by Kevin Reilly
Coping with Colonial Economies . More significant, however, were the indirect consequences of economic transformations. As India was flooded with machine-produced textiles from British factories, large numbers of Indian women lost their livelihood as handicraft producers of cotton textiles. And these women had little chance to find alternative work in the few modernized industries that did emerge in India during the colonial era. Thus, the economic gap between men and women grew, and opportunities for male domination increased. Furthermore, as Asian and African men focused more of their attention on producing cash crops or were pushed into working in distant plantations, mines, or cities, women found themselves saddled with increasing workloads at home, where they assumed greater and sometimes sole responsibility for domestic food production and child rearing.
Education and Opportunity . But new opportunities as well as new burdens beckoned in the colonial order, at least for a few. Western education offered modern employment possibilities to a handful and stimulated some to raise questions about the role of women. Huda Shaarawi, daughter of a prominent Egyptian family, was among the first of her generation to appear in public without a veil and went on in 1923 to establish the Egyptian Feminist Union, which pushed for the rights of Muslim women. Many more found opportunities in the burgeoning cities of colonial Africa and Asia, where they might escape the oppression of patriarchal families or the heavy labor demands of the colonial era. A growing exodus of women to the towns of colonial Zimbabwe in southern Africa in the early twentieth century prompted a joint and not very successful effort by colonial officials and senior African men—chiefs, elders, and household heads—to restrict the mobility and sexual activity of women and to confine them to the rural areas.18 The control of women was one area in which European officials and African or Asian patriarchs had something in common.
Missionaries and Conversion
A final notable change, born of the European disturbance in world affairs, involved the activities of Christian missionaries who fanned out over much of the Afro-Asian-Pacific world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their schools provided basic literacy to many and more advanced education for a few, their clinics and hospitals introduced modern medicine to Asian and African societies, and their teachings challenged traditional conceptions of social and family life, sexual morality, and, of course, religious ideas as well. While Indian, Chinese, and especially Islamic societies proved resistant to the religious message of the missionaries, the peoples of New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and especially non-Muslim Africa were highly receptive and Christianity spread rapidly. This was a remarkable cultural change, due in part to opportunities for education, employment, and status available to people identified as Christians. However, many Africans also saw in Christian rituals, symbols, and practice a powerful religious resource for dealing with the problems of everyday life: illness, infertility, the need for rainfall, protection from witchcraft, and the many upheavals and disruptions of the colonial era. These had been among the concerns of traditional African religions, so it was not surprising that Africans would think that people so obviously as powerful as Europeans should have access to supernatural power that might be applied to such problems. In addition, some historians have suggested that Christianity, a world religion focused primarily on an all-powerful creator, was becoming more relevant than local divinities and ancestral spirits in explaining and controlling the new and wider world of the twentieth century. To people who interpreted the world in religious terms, a universal religion might well seem more appropriate than a local one in the new circumstances of the colonial era. Christianity, in short, could provide both secular opportunities and religious resources for dealing with societies in the process of rapid change.
But while Christianity spread widely in Africa, it was also widely Africanized, particularly in thousands of independent church movements that broke away from their European missionary mentors. In the Belgian Congo, for example, a young educated Baptist convert named Simon Kimbangu had a series of visions and, in 1921, began a ministry of healing and preaching in very Christian terms. In just a few months, he had attracted an amazing following and so frightened the Belgian government that he was imprisoned for the rest of his life. But the movement spread, largely underground, and Kimbangu came to be regarded as an African prophet with a status equivalent to that of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha.
Changing Defensively
In many places, the transformations of the great disturbance arose less from direct European intervention than from local efforts to defend themselves against it. Some societies did so by drawing on their own cultural resources. In a number of American Indian societies of the later nineteenth century, hard pressed by settler expansion and the disappearance of their precious buffalo, prophets arose who declared that performing a particular “ghost dance” would bring back the vanishing buffalo, restore the dead to life again, and cause Europeans to vanish or at least to live peacefully with their Indian neighbors. Likewise, the Xhosa of South Africa, beset by diseases that decimated their cattle herds, followed the teachings of a young woman prophet to kill their remaining cattle and destroy their grain crops in the belief that this sacrifice would bring the ancestors back to lead an Xhosa revival. The cattle would return, grain would grow again, and Europeans would be driven into the sea.
Trying to Catch Up
Elsewhere and with more lasting impact, societies threatened by Western power but not fully colonized sought to borrow elements of European technology, culture, or practice to protect themselves against the external threat. Known as “defensive modernization,” this course of action brought substantial changes to a number of societies.
