this thesis, combined with the global ubiquity of McDonald’s restaurants, has been reflected in subsequent scholarship, such as James L. Watson, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), as well as in the use by magazines such as The Economist of the local cost of the Big Mac sandwich as a semi-​serious global pricing index of purchasing power. See http://​www.economist.com/​content/​big-​mac-​index (accessed August 21, 2015). 46 See also Jinping Wang, ­chapter  2 in Volume One. 47 Hulunbeier meng zhi, pp. 872, 875–​7. Yi Wang, “Irrigation, Commercialization, and Social Change in Nineteenth-​Century Inner Mongolia,” International Review of Social History 59 (2014). 48 Zhao Yue, Gudai Hulunbeier, pp. 217–​18, 302–​303; Atwood, “State Service,” pp. 6–​8. 49 Zhao Yue, Gudai Hulunbeier, pp. 329–​30. 50 Cheng, Hulunbeier zhi lüe, pp. 186–​9. 51 Song Xiaojian, Hulunbeier bianwu diaocha baogao shu [Report of an investigation of Hulunbuir border affairs] (1908, repr.; Tianma, 2012), pp. 36–​8. 52 Urbansky, “Tokhtogo’s Mission Impossible.” 53 Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). 54 Karen Barkey, “Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–​1850, ed. Richard J. Ross and Lauren Benton (New York: NYU Press, 2013), pp. 83–​107. 55 These surveys and the Manchukuo policy of ethnic pluralism are discussed in Thomas David DuBois, “Inauthentic Sovereignty: Law and Legal Institutions in Manchukuo,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (2010). 56 Thomas S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 57 See, for example, Andrew Jacobs, “China Fences in Its Nomads, and an Ancient Life Withers,” New York Times. For a more complete account of the effects of sedentarization, see Humphrey and Sneath, The End of Nomadism? 58 On the commodification of minority culture in China, see Donald Sutton and Xiaofei Kang, “Recasting Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern Sichuan, 1992–​2005,” in Casting Faiths: The Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Thomas David DuBois (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 59 Urbansky, “Tokhtogo’s Mission Impossible.”

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Chapter 2

Legal Fiction: Extraterritoriality as an Instrument of British Power in China in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Robert Bickers A core element in the repertoire of tools used to project foreign power into China might best be said to have become redundant outside a Shanghai courtroom on the afternoon of November 21, 1947. At just after 3 o’clock Zhu Yuhuang, the presiding judge, had started reading a written judgment that found Charles Percival Archer, a 33-​year-​old Hong Kong–​born British national, to be guilty of the murder of Yu Shengxiao, a Chinese black-​ market dealer. Archer was tried under a Code for Armed Bandits that found him a party to the enterprise even though he had probably not fired the shot that killed the victim. The key moment came after the session concluded, when a British consular official who had been observing the trial announced to reporters that he thought it had been “extremely fair.” This comment formed part of one newspaper article headline the following day. Archer was the first British man or woman tried for a serious crime since the abrogation in February 1943 of the mid-​nineteenth-​century Sino-​British treaties had removed British subjects from Chinese jurisdiction. In fact he was, as a British newspaper put it in Hong Kong, the first Briton tried for murder by a Chinese court “for 173 years.”1 Archer was sentenced to life imprisonment and taken to the city’s Ward Road Jail. Several things need noting about this case, which suggest ways we might approach the issue of extraterritoriality and its role within the practice of British informal empire in China in what is known as the “treaty century,” the roughly 100 years from the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in August 1842 that brought to an end the Sino-​British conflict known as the First Opium or Anglo-​Chinese War, to the Sino-​British Friendship Treaty of February 1943.2 First, there was the intense media interest in the trial in 1947 as the first of its kind under the new dispensation that British nationals now found themselves in. A particular irony was not in fact noticed at the time but is also relevant: Archer had, coincidentally, been the last man jailed by the British Supreme Court in Shanghai under the extraterritorial system on December 2, 1941 (and the British official observing the case in 1947 had formerly served in the International Settlement’s Shanghai Municipal Police force which had investigated the case).3 Archer had been found guilty of fraud in that earlier trial, but the prison sentence was commuted after the Japanese takeover of the International Settlement five days later and he was released early. The second point to note is the fact that this case was partly viewed through the prism of history, and against a background of a sustained discourse about the inequities of

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Chinese legal codes and practice that by 1947 had been underway for even longer than “173” years. In fact, the British had already made representations about what they saw as inadequacies in process and in conditions of detention when their nationals had been arrested under the new, post-​1943 regime. Old habits and attitudes died very hard: the “outlook for . . . British subjects who may run up against Chinese law is certainly appalling,” commented one official in April 1947.4 But this did not prevent a public expression of satisfaction with the proceedings. Third, the Archer trial took place after the conclusion of a parallel process that had found his partner in the robbery and shooting of Yu, an American marine named Thomas Malloy, also guilty of murder. The point at issue here is that Malloy was tried by court martial, because US forces in China were operating under a May 1943 agreement that removed them from Chinese legal jurisdiction for the duration of the war and for six months thereafter, and that was extended for a further year in June 1946. Such agreements were operating in Japan, and had been in place in wartime Britain.5 What this reminds us of is the need to remember that forms of extraterritoriality were a routine element in many bilateral agreements and relationships (and indeed remain so).6 They were a standard characteristic in premodern trading relationships, whereby communities of foreign merchants were regularly permitted an element of legal self-​governance by host rulers.7 However, popular and political opposition in China to the 1946 Act and its renewal, and its placing by critics within a longer history of what was articulated as the degradation of Chinese sovereignty, reminds us that however routine extraterritoriality can be argued to be, it was seen as a tool that supported the exercise of foreign power to China’s detriment. A further issue to bear in mind is Archer’s ambiguous standing as a British national. Born in Hong Kong, and adopted at birth by a Barbados-​born father and a Macanese/​ Filipina mother, he may possibly have had some Filipino ancestry. He spoke English, Spanish, Tagalog, and Cantonese and had studied and worked in Manila. Born in the Crown Colony, Archer was deemed a British subject, and had held a British passport since he was 17 years old. His status was, however, still marginal, and he occupied an interstitial position in the minds of British officials. Press accounts of his trial always noted that he was a “Eurasian,” and that he had been born in Hong Kong. The report that he “whimpered” under cross-​examination has clear roots in wider racist portrayals of “Eurasians” in Anglophone culture.8 The claims to British protection in China by men and women like Archer, however firmly grounded in law, were always compromised in the minds of metropolitan-​born officials by their otherwise uncertain status. As a result, we can reasonably assume that in some instances officials acted informally to bar the access of Eurasians to their services, but in general it would seem that they implemented current regulations, if at times grudgingly. While the politics of foreign colonialism in China, and of Chinese anti-​imperialism and nationalism, have of course received a great deal of scholarly attention, surprisingly, the practice of extraterritoriality itself has been understudied. Given its centrality to the set of practices known as “informal” imperialism which ranged from the intermittent exercise of military violence to securing competitive advantage through treaty 54

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in the economic sphere—​and much else as well—​this is an odd oversight.9 Where it has been the subject of attention, the focus of analysis has been on the system of mixed courts where Chinese were respondents or defendants. Those courts that dealt with cases involving the nationals of particular treaty powers as defendants have largely been ignored.10 These omissions are a little surprising, given the “173 years” of a history of concern about the interaction of foreign nationals with Chinese judicial processes. However, extraterritoriality was only one of the tools in the repertoire—​one of twenty-​six in fact, if we follow Jürgen Osterhammel’s identification of the discrete “phenomena” that formed part of the practice of imperialism in China.11 The impairment of Qing sovereignty and that of its successor states was so variegated as to make a clear analysis of individual (and often tightly and promiscuously interconnected) elements extremely difficult at times. The final phase of this tumultuous period in modern Chinese history was also dominated by the Japanese invasion of 1931–​45, the most vicious and comprehensive war of colonial aggression that the country ever faced, and this has also come to dominate understandings of the nature of foreign power in China. Legal systems and practices seem irrelevant by comparison. But the assault by Japan was the exception, not the rule, in China’s experience of colonialism. Law, in fact, mattered always: it mattered before the onset of the era of the treaties, and it mattered in their aftermath. At least, that is, law mattered in the abstract, and on the page and in rhetoric. But while there was law, there was also practice. This chapter will sketch the evolution and characteristics of the legal apparatus deployed by British state agents in the Qing Empire after 1842. The British system infrastructure was the first of the foreign legal regimes that was established in China, and was in time the most sophisticated and complex, and possibly dealt with the most challenges in identifying its remit and its limits, and in fact with catching up or keeping up with reality. How far it shaped the latter is a case in point. The questions to be addressed also include who, what, and where did it cover, and when and how did it evolve, as well as who precisely did it serve, and why, and whether it enabled or constrained. Extraterritorial regimes are generally viewed in strictly negative terms as representing a degradation of sovereignty. From a twenty-​first-​ century standpoint, in which most states have voluntarily surrendered some degree of sovereignty to transnational institutions or legal regimes, this might need some reconsideration. But in the case of China, there was certainly no voluntary surrender in 1842, or in 1858/60. They have also generally been assumed to be routinely unfair, and biased either deliberately, or implicitly, in favor of their own nationals.12 Comparisons drawn from formal colonial systems such as India’s, which demonstrate explicit bias, may not be germane, for foreign diplomats and officials in China were actually conscious of the fact that the country was and remained sovereign and independent. However much this was compromised in practice, it did constrain and shape their attitudes and actions.13 The question that might ultimately be best addressed, however, is a fundamental one: did law in fact actually matter? This chapter will first outline the origins and structure of the British system that was established, then look at its practical operations, and finally 55

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show how these direct us to understand the system as ultimately resting contingently on the needs and concerns of British officials in China, and not on the letter of any law.14

Designing and Implementing Extraterritoriality The genealogy of the British desire for withdrawal of British subjects from Qing jurisdiction can be traced back well into the eighteenth century when the English East India Company (EIC) held a monopoly on British trade with China. The pivotal—​but not the first—​episode was the trial and execution of a British seaman from a “country” (i.e., private, non-​EIC) ship Lady Hughes in 1784 for the accidental killing of a Chinese boatman. This man had been ordered to fire his cannon as part of a formal salute, but had wounded three Chinese officials in a boat moored nearby, one of whom subsequently died. The Canton authorities demanded that the gunner responsible be handed over to them, and after a stand-​off the local EIC officers complied and secured his transfer, even though they lacked any formal authority over country vessels and their crews. The man was executed some weeks later, outraging the British, who had understood from their discussions with Qing officials that he would be considered innocent of any capital offense. We do not in fact seem to know his name, and the principle of the case, not the individual’s fate, became the focus of discussion in language that was at times studiously religious rather than legalistic. The EIC agents at Canton had “purchased” the continuation of trade with his “innocent blood,” claimed one pamphleteer fifty years later.15 The issue proved particularly incendiary because the British on the spot were already concerned about the precariousness of their position, caught as they were, as they saw it, between the Portuguese in Macau and the Qing. For their part, recent experiences had meant that the Qing authorities themselves had little reason to be confident that the EIC had any real control over British nationals even at Canton. The order to execute the gunner had come from the throne and was linked to this lack of confidence.16 Anger over the Lady Hughes case persisted, and a view of Qing processes as unreliable and unjust became solidified and central to narratives of the British enterprise in China and its justification. This was reinforced by the execution of American sailor Francis Terranova in 1821 for a killing that was seen as being even more accidental. The Chinese, it was concluded, could not be trusted with foreign lives. This became a fixed point in policy deliberation and in British pamphleteering in the 1830s about the need for a resolution to perceived wider problems in the Canton trade, and which kept the cases of both men well and truly alive. The issue, more often than not framed around these two cases, remained a vibrant one in Anglophone histories into the twentieth century.17 The unsatisfactory and unstable footing on which British trade was established—​and its importance to officials in India and in London—​prompted a change in approach in the aftermath of 1784. The British ambassadors who were sent out to China thereafter, starting with Charles Cathcart in late 1787, carried with them instructions requesting a 56

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depot, a “small tract of land” or a “detached island,” where the “disorders of our people” would be curtailed through the discipline of jurisdiction by British authorities. As the EIC officers had no authority over country ships and their crews, the Chinese expectation that they were responsible for them was a recurring and difficult issue that might be resolved this way. But the instructions went further and stated that British subjects needed to be exempted “from Chinese jurisdiction for crimes.”18 The Lady Hughes episode then became embedded in arguments defending the system that was developed after 1842 and that were pursued well into the twentieth century. In particular it was made to serve arguments that the Qing legal code was deficient in not distinguishing between manslaughter and murder, and that it lacked due process. There was, moreover, an assumption that Qing officials and processes were corrupt and where they were not, were corruptible and arbitrary. However, the core concern of those in London instructing the envoys was to secure an effective means of controlling British subjects, and thereby to remove potential sources of conflict. The fact that the extraterritorial system was first and foremost a disciplinary mechanism through which the British aimed to more smoothly manage Sino-​foreign relations has largely been lost to sight. Up to a point these British demands would not have seemed unusual or impractical to Qing officials, although by the time of the Lady Hughes case there was concern grounded in experience that the British themselves, for whatever reason, would not follow due procedure with their own nationals, or be able to.19 We know a great deal about how existing Qing practices routinely allowed sojourning communities to exercise jurisdiction over their own affairs, and how this was grounded in a very long history of precedents.20 In the British case as it developed after 1784, however, there was a repeated conflation of jurisdiction over their own subjects with the acquisition of “ground.” Within the island detached from the Qing in 1842—​Hong Kong, occupied in 1841—​the British enforced a colonial legal system that exempted no residents from its provisions. There was some initial hesitation about this, but it was confirmed in 1844, and extended to the New Territories when they were acquired on lease in 1898.21 Hong Kong was even interpolated into colonial networks of the transportation of convicts.22 The perceived necessity of unambiguously establishing British sovereignty within the territory acquired lay behind this. A lesson was also drawn from the impaired authority of the Portuguese administration in Macau, which had no jurisdiction over its Chinese subjects.23 In the much more ambiguously situated zones acquired through mainly locally arranged agreements at most of the ports opened by treaty, or in those cities thus opened but without a British concession or settlement, a more complex set of practices had to be developed. The detail of the legal system that was developed was founded upon rather vague provisions in the Nanjing Treaty that were given a firmer basis in the 1843 Bogue Treaty and the supplementary Trade Regulations that it included, and then Articles XV and XVI of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin.24 It was also subject to shaping and refining in subsequent Sino-​foreign treaties, as a result of “Most Favored Nation” clauses, and the earliest and most explicit statement of extraterritoriality came through 57

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the US negotiator Caleb Cushing, and its clearest exposition came in the French Whampoa (Huangpu) Treaty of 1844. The sketchy statements of principle in the British agreements were revised in the 1876 Chefoo Convention. In the main, local and subsidiary agreements provided much of the basis on which the British treaty system operated. It was almost twenty-​five years after 1842, for example, before any systematic guidance was issued. This took the shape of a set of Instructions to Her Majesty’s Consular Officers written by Sir Edmund Hornby, the court’s first judge.25 Up to 1865 the system was centered on Hong Kong, as was the entire British infrastructure in China. Until the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin the governor of the colony was concurrently chief superintendent of trade for China; but with the establishment of additional treaty ports, and of British representation through a minister at the Court in Peking, Hong Kong was formally separated from the China establishment. Some overlap and structural integration remained (Britons convicted in Shanghai might serve a prison sentence in Hong Kong, for example, and the Shanghai judge was a member of the full Supreme Court there), but over the succeeding decades the colony developed much more firmly within networks of British colonial practice more widely, and intra-​colonial empire flows of personnel, ideas, and legislation. Informally, however, Hong Kong remained an integral part of the British presence in China, especially when it came to the movement of people and commercial and trading operations. It was a first, or last, port of call for those traveling to or from China via the Indian Ocean. It needs to be borne in mind that while legal pluralism was a long-​established feature of governance in China, the new post-​1842 dispensation became a point of contention. Qing officials became slowly aware of the nonreciprocal nature of the relationships that they now found themselves in, and that consular jurisdiction was an exception, not a norm internationally, and they became resistant by the 1870s to any further expansion of the foreign presence in China to new cities and markets. In general they adopted as their grounds for this the argument that it would make governance impossible, but they did not contest extraterritoriality itself (and even claimed it for their subjects in Japan under the 1871 Sino-​Japanese Treaty of Tianjin).26 In their critique they received articulate support from, for example, Sir Robert Hart, who prepared two memoranda for the Zongli Yamen in 1876 and 1878 which presented the ways in which extraterritoriality hindered the development of Sino-​foreign commerce as a result. Hart noted, too, that the word itself was never mentioned in any of the treaties. It was then a silent block to what he and others saw as progress.27 Clause 12 in the Sino-​British Mackay Treaty of 1902 committed Britain to “be prepared to relinquish her extraterritorial rights” should reform in China bring the legal system “into accord with that of Western nations.” But although this clause was used by reformers within the Qing administration to push for change in the legal system, it was inserted as a face-​saving and rather meaningless “pious hope,” in the eyes of both the British and Qing negotiators.28 Until 1919, Qing officials and their successors restrained, as far as they could, further extensions of this destabilizing 58

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system, but they did not contest it directly or attempt to have it superseded, until the Paris Peace Conference that year.

Establishing a British Supreme Court Despite the always slightly anomalous position of Hong Kong, the overall British structure in China seems clear and rational enough. A Supreme Court for China and Japan was established in 1865 in Shanghai. Over the decades it had various jurisdictions and names as a result, losing Japan in 1900, and gaining Korea until 1910. It sat from 1871 in a purpose-​built building in the Shanghai British Consulate-​General compound. The chief justice (later simply chief judge) would also go on circuit, sitting in consular courts. He always had a junior judge, later styled the assistant judge. This was not a “mixed” court: there was no Chinese representation on it. There were very occasional politically motivated exceptions that proved this rule such as the trial in 1869 of Robert Willis George (about which see below).29 This replaced the initial system that had the Hong Kong Supreme Court as its apex. Consuls sat as magistrates in police cases in their courts, referring upward to the Shanghai bench all matters that were more serious. Some of the consulates were equipped with purpose built, if unsophisticated, jails, and had consular constables. The first chief justice, Sir Edmund Hornby, came to Shanghai from Constantinople where he had established the British Supreme Consular Court in 1857. He brought with him a Colonial Office mind-​set, and an invidious personal strain of rampant racism. Hornby also made sure that no Qing officials were formally admitted to sit alongside him. A small clique of self-​regarding barristers developed around the Supreme Court, and a body of case law was produced and published.30 Consuls sitting in their Consular or “Provincial” Courts could deliver sentences of up to twelve months imprisonment or fines of up to (in 1908) £100 equivalent. Appeals from these went to the Supreme Court as Court of Appeal, and ultimately (in capital cases) to the British minister in Peking for confirmation, and to the Privy Council in London from the Supreme Court. The legal instrument on which the system was based was an 1865 Order in Council, which was restated at later points with further iterations. Hornby issued in 1867 the set of practical guidelines that advised consuls about how to implement both the letter of the order, and work within its spirit. These were not developed in consultation with London and were in part shaped by Hornby’s own assessment of how the British presence in China should be shaped. This court regime has garnered less scholarly attention to date than the Mixed Courts, for perhaps understandable reasons.31 In those courts foreign plaintiffs—​including the concession administrations—​pressed suits against Chinese defendants. These were established in the light of the requirement in the 1843 Bogue Treaty that Chinese courts would administer cases involving complaints against subjects of the Qing.32 At Shanghai, where the system first emerged, the district magistrate sat, administering Qing law, accompanied by a foreign consular official as assessor. This proved a lively 59

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site for dispute, and conflicting legal and wider cultures. There was a low level of foreign trust in the rationality or efficacy of this fairly ad hoc system, even after it was placed on a firmer footing in 1869. This could and did lead to actual conflict, most notably the “Mixed Court Riot” at Shanghai in December 1905, when International Settlement police violently seized custody of a Chinese woman suspected—​without any apparent basis—​of sex-​trafficking, as well as her attendants from the local authorities, in so doing, in Chinese eyes, exceeding any reasonable jurisdiction that they had. In an atmosphere of heightened nationalist tension arising from the movement boycotting American goods in protest at the extension of the racist Exclusion Act, this proved incendiary.33 At Shanghai and elsewhere it was at this Mixed Court that by-​laws and regulations of the International Settlement were enforced. The settlement administration was founded in 1854, and one of its first tasks was the formation of the police force. Prosecutions of Chinese by the police were brought to the Mixed Court, and accounted for the greater part of its criminal business. The bare numbers indicate that the court enforced an extraordinarily punitive policing regime, with the statistical equivalent of 3.1 percent of the Chinese population of the International Settlement at Shanghai being convicted of crimes in 1865—​3.5 percent in 1870 and 1 percent of the population being sentenced to forms of corporal punishment. The rate ranged from 2.2 percent in 1880 to 10.4 percent in 1910, and averaged 4.4 percent. Certainly this was a porous jurisdiction, into which large numbers came to work from outside, but even so, the numbers are high—​higher even than formally colonial Hong Kong.34 In 1911, as the Qing administration collapsed in Shanghai, the Mixed Court was taken over by the Consular Body at Shanghai—​the foreign consuls of powers that had signed treaties with China acting in concert—​and delegated its administration to the Municipal Council of the International Settlement, which appointed a registrar, and had a team seconded to him from the Municipal Police. Of further interest is the fact that from the early 1900s onward at Shanghai, the International Mixed Court was used by large numbers of Chinese plaintiffs who filed civil cases against other Chinese. It was cheap, plaintiff-​friendly, and decisions and processes were enforced by the International Settlement police. As a result, given its large Chinese population, and concentration of Chinese interests within what was effectively China’s finance capital, “minimum contact” assumptions brought a great deal of activity within its possible purview.35 Given both the punitive character of the policing regime of the International Settlement, and the complicity of the Mixed Court in enforcing this, as well as the potential for jurisdictional conflicts such as that in 1905, it is hardly surprising that this system has secured scholarly attention. It facilitated the projection of foreign power over Chinese residents and visitors to the concessions and settlements under alien administration. In practice, while the creation of mixed courts or similar process had been embedded in the treaties, the mixed courts served as a proxy for foreign control over Chinese. This was particularly transparent at Shanghai in the two decades after 1912 during which the SMC controlled the International Mixed Court. And its popularity with civil litigants 60

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is also indicative of other ways in which the existence of the foreign infrastructure in China impaired its sovereignty in ways that were not anticipated when the system was developed. For pragmatic reasons many Chinese were quite willing voluntarily to place themselves within its jurisdiction when it optimized the potential for securing personal benefit. This was an entirely rational strategy, and it was not unwelcome to the foreign authorities who derived some revenue, but more importantly even greater legitimacy, from this practice. Moreover, the foreign-​administered concessions and settlements became popular sites of Chinese residence and of investment, due to their stability and security in times of conflict, and also safe havens for political refugees. This last factor depended to some extent, however, on the attitude of the foreign authorities toward the politics of those concerned. Opponents of the Qing were protected in what became known as the Subao case in 1903–​1904, but the International Settlement police and administration would later collaborate with local Chinese authorities with alacrity and great success in breaking up communist networks.36 The International Settlement police brought prosecutions of foreign nationals of “recognized” powers to the court of first hearing of their own state. By “recognition” was meant the fact that there existed a bilateral treaty which accorded extraterritorial rights, and also that the defendant had sufficient proof of their right to be tried by that court. In practical terms, British subjects, for example, were required formally to register with the consulate on arrival, and to renew this registration annually. Technically, a British subject who was not registered could be denied consular recognition, and would then be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Mixed Court, alongside all nationals of states with no extraterritorial rights. In practice, as we shall see, there was much more ambiguity and flexibility. Moreover, judges could be caustic with Britons who attempted to evade jurisdiction on these grounds.37 Courts under the jurisdiction of at least sixteen foreign powers operated in China between the 1840s and the 1940s, including Britain, the United States, and Japan—​but also powers with a less prominent presence in China’s foreign relations, such as Denmark, Belgium, and Mexico. The courts dealt with civil as well as criminal business. The British Supreme Court records contain material on civil litigation, admiralty, divorce, probates, and intestate estates, and the volume of surviving records shows just how busy officials were kept.38 A British man or woman could be administratively cocooned from birth to death within this system, which extended the procedures established at “home” into China (as long as “home” was England, for it was English law that was implemented, not, for example, Scottish). It might have been Surbiton, or it might have been Halifax: it was all quite familiar, and judges and barristers even wore wigs. This was hardly unusual. British legal regimes operated at one time or another in at least twelve foreign territories outside the bounds of formal colonial control if we include the Ottoman Empire as a single whole, and in at least seventeen if we do not. Second, courts under the jurisdiction of at least sixteen foreign powers operated in China between the 1840s and the 1940s. Turan Kayaoglu has identified twenty-​six British courts in China, and eighteen each for the French and the United States. But in 61

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fact there were as many courts as there were consulates, always plus one: the Supreme Court. And, of course, such a norm of imperial practice had this become that the Qing negotiated extraterritorial status for its subjects in both Korea and Japan (where they formed the largest category of foreign traders enjoying such privileges). Indeed, after 1894, British officials in Korea looked after the interests of Chinese nationals, as part of their wider attempt to defend their own treaty privileges in the face of the assertion of Japanese power in the kingdom.39

Practice in Amoy (Xiamen) But how British was it really, and what does its practice tell us about that category? What we find is that legal regimes and sovereign states proved flexible and the idea of what was “British” did so too. After all, what did it have to do with Kung Lin Mhone (Jiang Qingshui 江秦水)? In 1879, a servant (described as a foreman) of Kung’s brought to the British consul news of the death—​intestate—​of his master, a merchant long resident in Amoy (Xiamen) and a “British subject of Chinese descent” from the Straits Settlements. Kung’s widow lived in the port, and his brother was partner in the firm—​ Hong ji (鸿记)—​but was currently in Moulmein (Burma) and not returning for a month. The foreman wished to forestall any attempt by local officials to seize the estate (of the value of some twenty thousand dollars). Instructions were wired to the Court at Shanghai by the consul, in this case Herbert Allen Giles, and were quickly received: “take steps requisite to preserve property.” Giles went to the company premises and sealed up all valuables, although he discovered that most of these were in the man’s home, which was an hour and a half’s journey from Amoy. Giles reported further that the foreman had asked him not to visit until after the funeral, and second, requested guidance on how business was to be conducted pending the return of the brother. Giles wrote that he was not aware of such a case occurring before. The deaths of British Chinese subjects were generally dealt with “according to Chinese customs by self or otherwise appointed administrators.” But he concluded that this was unlikely to last, as more and more arrived year on year. And their experience of British administration in the Straits was gradually teaching them the desirability as well as the necessity of a somewhat more formal, not to say legal, procedure than otherwise obtained.40 Giles took full possession of the estate, and when the brother telegraphed to authorize the foreman to run the business, handed it over to him. This episode and its resolution provide an opportunity to examine the actual practice of the British system in a locality, in this case Amoy. Each treaty port had its particular characteristics, and was looped into a bundle of networks and connections, and so it is best not to start with the assumption that they all functioned in the same ways. Amoy, for example, was orientated very strongly toward Southeast Asian facing trading and diaspora networks, as well as toward Taiwan. However, the ambiguities and apparent anomalies in British practice were replicated in every site where a consulate opened.41 Giles 62

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Table 2.1  Population of Xiamen for 1881–​1901 1881 Chinese American British Danish Dutch French German Japanese Portuguese Spanish Others Foreign Total

1891

1901

17 24 7

96,000 48 193 14 6 1 33 9 43 14 9

96,000 38 308 6 39 10 23 920 30 65 TOTAL

275

370

22 152 10

43

1,439

Source: C. P. Simoes, The Amoy Diary and Memorandum Book, 1882 . . . (Amoy: A. A. Maracal, 1881), p. 42; Customs, Decennial Reports, 1882–​91, pp. xxx–​xxxi; Customs, Decennial Reports, 1892–​1901, vol. 2, pp. xl–​xli.

and his predecessors and successors registered British subjects at the consulate initially in Xiamen, and then on Gulangyu Island, which faced across the harbor a small British concession. The port was one of the first opened to British trade and residence, and the first consul had arrived in 1845. In 1852 an agreement to demarcate what became the British concession was reached between the Daotai and the British consul. Table 2.1 shows the growth of the foreign resident community in the port. As might be expected, British Consuls at Amoy were not overtaxed with business. There might be twenty ships in harbor at any one time in the summer early in its history, and twenty crews brought much by way of “petty offences.” But even so, a snapshot in 1854 had eight Britons in jail, three charged with murder of a Chinese man, and five with the attempted killing of another. They were all sent to Hong Kong for trial.42 Despite the establishment of the concession, and in 1901 of an International Settlement on Gulangyu Island, the population of Britons was not large. As Table 2.1 shows, until the 1890s it certainly greatly outnumbered the other communities of foreign nationals in the port.43 These figures are potentially misleading, however. First, the data is never more than a semi-​accurate record, despite its precise measurements. The Chinese Maritime Customs generally provided the information, and like all Customs data, in addition, it recorded a precisely delineated zone—​the Customs station districts, and generally only foreign trade and activities within those. But more importantly here, about 700 of the “Japanese” listed in 1891 were naturalized Fujianese with links to Taiwan of varying degrees of authenticity. In addition the list excludes about 12,230 “Formosan Chinese” then registered at the Japanese consulate. At least a third of the “Spanish” were Filipinos, refugees from 63

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the conflict there, while others were Chinoy/​Tsinoy: mestizos.44 An unknown number of the British were Straits Chinese—​probably around a third—​(and an unknown but probably greater number of them were probably unregistered).45 Some of the Dutch are likely to be Peranakan from the Netherlands East Indies. Some or all of these other nationalities were people of plural heritage. But they are all officially recognized and counted as foreign nationals (although there is an element of choice in that on their part). The vital events of their lives, and their commercial or similar activities mean interaction with state agents from Japan, the United States, and Britain. With the case of Kung Lin Mhone, and in Giles’s observations, we might note the following points. Kung was to all intents and purposes a British subject, though he was Chinese, through his residence in the Straits Settlements. He undoubtedly had ancestral ties with Amoy. Consul Giles perceived a definite shift in practice among Straits and other British Chinese to seek to place their affairs under his jurisdiction. In return, we can see in his swift actions a readiness to act on their behalf, and the assumption that to do so was his legal duty, not an ad hoc decision on his part. It is also telling that Giles moved to undertake the protective seizure of Kung’s property despite the fact that it was physically located well outside the treaty port: jurisdiction followed the individual and was not confined to the areas explicitly opened by treaty. Moreover, as this case shows, the individual’s property was covered by his status. In addition, the geographical reach of this incident connected that property, Xiamen and its British consulate, the Straits Settlements, and Burma, which were by then (but only recently) also connected through newly laid telegraph cables. We might also note that Giles delayed his action at the request of the agent due to what we would now term “cultural sensitivities.” But if Giles, for his part, was learning to temper the processes of the administration of British law just a little, he in turn argued that British colonial administration was having a profound didactic effect on its Chinese subjects in the Straits, wherever they operated under British protection. The list of civil law cases that the Amoy consul recorded in 1880 reinforces the point that something very different was going on than had been imagined in 1842, let alone back in the 1780s and 1790s by those drafting instructions for British envoys: Hormusjee Cowasjee sued Jamsetjee Sorabjee Burocha (Bahroocha); Koon Teck sued Lloyd Khoo Tiong Poh (邱忠波), who managed a Singapore firm operating in Amoy, whose founder had left China in about 1852, as did Jaap Haan.46 The parties to these cases were Straits Chinese or Parsi merchants. There was not an English name on the list. And similarly the birth, marriage, and death registers contain names that could not be found in Herbert Giles’s home parish of Bampton, Oxfordshire. This process was legally gendered, and arbitrarily brutal with it. Mary Auchterlochie Chalmers, the Scottish wife of a local London Mission Society doctor, Edinburgh University-​trained Ahmed Fahmy, an Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity, was allegedly refused burial in the British cemetery at Amoy in 1902, on the technically correct grounds that she was not British. The registrations of the births of their children were retrospectively cancelled the same year. Fahmy retained Ottoman nationality. British women who married foreign nationals 64

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automatically took on the nationality of their husband (as did, of course, foreign women who married British men). Their nationality in the first place was contingent on that of their father.47 This polyglot world of British subjects was more complex yet. For example, in 1883 “a decayed builder” from Fuzhou, Horatio John Robertson (in fact a Min River pilot since 1855 at least, who styled himself a “Merchant” on his marriage certificate), attempted, on instigation of a “native named Lim Kim (with whom he is residing) to try and get a living at Amoy by maintaining claims for persons to whom in Lim’s opinion justice has not been done.” Robertson was reported to have presented a claim already rejected by the consul, from “Edwards, a negro . . . Constable to the United States Consulate here.” Born in Singapore to an Antigua-​born father (who was most likely the son of a black mother and white father), and a Melaka Portuguese mother, this man, St. Julian Hugh Edwards, sometimes claimed US citizenship and sometimes asserted British nationality.48 At this point the American consul W. E. Goldsborough said that Edwards “avers his British nationality,” but the British Consul had already seen his US consulate certificate of registration. Edwards also writes at one point that “although I was born in the Straits I have never registered myself as a British subject, nor had my late father.” “It would thus appear,” wrote then Consul R. J. Forrest, “that Edwards belongs to a class with whom under Sir E. Hornby’s instructions we should have little or nothing to do with.”49 The points of note here include Robertson’s collaborative relationship with Lim Kim; the court shopping that Edwards engaged in, or attempted to engage in, and the fact that Straits Settlements sojourners and migrants in Xiamen also included what we might term the “overseas,” or “offshore” British, a further subset of the British community that for all it was embedded at the heart of British activities was routinely disparaged.50 We might linger with Robertson a little longer, for he was in 1884 forced to take out a Chinese Maritime Customs-​issued Chinese Pilotage Service license. He did so, but stated in so doing that he refused to conform to procedures, claiming that he was not subject to the authority of anybody but the British Consul. He had the support of the agents of fourteen insurance companies in the port—​not on this principle, presumably, but as a reliable pilot with long experience of the port. But when the consul and vice consul confirmed in 1886 that he must abide by Customs instructions and enforced his dismissal from the pilotage service by the commissioner of Customs, Robertson sued them in the Supreme Court in Shanghai for “mal-​administration”—​and lost.51 The institution of a pilotage system by the Maritime Customs across all the open ports in 1867–​68 was a deliberate reacquisition of some measure of sovereignty by the Qing state, for it was administered by the Customs. This was confirmed by British Orders in Council issued by the minister in Peking: so British subjects were in fact, in this and in other Customs matters, subject to Qing law, albeit buffered to an extent by the consuls.52 The picture that emerges overall is a complex one, in which a wide range of men and women came under the jurisdiction of British consuls in Xiamen. This was to an extent an unstable constituency, relying on innovations in legislation for its interpretation, 65

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but also on the personal temperament of individual consuls (who might to a lesser or greater extent apply the letter of the law), and on the contingent strategies of the Kung, or Edwards, or Fahmy families. This was hardly what was envisaged in 1842, although even then the British had in treaty and in practice sought exemption for those Chinese who had actively or functionally assisted them during the war—​their suppliers, linguists, compradors, guides, and servants.53 The fundamentally collaborative nature of the existing British enterprise in China was migrated into the newly opened ports, as the British and their mostly Cantonese collaborators moved east and north together from the Pearl River delta. Early consular disputes with Qing officials often involved disputes over the treatment by officials of Chinese who had assisted the British during the conflict. The security of consulate staff, and by extension the compradors and Chinese employees of British traders, also came into this capacious sphere of consular sensitivity and watchfulness. The elastic logic of protection was extended to the property and goods of such Chinese employees and partners as well. Any model of British power in China that sees these as peripheral questions is inadequate. They lay at the heart of its operation.54

Disciplining British Subjects These Xiamen snapshots suggest that we need to look more closely at the British system, its remit, and limitations. One key feature that has not been acknowledged clearly and systematically enough is the extent to which it was a disciplinary tool. A legal order is by its very definition likely to be disciplinary, but extraterritorial jurisdiction has been too often seen as a blunt tool of British power in relation to China. But those early concerns expressed by EIC officials about the need to secure control over British subjects can be traced thereafter through the structure that was established, and how it was wielded. The British system had a remit over general criminal and civil cases relating to British individuals, as well as inquests and estates. It also enforced acts relating to those in specific employment categories—​such as seamen covered by various iterations of the Merchant Shipping Acts (including provisions relating to mutiny, desertion, and willfully disobeying orders)—​or from particular legal regimes: in the twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War, an invasive system of registration, surveillance, and control of movement was put in place for British Indian subjects.55 The registration of land held by British subjects was also undertaken by consuls, as part of the extraterritorial regime. Company registration was also effected by the court system that monitored compliance with company law. This was headquartered in Hong Kong from 1865 through a “Companies Ordinance.” Many British subjects jibbed in fact at having to be subject to the jurisdiction of the consular authorities. They were required by Order in Council to register with the local consulate in person in January each year, and particularly were fined if they did not. But there were periods in which registration was not enforced, alternating with 66

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periodic crackdowns when fines were imposed. Each time this happened individual Britons attempted to test the validity of the process and have the requirement lifted charging that it was a “poll-​tax,” “un-​English,” and “vexatious and obnoxious.” They received short shrift in court. There were two levels of fee, $5 and $1, euphemistically named A class and B class. A merchant was subject to the $5 fee: policemen, for example, including Sikhs, paid the $1 fee.56 Was the state to refuse them protection in need, it was asked, if they could not produce their registration certificate? The legal answer in fact was yes; the more accurate response would have been: when it was deemed necessary. The reluctance of many Britons to pay the modest annual fee was one matter. But as we have seen, it was not always immediately apparent who fell under its jurisdiction and when. Significant numbers of British subjects had to be cajoled and forced to register, but registration was for others a desirable good and it needed monitoring by the authorities. It had been muddied from the start by the caveats in the Nanjing (Article IX) and subsequent treaties about not punishing Chinese agents, allies, or suppliers of the British. The immediate extension of new British protection to some subjects of the Qing was vague in its conception, and it was soon extended in many British minds to their servants, employees, and commercial partners and agents. Or at least this became the default position of many Britons, who pestered consuls to assist them. Those consuls might or might not respond. In addition, British Chinese and Indian subjects themselves made immediate use of British consular jurisdiction when the treaty ports started to open in 1843. They came on the first ships. The system proved flexible when it came to incorporating some categories of Chinese. It also proved selective when it came to how it treated different categories of metropolitan Briton. Class affinities were a powerful factor in relations between consuls and their charges, and in their deployment of law, class tensions too. In his 1867 instructions Hornby wrote: It is of the utmost importance that what is called in these Countries the “rowdy Class” should be got rid of—​and it is this Class who are constantly guilty of conduct towards the Natives—​the authorities, and Foreigners, which occasionally is highly criminal, but which generally falls more properly under the head of being subversive of the peace and tranquillity of the public—​the Law against Vagrants of all descriptions should be enforced, and thus in time the foreign Settlements will be cleared of persons who are always creating difficulties with the authorities, and who are a source of annoyance and fear to the respectable portion of Foreigners.57 By necessity, the British operation in China required a socially variegated presence. It needed its mariners and seamen, foremen, machinists, policemen, bartenders, cooks, 67

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publicans, public health inspectors, nurses, and tax collectors, among others. In fact this body of men (mostly, but not solely) vastly outnumbered the “respectable” classes. Nine out of ten British employees of the Chinese Maritime Customs, for example, were in the outdoor staff. Most of those men were merchant seamen. Their presence and the instability or transience of their employment gave rise to official British anxiety, and specific initiatives to deal with destitute or unemployed Britons.58 There was an element of contingency underpinning Hornby’s political statement of purpose. War, rebellion, and the resultant boom in Shanghai in the early 1860s had both laid the foundations of the city’s modern growth, and turned it into what felt at moments like a wild frontier town. Hornby aimed to stop that. As a result, while extraterritoriality was ostensibly designed to protect British subjects in China, the system was also used to remove them from the country. So we have, for example, Robson and Campbell in 1876, “rogues and vagabonds” according to the charge sheet, sentenced to jail and deportation. Or Mahomet Cassim, jailed and deported, jailed for returning from deportation, and jailed again and re-​deported (and to pay all associated costs). British subjects with no “ostensible means of livelihood or settled occupation” could be required to place themselves under the surveillance of consular officers or those deputized on their behalf.59 While this was clearly a way of sweeping away the “rowdy” class—​the crimes are generally persistent petty theft, social disorder offenses, apparent destitution—​we find it deployed against white collar crimes as well: fraud in 1900, two key figures in a casino operation in 1912, and in 1929 for arms trafficking (the man involved had been 45 years in China, and was 70). Class and good standing could come into play: one of the casino operators had his sentence reduced to signing a surety for good behavior, after pleas for clemency on the basis of his otherwise “law abiding” residence in Shanghai.60 This tool was tempered by sentiment, and that sentiment was shaped by notions of race. Hornby wrote more widely as regards the unregistered that “we cannot in justice to the [Chinese] authorities refuse to recognise a British Subject, nor can we often, from mere motives of humanity leave our fellow Subjects—​simply because they have not registered themselves—​to the tender mercies of the Native authorities.”61 So it was acknowledged from the start that issues of “humanity” or affinity, or more simply put, perceptions of race, would trump legalistic practice. Contingency and affinity also featured in the treatment of British women. Officially they had “abandoned” their nationality in English law on marriage to foreign nationals. But affinities did play a continuing role, although this was unpredictable, as in the case of Mary Chalmers. There were practical limits to what consuls could do officially in regard to former British nationals. They would work privately to deal with “problems” seeking to rally private individuals or charitable resource to help in some cases (and as late as the 1930s there was a process in place to interview single British women taking out passports to go to China to try and identify those going to marry Chinese men, and to try to persuade them not to).62

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We might conclude that, overall, it looked like a rational, credible, and efficient system. It had a code, a structure, trained personnel, and the physical sites needed. In 1869 we might see the execution in Shanghai for murder of Robert Wallis George as a moment symbolizing its robustness. George, a shipyard foreman, had killed a Chinese carpenter who worked in the yard. There was ample evidence of premeditation. The system worked, and George was hanged in the grounds of the Consulate jail. Justice was done. Even attempts by the defense to rule out all Chinese evidence on the grounds that culturally it could not be considered as given on properly understood oath were ruled out (although they were considered). However, a number of problems remain. We might note that the execution of George perfectly fitted Hornby’s statement about dealing with the “rowdy class.” However, it should also be noted that George was Indian (presumably Anglo-​Indian given his name). The defense played up both his rights as an Englishman (his “birth-​right” to a jury of twelve peers: the practice at Shanghai was five), and his innate, because Indian, “excitability.” Neither strategy worked. Most of those executed after sentence at the British Supreme Court were Indian. I have only found two cases of white Britons being hanged, almost fifty years apart (1871 and 1915).63 Low social status was clearly a factor in each case. Of course, it is hardly novel to point out that notions of race, class, or gender inflect legal processes and decisions but such instances here reinforce the picture of the British system as a disciplinary tool.

Deploying the Regime More Widely How singular was the British system? Ostensibly the foreign powers benefitting from extraterritoriality deployed similar infrastructures. But in fact those of the major powers operated with assets and in ways that reflected their specific interests and ambitions in China. The network of Japanese consuls, for example, was more extensive than the British, and officials wielded much more power over Japanese nationals and colonial subjects through legally constituted Residents’ Associations and the justice system. This was enforced by a very large Japanese consular police network (with 280 staff in Tianjin alone in 1928, for example). There was no supreme court, and instead appeals from consular courts went to Nagasaki, while consuls operated as both judge and chief investigators. Japanese officials were proactive, for example, after 1895, in encouraging Chinese with connections (which could be tenuous) to Taiwan to register under their protection. Many Chinese in Fujian took advantage of the opportunity, which potentially brought with it a number of tangible benefits by detaching them from the jurisdiction of Qing officials.64 While Herbert Giles proactively asserted his jurisdiction over Kung’s estate in 1879, he did so because he considered it his legal duty to, given his responsibilities toward British subjects. But he was not aiming to expand a British presence. Japanese practice was quite different. In 1930, those describing themselves

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as Taiwanese outnumbered Japanese nationals resident in South China nearly five to one: and their interests there were Japan’s interests.65 The US case was different.66 In the course of the nineteenth century US citizens acquired extraterritorial rights in thirteen foreign jurisdictions, including, from 1844, Qing China. But only from 1906 did Americans come under the jurisdiction of a dedicated legal system, headed by a US District Court for China, inaugurated in response to consular corruption and malpractice, and the abuse of US status by other nationalities. The court was instituted with high hopes and rotund rhetoric, and a purge of those recognized as US citizens, not least of all Eastern European women engaged in prostitution, who had turned the appellation “American Girl” into a brothel brand. The court was designed “for China,” to curtail abuse, and protect Chinese, and the good name of the United States, from these entrepreneurs, racketeers, and vagrants. The court’s history proved to be a bumpy one, with fits of effective control sometimes reversed as local American interests combined to undermine or oust overly diligent judges and officials. The original “purge” of those claiming US citizenship did have an impact, but in fact simply drove individuals to secure papers from more hospitable consulates. The turbulent history of US policy and practice, and the rational, evasive strategies deployed by individuals in response, brings us back to Kung Lin Mhone, H. J. Robertson, Julian Hugh Edwards, and dozens, scores, hundreds of others like them. The Japanese system stands out in this for its effective policing of its own nationals and subjects, but the British and US infrastructures proved attentive only fitfully, and in their practices and through their limitations, mostly belied any representation of them as efficient, rational vehicles for the deployment of imperialist power. Like any system of discipline, the British extraterritorial infrastructure was constantly tested by its charges, whose resourcefulness and inventiveness also exposed its inconsistencies and its contingent nature. Advantage or profit could be gained in ways that related to lacunae in the regulations, or, more routinely, through the renting of their extraterritorial status by Britons to those without it. This could take the form of asserting ownership of land or property, of a business, or a ship. It could be legally complex, based on documentation and the performance of appropriate duties, but it could also be quite simply done. There was also crude performance of extraterritoriality through the fact of simple physical association of Britons with goods, properties, or Chinese associates. Extraterritoriality was vested both in the treaties, but also existed as an aura of relative untouchability around those who for reasons of ethnicity looked as if they possessed it. This fractured and incomplete extraterritoriality was in fact its greatest virtue for those under its sway. Managing land for Chinese proved to be a significant factor in the economies of the treaty ports. British interests ranging from individuals to registered property companies played an intermediary service role in Chinese land ownership. The British and other officials had their maps showing which nationals held which lots in the concessions and settlements. But in fact the actual ownership—​who supplied the 70

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capital—​was not indicated. This could take the form of initially ad hoc arrangements such as those entered into, for example, by Thomas Hanbury on behalf of Chinese business associates, during the 1850s Small Swords and Taiping derangements of the Yangzi delta, when the Quaker silk merchant purchased land and property in his name on their behalf in the settlement. Silas Hardoon’s property portfolio included investments undertaken on behalf of Chinese associates.67 But it also developed into much more sophisticated and structured arrangements. The Shanghai Land Investment Company, established in 1888, sought capital through the Shanghai Stock Exchange including Chinese finance. This was legally British landownership, but underneath that was a much more multinational reality. British interests acted as intermediaries, providing access to British status, and so extraterritorial protection. Unlocking Chinese capital was vitally important to a diverse range of companies. Jardine, Matheson & Co., for example, secured significant Chinese investment in their Ewo Cotton Mill. But the transnational nature of technically British companies was more polyglot yet. A 1903 German consular report highlighted the rapid growth of German interest in China, including substantial investment in British firms, including Shanghai Land Investment. The most ostentatious of these was the Anglo-​German Brewery Company, established in 1903 under the Hong Kong company ordinances, headquartered in Shanghai, but brewing in the German colony at Qingdao. It had a British chairman, a mainly British Board of Directors, and a German managing director. The entire output was sold to Slevolgt and Co, a German agency house. By July 1915 the shares in the company were 61 percent German and Austrian owned, with the remainder owned by Britons, French investors, Japanese, Belgian, Chinese, Portuguese, and so on.68 Its minority British interest was characteristic of “so many of these Hongkong registered companies,” as the British Minister Sir John Jordan put it in 1915.69 In the ordinary run of events this was not necessarily a problem. Many treaty port commercial interests were condominium: different national elements contributed, in this case German expertise, British company law, a majority of German capital, but a wide range of other foreign capital. In essence the use of company law from a British colony meant that, for example, Chinese capital could be invested in an off-​shore business that in fact operated in China. Interests based in Hong Kong took this further, as indeed, proved to be their right to, under British law. In a landmark case in 1924, the Supreme Court found against the Canton consul-​general who had refused to allow the transfer of title of a plot in the British Concession on Shameen (Shamian) to the Bank of East Asia, on the grounds that it was in all but formal identity a Chinese bank (it was established in Hong Kong in 1918 by Chinese interests), and that the Land Regulations did not allow transfers of Shameen lots to Chinese. Among additional justifications offered was that the bank’s business was entirely with Chinese customers. However, the majority of the directors and of the capital was British. The consul lost. A steadily worsening atmosphere at Canton—​in British eyes—​was part of the context, but the fact that those British directors were “of the Chinese race” was part of the case against it for the local consulate.70 71

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Consuls tried to police some of this and curb it where it was potentially destabilizing. The most outrageous were what they called “lie hongs,” which claimed ownership (for a fee) of Chinese property or goods to help its owners evade tax charges, for example, or secure advantage in legal disputes, or otherwise benefit. Extraterritoriality was a commodity on informal and formal markets, black and grey ones: for individuals—​who could front Chinese-​owned companies, and for companies themselves, as it provided a business model for routinely deploying Chinese capital within the treaty ports, for example, and less routinely for protecting Chinese assets during times of conflict. It could be high risk, of course, as Chinese officials found out in 1901, when their protective transfer to nominal—​but legal—​foreign ownership of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company during the Eight Power occupation of north China resulted in the irrevocable loss of the business and its assets to their foreign partners. Attempts to use the English legal system to regain control failed.71 The “lie hong” was typically a small operation, but the Anglo-​ German Brewery Company was in most ways simply a lie hong writ large. The same might be argued of a company like Jardine, Matheson and Co. They differed only in the character of their operators, who came from the same gentlemanly backgrounds as state officials, with whom they were also interconnected through overlapping networks of education, marriage, and social club membership. Class mattered, and so did understandings of “race.”

Conclusion If we look at the treaties, orders-​in-​council, consular regulations, and handbooks, we find a world in which the problem of the Lady Hughes has been solved. Robert Willis George was hanged by his national representatives, having been judged by his peers. Such apparent legal triumph, bolstered by narratives that continued to focus on historic controversies, as well as the assiduous collection of evidence of Chinese judicial or administrative malpractice, served to support the position established by the British in China. This same history of extraterritoriality in Qing China and its republican aftermath conversely supported the oppositional narrative framed by the talented and professionally ambitious Chinese researchers such as V. K. Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun), who set out to undermine foreign privilege in the early twentieth century first through scholarship, and then through diplomacy.72 But in a way, the problem was not the fact of extraterritoriality; rather it lay in its incompleteness. It was in practice a fiction that served a British purpose. It was incomplete, and inconsistent, and shaped by issues of class, ethnicity, and changes in political priorities. It was far from being hard and fast. More broadly, this was the type of wider conceit that underpinned British power. We know, after all, that there was no such thing as the British Empire. Obviously it existed in the mind, and in the emotions, of both its supporters and its opponents. But there was no single fixed 72

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apparatus that can be labeled as such. In that it was of course like most other empires. It might be described as a project, perhaps, but it was certainly a network: that is, it was an unstable congeries of jurisdictions and territories, with their own policies, including foreign policies, or projection or presentation overseas of the interests of their domestic constituencies/​constituents. These had their own laws and dynamics. The repertoire of tools available to the British, and other powers, was varied enough to allow them the choice of deploying whichever (or whichever combination) held the greatest potential to secure advantage at any one time. But those tools themselves were hardly static, the extraterritorial system not least of all. Its implementation was a matter of contingent need. This also meant that the category of “British subjects”—​of Britons, British, British protected subjects—​was a capacious, cosmopolitan, and polyglot one—​in legal terms. It also meant therefore that it was problematic and bothersome for Consuls in China, for all of these people were beneficiaries of extraterritoriality. In practice, those protecting colonial power eventually came to focus instead on those elites from which they themselves had come, into which they married, through whom they found employment for their relatives, and for themselves. These collaborators had always been present, of course, but in and after the 1930s became the focus for a shift in British policy.73 If the claims of and for extraterritoriality need to be tempered as a subject, discussion of it reinforces the importance of taking individual agency seriously in our models and analysis. Kung’s foreman, Edwards, Harmusjee Cowsajee, Robertson, and others were important actors in this story.74 These were incomplete systems, not total ones. This gave British official practice, for example, a certain amount of flex. But it also meant that individuals were able to evade and act outside the system. While there is an objective history of bilateral Sino-​British relations, performed through such things as extraterritoriality and the wider legal regime, it does not really exist most of the time in the lives of these Britons who operated in China. Extraterritoriality was a central article of faith in discourse and practice in nineteenth-​ century China, among other zones in which foreign power was projected. It lay at the core of the range of tools and practices underpinning “informal empire.” It still deserves greater attention than it has yet received, but its place in the rhetoric of its opponents or defenders should not distract us from its contingent and improvised nature. The strength of the British system lay in this flexibility and contingency. The seemingly hard principles underlying it could be superseded when it was deemed necessary. Left high and dry by this when policy moved on were individuals and networks of families who had operated under the British flag, but who were surplus to the requirements of new British policies. Charles Archer remained in jail in China for almost nine years. Although they included him as they drew up lists of those in detention, British officials made no representations for his release after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, as he had been properly tried for a serious offense. In 1956 he was abruptly released and deported to Hong Kong, and from there made his way to Britain, for the first time in his life. 73

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Manzhouli Harbin Jilin Shenyang

Treaty ports opened in : 1843 - 1844 1860 - 1864 1876 - 1877 1889 - 1909

Peking

Niuzhuang Qinhuangdao Beidaihe Dalian Taku Weihaiwei Zhifu (Yantai)

Tianjin

Qingdao

Zhenjiang Jigongshan Chengdu

Wanxian

Chongqing

Yichang Hankou Shaxi

Nanjing Wuhu Suzhou

Guling

Changsha

Shanghai Ningbo

Hangzhou

Jiujiang Wenzhou Guliang

Fuzhou

Xiamen

Simao

Mengzi

Sanshui Shantou Wuzhou Canton Nanning Kowloon new territories Longzhou Beihai

International Settlements British concessions Crown colony Shanghai Hill stations & resorts Weihaiwei Other treaty ports Other places mentioned in text

Hong Kong

Border of Leased Territories River patrolled by Royal Navy's China Station British troops China Station base

Britain in China, 1 January 1927 Figure 2.1  Britain in China, January 1, 1927. Map provided by Robert Bickers.

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NOTES 1 Shenbao, November 21, 1947, p. 4; South China Morning Post, September 20, 1947, p. 12. The reporter had made a mathematical error, for the reference was undoubtedly meant to be the execution for manslaughter of a British sailor in 1784 in Canton, 163 years earlier. 2 The concept of “informal empire” has its critics, but remains the dominant frame through which the portfolio of tools used by British state agents in China is best understood: for a strong critique, see Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006), 125–​46. For complementary uses, see its application to pre-​1937 Japanese practice in Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (eds), The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and the surveys in Matthew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce, and Capital (London: John Wiley, 2009). Qing state practice is discussed below. 3 And indeed, that had briefly employed Archer, not knowing that he had thirteen prior convictions: US National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 263, Records of the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch, file D8741/​104, “Charles Percival Archer, Candidate for the Shanghai Municipal Police,” March 25, 1941; Douglas Clark, Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2015), vol. 3, pp. 5175, 180. The official was Harold F. Gill (1905–​91), who served in the force from 1929 to 1943. 4 Minute by H. R. Sawbridge, April 23, 1947, in file on “Chinese court procedure and prison conditions”: The National Archives, Kew [hereafter TNA], FO 369/​3778E. 5 See Yanqiu Zheng, “A Specter of Extraterritoriality: The Legal Status of U.S. Troops in China, 1943–​1947,” Journal of American-​East Asian Relations 22, no. 1 (2015), 17–​44; and Robert Shaffer, “A Rape in Beijing, December 1946: GIs, Nationalist Protests, and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 1 (2000), 31–​64. 6 As the child of a British military officer stationed in (then) West Germany, I was personally subject as a services dependent in 1977–​79 to the extraterritorial regime that was first set out in the 1959 NATO “Status of Forces Agreement.” 7 Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (New York: Cambridge University. Press, 2010), pp. 40–​1. 8 South China Morning Post, September 4, 1947, p. 1; Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 71–​3. 9 For one survey, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-​ colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-​ Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 290–​314. 10 Exceptions include Clark, Gunboat Justice; Emily Whewell, “British Extraterritoriality in China: The Legal System, Functions of Criminal Jurisdiction, and its Challenges, 1833–​ 1943,” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2015. There is also discussion in Erik Esselstrom, Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009); Barbara J. Brooks, Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895–​1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). 11 Osterhammel, “Semi-​colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth-​Century China.” This is probably a slight underestimate, given that it mainly focuses on political, economic, and military factors.

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12 It is not clear if this is true, but what little research has systematically been done suggests that the assumption needs to be avoided: see Christopher Roberts, The British Courts and Extra-​ territoriality in Japan, 1859–​1899 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Roberts suggests that explicit bias is not statistically discoverable; however, this work probably fails to capture implicit bias. 13 Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). This is not to suggest that there was no everyday predisposition to violence among Britons in China, which there clearly was: see, for example, my Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Kolsky’s claim that white violence was “one of the empire’s most closely guarded secrets” (Colonial Justice, p. 2) is somewhat surprising. 14 I shall largely exclude the leased territory of Weihaiwei and crown colony of Hong Kong from this analysis. For discussions of these territories, see Carol Tan, British Rule in China: Law and Justice in Weihaiwei 1898–​1930 (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, 2008); Christopher Munn, Anglo-​China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–​1880 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001); for an institutional account, see James William Norton-​ Kyshe, History of the Laws and Courts of Hongkong, 2 vols (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1898). 15 “A visitor to China” [George James Gordon], Address to the people of Great Britain explanatory of our commercial relations with the empire of China, and of the course of policy by which it may be rendered an almost unbounded field for British commerce (London: Smith, Elder, 1836), p. 85. 16 Two cases in which British nationals escaped justice—​those of Abraham Leslie and George Smith—​are discussed in Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 64–​8. 17 Li Chen, “Law, Empire, and Historiography of Modern Sino-​Western Relations: A Case Study of the Lady Hughes Controversy in 1784,” Law & History Review 27, no. 1 (2009); William J. Donahue, “The Francis Terranova Case,” The Historian 43, no. 2 (1981), 211–​24; Songchuan Chen, “Strangled by the Chinese and Kept ‘Alive’ by the British: Two Infamous Executions and the Discourse of Chinese Legal Despotism,” in A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse, ed. Richard Ward (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 199–​219. 18 “Instructions to Lt.-​ Col. Cathcart,” November 30, 1787, and “Instructions to Lord McCartney,” September 8, 1792, in Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, pp. 160–​7, 232–​42. Cathcart died en route to China. 19 Li Chen, “Law, Empire and Historiography,” pp. 33–​4. 20 Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-​Century China and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 15–​29. 21 Land questions were, however, specifically exempted in the New Territories: Munn, Anglo-​ China, pp. 163–​8; Peter Wesley-​Smith, Unequal Treaty 1898–​1997: China, Great Britain, and Hong Kong’s New Territories (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1898), pp. 124–​9. For diplomatic reasons, Weihaiwei was treated differently and under the Foreign Jurisdiction Act, which meant that it was not regarded legally as British territory. 22 To Sind, Van Diemen’s Land, Singapore, Penang, and Labuan: Christopher Munn, “The Criminal Trial under Early Colonial Rule,” in Tak-​wing Ngo, Hong Kong’s History: State and Society under Colonial Rule (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 50–​4; see also Chan Yue-​shan, “A Study of the Adoption and Enforcement of Transportation in Hong Kong 1844–​1858,” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2009. 23 Anxiety about this would last well into the late colonial era: Robert Bickers, “On Not Being Macaoed in Hong Kong: British Official Minds and Actions in 1967,” in May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967, ed. Robert Bickers and Ray Yep (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), pp. 53–​67.

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24 ARTICLE XV: All questions in regard to rights, whether of property or person, arising between British subjects, shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the British authorities. ARTICLE XVI: Chinese subjects who may be guilty of any criminal act toward British subjects shall be arrested and punished by the Chinese authorities, according to the Laws of China. /​British subjects who may commit any crime in China shall be tried and punished by the Consul, or other public functionary authorized thereto, according to the Laws of Great Britain. /​Justice shall be equitably and impartially administered on both sides. 25 I owe my understanding of this process to the doctoral work in progress at the University of Bristol by Alex Thompson. 26 Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 103–​107, 161–​3. 27 Robert Hart, “Proposals for the Better regulation of Commercial relations,” January 23, 1876, in Maritime Customs, Documents Illustrative of the Origin, Development, and Activities of the Chinese Customs Service (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1938), vol. VI, pp. 352–​454. The section on extraterritoriality is on pp. 384–​ 9. The second memorandum was circulated to its diplomats overseas by the Zongli Yamen in 1878. On the learning processes embarked upon by Qing officials, see Richard Horowitz, “Central Power and State Making:  The Zongli Yarnen and Self-​Strengthening in China, 1860–​1880,” Unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1998. 28 David Faure, “The Mackay Treaty of 1902 and Its Impact on Chinese Business,” Asia Pacific Business Review 7, no. 2 (2000), 79–​92, discussion in particular on pp. 84–​5. 29 Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 73–​7. 30 On the court system, see Clark, Gunboat Justice; Emily Whewell, “British Extraterritoriality in China: The Legal System, Functions of Criminal Jurisdiction, and its Challenges, 1833–​ 1943,” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2015; and Alex Thompson’s PhD in progress at Bristol. See also Sir Edmund Hornby: An Autobiography (London: Constable & Co., 1929). 31 See Anatol M. Kotenev, Shanghai: Its Mixed Court and Council; Material Relating to the History of the Shanghai Municipal Council and the History, Practice and Statistics of the International Mixed Court (Shanghai: North China Daily News and Herald, 1925); Thomas B. Stephens, Order and Discipline in China: The Shanghai Mixed Court 1911–​1927 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Tahirih Lee, “Law and Local Autonomy at the International Mixed Court of Shanghai,” Unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1990; Cassell, Grounds of Judgment. 32 Article XIII of the October 8, 1843, Bogue Treaty supplementary General Regulations for British Trade: “Regarding the punishment of English criminals, the English Government will enact the laws necessary to attain that end, and the Consul will be empowered to put them in force; and regarding the punishment of Chinese criminals, these will be tried and punished by their own laws, in the way provided for by the correspondence which took place at Nanking after the concluding of the peace.” 33 Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–​1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 187–​95. 34 Kotenev, Shanghai: Its Mixed Court and Council, p. 312; Robert Bickers, “Ordering Shanghai: Policing a Treaty Port, 1854–​ 1900,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), pp. 173–​94; Munn, Anglo-​China, pp.  111–​13. 35 Tahirih V. Lee, “Risky Business: Courts, Culture, and the Marketplace,” University of Miami Law Review 47 (1993), 1335–​414.

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36 Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–​1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83–​95. The most recent analysis of the Subao case is: Elizabeth Dale, “The Su Bao Case and the Layers of Everyday Citizenship in China, 1894–​1904,” in Multilayered Citizenship, ed. Willem Maas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 110–​26. 37 See the exchanges in R. V. A. Harper and W. Hodds, in North China Herald, August 31, 1912, p. 639. 38 There are just under 4,000 probate files, and a very large number of records of intestate deaths, for example, in National Archives series FO 917, and FO 1092. 39 Cassel, Grounds of Judgment, pp. 113–​14; Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism, p. 1; Kirk Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Choson Korea, 1850–​1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 88–​91, 239–​43, 250–​1. 40 TNA, FO 656/​47, September 27, 1879, and October 1, 1879, Giles to HM Chief Judge, Shanghai. There is a further file: FO 678/​1899. 41 See, for example, the discussion in Robert Bickers, “British Concessions and Chinese Cities, 1910s–​1930s,” in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities: Emerging Social, Legal and Governance Orders, ed. Billy K. L. So and Madeleine Zelin (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 157–​96; and Sabrina Fairchild, “Fuzhou and Global Empires: Understanding the Treaty Ports of Modern China, 1850–​1937,” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2015. 42 Harry Parkes to Mrs Lockhart, October 18, 1854, cited in Stanley Lane-​Pool, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes . . . (London: Macmillan & Co, 1894), vol. 1, p. 188. 43 The early history of the British presence is covered in Chen Yu, “The Making of a Bund in China: The British Concession in Xiamen (1852–​1930),” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 7, no. 1 (2008), 31–​8. 44 Customs, Decennial Reports, 1892–​1901, vol. 2, p. 131. 45 This estimate is on the basis of Ei Murakami, Umi no Kindai Chugoku: Fukkenjin no katsudo to Igisiru/​Shincho (Maritime History of Modern China: Local Fujian actors and the British and Chinese Empires) (Nagoya: The University of Nagoya Press, 2013), p. 440. 46 Wong Yee Tuan, “Uncovering the Myths of Two 19th-​Century Hokkien Business Personalities in the Straits Settlements,” in Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, vol. 5, 2011–​12: and his “The Big Five Hokkien Families in Penang, 1830s–​1890s,” Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, vol. 1 (2007). This world is more fully explored in Ei, Umi no Kindai Chugoku (Maritime History of Modern China). 47 Heather J. Sharkey, “An Egyptian in China: Ahmed Fahmy and the Making of ‘World Christianities,’ ” Church History 78, no. 2 (2009), 309–​26. The registrations of the births of their daughter (1889) and their sons (1891, 1892) were later cancelled. Nonetheless, the son was British “enough” to join the Seaforth Highlanders in November 1914. He was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of Loos, September 25, 1915: De Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour:  A Biographical Record of Members of His Majesty’s Naval and Military Forces Who Fell in the Great War 1914–​1918 (London: Standard Art Book Company, 1917–​19), vol. 4, p. 54; Amoy birth register, 1870–​1929: TNA, FO 663/​86, entries for December 29, 1899, June 8, 1891, November 28, 1892. The younger son applied for naturalization as a British subject in 1914: London Gazette, January 5, 1915, p. 182. 48 For a fuller account of Edwards, see Douglas Fix, “The Global Entanglements of a Marginal Man in Treaty Port Xiamen,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land, and Power, ed. Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 159–​79. 49 TNA, FO 656/​47, Amoy, June 29, 1883, to Chief Justice.

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50 Douglas Fix, “The Global Entanglements of a Marginal Man in Treaty Port Xiamen,” in Bickers and Jackson (eds), Treaty Ports in Modern China, pp. 159–​79. Edwards’s father was born in Antigua, probably to a slave mother. His own mother was Portuguese Eurasian. 51 NCH, November 3, 1886, pp. 485–​6; July 2, 1886, p. 4. 52 The regulations were drawn up and proposed by the Zongli Yamen to the foreign diplomatic body for its approval, as per the French Treaty Article XV. 53 Murakami Ei, “ ‘Traitors’ and the Qing Government Policies Directed at the Coastal Residents of Fujian and Guangdong at the Time of the Opium War,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 70 (2012), 23–​46. 54 On this, see, for example, Kaori Abe, Chinese Middlemen in Hong Kong’s Colonial Economy, 1830–1890 (London: Routledge, 2017); John King Fairbank noted this in Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–​1854 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1953] 1969), pp. 219–​25, and it is a key theme in Eiichi Motono, Conflict and Cooperation in Sino-​British Business, 1860–​1911: The Impact of Pro-​British Commercial Network in Shanghai (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 55 Isabella Jackson, “The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-​Port Shanghai,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012), 1672–​704; Robert Bickers, “Britain and China, and India, 1830s–​1940s,” in Britain and China, 1840–​1970: Empire, Finance and War, ed. Robert Bickers and Jonathan J. Howlett (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 58–​83. 56 Quotations and fee details from the trials of J. B. Tootal and of A. J. How, NCH, March 6, 1869, p. 125; September 6, 1886, p. 292. Fines were imposed in 1869–​74, which encouraged 385 A Class registrations in 1874; there was then a lull until 1886, with registration immediately dropping off. Fines were being imposed into the late 1930s, and applied retrospectively to all years of nonpayment. 57 Edmund Hornby, Instructions to Her Majesty’s Consular Officers in China and Japan (1867), p. 19. 58 See, for example, the regular monitoring “of men of no known employment” in 1870–​71 by the SMP on behalf of the Shanghai consul-​general: Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai Municipal Council files, U1-​1–​571, “Watch Matters, 1870–​71.” 59 NCH, Robson and Campbell: August 26 and September 2, 1876, p. 232; Cassim: August 5, 1876, p. 132; Alcock Notification, January 14, 1867; Hornby, Instructions, pp. 103–​104. 60 NCH, October 5, 1912, pp. 68–​9; SCMP, July 20, 1929, p. 13. 61 Hornby, Instructions, p. 20. 62 Bickers, Britain in China, pp. 100–​101. 63 George: NCH, July 24, 1869, pp. 46–​8; July 31, 1869, pp. 64–​5; August 7, 1869, pp. 75–​6; September 4, 1869, p. 163. The execution in 1871 was of seaman William Williams, for killing a shipmate, and in 1915, of policeman John McFarlane, for killing his wife: NCH, June 2, 1871, pp. 406–​408; July 7, 1871, p. 496; October 2, 1915, pp. 69–​72; October 30, 1915, pp. 315–​16; Shanghai Times, October 25, 1915, p. 7. In each case the victim was also a Briton. 64 This draws on Brooks, Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy; Barbara J. Brooks, “Japanese Colonial Citizenship in Treaty Port China: The Location of Koreans and Taiwanese in the Imperial Order,” in New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–​1953, ed. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 109–​24; Esselstrom, Crossing Empire’s Edge. 65 Mark R. Peattie, “Japanese Treaty Ports Settlements in China, 1895–​1937,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 171.

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66 This section draws on the work of Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); “Prostitution as Privilege: The ‘American Girl’ of Treaty-​Port Shanghai, 1860–​1937,” International History Review 20, no. 4 (1998), 855–​83; and “Taking the Low Road to Sino-​ American Relations: ‘Open Door’ Expansionists and the Two China Markets,” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (1995), 62–​83. 67 Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 288–​94; Chiara Betta, “The Land System of the Shanghai International Settlement: The Rise and Fall of the Hardoon Family, 1874–​1956,” in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land Power, ed. Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 61–​77. 68 “German capital in China,” New York Times, March 9, 1903, p. 2; shareholdings: FO 371/​ 2310, enclosure in Shanghai No. 142, August 3, 1915. 69 Sir John Jordan, Peking No. 243, September 21, 1922, FO 371/​2310. 70 SCMP, November 4, 1924, p. 6; there is a full report on the case in TNA, FO 228/​3194. 71 Ian Phimister, “Foreign Devils, Financial and Informal Empire: Britain and China c.1900–​ 1912,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2008), 737–​60. 72 V. Kyuin Wellington Koo, The Status of Aliens in China (New York: Columbia University, 1912); Stephen G. Craft, V.K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), pp. 30–​60. 73 This is essentially the argument of Jürgen Osterhammel, “Imperialism in Transition: British Business and the Chinese Authorities, 1931–​37,” China Quarterly no. 98 (1984), 260–​86; and Bickers, Britain in China. 74 As, for example, Lin Man-​houng has in her study of Fujian-​born merchant Guo Chunyang, who was based in the Dutch Indies, and who secured Japanese, Dutch, and British status as a risk reduction strategy, and means of opening new avenues for commercial development (access to capital, for example): “Overseas Chinese Merchants and Multiple Nationality: A Means for Reducing Commercial Risk (1895–​1935),” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2001), 985–​1009.

