He had reached the Holy Land, but Beilis did not initially go to the Holy City. Despite entreaties that it was at the Western Wall where the most fervent prayers had been said for his release from prison, he delayed. Prayers had been said for his sake at many places other than Jerusalem, he pointed out. In any case, he was quite taken up with engagements in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, dinners and receptions, a visit to the colony at Petah Tikva, and endless requests to shake the hands of tourists, newly arrived migrants and locals – Jews and Arab Palestinians alike.
In April, however, just before Passover, he made the journey inland. Staying in a comfortable hotel by the Jaffa Gate, Beilis did the rounds of the synagogues, hospitals and charitable institutions of Jerusalem, his family and followers in tow. Eventually, he made it to the Western Wall itself. Herzl had found the place a disappointment, finding deep emotion impossible in a place of such ‘hideous, miserable, scrambling, beggary’.41 Beilis’ feelings were mixed, those of others in his group were uncontained:
I relived the whole Jewish exile and also re-experienced my own sorrows. As I was standing at the wall, absorbed in thought, I heard a sudden cry. Turning, I saw H. Berlin, one of the members of my party, crying. It was surprising from a man who had no Jewish characteristics whatever; he had been supposed to be far-removed from Judaism altogether. His daughter, a doctor, who could not even speak any Yiddish, was crying hysterically.
There was one final and still more remarkable step to be taken. Ascending to the Temple Mount, Beilis, the Jewish factory superintendant from Kiev, was granted access to the Al Aqsa mosque itself, the third-holiest site in Islam, guided around by a local Palestinian Arab. Despite all that had happened in Palestine over the previous year, such kindnesses were still possible. The die was not yet cast.
The Galata Bridge, Constantinople. ‘We live in a time of surprises’, wrote an American observer in 1913, ‘Turkey is reforming, China is waking up, the self-satisfied complacency of the white race has received a shock’.
PART IV
TWILIGHT POWERS
Around the world, throughout history, great powers had risen from obscurity to conquer huge tracts of the world or to weld magnificent empires from disparate territories. The Romans, the Persians, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great, the medieval Abbasid Caliphate, the Mongols, the dynasties of ancient China, the Ottoman Turks, the Aztecs and Incas, the seafaring Spaniards and Portuguese, now the British and the French – all had had their day. Some of these imperial creations survived for centuries. Others lasted only a few decades, or even just a few years, only as good as their last military victory, held together by nothing more permanent than fear.
This, to any well-educated citizen of the world in 1913, appeared to be the rhythm of history: empires rose, empires fell, empires were born, and empires died. At any single point in time – sometimes fully conscious of their predicament, sometimes without realising it at all – great and apparently once-invincible empires might be approaching the twilight of their days, after which dusk would surely fall over them, consigning their achievements to history. (It was no surprise that Britons studied the Roman Empire so closely – they wanted to understand how to imitate its success, and how to avoid its end.) Other empires would no doubt rise and take their place, perhaps led by some as-yet obscure people who, through accident of history, good fortune of geography, great leadership or technological innovation, suddenly found itself in a position to extend its dominion over others. For such a people, twilight heralded not dusk but the dawn of their own imperial age.
In 1898, the grand old man of British politics, Lord Salisbury, gave this classic description of the rise and fall of empires a modern, Darwinian twist. He described the world divided into what he termed ‘living’ and ‘dying’ powers. On one side of the ledger were those ‘growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organisation’.1 As such powers appropriated the technologies of the modern world – the railway, advances in armaments, and so on – they became still stronger and more developed, concentrating ever more power in their hands. Their best days lay ahead of them. On the other side lay the ‘dying’ powers, their best days now in the past:
Decade after decade they are weaker, poorer and less provided with leading men or institutions in which they can trust, apparently drawing nearer and nearer to their fate and yet clinging with strange tenacity to the life which they have got.2
This was a Darwinian world where the ‘survival of the fittest’ applied to states as well as to the natural world. It offered no room for complacency. And it raised three sets of questions for political leaders looking at their own countries. First, on which side of Salisbury’s ledger did their country fall? Second, if their country found itself on the wrong side of the ledger, was decline inevitable or could an active programme of modernisation reverse it? Third, did modernisation imply simply the adoption of the most advanced technologies – or did it also imply deeper cultural, social and political reform? Did becoming modern mean becoming Western?
