is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not the Yellow peril nor the Black peril nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home … It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay – the unnatural gap between rich and poor … the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury – here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.63
The rhetoric, in this case, should not disguise the solidity of the evidence. Social reformers and investigators such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree had based their disquiet about social problems and poverty upon detailed surveys on, respectively, the poor of London (Life and Labour of the People of London, 1889–91) and of York (Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901).
William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army and no relation to Charles Booth), in his Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), appealed to the propertied classes to help lift the English poor out of poverty, out of their ‘darkest Africa’, by following the example set by Bismarck’s social reforms, warning them not to ‘simply shrug our shoulders, and pass on … leaving these wretched multitudes in the gutters where they have lain so long. No, no, no; time is short.’64
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), a particularly influential pamphlet by the reverend Andrew Mearns, advocated that ‘the State must … secure for the poorest the rights of citizenship and the right to live in something better than fever dens – the right to live as something better than the uncleanest of brute beasts’.65
The idea that there was some kind of savagery in capitalism (hence the frequent allusions to darkest Africa and to wild beasts) was becoming commonplace. It was not surprising that Upton Sinclair called his best-selling novel on the conditions in the meat-packing industry in Chicago The Jungle (1906). What was shocking for many was the fact that misery could be so extensive in countries such as England and the United States, which were the richest in the world.
Of course, such sentiments were more likely to be expressed in a prosperous country than in a poor one where inequalities of wealth could be attributed to natural and ancient causes. The conditions of the workers were worse in barely industrialized countries such as Romania, where, in 1914, the working class numbered only 10 per cent of the population, and where working conditions were abominable, where workers had no protection, and no laws regulated the hours of labour.66
A key motivation for reform was to regard the poor and the unfortunate not as ‘strangers in our midst’ but as fellow citizens. Social reform and the creation of a national community went together. This was the case not just in Europe but also in distant Japan, where radicals and social investigators expressed feelings similar to those of British social reformers. The discovery that the poor even existed required public intervention. Socialist intellectuals such as Kotoku Shusui appealed to ‘Scholars, entrepreneurs, ministers, police chiefs’, pointing out that ‘many of … our fellow nationals are leading monstrous lives almost like animals’.67 The literary critic Taoka Reiun, whose interest in social inequality was enhanced by reading Victor Hugo, also urged the integration of the poor into the nation, warning that ‘The so-called civilization and enlightenment of the nineteenth century entailed much civilization for the rich’, but it made the gap between rich and poor greater.68
Few defended inequalities but, among those who did, exponents of economic liberalism were more pre-eminent than outspoken reactionaries. Thus, in 1880, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu explained that the excessive concentration of wealth was a thing of the recent past. The free market, he declared confidently, will smooth away inequalities, adding, almost but not quite in jest, that the real danger for the future was that there would not be enough inequality and that life would become boring with everyone being the same.69 Leroy-Beaulieu, in this as in much else, was wrong in upholding the political myth (admittedly widely held) that the Third Republic was an egalitarian republic of small owners.70 In fact, inequalities increased in France throughout the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, much of this increase in inequality occurring during the period 1860 to 1913, mostly because of the growth of large industrial and financial estates.71 Inequality in Paris increased substantially after 1867: the top 1 per cent climbed from owning 52 per cent of the wealth in 1867 to a staggering 72 per cent in 1913.72 There was not much égalité or fraternité in the Third Republic, but plenty of liberté to get rich.
That was the modernity that dazzled much of the world, as many years later American modernity would inspire so many in spite of its urban ghettoes and rural poverty. The new, recently arrived Americans, like those who had settled earlier, wanted to become their own boss. Abraham Lincoln, in his speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society (30 September 1859), thought that in America, for the new immigrant, wage labour was just a stepping stone to becoming their own master: ‘The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, then saves enough to buy some land for himself.’73 But, Lincoln’s wishes notwithstanding, most immigrants remained wage-workers, at the bottom of the pile, just above those with no work.
Inequality was a constant element in the development of American capitalism. Andrew Carnegie, the American steel magnate and philanthropist, did note the ‘contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer’, but he added consolingly that this was a ‘product of civilization’, ‘not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial … Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Maecenas … A relapse to old conditions would be disastrous – not the least so to him who serves – and would sweep away civilization with it.’74 This inequality, he claimed with the self-confidence of the rich, is ‘temporary’. The vast wealth will trickle down ‘by degrees’ largely through private benefaction, the way Carnegie did it.75 And, eventually, the nation will be united in prosperity.