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East Asian Empire and Technology: Imperial Japan and Mobilizing Infrastructure, 1868–​1931 John P. DiMoia Within the past two decades, the Taehan Empire (1897–​1910), the period of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–​1910) immediately preceding the onset of Japanese colonialism (1910–​ 45) in Korea, has become something of a celebrated topic among scholars of the region.1 Whereas once the period was characterized as offering closure for a traditional Korea, representing a holding pattern before the inevitable rise of the Japanese, the Taehan more recently has been considered an immensely dynamic period, one which saw the arrival of any number of significant innovations, especially in terms of urban infrastructure (transportation, communications), and also regarding bureaucratic, governing, and regulatory institutions. For example, the Toksu Palace witnessed the arrival of electrification in Seoul at the end of the nineteenth century, and many historians of Korea like to offer a comparison with neighboring cities such as Tokyo or Beijing.2 The first streetcars appeared in Seoul, and soon thereafter brought the first traffic fatality, a tale which has been written of in a number of different contexts.3 Andrei Lankov has described the first phone system in Seoul, albeit one installed on a modest scale.4 In all these cases, the arrival of new technology not only transformed the urban space of Seoul, but also the manner in which it was experienced by its residents, thereby lending a new appeal to this period as a potential object of historical inquiry.5 For Koreanists, this renewal of interest in the Taehan is driven at least in part by an attempt to revisit the colonial period, to reestablish the priority of native (Korean) innovation and development prior to the loss of sovereignty. This style of argument has been made for the origins of Korean capitalism, and here, similarly, it is now an ongoing controversy concerning the possible contributing role of the Japanese to Korea’s subsequent (technological) development.6 Although this chapter does not aim to resolve such a priority dispute, it invokes these older debates to underscore the centrality of Meiji-​era (1868–​1912) technology—​and still later, Taisho (1912–​26) and Showa (1926–​89)—​ along with the accompanying material infrastructure, as situated within the larger project of a formative Japanese Empire, including its impact upon colonial Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, among others. Arguably, Japanese imperial ideology was already evident as early as the late nineteenth century, implicit to the process of remaking the nation, and outlined in Fukuzawa’s famous essay “Throwing off Asia.”7 Central to this nation-​building dynamic was an enthusiasm for knowledge production, and more

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specifically, the kinds of applied knowledge made available through technology. On this last point, historians have long acknowledged the debt the Japanese owed to the German imperial scientific tradition with the arrival of Meiji, particularly in technical fields, such as bacteriology and the biomedical sciences.8 The role of specific material objects, however, appears less obvious, and the emphasis placed on the domestic space of the Meiji transformation often overlooks the corresponding role of expansionist practices, as Japan moved aggressively toward Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), having previously consolidated its hold over the Ryukyu Islands (1879) and Hokkaido (1869).9 In contrast to some of the more celebratory accounts of the Meiji period, this chapter offers a reevaluation of the recent literature concerning Japan’s technological and cultural awakening. It argues that this process of transformation was central to and in fact constitutive of the project of renewal, and equally, formed a critical part of what ultimately became a set of expansionist, imperial ambitions. Some scholars, Kaoru Sugihara of Kyoto University in particular, have claimed the growth of inter-​Asian commerce (Meiji Japan, Qing China, and the surrounding region) since the mid-​nineteenth century as a means to account for subsequent economic growth over the long twentieth century.10 While acknowledging this important point taken from economic history, I aim to follow in the footsteps of Andre Schmid, arguing that scholars of modern Japan have a tendency to minimize or ignore the violent effects of the colonization process (Taiwan, Korea, China) in telling a “national” story, preferring instead to focus upon a story of domestic success.11 For technology, I define the object of inquiry here primarily in terms of the material, although working at the level of ideas as well, seeking to illustrate how Japan constructed its new models of practice and bureaucracy (public health, new demographic mechanisms of recording and sorting populations, approaches to higher education), along with a material infrastructure (rail, communications), one that would make it a very different place within a short period of time.12 Again, the point here is that the story of Japanese domestic renewal quickly became less one of unmediated progress, and soon one of a much more ambivalent effort to control, process, and incorporate a significant number of new subject populations within a growing imperium, one offering a challenge to the long-​term dominance of Qing China. For colonial subjects experiencing this new culture, there was a curious ambivalence: on the one hand, an enthusiasm and respect for the novelty and display of power brought by Japan, and yet equally, on the other hand, a dawning awareness of the associated forms of repression.

Science and Imperialism: Approaching the “Problem” of East Asia and the Early Modern East Asia: Asia as Exception Within the broader historiography, the formative links between scientific practice and the global project of colonialism, characterized here primarily in terms of European 82

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expansionist impulses from about the mid-​seventeenth century, is less controversial as a topic.13 In brief, what was previously labeled “the Age of Discovery” or the “Age of Exploration” is now increasingly defined as a period during which the acquisition of new knowledge was tied tightly to an incipient capitalism associated with emerging forms of imperial and colonial rule.14 Portuguese portolan maps, which previously guided ships to ports, changed in shape and meaning as the new discoveries of the Americas changed the form of the map (or globe) dramatically, and this earthly transformation took place just prior to the more cosmic Copernican revolution, changing our very conceptions of time and space.15 Again, however, this literature places Europe at the center of the narrative, and the representative encounter in response is the Jesuit experience with the Qing court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the new Copernican astronomy was brought to the heart of the Sino-​centric world. Mediated through a series of Jesuit scholars—​including Matteo Ricci, Ferdinand Verbiest, and Johan Adam Schall von Bell—​and their Qing counterparts, this set of tales has become one of the best-​known encounters for the problem of knowledge exchange and the production of new knowledge, and also for its contribution toward understanding the West/​non-​West (China) dynamic through nascent forms of science and technology.16 The contrasting astronomical conceptions of the two parties have been written about extensively, and more recently the style of mathematics prevailing in China up to the calculus has also attracted attention.17 In effect, along with the Arab world and its extensive legacy for astronomy, optics, and mathematics, the role of “Chinese science” has become one of the few stories to challenge the Western “rise of science” narrative, the standard version concerning the transformation of knowledge with the creation of the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century.18 Still, these two cases (China, Arab/​ Islamic world) tend to get set aside as exceptional, and the case of “Chinese science” generally requires the use of quotation marks to call attention to its perceived status as unique, provisional.19 By this, I mean that the field of the history of science first emerged in the United States from a set of case studies of Western science in the 1930s, thereby rendering other forms of knowledge as peripheral to the main focus, a Europe-​centered story. Other knowledge traditions are therefore usually studied as area studies in their regional or national contexts, and not as the “history of science.” The “non-​West,” and especially East Asia, as a category thus remains something of a problem for many historians.20 Partly this is a disciplinary question, with work in the area requiring extensive language training and a knowledge of a different historiography (-​ies) to begin the task of doing comparative work. The second, and arguably more significant, problem is the intellectual one, with the science and colonialism literature framed almost exclusively from the perspective of the European colonizers, without recognition of any substantive response or contribution on the part of those being colonized. The Tokugawa and Meiji periods therefore offer a sharp rebuke to this dilemma in that Japan transformed itself from a country within the Sino-​centric orbit to one embracing an eclectic range of knowledge models by the mid-​to-​late nineteenth century. In other words, the Japanese imperial legacy, as uncomfortable as it might be historically, offers 83

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a powerful rejoinder to accounts that would limit or bracket the legacy of non-​Western knowledge practices in the early modern. Further, it becomes possible to take these diverse approaches to knowledge seriously in themselves, rather than seeing them as an adjunct to the Western story, or as motivated as a form of response.

Meiji Japan as a “Progressive” Model This still leaves the “exceptional” status of Japan as a problem, but for our purposes, a resolution to that dilemma can wait. The focus in this chapter rests on the rise of Japan as an imperial power within East Asia and its deployment of infrastructure as a formative part of its ambitions, first in the domestic context, and then throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. On this very point, historians have noted that Japan’s transformation corresponded roughly to the “2nd Industrial Revolution” (2nd IR), with the first IR corresponding to the eighteenth century in northern Europe, and the initial rise of coal, steam, and industrial production of textiles.21 In contrast, the 2nd IR is associated with the emergence of newer, synthetic materials such as steel and the first of the new dyes made available through the chemical industry in the nineteenth century, especially in Central Europe.22 Along with these material changes came corresponding organizational changes, here associated with the rise of new managerial, corporate forms. The 2nd IR is also linked to the rise of increasing mediation through media forms such as photography, and the availability of new means of communication, with the telegraph and telephone transforming personal and group interactions.23 If the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships in Yokohama in the mid-​nineteenth century represents at least one version of the “opening” of Japan, the domestic narrative ultimately proves much more complex.24 The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–​1868) was filled with fierce intellectual debates about the status of knowledge, and if Japan held a rich Sino-​centric intellectual heritage, the arrival of Dutch texts through Nagasaki—​ especially medical and scientific texts—​began to create a new legacy as conceptions of the body began to transform, and immunization (vaccination) slowly became a new form of accepted practice over the course of the nineteenth century.25 Again, the point remains that the first inklings of this transformation started much earlier with the first rangaku (“Dutch learning”) scholars, working as mediators across language and knowledge traditions. Many historians recognize Tokugawa as containing the incipient forms of practice leading to Meiji, and appreciate the depth of its richness and diversity as a series of lengthy debates on the question of which Japan would ultimately emerge. More importantly for our purposes here, Tokugawa also saw relative peace after the regional eruption of violence during the Hideyoshi Wars (1592–​98), and Japan did not emerge as an aggressor again on a major scale until the nineteenth century. If the use of categories such as East Asia and Japan remains a problem for some, the categories hold a very different set of associations for the specialist of the region, 84

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who recognizes that the dominance of Qing China as an intellectual and cultural model does not limit the corresponding richness of Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan. The Koreans had their own encounter with the Jesuit materials brought to China (the new astronomy), and for medicine, hanuihak, the Korean version of herb and plant-​based medical practice, began to assert its independence from China by the early seventeenth century, with the compilation of the Dongui Bogam.26 This medical compendium complied (Korean) knowledge of available resources for materia medica, offering a complement, and also an alternative, to Chinese medicine, and arguably served as the origins of an independent tradition. Similarly, Japan was busy processing both Chinese and European medical texts, even as it sought to maintain restrictions on the amount of information coming from the outside world.27 In short, the region was undergoing a period of rapid intellectual ferment for a great length of time, despite a surface calm for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The question of encounter with the West soon shifted from one devoted largely to theoretical models to one of immediate practical urgency when ships began to arrive with much greater frequency, and China’s defeat in the Opium Wars (1839–​42) in the early nineteenth century is often regarded as the beginning of this transition. While it would be easy to describe the period in the convenient shorthand of a “China in decline,” with a corresponding “rise in Japanese power,” this is much too simple a binary to represent a complex series of regional transformations.28 In any case, the emphasis on materiality began with attention to armories and weapons, as China was among the first to confront the new technologies wielded by Western nations.29 Watching from a close vantage point, Korea and Japan witnessed how the Qing were unable to handle the British challenge, and these neighbors responded to questions of modernity and scientific practice in their own fashion, as they wished to avoid the same fate. As mentioned at the outset, Korea briefly embraced the import of new technologies at the end of the nineteenth century, seeking to reform while surrounded by the powers of Russia, China, and Japan, a set of circumstances sometimes described by the chilling phrase “a shrimp among whales.”30 This activity, associated with the Kabo Reforms, meant dramatic economic, political, and cultural change for Koreans, even as colonialism was imminent. The concessions for electricity and streetcars went to foreign powers, a deliberate effort to link Korea to powerful interests, and in turn, potential protectors to ward off danger.

Meiji Japan: Infrastructure and Intimations of Empire, 1853–​95 This last observation brings us ahead of the story, as we cannot assume that Japanese empire was inevitable. If the challenges confronting China had a major impact upon its two neighbors, Japan and Korea, how did they respond, and equally, what did they do differently? The political side of the story for Japan is already well known, with the imperial restoration consolidating power in the figure of the emperor, and the move of 85

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the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo. Even if the terms in which this transition occurred remain unsatisfactory in many respects—​from “feudalism” to a “modern” form of governance—​they capture the broad strokes of what was going on politically, with the Shogunate coming to terms with a new, centralized form of political authority. More importantly, the political transformation represented only one facet of a much more complex series of overlapping transitions—​economic, social, cultural—​taking place at nearly all levels of society.31 Benefitting from knowledge accumulating in other parts of the world, Japan was able to make its careful and judicious selections from among the best of the world’s emerging institutions and practices. At the same time, the process was far from perfect, and famously, Japan made any number of selections in the course of renewing itself. The Iwakura Mission (1871) went abroad almost immediately, viewing and compiling its observations through an extensive tour of Europe and the United States.32 Domestically, the rapid transformation brought with it new roads, railroads, and land reform, offering an indigenous version of industrialization, especially in textiles. Several thousand hired experts, or o-​yatoi gaikokujin (“hired foreigners”), ranging across a wide span of specialties, arrived as consultants in their respective fields, working in schools, universities, and private settings. The model of knowledge transfer from the German context is perhaps the most famous case of this style of exchange, as numerous German professors spent time in Japan, with a leading figure such as bacteriologist Robert Koch going so far as to appear in a kimono to show his willingness to engage with students and colleagues.33 However, it would be dangerous to assume that the process was linear, or unproblematic, as it was inherently political: the new enthusiasm for materials such as brick and steel often brought out tensions within existing Japanese fault lines, with different parties each choosing their favored candidate. The series of debates in early Meiji about materials is worth considering here, as it was not just a question of practicality or appropriate fit in the Japanese context, but also one of forming new relationships, and sometimes even of the symbolic overtones attributed to a particular material object, or even its composition. David Wittner, for example, has emphasized the chaotic nature of the selection process, arguing that many of the technological “winners” for Meiji Japan did not necessarily represent the “best” choices from the standpoint of history.34 Similarly, Greg Clancey has looked at the impact of new construction materials on building practices and architecture in a nation prone to high levels of seismic activity. As Clancey and others have pointed out, the Japanese use of wood, along with flexible joints and materials, succeeded in some cases in making a better fit to the local context, even as the enthusiasm for brick and mortar transformed a good deal of the urban landscape, especially in cities.35 This development was especially important following the famous Kanto earthquake (1923), when many of the new buildings, alleged to be superior, suffered extensive damage. The point here is to recognize that the process was hotly contested, negotiated, with a variety of competing actors often arguing for the adoption of very different forms of materiality. If the new suggested the “modern,” not all parties thought that embracing it fully was the way to proceed. 86

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With this contestation, a different Japan began to emerge by the 1870s and 1880s, one benefitting from the selective adoption of new technologies and devices often developed elsewhere. If the earliest changes included new practices like vaccination and new views of human anatomy—​in fact, developments preceding Meiji—​the more significant changes came with wholesale infrastructural changes such as electrification, and the introduction of new forms of transportation and communications technology.36 If samurai families famously put on suits to become the Meiji equivalent of sararīman (“salaryman”), the Meiji cityscape was perhaps more conspicuous in making its presence felt, with numerous wires and cables soon unmistakable in their presence. Again, many historians have commented on the possible benefits to “late industrializing” nations, with Japan being one of the most celebrated examples, certainly for the Asian context: Japan was able to derive a significant benefit from knowledge accumulated elsewhere, and frequently did not have to repeat the labor necessary to achieve the same results.

Meiji Infrastructure: Rail and Transportation The transformation of the landscape with rail was startling for the period. When the young emperor relocated from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1868, he did so by horse, and numerous images of this procession exist, complete with its ceremonial trappings.37 As with many similar developments, news of rail transport had made its way through Dutch traders in Nagasaki, but the impact would not be felt domestically until the early 1870s. The construction of the first line between Tokyo (Shimbashi) and Yokohama in 1872 eased the transport of individuals and goods between the port and the neighboring city, beginning the process of urbanization that continues today in the form of a vast, linked mega-​city.38 At this point, the debate concerning expansion was contingent upon the question of whether the rail lines should be nationalized, with funding supplied by the central government. In part because of the financial limitations associated with the state’s transition, private rail lines came initially to Japan, with the first of these appearing in 1881. Many of the investors came from noble families, consolidating their power in an emerging Japan, and also offering the chance to “open” the north (Tohoku), a move associated with the new capital of Tokyo. For an island nation with a lengthy history of depending almost exclusively on shipping, the impact of the transformation was significant. The combination of private lines, followed by national lines within about two decades, allowed for the construction of an infrastructure uniting much of the nation, with main lines augmented by a number of regional spur lines. Although much of this activity came about through the intentions of individual actors, rather than a single, cohesive plan, nonetheless, the effect was one highly conducive to the simultaneous project of nation-​building, with the first line in Hokkaido opening in 1882 (far north), and similarly, the first line in Kyushu in 1889 (southwest). A nation-​state consisting of four main islands now saw a much better integration of its collective economy, and equally important, the Tokyo-​Yokohama hub to 87

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the east, which coincided with the Meiji restoration, became the focus of a vast network of rail lines reaching much of the nation by the end of the nineteenth century, hinting ahead to external developments. The integration of the four home islands often gets overlooked within the Meiji story, as both Ryukyu (Okinawa) and Hokkaido did not become properly “Japanese” until at a relatively late stage. The northern island was officially folded into the new nation-​state in the second half of the nineteenth century (1869), and part of the justification came with tensions concerning imperial Russia and contested territories to the north. The presence of resources such as fishing, coal, and timber offered an additional incentive, if one was necessary. The Ryukyu chain, to the southwest, was an independent kingdom as late as the eighteenth century, and then officially part of the nation at about the same time as Hokkaido, in 1879. In both cases, while the areas in question held a history of being under Japanese influence, distance and questions of ethnicity—​the Ainu people in Hokkaido, and Okinawans for Ryukyu—​placed the territories in a special type of relationship to the other islands. In his account of the period, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (1996), Steven Ericson takes up the nationalization of the Japanese rail network in 1906–​1907 as a case study in business history for shaping the character of state/​ private funding relations, emphasizing the significant risks undertaken by the former party.39 If his argument is more economic than technological, he nonetheless details the transformations associated with rail, arguments familiar in many other national contexts. The first railway timetables, especially at the national level, introduced an acute awareness of time, just as the factory whistle did in other industrializing societies, and individuals had to learn new ways of traveling and behaving. Rail served as a visible testament of accomplishment, just as industrial exhibitions of wares would project a similar message within a decade or two.40 If goods could still be transported by water, rail brought alternatives, and again, the regional and national integration effects were palpable, as were savings in transportation costs.

Rail and Colonial Expansion: Contested Spaces and Nascent Empire If the nationalization of Japan’s rail did not occur until the early twentieth century, this should not imply a chronology in which domestic circumstances needed to be consolidated, prior to moving abroad. In fact, some of the most interesting developments were already taking place in neighboring territories, and part of the reason for Japan’s interest in these sites rested with the competition for concessions, a contest held in conjunction with Russia and China, among other competitors. Seized as part of the settlement after defeating China in the Sino-​Japanese War (1894–​95), Taiwan became an experimental space for Japan, where some of the newest impulses and ideas could be tested. In contrast to Ryukyu or Hokkaido, Taiwan would not 88

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be part of the nation proper, but a colony to be settled and modernized. Appointed head of civilian affairs under Governor General Kodama (1852–​1906), Gotō Shinpei (1857–​1929) undertook an ambitious series of plans, seeking to transform the character of the local population, and in the process earning a reputation for himself as a master planner.41 If history has been less kind to Gotō in retrospect, it is perhaps a well-​deserved testament to the penetrating nature of his schemes and ideas, which continue to be controversial today. Trained as a medical doctor, Gotō rose rapidly through the domestic medical ranks to take incrementally higher positions within the hierarchy, distinguishing himself through a combination of ambition and bureaucratic skill. As part of his medical training, he was sent to Germany for a study tour, and while there, developed a deep interest in hygiene and its implications for effecting social change.42 For Taiwan, this interest in hygiene later turned into a series of ambitious social campaigns, seeking to root out the ingrained habits of the local population, or at least those specific behaviors to which Gotō objected. In particular, opium was the subject of an intensive control scheme, and he believed that such “traditional” practices needed to be eliminated in order for Taiwan to advance economically. By limiting its sale, and placing opium under a state-​ mandated monopoly, Gotō not only achieved his immediate aim, but also succeeded in generating substantial revenue.43 Along with these activities, Gotō achieved his reputation for the modernization of Taiwan’s ports and cities, and here, too, rail played a significant role as an element in the transport of goods and raw materials. Ports also dovetailed with his obsession with public health, providing another area ripe with a chance for reform. He nationalized the supply of sugar, salt, tobacco, and other commodities, quickly gaining control over their use and distribution. Other improvements to the island’s basic infrastructure were diverse and comprehensive, and included roads, the postal service, and the telephone and telegraph for communications. Prior to leaving his post in Taiwan in 1908, the island’s economy had improved dramatically, so much so that it was essentially self-​ sustaining by 1905, only about a decade into colonial rule. If Japan’s imperial ambitions had stopped at this point, perhaps Gotō might be celebrated historically, rather than remaining a controversial figure, as his next position was to take up the role of head of the South Manchuria Railway Corporation from 1906. The South Manchuria Railway Company has gained a great deal of notoriety in the scholarship for its prominent role in enabling Japanese penetration in early Republican China (1911–​48), anticipating the events of the early 1930s. At this early stage, the first decade of the twentieth century, the company’s formation did not yet suggest such an ominous outcome, although its origins do lie very much in Japanese militarism. After defeating China in the Sino-​Japanese War (1894–​95), a decade later Japan defeated Russia (1904–​1905) in the Russo-​Japanese War, with the outcome of this second conflict generating a good deal of surprise in newspaper coverage. Cartoons in the British humor publication Punch depicted the outcome, with a diminutive Japanese samurai taking on a much larger Chinese counterpart (Figure 3.1). A small Asian nation, even 89

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Figure 3.1  “The Jap in the China Shop” Cartoon, 1895, from Punch. Punch Limited, UK. one as ambitious as Meiji Japan, was not expected to defeat imperial Russia in a clash, and certainly not so decisively. One of the concessions made by Russia was to cede control over a rail line running from Harbin to Port Arthur, and this route served as the immediate justification for the formation of the new corporate body. Previously, this line had formed the southernmost part of the Chinese Eastern Railway, with its construction provided by the Russians. The rail line and the issue of port access had already served as a flashpoint for much of the late nineteenth century, as Qing China, Russia, and Japan each competed to control access to the interior, linking Manchuria and the Russian Far East. For the first two parties, the rail line had represented something of a compromise, with the Russians doing the construction under the aegis of a Qing concession. If the line linked the two empires, it also, critically, offered access to port facilities in the Far East, with Port Arthur serving as a contested site because of the promise of year-​round shipping. For the Japanese, the rail line represented a desirable end, one which brought them into direct conflict with the Russians, and once they gained control, it would offer an opportunity to rewrite the geography of the entire region. As its first step after assuming control, the Southern Manchurian Railway transferred the standard rail gauge to one suited to Japanese needs.

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The South Manchuria Railway Zone Even as the rights to the rail line are now regarded by many scholars as forming a central part of the underlying motivations for the Russo-​Japanese War, we should be careful in considering precisely how much emphasis to give to the region and the question of access. How much can a single rail line offer in terms of contributing to the formation of an imperial story? With the transition to Japanese control, the southern line became a material object capable of redefining China-​Japan relations, at least certainly for Manchuria. Initially, the Japanese demanded the same rights granted to the Russians in the original contract, a set of privileges covering extraterritoriality for a strip of land encompassing both sides of the line, an area defined to be sixty-​two meters in width.44 However, this set-​up also provided for a related set of facilities to maintain the railway, and included repair shops, and the coal and electrical facilities necessary to keep things running. Depending upon how these support facilities were mobilized, this interpretation lends itself to a much broader role for the Japanese in Manchuria. Within the scholarship for Korea and China, the new literature in the most recent ten to fifteen years has begun to pay greater attention to the issue of Japanese settlers, especially their roles as potential mediators in colonial Korea and Manchukuo (1932–​ 45).45 These individuals, frequently with no official connection to the Japanese military or to any state body, chose to relocate to these new areas, seemingly at great risk to their families and livelihoods. The opportunity represented by resettlement begins to make more sense, however, in the context of the changing landscape, especially with the South Manchuria Railway, or Mantetsu, taking a prominent position. As previously mentioned, the rail line required basic maintenance supplies, with coal and electricity vital to its operation. Moreover, as with rail in Taiwan, the possibilities afforded by a new network brought subsidiary economic effects that could not have been anticipated. Here, with what might seem like a small point, or at best a set of legal technicalities, an entire new literature has begun to develop: focusing less on the pure technological aspects of rail, and more on the deeply complicated lives of a diverse group of colonial settlers, the settlements they established, and the extent to which their diverse activities were enmeshed in, and otherwise directed by, larger sets of imperial forces.46 This engagement takes up a variety of positions in the field, with scholars from Korean Studies, Japanese Studies, and related subdisciplines crafting a conversation concerning the migration of populations of settler migrants within Japanese empire. Jun Uchida, for example, in her work Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–​1945 (2011), places the overseas Japanese at the center of the narrative, whereas previously they have been missing from the majority of accounts.47 Uchida’s actors frequently come from humble, and sometimes even lower-​class, origins in Japan, meaning that their interests in Korea lay less in the outright suppression of Koreans, and much more in achieving a basis for their own subsistence. In brief, these individuals were typically not among the former samurai or the elites driving the domestic transformation of Meiji, and saw greater opportunities in new spaces abroad.

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No apologist for Japanese colonial practice, Uchida instead illustrates the often contradictory positions taken by these settlers, even as they may appear “elite” with some historical distance. Similarly, their presence serves both as a facilitator and as a deterrence to the growth of the colony. Settlers in Uchida’s case did not necessarily coordinate their activities with the governor general, or even see themselves as resembling a cohesive unit. Instead, they made choices according to their individual lives and contingent rationales, often proving to be a challenge to what might be labeled “Japanese” interests. To return to the point made earlier, much of this mobility only became possible with the introduction of Japanese commercial interests, especially the infrastructure of rail and communications. Settlers often brought with them the possibility of further commercial activity in the wake of the first penetration. If this was the case for colonial Korea, the peninsula had a good deal to offer. But the alluring space of nearby China attracted even more attention, and this is why the corridor surrounding the rail lines has proven to be so consequential. This space could potentially bring with it other forces, and at the outset, Japan could justify placing a policing presence to guard the line. The vocabulary for this last point has to be carefully selected, as the line between “policing” and a military presence per se was a fine one, and this distinction allowed the Japanese the right to claim a need for protection.48 At this early point, China had to accept the need for the Japanese to maintain the line, as well as protect it and its supporting resources from the depredations of potential “bandits.” Further, with the first line secure, the Japanese could make contact with the Russians and link to the larger network in the region, effectively opening up a much larger space to Japanese business interests. For now, railway guards stationed themselves at intervals, and these personnel were often taken from the Japanese regular army, blurring the line mentioned above.49 In major cities, Japanese consular police provided a secondary layer of protection, and it should be obvious that even in the early twentieth century, the aims of empire started to assemble a common set of goals. At this point, Japanese empire rested with a highly rational and legalistic stance, a bureaucratic and commercial force, whereas later militarism would become much more explicit. The name for this little strip of land, to recall the original motivation underlying much of this discussion, was the South Manchuria Railway Zone (SMRZ), and again, it brought immense change through establishing its successful claim of extraterritoriality. In addition to the police bodies assigned to protective duties, the Japanese greatly expanded the size of the rail network, along with its support facilities. This meant additional and larger harbor facilities for designated cities, and the expansion of coal mining throughout the region. At various stops along the rail lines, hotels offered a convenient spot for guests to stay, and the construction of new banks, schools, and hospitals collectively suggested plans for a stay of much longer duration, further encouraging the idea of settlement.50 Famously, Mantetsu maintained its own research division, with efforts devoted to agrarian productivity, and soybeans became an area of particular interest, especially with the availability of land.51 If 92

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much of this activity was accomplished by the middle of the second decade (1915), it reinforces the idea that Japan was well along in its imperial mission, even before the military conflict of the 1930s. By way of comparison, Japanese colonial rule in Korea was in its first decade by 1915, a period typically known as “military rule” (or budan seiji), and most closely associated with the consolidation of hold over the colony. For Taiwan, colonization was at this point a reality for two decades, and as mentioned previously, the transformation was startling, with a dramatic change to the landscape of the colony and its styles of commerce. For the rail lines in Manchuria, 1915 represented a point at which Japan requested for a renegotiation of the terms, asking Republican China to grant new concessions on the rights governing the use of the land. The “Twenty-​One Demands” requested by Japan took advantage of the context of the First World War, meaning that the likelihood of external objections or intervention was kept to a minimum, or such was the Japanese aim.52 More specifically, the ultimatum asked that China cede control over the Shandong peninsula, and along with this, grant a great deal more influence over the Chinese economy, limiting any future deals with foreign powers, other than through Japan. In the end, Japan did not gain a great deal materially from this attempt at power politics, with China delaying and deferring as much as possible. At the same time, the United States and the United Kingdom objected quite strongly, perceiving the action as antithetical to the “Open Door” policy with China, and indicative perhaps of Japanese ambitions. If what happened in concrete terms was minimal, it might be useful to see the activity as performative, certainly a more open declaration of Japanese intentions than had been possible previously. With the Qing gone, and the early republic still struggling to find its footing, Japan held a position of comparative advantage with respect to China. Moreover, as mentioned, Western allies, while angered, were generally too occupied to be able to react in any substantive fashion. Perhaps the strongest response came in the form of trade, with Japanese exports hurt in transactions with several partners (China, Britain), and with Chinese nationalism receiving a considerable boost. On this point, some historians have linked the 1915 negotiations to the growth of mistrust between an ambitious Taisho Japan, and its nominal Western partners, including the United Kingdom and the United States.53 Certainly Japan did not like the presence of external actors getting involved in a matter it regarded as regional business, and one in which it had anticipated little interference. In addition, the famous naval negotiations of the early 1920s—​specifically, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–​22—​saw the Western powers again taking a strong stance on Japanese affairs, this time seeking to limit the size of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The signatories to the treaty called for Japan to accept a lower number of capital ships in its battle fleet, calculated on the ratio of 5 and 5 for the British and the Americans with 3 for the Japanese. This emphasized the growing awareness of Japan as a rising power, even as it joined the Allied side in the First World War, and received territorial concessions following the discussions at Versailles. 93

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Taisho Japan and Styles of Colonial Rule: Apparent Contradictions The death of the Meiji emperor (1912) and the resulting Taisho period is sometimes seen as a transition or interlude for Japan, in part because of the poor health of the new emperor, and his relatively short period of rule. The period sometimes receives descriptive labels such as “Taisho Democracy,” and is associated in particular with more liberal forms of practice, whether evaluated in terms of the policy debates taking place in the Diet, or in terms of the personal behavior and habits of emerging consumers. For our purposes, though, the transition should not distract from the growing tensions of northeast Asia, and certainly Japanese interests in China did not diminish. For others in Asia, increasingly metropolitan Japan became a model of education and new modes of living. Elite Koreans and other Asians traveled to Tokyo for higher education when the opportunity presented itself, offering a strong turn away from Sino-​centric/​Confucian models of scholarship long dominating the region. Many of the Koreans and Taiwanese to become prominent leaders in the colonies and in the postwar period figured in this migration, such as Taikyue Ree, a prominent chemist in Korea. In this sense, the technocratic and economic planning style of Taiwan and South Korea owe a debt to Japan’s legacy. If rail offered one form of penetration into the colonial space, it was by no means the only tool in the Japanese arsenal, and again, the informal march of empire continued in a variety of subtle ways. On this matter, Uchida is meticulous in showing the diversity of corporate and subsidiary interests following in its wake, providing all kinds of support mechanisms for her settler colony actors. Moreover, by the early 1920s, patterns of integration were no longer simply contained within one area of the empire, but were beginning to develop as forms of regional integration. Echoing a point made earlier by Bruce Cumings, among others, Uchida characterizes rail in Korea as an “artery” connecting the peninsula to China, providing Japan with a footprint, lending it direct access to the Asian mainland.54 She refers specifically to the 1927 plan for expansion of rail in Korea as the tipping point, illustrating her argument with visuals. If Korea was a stepping stone, and war with China would not break out for several years, certainly the Japanese were devoting a great deal of effort in linking Korea with Manchuria. Still, the Taisho period was enormously complicated, and if it is contrasted with Showa (1926–​89), it is not simply because of the militarism and war associated with the next two decades. Instead, Taisho is connected with the opening of the Japanese political spectrum, especially prior to the onset of the Great Depression, with attending effects for many parts of the world. In particular, the Japanese left, and a wide range of labor interests, came to public attention, making the mid-​to-​late 1920s enormously interesting for its social ferment. If young Asians came to Tokyo and Kyoto to study and to network with their peers, they appreciated Japanese intellectual and cultural models, and they also took advantage of the relatively free atmosphere for public discussion, a space

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in which to raise questions about the future of the region.55 This was also the period of “cultural rule” in colonial Korea, often considered the origins of modern Korean literature and film. Although only a handful of elite Koreans could make the journey abroad, they favored this route over the choice of the West, far more forbidding because of distance, language, and cultural difference. These individuals held a complicated form of personal identity, respectful, possibly even envious of Japan, the colonizing power. Later, during and after the war, these individuals held the unusual position of being proud Korean nationalists, and yet equally proud of their elite Japanese training: the second of these two factors often caused personal and professional problems. The infrastructure designed to elicit participation of these elites—​exams, schools, scholarship opportunities—​were not the only such tools, and of course, this type of activity took place in both directions. Along with Uchida’s settler colonists, the role of Japanese metropolitan elites, albeit in smaller numbers, also played a significant role in creating the distinct environment of developing colonial cities such as Keijo (Seoul). Many of the new institutions set up in such places, such as the imperial university (1926), were ostensibly created to satisfy popular calls for such a venue, and equally, to pre-​empt any local attempt to lead the activity.56 At the same time, Keijo Imperial University was clearly a space intended for the children of Japanese officials, and the doctors and lawyers produced by the school’s two faculties supplied their expertise to the colonial bureaucracy, as many of them stayed on to work in the colony.57 Although this situation changed somewhat during the war years, the majority of the cohorts enrolling at the site consisted of more than half Japanese citizens, sometimes reaching as high as two-​thirds.58 These individuals had professional reasons for making their decisions, and in fact many of them would likely have been born in the colony, the offspring of settler colonists who arrived a generation earlier. Along with this population, a significant number of tourists began to travel between the home islands and the nearby parts of the empire, with both rail and ferry lines facilitating what became a routinized process. Particularly in southwest Japan, travel between Kyushu and colonial Korea became fairly easy, with the typical path taking one from Fukuoka to Busan. From there, rail lines and other means of transportation made possible a journey through the peninsula, and China was also a possible destination.59 Postcards and photographic images helped to strengthen the process, imparting familiarity and nostalgia to certain destinations prior to arrival, and likewise, preserving fond memories upon departure, as Japanese visitors returned home.60 By “nostalgia” here, I mean a constructed process of incorporating the colony into the empire, with travel serving to familiarize the landscape, rendering the land more effectively a Japanese possession. For some scholars, the material culture of this period offers an opportunity to comment upon this rich body of colonial era memories, with visual images, print, radio, and film offering a complex repository of mediated touchstones. The relationship between the colonizer and colonial was undoubtedly difficult, one in which the Japanese sought elements of an earlier, or more reassuring, “proto-​Japanese” past which could 95

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be cultivated.61 For Koreans, the late 1920s represented a high point of nationalism prior to the onset of the long Pacific War, with “cultural rule” (or bunka seiji) (1919–​ 31) allowing for the expression of a limited range of political sentiments. In particular, Korean-​language newspapers, albeit with censorship, allowed for a greater degree of popular expression. Industrial workers and small-​scale business owners gained access to additional funds, meaning that the colonial bureaucracy did not control everything, even as it clearly skewed the economy to favor relations with the home islands. As older forms of infrastructure continued to dominate, they sometimes carved new forms of symbolic resonances onto the land and sea with the increasing interconnections. For example, the ferry routes connecting the southern tip of Japan, Kyushu, with colonial Korea have already been described in terms of popular culture and travel excursions. This observation holds true, but it should also include the added dimension of travel in the other direction. For many Koreans, especially those migrating within the empire for a short-​term stay, or those looking for long-​term work in Japan, the route marked the journey away from home. Many in this population would end up staying in Japan through the war years, helping to shape the Korean diaspora, which would eventually see significant Korean migrant populations established in Japan (especially Kansai), China (Yanbian), and Soviet Russia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan).62

Planning and Nationalism With all of this movement going on, many scholars accept the generalization that the Japanese paid more attention to industrial policy in their colonies, at least when compared with an older, extraction-​based model of raw materials, typical for much of Latin America and Africa. The Japanese were not motivated purely by raw materials, and based much of their industry, including a large number of sophisticated factories and supporting infrastructure—​hydroelectric plants, dams, bridges—​in the colonies, with this observation holding greater weight as the empire made its hold clear over first Taiwan, then Korea, and finally, entire sections of eastern and northeastern China. This investment was not for the benefit of the local population, clearly, but it did have the unintended effect of creating at least one or two generations of industrial workers in Korea, as well exposing thousands of imperial subjects (Taiwanese, Chinese) to new forms of technology and work discipline, with this development holding significant implications for the postwar era. In other words, if Taiwan and South Korea started from modest circumstances, both had large numbers of educated and industrial workers, significant human capital. Again, given the relative political diversity in Japan by the mid-​to-​late 1920s, certainly before the dramatic shifts associated with the Great Depression, it is hard to determine what factors led to an apparent break, resulting in the outbreak of war in 1931. For this very reason, there is an older literature describing the strident character of the nationalism driving the war machine from 1931. This style of argument implies that the surface calm and reason of Taisho suddenly gave way to the forces of war, perhaps 96

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motivated by the immediate context of the economic downturn. However, in response to this, a newer literature has emerged characterizing the Japanese war effort as completely rational and bureaucratic, planned in almost every respect. Perhaps best exemplified in the work of Hiromi Mizuno, Janis Mimura, and Aaron S. Moore, this emerging historiography locates Japanese techno-​nationalism in the debates over the appropriate role of technology dominating Japan since at least the early 1920s.63 In this context, there is far more continuity than had been allowed in the previous historiography. For Mizuno, the appeal of “scientific nationalism,” or “science for the nation,” captures the unique character of the combination of science/​technology specific to Japan—​in Japanese, kagaku gijutsu, translated as “science and technology,” as there is no direct English equivalent—​and driving much of its compressed, accelerated turn to modernity. An apparent contradiction, this hybrid blend of science, technology, and industrial application took hold in a nation with a deep sense of its mythic past, and emerging from Tokugawa. Moreover, along with this apparent contradiction, this type of practice allowed for a deeply rational, planned approach to numerous projects, in contrast to the zealous nationalism in some accounts of wartime Japan. Detailing a set of three groups of actors, Marxists, science popularizers, and technocrats, Mizuno’s account offers a way out of the apparent chasm between Taisho and what was to follow, arguing for a deeply planned, coordinated level of activity. In Janis Mimura’s Planning for Empire (2011), this theme becomes explicit with the language of the title, as Mimura builds upon themes similar to Mizuno, and shifts the focus from a Japanese war machine to the humble technocrats and bureaucrats, those with the responsibility for mobilizing and coordinating vast amounts of planning in order to have access to the right materials and supplies. In this version of the story, Mimura’s rational bureaucrats come to ascendance after 1931 with the growing need for supplies and logistics, the drive into Manchuria having exacerbated a potential problem. Taken together, Mizuno and Mimura offer a view of Japanese infrastructure distinct from that of existing histories of the military, or even business history, and depict instead an emergent “bureaucratic fascism,” if this term can apply, a bloodless scheme seeking to encompass vast amounts of information and details toward the achievement of specific imperial aims. Collectively, this new literature, represented by the works mentioned here, along with that of other young scholars, is transforming the way the Japan of the late 1920s is understood—​certainly recasting it, at the very least, as consistent with events taking place after 1931. Even with the violence of the Manchurian invasion, the transition is no longer regarded as abrupt or sudden, but rather as the logical outcome of policy decisions and bureaucratic practices established much earlier. This characterization should not be seen in teleological terms, and more in terms of a new reading of the nature of Japanese militarism, which emerged only after deeply engaging with the social and economic debates of the mid-​to-​late 1920s, and generally with a strong technocratic streak. Just as colonial settlers did not necessarily identify with the state’s aims, many of the participants in the coming violence were pursuing individual goals, with bureaucrats 97

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finding that the wartime state needed their skills as those most capable of handling and managing resources. For Aaron S. Moore, the issue becomes less one of bureaucracy in the abstract, and much more of engineering and construction, the logistical work necessary to get infrastructure in place before anything else can be accomplished. Evident from his title Constructing East Asia (2014), Moore’s work covers some of the same territory as that of Mizuno and Mimura, but instead focuses on the execution of technical plans, rather than on policy debates, even as that content remains implicit.64 In this work then, the technocrats move from building a new Japan to transforming the landscape and physical environment of colonial and imperial spaces, a logical move that conveniently elides much of the preliminary violence necessary to get to the stage of moving abroad. Moreover, keeping the emphasis consistent on planning and rationality, this work, too, conveys a calculating and cautious Japan, rather than one devoted exclusively to nationalist zeal. If Moore is much more explicitly devoted to infrastructure, the physical nuts and bolts of bridges, dams, and hydroelectricity, his work nonetheless complements that of Mizuno and Mimura nicely in that collectively all three scholars offer a new set of insights into the origins of the wartime state. The popular images associated with Showa Japan, especially the sensationalism of the 1937 attack in China, here give way to a massive set of blueprints or plans, and the corresponding materials necessary to execute them, whether measured in terms of material or manpower. If this scholarship is much more invested in the bureaucratic or planning legacy, and has a great deal to say about continuities between Taisho and Showa, it also provides a long-​term view for the post-​1945 world. In other words, the story of Japan’s transformation with the American occupation has long been regarded as a Cold War narrative of convenience.65 In fact, postwar Japan began recovering economically with the Korean War, when US military procurements allowed its industry to start producing again at a rapid pace.66 This revised narrative suggests that the entirety of Showa might be more about continuity than had been supposed previously, and certainly that the year 1945 by no means represents any kind of a fundamental dividing line. To cite a few examples, historians have long noted that plans for the 1940 Olympic Games, abandoned due to wartime contingency, were revisited in the building stages for the 1964 Games, often characterized as the debut of the “new” Japan. The shinkansen, or bullet train, also made its debut in 1964, and Takashi Nishiyama uses his periodization (1868–​1964) to unite Meiji with Showa, offering a longer narrative of a century spent grappling with questions of modernity and technology.67 More importantly for this new scholarship, the postwar world of Japanese development, whether domestic or international, remains heavily connected to construction interests, financing, and bureaucratic planning. Moore has been the most explicit on this point, illustrating that many of his wartime actors were very successful in reinventing themselves as developmental specialists in Southeast Asia.68 To offer an example, Moore tracks the career of Kubota Yutaka, head of Nippon Koei, a major Japanese construction interest during the wartime empire, and equally, 98

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a significant firm in the emerging postwar order. However, Kubota and others like him were very careful in how they presented themselves in the postwar period, especially in terms of their visibility. Many of the postwar projects undertaken by the firm involved work in Southeast Asia, and the funding derived from reparations owed by Japan as part of its war debt. In these cases, a newly reconfigured Japan could offer its expertise by way of payment, rather than to offer cash or goods. As Moore points out, however, the historical echoes with wartime activity were numerous, even as Kubota might prefer to now label himself a development specialist, or some similar category, eliding much of the engineering work performed during the war. Traveling throughout Southeast Asia and former Japanese possessions, Kubota sometimes found himself consulting on projects with which he had prior experience, or at least extensive knowledge.69 We need not jump this far ahead to anticipate late Showa, and it should be clear that much of the newer literature seeks to interrogate the postwar period, with an emphasis on a much stronger degree of continuity, both culturally and technologically. Of the authors mentioned, Nishiyama probably takes it the furthest in arguing for an explicit extension of the periodization, but all of these younger scholars emphasize at least some aspect of planning and technology, with the same sets of skills serving to aid the postwar recovery. If there has been less focus on the production of knowledge per se, and the spread of such knowledge throughout the empire—​whether in its medical (Hoi-​Eun Kim), chemical (Yoshiyuki Kikuchi), or biological (Lisa Onaga) form—​this may be because of the challenges posed by such work, requiring specialist training in both the science and the area studies context.70 This discussion offers additional ways to link late Taisho and early Showa with the wartime years and beyond, and this line of scholarly inquiry is likely to grow in the near future.

The Embrace of the Rational: Toward an Imperial Modernity This last remark hints ahead to the postwar environment, an interesting space for speculation, but one lying beyond the focus of this chapter. In many respects, the dilemma for scholars until now has been to explain the sharp contrast often used to characterize the dramatic events of September 1931, coinciding with the outbreak of war in China. In other words, how did an enlightened Japan, especially the one associated with the preceding period of Taisho democracy, adopt a strident militarism that would carry it for much of the next two decades—​and then, equally, transform again after 1945? According to much of the recent literature surveyed here, the answer lies precisely in the constructed nature of this contrast. Rather than posit an irrational, nationalistic Japan, scholars such as Mimura, Mizuno, and Moore make the case for a strong degree of continuity with earlier practice, with the focus resting on a deeply rational bureaucracy, and moreover, one serving as a state apparatus consistent with a set of expansionist aims. Moreover, in terms of evaluating the long-​term economic outlook, Sugihara places his 99

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emphasis upon regional exchange, especially that between China and Japan from the nineteenth century onward, using this as a means to counteract a reductive story, one that might otherwise appear to define any change as reaction to external pressure from the West.71 In short, the critical elements for an imperial approach were in place very early, and if we do not wish to trace a teleology, it is possible to argue for the presence of an imperial ideology and practice as early as late Meiji. To revisit what has been covered here, the Meiji state very quickly assumed control over the knowledge-​making processes, and sought out the world’s “best practices” in the form of the Iwakura Mission.72 At the same time, this embrace of new knowledge and models linked to a centralizing or nation-​ building process, one bringing the home islands closer together in a more rigorous fashion, especially with rail and shipping links. The earliest gesture representing a formal colonialism, assuming control over Taiwan (1895), bears all the markers of maintaining consistency with this approach, allowing Gotō Shinpei to make a considerable reputation for himself, certainly within domestic policy circles. As noted previously, Gotō held a degree as a medical doctor, and while it would be too easy to read this as a sign of a particular kind of modernity, it is the case that a number of other major figures for the period—​including Mori Ogai, the novelist and military officer, and bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō—​also held medical degrees. Kitasato, in particular, has come to represent the narrative of a transformed Japan for this period, having first studied medicine in Germany, like many other ambitious students, before returning to make his reputation. In 1894, he helped identify the plague bacillus in Hong Kong, along with Alexander Yersin. This style of bacteriological work on the part of Japanese medical practitioners, as Ruth Rogaski has noted, helped to change the vocabulary of disease in neighboring China, and more immediately, transformed the practice of public health throughout the region’s many ports.73 Similarly, medical practice figured prominently in Japan’s wars with China and Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, when the disease beri-​beri struck Japanese forces, subsisting on a diet of white rice, and not recognizing the possible nutritional deficiencies. Even the antidiarrhea pills given to troops in the conflict with Russia possessed a background history, as they represented a pharmaceutical form of an older traditional Chinese remedy, keeping Japanese forces in the field and ready to fight.74 Although I do not seek to reduce the discussion to one where Japan’s imperial aims rest solely within a biomedical impulse, this is one example of a larger systemic impulse toward embracing new knowledge and putting it such ends. In his recent take on colonial Seoul and its spatial politics, Assimilating Seoul (2014), Todd Henry offers a terminology that might prove useful here, articulating new forms of “Material” (­chapter  3) and “Civic Assimilation” (­chapter  4) through industrial expositions and sanitary practices, respectively. The first of these, dating to the initial decade of colonial rule (1915), places Japanese industry and its display at the heart of the colonial project, again, locating imperial aims at an early point, even 100

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as Henry allows considerable room for his Korean subjects to voice and shape their individual responses to this attempt at establishing rule.75 Through materiality, with rail and industry representing key examples, Japan extended and carried out its aims abroad, and supplemented these spatial interventions with an increasingly interventionist military/​policing presence, one where the public health apparatus responsible for quarantine was located inside the colonial police. In this context, 1931 was not a sharp break, and the attack on a railway position at Mukden, thereafter labeled the “Mukden Incident,” makes all the more sense. The setting off of a dynamite charge served as a pretext to blame Chinese “bandits” for an attack on Japanese rail, and allowed a military venture into Manchuria, setting off what eventually became a war of nearly fourteen years’ duration (September 1931–​August 1945). In the short term, the Japanese conquest of parts of northeast China allowed the establishment of a puppet state, Manchukuo. This experimental space has attracted increasing attention in the scholarship for its novel polices on race, industry, and managing imperial rule, representing, in many ways, the height of Japan’s willingness to push its ambitions to new ends and methods. If we stop here, and do not venture ahead into the Pacific War, nor to the postwar, suffice it to say that Japan’s intervention in eastern China, and its developmentalist policies throughout its empire, have left numerous questions for the periods leading up to and following 1945. And in terms of this entire volume’s major concerns, Japan’s modern empire appears almost relentlessly bureaucratic and deeply rational in its pursuits—​while much of the newer scholarship concerns the working of its policing mechanisms with respect to race, citizenship, and public health throughout its holdings. Certainly this was typical of the approach Japan used to justify its Manchurian incursion, and in its appeals to other Asians as a call for unity against the force of European colonial empires.

NOTES 1 Michael Robinson, Korea’s Twentieth Century History: A Short History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). See ­chapter  1, “A New Century and the End of an Era.” 2 Dong-​no Kim, John Duncan, and Do-​hyung Kim (eds), Reform and Modernity in the Taehan Empire (Seoul: Jimoondang, 2006). See also Kyung Moon Hwang, Rationalizing Korea: The Rise of the Modern State, 1895–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 3 Andrei Lankov, The Dawn of Modern Korea: The Transformation in Life and Cityscape (Seoul: EunHaeng NaMu, 2007). 4 Ibid., p. 30. Lankov notes that the first commercial phone lines (Seoul) had a total of thirteen subscribers in 1902. 5 Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 6 Carter Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–​1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). Eckert covers the economic history, and for a recent general introduction to science and Japanese empire, see 101

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David Wittner and Philip Brown (eds), Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Modern Japanese Empire (New York: Routledge, 2016). 7 http://​ocw.mit.edu/​ans7870/​21f/​21f.027/​throwing_​off_​asia_​01/​pdf/​toa1_​essay.pdf (accessed on July 10, 2016). 8 Hoi-​Eun Kim, Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 9 Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–​ 1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 10 Kaoru Sugihara (ed.), Japan, China and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–​1949 (London: Oxford University Press, 2005). 11 Ibid. Sugihara anticipates this criticism, arguing that his brand of economic history remains compatible with a critical take on Japanese imperialism. 12 Fabian Drixler, Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–​1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Federico Marcon, Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–​1899 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 2015). 13 Roger Hart, “On the Problem of Chinese Science,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 189–​201. 14 Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1626) offers a representative example bridging the new science and imperial perspectives. 15 Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). 16 Yi Kai Ho (ed.), Science in China, 1600–​1900: Essays by Benjamin Elman (Singapore: World Scientific, 2015). 17 Roger Hart, The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 18 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For the broader East Asian context, Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic Science and Civilization in China (SCC) series (Cambridge University Press) first brought attention to the idea of Chinese/​ non-​Western science as a field of inquiry, and continues to produce new volumes. There is a forthcoming Korea series under editorship of Shin Dong-​won of Chonbuk National University, Science and Civilization in Korea (SCK), or (in Korean), 한국의 과학과 문명 총서. For emerging scholarship concerning the Arab world, see Ahmed Ragab’s The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 19 For example, scholars specializing in these areas are usually not posted to history of science departments, but rather to an area studies specialty. Non-​Western science is still very much at a developmental stage in the academy. 20 Warwick Anderson, “Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies,” EASTS (East Asian Science Technology and Society) (Duke University Press, 2012), vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 445–​51. 21 In turn, the 3rd IR is associated with the rise of computers and related technologies. 22 The transition from indigo to synthetic dyes is just one example within the rise of an industrial, organic chemistry. 23 Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–​1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 24 John Dower, Throwing Off Asia:  Woodblock Prints of Meiji Japan, 1868–​1912, http://​ mit.sustech.edu/​ocwexternal/​akamai/​21f/​21f.027j/​menu/​index.html (accessed on October 31, 2015).

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25 Ann Janetta, The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the “Opening” of Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). See also the work of Daniel Trambaiolo of the University of Hong Kong, and Terrence Jackson, Network of Knowledge: Western Science and the Tokugawa Information Revolution (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). 26 Shin Dong-​won, 조선사람 허준 (Heo Jun) (Seoul: Hankaerae Sinmunsa, 2000). See also Soyoung Suh, Naming the Local: Medicine, Language, and Identity in Korea since the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 2017). 27 Yulia Frumer, “Clocks and Time in Edo,” PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2012. See also Frumer’s forthcoming Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 28 Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–​ 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 29 Ibid. See also Elisabeth Kȍll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 2003). 30 Schmid, Korea between Empires. In Korean, the phrase is a famous sokdam/​traditional saying. 31 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 32 Kume Kunitake, Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, ed. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 33 Hoi-​Eun Kim, Doctors of Empire. For a new take on Meiji and empire, locating Japan’s empire as early as the 1880s, see Ian J. Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 34 David Wittner, Technology and the Culture of Progress in Meiji Japan (New York: Routledge/​ ASAA, 2007). 35 Gregory Clancey, Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–​1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Gregory Smits, Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). 36 Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire. 37 Hidemichi Kaminishi, Tōhoku Japan’s Constructed Outland (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 38 Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo from Edo to Showa, 1876–​1989 (Vermont: Charles Tuttle, 2011). 39 Steven Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 1996). 40 Henry, Assimilating Seoul. 41 James Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 42 Michael Shiyung Liu, Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-​Ruled Taiwan, 1895–​1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2009). 43 Miriam Kingsberg, Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 44 Again, Japanese influence ultimately extended well beyond the legally defined boundaries of the zone. 45 Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–​1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 2014); Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil:  Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia, 2015). 46 The settler literature fills a much-​needed gap in complicating Japanese identity in the colonies. There is a large literature on the complicated identities of a wide range of imperial

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subjects across ethnic and national lines. See Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 47 Uchida, Brokers of Empire. 48 It should not be surprising that the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 involved an attack on a railway depot. 49 There is general agreement on this point in the scholarship. See Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 400. See also Alvin D. Cox, “The Kwantung Army Dimension,” in The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–​1937, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon Myers, and Mark Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 397. 50 If the economic side of this story has been documented, the rich cultural legacy of settlers is still very much a growth area. For the most well-​known account of the Japanese in Manchuria, see Young, Japan’s Total Empire. 51 Both Aya Homei of Manchester University and Hiromi Mizuno of University of Minnesota have projects in process concerning Mantetsu and its impact on Japanese research practices. 52 Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991). 53 Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-​Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). 54 Uchida, Brokers of Empire. 55 Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 56 The founding of Keijo Imperial University (1926) was preceded by a university prep school several years earlier. Japan also placed imperial universities in Taiwan and Manchukuo. 57 Seoul Taehakkyo Charyojip I, with thanks to the Program in History and Philosophy of Science (PHPS), Seoul National University. 58 Ibid. The numbers only began to reach parity for Koreans late in the war. 59 E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–​1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). See also Kate McDonald, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). 60 In addition to Atkins and McDonald, see also Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn (eds), The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). 61 Ibid. 62 Alyssa Park, “Borderland Beyond: Korean Migrants and the Creation of a Modern State Boundary between Korea and Russia, 1860–​1937,” PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2009. 63 Hiromi Mizuno, Science for the Empire:  Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Aaron S. Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–​1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 64 Moore, Constructing East Asia. 65 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 66 Economic accounts tend to dominate, citing the work of Edward Deming in the postwar context.

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67 Takashi Nishiyama, Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–​1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 68 Moore tracks his Japanese actors to Burma and Vietnam, for example. See note 59. 69 Aaron S. Moore, “Japanese Development Consultancies and Postcolonial Power in Southeast Asia: The Case of Burma’s Balu Chaung Hydropower Project,” EASTS 8, no. 3 (2014), 297–​322. 70 Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Anglo-​ American Connections in Japanese Chemistry: The Lab as Contact Zone (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2013). For biology, see the work of Lisa Onaga, Nanyang Technological University: “Silkworms, Science, and Nation: A Sericultural History of Genetics and Modern Japan,” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2012. 71 Kaoru Sugihara, Japan, China and the Growth of the Asian International Economy. 72 Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015). 73 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-​Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 74 Hoi-​Eun Kim, “Cure for Empire: The ‘Conquer-​Russia-​Pill,’ Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and the Making of Patriotic Japanese, 1904–​45,” Medical History 57, no. 2 (April 2013), 249–​68. 75 Nayong Aimee Kwon, Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

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Chapter 4

Suzerainty versus Sovereignty: Establishing French Empire in Indochina Bruce M. Lockhart The French colonization of the various territories of what became French Indochina combined a series of military campaigns and diplomatic protocols. While these treaties—​in theory, at least—​represented agreements between sovereign states, they were signed within a geopolitical framework based on more than just sovereignty as it was understood in the West. Each of the countries which came under French control—​Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Lao kingdoms—​had been previously subject to one or more suzerains or overlords. France could not ignore these suzerain-​tributary relationships and understood clearly that it would have to nullify them in order to maintain unchallenged authority over its newly acquired “protectorates.” Thus it sought to remove Siamese suzerainty over Cambodia and to end the centuries-​old tributary relationship between Vietnam and China. At the same time, however, it utilized Vietnamese claims to overlordship in Cambodia and the Lao regions to justify its acquisition of those territories. Thongchai Winichakul, in his seminal work Siam Mapped, has shown how Western concepts of sovereignty interacted and clashed with Southeast Asian views of suzerainty.1 His study has some discussion of the French claims to Cambodia and Laos but focuses primarily on the British. Thongchai adroitly shows how Siam moved beyond its initial ignorance of British interpretations of borders and territorial sovereignty to actively engage both the English and the French in the competition for mainland Southeast Asia. While much of Siam’s sphere of influence to the east ultimately came under French control, it was slightly more successful in the south, where it “lost” several tributary states to British Malaya but held onto those areas which had once been the Malay kingdom of Pattani and were under more direct Siamese rule at the time. Thongchai provides an excellent account of how the Siamese elite succeeded in turning traditional Asian suzerainty into Western-​style sovereignty over what remained of its territory, which became the nation-​state that we now call Thailand. The present study will concentrate on the other side of the story, to examine French interpretations of suzerainty—​Siamese, Chinese, and Vietnamese—​as part of their strategy of colonization. Three episodes of the colonization of Indochina will be studied: Cambodia (1856–​ 67), Vietnam (1874–​85), and Laos (1865–​93).

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Sovereignty versus Suzerainty Thongchai’s study is based on the “confrontation between the indigenous tributary relationship and the rationalistic European view of modern international relations” as well as the “new kind of political geography in which neither overlapping margin [i.e., borders] nor multiple sovereignty was permitted,” effectively creating “a new kind of sovereignty within a new entity.”2 His book’s use of the terms “sovereignty,” “suzerainty,” and “overlordship” in the Southeast Asian context is somewhat fluid; the terms appear more or less interchangeably to describe the relationship which Siam held with its tributaries. It should be noted, however, that there was not a general “one-​size-​fits-​all” model for the relationship between a Southeast Asian power center and its outlying areas. As Thongchai notes, the Thai used the term “muang” for units which might now be considered as “towns/​cities,” “provinces,” and even “kingdoms,”3 but that does not mean that Siam made no distinction among these different categories. Only certain muang (Cambodia and the Lao and Malay states) were prathetsarat, tributaries or vassals which had their own kings and paid tribute on a more or less regular basis. Other muang had lesser status, enjoyed considerably less autonomy, and were much closer to provinces. Sukhothai, for example, while once an independent kingdom, was by the nineteenth century one of many provincial muang, and certainly not a prathetsarat.4 The Vietnamese made similar distinctions. The core of their polity was inhabited mainly—​though not exclusively—​by ethnic Vietnamese and structured into a hierarchy of provinces (tỉnh 省), prefectures (phủ 府), and districts (huyện 縣), a system borrowed from China. (Having been part of the Chinese empire for roughly a millennium, the Vietnamese continued to borrow ideas and institutions from China throughout the centuries of their independence.) On the periphery of this core, in the highland areas, were châu (州), a kind of “virtual district” (in the sense that central authority there was largely symbolic and the extent to which it actually existed as an administrative entity is questionable) whose inhabitants were not Vietnamese and were governed by hereditary chiefs rather than by Vietnamese mandarins. (In China the official term for such places was 羁縻州 [jimizhou, Viet. ki mi châu]; this term was sometimes used in Vietnam as well.) The Vietnamese annals frequently record “tribute” (cống 貢) missions from their neighbors over the centuries, particularly the Cham and Angkorean Cambodia. In some cases, at least, it is likely that this was merely a rhetorical device to allow Vietnam to see itself as a suzerain like China, though on a smaller scale. By the nineteenth century, however, Vietnam had genuine tributaries (thuộc quốc), namely, Cambodia, Vientiane, and Luang Phabang. The former Lao kingdom of Lane Xang had fragmented into several pieces around 1700, leaving a handful of smaller and weaker polities vulnerable to influence from both the Siamese and Vietnamese. Cambodia had been effectively caught between its two powerful neighbors since the seventeenth century.

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Based on these distinctions, a case can be made that even within Southeast Asian political systems there was something that corresponded more closely to “sovereignty” in the sense of direct territorial control by a single power, as opposed to “suzerainty,” a more indirect and symbolic overlordship which could be shared by two or more powers, as was the case for Siam and Vietnam vis-​à-​vis Cambodia. While it does not seem possible to articulate this distinction linguistically in either Thai or Chinese/​Vietnamese before the creation of neologisms for “sovereignty” and “suzerainty” in the modern period, the difference was there. Sukhothai, in Bangkok’s perception, was much more directly ruled than Luang Phabang, and for the Nguyễn Court in Huế even a remote and ethnically heterogeneous “province” like Cao Bằng still had a very different status from a “tributary” like Cambodia. It seems clear that this distinction was not completely lost on the British and the French, who could differentiate more or less directly ruled provinces from more autonomous kingdoms under the suzerainty of a more powerful neighbor. The challenge for them, as Thongchai discusses, was just how to interpret that suzerainty and its implications for their expansionist agenda. His account suggests that on the Malay Peninsula the British came to have a reasonably accurate understanding of Siam’s ties to the northern Malay states (Kedah, Kelantan, and Terengganu) which were its vassals or tributaries. Over the decades of expansion beyond the original Straits Settlements, Britain gradually supplanted those relations without directly attacking them, until the 1909 Anglo-​ Siamese Treaty (which created a permanent border between Siam and British Malaya) formally brought them to an end, as much because Siamese perceptions of their interests and priorities in the area had shifted as because of any direct British action.5 By contrast, France took a much more aggressive stance toward suzerain-​vassal relations in the territories it sought to conquer, and it is to that story that we will now turn.

Cambodia, 1856–​67 In Asia France was to a large extent “playing catch-​up” to Britain, which by the mid-​ nineteenth century controlled much of India and more than half of Burma along with its Straits Settlements possessions. France, by contrast, had only a few scattered ports in India, and was desperate to acquire more influence and territory in areas where the British had yet to penetrate. The first attempt to establish an official French position in Cambodia took place in 1856 with the diplomat Charles de Montigny, who had just successfully negotiated a treaty with the Siamese laying down the foundations for diplomatic and commercial relations as well as guaranteeing freedom of activity for missionaries. De Montigny then headed for Cambodia (on his way to Vietnam, where he hoped to negotiate a similar treaty), encouraged by Bishop Jean-​Claude Miche, a long-​ term missionary among the Cambodian people. (French missionaries not infrequently offered support to representatives of their country in dealings with rulers of the lands

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where they were serving.) Miche encouraged him to believe that King Ang Duong (r. 1841–​44, 1845–​60) would welcome his presence and his attentions on behalf of the French Empire.6 At this point in time neither de Montigny nor his superiors in Paris had any intention of establishing a protectorate in Cambodia, though a few months later he would articulate in private correspondence with them his vision for France in Southeast Asia: France’s natural role—​one which is great, noble, and worthy of her—​is that of Protector, not only in Siam and Laos, but also in all of the rich and vast areas extending from British India as far as China . . . Burma, Siam and Laos, Cambodia, Cochinchina, and Tonkin. It is easy to anticipate that . . . if the imperial government [in Paris] so wishes, France will exercise sovereign protection in all of these kingdoms, as soon as agreements with [other] European countries there have been completely worked out, since at that point—​and perhaps even sooner in the not so distant future—​attempts at invasion [by these other powers] will be on the rise, having long been anticipated and feared by [local] rulers, so that France will be and will remain for them a generous arbiter and a powerful guarantor.7 De Montigny’s eloquent vision does not explain just how French protection over Burma would be achieved given that much of its territory had already been colonized by the British; perhaps the latter would gracefully withdraw in deference to France’s nobility and grandeur! Be that as it may, his priority for the moment was gaining a foothold in Cambodia, and he decided to take the bull by the horns and draft a treaty along the lines of what he had recently negotiated in Bangkok. The treaty was not ratified, however, due to a combination of his rather inept handling of protocol in his dealings with the Cambodians and to Siamese pressure on Ang Duong not to sign the treaty. De Montigny’s understanding of Cambodia’s relationship with Bangkok was far from complete. He acknowledged Siamese suzerainty and explicitly reaffirmed to King Mongkut (r. 1851–​68) in writing that he did so, yet he was somehow convinced that this should in no way interfere with Ang Duong’s right to sign a treaty with an outside power.8 In his instructions to the junior missionary tasked with explaining the treaty to the Cambodian ruler (de Montigny and Miche having departed for Vietnam), he gave the following explanation: The king of Cambodia was not to worry about the effect that the commercial treaty he was signing with France . . . could have in Siam. Above and beyond the perfectly legitimate nature of such an act, which could not

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be challenged by even the most touchy overlord [in this case Mongkut] and which lay within the sovereign rights of the Cambodian prince, Mr. de Montigny would take responsibility for explaining to the King of Siam that [this development] had taken place at [Montigny’s] personal initiative; and would point out to [Mongkut] the benefits that such a treaty offered, not only for the two signatory countries, but for Siam itself . . . The King of Cambodia, then, should have no cause for worry or concern about [Mongkut’s] feelings, because [Montigny] would take care of everything. Nor should [Ang Duong] forget that once he had become a friend and ally of France, he would necessarily be [a friend and ally] of all his neighbours.9 It is clear that de Montigny, while very much aware of Siamese suzerainty and not at that point prepared to deny it, in fact quite seriously misunderstood it. (Nor was he able to fathom why Mongkut might be unwilling to write a letter of introduction on his behalf—​for which he helpfully provided a draft—​to Vietnamese Emperor Tự Đức, apparently failing to perceive that this was like asking the Paris government to facilitate contacts between a powerful new player on the European geopolitical stage and France’s archenemy in London.)10 As a Siamese vassal Ang Duong was not a free agent, nor did he have “sovereign rights” vis-​à-​vis Bangkok, and whatever opportunities he may have had for relations with a European power, he was in no position to take any initiative without the approval of his suzerain. De Montigny’s treaty was stillborn, and he fussed and fumed about Siamese duplicity and Cambodian cowardice. The French had learned an important lesson, however, and one they would not forget the next time around. For the next few years, French attention was focused on Vietnam. De Montigny’s diplomatic initiative there had failed, but the Franco-​Spanish invasion of 1858–​59 put French boots on the ground and led to the occupation of Saigon and three surrounding provinces, which now became the colony of Cochinchina. Not only did the possession of territory in the Mekong Delta give France new motives for looking covetously at Cambodia, it also introduced a series of naval governors in Saigon who would become involved in dealings with that country. These admirals came under the authority of the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies (MMC), which consistently took a more aggressive stance in the region than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) which controlled the Bangkok-​based diplomats dealing directly with the Siamese Court. This conflict between the two Ministries, by no means unique to France or to this particular situation, would shape the French approach to Siam and Cambodia over the next decade.11 In essence, the MMC (particularly under the aggressive leadership of Prosper de Chasseloup-​Laubat) pushed for a tough stance vis-​à-​vis Siamese claims to Cambodia because it viewed Siam as already a stalking-​horse for British interests, since

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Bangkok generally had more contacts with British colonial governments than it did with the French. The MAE, however, argued for a more moderate approach lest Siam become more pro-​British than it already was.12 Generally speaking, the admirals in Saigon (first Louis Bonard and then Pierre-​Paul de la Grandière) followed Chasseloup-​Laubat’s line, exercising more initiative in Cambodia and enjoying more autonomy than the French consuls posted to Bangkok. Ang Duong died in 1860 and was succeeded by his son Norodom (r. 1860–​1904), who would now inherit the task of dealing with the Siamese and French. The circumstances of de Montigny’s failure had made it clear that France could not ignore the implications of Siamese suzerainty over Cambodia; the question was how to minimize its significance or, ideally, nullify it completely. Ang Duong had maintained until his death that any treaty with France should be signed in Bangkok with the involvement of the Siamese, and initially Norodom, although well-​disposed toward the new rulers of Cochinchina, was no more prepared than his father to cast off the yoke of suzerainty.13 The main initiative for a new diplomatic stance seems to have come from Bishop Miche, who in April 1861 pointed out to the French consul in Bangkok (with whom he was in direct contact) that Cambodia had traditionally acknowledged the overlordship of both Siam and Vietnam. “Now that France has occupied Cochinchina,” Miche suggested, “is it not time to claim suzerain rights over Cambodia?”14 This was precisely the strategy that the French now adopted in their dealings with Siam and with the Cambodians as well. It is not clear just when French policymakers became fully aware of Vietnamese suzerainty in Cambodia. The diplomatic documents give the impression that they had seen the Vietnamese largely as aggressors toward Cambodia rather than formal overlords. It is certainly true that by the time the French began to take an active interest in Cambodia’s affairs, the Vietnamese seem to have been largely out of the picture. The Vietnamese annals have relatively little to say about Cambodia during these years; two tributary missions (in 1854 and 1857) are mentioned, along with an outbreak of violence along the border. There are also hints that the Cambodians have been emboldened by their contacts with the French to become more aggressive, but there are few specific details about political developments in Oudong, the Cambodian royal capital.15 Vietnam was itself facing a suddenly heightened Western threat—​Montigny’s fruitless visit in 1856 had been preceded by a French bombardment of Tourane (Đà Nẵng)—​and was hardly in a position to be intervening in Cambodian affairs. Ironically, then, France sought to claim the primacy of Huế’s suzerainty in Cambodia at a time when Vietnamese influence had in fact seriously waned and Siamese authority was in the ascendance. There is a curious passage in the Vietnamese chronicles in relation to the 1862 treaty signed after the initial French invasion. The context is a discussion among court mandarins about the various stipulations being imposed by the French. All of the points mentioned would appear in the final treaty except one: a ban on further tribute missions from Cambodia. The Vietnamese professed to be unconcerned about this clause since “Cambodia is our vassal” and “whether or not it sends tribute, in any case [the French] 112

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have no right to interfere, so there is no point in arguing about it.” The Emperor commented that treaty or no treaty, if Cambodia made trouble for the Vietnamese, they would respond with military force and the French would have nothing to say about it.16 Published sources, even those relying heavily on original French documents, make no mention of a plan to break the tributary relationship between Cambodia and Vietnam. Most contemporary accounts treat the establishment of French rule in Cochinchina and in Cambodia as two separate episodes of the broader narrative of colonization with little reference to the traditional connections between the two countries. One exception is the 1874 study by Paulin Vial, a naval officer, who says that at the time of the French conquest of the Mekong Delta, the Vietnamese were very quick to put forward their rights on Cambodia, “explaining to us how much better founded their claims . . . were than those of Siam.”17 It is tempting to suggest that the French originally planned to forcibly break the suzerain-​vassal relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia, as they were doing with Siam, but then realized that they could make use of that relationship to further their own claims. There were two fundamental difficulties with this position, however. First, at this time France had no authority over the Vietnamese government in Huế or its external relations. The 1862 treaty ceded the territory occupied by France up to that point in time and contained other stipulations on trade and religion but left the Nguyển Court’s sovereignty otherwise intact, except where future territorial concessions were concerned; the first steps toward a protectorate would only come with a second treaty in 1874. Thus it was illogical if not absurd to claim that because France now owned a portion of Vietnamese territory next to Cambodia, it had thereby inherited Vietnamese overlordship over Cambodia. The Siamese made precisely this point, informing Paris in November 1861 that “the King of Cochinchina [i.e., Vietnam] is still the master of his capital. He still enjoys full authority in his kingdom.” It would not be possible, Bangkok insisted, to claim that France had inherited his suzerain rights until such time as he had been completely defeated.18 More importantly, the MAE in Paris agreed: the minister observed that “having had to limit our gains in Lower Cochinchina to only three provinces, we cannot claim [the right] to establish ourselves in Cambodia.” He reiterated his view that France should not alienate Siam by pushing too hard to steal its vassal.19 The second weakness of the French position was even more glaring: What was the logic of recognizing suzerainty (in this case Vietnamese) as a valid basis for their own claims to Cambodia while denying the legitimacy of Siamese claims made on the same basis? Chasseloup-​Laubat himself clearly articulated this contradiction, telling de la Grandière (who replaced Bonard in early 1863) that he should refuse any recognition of Siamese “claims” (prétensions) while fully upholding French and Vietnamese “rights” (droits). (Bonard had taken a slightly more accurate position, telling Bangkok that it could not claim sole overlordship over Cambodia because the Vietnamese also had rights.)20 Published documents do not provide a systematic explanation for this contradictory position, but certainly the French took it seriously. There seems to have been 113

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some attempt to argue that Vietnamese rights in Cambodia historically predated those of Siam, but this claim would not have held up to close scrutiny.21 However clear the issue may have seemed in Paris and Saigon, it was much less so in Bangkok and Oudong. Norodom signed a treaty with de la Grandière during the latter’s visit in August 1863. De la Grandière, like de Montigny before him, had pushed somewhat ahead of his orders; even the aggressive Chasseloup-​Laubat had suggested that he should wait for Norodom to make “multiple requests” before entering into formal diplomatic relations.22 The admiral believed in striking while the iron was hot, though, and he later reported to his minister that “King Norodom and his ministers showed themselves to be so unanimous in wanting France’s protection that the idea of a treaty came about naturally and, although I had not been tasked with obtaining one, the opportunity seemed too good to be passed up.”23 De la Grandière would have been less optimistic if he had known that only a few weeks after he penned these lines, Siamese envoys to Oudong signed a secret treaty with Norodom which nullified the agreement with France and reaffirmed Cambodia’s status as a Siamese vassal. (Norodom seems to have played more or less a double game, complaining to the French that he was being pressured by the Siamese and vice-​versa.)24 The existence of the treaty was only revealed in August 1864 when the news leaked out through the Straits Times in Singapore. (It is difficult to say whether the French were more upset at the deception or at having to learn about it from a British colonial mouthpiece.)25 They did not take it seriously, however, and having already blocked Norodom from going to Bangkok for his coronation earlier that year and insisted that the event take place in Oudong in June—​albeit with Siamese participation—​they felt that the precedence of their protectorate had been rightfully demonstrated.26 French officials were gravely preoccupied with the logistics of Norodom’s joint coronation lest it imply that Siam still retained some suzerain rights over its vassal.27 In fact, given that Siam as overlord had frequently been involved in crowning—​and sometimes in selecting—​its vassal rulers, the decision to allow Bangkok’s envoy to participate in the first place sent mixed signals, although France tried to keep these to a bare minimum. Norodom himself in his dealings with the French appears to have tried to downplay the significance of the Siamese role—​telling de la Grandière, for example, that some of the regalia needed for his coronation needed to be brought from Bangkok, without spelling out the precise reason why they were kept there in the first place. The French do not seem to have been fooled, and the Siamese envoy to the ceremony was overruled by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée (appointed as the French Résident in Cambodia) when the envoy insisted that he should place the crown (which he had brought from Bangkok) on Norodom’s head. (The compromise solution was for the Siamese envoy to hand the crown to Doudart de Lagrée, who in turn gave it to Norodom, who placed it on his own head.)28 It is also interesting that initially, at least, France seems to have been willing in principle for Cambodia to continue sending tribute missions to Bangkok even though in the French view it was no longer formally a Siamese tributary.29 Like the coronation, any such mission would in fact have implied that the tributary relationship 114

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with Siam was still in existence, and in the end it does not seem to have occurred, either because the French thought better of their decision or because the Cambodians and/​or the Siamese decided that it would not be meaningful. Both of these issues, however, suggest that the French did not fully grasp the more subtle aspects of the relationship which they were in the process of destroying. Interestingly, in a letter to Norodom in 1864 following his coronation, Mongkut stated that “the Emperor of France is supporting you to be independent and not under any other country [ekkarat mai khuen mueang dai]; Siam has recognized [the 1863] treaty.”30 Much of the letter was devoted to a discussion of which of the many Thai pronouns would be most suitable for their correspondence given this change in their relationship. Whatever Mongkut’s private feelings, however, Bangkok was certainly not prepared to publicly concede Cambodian “independence” at this point in time, and it took three more years of carrot-​and-​stick diplomacy. In 1867 a Franco-​Siamese treaty was finally signed which acknowledged Bangkok’s control over the Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap but formally ended any claim to the rest of the country.31 If France did not fully comprehend Siamese suzerainty, neither is it clear that they fully understood the implications of their own “protectorate” policy. Their internal documents spoke of an “affranchissement” (freeing or liberating) of Cambodia from Siamese influence, which was logical enough—​and indeed some members of the Cambodian elite would have agreed. De la Grandière’s remarks in his official correspondence provide some clues of how the French understood “independence.” First and foremost it was to be freedom from the Siamese yoke, as noted above, but more broadly he emphasized the qualitative differences between “our suzerainty” and that of the Vietnamese and Siamese. He specifically mentioned that French involvement on Cambodia would not be based on the traditional acts and structures of vassality. Instead, France would rely on “persuasion, good faith, good methods, and justice,” which were more suitable instruments for dealing with “humbled and crushed peoples.”32 Chasseloup-​Laubat phrased the matter somewhat more bluntly shortly before the final ratification of the 1863 treaty: “Cambodia must be independent between Siam and ourselves [in Cochinchina] but under our protection to put a stop to Siamese incursions, otherwise we will end up having to conquer part of it.”33 The objective, then, was a Cambodia which was “independent” and “neutral” yet somehow under French “protection.” These terms appear again and again in French documents, but obviously “independence” and “neutrality” in these particular circumstances had a different meaning. One official stated the French position clearly: [After the initial conquest of Saigon and the surrounding provinces] Cambodia’s independence was soon to appear as an essential condition for the development—​ and virtually for the existence—​of French Cochinchina. Given the weak state in which the kingdom found itself, 115

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independence was impossible without a protectorate . . . A treaty [between France and Cambodia] would give us new and exclusive rights, and Siam would be excluded once and for all.34 The illogic of an “independent” country under foreign “protection” as France understood it, though quite clear to the Siamese, was much less evident to officials in Saigon and Paris. Within a few years the idea would prove equally problematic in dealings with Vietnam and China as well.