In 1913, it was fairly obvious that the German Empire and the United States were, by Salisbury’s definition, ‘living’ powers, destined for roles of growing importance in the world. The jury was out on the Russian Empire, although most commentators would put it in the same category of a ‘living’ power, and some saw Russia as the inevitable Eurasian behemoth of the twentieth century. For other European empires – the Austro-Hungarian or even the French Empire – the outlook was less clear. Beyond these, in the wider world, two old empires – the Ottoman and the Chinese – were in a period of rapid and uncertain transition. To some they appeared to be on their last legs; others saw the stirrings of rebirth. A third non-European empire, the Japanese, was rising rapidly, having made a spectacular entrance into the ranks of great powers by defeating the Russian Empire in the Pacific, an outcome unthinkable to previous generations. Meanwhile, the questions hanging over the future of another empire – the British – grew more insistent with each passing year. This was Britain’s moment in the sun – of that there was no doubt. London basked in the glory of the largest empire the world had ever seen. How long this moment would last, however, was unclear. Was Britain heading into the twilight, too?
‘We live in a time of surprises’, wrote Elizabeth Kendall, an American globetrotter in 1913, ‘Turkey is reforming, China is waking up, the self-satisfied complacency of the white race has received a shock’.3 In Salisbury’s day, in 1898, things had been simpler. Then, the Ottoman Empire was the quintessential ‘dying power’. Having once extended as far as the gates of Vienna, by the turn of the twentieth century the Ottoman Empire was a mangy beast, thinned out by war, by secession, and by the slow pace of economic development. An independent Greek kingdom had peeled off in the 1820s. Serbia affirmed its independence from Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, in the 1860s. Bulgaria and Bosnia gained autonomy in 1878, and the British became masters of Cyprus. Egypt, the key to the Suez Canal, was firmly in London’s orbit by the 1880s. Whereas the populations of all the European Great Powers had increased over the nineteenth century, that of the Ottomans had fallen to barely twenty million, the vast majority of whom were illiterate. Britain produced more coal in a day than the Ottoman Empire did in a year, while the mileage of Ottoman railways was less than that of Brazil or Belgium, and only one-tenth that of India.4 The Ottoman Empire’s financial arrangements had essentially been outsourced to foreign bankers.
China was, if anything, in a worse state in 1898. There, over the previous fifty years, foreigners had turned their economic and military advantages over a technologically backward China into trade concessions along the Chinese coast and along China’s inland waterways: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nanjing and so on. The already-fragile hold of the Qing dynasty in Peking over the country as a whole – beset by a history of regional rebellions, and by regular famines and floods – was further weakened as a result. So-called ‘Unequal Treaties’ had been signed which resulted
in an ever-increasing foreign presence, and made it impossible for China to pursue an economic policy adapted to its needs. Traditional Chinese spheres of influence had been usurped at the fringes of its empire. The Russians took control over a slice of outer Manchuria in the 1860s, beating a pathway to the Pacific and establishing a Russian city at Vladivostok, which subsequently became the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railway. Despite Chinese protests, France occupied the neighbouring Indochinese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1880. (In 1884, a naval battle between China and France destroyed an entire Chinese fleet, within minutes, at the cost of just five French lives.) The British made Burma a protectorate and staked out their position over Tibet. In 1895, a people that most Chinese considered a tributary nation, the Japanese, were victorious against China in war. In consequence, Japan extracted a huge indemnity in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, incorporated Taiwan into its empire, and formally established that it was Japan – and not the Qing dynasty – which had pre-eminence in Korea.