Perhaps the most common pattern of borrowing involved military technology. This was at the heart of Peter the Great’s reforms in eighteenth-century Russia, as he imported western European officers to train his armed forces, adopted modern muskets and artillery, and introduced administrative and educational practices drawn from Europe. The desire to buy or reproduce European weapons was in fact practically universal. Such borrowing was obviously useful in defending against European aggression, but it also permitted local states to carve out their own empires. Late nineteenth-century Ethiopia, for example, used its access to modern military technology to defeat the Italians, becoming the only African state to retain its independence throughout the scramble. But it also considerably expanded its own territory and thus participated in the partition of the continent.
Ottoman Modernization
Efforts at defensive modernization often provoked serious internal conflict as they challenged existing power relations and cultural values. Did borrowing from the West offer protection from European aggression, or did it undermine traditional cultures and erode the privileges of established elites? It was a question that the Ottoman Empire confronted when, beset by European pressures, that Muslim state finally began to reform its military and taxation practices along European lines in the early nineteenth century. These actions appeared threatening to elements of the older military units—the janissaries—who feared being replaced by more modern military forces. Some Muslim religious leaders—the ulema—saw a danger to Islam itself in borrowing from the Christian infidels. Their combined opposition forced the reforming sultan from power in 1807. When the reform process resumed in the late 1830s, it deepened to include Western-style legal codes and schools; telegraphs, steamships, and railroads; and the concept of equality for all citizens regardless of religion. By then, advocates of still further westernization pushed for political change. A constitution limiting the power of the sultan was adopted in 1876 but lasted only briefly as yet another conservative backlash took shape. Similar conflicts about what to borrow from the West and how quickly to implement reform accompanied defensive modernization in many places.
Comparing China and Japan
Chinese Self-Strengthening . The various ways that defensive modernization actually worked out are perhaps best illustrated by the contr
asting cases of China and Japan. In nineteenth-century China, repeated military defeats and massive internal peasant rebellions finally persuaded the conservative Qing dynasty to undertake reforms in the 1860s and 1870s. Known as “self-strengthening,” these reforms combined a reassertion of Confucian education and principles of government with modest borrowings from the West, including the creation of modern arsenals and shipyards, translation services, and even a few industrial enterprises manufacturing iron, steel, and textiles. A Chinese general Li Hongzhang made the case for adopting elements of Western technology:
I have been aboard the warships of the British and French admirals and I saw that their cannons are ingenious and uniform, their ammunition is fine and cleverly made, their weapons are bright, and their troops have a martial appearance and are orderly. These things are actually superior to those of China. . . . I feel deeply ashamed that Chinese weapons are far inferior to those of foreign countries. Every day I warn and instruct my officers to be humble-minded, to bear the humiliation, to learn one or two secrets from the Westerners in the hope that we may increase our knowledge.19
But it was all a rather superficial and reluctant effort, in large part because members of the Chinese gentry class, with their wealth and privileges rooted in the rural areas, feared that thorough urban and industrial development would erode those privileges. Many felt that even limited borrowing from the West would undermine a Chinese regime based on Confucian principles. Court officials likewise inhibited a thoroughgoing reform program, severely criticizing as greedy and unduly ambitious those who were involved in foreign commerce and making no overall plans for improving banking, communications, or industry.
The results of such an approach soon became apparent. Further humiliating military defeats at the hands of Europeans and Japanese between 1884 and 1901 revealed the failure of China’s efforts at defensive modernization. The imperial system itself, some 2,000 years in the making, collapsed in 1911, and not until the communist seizure of power in 1949 was the country able to achieve a measure of stability, independence, and modern development.
Japan’s “Revolution from Above.” Japan began its encounter with Europeans in a broadly similar fashion to that of its giant neighbor. Like China, Japan had held the Europeans at arm’s length and strictly limited and controlled interaction with them for several centuries. And also like China, Japan was forcibly opened to Western penetration in the form of an American naval expedition led by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and subjected to a series of “unequal treaties.” But there the similarity ceased, for Japan responded to the new Western threat far differently than China.
The humiliation of the “unequal treaties” prompted a political upheaval in Japan known as the Meiji Restoration, which brought to power in 1868 a remarkable group of samurai reformers, governing ostensibly in the name of the emperor. This new regime undertook a dramatic—even revolutionary—process of modernization, far more extensive than anything the Chinese state had even contemplated. It drew heavily on European experience while maintaining Japanese control and much of Japanese culture intact. The feudal domains of Tokugawa Japan were abolished, and a new centralized bureaucratic structure took its place. A new national army based on universal conscription was established in 1873, and the samurai lost their identity as a privileged military caste. A program of state-directed industrialization initiated the first industrial revolution outside the West, while Western-style legal codes, based on individual ownership of property, were adopted. The government imported hundreds of Western experts and sent students and study missions abroad. And they even adopted the forms of a Western political system with a constitution, an elected parliament, and political parties, though real power continued to reside with the reforming oligarchy and the emperor. For a time, many Japanese enthusiastically imitated even the superficial aspects of Western culture, such as ballroom dancing, shaking hands, and European-style haircuts.