Vietnam, 1874–​85 The French colonization of Vietnam stretched over a quarter-​century and comprised a series of military expeditions of varying scale which resulted in three successive treaties. The 1862 agreement, mentioned above, focused on the outcome of the 1858–​59 Franco-​ Spanish military expedition, particularly the cession of Saigon and three surrounding provinces. France was not yet in a position to demand authority or influence over the rest of the country. Although the long-​term ambition of a protectorate or some other form of control was almost certainly in the minds of some officials in Paris at the time, such dreams would not begin to come to fruition for more than a decade. In 1874, a second treaty was signed, often referred to as the Philastre Treaty after the French official who negotiated it. This document was to be the principal source of disagreement among French, Vietnam, and China for the next decade; as such it merits a detailed examination of the relevant provisions. Article Two states that France, recognizing the sovereignty of the King of Annam [i.e., the emperor of Vietnam] and his complete independence vis-​à-​vis any foreign power whatsoever, promises aid and assistance and, at his request, will freely [i.e., without cost] give the necessary support to maintain peace and order in his country, to defend him against any attack, and to destroy the piracy which is ruining part of the kingdom’s coast. Article Three says that “in return for this protection [rendered in the Chinese text as 許助, ‘assistance’], the King of Annam commits himself to fit his foreign policy to that of France and to make no change in his present diplomatic relations.” The article goes on to authorize Vietnam to conclude commercial agreements with other powers, but France must be informed of them in advance and they cannot violate any of the terms of existing Franco-​Vietnamese treaties.35 The Philastre Treaty contains what would seem to be a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, France recognizes Vietnamese “sovereignty” and “independence” vis-​à-​vis 116

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all foreign powers, presumably including China. On the other hand, Vietnam’s external relations are to remain unchanged; this would also presumably include its relationship with China. The French, in their subsequent dealings with the Qing, would always emphasize the first point without any mention of the second. Article Three, however, arguably should allow for the continuation of Sino-​Vietnamese relations in their traditional form. This point is even more evident in the Chinese text of the treaty which the Vietnamese would have used (and presumably drafted themselves). The relevant sentence is 若從前有與何外國相交 往來通使 今應仍舊 不可變異: “If [Vietnam] has previously had relations with any foreign country [and] exchanged envoys, these should still [continue] as before with no change.”36 The Sino-​Vietnamese relationship was, of course, based mainly on regular exchanges of envoys, so it would not have been unreasonable to infer that such exchanges could continue, and this was precisely what occurred. A second issue, equally contentious, is the meaning of “sovereignty” and “independence,” neither of which term had an exact equivalent in Chinese in the 1870s. The French understood Article Two to mean that henceforth Vietnam would no longer be a Qing vassal; for them the implications of “souveraineté” and “entière indépendance” were obvious. What the Vietnamese (and later the Qing) thought is a different matter. The Chinese text for the first part of the Article reads as follows: 大南國大皇帝係操自主之權 非有遵服何國. “Sovereignty” here is translated as “exercising sovereign power,” but the term for “sovereign,” “自主” (zizhu, Viet. tự chủ), which later came to mean “autonomy/​ autonomous,” literally meant to be one’s own master or lord, and it is not certain that a Chinese or Vietnamese reader in the 1870s would have understood it as “independence” in the Western sense. More precisely, the Sino-​Vietnamese conception of the tributary relationship would not necessarily nullify the “sovereign” or “independent” status of Vietnam as articulated in these terms. Similarly, the phrase “complete independence” is rendered as “not dependent on/​submissive to any country”; again, neither overlord nor vassal would necessarily see the latter’s status as “dependent” or “submissive” in the sense of the term here. It is probable, then—​and subsequent developments appear to confirm it—​that neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese understood the Philastre Treaty as ending their centuries-​old tributary ties, whereas the French intended it to do exactly that. The French internal position at this time was clear: in the words of one minister writing to another in 1875, “Vietnam, weakened as it is at present and—​as it recognizes—​ powerless to guarantee the obedience of its own subjects, is forced to accept the protectorate of a great power. The position that we have acquired in Cochinchina [through the Philastre Treaty] does not allow any influence other than ours to be exercised over [Emperor] Tự Đức.”37 In short, the protectorate was meant to end Chinese overlordship and prevent any other power from coming into the picture. China, however, was not consulted at any point, and was only informed of the Philastre Treaty’s existence several months after the fact. The minister of foreign affairs in Paris, writing to the Chargé d’Affaires in Beijing, blithely expressed his confidence that the Qing government would 117

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“suitably appreciate” the new relations between France and Vietnam and would willingly see France take over responsibility for helping the Vietnamese maintain order within their borders.38 For several years the Qing had been sending troops into Vietnam at the latter’s formal request to help deal with remnant elements from the Taiping Rebellion which had taken refuge there. It was precisely this sort of intervention—​seen by the Qing and Nguyễn alike as the responsibility of a suzerain toward its vassal—​that the French wished to end. The delicate task of informing the Qing about the new geopolitical reality fell to Count Julien de Rochechouart, the French Chargé. As was often the case, this diplomat was caught between conflicting messages from Paris and Saigon. Writing to his minister, he noted that the latter’s explanation of the 1874 treaty seemed to emphasize Vietnamese “independence,” whereas the governor in Saigon appeared to view the country as already partly under the French thumb. As a result, he explained, in his letter to the Qing he had tried to downplay the sovereignty-​suzerainty question and focus instead on the more concrete—​and more urgent, in the French view—​issues of expelling the Taiping irregulars and opening up the Red River for trade through to Yunnan.39 The Philastre Treaty was formally conveyed to the Qing in May 1875. One might have expected that the French would provide a suitably modified version of the original Chinese text used by the Vietnamese, since it would have been as comprehensible in Beijing as it was in Huế. (It would have been necessary to change a few details such as the title given to the Vietnamese emperor and to the name of his country, since in both cases the Vietnamese did not favor the names “assigned” to them by the Qing and only used them in diplomatic correspondence with their suzerains). Apparently, however, the French chose to retranslate the French text without reference to the version signed in Vietnam, as the phrasing of the two Chinese documents is different. In the translation given to the Qing the two articles discussed above say basically the same thing as the original, but with different semantic nuances. Article Two maintains the term “zizhu” to describe Vietnam as “independent” and states that it will not 歸他國管屬, “come under the control of another country.” Article Three is rather more explicit. Where the original text translates France’s “protection” over Vietnam as “assistance” (許助), the version drafted in Beijing uses the term “protect” (保護, Viet. bảo hộ), which is a more correct rendering of the French and would come to be the standard translation for “protectorate” in Vietnam. Also, whereas the Philastre Treaty says that Vietnam’s external relations are subject to French “approval” (合意), the later translation uses the term “辦理,” closer to “handling” or “managing.”40 The point, then, is that the version given to the Qing suggested a tighter degree of French control than the original text of the treaty signed by the Vietnamese. Nevertheless, De Rochechouart’s cover letter to Prince Gong (Yixin), who oversaw China’s foreign affairs, deliberately tried to soft-​pedal the treaty’s implications for the Sino-​Vietnamese relationship. He said that “from now on it is up to France to safeguard the security and independence of His Majesty Tự Đức.” In Chinese this was rendered 118

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“交趾之國嗣後得保無虞侵淩且得自主皆資法國之職分所顧.” Again the term “zizhu” appeared to characterize Vietnam’s status. As the French diplomat had informed his superiors, the rest of the letter focused on a request to the Qing to help get all Chinese forces out of Vietnam and to cooperate in opening up the Red River for free trade.41 The Chargé’s decision to tread carefully around the suzerainty matter, however justified it may have been from a diplomatic point of view, was ill-​advised insofar as it left interpretation of this issue largely up to the Qing reading of the treaty. The problem was compounded by an ambiguous response from the Chinese which was then aggravated by a mistranslation on the French side. Prince Gong, in his reply to de Rochechouart, directed most of his attention to the two issues raised by the Frenchman, but he included a one-​sentence affirmation of the Sino-​Vietnamese relationship. The French translation was as follows: “Annam is the country also known as Viet Nam; it was a tributary of China, and the inhabitants of the Chinese border always had trading relations with the inhabitants of the neighbouring tributary states; the nature [of these relations] varied from province to province.” The original Chinese for the first part of this sentence, however, said “交趾即越南本系中國屬國”; the phrasing suggests that Vietnam was still a tributary.42 The French were clearly misled by the use of the past tense in their own translation of Prince Gong’s letter. Writing to Paris, de Rochechouart assured his minister that “the Prince only speaks of Annam’s vassal status vis-​à-​vis China in the past, which is a tacit recognition of the current situation.”43 This gross misunderstanding held sway for the next decade, and when years later the Qing began to voice objections to increasing French intervention in northern Vietnam and to assert their suzerain rights, France indignantly cited Prince Gong’s June 1875 letter and accused them of going back on the tacit consent they had supposedly given to the French protectorate.44 It is not clear just when the mistranslation was discovered. The French minister in Beijing, writing in September 1877, expressed some skepticism about the accuracy of the French text, based partly on the fact that Vietnam was sending a new tribute mission to China, but he does not seem to have specifically asserted that it was incorrect.45 It is likely, moreover, that even when French officials did at some point catch the error, the psychological momentum of expansion was far too strong to be hampered by semantics. The most likely explanation is that the Qing did not in fact grasp the full meaning of the Philastre Treaty, and that Prince Gong’s statement was meant as a reminder and a contextualization of China’s position on the other issues raised by the French. Nor is it clear that the Vietnamese themselves fully understood the implications of what they had signed in 1874. The next decade of Franco-​Vietnamese relations was a constant battle between the “protecting power,” always anxious to increase its authority, and the Vietnamese protégés, who were equally intent on minimizing that authority.46 The French were constantly accusing the Vietnamese of obstructionism and bad faith, but the feeling was probably mutual. If we consult the Vietnamese chronicles for this period, which were drafted shortly after the imposition of full French rule in 1884, they are completely silent on any kind of “protectorate” or any change in their relations 119

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with the Qing as a result of the Philastre Treaty. French officers and officials appear at frequent intervals in the narrative, but they are vaguely threatening foreigners to be rewarded, placated, or thwarted as circumstances demand. Conversely, the Qing appear as reliable neighbors with whom the Vietnamese are cooperating closely to deal with the problems caused by the Taiping remnants on their territory.47 The ambiguity of the Philastre Treaty for all parties concerned was clearly revealed in late 1876, when the Vietnamese Court announced its intention to send an envoy to the Qing, as it was normally expected to do every three years. (Tributary relations had been disrupted for some time because of the chaos caused by the Taiping Rebellion but resumed with a tributary mission to Beijing in 1873.) Logically the dispatch of such a mission two years after the traditional tributary relationship was supposed to have ended should have set off alarm bells in Huế (where the French now had a Consul), Saigon, and Paris, as well as at the French Legation in Beijing, but for reasons which are not clear from the published sources, it did not, and the mission departed for China without incident. In September 1876, Alexandre de Kergaradec, the consul in Huế, informed his superior in Saigon that the mission had just left for Beijing. He had been assured, he said, that the triennial “embassy” had “no special character” other than that of an ancient tradition. The consul (who apparently did not give much thought to the possible implications of this “ancient tradition”) had spoken to the envoys, who he noted were not of particularly high rank, and obtained their assurance that they would call on the French minister during their stay in Beijing. He noted the importance of this mission in setting a precedent for future contacts between the two empires but did not raise any objections.48 From Saigon Governor Victor Duperré passed on the information to the Legation in Beijing, noting that the Qing had so far raised no objections to either the 1862 or 1874 treaties and expressing his view that “Annam’s vassal status was only of purely historical significance.” He hoped that the minister in Beijing would agree with him that it was better not to rock the boat of Sino-​French relations by making an issue out of this symbolic visit.49 The minister’s response to this in his own correspondence with Paris was somewhat ambivalent—​as well it might be considering that both de Kergaradec and Duperré had seriously underestimated the significance of the mission. Vietnam’s past relationship with China was, he acknowledged, a “serious matter,” and he hoped that Duperré’s optimism about the advantages of maintaining the status quo was well-​ founded. He would, he said, do his best to ensure this.50 Initially Paris seems to have accepted the judgment of its men on the spot. Foreign Minister Duke Louis Decazes, writing to the minister in Beijing in May 1877, noted that the collective decision not to raise the suzerainty issue in the context of the Vietnamese envoys had been more than justified by the Qing willingness to withdraw the troops sent across their border to deal with the Taiping remnants. This action was considerably more significant in French eyes than the Qing reception of a tributary mission from

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Vietnam. Decazes did express the concern that old traditions die hard, and he posed a question which he and his colleagues would have done well to ponder more carefully: Should we not then be afraid that the signs of deference shown by King Tự Đức [toward China] and the regular relations that he maintains with [the Qing] through the exchange of formal embassies imply the continuation of closer ties, thus giving [him] a supporting role in a [geopolitical] policy which is rarely sympathetic to the European powers and whose disadvantages we will come to feel at the point in time when it is less beneficial for China to treat us nicely than it is at present?51 Interestingly, the French minister in China seems to have overcome his initial reticence, and a few months later he wrote a much more forthright letter to his superiors in Paris. By this time the Vietnamese mission had left for home, so the potential damage to the prestige of the French protectorate had already been done. The envoys, he reported, had not paid the expected courtesy call to the Legation in Beijing, thus leaving France in a rather awkward position in Chinese eyes. The minister expressed his personal doubts regarding the assumption that the Qing had quietly accepted the loss of their suzerainty—​it is he who raised the question of whether Prince Gong’s 1875 letter had been correctly translated—​and he commented that Vietnam now seemed to have two “protectors,” France and China. Having said all this, however, he still agreed with the earlier consensus that the issue should not be directly raised with the Qing unless it became absolutely necessary to do so at some future time.52 The final chapter of this episode occurred in March 1878, when the official Peking Gazette (京報) announced that the returning Vietnamese envoys had reached Huế. Writing to his minister in Paris—​the third occupant of this office in less than two years—​ the French diplomat noted caustically that the official Qing decree referred to Tự Đức as what he called a “second class prince” (most probably the Chinese had used a term for a vassal ruler). Tự Đức, he commented, had consistently referred to himself as “Emperor” in his treaties with France, a title which “would make him the equal of his suzerain the Emperor of China, whose vassal he effectively remains, as we see [from the decree].” Was it not bizarre, he complained, that a ruler whom the French honored as “Emperor” and with whom they had diplomatic relations would maintain such a degrading relationship without ever having protested against it?53 This was of course precisely the relationship that Vietnamese rulers had maintained for centuries—​“Emperors” vis-​à-​vis their own subjects but “vassal rulers” when it came to dealing with China—​but it is not clear that the French understood this point. In any case the French had learned their lesson, and when the time came for Vietnam to send another mission to Beijing in 1880, the idea was vetoed firmly in Paris. The decision came too late, however, and the last tribute mission in Vietnam’s history took place in 1880–​81.54

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The issue of Qing suzerainty took on a much more menacing form in 1878, when a group of rebellious Chinese troops under the renegade general Li Yangcai took refuge in Vietnam, and the Huế Court sent a formal request to Beijing to help defeat him and drive his forces out of their territory. The Chinese did so, eventually announcing his capture and imminent execution with an imperial decree affirming that “peace has been re-​established among those who are our vassals by virtue of our investiture.”55 This sequence of events made it clear that the French minister’s observation about Vietnam having two protectors was in fact correct: whereas France believed that the Philastre Treaty gave them exclusive responsibility for dealing with such intrusions into Vietnamese territory, both Huế and Beijing were equally convinced that China continued to share this responsibility as suzerain. This disagreement would provoke first diplomatic spats and then a military conflict between China and France. As Vietnam’s internal security continued to decline during the early 1880s, Paris and Saigon planned and implemented a large-​scale military incursion into Tonkin which was meant to lay the foundations for a full-​fledged protectorate. As China continued to intervene militarily in Tonkin’s northern provinces and each side firmly maintained that its troops were there on a legitimate basis, conflict was inevitable. The French campaign culminated in the 1884 Patenôtre Treaty, which finalized their control over Vietnam and effectively put an end to its independence but did not solve the problem of China. Qing recognition of the French protectorate and the consequent loss of its suzerainty only came the following year after a brief war. The 1885 Treaty of Tianjin, negotiated by the same Patenôtre who was responsible for the earlier agreement with Huế, stipulated that “China, determined not to do anything which may compromise the pacification effort undertaken by France, commits itself to respect . . . the treaties, conventions, and arrangements . . . between France and Vietnam.” To partially salve Chinese pride, this second Article went on to say that as far as Sino-​Vietnamese relations were concerned, “it is understood that they will . . . not affect the dignity of the Chinese Empire or lead to any violation of the present treaty.” There was extensive discussion among the French regarding the wording of the latter clause, as they were determined to make sure that nothing more powerful or significant than “dignity” was implied by the Chinese text. The final wording was 威望體面, combining a term for “honor” and the word usually translated as “face.”56 With this rather empty concession a centuries-​old tributary relationship came to a formal and definitive end.

Laos, 1865–​93 For both geographical and geopolitical reasons, the future of what eventually became French Laos took more than four decades to determine; the final treaty defining its borders was only signed in 1904, although most of present-​day Laos had been ceded by Bangkok in 1893 after the Paknam Incident near Bangkok, a classic instance of gunboat 122

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diplomacy. France began to look covetously at Laos when the ink was barely dry on its 1863 treaty with Cambodia. During the lengthy process of negotiating the 1867 agreement whereby Siam renounced all claims to that particular vassal, Paris became increasingly aware of the potential importance of the Lao territories to the north, many of which were unmapped and largely terra incognita. In 1865, when Consul Aubaret in Bangkok had obtained Siamese approval of an earlier version of the 1867 treaty, Chasseloup-​Laubat balked at a clause which stipulated French recognition of the present borders of Cambodia’s western provinces as well as those of “Siamese Laos.” The western part of Cambodian territory was formally ceded to Siam by the final version of the treaty (though it would be returned to Cambodia in 1907), but any reference to Laos was deleted on French insistence. The minister did not wish to see any formal recognition of Siamese claims across the Mekong, and he argued, “What is Siamese Laos if not a new and planned invasion of a piece [of territory] which is presently independent and which we have a tremendous interest in maintaining independent from Siam?” Any recognition of “Siamese domination over Laos,” he said, “could significantly compromise the commercial future” of French possessions.57 Chasseloup-​Laubat’s use of the word “independent” reflects the virtually complete lack of French understanding of the area which they were gazing at with such covetous eyes. “Laos” at the time was a broad and vague term encompassing what is now northern and northeastern Thailand, Laos, and northwestern Vietnam.58 Virtually none of the various small polities there could be described as “independent,” and all of them fell to varying degrees into the spheres of influence of Burma, Siam, China, and Vietnam. Aubaret himself, living as he did in Bangkok, had a clearer picture of the situation. Writing to his foreign minister, he pointed out that a large part of “Laos” was indeed under direct Siamese influence, a fact which could not be ignored. He seems to have been referring mainly to the Northern Thai muang linked to what had once been the powerful kingdom of Lanna with its center at Chieng Mai; by contrast, he described what he called “Laos Annamite” as only nominally under Vietnamese authority, peopled as it was by “tribes that [the Vietnamese] mix together under the common name of Savages.”59 (The term “Vietnamese Laos” came to be used by the French to designate the territories on the left bank of the Mekong which were ceded to them in 1893, whereas “Siamese Laos” referred to the areas on the right bank which were incorporated into present-​day Thailand.) Over the next two decades France expended most of its time and energy on consolidating its position in Vietnam, but Laos never completely disappeared from its sight. In particular, the Mekong Expedition under Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier (1866–​68), as well as the successive exploration missions under Auguste Pavie (between 1879 and 1895), were intended to map the territory on both sides of the Mekong in as much detail as possible as well as to look for direct access routes to Vietnam and evidence of Vietnamese control. These objectives were included in the instructions given to Doudart de Lagrée in 1866, nearly a decade before the 1874 treaty laid the foundations of a French protectorate over Vietnam. Although the possibility of claiming portions of 123

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Laos in the name of the Vietnamese was not clearly anticipated at this point in time (see note 60 for an exception), the Cambodia precedent presumably made this a very real possibility. Doudart de Lagrée and his team conscientiously sought out signs of Vietnamese authority north of their newly acquired Cambodian protectorate. The southernmost part of “Laos,” the small kingdom of Bassac (Champassak), was clearly under Siamese influence, and it was not possible to claim otherwise. Pushing northward, they found an area around Khemarat (on the west bank of the Mekong) which had previously paid tribute to Vietnam, and once they reached the Se Bang Hieng River (present-​day Savannakhet province in Laos), they claimed to have clear proof of Vietnamese influence, although this seems to have been limited to a record of paying tribute as well.60 There was apparently no solid evidence anywhere else in the region, however, as Doudart de Lagrée himself admitted, but what they lacked in proof, they made up for in imagination. The Expedition made the claim that the entire eastern bank of the Mekong between 16 and 17 degrees latitude had traditionally been under Vietnamese control and that Vietnam had only been driven out of the region by the Siamese around 1831.61 This version of events appears to have become widely accepted among French officials. Jules Harmand, who explored much of the same territory a decade later, criticized this claim as exaggerated, but he seems to have been one of the very few Frenchmen to say so, and even he claimed that Vietnamese in the mountainous region saw the Mekong as the western border of their empire.62 The whole story is in fact historical nonsense, and the Vietnamese chronicles suggest precisely the opposite scenario, namely, that it was only in the 1820s and 1830s that the Nguyễn attempted to claim any kind of authority over what is now central Laos.63 Two points need to be made about Vietnamese authority over what is now the territory of Laos. First of all, much of it was at best nominal, if not completely theoretical. Until the administrative reorganization of the border region which took place under Emperor Minh Mạng (r. 1820–​40) in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the areas in this region had been considered as ki mi châu, meaning that there was little or no direct Vietnamese control, and they probably did little more than send occasional tribute missions. Even when Minh Mạng reclassified the châu as huyện (districts, a term normally used only in lowland areas), they continued to be governed by non-​Vietnamese chiefs under the broad authority of mandarins inside Vietnam who probably never set foot in these remote areas.64 (The idea of “districts” being organized in an area inhabited by “barbarians” would have been ludicrous through much of Vietnamese history in the first place.) Second, the evidence strongly suggests that these administrative units supposedly governed by the Vietnamese were in the highlands and did not extend into the lowland areas between the mountains and the Mekong, which were inhabited mainly by ethnic Lao. These Lao muang would have been subject to the authority of the Vientiane kingdom until it was destroyed by the Siamese in the late 1820s, after which Bangkok extended its own authority over most of the river’s eastern bank. In so doing, they would have displaced Lao rulers, not Vietnamese.65 124

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The only area where the French could legitimately claim Vietnamese suzerainty was the region which is now Xieng Khouang in Laos (the former Phuan kingdom, called Trấn Ninh by the Vietnamese) and the muang which now constitute the northwestern provinces of Vietnam. The peoples of these areas had been tributary to the Lao (specifically the Luang Phabang kingdom) and the Vietnamese. Pavie spent considerable time in this region in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the Haw (Taiping remnants and other roving elements) were ravaging the area as the Siamese unsuccessfully tried to suppress them. This period was essentially a contest between the Siamese expanding eastward and the French expanding westward from Tonkin. The French won the contest, though mainly through military threats against the overextended Siamese and the sheer force of Pavie’s personality rather than through the legitimacy of their claims to Vietnamese overlordship. At the core of French claims to Laos was Luang Phabang, which was arguably the strongest and most autonomous of the remaining Lao kingdoms after the destruction of Vientiane. Thai historian Pensri Duke suggests that France began to look covetously at Luang Phabang as early as the negotiations for the 1867 treaty.66 It was not until the early 1880s, however, that the French began to make specific claims on the kingdom, and they continued to do so right up until the Paknam Crisis of 1893 that gave Laos into their hands. In 1882, Harmand (now France’s Consul in Bangkok) claimed to have raised the idea of a French protectorate with three envoys from Luang Phabang; he was “astonished,” he reported, at how clearly—​and apparently favorably—​they understood his proposal, “despite their barbarism.”67 Later in the decade, Pavie (whose appointment as French vice-​consul in Luang Phabang the Siamese reluctantly approved) began to press Franco-​Vietnamese claims more strongly. It was his frequent trips to the kingdom and his assistance to the royal family at the time of a Haw attack in 1887 that helped lay the groundwork for the eventual French protectorate over all of Laos. The Haw incursions had seriously undermined Siamese authority in the Lao territories as Bangkok proved largely incapable of repelling them militarily. Pavie was the right man in the right place at the right time, and he personally helped the Luang Phabang ruler to temporarily flee the invaders.68 The goodwill he gained through this personal intervention later stood France in good stead when it came to establishing the protectorate in Laos. Although the 1893 treaty itself had only Siamese and French signatories, the Lao elite at the time generally accepted French rule. French claims of Vietnamese suzerainty over Luang Phabang were considerably weaker than had been the case for Cambodia. Although the Lao kingdom had sent a few tribute missions to Vietnam after the establishment of the Nguyễn Dynasty in 1802, it had relatively little other contact with Huế, and the official account found in the Vietnamese chronicles makes it clear that there was virtually no contact before 1800. The Siamese, however, had been exercising considerable authority over Luang Phabang for more than a century by the time the French tried to claim it for Vietnam. Its rulers were crowned and sometimes chosen by Siamese kings, and it had been a target of Siamese expansion 125

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since the 1760s. This was also true of Vientiane and Champassak, the other two ethnic Lao kingdoms born out of the fragmentation of the former Lane Xang.69 Through this period the French continued to maintain that they were essentially upholding Vietnamese suzerain rights to Lao territory. This stance, as we have seen, was already being formulated even before the initial establishment of a protectorate in 1874 and was strengthened during the years that followed. Harmand argued in 1882 that France should “match our claims to those of the Vietnamese and base them on [Vietnamese] maps.”70 After the final colonization in 1884, however, when France had full access to the imperial archives, the military officer who was ordered to find documentary evidence of Vietnamese overlordship came up largely empty-​handed. For most of the east bank of the Mekong and particularly below the 18th parallel (precisely the region where earlier explorers had been so eager to find Vietnamese influence), France “could only counter long-​term [Siamese] possession” of the region with “traditional and seldom-​used [Vietnamese] rights.”71 Not surprisingly, the Siamese were generally dismissive of French claims in the name of the Vietnamese. Prince Devawongse, the influential foreign minister in the late 1880s, said flatly that these claims, “which have never been put forth by Vietnam, not even after it became a French protectorate, are contradicted not only by considerable historical evidence” but by the maps and accounts of various explorers, including the Mekong Expedition itself.72 Britain, too, intervening more or less at the eleventh hour in 1893, told officials in Paris that if one were to follow French reasoning, then the British could legitimately demand the retrocession of Normandy and other parts of France formerly attached to the English crown.73 The French did not allow themselves to be deterred by historical considerations, however, and pushed ahead with their gunboat diplomacy (the Paknam Incident), which achieved highly satisfactory results. The Franco-​Siamese treaty of October 1893 ceded all Lao territories on the left bank of the Mekong to France; a subsequent agreement in 1904 added to French Laos portions of the Luang Phabang and Champassak kingdoms which were located on the right bank of the River. It is worth pointing out (as Lao writers frequently do with considerable bitterness) that no Lao ruler was a party to either of these agreements, which were signed between the territories’ old and new overlords. Siam had to be satisfied with the right bank territories which now constitute northeastern Thailand, and the former Lao polity was permanently divided.

Conclusion As is well known, precolonial Southeast Asia could not be divided into neatly bounded, carefully delineated entities. Even spheres of influence and claims of suzerainty could not be definitively mapped, as shown by these two roughly contemporary maps drawn by Europeans, one from a Siamese perspective and one from a Vietnamese one (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). For the mainland area alone, it took more than a century from the 126

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Figure 4.1  Map of Southeast Asia from a Siamese perspective, ca. 1869. V. A. Malte-​ Brun, Carte du Royaume de Siam de la Cochinchine Française et du Royaume de Cambodge (Paris: Challamel, 1869) (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​).

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Figure 4.2 Map of Southeast Asia from a Vietnamese perspective, ca. 1838. From Jean-​Louis Taberd, An Nam Đại Quốc Họa Đồ Tabula Geographica Imperii Anamitici (Calcutta: Oriental Lith. Press, 1838) (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​).

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first boundary between Burma and British India until the final touching-​up of borders between Siam and French Cambodia. If one includes the Malay Peninsula, then the process extended even further back in time. If the story of European colonization in Southeast Asia is, as Thongchai has suggested, a gradual replacement of Asian suzerainty by Western sovereignty, the process was neither straightforward nor homogenous among the different parts of the region. On the Malay Peninsula, the British by and large recognized the Siamese sphere of influence over the northern states and never explicitly rejected it even though they sought to gradually erode it.74 France pursued a more aggressive—​and arguably illogical, not to say hypocritical—​strategy. On the one hand, the French acknowledged the historical reality of Siamese suzerainty over Cambodia and parts of Laos, as well as the much older Chinese overlordship vis-​à-​vis Vietnam. On the other hand, they genuinely believed that they could legitimately though unilaterally nullify this suzerainty through treaties signed with the vassals without reference to the overlords. It was only after Siam and China proved they did not share this belief that the French were forced to backtrack, as it were, and sign treaties with them as well, using various combinations of the carrot and the stick. It is not completely clear just how the French rationalized this approach in their own minds. The most likely explanation seems to be that they believed firmly in the supreme authority and legitimacy of written treaties, so that each successive document signed with the Cambodians and Vietnamese effectively—​in their eyes—​trumped the Siamese and Chinese claims for which there was no written proof. Siamese overlord-​vassal relations were implicitly acknowledged and framed written correspondence between the rulers but were not the subject of a specific treaty. Comments about a lack of formal documentation of Siam’s territorial claims to Cambodia and Laos appear several times in French sources—​notwithstanding the fact that, as we have seen, Vietnamese rights over the same areas were scarcely more concrete. (It is very likely that the Siamese attempt to nullify the 1863 agreement between Norodom and de la Grandière with a written “counter-​treaty” reflected Bangkok’s understanding of the importance of written documents.) It is also clear that the French to a large extent viewed Siamese and Vietnamese suzerainty over their tributaries as imposed by force; if this was the case, such rights were (in their eyes) less politically legitimate and could be weakened and even cancelled by a stronger power.75 A case can be made that their Western mindset based on interactions among sovereign, independent states did not allow them to grasp that a suzerain-​vassal relationship could be anything but undesirable and even abhorrent to the subordinate polity. Their private and public writings from this period consistently expressed the unwavering conviction that the “benevolence” of France’s tutelage would be inherently more desirable to those under its protection than the “oppressive” yoke of traditional suzerainty. In the case of Vietnam, it was difficult, if not impossible, for France to question the historical reality and legitimacy of the tributary relationship with the Qing. Even so, the 129

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assumption was that by introducing a written agreement that had legal force in Western eyes, it was possible to unilaterally terminate China’s role in Vietnamese affairs. As with Cambodia and Laos, the French believed that a legal instrument of Western sovereignty would supersede all other existing relationships. French officials seem to have been genuinely taken aback at the revelation that neither Beijing nor Huế understood the 1874 treaty in this way. The French were, in effect, forcing a replacement of traditional multiple suzerainty (in the case of Cambodia and Laos) by a single suzerain, themselves. For Vietnam it is evident that they believed that their “protecting” role was fully equivalent to Chinese suzerainty, so that they were legitimately supplanting the Qing in this position. Over time, this newly acquired “monopolistic suzerainty” evolved into complete and direct sovereignty with the creation of French Indochina as a full-​fledged colony with clearly defined borders. French behavior throughout this period suggests that although they could make the distinction between suzerainty and sovereignty, they were prepared to conflate the two forms of control when it worked in their favor. At one level, this policy was successful, as four decades of treaties with Siam and China could testify. That said, psychological and cultural bonds were less easily broken. Siam continued to remain a political and cultural point of reference for Cambodian and Lao nationalists, while anti-​ French Vietnamese elements of all stripes looked to China for inspiration, training, and sometimes physical refuge. The old patterns of suzerainty may have been eliminated, but their legacy remained. NOTES 1 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-​Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994). 2 Ibid., pp. 91, 106. 3 Ibid., p. 81. 4 A detailed discussion of the different categories of muang in the Thai polity of Ayudhya is in S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror & World Renouncer (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 133–​8. 5 Thongchai, Siam Mapped, pp. 85–​91; a more detailed treatment is in Kobkua Suwannathat-​ Pian, Thai-​Malay Relations: Traditional Intra-​regional Relations from the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 6 On the de Montigny mission and its context, see Pierre Lamant, “Les prémices des relations politiques entre le Cambodge et la France vers le milieu du XIXe siècle,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-​mer 72, no. 267 (1985), 167–​98 (downloaded from http://​www.persee.fr). An overview from a Cambodian perspective is in Khin Sok, Le Cambodge entre le Siam et le Viêtnam (de 1775 à 1860) (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-​Orient, 1991), pp. 149–​56. In 1853 Ang Duong had apparently attempted to initiate relations with the French through their consul in Singapore, but this contact bore no diplomatic fruit at the time (p. 149). 7 Quoted in Charles Meyniard, Le Second Empire en Indo-​Chine (Paris: Société d’Éditions Scientifiques, 1891), p.  383 (downloaded from Bibliothèque Nationale de France, http://​ gallica.bnf.fr/​); emphasis in the original. All translations from foreign languages are my own.

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Meyniard persuasively defends de Montigny against the charges of later writers that he had actually been tasked by Paris to establish a protectorate and failed to do so (pp. 360–​6). 8 Mongkut referred to de Montigny’s recognition of Siamese overlordship in a letter to Ang Duong written around this time; see the 1856 letter from Mongkut to Ang Duong, in Phratchahatthalekha Phrabat Somdet Phrachomklao Chaoyuhua [Royal correspondence of King Mongkut] (Bangkok: Mahamakut Royal College, 1978), p. 67. A March 1857 letter from de Montigny to Mongkut was addressed to “His Majesty the King of Siam, Ruler of Laos, Suzerain of Cambodia . . .”; quoted in Henri Cordier, La politique coloniale de la France au début du Second Empire (Indo-​Chine, 1852–​1858) (Leiden: Brill, 1911), p. 133. One colonial-​era writer flatly denied that de Montigny ever made such a concession as a justification for refusing to acknowledge Siamese claims; Louis de Carné, “Le royaume du Cambodge et le protectorat français,” Revue des deux mondes 79, no. 2 (1869), 865–​6 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​). 9 Meyniard, Second Empire, pp. 416–​17. Meyniard does not cite these instructions as a direct quotation, but it is clear that he had access to de Montigny’s papers and other official documents, and the style of the original French is that of a diplomatic text. 10 De Montigny attempted to enlist the aid of the veteran Siam-​based missionary Bishop Jean-​ Baptiste Pallegoix, who flatly refused; their correspondence is in Cordier, Politique coloniale, pp.  72–​6. 11 In Britain’s Asian possessions, for example, there was a triangular rivalry among the Colonial, Foreign, and British India Offices. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this parallel. 12 See Pensri Duke, Les relations entre la France et la Thaïlande (Siam) (Bangkok: Chalermnit, 1962), pp. 23–​30, which includes excerpts from French diplomatic documents. The specter of maleficent British influence in Siam appears again and again in contemporary French sources of all kinds; the explorer and colonial official Lous de Carné, for example, was convinced that Mongkut’s designs on Cambodia were British-​inspired (“Royaume du Cambodge,” p. 862). 13 Duke, Relations, pp. 19–​ 20. There was a cordial exchange of messages and presents between Admiral Léonard Charner in Saigon and Norodom in early 1861; Albert Septans, Les commencements de l’Indo-​Chine Française (Paris: Challamel Ainé, 1887), pp. 155–​6 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​). 14 Bishop Miche to Consul de Castenau, August 15, 1861, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 20. Mongkut in his letter to Ang Duong said he had acknowledged to the French that Cambodia also paid tribute to Vietnam but had characterized the Cambodian king as “a real Thai” (Thai thae) who had spent nearly three decades in Bangkok before taking the throne and had been Mongkut’s own friend since childhood (Phratchahatthalekha, p. 67). Regardless of geopolitical considerations, Thai and Cambodians had much closer cultural ties, and relations between the two courts were much more intimate, than was the case for Cambodia’s relations with the Vietnamese. 15 Đại Nam thực lực [Veridical records of Vietnam] (Hà Nội: Giáo Dục, 2007), vol. 7, pp. 306 (1854 mission), 493 (1857 mission); comments on Cambodia’s relations with the French are found on pp. 668–​9 and 682, for the year 1860. 16 Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 769–​70. 17 Paulin Vial, Les premières années de la Cochinchine colonie française (Paris: Challamel Ainé, 1874), p. 172 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​). 18 Siamese Phrakhlang Minister to Consul de Castenau, November 21, 1861, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 22. “Cochinchina” in this document refers to the entire Empire of Vietnam; the toponym had become common in English and French to refer to the kingdom whose capital was at Huế between 1600 and 1800, when there were effectively two Vietnams. Because the

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unified post-​1800 polity was ruled by the same family from the same capital, the older name was sometimes used even though “Annam” was gradually replacing it. 19 Note by Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 28. “Lower Cochinchina” refers to the Mekong Delta region; under colonial rule “Cochinchina” would come to refer only to this specific part of Vietnam, instead of the whole country as explained in the previous note. As noted, at this point in time France had only occupied half the provinces in the Delta. 20 Instructions from Minister of Navy and Colonies Chasseloup-​Laubat to Admiral de la Grandière, February 17, 1863, Duke, Relations, p. 30; Admiral Bonard to Siamese Phrakhlang Minister, December 10, 1862, p. 26. 21 Colonial official Charles Lemire provides a detailed chronology dating back to the eleventh century which significantly misrepresents relations between the Angkorean and Vietnamese polities in order to make this claim; Lemire, Exposé chronologique des relations du Cambodge avec le Siam, l’Annam et la France (Paris: Challamel, 1879) (downloaded from http://​gallica. bnf.fr/​). A document prepared by the Consulate in Bangkok accurately recognized that Siamese influence in Cambodia predated that of Vietnam (“Histoire abrégée du Cambodge,” submitted to Paris by Bangkok in August 1863), cited in Duke, Relations, p. 21. 22 Chasseloup-​Laubat to de la Grandière, August 18, 1863, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 34. Historian Georges Taboulet notes that the minister’s instructions to de la Grandière over the previous few months had been “very subtle and even somewhat contradictory”; Taboulet, La geste française en Indochine, vol. 2 (Paris: Adrien-​Maisonneuve, 1956), p. 629. An overview of the conflicting orders from Paris and the Admiral’s defense of his actions is found on pp.  621–​9. 23 De la Grandière to Chasseloup-​Laubat, October 5, 1863, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 35. 24 The text of the treaty is in A. B. de Villemereuil (ed.), Explorations et missions de Doudart de Lagrée (Paris: Imprimerie Bouchard-​Huzard, 1883), pp. 94–​101 (downloaded from http://​ gallica.bnf.fr/​). 25 Straits Times, August 20, 1864, available online at http://​eresources.nlb.gov. sg/​newspapers/​Digitised/​Article/​straitstimes18640820.2.6.aspx. The treaty was accompanied by a tongue-​in-​cheek commentary on the coronation as a reflection of French policy in Cambodia: http://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​newspapers/​digitised/​article/​ straitstimes18640820-​1.2.3.aspx. “Here,” the British writer said, “under the show of extreme courtesy, and by the simple direction of a particular ceremony, has a State, long tributary to Siam, been constituted an independent kingdom at the hands of the French, and a Viceroy [Norodom] relieved of his old allegiance to the Power that nursed him and gave him his viceroyalty, and made to look with fervent gratitude upon the French that make him King over the kingdom that was not theirs to give.” 26 Duke, Relations, pp. 43–​4. On Norodom’s abortive trip to Bangkok, see the documents in Villemereuil, Explorations, pp. 108–​11. Having failed to persuade the king that he should remain in Oudong and let the Siamese come to him, Doudart de Lagrée ran up the French flag over Norodom’s palace and fired off several rounds of cannon. The king, by then on his way to Siam, made a hasty return to Oudong. A lengthy letter from Mongkut to Norodom trying to assess the implications of the treaty and making plans for the coronation is in Phratchahatthalekha, pp. 105–​17. Mongkut was trying to strike a delicate balance between maintaining as much authority as possible over the Cambodian ruler and avoiding direct provocation of the French. 27 See the documents in Villemereuil, Explorations, pp. 104–​108. 28 Norodom’s February 1864 letter to de la Grandière is translated in ibid., pp. 107–​108. The Siamese envoy’s account of his dealings with the French was apparently leaked to the

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British and also published in the Straits Times on August 13: http://​eresources.nlb.gov.sg/​ newspapers/​digitised/​article/​straitstimes18640813-​1.2.5.aspx. 29 This possibility was raised by French Consul Aubaret in 1864 (Duke, Relations, p. 41). 30 Phratchahatthalekha, pp. 124–​7. 31 The text of the treaty is in Appendix 2, pp. 286–​9, of Patrick Tuck, The French Wolf and the Siamese Lamb: The French Threat to Siamese Independence, 1858–​1907 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993). Tuck provides a detailed study of this entire period. 32 Instructions from de la Grandière to French officials being dispatched to Cambodia, July 21, 1863, quoted in Taboulet, Geste française, vol. 2, p. 623. 33 Chasseloup-​Laubat to Drouyn de Lhuys, December 10, 1863, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 40; emphasis in the original. 34 De Carné, “Royaume du Cambodge,” p. 863; de Carné went on to describe the objective of French policy as Cambodian “autonomy.” 35 The text of the treaty is in Henri Cordier, Histoire des relations de la Chine avec les puissances occidentales 1860–​1900, vol. 2 part 1 (L’empereur Kouang-​Siu, 1875–​1887) (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1902), pp. 268–​9 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​). “Annam” was the most commonly used Chinese name for Vietnam, and the French gradually adopted it to refer both to Vietnam as a whole and specifically to the country’s central region. For general studies of events during this period, see Yoshiharu Tsuboï, L’empire viêtnamien face à la France et à la Chine 1847–​1885 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987); and Lloyd E. Eastman, Throne and Mandarins: China’s Search for a Policy during the Sino-​French Controversy 1880–​1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 36 The Chinese text of the treaty can be accessed under “第二次西貢條約” at https://​zh.wikisource. org. The source for the text is indicated as the Vietnamese chronicles (Đại Nam thực lục). 37 Minister of Navy and Colonies de Montaignac to Foreign Minister Decazes, April 19, 1875, in Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Documents diplomatiques: Affaires du Tonkin, Part 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883) (henceforth DDAT) (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf. fr/​), p. 39. 38 Decazes to Chargé d’Affaires de Rochechouart, February 27, 1875, ibid., p. 30. “Appreciate” (apprécier) in this context means to understand the value or significance of something, not necessarily to look favorably on it. 39 De Rochechouart to Decazes, May 27, 1875, ibid., p. 44. 40 For the version used in Vietnam, see the document cited in note 36; the translation given to the Qing government is in Guo Tingyi 郭廷以 and Wang Yujun 王聿均 (ed.), 中法越南交涉檔:  光緖元年至宣統三年 [1875–​ 1911] [Files on Sino-​ French-​ Vietnamese Negotiations 1875–​ 1911] (台北市:中央硏究院近代史硏究所, 1962), vol. 1, Document 3, pp. 4–​10; the text quoted here is from p. 4. 41 De Rochechouart to Prince Gong, May 24, 1875, DDAT, pp. 45–​6; the original Chinese version is in 中法越南交涉檔, Document 3, p. 3. 42 Prince Gong to de Rochechouart, June 15, 1875, DDAT, p. 49; the original version is in 中法越南交涉檔, Document 6, pp. 11–​12; quotation from p. 12. 43 De Rochechouart to Decazes, June 19, 1875, DDAT, p. 47. 44 See, for example, Foreign Minister Léon Gambetta to Chinese Minister in France Zeng Jize, January 1, 1882, ibid., p. 195. 45 Minister Brenier de Montmorand to Decazes, September 30, 1877, DDAT, p. 71; Cordier, Relations de la Chine, p. 281, note 1, corrects the translation; a French diplomat writing not long after these events explicitly stated that the French had misunderstood the Chinese position based on an incorrect translation of the letter; “Un Diplomate,” L’affaire du Tonkin (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1888) (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​), p. 5.

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46 On the tensions between 1874 and 1884, see Nguyên Thê Anh, Monarchie et fait colonial au Viêt-​Nam (1875–​1925) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), ­chapter  1; and Bruce McFarland Lockhart, The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy (New Haven: Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1993), ­chapter  1. 47 These observations are based on a reading of the Đại Nam thực lực, vol. 8, covering the period 1874–​83. 48 Consul de Kergaradec to Governor Duperré, September 27, 1876, DDAT, pp. 60–​1. 49 Duperré to Brenier de Montmorand, October 18, 1876, DDAT, pp. 58–​60. 50 Brenier de Montmorand to Decazes, November 26, 1876, DDAT, p. 58. 51 Decazes to Brenier de Montmorand, May 30, 1877, DDAT, p. 63. 52 Brenier de Montmorand to Decazes, September 30, 1877, DDAT, pp. 70–​3. Paris agreed with his assessment; see Foreign Minister de Banneville to Brenier de Montmorand, November 30, 1877, DDAT, pp. 73–​4. 53 Brenier de Montmorand to Foreign Minister Waddington, March 25, 1878, DDAT, pp. 75–​6. In fact, the French were extremely inconsistent in how they referred to the emperor, at least in their own language; the French text of the 1874 treaty, for example, talks about the “King of Annam,” whereas the Chinese text gives him his full Vietnamese title of “Đại Nam Quốc Đại Hoàng Đế” (“Great Emperor of Đại Nam,” the name adopted by the Nguyễn Dynasty for their country). The combination of “King” and “Annam” would have been extremely offensive to the Vietnamese, and in fact the letter from Emperor Napoleon III which de Montigny brought to the Court in 1856 was initially rejected precisely because it addressed Tự Đức as if he were only a king rather than an emperor; Georges Taboulet, La geste française en Indochine, vol. 1 (Paris: Adrien-​Maisonneuve, 1955), pp. 393–​4. 54 Cordier, Relations de la Chine, pp. 308–​15. 55 The decree, dated December 5, 1879, is translated in DDAT, pp. 138–​9; documentation of this whole episode is found on pp. 85–​145. 56 Cordier, Relations de la Chine, p. 533. On the wording of the treaty, see Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Documents diplomatiques: Affaires de Chine et du Tonkin 1884–​1885 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1885) (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​), pp. 262–​74, 288. 57 Chasseloup-​Laubat to Drouyn de Lhuys, July 9, 1865, quoted in Duke, Relations, pp. 46–​7. 58 Although the main (Tai-​speaking) ethnic groups of Northern Thailand, on the one hand, and northeastern Thailand and lowland Laos, on the other, are culturally and linguistically similar and were historically grouped together as “Lao” by the ethnic Siamese and by many Europeans, among themselves only the latter group would be called “Lao,” and it is they and their language that are now designated by that term. 59 Aubaret to Drouyn de Lhuys, November 10, 1865, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 47. 60 Villemereuil, Explorations, pp. 455–​6; Ernest Doudart de Lagrée, Voyage d’exploration en Indo-​Chine (Paris: Hachette, 1873), p. 262 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​); Louis de Carné, Travels on the Mekong: Cambodia, Laos, Yunnan (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1995), p. 130. Carné, who was part of the team, speaks of “incontrovertible proof” of this Vietnamese connection; as early as this exploration voyage in the late 1860s he was already anticipating possible future French claims on the region in Vietnam’s name. 61 See the citations in the previous note. 62 See, for example, Jean-​Louis de Lanessan, L’expansion coloniale de la France (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1886), p. 477 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​); and Charles Lemire, Le Laos Annamite (Paris: Challamel, 1894), p. 8 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​). Harmand’s observation is in “Rapport sur une mission en Indo-​Chine,” Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires, 3e série V (1878), 269–​70 (downloaded from http://​gallica.bnf.fr/​).

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63 Đại Nam thực lực, vol. 3, pp. 154–​5, 372–​3; and Đại Nam liệt truyện [Biographies of Vietnam] (Huế: Thuận Hoá, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 570–​86; the latter source contains summary histories of Vietnamese relations with the Cambodian and Lao kingdoms. For an overview of the history of the Lao-​Vietnamese border region, see Nguyễn Thế Anh, “Établissement par le Viêtnam de sa frontière dans les confins occidentaux,” and Saveng Phinith, “La frontière entre le Laos et le Viêtnam (des origines à l’instauration du protectorat français) vue à travers les manuscrits lao,” in Les frontières du Vietnam: Histoire des frontières de la péninsule indochinoise, ed. P. B. Lafont (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), pp. 185–​93 and 194–​203 respectively. 64 A historical geography of these territories is in Đại Nam nhất thống chí [Gazetteer of Vietnam], vol. 2, 2nd edn (Huế: Thuận Hóa, 2006), pp. 134–​65. 65 Siamese authority on both banks of the Mekong is very clear in both Thai and Lao histories of the period. Toem Wiphakphochanit, Prawatsat Isan [History of the Northeast], 2nd edn (Bangkok: Thammasat University, 1987), provides an extensive and detailed account of the expansion of Bangkok’s control over virtually the entire stretch of the Mekong from Vientiane down to the Cambodian border. Even strongly nationalist Lao historiography does not attempt to show Lao sovereignty over this territory during the decades before French colonization; see, for example, Maha Sila Vilavong, Phongsavadan Lao tae bouhan thoeng 1946 [History of Laos from ancient times until 1946] (Vientiane: National Library reprint, 2001), ­chapter  8; and Suneit Photisan et al., Pavatsat Lao (deukdamban-​pachuban) [History of Laos from ancient times until the present] (Vientiane: State Printery, 2000), pp. 447–​60. 66 Duke, Relations, p. 116. 67 Consul Harmand to Cochinchina Governor Le Myre de Vilers, May 17, 1882, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 116. 68 Pavie’s account of these events can be found in his A la conquête des coeurs: Le pays des millions d’éléphants et du parasol blanc (Paris: Bossard, 1921). 69 See David Wyatt, “Siam and Laos 1767–​1827,” in Wyatt, Studies in Thai History (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1994), pp. 185–​209; Walter Vella, Siam under Rama III 1824–​ 1851 (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin for Association for Asian Studies, 1957), pp. 78–​ 93; Martin Stuart-​Fox, The Lao Kingdom of Lān Xāng: Rise and Decline (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1998), ­chapter  4. On Vietnam’s relations with Luang Phabang, see Đại Nam liệt truyện, vol. 2, pp. 603–​607. 70 Harmand to Le Myre de Vilers, May 8, 1882, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 116. 71 Report by Captain Luce, October 15, 1888, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 130. He grudgingly characterized Siamese authority as “unfair . . . but fairly effective.” 72 Foreign Minister Devawongse to French Minister in Bangkok de Kergaradec, May 30, 1888, quoted in Duke, Relations, p. 129; see also Devawongse to French Minister in Bangkok Pavie, April 4, 1893, Duke, Relations, p. 147. 73 British Ambassador in Paris Lord Dufferin to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Rosebery, July 26, 1893, Duke, Relations, p. 163. 74 See Kobkua, Thai-​Malay Relations. 75 De Montigny, writing to his minister after his departure, described Siamese rights over Cambodia as “no more than the rights of the stronger over the weaker”; quoted in Cordier, Politique coloniale, p. 113. Jean Moura, a naval officer who served as Résident in Cambodia, argued that Mongkut had been unable to object to the 1863 treaty with Norodom because he had no “authentic written documents” to back up his claims to suzerainty and that both Siam and Vietnam had only been able to impose their overlordship through “abusive use of strength against a neighbor that they had gradually stripped [of territory] and reduced to impotence”; Jean Moura, Le royaume du Cambodge, vol. 2 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1883), p. 130.

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Chapter 5

Staking Out an Imperial States System: The Imperial Frontier in Asia in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Brian P. Farrell In November 1883, the Indian Army organized “a frontier expedition on a small scale,” to enter the southern area of the region of Waziristan. Their objective was to prevent further violent incursions into British-​controlled territory in India by a recalcitrant faction of the Sherani clan. This would be done by incursion into the rugged mountain terrain from which raids were emanating, in order to “argue the question out with the usual logic of force.” This military expedition was typical of its time and place: “three native regiments and two guns” led by a handful of British officers, depended on support from “friendly Sheranis” to reach their objective, leveraging this need to project force by using it to kill two birds with one stone: by making the mission “a survey excursion supported by an escort.” One of the principal officers in the expedition was Major Thomas Hungerford Holdich, a Royal Engineer officer permanently assigned to the Survey of India. Holdich, who already boasted some eighteen years of experience as a combat officer and survey engineer in what the British called the Northwest Frontier, the region which formed the borderlands straddling British India and Afghanistan, was by this time the officer commanding the Baluchistan Survey Party—​a special unit in the Indian Army formed for a very special purpose.1 Holdich and his survey engineers represented the institutionalization of an idea first carried out as a systematic military operation in the Second Anglo-​Afghan War of 1878–​80: Indian Army frontier expeditions and military campaigns were used to enable trained combat engineers to apply modern scientific techniques of topographical exploration and mapping to the mountainous and rugged borderlands, in the midst of their unfriendly inhabitants. Such systematic knowledge production was designed, in turn, to enhance two very important things. First, it would strengthen Indian Army capabilities to project force along this turbulent Northwest Frontier. Second, it would increase British political, as well as topographical and military, knowledge of these borderlands, and the unruly neighboring state into which they blended. Holdich described the advance of the force moving northwest from its base at Dera Ismail Khan, along the mighty Indus River: It is one of the most curious features of the frontier, this sudden exchange from soft silted flats intersected by

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deep irrigation cuts and channels, to the first gentle stone strewn slopes of the hills, spreading like a glacier from the rocks to the plains. This dividing line is the old Sikh frontier of the Punjab, and it is also (generally) our frontier to this day—​not the frontier of Afghanistan, but the frontier of those independent tribes who lie between us and Afghanistan. The Sikhs knew what they were about when they chose it. It may be unscientific, but it is at least practical. All the cultivation was theirs. All the rocks and the stones and the crooked hills were Pathan or Afghan—​ the property of anyone who cared to claim them.2 This vivid description captured, in one paragraph, four central themes that define any study of the “imperial frontier” experience in Asia in the “long nineteenth century”: contemporary ideas about “progress” and applying “modern” scientific techniques to military and political problems; terrain, topography, and their strategic ramifications for military purposes; economic activity and its influence on borderlands; historical and political relationships between borderland peoples, and between them and neighboring states. The themes Holdich identified point us toward the focus of this chapter. By the nineteenth century, the frontier was one of the oldest features of the historical experience of Empire in Asia, both conceptually and on the ground. But over the course of that century, the imperial frontier became one of the principal instruments by which Asia, and Asians, were woven into a new global system of power, politics, and relations between states. There was hardly an aspect of Asian and imperial experience not influenced by some dimension of the “imperial frontier”: the nature and extent of the polities in which people lived; political and military relations between polities and states; questions of identity and legitimacy; the movements of people, armies, goods, and ideas; and connections between regions and the wider world. The most iconic construction project in the history of Asia, already very old by the nineteenth century, was surely a classic expression of the multifaceted imperial frontier: the ancient “Great Wall” of China, systematized into the familiar crenellated continuous stone wall by the Great Ming, in the sixteenth century. The Great Wall represented not just a military defensive position and the physical marker of a territorial border, it also expressed a Ming grand strategy for frontier relationships with the steppe peoples of the northern borderlands.3 But in doing so, it reworked, rather than replaced, a nearly ubiquitous characteristic of the imperial frontier: ambiguity. The nineteenth century did not dispel this long-​standing characteristic of the imperial frontier. But it did generate fundamental tension between ambiguity and what became two defining themes of the era: “progress” and “civilization.” That tension shaped the experience of the imperial frontier, which in turn played a major role in the reordering of what became a Global Asia. This chapter will explore that story by examining that 138

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tension. It will discuss some historical and scholarly concepts of the imperial frontier; glance at the broader nineteenth-​century frontier experience; and then relate the imperial frontier experience in Asia to state-​building and reconstructing the wider states system, connecting all to the forging of a new global order. This study of imperial frontiers, states, and state systems will zoom in on Central Asia and the Northwest Frontier of British India, in order to analyze the larger dynamic. And it will argue that what often appeared, at first glance, to be a story of “European” imperial imposition on “Asian” arrangements is much better understood as the product of tensions between the old and local and the new and imperial—​overlapping tensions that played out on multiple levels, with contested outcomes, and some truly lasting effects.

The Imperial Frontier One common expression of empire over the centuries denied the very concept of any frontier: the assertion of universal domain. Sometimes such assertion was expressed physically as well as militarily; notable examples included the sprawling Mongol expansion, and Tīmūr’s ambitious program of conquest. But more often than not the rhetoric outpaced what the empire could or would try to realize. The very titles of universal domain formed much of the vocabulary of the history of Empire in Asia. Someone styling himself “Possessor of the end of time” projected unbounded assertions, as did “Lord of the Seas,” “Crown of the Universe,” “Shadow of God on Earth,” or “Refuge of the World.” By contrast Padishah, or “King of Kings,” and even Huangdi, or “Son of Heaven,” seemed at least implicitly to acknowledge some sort of limits to their domain, in one dimension or another. The titles however also captured a common, indeed central, characteristic of the imperial frontier: it was multidimensional, as well as multilayered.4 The concept and its realization were often profoundly important geographically, militarily, economically, politically, and culturally—​but not always in the same way, or to the same degree. Geography leads this discussion, because the physical contours of the great mega-​continent, the huge contiguous landmass that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Indian Oceans, framed the basic context. Distinct political entities found themselves compelled to articulate what bounded them—​and therefore what helped define them, and how they related to “others”—​when a vast ocean did not do it for them. Historians studying the frontier have plenty of company. Frontier experiences, concepts, and theories form active subfields in geography, anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and political science, also attracting attention in such multidisciplinary areas as environmental studies, migration and diaspora studies, and international relations. The question of just what a “frontier” is—​or has been—​is not in danger of being settled, but one familiar approach rests on making distinctions between form and function, expressed in language. In this approach, “border” can be seen as the political articulation of the limits of one claimed jurisdiction, separating it from another. “Boundary” 139

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can be seen as the physical demarcation on land, and the cartographic definition in the air and at sea, of a border. But “frontier” is usually seen not as a line, or lines, but as a zone, or region(s), with wider connotations of human activity and relationships, not just of terrain, topography, and jurisdiction.5 These distinctions are workable enough across time and space, and did not belong to empire—​but were very well brought out by it. Empires drew lines on the ground and on maps, but also sought to manage, and oversee, relationships between diverse places and peoples, and that diversity went in more than one direction. This experience in Asia can be unpacked with some help from frontier theory, historical and contemporary. Frontier theory identifies a range of different types of frontiers across time and place, including some which do not amount to delineations of space that can be represented by lines on a map. A quick summary suggests three broad lines of frontier theory analysis can be applied to the topic in front of us: the “natural” frontier, the “scientific” frontier, and the “administrative” frontier. The notion of the “natural” frontier was as ancient as that of unbounded domain, and while not restricted to the empire experience was certainly commonplace in it. Two seemed self-​evident: the “great waters” of the oceans, and the intimidating topography of the truly great mountain ranges. Both featured prominently in the Asian experience of empire; Russian expansion produced generations of discussion about reaching the Pacific and even Indian Oceans, while the mighty Himalayas marked a profound distinguishing zone between East and South Asian imperial orders. But natural frontiers, even when seen as obvious zones in which to draw some sort of domain boundary, were neither seen, nor treated, as walls or ditches that could not be traversed. Russian expansion pushed beyond the Pacific coast into North America. Bābur outflanked the Himalayas, moving through the extension range of mountains known as the Hindu Kush, to bring Central Asian dynastic lineages into South Asia, to form the Mughal Empire. Some regions of political Eurasia lent themselves to notions of the “natural” frontier; France, for example, to the extent that this became a central theme in its worldview, self-​image, and grand strategy.6 Many others, especially east of the Ural Mountains, emphatically did not. This fostered efforts to bound domains, for various reasons, by human constructions. The Great Wall was of course the most celebrated example, but there were others. Russian Empire expansion into the vast open steppe lands of Inner Asia generated a grand strategy that focused on defining a tangible boundary, one that really affected those living in or moving through the areas it traversed. The aim was to differentiate effectively between lands secured and patrolled by the tsar’s military power and those lying beyond it. This was done, from the 1720s, by constructing the Sibirskaia ukreplionnaia liniia: a chain of small fortified strong points and defensive positions, which each acted as a hub. They were used to consolidate domination of the surrounding area, and as a base from which to prepare and launch more forward movement. This “military” frontier enabled governance and administration to spread, slowly, which eventually transformed Inner Asian frontier steppe land into settled and governed “Russian” territory.7

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These were dramatic examples of a central feature of the empire experience: the assertion of power and control over wide ranging, and different, peoples and domains. They should not however be misunderstood as efforts to permanently, or completely, separate lands and peoples on either side of any fixed “line.” Even “military” frontiers were seen as means to manage, ideally to control, liminal zones in which a wide variety of human activity unfolded—​ranging from the welcome to the worrisome. The crucial relationship was almost always an interplay between five features: terrain and topography, culture and ethnicity, economic activity, political power and identity, and physical control and security. These were focused through a particular prism: the relationship between the imperial power asserting some form or degree of domain in these liminal zones and the peoples living within them, both “subjects” living “within” the empire and “neighbors” bordering it. The Great Wall was the classic Asian example of the large-​scale and long-​term challenges of managing liminal zones as an imperial frontier. An equally foundational European experience was the imperial frontier of Ancient Rome. Or rather frontiers. Imperial Rome adjusted its frontier strategy to suit not only any overall agenda of the time but also the circumstances of the region in question; a fortified wall running unbroken from coast to coast might have made some sense in what is now northern England, but was not practical along the southern or eastern fringes of imperial territory in northern Africa or the Middle East. Two frontier zones in particular were, for a long time, seen as quite definitive and unchanging: the great “natural” frontier formed by the line of the rivers Rhine and Danube, and that section of the limites, or boundary lines, known as the limes germanicus, in what is now central and western Germany. The idea that these were fixed and static lines of military fortifications, meant simply to defend against incursion and or contain expansion, is now however understood to be anachronistic. Imperial Rome developed deep zones of demarcation to manage its frontiers, blending, as appropriate, terrain, fortifications, garrisons, co-​opted and allied peoples, to act at one and the same time as buffers or “marches” to screen the interior, bases for forward sorties, and controlled areas where economic and other forms of exchange could be regulated. The lines of movement, supply, and communication were more important than the defensive walls and forts. The frontiers were designed to be permeable, not watertight. They formed the space that lay between the “outer” boundary that marked the limit of asserted jurisdiction, beyond which lay someone else’s space, and the de facto, if not always delineated, “administrative” frontier, within which “regular” or effective governance was expected or exercised. Recent scholarship rightly speaks of the long-​term “transformation” of the Roman Empire, through frontier interaction, rather than the older Gibbonian vision of barbarian invasion, decline, and fall.8 Similar things can be said about the Great Wall and the massive Chinese Inner Asian frontier. Indeed, studies of these parallel experiences staked out markers for understanding the frontier, imperial and otherwise, that made deep scholarly imprints. Two directly concern us.

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The first reshaped frontier studies in general, by exploring the concept of how frontier experience shaped the very nature of empire. This question was important to one of Asia’s most iconic historians, the fourteenth-​century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldūn. Khaldūn’s great work, The Muqaddimah, first published in 1370, aspired to be a history of the world. Khaldūn identified an important relationship, between nomadic Bedouin civilizations and their “conditions of life” on the one hand, and “sedentary civilization” on the other, whose interactions shaped the development of both—​the frontier being the interface which entangled them both.9 This idea resonated across time. Its modern discussion was led, as far as Asia was concerned, by two magisterial mid-​twentieth-​ century publications: Rene Grousset’s 1939 work The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, and Owen Lattimore’s 1940 study Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Grousset built on a long-​standing French tradition of scholarly study of Central or Inner Asia, whose component parts—​steppe nomads and forest peoples—​he did much to redefine. His first footnote was to an earlier work by Lattimore, whose canonical study had a truly lasting impact on frontier theory. Lattimore argued that what defined society in a frontier zone was the ways of life practiced by the peoples living there, more than terrain, climate, or other factors. He identified a recognizable geographical zone, or connected zones, running across Eurasia and straddling its great civilizations, within which there evolved frontier societies and a frontier style of politics. This was foundational to both the historical experience of empire and the wider experience of civilization because, over a very long span of time, the rhythm and pulse of the connected histories of Europe and Asia were shaped not by such things as fluctuations of climate but rather by interactions between conditions that favored “barbarians” and conditions that favored great “civilized” entities, more often than not empires. These interactions combined social, political, and geographical factors. Nowhere was this more palpable, or influential, than along the great northern and western frontiers of China, the nature of which were determined, in every respect, by the evolution of dynamic tension between the nomadism of the steppe peoples and the organized intensive agriculture of the Chinese heartland. One of Lattimore’s most germane points was thus that the frontier, by being the focal zone in which an empire actually worked out how it related to the wider world, became an integral part of empire in the process—​rather than its rampart, or outpost.10 The second had roots in the study of Imperial Rome, perceptions of which heavily influenced nineteenth-​century thinking and practice in Asia: the concept of the so-​called scientific frontier. The general argument was that the Flavian Dynasty in the late first century sought to establish durable frontiers along which to maintain, over the long term, a Roman territorial empire, and that these frontiers were “scientific” because they were designed to be rational balances between geographical, economic, military, and logistic considerations.11 The defended frontier was to be established along lines that gave the empire the best chance to defend the territory and peoples it desired to govern as effectively as possible, but also as cheaply as possible. That meant finding the optimal mixture between terrain, topography, distance, lines of supply, movement, and communication, both lateral and from the frontier to the heartland—​and positioning between 142

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what was being protected, or bounded, where the threats emanated from, and what they were. The “science” was military; we return below to the role this concept, and its perceived ancestry, played in our nineteenth-​century Asian story. These characteristics constituted the general nature of the “imperial frontier” experience inherited by nineteenth-​century Asia. The frontier, in practice and in concept, both bounded but also helped define the polity, sometimes decisively influencing how it related to the wider world. It was not a definitive line of separation but rather a zone of engagement, permeable and ambiguous, neither sealed nor clear cut. It could be unbounded, undefined, natural, notional, fixed, demarcated, military, scientific, administrative, traditional, customary, ignored, contested, or nonexistent. It was shaped more by relationships than by ground, but also by the interplay between both. And in the nineteenth century, in Asia but also in the wider world, it became both a driver, and a major reflection, of changes that reshaped the political world, and how its entities related to each other. A glance at that wider global context will help anchor our closer examination of the empire experience in Asia.

The Nineteenth-​Century Frontier No state changed more dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century than the United States of America. Driving that change was the expansion of the American frontier. Fittingly, near the end of the century an American historian presented a thesis that not just articulated how and why the expanding frontier shaped American development but also pointed toward a broader spirit of the time. Frederick Jackson Turner’s Presidential Address in 1893 to the American Historical Association, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” remains to this day, despite its age and problematic argument, one of the most widely discussed interpretations of the American experience. Turner argued that the very existence of a “frontier,” a territorial region in which European American settlement and administration, expanding westward, overwhelmed areas inhabited only by Native American nations, neither governed nor secured by “modern” methods, fundamentally shaped the development of a unique American nation. The availability of land, and the need to “tame” it, fostered such characteristics as rugged individualism, innovation, and democracy. The ecological idea that the frontier experience shaped the wider polity later found something of an Asian echo in such work as Lattimore’s frontier theses. But at the time, Turner’s thesis expressed a wider Western trope: the world was being reordered by the expansion of “modern,” developed, industrial societies into spaces occupied by peoples not able to engineer such transformations, a process starkly exposed at the point of interface—​the frontier. Turner saw the frontier as both a place and a process. This made it a source of instability but also, of course, of change—​of “progress.” Turner saw this as an argument for a unique American history: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.”12 143

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Later scholars challenged Turner’s emphasis on frontier agency in shaping a unique American experience, one that diverged from European influences. But many European contemporaries regarded American continental expansion, and Turner’s thesis, as part of a wider global development: the expansion of “civilization,” by which they especially meant the political economy and states system of the Industrial Revolution and Europe. German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, one of the principal exponents of a growing school of German-​led scholarship focusing on what it called geopolitics, put it crudely: frontiers were places where indigenous peoples were being pushed aside by white settlers. This settlement driven argument explained to some extent the expansion of Russian empire in Asia, after the emancipation of the serfs and the shift in Russian state policy toward settlement in the East, as Paul Werth explains in Chapter 6 of this volume.13 But even there it only partly captured the nature of the Russian imperial frontier experience in Asia, and did not account for that experience anywhere else on the continent. “White” settlers did not flock into East, South, Southeast, or Southwest Asia in displacing numbers, nor was there much “free land” to occupy. Yet the “expanding frontier” of “progress” and “civilization” became, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the most familiar perception of how and why empires were reordering Asia. Why? The spirit of the times was an important driver, along with the correlation of forces and the state of international relations. Over the course of the century, European-​based Great Powers became far stronger, economically and militarily, than the established Asian-​based empires with which they had long been engaged. This influenced the evolution of ideas about civilization and development which, over time, fostered a sense of hierarchy, or superiority, that had hitherto not been significant. And despite the success of the settlement of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the states system in Europe itself remained volatile, adversarial, fractious. The so-​called Concert of Europe broke down with the Crimean War in 1854, when for the first time since 1815 European Great Powers fought each other. By the second half of the century European polities were developing both the capacity and the will to reorder the entire world. And despite much argument to the contrary on behalf of nationalism and the nation-​state, the order they sought to rework, their states system, remained very much dominated, in form and substance, by empire. European ideas, ambitions, agendas, techniques, and methods were projected across the wider mega-​continent, where they combined with two striking features: demographically and culturally, the long-​established polities of Asia were too deeply entrenched to push aside or overwhelm, as was being done in North America; but technologically, politically, and organizationally, they were less and less able to cope with increasing European-​driven ambitions.14 One stark outcome from this blend was to entangle European rivalries and concerns with Asian-​based contentions and confrontations, in what a later generation would call linkage. This was most palpable in relations between Great Power empires, and most apparent at the interface where their projects clashed: the imperial frontier.