Many inside China and outside the country wondered whether Chinese civilisation was capable of renewal from within, given the country’s long history of resisting innovation and the strong interests of the establishment in preventing the kinds of social or political changes that could undermine their position. Many questioned whether China would survive as a political unit at all. (Both Ottoman and Chinese thinkers read Darwin and his acolytes on theories of natural selection – one leading Chinese theorist of reform, Yan Fu, translated the works of Thomas Huxley into Chinese.) A cartoon in a Parisian magazine of 1898 shows a traditionally attired Chinese gentleman, with arched eyebrows, pigtail (also known as the queue), drooping moustache and thin beard, hands raised in an expression of horror as a large cake marked ‘C-H-I-N-A’ is in the process of being divided up.5 Kaiser Wilhelm II plants his knife firmly to secure his slice; beside him Queen Victoria’s bejewelled fingers stake out the British claim; a wistful-looking Nicholas II of Russia ponders his country’s options while Marianne, female personification of the French Republic, looks on. To one side, samurai sword unsheathed, a Japanese figure greedily eyes the scene. This was a picture of a scramble for China along the lines of the scramble for Africa of the 1880s. A more suitable analogy for China’s position might have been that of an ancient torture still administered by representatives of the Qing dynasty: death by a thousand cuts.
By 1913, fifteen years later, neither the Ottoman nor the Chinese Empire was out of the woods. Both had experienced further military defeat, loss of territory, and political humiliation at the hands of stronger powers. (In 1913, the Ottoman Empire was battling to retain even a toehold in Europe.) But both had also undergone seismic political shifts at home, destabilising at first, yet fostering expectations of longer term renewal. In Constantinople constitutional government was reintroduced in 1908 as part of the ‘Young Turk’ revolution, bringing the hope that the Ottoman Empire would now re-establish itself through internal reform, and through the energies of a younger generation of political leaders. In Peking, the child-Emperor of the Qing dynasty had ceased to rule beyond the walls of the imperial palace of the Forbidden City, and the forms of republican government had begun to take shape under a former general, Yuan Shikai. If strong central government could be properly established – a very big ‘if’ in the context of the anarchy and civil unrest which predominated across the country for much of 1913 – all bets on China’s future role in the world were off. Wrote a foreign resident of Peking:
In the hands of such a [strong] government China will soon become a World-Power, easily able to hold her territory against aggression … With her wealth of internal resources and her teeming millions, a Westernised China must sooner or later count as the controlling factor in industrial and military struggles of the world.6
‘What will happen’, he asked, ‘when such a China begins to look abroad for markets and colonies?’ It was precisely such a fear of a newly-powerful China – a distant but no longer inconceivable prospect – which inspired British writer Sax Rohmer to pen the first of his extraordinarily popular Fu-Manchu novels in 1913. The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu described the fantastical dangers of a combination of ancient Oriental wisdom and modern Western technology.
Both China and the Ottoman Empire were still basket cases – but perhaps not forever. In the course of little more than a decade, from 1898 to 1913, both had jolted from a period of slow, steady and apparently ineluctable decline into a new and more uncertain phase, from which they might yet emerge leaner, fitter and better able to survive in the world of the great powers. Meanwhile, both Ottoman and Chinese reformers looked admiringly at a third empire which seemed to have already cracked the secret of surviving and flourishing in a Western-dominated world by beating the West at its own game: Japan.
As late as the mid nineteenth century Japan was an isolated island-nation where the public duty of every Japanese samurai was to kill any foreigner who might chance upon Japanese shores, and where an official policy of sakoku (closed country) was considered an article of national faith. From the 1850s on, however, Japan began to open up. This was partly the consequence of foreigners’ insistence on greater access: in 1854, an American mission led by Commodore Perry barged into the country, overawed the Japanese with its steamships, and demanded trade rights far beyond those traditionally accorded to select foreign traders. But Japan’s opening up was increasingly a matter of enlightened policy-making by Japanese leaders themselves, who understood the usefulness of Western military technologies in settling political squabbles at home, and who realised that modernisation was the key to Japan’s survival as an independent nation.