11
A Yearning for Democracy Sweeps the World
A wave of reformist unrest erupted in ‘laggard’ countries as diverse as China (the Xinhai Revolution, 1911), Turkey (the Young Turks Revolution, 1908), Mexico (the 1910 revolution against Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship), Iran (the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–7), the Portuguese republican revolution of October 1910, the modernization of Thailand (then called Siam, the name Thailand was adopted in 1939) at the turn of the century by the ‘Great Beloved King’ Chulalongkorn the Great, which led to the abolition of slavery and serfdom. In Russia, after the failed revolution of 1905, there was a wave of reforms leading to the legalization of political parties, elected bodies in local government, and a major agrarian reform. An important factor in this turmoil was the impact of the industrialization of Europe and its quest for raw materials and foodstuffs, notably in the Ottoman Empire.1
National elites tried to force through political and economic reforms under the banner of modernity. Sometimes these reforms resulted in increased inequality, since these pre-capitalist societies had never idealized égalité. Fear of conquest or domination by foreign powers was often an incentive for reform. Thailand, one of the few uncolonized countries in Asia, was afraid of French imperialism. In Portugal, still an imperial though powerless country, British colonial claims in Africa prompted the republican coup against the dithering monarchy. Japan, Iran, and China feared Western colonialism in general; Latin Americans feared the United States, hence the famous lament, often attributed to Porfirio Díaz: ¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos! (‘Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!’); Russia and the Ottoman Empire feared western European powers. Fear was one of the main constituent factors behind the movement of reforms from
above.
In many instances the process of change was initiated by the military, the army often being a prefiguration of the modern political party: centralized, disciplined, and able to recruit among diverse social classes. The pre-eminence of the military was particularly important in two distinct if different areas, the Middle East (in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire) and Latin America.
The Ottoman Empire was in gradual decline. The authorities in Constantinople, like those in China, were constantly urged to reform, but were unable to move fast enough. Some timid steps were taken. With the Ottoman Reform Edict of 1856, the Ottomans, realizing their debt towards the European powers during the Crimean War, accepted the principle of civic equality.2 Twenty years later, in 1876, Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had just acceded to the throne, promised to introduce constitutional reforms, but the constitution that was drafted, based on that of Belgium (1831), allowed for no constraint on the Sultan’s powers, thus undermining the powers of the elected assembly. What was new was the declaration that all would really be equal before the law regardless of religion.3
The external threat that had helped accelerate the pace of reforms also impeded them: the Russian military intervention of 1877–8 put paid to Ottoman constitutionalism.4 So in effect the constitution lasted for only a couple of years. Besides, the elected chamber had shown itself to be too independent, thus confirming the fears of traditionalists who thought that reforms, once started, would inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire imperial system. An era of repression followed as Abdülhamid purged, exiled, and assassinated his opponents while developing an expensive and complex system of patronage and clienteles.5 Osman’s empire (Ottoman being the Europeanized form for the House of Osman) had, in fact, become a kind of police state that used not just networks of informers and strict censorship but also the postal and telegraph services to monitor the activities and daily life of its citizens – as democratic states, such as the USA and the UK, continue to do to this day.
The Ottoman regime’s mistake was to try to break the link between democratic reforms and economic development, hoping to obtain prosperity without democracy, with the result that neither was achieved. The administrators of the empire (like those of the Chinese Empire) feared that the penetration of capitalist relations would increase the power of the merchant classes and decrease theirs, but knew that economic stagnation would also affect them adversely. Ottoman handicrafts had continued to suffer, since the 1830s, from the massive imports of cheaper, machine-made European goods. To such longer-term failures of the Ottoman regime were added more contingent factors such as the harsh winter of 1907 and the consequent spiralling cost of food. Such tension led to the Young Turks Revolution of 1908.6
This would not have been possible had not the Young Turks been able to unite various oppositional factions under the name of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), founded in Paris in 1889. Their ‘modernity’ was heralded in the opening paragraph of their manifesto that appealed to both women and men and denounced the government for violating human rights ‘such as justice, equality and liberty’. The condition of women came to the fore, as it always does when modernizing movements emerge, and a variety of feminist organizations sprang up, to the amazement of foreign visitors.7 The Young Turks also attempted the seemingly impossible task of uniting the various minorities under the umbrella of the ‘fatherland’. They were successful since, by 1908, they had forced Abdülhamid II to reinstate the suspended constitution and concede elections. This was the so-called Young Turks Revolution. The constitution was amended (1909), reducing considerably the prerogatives of the Sultan.8 Abdülhamid was finally deposed and the Ottoman Empire became, belatedly, a constitutional monarchy, but its days were numbered. Nation-building in the Ottoman multinational empire was impossible. It was only after the First World War that a Turkish nation arose out of the dismantling of the empire.
