CHAPTER 19

Empires in Collision

Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia 1800–1914

“In the 170-plus years since the Opium War of 1840, our great country has weathered untold hardships…. Following the Opium War, China gradually became a semi-colonial … society, and foreign powers stepped up their aggression against China.”1 Speaking in 2011, Chinese president Hu Jintao thus reminded his listeners of Britain’s violent intrusion into China’s history in order to sell highly addictive opium to China’s people. This conflict marked the beginning of what the Chinese still describe as a “century of humiliation.” In Hu Jintao’s view, it was only the victory of the Chinese Communist Party that enabled his country to finally escape from that shameful past. Memories of the Opium War remain a central element of China’s “patriotic education” for the young, serve as a warning against uncritical admiration of the West, and provide a rejoinder to any Western criticism of China. Some 170 years after that clash between the Chinese and British empires, the Opium War retains an emotional resonance for many Chinese and offers a politically useful tool for the country’s government.

China was among the countries that confronted an aggressive and industrializing West while maintaining its formal independence, unlike the colonized areas discussed in Chapter 18. So too did Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia (now Iran), Ethiopia, and Siam (now Thailand). Latin America also falls in this category (see “The Industrial Revolution and Latin America in the Nineteenth century” in Chapter 17). These states avoided outright incorporation into European colonial empires, retaining some ability to resist European aggression and to reform or transform their own societies. But they shared with their colonized counterparts the need to deal with four dimensions of the European moment in world history. First, they faced the immense military might and political ambitions of rival European states. Second, they became enmeshed in networks of trade, investment, and sometimes migration that arose from an industrializing and capitalist Europe to generate a new world economy. Third, they were touched by various aspects of traditional European culture, as some among them learned the French, English, or German language; converted to Christianity; or studied European literature and philosophy. Fourth, and finally, they too engaged with the culture of modernity—its scientific rationalism; its technological achievements; its belief in a better future; and its ideas of nationalism, socialism, feminism, and individualism. In those epic encounters, they sometimes resisted, at other times accommodated, and almost always adapted what came from the West. They were active participants in the global drama of nineteenth-century world history, not simply its passive victims or beneficiaries.

Dealing with Europe, however, was not the only item on their agendas. Population growth and peasant rebellion wracked China; internal social and economic changes eroded the stability of Japanese public life; the great empires of the Islamic world shrank or disappeared; rivalry among competing elites troubled Latin American societies; Ethiopia launched its own empire-building process even as it resisted European intrusions. (See Zooming In: 1896: The Battle of Adowa.) Encounters with an expansive Europe were conditioned everywhere by particular local circumstances. Among those societies that remained independent, albeit sometimes precariously, while coping simultaneously with their internal crises and the threat from the West, this chapter focuses primarily on China, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan. Together with Latin America, they provide a range of experiences, responses, and outcomes and many opportunities for comparison.