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One of the most determined architects of empire in Asia presented, in 1907, a Romanes Lecture at Oxford University which addressed the subject “Frontiers.” George Nathaniel Curzon was well qualified to deliver such a lecture. He had just spent seven years as viceroy of India—​an appointment for which he prepared by traveling more extensively across Asia, through Russia, then from Persia to Japan, than any other senior European statesman of the time, and publishing several weighty and widely read descriptions of the places, peoples, and politics he encountered; and an appointment during which he personally engineered more substantial change in British arrangements for the management of India’s frontiers (as we discuss below) than any other holder of the office. Curzon was driven, self-​confident to the point of arrogance, dedicated to the British imperial project, and convinced the British were uniquely suited to empire and ascendancy, but he was also a strategic thinker and close analyst of international relations. His lecture captured some of the more powerful themes that preoccupied the late-​nineteenth-​century experience of empire in Asia, and some of the more pressing concerns of the early twentieth: Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations. Nor is this surprising. Just as the protection of the home is the most vital care of the private citizen, so the integrity of her borders is the condition of existence of the State. But with the rapid growth of population and the economic need for fresh outlets, expansion has, in the case of the Great Powers, become an even more pressing necessity. As the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up, and every Frontier is defined, the problem will assume a different form. The older and more powerful nations will still dispute about their Frontiers with each other; they will still encroach upon and annex the territories of their weaker neighbours. Frontier wars will not, in the nature of things, disappear. But the scramble for new lands, or for the heritage of decaying States, will become less acute as there is less territory to be absorbed and less chance of doing it with impunity, or as the feebler units are either neutralized, or divided, or fall within the undisputed Protectorate of a stronger Power. We are at present passing through a transitional phase, of which less disturbed conditions shall be the sequel, falling more and more within the ordered domain of International Law.15 It is important to note that Curzon indiscriminately conflated frontier, border, and boundary. But he also nicely framed the problem we confront, which we can do by

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pursuing four of his points, either stated or inferred—​as understood, and acted upon, by agents of empire at the time. First, there was the growing sense that the world was running out of territory too sparsely populated, or weakly governed, to be reordered. This was entangled with the common tendency to misappropriate Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the natural world, the struggle for the survival of the fittest, to the political arena—​expressed as the sense that there were three types of polities contending for their place in the sun, and that this contention drove international relations: the vibrant and rising, the stagnant, and the weak and decaying. Second, there was the sense that the nature of this contention was changing, that “modern” Great Powers were imposing more efficient, more rational, and more effective norms, methods, and standards on the widening system of states—​often conflating the terms Western, European, and modern, for this process.16 Third, there was the view that this advance of “modern” states represented an advance of “civilization” itself, of Enlightenment shaped ideas and practices regarding how to organize, govern, and administer lands and peoples, states and societies—​and that this was rolling back, or overcoming, “barbarism,” or “savagery,” or “primitive” or “stagnant” societies, cultures, peoples. Finally, there was the common belief that this all amounted to a “civilizing mission,” a historic challenge, even duty, to spread the light and benefits of progress and modernity to “stagnant” regions and peoples of the world—​ often buttressed by the view that this mission would itself invigorate and strengthen the imperial project carrying it out, something Curzon certainly espoused.17 These contemporary perceptions became stronger as the “Great Divergence” in the correlation of forces between European-​based Great Powers and the rest of the world became pronounced, from the middle of the nineteenth century. The impact on Asia was conditioned by four crucial factors. First, a long-​standing states system dominated by empires was already deeply entrenched across the wider region. Second, this system had been engaged with European political, economic, intellectual, and other forces for a very long time. Third, the cultures and societies administered therein were complex, sophisticated, and deeply rooted. Finally, there was the sheer size of the continental arena, the “tyranny of distance.” The contemporary perception that “modern” capabilities again made it possible for a great enough power to dominate the mega-​continent once spanned by the Mongol project—​and that such domination would bestow systemic hegemony on the empire in question—​became the most significant rebuttal to another widespread argument of the time: Great Power ascendancy was secured by dominating the world’s “Great Waters.” Each thesis had a contemporary intellectual champion. In 1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the United States Naval War College and lecturer in history, published The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–​1783, in which he argued that the British Empire became the most powerful state in the world because British seapower imposed and maintained command of the sea, allowing the British to use seapower to dominate world trade and build a true global economic order. His arguments resonated with many at the time—​as Donna Brunero discusses in Chapter 8 of this 146

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volume—​apparently reinforced by British success in expanding maritime empire across Asia. In 1904 Halford Mackinder published “The Geographical Pivot of History” in The Geographical Journal, house organ of the Royal Geographical Society. Mackinder argued that the mega-​continent formed by the connected land masses of Europe, Asia, and Africa formed the World Island, that ascendancy in this space meant global ascendancy, and that the key to dominating the World Island was to command the Heartland. He defined the Heartland as the mega-​region that very nearly encompassed the Mongol Empire at its apogee, stretching from Eastern Europe across Central and Northern Asia—​this of course, by that time, amounted more or less to the territorial Russian Empire. Mackinder also summarized contemporary ideas and expanded their range. The wider debate expressed by Mahan and Mackinder, influenced by the perceptions suggested by Turner, and the themes identified by Curzon,18 can frame, for us, the usefulness of studying the nineteenth-​century imperial frontier in Asia—​and suggest a closer focus by which to do so. European-​based projects of empire sought to reorder the world, to create a global system of geopolitics and political economy. In Asia, this meant working within the many complications we identified, most notably the presence of long established but unstable polities striving to cope with unprecedented pressures and changes. The tensions this produced emerged most clearly on the imperial frontier. They revolved around the concept that brings us sharply into focus: the notion of, the complications posed by, “empty space.”

The Imperial Frontier and the Asian States System By the second half of the nineteenth century, the established Asian-​based “Great Power” empires, Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Qing, shared one crucial problem: they were being existentially challenged by European-​based power. The Mughal, indeed, were subsumed. They were displaced by the British Raj, created in 1858 when the British government disbanded the English East India Company (EIC) and established a Government of India to govern its territories directly, answering through the India Office, a department of the British government, to the British Crown. This expressed an established fact: British power was paramount in South Asia. But the British took pains to act in many ways that indicated they saw themselves as assuming the mantle of Mughal imperium, not destroying it: governing both directly and indirectly, through layers and hierarchies, differentiating between interests, peoples, and regions, maintaining alliances, assuming obligations, adopting inherited positions and challenges. Two of the most troubling emanated from the wider region. The so-​called Eastern Question became pressing when in 1854 it provoked war, pitting the Russian Empire against the British, French, and Ottoman Empires. The question was understood to mean the problem of what would happen to the European states system if the Ottoman Empire could no longer govern its territories and peoples; now it directly connected British concerns about the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean with Indian concerns about the Middle East 147

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and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, it became increasingly obvious that the Qing Empire, which in the previous century reordered vast regions of Inner Asia by flexing impressive military and administrative muscles, now struggled to cope with growing internal and external pressures. Agents of empire were concluding, by mid-​century, that the huge region from the Bosphorus to the Mongolian heartland was not governed by entities that could cope with the challenges, or meet the expectations, of their expanding “modern” Great Power state system, with its global vision. There appeared to be a vast arc of political and military “instability.”19 The crux of the matter was always clear: the viability of the state. If an existing state could maintain enough control of its peoples and territory to protect both from invasion, prevent its peoples from invading, harassing, or subverting others, and protect and promote wider commerce and movement—​if it satisfied general norms—​then it could be accepted. But norms changed. Drastically. The real trigger was Russian territorial expansion, the project of Russian empire—​ because the uniqueness of the one now made the other decisive. Geography, history, and grand strategy combined to persuade Russian agents of empire that their core territories faced what they saw as an existential challenge which no other great power confronted: either physically dominate the territories around them or else suffer constant incursion and harassment at best, invasion and disaster at worst. By the mid-​nineteenth century this perception focused eastward: ranging from long-​ established expansion across the northern forest lands into newer projections, south into the Caucasus and southeast into the Kazakh steppe-​lands. Russia was a cornerstone Concert of Europe Great Power after 1815, well placed to pursue the power politics of that state system, having territorially expanded deep into Eastern and Northern Europe. But to the east, source of the great Mongol invasion so many centuries earlier, there were few naturally or militarily defensible features to buffer between Russian governed and settled “heartlands” and often violent interaction with steppe or mountain dwelling peoples, governed by weak regimes or statelets, if at all. The common Russian argument was the gravitational pull: we need to dominate the next region in order to secure the one we already govern. But the rest of the world increasingly saw this as a rationale for limitless ambition. The territorial boundaries of the Russian state, generally driven forward by military force, expanded deep into the Caucasus, and Central Asia.20 That provoked reactions from Great Powers, from regional powers, and in Russia itself. Two Russian reactions served, in retrospect, to define the broadest Russian agendas of empire in Asia—​which in turn revealed the wider role of the imperial frontier. One came from a statesman trying to reorder the world, the other from a historian trying to explain why this must be done. Both focused on concepts of Russia’s supposedly unique situation and mission, problems of expanding “civilization” in Asia, and difficulties posed by geopolitically “empty space.” On December 3, 1864, Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov sent out a circular memorandum to Russian diplomats serving abroad, to provide talking points 148

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for Russian representatives to explain another military campaign to pursue territorial expansion in Asia. The result of long discussions involving most leading officials in the Russian government, the memorandum served notice that Russian military force was being used to alter the geopolitics of the Central Asian region, specifically by subduing the dynastic states, referred to as khanates, of Khokand, Khiva, and Bukhara. The objective was to replace unstable frontiers with stable, even fixed borders. To put an end to chronic low intensity conflict, punctuated by frequent violent raids by nomadic forces into Russian territory, which often carried off large numbers of Russians then sold in the slave markets of the region, the Russian Empire would “establish a natural mountain border of the Russian Empire in the south, which is regarded as a frontier between the settled population and nomadic tribes, by the incorporation of Khokand in it.” War Minister Dimitry Miliutin outlined one key rationale: leverage. Further trouble with the British over European affairs could be usefully influenced by dominating Central Asia, “for it would bring us to the northern borders of India and make easy our access to that country. By ruling in Khokand, we can constantly threaten England’s East Indian possession.” Gorchakov spelt out the other: “promoting the interests of humanity and civilization.”21 Gorchakov’s rationale spelt out what the Russian statesman insisted was now “the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar position.” Citing the United States, France in Algeria, Holland in her Colonies, and “England in India,” Gorchakov argued that “all have been irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march, where the greatest difficulty is to know when to stop.” That march described the “position of Russia in Central Asia,” which was “that of all civilized states which are brought into contact with half-​savage nomad populations, possessing no fixed social organization.” Gorchakov outlined what was ostensibly a Russian consensus about the imperial frontier, and did not mince his words: In such cases it always happens that the more civilized State is found, in the interest of the security of its frontier and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whom their turbulent and unsettled character make most undesirable neighbours. First, there are raids and acts of pillage to be put down. To put a stop to them, the tribes on the frontier have to be reduced to a state of more or less perfect submission. This result once attained, these tribes take to more peaceful habits, but are in their turn exposed to the attacks of the more distant tribes. The state is bound to defend them against these depredations, and to punish those who commit them. Hence the necessity of distant, costly, and periodically recurring expeditions against an enemy whom his social organization makes it impossible to seize. If, the robbers 149

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once punished, the expedition is withdrawn, the lesson is soon forgotten; its withdrawal is put down to weakness. It is a peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force; the moral force of reason and of the interests of civilization has as yet no hold upon them. The work has then always to be done over again from the beginning. In order to put a stop to this state of permanent disorder, fortified posts are established in the midst of these hostile tribes, and an influence is brought to bear upon them which reduces them by degrees to a state of more or less forced submission. But soon beyond this second line other still more distant tribes come in their turn to threaten the same dangers and necessitate the same measures of repression. The State thus finds itself forced to choose one of two alternatives, either to give up this endless labour and abandon its frontier to perpetual disturbance, rendering all prosperity, all security, all civilization an impossibility, or, on the other hand, to plunge deeper and deeper into barbarous countries, where the difficulties and expenses increase with every step in advance. The message was clear: to promote the advance of “civilization” in Asia, Russia found that it was required to expand its territorial control until it reached positions from whence it could maintain the physical security of its outermost regions, by ensuring they were bordered by states willing and able to enforce norms and intercourse the Russian Empire found acceptable. Physical security required two things: fortified frontier lines “should be united by fortified points, so that all our posts should be in a position of mutual support, leaving no gap through which the nomad tribes might make with impunity their inroads and depredations”; and these fortified frontier lines should also be “situated in a country fertile enough, not only to insure their supplies, but also to facilitate the regular colonization, which alone can prepare a future of stability and prosperity for the occupied country, by gaining over the neighbouring populations to civilized life.” This policy was the product of compromise, between those who wanted the Russian Empire to expand a great deal more and those who feared it would badly overstretch itself by doing so. Gorchakov sought to emphasize that compromise by focusing on what he saw as the key point: “It was urgent to lay down this line [fortified frontier posts] definitively, so as to escape the danger of being carried away, as is almost inevitable, by a series of repressive measures and reprisals, into an unlimited extension of territory.” The policy was to determine not how far the Russian Empire should expand the territory it administered and settled, but rather to establish where, in Central Asia, it should stop.22 150

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It is easy to depict this memorandum as defensive spin, presented to justify imperial expansion by brute force by situating it within wider practice at the time. The memorandum encouraged this, by claiming that the Russian Empire sought to overcome the dilemma of being forced to choose between accepting constant violent instability and attacks on its Asian frontiers or walking “the undefined path of conquest and annexation which has given to England the Empire of India, by attempting the subjugation, by armed force, one after another, of the small independent States whose habits of pillage and turbulence, and whose perpetual revolts leave their neighbours neither peace nor repose.” That this was more than mere sanctimony is underlined by the influence of ideas most famously expressed by the most widely read Russian historian of the era, Sergei Soloviev. From 1851 until his death in 1879 Soloviev published twenty-​nine volumes of his epic History of Russia from the Earliest Times. Soloviev pulled the numerous strands of Russian history together into a great master narrative that explained why Russia had predictably evolved into a centralized and autocratic state, why it was an integral part of European history but yet also a special, superior, and distinct product of that history, and why it had a special destiny, as the outpost of Christian civilization in Asia, to expand that civilization. The answers were rooted deep in Russia’s past, and revolved around the friction between the settled agriculture of the European steppes and the nomadic horsemen from Asia who so fundamentally disrupted those steppe-​lands. Just as this European heartland had to be “cleansed” from the “domination of the Asiatics,” the process had to move east, across the great Central Asian grasslands, in order to enable “their perceptual transformation into a native Russian frontier of advancing colonization.”23 Such arguments both fueled Russian ambitions and underpinned claims Gorchakov made in his memorandum. Their resemblance to the argument Lattimore later made about Inner Asian frontiers and empire is obvious, and the imperial frontier was indeed the whole point of Gorchakov’s outline. The foreign minister insisted that Russia seek a viable, indeed permanent, Central Asian imperial frontier. Based on bitter experience, that frontier could not be established along lines which made neighbors out of nomadic peoples who could not be suppressed or contained, but only along lines that adjoined “agricultural and commercial populations attached to the soil, and possessing a more advanced social organization”—​because only such neighbors offered a realistic possibility of “entering into relations.” The conclusion was blunt: “Consequently, our frontier line ought to swallow up the former, and stop short at the limit of the latter.” This Russian policy promised to engineer lasting geopolitical change on a scale large enough to affect the states systems of the whole mega-​continent. For many centuries the Kazakh steppe-​lands and the arid deserts just below them constituted a political and power zone that the great projects of empire which gradually surrounded it—​Persian, Mughal, British, Russian, and Chinese—​found beyond their military and political reach. This gave these empires breathing room to pursue their own projects without having to worry about more than low intensity conflict with the peoples and rulers in this region.24 But this was no longer the case. 151

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Despite their impressive westward expansion in the previous century, the Qing could no longer contain this new Russian determination to reorder the states and frontiers of this interior region. Indeed, they increasingly struggled to maintain their presence in adjoining or proximate space: confronting resistance and rebellion in Kashgar, barely retaining loose overlordship in Tibet, and being compelled to give way to Russian pressure in two significant concessions. In the Treaty of Peking, in 1860, the Qing ceded large territories north of the Amur River to demarcate what became a new imperial boundary with Russia in their northeast; in the Treaty of Tarbagatai, in 1864, Russian military advances compelled the Qing to cede territory from Xinjiang to establish a new frontier with what was now Russian-​controlled Kyrgyzstan. The Qing, buckling under simultaneous widespread challenges, failed to use local political and ethnic alliances to shape this demarcation, and had to accept Russian demands for topographical military criteria.25 Nor could the Persians pose any real threat to reorder the region. The Russians did. Gorchakov’s memorandum sought to justify a military advance well underway. The opening move came in 1861 with the seizure of the fortified town of Yengi Kurgan, just inside the Khokand side of the recognized border with Russian-​controlled territory, along the Syr Darya River. This was followed by an advance to establish a new border along the southern stretches of that river, to demarcate between the empire and Khokand. But this was just the prelude. The strategic advance followed in the summer of 1864, when Russian armies moved south and seized the centrally located town of Chimkent, which at least nominally belonged to Khokand. This put those armies in a position to advance against all three independent khanates in the region, allowing them to threaten the venerable Silk Road centers of Tashkent and Samarqand. It also prompted Gorchakov to make his compromise and issue his memorandum, because the Russian advances provoked the one imperial power strong enough to challenge this frontier project: the British, now paramount in India. The British reaction was so strong it dominated relations between the two empires for the next half century—​and during that same time span this strategic rivalry escalated to levels that made it central to reordering what became Global Asia. Multiple agents of empire played major roles in all this. British and Russian decision-​making communities in the metropolis, the two imperial governments, their political and military men on the spot in both regional governments and in the frontier zones themselves, established local governments, states, dynasties, regimes, clans, coalitions, and independent minded populations, nomadic and mountain dwelling—​all exercised agency in what the British, mainly after the fact, called the “Great Game.” Whatever the label, the objects of the game were always clear. First, which empire would control or dominate, by what arrangements, peoples, and territories lying between the Asian lands occupied and administered by the Russian and British Empires? Second, and as a result, which empire would become the dominant power in reordering Asia? Both set this rivalry in motion by starting to expand, toward each other, beyond the Asian territories they took control of before 1815. The Russians moved, generally south, beyond their established frontier fortification lines, the Sibirskaia ukreplionnaia liniia, which they had used to demarcate 152

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a border between their empire and the Kazakh steppe-​lands; the British moved, generally northwest, from the Ganges River valley toward what are now Pakistan and Kashmir, forging “British India.” The stakes were also clear: the security of British paramountcy in India, Russian security east of the Urals, and the political, territorial, administrative, economic, and other arrangements by which the peoples of Central Asia would live, and relate to each other and the rest of the world.26 The main theme by which the two great imperial powers sought to define and secure their own objectives was spelt out in the Gorchakov Memorandum: empty space—​geopolitical empty space. The particular issue on which this came to settle was the imperial frontier—​where and how would it be defined, and to what ends. But the challenge that united both these problems was also clear: how to rework the long existing system of local states and replace it by another that satisfied British and Russian objectives. That problem was caught up from the start in four more: British nervousness about their position in India; the fact the Russians were more interested, with more at stake, in all of this than were the British; the determination by both imperial powers to link this rivalry to wider geopolitical problems; and the multiple challenges of managing relations with, let alone trying to govern or administer, the many and fractious peoples of the region, not least given the forbidding terrain and topography involved. British worries about Russian threats to their position in India went back to the late eighteenth century. But our problem really began to take shape in 1834, when the independent Sikh kingdom ruled by Ranjit Singh annexed the mountain town of Peshawar. Singh’s militarily powerful kingdom dominated the region we may call northwestern India for the first half of the nineteenth century, but by absorbing Peshawar it rewrote the region’s age-​old strategic geography. As Holdich noted in the passage that began this chapter, nature placed the most fertile region on the subcontinent, the verdant grain fields of the Punjab, right next to some of the most daunting high mountain country on the planet—​inhabited by some of its most assertive peoples. The mightiest artery in this “land of the five rivers” was the great Indus River, rising in the Tibetan Himalayas, then flowing for 3,200 kilometers southeast, right through the Punjab, to the Arabian Sea.27 This posed a stark military problem: where should the Punjab—​and thus greater India—​be defended against invasion through the mountain ranges from the northwest? This was also a very familiar problem. No less a conqueror than Alexander the Great marched armies eastward through the greatest of the mountain gaps that debouched into the Indus valley, the Khyber Pass. More recent successful invasions or incursions through the same route included Chinggis Khan in 1221; Tīmūr in 1398; Bābur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, in 1526; Nadir Shah, founder of the Persian Afsharid dynasty, in 1739; and repeated raids mounted from 1748 to 1756 by Ahmad Shah Durrani.28 They all came through the same territory, but Durrani put new wine into the old bottle by building the state that came to dominate both the Sikh defense problem and our concern with the imperial frontier: Afghanistan. Defending the Punjab and India along the banks of the Indus itself meant giving up the fertile valley lands between it and the mountain ranges to the northwest. But defending 153

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them by establishing positions in that mountain country was more complicated than just selecting the best military terrain. By annexing Peshawar, the Sikhs complicated already difficult relationships. The Afghan state dominated by the Durrani tribal network, governed by an Emir based in Kabul, was born volatile and remained so. Its core territory became a triangle formed by the ancient towns of Herat to the west, Kandahar to the south, and Kabul in the northeast. Whoever claimed authority in Kabul usually struggled to exercise it anywhere else, including the other major towns. But this new Afghanistan claimed, at one time or another, authority, justified by dynastic and lineage connections, military occupation, or tax collection and land use, over territory ranging from deep inside the Central Asian khanates north of the Amu Darya River, well into Persian territory west of Herat, and east of the Indus, to include parts of the Punjab and Baluchistan. This pitted the emirate into chronic violent conflict with Persia, the khanates, and the Sikhs. While that was complicated enough, Durrani Afghanistan saw itself and behaved as an empire, displaying familiar characteristics: a state trying to exercise political authority over a range of different peoples, both divided and entangled by ancient lineages and loyalties, ethnic connections, religion, and above all personal and blood relationships. Durrani rule was transformed internally when one of its own powerful clan networks, the Barakzai, seized power in Kabul and established their own dynasty.29 The pivotal community however was the larger loose confederation of tribal, clan, and family networks from which the Durrani came: the Pathan, or Pushtun-​ speaking peoples. They formed a plurality of the population of the Afghan emirate, but could never be relied on to respect its authority. Most lived in the mountain ranges that formed borderlands between the governing power in Kabul and that in the Indus valley. They were an intensely tribal people defined by very local loyalties, both connected and divided by multiple networks of clan relationships. The Afghan state could not function effectively against their opposition, but their position inside these mountain borderlands, ranging from the Bolan Pass in the south to Chitral in the north, put them squarely between whoever defended the Indus valley and whoever threatened it. This made their behavior a strategic priority to both. The Pushtun borderland peoples could be swayed by wider appeals to ties of blood or religion; but as was frequently the case with peoples living in remote rough country that enabled them to live beyond effective higher authority, their support could never be assumed. Every adult male Pushtun was politically and militarily involved, but few looked much beyond their own immediate blood family network, in the particular valley in which they lived or around which they moved, if they were nomadic or ranging animals. Building any larger alliance among them, to pursue any wider higher purpose, was a challenge that required daily maintenance. And it was complicated by age-​old customs which virtually defined Pushtun life: blood feuding, which could last for generations; raiding valley lands in search of plunder; exacting some sort of toll for economic passage through their territory, often violently; and resisting incursion, political or military. They could not really be governed from afar, but could, from the small to the large scale, be contained, co-​opted, or divided.30 The Afghan emirate strove 154

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always to secure their loyalties, and through them to project claims beyond the mountain ranges into India. Naturally it upheld the Pushtun view that Peshawar, the citadel that allowed whoever held it to dominate the Khyber Pass, was their principal town; the Durrani made it their winter capital. But Peshawar was both the key to guarding India and the jumping off point for invading Afghanistan, which explains why Ranjit Singh finally annexed it—​this was the only way to secure the systematic military expansion he carried out to absorb the valley lands west of the Indus. This advanced the military frontier his Sikh kingdom sought to maintain to the position Holdich described: “the frontier of those independent tribes who lie between us and Afghanistan,” the most forward position from which “the cultivation” could still be defended, leaving the rocks and hills to the Pushtun. But it also aggravated irredentism between the Afghan emirate and the Sikh kingdom, by doing nothing more than moving the age-​old problem further west: to garrison an Indus frontier, to defend against the constant menace of Pushtun incursions and the recurring threat of invasion by a larger power, either from or through Afghanistan.31 The British willfully inherited this dilemma when, from 1828 onward, they erratically argued themselves into three conclusions: Russia posed a threat to their ascendancy in India which they must contain as far northwest as possible; Afghanistan was crucial to this objective, so its status must be determined; and British administration should push northwest, beyond the Indus. As long as the privatized British project of empire in India remained well to the east in Bengal, and the Russian project remained north of the Kazakh steppes, neither empire saw the other as imminent danger to their agendas in Asia.32 But as Russian military occupation and formal administration moved south, while the British likewise moved northwest, each came to see their own expansion as necessary or unavoidable, but the other as unnecessary and dangerous. British “men on the spot” drew the same conclusions as their Russian counterparts, acted for the same reasons, and were not overruled for the same reasons: time and again, despite contention at home, expansion was accepted as necessary in order to secure territory already administered. It is important to note the asymmetry here. Nothing but distance and the Urals stood between the metropolitan core of the Russian Empire and this Asian space it sought to reorder, whereas the British Empire expanded across salt water, and not even disaster in Asia could directly threaten the very survival of an independent United Kingdom in the British Isles. But while the Russians saw this keenly, and British agents of empire understood they were building fundamentally a maritime global project, the nature of that project made those same agents increasingly convinced, as the British position in South Asia expanded, that British power in India was a vital component of global British power. It took time for such views to mature; nor, at any time, were they ever undisputed. But mature they did, driven by the growing sense that the most vital interest of the British Empire was the health and vibrancy of the truly global network of political economy it led the way in forging. That rested on the ability to project British power across the world’s waterways. Such projection rested on a growing array of territories connected by seapower, administered by methods ranging from direct colonial rule, answering to 155

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London, to protection by treaty arrangement with a power that remained sovereign. The more important India became to the British Empire, the more British agents worried about whether Russia could, or would, threaten the British position there—​either as an end in itself or to complicate British interests elsewhere.33 As the British and Russian Empires became the strongest Great Powers on the mega-​ continent after 1815, both developed the tendency to see European and Asian international problems as challenges that could no longer be separated. Their own rivalry drove that tendency, but it was heavily entangled with the weakening positions of other powers. Two in particular, the Persian and Ottoman Empires, found themselves in front of periodic Russian pressure—​which increasingly provoked British concerns about threats to India. While there were as many different scenarios as concerns and critics, the most consistent worries were clear: weak states and fading powers whose territory provided an overland axis of advance toward India might give Russia the chance to pursue ambitions there which the British, forced to rely on much longer maritime routes, could struggle to contain. It took time for this rivalry, and these concerns, to dominate British and Russian strategic foreign policies. Distractions elsewhere, the sheer distances involved, difficulties of terrain, plus other constraints and demands on military power tempered the growth of the rivalry, as did some false starts. But by the late 1830s, each began not only to worry about each other but also to act on the ground.34 The collision course was launched by a British decision to try to head off Russian expansion by using the Indus River to project commercial and political influence deep into Central Asia, coinciding with a Russian decision to interrupt British penetration into that region by trying to exert influence in Persia and Afghanistan. These early probes led both into bloody false starts. The British helped Afghanistan defend Herat against Persian invasion, but then invaded the country themselves in 1839—​ ostensibly to support a proxy in a succession dispute, but in fact to prevent the country from drifting into a Russian orbit. But the Russian agents sent to foment trouble in Herat and Kabul had already been withdrawn. Worse, that same year a Russian army advanced south from the imperial base at Orenburg to attack the khanate of Khiva, to replace its unfriendly ruler with a more compliant proxy. But this third Russian attack on Khiva, which moved out in November, was shattered by ferocious winter weather and grim terrain, never made it to Khiva, and turned back in disarray in late January 1840. This left the British occupying force in Kabul entangled in the middle of the succession dispute, surrounded by a now enraged hostile population, with Russian power bogged down far to the north. Monumental political and military incompetence on the ground then undid the Army of the Indus, when increasingly violent Afghan pressure prompted it to retreat in January 1842—​a retreat so badly bungled the force was wiped out, a disaster so traumatic it influenced British policy toward Afghanistan for the next century. Military reprisals were duly exacted. But in October 1842 British Indian military forces retreated back across the Khyber Pass and Dost Mohammad Khan, the Emir the British invaded to topple in the first place, regained power in Kabul.35 The reason these failures were false starts, however, is 156

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that both empires believed they had initiated a policy they must now pursue. Both now found themselves entangled in a messy regional problem: how should each relate to the existing states between their territories, and how would this affect their larger imperial rivalry? The British problem was more pressing. They first tried to work with Dost Mohammed, but his price was the return of Peshawar. This forced the British to choose between having the Sikh or the Afghan state as an ally, and they chose the former. But Ranjit Singh died in 1839 and relations with his weak successors deteriorated quickly. This plus their Afghan fiasco pushed British decision-​makers, especially in India, toward “defensive expansion,” pressing beyond the Indus because they increasingly saw this as the only safe way to secure their own growing interests. That drew them, physically and politically, into reordering the whole area. One British Indian army conquered and annexed the southern state of Sindh in 1843, bringing the mouth of the Indus under imperial control. Another fought two wars with the Sikhs, in 1845–​46, and 1848–​49; this ended the Sikh “Empire”, as the Punjab was annexed into British-​ controlled India and its Sikh army co-​opted. This dramatically expanded the territory now under effective British administration, but was a predictable outcome from British involvement in regional geopolitics. Once the British concluded that the weaker but volatile states between their Indian territories and Central Asia could not be relied on to police themselves and also withstand Russian pressure, they saw little alternative but the more direct involvement that led quickly to so much expansion. Annexing the Punjab made the British the principal in the age-​old problem: how to defend India along its volatile and rugged Northwest Frontier borderlands. British military authorities on the spot recognized this by augmenting existing locally raised units into the Transfrontier Brigade, in 1849. Then in 1851 they reorganized these local units as the Punjab Irregular Force, whose mission was to patrol and police the new borderlands, answering directly to the new British civil authority in the Punjab, which assumed responsibility for administering the borderlands.36 The British power in India thus formally took responsibility for defining, and defending, an inheritance:  the Indian imperial frontier. The combination was complete: this new British imperial frontier now had to manage the Russian menace over the horizon, the Afghan state on the other side of the passes, and “the peoples who would not be governed” in the mountain borderlands between Kabul and the Indus valley. Before these new responsibilities could really be consolidated, the eruptions of the 1850s escalated the Great Game into that struggle for wider ascendancy that shaped the imperial frontier. The combination was the key. The Crimean War turned rivalry into hostility, aggravating everything. The Russians, smarting from defeat, became more antagonistic toward and suspicious of the British, sought to free themselves from the constraints imposed on them by the peace treaty of 1856, and increasingly saw expansion and activity in Asia as a prime strategy by which to do so. The already lively British debate over how to handle the Russians in Asia became livelier still. It cut across political lines at home and in India, becoming a strategic and political 157

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football. Two Asian challenges then reoriented this British debate: a second war with China, and the so-​called Indian Mutiny. The French and British defeated Qing forces and imposed greater diplomatic and economic intercourse on the Qing Empire. This increased the sense of rivalry and collision in Asia between the British and Russian Empires, feeding also the tendency to see connections between areas of contention. But the impact of the “Mutiny” was fundamental. The sense that British dominance of India was almost lost, resting precariously on a delicate and volatile array of working partnerships spanning the entire subcontinent, ranging from the top to the bottom of the social pyramids, produced lasting changes in British approaches to empire in India. This affected all aspects of that project, signaled most dramatically by terminating the EIC and creating the Raj. British agents now saw their policy to present the Raj as the legitimate and natural inheritor of the Mughal imperium as a fragile flower that required constant attention. This had a massive direct effect on perceptions of how to manage connections between internal security and India’s relationships with the rest of the world—​and that fundamentally influenced British approaches, at all levels, to the problems of the imperial frontier.37 To be sure, many responsible British agents of empire resisted the argument there was cause for alarm, fairly enough. Dost Mohammed signed a treaty of alliance with the British in 1855, then honored that treaty by rejecting Russian and Afghan appeals to exploit the “Mutiny” by retaking Peshawar. He also not only rebuffed Russian overtures but sought British help to pursue territorial claims north of the Amu Darya River. But the subsequent Russian political and military campaign to reorder Central Asia forced British decision-​makers, at home and in India, to confront now greater concerns: fears that Russian supported or inspired subversion or harassment, let alone outright invasion through Afghanistan or Persia, might trigger another internal political explosion in India, one that might shatter the very foundations of British paramountcy. That connection now defined British approaches to the imperial frontier.38 Into the twentieth century, the British and Russian Empires played their Great Game by trying to define an imperial frontier that would preserve their own position, constrain their rival, yet also enable both to build a new, and stable, regional states system. There were nearly as many different agendas and positions as there were agents, at home and in the region. But there was also a large degree of mirror imaging, some overlap, and even common interests. Recurring diplomatic contentions, punctuated by bouts of sabre rattling, produced several border disputes across most of the region; several protracted bouts of negotiations; agreements that led to demarcations and delineations; sustained efforts by both empires to, literally, walk and map the ground, to increase their working understanding of the region and peoples they sought to reorder; regional wars; and two close calls that nearly produced another British-​Russian war. The outcomes were striking: a workable but intractably “imperial” frontier, produced by a rivalry that resolved nothing, on any level, and was itself subsumed by wider linkages of geopolitics that drove it so heavily in the first place. We will pull this together by revisiting the discourse of geopolitical “empty space”—​as expressed so graphically in the Gorchakov 158

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Memorandum, and contested, at the time, through the concepts of the natural, the scientific, and the administrative frontier. To do this, we need to remember two points: there was never either a singular “British” or “Russian” position, policy, strategy, or agenda on any of these problems, at any time; and while it varied in degree, impact, and manner of expression, “local agency” always remained front and center to our problem. That latter point was best illustrated by a striking contrast: between the failure of the Central Asian khanates to maintain effective sovereign independence as states, and the success of the Emirate of Afghanistan in doing just that. Gorchakov’s assurances notwithstanding, by 1873 Russian military advances transformed Khokand and Bukhara into vassal states, taking Tashkent in 1865, Samarqand in 1868, and culminating in the conquest of Khiva in 1873. Four things combined to enable this expansion: the khanates could not cooperate against this greater common threat, indeed they kept fighting each other; the emirs could not prevent their peoples from violently raiding Russian territories, which gifted the Russians pretexts for military retaliation; successive Russian military commanders in the region tended to take matters into their own hands and exceed restrictions placed on them by home authority; advisers and ministers around the Tsar conducted a perpetual debate about imperial policy, aggravated by British protests. Russian-​controlled territory inched measurably closer to British India, justified by the Gorchakov argument that order must be imposed on this politically “empty space.”39 That left only two effectively independent regional states in between. One was dramatic but short-​lived. Yakub Beg, a senior military commander in Khokand, took advantage of regional confusion to seize control, in 1865, of Kashgar, an area nominally under Qing control but too remote to be effectively dominated by the Qing or the Russians, or supported by the British. Beg maneuvered between these larger powers to maintain harsh but effective rule for some years, but his mysterious death in 1877 enabled a Qing reconquest uncontested by the Russians or the British, preoccupied by now with other matters. Both remained content to regard the semblance of Qing control as “effective.”40 The other, far more significant independent regional state found itself framed squarely between Russian and British frontiers now pressing into territories it claimed for itself: Afghanistan. It is not exaggerating to say that the fate of Afghanistan became the crux of our problem of the imperial frontier. That was spelt out diplomatically in acrimonious rounds of negotiations between the British and Russian governments over what became the key issue to them both: the northern border of Afghanistan, which meant defining the frontier between it and the new Russian presence in Central Asia. Talks began in earnest in 1869. They produced an agreement in 1873 that ostensibly settled the question of the northern boundary of Afghanistan. But this turned out to be one of those agreements that meant different things to different parties, and also rested on incomplete knowledge of the situation on the ground. The issue was not simple but can be summarized: the status of the territories that straddled the Amu Darya, and the suitability of that river as a “natural frontier.” Three problems stood out. First, no one was sure where the source of the river lay. Second, along much of its length the river did not divide peoples, rather 159

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it served as an artery along which trade and other forms of movement took place. Third, an array of ambiguous relationships between the peoples living on either bank of the river, and the regional states, almost defied untangling. The 1873 agreement the imperial governments thought to have cleared the air suggested two things: that for a certain stretch the river would form the recognized boundary, with remaining territories both east and west of that stretch held over for future definition; and that the two Great Power empires now held each other responsible for how peoples and regimes on either side of this boundary behaved. For the Russians, this only confirmed the assertion they were imposing order in the khanates. But by acknowledging that Afghanistan’s sovereign territory bounded along the Amu Darya as the basis of its northern border, the Russians not only accepted the continued independence of the Afghan state, they also served notice they held the British responsible for how it behaved. This changed the problem, aggravating the ongoing political and strategic debates in both India and London, because it exposed the asymmetry: whereas the Russians were rightly confident they could control their new satellites and maintain their new imperial frontier, the British were now pledging themselves to police, as their imperial frontier, the conduct of a volatile independent state they did not control.41 This completed the equation: British concerns over their internal security position in India were now compounded not only by chronic violence along their new Northwest Frontier, entangled with the Pushtun peoples of the borderlands, but also by this new commitment to control an unstable state whose strategic northern border could not be reliably delineated along any “natural” line or axis. Given these conditions, it was not surprising that another eruption of trouble in Europe between these two Great Power empires brought their Asian imperial frontier problems to a new level. In 1871 French defeat at German hands shattered the balance of power in Europe, enabling the construction of the new German Empire and removing one major constraint on Russian policy. Subsequent cooperation between the new German and older Russian and Habsburg Empires seemed to remove another. When Balkan rebellions against Ottoman rule revived the Eastern Question in 1875, provoking political turmoil in Constantinople, a divided British government vacillated over how to respond to another Russian threat to Ottoman survival. But the outbreak of war between Russia and the Ottomans in 1877, formal Russian annexation of Khokand in 1876 in response to a rebellion there, stiff Ottoman military resistance, a public opinion backlash in the United Kingdom against Russian behavior, and some significant changes in Benjamin Disraeli’s British government produced a stronger response, in both Europe and Asia. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 once again contained Russian pressure on the Ottoman state. Disraeli engineered the appointment of Lord Lytton to the Viceroyalty of India in 1876, and the promotion of Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary in 1878. This shaped a leadership determined to prevent what they saw as Russian designs to shatter the British position in India, by applying enough military and political pressure on Afghanistan to either pull it away from British influence or co-​opt it as part of a direct invasion of India. There was some rationale to this. European war seemed close at hand in early 160

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1878, Russian statesmen and military officers spoke openly about putting pressure on British interests in one area in order to distract the British from another, and Russian military commanders in Central Asia drafted plans, and made preparations, to launch a three-​pronged advance toward British India. This persuaded Lytton, supported at first by the British government, to take steps to prevent Afghanistan from falling under Russian influence.42 His actions brought to a boiling point the protracted debate regarding how best to connect the problems of policing the Northwest Frontier, controlling Afghanistan, and keeping Russian pressure at bay. The debate can be summarized as between those who believed in a strategy of “Close Borders” and abstaining from military and political intervention beyond them, also called “Masterly Inactivity,” and those who supported the so-​called Forward Strategy. The Close Borders strategy focused on a diagnosis of Afghanistan plus an evaluation of internal security in India. Its exponents argued that the policy most likely to secure British paramountcy in India was to concentrate on the good government of India, on developing its economy, infrastructure, and society, on binding Indians to the Raj project. Defense should concentrate on internal and direct border security. The most influential champion of this strategy was Sir John Lawrence, one of the great figures of the British Raj. He went to India in 1829 as a servant of the EIC, then played such a prominent role in the Anglo-​Sikh Wars and subsequent successful British incorporation of the Punjab that he became its chief commissioner. From 1863 to 1869 he served as viceroy, lobbying for what became the protracted negotiations over the northern borders of Afghanistan. In 1867 he wrote an influential memorandum to explain why he believed the British should not interfere in Afghan succession politics or security problems. Lawrence argued the country was simply too poisonous to digest. The British were particularly hated and feared because of their 1839 invasion and subsequent interference, but any Power trying to conquer Afghanistan would suffer. Sheer facts of geography and distance, plus the deeply rooted Afghan tendency to unite against external invasion, meant the Russians could not overrun Afghanistan without bogging down in protracted conflict, at the end of long supply lines, against determined resistance. Provided the British left Afghanistan alone, they would very likely be asked to help evict any Russian invasion. Noninterference would also strengthen British demands for other Powers to leave Afghanistan alone. As for the danger of having to fight a Russian Army at the Northwest Frontier, borderland peoples were so hostile to all outside interference that if the British allowed the Russians to be the aggressor then surely “there is perhaps not one of these tribes who would not seek our aid against any invader . . . Which party would be best able, under such circumstances, to win them to its side; we, or the Russians?” Lawrence, who went on to become a member of the Council of India, actively opposed operations, military and political, beyond the recognized “administrative border” along the Northwest Frontier, calling for a strategic defensive.43 The opposing Forward Strategy rested on a different key premise: Russia was hostile. Russia sought to dominate Asia, British power in India stood in their way, so Russia would try to topple British power in India. Russia could overrun Afghanistan because it 161

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was weak and fractious, and from there it would be poised to invade India. With Afghan help, it could also use deeply embedded channels of Muslim intercourse and agitation to subvert the large Muslim minority in India, turning it into a fifth column. To protect India, the British must not only militarize their Northwest Frontier but also dominate Afghanistan, through political and if necessary military intervention. British Indian forces must meet any Russian invading force as far north of the Northwest Frontier as possible. The most celebrated exponent of this “Forward Strategy” was Henry Rawlinson, having made a great name for himself since receiving Connolly’s “Great Game” letter as a young political officer in 1840. By now Rawlinson was recognized as a leading Orientalist scholar, fellow of the Royal Society, member of Parliament, and in 1868 was appointed a member of the Council of India. In that capacity he wrote a trenchant rebuttal to Lawrence’s memorandum, arguing “interference in Afghanistan has now become a duty, and that any moderate outlay or responsibility we may incur in restoring order in Cabul [sic] will prove in the sequel to be true economy.” Rawlinson kept up the pressure, drawing on confidential intelligence reports to publish his 1875 tract England and Russia in the East, publicly and politically articulating the case for a strategic offensive that would make northern Afghanistan, not the Northwest Frontier, the rampart of India. Russian behavior played into the hands of such lobbying. One British agent on the spot put the point bluntly: “The optimists who believed in Prince Gortchakoff’s manifesto of 1864, excusing the capture of Chemkend as being absolutely necessary for the strategic requirements of the southern Russian frontier, will perhaps now perceive that the Russians do not consider that the expansion of their empire in Central Asia has yet reached its limit.” This climate enabled Lytton to present a fateful ultimatum to Sher Ali, emir of Afghanistan, in November 1878: accept a British diplomatic mission to Kabul, and cease and desist from ongoing discussions with Russian agents, or face the consequences.44 The result was the Second Anglo-​Afghan War, which in some ways resembled the first. The British suffered some military setbacks, bungled the politics of representation and succession in Kabul, bogged themselves down in a hostile country after the war scare in Europe subsided and Russian agents in Afghanistan withdrew, but then exerted enough military pressure to reach a workable agreement with a new Afghan emir, and withdrew on their own terms. But this time there were some crucial differences, stimulated by the more significant and proximate Russian menace. The most significant was the formal conclusion of a more binding British relationship with Afghanistan, spelt out in the memorandum by which the British recognized the government of the new emir on July 22, 1880: “since the British Government admits no right of interference by Foreign Powers within Afghanistan, and since both Russia and Persia are pledged to abstain from all interference with the affairs of Afghanistan, it is plain that Your Highness can have no political relations with any foreign Power except with the British Government.” This formally made Afghanistan a British satellite by giving the British a veto over its foreign relations, a point underlined by the British decision to retain control of the Khyber Pass. That made any future incursion into Afghanistan easier, any future 162

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Figure 5.1  Sketch of the countries between Hindustan and the Caspian Sea, 1879. (India Office Records) The British Library.

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incursion into India harder, but committed the British to permanent military garrison deep in the heart of the Pushtun mountain borderlands.45 That commitment unfolded in changing times (Figure 5.1). The costs of coping with Afghan military resistance and political hostility, plus the view that Lytton exceeded his brief, discredited the Forward Strategy, putting its champions on the back foot. This contributed to a change in government in the United Kingdom in April 1880. William Gladstone and the Liberals returned to office, committed to dropping the strategy. That all influenced the continuing debate over whether the security of India required the British to extend their imperial frontier much further to the north, to deny all approaches to India. Exponents called for occupying Kandahar at a minimum, some preferring the more ambitious policy of occupying the passes through the Hindu Kush mountain range—​a policy that would have required British-​controlled military forces to retain control of not only Kabul but the entire southeastern region of Afghanistan. The argument came to rest on relations with the new emir.46 That introduced one of the great personalities of the imperial frontier: Abdur Rahman Khan (ARK). In retrospect, it is clear that effective Afghan rule from Kabul did more for British security in India than intervening in periods of Afghan internal political upheaval. ARK was a grandson of Dost Mohammad, whose death in 1863 triggered this latest bout of succession rivalry that again entangled the British. Over time he fell out with his uncle Sher Ali, nominated by Dost Mohammad as his successor; in 1869 ARK fled into exile in Tashkent, where he placed himself under Russian protection. The Russians egged him on to intervene in the volatile Afghan situation in 1880, but when the British learned he was back in Afghanistan Lytton opened negotiations with him, hoping to strike a bargain that would enable the British to salvage at least the essentials from this latest intervention. The result was the July agreement that gave ARK assurances the British would provide him subsidies and armaments, and in case of unprovoked aggression against his realm military support if necessary, in return for accepting British direction in foreign policy. This allowed the British to withdraw from Kandahar back across the mountain borderlands, but only complicated their debate about the imperial frontier and how best to secure India in this new situation.47 The new factor in this debate was ARK and the British commitment to him. ARK emerged over time as the “Iron Emir,” a harsh but strong ruler who forged an effective central government over an effectively independent Afghanistan. He was no more able than anyone else to dominate the borderland Pushtuns. But he suppressed outright rebellions with great ruthlessness, and showed skill in leveraging local feelings to support his frontier policies—​and more skill in leveraging British assurances, Russian pressure, and the rivalry between the two to keep both at bay, to maintain the integrity of his state.48 The familiar factors in this debate were borderland violence along the Northwest Frontier, the arguments over how best to control it, and Russian behavior. The latter remained the greater menace. It provoked the second great war scare when Russian commanders on the spot triggered a chain of events by launching, from 164

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December 1880, a determined effort to occupy the last significant area in Central Asia which remained beyond their control. The Karakum Desert, the region between Khiva, northern Persia, and northwestern Afghanistan, was forbidding terrain. Life in and movement through it rested on oasis and river features. Its southern boundaries were undefined. It was inhabited by nomadic and semi-​settled Türkmen peoples who continued to live beyond the reach of any organized state, conducting regular slave raids in neighboring territories—​geopolitical “empty space.” A Russian army ended this in January 1881, by resolving the logistic problems of movement and supply through the desert, advancing to the principal town of Geok Tepe, storming it, then slaughtering its defenders and many inhabitants. The Russian commander was recalled, but his actions and the message they sent were not repudiated. The Russian Empire duly annexed what became the region of Türkmenistan, demarcated its boundary with Persia, then initiated a dispute with Afghanistan over that boundary.49 That dispute revolved around who would control the oasis settlements and riverine axes of advance that made it possible to control the region. Whoever did could use them to invade Afghanistan and advance on Herat; this would revive the threat of an advance on India that could outflank any defenses which might be established in the Hindu Kush passes. Russian military advances, reinforced by expanding their railway network into the region, finally provoked British protests when the Russians occupied the ancient oasis town of Merv in 1884. The two imperial governments agreed to jointly inspect, survey, and settle “once and for all” the boundary demarcation of the entire northwestern border of Afghanistan. This prompted the Russians to try to change facts on the ground as much as possible before this Boundary Commission could produce its agreement, then physically delineate it by placing markers on the ground. Combining delay and stalling in diplomacy, at home and on the spot, with military advance on the ground, the Russians attacked Afghan forces, in March 1885, and drove them away from the oasis town of Penjdeh, commanding the approaches to Herat. This provoked such a major crisis that even the Gladstone government prepared resolutely for war with the Russian Empire.50 War was avoided, and the British response was a factor, but what really made the Penjdeh Crisis a turning point in the whole story of the imperial frontier was the local principal on the spot: ARK. ARK, an experienced and wily soldier who learnt statecraft fast and well, did not overreact to the loss of a contested border outpost in his far northwest. He understood that a British-​Russian war would bring two imperial armies into Afghanistan to fight over it, whereas he could exploit the fact the British needed both to support him militarily, and to argue on his behalf diplomatically, in order to contain Russia without war. The two Great Powers may have high-​handedly decided they could define Afghanistan’s border themselves, but ARK’s measured but assertive policy pushed Afghan interests into the process—​and kept them there. For the rest of the century British efforts to define their imperial frontier amounted to the challenge to define Afghanistan’s borders, which they could not do without entanglement with ARK.51 Four major projects were pursued, all driven by the effort to connect, wherever possible, a “natural frontier” with 165

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a “scientific frontier.” The first concept was understood in traditional topographical terms: the effort, where possible, to use a river, lake, or mountain watershed as the basis for demarcating a formal boundary line. The second concept had two connotations. The first was the desire to draw on “modern” methods of systematic analytical research, investigation, and inquiry, to learn as much as possible about the lands, peoples, histories, relationships, cultures, customs, and practices of the territories involved, then collate, circulate, and apply this knowledge for practical purposes. The second was the direct military dimension we have already identified: to determine the optimal defense frontier, balancing considerations of terrain, cost, supply, movement, and maneuver, and positioning between threat and target. Military considerations were however prominent in all aspects of all four projects, which meant that military units and personnel played leading roles in all four. We have met the first project, predating the Penjdeh Crisis: the massive effort by the Survey of India, an agency launched by the EIC in 1767 then recast as a Department of the Government of India in 1858, to survey and map the entire subcontinent, using “modern” scientific and cartographic equipment and methods. This project expanded, from the 1860s, into areas such as the borderlands of the Northwest Frontier, and then Afghanistan itself, about which the British Indian Army and the Foreign Department of the Government of India knew too little and wanted to learn a great deal more. The 1883 expedition led by Major Holdich and the Baluchistan Survey Party was typical in three respects. First, for protection it piggybacked onto a military expedition, this one a punitive response to Pushtun incursions. Second, it combined cartography with ethnography and garden variety intelligence gathering on a wide range of issues. Finally, it relied almost entirely on Asian personnel, both military and nonmilitary, to operate at all. This included everyone from camp follower cargo carriers through sepoy riflemen to locally recruited guides, guards, and interpreters. Holdich and his engineer and political officer colleagues not only led such parties all over the Northwest Frontier, they also carried out the technical and intelligence work that grounded the other three major projects, produced by the British-​Russian antagonism that came to revolve around demarcating Afghanistan.52 A celebrated and significant addition to their work was provided by an ambitious program to recruit, train, and employ Asian personnel from borderland regions, to undertake covert reconnaissance missions into regions that became important to the Government of India but in which it was not safe or practical for Europeans to operate. These were the so-​called pundits. The program was launched by another survey officer, then Major Thomas Montgomerie, who recruited and sent pundit agents into Tibet. Then in 1867, after being posted to Peshawar, Montgomerie expanded the program and sent pundits to explore the Northwest Frontier regions of Chitral, Badakshan, and the Swat Valley, especially between the internal administrative border and the undefined boundary with Afghanistan. It was so successful, and became so important to intelligence gathering, that the program persisted well into the twentieth century, providing the backdrop for Kipling’s celebrated novel Kim—​which itself did so much to popularize the idea of the Great Game.53 166

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These protracted reconnaissance and intelligence efforts were augmented by one other source: Europeans, civilian and military, who threw themselves into what was very much a global theme of the times by carrying out personal journeys of geographic, scientific, political, and personal exploration, all over the larger region. This included Russian, British, and other agents, whose motives ranged from personal curiosity, to the desire for fame and fortune, or academic renown, and political and military involvement. The British, Russian, and Indian governments sponsored or obstructed many such journeys, as did such bodies as the Royal Geographical Society, but individual initiative and daring drove many others.54 Surely the most significant from the point of view of direct influence on strategic foreign policy, and determining imperial frontiers, were Curzon’s journeys in the 1880s and 1890s and the publications they spawned, all of which not only helped him secure the Viceroyalty in 1898 but also influenced his conduct of policy in that office. Those journeys included meeting ARK in Kabul in 1894 and holding lengthy personal conversations with him, about all manner of issues.55 Add it all up—​from the military borderland surveys of the Northwest Frontier, to the joint boundary commission diplomatic and reconnaissance exercises, through the pundit operations, eccentric explorer missions, and up to Curzon walking the ground himself—​ and it amounts to two Great Power empires using the resources of the region, human and otherwise, to understand, categorize, classify, and reorder the region, especially its frontiers. The second project was the Joint Anglo-​Russian Boundary Commission, formed in 1884 to carry out the agreement to demarcate the northern boundary of Afghanistan. Delayed by the Penjdeh Crisis, and by painstakingly slow progress on the ground as both sides stalled to seek advantage rather than acting in good faith, its operations extended to nearly the end of 1886. They provided a microcosm of the determination in practice of the imperial frontier. Survey work by engineers such as Holdich formed only part of the process. Indeed, ironically, “modern science” discovered it must rely on traditional, local, and customary knowledge. The commission tried to draw from a wide variety of sources to determine what line it should recommend and why. Most could only be obtained from local origins or with local assistance, and the whole effort uncovered as much confusion as clarity. The issue often boiled down to trying to determine whether there were any local understandings or arrangements—​resting on formal agreement, or informal custom and practice, or traditional behavior, or land use, or watering or movement rights, or tax imposing and paying records, or, especially, established relationships between resident peoples—​to indicate exactly which territory should be connected to what higher political authority. Despite being excluded from the survey parties, unavoidable dependence on such sources gave Afghans, from ARK to village leaders on the spot, opportunities to influence their work. “Modern scientific” methods of “knowledge production” could only assist local and traditional sources in filling in the fine details. The boundary was determined in the end after the commission reports were haggled over in St. Petersburg and London, finally producing an agreement that led to physical demarcation on the ground in 1887. The Russians relinquished some militarily 167

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important territory protecting the axes of advance toward Herat, but retained Penjdeh; the Afghans, despite producing some evidence of long-​standing political connections, gave up claims to much territory north of the Amu Darya River, in return for recognition of their administration southwest of that feature. This drew the Afghan northern frontier boundary line in open arid desert along its western stretches, providing advantage to neither empire, then along the river itself for its eastern stretches. The British accepted this outcome because it established the main point: a sovereign Afghanistan with a recognized boundary, keeping Russian-​controlled territory comfortably north of the passes through the Hindu Kush in central Afghanistan.56 The third frontier project emerged from the long-​running British debate about how to manage the Northwest Frontier. The Pushtun borderlands amounted to a standing commitment to active military operations by the Indian Army, which found itself forced to mount punitive or coercive expeditions, some on a large scale, almost annually. The arguments over how to manage this commitment raged from Peshawar to Calcutta to London, revolving around combinations, at various times and places, of different policies. Regular troops were used to garrison forts and strong points inside the mountain borderlands. Locally recruited forces such as the Punjab Irregular Force—​after 1865 the Punjab Frontier Force—​were used to police the area. Tribal forces were co-​opted into levies to police their own areas, reinforced by cash subsidies to the tribes. The administrative border was moved forward. Lytton, among others, called for creating a new regional government authority specifically to administer the Northwest Frontier region. The Close Border strategy was applied, restricting penetration into the Pushtun borderlands to retaliation for incursions. Condign punishment was inflicted on recalcitrant tribes or villages that refused to respect agreements or boundaries. ARK forced the pace by trying to expand his own influence in the mountain borderlands, which produced more violence not only with British India but also between Pushtun peoples on both sides of the uncertain boundary.57 The Government of India responded by sending its foreign secretary, Henry Mortimer Durand, to Kabul, to negotiate, with ARK, a formal boundary that would settle not only the international border but also determine which borderland sphere of influence each government would exercise, to control the Pushtun populations straddling the boundary. The agreement reached in November 1893 produced—​but only after more protracted negotiations, survey expeditions, and haggling about particulars—​the so-​called Durand Line.58 Dozens of surveys by joint British-​Afghan parties, carried out from 1894 to 1896, punctuated by violence on the ground and haggling in the capitals, produced a line nearly 1,500 km long, marked by several hundred stone pillars, that successfully defied any overall coherence. The Line cut through and divided ethnic, clan, and tribal traditional living and ranging areas, frequently defied topographical or terrain imperatives, and almost as frequently failed to consolidate tactical military considerations that the British nearly always tried to establish as the “bottom line” at any particular spot. The exercise provoked more efforts by ARK to stir up trouble to influence the demarcation. That plus the intrusion of the survey parties contributed to such massive Pushtun 168

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borderland upheavals that the British Indian Army was forced to mount the largest, most violent military operations along the Northwest Frontier it had yet conducted.59 Yet when the smoke and dust cleared, the Durand Line emerged. It not only separated India and Afghanistan, it also delineated, physically, the space British Indian authorities would try to police which lay between that boundary and their “administrative frontier”: the “internal” line marking the outer limit of “normal administration” of settled agricultural populations, also governed by the Punjab state authorities. This perhaps best exemplified the notion of the frontier as a political region “constituted not as sharply defined boundary lines but rather as transition zones of uncertain sovereignty between two states,” which seemed so persuasive to scholars in the Muslim world so many centuries earlier (Figure 5.2).60 The fourth and final frontier project seemed more dangerous at the time but was in fact more easily resolved. Despite avoiding war over Penjdeh and demarcating most of Afghanistan’s northern boundary, British-​Russian friction did not really abate. British concerns were stoked by Russian efforts to consolidate in Central Asia, especially by ambitious railway building—​and by a push to secure greater control in Badakshan, which lay just north of the eastern, still not definitive, stretch of the Afghan northern boundary. Some complications were familiar: no one knew the source of the Amu Darya River, and Afghan claims or control of peoples and territories straddled areas along this stretch of the river, especially the regions of Shignan and Roshan. The British now became more concerned about a new one: no one was clear on where the limits of effective control of territory actually were in the extremely rugged high mountain area known as the Pamirs, the space south of the Tajik areas now being absorbed by the Russians, east of recognized Afghan territory, west of Qing territory (the others called it Chinese Turkestan), and north of territory the British saw as commanding approaches to the northern Punjab. This last concern was a stretch, considering how rugged and remote the terrain was. But it drove repeated pundit, survey party, and reconnaissance missions to explore passes, and seek intelligence—​both British and Russian—​about how best to exercise some sort of secure over-​watch of the “empty space” statelets in these remote mountain valleys.61 This activity provoked a major incident in 1891 when a larger Russian party evicted a British survey mission led by then Captain Francis Younghusband, an inveterate explorer now serving as a political officer, telling him this was Russian territory.62 Several years of reconnaissance missions, garrison posting, and diplomatic haggling, punctuated by the Durand Line agreement, finally produced an agreement, in 1895, that traced the most eccentric stretch of the imperial frontier: the Wakhan Corridor. The northern boundary between this territory and what became Russian-​controlled Tajikistan changed little from the 1873 concord. The southern boundary between this territory and the “empty space” now patrolled by British India merely confirmed the trace suggested in the Durand Line agreement. But the Corridor now also confirmed an eastern terminus abutting on Qing-​controlled space, settled the issue of the source of the Amu Darya, and produced a narrow finger-​shaped extension of Afghanistan that served one sole 169

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Figure 5.2  Rough map of the Mohmand and Surrounding Country to illustrate the undemarcated portion of the Indo-​Afghan boundary between Nawa Kandau and Sikaram Peak, 1895. (India Office Records) The British Library.

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purpose: to separate British-​and Russian-​controlled territories, to give each additional time and space to respond to any forays. The remote ruggedness of the approaches on both sides only suggested how fraught their rivalry had become, and this latest imperial agreement actually aggravated the violence the British Indian Army faced at this northern extension of their Northwest Frontier. Yet for all that, while it did nothing to end the friction driving the imperial Great Game, it did complete one crucial component of it: the territorial demarcation of Afghanistan, now accepted as a political as well as military buffer zone between imperial spheres.63 The crucial point here is that, for the British in particular, the imperial frontier was layered. The popular and public understanding, which had influence on policy, saw the Northwest Frontier as the imperial frontier. And in one sense it was. The formal administration of settled British India gave way here to a zone of defense that formed a permeable space of shifting sovereignty, a buffer between the administrative frontier and the neighboring sovereign state. But in another equally real sense, the imperial frontier was Afghanistan itself. Not just its borders but the sovereign state. British suspicions of Russian ambitions had long been tempered by the readiness of not a few British agents, John Lawrence for one, to agree that “modern” Russian control was preferable to putting up with what they also saw as the turbulence of geopolitical “empty space” in Central Asia.64 But Afghanistan could not be allowed to fall into that same category. It was just too close, and too turbulent, with too many channels of intercourse, on too many levels, with British India. That required the British and British Indian authorities to find ways to help construct an Afghanistan they could manage, in their own strategic interest. Despite the difficulties his assertiveness caused them, at the council table and on the ground, ARK provided that Afghanistan. This can all be pulled together by analyzing two final issues:  the British imperial frontier ardently sought by many but never established in the end; and the reorganization of frontier administration and policing that addressed the issue of how to relate the local security problem to the higher problem of imperial defense. The former was the so-​called scientific frontier as a military border, for which we can revisit the lobbying efforts of Forward Strategy advocates, led by the most celebrated military commander of the time in British India, Field Marshal Lord Roberts. The latter involved creating a new district of administration and recasting grand strategy, both driven by Curzon during his long and controversial tenure as viceroy. The Second Afghan War put the concept of the military “scientific frontier” front and center in the rolling British debate. The concept itself, as applicable at this time and in this place, was well defined by a later British analysis: To seek for a zone which traverses easily defensible topographical features; which does not violate ethnic considerations by cutting through the territories of closely related tribes; and which at the same time serves as a political boundary is Utopian. What was meant by a 171

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scientific frontier in the [1870s and 1880s] was the best strategic boundary that could be used as a line of defence against invasion from the direction of Central Asia.65 The most expansive vision for this frontier argued for permanently occupying Herat and the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush. That would essentially make Afghanistan a British-​occupied protectorate. The costs, financial and otherwise, of trying to do that undermined the argument, and Lord Roberts became one of the foremost voices calling for a more modest but still expansive “scientific frontier,” focusing on occupying Kandahar, Ghazni, and Kabul. This would still place British Indian defensive positions well ahead of the mountain passes of the Northwest Frontier, denying all approaches to India save the northern axis of advance through the Pamirs. It would also place those garrisons in locations from which they could be sustained, provided the Indian government built the infrastructure required, railway and road, to enable supply and movement to at least the Khyber and Bolan Passes, if not beyond.66 Important voices reinforcing Roberts included two influential military tracts, one drawn from Indian experience and intelligence evaluations, the other more theoretical and generic. In 1884 Major-​General Sir Charles MacGregor, quartermaster-​general of the Indian Army, published The Defence of India: A Strategical Study. Drawing on Intelligence Branch reports so extensively that the Gladstone government forced MacGregor to publish a disclaimer claiming the work reflected only his personal opinion, he argued that the British position in India would only be secure if the Russians were driven out of Central Asia altogether, and insisted that occupying Herat was a minimum necessary step. This extreme call for a strategy of pre-​emption did not carry the day, but did help exponents such as Roberts argue for the defensive “scientific frontier” screen as the minimum prudent strategy. They were reinforced by the more influential theoretical work published by Lt.-​General Sir Edward Hamley in 1866, reprinted many times, and reinforced by specific articles and lectures devoted to the situation in India: The Operations of War, Explained and Illustrated. Hamley wrote in the Napoleonic fashion about the importance of the proper application of permanently operating principles of war, largely defined by positioning, maneuver, and geography. His chapters on “General Topography of a Theatre of War” and “Effect of the Configuration of Bases and Frontiers” were especially cited in regards to the India situation; Hamley elaborated himself in an 1878 article titled “The Strategical Conditions of our Indian North-​West Frontier.” His professional and popular prestige as a “military scientist” helped spawn multiple memoranda, essays, articles, and books, seeking, as an example, “India’s Scientific Frontier: Where is it? What is it?”67 This debate, fed by periodic revelations about Russian plans for invading or threatening India, dominated professional military discussions about the imperial frontier, and defending India, before, during, and after Roberts’s 1885–​93 term as commander-​in-​chief India.68 172

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Some action did ensue. Quetta was occupied and developed as the principal frontier base for the southern region, from 1876. The Khyber Pass was retained. Regular force garrisons were increased. The road and railway infrastructure west of the Indus was expanded. But pressures for a “scientific frontier” were in the end displaced by ARK’s success in maintaining a viable Afghanistan; the perceived financial and military costs of trying to establish any such position; the agreements painstakingly reached with the Russians; and the costs and consequences of the major military operations along the Northwest Frontier in the 1890s.69 The “scientific frontier” however, while never established, did reveal some essential characteristics about contemporary British understandings of, and policies toward, the imperial frontier. Those characteristics were powerfully expressed by our final issue: the reorganization of frontier administration and policing along the Northwest Frontier. Calls for such reorganization dated back to at least the Lytton Viceroyalty in the late 1870s.70 But Curzon brought them to the boiling point when he became viceroy, part of his determination to economize, rationalize, and “modernize” the administration of India in every respect. Regarding the imperial frontier and the defense of India, Curzon aggressively pursued four objectives. First, he argued that while the Russian threat to India was manifest, especially Russian intentions, it was not overwhelming. Curzon doubted Russian capacity to harm India, pointing to the difficulties of movement, supply, and operations across such forbidding territories and unwelcoming peoples, and argued that British strategy should be measured in response—​firm, but calibrated. He wanted to end the debate between Close Borders and Forward Strategy by rejecting both and pursuing something different. Second, Curzon insisted that India should pursue a more coordinated and assertive grand strategy, one that pre-​emptively deterred threats along every axis of advance, from the Persian Gulf to Tibet, by demonstrating British will to do what was necessary to prevent geopolitically “empty space” from being used to threaten India. Third, the viceroy argued that policing the Pushtun borderlands should be managed as an unsolvable problem that required open-​ended but proportional commitment. To that end, he supported maximum use of co-​opting local forces, generously distributing subsidies, maintaining working agreements with local tribal leaders, and calibrating punitive or coercive expeditions as finely as possible—​meanwhile withdrawing regular force garrisons back to the Indus Valley region, to provide distant over-​watch. Finally, he argued that the problems of the borderlands were so specific, so different from those involved in governing the settled areas of the Punjab, that its state government should be relieved from administering the Northwest Frontier, in favor of a new administration directly responsible for its policing.71 None of these arguments were new, but never before had someone so senior, with so much personal experience of the region and its problems, argued them with such skill and conviction. Curzon achieved three of his four goals, bringing about in 1901 the landmark reorganization that created the North-​West Frontier Province—​over bitter objections by the Punjab state government—​and reworking the security policies pursued on the grounds in the Pushtun borderlands.72 The viceroy’s manifest ambition to govern India 173

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as a power with its own unique strategic problems, expressed by a more assertive foreign policy and grand strategy, did however undermine his support in London, contributing to his controversial resignation in 1905. A provocative expedition to coerce Tibet, organized as yet another response to perceived Russian intentions to cause trouble in “empty space” and thus threaten the imperial frontier, was part of the package that brought Curzon down.73 But Curzon’s larger arguments, and his substantial reengineering of policy for managing the Northwest Frontier, proved effective and lasting.

Conclusion This was by no means the end of “the story.” No policies or strategies brought an end to violence along the Northwest Frontier. Military operations continued intermittently, responding to circumstances, beyond the final British withdrawal from the region in 1947. ARK died in 1901, succeeded by his son Habibullah Khan. He revived tensions by trying to drive a hard bargain over the terms of the protectorate, and occasionally stirred more trouble along the borderlands. The two countries fought a brief third Anglo-​Afghan War in 1919, which ended Afghanistan’s formal subservience to British control of foreign policy. And major punitive military operations in Waziristan were required through much of the 1930s. But creating the North-​West Frontier Province, and reworking policing strategy, did much to help the British manage these problems at lower levels of danger, if not at lower cost.74 Wider global developments did more. The agreement over the Pamirs did not end the Great Game. Germany did. Changes in German foreign policy after 1890 provoked first a Russian, then a British, response that ultimately persuaded both to place their Asian rivalries on a very low heat backburner, in order to concentrate on what both saw as a potentially much greater threat to their vital interests posed by German ambitions in Europe. The road to the Anglo-​Russian Entente of 1907, which expressly confirmed the status of Afghanistan and the frontiers of the region, was neither easy nor straight. It went through an anti-​ Russian alliance forged between the British and Japanese Empires in 1902, followed by the Russo-​Japanese War of 1904–​1905. And the two empires never ceased to regard each other warily across the buffer space of Afghanistan, or draft plans for war against the other. The central direction of the imperial defense of the British Empire took a giant step toward “modernity” in 1902, when the creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence made it possible to proceed in a more organized and systematic, less ad hoc, manner. The first problem it seriously considered was how the British Army could reinforce India in the event of a major Russian invasion. But by now both Great Powers could better police their own administrative frontiers, and were turning with greater concern to European threats. That enabled both to reduce this matter of the imperial frontier in Asia to a care and maintenance requirement.75 In our own era, Central Asian states regained their sovereignty but remain neighbors of Russia, with boundaries it drew for them. Afghanistan remains independent but volatile, 174

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a cockpit of conflict that always threatens to escalate beyond regional consequences—​ and continues, occasionally, to condemn the Durand Line, which still forms the international border between it and Pakistan. The imperial borderlands of the old Northwest Frontier remain just that: borderlands, divided and violent. In the far north the divided state of Kashmir is now one of the world’s strategic flashpoints. Ranging alongside it, sandwiched between Afghanistan and the Indus, is the old North-​West Frontier Province, renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by Pakistan in 2010. Still stubbornly resisting “modernity” are the “peoples who will not be governed” in the Pushtun borderlands stretching from the Swat Valley to Waziristan, in what Pakistan tries to police, rather than govern, as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This region may indeed claim to be our last remaining “imperial frontier.” The most lasting legacy of this history was Afghanistan. It was not the only Asian state that emerged through the “Great Divergence” of the nineteenth century as a sovereign polity with boundaries it had at least some influence in demarcating. Thailand enjoyed a similar experience, for similar reasons: assertive government, and strategic good fortune in serving as a buffer zone between larger empires. Nor did using the imperial frontier as an instrument for reordering Asia always follow this same pattern. Persia lost both territory and effective independence; something similar could be claimed even for Qing China. But the disappearance of Central Asia into the Russian Empire, the expansion of British India to the Durand Line, and above all the reordering of Afghanistan proved to be very lasting reconstructions indeed. Tempting as it is to focus on the Northwest Frontier as “the imperial frontier,” that was only one part of the story. The essential wider context, the contention that did so much to shape how the imperial frontier was understood, developed, and designed, was the geopolitical rivalry for ascendancy between the Great Power empires. That rivalry performed two defining functions. First, it connected the aspirations of higher policy to the specific characteristics, problems, and possibilities of government, administration, and defense on the spot, on the ground. Pushtun violence was so important because of the specter of Russian ambitions. Russian ambitions were so complicated because of the sheer difficulties of reordering, and governing, Central Asia. Second, the concept of geopolitical “empty space” formed the political and rhetorical basis from which this imperial rivalry played out. Gorchakov laid down a marker the British could never entirely reject. “Modern” states sought to reorder their world by constructing, or supporting, entities they could trust to meet their standards as neighbors—​or, as with Afghanistan, to suit their interests and requirements. The Northwest Frontier was a space within which the administrative frontier gave way to a zone of unstable shared sovereignty. Even a “modern” empire recognized and came to accept this arrangement as familiar and manageable. And all of this could only be done through systematic partnerships, however asymmetrical, with Asians. Afghanistan, the sovereign state, with its demarcated territory, became the real “imperial frontier.” Empire in Asia reordered the states system by entangling its concerns and conflicts with those of the states system of Europe—​and did so by redefining, by means of science, reconnaissance, diplomacy, politics, and military power, the imperial frontier. 175

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NOTES 1 T. Hungerford Holdich, The Indian Borderland 1880–​1900 (Elbiron Classic 2006 reprint of a 1901 original publication by Methuen & Co., London), p. 75; K. Mason and H. L. Crosthwait, “Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, KCMG, KCIE, CB [obituary],” The Geographical Journal 75, no. 3 (March 1930), 209–​11. 2 Holdich, The Indian Borderland, p. 76; Mason and Crosthwait, “Holdich,” pp. 210–​11. 3 Arthur J. Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC to AD 2000 (New York: Grove Press, 2006); Brian P. Farrell, “Fortifications, Imperial,” in The Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. John Mackenzie (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2015); see also the chapter by Jinping Wang in Volume One of this series. 4 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–​ 2000 (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); P. F. Bang and D. Kolodziejczyk (eds), Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5 Terminology still shapes this discussion, which entered a modern scholarly phase when Ladis Kristof published “The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers XLIX (1959). The discussion expands rather than coalesces, weighing and debating text and language, concept and practice, direction and purpose, time and place, continuity and change. Norman Schlesser, “Frontiers in Medieval French History,” The International History Review 6, no. 2 (1984), accepted Kristof’s argument that “the basic difference between frontier and boundary is that the former is outer-​oriented and the latter is inner-​oriented,” and that “boundaries . . . are the outer line of the effective control of a government.” Alejandro Colas cited Blackwell’s Dictionary of Human Geography to reiterate a distinction between official boundary lines and zonal areas, rather than using border and frontier synonymously, but also noted “the notion of ‘frontier’ has varied enormously through time and place,” in his paper “Peoples, Territories and Empires: The Place of Frontiers in Imperial History,” presented in 2007, accessible at http://​www.eisa-​net.org/​be-​bruga/​eisa/​files/​ events/​turin/​Colas-​colassgir07.pdf. Michael Khodarkovsky pursued this distinction between border and frontier by describing the former as “a clearly demarcated boundary between two or several sovereign states” and the latter as “a region that forms the margin of a settled or developed territory,” but he also outlined, through his study of the Russian imperial project in Asia, “the process by which a frontier area was first turned into borderland only to become later an integral part of the Russian empire,” in “From Frontier to Empire: The Concept of the Frontier in Russia, Sixteenth-​Eighteenth Centuries,” Russian History 19, no. 1–​4 (1992). Two more relevant examples from among numerous contributions to this discussion must suffice here. Alfred Rieber, in “Changing Connections and Constructions of Frontiers: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Ab Imperio 1 (2004), argued that scholars “made the distinction clearer between boundaries and frontiers by distinguishing between a linear and a spatial concept”; Ralph W. Brauer, in “Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 85, no. 6 (1995), identified Muslim scholarly perceptions, a thousand years ago, that political boundaries within their world were “constituted not as sharply defined boundary lines but rather as transition zones of uncertain sovereignty between two states.” We pick up this notion below. 6 This is explored by Lucien Febvre’s foundational article “Limites et frontiers,” in Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2ieme Annee, no. 2 (1947), then taken up by Norman J. G. Pounds, “The Origins of the Idea of Natural Frontiers in France,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41, no. 2 (1951); Schlesser, “Frontiers in Medieval French History”;

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Peter Sahlins, “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries Since the Seventeenth Century,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 5 (1990); and C. R. Whittaker, “Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions,” Journal of Historical Sociology 13, no. 4 (2000). A relevant side glance is Christian Lamouroux, “Frontieres de France, vues de Chine,” Annales Histoires, Sciences Sociales, 58ieme Annee, no. 5 (2003). 7 The argument emanates from Khodarkovsky, who unpacked it in Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500–​1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Igor V. Naumov, The History of Siberia, ed. and trans. David N. Collins (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Eva-​ Maria Stolberg, The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005), are useful, but see especially Evgeny Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Still important are William C. Fuller Jr, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–​1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992); and John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–​1831 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 8 C. R. Whittaker, “Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions”; and Rome and Its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2004); Susan P. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Prinicipate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); J. W. Drijvers, “The Limits of Empire in the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus,” in Frontiers in the Roman World, ed. O. Hekster and T. Kaizer (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and D. J. Breeze, The Frontiers of Imperial Rome (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2011), are all responding to the modern discussion initiated by Edward Luttwak in The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976). 9 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. and intro. F. Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chaps 2 and 4. 10 Rene Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (Rutgers: State University of New Jersey Press, 1970), trans. Naomi Walford (1939); Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, [1940] 1951), pp. xix–​39. For a modern assessment, see Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 11 Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, advanced the argument, most energetically engaged by Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers; see note 7. 12 An accessible account of the Turner thesis is George Rogers Taylor (ed.), The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston: DC Heath and Co, 1972). Relevant studies among the vast literature concerning the Turner thesis include: William Appleman Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 24, no. 4 (1955); David J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians and the Borderlands,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986); Whittaker, “Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions.” 13 Joseph L. Wieczynski, The Russian Frontier: The Impact of Borderlands upon the Course of Early Russian History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976); Mark Bassin, “Turner, Solov’ev, and the Frontier Hypothesis:  The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 3 (1993); Jens-​Uwe Guettel, “From the Frontier to German Southwest Africa: German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (2010). 14 Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), chaps 1–​2; Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [2009] 2014), Introduction, parts VII–​IX.