Tentative and uncertain at first, the process of opening up to the West accelerated sharply in the 1860s. In 1867, for the first time, the Japanese Empire provided a national pavilion at an international exhibition, the Paris Exposition Universelle, provoking a Western craze for Japanese art and design. Shortly thereafter, in 1868, after seven centuries when Japan had been ruled as a traditional semi-feudal military dictatorship known as the bakufu – a hereditary shogun calling the shots in Edo (Tokyo) and the Emperor in Kyoto reigning as a purely symbolic figure – the political authority of the Japanese Emperor was restored. The last shogun was shunted into an early retirement (though he only died in 1913). The samurai class – essentially an aristocratic warrior caste – was pensioned off.
The Meiji Restoration – as Emperor Meiji’s assumption of political power in Japan was called – proved a watershed. Although presented initially as a return to more ancient political forms, accompanied by a drive to rediscover native Japanese virtues and religion in place of the Chinese imports of Buddhism and Confucianism, the Meiji Restoration in fact provided the basis for Japan’s accelerated Westernisation led by the state. Sakoku was out, learning from the West was in. Books such as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 1869 Introduction to the Countries of the World, designed to be taught in schools, lauded the civilisational advances of the West.7 In 1871, fifty high government officials led by Iwakura Tomomi were sent around the world on an intensive study trip to identify the best examples of foreign technology and organisation, spending 205 days in the United States (partly because a few of the group had to travel back to Japan to acquire adequate diplomatic credentials), 122 days in Britain and 23 in Prussia, with side-trips to Paris, Bern, Copenhagen, Stockholm, St Petersburg, Vienna and Rome.
The officials were encouraged. ‘The wealth and prosperity that one sees in Europe date to a considerable degree from the period after 1800’, noted one of the study trip members in his diary.8 There was no reason, in other words, why Japan could not catch up. Under the slogan, Fukoku kyōhei – rich country, strong army – Japan began to lay the foundations for the country’s emergence as the pre-eminent power in East Asia. In 1889 it adopted a constitution, with a parliament known as the Diet. Its aristocracy was reformed to look more and more like that of Britain.
After a quarter-century of political, industrial and economic reform, Japan’s easy victo
ry over China in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–5 demonstrated the extent to which Japan had by then overhauled her Asian neighbour. The financial indemnity won from China allowed for further naval expansion, railway construction and, in 1901, the establishment of Japan’s first large-scale steel works. Just as important was the boost to Japanese pride which victory provided – and to the respect which Japan now expected from the rest of the world. From now on, one newspaper claimed hopefully, the West would ‘call us as we call ourselves: Nippon, which has a meaning, the rising sun, and there will be no more “Japan” or “Japs” in the foreign press’.9 In 1902, the greatest empire in the world, the British Empire, consented to make an alliance with Japan. Two years later, in 1904–1905, the Russo-Japanese war resulted in a stunning Japanese victory, the first time an Asian power had so comprehensively humiliated a European one. Although Japan was not able to extract a financial indemnity from Russia as it had from China (indeed the war left Japan close to bankruptcy) and although the territorial gains involved in the American-mediated peace were meagre – regaining Port Arthur, which she had won from China ten years earlier and been forced to give up under Western pressure in peace negotiations – the country’s position in the world was transformed. Japan had, through education, frugality, economic transformation, military strength and political determination, elbowed her way to the table of the Great Powers by 1913.
The Meiji era had thus been crowned with success. But with the Emperor’s death in 1912 and the accession of his son Emperor Taisho, other, more existential questions about Japan’s future came to the fore. Was Japan to be a true popular democracy, or was it to retain the attributes of a traditional oligarchy? Was Japanese society to become a Western consumer society geared towards the satisfaction of individual wants, or was it the role of each individual to serve the collectivity, the nation and the state? Was Japan as respected abroad as much as the Japanese felt it should be, or did Western racism represent a permanent block to Japan’s full acceptance into the Western club? In Asia, was Japan to become little more than a European-style colonial power, or was the country destined to wake the countries of Asia and lead a pan-Asian revival? Perhaps both.
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