Spreading National Power and Order beyond the West

In an age of nation building, colonies took on new importance because they seemed to add to the power of the nation-state. This benefit led Great Britain, France, and Russia to expand their political control of colonies. Sometimes the imperial powers offered social and cultural services, such as schools. For instance, in the 1850s and 1860s provincial governors and local officials promoted the extension of Russian borders to gain control over nomadic tribes in central and eastern Asia. Russian officials then instituted common educational and religious policies, such as instruction in the Russian language and in the principles of the Russian Orthodox church, as a means to social order.

Great Britain, the era’s mightiest imperial power, imposed direct political rule abroad as part of nation building. Before the 1850s, British liberals desired commercial profits from colonies, but, believing in laissez-faire, they kept political involvement in colonial affairs minimal. Since the eighteenth century, the East India Company had been gaining control over various kingdoms’ trading and tax collection rights and then began building railroads throughout the Indian countryside. As commerce with Britain grew, many Indian businessmen became wealthy. Other local men served in the colonial army, which became one of the largest standing armies in the world.

In 1857, a contingent of Indian troops, both Muslim and Hindu, violently rebelled when a rumor spread that Britain would force them to use cartridges of ammunition greased with cow and pig fat, which violated the Hindu ban on beef and the Muslim prohibition of pork. This was not their main grievance, however. The soldiers, more generally angered at widening British control, overran the old Moghul capital at Delhi and declared the independence of the Indian nation—an uprising that became known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Simultaneously, local rulers rebelled, condemning “the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and treacherous English.” Lakshmibai, the rani (“queen”) of the state of Jhansi in central India, led a separate military revolt when the East India Company tried to take over her lands after her husband died. Even as the British brutally crushed the rebels, Indian nationalism was born. Victorious, the British government took direct control of India in 1858, and the British Parliament declared Queen Victoria the empress of India in 1876.

A system of rule took shape in which close to half a million South Asians, supervised by a few thousand British men, governed a region that they now called India. Colonial rule meant both outright domination and subtle intervention in everyday life. For example, British taxes on high-quality Indian textiles led many to buy cheaper British cottons. Artisans were directed instead to farm raw materials such as wheat, cotton, and jute to supply Britain’s industry and feed its workers. Nevertheless, some of the Indians who benefited from improved sanitation and medicine chose to accept British arguments against Indian customs such as child marriage and sati—the self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Others found Europe’s scientific values attractive and came to appreciate that British rule, ironically, brought a kind of unity to India’s many separate princedoms, thus laying the foundation for an Indian nation.

French political expansion was similarly complex. The French government pushed to establish its dominion over Cochin China (modern southern Vietnam) in the 1860s. Missionaries in the area, ambitious French naval officers, and even some local peoples—much like Indian merchants and financiers—pulled the French government farther into the region. Like the British, the French brought improvements, but sanitation and public health programs led to a rise in population that strained resources. Furthermore, landowners and French imperialists siphoned off most of the profits from economic improvement. The French also undertook a cultural mission to transform cities like Saigon by adding tree-lined boulevards similar to those of Paris. French literature, theater, and art were popular with both colonial officials and upper-class local people.

In this age of Realpolitik, the Crimean War had shown the great powers the importance of the Mediterranean basin. Napoleon III, remembering his uncle’s campaign in Egypt, took an interest in building the Suez Canal, which would connect the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and thus dramatically shorten the route from Europe to Asia. Following the canal’s completion in 1869, “canal fever” spread: Verdi composed the opera Aïda (set in ancient Egypt), and people across the West applied Egyptian designs to textiles, furniture, art, and even public monuments in cities. The French army had occupied all of Algeria by 1870, when the number of European immigrants to the region reached one-quarter million. French rule in Algeria, as elsewhere, was aided by local people’s attraction to European goods and technology and by the opportunity to make money.

Its vastness allowed China to escape complete takeover, but traders and Christian missionaries from Europe made inroads for the Western powers. Defeat in the Opium War caused an economic slump and helped generate the mass movement known as the Taiping (“Heavenly Kingdom”). Headed by a leader who claimed to be the brother of Jesus, the Taiping’s millions of adherents wanted an end to the ruling Qing dynasty, the expulsion of foreigners, more equal treatment of women, and land reform. By the mid-1850s, the Taiping controlled half of China. The threatened Qing regime promised the British and French greater influence in exchange for aid in defeating the Taiping. More than 20 million Chinese died in the resulting civil war. When peace finally came in 1864, Western governments controlled much of the Chinese customs service and had virtually unlimited access to the country.

Japan alone in East Asia was able to escape Western domination, because it was keenly aware of the innovations taking place in the West. In 1854, the Japanese agreed to open the country to foreign trade in part to gain Western goods, including the West’s superior weaponry. Japanese reformers in 1867 overthrew a government that resisted such change and in 1868 enacted the Meiji Restoration. The word Meiji pointed to the “enlightened rule” of the new emperor, whose power reformers had restored. The goal was to combine “Western science and Eastern values” as a way of “making new”—hence, a combination of restoration and innovation. The new regime pushed Japan to become a modern, technologically powerful state free from Western control.