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1 5 George Nathaniel Curzon, Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907). 16 Raymond F. Betts, “Immense Dimensions: The Impact of the American West on Late Nineteenth Century European Thought about Expansion,” The Western Historical Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1979); Andrei Cusco, “From an Imperial Borderland to a ‘European Frontier’: History, Politics and the Ambiguity of Belonging (The Case of Bessarabia/​ Moldova),” in The Borders of Europe: An International Symposium, ed. L. Boia, A. Oroveanu (Bucharest: University Press, 2007); John S. Galbraith, “The ‘Turbulent Frontier’ as a Factor in British Expansion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 2 (January 1960); Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, chaps VII–​IX; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–​1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), chaps 6–​7, 13. 17 Curzon, Frontiers; Betts, “Immense Dimensions”; Whittaker, “Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions”; Bassin, “Turner, Solov’ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’ ”; Maier, Among Empires, chaps 1–​2; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), chaps 9–​10; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, chaps VII–​VIII, XVII; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, chap. 13. 18 Whittaker, “Roman Frontiers and European Perceptions”; Bassin, “Turner, Solov’ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’ ”; Guettel, “From the Frontier to German Southwest Africa”; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, chaps III, IX; Maier, Among Empires, chaps 1–​2; Pascal Venier, “The Geographical Pivot of History and Early Twentieth Century Geopolitical Culture,” The Geographical Journal 170, no. 4 (2004). 19 In addition to Sergeev, Maier, Burbank and Cooper, and Osterhammel, see also David Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914: A Study in British and Russian Imperialism (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1977); Harry G. Gelber, Nations Out of Empires: European Nationalism and the Transformation of Asia (London: Palgrave, 2001); and especially Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20 A very early expression of British fears of Russian expansion in Asia was George de Lacy Evans, On the Designs of Russia (London: John Murray, 1828). Half a century later two even more influential tracts sounded many of the same notes: Frederick Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1876); and Henry Rawlinson, England and Russia in the East (London: John Murray, 1875). Modern analyses include Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chaps 1–​3; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chaps 1, 4–​6; Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), chap. 2. 21 Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​ British Relations in Central and East Asia, pp. 94–​101; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, pp. 115–​18; Martin Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia: Confrontation and Negotiation 1865–​95 (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 13–​16. 22 The Gorchakov Memorandum is included by Ewans as Appendix 1, is downloadable from http://​www.fas.nus.edu.sg/​hist/​eia/​documents_​archive/​gorchakov.php, and is analyzed in Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, pp. 97–​100; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, pp. 118–​21; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia,  16–​19. 23 Bassin, “Turner, Solov’ev and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis,’ ” and more substantially in Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–​ 1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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24 Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, chaps 9–​10; Christopher Mott, The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2015), chaps 4–​5. Still important is Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 25 S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: Russia, China and Their Disputed Frontier (New York: ME Sharpe, 1996), chaps 1–​4; James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-​Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), chap. 6. 26 The “Great Game” phrase is attributed to Captain Arthur Connolly, a military intelligence officer serving in the East India Company Army. In July 1840 he wrote to Major Henry Rawlinson, just appointed as the political agent in Kandahar, “You’ve a great game, a noble game before you.” Connolly referred to the challenge to spread “civilization” to Central Asia, specifically hoping the British, as the “first Christian nation of the world,” would “help Russia cordially to all she has a right to expect,” and singled out the emir of Bukhara as the regional potentate who must be “forced” to behave properly. Ironically, Connolly then went into Central Asia undercover in 1841, on a mission to try to contain Russian designs on the region by orchestrating an alliance between the constantly feuding regional states, entered Bukhara to try to rescue a captive British officer, but was captured and executed as a spy. Rawlinson went on to become one of the great characters of British India, and, as discussed below, a major figure in the long challenge to define the imperial frontier in the “Great Game.” The term itself became popular in the twentieth century, assisted by Kipling’s use of it in his celebrated 1901 novel Kim. The “Great Game” has been used to refer to a variety of things, including a sustained and effective British covert intelligence and political warfare network and campaign in Central Asia to prevent Russian expansion. Some scholars regard this as exaggerated at best, but a persuasive recent analysis by Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757–​1947 (London: Greenhill Books, 2006), suggests that such a campaign was indeed developed, and was in fact the cradle of modern British military intelligence. Relevant literature is too vast to compress into this citation, and a number of important sources are cited elsewhere in this chapter; but three particularly interesting reflections on the “Great Game” and the imperial frontier, as we engage it here, include Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia; Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East 1775–​1842 (New York: Routledge, [1984] 2013); and M. E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–​1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); and “The Legend of the Great Game,” Proceedings of the British Academy 111 (2001). 27 The Sikh army, the Khalsa, occupied Peshawar in 1818, lost it in 1819, regained it in 1823, but Ranjit Singh tried for some years to govern it indirectly, until repeated Afghan attempts to retake it persuaded him to bring it more directly under his control. P. Singh and J. M. Rai, Empire of the Sikhs:  The Life and Times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2008), pp. 120–​3; Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River (London: John Murray, 2008). 28 Paddy Docherty, The Khyber Pass: A History of Empire and Invasion (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2007). 29 Tamim Ansary, Games without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan (New York: Public Affairs, 2012); Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 30 The most influential study of the Pushtun peoples remains The Pathans, 550 BC to AD 1957 (London: Macmillan, 1958), by Olaf Caroe, who was the last British governor of the North-​West Frontier Province, for which see below. Also useful are Hugh Beattie, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (London: Routledge, [2002] 2013); and Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-​Afghan Borderland (London: Hurst & Company, [2007]

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2011), chaps 1–​3. The classic study of remote peoples “keeping the state at a distance,” applicable here, is James C. Scott, The Art of Not being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 31 Lepel Griffin, for a time chief secretary of the Punjab and prolific analyst of the British India he served, published in 1892 an account of this Sikh expansion, pointing toward British inheritance, whose subtitle made the point directly: Rulers of India: Ranjit Singh and the Sikh Barrier between Our Growing Empire and Central Asia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). 32 British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), L/​PS/​18/​A113, India Board Memorandum, Position and Policy of England as an Asiatic Power, March 1, 1855. 33 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​ 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chaps 3–​ 5; Lawrence James, Raj:  The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Abacus, 1997), Parts 2–​ 3. An early influential Russophobic tract was David Urquhart, England and Russia (London: J. Ridgway and Sons, 1835), evaluated by Margaret Lamb, “The Making of a Russophobe: David Urquhart: The Formative Years 1825–​1835,” The International History Review 3, no. 3 (1981). Still important is J. H. Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 34 Edward Ingram, The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia 1828–​1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chaps 2–​3; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chap. 3. 35 For the First Afghan War, see Jules Stewart, On Afghanistan’s Plains: The Story of Britain’s Afghan Wars (London: I.B. Taurus, 2011), chaps 1–​4; T. A. Heathcote, The Afghan Wars 1839–​1919 (Stroud: Spellmount, [1980] 2007), chaps I–​V; D. S. Richards, The Savage Frontier: A History of the Anglo-​Afghan Wars (London: Pan Books, [1980] 2003), chaps 1–​4; Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009), chaps 6–​7. 36 Andrew J. Major, Return to Empire:  Punjab under the Sikhs and British in the Mid-​ Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1996), chaps 3–​4; T. R. Moreman, The Army in India and the Development of Frontier Warfare, 1849–​1947 (London: Palgrave, 1998), chap. 1; Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-​West Frontier (London: Abacus, 2000). 37 Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 5; James, Raj, pp. 278–​322. 38 BL, IOR, Lord Canning, Minute, February 5, 1857; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​ British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 2; David Loyn, Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan (London: Windmill Books, 2009), chap. 4. 39 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​C9, Historical Summary of the Central Asian Question 1836–​73, April 30, 1874; L/​PS/​18/​C17, Col. J. M. Veniukoff, The Progress of Russia in Central Asia (translated HMSO Print), 1877; L/​PS/​18/​C69, Russian Advances in Asia, 1873; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 3; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 6; E. Allworth (ed.), Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance: A Historical Overview (London: Duke University Press, 1994), chap. 4. 40 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​C15, India Office Notes, Kashgar Mission, November 1876; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856-1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chaps 3–​4; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chap. 6; Kim Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–​1877 (Stanford: University of California Press, 2004). 41 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A5, Foreign Department, Government of India, Memorandum, Afghan-​ Turkistan, September 7, 1869; L/​PS/​18/​A91, Afghanistan Agreement of 1872–​73, May 2, 1893; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East 180

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Asia, chap. 3; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chaps 4–​5; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 6. 42 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A10, H. B. Lumsden, Rough Notes for a Lecture on Afghanistan, and our Relations with it, May 1, 1875, put the point bluntly: “If we do not politically occupy Afghanistan Russia will lose no time in doing so to our prejudice”; evidence of Russian enticement in Afghanistan was collected in L/​PS/​18/​A38, Memorandum on the correspondence between General von Kauffmann and the Ameers Shere Ali and Yakub Khan of Kabul, from March 1870 to February 1879, April 1, 1880. Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 6; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 4; D. P. O’Connor, Imperial Defence and the Commitment to Empire 1860–​1886 (London: Create Space, 2014), chaps 4–​5, is compelling on Lytton. 43 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A4, Minute by the Viceroy (Lawrence), February 8, 1864; Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Basic Books, 2006), chap. 6; Johnson, Spying for Empire, pp. 119–​20. We lack a good modern study of Lawrence, who is discussed with insight by James, Raj, p. 370. 44 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A125, The Afghan Question, n/​d [1878]; L/​PS/​18/​A127, N. Cavagnari, Memorandum, July 29, 1878; Meyer and Brysac, chap. 6; Johnson, Spying for Empire, p. 126, notes that Rawlinson’s 1875 publication provoked the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, to resign in protest. Rawlinson lived to 1895, serving on the Council of India until that same year and becoming recognized as the foremost London-​based champion of the Forward Strategy; a modern printing of his memoir is George Rawlinson, A Memoir of Major-​General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (London: Adamant, 2005). 45 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​20 Memo 12, Note on some points connected with the Northwestern Frontier of Afghanistan, with special reference to Badgheis and Penjdeh, March 13, 1885; Heathcote, The Afghan Wars, chap. IX. 46 BL, IOR, L/​MIL/​17/​13/​17, North-​Western Frontier of India, documents a retrospective March 1898 House of Lords debate between Northbrook and Roberts, including relevant 1880 memoranda; Heathcote, The Afghan Wars, chap. IX; Stewart, On Afghanistan’s Plains, chap. 7; O’Connor, Imperial Defence, chap. 8. See also below, notes 66–​7. 47 The India Office itself acknowledged that Afghans “for the most part considered Abdur Rahman the rightful heir to the throne,” BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A42, Brief History of the Living Descendants of Payinda Khan and Dost Mohamed, May 14, 1880; L/​PS/​18/​A34, Minute by the Viceroy, June 5, 1880; L/​PS/​18/​A37, Aide Memoire: Negotiations with Abdul Rahman Khan, 1880, July 31, 1880; Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, chap. 3. Some contemporary flavor of this Afghan political reality can be captured in Abdur Rahman (with editorial assistance from Sultan Mahomed Khan), The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1900). 48 Ansary, Games without Rules, chap.  9; Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, chap. 3; Abdur Rahman, The Life of Abdur Rahman, chaps IX–​XII. 49 Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 4; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chap. 10. For a contemporary justification supplied by Russian principals to a sympathetic British diplomat, see Charles T. Marvin, The Russian Advance towards India (London: Sampson Low et al., 1882). General Mikhail Skobolev, commander of the force that sacked Geok Tepe, bluntly explained his action: “Merv is quiet and will be so until the effects of the lesson at Geok Tepe wear off . . . I hold it as a principle, that in Asia the duration of peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict upon the enemy. The harder you hit them, the longer they will be quiet afterwards. We killed nearly 20,000 Turcomans at Geok Tepe. The survivors will not soon forget the lesson” (pp. 98–​9). 50 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A147, Russian Assurances with regard to Afghanistan, 1869–​85, April 1900; Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chaps V–​VI; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in 181

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Central Asia, chaps 10–​11; O’Connor, Imperial Defence, chap. 10; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 7; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 4. 51 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A122, Memorandum by Mr. Bertie on the Question with Russia respecting the Kushk Canals in Afghan Territory, October 15, 1893; Abdur Rahman, The Life of Abdur Rahman, chaps XI–​XII; Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chaps III–​XVII; Ansary, Games without Rules, chap. 9; Barfield, Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History, chap. 3. 52 Holdich, The Indian Borderland, passim; Hevia, The Imperial Security State, chaps 3–​5; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 4–​6; C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–​ 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The comprehensive records of the operations of the Survey of India during the British period were published in five volumes as Historical Records of Survey of India, by R. H. Phillimore, four in 1945, the fifth in 1968. The first four are accessible at https://​archive.org/​details/​HistoricalRecordsOfSurveyOfIndiaVol1ByColRHPhillimore, the final volume at DigitalHimalaya http://​www.digitalhimalaya.com/​collections/​rarebooks/​. 53 Holdich, The Indian Borderland, passim, especially chap. 7; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 6–​7; Hevia, The Imperial Security State, chap. 5; P. Hopkirk, Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling’s Great Game (London: John Murray, 1996). 54 Meyer and Brysac, passim; P. Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha America, 1992). 55 BL, IOR, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111 56, Memorandum by Curzon on his Visit to Afghanistan, December 2, 1894. Curzon’s most influential tomes, both published in London by Longmans, Green & Co, were Russia in Central Asia and the Anglo-​Russian Question, 1889, and Persia and the Persian Question, 2 vols, 1892. Also relevant was The Pamirs and the Source of the Oxus, published by The Royal Geographical Society in 1896. David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1994), captures Curzon’s personality very well, but the best source for Curzon’s career in India and experiences in Asia is the large collection of his papers held in the British Library. 56 The Penjdeh Crisis and northern Afghan border questions are documented in detail in BL, IOR, L/​PS/​20 Memo 13, Telegraphic Correspondence with Sir P. Lumsden subsequent to his arrival at Sarakhs, November 1884–​November 1886; Memo 14, Correspondence respecting the Demarcation of the Northwest Frontier of Afghanistan from the Heri-​Rud to the Oxus, Parts 1 through VI, July 1884–​December 1886; Memo 16, Correspondence relative to the Boundary of Afghanistan on the Upper Oxus: Question of Shighnan, August 1884–​March 1893; and see also Memo 12, Memoranda Relating to the Frontiers of Afghanistan, April 1884–​September 1885. These documents include many Russian telegrams and memoranda. Accessible and important contemporary sources are C. E. Yate, Northern Afghanistan, or Letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888); and Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chaps V–​VII. Many of the chapters Holdich later published were first submitted as a report to the Government of India on “the recent surveys in North-​West Afghanistan in connection with the Boundary Commission,” held in BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A77. See also Hevia, The Imperial Security State, chap. 5; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chaps 10–​12; O’Connor, Imperial Defence, chap. 10. 57 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A79, Indian Frontier Policy, March 12, 1888; L/​MIL/​17/​13/​15, Record of the Expeditions against the North-​West Frontier Tribes from the Annexation of Punjab, second edition, 1884; C. Collin Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier 1890–​1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), chap. II; Beattie, Imperial Frontier, passim; A. Swinson, North-​West Frontier: People and Events 1839–​1947 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), chaps 4–​8; Moreman, The Army in India, chap. 2; A. M. Roe, Waging War in

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Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of Bin Laden, 1849–​1947 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), chaps 1–​4; J. Stewart, The Savage Border: The Story of the North-​ West Frontier (Stroud: The History Press, 2013), chap. 3. 58 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A109, Memorandum on British Relations with Afghanistan, January 24, 1896; L/​PS/​18/​A157, Afghanistan: the Nature of the Engagements with the late Amir, December 13, 1902; Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chap. X; Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, chap. IX; Stewart, The Savage Border, chap. 3; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chap. 7. 59 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A104, Arrangements for the Control of Waziristan, May 15, 1895; L/​ PS/​20/​Memo 18, Command Paper 8037, Correspondence relating to the Occupation of Chitral, 1896; India Office, Military Operations on the Northwest Frontiers of India 1897–​98 (London: HMSO, 1898); Pioneer, The Risings on the North-​West Frontier (Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1898); Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chap. X; Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, chaps V, IX; Stewart, The Savage Border, chap. 4; Moreman, The Army in India, chap. 2; Loyn, Butcher & Bolt, chaps 6–​7; C. Coughlin, Churchill’s First War: Young Winston and the Fight against the Taliban (London: Macmillan, 2013). 60 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​20/​Memo 18, Command Paper 8042, Afghan Boundary Agreement and Copy of Correspondence relating to Afghan Proceedings in Kafiristan, June 1896. L/​PS/​ 18/​A 82, Note by Sir Stewart Payley on the Pamir Question and the Northeast Frontiers of Afghanistan, November 19, 1891, outlines in detail British concerns leading toward the Durand Line negotiations. This is continued in L/​PS/​20 Memo 17, which holds relevant documents ranging from July 1892 through July 1894. The main point—​to control people by dominating crucial space—​is well expressed in the memorandum Military Considerations Connected with the Pamir Frontier, written on July 9, 1893, by Col. J. C. Ardagh, Indian Army Intelligence Branch: “For military purposes, therefore, a frontier following the highest watersheds is defective, and we should aim at keeping our enemy from any possibility of establishing himself on the glacis, occupying these longitudinal valleys, and therefore preparing to surprise the passes. We should therefore seek a boundary which shall leave all these longitudinal valleys in our possession or at least under our influence.” Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chap. X; see above, note 5. 61 BL, IOR, L/​ PS/​ 18/​ A86a, The Russian Expedition to the Pamirs of 1892, August 12, 1892; L/​PS/​18/​A89, Note on the connection between the Khanate of Khokand and the Pamirs, December 29, 1892; L/​PS/​18/​A95, The Northern Frontier of India: Roads and Passes: Measures for Defence of Frontier, February 1895; Holdich, The Indian Borderland, chap. XIII; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chap. 14; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chap. 10. 62 Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chap. 14; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chap. 10; Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), chap. 6. 63 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​20/​Memo 17, Note on the Question of Delimitation in the Upper Oxus Territories, July 1, Extent and objects of the proposed Delimitation in the Pamir Region, September 5, 1892, Military Considerations Connected with the Pamir Frontier, July 9, 1893, Correspondence, FO and Russian Foreign Ministry, April 1894; Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, chap. IX; Ewans, Securing the Indian Frontier in Central Asia, chap. 16; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 5. 64 NA, FO65/​1202, General Correspondence, Russian Empire, Proceedings in Central Asia, John Lawrence, minute, October 3, 1867. 65 Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, p. 16. 66 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A30, Memorandum on Afghan Affairs, November 2, 1879; L/​PS/​18/​ A34, Roberts to Lyall, May 29, Stewart to Viceroy, June 11, 1880; L/​PS/​18/​A35, Notes by

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Members of the Political Committee on the Herat Question, June 10–​14, 1880; L/​PS/​18/​A40, H. Rawlinson, Memorandum on Candahar, September 25, 1880. Roberts’s most substantial personal analysis was his June 22, 1886, memorandum critiquing Indian Government proposals, titled “The Defence of the North-​West Frontier of India,” held in L/​PS/​18/​A117. Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, chaps V, IX; Moreman, The Army in India, chap. 2; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 8–​10. 67 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​20/​Memo 12, WO Memorandum, Some Observations as to the Military Value of a Suggested Frontier Line between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire, April 19, 1885; C. M. MacGregor, The Defence of India: A Strategical Study (Simla: Government Central Branch Press, 1884); E. B. Hamley, The Operations of War Explained and Illustrated (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1866); Hamley, “The Strategical Conditions of our Indian North-​West Frontier,” RUSI Journal 22, no. 98 (1878); H. B. Hanna, India’s Scientific Frontier: Where Is It? What Is It? (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1895); Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 8–​9. 6 8 The many nineteenth-​century documents relating to British concerns about Russian military ambitions regarding India can only be summarized by selection here: NA, WO106/​6208, Analysis of General Kuropatkin’s Scheme for the Invasion of India, War Office Intelligence Branch Memorandum, August 1886; CAB38/​5, General Staff War Office Memorandum, Defence of India: Observations on the Records of a War Game played at Simla, 1903, May 5, 1904. BL, IOR, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111 695, Indian Army Intelligence Branch Memorandum, On the Power of Russia to Operate against Northern Afghanistan, 1899; F111 698, War Office Intelligence Division Memorandum, Distribution of the Russian Military Forces in Asia, June 1902; F111 699, Indian Army Intelligence Branch Memorandum, Russian Advances in Asia No. V, 1882–​84, 1885; F111 700, Indian Army Intelligence Branch Memorandum, Russian Advances in Asia No. VII, 1890–​95, 1896; F111 701, War Office Intelligence Division Memorandum, Twenty Years of Russian Army Reform and the Present Distribution of the Russian Land Forces, 1893; L/​PS/​18/​A141, Abstract and Extracts of Translation by Mr. Robert Michell of To India: A Military and Strategical Sketch, A Project of a Future Campaign, by Capt. W. Lebedeff, [Russian] Grenadier Guards, St. Petersburg, 1898, concludes by summarizing the long-​standing Russian view of the usefulness of threatening British India: Russia should occupy in Central Asia “a still stronger position, with the object of utilizing it whensoever our opponent [the British] displays an animosity similar to that which he displayed during the Crimean Campaign and at the period of the Congress of Berlin.” Lebedev, a hawk, argued, “The occupation of Herat, then of Candahar and Cabul [sic], and, finally, the inclusion within our sphere of influence of the whole of Afghanistan, such will be our further steps in Central Asia; this is needed for the profit of Russia, and we must not forego it.” See also Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–​1917 (London: Routledge, 2006); Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, chaps I, V, IX–​ X; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chaps 4–​5; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 8–​10. 69 This 1927 comment could have been written in 1890, it captured so well the impact Russian railway building had on British strategic thinking: “Strategically the Northwest Frontier of India embraces the whole possible area of operations between the Russian Central Asian railway and the British railheads in India,” in BL, IOR, L/​MIL/​17/​13/​8, Indian Army General Staff Memorandum, Amendments to a Study of the Existing Strategical Conditions on the Northwest Frontier of India, January 1928. The most likely nature and scale of the threat remained the subject of lively debate: NA, WO33/​49: War Office Memorandum, Report of the Indian Mobilization Committee Regarding the Strategical Situation in Central Asia, May 31, 1889; Joint Memorandum, Director of Military Intelligence, War Office, and Military

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Secretary, India Office, Indian Army Field Force, August 19, 1889; Minute on Indian Army Field Force memorandum, Adjutant-​General to the Forces (General Sir Garnet Wolseley), August 25, 1889. 70 The earliest of many calls for a separate frontier administrative entity might well be BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A4, Minute by the Governor of Bombay (Bartle Frere), December 12, 1863; Lytton’s views were detailed in L/​ PS/​ 18/​ A22, Memorandum on the Reorganization of the North-​Western Frontier, December 19, 1878. Davies, The Problem of the North-​West Frontier, 104–​106. 71 Curzon’s proposals are in BL, IOR, L/​ PS/​ 18/​ A148, Punjab Frontier Administration, September 13, and Lord Curzon’s Proposals regarding the Administration of the North-​ Western Frontier Districts, December 14, 1900. Curzon’s agenda can be studied in detail through his correspondence preserved in the British Library, in particular IOR, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111 158, Correspondence with Hamilton, Salisbury, and Godley, 1899; F111 159, Correspondence with Hamilton, Salisbury, and Godley, 1900; F111 160, Correspondence with Hamilton, Salisbury, and Godley, 1901; F111 161, Correspondence with Hamilton, Brodrick, Salisbury, Balfour, and Godley, 1902. These candid exchanges indicate Curzon’s readiness to draw on such personal experiences as traveling on the Transcaspian Railway, and discussing geopolitics with Abdur Rahman in Kabul, when challenging civil and military orthodoxy. See also Dhara Anjaria, Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899–​ 1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 72 Curzon publicly summarized his views in Frontiers, which benefits from being composed after his Viceregal terms came to an end. But in 1895 he wrote a comprehensive study “intended to deal with the entire question of Indian Frontier Policy,” as a scholarly analysis. The manuscript remained unpublished because he assumed the Viceregal appointment, and was preserved in BL, IOR, Curzon Papers, Mss Eur F111 122, titled On the Indian Frontier. Dhara Anjaria edited and published it, also contributing a fine Introduction, as On the Indian Frontier: Lord Curzon of Kedleston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Roderick Matthews, Lord Curzon: The Wisest Fool in Hindustan? eBook published by IDEAINDIA. COM in 2008, is worth reading, but David Dilks, Curzon in India, Vol. 1, Achievement (New York: Taplinger, 1969), remains the most important study of Curzon’s Viceroyalty, including a penetrating analysis of frontier reforms and strategic arguments in ­chapter  9. 73 The Tibet fiasco is recorded in detail in BL, IOR, Curzon Papers, F111 162–​164, Correspondence with Balfour, Lansdowne, Hamilton, Brodrick, and Godley, 1903–​1905; Dilks, Curzon in India, Vol. 2, Frustration (New York: Taplinger, 1970); Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa: The British Invasion of Tibet (London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, [1961] 2012); John Pollock, Kitchener: Architect of Victory, Artisan of Peace, Vol. II: Saviour of the Nation (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), chaps 1–​10. 74 BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A156, Afghanistan: Relations with the Amir, December 4, 1902; L/​PS/​18/​ A162, Afghanistan, October 13, 1904; L/​PS/​18/​A168, Afghanistan, February 14, 1905; Alan Warren, Waziristan, The Fakir of Ipi, and the Indian Army: The Northwest Frontier Revolt of 1936–​37 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Heathcote, The Afghan Wars, chaps X–​XI; Loyn, Butcher & Bolt, chap. 8; Ansary, Games without Rules, chaps 10–​13; Johnson, Spying for Empire, chaps 11–​13; Roe, Waging War in Waziristan, chaps 4–​7. 75 NA, CAB4/​1, Committee of Imperial Defence, Memoranda, 11B, On the Nature of the Anglo-​Japanese Alliance, December 29, 1903; CAB38/​5/​73, Committee of Imperial Defence, Memoranda, Dispatch of Reinforcements to India, July 13, 1904; BL, IOR, L/​PS/​18/​A169, Anglo-​Russian Relations, correspondence, Minto, Kitchener, Morley, May–​June 1906; L/​ PS/​18/​A166, Note on the Probable Attitude of the Frontier Tribes and of Afghanistan in the event of an attempted invasion of India by Russia and on the Frontier Policy in connection

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therewith, July 13, 1906; Gillard, The Struggle for Asia 1828–​1914, chap. 8; Sergeev, The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia, chap. 6; J. A. White, Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895–​1907 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an aggressively revisionist analysis, see J. Siegel, Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2002).

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Chapter 6

Human Mobility in Russia’s Asian Empire Paul W. Werth A central proposition of this volume is that over the course of the nineteenth century Asia experienced an extensive reordering that drew its lands and peoples into a global order and rewrote the continent’s map. Perhaps most strikingly, the critical player in East Asian politics—​the continent’s self-​described “central country” (中国)—​found itself confronted by imperialism and internal crises that gradually destroyed the Sino-​centric world order in East Asia.1 Elsewhere across the continent European-​driven imperialism became a powerfully disruptive force, upsetting and transforming previously existing systems and arrangements, for example, the Ottoman regional order so important for western Asia. To be sure, Asians themselves remained crucial agents and actors in the unfolding drama, but they were compelled to act in a context that depended heavily on the initiatives of European-​based states and people. For Northern Asia, the Romanov Empire proved to be the most dynamic force across the nineteenth century. Muscovites had reached the Pacific Ocean by the mid-​seventeenth century, and by its end established their first contact with the Japanese and begun demarcating the country’s southern border with China in the Treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kiakhta (1727). Meanwhile Russia continued its gradual advance into the steppe, securing oaths of allegiance (as the Russians saw them) from the khans of the Little and Middle Hordes. By the late 1820s it crossed the Caucasus range at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and Persia, taking another piece of the former—​Batum and Kars—​later in 1878. As Qing power weakened in China, tsarist servitors perceived both an opportunity for Russia to extend its influence southward and a potential threat to Russia’s Far Eastern possessions from rival powers. A new push into Asia began in the late 1830s, and it accelerated after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, as Petersburg compelled China to accept the Amur and Ussuri rivers as the new border (1858–​60) and—​once the North Caucasus had been subdued in a brutal war lasting until 1864—​conquered vast swaths of Central Asia, ending with the annexation of the Pamirs in 1895. The Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva became Russian protectorates, while Petersburg sought further to project its power into Persia, Korea, and Manchuria, and eventually to insinuate itself into the affairs of more distant regions such as Southeast Asia and Tibet. The consequences for the affected territories and peoples varied, but by the early twentieth century Russia had clearly become an Asian power in terms of its territorial composition and the geopolitical preoccupations of its elites. Indeed, just as Asia became

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increasingly important to Russia and its leaders, so too Russia became central to Asia’s future as the nineteenth century progressed. That the Russian advance proved disruptive to existing political formations and communities in Northern Asia is obvious. In this chapter, I focus on a particular aspect of that disruption, one that not only reveals a crucial dimension of Northern Asia’s reordering in the age of imperialism, but also captures a broader truth about the nineteenth century more generally. For it was in that era that increased mobility, and thus growing levels of human movement across greater expanses, became a major feature of human experience across the globe. To be sure, as Dirk Hoerder has shown in a monumental study of world migration over the past millennium, the movement of people has long featured prominently in human history.2 Yet it is also clear that technological change, industrialization, and imperialism—​all appearing or accelerating significantly in the nineteenth century—​created both new impulses and novel capacities for human movement, which now took on an unprecedented scale. Considering only voluntary movement, Jürgen Osterhammel notes that from 1815 to 1914 approximately eighty-​two million people engaged in long-​distance migration. Partly for this reason he identifies “mobilities” as one of eight “panoramas,” or major “spheres of reality,” that shaped and transformed the world in that century.3 Such movement represented a crucial ingredient for the integration of separate colonial systems into a global order—​a principal theme of this volume. Thus if diverse kinds of human movement were by definition unsettling, they also contributed substantially to the creation of the interconnected and interdependent world that we now inhabit and help to account for the kinds of convergences and the rise of global uniformities so skillfully described by C. A. Bayly.4 Empires represented key agents and contexts for these developments, not least of all because many of the world’s largest and most dynamic states considered themselves to be empires (or qualified as such, however they presented themselves). This nexus between empire and movement was no less significant for Russia’s engagement with Asia than it was for other parts of the world. Historians of Russia have recently identified different manifestations of human mobility—​migration, colonization, exile, and resettlement—​as a major theme in the country’s history.5 The context of empire, I propose, was critical for much of this movement. Slavic peasants colonized the steppe and began incursions into Central Asia. Armenian refugees arrived from Ottoman lands, while other peoples were expelled from Crimea and the North Caucasus into the sultan’s domains. Muslims and other believers undertook the hajj and similar pilgrimages on Russian railways and steamers. Traders moved across borders into Mongolia and China. And armies deployed across grand spaces as the empire’s frontiers extended toward the horizons. Here again, such movement was by no means entirely new in the nineteenth century, and in some measure what we observe after 1800 represented the continuation of trends observable in Russia’s early-​modern period.6 But the scope, scale, and speed of human movement in the nineteenth century was of a different order, especially in the last two or three decades before the Great War. Advances in technology—​the railway, in particular—​greatly enhanced human mobility. The projection of Russian power across 188

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vaster distances opened up new spaces for Russians and other tsarist subjects to inhabit. Economic opportunities—​for example, the oil industry around Baku, mines in the Far East—​created incentives for the subjects of neighboring states to seek their fortune within Russia’s borders. And conquest itself had the effect, in many cases, of unsettling communities and inducing or compelling them to migrate to new locations. In short, empire in some cases enabled such movement and in others compelled it. This chapter, then, takes up the theme of human movement within and at times beyond the boundaries of Russia’s expanding empire in the long nineteenth century. It posits that Russia’s expansion eastward and southward—​a form of movement in its own right—​created new opportunities, impulses, and imperatives for diverse kinds of people to resettle, migrate, travel, and thus forge new cultural contacts across the broad portions of the Asian continent. In the pages that follow, I pay particular attention to the attitude of the state. In the best traditions of early-​modern statecraft, the autocracy in Russia had long sought to play a leading role in marshaling and directing the country’s resources. But whereas previously such efforts had sometimes involved encouraging the immigration of foreign colonists and merchants to settle sparsely populated lands and to develop the country’s commercial life, well into the nineteenth century the regime’s view of human movement—​especially spontaneous movement—​had been largely negative. The discussion that follows demonstrates that by the later decades of the century the regime was prepared to embrace and even actively to encourage human mobility within and across its borders, though without abandoning entirely trepidations on that score. I begin by providing some broad observations about Russia’s growing presence and commitments in Asia over the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to railway construction as a key foundation for increased mobility. The next section is largely descriptive and provides an overview of the different forms of human movement in Russian Asia, ranging from Muslim pilgrimage and peasant resettlement to ethnic cleansing and labor migration. The chapter then proceeds to analyze both the ways in which state actors and others embraced the idea of increased human mobility, seeing it as a solution to diverse problems, and the manner in which such movement produced apprehension and discontent for both rulers and subjects. I conclude by suggesting that the movements I describe contributed to the convergence and entanglement of empires in Asia, serving among other things as threads that bound those empires together more tightly as the twentieth century began.

Russian Asia and Asian Russia Russia’s experience of empire in the nineteenth century was heavily focused on Asia. By 1815, in the aftermath of the colossal struggle with Napoleon, the country’s western borders had largely been set, whereas the situation in Russia’s south and east proved much more dynamic in the century to follow. Indeed, virtually all of Russia’s expansion after 1815 occurred in Asia, and over that period the East came to occupy 189

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a more prominent place among the priorities of leading Russian statesmen. This growing preoccupation took various forms. One was the creation in 1797 of a special division within the College of Foreign Affairs empowered to deal with matters “concerning Asiatic peoples, both those subject to Us and those with whom trade and other relations are conducted.”7 Becoming the Asiatic Department within the Foreign Ministry in 1819, this entity blurred the distinction between Russia’s subjects and those beyond while also reflecting the idea that Russia’s “Asiatic policy” was a separate domain governed by principles different from those regulating relations with European powers.8 Russian interest in the Far East grew substantially from the 1830s, based on a combination of an emerging sense of Russian national mission in the East and European penetration of China from the south, which disrupted trade through Kiakhta and suggested that Russia’s own border with the Qing Empire might be revised.9 Alexander II (1855–​81) came to the view that Russia’s rivalry with the West after the Crimean War might be conducted primarily in Asia. When foreign minister Alexander Gorchakov wrote in 1856 that Russia “has a vast field of political activity in Asia,” the emperor responded, “I completely agree with this.”10 Two years later the tsar wrote after noting new treaties with China, “Our position with regard to Asia thereby becomes still more important, and I envision that it is there that future destinies will be decided.”11 Tsarevich Nicholas Aleksandrovich’s ten-​month grand tour in 1890–​91 provided still more evidence for Asia’s growing prominence in Russian thinking. Rather than visiting Europe, the itinerary took the future Nicholas II from Trieste through Egypt, India, Ceylon, Singapore, Siam, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, China, and Japan, before taking him back to Russia at Vladivostok for the return to Petersburg across Siberia. The tour announced the determination of Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, to assert for Russia a presence in Asia and to impress upon the heir Russia’s destiny in the East.12 To be sure, Russia remained deeply concerned with European affairs; but given the globalization of international politics in this age of empire, Asia remained fundamentally connected to European matters rather than being distinct from them, as the previous chapter in this volume makes clear. In a territorial sense, by the early twentieth century Asian possessions represented a large majority of the country’s territory. Of the empire’s 22 million square kilometers in 1914, roughly three-​quarters were in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia. Counting all colonies at the time, only Britain had a larger empire (30 million square kilometers), while the next in line—​France—​was only about half the size of Russia (ca. 12 million square kilometers). By itself the province of Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia was larger than all but five countries in the world, though it had a mere 261,731 inhabitants in 1897. Russia’s land borders in Asia extended 21,000 kilometers, roughly half of that with China alone, the rest separating Russia from the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Afghanistan, and (after 1895) Japan.13 Of course, the population of Russian Asia was remarkably small in relation to the size of that space. Using data for 1897—​the year of the first and only imperial Russian census—​we find only about 15  percent of the 190

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empire’s population—​roughly 19 million people—​inhabiting Asia.14 But this statistic provides only a snapshot of what was a dynamic and rapidly changing situation, especially in the last three decades or so of the old regime (Figure 6.1). The scope and scale of Russia’s territorial possessions in Asia by the early twentieth century reveal a basic truth that is easy to forget in light of the empire’s collapse in 1917: in distinct ways Russia proved hugely successful in the age of empires. Having become the most populous country of Europe already by the 1760s, the country emerged as one of a small handful of truly global powers in the nineteenth century. It had formally incorporated some territories directly into the empire, such as Turkestan and the Far East; protectorates, such as Khiva and Bukhara; spheres of influence in northern Persia, Mongolia, and Manchuria; and finally leases, such as the one it obtained for Port Arthur.15 Russia thus exerted influence over an astonishing proportion of the Asian continent. There were undoubtedly setbacks along the way, perhaps most notably the humiliating defeat to the Japanese in 1904–​1905. And closer inspection typically reveals greater anxiety and deeper flaws than does the bird’s-​eye view; we shall revisit both later in this chapter. But it is worth emphasizing that throughout the nineteenth century Russia’s only major territorial loss—​the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867—​was voluntary and represented a redirection of Russia’s imperial ambitions rather than a capitulation.16 The Russian return of the Ili Valley, occupied since 1871, to the Qing a decade later was also largely voluntary.17 Even territorial losses after Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905—​southern Sakhalin—​were modest, though the frustration of the country’s ambitions in Korea and Manchuria clearly represented a blow.18 In short, Russia’s power and influence in Asia in 1914 was probably greater than it ever had been or would be. The motivations for Russian expansion into Asia were diverse and complex. In the previous chapter, Brian Farrell describes a process whereby Russia was drawn into the steppe and beyond by the need to assert control over neighbors who, it was thought, could not by themselves establish the order required to secure Russia’s existing possessions. In some measure, that process represented the continuation of a trend that began with Moscow’s earliest encounters with steppe peoples,19 although the proximity in the nineteenth century of the British, in particular, placed this process in a broader geopolitical framework. In the end there were many factors shaping Russian expansion in Asia: The geography itself set certain parameters; economic interests were undoubtedly implicated; and an emerging sense of national mission played a role as well.20 It is not the goal of this chapter to sort out these different factors, and for our purposes it might be enough simply to state that the idea of “imperial prestige” explains as much as does anything else. It is worth adding, however, that without bodies of water separating metropole from colony, Russia was perhaps more inclined than other empires to regard the challenge of securing its periphery as an existential one, even as rivals were inclined at times to regard its actions as reflecting limitless ambition. Important for knitting Russia’s territories to its central regions and crucial for a good portion of the human movement to be described below was an emerging rail network. 191

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Having opened its first line in 1837, Russia saw two main “booms” in railway construction, one in the 1860s–​1870s and the other in the 1890s, so that Russian railroad mileage rose from 1,626 km in 1860 to 70,156 in 1913.21 Although European Russia was the initial focus of railway construction, the country’s Asian half eventually occupied an important place as well. The Caucasus was the first Asian possession to see railways, with a line south of the range extending initially from Poti on the Black Sea to Tiflis (1872) and then, because of the oil industry, on to Baku by 1883. Central Asia came next. Completed in 1881, a new line started at the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk (initially Uzun-​Ada) and extended initially to Kzyl Arvat and eventually in the Fergana Valley (1899), with a spur from Merv to Kushka on the border with Afghanistan—​more than 1,000 miles in all. The rails were constructed in part (and initially) in conjunction with Russian campaigns against the Türkmen—​Benjamin Schenk calls this Transcaspian line “the Russian Empire’s first military railway”22—​and in part to counter British advances, though the economic goal of making Russia an intermediary in world trade between Asia and Europe was also relevant. Still more grandiose was the Trans-​Siberian Railway, whose construction began in 1891, when the tsarevich Nicholas presided at a ceremony in Vladivostok inaugurating the construction of the line from that city to Khabarovsk at the end of his Asian grand tour. The goals of the line’s construction were several: to bind Russia’s Asiatic territory more thoroughly to the European provinces, partly in response to Siberian regionalism; to integrate the two halves of the empire—​European and Asian—​into a single national Russian space; to promote the country’s industrial development; to counter growing Chinese migration and perceived British threats to Eastern Siberia and the Far East; and to facilitate peasant colonization of distant Asian lands. Various segments of the line were completed in different stages, while Japan’s defeat of China in 1895 allowed Russia to secure the right to construct a line across Manchuria—​ the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), completed in 1903. Another Manchurian segment extended south from Harbin to Port Arthur. With the completion of the complicated Circumbaikal segment in September of 1904, it became possible to travel all the way from Moscow or Petersburg to Vladivostok by rail. For strategic reasons, after the loss to Japan in 1905, Russia began construction of a line from Chita to Khabarovsk, so that by 1916 the entire coast-​to-​coast trip could be made while remaining on Russian territory.23 The result of all this was a substantial increase in the population’s mobility. As Schenk remarks, “In the second half of the nineteenth century, on the expanded rail net the empire’s population went into motion in the truest sense of the word.”24

Movement: Variations on a Theme What, then, were the sources of large-​scale movements of people over the course of the nineteenth century? One set of movements has to do with conquest itself. To be sure, the capacity to move large numbers of troops and supplies remained limited for much of the nineteenth century. In a stimulating article on the role of camels in the 192

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ill-​fated Russian campaign against Khiva in 1839–​40, Alexander Morrison reminds us that in the mid-​nineteenth century, the means of movement and supply employed by colonial armies remained essentially the same as they would have been even 300 years earlier. Dependent on large numbers of pack animals to move an army of even modest size, Russian commanders faced serious structural constraints on their capacity to wage war. To supply a force of 5,000 men, the campaign enlisted an enormous caravan of over 10,000 camels, 90 percent of which perished in light of the leadership’s decision to undertake the campaign in winter.25 For the most part the Russian conquest of Central Asia was complete before railways could shape military campaigns significantly, but the situation was different for later campaigns. Although arrogant “conquistador imperialists” such as Nikolai Przheval’skii could declare, “With a thousand of our soldiers we can subdue all Asia from Baikal to the Himalayas,”26 military operations of conquest and “pacification” usually involved much larger troop movements. Thus around 200,000 troops were deployed in response to the Boxer rebellion, with some 120,000 transported on the Siberian railroad.27 The numbers were even more impressive a few years later during the Russo-​Japanese War:  despite the large amount of traffic clogging the line, over a million soldiers made their way to the front along it.28 The two belligerents mobilized some 2.5 million troops before the war ended, and battles such as those at Liaoyang and Mukden involved massive armies in confrontation (the first 158,000 Russians vs. 125,000 Japanese; the second more than 270,000 on each side, making it one of the largest single battles in military history).29 After the war there were some 900,000 troops needing transport back to European Russia, with the result that from late 1905 well into 1906 “the vast Far Eastern Army flowed westward in an uninterrupted stream,” taking part in local struggles for power and thus shaping the Revolution of 1905 in those parts.30 Related to military movements were migrations of refugees and populations expelled from homelands for reasons of state security. The largest cases for Russia in the nineteenth century were centered in the south of the country, in Crimea and the Caucasus, and they bore close relation to the wars that unfolded against the Ottoman Empire (to a lesser extent Persia) roughly once a generation (1827–​29, 1853–​56, 1877–​78), and the long conquest in the North Caucasus (1817–​64). In the years after the Crimean War, especially 1859–​60, nearly 200,000 Crimean Tatars abandoned their native peninsula in favor of the Ottoman Empire, leaving hundreds of villages completely empty and bringing the local economy to a standstill. The most recent exploration of that process reveals as the source of the exodus a complex combination of wartime destruction, dislocation, and requisition; active promotion of the exodus based on official Russian accusations of Tatar collusion with the enemy; Tatar rumors about official plans for their relocation to the north; and Ottoman exhortations for Tatars to resettle in the Muslim country to the south. One student of the process concludes that this exodus should be seen as a forced rather than a voluntary migration.31 A similar kind of exodus unfolded a short time later in the North Caucasus, as Russia’s protracted colonial war came to an end there in the late 1850s to mid-​1860s. Some 370,000 people indigenous to the 193

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region departed for the Ottoman Empire and as many as 100,000 were resettled northward among the Cossack settlements of the lowlands. Some estimates are considerably greater, so that by 1864, the Circassian population in the Caucasus—​as few as 500,000 and as many as 2 million—​was gone.32 Sorting out the precise motivations of Russian military authorities is complicated and has produced different interpretations. Where one view sees an effort to integrate all but the most noncompliant individuals into the postwar imperial order rather than exclusion through forced exile,33 another sees “a watershed in [an] emerging imperial policy of demographic conquest,” and a brutally expulsionist and even consciously exterminationist campaign of ethnic cleansing.34 We may say at a minimum that even if tsarist forces did not expect the mass emigration, their actions nonetheless precipitated a movement of hundreds of thousands of Circassians and related tribes from the northwest Caucasus; the entire process was undoubtedly brutal. In the three years after the Russo-​Turkish War of 1877–​78, the tsarist annexation of Batum and Kars produced yet another Muslim exodus of some 140,000 persons to Ottoman lands (including also some Armenians). One scholar concludes that while the Russian administration did not force those Muslims to emigrate, neither did it try to dissuade them from leaving. Based on the calls of Muslim clerics to emigrate and fears of Russian rule after a series of wars with the tsarist empire, as well as bad harvests the first two years after the war, some four-​fifths of the Muslims of Batum and Kars left for Turkey. About half of these emigrants then returned to their homelands after encountering hardship in Anatolia, when a bankrupt Ottoman Empire proved unable to provide adequate material aid to the migrants.35 These Muslims were among approximately 800,000 people displaced by that war.36 Yet another mass exodus unfolded after the brutal suppression of a Muslim revolt in the steppe in 1916 by tsarist forces. Well over 100,000 (and perhaps as many as 300,000) fled across the border into Xinjiang, creating a serious crisis for Chinese officials there.37 For all this, Russia was not only a source of refugees, but also a magnet for foreigners, especially (but not only) Christians in Muslim lands. For example, some 57,000 Armenians left Persia and the Ottoman Empire after Russian wars with those two countries in the 1820s, and settled within the borders of the tsarist empire.38 On the assumption that they would be resourceful and loyal new subjects, Russia actively recruited these immigrants by issuing appeals that included promises of the freedom to trade, the acquisition of land, and relief from taxes over six years—​in short, “reliable, tranquil, and happy refuge” in Russia, as one appeal of 1828 declared. A propagandistic Russian account from the time labeled the exodus of Armenians from Persia “a unique event in the world’s chronicles,” as it entailed “the resettlement not only of people themselves, but the resettlement of hearts and souls.”39 An even larger wave of Armenians—​ perhaps as many as 300,000—​sought refuge in Russia during the First World War in response to Ottoman policies of deportation and extermination.40 Further east, when Russian forces evacuated the Ili valley in 1882, they brought with them the majority of its Muslim population—​perhaps some 100,000 families—​who were motivated by fears 194

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of Qing reprisals and their dependence on local strongmen who favored the move for their own reasons. Russia, for its part, saw advantages in populating its new frontier with a community opposed to the Qing.41 In both places—​the Caucasus and Turkestan—​we see a pattern whereby inhabitants of a conquered territory were offered the opportunity to resettle and thus choose their future political allegiances. If there was some element of choice in such movements, then penal deportation to Siberia was entirely compulsory, except for accompanying spouses and children. The tsarist regime used exile to Siberia as a form of punishment from as early as 1593,42 but the scale of movement increased considerably after 1800. If an average of 1,600 persons were exiled annually in 1807–​13, then the next five years saw an average of 2,476, and the five years after that (1819–​23) already 4,570. A reform of the exile system was undertaken in 1823 partly in response to these increases, yet the growth continued. By the 1860s over 11,000 exiles (including families) were entering Siberia annually, and by the next decade the number had jumped to 16,600 per year. In 1958, George Kennan reported that from the reform of 1823 until his own day some 772,979 exiles went to Siberia (though some of these apparently went more than once).43 Even after the partial abolition of exile, Russia sent 100,000 exiles to Siberia in 1900–​13 either administratively or judicially. In 1898 there were just under 300,000 deportees in Siberia (400,000 or ca. 7 percent of the Siberian population if we count families).44 Over the entire period 1801–​1914 the total is estimated at just under a million.45 Hardened and petty criminals, troublesome villagers, religious dissidents, radical revolutionaries, Polish insurgents—​ all occupied their place within this large if slow-​moving wave that provided both labor and settlers to the Russian east. Incredibly, in the first part of the nineteenth century the prisoners made the trip entirely by foot and at all times of the year; not surprisingly many did not live to see their destination. Later in the century the state made more active use of riverways and, eventually, railways, though whatever the means of conveyance exile convoys remained, as Daniel Beer writes, “dangerous, violent and unpredictable spaces.”46 Those exiled to the island of Sakhalin could also be transported by steamship, departing from Odessa and making a colossal trip around all of Asia to reach their penal destination.47 Observing the manners and morals of this largely male exile population in Siberia, administrators eventually concluded that they needed to encourage more female emigration, since wives offered the possibility of “civilizing” these men. Comparatively little was accomplished in this regard, however, and women’s experiences in deportation convoys help to explain why they might have been unenthusiastic about making the trip.48 Exiles represented an important source of labor in key industries of Russian Asia, perhaps most notably in gold mines like the one Kennan described in The Exile System in Siberia.49 From the late eighteenth century the Nerchinsk Mining District became the main locus of such laborers—​they mined silver, gold, and lead—​with the island of Sakhalin taking over that function after 1884.50 Nine thousand prisoners and 4,500 exiles became a permanent labor force for the construction of the Trans-​Siberian railway, while skilled labor had to be imported in many cases from Europe.51 195

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If the labor for such exiles was often compulsory, then the more voluntary search for work became a crucial driver of human movement as well. Chinese “coolies,” preferable because of their seemingly limitless supply and low unit price, were prominent in railway construction: they constituted over 21 percent and 40 percent of the labor force for the Trans-​Baikal and Ussuri segments, and between 70 and 90 percent on the CER.52 Chinese farmers and traders became critical in light of insufficient supply of goods from the Russian hinterland, as well as for public works such as the CER, the port of Vladivostok, and so on. By 1916 all but 7 percent of the gold miners in the Russian Far East were Chinese, and they constituted a substantial portion of Vladivostok’s population as well, where some 40,000 Chinese were hired by the Russo-​Chinese Bank for seasonal employment each year.53 Chinese immigration was conditioned by the Qing’s decision in 1878 to lift restrictions on Han Chinese access to Manchuria, which changed a trickle entering Russia into a torrent—​perhaps some 200,000 in the thirty years after 1878.54 Other foreigners made such moves as well. Attracted mostly by labor opportunities (above all farming), but also driven by floods and droughts, and eventually by Japanese annexation of their country in 1910, Koreans arrived in growing numbers: if there were a mere 3,000 or so in the Russian Far East in 1869, then there were twenty times that number by 1912 and over 80,000 by 1917—​and this despite the fact that it was illegal for Korean peasants to leave Korea.55 The rise of the oil industry in Baku—​for a time its fields produced more oil than all of those in the United States56—​eventually brought substantial numbers of workers from Northern Persia. One account suggests that by the early twentieth century not fewer than 300,000 Persian subjects, most of them ethnically Azeri, were crossing the Russian border annually in search of work. Migrants from Iran became a majority of the unskilled labor in the industry, and many of their comrades were employed in other industries and agriculture—​in cotton fields, orchards, irrigation projects, and so on. In 1907, when tsarist authorities established sterner control over the border in response to the constitutional revolution in Iran, the numbers of migrants dropped substantially, though landlords quickly began to agitate for looser control in order to meet labor needs.57 The growing Russian presence in Turkestan meanwhile generated new incentives for Kashgaris—​Muslims in western Chinese Turkestan—​to migrate across the border for work. By one estimate some 50,000 were doing so annually by 1914.58 In short, in the last decades of the empire migrants from Russia’s Asian neighbors became increasingly important for meeting the country’s labor needs. Trade and commerce also induced human movement on a large scale, though this was far from new in the nineteenth century. The extensive trapping of the early-​modern period, which initially drew Muscovites into Siberia, decimated the original fauna by the nineteenth century, but even so the trade continued to a degree. Trade was also central to relations with China and shaped an early treaty in 1727, which provided that exchange between the two countries should occur through the border settlement of Kiakhta. A series of Sino-​Russian treaties between 1858 and 1882 allowing Russians to trade in and through Chinese Mongolia invigorated trade significantly. Curiously, 196

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Buddhist monasteries, with their access to pack animals and labor, emerged as centers of Mongolian commercial life after the conclusion of these treaties, while lamas provided much of the transportation of goods between the two empires.59 For the trade that went across Central Asia bypassing Kiakhta, it was Kazakhs who emerged as such intermediaries especially from the 1760s to the 1830s (though they also robbed caravans until Russia could assert greater control over them). Bukharan and Khoqandi merchants connected Central Asia with Siberia and thus played a similar role. “Russian” merchants were in fact usually Tatars or other Muslims, but Slavs, too, became active in the trade, and a new commercial treaty in 1851 (the Treaty of Kulja) gave more opportunities for initiative to merchants who were Russian subjects.60 Religious belief promoted movement as well, especially in the case of pilgrims. Russian Asia itself contained numerous important shrines and saints’ tombs for Muslims and other believers. In fact Central Asia—​including Chinese Turkestan—​ featured an unusually large number of such sites, sometimes designated as “second Meccas,” which permitted Muslims in the region to perform a localized version of the hajj, as well as to honor exceptional local spiritual figures.61 But in terms of movement and distance, the more striking development by the end of the nineteenth century was a dramatic rise in the numbers of Muslims making the pilgrimage all the way to Mecca. Statistics are hard to come by, but by the turn of the century the combination of rail, steamship, and increased consular services, along with conquests in Central Asia that made Muslims the largest religious group in Russia after Orthodox Christians, combined to produce an annual flow of 6,000–​10,000, occasionally as many as 16,000, Muslims making the trip to the Hijaz. This was part of a more general phenomenon, whereby global imperialism converted the hajj from an elite experience involving comparatively small numbers into a mass phenomenon dominated by the poor, many traveling long distances for the first time in their lives. The bulk of the Russian pilgrims came from Central Asia, with smaller numbers from the Caucasus and the Volga-​Ural region. Depending on their point of departure, travel took hajjis by rail all the way to Istanbul or, more frequently, from Black Sea ports. But whatever the precise route, new transport possibilities profoundly increased the speed of the trip (Russian Muslims could soon make the round trip in a few months) and its accessibility (the hajj now became a mass phenomenon).62 But probably the greatest manifestation of mobility in Russian Asia was the stream of peasants and settlers from European Russia in the last few decades of tsarist rule. For several centuries the main destination for colonists had been the steppe of European Russia’s south and southeast (the broad area north of the Black Sea extending from Romania to the Volga), to which almost half a million people moved during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–​96) alone. That region continued to serve as a destination until the very end of the nineteenth century, receiving some 2 million people (slightly over half of the empire’s colonists) in the quarter-​century between 1871 and 1896. But over the century the target location for resettlement moved further east.63 In the thirty years or so before 1917, approximately 5 million peasants crossed the Urals—​almost half of them in just the 197

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period between 1907 and 1914—​thus making Siberia the fastest-​growing region in the country in those years.64 In 1908 alone, at the peak of the surge, almost 700,000 people passed through the resettlement point in Cheliabinsk.65 A foreigner riding westward from the Pacific to Moscow on the Siberian railway found especially striking “the great stream of emigrants flowing eastward along the route. There is nothing to be seen like it in any part of the world.”66 Although provisional, the figures in Tables 6.1 and 6.2 nonetheless give some sense of the scale of the movement from Russia to Siberia (excluding Central Asia) and the resulting changes in the population of Asiatic Russia. While most of these peasants settled in western Siberia and Northern Steppe, in a band running about fifty miles to either side of the railway line,67 growth was also dramatic in more distant parts of Russian Asia. The population of the Far East increased from a mere 70,000 in 1860 to 875,000 in 1917, with some 300,000 arriving just in the years 1908–​17.68 Comparatively fewer settled in Central Asia (Turkestan), though even there the numbers were far from trivial.69 The distribution of settlers is provided in Table 6.3. Table 6.1  Russian migrants settling in Asiatic Russia, 1801–​1914 1801–​50 1851–​60 1861–​70 1871–​80 1881–​90 1891–​1900 1901–​10 1911–​14

Peasants

Exiles and Prisoners

Total

125,000 91,000 114,000 68,000 279,000 1,078,000 2,257,000 696,000

250,000 100,000 140,000 180,000 140,000 130,000 25,000 27,000

375,000 191,000 254,000 248,000 419,000 1,208,000 2,282,000 723,000

Modified from Donald W. Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 32–​3.

Table 6.2  Growth in Siberian population, 1622–​1911 1622 1763 1815 1858 1897 1911

Natives

Russians and Foreigners

173,000 260,000 434,000 648,000 870,536 972,866

23,000 420,000 1,100,500 2,288,036 4,889,633 8,393,469

Total 196,000 680,000 1,534,500 2,936,036 5,760,169 9,366,335

Modified from Donald W. Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 32–​3.

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Table 6.3  Distribution of settlers in Asiatic Russia, 1893–​1912 Western and Central Siberia    Tobol’sk province    Tomsk province   Enisei province

          1,800,400   318,00 1,109,200   372,600

Northern Kazakhstan    Ural’sk and Turgai oblasts    Akmolinsk oblast   Semipalatinsk oblast

          1,226,800 484,600 640,800 101,400

Central Asia   Semirech’e oblast    Syr’-​Daria and Fergana oblasts

          87,800 81,200

169,000

Eastern Siberia and the Far East   Irkutsk province   Zaibakal oblast    Amur oblast   Maritime oblast

          117,000 6400 96,400 175,200

395,000

TOTAL

          3,591,200

Modified from Lewis Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 25.

Colonization also occurred beyond Russia’s borders. Perhaps the most notable example is Harbin, which in the twenty years or so before 1917 grew from an abandoned distillery with a minor portage across the Sungari River into a bustling city with over 100,000 inhabitants. Created to serve the CER, Harbin eventually had the largest number and concentration of foreigners in China and thus represented, in David Wolff’s words, “a special imperialist challenge to Beijing.” By 1912 the CER beltway—​ a swath of territory 220 feet wide encompassing the rail line—​had a Russian population of 70,000, with over 46,000 in the city of Harbin itself.70 The last years before the First World War saw colonization beyond Russia’s borders in northern Iran as well. As in the steppe, it began spontaneously here, but by late 1913 the tsarist government had developed an ambitious plan of colonization of Iran’s northern provinces, possibly with the goal of eventual annexation. Russian military occupation of part of Astrabad province in 1917 created the possibility of more aggressive colonization, though after the February Revolution the Provisional Government abandoned these plans. Thus even if not more than 4,000 Russian subjects had settled in Iran by 1914, this might well have been the start of a significant demographic transformation of northern Iran, had the revolution not intervened.71 199

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The larger picture is one of both settling and unsettling. Especially in the last decades of the tsarist era, large numbers of mostly Slavic peasants made their way to the empire’s peripheries, settling lands that were, by the standards of European Russia, sparsely inhabited. Along with military operations and mass expulsions, however, this very process had profoundly unsettling effects. Some peoples were displaced, others driven out or made refugees, still others drawn into Russia either to escape threats at home or to secure their livelihoods through migrant labor. Some movement, such as pilgrimage, was largely voluntary, while other forms were heavily coerced, and still others exhibited elements of both. In virtually all cases, this movement entangled Russia and Russians more deeply in the affairs of their neighbors, while also implicating non-​ Russian subjects in the fate of the tsarist empire.

Embracing Mobility Much of this movement was spontaneous in the sense that it was neither promoted nor directed by the state and its agents. Indeed, for a good portion of its history, the tsarist state took a rather dim view of movement, and one of Russia’s principal institutions—​ serfdom—​represented precisely a prohibition on peasant movement. Nonetheless, by the last decades of the nineteenth century leading tsarist statesmen had adopted a different view on mobility, considering it a positive thing that the regime should encourage in order to settle its more distant borderlands and to unleash the country’s productive forces. From this standpoint, the elimination of serfdom in 1861 represented a fundamental precondition for such an intellectual reorientation, even if the latter did not occur immediately. Considering state attitudes toward some of the forms of movement already identified allows us to see this shift in specific instances. Consider, for example, the matter of pilgrimage. The tsarist government viewed movement inspired by Islamic piety with some consternation, concerned as it was about both epidemics—​the most frequent reason for restrictions on the hajj—​and the prospect of pilgrims absorbing anticolonial ideas abroad—​a concern that increased substantially after a major uprising in the Andijan region of Turkestan in 1898. From this standpoint statesmen permitted the hajj reluctantly, so as neither to offend the predominant Orthodox Church nor to create the impression that the state was actually encouraging the pilgrimage. Yet in due course statesmen also recognized that the presence of Russian hajjis gave the empire occasion to open new consulates in the Near East and thus to project its power in competition with imperial rivals. Caring for Muslim pilgrims also offered Russia the opportunity to raise its status among Muslims both within Russia and abroad, as well as to promote the commercial interests of steamship companies and other Russian entrepreneurs. In the late nineteenth century tsarist officials therefore embraced a comprehensive policy of hajj sponsorship. The process began in 1839, when Russia opened a new consulate in Beirut, followed by others in Aleppo and Damascus in the mid-​1840s, which allowed tsarist authorities to better regulate the hajj traffic. 200

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They offered pilgrims places to store money and valuables and aided with estate issues when pilgrims died during their sojourn. By opening four new consulates in China’s Xinjiang province—​Kashgar, Urumqi, Kuldja, and Chuguchak—​St. Petersburg sought to integrate Muslims there into its hajj infrastructure. Even more important was the opening in 1891 of a new Russian consulate in Jeddah, the main port of arrival for seaborne hajj traffic. Petersburg immediately appointed a Muslim as consul (although that man died the next year). In 1908 another Muslim was appointed by the interior ministry to be an official organizer of the hajj for Russian Muslims. His efforts proved unsuccessful and the government did not appoint a director of the hajj again, but the project was not a complete failure. If on the one hand hajjis became conscious of their inferior treatment in comparison to Orthodox pilgrims (e.g., with reference to quarantine regimes), then some accounts suggest that pilgrims returned more patriotic than they had left. Some from Chinese Turkestan even posed as Russian subjects to avail themselves of tsarist consular services and protection.72 A similar evolution seems to be observable in the case of Buddhist pilgrimage: whereas tsarist officials sought initially to break ties between Buddhists in Russia and their coreligionists abroad, by the early twentieth century Russia sought to include provisions in a treaty with Britain to allow its Buddhists subjects to perform pilgrimages to Lhasa. Petersburg apparently realized that such pilgrims could help it to project power into Mongolia and Tibet.73 The matter of migration to Siberia and other Asian lands revealed a similar evolution of thought. To a substantial degree, this colonization of Asia began as a spontaneous process, whereby peasants resettled regardless of what state functionaries thought about the matter. Early on, state officials—​generally a cautious bunch—​worried about the “vagabondage” likely to ensue if peasants were unmoored from their places of residence. The institution of serfdom represented a substantial impediment to peasant movement, since its very purpose historically was to guarantee a stable labor force for the landowning nobility. Even after the formal emancipation in 1861, the government retained powerful mechanisms to restrict peasant mobility, with one major effect of the Emancipation Edict being—​in the words of the government’s own later report—​“to deny the right to resettle to most of the peasant population.”74 Leaving peasants bound to their local communities and subject to redemption payments as a condition of their access to land created few opportunities for movement, at least legally. This is not to say that there were no efforts at all to effectuate movement. A decree of 1830 ordered all religious sectarians classified as “especially pernicious” to be relocated to the newly conquered South Caucasus by either forced exile or voluntary resettlement, thereby allowing St. Petersburg both to be rid of these undesirables within Russia itself and to begin the colonization of its new territories. Tens of thousands of sectarians made the trek, and as late as the 1890s they constituted the majority of ethnic Russians in the South Caucasus.75 Beginning in 1843, the ministry of state properties sought to promote the migration of state peasants—​these “free rural inhabitants” were almost equal in number to the country’s serfs—​to western Siberia, and as many as 350,000 of them made this movement by the 1860s. Still, numbers were small compared to what 201

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transpired from the 1890s onward. And in any event, once the basic provisions of serf emancipation were extended to state peasants in 1866, the initiative that had begun in 1843 was effectively terminated. For the next twenty years encouragement of resettlement provided the exception rather than the rule, even if spontaneous migration on some level continued.76 Thus before the 1880s we see only cautious and selective promotion of peasant mobility, combined with regimes of social control generally designed to keep people in place. Three factors proved critical to altering the regime’s attitude in the last three decades or so. The first was population growth and rising land hunger in European Russia. Among the more striking features of the Russian Empire in its last half-​century was its astounding population growth. Between 1861 and 1914 the population more than doubled, with most of the increase coming not from Asian expansion—​new acquisitions were generally sparsely populated77—​but rather high fertility. By 1880 Russia’s population, at around 84 million, was substantially greater than other European powers (without colonies), the United States, and Japan. Across the nineteenth century, birthrates in Russia were consistently higher than those in other Great Powers—​hovering around 50 births per 1,000 inhabitants, in contrast to numbers in the range of 25–​40 in other states. While there was a modest decline in Russia’s birthrate by the early twentieth century, this was offset by declines in mortality and increases in life expectancy. The result was that if Russia’s population was increasing at an annual rate of 1.2 percent in the 1850s, this had increased to 1.68 percent by the last years of the old regime.78 Although there was probably sufficient land to support the growing population under different conditions of land tenure and use, migration offered one form of adjustment in response to demographic growth. Prolonged agricultural depression in the 1870s and an extensive famine of 1890–​91 intensified pressures for movement. The regime eventually recognized that resettlement could alleviate population pressure in the European provinces, which served as a key ingredient for peasant unrest in the Revolution of 1905. A second cluster of factors concerned geopolitics. Petersburg was eager to strengthen the Russian presence in Asia as a counterbalance to the threats it saw in imperial rivals. The Qing’s willingness to open Manchuria up to colonization by Han Chinese in 1878 created strong incentives for Russia to populate its Far Eastern possessions so as not to be overrun demographically. Moreover, Japan had emerged as a dynamic new power in East Asia, and its defeat of China in 1895 made clear that it would not give Russia a free hand in Manchuria and Korea. There was also the threat of “separatism” in Siberia itself, where a robust sense of regionalism had begun to appear by mid-​century. Cognizant of the example of the United States’ break with Great Britain in 1776 and of Canada’s attainment of Dominion status in 1867, tsarist authorities were determined to bind Siberia more thoroughly to European Russia. Colonization represented one way to do this. Finally, economic considerations occupied a place in tsarist thinking. Actively devoted to Russia’s industrialization in the 1890s, finance minister Sergei Witte regarded peasant resettlement as an important aspect of unleashing the country’s economic potential, 202

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though the interior ministry, still concerned with the dangers of large and uncontrolled migration, continued to emphasize the need for the state to control and limit the process. The Revolution of 1905, aside from creating a powerful argument in favor of increasing resettlement to alleviate land hunger, also brought to prominence statesmen with a new approach to governance. The most notable of these was the new prime minister from 1906 Peter Stolypin, who proposed that the regime could no longer rely upon the population’s passive compliance, but rather required active subjects whose initiative would secure the country’s future. For such statesmen, writes Charles Steinwedel, “the strength and well-​being of the state flowed from the population seeking to satisfy its own interests.”79 Even a brief catalog of measures demonstrates the commitments that the state eventually made to Siberian colonization. We have already noted railway construction in Russian Asia. Though the Trans-​Siberian was completed only in 1903, its first segment—​as far as the Ob’ river—​began operation already in 1896, thus opening the way to mass peasant colonization of the western portions of Russian Asia. Further construction opened the regions to the east, while the completion of the Orenburg-​Tashkent line in 1906 rendered Central Asia accessible to more aggressive colonization. After “Temporary Regulations” issued in 1881, a new permanent resettlement law appeared in 1889, a sign that the regime now recognized that more peasant migration was desirable.80 In 1896 the autocracy created a Resettlement Administration within the interior ministry, which in 1905 was combined with the agriculture ministry to form the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture—​GUZZ, by its acronym in Russian. This body had a strongly technocratic ethos embraced by a tight-​knit group deeply committed to their cause. It became, writes one scholar, “a prominent and lavishly funded agency.”81 Another comments, “Probably no Western country ever had an agriculture ministry whose functions approached those of Russia’s in scope and in their importance to the nation’s future.”82 Given the destination of most Russian settlers, the eventual head of the Resettlement Administration, A. V. Krivoshein, became known informally as “the minister of Asiatic Russia.”83 In 1896 the government also recognized the practice of scouting [khodachestvo] as a right of prospective migrants and provided greater infrastructure for their effective work.84 New laws in 1904–​1906 instituted freedom of migration, whereby migrants no longer needed special permission from the government to make the move. Russia’s new parliament, the State Duma, became involved in colonization issues as well. It appropriated 48 million rubles for better passenger cars on the railway, and the migration budget—​ funds designated to support and promote peasant migration in diverse ways—​increased more than sixfold between 1906 and 1914.85 The colonization of Asian Russia had thus become a major project for state and society alike. If the broad tendency from the 1880s to the First World War was to facilitate and encourage peasant resettlement, then official attitudes on migrant labor were more complicated, as a comparison of policies governing the construction of two different Far Eastern railways reveals. Initiated in 1896, the CER featured an extensive deployment of “yellow labor”—​mostly Chinese and Koreans—​while the Amur line, started in 203

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1908, saw a clear turn toward exclusionary and racialized labor policies. Thus around 60,000 Chinese were recruited for construction of the CER, and several thousand more crossed the border to work on portions of the Siberian line around Baikal. Defeat in the war with Japan helped to shift the calculus. Russia’s predominance in northeastern Asia no longer appeared inevitable, and accordingly one sees “a heightened concern with the ‘penetration’ of foreignness into Russian territory, and with the ‘colonization’ and Russification of the Priamur.” The terms for the construction budget of the Amur line accordingly specified that the work was to be completed exclusively by Russian workers—​“without the least participation of the yellows,” as an official publication of the Resettlement Administration declared later. Thus while construction of the CER welcomed cross-​border population mobility, the Amur project featured aspirations to erect a demographic barrier between Russia and China. The shift also signaled Russia’s own implication in a discourse about the “yellow peril” broadly shared among Europeans and Americans at the time. Thus even as absolute numbers of Chinese and Koreans increased in 1897–​1910, their proportion in relation to “Russians”—​actually Europeans of various ethnicities—​fell.86 In the years leading to this measure, Governor-​ General P. F. Unterberger of the Priamur remarked, “We didn’t occupy this region so that it could be colonized by yellows.”87 These preoccupations informed legislation in June of 1910 designed to limit the in-​migration of Chinese and Koreans. But economic realities—​above all the dependence of entrepreneurs on cheap “yellow” labor—​forced the inclusion of exceptions and exemptions in the law that were almost immediately utilized. Moreover, the law continued to permit periodic or seasonal employment, as its principal goal was to block permanent or long-​term Chinese and Korean settlement on Russian territory. In any event, Russia’s mobilization for war in 1914 undermined the restrictions in the 1910 law. Military and labor conscription depleted the Far East of over 500,000 residents—​nearly half of the farming population. In these conditions even tsarist officials haunted by the “yellow peril” had to sanction the recruitment of Chinese labor to alleviate shortages. Some 50,000 Chinese entered the Priamur Region in 1916 alone. The Ministry of Agriculture even proposed a massive program of importing 200,000 Korean and Chinese to work as agricultural laborers in central Russia.88 Thus we see a growing willingness on the part of the state to embrace human mobility, but also persistent concerns about the ethnic balance that too much migration from abroad might produce. Mobility could serve to unleash the country’s productive forces, aid in the projection of Russia’s power into distant realms, and secure comparatively recent conquests from imperial rivalries and regional demographic weakness.