The Young Turks, themselves members of the intellectual and political elite, had taken power ostensibly to re-establish parliamentary government and the constitution of 1876, but democratization was soon halted. The Young Turks, like their counterparts in China, Mexico, Egypt, and elsewhere, were authoritarian modernizers who distrusted the masses, as most revolutionaries do without discarding the idea of appealing to the people. They were secularists, prefiguring the Kemalist revolution of 1923. They advocated the separation of state and religion and hoped that Islamic education could be modernized, a hope that Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, ‘Father of the Turks’, thought was utopian, preferring to close the religious schools altogether.9
The consequences of the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, during which the Ottomans lost Macedonia and Thessaloniki (the birthplace of Atatürk), showed how precarious the empire had become – though it had been declining for over a century. Already in 1877, Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, had looked forward to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, saying that it was absurd to go on ‘treating and respecting the Turkish Empire as a living organism, when everybody else was treating it as a carcass’.10 In the years preceding the First World War, the European powers, like vultures, picked at the bones of the Ottoman Empire: Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece captured Crete and Thessaloniki, and Italy occupied Libya and the Dodecanese Islands, including Rhodes. Only the military coup of 23 January 1913 led by the Young Turks prevented the loss of the last European remnant of the empire, Eastern Thrace, to Bulgaria.11 The military continued to dominate Turkish politics throughout most of the twentieth century and were instrumental in building the Turkish nation. Most nations have been constructed as a result of wars, or the threat of war: Napoleonic France, the Third French Republic, Bismarck’s Germany, the Soviet Union, China, the United States after the Civil War, Austria, Italy, most postcolonial states, Yugoslavia, and Israel.
Iran, however (Persia was the name more commonly used by foreigners), was far more dominated by Western powers than the Ottomans were. Under the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907, the country had been carved up into spheres of influence: the Russian in the north, including Tehran, and the British in the south-east (‘protecting’ Afghanistan and Baluchistan). The merchant community, dismayed at the taxes it had to pay, wanted tariffs against foreign imports, especially textiles. But the Shah (King Mozaffar ad-Din), whose extravagant lifestyle had contributed to overburdening the country with debt, was in hock to foreigners and could rule only by constantly negotiating with various notables and local leaders. Protectionism never stood a chance.12
Once again the push for change in Iran came from abroad: the victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 had proved the strength of constitutional and reformed states, while the subsequent abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 ‘expanded the realm of possibilities … a constitutional revolution in Iran became imaginable’.13 In the summer of 1906 a series of demonstrations in Tehran led by an alliance of clerics and merchants convinced Mozaffar ad-Din to convene a National Consultative Assembly.14 The 1906 revolution left important legacies in Iran: there was some modernization in financial practices, in the judiciary, in public education, in elections to parliament or Majlis (Arabic for ‘a place of sitting’), in the development of political organizations; some women were able to take part in politics and founded the first women’s newspaper.15
However, the powerful clerics wanted a constitution quite different from that desired by the modernizing secular forces.16 They wanted to limit the powers of the state – just like their Christian counterparts in Italy, Austria, and Germany – whereas the secular forces wanted to create a strong state capable of overcoming Iran’s backwardness and leading the way towards an industrial society.17 In the ensuing turmoil an Iranian constitution was established – as in Turkey – on the basis of the Belgian constitution of 1831.18
As we saw in Chapter 10, nation-building is easier when there is some kind of linguistic or religious unity. Iran was far less ethnically diverse than the Ottoman Empire, while Isl
am, being correspondingly stronger, was useful to reformers in their struggle against foreign domination.19
It became evident to the new ruler, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who had succeeded his father in 1907, that the new constitutionalism could not be fought by appealing to loyalty to the monarch, but only by reviving and mobilizing popular support around Islam. Abroad, the Shah’s image was dismal. He was, in the words of W. Morgan Shuster, ‘perhaps the most perverted, cowardly, and vice-sodden monster that had disgraced the throne of Iran in many generations’. The front page of the Illustrated London News of January 1909 carried a picture of the Shah seated on the Peacock Throne with the caption ‘the “Kings of Kings” has declared that his country is unripe for either a Constitution or a National Council’.20
Forced into exile in Odessa, Mohammad Ali staged a comeback with Russian help.21 He dispersed the elected Majlis, but, without them, could not raise the tax revenues to pay off his debts to the British and the Russians, so he had to reconvene the Majlis while facing unrest in a number of provinces.22 He was ousted again in July 1909 by the constitutionalist forces and was succeeded by his son, Ahmad Shah, who was eleven at the time. It looked as if the modernizers had won, though the country had been weakened by constant upheavals, as the exiled Shah tried to stage one final comeback in 1910 and failed again. The British, once supporters of the constitutionalist and nationalist forces, changed tack on the grounds that it was not worth, as the (Liberal) Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, said, ‘[keeping] up a quarrel with Russia in order to curry favour with the Persians’, since they (the British) had signed an agreement with the Russians (1907) on their respective spheres of influence in the region.23 In fact, Great Britain had never really cared that much about Iran. Lord Salisbury himself had observed twenty years earlier that ‘Were it not for our possession of India, we should trouble ourselves but little over Persia.’24 The main ‘specialist’ on Iran in the British establishment was Lord Curzon, author of Persia and the Persian Question, written in 1892, who was deeply prejudiced against the Iranians, whom he regarded as inherently duplicitous and perfidious.25 Few listened to the leading British academic specialist on Iranian culture, Edward G. Browne, who, in his pro-Iranian book The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 (1910), explained that the nationalist-constitutionalist forces were ‘essentially the patriotic party, which stands for progress, freedom, tolerance, and above all for national independence and “Persia for the Persians”’.26
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