The outcomes of this process sharply distinguished Japan from China. Based on an intensifying industrialization and legal reform, Japan persuaded the Western powers to revise the “unequal treaties” and to acknowledge Japan as an equal power. Its military defeat of China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 launched Japan on an empire-building path of its own, gaining colonial control of Taiwan and Korea. Thus, while China continued to languish under the umbrella of European “informal empire,” Japan had joined the imperialist club of nations and emerged as one of the industrial “great powers” of the early twentieth century. The rise of Japan echoed loudly throughout the colonial and semicolonial world, suggesting that European dominance need not be permanent.
In 1907, one of Meiji Japan’s leading political figures, Shigenobu Okuma, looked back with great satisfaction on the preceding half century while seeking to explain his country’s remarkable transformation:
By comparing the Japan of fifty years ago with the Japan of today, it will be seen that she has gained considerably in the extent of her territory, as well as in her population, which now numbers nearly fifty million. Her government has become constitutional not only in name, but in fact, and her national education has attained to a high degree of excellence. In commerce and industry, the emblems of peace, she has also made rapid strides. . . . Her general progress, during the short space of half a century, has been so sudden and swift that it presents a rare spectacle in the history of the world. This leap forward is the result of the stimulus which the country received on coming into contact with the civilization of Europe and America. . . . Foreign intercourse it was that animated the national consciousness of our people, who under the feudal system lived localized and disunited, and foreign intercourse it is that has enabled Japan to stand up as a world power. We possess today a powerful army and navy, but it was after Western models that we laid their foundations. . . . We have reorganized the systems of central and local administration, and effected reforms in the educational system of the empire. All this is nothing but the result of adopting the superior features of Western institutions. . . .
For twenty centuries the nation has drunk freely of the civilizations of Korea, China, and India, being always open to the different influences impressed on her in succession. Yet we remain politically unaltered under one Imperial House and sovereign, that has descended in an unbroken line for a length of time absolutely unexampled in the world. We have welcomed Occidental civilization while preserving [our] old Oriental civilization.20
Perspectives on the
Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic and unprecedented changes in the older patterns of world history. With the industrial, American, and French revolutions, western Europeans and their North American cousins created new and modern societies unique in their wealth and power. These societies then came to dominate—or at least to seriously influence—much of the rest of the world while creating a global web or network of communication and exchange that encompassed and transformed the entire planet. These changes have been so profound and far reaching that it is hardly surprising that they have been assessed in many different ways. Both scholars and participants in these processes have sought to define the significance of this grand upheaval in world affairs and to give it some larger meaning.
Progress or Exploitation?
Celebrating Western Achievement . For some, especially those who benefited most, the nineteenth century represented a dramatic and recent example of progress and the human capacity for self-improvement. Vast increases in material well-being, a doubling or more of the human life span in industrialized countries, and enormous new knowledge about the world—is this not compelling evidence for an essentially positive view of these great changes? Certainly, these benefits were experienced most fully in the more developed societies of Europe, North America, and Japan, but even in the colonial or semicolonial regions of the world, the extension of European political and economic power laid the foundations for modern development. Railroads, ports, telegraphs, roads, schools, medical f
acilities, technological innovations, and the very idea of progress itself—all this accompanied European imperialism. Certainly, there was violence, exploitation, and brutality, but over the long run, the West, through the vehicle of empire, transmitted its modernizing impulses to the more stagnant societies of Asia and Africa, jump-starting their own processes of modern development. This has been the core argument of those who have celebrated the Western achievement and sought to justify the West’s global reach.
Alternative European Voices . Critics obviously saw things differently. Within Europe, socialists applauded industrialization for its potential to liberate humanity from the ancient scourge of scarcity while denouncing the inequalities and exploitation inherent in the capitalist system of private ownership and rampant competition. Conservative critics bemoaned the destruction of traditional communities, which they idealized as ordered, hierarchical, and organic with a place for everyone, and foresaw a future of crass materialism, individual self-seeking, and the loss of religious faith. The first half of the twentieth century, with its devastating global wars, its murderous fascist and communist regimes, and its economic disasters, seemed to confirm the critics’ view that Europe’s modern transformation bore self-destructive tendencies. And the environmental protests of the later twentieth century suggested that unchecked technological development was eroding the very ecological foundations of sustainable modern societies.