The Discontents of Movement If over time official attitudes came to a more positive view of human mobility (or at least accepted it as a necessity), then the movement of humans that we have described 204

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here could also produce significant discontent. Perhaps paradoxically, one expression of discontent concerned the civilizational potential of the Russian peasant. In line with growing Russian national sentiment, tsarist statesmen became much more conscious of the need to ensure that ethnic Russians—​which in official conceptions included Belarusians and Ukrainians—​be the principal colonizing force in Asia.89 To a growing degree, those charged with directing resettlement used expressions like “Russian resettlers” and the “Russian element.” Legislation in 1886 permitted only “Russian subjects from among rural residents of the Christian confessions” to settle in Turkestan. A decade later things had become even more restrictive: a decree of 1897 limited immigration to the Caucasus exclusively to “Orthodox settlers of native Russian background.”90 Similar language appeared with regard to Central Asia in 1904. And yet if Slavic migrants were expected to “civilize” the empire’s Asian peoples, conditions often compelled them sooner to adapt to habits of their new neighbors than to compel the opposite. Nor were Russian peasants even usually aware of the “civilizing mission” entrusted to them. Many Cossacks, critics contended, appeared to have lost their “Russianness” in the East and were not enthusiastic about farming, which was important for sedentarization of nomads. Could they really represent the Russian people in Asia? For their part Russian peasants, often arriving in an impoverished state and challenged by the unfamiliar conditions in their new homes, scarcely cut a compelling image. Nomads transitioning to farming seemed as likely to adopt Russians’ bad habits as their salutary ones. Russians in Asia thus seemed to exhibit a disturbing “cultural powerlessness.” In short, even as Russian population growth in Asia was presumed to advance the process of binding the periphery with the center, “peasant resettlement created new problems for authorities and exacerbated social, national, and religious controversies.”91 Nor was the situation substantially better in urban centers such as Tashkent. With the completion of the railroad from European Russia in 1906, tsarist officials in the city found themselves shocked at having to deal with so many members of Russia’s lower classes as they poured into the city. Their ranks were swelled by peasants in the region who had failed to master irrigation and thus made their way to the city in search of work. That Central Asians appeared more civilized in some respects than Russians made the apprehensions even worse, as did the appearance of Russian prostitutes in the city. Some local Russian elites lost faith in Tashkent’s mission of promoting “progress” in Central Asia and came to see the railway as more of a curse than a boon.92 Although the situation varied depending on the region, colonization spelled profound displacement and disruption for indigenous populations. Consider, for example, the native peoples in Siberia, who in the Far East and on Sakhalin numbered only several thousand. The Russian advance drove many further north and a few, such as the Buryats, further south from the main rivers, roads, and rail line. The result for Yakuts was to scatter them far and wide beyond their homeland on the Lena River, whereas the Turkic-​ speaking shamanists of the Altai were sooner driven toward each other to form a more compact bloc in that mountain region. In short, one historian concludes, “The ethnic 205

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geography of Siberia was altered radically by Russian occupation.”93 In the Kazakh steppe, the Steppe Statute of 1891 introduced the concept of “surplus land” [izlishki], which authorized the state to determine the land that Kazakhs actually needed and to deploy the supposed excess for the project of peasant resettlement. This gave resettlement authorities great latitude in converting pasture to farming, and allowed settlers to occupy the most fertile pastures in the northern parts of the steppes—​critical for the survival of herds in the summer months—​and thus drove nomads to the drier south. In these conditions nomadism became less sustainable. Conflict between Kazakhs and settlers was the result in many cases, although we also see evidence of Kazakhs either recruiting settlers as tenants or working for them as farmhands. Generating particular resentment was the authorities’ practice of claiming for resettlement purposes plots that sedentarized Kazakhs had themselves already factually brought under cultivation.94 It did not help that, after a new electoral law in 1907, peoples of the steppe and Central Asia lost even token representation in the country’s young parliament, the Duma. The encroachment of agriculture on the Kazakhs’ pastoral economy reminds us that the nineteenth century did not feature only increases in mobility. A dramatic manifestation of nomadic dissatisfaction took the form of a massive uprising in 1916 among Kyrgyz and other Central Asians reacting to a combination of wartime mobilization and the settlement policies of the previous decades. Desperate for labor in the context of the total war being waged further west, the tsarist regime decided in June of 1916 to draft ethnic minorities previously exempt from military service into forced labor brigades, most of them in Central Asia. In doing so, the tsar offered no quid pro quo, whereby steppe peoples might acquire equal land rights or political representation in exchange for their service. Beginning as a revolt against the process of the draft, for which the regime had made little preparation (mostly ignoring the advice of non-​Russian intermediaries) and which included various forms of corruption and injustice, the protest soon targeted Russian settlers, who had been encroaching on lands of the indigenous population. The revolt, writes Daniel Brower, was “in a real sense a settling of accounts with colonists at whose hands they [Kyrgyz] and their clans had suffered.”95 By September a large portion of the steppe was consumed by rebellion, though activity was concentrated among the Kyrgyz in the area of Lake Issyk-​ Kul, who had most recently faced the consequences of increased Russian settlement. In this “openly anti-​colonial civil war,” some 3,500 colonists died in the uprising, and the homesteads of approximately 9,000 settlers were destroyed.96 Russian reprisals—​ both the official ones undertaken by tsarist authorities and unofficial ones by enraged settlers—​were brutal and extensive, with substantially larger casualties on the side of Central Asians (estimates suggest between 100,000 and 200,000 pastoralists perished) and an exodus of large numbers of nomads and their animals across the border into China. The immediate cause for the revolt resided in the exigencies of the First World War, but the events in 1916 also revealed the depths of anger among Central Asians that the Russian policy of resettlement had generated by the early twentieth century. It also revealed that for all the visible success of Russia’s imperial enterprise, there were 206

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also profound tensions and fissures—​indeed flaws so deep that they placed the fate of the empire itself in jeopardy. In some sense, the chaos engulfing the steppe in the second half of 1916 represents merely an initial step in the final collapse of the tsarist autocracy in early 1917.97

Conclusion For Russian Asia there were two fundamental breaks in the nineteenth century. First, though energy and a sense of purpose for deeper eastward advance were building from at least the 1830s, a key shift came in the 1850s–​1860s, when Russia was able fully to activate itself and to acquire extensive territories in the Far East and Central Asia. Second, though peasant colonization occurred across the entire century, a fundamentally new commitment to peasant mobility appeared in the late 1880s with dramatic consequences for Siberia, the steppe, and the Far East in particular. One could say that with the first transition Russia acquired new territories, while with the second it began more aggressively to populate them. The picture here confirms that the century’s second half was the more dynamic, with that dynamism increasing as the twentieth century approached. The nineteenth century was a critical one for North Asia. Sparsely populated with only a small Russian presence at the century’s start, by 1914 the region’s demography had been transformed, and Russians (if we include Ukrainians as well) had become the predominant population everywhere except the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and a portion of the steppe. Borders had been altered and clarified, while various smaller polities (e.g., khantaes) between Russia, Britain, and China had been either conquered or reduced to the status of protectorates. The movements we have described here began to function as a thread binding the states of northern Asia together and implicating each in the affairs of the others. If Russia expelled Muslims in the North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, then it received Armenian migrants from those same Well-​Protected Domains. If Iranians came to Russia work in the oil industry, then Russia sent its settlers to begin the colonization of northern Iran. If Chinese and Korean laborers came to the Far East for work, then Russians established colonies such as Harbin in China. And if some Muslims came to the empire from China after the evacuation of the Ili Valley, then others fled there after the revolt of 1916. These movements across the empire’s borders bound these states to one another and helped to forge, for all of their differences, a shared experience of empire in Asia. It is a striking feature that in the decade before the Great War both Russia itself and its most important neighbors in Asia—​the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and China—​all experienced significant upheaval and constitutional revolution; and all of them collapsed or saw the establishment of new political regimes in the years between 1912 and 1925. It was in the nineteenth centuries that these empires became fundamentally entangled, and human mobility proved to be a critical ingredient in this convergence. 207

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Figure 6.1  The Russian Empire in 1914. From Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev (eds), Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–​1930 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007).

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NOTES For help and advice in preparing this chapter, I thank Daniel Beer, Austin Dean, Laura Jule, Cian McMahon, Alexander Morrison, Evgeniia Sablina, Jeff Schauer, and Benjamin Schenk and seminar participants at the University of Basel. I also thank an anonymous reader for useful critical observations on an earlier draft. 1 Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), pp. 53–​122. 2 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 3 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 117–​66 (statistic at p. 154). 4 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​ 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 5 Among the most notable recent works in this regard are Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (eds), Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (New York: Routledge, 2007); John Randolph and Eugene Avrutin (eds), Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Lewis Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum in Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014); Anita Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny (eds), Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age:  Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 6 Many of those are recounted in diverse contexts by Nancy Shields Kollmann in her fine recent survey, The Russian Empire, 1450–​1801 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 7 Citation from the decree creating the division, in Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, first series, no. 17844 (February 26, 1797), 499–​500. 8 John P. LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–​1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 117. 9 Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–​1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10 Cited in Evgeny Sergeev, The Great Game, 1856–​1907: Russo-​British Relations in Central and East Asia (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2012), p. 16. 11 Alfred Rieber (ed.), The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857–​1864 (Paris: Mouton, 1966), p. 122. 12 David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), pp. 15–​ 23; Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 323–​31. 13 Aziatskaia Rossiia, vol. 1, Liudi i poriadki za Uralom (St. Petersburg: Glavnoe Upravlenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia, 1914), pp. 39–​ 44; Rossiia: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), p. 114 (originally published in 1898). 14 Data from Boris N. Mironov, Sostial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda Imperii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), pp. 20–​2. 209

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15 Andrea Kappeler’s The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow: Longman, 2001), esp. pp. 168–​212, remains a good summary of these processes. 16 Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804–​ 1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 181–​8. 17 Svetlana Gorshenina, “Teoriia ‘estestvennykh granits’ i zavoevanie Kul’dzhi, 1870–​1871 gg,” Ab Imperio 2 (2014), 156–​7. 18 LeDonne, Russian Empire and the World, p. 215. 19 I address this in “Northern Eurasia, 1300–​1800: Russian Imperial Practice from Tsardom to Empire,” in Empire in Asia, vol. 1. 20 Stimulating works that engage with these issues include Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); LeDonne, Russian Empire and the World; Gorshenina, “Teoriia ‘estestvennykh granits,’  ” 102–​ 65; Alexander Morrison, “Russia, Khoqand, and the Search for a ‘Natural’ Frontier, 1863–​1865,” Ab Imperio 2 (2014): 166–​92; and “Introduction: Killing the Cotton Canard and Getting Rid of the Great Game: Rewriting the Russian Conquest of Central Asia, 1814–​1895,” Central Asian Survey 33, no. 2 (2014), 131–​42. 21 Robert H. Greene, “Bodies in Motion: Steam-​Powered Pilgrimages in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian History 39 (2012), 251. 22 Schenk, Russlands Fahrt, p. 86; Farrell, Chapter 5 in this volume. 23 On railways in Asia, see Schenk, Russlands Fahrt, pp. 79–​118; G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 147–​58. For more detailed considerations, see David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–​1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 14–​45 (on the CER); Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-​Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–​1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) (on the Trans-​Siberian). 24 Schenk, Russlands Fahrt, pp. 15–​18 (citation on p. 17). 25 Alexander Morrison, “Camels and Colonial Armies: The Logistics of Warfare in Central Asia in the Early 19th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57 (2014), 443–​85. 26 Quoted in Wortman, Scenarios of Power, pp. 323–​4. The idea of “conquistador imperialism” belongs to Schimmelpenninck, Toward the Rising Sun,  24–​41. 27 Marks, Road to Power, p. 201; March, Eastern Destiny, p. 156. 28 Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 53. 29 John W. Steinberg, “The Operational Overview,” in The Russo-​Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, ed. Steinberg et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 125–​ 6; Bruce Menning, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–​ 1914 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), pp. 175–​9, 186–​95. 30 Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1: The Old Army and the Soldier’s Revolt (March–​April 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 54. See also John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 100–​101; Sunderland, Baron’s Cloak, p. 54. 31 Mara Kozelsky, “The Crimean War and the Tatar Exodus,” in Russian-​Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered, ed. Lucian J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), pp. 165–​92 (quotation at p. 168); “Casualties of Conflict: Crimean Tatars during the Crimean War,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008), 866–​ 91; and Alan Fisher, “Emigration of Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years after the Crimean War,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 35, no. 3 (1987), 356–​71 (esp. 358–​9).

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32 Imra Kreiten, “A Colonial Experiment in Cleansing: The Russian Conquest of Western Caucasus, 1856–​96,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, nos 2–​3 (2009), 222. 33 Dana Sherry, “Social Alchemy on the Black Sea Coast, 1860–​65,” Kritika 10, no. 1 (2009), 7–​30 (citation at 10). 34 Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-​Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 111–​44, esp. 116–​20 (citation at p. 117); Kreiten, “Colonial Experiment,” 213–​41; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–​1917 (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2002), 22–​7. 35 Candan Badem, “ ‘Forty Years of Black Days’? The Russian Administration of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, 1878–​1918,” in Frary and Kozelsky (eds), Russo-​Ottoman Borderlands, 221–​50. 36 Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 142. 37 David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-​ Chinese Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 145–​6. The larger estimate is by Donald W. Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 236. 38 George A. Bournoutian, “The Ethnic Composition and Socio-​economic Condition of Eastern Armenia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change:  Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 79. 39 Citations from Sergei Glinka, Opisanie pereseleniia Armian Adderbidzhanskikh v predely Rossii (Moscow:  Tipografiia Lazarevykh Instituta Vostochnykh Iazykov, 1831), citations at pp. 49 and 108; emphasis in the original. See also Stephen Badalyan Riegg, “Claiming the Caucasus: Russia’s Imperial Encounter with Armenians, 1801–​1894,” PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2016, pp. 114–​27. 40 Peter Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 52–​3. In 1917 refugee rolls in the Caucasus region alone still revealed over 165,000 Armenians. Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 89. 41 Brophy, Uyghur Nation, pp. 57–​72. 42 On early stages, see Andrew Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590–​ 1822 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 43 George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, abridged from the first edition (Chicago, 1958), p. 26. While Kennan put considerable faith in these figures, Daniel Beer calls record-​ keeping within the system as “haphazard and incomplete.” See his “Penal Deportation to Siberia and the Limits of State Power, 1801–​1881,” Kritika 16, no. 3 (2015), 621–​50 (citation at 626). 44 Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 134. 45 Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, p. 33. 46 Beer, “Penal Deportation,” 644; Kennan, Exile System, pp. 116–​40; Andrew A. Gentes, “Siberian Exile and the 1863 Polish Insurrectionists According to Russian Sources,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, no. 2 (2003), 197–​217. See also Beer, House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars, New York, Knopf, 2017). 47 Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad Is My Native Land, 280. 48 Beer, “Penal Deportation,” 641–​ 4; Abby Schrader, “Unruly Felons and Civilizing Wives: Cultivating Marriage in the Siberian Exile System, 1822–​1860,” Slavic Review 66 (2007), 230–​56 (esp. 245–​50).

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4 9 Kennan, Exile System, pp. 165–​88. 50 Gentes, “Siberian Exile,” 210; “Katorga: Penal Labor and Tsarist Siberia,” in The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East, ed. Eva-​Maria Stolberg (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), pp.  73–​85. 51 Marks, Road to Power, pp. 179–​85. 52 Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–​1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 121. 53 Stephan, Russian Far East, pp. 71–​ 4; Walter Kolarz, The Peoples of the Soviet Far East (New York: Archon Books, 1969), pp. 33–​4, 42–​5; Chia Yin Hsu, “A Tale of Two Railroads: ‘Yellow Labor,’ Agrarian Colonization, and the Making of Russianness at the Far Eastern Frontier, 1890s-​1910s,” Ab Imperio 3 (2006), 227. 54 Stephan, Russian Far East, p. 71. The movement of some 25 million Han Chinese into Manchuria in 1890–​1937 (8 million of them permanently) represented “one of the greatest population movements in modern history.” For an account, see Thomas R. Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 2000), citation at p. 2. 55 Stephan, Russian Far East, pp. 74–​6; Jon K. Chang, Burnt by the Sun: Koreans of the Russian Far East (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), pp. 9–​32. 56 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–​1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 4–​6. 57 N. K. Belova, “Ob otkhodnichestve iz Severo-​zapadnogo Irana v kontse XIX –​nachale XX veka,” Voprosy istorii 10 (1956), 112–​21; Audrey Altstadt-​Mirhadi, “Baku: Transformation of a Muslim Town,” in The City in Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 283–​93. 58 Brophy, Ughur Nation, pp. 82–​4. 59 Devon Dear, “Holy Rollers: Monasteries, Lamas, and the Unseen Transport of Chinese-​ Russian Trade, 1850–​1911,” International Review of Social History 59 (2014), 69–​88. 60 Jin Noda, “Russo-​Chinese Trade through Central Asia,” in Asiatic Russia, pp. 153–​73. 61 Thierry Zarcone, “Pilgrimage to the ‘Second Meccas’ and Ka’bas’ of Central Asia,” in Central Asian Pilgrims: Hajj Routes and Pious Visits between Central Asia and the Hijaz, ed. Alexandre Papas, Thomas Welsford, and Thierry Zarcone (Berlin: Klaus Schwartz Verlag, 2012), pp. 251–​77. 62 Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). My discussion here is based on Kane, Russian Hajj; Daniel Brower, “Russian Roads to Mecca: Religious Tolerance and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Russian Empire,” Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996), 567–​84; Norihiro Naganawa, “The Hajj Making Geopolitics, Empire, and Local Politics: A View from the Volga-​Ural Region at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Alexandre Papas et al. (eds), Central Asian Pilgrims, pp. 168–​191; Elena I. Campbell, “The ‘Pilgrim Question’: Regulating the Hajj in Late Imperial Russia,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 56, no. 3–​4 (2014), 239–​68. The total of all pilgrims to Mecca across the nineteenth century was approximately 300,000 (Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, p. 164). 63 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field (numbers at pp. 77 and 180). For the argument that Russian colonization was a continuous if changing attribute of the country’s history, see Breyfogle et al., “Russian Colonizations: An Introduction,” in Breyfogle et al. (eds), Peopling the Russian Periphery, pp. 1–​18. 64 Sunderland, Baron’s Cloak, p. 77. 65 Alberto Masoero, “Territorial Colonization in Late Imperial Russia: Stages in the Development of a Concept,” Kritika 14, no. 1 (2013), 74.

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6 6 George Lynch, as cited in Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, p. 142. 67 Sunderland, Baron’s Cloak, pp. 77–​8. 68 Stephan, Russian Far East, pp. 66 and 310. 69 Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 145. 70 Wolff, To the Harbin Station, p. 92 (citation on p. 8). The rest of the population—​some 23,000 in the beltway, including over 8,000 in Harbin itself—​were Chinese. 71 Elena Andreeva and Morteza Nouraei, “Russian Settlement in Iran in the Early Twentieth Century: Initial Phase of Colonization,” Iranian Studies 46, no. 3 (2013), 415–​42. 72 My discussion here is based on the same sources cited earlier (note 62). 73 E. A. Belov, “Tibetskaia politika Rossii, 1900–​1914 gg., po russkim arkhivnym dokumentam,” Vostok 3 (1994), 99–​109. For more background, see also A. Popov, “Rossiia i Tibet,” Novyi Vostok 18 (1927), 101–​19; and 20–​1 (128): 33–​54. 74 Cited in Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, p. 178. 75 Their experience is recounted in Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 76 Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, pp. 139–​41, 152–​4, 178; and Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, pp. 28–​30. A broad overview of this process is provided by Siegelbaum and Moch in Broad Is My Native Land, pp. 16–​32, 67–​9. 77 Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, pp. 121–​3. 78 Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia, vol. 1, pp. 209–​10; vol. 2, pp. 380, 382. 79 Charles Steinwedel, “Resettling People, Unsettling the Empire: Migration and the Challenge of Governance,” in Breyfogle et al. (eds), Peopling the Russian Periphery, p. 137. 80 Sunderland, Taming, pp. 178–​9. 81 Peter Holquist, “ ‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology on Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010), 152. 82 Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, p. 130. 83 Anatolyi Remnev, “Siberia and the Far East in the Imperial Geography of Power,” in Imperial Russia: Space, People, Power, 1700–​1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 445. 84 Lewis Siegelbaum, “Those Elusive Scouts: Pioneering Peasants and the Russian State, 1870s-​1950s,” Kritika 14, no. 1 (2013), 31–​58. 85 Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, esp. pp. 129 and 162. 86 Hsu, “Tale of Two Railroads,” 242 (citations at 228 and 229). On the issue of “yellow labor” more generally, see Sunderland, Baron’s Cloak, pp. 95–​9. 87 Stephan, Russian Far East, p. 79; Chang, Burnt by the Sun, pp. 16–​24. 88 Hsu, “Tale of Two Railroads,” 250–​2; Stephan, Far East, pp. 80, 107; Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 78–​82. 89 Ukrainians specifically constituted a substantial portion of such migrants, as their home provinces were among the most densely populated in the empire. For example, in the South Ussuri district, Ukrainians constituted 96 percent of the civilian population (James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 215). 90 Citations in Charles Steinwedel, “Resettling People, Unsettling the Empire: Migration and the Challenge of Governance,” in Breyfogle et al. (eds), Peopling the Russian Periphery, p. 132; and Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, p. 139. On this issue more generally, see ibid., pp. 137–​40; and Sunderland, Taming, pp. 185–​91.

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91 Anatolyi Remnev, “Russians as Colonists at the Empire’s Asian Borders: Optimistic Prognoses and Pessimistic Assessments,” in Randolph and Avrutin (eds), Russia in Motion, pp. 126–​49 (citations at pp. 138 and 144). 92 Jeff Sahadeo, “Progress or Peril: Migrants and Locals in Russian Tashkent,” in Breyfogle et al. (eds), Peopling the Russian Periphery, pp. 148–​65. 93 Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia, pp. 174–​85, 216–​19 (citation at p. 174). 94 Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, p. 175; Kappeler, Russian Empire, pp. 189–​ 90; Siegelbaum and Moch in Broad Is My Native Land, pp. 374–​82 (esp. p. 376); Ian Cambpell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazakh Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–​1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). 95 Brower, Turkestan, p. 161. 96 Josh Sanborn, “The Russian Empire,” in Empires at War, 1911–​23, ed. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 99–​100. 97 On the revolt and its larger implications, see Brower, Turkestan, pp. 153–​64; Sanborn, “The Russian Empire”; and Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends, pp. 179–​86.

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Faith in Empire: Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance in the “Long Nineteenth Century” Jack Fairey Historians have treated religion (variously defined) as an essential component in the construction and maintenance of empires since at least the time of Polybius’s (ca. 200–​ ca. 118 bce) observation that “a scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing that keeps the Roman commonwealth together.”1 Across most of Eurasia, imperial governments themselves identified the protection and promotion of a particular belief system as activities that were integral to their very raison d’être. The Ottomans, as noted in the first volume of this series, boasted that their empire existed for the protection of the “Realm of (Sunni) Islam” (Dar al-​Islam) and the expansion of that “realm” at the expense of unbelieving states. The nineteenth-​century Ottoman jurist and statesman Cevdet Pasha obviously thought he was merely stating a truism when he described his empire as “a great state founded on religion.”2 The Safavid rivals of the Ottomans claimed that their state was founded on the bedrock of a similar commitment to Twelver Shi’ism. In Southeast Asia, the “Dharma kings” (dhammarāja) of the Toungoo and Ayudhya empires presented themselves as not only the protectors of the Buddha’s teachings, but as their very embodiment and future buddhas themselves.3 Even empires like the Qing that did not profess a single state faith still emphasized the sacral qualities of their rule and took great care to control and deploy religion in imperial service.4 The relationship between these empires and their religions was hardly unchanging, however. Over the course of the 1800s, for example, religion continued to be seen as a strategic handmaiden of empire (with Christian missionaries, in particular, accused of supporting imperial agendas), but piety receded as the primary justification for state claims in favor of more secular imperatives, such as raisons d’état, race, economics, and the temporal well-​being of subjects.5 This change was reflected, for example, in a dramatic decline in explicitly religious wars between states from the seventeenth century on. It can also be seen in the complaints leveled by internal critics in many empires against their own governments, whom they accused of failing to support established religions adequately and of having altered traditional policies on religious matters in response to foreign (i.e., European) demands or in imitation of foreign norms. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, disgruntled Muslims widely disparaged the reforming sultan Mahmud II (1806–​39) as the “Infidel Emperor” (Gavur Padişah) for his enthusiastic pursuit of “impious” Westernizing reforms.6 In 1859, Mahmud’s son, Abdülaziz,

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put down a coup attempt by pious Ottoman Muslims who objected, in the words of one British official, “to the little regard shown by the present Govt. to the Holy law [i.e., the Sharia].”7 In nineteenth-​century Persia, similarly, one of the many factors that turned the Shi’ite ulema against the Qājār dynasty was a widespread belief that the shah’s reforming ministers were attempting to Europeanize and Christianize the Persian state.8 During the same period in Japan, Buddhist leaders like Shimaji Mokurai (1838–​1911) were warning the Meiji emperor (r. 1867–​1912) that his new policies on religion were laying the foundations for a wholesale Christianization of Japanese society.9 To what extent were such claims about the changing role of religion in Asian empires justified? How did political actors across Asia in the nineteenth century use “religion” to assist in the construction and administration of imperial states? The central concern of this chapter is thus with religious developments that had a direct impact on Asian states as empires, rather than as societies, communities of believers, or schools of thought. Such an enquiry necessarily entails a narrower focus on the state and practical technologies of rule, rather than a broader investigation of changes in theology, parochial life, forms of devotion, and so on. The central question of this chapter, then, is not: “how did religions change during the nineteenth century” but rather “how did imperial practices and attitudes toward religion change?” Accomplishing this task will require investigation into the changes that took place in the uses of religion at three different levels of imperial governance, to whit: internally at the level of state ideology; domestically in the management of both individual subjects and entire religious communities; and internationally in relations between states. It should also be noted that the chapter will not examine the role of religion as a vehicle for resistance to empire—​a significant omission indeed given the many instances of religious insurrection in nineteenth-​ century imperial history, from ‘Abd al-​Qādir’s jihad against the French occupation of Algeria to the great Indian and Taiping rebellions against the British and Qing empires. Although this chapter is thus interested ultimately in developments across Asia, it approaches the topic through the study of one empire in particular: that of the Ottoman dynasty. The Ottomans were one of the largest non-​European empires to retain genuine political independence into the twentieth century. As such, they were members in good standing of an increasingly lonely club of independent non-​European states along with the Japanese, Qing, Qājār, and Thai empires. Almost everywhere else in Asia outside these five empires, it was not indigenous statesmen and administrators, but Europeans who framed the major policies and decisions affecting religious matters by the late nineteenth century. The Ottomans thus stood as particularly important “standard-​ bearers” for what remained of non-​European imperial traditions and their solutions to the challenges of ruling religiously diverse polities. Indeed, the question of how best to manage religious affairs in modern times posed itself in a particular acute and compelling form in the Ottoman Empire because of the size and religious diversity of its subject populations. In seeking to understand how empires in Asia chose to deploy and imagine religion across the entirety of the “long nineteenth century,” the Ottomans thus provide a particularly important case study. 216

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Ottoman Religion and Imperial Governance, ca. 1800 In order to appreciate how the religious practices and policies of the Ottoman Empire changed over the course of the 1800s, we must begin with what they had been at the start of the century. Such a description, in turn, involves a certain amount of anachronistic projection, inasmuch as Ottoman Turkish did not possess an exact counterpart to the modern English word “religion” nor do modern taxonomies of religion map neatly onto Ottoman realities.10 For example, whereas modern usage tends to frame religion as a matter of personal belief in a creed or set of theological propositions, the main words for “religion” in Ottoman Turkish centered around community, that is, around questions of how to live—​and with whom. Ottomans understood their empire as being divided into confessional communities, variously referred to in Ottoman texts as “congregations” (cemaat), “nations” (millet), or “groups” (taife), each of which was defined (at least in part) by adherence to a particular din.11 Although din is usually rendered into English as “religion,” it also meant “judgment” or “obligation,” conveying a sense both of the obligations that God had imposed on different groups and the divine judgment that followed performance or omission of those obligations. As a sort of divine mandate, “religion” dictated not only the faith and acts of worship expected of each Ottoman subject, but the laws they should obey, the civic leaders they should look to, the taxes they should pay, the customs they were to observe, and the literary languages in which they expressed themselves. Religion, in other words, formed part of the very bedrock of Ottoman political life and social identity. The most numerous and powerful of these notional communities was the “nation of Islam” (millet-​i İslam), composed of all the Muslims of the empire regardless of their ethnicity or place of residence. All the principal components of the Ottoman state—​its dynasty, land, military, and political administration—​were understood to belong ultimately to this Muslim community, although the latter might choose to extend their protection to non-​Muslims as well.12 Islam was thus foundational to Ottoman state ideology as a source of legitimacy and a principle of unity that connected the state to the majority of its subjects. The Ottomans had represented themselves from the earliest days of the dynasty as gazi warriors–​the frontiersmen and paladins of the Islamic world.13 After the conquest of Egypt and the Levant in the early 1500s, they assumed the loftier and more formal titles of “protector of the Two Noble Cities (Hâdim-​ül Harameyn-​ül Şerifeyn) of Mecca and Medina” and caliph, or “representative of the Prophet of God” (halife-​i Resullullah). The latter title, in particular, was an explicit claim to leadership of the entire Muslim world.14 As head of the Muslim community, the Ottoman sultan exercised a formal monopoly on political power and custodianship of all land not explicitly dedicated to God for pious purposes (evkaf) or set aside as private property (mülk).15 Islamic jurisprudence, based on the Qur’an and Hadith provided the Ottoman Empire with the structural core of its official legal system, and the religious scholars (ulema) who interpreted and applied its laws. The Ottoman armed forces were similarly seen as

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a quintessentially Muslim preserve after the 1400s, with non-​Muslims restricted thereafter to auxiliary and paramilitary roles. The rubric “Islam,” however, covered an exceptionally broad range of beliefs and behaviors. The Ottoman dynasty identified itself with Sunni Islam and, more specifically, endorsed the teachings of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence (mezheb). In daily life, however, Muslim subjects were free to follow any of the other three Sunni schools: Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali. Then there was the fact that the empire contained millions of subjects, classified administratively as Muslims, who embraced views and practices that the state considered “improper” (uygunsuz), “extremist” (gulât), or “heretical” (râfızî). Included under these categories were not just Shi’ites, but a plethora of groups such as Alawites, Nusayris, Melâmîs, Bektaşis, Yezidis, Yazdânis, Druze, Ahl-​ i Haqq, Hubmesîhîs, and Hurufis who supplemented the Qur’an with other doctrinal sources or even ignored it altogether. Finally, the “Islamic” fold included entire communities of Crypto-​Christians, Crypto-​Jews (Dönme), and syncretists of all stripes, who embraced elements of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism simultaneously.16 While “Muslims” formed the largest din, non-​Muslims constituted perhaps as much as half of the subject population of the empire and in many regions (such as in the Balkans generally or in cities like Thessaloniki) they were in the majority.17 By and large, the Ottoman state saw these communities as falling outside its purview and preferred to let them rule themselves. In exchange for loyalty, payment of a special tax (cizye/jizya) and acceptance of an inferior social and legal status, non-​Muslims were left to manage most of their own affairs, including their own separate legal courts, schools, and charitable organizations.18 At the outset, the Ottoman state struck these arrangements on an ad hoc basis with local communities as each was incorporated into the empire. By the early 1800s, local arrangements had tended to coalesce into a rough empire-​wide system of “nations” or millets. In essence, however, these entities were creations of the Ottoman state, and as such they corresponded primarily to its administrative needs rather than any religious or theological considerations (let alone ethnic or national ones). As a result, the various communities differed substantially from one another both in their composition and their internal organization. The largest and best organized of these religious “nations,” for example, were the Orthodox Christian community (Rum millet-​i) under the leadership of the Patriarch of Constantinople, which managed the affairs of most of the Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Arabic-​speaking Christians of the empire.19 The next largest was the Armenian community (Ermeni millet-​i), which served as a catchall for most of the empire’s non-​Chalcedonian Christians, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, Armenian Catholics and Protestants (briefly), and the Copts of Egypt. The Armenian millet also encompassed churches such as those of the Nestorians and Chaldeans, some of whose theological doctrines were diametrically opposed to those of the Armenian Apostolic Church.20 Most of the Jewish communities of the empire were left to create their own regional rabbinates for the oversight of legal and religious affairs.21 The community of the Roman Catholics or “Franks” was even more decentralized, being 218

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composed of a loose confederation of scattered communities, from Croats in Bosnia to the Maronites of Lebanon.22

Relationship between Religion and State Religion was thus clearly a major element in Ottoman political life—​so much so that Ottoman Muslims often spoke of “religion and state” (din ve devlet) in a single breath as an indissoluble composite. Was either component of this dyad institutionally predominant, however? Until quite recently, it was common to describe the Ottoman Empire as an essentially theocratic or “ghazi state” in which the government was obedient to and constrained by the dictates of Islam. Many Ottomans themselves believed this to be true.23 Increasingly, however, historians are concluding to the contrary that the Ottoman state, in Karen Barkey’s words, consistently “subordinated religion to its administrative and political interests.”24 There is something to be said for both perspectives. On the one hand, Islam profoundly shaped the structure and functioning of the Ottoman state and the latter allowed religious elites—​both Muslim religious scholars and non-​Muslim clergymen—​extensive temporal powers, resources, and autonomy. The Sharia was the closest thing the Ottomans had to a constitution or fundamental law and sultans took pains to ensure that their actions were seen as conforming to it (especially when they did not conform, as often was the case). The opposition of Muslim religious scholars (ulema) could move a sultan to alter a course of action or policy and on a few occasions religious scholars even issued legal rulings legitimizing the overthrow of reigning sultans.25 Such considerations have encouraged historians such as Bernard Lewis to characterize the Ottomans as a dynasty that was uniquely dedicated to the realization of Islam, having given “the holy law of Islam, a greater degree of real efficacy than it had had in any Muslim state of high material civilization since early times.”26 Upon closer examination, however, it is clear that the Ottoman state sought—​as perhaps no other major Muslim polity before it—​to stand above all religious institutions and to yoke them to the service of the imperial state.27 In many senses, the Ottoman dynasty treated religious communities in much the same way it did other important corporate entities, such as tribes, guilds, clans, or neighborhoods (mahalle). Like so many other empires, the Ottoman state actively sought to co-​opt the leadership of such entities by offering them extensive privileges (imtiyazat) and membership in the ranks of the imperial elite. These privileges and powers were carefully detailed in a patent of investiture (berat) that the state issued to each Muslim judge and non-​Muslim clergyman.28 Without this explicit license, officials could exercise none of their powers. In the case of Orthodox and Armenian Christian millets, for example, the Ottoman state granted bishops tax exemption, the right to collect a range of dues from their flocks and to operate their own law courts, a role in apportioning the taxes to be paid by their community, and a seat on the local administrative council alongside the Muslim governor and other notables. Bishops were entitled to preside over their own law courts, could impose 219

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sentences of imprisonment, beatings, or exile, and were assigned constables to enforce their rulings. In exchange, the clergy were expected to maintain social order, collect certain taxes from their flocks on behalf of the state, and suppress or report disloyalty.29 The resulting so-​called millet system simultaneously divided Ottoman subjects into discrete, self-​regulating, and nonterritorial administrative units, while at the same time integrating them into the state by giving their clergymen-​administrators a stake in the fortunes of the empire.30 The ambitions of the Ottoman government appear even more clearly from its efforts to bridge the traditional separation that had existed in Muslim polities between the state and the Islamic scholarly establishment. Across the empire, the Ottoman state created a network of ranked religious colleges (medrese) to produce the ulema trained in Hanafi jurisprudence that it required. Graduates of these colleges might then make their way up the ranks by state appointment through a more or less regular hierarchy of teaching posts and judgeships.31 The judicial district (kaza) was one of the most fundamental of Ottoman administrative units and its presiding judge (kadı) was in many senses the most important, “front-​line” official mediating between the state and the average Ottoman subject. In addition to administering justice, kadıs were responsible for a host of other duties on behalf of the state including supervising market activities, notarizing documents, overseeing certain public works, assisting with military recruitment, promulgating imperial edicts, collecting certain revenues, and drawing up reports to the central administration on local disturbances, public mood, and the like.32 Appointments were usually for only one or two years, after which the state could either rotate a given judge to a new position higher in the ranks or dismiss him with a pension. In court, magistrates were responsible for upholding not only Sharia law but also an entire corpus of imperial edicts and positive legislation (kanun) issued by the Ottoman sultans.33 In theory, there were no contradictions between Sharia and kanun and sultans took pains to preserve the appearance of harmony. When imperial and divine law did inevitably come into conflict, however, the state expected judges to give precedence to its edicts. Indeed, one of the advantages from an Ottoman perspective of the Hanafi interpretation of Islamic law was that it allowed greater latitude for judges to give “preference” (istihsan) to a forced or controversial legal interpretation over more clearly established ones, in the interest of the commonweal—​or at government direction.34 The career of a religious scholar in imperial service found its acme in an appointment to the sultan’s Imperial Council (Divan-​ı Hümayun), alongside the grand vizier, commanders of the Ottoman armed forces, treasurer (defterdar), chancellor (nişancı), and chief clerk (reisülküttab). Although individual religious scholars might find appointment at the whim of the sultan to any of these posts (except, generally, those of the military commanders), three seats on the divan were reserved specifically for the ulema: the two military judges (kadıasker) for the armed forces of Rumelia and Anatolia and (sometimes) the chief jurisconsult of the empire (şeyhülislam). The latter post, in particular, was intended to serve as the capstone for the legal-​religious hierarchy that the Ottoman state had created. The şeyhülislam 220

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was supposed to advise the sultan on all key appointments to judgeships and medrese professorships, to supervise the administration of imperial pious foundations (evkaf), to guide the state by issuing legal opinions, and to help minimize and reconcile conflicts between the Sharia and kanun law.35 The Ottoman Empire thus managed to create and empower a sizable hierarchy of collaborators among the elite of most religious communities in the empire, thereby making these communities responsive to state needs and directives. The considerable synergy between din ve devlet did not mean, of course, that all Ottoman clergymen or even all Hanafi members of the Islamic learned institution became state servitors—​far from it. Many Ottoman clergymen, from Christian monastics and itinerant dervishes to Shi’ite scholars, lived their lives quite detached from state service. Such detachment, however, was often an indication that they had not achieved much distinction, and most would still have been answerable to someone in state service. Given the importance of religious elites and institutions as intermediary authorities, the Ottoman state took an active interest in making sure that they remained fit for purpose. Ottoman officials did occasionally enforce religious orthodoxy by investigating and punishing cases of heresy or apostasy, but this was generally done with little enthusiasm.36 The Ottoman state would remain until the end of the nineteenth century largely uninterested in the ritual and dogmatic minutiae of its subjects’ religious life. It responded with alacrity, on the other hand, to internal communal disorders and often intervened to uphold the authority of the established hierarchy. In 1722, for example, Sultan Ahmed III issued an edict categorically forbidding the conversion of non-​Muslims to any religion except Islam. The edict specifically licensed Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish religious authorities to punish any of their flocks who tried to leave their spiritual jurisdiction for another with beatings, imprisonment and—​as a last resort—​execution.37 The willingness of the Ottoman government to intervene so forcefully in the internal affairs of other religions was not grounded in Sharia law but rather the preoccupation of the state with ensuring that all religion communities served their central purpose of maintaining order among the common people, “who cannot discern good from evil” (nik ve bed’i tefrik edemiyen) without the guidance of their betters.38 It was the duty of the state, in other words, to ensure that ordinary people remained subject to their appointed authorities, and not use religious conversion as a device to evade their responsibilities. Such incidents make clear that, whatever the undoubted importance of religion to the Ottoman state, in both practice and theory the Ottoman state’s image of itself as Islamic paragon was often superseded by a secular (or at least non-​confessional) ideology of the Ottoman state as the impartial upholder of social stability, justice and the general “order of the universe” (nizam-​i ‘âlem).39 In relations with the rest of the world outside the Ottoman Empire, in particular, sultans stressed their calling to serve as “refuge of the world” (alem penah) for all, regardless of faith and social station.40 221

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“Defensive Modernization,” Reforms, and the Threat of the West In many senses, the tumults of the “long nineteenth century” began for the Ottoman ancien régime on July 1, 1798, with the arrival at the port of Alexandria of a French fleet of 50,000 men under the command of General Napoleon Bonaparte. The appearance of this French armada was the beginning of a three-​year-​long French occupation of Egypt—​the largest and wealthiest province in the Ottoman Empire. Although relatively short, this interlude had major consequences for Ottoman history and was emblematic of the impact of Western empires on Asia more generally in the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure foreshadowed a string of similarly disruptive military interventions and incidents of gunboat diplomacy by Western empires across Asia, from the Second Anglo-​Burmese War in 1852–​53 and the opening of Japan in 1854, to the French conquest of Cochinchina in 1858–​62, or the Second Opium War in 1857–​60. In each case, European military interventions were epoch-​making, posing much deeper challenges to local empires than had been the case with similar European actions in Asia during the early-​modern era. Earlier conflicts such as the Portuguese conquest of Melaka (1511), Dutch incursions on Formosa (1624–​62), or even the First Opium War (1839–​42) had represented strategic setbacks for the great empires of Asia, but did not spark any comparable crisis that led to fundamental changes in imperial governance. What was it about these new imperial encounters such as the French invasion of Egypt that made such an impression?41 The first and most obvious factor was that they demonstrated the clear military and technological superiority of European forces. At the battle of the Pyramids in 1798, for example, the French decimated the local military elite—​reportedly eliminating two thousand Mamluk cavalrymen at the cost of only twenty-​nine French lives. The Ottomans eventually ejected the French from Egypt in 1801, but only after strenuous efforts and with the military assistance of a European ally: Britain. Nor could the Ottoman army dismiss its difficulties in Egypt as an isolated anomaly. During the century following the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, the Ottomans lost every war in which they fought alone against a European empire; only when allied to a strong European partner did they do well. The ease with which a relatively small French force conquered and held a central Ottoman province was a profound humiliation—​ especially given the importance of jihad and the defense of Islam in Ottoman state ideology. Such a string of failures invited searching reflections among the Ottoman elite as to the reasons why and what to do about it.42 A century later, similarly lopsided defeats suffered by the Qing, first against modernized Japanese forces in Korea (1895) and then against Western and Japanese forces during the Boxer Rebellion (1900–​1901), produced similar reflections among the Qing elite. The second impact of the French occupation of Egypt was that it exposed both Ottoman statesmen and ordinary subjects to new ideas and practices for administering

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an empire. Napoleon brought with him not only military men, but also the whole panoply of experts, scientists, and engineers needed to implement the French Republic’s system of governance—a system, it should be remembered, that represented the very cutting-​edge of European Enlightenment statecraft. Members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts d’Égypte proceeded to draw up modern maps of the new territory, inventory its natural and cultural resources, promote new agricultural and architectural techniques, and introduce the printing press and modern press journalism in Arabic.43 Then there was the (literally) revolutionary ideology of the French Republic itself. Here was a state that looked like an empire and behaved like an empire, but which spoke of itself as an association of free individuals opposed to all the things that had hitherto formed the very foundations of empire: hereditary monarchy, privilege, tradition, and inequality. It claimed, most strangely, to be an empire that belonged not to a dynasty or a particular class or group, but to the ruled themselves—​to “the people.” Most Ottoman elites viewed this ideology with the same repugnance as did other dynastic states of the Restoration Era. Over the course of the 1840s–​1860s, however, the rise of Napoleon III’s Second French Empire and the new empires of Italy and Germany showed conservative elites that nationalism could be detached from other revolutionary ideals and turned to the service of dynastic and aristocratic interests. Increasingly, European empires experimented with new “official nationalisms” that were to supplement or replace religion and dynastic loyalism as the ideological glue holding empires together. Increasingly, empires were seen as existing to serve “French,” “Russian,” “German,” and “Italian” national interests rather than merely the private interests of the houses of Bourbons, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Savoy.44 How did this evolution play out in the Ottoman Empire? In the short term, the Napoleonic Wars created a backlash against all things Western and initiated a conservative turn in Ottoman politics. The striking—​and sometimes outlandish—​features of the French occupation made a lasting impression on the Ottoman ruling elites, however. Muḥammad ‘Ali Pasha, the new Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805, recognized the strengths of the French colonial administration he had replaced and adopted many of their ideas, methods, and personnel into his own ambitious program of reforms to strengthen the Egyptian economy, armed forces, and bureaucracy.45 The benefits to be gained from these experiments were not slow in appearing. Under Muḥammad ‘Ali, Egypt quickly established a reputation as having the most competent administration and armed forces in the eastern Mediterranean. Between 1811 and 1828, Egyptian armies defeated rebellions first in Arabia and then in Greece that had resisted all previous efforts at pacification by the central Ottoman government. When Sultan Mahmud II sought to check the waxing power of his viceroy, however, by refusing to add Palestine and Syria to Muḥammad ‘Ali’s zone of control, relations degenerated into open warfare between sovereign and vassal in 1831–​32 and then again in 1839. In both conflicts, Ottoman imperial forces collapsed before the Egyptian advance. Only the armed and

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diplomatic interventions of Mahmud’s British, Russian, and Austrian allies were capable of preventing the Egyptian army from marching on Istanbul. While Muḥammad ‘Ali’s modernizing Egypt thus went from strength to strength between 1805 and 1839, the Ottoman dynasty underwent three decades of profound internal crisis, as a range of warlords, regions, and ethnic groups from Serbia to Iraq asserted their independence from the imperial center. Increasingly, the very existence of the empire seemed in question as the Ottoman administration proved incapable of disciplining even its own officials and troops. The failing grip of the imperial state extended into religious affairs, as religious institutions that had traditionally been pillars of order became centers of resistance to the dynasty. In Serbia and Greece, for example, members of the Orthodox clergy abandoned the state and sided openly with local Christian rebels.46 In Istanbul itself, many members of the ulema and of Sufi movements such as the Bektaşi sided with the janissary factions who dominated Ottoman political life between 1807 and 1826 and turned a succession of sultans into little more than figureheads.47 Loyalist figures and groups, however, such as the Nakşibendi Sufi order and many high-​ranking members of the ulema, were deeply concerned at the state of the empire and called for reforms that would both strengthen the central state as the guarantor of order and restore the supremacy of the Sharia and religious orthodoxy over all aspects of life.48 The Ottoman elite remained deeply convinced throughout these tumults of the essential correctness of their own traditions of imperial governance. They acknowledged, however, that those traditions had become corrupted or fallen into abeyance, and that they could not be restored to full force through mere superficial imitation (taklid) of the past—​deeper reform (ıslah) and renewal (tecdid) were required.49 The continued successes of Muḥammad ‘Ali were both a galling reminder of the failures of the central state and an example that invited imitation. The depth of the crisis in the 1820s–​1830s thus encouraged the Ottoman imperial elite to embark upon a half-​century of political and social experimentation in a desperate attempt to save the empire from disintegration. Some changes were made in straightforward imitation of European methods of governance. Sultan Mahmud made his officials exchange their turbans and robes for fezzes and frock coats and reorganized the branches of his government to make them appear more European, transforming paternalistic offices and captaincies into ministries and departments. In place of a “chief scribe” (reis-​ül-​küttab), Mahmud acquired a “foreign ministry” (nezaret-​i hariciye), and in place of a “treasury of the army” (mansure hazinesi) a “ministry of finance” (nezaret-​i umur-​u maliye). Beneath these superficial imitations, however, Mahmud continued to pursue goals that had remained essentially unchanged for a succession of Ottoman sultans since the seventeenth century. The most important change was not the content or purpose of the reforms themselves, but rather the new willingness of the Ottoman government to experiment with unfamiliar administrative ideas, forms, and practices.50

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The Impact of the Tanzimat on State Ideology The succeeding period from the 1830s to 1870s, known as the Tanzimat-​i Hayriye or “Auspicious Reordering,” affected just about every aspect of Ottoman life, from clothing to the internal organization of the government. The impact of the Tanzimat on Ottoman religious affairs was particularly marked, and can be seen in important changes to the dynasty’s basic strategies for self-​representation and legitimization. As we have seen, the Ottomans identified themselves not just as Muslims, but as the quintessential Islamic state. The dynasty had generally tolerated religious differences, but more from pragmatic expediency and Islamic legality than any commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience. It was also a tolerance of a deeply discriminatory kind, which imposed all sorts of legal disabilities on non-​Muslims. With the Tanzimat, all of these central features came into question. The Ottoman state began, most notably, to experiment with two mutually contradictory policies. On the one hand, it continued to invest heavily in traditional modes of self-​representation that linked the dynasty closely with Islam; on the other hand, it tried to appeal to non-​Muslims on nonreligious grounds, emphasizing the paternal solicitude of the dynasty regardless of religious distinctions. One of the most important milestones in these efforts was the issuance in the name of Sultan Abdülmecid on November 3, 1839, of an edict known as the Hatt-​ı Şerif (Noble Rescript) of Gülhane. The edict began in a traditional vein by paying homage to the centrality of the Sharia and asserting that all of the current problems of the Ottoman Empire had their origins in a failure to uphold Islamic law. Rather than take the logical next step and announce a return to the ways of the past, however, Sultan Abdülmecid proposed to begin his reign by creating “new institutions” that would restore “the benefits of good administration.” He undertook to govern “with the assistance of enlightened opinions” and to limit his own powers. Henceforward, Ottoman subjects would not be deprived of life, honor, or property without the due process of law. “These imperial concessions . . . shall extend to all our subjects, of whatever religion or sect they may be; they shall enjoy them without exception.”51 There has been some disagreement, both at the time and since, as to whether Abdülmecid was thereby promising equal rights to non-​Muslims (or “rights,” in the legal sense, at all) and whether he was inspired to do this by Western ideals or by Islamic ones.52 Whatever the case, it is clear that the Ottoman state had become dissatisfied with its traditional modes of self-​representation and was searching, as Şerif Mardin has noted, “for a unifying principle among officials to provide more permanence than a contract of alliance to the sultan.”53 In the 1840s Ottoman reformers began attempting to articulate and popularize a new, trans-​confessional sense of “Ottoman-​ness” (Osmanlılık) that placed patriotism to a common “fatherland” (vatan) or “father-​state” (devlet baba) over loyalty to any other identity. As one of Abdülmecid’s ministers would declare a few years after the promulgation of the hatt to a meeting of local notables on the island of

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Mytilini: “Muslims, Christians, Jews—​you are all subjects of the same emperor, children of the same father.”54 This tendency would find its clearest and most unequivocal expression almost three decades later in article 8 of the 1876 Ottoman Constitution, which declared that “all the subjects of the Empire are without distinction called Ottomans, no matter what religion they profess.”55 In conjunction with this shift, the Tanzimat reformers began to articulate a new ideological basis for their right to govern. They began, for example, to reinterpret the nature of past practices such as the toleration of religious minorities. As the historian Ussama Makdisi has noted: “Centuries of complex discriminatory rule, in which imperial toleration waxed and waned according to circumstances, were hastily reinterpreted as proof of an irrefutable history of Ottoman Islamic ‘Tolerance.’ ”56 This self-​conscious commitment to tolerance was reflected in new laws over the next two decades, most notably the Reform Decree (Islahat Ferman-​ı/​Hatt-​ı Hümayun) of 1856, in which Abdülmecid promised his subjects “united among themselves by the cordial bonds of patriotism,” freedom of religion, and the equal treatment of all subjects by the state regardless of their religion.57 The Ottoman elite even coined a new word in Turkish—​ medeniyet—​as a calque for the French civilisation to indicate their achievement of a higher level of social order, morality, refinement, economic development, and material comfort. All individuals should strive to realize medeniyet, but it was first and foremost the responsibility of the state to inculcate this value in its subjects and to use all religions to do so.58 The government’s attempt to promote a sense of common “Ottomanness” was plagued from the outset by a host of difficulties. The very word “Ottoman” had previously referred to the dynasty and to the imperial elite, so it violated the usual sense of the word to begin calling ordinary people “Ottomans.” One logical alternative would have been to adopt Western practice and call everyone “Turks,” but this too was problematic as the word “Turk” had a range of undesirable meanings from “Muslim” to “pastoralist.”59 Finally, any talk of a “nation” (millet) without reference to religion (din) was nonsensical to most Ottomans as the very words for political community also implied membership in a religious community. As a result, the Tanzimat had to invent an entirely new, religiously neutral vocabulary and to banish another set of words that had long been used in state and legal documents to distinguish between subjects based on their religion.60 Words that had once been ubiquitous such as “infidel” (kafir/​gavur) and “flock” (reaya) had to be replaced in official parlance by the more neutral “non-​Muslim” (gayri-​ Müslim) and “subject” (teba’a).61 These efforts largely failed and the popular conflation of “religion” and “nation” would persist to the very end of the Ottoman Empire. It was all the more difficult to change popular attitudes when the Ottoman state itself was uncertain as to how committed it was to making patriotism and equality the primary bases for its relationship with its subjects. The imperial government made repeated stabs at narrowing the gap between its proclamations and the obvious inequities of daily life, but these efforts were undermined by the fact that neither statesmen nor ordinary subjects were eager to embrace religious equality. The obstacles in the way 226

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of a common Ottoman identity thus seemed daunting. As one Ottoman officer stationed to Iraq concluded in 1878 after reviewing the province’s five different languages, eight major ethnic groups, and twenty religious sects (mezheb): “Even though the success enjoyed by the Europeans in following the political course of unifying their language, ethnicity, and religious school is not an impossibility [for us], the time and situation are not propitious to undertake the complete, serious plan that this would entail, let alone to solve the question of its theological permissibility.”62 The result was a very wavering and ineffective policy. A typical example was the decision in 1855 finally to abolish the discriminatory tax on non-​Muslims known as the cizye. The Ottoman government could hardly boast of its benevolence in coming to this momentous decision, however, as its British and French allies in the Crimean War had been actively demanding such a measure and it was widely expected that the Powers would impose abolition of the cizye at the peace talks projected to take place a few months later in 1856. Having mollified its allies, the Ottoman government promptly found a way of restoring the status quo ante. Before the year was out, the Ottoman government reintroduced an almost identical tax levied on non-​Muslims under a different name. Non-​Muslims continued to pay this bedel-​i askeriyye tax in lieu of military service until 1907.63 The Ottoman state also omitted to make good use of the two most important means of nation-​building in the nineteenth century: public education and military service. Instead, the Ottoman state continued to allow the different religious minorities to run their own networks of schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other social services. As a result, the great majority of non-​Muslims continued to be educated in confessional schools, whereas the newly created system of state-​sponsored middle schools (known as rüşdiye) ended up educating Muslim students almost exclusively—​even though the ostensible purpose of the schools had been to educate all imperial subjects. Over time, the “moral education” provided in state schools became more explicitly Sunni Muslim under Abdülhamid, making them even less inviting to non-​Muslims and to Shi’ites.64 The Ottoman government’s lack of control over the schooling of non-​Muslims is all the more striking for the astonishing number of schools in the Ottoman Empire that were operated either by foreign (and often hostile) states such as the kingdom of Greece or by missionaries and other foreign-​run charitable establishments such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle.65 The army, similarly, remained an overwhelmingly Muslim institution until 1909, when the Ottoman state finally legislated the conscription of non-​ Muslims into the regular army. Ottoman statesmen had reluctantly recognized universal conscription as a necessary measure almost a century prior and the government issued an edict formally announcing the conscription of non-​Muslims in 1856—​but it never acted on the edict, so the new law remained a dead letter for another half century.66 Despite the ambivalence of the Ottoman government’s record at home, it warmly emphasized its commitment to tolerance, civility, and non-​confessional ethical norms in its diplomatic relations with other states. Indeed, at a time when the fate of the Ottoman Empire hinged on the support of the Great Powers of Europe, it could hardly have been 227

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otherwise as a stance of confessional belligerence and holy warfare would have been suicidal. Instead, the Ottoman Empire actively sought admittance to the European community of states and finally gained this by the Treaty of Paris in 1856.67 Although the Ottoman government declared a jihad against Russia in 1853 during the Crimean War, this declaration was intended purely for consumption within the Muslim world.68 In all the empire’s communications with European states, it formulated its complaints entirely on the basis of treaty rights and European norms of behavior between states, rather than on Islamic jurisprudence.69 The Great Powers, in turn, made a point of reminding the Ottomans at every opportunity that membership in the exclusive club of “civilized” nations hinged on the observance of international (i.e., European) norms of behavior, foremost of which was respect for bilateral treaties and for the life, property, and security of Ottoman Christians.70 The marked preference of European merchants and diplomats for dealing with Ottoman Christians rather than Muslims put further pressure on the Ottoman social order by converting formerly disenfranchised minorities into the corner stone upon which depended good relations between the Ottoman Empire and its most important allies and trading partners. The precarious situation of the empire vis-​à-​vis the rising economic and military power of Europe thus converted religion—​and the position of Christians in particular—​ into a fraught topic in nineteenth-​century Ottoman politics.71 European statesmen used their advantage to begin intervening directly in Ottoman religious affairs in favor of their religious protégés and often did so against the expressed desires of the Ottoman state and public opinion. One of the most egregious examples of such interference was the legalization of apostasy, a measure that Abdülmecid first promised in 1844 and then finally made effectual in 1856. This decision to formally disavow what most Muslims considered “black-​letter” Sharia law was forced upon Sultan Abdülmecid by the British ambassador Stratford Canning, who prevailed over the opposition of the Ottoman government and the şeyhülislam Mekkizade Mustafa Asım.72 The newfound power of European states to reshape the Ottoman religious landscape can further be seen in a range of vexing interventions that forced the Ottoman government at various times to license against its will the creation of new millet communities (for Catholic Armenians in 1830, for Protestants in 1846), to permit the activities of foreign missionaries, and even to promote or remove religious leaders.73

Narrowing of the Religious Sphere While the Ottoman dynasty wavered over “Ottomanism,” it was sincerely invested in making other changes—​specifically the strengthening of the central government over the empire’s many centrifugal forces. Centralization, in the sense of upholding the authority of the imperial center over the rest of the empire, was nothing new to Ottoman political thought; the ambitious scope of all that the government contemplated bringing under its control during the Tanzimat, however, was unprecedented. Previous 228

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governments had accepted that there were practical limitations to the degree of control the state could exercise over its subjects and that sometimes it was best to rule by “salutary neglect.”74 An indication of how important local intermediaries had become by the eighteenth century is that perhaps as much as two-​thirds of the tax revenue collected in the Ottoman Empire was retained at the point of collection by intermediaries and never reached the coffers of the central state.75 From the 1820s onward, the Ottoman government aspired to rule its subjects more directly than ever before and to control a much wider range of affairs, including many that it had previously devolved onto intermediaries. In particular, as Abou-​El-​Haj has noted, whereas the strong, centralizing sultans of the sixteenth century focused their powers outward in wars of expansion, the dominant theme of the reigns of Mahmud II (r. 1808–​39), Abdülmecid (r. 1839–​61), Abdülaziz (r. 1861–​76), and Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–​1909) was a concentration of power in the hands of the sultan and his officials so that they might grapple with the empire’s grave internal problems.76 Such a consolidation could only be accomplished, of course, at the expense of those who had exercised the powers being reclaimed, that is, the provincial notables, tax farmers, military men, and—​perhaps most notably—​the various Ottoman religious elites and institutions. In the religious sphere, the process of state centralization and strengthening during the Tanzimat era took two particularly notable forms:  a significant increase in state control over religious institutions and elites and a general policy of reducing the temporal powers and administrative role of religious elites. While government efforts to supervise religion more closely can be seen as a continuation and deepening of earlier policies, the tendency of the Tanzimat reformers to shrink the range of activities that came under the general rubric of “religion” was new and reversed Ottoman traditions in important ways.77 The effects of these new policies were most apparent in changes to the sociopolitical role of the ulema. Prior to the 1800s, as Argun has noted, the Ottoman state “assigned extraordinary political and administrative roles and bestowed economic privileges on the ulema class that were far more comprehensive than those found in any other Islamic dynasty or empire.”78 Under Mahmud II and his sons, however, the Ottoman dynasty reclaimed many of these socioeconomic privileges and redistributed them to its new preferred servitors: the civil bureaucrats and diplomats whose special skills and knowledge seemed critical to the very survival of the empire. These changes began with the establishment of centralized state control over the pious endowments (evkaf) of land, cash, or businesses that funded Islamic establishments, from schools and poor relief to mosques. As such, evkaf were a sort of intermediary institution that provided some of the social services that would later become expected from the state. Pious endowments paid little or no taxes and could neither be bought nor sold. It has been estimated that by the late 1700s perhaps a third of the entire revenue produced in the Ottoman Empire was held in trust as evkaf.79 Such a prodigious generator of wealth represented a temptation for any state, let alone one grappling with the financial demands of a severe crisis. Sultans had experimented in the past with different 229

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means of tapping into evkaf wealth, but they had never attempted to control all evkaf in a systematic way.80 In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II did just this by quietly announcing the creation of a new Ministry of Imperial Evkaf (Evkaf-​ı Hümayun Nezareti). The ostensible purpose of the new ministry was to ensure that the various charitable endowments functioned as they ought. To this end, the new ministry took over the collection of revenues and was to redistribute the funds collected to their rightful recipients. In reality, the central state simply siphoned off most of this revenue to serve its own purposes. The result was the financial ruin of most Islamic institutions and the utter dependence thereafter of those who relied on evkaf revenue—​such as scholars, imams, teachers, and administrators—​on the state.81 The next important development was the Ottoman government’s decision to shift away from a legal model that presumed multiple, coexisting religious courts, in which clergymen interpreted sacred law primarily (although not exclusively) for their own co-​religionists. Instead, Tanzimat statesmen worked steadily toward the implementation of a unified civil code, enforced by a network of secular (nizamiye) courts, and applied to all Ottoman subjects equally, regardless of religion. The construction of a new legal system began in the 1840s, but the courts only began to function routinely across the empire following the promulgation of a civil code, the Mecelle-i Ahkâm-ı Adliye (Collection of Judicial Ordinances), in 1877.82 Officially, this was merely an evolution in Islamic law: the Mecelle was primarily based on the Hanafi interpretation of Sharia law; it had been drawn up by a trained religious scholar, Cevdet Pasha; and many of the judges who would apply it were also ulema. The new law code and the accompanying 1879 Code of Civil Procedure (Usul-​i Muhakemat-​ı Hukukiye) were, however, clearly influenced by developments in European, and especially French, law.83 The new legal system came with a new judicial hierarchy, new paralegal positions such as lawyers and prosecutors, and different levels of authority (i.e., courts of first instance, appeal, and cassation) separate from those of the Sharia courts. The new code was also different in that it was designed to be interpreted by people who were not necessarily trained in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and applied to people who were not necessarily Muslims. Unlike Sharia courts, for example, nizamiye courts allowed Christians and Jews to act as witnesses against Muslims and were supposed to give their evidence equal weight.84 With the formation of a Ministry of Justice in 1868, the administration of imperial law passed decisively from the religious establishment to the civil service. Sharia, episcopal, and rabbinic courts continued to function alongside the nizamiye, but they were increasingly restricted to matters of family law, personal status, doctrine, and ritual. The ulema were also affected by changes to their other major traditional competency: education. Islamic religious schools, both primary (mekteb) and colleges (medrese), had for centuries provided most of the education needed by members of the Ottoman social and political elite; in the nineteenth century, however, Islamic schools no longer provided the skills and knowledge that were most in demand. The Tanzimat state urgently required bureaucrats who spoke French, officers trained in engineering and modern weaponry, and doctors trained in the latest medical advances. Reforming 230

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the Islamic school system directly would have entailed conflict with the ulema, so it was easier for the Ottoman state to create its own elite schools that combined traditional Ottoman and modern Western learning.85 An early example of this was the establishment of the Arsenal School of Engineering (Tersane Mühendishanesi) in 1775, and the most ambitious was the attempt to create an Ottoman Imperial University (Darülfünun-​ı Sultani) in the late 1860s–​early 1870s.86 As it became clear that modern education was desirable not just for the elite but also for the general public, the government turned its hand to creating a modern educational system, embracing primary, secondary, and postsecondary education. This was a slow and difficult process that was never fully implemented, but a Ministry of Public Schools (Mekatib-​i Umumi Nezareti) was created in 1847 and the Public Education Regulations (Maarif-​i Umumiye Nizamnamesi) of 1869 laid down the outlines for a system of public education.87 Religious schools continued to exist—​indeed, in many places they were the only form of education available—​and many ulema served as teachers in the public educational system.88 A medrese education in and of itself, however, was henceforward associated with “religious training” and a career within the ulema, whereas the best paths to social and economic advancement led through Western-​style private or public schools. The Tanzimat era thus saw major changes in the relationship between the state and the ulema. Were there similar changes in the relationship of the Ottoman state with the non-​Muslim clergies? Reforms affecting the Islamic community were a higher priority, but the Ottoman state clearly intended to enact similar measures to curtail the independence, powers, and wealth of the various non-​Muslim clergies. As Mehmed Emin Âli Pasha argued in a memo to Sultan Abdülaziz, the existing system had become untenable: [The millets] have been granted privileges and immunities that have generated difficulties; these need to be resolved. The Government of Your Majesty should permit each community to be responsible for their purely religious affairs that concern them only. But in other matters it is time to subject them to the same laws as other citizens and not allow them separate constitutions. Privileges that these diverse communities enjoy give rise to unequal burdens and responsibilities. This is a great nuisance.89 In practice, however, European (and particularly Russian) sensitivities to anything resembling Muslim interference in the religious affairs of Ottoman Christians placed tight constraints on what the government could accomplish. Tanzimat reformers succeeded in replacing the millet courts with the nizamiye for most civil and all criminal cases, but otherwise the Ottoman state’s record of achievements was mixed. In 1856, for example, the government directed all non-​Muslim religious communities to carry out internal structural reforms.90 The Ottoman state intended to use this reform process to place the non-​Muslim clergies on state salaries and to transfer most real power within the millets to the hands of elected laymen who—​the Ottoman government 231

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hoped—​would be more malleable and loyal. The process of reducing clerical power proceeded relatively smoothly among the Armenians and Jews.91 In the Orthodox community, however, the resistance of the Orthodox clergy and of the Russian embassy consistently frustrated the intentions of the Ottoman government.92 The state ultimately managed to reduce the temporal powers of the Orthodox clergy considerably, but the latter remained the most powerful and “unreformed” of the Ottoman religious elites. Christian clergymen also retained control over education within their communities for the rest of the century and, to the chagrin of the government, tended to provide better education than was available in state schools.93

Soft Power and the Domestication of Religious Authorities Besides looking at changes to the role of religion within Ottoman internal governance in the nineteenth century, we should also consider the place of religion in relations between imperial states. Christopher Bayly has argued convincingly that one of the central features of nineteenth-​century history was the progressive and insistent manner in which “the European state and Western colonialism began to impose a new pattern of internationalism on the old world order.” Empires in Asia during the early-​modern era had been content to live with considerable ambiguity in international relations, including ill-​defined borders and overlapping imperial and religious ecumenes. The Ottomans, for example, were accustomed to a world of ill-​defined religious borders—​of Muslim pilgrims, for example, both Sunni and Shi’ite, who came to Mecca from every corner of the globe, of Sufi orders that operated across state boundaries, and of Christian primates, from the Patriarch of Constantinople to the Armenian Catholicos of Echmiadzin, who cared for flocks that resided in many states. Imperial states had monitored such activities, of course, but relatively lightly. Incorporation into the new international community of sovereign states, however, required acceptance of a new system, as Bayly described it, “of more rigidly bound territories, languages, and religious conventions.”94 One of these new axioms was that international stability hinged upon the ability of member states to render their own complex societies “legible,” rational, and therefore responsive to state direction. It was therefore the duty of every state to clarify the boundaries that divided states, individuals, and spheres of responsibility from each other.95 Truly independent and supranational religious figures and organizations, in other words, whether patriarchates, Jesuits, itinerant monks, Sufis, or pilgrims all increasingly fell into a suspect category similar to stateless peoples and nomads.96 Governments increasingly viewed such figures as intolerable until their relationship with the state had been rendered unambiguous and nonchallenging. As one French colonial administrator recommended regarding the Sufi orders of West Africa, the central priority of any government must be to “reduce [religious organizations] to mere associations that are purely local and do not look abroad for their marching orders.”97 Something of the importance that became attached to the establishment of clear lines of temporal 232

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authority over religion can be seen from the fact that in the Crimean War of 1853–​56, the Ottoman, British, and French empires went to war rather than accept Russia’s claims that it had a right to intervene in relations between the Ottoman Orthodox clergy and the Ottoman state.98 The fact that European empires wanted religious authorities to be answerable to temporal governments does not mean that they therefore wanted to prevent all religious activity across borders per se—​far from it. The nineteenth century was an era of outstanding international religious activity. So long as such activity conformed to the new rules, the Great Powers accepted religious missions and protectorates as a legitimate form of competition for influence abroad—​and more, if they could get away with it. In the Ottoman and Qing empires and, indeed, throughout Asia, there was a long history of European states competing among themselves for the right to pose as the patrons and protectors of specific religious communities. In the case of the Ottomans, the very political structure of the empire encouraged this, as an alliance with one or more of the different millets provided foreign merchants and diplomats with a ready-​made network of local supporters across the empire and gave them access to the formidable temporal powers wielded by the clergy.99 Virtually all European states therefore claimed a special relationship with one or more religious community. France, Austria, and Spain vied with one another for centuries over the right to act as protector of Catholicism in the East (with France generally holding the upper hand), while Russia claimed a similar status with regard to the Orthodox and Armenian churches. Britain and Prussia had come late to the region, and so were left to court smaller groups such as the empire’s few Protestants, Jews, and Druze.100 The crisis into which the Ottoman Empire had fallen by the middle of the nineteenth century gave this competition fresh urgency and significance. The Powers came to a broad, gentleman’s agreement that they could neither partition nor colonize the central Ottoman lands without triggering a larger European conflict. This left the Powers with little choice but to focus their ambitions on the acquisition of influence rather than territory. The fierce competition between European states to expand their soft power within Ottoman society led to an interesting evolution in the old competition over religious protectorates. Whereas European countries used to seek an exclusive identification with a particular confession (e.g., France with Catholicism, England with “reformed” Christianity, and Russia with Orthodoxy), by the mid-​1800s such a monogamous model was seen as too restricting. Increasingly, European states were open to partnerships with any religious community.101 The Russian government, for example, was eager to adopt not only Orthodoxy, but Judaism, the Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Jacobite churches, and even Islam as vehicles to advance its political influence in the Ottoman Empire.102 Ideally, however, these relationships were to be rendered as exclusive and unambiguous as possible. As a result, each of the powers rather hypocritically insisted upon the inviolability of their own religious protectorates over specific millets, while at the same time insisting that the Ottoman government allow them to make inroads into other religious communities. 233

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A good example of the ways in which religious activities were absorbed into larger imperial contests was the activities of foreign missionaries. Missionaries were, of course, not a new phenomenon in the East, as there had been a modest Catholic missionary presence across Asia for centuries. The new imbalance of power between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbors changed the situation dramatically, however, by making possible an influx of Catholic and Protestant missionaries against the wishes of both the Ottoman government and most Ottoman subjects. Conversion of Muslims was only barely legal in theory (after the legalization of apostasy) and extremely hazardous in practice, while the Orthodox and Armenian churches were openly hostile to European missionaries. The latter were therefore forced to focus on “non-​religious” activities such as opening schools, hospitals, and printing presses in both the major cities of the empire and also, for the first time, in provincial towns.103 Although most missionaries were motivated by nonpolitical intentions, the Ottoman state, Ottoman subjects, and the European diplomatic corps took for granted that missionary activities were ultimately directed toward the advancement of particular political and economic interests.104 In some cases, such as the activities of Russian Orthodox or Anglican bishops, there was no question as to which state they represented. Catholic missionaries were more divided, with different orders being associated with specific countries:  the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) with France, Franciscans in Palestine with Spain, Franciscans in Albania with Austria, and so on. The Ottoman state treated them all with great suspicion and monitored missionary activities closely. As we have seen, religious identity in the Ottoman Empire was not just a matter of private conscience but something eminently communal and political—​ it established each individual’s place in society and their legal rights and obligations. Conversions were therefore perceived as an attack on the community and, from the perspective of the central state, on the empire itself. The worst suspicions of the Ottoman government in this regard were confirmed in the early 1860s, when a rash of conversions to Catholicism in Crete and Macedonia were traced back to rumors that converts would no longer have to pay taxes to their millet authorities and that they would acquire French protection.105 Religious conversion was, in many senses, but one step removed from political secession. Beyond this, the government was well aware that most missionaries promoted a negative image of the Ottoman Empire abroad, while simultaneously empowering Ottoman Christians and feeding their potentially treasonous sentiments of dissatisfaction.106 This feeling that the Ottoman government was in competition with missionaries for the hearts and minds of its own subjects played an important role in encouraging the government to take a more active role in such matters as public education, care of orphans, public health, and censorship of religious publications.107 In many cases, for example, the state opened schools specifically in places it feared were vulnerable to missionary “propaganda.”108 Being unable to expel Christian missions, the Ottoman government sought to respond in kind by using Islam to promote Ottoman political influence abroad in 234

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the same way that Europeans were using Christianity. As Sultan Abdülhamid II observed in 1892, he could not oppose the Powers as he wished by taking “firm measures” against the missionaries; therefore, “the only way to fight against them is to increase the Islamic population and spread the belief in the Holiest of Faiths [i.e., Islam].”109 Internally, the Ottoman government under Sultan Abdülhamid II took an unusually active interest in “missionizing” its own subjects, using preachers, intimidation, and incentives to promote an official Hanafi version of Sunni Islam among Shi’ites, “heterodox” groups like Yezidis and Crypto-​Christians, and even among Sunni Muslims that it feared were insufficiently knowledgeable or committed to their faith.110 Abroad, the Ottoman government began cautiously to emphasize the sultan’s claims as caliph to universal religious authority among Muslims. Particular efforts were made to encourage links with Muslims in Africa, British India, Southeast Asia, and the Qing Empire.111 In 1862, for example, Sultan Abdülaziz appointed a senior Kurdish scholar, Abu Bakr Efendi, to take charge of the Muslim community in the British colony of South Africa, most of whom were Cape Malays and South Asians, and to set up Muslim schools and community institutions there. A key part of Abu Bakr’s work was the promotion of reverence for the Ottoman dynasty among South African Muslims. Toward this end, he staged public celebrations of the sultan’s birthday, dispensed gifts from the sultan, and made public speeches about the duties of Muslims “abroad” to the Ottoman Caliphate. He even brought fez-​ making equipment to South Africa in order to spread Ottoman dress among South African Muslims, underlining the message that the Ottoman Empire set the standards for how to be simultaneously “modern” and Muslim.112

Conclusion How representative of other empires in Asia was the Ottoman experience of the “long nineteenth century” and the resulting changes to the role of religion in imperial governance? Certainly, the century and a half between the late 1700s and the early 1900s was an extremely difficult period for the Ottoman Empire, as it was for most other empires in Asia. Like other Asian empires, the Ottoman dynasty faced a combination of internal upheavals and external pressures—​primarily from European empires—​that began in the 1820s–​1830s and became acute by the 1890s. These challenges, in combination, posed an existential threat to states like the Ottomans or the Qing that only a short time before had been universally admired for their ability to rule over great conglomerations of territories and peoples. Ottoman ruling elites, much like their Qing, Japanese, Thai, Korean, or Persian counterparts, retained a deep conviction in the fundamental correctness of their respective systems of governance. The depth of the crises they were passing through, however, encouraged experimentation with new administrative forms, practices, and institutions—​the Ottomans beginning early in the century, other empires such as the Qing only toward its end. In some cases these reforms borrowed directly 235

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from European models, but more frequently they were attempts to update indigenous traditions to meet the needs of the time. Foremost of these needs was what the Ottomans believed was an imperative that the state enhance its military power, wealth, and coherence in order to match those of its European rivals. The consequences of failure were dire and ever-​present. Increasing the power of the imperial state entailed making some subtle but important changes to core imperial aims and practices. Prior to the nineteenth century, all empires had, in many senses, been systems of large-​scale governance on the cheap. The Ottomans were typical of other early-​modern empires in their ability to project a nominal hegemony over a very extended range of territories and peoples, while only ruling directly over a surprisingly narrow range of locales, groups, and individuals. In most cases, the experience of “Ottoman” rule depended on whatever power-​sharing arrangements the dynasty had struck with a range of local intermediaries. The charm of imperial systems for dynastic rulers lay precisely, as Tilly has argued, in the ability of empires to “hold together disparate smaller-​ scale units without requiring much centrally-​ controlled internal transformation” and to “pump resources to rulers without costly monitoring and repression.”113 The empires being built in Europe and the Americas over the course of the 1700s–​ 1800s departed from these axioms in that they attempted to do much more—​and do it better—​than imperial governments had ever done before. Historians of South Asia have noted, for example, that it was precisely such ambitions that distinguished British colonial rule from its predecessors. As one recent history of the state and religion in South Asia observes: “The British Raj was a new kind of Indian state. What made it so was not the fact that it was ‘foreign’ . . . but the fact that it possessed unprecedented political power and administrative penetration, attributes that gave it the capacity to transform society in ways that no previous Indian regime had ever even aspired to.”114 The results seemed counterintuitive. Experiences like the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt or the succession of Russo-​Ottoman wars showed Ottomans that European empires had increased their ability to extract revenue, control their subjects, and win wars, while still managing the increased resistance and expense that any expansion of direct rule entailed. Both the example of these successes and direct competition with European empires encouraged governments across Asia to accomplish the same feats by launching new, more vigorous policies of centralization, administrative reform, and technological modernization. The most outstanding of these reforming empires was Meiji Japan, but the Chakri dynasty in Thailand, the Konbaung in Burma (under Mindon), the Chosŏn in Korea, the Nguyễn in Vietnam, the Qājār and Pahlavī in Persia, and, as we have seen, the Ottoman and Qing all attempted roughly similar programs of “self-​strengthening” reforms, with varying degrees of success. Such programs focused on military, economic, and administrative reforms, but religious reforms followed closely after. Like the Ottomans, other empires in Asia also sought to promote their own “official nationalisms” that were specially linked to particular religions, such as State Shinto in Meiji Japan or Theravada Buddhism 236

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in Thailand, but which were ultimately supposed to be nonconfessional in nature and tolerant of all religions. Like the Ottomans, empires across Asia increasingly showed an interest in exercising tighter control over religious elites and institutions. The focus of this interest was less about imposing uniformity of dogma, as it was about narrowing the independence and the field of competence of religious specialists of all stripes. Muslim ulema and sufis, Buddhist monks, Hindu brahmins, and Christian clergymen increasingly found themselves deprived of their financial independence, placed under closer state supervision, and compelled either to be more “useful” to the state or be removed from the prominent roles they had only recently played in imperial administration. As in the Ottoman Empire, religious elites in other empires continued to serve the state—​in some cases even more than they had before. They did so, however, explicitly as state servitors and employees—​teachers, clerks, judges, and chaplains—​working within state-​created and controlled apparatuses, rather than as members of self-​defined elite groups with independent privileges, traditions, sources of revenue, and structures. These changes were, moreover, not coincidental but the result of deliberate policies as imperial governments sought to reclaim the responsibilities they had once devolved onto religious specialists and replaced the latter with state-​appointed career bureaucrats—​the new high priests, as it were, of the modern state.115 This is not to say, of course, that there were no major differences in policy between empires. Indeed, it would be surprising if there were not between societies so different in history, culture, and political traditions. No one religion, for example, monopolized Qing institutions and state ideology (the obvious debt to Confucianism notwithstanding) in the manner that Sunni Islam permeated every aspect of Ottoman governance. Nor did religious communities play as central a role in the Qing administrative system as the millets did for the Ottomans. In consequence, religious reforms were a much more important and vexed question in the Ottoman Empire and distinctly less important among the Qing. Even sharper differences existed between the Ottomans and Qājār Persia, where the Shi’ite ulama continued into the 1920s to monopolize education and the administration of justice and to enjoy substantial, independent revenues. The political and social influence of the Shi’ite religious establishment actually increased over the nineteenth century, until in 1907 Moḥammad ‘Ali Shah signed a new “Supplementary Fundamental Law” (Motammem-​e Qānūn-​e Asāsī) which effectively recognized the right of the ulama to veto legislation they deemed un-​Islamic.116 The reasons behind this stark difference are instructive. Unlike the Ottomans, Persia remained insulated from European influences much later than most other major states in Asia, while internally a host of tribal chieftains, tax-​farmers, and mujtahids (prominent Islamic jurist) continued to dominate Persian political life. The weak monarchs of the Qājār dynasty periodically attempted to undertake modernizing measures, but were incapable of overcoming the resistance that such changes provoked. Qājār religious elites remained unreformed, in other words, because Qājār statecraft itself and the empire as a whole remained largely unreformed. This situation only changed in the decades following 1926, when the new 237

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Pahlavī dynasty of Rezā Shah embraced a program of centralizing and secularizing policies.117 It is exactly the many and obvious differences between empires that make the convergences interesting. Why should these tendencies have appeared across such dissimilar states? The first answer that suggests itself is that these particular changes were adaptive—​that is, that empires gravitated toward certain practices because they believed these would make them more competitive and longer-​lived. In some cases, such as the Meiji policy of adopting an official, state-​controlled form of Shinto, this seems to have been true. In other cases, as Radu Murea has pointed out, “defensive modernization” merely led to tyranny, civil unrest, state indebtedness, and, ultimately, “self-​ induced colonialism” as Asian empires struggled to become more like they imagined their European rivals to be.118 Certainly, the preoccupation of imperial states in this period with centralization and dramatic increases in revenue collection and competency encouraged states to overreach themselves in ways that could have dire consequences. In the case of the Ottoman state, for example, the religious policies of the nineteenth century failed dismally to bring about more effective direct rule and arguably brought the empire to an end that was sooner, messier, and bloodier than might otherwise have been the case. “Ottomanism” offended Muslims without reconciling Christians; the new “reformed” administrations of the Orthodox and Armenian millets proved more disloyal to the Ottoman state than the old clerical regimes had been; one by one, the religious and ethnic communities that the old empire had managed so successfully to contain seceded from Ottoman control amid horrific scenes of disruption and intercommunal violence. Opponents of the Tanzimat had predicted as much when they warned that the imperial government was committing suicide in revoking its traditional compact with religious institutions and casting aside centuries of tried and true policies.119 A second factor to consider is that some invisible historical forces like “Westernization,” “secularization,” or “modernization” were at work. There is no question that Western states had a profound effect on Asia, as they offered both alternative examples of how to manage religion and insistent–often hectoring–advice. We should be careful, however, not to fall into the fallacy that there was one European way of dealing with religion. Church/​state relations in Britain were clearly different from those in France, Russia, or Spain. This was made obvious to Ottoman statesmen by the radically opposing advice their European counterparts gave them. In the 1840s, for example, when the Ottoman government first began to contemplate a serious reform of its non-​Muslim communities it received divided counsels from the European diplomatic corps in Istanbul: the English and French embassies urged radical changes to bring about more direct state control and the elimination of clerical privilege; the Russian legation urged the Ottoman government to grant the Orthodox and Armenian clergy greater independence and temporal powers; the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, was in favor of moderate reforms and urged the Ottomans to remain true to their own traditions; other embassies such as those of Spain and Prussia cared only that their coreligionists not be adversely affected.120 238

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Despite these many differences, one returns to the point that there does seem to have been a common perception across numerous empires, both in Europe and in Asia, that it was imperative to increase government capacity—​to do more as a state and to extract more from one’s subjects than ever before. The Ottoman Empire and others states like it in Asia clearly felt that the passive compliance of the majority of their subjects was no longer enough—​they wanted subjects to become active and willing accomplices of empire in a way that only elites had in the past. That this should be so was not because older imperial habits had failed, but rather because they had succeeded. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, empires had come to cover an extraordinary amount of the earth’s surface and the “grey,” neutral zones between imperial zones of influence were shrinking rapidly. It was an era, in other words, of converging imperial horizons. This convergence created greater potential for conflict, but also a greater need for allies, peers, institutions, and infrastructure that were mutually “legible,” predictable, and therefore would allow a higher level of cooperation and integration. The hallmarks of imperial religion in the nineteenth century thus became a drive toward centralization, increased competency of the secular state at the expense of religious elites, the “nationalization” of religion, and an increased commensurability between states as to the place occupied by religion and religious elites in political life.

NOTES 1 From Book 6 of Polybius, The Histories of Polybius, ed. and trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), vol. 1, p. 505. For some recent examples, consider: Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Stewart Brown, Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (eds), Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–​c. 1800 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1995); Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 2 This is not to say, however, that Cevdet Paşa considered the Ottoman Empire to be founded exclusively, or even primarily, on Islam. It rested instead, he observed in a report from 1858, on four pillars: “That is to say, the ruler is Ottoman [i.e., of the Ottoman dynasty], the government is Turkish, the religion is Islam, and the capital is Istanbul.” Cevdet Paşa, in Selim Deringil, The Well-​Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–​1909 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 169–​70. 239

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3 S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 81–​91, 187; see also Chapter 4 by Bruce Lockhart in this volume. 4 See, for example, Richard Smith, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture (Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New  York, and London:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), chap. 7; see also the chapter by Frederik Vermote in Volume One of this series. 5 For some examples for and against: Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Faultlines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–​1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Norman Etherington (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire: Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–​1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004); Paul Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-​Kama Region, 1827–​1905 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Owen White and J. P. Daughton (eds), In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6 Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–​ 1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 31; Lucy Garnett, Mysticism and Magic in Turkey: An Account of the Religious Doctrines, Monastic Organisation, and Ecstatic Powers of the Dervish Orders (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), p. 189. 7 National Archives UK (NA), Etienne Pisani to William H. Bulwer, 17/​09/​1859, FO 195/​627. 8 Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785–​1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 169–​72. 9 See the 1872 petition of Shimaji Mokurai to the Meiji Emperor, translated in: Hans Martin Kramer, “Shimaji Mokurai: Petition in Criticism of the Three Articles of Instruction (Japan, 1872),” in Religious Dynamics under the Impact of Imperialism and Colonialism: A Sourcebook, ed. Bjorn Bentlage et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), p. 244. 10 For comparison: the OED defines “religion” as “belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods” and “a particular system of faith and worship.” 11 For a discussion of these terms in an Ottoman context, see Paraskevas Konortas, “From Ta’ife to Millet: Ottoman Terms for the Ottoman Greek Community,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999), pp. 169–​80. Some contemporary definitions are given for “djema’at,” “tayife,” and “millet” in A. C. Barbier de Meynard, Dictionnaire Turc-​Français (Paris: Libraire de la Société Asiatique de l’Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, etc., 1881), vol. 1, p. 534 and vol. 2, pp. 274, 784. Also “jema’at,” “ta’ife,” and “millet” in J. W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Constantinople: Boyajian, 1884), vol. 1, pp. 674, 1290 and (Constantinople: Boyajian, 1890), vol. 2, p. 1965. For a broader (albeit brief) discussion of these terms in the Islamic world, see: F. Buhl, “Milla,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition [hereafter EI], ed. C. E. Bosworth et al. (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1993), vol. 7, p. 61; Michael Ursinus, “Millet,” in EI, vol. 7, pp. 61–​4; E. Geoffroy, “Ṭā’ifa,” in EI, ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2000), vol. 10, pp. 116–​17; L. Gardet, “Djamā’a,” in EI, ed. B. Lewis et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 411–​12. 12 This sense of the state as belonging, in a general sense, to all Muslims reappears in various terms. The state treasury, for example, was often known simply as the “treasury of the Muslims” (beytülmal-​i Müslim’in). Ottoman writers, such as Evliya Celebi in his

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seventeenth-​century Seyahatname, similarly referred poetically to the Ottoman army as “the army of Islam” and the Ottoman sultan as “the sultan of Islam.” We should be careful, of course, not to understand this in a literal way as meaning that the inherently dynastic nature of the state was somehow forgotten or secondary (see note 2). Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (trans.), An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Çelebi (London: Eland, 2010), pp. 67, 213–​23, 255, 319. 13 See ­chapter  4 in Volume One of this series. 14 Hakan Karateke, “Legitimizing the Ottoman Sultanate: A Framework for Historical Analysis,” in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 25–​32. 15 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 20–​1; Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–​1600, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), p. 73; Colin Imber, Ebu’s-​ Su’ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), chap. 5. 16 The classic, though very dated, survey on both syncretism and “heterodoxy” in the late Ottoman Empire remains F. W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), 2 vols. Also see the collection of essays in Gilles Veinstein (ed.), Syncretismes et heresies dans l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman (XIVe–​XVIIe siècle) (Paris: Peeters, 2005). Stavro Skendi, “Crypto-​Christianity in the Balkan Area under the Ottomans,” Slavic Review 26, no. 1 (1967), 227–​46; Margarita Poutouridou, “The Of Valley and the Coming of Islam: The Case of the Greek-​Speaking Muslims,” Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikōn Spoudōn 12 (1997–​98), 47–​70. 17 Obtaining exact population figures for the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century is difficult, but the official figures from the first Ottoman census in 1830 are a fair starting point. The census registered 2,490,892 Muslim adult males, 1,080,463 reaya adult males (lumping together Orthodox, Catholic, and sometimes Armenians Christians), 35,707 Gypsies (both Muslim and Christian), 15,297 Jews, and 18,742 Armenians. The detailed register is given in Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–​1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 108–​15. 18 Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Ottoman Ruling Group and the Religions of Its Subjects in the Early Modern Age: A Survey of Current Research,” Journal of Early Modern History 14, no. 3 (2010), 239–​66; Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 2 vols (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982); Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 19 Richard Clogg, “The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire,” in Christians and Jews, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 184–​207; G. Georgiades Arnakis, “The Greek Church of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire,” The Journal of Modern History 24, no. 3 (1952), 235–​50; Halil İnalcık, “The Status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch under the Ottomans,” Turcica 21–​23 (1991), 407–​35; Ayşe Ozil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (Abingdon, Oxford, and New York: Routledge, 2013). 20 Kevork Bardakjian, “The Rise of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople,” in Christians and Jews, vol. 1, pp. 89–​100; Leon Arpee, The Armenian Awakening: A History of the Armenian Church, 1820–​1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909). 21 Levy Avigdor (ed.), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1994); Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-​Spanish Community, 14th–​20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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22 Armand Trannoy, “La ‘Nation Latine’ de Constantinople,” Échos d’Orient 15, no. 94 (1912), 246–​56. 23 The important seventeenth-​century Ottoman scholar Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi thus wrote that “the state was founded on the religious affairs; in fact, religion is fundamental, while the state was established as its subdivision.” In Marinos Sariyannis, “Ruler and State, State and Society in Ottoman Thought,” Turkish Historical Review 4, no. 1 (2013), 100. 24 Compare, for example, Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938), p. 132; or Oded Peri, Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem (Leiden, Boston, and Koln: Brill, 2001), pp. 50–​1, with Karen Barkey, “Islam and Toleration Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 1–​2 (2005), 8; and Malcolm Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 131. 25 Fatwas were issued legitimizing the overthrow of Osman II (1622), Mustafa I (1623), Ibrahim (1648), Mustafa II (1703), and Ahmed III (1730). 26 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 13–​14, also see p. 16. 27 According to Bruce Masters, “No other Sunni state had attempted to enter so directly into their subjects’ spiritual lives.” Bruce Masters, “Sunni Islam,” in Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters (New York: Facts on File, 2009), p. 548. 28 L. Fekete, “Berat,” in EI, ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 1170–​1. 29 On the powers and responsibilities of Orthodox clergymen in the early nineteenth century, see Jack Fairey, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), chap. 2, esp. pp. 42–​9. On non-​Muslim courts, see Antonis Anastasopoulos, “Non-​Muslims and Ottoman Justice(s?),” in Law and Empire: Ideas, Practices, Actors, ed. Jeroen Duindam et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 275–​92. 30 Karen Barkey, “In the Lands of the Ottomans: Religion and Politics,” in Religion and the Political Imagination, ed. Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 98. 31 Ilk Arifin Mansurnoor, “Religious Scholars and State:  Patterns of Recruitment among the Ottoman Ulama,” Islamic Studies 31, no. 1 (1992), 35–​51; İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, pp.  165–​72. 32 Ronald Jennings, “Kadi, Court, and Legal Procedure in Seventeenth Century Ottoman Kayseri,” Studia Islamica 48 (1978), 133–​72. On the kadı as an intermediary, see Boğaç A. Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652–​1744) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 43–​55. Leslie Pierce gives a detailed description of the court in Aintab in Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 3. 33 Engin Deniz Akarlı, “The Ruler and Law Making in the Ottoman Empire,” in Law and Empire: Ideas, Practices, Actors, ed. Jeroen Duindam et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 87–​110; Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–​1650: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 244–​51. 34 Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 174–​207; Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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2005), pp. 71–​5; Maurits van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 174–​5. 35 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 234–​44; Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Post Classical Age, 1600–​1800 (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988). 36 For some examples, see Hans Georg Majer, “ ‘The Koran: An Ottoman Defter’! Ottoman Heretics of the 18th Century,” in Syncretismes et heresies dans l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman (XIVe—​XVIIe siècle), ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Peeters, 2005), pp. 299–​310. 37 Text of the 1722 edict can be found in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Cevdet Adliye, 3216. Cited in Kılıç Davut, “Osmanlı Ermenileri Arasında Katolik Kilisesinin Kuruluş Faaliyetleri,” Yeni Türkiye 7, no. 38 (2001), 730. 38 This instance of the stock phrase is from a document by the Grand Vizier’s Office on September 24, 1892/​11 Eylül 1308, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Irade Dahiliye 56. Cited in Deringil, Well-​Protected Domain, p. 40. 39 Gottfried Hagen, “Legitimacy and World Order,” in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 55–​83. 40 See, for example, an order issued by Selim II on October 18, 1569, which speaks of his mandate to be a “place of refuge for the kings of the world and the other peoples who go about such.” In Ignace de Testa, Recueil des traités de la Porte Ottomane avec les Puissances étrangères depuis le premier traité conclu, en 1536, entre Suleyman I et François I jusqu’a nos jours (Paris: Amyot, 1864), vol. 1, p. 91. 41 See the account provided by an Egyptian religious scholar in Napoleon in Egypt: Al-​ Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, intro. Robert Tignor, trans. Shmuel Moreh (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001). 42 For a review of such reflections, see Virginia Aksan, “Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–​ 1808,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 1 (1993), 53–​69. Stanford Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Selim III, 1789–​1808 (Cambridge, MA: 1971), pp. 86–​111. 43 The capstone of these efforts were the thirty-​seven volumes commissioned by Napoleon, entitled Description de l’Egypte, ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Egypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée française (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1809–​29). 44 On “official nationalism,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006), chap. 6. The phrase has its origins in an expression (“official nationality”—​narodnost’ ofitsial’naia’) coined by the Russian historian Alexander Pypin in 1873 to describe the policies advanced by the Russian minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, in the 1830s. Alexander Nikolaevich Pypin, Kharakteristiki Literaturnykh Mnenii ot Dvadtsatykh do pyatidesiatykh godov (St. Petersburg: Stasiulevich, 1873), title of chap. 2. 45 Khaled Fahmy, “The Era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, 1805–​1848,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 139–​79. 46 Charles Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821–​ 1852 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 9–​70. 47 Ali Yaycıoğlu, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), chap. 4. 48 Butrus Abu-​Manneh, “The Naqshbandiyya-​Mujaddidiyya in the Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th Century,” Die Welt des Islams NS 22, no. 1/​4 (1982), 1–​36; Itzchak Weismann, Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2001), pp. 45–​55, 68–​80, 83.

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49 Carter Vaughn Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789–​1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 114–​19; Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), pp. 23–​ 50; Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 155–​95; Weismann, Taste of Modernity, p. 70. 50 The “net increment” of Sultan Mahmud II’s rule, as Şerif Mardin notes, “had been purely and simply the establishment of the respectability of change.” Mardin, Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p. 171. 51 This French translation of the hatt is from Édouard Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, ou Histoire des Reformes dans l’Empire ottoman depuis 1826 jusqu’a nos jours (Paris: A. Cotillon, 1882), vol. 1, pp. 257–​61. Also see Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–​1876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 36–​51. 52 The general assumption in Europe was that the hatt had been directly inspired by Western ideas; Ottoman statesmen hotly denied this. For a supporting view, see Butrus Abu-​Manneh, “The Islamic Roots of the Gulhane Rescript,” Die Welt des Islams NS 34, no. 2 (1994), 173–​203. 53 Şerif Mardin, “Some Consideration on the Building of an Ottoman Public Identity in the Nineteenth Century,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), p. 174. 54 Rıza Pasha, in Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, vol. 1, p. 69. 55 Complete text can be found in “The Ottoman Constitution, Promulgated the 7th Zilbridje, 1293 (11/​23 December, 1876),” The American Journal of International Law 2, no. 4 (1908), 367–​87 (esp. 368). 56 Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 185. 57 The text of the hatt is given in the original Ottoman and French translation in T. X. Bianchi (trans.), Khathythy Humaioun, ou Charte impériale ottomane du 18 février 1856, en français et en turc (Paris: Dondey-​Dupré, 1856), pp. 4–​5, 12–​22. 58 Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 10–​12, 104–​105. 59 Ibid., pp. 314–​40. 60 Abdülmecid formally banned the use of derogatory epithets for different classes of his subject in article 15 of the Reform Edict (Islahat Fermani) of 1856. Bianchi, Khathythy Humaioun, pp.  11–​12. 61 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 55–​6. 62 Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha to Sultan Abdülhamid II, in Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 63–​4. 63 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 45, 94–​5; Candan Badem, “The Question of the Equality of Non-​Muslims in the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War (1853–​1856),” in The Crimean War, 1853–​1856: Colonial Skirmish or Rehearsal for World War? Empires, Nations, and Individuals, ed. Jerzy Wojciech Borejsza (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton/​ Instytut Historii PAN, 2011), pp. 81–​2. 64 Fortna, Imperial Classroom, pp.  71–​5, 243–​5; Selçuk Akşın Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire: 1839–​1908: Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 65, 112, 240–1.

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65 Gerasimos Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor: Confession, Community, and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH, and London: The Kent State University Press, 1992), pp. 149–​56; Fortna, Imperial Classroom, pp. 77–​9; Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–​1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 66 Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 160–​4. 67 British Foreign Office, Protocols of Conferences held at Paris relative to the General Treaty of Peace. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty. 1856 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1856), pp. 9–​13. 68 The text of the relevant fatwa from the şeyhülislam can be found in Yusuf Sarınay and Kemal Gurulkan (eds), Osmanlı Belgelerinde Kırım Savaşı (1853–​1856) (Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri, 2006), pp. 157–​8. 69 See the Ottoman declaration of war published in Journal de Constantinople, October 9, 1853, p. 1. 70 This was made implicit in the Peace of Paris, despite the best efforts of the Ottoman delegation. Protocols of Conferences held at Paris, pp. 13, 57–​8, 66. 71 Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-​Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 2, 6, 10. 72 Baron Bartholomeus von Stürmer to Prince Klemens von Metternich, March 13, 1844. Haus-​ Hof-​und Staats Archiv, Staatenabteilungen VI, karton 90, fo 246. Also see Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 2. 73 Fairey, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom, chap. 3; Deringil, The Well-​Protected Domains, chap. 5. 74 Rifa’at ‘Ali Abou-​El-​Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 12–​13, 54–​60,  82. 75 K. Kıvanç Karaman and Şevket Pamuk, “Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500–​1914,” The Journal of Economic History 70, no. 3 (2010), 609. 76 Abou-​El-​Haj, Formation of the Modern State, p. 69. 77 Barkey, “In the Lands of the Ottomans,” p. 101. 78 Selim Argun, “Elite Configurations and Clusters of Power: The Ulema, Waqf, and Ottoman State (1789–​1839),” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2013, p. 193. 79 Bahaeddin Yediyildiz, Institution du Vaqf au XVIIIe siècle en Turquie: étude socio-historique (Ankara: Société d’Histoire Turque, 1985), pp. 152–​3. 80 Randi Deguilhem, “Waḳf. IV. In the Ottoman Empire to 1914,” in EI, ed. P. J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), vol. 11, pp. 87–​92; John R. Barnes, An Introduction to Religious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire (Leiden, New York, København, and Köln: Brill, 1987), pp. 67–​72. 81 Barnes, An Introduction to Religious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 72–​86, 118–​ 53; Argun, Elite Configurations and Clusters of Power, pp. 211–​43. 82 On the nizamiye, see Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 83 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 91–​100. 84 See, for example, the section of the code on evidence in Book 15, Chap. 1, Sections 1–​6 of The Mecelle: Being an English Translation of Majallah el-​Ahkam-​i-​Adliya and a Complete Code of Islamic Civil Law, trans. C. R. Tyser, D. G. Demetriades, and Ismail Haqqi Effendi (Kuala Lumpur: The Other Press, 2001), pp. 293–​304.

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85 Carter Vaughn Findley, “The Tanzimat,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. Reşat Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vol. 4, pp. 21–​3. 86 Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, pp. 63, 102–​103. 87 Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 15–​64. The text of the Maarif-​i Umumiye Nizamnamesi is given in translation in Emine Evered, Empire and Education under the Ottomans: Politics, Reform and Resistance from the Tanzimat to the Young Turks (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 205–​46. 88 Fortna, Imperial Classroom, pp. 134–​9. 89 In Fuat Andiç and Suphan Andiç, The Last of the Ottoman Grandees (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1996), p. 47. For a similar view, see Keçecizade Fuad Pasha, “Considération sur l’Exécution du Firman Impérial du 15 Février 1856,” 1867. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Hariciye Nezareti Siyasi Kısım, Dosya no. 1860, Gömlek sira no. 2, item 2, p. 6. 90 Bianchi, Khathythy Humaioun, pp. 6–​9. 91 Laicizing reforms were unnecessary in the Protestant and Catholic millets, as these millets had never invested their clergy with much temporal power. 92 Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor, pp. 122–​44; Fairey, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom, chap. 4, pp. 166–​76. 93 Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor, pp. 173–​7; Fortna, Imperial Classroom, pp. 74–​5. 94 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 234, 237. 95 James Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 2; see also Brian P. Farrell, Chapter 5 in this volume. 96 Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 248. 97 Robert Arnaud, Précis de politique musulmane (Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1906), vol. 1, p. 119. 98 For the texts of the British and French declarations of war, see: “The Declaration of War,” The Times, March 29, 1854, p. 9, and La Presse, March 29, 1854, p. 1. On the origins of the war, see David Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (London: Longman, 1994); and Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010). 99 For examples of such relationships in the Levant, see Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, chaps 3 and 4, and van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System, chap. 2. 100 Fairey, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom, pp. 63–​71. 101 See, for example, the memorandum written by Édouard-​Antoine Thouvenel, the French ambassador to Istanbul, in the mid-​1850s, on November 8, 1855, to his superior, Alexandre Colonna Walewski, on the impolicy of having allowed France to become so closely identified with Catholicism in the East. Archives Historiques du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Correspondance Politique, Turquie, vol. 323. 102 On Russian policies in this regard, see Eileen Kane, “Pilgrims, Holy Places and the Multi-​confessional Empire,” PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2005, pp. 20, 73–​4, 87–​9, 100–​103, 119–​49; Daniel Brower, “Russian Roads to Mecca: Religious Tolerance and Muslim Pilgrimage in the Russian Empire,” Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996), 567–​ 84; Paul Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos at Home and Abroad,” in Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighbouring Worlds, ed. Osamu Ieda (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006), pp. 203–​35. 103 Augustinos, The Greeks of Asia Minor, pp. 117–​20; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven; Eleanor Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon, Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 45–​137; Rufus Anderson, History of the Missions of the American Board of Commissioners

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for Foreign Missions to the Oriental Churches (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1872); Idris Yücel, “An Overview of Religious Medicine in the Near East: Mission Hospitals of the American Board in Asia Minor (1880–​1923),” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 14, no. 40 (2015), 47–​71. 104 Deringil, The Well-​Protected Domains, p. 114. 105 Charles-​Joseph Tissot to Marquis de La Valette, March 22, 1860. Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, Salonique, Series A, registre 6; Levant Herald, March 14, 1860, p. 540; Siméon Radeff, La Macédoine et la renaissance bulgare au XIXe siècle (Sofia: Imprimerie de la Cour Royale, 1918), pp. 134–​8; Rudolf Grulich, Die unierte Kirche in Mazedonien (1856–​1919) (Würzburg: Augustinus-​Verlag, 1977), pp. 43–​55. 106 One prominent American missionary, William Goodell, voiced the opinion of many missionaries regarding the Ottoman Empire when he complained in print that: “Everything in this country is as it should not be.” “Climate of Syria,” The Missionary Herald 21, no. 11 (November 1825), 347. 107 Fortna, Imperial Classroom, chap. 2; Evered, Empire and Education under the Ottomans, chaps 4 and 5. 108 Deringil, The Well-​Protected Domains, pp. 92, 94, chap. 5. 109 Abdülhamid II, cited in ibid., p. 114. On the views of Abdülhamid more generally on religion and politics, see Karpat, The Politicization of Islam, chap. 7. 110 Deringil, The Well-​Protected Domains, chap. 3. 111 Karpat, The Politicization of Islam, esp. pp. 52–​63 and chaps 10 and 12; Azmi Özcan, Pan-​ Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877–​1924 (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1997), chaps 2 and 3; Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–​1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 117–​20, 146–​57; Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 112 Karpat, The Politicization of Islam, p. 275; Martin Bruinessen, “A Nineteenth-​Century Kurdish Scholar in South Africa,” in Mullas, Sufis and Heretics: The Role of Religion in Kurdish Society, ed. Martin Bruinessen (Istanbul: Isis, 2000), pp. 133–​41; Abdulkader Tayob, Islamic Resurgence in South Africa: The Muslim Youth Movement (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1995), pp. 61–​2. 113 Charles Tilly, “How Empires End,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-​ Building, ed. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 4; David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions in the Extra-​ European World, 1600–​ 1914 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 3. 114 Ian Copland et al., A History of State and Religion in India (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 162. See also Farrell, Chapter 5 in this volume. 115 On changes to religion across Asia during the modern era generally, see Thomas DuBois, “Introduction: The Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia—​Paradigmatic Change in Regional Perspective,” in Casting Faiths: Imperialism and the Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Thomas DuBois (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–​19. On the policies of the Qing, especially regarding nationalism, anticlericalism, “anti-​superstition,” and the campaigns to “destroy temples, build schools,” see Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), chaps 1 and 2; and Paul Katz, Religion in China and Its Modern Fate (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), chap. 1. On state policy in Japan, see Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868–​1988 (Princeton: Princeton University

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Press, 1989), chaps 1–​6; Trent Elliott Maxey, The “Greatest Problem”: Religion and state Formation in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). On the policies of the Chakkri dynasty and its efforts to create a “hierarchical and politically regulated system of ecclesiastical administration” in Thailand, see Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, pp. 198–​225, 230–​41; Yoneo Ishii, Sangha, State, and Society: Thai Buddhism in History, trans. Peter Hawkes (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986); Neil A. Englehart, Culture and Power in Traditional Siamese Government (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2001). 116 See articles 2 and 27 of the translated text of the Supplementary Fundamental Laws given in Edward Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–​1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), pp. 372–​3, 376. 117 On Qājār and Pahlavī religious policies, see Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785–​1906:  The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:  University of California Press, 1969); Birol Başkan, From Religious Empire to Secular States: State Secularization in Turkey, Iran and Russia (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), chaps 2, 4, and 5; Robert Gleave (ed.), Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005); Vanessa Martin, Iran between Islamic Nationalism and Secularism: The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Behrooz Moazami, State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran, 1796 to the Present (Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 118 Radu Murea, “Defensive Modernization and Self-​Induced Colonialism,” in Empires and Nations from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Antonello Biagini and Giovanna Motta (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), vol. 2, pp. 52–​3. 119 Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–​1876, pp. 43, 57–​9; Ahmed Cevdet, Tezâkir (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1953), pp. 66–​89. 120 Fairey, The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom, pp. 95–​101; Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat, vol. 1, pp. 47–​9.

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Chapter 8

Maritime Goes Global: The British Maritime Empire in Asia Donna Brunero For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself. —​Sir Walter Raleigh1 These reflections on the connections between the sea, commercial power, and world dominance have been credited to the adventurer (sea-​dog) and hero of the Elizabethan age, Sir Walter Raleigh. While Raleigh’s fame emerged in the late sixteenth century, his deeds, written works, and spirit were called upon in the Victorian Age to explain not only the British Empire but to serve as an embodiment of a long history of British interests in the maritime world, as part of their rapidly expanding imperial system.2 In this volume, which investigates the experience, forms, and practices of empire in Asia in the “long nineteenth century,” it is important to reconsider the nature of maritime power, as too often attention has focused on terrestrial power. This emphasis on the land is predicated on a number of aspects such as establishing control over frontiers, determining territorial demarcations, claiming dominion over peoples, and evolving ideas of Asian sovereignty and suzerainty, especially in relation to European conceptions of power and rule. In this study of the “long nineteenth century” we examine the dramatic reordering Asia seems to have undergone. Asia was brought into new forms of governance and new configurations of the state, in some cases through the act of Western colonization. At the same time, Asia and most Asians became enmeshed within what became a truly global economy. This chapter takes a closer look at a central feature of both those larger processes: the maritime worlds of Asia, especially the role therein of British maritime power. British seapower not only shaped the Asian maritime world but it also linked Asian ports, hinterlands, and populaces with global communities and networks; these connections proved transformative within and beyond Asia. This chapter explores the development of British networks of imperial trade, migration, and the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and information across the oceans of Asia. By the early nineteenth century the British were considered the world’s preeminent naval power, and in Asia this naval presence coincided with growing merchant marine or commercial shipping presence. Scholarship has been so engrossed in the transformations of British power in India from the 1750s onward, however, that this

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has often overshadowed a simultaneous but equally important story: the expansion of maritime British commercial power in Asia.3 Maritime power could then encompass not only naval power but private shipping, ports, and trade networks. Maritime history as a field is enjoying a renaissance, and with good reason. Scholars agree that looking to the seas we can find new potential for connections, of interplays between regions, and also between different geographical spheres. This field, in which the seas and oceans are emerging as an important focal point, provides a new opportunity for thinking about the British Empire in Asia as a maritime empire. As such, this chapter redirects consideration once more to the oceans and seas of Asia, broadly encompassing everything east of the Cape of Good Hope, and in doing so brings the notions of a seaborne empire in Asia, as understood and experienced by Victorian Britain, to the fore. By the mid-​nineteenth century the British credibly claimed to control the major saltwater regions of Asia and their colonial territories boasted many key port cities, including Madras (Chennai), Karachi, Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai), Colombo, Rangoon (Yangon), Singapore, and Hong Kong among others. Herein was a British thalassocracy. The ships, shipping lanes, and ports were supported by an infrastructure of maritime regulations, port authorities, hydrographers, engineers, merchants, commercial associations, and laborers, who all contributed to the building and sustaining of British maritime dominance in Asia. By focusing on the colonial ports which rose to preeminence as part of an emerging imperial network of information, goods, and people in the nineteenth century, it is clear that the British achieved a thalassocracy in Asia by dominating the high seas. By exercising their naval power, and by controlling all the major trade routes with both commercial and naval might, they connected the Asian maritime world into what became a truly global maritime network—​also built primarily by British seapower. For the purposes of this chapter, thalassocracy does not mean to rule by the sea but it refers to rule by those who control the sea. This is an important distinction and makes it possible for us to consider the British Empire by the mid-​nineteenth century as a thalassocracy. The British Empire by the early 1800s was the preeminent maritime power in the world. Huw Bowen describes the oceans eastward from the Cape of Good Hope as a giant British imperial network connecting Asia to the Atlantic worlds.4 In The Birth of the Modern World Christopher Bayly argued that connectivity was important; the “age of revolutions” was marked by conflicts that ricocheted around the globe and “Napoleon himself indirectly acknowledged this when he remarked that the Battle of Waterloo had been lost in India.”5 As the British emerged as the preeminent imperial power of the day, maritime trade routes and port cities served as important nodes for events and technologies to ricochet through the British imperial world. The mid-​1800s should also be known as the golden age of the gunboat as “Palmerstonian diplomacy” meant that the notion of free trade and the threat or use of force to promote trading rights were often inextricably linked.6 And fundamental to this imperial network was the port city, as a maritime power relied on ports to sustain its imperial presence; these ports could also act as entry points for further interaction and incursion with indigenous societies. They 250

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also provided a base for diasporic communities, who were attracted by trade, potential for new trading partners, and the relative stability offered under the British flag.7 Over time, these Asian ports would become important emporiums for free trade (and bastions of British influence) evolving from their roles as English East India Company (EIC) outposts. But at the same time British maritime power was at its height, it was by no means impervious to threats or challenges; for any thalassocracy, control of the “great waters” could be tenuous. The great “highway of the ocean” as described by the noted Victorian advocate of Empire and Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley, enabled imperial flows of ships, people, and goods and was so utilized by the Royal Navy and commercial flagships of empire, such as the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&0).8 But no seapower could ever be so absolute as to eliminate all threats; the oceans and seas were simply too vast. Supremacy at sea meant dominating maritime life, not monopolizing it. Persistent threats included piracy and privateers, mutiny at sea (a threat to both shipping labor and naval discipline), poorly charted waters, and of course weather and the elements. The British thalassocracy, globally and in Asia, was formidable—​but not omnipotent. While formal trappings of maritime power were displayed through the Royal Navy, and by maritime institutions at port cities, regulating and policing ports, British imperial power was also advanced informally through mercantile means. The maritime highways of empire were kept secure by the Royal Navy but were heavily utilized and developed in turn by so-​called country traders, a term generally used to refer to individual merchants taking part in trade that moved between countries in Asia, rather than connecting back to the United Kingdom. This activity was heavily bolstered by the activity of Asian diasporic communities, particularly the Parsis in the Indian subcontinent and overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. And these links were often reinforced through the movement of migrants, workers, and soldiers as part of imperial flows of labor. As Amitav Ghosh reflects: “It is common nowadays to hear ‘diversity’ being spoken of as though it were some thrilling new invention. But it is unlikely that there were ever any more diverse collections of people—​albeit only men—​than the crews of merchant ships in the age of sail.”9 This diversity sustained a British maritime system but at the same time presented possible fault lines for the British thalassocracy in Asia. If the sea was a connective force,10 it also represented a frontier which could be uncertain, fraught with challenges. These threats could come in the form of external rivals such as the French, Dutch, or Russians, but also from internal disorder. Despite British aspirations to create an imperial maritime realm, Asian ports remained quintessentially Asian in terms of populations and identities. European communities within these outposts of empire remained small and largely transient; Asian colonial ports were markedly different in character to settler communities such as those established in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.11 This is aptly illustrated through Frenchmen Marc Chardourne’s reflections as he visited Hong Kong; he recognized it as China when exposed to its spices, smells, and sounds. And yet, after observing the bungalows, public buildings, and winding roads he opined “this is not China. It is an English City.”12 251

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Hong Kong demonstrates the contradictions inherent in many Asian ports, they had foreign enclaves and a semblance of familiar sights to the Western traveler and yet, were infused and shaped by their predominantly Asian populace. So this requires us to bear in mind that in Asia the British maritime empire was neither demographically nor territorially deep (even the port colony of Hong Kong is described as being at the “edge of Empires”).13 More often than not, the largest and most effective degrees of direct British control were confined to coastal spaces and enclaves surrounding major ports, and even the British, the preeminent seapower of the age, were always stretched to maintain a strong presence across all the world’s oceans. Hence, for any traveler in nineteenth-​ century maritime Asia, arriving at a British colonial port, one would see a naval vessel, or gunboat, and the Union Jack: signs of safety, stability, and imperial power. The British maritime empire in Asia was also complex, comprising multiple layers, and often relied on British traders, Asian merchants, and local labor to sustain its networks of trade and trading centers. To uncover this complexity, this chapter will do three things. First it will examine the key elements of British maritime power in Asia and how they constituted a thalassocracy. Second, it will discuss how this thalassocracy was understood and represented by Victorian Britons. And finally, to bring the idea of imperial flows in maritime worlds into a specific context and sharp focus, the chapter will examine how empire was viewed from the sea itself, most specifically the deck of a ship. This, arguably, can give us a microcosm of British maritime empire in Asia. By following the journey of an East Indiaman, the Lady Campbell, from Gravesend to Calcutta in 1825 we can garner insights into the British imperial maritime world as experienced at the time. A passenger on the voyage was Robert Ramsay, an -​EIC officer cadet on his first outward bound journey to India. Ports of call included Lagos (under Portuguese control), Cape Town, Madras, and Calcutta. Ramsay, a Scotsman, had a brother already in the Service and his father was also an “old hand” in the Company. Through Ramsay’s journals we have glimpses into how a maritime empire was understood from the perspective of a junior EIC recruit and, importantly, from the vantage point of the sea.14 Viewing the Empire from the macro (Victorian perspectives), to the micro (from the deck of a ship) can bring us inside the complicated array of British imperial flows in Asia that constituted maritime empire.

Maritime Empires in Asia Pre-​1800 Was early-​modern Asia ever dominated by a maritime empire? This is a pertinent question seeing that the focus of this chapter is an examination of how the British assembled a thalassocracy in Asia. The great Ming voyages of the admiral eunuch Zheng He of the 1400s were bold and notable in connecting parts of Asia within a broad ambit of tributary-​vassal relationships with the Chinese empire, but the Ming soon turned inward, restricting maritime trade and looking toward the security of their land frontiers; arguably they did not see themselves as a maritime empire.15 Port polities of Southeast Asia, 252

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such as Melaka which emerged in the 1400s, asserted their dominance of the waters surrounding their ports; but these polities with their pattern of charismatic kingship and transitory trading communities did not assert dominance over extensive territories or for a long period of time.16 Nor did the port polities of Southeast Asia necessarily see a need to claim an empire on the seas. This was illustrated in the following observation by the sultan of Makassar to a Dutch ambassador in the 1650s: “God has made the earth and the sea, and has divided the earth among men and made the sea common to all.”17 While maritime power was important, it was seen as a complement to existing power bases and the seas were not claimed as territorial interests. When trade declined so too did control of the port and waters.18 In this case, the Southeast Asian port of Banten is highlighted by Christopher Wake as illustrative of a representative port; he argues that many preeminent ports emerged in the seventh to seventeenth centuries not so much as a result of their hinterlands but as a result of their ruler’s ability to harness the “traffic in luxury goods” transiting through Southeast Asia.19 The idea of a rise and fall of maritime power is discussed in Philip Steinberg’s The Social Construction of the Ocean where the concept of controlling ocean-​space was described as a “European idea.”20 Steinberg cited both Indian and Chinese examples as Asian empires which made use of the sea but noted that these powers did not, on the whole, have any interest or intention to devote substantial resources to emphasizing seapower. They did not disregard the “great waters” but made no concerted effort to control them either; land, and terrestrial frontiers, were their priorities.21 The Portuguese and the Ottomans were the first major powers to claim “control of the waters” in Asia in the early-​modern era, but the Portuguese claim was longer lasting and more significant. The Portuguese Estado da Índia referred to Portuguese territories as the state of India. While strictly speaking this referred to territories seized or secured through agreements with local rulers (sometimes extracted through force) by the Portuguese in Asia, including Goa, Chaul, Colombo, and Macau, the expression sometimes also took on a more extensive meaning. Anthony Disney explains that from the seventeenth century, Estado da Índia was sometimes informally used to refer to a broader expanse—​that of the coasts, the waters, and the oceans of Asia.22 In other words, this use of Estado da Índia denoted the Portuguese as not a territorial but rather a maritime empire. This assertion shaped Portuguese policies and activities east of Africa for more than a century, during which they built up a far-​flung and ambitious network of widely dispersed “forts and ports.”23 But these imperial nodes spread manpower and finances very thinly, and were too often laxly administered. This all exposed the Portuguese maritime empire to ever stronger Dutch assault during the seventeenth century. Greedier, more ambitious, wealthier, and better organized, the Dutch capitalized on any sign of weakness from the Portuguese and rapidly gained the upper hand in this long, violent rivalry. The Dutch announced their emergence as a major power in Asian waters by capturing the 1,400 ton carrack the Santa Catarina (carrying vast quantities of gold, raw silk, and 253

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spices) in February 1603 off the coast of Singapore as it sailed from Macau to Lisbon.24 Their actions brought into question the notions of legality and illegality at sea, and dominance of the waters. The Dutch usurped the Portuguese in many parts of Asia by the 1640s, establishing their own maritime primacy in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia—​but were overcome in turn, during the eighteenth century, by even greater British power and ambitions.25 But along the way the Dutch did something of lasting importance. They built a maritime empire but did not claim sole control of the sea-​lanes of the ocean along which goods, people, power, and ideas circulated. They instead advocated the idea of the open seas—​that the “great waters” were common property of all, through which all had the right to transit. This was a major shift from the Portuguese conception of claiming the land and the waters. The concepts originated from the early-​seventeenth-​century work of Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum or Freedom of the Seas.26 This does not mean the Dutch accepted wide-​ open maritime competition, far from it. Rather, they physically and politically asserted control of key trade routes which allowed them to dominate the spice trade and establish what amounted to a stranglehold on ships passing through the Sunda Straits near their regional base of Batavia. But they did establish, in early-​modern Asia, the all-​important idea that maritime empire could not and should not try to control all ocean waters the same way territorial empire controlled a hinterland.

The British as a Maritime Power in Asia The British, therefore, came relatively late to these dramatically expanding networks of maritime trade in early-​modern Asia, but by doing so they found an established pattern to imitate: to secure trade arrangements and permissions to establish bases and nodes with local rulers, to serve as a framework of support and control for the exercise of the “freedom of the seas” in the “great waters.” The oceans might be free for the use of all—​but the only point to using the oceans and seas was to travel and land somewhere, and that simple structural fact formed the glue that enabled maritime empire to coexist with Mare Liberum. Ports acted as nodes within the maritime empire; as sites to replenish supplies, make repairs, and to conduct trade; they formed a web of interconnected contact zones across the waters. Early EIC accounts of their forays into Asia attest to the unevenness and tenuous nature of early contact and their attempts at exercising “freedom of the seas.”27 While the use of a chartered trading company was relatively novel, the British agenda in Asia prior to the 1800s was not of imperial domination but rather to enrich themselves by collaboration and cooperation with local traders and rulers alike. And this collaborative approach to indigenous sovereignty was never in fact discarded, even when, well into the nineteenth century, sweeping imperial domination did evolve, particularly on the Indian subcontinent—​the “birth” of the British Raj. The British became adept at juggling various layers of competing sovereignty and multiple interpretations of law which drew on indigenous legal systems to administer 254

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territories and to justify their right to rule.28 While it would be tempting to view this transition from the early uncertainties of the EIC to its predominance from a vantage point of the triumphal era of British naval prowess, particularly from 1815 onward, this would oversimplify the nature of the British presence in Asia (Figure 8.1). Seapower facilitated an increasingly significant mercantile presence that enjoyed massive expansion after 1815. After that turning point, no remaining Great Power could seriously challenge British naval and maritime strength. From the widest overall vantage point, British naval power so effectively ensured the safety of traders, by controlling the sea-​lanes through which they moved and protecting the ports they relied on, that the British Empire’s mercantile marine not only became globally dominant it grew to become the largest and wealthiest such force the world had ever seen.29 When combined with a fundamental change in British national policy in the 1840s, this ushered in an era of relatively unhindered commerce through “free trade.”30 This was the era of the Pax Britannica, and it fundamentally redefined the British imperial project in Asia. This era of flourishing mercantile trade drove the consolidation of business networks, practices of governance, and the creation of new imperial “centers.” As the EIC entered its twilight decades—​a terminal decline from the 1780s—​traders and commercial structures emerged throughout the ports, strengthening the sinews of finance and commercial dominance.31 Chartered banks are an example of this evolution, the first being the Oriental Bank Corporation (chartered in 1851) and the highly successful Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (established by the Hong Kong government in 1860).32 These banks often provided additional services such as loans to local trading communities and, importantly, facilitated international transactions. The vantage point from India, and the Indian Ocean then, indicates the evolution of a British maritime system so extensive that it not only spanned Asian “great waters” but also brought them into close connection with British maritime interests everywhere else, from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the Mediterranean Sea and Home Waters.33 The result was a global maritime empire, a “British world system,” which ultimately served to integrate the Indian and Atlantic Oceans into a connected unit. It is unsurprising, then, that of all the powers who had a presence in Asia, only the British were credited with becoming a thalassocracy there. Daniel Headrick, whose work on technology and empire is seminal in the field, observed: “Among empires, the most unusual is that of the seas . . . only once has there been a truly global thalassocracy, a nation whose fleet and merchant marine were dominant on almost all the seas of the world. This was Great Britain in the nineteenth century.”34 After glancing at the Greeks and the Vikings, Headrick singled out the British for having achieved such dominance of the world’s waters. Headrick focused more on the role played by technology (such as steam and telegraph) in reinforcing imperial power but it is telling that he saw the British as the only power capable of capitalizing on their presence in “great waters” by applying advanced technology, and securing strategic territories and bases on a large enough scale, and in a truly sustained manner, so as to anchor true British maritime 255

Figure 8.1  A map entitled “British Possessions in the Indian Seas,” with the main panel showing Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and inserts showing Melaka, Singapore, Penang, and Labouan, ca. 1872. The map is bordered with scenes depicting the indigenous peoples and fauna of the region. Published by A. Fullarton & Co, of London and Edinburgh. (Photo by Hulton Archive/​Getty Images.) 256

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dominance. And nowhere was this British thalassocracy more consequential than when it emerged in Asia and Asian waters by the middle of the nineteenth century. There was however more to maritime empire than warships, merchant men, ports, docks and warehouses. There was also a powerful ideological basis to British maritime power. Confidence in British maritime prowess has been described as crucial to the idea of an empire over the seas; this was illustrated by Lord Salisbury’s confident assertion in 1888 that “we are fish.”35 It is also worth noting that the “myth” the British maritime empire emerged in the Elizabethan Age, as a result of the exploits of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, came very much into vogue in the Victorian era.36 Such allusions to the origins of a maritime empire reflect on ideology and the lore of empire. David Armitage argued that “the British empire of the seas was both historically novel and comparatively benign; it could therefore escape the compulsions that destroyed all previous land-​based, and hence obviously military, empire. In short, it could be an empire for liberty.”37 Here was an alternative to the land-​based empire so often associated with militarism and autocracy, but also the expression of an “ultramarine tradition” long associated with myths and origins of British imperial greatness beyond their own shores. Technologies such as steam, telegraph, and advances in hydrography, all professionalized by the Royal Navy, led to a further consolidation not only of seas but also knowledge gathering and communications.38 Competition from rivals in Asia, the Dutch specifically, also spurred on British efforts in charting waters, creating maps, and producing knowledge of the waters of Asia.39 Shipping volume and frequency also steadily increased: shipping to and from the United Kingdom and the “EIC’s territories including Singapore and Ceylon” in 1829 registered a total of 165 ships totalling 71,000 tons inward and 125 vessels of 54,000 tons outward bound; these figures steadily grew over the following decades.40 This combination of imperial interests and a sense of threat from European rivals drove the British consolidation of their interests in Asia from the 1820s onwards. This revolved around establishing what became paramount power in India, which included the expansion of effective British control from Bengal outwards in all directions—​for example, by the occupation of Burma as a result of the Anglo-​Burmese wars of 1824–​26. While the territorial acquisitions were often the work of land forces and until 1857 principally the armies of the EIC, it was still undisputable that naval power and presence underpinned the entire British project in Asia as a whole and not just the subcontinent. Of course there were some age-​old limitations to the exercise of naval power, even in “great waters”; sailing ships relied on favorable winds. And shallow coastal waters posed their own risks, especially if they were not well charted.41 But the introduction of the steam engine changed the nature of naval power; the Admiralty was relatively slow (compared to commercial lines) to adapt to steam but by 1841 even the Royal Navy began to replace sailing vessels with steamships.42 Ships could now operate with greater ease in shallow coastal waters, move much faster in all waters, and move whenever they wished regardless of the prevailing winds; coaling stations were now the only real consideration.43 Steamships were an expensive investment but with a big business organization, agency networks in key ports, and mail 257

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subsidies they “captured the trades, such as passenger transport, where speed and punctuality mattered.”44 Ships grew bigger and faster; in 1828 the largest steamer was 500 tons, by 1840 P&O’s largest ships were over 1,000 tons, and by the end of the nineteenth century the average vessel was 4,000 tons.45 Steam did not however, change the most basic fact of all: only through the great waters of the oceans could the British or any other power, imperial or otherwise, move troops, protect trade routes, connect ports, convey migrants, and link regional networks into a global system. Steam, and the coaling stations and associated ship services, made a network of ports and bases all the more important. Through this framework the now more efficient and effective movement across the seas was enabled and exploited. This made a number of British colonial port cities in Asia, some of which grew from roots as company towns—​such as Calcutta and Singapore—​strategic points of control that became fundamental to the entire British global project of empire, for both defense and commerce.46 This was demonstrated graphically when many elements of the EIC Army erupted in 1857 in what became, to the British, the “Indian Mutiny.” In the violence which ensued, the British presence in South Asia, let alone British predominance, hung in the balance. The British defeated this “Mutiny” due in no small measure to the fact the Royal Navy could transport powerful British Army reinforcements to India without delay or interference. The “Mutiny” and British victory allowed the British to transform their position in India to the point where the British Raj became not only an Asian Great Power in its own right but the subcontinent became a cornerstone of the British global empire, its “jewel in the crown.”47 Even this greatest expansion of British territorial empire in Asia was reliant on, and conditioned by, sustaining seapower and maritime empire.

A Thalassocracy: Victorian Imaginings? How did the Victorians understand their maritime empire? The term “thalassocracy” may seem antiquarian but was often used by scholars of the nineteenth century to describe British maritime power. Victorians were deeply preoccupied with the importance of classical empires. Many leading intellectuals and politicians grew up on a diet of the classics, made the grand tour, and believed in the importance of the great classical empires as informing British power.48 This alone lends weight to considering the term “thalassocracy” in relation to the British maritime empire. The British were aware of a long tradition of maritime empires and in their case, they were obsessed with the classic Athenian and early-​modern Venetian maritime empires. By examining the rise and fall of these great seapowers they believed they might foretell some of the potential weaknesses of their own maritime empire. This term has roots in the Greek (Athenian) tradition, and was first used in the British context by the scholar George Grote in 1849.49 Grote’s multivolume work on the history of Athens was greeted with some criticism (in part because Grote was not a historian 258

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but a banker by occupation) as some of his contemporaries felt he placed too much emphasis on the present day when assessing Athenian politics and power.50 Despite these criticisms, the comparative method used by Grote was persuasive and his history was regarded as an important work of the era. For Grote, the Athenians became a lens through which to understand the British Empire and to explain the benevolence of British rule.51 Grote’s work influenced Seeley, one of the foremost Victorian proponents on the value and need for the British Empire. British maritime prowess was also exhibited through Victorian popular culture. It could be found in humble forms, as few who drank tea, ate bananas, or enjoyed pineapple (canned in prodigious quantities in Singapore) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would have been unaware that these delicacies were shipped via the networks of British maritime empire.52 This was echoed most clearly in popular culture via the works of Rudyard Kipling, whose poems relating to steamships capture much of the spirit and fascination of the age. In Kipling’s poem “Big Steamers,” written for a school-​aged audience, the importance of steamships is highlighted in connecting Britons to the British thalassocracy: Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers, With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas? We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter, Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese. And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers, And where shall I write you when you are away? We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver. Address us at Hobart, Hong-​Kong, and Bombay.53 Here the expanse of the maritime highway was brought into sharp relief; the goods of empire were transported via the ports of empire, as distant as the former penal settlement of Hobart, and as culturally “exotic” as the ports of Hong Kong and Bombay. The poem adds an ominous note to the fate of Britons if these big steamers are wrecked by asking what could be done. The reply? “Send out your big warships to watch your big waters” to ensure that no one need starve; once more the idea of naval power and the British thalassocracy is present but in a manner suited for general readers. Here, Kipling’s poem, without much subtlety, played on the idea of size with a big ocean, big steamers, big warships, demonstrating the Victorian belief in the strength of British seapower throughout their empire. While the Victorians lauded the big ships of empire, what was ironically overlooked were the smaller vessels plying between ports, into the river networks, and who formed what have been described as the “tugboats and lighters” of empire.54 These multiple layers of maritime empire were often disregarded, in preference to grand narratives of the great flagships and icons; for the public, the P&O Company, and the Royal Navy shaped the public imagination of the many ships plying the “great waters.” 259

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Impressions of British maritime power also made their way into reference works of the nineteenth century. For instance, an illustrated Atlas of the British Empire throughout the World (1868), by John Bartholomew, opens with the observation that “in wealth and civilisation the British Empire is unrivalled among the powers in either hemisphere.”55 India formed a focal point for the author, who reminded his readers that the land area of the Indian territories was almost seventeen times the size of the British Isles. But beyond the comments on the sheer scale and enormity of the British possessions in Greater India, what matters most here was the focus on Asian ports and their significance, not only to trade but also defense. Bartholomew highlighted Aden for its strong fortifications and its importance as the premier coaling station on the steamship route to China.56 Colombo was mentioned as a key possession and Singapore, as part of the Straits Settlements, was also noted for its strong fortifications. The list of territories (particularly those which also happened to be ports) was extensive. This work highlighted the expanse of the British Empire, presenting its many ports as a defining element of a British thalassocracy. This work presented a less romantic perspective of empire to that of James Anthony Froude and Kipling, but nonetheless stressed the importance of the maritime basis of the British imperial system in Asia. This very positive depiction of British possessions in Asia was counterbalanced by another Victorian contemporary who perhaps was more reflective on not only the form of British presence in Asia but also the substance. In The Expansion of England Seeley commented: On the other hand when the State advances beyond the limits of the nationality, its power becomes precarious and artificial. This is the condition of most empires; it is the condition for example of our own empire in India. The English State is powerful there, but the English nation is but an imperceptible drop in the ocean of an Asiatic population.57 Here, as an advocate of empire and promoter of the British Empire, Seeley reflected on the tenuous nature of British power overseas. Seeley had a particular vision of the British Empire, and he singled it out in his perceptive comment on what he saw as the most evident weakness of the British presence in Asia: that it rested on very few resident Britons. Seeley did not focus on the maritime realm, but the British imperial port cities in Asia would have fueled his argument. Even in the most prominent colonial port cities in Asia, Britons and Europeans were numerically insignificant. Were it not to rest on the constantly exercised power of the Royal Navy, this left the British maritime empire in Asia fundamentally dependent on the effective and willing participation of the indigenous populace, in partnership, of local capital, labor, commerce, and expertise. This required the British thalassocracy to maintain sway over vast territories, and administer numerous peoples, who were considered immeasurably different to the British. One did 260

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not need to subscribe to Seeley’s ethnic definition of empire to recognize this fact as defining.

The Great Modern Asian Port By the early 1800s through what can best be described as a combination of aggressive expansion and strategic acquisitions, the British boasted possession of a large network of ports, many of which emerged as the premier port cities in Asia. From the three presidencies of the EIC in Madras (acquired in 1639), Bombay (1655), and Calcutta (1690), the British developed their position as the most significant trading entity in the Indian subcontinent.58 As their trading interests grew, so did their armed forces. While at first intended to protect British trading interests, the EIC army soon provided the Company with the strength to drive off their European rivals (the French) in Southern India, and then by the late 1750s (after the “Black hole of Calcutta” incident and the Battle of Plassey), to become a great power in the geopolitics of the Indian subcontinent. As India came ever more firmly under EIC dominance, the British sought to secure trade routes between India and China; and to do so, they founded or seized other ports.59 Perhaps the most famous example was Singapore, secured as a trading settlement in 1819 through the actions of a maverick “man on the spot”: Stamford Raffles, who saw an EIC establishment in Singapore as a direct rebuttal to the perceived threat to British (EIC) trade posed by the Dutch in the Straits of Melaka area.60 The ports of Asia, and the tropics in particular, were not intended as white settlements. Instead, these ports held strategic and commercial interests: “to allow the British to open up the vast markets and populations of India and the Far East to European trade.”61 The British thalassocracy needed to expand its control over ports and networks to thrive. From such colonial ports emerged the “great colonial port cities” of the age of “high imperialism”: Cape Town, Aden, Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Rangoon, Singapore, and Hong Kong (Figure 8.2). Shanghai and Yokohama also held significance for British commercial and trading interests but were not formal British colonies. They did however reflect British power through strong and vibrant British shipping, commercial and financial interests; the geopolitical was also never far from the surface.62 These colonial port cities formed not only an extensive network throughout Asia but also served as regional hubs, linking various trade routes and intra-​Asian connections. In short, port cities became the centers of imperial administration and infrastructure.63 This was most clearly evinced in the way that each port had a role not only for trade but as a maritime center—​either for shipbuilding and/​or coaling, and/​or as a naval base. Singapore and Hong Kong were both key examples of such ports.64 And we are reminded that maritime empires were not only typified by the control of the waters but also by the primary role played by ports. Traders, migrants, workers, soldiers, and imperial officials all moved through them. Ports were also the vehicle for imperial careers, ranging from high office holders, to skilled professionals such as engineers, to huge numbers of Asian 261

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Figure 8.2  Hong Kong, ca. 1880. (Photo by The Print Collector/​Print Collector/​Hulton Archive/​Getty Images.)

solders, or sepoys and sailors or lascars, all of whom transferred between ports.65 Here the colonial port also became a vehicle for mechanisms of imperial control underlined by the constant presence of soldiers, sailors, and servants of empire. The growth of the great colonial ports of Asia was largely due to a ready supply of cheap labor. Throughout the British thalassocracy in Asia, cheap indigenous labor was essential to the functioning of the port; without this labor who would work the docks, refuel ships, and be enlisted to defend British interests? This vast labor force was highly mobile within the imperial network and represented a local experience of the British thalassocracy in action. The lascar typified the highly mobile and exploitative nature of labor within ports and along maritime trade routes (Figure 8.3).66 Furthermore, the ports and maritime networks provided mechanisms for ensuring control and administration. People who fell afoul of laws or the politics of empire, for whatever reason, ranging from criminals to dissenters, were transported across the oceans to settlements such as the disease-​prone Andaman Islands, which served an important role as a penal colony in Asia, particularly for transportees from India.67 Here the waters and oceans were used by the British to control troublesome elements by creating “separations” and 262

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Figure 8.3  Indian sketches: unloading ice at Bombay. Engraving, 1878, from the Graphic. BPA2# 2487 (Bettmann/​Getty Images).

moving offenders away from their homes. This also made them reliant on ships to bring provisions, and hopefully to one day allow them to return. The Asian port city has long been considered a “contact zone” between a modernizing West and Asian coastal communities. This could be traced back to Vasco da Gama’s first arrival at Calicut, but scholars have been quick to point out that Europeans did not transform Asia’s ports68; they did however assert themselves increasingly aggressively into Asia’s existing trading networks. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the great British imperial network of colonial port cities was visibly solidified and bonded by the opening of the Suez Canal and the development of railway systems, both reinforcing the already strong effects of the introduction of steam power and the development of the telegraph. The latter in particular, when laid along the seabed, connected the British Isles and the major cities of the empire in near real time by the 1870s, and from then on pressed ever more expansively into imperial hinterlands. Communication via the undersea telegraph cable was expensive however, and scheduled steamers remained a preferred means of communication for administrators. Meanwhile, the Suez Canal brought a staggering increase in British tonnage passing through the waterway, from less than 300,000 tons in 1870 to 2,000,000 tons in 1875, to over 5,300,000 tons in 1890; British shipping thrived with the opening of the new, faster route to Asia.69 All this tended to reinforce British perceptions of their thalassocracy in Asia in particular. 263

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Not only did these colonial ports form a valuable network for the circulation of goods, people, and ideas,70 they enabled the British to reach ever further, beyond the Indian Ocean, to consolidate their interests in East Asia and the Pacific. Examination of ports such as Singapore and Calcutta reveals that while the original impetus might have been a combination of strategic and trade agendas driven by British interests, this was not always what allowed these ports to flourish. Many times this was related to the ability of the port to harness or connect into existing networks, and the willingness of traders to use the port as a base.71 And while the British presence was not questioned, these ports were never seen in the same light as settler colonies; the great ports of Asia remained distinctly Asian in their composition. For instance, according to the Annual Reports of the Straits Settlement for 1872, Singapore’s census (of 1871) stood at: 19,250 Malays, 54,098 Chinese, 11,191 Indians, 2,164 Eurasians, and 1,329 Europeans and Americans.72 Similarly, the British population of Ceylon (its major port Colombo described as the “Clapham junction of the East”) remained constant but small; they were not described as “settlers” despite some generations of land-​owning families. As Margaret Jones observed: “like their compatriots in India, they alternated years of work with periods of leave back in Britain.”73 Asian ports were a base for British expatriates and sojourners, and in the nineteenth century while some of these communities may have expressed “frontier mentalities”—​in the way they lobbied the British government for administrative and naval support—​they were rarely settlers.74 These expatriate communities benefitted from and traveled within the British thalassocracy in Asia; many “imperial careers” were made this way as experiences at various ports (posts) were accumulated. The British imperial project in Asia may have been enabled by naval power, but it was implemented by commerce and the merchant marine. After 1815 the British were not only the world’s predominant naval power but they owned by far the most extensive merchant marine the world had ever seen. Commerce and naval power remained, as always, two sides of a coin. The connection was indissoluble: without maritime power there was little purpose to British expansion in India—​what could be done with the “fruits” of such expansion if it could not be exported or connected? Nor was there much chance British interests could flourish without maritime support. In every sense, British seapower was the lifeline of first the Company and then the Raj. British power came to dominate India precisely because it was so accessible to the sea. The P&O Company was regarded as the flagship of the British Empire but many other merchants and shipping companies had stakes in British imperial interests in Asia. Despite the small number of Britons residing in various colonial ports, the British mercantile community had a strong commercial and political presence and created institutions to protect their trading interests, for example, the formation of the East India and China Associations in London (1836) and Liverpool (1839), which were preceded by earlier similar associations.75 In a study of Liverpool as one of the great cities of the British Empire, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anthony Webster focused on the connections between Liverpool and the Asia 264

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trade.76 This study brought to light the volume of shipping moving to and fro between Liverpool and Asian ports. In particular, for the tea and cotton goods merchants operating out of Liverpool, ports such as Calcutta, Bombay, and beyond to China were key destinations.77 This focus on particular ports is supported by the general trade statistics of the London East India and China Association Annual Reports.78 By the nineteenth century, private traders had joined the EIC ships, alert to the benefits of the Asia trade. Shipping volumes bear out the correlation between Asian ports significant for trade: Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, China, Ceylon, Singapore, and Penang all featured prominently. Present in these ports, moreover, were private merchants, actively participating in the Asia trade. In Calcutta, the Anglo-​Indian John Palmer was a good example of a private trader whose fortunes were made (and dramatically lost) via his great interconnections within Asia. In Southeast Asia, Gillian Maclaine established a business in Batavia and relied heavily on Southeast Asian, East Asian, and European commercial networks in which to build his commercial interests in cotton, opium, and coffee. Asian traders also benefitted from networks established and secured with British seapower; Indian-​Parsi merchant Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy for instance, had extensive business concerns in colonial India and stretching to China.79 And John Carroll details the emergence of a wealthy and influential Chinese elite in the port colony of Hong Kong.80 These traders, European and Asian, could make the most of opportunities presented by new trading partners, new markets, and new commercial opportunities opened via the British maritime world. Accompanying merchants and shipping companies were service providers of all varieties, from chandlers to hoteliers, who provided a conducive environment for trade. The British acquisition of territories produced a relatively homogenous administrative structure, particularly in the era when the Indian presidencies were dominant, where general British laws and trading regulations were administered. Merchants and businesses were attracted by the stability and opportunities for further connections that these enclaves and this rule of law and physical security potentially provided; the flag attracted trade. Such early port city communities helped lay the foundation for what we may argue was a British maritime and mercantile empire. Port cities provided the conducive environment for local, Asian trading communities to operate; diasporic trading communities such as Parsis, Gujaratis, Chettiars, and the overseas Chinese flourished in the port setting. For example, ships registered as belonging to the port of Singapore in 1856 totaled 29,573 tons but most impressively the ownership included not only Europeans but also Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and Malays. Europeans owned only 12 percent of the ships registered to the port.81 This situation was not unusual within the intra-​Asian maritime world. These trading communities not only benefitted from the stable networks bolstered via the British maritime presence but sometimes emerged as business partners for European traders. Examples include the Straits Chinese who had formidable interests within British maritime networks, including shipping and dockyard companies.82 With them came access to existing regional networks and credit. Agency houses were established in many ports. A  common pattern, exemplified by Guthrie 265

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& Co. in Singapore, was to branch from merchant house to insurance, shipping, and investing in machinery, plantations, and property; all of these amounted to developing the financial infrastructure of ports and trade networks, bringing greater sophistication to Britain’s maritime empire. Further to this, commercial chambers of commerce (such as the East India and China Associations mentioned earlier) and banking corporations became a prominent feature of British colonial ports, cementing a seamless environment in which business could be conducted. By 1900, the aggregate value of trade passing through “Eastern Waters” of the empire was estimated as exceeding £500,000,000.83 Ports served as a meeting place for what colonial administrators would call a “medley” of races, while cash and an environment of protected commerce produced a very cosmopolitan maritime world.84 Efforts at planning the ports may have attempted to craft a European morphology but the result was mixed at best; perhaps this was most clearly seen in Singapore’s neatly planned early township when contrasted against the rather haphazard appearance of the development of Calcutta or Madras. Where in Calcutta and Madras “order and style” seemed somewhat subsumed in-​between the “White” and “Black” townships, the result was a city which teamed with impressive administrative buildings, and spacious and ostentatious houses built by wealthy traders (Britons and Asians alike). But alongside these residences grew a proliferation of hastily built and haphazard structures; Calcutta was described variously as a city of palaces but also of squalor and chaos.85 The great colonial ports were often shaped as much by conditions on the ground as those “imposed” by the demands of an increasingly interconnected and global trading system of the British Empire. Frontier communities of country and diasporic traders, Chinese and Arabs in particular, soon emerged as important stakeholders in these port city communities.

Challenges to British Maritime Empire The British presence and control of port areas and their networks was sometimes superficial; Hong Kong for instance, was often plagued by pirates and smuggling. Maintaining security in the waters was an ongoing challenge for the Royal Navy as where trade proliferated, so too did opportunism and subversion.86 Furthermore, British shipping and its dominance was often reinforced by Asian investors and Asian-​owned shipping. Some ships benefited from the security of a British flag and networks, others took advantage of it, and sometimes it was difficult to discern between the two.87 This may have been an empire under the British flag, but in so many ways it remained an array of alliances and partnerships. Scholars describe the experience on the ground as governing through multiple legalities; and that British authorities used a range of mechanisms and legal interpretations to ensure control over indigenous rulers and communities in their various Asian territories.88 And much of this array rested on the notion of Pax Britannica and the security and stability offered in the maritime empire in Asia. 266

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The action of the Royal Navy against pirates in Sarawak indicated one important instance where British seapower was contested. Calls to expand British control over the waters around Borneo from the “man on the spot” demonstrated that partnerships and voices “from the ground” often influenced and tested how effectively seapower could be exerted. The case of the Byron-​esque James Brooke (later Rajah Brooke) and his actions in Sarawak involved someone who understood the importance of British seapower and clearly saw its potential for opening new territories and expanding interests, both with trade and personal interests in the foreground. James Brooke was inspired by the actions of Stamford Raffles and sought to carve out territories in Borneo as part of an expanding British presence in Southeast Asia. He came into a small fortune after the death of his father, and used that money to buy a ship. Naming the ship the Royalist, Brooke set out in late 1838 to counter what he saw as excessive Dutch influence in the eastern archipelago of Southeast Asia.89 Brooke could however best be described as an adventurer who pushed British and his own interests in the region. His basic intention was to secure territories in Southeast Asia which had not been clearly demarcated by the 1824 Anglo-​ Dutch treaty. Initially representing the Crown and then acting as an advisor and ally to the Sultan of Brunei, Brooke was appointed a Raja of Sarawak, for his assistance to the Sultan, in 1841.90 This was not at first recognized by the Home government; instead he was appointed governor of the new colony of Labuan. Labuan was envisaged as a possible new center for steamships and trade in Southeast Asia.91 The port, however, never became much more than a second-​rate coaling station, was supplanted by Kuching, and remained subordinate to Singapore. With varying success over the years Brooke used his position in Sarawak and its potential (often exaggerated) to spur British interest in the region. When the “piratical” tendencies of indigenous rulers and their tribal communities proved hard to quell, Brooke called on British seapower, in the form of Captain Henry Keppel RN and HMS Dido, to aid him in pacifying the region. Keppel, young and ambitious and returning from action on the China Coast—​China had just encountered British seapower in the conflict that began what modern China now describes as a “century of humiliation”—​was won over by Brooke’s persuasive appeal. Bolstered by vociferous support from merchants of the Straits Settlement, Keppel joined Brooke in seeking out and engaging the “piratical” tribes that reportedly plagued the coast and waters between Singapore and Borneo, in 1843. Keppel’s account of the expedition revealed not only the personalities at play but a strong sense of conviction that Brooke represented British imperial interests. Brooke explained that without decisive intervention by the Royal Navy not only would Borneo’s native trade be at the mercy of the pirates, but he feared “much injury to our [British] own commerce and of our settlement in Singapore.”92 Following their successful expedition, Brooke and Keppel returned to Singapore, and London society, feted as heroes. This public acclaim did not last for so long, soon giving way to discomfort and criticism regarding the “anti-​piracy” measures which many considered more ruthless than warranted. A London Illustrated News issue of November 1849 ran a two-​page spread on the eyewitness accounts of Brooke’s expedition (along with naval forces to suppress piracy) and this lent ammunition to Brooke’s 267

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critics. Brooke and Keppel’s actions demonstrated the potential for the use of seapower to quell not only a maritime frontier, but to open up further trade interests (in the potential wealth of Borneo). They also revealed the way that personal ambitions sometimes had a hand in directing British maritime empire in Asia. The actions of Brooke and Keppel were not repeated, as the Home government was increasingly critical of such overtly aggressive naval actions and relatively unsympathetic to the pleas of foreign traders who continually appealed for British naval support. The Straits Settlements, for instance, often noted that their single steamship, Hooghly, was busy transporting the governor and was ill-​equipped to defend the port, and the allocation of one gunboat each for Singapore, Penang, and Melaka left traders feeling vulnerable.93 Here, the thalassocracy was tested, stretched, and sometimes revealed itself as frayed at the edges. British seapower was not only based on actual tangible demonstrations of power, but also cooperation and support from administrators, traders, and sailors, as well as the sustained belief in the benefits that a British thalassocracy could bring to the Asian maritime world.

The Empire from the Deck of a Ship While this chapter has examined Victorian popular conceptions of what it meant to be a maritime empire and port cities as nodes of a British thalassocracy, an important question remains: what did the empire look like from the water? The journal of an EIC officer cadet, Robert Ramsay, offers insights into how British maritime power was seen from the deck of an East Indiaman, the Lady Campbell.94 This young man’s account of his journey from Gravesend, London, to Calcutta (voyage of more than 11,000 miles) lasting from January to June 1825 provides us with a first-​hand account of the experience of traveling within the imperial network of Asia’s ports. While Ramsay’s journal is only a single travel account, his experiences were arguably typical for the time; traveling around the Cape by sail was arduous and fraught with challenges, delays were expected, and conditions on board were often uncomfortable at best. It also represents, to some extent, a case study of a microcosm of empire, as Ramsay’s observations of racial hierarchies on board the ship, issues of power and control all reflect the multiple layers of empire at work within this British vessel. Ramsay also provides rich reflections on the impressions of various ports, all very much the standard experience for a traveler of the 1800s. Furthermore, by examining life on-​board a ship, we are able to think about the ideas of imperial flows and imperial spaces as they were experienced via the seafarer. Ramsay’s journal reveals something of the anticipation felt by those traveling to Asia. In the first few days of entries in his journal he speculates over when they will be able to set sail. Ramsay is reassured that some waiting is to be expected, other vessels were similarly delayed. Much time is spent waiting for goods to be stored, cargo to be accounted for, and for passengers to arrive. Ramsay noted: “The Cambridge East 268

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Indiaman was towed up in the evening by a steam boat (steamers get £50 for this job). The 1st Mate comforts us for our delay by saying that some E. Indiamen such as the Asia, have been detained at the Mother-​bank, Portsmouth for three months by contrary winds.”95 Until steam proved a reliable and fast alternative, the journey out could take anywhere from four to six months. This in part relied on the favorable winds but also the skill of the Captain (after the opening of the Suez Canal some 4,000 miles was reduced off the distance and under steam, a passenger could think of traveling from London to India in a few weeks rather than enduring months at sea).96 In the case of the Lady Campbell, the Captain made several errors in charting his course, once going too far east and needing to backtrack to Madras (much to the disappointment of his passengers who had been placing bets as to when they would reach the port) and another of almost running aground near Masulipatam.97 By the time the Lady Campbell reached Cape Town any novelty of the sea voyage had long passed and the sighting of land became the ultimate goal of all passengers. Traveling via the Cape was fraught with risk but this was considered a trade-​off for what could potentially be a privileged and prosperous career. Some cadets (and officers) were very practical-​minded and Ramsay writes of many who served out their years in India most profitably by signing themselves to the business of “infrastructure projects”; in the subcontinent and other Asian ports, railways, docks, roads, and irrigation projects all attracted manpower, technical skills, and investments.98 The crew of the Lady Campbell provides insights into labor and the British maritime empire. Among the travelers were eight cadets, paying passengers including some ladies (the voyage costing approximately £15 a head), a small number of “China-​men,” seventy-​four lascars, forty able seamen, three mates, and four midshipmen.99 The lascars represented a highly mobile and cheap form of maritime labor and in some instances not only were Indian sailors in Britain pressed into the Royal Navy in times of war, but by the nineteenth century some British ships were wholly manned by Indian crews.100 The use of “Asiatic labor” became so common that in the late 1800s the condition and treatment of lascar sailors was raised as an issue warranting discussion in the British Parliament.101 In the case of the Lady Campbell, the lascars represented a significant proportion of the crew. A Serang or Tindall (boatswain) would oversee the order and work of the lascars. Ramsay keenly observed the lascars, and repeats many common stereotypes regarding these subalterns, for instance: “when it is cold the English sailors work to warm themselves, but the lascars cannot work for the cold; in a warm climate it is reversed, a lascar who has been in England only eight days has lost the use of his feet from the cold.”102 The lascars were also subject to a form of imperial discipline in that each evening they needed to have their lights out before everyone else; only their supervisor, or Serang, was permitted to leave his light on as “long as the white men.”103 Very early into the voyage Ramsay secured the services of the sepoy fifer to attend to his chores for him; even for a new cadet the advantages of class and race was evident. Having chores attended to no doubt made it much easier for passengers to tolerate the discovery of moldy clothes, and a cabin in disarray as a result of rough seas. 269

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While lascars were considered an essential element of ensuring shipping ran smoothly, they also represented a potential threat to British control. They were viewed as source of danger on board the ship as on more than one instance there were disputes on the Lady Campbell. For example, there was an argument concerning the lascars’ bedding and Ramsay details that “only the use of bayonets” kept order (the lascars were instructed to bring their bedding up for airing but refused).104 An African lascar is blamed as the ringleader in inciting the unrest but Ramsay also identifies the lascar cook as a troublemaker, describing him “as black as ever demon was pictured,” dressed in only a rag around his waist and armed with a stick.105 While impressionable, Ramsay’s observations shed light onto the perception of threats onboard the ship and also how intimately race was interwoven with these ideas; the cook reappears in a number of entries in Ramsay’s journal and is always associated as a figure to mistrust. Regular seamen also proved challenging to manage, a number were thrown into irons for misdemeanors, while others went missing (absconded) while anchored at port. Ironically, the ship’s chef was among those who swam away one night while anchored off Cape Town; he was hardly missed however, as a “China-​man” who had been his assistant proved a much more capable cook!106 Ramsay’s journal however reports most often of unrest among the lascars, from misdemeanors of theft to fighting. We should surmise that this was not simply out of fascination with the “different” sailors but reflects an ongoing unease with the “others” on whom the vessel heavily relied. For weeks at a time the Lady Campbell was at sea with rare sightings of a sail. The sight of another ship was usually a source of excitement and speculation as passengers and crew hoped to exchange news. Ramsay records his interest in gleaning any information regarding the British fighting in Burma. Passengers also hoped to compare their journey time to other vessels heading out to the East; to know one was making “good time” appears a way to make the voyage more bearable. One such instance between Lagos and the Cape caused alarm as the sail spotted on the horizon appeared to be a brig. Initial speculation was that this was another East Indiaman on route to the Cape but as the ship maintained the same distance over a day or two there were instructions to the Cadets to prepare their swords for fear this was a privateer.107 This danger was not realized but it was a possibility; the Royal Navy could not effectively patrol everywhere at the same time. Throughout British Asia the coastal areas were generally better protected owing to lobbying by merchant and local community interests, whereas the “great waters” were less monitored. Ports of call for the Lady Campbell included Lagos, Cape Town, Madras, and Calcutta. Here, on arrival at each port, Ramsay takes note of the ships anchored; an East Indiamen meant an opportunity of trading news and sending some letters, merchant vessels may invite the chance for trade, and a British man-​of-​war is also reported in nearly every port.108 The act of sharing and trading information and a sense of security in the British presence are a recurring feature in each port setting. Even Lagos—​which was a Portuguese port until it came under British control in 1851—​had a British Consul in residence. The Lady Campbell was well-​equipped and supplies replenished at Lagos; 270

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passengers gossiped about not needing to stop at the Cape, but when the time came, all were glad to go onshore at any opportunity they could. In fact, there was much preparation for a stop at the Cape and cadets wrote letters in anticipation of finding a vessel to carry these notes home; others checked whether they needed to order new clothes or other goods while ashore.109 And on departing the Cape, the Lady Campbell took on mail for Madras and Bombay; imagine how many letters traveled the seas until the telegraph became a reliable and affordable alternative. Here was a flow of information both governmental, financial, and personal circulating through the shipping routes and via ports. Each visit ashore brought new opportunities for exploration and Ramsay has a keen eye for the scenery at each port. He writes admiringly of the lush vegetation and flirting with the idea of buying a monkey in Lagos but sensibly opting for fresh fruits instead. When visiting each port, what Ramsay remarked on most however was not the scenery but the often glaring gap in living standards between the “white towns” and “black towns”; he described the miserable housing of the “natives” in Lagos, and the ragged appearance of the community in Cape Town as a few “English beauties” mixed among “officers, soldiery, Dutch-​Malays, Negroes and Hottentots.”110 He gave similar accounts of Madras and Calcutta; Madras was described as having a fine appearance from the sea, with the grand Fort St George a welcome sight; on exploring Madras on foot, his description of the black town near the fort was of extremely filthy and poor housing.111 Of Calcutta, Ramsay similarly observed, “The Govt. buildings and Gentleman’s houses are certainly splendid, The adjoining hovels of the poor natives are a sad contrast.”112 Here the sense of a port which had developed “organically” and with little real urban planning comes to the fore. The gleaming and bustling waterfront view gave way to reveal a squalid divide between the “white” and “black” townships. For any young cadet attention was focused most clearly on the forts, governor’s residences, and white settlements, and with this any opportunities to make connections to advance their career prospects. Ramsay’s voyage to Calcutta also provides a glimpse into the circulation of goods within the British imperial maritime world. The Lady Campbell was a 700 ton vessel and carried iron as part of her ballast. Cargo on the way out was priced at approximately one-​third the cost per ton compared to the cost for cargo tonnage collected for the return journey; sourcing materials from Asia was more valuable than shipping goods from Britain.113 Some smaller commodities were traded on the ships, while others were brought on board at different stages of the voyage, for a ready market in India. For instance, from the journal we discover that at sea some officers made a tidy sum selling weapons, and jewelry of the latest designs, to the passengers and crew. Gooseberry and currant bushes were also part of the Lady Campbell’s cargo, destined for Madras, each plant in its own container of soil. Dogs were bought at the Cape with the intention of making a quick sale once in India; however some animals did not survive the voyage. The most remarkable cargo might be the loading in Cape Town of two lion cubs, reportedly shipped for the governor general of India.114 Even 271

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within the one voyage we have a sense of the wide range of goods that traversed the waters; some were in bulk, others as luxury items, and even speculative ventures such as the plants. Via Ramsay’s journal we also have insights into imperial careers. Here was someone who occupied a middle level within the imperial career system, was white, privileged, connected to the EIC. But, at the same time, our author was relatively young, seemingly unseasoned as a traveler and in-​between worlds, inexperienced at sea, and moving into a new domain, that of India. As a Scotsman, Ramsay had no pretensions about his role in empire; while walking in Madras he observed, “Every path, tree and bush abounds with black and red ants, squirrels and lizards—​crows were also plentiful;—​like Scotchman [sic] they are to be found the world over!”115 Ramsay spent many nights during his voyage studying “Hindoostanee,” and at the same time working through the Calcutta and EIC Gazettes, identifying the names he recognized.116 Personal connections were an important part of advancement in the colonial port city world. A career in empire was often a family affair; Ramsay’s father was returning from service (their ships passed just off the coast of England) and he also had a brother in service in Calcutta, but his brother was deployed to Singapore before Ramsay could meet with him.117 Here we see that even the newest arrival to India often had connections via family or friends. The British imperial networks were not only marked by trade routes and travel but also by kith and kin. By the late 1800s, travel to Asia had become faster and more reliable but some similarities with Ramsay’s travel experiences remained. The Asian port city still intrigued and fascinated visitors and thanks to the relative affordability of steam travel, sojourners made a “grand tour” of Asian ports. With the advent of the popular picture postcards, the Asian port city as emblematic of maritime empire became commodified and collectable. For the collectors of such postcards, maritime space appeared compressed, and “East of the Suez” was more accessible.118 Victorian era historian Froude, who wrote on British maritime greatness in his twelve-​volume History of England, was not immune from feeling impressed when traversing the British maritime empire by liner.119 His more introspective work Oceana, or England and Her Colonies touched directly on the maritime world. Written in 1886 this was in part a travelogue of Froude’s journey from England to Australia, but also reflected his interest in the waters under British dominion and of traveling throughout the British maritime realm. Froude reflected in Oceana: “The steam boiler and the firm blades of the screw are stronger than the elements. We have yoked horses of fire to our sea-​chariots; the wire-​imprisoned lightning carries our messages round the globe swifter than Ariel; the elemental forces themselves are our slaves.”120 Froude’s classical allusions were a tribute to the triumph of the technologies of the age and of British steamships in taming the ocean and connecting the empire. Such expressions of pride and sureness in the British dominance of the “great waters” are a common thread linking Ramsay’s journal, in the age of sail, to the musings of a traveler who ventured forth at what was arguably the height of Pax Britannica. These reflections demonstrate that in the transformative years from the 1820s to 1880s 272

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the view from the deck of the ship was one very confident of British maritime power and imperial connections in Asian waters.

Conclusion While scholars have generally recognized the value in exploring the idea of a British maritime empire in Asia during the century of Pax Britannica and the shorter period of “high imperialism,” breaking down its components is somewhat more complicated than first appears. The British thalassocracy in Asia was one complemented by and dependent upon intra-​Asian networks. The great colonial port cities of Asia were not only important as imperial nodes of power and defense; ideologically they represented bastions of British power and economic influence in Asia. This chapter has argued that the maritime element was an important consideration in the reordering of Asia in the “long nineteenth century.” It was on the “great waters” that the British sought to dominate world trade, and to consolidate trade routes into part of a larger world system. An imperial network, punctuated by ports and traversed by naval and merchant vessels, created a web of trade routes, all linked to a British system of commerce, and infrastructure emerged by the mid-​nineteenth century; this was the British thalassocracy, and it did more than anything else to globalize a reordered imperial Asia. Imperial flows allowed for the exchange of goods, services, information, for imperial careering, and for the movement of sailors and troops as and when it was necessary. Europeans and Asians utilized the British maritime network for business, careers, and travel. For the Victorians, predominance at sea was fundamental; maritime prowess was part and parcel of both British identity as a great imperial power and substance as a Great Power. The British Empire was seen to be the greatest power in Asia, and the world, because it was the strongest maritime power. Toward the end of the century, American naval officer and scholar Alfred Thayer Mahan made that very argument in a study that became a best-​seller. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History shaped policies and strategies for a generation when his ideas were adopted by some major navies.121 Ironically though, at the same time, British government and military priorities regarding Asia increasingly turned inland, toward the so-​called Great Game and other continental rivalries, pursued elsewhere in this volume—​challenges that the British could only face, however, as a result of their dominance at sea. By the end of the nineteenth century the Royal Navy took on an increasingly supportive role in British imperial priorities and ambitions in Asia. It then soon found itself redeployed wholesale to meet greater danger closer to home. The sailors always argued that seapower must be indivisible and global, to match the oceans on which it sailed; the world’s oceans were now connected as part of a British thalassocracy. Just when British seapower in Asia reached its zenith, that very globalism redefined it and also its maritime empire. As for the great colonial port cities of Asia which emerged in the nineteenth century, such as Calcutta, Colombo, Singapore, and Hong Kong, all bore hallmarks of British 273

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influence and architecture, of economic and administrative infrastructure and yet they remained intrinsically Asian in their population and connections. Asian traders and shipping interests, labor and capital served to reinforce, support, and sustain the British maritime thalassocracy. Ports served as nodal points in an extensive network, and trade, commercial, and technological developments cemented the importance of the colonial port as evidence of British imperial power and reach. The maritime world of Asia could not have functioned without indigenous participation—​but it also connected Asian communities to new worlds they could not reach on their own, with great effects that still reverberate to this day. Finally, the view of the British Empire from the deck of the ship was one that revealed the waters, both of the “great seas” and the coasts, as prone to challenges. Labor was difficult to control and yet essential to all ships and ports, so too, race and power relations were a constant concern. The idea of a British maritime empire was long heralded through songs like “Rule Britannia,” but in reality sustaining a thalassocracy was a much harder and more elusive goal. Naval power aside, the British maritime empire wove together, in a complex array, British capital, expertise, and ambitions with indigenous shipping, collaborative ventures, and preexisting Asian networks. Managing this maritime empire was an ongoing challenge, demonstrated clearly through concerns over the safety of shipping—​threats at sea, of both the natural and also mutineers, pirates, profiteers, and adventurers—​and the maintenance of ports in an ever-​expanding trading network, dubbed by John Darwin the “British World System.”122 By traveling through these imperial flows we can see not only how complex this British maritime imperial system in Asia was, but also how much it changed everything it touched.

NOTES 1

The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, Vol. 8, “A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, Compass &c” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829), p. 325. 2 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 100–​24. 3 H. V. Bowen, “Britain in the Indian Ocean Region and Beyond: Contours, Connections, and the Creation of a Global Maritime Empire,” in Britain’s Oceanic Empires. Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds c.1550–​1850, ed. H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 45. 4 Ibid. 5 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons 1780–​ 1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 86. For a discussion of Bayly’s ideas, see Robert Travers, “Constitutions, Contact Zones and Imperial Ricochets: Sovereignty and Law in British Asia,” in Bowen et al., Britain’s Oceanic Empires, pp. 126–​9. 6 For works dealing with British naval power and foreign policy, see, for example: N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–​1815 (New York and London: Norton and Company, 2004); A. J. Stockwell, “British Expansion and Rule in

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Southeast Asia,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. A. Porter and Wm. R. Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 7 Robert Bickers, “Ordering Shanghai: Policing a treaty port, 1854–​1900,” in David Killingray, Margaret Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby, Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Boydell in Association with the National Maritime Museum, 2005), p. 173. 8 Freda Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 9 Amitav Ghosh, “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail,” Economic & Political WEEKLY, June 21, 2008, p. 57. 10 Haneda Masashi’s Asian Port Cities 1600–​1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009) makes a good case for understanding the ocean as a connective force particularly via the lens of the port city. In the era of steam and telegraph (mid-​1800s), these connections became even stronger. 11 John Darwin’s The Empire Project (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) provides an excellent overview of the British imperial “family” including settler colonies. 12 Marc Chadourne’s observations of Hong Kong were penned ca. 1930, but this account is very typical of the foreign visitor to an Asian port and it reinforces the very contradictory nature of the port city. See John. M. Carroll, Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), pp. 1–​2. 13 Ibid. 14 NMM JD5, Journal of Robert Ramsay. The journal is held in the library of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, United Kingdom. This journal is discussed briefly by Amitav Ghosh in “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail.” 15 For a discussion on Ming maritime policies and their implications in connection Southeast Asia and Indian ocean, read Kenneth R. Hall, “Multi-​dimensional Networking: Fifteenth-​ Century Indian Ocean Maritime Diaspora in Southeast Asian Perspective,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006), 454–​81; Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang (eds), Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–​1700 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016); Howard J. Dooley, “The Great Leap Outward: China’s Maritime Renaissance,” The Journal of East Asian Affairs 26, no. 1 (Spring/​Summer 2012), 53–​76; see also Jinping Wang’s chapter on the Ming in Volume One of this series. 16 See Sher Banu Khan’s chapter in Volume One of this series for a discussion of early Island Southeast Asia; Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 17 As quoted in Craig A. Lockard, “ ‘The Sea Common to All’: Maritime Frontiers, Port Cities, and Chinese Traders in the Southeast Asian Age of Commerce, ca. 1400–​1750,” Journal of World History 21, no. 2 (2010), 219. 18 Christopher Wake, “Banten around the Turn of the Sixteenth Century: Trade and Society in an Indonesian Port City,” in Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–​20th Centuries, ed. F. Broeze (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1997). 19 Ibid., p. 69. 20 Phillip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 47–​8. 21 For further discussion of China, India, and British conceptions of sea and land frontiers, see the chapters by the following contributors to this series: Jinping Wang and Murari Jha (in Volume One) and Brian P. Farrell (this volume).

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22 A. R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire: From Beginnings to 1807 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 145–​6. 23 See Anthony Disney’s chapter in Volume One of this series for a discussion of the Portuguese in Asia. 24 P. Borschberg, The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security and Diplomacy in the 17th Century (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010); and T. Brook, “How Asian Luxury Goods Found Their Way into Dutch Golden Age Paintings,” Apollo, The International Art Magazine, January 11, 2016. https://​www.apollo-​magazine.com/​how-​asian-​luxury-​goods-​found-​their-​ way-​into-​dutch-​golden-​age-​paintings/​ (accessed July 2, 2017). 25 Borschberg, The Singapore and Melaka Straits. Local powers (such as the Johor Sultanate and the Acehnese) were also embroiled in these rivalries. 26 P. Borschberg, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011); Travers, “Constitutions, Contact Zones and Imperial Ricochets.” 27 Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), for a popular account of the EIC’s lack of success in carving out territory in the spice islands. 28 For a discussion of the different legal systems and legal languages the British encountered (and eventually sought to co-​opt or subdue) in the contact zones of the Indian Ocean and beyond, see Travers, “Constitutions, Contact Zones and Imperial Ricochets,” pp. 99–​101. 29 The mercantile marine refers to privately owned vessels that carry cargo for profit, either in the national interest or on behalf of others. Private ownership of vessels could be small scale or a complex conglomerate, trading all over the world. The merchant marine did not only include ships owned by Britons but also other vessels whose owners opted to place them under British regulations. By sailing under the British flag, these vessels were obligated to follow British shipping regulations, pay duties as required, but importantly, they were guaranteed the protection of the Royal Navy if under threat. Richard Woodman, The Merchant Navy (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2013). 30 Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 26–​7. 31 For an excellent overview of the decline of the East India Company, see Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-​Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–​1860 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). 32 The Oriental Bank Corporation (OBC) was originally founded as the Bank of West India in Bombay in 1842. Its head office moved to London in 1845, a pattern common of many British business and banking ventures in Asia, both private and larger government-​supported ventures. The OBC had branches in India, Ceylon, and Hong Kong. Shizuya Nishimura, “British International Banks in Asia, 1870–​1914: An Introductory Essay 1,” in Shizuya Nishimura, Toshio Suzuki, and Ranald C. Michie, The Origins of International Banking in Asia: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford University Press, Oxford Scholarship online, 2009), pp. 2–​3. 33 H. Bowen, “Britain in the Indian Ocean Region and Beyond,” in Bowen et al. (eds), Britain’s Oceanic Empires, p. 65. 34 D. Headrick, Tools of Empire:  Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 187. 35 Quoted in Miles Taylor, “Introduction,” in The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837–​1901, ed. Miles Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 1. 36 Killingray et al., Maritime Empires, p. 2. 37 Armitage, The Ideological Basis of the British Empire, p. 101. 38 Ibid., p. 5.

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39 Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–​1915 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007); Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements years 1859–​61 “Marine” section is an example of the reports published with maps, charts demonstrating the systematic gathering of knowledge of Asian waters. 40 “Tables of the revenue, population, &c, of the United Kingdom and its dependencies. Part III. From 1820–​1833.” Compiled from Official Returns, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers online, 2006. Statement No. 54 on Shipping and the number and Tonnages of Shipping Employed in the Trade of the United Kingdom &c.” 41 Jeremy Black, “The Victorian Maritime Empire in Its Global Context,” in Taylor, The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, p. 168. 42 R. Kubicek, “British Expansions, Empire, and Technological Change,” in Porter and Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, pp. 259–​60. 43 Black, “The Victorian Maritime Empire in Its Global Context,” p. 168. 44 Michael B. Miller, “Pilgrim’s Progress: The Business of the Hajj,” Past & Present no. 191 (May 2006), 207–​208. 45 Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of Colonial Cities (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996), p. 81. 46 Malcolm H. Murfett, John N. Miksic, Brian P. Farrell, and Chiang Ming Shun, Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 47 See Brian P. Farrell’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of British land frontiers and the Indian subcontinent. 48 There are many works that deal with the British fascination with the classics. For the purposes of this chapter, Andrew Lambert’s “ ‘Now Is Come a Darker Day’: Britain, Venice and the Meaning of Sea Power,” in The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, 1837–​1901: The Sea and Global History, ed. Miles Taylor (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 19–​42. 49 Ibid. 50 See chapters on “Grote’s Athens: The Character of Democracy” and “The Comparative Approach in Grote’s History of Greece,” in Brill’s Companions to George Grote and the Classical Tradition (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014). 51 “The Comparative Approach in Grote’s History of Greece,” p. 242. 52 John MacKenzie, “Lakes, Rivers and Oceans: Technology, Ethnicity and the Shipping of Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Killingray et al. (eds), Maritime Empires, p. 118. The Irrawaddy Flotilla company forms a focal point in MacKenzie’s work; Yen Ching-​hwang, Ethnic Chinese Business in Asia: History, Culture and Business Enterprise (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013). 53 Rudyard Kipling, “Big Steamers,” available via the Kipling society website: http://​www. kiplingsociety.co.uk/​poems_​bigsteamers.htm (accessed July 14, 2015). 54 MacKenzie, “Lakes, Rivers and Oceans,” pp. 111–​27. 55 Bartholomew, An Atlas of the British Empire Throughout the World (London: John Phillip and Son, 1868). 56 Ibid., vii–​ix. 57 John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1883), Lecture III, “The Empire,” p. 46. 58 Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 72. 59 Ibid., pp. 71–​2. 60 C. M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore 1918–​2005 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2005). 61 Home, Of Planting and Planning, p. 171.

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62 For a classic work on colonial port cities, read: Rhoads Murphey, “Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (1969). Also see Chapter 2 in this volume by Robert Bickers, which examines British interests in Qing China and the Far East more generally. 63 Ulbe Bosma and Anthony Webster (eds), Commodities, Ports and Asia Maritime trade Since 1750 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideology of Western Dominance (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1990). 64 Tai-​Yong Tan, “Port Cities and Hinterlands: A Comparative Study of Singapore and Calcutta,” Political Geography 26 (2007). 65 Judith M. Brown, “Crossing the Seas: Problems and Possibilities for Queen Victoria’s Indian Subjects,” in Taylor (ed.), The Victorian Empire and Britain’s Maritime World, pp. 113–​28. 66 G. Balachandran, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c.1870–​1945 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). 67 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–​1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). 68 The Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history as advanced in the classic work by K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History 1498–​ 1945 (Allen & Unwin, 1953), has been largely debunked by scholars. Anthony Reid’s work is the most notable here, illustrating that early-​modern Asia was in fact enjoying an age of commerce, typified by dynamic and vibrant trading networks and settlements. See Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia’s Age of Commerce: 1450–​1680, 2 vols (Ann Arbor: Yale University, 2003). 69 Kubicek, “British Expansion, Empire, and Technological Change,” p. 252. 70 Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003), on the Indian Ocean and the circulation of ideas. 71 Tan, “Singapore and Calcutta.” 72 “Annual Report for the Straits Settlement for 1872,” census figures reported for 1871 in Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements, 1855–​1941, Vol. 2, 1868-​188., p. 128. 73 Margaret Jones, “The British in Ceylon, 1815–​1960,” in Settlers and Expatriates: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, ed. Robert Bickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 205–​ 208. The population of Europeans in Ceylon was 0.18 percent of the total population in 1911. A. Heatherson and O. J. Howarth, The Oxford Survey of the British Empire: Asia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), p. 475. 74 Robert Bickers (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates explores the tensions between sojourners and settlers and the shifting of identities between these two categories. 75 Ian Nish, “British Mercantile Cooperation in the India-​China Trade from the End of the East India Company’s Trading Monopoly,” Journal of Southeast Asian History no. 3 (1961),  74–​91. 76 Anthony Webster, “Liverpool and the Asia Trade,” in The Empire in One City? Liverpool’s Inconvenient Imperial Past, ed. Sheryllne Haggerty, Anthony Webster, and Nicholas White (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 77 Ibid., pp. 38–​9. 78 As cited by Webster, in ibid., t­ables 2.1 and 2.2. 79 Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta 1767–​1863 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007); and G. Roger Knight, Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth Century Southeast Asia: Gillian Maclaine and His Business Network (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015); Lakshmi Subramanian, Three Merchants of Bombay: Business Pioneers of the Nineteenth Century (UK: Penguin, 2016).

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80 See Carroll, Edge of Empires for a detailed discussion of the Chinese community—​and most importantly the elites—​in early Hong Kong. 81 Figures derived from the Report on the Administration of the Strait’s Settlements, 1856–​7, p. 91. 82 George Bogaars, The Tanjong Pagar Dock Company 1864–​1905 (Singapore: GPO, 1956). 83 Admiralty Office, “Memorandum on Sea Power and the Principles involved in it,” Admiralty to the Colonial Office, April 1903, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online (Proquest, 2005), p. 6. 84 Most notably, J. S. Furnivall’s theory of “plural societies” developed as a result of his observations of colonial Burma and wider Southeast Asia in the 1930s. For example: J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). According to Furnivall, many races converged in the marketplace but never “mixed”; the example of Peranakan (local descent) or Eurasians among others has undermined this overly simplistic view of colonial societies and port communities. 85 Home, Of Planting and Planning, pp. 75–​80. 86 NA, Admiralty Records, ADM125/​145, “Piracy at the Neighbourhood of Hong Kong” China Station Records, c. 1844–​45, as an example of numerous Royal Navy entanglements with pirates. 87 Annual Report of the Straits Settlement, 1858–​9. The section on Marine affairs often reports on the difficulty of dealing with petty piracy—​this was a continual problem as weapons were readily traded through Singapore and ships were generally well armed. 88 Travers, “Constitutions, Contact Zones and Imperial Ricochets.” 89 R. H. W. Reece “Brooke, Sir James (1803–​1868),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 90 A. J. Stockwell, “British Expansion and Rule in Southeast Asia,” in Porter and Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, pp. 378–​40; Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1846] 1991). 91 Robert Bickers, “The Challenger: Hugh Hamilton Lindsay and the Rise of British Asia, 1832–​1865,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society (2012), 22, 141–​69. 92 Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of HMS Dido, p. 153. 93 The Annual Reports of the Straits Settlements, 1855, 1858, 1861. Comments regarding the perceived lack of naval support are mentioned in the Marine Section. 94 JOD5. NMM JOD5. In his journal entries Ramsay demonstrates that he is a keen, although at times naïve, observer of his fellow cadets, passengers, and crew. So not only do we share something of the spirit of adventure that Ramsay seems to espouse but also in his reflections as he journeyed to Calcutta. 95 NMM JD5, January 1, 1825. 96 Details from Kubicek, “British Expansion, Empire and Technological Change,” pp.  254–​5. 97 NMM JD5, May 29, 1825. There is mention the Captain announced they will need to change course. Ramsay comments, “It is whispered that the Captain had been sailing too much East for the last few weeks.” 98 NMM JD5, April 22, 1825. 99 NMM JD5, January 1, 1825. 100 Balachandran, Globalizing Labour, pp.26–​7. The term “lascar” is believed to have been first used by the Portuguese and the Dutch to describe seafarers from the Indian Ocean region. This term was reasonably flexible and the term “Asiatic” was sometimes used interchangeably.

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101 MT9614 Board of Trade, inquiry following questions in Parliament over lascars’ accommodation, 1899. 102 NMM JD5, January 3, 1825. 103 Ibid. 104 NMM JD5, February 20, 1825. 105 Ibid. 106 NMM JD5, April 6, 1825. 107 NMM JD5, February 28 and March 5, 1825. 108 See, for example, February 5 on arrival in Lagos and March 26 at the Cape. NMM JD5, 1825. 109 Ibid., March 22 and 26, 1825. 110 NMM JD5, entries on February 6 and March 28, 1825. 111 NMM JD5, June 9, 1825. 112 NMM JD5, June 29, 1825. 113 NMM JD5, May 3, 1825. 114 NMM JD5, April 16 and 23, 1825. 115 NMM JD5, June 8, 1825. 116 NMM JD5, January 28, February 4, April 18. Ramsay studies nearly every evening but these entries specifically mention his progress. 117 NMM JD5, July 1, 1825. 118 Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See ­chapter  1 on rites de passage and perceptions of global space. 119 Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (Oxford: Oxford University Press Scholarship Online, 2013). The first two volumes were penned in the 1850s and these works received critical acclaim and earned Froude status as a contributor to the great historical works of the Victorian era (p. 4). 120 J. A. Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, 1886 (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1886), chap. 5, p. 78. 121 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660–​1783 (Boston: Brown & Co., 1890). Critics argue that Mahan tends to confuse economic and naval power in his study of British seapower and that his work fueled the arms race that in part triggered the First World War, but at the time his scholarship was very influential: see, for example, Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed the World (New York: New American Library, 1983); and Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 122 Darwin, The Empire Project.

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Chapter 9

Empire in the Long Run: Asia in the Nineteenth Century Odd Arne Westad Empires created modern Asia to an extent that goes beyond anything seen in other parts of the world.1 In Europe empires had to contend with alternative state formations since at least the early seventeenth century. In the Americas the imperial age had ended, abruptly, over a fifty-​year-​period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. In Africa European imperial control, though strong in name, was spread so thin that it barely affected most parts of the continent. Only Asia saw empires continuously predominate from the medieval era through to the mid-​twentieth century.2 Why was this so? The main reason is that Asian empires interacted with European empires in a continuum at least from the sixteenth century on. In India, the British Empire is best seen as a successor to the Mughal Empire that preceded it. In China, the Qing Empire fought, interacted with, and sometimes benefitted from other empires that challenged it. Japan, the last imperial formation that was constructed in Asia, learnt from European empires as it struggled to supplant them. In Asia, empire was neither an import, nor did European forms of imperialism ever fully supplant Asian forms. Hybrid practices ensured that empire remained Asia’s form of government for long enough to create both the physical and mental maps we are looking at today. This process of modern reordering took place, for the most part, during a long nineteenth century, lasting at least into the aftermath of the First World War, when Asian nationalist projects finally began emerging as political alternatives.3 The significance of this era is profound, because it witnessed the melding of European-​led and Asian-​ led imperial projects into a world order that is still with us today. It also put in place the fundaments for the capitalist transformation of Asia, often through companies that mixed foreign and Asian capital, personnel, and management practices. And it brought the United States and Russia in as powers in Asia, in ways that would first supplement and then supplant the older European presence.4 As the works reviewed in the Introduction point out, Asia’s long nineteenth century brought together protracted trends and developments into an ordering of the continent that has had remarkable resilience up to our own time. Part of the reason why the nineteenth century as such an ordering era is so visible to us today is the power of territorial hindsight. China and India would remain Asia’s largest states. Indonesia would remain, in form, what the Dutch East Indies had been, and Vietnam would remain as the French and the Nguyễn dynasty had put it together. The shape of imperial territoriality has held up remarkably well, in spite of 281

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twentieth-​century attempts by a long list of claimants—​from the Japanese to local irredentist and secessionists—​to break it up. We also see the significance of the nineteenth century so much clearer today because we know that much of twentieth-​century historiography got it wrong. Locating Europe’s ascendancy over Asia back to the early imperial era, to the renaissance, or even to classical antiquity, a whole series of Eurocentric social scientists—​from Max Weber to Robert Brenner—​assumed that the European predominance had very long-​term causes.5 What we find instead is that the nineteenth century was when concepts of development and underdevelopment were formed.6 And they were formed based on quite recent events: up to the late eighteenth century most of Europe and most of Asia had more similarities than differences in economic affairs, even though Europeans were pulling ahead fast in military technology. Europe as the measure of everything was therefore based on a “long nineteenth century” exception rather than on millennial trends. This Eurocentric ideologizing does not make the nineteenth century less important in terms of our understanding of global affairs. Quite the opposite! But it does make it easier to understand why the explicatory powers of nineteenth-​century events were often subsumed under a teleological image of the relentless long-​term ascendance of “the West.”7 The constant interaction between European and Asian powers in the long nineteenth century helps explain why so much happened quite quickly in terms both of political and economic transformation. The Qing Empire is perhaps the best example. Coming out of a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in which Beijing had found it increasingly difficult to bend its neighbors to its will, the Qing were challenged in a much more fundamental way by the British and other European attacks during the Opium Wars. But the Qing were able to overcome both that challenge and internal rebellions to emerge as a more determined imperialist state in the late nineteenth century, not just keeping the empire together, but attempting to expand China’s control over Tibet, Xinjiang, and even Korea. The Qing Empire not only survived the nineteenth century, but it adapted European forms of imperial control for its own purposes. The new Qing approach exchanged Confucian concepts of suzerainty for attempts at much more direct forms of control. These were in turn taken over by the Qing Empire’s successors, both Republican and Communist. China remaining an empire is therefore not only a nineteenth-​century reason why it looks the way it does today. It has also determined much of China’s approach to its neighbors and to the world at large.8 During the nineteenth century, business competition, integration, and market expansion drove the beginning capitalist transformation of Asia. Much has been written on how European-​style businesses grew within preexisting Asian models of exchange, credit, and trade. Much less has so far been made of how empires in Asia in the nineteenth century facilitated this transformation, both directly and indirectly. Some of this facilitation was unintended and even contrary to the metropole’s wishes. Where imperial officials wanted to order and regulate, businessmen, bankers, traders, and, eventually, 282

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investors wanted to earn money. Their activities made use of the infrastructure and relative safety empires provided. In some cases the outcome was strong enterprises that not only survived but thrived, even through the political and economic chaos of the twentieth century. They were transnational, versatile, and skilled, and therefore became pioneers of capitalist globalization.9 The political transformations created by nineteenth-​century imperial domination in Asia are also striking. The best example is of course Japan, which went from relative isolation and a strong emphasis on domestic cohesion (often to the exclusion of outsiders) to consolidated attempts at becoming another Asian empire. Like the Qing, the rulers of Meiji Japan wanted to build an empire that coupled their own political motivations with European methods of control and expansion. But different from leaders in Beijing, the Meiji elite needed to construct their institutions almost from scratch. Japan’s instruments for imperial expansion—​from the military to the bureaucracy to the large companies—​therefore became very much European in style, not just in contrast to China, but also to European-​led empires, which had had more time to adapt to local conditions. To begin with, the ability to transpose European knowledge (in its theoretical rather than its practical form) to assist Japan’s expansion may have aided Japan’s imperial quest. But, ultimately, it may have become a burden. Japan’s attempt to build empire in its purest form not only set it apart from its continent. It also made it more difficult to reach compromises with local populations. To wit: in terms of borders, the Chinese empire is still around, while Japan’s is long gone.10 Besides Japan, in some other Asian locations one may ask whether empire ever truly ended. In India, there are large population groups—​from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu—​ who see the republic as an inheritor of the Raj rather than an expression of their own interests. In China, the discourse of an empire becoming a nation-​state (and a People’s Republic to boot) is seen as a charade by many Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities at the empire’s edges. Indonesians are still struggling with making sense of a nineteenth-​ century imperial creation, the Dutch East Indies, as a twenty-​first-​century nation-​state. In many parts of Asia the imperial past is not even past, at least in the sense that a lot of issues cannot be resolved (or plainly understood) without recourse to nineteenth-​ century empire-​builders and their creations. As one of the chapters in this volume shows so clearly, as issues these imperial holdouts are particularly visible at the margins of former empires.11 At the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the Burmese frontier regions, the Indochina highlands, or the far Indonesian islands, ongoing conflicts have grown out of long-​lasting attempts to avoid imperial control.12 What these groups found is that the reconstitution of empires as nation-​states did little to end their predicament. On the contrary: in many cases—​ the Rohingya, the Hmong, the Dayak, and hundreds of others—​peoples found the new states to be more challenging because of their insistence on national integration. Across Asia little has been done to ameliorate such issues. In other cases, empires of the long nineteenth century inscribed countries with tensions that are still with us today. Korea is one such case. Having been colonized as 283

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a main victim of Japanese imperialism, the country was then divided as a result of the appearance of new twentieth-century empires in Asia—​those of the United States and the Soviet Union—​that ruled through ideological, economic, and military preponderance. The form of empire was new, as well as many of its tools, but the sense from below of domination and disenfranchisement was as intense as before. The potency of Korean nationalism can only be understood within this pattern of repeated subjugation from the nineteenth century on. Across Asia, nationalisms of today are often held up as a contrast to empires of the past, as was the case when empires in Europe collapsed in the wake of the First World War. Some of this discourse veers toward nostalgia, evoking a golden past of tolerance and pluralism. Given the difficulties that exist among countries and groups within Asia today, this contrast is without doubt not just an incorrect but an unhelpful view of the past. Instead we have to understand how today’s manifold national conflicts grew out of the patterns that imperial rule left us with. Grasping the strength and longevity of empires in Asia, and the history of how they were reconstituted in the nineteenth century, is a good starting point for understanding most major events in Asia today.

NOTES 1

For an overview, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). For the initial encounters between Asian and European empires, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–​1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd edn (Chichester: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2012); or Mark Mancall, Russia and China; Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a recent survey from a Russian perspective, see Iurii M. Galenovich, Istoriia vzaimootnoshenii Rossii i Kitaia [A History of the Relations between Russia and China], vol. 1 (Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2011). 2 This is not to say that European empires in Africa or the Americas did not adapt forms of rule that predated their arrival. Aspects of the Aztec or Inca states long outlasted their physical predominance, as did Benin or Ashanti practices. But only in Asia did indigenous and European empires coexist for a very long time. 3 The concept of a “long nineteenth century” is first laid out, of course, in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–​1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). 4 For nineteenth-​century Russian imperialism, see Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5 See Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity, ed. Stephen Kalberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-​industrial Europe: The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present 97, no. 1 (1982), 16–​113. 6 For an extensive discussion, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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7 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); see also the essays in Philippe Beaujard, Laurent Berger, and Philippe Norel (eds), Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme (Paris: Découverte, 2009). 8 See Stephen R. Halsey, Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), and, for a useful focus on Korea, Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Choson Korea, 1850–​1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 9 See H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–​1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also Shizuya Nishimura, Toshirō Suzuki, and R. C. Michie (eds), The Origins of International Banking in Asia: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Claude Markovits, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); G. R. Knight, Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-​Century Southeast Asia: Gillian Maclaine and His Business Network (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015). For migrant connectivity, see Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 10 Jung-​Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino Sakuzo and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–​1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012); Douglas Howland, International Law and Japanese Sovereignty: The Emerging Global Order in the 19th Century (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and, of course, W. G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 11 Brian P. Farrell in Chapter 5 in this volume. 12 Sometimes with significant success; see James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

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Index

Abdülaziz 215–​16, 229, 231, 235 Abdülhamid II 227, 229, 235 Abdülmecid 225–​6, 228–​9, 244n.60 Abdur Rahman Khan 174 foreign relations 164–​5, 167, 171, 173 governance 164 Pushtuns 164, 168 Aden 260–​1 Afghanistan 24, 25, 35, 153–​4, 283 borders 158–​60, 165–​71 governance 156–​7, 164 international relations 159, 162–​4 state 154, 164, 174–​5 territorial claims 155, 165, 168, 175 Afshārid Dynasty 153 Ahmed II 221 Akbar 43 Alaska 191 Alexander II 190 Alexander III 190 Alexandria 222 Algeria 216 Amoy (see also Xiamen) 62–​3 Amu Darya River 154, 158–​60, 168–​9 Amur River 152, 187 Anatolia 194 Andaman Islands 262 Anglo-​Afghan War, First (1839–​42) 156 Anglo-​Afghan War, Second (1878–​80) 137, 162, 164, 171 Anglo-​Afghan War, Third (1919) 174 Anglo-​Japanese Alliance  174 Anglo-​Russian Entente  174 Arabian Sea 153 Archer, Charles Percival 53–4, 73 Arctic Ocean 6 Armenians 194, 218–​19, 221, 228, 232–​4, 238 Athens 258–​9 Atlantic Ocean 2, 255 Australia 251, 272 Ayudhya 215

Bābur, Ẓahīr al-​Dīn Muḥammad 140, 153 Badakshan 166, 169 Baikal 193, 204 Baku 188, 192 Baluchistan 154 Baluchistan Survey Party 137, 166 Banten 253 Barakzai 154 Bartholomew, John 260 Batum 194 Bayly, Christopher 14–​17, 30 n.13, 188, 232, 250 Beijing (Peking) 47, 58, 81, 120–​1, 199, 282 Bengal 155 Black Sea 192, 197 Bolan Pass 154, 172 Bombay (Mumbai) 250, 259, 261, 263, 265, 271 borders (see frontiers) Borneo 267–​8 Bosphorus 147–​8 boundaries (see frontiers) Boxer Rebellion 12, 222 British Army 174, 258 British Empire 2, 10, 33, 61, 72, 190 Afghanistan, strategic importance 155–​8, 160–​2, 164–​9, 171–​2, 174 Asian labour 261–​3, 269–​71, 274 Asian merchants 251–​2, 260–​1, 263, 265–​6, 273 China, businesses 71–​2 China, diplomatic relations 9–​12, 19–​20, 56–​7, 66 China, extraterritoriality, Chinese roles 65, 67, 70–​2 China, extraterritoriality, general 19–​21, 53–​8, 61, 63, 70 China, extraterritoriality, institutions 58–​62, 65–​7 China, extraterritoriality, social class 67–​9, 72 Close Borders strategy (Masterly Inactivity) 161, 168, 173 defence, policy and strategy 24, 155–​8, 160–​4, 168, 171–​4, 260, 268

Index

free trade 251, 255 Forward Strategy 161–​2, 164, 171–​3 frontiers, general 23, 155, 157, 160–​4, 169, 171, 173 frontiers, reorganization 171, 173–​4 frontiers, surveying 137–​8, 159, 165–​9, 183 n.60 ideologies 44, 257–​60, 266, 272–​3 India, paramountcy 14, 25, 153, 157–​8, 258, 261 India, Raj (Government of India) 147, 149, 158, 161, 166–​8, 236, 254, 264 maritime empire 27–​8, 155, 249–​58, 260–​6, 272–​4 maritime trade 9–​10, 27–​8, 39, 63, 252, 255, 257, 259, 263–​73 race and identities 54, 62–​5, 68–​9, 72–​3, 78 n.47, 251–​2, 260–​5, 271, 274, 279 n.84 Russia, strategic rivalry 24, 25, 152–​62, 164–​7, 169, 171, 174 Russophobia 153, 160–​2, 172, 181 n.42, 184 n.68 seapower 14, 27–​8, 39, 146, 155, 249–​51, 255–​8, 261, 264, 267–​8, 273 Southeast Asia 109–​12, 126, 267 thalassocracy 27, 250–​2, 255–​64, 268, 273–​4 Brooke, James 267–​8 Brunei 267 Buddhism 34, 43–​7, 197, 201, 215, 236 Bukhara 19, 152, 159, 187, 191 Burma 283 British Empire 64, 129, 222, 257, 270, 279 n.84 empires 32, 110, 236 Byzantine Empire 34, 44 Calcutta East India Company 261 Government of India 168 imperial defence 258 port city 250, 252, 264–​6, 268, 270–​1, 273 Cambodia 22, 109–​16, 123–​4 Canada 202, 251 Canning, Stratford 228 Canton (see Guangdong) Canton System 9–​10 Cape of Good Hope 249–50, 270–​1 Cape Town 252, 261, 269–​71 Caucasus 190, 207

288

empire 47 pilgrims 197 railways 192 resettlement 193–​5, 201, 205 Russian expansion 148, 187 Catherine II (The Great) 197 Central Asia 153, 156, 158, 163, 174–​5 empires 3, 148–​9, 151, 171, 197, 199, 206–​7 frontiers 25, 149, 165, 169 khanates 14, 25, 149, 152, 154, 157, 159, 165, 187 Cevdet Pasha 215, 230, 239 n.2 Ceylon 257, 264–​5 Cheliabinsk 198 Chimkent 152, 162 China (see also extraterritoriality; see also British Empire, extraterritoriality) empire, general 4, 19, 142, 283 expatriates 63–​4 historiography 2–​3 Peoples Republic 31, 46–​7, 73, 282–​3 Republic 282 territorial concessions 20, 63 trade 9–​10 Chinese Eastern Railway 31, 41, 90, 192, 196, 199, 203–​4 Chinese Maritime Customs 63, 65, 68 Chinese Turkestan (see also Kashgar) 169 Chinggisid 37 Chinggis Khan 31, 47, 153 Chitral 154, 166 Chosŏn Dynasty 81 Christianity 216 expatriates 64 missionaries 44, 215, 234 Orthodox Church 46, 200–​1, 205, 218–​19, 224, 232–​3, 235, 238 Ottoman Empire 218–​19, 221, 224, 228, 230–​3, 238 Russian Empire 197, 201, 205 Circassians 194 Cohong 9 Colombo 250, 260–​1, 264, 273 Committee of Imperial Defence 174 Concert of Europe 144 Confucianism 5, 44, 237 Congress of Berlin (1878) 160 Connolly, Arthur 162, 179 n.26 Constantinople (see Istanbul)

Index

Cossacks 194, 205 Crimea 193 Crimean War 144, 147, 157, 187, 190, 193, 227–​8, 233 Curzon, George Nathaniel frontiers 145, 167, 171, 173, 185 n.72 geopolitics, grand strategy 145, 171, 173–​4 publications 145, 167, 185 n.72 travels 145, 167 Darwin, Charles 146 Dera Ismail Khan 137 Disraeli, Benjamin 160 Dost Mohammad Khan 156–​8, 164 Drake, Francis 257 Dundas, Henry 10 Durand, Henry Mortimer 168 Durand Line 168–​9, 175 Durrani 154–​5 Durrani, Ahmad Shah 153 Dutch Empire 2, 27, 149, 222, 253–​4, 261, 283 Egypt 1, 14, 26, 217–​18, 222–​3, 236 empire  expansion, general 4–​5, 7, 13–​14, 34–​5 historiography, general 3–​4, 13–​18, 32–​5, 81–​3, 107–​9, 141, 146, 278 n.68, 282 institutions 36, 38, 40, 237–​9 legitimacy 5, 34, 37, 43, 237–​9, 281–​4 structures 12, 19, 34–​6, 38 theories 2–​5, 19, 32–​4, 36, 255 empty space, concept 24, 146–​7, 153, 158–​9, 171, 173–​5 English East India Company (EIC) 158, 251–​2, 254–​5, 257 China trade 9–​10, 56, 261, 265 India, governance 9, 166, 261 operations 268–​72 extraterritoriality (see also British Empire; China) 12, 18, 20, 53, 61, 73 legal systems 18–​20, 54–​5 origins 57–​8, 65 sovereignty 55, 58–​61, 72 Eurasia 140 empires 5, 12–​13, 143, 146, 216, 281–​2 geopolitical concept 2, 6, 13–​18, 24–5, 28, 144, 146, 156, 187, 190, 281 Eurocentrism 13, 282 Europe, Europeans 6

attitudes towards Asia 19–​20, 144, 146–​9, 204–​5 empires 2–​3, 13–​14, 144, 222 international relations 144, 147, 157, 160, 174, 190, 222–​4, 227–​8, 233–​5 political theorists 1, 4, 34, 282 Federally Administered Tribal Areas 175 First World War 66, 93, 199, 203–​4, 206, 281 Formosa (see Taiwan) French Empire 2, 140, 147, 149, 160, 190, 216 China, relations 117–​22, 130, 158 Egypt 14, 26, 222–​3 expansion, Indochina 14, 22–​3, 44, 107–​16, 121–​6, 130, 132 n.26, 222 missionaries 109–​10, 232–​3, 246 n.101 sovereignty and suzerainty 22–3, 107, 110–​19, 122–3, 126, 129–​30, 135 n.75 frontiers (borders, boundaries) administrative (inner) 138, 140–​1, 159, 161, 169, 171, 174–​5 Central Asia 24–​5, 142, 159 definitions 23–​4, 138–​44, 169, 176 n.5 historiography 141–​4, 169 imperial 18, 23–​5, 138–​44, 158, 167 military 141, 143, 157, 159, 171–​3, 183 n.60 natural 140, 165–​6 scientific 24, 138, 140, 142–​3, 159, 166, 171–​3 states systems 23–​5, 138–​9, 175 Froude, James Anthony 260, 272 Ganges River 153 gazi 217 Geok Tepe 165, 181 n.49 geopolitics 144–​7, 175, 187, 191 George III 11–​12 German Empire 2, 160, 174, 223 Ghazni 172 Gladstone, William Ewart 164–​5 globalization 6, 12–​18, 24–5, 28, 232, 249–​50, 255, 263, 273, 281 Gorchakov, Alexander 148–​52, 190 Gorchakov Memorandum 148–​53, 158–​9, 162, 175 Goto Shinpei 89, 100 Great Depression 42, 94, 96 Great Game 152, 156–​7, 159, 166–​7, 171, 174, 179 n.26, 273

289

Index

Great Wall 138, 140–​1 Great War (see First World War) Greece 1, 223, 227, 258–​9 Grote, George 258–​9 Grotius, Hugo 254 Groussét, Rene 142 Guangdong (Canton) 32, 56, 71 Guangzhou 9 Gunboat Diplomacy 14, 20, 126, 222, 250 Habibullah Khan 174 Habsburg Empire 2–​3, 160 Hailar 31 Hamley, Edward 172 Harbin 31, 90, 192, 199, 207, 213 n.70 Hart, Robert 58 Herat 154, 156, 165, 168 Himalayas 140, 153, 193 Hindu Kush 140, 164, 168, 172 HMS Dido 267 Hobart 259 Holdich, Thomas 137–​8, 153, 155, 166–​7 Hong Kong 54 British acquisition 12, 57 British Empire 59, 71, 73, 252, 255, 266 legal system 57–​8, 60, 71 port city 250–​2, 259, 261–​2, 273 Hornby, Edmund 59, 65, 67–​9 Hulunbuir 19, 36 agriculture 40–​2, 45, 47 empires 31–​3, 37–​8, 40–​3, 45, 47 trade 39–​41, 47 Ibn Khaldūn 142 Ili Valley 191, 194, 207 India (see also British Empire) 2, 283 Council of 162 defence 153–​8, 161–​2, 164, 168, 172–​4 1857 “Mutiny” 158, 216, 258 Northwest Frontier 24, 137, 154, 157, 160–​2, 164, 166–​8, 170–​4 trade 39, 261 India Act, 1784 10 Indian Army 172 military operations 137, 156–​7, 162, 166, 168, 171, 173–​4 Indian Ocean 140, 255, 264 indirect rule, informal empire 5, 55, 75 n.2 Indochina 22–​3, 107

290

Indonesia 6, 281, 283 Indus River, Valley 137, 153, 155, 175 defence 154, 157, 173 Industrial Revolution 11, 13, 21, 28 empire 12, 14, 84, 188 infrastructure 18, 172–​3 Inner Asia 3, 140, 142, 148 Iran (see Persia) Iraq 34–​5 Islam 5 empire 3, 194, 197, 200–​1, 215–​19, 230, 235, 240 n.12 law codes 217–​21, 225, 228, 230 world order 3, 217–​18, 221, 228, 235 Istanbul 160, 197, 218, 232 Iwakura Mission 86, 100 Japan 6, 9 empire, expansion 22, 34, 82, 88–​93, 191 empire, general 1, 19, 21, 28, 34, 84, 99–​100, 216, 283 empire, historiography 21, 82, 86, 91–​101 empire, infrastructure 21, 81, 89–​92, 96–​101 extraterritoriality 59, 62, 69–​70 foreign relations 88, 93, 174 Manchuria, Manchukuo 42, 50 n.35, 81, 202 medicine 84–​5, 87, 89, 100 Meiji 21, 81–​3, 88, 216, 236, 283 modernization 86–​8, 94 settlers 91–​2, 94, 97 Showa 81, 94, 98–​9 Taisho 81, 93–​4, 98 technology 81–​2, 86–​7 Tokugawa 14, 83–​5, 97 Joint Anglo-​Russian Boundary Commission 165, 167 Judaism 218, 221, 230–​1, 233 Kabul 154, 156, 162, 168, 172 Kandahar 154, 164, 172 Karachi 250 Karakum Desert 165 Kars 194 Kashgar (Chinese Turkestan) 152, 159, 196–​7,  201 Kashmir 153, 175, 283 Kazakhs, Kazakh steppes 148, 151, 153, 155, 197, 199, 206 Keppel, Henry 267–​8

Index

Khalkin Gol (Nomonhan Incident) 31 Khiva 149, 152, 156, 159, 165, 187, 191, 193 Khokand 149, 152, 159–​60 Khyber Pass 153, 155–​6, 162, 164, 172 Kiakhta 190, 197 Kiakhta, Treaty of 187, 196 Kipling, Rudyard 6, 166, 259–​60 Korea 34, 40, 42, 187, 236, 283 extraterritoriality 59, 62 Japanese Empire 93–​6, 284 science and technology 85 Kubota Yutaka 98–​9 Kuching 267 Kulja, Treaty of 197 Kyoto 87 Kyrgyz, Kyrgyzstan 152, 206 Labuan 267 Lady Campbell 252, 268–​71 Lady Hughes 56–​7, 72 Lagos 252, 270–​1 Laos 22, 122–​5 lascars 264–​5 Lattimore, Owen 142, 151 Lawrence, John 161, 171 Liaoyang 193 Liverpool 264–​5 Lytton, Lord (Robert Bulwer-​Lytton) 160–​2, 173 Macau 56–​7, 253–​4 Macartney, George 9–​11, 13–​14, 19–​20 MacGregor, Charles 172 Mackinder, Halford 147 Madras 9, 261, 265–​6, 269–​71 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 146, 273 Mahmud II (Gavur Padişah) 215, 223–​4, 229–​30 Malay Peninsula 14, 34, 47, 109, 129 Manchukuo 31, 42, 46, 101 Manchuria 42, 91, 187, 191–​2, 196, 202, 212 n.54 Mare Liberum (Freedom of the Seas) 254 maritime empire 18, 249, 252–​4 globalization 8, 249, 273 trade 39, 253–​4 Marx, Karl 1, 34, 36 Mecca 217 Medina 217 Mediterranean 147, 255

Mekong River 14, 123–​4 Melaka 222, 253, 268 Melaka, Straits of 261 Merv 165, 192 Middle East 3, 147, 217, 223 Ming Dynasty 31, 37, 40, 43, 45, 138, 252 migrations 18, 25, 188, 212 n.54 Mongol Empire 2, 19, 31, 34, 40, 45, 146 Mongolia 31, 38, 41, 45, 191, 196–​7, 201 Montgomerie, Thomas 166 Moscow 192, 198 Mughal Empire 3, 24, 44, 140, 147, 158, 281 Mukden 193 Nadir Shah 153 Nagasaki 87 Nanjing, Treaty of 12, 53, 57, 67 Napoleon Bonaparte 222–​3, 236, 250 Nerchinsk, Treaty of 187 New Zealand 251 Nicholas II 190 Northwest Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkwa),  173–​5 oil 196, 207 Olympic Games 98 Open Door 93 opium 9 Opium Wars 12, 14, 85, 222, 267, 282 Orenburg 156, 203 orientalism 13, 162 Osterhammel, Jürgen 14, 16–​18, 30 n.13, 55, 188 Ottoman Empire 3, 14, 156, 187, 193–​4, 207 confessional communities (cemaat, millet, taife) 217–​21,  226–​8 cizye 227 Eastern Question 26–​7, 147, 160, 223–​4, 227–​8, 233 evkaf 229–​30 governance (salutary neglect) 26–​7, 216–​21, 224–​31,  235–​6 identities 26, 215–​17, 219, 224–​7 legitimacy 26, 215, 217, 224–​6, 234–​5 Mecelle-​i Ahkâm-​ı Adliye 230 millet system 219–​21, 226, 228, 231–​2, 238 reforms, general (ıslah, tecdid) 26–​7, 215, 222, 224, 235 religion and state (din ve devlet) 26–​7, 44, 215–​21, 225–​6, 228–​35, 237–​9, 242 n.23

291

Index

self-​image (Ottomanism, Osmanlılık) 217, 221, 223–​6, 228, 243 n.40 Tanzimat-​i Hayriye 26, 225–​32, 238 territory, frontiers 187 wars 222–​4, 228–​9, 236 P & O Company 251, 255, 264 Pacific Ocean 6, 140, 187, 198, 255, 264 Pakistan 153, 175, 283 Pamirs 169, 187 Paris, Treaty of (1856) 228 Pavie, Auguste 123, 125 Pax Britannica 255, 258, 266, 272–​3 Peking, Treaty of (1860) 152 Penang 265, 268 Penjdeh Crisis 165–​7, 169 Persia, Persian Empire 236 cultural influence 44 decline 147, 175, 191 religion 216, 237–​8 Russia 187, 191, 199, 207 territory, frontiers 154 wars 156 Persian Gulf 148, 173 Peshawar 158, 166, 168 Sikh occupation 153–​5, 179 n.27 Philastre Treaty 116–​20, 133 n.35 Philippines 6 piracy 251, 266–​8 Pitt, William 10 Polybius 215 Pomeranz, Kenneth 14–​15 Pontic Steppe 6 Port Arthur 90, 191–​2 port cities 28, 250–​1, 253, 258, 260–​1, 264–​6, 272–​3 Portuguese Empire (Estado da Índia) 27, 253 Przheval’skii, Nikolai 193 Punch 89–​90 pundits 166 Punjab 138, 153–​4, 169, 173 British conquest, annexation 14, 157, 161 Punjab Irregular Force, Punjab Frontier Force 157, 168 Pushtuns (Pathans) 175 Afghan state 154–​5, 164 customs, society 154

292

frontier violence 137, 157, 160–​1, 166, 168, 173 territory 138, 155 Qājār Dynasty 216, 236–​7 Qianlong Emperor 9–​13, 19, 43 Qing Dynasty 2–​3, 25, 31, 45, 169 British, diplomatic relations 9–​11, 65 decline 12, 20, 147–​8, 152, 158, 175, 187, 207, 222 expansion 14, 282 extraterritoriality 58, 61–​2, 69 foreign relations 58, 191 governance 37, 40–​1, 45–​6, 56, 59–​60, 65, 196, 202, 282 Indochina 22, 117–​21 rebellions 14, 152, 159, 216, 282 Qubilai Khan 47 Quetta 173 Raffles, Stamford 261, 267 railways 22, 25, 38, 87–​90, 95, 169, 172–​3, 188 Raleigh, Walter 249, 257 Ramsay, Robert 252, 268–​72 Rangoon 250, 261 Ranjit Singh 153, 155, 157, 179 n.27 Ratzel, Friedrich 144 Rawlinson, Henry 162, 179 n.26 religion empire 4, 18, 26, 43–​5, 215–​16, 233–​9 governance 26, 216, 232, 237 Roberts, Field Marshal Lord (Frederick Roberts)  171–​2 Roman Empire 3–​4, 33–​5, 38 frontiers 141–​2 Romanov Dynasty 187, 223 Roshan 169 Royal Geographical Society 167 Royal Navy 251–​2, 257–​9, 266–​9 Russian Empire 19, 31 agriculture 201–​6 Asian immigrants 196, 203–​4, 207 “Asiatic policy” 190, 192–​3, 198, 200, 202–​3,  206–​7 British Empire, strategic rivalry 149, 152–​3, 155–​7, 159–​61, 165, 167, 169, 174, 190–​2 Central Asia 25​, 148, 159, 165, 169, 174–​5, 187, 190, 193, 197, 206–​7 defences 140, 149–​51, 192–​3 exiles 195–​6, 201, 211 n.43

Index

expansion 14, 24–5, 38, 140, 148–52, 156, 158–9, 165, 169, 175, 187, 189–93, 207 Eurasia 24–5, 148, 151, 174, 187–92 frontiers 25, 140, 149–52, 159–60, 165, 167–​9, 187, 190 historians 7 n.4, 148, 151 international relations 25, 148–9, 157, 168, 187, 190–1, 196, 202 migrations 25, 188–9, 192–4, 196, 200, 204 military commanders 159, 161, 164–5, 181 n.49, 193 railways 31, 41, 169, 188–9, 191–3, 197, 199, 203–5 religion 44, 188–9, 194, 197, 200–1, 207, 232–4 resettlements 189, 193–5, 197–203, 205–7 serfs 200–2 trade 41, 188, 196–7 Russian Revolution (1905) 202–3 Russian Revolution (1917) 199, 207 Russo-​Japanese War (1904–​5) 89–90, 174, 191–3 Russo-​Turkish War (1878) 160–1, 194 Safavid Empire 3, 215 Saigon 111, 116 St. Petersburg 187, 192, 201–2 Sakhalin 191, 195 Salisbury, Lord (Robert Gascoyne-​Cecil) 160, 257 Samarqand 152, 159 Sanskrit 4 Santa Catarina 253–4 Sarawak 267 Seeley, John Robert 251, 259–61 Seoul 81, 95, 100 Seven Years War (1756–​63) 10 Shanghai 47, 53, 59, 71, 261 British Supreme Court 53, 58–9, 65, 71 International Settlement 53, 60–1 Sher Ali 162, 164 Shignan 169 Siam (Thailand) 175, 216, 236 border disputes 111–15, 122–3, 125–6, 135 n.65 sovereignty 107–9 suzerainty 107–9, 113–15, 123, 129–30 territory 108, 135 n.65 Siberia 25, 190, 192, 195–203, 205–7

Sikh Kingdom, Empire (Sarkar-​i Khalsa) 14, 138, 153–5, 157, 179 n.27, 180 n.31 Silk Road 39, 152 silver 9 Sinai Desert 6 Sindh 157 Singapore (see also Straits Settlements) 190, 250, 254, 257–8, 260–1, 264–8, 272–3 Sinic World Order 20 empires 5, 14, 187 Eurasia 3 tributary system 11, 112, 120–1 Sino-​Japanese War 1894–​5 88–9, 202, 222 Sino-​Japanese War 1931–​45 55, 96–7, 99, 101 Smith, Adam 34 South Africa 235 South Manchuria Railway Company, Zone (Mantetsu)  89–93 Southeast Asia 187, 215, 253, 283 European dominance 14, 22, 129 Sinic world order 22, 43, 112, 117, 120 sovereignty, suzerainty 18, 22, 107–9, 113–14, 117–18, 126, 130 Spanish Empire 2, 27, 43 states, states systems 36–7, 144, 146, 148 steamships 257–60, 263, 267, 272 Stolypin, Peter 203 Straits Settlements (see also Singapore) 62, 64–5, 261, 264, 267–8 Suez Canal 263, 269 Summer Palace 12 Survey of India 137, 166 Swat Valley 166, 175 Syr Darya River 152 Taehan Empire 81 Taiping Rebellion 216 Taiwan (Formosa) 62–3, 69, 222 Japanese Empire 88–9, 93, 96 Tajiks 169 Tarbagatai, Treaty of 152 Tashkent 152, 159, 203, 205 Tatars 193, 197 tea 9, 265 technology 18, 81, 255, 257, 263, 272 Thailand (see Siam) Tianjin, Treaty of (1858) 57 Tianjin, Treaty of (1885) 122 Tibet 38, 47, 152, 166, 173–4, 187, 201, 203

293

Index

Tīmūr Lang 153 Timurid Empire 24–5 Tokyo 81, 86–​7 Toungoo (see also Burma) 215 Transfrontier Brigade 157 Trans-​Siberian Railway 192–​3, 195–​6, 198, 203–​4 Turco-​Persian region 3, 5, 43 Turkestan 191, 195–​6, 198 Turkey 194 Turkmen, Turkmenistan 165 Turner, Frederick Jackson 143–​4 Twenty-​One Demands 93 Ukraine, Ukrainians 205, 207, 213 n.89 United States of America (USA) 14, 28, 34, 39, 196, 202 extraterritoriality 65, 70 frontiers 143–​4, 149 Urals 140, 153, 155, 197 Ussuri River 187 Victorian Age, Era 249–​50, 252, 257–​60, 272–​3 Vietnam 22, 128, 236, 281 French expansion 111–​13, 116, 119, 124, 126 Qing relations 120–​2 sovereignty, suzerainty 108, 112, 117–​20, 122, 124, 126

294

Vladivostok 192 Volga River 197 Wakhan Corridor 169, 171 Washington Naval Conference (1921–​2) 93 Waziristan 137, 174–​5 Weber, Max 1, 282 Western dominance 2, 6, 11–​14, 28, 85, 139, 144, 216, 222–​3, 232, 238, 282 Westphalian System 12 Witte, Sergei 202 women 64–​5, 68, 195 World history 4, 7, 11–​12, 14–​18, 83, 144, 188, 255, 281 Xiamen (see also Amoy) 62–​6 Xinjiang 38, 152, 194, 201, 282 Yakub Beg 159 Yakutsk 190 Yengi Kurgan 152 Yokohama 87, 261 Yongle Emperor 43 Yongzheng Emperor 9 Younghusband, Francis 169 Yunnan 32, 47 Zheng He, Admiral 252